John Darnielle’s band returns to visceral guitar-rock directness for a collection of songs that embrace and humanize the familiar tropes of action cinema.

Bleed Out

As anyone who’s seen The Raid will tell you, there’s purity in the brutal simplicity of action movies. There are good guys and bad guys; they try to shoot and/or beat the shit out of each other; ultimately, one side prevails. That black-and-white milieu might seem an odd fit for the pen of the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle, whose writing tends to leave room for pesky complications like subtlety, nuance, and omnidirectional empathy. But on Bleed Out, his new collection of songs inspired by a pandemic spent devouring classic action films, Darnielle both humanizes and embraces the familiar tropes of action cinema. He indulges in the escapist fantasy that action movies offer, while taking the real cost of living like one of their heroes all too seriously.
Each song on Bleed Out unfolds like an action epic in miniature, and although the scenarios depicted run the gamut from chase sequences to hostage situations, the main throughline is a single-minded pursuit of exacting vengeance from one’s foes. “I'm doing this for revenge,” Darnielle brays in his trademark yawp on the chorus of opening track “Training Montage,” succinctly capturing the motivation that drives the death-defying stunts of protagonists like Keanu Reeves’ John Wick and Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey. It feels as though half of the lyrics come in the form of threats of grievous bodily harm: "I'm going to leave a mark on you"; "I'm going to make you suffer”; "I'm coming to swat you down like flies."
Darnielle has written song cycles about dysfunctional married couples, Dungeons & Dragons, and the plight of the aging California goth. More than anything else in their catalog, Bleed Out resembles the Mountain Goats’ 2015 pro-wrestling album Beat the Champ. Like wrestling, action movies are a form of violent escapism that often tell elemental stories of good versus evil. But where Beat the Champ delved into the personal lives and tribulations of the men and women who dedicate their lives to wrestling, Bleed Out never really breaks kayfabe. It’s not about actors playing action movie protagonists; it’s about honest-to-god vigilantes in desperate life-or-death situations, cliches dragged from make-believe to cold, hard reality by the specificity of Darnielle’s songwriting.
Those urgent stakes are reflected in the album’s sound. Since the early days of John Darnielle yelling into an old Panasonic boombox, the Mountain Goats have evolved into a tight, road-tested quartet. Their music has grown beyond its lo-fi roots to become progressively lusher and more expansive, with session players brought in to add color and texture through organs, horns, and strings. Bleed Out, by contrast, limits the personnel to the band’s core members plus key addition Alicia Bognanno of Bully, who produces and plays guitar. Shepherded by Bognanno, Bleed Out is Darnielle’s most immediate and focused full-band album in years, with the stylistic flourishes of latter-day Mountain Goats jettisoned in favor of a visceral guitar-rock directness that hits like a fist to the face.
As in the action flicks it draws from, Bleed Out succeeds on a pure popcorn entertainment level. Envisioned by Darnielle as an album of “uptempo jams,” it’s full of hurtling drums, sparkling hooks, and anthemic choruses, and it’s easy to imagine songs like “Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome” becoming fan-favorite sing-alongs when performed live. The trick of series like Rambo or Death Wish, both referenced in the deceptively poppy “First Blood,” is making a toxic power fantasy seem badass and fun. That’s the same trick that Darnielle plays on Bleed Out, rendering his narrators’ doomed quest for bloody revenge as crowd-pleasing, fist-pumping power-pop that’s all too easy to get swept up in.
Darnielle doesn’t let up on the gas until the album’s eponymous closing track, a dreamy reflection from a man slowly bleeding out on the ground: “There won’t be any words of wisdom from me/Just a lake of blood for all the world to see.” Darnielle, like most sane human beings, knows that seeking revenge is ultimately pointless—that’s exactly why it’s so alluring. “You never learn to tell the difference between/The probable projections and the best parts of the dream/The fragments that stick with you, the ones you really feel/Those parts aren’t real,” he sings on “Extraction Point.” But there’s real catharsis in pretend violence, in living out fantasies of meting out justice without any consequences. Bleed Out deconstructs the tropes of action movies just as it lovingly recreates them, letting us have our cake and bludgeon our enemies to death with it too.


The Pet Shop Boys have persisted long enough that their return to club music feels calmly liberated, without any grasping for pop hits. On their latest, Super, they recall their own past with trademark arch wit.

Super

"I’ve been a teenager since before you were born," Neil Tennant sang on "Young Offender" 23 years ago, a sigh of bravado. The Pet Shop Boys have persisted long enough that their return to club music feels calmly liberated, without any grasping for pop hits—why bother, when EDM already reclaimed that territory? They stood very still while ears craned towards them. 2012’s Elysium had the detachment of a wet stamp, but Electric, recorded with producer Stuart Price, pushed the beats ardently uptempo, the bass leaping between octaves. Electric’s ready-for-the-weekend anthem saw Tennant asking his lover to stay until the end of it, the flirtatious chimes marking time.
The second entry in a planned trilogy produced by Price, Super elaborates and intensifies Electric’s approach: Louder, brighter, more. It doesn’t have the sustained arc of that album, but Price specializes in renovating house and disco, modernizing with care, and his small details still beguile. Amidst the mounting noise of "Inner Sanctum," a single piano note falls as if to the bottom of the ocean. The synths bounce like color through glass. Familiar Pet Shop Boys ideas or tricks appear faintly beneath it all, like they've attacked a palimpsest with crayons: "Happiness" begins as attenuated techno, and then, like "You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk," Tennant lays down what might be a country singer’s guide vocal.
These oversaturated shades spruce up a few clichés. "Burn" has a premise older than disco itself (this club will be kindling for our desire), but it plays out as romantic pomp, Tennant’s voice turning hushed and androgynous: "It feels so good, it feels so good, it feels so good." The Boys trusted Price enough to leave several tracks nearly instrumental, but you can sense their editorial hand slackening a little—Super is actually shorter than Electric, yet it runs three songs longer. "Sad Robot World" is an inadvertent Kraftwerk parody; despite the usual nuance ("That’s how you are, or have to be"), "Twenty-something" references smartphones, startups, and "trending ideas" as if practicing a venture-capital pitch.
Super’s best songs are no more subtle, but their noise produces strange contrasts. "The Dictator Decides" imagines an idle demagogue yearning to get strung up by his heels, Morrissey ghosting for Bashar Assad. "Will someone please say the unsayable?" Tennant pleads. "Will someone please tell me I’m wrong? I live every day like a sad beast of prey, for I have to appear to be strong." As he frets over secret prison facilities, the drumbeat marches to swiveling jackboots and distant gunfire. "I’d rather that you didn’t shoot me / But I’d quite understand if you did," he sings, subsuming violence under fine manners in a distinctly English manner. Syria’s ruined borders, after all, were imposed in the first place by a diplomatic baronet.
A Pet Shop Boys narrator is so often the bereft observer: Like Carly Rae Jepsen's characters, they tremble as they ache. "The Pop Kids" distends that feeling back across time, describing two friends who shared dances, favorites, and a passion neither could fully acknowledge. Tennant breathes "Ohhh, I like it here," the sound of someone glancing around and knowing, with wanton contentment, that they would rather be nowhere else. As ’90s house piano swells each chorus, the characters might be thrilling to some Behaviour remix—the Pet Shop Boys are distantly recalling their own past too, memories in a stranger’s dream.


Working with producer Jason Lytle, formerly of the band Grandaddy, Ben Bridwell has crafted his best album in nearly a decade, but problems still remain.

Why Are You OK

Why Are You OK? doesn’t sound much like Poco or .38 Special, so longtime fans are likely to hear it as Band of Horses’ best work in nearly a decade on general principle. Don’t assume they’re the majority: Mirage Rock was unfortunate truth-in-advertising for Band of Horses’ ultimate devolution into platitudinal fairground music, but it was still favorably reviewed, debuting at No. 13 on Billboard with even greater success in Europe. While Ben Bridwell may have been disappointed over Mirage Rock’s inability to please everyone, it offers an opportunity whereby Why Are You OK? can somehow sound like an edgy rebranding: even if this album doesn’t sound much like “The Funeral,” Bridwell is at least willing to acknowledge that Band of Horses was once a beloved indie rock band.
So the optics are better this time around. Band of Horses partnered up with Rick Rubin’s label and the production has changed hands from someone responsible for the first couple of Steve Miller and Eagles records to the dude behind The Sophtware Slump**. Whether the partnership with Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle is inspired or productive, it’s at least new, which is just as good. While Why Are You OK? lacks the specific sense of place that Seattle and South Carolina embedded in their first two LPs, “Broken Household Appliance National Forest” is a more interesting setting for the same old Band of Horses songs than the 4 p.m. slot at whatever festival still focuses on guitar music.
Lytle’s fingerprints are all over Why Are You OK?, and this is the closest thing you’re going to get to a Grandaddy record without actual Grandaddy: the seven-minute, prog odyssey “Dull Times/Moon” could be heard as Bridwell’s attempt at an “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot”-style opening gauntlet and nearly every open space thereafter is crammed with analog, squelchy synthesizers, ticky-tack drum machines and voicemail messages.
But Lytle’s presence ultimately serves as a reminder of what you miss about Grandaddy rather than Band of Horses. The quirks are try-hard in a way that makes Why Are You OK? unfavorably compare to the recent triumphs in capricious, quasi-indie southern rock. Whereas My Morning Jacket’s*The Waterfall *and Alabama Shakes’ Sound & Color felt like the work of songwriters who can upscale their eccentricities to an arena setting, Bridwell’s the inverse—these are populist, mundane songs that tack on their idiosyncrasies in post-production like Instagram filters.
The superficially pleasant aspects of Band of Horses have not yet abandoned them: Bridwell’s unorthodox enunciation and convivial persona are immediately identifiable, and it’s no longer necessary to compare him to any number of high lonesome indie types. And when Why Are You OK? charms, it does so in the humble, disarming manner that's come to be expected. “In a Drawer” fully commits to its aw-shucks nostalgia by having J Mascis pop in for the chorus in a welcome, well-timed “sitcom neighbor” sort of way. When Bridwell writes a song that’s meant to be bashfully beautiful, he gets there (“Whatever, Wherever,” “Lying Under Oak”), and when Band of Horses try to rock out, they succeed and do so functionally.
Bridwell's plainspoken lyricism can still be effective. Amidst the bong-loaded ambience of “Dull Times,” he tries to talk his way through writer’s block and he spends the duration of Why Are You OK? creating domestic still lives—when he sings about sitting on a bearskin rug listening to grandpa, or getting drunk or just sitting on the porch killing time, those songs are about just that. Elsewhere, he’s clutching knives in his sleep, screaming so loud upon awakening that he’s worried the cops will come. He later admits, “Getting me arrested was the strangest way to show me that you’re mine/But it saved my life,” and all of the above is presented with the same genial, arms-around-shoulder amity of rock songs that could be heard within any bar or drive-time playlist between Band of Skulls and Kings of Leon.
Then again, maybe that’s proof of a low-key genius at work here. Much of Why Are You OK? was inspired by Bridwell’s experience as a father of four—recording all night and taking his kids to school looking like the “fucking scariest dad.” Fatherhood teaches some to put their own problems aside and recognize what’s really important when other people are depending on you. That’s great parenting, not necessarily great artistry, and the title of Why Are You OK? becomes as unintentionally truthful as that of Mirage Rock. Every darker, weirder impulse got glossed over while the music gives an agreeable shrug.


