On his debut album, Zack Fox doubles down on the joke rap shtick, resulting in a collection of tracks that is as disjointed as it is unfunny.

Zack Fox: shut the fuck up talking to me

shut the fuck up talking to me

When Zack Fox’s joke song “Jesus Is the One (I Got Depression)” went viral in 2019, the comedian and illustrator distanced himself from the attention. “I’m not even a rapper,” he told Rolling Stone. “This popped off because of how monotonous and how saturated rap has become in this viral-Spotify-TikTok environment.” After the relentless stream of trolls, actors, athletes, weed carriers, and one-trick ponies that memed their way to the top throughout the 2010s, Fox’s ambivalence felt refreshing. He seemed willing to relish his viral moment, yet also let it pass. On his debut album, shut the fuck up talking to me, he reverses course, stretching his joke rap shtick until it tears.

“Jesus Is the One (I Got Depression)” was compiled from Fox’s gag appearance on Kenny Beats’ web series The Cave. The Cave typically recasts the rap radio freestyle as a casual hangout: Instead of subjecting visiting rappers to prodding questions and random beats, Kenny treats them as patrons, bantering with them as he tailors an instrumental to their style and whims—music-making as a trip to the barbershop, essentially. Because Fox was not a rapper, his episode was essentially a comedy skit. The resulting freestyle worked because it fit his skill set as an improviser, talking head, and slapstick comic.
His toolkit as a rapper is far more narrow. He raps exclusively in punchlines and insults, an approach that yields disjointed verses comprised of canned one-liners and limp similes. “I been fuckin’ up huns like Mulan did/Said he gone slide, I’m like ooh I wish/Beat a nigga ass like you my kids/Comin’ at ya head like new ideas,” he raps on “bane.” Like, like, like, like. Every line introduces a gag then abandons it. Non sequiturs are supposed to be random, but his joke dumps are rarely subversive or surprising; he almost always goes for the lowest-hanging fruit. Too many lines are both dull and thoughtless. “I feel like a condom, ain’t nobody fuckin’ with me,” he says on “menace,” the intended joke (condoms are uncomfortable) squandered by the poor word choice. He is emphatically bad at rapping.
Fox writes so much filler that there’s an almost algorithmic regularity to it: He starts fist fights, he shoots people, he gets geeked off the beans, he has sex, he drives cars, and he has sex in cars while geeked after a shootout that began as a fist fight. The redundancy might work if Fox had a sharper sense of style or continuity, or if his setups built into schemes or ideas, but he’s a styleless bore. Despite all the wisecracking, there’s no individuality to his shock-jock antics, no appetite, no direction. The beat loads, Fox raps, and nothing happens. His songs are like dud fireworks, screaming up into the sky but never exploding.
Weirdly, these uneventful songs don’t even read as parodies. Other joke rappers such as Big Shaq, Supa Hot Fire, and even Big Body Bes aren’t always funny, but they are at least identifiable as personae. Fox, by comparison, completely lacks presence. He just...raps. And even when he sticks to a bit, his writing spins in place. “get off my dick,” a bouncy, SoCal-inspired Kenny Beats production, is lively, but the verses just keep time until the chorus, and Fox simply scrabbles for dick jokes in the interim.
Deep down in this music, there’s vestiges of the outlandish and misanthropic debauchery of the Awful Records collective, which Fox is a part of, but shut the fuck up talking to me isn’t remotely as fun, horny, or wry as a typical Awful release. Whereas past Fox songs like “Square Up” and “Stick” at least had echoes of the crunk and snap music that Awful and Atlanta’s underground have kept alive, the songs here are automated and rootless. Humor will always be welcome in and essential to rap, but it’s best left to actual rappers.
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The Los Angeles-based singer and violinist blends avant-garde experimentalism with the swagger-drenched posturing of club rap, ’90s R&B grooves, and biting introspection.

Sudan Archives

Born Brittney Denise Parks—the 23-year-old singer and violinist known as Sudan Archives—employs an intuitive ear and an autodidactic curiosity to fuel the justifiably rapid rise she has enjoyed as a new fixture of the effervescent Angeleno music scene. Parks moves effortlessly within densely layered, glitchy, experimental folk landscapes across the six tracks on her self-titled debut EP, released this month on Stones Throw. Armed with little more than a digital looping station and a violin, Sudan Archives finds singularity and certain value in a sound that suggests both the depths of her ability and the untapped potential of the instrument itself.
Following talents like string duo Chargaux, cellist Kelsey Lu, and harpist Brandee Younger, Sudan Archives is the latest in a growing line of avant-garde, orchestral polymaths making experimental music by obliterating commonly held perceptions of their instruments. Sudan Archives’ moniker is a reference to the minor triads and pentatonic scales at the foundation of the string dominant folk of North and West Africa, which inspired her to avoid Western musical conventions in seeking and refining her own sound. Without allegiance to any particular trend and late to learning musical theory, Sudan Archives takes a decidedly percussive and improvisational approach to playing the violin. Combined with an uncanny knack for punchy lyrics, her style is the foundation for a seminal release that doubles as an unforgettable sensory experience.
The Sudan Archives EP is anchored by lyricism that mashes the swagger-drenched posturing of club rap with ’90s R&B grooves and biting introspection—best demonstrated by her one-off flip of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly single “King Kunta.” The aptly titled “Queen Kunta” is a much more spare and elegant production that plays like a warning shot beamed through the atmosphere from another dimension. lead single “Come Meh Way” is equal parts devotional chant and sassy homage to bubblegum r&b hooks, the track is a deconstructed dancehall riddim driven by claps staggered to create a rhythmic onslaught wrapped up in a rotund, buzzing low end.
The only true drawback by the midpoint of the EP is the abbreviated life of the tracks—an issue that might suggest this was a collection of unfinished ideas if the release did not feel so well thought out and otherwise complete.  Thankfully, the problem is alleviated by the engagement of the repeat button. “Oatmeal” also helps, a track that boasts atmospheric production and lyrics that extract the beauty from the mundane; Sudan Archives wipes away the jarring feeling of morning routine with the dulcet tone of one sentence, as she sings “Wake up, if you want some oatmeal I got you.” Pizzicato and sweeping strings intersect with her words to wash over the listener, creating what might be best described as a cleansing effect.
The closing track “Wake Up” picks up where “Queen Kunta” and her 2014 cover of Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead” left off as a statement of unwavering confidence. She states, “I got too much swag/That’s why I ain’t got no friends/I’m too confident.” With that, Sudan Archives doubles down on the fierce independence first displayed in her approach to musicianship and conjures revolution. It’s an appropriate conclusion given that the architect of this is an emotive, lo-fi agitator poised to buck tradition and flip what you thought you knew about the violin on its head.


On this LP from New York noise-jazz trio GRID, saxophonist Matt Nelson—a collaborator on tUnE-yArDs’ w h o k i l l—puts his tones through pedals and electronics to thrilling effect.

GRID

Saxophonist Matt Nelson is one of the more unpredictable virtuosos in New York’s underground. He played with a sense of ecstatic lyricism in a band assembled by Merrill Garbus for the album w h o k i l l. He’s delivered thoughtful supporting work in Battle Trance, a tenor-quartet group that plays compositions by Travis Laplante. And Nelson can also command center stage; his raging solos in Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones invite comparisons to some of experimental jazz’s most admired reed extremists.
This kind of performance mobility doesn’t tend to come about casually—and it’s clear that Nelson enjoys taking on discrete roles in different ensembles. On his first record as part of GRID, a collaborative trio with drummer Nick Podgurski and bassist Tim Dahl, Nelson conceives of a different challenge. This time, he often plays the saxophone covertly. As he puts his tones through a raft of pedals and electronics, the majority of Nelson’s licks sound like the work of a lead guitarist in an avant-rock trio.
On the band’s eponymous debut, Nelson’s indirect use of the saxophone is the most consistently thrilling element. During the initial minutes of the first movement (titled “(+/+)”), you might spend some time re-checking the album credits just to make sure there isn’t a guest guitarist on hand. But those slow-moving, feedbacking melodies are all Nelson. The free-improv pulses from the rhythm section create a compelling, abstract background. And when Nelson allows small bulbs of typical reed-instrument noise to flower, in the fourth minute, the listener gains a greater appreciation of the saxophonist’s command over this unusual terrain.
The NNA Tapes label has used the term “doom jazz” to describe the band’s sound, though there are some precedents that predate this subgenre coinage. Starting in the ’90s, Rashied Ali—the ferocious, late-period drummer for John Coltrane—worked with bassist Bill Laswell and the guitarist-vocalist Keiji Haino in the outfit Purple Trap. And Laswell’s ’80s partnership with saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, in the group Last Exit and on the duo album Low Life, is another touchstone for this school of noise-jazz. But those past ensembles have often been at pains to show how many song forms they can undermine: swinging wildly between clattering ragers, ambient soundscapes, and even some dance textures.
The members of GRID take a more stable view of the style. Some passages on the album have slightly more propulsive drive (see: “(-/+)”). Others a shade of greater mystery (as on “(-/-)”). But over four movements spanning 38 minutes, the differences between these sections are not as stark as on many prior rock-meets-free-jazz outings. The benefit of this more even-keeled approach is its novelty. Though the textures are extreme in nature, and densely layered, GRID doesn’t seem primarily interested in bludgeoning listeners.
That decision results in an unusually dreamy realization of the underlying aesthetic: one that brings the group’s work more in line with drone composition than with that of Laswell. The risk stalking such a choice is the fact that a listener’s attention can drift a bit. But in electing not to close with a dramatic bash of a finale, the members of this gifted trio signal that they may be fine with that reaction. Like much else on this surprising set, the quick fade-out ending creates an idiosyncratic impact that lingers well beyond the album’s running time.


Before he became Nicolas Jaar’s foil in the electro-noir duo Darkside, guitarist Dave Harrington was immersed in the jazz world. Become Alive finds him circling back to his improv roots.

