Paul Woolford's work under the alias Special Request harks back to UK '90s pirate radio and early rave culture. Woolford, who is 40 years old, experienced the culture firsthand, and his tracks are relentlessly and briskly unsentimental: Truth in advertising, Modern Warfare is a dancefloor weapon.

Modern Warfare EPs 1-3

As 2015 winds down, the trend of repurposing samples of UK '90s pirate radio and early rave culture might have reached its tipping point, thanks in part to Jamie xx's In Colour. And while it's the lynchpin of fellow UK producer Paul Woolford's work under the alias Special Request, it never sounds like an exercise in revisiting those old sounds. Perhaps Woolford's sensibilities come from approaching 40 and experiencing British rave culture firsthand. As he put it in an old interview, Woolford instead seeks to revel in "a false memory" in broadcasting tracks over an FM channel and then sampling the results as if it's his very own pirate radio station.
Being coy, playful, or evocative doesn't much factor into the nine tracks gathered up as Modern Warfare EPs 1-3. Much like fellow labelmate Zomby, Woolford released these EPs simultaneously on the XL Recordings imprint this week. And while both Zomby and Woolford posit them as "DJ tools," meaning they're for smashing dancefloors rather than home listening, the latter's end results are far more invigorating. One wouldn't soon mistake his rave/breakbeat/pirate radio-infused tracks for mawkishness, as he keeps the edges rough, the drive relentless, and the breaks concussive. Truth in advertising, Modern Warfare is a dancefloor weapon.
Putting the title track first feels slightly off, only in the sense that slowing down frantic breakbeats to house tempos doesn't do much for the relatively brief track. "Amnesia" treads a similar path, the snares feeling sluggish at 126 BPM. And when Woolford peels away the bass wobbles until it's just a piano line and a female voice bloodlessly saying "Come together/ We'll make it work," it smacks of the sort of soulless vocal house currently filling up innumerable Mixcloud and YouTube playlists.
But after those early missteps, Woolford finally locks in on "Reset It". Even with its faux pirate DJ shout-out and hokey backspin effects, the track transcends with a heady mix of adrenaline and ecstasy. The spare-but-brutal "Damage" builds from a nasty hi-hat pattern and soulful plea, each increasing in urgency and dub effects, suggesting a rubble-strewn landscape. Highlight "Take Me" finally approaches the velocity of old-school breakbeat but with a techno twist. These are peak-hour tracks meant for elevating a packed club to the next level and it almost feels like a crime to review them on an office stereo.
Despite the ambient opening, "Peak Dub" repurposes the "Amen break" for the millionth time with little to distinguish it, though that break fares far better in the context of "Tractor Beam", finding more snares and woozy noises to helix around it. While not the same immersive album listen as Woolford's Soul Music album from two years back, Modern Warfare's incredibly high peaks double as incendiary bombs and guilty pleasures.


Just in time for Halloween, the endlessly experimental and playful band take on two iconic pieces from The Shining and have a bit of frightful fun.

Deerhoof: Deerhoof Plays Music of the Shining

Deerhoof Plays Music of the Shining

If you get invited to be the caretaker of a grand, creepy hotel in the Rockies or Cascades during the dead of winter, don’t say yes. So goes the simplest takeaway of Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick’s masterclass in surrealist horror, The Shining. But Deerhoof didn’t pay that any heed: On a new two-song 7" issued just in time for Halloween, the inveterate, ever-exploratory indie rock standbys put two iconic pieces from the score through a madhouse of noise and drama. In a quarter-century, there’s very little the art-pop-punks haven’t tried, from unexpected covers to sharing band members on splits and recruiting guests for wild collaborations. Horror-movie covers for Halloween? That’s a perfectly Deerhoof move.
These two pieces are intensely visual artifacts, sculpted with clear care. First there’s “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, SX. 106,” an especially sinister update on the Béla Bartók original. (If you’re keeping track at home, yes, that’s Deerhoof tweaking the title of this classic.) In the film, the track is purely orchestral, its dour mood enshrouded in an austere string section and backed with drums that rumble in the distance, like a grim cloud hovering around a massive mountain’s summit. The music weaves in and out of what we see on screen, appearing in several, equally horrifying scenes, making the Overlook Hotel’s decadent, mid-century setting seem like a castle of spirits. Deerhoof’s version mimics the sound of tape being wound through an old projector, the signal cutting in and out as warped guitar and overloaded synths pull us toward doom. If there was a sense of light to the original, this horrorshow version is like a strobe flickering on bare skin in a pitch-black room. Its abrasive nature sneers like punk, making you shiver without the prettiness of the Bartók standard.
On the B-side, there’s “Midnight, the Stars and You,” written by the classic songwriting team of Woods, Campbell, and Connelly and performed in The Shining by the British bandleader Ray Noble and vocalist Al Bowlly. It enters the film in a dream sequence. Jack’s transported back to the 1920s, with gilded walls and rich guests in lavish garb. He will soon try to murder his family. Deerhoof take the kitschy bauble and let it ferment just so. John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez elegantly pick acoustic and electric guitars, enjoying a stately duet for the first minute. But then they plateau, making room for Satomi Matsuzaki. She would sound saccharine were it not for distortion that bubbles up, causing her voice to echo until it sounds like wind blowing through an old house. Then there are the strings, completely widescreen and turning a reverie into a nightmare. The pastiche is terrifying.
These covers could’ve been horribly self-serious, unnecessarily diligent renditions of songs that have already done the job of shocking for four decades. But they are instead really fun, just the right level of unsettling for a murder-mystery party or a Halloween-themed dinner. Just don’t let your guests know what’s happening in Room 237.


Tropic of Cancer is the project of the L.A.-based singer and synth player Camella Lobo. Stop Suffering, which she recorded and self-produced, is a work about grief, but a work wholly without self-pity.

Stop Suffering EP

Grief is a watery emotion, prone to slopping over the side of any container it occupies—and so it takes a project like Camella Lobo’s L.A.-based Tropic of Cancer, music that moves fluidly, to truly capture it. Stop Suffering, which Lobo recorded and self-produced with mixing and mastering from Joshua Eustis (ex-Telefon Tel Aviv), is her first major work since 2013’s glimmering Restless Idylls LP, and though it only comprises three tracks, the tracks are so finely crafted that it's a work worth returning to, playing again and again, and exploring within. It is a work about grief, yes, but a work wholly without self-pity, a work that urges slowly forward. It is a work about how grief ebbs eventually, with attention and time.
Lobo is an expert in how nearly microscopic musical changes can have an enormous emotional effect, and the opening title track is a master class on this phenomenon. It's built on gauzy layers of synth-wash just a step or a half-step away from one another, and as Lobo introduces a layer or pulls one back the subtle movement causes the whole track to shiver, like a spider’s web trembling below the movement of tiny feet. Her timing has to be impeccable to achieve this, and it is. Her vocal melody also stays within a relatively small range for most of the song, functioning more as an additional instrumental/ambient layer—pushed back in the mix, hovering suspended in delay—than a traditional vocal line winding around and through the instrumentation. It is a dense song with a dark heart that only truly shows itself near the end of the track, but it never feels murky.
"I Woke Up and the Storm Was Over" is more glacial in pace than the title track, but with a minimal heartbeat ticking at its core. It stretches luxuriously, like a cat's yawn, all choral synth and tidal sweep and percussive shoegaze bass, the sort that sounds like a big piano. On this one, Lobo’s vocals sit more atop the mix, more the focal point, more the driver. There is something in it that feels immensely, strangely hopeful.
If the title track is slowly running water and "I Woke Up and the Storm Was Over" is the glacier formed as that water starts to freeze, the closing track, "When the Dog Bites", is its iced-over final form. Droning and sparse in comparison to the highly textural tracks before it, "When the Dog Bites" throws Lobo’s voice into final heavy relief. When the bass drum hits, it feels like a communication across a vast expanse. The entire record feels composed in the way a classical piece does: a tale of grief in three movements, a tale of the sick motion of heartbreak eventually becoming still and distant, if not forgotten, as one's own sense of self becomes more pronounced. It is a delicate and painful journey, and one worth taking at Lobo’s side.


These hardcore miscreants never seemed like a band suited for reunions, so their first album in eight years reimagines their prior intensity with blown-out, abstracted menace.

You Won’t Get What You Want

You know how life goes: One day you’re making songs like “The Fuck Whisperer,” selling hideous yellow shirts with a vagina-bat flying above your band’s name, and sleeping on your ex-girlfriend’s couch just to spite her current boyfriend. Years go by, and suddenly everyone’s getting married and having kids; after all the actual blood, piss, and sweat that went into mocking indie culture and convention, your friends have somehow become craft brewers and commercial-music writers. Rhode Island hardcore misanthropes Daughters never seemed the sort of band compatible with the demands of adulthood. When they broke up in 2010 due to extreme internal duress, there was little reason to believe some newfound cachet, changing times, or popular demand would ever coax their wildly abrasive music back into action. They actually tricked each other into reuniting, anyway, with no organizing principles or plans besides a lingering contempt for humanity. You Won’t Get What You Want,they say by way of a title for their fourth album and first in eight years; what they really mean is you will get what you deserve.
Daughters’ past work provided instantaneous, absurdist release, strings of one-minute songs that pummeled and then fled. But at 48 minutes, You Won’t Get What You Want is almost as long as their last two albums combined, four times as long as their spastic tantrum of a debut, Canada Songs. In this more weathered iteration, rage and rancor are fleeting and unsustainable, forms of weakness that are at odds with their monomaniacal vision. So they’re used judiciously: “They got a name for people like you/But I didn’t take the time to write it down,” Marshall sneers on “The Reason They Hate Me,” a dance-punk anthem for cubicle-bound non-punks who would never dance. They distill the message into an all-caps rallying cry fit for the Big Black-through-Pissed Jeans continuum: “Don’t tell me how to do my job.” It’s the catchiest song they’ve ever written.
Similar to their Providence art-metal contemporaries in the Body, Daughters’ accessibility is directly proportional to their uncompromising compositional choices—hypnotic dissonance, martial drums cranked to incapacitating volumes, scathing vocal repetition, all rendered through impossibly vivid production. This is not music interesting in growing on you: it consumes and dominates. As “Satan in the Wait” and “Ocean Song” churn past seven minutes, they don’t aspire to communal catharsis; instead, they reward individual endurance. “Long Road, No Turns” takes perverse solace in Daughters’ dedication to anti-commercial craft (“Ain’t it funny how it works/Someone’s always got it worse”). Marshall’s grunts on “City Song” come off like a shell-shocked veteran of urban combat trying and failing to recapture any semblance of emotional arousal. After the percussive rubber bullets fire their last volley through a web of screams and groans, the words “And the fires are out and the water sits still” hang over complete silence. Daughters are still committed to violence, but more frightening is their capacity to harbor and patiently honor eight years of ill will.
“I let it into my heart.../I let it into my bed.../I gave it complete control/Led a long way down,” Marshall sings on the self-explanatory “Less Sex.” It’s delivered in the grand oratory fashion of Michael Gira and Nick Cave, singers often used as stand-ins for the anhedonic men of Cormac McCarthy novels, “Red Dead Redemption II,” or “Peaky Blinders.” But like Daughters, their cynicism is a product of their environment and their greatest asset; their solemn duty to the task at hand is the key to surviving a wasteland.


