The Seattle indie rockers’ debut album places them in the lineage of bands like Modest Mouse and Built to Spill, wrapping majestically dejected songwriting in ambitiously atmospheric production.

To Infinity

Special Explosion’s debut album has the specs of an advanced degree in Pacific Northwest indie rock: It’s schooled in a syllabus of classics and supplemented by mentorships with the genre’s hallowed institutions, and it even took four years to complete. To make the record, the Seattle band set up shop in their hometown’s Hall of Justice, Portland’s Ice Cream Party Studios, and Marin County’s Panoramic House. The first two are respectively helmed by Chris Walla and Modest Mouse, while Band of Horses’ Why Are You OK was recorded in the latter. To Infinity spends most of its time triangulating the ornate fretwork, jittery rhythms, and widescreen splendor of those exact artists, while plucking from basically everything else in the regional canon: Beat Happening’s unnerving twee lyricism, the Spinanes’ alternately brash and cooed co-ed vocals, the Shins’ meticulous architecture, you name it. The first two tracks earn their titles of “Wet Dream” and “Perfect Song”: To Infinity is indie-rock wish fulfillment, the kind of record that inspires “they don’t make ‘em like this anymore” plaudits even if they never were exactly like this in the first place.
The atmospheric To Infinity is true to its surroundings in all aspects: verdant, spacious, and ever-changing. Maybe it’s irresponsible of Special Explosion to make their crippling dejection sound this romantic, but that’s the Pacific Northwest for you. “Tears that fall like rain on a sunny day” is the kind of lyric that should be completely off the table 99.9% of the time, yet it’s a testament to Special Explosion’s synesthetic powers that no other phrase would fit better into the second verse of “Waterfalls,” a song both bleak and blindingly bright that reimagines Sufjan Stevens’ Oregon album made in the frilly folk style of Illinois.
Special Explosion self-produced the record with the assistance of Mike Vernon Davis, a young engineer who worked on Modest Mouse’s Strangers to Ourselves and whose voicemail should be overflowing in 2018—despite all of the vibraphones and treated drums and sweetened vocals, To Infinity never sounds overproduced or expensive. Similar to Death Cab for Cutie’s Barsuk albums, the sound is crisp and tactile, the instruments deftly layered, the textures active participants in determining the emotional tenor; it earned the ultimate “game recognize game” endorsement from Chris Walla himself.
True to its inspirations, To Infinity is meditative and constantly in motion. Jacob Whinihan’s inventive drumming functions as a lead instrument throughout, pushing the impatient chorus of the otherwise mesmerizing “Cats” (“I’d like you to like me more than you’d like to”) and taking “Going My Way” from crestfallen slowcore to a sad skip around around the maypole. The first single, “Fire,” is the likely byproduct of Special Explosion’s contribution to Foxing’s bejeweled post-emo opus Dealer, a mesmerizing incantation of desperate hope building to a brassy, white-knuckled crescendo. “Your Bed” is the only callback to the liquid, mercurial Built to Spill-esque guitar of their promising 2014 EP The Art of Mothering, at least until it hits the phaser pedals and blisses out completely.
But unlike Isaac Brock or Doug Martsch, Andy Costello isn’t beset by having nowhere in particular to go, nor is he overwhelmed by his cosmic insignificance. They place their creative drive on the same level as astronauts and ancient warriors on “Gladiator,” but shortly thereafter, Costello moans, “I don’t even know if it’s worth it at all,” pulsing with the muscle soreness that follows  a convulsive crying fit. “I’ll never have the guts to stick with what I do,” he admits on closer “So Long,” and in light of the band’s perfectionism and depressive streak, “I can’t do anything right” is a fitting final line for To Infinity.
Especially given the album’s painstaking creation, there’s a sense that the greatest underlying fear of finishing the record is figuring out what comes next. It’s not unusual for bands to inscribe the labor pains of an album’s creation in the songs themselves—writer’s block can serve as its own kind of inspiration. To Infinity is certainly in that class: “I can’t believe all the pain I would go through to say it’s not exactly going my way,” Costello sings, awestruck at his willingness to to compound his despondence. If Special Explosion have no more left to give right now, it’s only because they gave To Infinity everything they have.


On his debut album, the uncategorizable Chicago musician knits together experimental jazz, funk playfulness, Brazilian rhythms, and the sensuality of Prince.

Ben LaMar Gay: Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun

If you’re worried that you’re a latecomer to the work of uncategorizable Chicago musician Ben LaMar Gay, take solace in the certainty that you’re not alone. Gay’s new album, Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun, supposedly draws from seven of his previous records, with curious names like Grapes, Benjamim e Edinho, and Confetti in the Sky Like Fireworks. But when you start googling, not one of these albums surface. In this age of Bandcamp and Soundcloud, the cornetist, composer, and vocalist recorded seven albums in seven years but never let anyone outside of his inner circle hear them. Instead, he worked with jazz and experimental artists like Joshua Abrams’ Natural Information Society, Nicole Mitchell, Jaimie Branch and Bitchin Bajas while allowing his own songcraft to incubate to maturity.
Both a debut and a compilation, the confident Downtown Castles is a showcase for Gay’s eclectic sensibility. Fractured, giddy, funky, and meditative, each song and sketch spotlights a different aspect of his talents. The pulsations of “Music for 18 Hairdressers: Braids & Fractals” allude to Steve Reich’s minimalist masterwork Music for 18 Musicians, even as Gay’s buzzing reeds evoke free jazz. Named for iconic Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians co-founder Muhal Richard Abrams, “Muhal” would seem to situate Gay firmly in the Chicago jazz tradition; cornet and bass clarinet creak as he croaks lyrics woven from Abrams’ album titles. But, unlike an Abrams composition, the track throbs, tightens, droops, and flutters like a Prince B-side.
His Purpleness also makes his influence felt on the sensuous highlight “A Seasoning Called Primavera.” An ode to a paramour in braids that melts into an extended cooking metaphor (spiced with Gay’s knowing aside “I get it”), the song bounces atop a fidgety, broken beat, never staying put for long. There are nods to baile funk, footwork, the percolator dance, Thundercat, and D’Angelo, along with a dash of banjo and sawed fiddle. That may sound like a pretentious jumble of references, but Gay knits them so they all sway together.
Downtown Castles picks up sounds from all over the map—and the challenge of tracing those global influences is more fun than it is frustrating. A spoken-word interlude situates Gay in some Southern swampland; the layered voices and sputtering electronics of “Kunni” conjure early TV on the Radio. He finds the sweet spot between New Orleans Dixieland and Rio samba on the jubilant “Miss Nealie Burns.”
That Brazilian rhythmic sensibility weaves its way into most of the music, probably because Gay lives there when he isn’t in Chicago. He melts together violin, shakers, and synth bass on the beautiful “Uvas,” his voice never rising above a whisper. A crackling static pulse provides the bossa nova-inspired beat, as though Gay is transmitting the breezy, murmured music of João Gilberto from another galaxy. This is but one indelible moment among many on Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun, an album that is less about fusing jazz, funk, and other genres than it is about elevating the diverse sounds of Earth to the heavens.


On this brief EP, the duo of Ariel Pink and Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering collaborate on strange folk-synth hybrids, evoking the ’80s Paisley Underground and X.

Myths 002 EP

Ariel Pink is a misogynist; he’s not funny; he’s the worst thing ever; Ariel stinks. Paint him as provocateur and raging narcissist, but as the past few years have proven, he’s also a team player, down for boosting his friends and game for collaborations of all stripes. And so tapping him for the second installment of Mexican Summer’s Myths series seems like a no-brainer, especially since he’s worked with Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering previously, her voice gracing “Early Birds of Babylon” on his 2012 album Mature Themes.
With the breakout success of last year’s Front Row Seat to Earth, Weyes Blood’s profile ticked up considerably, and while four songs clocking in at 14 minutes is slight by design, Ariel is wise to accentuate Mering’s voice. Only on opener “Tears on Fire” does Pink take the lead. It begins with guitar jangle and what is either a warbling synthesizer or else Mering doing her best Yma Sumac impersonation in the background. For the first 40 seconds, it’s the gentlest I’ve ever heard Ariel—only for an operatic metal stomp, like a gate of hell, to rip open immediately after at the chorus. The song jags between pomposity and modesty, with Pink lurching between lines about “roasting pigs on the pyre” and how “the joke was from the heart.”
Then Mering takes over on “Daddy, Please Give a Little Time to Me” against a queasy synth gurgle and a snare that cracks from a room over, all of it swaddled in a haze of reverb and echo. It’s a peculiar song, as weirdly stilted and stylized as that of Pink, as Mering moves from a high quaver to delivering her lines like lost a Shangri-Las soliloquy.
In tandem, they do a hazy approximation of the early-’80s L.A. Paisley Underground on “On Another Day,” as if some demo from 1983 suddenly bobbed to the surface. It’s a slow burn of a duet between the two, at times evoking X’s John Doe and Exene Cervenka. Even though the end of the song reveals it’s played live in front of a crowd, there remains that tactile sense of distance that Pink’s sonics readily tap into, as if echoing not just from the past but from a parallel dimension.
But the clear standout of this brief collab is “Morning After.” Another strange folk-synth hybrid, Mering’s voice sounds like Fairport Convention’s Sandy Denny doodling around on a Moog; she stuns while barely climbing above a purr. “Here it comes/A cure for the night I’ve been waiting/To let you inside,” Mering sings of a long-anticipated love. But as the sinewaves quiver in the background, the moonlight-tinted love song turns into a vampire tale: “When I saw you I knew I was cursed/I’m the one who got bit first.” Short-lived as Myths may be, one hopes that Pink and Mering—odd, kindred spirits—have the chance to commune again.


Marie Davidson is a spoken-word poet and electronic artist who is also one half of the duo Essaie Pas. Her third solo release, examining club culture, shows near-exponential growth in her abilities.

