A bona-fide rock album from a noisy duo known for a killer live show and inconsistent records. Here they find success with straight-up rockers, punk rants, country-ish acoustic tunes, and even an aching piano ballad. Lee Ranaldo produces.

BOSS

Despite their long list of releases, Magik Markers have up to now been more compelling live than on record. Even on their best discs, the highs of their free-ranging noise-rock have come with meandering, sometimes off-putting lows. By contrast, the live act of guitarist and singer Elisa Ambrogio and drummer Pete Nolan is constantly fascinating. Their commanding stage presence steamrolls over musical gaps that, without the visceral visuals, might stick out awkwardly on record.
So it figures that, to make an album that holds attention the way their shows do, Magik Markers would have to channel their rambling spontaneity into more conventional tunes. What's so great about BOSS is that even though it is more structured and song-oriented than any previous effort, the band's fiery, scraggly approach remains intact. Paradoxically, by restricting their options (and, coincidentally, losing bassist Leah Quimby), the band has made its music even more open and free.
Such discipline has also made Magik Markers' sound more diverse. Their improv-based records sometimes got stuck in a narrow range of noises, but while BOSS may be a bona-fide rock album, there's lots of different stuff happening here: straight up rockers, punk rants, country-ish acoustics, and even an aching piano ballad. And each has an energy and authority that matches the band's live show.
That said, BOSS isn't a complete split from the band's past. They have veered toward straight rock in the midst of some of their noise jams before, and many tracks here evoke the post-Sonic Youth clang of 2005's I Trust My Guitar Etc. But there's definitely something new going on, and most of it comes from the seductive voice and lyrics of Ambrogio. She's always been a deserving attention-getter, but here her talents seem wider and sharper. Her singing primarily evokes Patti Smith, as do her words, which deftly use rhyme to build intangible meaning. For example, on "Taste" she varies her choruses with tantalizing off-rhymes-- "He had tasted her, tasted her/ Smiled right into the base of her/ He kept racing her, racing her/ And stayed alive; outpacing her"-- while her guitar and Nolan's simple drumming seem to rhyme in turn.
"Taste" may be *BOSS'*s most memorable track, but highlights abound. Opener "Axis Mundi" rises from initial guitar noise into a chugging swing, while "Last of the Lemach Line" sways hypnotically as Ambrogio intones with increasing desperation. Later, Nolan contributes primal piano chords to Amborgio's Cat Power-ish croon on "Empty Bottles", mixing nicely with the glockenspiel of producer Lee Ranaldo. Ranaldo also adds a layer of guitar fire to the manic "Body Rot", which sounds like a punked-out take on Rhys Chatham's minimal trance-rocker "Drastic Classicism".
BOSS stumbles just slightly at its end. The noise essay "Pat Garrett" never really gathers steam, while closer "Circle" comes off as a thinner version of "Lemach Line". But sandwiched in between is the stellar "Bad Dream/Hartford's Beat Suite", a haunting tale of bloody pockets and severed thumbs that approaches the chill of a Johnny Cash tune. Such a comparison might be surprising, but then BOSS is bound to rearrange a lot of people's perceptions of this potent duo.


Stones Throw offers an expertly crafted introduction to a label focused on unearthing electronic DIY music from the late 1970s and 80s.

Various Artists: The Minimal Wave Tapes: Vol. 1

The Minimal Wave Tapes: Vol. 1

New Yorker Veronica Vasicka has spent the past five years painstakingly and lovingly building Minimal Wave, a label that specializes in digging up and reissuing electronic DIY music from the late 1970s and 80s. From taking full control of the mastering process to creating packagings that border on the fetishistic, Vasicka has uncovered forgotten forays into independent new wave and synth-pop. Aptly dubbed "minimal wave", the genre's stock characteristics-- ticky-tacky drum machines, analog synthesizers, amateur vocal experimentation, lo-fi production-- seem more relevant than ever now, as a recent rash of DIYers have been toying with unpolished variations of everything from disco to IDM, using little more than a MIDI synth and a microphone. Thankfully, Stones Throw founder Peanut Butter Wolf-- who has devoted a great deal of time spotlighting leftfield niche records himself-- had the good sense to see the "obsessed freak" (his words) in Vasicka. "I always wanted to do an album of this kind of stuff, but I don't want to try and compete with someone like Veronica who does it better than I ever could."
For those seeking a substantial once-over, Minimal Wave Tapes, Vol. 1 serves as a great introduction. Most of the releases on the imprint are vinyl only, so PB Wolf combed through Vasicka's vast collection (the two co-produced the project) and hand-picked the group of tracks that show up here. Though Vasicka has released compilations in the past, Tapes is the kind of primer that makes the overwhelming (and for the listener, rather expensive) process of weeding through these acts (hailing from Belgium to Spain to the States and beyond) a little easier. And though there is a commonality at work with the music featured, the genre variations that arise throughout the compilation-- ranging from punk-funk to early techno rumblings to chilly goth textures-- help orient the listener with what they might like to delve deeper into. Almost every track shares an exploratory, homemade feel in either production or the varying degrees of musicianship at work, and though it makes things sound a little lop-sided at times, it's an exciting peek into the experimental, underfunded aspect of a burgeoning trend.
A lot of the music here is the underground response to the the well-selling synth-pop of the Second British Invasion. Oppenheimer Analysis' Andy Oppenheimer and Martin Lloyd bonded over the Human League and Soft Cell, and their "Radiance" echoes that chic, disaffected club feel. Certainly one of the poppier contributions here, it proceeds Crash Course in Science's "Flying Turns", a queasy, corroded chunk of Gang of Four-- acerbic, noisy but equally compelling. And while you can hear a little Kraftwerk just about everywhere, there's a wealth of varied personality that rescues these simple efforts from sounding too repetitive or indistinguishable. Most of the more memorable submissions fare better thanks to fuller construction and actual hooks, like the Joy Division-modeled "Just Because" by French trio Martin Dupont, or the English outfit Das Kabinette's "The Cabinet", which Ladytron can pretty much thank their entire career for.
But what might be one of the coolest things that Minimal Wave Tapes accomplishes is how nicely it frames the current synth-pop renaissance, reinforcing the idea that there's room in the garage for sequencers and Korgs as well as guitars and drums. Hopefully we have a little time until we start hearing traces of Bene Gesserit's brand of goofy spoken word or Duex's "Sprockets"-approved robo-schtick, but for now, there's plenty of really catchy touchstones being explored under early synth-pop's umbrella, many of which can be found in resurrected form over at Minimal Wave's site. And thanks to the parallel lines being drawn by Vasicka and the good folks over at Stones Throw, we might not have to bother with all that crate-digging to enjoy and experience it.


Slime Season 2 is Young Thug’s third full-length release in seven months. And in small but significant bursts, it’s the first of his releases to begin to flesh out a real idea of Jeffrey Williams beyond the blinding veneer of experimentation. This is the sound of 2015’s most dazzling bar-for-bar rapper hitting his stride.

Slime Season 2

Slime Season 2 is Young Thug’s third full-length release in seven months, rounding out a productive streak as formidable as any of his peers'. We already knew he was rap’s most wildly creative stylist: a rogue alchemist of undiscovered melodies, an electrostatic bonding agent for new metaphors. Still, until now, it remained unclear whether he could broaden the scope of his talents beyond a song-by-song basis, channeling the constant spray of ideas into something built to last. Slime Season 2 edges further in that direction, a more carefully constructed work than its predecessor in every sense. And in small but significant bursts, it’s the first of his releases to begin to flesh out a real idea of Jeffrey Williams beyond the blinding veneer of experimentation. This is the sound of 2015’s most dazzling bar-for-bar rapper hitting his stride.
It’s a noticeable improvement over September’s Slime Season, but not because Thug’s rapping is evolving at that speed. Both projects are culled from archives of work presumably stretching back at least a year; there is almost no hint of chronology among these tracks. But where SS1 felt rambling and uneven, there is a clear sense of purpose to SS2, applying the cohesion of Barter 6 to SS1’s pop promise. His engineer Alex Tumay executive produced the project, and Thug benefits greatly from an editor: SS2 is nearly an hour and a half long, but it flows. The mood is woozy and nocturnal, Thug’s adlibs serving as his own echo in some damp subterranean cave. The production roster ranges from Atlanta’s most wanted (Metro Boomin, Southside, London On Da Track) to lesser-known collaborator Goose and—out of nowhere—Fool’s Gold blogwave holdover Treasure Fingers, but all of their contributions blend into the tape’s murky cool.
Thug's lyrics are studded with the glorious non sequiturs you expect: baffling asteroids of one-liners, orbiting in isolation, that either mean nothing or hint at vast cosmological secrets. ("I look good as your dad on a Friday," from "Thief in the Night", is probably the former; "A wise man told me nothing," from tape standout "Raw (Might Just)", is unquestionably the latter.) But SS2’s most exciting developments are the rare moments Thug lowers his guard and focuses inward—something that’s only happened in glimpses until now. He darts between flashes of nostalgia, frank meditations on faithfulness and jealousy, nuggets of formative family history: "My nephew saw his daddy sent out home to the sky," he recalls on the queasy, wobbling "Beast".
But the moment that’s burned into my skull comes in the first verse of "Never Made Love", a Rich Homie Quan duet left over from the Rich Gang era. Quan brings pathos to the hook and gets out of the way: The song's main attraction is Thug’s sincere and complicated grappling with defensive detachment that taps into a well of long-buried family trauma. With it comes perhaps the most vulnerable and mystically cogent mini-narrative of his entire catalog, one I can’t help but quote in full: "My lookout man was my right-hand man, but he was wrong, though/ Then I seen some diamonds come off of my neighbor’s porch/ And it was her/ She had a Louis Vuitton purse clean as detergent/ She had the same exact face as my brother’s nurse/ And he in a hearse/ I never looked at it for what it’s worth." It’s pure poetry.
Critics have called Thug’s music surrealist, but SS2 presents him instead as a storyteller in the magical realist tradition, drawing glimmers of nonplussed fascination out of the rational world. Within this context, his habit for working in small-scale, occasionally disjointed bursts, recording each line spontaneously, makes perfect sense. His thoughts fracture and wander down unpredictable paths, forcing us to draw connections in non-linear ways.
At its core, magical realism suggests that the ultimate mystery in a logical world is man himself; its soft mysticism is a roundabout path to the heart. Above even the muddy, waterlogged sonics, the unifying thread here is intimacy. SS2 has Thug more transparent on love, trust, and heartbreak than ever before: "She Notice" and "Hey, I" stand out above the rest, unguarded and earnest and complicated as ever. He cheats, he stumbles, and then he attempts to deconstruct his own behavior, tracing the tangled roots of how 2015 rap’s greatest enigma came to be. Nearing the end of a landmark year, we still talk about Thug as a mystery: as transcending language, or as the ultimate triumph of style over substance. But the last thing we hear on SS2, closing out a chopped and screwed version of previously leaked ballad "Love Me Forever", is a hopeful yelp: "And I just wanna be loved!" It doesn’t get clearer, or more human, than that.


