A deluxe reissue of the band’s 1976 live fantasia highlights its charms and absurdities. It remains a messy, psychedelic document of Zeppelin in their imperial era.

The Song Remains the Same

The witching hour approaches. A full moon peeks through the thick, English fog. Jimmy Page, hair curled like a hobbit’s, crawls up the slopes of a jagged mountainside. At the summit, he encounters a Gandalf figure in a white, hooded robe, lamp in hand. The mountain wizard raises his head and fixes Page with a serene look. But this is no passive observer—the wizard’s wrinkled visage ages in reverse to reveal Page himself, first as a man, then a boy, a baby, a fetus bathed in starlight. Somewhere, in the distance, we hear the atonal skronk of a violin bow slapping against guitar strings. The wizard re-ages. Lightning crashes. Then, he pulls out a sword.
Maybe it was never publicly acceptable to be a nerd until the internet made everyone a nerd. But the historical record does not quite account for the world-breaking popularity of Led Zeppelin, who married a musical synthesis of blues, rock, and cock with a deep love of all things occult and fantastical, and more specifically, The Lord of the Rings. They worked from the midpoint between the jocks and dungeon masters, singing metaphorical allusions to anal sex and literal references to Gollum. The critics thought they were hacks, but the fans regarded them as golden gods, and for a decade they expanded and crystallized the myth of rock’n’roll as portal to primordial consciousness.
Stoned longhairs will blast “Dazed and Confused” out of parking lots for the rest of time, but to see what Zeppelin were all about you have to watch Robert Plant perform. A newly remastered reissue of The Song Remains the Same, the band’s 1976 concert film, provides a technicolor document of the band at its extravagant, excessive powers. Filmed during a three-night stint at Madison Square Garden in 1973, The Song Remains the Same is not the best music the band ever played or the best they ever sounded live. But it is a faithful portrayal of Led Zeppelin during their imperial era, as they rode an unbroken streak of creative genius and shattered sales records all over the world. (This reissue follows a previous remaster from 2007; the new one is louder and available on more formats, if that’s your thing, and switches up the sequencing to allow a nearly half-hour long version of “Dazed and Confused” to live on its own side of vinyl.)
The Song Remains the Same was stitched together from those three shows (in part because the band was partying too much to nail it every night), and the film footage was fleshed out with new material shot at a sound stage the next year, where the passage of time required bassist John Paul Jones to wear a wig. In When Giants Walked the Earth, a highly subjective and salacious biography, Jimmy Page said the soundtrack “wasn’t necessarily the best live material we had but it was the live material that went with the footage so it had to be used. So, you know, it wasn’t like A Magical Night. But it wasn’t a poor night. It was an honest sort of mediocre night.” The soundtrack is made more relevant by the accompanying movie, which comes as part of a “super deluxe boxed set” including assorted memorabilia associated with the film and an essay from Cameron Crowe.
The movie combines the traditional concert film with a few backstage vignettes (mostly starring band manager Peter Grant, a notoriously bombastic and protective figure) and, most infamously, a series of narrative sequences featuring symbolic representations of the band’s members. That’s how we get Jimmy Page climbing up the mountaintop, and somehow more absurdly, Robert Plant sailing a skiff toward a beach where he buries a flaming sword in the sand and battles through several knights to save a fair maiden. These cornball scenes were dated even then—the movie, which blew through its deadline by 18 months and required two directors to finish, was savaged by critics—but they do give you a sense of the magnified egos at play. The performances do the rest: the defiantly open-shirted Plant cradling his microphone against his sweaty chest; Page’s sparkly epaulets and double-necked guitar dramatics; the entirety of “Moby Dick,” a technically astounding drum solo nonetheless so alienating as a visual experience that the rest of the band would literally leave the stage to refresh their drinks.
Zeppelin hadn’t yet lost the thread—that would happen a few years later, when heroin entered the picture—but they still sounded a little haggard. Plant’s quadruple-octave range was starting to go, evidenced by the high notes he doesn’t even attempt on the notably restrained “Rock and Roll” and “Over the Hills and Far Away.” (The latter, which features a wildly meandering solo, was left off the initial film release.) But even a haggard Led Zeppelin was an elemental example of what a rock band could sound like at its most kickass. John Bonham hits his drums like he’s tunneling a hole through space and time; Page’s sleazy, psychedelic guitar tone would launch a million imitators. Playing this loud is a mandate, not a suggestion.
To avoid overthinking it: It’s Zeppelin in their near-primes performing nearly two hours of some of the heaviest music ever made. If you’ve ever enjoyed their music, or rock music in general, you’re going to find something to enjoy. You have the paleosexual grooves of “Whole Lotta Love,” the cosmic frippery of “Dazed and Confused” (the violin bow, however pretentious, still sounds great), the head-kicking riffage of “The Ocean” and “Black Dog.” That they pull off the tempo and coordination required on the title track is a kind of magic trick, and though Plant has disavowed his “Does anybody remember laughter?” ad lib during “Stairway to Heaven,” it’s still a sweetly earnest moment in a song that, to many ears, has calcified into a hokey sigil of the whole classic rock era. Rock stars would soon age out of presenting themselves like this without irony, or self-consciousness. Why not giggle about bustles and hedgerows, if that’s what it took to have a good time?
Despite his fraying vocals, Plant is the star of the film due to his sun-god looks, a driving force of the band’s appeal. (”They thought it was my fault Robert Plant had such a big cock,” said director Joe Massot, who was eventually replaced, of an early screening the band hated.) Not long after, he’d break his leg in a car accident, signaling a chaotic period where Page got deeper into drugs and Bonham got deeper into the alcohol addiction that made him an occasionally violent terror. Most tragically, Plant’s five-year-old son would die suddenly in 1977, creating an emotional chasm between him and the band that never healed, not before Bonham’s death in 1980. They were a transcendent group for only a short while, a function of their era and talent.
Because they never stayed together like the Rolling Stones, or became public-facing cultural ambassadors like the solo Beatles, it can feel a little tricky to place Led Zeppelin in a modern context. Maybe it’s banal to suggest yet again that the popularity of rock music has diminished since the 1970s, but it’s frankly mind-blowing to watch this and remember that millions of people once wanted to watch Robert Plant pretend to sword fight and Jimmy Page encounter a fictional wizard version of himself, wrapped around scruffy solos and vocal runs meant to ignite stoned minds. It feels like a true documentary, in that it locates and explains this particular moment in time. Unlike some other concert films, there’s plenty of audience shots. Two fans, seen during “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” stick out to me: A woman in some kind of embroidered robe, who sits with her hands folded as though she’s watching a play. Next to her, a man in a mustache stares ahead, mouth open, totally slack-jawed and transfixed. Slowly, he begins to smile.


On his third album, the antics of Mac DeMarco are muted in favor of his impeccable songwriting, which shines through more than ever with warmth and precision.

This Old Dog

The thing people love about Mac DeMarco is also the thing people hate about Mac DeMarco. To fans, he’s a decidedly unpretentious singer-songwriter with a wacky sense of humor. His extracurricular gross-out antics—getting naked in videos, sticking a drumstick up his ass onstage—are evidence that he doesn’t take himself or the world too seriously, and is someone who rightly thinks rock music has room for the fun and silly. To his detractors, these stunts are at the very least an annoying mark of an archetype—the lazy, mugging, unshaven, drifting-through-life slob à la Bill Murray in Stripes—that has worn out its welcome in the 2010s. DeMarco’s actual music is chill, loping, slightly goofy, slightly druggy, and sometimes seemingly half-asleep, which is to say, it has such a clear relationship to his persona that it amplifies the reaction to his persona. You have to take the whole thing—the guy who shows up in videos and onstage, and the person singing these songs—together.
At this point, a radical change-up for DeMarco would be weird—he’s got his style, it works, and he’s sticking with it. But This Old Dog, DeMarco’s third album, does show some signs of growth. Compared to the two records before it, the new album is less cluttered, never using two words when one will do, and generally going easy on the woozy guitar effects. There’s more acoustic guitar and less processing, which frees it from the post-chillwave context of his earlier music. For a guy who seems to live life off the cuff and in the moment, his music feels more timeless.
This approach brings to mind singer-songwriters of an earlier era, particularly iconoclasts like Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, and JJ Cale. The title track brings to mind Little Joy in its unhurried and confident sense of swing, and DeMarco’s natural warmth and weariness shine through. “Baby You’re Out” tumbles beautifully through its chord changes like a soccer ball falling down a stairwell that manages to hit every fourth step. “One Another” twinkles like an earlier generation’s soda jingle, with a little slouch that invites finger snaps with every backbeat. If 2 brought to mind a dank basement, the best songs here throw open the windows and let in the sunshine.
The move to a more “classic” sound suits DeMarco’s music, and it’s also a reminder that what at first glance seems like laziness might actually be brutal efficiency. On a casual listen, DeMarco seems to kick back and let everything fall into place, but his music demonstrates a relentless devotion to craft, with all the fundamentals intact. Each melodic shift, every turnaround on the chords during the choruses, every bridge—all are exactly where they should be. Even though they are not derivative, you swear you’ve heard them before because they show such a proficiency for songwriting structure.
By now, DeMarco has mastered the art of recording, at least within the parameters he’s established for himself. In addition to playing every instrument, he produced and engineered This Old Dog, and the arrangements are minimal and impeccable. His voice is recorded bone-dry to enhance his conversational tone—he sounds like he’s never more than a barstool away. The bass and drums are so locked-in they seem like a single instrument. Every brush of acoustic guitar sounds like it’s coming from right in front of you, and when he cuts loose on his electric and gets spacier, as he does during a gnarly freak-out that serves as the coda to the lengthy “Moonlight on the River,” the textures are both rich and thematically appropriate.
There’s a longstanding idea in pop songwriting that, depending on how the words are delivered, you can say a great deal with clichés, and DeMarco’s approach to lyrics has always been disarming in its simplicity. A great deal of what has been called “indie rock” thrives on being elliptical and obtuse—think Stephen Malkmus, a slacker guitar hero from an earlier generation who has some surface-level similarity with DeMarco, but never wanted to give too much away. You never knew exactly what Malkmus was singing about; Mac’s approach to words is more akin to a highway billboard, short and sweet enough to be heard when driving by at 75 MPH. A song like “My Old Man” takes a common sentiment (“Looks like I’m seeing more of my old man in me”) but DeMarco’s unvarnished approach helps these mundane observations land, and those who know something about his life and his troubled relationship with his father get an extra layer of meaning. Sometimes the words are pure boilerplate (“My heart still beats for you,” “A wolf who wears sheep’s clothes”) but since low-key craft is the order of the day, “mechanical” isn’t such a damning adjective.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with This Old Dog, it’s more that DeMarco is keeping his sights low. Some people might appreciate this record more than his last two, with the extra refinement of the sound, others may prefer the earlier stuff, which had a bit more humor and with lyrics that painted more colorful pictures. It’s a push. DeMarco’s problem, if you can call it that, is a good one to have—he owns his sound and continues to write songs that fit within it. For DeMarco and his audience both, all joy depends on this comfort.


