On his first album sung entirely in Spanish, the Uruguayan-American singer-songwriter finds poetry in small moments, with low-key craftsmanship that matches his songs’ quotidian subject matter.

La Onda de Juan Pablo

Juan Wauters doesn’t need big drama to stir up big feelings. The following are a few images that precede some of the biggest musical moments on La Onda de Juan Pablo: A boy dreaming about being his soccer-superstar hero; an older couple sitting in their garden and missing their son who left home; and Wauters buying himself some pants. Anyone who has ever looked around a crowded subway car and been momentarily captivated by the volume of thoughts floating through all the brains within a short radius should recognize a similar wonder in the sounds and stories of La Onda de Juan Pablo, the singer-songwriter’s first album sung entirely in his native Spanish.
The context of how the Uruguay-born, Queens-raised Wauters made this album reinforces that wonder. La Onda was recorded across several Latin American countries where he traveled or lived over the past two years, mainly using recording equipment that he carried with him. Wauters wrote these songs in different genres endemic to those countries, including Afro-Uruguayan candombe, Latin American bolero, and Mexican bolero ranchero. The styles inform his songs about neighborhoods, families, work lives, and his own relationship to all of the above—assisted by the very musicians he met playing on streets and in plazas. It’s his voice, but it’s also theirs, one man’s travelogue autographed by the people he befriended along the way.
Like its images, La Onda’s smallest sounds often hit the hardest. On “El Señor,” a Buenos Aires folk guitar player named Alejandro Dominguez feathers delicate fret-board wizardry through a clock-ticking rhythm for a pirouetting instrumental coda that gently expands and intensifies like dilating eyes. Wauters, meanwhile, narrates a story about nothing more than a man who decides to be the only one in his family to move away from home. Wauters’ ode to public transit, “Blues Chilango,” is pure, centering zen, opening on tingle-inducing bongo taps from Mexico’s Izakúm Vazquez and gliding to a stop with a perfect sax solo by Puerto Rico’s Juan Botta, which practically shouts for the joy of people-watching after Wauters just lists them off as they pass: “Un carnicero, un electricista, un carpintero, un relojero” (“A butcher, an electrician, a carpenter, a watchmaker”).
It all pulls even tighter when Wauters sings about his own place in the world on the contemplative centerpiece “Mi Vida.” Inspired and accompanied by a 25-string guitarrón chileno player named Luciano Fuentes Borquez, whom Wauters saw performing payada music in Santiago, Chile, he sings about riding his bike and making peace with the hand he was dealt. “Qué vida triste me tocó a mí vivir/Pensaba hoy” (“What a sad life I ended up with/I thought today”), he sings, before immediately contradicting himself: It’s also pretty good—he has a girlfriend, a son, and a nearby neighborhood park. Wauters doesn’t lust for life, nor lament it; it’s a satisfied ambivalence that pairs well with a sense of humor.
That’s something he’s always had. Wauters occasionally adds a dash of deadpan to his straight-faced delivery, as when he sang, “Like a movie that is good/You require my attention” on Who Me? He pulls a similar punch here to open “Blues Chilango,” cutting down the pretension of elaborate similes: “Soy como un hombre que trabaja con su barco/Como un hombre que trabaja con su tierra/Pero vivo en la ciudad.” (“I am like a man that works with his boat/Like a man that works with his soil/But I live in the city”). Time and again, Wauters sides with extreme straightforwardness over metaphor, preferring the power of moments uncontaminated by interpretation. Street-vendor jingle “Disfruta la Fruta” lingers on just one chord as he lists different fruits that he likes to eat—and if that sounds unlistenable to you, maybe don’t go see him perform, where recently he’s sung the song in changing iterations for 30 minutes.
Wauters neither tries to innovate nor panders to tradition. He just plugs in his own voice: He’ll cram a wordy phrase into a split-second gap and place inflections awkwardly, banging up songs with a slightly amateur wobbliness. He doesn’t have the chops of late Uruguayan guitar icon Alfredo Zitarrosa, or the golden pipes of Mexican-American pop treasure Julieta Venegas, or the wordsmithy depth of eternal Queens guy Paul Simon (in spite of a certain uncanny resemblance when he performs alongside his longtime friend and collaborator Tall Juan, who adds guitar and bass to the album’s energetic peak, “Candombe”). But Wauters doesn’t aspire to this type of stardom; he prefers looking at all this great music that came before him as personal inspiration as opposed to an ideal. Wauters’ greatest strength, after all, is what he sees in everyone else.


The first Fog record in almost a decade finds Andrew Broder distilling years of genre-hopping down to a core aesthetic. This is Fog in its purest form: minimal, haunting and darkly impressionistic.

For Good

Andrew Broder has held a lot of jobs over the course of his career: turntablist, indie-rock frontman, beatmaker, ambient musician. More recently, he’s been working as a handyman and commercial painter in his native Minneapolis. Following the release of 2007’s Ditherer, Broder stepped away from the Fog moniker for nearly a decade, though he continued to dabble in various side-projects and solo endeavors. With the benefit of distance, Broder is now looking back at his itinerant career, drawing inspiration from his own work and as ever, pushing forward into new terrain. For Good isn’t just a new Fog record—it’s an album where Broder finds his way back to the project’s off-kilter core.
Still, a lot has changed since 2007, not the least of which is Broder himself. On For Good, his vocals are more confident, his darkly impressionistic lyrics sharper, his piano playing playing delicate yet assured. Stepping back from the full-band arrangements of Ditherer, Broder returns to the lone tinkerer ethos that underpinned his early work but with all of his new tricks in tow. For Good essentially feels like the summation of Broder’s wide-ranging career: the loose rhythms of Ditherer, the pop sensibility of 10th Avenue Freakout, the wispy avant-turntablism of Ether Teeth.
In some ways, this is also Broder’s most approachable record yet. Title track "For Good" masquerades as a '70s British rock ballad until wobbly percussion and mechanical wheezing subsume the mix completely. "Kid Kuma" could easily pass for a Hail to the Thief-era Radiohead B-side, with its clattering percussion, rubber-band bassline and a chorus set airborne by Broder's falsetto.
On other songs, though, Broder is as uncompromising as he’s ever been. The record’s midsection is both bleak and sonically confrontational—here Broder lets his experimental side run wild within the constraints of a pop song. "Cory" is a claustrophobic nightmare: all oppressive low-end, machine-gun drums and submerged, chopped-up vocals as percussion. "Crime was always there for you/Crime was always there for me," Broder sings during one of the song’s few bright spots. "Jim" is driven by a breakbeat that whirrs to life like some terrifying machine: it sounds like the sort of thing Amon Tobin and Scott Walker might cook up together in an abandoned factory full of old industrial equipment. "Trying" is a sample-based hip-hop instrumental trapped under a heavy cloak of foreboding, like Madlib if he had co-produced a track for Thom Yorke’s The Eraser.
Some of the most stunning songs here bridge the gap between Broder’s past and present. Take the penultimate track, "Made to Follow," a gorgeous little hymn that’s punctuated by errant samples of dialog that Broder scratches in and out of the frame. The end result feels like a crisper, higher-fidelity version of Fog circa Ether Teeth, minus the ramshackle scrappiness. Scratching also features prominently on songs like "Trying" and "Sisters Still," reminding us of Broder’s turntablist bona-fides while blurring the line between DJ and songwriter.
Most of For Good is already fairly minimal, but album closer "Father Popcorn" strips away nearly all ornamentation to zero in on the very essence of Broder’s craft. Like many of these songs, it traces a wandering narrative, nodding toward our new gilded age in its opening ("On a rickshaw ride/racing to the rich part of London at night"), sketching out a scene of Lynchian Americana in its midsection ("Diner counter/Piece of peach pie/Cup of coffee/Wet my fingers") and settles on a tender vignette of fatherhood, closing with the lines "Father popcorn/Father popcorn/Make the popcorn." Musically, it’s one of the most skeletal songs of Broder’s career, consisting of little more than a repeating piano figure, hushed vocals and swells of strings that flutter, hummingbird-like, around the final notes of each bar. Despite its nearly seven minute runtime, the song is consistently engaging throughout, proving how far Broder has come as a songwriter and vocalist.
If there’s a surprise to be found on For Good, its that Broder finally sounds comfortable with his own vision; in his time away from the project, it seems that he was able to reconcile all of the different sounds that Fog has attempted over the years. Despite how sonically adventurous some of these songs are, there’s something almost serene about For Good, especially when considered next to the anxious energy of previous Fog albums. That said, unlike a truly original record like Ether Teeth, For Good is hardly groundbreaking: it’s an album of warped, melancholic indie-pop that slots in nicely next to acts like Sparklehorse, the Eels, and Radiohead. That’s hardly a bad thing, even if Fog’s current incarnation is a far cry from its more experimental beginnings. After all, the point of an experiment is to arrive at an answer. Andrew Broder seems to have finally found some.


Three-chord punk boiled down to two-chord devotionals, these two amazing Feelies records are back, and both are worth a lot of your time.