The iconoclastic artist moves to a plush and magisterial kind of rock music for a gratifying and intense record, one whose pleasures are viscerally immediate.

Heaven to a Tortured Mind

Yves Tumor plays a sex god on their latest album, a carnal rock record called Heaven to a Tortured Mind. If you were only familiar with the experimental ambient and noise Tumor was making just four years ago, this might sound unlikely. But transformations and roleplaying are key to understanding why Tumor is among the most interesting artists working today. Genre-bending is an inadequate rubric for describing what makes Tumor’s sound so enticing; with each new record, they seem to embody a genre—its history, its texture, its tropes. The mutations and evolutions across their work are something closer to method acting.
Every gesture or affect on display across Tumor’s previous albums represents an engrossing performance of whatever genre they’re studying at the moment. When Tumor became a darling of the experimental scene following 2016’s Serpent Music, they looked the part of a confrontational noise and ambient artist: decked out in chains, cowboy hats, and flowing robes. Their sound matched—a mix of influences that found common cause with the likes of Laraaji, William Basinski, and Dean Blunt. Then came 2018’s auteurist pop masterpiece Safe in the Hands of Love, Tumor’s most successful project to date, which transformed them into a charismatic bandleader and howling vocalist.
When I saw them on that album’s tour, I was struck by the metamorphosis of Yves Tumor, dressed in a crushed velvet suit and flowing white blouson, carried themselves like the wayward son of Prince, bounding across the stage as explosions of percussion and guitar rattled behind them. The ardor of the performance demystified at least one mystery about this artist: Yves Tumor’s next project was learning to be a rock star. And with the glorious sonic smut we find on Heaven to a Tortured Mind, we get a sense for the very kind of star Tumor wants to be known as.
While Heaven to a Tortured Mind, like past Yves Tumor records, is a collage of styles (there’s glam, psych rock, krautrock, Britpop, soul, and noise here), a distinct personality emerges—that of Yves the seducer. This plush and magisterial kind of rock—heavy on imperial horns and crashing drums and bodacious guitar solos—evokes the sensuousness of suede and cigarette smoke, conjuring an atmosphere of total, decadent vice. With its hellish brass instruments and prowling basslines, the album’s doozy of an opener, “Gospel for a New Century,” is a perfect distillation. Amid the indulgence, Tumor’s voice becomes a thing of beauty: A raspy, sometimes guttural instrument that howls of love, loss, and damnation. It suggests a time when rock music felt forbidden—played backwards on turntables to reveal messages from sexy heretics.
Tumor is fascinated with blending disgust and pleasure, beauty and abjection. On “Medicine Burn,” they strike an unholy balance between gory imagery (“Severed heads on the mental guillotine/Life of blasphemy a room full of kings”) and a buoyant, bouncing vocal performance. A similar tension underlies “Identity Trade,” where the wonderfully schmaltzy squawk of what sounds like a clarinet accompanies a tale of murderous desire (“I saw my first lover clutching a dagger sunk beneath the water”). The study in contrast that’s been a motif of Tumor’s work from the start is magnified, given the swagger and attitude of music you would hear in a stadium. “Kerosene!”, a lovely and bracing duet with the singer Diana Gordon, builds to a towering, speaker-shattering guitar solo; the two-part “Romanticist/Dream Palette”—a collaboration with Sunflower Bean’s Julia Cumming and Kelsey Lu—swirls the voices together around pummeling drums and dueling guitars. These are not songs for the ascetic within us; this is music meant only for reverie.
In that way, Heaven to a Tortured Mind is the most straightforward record in Tumor’s catalog. It’s an album with commercial, or at least mass, appeal in mind. And it seems to confirm something Tumor hinted at in a 2016 interview about their musical aspirations: “I only want to make hits. What else would I want to make?” The product of this ambition is a gratifying and intense record, one whose pleasures are viscerally immediate. Above all, it’s loads of fun to watch Tumor don the guise of a devilish rockstar. It’s not exactly a new archetype in our cultural imagination, but the ravishing delight Tumor brings to this character is what makes their music so affecting. Yves is a performer whose roles, played with the utmost rigor, always find a way to linger in the memory.

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A previously unknown recording, discovered by chance in 2017, captures the saxophonist testing the limits of his sound in the summer of 1961. It’s a snapshot of a pivotal moment in jazz’s evolution.

John Coltrane: Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane With Eric Dolphy

