The new box set examines the early years of Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International Records, a soul-music label that defined its city the way Stax did Memphis and Motown did Detroit.

Billy Paul / Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes / The O’Jays / Dick Jensen / The Intruders / MFSB: Get on Board the Soul Train: The Sound of Philadelphia International Records Vol. 1

One of the biggest hits of the early 1970s was inspired by people watching. Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, already titans of soul in Philadelphia, would sit at their favorite downtown bar and watch the same people order the same drinks every day. One couple stood out: The man and woman would meet at the same time, sit in the same booth, play the same songs on the jukebox, then go their separate ways. Gamble and Huff were songwriters, and they idly devised a backstory for the man and woman, something about two married people scheduling daily trysts with the sad knowledge that their love would never be more than that hour at the bar. They set the story to a melody and gave it to an artist on their Philadelphia International label named Billy Paul, a jazz singer they were trying to transform into an R&B star. He knew “Me and Mrs. Jones” was a hit as soon as he recorded it.
Projecting a very 1970s kind of cool, with a gravelly yet agile voice, Paul plays down his usual vocal improvisations on the song in order to elongate the notes. It’s a way of drawing out the moment: When he sings, “We got a thing going on,” he holds “thing” a few beats longer than expected, giving those adulterous lovers a little more time together. The billowy arrangement by Bobby Martin, full of elegant strings and weightless guitar, is similarly patient. Like the infidelity ballad “Dark End of the Street,” it’s a song that shuts out the whole world. “Me and Mrs. Jones” reached No. 1 on the Hot 100, selling more than 4 million copies—all the more impressive given that white radio stations routinely dismissed similar R&B singles as “too Black.”
The song established Paul as a sophisticated artist and a sensitive vocal interpreter, although he’d never again enjoy such a smash. “Me and Mrs. Jones” became his signature song; more than that, it became a signature song for the era and a paragon of Philly soul, a velvety strain of R&B whose opulent orchestrations added heightened drama to everyday predicaments experienced by Black Americans in this new decade. The style was pioneered by Gamble and Huff, a pair of sidemen turned songwriters turned businessmen, whose Philadelphia International Records (PIR) did for Pennsylvania’s largest city what FAME did for Muscle Shoals, Stax did for Memphis, and Motown did for Detroit.
Founded in 1971, their label is the subject of a new compilation that collects remastered versions of PIR’s first eight LPs, released from 1971 through 1973. Commemorating the label’s 50th anniversary, Get On Board the Soul Train will be followed by more volumes tracing its outsize influence throughout the decade. But this one is a good introduction to PIR in particular and to Philly soul in general, as it shows how the label and the genre were born out of the city’s secular and sacred music scenes. Starting in the 1940s and 1950s, small gospel groups and street-corner doo-wop ensembles alike relied on tight harmonies and theatrical spoken-word interludes, and a few of them survived long enough to work with Gamble and Huff.
Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, for example, were veterans of the touring circuit by the time they released their PIR debut, I Miss You, in 1972, playing to white audiences and Black audiences—but not at the same time. Their close harmonies provided a structured backdrop against which their two lead vocalists—Melvin and a rising star named Teddy Pendergrass—could improvise and testify. There’s a smooth theatricality to their album, whose songs are often interrupted by lengthy romantic monologues addressed to an imagined lover. On “Be Real,” Pendergrass gives us a one-sided argument, as though he’s practicing it in his head for whenever he finally musters the courage to confront her. Gamble and Huff may have written (or co-written) most of these songs, but the singers put their own stamp on them, especially on “If You Don’t Know Me By Now.” It’s one of Gamble and Huff’s best and most heartbreaking compositions, and Bobby Martin’s string arrangement lifts the song a few feet off the ground, but it’s Pendergrass’ impassioned delivery that makes it a stone soul classic.
The O’Jays take that sound even further on their PIR debut, 1972’s Back Stabbers, simultaneously refining and deconstructing the R&B vocal group sound. “992 Arguments” and “Time to Get Down” are exciting in their taut vocal choreography, and “Love Train” churns up enough exuberance to make its hippy-dippy sentiment sound realistic, even feasible. But “When the World’s at Peace” takes everything apart, spiraling into a lengthy coda where the voices deliver disembodied rhythms. It’s a moment that echoes both the disillusionment of Sly & the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Going On and the beleaguered optimism of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. It’s a genius bit of sequencing to follow that song up with the masterful title track, whose paranoia is lent credence by its funky, cinematic arrangement. “Back Stabbers” is the inverse of “Love Train”: ostensibly about romantic rivals making time with your special lady, it signals broader concerns about America in the ’70s. Especially when paired with Undisputed Truth’s 1971 hit “Smiling Faces Sometimes,” it sounds like a rebuttal of the ubiquitous smiley face that became the decade’s unofficial logo.
Both “Back Stabbers” and “Love Train” were big hits, but not everything that PIR did landed so well. Dick Jensen was a Hawaiian lounge singer who managed to parlay the public’s fascination with the 50th state into a Vegas residency and a handshake association with the Rat Pack. Sammy Davis Jr. had a smash with “Candy Man” in 1972, so perhaps the label thought there might be a market for a handsome crooner. Backed by what was solidifying into the label’s multiracial house band, Jensen sounds completely out of his element on “I Don’t Want to Cry” and “32nd Street,” like Engelbert Humperdinck collaborating with Isaac Hayes, and it’s not hard to see why he’s usually omitted from Philly soul playlists and box sets. Still, his version of “Going Up On a Mountain” is mighty, and he’s an intriguing discovery on this set, if only for making every other artist sound a little more exciting.
For the most part, PIR stuck with what worked. The Intruders had been singing locally since the ’50s, and Gamble and Huff had written and produced their 1968 breakout hit “Cowboys to Girls.” Their PIR debut, Save the Children, is a deeply eccentric take on Philly soul, starting with their cover of Gil Scott-Heron’s title track and extending to their disarmingly sweet “I’ll Always Love My Mama,” a song that ought to be unbearable but somehow isn’t. Their cover of “Mother & Child Reunion” makes good on Paul Simon’s world-music aspirations, and “I Wanna Know Your Name” stops everything so Sam “Little Sonny” Brown can recite his Tinder profile: “I drive a little red Volkswagen/I like to go horseback riding/I like all kinds of sweets/Cupcakes, currants, things like that.” It has the effect of grounding the song in reality; like “Me and Mrs. Jones,” it creates its own space separate from the larger world, this time with pastries.
Credited on Save the Children for the first time ever was PIR’s house band, MFSB (short for Mother Father Sister Brother), a group of veteran studio players that had gelled into its own distinct entity, not unlike Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra. Their self-titled debut, boasting some of the funkiest artwork in the label’s history, opens with a florid interpretation of Curtis Mayfield’s “Freddy’s Dead.” Where the original was fleet and street tough, MFSB’s cover is maximalist: a block party set to music. That applies to most of the songs on MFSB, including their cover of “Back Stabbers,” which is essentially the band covering itself. In fact, half the fun of this box set is hearing these artists comment so creatively on other pop trends, as they reach out and bring a little Philly to other cities and scenes.
MFSB in particular would prove prolific and highly successful throughout the ’70s, but the early years of PIR, the years covered by this box set, belonged to Billy Paul. He gets three of the eight albums here, which speaks to his breakout status as the label’s biggest star. As such, he’s the only artist to have much of a trajectory in this volume. On Going East, the label’s first LP, he establishes a sound and an approach, especially with his imaginative covers of Les McCann’s “Compared to What” and “Magic Carpet Ride,” a song so ubiquitous that you might think there’s no way it could ever sound new. But Paul and the studio musicians take Steppenwolf’s familiar riff and turn it into a jazzy shuffle, upbeat and inviting, especially when the flute comes in. Paul scats the lyrics, essentially rewriting them with his rat-a-tat delivery, turning a song about getting high into an anthem for getting down.
That confidence is even more pronounced on 360 Degrees of Billy Paul, which contains “Me and Mrs. Jones” along with another set of covers. Rather than sounding slow and self-congratulatory, his version of Elton John’s “Your Song” is bright, exuberant, witty, overjoyed—a declaration of love by a man who sounds like he can’t believe he’s found the real thing. It should have been a hit, but PIR was unprepared to capitalize on the success of Paul’s breakout single and released the “Am I Black Enough for You,” penned by Gamble and Huff. It’s a fantastic song, with a hip-shaking horn section and a tone somewhere between playful and angry, but it was not a song that was going to get the same kind of widespread radio play. And his follow-up album didn’t even contain new material. Instead, it was a reissue of his 1970 LP Ebony Woman (released on Gamble and Huff’s previous label, Neptune Records). Paul doesn’t show the same dramatic flair with lyrics as he does on his other two albums in this set, so there’s not much purpose to his deconstruction of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.” With its meandering arrangements and stiff playing, it sounds like a step backwards for Paul as well as for this otherwise triumphant collection. (A better end point would have been the other album that was reissued at the same time, 1968’s Feelin’ Good at the Cadillac Club, but presumably that will kick off volume two.)
Get On Board the Soul Train, however, is the rare box set that’s actually more than the sum of its parts. The highs on here are higher than the lows are low, and, more significantly, the warts-and-all approach creates a compelling context for Dick Jensen and the O’Jays alike. Too often soul music from this and previous eras is dismissed as a singles genre, a backhanded compliment that assumes Black artists couldn’t possibly sustain the longer or more complex statement that an album demands. Previous PIR reissues have served up some full LPs (most notably 2014’s Philadelphia International Records – The Collection), but by making room for every LP, this particular set argues persuasively that Philly Soul was a collaboration among songwriters, arrangers, producers, session players, and singers—which doesn’t diminish the work of the artists who got their name on the spines but elevates everyone else. Together, they established a sound that beautifully synthesized jazz, soul, funk, soundtracks, and avant-garde composition, and soon they would refine that concoction into disco. In fact, one of the earliest examples of the disco beat—you know the one, with the excitable 4/4 clip, heavy on the high hat—was played by MFSB’s Earl Young on Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’ 1973 smash “The Love I Lost,” but that’s for another volume.

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Laetitia Tamko’s bright, dewy electro-pop album depicts growing up with candor and levity.