The Feelies: Crazy Rhythms / The Good Earth

Crazy Rhythms / The Good Earth

The Feelies formed as a four-man rock band in a New Jersey suburb whose biggest 20th century shakeup was a textile strike. They wrote some original material and learned a couple of Beatles songs. They took their show 20 miles southeast to Hoboken, drove to Manhattan under the Hudson River, tucked in their shirts, pushed their glasses up on their nosebridges, and unleashed a kind of hypnotic punk-lite so buttoned up that it sounds choked-- like they counted to four and grabbed an electric fence. Did I say the Feelies are a rock band? I misspoke. They're a particle collider.
Crazy Rhythms, their 1980 debut, has none of the attitudinal markings of rock-- no looseness, no swing, no danger, no laughs. Its cover-- a band portrait on a sky-blue void, echoed 14 years later on Weezer's "blue album" -- is bland and eerie. It looks like a misplaced rendering of four boys whose closest contact with rock music came from fixing radios. The title of the album appears as some innovative form of non-joke.
And yet, and yet. Three-chord punk-- apparently too excessive for them-- is boiled down to two-chord devotionals: one for the first three minutes, one for the second. Two- and three-note guitar solos drone over the mix like a Muezzin's call. Bill Million and Glenn Mercer sing in grey, unimpressive voices-- probably influenced by the Velvet Underground, but just as likely a product of the belief that lead vocals were for generally immodest people.
The focus and direction of the sound hangs on Mercer and Million's guitars, but the essence of the album-- the DNA sequence not found anywhere else-- is its percussion tracks. Cymbals and hi-hats are ignored almost entirely-- too cathartic, too showy. Almost every track is overdubbed with a dry chorus of cowbells, claves, woodblocks, bells and maracas. Glenn Mercer's credit on a cover of the Beatles' "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey" reads: "other guitar, vocals, bell, coat rack." Drummer Anton Fier thumps out the words NOT TIRED YET NOT TIRED YET NOT TIRED YET in Morse code on his tom-toms. Presumably, shows ended with the rest of the band unplugging him.
It's fastidious, committed and unendingly tense music. A couple of tracks-- first single "Fa Ce'-La" and "Original Love"-- take the shape of pop songs: A few minutes, a few parts, a verse, a chorus. Most of the songs, though, are shaped like Steve Reich or Philip Glass compositions: Music that creates drama by swelling, shading and repeating, not carving out peaks and valleys. The album's longest, most arresting tracks -- "Forces at Work" and "Crazy Rhythms"-- don't seem to change as much as dilate.
The music on the album is rare, but the tone-- especially with the knowledge that it was never really replicated by any other band-- is rarer. Weezer, the Talking Heads and the Modern Lovers used their social eccentricities as badges of honor and safe vantage points for self-expression. The Feelies don't sound any more comfortable on Crazy Rhythms than you imagine they might standing in a room full of strangers or mountain lions. They sound commanded by inspiration, almost religiously single-minded. Mark Abel, who co-produced the album with Mercer and Million, called them "the most obstinate people I've ever met." According to Jim DeRogatis's liner notes for the reissue, they started telling adulatory interviewers that driving through the Holland Tunnel gave them headaches.
Crazy Rhythms is their big album. Their talked-about one. The Good Earth, produced by R.E.M.'s Peter Buck and released six years later, is their little one. Bassist Keith DeNunzio and Anton Fier left the band (Fier went on to play with Bill Laswell, Pere Ubu, John Zorn and a gymnasium's worth of notable avant-rock musicians). Dave Weckerman, Brenda Sauter and Stan Demeski-- all local musicians Million and Mercer had been tooling around in side projects with-- joined.
The tempos are relaxed, the percussion understated, the instrumentation largely acoustic. It's no less hypnotic than Crazy Rhythms, but it has a different notion of infinity: Wheat fields, Sunday drives, childhood bedtimes to the sound of adults murmuring from the living room. The cover image-- the band, slightly sepia-toned and standing in tall grass-- is a rural reconsideration of Crazy Rhythms, a stepping back. Mercer's vocals are a stream-of-consciousness hum under the shimmer of guitars. "Being a guitar player," he said, "I don't have much of a need to express myself as a singer" -- a claim that makes you think the guitar solos are going to be fireworks, and they aren't. Fireworks are not what the Feelies were about.
You don't hear too many people talking in hyperbole about The Good Earth is for the same reasons you don't hear people talking in hyperbole about taking a nap in the park. Listening start-to-finish, it sounds even more removed than Crazy Rhythms, an album that blurs together and exists unto itself-- different enough from their first album to be incomparable, different enough from a lot of other music-- even R.E.M.-- to be unmistakable as anyone else.
These albums have been out of print for several years. If you were lucky (or old) enough to own them the first time around, buy them again. The bonus material is nothing special: New live recordings from their recent reunion shows, a couple of demos, a couple of older covers (but not the cover of "Paint It, Black" appended to the last edition of Crazy Rhythms). And you have to download the songs using a little business card with a serial number because the band thought the albums should stand on their own, which they should.
But oh the glorious sound. I am not someone who relaxes on an animal hides in front of four-foot tall speakers and compares the relative merits of recordings, but I will tell you that these remasters sound fantastic-- crisp, nuanced, and all kinds of other luxurious adjectives. Apparently, there's a dog barking the background of The Good Earth interlude "When Company Comes". Someone mumbles during the guitar break on "Let's Go". And the coat rack, as clear and unexpected as ever.


Ariana Grande executive produces the latest entry into the pop-camp franchise, but the collection feels warmed over, too glossy, and only remedially empowering.

Various Artists: Charlie’s Angels (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Charlie's Angels (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Pop music shows up in prominent and irreverent ways within the Charlie’s Angels universe. The original TV show’s brassy theme song is as indelible as the image of the franchise’s three detectives in silhouette, and the campy film reboot in 2000 used a wealth of inspired syncs: a high-flying alleyway battle set to the Prodigy; Sam Rockwell shimmying in his evil lair to Pharoahe Monch; even Cameron Diaz doing the whitest Soul Train routine of all time to Sir Mix-A-Lot. That lovable version of the crime-fighting Angels, of course, also brought about “Independent Women (Part 1),” Destiny’s Child’s inescapable tie-in empowerment anthem that became the longest-running No. 1 of that year and the group’s most successful crossover single ever.
It’s an inevitably long shadow for Ariana Grande, who enters the fray this month by executive producing the soundtrack for an Elizabeth Banks-directed update coming to theaters. Brought in to represent “not just the theme of the movie but the audience,” Grande is a natural fit for 2019’s Angels, with enough effortless charm and cultural cachet to hold court over the soundtrack’s assembly of high-wattage, all-women guest stars. Yet for all of its promise in the wake of Grande’s slinky, accomplished thank u, next earlier this year, Charlie’s Angels instead smooths over any and all hard edges, opting for big-budget pop grabs and glossy filler that undermine the impressive lineup of talent.
Grande addresses the “Independent Women” elephant head-on with “Don’t Call Me Angel,” a drab pop collaboration between herself, Miley Cyrus, and Lana Del Rey. With a narcotized delivery and hammering metallic bells, “Don’t Call Me Angel” will absolutely be forgotten in each artists’ respective discographies within the year, and for good reason: Where Destiny’s Child organically drew on female empowerment by speaking directly to a generation of working women and encouraging them to command authority, Grande’s song slings demands exclusively at men in its confounding bid for control. It’s only empowering at the most remedial level.
The balmier pop-R&B cut “Bad to You,” with Grande regulars Normani and Nicki Minaj, coasts on better chemistry and Normani’s swooning voice, plus some outsized Max Martin production. Nevertheless, with Minaj sleepwalking through her verse and lyrics that once again exclusively chide male partners, it barely rises above mid-tier. The rest of Grande’s braintrust of collaborators fare better: Victoria Monét joins her for the trappy “Got Her Own,” bouncing featherlight vocal runs off each other like they’re in a round of badminton. And “How I Look on You,” Grande’s only solo feature, is a self-reflexive dark pop highlight, ripped through with a sluggish guitar line, trap snares, and sharp rejoinders to a character who finds her star power more appealing than her personality. It may be microwaved thank u, next, but it’s still a solid reminder of Grande’s songwriting finesse when she isn’t mobbed by guests.
Because for as stacked as the Angels tracklist is, listening to it in full feels unhinged: There’s “Nobody,” a forgettable house-pop song with Chaka Khan that somehow bears zero relation to “Ain’t Nobody” and which not even Khan herself can bother feigning excitement for. It’s as doomed as an obligatory EDM-lite remix of Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls,” or the overproduced squad feature that opens the album with literal fanfare, “How It’s Done,” which finds Kash Doll and Stefflon Don trying their best under Kim Petras’ big, shouty chorus. That kind of keyed-up energy that spans the soundtrack might be electrifying—or at least make some sense—during an action sequence in the film. On its own, it just scans as low-grade exhausting.
The most vexing aspect of this Charlie’s Angels soundtrack is that the levity and camp at the heart of the series never comes into focus. The truth is that Grande is a perfect choice for the film and its audience: a bona fide pop idol, wunderkind, and businesswoman with a sharp sense of humor and a cohort of multitalented women in her inner circle—all elements that could have led to an artfully playful soundtrack that breathed new life into an iconic, female-fronted, big-budget action machine. But with an outcome this ordinary, it just sounds like Grande is cashing in.


DJ Koze is a big figure in electronic music, but he also appears to be its benevolent godfather. This compilation of tunes from his label Pampa runs the gamut of sounds, but always stays jubilant.

Various Artists: DJ Koze Presents Pampa Vol. 1

DJ Koze Presents Pampa Vol. 1

In its seven years of existence, Stefan Kozalla and Marcus Fink’s Pampa Records label has been defined by its stance against purism. The techno and house artists featured by the German label, from DJ Koze himself to the underground king Isolée, from the madcap experimentalist Roman Flügel to the fan-favorite Dntel, shun conventional genre wisdom and of-the-moment sounds, instead favoring an approach wrapped in humor, warmth, and the pleasure of small surprises. “All the best things happen from mistakes,” Koze told Pitchfork three years ago, in a statement representative of the spontaneity that he’s embraced in heading up the imprint.
That’s not to say that the tasting menu represented by the new label compilation Pampa Vol. 1 is incoherent, even with the unexpected appearances of big-name guest stars including Jamie xx and Matthew Herbert. The 19 tracks that make up this confectioner's array sit in neatly ordered rows, most of them sweet, light, and pleasant, with novel ingredients often cropping in the middle or even near the end of tracks. With a running time of nearly two hours, the compilation shouldn’t be ingested in one go—doing so might bring on the overstuffed achiness of gobbling down a box of chocolates. The offerings on hand here are meant to be picked out at random and savored; Pampa Vol. 1 is the album as discovery machine, rather than completist’s task. It’s as good an album as any to justify the existence of the shuffle setting.
Starting at the beginning may run counter to the record’s freewheeling design, but Matthew Herbert’s remix of Lianne La Havas’ “Lost and Found” is irresistible as an album opener. In Herbert’s hands, the pain and beauty of the London singer’s 2012 ballad are transmuted, as staircases of bass elevate the track’s more hopeful qualities. If you feel like taking a side entrance, another possible point of immersion is the Swedish house producer Axel Boman’s offering, “In the Dust of This Planet.” Boman’s 2010 EP Holy Love was one of Pampa’s first big releases, and the new track is characteristic of the exploratory push that Pampa’s artists receive from the label. Its winding back half, considered by Boman to be its proper ending, interrupts what had been a climactic crescendo. That shift changes the song's entire direction, allowing it to evoke a sense of regret, an actualization of the wish to go back in time and start again.
Newcomers to Pampa may skip right to the Jamie xx offering, “Come We Go,” and thankfully, it’s as good a portal as any into the label’s core values. At first, the track seems as if it’s following the path of In Colour’s dance floor fetish. Then, suddenly, the walls close in and the bass becomes claustrophobic. It’s a left turn typical of DJ Koze’s sense of play, and although it’s not entirely clear, he appears to be Jamie’s collaborator on the track, working under the pseudonym Kosi Kos.
Other standouts include the cotton candy world built by the Swiss house veteran Michel Cleis on his contribution, “Un Prince,” Acid Pauli’s fractured beauty “Nana,” which dices its sampled melody into thousands of tiny pieces, and Die Vögel’s bizarrely lovely pastoral, ”Everything,” which features the American singer Sophia Kennedy, another track to which Koze contributed something essential (in this case, advising that the beat be pulled out altogether.)
Some tracks don’t make as much sense within the mix, including “I Does It,” a serviceable slab of funk-infused hip-hop from the electronic duo Funkstörung that’s aggressive and low-slung in a way that feels out of sync with its airy companions. The crooning that provides the centerpiece of Josef’s “I Wonder,” is so shrill that it makes the track hard to stomach; it seems like a joke that was pushed a bit too far.
The record is bookended by two versions of Roman Flügel’s “9 Years,” the original and Koze’s club remix, which fans may recognize from Flügel’s Essential Mix. Koze’s version is no mere ego trip; if anything he does more justice to the tracks core attributes—its pensiveness, its beauty—than the original. It’s the most obvious example of Koze’s influence on his collaborators, but in the statements included with the press copy of Pampa Vol. 1, several of the artists mention how a suggestion he made helped them finish their tracks. Koze has described the label as a __“__small family,” a “gang which makes you feel that you’re not alone.” If that’s the case, the new record suggests that he’s operating as the ideal paterfamilias, daring the artists he works with to go beyond their boundaries, to try something unfamiliar, to surprise themselves, and in doing so, to give listeners a taste of something new.


