X-Ray Spex’s debut album is a brash, vivid masterpiece of the germinal punk era. Its songs tackle identity, feminism, and consumer society with fire and joy.

Germfree Adolescents

Who is Poly Styrene? On January 20, 1979, the BBC endeavored to find out. “I chose the name Poly Styrene because it’s a lightweight, disposable product,” Styrene stated, with an absurd serenity, while scrubbing her teeth on national television during a 40-minute special on her London band, X-Ray Spex. “It sounded alright. It was a send-up of being a pop star—plastic, disposable, that’s what pop stars are meant to mean, so therefore I thought I might as well send it up.” Only two months had passed since the release of X-Ray Spex’s Germfree Adolescents, a brash, vivid masterpiece of the germinal punk era. An incisive 1977 interview with the fanzine Jolt, penned by one Lucy Toothpaste, was revealing in other ways. “She’s a girl and she’s half-black,” goes Toothpaste’s introduction. “HOW OPPRESSED CAN YOU GET?” (Caps Lucy’s.) “Doesn’t seem to keep her down though,” Lucy added, before quoting a patch of Poly’s more impressionistic lyrics: “‘Yama yama yama yama yama yama.’”
Poly Styrene was born Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, the daughter of a Scottish-Irish secretary and a dispossessed Somalian noble, in 1957. While UK punks were screaming about cutting ties with their pasts, Poly spoke of her fascination with her own history, her uniquely multicultural family tree; plenty of punks played Rock Against Racism gigs, but Poly was one of few active participants of color. After working in fashion in her youth, she ran away from home between the ages of 15 and 17 and spent a year touring Britain’s hippie music festivals, including the Trentishoe Earth Fayre—after the fest, she lived with fellow travelers in the countryside, where they brewed dandelion tea and bathed in streams. This wandering all stoked the ecological consciousness that would fuel her ethos in punk. Armed with her itinerant background, Poly Styrene became one of the most original pop stars in music history—trained in opera, acutely anti-authoritarian, braces cemented across her teeth—and she was indeed the sharpest punk lyricist that Britain ever saw.
She rolled her Rs over supercharged riffs with more tenacity than Johnny Rotten. She yabbered gibberish more wildly than the Ramones. She naturally did punk-reggae better than the Clash or the Slits, and she was upending the notion that “cleanliness is next to godliness” when Kurt Cobain was in elementary school. With guttural, soul-cleansing, full-body wails, Poly sang of our sanitized culture’s lethal obsession with sterile perfection long before pop culture had sniffed “Teen Spirit.” Poly Styrene’s prescient lyrics could serve as epigraphs to scholarly books about identity politics, commodified dissent, or consumer society. They are also fun.
On her 19th birthday—July 3, 1976—Poly saw the Sex Pistols at Hastings Pier and was changed. She swiftly put an ad in Melody Maker seeking “young punx who want to stick it together.” X-Ray Spex—name inspired by ads in True Detective mags, and brilliantly evoking punk’s impulse to dissect life below the surface—was managed and produced by one Falcon Stuart. Sixteen years her senior, he was also Poly’s boyfriend and produced her pre-punk reggae single “Silly Billy,” released on GTO—the UK label that put out Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.” One of the “young punx” to reply to that ad was 16-year-old Lora Logic, a Bowie-child who wrote and performed the band’s definitive sax arrangements before getting unceremoniously chucked out (allegedly for claiming too much of its spotlight). “Poly just wanted some men that would blur into the background,” Lora once told me, and she got a formidable lot in guitarist Jak Airport, bassist Paul Dean, drummer BP Hurding, and later sax player Rudi Thompson. They released four singles before EMI put out their only album, Germfree Adolescents, in November ’78.
X-Ray Spex is what I consider capital-P Punk—meaning, of the original movement—more than lowercase-p punk—meaning, by current vernacular, an action. Though raw, strange, and legitimately subversive, the songs of *Germfree Adolescents *have traditional structures. There are persistent verses and choruses and swaggering solos, steady beats and percussive hip-shaking claps; there are overdubs, candy hooks, chiseled little flourishes in the form of “oh-oh”s and (on “Highly Inflammable”) even some galactic synth shimmer. Germfree Adolescents holds up, in some sense, like pop music, albeit pop that is equally scorched and joyful, liberationist, charged with intellect and insurrectionary zeal. It inspires in ways that transcends genre, which explains why an artist like FKA twigs has called Germfree Adolescents her favorite album ever. Its musicality is honed; the musicians here are obviously amazing players. Its chugging faster-harder chords accelerate by the second, like the culture Poly describes. It is steely, shit-kicking, and bright; like an unbreakable machine, its build reflects the industrialization at hand. Germfree Adolescents’ singular sax-punk sound is, to borrow a word from Poly’s lyrics, “bionic.”
Along with her hippie inklings, Poly devoted much of her teenage years to watching fringe theater groups, and so she was visually inclined. This manifested in her striking and unusual sartorial choices—such as a green tin army helmet or a lipstick-red conductor’s jacket—as much as in X-Ray Spex’s music. The riffs were tonally fluorescent, but Poly’s language also made immediate appeals to the imagination. Her images—of “warriors in Woolworths,” of her mocking desire to turn into a “dehydrated” “frozen pea”—become 3D in your head. And Poly is refreshingly funny. “I am a poseur and I don’t care!” she sneers on the galloping “I Am a Poseur”; sarcasm vivifies “I Am a Cliché”’s pogoing titular chant. On the vibrant, almost-slapstick “I Can’t Do Anything”—“I can’t read and I can’t spell/I can’t even get to hell”—Poly cheerfully fights back against a guy called Freddy who tried to “strangle” her with plastic jewelry. Each word is an embodied exclamation point: “I hit him back!/With my pet rat!”
The prevailing theme of Germfree Adolescents is the inescapable horror of daily life in consumer society. Poly’s voice and the music—always peaking, always cranked to 100%—is persistently in-your-face, just like the most garish excesses of capitalism. “There was so much junk then. The idea was to send it all up,” Poly said in England’s Dreaming. “Screaming about it, saying: ‘Look, this is what you have done to me, turned me into a piece of styrofoam, I am your product. And this is what you have created: do you like her?’” The original tracklist opened with revving drums and Poly roaring “AAARRT-I-FIIICCIAL,” a reverbed rallying cry. “I know I’m artificial/But don’t put the blame on me,” she blazes. “I was reared with appliances/In a consumer society.” There is a scene in Who Is Poly Styrene, set among the modern industrial wasteland of the supermarket aisles, where Poly is pushing a shopping cart beneath the glare of fluorescent lights, grabbing at products: Daz laundry detergent, Special K, Anadin painkillers, Comfort fabric conditioner, Sunlight lemon liquid cleaner. The Raincoats’ Ana da Silva once told me she wrote her 1979 song title “Fairytale in the Supermarket” after watching it and realizing that Poly’s songs were like “fairytales, but in a consumerist society.” In 1978, Mick Jones was lost in the supermarket; Poly Styrene stared its offerings dead in the eye.
Anthems like the unsparing “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo” and “Plastic Bag” anticipated the anxieties of a world made of hidden cancerous chemical detritus. “Day-Glo” has an ominous gravity, but it’s catchy, sneaking into you like a sweet, hastily-torn packet of Splenda. Poly explores the toxicity of daily life in excruciating, relentless detail: our homes (“nylon curtains” and “perspex window panes”), our infrastructure (“the acrylic road”), our transport (“my Polypropylene car”), our fake food (“a rubber bun”), irradiated air (“the X-rays were penetrating through the latex breeze”). It culminates with an image of fake plastic trees years before Thom Yorke sang of a “cracked polystyrene man” (“synthetic fiber see-thru leaves fell from the rayon trees”). X-Ray Spex songs are like musical Andy Warhol soup cans; they find a spiritual predecessor in Warhol’s pivotal 1964 exhibition The American Supermarket. Look around, both whisper to you: Everything is plastic.
On “Plastic Bag,” Poly coupled her eco-critique with an incendiary indictment of advertising: “My mind is like a plastic bag/That corresponds to all those ads/It sucks up all the rubbish/That is fed through my ear/I eat Kleenex for breakfast/And I use soft hygienic Weetabix/To dry my tears.” Her sly reversal—Kleenex for eating, Weetabix for crying—underscores the interchangeability of these artificial products. Poly knew advertisements were inescapable, were rewiring brains; look out, they are coming for you right about now. But she was also genius enough to speak their mass language: “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo” was an unlikely chart hit in the UK, reaching No. 23 in April ’78.
In an age of burgeoning A.I. and rampant outsourcing, the sci-fi poetry of “Genetic Engineering” is even more prophetic, as Poly declares that “genetic engineering could create the perfect race… could exterminate/introducing worker clones/as our subordinated slave.” Her grim propositions have lost none of their daunting edge. Punks were screaming “NO FUTURE,” and fair enough, but Poly went further, deeper; her songs dared to imagine just how bad hellish normalization could be. And here we are.
Words like “disinfectant,” “Listerine,” and “sterilized” have never sounded so oddly seductive as they do on the postmodern love song “Germfree Adolescents,” the era’s greatest punk-reggae ballad. “I know you’re antiseptic/Your deodorant smells nice/I’d like to get to know you/You’re deep frozen like the ice,” Poly beams through this dubby, surreal waltz. In her futuristic tale of boy-meets-girl, purity reigns; “he’s a germfree adolescent” and “cleanliness is her obsession.” “Cleans her teeth 10 times a day,” Poly sings, “Scrub away, scrub away, scrub away/The S.R. way.” Both “deep frozen like the ice” and “the S.R. way” (sodium ricinoleate) reference a promo for Gibbs S.R. toothpaste, the very first television commercial broadcast in England in 1955. As Poly’s voice cracks out with each repeat of “10 times a day,” the desperation—the casual corner-store apocalypse of unpronounceable additives—pierces through the song’s swirling veneer. “Germfree Adolescents” became X-Ray Spex’s most successful single, reaching No. 19 on the charts in November ’78.
Somehow, Poly’s two most radically feminist statements—debut single “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” and a later B-side, “Age”—were left off the original Germfree Adolescents tracklist, only added back to the 1991 reissue. All punch and bounce, “Age” takes on ageism, body dysmorphia, and the beauty myth perpetuated by Hollywood in a fell swoop: “Age/She’s so afraid/Age/She’s not the rage.” (Check the mellow, reggae-tinged version of it on Poly’s lovely, misunderstood 1980 solo album Translucence.) The iconic “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” was, and is, like dynamite to patriarchy. It is a succession of lightning bolts, dizzied with ideas, as Poly’s profoundly unhinged voice skyrockets into the red to cap each chorus line. “Bind me, tie me, chain me to the wall/I want to be a slave to you all,” Poly seethed. It’s the ultimate punk song, and also intersectional feminist scripture: “Some people think that little girls should be seen and not heard/But I say oh bondage, up yours!”
In 2005, excerpts from Poly’s “diary of the seventies” appeared on her website. Poly muses on Superwoman, on vegetarianism, on reading about genetic modification in the glossy pages of *Time. *But she also reflects on Lucy Toothpaste probing her regarding “Oh Bondage! Up Yours.” “Is it about women’s liberation?” Lucy asks, and Poly replies vaguely, mentioning bondage trousers she saw at Vivienne Westwood’s SEX boutique. Then her entry continues forth, tracing the DNA of each line. She alludes to The Sexual Revolution by Wilhelm Reich, to images of “Suffragettes chained to the railings of Buckingham Palace,” to “pictures of ball-and-chained African slaves stored in my psyche.” Poly Styrene would often deny that her songwriting was autobiographical; six months before Germfree Adolescents came out, she told NME, “You have to be detached from everything in order to write. I have to observe… I can’t get too directly involved.” But you can’t escape yourself. The glimpse into Poly’s inner life shows just how innately distinct her perspective was from all around her in UK punk. Transcending time and place, though, in Shotgun Seamstress—the indispensable zine by and for black punks founded by Osa Atoe in 2006—the author repeatedly dubs Poly “Captain of the Brown Underground.”
Poly did not have to try to be this different; she simply was. At the core of Germfree Adolescents is a mantra that could summarize all of popular culture in 2017: “Identity/Is the crisis can’t you see.” Just over a year ago, Wesley Morris in The New York Times Magazine declared 2015 “The Year We Obsessed Over Identity,” situating our world “in the midst of a great cultural identity migration” where “gender roles are merging” and “races are being shed,” and of course this is felt at the turn of any axis. But a migration has a destination; identity is always fluid. On “Identity,” Poly wisely presents these dilemmas of personhood as perennial question marks: “When you look in the mirror do you see yourself?/Do you see yourself on the T.V. screen?/Do you see yourself in the magazine/When you see yourself does it make you scream?” Eviscerating and empathic in equal measure, “Identity” is a most logical anthem for today.
When X-Ray Spex imploded in mid-’79, they cited creative differences, but there was a darkness churning below the gleeful surfaces, which boiled over before Germfree Adolescents was released. The wages of Poly’s exuberance had a cost; she lived, to some degree, within the extremities of the hyperactive mindset she sang from so intimately. (It was not until 1991 that she was diagnosed as bipolar.) In the mid-2000s, Poly referenced a “traumatic experience of a sexual nature” she’d endured in ’78; she had a breakdown, went to John Lydon’s flat, and shaved her head (if she ever became a sex symbol, she promised early on, she’d shave her head). On tour that summer, she claimed to have seen a UFO fly past her hotel window “like a fireball.” (“I wasn’t mad, but I went into the hospital after that,” she said.) Lydon wrote of Poly in his 2014 memoir: “They used to lock her up occasionally… She’d break out and always make a beeline for my house… She was good fun until the ambulance turned up for her.” Poly soon remembered chanting with Hare Krishnas during her teen hippie years, began reading The Bhagavad Gita, and aligned with the movement. One need only look at the muchness of what Poly writes about to understand the potential sources of her struggle. In England’s Dreaming, Poly said she wanted Germfree Adolescents to be like “a diary of 1977.” It is also a diary of survival in a world closing in on us all in ways that can go hauntingly unseen.
Elsewhere in her journal, Poly meditates on her own ascending fame with three quotes:

“We will be famous just for one day.” —David Bowie
“Everybody will be famous for 15 minutes.” —Andy Warhol
“I am a cliché.” —Poly Styrene

But clichés do not hold. They dissolve. Poly Styrene is solid; Poly Styrene lasts. With her inclinations towards Eastern spirituality, perhaps she would relish in how the status of Germfree Adolescents now feels sky-like. Poly Styrene is the future, and she is now.


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 1990 R&B blockbuster that bridged the gap between new jack swing and hip-hop soul.

Poison

They’d been talking about Bell Biv DeVoe for four minutes straight, and Ralph Tresvant was getting pissed. All six members of R&B group New Edition were back together, sitting on BET’s black leather “Video Soul” sofa for an interview, and these three guys who usually sang backup for Ralph—Ricky Bell, Michael Bivins, and Ronnie DeVoe—wouldn’t shut up about their little hip-hop side project.
Tresvant decided to interrupt and set it straight. “Mike keeps stressing BBD—it’s not a BBD moment,” he said. “It’s a New Edition reunion.”
This was 1990, and the trio’s debut single “Poison” was on the verge of breaking into the Top 10. Their album, also called Poison, had just dropped, and it was on its way to selling 4 million copies. By the end of the year, Billboard would declare BBD the biggest new pop group of 1990. It was definitely Bell Biv DeVoe’s moment.
Poison was a conceptually groundbreaking pop album that reinvented the relationship between R&B and hip-hop for the ’90s. BBD even had a neat little mission statement to explain their vision: “Our music is mentally hip-hop, smoothed out on the R&B tip with a pop feel appeal to it.” They stamped the slogan on their album cover and flashed it on screen during their videos. They talked about it in every interview, including that day on BET. The show’s host wasn’t sure what to make of it: “And like...what does that mean?”
Ricky Bell spoke up: “You have to listen to the music to understand what we’re talking about.”
You’ve heard “Poison” too many times, probably at a wedding or a school dance or some perennially bad episode of “Carpool Karaoke.” But Bell Biv DeVoe is more than just a song, and their debut album represents a critical leap in the evolution of R&B. A collaboration with revered Public Enemy production crew the Bomb Squad, Poison embodied the style and sound of hip-hop in a more convincing way than any R&B album before it. For better or worse, Bell Biv DeVoe set the stage for three decades of singers who want to talk, dress, and act like rappers.
Back when he was only 14, Michael Bivins introduced himself to the world with a little rap on New Edition’s 1982 breakout hit “Candy Girl”: “She walks so fast, she looks so sweet/She makes my heart just skip a beat.” The group made smiling, bubble-gum electro-pop, but Bivins had the cool confidence of a rapper, even if he was stuck singing background vocals most of the time. As New Edition grew from boys to men, embracing a sophisticated sound on their 1988 album Heart Break, Bivins was quietly establishing his hip-hop credibility.
On the 1989 single “N.E. Heartbreak,” Mike foreshadowed the BBD attitude with a more aggressive rap style:

Strolled in the party, walked to the bar
Playing incognito like I ain’t no star
F-F-Fellas looking jealous
And girlies looking horny
Saw a foxy young lady—her man was corny