Adieux Au Dancefloor

For a brief pocket of time in the beginning of the 2010s, spoken-word poetry was surprisingly prevalent in music. Spanning Jamie xx’s remixes of Gil Scott-Heron, to Brian Eno and the poet Rick Holland’s Drums Between the Bells, and the lowbrow masterpiece of Paris Hilton’s “Drunk Text,” this little bumper crop did not go unnoticed: The Guardian clunkily called the shared musical space “poetronica.” While reading poetry over sweet-toned beats always felt kitschy, there is something undeniable linking the two forms: As the poet Jodi Ann Bickley has said, the forms are exceptional at creating a sense of “place,” and both inherently are dictated by a primordial sense of rhythm.
One of the most successful and captivating practitioners of spoken-word electronic has been Marie Davidson, one half of the Montreal coldwave duo Essaie Pas. Her two previous solo releases (Perte D'Identité and Un Autre Voyage) mingled gothic ambient music, poetic repetitions, and analog synthpop to great success. Her work has never felt campy, but is darkly rendered, probing, and redolent of Lizzy Mercier Descloux. In her third solo release, Adieux Au Dancefloor, Davidson presents a project that indicates exciting and near-exponential growth in her ability as a writer and producer.
The project started to gestate last year, after Davidson returned to Montreal from Berlin, having completed a recent European tour with Essaie Pas. She says that the music was informed by a dualistic relationship to “dance music and club culture”; a fascination and disgust that emerged after the conclusion of her trip. “Touring and playing live late at night can lead to destructive habits and behaviors,” she said. Adieux Au Dancefloor (“Farewell to the Dancefloor”) is the result of redirecting the chaotic energy of constant clubbing towards creative ends.
In line with it’s inspiration, Adieux Au Dancefloor is much more informed by club music than her previous releases. The sounds and their presentation are pleasing and spacious and and made to appeal to a dancefloor sensibility, aligning it with Essaie Pas’ recent release Demain Est Une Autre Nuit, a fantastically shadowy and phantasmagoric album of analog dance music.
In the album’s opening moment, “Dedicate My Life,” Davidson conjures the beautifully unhinged spirit of Throbbing Gristle, with pointillist synths, relentless drums, and needles of heated noise that recall the profane and industrial heartbeat of “Hot on the Heels of Love.” When Davidson begins reciting her poem, she introduces the album’s narrator, an empowered, effortlessly cool, feminist badass. “People ask me/What I do with my time/Listen/I dedicate my life,” Davidson says. At one point her voice disappears beneath the swirling noise, as a tempo change provokes ecstatic body motion. It might feature a poet as its narrator, but this is not a "contemplative" album; this is dynamic, kinetic music wants to provoke a flurry of action.
The album retains this speedball excitement as it weaves it’s way through instrumental tracks and poems in both English in French. In tracks like “Denial,” Davidson explores the upper limits of her analog gear, pumping up the pace and pulsations of her synth to a point that finds the song almost unravel on itself. It reminded me of the chaotic beauty of watching viral videos of washing machines self-destructing.
Even in its drapery of fog and acid, Adieux Au Dancefloor consistently finds feel-good moments. Take for example, “Good Vibes,” which lifts up Davidson’s call to arms (“This song is dedicated to all the jealous people”) with a pleasantly jarring and rough-hewn synth loop. Or “Naive to the Bone,” the album’s funniest and most writerly number with lines like “Let me picture my future, a large room where you can hear the silence/No space for arrogance, no pain in my chest/Just the beating of my heart” conjuring Anne Sexton. She also flashes a sharp and quotidian sense of humor, castigating an unnamed enemy’s fashion choices: “In The Middle Ages, people used to wear clocks, it's 2016, get real.”
The album culminates in its title track, which gathers together her wit into an unreal screed and personal exorcism of nightlife’s inescapable vapidity. Singing in French, she starts the song by painting a hellish scene: “A stranger taking a picture of himself with his phone/A girl lying on the floor, her eyes rolled upwards.” She shrouds the burn of her words with the most exciting and seedy sounds of the album. It smartly distorts the content of her poem with the sensation her music produces, making those lines seem even more affecting. As the song reaches it’s at end, Davidson says “There are no more reasons to celebrate/Who will pity me in the morning if I lose my mind?,” presenting a hard question for the brain already sapped of serotonin.
Throughout Adieux Au Dancefloor, Davidson constantly turns these moments of powerful doubt and bad mojo into joyous dance music, making the album a strenuous mental and physical exercise. The music here presents a criticism of the very place it is meant to live. What Davidson does here is not just a piece of music, or a set of poems, but a critical dialogue framed as a brooding electronic epic.


The new Hunky Dory-era box set offers a tantalizing peek behind the curtain of Bowie’s theatrical persona during arguably the most pivotal moment in his life and career.

Divine Symmetry

In 1971, radio host John Peel introduced the 24-year-old musician featured on a broadcast of Pick of the Pops as “a young man who writes good songs and makes good records, but never seems to get the recognition he deserves.” In his early career, the artist born David Robert Jones didn’t seem like he was headed toward stardom. His first instrument at age 13 was not guitar or piano, but saxophone. He hopped from small band to small band in high school, rebranding as Davy Jones and then, to avoid confusion with the Monkees singer, as David Bowie. In 1967 he released a self-titled album of music-hall-style rock on a small label, but they rejected some of his singles and the partnership collapsed. He stayed at a Buddhist monastery in Scotland, joined a mime troupe, and dabbled in experimental performance art. He landed at Mercury thanks to some lucky connections, and remained relatively off-radar until five days before the Apollo 11 launch in 1969, when his cosmic single “Space Oddity” briefly catapulted him into mainstream consciousness. But the following year his third album, the eclectic and single-less The Man Who Sold the World, found most of its success in his town of Beckenham, England.
Talented but creatively disarranged, Bowie found himself at a crossroads. “In the early ’70s, it really started to all come together for me as to what it was that I liked doing,” he reflected in 2014. “What I enjoyed was being able to hybridize different kinds of music…. I didn’t really see the point in trying to be that purist about it.” With this revived perspective, along with a transformative trip to the United States in 1971 where he rubbed elbows with creative muses like Andy Warhol and Lou Reed, Bowie became “more cynical” about the boundaries of the artistic world and more inventive about his place in it. When he returned home to England, back to his newborn son and a piano gifted by a neighbor, the young artist pieced together what would become his fourth record, the first he ever co-produced and his first after signing with RCA: Hunky Dory. In his words, it was “the album where I said ‘Yes, I understand what I’ve got to do now.’”
Divine Symmetry, subtitled An Alternative Journey Through Hunky Dory, is the latest box set to explore Bowie’s oeuvre. The 4xCD collection surveys the year leading up to the album’s release; it includes previously unreleased tracks, demos, live recordings, and studio sessions from the era, as well as updated mixes. The music is accompanied by a 100-page book featuring facsimiles of primary documents, insights from insiders like co-producer Ken Scott, and liner notes by Tris Penna; there’s also a separate booklet in Bowie’s own hand that gives an intimate look at his process through sloppy footnotes, scrapped chords, and fashion doodles. It’s a look into his mind during the most consequential transition of his career, a retrospective peek at him rehearsing the character of himself.
Divine Symmetry is by no means the first attempt at chronicling Bowie’s musical development, but it feels especially personal, perhaps because of its smaller size (Five Years was a whopping 12 discs), perhaps because of the volatility of this time in his life. The stakes feel higher: We want to see his path to the success we already know exists. In this collection, we hear him begin to construct the theater of Hunky Dory: He’s practicing, testing lyrics, workshopping different arrangements, messing up, joking around. He’s also stitching together the tapestry of his next record, a little project called The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.
Divine Symmetry’s demos and offcuts strip back the warm, piano-centered framework that makes Hunky Dory feel like it always belonged on Earth. On Ziggy and albums to follow, Bowie would reinvent the interstellar, guitar-centric sound of “Space Oddity” and The Man Who Sold the World with a mature glamor that grew from Hunky Dory’s grounded orchestration. The piano offered a palette that was both rich and mellow, allowing Bowie to play around with a malleable and unique yet still classic tool. Songs like the forgotten “How Lucky You Are (aka Miss Peculiar)” are early examples of him working on the keyboard; his playing is rudimentary, with buoyant hits on every beat in the waltz. A curious vaudevillian spirit was brewing that would appear more fleshed-out on tracks like “Fill Your Heart” (a Biff Rose tune ultimately recorded by Rick Wakeman on a Bechstein grand). A similar bareness can be heard in the “Life on Mars?” demo, a short piano skeleton of the cinematic masterpiece to come. Before he was venting about a “God-awful small affair” in crystal-blue eyeshadow and auburn hair, he was just a man at a piano singing softly about a “simple but small affair.” His growth as a lyricist can be seen in the melodrama of one line.
The live recordings offer special insight, illustrating which of his instinctual choices Bowie opted to keep. With just gentle guitar strums below his voice, the John Peel version of “Kooks” is a lullaby compared to its oom-pah-driven final product; though recorded for broadcast, it feels as though Bowie is singing directly to his son. It’s a souvenir of the song’s emotional essence—an eccentric new father’s playful imagination of his child’s future—that adds an endearing new dimension to the Joplin-esque veneer of the studio version. The “Queen Bitch” demo and live recordings are tame and melodic compared to the acrobatic talk-singing of the album cut, where the verses take on an intensity already present in the chorus. Though his performance on Peel’s show sounds tightly wound, Bowie’s liberated “In her frock coat and bipperty-bopperty hat!” is a glimpse at the song’s intended character. As the jealous narrator watches a male lover court a sex worker on the street outside his window, we get a closer look at Bowie’s evolving relationship with sexuality and identity, one that sounds less campy and more heartfelt.
The box set also includes early versions of songs that were later sidelined, like the folky, harmony-stacked “Tired of My Life (Demo)” and the previously unreleased “King of the City (Demo).” They draw attention to his growth as a lyricist, even within the span of the album’s creation: “Come back to the real thing, baby/I’ll make it all slow down, baby/We’ll tell our friends we’re finding our own way” is underwhelming beside the mind-bending novelty of watching the ripples change their size. We get to know the battle-satirizing “Bombers” better than ever before; the caricaturistic track that Bowie described as “kind of a skit on Neil Young” was left off the original Hunky Dory at the last minute. The demo sounds like it went through a food processor, but the 2021 remaster on Disc 4 allows for proper redemption. These mixes (including remasters of the seven-track 1971 promotional album BOWPROMO) avoid sounding unnaturally clean; with Scott reprising his role as producer, they retain some of the dirt and charm of their earlier, less professional iterations.
Divine Symmetry is forgiving of Bowie’s transitional trials. For a box set focused on a single album, it doesn’t feel as self-indulgent as it might have; the multiple versions of songs are perhaps excessive for a passive listen, but the collection represents an invaluable document of his artistic growth. Hunky Dory is an approachable record: playful and earnest, a musician’s self-rejuvenation that bursts with palpable curiosity. The album’s conception comes across as rather anti-rockstar and endearingly human, a glimpse into the workshop of Bowie’s vaudeville theater before it turned into an arena.