The producer also known as Mincemeat or Tenspeed collides the feverish energy of contemporary noise and techno for his shortest and most potent release yet.

World War

When Providence producer Davey Harms began releasing music, originally under the name Mincemeat or Tenspeed, he was a beat-driven outlier in the 2000s noise scene. Armed with only a looper and a phalanx of distortion pedals, Harms triggered pugilistic flurries of locked-groove beats. Dan Deacon was an early champion, telling Pitchfork in 2007 that Harms is “my favorite performer right now.” But when Zum Records boss George Chen spoke to the site in 2010 about releasing Mincemeat’s breakthrough, Strange Gods, he admitted that “hardcore noise people might not be inclined to include [it], because it’s fun and has a beat to it.” A decade later, Harms hasn’t changed his approach, but the noise landscape has undergone a tectonic shift towards club music. With his new album, World War, Harms taps into both contemporary noise and techno, combining their feverish energy in a thrilling, off-the-rails collision.
Like Providence contemporaries Lightning Bolt and Container, Harms’ music is built on aggressive repetitions that amplify subtle variations. This quality intensified after Harms began releasing music on Hausu Mountain, the genre-melting Chicago label whose founders Maxwell Allison and Doug Kaplan were among Mincemeat’s early fans. On 2016’s Cables, released under his own name, Harms loosened his pedal-only set-up without compromising that barreling intensity. On Soundsystem, a 2017 follow-up credited to World War, Harms broke further from his comfort zone with dynamic rhythms to compliment his expanding instrumentation. Appropriate for an album named after one moniker and credited to his other, World War takes the best qualities from each release and produces a leaner, meaner fusion. At under 28 minutes, it’s Harms’ shortest and most potent release yet.
World War snakes and soars over six tracks like the strange creature on its cover, half B-52 bomber and half Beetlejuice sandworm. “Dealer’s Choice” kicks into gear with thudding bass notes and an onslaught of drums, until a whining synth slithers into the frame. Harms’ favorite method of gradually piling on noise and polyrhythms persists, but with a small adjustment of trajectory, he manages to land in new destinations. “Position True” reaches in-the-red altitude only to navigate new peaks and valleys: Rattling drum loops and noise hit early, but by the halfway point the song reorients around a spartan synth rhythm as focused and insistent as minimal techno pioneer Robert Hood.  Still, there’s nothing wrong with hammering a beat into oblivion, and on “March of the Hoopleheads,” every brittle drum hit and grinding synth only provides more gas for the 4/4 juggernaut. In spite of the harshness, it sounds designed to tear through a techno set.
Harms compliments World War’s bracing first half by entering his spaciest territory yet on its B-side. “Knowing Hand” adds trembling, tabla-like percussion and hovering synths that sound like a swarm of UFOs, while “Little Brother” builds to a loping techno groove that’s pleasantly loose compared to its tightly wound neighbors. The best surprise is closer “Survival,” a polyrhythmic swirl of spindly synths made all the more dramatic by its lack of momentum. After building pressure its entire run, World War finds a surprising payoff in this delicate final flourish. Harms’ cult classics hinged on endlessly ratcheting up the tension; World War shows he can refine his style while still searching for a new extreme.


The Fresno, California veteran stakes a claim to his legacy by continuing to do what he does best: rolling out boasts, anecdotes, and smack talk like he’s working over a speed bag.

Medallions Monarchy

The term “stalwart” was made for rappers like Planet Asia. Listen to any of the Fresno, California native’s music and you’ll see patterns of slick-tongued braggadocio blended with Five Percenter teachings, a delicate balance of the spiritual and the profane as inspired by string theory as it is by Wu-Tang Clan and Too $hort. Unlike fellow West Coast spitter Ras Kass, who raps like a rhyming world history textbook, Asia mostly uses the metaphysical as wallpaper for the lifestyle raps, drug dealing, and hood reporting he’s made his name on since 1997. In that time, he’s racked up a short-lived deal with Interscope, founded his own label Gold Chain Music, and released enough independent mixtapes, collaborations, and one-offs to make Curren$y blush. In a modern rap underground defined by warping the old-school boom-bap ethos, Planet Asia fits like a jewel into a pendant.
As a luminary of traditionalist hip-hop with two and a half decades worth of experience, Planet Asia is anything but humble. “I refuse to be over 40 and bitter,” he says plainly on “Everyday Victory,” a song near the end of his latest project Medallions Monarchy. Over blaring horns and organ stabs supplied by New Jersey producer Brainorchestra, he stakes a claim to his legacy by continuing to do what he does best: rolling out boasts, anecdotes, and smack talk like he’s working over a speed bag.
Asia prides himself on providing the same kind of life advice you’d expect to hear from a fly uncle draped in gold, techwear, and incense. It doesn’t matter if he’s recalling dirty macking stories of “I’m a Drug” and “Soundbwoy Homicide” or times when bullets tore through his car seat during a drug deal on “Marvelous Merchant”—he sells it all with a smooth growl. His cadence and syllable placements on “Marvelous Merchant” catch the ear almost as much as the image of a city where Asia walks around with “hyenas on a chain without the muzzle.” He’s grateful to still be breathing after seeing drugs moved and bodies go cold and, as he says near the end of “Clap Ya Hands,” he still gets a kick out of translating self-knowledge into rhyme: “Trials attributed to my upbringing/I was born understanding like the sun beaming.”
His lyrical style may not have changed much, but Asia’s been keeping his ear to the street when it comes to beats. Medallions boasts a solid range of fuzzy loops and drum breaks that spans generations. Veteran producers Eto and Chong Wizard offer ominous lilting marches on “F.Y.P.M.” and closing track “The Scenery,” respectively. But the album’s best beats come from its two youngest producers—Brainorchestra and Griselda affiliate Camouflage Monk, with two apiece. The wonky drum patterning on “Marvelous Merchant” and the stately shuffle of “Floating to the Max” challenge Asia’s agility, forcing him to find unique pockets.
That isn’t to say Planet Asia is showing his age on the mic. On the contrary—he’s been preparing his group Gold Chain Military’s debut album and has dropped no less than six projects in the past 18 months, hard work that’s aligned his ethos and release strategy with prolific modern outfits like Griselda and the members of Mutant Academy. Medallions Monarchy may not be a revelation like 2006’s The Medicine or 2017’s Apollo Brown team-up Anchovies, but it’s breezy and hard-hitting, another link in Asia’s ever-extending chain.
Correction: As of October 18, this review has been updated to restore the final paragraph, which was inadvertently omitted on original publication.


The curious, sometimes effective, sometimes bizarre music collected here features contributions from Beck, El-P, Patti Smith, DJ Shadow, Billie Eilish, and more.

Various Artists: Music Inspired by the Film Roma

Music Inspired by the Film Roma

Music is integral to the world of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, but it is also incidental, experienced only as part of the action. The remarkable 2018 film contains only diegetic uses of music; no song is ever superimposed over the deliberately paced action that takes place in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma neighborhood at the dawn of the 1970s. Of the 41 songs identified in IMDB’s soundtrack credits, most viewers won’t notice more than a handful. A wistful Leo Dan lament plays tinnily on the radio as Cleo, the film’s housekeeper protagonist, tidies up; a Berlioz symphony shakes the paterfamilias’ Ford Galaxie as he stubs out his cigarette in its overflowing ashtray; a garage band rehearses a shambling cover of “House of the Rising Sun” outside a corrugated shack in the muddy slum of Nezahualcóyotl. It’s all part of Cuarón’s naturalistic touch.
In fact, there is no difference between those moments and any of the other sounds so meticulously captured in the film’s sound design: the knife-sharpener’s whistle as he trundles his whetstone down the street, the cries of women in a crowded maternity ward, the three unbroken minutes of footsteps and mop sploshing that provide the film’s meditative opening scene. All these sounds are inextricable from the delicate shading of Cuarón’s black-and-white tone poem, as much a part of the setting as the period costumes, the middle-class furniture, the indigenous characters’ Mixteca dialogue.
But this album—Music Inspired by the Film Roma—is not that soundtrack. The actual original motion picture soundtrack, featuring not just Leo Dan and Berlioz but also mambo giant Pérez Prado and the coastal sound of Acapulco Tropical, is a fine complement to the film—an interactive volume of CliffsNotes, perhaps, a chance to duck inside Roma’s hidden corners. This album is an altogether different proposition. Overseen by Cuarón and music supervisor Lynn Fainchtein, it’s billed as Cuarón’s favorite artists making music inspired by his film. It would be an unusual grouping by virtually any standard, gathering together proto-punk royal Patti Smith, post-millennial icon Billie Eilish, British folk singer Laura Marling, and turntablist DJ Shadow, among others. To apply such an eclectic roster to Roma’s meticulous work of reconstruction is even more confounding.
Following Cuarón’s field-recorded introduction, “Tepeji 21 (The Sounds of Roma),” the album begins with a double dose of déjà vu. First Patti Smith reprises her 1996 song “Wing”; then Beck and his father, the Canadian arranger and composer David Campbell, tackle “Tarantula,” a 1982 song by the 4AD band Colourbox. Both are lovely renditions—the pedal steel of “Wing” is liquid and narcotic; Beck’s “Tarantula” blows wide the proportions of This Mortal Coil’s 1986 cover of the song—and, if you squint, you can kind of see how “Wing,” at least, might reflect back on Cleo. But Beck’s song would seem to have only the most tenuous connection to Roma, and its bilious lyrics (“My world’s under a sentence of death, I was born underground/But when the pressure gets too much for me, I bite”) feel out of step with the story’s quietude, and even its brief moments of violence.
The best songs here connect more firmly back to the narrative. Billie Eilish’s “When I Was Older” takes its premise from Pépe, the film’s youngest character, who has a habit of fantasizing about his past lives. It’s a gorgeous song, with diaphanous synths rippling atop snub-nosed synth bass and tough trap snares, and even though the sound couldn’t be further from Mexico City of the 1970s, it makes for a fitting contemporary extrapolation. At the other end of the spectrum, the Mexico City group Sonido Gallo Negro’s “Cumbia del Borras” pays tribute to the movie’s canine character with a giddy psychedelic cumbia whose slipperiness may or may not have something to do with the dog’s penchant for befouling the family’s carport.
A number of artists avail themselves of sounds from the film—the knife-sharpener’s whistle recurs again and again—while others deliver appropriately cinematic mood pieces. El-P and Wilder Zoby’s instrumental “Marooned” is a nice surprise; UNKLE’s mopey “On My Knees,” not so much. A few selections are simply great songs, no matter the context: The Colombian-Canadian singer Jessie Reyez’ largely acoustic, cumbia-flavored “Con el Viento” has a certain timelessness that lends itself to a project like this; it’s also a fine introduction to the rising singer’s expressive voice. There’s another introduction here, in the form of “PSYCHO,” by Bu Cuarón—the director’s 16-year-old daughter. She also has a strong voice, but, like so much contemporary pop, it’s been overproduced—processed and equalized to a fault—and the song’s big-budget pop runs against the grain of the rest of the album.
Even at its best, much of Music Inspired by the Film Roma feels unnecessary. Cuarón’s movie is such a singular, self-contained universe—right down to the furniture that he borrowed from his extended family, in order to recreate his boyhood home in meticulous detail—that a project like this runs counter to the spirit of the whole enterprise. When Cuarón repainted the surface of a Mexico City street to ensure that even the marks on the asphalt were historically accurate, what are we to make of unmistakably futuristic synths and trap drums? The album doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as smash it to pieces with a high-tech battering ram. The beauty of Roma comes down to its tone and its upending of narrative expectation. We expect big, tragic, pivotal things to happen, and for the most part, they don’t. It’s a quiet film about big ideas; a film about interior worlds that refuses to let viewers get too far inside its characters’ heads. But Music Inspired by the Film Roma is none of those things. It’s a reverse mood board, or at best, a kind of bizarre, sanctioned fanfic.


