Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge’s sly, smooth-talking rap&B sounds older and wiser these days. The duo’s stellar second album layers doubt and insecurity into jet-setting antics and featherbed-plush beats.

Why Lawd?

In December 2020, Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge performed at the Double Happiness festival. The show was a livestream and the artists were isolated with no audience except the camera crew. “I hate it, bro. I want the people, I want the sweat,” Paak joked. But NxWorries squeezed plenty of fun out of their barely 10-minute set. Its most striking moment made it directly onto their second album, Why Lawd? “Stop playin’ wit’ my boy Knxwledge,” Paak shouts through reverb’d vocals, hyping up early single “Where I Go,” a smooth jam that equally channels early 2000s Monica and Knx’s WrapTaypes series. When the clip appears in the album version, it sounds grandiose yet humble. Paak and Knx have toured the world, sold out arenas, and worked with plenty of larger-than-life collaborators. But that stripped-back rendition of “Where I Go” contains both the intimacy of a steamy rendezvous and the focused showmanship of a band ready to shut down a 10,000-cap room.
NxWorries’ 2016 debut, Yes Lawd!, was as carefree as a new-age mack daddy rap&B album could be. The billowing thump of Knxwledge’s exhaustive backlog of beat tapes blended well with Paak’s scratchy croon-raps, somewhere between Joe Tex and Black Dynamite with a taste for vegan sausage. Eight years on, with higher individual profiles, how would NxWorries recapture that patent-leather Air Force sheen? The sumptuous Why Lawd? not only succeeds, it expands their vision. The beats are more ambitious, the lyrics more thoughtful on subjects of affection, rejection, and coital bliss. They sound as enamored with having loved and lost as with the future joys and miseries just over the horizon.
Yes Lawd! came to party and dash, but Why Lawd? takes a slightly more grown approach. The first proper track “86Sentra” starts out business as usual, with Paak dangling used cars in front of love interests and rapping about playing the Super Bowl over an ominous organ loop. On “MoveOn,” he contemplates the pain he’s put himself through by living recklessly. Then, as if to put that insight to the test, “KeepHer” fleshes out the story of an ex-wife determined to leave his bullshit for a new paramour, no matter how much money he throws her way. “He don’t love you the way I—/You don’t look good in that Hyundai,” he says, before begging her for farewell sex in the next verse. It’s rewarding to see his slimeball charm turned against him: Paak is rarely, if ever, on the business end of a breakup song.
Why Lawd? savors these contrasts, adding new emotional layers to NxWorries’ jet-setting hijinks. Paak’s trademark smooth-talking Svengali routine is still in effect, but the breezy connects are few and far between; now, affairs are usually followed by the sting of denial or the nagging doubts of age. The dramatic synthwave gestures of “Daydreaming” lead into the 3 a.m. drunken car sobbing of “FromHere,” a rakish torch song worthy of the Stylistics. While this isn’t a concept album, the songs feel connected, as if each were an episode of your favorite romantic dramedy. “HereIAm” plays like a funeral dirge, mournful organs echoing Paak’s melancholic scroll through an ex’s Instagram before bleeding into “OutTheWay,” where rattling drums and pastel synths signal budding new love. These vignettes aren’t just teeming with personality missing from more precisely manufactured work like Oxnard or the soul cosplay of Paak and Bruno Mars’ An Evening With Silk Sonic; they sketch out a portrait of Paak as a father, son, divorcé, lover, and freak aspiring to keep his streak alive.
Knxwledge supplies Paak with some of the most breathtaking production of his career. The beats on Why Lawd? are ornately constructed, each a treasure hunt for the tell that it’s all made from tiny bits of other songs. Knx’s hazy lo-fi aesthetic has always operated at an epic scale, but his love for gospel, soul, and doo-wop has helped his beats grow into more elegant shapes. While many of these confections are refined takes on ideas from his 2020 solo album 1988 or the later volumes in his woefully discontinued Meek Mill remix series, the genre excursions offer the album’s biggest surprises. “Daydreaming,” with its synthwave saturation and closing guitar solo, wouldn’t feel out of place on Miami Vice. “FromHere” and “DistantSpace” don’t sound like homages to the Temptations and Motown; they sound plucked from the shelves of Berry Gordy’s office and looped and drum-tracked to perfection. Knx and Paak wear their reverence to the classics on their sleeves, but Why Lawd? never strays far from its dirty swinging rap&B center.
The two of them could’ve used nostalgia to coast on the legacy of their nearly decade-old debut to turn in a serviceable redux. Instead, Why Lawd? leans into a rawness and fear Yes Lawd! only hinted at. No one is immune to getting curved. Loneliness can supersede all the money and hook-ups in the world. Putting that reality front and center is a bold shift from the first album’s devil-may-care attitude, and makes for caramel-rich music that nods to the duo’s idols while forging its own groove. “Who would ever think that we’d find a hole in the system?” Paak asks over a rattling drum break and guitar riff on “Battlefield,” a song that begins with assured autobiography and ends with a joke involving a fling that lasts barely as long as a Dodgers game. Leave it to NxWorries to find the beauty in the bruises.


On Kingston, Penn., punk outfit Title Fight's ambitious new Spring Songs EP, the group softens their sound without forfeiting the hooks or energy of their previous releases.

Spring Songs EP

Title Fight are from Kingston, Penn., an erstwhile coalmining town in the northeast part of the Keystone State that uses Wilkes-Barre as its metropolitan reference point. Though its punk scene is vibrant and tight-knit, to the point of being kinda quaint, a band looking to break out on a national level needs an almost pathological level of ambition. Of course, you need great songs as well and Title Fight have plenty of those. But as a melodic punk band that functions within a realm that doesn’t have much use for typical signifiers of compositional ambition, their drive is trickier to quantify, a “most likely to succeed” kind that can smack as careerism in the wrong hands. The quartet are productive, they respect their elders (Quicksand/Rivals Schools’ Walter Schreifels produced their proper debut LP, 2011's Shed), they roll with the winners (collaborators and tourmates such as Balance & Composure and Touché Amoré), they’ve been on three different labels amenable to their sound at the time and they tour relentlessly. That and they have no time for bullshit—Title Fight’s Twitter account has over 32,000 followers and zero "followings", which makes them look far more focused than antisocial.
So, it’s interesting to see their Spring Songs EP called “ambitious” by onlookers, as if that's a new quality for Title Fight. In a way it’s backhanded, suggesting that their previous influences such as Lifetime or Jawbreaker or Saves the Day were necessarily stepping stones to the trad indie-rock sound captured here. But it’s worth keeping in mind that Title Fight are still barely out of their teens, and you know what? That’s not an atypical listening progression for someone who’s growing up right along with Title Fight. And so Spring Songs does manifest a new kind of ambition, which is the band staking out different territory and hoping their fans come along.
The arrangement makes for a tidy introduction: two songs on two sides, split equally between their two vocalists, Ned Russin and Jamie Rhoden.  Moreover, half of Spring Songs finds the vocals lunging out from the newly warm and analog production, the other have them more nestled within the handsomely textured, melodic guitar leads. The permutations allow Title Fight the ability to show just how little they needed to change their overall approach to edge into a new aesthetic. The Rhoden-led “Be A Toy” susses out the musical currency existing between early-90s Merge and mid-90s pop-punk as well as the emotional underpinning—I mean both cohorts were accused of being “slackers," right? And “Be A Toy” finds common ground in a line like “do you regret being used/are you used to it yet?”, trying to get your rocks off while feeling like crap. Meanwhile,  “Blush” counters with the rawer-voiced Russin raging over sour guitars for an effect that’s hooky and also jagged—it’s probably what A&Rs had in mind when trying to find that bridge between Nevermind and Dookie.
In most aspects, Spring Songs is the loosest Title Fight recording. Ranging from 2:30-4:00 and removing the BPM and rhythmic strictures of punk, these would all be among the longer tracks on previous LPs Shed and Floral Green. Yet, it’s their tightest, most hook-focused songwriting yet. The spare, midtempo “Receiving Line” gives Russin’s lyrics more sonic space to be heard and as a result, a typically topical Title Fight song allows the listener more freedom of interpretation. You sense the emotional tenor when Russin sings “we drove my car that weekend/ 100 miles barely speaking," and with an understated economy of words, he gives just enough inside information to pique interest rather than full disclosure “‘I’m sorry for your loss’/you probably get that a lot/we didn’t have to talk/you probably get that.”  “Evolution” feels like the proper term here, as Title Fight are simply teasing out certain aspects that were present of their previous two LPs, particularly Floral Green. And if there are any qualms to be had, it’s in the sense that you’ll be hearing these again soon, that Spring Songs is a teaser rather than a standalone for a band that would probably feel very lazy if they ended 2013 without a proper release.
But Spring Songs does leave a lot to the imagination and not simply in the matter of “what will the next Title Fight album sound like?” Here we have a rock band on an independent record label, whose sound and work ethic are unmistakably punk. And yet, you’re more likely to hear electro-pop or major-label bands such as Chvrches or Haim called “indie” more often than Title Fight. How is that? Is it because most of time, genre tags are used to described the perceived fanbase than the music itself? If that's the case, Title Fight really are going indie rock on Spring Songs. But even if it reaches people who aren't familiar with their past work, Spring Songs helpfully shows Title Fight as pretty much the same thing they've always been: an ambitious band that makes very good songs.


Ezra Rubin’s debut LP is an earnest and subdued attempt at making his soulful, ominous, post-club productions agreeable to a general audience.

