Stereolab’s masterpiece fused analog with digital, past with future, Marxism with the commercial magic of music through a pristine record that defined an age of “recombinant pop.”

Dots and Loops

In September 1997, Stereolab’s sixth album Dots and Loops was their first to land on the Billboard charts. It may have been riding the critical goodwill of the previous year’s breakthrough Emperor Tomato Ketchup, but the time was ripe for Stereolab’s breakthrough, as well—over the past year, the modern rock landscape had finally caught up to the crate-digging leftists. Less than a year after Billboard’s Modern Rock chart was topped by two moody  Fats Domino and B.B. King-sampling coffee-shop poets came a catchy song about crystal meth addiction and an unavoidable pub singalong by anarchists who cited Paris 1968 graffiti in their liner notes. It’s fitting, then, that Dots and Loops is, even more than Emperor, the perfect realization of the sound that Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier had been shaping since 1991.
The roots of Stereolab lie in the teeming indie-pop scene of London in the late 1980s. Gane played guitar in the deeply anti-Thatcher jangle-pop band McCarthy, who released three albums in their brief career titled I Am A Wallet, and The Enraged Will Inherit the Earth, and Banking, Violence and the Inner Life Today. Sadier, born in the Parisian suburbs during the political tumult of May 1968, was a fan. She met Gane at a McCarthy gig and they hit it off immediately. The two started dating and Sadier toured as a vocalist with the band and appeared on a handful of their later recordings. When McCarthy broke up in 1991, Gane was through with British indie-pop. Whatever came next for him and Sadier, he decided, wasn’t going to sound like any current trend in guitar music.
Digging through his record collection, Gane returned to the first two albums by (at the time relatively unknown) Neu!, a Düsseldorf experimental duo active from 1972 to 1975. He obsessed over Klaus Dinger’s mechanistic drumming and appreciated his sardonic anti-consumerism (Dinger playfully named the duo “Neu!” and designed their bold cover art as a jab at advertising lingo). Also like Dinger, Gane approached Stereolab as a musical and ideological tabula rasa, relying on the mechanistic “motorik” drumming of Neu! songs “Hallogallo” and “Fur Immer” to eliminate all vestiges of residual rock influence and barrel ahead into an unknown future. Unlike Dinger, however, Gane kept one eye on the past. The other component of Stereolab’s sound was the buzz of a Farfisa organ and the otherworldly tones of the Moog synthesizer. Gane’s retro preoccupations extended to the packaging as well: One album was a nod to hi-fi godhead Juan Garcia Esquivel, and the cover of their first for Elektra portrayed a stylus hovering over a record like an invading craft making first contact. Gane named the project Stereolab, after a hi-fi system test record from 1960. They etched “NEU KIDS ON THE BLOCK” in the runout groove of their first 10” on outré London label Too Pure, a new imprint fond of loud, female-fronted, krautrock-loving groups.
The calm in the center of Stereolab’s trebly storm was Sadier. Her dispassionate French/English croon itself was a throwback—at least to those early ’90s heads familiar with “Bonnie and Clyde” or ye-ye icons like Francoise Hardy. She was fond of Guy Debord’s 1967 Situationist manifesto Society of the Spectacle, which, across 221 short “theses,” argues that capitalism and mass media discourse have combined to wholly subsume reality, leaving only media representations in their wake. Debord’s thinking deeply influenced Sadier’s lyrics, and its abbreviated style is refracted in Sadier’s phrasing (imagine Sadier singing the line “cyclical time in itself is time without conflict,” number 129 in Spectacle). The band’s early 1993 peak saw Sadier advocating for “La Resistance” on their highest-charting single to date, and on the 18-minute krautgaze epic “Jenny Ondioline” she wonders if “democracy is fucked.” Looking back, that song marked a symbolic end of Gane and Sadier’s indie-motorik project. Sadier’s lyrics would hold fast and gain new dimensions while Gane’s restless tinkering with Stereolab’s sound continued apace.
With 1996’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Stereolab made its first masterpiece. Opening track “Metronomic Underground” sounded much more like Can than Neu!, and more like spongy, alien trip-hop than either. The ultimate record collector band had finally done what critics (often unfairly) expect of all bands: “transcended their influences.” After five years, Emperor positioned Stereolab at the forefront of “alternative” music. In part, Gane had Chicago producer/drummer John McEntire to thank. McEntire’s band Tortoise had caught Gane’s ear with their moody 1994 debut, and their 1996 breakthrough Millions Now Living Will Never Die led critic Simon Reynolds to position the group at the forefront of a “post-rock” movement in American indie music. Like Gane, McEntire was a studio rat and gear nerd. Unlike Gane, McEntire composed songs with instrumental loops. On The Fawn, the 1997 album from McEntire’s other band The Sea and Cake, he and singer/songwriter Sam Prekop excised virtually all indie rock signifiers and built songs like “The Argument,” from Prekop’s Latin-pop-influenced acoustic guitar and hundreds of electronic loops. With McEntire, Gane had found the perfect collaborator who could not only bring his ideas to fruition, but cast Stereolab’s entire sound in his own image.
McEntire produced all but three tracks on Emperor’s follow-up, 1997’s Dots and Loops, which, unlike any Stereolab album before it—or, really, any other album at the time—cocooned the group in a sovereign sound world. Sometimes derided as the moment when Stereolab tipped over into the bourgeois excess of those space-age pop albums that initially inspired them, 20 years later Dots and Loops is the telos of Gane’s original ideal for the group. It’s the first album on which Stereolab actually made the rhythm-focused, rock-averse music that they’d long striven toward—a late-90s’ version of Neu!’s headlong quest into some imaginary future, precision-tooled using cutting-edge studio technology so that every chord and vocal line becomes immaculate hi-fi test material.
The first seconds of opening track “Brakhage” show McEntire’s influence immediately: after sputtering to life like it’s being tuned in from outer space on a vintage receiver, a two-chord keyboard vamp oscillates over McEntire’s skittering drum and vibraphone loops. In comes Sadier, doubled by Mary Hansen, with one of her simplest manifestos, sung like a nursery rhyme: “We need so damn/Many things/To keep our dazed lives/Lives going.” Maybe Sadier was simultaneously referring here to consumerist desire and the sheer amount of studio gadgets required to make the album itself. For Gane, the lengthy process of composing through loops functioned as a self-made digging expedition. “I like building up layers, and then looking through those layers to reveal something underneath,” he later said. “New sounds come from the natural process of all of these things going on at the same time. I like the element of chance.”
Working digitally was a natural response to dealing with all these things at the same time, and it was Gane and McEntire’s inaugural experience using Pro Tools in the studio. The digital audio workstation (or DAW) was just then establishing itself as a studio necessity, and Pro Tools was quickly becoming the default option. The album’s detractors might say that the endless possibilities of digital editing only contribute to Dots and Loops’ fussiness. The first minute-and-a-half of the mesmerizing “Diagonals,” however, is evidence of McEntire and Gane’s ability to negotiate the infinite possibilities afforded by Pro Tools. They speed up a marimba loop until it purred like a tiny engine, and thread it through a mutant-funk jazz drum loop, sampled from krautrock progenitor Amon Düül’s “I Can’t Wait.” As a languid brass chart lazily washes ashore, it breaks into a 5/4 time signature (one of the group’s favorites on this album, used for the equally frenetic “Parsec” and the unhurried “Rainbo Conversation”) as Sadier and Hansen warble in both French and English about the materialistic escapism of the bourgeois European holiday.
Stereolab fans will often argue that Transient, Mars, or Emperor are a better distillation of what makes the band great, but Dots and Loops’ interaction with its historical moment separates it from its predecessors. Tracks like “Brakhage,” “Diagonals,” and “Parsec” rank among 1997’s most future-looking pop, the stuff that seemed, then and now, to exist in its own stratosphere: Missy Elliott and Timbaland’s Supa Dupa Fly, Busta Rhymes’ “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See,” Aphex Twin’s “Flim,” Roni Size’s New Forms, Björk’s Homogenic, and Mouse on Mars’ Autoditacker. That last album, the third by German electronic duo Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner, is a uniquely visceral kind of electronic music, the kind of thing that seemed to emanate from gently prodding some squishy beast with small jolts of electricity. Mouse on Mars were studio obsessives who loved experimenting with live instruments, contact microphones, obscure samples, and—deploying one of Reynolds’ “post-rock” criteria—using guitars and guitar gear for non-rock purposes.
Mouse on Mars were also veterans of Too Pure, and Stereolab cut the three Dots and Loops tracks that weren’t recorded by McEntire in Chicago at the pair’s St. Martin Tonstudio. Their production touch on the album is light, but the atmosphere of a mid-tempo waltz like “The Flower Called Nowhere” (Pharrell is a fan) is much earthier and more organic than McEntire’s comparatively chilly work, but the two-part, nine-minute album-closing “Contronatura” showcases the real Mouse on Mars M.O. For the first half, Toma and St. Werner buoy Sadier and Hansen’s empathetic vocals—”My dearest friend, don’t go”—on a viscous sonic goo which sutures the laconic first half to the song’s jauntier second. Over halfway through, Sadier shifts the song from a dialogue between friends to a political tract that captures the album’s mystifying artificial/natural spirit in its final moments: “This is the future/Of an illusion/...Living fantasy of the immortal/The reality of an animal.” To mark the transformation, Toma and St. Werner turn the track into a thumping, gelatinous march rhythm. The last four minutes of Dots and Loops are also its most danceable.
Stereolab’s trans-Atlantic, deeply collaborative production on Dots and Loops emerged at a moment when global trade initiatives and rapidly expanding electronic networks were rendering the world more technologically interconnected and economically interdependent than ever before. In 1997, the Internet Underground Music Archive was four years old, Justin Frankel released the first version of Winamp—a novel way to play the compressed digital files that were being ripped from CDs and traded through syrup-slow dial-up connections—and prosumer-level digital production software was proliferating. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act—which permitted labels to copy-protect music files and sue anyone who shared songs without express permission—was still a year from being rammed through Congress and enacted into law. The music business was careening toward its millennial economic peak, and massive retail emporia like HMV and Virgin Megastores carried tens of thousands of titles. As a deeply collaborative form of commercial art, pop music has always tended to fold back on itself from time to time, as styles, melodies, and even recordings are incorporated into new sounds. In the late 1990s, that process dramatically accelerated.
Let’s call the most adventurous, sample-driven and style-copping music of this period “recombinant pop.” Around the world, musicians who came of age during the 1980s were digging through an ever-increasing archive and using digital software to redefine alternative music through the looped, sampled, and collaged productions of hip-hop and electronic music. Per an influential sociological study published in late 1996, “omnivorous inclusion,” had emerged as the defining characteristic for highbrow music nerds, a position, the researchers concluded, that was “better adapted to an increasingly global world managed by those who (show) respect for the cultural expressions of others.” Gone was rock’s romantic authenticity, drawn from the soul of the poet. “It was not so hard to accept the ersatz as ultimate authenticity,” cultural critic Geoffrey O’Brien argued in an examination of Burt Bacharach’s sudden return to fashion at this moment. “The point is not roots but connections, the more far-fetched the better.” A January 1998 SPIN feature on so-called “Sound Boys” argued similarly that “song-based rock music has ceded cutting-edge status to pure sonic exotica.” The rock and pop world had finally met Stereolab on its terms.
1996 and 1997 were a tipping point for recombinant pop. Penultimate Dots and Loops track “Ticker-Tape of the Unconscious” opens with a sample from Gal Costa’s Tropicalia gem “Divino, Maravilhoso,” and its brisk, undulating rhythm track sounds a bit like Timbaland or the Neptunes trying their hand at lounge jazz. Along with Emperor, those two years were heady: Beck’s Odelay, Cornershop’s When I Was Born for the 7th Time, Cibo Matto’s Viva! La Woman, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing....., Fat Boy Slim’s Better Living Through Chemistry and Daft Punk’s Homework each created era-defining beat music that sampled broadly from global sources. The Beastie Boys’ Grand Royal label released the throwback roller-rink funk of Luscious Jackson, while Matador was handling stateside releases of Tokyo lounge-pop weirdos Pizzicato Five and Cornelius’ Fantasma, the peak of Keigo Oyamada’s dense, sample-laden Cornelius project.
Oyamada was the center of Tokyo’s “Shibuya-kei” scene, a network of savants described by Scottish art-pop provocateur (and, in 1997, scene reporter) Momus as “intelligent shopping as art.” That’s as good a phrase as any to describe recombinant pop, or its hip-hop predecessor, crate-digging. It worked both ways, too: Dots and Loops sounded like nothing else at the time, and like lots of stuff from other times—a hipster marketing team’s dream. A year or so later, the jittery, retro-psychedelia of “Parsec” was used in Volkswagen’s “Less Flower, More Power” TV ad, which itself used a minimalist, white-out design—referred to in photographic circles as an “infinity cove”—that mirrored Gane and McEntire’s impeccable, futuristic vision.
Apart from McEntire and the band itself, Dots and Loops owes its sound to another studio epicure and insatiable consumer of pop’s past. Like Gane, Sean O’Hagan spent much of the ’80s in an indie-pop band (Microdisney) before seeking a more eclectic, recombinant sound. As the High Llamas, O’Hagan developed a lush style of string and brass arrangements around a British folk-pop core, incorporated antique instruments like the tack piano, and named songs after his 60s heroes—“Bach Ze,” “Shuggie Todd.” O’Hagan’s specific muse was Pet Sounds-era Brian Wilson and the meticulous, academic arrangements of his later collaborator Van Dyke Parks. O’Hagan adopted chilly electronic textures for Cold and Bouncy, released in early 1998—the wriggling sounds under his signature loping string and brass arrangement on “HiBall Nova Scotia” sound like they could’ve been sampled from Mouse on Mars. Not for nothing, but “cold and bouncy” is another perfect phrase to describe Dots and Loops, too.
O’Hagan’s bucolic tempos, amoebic electronic textures, and weepy strings suffuse the four-part, 17-and-a-half-minute epic “Refractions in the Plastic Pulse”—one of Sadier’s finest Situationist statements on human interaction amid the Spectacle—and provide a serene, unsettling drone behind the busy “Rainbo Conversation.” Best of all, though, is his punchy brass arrangement on “Miss Modular,” Stereolab’s first stab at Motown-style R&B-pop. While O’Hagan’s Farfisa plays tag with McEntire’s syncopated drum loops, his effervescent horns swell and ebb, and Gane’s strummed acoustic gives the song the surreal feel of the best ’60s Latin pop with a late ’90s production sheen. Sadier contributes one of her finest lyrical moments to the track, as well. The imagery she conjures—a trompe l’oeil on a cardboard box, a spectacle that rhymes and arouses a flash in the eyes, an intimate show—is mild Situationist poetry about the commercial magic of pop music itself.
Though Stereolab would continue at a fairly prolific clip for the next 12 years before declaring a “hiatus” in 2009, they never again made anything as singularly wonderful and of its time as Dots and Loops. Jim O’Rourke joined his Chicago contemporary McEntire for the 1999 LP Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night and 2001’s Sound-Dust, though the 2002 death of Mary Hansen was a creative and psychic schism from which the band never fully recovered. Pop music and the recording industry changed quite a bit as well: the digital wave that was cresting in 1996 and 1997 hit the shores at the turn of the century, and Stereolab’s retro obsessions and recombinant methodology dispersed broadly (while the motorik drumming that they introduced to the indie rock world became its 21st-century Bo Diddley beat). None of this dims the joy of listening to Dots and Loops 20 years later, it only enhances the experience. A band that started in the midst of CD mania by obsessing over pop’s analog past reached their peak six years later by embracing the bleeding edge of digital studio technology. They made a work both of its moment and one that seems to hover outside everything else. In 1997, the alternative music world finally caught up with Stereolab—right as they exited its orbit.


