The Band Formerly Known as Twin Sister return with a new album that possesses a distinctly nocturnal vibe. Mr Twin Sister is a 37-minute tribute to the way night allows people to discover who they are and who they want to be.

Mr Twin Sister

You’re free to listen to Mr Twin Sister’s self-titled, not-quite debut whenever, wherever and however you damn please. But at the risk of assuming authorial intent, the Long Island band would prefer you wait at least until the golden hour before getting started, as no one here is liable to be awake before then. Mr Twin Sister is an exclusively nocturnal being, though it’s not picky about time and place; it seeks quiet nights on the town, wild nights in, twilight, starlight, dusk, dawn, living after midnight, working for the weekend. You can imagine it soundtracking runways, clubs, and kitchen-drinking sessions alike, as Andrea Estella is surrounded by the crisp, luminescent glow of disco balls, streelamps, fluorescents, and anything but natural sunlight. For 37 minutes, Mr Twin Sister pay tribute to the way night allows people to discover who they are and who they want to be.
Transformation and self-discovery would be primary concerns for this band: though the former Twin Sister maintained the same personnel, the context around them has changed to the point where “Twin Sister” is a closed chapter. They’re one of the last remnants of a time when people still used the word “buzz band” to describe up-and-comers, often applied to playful, savvy, photogenic acts that served as a bridge between chillwave’s deconstruction of guitar-based music and the refurbishing of indie as a pop and R&B-based idiom.
Next to Cults’ “Go Outside” and Sleigh Bells’ “Crown on the Ground”, Twin Sister's wonderful 2010 single “All Around and Away We Go” was the definitive song of the time, and they were expected to follow suit toward the verge of modest stardom. When In Heaven dropped on Domino in late 2011, it did a lot of great things, but “coming on strong” wasn’t one of them—it may have been considered too wispy, too twee, and too weird for mass consumption. The past three years have been marked by a terrible, debilitating van accident and minor successes unrelated to In Heaven: early single “Meet the Frownies” was sampled by Kendrick Lamar, while Estella subbed in for Leighton Meester in the Kickstarter-funded Veronica Mars movie. Within the first five minutes, Estella admits, “Finding out the actual year/ Made me realize how much happier I was not knowing.”
In any other year, the album art for Mr Twin Sister would be likened to a demo and taken as foreshadowing of a raw, plaintive reintroduction, a negation of what came before. In 2014, though, it looks a hell of a lot like the Yeezus cover, and while Mr Twin Sister is pretty much the exact opposite of that record’s harsh and uncompromising sound, it is similarly fashion-forward, an amplification of what preceded it and proof that “DIY” doesn’t necessarily have to mean “lo-fi.” Opener “Sensitive” takes two minutes to fade in from a gorgeous blur of whirled synths and chiming ambient sounds, and once its supple, seductive beat drops, Mr Twin Sister blind you with their newfound taste for aggressive opulence. Throughout, Mr Twin Sister is every kind of luxury—it’s more pillowy and firm than the spindly, spiky dance-pop of their past, crystalline on the outside and glittery on the inside, a snowglobe of a Times Square celebration.
Mr Twin Sister sounds flawless, and the fact that they co-produced the album and put it out on their own label aligns with a lyrical streak of independence that runs throughout. A withering dismissal of aggressive men set to assured, lolling pop-funk, “Rude Boy” inverts the dynamic of the Rihanna song of the same name, addressed most directly to narcissists and pickup artists using any public space as a sexually-charged proving grounds. But considering the band’s retreat from indie rock’s buzz-making machinery, the more general barbs ("What makes you so certain that I wanna be forced to notice you?") could be aimed at any kind of attention seeker or dude trying to blow smoke up your ass. Estella curtly sings, “I’ve got all the drinks that I can handle,” a statement that takes on a more sinister connotation during “In the House of Yes”. The title is a bait and switch—it’s uplifting, up-tempo and communal dance music, and the narrative takes place entirely within Estella’s head. It might be a reciprocation of their loan to Kendrick, fusing the uneasy cautionary tale of  “Swimming Pools (Drank)” and “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe”’s glorification of “me time.” Dancing alone in her room, Solo cup in hand, Estella jokes, “Now that I’ve had two or three/ I can get a little free,” and that taste of freedom leads to four, six, and eventually, a quick spiral to the floor. The perfect night out would actually take away everything involved with "going out," and “In the House of Yes” is an escape from the world and its surrounding problems.
In spite of the disparate situations presented, both “Rude Boy” and “In the House of Yes” are unified by a desire to have some time to one’s self, to figure out what you really want out of life. “Out of the Dark” and “Twelve Angels” follow suit in a more confrontational and direct manner and underline the intent of Mr Twin Sister’s androgynous rename. Amidst the thick, liquid groove of the former, Estella observes and admires women who can naturally put on lipstick, a skirt, and a smile, but its chorus calls into question what “the dark” actually is, and whether the song is meant as a means of shedding more than social anxiety: “I am a woman/ But inside I’m a man/ And I want to be as gay as I can.”
This idea is presented even more literally on “Twelve Angels”, where Eric Carmona takes on the role of a bar-hopping woman in drag. Unfortunately, the band actually plays things too straight, utilizing the most common forms of electro dehumanization—that is, pitch-shifted and doubled vocals getting tossed down into a metallic airlock. In terms of topic, tone, execution, you name it, it’s perfectionist Silent Shout homage. But the derivation makes it a strange fit into such an otherwise idiosyncratic record; immediately after, the instrumental “Medford” serves as a bridge to “Crime Scene”, an acoustic sunrise where the record comes to an abrupt, but satisfying closure.
But Mr Twin Sister doesn't play out as a narrative arc as much as it does like a lifelike, disconnected series of situations. It isn’t a record about being young and love, just one about being romantic in all senses of the word. Its intentions are put most bluntly on the emotional and literal centerpiece “Blush”, when Estella sings, “Is there even a real me/ Or am I just a series of nights?” The band evokes the most sentimental idea of city nightlife on a record full of them—a slowdance on a rooftop, overlooking the skyline, an intimate moment interrupted by saying something foolish and trying to define it: “Have you felt like you would always be alone?” With one line, Estella amplifies the underlying worry behind every feeling of isolation, joy, regret, and excitement that's expressed throughout Mr Twin Sister. But during the duration of “Blush”, the fleeting perfection of the moment makes that a concern for another time; for now, the night is young, and anything is possible.


In this 2015 set marking his retirement from live performance, the veteran improvising guitarist explores the simpler, starker side of his abstract, purposefully formless music.

Absence

One of the many innovations of AMM, the influential improv group co-founded by Keith Rowe, was their use of silence. Formed by three restless young artists with jazz backgrounds, the group found an audience in the burgeoning London art scene of the mid-1960s, although their work often barely scanned as music. A painter as well as a guitarist, Rowe took inspiration from Jackson Pollock and laid his instrument across a table, striking its body and strings for textural effect. Played with unorthodox equipment like bows and needles, it sometimes emitted a low, electric hum; other times, it was an onslaught of noise. Musicians who weren’t on their wavelength found it difficult to collaborate. Concertgoers expecting entertainment were forced to sit with their discomfort.
As a solo artist, Rowe has maintained his vision into the 21st century. Keeping up a steady stream of releases and collaborations, he has served as a vital, inquisitive presence among a generation of electroacoustic artists, like Fennesz and Oren Ambarchi, who took inspiration from his inventive approach. His most recent solo album was a four-hour set from 2016 called The Room Extended. An uncompromising epic that sampled his own recordings dating back to the ’60s while sounding unlike anything else in his catalog, the music felt cumulative and deeply personal. On the cover was a scan of Rowe’s brain, an image taken from the medical examinations that would reveal a positive diagnosis for Parksinson‘s, in early 2015.
Less than halfway into a show that same year—captured here on his new album, Absence—Rowe decided to retire from live performance. He noticed a tremor in his right hand and immediately recognized the way it compromised his sound. (On the record, it plays like a dizzy, pulsing wave of static, lasting about 10 seconds, beginning at the 12:10 mark.) Even for those attuned to the cadence and rhythm of Rowe’s abstract, purposefully formless music, this moment might not stand out. But for Rowe, whose work has always been filled with cryptic references and well-kept secrets—right down to the name AMM, an acronym whose meaning he has never explained—it felt like a sign, a definitive stopping point.
The resulting album—which Rowe has decided to release, in his characteristically irreverent terms, “before it too departs for the dustbin”—is focused on a simpler, starker set of tools than The Room Extended. But it is just as intense. When asked about his relationship to the idea of “harshness,” a word often used to describe his art, Rowe meditated on the varying degrees of the term. “Going out into the vineyard very late on a winter’s night, when it’s cold, it can feel very harsh, but there’s only silence,” he replied. “Harshness is comparative.” As opposed to the industrial fanfare of his noisier material, the music on Absence falls on the alone-in-a-vineyard-on-a-winter-night end of the spectrum: subtle, solitary, beautiful in theory but a little unnerving in practice.
By now, the sound of Rowe’s live setup has become familiar: the scraping of strings, the busted-cable buzz, the whirring of fans. You can hear all these trademarks during this single-track, 33-minute performance, which proceeds with the blurry momentum of a slow walk through heavy snow. In his usual way, Rowe intersperses his guitar playing with radio transmissions, adding an additional dusting of spontaneity, even dark humor, to the proceeding: the oblivious speakers blasting from a passing car just as you receive troubling news. Among the samples that turn up are a Nelly Furtado single about regret, a Justin Bieber hit about puppy love, and a euphoric ’70s funk deep cut about losing yourself to rhythm, which cuts off so abruptly that it sounds like half commentary, half punchline.
Absence concludes with a recording of a symphony by Haydn, and it’s the longest sample here. When asked about his interest in improv over composition, Rowe spoke about his appreciation for both forms, asking why we listen to music in the first place: “When you go to hear a Haydn string quartet, there are no surprises, are there? In terms of newness. People listen for the exquisite exposition of the quartet.” While his usual process involves cutting the sample before your brain has time to place the melody, this time he lets it run. You might find yourself slipping into the music, even forgetting about the larger work around it. Then it fades: a minute of near silence, someone coughing, a few shifting chairs, and applause. As a listener, we hear the audience lift from their trance, respond, and move on. Then we do the same.
“Retirement, or stepping away, is difficult and painful,” Rowe writes in the liner notes. “It requires a recognition of certain realities, that you are not important, that the world does not care that you have stopped performing solos, actually the world does not notice that you have stopped, life outside your bubble continues, get used to it, you are not at the centre of anything.” His words are a blunt reminder of the ethos at the heart of his work, which values exploration for the greater benefit over any mere sense of achievement or personal fulfillment. He wants the ideas to be what lives on. At the same time, it feels natural to hear this one, more than any other album he has released, and consider the gravitational force at its center, to miss it when he leaves the frame. It is a portrait of an artist slipping the borders between the silence he can control and the silence he cannot.