On their third album, Mammoth Grinder, who share members with Hatred Surge and the now defunct Iron Age, offer a manic blend of death metal, crust, and punk. It's a savage collection that finds the Austin quartet coming into their own as genre-bashing geniuses.

Underworlds

Reading metal reviews would be a lot more entertaining if we'd occasionally pause and allow our imaginations to run wild through some of the album titles and band names. Monikers like Palace of Worms and Lake of Blood capture the mind’s eye, while Ride for Revenge, Pig Destroyer, and diSEMBOWLMENT send chills down the spine. While a Skeletal Spectre haunts your dreams and a Front Beast with One Tail, One Head lurks in the shadows behind your bedroom door, a Mammoth Grinder sounds like a fearsome contraption in a scene from some wintry Neolithic Fargo, a sputtering metallic beast cranking out ropes of dark, bloody flesh and orchestrating a chorus of deafening clangs, frenzied roars, and whirring blades as the show turns crimson beneath it.
You could describe the Austin band Mammoth Grinder's latest album in much the same way. It's been four years since the release of Extinction of Humanity, but Mammoth Grinder’s third full-length Underworlds maintains that forward momentum-- it's a savage collection that sees the four-piece (who were a trio the last time we heard from them) heading straight for the jugular from the first note and tearing through the title track in under two minutes. It’s the kind of entrance that catches you off guard, and the intensity doesn’t let up. When they go slow, it’s all sludgy, bludgeoning breakdowns and Stockholm grooves; when they speed up, it’s a torrential storm of gutter thrash and hardcore punk that aims to fuck things up faster than a Sharknado. The band have long incorporated death metal elements into their songwriting, and the 2011 split with a grind-heavy Hatred Surge (with whom they share key members) may have dropped some major hints, but on Underworlds, Mammoth Grinder have fully come into their own as genre-bashing geniuses.
“Wraparound Eyes” stomps in with a big fat groove and dips in and out of the same, padding out the rest with Disfear-driven d-beats and Entombed riffs, while “Revenge” sounds like Bolt Thrower’s “... For Victory” sped up to 45 RPM with a few lines of yayo laid out on top. “Roperide” has the album’s best moshpit anthem-- you can almost see the bodies fly. Three-minute burner “Cog in the Machine” is an epic by Mammoth Grinder’s standards, and they use those extra thirty seconds to hammer their message home (hint: it’s not a very nice one). “Born in a Bag” is pure Swedish death down to the guitar tone and whiplash guitar solo, and album closer “Moral Crux” drags it all back down, a stoned stomp towards oblivion. (You can’t go wrong with a good “bleah!” grunt.) When not indulging his inner Matt Harvey, vocalist Chris Ulsh’s hoarse throat erupts again and again as a gravelly warning or enraged bellow; you can hear the spittle flying out and feel his white knuckle deathgrip on the mic.
The album is peppered with the kind of wild-eyed, squealing guitar licks that’d make Jeff Hanneman proud, and a big, hollow drum sound acts as a powerful backup generator for when the guitar and basslines need a bar or two to breathe. Brevity is the soul of wit, after all, and much like a particularly cutting Oscar Wilde diss, the short lengths of the songs come off as calculated and clever. Nothing feels hasty or rushed. Mammoth Grinder know exactly how to get in, cause a ruckus, and get out in three minutes or less, and aren’t interested in belaboring their point. They've earned the right to keep it tight.


It’s been 19 years since the Gothenburg death metal band At the Gates released Slaughter of the Soul, one of the best, most innovative, and most influential metal albums of the '90s. The long-awaited follow-up, At War With Reality, rocks with fury and passion.

At War With Reality

It’s been 19 years since At the Gates released Slaughter of the Soul, one of the best, most innovative, and most influential metal albums of the '90s. Maybe it was a little too influential—because now that Slaughter’s "will-it-ever-come?" follow-up, At War With Reality, has arrived, it’s got a big cross to bear. The Gothenburg death-metal titans have reconvened at a time when their precise, abrasively melodic sound has been repurposed—and re-repurposed—by about a zillion mediocre melodeath and metalcore outfits. That shouldn’t have any bearing on At War With Reality, but it does: Any seminal band that resurfaces after so long an absence are prone to be called on the carpet not only for their own accomplishments, but for the zeitgeist they’ve unleashed, better or worse. Luckily for At the Gates, they don’t seem to care one way or the other. Though maybe they should have.
Heavy bands making stunning comebacks has become nearly routine over the past few years; look no further than Amebix’s Sonic Mass, Carcass’ Surgical Steel, or Godflesh’s A World Lit Only by Fire. At the Gates have earned a spot on the ladder, but on a lower rung; At War With Reality is crisp, concise, and tastefully technical, but it isn’t tear-your-head-off incredible. The production, for one, is miles better, with a fuller, fleshier attack, and frontman Tomas Lindberg’s feral rasp has been coarsened even more by his tenure with his resurrected d-beat group Disfear. On "Order from Chaos", a simmering, tribal rhythm augments his apparent attempt to throw up his own lungs; lead guitarist Anders Björler installs atmospheric melodies and nearly gothic arpeggios. It’s one of the few glimpses of dynamism to the album. Mostly it sticks to a clipped, cold, chunky groove that might as well be a melodeath plug-in.
The lack of highs and lows aside, At War With Reality sticks to a solidly savage middle. "Eater of Gods" and "The Conspiracy of the Blind" are meaty, marauding, and righteously irate. Too bad they’re also practically interchangeable. At times, they sound more like the Haunted, the long-running outfit that’s been a halfway house of sorts to various members of At the Gates following their 1996 breakup. That’s not always a good thing, as the Haunted ran out of steam and ideas years ago; At War With Reality tracks like "Heroes and Tombs" seethe and shred, but they might as well be Haunted tunes with a few more flourishes (and a lot less cartoonishness). At a time when At the Gates should be doing everything it can to set itself apart from the pack, it’s leaned on the most obvious—and most insular—signifiers imaginable.
At War With Reality unquestionably rocks with fury and passion, and that’s its saving grace. What doesn’t work is the album’s concept—in essence, an homage to the elliptical, magic-realist short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. Basically, the concept involves shuffling around various Borges motifs—labyrinths, mirrors, mysterious cities—and making a patchwork of them. It’s a shallow approach to one of literature’s greatest writers, and while Lindberg should get credit for not, say, being yet another metal band singing about H. P. Lovecraft, the opportunity to rise above feels squandered. Not only does Lindberg directly, lazily lift the titles of two Borges stories wholesale—for the songs "The Circular Ruin" and "The Book of Sand"—the music doesn’t in any way connect with or evoke the otherworldliness of the author’s work (aside from the shadowy, sumptuous instrumental "City of Mirrors"). It’s funny that one of Borges’ primary themes is self-reference—because At War With Reality is, above all else, an At the Gates album that feels like a pastiche of At the Gates. At least it’s a spirited one.


The British singer and producer delivers a satisfying little blast of club-pop bangers, channeling the big-room bliss of mid-’00s dance hits.

Club Shy EP

Whether you like it or not, the mid-2000s are back, their pungent odor hanging in the air like the stale Red Bull fumes in your hometown’s worst club. The 2006 dance mashup “Perfect (Exceeder),” by Dutch musician Mason and American rapper Princess Superstar, is trending on TikTok, thanks to its inclusion on the Saltburn soundtrack; Charli XCX’s new single sounds like it’s trying to resuscitate the legacy of British house duo Bodyrox and singer Luciana’s 2007 hit “Yeah Yeah”; and Kanye has reportedly hired disgraced American Apparel founder Dov Charney as the new CEO of Yeezy. Blane Muise, aka Shygirl, has been on this tip for a while, and her new EP, Club Shy, suggests that she’s more equipped than most to bring the sound back into the mainstream. It’s a fairly conventional set of club bangers done right: This is an alluring, nonchalant flex between albums that’s weird enough to drop in the hyperpop Discord, but satisfying enough to play at your next birthday party.
At 16 minutes, Club Shy is short, but it covers a lot of ground. Across the record, Muise cedes a lot of space to like-minded collaborators; much of the time, they emphasize her vaporous vocals, but there are a few scene-stealers in the mix. Empress Of, on a hot streak after memorable collaborations with Rina Sawayama and MUNA, sounds charged and sinuous on the stripped-back house jaunt “4eva,” practically upstaging Muise with a half-sung, half-rapped verse that’s charismatic and catchy. Irish musician Cosha adds earthiness to the EDM throwback “thicc,” her rich vocals surging over the breakneck big-room production.
These songs offer simple pleasures, but they’re not uncomplicated. “tell me,” a simmering deep house cut produced by Boys Noize, plays like a club track written from the point of view of your wallflower friend, all libidinous desire and desperation without physical payoff. On “thicc,” the promise of a club hookup isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; Muise flits between intensity and coolness, but the focus is always on her sense of introspection, rather than the passion of the moment. Once you move past the brash exterior, it’s clear that Shygirl’s music is powered by tension and ambiguity as much as it is by spine-tingling drops.
In this sense, Muise’s clearest antecedent isn’t necessarily Madonna or Róisín Murphy, two progenitors she’s cited as influences, but Katy B, another south London diva who tapped into the yearning potential of the city’s slinky underground club music. Club Shy, with its dual impulses towards confessionals and crowd-pleasers, often recalls Katy’s classic debut On a Mission, enough that you leave hoping there’s a Shygirl/Benga link-up on the horizon. Like Katy, Muise seems to understand that shyness and ravenous desire aren’t at all mutually exclusive: Tears might just look like sweat under flashing club lights.
On Club Shy, this feeling manifests most clearly on “mr useless,” a wistful breakup song made with British pop producer SG Lewis. Muise’s vocals are placed front-and-center here, unlike the rest of EP. If you took away the slick electro house production, it would sound more like a feisty life-after-love ballad: “I’m the best I ever been and I’ll ever be,” she sings with a shrug. Of course, were it actually a ballad, it would be the defining moment of this record, but Muise is smart enough not to give Mr. Useless so much space. Instead, on Club Shy, he becomes fodder for the smokers’ area—a little extra energy to burn up on the dancefloor.


The debut album from the duo of John Talabot and fellow Barcelona producer Velmondo spins a shadowy, subterranean web.