John Coltrane began the decade in which he became immortal in typically audacious style. He quit the biggest jazz band in the world, led by Miles Davis, at arguably the peak of their fame. His early-’60s classics Giant Steps and “Live” at the Village Vanguard planted seeds for free and spiritual jazz, which flowered into teeming subgenres. Before he lost his fight with liver cancer at age 40, Coltrane released definitive albums in both modes, but they were hardly end points for an artist who often seemed to embody flux itself. He went from playing changes to reinventing them. His constant transformations illustrated a quintessential ’60s metaphor: Coltrane’s music rolled along too hard and fast to gather any moss.
In 1961, it picked up speed. A year before his vaunted classic quartet took shape, Coltrane assembled a band and then replaced individual members—not because their contributions were lacking, but because each iteration told him what to do next. Accompanied by pianist McCoy Tyner, drummer Elvin Jones, and bassist Steve Davis, he released a profound take on Richard Rodgers’ “My Favorite Things” that got so much airplay it revitalized the soprano saxophone. Recording with a new label, Impulse!, Coltrane switched bass duties to 23-year-old Reggie Workman and backed his combo with a slew of auxiliary musicians. The result was the risky, perennially underrated Africa/Brass, which updated the big-band ensembles of yore with transatlantic clave beats and polyrhythms. Anomalous on the surface, such albums offered a blueprint for Coltrane’s future: screeching, unsettled melodies; bottom ends that churned and thrashed; a sprawling palette that mixed in music from India and Africa. Four years had passed since Coltrane quit heroin and resolved to become a “preacher” on his instrument, and now he eschewed the bohemian archness of giants like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie to propound an earnest, devotional relationship with his art. The rest of jazz soon followed suit: A decade later, musicians far and wide explored the spiritual caverns and world-spanning vistas that Coltrane uncovered at the dawn of the ’60s.
Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy, a new archival release, captures the 34-year-old artist as he comes to grips with his music’s remarkable possibilities. The album is culled from a couple of nights during an August and early September residency at the Village Gate, a since-shuttered Greenwich Village venue. Containing just five songs in 80 minutes, the set is nonetheless comprehensive. Coltrane plays a hit (“My Favorite Things”), a standard from before his era (1936’s “When Lights Are Low”), a song that he would not put out on record for several years (“Impressions”), and a couple of recordings that the world was about to hear in studio form (“Greensleeves” and “Africa”). The LP is a freeze-frame of jazz as it escapes the present and absconds to the future.
It also illuminates Coltrane’s work with a tragically short-lived fellow traveler, Eric Dolphy. Unlike Coltrane, who was keen on modality, Dolphy experimented without abandoning tonal concerns. He was a crackerjack soloist who could make any stray bleat from his mouthpiece sound soulful. The quartet welcomed him in the spring of ’61 as a featured sideman, and he left fingerprints on much of what Coltrane accomplished for the rest of the year. The multi-reedist orchestrated large sections of Africa/Brass in May and June, and his solos took over the bandstand while he gigged with the band that summer and fall. Just as Coltrane did for Miles Davis during their final shows together, Dolphy widened Coltrane’s canvas. The two had been friends for years. Coltrane even carried a photo of Dolphy with him after he died, at 36, in 1964, from a diabetic coma, hanging it on the walls of hotel rooms while he traveled. But the beauty of their interplay was tightly wound in the tension of two self-directed men with irrepressible appetites for innovation. Coltrane understood that he had to carve out space for Dolphy’s individuality within his band. He purportedly sat offstage during Dolphy’s solos at the Village Gate, magnanimously handing the reins to an artist who would express himself regardless.
Critics tout Coltrane’s soprano saxophone as the key that unlocked the door to spiritual jazz, yet Dolphy’s similarly unconventional instrumentation greased the hinges. The version of “My Favorite Things” on Evenings at the Village Gate begins with a prelude from Dolphy’s flute, airy and ascendant, before the main horn line offers solid footing. On the next track, “When Lights Are Low,” Dolphy’s bass clarinet simmers below Coltrane’s tea-kettle sax tones. Together, they liberate the cut from its worn page in the jazz fakebook.
Coltrane’s road to the avant-garde was built from his ability to compose, arrange, and imagine new roles for diverse instruments on his bandstands. He divided rhythm duties, writing static harmonies that pulsed through his piano lines, permitting more movement from drummers and bassists. On “Greensleeves,” Tyner’s hypnotic chords riff on the motif from “My Favorite Things.” Meanwhile, Jones tumbles out of a waltz and through a seemingly endless fill on the toms and cymbals. Some of the Village Gate dates featured a second bassist, Art Davis (no relation to Steve), who provided drones and allowed Workman to roam without restraints.
Album closer “Africa” emerged from one of those nights. It’s the only live rendition of the Africa/Brass centerpiece known to exist on tape. The song begins with applause, as the band teases a fleeting figure from a George Gershwin tune that Coltrane reinvented, “Summertime.” Davis plunks away regularly, enabling Tyner to sprint up and down the keys and Workman to navigate a searching bass solo. Africa/Brass was Coltrane’s most unusual album in the busy year of 1961, and it landed on shelves near the end of his run at the downtown venue. The inclusion from his latest, weirdest disc coaxes the audience to polite applause and probably some puzzlement, too.
Confusion was a frequent reality at the Village Gate, a hall that prided itself on its sometimes disarming variety. Comedy acts appeared after avant-garde jazz musicians. Experimental luminaries performed on the same stage as popular singers. During various appearances at the Gate, Coltrane faced skeptical audiences who had come to see folk singer Odetta, blues legend Lightnin’ Hopkins, and 19-year-old Aretha Franklin. The shows included on Evenings at the Village Gate were shot by photojournalist Herb Snitzer, who claimed that the room was half empty; he imagined Coltrane had made five or “maybe ten bucks” from the concert. The dog days of summer were in full swelter, and the venue had to lure listeners out of their homes and onto the sticky Village streets for dinner (bad service, but apparently tasty food!) and a show. Yet it’s hard to imagine that Coltrane and co. cared much about their audience. The sound from the stage is an elemental force blasting through the soporific climes, shaking the empty seats.
Across the hall, one spectator made a spontaneous decision. Twenty-four-year-old engineer and Village scenester Rich Alderson wanted to test the club’s sound system and also an old RCA 77-A ribbon microphone he had modified. Coltrane and club owner Art D’Lugoff never meant to cut a record, but Alderson captured a couple of evenings and then forgot about them. He soon moved on from the Village Gate—eventually, Alderson built the sound system for Bob Dylan’s mid-’60s tours—and the recordings were lost until a Dylan scholar discovered them by accident while doing research at the New York Public Library in 2017. Another piece in the puzzle of John Coltrane arrived, as it should, by improvisation and chance.
Still, the rudimentary production will frustrate fans who seek sonic perfection from mid-century pioneers. Tyner’s piano is muffled enough on “My Favorite Things” that his parts can sound like ghostly percussion unless you focus on them. Basslines are sometimes difficult to unearth from the tumult, with the notable exception of “Africa”—ditto Dolphy’s more delicate trills. Scores of Coltrane heads weaned themselves on the impressive fidelity of “Live” at the Village Vanguard and 1964’s Live at Birdland, both of which were captured with extreme stereo know-how by Rudy Van Gelder. Fans expecting this treatment may be displeased, but their reactions befit the artist—Coltrane never liked meeting expectations.
His Village Gate set offers us something beyond pristine audio: extraordinary energy. The parts we cannot clearly perceive murmur away, offering fullness to the music anyway. Improved sound quality wouldn’t make the listening experience more authentic—but it could make it fussy, more in keeping with sterile 21st-century airpods than an acoustically challenged Bleecker Street basement in the early ’60s. (This basement remained a venue, Le Poussin Rouge, after the Gate closed 30 years ago; the ground floor, naturally, has become a CVS.) Alderson placed his single mic near Elvin Jones, whose elastic drumming feels like a marvelous solo act. He flails against orthodoxy, rattles the bars of swing time and jeers at the expectations of consistency that percussionists have to shoulder. Ostensibly a timekeeper, Jones was the wildest member of Coltrane’s ’61 quartet, and perhaps as a result he was the last player of this era that Coltrane would replace.
At the end of the year, Workman left— his father was sick and Coltrane had a new trajectory in mind. Dolphy departed soon after, eventually joining Charles Mingus’ band for the second time, where his deft reedwork could take center stage. The quartet reshuffled as Coltrane surged forward. These Village Gate performances, though, continued to reverberate in his own music and in music at large. There were precedents for composers using two bassists, but arguably no one before Coltrane had saddled one bassist with roving lead parts and another with a stationary, raga-inflected drone. Coltrane battle-tested this dynamic at the Gate, and then developed it over the years. His experimentation signaled something both impractical and studied, a breakdown of big-band largesse into the endless permutations that opened to jazz musicians as ’50s conventions fractured into parallel universes of sound. Within a month of the Gate performances, Ornette Coleman released Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, which used two bassists. In 1966, Cecil Taylor doubled up bassists on his uncompromising Unit Structures. By 1970, Coltrane’s former boss Miles Davis was using two bassists on a game-changing release in a far different vein, Bitches Brew.
The poet and jazz critic Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones), in his gorgeous liner notes to Live at Birdland, called McCoy Tyner “the polished formalist of the group” and claimed that he played more cautiously than his bandmates. Baraka’s comment became writing on the wall—in 1965, Coltrane replaced Tyner with his wife, Alice Coltrane. But the saxophonist was merely trying out something new, not deriding something old. Perhaps because he died tragically young, it’s easy to imagine that Coltrane had a destination in mind with his music, some heavenly realm formed of sacred geometries and unceasing magic-hour light, where an even more classic quartet plays nonstop with Rudy Van Gelder perched behind the sound boards. In reality, had Coltrane lived to ripe old age, he would have continued to try out different styles, bands, influences and ideas, no doubt jamming with past collaborators along the way. Squabbles about sound quality, and comparisons between various iterations of his quartet, are never convincing: John Coltrane cared about change, not perfection.
He played “My Favorite Things'' during his last recorded concert, in 1967, at the Olatunji Center for African Culture in Harlem. The version bears no similarity to the original except for a several-second phrase during a breathless solo. These familiar notes are surprising after an onslaught of free jazz, masterminded by a terminally ill genius who had passed through all sorts of flames in order to become the most transformative, intense and grating saxophonist in the world. Then again, Coltrane once said that he considered “My Favorite Things” to be the best recording he ever made. He liked the composition because he could play it fast or slow, because it “renews itself according to the impulse you give it,” because it was a good place to start.
On Evenings at the Village Gate, Coltrane treats his hit as raw material. He adapts it for another soloist, and rebuilds it into other tracks, one of which he dedicated to Africa. The experience recalls a quote that, like his music, has been referenced too often but retains its grandeur all the same: “I want to start in the middle of a sentence and then go both directions at once.” Coltrane reaches at once into the future and the place where music began. He touches the primeval and follows along with the changes.


Experimental artist Kerry Leimer self-released his and others' work on his Palace of Lights imprint, and the erudite RVNG imprint has put together this collection of unreleased tracks that position Leimer as one of the few American artists who worked in the field of kosmiche at the time of the sub-genre's original peak.

K. Leimer: A Period of Review (Original Recordings: 1975-1983)

Three years ago, Douglas Mcgowan (the man behind last year’s resplendent new age compilation, I Am the Center) sent a parcel of strange records my way, including one from Seattle-based musician Marc Barreca which seemed to hover in between many genres: new age, industrial, soundtracks. Barreca's record was released on the obscure Palace of Lights imprint run by another musician operating in the mists of the Pacific Northwest, Kerry Leimer, who himself had self-released a handful of his own work.
Investigating Leimer’s albums—specifically, 1982’s Land of Look Behind and 1983’s *Imposed Order—*revealed a curious artist. While the pastoral synths might scan as those of a new age practitioner, the weird loops of bass and noise eddying throughout suggested someone with more avant-garde tendencies. And when the drums burst into those otherwise ambient pieces (Look Behind drew on field recordings made in Jamaica of nyabinghi drumming, while Order used drum machines), it complicated matters further. These albums are long out of print, so it makes sense that the erudite RVNG imprint—already responsible for reviving forgotten artists ranging from Harald Grosskopf to Franco Falsini—would claim Leimer as one of their own.
A Period of Review (Original Recordings: 1975-1983) posits K. Leimer as the American Eno, and while there are sonic ties back to the likes of Cluster, Faust, and Jon Hassell, Eno is the only predecessor that Leimer admits to, telling writer Dave Segal in the liner notes: “None gave me more of a push than Eno, specifically…No Pussyfooting. The attractor was the loops: the loop provided an instant structure.” The Eno fandom is obvious on one of the set’s rare vocal pieces, “Lonely Boy,” where Leimer laments being a composer watching tiny lights blinking at him. “I don’t know what to do/ With instruments and all these wires,” he intones, even nailing Eno’s dry British deadpan. Another song title is perhaps too on the nose: “Eno’s Aviary.”
Despite that namecheck, there is something distinctly punk coursing through this compilation of thirty previously unreleased tracks. The sleeve art of other Palace of Lights releases (which RVNG also plans on compiling later this year) are odd pencil drawings: heads morphing into home stereos, diagrams where fingers become entangled with bass strings. It suggests that strange time period after the Sex Pistols exploded overseas but before punk crossed the Atlantic and crystallized into hardcore. Much like other punks of that era who didn’t really want to shove a pin through their nose, Leimer was more than a trained musician who simply wanted to vent frustration and make some noise with tape loops.
One of the set's pleasures is that although Leimer doesn’t quite know what to do with the  instruments on hand—primarily a Rickenbacker bass, a Mini Moog, Revox tape decks, and a handful of effects pedals—the results are entrancing. The drum machine beats feel primitive yet intuitive on pieces like “Entr’acte” and “Archie’s Dub”, which possess a strange layering of dub effects that bring to mind Eno’s collaboration with David Byrne on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Leimer’s band Savant would explore that polyrhythmic sound even further). For an album featuring so many dreamlike, drifting passages, it’s startling to look at the runtimes and realize that only four pieces ever top the 4:30 mark; beautiful ambient tracks like “Almost Chinese”, “At Daybreak”, and “Two Voices” take you much further afield than their concise runtimes suggest.
These pieces most closely evoke the work of Roedelius and Moebius in Cluster: meditative, wistful, lovely, giving off gentle glimmers of light. In trying to think of the closest American corollary for this set, the possibility emerges that Kerry Leimer is one of the lone examples of American kosmische music, that elegant hybrid that falls somewhere between the Velvets-styled mesmerism of Can in the early '70s and the placid tones of new age music that arose in the next decade. It’s a sound that applies to mid-70s Cluster, Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, the second side of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, and others. Yet while import copies of such records no doubt made their way back to the States, it’s rare to find the American version of such a sound. There’s cosmic overtones to be found in jazz from that era (Miles Davis’ “He Loved Him Madly” in particular) as well as from more academic composers like Terry Riley and Laurie Spiegel, but for most bands and musicians of that decade, kosmische seems to have not been emulated. In experiencing this evocative set some three decades later, Leimer’s music sounds like the road not taken.