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The British producer’s detailed yet frictionless house bangers are full of reverence for the dancefloor, though too controlled to match its catharsis.

times

To a newcomer discovering SG Lewis’ music—on a Spotify-curated playlist called “Serotonin,” in a YouTube DJ set where he bobs his head in an empty studio for an hour—the 26-year-old singer and producer might appear to be a blithe trendhopper, poised to capitalize on the nu-disco renaissance shimmying through pop. His funk-flecked house tracks fit right in with Dua Lipa’s slick ’80s basslines and the Weeknd’s retro glitz, Jessie Ware and Kylie Minogue’s strobe-lit resurgences. But Lewis has braided disco into dance music for years. In 2014, he signed to the same label as Ware, PMR, after remixing one of her songs. Since then, his flickering singles and trio of concept EPs have revolved around obvious, easy themes: We’re young, dancing’s fun, tonight is all we have.
His full-length debut, Times, arrives nearly a year after most clubs closed, when the minutiae of what used to be a normal night out have taken on a kind of reverence. In the blank expanse of quarantine, music made for dancefloors becomes a eulogy and a prayer, an act of mourning and a symbol of hope. Times is compact and glossy, competent and earnest. The first song opens with a muffled declaration about the power of house music: “There was harmony in the music, there was harmony in the behavior of the people, and we had a good time.” Lewis rejoices in the mundanity of nightlife with surprising tenderness and grace.
His influences are blatant—the burble and glide of labelmates Disclosure, the packaged funk of the Neptunes—and sometimes homage slips into imitation. The bassline at the start of “Chemicals” is a dead ringer for Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” and it lingers long enough to miss the source material. Once the track unfolds, though, it reveals more: glittering snarls of synths, an intricate layer of strings in the background. “I might be seeing double, but I need you both,” Lewis croons, wrenching intimacy out of drunk desperation. “Time” builds off a Dennis Edwards sample, sliced and warped as Rhye writhes his voice over the tingling beat.
Nile Rodgers stops by for a kinetic blast of guitar on “One More,” a glistening ode to party flirting and the best track on the album. Lewis distorts and layers his vocals, smearing them over cinematic synths and a twirling drum pattern. He focuses on the tiny, fleeting choices that stitch together a night: a cigarette on the balcony, a move to another bar. “I know you’ve got friends in the bathroom stall,” he sings, pleading. “Can we just stay here for one more song?”
Small production details propel these songs. “FeedTheFire,” a shuffling, insistent track Lewis wrote the same day he helped produce Dua Lipa’s standout “Hallucinate,” features subtle but shimmering strings. The drums throb on “Impact,” a Robyn and Channel Tres duet that twists and reverbs their incandescent harmonies. Even during a mostly forgettable track like “Back to Earth,” the background texture gleams. The clatter and whoops of a crowd or a party are just audible over the thumps and flute, a clever reminder tucked into the drums.
That’s why it’s frustrating when Lewis retreats into safety—the Chainsmokers-esque twinkle of “Heartbreak on the Dancefloor,” or the plodding closing track. Times is a pristine album of frictionless bangers, but these songs are so controlled that they never come close to catharsis. Lewis is clearly an expert student, absorbing and refracting the history of dance and disco with the ache of the present moment. Imagine what he could do if he aimed for the future.

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In 1985, Los Angeles performance artist Anna Homler recorded a series of shamanistic dream-songs with Southern California composer Steve Moshier, who accompanied Homler's chants with watery synthesizers and rubbery electronic pulses. If anyone is going to make sense of this 31-year-old séance in 2016, it's the New York label RVNG Intl., which has just reissued it.

Anna Homler / Steve Moshier: Breadwoman & Other Tales

Breadwoman & Other Tales

"The creation story was just me having the overwhelming desire to wear bread, and hollowing it out and putting it on my head," says Anna Homler of the genesis of Breadwoman, a long-running work that is exactly as the Los Angeles performance artist describes: a woman dressed in peasant clothes, with bread for a mask—a specter at once primitive and majestic, ancestral and eternal.
The chanting, meanwhile, started in 1982: She was driving through Topanga Canyon in a 1961 Cadillac she called the Whale when a song came to her, but not a song in any language she knew. She sang along, a faithful receiver, and those transmissions eventually became the material on Breadwoman & Other Tales, in which she gives voice to shamanistic dream-songs rendered in a style partly reminiscent of Meredith Monk and Joan La Barbara. "It's a found language," she says of the tongue that she began channeling in her Breadwoman songs. "I used to say it was invented, but I didn't really invent it; I found it. It bubbled up."
The recordings here come from a 1985 cassette, but if you believe Homler, the songs themselves may be thousands of years old. Noting how certain "words" in her lyrics later turned out to resemble words in other tongues (various African languages, or Serbo-Croatian), she ventures that perhaps she taps into something ancient in her songs—a universal language, a mother tongue passed on to us via her harvest god.
If anyone is going to make sense of this 31-year-old séance in 2016, it's RVNG Intl., a New York label that has made bridging generations an integral part of its practice: linking up psychedelic noisemakers Sun Araw and M. Geddes Gengras with legendary Jamaican reggae outfit the Congos, for instance, or getting Julianna Barwick in a room with no wave legend Ikue Mori. Homler's musical partner for these '80s sessions was Steve Moshier, a Southern California composer who accompanies Homler's chants with watery synthesizers and rubbery electronic pulses, fusing distant past with deep future. (That collision brings to mind Craig Leon's work of stargazing primitivism Nommos, which, as chance has it, RVNG Intl. reissued on 2014's Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music.) It would be easy to imagine a project like Homler's getting wrapped up in New Age packaging—birdsong and pan flute and synth pads as airy as spun sugar. Fortunately, Homler and Moshier had something far different in mind, and, consequently, the music on Breadwoman & Other Tales sounds as alien now as it must have then.
On "Ee Chê," Homler's chanting, sung in a mode that's not quite blues but not quite not blues, either, flows in multi-tracked circles over a slow railroad chug of white noise punctuated by plunging bass glissandos. Moshier has a knack for finding a single, spellbinding sound and sending it swinging through the void like a pendulum, and here, it is a lone, wavering bass tone that feels less like a musical figure than something inadvertently picked up by a space telescope. Two long, meditative songs, not on the original cassette release, might be the most spellbinding selections here. On the 12-minute "Sirens," Homler squeals and clicks over queasy synth drones, and on "Celestial Ash," delay and multi-tracking are used to stretch Homler's voice into a luminous mist, as she sings a patient, mournful song over looped whispers and coos. It is mesmerizing; 17 minutes pass by in a flash. Whatever your feelings about divining speech from ancestral voices, you don't have to take any of Homler's theories literally to recognize the power in these songs. Wherever they may have come from, they have the power to take the listener far beyond the limits of the known musical universe.


On his first full-length under the Leech alias, Brian Foote dissects his electronic music until it evokes the wide-open spaces of early drum’n’bass.

Data Horde

For the better part of the last 20 years, Brian Foote has been behind the scenes and at the perimeter of the stage, calmly making sure everything goes smoothly. With work for both the celebrated Kranky label as well as his own Peak Oil imprint, studio credits ranging from production for Zola Jesus to drum programming for a pre-Ableton Stephen Malkmus, or catch-all auxiliary electronics duties in Valet, Fontanelle, and a touring configuration of Atlas Sound, Foote’s roles tend towards the understated but indispensable. A patient, exacting approach guided even the mossiest work from his electro-acoustic collective Nudge, and he applies that same precision to Data Horde, the first full-length from his dancefloor-minded alias Leech.
In the liner notes for a Leech cassette release from 2017, Foote shouted out trailblazing early ’90s UK jungle labels Moving Shadow and Good Looking Records, and some of the material feels influenced by jungle’s early, more minimal days. With Data Horde, Foote pays more direct tribute, exfoliating his tracks until the skeletal elements of dissected drum’n’bass are left in a vast, empty field. Within these dubby, wide-open spaces, Foote steadily unravels tightly controlled productions.
As the title might imply, Data Horde has a labored-over feel, as if the sessions were refined repeatedly over the course of months or even years. The slowly blooming first few minutes of “Nimble” feel disorienting until accumulating layers of polyrhythms and interlocking synth lines click into place to reveal the purpose of every sound. Clearly a fascinated student of techno history, Foote plays with the boundaries of where one microscopic subgenre of electronic music becomes another. A brief passage of fuzzy bass stumbling drunkenly through choppy drum patterns in “Bit Rot” suggests IDM, but stops short before making any predictable moves. Vaguely familiar jungle breaks slither in and out of focus and acid basslines drool across “Delysid,” rolling in waves of anticipatory tension that never fully break. In every track, the expected turn is sidestepped, and the drop never happens.
Most interestingly, even with its nods to rave’s early prime, Data Horde is neither a nostalgic love letter to the golden era of drum’n’bass or an academicized archeological dig of a ’92 warehouse party. Foote aims for a specific sweet spot of jungle’s gilded days, but also explores beyond those constraints. With the same steadfast demeanor that touches all of Foote’s work, his first fully formed collection of Leech material creates a breathing environment where fragments of the past joyously corrode into whatever comes next.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the pop star’s singular 2007 album, her oft-misunderstood comeback and a defining cultural artifact of the dark, trashy, celebrity-driven essence of the aughts.