Become Alive

Before he became Nicolas Jaar’s foil in the electro-noir duo Darkside, guitarist Dave Harrington was immersed in the jazz world, hitting shows at the old Knitting Factory and Tonic in the late 1990s and early '00s. The New York improv scene was at the time especially vital, but like any other young, hungry player, Harrington began to dabble outside of jazz so as to have enough working gigs, doing time in metal, synth-pop, and indie bands. With Darkside now on indefinite hiatus and Harrington’s profile significantly raised, it makes sense that he would form his own band and circle back to his improvised music roots.
Following the downtempo Before This There Was One Heart But a Thousand Thoughts EP is Become Alive, Harrington’s debut album as a leader, which features instrumental configurations ranging from duos to 11-piece ensembles. Opener “White Heat” is made by a five-piece, and finds Harrington’s group creating a dark, foreboding mood, as he coaxes flares of feedback that suggest a fire at the horizon. But even as it builds across its seven minutes, there’s little actual movement. Volumes swell and recede, cymbals sizzle and settle back in, but rather than resolving tension, “Heat” just dissipates.
That dynamic holds true the rest of Become Alive, which accentuates texture and mood over structure and melody to a fault. The unsettling atmosphere draws you in, but there’s a sameness to the eight tracks that makes distinguishing individual parts difficult, in part because every instrument finds itself in the service of ambience rather than melody or meter. “Slides,” arranged for Harrington and John Stanesco’s bass clarinet, suggests disused industrial space, the electronics churning far in the background like discarded machinery. Its function is mainly interstitial, leading into “The Prophet,” wherein the drums and percussion clatter in an increasing pace without ever settling on an actual rhythm.
The highlight is the title track, a nearly 10-minute epic that features 11 players and some new timbres: vibes, flute and soprano sax. The group works right up to a boil, the woodwinds swerving around the other instruments. Harrington’s guitar has plenty to engage with here, be it the high register of the saxophone or the rumbling percussion, suggesting Santana at his earliest and most incandescent. The piece continues to build and build, reaching a massive, full-blown climax that justifies its lengthy runtime.
The album ends on a stronger note. “Spectrum” mixes vibraphone, theremin, Fender Rhodes and Harrington’s pedal steel, a curious array of instruments that come together to suggest a weightless, sparkling space that slides ever so slowly towards dissonance. The new age ambience of “All I Can Do” leads into Become Alive’s most driving and most lyrical number. Harrington’s solo shows that while he’s adept at embracing bleak, desolate atmospheres with his fretwork, he’s just as capable of moving towards the lighter side. If the first half of the album has a lethargic sense that record never quite shakes, the last two tracks suggest there may be more for the group to explore in the future.


The deep, distorted grooves of Stereolab’s second album mark the middle of their motorik period, an incantatory album with a darkly lit sound as if everyone played with their eyes closed.

Stereolab: Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements

A locked groove is that empty loop your needle gets trapped in when you leave a record on the turntable after the music has finished. Technically the record is still playing, but it’s only producing a soft, rhythmic hissing. It’s noise, but for many music lovers, the noise comes with a feeling and a history. A distinctly Stereolab flourish was to sample that repetitive hiss on “Lock-Groove Lullaby,” the last song on their second studio album, 1993’s Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements. The idea of finding romance in an incidental machine sound is Stereolab in a nutshell: As postmodern recyclers of 1960s kitsch and analog sound effects, they were never ones to let the standard definition of musicality limit their quest to invent a new and idiosyncratic kind of pop music.
Stereolab was formed in 1990 by British guitarist Tim Gane (formerly of McCarthy) and French singer Lætitia Sadier, and the band’s numbers fluctuated over the years—notably, when they gained backup singer Mary Hansen in 1992 (losing her 10 years later to a cycling accident), added drummer Andy Ramsay in 1993, and gigged and recorded with master arranger Sean O’Hagan, of the High Llamas. In 1993, they were hitting their stride, still a little mired in the heavy guitar of their early material (the 1991 EP Super-Electric is essentially indie rock) but veering toward more esoteric pastures. A series of discoveries in electronic equipment launched Gane in new compositional directions: In particular, there was a secondhand Farfisa Bravo organ bought cheap and only really suitable for two-note drones. Over the course of their long run of great studio albums, from 1992’s Peng! to 2010’s Not Music, the founding Gane-Sadier dyad (a longtime couple, though they eventually split) gradually forged a sound both unmistakable and extremely difficult to describe. Some things are ineffable: How would you describe the sound of a locked groove to somebody who has never seen an LP?
Memory is as much an instrument for Stereolab as the Moog. Using familiar reference points from the history of pop—lovely lounge melodies, old-timey grooves—Stereolab created a new model for what a song could be. Theirs have no real predetermined structure, apart from the fact that most (though not all) are under 10 minutes long. Instead of following the usual verse-chorus-verse shape, Stereolab songs are cyclical epics organized around musical phrases repeated so often they become incantatory. In this new form, the pleasant ambience of Muzak muddles with Sonic Youth-ish chugging guitar; nothing is new, but the combinations are unexpected.
Transient Random-Noise Bursts is heavier than Stereolab’s later albums, low on the playful jangle of Emperor Tomato Ketchup and high on dark, persistent grooves. “Jenny Ondioline” and “Pack Yr Romantic Mind” are the album’s standout tracks, now classics. The former is a good encapsulation of that darker vibe: It’s dirge-like at first, with a roundabout of a hook and a steady mid-tempo thump. But Sadier’s melodic line elevates what would otherwise be odd guitar rock into something sweet and singsong. “Pack Yr Romantic Mind” is less fuzzy and more tuneful; two chief melodies, split between Sadier and a synth that sounds like her robot alter ego, achieve a rare fusion of funk and minimalism.
The music is anchored by a handful of elements: Gane’s repetitive chords, synth drones, and electronic effects, unswerving motorik beats (the Neu! influence), and Sadier and Hansen’s vocals weaving prettily around it all like daisies in a hairdo. For the uninitiated, the resulting music is like nothing you’ve heard before, but also somehow something you’ve been listening to in your head your whole life.
That’s partly down to the way nostalgia activates deep, animal parts of one’s brain, and partly due to Sadier’s gorgeous and often unintelligible singing. Cocteau Twins-style, she’s wont to put the stress on a strange part of a word, changing a phrase like “The greater is the beauty” into “Tha grade ari step you tee.” The effect is to break down language, turning syllables into noises and consonants into percussion, while her voice still disguises itself as yé-yé-style pop singing. You can clearly hear on Transient Noise-Bursts that Stereolab composed via a process of live improvisation, all their different elements becoming odd but easy bedfellows through practice. Because Gane provides such a solid foundation for his collaborators to extemporize around, their contributions feel natural, almost automatic or unconscious, as if everybody was playing with their eyes closed.
It must be that pre-verbal vibe which makes Stereolab such an instinctive band. To me, “Pack Yr Romantic Mind” sounds exactly how it felt to sit in my teenage bedroom, deeply absorbed in some project as the time and space around me took on a repetitive looping aspect, old records playing in the background. Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements is Stereolab at a slightly more serious pitch than some prefer, but that lends the album a sense of rigor and strength—still joyful and surprising, just lit by a different color.

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Low End Theory associate Nosaj Thing's second album serves as a kind of twilight to its predecessor Drift's midnight, elaborating on Jason Chung's icy sound with occasional hints of pop clarity. Guests include Toro Y Moi and Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead.

Home

As bass music has emerged from the underground in the States, it has, predictably, become warmer, brighter and more accessible. Sure, a key element of Skrillex's appeal is the enormous release that comes with the drop, but it's equally important to have pleasant sounds as contrast. The move toward warmth isn't limited to the most obvious of brostep producers. Flying Lotus isn't soundtracking raves quite yet, but he's certainly shifted towards accessibility, moving from the eerie glitchfest of Los Angeles in 2008, to the settled comfort of last year's Until the Quiet Comes.
Even some of our iciest producers seem vulnerable to this gradual instrumental warming. Take FlyLo's sometime Low End Theory associate, Nosaj Thing. The Los Angeles producer's debut album, Drift, (which came out a year after Los Angeles) was an icy chasm, a shifting cave of sound that seemed as if it could have originated in the coldest reaches of space. But his new album, Home, serves as a kind of twilight to Drift's midnight, elaborating on his sound while taking a welcome turn towards the light.
That's not to say that Nosaj Thing, born Jason Chung, is suddenly making full-fledged pop. The darkness hasn't disappeared entirely. But occasional hints of pop clarity lie trapped just beneath the surface of many tracks on the new album. The shift is surprising given Chung's former penchant for working in huge dark spaces and his origin in the realm of glitch-hop, a subgenre that frequently posits intricacy as its own kind of beauty. But it's not unwelcome, considering the producer has clearly retained his ability to produce the studied soundscapes that made his debut so promising. It's just the sharp edges are now complemented by some soft ones.
The change is particularly obvious when Chung employs vocalists. Blonde Redhead's frontwoman Kazu Makino transforms the plaintive "Eclipse/Blue" into a particularly pillowy affair, a torrent of the kind of grey and blue sounds that are described in the lyrics. The Toro Y Moi-featuring "Try" and its accompanying "Prelude" are downright lovely; a slow tapestry of summoning synths soon gives way to epic fireworks reminiscent of the intro to M83's Hurry Up We're Dreaming. When Chaz Bundick's voice comes in about halfway through "Try", his wispy voice blows beautifully through the music, sounding aloft within the mix.
What distinguishes Chung's production from that of M83 is its nuance and its lack of obvious sentimentality. Nearly every track on Home is downtempo, but multiple backbeats help to direct the flow of energy-- doubling down on bass on a song like "Snap" makes for a dynamic listen. On the surface, the song resembles something that a bombastic producer like Rustie might make for a peaceful Sunday afternoon, but upon further inspection, it isn't quite as peaceful as it first appears. A close listen reveals a busy world of secondary beats and electronic runs fluttering underneath the mix's outer membrane. "Glue" has so many ping-pong echoes and backing beats that it takes a moment to locate the rhythm that's actually moving the track along.
On Drift, melodies existed to accentuate complex beats like these, as on "Fog", where chilly synthesizers wove in and out of an asthmatic gasp of a bassline. Even when light broke in on a slow descending bridge, it was still accompanied by that breathless sound, something like Gollum trying to catch his breath in Beijing. The closest comparison on Home is the title track, which opens the album. A synth line moves through a dark chorus of voices until it arrives at a shuddering epicenter that woulnd't have felt out of place on that 2009 album. "Distance", too, is somewhat cold-blooded at first, as a brief synth flutter foreshadows an ominous minor key transformation that threatens to dominate when the beat vanishes midway through. But, in a nice microcosm of the album's direction, it uses those minor keys to produce a gorgeous swirling effect that re-ups and reamps when the beat returns.
If any more evidence were needed of the change in Nosaj Thing's sound, album closer "Light #3", the third in a trilogy that appears throughout Drift, would serve as proof. Numbers one and two, both of them absolutely stunning tracks in their own right, offer sharpness as beauty, a panoply of cutting sounds choreographed exquisitely. By contrast, the piano that begins the third volume leads in to a gentle mountain of strings and voices, just as beautiful as the first two, but peaceful too, never threatening to overwhelm. Jason Chung may not have put out any music in the last four years, but he appears to have used that time well. Home is an ace of a second album, one which maintains the most important elements of Chung's painstakingly crafted sound while progressing nicely into a friendlier arena.