The famed producer teams with the Italian composer to attempt to salvage the "soundtrack without a movie" concept album. Jack White and Norah Jones guest.

Rome

The "soundtrack without a movie" album, an attempt to recreate the evocative sweep of a film score away from the screen, has a long and mostly ignoble history. The concept was flogged so hard in the 1990s, usually by dance producers desperate to break out of the club scene, that it was almost left for dead. It didn't help that most of these records were limp pastiches of old-school Hollywood orchestration that paled next to 99% of either actual film scores or real-deal pop albums.
All that bad product doesn't make the movie-less soundtrack a bad idea, of course. It's just that few of these projects have had the talent pool, or the commitment, to pull off a Rome. You can hear composer Daniele Luppi's love and respect for the brooding romanticism, fragile delicacy, and almost psychedelic spaceiness of classic Italian soundtracks in just about every note. In his partner Danger Mouse, he's found not only a similarly smitten collaborator, but a producer who's made a career out of accurately capturing the atmosphere of old records without (usually) coming off sterile. And they've got the moody vibe of those 60s soundtracks down on Rome, as much due to the vintage recording touches as to the Italian movie industry O.G.'s the duo drafted in to lend their hard-earned feel for this music.
But Rome isn't just about faithfully recreating a much-loved period in film history. It'd be a much more boring, if beautifully produced, record if it were. In addition to his work as a composer for film, Luppi's lent his talents as arranger and player to various pop acts, and Danger Mouse has spent much of his career using his crate-digger's ear to craft retro-minded albums that still work for a modern rock audience. Rome's real coup is that, despite its concept hook, you don't have to listen to it as if it were a potential film score. What the duo's made is a beguiling and true hybrid, halfway between pop album and soundtrack-minus-the-movie. If you've got no familiarity with the music Rome pays homage to, you can take comfort that much of it sounds, coincidentally, very similar to the gentle-but-dark 60s psych-pop Danger Mouse makes with Broken Bells, sans a singer. And while it's true that the bulk of the album is instrumental, more concerned with mood than hooks, it's sequenced masterfully, including a handful of well-placed (if purposefully subdued) songs.
Luppi and Danger Mouse cannily snagged two talented but obviously very different voices in Jack White and Norah Jones. White's natural eeriness and Jones' diffident eroticism certainly fit a sound built around mystical melodrama and chilly Euro heartbreak, but their voices are such complimentary opposites that they turn out to be what gives Rome much of its distinctness, keep it from being just another record collector (or film collector) exercise in getting everything period-perfect. And true to the album's slippery not-quite-an-album/not-quite-a-score form, their contributions can either work as the big showcase moments for pop fans, or just as part of the soundtrack-like flow. And whether or not the album succeeds for you as a score to your own invisible flick, inducing images of fog-swept villas and sigaretta-chomping villains in fedoras as the organs swell and the guitars pluck mournfully away, it's purely gorgeous.


2 Chainz is rap’s court jester of the moment. FreeBase, his recently released free EP, allows 2 Chainz to stay in character without overstretching his shtick.

FreeBase EP

2 Chainz is rap’s court jester of the moment, and he's requested by rappers far and wide to deliver on that talent: precise bars, quotable lyrics (“Money tall like Jordan”), and his trademark adlibs wrapped in his crude but charming persona. In his solo work, nearly every line is a result of his desire to get a laugh, and FreeBase, his recently released free EP, allows 2 Chainz to stay in character without overstretching his shtick.
FreeBase remains as sonically adventurous as 2 Chainz’s previous two albums. Mike Will Made It’s lumbering stomp on “Wuda Cuda Shuda” and Young Chop’s eerie speedboat-chase music on “They Know” demonstrate why they have been go to producers of the last few years. The tape's padded out with samples from Richard Pryor and the absurdist comedy Step Brothers, providing a framework that makes the EP more than a pack of leftover tracks from an old recording session.

On repeated listens, 2 Chainz’s punchline-focused style turns initial smirks into outright laughter. His sense of humor is most potent when riffing on familiar rap tropes, but it can be hard to stomach when he turns to pure misogyny on tracks like “Flexin on My Baby Mama”.  Regardless, FreeBase has its genuinely funny moments, such as when 2 Chainz, who has worked with everyone from Kanye West to Lil Boosie, states “I’ve done a song with everybody from Jermaine Dupri down to Papoose,” which is at the least an interesting selection of artists to namedrop.
2 Chainz can appear on a song with any rapper or pop star, but he also wants to throw his weight around in the area of modern rap that A$AP Rocky namechecks on “Crib in My Closet”: fashion. "Crib in My Closet" sounds like a 2000-era Big Tymers boastful track where 2 Chainz, A$AP Rocky, and Rick Ross fight for the “Best Dressed” crown, with Rocky delivering the knockout punch by name-dropping the Met Ball and Anna Wintour. It should be said, though, that 2 Chainz's obsession with fashion also provides the best intentionally ironic line, as he yells “I don’t respect my elders,” willfully ignoring that, in terms of age, he's the oldest rapper to appear on the EP. 2 Chainz been rapping for over a decade, but now his music sounds like he’s just entertaining himself during late night recording sessions and (correctly) assuming his audience is along for the ride.


On his third album and his Merge debut, garage rocker Mike Krol plays and sings with the uncontainable excitement of an underdog finally realizing his dreams, and the album courses with the adrenaline of newfound confidence. The sound is scuzzy, but the energy is pure.

Turkey

The title of singer/guitarist/drummer Mike Krol's third album is a bowling reference, used for when you get three strikes in a row. On a poster in the liner notes, he is pictured holding two gold records, with tags beneath each reading, "to commemorate the sale of no more than 500 copies." Clearly, Krol has a sense of humor about himself, and his position.
But his Merge debut isn't hangdog at all. It has a do-or-die desperation: The sound is scuzzy, but the energy is pure, bristling with the aim to be stronger and more memorable than the two that came before it. When Krol whines and shouts lines like "you've been warned that I'm not fooling around," you believe him. The song that line comes from, by the way, is called "Neighborhood Watch", and it's sung to somebody who stole his bike. This is one of Krol's strongest suits; taking a small and seemingly silly premise, making it universal and hiding at least one line in each song that could be pulled from it to form a mission statement. "The world can't stop me now," he sings in "Cactuses", a song about being mad at the pain that a cactus has caused him.
Krol recorded Turkey in just four days, co-producing with Elliott Kozel, who also plays piano and synth on the album. Engineer Beau Sorenson improves upon the sound of Krol's first two albums, without compromising any of the shambolic glory. Instruments are panned hard, handclaps occasionally emerge through thick fuzz and squalls of feedback, and at the center of it all is Krol's nasally voice, singing sweet melodies through a guitar amp and hitting effects pedals at just the right time. He sings with the uncontainable excitement of an underdog finally realizing his dreams, and the album courses with the adrenaline of newfound confidence.
It's hard to resist comparing Krol's voice to John Dwyer or King Tuff, and Krol seems ready to dispel any accusations of bandwagon-jumping. "I feel left out of every city and scene I belong to," he sings on a track that is unambiguously titled, "Left Out (ATTN: SoCal Garage Rockers)".
If Turkey  just misses greatness, it's because it's just too short. The whole thing is over in 18 minutes. This is the downside to spending only four days recording. And with the way that Turkey is sequenced, you can feel the slow deflation of the world-conquering drive. The album is front-loaded with biting rock that eventually devolves into "Piano Shit", a song which is just a Dustin O'Halloran-ish re-working of the previous track. (It's called "Less Than Together", and Krol's singing is less-than-in-tune on it.) The song "Save the Date", where Krol anticipates an invitation to the wedding of an ex, hints at deeper moods, but it, too, is over too quickly, a verse shy of poignance. You can hear Krol's asides to the engineer on Turkey, just as you can in his previous releases, and they hint at his gradually expanding ambition. His 2011 album, I Hate Jazz, ends with him simply asking, "Did that sound even close?" Turkey finds him zeroing in: "Did that sound better?"


Even if the second album from this Nashville singer doesn’t sound like the blues, she embodies the spirit, squaring up to her demons without fear.

Silences

“The blues” summons a bevy of specific sounds: the piercing riffs of Big Mama Thornton, the scratching strums of Memphis Minnie, the brazen swagger of Bessie Smith, the relaxed picking of Algia Mae Hinton. But more than chord progressions or meter counting, the blues are about feeling, about looking demons in the eye and calling them by name. Silences, the second LP from Nashville’s Adia Victoria, scans like a biting, lush indie rock record, but it’s a blues album in this pure sense. As she cavorts with and squares off against demons across these dozen tracks, Victoria positions herself as a 21st-century heir to the blues, honoring traditions while eagerly bucking them.
Silences takes its title from the 1962 book of the same name by first-wave feminist Tillie Olsen, a reflection on the yawning void in artistic canons that came with excluding women from serious consideration. Victoria’s corrective measure is mighty. Working with producer and the National guitarist Aaron Dessner, she lets these dense arrangements occupy every corner of the mix. “Clean” opens with slumping, bowed strings, descending with the drama of a diva floating down a grand staircase. Atmospheric guitars, electronics, and saxophones lend Victoria support as she sneers. Her vocals remain cool and controlled, as if she’s refusing to let trouble get the best of her.
Victoria brings jagged-edge attitude to the hard-charging “Different Kind of Love” and the determined “Pacolet Road,” where she sings about escaping the South to do “everything in the world that my grandma ever wished she had.” There are moments of gentler reflection, too, as on the lilting “The City,” which Victoria adorns with a sample of Billie Holiday crooning “Lady Sings the Blues.” With “Get Lonely,” a poignant twist on love-song tropes, Victoria yearns for an intimacy that may be untenable: “Maybe you’ve prayed your demons away/But something tells me mine are here to stay,” she sings.
The foes here are both internal and external—betrayal, prejudice, temptation, herself. Victoria approaches these familiar struggles not with lowdown defeat but with frank acknowledgement of the trouble they give her, letting listeners into these intimate battles. “I like the things that make me hurt,” she admits on “Devil Is a Lie,” a wry, stuttering waltz of horns and pizzicato strings. “You give an inch, they take a mile/No, you will not make me smile.” It is a lament and taunt within a single breath. On “Nice Folks,” she takes do-gooders to task, noting that they drag her down and silence her without recognizing the harm they do. The track’s climactic drum break feels apocalyptic, as if Victoria herself were summoning heaven and hell to right such wrongs.
Victoria buttons up Silences with “Dope Queen Blues,” a powerhouse reiteration of her battle to emerge triumphant in a world that wants to flatten her—the culmination of her ruination, as she sings in the refrain. But as Victoria makes clear during Silences, demons don’t have to be all bad news; if we have the power to name and shame them, we have the power to have a little fun with them, too.