Tears in the Club

Ezra Rubin (aka Kingdom) is an architect of the post-club sound—a new profile cleaved from caustic synthesizers, herky jerk percussion, and crying on the dancefloor. The melting pot of sounds he and his collaborators in Fade to Mind (Nguzunguzu, Total Freedom) and Night Slugs (Bok Bok, L-Vis 1990) offered pulled from UK garage, dancehall, and diva-driven house that still seems prescient. Rubin, in particular, helped shaped a postmodern vision of R&B alongside Kelela and Dawn Richard that’s influenced everyone from FKA twigs to Justin Bieber. Rubin was staged to make a pop crossover. His debut LP, the delightfully titled Tears in the Club, is an earnest and subdued attempt at making his panoply of sounds agreeable to a general audience.
This is immediately clear from the album’s opening moment, “What Is Love,” a collaboration with SZA. Rubin is no stranger to producing for powerhouse vocalists, but with Tears in the Club he dips his toe into the world of major label team-ups, and the result has neutered the outré aspects of his sound. On “What Is Love,” certain trademarks still pop up—vaporous synth pulses and staccato percussion—but he’s slowed down the normally breakneck pace of his music to somewhere sleepier and almost lackadaisical. In the past, Rubin’s slow jams (Dawn Richards’ “Paint It Blue” for example) had a seething atmosphere just bubbling beneath the surface. With SZA, that feel is gone. This is also true of some of his solo tracks. “Nurtureworld” is a confusingly out-of-focus dance track that spends most of its three minutes finding its proper footing, and the album’s title track is a defanged version of the controlled chaos he once offered.
Yet, Kingdom recovers from these missteps. “Each & Every Day,” his collaboration with Vine star Najee Daniels, adds a shot of bubblegum into his otherwise ominous productions. It resembles what Charli XCX would sound like singing over a DJ Rashad beat. His second song with SZA, “Down 4 Whatever,” benefits from the more vigorous, energetic beat Rubin provides. A solo track called “Into the Fold,” offers a picture of what pop-ified post-club music could sound like—bright whacks of drums and smokey looped vocals mingle well with more experimental elements like a dissonant hiss in the background. But his thesis statement for this album comes on a song with the Internet’s Syd, who might be the perfect vocalist for Kingdom’s attempt at a crossover style. Her slinky voice follows Kingdom’s syncopations beat for beat, and the protean, mercurial change in pace befits Syd’s ability to pitch shift on the fly. It’s a promising peek into what Kingdom could do for a radio-ready artist.
On a recent release, Vertical XL EP, Rubin filled inhuman sounds with soul, and Tears in the Club attempts to take that idea to a mass audience. One wonders if he is unintentionally softening his music for the sake of a breezier product. It’s less a statement of purpose and more of an experiment with an inconclusive hypothesis. Instead of heightening, or focusing the pandemonium he could unleash on the dancefloor, his work is denatured by a fairweather disposition. Even if he never means to, Tears in the Club is a disappointingly genteel work, from an artist known for anything but.


With their post-return jitters under control, Garbage have solidified that return with Strange Little Birds, their darkest, most intimate LP and the band’s strongest effort in 15 years.

Strange Little Birds

Garbage would sooner risk obsolescence than fake a smile. The industry learned this the hard way in 2001 when they tried to steer the band back to the mainstream following the commercial failure of their third record Beautiful Garbage, released three weeks after 9/11. Hoping for a smooth transition onto the pop-and-rap-glutted charts, label executives approached frontwoman Shirley Manson and producers-slash-bandmates Duke Erikson, Steve Marker, and Butch Vig demanding rapped guest verses and pop hooks. They got the same old Garbage instead: seething, surging, brutal–Billboard potential be damned.
Fifteen years later, Garbage have outlasted the naysayers and jilted ex-lovers. 2012’s Not Your Kind of People* couldn’t match the sonic cohesion and thrills of 1995's self-titled debut *and *Version 2.0, *but as the band’s first effort in seven years, it also provided an oasis for all those jaded by EDM's brainless, bro-y #posivibes. With their post-return jitters under control, the band have solidified that return with Strange Little Birds, their darkest, most intimate LP and the band’s strongest effort in 15 years.
Manson's been happily married for six years (her husband, Billy Bush, co-produced this album and its predecessor), but she’ll never get over misery, her lifelong muse; like all Garbage albums, *Strange Little Birds *obsesses over, romanticizes, and even celebrates sorrow. On the lead single “Empty,” she towers over her bandmates’ roaring void with arms akimbo, underscoring her woe by way of dramatic, elongated syllables; “I’m *sooooo *empty,” she moans, quaking atop Vig and Erikson's steeled groove. “Night Drive Loneliness,” a ballad inspired by a piece of fan-mail thrust into Manson's hand following a Garbage gig in Russia, develops its titular subject as a sensual ritual. Considered in tandem with the track’s slinky lounge arrangement and boudoir imagery (“I got my high heels/and my lipstick/My blue velvet dress in my closet”), Manson's sighing refrain–“My night drive loneliness comes again and again”–hints at a more hopeful subtext: perhaps depression's just another nameless paramour occupying the passenger seat, another car whizzing by in the night.
Of course, the same could be said for love. Every glimpse of romantic bliss on *Strange Little Birds–the galvanizing lust on “Magnetized,” the stolen glances of “We Never Tell”–ultimately dissolves under Manson’s fatalist approach to matters of the heart. Although she’s come a long way from the paranoid interrogations of the Bleed Like Me *era (“I think you’re sleeping with a friend of mine/I have no proof, but I think that I’m right"; “Why Do You Love Me?”) the front-woman still regards love as a rigged game–one she’s happy to play, because she’s got nothing else to lose. Midway through the album, on the funereal choruses of “Even Though Our Love Is Doomed,” Manson soberly proclaims the song’s titular sentiment to deliver a message of hope, not fear: “Even though our stars are crossed/You’re the only thing worth fighting for/You’re the only thing worth dying for.” Elsewhere, “Sometimes” and “Amends”–Strange Little Birds’ respective opener and closer– fashion Manson's philosophy into an olive branch extended to her already-“doomed” loves: “There is nothing you could say/To cause more hurt, or cause me shame/Than all the things that I have thought about myself,” she admits.
*Strange Little Birds *lands less than a year after Garbage’s 20th-anniversary reissue of 1995’s landmark self-titled debut, and while the new album’s sessions predate Garbage’s commemoration festivities, their temporal and stylistic overlap sets it apart from the similarly-styled but unevenly executed band have released over the past fifteen years. Indeed, the  sonic parallels between the two albums are frequent, and far from subtle: “Empty” and “Supervixen” share the same glam-industrial DNA, and the dreary “Blackout” employs the same skittering trip-hop showcased in “A Stroke of Luck.” Despite these superficial similarities, repeat spins of Strange Little Birds ultimately belie an older, wiser reincarnation of that youthful rage, not just a cheap retrospective. Twenty years on, Garbage are still grappling with their demons, but they’re disarmingly zen–even ecstatic– about the battle. With material like this, they’ve got a right to be.


After a long wait and an intense build-up, Stevie Wonder’s 2005 collab-heavy return is unerringly stately, sometimes bracing, proof that the artist had endured.

A Time to Love

For an artist who had spent each decade of his life in the public eye, the years leading up to Stevie Wonder’s 77-minute opus, A Time to Love, were uncharacteristically fallow. Steeped in intrigue and plagued by delays, the album’s decade-long development became a story in itself. Though Wonder had long led the way in studio innovation, it appeared the infinite possibilities of the digital age, combined with his notorious tendency for tinkering, had finally begun to overwhelm him. Twice, hard deadlines came and went. Deep tensions formed between Wonder and his longtime label, Motown, who was pouring resources into the recording and counting on the results to help buttress its flagging bottom line.
Sylvia Rhone, Motown’s newly appointed president, was eager to put the label on a more modern footing, and her simmering frustrations with Wonder soon became public. “In time, God will give me what I need to do the album on time,” he told the press, a fairly open-ended, mystical formulation unlikely to comfort stakeholders. Meanwhile, the credits stretched to include everyone from Prince to Paul McCartney, India.Arie to gospel singer Kim Burrell, and even his own daughter Aisha Morris. Wonder had long enjoyed the company and energy of bountiful collaboration, and all these choices made sense with respect to conjuring a career-spanning aesthetic throughline, but the inevitable scheduling conflicts only further complicated the process.
Process was only part of the distraction. When Wonder’s previous LP, Conversation Peace, was released in 1995, he had graduated from a celebrated musician to something on the order of a cultural deity. As boomers came of age and consolidated political and economic power, the music of their youth was increasingly detached from its context and recycled as nostalgic comfort food: Picture Bill and Hillary Clinton capering to “Don’t Stop” at the 1993 inauguration party, or the historical white-wash of 1994’s Forrest Gump. Try as he might, Wonder struggled like many of his peers to unyoke himself from the cultural forces determined to reduce the radical achievements of the ’60s and ’70s to a passive, self-gratifying soundtrack.
In spite of the crass cheapening of the ’60s tumult, Wonder continued to throw his shoulder into righteous activism. His involvement in the USA for Africa project and the campaign to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday during the 1980s affected lasting and meaningful change. As other avatars of dissent from the previous era lost interest or principle, Wonder’s steadfastness elevated his reputation ever higher. He traveled the world and was greeted like a foreign dignitary. He was feted with awards and performed at the 1999 Super Bowl. Ten fraught days after 9/11, he played harmonica on “America the Beautiful” during what was essentially a nationally televised wake, accompanying Willie Nelson, one of his only true peers as a chronicler of the overlooked and underserved.
Additional complications abounded in Wonder’s personal life, long a Gordian knot of shifting romantic allegiances that eventually resulted in his fathering nine children with five women with whom he was on variously good terms. There were palimony cases and sundry disputes, and the threat of a tell-all book from a former backup singer that mercifully never appeared. Most painful of all was the 2004 death of his first wife and longtime creative partner, Syreeta Wright, which shattered him to his core and inspired the lyrics to the A Time to Love track “Shelter in the Rain.” (“When all the odds say there’s no chance/Amidst the final dance/I’ll be your comfort through your pain.”) This rich tapestry of backstory was widely reported in the music press, fomenting genuine curiosity about what bounty A Time to Love’s seemingly endless gestation period would ultimately produce.
When the first single finally materialized in the spring of 2005, it seemed like all the waiting had been worth it. “So What the Fuss,” featuring Prince on guitar and En Vogue on backing vocals, is a forceful piece of socially conscious funk, with Wonder’s growling vocals and distorted clavinet convincingly conjuring the mood of early ’70s classics Innervisions and Talking Book. Sounding like the ecstatically fried grooves of Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain experiencing the aftershocks of Prince’s own “Housequake,” “So What the Fuss” simmers with a mix of gospel uplift and lurking menace, always the secret undercurrent of Wonder’s best work. Without an official release date for the proper album, Wonder seemed to relish the rough-and-ready vibe, even vetoing Motown’s first choice for a single, the rather mawkish “From the Bottom of My Heart.”
While Motown’s choice for a single wouldn’t have elicited the same excitement, it would have been a more accurate representation of the work to come. When the album was finally released that fall, it was 77 minutes of unerringly stately, sometimes bracing, and occasionally indistinguishable forays into neo-soul and quiet storm, taking love in all its permutations as an overarching theme. After a lost decade, A Time to Love was abundant proof that Stevie Wonder had endured. And yet, it desperately could have used some editing—it’s at least 20 minutes too long. Or perhaps it should have been two very good Stevie Wonder records, rather than one overstuffed omnibus. But genius works in mysterious and sometimes convoluted ways, and these comforting, contented odes to lasting love feel like an act of generosity and an exercise in unvarnished sentiment.
After the long wait, the delays, and the intense build-up, Wonder’s return was neither late-career miracle nor shell-of-his-former-self parody. Instead, it was an earnest overview of the artist in middle age. Opening track “If Your Love Cannot Be Moved,” a salsa-inflected duet with Kim Burrell, spans six leisurely minutes. Its supple groove and genre fusion seem intentionally designed to reassure listeners that Stevie Wonder, the peerless bandleader and arranger, remained very much in control of his gifts. If anything he may be too much in control. “Sweetest Somebody I Know” is a charming grab bag of go-to-Wonder-isms from the Hallmark-adjacent sentiment to the harmonica solo: It’s lovely to listen to, if light on inspiration. So it goes for much of A Time to Love’s slow-burning first half. “Moon Blue” is pretty but a touch perfunctory to justify its near seven minutes. The title of “From the Bottom of My Heart” pulls its refrain from his ’80s smash “I Just Called to Say I Love You” but fails to improve upon it. It isn’t remotely fair, but is nevertheless inevitably the case with an artist of Wonder’s stature: In his fifth decade of recording, his primary competition was his younger self.
If A Time to Love never quite blows you away, there are still glimpses of Wonder’s sublime ability. The gorgeous duet with daughter Aisha Morris, “How Will I Know,” harkens back to his grounding in the jazz standards of the pre-rock era, conjuring the heartbroken balladry of Billy Strayhorn. “My Love Is on Fire” features a buoyant keyboard hook and robust libido à la the ecstatic horndog loverman jams of 1972’s titanic Music of My Mind. The penultimate track, “Positivity,” is a vaguely silly but ultimately irresistible paean to the profound optimism which has been a lifetime trademark of an artist born into the twin adversities of blindness and poverty. Conjuring a winsome vibe liberally borrowed from the Ohio Players’ “Love Rollercoaster,” Wonder continues asking the big questions: “When the people ask me as an African American/What do I see tomorrow in the human plan/Is it possible for all of the people of the world to co-exist?” His answer is hedging, circumspect, but ultimately hopeful.
At its best, A Time to Love uses its self-referential sprawl to convey the wisdom of a man who’d seen it all. He was no longer the prodigy who helped make Motown an institution, or the visionary shaman of ’70s soul, or the go-to hitmaker of the go-go ’80s. The world keeps on turning, and Wonder changes with it. This music was also an endpoint, at least for the time being. Following the record, Wonder essentially went dormant again. Suffering from health problems that required a kidney transplant, he released no new music for 15 years. Then, in 2020, he surfaced with two singles, released on his own label. Even if the unimpeachable masterpieces are behind him, A Time to Love proved his presence can still elevate us to higher ground. If Stevie Wonder hasn’t given up, then why should we?