Sorry I Haven’t Called

Laetitia Tamko opens her latest album as Vagabon, Sorry I Haven’t Called, as if you're leaving a party right alongside her, finally free to debrief without looking over your shoulders. “Can I talk my shit?” the Cameroon-born, New York-based musician asks in her lilting falsetto, then without waiting for an answer, confesses: “I got way too high for this.” The song is whimsical and vibrant, her conversational words floating over the wistful ahs of an Auto-Tuned choir and bouncy drums. It feels like a reminder that being vulnerable doesn’t have to be scary: It can feel cheeky, bold, and even fun.
Tamko emerged from the Brooklyn DIY scene and became part of the new indie-rock vanguard after the release of her debut album, 2017’s Infinite Worlds, a collection of scrappy guitar anthems that felt pensive and ferocious in equal measure. She deviated from that sound on her second album, experimenting with slower, reverb-drowned R&B and indie pop. On Sorry I Haven’t Called, which was co-produced by Rostam, Tamko changes shape once more, resulting in bright and dewy electro-pop songs with more rhythmic dimension. She wrote the album while processing the death of her close friend and collaborator Eric Littmann, expecting to create somber ballads “But when I sat down to write,” she recalled, “I found that I headed more towards catharsis, more towards euphoria, more towards joy.”
Honesty, to oneself and to others, is a central theme throughout Sorry I Haven’t Called. On several songs, Tamko measures the growing distance between people, slipping into reveries about the conversations they might have once had: “We find ourselves taking different paths/I see you out and I miss your laugh,” she sings on the wistful ballad “Passing Me By.” On standout “Do Your Worst,” a slice of breakbeat-pop with flute-like trills, Tamko grieves an unhealthy relationship: “You turn me into someone I don’t fuck with/I don’t like myself when I’m with you.” Her subjects can be complicated, but her songs are breezy, inviting the listener to sing along.
Sorry I Haven’t Called illustrates a shift in Tamko’s storytelling: She sidesteps diffuse, open-ended imagery for blunt, informal observations. As a writer, Tamko refuses pity, always reflecting on her own role in a dynamic, or searching for a silver lining. This mentality is clearest during the buoyant, Afrobeats-influenced “Carpenter.” “I wasn’t ready to hear you out,” she sings over euphoric shakers and guitar, “but I’m more ready now.” You get the sense of a songwriter shedding her skin, accepting that these inevitable changes will allow her to learn new lessons. On Sorry I Haven’t Called, she depicts the process of growing up with an unflinching heart.


After 17 years, five albums, and numerous line up changes, Hot Hot Heat are calling it quits with their final, self-titled LP, which looks back on things with surface cheeriness and tangible fatigue.

Hot Hot Heat

After 17 years, five albums, numerous line up changes, Hot Hot Heat are calling it quits with their final, self-titled LP–not that they expect you to care. The Canadian group are totally fine with their spiral into obscurity, because they’ve have nothing left to say, judging from frontman and principal songwriter Steve Bays’ comments to the press in the wake of the split. “I really have no idea what it means to put out a record out in 2016,” he admitted to The Independent, surprised that anyone even bothers about Hot Hot Heat anymore, or cares about their dissolution: “It feels like we’re getting a warm reception so far, and not any kind of… ‘What are you doing here?’”
Bays’ statement is ostensibly intended as a humble shout-out to the diehards, and yet the self-deprecating jokes belie gravely low expectations and a dearth of self-confidence. It’s not the best look for a triumphant farewell address, but considering the purgatory faced by Hot Hot Heat’s former peers and touring partners, can you blame him? (Anyone heard from Louis XIV? She Wants Revenge? The Bravery?)
Still, the quartet have reason be proud, or at least not so damn hard on themselves. While the bulk of their contemporaries have more or less fallen into a temporal tar pit in recent years, Hot Hot Heat started this decade out strong with 2010’s Ryan Dahle-produced, forward-thinking Future Breeds, a decidedly safe–but nonetheless enjoyable–update to the off-kilter, post-punk-y pop showcased on 2002’s Make Up the Breakdown, the group’s strongest album. As expected for a career-concluding LP, Hot Hot Heat does away with this progressive approach: instead, they’ve offered up a thirty-minute, ten-track retrospective that reflects on the past decade-and-a-half with playful fondness–and beneath the cheery surface, tangible fatigue.
Bays framed the band’s self-titled LP as a return to Hot HotHeat’s punkish early period, shortly before the runaway success of Make Up the Breakdown garnered the group international attention. At that time, Hot Hot Heat recalled a more unwieldy XTC, and between Bays’ energetic barks and squeals and since-departed guitarist Dante Decaro’s proficiency in choppy punk riffs, “Bandages’” short reign on the rock charts offered a refreshing dose of goofy new-wave à la Devo.
Sadly, despite his claims of the contrary, this familiar old spark rarely ignites Hot Hot Heat, musically nor lyrically. Bays’ usual tics–the high-pitched yelps, the glam posturing–have all but faded away, leaving us with Julian Casablancas’ long-lost Canadian cousin, all sneered soh-ries and throated mumbles on “Modern Mind.” Similarly, guitarist Luke Paquin sounds like he's spending a lot of time with the last two Strokes LPs, swiping swatches of Albert Hammond Jr.’s Thin Lizzy-meets-Daft Punk palette for “Magnitude,” “Mayor of the City”, and “Sad Sad Situation.” (I’m not sure what’s more unsettling: the incessant déja vu, or Hot Hot Heat’s uncanny ability to make those albums sound good.)
Hot Hot Heat’s curtain call isn’t all recycling–accordingly for its position in the band’s discography, the record entails a litany of wistful reflections. “It could’ve been you/It should’ve been you,” Bays laments on the chorus to the opening track, a hand-wringing portrait dedicated to a childhood friend who never rose to his glorious potential (arguably, a narrative one could extend to the band itself); on “Pull Levers,” he repeatedly reminds the audience that it's “too little, too late.” Regardless of the group’s intention, these contrite undertones are easily the album’s most compelling trait, and its best songs tackle that ambivalence head on: the nocturnal samba “Alaskan Midnight Sun,” a nod to the band’s early flirtations with world music, as well as the aptly-titled closing shuffle “The Memory’s Here.” It makes for an oddly bittersweet closing note: Rarely does a band bid you farewell and admit it overstayed its welcome in the same breath.


Japan’s Kouhei Matsunaga, aka NHK yx koyxen, takes a scientific approach to experimental electronic music. His new album is a dynamic work of maze-like rhythms, trapdoors, and serenity.

Exit Entrance

A clinical, almost scientific air hangs over the work of Japan’s Kouhei Matsunaga, aka NHK yx koyxen. He makes experimental electronic music that sounds like it is the result of an actual laboratory experiment. His textures crackle with electrical charge; his rhythms morph and multiply like bacteria. You imagine him pulling his beats from test tubes. His rickety structures are part Frankenstein’s monster, part Rube Goldberg contraption—rave heaters fueled by Bunsen burner. But unlike most products of the scientific method, Matsunaga’s music often seems deliberately inscrutable. In place of conventional titles, many of the releases in his voluminous discography make do with numerals. Whatever meaning names like “236,” “190409,” or “7” might have (to say nothing of “1057_S” or “862” or “Y”)—are they file names, parameters, snippets of code?—is left unsaid. If there’s an encryption key to his work, he’s hidden it safely away—soldered to the corroded guts of a malfunctioning Casio keyboard, maybe.
That Matsunaga trained as an architect might not be surprising. No matter how chaotic his music, at its base lies a lattice of intersecting vectors, like a crumpled blueprint. For 20 years, he has orbited the fringes of electronic music, recording for labels like Mille Plateaux and Important, and collaborating with musicians like Merzbow and Mika Vainio. But in the past few years he has come inching in from the cold. After the rhythmic free-for-all of his Dance Classics EPs for the PAN label, last year’s Doom Steppy Reverb, for Oscar Powell’s Diagonal imprint, was his most “techno” record yet. Now he turns up on DFA, of all places. Exit Entrance is hardly a dance-punk or a disco record. But it is a little less hermetic, a little less airless, than his previous recordings. (He has even shifted to word-based titles.) The beats are crisper, the structures marginally closer to traditional dance music. You can imagine DJs playing many of these tracks. The pastel thunder of “Outset” sounds like a Jeff Mills set heard from the alley behind the nightclub; the sludgy “Dignity” could pass for an electro track played back on a turntable with a 16 RPM setting.
The opening “Meeting” sets the record’s tone: As a chintzy keyboard melody plinks away, synthesizers drip like leaky faucets, and a syncopated beat crunches like boots in snow. Cautiously emotive, it is simultaneously playful and distant; it doesn’t quite pass the Turing test. The sequences evolve in such a way that it’s hard to put your finger on what the musician is doing to them; subtle tweaks make frequencies squirm as though alive. Driven by a bruising kick drum and nervous shakers, “Finding” barrels ahead at 140 beats per minute, its rhythm constantly reshaping itself, with no two bars exactly alike. Despite the heavy drums and the open throttle, there’s something coy about its rubbery plucks that sets it apart from most straight-ahead club fare. A similarly toy-like quality infuses the pinging “Intention,” which suggests a breakbeat rave tune modeled in Erector Set, while the drifting acid of “Mutually” conveys a kind of accidental whimsy. Over a scratchy, bare-bones beat, the arpeggio gradually comes unstuck from the scale and blossoms into unexpectedly beautiful harmonies that disappear before anything like sentimentality can settle in. If you told me that a randomized algorithm were responsible for 90% of the composition, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
Even “Dented,” the 12-minute rave maelstrom that closes the album, has this simulacral sensibility: It bangs, but something about its squelch feels not quite right, and the longer it goes on, the more claustrophobic it begins to feel. That’s not to say that everything on the album is so tricky: The short, sketch-like “Notice” offers an oasis of blissful feeling. Rich synthesizer chords glisten like dewdrops and thick, humid reverb drifts upward; it all unrolls as calmly as a stroll in a glassed-in atrium. It’s tempting to hear it as an echo of Japanese environmental music, the ambient subgenre in which atmospheric music is composed with specific spaces—shopping malls, offices, etc.—in mind. In an album full of maze-like rhythms and trapdoors, our architect has penciled in a space of total serenity, one that makes the rest of the album seem all the more dynamic in comparison.


For whatever reason, psych-pop seems more prone to reductive descriptions than most other genres. For critics,\n\ it's all ...