On their debut album as a quartet, Greg Fox, Melvin Gibbs, Sasha Frere-Jones, and Grey McMurray find common ground in psychedelic post-rock jams that are both sprawling and supremely focused.

The Work Is Slow

All four musicians in avant-rock supergroup Body Meπa—drummer Greg Fox, bassist Melvin Gibbs, and guitarists Sasha Frere-Jones and Grey McMurray—have spent their careers in myriad contexts, and their debut album together, The Work Is Slow, finds them operating in yet another mode, dishing out sprawling post-rock jams both jazzy and psychedelic. One could point to previous efforts as antecedents—jazz-fusion freak-outs in Gibbs’ Power Tools, funk-rock meanderings in Frere-Jones’ Ui, drugged-out fuzz in Fox’s Teeth Mountain—but the quartet sounds supremely focused on this record. More than their other output, the goal here is to entrance.
As the title suggests, The Work Is Slow has songs that unfold patiently, and opener “Horse Flower Storm/Fabuloso” is suffused with the sweet languor of a hot summer day. That feeling primarily comes from the guitars: In the beginning, McMurray opts for ambient mood-setting while Frere-Jones plays the role of the noodler (the former’s guitar appears in the left channel while the latter’s is in the right). Even as McMurray creeps into noisier terrain, he never vies for center stage. Such restraint is key to Body Meπa’s cohesion: They constantly play off each other without overstepping boundaries, well aware that atmosphere is best maintained when everyone has equal say. When Fox whips out his double-kick-drum barrages, it’s less for the sake of an ostentatious climax than to playfully offset those contemplative guitar melodies.
The Work Is Slow is more than just dreamy soundscapes, though. “Bullitt” features a fiery wall of noise conjured up by Gibbs’ robust bass, Fox’s clanging cymbals, and McMurray’s searing guitar. Frere-Jones’ brambly free-improv guitar whimpers amid the chaos, like a small animal trapped in a burning building. It’s the most raucous song on the album, and every element is neatly controlled for maximum immersion and impact. It’s followed by “Motherwell,” which serves as a necessary relief. The meaty bassline is sandwiched between bright, nimble guitars, and repetition keeps you locked into its meditative groove.
There’s a quote from Ornette Coleman, the jazz titan whose 1978 album Body Meπa take their name from, that feels apt: “The theme you play at the start of the number is the territory. And what comes after, which may have very little to do with it, is the adventure.” While Body Meπa don’t sound as unwieldy or unpredictable as Coleman’s Prime Time band, there’s a similarly invigorating spirit of possibility in how the quartet navigates each track. On “Money Tree,” flurrying guitars inspire hypnagogic bliss, but Gibbs’ mid-song string of unbroken eighth notes injects hair-raising verve. Suddenly, everything snaps into place.
That’s the real joy of The Work Is Slow: You can feel the weight of each note and skronk and hiss, every change in rhythm and beat and melody. Fox, Frere-Jones, Gibbs, and McMurray’s contributions may be understated, but they’re all crucial to each track’s creation. This, in conjunction with clear and sustained atmospheres, allows for songs to feel both out of time and patently linear; they’re quietly thrilling, like hours-long road trips. On the triumphant closer “Ribbon,” sputtering kick drums burst alongside sparkling guitars, and it exudes the magic of a fireworks show. Even with decades of collaborations under their collective belt, Body Meπa accomplish a feat that always impresses: They’re a new band in perfect lockstep.

Buy: Rough Trade
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After a string of muted, experimental releases, Ghost strains to recapture some of the old Wu fire.

Ghostface Killahs

After the high-water mark of 2006’s Fishscale, Ghostface Killah embarked on a series of intriguing collaborations with producers like Adrian Younge and BadBadNotGood. Receding into the middle distance of his own music, he offered solid verses that served as backdrop for a more free-flowing, live-band sound. It seemed, perhaps, that Ghost might be reverting to an older definition of MC in his middle age, turning from a microphone controller into a master of ceremonies.
But on his new album, Ghostface Killahs, he strains to recapture the old Wu vibe, with limited success. It’s a brisk listen with plenty of strong tracks. “Me Denny & Darryl” features huge verses from Ghostface and a laid-back Method Man, who grants the song its title and whose verse is filled with vintage quotables. Ghostface does him one better on the second verse of “Flex,” jumping from a loving description of Wallabees with an Air Max bubble to “Fish tank so big even the babies can swim in/Rockin’ the toddler, four finger lacin’, ridiculous gems in ’em/Benjamins stuck together like boxes of Entenmann’s.”
This is Ghost at his most undeniable, breathing new life into tired Wu-Tang tropes. On Ghostface Killahs he’s emerged from the fugue in which he’s seemed lost for so much of this decade; his energy is up. On “New World,” the producer Danny Caiazzo isolates the bassline from Aaron Neville’s “Hercules” (a favorite used to memorable effect by Action Bronson, Biz Markie, and UGK, among others) to give Ghost a vehicle. The rapper plays tour guide through bus windows to a world as ugly as ever, one where red meat makes people crazy and the police are murdering black people. It’s a great example of what late period Ghostface could be, a ringmaster bringing experience where youthful passion once raged.
Were the album filled with songs like these, it’d be a minor revival, but Ghostface Killahs is marred by too many tracks that are either curdled by casual cruelty or just tired retreads. The sheer number and intensity of the gay slurs is indefensible, reaching its peak on “Pistol Smoke,” a barely-there beat with no imagination leaving Ghost spewing vitriol at effeminate enemies. The song, with a snarled hook by the Wu-Tang affiliate Solomon Childs, appears to be trying to approximate the menace of classic M.O.P. It doesn’t have half the energy or a quarter of the inspiration. And while the beats here are generally competent, they are beige imitations of the production granted to Ghostface over his career from some of the best producers in rap history.
Not that Ghostface Killah needs inspiration or a Rushmore of beatmakers to sell records. The new album, which was released on the rapper’s website a week before it hit streaming platforms, shot to No. 2 on the iTunes charts upon its broad release, behind only Post Malone. That’s not Billboard, of course, but it shows that the rapper still has a dedicated audience, to whom the quality of the new music might be less important than their ongoing loyalty. Which is to say, if Ghost is to recover, he’ll be doing it for himself.

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On his fifth solo album, the Memphis legend invites guests like Jay Rock and Megan Thee Stallion, splitting the difference between coasting and staying fly.

The Hustle Continues

Juicy J opens “Po Up,” the fourth song from his fifth solo album The Hustle Continues, on a nostalgic note. We hear the sound of liquid filling a cup and then the Tennessee rapper-producer lists the names of several icons who recently passed away, from rappers Nipsey Hussle and Juice WRLD to filmmaker John Singleton and basketball star Kobe Bryant. The moment charts a genealogy through Juicy’s long and prosperous career; he first formed his group Three 6 Mafia with Lord Infamous and DJ Paul in 1991, the same year Singleton released his breakout film Boyz n the Hood. The Mafia released their debut album Mystic Stylez in 1995, one year before Bryant became a first-round NBA draft pick for the Los Angeles Lakers. Much like Singleton and Bryant, Juicy J altered the foundation of his chosen field, honoring its roots while blazing a new trail with an irreverent smirk.
The Hustle Continues is proof that Juicy’s sound remains unstuck in time almost 30 years later. The ear-shattering low end and hellacious synths and keyboards he’s trafficked in since his start are more popular now than ever, and he knows it. Hustle, then, is Juicy’s attempt at continuing to carry the torch, like the favorite uncle you can always count on to shut down the VIP section at the club. He sounds particularly engaged at his best, ready to occupy familiar roles with ease. He oozes menace on opener “Best Group” and “Memphis to LA,” where he trades tales of guns and death with TDE’s Jay Rock and fellow Three 6 member Project Pat. “Shopping Spree” and “She Gon Pop It” sound like the strip-club standards they’re destined to be once clubs and bars are safe to attend again post-COVID. His voice billows across the skittering drums of weed anthems “Gah Damn High” and “What I Need.” Juicy sounds like he’s still having fun and, most importantly, like he wants listeners to have fun, too.
The fun reaches another level when Juicy raps alongside younger artists. “Killa” floats a fierce piano refrain and trunk-rattling 808s down the river Styx and teases an uncharacteristically high-energy verse out of Griselda rapper Conway the Machine. Young Dolph and Megan Thee Stallion bring this same energy out of Juicy on “Shopping Spree” and “She Gon Pop It,” respectively, confirming why both continuously come to Juicy for beats on their albums.
Unfortunately, plenty of features that seemed great on paper come across as stale and awkward in execution. A$AP Rocky (“Po Up”) and new Memphis star Key Glock (“That’s The Way It Goes”) sound asleep at the wheel while others, like Jay Rock, sound out of place. Maryland rapper Logic—who’s already omnipresent throughout as the voice behind Juicy’s new beat tag—is given two features, both of which are energetic but rife with bars that crumble like Nature Valley granola  (“Was never one for the Akademiks/But knew the everyday struggle”). The worst of Hustle’s features either feel like padding or derail the album’s meticulously crafted atmosphere.
The Hustle Continues isn’t concerned with rewriting the book of Juicy J. There are no risks taken and the stakes aren’t particularly high, but they don’t need to be. At 45 years old, Juicy is a legacy act whose influence can be seen in rappers from Tyler, The Creator to Travis Scott to Rae Sremmurd. He seems content with the privilege of collecting publishing on his vast back catalog and clearly relishes creating alongside his progeny in the process. When the stars align this smoothly, sometimes the best option is to simply stay fly.

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Toro Y Moi's Chaz Bundick continues to show his dance bona fides on this 12" of Italo disco, house, and retrofitted roller boogie.