The blues-rock supergroup comprised of Jack White, Kills vocalist Alison Mosshart, City and Colour bassist Jack Lawrence, and Queens of the Stone Age's Dean Fertita returns for another exorcism of its members’ most feral tendencies.

Dodge and Burn

It's entirely possible that when Jack White allegedly threatened to beat up Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney in a New York City bar earlier this month he was doing some street-team marketing for the new Dead Weather record. Because whenever White steps behind the drum kit of this scuzz-rock supergroup, he hits with a crazed intensity that suggests he’s looking to pound a different sort of skin. Since the release of the band’s previous album, 2010’s Sea of Cowards, White has embarked on a solo career that’s seen his work turn both more intimate and extravagant; in this light, the Dead Weather have come to represent the hanging side of beef on which he can unleash his pent-up aggression.
Tellingly, White and his mates—Kills vocalist Alison Mosshart, City and Colour bassist Jack Lawrence, and Queens of the Stone Age guitarst/keyboardist Dean Fertita—have announced they have no plans to tour in support of Dodge and Burn. This news would reinforce the notion that this group essentially functions as an exorcism of its members’ most feral tendencies before they return to their day jobs. Theirs is a blues defined not by chord progressions but physical reactions, embodying the music’s storied tradition of howls and moans and demonic possession into a fierce, physical sound. There’s a restlessness to Dodge and Burn, from Mosshart’s seething vocals and Fertita’s spasmodic guitar solos to Lawrence’s corroded basslines to White’s abrupt breakdowns. Even when songs are built around a shopworn sentiment, they’re given a twist: on the opening "I Feel Love", Mosshart answers the song’s titular declaration with a withering "every once in a while."
The Dead Weather’s cabin-in-the-woods creepiness can verge on the contrived—like on "Three Dollar Hat", where White makes like a young Isaac Brock taking on Nick Cave’s "Stagger Lee", and losing. But the band’s theatricality mostly complements the agitated tone of the songs and the dubby, dread-of-night ambiance of White’s production, particularly in those moments when Mosshart and White go head-to-head. The mid-album knockout "Rough Detective" sees the two trading verses and pushing one another to hysterical extremes; instead of dropping the typical guitar solo after the second shout-it-out chorus, the song yields a carnival-like melee of chopped-up chatter and pitch-shifted squeals. And when White asks, "what’s happening?", he sounds genuinely spooked by the song’s sudden descent into madness.
Like its predecessors, Dodge and Burn can leave you wishing for more interaction between the two leads—the duets are always the highlight of any given Dead Weather record, the moment when all that simmering tension boils over. But Mosshart once again handles the heavy vocal lifting with menace to spare, be it the frisky sing-speak of "Mile Markers", the predatory soul stomp of "Let Me Through", or the violent mood swings of "Open Up", which upends its desolate opening verse with a riff straight off an early Rush record. And given her commitment to staying in character, it’s doubly strange how, in the album’s dying minutes, the Dead Weather completely abandon their monochromatic schematic.
Dodge and Burn is capped by the ill-fitting "Impossible Winner", a sensitive piano ballad that’s practically Oasis-like in its orchestral ascent (and which, in light of the equally stately "The Last Goodbye" from the last Kills record, prods Mosshart further toward her destiny as a torch-song chanteuse). It’d be one thing if there was anything else on this record—or in the band’s entire discography, for that matter—that showed the Dead Weather had any interest in opening up their airtight rock-noir aesthetic. But tacked onto the end of another dependably dank Dead Weather record, the song feels less like a graceful break-of-dawn denouement than the musical equivalent of being awakened in the middle of the night by a flashlight to the face.


Issued just four months after their debut, the underrated 25-minute EP is a glorious distillation of their early sound, about harnessing the noise and directing it even if you can never hope to tame it.

Low Fi EP

In Stereolab’s first few years they released an onslaught of material—singles, full-length LPs, a mini-LP, compilation tracks. It was one of those moments in music where a band is so creative and bursting with so many ideas there simply aren’t enough places to put them all. Being a record collector’s band, Stereolab decided to scoop up their copious non-LP material and compile it. They called the collections Switched On and issued three volumes of the series in the 1990s, each longer than the last. Almost all of their most significant early songs, no matter how obscure their initial issue, found their way to one onto one of these comps.
But one release included with that initial rush has so far fallen through the cracks. The Low Fi EP, issued in September 1992, four months after Peng! and a month before the inaugural edition of Switched On, hasn’t been compiled nor is it, as of this writing, available on streaming services. But Low Fi contains 25 minutes of focused Stereolab brilliance, the distillation of the minimalist rock side of their early sound.
For most of its runtime, Low Fi is a glorious streak of pure energy, leaving aside the exotica and motorik influences to focus on stomping rock’n’roll. Structurally, the first three songs, “Low Fi,” “(Varoom!),” and “Laisser-Faire,” are all homages to the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray,” each offering a variation on that song’s immortal two-chord chug. “The idea was a combination of naïve pop melodies melded with very simple rock minimalism,” Stereolab’s Tim Gane told TapeOp in 1998, discussing the band’s m.o. around the time of Low Fi. “Our innovation was to strip everything back.”
The key to that sound here is how the guitar, Moog, and Farfisa organ become a single roaring instrument, one hell-bent on transforming electricity into noise. You can feel the voltage surging through every stretched chord, the rumble of the circuitry and the waveforms being pounded into new shapes. From their hi-fi test record of a band name on down, Stereolab positioned itself as a refinement of existing musical ideas, a collective devoted to bringing earlier sounds and styles into the present moment with the precision of scientists. The records were assembled deliberately, using complicated musical instruments that required a regular maintenance.
So one part of the band’s image was as tinkerers, people in white coats working to perfect new formulations, somewhere away from the spotlight. Their kindred spirits were bands like Kraftwerk, laboring in Kling Klang for years, waiting for technology to catch up with their vision, or Kevin Shields, obsessing endlessly about the layering of guitar feedback. Stereolab were that focused on sound, but they were also moving fast, and they wanted to convey their findings to an audience as they discovered them. Low Fi shows that side of the group. Here, it doesn’t matter if every detail is in its right place; it’s about harnessing the noise and directing it even if you can never hope to tame it, the power of chaos over the power of knowledge.
The opening title track is the most obvious VU nod, adapting the precise changes and tempo of “Sister Ray” (years after Jonathan Richman’s Modern Lovers borrowed it for “Roadrunner”). Floating over this thick and sticky harmonic edifice are two voices—founder Lætitia Sadier, and a newcomer, the Australia-born Mary Hansen, who would be an important part of Stereolab’s sound until her tragic death in 2002. On “Low Fi,” the fundamental ugliness of the distorted chords is thrown into sharp relief by the clear, uninflected beauty of Hansen and Saider’s vocals, as they trill wordless “la-la-la” in unison, like mischievous sisters who share a secret. Sadier’s voice has an undercurrent of weight and seriousness—Nico was a frequent point of comparison in Stereolab’s early days—while Ramsay adds a note of lightness and warmth. They are yin and yang, and when they are heard together they reach a kind of perfection.
The following “(Varoom!)” is another effortlessly catchy pop song, until it’s not: halfway through, it fades down and a delicious feedback drone emerges, the kind of dense, woozy churn of sound that seems to be collapsing and expanding simultaneously. The chords are a slight variation on those on “Low Fi”—there are still just two of them, but now they take up equal space, rocking back and forth like a seesaw or a nodding head.
If Low Fi produced one Stereolab standard, it’s “Laisser-Faire,” a track that also exists in a brilliant version recorded at the BBC and collected on ABC Music. Once again there are only two chords, but now the pace is quicker, and Sadier’s vocals hover just above the guitars, touching down briefly with each vowel, while Hansen sounds far away, a memory of the song that unfolds at the same time as the experience of it. Though difficult to discern without a lyric sheet, the words outline a political struggle every bit as relevant in 2019 as it was in 1992: “History will only repeat itself once more/The Western world is going more and more right-wing/Yearning for some sort of protection, too scared to do anything.”
Stereolab’s political agenda was outlined by Sadier in an interview with Chickfactor shortly after the release of Low Fi: “To create a disturbance is the best way we thought of to make people and ourselves think.” Arguably the definitive early Stereolab song, “Laisser-Faire” captures all their fusion-of-opposites glory—forceful and delicate, direct and allusive, nostalgic and future-looking, crude and multi-dimensional. Low Fi stands as a tribute to a moment when Stereolab’s cup runneth over, when the songs were coming faster than they knew what to do with them.