After touring together, the psych-funk trio and the soul singer head into the studio for an EP that’s both tantalizing and a little half-baked.

Texas Sun EP

From their respective metropolises, Khruangbin and Leon Bridges offer fascinating variations on the notion of “Texas music.” The Fort Worth-based Bridges explores a strain of soul that is more closely associated with Mississippi and Chicago than the Lone Star State, while Houston trio Khruangbin dabbles in a strain of globally minded, stoner-friendly psychedelia that authorities didn’t always look upon so kindly. Today, both artists find themselves rising stars, garnering millions of streams and promoting the vision of a more diverse and open-minded Texas, the one that leads to headlines like this.
The two teamed up for a joint North American tour in 2018, but heading into the studio together wasn’t an obvious next step. Their partnership might pay dividends down the road, but at four songs in 20 minutes, Texas Sun is both tantalizing and a little half-baked. The title track gives a glimpse of how each party might bolster the other: Khruangbin bassist Laura Lee, guitarist Mark Speer, and drummer Donald Johnson impart some much-needed looseness and pliancy to Bridges’ vocals, while the singer in turn grounds their wandering with song structures and sturdy vocals. “Texas Sun” is a simmering road-trip number, with Bridges’ delivery rendering that oppressive sun into something more mellow. Khruangbin provides a head-nodding beat, but for all of their synergy, the result still resembles boilerplate Bob Seger.
The slinky “Midnight” could have been cribbed from a Numero Group Eccentric Soul compilation. Bridges’ lyrics again situate us in a moving vehicle, this time at night instead of the sweltering midday heat. They conjure a wistful mood, with lyrics that detail a new love in the passenger seat, cruising around with no particular destination in mind, smoking with the windows down, the backseat beckoning from the rearview mirror. “Put on your lavender/Perfume and a nice dress,” Bridges croons sweetly.
“C-Side” boasts the sultriest groove, with Lee’s loping bassline riding behind a clopping cowbell and mallet percussion. But Bridges’ chorus is diffuse and unmemorable, and the percolating beat lingers in the mind for longer than the words. The smoky minor-key ballad “Conversion” (which has its roots in the gospel hymn “At the Cross”) showcases Bridges’ honeyed, unhurried delivery at its most effective. If anything, the four songs leave you wanting more from this collaboration, offering up brief, blurry glimpses of their Texas landscape rather than the expansive vistas that they might arrive at should they ride together a little longer.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Dead Oceans / Columbia / Night Time Stories Ltd.


The indie rock singer-songwriter Ella O’Connor Williams’ debut album is poetic, ethereal, and slightly distant.

I Was Born Swimming

Ella O’Connor Williams’ debut album as Squirrel Flower is a promising leap to a bigger label (Polyvinyl) that attempts to reach headier places than your typical indie rock record. It’s an experiment that does justice to Williams’ expanding vocal talent and her poetic way with sound, and it’s a bold departure from her previous material. The songwriting, though, suffers from a certain inattention.
Album opener “I-80,” named after the famed freeway connecting California to New Jersey, begins with acoustic guitar, as a clear and focused-sounding Williams sings poetically about the failure of poetry: “I tried to be lyrical/But lyrics failed me.” Gradually, more instruments—louder and more rhythmic guitars, pounding drums, heavier bass—build toward a promised epic release, like testing to see how fast you’re willing to let yourself speed along an empty highway. But it never arrives; the song just stops. Williams spends the rest of the album repeating this cycle, speak-singing over electric riffs that sound like they were meant to be acoustic. It feels like playing air guitar to Leonard Cohen.
The first single, “Red Shoulder,” is the best song, a “we inherit the earth” declaration that Williams seems to pull directly from the soil beneath her, even if it may or may not be about the end of a relationship. (“You’re one for healing/But I’m still reeling.”) While it’s one of two songs on the LP that was self-produced, the song’s appealing “road-trip indie” feel fits perfectly on an album produced by Gabe Wax (arguably best known for his work with the War on Drugs, Soccer Mommy, and Adrianne Lenker). Its guitar-riff-as-a-chorus recalls one of  Pavement’s songwriting tricks: using sounds, not words, to construct the catchiest moments of a song. It’s going to sound great live.
If no other song approaches the high of “Red Shoulder,” there are plenty of isolated moments that come close. Williams is at her best when she’s confident enough to sit back and whisper. “Slapback” brings out her voice with a stark, blues-like chord progression that makes the phrase “If you slap me, I’ll slap you right back” more potent than any wall of sound could. “Eight Hours” renders guitar notes as delicate as wind chimes. “Streetlight Blues,” starts out like Dave Matthews Band’s “Cry Freedom” (not an insult; that guitar tone is great) and builds into a Derek Trucks-like solo that feels like a ray of light. And the closing title track deftly mirrors the melody from “I-80.”
Williams’ most straightforward and ingratiating album as Squirrel Flower is 2015's Early Winter Songs From Middle America. That album’s standout track, “I Don’t Use a Trash Can,” proved that she can write a great chorus when she wants to. I Was Born Swimming suffers from its lack of them. Save for “I-80” and “Red Shoulder,” the album’s lyrics read more like poems set to music written after the fact. By side B, the disconnect becomes noticeable. The songs all have similar tempos and dynamics and lack clear centers, and the music starts to feel like an afterthought. When there is a chorus, like in “Honey, Oh Honey!” it’s the whole song, or it feels like a joke. At its most aimless, like on “Seasonal Affective Disorder,” the music just feels lost.
It’s OK for songs not to have choruses, of course, and it’s OK to write songs that feel more like poems than, well, songs. But in doing so, Williams puts some maybe-unintentional distance between herself and the listener. I Was Born Swimming is her most expansive and professional-sounding record to date, and on the whole, does more right than wrong. But it’s an MFA of an album. As a project, it’s admirable. As an album, it leaves you cold.

Buy: Rough Trade
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As part of its 40th-anniversary celebrations, the Mute label commissions 58 covers of 4:33, John Cage’s notorious “silent” piece, from New Order, Depeche Mode, and other staples of the roster.

STUMM433

It’s been almost 70 years since John Cage debuted 4:33, his infamous silent piece, to a baffled crowd in Woodstock, New York. A lot of people left the concert pissed off. His friend and colleague Christian Woolf was mortified to have brought his mother, who dismissed it as “a schoolboy’s prank,” while Lou Harrison, another peer, said Cage’s work was “quite boring.” But in 2019, the hubbub having long since died down, the feeling is that someone had to do it. However grating it might have seemed, 4:33 remains arguably the 20th century’s most elegant artistic thought experiment. It’s a moon-landing-level gesture of the avant garde’s triumph over history. In a century obsessed with liberation, Cage deftly penned the ultimate musical permission slip.
Brazen and deceptively simple, 4:33 was a hit. Its premise can be explained in a single sentence and demands a reaction, which means it moved like wildfire through the public consciousness. While much of the century’s early modernism required an educated audience capable of following the unnerving destabilizations of dodecaphony and its attendant tone rows, hexachords, and aggregates, Cage’s silence hits you right between the eyes. 4:33 is a koan, a question without an answer. As Cage put it, “Silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind.”
Of course, the thing about 4:33 is that it’s not really silent. In the absence of composed sounds, the world rushes in. Not only are the idyllic rustling leaves or the soft hiss of the wind part of the piece, but also the scoffing of peeved concertgoers and the slamming of doors as they storm out. 4:33 opens its borders to any sound or absence thereof and in this way it embodies a set of twin legacies: on the one hand, meditative submission to the world, and on the other, jarring provocation of its audience’s perception of music’s place within it.
Mute Records remains one of the great disciples of this second legacy. In the 1980s, label boss Daniel Miller cultivated a space where some of the most popular sounds of the era swam freely with the bleeding edge of punk and industrial music. Yazoo and Erasure found their footing as global superstars alongside Boyd Rice’s “Mode of Infection” and Throbbing Gristle’s “Maggot Death.” Echoing Cage’s embrace of the unknown, Miller said of electronic music, “You didn't have to learn any chords, just press down on the keyboard and an interesting sound would come out.” He described the Birthday Party as “not so much a band as an incendiary device.” A similar assessment could have been made about much of Cage’s work throughout the 1950s.
So it makes sense that Mute is releasing STUM433, a collection of “covers” of 4:33, as part of its MUTE 4.0 (1978 > Tomorrow) retrospective. As the label celebrates four decades of visionary work, a plan was formed to have every Mute artist record their own version of the piece. They were able to round up 58 of them, ranging from synth-pop icons New Order to dub-techno pioneer Pole. This is a testament to Miller’s acumen as a label boss. You might not think the musicians behind “Porcelain” or “People Are People” would be interested in a composer who spent time playing a cactus with a feather, but Moby and Depeche Mode both make an appearance. Plus, you know, it fits the label’s name.
It takes almost four and a half hours (though not quite four hours and 33 minutes) to get through STUM433, which means practically no one will hear it in full. And even if you make it to the end, will you ever truly hear it? Try focusing your full attention on 265 minutes of microphone hiss, light urban din, and intermittent nature sounds. It’s not easy. The album hovers, misty to the point of near-invisibility, with a number of interchangeable outdoor takes, some vacant rooms, and an odd cavernous reverberation. Occasionally someone gets clever, like when Michael Gira counts his way through the piece, but few dare to seriously run with Cage’s prompt.
STUM433 is a mammoth coffee-table book of a record, telegraphing astute cultural values and cool points without offering much actual art. But staging a team-building exercise for the label roster isn’t a crime, and the only people who will purchase the lavishly packaged set are those with a yen for sexy, rather pointless lifestyle accessories. So what the hell, go for it, right?
Maybe, maybe not. 4:33 gestated in Cage’s mind for at least 12 years before he wrote it. “I didn’t wish it to appear, even to me, as something easy to do or as a joke,” he once said, while pianist David Tudor, who premiered 4:33, described it as “one of the most intense listening experiences you can have.” So what exactly, for example, does Chris Liebing bring to the conversation? The techno producer is known for slamming it out on huge festival stages, presenting loopy synth lines and 909 snare rolls on an IMAX scale. His contribution to the compilation is a muffled roar, perhaps of a dancefloor heard through a dressing room wall. You may enjoy it, but the recording absolutely seems “easy to do.” The same applies for Goldfrapp, Nitzer Ebb, ADULT. and others across the collection. Regardless of your opinion of these artists, an interest in the avant garde doesn’t guarantee an intriguing point of view on its most iconic and vexing works. STUMM433 is a diversion, a far cry from Cage’s measured conviction. “I probably worked longer on my silent piece than I worked on any other,” he said. “I wanted to mean it utterly and be able to live with it.”
Cage never released a recording of 4:33, but its spirit haunts the halls. The last 70 years have been filled with music that deploys field recordings and nature sounds to transportive effect. A generation of composers embraced Cage’s fundamental ideas of letting go, ceding authority to process and space. More recently, YouTube has been populated with quasi-silences: extended videos that recreate the ambient hum of sci-fi environments as well as ASMR’s hushed, reverential banalities. As the years went on, Cage and his direct contemporaries often composed on the edge of silence, as if 4:33 had expanded into an ocean of emptiness, their sparse arrangements the dinghies keeping them afloat.
Maybe you just have to be there, and any attempt to capture the piece on tape will falter. Going through the set, I was reminded of a subway ride I once took. I had a handheld recorder and a set of headphones with me, and I decided to capture the sounds of the train. As I put on the headphones, I was enveloped in an astonishing world. All the sounds were the same, but the depth of field had changed—conversations seemed closer, the rattle of the ride more vibrant. I walked out on the street entranced by the tingling psychedelia of this same-but-different reality. It’s an experience anyone can try. But don’t expect it to last. When I got home and listened back, there was nothing particularly distinctive there. It just sounded like any other subway ride.