Lina

Even though the debut LP by Chaz Bundick's Toro Y Moi, Causers of This, maximized the zoned-out vibes, there were traces of dance signifiers worming their way out of the music, itching to be sped up and broadcast as something bigger and bolder. That's exactly what happens on Bundick's solo side project, Les Sins. His first outing under the name, Lina, is a 12" double-sided single that sounds like Toro Y Moi on club DJ duty, grafting Italo disco, house, and retrofitted roller boogie elements into his already pop-edified palette. The resulting nine minutes of music explore Bundick's dance-friendly impulses in ways both enjoyable and grating.
A-side "Lina" is the real keeper. Bundick establishes a steady groove with a female vocal hook, funked-out bass, and string loops. It's propulsive and clean, even when Bundick starts to deconstruct and chop away at all the details. The first minute or so feels rarefied-- fans of Daft Punk and Avalanches will easily find something to latch onto-- it seems a little pointless to just drop everything into the Cuisinart. But since Bundick is able to shape and re-wrap these elements back into the groove so precisely, all the refitting feels ambitious. "Lina" shimmers on the surface and pulsates steadily underneath, making it a perfect fit for some cavernous warehouse space that's packed with bodies and hasn't been hit with a noise violation yet.
"Youth Gone" is very much the leftfield, exploratory B-side, and despite featuring a similar level of energy, it lacks "Lina"'s warm, delirious throb. In fact, it's actually a little irritating. A too-short, horn-guided sample leads the first half of the track, imparting a nauseating feeling that awkwardly amplifies some of the skittery leanings of Toro Y Moi proper. Labored and repetitive, "Youth Gone" never eases up, even when a more concrete two-step beat is laid down. As a whole, Lina kind of knocks the wind out of you, in ways that feel both pleasurable and disorienting. Still, Les Sins is just the kind of thing you'd want to hear on the side from someone like Bundick-- a brief, intriguing flight of fancy.


On a mixtape of exclusive material debuted on NTS Radio, the Toronto-based producer Jacques Greene trades distanced, soulful melancholy for full-on dancefloor hypnosis.

Mixtape

By the time Jacques Greene released Feel Infinite, his 2017 debut album, he’d mastered the art of headphone house: dance-lite takes on electro-R&B that are more about the club than for it. The Toronto-via-Montreal producer, born Philippe Aubin-Dionne, spent years perfecting his style by flipping chopped-up vocals from artists like Ciara and Tinashe into sweaty, syncopated heat. His bedroom tones and chart-music samples became a hit among Tumblr kids and techno elites. And then, right at the moment moody R&B began to sweep the mainstream, he changed gears.
Aubin-Dionne’s venturesome new mixtape trades distanced, soulful melancholy for full-on dancefloor hypnosis. The 48-minute stream of new material, debuted on NTS Radio and also available on YouTube, is far-out and shape-shifting, like wandering through the different rooms in a dark, labyrinthine nightclub. There are trance climaxes, purring techno intervals, ambient meditations, and spells of after-hours soul—sounds that seldom appear alongside each other, especially this elegantly. Unlike Feel Infinite’s song-focused format, this collection flows with the finesse of a sophisticated DJ set, with each new discovery a seamless surprise. If you thought his club days were behind him, think again.
The Jacques Greene alias was built on eclectic digital crate-digging and fearless sampling (Aubin-Dionne is known to bury YouTube covers and strangers’ phone recordings into the sheets of his tracks). Here, he expands on this affinity for imaginative vocal samples by chopping them into more abstract forms, and then folding them into dancier structures. While this isn’t a dramatic reinvention, it’s a distancing from the diva samples and pop re-cuts he became known for (his edits of Drake and Radiohead, though tasteful, feel beneath him). The only remix here is a spin on Rhye’s “Song for You,” where synth arpeggios and whirring drums make the serenade feel ominous and urgent. It’s the closest the producer gets to the kind of traditional vocal that played such a big part of his old sonic identity. But aside from Cadence Weapon’s hushed raps on “Night Service,” the soulful murmurs that appear here have been so heavily treated that they provide more texture than melody. Similarly, the nervous “DMs With God” begins as a cluster of clangy percussion and humming before a warm, grooving bassline lifts it into a dancefloor moment.
But all that texture! Between the breathy hiccups, squishy synths, sheets of white noise, and glacial echoes that hum like bowls in a Tibetan sound bath, there’s so much activity under the surface that the absence of easy-to-spot singers feels insignificant. Lose yourself the whinnying synth line of “Convex Mirror,” the mixtape’s brightest shining star, for a taste at what he can do with machine-driven melodies. With the frenetic energy of a spaceship rave, notes fly high and low like shooting stars while polyrhythmic percussion swirls beneath. It’s a delight to know that Aubin-Dionne’s next phase won’t sacrifice his knack for melodrama, but even more exciting to glimpse the new depths ahead.


The 1998 collaborative album brought together a trio of legends from the worlds of ambient and chillout. It’s a placid but playful collection that is like nothing else in their repertoires.

Mixmaster Morris / Jonah Sharp / Haruomi Hosono: Quiet Logic

Quiet Logic

Haruomi Hosono was, in his words, “adrift in the sea of ambient music” in the ’90s. The multi-instrumentalist and producer had grown restless with the level of celebrity foisted upon him as one third of synth-pop supergroup Yellow Magic Orchestra and was desperate to take his career in another direction after the band decided to go their separate ways. He immediately went into hiding, ramping up work as a producer for other artists and obscuring his identity behind a network of different aliases. (Coming up with band names to camouflage himself, he says, was a fun hobby.) In further pursuit of new experiences, he spun up a series of labels on which he could collaborate with artists outside of his usual circles. As Hosono descended deeper into his latest obsessions, it seemed inevitable that he would collide with like-minded icons Mixmaster Morris and Jonah Sharp.
The UK producers are legends in their own right. Morris made a name for himself as a prolific DJ, becoming a pioneer of ambient chillout, which gave ravers respite from the fast-paced environment of the main floor. Sharp, recording as Spacetime Continuum, occupied a similar zone—originally influenced by Chicago house and Detroit techno, his sound transformed as he retreated to the chill-out rooms and turned down the tempo. Both shared Hosono’s curiosity for music from all genres and corners of the globe, keeping everything from Balearic beats to atmospheric jazz in their toolkits.
When the pair arrived at Hosono’s Quiet Lodge studio in 1997 to begin work on their collaborative album, Hosono gave them total freedom to play around. Operating on opposite circadian rhythms, the two recorded throughout the day and Hosono tuned the results while they slept. Hosono trusted the musicians to tinker with any instrument in his studio, with one exception—nobody could lay a hand on his Moog theremin. (“It’s a theremin,” Morris recalls slyly responding in the liner notes of the album. “I don’t need to touch it.”) On the title track, the bounty at their disposal becomes evident. Drum and cymbal samples intermittently skip over a shuffling pulse. Synthesized melodies stack up and rapidly fall away while kalimba-like tones occasionally roll in like a gently cresting wave. It’s placid but playful; it feels like they’re having a blast packing in as many sounds as they can.
The English producers bring their otherworldly ability to bend time to the project. “Uchu Yuei (Swimming in Space)” sounds like what you’d expect from crossing the two musicians, but the building blocks are carefully placed; the track slowly gathers momentum as they tease the central rhythm, eventually letting it erupt into a skittish drum pattern. They push each other to new heights too, like on “Waraitake.” A cascade of fluttering notes underpins the almost 14-minute odyssey as it sweeps through various movements, like the endless prismatic patterns of a kaleidoscope. Digital glitches cut in and out, twisting into jagged waveforms. The beat picks up intensity until it becomes a heavy stomp, punctuated with reverb as if each hit of the drum pad has 10 tons of weight behind it. It’s like nothing in either of their discographies.
But what makes Quiet Logic feel complete are the moments of contrast that Hosono provides on the tracks he co-produced. The walls close in on “Wakarimasen,” heightening the tension with an oppressive throb. Hosono speaks a mix of Japanese and English, coating his voice in a viscous echo as he utters abstract phrases. It would be the least ambient piece on the record if not for the closing track “Dr. Gauss / Yakan Hiko (Night Flight),” which releases the relaxing spell with its elastic, unsteady cadence. If Morris and Sharp have the power to effortlessly put you into a trance, Hosono knows best how to snap you out of it.
Quiet Logic was originally distributed on Hosono’s independent imprint Daisyworld, making few waves in or outside Japan where it was released. For Morris and Sharp, that low profile was an opportunity to toy with sounds outside their repertoire and work in ways neither of them were accustomed to. Hosono was looking for a change too; by the time the three had met at Quiet Lodge, he was already washing ashore from the ambient sea and had an eye to new frontiers. Quiet Logic captures a legendary trio at the top of their game, right before the moment they were set to scatter in different directions.


The newly reissued collaboration between Brian Eno and bassist Jah Wobble from 1995 is an outlier in both their catalogs, which is part and parcel of its allure.