Displaying an atmospheric sensibility reflecting her soundtrack work for fashion campaigns and short films, the UK producer balances ’80s-inspired synth epics and contemporary, club-adjacent sounds.

Indigo Dream

Depending on your perspective, indigo can be the first or the last stripe of the rainbow: either the darkness into which all color melts, or the starting point from which the entire spectrum unfolds. London-via-Merseyside producer E.M.M.A. shifts back and forth between these viewpoints on Indigo Dream, where widescreen ’80s excess—all neon pinks, retro-wave fonts, and cocaine euphoria—runs into moody, intricate atmospheres reminiscent of the soundtracks for indie video games like Wilmot’s Warehouse, Limbo, and Monument Valley.
In the years since her first LP, 2013’s Blue Gardens, E.M.M.A. has turned to soundtracking campaigns for fashion houses including Gucci and Chanel, as well as scoring a clutch of short films. After the clubbish lean of Blue Gardens, Indigo Dream tilts toward the cinematic and the intimate. Synths take center stage here, but with a cool restraint throughout. “Interlude” exhibits a painterly approach; “Wave” trills and glistens; “Shell” stirs on a swollen bed of woven arpeggios; and there’s a moment halfway through “Ballad of Janet” when the bassline gives way to an electrifying wash of synthetic strings. Occasionally these touches feel overwrought and meandering: “Ryan Gosling in Space” attempts to wrench color and emotion from a dense, reverberating array of keys and snares, but what should be punchy comes off as wandering and unfocused.
Some of the tracks here date back as far as 2015, but much of the dancefloor-dependent drum work that threaded its way through previous outings (see the abrasive Baroque-step of 2017’s “Mindmaze”) is absent here. It appears in occasional flourishes—the delicate, snapping menace of “Shell,” or the rounding kicks and bitcrushed claps of “Echo”—but elsewhere E.M.M.A. makes inventive percussive use of a whole range of other sounds: fizzes of white noise on “Gold,” a plucked synth on “Interlude” that conjures water droplets breaking the glassy surface of some otherworldly lake. The occasional insertion of field recordings and found sounds (birds chirp on “Ballad of Janet”; “Into Indigo” conceals a distant thunderstorm) offer an organic presence in an otherwise computer-generated enclave.
Despite the album’s slight, 35-minute runtime, recurring movements and motifs across the nine songs make it feel weightier and more substantial—like a slowly unwinding conversation or, for that matter, a dream: the type you strain to keep a grip on as another morning pulls you from slumber.

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The latest album from Philly songwriter Zoe Reynolds embraces the synths and glitter of pop music, but it feels most luminous when it’s raw.

Mood Ring

Under the moniker Kississippi, Zoe Allaire Reynolds makes gleaming pop music that exudes a sense of triumph over heartbreak and playfulness over pain. The Philadelphia songwriter doesn’t cover up the hurt so much as dress it with glitter, making it easier to reflect on. She works primarily in the tradition of pop acts who find a way to dance among the emotional wreckage, using confessional lyrics to outline the carnage, twisting heartbreak into a hook. On her second album, Mood Ring, Reynolds isn’t interested in stewing in sadness; she finds joy in feeling so much in the first place.
On earworm highlights like “Moonover,” Reynolds sounds right at home over pumping percussion and glittering keys. Empowered by the music, her lyrics suggest that caring too much can be a sign of strength, even wisdom: “I couldn’t let you go,” she sings. “I know I was yours long before you were mine.” Elsewhere in the track, she shakes a can of yerba mate for percussion while producer Andy Park joins in with a Lexapro bottle. It’s a fitting accompaniment, using these everyday objects for healing as a kind of rhythm in songs that seek the same results.
This music is a swerve from the gruffer indie rock of Kississippi’s 2018 debut, Sunset Blush. In place of that record’s moody electric guitars and unpolished vocals, these songs lean closer to Taylor Swift circa 1989, especially “Around Your Room,” which pairs poppy ’80s synths with tongue-twisting lyrics about the early mythology of a relationship: “Keeping your hands to yourself in the backseat/Carefree, windows down like we’re 16.” Sometimes, as on the sedated, surf-dazed “Dreams With You,” Mood Ring relies too heavily on the serotonin-boosting synths: The mood starts to feel repetitive and formulaic as opposed to celebratory.
The dilemma that Reynolds confronts throughout these songs brings to mind some crucial questions about darker pop music: How long can you dance when your world is crumbling? How much glitter is too much? Occasionally, Reynolds succumbs to her emotions, and her delivery is less refined, emerging as a strained yodel. She embraces this quality on the closing “Hellbeing,” where she lets the highest range of her vocals cascade into the ether over the staticky strums of an electric guitar. Verging on an emo cadence, it feels like a guttural cry after the rest of the album’s blissful shimmer. In these moments of imperfection, when Reynolds reveals some rust among the gold, she is most luminous.

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The creative arc Lee Gamble’s music has taken is a strange and wonderful thing to behold. The electronic producer's latest is a sprawling record, containing 16 tracks spread out over more than an hour. It takes time and patience to figure out what Gamble is going through, and even then, there are no easy answers.

KOCH

The creative arc Lee Gamble’s music has taken is a strange and wonderful thing to behold. It began with a literal tearing apart of his influences, and then set off on a journey to see how much further away he could progressively move from them. His first full-length release, Diversions 1994-1996, tore passages from jungle mixtapes, stripped all the beats out, and reimagined them as dysfunctional bad dreams. The word “abstract” is never far away when people reach for descriptions of the London-based producer—and with good reason. His second release for Pan, Dutch Tvashar Plumes, was a hollowed out shell of techno, where all semblance of form and shape was lost long ago, leaving only fragments of a former good time. Gamble’s music is staged in an unusual place, somewhere between the unreal and the all-too-real, where wretched drug experiences at past-peak club hours somehow end up in a form of metaphysical drift into the following morning.
KOCH is a sprawling record, containing 16 tracks spread out over more than an hour. It takes time and patience to figure out what Gamble is going through, and even then, there are no easy answers. It’s a work of complexity, although its parts, when isolated, don’t necessarily form knotty riddles. “Motor System” quietly pounds out a rudimentary beat while flattened voices curl around it, suggesting a highly mechanized form of industrial music. Often there are layers of distortion coating everything, such as on “Caudata”, where Gamble constructs graceful shapes over a wall of fog, putting it in a similar place to Leyland Kirby’s work with old 78 rpm records on An Empty Bliss Beyond This World. Another technique he’s fond of is spinning out the club experience in slow motion, or making it feel like it’s happening in a place that’s far away but just close enough so the tiniest welt of bass can still be heard (“You Concrete").
The overriding feel on KOCH is one of removal, of distant observation. Gamble’s music has the feel of someone floating above it, looking in, only tangentially participating in what’s going on. Beats are muffled, signals echo for an eternity; on “Head Model”, there’s acres of room between the parts being triggered, but it never feels like there’s a ton of space opening up. Instead, it’s all dense, claustrophobic reflection, with many of Gamble’s tracks trapped in one very specific moment without any forward flow at all. Occasionally there’s movement, but even that verges on the cyclical. “HMix” begins with a charge of muddied beats and bass, only to get filtered into reedy compression that resembles the worst kind of amphetamine headrush. There’s a similar mindset here to others who have attempted to scoop out the innards of electronics to see what remains—Actress, Autechre, Pan Sonic—but Gamble is in an even more detached place, where the inclusionary side of club culture appears utterly alien.
An emergent motif on KOCH is the awkwardness Gamble siphons into his work, where parts only just fit or threaten to fall out of sequence altogether. “Ornith-Mimik” is all glistening, high-pitched tones sloppily vying with a straight pulse and random video game interference, while “Gillsman” is so purposefully clumsy it gains a drunken lop to its stride. It fits perfectly with the sense of separation this album is built on, as this is not music that has easily definable origins beyond Gamble’s headspace. It all revolves around small glances and split-second patterns, resembling the minutiae of club culture, taken and amplified into a bigger space where there’s barely any room left for it to breathe. At times, KOCH is so microscopic it feels like there’s barely any place left for this music to go. But Gamble keeps finding new ways to take it apart and reassemble it, to the point where something so closed off, so concerned with the smallest of gestures, feels thrillingly open.


On his first album in 11 years, Compton rap veteran MC Eiht’s no-frills approach hasn’t changed one bit. Executive produced by DJ Premier, the record is a who’s who of 1990s rap.

