Returning to familiar sounds of vintage girl groups and rock’n’roll, Ezra Furman writes trans pride and existential fear into an album that feels like her most complete picture yet.

All of Us Flames

As she’s cycled through album-length homages to doo-wop and conceptual projects about falling for an angel, Ezra Furman has traced how she sees herself in real time. On 2019’s raucous, political Twelve Nudes, Furman most clearly linked her themes of rebellion and transgression with her personal journey. On the ballad “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend,” she let her guard down entirely, musing about changing her name and reconfiguring personal desire. In the years since, she came out as a trans woman, scored Netflix’s Sex Education, and became a mother. Her latest album, All of Us Flames, feels like the most complete picture yet of Ezra Furman as a songwriter: genres fluidly co-existing with one another, projecting a fearless image while struggling with her own internal fearfulness.
Furman has long drawn on older forms of rock and folk music, revitalizing traditional song forms by inserting queer narratives deserving of the same canonization. The bluesy chord progression of opener “Train Comes Through” enters into folk’s long tradition of train songs, but Furman’s lyrics advocate for those written out of history: “It’s not written in your Bibles/It’s a verse behind the verse/Only visible to an obsessive detail-oriented heathen Jew.” In the absence of a sacred text, she resolves to write her own in “Book of Our Names,” continuing a parallel from her past music between trans oppression and Jewish Exodus. Not every song is so heavy: “Forever in Sunset” pays homage to early Bruce Springsteen, recontextualizing his escapist yearning for a pandemic-damaged world: “Do you remember when you thought the world was ending?/Seems funny now.” For once, there’s a way out, or at least a momentary reprieve as Furman turns to queer love as salvation: “You’ve got me in your arms/Maybe that’s all we need for warmth.”
In producer John Congleton (who also mixed Twelve Nudes), Furman’s found a collaborator equally interested in pushing conventional rock tropes to their limits. Congleton’s proclivity for raw, distorted recordings can sometimes overwhelm, but Furman meets it with equal intensity. The surreal dynamic shifts and lush synths of “Lilac and Black” maximize Furman’s anthemic songwriting, while the girl-group homage “Dressed in Black” blows out the drums and vocals until they sound like they’re playing from worn-down vinyl. “Poor Girl a Long Way From Heaven” shifts away from acoustic instrumentation, winding up at an unexpected combination of Future Islands’ yacht-pop and Perfume Genius’ art rock; somehow, that naturally suits Furman’s tenor vocals as well as punk rock and doo-wop.
Yet the focus remains Furman’s characteristically verbose lyrics, and beneath her growing confidence lie new layers of paranoia. On “Ally Sheedy in the Breakfast Club,” Furman tackles the phenomenon known as “gender envy,” yearning to become the person she watches on VHS: “I watch her flicker on my TV/The teenage girl I never got to be.” (The unspoken punchline: Sheedy’s Breakfast Club character, Allison, ultimately gets the kind of feminine makeover demanded by the same systems Furman wishes to dismantle.) The out-of-character warble in Furman’s voice on “I Saw the Truth Undressing” suggests another repressed desire: She watches, frozen, as the object of her affection disrobes, but because trans desire is so pathologized, Furman’s narrator is afraid to indulge the voyeurism. When she rallies a “queer girl gang” against the epic build of “Lilac and Black,” the call to solidarity is shadowed by the warning that “we might not make it back.”
Even when she lets listeners in on her internal questioning, Furman’s music sounds confident because it has to be. As passionately as All of Us Flames dreams of escape, it’s bound to a dystopian reality, where even the dreamiest, most abstract songs aren’t immune from fear. The closest thing to a found utopia comes on “Temple of Broken Dreams,” where Furman again ties her Jewish faith to her trans identity, two “tribes of travelers scattered across the map” and hungry for connection. The characters on “Dreams” are too traumatized to reach that better world, only “a collection of the shards that you can save,” but they keep trying anyway.


Chris Clark, a.k.a. Clark, composed the score for a moody British TV serial called The Last Panthers. Here, he shapes this incidental music into a flowing 48-minute suite that conjures almost as much of a story as the show itself.

The Last Panthers

When the announcement hit last fall that David Bowie had recorded the theme to a British crime serial called The Last Panthers, a smaller piece of news got drowned out in the hubbub*:* Chris Clark, aka Clark of Warp Records, was tasked with composing the sound and music for the show itself. It was a surprising connection to many, but becomes perhaps less so when you realize that The Last Panthers show is produced by Warp Films, a burgeoning offshoot of the venerated electronic label. As they did with Broadcast for the studio’s indie horror film Berberian Sound Studio, Warp have decided to release Clark's work as a standalone effort.
It’s worth noting that Clark and Warp have chosen to present The Last Panthers as another chapter in Clark’s discography rather than as an "Original Soundtrack" or a "Music From..." Clark's catalog is deep and well-respected, and The Last Panthers is kind of a curious entry. It presents itself with two separate tests to pass: 1) Is it an effective soundtrack to a show? 2) Does it stand up on its own, without visual context?
To the first question, the answer is a resounding yes (U.S. viewers will get the chance to judge for themselves later this year, when the show is released Stateside). The dark, rain-soaked impressionism of the cinematography, coupled with the quiet, low-key dialogue, spoken in a variety of languages, creates a cold, gray and glassy world which the viewer feels they can observe at a distance but never penetrate. Clark’s work plays as much of a role in shaping this world as the visuals, making his cues not just appropriate but intrinsic to the show.
Answering the second question, how well The Last Panthers stands on its own, is a bit trickier. Clark has always been a stylistically varied artist, working in a range of tempos and textures, but The Last Panthers is most notable for the total absence of  the faster, louder numbers, or the incredible low-end beats for which he is known, like 2003’s "Early Moss" or "Banjo" from 2014's Clark.  He’s basically constructed an entire record of miniatures like "Ship is Flooding" and "Strength Through Fragility" (both also from Clark), or "Pleen 1930s" (the first track from his very first record in 2001)--tracks that typically ran short on his records and often felt more like interludes than compositions.
Coincidentally or not, many pieces feel reminiscent of the spindly instrumentals populating the back halves of Bowie's Heroes and Low. "Panther Bass Plock" and "Chloroform Sauna" practically channel "Neuköln" from Heroes at the altar, particularly the low-end sea burbles underneath the rising synths.  Tim Hecker is evoked throughout, especially with the gently ebbing waves of "Upward Evaporation," while "Serbian Daffodil"’s warbling reverb-heavy synths recall Boards of Canada interludes and "Omni Vignette" is Erik Satie by way of Drukqs-era Aphex’s plaintive sustained piano.
But "sounds likes…" aside, what is most impressive about The Last Panthers is the way in which Clark has taken all of this incidental music and shaped it into a flowing 48-minute suite that conjures almost as much of an imagined visual story as The Last Panthers show itself. Due to the subdued nature of the proceedings along with short track times and a smattering of dreamily repeated theme refrains throughout, the listening experience doesn’t lend itself to tracks standing out on their own. Exceptions, however, are the awesomely titled "Strangled to Death in a Public Toilet," with its beautiful dead-angel chorus reminiscent of Gavin Bryar’s "The Sinking of the Titanic"; "Diamonds Aren’t Forever" and it's follow-up "II," which both break down midway through fogs of noisy synth to reveal plaintive repeated piano and violin; and album closer "Hide On the Treads 3", whose ascending and pumping glockenspiel arpeggios provide the closest thing to sunshine on this otherwise completely gray sound collage. It's been suggested before that Clark is writing the soundtrack to the end of the world; if so, The Last Panthers feels like the lonely soundtrack for whatever's left after that.


On this EP recorded with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, the group shows that their capacity for new ideas and reinvention has yet to fail them.

No Horizon EP

At some point over the last decade, impermanence became Wye Oak’s muse. The duo’s early projects were defined by Jenn Wasner’s guitars, whose eruptions gave their otherwise-dreamy indie rock a volatile edge. There were keyboards, too, but they were mostly limited to whatever drummer Andy Stack could play with his free hand. Since Wasner issued a temporary moratorium on those signature guitars on 2014’s Shriek, however, every album has been, if not quite a reinvention, then a reconsideration of their core sound, a study in how a band can evolve when they refuse the most obvious path forward. Their sound has been digitized and de-digitized, built up and stripped back, with no suggestion that any iteration was anything more than a pit stop.
Until recently, the lone constant of the group had been their two-piece lineup, but even that’s been open to amendment. Before their most recent tour was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic, the duo had expanded to a five-piece, where they performed material not only from Wye Oak but from the respective side projects to which Wasner and Stack have increasingly dedicated more of their time. And on Wye Oak’s new No Horizon EP—which, true to the band’s malleable nature, sounds little like the tantalizing standalone tracks the band has been dropping over the last year or two—they’re joined by a different set of temporary contributors. The EP was recorded with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, a mammoth choir that lends a shot of instant grandiosity to everything they touch, including recent tracks by The National and Bon Iver.
It’s incredible how the notion of an indie-rock choir has expanded since the mid ’00s, when Saddle Creek artists might invite whoever happened to be near the studio over for what amounted to a campfire sing-along. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus doesn’t do informality. Their arrangements are as ornate and stately as chapel glass, every interweaving vocal meticulously plotted for maximum orchestral impact. They don’t merely augment the songs on No Horizon; they drive them. Opener “AEIOU” dazzles with layer upon layer of kaleidoscopic refractions of voice. On “No Place,” the choir subsumes Wasner’s dusky vocals almost completely; here, she’s just one singer among dozens.
An air of secrecy once shrouded Wye Oak’s records, a fog that loomed over the production like a Do Not Enter sign, but in recent years they’ve let their sound grow more direct and open. On 2011’s Civilian, Wasner’s murmur swallowed key lyrics whole, as if protecting them from the world. Now she has a choir belting them. “When the world is just a concept, everything has hidden meaning,” they chime on “Sky Witness,” a line that’s as perfect a thesis statement for Wasner’s songwriting as any.
For all its wow factor, No Horizon has less replay value than most Wye Oak releases. Because of those choral arrangements, it burns bright but fast—a little bit of coloratura goes a long way, and these songs don’t skimp on it. A full album of this would be overkill, so the EP’s small-plate portion works in its favor. So, too, does the unlikelihood that they’ll ever make another like it. Wye Oak is the rare band that grows less defined with each project, but their capacity for new ideas has yet to fail them.