Blackout

A woman drives fast along the California freeway with the radio screaming, delirious with grief. She does this every morning, dressing quickly in her Beverly Hills home so as to leave no time to think. Changing lanes is like a dance the way she’s trained herself to do it, seamlessly and to the beat. She walks barefoot into gas stations, rinsing down pills with warm Coca-Cola and chatting mindlessly with the attendants. Her marriage is over. Her showbiz career is dead. Her child has been taken away. She is known to cry at parties or get carried home; close friends have come to believe she’s insane. It is only on the freeway, when the music is loud, that she can forget what’s become of her life. To fall asleep she imagines herself on the road: “The Hollywood to the San Bernardino and straight on out, past Barstow, past Baker, driving straight on into the hard white empty core of the world.”
How chic the story sounds the way Joan Didion tells it in her 1970 novel Play It as It Lays. The woman is a trainwreck but a sharp and glamorous one, numbing out on pills as a critique of moral rot in 1960s Tinseltown. Books are great that way. Played out in real life in the year 2007, the tale loses its cool; now the woman is a punchline whose endless personal disasters keep a burgeoning new media economy afloat. It seemed that every week, or sometimes even every day, brought a hysterical new headline regarding the downward spiral of America’s pop princess. (“HELP ME!” “INSANE!” “OUT OF CONTROL!”) “We serialize Britney Spears. She’s our President Bush,” said TMZ founder Harvey Levin in a gruesome Rolling Stone cover story from early 2008, which began with Britney wailing in a San Fernando Valley shopping mall as a crowd closed around her with their Sidekick smartphones brandished. “I don’t know who you think I am, bitch,” 26-year-old Spears snarled to a shopgirl approaching for a photo. “But I’m not that person.”
What had become of the Southern sweetheart was not a symptom or appraisal of a new century’s decay but the foremost emblem of it, or possibly its cause. A New York Times essay that summed up 2007 as the year of the trainwreck, in which “prominent figures from every arena of public life did harm to their reputations and livelihoods in devastating fashion,” led with a description of Spears’ lifeless performance at the VMAs that fall. “Is there any measurable way to prove what many of us feel in our gut,” the article went on, “that 2007 was the year when the excesses of our most reliably outrageous personalities finally started to feel, well, excessive?” Or was it that the billion-dollar gossip industry, newly powerful online, had willed this chaos into being? It was the dawning of the era of perpetual surveillance, and websites once considered too sketchy to break news were scooping the “real” outlets when it came to all things shallow and macabre.
It had been nearly four years without new Britney Spears music. She remained the defining figure of American pop culture, only what that meant had changed, and by then the image of the happy blonde from Kentwood, Louisiana, had been replaced a few times over. “Have you ever gone further than you wish you had?” Diane Sawyer asked the singer gravely on Primetime in 2003, whipping out the pages of a recent Esquire shoot which styled her in little more than a dozen strings of pearls. Its accompanying story, written by Chuck Klosterman, opened with the sentence, “Britney Spears is pantless,” and went on to conclude: “She is not so much a person as an idea, and the idea is this: You can want everything, so long as you get nothing.” On the cover she was made up like Marilyn Monroe, with whom she shared a knack for articulating her own myth with more profundity and wit than most smug writer types.
In the years since her last record, 2003’s In the Zone, Spears had married a dancer from Fresno, gave birth to their two sons, negotiated a divorce, lost custody of the babies, went twice to rehab, shook off her management team, and spent her days hunted by cameramen through the gas stations, pharmacies, and drive-thrus of L.A. She also wrote a blog. For $25 a year, you could read the singer’s musings on the fearsome beauty of tigers (“their eyes, their stripes, their constant quest for survival”) or poems she’d written: “Manipulation is the key/They screw it in/Because you’re naive,” went one from 2006. Other times she’d weigh in on her latest dramas with good humor and startling self-awareness. “Recently, I was sent to a very humbling place called rehab,” she wrote in spring 2007. Three months before, she’d shaved her head bald at a hair salon in the Valley as the paparazzi snapped on. Headlines called her crazy, but she looked strangely serene. “It felt almost religious,” Spears described the moment in her 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me. “I was living on a level of pure being.”
In a blog update from June 2007, Spears appeared in a cheap wig and elbow-length white gloves, posing like she might have circa Oops!... I Did It Again. “I’m asking my most die-hard fans for some assistance in order to name my upcoming album” the post read, presenting the following titles for fans to vote on:
1. Omg is Like Lindsay Lohan Like Okay Like
2. What if the Joke is on You
3. Down boy
4. Integrity
5. Dignity
As a riff on her own image, it was better satire than the cheap shots at the star that pervaded late-night TV. In any case, she named the album Blackout.
⚜ ⚜ ⚜
In a ritualistic deflowering ceremony stretched out across three years, millions watched as Spears transformed from a shy schoolgirl to a sweat-slick jungle queen, writhing beneath a python onstage at the VMAs. I can’t count the times I’ve replayed these performances—1999, 2000, 2001—trying to articulate what made her such a star. Her melismatic voice, sung from her nose and not her chest, lacked the power of the divas of the ’90s, trembling instead with plucky naivety. But beneath her confidence and cheery disposition, the pathos of her best songs (“Sometimes,” “Lucky,” “Everytime”) always seemed to trace back to the loneliness of being misconstrued. “Notice me,” she whimpered on the first line of the latter. In the 2004 video, she drowns in the bathtub of a hotel room from injuries sustained in a paparazzi chase while a baby is born in a hospital nearby. Spears wrote the treatment herself.
By September 2007, four years had passed since Spears’ last VMAs appearance, where a campy kiss with Madonna had triggered lesbian rumors and conservative talk show ire. Compared to the promo blitzes for her previous albums, she had so far done almost nothing to advertise the long-awaited Blackout, her fifth album to be released later that fall. Her performance of its lead single that would open the awards show was hyped as the equivalent of Elvis’ 1968 comeback special. “My team was pressuring me to get out there and show the world I was fine,” wrote Spears in her memoir. “The only problem with this plan: I was not fine.”
Sleepless, under-rehearsed, and fresh off a backstage run-in with her ex Justin Timberlake, who’d take home more awards than any other artist that night, Spears had a panic attack. With messy hair and denim-blue contacts, she staggered around the stage, shimmying miserably to a song called “Gimme More.” “I knew it was going to be bad,” she described in the memoir. “I could see myself on video throughout the auditorium while I performed. It was like looking at myself in a funhouse mirror.” The camera panned the crowd: Rihanna stifled a giggle, 50 Cent arched a brow. Spears looked so tragic up there that I doubt too many viewers were paying much attention to how nuts the music sounded. Her voice stretches and smears and splinters, interrupted now and then by a man who sounded like Satan, or perhaps Dracula. It’s a song about surveillance in the guise of a song about sex, showing you how it feels when the two topics are entwined—a pole-dance number for the panopticon. “They want more?” she gasps over the beat’s zombified thud and the creepy oohs and ahhs of the spectral background choir. “I’ll give them more,” she promises, whispering it like a threat.
At home, the song’s producer, Floyd Hills, watched, waiting for a sign: “Just give me that one pop to let me know you back.” The beatmaker better known as Danja had come up under Timbaland, the most influential producer of the century thus far; they’d shared credits on Timberlake’s 2006 album FutureSex / LoveSounds, which ran the charts and earned the former boy band member newfound cred. That summer, Danja had begun to work with Spears on the album that would mark his solo breakthrough, which she’d call in her memoir “the thing I’m most proud of in my whole career.” The producer had become obsessed with the dance music he’d heard in the nightclubs of Miami, a year before the Daft Punk tour that brought their French touch to the American mainstream in 2007. “Everyone was bouncing around to Benny Benassi’s ‘Satisfaction’ and Tiesto, literally in a trance,” Danja recalled of one night at Club Space. “I was like, that’s it. If my music doesn’t make you feel like that, what are we doing?”
The Blackout sessions flowed without direction or distraction, with Spears estranged from her old team and unburdened by the notion of “pop.” “She might have been going through more in her personal life than what we knew at that time, and it got a little crazier when we were deeper in the project,” Danja said a decade later. Still, the crew of writers—among them Keri Hilson and T-Pain—were struck by the singer’s instincts. She knew exactly what a Britney Spears record should sound like at that time. “You would know how she felt about a song by pure body language,” said Danja. He stuck to beats that made her dance in the booth: “Something hard and edgy with hip-hop undertones. Once I realized that was what she wanted to do, that’s where I stayed.”
A synth on the fritz, an animal shriek, and the slap of a bag of quarters on the folding counter of Hell’s only late-night laundromat: so begins Blackout’s second single, “Piece of Me,” the coolest song of Britney Spears’ career. “I’m Miss American Dream since I was 17,” she sneers, her voice thrown and refracted, sinking through Auto-Tune ooze into a beat from Bloodshy & Avant, the Swedish duo who’d helped her win her first Grammy for “Toxic” in 2004. You could simplify the song as a piece about the obliteration of selfhood as the cost of mega-fame, its decayed sound paired perfectly with its rotten subject matter. But that description makes it sound like Spears would play the victim. Instead she rolls her eyes, already bored with your obsession.
“Piece of Me” is among the great works of American art about fame. But at the 2:08 mark, it becomes a masterpiece as Spears’ voice glitches, stutters, and doubles over the throb of a synth line as elegant as the 2000’s iciest grime. It is rightfully here that the careers of Charli XCX and PC Music begin, with music that still sounds like the future of pop 17 years later. Most critics at the time attributed Blackout’s radical sound to the non-Britney Spears names among its credits, where she is listed as executive producer. (“She has done almost nothing, in the recording studio or outside it, to convince fans that Blackout is really hers, or really her,” wrote Kelefa Sanneh in a New York Times review.) But in ways that anticipate Kanye West’s Yeezus six years later—the treatment of the human voice, the purpose behind each sound—such an alarming album on fame’s shattering potential could be made only by this artist at this moment.
And what exactly did Blackout emerge from? Taking notes to write this piece, bullet points played out like a mid-aughts version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”: “BIMBO SUMMIT / BLING RING / PORNHUB / WILL.I.AM / ROCK OF LOVE / CINESPACE// KIM K SEX TAPE / SOULJA BOY CRANK THAT / JUICY ON MY SWEATPANTS / DEADMAU5 / BLOGHOUSE / ANNA NICOLE SMITH” It’s the era’s naughty qualities that most stand out today. But the trashy-fun abandon never quite made it to pop, which still felt quaint beside the bacchanalian club rap and stadium R&B. (“It’s been boring,” Spears said in 2006 regarding the pop scene. “Nothing’s been wow to me.”) Cher’s “Believe” had brought Auto-Tune’s post-human sparkle to the radio in ’98, though songs by T-Pain and Lil Wayne that normalized the plug-in as an expressive tool were still mostly seen as gimmicks. Blackout took the concept further, going beyond naughty to feel genuinely sinister: a glimpse inside a life from which every bit of normalcy had been stripped away.
“I’m crazy as a motherfucker, bet that on your man,” Spears sing-songs on Blackout’s weirdest song, “Get Naked (I Got a Plan).” The track buzzes like a lightbulb dangling from a string as Danja assumes the role of a maniacal wizard, smearing his cackling vocals across space and time. Spears’ chants and teases are stretched and pulled to the limits of what is recognizably human; still, she rides the beat. It’s a song about sex that makes you consider abstaining from it forever, and that’s before Danja slips into a terrifying trance, grasping mechanically at Spears like a demented pervert robot.
The year before, Spears’ superstar ex had made a promise to bring sexy back. I listen to FutureSex/LoveSounds today and cringe, less for the pleasures of millennial misandry than for how purely wack it sounds when played next to Blackout. Why is it that Blackout sounds vital today where FutureSex sounds limp, though Danja’s fingerprints are all over both records? You could call it a vibe shift: FutureSex marked the end of Timbaland’s 10-year reign as urban radio innovator, while Blackout looked ahead to our synthetic future. (Timbaland’s slick beats in the late ’90s and 2000s conjured images of hoverboards and flying cars, but it’s the melancholy futurism of TLC’s FanMail that resonates today in its 1999 vision of lonely androids refreshing their inboxes.) More than that, Spears understood something Timberlake didn’t: Abjection is a powerful aphrodisiac, and desire requires a void.
Venture too far down the rabbit hole of 2007 Britney cliché and you might end up at the idea of Blackout as an evil album, an exploitative document of a woman at rock bottom. The cliché extends to the well-intended but condescending coffee mugs emblazoned with the catchphrase “If Britney Survived 2007, You Can Make It Through Today.” But to view Blackout through a lens of victimhood is to miss how fun and wild the album can be. Irksome on the first few listens, “Radar” becomes addictive in its counterintuitive swing, her vocals just behind the beat like today’s rap avant-garde. On “Freakshow,” Spears raps in a campy-cool mode between Peaches and Fergie (“On some superstar ish, pushing hot Bugatti whips”) before her voice is chopped to smithereens as Bloodshy & Avant try their hand at dubstep wobbles. Even harder is “Toy Soldier,” an amped-up K-Fed sneak diss co-written by Sean Garrett, the pen behind Ciara’s “Goodies” and Beyoncé’s “Upgrade U.” (Call me crazy, but I hear glimmers of Azealia Banks’ “212” in its bratty bounce.)
The only press Spears did for Blackout was a live radio interview with Ryan Seacrest that October. KIIS-FM had told her it would be about the record, until the questions began: Do you feel like you’re doing everything you can for your kids? How often will you see them? “It felt like that was the only thing that people wanted to talk about: whether or not I was a fit mother,” Spears remembered in her memoir. “Not about how I’d made such a strong album while holding two babies on my hips and being pursued by dozens of dangerous men all day, every day.” Still, she managed a quick mention of her favorite track: “Heaven on Earth,” the nearest Blackout comes to a love song. Its inspiration (Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”) is all climax, but Spears works the other way, surrendering the final minute to freefall. “I falllllll off the edge of my miiiiiind,” she exhales, spiraling to a level of pure being.
Where her previous CD booklets had arrived with gushing “thank you” lists, Blackout came with none at all. It was the first Britney Spears album without a No.1 debut when a last-minute Billboard rule change bumped the Eagles’ seventh album, sold exclusively at Walmart, to the top. Even the glowing reviews wondered whether this nihilistic album was by Britney, or about her. Why not both? Years later, a leaked email from Spears demanded co-direction credits for the “Piece of Me” video. “I am learning more and more to take charge of my own life for a change,” she wrote. “If that bothers you then go sign another artist.” (She signed off: “Cheerfully yours.”)
“Do you feel out of control in your life?” asks an interviewer off-screen in Britney: For the Record, the MTV documentary on Spears’ “post-breakdown” life released at the end of 2008. That February, she had been placed against her will under the conservatorship of her father and former business manager, which would last for the next 13 years. “No, I don’t feel it’s out of control. I think it’s too in control,” Spears answers without pause. “There’s no excitement. There’s no passion. It’s like Groundhog Day every day.” The camera pulls in close as she wipes away her tears. “When did you last feel free?” the man asks later. “When I got to drive my car a lot,” she wistfully replies. “I haven’t been able to drive my car.”