With a newly polished sound, the indie pop group’s latest is a neatly packaged document of quarter-life angst.

Emotional Creature

Lili Trifilio, the leader of Beach Bunny, rose to indie-pop prominence largely thanks to teenage girls circulating her songs on TikTok. In the five years since her solo project expanded into a full lineup with guitarist Matt Henkels, bassist Anthony Vaccaro, and drummer Jon Alvarado, the 25-year-old songwriter has amassed a sea of loyal fans who attend the band’s shows en masse to participate in female-dominated mosh pits, driven largely by the mutual rage of a broken heart. It’s easy to hear why Beach Bunny’s music has garnered such devotion. Trifilio writes about widely understood experiences: the self-doubt prompted by a relationship on the fritz, the thrill of being so infatuated with someone you want the world to watch you kiss them, the malaise of feeling unfit to be prom queen. Her melodies, meanwhile, stick with the spirit of an early 2000s Radio Disney hit—memorable and pleasant, if slightly simplistic.
The group’s 2020 debut, Honeymoon, was an unsophisticated but charming bible of love songs that mirrored the catharsis of sleepover gossip. When the pandemic rendered that therapeutic sense of community impossible, Trifilio spent the newly acquired free time taking in galactic sci-fi stories like Star Wars and Star Trek; perhaps feeling a bit distanced from herself, she began writing her second album, Emotional Creature. Its 12 songs attempt to capture the burden of a bleeding heart: “I feel confused by what I’m ashamed for/I feel ashamed by my human nature,” she sings on “Scream,” a synth-embellished ballad that culminates in a distant shriek. With Fall Out Boy and Motion City Soundtrack go-to Sean O’Keefe handling production, Emotional Creature is Trifilio’s neatly packaged documentation of quarter-life angst.
The thematic cornerstone of Emotional Creature is “Weeds,” a mid-tempo rock ditty that builds to a sweeping, anthemic coda. “I’m tired of being anxious, broken, choking on my tears/I let the same old problems steal away my years,” she sings, and you can almost picture Trifilio talking directly to herself in her bathroom mirror: “He’s not the problem/The problem is you think you’re only viable for love when someone makes you feel complete.” Throughout the record there are subtle hints of growth—both personal and musical—but they’re often dragged down by the redundancy of her thematic concerns. From feeling a little too dependent on a partner (“Oxygen”) to finding your dream boy (“Love Song”), she’s covered a lot of this subject matter before, often better the first time.
In the great pursuit for relatability, Trifilio’s lyrics are familiar and nonspecific: “But then I fall into your arms again/After all, is this the end?” she hollers on the searing “Gone.” During the pandemic, she moved back in with her parents and perhaps as a side effect, Emotional Creature is filled with vignettes of innocent bedroom scenes: “I can’t hide the letters in my bedroom,” she sings over a Michelle Branch-like chug on opener “Entropy,” before telling a love interest that their “laugh lives in [her] bedroom” on closer “Love Song.” And while it’s heartening to hear a genuinely enthusiastic underdog like Trifilio take on a more polished sound, her shortcomings become more discernible without the casual, garagey shading of her past work.
Music made or revered by teenage girls doesn’t imply shallowness. Take fellow TikTok darling Olivia Rodrigo, whose debut album Sour came loaded with slick one-liners about teen heartache and angst, or Letters to Cleo’s Kay Hanley, whose chipper snarl on the Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack remains an oft-referenced touchstone 20 years after the film’s release. There are moments when Emotional Creature approaches the high bar set by those records, like on the bouncy, whimsical “Karaoke,” which features some of Trifilio’s best  melodies and one of the album’s most endearing lines: “I learn all the words to your daydreams like I’m trying to sing karaoke.” On the breezy “Eventually,” she swaps her usual schtick of young love for an anecdote about her first panic attack: “I tried to cry but I laughed cause my brain’s acting stupid,” she sings, a welcome moment of nuance.
For those who’ve endured the all-encompassing apprehension of a new relationship, mourned  their first real breakup, or simply wondered what to do with all these feelings, it’s easy to have a soft spot for Trifilio and the unabashed affection of Emotional Creature. But futile romance isn’t the only criteria of mid-20s dread; there’s a whole world out there to make someone want to throw caution to the wind and launch themselves into outer space. “Life looks better through my worldview,” Trifilio sings on “Oxygen.” It would be a more rewarding sentiment if she weren’t viewing the world solely from her comfort zone.


The second solo album from the Alabama Shakes singer-songwriter is musically muscular and thematically heady, a sound nerd’s project with stadium-sized panache.

What Now

Almost immediately after Alabama Shakes broke through with tasteful retro-soul style, Brittany Howard pushed back against categorization. Her band’s Grammy-winning 2015 record, Sound & Color, borrowed from touchstones as far-reaching as Y2K post-punk, Erykah Badu, and Portishead, but it was Howard’s 2019 debut solo album, Jaime, where her experimentation truly blossomed. Its sound gravitated between quiet torch songs and raucous declarations that mixed funk-rock with electronica, bound by startling lyrics mined from Howard’s biography. What Now, recorded during the pandemic in Shawn Everett’s studio, is a different beast. Its subject matter is more gestural and existential—a love gone wrong, a call for peace, a bout of depression in the near future. It feels both looser and brawnier, a sound nerd’s project with stadium-sized panache and a grab-bag approach.
What Now opens calmly enough, with crystal singing bowls and a few tentative piano chords and cymbal hits, as Howard narrates her trepidation. “But will I know?/Will I feel it?/The first moment that I see it?” she sings, her voice layered over itself in a blanketing echo. Then, with a whirling synth and explosion of drums, she’s off, blasting through the atmosphere, whizzing past soul, blues, funk, jazz, psychedelia, and house music. If Howard’s lyrics make it seem like she’s still working through things, her music sounds like she’s got it all figured out. Every song here, even the slow stuff, feels giant and propulsive—a grand celestial tour of rock and R&B, guided by one of the few singers and multi-instrumentalists with the range and intuition to pull it off.
Howard is studied in the Stevie Wonder school of pulling a groove out of just about anything, thanks in part to her rhythm section here, drum virtuoso Nate Smith and versatile Alabama Shakes bassist Zac Cockrell. “I Don’t” builds around a melancholy chipmunk-soul hook in the vein of Cam’ron; “Patience” morphs from a bog-standard slow jam into a dazzling showcase of warped keyboard effects; at least one song features Howard banging on a trash can. There’s the muscular, airtight funk-rock of the title track, the frenetic boxed-in percussion of “Red Flags,” and a big swing at house music on “Prove It to You.” Yet some of the album’s most inspired choices have no rhythm at all. Between nearly every track, the singing bowls return, played by sound bath practitioners Ann Sensing and Ramona Reid, providing a brief respite and sealing What Now together like spiritual glue.
Shining like a beacon through it all is Howard’s extraordinary voice. On “Red Flags,” she morphs between staccato chants, defiant snarls, heavenly lilts, a show-stopping falsetto on the chorus—sometimes she’ll do it all at once, thanks to the album’s impeccable multitrack layering. Howard already had the honor of double-soloing with Prince, but she gives him a run for his money on “Power to Undo,” howling and gasping over her own razor-blade guitar licks. The way her voice and the rest of the band build off each other is wondrous in its own right; take “Samson,” where her subdued vocals weave around a trumpet line from Rod McGaha, before she fades out and lets McGaha continue on a solo in the back half. It’s an intricate give-and-take that’s easy to forget during the energized jams, but the unity between Howard and her collaborators drives home the album’s mightiness.
Against its lush acoustics, the songwriting on What Now can feel like an afterthought. Howard constructs narratives that start from an impressionistic fragment of a feeling—uncertainty, indignation, crushing desire—and lets the music take you the rest of the way. Biography is obscured, leaving only the stray “you” and “girl” in songs that feel like letters never to be sent. After the soul-baring of Jaime, where Howard discussed racism and queerness through the lens of personal history, she’s putting more distance between herself and the song. The emotions she describes are no less direct, but their context is elusive.
The most outward-facing themes on What Now come from Maya Angelou, whose adjuring reading of 1995’s “A Brave and Startling Truth” makes up the album’s midpoint interlude. Written for the semicentennial of the United Nations, Angelou’s poem connects the smallness of human life in the universe to an “imperative” for freedom and equality. Howard continues that thread into “Another Day”: “We were born in a time to change the paradigm/Peace is the prize of our timeline,” she declares over punchy, Thundercat-esque bass, becoming a melodic vessel for the poet’s broader message.
But Howard is equally wise to humanity’s smallness, to the effort—and the rest—required to sustain until the imperative can be realized. When What Now finally comes back down to Earth on the beautiful closer “Every Color in Blue,” it’s like a freefall. Methodical guitar and stuttering beats lay the groundwork, Rod McGaha’s trumpet floats up above, and in the middle of looping piano chords, Howard draws out every syllable like she’s letting gravity pull her down: “You don’t see my injury/You don’t see the energy it takes me.” As joyful and effortless as Howard’s work can appear, these songs don’t come for free.


Mike Kinsella’s latest is his most relentlessly morose and objectively gorgeous work as Owen to date.