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The prolific British pianist-keyboardist-composer’s work is centered on place, partnership, and circumstance. Mostly abandoning jazz, he crafts an idiosyncratic, pastoral opus.

Symphonie Pacifique

British pianist-keyboardist-composer Greg Foat has long been pigeonholed as a jazz musician, yet he fits the tradition sideways, at best. Though he studied with UK jazz luminaries like pianist Gordon Beck, and his Greg Foat Group came to renown by tapping into Britain’s late-’60s jazz-rock heyday of bands like Soft Machine and Nucleus, his work’s preoccupation with texture, melody, and narrative had long placed him outside that music’s jam-oriented solo expressions. Since 2017, when Foat committed himself to a way of working more centered on place, partnership and circumstance than predetermined style, the peculiarities in his music have become more pronounced, and his creative output has mushroomed. It’s hard not to hear Symphony Pacifique, Foat’s ninth album in the past four years, as a summation of this period.
Symphonie Pacifique also speaks to another reconsideration of the genre-nonspecific, mixed-use sound space where, for over 60 years, improvisation, composition, and sonic investigation have blended to no uncertain purpose. The album echoes this artful testing ground for recordings—a tradition-free mix of film scores, radiophonic library sounds, percussion records, hi-fi experimentalism, space-age pop, and far beyond. Heady, outwardly beautiful, aesthetically lush, and self-aware enough to avoid devolving into pap, it fits in with music often championed for its wealth of taste and knowledge—and just as often dismissed for its middlebrow pretension. Yet such experiments can also be a well for mental and creative resets—which is how they have seemingly served Foat.
While the Greg Foat Group (2009-2016) was based in electric jazz-meets-rock playing, it was primarily a vehicle for Foat’s dreamy pieces, often reflecting fantasy narratives (2011’s Dark Is the Sun is based on a Philip José Farmer sci-fi novel, 2015’s The Dancers at the Edge of Time on one of Michael Moorcock’s) and filled with an array of synthesizers and studio-centric arrangements. More than a glimmer of Britain’s prog-rock heritage and accompanying largess was on display, though Foat’s tunes also regularly served a soft and pastoral solitude, reflecting the rural and naturalist influences of the Isle of Wight, where he’s lived since boyhood.
In 2017, Foat and Warren Hampshire, another Isle resident and multi-instrumentalist with indie-psych-funk group A Band of Bees, released Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, a new-age-folk meditation about tides. Like a dam bursting, Galaxies heralded not only a new way of working and a flood of recordings, but a diversity in Foat’s music he’d mostly kept in check. Ensuing collaborations—with Hampshire, with studio engineer and Isle resident James Thorpe, with Edinburgh deep house producer Linkwood—were interspersed with “solo” albums featuring Isle locals, old Group members (bassist Phil Achille, conguero Eric Young), low-key Brit jazz legends (saxophonist Art Themen, drummer Clark Tracey), and a set of prodigious boldface players (saxophonist Binker Golding, Kooks guitarist Hugh Harris, drummer Moses Boyd). The records were united not by a specific sound but by an immediacy, a project-to-project fluency, and the sense that, as each moved from groove to texture to rumination, the musicians were there to serve the ensemble.
Symphonie Pacifique spotlights those elements magnificently. It’s not incorrect to generalize the album as a soul-jazz session full of symphonic and studio-built asides—a smaller-scale take on, say, David Axelrod’s kaleidoscopic fantasias that spotlights the personalities of Foat’s compositions and his broad cast of players. Occasionally Symphonie does get reductive, the too-bright tone of Foat’s Steinway driving its more linear pieces from the front, and the album can sound smooth and lightweight, a facile version of the music Foat has mostly abandoned. Yet these moments rarely last long. The handful of string interludes hint at grander ambitions, and the plethora of balearic fusions repeatedly return Pacifique towards a more complex light.
Fusions like “Anticipation,” built on dubbed keyboard chords straight out of Underworld’s rave smash “Born Slippy,” a sweeping mix of strings, synths and wordless choir, Boyd’s rolling drums, and dueling saxophones, which sounds like an update on a Mizell Brothers/Donald Byrd collaboration. Or “Man Vs. Machine,” featuring Young’s percussion elbowing into Foat and Boyd’s analog synth-drums duet, and robo-funking like Kraftwerkian commentary. Co-written with Hampshire and spotlighting a trio of Foat’s piano, Heather Wrighton’s harp, and Achille’s bass, “After the Storm” has the environmental new age majesty of a Steve Roach piece—and is narratively book-ended by Thomas Frank’s almost-solo “Meditation on a Pedal Steel,” which soundtracks its last drops. An epilogue titled “Three Tenors,” featuring the unaccompanied yet effects-laden (and psychedelically mixed) conversation between Themen, David Bitelli, and Rob Mach’s saxophones, is Pacifique’s capstone, simultaneously referencing multiple directions in sound—beatless free jazz, dub, ambient—while choosing none.
Importantly, Greg Foat is nowhere to be heard on “Three Tenors,” yet philosophically he is still in command from the production room, letting the players he put in place magnify its roar. Such low-key involvement marks the best parts of Symphonie Pacifique, and the bright recent chapter of his long career: unencumbered by rules and definitions, in love with the freedoms of sound, guiding from the back. A leading jazz player has abandoned ambition for more unexpected, idiosyncratic visions.

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Lapalux stands out as one of the more accessible producers on Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder label. On his debut album Nostalchic, Stuart Howard moves from deconstructed pop to a more relaxed brand of R&B and soul, both genres that complement his consistent interest in texture.

Nostalchic

Lapalux stands out as one of the more accessible producers on Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder label, making music that skews closer to pop than much of the hybridized production the label is known for. The Essex native, born Stuart Howard, showed himself to be a savvy deconstructionist on a pair of 2012 EPs. He took the raw ingredients of offbeat pop songs--melodic backbone, diaphonous vocals, clattering drumlines-- and shuffled them to create IDM tracks that felt inventive and accessible. He's using similar tricks on his debut album Nostalchic, while moving from deconstructed pop to a more relaxed brand of R&B and soul, both genres that complement Howard's consistent interest in texture.
On Lapalux’s first two Brainfeeder projects, When You’re Gone and Some Other Time, you could hear the 25-year old producer cautiously experimenting with new ideas, working within traditional structures even as he experimented with outré sounds. He’s more confident on Nostalchic, walking the line between chaos and stability to create a sound that resembles a jittery, discombobulated version of chillwave. Brainfeeder's Hip-Hop Beats N' Bass blueprint is still present, but it isn't the focus on the album. Instead, on tracks like the back-to-back standouts "Flower" and "Swallowing Smoke", Howard's working with a hundred little slivers of the same core melody, rearranging them again and again by attaching them to different portions of the beat until, by the end of the song, they fit together smoothly. It's sampling as fine art-- as precise and painstaking as a mosaic.
With all these separate elements floating around, it's possible for things to get a little too messy. "Kelly Brook" is muddled and unpleasant, shot through with sounds that don't make sense with each other. It's as if the pieces of several different songs were never properly separated and it’s one of the few moments on the album where Howard doesn’t appear to be in total control.
Vocalists appear throughout Nostalchic, serving as amplified versions of their sampled counterparts from the guest-free tracks. Though Jenna Andrews has a strong showing on the languorous “One Thing” and Kerry Leatham’s distorted voice adds depth to the standout “Without You”, Lapalux is actually his own most reliable performer. On “Walking Words” he's familiar enough with the beat to insert what sounds like his own murmurs and distortion directly into the spaces available and his vocal ends up mimicking the track's motion perfectly.
With a name like Nostalchic, you might assume that Howard is trying to conjure something from the past, to produce the sonic equivalent of immaculate vintage clothing. The sentiments expressed on the album are in keeping with that concept: the lyrics, where they exist, tend to keep things simple with messages like “Do you want to dance?” and “I want to make love.” But, keeping solidly in line with the Brainfeeder tradition, Nostalchic is a forward-looking album, warm and comfortable but never obvious.


Fuzz is the San Francisco hard rock trio featuring Ty Segall on drums and vocals, but Charles Moothart's riffs and guitar solos are the main event. That said, this album finds strength in the loud, jam-centric prowess of all three dudes playing together.