Spinner

Rather than simply releasing the music he had recorded for Derek Jarman's 1994 film Glitterbug, Brian Eno handed over the score to bassist Jah Wobble, encouraging him to do with it as he pleased, with the results released in 1995 as Spinner. Wobble—born John Wardle—wasn’t any old bass player: His cavernous dub bass lines lifted Public Image Ltd. out of the Sex Pistols’ considerable shadow. By 1994, he was an artist of some repute, having led his Invaders of the Heart, a globe-trotting collective of musical mavericks, to the middle reaches of the British charts.
All the same, you can picture the flicker of delight that must have traced across Eno’s brow when he received back his musical cues alternatively untouched (“Garden Recalled”), employed as the basis for entirely new tracks (“Steam”), and accompanied by Wobble’s bass pressure (“Like Organza”). “I didn't even hear it all till it was finished,” Eno told The Wire in September 1995 of Spinner’s recording. “Everything that he [Wobble] put on, he produced. Anything you hear looming around in the back is probably what I produced…”
That “probably” is important. Spinner—which is being reissued in an expanded edition—fills an intriguingly permissive space in the Eno catalog, where he stepped back from his own strict editorial criteria and placed himself “in the hands of Jah.” Spinner comes from synergy and collectivism rather than individual inspiration, an impression reinforced by this reissue, which adds “Stravinsky” (an original Eno track from the much bootlegged Glitterbug soundtrack) and “Lockdown” (a new song by Wobble) to the collected canon. Spinner is also an outlier in the Eno catalog for its pulsating low end, a rarity for a producer who was more audibly influenced by the spaces of dub rather than its bass textures.
“Like Organza” is the perfect example of how this musical tag-teaming works. Nothing much actually happens in the song: Eno (presumably) brings the chiming of a bell and a drone-y organ, to which Wobble adds a serpentine bass line, which curls around the melody like a warm dog’s embrace. For two-and-three-quarter minutes, all is well in the world, as if the perfect harmony of bass and melody has temporarily restored cosmic stability.
At other times, Wobble’s direction is notably more maximalist. On “Unusual Balance” he employs metallic guitar, drums locked in a haltering reggae two step, and the electrifying voice of Iranian-born vocalist Sussan Deyhim to create a dubbed-out Middle-Eastern space metal, while Eno’s contribution is seemingly reduced to a few stray piano notes littered around the background. “Transmitter and Trumpet,” meanwhile, mixes up Can’s Jaki Liebezeit on heavily-processed drums with other-worldly atmospherics; the tent-peg-solid three-note bassline balances this eight minutes of kosmische drift that sits somewhere between the Orb and Can’s own adventure in reggae on 1976’s Flow Motion.
The upshot of this wild collaborative fever is that Spinner’s weaker numbers are those—like “Garden Recalled” and “Space Diary 1”—where Eno’s original work is left untouched, their glassy textures a little cold in comparison to the fervent musical madness around them. Given Wobble’s work on the rest of this album, though, you trust him that these songs were better left untouched and Spinner’s excellent sequencing allows them to serve as a palate cleanser between contrasting musical flavors.
Spinner’s cosmopolitan influences and improbable origin means it often gets overlooked among the labyrinthine Eno catalog. It’s not quite ambient; it’s not exactly dub; it’s not even really a Brian Eno production. And yet there is something invigorating in this album’s refusal to conform. Eno, a man known for his career left-turns, cerebral innovation and nonconformist working attitudes, once called it “a very strange record”. And coming from him, that’s quite a compliment.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Punk-turned-country-leaning chronicler Laura Stevenson’s third album is her first with an outside producer, Kevin McMahon, who's previously worked with Titus Andronicus and Swans. It's also the first where she's decided to deal with her demons.

Wheel

On punk-turned-country-leaning chronicler Laura Stevenson’s first album, 2010’s A Record, she was frank about her tendency to obscure her feelings. The precious, old-timey piano waltz of “Beets United” found her intoning, in her sweet vinegar voice, “I need to stop singing in code/ To start ringing true because true rings only.” But it’s taken her until her third LP-- the second for Don Giovanni-- to feel she’s reached that point. She’s also dropped …and the Cans from her stage name (though they remain her backing band) and decided to deal with her demons: the realization that death is inevitable, and the ensuing battle between succumbing to futility, self-destruction, or balancing somewhere between the two. “There comes a time when you decide if you fight it off or learn to die,” she sings on “Triangle”, her snarl slight over her band’s crunching, good-timey wallop. It’s heavy stuff, but you wouldn’t immediately know it just by listening to Wheel, which spins a line in folk-rock bonhomie so sincere that a few gnarled sticks thrown in its spokes wouldn’t go amiss.
The 28-year-old Long Islander isn’t exactly an open book on Wheel, but sticks to a neat scheme of metaphors to dress up her existential anguish. The characters in her songs are either trapped, cowed within disintegrating bodies (Stevenson is a big Jeff Mangum fan, and it shows), hiding away from the world, still living within damaging, inescapable situations; or they’re trying to run, though beyond the general idea of escape, towards what and why is never that obvious. (Though the record’s most quotable line doesn’t fit either foot: “You’ll be a home for ungrateful drones who will churn your bones to butter,” she rails on “Swim Swim”, where California gets swallowed up by an earthquake and bees set down roots.)
Problem is, if Stevenson's lyrics are desperate and raw, her and her band's music bowls along blithely, neutering her newly on-show, distinct personal anguish: The sugary gait of “Renee” and “The Move”’s simpering softness fall halfway between I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning-era Bright Eyes and the slightly self-satisfied cadence of popular, modern British folk. Standout single “Runner” is a weird, twangy anthem with a pop-punkish chorus (“This summer hurts! This summer hurts!”) that nods to Stevenson’s teenage obsession with Green Day and Operation Ivy. “Bells and Whistles” has similarly overflowing verses and indignant, punchy choruses to Lady Lamb the Beekeeper’s recent album, Ripely Pine, but lacks Aly Spaltro’s taste for blood; “Every Tense” is strings-swollen and grave, like Sigur Rós making Americana, “Telluride” the flagging third hour of a Bruce Springsteen outdoor show. You get the picture: Stevenson and band cover the full spectrum of 21st century populist folk, from hushed intimacy to torrid crescendo and dusk-lit festival stage rousing, a touch like latter-period Rilo Kiley.
Wheel is Stevenson’s first record with an outside producer: Kevin McMahon has previously worked with Titus Andronicus and Swans, so he should be a dab hand at managing vim and dread, but the thick arrangements and too-poignant string interludes often make Stevenson’s lyrics difficult to hear properly, and their tendency toward generic twang and climax gets old quickly. Wheel is accomplished, but does next to nothing you haven’t heard before and offers no original thrills.
It's no means an unpleasant record, however, and Stevenson is a winsome presence with a wild voice, and an occasional knack for compellingly weird hybrids; “Runner” and the Fiona Apple-does-Built to Spill vibe of “Eleonora” put a halfway idiosyncratic spin on theatrical, muscular folk rock. But it’s Laura Stevenson’s third album, and the third that leaves you feeling warmly disposed but unconvinced, gamely professing your interest to see what she does next time around. The rub is that the notion of potential unfulfilled is in part responsible for crushing her songs on this record, aspiring to templates and rafters that definitely don’t ring as true as Stevenson’s vividly impressionistic, twisted lyrics and psyche.


Vivian Girls bassist Katy Goodman uses simplicity as an airy foundation for her lovelorn twee-pop songs on this side project.

La Sera

Katy Goodman can usually be seen playing bass and adding syrupy harmonies to Vivian Girls' spiky guitar songs. Her voice and melodic bass lines lend a sense of fragility to that band, so it's no surprise to hear that carried over into her side project, La Sera. Here, Vivian Girls' distorted guitar and haze is replaced by a bare sound, stripped to its core elements, while Goodman's voice becomes central, sometimes double-tracked.
The opening jangle of "Beating Heart" builds with purpose, slow and precise as Goodman sings above clean guitar chimes. Honeyed vocal harmonies stream in, collecting these simple elements, giving the song an ebb and flow that recalls stately, more minimal guitar bands such as Galaxie 500. When a distorted guitar cuts in toward the end, it feels all the more powerful for the restraint surrounding it.
It's this kind of heft that carries the first-- and best-- quarter of the album, where Goodman uses simplicity as an airy foundation for her lovelorn twee-pop songs. It's a trick showcased well on "You're Going to Cry", with its weary lyric pitted against off-the-cuff acoustic guitar strums and sparse drumming. Something in her enunciation on the song, not allowing any syllable to fade away, sounds quite innocent and childlike, making for an interesting contrast with the seen-it-all-before theme of the verses.
There's a subtle 1960s girl-group influence throughout, but there are also hints of the folk-pop of that era on "I Promise You", as a sweet organ line props up the end of the song, sounding almost like a flute. These interesting moments, living in the space in the music, allow it to feel blithe and easy.
The carefreeness that lends La Sera's better songs a sense of spontaneity shows up some of its weaker moments. "Left This World" feels thin and more like a foundation or fleeting idea than something fully formed. That song is typical of the latter half of the record and, despite being made up of very short songs, still feels like a slog. "Lift Off", at one minute long doesn't stick around long enough to command much attention, except to note the odd-sounding chorus harmony. This sort of brevity and emptiness makes the tail end of the album, already short at 26 minutes, feel throwaway and hasty. It's hard not to feel, therefore, that this would have made a much better EP, losing some of the shapeless songs that drag down the momentum and charm of the record.


The playful, whipsmart UK band returns, this time with leader Eddie Argos trying his hand at some actual singing.

Brilliant! Tragic!

All right, whose brilliant (i.e., tragic) idea was it for Eddie Argos to start singing? Was it producer Frank Black? Argos himself? Jasper "the Dolphin" Future? Did anybody actually think the problem with Art Brut was all the talking? I rather thought that was like the whole point. Granted, you either love the talking-singing thing or you hate it (see also: the Hold Steady), but at least it was their thing. And beyond being totally, instantly recognizable, it wasn't all that bad of a look for Art Brut, either: Argos' witty, conversational lyrics were always well served by his spoken delivery, offset by the band's playfully slick rock session band chops. But now Argos has gone from ranting about halting a make-out session to turn up a pop song, to singing (scarcely), "I want to be played in the background while couples drink their wine/ That would be a triumph with a voice like mine/ Everybody wants to feel sexy sometimes/ I can make it happen with a voice like mine."
Well, at least he hasn't lost his wry sense of humor. But about this newfound singing business: Argos has discovered a voice that sounds a bit like Jarvis Cocker's, only if he'd lost it after a long night out drinking-- a little hoarse, whispering low so as not to upset the hangover. So the album opens with what might as well be its mission statement, "Clever Clever Jazz", a typically dry-humored song about a band punching above its weight: "Sorry that it doesn't sound like it's planned... can't you see we're doing the best that we can?" Next is another entry into the band's "Weekend" trilogy (now extended, Douglas Adams-like, to four songs if you count B-side "Really Bad Weekend"), "Lost Weekend", and while it's as clever and sweet as any of its predecessors, Argos' intonation doesn't exactly do it any extra favors.
Some songs work fine with the singing: The above-quoted ballad "Sexy Sometimes" succeeds by dint of making Argos' very struggle the subject of its gently plodding fun, as does "Is Dog Eared" to some degree. And then halfway through the album, it seems like even Argos has started to think all this is a bad idea, reverting back for the remainder to his old patterns of speech and shouting.
The results are, unsurprisingly, some of the album's strongest songs, largely because Argos just gets out of the way of his own lyrics. "Martin Kemp Welch Five A-Side Football Rules!" is a scorcher, covering the familiar Art Brut territories of football and unrequited schoolboy crushes. "Axel Rose" raucously praises its subject as being the sort of guy you'd want in your corner when giving the world the finger. Maybe best of this side is "Sealand", ending the album on a drifting note, a dream of starting a sovereign nation of two at sea that affectingly flips the motto of It's a Bit Complicated standout "People in Love": "People in love lie around and get fat/ I didn't want us to end up like that."
In all this talk about talking, the band Argos originally hired through an ad in the back pages of the NME gets short shrift. But trust that they still sound very much like a band hired from the back pages of the NME: competent rock hands with equal flair for squealing guitar solos and pop backing vocals, easy showmen but not exactly showy. Basically, they punch their weight, and they do it quite well-- sorry to say, but their frontman-turned-singer might want to follow their example.