The Avalanche

In case you’ve missed out on the past 20-some years of American Football and Owen and are just now checking in with Mike Kinsella for the first time, here’s where he’s at in 2020: “I’ve got friends that don’t know me/A wife that’s disowned me/Here in concept only to miss.” This comes in the middle of “Dead for Days,” a song that begins with memories of his brother Tim finding their father’s unconscious body and ends with Mike imagining himself going out the same way, hoping at least it’ll be deemed an accidental overdose. While The Avalanche is billed as an album of “unraveling marriage and big endings," it’s also, simply, “the next Owen album,” a prophecy self-fulfilled in every brutally candid song and interview acknowledging the effects of porous boundaries between songwriting and real life.
“I can’t believe the lies that my mouth spits/I can’t believe she stayed as long as she did,” Kinsella softly croons, setting the course for an album spent in the most indulgent part of a breakup: plenty of self-examination and admissions of fault, but no hard lessons learned and no real desire to change just yet. It’s hard to blame anyone who lacks the emotional bandwidth to take this all in at the moment. But you don’t send back a piece of cheesecake for tasting a little too rich and you don’t tap out on an Owen album because it’s a little too self-pitying.
The Avalanche wallows, but the realization rather than the anticipation of karmic retribution lends it emotional urgency even as Kinsella works in his familiar modes of meandering melodies, exquisite acoustic arpeggios, and the occasional lapse into cringe-posting that threatens to break the whole spell. When he sings, “I can’t have my cake and fuck it too,” at the top of “I Should’ve Known,” it’s not clever, but an example of how easily he can ruin a moment (“OK, I won’t make another goddamn joke/I know, how rude”). The self-awareness still can’t cancel out a line so awkward that it haunts every subsequent spin like a screenshot of a deleted tweet.
But that tendency has been drastically reduced from previous Owen albums, and The Avalanche is the project’s most relentlessly morose and objectively gorgeous work to date. To the same degree American Football LP3 realized the ambitions of its more tentative predecessor, The Avalanche goes maximalist with the template Kinsella and Bon Iver collaborator S. Carey set on 2016’s The King of Whys. Justin Vernon may have abandoned these winter wonderlands nearly a decade ago, but this is where Kinsella belongs right now. He is frighteningly alone in bustling environments—a sober mind filled with horrifying memories, at a bar an hour outside of town where he won’t be seen indulging his basest desires, and in “The Contours,” sighing “I’m in therapy/She’s in therapy” to relate a heartbreaking side-by-side separateness. Even as banjos, strings, bit-crushed electronics, overdubbed coos, or Now, Now’s KC Dalager wind through the mix, they’re all rendered ghostly by Carey’s see-through sheen.
Even if American Football has become Kinsella’s primary focus, it’s heightened the importance of Owen as a creative outlet, a way to counterbalance the brand with the human being. There’s no question whether the misery or the music came first; the Kinsella brothers have come to understand Cap’n Jazz’s abstract emo as functionally primal scream therapy, an outlet for the trauma they were suffering in an abusive household but couldn’t quite name. Mike Kinsella has covered the same subject far more directly in just about every album he’s made as Owen in the time since. “I’ve got a reputation for fucking up to uphold,” he sings during “On With the Show,” the most straightforward pop song he’s ever written, and one that addresses the central concern for anyone whose personal brand is contingent on being depressed in public. Are such people subliminally drawn to relational chaos as a way to uphold their brand, or is the brand itself the reason for their chaotic life? The Avalanche does not determine where the feedback loop begins, only how destructive—and how difficult to stop—it is once it gets going.

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Ellis Ludwig-Leone remains San Fermin's primary songwriter, composer, arranger and lyricist, but on Jackrabbit he presents his ambitious, heavily orchestrated chamber-pop as the work of a dynamic full band.

Jackrabbit

Ellis Ludwig-Leone, who records as San Fermin, studied composition at Yale University, served as a musical assistant under Nico Muhly and is a young, pop-classical fixture in New York City. It all sounds quite a lot like the backstory of Dave Longstreth, and his music sounds even more like Longstreth’s: San Fermin’s breakout single "Sonsick" was essentially the Broadway version of "Stillness Is the Move", and the resultant record followed suit with highbrow, heavily orchestrated chamber indie with literary aspirations. Ludwig-Leone remains the project’s primary songwriter, composer, arranger and lyricist, but he takes the focus off himself for Jackrabbit, presenting San Fermin as a legit, eight-person touring band. Once again, the experience is more likely to make you think of other indie A-listers rather than San Fermin.
This was mostly true of San Fermin as well, though it had a debut’s charm. Ludwig-Leone had chops and taste; perhaps a distinct point of view would emerge with experience and time. And besides, its unwieldy ambitions were welcome at a time when the Decemberists, Dirty Projectors, Sufjan Stevens and others were laying low. But rather than building or expanding on his foundation, Ludwig-Leone just piles on and exaggerates: everything San Fermin did, Jackrabbit does twice as loud.
The vocals are still split almost equally between Charlene Kaye and Allen Tate and alternate on a song-by-song basis. But San Fermin’s storyline has been exchanged for generic signifiers. Narrators "run for the hills" on the title track, aspire for "The Glory", enter "The Cave", get lost in "The Woods",  and fall "down, down, down the rabbit hole" without much further elaboration. Kaye’s features are more enjoyable, especially when they take after "Sonsick": even if the elements are familiar, at least they’re combined in a novel way, and they allow you to indulge in some circa-2005 indie rock fantasy booking: What if Sufjan Stevens got a hold of Amber Coffman and put her at the forefront of his most bombastic Illinois orchestrations? That’s pretty much the pitch for "Jackrabbit" and "Philosopher", songs where Ludwig-Leone’s bold melodies and gushing orchestration have a vocalist who can keep up.
And at the very least, Kaye’s songs tend to evoke several bands at once. Allen Tate, however, has either never heard the National or has never listened to any band other than the National. There’s no other way to explain the staggering degree to which Allen Tate sounds exactly like Matt Berninger. Not Leonard Cohen, not Mark Kozelek, or anyone else in the lineage of dour, baritone barstool bards. Just Matt Berninger. His vocals are subject to the same exact cadences, the exact melodic contours, the same wink-and-nod affectations, the same grim humor, the same vocabulary. When Tate takes the lead, San Fermin becomes the equivalent of a shaky music biopic, completely compromised by the uncanny valley effect of having someone not quite be the person he constantly reminds you of. The script, the setting, the soundtrack—all of it is rendered moot.
Worse yet, the melodramatic production on "Emily" and "Woman in Red" ensures they can't even pass as pleasant mimicry. The wearying volume of Jackrabbit is the most taxing aspect of a record that already arrives intentionally overstuffed. Ludwig-Leone has revealed himself to be a pop maximalist, as even the minute-long interludes are given to Backdraft-like bursts of horns and strings. Maybe the guy's heart is truly in theater, as Jackrabbit's overwrought spectacle unintentionally doubles as "Indie Rock in the Aughts: The Musical."


The prolific noise rap project drills down on their sonic signature and remains politically agnostic and persistently agitated.

Year of the Snitch

In the process of trying to sabotage their career at every turn, Death Grips became career artists. Regardless of how you classify their prolific output thus far, the noise-rap art project has averaged one album per year, with enough variation and quality control to make their “will they or won’t they break up” shtick background noise. They’re industrious, downright reliable, even. So on their 10th release in seven years, Year of the Snitch, Death Grips stay politically agnostic, persistently agitated—in a word, noided. It’s kinda quaint. Maybe even comforting.
Year of the Snitch makes it easier to see how their essence may have leached into today’s serrated musical landscape. The convergence of nu-metal and SoundCloud rap might’ve happened anyway—same with the bonkers, jump-cutting metalcore of bands like Code Orange and Vein—but it’s possible to hear their groundbreaking 2012 album The Money Store as a soft launch for what was to come—a context to understand the kind of heavy music either associated with high-intensity CrossFit or Mountain Dew-fueled eSports.
Even still, Death Grips’ sonic signature is so completely their own that it can’t be evoked with anything short of parody. It proves to be very adaptable to an increasingly diffuse number of sounds on Year of the Snitch. Mid-’90s drum ‘n’ bass beats with shoegaze guitars? “Death Grips is Online” will certainly try to create a “Dreamcast Teenage Riot.” “What if Death Grips went rockabilly?” is a question nobody was probably asking, but god bless “Disappointed” for giving us the answer. Is “Streaky” MC Ride’s stab at trap-rap or a strip club anthem? It’s hard to tell from its actual lyrics, but when the album threatens total abstraction, that’s where a drummer as expressive and destructive as Zach Hill grounds the sound into something resembling a band playing a song.
As far as what Death Grips actually have to say this time around, “Linda’s in Custody” refers to Linda Kasabian, a Manson Family member-turned-key witness for their prosecution. She turned 69 on June 21, the day that Year of the Snitch leaked. I don’t know if that was Death Grips’ intent, but at least one of their conspiracy-prone fans seems to think so on Genius. If referencing such annotations seems like an unforgivable faux pas, I would argue that it’s borderline critical malpractice to look at any Death Grips album without considering how their fans will interact with it. Acknowledging that the project’s entire existence has been an elaboration on deep internet culture is a starting point for the conversation: What Lil Pump is to SoundCloud, what Car Seat Headrest is to Bandcamp, Death Grips are to 4chan. I mean, the title of “Death Grips is Online” is a reference to one of their most viral tweets—not even Kanye’s done that yet.
MC Ride’s extremely rare expressions of legible emotion—“I require privacy,” or, “This is a brand/Not your boy”—are seemingly at odds with Death Grips being firmly within the realm of fan service. Was there any point of them even making a video for “Shitshow” if it wasn’t going to get banned from YouTube for violating its decency standards? Their use of filmmaker Andrew Adamson’s voice for a spoken word interlude on “Dilemma” feels reverse engineered to grab “Death Grips Worked With the Director of Shrek” headlines. Good luck trying to spot Tool bassist Justin Chancellor’s contributions without the credits, but you could say that Death Grips linked up with maybe the only band that gets more love on the deep web than they do. The most notable contribution on the album comes from DJ Swamp, a champion turntablist who once toured with Beck and Ministry, who scatters his production throughout.
Entertain the possibility that Shrek, Tool, and Beck fans might use all of the above as entry points to Death Grips, and Year of the Snitch could be viewed as their most extroverted album yet. More likely, they all showed up in large part simply for the appeal of the volatile experimentation the name Death Grips carries: violence, noise, stoned humor, surrealism. Of course, like every Death Grips album, Year of the Snitch is about 10 minutes too long. Much like 2016’s Bottomless Pit, this album isn’t a significantly weaker work than The Money Store or NO LOVE DEEP WEB, but as with everything Death Grips, context matters. “I’ve Seen Footage” and “Hacker” were relative pop songs, and their previous album covers and stunts were not significantly more shitposty than what they’re up to now. But those things came about when Death Grips were shockingly close to being a mainstream concern, a targeted Molotov cocktail compared to Year of the Snitch, an M-80 blown up in an empty clearing—explosive, fun as hell, but lacking a clear target to give it meaning.


The latest compilation from Nina Kraviz’s label explores the fringes of techno with a twisted grin.

Various Artists: Happy New Year! We Wish You Happiness!

Happy New Year! We Wish You Happiness!