Fuzz

In recent years, even when he's sharing the spotlight, Ty Segall has been the central focus of his endeavors: Ty Segall and White Fence, Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin, Ty Segall Band. With Fuzz, even though he's stepped back to the drumset, he's still the singer, he's still helping to write the songs, and he's really good at drumming. Segall's records come with that inevitable "prolific songwriter" baggage, and that might be why Fuzz tried to stay anonymous when they released their first single. Maybe the trio were trying to sidestep the Segall conversation altogether. Of course, it didn't work. It was always pretty easy to figure out who was singing those songs, and it didn't help when they outed themselves as Fuzz to Spin before even releasing a Fuzz record. Once again, at least in their press coverage, Segall receives top billing.
But with an almost startlingly generic band name (that has been used a few times already), it feels clear that the attention was never meant to be solely Ty's this time. Fuzz is a power trio—a united front of longhairs who work together to build a hard rock soundscape. It's not about the people, it's about the fuzz, man. Segall's vocals pack the cartoon menace of early Sabbath Ozzy, and his drumming is precise-yet-loose, powerful, thrilling. Roland Cosio helms a steady, groove-ready low end. Then there's Charles Moothart, the quiet guitarist who helped create the obliterating guitar sound of Slaughterhouse. He's also the band's riff writer—he'd set up a riff, Segall would help him finish it and add lyrics. You don't have to live with Fuzz for very long before it's clear that the riffs and guitar solos are the main event. Moothart deserves just as much limelight as Segall.
Take the opening moments of "Sleigh Ride", "Raise", and "Loose Sutures"—all are kicked off by a meaty and catchy guitar line. One minute, Moothart's busting an enormous guitar solo on "Loose Sutures", the next he's doing some delicate, somber work in "Hazemaze". He even gets to step out front on "Raise", contributing a rare vocal turn where his assertive baritone takes a cynical look at the existance of God. And his voice sounds really good over this proto-metal guitar rock. In a vocals-specific analogy comparing Ty Segall Band to the Who, Segall is Daltrey (the electric frontman vocalist), Mikal Cronin is Townshend (the tenor who can scream real good), and apparently, Charles Moothart is Entwistle (the traditionally quieter one who could totally be the lead singer if he wanted to).
But again, while everybody gets their individual moment to shine, it'd be short-sighted to pick an MVP in Fuzz. This album finds strength in the loud, jam-centric prowess of all three dudes playing together. As a unit, they achieve power, drive, and soul. They've got the same chutzpah the MC5 had on Kick Out the Jams, but Fuzz don't sing about revolution. They sing about burning, bleeding, and burials. They're like a murder-obsessed Blue Cheer. On "Sleigh Ride", belting in a goblin voice and spitting out every consonant as hard as he can, Segall sings, "Isolation,/ Isolation,/ Feel the stiffness of isolation." Meanwhile, the band establishes vicious, galloping pace—intimidation all around, nowhere to hide.
Like Slaughterhouse before it, Fuzz is an album that depends heavily on power. But while the trio keep muscle and intimidation in play throughout the album, they also leave room to calm down and breathe. Stuff like "I Bought My Eyes" stacked power upon power for an entire track, inviting you to speed across the highway or sprint to the finish of a particularly difficult run or lift an impossibly heavy object. "Loose Sutures" comes to a full stop in the middle, leaving only the persistent hiss of feedback. For two minutes, there's no adrenaline rush—it forces you to be patient while Cosio rides out a bass solo and while Ty offers up a few drum fills. And then, a slow build of drums into a full, loud, utterly satisfying wall of sound that crashes through to the finish. It's a similar technique to the one Sabbath implemented on Paranoid by placing the mellow "Planet Caravan" between "Paranoid" and "Iron Man". "Loose Sutures" has sweet harmonies, feedback-coated quiet, noise, and a searing guitar solo—it's definitely a well-crafted hard rock song.
Ultimately, it's an album that would benefit from a few more sonically diverse moments like that one or the quiet sprawl of Fuzz's opening stretch. The band is obviously very good at delivering infectious hooks with muscle and soul, but those moments only pop if there's a control in place to offset the heavier stuff. Otherwise, the record becomes one big mass of fuzzy low-end guitars and occasional solos. Fuzz consistently run the risk of noodling for a bit too long or pushing one idea a little too far. It's tricky to balance loud and quiet, and Fuzz are still finding their footing. They thrive when they're locked into a sturdy, well-constructed groove like "Fuzz's Fourth Dream" (which, as a stand-alone 7", is the band's best release to date). But in Fuzz's 36 minutes, Segall, Moothart, and Cosio find several satisfyingly stoned, overwhelmingly powerful hooks. That's a good place to start.


The latest from the Odd Future member pairs him with producer and Eminem collaborator the Alchemist for a more assured album that focuses on his solid rapping.

No Idols

Back when Domo Genesis released his first album, not a lot was known about Odd Future. This was in August 2010, and his Rolling Papers was for many listeners the first introduction to the crew's disorienting, insular world. It also raised a simple question: What is all the fuss about? The album was low-key and low-ambition-- it was, after all, called Rolling Papers. It showed that Domo lacked Tyler, the Creator's force of personality or Earl Sweatshirt's prodigious wordplay, and its influences (MF Doom, Wiz Khalifa) were obvious. It's also a fairly agreeable record, and that too cut against the rapidly growing narrative of Odd Future's divisiveness.
Now, of course, things are much clearer. As the members of Odd Future continue to splinter off for individual projects, it's easier to see where they fit into the puzzle. Domo is still low-key-- as a rapper he seems to have little interest in the type of controversy Tyler craves-- but it would be hard to call him low-ambition anymore. If there's one thing that stood out about the crew's OF Tape Vol. 2 from March, it was the force with which Domo is now rapping. Contrary to what we heard on Rolling Papers, Domo Genesis is taking rapping seriously.
That increased professionalism is carried over to No Idols, Domo's new collaborative album with producer the Alchemist. Being serious about the art of rapping is far from a virtue in and of itself (as, say, Slaughterhouse proves). But with Domo it coincides with his evolution into a surprisingly good technical rapper. He's no star, but No Idols is a very solid record. It's the sort of thing Curren$y has made a career out of.
It's refreshing to hear Domo carry his own record, but the masterstroke of No Idols is his pairing with the Alchemist, whose beats fit the shift in Domo's career. Where Rolling Papers leaned hard on bright, airy keyboards, the Alchemist's productions are strictly in the lineage of the sort of East Coast lyricism that Domo is now nodding to. His beats here are strong in their own right, but never try to compete with the rappers. That stands in stark contrast to the jarring melodicism that peppers Tyler's production work on Rolling Papers. Alchemist's beats are dark and noirish, but not in a way that intends to convey malice. The tones are almost soft to the touch, with a vibe of relaxation and playfulness that keeps things from feeling too serious. One example is "All Alone", which features a cooing female vocal sample rubbing up against some grunting likely taken from a kung-fu film. But there's also the weed tribute "Me and My Bitch", which is built on undulating keyboards that paw at your face.
Domo still gets outshined here when Earl or Action Bronson show up, but he's not out of his league. His type of internal rhyming ("Oh so cocky, you can't stop me in this ol' Versace") also isn't spectacular, but it's certainly above workmanlike. There's also a powerful exuberance in his voice that feels fresh and invigorating, and it's crucially far from the snide and aggrieved shit-talking you often hear from contemporary rappers who work within the same frame. Domo is probably never going to be the standout member of Odd Future, but No Idols is a better album than the amateurish Rolling Papers indicated could be in store. His decision to team up with the Alchemist shows a judicious, deft touch, and that alone is encouraging.


North Carolina MC Phonte and Dutch producer Nicolay continue their partnership with an unexpected left-turn, crafting a surprisingly strong full-on R&B record with almost no rapping.

The Foreign Exchange: Leave It All Behind

Leave It All Behind

The 2004 album Connected by the Foreign Exchange (North Carolina rapper Phonte and Dutch producer Nicolay) was a record of unusual warmth and vibrancy. And yet, one bum line from Phonte still threatens to derail it with every listen-- "Applied for the job of rap nigga/ But I was overqualified." For better or (mostly) worse, this sort of mindset has boxed in just about everything he's done since with Little Brother, his project with rapper Big Pooh. Though obviously in pursuit of commercial adulation and positioning himself as a vanguard of thinking man's hip-hop, Phonte too often casts those who are more successful in simple and condescending terms while offering a one-step solution to all hip-hop's ills-- increased sales of Little Brother records. A slew of missed opportunities and disillusion with the game have resulted in a whole lot of disappointing Phonte projects. But knowing this can't prepare you for just how closely Leave It All Behind hews to its title, as Phonte opts out of hip-hop with a nearly full-on R&B record with exactly two rapped verses. And there's really no way of preparing for how good it actually turned out.
I mean, Phonte's never shied away from doing hooks, but who knew he wanted to go all-out like this? But go straight long enough from the grid of the mainstream and you'll end up where you were-- word is that rapper-ternt-sanger is a pretty big with the kids these days. But while Leave It All Behind can certainly be judged in a different light post-808s and Heartbreak, it actually has more in common with Yo La Tengo's *And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-*Out, a similarly muted, lovely, and humane take on adult relationships worth working for (which makes it the complete opposite of the often embarrassingly juvenile petulance of 808s). Grown and maybe not-so sexy, but certainly lived-in. "All or Nothing/Coming Home to You" begins with the always-charming intro where its narrator arguing with a woman you can't see or hear. But when Phonte mutters, "That's cool-- I wanted to play Xbox on the big TV anyways" after being shuttled off to the couch, it's reminiscent of the kind of knowing detail Mike Skinner used to master in before coke and zen fucked up his brain.
Phonte's voice isn't really suited for heavy lifting, but he's hardly alone on Leave It All Behind, getting contributions from Nicolay's more unheralded collaborators and making it rightfully feel like a conversation. Darien Brockington's easygoing lilt raises "Take Off Your Blues" out of a dangerously Love Below sentiment, while Musinah and Yahzarah give earthy counterpoint to the siesta soundscapes of "Daykeeper" and "If She Breaks Your Heart."
And musically, Nicolay's in his comfort zone, making the sort of album he'd been more or less heading towards since Connected, an album that, while certainly rooted in hip-hop, knocked like a pillow fight. It's characteristically consistent, melodic, but rarely cloying, owing its dominant sound to ghost-white sheets of Rhodes and Stevie Wonder chord leaps that terms like "milky" do no justice. Opening track "Daykeeper" successfully applies the opaque synths of "Kid A" to a completely opposite exploration of bedsit contentment. Likewise, it's tempting to see the title of "House of Cards" as bait for curious Radiohead fans, but the liftoff it achieves during its hook is stunning on its own terms, live drums and guitar glimmers twisting in the wind.
Wisely, Nicolay manages to steer clear of boilerplate neo-soul, or at least the interesting parts do. Leave It All Behind is mostly butter, but occasionally lapses into cheese. After "If This Is Love" pleasingly recalls Total's "Trippin'" with a simple but effective late-90's electronica touch, "Something to Behold" is the sort of crossover loverman rap that Little Brother would probably limply parody on The Minstrel Show. Meanwhile, some pretty terrible lyrics are hiding in plain sight amidst borderline easy listening. The closing title track tucks the kids in to bed while hoping they "dream of lullabies and clowns," and I dunno-- clowns singing lullabies tend to freak most discerning kids the fuck out.
And above all, there's the possibility that it can be tagged as a great R&B album that spans the late hours and early morning...if you're into that sort of thing. And really, as with Connected, it would be a shame if Leave It All Behind were merely lauded for how it stood in opposition to more commercially dominant hip-hop trends or derided for the same reason. It's difficult to figure how to address these qualms without the whole Foreign Exchange franchise folding altogether. For guys who haven't spent a whole lot of time together, Phonte and Nicolay get lots of mileage out of the idea of their music being handcrafted as if they were actually were hanging out in the studio. Would Leave It All Behind be a better album if Phonte didn't admittedly sound something like Maxwell with weaker lungs so often? Would it be better if Phonte rapped more? Probably not-- these sorts of projects too often inspire catcalls to keep a day job, but the Foreign Exchange may have just earned an unexpected promotion.


On Parquet Courts' third and best album of whip-smart rock revivalism, the Brooklyn quartet continue to expand their musical horizons. The impeccably structured Sunbathing Animal calls back to their Texan roots, its wide-open sprawl freed of the band's explicitly urban trappings.