The Detroit producer and fashion photographer's first album for Scuba mastermind Paul Rose's Hotflush label might make you want to take a shower.

Majenta

The sound of bass music is constantly mutating, and the UK label Hotflush has certainly played a part in that over the last nine months. While many of its recent singles still toy with big grooves, crisp hi-hats, and deep rumble, its releases have taken on a sonic guise that's straightforwardly melodic and, at times, pink-hued and romantic. Last year saw the release of Braille and Machinedrum's self-titled debut LP as Sepalcure, an adventurous record that explored sensual depths while appropriating sonic signifiers from assorted dance sub-genres; this year has brought the open-hearted second album from label head Paul Rose's Scuba project, Personality, as well as Scottish producer Beaumont's Never Love Me EP, which threw lush Italo synths into the mix and came adorned with the kind of artwork that Drive fetishists could get airbrushed onto the back of a leather jacket.
It makes sense, then, that Detroit producer and fashion photographer Jimmy Edgar is releasing his latest record, Majenta, on Rose's label, even if the team-up itself wasn't premeditated. (Edgar says this move came about after a dinner conversation with Rose and Sepalcure's Travis Stewart and Praveen Sharma.) As an under-30 with a career spanning more than a decade, Edgar's music strays just about as far from bass music proper as you can get. He works with a variety of sounds, from the type of techno that's closely associated with his hometown, to seedy, dank electro, to window-fogging, pitched-vocal R&B. Dance music by definition is made to move bodies, and so is Edgar's-- only, in his case, in the type of way that could get someone slapped with lewdness charges.
That is to say, Jimmy Edgar is insatiable. He loves talking about sex, singing about sex, referencing sex. This is a man whose most notable track in his eight years with Warp was titled "I Wanna Be Your STD", and who called his last album XXX (only after he decided to change it from its working title, Deeper). Majenta is similarly soaked in low-art sleaze; just scanning the tracklist ("Sex Drive", "Touch Yr Bodytime", "Hrt Real Good", "In Deep") is enough to make you question whether you really want to hear what the Majenta cut "This One's for the Children" is all about. (Not to worry: it's just your run-of-the-mill "Up with people, down with the system" slice of Detroit techno.)
Suffice to say, Edgar really overdoes it on the sex stuff, moreso than on the other albums he's put out in the last decade. It's not that dance music can't be carnal, but that everyone's idea of what's "sexy" isn't the same, so presenting a specific expression of sexuality as a universal representation is a dangerous tightrope walk. At his core, Jimmy Edgar is a hippie, if a bit of a ridiculous-sounding one (he claims in the album's press release that he's recently "made galactic contact with the community"), but the only way Majenta could bring people together is if they were convening to nervously giggle at Edgar's various trying-too-hard vocal turns, which come across as erotic as reading Fifty Shades of Gray on the subway.
Musically, Majenta initially seems better than XXX, only because the lack of uniformity that plagued the latter LP means that the former's standouts-- the warm, skipping vocal house of "Let Yrself Be", electro-bass near-twins "Indigo Mechanix (3D)", and "In Deep"-- stand out that much more. Unfortunately, more than mediocre tracks or throaty sexual goofs, what does in Majenta is its scattershot nature. There's no flow to the way the album's sequenced, to the point where it seems purely arbitrary. Furthermore, Edgar seems so concerned about skipping between genres that he neglects to refine any one specific sound; even the strongest cuts rarely rise above "nice try." Edgar is clearly aiming for some sort of climax-- spiritually, musically, sexually-- but by the time Majenta sputters to a close, all he's left with is a mess on his hands.


Foregrounding sensory disorientation, clashing keys, and confounding meters, the Brazilian musician’s sample-based music investigates the warping effects of cultural and political memory.

Teghnojoyg

Babe, Terror is the moniker of the São Paulo-based electronic producer Claudio Katz Szynkier, and the woozy, magnetic music he issues under this alias has attracted pockets of influential admirers. In 2010, Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden reworked one of Szynkier’s pieces, “Summertime Our League,” for an EP of the same name. The Norwegian space-disco producer Prins Thomas and tropicalia legend Caetano Veloso count themselves among his fans, as does the UK producer Daniel Avery, who has turned up alongside him on wax, and the shoegaze band Ride, who included a 26-minute suite Szynkier composed from their own tapes on the Japanese version of their album Weather Diaries.
These are disparate artists, but they share a sculptural approach to music making, a tendency to manipulate sounds like clay. You can imagine what may have excited their imaginations when listening to Szynkier’s information-dense and implication-heavy new album Teghnojoyg, which comes on like an overpowering wave but breaks down into squirming particles the closer you squint at it. As he did on 2020’s disquieting Horizogon, Szynkier composts a pile of antique sounds—dollar-bin disco LPs seemingly spun backwards, snippets of could-be obscure jazz albums, old orchestral 78s—until they give off an alluring, dangerous heat. He cherishes sensory disorientation, and his works often clash meters and keys: Pieces like “Mesopothance” invite the suspicion that you have two tabs open, playing incongruous pieces of music. But they slot together in a pleasingly strange way, congealing into a whole under the intensity of Szynkier’s gaze. This music is so warped and tactile you can almost see it melting.
Szynkier seeks to extract not familiarity from his well-worn sounds, but its opposite. He scrambles and chops his samples until they yield the desired ghosts: On “Congosymphag,” he swirls together some disembodied voices—breathy, soulful vocals that may have belonged to a house record long, long ago, somewhere far, far away—until they seem to suck downward and liquefy in the spinning blades of his sampler. On “Casa Das Canoagens,” an orchestra plays something dark and plangent, a late-Romantic work whose troubled chords hint at the incipient breakdown of tonality. It could be Mahler, Bartok, Strauss, early Schoenberg. But Szynkier defaces it with Vangelis synth squirts that fire neon-pink blotches all over the track, an early-’80s technofuturist vision straight out of Blade Runner set loose in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Somewhere miles away and off to the side, a chintzy drawing-room piano tinkles away at a sentimental melody, maybe Rachmaninoff, oblivious to the chaos around it. The way Szynkier positions these pieces around each other suggests a yearning of some sort, a melancholy spirit of inquiry.
Szynkier has used the world “portal” to describe the sensation he wants his music to evoke, and like many musicians—William Basinski comes to mind—he is obsessed with the warping and eroding effects of memory, both cultural and political. He’s spoken passionately about the outsized effects of COVID-19 on his home country of Brazil under the “pathological capitalism” of Bolsonaro’s far-right government, and called for a reckoning with the resulting psychological traumas. But full-scale societal trauma is too enormous to be faced head on: Instead, it transmutes itself into the fabric of our dreams and nightmares. The music on Teghnojoyg throbs with a sort of jubilant unease, a haunted half-revelry that feels like vibrant ghosts babbling their way down now-empty city streets.
That plangent string writing returns again in the album’s final piece, “Casa das Guineas.” Save for some dark, unnatural notes lurking deep in the bass, the harmonic language now is peaceful, settled, majestic. Some glowing synth patches dot the sky again, another alien landing, but this time Szynkier allows the mood to remain tender, and the key stays major. Somewhere amid the the busy bubbling of the synths, the 18th-century piano, still plinking away, and the heaving orchestra, you sense Szynkier sorting through various pasts for apocalypses both real and imagined, encroaching and still possible, to find where the shafts of light might poke through.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review incorrectly referred to the electronic producer Daniel Avery as a member of the rock band Grizzly Bear.


The Hold Steady continue to prove themselves a more convincing classic-rock act than should be possible in 2008, creating a tension between old-fashioned storytelling and self-referential art.

