New Pornographers leader Carl Newman's second album follows the cues of his relatively quieter work-- 2004 solo album The Slow Wonder and the Pornographers' overlooked Challengers-- but still helps solidify him as a singular songwriter.

Get Guilty

Carl Newman's music, whether with New Pornographers or solo, is typically referred to through the deceptive category of "power pop." But concentrating on simplicity and force alone unfairly deflects attention from the nuance of Newman's approach-- in his lyrics, arrangements, and delivery, there's always much more going on than can be viewed at a distance. Because of the power pop tag, the emergence of Newman's "quieter" side-- best represented by 2004 solo album The Slow Wonder and the Pornographers' overlooked 2007 LP Challengers-- led many to question if, absent the effusive energy, his music was still worthwhile. Wonder's follow-up Get Guilty isn't going to satiate those looking for another Twin Cinema, but it helps solidify the fact-- known to fans for a while now-- that Newman's singularity as a songwriter lies in more than histrionics.
Like Wonder, Guilty has its share of up-tempo tracks, yet its real pleasures are idiosyncratic, revealing themselves the more attentively and often you listen. Newman has himself compared (with tongue at least partially in cheek) late-album cut "The Collected Works" to Queen's "Fat Bottomed Girls", yet that bit of self-deprecation elides what happens after the first verse, when the bottom drops out of the song, leaving a piano to briefly dialogue with what sounds like a tiny, dying violin. "Like a Hitman, Like a Dancer" is an acoustic rocker with a recognizably whooped-up chorus, but those two titular characters, in Newman's world, are connected by virtue of the fact that they're "all muscle." During the verses of "Elemental", the harmonies of Nicole Atkins (along with Mates of State's Kori Gardner, Guilty's female vocal ringer) provide a subtle, high-register hum behind Newman. Gentle, swirling organs subtly enter the frame to signal that song's slight shift to a refrain, recalling the stately psychedelia of Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom.
Like some of Costello's music, much of Guilty feels like a gambit-- a playful way of unsettling expectations with a fun-house mirror approach to musical structure and a fondness for meta-narratives. Newman, like buddy and collaborator Dan Bejar, has always turned his (and our) attention back toward the process of creating (see also: "The Fake Headlines", "Twin Cinema"). The title Get Guilty is a deliberate wink toward postmodern author Donald Barthelme, and "The Palace at 4 AM" is a meta-romantic homage to the act of writing, nestled inside a life-on-the-road tale. On the stately, cascading album-opener "There Are Maybe Ten or Twelve", after singing the song's first lyric, Newman throws us off his path: "That wasn't the opening line, it was the tenth or the twelfth. Make of that what you will."
Because he knows how to imbue them with purpose and drive, Newman's narrative fragments and impressionistic lyrics can work just as well without self-reflexivity. On "The Heartbreak Rides", one of his dozen or so best compositions to date, he sings, in his irresistibly nerdy falsetto: "She led the modern sunset to your window, gestured with a plain-Jane hand, she said 'Let's go.'" We don't get a direct sense of what the adventure entails, but the suggestion alone, like the song, is invigorating, like an unplanned road trip or the anxious rush of a romantic relationship.
Always his own biggest critic, Newman remembers his youthful capriciousness on the string-flecked, nostalgic "Thunderbolts", singing "We played it too green to start, to play it with any art," as the song pushes toward a crescendo that never comes. Perhaps he's remembering the time when it seemed only natural to substitute verse-chorus-verse with the much more satisfying "chorus-CHORUS-CHORUS!!!" and describe his group as mass romantics and new pornographers. Yet like "Thunderbolts", those ironic descriptors-- suggesting that his music inspired awe by appealing to sensations more than emotions-- indicate Newman's modesty more than they define his art. Revisit his earlier records with an ear toward refinement instead of sheer voltage, and the roots of Get Guilty will clearly reveal themselves amidst the clamor.


On his ninth album, the reserved bandleader incorporates more classic rock references than usual, but they’re the frames for subtleties and surprises within.

Tip of the Sphere

Cass McCombs is open about his tendency to borrow from his predecessors. “I always approach my own music as a listener of other people’s music,” he told Red Bull Music Academy in 2017, several months after the release of his last album, Mangy Love. “My music is a response to the music that I love.” On McCombs’ ninth album, Tip of the Sphere, his hands are more visible than usual as they thumb through a familiar record collection. From the Elton John piano that opens “Absentee” and the pulsing “American Canyon Sutra,” which recalls Lou Reed with its sober spoken-word intonation, to the Haight-Ashbury grooves that echo everywhere, these songs speak through the familiar voices of classic rock. “The Great Pixley Train Robbery” is a story-song worthy of Dylan, “Estrella” an intricate guitar work suggesting Richard Thompson. “Sleeping Volcanoes” could be a great lost Warren Zevon B-side. Because McCombs and his band toy with familiar sounds, even his new songs feel worn and cozy, like winter clothes pulled from storage at the start of December.
The blunt references and clear echoes may fool you into thinking this music isn’t somehow original. But McCombs and his band use the obvious as a sort of feint. Through fine details and sudden switchbacks, they reveal hidden layers and twists. “Real Life,” for instance, initially feels like a lovely, lived-in folk jam. But in its last minute, it accelerates, as drums that had kept a dreamy tempo suddenly stir awake and dance, transforming the song into something strange and new and wonderful. While the Elton John piano catches your ear during “Absentee,” Sam Griffin Owens’ sax warbles down in the mix, a class clown whose mischief makes the day’s lesson more fun for everyone, teacher included.
Sphere is heavier than Mangy Love, but it doesn’t sport that record’s melodic highs, either. Still, it’s the more rollicking listen, with songs that alternate paces as if driven by some constantly shifting breeze. The interplay between McCombs’ guitar and Dan Horne’s bass on the record’s more upbeat tracks, like “Train Robbery” or “Rounder,” even recalls the energy shared by legendary tandems, like Townshend and Entwistle, say, or Duane Allman and Berry Oakley. (Horne showed this clear chemistry with McCombs during Mangy Love.) McCombs’ voice, too, has become as sharp as any instrument—crystalline and tremoring on “Prayer for Another Day,” and then shifting immediately to low and foreboding on “American Canyon Sutra.”
McCombs possesses a rare ability to diffuse improvisation into these sharply arranged songs, allowing for spontaneity during the recording process by disguising it. On “Sidewalk Bop After Suicide,” a rigid guitar-and-drum structure keeps getting nudged out of place by little flourishes. It’s the kind of thing that makes Sphere equally enjoyable whether you’re listening passively or actively; the record doesn’t demand attention but rewards it generously. The same is true for McCombs’ lyrics, which drift from the abstruse (“Rounder,” seemingly influenced by the Scottish ballads the singer loves) to the lucid (“Tying Up Loose Ends,” on which a single verse asking about long-gone relatives makes for the record’s most heartbreaking moment). The sequencing of Tip of the Sphere feels so instinctual that it’s hard to ascribe intention to it, but there’s a clear intelligence at work here. Two long jams, “I Followed the River South to What” and “Rounder,” are the bookends, but they breeze by, as does the rest of the thing. Tip of the Sphere is a confounding trick of time distortion, the shortest hour-long record I’ve ever heard.
Familiar McCombs motifs appear: the dubious value of money, the dubious application of justice, reincarnation, what it means to live in nature, to be imprisoned, to be homeless. The turbulence you’d expect to hear in 2019 flashes up, too. “Thank you to the authentic fake/Our true enigmatic uncle/Welcome to coo-coo land!/Home of the fake,” McCombs sings during “Sleeping Volcanoes.” But the record is more moving in its smaller moments. “Tying Up Loose Ends,” the prettiest song here, has one simple verse, in which the narrator finds an old box of family photographs and wonders in vain, “Is there anyone still left who can tell me who all these people are?”
Every so often, listeners will refer to McCombs as if he belongs to a simple category—the cagey-interview-giving, mystique-preserving singer enamored with his own enigma, a counterpart of Bradford Cox. But McCombs has never really devoted an excess of energy to his own legend or the way he’s perceived; he likes to talk about his ideas, not himself. As he moves into his fifth decade, the fact that McCombs has never defined himself clearly seems to be working in his favor, making it impossible to see him as familiar, as an old story. Tip of the Sphere again rejects easy definitions and expectations, growing and surprising with every listen.


Armed only with his acoustic guitar, Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy offers stripped-down versions of songs pulled from across his catalog, including songs originally cut with Loose Fur and Golden Smog.

Together at Last

For Wilco’s entire history, the band’s leader, Jeff Tweedy, has existed as a solo artist. Though the songwriter’s solo recorded output has been limited to the likes of bootlegs and the original score for the 2001 Ethan Hawke film Chelsea Walls, Tweedy alone thrives in a live setting. These shows are the only place where Wilco favorites and deep cuts sit comfortably beside songs from his other projects: alt-country cornerstone Uncle Tupelo, a strum-and-hiss trio with Jim O’Rourke and Glenn Kotche called Loose Fur, the rotating roots-rock collective Golden Smog, or, most recently, his father/son project Tweedy. And the appeal of his solo shows shows goes beyond the music. Tweedy’s curmudgeonly performance presence—from the stage, he discourages clapping along and isn’t afraid to call out those making too much noise—imparts a sense of conversational intimacy.
Together at Last celebrates Tweedy’s live solo presence, even if that isn’t the explicit intention. On 11 tracks that focus on his work in Wilco, along with a stray song each from Loose Fur and Golden Smog, the almost exclusively solo acoustic arrangements are similar, if not exactly the same, to the ones he’s been performing in theaters for years. The album is the first in a series recorded at his Chicago studio that will highlight his life as a songwriter, and it revises some of Tweedy’s best moments with mixed results.
Summerteeth standout “Via Chicago” and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot opener “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” are both all-timers, songs that transcend the Wilco songbook and stand worthy of these stripped-down, acoustic retellings. They work because of their contrast to their original recordings, both of which used deconstruction and clutter to maneuver Wilco’s straightforward melodies into more complicated territory, one that evoked transistor radio nostalgia and wistful memories. These production turns would ultimately distinguish Wilco from their alt-country peers, but here we’re reminded of how sturdy the songs are on their own. Deeper YHF cut “Ashes of American Flags” gets a similar treatment, with a spare re-recording to underscore lyrics that look for signs of hope from within moments of bleakness. Tweedy’s claim that he would “die if I could come back new” quivers with years of reflection, the song flowing with a new life.
Together at Last has only two non-Wilco tracks, but they illustrate what the set does best. “Laminated Cat” exists in a few different forms, including both the fuzzed-out YHF outtake “Not for the Season” and the Loose Fur version that infuses Tweedy’s straight-ahead pop sensibility with the hisses and squeals of his collaborators. But here, the bare-bones arrangement highlights the song’s calendar-flipping poetry, accentuating each verse’s sense of seasonal discomfort at the uncontrollable passing of time. Golden Smog’s “Lost Love” is an even a deeper dig, anchored by a wide-eyed sentiment that doesn’t try to be more than a direct love song. “Broken hearts all around me, but I don’t feel a thing,” Tweedy sings, lacking the cracked-skin weariness present on many of these new recordings, and thus honoring the youthful conceit of temporary romance that he wrote about 20 years earlier. This is Tweedy as excavator, rescuing a pair of gems that have been hidden in obscurity and offering them a fresh chance at appreciation.
Just as often, though, Together at Last lacks a sense of purpose. “Dawned on Me” and “I’m Always in Love” show how much the upbeat originals rely on production for their full impact. As acoustic renditions, they offer little more than skeletons of their former selves. “Hummingbird” fares even worse, with Tweedy, possibly unable to hit the song’s falsetto climax, whistling in place of a full-band coda. In a live setting, he’d be able to crack a joke about this affectation and move on from the moment, but on record, the song just hangs there, crying out for a little levity. With his wry charm absent, the album ultimately shows only a partial picture of Jeff Tweedy as a solo artist.