Sunbathing Animal

Andrew Savage is, above all, a stylist. Before he came to be known as the yawpy mouthpiece co-fronting Brooklyn indie rock outfit Parquet Courts, he was one-half of Denton, Tx. duo Fergus & Geronimo, where he and bandmate Jason Kelly made the type of reference-heavy experimental rock that was practically designed to catch the ears of rock nerds as much as it was bound to confound casual passersby. Their sense of humor and slavish devotion to past sounds was reminiscent of Ween, if Ween wrote songs about parasitic music writers and trust-fund hippies. 2011's Unlearn opened with a song called "Girls With English Accents" (try and guess what it was about); the following year's Funky Was the State of Affairs kicked off with Savage and Kelly doing the best "'Allo, guv'nor" affectations they could muster. Funky was a sorta-concept album that carried thematic allusions to Funkadelic's Maggot Brain while sometimes resembling if Gang of Four covered "Peter Gunn" in double time.
It only took two albums for the delightfully, inscrutably weird Fergus & Geronimo to sound like they were running out of steam, and by the time Funky Was the State of Affairs saw release, Savage had put up roots in New York City and was wielding the influences of his new home in Parquet Courts. The band's debut release, the 2011 cassette American Specialties, featured cover art ripped from the light-box Chinese restaurant menus that are ubiquitous throughout the city; the following year's Light Up Gold paired musings about pushy street-team clipboard-brandishers and being stoned in Queens over music smacking of the literate, nervy rock music that emerged after punk's first wave burned out in the late 1970s.
In interviews, Savage hasn't been shy about his aspirations to claim a place in NYC's considerable rock lineage. Inarguably, the city hasn't seen a unified, geographically-defining scene emerge since the days of Julian and Karen, so Parquet Courts sound less like a "New York band" than they resemble a band that carries qualities that people have associated with New York bands of years past—structural slackness paired with paranoid energy, topped off with a sense of wit that exudes book-smarts as much as it smacks of smart-assedness.
On their third and best album, Sunbathing Animal, they continue to expand their musical horizons by offering more of their own takes on older sounds: there are sonic nods to the spiky energy of Wire circa Pink Flag, the Velvet Underground's relentless chug, Television's more straightforward moments of elegance, Bob Dylan's braying ramble, surf rock's angular riffs filtered through amphetamine-poisoned blood. Most surprisingly, the loping "Dear Ramona" comes off as a post-collegiate update of frat-rock luminaries Cake's "Short Skirt/Long Jacket", swapping the latter's shiny fingernails and cupholder armrests for black coffee and moleskine notebooks.
Above all, the spectre of sly-smile indie-rock kings Pavement looms over Sunbathing Animal, more so in execution than in explicit resemblance. If Light Up Gold carried the dashed-off basement charm of Slanted and Enchanted, then Sunbathing Animal is Parquet Courts' Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, a record that focuses more on structure as the band deploys melodic tricks with greater subtlety and precision. Crooked Rain still stands as the Stockton-hailing Pavement's most West Coast-sounding album, and the humidity of Sunbathing Animal similarly calls back to Parquet Courts' Texan roots, its wide-open sprawl sounding freed of the band's explicitly urban trappings.
Recorded over the course of three days, the propulsive energy of Light Up Gold sometimes resembled a quartet of short-distance runners about to collide into each other, limbs akimbo, while reaching the finish line. Sunbathing Animal, then, sounds like the work of long-distance pavement-pounders who have learned when to store up energy, and when to release it. As an album, it's impeccably structured, with the slow-burn cuts placed in just the right places to break up the band's steady crunch; Parquet Courts' newfound sense of control works in miniature, too, as evidenced by the coiled guitar breakdowns on opener "Bodies Made Of" and the back half of "Black & White", where the band's scraping choogle spins out into freewheeling zonked-out noise before pulling back to reveal a shimmying rhythmic duckwalk, anchored by hand claps.
The increased focus of pacing on Sunbathing Animal means that, at first blush, it's a less immediate album than its predecessor; at 46 minutes, it's a little less than a quarter-hour longer than Light Up Gold, and there's a few extended jams—the molasses-tumble of "She's Rolling" and "Instant Disassembly"'s folksy ramble both go beyond the six-minute mark—that take cues from the anti-anthem "He's Seeing Paths", from last year's Tally All the Things That You Broke EP. The hooks are stronger and more distinct, though, in the sense that Sunbathing Animal registers as 13 separate songs, a change from Light Up Gold's energizing blur. The guitar work, courtesy of co-frontmen Savage and Austin Brown, is clever and accomplished without being too showy; in their hands, the instruments squeak, saunter, and roar, sometimes simultaneously. On the title track and the album's most aggressive cut, the duo merge to create an impenetrable wall of strings, soloing recklessly underneath each other as drummer Max Savage (brother to Andrew) bashes away in a manner reminiscent of a specific, not-always-sunbathing animal.
"Sunbathing Animal" is four minutes of impassioned fury that doubles as a solid punk tune and as a speed-addled take on pre-Beatles rock'n'roll—but forget the video, all you need is the lyric sheet to tell that Savage is singing from the perspective of a housecat. "I want to flee/ But I can only stare," he laments furiously, one of many times that he and Brown get lyrically weird on Sunbathing Animal. The sloganeering and sneering found on Light Up Gold is gone, along with most notions of straightforwardness, as the closest either singer gets to clarity is on the back-from-touring grievance-list "Always Back in Town". Otherwise, the lyrics are stranger, more elliptical, less "Stoned and Starving" and more just plain stoned. "What color is blood?/ Still the same that it was?," Savage yells over the ascending strut of "What Color Is Blood", taking on the bug-eyed paranoia of David Byrne circa More Songs About Buildings and Food; on "Instant Disassembly", he conflates love, anxiety, and protection before admitting that the firmament containing those virtues is in serious decay: "There's nothing left to dismantle/ The house it just collapsed on itself."
Yet again recalling Pavement in their glory days, Parquet Courts remain inscrutable even as their talents grow, a band less willing to show their hand as they are interested in describing why hands are such weird body parts to begin with. The closest thing Savage offers as far as a lyrical clue to the band's general mindset is buried in the middle of "Instant Disassembly": "Turn on the white noise murmur of the AM band/ And the last classic rock band's last solid record creeps in." The couplet could, in a way, be a joke about the permanence of musical obsolescence—but it doubles as a mission statement, too, as Parquet Courts are a band using the past to write their own version of the present. If you're looking for something "new," you aren't going to find it here, and that's totally okay: Sunbathing Animal's considered, whip-smart rock revivalism is a work of substantial growth from a band that already did "simple" quite well, placing Parquet Courts in their own distinct weight class.


Following 2011's CoCo Beware, the N.Y. five-piece Caveman have tweaked their folksy template, embracing the spacey expanses and mournful, low-key melodies only hinted at on their debut.

Caveman

Since forming in 2010, the New York five-piece Caveman have been slowly garnering attention for their loose, deceptively expansive indie-folk rock. Their music carries both a professional air and world-weary rasp, an impression that’s borne out of the group’s credentials, and overlapping lives, as journeyman veterans of NYC’s massive music scene for the better part a decade. The genesis for Caveman was catalyzed by the almost synchronized dissolutions of its member’s former bands, remembered now only with ghostly MySpace portals: The Subjects (lead singer/multi-instrumentalist Matthew Iwanusa and guitarist Jimmy “Cobra” Carbonetti), White Clam (keyboardist Sam Hopkins), The End of the World (drummer Stefan Marolachakis), and Elefant (bassist Jeff Berrall).
They watched their former musical projects run their course and run out of steam, and slowly drifted toward each other as friends hanging out in Carbonetti’s custom guitar shop in the East Village, eventually realizing they wanted to get on with it as a band. They self-released their debut CoCo Beware in 2011 and toured behind an album of competent indie folk with weird proggy flourishes and surprisingly tight four-part harmonies. It was tentative in some instances and looser in others; more of an early blueprint than anything else. CoCo was then snatched up by Fat Possum, and when the band found themselves ready to put together their self-titled sophomore release, they were armed with the chemistry built from sharing a stage for two straight years.
Holed up in Iwanusa’s grandmother’s New Hampshire barnhouse, they began to work through ideas in long jam sessions, cultivating and tweaking a folksy post-rock template that’s reliant on nuanced interplay between the band members. The result is Caveman, a sophomore album that embraces the spacey expanses and mournful, low-key melodies only hinted at on their debut. Gone is the straightforward thump of songs like “My Time” or the placid alt-country of “Old Friend”, replaced by stranger, more confident experiments like the lurching, ethereal “Over My Head” or the Nebraska-echoing “I See You”.
The group hasn’t rebuilt their aesthetic completely, but they are changing the way they communicate it, and the way they communicate with each other from song to song. Their rich, Brian Wilson harmonies are deployed in unexpected places, and are more haunting and reserved than uplifting. “Where’s the Time”, a bass line gurgling, syncopated slow burn that eventually blossoms into a cacophony of ambient textures and a psyched-up guitar solo, uses those harmonies to underline a chorus that’s oddly selfish and detached: “Where’s the time to waste on someone else’s life.” The fragile, atmospheric folk of opener “Strange to Suffer”, and it’s album closing counterpart “Strange”, has the group harmonizing with almost-falsettos in a way that resembles chanting monks attempting a seance, repeating the song’s only line just twice: “Strange to suffer, why do these people turn away.”
But for all those instances of heady explorations, there’s a lingering feeling that they are still hesitant to really kick down the doors of their songwriting confinements. A track like “Pricey", with that incredible, stalking guitar riff that could have been teleported here from Pink Floyd’s Meddle, tries to be a dark, prog-inflected opus, but lurches around listlessly with pedestrian vocal parts from the usually stellar Iwanusa. Likewise, the brightly colored neon of more widely used synthesizers doesn’t always gel effectively with band’s usually sterling, rock-based musicianship, propelling some tracks to the stratosphere-- the gliding luxury of “In the City”, for example-- while leaving others with a garish accent mark (“The Big Push”) on an already drab composition.
Regardless, Caveman isn’t short on efforts to move the band’s sound into uncharted territories. It's the first release for the band as an “all in” musical endeavor and it definitely feels that way. In an age where so many group’s are driven by a sole songwriter/creative force, it’s exhilarating to hear an album that’s almost stubbornly democratic, the confidence that the members of Caveman possess in one another being their most prized asset.