Satanic Panic in the Attic

For whatever reason, psych-pop seems more prone to reductive descriptions than most other genres. For critics, it's all too easy: Just state the bandname and album title, discuss the intensity of the lead songwriter's Brian Wilson fixation, and critique him based on the effectiveness with which his band approximates Pet Sounds. For extra points, drop words like "hallucinogenic" or "sun-drenched" in the review as often as possible, and-- if you're really good-- throw in a well-placed Curt Boettcher reference. There you have it: Band X is another petty homage to 1960s California pop.
I often wonder why music fans aren't more resistant to this type of summary delineation; surely there's more to Jeff Magnum's twisted genius than a childish idolization of the Beach Boys, just as Will Cullen Hart's powers don't derive from something abnormal in the water he drank as a kid. I suppose this critical tactic is prevalent because there really are artists who fit this simplistic bill, ones whose records are about as essential to a pop fan as the work of a bad Zeppelin knockoff would be to a metalhead.
I've always pegged Of Montreal as one of those inessential bands. The only real adoration I've felt for any of their tracks is for "Don't Ask Me to Explain", a simplistic ditty from the band's debut LP that manages to do Weezer better than Weezer themselves. And although Of Montreal haven't released a real dud in the band's eight-year recording life, the most engaging thing about their songs is often their longwinded, quasi-literary titles. Evidently, the band has had trouble keeping the attention of record labels as well, spreading their seven-album yield amongst five different imprints.
Two years removed from Aldhils Arboretum, their last studio album of new material, the band has had-- by Of Montreal standards-- a relatively long time to hone their sound and explore a more cohesive approach to songwriting, one less encumbered by oblique concepts. Since 1997, Of Montreal have churned out roughly an LP a year, not to mention untold EPs, B-sides, and an effective collection of singles. The group's longest previous respite between LPs was the two-year hiatus between The Gay Parade and Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies: A Variety of Whimsical Verse. And while Coquelicot was clearly more ambitious than its predecessor, it wasn't a vast transformation in either quality or style. All told, there was no reason to expect any great strides from this dependably generic quintet this time out, which makes Satanic Panic in the Attic all the more surprising.
Satanic Panic displays a considerable maturation in Kevin Barnes' songwriting. Everything, from the Sgt. Pepper's-copping album art to the wontedly verbose lyrics and song titles, would suggest a predictable collection of spindly psych-pop. But when the music actually starts, the differences become apparent. "Disconnect the Dots" begins with a Doppler-affected drum sample, before the abrupt appearance of both handclaps and a verifiably indelible guitar riff. Seconds later, Barnes arrives, bearing an invitation: "Come disconnect the dots with me, poppy," he intones, before deliquescing into a blissful mini-chorus. From there, the song shifts effortlessly from section to section, orchestrating a dense but well-balanced array of organ drones, vocal harmonies, astral guitar peals, and interlocking electro-acoustic percussion. And this is all in the album's first 4\xBD minutes.
"Disconnect the Dots" is more than just an album pacesetter-- it's a mission statement for a band remade, or at least reconsidered. The new Of Montreal grab your attention, not deliberately invite it to wander, as the next track, "Lysergic Bliss", makes abundantly clear. The song is perhaps most reminiscent of the band's earlier work, sluicing through multiple time and key changes with operatic grandiosity. On a previous effort, the song's fragments might have either fallen apart from lack of a coherent vision or been mashed together to form a mottled soup of disparate ideas, but here, the track is handled with impressive finesse; even the bridge's extended a cappella harmonies have a natural flow.
Elsewhere, Satanic Panic frequently leans closer to Steely Dan than the Beach Boys, which lends a refreshing dose of realism to the implicit reverie of songs like "My British Tour Diary". Elsewhere, "Eros' Entropic Tundra" and "Erroneous Escape into Eric Eckles" are both delicately refined, while still retaining Of Montreal's psychedelic salience. And while the music hits with somewhat of a blunted edge, Barnes' harmonies are always unimpeachably catchy.
My naysaying of Of Montreal's earlier work is only meant to underscore the impressive growth displayed here. While albums such as The Gay Parade and Coquelicot often drowned in oppressive amounts of cheerfulness, it's possible to take Satanic Panic seriously while still enjoying even its stickiest melodies. It may lack the raw inventiveness of a potential peer such as Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk at Cubist Castle, but Of Montreal are psych-pop of a different strain. Satanic Panic in the Attic is idiosyncratic without being hokey, and although the band has been stiffed recognition for the consistency of their previous work, this album should make the group much more difficult to ignore.


Produced by Mica Levi, Tirzah’s debut is a compelling vision of what imperfect pop music can be—joyful in both sound and feeling precisely because both seem so out-of-step and asymmetrical.

Devotion

The imperfect piece of art has a sway all its own. To some, the blemishes and dimples on a handmade ceramic bowl will always be better than the machine-made replica. The Japanese call this kind of beauty wabi-sabi; some European thinkers refer to such ineffable idiosyncrasy as “aura.” But at this point, imperfection has been perfected and mass-produced in the form of distressed jeans, faux-vintage furniture, and certain lo-fi music. Encountering something genuinely, gorgeously flawed is elusive. Tirzah Mastin’s debut album Devotion is a compelling vision of what imperfect pop music can be—joyful in both sound and feeling precisely because both seem so out-of-step and asymmetrical.
Tirzah began to hone this vision in 2013 when she released I’m Not Dancing, an EP of eccentric dance-music ballads she made with the British producer and composer Mica Levi. The EP’s title track, one of Tirzah’s defining songs, sounds as unconventional and alluring now as it did half a decade ago: Wheezing, blown-out synthesizers and rickety drum hits mingle with her quietly loud voice—so pure, so raspy, so dogged and cool all at once. It begs you to lean in closer and make sure the speakers aren’t broken. Like Jai Paul or FKA twigs, her delivery is unguarded and messy in the way someone singing alone in the shower might belt out a song. Listening to her feels somehow both private and totally casual, a peculiar sort of shared intimacy. It’s this quality that makes Devotion so particular.
Working again with Levi, who has produced all of Tirzah’s past music, she’s moved away from the bright, ramshackle club music vibe of past releases, and together, they’ve honed a sound that’s lean and almost uncomfortably close. The spare style allows the listener to really zoom in on each little detail of Tirzah’s voice—and in that space, things get pretty intense.
On the opener “Fine Again,” Tirzah takes time to savor each word she sings—elongating every little detail of the word “fine” and unlocking new timbres as she goes. But the song doesn’t move along smoothly. It starts, stops, and hiccups, tripping you up once you’re comfortable. You look to Tirzah’s vocal as an anchor, but then the vocal line gets thrown across the room, multiplied into choruses, muted, pitch-shifted, sped up, slowed down, and torn apart. Serenity arrives when one heartstopping romantic phrase—“This feels so pure this feels rare”—rings clear. This all happens in under three minutes, and it’s representative of what Devotion does well: It’s an invitation to explore the nooks and crannies of adult relationships.
Tirzah has described the album’s 11 tracks as “straight-up love songs,” which elides just how gritty, lived-in, and straight-up strange these pieces can be. On “Guilty,” there’s a guttural crunch of distorted electric guitars that’s followed up by a gobsmacking use of Auto-Tune that doesn’t smooth out Tirzah’s voice, but rather accentuates its gravelly texture and breathy impurities. It creates a sensation that feels simultaneously alien and human, recalling Levi’s work scoring the unsettling 2013 horror film Under the Skin, where she made atonal string compositions feel fleshy and organic.
That spirit of surprise comes from Levi’s desire to make sparse backdrops that free up Tirzah’s voice to explore and make mistakes. The producer’s austere technique resembles Arthur Russell’s more minimal pop experiments: The world Levi builds for Tirzah is airy and open—her piano chords and drum hits float by like a paper bag caught in a breeze. When that spare sound doesn’t congeal with Mastin’s voice, though, it can make the songs seem unfinished, listless, or both: The quiet piano ballad “Say When” sounds like a scratch take; others work hard not to be noticed, like “Do You Know,” with its circular synths and shuffling drums.
When that simplicity does shine through, it’s cutting. It all comes together on the album’s striking title track a duet with the South London artist Coby Sey. The sound of Sey’s wounded hums wrapping themselves around every weary note Tirzah sings is electric. Her blunt writing—“I just want your attention/I just want you to listen”—only makes the song even more excruciatingly emotional. Surrounding her is just a simple drum and piano loop, letting every tired, stretched-out note luxuriate in sadness. To write and sing love songs this naked and uncompromising could be taxing. But nothing about Devotion feels like a burden. Instead, it’s so personable and candid that it feels like a privilege to spend a few minutes hearing what Tirzah has to say, imperfections and all.


The colorful Los Angeles dance-pop trio’s second album, released on their Time No Place imprint with help from Kompakt, retains their 2010 debut’s feeling of youthful mischief, but reinforces it with tuneful songs and deluxe production that seemed only a distant possibility on that collection.

FM Sushi

A name like “Rainbow Arabia” comes armed with expectations: a childlike whimsy, a colorful disposition, and some sort of cultural appropriation are among things you’d likely chalk to up a group with the moniker. Their last album, 2010’s Boys and Diamonds, lived up to those first impressions: It was a collection of Orientalism-tinged ditties full of kid-friendly chants and West African melodies. But even when their songwriting was strong, they still felt more like an idea than a band. Their new album FM Sushi, released on their own Time No Place imprint with some help from Cologne techno giant Kompakt, retains that feeling of youthful mischief but reinforces it with tuneful songs and deluxe production that seemed only a distant possibility on Boys.
The Los Angeles husband-wife duo have undergone some changes since then. For one, they’ve brought in a live drummer to beef up their drum machine rhythm tracks. The pool of sounds they borrow from has also greatly expanded. While their reference points are still pretty identifiable, they throw sounds together in a much more interesting way than their old drowning-in-reverb indie pop. It’s noticeable early on, with the spry second track “He Is Sorcerer”, full of New Order grandeur and their most irresistible melody yet. Every phrase uncoils effortlessly from the last, like the stuff summer jams are made of. Tiffany Preston’s vocals sound unnervingly like the Knife’s Karin Dreijier Andersson, but her newfound confidence to play with her voice is almost enough to look past the resemblance.
Though the Prestons are definitely writing tighter pop songs this time around, their inspiration comes from an unlikely source: German synth and soundtrack music from the late 70s. Tangerine Dream and their many contemporaries have been a prominent thread in electronic music for several years now, often with guarded techno types, but the trio handle the influence in unusual ways. The puffy textures serve to make their  pop songs plusher, but the inherently portentous tones provide emotional complexity as well. The title track is turned mournful heart-tugging, and they layer bluesy guitar licks over the the machine moans of “Moments I Had". Transplanting sounds from all sorts of genres, it would be easy to label them as record-collector pop or internet music dilettantes-- but their music feels too honest and eager for such cynical categorization.
That being said, it does feel like they’re piecing together bits from their favorite artists, intentionally or not. On moments like the arpeggio-drenched “River’s Edge”, or especially instrumental “Thai Iced Tea”, where MIDI sax rides a bumpy groove like a toy miniature “V-2 Schneider”, they’re their own band. But on “Lacking Risk” and “Three Moons”, they blatantly ape the chintziest of 80s pop. They do it well, sure, but so do countless other bands. And considering this is a group that apparently likes to re-interpret entire Tangerine Dream soundtracks in their spare time, it’s obvious that they’re capable of better. FM Sushi, then, is a stepping stone for a group suddenly poised to do great things, things their debut never even suggested. But looking over the precipice is different than actually crossing it-- so for now we’re stuck with them as they formulate their next move. At least it’s not a bad place to hang around.