On Why Do the Heathen Rage?, Matmos member Drew Daniel's third album of propulsive electronica under the occasional name the Soft Pink Truth, taunts perhaps the most reactive, boundary-buttressing subgenre of them all: black metal.

The Soft Pink Truth: Why Do the Heathen Rage?

Why Do the Heathen Rage?

Drew Daniel must have armadillo-thick skin—or, a closet crowded with functional chainmail. On Why Do the Heathen Rage?, his third album of propulsive electronica under the occasional name the Soft Pink Truth, the Matmos member taunts perhaps the most reactive, boundary-buttressing subgenre of them all: black metal, a historic domain of hate crimes, real blood, ideological belligerence and institutionalized aggression. Daniel—a gay electronic producer who moved from San Francisco to Baltimore in 2007—recruited a cast of indie rock pals and heavy metallurgists to cover 10 black metal songs, with relative standards from Mayhem, Darkthrone, and Sarcofago accompanying a sample of more obscure sides.
But guitars appear exactly one time here, blood-curdling tirades maybe three. Instead, Daniel and his collaborators turn these tirades about fucking and killing, desecrating and dying into dance-floor and pop-chart bait, with bludgeoning house tempos, mesmerizing hooks and prismatic synths. Why Do the Heathen Rage? is Daniel’s open invitation to name-calling, a plea to be branded with poser status and homosexual slurs from a scene that’s often been happy to oblige. It’s perhaps the ultimate black metal troll, an album meant to make the truest kvlt heathens, well, rage. The rest of us can simply move.
The Soft Pink Truth began as a sort of dare for Daniel from the producer Matthew Herbert, who challenged the experimentalist to make a house record. Likewise, Why Do the Heathen Rage?, the project’s first output in a decade, began as Daniel’s dare for himself after DJing at Rainbow in the Dark, a monthly “party for gay men, satanists and metal enthusiasts.” Could he pair one obsession with another? Could he take the misanthropic might of black metal and tie it to the communal ecstasy of techno? Could a song like Mayhem’s existentially doomed “Buried by Time and Dust” be rewired for the club? Absolutely.
In Matmos, Daniel has used electronic music to explore audacious concepts, whether that’s meant building a record from samples of surgical procedures to an album-length, detail-laced tribute to the duo’s heroes. Why Do the Heathen Rage? takes a similar tack, funneling far-flung resources into one intimidating concept. These risky reassessments come loaded with guests uniformly and uniquely suited to the challenge. In the prelude, for instance, Antony Hegarty trades lines of a poem about mysticism, androgyny and witchcraft with Daniel. The gossamer ease of the former sits like a specter against the pitch-shifted, Lucifer-deep growl of the latter. That juxtaposition sets the stage for a play between shades of pink and black, a tension that the album—the whole project, really—mines.
“Satanic Black Devotion” calls on both guitarist Owen Gaertner, who toiled through transcriptions of all of these songs for Daniel, and Locrian’s Terrence Hannum, a nominal “metal guy” with a particularly broad view of what that might mean. In four minutes, the cover pinballs between Gaertner’s solemn electric guitar and Daniel’s drum machine punishment, Daniel’s ghoulish chants and Hannum’s pained screams. An “I’ve Got the Power” sample precedes an atmospheric fade into pastel noise. The trio finds its own path through the melodrama of the Sargeist original but leaves room to point out that its self-serious malevolence is worthy of at least one laugh. Solo black metal dudes always have the power.
For similar reasons, Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner emerges as the unexpected star of Why Do the Heathen Rage?. Along with Daniel himself, she serves as the paragon of respecting the source material while repurposing it at will, too. In its original form, “Let There Be Ebola Frost” is a rote, mid-tempo march from Finland’s short-lived AN. Its lunging riff and lacerated vocals mostly obscure the extreme essence at the song’s core, as though the band were too shy to confess to their own apocalyptic vision of a “realm of flushed blood.” But Wassner commands this script, delivering worldwide extermination orders without a hint of irony or innocence. “Feel it bleed so quick,” she coos in a moment of graceful comedown, Daniel emptying the beat into a bed of graceful synthesizer sighs. “I don’t feel any kind of compunction.” She summons a sort of schoolyard song at the end, turning a partial acrostic about annihilation into a cheerleading chant. Her turn on Sarcofago’s “Ready to Fuck” turns the fellatio demands of a dude named Antichrist into a subversively demure seduction, full of starts and stops and squeals and background moans from both Wassner and a tamed demon played by Daniel. The take accomplishes what Sarcofago ultimately sought—that is, sex, or the suggestion of it—but reshapes the message by switching the sender.
At such moments, it’s tempting to praise Why Do the Heathen Rage? as an expert, unapologetic sendup of black metal, a massive fuck you to a caste that’s said exactly that to so many others as a matter of stylistic necessity. The cover even depicts dudes in corpsepaint running trains on one another and skinheads getting handjobs from longhairs who wield knives and spike bracelets. And the record ends, too, with a wild-eyed and reckless race through “Grim and Frostbitten Gay Bar,” a cut from the most obscure act included here—Impaled Northern Moonforest, the hyperbolic and hilarious black metal parody launched and dropped by members of Anal Cunt more than a decade ago. In spirit and sound, it’s the most allegiant cover here, a confirmation of a delirious mockery. The killer, one might surmise, has been killed.
That’s too simple for black metal, though, and too simple for techno. Most of all, it’s too reductive for Daniel, an artist whose previous output doesn’t necessarily reflect his pedigree as a fan, a writer, a thinker and a person. (One doesn’t really stumble across AN without a rather serious investment in this stuff.) “It’s about a contradiction or about a double citizenship that I have as somebody that’s a gay dude who’s heard a lot of dance music in gay bars and… loves a lot of sounds, a lot of imagery and a lot of ideas that are totally contemptuous of the ethos of dance floor music,” he told Steel for Brains. He’s not out to destroy black metal so much as to reconsider the source of its unrepentant attitude and redirect it into another form with equal gusto. He’s strip-mined one thing he loves in order to drive another. In doing so, he’s found a wonderful, unexpected kind of combustion.
Yes, that will get him called names, and yes, that will make some faithful truly rage on message boards and (anonymously) in comment threads. But in 1982, above the belligerent stomp of “Black Metal,” Venom’s Cronos sang of “taking our chances with raw energy,” setting at least one cornerstone for the movement that followed. Daniel begins Why Do the Heathen Rage? with a trunk-rattling version of that anthem, launching his own take on black metal primacy by co-opting one of its founding documents. He swaps guitar solos for breakbeats and turns the chorus into an ecstatic, industrial chant. It’s meant to be shouted out with eyes closed and fists up—you know, real, metal power.


Newly expanded with three complete concerts, this 1978 double live album captured the elastic, elusive charms of Little Feat and proved foundational for jam bands to come.

Little Feat: Waiting for Columbus (Super Deluxe Edition)