Which Way Iz West

Over the course of his 20-plus-year career, Compton rapper MC Eiht has been the neighborhood’s straight-talking watch leader. Under the dark of night, amid the wail of police sirens, he’s the lookout in a city where crooked cops and gang members can kill you all the same, where too much flash makes you a target. There’s a voyeuristic approach to his flow, a feeling that he’s seen some shit and doesn’t want you treading that same road. Twenty-four years ago—on 1993’s “Streiht Up Menace,” Eiht’s breakout single—the rapper weaved a cinematic portrayal of a young man growing up in Compton, whose father was killed and mother struggled to make ends meet. Ultimately, the character—loosely based on the protagonist in the film Menace II Society—joins a gang and dies while protecting his block. It’s the type of dismal narrative that would partially influence someone like Kendrick Lamar, whose rhymes are set on the same Compton-based cautionary tales. Now, MC Eiht is a veteran in West Coast rap, and he’s  still telling you about the hustle, about the daily struggles of merely existing in South Central Los Angeles. He’s still ducking one time, all with a smirk and a “geah.”
Five years after his riveting verse on Lamar’s “M.A.A.D. City,” Eiht is back with his first album in 11 years, Which Way Iz West, an all-in recording executive produced by DJ Premier and featuring a who’s who of 1990s rappers: WC, the Outlawz, Kurupt, the Lady of Rage, Xzibit, Big Mike, B-Real (of Cypress Hill), and Freddie Foxxx (aka Bumpy Knuckles). With that lineup, West is the kind of album that could work well or not work at all. For whatever reason, rappers aren’t often allowed the space to age; once they get into their 40s, they’re considered too old to release music with any large-scale effect. For the most part, though, Eiht and company sound rejuvenated here, sans an awkward Kurupt verse on “Gangsta Gangsta” that feels ill-prepared and doesn’t fit (“Ready or not, here I am/Katrina is my bitch, I’m breaking levees and dams”). Elsewhere, on the menacing “Heart Cold,” the Lady of Rage turns in a fluid, battle-ready verse that plays equally well in any era—whether in 1998 or 2017. “She’s aight, but she’s not Rage,” she proclaims. “Sheit, neither is he though/I’m ill, I need chemo.”
Eiht is a no-frills MC whose cadence and topical concepts haven’t changed one bit. Even as gangsta-rap gathered steam in the early- to mid-‘90s, Eiht’s blend remained especially dark, which helped him earn a cult following, but he never quite rose to the levels of popularity enjoyed by Cali contemporaries like Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Ice Cube. Instead, he’s lived in a weird purgatory: his name rings out, but it doesn’t resonate as loudly as it should. “Fuck the radio, ban me, they can’t stand me/Never winnin’ a Grammy, still gon’ jam…,” Eiht quips on “Got That,” an album highlight. “...Tryin’ to make that shit that make ya feel good/Never commercial, ain’t real hood.”
At this point, it’s clear Eiht makes music for the love of it. He’s not tethered to any sort of fame or notoriety; instead, Which Way Iz West is an album for nostalgic rap heads who want to relive the so-called golden era of ’90s hip-hop, where gritty beats and complex rhymes took precedence over booming 808 drums. As good as Eiht sounds on West, he benefits from a bright soundtrack largely produced by frequent collaborator Brenk Sinatra and overseen by DJ Premier. Throughout the LP, Sinatra and Premier split the difference between West Coast G-funk and golden-era boom bap, arriving at a sound that caters nicely to Eiht’s rhymes. He’s keeping you on the straight and narrow, whether you know it or not.


Corinne Bailey Rae's lush new album features Esperanza Spalding, Moses Sumney, R&B group KING, and others. The mood feels wide open, centered on spacious grooves.

Corinne Bailey Rae: The Heart Speaks in Whispers

The Heart Speaks in Whispers

If you’ve kept up with Corinne Bailey Rae over the years, your mind likely goes to one place—to that dusty road where, in the video for “Put Your Records On,” she and a few friends biked casually through the countryside. It was a lovely scene, a strong sign of togetherness and femininity, set against a sunlit backdrop. It was the second single of Rae’s 2006 debut album, and one of the first times we saw the singer/guitarist, whose blend of soul music is equally weightless and captivating. Rae quickly became a star; in 2007, she was nominated for three Grammy awards and three Brit awards, and her debut record has sold four million copies worldwide.
Yet in 2008, Rae’s husband, Jason, died after an overdose of alcohol and methadone. It led to a creative hiatus and a moment of intense reflection. “For a huge period, I didn’t want to do anything,” Rae told The Independent in 2010. “It was like a barrenness which I’d never experienced; this sense of time just stretching and stretching and not having anything to put into it all.” As a result, Rae’s follow-up album—The Sea—felt sullen, full of edgy sounds expressing loss and despair. That was six years ago.
Following yet another hiatus from music, Rae is back with a new album and a lush new sound. The vibe is far more colorful than anything she’s done previously, and her collaborators—KING, Esperanza Spalding, Moses Sumney and others—set a high bar for unique alternative art. The Heart Speaks in Whispers was partially recorded in Los Angeles where, according to Billboard, Rae fell in love with its black Bohemian alternative scene. “All these musicians know each other and hang out,” she told them. “Thundercat, J Davey, Flying Lotus, Kamasi Washington—all the people who circle around Kendrick Lamar...I felt like I was in heaven.” You hear those influences throughout, especially on songs “Been to the Moon,” “Green Aphrodisiac,” “Horse Print Dress,” and “Taken by Dreams,” gentle pop/R&B hybrids with a California sheen. Aided by KING members Paris and Amber Strother, who collaborated on parts of this album, you hear vestiges of their sound on “Tell Me,” a cavernous pop jam worthy of the group’s own stellar LP. Spalding, who also released a great record this year, sings background on “Green Aphrodisiac,” and Sumney lends his golden voice to “Caramel.” While this is Rae’s album, Heart feels like a group effort in that regard, like the result of several jam sessions set by the crew’s collective energy.
Unlike The Sea, with its dark themes and heavy rhythms, Heart offers broader emotional range, and Rae seems at peace with her life and newfound direction. The mood feels wide open, centered on spacious grooves, and the lyrics seem lifted from Rae’s diary, a heart-fluttering prose that lands softly on your ear. She sings about dreams, of walking through figurative darkness in search of brighter days. “Hey, I Won’t Break Your Heart,” a meditative ballad near the album’s beginning, speaks of summertime romance and the cautious optimism of a new relationship. Heart represents the best of Rae’s first two albums, connecting the understated charm of her debut with The Sea’s pensive tone. It makes for a fascinating listen, one filled with catharsis and inspiration. Rae doesn’t directly mention her past struggles, but her light permeates this record, leaving a shining example of strength and perseverance.


The follow-up to the Norwegian band's radical 2010 breakthrough, Blackjazz, trims the excess and foregoes the over-involved lyrical complications to wind up as a heavy baroque rock'n'roll record. Shining suddenly seem as good at songs as they have been at lengthy suites.

One One One

If you’ve listened much at all to Norway’s Shining, you’ve likely learned not to be surprised by their ceaseless surprises. For more than a decade, the band has often functioned as a pinball ricocheting between musical enthusiasms with delightful unpredictability. Initially a jazz band, they’ve since shot between psychedelic and progressive rock, spasmodic noise and iron-fisted metal, ostensibly directed by little more than mercury and whimsy.
After four albums, though, 2010’s radical Blackjazz-- their public and aesthetic breakthrough, all at once-- showed that their path had been, if not deliberate, then not without its instructive moments. That previous decade, Blackjazz proclaimed, had been one of stepwise accretion, where all the heavy metal and free jazz, long-form experiments and stylistic adventures had gathered around the core of charismatic producer and frontman Jørgen Munkeby and pliable drummer Torstein Lofthus. Suddenly, they were able to mine all of those past sounds for an album that could not sit still. In 57 minutes, they jerked from Naked City-speed eruptions to Ministry-sized beatings, from Meshuggah-bordering technicality to Melvins-dumb lumber. Hell, they ended with a King Crimson cover. If you didn’t come to expect surprises, you’d come to deal with whiplash, vertigo, or nausea soon enough.
But any record as adventurous and idea-saturated as Blackjazz creates a de facto albatross for the band that’s made it: Hit repeat, and you’ve made yourself obsolete. Push the hybridization to the limits again, and you run the risk of becoming merely tedious. (See Shining’s collaborators in Enslaved for a case in point.) So on One One One, their first studio LP since Blackjazz, Shining has smartly pulled back and inward, delivering nine incredibly understandable but willfully baroque modern rock singles in about 36 minutes. Rather than find several dozen new ways to surprise, Shining landed upon just one-- trim the excess, forego the over-involved lyrical complications, and make a rock’n’roll record. One One One likely won’t rearrange anyone’s imaginations regarding how much motion a band can fit into one album, but it does lift the veil of obtusity from Shining, a band that’s suddenly as good at songs as they have been at suites.
One One One opens with a short squall of guitar noise and an immediate drum groove, funneling into a verse that runs with the same italicized spirit as most any rock number you’ll find along the FM dial. Roaring keyboards and chugging riffs swell beneath Munkeby’s hook, pushing the signal outward. It’s just one of several instantly memorable numbers here: “Walk Away” is little more than a series of refrains, with Munkeby repeating the title over a tech-metal riff by way of mere introduction. By the song’s end, Shining’s toggled between at least three passages that could count as hooks. With its throbbing electronics and calliope keyboard, the hilariously titled “My Dying Drive” crams Nine Inch Nails and King Crimson into the same four-minute space; the result is a defiant pop-rock song about fucking with the man even at death, anchored by a refrain meant to be shouted out in some sweaty pit. That’s a consistent feeling throughout One One One: Shining no longer seems to be a post-everything oddity, making music best analyzed from some safe distance. They are making visceral, economical anthems, meant to be felt first and fussed over later.
To that last point, though, these songs do brim with the sort of compositional depth that’s now expected from Shining, even if they take a while to tease out. “The One Inside”, for instance, seems to get stuck on a drum roll at one point, creating a bed for Munkeby’s voice that feels both shifting and stable. Just beneath the thrust of the song, the bass steps on top of and away from the groove, while the guitars fan outward from the central riff, creating the illusion of feathered density. And then there’s the saxophone solo that fuels the sudden burst of black metal-- it’s Shining doing Shining, just in delightfully compact form. Speaking of saxophone, “How Your Story Ends” might be the first song to mix an unmitigated metalcore chorus with moments of Motörhead rumble and a horn solo that borrows liberally from the blues and Middle Eastern melodies. These complications make the song no less direct; they simply make it something you’ll want to listen to again and again.
In a recent interview with Noisey, Munkey admitted that, for a decade, he was too busy with jazz and classical fare to pay much attention to heavy metal or industrial music. When he stumbled back into heavier sounds several years ago, Shining soon shifted toward its complicated machinations. “I started rediscovering metal,” he listened. “I listened to my old stuff, Death and Emperor, and then I started discovering newer stuff like Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails.” That sort of joyous newness defines both Blackjazz and One One One, creating the effect of a child high on sugar, racing around a room for an hour until collapsing. The shifting approaches of Blackjazz redirected some of that energy, while One One One focuses it directly into successive four-minute bursts. That’s exhausting and exhilarating, yes, but it’s also the symptom of a band that’s still fascinated by what they accomplish. That is, the surprises likely aren’t over.


Wolf Alice have gained attention for their powerful live show and four EPs. Their debut is a tentative coming-of-age story, as guitarist/singer Ellie Rowsell refuses to settle for a single identity.