Dunedin, New Zealand-based singer-guitarist Kane Strang's songs have a way of making modest acts seem heroic. At his best, he comes off like Panda Bear doing a one-man garage-band remount of Pixies slow jams.

Blue Cheese

The Dunedin, New Zealand-based singer-guitarist Kane Strang traffics in off-the-cuff, off-kilter indie-rock songs that somehow sound like the products of great struggle and effort. Listening to Blue Cheese, his first North American release, feels like that hungover moment on a Sunday morning when you have to summon all your strength to hurl yourself out of bed and over to the bathroom. In the same way you might want to award yourself a medal for making it there without puking in the hallway, Blue Cheese's tousled charm has a way of making modest acts seem heroic.
Blue Cheese was recorded by Strang while house-sitting his parents’ house, but it’s hardly a reservoir of sensitive, singer-songwriterly introspection. Rather, it’s the sound of a young, restless soul taking full advantage of the empty environs by making an inspired racket and broadcasting his innermost musings to no one in particular. Kane Strang isn't just this guy's name, it's also a handily onomatopoetic descriptin of the odd jangle of his guitar. Strang actually plays all the instruments here, a fact betrayed by the sludgy, rumbling bass lines, the lumbering, drum machines, and the one-finger synths that feel like placeholders for the brass and string sections he can’t yet afford.
And though Blue Cheese is being billed as a proper debut in the wake of 2013’s demos collection, A Pebble and a Paper Crane, a certain slapdash aesthetic remains: songs have a tendency cut out before they even reach a chorus, and the uniformity of their sound, arrangements, and temperament suggests it was all cranked out sequentially in a single session, with the console settings untouched from one song to the next. Over its brief 28-minute run time, there are moments when you’ll be itching for a change of scenery, but Strang has a gift for pulling diamonds from the rough, and he’s careful not to let his winsome voice and finely cut melodies get overwhelmed by their surroundings.
In his most inspired moments, Strang comes off like Panda Bear doing a one-man garage-band remount of Pixies slow jams. He shares both acts' penchant for twisting innocent sing-alongs into bizarro meditations: On the surface, "The Web" is an optimistic, wide-eyed ode to blossoming romance, but it soon becomes clear Strang’s paramour is an online connection he’s never met IRL. He never quite works up a sweat—even the album’s lone rave-up "Never Kissed a Blonde" is more of a wallow  than a romp. As per its DIY design, this album is about doing what you can with what you've got. But like the unattainable women Strang is fond of serenading, the album’s pop potential leaves you imagining all that could be under different circumstances.


The London rapper/singer Little Simz, who broke out with last year's A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons, grows more engaging as she digs deeper into her emotions. Her new mixtape finds her at her most fearless and vulnerable.

AGE 101: DROP X

Few young rappers are as explicitly vulnerable as Little Simz. Born Simbi Ajikawo, Simz shines brightest when leaning into her deepest emotions, and on her previous EPs, mixtapes, and debut album A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons, she connected harder the deeper she dug. On "Gratitude," her single from her debut, she raps, "Put my feet in the studio and call it my home while others have got no way out," and the listener understands the severity of the stakes. Music is her escape and it is because of music that she is later able to dive deeper into her psyche and those of the people she uses as characters in her songs. "I ain’t never had a chance to do what I love," she says later in the song. "Ain’t nobody been encouraging me. I just stay indoors dreaming."
On her latest mixtape, AGE 101: DROP X, she peels back even more layers, discussing the scheming of her family and friends in an uncompromising world and the mounting pressures she experiences as her career continues upward. "Why don’t they like seeing women in charge? Shit I’ve seen left me mentally scarred" she raps on "Savage." Despite this, DROP X feels warmer and lighter than any of Little Simz' other records, and more confident. The production is sharper than anything she’s previously done, aligning with a more progressive electronic sound that weaves in between the Afrofuturism of indie R&B and post-dubstep experimentations. She also has more collaborators here than ever before, from the honey-voiced Jesse Boykins III to the slow and viscous flow of Chicago's Mick Jenkins.
"Interlude," which features Bibi Bourelly, is the strongest track, beginning with a warm guitar strum and a cold, steady coupling of drum machine and percolating synths. It sounds as fit for a singer as a rapper, and a large portion of the song is given to Bourelly. Like Dawn Richard’s "Adderall/Sold (Outerlude)," "Interlude" examine the pull of substances, the truth in things (pills, whiskey) that should only be temporarily enjoyable and not permanent solutions. Both songs are sad on the surface, but underneath is a level of hope: "Staying busy working on my shit/ How else can I be great?" Simz asks. More than most artists, Simz puts all her hope in her work; her work is her passion, the thing that helped her escape.
There is a lot of despair in Simz’s lyrics, pulling against that hope. She raps of the trials of the brutalized black body, stripped of its humanity before it has a chance to grow and thrive ("They ain't even have the one-off chance to become the greatest," she raps on "Kiki's Future") as well as her desire to keep going, regardless. She raps, "Still I'm hella angry at the system/ Young black woman, who the fuck is gonna listen to me now?" knowing full well the things stacked against her (her gender, her race) and still she keeps pushing. AGE 101: DROP X is her 10th release. By now, we should know she's not kidding. Thank goodness for that.


On her new album, the Mexico City-based cellist and singer moves from abstraction toward more familiar pop and rock silhouettes. But her lyrics remain committed to the power of opacity.

Sentir que no sabes

Mabe Fratti says her music is like looking at yourself in a “really good mirror” and staring at “all the pores in your skin.” Her charmingly idiosyncratic songs seem to caress every small hollow, every laugh line, every curiously located freckle. The Guatemalan-born, Mexico City-based artist thrives on that kind of in-your-face freedom: She twists horns, drums, and cello into angular shapes, shifting between the structures and textures of experimental music, post-rock, jazz, and classical. Sentir que no sabes (Feel Like You Don’t Know), her third album in eight months, is a statement of self-definition—one that encourages you to be at peace with all your insecurities. It’s this propensity to let the irregular feel like second nature that makes Fratti so magnetic. Sentir que no sabes is a summons to make your own rawness a home.
On Sentir, Fratti moves closer to the silhouettes of pop and rock than ever before. These songs start to follow more discernible and familiar forms—although she continues to luxuriate in the oblique. “Oídos” begins with jagged, unsettling strings, plinking piano notes landing alongside Fratti’s plangent vocals. A lonely trumpet, played by Jacob Wick and arranged—along with all the album’s drums and strings—by Fratti’s Titanic collaborator Héctor Tosta, blares in the background, twisting into serpentine tendrils. It’s too meandering to be a proper pop song, but still cohesive enough to soundtrack a pensive montage in an art-house film. Lead single “Kravitz,” on the other hand, is full-blown rock, with a grungy bassline and thumping kick drum chugging alongside Fratti’s paranoid lyrics about ears in the ceiling. There are still a couple of jolts, of course: a shrill key; a portentous horn; a trembling vocal performance. Fratti has a gift for creating small dramas like this. She possesses the self-assurance of a viper, slithering through dissonance and harmony without hesitation. This capacious mode looks good on her.
On previous releases, it was easy to let Fratti’s words fade into the background—to be moved by a discordant blast of percussion, a spectral melody, or a strummed cello phrase. Fratti has always examined psychic interiors in her lyrics, but Sentir offers more urgent ruminations on the struggle to process emotions, make decisions, and not know what’s next. This often takes the form of self-interrogation. Under a plaintive plucked cello and ethereal, ’80s-inspired keys on “Pantalla azul,” she wonders, “No hay lección más que entender que todo se desordenó/¿Estoy en la razón?/¿Mientras los demás tienen otra historia?/¿Qué hacer con estos pedazos?/Seguir en la espera de un milagro.” Everything is a mess, but maybe it’s alright to feel lost in the pieces that are left behind, waiting for a miracle. In these moments, I feel a kinship between her lyrics and the digressive novels of Clarice Lispector. Like the Brazilian author, Fratti’s writing is sometimes inscrutable, but always self-scrutinous. It plunges into the confounding chaos of the psyche, seeking flashes of wisdom in all the muddle.
Fratti moves gracefully between apprehension and acceptance as she delivers these reflections. Moments of unknowing hold their own among moments of clarity. “Márgen del índice” begins with harsh clanking, electronics hissing in the background like heavy machinery as Fratti chants in sinister tones. But 15 seconds in, a gorgeous melody takes hold—it’s as if Fratti is holding our hands through her own uncertainty, her mind moving from confusion to relief and back again. The instrumental tracks “Elástica II” and “Elástica I” have a similar effect; Fratti echoes the plasticity referenced in the title, treating her cello like the stretchy slime you might find in an ASMR video. It’s a masterful interpretation of the mass of entangled—and often conflicting—feelings that live in our consciousness.
Sentir que no sabes is the kind of record that requires you to surrender to it, to listen meticulously and without expectation, regardless of how well you understand its themes. Fratti is much like Arthur Russell in that way—an artist who coaxes you to crawl into their alien world and make it your shelter. On the vocoder-laden “Alarmas olvidadas,” Fratti sings alongside a looping, growling cello. Everything is slow, loose, and lurching, like a strongman struggling to pull a big rig. Mint Field’s Estrella del Sol whistles in the background, but suddenly, there’s a brief respite from the tension: Arpeggiated keys and Fratti’s seraphic voice swell, rising above the unease. “La verdad es desafío,” she sings. Truth is a challenge. The unknown, she suggests, might not be something to avoid, but rather a place to immerse yourself. It might contain all the answers you need.