During their heyday in the mid-1970s, Little Feat had the reputation of being your favorite band's favorite band. Other groups sold more records and tickets, but Little Feat cultivated a deep, passionate cult through their funky concoctions of New Orleans soul, California country-rock, and urban blues, a blend that was plenty appealing on record but found its natural home onstage. Little Feat were aware of the chasm between their studio sets and concerts, so they aimed to channel that kinetic energy onto Waiting for Columbus, the 1978 double live album that’s now been expanded into an eight-CD box set with three complete concerts that provided the source for the original LP. Like many double-live sets of the era, this was the album that crystallized the band’s appeal, capturing the elastic, elusive charms of a group that wandered on the fringes of rock counterculture since the late ’60s.
Lowell George, a shaggy hippie with prodigious appetites, formed the band after leaving the Mothers of Invention. Legend has it that Frank Zappa kicked out George after hearing the guitarist’s original composition “Willin’,” a country-rock ballad for dopers. George called up Bill Payne, a keyboardist who didn’t pass an audition for Zappa, then roped in his old Factory bandmate drummer Richie Hayward, and invited ex-Mother bassist Roy Estrada into his new band, who alternated heavy, surrealistic blues with stoned country-rock. After delivering two superb albums in this vein, Little Feat regrouped, swapping Kenny Gradney for Roy Estrada while bringing in percussionist Sam Clayton and guitarist Paul Barrere, players that helped lead the band in a funkier direction on 1973’s Dixie Chicken and beyond.
Little Feat found their footing on 1974’s Feats Don’t Fail Me Now, a record made after the group relocated from Los Angeles to the Washington D.C. area. They started playing college towns up and down the east coast, developing into a ferocious rock’n’roll band with the dexterity of jazz musicians. They were kindred spirits with the Grateful Dead—George wound up producing the Dead’s 1978 LP Shakedown Street—but their rhythms hit harder and the band was tighter, qualities that helped Little Feat become a simmering cult sensation. They reached a boiling point on January 19, 1975, when they played a Warner Bros. package tour at London's Rainbow Theatre, blowing headliners the Doobie Brothers off the stage with an unusually fiery set. Soon, the UK embraced Little Feat—and that includes British rock royalty: Jimmy Page sang their praises, while Clayton remembers, "One time, the Stones picked us up at the airport on the runway. We didn't even have to go through customs."
All the accolades didn’t translate into blockbuster sales in the United States. Little Feat managed to eke out respectable chart positions with Feats Don’t Fail Me Now and its successor, 1975’s The Last Record Album, whose title alone suggests how precarious their fate seemed. George started to drift away from the band during the recording of Time Loves a Hero, a 1977 record where Payne and Barrere nudged their music toward jazz, an inclination that came to a head on “Day at the Dog Races,” a winding instrumental that divided the band; upon hearing it, George groused “What is this, fuckin’ Weather Report?”
George rekindled his interest in Little Feat with the idea of a live album. The group decided to record shows at their hometown Lisner Auditorium in D.C. and return to the Rainbow, the site of their London triumph in 1975, adding a few warm up gigs in Newcastle and Manchester for good measure. Culling highlights from the Rainbow and Lisner gigs, Waiting for Columbus presented the platonic ideal of a Little Feat record: two LPs of prime loose-limbed funk, blues boogie, and jazz odysseys. Cut while they were plugging Time Loves a Hero, the tracklist prioritizes funky fusion over the stoner humor and hard-bitten blues of their first two records yet those elements are still present in the open-ended reworking of “Sailin’ Shoes” and the heavy stomp of “A Apolitical Blues.” When the group slides into “Old Folks Boogie,” it’s also possible to hear the origins of the middle-aged groove merchants Little Feat would become once they reunited nearly a decade after Lowell George’s 1979 death. When this shuffle is surrounded by funny, road-beaten rockers from Dixie Chicken and Feats Don’t Fail Me Now, it adds up to a complete portrait of everything Little Feat could do. As much as the Grateful Dead’s interstellar explorations, Waiting for Columbus is a urtext of jam bands, a joyous celebration of grooves and textures born of the group's idiosyncratic chemistry.
Much of that chemistry is an illusion. Waiting for Columbus was heavily tweaked in the studio, with George supplying vocal and guitar overdubs over the course of three weeks. The ambling sets were sculpted into four smooth sides, skillfully balancing George’s tunes with those of Payne and Barrere. Engineer Warren Dewey set up mics in a hallway to capture the band’s pre-show huddle where they harmonized on “Join the Band,” a spiritual George and Payne discovered on a Smithsonian folk collection, so that snippet serves as a fanfare for the good times to come. These little editing tricks are put into sharp relief on the new Super Deluxe Edition, which includes a full Manchester warmup date, a night at the Rainbow, and one at Lisner.
Superficially, these concerts don’t offer much in the way of surprises. Little Feat didn’t expand when they jammed—they dug deep, burrowing into the recesses of a groove to give it life and color. When they extend “Dixie Chicken” to 14 minutes, it’s a way to ride a wave, not to head into the unknown. Throughout these shows, Little Feat play with varying levels of intensity: In Manchester, they are a bit loose, while they’re focused and driven at the Rainbow and invigorated by the hometown crowd in D.C. These may be subtle differences but they are notable, as are the variations between these unvarnished live tapes and the finished album. Some of that amounts to the rough vagaries of live performance, whether it’s garbled lead vocals on a spectacularly funky “All That You Dream” from D.C. or George attempting to explain guacamole to a London audience during a fevered “Tripe Face Boogie.” On the whole, the performances are hotter than the finished LP, yet the shows also hint at the schism in the band by making space for fusion, both in the form of the jazzy “Red Streamliner” and long, long readings of “Day at the Dog Races” where Little Feat does sound like a streamlined Weather Report.
Heard on their own, each concert is thoroughly enjoyable, but an unexpected bonus is how they collectively accentuate the marvel of the original version of Waiting for Columbus. Far from diluting the experience of live Little Feat, the studio polish on the 1978 LP offers a heightened reality of the band, one where the bandmates are perfectly aligned, never leaning too hard on any one of their inspirations, never proceeding too far down one detour: They’re just rolling right through the night in a state of bliss.


After several years digging into hushed oddities and esoteric songwriting systems, Ben Chasny resurfaces with his most immediate batch of songs yet.

Six Organs of Admittance: Companion Rises

Companion Rises

Despite his career tenure in the reductive order of “freak-folk,” Ben Chasny has never been easy to track. For nearly a quarter-century as Six Organs of Admittance, Chasny—perhaps the most consistently exploratory figure in what was once dubbed New Weird America—has moved in fits, starts, and left turns. He has been a high-flying guitarist and a hypnotic singer-songwriter, a curdled noise enthusiast and an aspiring poet. And just when he seemed to settle, Chasny developed his own system of speculative music, Hexadic, in which a deck of cards prompted the notes he played for a pair of challenging 2015 albums. And then, of course, he pivoted to his most serene music ever.
Companion Rises offers a few more unforeseen forks in this riverine path. Chasny has earned a reputation as an ardent collaborator, but he wrote, recorded, and played everything here alone. What’s more, he generated many of these rhythms—and there are lots of them, layered like intricate strata of ancient stones—with computer programs he designed. That sounds complicated, but Six Organs have actually never made an album that maintains such momentum or delivers so many compulsive hooks at once. “I don’t know what kind of music it is,” Chasny wrote while mixing Companion Rises last summer. After all this time, it’s music that suggests wholesale new frontiers for what Six Organs might become.
A keen melody or stunning detail anchors every song on Companion Rises. The title track—a tender astrological ballad, where synthesizer rays suggest the rising or setting sun—is one of the most beautiful, disarming songs Chasny’s ever recorded. “The 101,” meanwhile, reimagines the Six Organs aesthetic of muttered vocals and byzantine guitars as garage rock, as though Chasny suddenly stepped into the Fun House. Electrifying and jarring, the song and its jagged solo drag Chasny back toward the psych-rock roar of Comets on Fire, a band he left a dozen years ago. It’s thrilling to witness.
Whenever Chasny burrows inside some particularly contemplative tune, he eventually claws back toward the light. When his cooing voice finally lifts over the fluorescent electronic washes of “Black Tea,” it’s like watching clouds break. “Haunted and Known” drifts through three minutes of acoustic guitar and fragile falsetto before squelching electronics start to roar, ultimately overpowering everything.
What’s most remarkable about Companion Rises, though, is a trio of songs—“Two Forms Moving,” “The Scout Is Here,” and “Mark Yourself”—that suggest a new future for Six Organs. Chasny has often favored meticulous arrangements, where each sound gets its own distinct space; these songs could get tedious, mazelike. But on these songs, Chasny wedges the flotsam of brittle guitars and the jetsam of distorted electronics closely together, shaping a warped sort of composite folk-pop. It recalls the most essential work of Califone, a band at their best when building something new by mining the junkyard of American folk. Chasny has rarely sounded so tuneful or focused.
In recent years, following Chasny has meant diving with him into esoterica, where the animating ideas for a piece of music, from the Tarot to the desert, could feel more important than the songs themselves. The results were fascinating, if vexing. Based on theories about aliens, astronomy, and the occult, the writing on Companion Rises is still thematically obscure. But, at least temporarily, Chasny has resurfaced in search of a more immediate connection, letting heavy notions push his songs upward rather than drag them apart.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Collecting a year's worth of heady dance singles plus two unreleased tracks, Pink suggests Four Tet is capable of going deeper and expanding higher than almost anyone else out there.

Pink

In March of last year, Four Tet's sole proprietor Kieran Hebden dusted off his Text Records imprint. Originally started in 2001, it had only released eight titles over the course of a decade, but 2011 would prove to be a busy year for Hebden. Rather than rest on the laurels and accolades for 2010's There Is Love in You, he released his entry in the acclaimed Fabriclive series, toured and DJed internationally, and then jumpstarted Text with two plain sleeve 12"'s: "Ego"/"Mirror" was a Four Tet collaboration with dubstep demiurge Burial and some British bloke named Thom Yorke and "Pinnacles"/"Ye Ye" was a split single featuring Four Tet and Caribou's Dan Snaith (before he assumed his Daphni moniker).
The former signified a decade's worth of British electronic music--running from Kid A through Four Tet and onto Burial-- while Four Tet's "Pinnacles" served a function similar to his 2008 EP Ringer. After the loft jazz-inspired Everything Ecstatic and a heady collaboration with noted jazz/soul/African/funk drummer Steve Reid that resulted in numerous drum-laptop improv albums and suggested that Hebden might never quite return to earth, Ringer reminded fans that Hebden has always kept an ear to the dancefloor. But whereas that EP reveled in 4/4 minimal-yet-playful techno bangers, "Pinnacles" was a decidedly more ambitious affair, intermingling dubstep's wobble with an elegant McCoy Tyner-esque piano line, Joe Meek guitar lick, and some lasers. Perhaps spurred by the "Thom Yorke Bump," it triggered a year's worth of heady dance singles from Hebden, spanning three 12"'s (with another credited to the moniker Percussions), all compiled now on Pink with an additional two unreleased tracks.
"Locked" opens things and hearkens back to the Four Tet of old. A dusty, crackling drum break that would make b-boys bob heads lopes around, but it soon abuts another machine pulse, suggesting an African polyrhythm about its downtempo pace. It's from this trickier rhythmic bed (with a substrata of bass frequencies) that Hebden builds up a wistful melody that evokes memories of his 2003 breakout album, Rounds. The unreleased "Lion" follows, suggesting both the earliest instances of late-80s tribal house as well as au courant UK bass music, the primitive yips, clipped kalimba line and speedy metabolism of the snare underpinned by a menacing drone.
When the "Jupiters" single dropped earlier this year, I was a tad underwhelmed as the overture-- while stately and lovely-- seemed to do little for the side. Yet it works better in the context of Pink, providing a beatless interlude before dropping us into Four Tet's most bass-heavy and adventurous track to date, nodding to Autechre at their crunchiest and 2-step at its twitchiest. It's followed by its standout flipside, "Ocoras", wherein Hebden takes what could be a skipping CD of organ music and some of Pantha du Prince's struck-bell tones and minces them finely before sprinkling atop some propulsive minimal techno.
A skittering hi-hat rather than harps power "128 Harps" and again evokes the "idyllictronica" tag once affixed to Four Tet's particular strain of electronic music. "Pyramid", originally the B-side for "Locked", has a Model 500-worthy bassline and Hebden again deploys a voice (uttering "I remember how you walked away") in much the same manner as he did on "Love Cry". Those components alone would make this a standout track, but he again pushes at such parameters and at around the four minute mark, a shimmering metallophone melody worthy of Steve Reich arises and provides a break: not in the sense of unadorned drums building up tension for release, but like a sun through clouds. And while Pink should not be conflated with a proper follow-up to There Is Love in You, even as a singles comp it suggests that the undergrad producer circa Rounds is now post-doctorate, and Four Tet is capable of going deeper and expanding higher than almost anyone else out there.


Billy Corgan's 1990s hot streak was fueled by self-loathing and self-aggrandizement, the equal and opposite manifestations of a whopping ego. The reissue of the Smashing Pumpkins' 1994 odd-and-ends collection showcases his ability to write colossal electric odysseys and wispy love songs.