The new ensemble from vanguard jazz drummer Jack DeJohnette has been called a supergroup. Their debut draws on the cultural legacy of Upstate New York, with takes on Dylan, Hendrix, and Joni Mitchell.

Hudson

Drummer Jack DeJohnette has spent five decades in jazz’s vanguard. Last century, he helped steer Miles Davis’ fusion excursions, led a stellar series of sessions for the ECM label, and later accompanied fellow giant Herbie Hancock. In more recent years, DeJohnette has built out that legacy with a range of work that has been notably diverse in character, even by the standards of someone with his eclectic track record.
In 2013, DeJohnette convened a group of avant-garde elders including Henry Threadgill and Roscoe Mitchell for the searing live set Made in Chicago. Then he teamed up with Ravi Coltrane and Matthew Garrison for In Movement, an album that spent some time looking at jazz’s past without neglecting to push things forward. Now comes yet another new DeJohnette ensemble: the collaborative group Hudson. Since the lineup includes famed jazz guitarist John Scofield, keyboard stylist John Medeski, and the versatile bassist Larry Grenadier, Hudson is being billed as a “supergroup.” If that seems a stretch—given that no one else’s reputation is quite on the level of DeJohnette’s—it’s only a slight one.
The band’s self-titled debut opens with a song that’s also titled “Hudson”: a nearly 11-minute meditation on the subject of improvisational funk. Steering so close to the textures of Davis’ Bitches Brew might prove embarrassing for most groups, but Hudson pulls the homage off—and not just because DeJohnette played on that vintage landmark. Scofield’s distorted tone on the track suggests a cool, pristinely judged restraint. At the close of the song, the guitarist plucks some ghostly harmonics with just the right amount of bite, merging with the drummer’s quiet-but-crisp pulses. It’s electric, not histrionic.
Named after the valley that its members call home, the band also draws on the legacy of a few musicians associated with the area (at least in the broader pop imagination). So Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” gets a tender, bluesy airing. Hendrix, a Woodstock veteran, is conjured via a hurtling take on “Wait Until Tomorrow.” Medeski shines during an interpretation of Robbie Robertson’s “Up on Cripple Creek”—producing soulful figures on his electric instrument, at select points, while also crafting boisterous, early-jazz textures on an acoustic piano.
Scofield turns in some of his most inventive work on two Dylan covers: the guitarist lends “Lay Lady Lay” a cheerful vibe, while “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” inspires a harmonically adventurous solo. All of these covers sound successful on their own individual terms. But as a band, Hudson hits an interpretive high note on “Hard Rain.” They start out doing justice to Dylan’s melody—though as the performance progresses, the group collectively channels the song’s sense of portent, without any need of the recent Nobel laureate’s lyrics.
The originals have charm, too. DeJohnette’s “Dirty Ground” sounds like it could be an old-school R&B number. The composer-drummer’s vocals have a weathered quality, but his phrasing is catchy and assured. (The man knows what goes into a memorable rhythmic progression.) “Song for World Forgiveness” and “Great Spirit Peace Chant” further enforce the fusion-jazz-meets-Summer of Love concept. And since Bitches Brew was (roughly) part of that same moment, another new song—Scofield’s “Tony Then Jack”—references the lineage of Davis’ drummers (specifically, Tony Williams, who preceded DeJohnette in the trumpeter’s retinue). This is not the most fiery music DeJohnette has collaborated on, in his eighth decade. But the peaceable mastery that moves through Hudson does have the distinction of feeling comfortable without being too predictable.


Will Sheff makes kindness an aesthetic on this album of gentle, idiosyncratic songs about dog adoption, celebrities’ emergency tracheotomies and finding transcendence in nature.

In the Rainbow Rain

Will Sheff walks into a bar. Let’s say it’s your local and there’s an empty stool beside you. The past couple of years have sheared nerves and petrified muscles; bad news passes through you both, like radio waves, at all times. But Sheff has some wisdom to offer you. So, do you want to hear that you gotta lose a little pride to love somebody, that we probably won’t ever have all the answers? Or would you rather learn about a bunch of celebrities’ emergency respiratory surgeries?
Sheff takes both tacks on In the Rainbow Rain, Okkervil River’s ninth album. It’s telling, though, that “Famous Tracheotomies” is the icebreaker. The track is an ideal reminder of his talents: his surefooted navigation of jagged cadences, his obituarist’s judicious sense of detail, his reverent rifling of cultural back pages. (The final tracheotomy detailed is Ray Davies’, which allows the band to vamp on the chorus to “Waterloo Sunset.”) Even though Sheff leads with his own story—he had a tracheotomy before turning two—there’s nothing mawkish about the song. Layering soft-rock melodies over gospel backing vocals, it’s an alternately tender and stark inventory of frailty that demonstrates how mortality snaps everyone to attention.
“I wanted to make a record where a sense of kindness felt encoded into the music,” Sheff has said. And he has. The current iteration of Okkervil River, composed of Sheff’s touring band for 2016’s Away, casts the songs in warm, dusky light. The album’s sound is confident yet gentle, like the War on Drugs’ tricked-out AOR engine powering a languid Sunday drive. For his part, Sheff avoids the vocal exhibitionism that goosed previous albums. Sometimes you have to lean in to catch the takeaway—but that careful attention is too often rewarded with platitudes. He adopts a beatific, drunken burble on the twinkling “Family Song,” which closes with a statement —“You’re alive, I’m alive”—that is life-affirming in only the most literal sense.
It’s one of three tracks that, perhaps in a callback to Okkervil River’s early releases, have “song” in their titles. The best of these is the dog adoption story “Shelter Song,” which tempers the human and animal characters’ relief at finding each other with Sheff’s acknowledgment of how precarious survival can be: “I thought that nobody loved me at 10/Sad kid, scared animal/A nasty word and I’m back there again.” The drum machine pads apprehensively. At the close, bassist Benjamin Davis traces wary circles that give way to a yowling guitar solo from Will Graefe.
You can win over a dog with kindness, but sizing up people proves more difficult. On “Human Being Song,” which closes the album, Sheff is so stuck between the competing urges to embrace others (“It’s hard to be a human being/Just seeking, needing, feeling pain”) and to push them away (“It’s hard to open up your heart/And face the fact that you could fail”) that it’s up to the band to nudge him beyond this impasse, shifting from the sway of classic rock to the benediction of gospel. But, since the former genre exists to conjure the unnameable and the latter speaks the language of certainty, neither quite provides the answers Sheff seeks.
In the Rainbow Rain isn’t always this thematically dense, though, and its more laid-back songs help loosen the philosophical knots that tracks like “Human Being Song” tie. The epic “The Dream and the Light” takes the E Street Band on a nighttime limo ride straight out of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. On “Pulled Up the Ribbon,” keyboardist Sarah Pedinotti suspends synth lines from a high ceiling and Davis’ basslines nail them to the earth. “External Actor” is a backwoods trek that celebrates “moments of opaque-eyed, knocked-out rapture” and traces a line from your beer can to zodiacal light. The song may be a bro-country writing exercise under the influence of mushrooms, but it plays to Sheff’s strengths. Like the bar’s most beloved regular, he has a gift for shoving drinkers’ shared uncertainties under the stools and making old stories do new work.


Jenny Death is billed as a companion album to Niggas on the Moon, and part of a larger sequence called The Powers That B. It furthers Death Grips' vision for aggression without borders, and while it isn't on the level of their artistic and commercial breakthrough The Money Store, it will absolutely remind you of why you loved them in the first place.