L.A. producer best known for his work on Gonjasufi's A Sufi and a Killer folds in music from across the spectrum on this distinctive EP.

Death Gate EP

At his Low End Theory parties in L.A., the Gaslamp Killer makes a point of playing whatever records he wants, whether it's obscure Turkish music or wobbly dubstep or garage rock. Like DJ Shadow and Madlib before him, the Gaslamp Killer's record collection is, presumably, so large and unwieldy that what we're listening to is the sound of someone being devoured by his own resources. Death Gate continues the trend: In just over 15 minutes, there are enough scraps of sound for another artist to create a whole album. But what's most intriguing about Gaslamp Killer is that, like early Shadow and Madlib, he has an understanding of restraint. With so much music to draw from, there's a tendency to want to throw out your whole arsenal. But if there's anything connecting these five tracks it's a sense of minimalism-- even tastefulness.
As you might guess, marijuana is a key inspiration here. In a recent interview with Resident Advisor, Gaslamp Killer professes that his aspiration is to have a weed hook-up in whatever city he's in; that way, he can get stoned as soon as he gets off the plane. Back when the mighty herb was half as powerful and half the price, you had dub and jazz and stoner-rock to get high to. Nowadays, with hydroponic technology moving as fast as the Internet, you have all of them in one. Which, at its best, is precisely what the Gaslamp Killer does.
"Shattering Inner Journeys" could serve as the Gaslamp Killer's manifesto, and it's easily his best track to date. In a strikingly raw six minutes, Raymond Scott-style library synth squeals creep over a drum break ripped out of a mid-1990s Mo' Wax vault, bleeding into an appropriately eerie Piper at the Gates of Dawn homage. And then in the last minute, the song chugs out on an oddly dubby proto-industrial pitter-patter. Snaky, whiny crunk-rap keyboard riffs twirl around a skittering synth-drum beat on opener "Fun Over 100", and the remainder rock gut-punch, battered hip-hop beats that sound like old Company Flow bootleg instrumental tapes. Though these tracks can be somewhat compressed, there is a noticeable paucity of instruments, typically relying on little more than drums and a keyboard or guitar lick.
The Gaslamp Killer's profile was raised substantially by his production work on Gonjasufi's A Sufi and a Killer, and "When I'm in Awe" is like a lost track from it, almost to a fault. Within that album, the track would have fit into its whacked-out, garage-Rasta drug nightmare. But here it feels more like a bonus track, especially compared to the rest of the EP, which foregoes that album's Beefheart-hop sound for pronounced percussive instrumentals.
The era and sound that the Gaslamp Killer is going for is pretty easy to identify: the b-boy end of sample-heavy mid-90s hip-hop. But the way that he approaches his tracks is distinctive both in what he adds as well as what he leaves out. What will a Gaslamp Killer LP sound like? It's hard to tell, which, in this case, is an exciting prospect.


Already known for crafting long, minimalist tracks, the Chilean-German producer here stretches his modus operandi to the limit, offering a 37-minute single, plus a 36-minute CD-only remix.

Fizheuer Zieheuer

To those who track the ambitious (and occasionally absurd) movements of the Chilean-German DJ and producer Ricardo Villalobos, his latest effort may seem like self-parody. While Ricardo Villalobos has always been known for crafting long, minimalist tracks, this one surely takes the cake, clocking in at 37 minutes and offering little in the way of development, surprise, or variation along the way. And though it may come as a bit of a shock, here that is not a bad thing.
At the risk of being reductive, Fizheuer Zieheuer essentially consists of a lone boom-tick pattern-- so basic it might serve as the house-music chapter of a beatmakers' tutorial-- overlayed with two interlocking horn parts. One is a minor-key, mostly ostinato figure that oom-pahs almost uninterrupted for the length of the track; a trumpet solo occasionally breaks through like a ray of light through low, grey clouds. A bonus cut, "Fizbeast", rounds out the CD release to bring total running time to more than 72 minutes-- downloader's value alert!-- but that remix remains even more restrained. Its own interior dubscape is so minimally variegated as to be almost dizzying, like playing hopscotch on a moving sidewalk in zero gravity-- in a blizzard.
And yet, any minimalist will know that no mere tabulation of the elements can get at the heart of repetition, and that's certainly the case here. Working more minimally than he ever has, Villalobos finds perpetual motion in seeming stasis, using judicious filters and delay to ensure that no two bars are alike. His pinhead moonstomping is like the sonic version of micropsia, in which traditional perspective fails and objects lose their scale: echoes outgrow their sources and offbeats shadowbox their downbeats to death. And while the chorused, beer-hall horns never quite cede the center, they're occasionally threatened by a lone percussive sound that hammers away at the Two and Four: a bright, metallic ringing, it sounds uncannily like a baseball bat struck against the frame of a chain-link fence. (Ricardo goes Little League? How oddly American.) Absurd as it may be, following that one sound and its bobbleheaded echoes is one of the track's great, hypnotic pleasures.
But it's the brass that give "Fizheuer Zieheuer" its real power. The horns, after all, are what most people use to identify the track, and they're what leap out and grab you when you hear it in a DJ set. But the horns have also become a sticking point. I don't think anyone ever seriously believed that Villalobos himself played or even commissioned the horns, but in recent weeks this already polarizing cut-- a critical darling, it's been panned in equal measure on forums like Discogs.com, where its length has invited terms like "pompous" and "pretentious"-- has become even more controversial.
In late December, a Discogs.com forum member uncovered a song called "Pobjenicki Cocek" performed by Blehorkestar Bakija Bakic, from the Vranje region in southern Serbia, and claimed that in it lay the key to "Fizheuer". The following week, when the Italian blog Batteria Ricaricabile posted the song, originally released on a 1999 compilation called Road of the Gypsies, the extent of Villalobos' borrowing became clear. The chugging refrain is taken from a moment where Blehorkestar Bakija Bakic's song pauses and marks time; with little percussion and no lead voices to get in the way, it's ripe for looping. The bright, bold melodic passage that leads Fitzheuer to its dizzying heights, meanwhile, comes straight from the intro to "Pobjednicki Cocek"-- dragged, dropped and left virtually unadulterated. "Fitzheuer Zieheuer", in other words, is basically a remix, if not an edit.
But the great question remains: So what? Leave the copyright questions to Lawrence Lessig; "Fitzheuer Zieheuer" remains a force to be reckoned with, not in spite of but because of its audacity. If Villalobos hadn't released a 35-minute track under his own name, somebody would have had to do it for him; better still that he did so with this brain-bungeeing, hair-raising, tortoise-and-hare race between call and response, downbeat and delay, that livens up any DJ set like a bolt from the blue.
"Fitzheuer Zieheuer" didn't need to be 37 minutes long; Villalobos could have made exactly the same point in 18, 15, hell, 10 minutes, and nobody would have felt shortchanged. But I'm glad he did it this way; if nothing else, the track offers a window into his creative process, where production and marathon DJ sessions merge in the form of 20- or 30-minute drum tracks that he records to CDR and plays out layered with other records. I suspect that that's how "Fitzheuer" got its start, as a private-press thing that Playhouse decided to make public. If I have any complaint about the release, it is-- perhaps paradoxically-- that they decided to release it at all. Heard in the context of one of Villalobos' epic sets, at lord-knows o'clock and with the crowd gone completely unhinged, a track like "Fitzheuer" is unbelievably special; the way those horns leaven the air after too many electrohouse synths, they're like sorbet. Or better still, grappa.
But debated to death on the message boards, ruling the charts at Beatport, and blasted at the most inopportune moments by warm-up knobs desperate to appear au courant, the tune wears out its welcome awfully quickly; its ubiquity works against it. I'm glad that Playhouse decided to share "Fitzheuer" with the world; love it or hate it, the discourse it generates enriches dance music. But with file-sharing sites like YouSendIt and Sendspace making a superstar's turn at Fabric or Panoramabar accessible to all and sundry, I wonder if Villalobos' private-press product needed to be taken public at all. Leaked online, it would have generated all the intrigue and rumor that it has anyway, and spared the overly public airing, it might have retained an air of mystery. Or maybe it's just disappointing knowing where the song comes from: No one really wants to find their Holy Grail, especially so soon after even being tipped off as to its very existence.


After over three decades of drumming in the Melvins, Dale Crover has released a muffled, scattershot solo album. It comes on the heels of a new record from the Melvins themselves.