Pisces Iscariot

I barely recall having two nickels to rub together at any given time in the 1990s, but between studio albums, video collections, B-side compilations, t-shirts, live bootlegs, and guitar tablature books (even Adore!), I estimate that the Smashing Pumpkins separated me from about $400. And not once did I feel like I was being taken advantage of. Billy Corgan: That guy knew how to give. Obviously, his willingness to personally pen his own liner notes, skewer his poor lil' rich boy image at Hullabalooza, author a column in Guitar World to teach you how to get the right tone for "Geek U.S.A." and lick shots at Steve Lukather weren't entirely altruistic. Corgan's tremendous artistic hot streak was fueled by self-loathing and self-aggrandizement, the equal and opposite manifestations of a whopping ego. But what other multi-platinum rock star was doing this kind of thing back then?
Smashing Pumpkins' reissues have been certainly generous so far, and Pisces Iscariot is no exception. However, Pisces Iscariot was generous to begin with, a stopgap between Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness that was described by Corgan as his attempt to make a mixtape instead of an album. That's pretty much bullshit. He obviously comes from a background that worships the LP form, and Pisces Iscariot is painstakingly sequenced to maintain a concept record's sonic peaks and valleys, favoring stylistic cohesion over protracted diversity. Its ratio of sweet acoustic strummers, barnstorming riff-rockers, and expansive guitar freakouts is balanced almost exactly akin to that of Siamese Dream or Gish. It still works as an album if you want it to, meaning it's not exactly Incesticide or Masterplan as far as alt-rock cash-ins go. This is a compliment Corgan would probably take as a tremendous validation.
In fact, the only concrete way to differentiate this from a typical Smashing Pumpkins album without Corgan's designation are the cover songs, and what's interesting is how uninteresting the selections are. Corgan would align himself with the likes of Queen, Boston, and Black Sabbath as something of a preemptive strike; bands who sold a ton of records and were often reviled for having the wrong kind of ambitions. But on the deluxe version of Pisces Iscariot, you can find live covers of the Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs" and Neil Young's "Cinnamon Girl", both of which are basically "Livin' on a Prayer" in Canon Karaoke.
The two that made Pisces proper definitely earned their place, though. Who knows what inspiration Corgan took from the beer-barrel-chested belting of Eric Burdon, but their version of the Animals' "A Girl Named Sandoz" is loose and fun, a rare instance where you might imagine Smashing Pumpkins as four people who legitimately enjoyed making music together. More crucial is "Landslide", which works largely because Corgan doesn't go out of his way to make it his*.* There are no kettle drums, no weeping strings, just a nylon acoustic, a single overdub for the solo, and one of his most sympathetic and tender vocal performances. It's not a hard song to pull off, but this version verges on definitive. And as these things generally worked out at the height of the music industry boom, it allowed Smashing Pumpkins' so-called "mixtape" to go gold and peak at No. 4 on the Billboard chart.
"Landslide" assured the band some career momentum, and it's also the key to understanding what Pisces says about the Smashing Pumpkins in 1994. Corgan may not have been better at making wispy, acoustic love songs than he was at colossal electric odysseys at the time, but it's a side that had been underdeveloped. Siamese Dream had its soft side, obviously, but those songs befitted a heavy, heavy record-- "Disarm", "Spaceboy", and even "Luna" dripped with pathos and Mellotron strings. Conversely, Pisces' delicate bookends, "Soothe" and "Spaced", are every bit what their titles suggest, disarming you with fumbled acoustic picking and found sound (according to the liner notes, you can hear the cars outside Corgan's apartment go by on the former).
Meanwhile, "Obscured" and "Whir" are two of Corgan's most gorgeous songs, period. The chord progressions are almost incapacitating in their beauty, supplemented by gauzy vocals, brushed drumming, and harmonic feedback touched by an early-morning vulnerability that the Pumpkins would never achieve again, not even on Adore. It was perhaps the one mode in which James Iha could reasonably compete with Corgan, and his contribution, "Blew Away", is indicative of the more country-ish lean of his solo albums. Had Smashing Pumpkins' albums not been such massive undertakings, it would have been interesting to hear what an LP of true-blue love songs might have accomplished.
The lighter touch has a varied effect on Pisces' rock tracks. Many of them are top-shelf: The 11-minute "Starla" is the moonier, flower-child kin of "Silverfuck", and "Hello Kitty Kat" and "Frail & Bedazzled" are groove-heavy glam-rock. While there's no shame in saying nothing here could dislodge a track from Siamese Dream-- one of the best records of its time-- the question is, why are these B-sides? Part of it is tautological. They don't generate the same heft as "Quiet" or "Rocket" because they lack the associative power of being on the actual records. You get an idea of what separates an album cut from a B-side with songs like "Plume" and "Pissant". Corgan has a weakness for this kind of thing-- lyrically regressive ("talk revolution as if it matters now," "my boredom has outshone the sun"), musically blunt, and presented in a relatively "raw" fashion. But it mostly shows him to be completely unconvincing as a punk or a burnout.
For the Smashing Pumpkins, conviction is equivalent to effort, and although Corgan lived to boast of hand-manipulating tape flange and backmasking spoken-word samples, his overcompensation in the studio wasn't about bolstering weak songs. Rather, it was all about bolstering the idea that You, Alienated Teen Listener, shared Corgan's pervasive sense of persecution and that those guitar armies and forthright moping orders provided the necessary ammunition to battle a world that was rigged against you. Nothing on Pisces Iscariot is a dud, but since Corgan puts "mixtape" below the level of "album," you sense he knew something we didn't about "Blue" or "Plume". Perhaps he determined a structural deficiency rendering them incapable of enduring the overdubbing rigor that spawned the thematically similar but exponentially mightier "Bodies", "Fuck You (An Ode to No One)", or, obviously, "Bullet With Butterfly Wings".
Because really, Smashing Pumpkins songs were larger than life and Billy Corgan was not. And he knows it. And the years burn. He never conveyed the political or ethical gravitas of Bono or Eddie Vedder, never was as beautiful and doomed as Kurt Cobain, never stood for musical and technological progress like Thom Yorke. And even if the derision he earned in indie rock was based on outmoded ideals of authenticity, the hatred was real.
Still, even as his first and most intense fans get to rewrite the history of the 90s, Corgan gets left out of the critical pantheon. The music of Pisces Iscariot won't change that, even though it's something close to essential for any self-identifying Pumpkins fan (to these ears, it's more distinctive, sonically diverse, and consistent than the beloved but ultimately threadbare Gish.) But even if most of his musical values are and were derided for celebrating 70s prog/pomp excess, Pisces Iscariot is proof that Corgan might actually be more progressive than he lets on. When you look at how Billy Corgan used the Smashing Pumpkins to interact with the public at the time-- treating liner notes as an exchange between pen pals, doing odd press of his own volition, making "mixtapes" that fused curation with composition-- these are all things that feel awfully commonplace now. Is it any wonder his general attitude nowadays is "no good deed goes unpunished?"


Over a well-played hand of wistful, bright-eyed, and reflective beats, HNDRXX strikes a near-perfect balance between a man still licking his wounds and a man emerging from a long, dark night.

HNDRXX

Future has become the antihero for men who believe emotional torture is essential to masculinity. After a splashy, very public relationship with the singer Ciara, the two had a splashy, very public breakup that spilled from the courts and onto Twitter. In its wake, Future measured his pain into cups of codeine-spiked soda and poured it all over his music, most notably on 2015’s Dirty Sprite 2. Dudes who lived vicariously through him dredged up all sorts of relationship trauma in order to wail alongside him, once more with feeling.
After DS2’s 4 a.m. drive through the desert, Future cartwheeling back into the heart-clutching love songs and sweet-street persona of his 2012 debut, Pluto, might have been jarring. But nobody stays in beast mode forever, and FUTURE, the companion piece to HNDRXX, showed a few cracks in his hardened facade. Heartbreaks heal, especially when you’re a Romeo rapper with an R&B bedside manner and an unending supply of Vicodin. Over a well-played hand of wistful, bright-eyed and reflective beats, HNDRXX strikes a near-perfect balance between a man still licking his wounds and a man emerging from a long, dark night.
That’s not to say there isn’t a little bumpiness upon re-entry. For all of us who missed the old Future—that “Turn on the Lights” Future, that love-you-down-in-the-sheets and buy-you-a-new-Range-for-the-streets Future—HNDRXX’s opener “My Collection” is a bit of a mind fuck. Over a wispy lullaby of a beat that sounds like more like an outro than an intro, Future peels off bills before asking, “You wanna come to Pluto?” Yes! Unfortunately, he lapses into light shaming of Ciara’s sexual history before the cringe-worthy declaration, “Even if I hit you once, you part of my collection.”
A trio of standard-issue songs follows, filled with flossy verses flush with cash, cars, designer namedrops and a couple funny lines (“I wanna take you out to Paris and buy you better clothes,” he says in “Lookin Exotic”; “Baby mama back drinking liquor/Now she tryin’ to fuck my life up” in the DJ Mustard-produced “Damage”). The Weeknd’s sniveling on “Comin Out Strong” aside, these all blur together.
But redemption comes on the ghostly “Use Me.” One of Future’s gifts is imbuing his voice with such emotion that lyrics become putty in his hands. As shadows flit across the wall, the plaintive refrain of “use me” is made all the more gut-wrenching when he belts it. By the time an organ warbles onto the song, he’s spent, his heart wrung dry. The shivery chorus begins to fade, and birds start chirping. It’s chilly, but dawn has finally broken, and somebody's cooking Nayvadius breakfast this morning.
“Incredible” and “Testify” are sun-warmed island beats that smell and shimmer like tanning oil-slicked shoulders. Future sounds like he’s on vacation, loose as his limbs after that hot yoga class. “I was havin’ trust issues/But I’ve been havin’ way better luck since you,” he starts off “Incredible,” relieved to baby talk again instead of bragging about another random bad bitch. Plenty of lines on HNDRXX  melt hearts and make up for all games and the lies: “I wanna hear your heart pump pound for pound …We conversin’ back and forth like we real partners/Spiritually we bonded through the turmoil.”
If that’s not enough, he comes bearing a gentle pop duet with Rihanna, “Selfish” (featuring delicate production from Detail, Major Seven, and Mantra), and a seven-and-a-half minute apology, “Sorry.” He’s still airing out grievances and self-medicating with a fistful of ‘scripts, but the run from “Use Me” to “I Thank U” is inspired. The sun burns the edges of the clouds without entirely breaking through, which feels more honest, anyway.
The old cliché is that artists produce better work when they're in pain, and it did seem like the deeper Future sank, the higher his star rose. Appreciating that without romanticizing or wallowing in his despair is key, as is allowing him freedom to create from a different emotional vantage point. As Charles Bukowski wrote in “Let It Enfold You”: “Either peace or happiness,/Let it enfold you/When I was a young man/I felt these things were/Dumb, unsophisticated.”
But Bukowski got that first part wrong. Peace and happiness do not simply “enfold” you. Sadness spreads like weeds, and channeling that into your music is a means of purging it so it won’t choke you. It’s joy that requires constant tending to grow. With HNDRXX, Future did just that, venturing back into the day for some fresh air with his woman who’s frying bacon. The sand’s like flour between their toes, and the music feels just fine.