Cluster I

Beneath John Talabot’s catalog runs a pipeline tunneling from euphoria to dread—from sunset reveries to midnight rituals. In just over a decade, the Catalan electronic musician (aka Oriol Riverola) has gone from being a serenader of beach parties to a paranormal medium presiding over death-disco seances. His early singles and 2012 debut album burst with sun-kissed vibes and supersaturated colors—Mediterranean house music’s answer to chillwave. Yet since then, virtually everything he has done—almost all of it collaborative—has run progressively toward the shadows.
There was the darkly lustrous cosmic disco of Quentin, with Barcelona’s Marc Piñol, and the languorous Italo chug of Lost Scripts, with his old pal Pional. Under the fortuitous portmanteau Talaboman, with Swedish house miscreant Axel Boman, there were oily motorik escapades and ominous flashbacks to ’70s Berlin. Early in the pandemic, Riverola and his girlfriend hid out in the countryside with another couple and cooked up Drames Rurals, wringing chilly, claustrophobic funk out of cabin fever. Cluster I is the debut album from Mioclono, Riverola’s duo with Velmondo, aka Arnau Obiols, an associate of Riverola’s label Hivern Discs. It might be his most sumptuously eerie release yet. Across eight long tracks covering nearly an hour and 20 minutes, Mioclono go spelunking in a slow-motion underworld, wrapping haywire synths around lysergic drum circles.
Following an ominous spoken-word introduction—“You know, my wife has never seen blue sky in her entire life,” says a man who sounds like a drunk Mel Gibson—opening track “Blue Skies” introduces the elements that dominate the album. Loping congas and shakers establish a tentative rhythm; a bleepy arpeggio stretches across the track from end to end, like a clothesline hung with ragged electronic tones and fluttering drum fills. There are few melodies to be found anywhere, although tuned drums like the djembe and darbuka lend rich tonal resonance, and on “Myoclonic Sequences,” steady marimba patterns flood the song with color, like a Balearic take on new age. Mostly, though, Mioclono favor buzzing harmonies and grinding, ring-modulated timbres—rough, tactile textures that complement the innumerable layers of percussion in play.
Occasionally, Cluster I’s quivering oscillators and sour synth tones seem determined to unsettle: The atonal buzz and explosive drum fills of “Pell de Serp” are about as cuddly as an erupting termite mound. But the most satisfying tracks are immersive and enveloping. “Fog and Fire,” which evokes the occult rites of Craig Leon’s Nommos, probably doesn’t need to be 16 minutes long, yet Mioclono don’t waste a second of it, fleshing out their pitter-pat congas and metallic clang with air-raid sirens, dubby squalls, and a gravelly voiceover that brings to mind Vincent Price muttering spells over a bubbling cauldron. “Acid Rain” is the highlight, braiding multiple TB-303 lines over meditative hand percussion. In the fashion of Plastikman tracks like “Plastique,” it tips uneasily between slow and fast, balancing 4/4 plod with flickering 32nd-note fills, and spinning its acid melody into a stream of quicksilver beads. It’s mysterious, lithe, stealthy.
Given the music’s krautrock overtones, it’s tempting to assume that the title is a reference to Cluster, the astral-traveling ’70s duo of Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius. Certainly there is something of that group’s eerie frug in Riverola and Obiols’ seesawing oscillators and hypnotic pulses. But another association can be found in the duo’s name, which is the Spanish term for a rare type of epilepsy experienced by both musicians: Myoclonic seizures—sudden muscle spasms that may feel like a jolt of electricity, and can be accompanied by brief moments of unconsciousness—tend to come in clusters. As the duo notes in a text accompanying the album, epilepsy was historically believed to have mystical overtones. In this reading, Cluster I is an attempt to peel back the surface of the rational world and explore the unknown forces swirling just beyond science’s reach.


Tirzah and Mica Levi bore deeper into their strange and unique style of music. This time it is even more cramped and claustrophobic, a minefield of fitful rhythms and rain-filled craters.

trip9love…???

“I’m not dancing,” Tirzah Mastin proclaimed on her debut EP: “I’m fighting.” That might have come as a surprise, because the music—produced by Mica Levi and released on the Hot Chip-affiliated Greco Roman label, no stranger to club culture—sounded more or less like dance music, albeit a rough-hewn variant of house at its most minimalist and homespun. But in the years that followed, the two collaborators largely abandoned anything approaching dance-music convention—indeed, convention of any kind. On 2018’s Devotion and 2021’s Colourgrade, they delved instead into the smoky textures of Tirzah’s voice, the unnerving intimacy of her lyrics, and Levi’s tenderly gothic production. Those records sublimated the idea of struggle into a battle with form itself. They bristled with broken rhythms, bent notes, and flat expanses of empty space. Tirzah’s new album—once again produced by Levi—has been billed, loosely, as a return to the club, but take that with a grain of salt: It is the most challenging and pugilistic record of her career. If she was fighting before, this sounds like all-out war.
The music that Tirzah and Levi make together has always been stripped down, even austere. By Colourgrade, it had evolved into an arte povera version of R&B—an almost sculptural assemblage of splintered drumsticks, metallic lumps, and Windex rainbows streaked across dusty glass. But their new record takes that asceticism to new extremes. Colourgrade was an outgrowth of Tirzah’s live shows with Levi and Coby Sey, and for all its restraint, it moved with the spontaneity of friends in conversation; its empty spaces signaled an openness waiting to be filled. (“We made life, it’s beating,” she sang on “Beating,” marveling at the miracle of procreation.) The world of trip9love…???, in contrast, is cramped and claustrophobic. Hammered out on a watery, out-of-tune piano and hard-scrabble drum machine, it sounds like the artists might have holed up in an attic crawlspace, armed with just an iPad and the gnarliest tube-amp plugin they could find. Levi called Colourgrade “sort of unpolished,” but trip9love…???, crusted with distortion, is flat-out damaged, a minefield of fitful rhythms and rain-filled craters.
The musicians have said that they wanted the album to feel like one long song, and in many ways it does. Track after track features the same somber piano, the same overdriven drum machine. Not just the same drums, but the very same beat. It’s a curious pattern, slow and lumbering: brittle trap hi-hats, battered snares, a kick drum ominously shifting its weight. But Tirzah and Levi’s generous vision allows them to wring considerable variety out of this simple setup. (Perhaps it’s because the EQ changes slightly from song to song, but it took me a dozen or more listens before I realized that the drum programming is the same across the entire album.) The tone of the piano doesn’t change much either; it’s cloaked in echo and distance, like an upright discovered at the bottom of an empty well. Sometimes they cut up dissonant phrases and heap them in soggy layers; sometimes a single figure repeats without variation for the duration of the song, like a condemned soul resigned to its fate. The two elements create an unsettling contrast. The piano is distant and mournful, while the drums are confrontational, in your face, charged with latent violence. One broods while the other lashes out.
In between, Tirzah might be Atlas with the world on her back, serenely shouldering the weight of that heavy, heavy music. Her voice is nestled low in the mix, which has the effect of making you lean in close, and it is as beautiful as ever—soft, smoky, elegant but unshowy. She takes a gestural approach to her melodic lines, tracing them over and over, finding small variations in nimble melismatic trills and accidentals. She has a hypnotist’s talent for drawing out her words—she stretches the seven meager syllables of “Smile ’cause you’re right here with me” over the span of seven sprawling bars—and she favors mantra-like melodies that have the familiar cadence of speech, patiently laying out short, choppy phrases as though retracing her steps, looking for something she has lost. “Me there/Easy/Bathing/Heated,” she muses in “he made,” her voice rising and falling in pitch: “Deep rooted/He’s patient/He made/Me late.”
The actual subjects of these songs are rarely clear. But the beauty of Tirzah’s voice, and the ease of her delivery, stand at odds with the undercurrent of sorrow in her songwriting. It frequently sounds like she is facing down demons. In “Promises,” she muses about finding safety and comfort in a relationship before driving home a chorus infused with the dreary realism of a business transaction. “u all the time” resembles the interior monologue of someone lying awake at night, seething over an unhealthy relationship: “Taking u back/taking ur crap/Pieces of time/Counting mistakes/Keeping receipts.” Some tracks, like “2 D I C U V,” scan as love songs, but even the love songs are shot through with ambivalence, warm-hearted lyrics offset by chilly dissonance.
trip9love…??? is an audacious gambit: a theme and variations that worry away at its material like a dog gnaws a bone. Yet nestled within this coiled, feral sound is some of the loveliest music that Tirzah has yet written—like the beatless “their love,” which might be a tribute to all the doomed relationships in the world. “Their love/Only a dream you know/They love they lose,” she sings, her voice imbued with impossible grace, as the piano trickles like water down the drain. The anguish is exquisite. trip9love…??? is tender as a bruise, the kind of bruise you press down on now and again, just to confirm that it still hurts—and to take secret pleasure in the ache.


With her self-produced fifth album, Kate Bush became a total auteur, embracing the possibilities of digital sampling synthesizers and creating a perfect marriage of technique and exploration.