In the song’s music video, Bivins rolls through the party with Heavy D as his wingman. Months later, Biv appeared in Eric B. & Rakim’s gritty black-and-white video for “In the Ghetto,” walking down a dark alley with the God MC and his crew. “The engine for Bell Biv DeVoe was Michael Bivins. He had a vision for the group,” said Hank Shocklee, leader of the Bomb Squad and the producer who would help shape Poison. “New Edition was all about wearing suits and dressing upscale. Michael brought it back to the street realm. They really brought out the hip-hop element by wearing Timberland boots and sagging pants. This is what gave the group their visual look.”
At the 1989 Soul Train Awards, New Edition took the stage wearing grown-and-sexy tailored suits—except for Bivins, who was rocking a gold chain, green baseball hat, and baggy green leather pants. He had played his role for seven years, but now that Tresvant and Johnny Gill were going solo, the questions had started: What are you gonna do? Bell and DeVoe were in the same position. As the New Edition tour was ending in the summer of 1989, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis suggested they start a trio: Bell, Bivins, and DeVoe.
Louil Silas Jr., the executive VP of black music at MCA Records, did not want Bell Biv DeVoe to make a rap record. “Louil wanted to have them back in suits like they were still in New Edition,” remembered producer Alton “Wokie” Stewart. Wokie and his partner Timmy Gatling were fresh off producing sophisticated R&B singer Christopher Williams when Silas asked them to record with BBD. The sessions produced a pair of safe, sensitive slow jams, “When Will I See You Smile Again?” and “I Do Need You,” that appear at the end of Poison. They feature zero rapping, a saxophone solo, and a seductive quiet storm monologue.
“(Mainstream black music) doesn’t deal with the kids on the street anymore,” Shocklee said at a black radio conference in 1988. “It’s now being made for people who drive Mercedes, not people who ride the buses.” More and more radio stations were advertising their “no rap” programming policy, despite the fact that young people were buying a ton of rap records. Tone Loc’s 1989 hit “Wild Thing” became the top-selling single of the late ’80s, but one in six radio stations refused to play it because “the program directors dislike rap music or found the song sexually suggestive,” according to Billboard.
Public Enemy was the biggest thing in rap, but their music got no love from quiet storm R&B radio. In 1988, frontman Chuck D wrote a cover story for Black Radio Exclusive, a radio trade magazine, in which he criticized the black radio industry for ignoring hip-hop. “Rap gives you the news on all phases of life, good and bad, pretty and ugly: drugs, sex, education, love, money, war, peace… you name it. R&B doesn’t do that anymore,” said Chuck. “R&B teaches you to shuffle your feet, be laid back, don’t be offensive, don’t make no waves because, look at us! We’re fitting in as well as we can!”
“Hip-hop and R&B were in two separate spheres, two separate universes,” said Shocklee, who invited BBD to work with the Bomb Squad, which also included his brother Keith and programming wiz Eric “Vietnam” Sadler. At their first session in late 1989, Ricky, Mike, and Ron were all dressed up, looking like they came straight from a New Edition show. To break the ice, Keith Shocklee brought them up to the “hip-hop spots” in Harlem to shop for new clothes—jeans, sneakers, and t-shirts. When they came back, they were ready to make some rap music.
Based on their strengths, Shocklee assigned them roles: Ricky would be the singer, while Mike and Ronnie would stick to rapping. “For me, it was about crafting a sound [where] the rappers and the singer could co-exist together,” Shocklee remembered in 2015. “The rapping and the singing had to be married together.”
In the ’80s, collaborations between rappers and singers were mostly cookie-cutter—the singer would perform the chorus and verses, and then the rapper would jump in during the break or the intro for a quick verse. The result still still felt like an R&B record, just with a brief rap interlude, as heard on LeVert’s “Just Coolin’” (featuring Heavy D). Some R&B acts had started pulling double duty and adding their own raps, like Bobby Brown on 1989’s “On Our Own,” but it was still very rare for R&B singers to appear on hip-hop songs. BBD’s arrangements broke the rules by pairing rapping and singing together within a single verse, making rap-free radio edits impossible.
The first voice you hear on “Poison” is Kool G Rap, the wildly influential Queens MC who helped create East Coast gangsta rap. G Rap shouts “poison!” at you 38 times throughout the track, a sample from his own 1989 song “Poison.” The voice was like a dog whistle for hip-hop heads that immediately gave BBD a hardcore edge.
The poison in this story is, of course, a woman. On the song’s chorus, Bell warns listeners to “never trust a big butt and a smile,” a line that’s jacked from another hardcore rapper, KRS-One. Mike and Ron both call girls “hoes” in their rap verses—a daring move for two clean-cut boy-band members—while Bell’s doo-wop harmonies keep things civilized. The cool walking bass echoes LL Cool J’s 1987 hit “I’m Bad,” and the iconic rapid-fire snare pattern is a blunt rendition of new jack swing’s signature rhythm.
“Poison” was written and produced by Elliot “Dr. Freeze” Straite, a Brooklyn producer and aspiring artist who shared a manager with BBD. But several musicians have claimed credit for helping to shape the track, including Hank Shocklee. “When it came to me, the record was very mellow and laid back,” Shocklee said. “I had to take it and give it a boost and pump it up. Besides changing kicks and snares, I wanted to make sure it had some power and punch. The drums had to be loud. When you hear the intro to the song, that’s what set the whole song off.”
The Bomb Squad crew only received production credits on three songs, but Shocklee says he actually remixed most of the songs so they would feel more hip-hop and have a cohesive feel. Minus the two out-of-place slow jams at the end of the album, every song on Poison is deeply committed to the mission of hip-hop fusion. The Shocklee-produced “Ain’t Nut’in Changed!” and “Let Me Know Something?!,” are the album’s most overtly hip-hop moments, bringing the golden era’s chopped funk aesthetic to R&B. These aren’t hip-hop-influenced new jack swing beats with typical mega-loud snares and orchestral synth stabs—they’re straight up hip-hop beats with samples flying everywhere and some singing on top.
The highlight of Shocklee’s sessions with the group is “B.B.D. (I Thought It Was Me)?,” which became Bell Biv DeVoe’s second No. 1 R&B single. Shocklee created the record after trying to imagine what Teddy Riley would do with BBD, imitating the hype, breakbeat swing of Riley’s hardest-hitting club bangers for Big Daddy Kane, Wreckx-N-Effect, and Heavy D. The lyrics on Poison are largely pretty light-weight party raps, but BBD were not pop rappers like Milli Vanilli or Technotronic—their music feels of the culture. Biv even came through with some slick nautical wordplay:

Yo, I love being a bachelor
Ricky said, “Yo, that girl’s a good catch for ya”
She and I choose to cruise in my love boat
My waterbed, kept us afloat

When it came to BBD’s controversial hit “Do Me!,” DeVoe swiped his lyrics without permission from an aspiring teen rapper named Busta Rhymes who he’d met the studio with Shocklee. Musically, the song is a pretty typical new jack swing affair, but lyrically, it pushed the envelope of sexuality in R&B. Ron—who was 22 at the time—tells a story about committing statutory rape (“backstage, underage, adolescent...”), while Mike brings some light S&M to the party: “Ooh, that booty/Smack it up, flip it, rub it down, oh no!” It’s hard to ignore three horny dudes chanting “do me, bay-bayy” with orgasmic moans as background vocals.
The song was a huge hit, despite disrupting R&B’s polite, euphemistic relationship with sex. The “smack it up” line in particular prevented some radio stations from playing “Do Me!,” but the song still received heavy rotation on MTV and went to No. 3 on the Hot 100. “This time we chose not to bite our tongues,” Bivins told [SPIN] in 1990. “This is us, we’re just speaking words that we hear every day.”
The obscenity trial surrounding 2 Live Crew had reframed hip-hop’s explicit sexuality as a free speech issue. If BBD wanted to be “mentally hip-hop,” they had to find some way to align themselves with hip-hop’s confrontational cool. And as three former teen heartthrobs who had grown up singing love songs, making the leap to sex songs was the most believable way for them court controversy.
The music video for another hit, “She’s Dope!,” where they compare the object of their affection to a “sexy X-rated video queen,” features a scene where Bell pours a bottle of champagne on a woman’s breasts. Selling sex was BBD’s way of asserting their masculinity, and, as is often the case, women were caught in the crossfire. “Poison” might be a transcendent party song, but its low-point is DeVoe’s mean-spirited, hypocritical assessment of a woman who’s slept around:

The low-pro ho, she’ll be cut like an afro
So what cha sayin’, huh?
She’s a winner to you
But I know she’s a loser
How do you know?
Me and the crew used to do her

BBD not only gave R&B singers permission to talk like rappers, they proved that baggy pants, dope beats, and a little casual misogyny could turn you into a huge crossover pop star. At the time, R&B needed to break free from the stale love-song conventions, but we now live in a world where Chris Brown has everyone singing “these hoes ain’t loyal” at the Soul Train Awards. Hip-hop contains multitudes, and Bell Biv DeVoe chose not to co-opt rap’s Afrocentric identity politics, its clever multi-layered lyricism, or its criticism of systemic racism. The fact that they mostly chose to co-opt hip-hop’s misogyny—and the fact that it made them even more famous—shows what entertains us as a culture.
Ralph Tresvant still did not understand BBD’s crossover appeal. “That’s weird to me, man. We’re all from New Edition. White folks eat up Bell Biv DeVoe, but [when] we’re together, they scratch their heads,” he said in the wake of their success. Along with Tone Loc, Young MC, and MC Hammer, BBD helped usher hip-hop into mainstream radio rotation, clearing the way for white-privilege beneficiary Vanilla Ice to score the first No. 1 rap hit in the fall of 1990. And like hair metal’s death at the hands of grunge, hip-hop’s rise rendered many veteran R&B acts irrelevant—especially those who weren’t capable of adopting the sound and style of rap.
Bell Biv DeVoe weren’t the first to inject hip-hop into R&B. But they were the first to suggest that the two genres could be one in the same, predicting the rise of modern genre-fluid hip-hop/R&B superstars like Missy Elliot, Black Eyed Peas, and Drake. BBD’s slogan—mentally hip-hop, smoothed-out on the R&B tip with a pop feel appeal—sounded crazy in 1990, but today, it sounds like a prophecy.


On their first-ever EP, the Swedish dance-pop band again aim for escapism while failing to realize that the format offers a chance for exactly that.

Lover Chanting EP

Little Dragon have long seen their sounds as a way out of reality. “Our aim is to make music for people to escape into,” drummer Erik Bodin told Spin in 2011, when the Swedish four-piece released their third album, Ritual Union. That mission statement summarizes a decade-plus of snappy synth-pop throwbacks, none of which have quite eclipsed the success of the group’s 2010 guest turn on Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach. Still, even without any hits of their own, Little Dragon have, across five albums, built a body of work largely catchy and generally upbeat enough to earn a respectable following and soundtrack trips to the shopping mall.
Little Dragon’s first-ever EP, Lover Chanting, arrives just a year after the middling Season High. It returns to their escapist mantra: “Dance for peace and unity in this world of madness!” reads the recommendation that accompanies these three songs. “Embrace the great mystery of everything that your brain can’t grasp and lose track in the most beautiful sense.” The cavalier sentiment is the glossy finish atop minimal substance; these tunes are pleasant enough, but they offer little more reward than fast-acting, fast-fading dopamine hits.
Little Dragon check several of the requisite boxes for movement, at least. The title track and opener is cut from loping disco synths and a bludgeoning backbeat that feel club-friendly and familiar enough from Little Dragon’s past catalog. The hook, a rare vocal performance by Boden, is undeniably infectious, though its refrain of “Do you wanna be my girl/I wanna be your man” is so hilariously shallow that even Yukimi Nagano, Little Dragon’s lead singer and primary lyricist, “got a bit worried about [Bodin’s] lyrical abilities.” But for a song that purportedly prioritizes motion, it never gains momentum; halfway through, its points have already been made, but it harps on nevertheless. (As though by way of acknowledgement, the EP actually ends with an edit of the track that chops off two minutes.)
“In My House” has the same problem. In her best moments, Nagano’s delivery is captivatingly idiosyncratic—her voice nasal and slippery, applying an oddly sensual tone to sterile words. But here, even her best efforts don’t break up the monotony of the song’s dancehall-lite wobble as it stretches toward the six-minute mark. “Timothy,” the EP’s final full track, is its shortest and best, with a whistle riff to rival that one by fellow Swedes Peter Bjorn and John and a star-is-born narrative that offers a ballast its counterparts lack.
Too bad: An EP is often a great place for a band to experiment and test out new ideas between albums, to make mistakes and start again, especially when their trademark sound seems tired. But Little Dragon show none of those desires. For them, the pursuit of escape has created another sort of trap: the comfort of the familiar.


The new album from Macklemore—his first without collaborator Ryan Lewis since 2006—is a light listen with a couple of good moments and some innocuous clunkers, plus features from Lil Yachty and Offset.