My Love Is Cool

What a relief it is that the next big British indie sensation isn't a bunch of anointed lads with stadium-sized savior complexes. Wolf Alice's debut album is one of 2015's most anticipated homegrown debuts, thanks not to them running their mouths or having the right management, but three years of hard touring punctuated by just four EPs. In the UK, My Love is Cool is being touted as grunge’s second (or, ninth) coming, when really it affirms the tentative coming-of-age story in guitarist/singer Ellie Rowsell’s lyrics by refusing to settle for a single identity at this early stage.
Wolf Alice are best at capturing sensations. The chiming rush of "Bros" freeze-frames the heady teenage abandon of the lyrics—bad haircuts and hopping buses with a best friend you'd die for—as Rowsell's wistful vocal turn establishes her increasing distance from that time. Meanwhile "Freazy" is Wolf Alice's us-against-the-world mission statement: "You can hate us all you want but it don't mean nothing at all." There's a neat Haim-like snap to the choruses, but the dreamy verses clash with Mike Crossey's intense production sheen, evoking a time when Tin Tin Out were pop's go-to remixers.
When Wolf Alice rage, they usually do it with stealth. It takes 90 seconds for "You're a Germ" to turn from grave whispers about a bad boy in cheap leather to an indictment of the "dodgy fucker." Rowsell's a limber vocalist: "Lisbon" starts with Azure Ray sweetness as she clings to an ex's stolen cigarettes and threadbare t-shirt, but by the end it sounds as if she's rounded up the rest of the band to smash in every window of his house. Forgoing restraint in favor of hard-edged, exhilarating swagger, "Giant Peach" and "Fluffy" confront the suffocating element of remaining in the place where you grew up. "What the hell keeps me here/ In a dark old town that I've adored?" Rowsell snarls on "Giant Peach". "The rules don't seem so clear/ And change, it feels like fear/ It's all you know."
That sense of vulnerability also informs some of Rowsell's bleaker lyrics, which unpick the social implications of mental health issues while conveying their claustrophobia. "Silk" mutates from spare coldwave to a dark nursery rhyme that rejects the idea of depression as an interesting character trait. On "Soapy Water", a distant-sounding Rowsell hides inside a mesmerizing disco swirl to conceal the effects of anxiety from her parents. It's crushing but strangely comforting, like repeated viewings of The Virgin Suicides.
Concealed at the end of My Love Is Cool is the secret title track, a bedroom demo of Rowsell and her electric guitar. "Teach me, teach me/ Teach me rock and roll," she sings softly. But the confident diversity of My Love Is Cool indicates a band who have their own thing all figured out, who shouldn't veer from their own strange path to live up to outdated narratives that dictate what a young British band should be.


Portland-based metal outfit the Body take doom metal as their core template and shred it to pieces until it's completely unrecognizable. On their new I Shall Die Here, the Haxan Cloak's Bobby Krlic comes on board as producer, helping drummer Lee Buford and guitarist/singer Chip King rip the guts out of their sound to achieve maximal brutality.

I Shall Die Here

Genre boundaries mean nothing to the Body, who celebrate 15 years in the business with their most audacious statement to date in I Shall Die Here. The band, now based in Portland, Oregon after years spent in Providence, Rhode Island, take doom metal as their core template and shred it to pieces until it's completely unrecognizable. The band, a two-piece of drummer Lee Buford and guitarist/singer Chip King, plus longstanding studio collaborators Seth Manchester and Keith Souza, clearly felt something needed to change after their 2013 album, Christs, Redeemers. That album felt like a retreat, a surrender, a settling into type, where prior form and function was repeated, not forwarded. Enter Bobby Krlic, the British musician who records jaundiced electronic works under his Haxan Cloak moniker, who comes on board as producer, helping Buford and King rip the guts out of their sound to achieve maximal brutality.
Something that's evolved over time with the Body's work is their use of space, not just in their choral collaborations on prior records, but also in their other material. On I Shall Die Here it's their most potent weapon, giving the sound a greater sense of suggestion than ever before. The dips into near-silence, where machine noise is allowed to trail quietly in the mix, effectively work as cues to pry open the imagination. At times they even function like a scene in a horror movie, where you just know something bad is coming around the corner, but the sense of anticipation is so expertly orchestrated that the fear is only heightened when the moment finally hits. "Our Souls Were Clean" is the best example of that here—it's all echoing electronics that resemble a machine repeating on itself long after any human hand has touched it, ultimately turning into a convulsing swirl of noise that feels like being trapped in a constant spray of vomit over the two-minute close of the song.
It's not always clear who did what here, or how much Krlic overhauled the sound of the Body. In a sense it's better going into I Shall Die Here without knowing whether samples changed hands, or how strips of guitar were pulled out and inserted elsewhere. A strong air of album-as-standoff results, with musicians from different disciplines throwing daggers into each other's work, making it feel like everyone was eyeing each other uneasily across the studio floor. Such working methods could turn into a mess, but here it results in a great weight of tension sinking into the material. It's hard not to feel suffocated by it all when the death march beat of "To Carry the Seeds of Death Within Me" pulls in layer upon layer of oppression. But there are also strong dynamics at work in "Seeds", especially when the song gets stripped down to the bare bones and a great sweep of noise jolts it back to life—a trick mirrored on the opening "Consumed" from Krlic’s Excavation. It makes it feel like ten tons of electricity are suddenly pulsing through the track.
An unrelentingly bleak worldview is presented throughout the Body's work, and often in their interviews as well. Occasionally they substitute desolation for ghoulish thrills, which is marginally less successful. The pitch-shifted spoken word intro to "Alone All the Way" adds an unwelcome touch of schlocky horrorcore, although the subsequent track—all air raid distress calls and isolated screeches in the dark—brings the murky air of pessimism that curls up around the album firmly back into view. At its strongest, on the standout "Hail to Thee, Everlasting Pain", it's an album that takes a mazy journey through styles, not so much seeking common ground between them, but actively looking for the point of agitation that arises as they brashley bruise up against one another. So "Hail" takes in a great lattice of sound, bringing samples on board that resemble the compact structures of Autechre's Amber, along with treated industrial drums, great slabs of drone-y guitar, and King's blood-curdling shriek.
The collective work on I Shall Die Here makes it feel like all involved were searching for illogical endpoints, driving strains of metal and electronic music to some kind of brink of extremes that the Body and the Haxan Cloak's individual output had never taken them before. There's certainly an end-of-all-things atmosphere, but perhaps more importantly a strong sense of unlearning everything they knew in an attempt to push music into a totally new space. Not that this is music without precedent; there are shades of Demdike Stare, Prurient, Earth, and Sunn O))) at various times. But the execution of I Shall Die Here is so full-blooded, so committed to forcing your head underwater to the point of blackout, that it's hard not to view this as a singular piece, out there on its own, in a place most people wouldn't want to go anywhere near. It adds a chillingly lonely air to the work, making it morbidly fascinating to see its participants head out on a road pointed eternally downward, landing in a place wracked by torment and lost hopes.


Chad Ubovich returns from the brink with a dark, ambitious psych-rock record. The fuzz-drone riffs are big enough to hit the rafters and there’s plenty of niche touches for the heads.

Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom

Psychedelic rock has long been a means to distort and escape reality and, as such, it has a reputation for being a passive, emotionally detached artform, born from the state of being too fucked up to feel. But few contemporary artists seize upon the genre’s disassociative powers with such intensity and urgency as Meatbodies’ Chad Ubovich. Where his band first appeared 10 years ago as a high-octane punk-fueled satellite in the greater Ty Segall Universe, Meatbodies’ transportive ambitions have, perhaps not coincidentally, expanded dramatically as Ubovich has grappled with the many hard-knock realities he’s sought to escape.
After spending most of his 20s on the road with Meatbodies and various other affiliated acts (including Mikal Cronin’s live band and proto-metal power trio Fuzz with Segall and Charlie Moothart), Ubovich reached his physical and mental breaking point after the release of 2017’s Alice and hit the pause button—only to replace the all-consuming mania of tour life with the all-consuming mania of drug use. Upon getting sober, he began working on Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom, in 2019, but had to abort mission partway through once COVID lockdowns took effect in early 2020. (While waiting out the pandemic at home, Ubovich and drummer Dylan Fujioka dusted off some scrappy old demos and punched them up for 2021’s stopgap mini-LP, 333.) And once it was safe to properly resume work on Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom, Ubovich lost his home and nearly his life: the house he had been living in for eight years was condemned, but not before its contaminated environs spurred a debilitating case of pneumonia that left Ubovich hospitalized for a month, to the point where his recovery involved relearning how to walk and play his instruments. So if anyone’s earned the right to check out from reality and indulge in the transcendental properties of psychedelic rock, it’s this dude.
But despite all the chaos and upheaval Ubovich has endured, Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom is a testament to his clarity of vision. And for Ubovich, that means fine-tuning his iconoclastic inspirations to suit his own feel-good needs: Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom regularly consults the Spacemen 3 playbook for both its fuzz-drone riffs and ambient orchestrations—there’s even an instrumental interlude unsubtly titled “(Return of) Ecstasy”—but applies them to more classically styled ’60s psych-pop tunes; songs like “Billow” mirror the tambourine-rattled stoner sway of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, but rock much harder. And while Ubovich shares a mischievous melodic sensibility with his old pal Segall, Meatbodies project more of an anthemic bravado that transforms their niche record-collector concerns into mass-appealing, festival-ready rock music: “The Assignment” imagines how Oasis’ Be Here Now might’ve turned out if the Gallaghers spent more time doing acid than coke, while “Hole” is part DIY “Cherub Rock” grungegaze groover, part Laser Floyd synth spectacle.
However, Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom’s kaleidoscopic radiance and rhythmic verve are ultimately vessels for Ubovich’s darkest thoughts. If psychedelia is a portal to an out-of-body experience, Ubovich is floating away with one eye on the ground below, bracing for the moment when the spell is broken and he crashes back down to earth. While “Silly Cybin” appears as a playful, acoustic-based singalong that matches the spirit of its punny title, there are bad-trip horrors and suicidal ideation cataloged within. But if that song establishes a stark contrast between bliss and psychosis, the cryptically titled “ICNNVR2” completely blurs it: “I carve the crosses right into my arms, in the purple drunken dawn,” Ubovich declares, before he rides straight into an incoming brass-blasted storm, much like another stoner-punk who once tried to assure us he was feelin’ alright in the midst of a raging saxocalypse that suggested otherwise.
If Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom is Ubovich’s attempt to channel negative experiences into positive energy, the album’s searing centerpiece, “Move,” is all the more captivating for its refusal to sugarcoat its bitter sentiments. Cut from the same blood-splattered cloth as Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop” or The Gun Club’s “For the Love of Ivy,” the song’s menacing motorik throb and sinister aura are intensified by Ubovich’s spiteful address to a former confindate (“I can count the reasons/ the reasons we don’t talk”), en route to an extended, echo-drenched descent into madness and furious finale. (The track is seven minutes long, but you can easily imagine Meatbodies stretching it out to twice the length in concert and making it their go-to set-closer till the end of time.)
But while “Move” counts as this album’s most agitated and aggressive outburst, you can sense Ubovich finding strength and resolve in its ugly emotional exorcism—the song is effectively a primal-scream and hypno-therapy session all in one. And that sense of catharsis is ultimately what grounds Meatbodies’ hyper-referential rock in the here and now. Among the requsite thank-yous to friends and famliy, Ubovich’s liner notes for Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom include shout-outs to Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Spacemen 3, Iggy Pop, and the 13th Floor Elevators “for changng music” and, presumably, his life. But more than just advertise Ubovich’s influences like patches on a jean jacket, those dedications function as Meatbodies’ pledge to honor their legacies—not by merely making music that sounds like theirs, but by furthering their mission of using primal rock‘n’roll as a pathway to spiritual awakening. And with Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom, Ubovich offers a resounding reaffirmation that psych-rock is forever, even if the escape it provides from our cruel world is ultimately temporary.