SF rock fixture recently constructed a handbuilt jukebox jammed with 100 songs recorded with help from a coterie of the Bay Area's garage-pop artists.

Sonny Smith: 100 Records Volume II: I Miss the Jams

100 Records Volume II: I Miss the Jams

"When you're young... to say screw it all and chase your dreams is seen as courageous and brave," Sonny Smith reminds us in his song-poem "Broke Artist at the Turn of the Century". "People salute you. As you grow older, they no longer think of you as heroic. They see you as something else: selfish, foolish, or lost." Yeah, he's singing in character-- Hank Champion, descendent of Texan miners--  but surely that line in the sand between youthful ideologue to struggling something-or-other has occurred to Smith. Especially lately: The San Fran renaissance man-- artist, author, and bandleader-- recently completed work on his most elaborate project yet, a handbuilt jukebox jammed with 100 songs written by Sonny and recorded with help from a coterie of the Bay Area's garage-pop movers and shakers.
Each tune is assigned a fake band name, each record its own custom sleeve with several groups even earning their own elaborate backstories; the mind reels at the scope of the project, the mastery of mixed media such an undertaking would require, the drive it'd take not to just say screw it and move onto something else. Here's this relatively unsung singer-songwriter crafting possibly the most complicated box set of all time, in an edition of one; brave, to be sure, but at least on paper, not too many degrees removed from foolish either. But Smith, as he did with his Sunsets' still-great Tomorrow Is Alright LP, makes it all seem too easy, and his affably eclectic jukebox-era songcraft and the formidable crew he's assembled for backup make I Miss the Jams-- the second, 10-song set culled from the original 100-- seem anything but foolhardy.
With all the project's extra-musical elements, Smith and company could've almost been forgiven for half-assing the songs themselves; standing in a room with that jukebox, punching buttons for Earth Girl Helen Brown or Loud Fast Fools, the occasional noise splatter or big dumb lark would seem almost inevitable. But the 10 tracks on I Miss the Jams would suggest that Smith put the tunes at least on par with all the trappings, offering up a genial set of retro-minded rave-ups recorded in warm, punchy mid-fi. Smith's sly wit and remarkably natural way with songcraft are very much in evidence here as they were on the Sunsets' LP, but the songs here are simpler and, accordingly, more direct; the bawdy "I Wanna Do It", featuring a brassy vocal from the Sandwitches' Heidi Alexander doesn't mince words, while "Teen Age Thugs"-- its verses in Spanish, its chorus bored into your skull in English-- makes its point despite the potential language barrier. "Broke Artist" tells its tale of a skid row artist, his similarly hard-luck benefactor, and a run in on the wrong side of the tracks; Smith's best lyrics have a short-story quality about them anyway, and it's nice to see him finding yet another way to marry his many passions on wax.
Perhaps understandably, the tunes do occasionally feel a tad like genre exercises-- "Ain't No Turnin Back" skiffles, "Back in the Day (I Can't Stand It)" is straight British invasion R&B-- but Smith's such an unflappably cool songwriter than even borrowed clothes fit him like a glove. Like Tomorrow Is Alright, I Miss the Jams is a remarkably blithe, laid-back work, the subtle charms of Smith's gently funny, sneakily subversive songs occasionally taking a listen or two to sort themselves out. But there's a durability there that belies the fairly easy reference-grabbing and the slightly shrugged-off attitude on display; Smith's fairly unshowy, trend-averse style may never win him the fanbase of some of his peppier, more hook-forward left coasters, but their clean lines and easy feel lends them a feeling of timelessness that seems like it ought to endure.
For all the romantic notions of creative solitude in "Broke Artist", Smith couldn't have made his big box happen without a good showing from the smoldering San Francisco indie rock scene, who come out in droves here. Ty Segall takes it down a notch or four on the surfy "One Way Doomsday Trip to Nowhere", Smith and the Fresh & Onlys' Tim Cohen attempt to out-deadpan each other on the otherwise rollicking "Time to Split", and Kelley Stoltz fulfills his unspoken obligation to be on every San Fran record ever by appearing throughout. The spirit of community amongst this ragtag crew hasn't gone unremarked upon, but it's definitely in full force here; although it's certainly Smith's record at the core, it plays like a nice little overview of the San Francisco scene as it stands, their unusually fresh and forward-looking take on shuffly mod-pop. Through it all, Smith and company remain calm, totally uncowed by the task at hand. With friends like those willing to help flesh out songs like these, Smith's wild-eyed devotion to this absurdly laborious project makes all the sense in the world.