Gemini

The cultural context in which Macklemore briefly became one of the most derided musicians on the planet has, in some sense, dissipated. In 2014, the Seattle native, born Ben Haggerty, caught hell when The Heist—his goofy, modest, hit-laden album with Ryan Lewis—was awarded a Grammy over Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city. In response, Macklemore sat down, had himself a think or three, and emerged in early 2016 with a painfully labored sequel. This Unruly Mess I Made succeeded in earnestly engaging with criticism that Macklemore and Lewis had profited from white privilege while utterly failing to show that they deserved the attention they’d received. It was a bad album made in good faith when people still had room to care. But does anyone have the energy to be angry at Haggerty anymore?
On his new album, Gemini, Macklemore feels like he’s shrunk back down to an appropriate size. The record is not wondrous, but it’s a light listen with a couple of good moments and a handful of clunkers. The weaker moments reveal his shortcomings as a rapper without being provocative or ponderous enough to provoke a firebomb, or even a raspberry, in response.
Gemini is Haggerty’s first solo album in 12 years and his first without Lewis since the two met in 2006; the duo announced an amicable split in June. Macklemore has been careful to praise the relationship in interviews, but he’s also suggested that his partner placed significant pressure on him. (“Ryan is so good at [...] bringing out the best in people,” he told Rolling Stone. “It can be daunting a little bit when someone’s constantly like, ‘Nope, rewrite it. Nope, rewrite it, rewrite it.’”) With Lewis gone, Gemini’s sound falls to an old collaborator, the producer Budo, along with Tyler Dopps, the young engineer and producer who helped source samples for This Unruly Mess.
Budo and Dopps have left Macklemore’s sound more-or-less unchanged, if a bit less cloying, with plenty of tinkling piano keys and bland, stadium-sized choruses. The record is faux-inspirational in the front and faux-churchy in the back with some mild, relatable songs stacked up in the middle. Those include “Intentions” and “Good Old Days,” the first about failing to make good on intentions (“I wanna be faithful/But love hooking up with randos”) and the second, which features Kesha, about the good old days.
Relatable, platitudinous songs like these, which mistake honesty for profundity, are Macklemore’s bread and butter. They’ve allowed him to retain a dedicated fan base as his mainstream appeal has waned. Listening to Gemini, it struck me that one of the things that must draw fans to Macklemore is the simple intelligibility of his lyrics. Rap has only gotten more cryptic since the emergence of Young Thug, Lil Uzi, and their Soundcloud imitators. Macklemore, on the other hand, enunciates so clearly that he could be calling bingo at a local retirement home. Fittingly, on “Glorious,” he imagines getting props for his bars all the way from heaven, sent not by a departed rap legend but by his late grandma.
Lines like that one combine Macklemore’s self-seriousness (“I am a terrific rapper”) with his goofier side (“Even my grandmother thinks so”). He has trouble sticking consistently to either approach. On the Lil Yachty-featuring “Marmalade,” there’s a particularly confusing sequence where he talks shit to a hater for being on Tinder, only to pivot: “And if I was single/I’d be right there with ya/But I’m committed, keep my dick in my britches.”
Macklemore is a generous collaborator, extending a hand to plenty of unknowns and gamely imitating the flows of established artists including Yachty and Offset on “Willy Wonka.” (Listening to Offset rattle off the reasons why Willy Wonka is a sensible role model is one of the fleeting pleasures of this record). The romantic “Zara” includes a sweet tribute to 1990s R&B and is elevated by Abir, a Moroccan-born singer with a powerful voice; when asked what she was most excited for fans to learn about her in a recent interview, she responded, “That I exist!”
There are some other standout songs: the block-party special “Levitate” and “Corner Store,” which is enjoyable despite being a thunderingly obvious “Thrift Shop” redux, lacking only the latter’s catchy hook. There’s also plenty to ignore—like “Firebreather,” in which Macklemore dabbles in rawk with the help of fellow Seattleite Reignwolf. The album’s closer “Excavate” is outrageously maudlin with an overwrought falsetto from the Washington singer Saint Claire. But it’s obviously sincere and even touching at times. The hip-hop world has moved on to fresh abominations—to YouTubers who cannot even pretend to be making music in good faith, to viral successes apparently intent on repeating the errors of Macklemore and Iggy Azalea anew. Gemini, meanwhile, is an album full of schlock that no one is asking us to pay attention to, and it signals that Macklemore wants, and deserves, to be left in peace.


On her 1967 debut album, Nico’s unmistakable voice sings the songs of Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Jackson Browne. Chelsea Girl helps define her as a mercurial aura and a manifold, complicated artist.

Chelsea Girl

In the early-to-mid-1960s, visitors to Andy Warhol’s silver-plated Manhattan Factory were often asked to sit for a screen test. Unlike traditional screen tests, which are more like auditions, Warhol’s brief black-and-white 16mm films were silent portraits of an individual in a moment of unguarded stillness. Nico’s 1966 Screen Test finds the singer perfectly content in front of the camera. She fiddles with a few props, stares off into space, and nibbles on her fingernails. It’s almost as if the camera is not there at all, which for Nico, it may as well not have been. She was always under someone’s gaze, a kohl-lined enigma glaring out from behind her bangs.
Nico spent most of her life as a manifold figure reduced to a muse. She was so often limited to her striking physical presence and icy “unapproachable mystique.” As Warhol’s Screen Test shows, Nico possessed that inexplicable magnetism, a wordless ennui. But she was also written off as untouchable and unknowable, which by all accounts she was. “She had no inner life. What inner life she did have was always strictly kept in her,” said Viva, one of Warhol’s Superstars, in the 1995 documentary Nico Icon. “There was really nothing to talk to Nico about because she had no interests.” “[Nico] didn’t hate people,” says her friend Carlos de Maldonado-Bostock in the same film. “She was just alone, alone. And she was scared to death. Of herself, of everybody.”
Nico’s beloved 1967 solo debut Chelsea Girl is her aura commodified by men who were intoxicated by the idea of Nico. Despite the fact that each song on the album feels extracted from Nico’s soul, she did not write any of the lyrics. Of course, men writing music for women is a constant in the history of pop music. But there’s something about Nico’s qualities—ennui, detachment, mystery, beauty—that make Chelsea Girl a double-edged sword. Consider the lyrics to “Afraid” off Nico’s 1970 record Desertshore: “You are beautiful and you are alone.” Detachment, the ever-present quality of Nico’s voice, only intensified the idea of her as just an image.
Throughout her life, Nico actively encouraged the air of mystery that followed her. She claimed to have been born everywhere, from Berlin to Budapest (definitively, it was Cologne, 1938). She said her estranged father was either a soldier with Hitler’s Wehrmacht armed forces or a Turkish Sufi (it was former, and he was killed by a commanding officer, after being shot by a French sniper). When the British bombardment of Cologne intensified, mother and daughter moved to a small town outside of Berlin. After dropping out of school around the age of 14, Christa Päffgen was discovered by the German fashion designer Heinz Oestergaard and began a fruitful modeling career. Eventually, she would take on the name of photographer Herbert Tobias’ ex-boyfriend: Nico.
Nico began acting in her early 20s, appearing most notably in Federico Fellini’s 1960 film La Dolce Vita. About a year later, while studying at New York’s Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg, she had a brief affair with French actor Alain Delon, which resulted in a son, Ari. By the time Nico met Warhol in 1965, she was already a Superstar of her own creation.
She was hardly a singer, nor did she aspire to be one. Her unwavering Germanic baritone was a result of the opera and wartime propaganda anthems she grew up with and the jazz and blues she witnessed as a young model in Paris. But Nico’s voice only heightened the spectacle Warhol desired. “The group needed something beautiful to counteract the kind of screeching ugliness they were trying to sell,” explained Paul Morrissey, a Factory filmmaker and one of the Velvet Underground’s first managers, “and the combination of a really beautiful girl standing in front of all this decadence was what was needed.” Warhol had recently been approached to help open a discotheque in Long Island and was looking for a house band. Coincidentally, he had just encountered the Velvets at the Greenwich Village venue Café Bizarre and decided that the quartet were the perfect fit. Enter Nico, who would be the band’s “window-dressing.”
Conflict between the Velvets and Nico erupted immediately, largely because of Nico’s desire to sing every song. At this point, there were no songs fit for Nico’s low, unbroken rumble in the Velvets’ repertoire, so Warhol commissioned a reluctant Lou Reed to write a few ballads for his rising star. The resulting songs—”Femme Fatale,” “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror”—are deep psychological studies rooted in Reed’s complicated relationship to Nico and the cultural spectacle swirling around them. While each of these songs seems directly drawn from Nico’s psyche, “I’ll Be Your Mirror” is Nico in a nutshell. As French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote in his 1979 book Seduction, “’I’ll be your mirror’ does not signify ’I’ll be your reflection’ but ’I’ll be your deception.’”
Despite its historical accolades, their 1967 album The Velvet Underground & Nico was considered a commercial and financial failure, and as a result, the band was not playing many shows. Nico began a solo residency at the St. Marks street club The Dom where she was initially accompanied by a tape deck playing Reed’s pre-recorded guitar solos. Apparently, it was painfully awkward, and soon Nico was joined by the actual Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Tim Buckley, and a young Jackson Browne, who later became her lover. In the final weeks of Nico’s residency, the Velvets presented her with an opportunity to join them on tour. Nico chose to stay in New York, symbolically ending her time with the Velvet Underground. “I have a habit of leaving places at the wrong time, just when something big might have happened for me,” she would say.
But something big was happening for Nico. Her 1967 solo debut Chelsea Girl would be her first step towards claiming herself as an artist and individual. Although the record’s 10 sparse folk-pop songs were written by Nico’s male collaborators—Browne, Reed, Cale, Bob Dylan, Morrison, and Tim Hardin—Chelsea Girl is not a covers record. Rather, these were the unreleased songs she had acquired through her residency at The Dom. Like her songs on The Velvet Underground & Nico, each track is a remarkable communion between writer and singer. “I am the person, the Chelsea Girl,” Nico declared while revisiting the hotel years later. The record takes its name from Warhol’s split-screen 1966 experimental film Chelsea Girls, which documents the mundane activities of scenesters at the legendary Chelsea Hotel. “Chelsea Girl” is a continuation of the film in the form of a ballad about the hotel’s S&M queens, Superstars, and junkies; every character’s verse contains a heartbreaking epitaph like, “Her future died/In someone’s past.”
Chelsea Girl presents a young woman torn between the regrets of her past and the unknown but hopeful future. Browne’s three contributions—“These Days,” “The Fairest of the Seasons” and “Somewhere There’s a Feather”—are introspective meditations on change backed up by Cale’s chirping viola and Browne’s gentle acoustic guitar. “These Days,” the ultimate loner anthem and the most famous song of Nico’s career, has been covered by artists from Drake to Elliott Smith, and is as iconic as Nico herself. It’s no wonder Wes Anderson chose to use it as a theme of sorts for The Royal Tenenbaums’ Margot, a character whose mystery and sadness is as heavy as her mink coat. But upon listening to Browne’s twangy version of “These Days,” it becomes obvious that Nico’s droning, Germanic drawl is what makes the song so affecting.
While Browne focuses on transitions, Cale pushes Nico into more a more esoteric realm. On “Little Sister” (co-written with Reed), Nico’s voice is flat and brooding in direct contrast to the whimsical organ which pipes along beside her. She sings in “perfect mellow ovals” as Goldstein wrote in 1966. “It sounds something like a cello getting up in the morning.” “Winter Song” on the other hand, basks in an almost medieval atmosphere which is heightened lyrically by talk of  “tyranny,” “royal decay,” and the “worshipping wicked.” The closest thing to a Velvet Underground song on Chelsea Girl is Reed, Nico, and Cale’s hefty eight-minute “It Was a Pleasure Then.” While Cale’s viola groans with distortion and Reed’s guitar drives into darkness, Nico’s voice soars into a wordless soprano at the peak of her range. She draws out the words until they lose definition and simply become expressions.
Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine” provides some levity at the end of Chelsea Girl. Though Judy Collins also claimed that Dylan wrote the song for her, technically he wrote it while on vacation in Greece with Nico in 1964. Whereas Collins’ version is an alarmingly cheery love song drowning in organ, Nico’s take indulges in darkness despite the poppy orchestra backing her up. “I’ll Keep It With Mine” brings Nico full-circle from “I’m Not Sayin,” and would be the last time she ever made a song so conventional.
Reactions to Chelsea Girl was at best indifferent and at worst, sexist. One Los Angeles Times writer remarked, “Nico’s a classy girl, but they’d sell more Nico if she were naked...and not hiding behind a string orchestra in a flower print dress.” For her next record, 1968’s wintry The Marble Index, Nico picked up the harmonium and wrote all of the songs after being encouraged by her “soul brother” and part-time lover Jim Morrison to document her dreams. She dyed her blonde hair with henna and trading her white clothing for an all-black ensemble. “I felt that at last I was independent, and that I knew what independence was,” she said.
But while Nico was taking some control of her music, her life was spiraling. There was the time in 1974 that she performed the German national anthem “Das Lied der Deutschen” including the verses that were banned in 1945 due to their Nazi associations. A year later, Nico was dropped from Island because she told a reporter that she “didn’t like negroes.” In an alleged instance in the early ’70s, Nico declared that she “hate[d] black people,” smashed a wine glass on a table, and stabbed the eye of a mixed-race singer who worked with Jimi Hendrix. Concert footage of a middle-age Nico in the early ’80s portray her as a skeletal figure with gaunt cheeks, rotten teeth, and sunken eyes from a disturbing heroin addiction. It’s as if Nico found power in destroying her image.
Nico once admitted that she could not relate to the songs Reed wrote for her. “I can’t identify with that,” she said of “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “to notice only the beautiful and not the ugliness.” Despite its melancholy, Chelsea Girl is still very much caught up in this world of the Screen Test, one focused on ineffable, alluring melancholy. To today’s casual Nico fans, she still exists in this bubble, a blonde monolith in a white pantsuit, a vessel for dreams and desires. But to consider Nico as frozen in her Chelsea Girl years is a disservice to the active efforts she made later in life to move beyond her image. But consider all of Nico, the strange circumstances of the Velvet Underground, the image of Chelsea Girl, and the horrific, inexcusable actions of her later life. It’s a wholeness she craved all along.