The Return of East Atlanta Santa leans on the lighter, more playful side of Gucci’s personality. You can hear him settling into his clean post-prison lifestyle and his new, clearer voice.

Gucci Mane: The Return of East Atlanta Santa

The Return of East Atlanta Santa

The unifying thread in Gucci Mane’s music since being released from prison this past May after serving nearly three years for drug and gun charges can be summed up in one word: readjustment. His stunning physical transformation—which included losing 75 pounds and the emergence of an enviable six-pack, the results of a healthier drug-free lifestyle—also impacted Gucci’s rapping itself. Aside from the usual sort of rust that needed to be shaken off, his dramatic weight loss affected his delivery in other tangible ways (which only stoked the fires of the clone conspiracy theories): the new Gucci was less congested, less slurred, and less guttural.
July’s Everybody Looking felt like an exploratory mission, as if he was unfamiliar with his own voice and testing out his new physical presence for size. Three months later, Woptober followed, which found the prolific Atlanta rapper increasing his familiarity with his vocal register, his rapping tighter and more assured. On The Return of East Atlanta Santa, his final release of 2016, Gucci has caught up with his new normal, sounding fully acclimatized to the new version of himself.
No longer is he searching for his footing: on opener “St. Brick Intro” he immediately slips in the pocket of Zaytoven’s funhouse minor-key rework of “Jingle Bells” and paints himself as the trap Kris Kringle: “Middle of the winter, I pull up in a vert / It’s the middle of December, she pulled up in a skirt/ Santa Claus of the hood, I pull up with the work / They call me East Atlanta Santa, run up on me, get murked.” Irreverent and silly as hell, the only thing that might prevent it from joining the pantheon of unconventional Christmas bangers is the slightness that comes with acting as an album’s welcome mat.
The holiday cheer extends no further, but the album’s remaining twelve tracks benefit from similarly locked-in performances. Whereas Everybody Looking and Woptober mirrored Gucci’s new lifestyle in content as well as form—he opened Everybody Looking by introducing himself as a “recovering drug addict”—here it is reflected in the clarity of his performance. The allusions to cleaner living are mostly oblique. “Last Time” features Travis Scott in support mode—which also happens to be his best mode—and preaches conscientiousness in recreational drug use. It contains some of the few direct references to Gucci’s erratic last decade: “See I’m an ex-X popper and online shopper / Niggas thought I was a clone, they heard me speak proper.” The other nod to his self-destructive past arrives in the chorus of “I Can’t,” one of the stickiest in his post-prison output: “You can talk about homicides, but I can’t.”
Gucci himself remains as magnetic as ever. He isn’t overwhelmed when Drake shows up to pull double duty on “Both,” lending his voice to the song's chorus as well as contributing a verse of his own. It’s more successful than the last time the two linked up—“Back on Road” off Everybody Looking—on which a phoned-in Drake hook added little. Gucci’s also still capable of rattling off deceptively poetic turns of phrases like “Now my watch so fucking bright it look like sunlight in the night,” as heard on the Mike WiLL Made-It-produced standout “Nonchalant.” On the same song he raps “In a whip so new, valet scared to park it,” an example of his sense of humor, which doesn't always get enough credit. The Return of East Atlanta Santa leans on this lighter, more playful side of Gucci’s personality, proving along the way that back to business doesn’t have to mean an absence of fun.


Okay, can someone please remind me why The Strokes were such a polarizing force about two years ago? Listening to ...

Room on Fire

Okay, can someone please remind me why The Strokes were such a polarizing force about two years ago? Listening to Is This It last week had me scratching my head over how it managed to become the Roe vs. Wade of the rock crit world in 2001, with everyone forced to choose sides: "saviors of rock!" or "everything that's wrong with music today!" At the time, I found myself in the latter category, ironically earning myself a spot on this very staff with a lengthy diatribe against the band's hype machine, socioeconomic background, and rampant influence-pilfering. You know, basically everything but the music.
I feel pretty silly about such grandstanding nowadays, having finally listened to, and embraced, at least the show-stopping middle third of The Strokes' debut. But with the release of Room on Fire, both sides of The Great Strokes Debate look a little foolish; NYC's finest have all but given birth to an identical twin. In the interim, a perplexing flirtation with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich ("you know, 'Last Nite' was just a few lasers away from being perfect!") was scrapped, and the band's relentless touring failed to lead them down the cockier, arena-rock path some suspected they'd travel. Instead, Room on Fire is eleven songs sharing DNA with its predecessor, a follow-up of more sleepy, contagious mono-pop that doesn't sound diligently recorded so much as yawned out.
This is far from a bad thing, largely because The Strokes seem almost pathologically unable to write a song that isn't immediately catchy. Tracks like "Reptilia", "Meet Me in the Bathroom", and "Under Control" take their place alongside the highlights of the band's debut, all hitting that perfect contrast of woozy nonchalance and taut guitar work that appears to be the alpha and omega of their stylistic inventory. That there's nothing new or innovative to be found here is sure to be a common complaint, though only those who prize evolution over knowing one's strengths will cry fraud.
Speaking of the originality quotient-- and not to add more historical tinder to the fire of what bands The Strokes supposedly owe a debt to, but-- lead guitarist Nick Valensi is sweating The Pixies' Joey Santiago something fierce here. His development is the only newish detail I can detect on Room on Fire, and it's an inspiration that lends improvement; Santiago's beautifully simple lead lines were The Pixies' secret weapon, and Valensi employs a similar humble style to lend a melodic counterpoint to the proceedings. Whether showing up at the Halloween party as The Cars' keyboard on "12:51" or contributing slow-hand solos to "What Ever Happened?" and "You Talk Way Too Much", it's an extra spritz of tuneship that only assists The Strokes' infectious ways.
Of course, Julian Casablancas is a far cry from Frank Black as vocalists go, but it can at least be said that he knows his place through Room on Fire. Wisely avoiding the unbecoming screaminess of subpar Is This It tracks like "Take It or Leave It" and "New York City Cops", he instead applies a cough syrupy croon to "Under Control" and "The End Is No End", its bum notes smoothed out by his payphone vocal effect addiction. Casablancas also appears to have moved beyond the smirking misogyny of his early lyrics, just as the cover art is sagely chosen to continue the abstract graphic theme of the Stateside edition of Is This It rather than the Smell the Glove-style UK version.
Meanwhile, the rhythm section, the band's Achilles' heel, continues to miraculously scrape by, lending these tracks a vaguely new wave air despite slack-limp playing (hey guys, trade Godrich's number for the DFA's and you might be onto something). Drummer Fabrizio Moretti has always tended to sound a bit like a drum machine, and here his best work happens when he shares the drummer's stool with a sampler-- "The Way It Is" and "Meet Me in the Bathroom" shuffle with the best technology 1983 had to offer. Bassman Nikolai Fraiture, mostly relegated to backbone status on this outing, carries less of the band's melodic weight than he did on Is This It but gets a front-of-stage moment on the perfectly choreographed breakdown of "Reptilia".
It remains to be seen whether old white men will continue to trumpet The Strokes as leading the cause of hiphopicide, and if young white idealists will stand firm on the opposite side, regarding the band as the Nike of indie rock (and no doubt fixating their conspiracy theories on Casablancas' sarcastic aside "keepin' down the underground, oh no!"); what's clear is that The Fab(rizio) Five neither deserve, nor desire, either status-- their goals are about as unpretentious and uncomplicated as possible. They may not be able to get away with milking this formula for many more albums, but for now, Room on Fire's eleven songs find them drowsily getting away with what they do best.