The second album from singer-songwriter Sophie Allison is piercing and unpredictable. In contrast to its bigger and brighter sound, the mood is grimmer, the emotional truths darker.

color theory

When Sophie Allison sings, she sounds wide-open and guarded, casual and intense, intimate and coolly removed. In her best songs as Soccer Mommy, a piercing line —“I don’t wanna be your fucking dog,” for example, from “Your Dog”—wriggles away from direct interpretation as she delivers it, turning from declaration to hypothesis. Some of the magnetism of her pop-inflected indie rock comes from the winding shape of her melodies; in their unpredictable motion, they often resemble counterpoint written to a root melody that’s been erased. But a lot of her power derives from the immediacy of her voice—when she opens her mouth it’s as if a spotlight appears.
The songwriting of her earliest direct-to-Bandcamp material was still hazy at the edges, but by her 2018 studio debut Clean, a world-class indie rock singer-songwriter was standing in her place. It doesn’t always happen this way, but the acclaim followed her swiftly and her fanbase multiplied. She toured with Vampire Weekend and Wilco, with Liz Phair and Paramore and Kacey Musgraves. In another era, Clean might have landed her a lucrative major-label contract. In this era, she enters the low-level managerial world of a successful indie rock band, one in which you become your own manager and booker and agent, even if you also hire and pay those people. “I’m touring for a living and I run a small business, basically,” she told the New York Times last month. “It’s a very isolating existence.”
color theory exhibits much of the growth—and some of the growing pains—that usually attend massive transformations. She’s on Loma Vista now, home to fellow indie-label graduates like St. Vincent and Andrew Bird. It might not be Caroline or DreamWorks in the ’90s, but Allison makes the most of her opportunity, and the songs feel like a response to an exponential leap in platform and possibility.
As she did on Clean, she worked with producer Gabe Wax, who has also helmed projects by the War on Drugs, Deerhunter, and other indie A-listers. Where Clean was warm and rough-hewn, the product of a careful microphone set-up and mutual trust, color theory feels dazzled with the endless creative possibilities of the studio. The drizzle of acoustic and electric guitars on “lucy” feels fine-tuned to evoke memories of The Bends-era Radiohead. On the seven-minute-plus “yellow is the color of her eyes,” layers of Mellotron, Wurlitzer, and Prophet synthesizer (all played by Allison) lend the song the sleepy-eyed sheen of shoegaze. The drums on “circle the drain” are subtly sweetened by drum machine à la the work of ’00s pop hitmakers The Matrix, and its edges shimmer with drones and synths until it resembles one of the billowing soap bubbles in the video for Sheryl Crow’s “Everyday Is a Winding Road.”
In deliberate contrast to the bright sound, the mood is grimmer, the emotional truths darker. Allison has said the album depicts three states of being, represented by three colors: blue for depression, yellow for mental and physical illness, gray for mortality. Clean began with the urgency of youth, in the moment of a break-up; the first lyric of color theory opener “bloodstream” is wearier. Observing the “pale girl staring through the mirror,” she remembers the way blood used to flow “into my rosy cheeks” before she looks down: “Now a river runs red from my knuckles into the sink,” she sings, her voice flat and resigned. She is quick to qualify and complicate the alarming image (“Maybe it’s just a dream”) but the feeling resounds: color theory pitches headlong into the anomie of early-20s depression—the moment in adulthood when the bright colors of adolescence start to dim for the first time and it occurs to you, with dull alarm, that the rest of it might be like this.
As a lyricist, Allison keeps her footing in this more internal landscape. She has a skill for following winding syntax to a sharp point: “I am fake it till you make it in a can/And you have a calmness that I could never understand,” she sings on “Royal Screw Up,” a song that also includes the frank admission, “I am the problem for me/Now and always.” You can trace her admiration of Taylor Swift in how she follows a standard-issue pop-song metaphor until it yields a moment of truth: “I try to break your walls but all I ever end up breaking is your bones/And the bruises show/Standing in the living room talking as you’re staring at your phone/It’s a cold I’ve known,” she sings on “Nightswimming.” The paired couplets are neat as a folded napkin, and the alienation—who hasn’t felt dismissed by a brandished smartphone?—is palpable.
If there is anything missing from color theory, it’s a sense of intensity and surprise. Many of the songs chug along around the same midtempo, with a similar first-drum-lesson beat. Her choices are intentional; Allison has cited “bops” from her childhood like Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn,” Sheryl Crow’s “If It Makes You Happy” and Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” as inspiration, and she has borrowed some of these songs’ chunky simplicity for her arrangements. The varied strum patterns that gave Clean’s songs their sinuous, lived-in feel have given way mostly to chugging down-stroked power chords, and the palette is bright, clean, and uncluttered. But she doesn’t tap into these anthems’ urge to shout from the rafters, even if what you’re shouting is that you’re desperate, rock-bottom, about to give up: The songs on color theory sometimes feels like a series of 8-point-font text messages projected onto highway billboards.
On the penultimate song “stain,” she casts off most of the instruments and leans into the microphone again, just her fingers gripping a pick and a backing of tense silence. The music instantly becomes corporeal, urgent—she has yet to locate this power within the glossy peaks of new sound she has churned up. “Now I’m always stained, like the sheets in my parents’ house/Yeah I’m always stained/And it’s never coming out,” she sings, and as the song cuts out—neatly, at exactly three minutes, one of the album’s shortest—your nerves jangle with the humming of the strings, your gut churns in simpatico with Allison’s.
Correction: An earlier version of this review mistakenly referenced New Pornographers and Barenaked Ladies as being signed to Loma Vista. They have since been removed.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the Houston rapper’s 2002 album, where stoner logic and slacker humor becomes a timeless look into the psyche of the everyman.

Just Tryin’ Ta Live

Devin Copeland was more into breakdancing than rapping. Moving around Texas in the mid-1980s, he would link up with any dance crew he could find. Being himself trumped any aggrandized persona he could come up with. He was calm and lovable, a scamp, though this Devin that his Houston friends knew was not the one introduced to America through the music video to Scarface’s “Hand of the Dead Body.” There’s Devin, posted up next to a cop car, mean-mugging as a neighborhood protest breaks out in defense of Scarface and Ice Cube. This is the most serious Devin the Dude would be for the next seven years.
Devin was always “the dude,” another cast member in Rap-A-Lot Records’ long history of colorful characters who never fit hip-hop’s ideal image of a star. He didn’t have Scarface’s mystique, Bushwick Bill’s outrageous stage persona, or Big Mike’s blunt delivery. He and his group the Odd Squad—a rag-tag trio of misfits turned best friends featuring Jugg Mug and the blind rapper DJ Rob Quest—defied all conventional Rap-A-Lot logic. They were funky class clowns, messing around with samples and instrumentals and delivering only one album, 1994’s rollicking Fadanuf Fa Erybody. The Odd Squad’s sound didn’t come anywhere near the rugged sides of Houston, instead opting for back-of-the-crate samples of Milt Jackson, the Crusaders, and the Five Stairsteps. It was part East Coast boom-bap, part juvenile raps about sex (“Your Pussy’s Like Dope”) and weed (“Rev. Puff”). The album crashed and burned; later that year, Rap-A-Lot poured its resources into Scarface’s hard-bodied The Diary instead. With dreams of a second Odd Squad record dashed by the label, Devin determined he could be just as good on his own.
The road towards Devin the Dude’s second solo album, the quixotic and subtly titled Just Tryin’ Ta Live, made it seem like he was being primed for stardom. There was Devin on the chorus of “Fuck Faces,” a sex romp from Scarface’s 1998 album My Homies that evolved into a cult classic. A year later, Dr. Dre tapped Devin for “Fuck You,” off of Dre’s explosive 2001, plucking him off of shows with Dre protégé Mel-Man. Houston’s favorite weed head, the guy type-casted for stoner comedy soundtracks, was suddenly a known entity outside of city limits, though not really a household name. “I’ve never considered myself a star,” he told Noisey in a 2017 profile. “I feel like I am no better than anybody else, and sometimes I don’t get the girl at the end.”
Devin’s previous album, his 1998 debut The Dude, amped up the goofball nature of Fadanuf and packaged it around verses from Scarface, the Odd Squad, and others. It had all of the same crude sexual humor that made Devin an outright star on “Fuck Faces” but as the album wore on, it flattened out. Devin intended Just Tryin’ Ta Live to lean more into the music than his humor, alluding in a 2002 interview with MTV to a more “serious riff” going through the album. The sound of Devin’s world—green, hazy, and funky—also had space for deeper meaning.
And by trying to be serious for once, Devin the Dude unlocked his secret power: creating moments more realistic than any of his Houston counterparts. Just Tryin’ Ta Live is the kind of rap album where you don’t even need to aspire to be Devin—mainly because he’s high and non-aspirational. It’s a ne’er-do-well opus, a 60-minute stretch of time where the narrator could be any person on any given day. Off sheer charm and confidence, Devin could make you rally behind having a shitty car—as long as you had a car, you won. Other Houston rappers indulged in mafioso fantasies or wild capitalistic flexes. Devin’s world was hard, but he always took it easy.
At the onset, Just Tryin’ Ta Live attempts to balance Devin’s would-be superstar status with his affable, BarcaLounger nature. It cultivates and further expands on Devin’s everyman persona, a man more concerned with “reefer and beer” than being the biggest rapper alive, much less on his block. It’s a self-awareness few artists could crystalize or even approach; Devin does it for an entire album. The opener, “Zeldar,” imagines an alien traveling through space and time just as Devin would, using weed to cure anxiety but remaining an outcast: “I rolled into the hood/I’m greeted, but it wasn’t all good/I saw mixed people all kinds of colors and they looked at me like I was weird.” Producer Domo’s pianos and cartoon sound effects play around as Devin attempts to bring levity to his celebrity: “My name is Zeldar and we shop at Walmart.”
Devin might yearn for the high of celebrity, but he also relishes the lows of normal life. “Lacville ’79,” a downtempo funk odyssey, unfurls as Devin overhears neighborhood gossip while being ostracized for his beloved, busted car. As long as he has his gateway to the world, a 1979 Cadillac Seville, he’ll keep on pushing—regardless if crooked cops know the stash spots underneath the dash, or if pedestrians gawk at his beater. On “Go Somewhere,” he drunkenly details a night where he’s stopped at the entrance of the club and can’t get in, despite being a guy who appeared on a Dr. Dre album. “The bouncer’s at the door thinkin’ I gotta lie to get in,” he raps before being accosted and interrogated. “‘You ain’t no motherfuckin’ rapper, where’s your gold and your diamonds?’”
The moments when Just Tryin’ Ta Live tries to bring in some outside perspective are jarring compared to the half-baked, wholly self-deprecating raps surrounding them. On “Some of ’Em,” Xzibit takes shots at nameless foes and Nas raps about how he wants none of the media scrutiny and racism aimed at the three famous Mikes—Jordan, Jackson, and Tyson. Such ambition is lost on Devin. His worldview is shaped around surviving for himself. The main character of his world likes rapping because it’s a fun job: You get to smoke, fuck, and drink. He often succeeds at doing all three.
Devin portrays himself as a sinner who loves free sex with no strings attached, a wanderer who won’t commit himself to one thing forever. But it never feels like a party anthem, because around the corner, there’s Devin experiencing a real-time struggle between being rich, being poor, and finding the happy medium. All of this is laid out on the album’s signature moment, the DJ Premier-produced “Doobie Ashtray.” Through his trademark scratches, sleepy guitar notes, and an ocean-deep bass line, Preemo taps into the Texas roots of his childhood and together he and Devin lay down the modern blues. “A rich man can lose a lot at one time and feel like he has nowhere to go,” Devin told MTV in 2002. “A man that really don’t have much at all could lose as much as a doobie and feel like he’s left out. The song is about how you’re going to face that. What is your next step?” A true stoner classic, “Doobie Ashtray” asks the question that lies at the center of Devin’s philosophy: Are you more with less or less with more?
Devin’s desire to become an everyman rap star traces back to Scarface. If not for Face, who hailed the Odd Squad’s lone album Fandanuf Fa Erbody as his favorite release of all time, there would be no solo Devin the Dude album. It’s why the two men’s stories—one who saw the world for its gravity and treachery and another who saw the spoils and desired no part in its weariness—are so intertwined. It’s the tao of Houston rap: For every hard-headed rapper who chooses to narrate the ills of society and how it affects them, there’s the other, who wants to merely live within said society and be content.
The resigned optimism of days spent in a fog of weed and Lone Star comes screeching to a halt on the title track and album closer. With a swollen guitar and drums beneath him, Devin raps about wanting to get out of his comfort zone, then relents at the last second. “I just write shit, hopin’ it might hit so I can make a living/But there some who don’t like it,'' he reflects. “But I... I really don’t give a motherfuck.” It’s the climax to a film where Devin, steady on a mission to enjoy his vices without getting hemmed up, refuses to bust under pressure. Being himself, he decides, allows him far more clarity than attempting to be someone else.
Just Tryin’ Ta Live is about Devin the Dude being rooted in his own faith. Fame wasn’t going to find him the same way it found his friend-turned-fan Dr. Dre or one of his idols, Too $hort. It’s a rap album whose creator sees fame as a byproduct of his day job. He continued to point out the clear outline for his career: find simplicity as a man who uses rap as a profession, not as a mythical persona. The style wound up having disciples such as Larry June, Curren$y and Le$—self-made men who just rap, smoke, and enjoy cool shit. The Devin the Dude of Just Tryin’ Ta Live is never out of reach for anyone; he knows that being a man of the people, for the people, is the kind of fame money can’t buy.
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Tinashe's latest release is another helping of the moody, ominous R&B that she has quietly made her name on.