Techno may come couched in an air of deep seriousness, but it is, in the end, largely party music. For all the admirable futurism that animated the genre’s Detroit pioneers, techno’s essence comes down to high-spirited youngsters dancing to silly mechanical noises in a darkened room. трип (Trip), Nina Kraviz’s fabulously individualistic techno label, innately grasps this. The label’s latest compilation, Happy New Year! We Wish You Happiness!, balances techno’s brutalist electronic edges with a welcome touch of the ridiculous.
Newcomer Buttechno—not the most serious name in electronic music—pulls off this tricky balancing act with aplomb. His two contributions to трип 23 are simultaneously ludicrous, pitch dark, and fascinating: “Rostokino Acid” is a mutant gabber banger made out of the kind of squelching duck noise you might encounter in a cheap child’s toy, while “Dubstepping Progression Fast” abandons the straight-up 4/4 rhythms of the dancefloor in favor of preposterous rhythmic paths that suggest Autechre getting excitable on cheap spirits and sub-bass.
Spanish producer Carlota, one of three newcomers to the label, alongside Buttechno and Snazzy, shares this sense of absurdity. Her two tracks, the outstanding “Your Destination” and the chilling “Noise Psychosis,” may be darker than Buttechno’s screwy electronics, but they are so deviously twisted in their execution, riffs melting and mutating like phantoms in an electronic house of mirrors, that they both delight and disorient. The result is a kind of chilly, metallic psychedelia, rooting the genre in the frozen steppes of Siberia rather than San Francisco’s Summer of Love.
трип mainstays PTU, meanwhile, show an almost childlike sense of folly in the way they throw unlikely musical ideas at a wall to see what sticks. “Mstera” emerges with metallic scuttling and a scrambled synth line stuck to its gruff 4/4 exterior; its mechanical textures, reminiscent of the British illustrator Heath Robinson’s fanciful contraptions, are far removed from techno’s slickly linear stereotype.
At other moments, трип 23 falls a little flat, with the record’s appeal to the inhospitable extremities of electronic music tipping the balance too far toward unbridled thump. Nina Kraviz vs. Snazzy’s “U Ludei Est Pravo!” is dark, distorted, and rather forgettable: Like PTU’s “Mstera,” Kraviz’s collaboration is constantly shifting, balancing murky electronic riffs with vocal snippets, but none of these elements stick around in the imagination much beyond the song’s four-and-a-half-minute run time. The Mover’s “Track 1” and Vladimir Dubyshkin’s “Soviet Film,” meanwhile, feel too straight-laced for such highfalutin surroundings. “Track 1” has an ornate melodic sweep straight out of the IDM songbook that doesn’t really develop, while “Soviet Film” resembles a standard techno tool, its rumbling synth lines and linear structure in thrall to the dancefloor in a way that feels decidedly un-трип.
There’s nothing really wrong with these songs. But it is a sign of how how far трип has travelled down its path of electronic singularity that a well-constructed dancefloor track and a neat IDM flashback feel like average ducklings among a cygnet parade of audacious electronic experiments. If трип can continue to deliver serious techno with a smile in the new year, expanding the mind without interrupting the party, then 2019 won’t want for lively nightclubbing.


This reissued box set from Prince’s unloved early-’00s period provides proof of his astounding skill as a performer and the depth of his catalog even in its shallow end.

Prince: Up All Nite With Prince: The One Nite Alone Collection

At the turn of the millennium, the party seemed to be over for Prince. Between 2000 and 2002, he lost his father, got divorced, remarried in secret, found religion, and defended Napster in his war against a tyrannical music industry infrastructure. On top of all that, the albums he released were panned or disregarded. Even in the wake of his death, in 2016, this period was remembered as controversial or underwhelming. A reissued box set recorded during this time, composed of the 2002 album One Nite Alone…, the two-part One Nite Alone… Live!, One Nite Alone, The Aftershow: It Ain’t Over, and the Live at the Aladdin Las Vegas DVD, aims to rectify that. Taken on the whole, the box set is proof of his astounding skill as a performer, the depth of his catalog even in its shallow end, and the consistency that he brought to his concerts, night in and night out. It remains one of the few archival documents of his sometimes awe-inspiring, sometimes maddeningly mercurial, but always adventurous live experience, and the most complete picture of how he put together his shows.
The discs are arranged by intensity: from the intimate, heart-to-heart balladry of One Nite Alone... to the rowdy, collaborative jamming of his after-shows. Originally released exclusively through NPG Music Club, the subscription-based access portal Prince created to share his music online in the early 2000s after a battle with Warner Bros., the box set focuses on songs that are often overlooked, forgotten, or downplayed as part of a career downturn. Perhaps none of his albums from this era suffered more from this perception than One Nite Alone…, which is easy to overlook in its austerity. Just as 1998’s The Truth pared down his songs to acoustic guitar and wispy vocals, on One Nite Alone... Prince embraced a similar reduction. Its alone-at-the-piano vibe, made ethereal and informal by his stirring voice, conjured a sort of one-on-one illusion. Very few of the ballads in his catalog are stripped so bare and exhibited so nakedly.
These aren’t in the realm of his best-written songs. In fact, when closely scrutinized, some are crudely scrawled love poems. But the subtle, spellbinding force of him on the bench unattended undercuts a lot of the clumsiness of the lyrics. The understated flourishes ring out resoundingly: the flowing, elegant piano solo on the title track, every audible tap of the sustain pedal; the way the minor chords from “Have a Heart” resurface late into “Objects in the Mirror”; the steady crescendo into the satisfying climax of the shrieked words holy wine on the Joni Mitchell cover “A Case of U.” “Avalanche” is a gripping song about the mounting wave that is racism and how the music business exploits Black artists, a practice this album was trying to fight with its exclusive release.
The hushed atmospherics of One Nite Alone… open up into the jazzy revels of One Nite Alone… Live!, a two-disc show compilation arranged from stops on the 2002 tour. The shows, which occurred in the run-up to the official release of One Nite Alone…, featured very few songs from the album on the marquee. Instead, it focuses on his born-again 2001 gospel album, The Rainbow Children. Released in the wake of his conversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, The Rainbow Children is usually remembered as one of Prince’s most frustrating albums—a dramatic and sudden shift toward jazz with an irksome, omnipresent voice-of-God-like narration and a muddled concept to boot. In a review for Rolling Stone, Arion Berger called the record busy and portentous, “church interludes that are too mystical to carry earthly convention.”
However, the same things that made those songs seem over-involved as album cuts made them perfectly suited to his live show. That kind of self-indulgent musicality and preacher’s theatricality fit the stage. There have never been funkier songs about theocratic order. Anyone unwilling to be receptive to change was kindly asked to leave: “For those of you expecting to get your Purple Rain on: You’re in the wrong house.”
The shows transformed the album from misbegotten lecture to lively celebration. In these moments on stage, his virtuosity became a bridge to the divine. With a reimagined New Power Generation backing him, featuring three saxophone players (Maceo Parker, Candy Dulfer, Najee), a trombonist (Greg Boyer), Rhonda Smith on bass, John Blackwell on drums, and Renato Neto on keyboards, the songs erupt to life.
The lounge-ready arrangements of these songs fill a room. “Muse 2 the Pharaoh” is a bizarre cut with a wack rap verse, but live, the keyboard glows, the guitars are heavier, and the groove is inescapable, rendering the rest moot. “1+1+1 is 3” breaks out into a full-on funk jam (“Somebody get me another suit ready, I’m about to sweat this one out!” Prince exclaims as he goes). The nearly 13-minute official debut of “Xenophobia,” a massive introduction for the band and a crash course in what patrons were getting with this tour, is as inspired as it is insulating. This was not an experience for the casual fan; this was an extension of the NPG Music Club vision. He implies as much: “If you drove up here in a Little Red Corvette/You might be surprised at what you gon’ get.” With the benefit of hindsight, it is proof that even the most inaccessible Prince music could be activated simply by establishing a direct connection between him and his public.
Eventually, every Prince show had to satiate the broader audience that made him a pop icon (or at least it had to pretend to try), and so disc two of One Nite Alone… Live! is for the generalist Prince fan who hadn’t heeded his earlier warnings. He does a cursory scan of the hits and fan favorites. Of course, Prince, out of spite, would rarely commit to playing any of those songs in full. As if out of obligation, he sprinkled in abbreviated renditions of “The Beautiful Ones,” “Free,” and “Sometimes It Snows In April” while drawing out Lovesexy’s “Anna Stesia” to 13 minutes. He snuck in two seven-minute Rainbow Children deep cuts. Some folks likely got all dressed up to only hear 40 seconds of “Diamonds & Pearls” and a minute and a half of “I Wanna B Ur Lover.”
This section of the main act is, strangely, the most difficult to sit with. He was not as committed to these old songs as he was sharing the messages of his newer ones. The crowd largely had the opposite desire, and that clearly frustrated him. But even his muted protest couldn’t completely stifle the showman in him. Only a few notes into “Adore” the crowd is whipped into a frenzy. His voice seems translucent, and the light that passes through it only better illuminates the baffled audience stunned by his effortless range. His sense of timing and feel for dynamics are unmistakable. Just for a moment, he transforms from religious leader to sex symbol, and there the sexual becomes sacred, which feels fitting for a song about sex so good it makes angels cry.
After a sultry performance of “One Nite Alone...,” his falsetto twinkling, “Adore” forms a little suite with “I Wanna B Ur Lover” and “Do Me, Baby,” and not even their truncated lengths can nullify the building momentum or the effect they have on the crowd. He treats listeners to his interpretation of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” the song that Sinéad O’Connor made famous, turning her drawn-out bridge into a fidgety fit of kinetic energy. He brings a sassiness to “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?” And even dressed down, “The Beautiful Ones” maintains much of its power, centered by his tender singing. His simpering delivery, like he’s withdrawing into a shell, only makes you yearn for more.
For those willing to wait, more often came in the form of a second show, one more freewheeling than the first. This part of the experience is captured on One Nite Alone, The Aftershow: It Ain’t Over, the most essential disc in the box set. Even listeners turned away by his religious musings and his aversion to the classics can appreciate the unquestionable skill at work here, a snapshot of one of Prince’s hallowed live traditions.
The after-show phenomenon was born during the Parade tour in 1986, according to Matt Thorne, the author of Prince: The Man and His Music. After debuting the after-show practice at two London gigs, Prince perfected the form with a third secret show at France’s small jazz venue Le New Morning that featured mutating arrangements and his father as a special guest pianist. After that, the after-show would become one of his signature moves, a live experience all its own. These shows were weirder, looser, more intimate, more improvisational, and more epic. Prince had a running dialogue with his band, giving orders on stage and correcting mistakes, and while at his stadium shows he liked to tease out the hits, during after-shows, B-sides, rarities, and covers could evolve into ten-minute opuses.
If Prince had been a bit more discerning, he might’ve released one of his more acclaimed after-shows—the nearly mythic set at The Hague’s Het Paard Van Troje in 1988 during the Lovesexy tour, perhaps—in its entirety, as its own live album. No such document exists, and though many live songs are scattered across his titanic discography, this release is one of only four official full-length live recordings of Prince. Two of the other three, C-Note, a five-song sample of outtakes from One Nite Alone… tour soundchecks, and Indigo Nights, cut from after-show performances at indigO2 nightclub in London in 2007, feel unsubstantial and incomplete. The last and recently shared soundtrack to the 1985 concert video, Prince and the Revolution: Live, is a great set from Prince and his best band, but as a ticket to his concert exploits, it’s less comprehensive. The Aftershow remains the best (official) second-hand experience for being in his audience.
The Aftershow is the rewarding culmination of the box set’s steady arc. After the solos, sermons, and serenades of the first three discs, the last is blissful excess. He completely reimagines “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” and “Girls & Boys.” The George Clinton-featuring “We Do This” is joyous funk-rap interplay between two masters. The definitive version of “2 Nigs United 4 West Compton” is far more percussive, its spring-loaded bass line and supercharged keyboards building out an unstoppable locomotive engine, prompting Prince to yell out, “I want to sing but it’s too funky.”
If One Nite Alone… showcases Prince as the single-spotlight vocalist and the main act discs showcase Prince the bandleader, then The Aftershow is an exhibition for Prince as one of the greatest guitar players ever. “Joy in Repetition” is a masterclass. The deeper you get into the 11-minute “Peach (Xtended Jam),” the sturdier his rhythmic guitar becomes, even as the players around him dive in and out of solos. He amps up “Alphabet Street” and leads the band through a speed-run with some furious playing. By the end of its nearly hour-long run-time, he’d put on a clinic to rival his Super Bowl showcase.
Few seemed to understand presentation the way Prince did. After his death, his former publicist and manager Jill Willis said he was always dressed in something he could feasibly wear on stage. Several people who interacted with him over the years remarked that you would smell him before you saw him, and that he smelled like lavender. Being in view so often, he took great care in selecting how he packaged himself. He took this same approach with his craft as a performer and entertainer. Across the many varying discs of the One Nite Alone… box set, a recluse puts his showmanship on display.