Eleanor Friedberger's solo music has long made New York City its stage, but she moved to upstate New York to write her third solo album New View. The record’s no-fuss, featherlight acoustic pop songs weave into one another seamlessly, Friedberger’s melodies familiar and redolent of artists like Harry Nilsson and Neil Young without playing like nostalgia.

New View

This past October, Eleanor Friedberger released "False Alphabet City," a groovy one-off single all about the "city that betrayed her." Like many musicians before her, Friedberger has long made New York City her favorite stage. Her songs, which roll with a bouncy '70s pop nostalgia, are peppered with stories of getting sick riding the Coney Island Cyclone, snapping pictures in front of a sweet Lamborghini on Manhattan Avenue, and the small, poignant act of muting Taxi TV. But with a bitter edge in its tone, "False Alphabet City" played like an earnest goodbye, to the noise, to whoever hurt her, to the false glamour of urban spaces.
So after over a decade of Brooklyn dwelling, Friedberger moved to upstate New York and wrote her third solo album New View. And while Personal Record was populated with energized, electric rock songs and party-hopping anthems, New View’s territory is far more easygoing, more traditional in its structure. The record’s no-fuss, featherlight acoustic pop songs weave into one another seamlessly, Friedberger’s melodies familiar and redolent of artists like Harry Nilsson and Neil Young without playing like nostalgia. But even if New View’s overall aesthetic may pair nicely with your laziest summer Sunday morning, there’s an undercurrent of serious melancholia in Friedberger’s writing here, setting it apart tonally from her previous two records.
What’s palpable on New View is a sense of loneliness. You might even say hermitry, as Friedberger’s writing here suggests, at times, a mindset distanced from physical society. The hazy "Open Season" plays like Friedberger writing a letter to a long-lost friend or lover whose whereabouts she doesn’t know. "Is it freezing over there? I’m opening a tree museum, that’s my new hobby," she sings, seemingly poking fun at how settled her life has become. On "Cathy With the Curly Hair," a bopping, synth-laden outlier, Friedberger goes through the calendar months recounting memories of an unraveled relationship. In a year when catching up on an old friend’s whereabouts is as easy as Googling their name, New View’s ponderings might seem anachronistic, too reliant on in-person communication. But perhaps we all know by now that loneliness can be just as prevalent in a hyper-connected present.
An interesting thread throughout New View’s equal parts wistful and frustrated tales of breakups is how often Friedberger explicitly refers to writing about them. She mentions that she knows she'll write about someone, to the experience of listening to her own songs when she has nothing more to say, to her own stage fright. On "Never Is a Long Time," Friedberger invokes the cynical energy of Lindsey Buckingham’s Tusk cuts, particularly "Walk a Thin Line," as she sings of a relationship's undoing in an uncharacteristically low and trembling voice, a single drum banging haphazardly in the background. "We are less than nothing, nothing is a perfect rhyme," she sings.
In the past, Friedberger has loaded her music with little pedestrian anecdotes that feel specific to her songwriting, bits of wordplay and vivid descriptions of acquaintances and locations. Sometimes she gets there on New View, particularly on "Does Turquoise Work?" and "All Known Things" which includes kissing in a mausoleum, but the album is largely devoid of these lyrical quirks. In their place is a kind of self-aware storytelling that plays like Friedberger is letting us in to a very personal process. At times New View can seem like a concept record detailing Friedberger's ambivalence about her main gift: spinning fragile memories and feelings into accessible songs.


Co-produced by Adrianne Lenker, the Australian songwriter’s debut is a dark little star of intimacy and intensity. The atmosphere is rapt, the silences charged.

Echo

The Sydney-based singer-songwriter Indigo Sparke makes the kind of spare folk that can quiet a room. Circumstances being what they are, she hasn’t had the opportunity to quiet very many. Last year, though, she was joined by a kindred artist, someone else who does not have to raise their voice to command attention. A few songs into her March 2020 performance at NPR’s Tiny Desk, Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker sauntered out. The pair were briefly involved in 2019, and as with Big Thief guitarist Buck Meek, Lenker and Sparke seem to have forged an enduring musical connection. At NPR, Lenker looked both self-effacing and worshipfully attentive, offering tasteful filigree: David Rawlings to Sparke’s Gillian Welch.
Sparke prefers to keep her music at a soft glow, brushing the strings with her fingertips to draw the barest whisper of sound. Her voice is often breathy, recalling dreamy folk artists like Hope Sandoval, Julie Byrne, and yes, Adrianne Lenker. If you didn’t pay close attention, you could probably slot her into a Soft Sounds playlist without pausing to observe the undercurrents running through her work.
But as with Lenker, there is a weird magnetism just beneath the surface. Sparke sings with quicksilver emotional ferocity, flickering out of her head voice into a lower register that hints at wilder, more elemental feelings. She acted briefly before breaking into music, and although her songs are simple, she has a performer’s instinct for how to transmute a rudimentary blob into a Rorschach blot. The atmosphere is rapt, the silences charged. The longer you spend sinking into her music, the more you realize its essence is not airy, but inky and dense, and Echo is a dark little star of intimacy and intensity.
By her own account, Sparke taught herself to play guitar in her 20s, and most of these songs are nothing but a few open chords broken into rudimentary fingerpicking patterns, the sort of playing you could more or less figure out in an afternoon. But on songs like “Wolf,” “Bad Dreams,” and “Everything Everything,” she hauls big feelings, dripping and alive, from the depths with just a few tangles of notes. Finger-picking is an intimate form, one that gives you a window into a musician’s consciousness—hearing the little inner voicings ripple out is like hearing a mind at work. It is subtle, ongoing magic similar to sentence-making—the way the words fall in a line, the places where the notes land. Sparke’s finger-picking patterns are so careful, so expressive, that they constitute little songs themselves.
“Bad Dreams” takes up a rolling quasi-flamenco pattern that recalls Leonard Cohen’s earliest work, or Angel Olsen’s 2014 Cohen tribute “White Fire.” “Everything Everything” pairs another basic pattern with an otherworldly-sounding piano, floating in from a blue-black darkness redolent of Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon.” “Everything everything, everything is dying,” Sparke whispers, and the mood is not gothic but serene, even comforting.
Conversely, Sparke’s lyrics make love and human desire sound perilous and self-devouring: “You broke all of my ribs in a dream the other night/You said you were not hurting me, just trying to hold me tight,” she sings on “Bad Dreams,” drawing out the last word and sounding for all the world like someone having the air throttled out of them. The sex on “Wolf” is indeed sexy, but also terrifying in its enormity: “Come upstairs, let me show you all the parts you haven’t seen/There’s a hell, there’s a heaven, there’s a universe exploding...I am wet, I am burning, I am an ocean for you.”
Her stark imagery serves the same purpose as her playing—setting the stage and ceding it. Everything is in service to her voice, which mingles sensuality and menace, soothsaying and foreboding. At the close of “Carnival,” Sparke dips again into her voluble middle and lower range. The song reaches a peak when the strumming quiets, and her voice quavers: “Oh mom, please hold my hand ’cause I feel like I can’t feel,” she sings, breaking again into her head voice, and simply keening. The moment feels alive, unbidden, a current let loose into the world and vibrating out into the absorbing dark.

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Mos Def's long-awaited sophomore full-length was five years in the making, but perhaps unwisely uses too many scraps from the nixed recording sessions of his rap-rock group Black Jack Johnson. And don't even get us started on Jay-Z killer "The Rape Over". The what?!

The New Danger

I know I'm in denial, but I'm still hoping that the first five minutes of The New Danger were unintentional. Perhaps Mos Def, still lit after a performance of Top Dog/Underdog, wandered into the studio during Living Colour's reunion jamboree, recorded five minutes of talking, and walked out with some sort of leather-induced amnesia. How else to explain the jarring transition between Raphael Saadiq's floating keys on "The Boogie Man Song" and Dr. Know's hyper-machismo axe-wielding on "Freaky Black Greetings"? How to explain an awkward, ill-advised stumble through Durst-style rap-rock? After exactly five years of waiting for the follow-up to 1999's magnificent Black on Both Sides, Mos Def opens by rehashing the final minutes of "Rock 'n' Roll" with the less-than-subtle assistance of Black Jack Johnson. Mos, say it ain't so.
Curiously, despite Mos' on-the-mark vocalizing about the neglected acknowledgment of the Afro-American influence on rock, he chose the arguably least "black" form to express himself. Granted, more African-American creative input in modern rock would be a wonderful thing-- and Mos' attempt is laudable-- but as he says, "I ain't try to fuck with Limp Bizkit," suggesting that rap and rock are two very different beasts whose collusion could be disastrous. Yet both "Freaky Black Greetings" and "Zimzallabim" borrow heavily from the Chocolate Starfish playbook. Suffice to say, Mos' cry, "We show you how to really make a moshpit bounce" is unconvincing at best.
"War" regurgitates a similar tune, adding a fairly benign critique of its titular subject, depressingly offering the impression that Mos believes a loud message makes an acceptable substitute for a thoughtful one. On the record's rock-tinged tracks, Know's overpowering licks seem to render a stop payment on Mos' creativity. "Life Is Real", for example, finds a terminal case of logorrhea infecting an uncharacteristically awful Mos verse: "My whole life is ill/ My whole life is real/ Mornings, noons, nights/ Birthdays, work days, holidays, funerals." What's more, Know's material fails to connect thematically or musically to the rest of the album, causing an unfortunate fit of dysrhythmia.
It's unfortunate that a phenom like "Sex, Love & Money"-- with its fat Dick Tracy horns, whimpering jungle flute, and marching band percussion-- is lost in the melee. Here, Mos tantalizes us with a glimpse of his past ebullience as he hums: "Lay back and relax your mind/ About to double the dosage in the half-time/ Master physical mastermind." Likewise, "The Panties" and "Modern Marvel" revel in the sleepy genius of "Umi Says" and deliver their respective messages of love and sadness with quiet, erupting impact. These, however, are the lone highlights of this otherwise disappointing release. For an artist whose stage moniker literally translates as "the highest certainty," Mos Def's newest release carries the unfortunate weight of indecisiveness.