The meme rapper’s debut album confirms everyone’s suspicions about the relationship between viral hip-hop fame and rapping abilities.

Bumps & Bruises

Prior to TikTok, viral rap stars took off through SoundCloud and Vine. Lil Yachty, Lil Pump, and OG Maco—this first generation of meme rappers paved the way for the success of Lil Nas X while handing corporations a ready supply of appropriation-ready rap lyrics to keep pace with millennial consumption habits at the same time. Now that the first batch is getting older, we are learning which of them can actually rap without resorting to gimmicks.
Ugly God belongs to this first wave. In 2015, the Houston rapper racked up more than 33 million hits on SoundCloud for the iPhone ringtone-sampling “I Beat My Meat,” spawning a mini-dance craze in the process. He hit the Billboard charts with his follow-up single “Water” and was inducted into the the 2017 edition of XXL’s Freshman Class. He appeared on singles alongside fellow XXL classmate PnB Rock as well as with rappers like Famous Dex, Lil Yachty, and Lil Pump. It was a good run, but two years is a long time in viral rap years, and Ugly God’s debut album Bumps & Bruises confirms everyone’s suspicions about the relationship between viral hip-hop fame and rapping abilities.
Ugly God raps over his own production for the project’s 14 tracks, which makes the whole thing feel a lot longer than it is. The music is tinny and piecemeal and the raps are dull and repetitive in the worst possible way: “Went to college for the hoes, blew up then I dropped out,” he mumbles on “Jaguar.” He shows his money off for “bitches” and “hoes” in the most tired patriarchal way imaginable: On “For Real,” he follows “My diamonds on fleek/I’m on her neck like a leash” with the chorus “My old bitch cold like ice/My new bitch hot for real.” (Shoutout to the apparent hordes of women getting their bills paid, hair and nails done, and overall expenses handled by Ugly God.)
Worst of all, he isn’t even funny, and humor was one of his only strengths. “I might make some Cajun/I fuck with Caucasians/My dick game amazing/Get served like a patient,” goes one numbing stretch from “Back to the Basics.” Not even the song called “HAHAHA!” gets a laugh: “Hahaha when you kiss your bitch right after she ate this semen, huh/Hahaha when you send me your music and I’m knowing I ain’t never gon’ stream it, huh.” Other than a guest feature from Migos’ Takeoff, the album’s only saving grace is “Bumps & Bruises (Interlude),” an under-two-minute track in which Ugly God raps about being one of meme rap’s pioneers and calls out the new generation for copying his playbook for success. Otherwise, it’s pretty clear that his social-media reign is over, and while it’s surreal to classify someone a has-been at the age of 22, Bumps & Bruises is a time capsule from the mid-2010s that should have stayed buried.


Spastic, accessible indie rock from scrappy Hot Hot Heat soundalikes.

We Are Scientists: With Love and Squalor

With Love and Squalor

With Love and Squalor is the debut LP from We Are Scientists, and while they've been self-releasing material since 2000, the album shows the exuberance of youth on every seam: lyrics about girls and drinking and little else, rhythms rushed just past danceability, guitar-heavy verses with even heavier guitars in the chorus, more hooks, more riffs, more syllables than needed in the word "explode"-- about 11 instead of two-- on opener "Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt".
Singer Keith Murray is the ringer of this scrappy crew. His calm, romantic delivery takes these constantly shifting tracks, with guitars filling every corner of the compositions, and makes them a little more palatable. For a band that's going to incur some Hot Hot Heat references for their spastic but accessible take on indie rock, his professional croon is a pleasant counterpoint to Steve Bays' yelp.
The band attempts to deliver a perfect single on every track, and expectedly, only a few deliver that rush. While "Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt" comes on a little too strong, the following "This Scene Is Dead" and "Inaction" quickly find their groove. "This Scene Is Dead" plays like a cuddlier version of Les Savy Fav's "The Sweat Descends", a few notes of guitar reverberating over the verses before a churning chorus, and "Inaction" loses no momentum through its rhythmic twists and turns.
The band does their best to change the beat and keep it fresh between the three of them (bass, guitar, and drums) while straddling the line between indie and pop-punk. But somewhere around "Cash Cow", a pattern starts to emerge: a herky-jerk indie-safe verse meets with soaring stretched vowels and downstrokes on the chorus. It's an effective formula, provided it isn't used on 12 consecutive tracks.
There are a few songs that transcend the cut-and-paste approach, like the punk-inflected "Callbacks", Murray's Devo-like inflection on the giddy repetition of "The Great Escape", and the slower "Can't Lose". On "Can't Lose", the rhythm section stutters like an engine with one piston, and while the chorus pulls the same trick as all the others, the band comes up with a brief bridge that's so unassuming and tender it contrasts with the entire album. Most of these tracks have hooks aimed straight for your jugular, but "Can't Lose" shows the band could go even farther with a little restraint.


The London hardcore band’s second album takes a bolder, brighter approach. Its embrace of self-love and community feels radical and hard-earned.

They Fear Us

On the cover of Ithaca’s 2019 debut, The Language of Injury, a bright pink chef’s knife carved up a grayscale image of your standard raucous hardcore show. So too did the London five-piece make mincemeat of monotonous metalcore, skewering its exclusionary history while folding in adventurous tastes of other genres. The shirts emblazoned with “Stop supporting racist bands” and the press releases decrying metallic hardcore’s “lack of ambition” weren’t just a public-facing persona—the music went there, too. Language managed to incorporate doom, crust, black metal, and screamo, while vocalist Djamila Boden Azzouz threw down the gauntlet to contemporaries with lyrics like, “Nothing you say moves me/You’re not what you said you’d be.” Ithaca were a band on a mission, bursting into the genre and fighting their way out for 31 relentless minutes. Now they’ve reached the throne room.
They Fear Us, their second album, doesn’t lack aggression—it opens with Boden Azzouz spitting out the bones of her enemies over a windmill kick of a groove: “Don’t say you can take it/Don’t think I won’t break it.” But unlike Language, this isn’t an album focused entirely on pummeling the status quo into submission. In a recent interview, Boden Azzouz called They Fear Us “so much more triumphant” than its predecessor, and this change becomes obvious less than a minute into the album, when the clouds part for the soaring hook of “In the Way.” The guitars brighten, the drums accelerate from a stomp to a gallup, and Boden Azzouz’s clean vocals take the reins: “Here it goes/Aspiration holds.”
Throat-shredding hardcore vocalists pivoting to more melodic fare can be a sore subject among fans, but Boden Azzouz is better equipped (and qualified) for the transition than many of her reedy-voiced peers. She studied musical theater for a few years at the University of Leeds, and on They Fear Us, you can tell. Whereas her singing took a backseat to her screaming on Language, now the two vocal styles receive almost equal airtime. The rest of the band responds by building songs around brighter, dare-I-say hammier melodies. Language relied on the classic post-hardcore move of contrasting all-out assaults with quiet, pretty moments, but They Fear Us’ beauty is louder, bolder, and more drawn-out.
In the past few years, shoegaze has emerged as the destination of choice for heavy musicians seeking to pivot, and They Fear Us proves that Ithaca are not immune. The album’s lush sound and clean hooks pit them ever closer to UK forebears like Svalbard and Rolo Tomassi, and Ithaca wield the influence while maintaining their own unshakeable personality. “Fluorescent” in particular nails that gloriously synthetic Diamond Eyes sheen with its rich palette of digitized guitar effects and Boden Azzouz’s Chino Moreno-esque ability to switch from a keening wail into a screech at the drop of a hat. All the while, drummer James Lewis keeps the band’s heavy chops at the forefront with alternating double-pedaled breakdowns and peppy blastbeat/D-beat hybrids.
The only remnant of Language’s whiplash-inducing transitions is the band’s deft weaving between burly beatdowns and more buoyant, arena-ready fare. Check out the title track, where the lofty, clean lyrics “Bow to your blood/Your queen and/Your God” are paired with heavenward Coheed and Cambria guitar harmonies, before Boden Azzouz turns on her snarl and the guitars follow suit with nasty low-end arpeggios. The distorted squeal that hits right when Boden Azzouz lowers her voice at the end of the lines, “You think we’re lightyears away/You think we’re decades” exemplifies how the band’s skilfull play of tension and release mirrors her vocal approach.
Ithaca save their boldest trick for last, closing They Fear Us with the gorgeous, bald-faced pop song “Hold, Be Held.” Opening like a Bloc Party ballad with chiming guitars and a sparse drum machine, the song blooms into a full-throated chorus before Boden Azzouz cedes the mic to guest vocalist Yansé Cooper, whose fluttering voice is eventually woven into a rich round with backing screams and the original chorus. The song’s open-hearted cry is a radical choice for a closing statement, befitting a hardcore album so radical in its embrace of self-love and community. Musically, They Fear Us is bolder than its predecessor—more confident in its melodies, more unconcerned with heavy music posturing—and Boden Azzouz matches this evolution in her performance: She has shifted from seething outward angst to seeking strength within.


Stefon Alexander's fourth LP of clenched-fist, politicized, and proudly Midwestern hip-hop features production from Lazerbeak and Boys Noize, along with a Justin Vernon cameo.