Nightride

Over the past four years, Tinashe, a 23-year-old former child actor turned singer, has been nudging the needle of R&B forward with a handful of moody and distinctive projects. Eschewing the glossy production and gospel-influenced, showboating singing style characteristic of traditional R&B, she wove a cocoon, leaning on woozy, atmospheric beats that nodded to chopped-n-screwed culture. Despite her movie-biz background and, yes, camera-ready face, however, she’s struggled to break through in the music industry. In an interview with xoNecole last year, Tinashe explained why she hadn’t been given much support.
“I think it comes from a place of there is only room for one. Or there is only room for two. … There is a Beyoncé, there is a Rihanna, there is Zendaya, there is a Jourdan Dunn. There is a Black girl in all of these positions and we don’t need another one. It’s just kind of ridiculous because there are like a hundred blonde, white actresses and leading ladies. There are a hundred rappers that all virtually look the same, sound the same, and dress the same and no one cares. But for some reason, when it comes to young women … There can’t be room [for us all]. There can’t be five Black girls winning.”
There is truth to her response, especially in rap. As more and more promising female rappers pop up, from an industry standpoint there’s still Nicki Minaj and everyone else. But Tinashe’s music also has a somewhat reticent, inaccessible air to it, and her lyrics lack stickiness, which make holding the spotlight hard. Despite her best efforts—the choreographed shows, the sexy cover shoots, the collabs with bigger players like Chris Brown and Nick Jonas—and a warm critical reception (Aquarius, her 2014 debut studio album, ranked on many year-end lists, including Pitchfork’s)—she hasn’t quite become a “star.” She scored a mainstream smash with 2014’s “2 On,” but that might have been a fluke, owing more to the ubiquity of DJ Mustard’s club-ready beats and a stronger POV than Tinashe typically employs in her own slippery vision. Clearly, her team wants Tinashe to be a radio artist (see her addition on a new version of Britney’s sharp “Slumber Party”), but she is making much smarter music than “2 On” or “All Hands on Deck.” In fact, if claiming a spot on heavy rotation playlists is the goal, she might be making music that’s too good, as evinced by her latest project, Nightride.
Delays of Joyride, her upcoming sophomore album, and fuzziness over exactly what Nightride is—a mixtape for sale, a companion piece to Joyride?—hint to her team’s confusion of how to market the excellent yet not-easily-defined music she’s creating. For example, “Energy,” the mystical Mike WiLL Made-It track, is one of the best songs of the year and it didn’t even make the cut here.
Album opener “Lucid Dreaming” is a soothing balm, its wooden chimes evoking the calm of savasana. However, Nightride’s first half is heavily weighted with somber ballads, and the first 25 minutes begin to drag, with the exception of the taut “Company,” which skitters and flits. But from that point on, Nightride sounds fascinating and, while polished, less sleek and cold than the title suggests. It has more of an ominous, broken-down carnival vibe. Tinashe is making some very weird music here (she’s not alone in that, of course—Sevyn Streeter, Dawn Richard, Abra, Kelela immediately spring to mind as her peers). The lopsided, one-wheel-falling-off wonk of “Ride of Your Life” gives way to “Party Favors,” an off-kilter banger that inflates and deflates, swelling with and hissing out helium. And really, considering the country is currently on Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride, shouldn’t the music crafted during it swerve left, taking bumpy, pitch-black back roads instead of paved, well-lit streets?
Generally, production here is drizzly and overcast, and work from newcomer Stephen Spencer (his glitchy-yet-sultry slow-burner “Spacetime” is just begging to soundtrack a futuristic sex scene) to vets like Metro Boomin, Boi-1da, and The-Dream (whose winking “Company” is the lone cloudless song on the project) is excellent and cohesive despite there being almost as many producers as there are songs. Obviously they were inspired by the theme—Tinashe has long preferred shadows and slinkiness to bright poppiness, and Nightride is strictly after-hours music. She even trades her standard breathiness for a richer tone to match the deep groove of “Sunburn.” The listener’s only decision is setting—dim club, deserted freeway, darkened bedroom. The music is infinitely interesting, possibly more so than the artist singing it. But then again, you shouldn’t count out anyone releasing an album like Nightride. As she whispers after “Sacrifices,” “I will not be ignored.”


The lead singer of the now-defunct Smith Westerns steps out with a solo debut that furthers the emotional trajectory of his former band while offering a softer approach.

New Misery

When a band goes through a messy divorce, you often get a clean division of communal artistic property. The ensuing rivalry, whether spoken or unspoken, typically pits the eccentric against the centrist—see Mars Volta vs. Sparta, Lennon vs. McCartney, Wilco vs. Son Volt, or Andre 3000 vs. Big Boi. For those who must choose sides in following the dissolution of Smith Westerns, which saw former guitarist Max Kakacek breaking off from the band to form Whitney, an immediate tonal difference can be identified: Whitney plays breezy AM radio-indie; Lead singer Cullen Omori made a solo record and called it New Misery.
So it’s up to Omori to further the emotional trajectory the Smith Westerns established over their three LPs. While they grew from reckless, glam-punk wunderkinds to the verge of maturity, the best Smith Westerns songs (“Weekend," “All Die Young”) were the sound of young men seeing their golden days dissolving in front of their eyes in real time. Their success was enviable by just about any standard, but now that the smoke has cleared, Omori is now saddled with the expected problems of someone who skipped college to be in a modestly popular rock band: financial instability and a lack of marketable skills.
There are points here where Omori directly invokes his previous band’s rep as hedonist brats amongst the genteel indie rock acts that defined the early part of the decade, but his malaise is typically drawn broadly enough to not offend the specifics of any quarter-life crisis. “Wrote a letter to my former self/ Saying ‘thanks for knowing when to give up’,” he smirks on “No Big Deal,” speaking to the regrets and fear recognizable to anyone who invested their formative years in something that left them unprepared to face the future. Sure, an early highlight of New Misery is a sleepwalk of drowsy harmonies and slide guitar reminiscent of All Things Must Pass. But its sentiment is a far more cynical rendering of the same idea: “And Yet the World Still Turns.”
Omori has never been the most personal songwriter, so the context of New Misery gives an easy entry and a new way to experience a style that has remained mostly intact since Soft Will. Very little of it can be described as “rock,” none of it as “punk,” the result of Omori trying to emulate the top 40 music he’d hear in hospitals while working with a medical supply company. New Misery provides sturdy melodies throughout; as with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, Omori’s voice ensures that he’ll always approach pop sounding like a classic rock throwback, though he doesn’t have the same taste for adventure or sonic precision.
New Misery’s filler doesn’t lie in the songs themselves, but rather within them, the predictable indulgences of both solo albums and transitions from guitar to synthesizers. The instrumental sections that of “And Yet the World Still Turns” and “Lom” meander rather than mesmerize, overdubs add distance rather than depth, Shane Stonebeck’s production slathers reverb on every instrument, turning even the coke-sniffing Drive-pop of “Cinnamon” into aural taffy.
The razored leads of Kakacek were often the thing that could draw boundaries on Smith Westerns songs as they became increasingly reliant on reverb and Chris Coady’s humidified production. Omori hasn’t quite figured out how to replace them; “Poison Dart” and “Sour Silk” would be gorgeous Smith Western ballads without the time-stamped, sci-fi synths that feel like placeholders. He certainly doesn’t need any implication that Kakacek and Julien Ehrlich’s absence are palpable and sorely missed here; after all, the reception of Whitney’s Light Upon the Lake singles has them well-positioned to play afternoon festival slots for at least the next two years. But that’s where the non-musical context of New Misery comes into play—it’s a transitional album in all senses, more intent on Omori getting lost inside himself before he tries to move forward.


Five classic Throbbing Gristle albums have been beautifully remastered and lovingly repackaged in gatefolded 2xCD editions.