Spanning tender acoustic ballads, silky R&B performance, and contemporary urbano swagger, the singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist’s second LP unites the facets of his own artistic identity.

Agüita

Some electronic musicians use a handful of aliases, recognizing that their fans—and the industry at large—can have difficulty reconciling new sounds coming from familiar names. Jazz artists form fresh ensembles to explore different lanes. Punks start new bands. None of those options seem to suit Gabriel Garzón-Montano. Instead he’s populated his latest album, Agüita, with three characters, each a different facet of a three-dimensional self-portrait that examines the origins of his sense of self. The son of a Colombian father and French mother, born and raised in Brooklyn, he’s at once of Europe and Latin America, of New York and the United States. The first two characters, the “wistful impressionist” rooted in European theatre and fashion and the “leading man” studied in American soul and R&B, will be familiar to those who’ve heard his first two records, the 2014 EP Bishouné: Alma del Huila and the 2017 LP Jardín.
But the third, an “urbano hitmaker” with the contemporary swagger of a reggaetonero, is something new, an illuminating view into how GGM constructs his own id. Debuted in a stunning medley for the Colors video performance series, the character feels like connective tissue between the others, slithering across the sexual spectrum as he tries on urbano’s egocentric hypermasculinity, minus the misogyny. These are also his first songs in Spanish; the challenge of writing in another language is amplified by the fact that he’s not just singing, but rapping, and the flow en español comes with its own unique challenges of diction and cadence. His fractured sense of self serves him well here, as he uses second-generation Spanglish to connect troublesome bars.
Still, it doesn’t always work. The “look like a book/stack like books” line on “Mira My Look” reaches Travis Scott levels of goofy. But the experimentation is admirable, even if the transition from romance to raunch can feel awkward at times, like when the “soaking wet” metaphor in “Agüita” manifests as a literal firehose in the video. From a production standpoint, the new direction is promising. For the Sly & Robbie-sampling “Muñeca,” Garzón-Montano studied plugins and compression techniques in an attempt to match the frequencies of J Balvin’s “Reggaeton,” itself an homage to OGs Tego Calderón and Daddy Yankee; the result is a thumping bassline in lockstep with the classic riddim’s drums and a horn melody that’s somehow both blaring and subdued. The most successful contemporary reggaetón finds ways to breathe new life into the classic riddim, but reverse-engineering the formula is a good start.
The rest of Agüita feels more in line with the aesthetic Garzón-Montano has spent much of the past decade crafting. A multi-instrumentalist with an ear for sound design, his aesthetic is that of a deviant with a touch of sweetness, like a freak in the sheets who still sends your mom flowers on her birthday. His analog instruments have distinct textures, from dampened drums to willowy strings and carefully placed negative space. They complement the album’s most tender moments, like the despair of his mother’s passing on “Moonless,” or the juxtaposition of his cracking voice and the gorgeous, meticulously arranged strings on “Fields.” And “Someone,” with its depiction of a one-sided tryst, pairs sexual generosity and emotional vulnerability in a way not often seen from a “leading man.”
Separately, the songs on Agüita don’t seem to fit together. But Garzón-Montano’s touch as a producer is deft, and his masterful track sequencing produces fluidity. It’s how a song like “Bloom,” a sparse, lyric-driven track in which he toys with homonyms at the beginning and ending of each verse, can precede the swinging-dick vibes of “Agüita.” He likes to refer to the album as “anti-genre,” but really, the genre is Garzón-Montano. Even as he reaches for disparate sources of influence, his gaze is still directed inward, his songs an examination of the various elements of his own artistic identity. The album credits, which feature guest vocals from Nick Hakim (“With a Smile”), Ana Tijoux (“Muñeca”), and a coterie of guest musicians, are evidence of frequent collaborations. But much of the production was solitary, and Garzón-Montano’s vocal tracks were recorded in near isolation on the family farm in the foothills of the Andes, deep in Colombian coffee country.
At a glance, Garzón-Montano’s work would seem incompatible with the hyperspeed of the contemporary music industry and its constricting metrics of success. His embrace of Colombia’s language ironically pushes him further to the margins; though Agüita’s reggaetón songs warrant inclusion on the Latin charts, the album doesn’t have enough Spanish lyrics to qualify for Latin Grammys. Yet with each release, it’s clear he is wholly unconcerned with playing that game. Instead, his music radiates self-reflection—each song carefully considered and delivered with intention.

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Compton rapper YG and producer DJ Mustard have forged the type of symbiotic producer-rapper bond that's scarcely been seen on a mainstream field of play since Drake and Noah "40" Shebib. On YG's major-label debut, Mustard’s production and YG’s songwriting have both gone deliciously widescreen.

My Krazy Life

Much ink has been spilled over the death of regionalism in rap: New York's A$AP Mob fusing Harlem rap with Memphis and Houston aesthetics, Chief Keef and Chicago's drill kids building on the blueprint crafted by Waka Flocka and Lex Luger in Atlanta, and Drake up in Toronto shrewdly cherry-picking styles from everyone. However, a group of Cali savants are eking out a body of work that gives the lie to the current proclamations of post-regionalism. Up north, the Bay area hyphy sound's morphed into something sleeker and poppier thanks to LoveRance and Heartbreak Gang’s Iamsu! and Sage the Gemini. Down in L.A., DJ Mustard’s elevated the profiles of third-tier YMCMB star Tyga, singers TeeFlii and Ty Dolla $ign, and Compton rapper YG.
Mustard's sound peruses the common ground between the chunky low-end synths of seminal house hits like Robin S.’ “Show Me Love” and the orchestral pomp of g-funk-era Dre. He and YG have worked closely on mixtapes such as 2012's 4 Hunnid Degreez and the Just Re’d Up series, forging a symbiotic producer-rapper bond the likes of which has scarcely been seen on a mainstream field of play since Drake and Noah "40" Shebib. YG’s major-label debut My Krazy Life marks a turning point for the duo; here, Mustard’s production and YG’s songwriting have both gone deliciously widescreen.
Mustard’s still working with the melodic economy that has drawn shrewd trend-watchers Drake, Young Jeezy, and 2 Chainz to his fold, but here they’re lighter and brighter. The opening fanfares on My Krazy Life's tracks are gossamer but massive, like a blindside smack from a pillow. Typically, Mustard’s productions lay their wares out early and drive home simple hooks flanked by little else but 808 kicks and claps, occasionally throwing in a weird embellishment or nod to his forefathers. Strip club anthem “Left, Right” doubles down on its colossal three-note theme with a fiddle midway through each verse, “BPT”’s air raid siren keys are accented with orchestra hits like Dre and 50 Cent’s “In Da Club”, and “Do It to Ya” plunks out piano and Moog melodies on loan from Tha Dogg Pound’s “Let’s Play House”.
But by and large, Mustard’s game is achieving ecstasy through simplicity and repetition, hooks and drums thundering through each measure with scarcely a note gone to waste. YG could’ve shit on a mic with Mustard as co-pilot and still turned out a halfway listenable hour of music, but to his instead he’s used My Krazy Life to play with the gun-toting lothario rubric he pieced together on the earlier mixtapes. The album is very much an exercise in genre (gangsta rap, natch) beholden to all the structural touchstones of a modern-day mainstream rap release, but this time YG’s classicist read on Southern California gang life comes with a refined flair for storytelling.
Stylistically, YG says he was aiming for Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle, and you can hear faint traces of that record on My Krazy Life, especially in the way that songs that touch on his background as a convicted residential burglar (“1AM”, “Meet the Flockers”) collide with decadent good life numbers like “I Just Wanna Party” and “Who Do You Love?” to paint a picture of a young gangster who works hard and plays harder. My Krazy Life periodically eases off its unsettlingly gleeful blueprinting of breaking-and-entering scenarios through YG’s ace hook construction and a selection of comical interstitial skits—and hang around for the deep cut “Really Be (Smokin N Drinkin)”, which pulls the listener inside the loss and desperation that provides the impetus for such extralegal escapades.
My Krazy Life also finds YG flexing a greater comfort in regards to songs about women. It might be unreasonable to expect a guy who rose to fame on “Toot It and Boot It”, whose body of work is rife with vengeful pith like “Bitch Betta Have My Money” and “Youzza Flip”, to care about his bedside manner—but he makes inroads. “Do It to Ya” is the requisite sex jam, but this time the focus is on reciprocity instead of conquest. “Me and My Bitch” chronicles the souring of a relationship after a girlfriend cheats, but he intimates that he still carries a torch for her when they slip into a nebulous friends with benefits arrangement after breaking up.
My Krazy Life’s most engaging relationship song is familial: “Sorry Momma” closes the album with an apology to YG’s mom for a laundry list of petty misdeeds and a pledge to do better by her now that he’s rich and she’s not doing so well. On a certain level, the softer touch of these songs ticks off the expected major label song-for-the-ladies pandering—they’re replete with syrupy hooks from ratch&B crooners Ty Dolla $ign and TeeFlii—but they also reveal a songwriter who remains captivating even when he pushes his trademark tough guy posturing to the side.
From classic Compton set-repping rhymes, to guest spots from TDE’s Jay Rock, Kendrick Lamar, and Schoolboy Q, to production that boils g-funk down to its requisite elements, My Krazy Life breathes new energy into West Coast gangsta rap. YG holds summits with out-of-towners throughout, exchanging bars with Drake on “Who Do You Love?”, taking a beat from ATL maestro Metro Boomin for “1AM”, and celebrating friendship with Jeezy and Rich Homie Quan on the platinum-selling buddy anthem “My Nigga”.
But this album’s sense of place and time isn’t amorphous and dependent on collaborators, as it's been with YG’s peers: My Krazy Life is always kicking back under roadside palm trees or darting through back alleys, shaking foes that give chase. It's a record that's always posted up in sunny SoCal, and whether it's serving up carefree party anthems or dispensing crass advice on whose houses to knock over and what to take, L.A. feels like the capital of the country when it’s playing. YG and DJ Mustard have been dress rehearsing for nationwide stardom all along, but My Krazy Life is ratchet music’s Technicolor reveal.