The Brooklyn band has described this four-song release as "an EP in length, but well beyond that in scope." If Hospice and Burst Apart were dark, rolling hills headed towards catharsis, here's the bottom.

Undersea

Turmoil is in Peter Silberman's DNA. Leading up to the release of 2011's Burst Apart, the frontman for Brooklyn soundscape-rockers the Antlers told Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal that his band's fourth LP would be less emotionally wrenching than the previous record that put them on the map, 2009's Hospice. "This is not a sad record... It does have an emotional punch, but it's a little less desperate. There are no life or death situations on this record, no terminal illness, no abusive relationships." How'd that turn out, anyway? Well, Burst Apart's opening song is called "I Don't Want Love", and its closing song compares a relationship to a dead dog. Lovers are shunned, teeth fall out, hopelessness is conveyed throughout, and at one point the protagonist seemingly (and willingly) lets a house fire engulf him and whoever else there is inside. Maybe he was joking.
To be fair: While Burst Apart contained its fair share of emotional evisceration, the stakes did seem somewhat lower, or at least less immediately life-shaking. As a lyricist, words have rarely failed Silberman (see: the literate hospitalization-as-cohabitation narrative storytelling of Hospice), but with time he's developed a sense of linguistic economy, which has in turn made the displayed imagery more cryptic and threatening. Perhaps not coincidentally, as the word count decreased, the Antlers zoomed past the early specter of a Funeral Jr. albatross and evolved into something much more interesting: a warm, expansive, and at times hair-raising space-rock band with its attention turned toward fleshy matters, rather than the stars above.
There were hints of this potential to be found in Hospice-- big booming stretches of ambient guitar wash and tape-decayed vocals-- but that record's emotional, singularly focused claustrophobia was so intense and choking that when Sharon Van Etten showed up near the end of the trippy, strung-out "Thirteen", it felt like an intrusion. Burst Apart was all widescreen-lens, though, with guitars that chimed and rolled into some golden void, fog pouring out of keyboards, and so much empty nothingness surrounding the proceedings that everything took on a hollow 3D glow. The album's centerpiece, "Rolled Together", managed to out-Sigur Rós the great Hopelandic ones themselves in just under five minutes; when the band performed the song with Brooklyn bros Neon Indian for last year's regrettable (together) EP, they doubled the length. The results weren't ideal, but it made sense.
And so the Antlers psychedelically steamroll along with Undersea, a four-track release that's been described as "an EP in length, but well beyond that in scope." (If that sounds like bong-session speak, remember Silberman's perfect prescription for listening to "Rolled Together": "best heard stoned with friends".) Since the band become a multi-person concern and broke free from its solo-project beginnings, the Antlers have been credited for production as a group, and their sense of hermetic, mutually reliant interplay has never been stronger than it is here. As they often do, the trio's created its own world within the 22 minutes allotted here-- only, the vibe is pure aftermath, with smoke rising from fresh embers and the environment taking on a lush yet deserted texture. If Hospice and Burst Apart were dark, rolling hills headed toward catharsis, well, here's the bottom.
And what a gorgeous arrival it is. Every detail on Undersea sounds like breakable goods bought at a high-end flatwares store, and I mean that as the highest compliment-- it's all wrapped in thick, translucent gauze, not so much crash-landing as simply (but heavily) kissing the ground upon impact. "Endless Ladder", an eight-minute perpetual comedown with a title that's almost eye-rollingly evocative, surfs a single, stretchy riff with zen carelessness as frissons of synth noise and burbly echo-mic'd whine pass by. It's almost maddeningly head-in-the-clouds, but also something that, if it hits you at just the right time, you could possibly listen to on loop for hours. "Endless Ladder"'s three companions on Undersea aren't as openly contemplative (although the harp-and-horn blare of "Drift Dive" certainly comes close), instead leaning on the dark sonic undercurrents of post-adolescent tension that makes this band a big deal to many people.
Still, the Antlers at their most mopey are still plenty elegant, so the dirge-like "Crest" ripples with laser swooshes and rattlesnake percussion, mining new depths of total paranoia. Speaking of feelings: There are plenty of them on display (this is the Antlers, after all), as Undersea's water-based theme finds a few uses for H2O other than pure hydration-- drowning, flooding, and subsequently destroying the world, and in the case of the sad-eyed kiss-off closer "Zelda", separating those who love one another.
Silberman's lyrics are as simultaneously distant and evocative as ever, but the overwhelming amount of detail surrounding them renders them somewhat irrelevant here, a bubbling treasure chest in Undersea's sonically overwhelming fish tank. If you're the type that "can relate" to the Antlers' highwire drama, there's a solid chance this release could leave you cold. (On the other hand, if Hospice left you jeeringly and incorrectly shouting "My Bloody Bright Eyes!" then you just might love this.)
"I'm not listening to [Neutral Milk Hotel's] In the Aeroplane Over the Sea as much as I was when I was 19," Silberman also told us back in the beginning of 2011, listing Portishead, Dirty Three, Boards of Canada, and the various strains of post-rock and electronic music as emerging influences in the now 25-year-old's musical mindset. Namechecking obscurists and hip-to-death backseat drivers (both of which are plentiful in the Antlers' native Brooklyn landscape) would quite possibly sneer at these admissions-- who hasn't had a moment with Geogaddi in their 20s?-- but what struck me upon reading those quotes, specifically, was Silberman's sincerity in growing as a music listener.
So just as Silberman has laid bare his own messy, tormented angst as a means of moving on and becoming stronger, the Antlers as a band are growing up, and growing forth, into a career that's accruing fascinating weight with every move they make. They are a popular band, but in today's cool-kid, all-new-all-the-time musical culture, their emotional straightforwardness and debt to the since-canonical sounds of the past means that they perpetually risk being underappreciated. So ignore them if you dare, but consider yourself warned, too, that watching one of the biggest little groups in Brooklyn conjure such fascinating sonic shapes is becoming a reward in itself.


Love From Dust marks the minimalist Irish producer Donnacha Costello's return to making music after unspecified circumstances in 2010 led him to sell off his studio and abandon music entirely. The gentle, elegiac collection was recorded live in single takes and with no overdubs on an obscure Buchla Music Easel synthesizer.

Love From Dust

For a minimalist, Donnacha Costello has always tended to think big. True, the Irish producer's debut album, 2000's Growing Up in Public, was an exquisitely restrained array of blips and digital crackle, but that turned out to be a red herring once you looked past the clicks. His 2001 album Together Is the New Alone was an example of ambient music at its most emotionally resonant, and from there he really broadened his horizons. Colorseries, his crowning achievement to date, sprawled across 10 different 12"'s that wrung every last drop of incandescence from a lean machine setup.
Love From Dust is Costello's first album in five years. It marks his return to making music after unspecified circumstances in 2010 led him to sell off his studio and abandon music entirely. A more fortuitous set of circumstances brought him back: a custom-built EMS Synthi A, a rare analog synthesizer, finally became available to him after 13 years with his name on the waiting list. Costello's attempt to crowdfund the costs of recording a new album didn't meet his goal, so, alas, no Synthi. But he did raise enough to buy his backup choice, a Buchla Music Easel, which constitutes the album's entire instrumentation, save a pair of effects pedals.
While it's not a concept album, it's very much an album determined by a specific set of constraints. The Music Easel is designed to be played in real time—the Philadelphia musician Charles Cohen, who also recorded his most recent album on the device, has described the instrument's benefits as "complicated control over simple sounds, as opposed to many other instruments, where you have very, very complex sounds but only simple control"—and to that end, Costello recorded his album live in single takes with no overdubs. It's striking that a synthesizer this obscure should turn up as the sole instrument on two albums in the same year, but the two records couldn't be more different. Where Cohen's music is wiry and alien, evoking transistors with indigestion, Costello's is gentle, elegiac, soft as a well-watered lawn in the shade.
He favors slow-moving chord progressions and consonant tones and extreme repetition, and each of the album's seven tracks is built around a single repeating figure. (The bookending songs "Niigata Moment" and "Unconditional" are variations upon the same theme, which lends to the sense that the album is best absorbed in a single sitting—or, better yet, while dropping off to sleep.) The wistful "Ten Ton" patiently follows organ-like tones through a softly cycling chord progression; "Farewell" evokes Boards of Canada at their dreamiest, with silvery filaments that seem to dissolve in thin air. Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II is another obvious antecedent, both for its warm analog tones and its naïve melodies.
Structurally, each track is a one-way street, repeating the same figure for so long that it's easy to forget that it's even playing. But then a note jumps up or down an octave, snapping you out of your reverie. And if you skip from the end of a track back to the beginning, you may be surprised to find how much has changed without you noticing, as the waveforms have grown teeth and toughened up, going from a lowing drone to a ragged growl. It all builds to a head with "Everything Is Going to Be", the album's penultimate track, and its longest. There's something about the distortion that makes its resolving chord progression feel even more satisfying; the tension registers as a physical vibration, and the release is just as visceral. At the music's peak, the tone is almost obscured by the buzz; it's like trying to catch a glimpse of a gorgeous landscape through narrowing blinds. It's a small moment that feels huge, a mark of Costello's talent not so much as a minimalist as an illusionist.


After 2010 breakthrough Clinging to a Scheme LP, Sweden's the Radio Dept. return with a strong career overview based on their varied singles output.