Throbbing Gristle: Second Annual Report / D.O.A. / 20 Jazz Funk Greats / Heathen Earth / Greatest Hits

"Yea yea twist again better than we did last summer, laughing in the face of all rock and roll historians collectors revivalists purists inquisition members puritans bores creeps and not forgetting the fussy midgets with obscene hairdos." So wrote Claude Bessy in the liner notes to Throbbing Gristle's Greatest Hits, one of the five classic Throbbing Gristle albums Industrial Records have just reissued, and which now sit upon my desk, uncanny and accusatory, over 30 years after that pre-emptive fit of snark. Throbbing Gristle were never meant to be reliable, but here they come again, ready to be harvested by the very culture industry they alternately solicited and spat upon so long ago.
Permit me to adjust my obscene hairdo and offer those of you not already in the know some history: In their first incarnation as the Death Factory, they were the house band for Coum Transmissions, an abject performance-art troupe whose presentation of used tampons, anal syringes, and pornography featuring band member Cosey Fanny Tutti in the ICA gallery for their "Prostitution" show in 1976 earned them tabloid infamy and denunciations in Parliament as "wreckers of civilization." So far, so punk. But the music of the Death Factory, soon re-named Throbbing Gristle after a Yorkshire slang term for an erection, was a horse of a different color: "industrial music for industrial people," a dystopian, negative form of what the band itself called "post-psychedelic trash."
While the rest of the Class of '77 pogoed steadily, Throbbing Gristle blew hot and cold, a passive-aggressive tug of war between the sharp and the slimy: The formal elegance of Chris Carter's synthesizers are scrawled upon by Genesis P-Orridge's bass riffs and Cosey Fanni Tutti's fuzz guitar freakouts, spiced with violin and dubby honks of cornet. This already pungent stew is spiked with taped material selected by Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson-- excerpts of everyday intimacy and true crime verité-- and the arsenic tang of Genesis' vocals, either sung in a soft sort of sprechstimme or howled into effects. On their debut, The Second Annual Report, the music alternately chugged along like a squelchy, crude cop of the Velvet Underground, or stretched out into malingering new age, like a syphilitic Tangerine Dream. But they got both more virulent and more ambitious with time, upping the hostility and dread on D.O.A, taking a kitsch detour toward mutant disco on 20 Jazz Funk Greats, auto-cannibalizing their catalog in the live-in-the-studio ritual recording of Heathen Earth, and reasserting a strangely forceful collection of avant garde anti-pop for a Greatest Hits package revealingly subtitled Entertainment Through Pain, which collates their singles output as a quiver of tense stabs at accessibility.
In time for Christmas, a revived Industrial Records has just re-released all five of these classic albums, lovingly repackaged in deluxe gatefolded 2xCD editions. In each case, the original album is (wisely) preserved intact on one CD, while a second CD collects period singles, live performances, and a smattering of alternate mixes and unreleased material. Artwork is supplemented with alternate takes from photo-sessions, and it's a jarring experience for collector scum like myself to see and hear these goofy blooper reels and deleted scenes, in which the avatars of colder-than-thou aesthetics stand on one foot or giggle. Savvily recognizing the waning moment of the CD as such, there are vinyl editions of the albums too, which faithfully reprint the original artwork at full size and format. While so far I've only checked out the vinyl for 20 Jazz, it looks drool-worthy and sounds far stronger than any other pressing that this fussy midget has encountered.
Given that these albums have stayed continuously in print for years through arrangements with Fetish Records, and later Mute, one must ask: Why bother paying attention to these reissues? In a triumphant vindication of sound over image, the real motivation for this re-presentation of a back catalog is that all five of these five albums have been remastered by Chris Carter himself, a labor of obsessive-compulsive love whose consequences I intend to unpack, album-by-album, below. On the face of it, the idea of an "audiophile TG" makes for a jarring proposition: The band always seemed weirdly proud of the dismal fidelity of its early recordings, and its stated objective was to be repellent and un-assimilable. As an early Coum Transmisions slogan put it, "We Guarantee Disappointment." However off-message, the immersive experience of these new versions redeems what might sound gratuitous, or merely greedy, about this gambit. It's the audio equivalent of a "director's cut" edition of a beloved series of seedy cult movies, something to file between your Kenneth Anger boxset and a Hermann Nitsch coffee-table tome.
Assessed as an archival work of restoration, it's a bullseye. I've been listening to these records for 25 years, and for me, this feels like the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel, if the Sistine Chapel were painted by Hieronymous Bosch instead of Michelangelo. Simply put, the heat and noise and grit and dirt and gristle is still there, but Chris Carter has finally put meat on the bones. There's simply more vitality and physicality to the music, and yet it still sounds "very TG": The harsh, brittle, and scalpel-sharp high end is preserved, but the kick drums are heavier, the riffs hit harder, and the field recordings now produce a tactile IMAX-theater immersion effect. But going beyond these side effects of possibly overheated fanboy devotion, the re-introduction of Throbbing Gristle into the cultural bloodstream also offers up a temperature-taking opportunity to assess both the entire arc of their career and the harder question of whom it might speak to today.
SECOND ANNUAL REPORT
Recorded in their rehearsal space and at various grubby gigs onto a Sony cassette recorder in a defiantly lo-fi manner in 1977, Second Annual Report makes an oddly recalcitrant candidate for a remastering job. Music this deliberately weedy was never going to please audiophiles, and the wags at Industrial Records know that even today this record is a tough sell. For sheer sangfroid, it's hard to beat a press sheet that boasts, "Contains three different versions of 'Slug Bait', a song about eating a baby." Talking about killing people isn't necessarily interesting (hello, Foster the People), but when I hear Genesis P-Orridge describe a businesslike psychopath butchering a family ("I cut his balls off with my knife (KNIFE); I make him eat them right there in front of his pregnant wife (WIFE)"), I still blink and twitch a little. The creeping dread "Slug Bait" achieves lies not in the lyrical body count but in the hiccupping repetition of trigger words as Gen's vocal longjumps from a casual speaking voice to a garbled shriek, and in the deliberate misfit between the vocal's desperation and the detuned pastoral synths smeared underneath.
It's hard to say whether this was a raising or a lowering of the bar, but the bunker mentality of "Industrial" subculture as a power-obsessed stance of aesthetic nihilism wedded to nasty, lo-fi noise was born on this record, leaving a bloody trail for Wolf Eyes, Brainbombs, Prurient, and others to follow into the present moment. As if that were not prescient enough, Second Annual Report counterbalances the bloodthirsty yang of its first eight songs with the yin of its long, brooding final track, the gauzy, scuttling, 20-minute soundtrack to the Coum Transmissions film "After Cease to Exist". Which is to say that, in 1977, TG already forecasted the ongoing migration of noise dudes toward new age (take a bow, James Ferraro), a sea-change which has been recursively washing over the underground for the past several years.
D.O.A.: THE THIRD AND FINAL REPORT OF THROBBING GRISTLE
Widely regarded as the band's finest hour, 1978's D.O.A. effortlessly surpasses Second Annual Report both in its ballsy, forceful execution and its passionate range. If TG are Fleetwood Mac, then D.O.A is their Rumors: the sound of a band alchemically transforming romantic upheaval into their sharpest statement. In a proggy gambit worthy of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, D.O.A. explodes the idea of a unified album into a suite of collective songs punctured by four solo pieces from each band member. Sleazy's "Valley of the Shadow of Death" is a fetishistic fly-on-the-wall compilation of working-class men and boys talking shit, a sonic file folder of vanished moments that are naggingly unclear (Chit chat? Hustling?). Gen's melancholic pleading on his solo effort "Weeping" couldn't be further from the tranquility of Cosey's idyllic "Hometime", and this polar juxtaposition flags the album's messy personal backstory (the album was recorded after Gen and Cosey's ongoing romance imploded, and Chris and Cosey's lifelong partnership began). But the standout solo track is surely Chris Carter's celestial arpeggio staircase "AB/7A", a clear influence upon the now-much-imitated Emeralds aesthetic of heart-tugging synth mandalas.
Counterbalancing these solitary excursions, the group efforts on this album are exhilaratingly bleak: From the chemtrails of distortion on "Hit By a Rock" to the amplified sound of early computer code stored on cassette on "I.B.M." to the final raveup of "Blood on the Floor", it's never less than car-crash fascinating. At the center of the record is "Hamburger Lady", a nightmarish vision of a burn victim's excruciatingly prolonged survival in the administered world of a high-tech hospital. It's probably Throbbing Gristle's greatest song, and it sounds tougher and more menacing than ever. The re-mastering has put a bass-jeep-worthy oomph into the low end of the kick drum, thickened the seasick, doomy bass dirge that, yes, throbs at its heart, and sharpened the edge of the scything central riff, a party horn run through a custom-built effects unit called the Gristleizer. Witch-house wishes it were this creepy, but even upside-down crosses won't save you from the horror of everyday life. A nauseating masterpiece, and an essential recording.
20 JAZZ FUNK GREATS
You could write an entire book about the sly wit and polymorphous slipperiness of 20 Jazz Funk Greats, whose kitsch seaside holiday photo on notorious suicide spot Beachy Head tips off the viewer to the deliberately fishy insincerity of its sonic contents. In a smash and grab that testifies to both increased musical ambition and a relentless urge to wrongfoot audience expectations, 20 Jazz Funk Greats finds the band waking up from D.O.A's dark night of the soul and feeling curiously frisky. Snacking on not only the titular funk and jazz, the band also takes touristic zig zags through exotica, rock, and disco. Like the alien mimic in John Carpenter's sci-fi horror film "The Thing", each song seems almost persuasive as a stab at these genres, but crucially twists itself out of alignment in a perverse reveal.
"Hot on the Heels of Love" is a delirious slice of Moroder-esque boudoir-disco complete with breathy vocals from Cosey and, thanks to the remastering, a floor-filling low-end thump. The blueprint for 100% Silk's hipster-house shenanigans arguably starts here, with people who have no business taking over the dancefloor doing it anyway, with surprisingly solid results. An even stronger case for the critical re-thinking that mastering can achieve, "Convincing People", which has previously struck me as a less-than-successful stab at a cynically collapsed political anthem, now sounds suitably fist-pumping. But the standout moment here is still "Persuasion". Handcuffed to a plodding, two-note bass figure, Gen croons a narrative of pornographic photography sessions, which is punctured by squealing shards of Cosey's guitar and deeply unnerving tapes of unidentifiable people in compromising situations that seem to mingle distress, ecstasy, and pain. Tilting a repellent and yet seductive purr against found audio fragments, it's as if the crew of "To Catch a Predator" arrived too late to stop the Drake of "Marvins Room" from making a snuff film: once encountered, you can't hit undo.
But as much as TG tried to deliberately "guarantee disappointment" and mutate away from any signature, certain gestures had started to recur: "Six Six Sixties" ends this album in the riff rock grind-mode just as "Blood on the Floor" ended D.O.A. Patterns had begun to emerge, and the cumulative pressure of their own survival now forces the band members to work harder to surprise themselves. It's in the pathos of their promiscuous liasons with the forbidden territory of various forms of "real music" that this album generates a weirdly gripping power of its own. I am biased and perhaps lonely here, but this fussy midget regards it as their peak.
HEATHEN EARTH
A live-in-the-studio séance recorded in one take in front of a posse of friends and associates, I've always regarded Heathen Earth as the dog in the manger, sounding slightly stiff relative to the unhinged and abrasive live sound captured on the TG24 boxset, which archives their scalding live gigs before frequently hostile crowds with less fidelity but more heart. The opening salvos of this concert draw upon songs and rhythmic tapes already deployed on 20 Jazz Funk Greats, and they sound tentative, fragmentary, slightly inhibited. But things begin to erupt when the whistling-led mirage of "The World Is a War Film" dissolves into a ripping version of "Something Came Over Me", turning that single into a propulsive, masturbatory launchpad for a swirling noise-dub overload which Carter's remastering has pumped into startling new prominence. Gen holds back from taking much of a vocal frontman position, and the result is a greater awareness of TG's ear for texture. It would take a spicerack of adjectives to do justice to the gnarled, twisted, flanged, and serrated soundworld conjured by the band's unique gear and more-is-more approach to processing. But it's a testimony to their precision that, for all their influence, nobody quite sounds like them when they are truly on blast, as they are here. Things come to a suitably frenzied peak in the stomping, cornet-led "Don't Do as You're Told, Do as You Think", in which Cosey's horn-through delay finally makes good on the clammy flirtations with jazz from 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Having promised a séance on a rainy afternoon, a relaxation technique cassette concludes the jam.
GREATEST HITS
Though they are taking the piss in passing themselves off as band who had "hits," this compilation from 1980 of 7" singles and assertive album tracks in fact does the trick nicely: It makes a first-rate introduction to the band and offers a less torturous entryway to their prickly, poisonous oeuvre than any particular album. The swells of "Hamburger Lady" start us off feeling nausea, and this bumpy ride builds in force from there. You can sense in this victory lap a kind of précis of their career arc that testifies to the strange tractor-beam effect of pop values on an experimental band. The single element from Second Annual Report is "Tiab Guls", a backward version of "Slug Bait" that effectively censors the bloody lyrics by upstaging them into a blur. The perkiest and most uptempo high points of D.O.A. and 20 Jazz dominate, and the cover, a pastiche of Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny exotica sleeves, tips its hats to the cover of 20 Jazz as well. But the real peaks are the spiky singles "United" and "Adrenalin", fantastically complete exercises in minimalistic synth-pop songwriting that imply an alternative universe in which Throbbing Gristle were just a fuzzier, more dyspeptic cousin to Depeche Mode and John Foxx.
I wish there were a hidden TG album with 20 more songs like these, and it just so happens that the bonus tracks on this CD are the most intriguing and fully formed, including alternative mixes of "AB/7A" and "The Old Man Smiled". It is this full-speed-ahead electronic pop aspect of TG's lineage that aligns these pioneers of industrial music with the minimal synth, cold wave, and proto-techno revivalists of today. TG were crucial early pioneers of an aesthetic that now cuts a broad swathe across the audio landscape, from Martial Canterel, the Wierd Records posse, and Cold Cave, through to, arguably, lots of recent pop and R&B production, where icy synths and stark drum patterns undergird alienated vocals ad infinitum.
It's an unintended irony that a band so hostile to the very idea of "music" as such should have created recordings that have become enshrined into canonical constellations, but TG's influence has spiraled outwards as a direct result of their very unreliability and deviance. Thanks to the weird range and high quality of their catalog, separate strands of Throbbing Gristle's DNA are now entwined within the histories of electronic music, techno, dance music, goth aesthetics, occult subcultures, the avant edge of indie rock, and the entirety of the noise underground. It's a capitalist fairtytale born of hipster hindsight: The people who tried as hard as possible to make their audiences uncomfortable turned out to have a little bit of something for everyone.
In the wake of Sleazy's startling death in 2010, a kind of melancholic asymmetry has settled into place: the archive as mausoleum. The band can no longer re-unite and tour, though rumors and speculation continue to circulate about the ultimate fate of the extended recording sessions that the band tracked in London at the ICA for an extended deconstructive cover of the entirety of Nico's Desertshore album. In the wake of the decline of the CD and the seemingly inevitable slide downward in fidelity as the new brigade of information hunter-gatherers settle for the lossy, filed-shared free-for-all of torrents over the material culture of collectables, it's a perhaps deliberately out-of-step gesture to decide at precisely this point to remaster, repackage, and represent these Mosaic tablets of noise into upscale commodities memorializing a vanished moment of rebellion. So much for laughing in the face of historians, collectors, and revivalists.
Having the last laugh while seemingly anticipating this bittersweet outcome, Throbbing Gristle still don't add up: These albums are perversely inconclusive, by turns drably ugly and beautifully vital. However much Chris Carter has clarified their sound and stabilized their canon, the work itself remains as profoundly self-differential as ever. To cite a phrase the band used for its LP of the cut-ups of their icon and friend William S. Burroughs, there is "Nothing here now but the recordings." But those recordings have a funny way of coming to life. In 1981 in the NME, Paul Morley prophesized that "one day TG's music will sound rich and sweet." Thanks to Chris Carter's remastering and the necromancy of Industrial Records, that day has arrived.