Dale Crover / Melvins: The Fickle Finger of Fate/A Walk With Love & Death

It took over 30 years, but it finally exists: a Dale Crover solo album. The legendary drummer of the Melvins, and even Nirvana for a time (he played on three tracks on Bleach), has long hinted at the possibility of a solo effort. In 1992, he and the Melvins released the aptly titled Dale Crover, a punk rock record that sounded more akin to Sonic Youth than their usual gush of sludge metal. The album is an odd but illuminating look into the mind of Crover, and a clear reminder of his musical origin: a garage band called Fecal Matter with Kurt Cobain (both are from Aberdeen, Wash.) in the 1980s. Crover’s always had the energy and savage edge to be a singular metal drummer. But he’s also a gifted grunge and rock artist, a genuine punk at heart. If The Fickle Finger of Fate proves anything, it’s that, for the better part of three decades, Crover’s been dreaming—reminiscing maybe—about the good old days with Kurt.
It’s easy, then, to imagine songs like “Hooch,” a track that Cobain himself produced on the Melvins’ 1993 album Houdini, as source material for Fickle Finger. In his work from around that time, Crover doesn’t overcomplicate his arrangements, nor does he steal the air away from the music’s dredging guitar; instead, he balances the heaviness of the soundscape. Simplicity is his preference, his greatest tool in doing so. He pulsates and thunders along, confidently letting the aftermath of his cannon-beat filter evenly throughout the rest of the distortion. He was rarely the focal point—he mostly ensured there was none.
But on The Fickle Finger of Fate, Crover is now front and center, and it’s a bizarre place for him to be. He wrote, played, and recorded most of the album himself, and in this way, it’s almost melancholic in how it plays like an old demo, like a tape your friend might’ve handed you in 1992. Only six of the 20 tracks are longer than three minutes. The production is muffled, Crover’s voice hooded with noise. While the album spans a few genres, it doesn’t develop them fully: some of the shorter tracks like “String Bean” and “Prismo” beg to be fleshed out into full songs. Others, like the 14-seconds-long “Our Supreme Leader,” have no business being slotted between a song crafted around noise-rock and another trying to be Pink Floyd.
In fact, the numerous short interludes on Fickle Finger end up disrupting the progression of the music more than connecting it. The hard-nosed, grinding anthem “Big Uns” is one of the album’s best tracks—but instead of carrying its momentum, the two jabbing interludes that follow take you to the slow and woozy (and acoustic) title track. In this regard, it’s difficult to see what the album adds up to beyond a mixed bag of half-baked rhythms and riffs.
As the fickle finger of fate would have it, the Melvins themselves now seem to suffer from the same indecisiveness and lack of focus. Their latest full-length, A Walk With Love & Death, was released earlier this year and it is formed by two distinct collections. “Death,” the first part of the album, delivers the usual wash of avant-garde drone and sludge that has boringly come to be expected of 21st-century Melvins. “Love,” the second part, is actually an original and interesting sound collage and soundtrack for a short film directed and produced by the band’s friend Jesse Nieminen.
“Love” is an intriguing assortment of samples, stray recordings, noises, sound effects, conversations, and Moog-esque tones. Experimental though it may be, it’s not unlike 2001’s Colossus of Destiny, an hour-long trek through the din and drain of stitched together samples. The colorful confusion of sound, the unpredictability of the coagulating fragments, makes the music almost imagistic and allows it to exist on its own terms both as a film score and as a sonic portrait of people, places, and scenes. “The Asshole Bastard,” “Park Head,” and “T-Burg” in particular offer up humor, urbanity, and warmth. It’s unusual stuff even for the Melvins, and for a band 34 years into an unusual career, that’s no easy feat.
Unfortunately, “Love” is preceded by “Death,” which, as a general rule of thumb in the universe, is rarely a good thing. The two distinct parts of A Walk With Love & Death are entirely weighed down by their own differences: they do not meet at any central point, motif, or musical concept. The darkness and fuzziness of “Death,” in many ways, counteracts the careful piecing together of “Love,” just as the meandering nature of “Love” pushes back against the groove-bound tightness of “Death.” They deflate and distract from one another to the detriment of the whole assemblage.
The Melvins, and of course Crover, may be determined to continue experimenting and wandering at this point. But they should be warned: not all ventures outward lead you to a better inward place.


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 an uncompromising debut, pop music that ventures to the extremes of sound and emotion.

The Lion and the Cobra

After the early sessions for her debut album, Sinéad O’Connor went home and studied the peak meter on her personal recording device, singing to herself, alone. The green light meant she was in the proper range to be recorded; yellow meant she was in danger of clipping; red meant she was too loud. Because the label had paired her with a producer she did not trust, or particularly like, the teenage songwriter from Dublin realized she would have to internalize these metrics in order to preserve her music the way it sounded in her head. “So I’ve made my voice into its own master fader,” she wrote in her memoir, Rememberings.
Even after she fired the producer and took his place—scrapping the sessions and starting over, putting herself in a hundred-thousand pounds of debt before the album’s release in November 1987—this would be an important lesson in control and self-reliance. These were songs that lived in extremes. The accompaniment was often barely there: a wash of ambience, layered acoustic guitars, a Bible passage recited in Gaelic by Enya. Or it was a full-on attack: shoegaze drones, blaring strings, military drums, and dance beats.
And then there’s her voice. It has the elucidating quality of light through stained glass but can just as easily become a tempest, shattering windows and leaving the interiors raw and wrecked. She would go on to record albums of traditional Irish folk music and roots reggae, transform a Loretta Lynn song into an apocalyptic showtune, rap about the Great Irish Potato Famine, and manage never once to sound ridiculous doing any of it. To this day, the best visualization of her gift remains a steady close-up of her face with a tear rolling down her cheek. She sings and you cannot look away.
The Lion and the Cobra, like all of O’Connor’s albums, requires active participation: a listener on the edge of their seat, a hand near the volume knob, a constant feeling of unease. O’Connor has confessed to furnishing the Irish mountaintop home where she lives alone with “deliberately” uncomfortable chairs: “I don’t like people staying long.” Her albums take a similar approach. They seem to peak with negative space. Even at her most accessible, O’Connor wants you to hear the way she summons this music from the dark, quiet places where it has been buried; it floods and calms and stretches beyond our sight, like the sky after a storm.
In songs like “Mandinka” and “Jerusalem,” the magic is in the interplay between O’Connor’s voice and the bed of cavernous rock music: how she stretches the titles into one-word choruses, weaving the syllables through their knotty arrangements. In the refrain of “Mandinka,” a song about a young woman refusing tradition, the guitar riff rises and falls as drum rolls echo in the right and left channel. Even with these flourishes, her voice, double-tracked and coated in reverb, is the center of everything. The song is delivered like a miniature symphony. You can sing along with every little moment, each placed just so in the soundfield.
O’Connor never considered herself a pop artist, but she immediately had a knack for getting in people’s heads. Before she broke through with a ghostly rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” she sought a different thrill in The Lion and the Cobra’s “I Want Your (Hands on Me).” It’s her rare song that feels modeled after hits of the era, an early attempt at blending her blunt-force, hip-hop influence with gentler melodic gifts. At the time, she called it a “tongue in cheek song about sex,” and it would eventually receive a dance remix with a verse from MC Lyte about how, despite the seduction in its title, “When I say no, yo, I mean no.” The hook feels almost preverbal as she finds ways to subvert the directness: “Put ’em on, put ’em on, put ’em on me,” O’Connor sings until the words bleed into the rhythm.
These simple pleasures exist in a different universe than “Troy,” a dark, ambitious ballad with lyrics ranging from Yeats allusion to dragon-killing fantasy, breathless apology to full-throated rage. On the album, her words are backed by a string section responding to each shift in her inflection. In concert, she would sing it with just a 12-string guitar, her voice trembling then crashing like something heavy dropped suddenly from above. It is one of the only songs on the album she admitted to being autobiographical at the time. The lyrics were addressed in part to her abusive mother who died in a car crash when O’Connor was 19, but who would haunt her life and work long after. “I couldn’t admit it was her I was angry at,” she would later reflect, “so I took it out on the world.”
During a troubled childhood, O’Connor escaped through the radio. She was sensitive to music: violently repelled by what she hated, like her sister’s Barry Manilow poster, and obsessively devoted to what she loved, like Bob Dylan. One of her favorites was his 1979 album Slow Train Coming, the start of the icon’s brief run as a born-again Christian songwriter, a polarizing and misunderstood period in his career. O’Connor counts herself as one of the era’s few disciples. As recently as this month, you could spot the record in her home, perched behind her shoulder during interviews—the patron saint of hearing the audience boo and cranking it up anyway. Which, of course, is precisely what she did when she had the chance to honor Dylan at his 30th Anniversary tribute show.
At the time of that performance in October 1992, O’Connor could count plenty of reasons why her audience might be dismissive—at first, she thought they just didn’t like her outfit. But there was also the controversy with the national anthem. She claimed she had been given the option for it to be played before a concert in New Jersey, and she had politely said no; media reports soon emerged that she refused to perform if she heard it playing. There was also, of course, the time she appeared on Saturday Night Live and tore a photo of the pope that once belonged to her mother—removed from the wall while she was cleaning the house after her death—and made an unrehearsed statement against the Church’s history of child abuse. “Fight the real enemy” was the clearest way she could think to communicate her message. Many viewers took it as a provocation to fight her directly.
But for a while, everyone was listening. When O’Connor performed “Mandinka” at the 1989 Grammy Awards—with the Public Enemy logo dyed into her hair in solidarity with the radical hip-hop artists snubbed by award ceremonies—she appeared genuinely gleeful, received by rapturous applause. Completely alone on an enormous stage, she swiveled around and shook her knees, singing pitch-perfect at the top of her lungs in a black halter top and jeans. The performance is radiant and definitive, delivered for an audience of insiders who would, at best, completely turn their backs on her or, at worst, actively derail her career, all within the next few years.
While O’Connor’s relationship with the music industry and press grew increasingly thorny, it was also a conscious retreat as she grew exhausted with the mainstream. On The Lion and the Cobra, you can hear her planting flags in the places where she would later take sanctuary. The piercing balladry of “Just Like U Said It Would Be” previews the pared-back exorcisms of 1994’s Universal Mother; the old-Irish mysticism of “Never Get Old” would be a refuge in 2002’s extraordinary Sean-Nós Nua. And like the fragmented opener “Jackie,” narrated by a woman waiting every day for her lost husband to return from sea, defying the warnings of her community, some of her best later work was delivered in the form of mantras, secluded from the noise of the world around her. “I am enough for myself,” she affirms in one of them, a lesson she would spend the following decades accepting.
Within a few years of its release, O’Connor was already distancing herself from the blinding rage and catharsis of The Lion and the Cobra: “Now I’m an old woman of 23,” she explained in a whisper, only half-kidding. “I don’t feel as angst-ridden as I did when I was 15.” She was adamant about not being defined by the pain in her songs. After Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, she spoke about her desire to offer another path to her fans: “The tragedy is that he could’ve got out of it if he’d had more faith that he could,” she suggested. “I’m very conscious of wanting to show people it can be done, putting it right before their eyes.”
In 1987, O’Connor was beginning to accept this wisdom, but her faith was being tested daily. When she fell in love with her drummer, John Reynolds, and became pregnant with her first child, the label encouraged her to get an abortion. “I was very upset and very hurt. How could I choose between my career or a child?” she told Rolling Stone three years later, in a profile that coincided with “Nothing Compares 2 U” reaching No. 1 on the Billboard charts. “I wanted the baby—and I decided to have it.” And so she did: Jake was born that summer. The Lion and the Cobra arrived in the fall, and with it, O’Connor’s life in the public eye began.
O’Connor’s music became her armor during these battles, her fortress as the world slowly closed in on her. 1990’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got expanded the debut’s emotional canvas in ways that welcomed an entire record-buying public, but The Lion and the Cobra, dense as a dark cloud, proudly bent to the whims of only its creator. Consider the end of “Troy,” when O’Connor delivers one of its pivotal lines—“Every look that you threw told me so”—raising her voice to a harrowing climax. As the sound grows distorted in the mix, she prolongs the note, louder and louder, as if trying to break through the monitor—an early attempt at fighting the mechanisms that delivered her message, of testing her limits. Or maybe just to be heard.
Depending on where you live, there are two different covers for The Lion and the Cobra. For the American release, the label went with an angelic portrait of O’Connor with her arms crossed against her chest, eyes cast downward, mouth shut before a glowing, white background. It was an alternate option to the one she preferred, used throughout the rest of the world. There, her mouth is open, eyebrows arched, shoulders thrown back slightly, capturing her in constant motion and placing the image in a kind of blur. As a young artist’s introduction to a new audience, this depiction was deemed a little too angry, too provocative. In Rememberings, O’Connor recalls the shoot. The photographer was playing the album back, encouraging her to respond naturally as the cameras flashed. “I look like I’m screaming,” she writes. “In fact, I was singing.”