Stay Positive

The Hold Steady weren't the likeliest candidates for success. Pulling together after the demise of the imaginative, verbose, and mostly overlooked indie act Lifter Puller, Craig Finn relocated to New York to start a new band. Holding to his distinctive poet-lost-at-karaoke delivery, Finn-- like the Replacements and Hüsker Dü before him-- began unashamedly mining classic rock radio for inspiration. Surprisingly, it's the latter group you can hear on opening track "Constructive Summer", and not just in its title's resemblance to one of Hüsker Dü's most celebrated songs.
One of the Hold Steady's most direct and thrilling tracks, "Constructive Summer"'s tempo and edge are borrowed from punk artists like Iggy Pop, Joe Strummer, and Finn's friends in Dillinger Four (in a lyrical reference that will reward all the close Hold Steady readers out there). Here, the Hold Steady retain the successful balance struck by Boys and Girls in America, with Finn again avoiding crowding the band as it continues to grow musically: the ballads are weepier, the rock songs more immediate, the attempts to diversify more striking. While they continue to prove themselves a more convincing classic rock act than should be possible in 2008, there's a tension in this album's lyrics between old-fashioned storytelling and breaking down the fourth wall. Stay Positive is their mostly successful bid to have it both ways.
Stay Positive also returns to the narrative threads that marked 2005's Separation Sunday and Finn's work in Lifter Puller, with murder and mayhem creeping back into the lyrical picture. The polite horn interjections and laid-back blooze licks of "Sequestered in Memphis" are musically joyous, though lyrically the narrator sounds inconvenienced to tell his story-- then hints before the chorus that he's retelling it in a station-house interview, as if he only returns to the chorus a second time at the behest of an interrogator. On one of the band's more ambitious musical diversions, "One for the Cutters", the guitars follow the lead of (no joke) a harpsichord while Finn relates the tale of a college girl who gets high a little too often and starts to party with townies-- no new subject matter there, until she finds out the difference between them and her freshman hookups is a proclivity to stab people.
Songs like "Navy Sheets" or "Lord, I'm Discouraged" are mostly notable for adding new elements to the band's palette, be it new-wave keyboards or uncanny Slash-worthy solos, respectively. Meanwhile, "Both Crosses" adds busy acoustics (with J Mascis on banjo, no less), organ, and whispers of theremin to wrap murky atmosphere around one of the record's central mysteries: The girl haunted by visions of the future (referenced and romanced in the song before, "Yeah Sapphire") overdoes the self-medication for her condition and talks about seeing two crucifixions, one being Jesus Christ. The narrator gets understandably nervous over who will be the second.
Stay Positive's other stories are a little less heavy: The band stretches its comfort zone on tracks like "Joke About Jamaica", adding a little talk-box while nodding to Zeppelin and offering sympathy to girls snubbed by music snobs in its lyrics. "Drive-By Truckers frontman Patterson Hood shows up to sing a bit on "Navy Sheets" and Lucero's Ben Nichols croaks some call-and-response on the chorus of "Magazines", but somehow seems lost. Even as the band grows out of its quirks, its universe seems too impermeable yet to accommodate just any guest vocalist, whether the collaboration looks completely natural on paper or not.
Every Hold Steady record heeds the importance of a killer closing track, but even so, "Slapped Actress" is something special. The band navigates one of its trickier compositions here, with churning, dirge-like guitar chords and a restrained piano performance that complements the song's changes in tone. As his protagonists beat a hasty retreat (to where else but Ybor City again), Finn manages to tie up the lyrical seeds he's planted on the record, and more: In an allusion to John Cassavetes' Opening Night, Finn nods to the fact that being in a touring band can be drudgery ("some nights it's just entertainment, and some other nights it's work"), but finds some new metaphors and new inspiration with Jumbotron-ready lines ("We are the theater," "we make our own movies") that acknowledge these songs belong to the listeners as much as the band.
While its title and lyrics often make Stay Positive sound like a darkest-before-the-dawn kind of record, the themes Finn keeps returning to-- skipping town, starting over clean, resurrection-- all speak to the redemptive power of second chances. When the Hold Steady plead with you to "stay positive," and you consider their unlikely and continued ascendancy, you could do worse than take them at their word.


On their third record, the Philly band has achieved a balance between seething chaos and quietly devastating vulnerability. It’s one of the best punk rock records of the year.

Patience

Mannequin Pussy are inherently unforgettable. For starters, there’s the name, conjuring images of plastic clits and keeping the prudes away. (For me, I think of German surrealist Hans Bellmer’s doll project, a series of dismembered female mannequins arranged in fetishistic, voyeuristic, and ultimately unsettling manners). Then there’s the music itself, which summons a different type of terror. Beginning with their 2013 debut Gypsy Pervert, Mannequin Pussy have whipped up breakneck punk tornadoes with equally brutal names like “Meatslave.” But beneath that fury are tender confessionals about love, heartbreak, and trauma, which were explored more deeply on 2016’s Romantic.
On their third record, Patience, Mannequin Pussy have achieved a balance between seething chaos and quietly devastating vulnerability. Working alongside beloved emo producer Will Yip, Patience is their most expansive album yet, and not just because it’s their first to pass the 20-minute mark. Though some songs sprint by in under 60 seconds, most luxuriate in the amount of room they are now afforded. Intricate melodies that were once buried beneath sludge have been polished so that the glimmer shines through the grit. As exemplified by their journey, Mannequin Pussy—guitarist and vocalist Marisa Dabice, guitarist Athanasios Paul, bassist Colins Rey Regisford, and drummer Kaleen Reading—suggest that if patience is a virtue, then so is pop-punk.
Ironically, then, the stories on Patience demand urgency as Dabice struggles to extract herself from toxic relationships or attitudes. Sometimes Dabice’s body is not her own, either because someone has possessed it or she has temporarily dissociated for escape. She recounts this loss with unflinching candor, describing herself being pinned down, shoved against the sink, spit on, and objectified. “When you hit me it does not feel like a kiss like the singers promised,” she murmurs on “Fear + Desire.” Those words, so blasély sung by the Crystals in 1963, were just “a lie that was written for them,” a twisted logic we tell ourselves to survive.
The effect is radically complex, championing the ability for women to be weak and strong, fragile and larger-than-life, often at once. These contradictions are expressed in the title of “Fear + Desire,” which stretches violence into a forlorn expanse that ends in a blast of feedback. The subsequent “Drunk I,” on the other hand, jumps between throat-shredding rage and airy backing vocals so quickly that the song ends before the dynamic has a chance to settle. The biggest moment of catharsis arrives via the slow-burning “High Horse.” As Dabice painfully conjures the details of an abusive relationship—hot breath, a taste that lingers on the teeth—the subdued rhythm section winds tighter and tighter through ambient haze. Finally, her voice blasts off. “I fucked up,” she screams in an eruption of pain and regret. But as a final, crucial gesture of defiance, Dabice proudly reclaims her self-importance. “Your world’s on fire, as I watch up from my high horse/Your world’s on fire, and I walk away,” she howls. That last image, of Dabice calmly strolling away from the burning ruins, is delivered with a softness that lingers on long after the song itself.
Because what happens after you walk away? How do you unlearn self-hate and how do you begin to dismantle the systems that teach and uphold that behavior? This seems to be the part where patience is most crucial. On the gigantic, grungey lead single “Drunk II,” Dabice wrestles with the end of a relationship, drinking and partying to numb her pain. “I still love you, you stupid fuck,” she spits, exasperated and wistful. Finally, after much self-loathing, she comes to terms with heartbreak, realizing that on some level a breakup is an important expression of truth. “Cream” practically crawls out of its skin with pummeling harshness as Dabice promises to treat herself better. “Gonna feel love/I want it to be everything/And unlearn to be like that,” she sings before bursting into a torrent of enraged Spanish.
But even when Mannequin Pussy venture to truly dark places, Patience is such a pure joy to listen to. In its biggest moments, Dabice’s raw edge is matched by equally colossal riffs, explosive energy, and surging momentum. Patience, is without a doubt, one of the year’s strongest punk rock records. Mannequin Pussy prove that there is still so much untapped potential in the genre, and that the people who are doing the heaviest excavating are the ones most often overlooked.
As if to say that there is always light at the end of the tunnel, Patience concludes with some levity. On the hooky “Who You Are,” Dabice gives a pep talk to her younger self, her once scorched-earth attitude replaced by gentle empathy and a surge of gleeful power chords. The optimism pours over to closer “In Love Again,” a hopeful song about starting over and rediscovering the intoxicating thrill of new love. “I’m so happy/Laying here with you/I’m in love with you,” Dabice sings. Her voice fades away and a light congregation of handclaps and keys begin to soothe the wounds that were so raw in the album’s opener. Patience is never easy, but Mannequin Pussy make it worth it.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The talented young Seattle band plays sly and uncommonly melodic odes to ’70s sleaze-rock on its self-released debut.

American Advertisement

A few years ago, Advertisement might be the kind of band you’d catch three times in two days at South by Southwest, vibing to their frayed mid-1970s swagger and impulse-buying a cassette from the merch table despite having no way to play it. At some point in the sweaty haze, you might text your dad, telling him to put down the Greta Van Fleet and listen to this instead.
Such an encounter felt like a relic of the recent past even before the pandemic, but Advertisement’s self-released debut album captures the loose, pleasantly depraved energy of a DIY rock show well enough that you can almost smell the pot fumes from your couch. The band, comprising six childhood friends from the Seattle area, sounds like a rebellion against the city’s ballooning gentrification, armed with rickety instrumental textures and lyrics that evince a sly distrust of American ideals. The members have previously been involved in West Coast hardcore bands like Nasti and Vacant Life, and Advertisement’s 2018 EP reflected that lineage. But on American Advertisement, they slow the tempos and deliver an uncommonly melodic brand of vintage sleaze-rock with frazzled grooves and dueling guitars.
The riffs consummate this transformation, from the slide-guitar grit of “Pretty Money”—an absurdist send-up of capitalism that the band has dubbed “Marxist-cosplay pastiche”—to the melodic wah-wah psychedelia of “Tall Cats.” Wiry-voiced lead singer Charlie Hoffman has mastered the art of sounding like he couldn’t care less, which suits the material well. At times he resembles a young Iggy Pop on a country kick, though the closest Advertisement comes to Stooges-style anarchy is on the breakdown at the end of “Always,” the record’s eight-minute climax. “Freedom,” another lengthy track, rides a krautrock-inspired groove, but its motorik intensity is an awkward match for this band’s cheeky lyrics and irreverent spirit.
Most punk bands wait until album number three or four before they start dabbling in Crazy Horse sprawl and citing the Grateful Dead as an influence, but Advertisement’s attitude seems to be, why wait? They do a fine approximation of Laurel Canyon twang on country-rock brooders like “Days of Heaven” and “Shipwrecked Hearts,” broadening the band’s hard-rock pedigree, and when monotony starts to set in on Side B, the aforementioned “Always” is a welcome jolt.
If you liked The Men more when they rented a cabin in the Catskills and swerved into rustic psychedelia, chances are you’ll like this, too. Advertisement are better lyricists, too, with a knack for surrealist vignettes that distort and pervert American fantasies. Consider the flurry of imagery near the end of “Always,” in which Hoffman calls out to “dressage stallions with erections half-mast” skipping through rings of fire for a cheering crowd. “It’s only the American zen,” the singer mutters, babbling like a prophet as the song accelerates into nightmarish cacophony. In Advertisement’s vision of American zen, grim soothsaying is delivered with a wink and a grin.