Jenny Death

Keeping up with the Death Grips has increasingly become a headache. Cryptic break-up notes, a tumultuous split with Epic, a realignment with Harvest, cancelled tours (including one with Nine Inch Nails), no-show gigs: All of these antics were tolerable, sometimes fun, when they came backed up by compelling music. But even that part of the bargain, over the last year, has proved questionable. Last year’s Niggas on the Moon leaned too heavily on Björk samples and flattened their approach, while Fashion Week was an intriguing, if ultimately directionless, collection of instrumentals. *Fashion'*s song titles spelled out JENNYDEATHWHEN, hinting cryptically that their next album would be Jenny Death, the second half of the two-part sequence called The Powers That B. But by Fashion, it was hard to tell if even their hardcore faithful cared about what they would do next.
Jenny, which Death Grips streamed on YouTube last week in advance of its release, is the record they needed to make. It’s not on the level of their artistic and commercial breakthrough The Money Store, but it will absolutely remind you of why you loved them in the first place. In fact, it’s so different from (and better than) Moon that it shouldn’t even be tethered to it. On these ten tracks, they’ve harnessed the unbridled energy of Government Plates into their most fully formed songs since Money, which helps justify their bluster.
Producer Andy "Flatlander" Morin brings a lot of the death-disco of Money back into the mix, which broadens their approach without compromising their potency. Nothing here reaches the aggro-pop heights of "I’ve Seen Footage", but "Inanimate Sensation" comes close; it's clear why it was released as the first single. Over Flatlander’s seasick bass synths, Stefan "MC Ride" Burnett jumps through various vocals patterns—his trademark bark, chopped-and-screwed raps, menacing whispers—and ends up with something like a Jock Jams for the underworld. The buildup to MC Ride’s final verse is a staticky, topsy-turvy rush, culminating with the soon-to-be-immortal "I like my iPod more than fucking!" Yell that with your headphones on at work.
MC Ride was so sorely missed on Fashion that his presence on Jenny feels like a triumphant comeback. Flatlander may provide the electronics and Hill may bring the percussive energy (and also lent initial critical credibility) to Death Grips, but MC Ride is the unpredictable heart of the group. He was somewhat lost in the madness of Plates and subdued on Moon, but he is in full, raw force here: The title "I Break Mirrors With My Face in the United States" brings to mind a sadistic animated .gif enacting the Black Flag Damaged cover, and MC Ride's raging, hypnotic vocal reinforces this impression. He isn’t just a spiral of rage, either—"Pss Pss" casts him in creep mode, suggesting illicit fantasies in a hushed whisper.
The music on Jenny nods to Death Grips' more conventional rock influences, but it’s in no way trying to pander to a rock audience. Each element they reference is blown up and rebuilt in their own vision. Vaguely surfy dream-pop gets shot into overdrive on "Centuries of Damn". "Beyond Alive" and "ON GP" both contain big rock riffs, the latter approaching metalgaze territory. "GP" inflates MC Ride’s discontentment into something massive and anthemic. It’s jaded stadium rock—all it needs is a stadium and an ironclad guarantee they’ll show up.
You hear more of drummer Zach Hill’s acoustic drums on Jenny, too. He continues to unlearn his technical prowess from his Hella days, but he’s electrifying even when going back to basics. Throughout, you can hear them furthering their vision for aggression without borders, swallowing in hip-hop, hardcore, industrial, and the hardest forms of dance music, while not in debt to any one of those elements. Death Grips don’t just imagine a world where rap-rock is redeemed and various forms of heaviness coexist side-by-side, but where those lines are obliterated. That fantasy may not have panned out quite the way it should have, but to deny their ambitions does a disservice to what heavy music can be.
Closer "Death Grips 2.0" acknowledges the ongoing "will they or won’t they" dynamic that’s long been a point of frustration amongst their critics. The title suggests a rebirth, but the content, a sort of Araabmetalmuzik blast of cut-up industrial beats, could also be a fiery demise. It’s the perfect Death Grips closer, especially with their status in constant question. Right after their alleged "breakup," there were eulogies for the group, but Death Grips are not the sort of group to be eulogized. Are they calling it quits after this record and tour? Was the breakup even real to begin with? It’s hard to speculate whether Jenny is a redemptive closing chapter, a new beginning, or some other inscrutable part of Death Grips’ master plan, if they even have such a thing. What is evident is that Jenny Death is some of their strongest material in a while, and may even return a few disillusioned converts to the flock.


The Bronx rapper’s bluntness and playful ear for beats gives his sex-obsessed songs the nonchalance of a one-night stand.

Pretty Girls Love Slizzy

At this point, calling Bronx rapper-producer Cash Cobain’s music “filthy” is like calling hot sauce “spicy”: a technically correct observation that doesn’t begin to describe what it’s doing to your nerve receptors. Though he’s a pioneer of the sample and sexy drill movements that have subsequently merged with the jerky rhythms of club rap, the main topic in most of his songs is sex—having it, pursuing it, starting and ending relationships over it. Still, there’s a care and humor to his craft that makes his debauchery endearing instead of creepy. Like Pusha T with cocaine or Action Bronson with food, he’s a specialist using his skills to wax poetic on his favorite subject in every way possible (“She told me to cum inside like a visit,” he says on “Slizzy Dialogue”). And while he isn’t quite as outlandish as fellow sex-obsessed rappers like SahBabii, his bluntness and playful ear for beats gives each song the nonchalance of a one-night stand.
Pretty Girls Love Slizzy, his sixth album, doesn’t skimp on the sex talk, but for all the silly puns (“I wanna drink on that shit like a Mistic/Name her pussy Jada ’cause I kissed it”), DM slides, and Hennessy-soaked hookups, his never-ending quest to get laid has a romantic drive. Take the frantic “Slizzy Dialogue,” a point-by-point retelling of a short-lived affair—from first contact to steamy linkup—that ends with a postcoital phone call from his lover’s boyfriend. Over warbling synths and fast-clacking drums, the song flows with the hectic energy of an impromptu FaceTime convo, complete with exasperated ad-libs and he-said-she-said qualifiers. Later, on “Clocking U” and “Took a While,” he’s begging for action like a bizarro version of Don Toliver, affectionately telling a woman he misses her before asking her to “blow me like some tissue.” Many rappers could make this request sound uncomfortable, but it helps that Cobain doesn’t take himself too seriously. His unfussed delivery keeps things moving like a breezy romantic comedy.
Aside from his comically large libido, Cobain has a striking ear for beats. His blend of sample drill and Jersey club has many imitators, but none have reached the dizzying heights of his and Chow Lee’s 2022 mixtape 2 Slizzy 2 Sexy, which flipped everything from the Plain White T’s to Trinidad Cardona into singular audio candy. A handful of Pretty Girls’ beats re-up that formula: The flip of Jai Paul’s gossamer “BTSTU” that powers lead single “Rump” dovetails nicely with the thumping club drums at its margins. It pairs well with “Not No Xanax 2,” which reimagines Nelly and Kelly Rowland’s “Dilemma” hook as a chiptune-esque party jam. But what really elevates Pretty Girls is Cobain’s ability to branch out beyond club and drill without overextending himself. “So Fire” scales back the BPM, using heavy reverb and dubby dancehall drums to create a humid sway. On “Nice N Slow,” the talkbox vocals, rapid-fire drums, and twinkling synths call to mind a drill flip of Chromeo. That sense of adventure has always been present in Cobain’s music—this is a guy who’s unafraid to dig into the Spice Girls and Ray Charles catalogs for material—so it’s nice to hear him try out different tunes.
The challenge of being a rapper with hyper-specific subject matter is finding ways to keep it fresh, but Cash Cobain has yet to disappoint. His music isn’t sexy just because he’s unabashedly horny, and it isn’t entertaining just because he has immaculate taste in samples. It works because you can feel the fun behind it. There’s a life-affirming buzz behind the simple elegance of Cobain and New Jersey producer McVertt’s starry beat on “Messy,” or the glowing way he asks, “Can I hit it in the back of the Caddy?”—moments worthy of kicking off block parties and echoing from car stereos at stoplights. Cash Cobain bottles that essence and sprays it on tracks like cologne.


One-time 4AD mainstays His Name Is Alive have never stayed in one place. That eclecticism continues here on their latest, a proggy rock opera with horror music undertones.

Tecuciztecatl

Of all the bands to call British label 4AD home in the early '90s, none are as inscrutable—or wholly unpredictable—as His Name Is Alive. While the band’s early peers (the Breeders, Red House Painters) spent the better part of that decade honing singular aesthetics, His Name Is Alive were intent on doing the opposite. Early albums like Livonia and Stars on E.S.P. flirted with everything from shoegazey ephemera to sun-bleached California dream pop, but never lighted long enough on any one style to truly embody it. Warren Defever—the Michigan-based musician, songwriter, and mercurial heart of the band—embraces a kind of gleeful wanderlust, a predisposition that only intensified after the band parted ways with 4AD in the early 2000s. In the years since, Defever’s output has become even more of a willfully mixed bag, encompassing everything from spooky R&B, blown-out psych rock, meandering instrumental compositions, and—on 2007’s Sweet Earth Flower—an album-length tribute to free jazz saxophonist Marion Brown. Some 20 years deep into their career the only single thread twisting through all of His Name Is Alive’s music has been Defever’s own peculiar force of vision, which makes exploring the band’s now expansive back catalog both a satisfying and weirdly schizophrenic experience.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Tecuciztecatl—the band’s 14th full-length—is a thing both wonderful and extraordinarily strange. A concept record that comes with the worrisome descriptor of "psychedelic rock opera," Tecuciztecatl involves a proggy narrative about a young woman who discovers she is pregnant with twins—one good, one evil—and must seek the help of a demon-hunting librarian. Each of the album’s nine tracks is written from the perspective of a different character and the whole melodrama is set to play out like the soundtrack to a gothic psych-rock horror movie that never actually was. (Additionally, every edition of the record—be it on vinyl, CD, or digital download—is unique, each with different mixes and tracklists.) Most records would surely collapse under the weight of this kind of conceptual pretense—the struggle of good versus evil as played out from within the womb! —but Tecuciztecatl succeeds due to the strength of the songs, all of which still operate nicely outside the confines of the album’s bloody narrative.
The album opens with “The Examination”, a 13-minute opus comprised of simmering, Yes-era synthscapes, a chorus of flutes, and—most flamboyantly—an arsenal of fuzzy, overdriven guitar lines twisting around each other. As the song morphs from prog-rock anthem into something resembling a messy garage-funk jam, vocalist Andrea Morici’s plaintive vocals provide a calming counterpoint: "Look into my eyes/ Look into the light all around you/ Make yourself at home." As opening salvos go, it’s a doozy…and something the rest of the album never quite lives up to. Still, tracks like "Reflect Yourself" and "See You In a Minute" play around with classic rock power riffing in ways that are both ridiculous and kind of perfect. Employing harmonious guitar solos that were apparently perfected by practicing along to an edit that Defever created of every Thin Lizzy guitar solo recorded between 1973 and 1983 (It’s a real thing. You can check it out on YouTube), much of Tecuciztecatl plays like a celebration of the kind of bombastic, gatefold double-album sonic excess that marked '70s bands like King Crimson and Emerson Lake and Palmer.
It would be easy for these sorts of rock opera theatrics to come across as jokey or ironically reverential, but Defever's earnest commitment never wavers. Psych-rock noodlings aside, it’s the more subdued tracks—the splish-splashy "African Violet Casts a Spell" and the pastoral vibes of album closer "The Cup"—that not only sound the most like classic His Name Is Alive, but also save the record from simply being a conceptual goof. Divorced from the album’s bizarro storyline, "I Believe Your Heart Is No Longer Inside This Room" would still rank as one of His Name Is Alive’s most inspired tracks—a song that manages to simultaneously address birth and death while also incorporating an orchestral snippet of "Joy to the World" in a way that somehow makes total sense. No small feat.
In the end Tecuciztecatl is an unusual treat because it manages to have it both ways. As an aspiring rock opera, the album is sufficiently bombastic, but it’s also surprisingly emotional. That the record can be both is a testament to Warren Defever’s kooky dexterity and his continued willingness to take big, weird conceptual risks—something that gets celebrated less and less within the increasingly homogenous landscape of what has come to be known as indie rock. Tecuciztecatl will certainly not be everybody’s cup of demon twin tea—and as albums go it is the very definition of a "grower"—but those willing to spend time with it will are to be rewarded with what is a sometimes challenging but ultimately strangely beautiful listen.


The Mood Hut co-founder’s full-length debut and first release in seven years is a lighthearted collection of deep house, dub, yacht rock, and ambient sketches.