Hounds of Love

When Kate Bush debuted in early 1978 with “Wuthering Heights,” arguably pop’s most uncanny ballad, she arrived as England’s first and perhaps only out-of-the-box pop genius. Several years earlier, a publicist and Bush family friend gave Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour a demo of over 50 songs recorded when she was only 15. Impressed, Gilmour bankrolled Cockney Rebel arranger Andrew Powell to produce three tunes, one of which, “The Man with the Child in His Eyes,” would become her second surrealist smash. EMI signed her at 16 so no other label would snag her, then kept her under wraps. By the time she released The Kick Inside at 19, Bush’s songwriting had already achieved a sophistication reserved for Bacharach-level vets, while her keening soprano, literary references, and wide-eyed silent-film-star presentation positioned her firmly left-of-center—not the usual place for a prodigious pianist singing symphonic soft rock.
On this and ’78’s follow-up Lionheart, Bush sang fearlessly of religion, incest, murder, homosexuality, and much more. “There’s room for a life in your womb, woman,” she crooned with the earnestness of a Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival radical, and did so while much of Europe was watching. She exuded brains and beauty and suffused both with an unyielding otherness that made her an LGBT icon and spiked her international cult with aliens of every stripe, from African-American bohos like Prince and OutKast to Johnny Rotten. Despite her overnight success, she would never conform to conventional stardom: Instead, she reversed the usual rock ‘n’ roll process where once-provocative artists cave to commercial pressure and shake off the quirks that initially made them distinct: Maturity would only make Bush more daring.
But by 1985, the year of Hounds of Love, she needed to reaffirm her appeal. Thanks to MTV, UK pop had exploded in worldwide popularity since The Dreaming, her self-produced record that EMI nearly returned for lacking potential singles; its only hit, “Sat in Your Lap,” was 15 months old by the time the album finally reached stores in 1982. Raging and experimental, it was akin to Public Image Ltd. and Siouxsie and the Banshees, not early Sheena Easton, and sold far less than its predecessors. So Bush and her romantic partner/bassist Del Palmer abandoned London for a 17th-century farmhouse, spent the summer gardening, and built a 48-track studio in her family barn where she doubled down on the Fairlight CMI, the pioneering digital sampling synthesizer that ruled The Dreaming.
The Fairlight was a notoriously expensive and complex computer; the few who could afford and figure out how to play one during their ‘80s heyday were either established stars like Peter Gabriel and Stevie Wonder who were invested in cutting-edge sounds, or similarly brainy upstarts who funded their techno-pop through production. One such boffin, Landscape’s Richard James Burgess, helped program Bush’s Fairlight on the very first album to feature it, 1980’s Never for Ever, which was also the first UK chart-topping album by a British female solo artist, one that marked a transition between the symphonic sweep of Bush’s earliest albums and what followed. On Never for Ever, the instrument was mostly a means to wrangle the sound effects that heighten her melodrama. By Hounds of Love, she’d mastered it as a musical instrument unto itself.
What set Bush apart from Fairlight wizards like Thomas Dolby, who made a point of their geekdom, was that she also drew deeply from the world music that captivated her older brother Paddy Bush. His balalaika, didgeridoo, and other centuries-old folk instruments tempered her Fairlight’s inherent futurism. She didn’t employ it to create walloping beats like the Art of Noise, or use it to spew out orchestral blasts like the Pet Shop Boys. She used the Fairlight the way Brian Wilson used cut-up tape and how today’s avant-garde exploit Pro-Tools—to create perfectly controlled cacophony.
Take, for example, Hounds of Love’s lead cut, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God).” The song was Bush’s first U.S. hit, and it brought to the mainstream gender-equality issues that female-led post-punk acts like Au Pairs had been thrashing out for years in the underground. She delivers the bulk of it tenderly like a love song, but also poses pointed questions: “Is there so much hate for the ones we love?/Tell me, we both matter, don’t we?”
But as the track climaxes, weaving in and out of perception is the Fairlight-manipulated sound of Bush screaming, as if trying to escape her body, sex, and consciousness. “If I only could, I’d be running up that hill,” she sings once again at the end, but this time her soprano is joined by a down-pitched rendering of her own voice, to suggest technology had made her trans-gender prayer come true. Armed with equally advanced machines and melodies, Bush now creatively trumped nearly every mid-’80s rocker; only Prince and a few others were in her league.
This was a striking achievement for a quintessentially femme star: Among her gender-bending UK generation, Bush had the highest chirp, the most flowing locks, and the tightest leotards; when she shed the latter for the fantasy segments of her “Babooshka” video, she transformed into a scintillating windblown warrior with disco levels of exposed flesh and shameless camp. Both “Breathing” and its video is set in a uterus; “In the Warm Room” exalts vaginas the same way Led Zeppelin sang about dicks.
Hounds of Love proved there were no compositional mountains Bush couldn’t climb. While the second side asserted her vanguard bent, the first side yielded four UK Top 40 hits. Neither synth-pop nor prog-rock, Hounds of Love nevertheless drew from both with double-platinum rewards on her home turf, and yielded her first U.S. hits, even without a tour. And its idiosyncrasies have only fueled Hounds’ lingering influence: Florence and the Machine cribs its Gothic angst. Anohni mirrors its animal divinity. St. Vincent draws from its sexual politics and sonic precision. Utah Saints sampled it and the Futureheads covered it, both with UK Top 10 results. Coldplay’s “Speed of Sound” goes so far as to paraphrase “Running”’s rhythm, chords, climax, and highland imagery. It’s the Sgt. Pepper of the digital age’s dawn; a milestone in penetratingly fanciful pop.
Bush’s talent was so undeniable that she could sneak into contemporary music’s center while curbing none of her eccentricities. The album’s second single “Cloudbusting” celebrates Wilhelm Reich, a brilliant Austrian psychoanalyst but crackpot American inventor. Full of details gleaned from his son Peter Reich’s A Book of Dreams, it’s specific to their teacher/pupil relationship, which is played out further in its video featuring Donald Sutherland. But “Cloudbusting” also deals with a much more universal situation: Children long to protect their parents, despite having no adult power to do so. Accordingly, Bush resorts to the one thing all children possess in abundance—imagination. “I just know that something good is gonna happen,” she sings, a string sextet sawing insistently as martial drums beat a battle cry that morphs from helplessness to victory, however imaginary. The son she portrays wills himself into thoughts nearly delusional as his dad’s, and the result is optimistic yet poignant, as he ultimately believes, “Just saying it could even make it happen.”
Imagination’s pull is the subtext to Bush’s entire oeuvre, but that theme dominates Hounds of Love, and not least in the title track. Whereas her piercing upper register once defined her output, here she’s roaring from her gut, then pulling back, and the song shifts between panic and empathy. “Hounds of Love” boasts the big gated ’80s drum blasts Bush discovered while singing background on Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers,” and yet its cello just as percussive: It builds to suggest both her pulse and the heartbeat of the captured fox she comforts and identifies with. She fears love: “It’s coming for me through the trees,” she wails. Yet she craves it, so desire and terror escalate in a breathless Hitchcockian climax.
On Hounds of Love, the singer who started directing her own videos at this point becomes total auteur, and takes such a firm grasp on every aspect of the recording process that she often replaces Del Palmer, her own lover, on bass. On “Mother Stands for Comfort,” an all-knowing maternal contrast to the delusional papa of “Cloudbusting,” she duets with German jazz bassist Eberhard Weber, who plays yielding mother to Bush’s wayward daughter. Her Fairlight clatters with the crash of broken dishes while her piano gently wanders, but Weber’s fretless bass maintains its compassion, even when Bush lets loose some freaky primal-scream scatting toward the end.
Skies, clouds, hills, trees, lakes—along with everything else, Hounds of Love is also a heated paean to nature. On the cover, Bush reclines between two canines with a knowing familiarity that almost suggests cross-species congress. She honors the sensual world's benign blessings on “The Big Sky” even while Youth’s raucous bass suggests earthquakes. Bush references its elements with childlike awe: “That cloud looks like Ireland,” she squeals. “You’re here in my head like the sun coming out,” she sighs in “Cloudbusting,” and her stormy emotions are reflected by the music’s turbulence. But nature’s destruction can also inspire us to seek solace in spirituality, and that’s what happens on Side Two’s singular suite, “The Ninth Wave.”
Bush plays a sailor who finds herself shipwrecked and alone. She slips into a hypothermia-induced limbo between wakefulness and sleep (“And Dream of Sheep”), where nightmares, memories and visions distort her consciousness to the point where she cannot distinguish between reality and illusion. Is she skating, or trapped “Under Ice”? During her hallucinations, she sees herself in a prior life as a necromancer on trial; instead of freezing, she visualizes herself burning (“Waking the Witch”). Her spirit leaves her body and visits her beloved (“Watching You Without Me”). Then her future self confronts her present being and begs her to stay alive (“Jig of Life”). A rescue team reaches her just as her life force drifts heavenward (“Hello Earth”), but in the concluding track, “The Morning Fog,” flesh and spirit reunite, and she vows to tell her family how much she loves them.
As her sailor drifts in and out of consciousness, Bush floats between abstract composition and precise songcraft. Her character’s nebulous condition gives her melodies permission to unmoor from pop’s constrictions; her verses don’t necessarily return to catchy choruses, not until the relative normality of “The Morning Fog,” one of her sweetest songs. Instead, she’s free to exploit her Fairlight’s capacity for musique concrete. Spoken voices, Gregorian chant, Irish jigs, oceanic waves of digitized droning, and the culminating twittering of birds all collide in Bush’s synth-folk symphony. Like most of her lyrics, “The Ninth Wave” isn’t autobiographical, although its sink-or-swim scenario can be read as an extended metaphor for Hounds of Love’s protracted creation: Will she rise to deliver the masterstroke that guaranteed artistic autonomy for the rest of her long career and enabled her to live a happy home life with zero participation in the outside world for years on end, or will she drown under the weight of her colossal ambition?
By the time I became one of the few American journalists to have interviewed her in person in 1985, Bush had clinched her victory. She’d flown to New York to plug Hounds of Love, engaging in the kind of promotion she’d rarely do again. Because she thoroughly rejected the pop treadmill, the media had already begun to marginalize her as a space case, and have since painted her as a tragic, reclusive figure. Yet despite her mystical persona, she was disarmingly down-to-earth: That hammy public Kate was clearly this soft-spoken individual’s invention; an ever-changing role she played like Bowie in an era when even icons like Stevie Nicks and Donna Summer had a Lindsey Buckingham or a Giorgio Moroder calling many of the shots.
It was a response, perhaps, to the age-old quandary of commanding respect as a woman in an overwhelmingly masculine field. Bush's navigation of this minefield was as natural as it was ingenious: She became the most musically serious and yet outwardly whimsical star of her time. She held onto her bucolic childhood and sustained her family’s support, feeding the wonder that’s never left her. Her subsequent records couldn’t surpass Hounds of Love’s perfect marriage of technique and exploration, but never has she made a false one. She’s like the glissando of “Hello Earth” that rises up and plummets down almost simultaneously: Bush retained the strength to ride fame’s waves because she’s always known exactly what she was—simply, and quite complicatedly, herself.


After a couple of free passes, the third album from the 21st century incarnation of Weezer uses up the band's last shred of nostalgia-driven goodwill.