Formed after the suicide of the bassist from their previous group, Texas duo Pinkish Black have emerged with their grimmest and most triumphant album yet. Despite all the despair and misanthropy written into these words, these songs often feel like conquests.

Bottom of the Morning

On the same October day Pinkish Black released their third and best LP to date through Relapse Records, the label also issued the final recordings of the members' earlier act, a process stalled for five years by tragedy. Pinkish Black's anchors—the theatric singer and florid keyboardist Daron Beck and athletic drummer Jon Teague—formed The Great Tyrant a decade ago with bassist Tommy Atkins. A young, exploratory and vaguely metallic outfit interested in doom and goth, industrial and krautrock, The Great Tyrant was working on The Trouble with Being Born when Atkins killed himself in 2010. Beck and Teague scrapped the sessions and started a new band, taking the color of the blood-splattered walls where Atkins had died—that is, pinkish-black—as a lurid tribute to the missing member. It's fitting, then, that The Great Tyrant emptied its archives on the same day Pinkish Black offered its latest, greatest work to date, Bottom of the Morning. As a duo, Beck and Teague have finally found the sound and strength for which they've long searched. Fighting through a half-decade of despair, the results on Bottom of the Morning almost feel heroic.
Pinkish Black's previous two albums were hesitant and uncertain, as though Teague and Beck were trying to define their shared aesthetic while teasing out a new duo chemistry, too. Their fine 2012 debut packed in some excellent ideas and alluring sounds, but the band—particularly Teague's voice—was obscured in effects. Though more forthright, the subsequent Razed to the Ground found the duo again trying to do too much, as they moved from slow-motion dirges to extravagant, pulse-pounding doom.
But Bottom of the Morning is, at last, the first unified, unabashed Pinkish Black album. These songs are unveiled, a message that's as clear with the hook-heavy, march-like opener "Brown Rainbow" as it is with the beautifully brutal instrumental closer "The Master is Away". On these seven tracks, Beck and Teague amplify the grandiosity, directness and intensity of what they do. The keyboards can be as rich as a Tangerine Dream or Goblin record, the melodies as creepy and contagious as John Carpenter. And Teague emerges as a powerhouse capable of summoning John Bonham, Klaus Dinger and Billy Cobham. But the real coup here comes through Beck's voice. Even on The Great Tyrant's LPs, especially the now-unearthed The Trouble with Being Born, it was clear how capable he was, though he wasn't yet quite in command of his talent. Here, however, his mix of near-monastic chants, witchy incantations and operatic verses—now, not crowded by manipulation or undercut with noise—serves as the record's compulsory core. You lean in close to hear what he's saying.
It should come as little surprise that a band named for a friend's suicide embraces dark lyrics. Indeed, these songs approach the nihilistic. "Special Dark" is little more than a string of negative participles and adjectives—"withered, fractured … bleaker, starker"—intoned in a dour murmur over blown-out bass and busy drums. At the start of "Bottom of the Morning", Beck whispers and sings about wasting life and wasting time; at track's end, he howls about endless cycles of false promises and futile attempts at self-improvement. "Everyday's the same again," he sings, his voice stentorian but graceful, like a latter-day Scott Walker. "Everyday it's growing thin." Since Atkins' death in 2010, they've survived the death of several family members and severe sickness; the weight and worry of the world are central to these songs.
But somehow, those qualities are boons, not burdens. Despite all the despair and misanthropy written into these words, these songs often feel like conquests. The album itself is triumphant, like a survivalist manifesto offered at the close of a markedly tough spell. Behind the grim declarations of "Bottom of the Morning", for instance, the twinkle of the organ, the groove of the left hand's bassline and the dance of the drums suggest Miles Davis' On the Corner, perhaps even Weather Report. And though "Burn My Body" is as lyrically macabre as the title implies, bright synthesizer arpeggios and the back-and-forth motion of the drums offer the relief and release endemic to the narrator's final request. As the song ends, the synthesizers and drums intimate a skyward ascension, a last will finally honored. On Bottom of the Morning, Beck and Teague have effectively stepped beyond the ghosts of the past, landing in a present where the results are now as compelling as the backstory.


Lana Del Rey’s sixth album dials back the grandiosity in favor of smaller, more intimate moments. It carries a roaming spirit of folk and Americana without losing the romantic melodrama of her best work.

Lana Del Rey: Chemtrails Over the Country Club

Chemtrails Over the Country Club

On the morning of January 11th, as she ate a popsicle for breakfast with a newly broken arm, Lana Del Rey tumbled into nearly 40 somersaulting minutes of free-associative responses to questions from BBC Radio 1 presenter Annie Mac. On live radio, the pop star parkoured from thoughts on Trump’s presidency to going to the farmer’s market barefoot to how she’d characterize at least half of her friends as jerks. Finally, her frisson found a foothold in the psychology behind the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that had taken place six days earlier. Partway through clarifying how she felt Trump’s “sociopathy” may have unintentionally inspired the deadly siege, she cleared her throat to show her conviction. “I actually think this is the most important thing I’ll say in this interview,” she underscored. “For people who stormed the Capitol, it’s dissociated rage. They want to wild out somewhere! It’s like, we don’t know how to find the ways to be wild in our world….and at the same time, the world is so wild.”
In or out of context, this is an entirely fair analysis. With rare exception, the strange tradition of having celebrities act like talking heads on matters of national politics or domestic terrorism is both a largely pointless and joyless spectacle. But Lana’s monologue about the neuroses plaguing the United States was genuinely fascinating—for two reasons.
The first is that, for the past decade, Lana has been an exceptional hunter-gatherer of white American arcana. In 2011, she emerged as an aesthetic howitzer, exploding a broad but deeply personal index of iconography into her own nation of death-driven kitsch. It was Xanadu, built from a blissful, degenerate, high-femme sort of jingoism. Geographies—the Hollywood sign, the tri-state, California writ large—became mythological playgrounds for her to languor around and smoke Parliaments on. Marilyn Monroe, men in training yards, cherry pies, a Pleasantville middle-class, Coachella, violence-as-romance and romance-as-violence: she offered us a canon of heritage markers recast in ’10s-era drama and became the rare sort of talent that was able to congeal past and present into seductively conceptual cinema. With time and refinement, Lana Del Rey had mushroomed into what we called the next best American songwriter—emphasis on American.
The second reason was more obvious. The original purpose of the BBC interview was to promote her newly released single titled “Chemtrails Over the Country Club,” and the album that shares its name. Whether meant to be tongue-in-cheek, a joke, or not one at all, the title’s flawless alignment with the mood and mien of that moment—the conspiracy-mindedness, the radiant gloom, the fragility, and the suggestion of the type of person associated with the words “country club”—was an act of poetry. It was remarkable to hear the bard of white American malaise suggest which delusion was gripping the nation.
Two months later, Miss America’s latest text has emerged, and Chemtrails Over the Country Club is definitely both wild and incredibly American, the twin tenets of her empire. In 2017, Lana told Pitchfork that the American flag was no longer going to be a part of her live performances for fear of indicating national pride during the Trump era, but there was still one billowing on the cover of 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell!, and there may as well be one on the front of Chemtrails as well. (There actually is a flag hidden on the back.) She can’t help it: No muse speaks louder to Lana than the promised land, where cities are metaphors, its dead are its gods, and she, its glamorous Orpheus.
Like most labeled among the “greatest” of their realm, Lana Del Rey is focused on conquest. Here I mean that literally, in terms of acreage: Where her previous albums were rooted mostly on the coasts, her sixth record reaches prominently toward the center of the nation, warmed by the yeasty heat of the heartland. She goes to Arkansas and Nebraska and Oklahoma, narrates life as a waitress, lauds Jesus erotically, and affects a little twang. It is her most rangy album—her folksiest, her singer-songwriter-iest—and takes us physically further and deeper into her crystal vision of the country. If Norman Fucking Rockwell! was broadly interpreted as her “obituary for America,” this one might be her purest paean to it.
Depending on your mileage with her mythos, there are a few different entry points into Chemtrails. Likely because this is an album with a jumble of at least a few former-outtakes and entirely new cuts, Chemtrails is generous inasmuch as each song seems to work like a point on a timeline, correlating toward a version of Lana from periods past or present. Despite how often her body of work seems to loop back on itself into one slowly-growing Möbius of intertext—Bob Dylan lyrics, Elton John lyrics, countless mentions of California, jewels, the price of fame, roses, thorns—placing these tracks along her continuum is rewarding.
For those who found solace in Norman Fucking Rockwell’s sincerity—that quality that made her less of a fabulist and more of a protagonist—“Wild at Heart” represents the Lana myth at its most hard-boiled. The song begins on Sunset Boulevard. The melody is as if “How to Disappear” and “Love Song”—two of NFR’s most plaintive ballads—were put into a blender. The references are Lynchian, but only at a slant: There is nothing of Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage’s skull-crushing vim from the auteur’s movie by the same name, but the soapy storyline does smack of the film’s strangely glib tenderness. There is a lot of cigarette smoking, peripatetic wandering, and firm declarations of being seductively fucked-up. “If you love me, you love me,” she assures, “because I’m wild at heart.” Welcome back to Lanaland.
What Proust did for scent, Lana does for American spaces. She wanders through cities, breathes in the air just to get a sense of it, then drifts on. She travels east from L.A. to “Yosemite.” The opener “White Dress” introduces some adult alternative radio digestibility into the sound, a little bit of Jewel in the sparse drumming and the uniquely squeezed, head-voice heroics that we’ve not heard from her before. But she’s in Orlando then, a city of transience, sticky heat, and languishing in her desire to be anywhere else. Texas is buried inside “Breaking Up Slowly,” a torchy piece sung in an outlaw tenor. It calls upon the dissolution of the greatest twosome known to country—Tammy Wynette and George Jones—as a thematic fulcrum, but what she does more plainly in her duet with Nikki Lane is suggest country’s token lawlessness—the freedom of not knowing what to do or where to go next.
Her reverence for Wynette makes a lot of sense. Lana kept one of Wynette’s albums in the studio with her as she recorded her album (“I always have Tammy with me,” she said), likely as both spiritual and lyrical guidance. It’s almost too on-the-nose: Wynette’s biggest hit, “Stand By Your Man,” is a ballad that celebrates a particularly outmoded strain of womanly steadfastness in the face of difficult love—a sorrowful get-it-together mantra that seems more like a rationalization than a reminder. Lana’s “Let Me Love You Like a Woman” is its psychic twin—not country in sound but in aura, a tribute to the now-taboo thrills of traditional submission.
It should be less surprising that there is so much God in this. For someone with so much worship for the nation under it, her relationship to God has been complicated. (“Me and God we don’t get along,” she sang in “Gods and Monsters.”). But Lana has done a lot of reckoning with higher powers as of late: “It made me feel like a God,” goes the moonglow refrain of “White Dress;” there’s a lot of “contemplating God” in “Chemtrails Over the Country Club,” and “Tulsa Jesus Freak” is a full-on ultra-glam evangelical spectacle, lifted to heaven on the prosthetic wings of AutoTune.
The holiest spirit here, however, is her own. When she goes full Lana and gives in to her proclivity for near-embarrassing, entirely seductive, overwrought American beauty, it sounds divine. “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” is a ballad drawn directly from the Lana Del Rey vein, all honey sun, moneyed smiles, the pleasure of living lavishly. The video shows Lana in a diamanté mesh mask, looking a little like Hedy Lamarr in low fidelity, glancing sweetly from the driver’s seat of a mid-century Mercedes-Benz Cabriolet. Chemtrails dart overhead in crosshatch as Lana stares up with widened eyes. Whether or not she actually believes in covert geoengineering is entirely irrelevant: it’s the idea behind them she’s in love with. Like so many who find themselves alienated and disillusioned, she erects dreamworlds to inhabit, writes narratives that provide substance to a life that threatens to spiral without them. “I’m not unhinged or unhappy,” she declares. “I’m just wild.”
Her reassurances come with reason—few artists in recent memory have summoned more concern. Recall how intensely critics offered outsized meditations on the authenticity of her persona when she emerged in 2011 with Born to Die—they just didn’t believe what they saw. Her image as a volatile WASP cosplaying as a bourgeois-boheme obsessed with American kitsch—reviews practically demanded an apology for her image, or at least some crumb of irony, to match our cynicism. Who was more detached, us or her? Morally or aesthetically, it felt unreal—so she doubled-down, showing us how real and earnest she was. After Norman Fucking Rockwell, pop culture took her more seriously. And so she wrote a manifesto about her womanhood, which proposed a few clumsily-worded questions and asked for space and credit among choice women of color. She later tried to assure us—with some belligerence—that she has given people of color plenty of room at her table. Small infernos ensued.
These are not isolated wildfires. Lana has been chronically drawn to the combustible. Thematically, lyrically, and in reality, her voice has always been incendiary. The groundswell after the BBC interview—the post-interview, welly-eyed “fuck you” directed at media magazines and her detractors—I can think of no artist of her caliber who has drawn a more direct line between the self-abnegation of her pop persona and the person before us. There is no rule in place here, but when the artist’s being starts eclipsing their art, it becomes, for better or worse, part of their art too.
Lana the artist and Lana the woman have been extraordinarily compelling as of late. Not because it’s in any way satisfying to see such a singular talent gesture so blatantly toward her own fragility and fear—off her albums, at least—but because she consistently manages to reflect back a very particular portrait of the country she holds so close. Chemtrails’ vision may be roaming, but the artist’s remains impressively narrow. To paraphrase Lana, it is definitely difficult to articulate one’s wildness, especially for those so inherently wild at heart. What is lucid, though, is that Lana Del Rey’s inheritance has always been truly American—and everything we’ve seen in recent memory confirms how disarmingly, specifically American she’s become.