Working with a stripped-down palette of synthesizers and almost no drums, the UK producer reconnects with the fundamental sense of strangeness that runs through his best music.

GLOW

One unforeseen side effect of the pandemic is that our collective sense of time has been thrown out of whack. The arrow of our days no longer flies true; it moves more like a crinkled paper plane—soaring briefly, plunging without notice, skidding gracelessly sideways across the floor. Sometimes it seems almost to loop backward. The London producer patten’s GLOW, recorded entirely during the UK’s lockdown, is propelled by this elastic timekeeping and steeped in the uneasy mood of the day. Created using a relatively stripped-down palette of synthesizers, it features almost no drums but could not quite be called ambient. It is restless in places and directionless in others; the mood is emotionally numb, except when it is sullen. Sometimes it is even a little boring, but not in an unpleasant way. Like a ticking clock in a quiet room, its blankness is the sort that leads the mind to wander. And the chance to wander, these days, is to be prized.
The absence of beats marks a notable shift for patten. On early albums like 2011’s GLAQJO XAACSSO and 2014’s ESTOILE NAIANT, which kicked off a brief tenure on Warp, he harnessed a welter of hyper-compressed, low-bitrate sounds and squished them into a lumpy sort of beat music: Imagine a fistful of lossy YouTube rips fed through a Play-Doh noodle maker. Last year’s Flex took a step away from the psychedelic murk of those albums, incorporating the icy clarity of trap and grime along with some of the brawn of breakbeat-driven bass music. The results often sounded less original—and less interesting—than his foundational work. But with GLOW, patten reconnects with the fundamental sense of strangeness that has run through his best music, even without the tangled rhythms and messy textures that once were his stock in trade.
On most of GLOW’s 14 tracks, patten plays his cards close to his chest. Each song is made up of a slim handful of moving parts that tend to spin slowly and aimlessly in place; loops trundle along in parallel, patterns stumbling almost imperceptibly. These sequences and arpeggios sound less like impeccably executed digital commands than the product of fingers idly drumming against the keys, the musician half-asleep in the studio chair, deep into the small hours of the night. There are no big emotional payoffs; most tracks just play out until they don’t anymore. In “Clandestine Modal,” distortion gradually creeps across an expanse of airy synths, covering them in fuzz, like mold consuming a piece of fruit. “Screen Burn,” mostly just heavy pads and buzzing FM bass, spins like a leaden mobile in thick, humid air. “Rorschach” suggests the theme from The Exorcist played on kalimba and run through dub delay, underscoring the anxious, horror-film mood that lies just below the album’s surface.
Many of these pieces could work well as film cues. That goes equally for the simplest tracks—like the dissonant “Chronoblur,” its reverb as opaque as a frosted window—and the few that are more complex. “Memory Palace” unfolds with a particularly gratifying unpredictability, playing a garbled guitar melody off fluorescent-tube hum, like Oneohtrix Point Never remixing the Cure’s Pornography. “Valley Commerce” is even better. Over plodding, minor-key piano and soft horns, a palm-muted guitar rhythm rises in the mix, triggering unexpected memories of ’90s alt rock. It’s an attention-grabbing climax on an album that mostly keeps drama at arm’s length.
Despite patten’s description of the record as an album with “no beats,” the faintest outline of a drum pattern appears on the penultimate track, “Lariat,” where rigid eighth-note taps click insistently against a gelatinous synth figure, as though determined to rein it in. Behind that, a fragment of what sounds like voice is spun backwards and forward, over and over, suggesting a bored filmmaker slumped over the edit bay, toggling a snippet of video back and forth. It’s an effective encapsulation of GLOW’s entire outlook: stuck in place, marking time, and stolidly waiting—for what, exactly, nobody quite knows.

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Föllakzoid hail from Santiago, Chile. But with their rigid rhythms, their chemtrail synths, their afterburner guitars, their sound is pure Düsseldorf, circa 1971. And this krautrock-worshiping quartet's fascination with all things kosmische isn't merely musical.

II

Psychedelia is supposed to be boundless-- gobble enough indoles, and all the old categories start to dissolve, freeing you up for transcendence. Psychedelic warriors Föllakzoid hail from Santiago, Chile, but-- with their rigid rhythms, their chemtrail synths, their afterburner guitars-- their sound is pure Düsseldorf, circa 1971. But this krautrock-worshiping quartet's fascination with all things kosmische isn't merely musical: their primary concern seems to be untethering themselves from the earth. Their debut leaned toward desert rock, but the interplanetarily minded II is a bold shift in perspective from their earthbound origins, an all-out swing into a very different sound that follows its own alien logic. For Föllakzoid, though, space seems to be the place.
Vocalist Juan Pablo Rodrigues, with his unbudging deadpan, spends much of II playing the ghost in the machine. So when he starts muttering "is it getting lonely?" as "9" intensifies, you wind up feel in positively marooned, all alone while the track's latticework tightens. And even as the song lengths skirt double-digits, Föllakzoid's commands your attention. Just as you start to admire the music's weightless beauty of the synths and guitars, they seem to close in on you. While "Trees" throbs, guitarist Domingo Garcia-Huidobro provides the scenery, his massive, ever-expanding riff drawing up the topography of the cosmos. Keeping the rhythm section lean and the synths fairly sleek and steely might seem to put a lot of pressure on Garcia-Huidobro's guitar. But he, too, knows when to step up, and more importantly, when to hold back. This keen sense of drama means every time "Trees" brings that riff around again, it's not just a reprise, it's an event. "99" plays like a Dali painting, every surface ripples like a pond, every instrument double-helixing around itself.
I've seen a 12-minute version of "Pulsar" floating around; mine's 15. Either way, "Pulsar" takes a little too long to get going, and doesn't do quite enough when it does. Once its initial pulsations melt away, a Deodato-style mecha-disco groove floats to the surface, one too troubled to ever quite lock into. II's vastness is impressive, but between Rodrigues' inhuman mumble and the way every note seems to echo off some faraway mountain, certain stretches feel a bit barren. And all the sci-fi I've ever watched has me conditioned to expect a third-act payoff greater than the one II provides; Föllakzoid would like you think some atom-smasher's just around the next turn, but there's no such blowout here, just a few smaller skirmishes. Still, this is strange new terrain for Föllakzoid, and they go after it boldly, conjuring worlds in the process.


Def Jux star issues his most personal album to date, which, in its own neurotic way, is also his most optimistic.

Mo' Mega

On its surface Mo' Mega appears to be more of the same renegade rap on which Definitive Jux has built its reputation. All the Jukie generals are lined up behind a battery of El-P's thunderous howitzers, barking commands, but this time something is different. In the past a Lif/El-P collusion meant mayhem and doomsday, but Mo' Mega is, once the smoke clears, a personal, and, in its own neurotic way, ultimately optimistic album. Lif's realizing there is no revolution and no winnable wars. He's spent years calculating his dissension, and the woes of the world have only gotten worse. So, finally, he makes a record that expresses universal frustrations instead of weirding everyone out with labyrinthine rants about things we already know, and, in the process, finds a way to live a little.
Let me say up front that I've always had a soft spot for Lif's robo-Rakim monotone, but often enjoyed his albums the same way I enjoy crack music-- by reveling in the syntax and ignoring the contents. Only with Lif, it was because he was shirking responsibility by abstracting it instead of ignoring it altogether like, say, Cam'ron. From Enters the Colossus to I, Phantom, Lif distanced himself through elaborate conspiracy theories and album-length allegories. Technically interesting, but hardly an attempt to connect. He revealed a bit more of himself on last year's Perceptionists album with songs like "Love Letters" and "Breathe in the Sun", yet nothing that really indicated the revelations on Mo' Mega.
Lif claims this is his most sincere album, but stacked against the mechanical rhetoric of his priors, it's his only sincere album. He's not yet the rap James Taylor, but he is relatively vulnerable, saying, "I wish I could ring the blood outta your clothes/ Give back your afros and your strong black nose...And I yawn and grow weary/ Succumb to old theory that strips my wits of thoughts I used to hold dearly," on "Take , Hold, Fire!". And he actually sounds angry on "Brothaz": "The Bush Administration's worth nothin' Just fuck em!/ Throw ‘em in a barrel Buck ‘em!...Fuck Clinton too!/ You ain't really down because you live Uptown, bitch/ Rwanda!" It may not look that emotional on paper, but it's the equivalent of Al Gore 2006 vs. Al Gore 2000. It's both frustrating and energizing that someone with Lif's ability is finally being himself after years of cryptic bullshit. And that's before he gets to the songs about cunnilingus.
Where Lif really succeeds here is in taking things personally. The pronouns are now "I" and "my," and his problems with the government are now the missed moments with his lady because he has to make a check. He's articulating the prospect of having a family when you're getting older and can barely provide for yourself, and the daily frustration of feeling like your country has failed you. None of these are musical or artistic epiphanies, but it's Lif's realization that his problems are commonplace that makes Mo' Mega more interesting than his other stuff.
El-P continues paring down his signature maelstroms to focused goth-funk. The guitars now riff, the keyboards stab. His drums pummel harder given more space, and odd little bits of nostalgia surface from the rubble with a sampled piano roll or horn blast. And when El-P gives up the controls, things even threaten to get fun (shhh). Edan contributes another seamless fast rap rumbler on the absurd "Murs Iz My Manager", Lif himself flips a dancehall riddim on "Washitup!" (the aforementioned ode to going downtown), and Nick Toth channels Boston progenitor Ed O.G with his plinks and strums on "For You", Lif's letter to his future seed. Not to be left out of the good times, El-P uses the musique concrete of enthusiastic sex for percussion on "Long Distance". It's almost like Def Jux is lightening up, and Mo' Mega is the new mission statement. If that's the case, it's about time.