Make Believe

If you're one of those poor souls who while away the day job by keeping a scorecard of music review sites, there's one thing you already know: There are two distinct groups of bad albums. The more prevalent kind is the fodder that fills a critic's mailbox, bands with awkward names and laser-printed cover art that don't inspire ire so much as pity. The second group is more treacherous: Bands that yield high expectations due to past achievements, yet, for one reason or another, wipe out like "The Wide World of Sports"' agony-of-defeat skier.
Often, these albums are bombarded with website tomatoes for reasons you can't necessarily hear through speakers: the band changes their sound and image to court a new crossover audience, perhaps, or attempts a mid-career shift into ill-advised territory. Or maybe they start writing songs about Moses in hip-hop slang. But sometimes the bad album in question is none of the above; it doesn't offend anyone's delicate scene-politics sensibilities or try to rewrite a once-successful formula in unfortunate ways. Sometimes an album is just awful. Make Believe is one of those albums.
Weezer have been given a lot of breaks in their second era-- both The Green Album and Maladroit were cut miles of slack despite consisting of little more than slightly above-average power-pop. The obvious reason for this lenience has to do with the mean age of rock critics, and the fact that most of these mid-20s scribes were at their absolute peak for bias-forming melodrama when The Blue Album and Pinkerton were released. Even for someone like me, who came late to the Weezer appreciation club, it was impossible to hear these "comeback" albums without the echoes of the earlier alt-rock pillars ringing in our ears.
But now there's an antidote to that nostalgic interference. Right from the start of Make Believe, when Weezer lurches into a flaccid take on Joan Jett's "I Love Rock N' Roll" with an unfathomably horrible speak/sing vocal from Rivers Cuomo (think "I like girls who wear Abercrombie & Fitch"), you can hear hundreds of critics mouthing "no no no" and going into crumpled shock. What's more disconcerting is that the song gets worse over the course of its three minutes (let's just say "Framptonesque voicebox solo" and get back to repressing the memory)-- and it's the album's first single.
Hearing a song like "We Are All on Drugs", which nicks the classic melody of the schoolyard "Diarrhea" song (you know, "when you're sliding into first..." and so on) for an anti-drug message stiffer than Nancy Reagan's "Diff'rent Strokes" cameo, it calls into question whether The Blue Album was really that great, or whether it just stood out as a rare beacon of guitar pop in a grunge-obsessed era. Trying to wrap your mind around the land-cliché-record lyrics of songs like "My Best Friend" and "Haunt You Every Day" leads me to wonder how Pinkerton could ever have seemed like such a cathartically resonant treatise on unrequited love. Was Rivers Cuomo always on the notebook-scrawl level of "I don't feel the joy/ I don't feel the pain," and did we not notice because scrawling in notebooks was the depth of our emotional knowledge at the time?
Okay, let's not be so hard on ourselves here: I'm pretty sure this is all Rivers' fault. Pinkerton triumphed by being an uncomfortably honest self-portrait of Cuomo. On Make Believe, his personality has vanished beneath layers of self-imposed universality, writing non-specific power ballads like he apprenticed with Diane Warren, and whoah-oh-ohing a whole lot in lieu of coming up with coherent or interesting thoughts. Coupled with his continued obsession with tired power chords and bland riff-rock (surprisingly not sonically boosted by producer Rick Rubin, whose post-"99 Problems" grip on relevance is now officially spent), the creative driving force behind the Weez is asleep at the wheel.
Considering Weezer supposedly went through hundreds of songs and several discarded albums to arrive at this final product, the laziness of this songwriting borders on the offensive. Whether recycling dynamics from the band's back catalog (see: "Perfect Situation") or taking the easy Mother Goose rhyme (see: every fucking song here), these 12 tracks sound as if they were dashed off in an afternoon's work, maybe with Rubin holding the band at gunpoint. The one half-decent song on the record, "This Is Such a Pity", fails to even maintain its status as a pleasant Cars homage, interjecting a guitar solo that sounds like it was cut from the original score to Top Gun.
So does Make Believe completely ruin not just present-day Weezer, but retroactively, any enjoyment to be had from their earlier work? I don't know-- I'm too scared to re-listen to those first two albums-- but it certainly appears that Make Believe will expertly extract the last remaining good graces the critical community has to offer latter-day Weezer, unless my colleagues' memories of slow-dancing with Ashley to "Say It Ain't So" are more powerful than I can possibly imagine. Of course, if Ashley went on to break your heart, fellow critic, Make Believe might be just the medicine you need; put it on repeat and watch your emotional scar be obliterated as collateral damage in the torpedoing of Weezer's legacy.


The Philadelphia quartet’s full-length debut showcases their defiant brand of noise-pop, a big rainbow of chaos.

Empath: Active Listening: Night on Earth

Active Listening: Night on Earth

The ecstatic gestures of Empath’s noise rock tend to fall in and out of focus. At first, the band lets you get a firm grip on the shape of their songs; then the songs lose their shape entirely. In the first 30 seconds of their full-length debut Active Listening: Night on Earth, Empath weave together synth-pop bass, a rock’n’roll backbeat, and a muted funk guitar. Tying together the ensemble is a sour whistle whose tone lands somewhere between Clinic’s ubiquitous melodica and Neutral Milk Hotel’s singing saw. It’s loud, it drowns out everything but lead singer Catherine Elicson’s voice, and it immediately marks Empath as a group who’s not interested in tidying their music up into easily digestible categories. They are here to make a mess.
In 2018, Empath released a single called “The Eye” that worked a little like a mission statement. It’s an inexhaustibly catchy song that mixes frosty synth tingles with a breakneck drum part (Empath’s drummer, Garrett Koloski, used to play with the punk band Perfect Pussy). Nothing on Active Listening feels quite so urgent or alive as that one gem of a track, but Empath set themselves a ludicrously high bar.
The same destabilizing dopamine rush behind last year’s Liberating Guilt and Fear EP courses through this album. Songs bleed into each other; disparate elements clash in thrilling displays of color and irreverence. A militant beat runs beneath shoegaze-ready vocals and wiry, fingerpicked guitar chords on “Decor.” “Roses That Cry” begins with a couple bars of carnival piano and ends with a squall of feedback bleeding out into silence. By mixing tooth-gnashing drumbeats with light, playful synthesizer touches, Empath dig away at the absurdity of feeling both helpless and completely stressed out. Teenagers feel this way, but so do adults locked into exploitative labor situations teetering on the edge of financial downfall. Late capitalism infantilizes, and Empath responds by throwing hardcore punk and Kidz Bop in the same rusty garbage disposal.
While many bands with similar aesthetic strategies (like their forebears in No Age or contemporaries in American Pleasure Club) tend to chase abjection as a primary effect, Empath never succumbs to self-pity. Rather than wallowing, they fight tooth and nail through their own personal hell to clamber up to a place of relative freedom. “I just want to get to heaven,” Elicson sings on “Heaven,” a rework of a song originally released in 2016. She sings it without bitterness in between earnest fits of screaming like a true article of faith.
When you’re exhausted, there’s a point where everything starts to get hilarious. The body’s crumbling resolve starts to seem like a big joke, and a euphoric daze starts to glimmer around the edges of your suffering. No band working today simulates this state as well as Empath, whose music finds explosive beauty in the bare fact of survival. They’re the oasis in the shitstorm of your life, a welcome reminder that there’s always something waiting to rise above the horizon of your pain.


Meet Jeremy. Jeremy likes Sonic Youth. His favorite album by the Youth is Goodbye 20th Century, their self-released cover album ...

Murray Street

Meet Jeremy. Jeremy likes Sonic Youth. His favorite album by the Youth is Goodbye 20th Century, their self-released cover album of avant-garde works by various modern classical composers. The CDs currently in his five-disc changer are Shalabi's St-Orange, Xiu Xiu, Merzbow, the Boredoms, and Fennesz.
Meet Erica. Erica likes Sonic Youth. Her favorite album by the Youth is Dirty, the band's most direct flirtation with mainstream rock. The CDs currently in Erica's five disc-changer are the Breeders, Blonde Redhead, Wilco, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Sleater-Kinney.
Oversimplified personifications? Sure, but chances are, if you're a fan of the twenty-year-old Sonic Youth franchise, you probably exist at some point on a continuum between my little creations above. The band itself has been running a zig-zag pattern on the same scale its entire existence, constantly oscillating between their art-noise laboratory and major-label rock band personae while covering all points in between. As a result, you don't see the Jeremies and Ericas of the world coming together over a single Sonic Youth record too often-- if one is jammin', the other's likely scoffin' or wincin'. Not since the sprawling Daydream Nation (and arguably, its predecessor and follow-up) have the two been able to slow-dance to the same song collection.
Movie Trailer Voiceover Guy: "Until now...!"
Yup, Murray Street is Sonic Youth's first successful convergence of envelope-pushing guitarwork and accessible songery since 1988. I'm smart enough to not go too far down the dead-end alleyway of Daydream Nation comparisons, but I'll admit it reminds me a helluva lot of that masterwork-- more so than any of their records between then and now. And I don't think it's coincidental that the two albums showcase a band more relaxed than elsewhere, letting songs stretch out to their maximum length while still coming back for a singalong-able section or two.
As everyone probably expected, that whole 'this is our classic rock album' gambit was a big goof. While the band's new quintet structure offers the potential for some Skynyrd-style three-guitar freakouts, the guys and gal limit themselves to the occasional old-school namedrop (Lou Reed, "Tiny Dancer") and a handful of FM-ready riffs. No, Sonic Youth still sounds like good ol' Sonic Youth, albeit with a focus on melodic improvisation only rarely heard before.
If the band is revealing its roots to any oldies act, it's to Lee Ranaldo's long-cherished Grateful Dead. Three tracks here run long-distance events in the six-to-nine-minute range, and one (Ranaldo's "Karen Revisited") rides a long ambient section all the way up to 11:00. Sonic Youth's always had long songs, but not too many that stay as tightly focused and listenable as these; they're finally capitalizing on the jammy possibilities suggested by "The Diamond Sea." "Rain on Tin," for example, gets the singing over with in a hurry and dwells mostly on long, instrumental passages that intertwine the three guitars like a fourth-grader braiding friendship bracelets.
Importantly, these astral flights are usually filling in the space around semi-traditional song structures, avoiding the spoken-word incantations and directionless instrumentals of recent albums on both DGC and SYR imprints. If vocal duties can be considered representative of songwriting leadership, it's Thurston Moore who's leading the charge here, as he takes the mic on more than half of Murray Street's songs. His twisty "The Empty Page" and spooky "Disconnection Notice" are certainly no new directions for the lankiest man in rock and roll, but offer up foundations as exciting to hear as the unscripted passages.
Kim Gordon's contributions, meanwhile, are curiously backloaded to the end of the album-- a sequencing that would have been merciful on the last few albums, but is surprisingly unnecessary for the double shot of goodness found here. "Plastic Sun," which may or may not be about Britney Spears (have we forgotten our Madonna fetish, Youthies?), packs more rhythmic punch than anything since the "Eliminator Jr." portion of "Trilogy." Likewise, her "Sympathy for the Strawberry" hits slow-motion crescendos as bombastic as Godspeed, with a mere fraction of the personnel. The centerpiece, "Karen Revisited," finds Ranaldo again claiming his crown as the band's best hook-writer before exploding into ultraviolet feedback-- a segment that'll have Jeremy doing cartwheels, but'll have Erica jumping for the fast-forward button.
And then, there's Jim O'Rourke. Ahhh, Jim; say what you will about the guy, but he's now worked his mysterious influence over not one, but two of the year's finest albums (and it's only June)-- I fully expect him to announce production duties on some kind of afterworld-bridging Beatles reunion any day now. It's hard to tell exactly what he's doing or playing on Murray Street, but for the stop/start bassline of "The Empty Page" alone he's a valuable addition. Hardcore fans may resist his presence like baseball traditionalists despise interleague play, but Murray Street is good enough to mercifully displace memories of the band's wobbly first steps with the omnipresent O'Rourke on NYC Ghosts & Flowers.
At the very least, the perplexing twenty-years-along addition of a fifth member seems to have given the Youth just the kick in the ass they needed to stop making merely good albums that hit with segments of the fan population and get back to making great ones that resonate with everybody. Journalistic integrity aside, it gives me great pleasure to be able to like a new Sonic Youth album without having to force it, and to finally give their back catalog a nice, long rest. You can bet your hat there's gonna be Jeremies who say Murray Street isn't far-out enough, and Ericas who would prefer the band kept things under four minutes, but a whole lot of in-between folk are going to be pleased as punch with the results.