The power once held by Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy, and Cypress Hill is spread far too thin and feels far too dated to sustain the momentum of the supergroup’s debut LP.

Prophets of Rage

“Rep a stutter step then bomb a left upon the fascists,” sang Zack de la Rocha 25 years ago on Rage Against the Machine’s all-powerful debut. It bears mentioning that Prophets of Rage still think it’s cool to punch a Nazi. The rap-rock supergroup unites members of some of the most radically militant bands ever to claim regular rotation on MTV, including the rhythm section of Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy’s Chuck D and DJ Lord, and Cypress Hill’s B-Real (who, while never as manifestly political as his bandmates, shares a certain street-fighting-man ethos.) There was a time when all of these artists felt genuinely dangerous, and on Prophets’ first album of original material, they set out to prove they haven’t lost that edge. “We goin’ Molotov,” raps Chuck D, in one of the album’s dozens of lines about resisting, fighting back, or weaponizing music. Prophets of Rage aren’t just a band, they insist. They’re a counteroffensive.
Prophets of Rage came together not because de la Rocha was disinterested and this new lineup might sell a lot of tickets, but because the times demanded it. “Here we had, sitting dormant in the garage, these 20 kilotons of explosive rock’n’roll music of the Rage Against the Machine catalog,” guitarist Tom Morello said in a recent interview. So they heeded the call: If they don’t play the old hits, and now new songs that sound an awful lot like those old hits, who will?
Between the battering-ram rhythms and Morello’s volatile guitars, Prophets of Rage’s originals land with the brute impact of the RATM classics. Without de la Rocha leading the charge, though, it’s harder to humor the fantasy of this lineup on the frontlines. Their physically demanding music needs a singer with stamina and titanic lung capacity—the kind of dynamo frontman you picture spending most of their concerts midair. Due respect to Chuck D, even in the prime of his youth he wouldn’t have fit that bill. Though his voice retains its hallmark boom and he acquaints himself better to these originals than the winded covers of the group’s debut EP, he stick-and-moves with all the dexterity of the Kool-Aid Man. Scorchers like “Radical Eyes” and “Unfuck the World” call for a singer with pipes. Prophets of Rage don’t have one.
For artists who’ve tightly woven politics with their identity, Prophets’ songs are bizarrely light on specifics. The lyrics read like they were pieced together from headlines they never bothered to click on. Even the album’s great gimmie, “Hail to the Chief,” a takedown of a president who gives his critics so much to work with every single day, is inexplicably vague. In his heyday, Chuck D didn’t just drop slogans; he gave dissertations—Public Enemy’s lyric sheets used to read like pamphlets or manifestos. Now he strains to maintain simple lines of thought. On “Legalize Me,” he rattles off enormities like Michael Stipe channel surfing through “It’s The End of the World As We Know It”: “Young widows candles lit/Teenagers blown to bits/Unfriendly radio hits…”
If nothing else, Prophets of Rage washes down the sour aftertaste of their opportunistic EP, which introduced a band seemingly less interested in justice than a quick buck. Here, there’s no questioning that their hearts are in it—hearing Chuck D snarl “We fucking matter!” on “Who Owns Who,” even if it is over Rebirth-caliber rawk riff, is the album’s great thrill. Good intentions are a low bar for an album, though. Activist music is less of a commodity today than it was during the formative years of Rage Against the Machine and Public Enemy. Good art doesn’t need the word “political” appended to it. Good art is dangerous, radical, and inherently political. It says something new, persuasive, or inspiring. It lays out an actual vision for unfucking the world.
Prophets of Rage don’t do any of that. Everything about the project’s packaging, from its Shepard Fairey artwork to its Michael Moore-directed music video, feels pat and past its expiration date, relics of a previous revolution copy-and-pasted onto the current one. The band hasn’t done themselves any favors by sticking so closely to the sounds of their youth, either—not that they were ever going to top the pipe-bomb intensity of their earliest recordings, anyway. Run the Jewels have proven it’s possible to make relevant political music after 40, but their music works because their ideas are fresh, and their anger is calibrated for now. It speaks volumes that Zack de la Rocha is more interested in moonlighting with RTJ than reliving past glories with his old bandmates.


The Chicago psych-rock outfit lets loose with heavy krautrock-style repetition on their second full-length.

Guider

On their second full-length, Chicago's Disappears have gotten more Zen. Where their mix of Velvet Underground chug and krautrock groove on 2010 debut Lux was pretty melodic, on Guider they're more interested in being hypnotic. They've embraced repetition, using it as an end of its own rather than a way to find hooks. They do offer lots to latch onto-- memorable riffs abound, and revving tempos propel the tunes like a car stuck in 5th gear. But they sound more into straight lines than catchy arcs, more into the moment than what came before.
The recording details confirm that immediacy. According to Kranky's press release, all but one track is a first take. In fact, Disappears literally erased the past, recording over tapes originally used for the Lux sessions. Still, for an album so in-the-moment and so short-- it lasts only 30 minutes, and half is taken up by closer "Revisiting"-- Guider doesn't fly by. All the repetition distorts the sense of time, as if each groove had begun before tape rolled and continued to churn past the end.
That aligns Disappears with another band that can turn one riff into an eternal swing, San Francisco's Wooden Shjips. Both also draw openly on classic influences-- Disappears' twitter bio is "Music for Record Collectors"-- and this time around the common denominator is Spacemen 3. That group's rumbling bass, reflective guitar, and flattened vocals spring up in the quiet/loud drama of "Not Romantic", the stair-climbing "Superstition", and the shivering riffs of "Halo". But Spacemen 3 weren't unique-- they borrowed as much from Suicide and the MC5 as Disappears borrow from them-- and their influence on Guider produces something that can't simply be called a copy.
A more valid criticism would be that heavy influence makes Guider less able to transcend genre than the more openly catchy Lux. For me, the band makes up for that deficit in sheer magnetic energy, which isn't easy to wrangle from such a well-worn style. That energy is plentiful enough that Disappears may yet make a record that captures both true believers and recent converts equally.


After 38 years of making music, Kim Gordon’s thrilling solo debut lives at the vanguard of sound and performance, shot through with the beautiful, unsparing noise that has always defined her art.

No Home Record

The last chapter of Kim Gordon’s 2015 memoir, Girl in a Band, is a kind of epilogue—a bridge to the next volume in the long life of the indie-rock icon. Sonic Youth is over, and so is Gordon’s marriage to bandmate Thurston Moore. Their daughter, Coco, is off at art school. Gordon has left the family’s brick homestead in Northampton, Massachusetts, but instead of returning to New York, where she was a paragon of Downtown cool since 1981, she heads out to Los Angeles, where she grew up. By the book’s final pages, she is wintering at a hilltop Airbnb in Echo Park—a temporary landing pad for the permanent business of starting over. She is making visual art again; she’s showing in L.A. and has gallery representation in New York. Then, as she sits in someone’s car outside her rental, making out, she turns to the reader to confess, “I know, it sounds like I’m someone else entirely now, and I guess I am.”
No Home Record—which, incredibly, is Gordon’s first solo album in 38 years of making music—offers evidence of her reinvention: Even longtime fans may find themselves thunderstruck by some of the turns she takes here. But the record also confirms the essence of her creative identity; it’s shot through with sounds and concepts that have defined her work over the years, just presented in a way we’ve never heard them before.
This isn’t the first music Gordon has made since Sonic Youth called it quits, in 2011. She and guitarist Bill Nace have three records under their belt as Body/Head, all recorded in the years since the band dissolved. But where the squall of Body/Head’s dual-guitar improv occupies a space not far from SY’s stomping grounds, No Home Record offers something radically new and, in places, almost shockingly contemporary.
It’s safe to assume that not many people expected an overdriven trap banger with an African thumb-piano melody as one of the highlights of Gordon’s solo debut—but here we are, and “Paprika Pony” is enthralling: druggy and hypnotic, the kick drum like a cross between a sheet of thunder and a crumpled paper bag. Over an ominous, skulking beat, Gordon half-mutters, half-whispers a free-associative path through the alleys of her mind.
As much as Sonic Youth’s whirlwind sound could feel like a self-contained entity, there were occasional glimpses of the world outside, like Gordon’s karaoke-booth Robert Palmer cover on 1989’s Ciccone Youth’s The Whitey Album, or her duet with Public Enemy’s Chuck D on 1990’s “Kool Thing.” No Home Record is clearly interested in getting the hell away from the strictures of noise and indie rock as they’re conventionally understood. The opening “Sketch Artist” might have been made by avant-rap groups like clipping. or Death Grips—an overwhelming bass blast that summons all the slow violence of an earth mover churning up everything in its path.
From interviews, it sounds like neither Gordon nor her co-producer, Justin Raisen—a Los Angeles producer who has worked with Yves Tumor and Charli XCX—expected the album to turn out quite like this. Gordon was fiddling around with an old drum machine, listening to the Stooges and footwork producer RP Boo; as inspiration, she sent Raisen an old Sonic Youth B-side called “Razor Blade,” a scrappy acoustic trifle. Then, three years ago, they made “Murdered Out,” a malevolent hurricane of a song, and the record’s direction was settled.
Some songs are more low-tech—“Air BnB” is a mammoth slab of bluesy, atonal rock, “Earthquake” is a shimmering drone-folk opus—but the most exciting moments are giddy with the sense of worlds colliding. Noise, techno, and post-punk; custom-tuned guitars and battered MPCs; 808s and overheated bass amps—multiple strains of underground music history pushing together like tectonic plates, building up extreme pressure under the surface. The album’s energy, too, suggests a fusion of New York and Los Angeles, equally suited for stomping down a crowded city sidewalk and sitting in traffic. Whether heard on headphones or car stereo, the crushing bass and battering-ram drums feel like a protective exoskeleton—ideal armor for the days you simply cannot abide another living soul getting in your fucking way.
Where Girl in a Band’s prose was was full of “a lot of read-between-the-lines stuff, which is how I am anyway,” as Gordon claims, No Home Record is similarly ambiguous, layering snapshots of an American culture in decline with lines it’s hard not to read as autobiographical. “Get Yr Life Back,” a smoldering, no-wave approximation of trip-hop, surveys the wreckage with an almost animal intensity. On the vulnerable “Earthquake,” she sings—really sings, in a way she almost never does—“This song is for you/If I could cry and shake for you,” before unleashing the hidden blade: “You want me to see you/Are you 12?” (It’s one of several jabs aimed at oblivious man-children.) And the brutally unsparing “Murdered Out” flips the image of customized cars with tinted windows into an unambiguous fuck you: “Murdered out of my heart/Covered in black matte spray/Will you see when I’m not there/…You didn’t even know who I became.”
Even at her most pointed, it’s the ambiguities that keep things interesting. Is the giddy chorus of “Air Bnb” (“Air BnB!/Gonna set me free!”) a sardonically peppy sendup of late-capitalist shibboleths, or a genuine celebration of second chances? Probably a little of both. Gordon’s most trenchant truths are not in her words, but in her voice. She has frequently demurred that she is not a singer, but “singer” is far too limiting a word for what she does anyway. In Sonic Youth, her voice could be a jagged knife, a lover’s confession, steam rising from a subway grate. On No Home Record, she takes advantage of a newfound sense of space in the music to explore the limits of her expressiveness, whispering in ASMR-grade tones, the mic so close you can hear her licking her lips between syllables.
The best exploration of her voice’s capabilities is “Cookie Butter.” Zoom out, and it’s clear that the song’s interwoven “I” and “you” statements are meant to underscore the way miscommunication is threaded through human relationships. Up close, though, her two-word statements take on a hypnotic minimalism, the force of repetition leaching meaning out of the actual words: “I saw/I’ve known/I remember/I liked/I met/I awaken/I wish/I have/I suck/I approach/I fucked…” On and on it goes, Gordon not so much speaking the words as carving out the syllables with her teeth, until the phrases come to seem almost sculptural, like a series of small statuettes lined up in a row. The song is an artful capstone to a thrilling debut album, one that is an ingenious fusion of sound and idea and a fearless celebration of second acts.