The Flint, Michigan, doomgazers’ follow-up to 2019’s New Hell dabbles in new styles while doubling down on the unrelenting misery.

New Low EP

Meet the new hell: not quite the same as the old New Hell. On their 2019 album for Deathwish, Inc., Flint, Michigan miserablists Greet Death took their label's name to heart on songs like “You’re Gonna Hate What You’ve Done” and “Do You Feel Nothing?,” wrapping their nihilism in deceptively uplifting melodies. But their new EP makes overwhelming self-loathing the whole point.
A 21-minute collection of five singles released roughly every other month since September 2021, New Low initially scans as a transitional and exploratory work. Sam Boyhtari’s vocals on “I Hate Everything” and “Panic Song” dabble in mesmeric bedroom indie and oversaturated shoegaze, while Logan Gaval sticks to the low, lonesome gloom-country he favored on New Hell. Thistime, though, the mud-caked guitar forms a Pigpen dirt cloud, rather than blowing the roof off.
Yet despite the piecemeal assemblage, New Low is the most cohesive Greet Death release yet, a place where the band’s nebula of influences condenses into its own stylistic shorthand. As songwriters, Greet Death have embraced sharpness in every way—more hooks, less repetition, more concision; “Your Love Is Alcohol” is about as complicated as metaphors get. Gaval and Boyhtari once made tentative attempts to merge their two extremely disparate vocal styles, which invert their respective instrumental roles as lead guitarist and bassist. Whereas they cleanly split the lead vocal duties on Dixieland and occasionally swapped lines on New Hell, the two have achieved a newfound harmony on “Punishment Existence”; the shift in tone is subtle, but the perspective remains—that boulder isn’t going to roll itself up that hill.
The self-aware grimness of “Punishment Existence” gets at Greet Death’s most salient quality: the kind of distinct point of view that is often a secondary concern in a style of music that can be as reliant on vibes as the vibiest Spotify playlist filler. Unlike the goth Americana or impressionistic swooning that usually accompanies slow-and-low doomgaze, Greet Death embody a relatable workingman’s dread, a middle path between the bleary tones of slowcore and rugged Midwestern yearning; though the gliding guitars on “Panic Song” evoke Ride and Slowdive, just imagine either of those bands singing about gas station food. Greet Death don’t romanticize their depression; there are no cataclysmic breakups, no untimely deaths, no single event that shakes someone to their core. The narrators on New Low go to work and come home having completely lost track of where the past eight hours went. Strip these songs down to an acoustic guitar, swap out a word or two, and they could be earnest folk songs.
Then again, songs like “Punishment Existence” and “I Hate Everything” also indicate that, nearly a decade into their career, Greet Death have developed a healthy sense of humor about themselves. The unrelenting misery of New Low’s tracklist is kind of a fan service, balancing the deadpan hilarity they convey through their stage banter and social media. “Sometimes it feels like everything’s coming to an end/I wish I could escape from this existential dread,” Gaval moans on “Punishment Existence,” and while there’s no reason to doubt his sincerity, I can imagine him making air quotes around “existential dread.” Though the record lacks a quintessential Greet Death monument to pity like “You’re Gonna Hate What You’ve Done,” New Low confirms that the only way to follow an album like New Hell is by digging a deeper hole.


Pusha’s partnership with Kanye West has brought stability, and more importantly, direct involvement in a hit parade steered by one of the best producers in the industry; on his latest mixtape, he's aware of his peculiar place as both a seasoned rap veteran and a relatively untested commercial commodity.

Wrath of Caine

As one half of the Clipse, Pusha-T felt the havoc that finicky rap labels can wreak on a career; the group’s decade-long tenure is fraught with shelved albums, excruciating stints in label purgatory, and critically acclaimed commercial flops. When his brother Malice found religion on a sabbatical from rap, Pusha’s alignment with Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music imprint redoubled his rap industry stock, earning him name recognition, chart successes, and award nominations that eluded him in the Clipse. His initial solo releases were shaky, though. His 2011 debut mixtape Fear of God was brittle and half-baked, and while the album-length EP Fear of God II: Let Us Pray fared better, it did so by cannibalizing the best songs from the mixtape and padding out its tracklist with appearances from famous guests. Nearly two years on, Pusha has bested the Fear of God series with Wrath of Caine, a stopgap mixtape of originals meant to tide us over until the release of his forthcoming solo album My Name Is My Name, whose title quotes Marlo Stanfield of HBO’s beloved cop drama The Wire.
It makes sense that Pusha-T would fixate on Marlo, a ruthless drug dealer who kills his way into a higher tax bracket only to find himself at a loss for what to do with his newfound money and dominion. Pusha’s partnership with Kanye West brings stability, and more importantly, direct involvement in a hit parade steered by one of the best producers in the industry. For an underdog whose kingdom was built on a dealer’s twin thrusts of entrepreneurialism and danger, whose displays of wealth were couched in the hard luck stories of how it was acquired, to suddenly lose that underpinning of struggle is jarring. It makes for a lot of brazen talk of money. Wrath of Caine is Pusha-T coming to terms with his place in the rich asshole bracket he and Kanye detailed with “Runaway.” “Peasants ain’t sittin’ with the kings, Goliath ain’t worried ‘bout your sling, and Cassius ain’t bothered by your swings”, he raps on “Doesn’t Matter”.
Wrath of Caine’s caustic witticisms work in contrast to the gossamer production. Chief Keef associate Young Chop imbues the larger-than-life kingpin posturing of “Blocka” with pillowy low end and spectral synths, with very little in between. Harry Fraud’s work on “Road Runner” and Boogz and Tapez’ “Only You Can Tell It” both warp vocal samples into massive, stately productions that sound like trap music rebuttals to the seraphic grandeur of Clams Casino. Jake One serves up sedate reggae for “Take My Life”, while SK and Arthur McArthur recreate the mood of reggae with swaying, oceanic synths on “Trust You”. Pusha seems pretty taken with Jamaican culture lately: “Blocka” features vocals from newly minted dancehall star Popcaan and a video shot in Kingston, and Wrath of Caine is peppered with spirited patois toasts from a gangster’s spoiled moll. (It’s also worth noting that “Pain”, My Name Is My Name’s lead single, samples the Nyabinghi drums of Rastafarian religious rituals.) It’s a fitting connection for Pusha, as his own history, insofar as rappers’ autobiographical tales are to be believed, is a kind of winding Shottas-esque story of drugs, shady business associates, and unbelievably good luck.
Pusha-T has navigated this improbable second act of his career with caution. His visibility is as great today as it has ever been, but he moves with an astute awareness of his peculiar place as both a seasoned rap veteran and a relatively untested commercial commodity. That means playing by the rap majors’ rules, keeping his buzz warm by giving away fully realized songs for free online and ceding lyrical real estate to feature artists du jour like Rick Ross and his Maybach Music Group henchmen. Wrath of Caine’s guests neither add to nor subtract from the proceedings, and where he can, Pusha wisely relegates them to hook duty. After Fear of God’s withering batch of middling freestyles and rangy originals and Fear of God II’s pervasive sense that the artist with top billing was a guest on his own album, Wrath of Caine is really the first hint of what Pusha-T is capable of as a solo artist. He’s not really relatable anymore, and hard times are distant memories rather than palpable realities, but he’s still got sharp wit and snarling lyrical intensity to fall back on, and Wrath of Caine thrives off of that gritty elan.


Former Slint, Tortoise, and Zwan member releases first LP under his own name.

Pajo

Like another singular musical intelligence named David, Dave Pajo is intimately familiar with changes. First he was in this band called Slint; apparently they were some kind of big deal. Ditto Tortoise. And as a solo artist under the guises of M, Papa M, and Aerial M, Pajo has quietly staked out territory at the nexus of pastoral folk and minimal electronica. He is a dim yet essential star in a musical constellation that includes Leonard Cohen, Iron and Wine, and Windsor for the Derby. Given his retiring demeanor and the subtlety of his solo work, everyone was thrown for a loop when he hooked up with the Great Pumpkin to glam out with Zwan. We all know how that turned out. After washing off his stage makeup and shaking the glitter out of his hair, Pajo is back in the murky, spare musical environment where he seems more at home: His new solo LP, recorded under his own name this time (reaffirmation of identity after hanging with the ego-devouring Corgan?), picks up more or less where Whatever, Mortal left off.
Pajo's solo output has stayed within fairly narrow stylistic borders, but he's made minute adjustments in style and personnel. We talk about evolution when an artist makes a drastic change from one album to the next, but Pajo's growth seems more faithful to the spirit of the word: A slow, incremental process of refining and tweaking-- natural selection rather than rampant mutation. This time, he used a bare-bones recording process that enhances the aura of mystery surrounding his enigmatic meditations, producing the album with cheap software that came with his laptop and singing directly into the computer's microphone. Sounds sketchy on paper, but it works: If you're familiar with Pajo's music, you know he needs fancy production like Corgan needs a hairnet, and the hissy, unfettered recording makes the songs sound like decaying artifacts.
Still, Pajo requires a few passes before the songs begin to differentiate and expand: Pajo's voice is a gray, remote apparition that tends to shade into a hoarse whisper. It's remarkably placid and still, and has a strange negating effect that can only be described as audible silence, if you'll forgive the abstraction. Forgoing instrumentals this time in favor of shimmering, spectral folk with electronic dressings, the eerie quietude does not relent, from the initial skittering dirge "Oh No No" to the final spoken-word echo chamber "Francie", even on the borderline rocker "Baby Please Come Home". This record doesn't intend to blow your hair back; it wants to get under your skin, and with its twinkling arpeggios, morbidly graceful lyrics, and barely there electronics, slowly, it does.


Daniel Brandt is the percussionist of Berlin’s Brandt Brauer Frick ensemble, which balances modern classical and dance music. His first solo album is better suited to isolated contemplation.