The past decade of British club music looms large on Lorenzo Calpini’s breezy debut album, which enlists a global cast of guest vocalists to broaden the Rome-based producer’s sound.

Love Junction

Lorenzo Calpini makes chromatic, high-sheen club tracks with the precision of an obsessive fan and the breezy insouciance of an outsider. Based in Rome, he fell for UK sound system music from afar, devouring Rinse FM podcasts in the golden years after dubstep’s peak, when UK funky briefly reigned supreme. He upgraded his distance learning to a full degree with a two-year stint in Leeds—where he concluded, with some disappointment, that British ravers were more interested in getting wrecked than in appreciating the music. (Not a totally unfair assessment.)
It was once Calpini returned to Rome that he found his footing as a producer and DJ, inspired by the syncopation of UK funky and the complementary sounds of Lisbon kuduro, as well as the African rhythms that form the roots of both styles. His singles and EPs to date have slotted in easily on London’s Nervous Horizon and Lisbon’s Enchufada, two labels where brawny drums take center stage. But on his debut album, he brings in a crew of vocalists to broaden his scope.
Love Junction arrives via Friends of Friends, the LA label that’s home to artists like Groundislava and Shlohmo—beatmakers who aren’t necessarily aiming for the dancefloor—and it’s a breezy fusion of Calpini’s influences to date. The past decade of UK club music looms large; you can hear the dreamy post-dubstep of Mount Kimbie in the reverb-heavy guitars of “Kanaan” and the peppy Afro-swing of J Hus in “Hello!” and “Come Over.” African instruments and rhythms pop up throughout the record, sometimes nodding to the hypnotic pulse of vintage Afrobeat. Threading it all together is Calpini’s particular synth sound: warm, gooey, and a little bit wistful, as if weighed down by the nostalgia of a distant onlooker.
His collaborators include Ghanaian rapper Nawtyboi Tattoo, the star of Love Junction’s two biggest pop moments: “Come Over,” a blazing-bright production with a chorus from Ghanaian singer Lamisi; and the ecstatic “Hello!,” a ridiculously catchy Afro-swing hit-in-waiting that feels built for Carnival season. What Nawtyboi lacks in lyrical dexterity, he makes up for in sheer exuberance—turning a single, globally recognized word into an entire chorus isn’t as easy as he makes it look. Also on the sound system side, dancehall bumper “Clearing My Mind” features the Auto-Tuned warble of Jamaican singjay 45DiBoss over grimey, square wave synths and a rhythm that cracks open dembow’s regular thump to make something refreshingly wonky. “Chasing” is less successful; Bristol singer Chikaya brings a yearning R&B vocal to a slow-motion house groove that’s warm as a bubble bath but fades when it should be taking off.
The vocal tracks are evenly interspersed with instrumentals, which makes sense on paper but doesn’t always feel natural. On the groove-based tracks, Calpini leans into his African influences, but rather than building endless grooves in an Afrobeat style, he tends to change course every four or eight bars, betraying a restless, puppyish energy. The best results come when he lets himself go with the flow. On the title track, techno and Afrobeat collide naturally; the metallic buzz of the Tanzanian zeze provides an organic pulse as skittish saxophone cuts a looping trail through the groove, like an insect on the breeze. “Rio Grande” is a keeper, too, resembling Calpini’s drum-heavy early singles with its insistent, rattling conga and one huge, fat question mark of a synth, teeing you up for a drop that doesn’t land where you’d expect. But “Lips & Bones” is overstuffed: It riffs on a combination of Night Slugs-style fruity keys and grotty, basement-rave drums, but there’s just too much going on, even before the Latin jazz drum breakdown.
Still, it’s rare to encounter a club producer with such versatility at his fingertips. Being an outsider can bless you with a fresh perspective, as grime MC Kwam points out in the opening seconds of drum workout “Goo”: “We got some different flavor here... from mainland Europe.” Love Junction has a relentless enthusiasm that’s hard to resist, even when Calpini’s surplus of globally sourced ideas don’t quite stick together.


Mixing mid-fi ’90s influences with elements of slowcore, the Brooklyn trio Wild Pink evoke early Death Cab as they calmly process the chaos of the city around them.

Wild Pink

The members of Wild Pink live in Brooklyn but really reside in their own minds. Whether it’s mundane NYC landmarks (the Taconic Parkway, a giant clock over the John Smolenski Funeral Home) or hallowed monuments, Wild Pink seek the familiar in their dynamic surroundings. “Riding out some psychotropics/In the shadow of the World Trade/Trying hard to understand the culture in my face,” John Ross sings in “Great Apes.” Wild Pink lives in this wearied New York state of mind: standing on the subway, walking through crowds lost in thought, letting the mental chatter drown out every voice around you.
After two EPs that found the Brooklyn trio exploring an array of mid-fi ’90s influences, they’ve honed a sound that suits Ross’ perspective—maybe not so much comfortably numb as “manageably anxious,” reminiscent of early Death Cab for Cutie or American Analog Set, bands who took on characteristics of slowcore without being stylistically bound to it. Parallel to his band’s evolution, Ross has ditched his searching yelp and distilled his entire emotional range into a single, unshakeable tone. It’s not monotonous, per se; what Ross does is a variation on “shower voice,” a sort of a tuneful mutter. The ways his timbre peaks through sundazed ambience (“Broke On”), glistening jangle-pop (“Great Apes”) or piercing fuzz (“Nothing to Show”) can be remarkable or infuriating—like hearing chatter in the library where you can *just *make out enough of the conversation that it doesn’t become white noise.
At times, Ross can unnerve the listener enough to lean in closer for his lyrics, which are like quotables from non-contextual conversations: “I’ve got a dad’s breath/From cheap beer and cigarettes,” “You are the beauty queen/You left piss on the seat,” or most memorably, “Then I said something dumb/Like ‘the Redskins hate the Cowboys because Kennedy died in Dallas.’” Ross says the latter to defuse the tension of visiting a roadside vigil on the opening “How Do You Know if God Takes You Back?,” and throughout *Wild Pink, *the jokes serve as his emotional armor. His picture of an isolated, yet contented youth is drawn with John Darnielle-esque detail (“My whole world was in my room/Playing both sides of a Magic game/Black vs. Green/And a bootleg Maxell tape of Queen”) and on the devastating closer, he recalls to a friend, “On 9/11 your mom took you to see Legally Blonde.” The names of these songs are, respectively, “Wanting Things Makes You Shittier” and “They Hate Our Freedom.”
For the most part, though, *Wild Pink *deals in the usual language of the overeducated and underemployed. “You’re cultured and cursed/With dated ideas about what it means to have American Dreams,” Ross sings on “I Used to Be Small.” And other times, he just takes issue with cell phones. “Put your phone down/Put your phone down,” Ross sings, but none of his words feel judgmental—they’re just a polite, noticeably exhausted request.
“You’ll hear about the war and know it’s not yours,” Ross warns during a visit to a nursing home on “Broke On.” Throughout, there’s a discernible yearning for something worth fighting for, something character-building, as the older generation might have put it: “there’s no war left to win” or, “all my life I wish I had died bravely.” These lines carry a heavier, more political resonance now than they probably did when Wild Pink was recorded. Had it been released last year, it might have just been a solid indie rock record about everyday New York living. But Ross sounds like so many people whose nebulous concerns about the future have been sharpened. Wild Pink may not be a generation’s bonfire, but it now sounds like the slow burn leading up to it.