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The New Orleans-based punk artist crafts broad caricatures of chaos and destruction with giddy hooks, flashy musicianship, and self-mythologizing humor.

Heaven Is No Fun

Throughout his recording tenure as Sick Thoughts, Drew Owen has become a trusted craftsman of rabid, gleeful songs about violence. The Baltimore-raised, New Orleans-based one-man band is responsible for the all-time best punk song about chainsaws, and there are plenty of those. When he was an explosive short-haired teenager screaming for vengeance and blood on a hot streak of scrappy lo-fi garage punk 7-inches, Sick Thoughts had the captivating volatility of a firework accidents YouTube compilation. Heaven Is No Fun arrives after roughly a decade of Owen writing and recording this deep well of scuzz: He’s now a long-haired 25-year-old who doesn’t scream on record quite as much as he used to, but when he joyously sings that he hates you and is going to feed your severed nose to his fish, it’s clear that his overall formula is largely unchanged.
Heaven Is No Fun sits squarely in Owen’s creative comfort zone—broad caricatures of chaos and destruction with hooks that sound borderline giddy. Recorded at his home in New Orleans around the time Hurricane Ida raged, the music almost exclusively oozes sleaze and contempt. As his deep, disconcertingly casual voice promises that we’re all imminently going to suffer on “Horrible Death,” his guitar work is fast and ramshackle. For a clear sign of his progression as a musician, listen to the high flying hammer-on guitar solo at the outset of “Hole in the Wall”—his playing feels flashy and ambitious, a show-off ’70s hard rock performance that feels like completely new territory for a Sick Thoughts record. The song transitions quickly from its classic rock radio trappings to a brand of distorted and unsettling New Orleans power chord punk befitting a sticky, smoke-filled basement show. Owen’s words are clipped and staccato as he runs through the beats of a relationship-ending blowout argument, his catchy power-pop hook contrasting with his chorus about going full Adam Driver on his drywall.
The earworms and guitar solos do plenty of work to make all this misery sound like a blast, but the true joy of Owen’s records comes from how funny he can be. The title of the album is taken from a line in “Mother, I Love Satan,” an anti-hymn that defines the character behind this record’s fury. If Owen’s only point was “I’m never going back to church,” he’d sound like pretty much any god-fearing teenager who doesn’t want to wake up early on a weekend. Instead, Owen goes out of his way to ignite a new satanic panic as he talks shit about Sunday school, calls priests stupid, swears that he loves the devil, and shouts “I wanna go to hell!” Second to the Lord’s followers on his enemies list is an unnamed condescending “Rich Kid.” In the album’s closing moments, Owen drains this asshole’s bank account while delighting in their affluent tears. It’s not even just that these moments elicit laughter—Owen is growing the Sick Thoughts mythology on some comic book, professional wrestling, or action movie sequel shit.
His songs aren’t especially long, so when Owen calls for an E.M.P. attack in a tight 96 seconds, his belligerent young man gimmick never has much of a chance to wear thin. “Submachine Love” is one of the longest and most theatrical tracks, and it’s the rare point where the whole operation sags a bit. The high register chorus vocals are over-the-top ’70s bro metal vocals, reaching for the guitar-god rafters. It’s a police chase through the desert and an apparent breakup metaphor. For a moment, the album buckles just a bit under the weight of this one song’s aesthetic excesses.
Owen’s best instincts are his most straightforward, like how he boils down his feelings on the power-pop banger “No Life No Life”: “I really don’t know what I’m gonna do but I know it ain’t with you.” His cover of “Someone I Can Talk To” by UK punks the Limps follows this template. It’s an unambiguous plea for companionship, and it’s a nice reprieve from all the demolition. Whether Owen’s out here trying to steal a rich kid’s debit card, smash everything in sight, work through his emotions, or accept Satan into his heart, Heaven Is No Fun thrives when his chaotic hostility cuts straight to the point.


On their third full-length, More Faithful, Montreal shoegazers No Joy find subtle ways to deepen their sound. They recorded with Ariel Pink producer Jorge Elbrecht in Brooklyn and Costa Rica, and there's a little bit of the city and moments of the sea present on nearly every track.

More Faithful

On their third full-length, More Faithful, Montreal shoegazers No Joy make it clear that they're not afraid to shift their sights towards the sky once in awhile. Although their songs still possess the signature qualities of the genre—fuzzy guitars and repetitive, mantra-like refrains—there are hints that the band is trying to expand within it, breaking through the sometimes-monotonous din with moments of light. It's a hard album to pin down, at moments bright and tender, at times as dark and scuzzy, and the contrast helps mitigate the sameness that sometimes plagued their previous efforts.
Beginning with their second LP Wait to Pleasure and continuing through the 2013 EP Pastel and Pass Out, you could hear the band seeking ways to deepen their sound. More Faithful was recorded with Ariel Pink producer Jorge Elbrecht in Brooklyn and Costa Rica, and there's a little bit of the city and moments of the sea present on nearly every track. "Moon in My Mouth", a psyched-out, dreamy track with a swaying, beach-punk riff, showcases singer Jazamine White-Gluz's bright vocals and lulls the listener. It's punk rock taken poolside, city mice taking a break from the harsh squall. The sound is both massive and soft around its edges, layering elements of surf-rock and psychedelia into the harsh din of Laura Lloyd's guitars.
Light and dark are constantly at play across the album's surface, like shadows from moving clouds. Album opener "Remember Nothing" is a dissonant, clanging contrast to the mellow vibes of "Moon", opening with a fast, hi-hat-reliant drum beat and a muddy riff that wouldn't sound out of place on a Sonic Youth record. Then the vocals enter, and leaven the murk with a hint of tenderness. "Burial in Twos" starts out spacious and gorgeous, with a wide-open ringing riff and pinging synth hits, before some gristly electric guitars enter and grind their teeth.
There's a feeling that nothing on the album is accidental. The squealing, careening "Chalk Snake", which is so Jesus and Mary Chain-esque it veers into the realm of pastiche, ends by juxtaposing a high-pitched note of guitar squall with a piano line that almost sounds like Joni Mitchell. It's these subversive little moments that help No Joy avoid the diminishing returns that often plagues shoegazers. And although they're still obviously committed to noise, still praying at the fuzzy altar of My Bloody Valentine, they're a band that's still evolving, and letting a little bit of light in through the cracks has served them well.


There's an intimacy to Sam Beam's voice that makes it shamefully easy to imagine him curled up in ...