His Name Alive's new album is inspired by the Large Hadron Collider, filtering the cosmic implications of the awe-inspiring device through the stonier side of ‘70s rock.

Patterns of Light

There is a surprising amount of music inspired by particle accelerators. Techno-classical producer Kate Simko wrote an album about the one at Fermilab, located outside her hometown of Chicago. Jazz pianist Al Blatter once improvised along to a “sonification” program that translates data collected by the Large Hadron Collider into music on stage at the Montreux Jazz Festival, where CERN, the multinational research organization that runs the LHC, has held several artist workshops. Sound artist Bill Fontana created a piece that used the LHC itself as an instrument, refracting sound generated by its own data. The LHC and Fermilab have each inspired their own not-particularly-good nerdcore rap anthem, complete with inter-lab beef.
So His Name Is Alive isn’t breaking new conceptual ground by taking the LHC as the inspiration for their new album Patterns of Light, but where they’ve taken that influence is entirely uncharted territory. Previous works in strange little niche have crossed multiple genre lines, but there’s always been a consistent aesthetic: clean-lined, blippy, and serene, like what you’d expect to find in a PBS documentary, or what you might imagine a massively powerful and complex piece of technology might listen to for fun. His Name Is Alive mastermind Warren Defever has gone pretty much the exact opposite way, filtering the idea of the LHC through the stonier side of ’70s rock.
Defever has spent the past 25 years picking a strange course through a field of genres that up until now has touched on goth, folk, R&B, noise, and chamber pop, but even with all that range, Patterns of Light feels like an outlier. Even if you heard 2014’s Tecuciztecatl, where the band merged shoegazey noise with vintage prog, you’ll still probably be caught off guard when the album opens with a track that–apart from the hypnotic multitrack cooing of vocalist-keyboardist Andrea Morici–sounds exactly like Dio-era Black Sabbath. It’s by far the heaviest, shreddiest, most aggressive thing Defever’s ever done, and, as far as I can tell, entirely unlike any other music ever composed for CERN.
The major difference is that past artists seem to have been inspired by the Large Hadron Collider’s earthly manifestation: the sleek lines of its beam-conducting apparatus, its intricate computer arrays, the pixelated action art of its data visualizations. Defever, on the other hand, considers it from a more cosmic perspective, which the LHC offers in abundance. After all, this is a machine that was built in order to rip the veil off the mechanisms of reality, one designed in search of something that’s often been called the “God particle.” It’s so powerful and strange that a lot of people seriously thought that it was going to destroy the universe when it was first powered up. Even after it’s been up and running for years without tearing apart the fabric of reality, people are still terrified of it.
Patterns of Light runs on this occult energy. The lyrics—with their frequent invocations of witches, dragons, and the “light of creation”—often read like spells, where knives and sacrificial murder pop up next to dark matter and the standard model of particle physics. “Silver Arc Curving in the Magnetic Field” describes the LHC collider’s 17-mile-circumference circle like the ritual site of a new techno-pagan cult–just the latest iteration in a 3000-year-old tradition of earthworks inscribed into ancient Celtic land.
It also helps Defever’s direction in genre-hopping make stronger thematic sense here than on other His Name Is Alive albums. Classic metal and prog—which the band expertly executes on cuts like “Black Wings” and “Demonmix”—have long served as vehicles for high-concept, bong-smacked, “whoa, man” philosophizing. The sunshiney psych-pop of “Calling All Believers” bears a strong resemblance to the Canadian band Klaatu’s new age-y 1976 hit “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft,” while the pastoral folk of “Dragon Down” sounds like it could have been lifted from a private press LP recorded by a Californian hippie cult. A front-to-back listen through Patterns of Light can feel like a tour through all the places where pop radio and esoteric thought crossed paths during the ’70s, and a tribute to the ways both music and physics strive to explain a universe that can sometimes feel stubbornly unknowable.


Following her ambient collaboration with Cole Pulice earlier this year, Lynn Avery’s newly reissued 2020 LP is charmingly offbeat and shrouded in snowy intimacy.

Carpet Cocoon

In Lynn Avery’s hands, the cosmos feels like it could fit in your pocket. The Oakland artist’s homespun style of ambient music delicately balances the tactile with the mystical, weaving freeform jazz and lo-fi collage together into playfully diffuse semblances of songs. Over the last several years, Avery has gradually nurtured her peculiar little sound worlds, regularly working with saxophonist Cole Pulice and flutist Mitch Stahlmann to explore her ideas from different angles. She achieved one of her headiest concoctions yet earlier this year with To Live & Die in Space & Time, where she and Pulice stretched their new-agey jams out into negative space, tapping into a stately and surreal calm suspended in zero gravity. Now, Avery follows that record with a reissue of 2020’s Carpet Cocoon—her wondrous, charmingly offbeat debut album as Iceblink.
Where Avery’s other collaborations with Pulice and Stahlmann often reach way up into the clouds, Carpet Cocoon has its feet planted firmly in the soil. Describing it as a “comfort album” to “retreat to in the winter,” Avery adorns the record in tenderly plucked nylon string guitars, lending even its more uncategorizable tracks a sweet, earthy air. From the moment the album opens with the acoustic “Healer,” Carpet Cocoon shrouds itself in a snowy intimacy, as Pulice’s saxophone lines waltz with Avery’s melancholy fingerpicking in a lonely yet soothing lament. Avery and Pulice continually expand on the song’s winding, folky theme, granting it an almost epic quality, like thumbing through the pages of a hardbound book found buried in your grandmother’s attic.
Carpet Cocoon’s most special moments are those where Avery lets her ambitions loose. “Cellphone in the Bath,” with its chirpy, tick-tocking mallets, recalls the more whimsical experiments of Inoyama Land, but on a bedroom scale (it certainly wouldn’t sound out of place as a video-game merchant background theme). Avery continues to swerve with each track, dipping into a slanted bass groove on the muted “Vocoder Upright” and looping in Stahlmann’s radiant flute accompaniment on the blossoming, Isik Kural-like synth vignette “Microsong.” But her various experiments never disturb the album’s peaceful essence. Even darker tracks like “August Von Koenig,” whose mysterious guitars and ringing bells feel as if they were lifted straight out of an eerie folk tale, fit neatly into Avery’s warm patchwork.
Though Avery has taken her craft to hypnotizing, otherworldly new places in the years since Carpet Cocoon, there’s a certain magic to her debut album that’s distinct. Carpet Cocoon feels as lovingly assembled as an old photo album, each hissy field recording infused with a serenely nostalgic quality, like overexposed Polaroids too fuzzy to make out the clear details. It’s so organic that it almost seems to breathe on its own, revealing tiny new textural details with every new spin. In an ambient scene where soft, easy vibes often rule above all, Avery has proven herself to be incredibly adept at threading the needle between accessibility and adventurousness. Tracing her journey back to its beginning shows just how many different directions her sounds can go.