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Thirteen years after his debut album helped open up new possibilities for UK bass music, the Bristol fixture returns with an LP meant to probe the various corners of his musical universe.

Reality Tunnels

When Pinch’s Reality Tunnels was announced last month, many headlines focused on the fact that it was Bristol producer Rob Ellis’ first new solo album in 13 years. That’s a long time for any genre, but by electronic music standards, it’s a lifetime. When he released Underwater Dancehall back in 2007—incredibly, the same week as Burial’s seminal Untrue—dubstep was still in full bloom, and the genre was only just beginning to open up and give way to what is now commonly (and frustratingly) referred to as bass music.
As imperfect as the term “bass music” may be—especially when it is often used as a catch-all for a wide variety of disparate sounds and styles, most of them with roots in Black cultures from around the globe—there’s no question that Pinch has been one of the genre’s most reliable protagonists. Although he hasn’t released another Pinch LP since his debut, he’s proven to be a remarkably versatile low-end specialist, dropping collaborative albums with Shackleton and dub legend Adrian Sherwood while issuing dozens of solo EPs and building his Tectonic label into a trusted platform for all things bass.
Reality Tunnels is an attempt to synthesize the various parts of Ellis’ career into a single, coherent work. The album takes its name from a concept put forth in Robert Anton Wilson’s 1983 book Prometheus Rising—the author famously described it as an “owner’s manual for the human brain”—which posits that human beings apply subjective filters (“reality tunnels”) to the world around them, giving rise to our individual beliefs, values, and behaviors. In the context of the LP, Ellis sees each track as a different reality tunnel, a portal into a specific corner of his musical universe.
At its best, this makes for some incredible music. Lead single “Accelerated Culture” is an over-caffeinated bass-techno banger that’s on par with anything that Bristol’s celebrated younger generation of producers (e.g. Hodge, Batu, Bruce) is doing. Also impressive are “All Man Got,” a sludgy bit of dubstep with a live vocal turn from veteran grime MC Trim, and “Party,” a mutant dancehall stalker ominously voiced by Killa P—the horns on that one are downright regal. Those tunes are all in Ellis’ bass-heavy wheelhouse, but he steps far outside his comfort zone to deliver one of the album’s best tracks. “Back to Beyond” is a sumptuous piece of ambient with lush strings, angelic vocal choirs, and devotional overtones; electronic music fans often jokingly refer to the club as “church,” but this song wouldn’t be out of place inside an actual house of worship.
Unfortunately, not all the experiments on Reality Tunnels are successful, particularly when guest singers are involved. Album opener “Entangled Particles” is essentially an updated take on Bristol’s trip-hop legacy, complete with jungle flourishes and Ellis’ signature industrial-strength low end, but Emika’s vocals drag the proceedings too far into pop territory; what’s left is the the kind of song that might come on during an especially dramatic scene of whatever foreign crime drama you’re currently binge-watching on Netflix. Then there’s “The Last One,” which features Greenlandic folk singer-songwriter Nive Neilsen; with its melancholy vocals and gently strummed guitar, it strives for Mezzanine-era Massive Attack, but winds up sounding more like Mazzy Star. On its own merits, it’s not a bad bit of fuzzy grunge-pop, but on a Pinch album, it’s something of a non-sequitur.
Ellis does manage to tap into some classic Massive Attack vibes on “Change Is a Must,” which melds gurgling dub rhythms with the soulful lament of Jamaican singer Inezi; it’s more Blue Lines than Mezzanine, but the song is sure to satiate anyone who’s looking for some Bristolian trip-hop magic. Still, it’s difficult to hail the song as essential. Despite the diversity of Ellis’ output over the years, he’s always been an artist who fearlessly pushes music into the future, even as he’s referencing the past. His new album is obviously meant to be a more personal record, but in throwing out his usual rulebook, Ellis seems to have inadvertently wound up splitting the difference between nostalgia and innovation. What’s left is a scattered effort, and one can only wonder what Reality Tunnels might have sounded like if Ellis hadn’t followed so many of them down such sentimental pathways.


Animated with a new intensity, the Cornwall band’s fifth album may be its most ingenious and immersive mix of folk and rock yet.

Red River Dialect: Abundance Welcoming Ghosts

Abundance Welcoming Ghosts

Midway through “Salvation,” Red River Dialect’s headlong foray into psychedelic folk-rock, David Morris yelps out the words, “Iced coffee brain freeze!” It’s an odd moment, marrying a mundane idea with swirling fiddle and a relentless wah-wah guitar, and for that reason alone it could be easily parodied. It’s also a captivating moment, one that anchors the song’s loftier subjects to the everyday world and reveals something essential about Morris as a songwriter and bandleader. Red River Dialect are fascinated by tactile sensations, whether it’s the sharpness of hot metal against your hand or the soft tension of a piano key under your finger. When Morris shouts about brain freeze, you hear the band work together to evoke the chilly stab of adrenaline.
Such physical sensations are important, as they ground the earnest spiritual inquiries animating the Cornwall band’s inventive folk-rock songs. Morris is the son of an Anglican priest; as a teenager he found Buddhism through the Beat poets and went on to work as an interfaith adviser at the University of Westminster in London. Immediately following the sessions for Abundance Welcoming Ghosts, Red River Dialect’s fifth album, he decamped to Nova Scotia for a nine-month stay at Gampo Abbey. The music and the monastery visit may serve the same purpose, as Morris has regularly seeded Red River Dialect songs with spiritual insights and observations. “May I welcome joy when it comes near,” he sings on the jazzy, Pentangular “My Friend.” “May I also laugh about but never doubt it.” There’s a quiver in his voice, slightly more suppressed here than on previous records, that makes the lines sound less like lessons and more like reminders to himself.
Perhaps because the band knew Morris was going to disappear for close to a year, or perhaps because they spent so much time touring behind 2018’s Broken Stay Open Sky, these songs possess a new urgency and intensity. There’s an electric tension to “Blue Sparks,” with piano notes that sound like the hooves of a galloping horse. Even a slower, quieter tune like “Two White Carp” sounds barely contained, as though the players might burst out of the Welsh landscape as Morris paints it. In the tradition of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, who mixed traditional English folk songs with contemporary rock sounds, Red River Dialect understand the importance of a solid rhythm section: Drummer Kiran Bhatt and bassist Coral Kindred-Boothby play with a jazzy sense of invention that makes “Snowdon” sound like it’s powered by an invisible engine.
Abundance Welcoming Ghosts may be the band’s most ingenious and immersive mix of folk and rock yet, but it’s also Morris’ most compelling set of songs. He invests small sensations with outsize power, finding joy in sensory pleasures as well as in the mystical inquests that music allows. “Oh, a piano,” he sings on “Piano.” “Open the lid, play a single note, and look out through a new window.” Even as the record is steeped in the long history of British folk music, that balance of the tactile and the spiritual anchors these songs in the present moment.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Polish band’s latest shows that they don’t make protest music so much as process music, indulging the ugliest aspects of post-punk and post-hardcore as a means to protect what’s good and beautiful in this world.

B Flat A

In his life and art, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski has devoted himself to anti-fascism, which, in his native Poland, has become something of a full-time job. As a descendent of a concentration-camp survivor, he’s channeled themes of intergenerational trauma and the banality of evil into celebrated works of poetry that have led to guest-lecturer gigs at universities around the world. As an activist, he made headlines after he and a friend discovered 500,000 discarded shoes in the woods near the Stutthof camp-turned-museum site, where some 65,000 prisoners died during World War II. Despite the international media attention, the museum opted to let the mounds of footwear languish in the forest out of sight—which, for Kwiatkowski, signified yet another victory for a pervasive Make Poland Innocent Again campaign that seeks to downplay the country’s complicity in Nazi war crimes and use the government’s legislative might to erase it from collective memory.
But as a singer and guitarist for Gdansk quartet Trupa Trupa, the scholarly Kwiatkowski finds the visceral, violent emotional release that’s all but necessary when you spend so many hours of your day ruminating on past genocides. Despite Kwiatkowski’s outspoken nature, Trupa Trupa don’t make protest music so much as process music, indulging the ugliest aspects of post-punk and post-hardcore as a means to protect what’s good and beautiful in this world, while shrewdly using psychedelic whimsy as a Trojan Horse to confront historical horrors. On the group’s fifth album, B Flat A, that process has become all the more fraught and grueling, with the band swinging harder than ever to stave off the dual threats of pandemic-induced paranoia and Poland’s ongoing slide into authoritarianism, while also vividly conveying the psychological duress and physical exhaustion of a life locked in perpetual struggle.
Though Kwiatkowski and fellow guitarist Wojtek Juchniewicz sing in English, their words aren’t so easily decoded—they’re delivered more as taser shocks to complement their barbwired riffs, Wojciech Juchniewicz’s cattle-prodding basslines, and drummer Tomasz Pawluczuk’s rampaging rhythms. But the insurrectionary intent is deeply felt nonetheless. With its lockstep drum beat and echoing chants, the opening “Moving” plays like the soundtrack to a movie-montage training sequence of guerilla soldiers preparing for war. In other instances, the cryptic communiques judder with real-world resonance: The aptly named “Twitch” rides a Trail of Dead-style stampede while Juchniewicz shouts, “It’s just a chill/But I’ve got a pill/Go back to work,” effectively summing up the pandemic experience of every low-paid laborer forced to put their health on the line for the economy.
Despite their surface-level similarities, Trupa Trupa don’t slot so easily alongside the current crop of rant’n’roll post-punkers sing-speaking their way through our current dystopia. B Flat A betrays a greater attention to sound design and melodic definition that transcends the genre’s claustrophobic confines and gestures toward something more immersive and panoramic. “Kwietnik” (Polish for “flowerbed”) may begin with a standard Sonic Youthian surge, but the bottom soon falls out of the mix, leaving Juchniewicz’s muted verses to fend for themselves against a muffled throbbing beat, like someone trying to record a slowcore confessional while a techno party rages in the loft next door. With “All and All,” Trupa Trupa shoot Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage” straight into the dark side of the saloon, yielding a delightfully dazed country lullaby that nonetheless simmers with vengeful fervor. But their most insidious act of subversion comes in the form of “Uniform,” a sweet psych-pop singalong laced with poison. The lyrics amount to a single absurd line repeated ad infinitum—“I’m gonna eat all my uniforms”—but, through Kwiatkowski’s innocent wide-eyed delivery, those words crystallize the blind, eager conformity that fascism encourages, like an eerily cheery Hitler Youth recruitment poster translated into musical form.
Trupa Trupa’s previous album, 2019’s Of the Sun, riffed on similar themes with a more monochromatic palette and lumbering momentum, but the lyrics on that record nonetheless exuded an uncanny optimism—the proverbial flowers poking out of sidewalk cracks. On B Flat A, such silver linings have withered into ash. By the time we reach the closing title track, Trupa Trupa are drowning in the pandemic blues, their pugilistic fury simmered down into a haunted jangle, their righteous rhetoric debased into a blur of indecipherable, overlapping spoken-word verses that sound like they’re emanating from a detuned radio. And yet over the course of its six-minute run, this threadbare track accrues a hypnotic allure, as its melancholy toughens into resilience. It’s a song that seems to suggest our mere survival is a victory in and of itself, for it means we’ve lived to fight another day.