On their winsome debut, the duo Whitney make a warm, simple and profoundly enjoyable rock'n'roll record, evoking the earnestness and innocence of Girls.

Light Upon the Lake

Can a duo be a supergroup? Maybe that’s a tongue-in-cheek designation for Whitney, the band composed of former Smith Westerns guitarist Max Kakacek and former Unknown Mortal Orchestra drummer Julien Ehrlich. Both were standout members of their former bands; Kakacek never got his due in Smith Westerns, as singer Cullen Omori’s presence soaked up much of the adulation. Ehlrich, who looked about 11 years old behind the kit with UMO, was a long-limbed beast. Whatever reasons for their previous acts’ dissolution and split, the two have found each other and put together something simple but always invaluable: a great warm weather rock’n’roll record.
It’s hard to talk about Whitney without first talking about Girls, another sweet-and-sour rock duo that both UMO and Smith Westerns spent time on tour opening for. Girls breathed life into earnest folk-rock by writing simple, powerful songs about being in love with life and learning to enjoy the basic things. But they broke up after two albums, and their absence left an empty space that has never been filled. Whitney come closer than any band since.
Light Upon the Lake, their debut LP, is a short collection of short songs; half of them are made up of easygoing guitar flourishes, the other half feature woozy strings and slurred brass. This is the Corona of rock records, as Whitney consistently walk that fine line between identifiable and platitudinal. Take the chorus from most recent single “No Matter Where We Go”: “I can take you out/I wanna drive all around with you with the windows down/And we can run all right.” It’s so generically wistful that it could provoke an eyeroll, but it’s delivered with such gentle earnestness that it’s improbably touching. Light Upon the Lake operates in a universe of endlessly repeatable joy, with a touch of melancholy to keep it interesting. The songs could be about romantic love, but they’re open-ended enough to be whatever you want them to be.
The vocals are a harder sell. Ehrlich, assuming vocal duties here, is on the whinier, Muppet-ier side of things. The overall muffled effect of the recording doesn’t help to crystallize anything, either. It’s like someone’s stopped at a stoplight singing their heart out in their car with the windows up and you hear it from the sidewalk. It works great in terms of expressing earnestness but possibly not in terms of pleasantness. I like it because it feels very true. That said, I wouldn’t hold it against you if you weren’t turned off, at least initially.
Make it past that, though, and you’ll find most songs to be near flawless on a small scale, working the way a great short story does. The crisp edges of these songs betray people who really know how to play their instruments, but instead of flashing that fact, they back up, writing only in vivid, broad, easygoing pop-rock strokes. “Golden Days,” has all the elements of showiness—a guitar solo, extraneous brass, a singalong—but the song stays small and hummable. Low-key perfectionism is perhaps a humbler virtue than seeking the big, dynamic splash. But it has a way of sneaking in past our defenses and lingering longer—before we know, we’ve been singing that song under our breath for the better part of a year.  Whitney might not reinvent anything, but they sound perfect right now, and it’s hard to argue with being in the right place at the right time.


On the final entry in a trilogy that began with her Polaris Prize-winning 2020 album, the Montreal rapper seeks elusive redemption in cacophonies of tense noise and gothic samples.

Backxwash: *HIS HAPPINESS SHALL COME FIRST EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SUFFERING *

On “Mukazi,” the closing song from her latest album, Backxwash attempts the conventional aesthetics of a triumphant hip-hop track. “It’s like my life means something, less stress these days,” Ashanti Mutinta yells over the kind of Kanye-ish victory lap beat that millennial rap fans grew up on, with a soul sample that sounds like heaven opening its gates. But don’t bother checking your headphones, because the track’s eerie deterioration is part of Mutinta’s production. Interrupting an outpouring of beneficence to loved ones, Mutinta suddenly decides “tell my homies I love ’em, even though I don’t trust ’em.” Then a redacted name gets flipped off and Mutinta lets out one last shout and just dips, letting the sample play unadulterated.
Is this parody? Not quite. This is, after all, the concluding note of a trilogy that includes 2020’s God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It and last year’s I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES. Rather, Mutinta seems unable to bear the farce: It’s as though she deeply wants to make a song like this, but far from being unable to keep a straight face, she can’t do it without breaking down. When she gets on the track, it crumples and distorts. At the end of the trilogy’s journey, hoping to achieve something like transcendence, she can only manage a hollow performance of it. Throughout HIS HAPPINESS SHALL COME FIRST EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SUFFERING, Mutinta seems to strain for faith without relief. The album begins with the ring of an unanswered telephone, followed by a pastor’s voicemail message. In his absence, unhappy voices start to fester and protest.
Mutinta spends most of HIS HAPPINESS SHALL COME FIRST EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SUFFERING in cacophonies of tense noise and gothic samples, over which she and her companions yell in voices of frustration. “Vibanda” opens on a towering, end-of-days sample of the famous Lacrimosa portion of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor—you know, the part of the Requiem Mass that begs mercy for sinners being cast into hellfire, never to feel the sanctity of God’s love. Mutinta’s voice is cloaked in a filter straight from The Exorcist as she raps the refrain, “I’m a dog, I’m a pest, I need help, I’m possessed!”
In hip-hop sample selection, it’s traditional to reach for obscurities, but though Mutinta takes a relatively experimental approach to rap, she laces her work with familiar references: Mozart, Malcolm X in “Muzungu,” the drums from “When the Levee Breaks” on God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It. These are sanctified figures, the kind we’re used to turning to for guidance, the ones that ought to contrast the absent pastors and malevolent priests. Here, they seem to be chosen for the exact opposite reason: They can’t offer the relief Mutinta needs, only punctuate her spiral into despair and self-loathing. By the penultimate track, “Kumoto,” between refrains of “my evil deeds, my evil deeds,” Mutinta recalls saying something cruel to a sick classmate in their final conversation before the classmate’s funeral. The admission of sin should be cleansing, a show of repentance followed by absolution. But even after she’s done addressing specifics, Mutinta can only sputter “my evil fucking deeds,” as a piano riff beckons down, down, down.
That’s when the final track, “Mukazi,” arrives. It promises the grail, the holy truth behind the fanatical farce, and the reward for this brutal journey into the hellish depths of Mutinta’s psyche. She addresses herself with a list of things she wants to say, like, “I wanna tell you that even though it was hard/You really know who you are, no need to don a facade.” It’s left ambiguous whether she can truly bring herself to say these affirmations, whether this is the triumph she has earned. It could be.


Zach Condon continues to surprise if not amaze on this intriguing and disparate 2xEP.

Beirut/Realpeople: March of the Zapotec / Holland

March of the Zapotec / Holland

After the remarkable efforts of Gulag Orkestar and The Flying Club Cup, Zach Condon's offbeat hybridization of traditional Eastern European motifs and Western indie pop reached a glorious pinnacle. But where take things from there? Rather than resting on his laurels, the 23-year-old Santa Fe native packed his bags, hopped on a plane to the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, and began recording a selection of new material with local 19-piece collective the Jimenez Band. Aided by a translator to help communicate their compositional ideas, Condon and his cohorts worked tirelessly on March of the Zapotec, a slew of songs composed in the small weaver village of Teotitlan del Valle during the spring of 2008.
Condon's self-confessed Francophile leanings still run strong, particularly in his Jacques Brel-meets-Serge Gainsbourg vocal delivery, and Balkan folk patterns continue to remain at the core of his musical references. Yet his flourishing interest in Mexican wedding and funeral music, highlighted by the animated huffs and puffs of a "barely rehearsed" brass band, inevitably takes these recordings somewhere different. March of the Zapotec is the sound of a musician continuing to evolve and, most importantly, allowing himself to be persuaded by his inspirations without losing sight of his own creative personality. Like many young, culture-hungry travelers, Condon seems to be embracing as much as possible, re-shaping his interior musical landscape as he continues to learn the tricks of the trade from masters and street performers in various parts of the world.
Just as Mexican funerals are known not only for reflection and mourning but also for the celebration of life, the six songs that comprise March of the Zapotec sound as joyous as they do melancholy. The jolly three-step-waltz of "La Llorona" and "The Shrew" wouldn't sound out of place on a soundtrack to Emir Kusturica's dark and memorably shambolic wedding scene in the film Black Cat, White Cat. "The Akara" is similarly expressive, introduced by a bold but despondent trumpet fanfare that slips into a lively melody as Condon sings through his malaise, "so long, my fate has changed, it's hindering."
But March of the Zapotec is just one half of this intriguing and disparate 2xEP. The second is very different, and closer in sound to Condon's pre-Beirut bedroom recordings, when he went under the alias Realpeople. Having spent years making electronic music as a teenager before focusing on the elaborate acoustic inventions he is now known for as Beirut, it seems only natural for Condon's older methods to finally see the light of day. Although he has more than proved his mettle as a masterful, highly visionary musician, it will perhaps be a relief to fans of Beirut that Holland does not feel out of place beside the material that initially drew Condon to popular attention. It is after all, an extension of an already strong musical direction or, in his words, "different aspects of my personality."
These five songs, mostly recorded alone, begin with the lyrically superb "My Night With the Prostitute From Marseille" and take more than a few notes from the Magnetic Fields and, perhaps a little surprisingly, Boards of Canada. "Venice", with its dreamily atmospheric intro, which gracefully crackles in the background like old letters burning on a fire, is a fine example of Condon's apparent knack for constructing a home-- whether permanent or temporary-- on a wide range of melodic turf.
As a concept, this EP could be seen as rather puzzling with its marrying of such stylistically different material. However, listening to the two discs back to back allows insight into the development of Condon's burgeoning ideas. Rather than re-tracing the path that made him popular, he has hacked into the wilderness of his new inspirations, no matter how divergent, and emerged triumphant. As another of his favorite French luminaries, Jean-Luc Godard, once famously said: "It's not where you take things from, it's where you take them to."


Tove Lo's second album offers a platform for her to argue that self-destructive affairs of a particular sort of woman are a subject worthy of four-part concept albums.