We Don't Even Live Here

The title of Stefon Alexander's fourth LP as P.O.S. conveys a self-deprecation and sense of displacement that reminds me of the last time I saw him perform live. Unfortunately, due to recent health complications, it could be the last time I see him live for a while. He was added to the 2010 Coachella lineup only days before the festival took place and he was quite literally the first person to perform that weekend, arriving to a sparsely-filled tent of curious foreigners and confused onlookers who almost certainly assumed they were supposed to see P.O.D. He acknowledged the obstacles, embraced the opportunity, and absolutely rocked that show-- he undoubtedly earned some fans in that half hour. Making the best out of a shitty situation is likewise a prevalent theme in P.O.S.' latest record of clenched-fist, politicized, and proudly Midwestern hip-hop. The problem is that the strangely smug We Don't Even Live Here feels more like P.O.S. preaching to the converted than attempting to make a believer out of anyone, lacking any palpable resistance necessary to justify the constant underdog pose.
To his credit, P.O.S. ensures We Don’t Even Live Here at least sounds celebratory. It features production from the likes of both Lazerbeak and Boys Noize that goes heavy on squelchy electro-funk, you get a Justin Vernon cameo on "Where We Land", while "Wanted/Wasted" and "They Can't Come" are near disco-sample rap, at least not that far off from something that could appear on a 97 Bad Boy record. For the most part, the aggro-punk abrasion of 2009's Never Better is jettisoned, but most of it is either overtly rock (the 5 Hour Energy-pounding opener "Bumper") or implicitly rock, the drums always knocking and often taking the tone of real snares and kicks. It could just as easily please a Rock The Bells purist as it could a Warped Tour onlooker. #47 debut on Billboard aside, no one would consider it pop-rap, yet there are catchy hooks throughout, even if their clunky verbiage make them difficult to actually sing along with.
But it's not really a crossover of any sort since the appeal of We Don't Even Live Here essentially comes down to whether or not you're already marching with P.O.S. The vast majority of the record is rendered from the perspective of "we" or "they," where "we" constitutes the Doomtree collective and anyone who has even some semblance of anger about the state of hip-hop or the economy. "They" are classic strawmen-- commercial rappers who are liars by definition, shady politicians, and anyone who has doubted Doomtree. So while We Don't Even Live Here is cerebral, not much of it stands up to intelligent debate, often vague and heavy-handed at the same time. The biggest problem manifests in a track like "Fuck Your Stuff", where a group chant promises that they'll be "scuffin' up your Nikes, spittin' on your whip." It's a weirdly dated image that's the first of many signs that P.O.S. has some kind of awareness of the mainstream. But other than brief mentions of OWS and terribly forced namedrops of Anonymous and Christopher Hitchens, you're left wondering about the last time he meaningfully engaged with it. Subliminals are thrown at the likes of "All I Do Is Win", "Stunt 101", "Diamonds from Sierra Leone", "Run This Town", and for fuck's sake, J-Kwon.
As a response, do you mention Jay-Z's involvement in the 2012 election, or Kanye's benefit concerts, or Diddy's "Vote or Die" campaign, or that Young Jeezy made the definitive Barack Obama track? It hardly seems worth it, since P.O.S.'s reaction on "Wanted/Wasted" is the following: "black president, hooray for history/ but that shit's still totally pretend." What's "that shit," and how is it "totally pretend"? He leaves it at that, and "Fuck Your Stuff" is simply more food for thought filled with empty calories: "fuck dumbin' it down/ spit ice, skip jewelry/ Molotov cocktails on me like accessories." "Accessory" being a key term since P.O.S.' platform of revolution is so depersonalized-- "they on some nonsense/ we on some non-stop," "kickin' out your DJ," "this world's got a whole lot of locked doors/ we decided not to live here anymore"-- the homemade explosives and other instruments of mayhem mentioned throughout are rendered as much of a bauble and signifier as one of "their" luxury cars. Hell, the title of "Lock-Picks, Knives, Bricks, and Bats" might as well be "Beamer, Benz, or Bentley".
There can always stand to be more socially engaged musicians in any genre, but hip-hop has proven to be bountiful if imperfect on that end in 2012. You could hear the lived-in experience on Killer Mike's R.A.P. Music, a record which balances blanket statements with tough questions. El-P's Cancer for Cure conflated sci-fi with poli-sci. The Coup filtered absurdist humor through itchy new wave. Death Grips might not be saying a whole lot that's intelligible, but it sure as hell makes you want to smash something. Even the abhorrently violent hip-hop coming from Chicago can trigger real discussion as a necessary reflection of its environment. Ironically, We Don't Even Live Here creates a world where P.O.S. is all too welcome. You'll never go broke playing yourself up as the solution or alternative to the perceived mindlessness of pop radio, but it doesn't matter if you're going to the club to get drunk or simply reading post-election commentary that confirms whatever beliefs you held beforehand: They're both forms of escapism, and We Don't Even Live Here just doesn't seem aware of how content it really is.


This Chicago trio makes the rare free-jazz album that goes down easy, playing with a grace that makes even the farthest-out moments feel accessible.

Jackson / Baker / Kirshner: So Glossy and So Thin

So Glossy and So Thin

Keefe Jackson, Jim Baker, and Julian Kirshner are all lesser-known musicians in Chicago’s perennially rich jazz and free-improv scene, a trio of role players whose innovations have yet to receive their proper appreciation outside of the Windy City. So Glossy and So Thin, their second trio release following 2016’s The Noisy Miner, should change all of that. Taken from a pair of performances at Roscoe Village venue The Hungry Brain in 2018 and 2019, the album’s two 20-minute tracks are a showcase not only for their talents as individuals, but also for the depth of their connection. The ease with which they handle this music makes even their farthest-out moments feel accessible. The joyful spirit behind Jackson, Baker, and Kirshner’s explorations makes So Glossy and So Thin the rare free-jazz album that goes down easy.
Part of its charm has to do with how clearly these three enjoy playing with one another. They come off like they’re racing to an agreed-upon location by separate routes. Jackson’s sax and Baker’s piano tease and tickle in the opening moments of “Then,” rolling around like a pair of dogs in a yard. They shift in and out of time with one another, with the rapidly assembled patterns of Kirshner’s drumming providing a kind of mosaic-tiled ground for the other two to race over. At times they pump like a New Orleans funk band, full of footloose swagger and goofy gestures. At others, they bang out stormy pulses and thick, dissonant chords that would be at home on the experimental series of a major symphony orchestra.
What links these moments together and keeps So Glossy and So Thin from feeling disconnected is how smoothly they transition from section to section. Once they’ve exhausted “Then”’s opening, the trio deftly glides from all-out clatter to low-volume tinker with the grace of a pelican skimming the ocean, setting the stage for a gorgeous off-blue solo from Jackson. They make it work in reverse, too, raising “and again” from a simmer so slowly you don’t notice how hot things have become until they turn it back down again.
That low section in “and again” is one of the album’s most effective moments. It’s built around a long solo from Kirshner, who takes a note from Rashied Ali and treats his cymbals like hanging sound bowls; he keeps them at a steady ring while attending to a nervous pulse out of the kick drum, with a few strokes of tom providing the color. The motion is constant, but Kirshner’s playing is so deft —he taps the bell of the cymbal like he’s testing an egg — it feels like an ASMR recording, or the distant buzz and thump of a highly pitched synthesizer.
As if to not be outdone, Baker brings out an actual synthesizer in “and again.” While Sun Ra was incorporating electronics into his music by the early 1960s, and Patrick Gleeson’s modular synths were crucial to the success of Herbie Hancock’s wildest mid-’70s experiments, Baker has over his many years working with the ARP 2600 developed a mode of playing that gives the synth an expressive range as wide as any wind instrument. Stacked against the cough and yawp of Jackson’s sopranino sax, the ARP comes alive. Baker almost seems to be breathing through the machine, making it howl and groan, and teetering between tonality and atonality. Jackson picks around the ARP’s edges, goading Baker deeper and deeper, before breaking off and joining Kirshner’s rattling toms to create a pattern that itself feels like the product of a modular synth. They play in this free space — lines between sax, synth, and drums obliterated — for a few moments, then move on.
At its core, So Glossy and So Thin is nothing more than three musicians creating an environment where they can test out some of their best ideas. Remarkably, every single one of them pays off. While the music isn’t simple, it’s always convincing, like watching a movie in a foreign language: Even if you can’t follow the plot, the emotional contours are plain as day.

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Star Wars Headspace is a new album of electronic music inspired by the Star Wars films. Executive produced by Rick Rubin, the record is alive with adolescent energy, thanks to a well-chosen roster of producers including Flying Lotus, Shlohmo, Baauer, and more.

Star Wars Headspace

In April 2015, the emotional juggernaut that was the first two-minute Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer was released online. Drawing heavily on the iconography of the original trilogy—a beached star destroyer, Vader’s crumpled helmet, X-Wings soaring—it played on a few generations' worth of treasured memories, but what sent it over the top were the stirrings of that lovely old John Williams theme: Nostalgia, ultra.
Even more than the visuals, the sounds of Star Wars are what evoke the giddy soul of the films. Williams’ score does the heavy lifting, yes, but the whirrs and shrieks of assorted creatures, the laser blasts, and endless memorable lines are almost as important. (My sister and I would rewind the VHS tape of the first Star Wars film to hear the Jawa exclamation "Utini!" over and over again.) It’s this latter mix of sounds that animates Star Wars Headspace, a new album of electronic music inspired by the films. Executive produced by Rick Rubin, who was a teenager when Star Wars was released, the record crackles with adolescent exuberance, thanks to a well-chosen roster of producers. Neither stale tribute nor sloppy lovefest, Headspace aims for simple fun and hits it square, like a T-16 targeting womp rats back on Tatooine. (Sorry.)
Flying Lotus, who contributes a track, said in an interview on Beats 1 that the producers involved were given access to a vast anthology of Star Wars sound bites but were cautioned away from Williams’ music. For that reason, random chirps, whirrs, and speech fragments dominate the proceedings, and many of the producers cash in as many of these chips as possible. Big-tent EDM DJ Kaskade kicks things off with "C-3PO’s Plight," a maximalist piece of novelty camp that turns one of the golden droid’s asides into a weirdly moving lament. The house producer Claude Von Stroke offers a goofy dance anthem that recalls the work of Todd Terje.
The musicians on the record’s latter half focus less on obvious tribute material. Flying Lotus and Shlohmo, both of whom have ventured outside of their comfort zones in recent years, incorporate droid bleeps and bloops into fresh versions of their older styles, as if they’ve walked into a childhood clubhouse and remembered all the best hiding places. "I feel real close to these sounds," Flying Lotus said in his interview, and you can tell.
This cozy nostalgia is a way of avoiding risk, and much like The Force Awakens, most of the tracks here are not particularly adventurous: GTA imitate Baauer with an imperial-style banger, while Baauer himself reaches into his usual explosive bag of tricks. Röyksopp, in one of the album’s few missteps, put together an 8-minute amalgamous mess that sounds patched together from their back catalog.
But like the new film, the tracks sound relaxed and self-assured, none more so than "NR-G7," one of Rubin’s two contributions. A successful synthesis of four or so different approaches, from pounding four-on-the-floor gristle to dazzling jet-stream synths and back again, it's a testament to the idea that sometimes indecision is the best decision. Rubin’s involvement, both as a musician and an artistic conscience, elevates the collection from crass tie-in (which, of course, it is) into something undeniably greater.
The most ambitious tracks on Headspace reach for the majesty of the original score, and Rubin places them near the end of the record where they can have the strongest emotional impact. "Sunset Over Manaan," produced by Attlas, has an aching melody that might remind you of "Leia's Theme." And the epic orchestration of Breakbot's final track taps directly into the neo-Romantic essence of Williams' music. It’s one of the only tracks that turns its back on nostalgia, striking out to explore new territory.