Eternal Something

In 2012, the Brandt Brauer Frick ensemble, a German 10-piece chamber orchestra cranking out avant-garde techno music, made their U.S. debut at Lincoln Center. The following night, the core namesake trio brought their live act to Santos Party House for a late night marathon at the now-defunct Manhattan club. Since their start in 2008, Brandt Brauer Frick have split their time in performance venues at opposite ends of the spectrum like this: suit-and-tie fare one night, sweaty dance clothes the next.
As an ensemble, the group hones a balance between modern classical and dance music that hinges on deep repetition. For his first solo album, Eternal Something, the outfit’s percussionist Daniel Brandt has whittled the larger group’s acoustic approach to repetitive music down to his own solitary inklings. As a result, Eternal Something seems better suited to isolated contemplation than the dancefloor, even when the tracks build up to full-fledged drum attacks. Beyond the sounds he plays himself, Brandt has enlisted three others. Florian Juncker joins on trombone, Andreas Voss contributes cello, and then there is Manu Delago on the hang—a steelpan-derived instrument that was invented less than 20 years ago, looks like a flying saucer, and pings before it hums when struck.
Throughout Eternal Something, Brandt commands and layers sounds as percussive elements first and foremost, often obfuscating timbre in the process. The constant cello bowing on “Kale Me” becomes a quiet drone element beneath the pattering of stacked piano and guitar. On “Turn Over,” the hang seems to spiral around like a ticking clock falling through space, but the effect is propped up by ambiguous chirps and blips. It’s rare to hear an instrument run its full range, which muddies any attempts at parsing them out. Instead, riffs often drone in two or three-note variations, looping back on themselves quickly and constantly, ready to lock in-step with new sounds darting through. Brandt builds and diffuses rhythmic tension urgently, producing songs too busy and finicky to function as background noise.
The album’s opener, “Chaparral Mesa,” is the longest and most rewarding of the bunch. It begins with what sounds like a pair of intertwined guitars plucking single notes just out of unison. Brandt braids a wall of conspicuous, clean noise made up of single notes; some six minutes in, distorted strums lurch towards a thumping house break. Like much of the rest of the album, the effect is propulsive, tense, and entirely mesmerizing. Likewise, Juncker’s trombone creaks and swells ominously at the end of the title track, playing out more like an enveloping movie sound effect than dance fodder.
In that way at least, Eternal Something will sound familiar to any Brandt Brauer Frick fan, but Brandt’s solitude bears out an intimacy often missing in the group’s rigorous chamber music. These songs never feel preordained in the way that orchestral compositions do; they instead seem to work themselves out naturally. “On the Move” is a stunning kicker that builds from a plod to a chugging, horn-helmed swell. It’s the type of track that demands a full listen, lest you abandon the progress too early or miss out on the momentum by jumping in too late. This is the trick Brandt pitches throughout Eternal Something, carving out a path and begging you to see it through. Thankfully, he rewards patience with captivating twists and turns.


Shel Silverstein’s reputation rests on his children’s books, but he also had a long, illustrious songwriting career in Nashville. No one performed his ribald, irreverent songs more than the progressive country singer Bobby Bare, and this box set collects their work.

Bobby Bare: Bobby Bare Sings Shel Silverstein Plus

Bobby Bare Sings Shel Silverstein Plus

Buried within the book for the hefty box set Bobby Bare Sings Shel Silverstein Plus lays a disclaimer by liner notes author Dave Samuelson: “Newcomers to the Bare/Silverstein catalog should note several of these recordings contain language that may surprise if not shock more sensitive ears. Always the iconoclast, Silverstein generally directed his ribald, often dark humor to a predominantly male audience. His world straddled both the ‘Playboy’ philosophy and the bohemian Beat Generation of the 1950s. Anyone offended by his depiction of women should remember his work mirrors the attitudes, sensibilities and humor of an earlier era.” A content warning may be necessary for listeners who are only familiar with Shel Silverstein as the author of children’s books, blissfully unaware of the existence of such gleefully pornographic records as 1972’s Freakin’ at the Freakers Ball.
Much of Silverstein’s reputation rests upon the enduring popularity of The Giving Tree, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and A Light in the Attic, children’s books published between 1964 and 1981, years where he also worked as a cartoonist, a Playboy satirist, and a folk singer, a vocation he pursued despite the inconvenient fact that he couldn’t sing, he shrieked. He might not have been able to carry a tune, but he could write one, a talent recognized by Johnny Cash, who was drawn to the literal gallows humor of Silverstein’s “25 Minutes to Go” and put it on his 1965 LP Johnny Cash Sings the Ballads of the True West. Four years later came “A Boy Named Sue,” a near-novelty written by Silverstein and delivered with thundering menace by Cash—a combination that gave the Man In Black his biggest hit and opened up Nashville for its songwriter.
Silverstein found some kindred spirits in Nashville—he wrote Waylon Jennings’ 1970 hit “The Taker” with Kris Kristofferson and authored Loretta Lynn’s 1971 “One’s on the Way” on his own—but he discovered his muse in Bobby Bare, a towering progressive country singer who had been kicking around Nashville for over a decade. Bare had a hit straight out of the gate in 1958 with “The All American Boy,” a loving parody of Elvis Presley, then scored a pair of career-making singles in 1963 with the lonesome “Detroit City” and “500 Miles Away from Home.” The country Top 10 was no stranger to Bare throughout the 1960s, a period where he demonstrated an ear for distinctive songwriters, helping bring Tom T. Hall, Mel Tillis, and Tompall Glaser into the spotlight. Before he met Silverstein, Bare cut “Sylvia’s Mother,” the number-five hit for Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show.
“Sylvia’s Mother” was one of the last hits Bare had at Mercury Records before he returned to his old home of RCA, lured back to the label by then-president Chet Atkins’ promise that he could produce his own records. Ever since he heard Joe South’s Introspect on the radio in LA, he wanted to make a concept album, asking all of his songwriter friends to write him a song cycle, but they all demurred. Then, Bare met Silverstein at a Country Radio Seminar party one Saturday night in early 1973. The singer told the songwriter about his hard luck. That next Monday, he got a call from Silverstein saying he had an album’s worth of songs ready to go.
The resulting Lullabys, Legends and Lies kicked off a lifelong collaboration between the pair. Until Silverstein’s death in 1999, Silverstein wrote country songs with Bare in mind, while Bare turned to Silverstein whenever he needed a new project, as he did for his 1998 supergroup Old Dogs. That record isn’t featured on Bear Family’s hefty new box set Bobby Bare Sings Shel Silverstein Plus, as the box set focuses on recordings made between 1972 and 1983, a period where Bare released three full albums devoted to Silverstein songs, recorded another complete set that sat in the vaults for decades, released another two where Shel dominated all other songwriters, and then regularly fit a Silverstein song or two onto his other LPs, leaving a handful of other tracks unreleased. All told, Bare recorded well over 100 Silverstein compositions during this period, and that sheer number is proof of their symbiotic partnership: the singer found his songwriter, the spinner of yarns found his storyteller.
Their potent chemistry was palpable on Lullabys, Legends and Lies, the concept album Bare longed to make. Silverstein gathered some old tunes of his, wrote a few new ones, then handed Bare a bunch of songs hanging off the very loose notion conveyed in the title. Acting as his own producer, the singer kept things cheap and lean, creating the impression that he and his band were singing and picking at home. The immediacy of this intimacy was striking but Silverstein came up with an ingenious notion: record an in-studio audience’s reaction to the playback of the album, then add their whoops, laughter, and off-key singalongs to the finished product, giving the illusion of a concert album.
Their gamble paid off. “Marie Laveau” gave Bare his first number one country hit and “Daddy, What If,” his sticky-sweet duet with his young son Bobby Jr., almost cracked the Top 40, sending the album into Billboard’s Country Top 10, its success paving the way for other self-produced mavericks like and Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger. If Lullabys, Legends and Lies didn’t prove to be as enduring as what followed in its wake, chalk it up to the album’s contrived charm working a little bit too well: Some of Silverstein’s stories are a bit too cutesy, as is the framing device of the crowd. Still, the record is powerful, particularly in how Bare’s casual authority undercuts Silverstein’s impish tendencies, a quality evident in the still, plaintive “In The Hills of Shiloh” and, especially, how the singer keeps the winding story-song “The Winner” compelling, delivering each successive punchline with an widening smile.
“The Winner” would wind up as the template for much of the work Bare and Silverstein would do together, but first they had to attempt to replicate the success of Lullabys, Legends and Lies. Inspired by Studs Terkel’s oral history Working, Silverstein decided to address the plight of those downtrodden by the recession of 1973 through Hard Time Hungrys, but it took a long time to weave his stories with man-on-the-street interviews, so the pair decided to bash out Singing in the Kitchen first. Billed equally to Bare and his family, Singing in the Kitchen built off the success of “Daddy What If,” finding the amiable patriarch singing kid-friendly songs with his children. Listening to it is like viewing snapshots of another family, one you might not know particularly well: their affection is evident, but not quite contagious. Still, Singing in the Kitchen bought Bare time to complete Hard Time Hungrys, the most ambitious record he ever made. The attempt to cross-pollinate Silverstein’s storytelling with audio vérité is admirable but also exhausting. Every time the music gains momentum, like when the tongue-in-cheek blues “Alimony” rambles into view, the interviews cut in and derail the record.
These three albums may have flaws, but they’re flaws born of ambition, and that adventurousness helped place Bare in the vanguard of the burgeoning outlaw country movement. He also was scoring just enough hits to gain the attention of other labels, so he decided to jump ship for Columbia in 1978, a move that coincided with a brief ill-fated association with rock manager Bill Graham. RCA, particularly its Nashville president Jerry Bradley, didn’t take well to this news. Bradley never agreed with Atkins’s decision to let Bare produce his own records, so when the singer decided to leave the label, RCA buried Great American Saturday Night, a Silverstein-written concept album capturing all the different kinds of debauchery and despair on a random weekend night. Originally planned for 1977, the version on this box is longer than the BFD release from earlier in 2020 and, in this narrative-filled edition, it’s the clear bridge between the duo’s earlier records and Bare’s sleazy, Silverstein-heavy 1980 records Down & Dirty and Drunk & Crazy; it tempers its cinematic scope with earthy lasciviousness.
Bare recorded songs by other writers during the latter half of the 1970s—1977 brought Me And McDill, a salute to Bob McDill—but he still found a way to fit Silverstein songs onto his other concept albums (1975’s Cowboys and Daddys) and kept him by his side when he took a stab at crossover success with Bare, his 1978 debut for Columbia. This box collects these tunes, as well as several unreleased cuts, as a pair of “Stray Bare Tracks” discs, collections that have more in common with the middle-aged crazies of Down & Dirty and Drunk & Crazy than the redneck hippie dreamer of Lullabys, Legends and Lies. The contrast between these two phases is startling. The first three records are intimate and sweet, sometimes hinting at earthier concerns, but their good intentions triumph over their devilish instincts.
That’s not the case with the rest of the material on the box. Once Bare and Silverstein grew comfortable with each other, they indulged in each other’s strengths and excesses as only a pair of close friends can. Appropriately, as the pair’s familiarity increased, the music turned bolder, even burly, with the productions accumulating some slick period flair. Bare’s records wound up pitched halfway between swaggering outlaw and smooth Urban Cowboy country-pop crossover, a transition that suited Silverstein’s narrowing of vision.
Where he once devoted himself to myths and finding the mysteries in everyday lives, he now busied himself with mundanities of modern life: telling dirty jokes, sucking on a glass of wine at TGIFridays, and cursing diets. He still could summon some genuine pathos—as late as 1983, Bare cut the hard barroom weeper “Drinkin’ from the Bottle”—but these Stray Tracks also show how Silverstein sometimes like to push Bare right up to the edge and the singer happily went along. With its chorus of “does anybody here want to fuck or fight,” the title track of Great American Saturday Night itself is testament to this fact, but “They Held Me Down”—an unreleased Bare track Silverstein recorded for his 1978 LP Songs and Stories—is a veritable index of immoralities, delivered with a sideways grin.
Bare channeled some of this cheerful perversion onto Drunk & Crazy, an album where he laments his hard-rocking band and celebrates the sloth of “Drinkin’ and Druggin’ and Watchin’ TV.” Drunk & Crazy is also home to “If That Ain’t Love,” a song that could have earned the box set’s disclaimer all on its own. With his tongue firmly in cheek, Silverstein’s narrator chronicles a list of domestic terrors, and while the abuser is clearly the one the songwriter is targeting as the butt of the joke, the intensity of the imagery (“"Baby I’m sorry I done you like that/I called you a name and I gave you a whack/I spit in your eye and gave your wrist a twist/And if that ain’t love, what is”) is as jarring as the rowdiness of the performance. That seediness illustrates that it was a long road from the genial tall tales of Lullabys, Legends and Lies and the dive-bar soundtrack of Drunk & Crazy. Hearing Bare and Silverstein make that journey over the course of these eight CDs leaves you with a new appreciation for their funky, off-color chemistry.