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Eight Bells is the doom metal project of Melynda Jackson, formerly of the defunct, long-running instrumental collective SubArachnoid Space. Landless veers between shoegaze-inflected dreaminess and blackened blurs without lapsing into metalgaze tropes.

Landless

Instrumental music can accomplish a great many things, but one thing it’s not so good at is storytelling. It’s no wonder, then, that when Melynda Jackson of the defunct, long-running instrumental collective SubArachnoid Space launched the heavy, stripped down doom metal project Eight Bells as singer/guitarist, she had a few stories up her sleeve. Or in the case of Eight Bells, one ambitious tale. The trio’s 2013 debut, The Captain’s Daughter, comprised four songs that formed a story arc about a character lost at sea; on Eight Bells’ new album, Landless, that character makes it home. Spoiler alert: Things don’t go well.
Landless is drenched in isolation. "Hating" scrapes its way across a gulf of despair, with wraithlike vocals and numbed melodies hanging over pinprick prog fretwork. The riffs are meaty and vast, but the pulse of ethereal '70s rock—from Pink Floyd to Hawkwind’s more celestial moments—haunts "Hold My Breath," which nods to more modern influences with an intricate, off-kilter, Isis-esque groove. There’s an ambience to Landless, bottled like smoke in numerous passages throughout the album, but it reaches track-length mass on "The Mortal’s Suite," an echoing exhalation of negative space and gothic grays. It’s as though Jackson has taken the flights of fantasy that SubArachnoid Space specialized in, edited them down, and folded them into an ashen doom.
For an album about aloneness, there’s a lush synergy to Landless. Dual vocal lines emanate from some unseen place, sometimes braided together in a conjoined plea for connection, sometimes adrift in solitude. On "Touch Me," that dynamic is brought to a stunning culmination; Jackson and bassist/singer Haley Westeiner whisper and drone in a fugue of hushed desperation, harmonizing but always just out of phase.
As for Landless’ narrative, it’s not exactly a solid one. The album’s title track, nearly 13 colossal minutes long, sheds wisps of images and ghostly chants that melt into the ether. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful, veering between shoegaze-inflected dreaminess and blackened blurs without lapsing into metalgaze tropes. Whatever has befallen Jackson’s protagonist isn’t entirely clear; all that’s certain is that the ending, like the beginning and middle, are lost in a fog of otherworldliness and doubt. Ultimately, the narrative isn’t about the words so much as the atmosphere—and in the saga that is Landless, voices are just one more glorious instrument spelling out an epic, tragic fate.


Ignoring calls to fold Erlend Øye's hushed beats into their hushed folk, the Kings of quiet return with their most whisper-soft-- and graceful-- record yet.

Kings of Convenience: Declaration of Dependence

Declaration of Dependence

Kings of Convenience made headlines last month. No, wait, Leslie Feist did. It's been an eventful five years since the Norwegian duo's previous album, Riot on an Empty Street, featured the Canadian songstress on two tracks. After Erlend Øye and Eirik Glambæk Bøe's recent New York show, that a surprise Feist guest appearance got top media billing underscores just how eventful. Sorry, guys, I guess royalty isn't what it used to be.
No longer does Quiet Is the New Loud, the title of Øye and Bøe's 2001 Astralwerks debut, sound like such an appealing mantra. The hushed politeness that Kings of Convenience and, earlier, Belle and Sebastian reintroduced to indie listeners around the turn of the millennium must've lost its fresh feeling somewhere between Natalie Portman big-upping the Shins and the Decemberists doing a prog-folk rock opera. Then there's the more than 400,000 copies Riot sold in Europe, a number that looks virtually impossible for a group of such modest stature today. Throw in Øye's two mostly solid albums fronting dance-poppers the Whitest Boy Alive, and, well, what do Kings of Convenience have left to say?
"Quieter is the new quiet," apparently. Despite calls for the whisper-folk pair to make Øye's house and techno background more apparent, Declaration of Dependence doubles down on hushed Scandinavian understatement. No drums, unless you count slapped fretboards or squeaking fingers: just two voices, two acoustic guitars, and occasional cello, viola, or one-finger piano plinks. Along with sharper songwriting focus, this go-for-broke softness makes for the most durable, rewarding Kings of Convenience album yet-- a Pink Moon to past efforts' Five Leaves Left. Barring a last-minute José González surprise, it's also probably the best new full-length of its style you'll hear this year.
The songs on Declaration of Dependence reveal everyday tensions with a cool, undemonstrative reserve. You can hear the spare but descriptive verses as about romance, the band itself, or global politics, depending on your preference. Where Riot opener "Homesick" offered the suggestive image of "two soft voices blended in perfection," the new album's first track, tender "24-25", declares, "What we build is bigger than the sum of two." Slowly shuffling "Renegade" uses bold, vivid brush strokes to carry out that old maxim, "If you love something, let it go"; "Why are you whispering when the bombs are falling?" a solitary voice asks, between slightly dissonant strums. "Riot on an Empty Street", a holdover since years before the album of that same name, finds a traveling singer lost for words, but not for delicate melodies.
Rather than become more electronic, Kings of Convenience here choose simply to apply dance music's minimalism and sense of texture more fully to their chosen acoustic-pop form. Bittersweet single "Mrs. Cold" has been compared to Jack Johnson, probably because both use percussive hand slapping, but the popular surfer-turned-singer has never recorded anything so perfectly poised, so deceptively depressing; a ringing lead guitar line repeats like a looped sample. "Boat Behind", a single in other countries, floats a melancholy violin line over a tangled tale about reuniting with someone but never belonging to them, sounding almost like another lost Arthur Russell demo. "Rule My World", which follows Sweden's González into forceful denunciations of theocratic zealotry, has the bouncy upswing of French house. Øye's smoky falsetto fills in for the absent Feist on songs like "Freedom and Its Owner". "Power of Not Knowing" neatly echoes Simon & Garfunkel's "April Come She Will".
Both halves of the duo now live back home in Bergen, Norway, after a multi-year absence by the Whitest Boy Alive singer. Whether inspired by lovers, each other, or the warmongers of the world, Kings of Convenience's latest is ultimately just what its title says: a bold and beautiful assertion that we are better off together than apart. Or, as "My Ship Isn't Pretty" wonderfully puts it: a series of "quiet protests against loneliness." If the album cover had you expecting 2009's umpteenth nu-Balearic cruise, be glad we got this eloquent message in a bottle instead.


On his band's first album in seven years, Gary Lightbody aims for clarity, connection, and personal resonance but lapses into the pomp and incoherence that have plagued Snow Patrol for a decade.

Wildness

In the early 2000s, Snow Patrol became inextricably connected with the ABC medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy.” Gary Lightbody and his band were a constant at Seattle Grace as the rotating cast of residents flirted with disaster, death, and (mostly) each other. Denny Duquette, Jr. took his final, swooning breaths to “Chasing Cars” in the Season 2 finale—and then the show’s cast performed it in the musical episode “Grey’s Anatomy: The Music Event.”
On their first album in seven years, Snow Patrol don’t need Shonda Rhimes to amp up the drama. Wildness was inspired by Lightbody’s struggle with sobriety, his father’s battle with dementia, a crippling fear of losing his edge as an artist, and—why not?—a headline-making new love interest for new guitar player Johnny McDaid. It’s a cruel twist of fate that Snow Patrol fail to come up with some worthy syncs for a “Grey’s Anatomy” script when they’ve practically lived in one.
This is a band that once gave silence at the breakfast table the gravity of a nuclear standoff. Their most personal album deals in matters of literal life and death and can get shrugged off like waiting room music. To some extent, this seems to have been Lightbody’s intention: He aimed for “clarity and connection” on Wildness, a familiar and canny pivot for intensely apolitical acts who want to acknowledge the world’s sad state of affairs without risking any blowback. “Friends and foes and princes/Are all just human in the end,” Lightbody preaches on “Empress,” before insisting, “This is so damn simple.” Perhaps it’s willfully naive as well, but you come to Snow Patrol for consolation, not confrontation.
No one’s asking the band to address the totality of life on Earth, although that’s exactly what they attempt to do on Wildness’ opener, “Life on Earth,” a by-the-book grasp at gravity. The intro is all shimmering acoustic guitars in negative space. Then a chorus lifts like velvet curtains. There are regal drum rolls, declarative lyrics about our collective existential predicament, and some well-placed profanity: “Shouldn’t need to be this fucking hard/It’s just life on Earth,” Lightbody snarls.
It’s bizarre to hear the same guy who’s begging for simplicity go on to compose an album whose lyric sheet can barely go one verse without herniating wordplay: “Now slip the tattoo on/Serenity it scorns your every mood,” he insists on “Wild Horses.” “Empress” has us “standing in the steady throne of restless hope.” On “A Youth Written in Fire,” he’s urging us to “Remember the first time we got high/We felt like the rabid lion’s roar.” Do any of these make sense, even to the lucky few who are capable of experiencing love and loss as intensely as Gary Lightbody? Did that first kiss really feel “like a planet forming,” or is he just happy to see us?
More than Lightbody’s lack of cogency, the imperious tone burdens Wildness. At the band’s peak, Snow Patrol albums were designed like Autobot Blaster: Even with U2 and R.E.M. standby Jacknife Lee’s battle-ready production, there was an intimate mixtape at the core of 2003’s Final Straw and 2006’s Eyes Open. And these guys are pros themselves now: McDaid is one of pop music’s favorite hired guns; he’s co-written for Shawn Mendes, P!nk, James Blunt, and Ed Sheeran. Lightbody is best known to some young pop fans as “that dude on ‘The Last Time,’” a duet with Taylor Swift  that came in 121st out of 129 on a Rolling Stone ranking of her songs.
What’s remarkable about “Don’t Give In,” the lead single from Wildness, is that Lightbody’s vocals on the track sound even more mismatched to the music than they were on “The Last Time.” The incessantly repeated hook shows that he’s learned some things from his pop moonlighting, but, for some reason, the song also finds him abandoning his handsome Northern Irish burr in favor of a weak Springsteen impression.
It’s a fitting, if unfortunate, encapsulation of the confusion about what Snow Patrol are supposed to be that has apparently plagued Lightbody for more than a decade. The band initially came off as a scrappier, rawer version of Coldplay—but since “Chasing Cars,” they’ve sounded more like Coldplay with less conviction, only tentatively experimenting with pop and electronic music. Polished to an antiseptic sheen, without shine or sparkle, most of Wildness is squarely within the bland “young adult contemporary” realm in which McDaid and Lightbody operate outside of Snow Patrol. “A Dark Switch,” “Wild Horses,” and “A Youth Written in Fire” comprise the only efforts to live up to the album’s title, their jittery rhythms no spicier than a mound of Zatarain’s.
Yet the most affecting tracks are among the least stylistically ambitious. “Soon,” a plainspoken tribute to Lightbody’s father, is as moving as it is critic-proof. “What If This Is All the Love You Ever Get?” is exactly what you’d expect from a Snow Patrol song of that name: a reverberating piano ballad on which Lightbody pleads with us to let go of regret, live for today, tell her you love her, goddammit, do not let this pass you by. The one song on Wildness whose title is phrased as a question is also the only one that demands a “Grey’s Anatomy”-level emotional response, finally delivering on Lightbody’s stated aim of connecting with his audience, loud and clear.