The Radio Dept.: Passive Aggressive: Singles 2002-2010

Passive Aggressive: Singles 2002-2010

The Radio Dept. have spent their whole career as underdogs. They are a band whose big moment has always seemed just out of reach, something compounded by the fact that they went album-less for four years, finally ending the dry spell with last year's fine Clinging to a Scheme. That record's success brought with it a swell of momentum-- two singles, an EP, and even a free Internet single to coincide with the Swedish elections. It was a period of activity that won them a whole new set of listeners, and the decision to reconcile their scattered career into an accessible singles collection seems to be a wise move.
The first disc of Passive Aggressive aims to be just that-- a collection of chronologically ordered singles and album material that shows how much ground the Radio Dept. have covered in eight years. "Why Won't You Talk About It?" opens the set with in-the-red guitars and a drumbeat that seems to be endlessly on the verge of kicking in. Johan Duncanson's barely there vocals have a similar lackadaisical quality and effortless cool to Julian Casablancas of Is This It-era Strokes. It has a magnetic breeziness about it, and for all of the early-2000s signifiers and the blown-out lo-fi production, it actually sounds five years ahead of its time.
After the debut album, Lesser Matters, the band took on a more electronic bent, showcased here by "The Worst Taste in Music", a well-executed piece of synth-pop reminiscent of the Pet Shop Boys and a stand-out moment on the collection. It's a shame that it is the sole representative from 2006's underrated Pet Grief. Much of that excellent record pre-dates many of the recent Balearic-leaning groups such as Korallreven, jj, and ceo, and this would have been an excellent opportunity to recast their significance as progenitors of that scene.
At their best, as on last year's "Heaven's on Fire", the Radio Dept. internalize their varied influences-- dub, sample culture, synth pop-- and refocus them into a something that is unmistakably their own. Their identity is so hard-wired into the core of the sound that it means they can nod to slightly alien textures such as the offbeat keys and dub leanings of "Never Follow Suit" without it sounding contrived.
The B-sides disc is less strong, and there are some odd choices-- the inclusion of throwaway instrumental "Tåget" over the excellent Cure-tinged cut "Deliverance" from the This Past Week EP is disappointing. There are a few highlights to be found, but even those, such as buzzy instrumental "Mad About the Boy", sound like sketches. At best, some of these songs show promise, at worst, the mostly minor-key explorations come across as labored and even overwrought in the case of "You and Me Then?". While it's interesting to hear the band experiment and stretch its legs, these tracks mark a lot of the disc out as fan-only material.
The weakness of the second disc makes for a slightly awkward contrast as the collection straddles an uncomfortable middle ground between appeasing long-time fans with rarities and acting as a primer to the band's sadly underrated previous material. But while there are a few selection missteps overall, the first disc in particular makes for a great initiation to the Radio Dept.'s previous work. And that there is the opportunity to re-introduce this long undervalued band is something to cheer in itself.


The Beatles are the subject of yet another reissue campaign. This time it's a box set compiling the band's four 1964 U.S. albums-- Meet the Beatles, The Beatles' Second Album, Something New, and Beatles '65-- none of which have been previously issued on CD.

The Capitol Albums, Vol. 1

I. What is this box set about?
A. The set contains the first four American-version Beatles records, all from 1964, in mono and new stereo mixes.

Meet the Beatles

The Beatles' Second Album

Something New

Beatles '65

B. It also contains a 48-page booklet with notes by Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn (The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions).
C. These albums have never been available on CD until now.
D. These albums have never been available in stereo in any format until now.

They were remastered from the original Capitol master tapes.

The stereo effect was actually produced by using the two original tracks of mono, compressing them and then adding some reverb. (i.e., these aren't actual "stereo" performances, but "duophonic.")

E. The albums are presented in miniature replicas of the original LP jackets.
II. Is it worthwhile for Beatle fanatics? Casual fans?
A. Since most fans have owned the British versions of the Beatles' albums for years, this set is most valuable to American fans who lived through Beatlemania, or as a curio to the rest of us.
B. The packaging seems hastily assembled. The CDs don't even come in inner sleeves, so they always fall out when you pick them up.
C. Casual fans would be better off sticking to the British albums (on EMI), as they contain most of this music in superior mixes. They also have the notable characteristic of being the records the Beatles wanted to make, unlike these Capitol-assembled compilations.
D. Nobody really needs to own "Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand" twice-- owning the Past Masters sets takes care of all the non-album singles, and the British albums have the rest.
III. Do the stereo mixes sound good?
A. Remember, it's "duophonic," not stereo. The Pet Sounds reissue from a few years ago is a much better example of presenting in stereo an album that was originally released in mono.
B. The Capitol mixes are filled with reverb. This gets annoying after a while, because all the vocals sound cavernous.
C. That said, the instrumental tracks are clearer.
IV. Why did they only do this for these albums, and not the rest of the catalog?
A. The existing Beatles' CD catalog hasn't been remastered because there is no need.

The sound is good, especially considering when they were remastered (1987).

They still sell well. There's no need to fix what isn't broken.

B. That said, I'd love to hear a 24-bit treatment of the Beatles' records. Few bands deserve to be heard in optimal sound more than them.
V. How do the individual albums hold up?
A. Meet the Beatles

There isn't a bad song on this record, with the possible exception of McCartney's "Hold Me Tight", which lacks a good melody, and features some of the least interesting lyrics in the Beatles' canon ("Hold me tight/ Tell me I'm the only one/ And then I might/ Never be the lonely one"? D'oh!).

Leading off with "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "I Saw Her Standing There" leads to a slightly anti-climactic experience for the remainder of the record.

I can't imagine ever listening to the mono versions of these songs again. But then, I can't really imagine playing these albums much anyway.

B. The Beatles' Second Album

Alright, that's not fair. There is some historical value to hearing this stuff. So, go history.

"She Loves You" is still one of my favorite Beatles singles.

Cover version war: Lennon singing "Money" and "Please Mr. Postman" towers over McCartney's "Long Tall Sally" and Harrison's "Roll Over Beethoven". However, just like the British edition of Beatles for Sale (1964), this album seems overrun with covers.

C. Something New

Now we're getting good: "Things We Said Today" and "If I Fell" are two of the best pre-Rubber Soul Beatle songs. "And I Love Her" also nods to the direction the band would take starting in 1965.

And yet, Capitol thought "Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand" complimented them well.

Still, this seems like the most thoughtfully compiled of the Capitol albums.

D. Beatles '65

And this is the most haphazardly compiled. "I'm a Loser", "No Reply", and "I'll Follow the Sun" stand up to the best early Beatles songs, but seem out of place on a record featuring "Rock and Roll Music", "Mr. Moonlight", and "Honey Don't".

"Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby" has more reverb than any song I've ever heard. Okay, maybe not more than that last Acid Mothers Temple album, but close.

Capitol kept releasing different versions of the Beatles' records until Sgt. Pepper's in 1967. According to some, the Beatles protested in 1966 by delivering the infamous "butchered baby" cover photo for Yesterday... And Today. If Capitol put that in the next box, I'd give an extra point just on principle.

VI. Anything else?
Not really. I'm giving this a 6 because while there's a lot of great music here, there's very little incentive for me to play it, and none of these albums compare favorably to their British counterparts. Oh well. Next up: McCartney's ready for some football.


On their 1991 breakthrough album, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were the partially-clothed id, barreling toward the funk and stumbling across inclusiveness along the way.