The RCA Victor & T-Neck Album Masters, a brick of an Isley Brothers box set, contains 21 albums from the beloved vocal group, nearly all expanded with single mixes and other assorted rarities. A close listen to the collection underscores how they may have been reliable but they were never static. They were keenly aware of emerging trends, and hearing these albums back-to-back underscores that progression.

The Isley Brothers: The Isley Brothers: The RCA Victor and T-Neck Album Masters

The Isley Brothers first appeared on Billboard in 1959, when "Shout (Part 1)" made its way to 47 on the Hot 100. They last cracked the charts in 2006, with "Just Came Here to Chill" petering out at 25 on the R&B charts. Few other artists can match that kind of longevity and, fittingly, the band's biggest hits still resonate. "Shout", "Twist and Shout", "This Old Heart of Mine", "It's Your Thing", "That Lady", and "Fight the Power" all arrived during the glory days of Top 40 in the '60s and '70s, enduring hits still heard on oldies radio, movies, television, and commercials. The Isleys also are a bottomless well for samples in hip-hop. "Fight the Power" provided Public Enemy with the title and some beats for their defining 1989 protest anthem, Ice Cube based "It Was a Good Day" on "Footsteps in the Dark", "Between the Sheets" provided the bed for the Notorious B.I.G.'s "Big Poppa", "That Lady" invigorated Beastie Boys' "B-Boy Bouillabaisse" and can be heard in Kendrick Lamar's recent "i".
Kendrick's sample illustrates how the Isley Brothers remain close to the surface of modern culture, so perhaps the time is ripe for The RCA Victor & T-Neck Album Masters, a brick of a box containing 21 albums, nearly all expanded with single mixes and other assorted rarities (it also represents the first CD release of 1969's Live at Yankee Stadium, the U.S. digital debut of 1981's Inside You and 1982's The Real Deal, and the first-ever release anywhere of Wild in Woodstock, a good live-in-the-studio record cut in 1980). As hefty as this is, it doesn't have all the recordings they ever made, not by a long shot: everything they did for United Artists (where they recorded "Twist and Shout") or Motown (where they struck gold with "This Old Heart of Mine") is absent, as is anything from the 20-plus years they spent hopping between Warner, Island, and DreamWorks, racking up sizeable R&B hits but never seeing crossovers.
In fact, the RCA designation is a bit of a misnomer, as the only record the group recorded there was 1959's Shout!, so this winds up being a deep dive on the Isleys' work for T-Neck, the independent label they launched in 1964. About a decade later, the Isleys signed a distribution deal with an Epic Records run by Clive Davis and that's when their career hit its stride: 3 + 3, their first album on Epic, reached #8 thanks to "That Lady", and two years later The Heat Is On became their first #1 on the back of its single "Fight the Power". The Isleys stayed in the pop Top 10 until 1980's Go All the Way and racked up platinum albums until 1983's Between the Sheets, after which the band's classic lineup splintered and the group left Epic, selling the label the rights to T-Neck as a way to get out of a financial jam.
Despite this prolonged success—and even when they hit a rough patch in the early '80s, they bounced back on the R&B charts within a couple of years—the Isley Brothers never have been considered album artists, not in the way such peers as Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Sly and the Family Stone, Al Green, or Curtis Mayfield were. They never had an album place on Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics poll, they never make All-Time Greatest Albums lists; they're seen as a perennial singles act, responsible for some of the greatest 45s of the 20th century but never tying it all together into a grand artistic statement—a sentiment, if true, would make this 23-disc set a slog. It's not. It's absorbing, due to the Isley Brothers' ability to shift with the fashions, their dogged work ethic and embrace of recorded music as commercial product. At their peak, they delivered hot funk and smooth soul every year without fail—sometimes splitting an album in two so there was a fast side and a slow side—and there is something to be said for that regularity: when you laid down your money, you knew the Isleys would deliver the goods.
A close listen to The RCA Victor and T-Neck Album Masters underscores how the Isley Brothers may have been reliable but they were never static. They were keenly aware of emerging trends—shamelessly exclaiming "It's a Disco Night" in 1979 but threading in hot analog synths á la Rick James on 1982's The Real Deal as they slowly drifted into a quiet storm—and listening to these albums back-to-back underscores progression, not complacency. The presence of the outlier of 1959's Shout! emphasizes just how far the group travelled. Here, the group—just a trio of Ronnie, O'Kelly, and Rudolph Isley—slipped exuberant R&B in between blues and Tin Pan Alley standards, the kind of tunes acceptable to the supper club audiences that constituted a pop crossover in the late '50s.
This was standard practice in 1959 because kids didn't buy long-players, adults did, yet this divide between respectable material and rip-roaring rockers like their original "Respectable" gives Shout! a slight musty air. The Isleys traded the standards for the twist while at United Artists in the early '60s, a swap that emphasized their youth but still carried traces of stiffness due to UA and the Isleys chasing dance crazes. Like so many artists, the Isley Brothers learned how to cannily blend their commercial aspirations with pure soul while at Motown, a pivotal moment missing on this big box. Instead, this set has their fledgling mid-'60s singles for their own T-Neck, 45s heard on the compilation In the Beginning. Released in 1971—the date explains why Jimi Hendrix, the trio's guitarist in 1964 and 1965, looms over the band itself on the cover art—In the Beginning crackles with the rumblings of the intense grit of funk, goosed along by Jimi's proto-psychedelic guitar, music that points the way toward T-Neck Isley Brothers more than Motown's This Old Heart of Mine. Ernie Isley picked up the thread Hendrix lay hanging, but before Ernie turned into a guitar hero in his own right came "It's Your Thing," a wild, loose-limbed groove that functioned as the Isleys' repudiation of Motown and embrace of Sly and the Family Stone funk.
With this 1969 hit, along with the It's Our Thing album that accompanied it, the Isley Brothers embraced the now of '60s soul. The album was very much their thing: they threw in everything they had in reviving their indie T-Neck, abandoning the uptown soul without losing sight of a pop audience while also deepening the groove, all giving them their biggest hit to date. Maintaining momentum proved tricky, especially when their socially conscious, Black Power-fueled records (1969's The Brothers: Isley, 1970's Get Into Something) didn't catch a spark, so the group caught the rays of the hippie sunset in the early '70s, scoring a genuine hit with Stephen Stills' "Love the One You're With", the cornerstone of a covers-laden '71 LP Givin' It Back, where Ronald, Ernie, and Marvin all posed like Earth-minded singer/songwriters on its burnished cover. Givin' It Back coincided with the rise of album-oriented radio and, as there was now an audience consuming albums as albums, the Isleys began structuring their long-players as immersive experiences. A flirtation with Philly Soul followed in 1972—Brother, Brother, Brother bore a huge hit with "Work to Do", but it's an anomaly on a record where the second side contains just two songs, one of which is a 10-minute workout on Carole King's "It's Too Late"—and then came the 3 + 3 makeover, when the trio doubled the size of their lineup and found funk.
3 + 3 is the breakthrough, the album where the bespangled bell-bottomed soul renegades of the '70s were unveiled—not coincidentally, it's the first released on Epic—but it's a record where the fizzy "That Lady" sits next to a cover of James Taylor and the Isleys find a way to bring soul to Jonathan Edwards' "Sunshine (Go Away Today)" and Seals & Crofts' "Summer Breeze", two of the most sensitive of the '70s SoCal soft sounds. More than anything, this illustrates how the Isleys' phases overlapped: they found their groove thing but weren't quite ready to leave covers behind, not when those covers were successful and broadened the audience. They needed the security of one other hit—1974's Live It Up, whose title track went to four R&B while a cover of a Todd Rundgren ballad sat on its second side—before they cut their first album of all originals, 1975's The Heat Is On. With its "Fight the Power"—an anthem of defiance that seemed more political than its lyrics actually were; it was a rebellion that jumped demographics—they had their biggest-ever crossover hit and it's one firmly grounded in funk: its attitude and melody hooked in a larger audience.
The Heat Is On proved to be the apex of the Isley Brothers' chart success, at least as far as the crossover pop audience was concerned. Hit albums still followed—1976's Harvest for the World, 1977's Go for Your Guns, and 1978's Showdown all went platinum or better, all accompanied by major R&B hits—but the Isley Brothers were now firmly an R&B act, one who were still stars but stars for a specific demographic. Retroactively, these records do have a crossover appeal, due in no small part to their lasting legacy within the R&B demographic, a legacy echoed through samples that underpinned crossover hip-hop hits of the '90s. After Showdown, however, the last run of Isley records on T-Neck—1979's Winner Takes All, 1980's Go All the Way, 1981's Grand Slam and Inside You, 1982's The Real Deal, 1983's Between the Sheets—are records divided between smooth quiet storm and cloistered disco fallout, records that substitute adventure for calculation. By most measures, these albums aren't as strong as what came before, particularly the hot streak of the mid-'70s, but when listened to in succession, they're not drastic disappointments; they underscore the fleet-footedness of the Isley Brothers, how they followed fashion and wound up reflecting their times.
This eager elasticity is why Eric Weisbard uses the Isley Brothers as his R&B case study in his revelatory book Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music. Weisbard argues that the Isleys were crowd-pleasing showmen from the start, a group keenly aware that a broader appeal meant steady work, so they were happy to go wherever their audience went, no matter what sound took them there. Through its sheer variety, The RCA Victor & T-Neck Album Masters does provide supporting evidence for this thesis but the wonderful thing about the box is how the Isley Brothers never sound crass or mercenary as they hop from church-inflected R&B to funk to quiet storm. The Isley Brothers never abandoned their identity as they rolled with the changes, finding sly ways to make fads seem like divine inspiration. If they never did manage to deliver an outright classic album—3 + 3 and The Heat Is On come very, very close—this box suggests using this metric as a yardstick for measuring greatness is a fallacy. What the Isley Brothers achieved can't be contained in a single album nor can it be adequately summarized in a hits collection. They seized all the tumult, all the excitement, all of the sounds of their time and turned it into enduring commercial art whose endurance and depth is best appreciated in a set like this, where the actual records can be heard in their entirety.