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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a ’90s pop-rock mainstay, a warm and rootsy record where Jakob Dylan came to terms with being his father’s son.

The Wallflowers: Bringing Down the Horse

Bringing Down the Horse

In 1992, no one wanted to hear organ on a rock song. At least that’s how Jakob Dylan, pragmatic frontman of the Wallflowers, explained the mediocre sales figures for his band’s self-titled debut. Those warbling, metallic emanations from Rami Jaffee’s Hammond B3 twisted through their scrappy first album like the double helix of a DNA strand, or miles of winding railway track. The record came out roughly one year after Nirvana’s Nevermind, which landed like a warhead and rearranged the molecules of rock music for the next two decades. To his label’s dismay, Dylan’s shambly bar-band melodies did not capture the rage—or the allowances—of American teenagers. But then, he never set out to be the voice of a generation.
Jakob Dylan formed the Wallflowers in a fit of surrender. Whether it was conscious or not, he’d been resisting the family business for years; many men outdo their fathers, but only a fool would think he could best Bob Dylan. So he didn’t try. When pressed about his childhood in early interviews, the younger Dylan alluded to a whitebread American upbringing. As a kid, he played Little League. He idolized his older brothers, who exposed him to all kinds of punk rock: the Jam, Stiff Little Fingers, and crucially, the Clash. That charged music ignited something in Dylan, who picked up a guitar as a pre-teen, and played in garage bands with names like Trash Matinee.
He had tried to conceal his lineage for as long as humanly possible. In school, there was nowhere to bury it, but Dylan would hide out when he could. One day in seventh grade, his classmates flipped their social-studies textbooks to a chapter about the 1960s. Printed on a page next to Martin Luther King Jr. and the Beatles was a thumbnail photo of Jakob’s dad. He asked for a bathroom key and slipped quietly out of the classroom. After high school, Dylan moved to New York to study painting at Parsons. It was one final push against a tide rising inside him. Two weeks into the semester, he returned to Los Angeles and accepted his fate.
Dylan enlisted his childhood friend Tobi Miller on lead guitar, bassist Barrie Maguire, and drummer Peter Yanowitz, who gigged in the late ’80s as the Apples, “which is even more pathetic than the Wallflowers,” the frontman once joked. Jaffee joined two years later, as the band became more of a presence around L.A. They convened in the back bar of Canter’s Deli for weekly jam sessions, where Jaffee invited scores of local musicians to bang out Neil Young covers around a beat-up house piano. Jaffee played with Dylan daily for about two months before Yanowitz tipped him off about his old man.
By the mid-’90s, the Wallflowers’ debut had only moved 40,000 units. Maybe it was the organ. Maybe the vocals were too muddied in the mix. Or maybe, to entertain another of Dylan’s pet theories, it wasn’t sad, angry, or grunge enough. “It’s just not what I’m interested in,” Dylan told The Los Angeles Times when asked if he’d consider a heavier sound. “I was never interested in just being in fashion. I was never the kid on Melrose who wanted to grow the dreadlocks and put on Doc Martens.” The limp reception prompted a change in labels and personnel—only Jaffee stayed on with Dylan as they readied their second album, 1996’s Bringing Down the Horse.
“When our contract fell through, there was a year where nobody would come to see us, talk to us, or even return our manager’s phone calls,” Dylan once told Billboard of his band’s post-debut slump. “We were severely damaged and mauled goods at that point.” That stale sense of dissatisfaction crept into the songs on Bringing Down the Horse, which Dylan wrote in the fallow years between 1992 and 1996. The title, a tweaked lyric from the forlorn “Invisible City,” referred to Dylan wresting control of his own creativity. For the Wallflowers’ second album, Dylan and Jaffee were joined by guitarist Michael Ward, drummer Mario Calire, bassist Greg Richling, and vitally, producer T Bone Burnett, who’d sculpted sounds by Elvis Costello, Marshall Crenshaw, Bruce Cockburn, and Gillian Welch. Burnett had also known Jakob since he was a little boy, when he manned piano and guitar in Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue.
More than an adept, sensitive producer, Burnett was a kindred spirit to the Wallflowers. His own solo career was steeped in murky Americana. A sly observer and incisive commentator, Burnett would cut one record as a roots traditionalist and cram his next session with a drum kit, harmonium, and a string section. For Bringing Down the Horse, Burnett split the difference and mostly stuck to the Wallflowers’ core instruments, giving them some separation and clarity. Unlike their scruffy debut, which was recorded live, Bringing Down the Horse was warm and precise. Jaffee’s organ melodies, whirring out of a B3 and a Vox Continental, were a defining element of that sound.
Dylan had spent the past three years trying to sharpen his writing, almost as a defensive strategy. Comparisons to his dad were crowding the columns of every interview; it was the rasp and slight whine in his voice. His deft, painterly verses. The fact that he dared to make rock music at all. “I can’t imagine a more daunting specter to have for a father, especially if you’re a singer and a songwriter,” Burnett told The Los Angeles Times several months after Bringing Down the Horse hit the shelves. Despite everything it afforded him, Dylan hauled his surname around like an albatross. There would always be a sect who saw their prophet’s son as an unskilled leech.
Though he wouldn’t discuss song lyrics at length, Dylan admitted that “Bleeders,” one of the best cuts on Bringing Down the Horse, was a dissection of all that judgment. As the song crept in on spangled guitar and a liquid line from Jaffee, Dylan compared his conflict to a fish fighting against the current.
Once upon a time
They called me the bleeder
Swimming up this river
With sentimental fever

But this ain’t my first ride
It ain’t my last try
Just got to keep moving on
If they catch me ever
They’ll throw me back forever
Dylan would later admit that “sentimental fever” referred to the devotion to songwriting he’d inherited from his father. Those hands, plunging into the water to disrupt his upstream struggle, belonged to the record industry. “[I was] being told countless times that I was not very good, and that the songs were no good, the band was no good, and that there was no future to this thing,” Dylan told Details in 1997, elaborating on the origin of “Bleeders.” “There was a time there when it was embarrassing to say the Wallflowers were playing.” But the numbers were reflecting a different narrative.
Bringing Down the Horse was climbing the charts, and by the close of 1996, it had reached No. 74 on the Billboard 200— wedged unceremoniously between MTV Party to Go Vol. 10 and ESPN Presents: Jock Jams Vol. 1. The album front-loaded its two biggest singles: the keening ballad “6th Avenue Heartache,” and the moody alt-anthem “One Headlight.” Dylan had written the former during his stint in New York, where he watched an older unhoused man play Everly Brothers songs on the steps of an apartment building daily. One morning, the man was gone, and people pilfered his belongings bit by bit.
The production of “6th Avenue Heartache” is some of the cleanest and most calculated on Bringing Down the Horse. To complement Jaffee’s rippling chords, the band brought in Leo LeBlanc, a pedal steel guitarist known for his work with John Prine. Dylan’s melody, a heartsick country dirge, was near-perfect. But then someone brought in Adam Duritz. The Counting Crows frontman, with his treacly, Glee Club pipes, spoils Dylan’s effortless rasp. Duritz dates the song, and his presence almost feels like a cash grab. “Maybe you don’t think you will like the album because I’m on it, but hey, Adam Duritz is on it also,” Dylan joked with Billboard about the single. As a business maneuver, it was shrewd: Counting Crows were a multi-platinum property.
Because Dylan is a talented songwriter, his misses feel more lazy than overwrought. Sleeper tracks like “Three Marlenas” and “Angel on My Bike” bob atop stagnant, circular melodies, like ice diluting a drink. Lyrically, Dylan does little to spike the tepid punchbowl; “Angel on My Bike” features a string of dull and undetailed passages, like this one:
I can’t handle a care
I want, but I can’t be there
While angel’s a prayer