Opening the Door

Vancouver’s Mood Hut broke out last decade with a resin-fingered new-age aesthetic, a preference for vinyl releases, and a gentle, chord-perfumed take on deep house informed by what they variously call the “Canadian Riviera” or the “soft water city.” Though their sound anticipated the buzzy “lo-fi house” movement that would become ubiquitous online a few years later, Mood Hut has shied away from publicity while releasing a stream of albums, EPs, mixes, and compilations (many of which were not available digitally until 2018) at a low-key clip. Australian-born co-founder Jack Jutson has been particularly reticent. His last two releases as Jack J, 2014’s MH007 and 2015’s “Thirstin’”/“Atmosphere,” are among the label’s crown jewels, yet he’s avoided capitalizing on their hype with a full-length—or even another Jack J release—until now.
But Opening the Door offers nothing like a definitive culmination of Jutson’s sound. In keeping with Mood Hut’s tendency to be guided only by the pursuit of the perfect vibe, the album is a lighthearted collection of deep house, dub, yacht rock, and ambient sketches that sounds great on a sunny afternoon walk. Only three tracks, all on the first side, sound like dance music, and Jutson’s heavy, dragging hi-hat is often the only thing affiliating them with house. The remaining tracks lope patiently at reggae or R&B tempos or, in the case of “Clues Pt. 1” and “Closing the Door,” cut the drums to focus on watery ambient textures permeated with Linda Fox’s saxophone. And the pearly guitars in the background sometimes edge towards the slacker-rock atmospherics of fellow Canadians Mac DeMarco and Homeshake.
Jutson’s soft, slightly raspy voice has often shown up in his music as a seductive murmur or as a source to treat as a sample. Now he’s singing actual songs, more or less. “If You Don’t Know Why” opens with an eager drum thwack familiar from Jutson’s earlier work, but soon his circular mantras of reassurance drift into the frame, meandering far from the rhythmic grid: “If you don’t know why/If you don’t know why you’re crying/I’ll come by… Let’s get together and not know why.” “Only You Know Why” describes Jutson’s own distress vaguely but poignantly: “I used to think that if I was lost I’d easily be found/I took one wrong turn and turned my whole world upside down.” These are bleak lyrics for music this sunny, alluding to disappointment and mental anguish, and there’s the sense that these easygoing songs are pushing against a world of suffering. There’s always been a slight melancholy to Jutson’s productions, as if the sun is out but the shadows are lengthening, but Opening the Door literalizes it.
Yet these heightened emotional stakes can’t keep Opening the Door from feeling a little slight, especially given its long gestation. Its eight tracks all hover around four to six minutes apiece, and, conspicuously, there’s no obvious epic or clear highlight like MH007’s “Something (On My Mind)” or “No Need” from Jutson’s Pender Street Steppers duo with Liam Butler. Mood Hut’s insistence on operating on its own timetable means this is either deliberate or outside the sphere of Jutson’s concern. But a Jack J full-length that sustained the scale and ambition of MH007 or Pender Street Steppers’ Life in the Zone mixtape could have towered over the Mood Hut catalog, rather than slotting easily alongside it as a breezy and enjoyable release on a label that’s put out a lot of those.


[EARLY Rough Draft of Death Cab Review, 10/7/03, 6:30 (NOTE: important, finish! final draft for Ryan before ...

Transatlanticism

[EARLY Rough Draft of Death Cab Review, 10/7/03, 6:30 (NOTE: important, finish! final draft for Ryan before first date to Olive Garden and The Rundown (9:50).]
I. INTRO -- (first decision: clever metaphor or witty personal narrative??)
A. (used to be one of favorite bands / accordingly: personal stuff has more depth/heart)
start-shame on band, damn this record. makes me feel old and wise-- uh, but, yeah, am older (a little, SAA was only '99 (98?) in any case-- can say I had it right when it came out-- would give me more leeway (Ich bin expert)-- but, seriosuly not wiser-- shouldn't be made to feel wiser. Trans. decidedly makes me feel wise (see Roget's for new/better word for 'wise'), like i'm all of a sudden worldly and all-aware. Makes me feel like fucking Kerouac or something. --used to pause the songs when playing for friends and read from the lyric book, made me feel so callow and sheltered and myopic and like I had so much more to see and learn w/ "your wedding figurines: I'd melt so I could drink them in," and "gravitated toward a taste for foreign film and modern plays," (find better lyrics) there was nuance and the possibility of discovery and growth and suggestive prowess even in the face of experience. It was so forward-looking/thinking but had already seen so much.-- with this album: the mystique is gone, these songs are heads turned back over shoulders in commentary and nostalgia: but the scenes are already diluted with age and the pictures aren't as sharp-- nowhere left to go, just idling. Lyrical extension: Opening lines of cd: "so this is the new year / and I don't feel any different." (further (farther?)develop later)
B. possible INTRO 2? (direct metaphor route)(hell, first one got loose anyway..)
This is the sound of a band not embarrassed to lounge around Sunday afternoons in a bathrobe and tube socks drinking milk from a straw. Transatlanticism is ripe with indulgence and decidedly lacking in pretension or restraint. (eh, bail for now)-- but does get at 'role acceptance' and complacency.
Transition in....
??(mention concurrent release of Super Hybrid Audio cd version, can only be heard on special player. avoid obvious, "not worth buying just for this cd" rip)
??(new drummer-- Jason McGerr-- Not the same energy, but DCFC more Gibbard's melodies and Walla's knobs anyway)
II. The songs:
An exercise in scope: Transatlanticism dulls the edges of their usually acute divinations. A towering mass of sound: it leans (mostly lyrically) more toward Postal Service inclinations than it does previous groundwork. Case in point:
-- sunny jingle jangle of "Title and Registration", a Gibbard-patented melody accompanied by clear, understated guitar work replete with a stop/start drum kit and ringing tones. Will leave you singing about glove compartments.
Elsewhere: anthems and super-produced moments of glory.
"The New Year": pure arena rock. Direct and pandering. No distance between sound and receptor: play like they're running out of time, even sing about it, "I wish the world was flat like the old days/ and I could travel just by folding the map/ no more airplanes or speed trains or freeways/ there'd be no distance that could hold us back." Used to be Something About Airplanes and coasting down the 405-- the journey was the reward. Now it's the destination.
"We Looked Like Giants"-- fully realized anthem, true rocker- 'bout sexual discovery (old-hat subject matter --again: makes me feel experienced) a claustrophobic's nightmare.
"Expo '86": a mini anthem that tests the waters, pulls away and then dives in headfirst before finally drying off to Gibbard's lonely plea.
"Tiny Vessels": what could be the best moment of the album is tossed off due to lack of restraint, final third is mesmerizing. Broken by an Uluru sized wall of distortion and thrashing. Worst moment- 8 min. of "Transatlanticism", akin to witnessing the reunion of high school sweethearts away for a field trip weekend across a 10 acre wheat field, -- builds and builds to no avail. too romanticized. too far-sighted.
Then, the old Death Cab:
"Lightness", an updated "Coney Island".
"The Sound of Settling", old mixed with new, middle Photo Album pop-sensibilities tuned in to the waning needs of maturation. But no hidden agenda (hand claps and "bah baa/ this is the sound of settling") talks about wanting to go grey-- it shows.
finest moments: "Passenger Seat", bare, spacious understated beauty w/echoes of "Lowell, MA".
"Death of an Interior Decorator", vintage stuff-- overlapping guitar tones folding in on each other and beautifully realized bridge. Showcases his ability to scriptwrite.
--all together: a complete vision. A destination.
CONCLUSION: (III),
Ends the album where the Stability EP left off, w/ "A Lack of Color"-- a low-key ziplock on the freshest meal. Record IS a meal, with all courses well thought out. Ingredients may be obvious-- final taste and chef's vision remain a family secret. Just have to taste for yourself. Same cook-- bigger batch of sound.
My comfort-- nothing affected. Just sincere and honest. Can't disguise who you are-- or who you've become. And can't really complain-- not really. Just accept, Band already has.


Left for dead by industry mergers, Pusha and Malice enjoy a dramatic resurrection via the RIAA-baiting mixtape circuit.

Clipse: We Got It 4 Cheap, Vol. 1 / Vol. 2

We Got It 4 Cheap, Vol. 1 / Vol. 2

Left for dead more than two years ago, Malice and Pusha T-- aka Clipse, two-hit wonders if there ever were some-- had no damn right doing this. This is not what's supposed to happen to these guys. After their label, Arista, messily merged with J Records, the duo was shuffled to Jive/Zomba, an imprint historically unable to market gritty hip-hop. For a brief moment, the Brothers Thornton sat idly, intermittently whining about their still-forthcoming album Hell Hath No Fury, and plotting their return. But lacking the backing of den mother Pharrell Williams, who launched their careers with "Grindin'" and produced their entire debut with partner Chad Hugo, Clipse were toast. So, of course, in an attempt to stonewall Jive into voiding their contract, they recorded the year's most astonishing mixtape series, We Got It 4 Cheap. And when forced to pick up the pieces and carry on, talkin' and sellin' shit, Malice and Pusha recruited two baritone toughs from Philly, Ab-Liva and Sandman, to round out their new incarnation.
The result is the Re-Up Gang, a supergroup in the most undistinguished sense. Ab-Liva and Sandman are the stylistic opposite of Clipse, burly in voice and muddy in inflection, intensifying most tracks, but usually just acting as foils. All vocals are mixed way upfront by DJ/entrepreneur Clinton Sparks, easier to hear over instrumentals you already know. Subtle choices like these make We Got It 4 Cheap's two volumes-- and chiefly Volume 2-- the best examples of what a mixtape can be. Bigger than just that new shit you cop from Canal St., these demonstrate that mixtapes, like albums, can be an art form. Mixing, scratching, beat choice, reconfiguring choruses-- all come into play, elevating typical songwriting into philosophical, deconstructionist terms. "How can I make this better?" "This beat would sound hotter if we rapped on it," etc.
Have we talked drugs yet? That's what they do here; talk the art of the deal and their mastery of such. It sounds simplistic, but Clipse have been the premier drug-dealing soliloquists for some time. Unflinching and unforgiving, Re-Up re-imagine hustler as hero with lyrical ingenuity and deft wordplay. Some may struggle with the joy these boys get from moving weight; it's an indefensible stance-- we all have our faults, and we all have to eat-- but the revelry is also what makes it enjoyable. Otherwise, Clipse could just move West and write for scripts for Michael Mann.
Volume 1, which hit back in January, is too long, and it's overrun with suspect beat selection and too many references to HBO's "The Wire". It's anti-populist and too short on the MCs in demand, Malice and Pusha, who appear on about half the songs. But it's also far stronger than most releases like it, featuring a reinvigorated crew and one killer freestyle ("Coast to Coast"). Tracks like "Studin' Y'all" and "Pussy (Remix)" made them seem relevant again, too. A few months later, "Zen" fell from the sky (onto their website) and the divide was drawn. Once a tremendously gifted but one-dimensional singles crew, Clipse took their talents to new heights with the abrasively dynamic song. Teeming with quotables ("I sell that ostrich, I'm so obnoxious"; "Two diamond jump rope, my neck do the double dutch"; "All I see blackface and you singin' 'Mammy'"), Clipse were possessed by a new vigor. They were clever before, sure, but now everyone-- especially the contemptuously nasal Pusha-- had become transcendent.
Volume 2 delivers on the promise of "Zen". In alternating mismanaged heaters ("So Seductive", the murderous "Kobra"), hugely successful singles ("1 Thing", "Hate It or Love It"), and timeless thrillers ("Elevators", "Daytona 500"), the pacing never slows. It would be too easy to list punchline after punchline, but to put it simply, Pusha, whose scintillating word choice and deft phrasing can be frightening, takes Timbaland's "Put You on the Game" and makes it his anthem on "What's Up". His verse barks and prances at once: "Cop the sorbet/ Straight from Jorge/ Jack of all trades/ Even mastered the gourmet/ Plus the price got the street tongue in cheek/ Cook it till it's Al Dente/ Muah, magnifique!"
The second volume also features key contributions from Pharrell who's still rapping (mostly awkwardly) but is apparently writing his own lyrics, according to Pusha on a humorously assertive interlude. Skateboard P's flow is jumbled but his sentiments are personal on "Maybe (Remix)" where he reveals insecurities about uncleared samples over the "Elevators" beat ("You and me/ BAPE, Ice Cream, and BBC"). Finally, some vulnerability.
The tape ends on a tranquil note with "Ultimate Flow". Lifting the strummy, nearly forgotten instrumental from Lil' Kim's "Drugs", Pusha offers a summation of the conquest: "I draw this off inspiration, you trace shit." Things still aren't right with the world ("Nigga, fuck Zomba/ I sell nose candy.../ Willy Wonka"). And the future of Hell Hath No Fury is still unknown. Some joker at Amazon.com even set the release date for January 1, 2020. Perhaps someone at Jive should take notice-- a lot of people still care about these rogues.