Swedish producer Armand Jakobsson, aka DJ Seinfeld, is an ostensible figurehead of the recent lo-fi house movement. His new EP tends towards warmth and melody even at its roughest.

Ruff Hysteria

Armand Jakobsson is a house producer from Sweden who operates under two aliases: DJ Seinfeld and his twin ego Rimbaudian. For just over a year, he’s been going at a clip, sharing dozens of tracks on SoundCloud and pressing the best of them to vinyl for labels like Lobster Theremin and Endotherm. The musical distance between his two projects is almost negligible, yet it’s as DJ Seinfeld that he’s ended up becoming a figurehead for what has been called, improbably, the “lo-fi house” movement.
DJ Seinfeld and Rimbaudian share a penchant for primitive, distorted drums paired with simple, emotive melodies spelled out in reverb-laden vocal and piano samples. This continues on Seinfeld’s recent four-track Ruff Hysteria EP. It’s a straightforward recipe, and one that’s been servicing dancefloors well for years in the hands of artists like Anthony Naples, Omar S, Legowelt, and their acolytes. But look at the other artists leading the “lo-fi scene” and you’ll notice a shared aesthetic. In the UK, Ross From Friends and DJ Boring both dabble in ’90s nostalgia—the latter’s 2016 single “Winona” samples an old TV interview with the actress—and a mood of playful, ironic detachment. Other artists who’ve been called their peers, like Montreal’s Project Pablo and Australia’s Mall Grab, may share an off-the-cuff, unserious presentation, but otherwise have no more in common than they do with any house producer looking to classic styles and analog machines for inspiration. So “lo-fi” is a sub-genre with no edges; the current “scene” has no home turf or artistic manifesto.
Jakobsson’s bright and breezy formula typically melts a silky vocal from Sade or Janet Jackson over saturated drums for a heart-pounding, peak-time rush. The four-track Ruff Hysteria EP, pitched as “too unsavoury for public consumption,” is grittier stuff; on the sleeve, Jerry Seinfeld’s face melts like candle wax over a rictus grin. But the gory humor doesn’t bear out in the music, which tends towards warmth and melody even at its roughest. “Vaping Lyf” bleeds messily, with squashed hi-hats cutting into a one-note melodic squiggle. Like all of Jakobsson’s tracks, it’s structurally linear and totally functional—although with drums this far into the red, all but the best sound systems could turn it to sludge.
“Ruff Hysteria” and “What Kind of Sandwich Is This?” are bleary-eyed nocturnes that recall the hazy shuffle of Moiré, with beefy bass melodies dominating foggy piano drifts and distant vocal samples. The outlier is “Wombat Bounce,” a wonky tribute to vintage rave—wedges of saucer-eyed synths interrupt the breaks and hi-hats melt like they’ve been left out in the sun. Aside from the bottom-heaviness, this is accessible, DJ-friendly material—hardly the stirrings of a new movement. As it happens, Jakobsson creates his analog-fancying sound inside his computer. Nowadays you can recreate the crunch of aTR- 909 with a cracked DAW and a few decent plugins. It’s totally free, and what could be more lo-fi than that?


On their second album, the Houston-based instrumental trio crafts a unique, psychedelic vibe that hangs between continents and eras.

Con Todo El Mundo

Khruangbin craft atmosphere music that never fades into the background, like some endless curl of smoke that keeps pluming upward. Sprinkled with snippets of spoken word, faint vocal melodies, and ranging and impeccably performed guitar solos, the whole of their second record, Con Todo El Mundo is, in effect, a long and pleasant head nod that seems to hang between continents and eras. The group—whose name is a transliteration of the Thai word for “airplane”—elicits the same eclectic enjoyment of any number of artists that came of age around the turn of the century, from the laid-back trip-hop feel of Kruder & Dorfmeister to dub-jammy Thievery Corporation: Ethereal instrumental music that might be described as “world” as shorthand for its range of melody, rhythm, and overall vibe. But the Houston-based instrumental trio makes music that’s a little more dusty, frayed around the edges, and personal.
Though clearly informed by psychedelic rock, the primary influence that fueled their 2015 debut, The Universe Smiles Upon You, was Thai funk, music that bassist Laura Lee and guitarist Mark Speer found by scouring the Thai music blog, Monrakplengthai. Speer was in a gospel band with hip-hop producer and drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson, who became the third member, adding the more influences to the blend, and plenty of breakbeats. But Con Todo El Mundo broadens the group’s sound, maintaining the funk but also adding bits and pieces of Caribbean, Indian, and Middle Eastern music. Iran is the obvious touchstone in “Maria También,” whose video directly addresses women’s rights in that country. Throw in a few retro surf riffs and whispered vocal lines and you’ve got an aesthetic that feels at home at any beach or desert in the world.
From the laidback first few seconds of guitar, bass, and organ that begins “Cómo Me Quieres” (“How do you love me?” )—the question answered by the album’s title Con Todo El Mundo (“With all the world”)—it’s clear that this music might be the perfect accompaniment to just about any somewhat passive activity. Cooking? Studying? Walking? Riding the bus? Khruangbin have your back. Need to speed it up a little? Skip to the funky, zouk-styled bounce of “Evan Finds the Third Room.” Relaxing around the house on a Sunday afternoon? Try the loping slowness of “A Hymn.” Every track is profoundly pleasant and, at times, even danceable, in a crunchy kind of way.
Perhaps this is music for the Spotify era; a flowchart of sounds spawned from a range of music connected by the wonders of algorithmic technology. Describing how musical influence can be found anywhere, drummer Johnson describes Shazaming tunes in his local pho restaurant, and the band also offers a curated Spotify playlists for listeners. Each one contains music that influenced the band while recording and allows the playlist to be tailored to the length of an airplane journey and tweaked according to the mood. It may read like a slight to say that Con Todo El Mundo sounds like the result of an algorithm, but it’s an algorithm that reflects the way music is now consumed. Every week listeners “discover” new rhythms catered to an activity or previous selections. But it also allows, maybe, just maybe, for what was once called “world music” to slide into these shuffled, technologically selected playlists. Khruangbin’s takes this new mode of listening and injects its own singular and developing personality into the playlisting of modern music.


With her forceful contralto and skyscraping pop-rock, the Los Angeles songwriter’s second album is a dramatic chronicle of exiting young adulthood into an uncertain future.

Romanticism

Time comes for us all, but Hana Vu is taking it harder than most. “There’s no song in my heart like I thought there was when I was young,” she wallows on the first song of her second album, Romanticism. It’s the kind of lament that a more restrained songwriter might make with melancholic resignation, but Vu doesn’t do quiet emotions: She bellows the line as if she’s been mortally wounded or awoken to find the sun stricken from the sky. She’s not just getting older—the very fabric of her being is slipping through her fingers, and she’s wrecked.

On Romanticism, Vu channels her despondence into such titanic pop and gleaming rock that you don’t feel her pain so much as marvel at the magnificence of its display. She sings with an operatic authority that makes even her most hyperbolic assertions land as indisputable truth. “I scream so loud/Because I don’t exist no more,” she writhes over glammy twinned guitars on the album’s rousing farewell to youth “22,” her unrelenting voice prodding the song to a Bowie-esque climax. The irony that she’s still in her early 20s isn’t lost on her, but she has such command over her voice that she really does seem old beyond her years. Her keening contralto envelops the song as if it’s been conjured from an ocean of epsom salt.

Just imagine how some of the label A&R in her native Los Angeles might have tried to mold her rock instincts for maximum return: play up the soaring guitars, tie her into a “Gen Z can rock, too” narrative, and perhaps encourage her to throw shade at the state of popular music in interviews. Everybody involved would probably make a mint. Vu’s own vision isn’t nearly so prefabricated. It’s much more nuanced and amenable to the times, a complement to the stately gloom of Mitski, the TikTok sadness of Boygenius, and the alt-rock ear candy of Olivia Rodrigo. For all its insularity—she wrote the album alone and recorded it almost entirely with just one other musician, Jackson Phillips of the dream-pop project Day Wave—Vu’s music is unmistakably a product of this moment.

Depression’s unliftable curse hangs heavy over the album. On “Hammer,” Vu pleads for a cure to an ailment her doctor can’t diagnose: “There is no answer/But I want one anyway.” Romanticism’s tone lightens on its more resigned B-side, as tense rock gives way to driftier, dreamier material, but Vu’s malaise never clears, despite her attempts to harness the power of positive thinking. Over a tentative dance-pop pulse, “Dreams” imagines an existence where “it doesn’t hurt to be alive,” while “Airplane” sets a lovelorn fantasy to the buoyant pop-rock of the Killers. A closing suite of three more love songs challenges the core assertions of the album’s first half, suggesting the root of Vu’s anguish might be romantic, not just existential.

Vu’s been kicking around the Los Angeles music scene since she was 14, which may explain in part why she carries herself like such an old soul. She also lost a prime chunk of her youth to pandemic, time she can’t get back. On Romanticism, she grieves the past not just out of nostalgia for something that’s been lost, but also trepidation about the future. “Do you remember getting older?/Can you tell me what it’s about?” she sings on “Airplane.” It’s one of the rare moments on the album when she sounds hopeful, as if knowing might take some of the worry away, but of course, nobody can tell her precisely how adulthood will unfold. That’s what makes it so frightening.


Brooklyn's Underachievers practice the kind of esoteric mysticism that once flourished in some far-flung corners of '90s rap, from Leaders of the New School to X-Clan.