This anthology of self-released new age music from the 1980s captures a moment of spiritual questing, and it rightly rescues its creator from historical obscurity.

Pauline Anna Strom: Trans-Millenia Music

Trans-Millenia Music

Although it claims an international audience, the genre loosely known as new age has a special home in San Francisco. Cloaked in fog that cascades majestically over palm-dotted hills, the city’s microclimates, rolling landscape, and edge-of-the-continent setting make it an aptly evocative home for fringe dreamers, schemers, and seekers. Even prior to 1967’s headline-grabbing Summer of Love, the Bay Area had become a magnet for some of the avant garde’s most utopian voices: Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros both taught at Mills College, while Morton Subotnick’s San Francisco Tape Music Center helped develop the groundbreaking Buchla synthesizer. Organizations like the Esalen Institute and Synanon set up shop along the coast and pioneered the pursuit of alternative lifestyles, while the city’s strong anti-war, free speech, women’s rights, and gay rights movements flourished.
It was in this heady context that Pauline Anna Strom began making music. Blind since birth and a self-described “hell-raising flower child,” she arrived in San Francisco following her husband’s assignment at the Presidio military base with no plans of pursuing a career in the arts. But exposure to pioneering albums by Tangerine Dream, Kitaro, and other electronic artists from overseas soon led her to purchase a small complement of synthesizers and to set up a makeshift studio at home. Dubbing herself the Trans-Millenia Consort, Strom dove into her work, mapping an inner world of imagined pasts, possible futures, and alternate realities. Trans-Millenia Music is a survey of the most striking music she released throughout the 1980s. Variously ethereal, playful, and brooding, but always confident, the album captures the fervent experimentalism of Strom’s West Coast milieu and focuses attention on an artist who might otherwise have been relegated to history’s footnotes.
Of Strom’s seven albums released between 1982 and 1988, six are represented on Trans-Millenia Music. Rather than working chronologically, the team at RVNG has chosen to jump around freely, sequencing for flow and drama while leaning heavily on Strom’s mature phase, nodding to a few early highlights but keeping its eyes on the prize.
The album kicks off with “Freedom at the 45th Floor” and “Virgin Ice,” both taken from Spectre, her third album. Immediately engaging, the music’s mellow surface betrays a palpable urgency lurking beneath. There’s an audible connection to Cluster and Brian Eno’s 1977 collaboration, especially in Strom’s gentle vamping. Both exude a comforting coziness tinged with something more ambiguous. It’s hard to imagine it’s a coincidence: “Spatial Spectre,” taken from the same album, could pass for an outtake from Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land, released two years prior. As strong as anything from that record, “Spatial Spectre” answers Eno’s vaporous audio environments with a more muscular, overtly creepy workout that hovers and undulates while maintaining momentum.
Other songs veer, both for better and for worse, into tone-poem romanticism. “Rain on Ancient Quays,” a lightly overdriven work for electric piano and effects, is one of the anthology’s most arresting tracks. Unabashedly moody and grim, it evokes the lurking danger of a chintzy TV movie in the best way; I was particularly reminded of V.C. Andrews’ gothic fever dream Flowers in the Attic. “Warriors of the Sun,” on the other hand, indulges in kitschy exoticism, with synthetic flutes playing a sort of general-purpose spiritual melody before moving into a quasi-Japanese pentatonic march. “Bonsai Terrace” covers some of the same ground, although it benefits from a lurching, unsettling arrangement. Two of her earliest pieces, “The Unveiling” and “Gossamer Silk,” are perfectly lovely but would fit too comfortably in a massage parlor to make a serious impression.
Some of the very best tracks are from 1988’s Mach 3.04, a self-released cassette that Strom has yet to follow up: “In Flight Suspension” and “Cruising Altitude 36,000 Feet” glow with an exploratory power and depth that belie their modest initial release. There’s an uninhibited forcefulness to her arpeggios that takes these pieces beyond the confines of new age. In recent years, the genre has drifted back into style, though it is often viewed through the lens of semi-ironic detachment. That critical distance is understandable when approaching music that could be so grandiose in its proclamations. The liner notes to Strom’s debut album spoke in soaring terms of spiritual transcendence—bold claims, and possibly not what music actually does. But Trans-Millenia Music captures an artist expressing herself freely and without fear or hesitation, and it makes good on its title. Work like this may fade into obscurity, but it remains fresh to all who seek it out, still vibrant and pulsing with energy in any age—new or otherwise.


Bon Iver's classically trained percussionist crafts a debut solo record of austere folk and lush sonics.

All We Grow

When he learned that Justin Vernon was expanding Bon Iver from a one-man project into a full band, Sean Carey retreated to his bedroom, broke down For Emma, Forever Ago into parts, and learned each one. After approaching Vernon at a show and briefly jamming together, Carey was hired more or less on the spot. That's not the most exciting chapter of the Bon Iver story, but it says a great deal about Carey and his first solo album, the shimmery, contemplative All We Grow. With a degree in classical percussion from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Carey approaches songwriting and recording as a student: obsessive and detail oriented, able to absorb a great deal of information and restate it not rotely, but artfully. He has obviously spent a great deal of time absorbing the works of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Mark Hollis, and Bill Evans, and on his solo songs he renders those sounds and influences into music that lies somewhere between folk and composition.
That approach places Carey among a loose group of musicians who are currently bucking folk's traditional emphasis on spontaneous performance in favor of a much more composerly tack-- musicians who give Glass and Reich the same esteem Dylan or Fred Neil usually enjoy. Carey doesn't build minimalist arrangements around vernacular tunes like Sam Amidon, deconstruct Appalachian traditions like Megafaun, or emphasize atmosphere to quite the degree that Vernon does. Instead, the distinguishing characteristic of All We Grow is its elemental quality: Using only a piano, guitar, and drums, Carey creates a sound that is simultaneously austere and lush, pitting each instrument against the others. On "We Fell", the drums and guitar create the suggestion of a self-sustaining groove, but the song really comes alive when Carey's piano flutters through the middle of it like a contrail, the theme becoming lovelier and more poignant with each repetition. Following the unraveling of the mournful "Mothers", "Action" lives up to its title as its jarring intro establishes an insistent percussion rhythm that punctuates the nettle-sharp guitar licks. Every element reinforces the sense of bittersweet nostalgia implied by that found-image album cover.
Of all the instruments on All We Grow, the least compelling may be Carey's voice. He possesses a sleepy whisper that has relatively limited vocal or dramatic range, but he compensates by mic'ing it very closely to capture its grain and texture. That technique-- used to good effect on opener "Move" and the mostly wordless "Mothers"-- emphasizes the sound of his voice over any lyrical meaning it might convey. For all practical purposes, All We Grow might as well be an instrumental album, so much so that it sounds best when Carey eschews vocals altogether. The title track opens with a prismatic intro anchored to perhaps the album's most structured melodies, but it's only after the music departs from the lyrics that the song really opens up. Carey unstitches it carefully, allowing each instrument to break away from the others gradually, even as the music threatens to dissipate into the air.
Not every song achieves such effortless drama. At times, Carey comes across as more a student than a master. He has obviously consumed a tremendous amount of music, but he hasn't fully digested some of his influences. "In the Dirt" employs fluttering woodwinds recognizable from the last few Sufjan Stevens albums, and several songs favor an almost mechanized piano theme that's practically quoted from Philip Glass. Yet these familiar elements ultimately inform rather than dispel the album's pervasive melancholy, making All We Grow a nice complement to, rather than a distraction from, his day job.