Our Endless Numbered Days

There's an intimacy to Sam Beam's voice that makes it shamefully easy to imagine him curled up in the corner of your futon, slurping tea from a chipped mug, absent-mindedly fiddling with an old acoustic guitar and scribbling words into a coverless notebook. He is always chewing on a pencil, and when he talks, his words come slow.
Shake it off. While the idea of Sam Beam tugging at your afghan might seem perfectly inviting, it's actually just dangerous: the traditions and artists of the American south have long been fetishized and vilified with equal fervor, and, perhaps appropriately, both the region and its inhabitants are starting to assume near-cartoonish proportions in print and onscreen. Unsurprisingly, Iron and Wine's grubby campfire hymns are subject to the very same kind of blind, moonlight-heavy romanticizing-- which might make swallowing a new, gently-buffed Iron and Wine album doubly difficult. Picture crisp, fuzz-free vocals and gently brushed snares shooting like darts, incisive and stinging, each chiseled tip dipped in hot studio poison: This is not the Iron and Wine of yesteryear.
When The Creek Drank the Cradle puttered quietly out of Sub Pop's warehouse in 2002, it was stupidly easy to be tugged into the quasi-escapist, heavily idealized portrait of Beam-as-basement-troubadour-- a bearded, southern, "down home" father of two with a cardboard box full of shitty equipment and an unassuming shoulder shrug. The whimsical inadvertence of Beam's debut-- and the vague sense that the composition and realization of Creek were just as profound and accidental as the record's eventual distribution-- lent Beam's work a dangerous edge of serendipity. Listening to The Creek Drank the Cradle felt like accidentally digging up a diamond, clutching it briefly in a soil-streaked palm, and then shoving it deep into your front pocket, eyes shooting around suspiciously. Nobody who found it ever wanted to give it up.
Last year's The Sea and the Rhythm EP, which featured five previously unreleased Creek tracks, saw Iron and Wine maintaining his four-track sigh, bringing his hissing home-studio work to a glorious, satisfying end. For Our Endless Numbered Days, Beam darted out of his basement and into Chicago's Engine Studios, and the resulting record sees Beam taking a satisfying break from air-conditioner-as-rhythm-section: Producer Brian Deck (Califone, Fruit Bats, Holopaw) folds in twittering percussive bits, while sister Sarah Beam coos sweet harmonies and bandmates Jonathan Bradley, EJ Holowicki, Jeff McGriff, and Patrick McKinney provide ample backing. Our Endless Numbered Days is cleaner, more diverse, and generally sparser than its predecessor, and, given the apparent limits of Beam's former setup, it's also an astoundingly progressive record: Beam has successfully transgressed his cultural pigeonhole without sacrificing any of his dusty allure.
Opener "On Your Wings" mixes Beam's pert guitar picks with rolling slide; scraps of percussion gradually fold in, vocals fall off, and the band somersaults into a comparably raucous mini-jam. In "Naked as We Came", Beam nods to the album's enigmatic title, softly lamenting mortality ("One of us will die inside these arms/ Eyes wide open, naked as we came/ One of us will spread our ashes around the yard") over Creek-ish acoustic strums, while Sarah whispers along, her barely audible murmurs more haunting for their delicacy. "Each Coming Night" is instantly moving, perfectly hinged on a bubblegum melody, while "Sodom, South Georgia" nails gothic disquiet both on and off the page ("All dead white boys say, 'God is good'/ White tongues hang out, 'God is good'").
Studio tweaking aside, there's another, more subtle tonal flip here: Beam's lyrics, once dribbling over with issues of faith and fidelity, are distinctly more guarded, a switch which seems inextricably linked to the relative (and unexpected) ubiquity of his debut. Creek was full of gently whispered secrets, each tiny, grinning confession or perverse admission only adding to the record's furtive charms. A sizable audience might not have been part of Beam's songwriting equation before, but it is now-- and while Our Endless Numbered Days' lacquered cuts might seem slightly more transparent at first, their lyrics are infinitely more obscured, heavy with their own predestined publicity. Now, Beam juggles bits of dialogue (over half of these tracks feature extra speakers; "Naked as We Came" and "Each Coming Night" both focus almost exclusively on clips of conversation), painstakingly easing himself out of the narrator's chair, and voicing what would otherwise be some wincingly maudlin bits (see "I want your flowers like babies want God's love").
Obviously, none of this makes Beam any less of a poet; if anything, Beam's freshly veiled lyrics have simply pushed Iron and Wine toward more subversive levels of storytelling. The song-as-poem critical course has been applied to Beam before, but the accuracy of the analogy never wanes: Beam and Deck toy with syntax and meter, using shaky bits of percussion, volume shifts, and tempo changes to mimic the twitchy movement of the best epic poetry. In the past, Beam's lyrics have proved his linguistic prowess, but it's the eerie lyricism of the instrumentation that ultimately pushes Our Endless Numbered Days deep into the canon of American verse.
Slavic poet Charles Simic talks about poetry as "a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph." And it's in this sense that Beam is, above all else, a poet: His tabletops are littered with gritty little snapshots of life well-lived, strewn with tender acoustic strums, pictures of the ocean, shaken maracas, mothers, fathers, arms. It's a beautiful display.


Despite being born of injustice, an air of victory hangs over Meek’s first full-length since he was released from prison. It captures an intensity that the Philadelphia rapper is known for and best at.

Championships

Meek Mill is now saddled with something bigger than himself. From the moment he helicoptered out of Pennsylvania’s Graterford Correctional Facility in April of this year after being imprisoned for a parole violation, he embraced his role as a poster child for criminal justice reform. “It’s a shame that model probationers can be immediately put back behind bars simply for missing curfew, testing positive for marijuana, failing to pay fines on time or, in some cases, not following protocol when changing addresses,” he wrote last month in a New York Times op-ed, imploring lawmakers to pass legislation granting reductions in probation time for good behavior.
These concerns aren’t foreign to Meek’s music. All of his projects have told the story a man who, because of where he was raised, has never known true freedom. Yet he’s never made that case as passionately or comprehensively as he does on Championships, his first full-length since his release and the closest he’s come to sustaining the “1812 Overture”-intensity of his “Dreams and Nightmares (Intro)” for an entire album. “Invisible shackles on the king, ’cause shit, I’m on bail/I went from selling out arenas, now shit, I’m on sale,” he raps on “Trauma,” one of several righteously operatic numbers tying black incarceration to the legacy of slavery.
As always, Meek Mill raps with a level of buy-in that few of his peers could muster even in their imagination. On “What’s Free,” an impassioned flip of Biggie’s “What's Beef,” Meek launches a valiant defense of not only his character but his humanity. “Two-fifty a show and they still think I’m sellin’ crack,” he raps. “When you bring my name up to the judge, just tell him facts/Tell him how we fundin’ all these kids to go to college/Tell him how we ceasin’ all these wars, stoppin’ violence/Tryna fix the system and the way that they designed it.” Though the track is marred by Rick Ross, who muddles its message with a repulsive, sub-Eminem homophobic quip about 6ix9ine in prison, it closes with a grand finale: a bravado, 50-bar JAY-Z verse that stands among his meatiest ever.
Up until now, every Meek Mill album has been several shades less entertaining than it should have been, as the rapper’s fired-up screeds inevitably gave way to a dreary parade of grievances. Championships finally breaks that curse. Despite being born of injustice, an air of victory hangs over most of the record and that jovial spirit carries through many of its guest spots. Cardi B raps exclusively in flexes on “On Me,” a rowdy number cut from a distinctly “Bodak Yellow”-esque cloth, while Drake returns to bury the hatchet over a tipsy Wheezy beat on “Going Bad.” Meek lands an especially good feature from Puerto Rican rapper Anuel AA on “Uptown Vibes,” a reggaeton-spiked update of the cheery champagne rap of Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night.
The success of Championships is all the more impressive given the market pressure on Meek to make a very different kind of album. His last few radio hits have come not from locker-room-igniting anthems, but rather a string of soggy, sleepy R&B tracks that have been poorly matched with his human-megaphone routine. Thankfully, save for the limp “Almost Slipped” (where he shares the groaner “relationships turn into situationships”) and this summer’s hit “Dangerous,” redundantly reprised from his Legends of the Summer EP, Championships avoids that trap. Mostly the record commits to what he does best: substantial rap with clear stakes and an uncommon sense of purpose. After a career marked too often by botched opportunities and wasted potential, Meek Mill has finally risen to the moment.


With his latest full-length, techno pioneer Robert Hood returns to his true-form minimal techno—a style the producer is often credited with inventing.

Paradygm Shift

Nearly twenty-five years after emerging as a pioneering techno artist, making his name as a central figure in Underground Resistance, Robert Hood remains one of the most in demand DJs in the world. He lives a double life: one, as an ordained minister in rural Alabama; another, as a strobe-lit, globe-trotting selector. Those identities converge in his project Floorplan, in which he makes stomping gospel-house alongside his daughter. (Hood once said with Floorplan, “God literally told me, ‘I want you to put a gospel message in the music.’”) But Hood’s signature arpeggiated techno loops play out in his work under his own name. The Detroit-bred producer has fine-tuned his recipe for making bodies move, and his touring schedule remains rigorous; he plays to packed clubs and thousands-strong festival crowds almost every weekend. It’s befuddling that Hood manages any studio time in between.
Paradygm Shift is the second full-length record from Hood in as many years, following 2016’s Floorplan record Victorious. As Robert Hood, his tracks are monochrome and more skeletal than the flashy, big-room house of Floorplan. Paradygm Shift is a return for Hood to his true-form minimal techno—a style the producer is often credited with inventing on his landmark 1994 album Minimal Nation. Cuts from that record, like “Acrylic,” “Ride,” and “Unix,” are masterworks of efficiency and bear the gold standard of stripped-down dance music. Then and now, Hood’s subtle tweaks and variations make the sequenced synthesizers come alive; the ever-present, pounding kick drum is a militant metronome that Hood abuses gracefully as his melodies slide into morphing grooves between the beats. This is capital-T Techno that’s psychedelic straight to its mechanical core.
“I Am” has a bouncing, hypnotic funk that hearkens back to Minimal Nation most directly. Gently rising chords are filtered down to their deepest, lowest frequencies. As Hood builds the track, the chords grow menacing, distorting and slipping between beats. There’s an illusory effect to these mutations, as micro-shifts between the interlocking rhythms keep the track in perpetual motion—simultaneously rising and falling.
“Nephesh” offers a dubbier, rounder sound, with a gentle two-chord progression quietly anchoring the spiraling stabs as Hood filters his synths nimbly. “Thought Process” is sharp and punchy, as a kick drum awkwardly tries to slink into the groove in the track’s final turn. “Pattern 8” has a slippery feel, and the clanking bell melody is locked to a 12-step sequence that is constantly shifting between measures. It’s a technique that is quintessential to his style, but relying on a workhorse sequencing method, “Pattern 8” feels like Hood is riding on auto pilot.
Hood’s enduring genius has been his ability to take listeners from Point A to Point B in his tracks without realizing how he took you there. On Paradygm Shift, he forgoes the lean machine of Minimal Nation for a more immediate and voracious, full-body sound. Hood said of this record that he wanted to “reiterate Robert Hood as an electronic music artist who is bringing minimalism back in the forefront, and not to get lost in the melody.” For Hood’s fans, this ambition is certainly welcome—but wanting to reinvent the wheel on Paradygm Shift, he falters with uninspired execution. Still, Hood’s dedication to precisely-crafted techno and transcendent DJ sets proves he still has plenty of gas left in the tank.


The newest installment in Fucked Up's series of songs for each year of the Chinese Zodiac is a pair of tracks that have been around for a while: a 15-minute song featuring Jim Jarmusch and a 22-minute instrumental paldindrome.