On his third solo album, the New York drummer sheds his earlier records’ conceptual frameworks, marshaling percussive chaos into increasingly controlled forms.

Contact

Over the course of three studio albums, Greg Fox’s solo output has become less conceptual. In 2014, Mitral Transmission drew upon experiments using free-jazz drummer Milford Graves’ various bio-sensing apparatuses, which allowed Fox to find music in the natural rhythms of his body. The Gradual Progression, released in 2017, was a richer, headier work, one still intimately connected to process, though the conceit wasn’t as high-minded: Channeling jazz and new age, Fox began working with software called Sensory Percussion, which can turn a drum kit into an electronic controller or sampler, allowing for a broader array of sounds in the mix.
On Contact, there are even fewer formal constraints. Recorded with veteran doom-metal producer Randall Dunn (Earth, Sunn O))), Six Organs of Admittance) in just two days, the album feels more improvisatory than The Gradual Progression, and more blindingly technical. Fox remains a gifted physical performer, marshaling percussive chaos into increasingly controlled forms—defined rhythmic mutations in cymbal crashes and cool, rolling snare hits. The track titles draw from Buddhist concepts, though Fox admits they’re “somewhat arbitrary”; more than any overarching thematic framework, a freeform, exploratory sensibility guides the album.
There’s a sense, too, of things being stripped back. This is clearest on the three title tracks, which are minimalistic to the point of resembling technical exercises. Fox presents complex rhythms in isolation, without any extraneous samples or production tricks. It’s sonic acupuncture—just Fox and the kit, iterating on a series of patterns to near-therapeutic effect. “Parasthesia” achieves something similar with an opposite tack; occasional blasts of processed, oxidized sound punctuate a sustained ambient tableau, with fewer flourishes and relatively little negative space. Where the three “Contact” tracks are aesthetically austere, “Parasthesia” represents an economy of motion. There’s a bit of that on “Vedana,” too, though the effect is somewhat weaker; the repetitions fatigue more than they entrance.
As indebted to prog as to spiritual jazz, “From the Cessation of What” is the album’s most developed piece, and its most texturally stunning. What begins as something misty and spacious quickly tightens as the drumming becomes more dynamic. With a cascade of bright, percussive plinks, the track becomes almost dialogic; the interplay between the starkness of the kit and the gloss of those sampled tones resembles a kind of conversation. And in the final third, amid psychedelic organ, Fox lets loose, closing with splashy, cathartic release.
The album’s title, Contact, nods to the basic mechanics of drumming: the isolated experience of hitting, rolling, or brushing as a moment of connection. But more than ever, in Fox’s solo catalog, that physical sensation bleeds into the psychic. The relationship between gesture and emotion is newly unmediated, and individual actions evoke worlds. Fox is the lone, many-limbed curator, conjuring sounds and samples in space. And though Contact is mostly a one-man endeavor, the music generates a sense of proximity, of presence. That tension feels both like an ironic reminder of our current isolation and a gesture toward a more communal future.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The young American singer launches her career with a slinky, vintage album featuring production from Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner—though it sounds more like Turner side-project than a showcase debut.

Belladonna of Sadness

Alexandra Savior has a penchant for clever wordplay and a voice that can hypnotize, terrorize, or both in four measures or less. Her YouTube covers favored the elongated swoons of Adele and Angus & Julia Stone ballads before she found a fan in Courtney Love and signed to Columbia. For her first full-length, she teamed up with Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys and producer James Ford whose production credits pepper the vast majority of Turner’s output. But instead of a debut album that flaunts the dynamism of a new artist, the result is an album that barely even feels like one—or, at the very least, only vaguely resembles a collaborative effort that casts Savior as the hostess of Turner’s discount ideas.
From the looks of “An Introduction,” a brief video she dropped a month before the album, the trio get along famously; she, “Al,” and Ford wearing a paper bag all ham it up in between vocal takes. She jokes about giving the studio a “feminine touch” by hanging roses from the ceiling. “There’s a feminine aspect to it,” she says of *Belladonna *and her limited aesthetic influence. “I think that that’s what I was trying to bring in—but at the same time, having this grit like a horror film would have. I wanted it to be murderous.”
The clip pulls back the curtain on Belladonna’s deceit: This is an Alex Turner album passed off as Savior’s simply because she sang it. Her vocal affectations so closely mirror the languid elasticity of her mentor’s that they come off as impressions instead of articulations of original thought. Turner’s musical ticks are so distinct that they’re instantly recognizable when someone else tries to dress them up as their own. Direct lines can be drawn from “Do I Wanna Know?,” “Crying Lightning,” and scores of Arctic Monkeys and Last Shadow Puppets singles to the bulk of Belladona’s ebbing bass lines and spooky chord progressions. “Mirage” hits a little too close to home with its stage-name games and persona dress-up: “She's almost like a million other people/That you'll never really get to know/And it feels as if she's swallowing me whole” would serve as wry commentary and a portrait of an alter-ego if Savior herself wasn’t leading an album that sounds like it could slip into an Arctic Monkeys set with a simple pronoun swap.
But Belladona isn’t without its charms, and Savior succeeds in delivering that “murderous” quality she was after. The ceaseless cavalcade of minor chords and eerie, campy vibes perfected by Turner lend themselves especially well to “Bones” and “Mystery Girl.” Turns of Belladona even resemble Tarantino in their enthusiasm for vintage noir and suspense, like “Vanishing Point,” which is ripe for licensing for any manner of stabby plot points in the CW’s latest blood-spattered drama (her demo for “Risk”—another collaboration with Turner and Ford—appeared on the second season of “True Detective”’s soundtrack). Her voice and affectations are so guided by the heavy hands of Turner and Ford that Belladonna of Sadness is largely indistinguishable from their work: At best, Savior is a muse for her own introduction; at worst, she’s a conduit who’s yet to prove that she can hold her own with the company she keeps.


After the turbid nightmares of Wu-Tang's 8 Diagrams, it's no surprise that RZA's follow-up is a notably lighter affair, a record that divides his work between a could-be pop audience and the hardcore Wu heads.

Digi Snacks

Most would argue that the differences between Robert Diggs and Bobby Digital are essentially nil beyond the latter wearing a paper-plate mask while in character. Not exactly-- the story told by RZA in the Wu-Tang Manual has one major advantage over the narrative sorta-established by his alter ego over the past decade (!) in that it actually has something of a point to it. Namely, that any time the Wu has been caught slippin', it's because everyone else failed to give RZA the benefit of the doubt.
And while it's easy for RZA to claim ownership of 20/20 foresight while trying to do the unprecedented, micromanaging the careers of eight budding superstars, it wasn't until winter of last year where his artistic leadership underwent real scrutiny. While a Wu-Tang project in name, 8 Diagrams was ultimately considered RZA's baby, as the rest of the Clan (most notably Raekwon and Ghostface Killah) wiped their hands of it upon release, slamming the Abbot as a control freak "hip-hop hippie" that went behind everyone's back to completely change the character of the record-- a sentiment that gained even more traction after the subsequent drop of Ghost's excellent but cruise-controlled Big Doe Rehab.
But the divisiveness was more talked about than practiced-- both records had nearly equal fortunes commercially (none) and critically (almost rote praise). Still, it's easy to see how RZA could piggyback on this situation and garner so much goodwill leading up to his latest solo LP. First off, he didn't come out of that fiasco looking as petty as Ghost and Rae do when they bitch to the media, and while 8 Diagrams wasn't the maverick work of genius some tried to pawn it off as, his sonics did enough to temporarily deflect the fact that half the Clan sounded frighteningly washed-up. More to the point, Bobby Digital is actually a more trustworthy brand name as far as solo albums go-- his first two bows are uneven, but unhinged semi-classics amongst the Wu faithful, while Birth of a Prince (released as RZA) contained tracks like "We Pop" and "Fast Cars" that have few peers in his discography in terms of sheer awfulness.
Yet despite being erudite and lucid in his recent outside pursuits, Digi Snacks finds RZA unable to convey what he really believes, stumbling through mealy-mouthed lyrical and musical ideas before passing the baton to a more engaged but exponentially less interesting subordinate. He's actually become easier to parse-- far less of the "prominent dominant Islamic Asiatic black Hebrew" stuff; unfortunately he's a lot harder to understand. Here he's working with about three mismatched cadences at once on "Booby Trap", as a grown man going by the name of Dexter Wiggles shouts, "Zap! It's a booby trap/ Would you like a digi or a Scooby snack?" Even as someone who thought that "ears of corn/ And heads of lettuce" ran on some engine of internal logic, Digi Snacks is unknowable, switching from boilerplate social uplift ("I said, 'damn that's poverty'/ He said, 'that really bothers me'") to Gods and Earths pillow talk to Wu mythologizing to standard-issue gun talk, all of it bound together by god knows what-- maybe a weird admiration of Jay-Z's The Black Album?
It's as good of a guess as any, considering RZA bites the "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" flow wholesale on "No Regrets", and slaps it on a Maths & English leftover starved of air and funds. But I guess we shouldn't go any further before discussing "Straight Up the Block", a collaboration with David Banner that makes more sense than it first seems-- after all, both have an aversion to meter and a penchant for dubious political conspiracies. But this attempt at an international player's anthem manages to be the most egregious misuse of talent outside of the Mets-- Banner salvages the beat from Swizz Beatz' scrapyard and then tunes down RZA's voice to the point where his slow grind French ("Je m'appelle Bobby Digi-tell...mademoiselle") tumbles out of his mouth like broken Slinkys.
Advance single "You Can't Stop Me Now" gave the impression that we might get a more earthbound, introspective RZA, but it's like "December 4th" without those silly interludes-- who hasn't heard this story of his come-up dozens of times? It doesn't help that RZA sounds almost completely uninvested. He could just as easily be reciting from a book, which is technically an improvement over the thudding, bored verse from Inspectah Deck, who might as well be rattling through the Yellow Pages. With that you see the ill effects of the estranged Clan, since Deck's bow is the only one from the A-listers on the entirety of Digi Snacks.
After the turbid nightmares of 8 Diagrams, it's no surprise that Digi Snacks is a notably lighter affair, but it just divides RZA's work between a pop audience that never really wanted him and the hardcore Wu heads who think "Tearz" is as soft as they should ever get. "Good Night" revives the waterbed motion of "My Lovin' Is Digi" better than the eponymous sequel, mostly because it's still entertaining to hear didactic rhymes about sinking one's "Titantic" (sic) into your Atlantic and the boundless verbal elasticity needed to fit "Chicago," "Virgo," and "convertible" in the same rhyme pattern.
If anything, Digi Snacks managed to pinpoint where we are in the Wu cycle of life. In 1998, hip-hop was flush with enough cash to possibly sustain a Bobby Digital movie and now, low-overhead labels like Koch ratchet down expectations to the point where it can be pursued as the niche project it always was. But "half-baked" isn't an improvement over "raw" for a guy like RZA, and anyone who's heard a recent Kool Keith record can tell you that an astounding catalog, reality-defying self-confidence and an otherworldly alias can't restore rapidly dwindling goodwill on its own. Things just ain't the same for quasi-mad scientist/ghetto philosopher/sexual dynamo superheroes.