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For the second year in a row, Will Oldham drops a fully-formed, gorgeously wrapped disc with little buildup.

Beware

In his review of last year's exceptional Lie Down in the Light, Stephen Deusner noted just how consistent Will Oldham's output had become, bemoaning somewhat Oldham's inability to truly excite. But there's a yin to that yang, that being Oldham has amassed such an army of friends and co-conspirators that he can create an album of Lie Down's quality without excessive pressure or to-do. For the second year in a row, Oldham drops a fully-formed, gorgeously wrapped disc with little buildup, though Beware will receive a promotional bump (a small tour and, in some markets, local-cable commercials) that Oldham begged off of Lie Down. Beware moves Oldham closer still to proper country music, uprooting some of Lie Down's balmy Appalachian posts for robust, quivering compositions recorded with an almost entirely new group of musicians.
So Beware is Oldham's "big" record (touring, promotion, etc.), but musically the album seems in many ways smaller-- or at least more level-- than Lie Down. Beware contains no sentiment as scintillating as "So Everyone"'s ode to public intimacy, no melody quite as curvaceous as "For Every Field There's a Mole", and its considerably more ominous artwork and lyrical content feel more in line with Oldham's norms. From its imperative title to "Afraid Ain't Me"'s final instructions to "Work, baby," Oldham seems more inclined than ever to instruct and guide, a move befitting his age, experience, and the role he plays in the indie-rock community.
It's a role that, predictably, Oldham turns upside down within moments of the album's first lines, circling the title's sure-handed warning around himself: "Beware of me." Oldham acolytes already know this, as Oldham often fibs-- or "sings in character," to be judicious-- but Beware still stands as Oldham's sagest album yet, with many of its poignant moments arriving as knowing declarations. It's strange to suggest that Oldham is suddenly somehow wiser, but Beware doesn't lack for perspective. He talks lovingly of children, pokes fun at his physique, and receives an "unfinal call"-- a warning-- from an angel. When on the lover's hymn "My Life's Work" Oldham says, "I take this load on/ It is my life's work," he could just as easily be talking about the burdens of cult artistry.
Elsewhere, the familial comforts of Lie Down have been replaced with ribald, cowboy promiscuity. Oldham's characters' relationships with women have developed into a loving, frustrating dependence: "It's kind of easy to have some fun/ When you don't belong to anyone." He occasionally aims for the type of woebegone romanticism Jack White's been hamming at for years, singing during the goofy horn-led rocker "You Don't Love Me", "You say my kissing rates a six on a scale of one to 10/ And you wouldn't pass the time with me 'cept you're tired of all your friends." When he commits, divulging that he wants to be your "only friend," he's immediately on the defensive: "Is that scary?"
Beware's backing cast might lean a bit hard on conventional arrangements, but even when Oldham's not turning American musics on their heads, he paws at them playfully. Songs spire heartily upwards ("You Are Lost") or move in fits ("Heart's Arms"); buzzing slide guitars and plucked banjos don't sound laconic, they sound nervy. Sometimes the convention-chucking is more explicit, like the flutes and flanged guitars of the ropey "I Am Goodbye" or the twiddling marimba on "You Can't Hurt Me Now". The resultant songs have a familiarity that aims them toward the back of your brain but an internal energy that prods them into prominence with repeated listens.
Oldham has once again surrounded himself with voices, lending credence to the characters and modes he slips in and out of. Unlike Lie Down's Ashley Webber or The Letting Go's Dawn McCarthy, Jennifer Hutt and Emmett Kelly (among others) serve less as foils than as gatherers, doubling and tripling Oldham's creak like some gospel-not-gospel choir. It is warm and well-felt music, to the point where the message of a song like "I Don't Belong to Anyone" might differ substantially had a younger Oldham performed it sans accompaniment ("Don't Belong" is followed, incidentally, by "There Is Something I Have to Say", the lone, croaky Beware track that might've fit on Master and Everyone).
The sheer number of roles that Oldham inhabits, however, should prevent anyone from drawing hard conclusions about his state of mind. Beware feels more severe and less physical than Lie Down, but Oldham still talks about his tummy on two separate occasions. It feels wise, but there's Oldham, hooting and whooping during "I Am Goodbye". It feels content in its place, but there's the commercial during "Ellen" in the New Orleans market. When Oldham sings, "I know everyone knows the trouble I have seen/ That's the thing about trouble you can love," he might well be jiggling his belly at artist-audience relationships. Impossible to say whether Oldham's being candid or goofing on despair, but either way, he's earned the right.


After the move toward genial folk-pop on their misstep of a third album, Dodos return to the formula that made Visiter so successful.

No Color

In the shadow of Dodos' breakthrough LP Visiter, their 2009 follow-up Time to Die was considered a minor letdown; in a vacuum, it was actually more of a misstep. The addition of a third member had gummed up the works for original members Meric Long and Logan Kroeber went the party line. Instead, the record's achilles heel was the usually appropriate tidy economy of Phil Ek's production. Here, for perhaps the first time, it worked against one of his charges, turning down Dodos' raw idiosyncrasies and miscasting them as genial folk-pop á la Fleet Foxes or the Shins. But when a misstep is this obvious, the flipside is that troubleshooting is incredibly easy-- back to a duo and working with previous engineer John Askew, No Color isn't quite the knockout Visiter was, but it's a logical step in trying to advance beyond the untamed but thrilling sprawl of the past without slamming the door on it.
The difference is obvious from the first minute: On opener "Black Night" you're immediately reminded just how magnetic Long and Kroeber can be when they're playing like they don't have to worry about waking the neighbors. The sheer physicality with which these two interact with acoustic instruments feels positively electric, a potent reminder that regardless of their unorthodox musicianship, this is above all else a rock band. And most importantly, one that avoids the usual trope of acoustic acts gunning to be forceful (i.e., strum harder) and plays off each other's virtuosity for whatever form of crowd-pleasing they want, whether it's another chorus for a beer commercial or unplugged psych-rock with the volcanic peaks of freaky companions Akron/Family.
Lyrically, No Color is a step in a new direction for Dodos-- for mostly better. Catalog highlights "Jodi" and "Fools" were ultimately both driven by the same gut-level writing that also resulted in some fairly awkward woe-is-the-world accounts, and Long is noticeably more impressionistic here. The upside is in how the phrasing is rhythmically and thematically more locked in than ever with the sonics-- words acts in tandem with the dizzying momentum accumulated during "Black Night", while the odd-metered repetition of "Sleep"'s chorus mirrors the narrator's increasing self-obsession.
For the most part, the autumnal glow is a good look, even if they nail that feeling a bit much in the record's most sedated and less rewarding second half. "Companions" and "Don't Stop" close No Color with Long's most pyrotechnic chops and most pedestrian melodies. But in between, "When Will You Go" and "Don't Try and Hide It" hit an anthemic stride whose subtle build and optimism feel like new wrinkles-- in particular, the latter works in a manner similar to Jimmy Eat World's "The Middle", claiming a pep talk about feeling normal can be every bit as effective as one that makes you wonder if you really have a freak flag to fly.
In a weird way, "Don't Try And Hide It" feels like a thematic mission statement for No Color. For one thing, it's one of several tracks that feature backup vocals from tourmate Neko Case, but the reason I feel comfortable waiting this long to bring up what at least sounds like a huge selling point is because she's, well, kinda hidden. If you wanted to hear her do the force of nature thing, well, that's what Neko Case albums are for, and the way she fits in as a bit player drives home a line from "Black Night" where Long confidently sings "it was never that I was aiming at being someone else." Whether that's true or not, No Color is proof that Dodos are indeed at their best when they're simply being themselves.


The Chicago footwork producer trades the genre’s emphasis on sampling for ultra-vivid sound design fleshed out with futuristic textures and classic synths.