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The duo’s 1988 goofy but undeniably catchy double-album mixed hip-hop bona fides with an effervescent MC. It would win over Middle America and score the first-ever Grammy for a rap album.

DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince: He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper

He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper

DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper is no one’s idea of a revolutionary document. It’s proudly, cheerfully, purposefully corny: The first song is a Nightmare on Elm Street parody featuring the line, “He’s burned up like a weenie/And his name is Fred.” Listening to it often feels babysitting a room full of fourth graders for a few hours. And yet, it racked up a lot of “firsts”: It was the first hip-hop double album and the first rap album to win a Grammy; in fact, it was the first year the Grammys even acknowledged rap.
It was not fashioned with global conquest in mind; it was recorded in a month or so by two kids from West Philly who met a few years earlier at a house party. Nonetheless, when Will Smith and Jeffrey Townes learned of their Grammy nomination, they grasped the significance of the moment. And when they learned that the Grammys refused to televise it, they pleaded and made their case, even appearing on “the Arsenio Hall Show” to demand that the academy allow their moment some airtime. But the Grammys held their ground and the pair boycotted the ceremony—it was only later, when someone called them, that they learned they had won.
The Grammy boycott may have been the only time that Will Smith—one of the most supernaturally ingratiating humans of the 20th century—refused to show up. He seemed to have decided early on that he was going to make it virtually impossible for the music industry and culture’s gatekeepers to miss him. Extroverted without mania, likable but thoughtful, swaggering but goofy, confident but mildly self-deprecating, he grinned and mugged and belly-laughed and said “yes” to everything with such vigor that he cratered into the heart of Middle America. In the history of charm offensives, Will Smith is Alexander the Great, and He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper was his first invasion of the world.
It was not, however, his introduction to the world; Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince’s 1987 album Rock the House had scored some minor success with the campy, cautionary tale “Girls Ain’t Nothing but Trouble,” which hit the radio just as Smith was graduating high school. From then on, their ascent was quiet and frictionless: their record label Jive sent them to London to hole up in a hotel to record their follow-up. They worked tirelessly, with Jeff mostly confined to his hotel because of a cast covering his leg from a car accident back in Philly. Before Jive approached, the two of them had been hashing out material for a DJ album, and Jeff suggested they combine those cuts with the new music and voila: rap’s first double album. It was an inauspicious creation myth, and when they finished, they packed up, came home, and immediately went on the Run’s House tour alongside Whodini, Run-D.M.C., EPMD, and Public Enemy.
Amid these heavyweights, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince were decidedly the underdogs, the cheerful kids along for the ride. While Chuck D. raided white supremacy, the colorful, kooky video for “Parents Just Don’t Understand” was busy entertaining suburban homes. Then, three weeks in, their manager Russell Simmons appeared at a venue to present them with a gold record. On a gamble, Smith asked the crowd to complete a line from “Parents Just Don’t Understand”—20,000 voices roared every word of the song right back at them. Steadily, the wholesome underdog kids ended up becoming the focus of the all-star tour, and soon the duo with the songs about Burger King and Freddy Krueger were going on after Public Enemy. He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper would eventually go on to sell three million copies.
There were some subterranean industry shifts rumbling just beneath them that no doubt boosted the album’s velocity. The business of hip-hop was shifting solidly from fast-and-cheap singles to album formats, which meant that major labels could—and did—carpet-bomb the box stores of America with their products. Hip-hop was also entering its first widely acknowledged Golden Age, with Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Public Enemy, and KRS-One filling out rap’s first real popular-culture Mount Rushmore. “Rap is in a phase in which it is simultaneously acceptable to the companies running the show, the artists making the music and the audience out there buying it,” Peter Watrous shrewdly observed for the New York Times in June of 1988, just as the album was released. The ground was softened for something as transparent, likable, and immediate as DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.
With Smith mugging to the very last cheap seat in the rafters and Townes quietly cutting up records with blinding virtuosity, it was guaranteed that at least half of the duo would nullify some of your reservations. If you were leery of hip-hop because you were A) old, B) white, or C) both, Smith was a one-man disarmament machine. If on the other hand, you were a hardcore hip-hop fan, busy memorizing the meter of Rakim’s lines the year he laid them on wax, then Jeff’s pyrotechnics allowed you to swallow Smith’s antics. He was the DJ, Smith was the rapper.
Smith, understandably, hasn’t been cited much for lyricism or for influence as an MC. He’s also been the subject of multiple ghostwriting allegations, although Nas, frequently cited as a writer for Smith, has vigorously denied it. But he remains a genial and effective rapper, a guy you recognize from the second he opens his mouth. He flowed like a Saturday-morning-cartoon version of Big Daddy Kane or KRS, with compound rhymes and sentences that flowed over line breaks to slyly draw your attention to the tricks he was playing: “It was kind of an accident, the way that it happened/One day I was rapping, and on the beat Jeff was backing/Me up, and all of a sudden, he brought in a cut/And I dropped my microphone and said, ‘What the—?’” He rapped on “Brand New Funk.”
It was nothing that wasn’t being done already by Rakim and Kane and other bolder innovators, but Smith injected the sunbeam of his personality into it. Has anyone ever chuckled mid-flow more convincingly than Smith? His voice is clear and chipper, with every single word as audible and legible on first listen as ten-foot high neon-green graffiti letters. He grinned into fisheye lenses in his videos, full of puppet-show props and sped up, Looney Tunes-style antics. A young Marshall Mathers might have been absorbing every word of LL Cool J’s records at the time, but there’s no question, looking at Eminem’s breakthrough videos for “My Name Is” and “The Real Slim Shady,” that the Fresh Prince’s “friendly scamp” presentation resonated somewhere in his subconscious.
There are a couple of troublesome reminders in Smith’s lyrics of just how hard it is to remain in the perceived “middle,” or rather reminders that “the middle” is simply a peephole for what those pushing on either side allow you to see. Did you remember, for instance, that one of the punchlines in “Parents Just Don’t Understand” is Will Smith almost having sex with a twelve-year-old? Or that he shouts out “all the homeboys that got AIDS be quiet” as a way of getting the crowd to cheer on “Live At Union Square, November 1986?” This was right around the height of the AIDS epidemic, but popular awareness of AIDS was years away from critical mass, so the joke dinged off American consciousness like a Nerf bat. In 2017, it feels like a bludgeon.
When the duo blew up, they were in fact widely derided as the hip-hop equivalent of Nerf bats. “That’s when we started hearing, ’Aw, man, that shit’s for the suburbs,’ Townes remembered. “I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Southwest Philly is so far from the suburbs. You have no idea the shit I’ve seen or have gone through…’ I paid very close to attention to that. We were cool as long as we stayed on black radio and stayed amongst our hip-hop peers.”
It’s understandable that Townes would bristle. With his sterling hip-hop credentials, he was quietly doing brilliant things on those supposed harmless and flyweight songs. On “Brand New,” he cuts up a drum and horn break from Pleasure’s “Bouncy Lady,” speeding it and warping it until it sounds like a crumpled-up ball of paper. On “Let’s Get Busy Baby” he isolates a little hiccup in the rising sunbeam of Stevie Wonder “Sir Duke” horn lick, and builds a little burbling 8-bit Atari groove from it. On “Time To Chill,” he broke down a flip of George Benson at a time when almost no one in hip-hop was reaching for satiny-smooth, plush samples. This was the age of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad air-raid squeals, the stark, hard drum breaks of Eric B, but on “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” he cut up a chuckling little burble from a Peter Frampton song and turned it into a five-minute long Whoopie Cushion. He’s a genius, alternately working in plain sight and hidden comfortably there, where he’s remained for decades, allowing Will Smith to soak up the spotlight. There is perhaps no old-school hip-hop legend in history with a savvier or more comfortable relationship to fame than Jeffrey Townes.
Meanwhile, by 1990, Smith had blown through a million dollars, an unfortunate occupational hazard for a rich teenager. While hip-hop was scaling up and outward around him, he found himself in debt and on the precipice of fading into the history books along with all his firsts. So, looking for a way forward, he signed on with producer Quincy Jones and a TV writer named Andy Borowitz for a pilot about a young West Philly youth who moved in with his rich relatives in Bel Air. He and Jazzy Jeff knocked out the theme song more or less overnight, and a pilot was made. The pilot did well: as Borowitz remembered, years later: “The audience loved Will right from the start.”