Year of the Tiger

Total running time of Year of the Tiger: 37:35. Total running time of the Ramones' debut album: 29:04. Total running time of Nick Drake's Pink Moon: 28:22. Total running time of Fela Kuti's Expensive Shit: 24:13. Let's call this an album, OK? In any case, Fucked Up have been releasing long songs for each year of the Chinese Zodiac since 2006, although they're running a little behind at the moment. (The Year of the Tiger ended in February 2011; we've passed through the Rabbit Year and are now in the Dragon Year.)
Year of the Tiger is a pair of tracks that have been around for a while-- the band claimed to have finished the title song almost two years ago. It's the first music we've heard from the band in a while that doesn't have some formal connection to their David Comes to Life project. "Year of the Tiger" itself is a 15-minute song with a very long lyric (apparently by guitarist Mike Haliechuk) about an aging tiger approaching his death. Fucked Up's lead bellower Damian Abraham gets most of the words to himself, although he's also got some support: former Del-Byzanteens singer/keyboardist Jim Jarmusch-- yes, fine, he's a director, too-- intones a few verses, and either Annie-Claude Deschênes (of Duchess Says) or Katie Stelmanis (of Austra) or both add the pretty hey-I-can-actually-sing vocals that FU have been using for contrast with Abraham's voice over the past few years.
The marvelous thing about "Year of the Tiger" is that it's actually a fully constructed song, not a vamp-with-solos or a chain of vaguely related pieces segued together; it builds and builds and builds, with one new riff after another uncoiling itself and wrapping around the pillar of all the others. It's bombastic as hell, of course-- the keyboard part is the closest Fucked Up have ever come to Meat Loaf-- but this is the product of a band that thinks big. The song's weak point is its lyrics, which have lots of sharply observed images ("his castle of gristle and bone"), but also too many passages with dodgy or overwrought diction ("that deathly coddle of light"). Abraham's guttural howl is a great equalizer of lyrics, but the sung sections reveal the words' awkwardness: Lines such as, "Light drips like paint from heaven/ A shining pall on the horizon," are easier to get away with screamed than chirped.
Fucked Up's blog describes the second side of Year of the Tiger, "Onno", as "a weird rager," which is about right. It appears to be a full-on 22-minute instrumental palindrome, a pyramidal stack of drones and riffs with a crashing forward-and-backward beat-- the closest thing they've ever produced to Melvins' more extreme recordings, or to Hüsker Dü's "Dreams Reoccurring". For a "studio experiment," it's exceptionally listenable: Again, this band is great at arrangements, and every five-second segment of this record sounds almost but not quite like the one next to it. If it were in a movie soundtrack, it'd have to be in a sequence with a violently strobing red light. It's too much, too much, too much-- exactly what we rely on Fucked Up for, that is. Who would ask for anything less?


The South African indie pop trio returns from hiatus sounding wiser, softer, and as virtuosic as ever.

Beatenberg: *On the way to Beatenberg EP *

On the way to Beatenberg EP

Since their 2011 debut, the South African trio Beatenberg have balanced syrupy melodies with sophisticated emotions and simple arrangements with elegant, perceptive writing. They’re well-versed in classical, jazz, and Afrobeats, and on their 2018 full-length 12 Views of Beatenberg, they scattered these touchstones across otherwise straightforward indie pop. Still, there were moments where their slick, happy-go-lucky shtick lacked substance. Though the album found success in South Africa, Beatenberg hadn’t achieved the international acclaim they desired, so they took a break. Bassist and lead producer Ross Dorkin went to London to earn a graduate degree and produce for other artists; drummer Robin Brink moved to Berlin to revel in his love for dance music; and lead singer and guitarist Matthew Field stayed in Cape Town, where he put out two terrific solo EPs that allowed him to experiment within the Beatenberg universe while also carving out a lane of his own.
On the trio’s first new release in four years, On the way to Beatenberg, they sound wiser, softer, and as virtuosic as ever. Dorkin’s production has evolved to favor subtle, organic textures, as if he’d purged every plug-in from his DAW and opted to go analog. Field, whose voice coasts over the focused, sunny compositions with an unassuming cool, sings some of the most memorable melodies and incisive lyrics of his career. With a soothing calm, he explores climate disaster, apathetic consumerism, and social media-provoked loneliness. Like the best beach reads, On the way to Beatenberg satisfies a sweet tooth while remaining agile, its big ideas buried beneath rhythmic guitars, colorful piano, and as many hand drums as one could possibly ask for.
This tightrope walk between pleasure and profundity is on full display on the Msaki-assisted “White Shadow,” an uplifting song about externalizing one’s inner life. The plucky acoustic fingerpicking and subdued string arrangement give way to Msaki’s beautiful, booming chorus: “Don’t sail away in your mind/Have you always been like this?/Conspiring with lightning?” Field, meanwhile, describes wishing that someone would read his margin notes so that they could catch a glimpse inside his mind. The song affords multiple meanings—you can sway to the sun-drenched rhythms or settle into the stuffy isolation of Field’s writing.
This double valence is felt most when Field reflects on the sad state of the world. On “Le Pain Quotidien,” he depicts an existence fragmented by online neuroses: “See a bunch of photos/Life is somewhere else.” Field’s writing manages to maintain its understated wit, even if the use of Auto-Tune functions more as on-the-nose cultural commentary than a melodic device. The EP’s most affecting critiques emerge more poetically, like on “The Lighthouse of Alexandria,” when Field almost casually mentions eroding coastlines and incendiary profit obsessions.
As the lyrics oscillate from plain observations to thorny metaphors, the compositions morph from obvious to intricate. “The Lighthouse of Alexandria” begins with a Beethoven interpolation before transitioning into an upbeat, sparkly second act; the gentle keys and handclaps on “85” fade into a warm, ecstatic blend of guitars and bass. The most invigorating arrangement on On the way to Beatenberg arrives at the end, on “Symposium.” Cheery piano chords support Field as he croons about love, not as “a puzzle or a problem of logic” but as an intuitive, mysterious force. It’s a pleasant, straightforward thought. But when the hook arrives, the tone shifts. Field, for once, quiets his anxieties and finds solace in the sublime—he wants to love, to connect, to exist thoughtlessly alongside another, to write the most beautiful song he possibly can.


In a twist, the Brownsville rapper projects the streetwise narratives of his youth through the lens of Greek mythology—an audacious move, but his hypnotic voice and evocative writing pull it off.

Hermit and the Recluse: Orpheus vs. the Sirens

Orpheus vs. the Sirens

History is likely to look kindlier upon Ka than contemporary audiences do. At a time when rap can seem overrun by teenaged goofballs with technicolor dreadlocks—each with their own signature ad-lib—Ka is an anachronism. He’s a 46-year-old New York City firefighter whose intricate lyrics can sound less like rap than arcane incantation. To enjoy his music is to feel like a member of a shrouded and especially dusty religious order; every year or two he emerges from his aerie (okay, it’s a fire station) to deliver an album to be pored over in the darkest hours. With Orpheus vs. the Sirens, he’s added another fascinating chapter to his nighttime grimoire.
There’s an epic (in the literary sense) quality to Ka’s storytelling. Because he’s decades removed from his roguish childhood, his recounting of Brownsville, Brooklyn has an aged aura—it’s all perspective, no immediacy. His late-life (for a rapper) discography, which began with 2008’s Iron Works, can feel akin to Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn”: Every Brownsville moment listeners hear is a small part of a mostly unrecorded story, with Ka doing his best to re-apprehend long-since-faded happiness and ambient, resonant trauma.
It makes sense, then, that Orpheus vs. the Sirens adds a patina of Greek mythology to his personal chronicles. If that concept sounds pretentious or overbearing, well, it would be for most other rappers. But Ka—who, along with producer Animoss, goes by the name of Hermit and the Recluse for this project—is less interested in a grand, public display of intellect than he is in altering the angle from which he views his life: What if, instead of leading his own (uniquely American) life, he’s lead a life of mythological struggle, selflessness, and triumph? He was raised in Brooklyn when it was fire-scarred and rubble-strewn and, in repurposing some of Western literature’s foundational motifs, he seizes some of that immense power for himself.
Orpheus vs. the Sirens opens with a succinct summation of Ka’s beliefs: “I think it’s fine, to relinquish mine, for the life of our seeds/For the weak moves these dudes eat your food like Harpies/Not just car thieves, large pleas, came home hardened murderers/By the death toll would’ve guessed the threshold was guarded by Cerberus” (“Sirens”). Later, on “Golden Fleece,” he compares the hot-blooded restlessness and violence of Brownsville to Jason and the Argonauts retrieving a winged ram’s hide from a tree guarded by a dragon. And, before Citizen Cope’s coda on “Hades,” Ka, world-weary to the bitter end, raps in a near-whisper, “Once empty bellies are full, it houses greed/Between you and me, every knock ain’t opportunity/I hate the maybes/So wake the ladies and take the babies, in case it’s Hades.”
When Ka produced for himself, as he did on Grief Pedigree and The Night’s Gambit, he made sparse, sepulchral instrumentals that utilized drums sparingly if at all. This became the cudgel with which his critics assailed him: His beats sometimes lacked drums, thus his music lacked momentum, thus he was boring. No such cudgel exists here. Orpheus vs. the Sirens was produced entirely by Animoss, whose instrumentals deftly complement the intricacy and tension of Ka’s narrative. His samples are full of vibrating guitars, sorrowful organs, and cascading drums. They’re rich without being busy, artful without being overbearing.
And the same is true for the whole of the album. Orpheus vs. the Sirens has an exceedingly rare artistic clarity which rings sharp and pure like a Tibetan singing bowl. Here, Ka’s age works in his favor: In a genre overflowing with intemperate youth, he is a wizened, patient sage burdened only by memories of a Brooklyn past and volumes of arcane incantations for his shrouded, dusty devout.


Since her aggressive and experimental 2012 debut full-length, Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Princess, Blanco’s work has consistently been centered around identity and the struggles of claiming her own. That constant battle to avoid marginalization continues on Gay Dog Food.