It’s 45 miles on that highway
Angel double prayer
Throughout the song, Dylan’s rhyme schemes are unimaginative, his vernacular feels limited, and there is hardly any concrete imagery to chew on. In one exception, he sketches a nautical quagmire worthy of scrimshaw: “She found me down on a two-ton anchor/Tangled up in wire.” It’s a brief reminder that Dylan’s poetic strengths lie in specific renderings of American masculinity—ill-fated sailors and wanderers, brined by the sea or cured in cigarette smoke.
“Three Marlenas,” “Josephine,” and cringey bar-rocker “God Don’t Make Lonely Girls,” present another thematic suite on Bringing Down the Horse, with Dylan tightening his scope on the opposite sex. He watches one woman dance “behind the glass at a peep show,” and trails another as she recovers from a one-night stand. “Josephine,” a modest but piercing ballad, centers on someone with a “schoolgirl smile,” who presumably tastes like “sugar and tangerines,” as Dylan muses over warm, gold-toned guitar. Whether he is recalling a childhood love, or writing from the perspective of a ’90s Humbert Humbert, I cannot say.
What connects these three cuts is an innate (though likely unintended) sense of moral superiority over sexually liberated women, or at the very least, a fixation on purity. On the drowsy “Three Marlenas,” Dylan’s language is sparse but seemingly loaded with judgment. A distressed damsel with lipstick-smeared clothing lies alone in “somebody’s” bed, indicating a screw that didn’t offer foreplay, or even a first name. “She only went and did what she did/’Cause he would drive her home then,” Dylan sings in the first verse, his vocal chords sputtering at the close of each line. His refusal to name exactly what “she did” smacks of an unspeakable act. That she leveraged sex transactionally—for a ride—seems clouded with misplaced pity.
The most garish of this conceptual trio is “God Don’t Make Lonely Girls,” which treats its leading lady like some honky-tonk “Roxanne.” Dylan plays the peep-show patron, who projects his wholesome fantasies onto the dancer before him. “Something is wrong, she don’t belong,” he drawls, his bandmates summoning the swagger and twang of a Ford commercial. Much like Sting’s sex worker savior, Dylan’s character fancies himself a shining knight who can solve the dancer’s problems with a mere wardrobe change. “I’ll bet she’d look good in a brand new dress/She never felt good in her fishnet,” he assumes, a bit too pleased with the thought. The song reeks of feel-good filler—like something that you might hear at a county fair. But its Puritan gender framing dates the album more than anything else. No wonder the Wallflowers front-loaded their strongest work.
If you watched MTV in the ’90s, you need no introduction to “One Headlight.” The music video was coursing through the cable TV circuit like an ice cream truck circling the suburbs. Like much of the album, the song was structurally simple—a canvas for Dylan’s rust-eaten imagery: cheap wine, busted trucks, and the stench of death. For all the media’s insistence that Dylan must have been influenced by his dad, “One Headlight” pointed to another American Son: Bruce Springsteen. The lyric “This place is old/It feels just like a beat-up truck/I turn the engine but the engine doesn’t turn” was a direct reference to Springsteen’s 1987 song “One Step Up”: “Went out and hopped in my old Ford/Hit the engine but she ain’t turnin’.” Dylan accepted the irony that even if he didn’t spin his father’s records till the grooves smoothed out, his idols surely had.
At some point during the promo cycle for Bringing Down the Horse, someone remembered a powerful economic force: schoolgirls. I was only 7 when the shadowy video for “One Headlight” hit MTV, but it was obvious that Dylan had been packaged as a heartthrob. Shot under a bridge in Brooklyn, the visual pulls tight focus on Dylan’s eyes, which have been labeled every shade of azure since the clip first aired in 1997. His fetishized irises seemed like a marketing course correction: The video for “6th Avenue Heartache,” directed by a young David Fincher, had all the allure of a PowerPoint presentation. It was also filmed in black and white, robbed of those “startling, Samoyed-blue eyes,” as one reporter described them. The rest of the album’s videos were shot in color.
Dylan was aware of his hunk status, but didn’t dwell on it too much. He was a husband and father in his mid-20s, and had seen first-hand how fame could corrode family life. If his picture was being torn out of glossy magazines and slipped into binder covers, he found it amusing. In a 1998 interview with Rolling Stone, the wry musician was asked to comment on his undeniable “yumminess.” “Well, you know, to be called yummy is a fantastic honor,” he said, tongue firmly in cheek. “I’m going to do everything I can to continue to face up to that and not let anyone down in the future.”
But while he laughed at himself and his perceived sex appeal, Dylan never dismissed the contingent of Wallflowers fans who were taping his photo on their bedroom walls. “People frown on having young fans, especially young girls,” he said in ’97. “But if people look back and get their education, they’d realize young girls discovered the Beatles before anybody.” Dylan was quick to clarify that he wasn’t ranking his band alongside the Fab Four—but he couldn’t ignore the frenzied concertgoers. One night at Boston’s Avalon Ballroom, a frilly brassiere made its way on stage, followed by a dog-eared copy of Lolita.
By 1998, Bringing Down the Horse had sold 4 million copies—more than any solo studio album by Bob Dylan, as the trade papers liked to point out. “One Headlight” picked up two Grammy Awards that year, for Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group. The Wallflowers would go on to release five more studio albums; their latest landed just two years ago. But they’d never summit the mountain again. Arriving between the death of Kurt Cobain and the release of Radiohead’s OK Computer, Bringing Down the Horse was the last gasp of chart-topping, Western-bent alternative rock. Dylan was no longer swimming upstream. And the hands that had tried to grab him were fishing in different waters.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan

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This Mexico City-based experimental collective has been operating underground for over 20 years. Here, Feeding Tube Records reissues a vital compilation of their art-rock psychedelia.

Dog

With our crate-digger culture reaching peak levels, it’s always surprising to find an artist that has been making music for over 20 years and hasn’t already been anthologized. That’s what makes the surprise arrival of Los Lichis, a collective of experimental musicians and visual artists from Mexico City that first started working together in 1996, such a vital shock to the system. Chances are the recent reissue by Massachusetts-based Feeding Tube Records of Dog, a comp culling from the group’s self-released material, is the first time you’re hearing of them.
The members of Los Lichis—José Luis Rojas, Gerardo Monsiváis, Manuel Mathar, and French sound artist Jean Baptiste Favory—are entirely responsible for keeping below the cultural radar. Until recently, their music was only available for purchase in art galleries in Mexico. They have been slow to embrace digital distribution; their Bandcamp is just a couple months old. But from the sounds of this fantastic collection of dessicated art rock, cracked electronic experiments, and AM radio intrusions, their emergence from the shadows feels long overdue.
While the two-LP set isn’t arranged chronologically, listening through reveals how these men evolved as musicians and improvisers. Their work from the late ’90s—made before the arrival of Favory and his synthesizers—is rough-hewn and exploratory, built from junky-sounding drum machine rhythms and warbling electronic melodies. It has the excitement of Morton Subotnick compositions. Other tracks from that era, like the loopy and drowsy “Opium Boogie” and Throbbing Gristle-esque “Osaka ’77,” are a little more direct but remain suffused with a healthy dose of tape hiss and a playful energy.
As a producer, Favory’s input through the ’00s on helped bring Los Lichis even further into focus. Favory met Mathar and Monsiváis when the pair showed their art at Paris’s International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC) in 2000, and since then, he has been a satellite member of the group, visiting Mexico once a year for improv sessions and performances. His impact helped clean up their recordings considerably, and it also brought a welcome psych rock influence to the proceedings. “L’Origine de la Guitare Fantôme” slinks from its slow, glittery build into a nicely dawdling Dead-like jam punctuated by insistent keyboard bleats. “L’Inévitable Catastrophe,” meanwhile, has the overwhelming gush of a Loveless interlude.
What this collection is missing is the more overt political commentary that has been central to the visual work that Los Lichis has done on their own and as a collective. There are hints within certain song titles—the early Sonic Youth sounding “Krondstat Variation” is an apparent reference to the site of a major uprising during the Russian Civil War, and an overmodulated blues jam from 2002 is given the name “Eva und Adolf”—but otherwise, the music could have even more impact if married with some of the group’s striking videos and paintings. Even without visual accompaniment, Los Lichis retain that naturalistic spark and simmering wildness that only the best improvised music can provide.


The Brooklyn band’s ninth album is vivid and weird: a celebration of second winds, unlikely comebacks, and undying rock’n’roll dreams.