On their lush, formidable debut, the “dream-doom” duo of Tomb Mold’s Derrick Vella and Innumerable Forms’ Justin DeTore illustrate how emotionally boundless metal can be.

Tide Turns Eternal

It’s been an exceptional time for metal that sounds like the dying cries of an alien planet being sucked into a black hole. Newer bands like Blood Incantation, Worm, and Spectral Voice have all taken the templates of old school death and doom metal and imbued them with a mystical, psychedelic aura, with songs whose thrashing riffs slowly spill into abstract ambience and shimmering post-rock guitars. Toronto’s Tomb Mold forged one of the heaviest totems yet to this stylistic rebirth with their dark, disorienting 2019 release Planetary Clairvoyance, thanks in no small part to the searing guitar work of Derrick Vella. Now, Vella has returned with Dream Unending—a “dream-doom” project with Innumerable Forms frontman Justin DeTore that pushes his guitar work even further outside the typical confines of metal.
One of the most immediately gripping qualities of Dream Unending’s debut, Tide Turns Eternal, is how much of it completely does away with death metal riffage altogether. Instead, the album is lined with lush, echoing 12-string guitars that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Durutti Column or Cocteau Twins record. A professed disciple of moody 1980s acts like the Cure and the Blue Nile, Vella captures those bands’ ability to weave lonesome, chorus-soaked textures into something yearning and warm, shrouding his wilted melodies in a dense haze of reverb and phaser pedals. As a result, Tide Turns Eternal is one of the most sonically diverse metal albums of the year, pulling a rich prism of tones and effects together to create a phantasmal gaze into the genre at its most heady.
The most direct precedent for Dream Unending’s sound is the gloomy, gothic death/doom spearheaded by the Peaceville Three—the trio of Anathema, My Dying Bride, and Paradise Lost, all signed to the UK label in the early ’90s. But where those bands gravitated toward medieval and grandiose aesthetics, Vella and DeTore are reaching for something more otherworldly. Just listen to “In Cipher I Weep,” which opens on an uncanny fretless bassline and gradually stomps its way toward an eerie church organ climax; or “The Needful,” which starts with a spellbinding Floydian guitar intro and ends on a howling solo that sounds like a comet catching fire in the night sky. Vella and DeTore are constantly pushing each other to discover ruminative new territory, using the trudging march of doom metal to explore their most introspective impulses.
Even on the album’s most heavenly moments—like the billowing fog of guitar chords that arrives four and a half minutes into “Dream Unending”— Vella’s riffs never lose the dissonance of his death metal roots, infusing all of Tide Turns Eternal with a sense of anguish and longing, but also hope. As the album reaches the end of its nearly 10-minute closing title track, a gorgeous vocal passage from Alberta singer-songwriter McKenna Rae enters like a light peeking through the mist. Before long, however, Vella reveals his most unvarnished, brutal riff yet, as DeTore joins in with pounding drums and a guttural, earth-sundering roar. It’s as if the entire album is collapsing in on itself: a harrowing final moment on a record that serves as a reminder of how emotionally boundless metal can be.

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The instrumental edition of last year’s cosmic jazz-funk odyssey brings Flying Lotus’ detailed compositions and soundscaping to center stage.

Flamagra (Instrumentals)

Roughly a year ago, Flying Lotus released Flamagra, an expansive, cosmic jazz-funk saga that spanned 27 songs over the course of 67 minutes and featured 10 guest vocalists. His latest offering is an instrumental version of the LP, now scrubbed of vocals from Anderson .Paak, George Clinton, and Tierra Whack, among others. The result conjures ambivalence: On one hand, songs snipped away from their narrator can feel like canned backing tracks. On the other, the pure instrumentals allow FlyLo’s detailed compositions and soundscaping to take the lead role, without competition from other big personalities.
None of the original guest vocalists did Flamagra any harm, but they did risk ejecting you from FlyLo’s wild, sci-fi spiritual journey. The album’s opening minutes chart an undulating course through the cosmos: On the spectacular “Heroes,” we’re jet-propelled by skittering percussion, lightspeed guitar noodling, and radiant chorals. The ride ebbs and flows with the subsequent “Post Requisite” and “Heroes in a Half Shell,” but the appearance of Anderson .Paak’s distinctive voice on “More”—while perfectly suited to the song itself—feels like a sudden call back to earth. The instrumental version does away with those distractions, allowing for a more immersive listening experience.
While Flamagra as a whole is strengthened by the instrumental treatment, individual tracks can suffer. Compared with the richness of surrounding songs, “More” sounds unfinished without .Paak. Tierra Whack’s performance on “Yellow Belly” was a highlight of the original album, twisting and contorting her voice as if shaping a surreal balloon animal. Without her idiosyncratic delivery, the song is just a series of curt handclaps, chimes, and bass couplets. There’s a prominent, palpable absence that was clearly meant to be sung over.
Some tracks are musically fortified enough to stand on their own. While it’s impossible not to miss George Clinton’s warm rasp on “Burning Down the House,” the sturdy, meandering funk holds strong thanks to Thundercat’s titan bassline. The swerve of fretless bass and spangly synths on “Spontaneous” are far more captivating on their own than alongside Little Dragon’s somewhat sanitized soul vocals. Similarly, the Toro y Moi-featuring “9 Carrots” doesn’t lose much without a singer.
One question looms over the Flamagra instrumentals: Why? It’s not a matter of quality, but of intent. Flamagra already featured 17 instrumental tracks in its original release; the decision to strip the voices from the other 10 seems like an afterthought, and occasionally sounds like one. There is also a slight issue of consistency. Why is David Lynch’s spoken word piece “Fire Is Coming” the only guest appearance to remain on the instrumental version?
Perhaps Flamagra could have made sense as two separate albums: 17 instrumentals on one disc, 10 guest-featuring songs on the other. As adjoining chapters in the same book, the two releases would be in conversation with one another. But it’s hard to imagine someone listening to Flamagra as it was re-released to streaming services, with the initial album and the instrumental version back-to-back—not only because of their length, but because of their sequential similarities. The addition of Flamagra (Instrumental) is best suited for the FlyLo completist: It may be more cohesive as a trip, but it doesn’t offer any truly new revelations.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On their most purposeful record to date, Kim Gordon and Bill Nace conjure a complete sonic ecosystem where they control the weather.

The Switch

It feels odd to talk about control when discussing Body/Head. Kim Gordon and Bill Nace’s grinding guitar duets seem primed for letting go, with both members surrendering their musical egos to the flow of their noises and textures. They get out of their own way, carving out ample time for each piece to gestate, grow, and ripen. Dig deeper into their songs, though, and the discipline in Gordon and Nace’s approach emerges. No matter how far they stretch, their tones and rhythms always cohere, making their music as mesmerizing as a hypnotist’s swinging clock.
You don’t have to venture far below the surface to detect that control on The Switch. It’s Body/Head’s most purposeful record so far, as Gordon and Nace conjure a complete sonic ecosystem where they direct the weather. The most stunning example of this power is the album’s shortest track, “In the Dark Room.” Dense and harrowing, it features the kind of dissonance usually associated with sprawling improv. But, in Nace and Gordon’s hands, these unchartable sounds combine like well-defined movements in a symphony. Their guitars rhyme as if they were trading chord changes rather than thick swaths of noise.
This kind of orchestrated synchronicity is a necessity for Body/Head, because their music is more about building moods and weaving textures than about creating surprises. As abstract as their songs often are, they rely on defined structures to maintain their entrancing focus. That’s why, even though The Switch’s heavy sounds can be dizzying, no moment on the album feels random. One key is Gordon and Nace’s mastery of slowness. Their consistently patient approach is a signature, evoking Tony Conrad’s way of concentrating his tuning by playing deliberately slowly, as well as Earth’s decades-long aversion to rushing through a song.
The intriguing paradox of music played at this glacial pace is that it alters your perception of time, so songs can seem to speed up when their tempo doesn’t actually change. It’s a matter of kinetics rather than clock ticks; shifts in a track’s energy, intensity, and volume create the illusion of acceleration. This is especially true of the moments when Gordon sings, infusing adrenaline into Body/Head’s guitar sounds. On opener “Last Time,” her elongated syllables give a curving shape to warped noise. On closer “Reverse Hard,” her rhythmic glossolalia is sparse, but it elicits a chopping guitar response that becomes the song’s pulse.
The best—and most aptly titled—track on The Switch is the hypnotic “Change My Brain.” Here, Body/Head’s reliance on structure is matched by their fascination with texture. Every granule of sound emanating from Gordon and Nace’s guitars is carefully crafted, and the song’s progression is almost solely a product of these delicate variations. The pair builds a rhythm from clipped feedback, then ride it through waves of distortion that change shape in minute, near-pointillist adjustments. Gordon’s most impassioned singing on the album helps here, too, but it’s the pair’s frame accuracy that makes the track so dramatic. The results are far from predictable, but they serve as further proof that Body/Head are fully in control.