This sequel to last year's vault-digging Alone is less revelatory than the first volume, but it nearly matches its predecessor in quality.

Rivers Cuomo: Alone II: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo

Sequels to vault-clearing compilations tend to dip in quality, to no fault of their compilers: An initial volume of demos and leftovers should be the cream of the crop-- who knows if there will be interest or time for a second? For Rivers Cuomo, there naturally was plenty of interest. Thankfully, Alone II: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo-- the follow-up to last year's Alone-- is nearly as good as the earlier volume: There's less deep-vault revelation this time around but there's more variety in style and sound.
Bad news first: Despite a flashy guitar solo and some laborious harmonies, "I Want to Take You Home Tonight" plods, and "The Prettiest Girl in the Whole Wide World" would have been better left in the garage. Alone had its silly spots, for sure, but they at least revealed a lot of Cuomo's personality and charm. There's not a lot of replay value in marching-band interludes and song snippets played into answering machines, and while covers are fun, the Beach Boys' "Don't Worry Baby" is a choice and an arrangement that will surprise no one, ably performed or not.
The best Alone II offers is straight-ahead, no-nonsense power-pop-- not that anyone's ever complained about that from Cuomo. "My Brain Is Working Overtime" joyously rides a scant few chords into the ground, "Walt Disney" sparkles gently but confidently, and "I'll Think About You" is a staccato acoustic jig with Cuomo sounding, for once, relaxed. More pieces from "lost album" Songs From the Black Hole are revealed yet again with a full-blown song suite: Longing ballad "Oh Jonas" features some vocal schizophrenia, which segues into the lurching "Please Remember", and ends on the playful and slightly-seedy "Come to My Pod". All of them are goofy, off-the-cuff, and charming.
Bleeding-heart Weezer fans will still find at least a few tracks to pin their fond memories on. "The Purification of Water", a strident Blue Album-worthy ballad, pins familiar low-end riffery on some Hammond-esque organ. "I Don't Want You Let to Go" has lovely acoustic instrumentation, and even the maudlin piano bitch-out to critics, "My Day Is Coming", is believably wounded. Any of these would fit onto any of their records with a little more time and attention, but the instrumentation and faux-Romantic lyrics of "The Purification of Water" is the only one that distinguishes itself in this early form.
The novelty acoustic rap cover might be the most odious trend of my generation, but previously-unreleased track "Can't Stop Partying" subtly bucks the trend. A lack of irony doesn't make it less awkward, but it's certainly more palatable: it's a collaboration with Jermaine Dupri, for one, has an oddly striking melody (even if it's a little close to Smashing Pumpkins' "Disarm" for comfort), and made slightly more interesting in a sad-libertine sort of way for a mournful tone behind it's party-ready lyrics.
"Can't Stop Partying" doesn't sound awkward from Cuomo, necessarily-- but it does sound heavily labored. Cuomo isn't the type of artist to wait around for divine inspiration-- he's a worker, songwriting is his job-- but as we get deeper into the vaults, more of the material sounds like actual work, or daily exercises without a spark of fun or unpredictability (outside of a woebegotten space-themed rock opera, of course). Alone was worth the occasional cringe to show Cuomo's experiments and sonic baby photos through the years, especially after three studiously formulaic records. The weird part is that, after the Red Album, Cuomo's day job is actually more unpredictable than these demos-- for better or for worse.


Nearly a decade since their last album, Superchunk crank out snarky bruised-romantic pop-punk anthems without any dip in energy level or quality control.

Majesty Shredding

The last time Superchunk released an album, you could've conceivably called them an emo band, or at least a proto-emo band, without starting a fight. Here's to Shutting Up came out in 2001, when bands like the Promise Ring and the Get Up Kids were indie fixtures. Those bands stole plenty of winking heartfelt whoa-oh-ohs and ragged sugar-rush tempos from Superchunk's playbook. Since then, emo has gone through at least five or six sea changes; it now sounds absolutely nothing like Superchunk. The world has changed. Superchunk haven't.
Majesty Shredding isn't a reunion album, though bands break up and reunite in way less time than Superchunk took between albums. And it's not an album that Superchunk needed to make to keep their collective name out there. After all, Superchunk's Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance founded Merge Records; these days, they're making that Arcade Fire and Spoon money. So for at least a few years, Superchunk have operated something like a fun hobby; the band accepts whatever shows it feels like playing, and it has no pressure to crank out another album every few years. Even though Majesty Shredding has been a long time coming, it's not some grand statement. It's not some stylistic leap forward, either; the band still sounds very much like the one who released Here's to Shutting Up in 2001, which in turn sounded very much like the band who released its self-titled debut in 1990. Instead, it sounds like McCaughan had another 11 Superchunk-sounding songs sitting around, and the band finally found time to record them.
Pretty incredibly, this band has cranked out snarky bruised-romantic pop-punk anthems for two decades now, without any dip in energy level or quality control. They've made a few tweaks and improvements over the years, but they've all been in service of these scrappy, frantic singalongs. The only real new wrinkle on Majesty Shredding is McCaughan's newfound upper register; his yelp verges on Ted Leo status a few times here. But the real joy on the album lies in the little details, tiny and brilliant songwriting choices that bespeak all Superchunk's years in the game. The gorgeously liquid jangle-riff that kicks in just at the very end of "Winter Games", the whooping "yeah! yeah!"s that close out "Crossed Wires", the viola that heroically fights upstream on the excellent ballad "Fractures in Plaster"-- younger bands might be able to come up with stuff like this, but they rarely execute these tricks with this level of confidence.
There's not a whole lot at stake on Majesty Shredding, but there never has been for Superchunk; their biggest anthem, after all, is a matter-of-fact rail against an annoying co-worker. Much of Majesty Shredding seems to concern the importance and difficulties inherent in maintaining a fantasy life as you get older, but it's not a morose or self-involved album. Instead, they've made a total wheelhouse record, and a very good one. The same qualities that make Majesty Shredding sound perfectly at home in Superchunk's discography also make it stand out in today's climate, where nobody really does straight-ahead wide-eyed power-punk well anymore, give or take a Surfer Blood or Japandroids. When lead Mountain Goats barker John Darnielle sings backup on one song and you don't even notice him, you're dealing with a band whose members know exactly who they are. So: A fine entry in a fine catalog. They aren't wasting that Arcade Fire money.


Two of the most famous pieces of musique concrète by French composer Luc Ferrari are reissued in all their aleatory and surrealist clamor.

Luc Ferrari: Tinguely 1967 / Hétérozygote / Petite symphonie intuitive pour un paysage de printemps

“It’s a sculpture, it’s a picture, it’s an accompanist, it’s a poet, it’s decoration—this machine is a situation.” So Swiss artist Jean Tinguely described one of his large kinetic sculptures, art pieces that recycled metal scraps and mounted them in chunks of wood, cement blocks, or oil barrels. When triggered, these motorized sculptures shivered to life in art galleries, making a clamor not unlike musique concrète, the post-war sound conceived by French composer Pierre Schaeffer in a studio that during the war served as a center for the Resistance movement in French radio. It was a sound as malleable as Tinguely’s descriptor and none of the composers responsible for such music pushed the definition more than Luc Ferrari.
Ferrari encountered the likes of Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage in the early ’50s before joining Schaeffer at the newly established Groupe de Recherches Musicales near the end of that decade. Musique concrète could manipulate recorded sound, the human voice, musical instruments, or synthesizers, but while Schaeffer and his fellow composers favored a more academic approach, Ferrari’s music was impish. His most famous piece of musique concrète, 1970’s Presque Rien, replicated dawn in a Yugoslavian fishing village, which Matmos’ Drew Daniel once described as “a letting go of the standard purposes of musical sound…in favor of a quietly focused experience of listening to the sounds of the world on their own terms.” But he also did fidgety orchestral minimalism and a Sapphic encounter set to African drums and his own whispers.
Tinguely 1967 reveals two previously unreleased soundtracks from the first decade of Ferrari’s output, including one rendered from recordings made of Tinguely’s epileptic sculptures to soundtrack a 1966 television piece on the artist. “Tinguely” clangs to life, sussing out a rhythm from a sound like a screen door slamming against a bird cage over and over again. What scans as just an unorganized din, slowly reveals a peculiar sensibility making sense of it all. There are staccato outbursts of typewriters, looped voices, whirring motors, metallic scrapes like picking at a lock, and what might be a tuba burbling. At one point, Ferrari combines some of them in such a way so as to suggest strolling through Tinguely’s workshop, though a blast of heavy alien reverb reveals it to be a sonic construct.
“Dernier Matin d'Edgar-Allan Poe” dates from three years prior, a piece for a short 33mm black-and-white film. It’s the subtler of the two and rather than Ferrari’s telltale slyness with musique concrète, it sounds more like a free improv trio: a bow scratches against strings, a drumstick moves across a cymbal, a chord organ lurches. It grows even quieter to include the small sounds of a creaking chair and what might be the man himself humming into a kazoo. Both pieces reveal different iterations of Ferrari, but they aren’t the best entry points into the man’s peculiar sound-world.
A recent reissue on Mego’s vital Recollection GRM series is a better introduction to Ferrari, presenting two of his more important sound-works. “Hétérozygote” dates from around the same timeframe as “Dernier,” but it’s the more masterful piece, what Ferrari in the liner notes deems “anecdotal” music, wherein “the listener is then asked to imagine their own story.” Sounds arise, their source scarcely identifiable before changing and roaring past. Bell-like notes distort into something eerier. Whistles and brass are sounded, but Ferrari breaks them into small fragments and reconfigures them, not like a pique assiette. A woman whispers as she walks along the shore and flutes get stretched into coyote howls. A rocket roars across the stereo field. Party laughter and goat bays intermingle with electronics. Ferrari provides distinct scenes, though just what that story might actually be is evocative if inscrutable, a Donald Barthelme short story filmed by Luis Buñuel.
“Petite symphonie intuitive pour un paysage de printemps” comes a decade later and finds Ferrari seamless in his blending. He calls the piece an “imaginary soundscape” and it’s as luminous as anything in his catalog. An aural approximation of sunset in the Gorges du Tarn in southern France, Ferrari approximates a walk through the countryside: voices arise and move off, crickets, birds, and dogs sound, Ferrari placing some in the distance, some near the ear. All while a few flute loops around at the edges playfully, though over the course of its 25 minutes, it slowly takes over the piece. First encountering the piece many years ago, with its snippets of voices, hazy melody and increasing density, it struck me as what Boards of Canada might sound like had they ever made a sidelong track. Returning to it now, it feels more complex than that. For as alien as musique concrète can be, in the hands of Ferrari, he was able to render it into something that felt warmly familiar. Here he paints a stunning vista at dusk, capturing the expansive horizon with sound rather than sight.