Gay Dog Food

Mykki Blanco, a performance-art character created by Michael Quattlebaum, has gone through a few phases already in her short career. Since her aggressive and experimental 2012 debut full-length, Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Princess, Blanco’s work has consistently been centered around identity and the struggles of claiming her own. Right before the release of her follow-up EP, Betty Rubble: The Initiation, I interviewed her on the trials of being a multi-persona artist. She told me, "A lot of people want musicians to have one image. If I had chosen to do that in a gimmicky way, it may have made things easier at first, but I would’ve lost out in the end because I would be a prisoner of a persona." That constant battle to avoid marginalization continues, and arguably tips over, in Blanco’s latest project, the self-proclaimed "punk" album, Gay Dog Food.
One of the first things you notice here is that Blanco has scaled back on actual rapping. Some of the record's early songs ("For the Homey's", "Self-Destruction"), while maintaining Blanco’s penchant for adaptable cadence and stable charisma, feel like empty attempts at war-cry chants, but others fare better. On "Baby’s Got Big Plans", the spooky sounds that back Mykki’s ominous nobody’s-fucking-with-me lyricism call back to standouts from her catalog ("Virginia Beach", "Feeling Special", "YungRhymeAssassin"). The same goes for "Fulani", which features backing vocals by Ian Isiah.
Musically, Gay Dog Food is no more punk than any of her previous music. "A Moment With Kathleen", a collaboration with feminist punk pioneer Kathleen Hanna, is in line with the concept but fails to offer more than what’s on the surface. Mykki’s most spirited vocal delivery comes in the Cities Aviv-featuring "Moshin in the Front" which is another song that, distortion aside, feels like it could have fit on any Blanco project.
Mykki’s talent and continued willingness to strip away rap conventions keep Gay Dog Food from being a complete wash. She’s at her best when the desire to self-compartmentalize is absent. "Cyber Dog"’s harrowing pings, creepy "You’re my alien angel baby girl/boy" chant, and seesaw of monstrous indecipherable vocals is Gay Dog Food’s most entertaining track. The project’s least Mykki-centric moment, "Lukas", an outsider look at a man whose all-over-the-place quest for identity could place his story and the song a spot on the Shortbus soundtrack, is another standout.
Gay Dog Food sees Mykki Blanco at an understandable crossroads; in a recent conversation with Kathleen Hanna published by The Fader, Blanco spoke about her frustration with being grouped with other gay, black artists like Zebra Katz and Le1f for reasons other than the sound of their music. That, and her publicized disregard for a "straight man’s respect" in an interview with Paper Magazine shows her with a reasonable level of anger at being constantly shortchanged. But for the bulk of Gay Dog Food, the depth that comes so easily in Blanco’s interviews is in short supply.


Alan Braxe’s iconic monograph of French house, originally released in 2005, channels livewire synths, sculpted drums, and tension-stoking filters into a steady succession of dopamine hits.

Alan Braxe / Fred Falke: The Upper Cuts (2023 Edition)

The Upper Cuts (2023 Edition)

French house isn’t so much a style of music as a state of mind—an elusive feeling, an inimitable flavor, like saudade or saffron. You know it when you hear it. The genre’s characteristic chords exude color like a blush rising beneath the skin; its low-pass filters caress their drum loops like silk slips off a collarbone. Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo invented the sound with early singles like “Da Funk” and “Burnin’”; they shaped its dimensions and sparked its mischievous essence on their respective labels Roulé and Crydamore. But more than any other artist, their acolyte Alan Braxe—whose debut single, “Vertigo,” was Rolué’s third release—defined the style’s uniquely Gallic finesse: that rushing, rolling fusion of club tropes with easy-listening harmonies and rich, full-fat fromage. The secret of the French touch lies encoded in the creamy whorls and ridges of Braxe’s musical fingerprints.
The Upper Cuts, originally released in 2005, gathers the majority of Braxe’s early solo productions and collaborations, including the monumental “Music Sounds Better With You”—a filter-house unicorn created with Bangalter and Benjamin Diamond in the one-off trio Stardust—and his work with bassist and fellow producer Fred Falke. This new reissue, which follows Braxe’s recent triumphant return alongside his cousin DJ Falcon, makes a few changes—a stray hip-hop production is out, a 2002 remix for Britney Spears is in—and adds two tracks from Braxe’s 2013 EP Moments in Time, plus two brand-new songs, including a plush nu-disco collab with Annie. French house is neither particularly hot right now nor so outmoded that it’s poised for revival, which might make the timing seem curious. But the style’s influence weaves through decades of pop music, from the era recently retconned as “indie sleaze” through yacht rock and chillwave and on to the contemporary disco-pop revival; even the Weeknd got in on the action. The Upper Cuts is a reminder that, three decades after Daft Punk announced a new wave of French dance, the retro-futurist sound has achieved something like timelessness.
The chief lesson that Daft Punk took from the “teachers” of the house canon was the value of simplicity—that all you really need to achieve dance-music immortality is a whip-cracking snare and an acid line capable of melting steel. Braxe internalized that ethos. Broken down into their constituent parts, his tracks convey a wealth of emotion with just a few starkly delineated elements. Synths zap, drums crack. The mood vacillates between electrifying drama and sneaky deadpan. Jagged arpeggios resemble breaking-news alerts from the nascent days of cable TV; Falke’s basslines are oil-slicked and serpentine, virtuosic funk delivered with a slap and a wink.
The profound economy of Braxe’s production is apparent from the first song on The Upper Cuts, 2000’s “Most Wanted.” The track opens with a 16-bar loop of kick drum, laser chirp, and the faintest hint of conga, distilling the entire pantheon of disco into a three-syllable koan. When the song’s central synth riff finally drops, it’s shrouded by a band-pass filter, muting both the high and low frequencies, and setting up a delicious hit of dopamine every time he lets the full spectrum come flooding back in. That’s it. That’s the whole song.
Unlike Daft Punk, Braxe was not unduly influenced by Chicago—at least, not Chicago house. But Chicago the band? Feathery soft rock of their ilk is key to Braxe’s sentimentalist menagerie. “In Love With You” (the lone single credited to the Paradise, Braxe’s duo with singer Romuald Louverjon) is a starry-eyed homage to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love” borne aloft on airy choral pads, chrome-plated electric piano, and full-throated ardor, while “You’ll Stay in My Heart” takes its stylistic cues from middle-school slow dances. Seventies AOR is a major touchstone: Braxe’s beats are blocky things, heavy on big, backbeat snares, thundering toms, and skull-thwacking cowbell so prominent that it verges on parody. “Arena” slathers a drum solo in gargantuan reverb, audience chants, and ersatz applause, a clever simulacrum of oversized stadium rock that is both slyly funny and slightly uncanny, like a concert in the metaverse.
“Arena” and the similarly hollowed-out “Intro,” which are mostly just drums, are outliers in their percussive, monochrome palettes; Braxe’s signature is his luxe, sensual use of harmony. His chords are opulent yet efficient machines for the delivery of emotion; he’s fond of unexpected modulations that catch you off guard, no matter how many times you’ve been through the changes’ slalom curves. Much like his teasing use of the filter, Braxe’s counterintuitive chord progressions—like the giddy twists and pivots of the new wave-flavored “Rubicon,” the album’s exuberant highlight co-written with Falke—deliver a concentrated burst of pleasure with every wrong-footing resolution.
But even when Braxe nods to rock or pop, these remain tracks rather than songs, anchored in the dance-music continuum. When there are lyrics, they’re a pithy hook. There are no verses or choruses or bridges; each track’s arrangement is reduced to a single set of changes cycling ’round until the cows come home. Even the Chaka Khan-sampling “Music Sounds Better With You,” which spent two weeks at No. 2 on the UK pop charts in 1998, entertains only the slightest variation to its endlessly repeated chords. The basic measure of unit in all these songs is the loop. The loop is fundamental, holy—honed to its essence and tweaked just enough to keep it alive. Braxe’s opening and closing filters give these rigidly repeating sequences the illusion of movement, the way dancing flames may once have allowed cavemen to “animate” static paintings. No wonder the joy he evokes feels so primal.


Steve Hauschildt was always the quietest member of Emeralds, standing stock-still behind a bank of synths as he spun out soothing electronic ambiance. His first solo album in three years is his most emotionally potent offering yet, taking the gentle ecstasy of previous records and drawing it into a deep, soul-cleansing reverie.

Where All Is Fled

Steve Hauschildt was always the quiet Emerald. While John Elliott was headbanging away to rhythms that only he could hear and Mark McGuire adopted the traditional grimace of rock'n'roll axemen since time immemorial, Hauschildt stood stock-still behind his synths, like a member of Kraftwerk who had strayed from the assembly line. Since the Cleveland synth-and-guitar trio's 2013 split, Elliott has poured his energies into his Spectrum Spools label's considerable output, and Mark McGuire has put out six or seven new records, some with a considerable shred quotient. Hauschildt, meanwhile, has mostly kept his head down. Last year he released S/H, a double-CD collection of studio experiments, live cuts, and CD-R favorites, but Where All Is Fled is his first album of new material since 2012's Sequitur. That album surprised many listeners, given the way that it balanced Hauschildt's customary ambient burble with pert drum-machine programming, vocoder, and synth-pop flourishes. But Where All Is Fled swings the pendulum back towards his sweet spot, musically speaking: gentle arpeggios, chiming leads, sunrise synths poised on the brink between sublimity and kitsch. It's his most emotionally potent offering yet, taking the gentle ecstasy of previous records and drawing it into a deep, soul-cleansing reverie.
Hauschildt lays all his cards out on the table with "Eyelids Gently Dreaming", a graceful piece built around a melodic chord progression, steady as an IV drip, that sounds a lot like Stars of the Lid—is the title a giveaway?—rendered with synthesizers instead of guitars and strings. "Anesthesia", a weightless shimmer that sounds like something off Cocteau Twins' Victorialand run through a very expensive reverb unit, suggests what you'd get if King Midas picked up an opiate habit. And the unabashedly sentimentalist title track wouldn't be out of place in an On Golden Pond reboot, what with its teary-eyed piano melody. Still, there's a strangeness to the overall sound—the piano pocked with stuttering artifacts, Fennesz-style distortion looming beneath—that sets it apart. Even when he's reaching for his hanky, he's careful to keep one hand on his synth, tweaking away in search of the perfect patch.
But it's not all so slow-moving; On tracks like "Vicinities", "Edgewater Prelude", and "The World Is Too Much With Us", Hauschildt channels his energy into arpeggios that spin like sparkling dynamos. "Arpeggiare" is particularly lively, with dizzying delay taps suggesting Frippertronics in zero-G. His newfound focus on pulse sometimes leads him to forms approaching a kind of drum-free dance music. The cosmic "Sundialed", with its wild, chromatic leaps, is not so far off from Lindstrom's super-saturated space disco, and "Caduceus" is reminiscent of John Beltran's Ten Days of Blue, Detroit Escalator Co.'s Black Buildings, and other examples of techno at its most yearning. And fans of Pub's "Summer", a now-obscure dub techno single from 2000, will be thrilled by how uncannily Hauschildt has recreated that song's watery bliss.
While it's true that much of the album represents a refinement of ideas and processes that Hauschildt has been playing with for years, at least one song, "Lifelike", points to possible avenues for further development. Like "Aqueuus", it's a wonderfully watery meditation on the kinetics of bubbles. Chimes and plucks peel off into rippling delay chains, and the shimmering melodic line suggests a lullaby for jellyfish; it's a picture of biology as rapture, of physics as ecstasy. We've always known that Hauschildt could make amazing sounds. The question, going into this album, was whether he could give them purpose and meaning—whether he could put his technical mastery into the service of music at once experimental and lyrical. Where All Is Fled answers resoundingly in the affirmative.