On its first album in 11 years, the Damon Albarn-fronted supergroup tackles Brexit head on. In his “Anglo-Saxistentialist” reckoning, false nostalgia imperils a true vision of British identity.

The Good, the Bad & the Queen: Merrie Land

Merrie Land

Damon Albarn has been here before: examining the state of his nation from a place of great ambivalence. He’s been tangled in the Union Jack since his days at the helm of Blur, when he laced chart-topping pop with serrated critiques of British culture. In the decades since, the definition of that culture has become increasingly contested—particularly in the debates around Britain’s 2016 decision to leave the EU. Shaken and spurred by the Brexit referendum, Albarn’s supergroup the Good, the Bad & the Queen—also including the Clash bassist Paul Simonon, the Verve’s Simon Tong, and legendary Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen—came back together after 11 years to make Merrie Land, a concept album about what it means to be British.
For Albarn, it’s part of a lifelong investigation into the nature of Englishness, or what he has called “Anglo-Saxistentialist.” In a recent interview, he referred to Merrie Land as “the next installment of [Blur’s] Parklife.” If the world of Parklife was rendered in crisp, saturated colors, Merrie Land is drab and strewn with debris. Albarn guides us through its greying sites, pointing out ruins of English identity along the way. “If you are leaving/Please still say goodbye,” he sings atop lullaby organ in the title track; “Can you leave me my Silver Jubilee mug, my old flag?” These obsolete symbols are typical of the album’s tarnished menagerie—evocative, Albarn says, of a “nostalgic, sentimental vision of how England used to be,” even if it “never really existed.”
This kind of nostalgic residue is smeared all over Merrie Land, which is shot through with sounds and images that feel haunted by age and irrelevancy. On “Gun to the Head,” belches of brass suggest the ghost of the royal marching band; on “Nineteen Seventeen” Albarn shows us curled, faded snapshots of “Pylons, rapeseed fields/Powdered skies and trees alone/Thousands of white crosses in a cemetery,” captured from a train leaving “a place we can’t remain close to anymore.” “My heart is heavy,” he sings, “because it looks just like my home.” The bloom of strings and pulsing Mellotron suggest Parklife’s “To the End,” though the magnitude of this ending feels far greater.
Merrie Land owes as much to Britain’s musical traditions as it does to its relics and geography; the first half of the album offers an absurdist vaudeville romp akin to the Kinks and Sgt. Pepper’s, whereas the late-album cut “The Truce of Twilight” touts a walloping bassline that recalls the Clash’s dreary “The Guns of Brixton.” “Lady Boston,” one of the record’s sparser tracks, is built upon ghostly layers of regal noise: Battle snares roll softly, and the wails of a Welsh choir are tempered as if wrapped in gauze.
While the Good, the Bad & the Queen are skilled at providing a wide breadth of styles here—from the woozy, carnivalesque organ of “The Last Man to Leave” to “The Truce of Twilight”’s militaristic chants—they especially succeed at conveying a crumbling and isolated Britain. In a passage from the title track, Albarn closes in on that isolation, to claustrophobic effect: “So rebuild the railways/Firm up all the roads,” he sings. “No one is leaving now this is your home.” Albarn’s plainspoken phrases hover above the mix, lending a blunt edge to the song’s loping circuit of strings and woodwinds. Simonon’s trudging bassline and Allen’s sparse snares imbue his words with an oppressive weight: In Merrie Land, national identity is not a promise but a trap—an estrangement from one’s own true past and the collective history that builds a country.


Culled from a period of intense musical transition over the past decade-plus, these 27 songs offer an alternate window into the songwriter’s depravity and anxiety—and the quest to overcome both.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: B-Sides & Rarities (Part II)

B-Sides & Rarities (Part II)

What is the point of a rarities collection right now, anyway? The world’s creative spoils seem fated for an eternal black box, an ever-expanding cloud where everything we make (and lots of what we’ve already made) will remain accessible forever. Why buy an artist’s flotsam when you can stream the lot for free?
This is especially true of someone like Nick Cave, who is not only halfway into his fifth decade of releasing records but has also cultivated a cultish allegiance among his faithful. With almost no work at all, you can watch the Bad Seeds rehearse in 1987 in a tiny Berlin room, see him transfix with an exquisite version of “Into My Arms” in 1999 in an all-star songwriters’ circle, or laugh as he roasts Billy Corgan during a 1994 interview by telling him he has the “mentality of a teenager.” Thanks to assorted EPs, singles, and soundtracks, nearly half of the 27 songs on Cave’s new B-Sides & Rarities (Part II) have already been available on YouTube for years. If something by Cave can be archived, his legion has likely done it.
But the internet’s black box doubles as a dustbin, a place where junk and jewels coexist because they’ve never really been sorted. That remains the purpose of a rarities collection—an opportunity for an artist to make sense of what they once assumed was ephemera or errata, to see if it can cohere with the rest. In Cave’s case, it absolutely does. He has, after all, spent his career flitting between the gutter and the gods, fighting through depravity in search of some higher meaning or, at the very least, a whiff of redemption. If his castoffs offer different perspectives on that same quest, why shouldn’t they be collected and ordered to tell a different version of the same story? Compiled by Cave and Bad Seed-in-chief Warren Ellis, B-Sides & Rarities (Part II) reveals alternate windows into the worries and insecurities behind Cave’s careworn face, then offers what little advice he can spare about how to overcome them.
Cave & the Bad Seeds released their first such compendium in 2005, consecrating their first two decades with a wild and disorienting 56-song ride. The Bad Seeds were young and wild then, a shambolic rock band as open to No Wave as they were the Delta blues. They scored Cave’s tales of gothic delight with mischief and messy power. Salvaged from singles, live recordings, and soundtracks (including, hilariously, Scream 3), the massive set felt as overwhelming as a YouTube wormhole.
Stretching from 2006 to 2019, Part II is more focused. It picks up when the Bad Seeds still had that scabrous rock-band glow, when they attacked a song as though intent on shaking it to death. They sound jubilant during opener “Hey Little Firing Squad,” a B-side from Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, the Bad Seeds’ final (for now) full transmission as unrelenting rockers. Cave traces the assorted anxieties that haunt even the best relationships, but the band turns it into an earworm, its shouted hook  inescapable.  “Accidents Will Happen” lifts an Elvis Costello title, but its lechery shapes a ringer for the same nervy, fun aplomb that defined Archers of Loaf. “Accidents keep happening/This old world was born from one,” Cave sings at one point, the wink practically audible beneath the sneer.
Much of the set, though, portrays Cave in a moment of profound musical transition, shifting from the acerbic leader of a menacing rock band to the contemplative mind at the center of the more esoteric electronic textures that shape 2016’s Skeleton Tree and 2019’s Ghosteen. When the Bad Seeds opened their 1984 debut with a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche,” it was noise-pocked, accusatory, and mean; the piano-and-strings version here, recorded for television in 2015, is tender, lachrymose, and almost defeated. This is the plea of someone who has found no suitable answers for urgent existential questions despite 30 more years of asking. He’s trying a new approach.
This struggle is the core of this set, same as it has almost always been for Cave. He stockpiles talismans against an unseen evil during the throbbing “Needle Boy.” He does his best to avoid a nervous breakdown amid the fried circuits of “Lightning Bolts,” a fraught contemplation of being a parent in a world so fucked that even “in the cradle of democracy, the pigeons are wearing gas masks.” Visions of gargantuan insects plague him during “Big Dream (With Sky),” a Ghosteen-era duet with Ellis that unfurls like a dirge. One of the most glowering works in Cave’s vast songbook, “Steve McQueen” considers murder, sexual predation, depression, and suicide over four minutes of an eerie synth drone. “I’m Steve McQueen, the atrocity man,” he deadpans after a death threat, “with my strap-on, blood-borne dream.”
Cave takes care to temper this despair, or at least peer around it when possible. The version of “Skeleton Tree” included here—one of four demos from recent albums—is despondent and lurid, with Cave taking potshots at Jesus that didn’t make the relatively sanguine final version. The first attempt was ostensibly too much. A pair of interconnected tone poems, “Euthanasia” and “Life Per Se” express cautious optimism in love, knowing that it can shatter or save you in an instant. “In the end, it is your heart that kills you/It’s all wrong, but it’s all right in its way,” he later warns before recommitting himself to the risk.
Both halves of Part II finish with singalongs. The first disc (or LP) concludes with an enchanting version of “Push the Sky Away,” an anthem of perseverance and individuality that’s lifted here by an Australian chorus and orchestra. Cave ends it by thanking everyone—the instrumentalists, the singers, Ellis, all corners of the crowd. It is an indulgent act of gratitude, Cave verklempt that his darkest thoughts have found people for whom they are beacons.
The second ends with “Earthlings,” Cave’s stoic reflection on art’s ability to deliver us from our own evil. “I thought these songs would one day set me free,” he offers with a hangdog tone. “I thought these songs had traveled here for me.” But as the song progresses, he notes that his pals are approaching, gathering together for his benefit. Perhaps they’re the ones who are there to set him free, to help him ensure this hard time passes, too. But is this a party or a funeral? When those same friends sing the coda in union, their harmony feels as bittersweet as an autumn bonfire with loved ones, dead leaves falling all around the warm blaze. Both tracks are perfect capstones for what Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds have done for nearly 40 years, both on full albums and with the outcasts assembled here: Tell us about the bullshit, then try to find a way to withstand it.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Nearly every moment of Chvrches' follow up to The Bones of What You Believe radiates with sky-high aspiration, the verses and pre-choruses and choruses in brutal competition to be called "the hook." The fine-tuning and craft is deeply embedded in the music, which exudes that uncanny, priceless quality of the truly popular: confidence.