Will Oldham shifts away from the fuller sound of his recent albums on this soft, casual collection, but the songwriting-- mostly detailing the moral tangles of everyday people-- still has a reassuring sense of familiarity.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Wolfroy Goes to Town

Wolfroy Goes to Town

Perhaps the most conventional story Will Oldham has to tell is his own. As a teenager in the late 1980s, he moved from his hometown of Louisville to Hollywood, where he struggled as an actor before eventually landing a small role in John Sayles' Matewan and a larger role in a TV movie about Jessica McClure. Oldham soon defected to music, writing songs first under the Palace set of monikers and later as Bonnie "Prince" Billy. Twenty years later, while he still takes the occasional role, Sayles and McClure represent the poles of his subjects: His songs, often in a skewed country or folk tradition, are full of darkly American oddities and characters trapped down in their own metaphorical wells.
Oldham's film career continues to inform his music, as he writes songs as soliloquies and inhabits them the way an actor might perform a dramatic role, transforming dialog and stage direction into something flesh-and-blood, memorable, and moving. He writes in isolation and hires a small cast of backing musicians to help him bring these one-act songs to life. For his latest Bonnie "Prince" Billy album, Wolfroy Goes to Town, he's chosen a cast of regulars, including guitarist Emmett Kelly. Most of the Wolfroy troupe, like composer/multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily and Chicago-based singer-songwriter Angel Olsen, have toured with him for a while now, and backed him on many of his most recent records. Together, they give these new songs a soft, casual vibe, and the minimal instrumentation-- mostly acoustic guitars and bass-- evokes a dark, bare stage.
Oldham places the hardiest emphasis on vocals-- not just his own, but those of his players. His female duet partners have tended to act as his opposites, the coo of their voices offsetting his weathered creak. But on Wolfroy, Olsen sounds just as odd and ragged as he does. There may be no spark of contrast between them, but there's a spark nonetheless, and she's one of the most grounded female characters on any Bonnie "Prince" Billy record. The rest of the band's harmonies are rough and pointedly unrehearsed, barely holding together on "Black Captain" and "Quail and Dumplings". Rustic, however, does not mean primitive. "Cows" ends with a sophisticated vocal roundelay that has more in common with British folk than with its American counterpart. It's a lovely moment-- a spare, hushed, and unexpected coda.
Oldham's music is deeply attuned to the past and to the people we imagine inhabited it, yet his actorly approach separates him from the mainstream Americana crowd, who tend to favor a more autobiographical approach, or at least some sense of direct confessionalism. Oldham's songs are only obliquely about himself, and they rarely reveal much about the man singing them. "As boys, we fucked each other," he sings at the beginning of "New Tibet". "As men, we lie and smile." In other hands, such a line might deliver a shock to interrupt the lull of the music, but Oldham never breaks character. That f-bomb becomes part of the lull, and is not so much sung as ruefully breathed. The song possesses all the ruminative gravity of "I See a Darkness" and in tone and character could be interpreted as a sequel.
Heroes hold no interest for Oldham, who is much more concerned with the moral tangles of everyday people, like the character in "Quail and Dumplings" who promises a bright future of full bellies and no worries. Despite the subject matter, it's almost impossible to read that song strictly as a 2010s recession anthem, although it certainly derives some power from current conditions. Oldham's antiquated diction and sepia-toned details-- "one day it's going to be quail and dumplings for we"-- removes the song from the present and sets the characters deep in some imagined past. In one sense, it robs the song of any topical gravity, but in another, he allows "Quail and Dumplings" to transcend any one era.
By this point in his career, Oldham seems to realize that it's difficult for his audience to hear his songs outside of the context of his previous albums and incarnations. So he plays that up on Wolfroy, both by shifting away from the fuller sound of his recent albums, and by subtly alluding to his own characters. By now it's esoteric, but hardly a simple retread of past glories. Instead, that sense of connectedness lends these songs a reassuring familiarity, as though they were new corners of a strange world whose boundaries grow larger and whose scenery grows more inviting with every Oldham release.


Recorded at Berlin’s historic Funkhaus in 2018, this live album sounds uniformly gorgeous and features the composer and his passel of gear working dutifully as a well-oiled machine.

Tripping With Nils Frahm

Nils Frahm’s dominant mode is the eyes-closed fantasia: immersive, rapturous, sentimental. That goes for his post-classical solo-piano work, which is indebted to both Keith Jarrett and George Winston, as well as his surging electronic pieces, which translate the grammar of classical minimalism into the language of techno. His music favors fluid lines and wistful melodies; even when it throbs, it prizes beauty, lyricism, and elegance.
But on stage, the German musician is also a showman. Surrounded by keyboards and machines—grand piano, upright piano, harmonium, Fender Rhodes, Mellotron, toy piano, Roland Juno-60, Moog Taurus, Roland SH 2, analog drum machines, and tape delay units—he is a mad scientist of MIDI/CV converters, a flat-capped conductor of hammers and pan pots and LEDs. Sculpting sine waves into controlled whirlwinds, he straddles his gear, arms akimbo, lunging from station to station: hammering out Rhodes arpeggios with one hand and toggling sequencer parameters with the other, then shifting to the Yamaha grand in the space of a beat, all while finessing his delay chain, triggering pipe-organ samples, and keeping his drum machines in check. There are moments of stillness, too, but at their peaks, his shows are athletic feats as much as they are opportunities to get lost in sound.
Frahm’s showmanship was on full display in December 2018, when he set up at Berlin’s historic Funkhaus—a former East German radio headquarters, where he keeps his own recording studio—for four consecutive nights of performances. He played in the round, a castaway on a small island of gear, by turns manic, melancholy, and mild. Tripping With Nils Frahm, which boils down choice moments from those four nights into a 76-minute album, is more polished than his 2013 live album, Spaces, a compendium of two years of live performances. That collection acknowledged both spontaneity (“Improvisation for Coughs and a Cell Phone”) and the constant possibility of failure (“An Aborted Beginning,” an ambient dub sketch that peters out after 94 seconds), but on the new one, he and his passel of gear are a well-oiled machine.
The album, split between delicate solo piano pieces and billowing, groove-driven electronic improvisations, is largely drawn from his 2018 album All Melody and its outtakes collection, All Encores. What might be most surprising is how faithful his live renditions are to the original studio recordings. Without seeing it—something possible in an accompanying concert film, which includes 11 minutes’ worth of extra music—it can be hard to imagine how Frahm manages to do so much with just two hands. In “Sunson,” he juggles slow-motion techno with Mellotron counterpoints, cascading pipe organs, and the occasional Rhodes melody; “Fundamental Values” makes room for ambient pulses, Windham Hill-like piano solo, operatic vocal samples, and a heart-in-mouth climax whose double-time percussion is reminiscent of Autechre’s “Lost.” The crowd-pleasing “All Melody” stretches the original’s nine and a half minutes to more than 14, drawing out the tension inherent in his tumbling arpeggios. Sprawl is par for the course. Five of the album’s eight songs are more than 10 minutes long; “Fundamental Values” takes a four-minute album cut and blows it up to more than 14.
The sound throughout is gorgeous. Frahm is serious about his gear—he owns 11 Roland RE-501 Chorus Echoes, and uses five of them on stage—and that obsessiveness translates into truly incredible sound: sumptuous, nuanced, enveloping. He favors instruments with striking visceral sonorities, and he knows how to get the most out of the contrast between them. Some of the album’s most electrifying moments happen when he turns the sampled sounds of a pipe organ into an icy cascade of staccato tone bursts. But a nagging sense of sameness nevertheless settles in over the course of the record. “All Melody” and “#2” amount to a 25-minute set of theme and variations; the arpeggios and steady pulse of “Sunson” feel cut from the same cloth, and “Fundamental Values” reprises ideas from all three. The album’s most rewarding stretch is “My Friend the Forest” and “The Dane,” a pair of related solo piano pieces where he strips away the bells and whistles and lets his harmonic sensibilities shine.
Even here, though, Frahm’s fondness for ornament occasionally gets the better of him. Where “My Friend the Forest” is spare and patient, his soloing in “The Dane” turns cloying. There’s an occasionally claustrophobic air of deep feeling in his neo-romantic melodies. Pushing forward in needling eighth-note phrases, his solos can be a little too insistent, his cadenzas too lily-gilding. Listeners suspicious of overt emotional cues might find these portions of his music manipulative in their insistence upon feeling just one type of way.
The album’s loveliest moment is its simplest: The closing “Ode - Our Own Roof” is spare and delicate, like snowfall under a single streetlamp. Dialing back some of the excess—and the seriousness—might go a long way toward letting Frahm’s music breathe. In a 2016 interview with The Guardian, Frahm cited the influence of Andy Kaufman, the consummate showman, and espoused the musical properties of the $1 Ikea toilet scrubber. In the concert film, there’s a brief interlude where Frahm uses just such a pair of white plastic brushes on the inside of the concert grand: drumming on the struts and the strings, eking out a booming rhythm before a tongue-in-cheek finale of bristles scratchy-scratching against mic heads. To be sure, this is Frahm in peak entertainer mode, but in sonic terms, it’s also a welcome contrast—an acknowledgement that there are sensations beyond reverie; that even rhapsody requires the occasional reprieve.