Unleash

Chicago footwork producer Heavee first acquired a taste for dance music through cartoons and video games. In an interview, he cited the breakbeat-laden scores from The Powerpuff Girls and Jet Set Radio Future as his introduction to electronic music. Some of his first tracks he produced on a Playstation 2, using Funkmaster Flex’s Digital Hitz Factory. On his 2018 debut album with the Teklife collective, Heavee’s lush, nostalgic synth arrangements set his style apart from the more minimalistic sound of his peers, and 2022’s Audio Assault EP, on Hyperdub, nodded even more clearly to the sounds of his youth, using eerie melodies and 16-bit samples to emulate the atmosphere of boss battles.
Heavee’s first full-length for Hyperdub, Unleash, is largely a study in sound design, exploring strange metallic textures, new-age kitsch, and vintage club chord progressions. “Unlock!” opens with gnarly bass tones that sound like the growls of a high-level beast in a role-playing game, accompanied only by droning pulses of static. It’s a profoundly unsettling intro (especially for a track slotted so early into a dance record), but Heavee’s patience pays off when the elements finally coalesce into a beat. The result strikes a balance between Hausu Mountain’s proggy sound collage and SOPHIE’s most purely percussive experiments; it’s a wasps’ nest of intersecting hums, harried fluttering, and insectoid chirps. “Whiplash” is a similarly industrial reconstruction of footwork: Around woozy, pitched-down commands to “act a fool with it,” Heavee hammers away as though he were erecting scaffolding in the backdrop. It feels like dancing as the club is still being built around you.
Elsewhere, Heavee offsets those pared-down cuts with baroque orchestration. Opener “StarSeeker” is as pretty as footwork gets, with sparkling synths reminiscent of ’90s IDM; “Smoke Break” enlists multi-instrumentalist Takayuka Nakamura to play live trumpet over dreamy jazz keyboards. A couple of tracks eschew drums entirely, focusing instead on Heavee’s fondness for the sounds of classic synths. With more traditional footwork cuts like “CanUFeelIt” and the Goodie Mob-referencing “WorkMe’’ filling in the space between the producer’s more out-there ideas, Unleash acts as a survey of both the genre’s history and the artist’s own.
Unleash connects the chrome-plated optimism of Y2K pop culture to its influence on both a young Heavee and the cybernetic grit of early footwork, while charting a path forward that acknowledges contemporary avant-garde club sounds. The album can be chaotic, jumping from one disparate idea to the next, but each element draws you closer to understanding Heavee better. Where many footwork records work with a relatively contained set of samples and timbres, focusing most of their attention on rhythm, Heavee is an ambitious world-builder: Each track sounds like it’s been sourced from a different planet, but their intersecting orbits sketch a picture of the artist’s unmistakable vision.


Afghan Whigs’ fourth album and major-label debut, 1993’s Gentlemen, is a harrowing song cycle chronicling the death throes of a relationship. Removed from the alt-rock boom of the early '90s, Gentlemen at 21 offers some fresh insights into the collection, but fortunately doesn’t remaster or repackage the mystery out of it.

Gentlemen at 21

Greg Dulli sings about some fucked-up shit on the Afghan Whigs’ fourth album and major-label debut, 1993’s Gentlemen, a harrowing song cycle chronicling the death throes of a relationship. But when it came time to record “My Curse”, one of the darkest moments on the album, he didn’t think he had it in him. “I tried to sing it, but it was kinda really impossible for me to do,” he told Loose Lips Sink Ships back in 2005. “It was too close to the bone. Basically I chickened out.” That’s a remarkable thing to contemplate: This is, after all, an album that serves as an emotional exorcism, visceral and violent, played by a band not known for its squeamishness. Rather than tackle the song himself, Dulli enlisted Marcy Mays of the Columbus, Ohio, band Scrawl, and she sings the absolute hell out of it. Her slurred, scrawled vocals are tough-minded and defiant one moment, freshly bruised and broken the next, as she treads the tightrope between temptation and repulsion, between pleasure and pain.
“Curse softly to me, baby, and smother me in your love,” she all but begs, as though she must summon the courage to get each syllable out of her mouth. “Temptation comes not from hell but from above.” It is, to say the least, a powerful moment, but it also fulfills an important narrative function: If Gentlemen documents the demise of a romance, then “My Curse” allows the woman to tell her own side of the story, to call out the posturing in Dulli’s hyper-masculine lyrics, to express explicitly the pain he is inflicting on her. Offering a new perspective on the album’s brutal sexual politics, Mays reveals his outsize persona to be a ruse: a defense mechanism with which he can refract emotions too dark and messy and traumatic to face head on.
Perhaps that’s why the album still sounds so vital and so fresh 21 years on. Removed from the alt-rock boom of the early '90s, Gentlemen is both personal and unknowable, cocksure yet deeply troubled—in other words, so complicated and contradictory that we’re still trying to untangle its knots. Gentlemen at 21 offers some fresh insights into this song cycle, but fortunately doesn’t remaster or repackage the mystery out of it. The album sounds sharper and a bit more dangerous, those coiled guitars riffs more potent and Steve Earle’s drums wilder and more insistent. And the bonus demos and covers reveal the DNA of the album, signaling not only the rock and R&B sources that inspired Dulli, but also giving some insight into the band’s creative process before they trekked down to Ardent Studio in Memphis, Tennessee.
Memphis figures prominently on Gentlemen, even if the album opens with the buzz of car wheels on the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge in the band’s hometown of Cincinnati. The Afghan Whigs had long been incorporating the sounds and fashions of black soul, funk, and jazz into their buzzy indie rock, which lent previous albums like 1990’s Up in It and 1992’s Congregation a sense of taut rhythmic urgency. The band had previously covered Al Green’s “Beware” and the Elvis hit “True Love Travels on a Gravel Road”, and they chose Tyrone Davis’ “I Keep Coming Back” for Gentlemen, proving their well of influences went much deeper than the usual alt-rock fare. While their contemporaries drew from indie bands like the Raincoats and the Meat Puppets or from classic rock acts like the Who and Neil Young, Dulli was much more interested in Stax and Motown, in Curtis Mayfield and Isaac Hayes.
On later albums, these sources would become much more obvious, but on Gentlemen they are buried in the mix, evident in the strangled riffs on the title track and in the sensual drift of “When We Two Parted”. Drummer Steve Earle is crucial to this balance of styles and sounds, keeping time as tight as the great Al Jackson Jr. but adding the fills and frills of showy rock drummers like Keith Moon. (Sadly, this would be Earle’s final album with the band.) In this regard, the covers included with Gentlemen at 21 prove more substantial than your typical bonus material, not only providing a blueprint for the Afghan Whigs’ sound but also providing a sort of mixtape for the characters involved. It’s not hard to imagine Dulli’s narrator blasting the Ass Ponys’ “Mr. Superlove” for inspiration, or tempting a lover with Dan Penn’s “The Dark End of the Street”, or consoling himself with the Supremes’ “My World Is Empty Without You”.
Over two decades Gentleman has most often been described as a “song cycle,” a term that distinguishes it from a concept album or a narrative album (although both terms are to some degree applicable). If that idea persists, perhaps its due to the word “cycle,” which seems apt: Gentlemen ends more or less where it begins. Scene-setting overture “If I Were Going” opens the album with a slow fade-in finally interrupted by Earle’s stop-start drumbeat, and “Brother Woodrow/Closing Prayer” closes the affair with a long, cinematic fade-out, with a dissonant cello echoing the migraine drone of the Roebling Bridge. The sequencing shapes the album beautifully, creating a sense of emotional fatigue while only hinting vaguely at redemption. Thematically, however, that cycle implies a romantic fatalism, as though every relationship is doomed to end painfully.
That’s what makes Gentlemen at 21 such a compelling and necessary reissue, even if the album has never been terribly hard to find. Living with this record, whether for a few weeks or a few decades, only repeats the pattern and makes the songs sound increasingly, almost unbearably desperate. That urgency has not softened over time or even with the addition of bonus material. The early versions of these songs, recorded at Ultrasuede Studio in Cincinnati, show just how little they changed at Ardent, although it’s unclear whether they burst out of Dulli’s brain fully formed or the band sharpened them. Perhaps the most intriguing bonus track is the Ultrasuede version of “My Curse”, with Dulli singing lead. He toys with pitch and meter like a man with more to say than his voice can convey, but he’s more engaged with the material than he sounds on later bootlegs like Time for a Bavarian Death Waltz. In fact, he sounds relatively timid, perhaps even beaten, exhausted, raw, lowdown—as though he no longer possesses the hope or the courage to keep the cycle going. In a way, chickening out may be the boldest thing he ever did.


On their first album in four years, Brooklyn’s Blondes hone in on more overt dancefloor energies while maintaining the dreamy introspection that is their signature.

Warmth

Among the artists who helped give shape to the many-faceted entity that was Brooklyn techno in the early 2010s, Blondes always felt somehow separate. Sounding less stylized (whether intentionally “raw” or self-consciously digital-native-slick) than many of their peers, Sam Haar and Zach Steinman make improvisation-driven mini-epics that are equally invested in sanguine textures and the imaginative worlds made possible by their hardware. Thanks, in particular, to the former, their music can conjure the ecstatic energy of early 1990s rave hits, albeit reconfigured to feel more relaxed and more introverted.
For Warmth, their first full-length since 2013’s Swisher, the duo parted ways with RVNG to join the Belgian label R&S. They were seeking, they said, proximity to a more dancefloor-oriented roster. The record is a little higher in energy than their older offerings, a little more forthright with its driving rhythms, but it maintains the dreamy, inward-looking quality that’s always characterized Blondes’ work. “OP Actual,” the album’s first track, lays the ground for their process. Subtle melodies float in and out of a slow-building chorus of synthesizers; some are full and tuneful, like organs, while others are mostly sticky texture. Somewhere underneath is a four-on-the-floor beat, but it’s almost an afterthought. All build-up, the track washes away without cresting.
Just as its individual compositions follow an internal narrative logic, Warmth’s track-by-track development has all the bends and arcs of a live set. Following “OP Actual,” most of the album is quicker to get to the point, letting beats develop before unfurling a mesh of interlocking melodic and textural elements. It might be this directness, rather than a shift in BPM or style, that makes this more of a traditional dance record: These pieces are designed to be felt by the body before the brain. Haar and Steinman’s impulse for grandiose melodic developments (think of previous standouts like “You Mean So Much to Me” or “Elise,” which were so memorable that neighboring tracks paled in comparison) is toned down, and individual tracks are that much less distinguishable. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, given the way the 65-minute set blends into a holistic experience.
Once the listener is physically engaged, Warmth wanders into near-psychedelic terrain. The duo’s impulses are too subtle to be fully hedonistic, but Blondes are pleasure-seekers all the same: When a rich ambient progression soothes a shivering patch midway through “Stringer,” or when single “KDM” locks into a swelling aqueous groove, it’s hard, quite simply, to not feel good. Such moments are still punctuated by tense interludes: “All You,” for example, is built from sawing tones that ricochet as if locked in a claustrophobic, subterranean space.
Blondes have often sounded like a project that’s in dialogue more with itself than with exterior influences; Haar and Steinman look less to their record collections than to their live sets as a jumping-off point for new material. Even as they bend aspects of their intent, the duo’s voice maintains a distinctive clarity, and their style of production maintains its vivid palette. Warmth stands to resonate with those seeking a transportive experience whose peaks and valleys never overwhelm.