Red Hot Chili Peppers: Blood Sugar Sex Magik

Blood Sugar Sex Magik

In 1984, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were a long shot to make it to the 21st century. They were a party band back then—too funky for hair metal, too cock-obsessed for college rock. (And that name, perfectly encapsulating the band’s essence while being incredibly gauche.) They wrote songs about their dicks; they then stretched cotton socks over those same dicks and jumped around on stage without fear of gravity. They were revered as a potent live act, and got some songs on the radio, but they’d yet to make a strong step forward—their own label balked at giving them resources. The decade passed with small successes—a gold record for 1989’s Mother’s Milk—and unexpected tragedies, such as the death of founding guitarist Hillel Slovak, with the hope of something better to come. In the music world, they were definitely not a big deal.
And then, the world changed. By now, the hagiography about Nirvana’s Nevermind has been well-repeated: It terraformed the radio into new, unfamiliar shapes, it sparked a 10,000% rise in flannel sales; it broke pained groaning as a pop sound, etc. But it also set the tone for a decade more permissive of what a popular rock band could sound and look like, in ways that would reverberate far away from grunge or flannel obsessives. Their success allowed a fomenting alternasphere of bands who didn’t adhere to existing mainstream norms to rise up: Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden… and suddenly, the Chili Peppers. Blood Sugar Sex Magik was released on September 24, 1991, the same day as Nevermind, a neat coincidence for historical records, and perfect timing for their attempt at fitting into a broader cultural milieu. In its title—a phrase as ridiculous as their name—were the irreducible elements of their previous records, distilled into a declarative statement.
Teenaged guitarist John Frusciante had been hired after the untimely death of Slovak, who passed away from a heroin overdose in 1988. Slovak rooted the band in their early sped-up punk-funk sound, a slurry molding of acts like Gang of Four, Jimi Hendrix, and Parliament-Funkadelic (George Clinton produced their second album, Freaky Styley). On those records, the Chili Peppers sounded like a live band trying to rein it in, with varying success. They’d never recorded two records with the same lineup, forcing them to continually jel on the fly. Frusciante changed all of that. His melodic instincts were languid and expressionist—a counterpunch to a rhythm section that wrote funk for moshing, allowing them to write open-hearted songs for the first time in their career. He found his footing following an up-and-down recording for Mother’s Milk, which forced him to shed his identity as a kid playing with his heroes. “The first year or so I wanted to be in the band so bad, I wanted to do a good job so much,” he said in an oral history of the group. “I was trying too hard to be like what I thought a Chili Pepper should be rather than just being myself… musically on guitar and in my personal life.”
Part of this smoothing process was also due to their newly signed multi-million record deal with Warner, which pretty much necessitated they try to release something approaching a blockbuster. As producer, they brought in Rick Rubin, who by 1991 was already a monastic, perma-bearded guru with a reputation as band whisperer, having made high-profile career-best records with Slayer, the Cult, Danzig, and half the rap world. Unlike early producers, who gave the Chili Peppers specific direction and sounds to shoot for, Rubin allowed them to relax. Instead of recording in a studio, the band decamped to a spacious house in Laurel Canyon, where most of the members lived in between sessions. (Drummer Chad Smith commuted from his nearby Los Angeles home, because he was spooked by rumors the house was haunted; Frusciante reported once hearing a woman scream in some coital outburst, while Anthony Kiedis said psychic mediums had detected “sexual energy” in the house. Believe what you will.)
Funky Monks, a documentary capturing the whole operation, presents an interaction between Frusciante and Kiedis that sums up the pull-and-push between their newfound artistic focus and their irrepressible sophomoric fuckery. Frusciante, earnest and clean-shaven, is exuberant. “We’re making an amazing, amazing, groundbreaking, revolutionary, beautiful, artistically heightened, incredible record,” he gushes. Next to him, Kiedis suppresses an eye-roll, deadpanning: “If Baron von Munchausen had ejaculated the four of us, being the Red Hot Chili Peppers, onto a chessboard, I would have to say Rick Rubin would be the perfect chess player for that particular board.” Frusciante, undone by his own guilelessness, grins like a dork.
But Kiedis was learning to be earnest, too. “Under the Bridge” might have remained a scribbled-down poem had Rubin not spotted it while flipping through Kiedis’ notebook; he suggested he show it to the band, despite Kiedis’ reservations that it didn’t sound like it could be a Chili Peppers song. He was right, but that didn’t matter: They worked out a tempo and key, and later, Frusciante came up with a lonesome chord progression for what would become their defining moment. The power ballad sounded wildly different than anything they’d ever recorded; the lyrics were completely unmuddled by Kiedis’ rhetorical gesticulations, speaking plainly about an isolation felt after wandering the city in search of something your loved ones couldn’t provide. Millions of MTV viewers didn’t need to shoot heroin in order to connect with Kiedis’ allusive plea to be freed from his demons: “I don’t ever want to feel like I did that day/Take me to the place I love, take me all the way.”
The video, which featured the enduring shot of Kiedis running shirtless in slow motion toward the camera, looking very zen-Danzig, played constantly on MTV, pushing their record sales even higher. It legitimized them as a “serious” band, for all their denuded giddiness, and became a mainstay of MTV’s “Buzz Bin” section, which plucked out promising singles and pushed them toward greater success. “Buzz Bin” videos were explicitly programmed to play three times a day, seven days a week, for eight weeks, while also receiving tangential news coverage around the network—and the Chili Peppers had two of them in “Under the Bridge” and “Give It Away.” In an era where MTV could still break new bands, that was no small tool in pushing their music to the mass audience they’d always craved. As they shared airspace with artful videos like “Losing My Religion” and “Jeremy,” a band that had once written a song called “Party on Your Pussy” was suddenly meaningful.
The faded, tender spirit of “Under the Bridge” went with yearning songs like “Breaking the Girl” and “I Could Have Lied,” both penned about Kiedis’ doomed relationships. (The latter was allegedly inspired by a brief fling with Sinéad O’Connor—imagine those conversations.) They sounded sweeter, and somehow mature. For a long time, the Chili Peppers had been preoccupied with the grime and uninhibited physicality of sex. As Kiedis put it in his autobiography, which is punctuated every 15 pages with an X-rated anecdote: “You’re young and you’re not jaded yet and so the idea of being naked and playing this beautiful music with your best friends and generating so much energy and color and love in a moment of being nude is great. But you’re not only nude, you’ve also got this giant image of a phallus going for you.”
That says it all, as does the album’s subject matter. A lot of songs are about what the boys liked to do best. The title track? It’s about fucking. The Cretaceous oogie-boogie of “Funky Monks,” in which Kiedis sneers “Every man has certain needs/Talkin’ ’bout them dirty deeds”? It’s about fucking. “Sir Psycho Sexy,” an over-eight-minute wet dream defined by its burping bass tone and letter-to-Penthouse lyrics? It’s about fucking. “Suck My Kiss,” with its “Mr. Brownstone” flow and fighter’s groove? Definitely about fucking—and by the way, one guess what the original title was supposed to be? The unapologetic attitude toward sex was reflected in the extended jams that dot the album. The Chili Peppers saw no need for a 30-second outro when two or four minutes might work, creating extra time for dancing and whoever-knows-what.
You don’t have to read the Kiedis book to intuit that the Chili Peppers saw nakedness not just as lascivious romp—though, of course, there was that—but as pathway to a more unconscious, unrestrained state. They weren’t total goons; they were into mindfulness, and all that. The album opens with “The Power of Equality,” an explicitly anti-racist missive where Kiedis professes his love for Public Enemy and bellows “Say what I want, do what I can/Death to the message of the Ku Klux Klan.” “The Righteous and the Wicked” intones about a forthcoming environmental apocalypse owing to man’s selfish behavior, with Frusciante’s guitar tone sounding like a dark cloud pumped through a smokestack. Their gestures toward social justice were hardly sophisticated, less a well-reasoned dialogue than a full-throated “Racism fuckin’ sucks,” but that was the point. They were the partially-clothed id, barreling toward the funk and stumbling across inclusiveness along the way. During their performance at Woodstock ’99, they were asked by Jimi Hendrix’s sister to cover one of the late guitar legend’s songs as tribute; they picked “Fire,” which they’d performed for years, and ripped into it right as real bonfires were spreading at the festival, leading to the not-inaccurate charge they were literally fanning the flames. They mostly meant well, but didn’t always stick the landing.
They were also still sometimes prone to fratty, unjustifiable behavior: Kiedis was once convicted of indecent exposure, and Flea and Smith were charged with battery and sexual harassment after an incident where they spanked and yelled at a female fan present for an “MTV Spring Break” performance. Many more examples of inappropriate behavior are out there, and while it’s easy to imagine their defense—“We were just having fun”; “we got out of control”; “we were too drunk”; pick one— it doesn’t mean they weren’t acting like assholes. This attitude found a home with a certain segment of listeners. In his book, Kiedis notes the label’s concerns that “a large segment” of their fan base would be alienated by a shot in the video for “Warped” where he and Dave Navarro (who played with them in the ’90s; it’s a long story) briefly kissed. As they got older, the Chili Peppers never really grappled with the ramifications of all their bad behavior (like, say, the Beastie Boys). They were a classic Los Angeles rock band, a city where thousands of behaviorally repugnant transgressions have been ignored in the name of entertainment.
At their best, they folded their unbridled mentality into their burgeoning pop sensibility. “Give It Away” remains one of the memorable rock singles of the ’90s. Led by Flea’s hiccuping bass line, and filled out by Frusciante’s chrome-plated guitar work, it split the difference between the lizard-brain rock of their early days and the blissed-out spirituality they would later adopt. Kiedis was extremely on one, waxing existential like a naked priest you find at Burning Man: “There’s never been a better time than right now”; “Low brow but I rock a little know how”; “Reeling with the feeling don’t stop continue.” Gutter-minded it seemed, lines like “what I’ve got you’ve got to get it put it in you” weren’t sly ways of suggesting he’d like to hug and kiss you. (It’s a reflection on how love—the spiritual, not physical kind—has to be given away, taken from a life lesson gifted by the musician and artist Nina Hagen, with whom he was briefly involved.) Likewise, “Come and drink it up from my fertility” wasn’t only a literal request to suck his dick, even if he grabbed his junk in the video.
For all the snark that Kiedis’—shall we say—unique lyricism attracts, he was nonpareil amongst rock singers at chaining solecistic, seemingly dada-esque thoughts into melodically effortless, rap-inspired verse. Though the Chili Peppers would inevitably inspire “rap-rock,” that wallet-chained spectre haunting the conclusion of the ’90s, Kiedis’ rubbery delivery, filled with hard inflections to catch your ear, softened what could’ve been an ugly clash of styles. “Give It Away” was certainly the best example of that virtuosic talent. It was also aided by an instantly eye-catching video, directed by French photographer Stéphane Sednaoui, which must have been storyboarded simply: “We’re gonna take you to the desert, smear you in silver paint, and let you Chi Pep the fuck out.” The indelible image of the shined-up Chili Peppers edited together in the same frame, writhing and flowing in balletic motion, snapshotted their vibe better than a million magazine profiles could.
Generation-signifying album it might be, it’s hard not to notice that a quarter of the record could be lost at no harm. “Mellowship Slinky in B Major” sounds like the worst of the limpid funk-rap they’d later inspire; “Apache Rose Peacock” and “Naked in the Rain” are redundant with other tracks; “The Greeting Song” is openly despised by Kiedis himself, who said he was pushed to write it by Rubin. (Here he is, unequivocal: “To this day, I hate that song. I hate the lyrics, I hate the vocals.”)
Of course, no one is listening to the album 25 years later because of “Mellowship Slinky in B Major.” It’s endured as a document of the moment when the Chili Peppers went widescreen—when they suddenly seemed like a band that might last for another 25 years. In 2016, the Chili Peppers signify nothing but themselves. But unlike the surviving members of the 1991 alt-rock class, their new music gets on the radio, and they remain massively popular by conventional metrics. (Their latest album debuted at No. 2 on the charts; a worldwide stadium tour is ongoing.) Blood Sugar Sex Magik is also a lodestone for a brand of more aggressive, politically negligent rock music that would emerge by the end of the ’90s. Their red-blooded punk-funk hybrid was the Beatles to a generation of misunderstood, aggro listeners who started bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit, and that sound was best exemplified on this record. Maybe that’s a dubious legacy, but it still makes them a significant reference point for any serious look at how the decade would turn out.
Flea once praised Chad Smith’s drumming by saying he kept them from “floating off into the sissy-boy ether,” which explains their subliminal tilt toward jock rock. Nevertheless, a special mysterious something permeates the album. They were directly influenced by the darkened moods of Jane’s Addiction, their closest peer in the alternative scene (which is part of why Navarro joined the band), who drove them to pull something unexplained from the fringes of their creativity. It’s in the glitchy, lapping solo that plays in “Give It Away,” the ghostly flute touches on “Breaking the Girl,” the pyrotechnic outro to “Sir Psycho Sexy.” It’s in the album’s mythology: “They’re Red Hot,” a cover of the apocryphally Satan-indebted Robert Johnson, was recorded outdoors on top of a hill, as though the band were communing with the dead. A cosmic weariness brought on by Kiedis’ drug addiction, and the band’s realization of mortality in the wake of Slovak’s death, surrounds the songs. It’s seen through the lens of antic cock rock, but it’s there.
All of it set the stage for the whole mystical California thing that would define their later years, and allow them to grow into a legacy rock band. It unlocked their ability to write any type of song within the Chili Peppers framework, and enabled them to write their biggest album, Californication, upon Frusciante’s reunion with the band due to a brief, exhausting separation. Frusciante would eventually leave again, and the band would struggle to reach the same creative heights, but it didn’t matter. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, Super Bowl halftime performance, the bass solo at Kobe’s last game—they slowly became iconic, known by their mononyms and their socks and the pleasure of trying to imitate Kiedis’ inimitable flow off the top of your head. Not bad for some Cali yucks.


This 4xCD box set is the most expansive and exhaustive summary of the rock'n'roll legend's long career, which had its share of ups and downs and ended on an impossibly high note with his 1989 album Mystery Girl and his work with the Traveling Wilburys.