The battled-tested L.A. rapper’s debut combines technical skill and narrative ambition for a gripping album about broken systems and the drudgery of art always imitating life.

Generational Curse

Halfway through Generational Curse, the debut album by the South Central L.A.-born rapper ICECOLDBISHOP, somebody shoots up a house party. Like so many other things in Bishop’s writing—the deaths of parents and friends, the drugs that rot relatives’ lives and stink up living rooms—the shooting is both an acute event and an indistinguishable part of the ocean it ripples through. As the album’s title suggests, Bishop traces long arcs of poverty, policing, and decay, and pokes at the tension between the individual and the collective, nature and nurture, fate and self-determination. All of this is rendered in vocals that suggest Danny Brown and Suga Free stretched to the dimensions of Saturday morning cartoon characters, a hyperkinetic knot of energy and angst.
There’s an air of predestination to even the most straightforward stories in Bishop’s raps. His mother was pregnant with him while she demonstrated at the 1992 uprisings that followed the Rodney King acquittals; even after his family moved across the San Gabriels and into Victorville, seeking a reprieve from the ambient threat posed by gangs and police, Bishop would drift back down to the city whenever he could, honing his outre style in battles and in makeshift studios. While he’s released relatively little music since first garnering attention with 2017’s portentous “Porch” (“On the front porch, same place where they shot dice at/Same neighborhood [long, beeped redaction] lost his life at”), Bishop’s cacophonous verses make it feel like every year and experience is flooding back on top of one another.
What keeps this onslaught of technique and information from becoming overwhelming is Bishop’s remarkable attention to detail. Sometimes this is reflected through beautifully incongruous similes (on “I Can’t Swim” he brags that one phone call will have his shooters “sliding like the limo curtain”), other times horrifying images, like the veins that disappear from his heroin-addicted cousin’s arms. He warns, on “Last Night,” to watch for partygoers with shoes tied too tightly—those are the undercovers. And an expected juxtaposition between Martin Luther King and violence on a street named after him zooms all the way in: to the Burger King on the corner of MLK and Western (“Til the End”), the same song where he talks about kids shooting at kids by calling a dead body “a stripe on my letterman.” “Went to hell,” he continues, “back to Earth, then went back to hell again.”
For as topically sprawling as Bishop’s songs can be, the construction of each component part is drum-tight. On “Out the Window,”  his iambic bounce on the lines “Chopper tucked inside the oven, it don’t even work/Little bro just copped Mercedes, he don’t even work” quickly turn to silk on a hook so delicate that it actually exacerbates the menace of its lyrics. Sonically, the album takes a minimal approach to the rattling atonality of L.A.’s last decade, though it occasionally offers irrepressible G-funk basslines from the ’90s. At the end of “Candlelight,” Bishop identifies the musical lineages as running parallel to the generational curses, singing a lighthearted freestyle full of murder threats. Its playfulness underlines that these are genre conventions— violence as raw creative material—but is interrupted by the appearance of real-life rivals. For Bishop, art imitates life imitating art, on and on, generation after miserable generation.
Bishop likes to invert how life is rendered on an album, where the broad narrative motifs are clear as day but the day-to-day events are shrouded in mystery. The names of gunmen are whispered then dismissed, the status of their victims subject to games of emotionally charged telephone. The most chilling version of this device comes on the eerie, slinking “D.A.R.E.,” where he says of his father’s death: “I was 1 when I heard half of my parents died,” the syntax so alien that it restores power to a trauma that would otherwise be dulled through euphemism and repetition. That reminder courses through Bishop’s music: Just because something is common doesn’t make it any less horrifying. “My cousin died 10 years ago and it’s still shocking,” he raps on opener “Full Fledge,” before returning to the same event as “D.A.R.E.”: “My daddy died back in ’94 and we still crying/Gangbanging, 50 years old, and we still dying.”
Though Generational Curse is in conversation with styles of L.A. rap that stretch back far more than a decade, its closest analogue might be Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city. Curse is less plotty than good kid—necessarily so, as it’s concerned with the way cycles repeat themselves. And yet the warring senses of watching (friends, enemies, each threats in their own way) and being watched (by elders with bad advice and cops with bad intentions) yield albums of young people who have been scandalized and, in turn, learn to scandalize others. But where Kendrick defaulted to the observer’s position, Bishop is more comfortable being active. You imagine him across a cramped car from Kendrick, the good and the bad influence at once, his hand on the wheel but the destination locked in.


Released for the first time, a recording of the opening night of Ono’s 1974 Japanese tour captures her at her mischievous peak.

Yoko Ono / Plastic Ono Band: Let’s Have a Dream (1974 One Step Festival)

Yoko Ono took flight. In August 1974, she touched down in Tokyo’s Haneda Airport to mobs of fans and a constellation of flashbulbs. She was arriving to perform a run of six shows ostensibly pegged to her most recent album, 1973’s uncharacteristically slight Feeling the Space. But the nine months since its release had been a time of upheaval and artistic renewal. Separated from her husband, John Lennon, who had eloped—with her blessing—with a lover, she quietly recorded a new album, A Story, with a blistering centerpiece titled “Yes, I’m a Witch.” Though the album would remain unreleased until 1992, due to problems at her record label, Apple, Ono had been galvanized by its creation process. “When I wrote the song ‘Yes, I’m a Witch,’ I was ready to scream,” she said in 2007. “I think it was important that I came up with that in 1974. I needed to shout it for the good of my mental health.”
Fifty thousand fans showed up to hear Ono let rip on the opening night of the tour, a live performance at One Step Festival in Koriyama, Fukushima; the recording has now been released for the first time, by Idol Japan Records, as Let’s Have a Dream. On stage, Ono banters with the crowd in Japanese before flipping to English to figure out the setlist with her specially assembled Plastic Ono Super Band, which includes the Brecker Brothers and Steve Gadd, the drummer behind the iconic drum fills of Steely Dan’s “Aja.” In the surviving video footage of the performance, she blows kisses to the crowd, struts across the stage in towering platform heels, wiggles her waist, and squats on her haunches while dramatically warbling. As the crowd screams its applause, she stands with arms aloft, like a homecoming Olympian showing off her gold.
On Let’s Have a Dream, “Angry Young Woman” is hardly recognizable from its origins as an earnest message song. Communing with Steve Khan’s intuitive, bluesy guitar, Ono sounds beautifully melodic as she descibes a woman with “three children and two abortions” who rejects mothering for a new life. It’s a remarkable thing to hear a ’70s crowd cheer for a song with such thorny themes; 50 years on, the topic of mothers who reject parenting remains a taboo touched by few. Feeling the Space’s baroque piano and folksy choir always felt like a mismatch for “Woman of Salem,” a parable about the pack-mentality sexism Ono knew all too well. Here she is resplendent and raw, expelling a torrent of female stereotypes as if acid were burning a hole in her throat and the mic were a spittoon. As the song reaches its climax, Ono’s voice curdles. “Help! Help!” she shouts, before her band splinters into carnivalesque disorder, with a flute that flouders like a cartoon bird in a snowstorm. She screams, invoking a murderous mob. “Must kill! Must kill! Must kill!”
Ono’s abrasive vocalizations were inspired by dissonant Schoenbergian opera, Tibetan and Indian singing, and hetai, a Kabuki technique. “It gets to a point where you don’t have time to utter a lot of intellectual bullshit,” she explained. “If you were drowning [...] you’d say, ‘Help!” but if you were more desperate you’d say, ‘Eiough-hhhhh,’ or something like that.” On a storming reimagining of Fly’s “Don’t Worry Kyoko,” her ululations and screams thrillingly clash with piercing brass and the Plastic Ono Super Band’s “Green Onions”-esque R&B, before an arresting climax—“Kyoko! Kyoko! Kyoko!”—where Ono appears intent on expelling every last bit of breath from her lungs.
Just as she seems about to spin off her axis, Ono shifts gears. Two Japanese-language rarities, debuted at One Step, are rockers to rival the best moments on Approximately Infinite Universe. The previously unreleased “One Way Road” is a jazzy strut with smooth sax and woodwind glissandos that make Ono’s singing feel particularly fantastical—at one point, she glides up to the highest point of her register to mimic the flute’s airy vibrato. And “Yume O Moto,” a hopeful ballad previously only available as a Japan-only 7" and in remixed form on 1992’s Onobox, presents a list of impossible wishes that brings to mind the logic-defying invitations of Ono’s foundational Fluxus work, Grapefruit. “I want to caress the New York skyline,” Ono sings in Japanese, “I wanna be blown by the willow in Ginza.” Her voice is sonorous and sincere, coupled with echoing guitar lines that seem to reach skyward.
Reviewing a then-recent Ono residency at the East Village club Kenny’s Castaways, a New York Times critic panned her show as “abrasive” and “confrontational”—as if that weren’t the intention all along. But Let’s Have a Dream shows that’s only half the story, proving Ono’s bizarre genius as well as her warmth, charisma, and downright lovability as a performer. Given that, after her Japan tour, Ono took a break from music until 1980’s Lennon collaboration Double Fantasy, the album feels like a triumphant cap to her early-’70s imperial period. Her music would turn to graver concerns and would, at times, retread familiar ground. Let’s Have a Dream is the sound of Yoko Ono at her mischievous peak; you can’t help but marvel at her renewed rage and feel captivated by her joy at a time where the universe felt approximately infinite, and she couldn’t help but share it.

Correction: An earlier version of this review stated that Light in the Attic Records released Ono’s live performance at One Step Festival in Koriyama, Fukushima. It was released by Idol Japan Records.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a lost gem of neo-soul from 1996 made by a nascent phenom from the UK, heralded by Aaliyah and D’Angelo as one of the greats.