The Underachievers: Evermore: The Art of Duality

Evermore: The Art of Duality

"I know my soul was born to do some cool things," testifies AK over the wood flute-and-maracas loop of "Rain Dance (Phase One Intro)". The Underachievers, his duo with Issa Gold, practice the kind of esoteric mysticism that once flourished in some far-flung corners of '90s rap, from the feverish jabberwocky of Leaders of the New School’s T.I.M.E.: The Inner Mind’s Eye to the pan-African zealotry of X-Clan’s To the East, Blackwards, and the backpacker bohemianism of Zion I’s Mind Over Matter, Mystik Journeymen’s The Black Sands Ov Eternia and Abstract Tribe Unique’s Mood Pieces. It’s an ethos that largely dissipated by the end of that decade as rap moved on. But the Underachievers have not only revived it, they’ve stuck with their spiritual bent through four projects, including 2013’s revelatory Indigoism, last year’s uneven but satisfying Cellar Door: Terminus Ut Exordium, and now Evermore: The Art of Duality.
At first, Evermore appears to offer more of the same, as they rap about being miseducated in school, dabbling in street hustles, and feeling alienated from society. "We lost in this world, but it’s hard to relate," says AK on "Chasing Faith". They strive to use their experiences to educate others through hip-hop music, celebrating the use of "natural" herbs such as marijuana and ‘shrooms, but acknowledging that they’ve struggled with harder substances. They underline the importance of their metaphysical lessons by acknowledging in "The Dualist" that "We all sin."
AK and Issa Gold complement each other. Vocally, AK has a more sour tone and a barking delivery that sounds like he’s dispensing real talk. Issa Gold has a mid-range baritone that lightens when he gets excited, as if he can’t wait to finish rapping one line and start the next. Both are strong lyricists, but for much of Evermore, they repeat the same themes again and again. The perils of mental illness are frequently noted; mainstream religious dogma, school indoctrination, and the banality of social media and Western pop culture are repetitively disparaged.
These observations are delivered over serene production. "Shine All Gold" matches an acoustic guitar loop to a bass drum bounce, then closes with an ambient techno beat. The next two tracks, "Chasing Faith" and "Star Signs", pick up that downtempo thread and build backgrounds full of melancholy and yearning. "The Dualist" breaks the holistic spell with the kind of mid-'90s boom-bap classicism on which the Underachievers and other Beast Coast artists built their reputation. The warm electric keyboards and synthesizers of "The Brooklyn Way" make for a particularly glorious peak. "Hands up if you live for love," chants Issa Gold.
For much of Evermore, the Underachievers spin in their spiritual axis, until a series of tracks near the end break the heavenly trance with jarring abruptness. Trap orchestration creeps in on "Take Your Place" as Issa Gold warns, "Don’t fuck with the snakes," and AK adds, "Really pop up on a nigga blocka/ If he think he hotta ‘cause a nigga conscious/ Got to keep a chopper just to cease the nonsense." The duo descends into a hellish inferno until they reach the ninth circle of "Allusions". "Got a bitch in the Bay that loves the ‘shrooms/ She be screamin’ AK when I shove the broom," brags AK. Issa Gold adds, "Smoking fuego with your dame/ Been like a whole 20 minutes, can’t front, nigga still don’t know her name /30 minutes later, had my pinky in her brain/ She like, I thought you was different, all of you rappers just the same/ She ain’t complain."
The latter songs throw everything that precedes it into doubt. Are the Underachievers just rap dudes lusting for weed, bitches, and cash like everyone else? They’re obviously aware of the contradictions, but Evermore: The Art of Duality places these adventures in a present-tense context. Perhaps they’re simply acknowledging their flawed humanity. Just as likely, they don’t yet realize that their perspectives on sex and violence can be as tough to break as the mental prisons that damaged their troubled youth.
The Evermore journey is an engaging one, but it would have slid into a new age torpor if not for the spate of ugliness near the album’s end. The coarse "Generation Z" shenanigans give the earlier "Chasing Faith" added urgency. We now know why the Underachievers strain to ascend their earthly selves. "I done came far, still got a lot further to go," raps Issa Gold on the final track, "Unconscious Monsters (Evermore Outro)". "Trying to leave a mark by giving everything that I know."


Young rapper Bishop Nehru's teamed up with DOOM for this brief full-length, and such a relationship could have soildified the former's status as a strong young talent. But NehruvianDOOM sounds more like the work of an MC with a little while longer to go, and a producer who's sounded more inspired in the past.

NehruvianDOOM

The veteran mentor/young up-and-comer dynamic almost always has a good story behind it, even if it's a simple one. In 2013, when he was still two years away from the legal drinking age that his show's attendees were at, rising NYC phenom Bishop Nehru shared a bill with MF DOOM in London's renowned 100 Club. Nehru had already seized on the opportunity to rhyme over a DOOM beat the previous year on his early release Nehruvia: the Mixtape with his track "Lemon Grass". Even more fittingly, he opened the mix with an interview clip of DOOM venting about the state of the hip-hop industry, one that could've been recorded any time in the last ten years and still more or less held true.
With Nehru operating as an East Coast classicist-minded MC with a '94 revivalist mindset that rivals Joey Bada$$, forging a relationship with DOOM should have solidified his status as a strong young talent. But NehruvianDOOM sounds more like the work of an MC with a little while longer to go and a producer who's sounded more inspired in the past (even in exile). Even at only eight tracks—nine if you count the intro—Nehru's presence starts to tread water, a technically sound voice with solid lyrical structure that isn't quite there yet as far as bringing a unique perspective is concerned.
To be fair, harshing on a teenage rapper still finding his voice is like griping that I Was Made to Love Her is a weaker album than Innervisions. It's easier to shrug at what DOOM brings to the table, actually; his role on this record, touted as the first full-length production job by DOOM since King Geedorah's 2003 album Take Me to Your Leader, is largely relegated to unearthing some of the more underused stuff from his Special Herbs archives. It still bumps, just in a way that a lot of hardcore heads have likely heard before, all blurry soul-jazz and punch-drunk underquantized drums. DOOM's verses, rare as they are, also still show glimmers of the off-the-cuff-sounding, truism-tweaking conversational punchlines that made him so appealing throughout the '00s—but they mostly come across as autopilot or hook-duty versions of his usual self, with the occasional contemporary reference (like a missing Malaysian airplane joke in "Disastrous") held up like a newspaper headline in a proof of life hostage photo.
So Nehru's shortcomings are easier to forgive, even if the best you can say about him at this point is that he's lucky to be one of those rare high-school age artists who doesn't let his own naiveté get the best of him. He maintains a solid balance between conceptual wordplay, philosophical musings, and internal rhymes, but it's not quite well-traveled enough to possess a real authority. Which makes sense, in that he's still figuring shit out; a line like "Am I being idolized, or am I a pair of idle eyes" in "Om" or the frustrated come-up aspirations of "So Alone" touch on a nerve of creative-teenager introspection. Those lines are delivered with more finesse than personality, a flat-voiced series of monologues that have their share of nod-worthy internal rhymes but still need refining into a style that outgrows its influences. The number of recent artists who've done that by the time they hit 18 can be counted on one hand, so it's still worth following Nehru's development just to see where he takes his style. But in the meantime, this generation-crossing collaboration feels like a record lodged in a sort of chronological rut, one where a young artist fronts an old-sounding record that sounds like it could've been released at any point in his lifetime—and helmed by any number of MCs that could've sounded like him.


The second solo album from the Real Estate frontman defaults to carefree songwriting that explores sacred moments of adolescence in the Jersey suburbs.

Magic Sign

Real Estate’s 2020 album The Main Thing never had a chance. As singer and guitarist Martin Courtney tells it, the New Jersey band labored uncharacteristically long over their fifth LP in a bid to make something that couldn’t be dismissed as “another Real Estate record.” A self-consciously big statement from a band that specialized in endearingly small ones, the album was released just days before the pandemic brought the world to a halt. Yet even with better timing it’s hard to imagine it could have met its lofty ambitions of rekindling the critical goodwill once enjoyed by a veteran indie group whose modest guitar-pop sounded out of step with the times, even during their early ‘10s heyday.

Courtney set out to make The Main Thing Real Estate’s best album, but on some level he seems to understand that he wasn’t being true to himself by forcing it. This is, after all, the same songwriter who insisted on Days that it shouldn’t take all summer long “just to write one simple song.” And so for his second solo album Magic Sign, written while separated from his bandmates during the pandemic, Courtney defaulted to the more carefree songwriting that’s always come most naturally to him. After pouring so much into The Main Thing with so little to show for it, “I didn’t really want to think too hard about any part of the process of making this record,” he explained.

Courtney has never needed an excuse to dwell on comforts; he’s already architected one of the most tension-free discographies in modern indie-rock. But on Magic Sign, which he drafted largely at night while his kids slept and his wife worked late shifts at the hospital, the good vibes serve as a kind of defense mechanism. Amid the fear and uncertainty of the pandemic, he retreated to some of his safest, most sacred memories of adolescence—particularly of those transitional years where he found the freedom to roam beyond the New Jersey suburbs.

“In the basement of my mind, I’m on a bike in 1999,” he sings on “Merlin.” On “Shoes,” he similarly reminisces on long days with nothing but time to kill: “In vacant lots with dusty shoes, we found things to do.” The accompaniments are fittingly blissful, chime-forward as always but with just enough variations to set it apart from a Real Estate LP. The reverb is turned down and the vocals are pushed way up; strings and pedal steels further warm several songs, while The Walkmen’s Matt Barrick provides some thrust behind the drum kit, especially on “Sailboat,” a sugary homage to Yo La Tengo’s gentle rippers. It’s all brought to a hi-fi finish by Rob Schnapf, the Elliott Smith producer whose presence highlights the similarities between Courtney’s droopy sighs and Smith’s own wistful tenor.
Despite its overt optimism, there are cracks in the album’s dreamy facade. Courtney’s lyrics are filled with allusions to silent houses and empty lots, all of which give the impression of a world that’s moved on from his memories. Over the Byrds-y twang of opener “Corncob,” he struggles to remember the name of a childhood pal he ran around with. The more he tries to live in the past, the more he’s reminded of age. A more dramatic songwriter might further explore that dissonance, but Courtney never digs all that deep. Even when he’s singing about ghosts in the walls on “Sailboat,” it sounds like another pleasantry.

Courtney’s breezy, honeyed harmonies make the record go down easy, but Magic Sign may be Courtney’s first album that errors on the side of being too carefree. He’s always kept his lyrics simple, but here he falls back on so many underdeveloped “head/bed,” “sound/around” rhyme patterns that his prose often feels like a first draft he never got around to tightening. Maybe he was making a point by keeping his lyrics so plain. There are albums born of a burning need to create and express, and there are albums that exist simply because the artist had the spare time and inclination to make them. Magic Sign never pretends to be anything other than the latter.