Originally released in 1980, the newly reissued second album from the Belgian art-rockers is a knotty experiment that freely slams together the sounds of contemporary classical music and free jazz.

Aksak Maboul: Un Peu De L’Âme Des Bandits

Un Peu De L’Âme Des Bandits

In March of 1978, a handful of European prog rock bands performed at a small music festival in London called Rock in Opposition. The event was conceived by the outsider British band Henry Cow, who had found kindred spirits in avant-prog outfits in countries like Sweden, Belgium, and France, and their slogan was, “The music the record companies don’t want you to hear.” For a couple years, RIO became a quasi-formal anti-establishment collective, and the arty Belgian avant-rock band Aksak Maboul joined its ranks as part of a second-wave expansion. At the time, Aksak Maboul were exploding their experimental ambitions, a charge spearheaded by co-founder Marc Hollander. The weird, tangled sophomore album they released in 1980, Un Peu De L’Âme Des Bandits, is just now receiving its first vinyl reissue on the same pivotal independent label it spawned nearly 40 years ago.
The songs on Bandits are the product of an ambitious, kooky recording session Hollander orchestrated in Switzerland. The album was released just three years after Aksak Maboul’s debut, and the sound is far more erratic and knotty, almost absurd in the way it juxtaposes genres and tiring in some of its contemporary classical and free jazz improv explorations. The first song, “Modern Lesson,” struts a plain Bo Diddley guitar riff across the track as grungy foundation and thrashes it with a barrage of nutty accompaniment: screechy, deranged vocals skitter in and out, a bassoon and plunky synth lend a momentary near-carnival effect, an early drum machine maintains some parallel timeline. None of the songs on the album sound alike, but they share this maximalism that flirts with cacophony but drudges up a groove if you give it a minute or two (or four). Sometimes, the accomplishments are more austere. The eerie synths and awkward gait of the tense “Alluvions” sound indebted to the cinematic classic of the Fantasia soundtrack until the song wobbles into a frantic half-manic jam.
Rarely do songs bleed into one another or follow logically; more often, neighboring tracks sound like they’ve cracked the album apart by standing so close together. When the opening thrashing guitar of “Inoculating Rabies” threatens a committed post-punk turn halfway into the album, a bassoon swoops in to perform an unexpected duet with a bass clarinet. Bandits is full of this dissonance as meta-commentary. “Geistige Nacht” sounds like sinister crime drama funk that snowballs off-kilter: a panicky bassoon solo (there’s a lot of bassoon here) sets the tone for the second half and then rattles further into a freewheeling jam. The percussion keeps the improv grounded with a shuffle; it feels like a final jigsaw piece that illuminates the rest of the sounds as the band feels around in the dark. Elsewhere, songs like “Palmiers En Pots,” a faithful tango, and “I Viaggi Formano La Gioventù,” a meandering Turkish raga, are capsules of Hollander’s tick for filtering traditional music from around the world through the baroque deconstructivism. (The tango was “written” by cutting and pasting, literally, lines of music from disparate traditional pieces into a Frankensteined whole; the music from “I Viaggi” was nabbed from a Turkish brochure.)
Bandits sounds of a piece but stitched together from track-length experiments. It has no regard for flow and a dissonant chaos at its heart, but its unpredictability never comes at the expense of exhilarating technicality. The reissue’s extras, a backstory booklet with a spare bonus CD that lays out the chronology of the band and tracks the meandering experimentation that led to Bandits, helps position the recording and understand its intent. But the simple victory is that Bandits has been unearthed for a new audience. From the brainy free jazz improvs to hysterical noise rock jams and sludgy grooves, you don’t need to learn the nuance of its history to peel back the zeal of its musicians, who seemed all along to be saying, “Hey, serious music can be silly too.”


On its first album in six years, the Austin group dreams up an elaborate fictional universe and delivers it with swaggering glam-rock panache.

Bite

A Giant Dog’s Bite, the Austin, Texas, group’s first batch of new material since 2017’s Toy, bills itself as a concept album, but Avalonia (the invented realm in which the action takes place) bears little difference from the modern United States. It’s a technocracy, a place where cyberspace trumps embodiment, and in A Giant Dog’s telling, it’s unclear which force will ultimately triumph—the artificial “synthemotional,” or the all-too human urge to “tear apart the place” in search of a tangible, equitable paradise. We live in a society, indeed, and the band explores this unfortunate fact through nine rollicking, anthemic rock songs laced with a defiant yawp that’s alternately convincing and contrived.
Bite boasts a similar fervor to 2016’s Pile, whose “I’ll Come Crashing” sounds like the ne plus ultra of skate video soundtracks, but where previous songs read like dispatches from the edge of a brawl, the group’s latest is infused with glam-rock gloss and grandeur. “Happiness Awaits Inside” opens with a few instrumental bars that channel T. Rex by way of Ennio Morricone, and when Sabrina Ellis sings, “Sew me a gown I’m going downtown/In the fabric of space and time,” it feels like swaggering into a saloon on Orion’s Belt. Ellis’ languorous, sneering vocals on “A Daydream” counter quivering strings and a rumbling bassline, a jaguar pacing through a swarm of bees before the last few seconds descend into delightful chaos. The driving tempo and fevered drumming on “In Destiny” call back to the best of the band’s back catalog, an Iron Maiden canticle as at home in a game of Crazy Taxi as it would be on some hero’s journey.
But amid this fierceness, some facets of the album crumble under closer scrutiny. “Different Than” opens promisingly with a Bratmobile riff and an earworm melody, but midway through, it gives way to a “Fight Song”-style chorus, the sort of triumph that feels suspiciously hollow. A similarly jarring switch happens in “Watch It Burn,” which starts with a come-hither acknowledgement of “heavy, heavy justice,” then devolves into what sounds like the final act of a stage musical. “One of these days, I’ll learn/You just have to watch it burn,” the band sings together like the cast of Les Misérables.
Part of the issue is the haziness of Avalonia itself, which seems to exist in contrast to humanity, “a law that’s written on your soul,” as Ellis sings on “Watch it Burn.” Is it a cloud-hosted version of reality, with all the same injustices? Bite’s least successful songs never quite galvanize the listener, relying either on platitudes or vagaries. (A persona on “Daydream” implores, “Human, where’d you get your arms from?/Use them, just like an algorithm./ Your body was never ever welcome./There’s peace here in Avalonia.”) The rallying cries themselves aren’t particularly clear, except as an acknowledgement of us (the marginalized) versus them (the marginalizers). Without a guide to Avalonia’s characters, without a sense of how this world’s battles differ from the ones happening in the here and now, it’s hard to know precisely the direction in which to channel righteous rage, or if it’s worth summoning at all.
In the press release accompanying the record, the band describes developing an entire cosmos, peopled by characters they “had to find ourselves within, or project ourselves into.” That process ultimately seems like it was more rewarding for the musicians than for their listeners. The album’s alternate universe and its residents remain as blurry as the last frame of a vision test. But in the moments that it comes into focus, Bite is ferocious and fun: a zip code you probably wouldn’t move to, but engaging enough as a dystopian tourist destination.


The adventurous trumpet player, best known for his work with Supersilent and his solo records on Rune Grammofon, makes a terrific debut for ECM.

Cartography

Arve Henriksen came at jazz sideways, honing his singular voice as a session player-- with David Sylvian's Nine Horses, Christian Wallumrød, Supersilent, and many others-- and through a series of fine, ambient-tinged albums for the Rune Grammofon label. These were tricky, seductively spare works that got at jazz by outlining jazz-shaped holes. They were most notable for Henriksen's adventurous, curiously-phrased style as a trumpeter. He made his instrument sound like a woodwind, a flock of birds, a Japanese flute, a punctured helium balloon. His strangled yet fluent tone is marked by a vivacious Scandinavian melancholy and a hint of noir. His meditations for trumpet and electronics expand the warm, alien landscape that Jon Hassell initially revealed, and populate it with Olivier Messiaen's avian familiars.
Cartography, Henriksen's first album for the serious-business jazz label ECM, is an ambitious showcase for his exotic syntax: Notes float on cushions of air or clang like lead; they sigh, squeak in distress, bleat, and taper off into thin shrieks. When ravishingly full tones break out from the baroque constraints, the effect is devastating. Henriksen plays the way Ian Curtis sang: A rough-and-ready yet wounded voice, always on the verge of cracking with emotion. On "Migration", he unrolls a gaseous theme that periodically dissipates into the merest pinched tones-- minimalism's pervasive mark is not omitted here. The climactic swells of "Migration" have chafed edges, as if Henriksen's trumpet had a sore throat. He spits rapidly through the mouthpiece on "Ouija" to create a richly-textured, telegraphic stutter. But he's a focused, patient player, who miraculously condenses breathtaking themes from this almost-zoological diversity.
Cartography differs from prior albums in that it was cobbled together from structured improv sessions with a variety of collaborators, both live and in-studio, over a three-year span. But it plays seamlessly, owing to Henriksen's highly-developed style, as well as to smart, immersive post-production by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré, who enrich the live instrumentation with samples, field recordings, synthesizers, and programmed beats. While Henriksen's plaintive motifs are still central, pacing the development, there's a lot more going on around them than before.
"Poverty and Its Opposite" sets Henriksen's trumpet against a distant shimmer and intensifying abstract percussion; it's like a forest coming to life as night falls. "Recording Angel", with its scratchy textures, haunting Trio Mediaeval vocal samples, and founts of drenching melody, is a jazz answer to Nico Muhly's Mothertongue. From the distressed orchestral samples on "Loved One" to the staticky piano of "Sorrow and Its Opposite", the invention never flags, and never veers away from the service of severe beauty. No matter how many times I hear the two pieces that feature spoken-word poetry by David Sylvian, I can never hold onto the narrative thread for very long before I slip into the sounds of the words and the timbre of Sylvain's calming voice. That's how deep an enchantment Henriksen casts on Cartography, which maps an impressionistic world where sound is meaning.