The Price of Progress

You can almost picture Skippers, the stripmall bar that serves as the setting for “Carlos Is Crying,” off the Hold Steady’s ninth album. The place is packed with cubicle drones sharing pitchers of beer and guzzling glasses of box wine, everybody letting off steam on a weeknight. That’s where poor Carlos finally breaks down sobbing. As Craig Finn relates the story, the guy hasn’t been to his job in weeks, even though he tells his wife he’s earning a steady paycheck. This is not how he expected his life to turn out: “We started as skaters,” he reminds his friends at the table. “Man, we used to glide/We used to hang like the smoke.” The Hold Steady chime in with some sympathetic harmonica and a bouncing-ball guitar lick, until Carlos admits, “Now every conversation I have is about money.”
This is how the Hold Steady’s characters age. They used to skate, party, take drugs, give themselves tattoos with ballpoint pens, make up clever nicknames, finger their rosaries, and chase salvation “into dark parts of big Midwestern cities.” Now they work unspectacular jobs, scrape to pay mortgages, and tell the same old stories about the past as Finn measures the crushing distance between adolescent dreams and adult realities. But this is not the way the Hold Steady ages. In their best songs the scene was always better a month or a year ago, the bands always heavier, the drugs harder. They traffic in the tragicomedy of lowered expectations, and they’ve yet to lapse into self-parody because Finn is always generous with the details and the Hold Steady are always ready with a dramatic guitar lick. They never condescend to any of the dreamers still clutching at their old dreams.
Rather than ignore the flatline trajectory of adulthood, Finn first embraced it on his solo albums, and he has examined it more determinedly with the Hold Steady over the past few years. More than anything else—including their 2016 reunion with keyboardist Franz Nicolay—this untapped thematic territory gave the band a boost after two disappointing records. The Price of Progress is full of second winds and unlikely comebacks, with Finn’s characters finally reaching a point where they can move forward again. On opener “Grand Junction,” a frayed couple drift through the West, searching for a destination and almost getting there by the final verse. The song evokes a very particular American vista, with the guitars counting the white lines down the highway and the synths hitting a crack in the windshield. It’s less a travelogue than a 21st-century landscape painting where “all the mountains were mocking our own little pitiful lives.”
Finn subtly expands the stage and stakes on the album’s second half without taking his eyes off his characters, who travel without really going anywhere. “The Birdwatchers,” an epic with music-box keyboards and minor-key tension, follows a couple traipsing through an unnamed country and looking for thrills that can’t be found in their guidebooks. Maybe it’s the same country in “Distortions of Faith,” a woozy waltz about a desperate musician who accepts millions to perform for a dictator. Despite some murky production by Josh Kaufman of the Fruit Bats and Bonny Light Horseman, the Hold Steady turn these songs into weird, vivid snapshots, always looking for new ways to soundtrack Finn’s globetrotting tales, whether that means the ’70s spy motif that adds a wink to “Understudies” or what sounds like an ’80s TV theme that casts “Perdido” as a strange period piece.
These are songs about desperation with no direction, alienation with no reconciliation, isolation in a crowded bar—a hunger for something that can’t be found on the laminated Skippers menu. That’s another way to say that the Hold Steady have lived up to their name: By slyly tweaking their musical palette and by expanding their familiar milieu, they’ve managed to thrive at a time when even high-functioning rock bands are having too many conversations about money. They’re adaptable, much like the protagonist of “Sideways Skull,” a woman who keeps her band going while living in a recovery clinic. Finn crams in so many amazing details about her world: the blood capsule in her mouth, the glam-rock top hat, the “jacket held together by the rock band patches.” It’s funny, but it’s not a joke. Instead, it’s a rousing anthem, an unabashedly positive jam. The Hold Steady are sincerely rooting for this artist who finds it “hard to fully rock in a halfway house.” They get you to root for her, too. “The trick is not getting cynical,” Finn barks, which sounds like the soundest and most adult wisdom they could pass along.


The My Morning Jacket frontman collaborates with his hometown orchestra on a spiritual set of covers and originals over symphonic arrangements.

Jim James / Teddy Abrams: The Order of Nature

The Order of Nature

The friendship between My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James and Louisville Orchestra conductor and music director Teddy Abrams dates back to 2014, the year Abrams moved to Louisville to become the youngest director in the ensemble’s 82-year history. Upon taking over, Abrams immediately started focusing on attracting young locals to the symphony, arguing in a PBS miniseries that funk, jazz, bluegrass, and folk were all not just viable, but fertile sources of inspiration for orchestral pieces. Abrams is also a composer, and thus a collaboration with Louisville native James seemed not as much an “if” as a “when.”
It would happen two years later, when James contributed guitar to an Abrams-penned song for Muhammed Ali that was released on the day of the boxing legend’s funeral. Now, the two of them have gone in together on a full-fledged project. The Order of Nature: A Song Cycle is a nine-song program featuring James as vocalist, recorded live at Louisville’s Festival of American Music last April. Each song is either an original composed by James and Abrams, a classic cover, or an Abrams reworking of a James solo cut—none are from the My Morning Jacket catalog. James sent Abrams demos of these songs in acoustic form, which Abrams then filled out with new orchestral arrangements.
The arrangements frame James’ sonorous voice so that it sits at the serene eye of a symphonic and choral hurricane. James lovingly interprets Nina Simone on the Charles Reuben-penned “The Human Touch” and later puts his own spin on Simone’s version of “Who Am I?” the Louisville Orchestra keeping him surrounded and supported, not suffocated. When James bellows to the heavens on the latter, “Will I ever live again?/As a mountain lion, or a rooster, or a hennn?” it’s equal parts spiritual and goofy. That’s a familiar mode for James, but not so much for Abrams, who simply follows his lead and crafts an avalanching grand-piano podium for James to project from.
Some of James’ solo songs struggle to emerge from under the shadow of their former selves. “Here in Spirit” and “Same Old Lie” were highlights on James’ psychedelic Eternally Even, but Abrams’ cinematic grandiosity swamps them. Compared to the fine-grained studio versions, they just sound flat-footed.
Conversely, Abrams’ rollicking arrangement on “Over and Over”—the third official version of the song that James has released in two years, after it appeared last year on Uniform Distortion and its rearranged companion album Uniform Clarity—fluffs it with Bacharach-ian details, its trumpet micro-gusts and lush strings ushering it towards a brightness that the two prior versions couldn’t unlock. That blissful feel creates a new, suddenly essential contrast with James’ lyrics about the tragedy of repeated mistakes; after all, the idea that “we drop the same bombs” and “we shed the same blood” is about as irrational as layering happy brass and a fiddle solo over such grim sentiments. The song’s impact practically doubles. This sounds like the version it was meant to be, the best one.
The loose thread binding the album is Mother Earth’s ability to unite—or as James has put it, “the fact that nature doesn’t know how to hate.” But for every ounce of energy that The Order of Nature spends preaching peace, harmony, and the wonders of the great outdoors, it burns more working overtime to convince newcomers of the power and magic of the Louisville Orchestra. “Back to the End of the World,” the album’s majestic center, nibbles a melody from the Fred Neil-penned, Harry Nilsson-popularized “Everybody’s Talkin’” and Bruce Channel’s “Hey! Baby.” It’s lovely and rich, but like much of the album, it also strains a bit in reaching across the classical-pop divide. In Abrams’ own words, when it comes to writing music, “it’s really important that the atmosphere matches the experience.” But the merging of Abrams’ and James’ worlds owes more to geography than to atmosphere. That makes The Order of Nature something of an inherent gamble. The two composers end up breaking even.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Zomby follows his buzzed-about dubstep singles with... a full-length 'ardkore throwback album. In the process he reveals himself as a provocative genre-tweaker able to nimbly move-- historically and stylistically-- throughout rave, garage, and jungle.

Where Were U in 92?

Zomby is a wiseass. I don't mean that flippantly or pejoratively, but I just can't think of a more appropriate term. Here we have a producer who sealed his rep as a dubstep powerhouse with 2008's much-buzzed-about breakthrough single "Mu5h/Spliff Dub (Rustie Remix)", and then he goes and decides that the best way to build on that goodwill is with a full-length 'ardkore/jungle throwback album. Well played, sir, and bonus points for turning a half-rhetorical phrase from M.I.A.'s "XR2" into a giddy, time-warping answer: Where Were U in '92? isn't just a rib-nudging throwback, but an electronic dance music family tree's branch rendered in flashing neon. Despite his dubstep associations, Zomby is revealing himself to be a provocative genre-tweaker, someone who's never content to let an idea stagnate for more than a moment and shoots out in all directions-- historically and stylistically-- to keep things interesting. As one of those crucial producers who can trace his current musical lineage back through a youth consumed by garage, jungle, and rave, he's long since figured out how all the pieces fit together.
This album's circa-1992 throwback elements are obvious but cleverly deployed: Bursts of ultra-pitched-up diva vocals provide hyperactive melody, only to be answered by rugged dancehall shouts; sirens and air-horns explode against densely-packed uptempo breakbeat rhythms; synthesized stabs and slashes blur the line between pianos and string sections. And while the album feels brief yet fully realized, its mood-swing structure and abrupt transitions-- the wobbly, dubbed-out gloom of "Tears in the Rain" jolted into the shiny 1 a.m. massiveness of "Get Sorted", or the rapid-fire "Hench" stepping into the subdued breakbeat of "B With Me"-- evoke the kind of feverish real-time mutation that came from a low-tech, pre-internet yet fast-moving DIY movement. It all sounds a bit like a homemade mix cassette assembled from scraps and pieces by some teenager with a dual-deck tape recorder and more interest in pace-tweaking, blunt-trauma segues than seamlessly-crossfaded transitions. (Though you can't say he didn't warn you, what with the first track bearing the title "Fuck Mixing, Let's Dance".)
Zomby's commitment to the era's style extends all the way to the equipment he used to record the album, using the studio techniques of the era and putting it all together on an AKAI S2000 and an old version of Cubase running on an Atari ST. So it's kind of jarring-- in a good way-- to hear a few more current-day notions run through it, like some of the robot vocals from "Technologic" downpitched and dragged across an archetypal breakbeat rhythm on "Daft Punk Rave", or the crunked-up ghettotech of "Pillz" making the UK hardcore/Southern bounce connection (and its shared interest in ecstasy) that much clearer. And there's never a sense that the music on here is strictly a backward glance; for every moment that sounds like it could've come from A Guy Called Gerald's 28 Gun Bad Boy or one of those great early jungle tracks that came out on Awesome Records or Moving Shadow back in the day, there's enough guttural bass and rhythmic elasticity to remind you of the garage and dubstep disciplines where breakbeat's successors eventually migrated to by the mid-late 00s.
It only makes sense that this album closes out with "U Are My Fantasy (Street Fighter II Theme Remix)", which reworks Baby D's '92 rave anthem "Let Me Be Your Fantasy" with music and sound effects from the classic fighting game, since Super Street Fighter II Turbo was recently revived as an updated, modernized, super-glossy high-definition remake for next-gen home consoles. And just as the people who grew up throwing dragon punches in arcades found out that there's still a tight, fluid game under that shiny new surface, Zomby's proven that the fundamentals of a sound that peaked over 15 years ago can still be streamlined into the current zeitgeist. He's gotten to the point where he can invoke old signifiers as something more than you-had-to-be-there nostalgia: all at once, Where Were U in '92? is a history lesson, a depiction of a musical timeline that folds in on itself, and a revival that works because it approaches its subject with the idea that it simply evolved instead of died.