Lady Wood

For the lead single of her second album, Tove Lo chose as inspiration one of the most-circulated and least-understood literary quotes of the past decade, the “Cool Girl” monologue from Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl: “Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.” People circulating this quote almost always leave out the fact that the woman delivering this soliloquy is a psychopath who will go on to rack up a body count. But why they circulate it is more telling: that in her misanthropy she’s elucidated something very real about relationships, and very bleak.
Tove Lo knows a bit about bleakness and misunderstanding; she’s courted both from her first single. The bluntness of “Habits (Stay High)” ensured it’d cut through the crowd of anodyne rising pop stars but also ensured that for the next year Lo would field interviews about whether she actually lurked in sex clubs and picked up daddies on the playground. As a student of confessionalism, she knows audiences have an endless appetite for scandalous female writers, from Mary McCarthy to Cat Marnell to Fiona Apple to Britney Spears, and that they crave their honesty less than they do their imagined autobiographies, their self-destruction and bare flayed skin. As a student of pop, she knows that her industry parses women's vulnerability as empowerment, their pain as sexiness, their point as pop as usual. Lo certainly leaves herself open to misinterpretation—her Sticky Fingers-via-creepshot album art, her music’s endlessly quotable debauchery. Perhaps knowing this, she practically spells Lady Wood out: putting an explanatory interlude in the outro of “Imaginary Friend” (“I don’t know... I guess it’s kind of like a voice in my heart reminding me that there's nothing to fear”), all but defining “lady wood” on the title track, or addressing the audience on “Cool Girl”: “Now you can’t tell if I’m really ironic,” Lo sings, absolutely correctly.
“Cool Girl” is equally a pop song, a delivery device for a sassy, stuttery chorus about being a cool girl. It's the line all smart music walks, and Lady Wood walks at album length. The album’s a showcase for Wolf Cousins, the Max Martin-affiliated songwriting collective that includes Lo and nearly a dozen others, including Swedish writer Ilya Salmanzadeh, Iranian producer Ali Payami and production duo the Struts. They’ve written about half the charts, but Lady Wood is as concentrated an outlet for their sound as you’ll find. But it’s equally a platform for Lo to argue, as she did on Queen of the Clouds, that the self-destructive affairs of a particular sort of woman are a subject worthy of four-part concept albums.
Lady Wood is the first two parts: the high and the comedown, the party and the afterparty. The structural resemblance to the Weeknd’s EPs isn’t accidental. When Abel Tesfaye worked with the Scandinavian claque he became Lo’s direct colleague, and the debauched tableaux and nervous vocal tics of tracks like “Don’t Talk About It” and “Keep It Simple” sound almost tailor-written for him. The sound is basically the same, too: nocturnal, minor-key synthpop, less suited to dancing with tears in your eyes than waking up alone and disheveled the morning after. It’s the same sound the Wolves have worked for over a year, but in Tove as in Abel they’ve found an ideal collaborator, one who goes as dark as they do.
For the most part, Lady Wood abandons the shock value of its predecessor; the title track and a couple nods to being “under the influence” are about as explicit as things get. But her ruminations and obsessions are the same: the fleeting freedom found in bad behavior; the compulsion of her women to tamp down their desires and their inability to do so; envy of the men in her misadventures, who have it easy. It’d be easy to play this as melodrama, but Lo sings most of the album without affect, so when she *does *emote, it counts for more: sneaking cutesy Betty Boop inflections into the backing vocals of “Cool Girl”'s chorus, belting into the void on the ballads, exclaiming “I’m gonna get hurt!” like it’s her deepest desire. That’s on standout “True Disaster,” which begins as Marr-like feedback haze and turns into one of the year’s best pop songs, a perfectly wrought instrument of self-laceration. (The effect’s somewhat ruined when the titular disaster reveals himself two songs later as mealy-voiced Joe Janiak, who barely sounds capable of manipulating a coffee machine, let alone a woman. This is why “True Disaster” should be a single.)
That said, “True Disaster” isn’t a perfect pop song. It suffers from Tove Lo’s primary weakness as a songwriter: her compulsion, at least once per track, to include a line that her Scandinavian colleagues might call “juicy” but that comes off more like a brand saying bae. At least on a track called “Lady Wood” you know what you're getting, but nothing about “True Disaster” prepares you for the line “I can’t hide my feels.” Even the tracks free of such nonsense are so unrelentingly bleak and so professionally done that, at album length, they become interchangeable well-produced malaise. Yet when Lady Wood tries to go upbeat—as on “Imaginary Friend” and “WTF Love Is”—the resulting tracks are the weakest by far. The bridge to “Cool Girl” is designed to be the emotional core of the whole album, the moment Lo lets her guard down and reveals her true desires, but it just sounds like she’s emulating Sia.
Proportionally, these are trivial complaints. Lady Wood is short, but Lo finds ample darkness to plumb. “Don’t Talk About It” recasts the girl squads so ubiquitous in pop culture as nihilistic cliques hazing each other into empty highs and dead-eyed selfies. “Flashes” does the same without the squad, Lo lamenting the effect on friends back home of so much mining her life for content: “When I fuck things up in front of camera flashes, what about you?” “Vibes” is deceptively chill, the supposedly lighthearted flirting of two parties with nothing between them but contempt. “What's your line, though?... Heard that before,” Lo teases, only to be negged down by Janiak. And “Keep It Simple”—befitting the title, just Lo and Cousins standout Payami—presents a scenario both hyper-specific and likely relatable: lying in bed with a rebound at some garbage hour of the night, flipping through an ex’s old sexts, feeling nothing. Payami’s synths land fast and loud like thunderclaps, and Lo pushes any impending connection or intimacy back into the dark. Then she pulls herself together for the drop, the cool girl once more.


In the six years that have passed since King Khan and his band the Shrines last released a new album, Arish Khan’s sassy self-deprecation has turned to sobering introspection, and with good reason. Idle No More, his first proper record with a U.S. label, evinces a new sense of purpose.

Idle No More

Arish Khan may surround himself with an army of nine and call himself a king, but at heart, he's a court jester. For all the voodoo mystique and sex-machine swagger he wields onstage, his songs brim with anxiety and humility, whether he’s lusting after cute record-store clerks, professing his weakness for plus-size paramours, or measuring his commitment in food stamps. It’s the sort of charm offensive that comes naturally when-- as a brown man in the traditionally white world of garage-punk, not to mention in Khan’s adopted hometown of Berlin-- you’ve lived your life as an outsider among outsiders. But in the six years that have passed since he and his band the Shrines last released a new album, Khan’s sassy self-deprecation has turned to sobering introspection, and for good reason. He’s endured the death of three close friends (including punk-rock pal Jay Reatard), and a reportedly nasty falling-out with long-time collaborator Mark “BBQ” Sultan (his frequent partner in crime since their late-90s tenure in Montreal’s the Spaceshits); the cumulative effect of all this turmoil saw Khan seeking solace in psychiatric hospitals and Buddhist monasteries alike. If his 2011 solo release for Scion’s A/V series-- released under the ad-hoc King Khan Experience banner-- sounded like a mess, that’s because, well, at the time, he felt like one.
But if you need any proof that Khan is back to fighting trim, just look at the spine of his latest record, which bears not only the imprimatur of the Shrines-- the band that brings out the show-bizzy best in him-- but the logo of his first proper U.S. label: Merge Records. (Khan’s 2008 Vice Records issue, The Supreme Genius of King Khan and The Shrines was a compilation culled from various European releases.) Khan’s work with the Shrines has typically drawn from the funk, psych, and soul of the turn-of-the-’70s black-power era, but seemingly had little use for its ideological intent. Idle No More, however, takes an inverse approach: its fusion of Brian Jones-era Rolling Stones paisley pop and Spectorian pomp pushes Khan and the Shrines beyond their usual JBs jones, but the album’s title speaks to a burgeoning social consciousness. It’s named for an emergent Canadian Aboriginal-rights protest movement, one Khan particularly identifies with after spending his teen years hanging on reservations in Quebec with a Mohawk friend (one of the aforementioned casualties). Though there’s not a single song here that explicitly addresses the plight of First Nations people, Khan has essentially donated his album title to the cause as if it were an advertising billboard-- the first indication of the album’s more sanguine, openhearted spirit.
Even in the absence of any overt political sloganeering, Khan evinces a new sense of purpose here. The album’s first side counts as the most majestic music the King has produced, blowing up his garage-rock roots to a cinematic scale without losing the ballsy attitude. The Shrines bring the brass, of course, but this time they’re bolstered by sweeping strings and ba-ba-da-ba choruses that transform songs like “Born to Die” and “Thorn in Her Pride” into the stuff glitzy 60s prime-time variety specials were made of. But the more opulent environs don’t dilute Khan’s finely tuned sense of irreverence: When he cops Lou Reed’s “and all the colored girls sing” directive prior to the latter songs’ “shoobie-doo-wop” finale, it becomes immediately clear he doesn’t have the budget to hire an actual troupe of back-up singers, so he just pitches his voice up and sings the hook himself. “Luckiest Man”, meanwhile, is a cheeky account of his soul-searching sojourn and recovery set to the buoyant groove of Archie Bell & the Drells’ northern-soul classic “Tighten Up”. But even when there’s a lightness and congeniality to the songs that Khan has rarely evinced before, the Shrines’ big-band effect lends them an imposing wall-of-sound grandeur and fierce Motown momentum.
That is, until the brooding ballad “Darkness” brings the album’s vigorous pace to a screeching halt. A dark-soul-of-the-night document of his recent breakdown, it should be Khan’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World”, a slow-burning, show-stopping set piece that prompts the singer to his knees and bring the house down with him. Instead, he opts for a campy, drag-queen croon that saps the song of its emotional impact by constantly drawing attention to how far Khan is singing outside of his usual raspy range. From there, Idle No More never fully regains its footing, as the album tries to balance deeply personal subject matter and the Shrines’ party-hearty energy with inconsistent results: “Pray for Lil” (featuring a beautifully yearning guest lead vocal from Jena Roker) is a winsome tribute to Khan’s wife and the support she provided in his hour of need, but the songs dedicated to late Atlanta garage-scene fixture Bobby Ubangi (“Bad Boy”) and Reatard (“So Wild”) feel a touch too slight and undercooked, given their inspirations. However, the closing Hendrixian ballad “Of Madness I Dream”, peacefully reconciles Idle No More’s overarching themes of remorse and renewal--for King Khan, the premise of mourning and the promise of morning are one and the same.