The Copenhagen composer’s second album this year, and her first for Oakland’s Constellation Tatsu, offers a dynamic take on ambient music, one meant for active listening.

Island Alchemy

For the better part of the past decade, the Oakland label Constellation Tatsu has put out experimental electronic music in accordance with a simple motto: “adventurous with spiritual artistic sensibilities.” They’ve collected a lot of different sounds under that umbrella—the catalog includes austere drone pieces, downtempo techno, and windswept shoegaze, among a whole lot of other stuff—but most releases are united around a similar disposition. Steven Ramsey, the label’s founder, said that the music is meant to take people outside of their comfort zone, then give them “space to breathe.”
Even before Constellation Tatsu released the Copenhagen composer Sofie Birch’s new album Island Alchemy, she has long been a steward of similar ideas about how to approach slow, sad, synth-led music. Both under the moniker Birch and her full name, she’s released pieces that feel complex and studied—full of labyrinthine arpeggiations, collagist textural work, and dizzying melodies—as well as intentionally peaceful and welcoming. Island Alchemy, Birch’s second album of 2019, shows just how engaging this approach can be.
The album’s second track, “Myg,” is its longest, and over the course of its 10-minute runtime, kosmische synth arpeggios overlap and intersect with wheezy, stretched-out samples, seasick bass drones, crunchy found sounds, and what might be the distorted ringing of an outgoing phone call. It’s dense but it moves freely from one idea to the next; each layer is a new hook for your brain to latch onto.
The record’s shorter pieces aren’t as grand or sweeping, but they offer their own pleasures. As a synthesist, Birch wields a palette that is varied and playful. On “Net (Neverendingthing),” she dabbles in a misty style associated with recent new-age revivalists like Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and Emily A. Sprague, along with the tape label Sounds of the Dawn. But elsewhere, her sounds are more unpredictable and otherworldly. “Loph” is both Baroque and surreal; the animated opening harpsichord-like melodies could soundtrack a Saturday morning cartoon, followed by what might be a classical guitar strung with rubber bands. Each individual element feels deliberately colorful and bright, to an overwhelming degree. It’s vibrant in a way that’s almost hard to process, like you’re staring at a Magic Eye poster a mile wide.
Ambient music is often heralded for its functional purposes. It is self-consciously soothing; it comes with an implicit invitation to drift away. And Island Alchemy can offer that, if that’s what you’re after. The pieces are paced methodically and meditatively. The melodies are elliptical and hypnotic. But like many Constellation Tatsu artists, Birch seems to have more active listening in mind. You can hear it in the movement and diversity of the sounds she chooses, in the thought put into the way textures overlap. If this is music for dreamers, it’s for the ones who pay close attention to the details in their nighttime reveries, for whom every small moment is full of meaning.


Producer Delroy Edwards combines the faded ‘80s vibe of Ariel Pink and John Maus with a sharp eye toward what moves bodies on dance floors today.

Hangin’ At the Beach

Delroy Edwards has a knack for turning the past into the future. Through his label L.A. Club Resource and online store Gene’s Liquor, he unearths old underground rap and techno tapes that sound remarkably fresh, and his own music, be it his pumping house jams on L.I.E.S. or the cassette-sourced mixes he calls Slowed Down Funk, is drenched in a similar kind of creative nostalgia. His two proper LPs, 2014’s mini-album Teenage Tapes and now the 30-track Hangin’ at the Beach, both combine the faded ‘80s vibe of Ariel Pink and John Maus with a sharp eye toward what moves bodies on dance floors today.
The retro aspect of Hangin’ at the Beach is refreshingly irony-free. Edwards’ songs, most of which run under two minutes, sound like muffled AM radio because he likes working with hissy cassette tapes, not because he’s making cultural commentary a la James Ferraro or Daniel Lopatin. “For us there’s no kitsch value, there’s no gimmick in it,” he has said of his label’s music. “If we put it out, it’s because we like it.” As a result, there’s an eager joy in many of Edwards’ songs, which can be as fun as a goofy ‘80s comedy and movement-inspiring as a sped-up workout video, while simultaneously rattling club walls.
Not everything on Hangin’ at the Beach is simple and sunny, though. There are dark sounds here, and dense layers of lo-fi fuzz that reward repeat listens. The way Edwards weaves more abstract moments with passages of pure retro-pop gives the album the feel of a lost soundtrack. He can follow something as openly dramatic as “Brothers in Arms,” which could fit in a John Carpenter thriller, with the formless near-noise of “Tunnel Vision,” and make the two tracks feel like sides of a coin. He makes “Surf’s Up!” evoke waves crashing on Mars, and the electronic ripples of “Safe Places Pt. 1” sound like Fennesz in a basement closet. Tracks like those suggest that the beach at which Edwards hangs exists more in his mind than anywhere near his Los Angeles home.
If Hangin’ at the Beach is indeed a mindscape, then it reveals Edwards’ musical imagination to be much wider than his main reputation as a house-music maven. That’s what makes it a thrilling listen, too: you get the sense that he can go pretty much anywhere sonically, and the brevity of each track combined with all the driving rhythms makes the record feel like a roller-coaster tour of his firing neurons. Ultimately, Edwards is at heart a beat-maker—he was classically trained in jazz drumming and explicitly says his music is “fueled for clubs”—but on Hangin’ at the Beach he treats those genre parameters not as lines to color inside, but barriers to obliterate.


On the Portland rapper’s surprise “EP/LP/Mixtape/Album,” his feel-good music starts to lose some of the stained, lived-in quality that once made it so rich.

ONEPOINTFIVE

Aminé crashed the rap ranks two years ago with an offbeat tease called “Caroline,” which went quadruple-platinum and positioned him as an outsider star. His songs had a knowing wit and a kind of brightness that made him a beacon in an era of rap gloomcasters. But his music has become more vainglorious this summer, for what he's dubbed flexing season. His optimism has waned and he's turned his attention to expensive things—owning them, flaunting them, seeking comfort in them. His new “EP/LP/Mixtape/Album,” ONEPOINTFIVE, the follow-up to 2017’s Good for You, was released on a whim, as if merely a trifle, another casual flex. (“Mixtapes are albums and albums are mixtapes. Niggas call they albums mixtapes cause if it flops, it’s an EP,” he joked in a promo video.) Regardless of classification, ONEPOINTFIVE is a project about adjusting to a new class of rapper, how shifting tax brackets come with a new outlook on life. But in these songs of excess, Aminé’s feel-good music starts to lose some of the stained, lived-in quality that once made it so rich.
The songs on ONEPOINTFIVE aren’t rapped with the same joy as those on Good for You. They are significantly less interesting, less curious, and less story-driven. His swaggering is all bluster, no charm. On songs like “Hiccup” and “DapperDan,” he loses sight of his reflection admiring his jewels, and on “Chingy,” his boasts lack imagination. He’s less clever writing from this space, basically not saying anything Migos haven’t said already.
Aminé used to judge rappers for this kind of talk. Good for You’s “Money” was a thoughtful consumerist critique that weighed tipping the personal scale against the scourges of late capitalism. He imagined stacking coins as a fool’s errand, like drinking salt water to quench one’s thirst. “Money don’t make you happy, it just makes you wanna get richer,” he rapped. He’s richer now, but no less anxious: “Birthdays these days be the worst days/’Cause I know I’m gettin’ older and not happier.” And yet, the new album still devolves into aimless materialist raps that feel empty. There are brief pivots toward the prudence of previous work, to be sure: The opener, “Dr. Whoever” is a frank admission of grief and on “Why?” he raps, “I need love, I’m depressed/I’m a fool, I’m a mess.” But these are tiny thought bubbles popped by shiny objects, blips along a half-hour cruise through new-money trappings.
Positivity has been sold as Aminé’s defining trait, but he is slowly shifting away from that energy. Money can turn friends to hangers-on; turn suitors to opportunists; turn lovers to liabilities; turn a light-hearted upstart rapper into a cynical big shot. Even the palette he and his producer Pasqué are working with is darker, the scenes in his songs more overcast. Aminé once seemed like an outlier, the fun-loving Portland boy content to be himself on rap’s fringes. Now his songs tuck neatly into the contemporary trap fold. That isn’t to say they can’t be satisfying, because Aminé, Pasqué, and Tee-Watt have delivered one of the better-produced trap records of the year with quirky, off-kilter beats that shift and patter in cool ways. But where it felt like only Aminé could make the vibrant Good for You, ONEPOINTFIVE falls squarely into a bracket with the rest of his flex-rap colleagues, and many of them play the showboat better and more convincingly.