Folk Time

For those who think of Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter as major figures in American music, the Hart Valley Drifters’ Folk Time is a monumental discovery. Recorded in 1962, Folk Time is Garcia’s only known surviving studio recording from his banjo days before attaining electricity a few years later. The future Dead guitarist is clearly the quintet’s leader, or at least most charismatic, and the primary singing voice through most of the 17-song session, with the group’s vocal trio also including Robert Hunter on upright bass and future New Riders of the Purple Sage founder David Nelson on guitar. Folk Time captures three lifelong collaborators during their invaluable time exploring the roots of American music before making their own.
Though the front cover portrait of Garcia as an itinerant young Mumford with suspenders and bed-roll might read as a little doofy at first, it’s also accurate. Garcia and his friends took up bluegrass and old-time music in the early ’60s with the same bright-eyed bushy-tailed enthusiasm that young folkies have displayed in every decade since. The difference is what the soon ex-Drifters did with it. Garcia fed folk traditions into the Dead’s psychedelic maw and eventually became an influential figure in bluegrass in his own right, inspiring longhairs to take to the banjo after his participation in 1975’s best-selling Old & in the Way. Though Deadheads have traded hissy audience recordings of Garcia’s early projects for decades, the KZSU tape never even existed as a rumor. It was found by filmmaker (and liner note writer) Brian Miksis in 2008 and never circulated.
Taped in mono around a single microphone in the last months of 1962 at Stanford University’s KZSU, the Hart Valley Drifters were decidedly non-Stanford students and the opposite of radicals. The quintet hew strictly to the bounds of bluegrass and old-time music, even making sure to distinguish between the two styles during their band introductions, with Garcia playing guitar on the former, banjo on the latter. And it’s not that they’re especially breathtaking or groundbreaking traditionalists, either. They pick well together and know how to sing as a group. Even some notes don’t arrive in perfect harmony, the gospel back-and-forth of “Standing in the Need of Prayer” and dynamics of traditional foot-stompers like “Pig in a Pen” come off with jubilance, offering a hint of the charm that would (for some) carry the Dead through their most ragged moments.
The Drifters probably wouldn’t be of much interest if not for their personnel. Comparing the one track Folk Time shares with Garcia’s later bluegrass combo Old & In the Way, “Pig in a Pen,” reveals everything the Hart Valley Drifters lacked, but could taste. But, like Bob Dylan hoboing around Greenwich Village covering Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly songs, Folk Time is the sound of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter absorbing their own set of influences, building their repertoires, and finding their voices.
Containing the only extant recordings of Garcia singing Dock Boggs’s “Sugar Baby” (likely learned from Harry Smith’s fabled Anthology of American Folk Music) and winking, 19th-century sexual-political ballads like “Billy Grimes, the Rover,” Folk Time will be a delight for acoustic-minded Dead freaks. Eventually becoming one of rock’s most distinct vocalists, often getting by on charisma and expressiveness more than note-for-note accuracy, Garcia’s singing on Folk Time is far more developed than other circulating audience-made folk era tapes (and the earliest Grateful Dead recordings) would suggest. The 20-year-old Garcia fakes the slightest Southern twang on the opening “Roving Gambler” and elsewhere, perhaps involuntarily, but mostly his affable California reediness is in place.
Unquestionably the best performance on the disc is the closer, a blues arrangement of “Sitting on the Top of the World” featuring only Ken Frankel’s guitar and Garcia’s voice, and a sure stunner for Deadheads. There’s a touch more of the affected twang, but the performance and recording transcend Garcia’s age and experience, drawing from a quiet power and providing the only real glimpse of the singer he would become in the Dead. Perhaps even using the single microphone as an instrument, Garcia’s voice brushes down to a whisper. Moving with a lazy gait, Garcia catches the song’s carelessness with all the conviction of a California native. Though Garcia’s singing had a long way to go, it’s especially evident how the conversational instrumental details of the Hart Valley Drifters could turn into the improvisational pockets of the Dead, the traded lines of “Nine Pound Hammer” only a few volts away from the twining guitars of “China Cat Sunflower.”
Picking up the banjo after being discharged from the Army in 1960, Garcia immersed himself in folk music for a half-decade, practicing obsessively, working as a music teacher, and playing in a series of bands around the Palo Alto area, including the Thunder Mountain Tub Thumpers, the Black Mountain Boys, and others. Like many other central ’60s musicians who would eventually plug in and freak out, Garcia came of musical age during the great folk scare, finding post-War solace in ancient (and ancient-seeming) songs. Only a few years from dashing headlong into the neon-pulsing present tense of LSD, Garcia and others first dove deep into a mythic past that seemed to come alive in the grooves of old records and zoetrope-like flicker between banjo rolls.
But they don’t always sound as if they believe it themselves. The album’s most unconvincing performance isn’t one of the mountain songs or labor tunes, but the traditional “All the Good Times Have Past and Gone.” Nelson was 19, Garcia was 20, and Hunter was 21 and who even could take that sentiment seriously coming from them? It’s perhaps the same reason why Garcia seems to occupy “Sitting on Top of the World” so effortlessly, a song he would sing as an ebullient bounce on the Dead’s 1967 studio debut and keep in his songbook until just before his 30th birthday in 1972. But with the Hart Valley Drifters in the early ’60s, the good times were only just showing the first signs of starting.


On a set inspired by his father’s death, jazz drummer Sebastian Rochford enlists pianist Kit Downes, a longtime collaborator, to help him tell a story about company and grief.

Sebastian Rochford / Kit Downes: A Short Diary

A Short Diary

On A Short Diary, Sebastian Rochford leads from behind. The jazz drummer’s first release under his own name for ECM is unquestionably informed by recent events in his own life, yet Rochford—a former member of Sons of Kemet and Polar Bear who also works with Brian Eno and Andy Sheppard—settles into a restrained, secondary role. Pianist Kit Downes is the main animating force on an album where the two celebrated British players coexist in a gentle place clouded by melancholy.
The past few years have brought a spate of solo or duo releases in jazz, whether recorded in the pandemic (Matthew Stevens’ Pittsburgh, Marius Neset’s A New Dawn) or released into a world particularly receptive to themes of isolation and mourning (Bheki Mseleku’s Beyond the Stars, Esbjörn Svensson’ HOME.S.). Rochford’s album—which he specifies is a diary “of loss”—works with similar themes. After his father, the poet and psychotherapist Gerard Rochford, passed away in December 2019, the drummer sat down at the old grand piano of his family home in Aberdeen, Scotland, and began to formulate a creative response. “Music just seemed to come to me, sing inside me every day, sometimes even as I woke,” Rochford said.
But on A Short Diary, sorrow is replaced with consolation, and, in responding to death, the duo also creates a parable of grief. A Short Diary is like a tranquil art-house film, telling a story that’s as much about company—two contrasting voices learn to mesh, rather than jostle—as summoning an artist’s innermost feelings. Rochford finds well-established support in Downes. Both were members of London’s influential Loop Collective, and Rochford later appeared on Downes’ 2019 ECM album Dreamlife of Debris. In 2012, the two recorded a 35-minute appearance together at London’s Upload Festival. But where that duo set is busy and bustling, the atmosphere is completely different on A Short Diary. Rather than serving as a sparring partner, Downes leans into the role of an old friend, letting Rochford’s compositions pass through him with only the smallest of elaborations.
Like many ECM releases, the album’s reference points are drawn from European classical music. Rochford writes chains of stark chords that just about link together. Sometimes, the effect is hymnal: Opening track “This Tune Your Ears Will Never Hear” is shaped like a Bach chorale prelude, with an anchoring phrase that spills out into mumbled variations. Other progressions—powerful, yet disjointed and keen to digress—could be cribbed from Mahler. Rochford’s careful yet characterful piano writing (in a score marking, he indicates that the opening track should be played “like a child calling out into the empty void”) brings out Downes’ tender side; the pianist realizes Rochford’s compositional voice simply and humbly, as a conduit for Rochford’s distinct melodic style.
The atmosphere is chilly, like listening to Feldman or Schnittke; A Short Diary rarely relaxes into a comfortable emotional space, though its mood is consistent in its muted qualities. The midpoint of the album—the gently grooving, Satie-esque “Love You Grampa”—is the only place that the duo drifts into honeyed nostalgia; Downes’ flash of primary-colored chords at the track’s close is as close as the album comes to a positive narrative upturn.
All tunes are composed by Rochford, except for the closer, “Even Now I Think of Her,” written by his father. That song offers another flicker of welcome contrast: a flavor of Charles Aznavour-like chanson, with harmonic melodrama, darkened tonalities, and a clear rhythmic form that both parties submit to expressive rubato. But any chance of a hopeful conclusion is denied as the track, and the album, finish in grave darkness. It’s a challenge to reach the end of a record that turns in on itself at every opportunity, but in that aspect, it’s as honest a depiction of grieving as you might hope to hear.
Rochford’s father might have been familiar with David Kessler, who in 2019 added a sixth stage of grief—meaning—to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ celebrated five-stage model. But Rochford and Downes aren’t quite ready to search for meaning just yet. Instead, they sit in close company, the place where absence is felt most profoundly.


On her second consecutive album produced by Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, the ever-adventurous former pop star takes on the moment’s social upheaval by getting personal.

Broken Politics

Neneh Cherry’s fifth album in 30 years is called Broken Politics, a reflection of the ebullience lost in realizing that our politics have always been that way. Nearly three decades ago, Cherry topped international and stateside charts with “Buffalo Stance,” a diva dance and hip-hop hybrid that, like De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising the same year, heralded bursts of color in every sense. On her second album in four years to be produced by Four Tet mastermind Kieran Hebden, Cherry creates a dozen landscapes where chimes and samples of various ringing objects act as reminders of other ways of living—offering, if not a way out of politics altogether, then at least a way of relying on our own devices.
Fans expecting an amalgam of Hebden’s beguiling microscopic electro-jingles or Cherry’s enduring exuberance won’t hear it here. Many of these dozen imagistic self-avowals have a discouraging sameness. So fluent is their collaboration that their weaknesses become complementary. Cherry’s melodies aren’t often up to Hebden’s beats, and his beats are frequently too genteel for Cherry’s ambivalence. Many tracks work at the three-minute mark but get tiresome by four. When the pair get contemplative, as they often do, it’s like watching numerators and denominators cancel each other out.
Yet when Broken Politics’ material matches the record’s title, it triggers a sense of unease, a tentative awareness of danger, like smelling something burning in the kitchen. “Natural Skin Deep,” the album’s strongest track, begins with mumbles, an anticipatory din before Hebden loops a steel drum and a percussive throb reminiscent of another Cherry collaborator, Tricky. Cherry sings the hook, “My love goes on and on,” with the tone of someone trying to cheer herself up or at least match the the mournful bleat of the accompanying Ornette Coleman sample. On “Deep Vein Thrombosis,” named after the blood clotting of a limb vein, Cherry’s verses are intentionally occluded. She follows “Like a female dog’s got a name/Life’s a bitch” with “How fragile is a life that can have everything now, too.” Meanwhile, Hebden and co-writers Cameron McVey and John Tonks pluck, trigger, and otherwise render a low thrum on guitar and piano over a shaker. Their efforts score a glimpse at an imagination too unquiet for coherence.
Broken Politics also contains moments when Cherry’s lyrical shorthand and Hebden’s discrete units of sound cohere into something bigger. Using a wall-of-sound approach to flutes in “Slow Release,” Hebden turns Cherry into a high, yearning wind instrument, much like the sliced-and-diced vocal of 2010’s “Angel Echoes.” “Slow release, no pressure, no pressure,” she affirms, perhaps a comment on her own leisurely recording career. Like Lucinda Williams’ “Side of the Road,” she carves a space where politics, broken or otherwise, don’t intrude on her thoughts—a temporary luxury at best. On “Kong,” Massive Attack’s 3D adds the hi-hats and synthesized rumbles of his former band to a lurking piano line, momentarily recalling the 1994 set piece “Karmacoma.” At the peak of Clintonism and the dawn of New Labour, Cherry’s confrères could afford the comas; with the world on fire, “goddamn guns and guts and history,” as Cherry puts it, have caught up to us. The effect is like stepping out of a burrow onto a prairie.
The crucial transatlantic precursor to Massive Attack—whose “Unfinished Sympathy” used strings, percussive loops, and Shara Nelson’s vocals for well-drawn melancholy as the basis for a remapping of Raw Like Sushi’s “Manchild” two years later—Neneh Cherry deserves bouquets, or, better extended appraisals. Her last record, the rumbling Blank Project, anticipated the current climate by four years. The thought of a hit such as “Kisses on the Wind” saving us all is like believing in the Easter Bunny, and, at 54, it’s not Cherry’s aim, anyway. Amid our tumultuous news cycles, the unevenness of Broken Politics is the best she can do, and it’s enough.