A frequent collaborator of Babyface, Flying Lotus, and Kamasi Washington, the Los Angeles keyboardist brings a wide range of inspirations to bear on a fun, frothy record that’s slathered with vocoder.

Resistance

Older siblings can mess you up in so many ways. They can out-wrestle you, put your toys on a higher shelf should the whim strike, casually tell you that you’re adopted at dinner. And then there’s what Brandon Coleman’s brother did to him when he first took up playing piano at the age of 16: He gave him a copy of Herbie Hancock’s Sunlight. Hancock’s skills could make almost any novice abandon the piano, but this 1978 disco-funk album was shot through instead with Hancock’s vast array of synths and his vocoder-warped vocals. And in the years since, Coleman has gone on to play for Babyface, Childish Gambino, Flying Lotus, and Thundercat; he’s also a pillar of saxophonist Kamasi Washington’s band.
On Resistance, his first album for FlyLo’s Brainfeeder imprint, Coleman lets the Sunlight in while also drawing on the other late-’70s/early-’80s titans who also roboticized their pipes. Across Resistance’s 12 frivolous but frisky tracks, he also alights on Stevie Wonder and Zapp & Roger, and, like his predecessors, Coleman finds a way to use the vocoder’s warble to amalgamate jazz, soul, and funk. That’s Coleman’s vocal fluttering across the symphonic disco stomp of “Live For Today” with the life-affirming purr: “Girl, we can’t be afraid to live for today/No matter what they say.” It’s a carpe diem come-on couched in the plushest velvet.
While vocoder-tinged songs were mostly a funk curio in the late ’70s and early ’80s, those silvery, weirdly slick singing styles have since become mainstream thanks to the unavoidable alien shimmer of Auto-Tune infiltrating modern popular music, from EDM to R&B to hip-hop. In dusting off the old vocoder, Coleman has good company in artists like Daft Punk and Chromeo. But he doesn’t sound overly studious about the era—more like he was neck-deep in it, the feel less robotic and more fluid.
Coleman’s chops are on point throughout, nailing high notes with the vocoder, adding beguiling keyboard ripples, crafting sweet bridges to catchy choruses, riding in the pocket of the album’s infectious grooves. His horns and fat synth squelches on “A Letter to My Buggers” are the sweetest ear candy, and he  adds just a smidge more bounce to the ounce on the Zapp homage “Sexy,” carrying on that vocoder-funk lineage wherein a future full of horndog cyborgs is envisioned.
It’s a fun future to imagine and move to. And throughout, Resistance keeps the proceedings light, sometimes to a fault. “Addiction,” with its big, echoing canned claps and keytar vrooms, isn’t about the opioid crisis—just old-fashioned pheromones. But such playfulness—frothiness, even—makes for a fun spin. For those accustomed to Coleman’s role laying the foundation for expansive spiritual-jazz explorations in Kamasi Washington’s band, it’s revelatory to hear him so spry on his feet and down to get down. If his work with Washington contains all the weight and gravitas of Sunday church, Coleman’s Resistance has all the fun, breeziness—and yes, sunlight—of an afternoon church picnic.


After four albums and four EPs of ambitious yet friendly, pristine and proggish indie pop since 2006, this oddly named band steps into the spotlight.

The Satanic Satanist

When you name your band Portugal. The Man (punctuation purposeful), you relegate any music you release under such a moniker to "conceptual" status by default. Whether a self-fulfilling prophecy or the product of title-driven priming, then, this Portland by way of Alaska band has now released four albums and four EPs of ambitious yet friendly, pristine and proggish indie pop since 2006. 2007's 10-track EP It's Complicated Being a Wizard, for instance, opened with a 23-minute opus, followed by that same piece broken up into nine sections. Accessibility and a vague gloss of concept comprise The Satanic Satanist, on which the band, already tailor-cut for indie approval, seems to throw everything on the table to make a groovy album with wide appeal.
Satanist isn't necessarily thrilling, but within the tighter parameters the band set for itself, the group has succeeded at making a good-old-fashioned classic rock record. Song lengths stay around the three-minute mark, the production quality gleams, every hook feels anthemic, and the whole thing is permeated by themes of nostalgia, nature, and togetherness (man). I could dive into the lyrics and try to delineate some sort of binding narrative to the work, but the album doesn't seem to want me to (nor do you). The best quality of Satanist is that everything sits right on the surface, from the opening rally cry of "People Say" ("What a lovely day yeah we won the war/ May have lost a million men, but we got a million more") through the hyperactive bongo/wah-wah work on "Lovers in Love" and the would-be hippie anthems "Everyone is Golden" and "The Sun" ("we are all just lovers"!). Binding the whole piece more than even the cross-faded tracks is the limber, occasionally awesome voice of singer-songwriter John Baldwin Gourley, which can hop north into a crystal falsetto, or drop down into a soulful moan at a second's notice.
While the deal Portugal. The Man made with Satanist doesen't quite qualify as a Pyrrhic victory, it does raise an important, evergreen question about sacrifices. Compromises, more specifically: the sort that bands now and then make with the goal of accessing more ears.  Is it better to release more "challenging" music and risk remaining largely unknown, or strive toward "pop" record, maybe gain a few new fans, but risk sacrificing a lot of what makes your band unique? These guys have balanced eccentricity and pop savvy since they started, and Satanist is the first record where it seems they've thrown their weight toward the latter. And while it's certainly enjoyable, it's also a bit more generic than anything they've done before. Maybe their own philosophy can be used to explain my point better: If, as they assert, "Everyone Is Golden", doesn't that sort of devalue gold?


Hannes Norrvide's long-running coldwave synth project breaks into the greener pastures of Depeche Mode-style new wave.

Lust for Youth

Coldwave never cared about you. The minimalistic, machine-driven sound that bubbled up twice in the past half-century—once in the midst of post-punk's late-1970s heyday, and again in early-2010s Brooklyn—was largely reliant on keeping its audience at bay, all but ensuring its limited shelf life. With synth lines so brittle that you could snap them over your pinky finger, hissy drum machines, and vocals that frequently bordered on atonality, coldwave was purposefully alienating. A lot of DIY or home-recorded music from this decade gained recognition from its warmth and inviting textures; in stark opposition, coldwave's practitioners rarely seemed interested in whether anyone was listening at all.
The subgenre's aesthetic limitations are baked in, and practically a virtue, which makes Lust for Youth's trajectory over the last three years all the more fascinating. When Swedish synth aesthete Hannes Norrvide's project emerged with his 2011 debut Solar Flare, all the marks of coldwave's sub-zero sound were present and accounted for, and it was still mostly business as usual when Loke Rahbek (who also founded the aptly-named Posh Isolation label) joined up for the following year's Sacred Bones debut Growing Seeds.
But as Lust for Youth persisted, there emerged signs of life after coldwave. Pomegranate from 2013—billed as a collaboration between Norrvide and Rahbek's Croatian Amor project—explored the opalescent clouds of new age; Perfect View from the same year incorporated conversational vocal samples not unlike something from the Swedish imprint Sincerely Yours. When International arrived in 2014—the fifth Lust for Youth release in the span of four years, evidence of coldwave’s one-take prolificacy—the group had expanded to a trio and tilted towards the explicitly poppier sounds of new wave, a journey they continued on 2016's Compassion.
Their latest, a self-titled effort, finds Lust for Youth back to a two-person setup, Rahbek having departed while Norrvide and Malthe Fischer soldier on. The paring back of personnel isn't reflected in the record's sound, though; instead, Norrvide and Fischer pick up where Compassion left off, with gleaming synths and crisp drum patterns lovingly recalling the dour, sweet-and-sour synth-pop of New Order, Depeche Mode, and their thousands of imitators.
Norrvide's vocals are front and center, and his voice often possesses a lovely ugliness that's alluring when cast in the right light, as when he scales the jagged pop mountains of “Adrift” or drapes himself over “Great Concerns.” Lust for Youth is at its most engaging when Norrvide and Fischer throw curveballs. They find an able collaborator in Danish musician and philosopher Soho Rezanejad, whose vocals add a glowing and gloomy texture to the slow-dance duskiness of “Fifth Terrace”; with wavering atmospherics lying under a cumulus of spoken-word, “Imola” suggests a sparser take on the starry-eyed synth fantasias of M83.
Otherwise, Lust for Youth trades in one kind of over-familiarity for another. The gloriously mopey sound of new wave might be novel to Norrvide and Fischer, but there's not much here that stands out in synth-pop's always-crowded field. In a sense, that's fine; Lust for Youth wear this sound well. But Lust for Youth shows they might have escaped coldwave’s dead end only to settle into a rut.