Every Open Eye

Anyone who has spent more than a minute in a clothing store over the past few years has heard dozens of bands making a calculated, charmless attempt to duplicate what came so naturally to Chvrches on their zeitgeisty debut The Bones of What You Believe. Which leaves the real deal facing a tremendous challenge three years after emerging anonymously from their basement with "The Mother We Share". "After making one record that people really like, some bands reject the things that everyone liked about them and make some really deep, thoughtful, dark record," Martin Doherty admitted to Pitchfork earlier this year. Fortunately, the hard work and meticulous fine-tuning of Every Open Eye is so deeply embedded in the finished product that Chvrches never come off as self-conscious. Instead, it manifests as that uncanny, priceless quality of the truly popular: confidence.
Chvrches toured The Bones of What You Believe exhaustively, so they don't have to overthink what things "everyone" liked about them and which parts were scare-quotes deep, dark, and thoughtful. You’ll be really let down if you hoped Chvrches would build on the proggier excursions of "Science/Visions" or if you believed Doherty’s expansive, nearly-six minute closer "You Caught the Light" justified a bigger role. Otherwise, the band rightfully assume that their unabashed embrace of pop's ruthless economy got them playing festivals in front of thousands of pop fans.
So, when Lauren Mayberry belts, "we will take the best parts of ourselves and make them gold," it can be read as the band's artistic edict rather than one of the examples of her occasional slip into Millennial Successorizing ("I am chasing the skyline more than you ever will"). Nearly every moment of Every Open Eye is filled with aspiration and there's not a false step or bum note, verses and pre-choruses and choruses in brutal competition to be called "the hook." Mayberry summed it up as "emo with synths in it" in a recent podcast while expounding on a teenage love of Jimmy Eat World, and you can suss out a structural similarity between Every Open Eye and Bleed American (five radio-friendly bangers, ballad, four more radio-friendly bangers, slow-dance closer). Even the obvious deep cuts have a functional purpose—"Afterglow" is a slight comedown that still feels necessary as exit music after nearly 40 minutes of constant peaks, while Doherty's light-stepping, funk-pop inclusion "High Enough to Carry You Over" is an allowable indulgence for a band that truly prides itself on being a band, rather than Mayberry and Those Other Guys.
There's also an irrepressible buoyancy and reassurance, even if it's not just in her head where Mayberry feels looked down on. Her detailing of the brutal rape threats and casual misogyny she faces as a female public figure are both shocking and sadly familiar; she's more cagey about the personal relationships that serve as the lyrical muse for much of Every Open Eye. Though Mayberry's background in law and journalism served as an early footnote in the Chvrches come-up, she draws on that as much as any musical thread here. Whether asking for reconciliation ("Clearest Blue", "Empty Threat") or demanding closure ("Never Ending Circles", "Leave a Trace"), Mayberry is judge, jury, and executioner, making convincing, carefully worded closing arguments set to casually devastate.
With nearly all of mainstream pop's biggest acts looking toward the '80s for inspiration, Every Open Eye might be even more of-the-moment than its predecessor—Mayberry’s extracurriculars cast her lyrics in a feminist lens à la Cyndi Lauper and Madonna, while the arena-ready hooks justify the comparisons to pre-Violator Depeche Mode (the synth riff from "Clearest Blue" can't get enough of "Just Can't Get Enough") and the Pet Shop Boys. But minus the occasionally violent imagery of "Gun" and "By the Throat", Chvrches lack any of the qualities that made the aforementioned feel subversive or rebellious. This can actually work in their favor—"Leave a Trace" was memorably described by Mayberry as a "middle finger mic-drop," but her words are neatly manicured and polite enough to painlessly decapitate rather than bludgeon or incinerate. You can't have peak efficiency without formulas, though, and by the time "Playing Dead" and "Bury It" threaten to get mixed up on title alone, the similarly beaming melodies and diffident references to bones, crossed lines, and oceans start to render heartbreak, joy, resilience, and exhaustion interchangeable.
The minor flaws of Every Open Eye are much more acceptable in light of the hedge-betting sophomore efforts from Purity Ring and Disclosure, perhaps the two acts who've been more imitated over the past two years than Chvrches. They've moved past their earliest days when their competition was assumed to be M83 or Passion Pit or even the Knife, but in leveling up, they actually seem more conservative sonically, lyrically, and visually than the pure pop acts for whom they're used as a foil, i.e., Taylor Swift, Carly Rae Jepsen, Rihanna... hell, maybe Justin Bieber? If Every Open Eye is Chvrches taking the best parts of themselves and making them gold, I can't wait to hear them try to go platinum.


A juke-filled, global set of songs compiled in Japan reflects the fear and uncertainty of the atomic age, recontextualizing the joy of footwork into ominous, often unsettling compositions.

Various Artists: Atomic Bomb Compilation Vol. 4

Atomic Bomb Compilation Vol. 4

Nuclear energy produces anxiety in Japan. Long a controversial topic, it became a renewed source of worry following the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi power plant during the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Fears stirred by the aftermath—and of similar incidents occurring—caused a nationwide furor in subsequent years, leading citizens across the nation to speak out about how little they trusted the government tasked with harnessing a nuclear program. Anger over Fukushima even drew out a group that isn’t always eager to get political in Japan—musicians. Long constrained by commercial commitments, performers such as Ryuichi Sakamoto and Kazuyoshi Sato criticized the government’s handling of the situation online and appeared at protests against nuclear power. Still, many artists chose to express anger and worry through heavy metaphor rather than directly, if at all.
The Atomic Bomb Compilation series is direct with rage. Started in 2012 by Hiroshima juke producer CRZKNY, the project gathered dance songs around the theme of “the tragedy caused by abuse of nuclear energy.” The United States’ use of atomic weapons on CRZKNY’s hometown and Nagasaki at the end of World War II were remembered on these collections, both as memorial and reminder of nuclear energy's destructive past. The music, fittingly, is ominous and frequently chaotic. Although initially heavy on domestic artists and footwork, later releases brought in creators from around the world dabbling in a variety of styles. Vol. 4, released on the 71st anniversary of Japan’s surrender, is the best installment yet, featuring over a dozen electronic acts coming together to painfully reflect and highlight the paranoia of present-day nuclear power.
Protest sits at the center of Atomic Bomb Compilation Vol. 4, but it also offers a snapshot of how international artists have absorbed the Chicago-born juke sounds in the years since RP Boo, Traxman, and the Teklife crew started receiving increased attention. This set features contributions from Japanese producers, members of Polish Juke, creators in Mexico and beyond, each giving their own perspective on the high-energy style. Jakub Lemiszewski pushes “Exceeding” towards suffocating levels with rippling synths, while Argentina’s Aylu makes good use of space on compilation closer “Y_Y,” a cut where every breath and skittery drum hit lingers in the air.
Although most of the tracks here at dance-floor speeds, the mood permeating Atomic Bomb Compilation Vol. 4 is rarely joyful. Opening number “e_i_r,” courtesy of Hyogo’s jue6ons, is an eight-and-a-half-minute warning signal that slowly grows in intensity. The following songs unfold more swiftly but use the cornerstones of juke to create uneasy atmospheres. “Bakushinchi,” a team-up between Kyoto’s Gnyonpix and Melbourne’s DJ Innes, takes a steely drum machine and places them next to synth gurgles that highlight the stiffness of the beat, making for a disconcerting feel. Organizer CRZKNY takes it even further on his three contributions, embracing sharp metallic textures that give footwork-ready cuts such as “Vida” a dangerous edge. When the album deviates from juke during the gutter drone of Black OPS’ “Ruins Lining” or “Hiroshima’s A-Bell” by Polish creator Paide—featuring a field recording of chirping birds slowly folding into harsh white noise—the end result still feels unnerving.
The bulk of Vol. 4’s tracks don’t call out nuclear energy or accidents directly, opting instead to create a paranoid atmosphere mirroring the worries of the atomic age. Yet other instances are far more direct, whether referencing former prime ministers who helped bring Japan’s nuclear industry to peak prominence (producer Franz Snake’s “Yasuhiro Nakasone Said,” a jittery track featuring the former PM’s voice sliced and diced) or being very on the nose with what they are trying to recreate (lililL’s “Atomic Explosion,” the comp’s most cacophonous moment). Juke’s use of repetition, meanwhile, drives home deliberate messages sampled from familiar figures. Chicago’s bahnhof::zoo takes a snippet of Barack Obama's speech during his historic visit to Hiroshima earlier this year and makes it the center of “Fell From The Sky.” On the very next song, UK artist Count Vanderhoff centers the piece around a soundbite of Scottish Parliament member George Kerevan asking new UK prime minister Theresa May, “Is she personally prepared to authorize a nuclear strike that can kill a hundred thousand innocent men, women, and children?” (She said, “Yes.”)
At 25 songs, Atomic Bomb Compilation Vol. 4 is an overwhelming listen given its intentionally bleak vibe. But this series isn’t meant to be an escape. It memorializes immense human suffering brought on by nuclear weaponry and looms high as a cautionary tale for catastrophic misuse of nuclear energy. There’s very little fun to be found in exploring the concept of man-made Armageddon. Instead, this collection highlights the urgency of a highly politicized issue and soundtracks an uneasy, uncertain life in the atomic age.