Lewis Taylor

Four days in a New York hotel room and Lewis Taylor hadn’t heard from a soul. He took the eight-hour flight from London at the behest of D’Angelo and his camp to work on the follow-up to Brown Sugar and now, no knock on the door, no phone call, nothing. Taylor, a self-described neurotic in his early 30s, could only sit and wait for a life-changing opportunity. In New York, no one had even heard of him; his album—a brooding, confounding R&B record that excited UK music journalists but left his label wondering where the hit was—hadn’t been released in the States.
As a child, he inherited his parents’ affection for the tendon-straining R&B shouters of the American South and the smooth, romantic crooners, especially Sam & Dave and Sam Cooke, and thanks to the trippy album artwork on display in a record shop in Hertfordshire, near where he grew up, he discovered prog and psychedelic rock acts like Edgar Broughton Band, Syd Barrett, and Yes. For his debut album, Lewis Taylor, he borrowed from both these fixations to create guitar-driven, structurally ornate tracks that he then blessed with his voice, a svelte tenor that sounded like it had been honed under the tutelage of Marvin Gaye. D’Angelo wanted some of that.
The promise of shaping the myriad ideas mentioned by D’Angelo’s people over the phone—it was difficult to tell which direction they wanted to go in after the success of Brown Sugar—must have felt far away in the hotel room, even though D’Angelo was supposedly somewhere in the vicinity. Taylor wasn’t in the studio, where he expected to be, where he felt comfortable. Frustration mounted. What was the point of enduring this treatment, such blatant disregard for his time and feelings? After four days, he checked out and returned home.
Taylor’s career is one of the most under-discussed in modern R&B history, and this anecdote, which the artist relayed to journalist and scholar Michael Anthony Neal in a 2006 Pop Matters interview, captures his frustrations and difficulties in microcosm. It’s fitting that the interview has been, for all intents and purposes, lost on the internet, only accessible if you excavate using the Wayback Machine or some other archiving project. Unlike white R&B artists like Jon B. or Rick Astley, who found new relevance in the digital cultural memory through Drake adoration and viral pranking, Taylor never found the means to keep his eclectic catalog alive for subsequent generations. It didn’t seem like he much cared to, either; he was content to have a crotchety underdog’s career releasing oblique R&B records that didn’t try to reenact note-for-note the styles of the past or embrace the genre’s meld with hip-hop. After all, this is a guy who, when asked about being a blue-eyed soul singer in a 1997 interview, responded, “Well I suppose the most unintelligent answer I could give to that is ‘fuck off.’” Eventually, the music industry responded in kind.
Initially, though, Taylor cast a spell. On the strength of a demo that had a touch of Al Green’s vocal phrasing, Taylor signed with Island Records and recorded a masterpiece, the self-titled 1996 debut that gathered a cult audience which included two of the most beloved acts in R&B, D’Angelo and Aaliyah. Neal, a professor of African and African American studies at Duke, went so far as to label Taylor “white chocolate” in an academic journal, meaning a white performer of Black music who “legitimately add[s] to the tradition.” Taylor looks different but still “contains all the ‘flava’ and the texture of the original.” (He wrote it, not me.)
Taylor’s skill should be obvious to anyone hearing his voice and guitar-playing, something like if Marvin Gaye merged with Jeff Buckley. But what to do with him? How to market an uptight, limelight-allergic, white neo-soul singer in 1996, before that branding shorthand became commonplace—and well before you could attach, say, Mark Ronson to the project? Island couldn’t figure it out.
In search of an attention-grabbing breakthrough single, the label took a page from the Pat Boone playbook, encouraging Taylor to cover soul classics like Stevie Wonder’s “Until You Come Back to Me” and the Supremes’ “Reflections,” and passed on a completed album he handed over something that was decidedly more Brian Wilson than Jon B. Unable to solve the marketing dilemma and seemingly uninterested in keeping a hit-less wunderkind on their roster, Island dropped Taylor outright after the release of his second album, 2000’s Lewis II.
The biggest hit bearing Taylor’s name is Robbie Williams’ 2006 cover of the brilliant dance tune “Lovelight”—produced by Ronson, of course. Following in D’Angelo’s footsteps, Chaka Khan left Taylor hanging after extending an invitation to collaborate. Eventually he decided to self-release his records until a boutique label swooped in, even convincing him to book his first U.S. tour in 2006. But he played only one date, a well-reviewed Bowery Ballroom show attended by, among others, Stuart Matthewman, of Sade, before bailing on the entire endeavor and retiring.
In 2016, Taylor explained his decision in a candid, sometimes prickly interview on the blog Soul Jones, saying that his pursuit of music had turned him from an “eccentric, slightly arrogant little nerd to an egotistical self-centered little shit.” And, obviously, it couldn’t have been the result of fame; Taylor said that the transformation began before he released his debut. It took standing on the brink of an international tour to realize that if he didn’t walk away from music, he couldn’t change from what he’d become.
Male insecurity—the perhaps harder-to-claim reality coursing beneath the brash egotistical ugliness—is the great subject of Taylor’s music and there’s no better, more engaging expression of that tumult than his self-titled record. The album begins in media res as we listen in on the pleading, bewilderment, and frustration of a breakup in progress. After a tense, patience-testing instrumental introduction, Taylor's first words are, “Tell me what we’re gonna do/I wanna know how we’re gonna pull through.”
Imagine if Let’s Get It On opened with Gaye’s world-ending divorce song “Just to Keep You Satisfied” instead of the title track—that’s the mood, but with less weary resignation and more agitated confusion and anger. Taylor insisted that the blues—“playing six guitar parts at once and singing on top”—inspired his writing during this period more than anything else, and the genre’s plaintiveness (and occasional meanness) suffused his lyrics, too. About four minutes in, Taylor resolves the musical tension by incorporating the kind of layered doo-wop vocals Gaye sculpted with genius (those velvet ooos and la-la-las), while simultaneously activating full son-of-a-bitch mode, singing, “If we don’t make love, it’s over, baby...If we don’t work tonight/Then we just ain’t right.” Not getting laid one last time makes the split real, especially since she’ll be denied his gusto: “If I don’t get lucky, you don’t get lucky too.” A real gentleman, this guy.
There are many abject flavors on this record and the most satisfying comes via the next song, “Bittersweet.” Aaliyah called it perfect; it should be considered a peak of the neo-soul era, spoken about with the same delight and awe reserved for “Untitled,” “On & On” and “Ascension.” (One of the ironies of Taylor’s career is that, despite his whiteness, he still missed out on commercial success, thus avoiding the disdainful “Elvis Effect” of sanitizing Black music for lucrative, history-erasing white consumption.) “Bittersweet” enacts the taste of its title by moving from gloomy to transcendent. The lyrics describe a relationship the very miserable narrator says he wants to leave but can’t muster the courage to end: “I pick up the telephone to say it’s over/Soon as I hear you talk it’s started all over again.” She laughs at him when they make love. His friends have abandoned him, calling him crazy for putting up with this. He is, in short, down bad.
And yet! Rather than wallowing in self-pity, the song finds ecstasy in agony. At first “Bittersweet” is brittle and ominous—the opening piano noises are stark, like something creaking in the attic. The guitar line is sinuous, paranoia-stoking. At intervals, he triggers a stack of his vocals doing something that sounds like an ugly inhale. It doesn’t seem possible that any sweetness could be extracted from this murk. But by the time the bridge begins, there’s no predicting the evolution of these monstrous, conflicted feelings. The thundering piano chords that bring the chorus back sound like church. “Oh, come on/You got me losing my mind,” he wails, his voice coming from somewhere beyond despair or joy. This kind of bad love isn’t novel subject matter, but Taylor’s execution is ambitious enough to blow your hair back. “Bittersweet” so moved Aaliyah that it compelled her in an MTV interview to ask that Taylor “call a sista: let’s hook up, let’s do something.” She had found a copy of his record in Australia.
The songs on the opening side of Lewis Taylor make surprising choices that keep them dynamic and alive. Not a single one ends in a place you could anticipate from the opening minute, and Taylor crafts consistently stunning endings. Some criticism of his second album focused on his “cerebral, convoluted chord structures,” but such extravagances never weigh down Lewis Taylor. “Whoever,” “Track,” “Song”—all have refrains liable to stick with you for days. The latter is so weirdly skeletal at the start, barely more than his voice, clanging percussion, and some bass, and from that emptiness, a massive hook emerges that he lets ride for the final two minutes. It’s an anthem for suckers in love: “Find me weak, find me strong/I get all messed up whenever you call my name.” Male R&B stars in the ’90s increasingly emulated the bravado of hip-hop, but Lewis Taylor offers a kind of emasculated R&B, more excited by self-destructive feelings than pleasure.
Unable to resist a twist, the back half of Lewis Taylor provides a thoughtful repudiation of all that fit-throwing and floundering, signaled by track six, “Betterlove” (and, later, “How” and “Right”). It’s an easy-going ballad with the kind of last-minute key change that screams love triumphant in the face of adversity. “You teach me and I learn about the way a man should be,” Taylor sings, petulant and self-effacing no more. On “Right,” he puts it as laconically as possible: “She’s right and I’m wrong.”
There was a real secret behind the creation of the album that informed these lessons. The record has been portrayed as a Prince-esque solo effort, the lone genius in a studio brimming over with ideas and technical ability. The liner notes billed his manager and romantic partner Sabina Smyth as the executive producer. This undersold her contributions. In the interview where Taylor cleared up rumors about his retirement, he also spoke about collaborating with Smyth. “She was involved in the writing, the arrangements, sounds and textures, and the production [on Lewis Taylor],” he said. “And I didn’t credit her because I was so insecure, immature and self-involved. I would say that the executive producer credit I eventually gave her on that album is patronizing at best.”
There’s an edge in that last line, a whiff of self-loathing. Patronizing at best—like his past behavior still beckons as a lash to use against himself, even after he’s owned up to his mistakes. The sense memory of an indiscretion stays vivid. The mixture of anger, lust, shame, pride, and remorse channeled in Lewis Taylor is as potent as modern R&B has produced. The genre is often at its best when it grapples with the unsavory complexities of the heart, even if the music isn’t as widely palatable when scraping around in the dark corners of a relationship. Here, My Dear was never as popular as Let’s Get It On. It took time to lure its audience.
This has been the year of renewed interest in Taylor. In January, D’Angelo debuted a radio show with Sonos and played a cut from the Japanese release of Lewis Taylor, a strange and beautiful bonus track called “I Dream the Better Dream,” which sounds like In a Silent Way shaking hands with Music of My Mind. “This motherfucker’s a genius, man,” D’Angelo murmured, in his cigarette-husked voice. The discerning British reissue label Be With Records released Lewis Taylor on vinyl in a handsome edition over the summer. And in June, the most unexpected event: the newly launched Lewis Taylor Instagram teased a new album. “After taking a bit of a break, Lewis and Sabina have returned to the studio,” went the caption.
It’s tempting to read “Bittersweet” as a metaphor for Taylor’s relationship with music: a bad love affair that brings as much displeasure as delight. If making music brought him the kind of stress heard on that record, it’s no wonder he needed some long breaks, some soul-searching. But that turmoil is precisely what makes Lewis Taylor a success. The phone stayed silent, that plum collaboration up and evaporated, the single didn’t garner the audience it deserved—these things cease to matter once you press play.

Buy: Rough Trade
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