On his Mello Music debut For Mark, Your Son, the Chicago-born rapper, singer, and producer Lando Chill comes to grips with the death of his father.

For Mark, Your Son

Lance Washington was four years old when a heart attack killed his father. Raised in Chicago, Washington moved to Arizona for college, where he planned to study film. He developed a dependency on Adderall and dealt with depression during his freshman year, something he helped counter by writing poetry. Poetry became songwriting, and Washington started making music under the name Lando Chillrissian, which he soon shortened to Lando Chill.
Late in 2014, Washington began to write the songs that would become the basis for his debut album on Mello Music Group, For Mark, Your Son. He’s referred to the album as “self-medication,” a means of treating a loss that he had yet to come to terms with. But if the record represents a document of extended grieving for a father barely known, it’s just as much an introduction to a young artist who, after writing songs partly for his own personal betterment, abruptly finds himself in front of an audience.
Piano-based boom-bap and chipmunk soul beats are sprinkled throughout the record, (courtesy of Duncan “D-Funk” Odea and David “Jetlag” Manin, two Arizona producers), and Washington raps more than he does anything else. But For Mark is not a traditional rap record; Washington was a fan of folk music in college, and his songs are rough-hewn and acoustic-sounding. Several of them feature his unaffected singing and though his voice is vaguely reminiscent of Kid Cudi’s, frequent comparisons between the two artists speak to their shared interested in a variety of genres (and the fact that Washington has mentioned him as an influence) more than anything else. They’re not all that much alike.
Lando Chill is a competent rapper, and a competent song-maker, but the concept of For Mark, Your Son is more promising than its execution. It’s difficult to learn much about Washington on scattered songs like “Early in the Morning,” a pleasant little ode to the pleasures of morning weed and morning sex without a single memorable line. And for the most part, we don’t get a good sense of how his grief has affected him, even on songs like “Proud,” which explicitly reference his father.
That’s not to say there aren’t interesting things going on here. They’re simply underdeveloped. In the two-minute song “Save Me,” Washington wrestles with bitterness and doubt, asking “Who’s gonna save me when this God ain’t enough?” In the next line, he blames the same God for taking his father. It’s the rawest and most moving moment on the album, and it hints at why Washington may not be particularly well-suited to rap. Most rappers thrive on verbosity, or at least the raw ability to do interesting things with language. But Washington’s music is strongest when his lyrics are most concise.
Washington is nothing if not ambitious. He is already eagerly discussing his next record, another concept album, this one based on Paulo Coelho’s novel The Alchemist. It may be that writing about a less closely held topic will allow him the room to open up, and to experiment with a style that fits him better than much of the music on For Mark. In an interview with Respect Magazine, he declared that he didn’t have a definitive sound, saying that instead he had “a voice, a message.” But while there’s no reason why an artist should be wedded to any particular genre, for a largely unknown musician like Lando Chill, developing a comfortable musical approach might accentuate that message, and allow it to resonate.


The Australian songwriter’s empathetic, understated rock songs sift through a litany of relationships and beliefs, seeking a balance between thinking about life and actually living it.

Pre Pleasure

On the cover of her third album, Pre Pleasure, Julia Jacklin paws a blown-up portrait of her own face. Back to the camera, the Australian songwriter’s outstretched hands press against a photograph that captures her in a moment of ecstasy, her blue eyes wide and red lips parted. The concept was inspired by one of Jacklin’s new songs, “I Was Neon,” in which she wonders if a version of herself has been lost to time. “I quite like the person that I am/Am I gonna lose myself again?” she repeats, voice roiling with equal parts anxiety and excitement. If she could reach through the photograph and make contact with that incarnation of herself, what would she say?
Change is a constant in Jacklin’s music. On her 2019 breakthrough Crushing, she fought for stability amid breakups and upheavals, finding strength in a renewed relationship with herself. Her third record, Pre Pleasure, again seeks a balance between thinking about life and actually living it. Co-produced alongside Marcus Paquin (the Weather Station, Arcade Fire), Pre Pleasure is an easygoing album from a mind that rarely stops racing. On the opener, “Lydia Wears a Cross,” Jacklin paints a vivid scene of parochial school days spent listening to the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack and praying for Princess Diana. Subscribing to the rituals of religion, she admits over a simple drum machine, was easier than real belief: “I felt pretty/In the shoes and the dress/Confused by the rest/Could He hear me?”
As on Crushing, Jacklin’s most compelling songwriting occurs when she explores her relationship with her own body; as she details on the swooning “Ignore Tenderness,” connecting with pleasure can be an uphill battle. The slow-burning “Magic” captures a delicate moment before intimacy when her desire for vulnerability struggles against shame and anxiety. “I will feel adored tonight/Ignore intrusive thoughts tonight/Unlock every door in sight,” she softly assures herself, each word delivered with a quiet determination atop a patient and understated melody. In between these incantations, she imagines a fantasy where she feels confident enough to stick to her own boundaries, a shift of belief suggested by a subtle swelling, a quickened heart.
It’s testament to Jacklin’s empathetic approach that her examinations of other people are equally nuanced. The barebones “Less of a Stranger” examines the complicated bond between mother and daughter, while on the subtly grungy “Be Careful With Yourself,” she implores a lover to quit smoking and stop repressing their feelings. It’s less a Goop-y self-care pitch than a modest declaration of commitment: “I’m making plans for my future and I plan on you being in it,” she reasons.
Closer “End of a Friendship” maintains a similarly measured perspective. The conflict described is hardly explosive—too much energy has already been expended supporting the illusion of congeniality—and Jacklin chooses to provide little of her own perspective. “All my words are caught up in a cloud/You know someday you’ll have to say them out loud,” she sings. For now, she lets a cinematic string arrangement convey the breadth of her feelings and memorialize the friend’s place in her life.
Pre Pleasure takes its time unwinding and occasionally leaves too much unsaid. Some songs drift away, setting a mood rather than communicating an idea. But when Jacklin allows the two to work in tandem, she excels. Nowhere is this more evident than on “Love, Try Not to Let Go,” which finds Jacklin wishing she could give her heart to “everyone somehow.” Love, she attests, is all she desires; atop a breezy, piano-driven melody, she lets the word luxuriate in her mouth, savoring its promise. But opening yourself to the world comes with risks: “I need you to believe me when I say I find it hard/To keep myself from floating away.” The titular chorus interrupts Jacklin’s reverie with a sudden roar of guitar like a train barrelling out of a tunnel, underlining the difficulty of holding on to a feeling. Love, without the complications, is worth freezing in time.


Composer/producer Nils Frahm's latest album with his childhood trio nonkeen highlights that Frahm is best when he's having fun: proposing limitations but then pushing back against them when the musical moment seems to call for it.

The Gamble

German keyboardist and composer Nils Frahm's music has always been, at its heart, instinctive—sometimes, to a degree where it seems like he's trying to get a rise out of people. He's been bold enough to release albums of spare, fully improvised solo piano material; last year, he decided to flout both copyright and John Cage-ian practice by performing a version of the notorious avant-garde composer's silent work, 4:33, with plenty of sound. Rules and guidelines have never been hard and fast things for Frahm, and his latest album with his childhood trio nonkeen highlights that Frahm is best when he's having fun: proposing limitations but then pushing back against them when the musical moment seems to call for it.
The Gamble loosely explores and repurposes old informal recordings Frahm made with fellow bandmates Frederic Gmeiner and Sebastian Singwald in Germany in the early '90s. The recently reunited nonkeen recorded over and sampled mixdowns from the original, often degenerated '90s 4-track tapes, and used the same type of primitive recorders to record their new parts. The complex and troubleshooting-filled process gives the record both a welcome warmth and oddly brittle quality. The drums sound hollow and far off, occasionally like toy models of themselves. However, there is a richness to the analog-plus-digital method which easily transcends the characterization of "lo-fi."
The short record's unusual production style is essential because it helps shape and enhance its raw musical building blocks. Some of these pieces might sound a touch too non-descript if they had been realized in a more polished way. It's the cleaner, more straighforward pieces which feel the most aimless. But when the band restricts themselves to dense, blurry rhythms and unidentifiable timbres, the album shines. On hyperactive jams like "Ceramic People," the source of sound becomes uncertain and dizzying, giving the music a constantly destabilized feel.
The use of bottom-shelf, my-first-recorder-type equipment isn't just an aesthetic choice. It's also a huge source of the music's elements of chance or spontaneity. The finicky materials result in feedback and odd bursts of incidentally rhythmic noise which often become the highlights of the songs. On "Pink Flirt"—featuring Frahm's electric piano and organ—the tape slows down suddenly to create a majestic sweep. It's the album's central, disruptive climax. It's no accident that rather than listing the instruments they played on their Bandcamp credits, nonkeen chose to list the various dated recording devices used in their album credits; these machines are The Gamble's most important soloists.
Despite all the preoccupation with recording technique, the album mainly succeeds because it sounds like the work of a small group of musicians, jamming and building off of one another's cues in real time. This is not "serious," process music, and it doesn't sound like it. The classical reference points of Frahm's work as a soloist are evident in the music—Cage, the minimalism of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, the humor and plaintiveness of French turn-of-the-century composers like Erik Satie and Gabriel Fauré, and dignified, semi-New Agers like Keith Jarrett and George Winston. But in the context of the propulsive ensemble, points of inspiration are never pulled out and highlighted one by one; each of the three players seems to be culling from different places at once.
Influences that are new to Frahm's catalog crop up here to provide welcome reference points. Frahm's seething Rhodes piano, which recalls Joe Zawinul or Herbie Hancock, is a necessary arbiter of tension throughout the album, a playful element which helps to distinguish nonkeen from your average krautrock-indebted, experimental rock band. Centerpiece "This Beautiful Mess"—dominated by electric piano scare cues—sounds like something between Cluster, Mulatu Astake's noir world-jazz, and exotic slow-wax fusion that could have been pressed on ECM. Like all the best tracks on The Gamble, the live band sounds more and more unreal as the track builds.
Nonkeen's vocabulary is very familiar, sometimes verging on lackluster. But the band knows its own limitations, and charms across the record's duration. They quickly establish moods—appealing, slightly disparate shades of pensiveness, rueful theme music for some hypothetical arthouse drama—and then cut straight into the next well-realized idea. We aren't forced to listen to long pieces that are hoping to introduce hypnosis, as in the minimalist music or traditional krautrock that comes to bear on nonkeen's vocabulary; each song is simply a quick burst of energy. The Gamble sounds like the peek into a group of friends' private rituals that it is—as charmingly patched together and messy as it is well-paced and dynamic.