The Soul of Rock And Roll

Roy Orbison didn't shake his hips. He didn't set his piano on fire. Didn't wear blue suede shoes. Didn't become a preacher, marry his cousin, or go to jail. He wasn't what you'd call handsome, at least not in the sublime way that Elvis wore his looks. He was neither a rebel nor a rabble-rouser. He stood stock still and kept his head up. He sang about crying over girls, and his signature shades hid the tears in his eyes. He played a mean guitar, but sang a meaner ballad. He yearned and wept, but never moped. His stoic demeanor lent his tales of heartbreak a dignity that gave them verisimilitude and told his teenage listeners that all their confusion and pain-- all part of the culture, even if shunned by adults-- were real and worthwhile.
Most efforts to laud Orbison, a first-generation rock'n'roller whose earliest hits were recorded at Sun Studio alongside Elvis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins, tend to appraise him as the granddaddy of some current trend, like emo, when in fact he is, like Bruce Springsteen or Tom Waits, a more singular artist. With its natural quaver and multi-octave range, his voice allowed him to do things other singers could not, and his best singles pair his stately vocals with equally ornate arrangements. However, if indie musicians wanted to shelve their copies of Pet Sounds and Born to Run for a few years and start taking notes on Orbison, not only would that make my job a whole lot more interesting, but The Soul of Rock and Roll would be the place for them to start.
This 4xCD box set is the most expansive and exhaustive summary of Orbison's decades-long career, which had its share of ups (the early 1960s, the late 80s) and downs (the 70s) and ended on an impossibly high note with his 1989 best-selling album Mystery Girl and his work with the Traveling Wilburys. Most Orbison comps begin at Sun Studio, with tender teenage hits "Devil Doll" and "Ooby Dooby" (Orbison may be the only singer who can make those two syllables not sound sexual and still sound interesting), but this set finds life before Memphis. Orbison was a guitar slinger with the Teen Kings in the early 50s, drawing from vocal groups, country and western, and rockabilly without really synthesizing them. Perhaps the most revealing track is "Guitar Pull Medley", a previously unreleased nine-minute recording of Orbison, by request, ripping through covers like "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You" and "That's All Right" at a party, proving he could hold his own against his more popular labelmate Elvis. Orbison's cool and easy proficiency with so many songs contrasts with his companion's starry-eyed demeanor. It sounds like a scene from Robert Altman's Nashville.
The Soul of Rock and Roll is broken down primarily by decade-- a logical organizing principle even if it doesn't actually fit his career very precisely. Still, that means the second disc is far and away the best here, with a run of hits for Nashville-based Monument Records that's about as close to perfect as possible. "Uptown", "Only the Lonely", "Blue Angel", "In Dreams", and "Running Scared" (a modified bolero) are grandiose and operatic, lushly arranged, cleverly recorded (all in one take, with no overdubs), and as genuinely moving as pop music can be. Cathedrals to heartbreak, these early Monument recordings represent not only the set's high point, but the heyday of Orbison's career and the era that defined the rest of his catalog. The rest of his 60s output follows the same template, as Orbison and producer Fred Foster give similar treatment to "All I Have to Do Is Dream", the gorgeous "Blue Bayou", and the Willie Nelson-penned "Pretty Paper".
The third disc covers Orbison's 70s output, but almost all of these songs predate that decade by several years. Following the deaths of his first wife in a motorcycle accident and two of his sons in a house fire, he spent most of the 70s away from the spotlight, but The Soul of Rock and Roll uses that downtime to argue convincingly that his strengths as a balladeer were matched by his prowess as a guitarist and his power as a performer. From 1963, his cover of "Mean Woman Blues", with its relentless beat, effervescent sha-la-la backing vocals, and yakkety sax, actually swings, especially on his fiery guitar solo. And his take on Ray Charles' "What'd I Say", recorded live in Holland, stomps and shimmies like his early rockabilly material.
The final chapter is far and away the most surprising, a plot twist that no one could have predicted: Instead of fading away like, say, Carl Perkins, Orbison launched an improbable late-in-life comeback that's all the more remarkable for breezily updating his signature style while sidestepping bland dinosaur rock. "You Got It" and "She's a Mystery to Me", both from his swan song Mystery Girl, show only a few new wrinkles in his voice, which add texture and authority. His new recordings of "Oh Pretty Woman" and "In Dreams", both for his 1987 greatest hits album, of course can't improve on the originals, but aren't the disasters most re-recordings turn out to be. And Orbison is perfectly at home with the Traveling Wilburys on "Not Alone Anymore", although his verse on "Handle With Care" makes that song a notable omission in this set.
The worst I can say about The Soul of Rock and Roll is that the liner notes are particularly unrevealing, a missed opportunity. An artist like Orbison, who despite his success haunts the periphery of rock history, not the center, demands a more balanced and in-depth approach that can contextualize his music without resorting to namedropping and can relate meaningful commentary without resorting to anecdote. Missing that textual component, the set loses some of its impact, but Orbison's songs-- at once modest and grandiose, showy and private-- provide all the testimony he needs.


Guillermo Scott Herren collaborator's project is similarly enamored of Latin American psych-folk, scratchy beats, and warm, homemade production.

Awe Owe

The concept of black ice cream-- what flavor is "black" anyway? licorice? walnut? black bean?-- sounds strange but refreshing. Which is an apt description of the music of Helado Negro, Roberto Carlos Lange's project named for the Spanish translation of that odd dessert. On his debut, Lange, the Florida-raised child of Ecuadorian immigrants, offers a lazy summer's day worth of dreamy, percussive tracks (almost entirely sung in Spanish) that pay homage to his roots yet use broad brush strokes from a silvery, futuristic palette. It's like Beck's version of Tropicália, but bled of his white-boy admiration of the exotic.
You may recognize Lange from his work in Guillermo Scott Herren's Savath y Savalas, a project that is similarly enamored of Latin American psych-folk, scratchy beats, and warm, homemade production. And, in a lot of ways (most notably its blend of traditional Latin music with the elastic sonics of experimental electronica), Awe Owe sounds like a follow-up to Savath y Savalas' La Llama, which was released earlier this year. Except that there is no place for Llama's spooky undercurrent amidst Awe Owe's feather-weight, beachy effervescence. Without the steely, mechanical effects and dark, tinny din that are clearly preoccupations of Herren's, Lange is free to leave lots of airy space between his chattering percussion and loopy xylophone melodies and play with whispery bossa nova textures without being overwhelmed by rhythmic heaviness.
Without hooks to hang on to, though, or vocals to serve as your guide-- most of the singing here is washed out, like the sun-bleached stucco of homes by the shore-- this album gives off a first impression of curiously constructed background music. But like a pointillist painting, the individual songs seem fuzzy and indistinct until you look at the album as a whole, and only then do they sharpen into view. Opener "Venceremos" (translation: "we will triumph") gives the album a whimsical start, with a plucky xylophone run that's reminiscent of Stephen Malkmus' "Phantasies". The track then finds its groove with trotting percussion that sounds like horse hooves against cobblestone streets and an acoustic strum so breezy that you can practically smell the saltwater in the air.
With its ambiance so clearly stated from the get-go, the album then moves on into Animal Collective territory with "Espuma Negra", which builds its psych-tinged track over a hypnotic, repetitive core riff. Then "Dos Sueños" lives up to its title (which translates to "two dreams") with an ethereal, winding melody, spare, plinky orchestration, and some tangy harmonized "oohs" that are so mellifluous they almost sound created by synthesizers or a Theremin instead of human voices.
The album is frontloaded, though, and the middle, mostly instrumental section is somewhat forgettable and monotonous before giving way to the best song on the record. After roughly 35 minutes of organic melodies spackled over electronic beats and effects, closing track "Deja" surprises with its handclap percussion, which makes a nice bed for Lange's hushed, easy singing, nimble fingerpicking, and the ominous sound of distant church bells. Eventually the track displays Lange's mechanical proclivities, layering hard-edged scrapes and computerized bubbles under its echo-y vocal melody, making it the only track on the collection that sounds like it is meant to be listened to, not by the sea, but 20,000 leagues under it.
Lange made Awe Owe in his home studio in Brooklyn with different friends and collaborators (from the aforementioned Herren to Stars Like Flea's Shannon Fields) floating in and out of the sessions, and this gives the album the feel of being stitched together like a homemade quilt. And like a quilt, it is warm and comforting, if not necessarily dynamic. So while it may never deviate from its mid-tempo lull, its mellow, reflective songs are goosed by their Latin melodies, making it a languidly satisfying complement to the hazy, hot final weeks of summer.


Incredibly, this is the first U.S. CD release of the legendary punk album from Ari Up and company.

Cut

Here are some things you might already know about Cut, even if you haven't heard one note of the Slits' music: This is the first time the album's been released domestically in the U.S. on CD (with the obligatory bonus tracks). The album cover features three members of the group wearing nothing but mud and loincloths. When the group first formed, they couldn't play their instruments for shit. The songs on the album offer an amalgam of punk's abrasive DIY WTF-ness and the spacious relaxed rhythms of dub reggae. This album is a keystone for any and all punk-based grrrl movements. And-- though it goes without saying, it's often said anyway-- this album is terribly, terribly important in the history of the rock music and the grand scheme of canonical flippity floo flap.
Funny thing is, for all its import, Cut is actually a lot of fun. Fun in the way Ari Up trills and coos and yelps across the songs like a precocious schoolgirl taunting all the boys and teachers. Fun in the way Viv Albertine scratches and waxes her guitar. Fun in the way Tessa's bass and Budgie's drums slip in and out of grooves like lovers test-driving the Kama Sutra. Fun in the way the group turns every subject it touches into a giddy playground sing-a-long, whether it be a diatribe against pre-set gender roles ("Typical Girls"), a story about Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten butting heads ("So Tough"), a cautionary tale about PiL's Keith Levene's drug use ("Instant Hit"), or songs tackling other didactic topics like invasive media propaganda, shoplifting and the idealized love of a new purchase. Fun in the way producer Dennis Bovell employees spoons and matchboxes as beat accents (in "Newtown"), centers the group's meanderings with a little piano or more traditional percussion, and allows the band to occupy both punk and dub at the same time. The Slits don't destroy passerby: They stop them, dance around them, sing songs to and about them, playfully taunt and tease them, and then pass them the dutchie.
The bonus tracks are OK add-ons-- the group's version of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" was slated to be the record's first single way back in the day, and would have served fine as another respectfully disrespectful punk cover, but appropriately ended up as the B-side to the actual first single, "Typical Girls". "Liebe and Romanze (Slow Version)" is an instrumental version of "Love Und Romance" bathing in the hot and welcome tropical sun outside of Lee Perry's studio, and serves as a pleasant cool down after the frenetic shenanigans that preceded. But, of course, if you're giving this album a spin, it's for the first 10 tracks, and if you're coming to them for the very first time, then I envy you. Yes, this is an important document, and part of any balanced popular musical diet, but this isn't a multi-vitamin-- this is skipping school as spring turns to summer to spend an extra-long lunch with friends driving to the not-so-local Jamaican bakery for a few beef patties and some much-needed fresh air. Take a long, deep breath, and enjoy the moment while it lasts.