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The nu boss is born here:
\n\n\ "Two years ago, Page Hamilton-- singer, guitarist and founder of the proto-metal ...

Size Matters

The nu boss is born here:
"Two years ago, Page Hamilton-- singer, guitarist and founder of the proto-metal outfit Helmet-- was driving around Los Angeles with the radio on. The jock on duty had just debuted the hotly anticipated new track from some xFC-metal millionaires."
And, as you might have guessed, the story (and this promo pitch) ends in medias res, with Helmet, unwavering bastion of all things Hard and Rock, emerging from the dry ice mists of obscurity and obsolescence to rescue the tired, huddled, headbanging masses from the ever-growing throng of bare-ass emperors. Glory be unto they who bring forth The Rock for their people beset by The Rot, were that it be The Rock they actually bring forth.
If Helmet had one thing going for them in their prime, it was a monochromatic discipline. They gave fans a gussied-up version of the working class scree proffered by Big Black and other Albini disciples. With Helmet, the guitars cut like lasers, not pavement saws. The rhythms were efficient and martial, not frenetically robotic. And while Albini's words were flecked with coal dust and offal and the scarring of 12-hour work days, Hamilton barked and yelped like a guy earning union wages with full benefits and 401K matching. Helmet did lack a certain visceral passion, but they were precise and exacting and brutal and-- when all the metaphors are bagged and tagged-- Helmet did indeed rock. It's safe to say that Helmet's million-dollar Interscope contract (inked circa 1991) paved the way for all the xFC-metal millionaires Hamilton now finds himself both befriending and opposing.
So, of course, in the era the unnecessary umlaut-- when the sound that made Helmet well-respected kings of rock are now commonplace among both standard bearers (Deftones, Tool, Slipknot) and shysters (take your pick), and it's safe for MTV's "Headbanger's Ball" to return to the airwaves-- Helmet releases a record that's about as hard as a loofah. A DJ could easily slip tracks like "Drug Lord" and "Unwound" between offerings from Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stone Age. In fact, Burning Airlines could probably sue for copyright infringement-- "See You Dead" : "Wheaton Calling :: "Ice Ice Baby" : "Under Pressure".
Instead of reinventing the wheel (or perhaps the tank tread), Helmet attempt to diversify their portfolio, offering dynamics and approachable melodies and other types of listener-friendly capitulations one wouldn't associate with the folks that dropped "Meantime" and "Unsung". The group's online bio claims Page & Co. (old Helmeteer Chris Traynor and new guys John Tempesta and Frank Bello-- veterans of Testament and Anthrax, respectively) didn't set out to make Meantime, Part II with this new record; rather, they made Wilma, a less varied version of their confounding post-breakthrough album Betty.
Therein lies part of the problem. As I said, Helmet's strength is their lack of diversity-- the group is a lumbering, slow-footed, imposing heavyweight, and it succeeds by beating opponents into submission. It's awkward to witness such a gloriously thuggish monster vainly attempt the rope-a-dope. Part of this pop-centric bait-and-switch is shifting the focus away from the guitars and hi-hats towards the vocals. Unfortunately, the "singing" on Size Matters happens in two modes: the hoarse bark and the nasal sneer. Both of these styles are evident on the album's first track, "Smart", and neither do the group any favors. Page Hamilton as R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket (authoritative, stern) = yes, sir! Page Hamilton as R. Lee Ermey in Saving Silverman (emotive, awkward) = unfit for command.
Worse yet, Helmet's clipped monosyllabic lyrical M.O. (consistent throughout their recorded output) doesn't jibe with this slight stylistic shift. It's safe to say that lyrics were never Helmet's strong suit ("I'd like to see you/ In two pieces/ Won't be walking/ Barely breathing/ I'd like to see you/ At my door/ We're together/ Like before"), but it's not going to do any good to draw attention to them.
Granted, there's enough wicked fretwork and cool guitar noise throughout this record to both recall past glories and satiate those in need of a modern rock fix. Just be warned that there are some hoops to jump through. Also be wary if you believe the hype and are hoping that Helmet have returned to save us from the upstarts and charlatans who pass themselves off as metal. Indeed, Helmet have met the enemy-- and, unfortunately, the enemy is Helmet.


The chart-topping balladeer’s risk-averse second album is simultaneously overwrought and uninspired.

Lewis Capaldi: Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent

Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent

In one scene in the recent documentary Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now (no apologies to Charli XCX!), the Scottish singer’s uniquely graceless manager shares his fears over the slow gestation of his act’s second album, and the apparently underwhelming demos he’s delivered thus far. “I’ve definitely put all my eggs in one basket,” the manager says, right in front of him. Even the usually unflappable Capaldi—an endearing gobshite not shy about posting Instagram videos from the toilet—looks taken aback: “He says ‘eggs in one basket’ as if I’m not here and not Lewis Capaldi whose name is on it.”
He also says it as if Capaldi isn’t evidently in the throes of a mental health crisis, weathering imposter syndrome, writer’s block, and the tightening grip of Tourette’s (which manifests in aggressive full-body twitching) as he crumples under the pressure of following up not only the UK’s biggest-selling album of 2019, but 2020 as well. The balladeer’s lovelorn debut, Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent, filled the chart gaps between Ed Sheeran albums and established Capaldi, with his tornado-strength choruses and plainspoken heartbreak, as The Boy Adele, while his lethally funny social media persona minted viral gold—precisely the sort of asset that the music industry is not about to let go quietly.
The film starts in August 2022, with Capaldi being interviewed onstage at an industry event in London. He convulses violently while giving deadpan answers about wanting to stick precisely to the formula established on his debut, because reinvention is overrated. The audience laughs along. I was there, and left haunted by the disparity of the crisis that appeared to be unfolding and the cheery (some might say venal!) business-as-usual atmosphere, which Capaldi seemed to have embraced creatively at least. But the documentary later reveals that this night proved a turning point: His parents pulled the plug and he got four months off to address his health. We revisit him two weeks back into business, conveniently feeling much better, on the cusp of a UK No. 1 single (bolstered by signed CD copies that retailed for 99 pence, unsurprisingly not mentioned), and with an album finally in the bag. Ta-da! A happy ending! Champagne corks litter EMI’s carpets.
So what magic was wrought to bring Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent to satisfactory completion? Capaldi and his co-writers have stuffed the basket with every egg they have in hopes of reminding listeners why they liked him in the first place. I cannot remember an album that suffered from such an extreme case of risk-aversion, nor demonstrated so little faith in an artist’s potential, nor any notion that their fanbase might be willing to grow with them. If anything, it shrinks his already narrow proposition. Any number of these potential bank-advert ballads sound like his debut’s “Someone You Loved” (which had one of the longest-ever climbs to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100) and it’s no mistake. When Capaldi points this out in the documentary, his manager responds: “That’s a good thing—not to be condescending but people love things that just sound the same.” Nearly every song starts gently, with Capaldi’s voice in its appealing conversational mode—a little boyish and uncertain, as if trying to reach someone—before a chorus smashes in like a wrecking ball. You can set your watch by them: “Haven’t You Ever Been in Love Before?” literally contains the sound of a ticking clock to remind you to brace for impact.
The first time, it’s a hair-raising effect—“Forget Me” is as visceral as a pleading romantic showdown outside EastEnders’ Queen Vic pub—and occasionally Capaldi steals a little nuance in there. “Wish You the Best” starts with understated immediacy as he follows a train of thought about an ex, longing to know everything about her new life, but hold the new boyfriend. Then the chorus hits: “I wanna say I miss the green in your eyes/And when I said I wish we could be friends, guess I lied,” he howls, and the sour note he lands as he stretches out that last word feels grimly true as he contemplates the gap between who he wants to be and who he feels he is.
Otherwise, near enough every song proceeds at this state of emergency. Meanwhile the ceaselessly wet, antiseptic piano proves entirely the wrong foil for a voice forever on the cusp of unraveling. There are no middle eights—songs just toggle between loud and quiet, then finish right where they started. At one point in the film, Capaldi says he wants to make the album “a more cohesive, focused body of work—it’d be nice if people listened to it that way.” Then he briefly breaks down, perhaps daunted by the task, or painfully aware of how unlikely that is given the way things are going. The sheer, incessant velocity makes the record unlistenable as a whole: It’s like watching a play in which every scene is acted as if it were the emotional climax. The inevitable choruses become unwitting punchlines.
And the torrential scale pulverizes some nice songwriting. Yes, there’s a wealth of cliché—lifeless hearts, shipwrecking storms, labored biblical metaphors—but fans come to Capaldi for that kind of unstudied romance. He has a Nashvillian way with a gentle lyrical twist and his yearning to connect is endearing. “I take her out to fancy restaurants/She takes the sadness out of me,” he sings on “Pointless” in a sad rundown of his perceived inferiorities. “Love the Hell Out of You” sweetly subverts the expression by promising to squeeze out his lover’s demons. You get a rare flash of his mischievous personality on “Heavenly Kind of State of Mind” when he declares that being with someone makes him feel like “I could run and tell the Devil to go fuck himself.” (In that sense, Lewis Capaldi reminds me of Liam Gallagher, another comic king whose wit rarely pierces his banal lyrics.)
Although the album’s thematic anchor is a thwarted romantic relationship, the defeated outlook could just as easily apply to Capaldi’s fears over his career. He worries about people changing their minds, realizing that “I’m fucking useless and full of excuses.” These fears underpin Broken’s only two properly good songs. “The Pretender” reveals the depths of Capaldi’s insecurities, whether as a lover or a performer: “So tell me who you want me to be/I can wear a million faces/’Cos I don’t like the one underneath,” he sings, and the pain in his voice is shapeshifting and ragged, rather than blasting like an alarm. The racing piano and swirling tempest of strings actually feel like they might break apart, and the effect is stirring. And the Max Martin co-write “Leave Me Slowly” totally shifts tone from soggy piano to dazzling keys right out of Prince’s “I Would Die 4 U.” The epic mode, right down to a wibbling guitar solo, makes Capaldi’s bloodletting feel right at home. It’s a delightful surprise near the end of the album, like finding the sparkly toy in a box of stale cornflakes.
Why is there not more of this stylistic variation when it works so well? Divinely Uninspired was pretty conservative but it might as well be SZA’s SOS compared to Broken. Perhaps sticking to the formula gives Capaldi a sense of steadiness when he’s otherwise wracked with uncertainty; perhaps it’s pure commercial arse-covering on the part of his team and label. If you don’t like Capaldi, or Adele, or Sheeran, or George Ezra, or any of the hat-wearing British pop boys, you obviously aren’t going to like this either. But if it inspires anything in you, let it be anger at the industry ghouls caging their golden goose, perfectly aware that it won’t be them left with egg on their faces if this hedge-betting waste of time sinks.


Relentlessly smashing together bits of punk, grindcore, rave, industrial, and more, the Pittsburgh duo’s maximalist music echoes the cruel momentum of the modern world.

U-Void Synthesizer

Since their inception, the Pittsburgh duo Machine Girl have put upsetting images of dogs at the heart of their symbology. Some of their album covers are straightforwardly terrifying—their 2014 album WLFGRL features a blown-out image of a snarling beast, fangs bared, poised for attack. Others are more surreal, like ...BECAUSE IM YOUNG ARROGANT AND HATE EVERYTHING YOU STAND FOR, which trains a video-game firearm on the face of a canine. For the cover of 2018’s The Ugly Art, vocalist and producer Matt Stephenson said he wanted to make “a fucked up Deep Dream sort of image but with dogs,” and so he stitched together a bunch of pictures of gnarled beasts to make a dizzying collage in the shape of an even bigger dog. U-Void Synthesizer, the duo’s newest album, continues this tradition, editing a regal image of a pup into a demonoid monster wearing a spiked collar that reads “GOODBOY.”
The music has changed a lot over the years—from Stephenson’s solo experiments in the early days of the project to the crushing noise and shredded EBM punk he started making once drummer Sean Kelly joined the band—but the dogs on the covers hint at the spirit that’s united all of Machine Girl’s mutations. No matter the style, their music is designed to be unpredictable and dangerous, full of animalistic rage and uncontrollable energy. You’re meant to be afraid of its bite.
Even with volatility as one of the band’s core values, however, they’ve rarely felt as wonderfully feral as on U-Void Synthesizer. The music that Stephenson and Kelly make together has always been chaotic, but they try out more sounds and styles across these 11 tracks than seems possible. Take the immense first track, “The Fortress [The Blood Inside]”: In just under four minutes, Stephenson and Kelly squeeze in ecstatic trance synths, grinding noise-punk passages, open-hearted sacred-music harmonies, gargly grindcore vocals, half-stuttered rapping, and, yes, the sound of a barking dog.
Most of the record operates at this blistering pace. Other tracks meld together mutant dance music with cacophonous noise (“Scroll of Sorrow”) or slam samples from bad translations of the Star Wars prequels with glitchy metal refractions (“Batsu Forever”). Even more straightforward songs, like the minute-and-a-half blitz of “Kill All Borders,” are arranged in such a way that they’re blurry and bewildering too. Kelly plays his kit with a sweaty intensity that has often invited comparisons to Lightning Bolt’s tunnel-vision pummeling, and Stephenson’s in-the-red electronics leave little room in the margins of the tracks for any stray thoughts. U-Void Synthesizer is meant to totally consume you.
This sort of kitchen-sink approach to heavy music isn’t a totally new one. Avant-minded metal acts like Liturgy have often experimented with deliberately overwhelming arrangements, as have artists like Bonnie Baxter, Deli Girls, and many of their other contemporaries in New York’s punk-minded scene of self-described “mutants.” But U-Void Synthesizer is unique in the way it echoes the cruel momentum of the modern world. Machine Girl have said that this is largely the point of their music. “I think most of what dictates our taste is pretty maximum shit because we’ve just consumed so much media in our lives,” Kelly said in an interview last year. “So for us to really relate to anything it has to be over the top.” In their mile-a-minute music, there’s little hope for rest—just pure fear, momentum, and adrenaline for a society that demands it.


At various points, the electronic composer and onetime Parts & Labor frontman Dan Friel evokes noise, industrial, punk crossed with techno, video games, even jazz. On Life, his fourth full-length, he covers that range more thoroughly than ever.

Life

The sound Dan Friel has created is so uniquely specific, it's easy to oversimplify: distorted nursery-rhyme melodies over cracked drum-machine beats. But dig just a little below the surface and there's a lot more going on. At various points Friel evokes noise, industrial, punk crossed with techno, video games, even jazz. On Life, his fourth full-length, he covers that range more thoroughly than ever, which perhaps explains the album's all-encompassing title. Pretty much his entire musical existence is locked in these grooves.
The title might also refer to the fact that Friel has literally created life—this is the first album he's recorded since his son Wolf was born in 2013. Friel's music has always had childlike qualities, but here he makes that connection explicit. He opens with a sweet, woozy jingle called "Lullaby (For Wolf)", following later with the even-more sugary "Theme", which could pass for an outtake from Raymond Scott's Soothing Sounds for Baby. The warped, off-speed crunch of "Sleep Deprivation" would fit on any Friel album, but pinning its title to parenthood reveals how well his music captures the half-awake fog of early child-rearing.
The rest of Life may not be about kids, but every track contains some simple melodic nugget that any toddler would happily hum along to. The best songs revel in that anthemic innocence, particularly the catchy "Cirrus", an immediate earworm on the level of Friel's 2012 insta-classic "Valedictorian". The two title tracks are nearly as memorable, though a lot more abrasive, ringing with distortion and bullet-like fuzz blasts.
But again, hearing Friel through a single thematic prism is unwise. Some sections in Life sound like hip-hop bathed in nitrogen, or even like lost Bomb Squad beats. Friel's way of taking his melodies off on tangents evokes jazz solos; his obsession with gritty texture gives some pieces, like the clanging "Bender", the musique concrète feel of a busy construction site. And for all its machinistic beats, Life can also sound like a sloppy punk band rattling basement walls. That's especially true during "Jamie (Luvver)", Friel's wordless cover of a Joanna Gruesome song, which gives the already-energetic original a huge shot of late-night caffeine.
What unites all the styles in Friel's sonic fryer is playful momentum. His main instrument, a Yamaha Portasound keyboard, is literally a toy, and throughout Life it sounds like he's rolling around on the floor. Most of his songs include a constant whirr, and leave you with the echo of that eternal buzz—an effect that I imagine is a mirror of Friel's bleeping brain. Give Life some time and you might find it infecting your synapses, too.


The Canadian supergroup continues its shift from urgent, high-velocity rave-ups to mid-tempo tunes with an ornate, cinematic grandeur.

Together

As a project, the New Pornographers have more in common with a blockbuster film franchise than a typical rock band. All of their albums follow a similar crowd-pleasing blueprint, and the group's four primary vocalists consistently fall into familiar roles: A.C. Newman is the everyman protagonist, Neko Case is the sassy dame, Dan Bejar is the lovable rogue, and Kathryn Calder is the demure ingenue. The logistics of managing so many successful careers makes each album an event along the lines of a sequel, with all the corresponding expectations, escalation of stakes, and more recently, diminishing returns. The first three New Pornographers records stand as an outstanding trilogy of brainy, hyperactive power-pop; Challengers, their fourth LP, left listeners disappointed and confused, wondering why the group had largely abandoned up-tempo thrills.
If only because it rocks slightly more on a superficial level, the New Pornographers' fifth album, Together, will inevitably be labeled a return to form. In reality, Newman and his partners are still developing a style that began with Twin Cinema cuts like "The Bleeding Heart Show" and "These Are the Fables" and came into full bloom on Challengers. Newman has shifted his focus from urgent, high-velocity rave-ups to mid-tempo tunes with an ornate, cinematic grandeur. When the band rock out on Together, as they do on "Your Hands (Together)" and "Up in the Dark", it's mostly a matter of hitting rhythmic hooks with a very strong emphasis, like ending a sentence with a dozen exclamation points.
Compared to Challengers, Together is sunnier and has fewer slow songs. However, whereas Challengers' gentle moments opened up the group's stylistic range, Together's quietest track "Valkyrie and the Roller Disco" feels like a speed bump in the middle of an album that could have used an extra jolt of energy. Newman is more successful when he merges his taste for symphonic bombast with his skill for huge choruses ("Moves", "We End Up Together") or when he holds back from unleashing the band's full force on the springy, cheerful Calder showcase "Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk".
As Newman continues to explore new ways of writing for his ensemble, Dan Bejar's contributions find him making better use of the the band's distinct resources. Whereas his songs had sometimes seemed arbitrarily wedged into New Pornographers albums for the sake of acting as Newman's foil, Bejar's material on Together is more of a piece with the record's tone and character. "Silver Jenny Dollar" and "If You Can't See My Mirrors" are lush yet breezy, and provide a welcome contrast with Newman's more overwrought arrangements. "Daughters of Sorrow" takes full advantage of the band's elaborate harmonies for a majestic vocal crescendo. All three songs contrast Bejar's voice with that of Neko Case, wisely exploiting a chemistry that had not yet been fully explored.
Case, despite taking the spotlight on the stand-out tracks "Crash Years" and "My Shepherd" and being present through most of the songs, is mostly under-utilized here. Whereas her huge, brassy voice had been deployed as the vocal equivalent of a fuzz pedal on classics like "The Laws Have Changed" and "Letter From an Occupant", she has since been relegated to mid-tempo numbers and ballads. She carries those songs well, but it's not a far cry from what she does on her solo albums, and it tosses out the novelty of placing her alt-country powerhouse voice in the context of hard-charging rock songs. Newman has done better in servicing Calder, whose delicate, princessy tone is well suited to his smaller, less assertive compositions.
Aside from "Valkyrie", Together is a solid collection of well-crafted songs. However, in spite of the quality, the album isn't entirely satisfying. To some extent, this is simply a case of a band capable of greatness merely turning in a pretty good record. The real problem is more subtle. Though Newman's songs have become more melodramatic and sentimental in recent years, his lyrics have remained rather cryptic. It's clear that some of the songs are addressing something intense and personal, but he keeps the listener at arm's length, which in turn discourages identification and emotional connection. Newman's cerebral wordplay and mythic allusions worked well in zippy power-pop songs, but the grand gestures of his newer material require more heart and less brain. Bejar, who is no less arty and obscure in his lyrics, can pull off his more pretentious moves with raw charisma and self-aware wit, but Newman can't help but come across as a sincere straight-arrow type. He puts so much effort into subverting that quality in his voice, but at this point in his career, it's something he ought to consider embracing.