The New Jersey band turns in another solid album of old-school riffs and ripping solos, but the songs stop just short of the radio-rock anthems they want to become.

Desire Pathway

Screaming Females don't immediately seem like a band that's been around for 18 years, but perhaps their longevity can be chalked up to their consistency. They’ve maintained the same power trio lineup, and all eight of their albums have been released on the same label. Their sound has undergone only incremental changes and, even with the occasional power-couple collaboration, plum opening gig, or glowing profile, they’ve never blown or broken up, maintaining a fairly constant state of popular and critical acclaim over the past decade. But at least for the first 35 seconds, Desire Pathway teases the possibility of a shocking reinvention.
Screaming Females’ eighth album fades in with an uncharacteristic whirling synth effect, but “Brass Bell” soon reverses course, underlining everything that makes Desire Pathway a modern anomaly. Marissa Paternoster plays riffs, things that make you pick up a Gibson SG in Guitar Center with no intention of buying it. There might be occasional leads, but more often, Paternoster rips solos, ones that could easily hold their place in Guitar World alongside their 25th tablature of “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2” and a new Ghost song. If Desire Pathway is anyone’s introduction to Screaming Females, it immediately reiterates why Paternoster ranked ahead of hotshots like Dave Navarro and Vernon Reid on a 2012 “Greatest Guitarists of All Time” list. Even if Screaming Females’ name and DIY operating principles inherently subvert the lemon squeezin’ excess of classic rock, their actual musicianship often aligns with the taste of the most staunch hesher revivalist.
But in 2023, classic rock stations might actually be playing Nirvana and PJ Harvey, and this is the legacy Screaming Females tapped into by recording at Pachyderm Studios—the same Minnesota facility that birthed In Utero and Rid of Me, two of the gnarliest albums funded by major label money in the ’90s, whose veins pumped stomach acid and migraine medications. In the past, these might have been best case scenarios for a Screaming Females record; indeed, they already made an LP with Steve Albini titled Ugly. Pachyderm also bore witness to less credible, though no less beloved hits from Soul Asylum and Alkaline Trio, whose unfussy and immediate variants on Midwest pop-rock are more in line with the coordinates of Desire Pathways. Though Paternoster’s booming bellow is best suited to chromatic, Mandatory Metallica melodies (“It’s All Said and Done”), it can also be accessorized by paisley jangle (“Beyond the Void”), double denim (“Let You Go”), or Sharpie-black nail varnish (“Mourning Dove”).
Much like Screaming Females’ previous albums, Desire Pathway feels like it’s competing with a bolder version of itself that sits just outside of view. This is the third album they’ve made with Matt Bayles, a guy who made his reputation producing post-metal bands like Isis and Russian Circles with clinical precision. The refined touch that felt so jarring on 2015’s Rose Mountain became familiar on 2018’s All at Once, and Desire Pathway goes even further to distance itself from the concussive force of Screaming Females’ live presence. If not exactly “heartland rock,” Screaming Females are working within its adjacent descriptors: earnest, workmanlike, lifers. Yet, the songs on Desire Pathway beg for a more audacious treatment that lets them live out their destiny as radio rock anthems in practice rather than theory. With very few exceptions—the occasional flange effect, an exaggerated volume swell at the end of “Brass Bell,” a handful of judicious and effective vocal harmonies—Desire Pathway never sounds like anything other than three people playing together in a room, albeit being seen and heard from the other side of the studio glass.
The fault isn’t entirely with Bayles, though. After a spirited Side A, Desire Pathway settles into modest tempos and conventional rhythms, as Paternoster’s commanding vocals take command more or less the same way, flattening the emotional arc implied by the subject matter: “I’m a freight train in the desert dragging chains,” “now the stage is empty and I am too,” “I’m withered in despair, a burnt pile in the sun,” “a titan of love and shame.” The lyric book reads like a volcanic, ugly cry. But Screaming Females’ entire existence has been a rare testament to consistency and, despite being five years in the making and inspired by a devastating breakup, Desire Pathway can’t help but be their most consistent album yet.


An architect of New Zealand’s fabled Dunedin sound returns with another dose of heavenly pop. This time, he may even be happy.

Snow Bound

A happy man is a platitudinous man. In his sixth decade, the Chills’ Martin Phillipps sounds this note of wary optimism. “Even bad sugar makes bitter taste sweet” goes the first chorus of Snow Bound, his classic New Zealand pop band’s sixth album in thirty years, barely a minute in. The same songwriter who penned the rumbling, wounded classic “Pink Frost” goes so far here as to title a song “Easy Peazy.” Of course, calling a heroin-triggered hepatitis C survivor and admitted hevay drinker a happy man attests to the delusionary glint inherent in Phillipps’ heavenly would-be hits. Hoping Snow Bound succeeds on what’s left of college radio is its own kind of delusion, but the Chills always had a knack for being slightly behind the times. Still, Snow Bound is the Dunedin native’s most winning album since 1990’s Submarine Bells—brash, tensile, and enormously confident.
Phillipps’ has a penchant for huge keyboards, the kind that fans of the Cure’s Disintegration know well: the kind that billow and unravel like storm clouds moving across plains. Oli Wilson’s criss-crossing organ and Cars-indebted synths over Todd Knudson’s walloping drums during “Scarred” will be familiar to fans of early ’80s AOR. Rolling piano lends “Lord of All I Survey” an insistent optimism, as Phillipps wills himself to be happy. But no Chills album is without its melancholic whorls, as when Phillipps announces during the title track, “You cut through the city like a surgeon’s knife/On a quest for life but saving no one.” As a writer and bandleader, Phillipps has learned to trust his instinct for the topic sentence, supported by gradations of sound and thought as lucid as citations.
Sure, some fans might long for the mysteries of Submarine Bells, where the songs shone through subaqueous environments. But Snow Bound’s mid-tempo churners, like “The Greatest Guide,” offer plenty of mystery through Phillipps’ guitars, anyway. If there’s an analog, it’s the last album of the first run by the Chills’ Australian contemporaries the Go-Betweens, 16 Lovers Lane. With an eye on the charts, that quintet wrapped acoustic guitars in pastel gauze, though the tension between two gifted songwriters resulted in a minor sunshine-on-a-cloudy-day masterpiece, bleak and rueful and suspicious. Snow Bound similarly trembles with Phillipps’ effort to cheer himself up. On these 10 songs, noticing other people and accepting the damage done are synonymous.
By his standards, Phillipps has entered a prolific release regimen: Snow Bound comes three years after Silver Bullets, a follow-up to an EP released during Dubya’s first term. Distinguished by Phillipps’ insistence on redressing mistakes and a welcome awakening to global political trends, Silver Bullets was the comeback he and we needed. But as the keyboards twinkle above the guitars on Snow Bound’s final cut, Phillipps avers, “We still, still, still believe in harmony,” it’s clear that this is even better than the old times. Harmony at large is Phillipps’ equivalent of the Lord’s Prayer: a practice done for keeping aloneness at bay, for Phillipps the intensest rendezvous.


Leslie Feist follows her half-covers/half-originals album Let It Die with a record that's equally diverse yet more full-blooded, all sung in a voice that could make even Dick Cheney weep.

The Reminder

On "Mushaboom", the signature track from her 2004 breakthrough album Let It Die, Leslie Feist claimed, "It may be years until the day my dreams will match up with my pay." Now, after countless sold-out shows across the world, close to half of a million records sold, and placement in a commercial for British bed manufacturers Silentnight, it seems safe to say this NPR darling's "pay" should be satisfactory. But, while Feist may now be able to afford the idyllic hideaway she pined for in "Mushaboom", the Calgary native still wouldn't be able to enjoy its creature comforts thanks to her hectic, frequent-flyer schedule. Alas: Faraway, so close. Brimming with heartbreak, solitude, and foggy memories, Feist's "dreams" still sound distant on The Reminder, the singer's outstanding third album.
Mostly written on the road, the new LP gets its inspiration from the disconnections of non-stop, intercontinental hotel-jumping. Talking about her ephemeral lifestyle in an interview with Pitchfork last year, Feist said, "You just never set roots; you take pleasure in simple conversations, because you know you're not going to have much more than that." Though she's trekked on her own and with bands including By Divine Right and Broken Social Scene for more than a decade, the 31-year-old songwriter sounds desperate for something more than "simple conversation" here.
Unlike the half-covers/half-original split of Let It Die, every song but one was at least co-written by Feist on The Reminder. (And her buzzing take on the traditional playground sing-along "Sea Lion Woman" makes it distinctively Feist-ian anyway.) Whereas her last album's smoothed-out eclecticism could be both daunting and empty, The Reminder is equally diverse yet more full-blooded. From the indie pop of "I Feel It All" to the creeping electro-ballad "Honey Honey", the album ambles effortlessly; its musical palette is wide enough to stave off repetition yet innate enough to offer an intense cohesiveness. The record's keen combination of off-the-cuff production and no-fat songwriting is likely linked to its method: With several songs whittled down over years of performances, Feist-- aided by her usual one-named conspirators Gonzales and Mocky, along with Jamie Lidell and others-- recorded them in less than a week in a manor outside Paris. Fleeting touches from horns, glockenspiels, makeshift choirs, and other subtle accoutrements never announce themselves ostentatiously. Instead, the LP relies on a modest refinement that breaks with current singer-songwriter trends that promote infinite ambition in lieu of the basics-- melody, arrangement, feeling.
Hardly the first singer-songwriter to love, live, lose, and emote, Feist once again elevates herself above countless other diary-keeping tunesmiths with a voice that could make even Dick Cheney weep. Marked by specks of Dusty Springfield's soul, Björk's confrontational adventurousness, and Joni Mitchell's warmth, the singular allure of Feist's vocals is difficult to deny or overstate. You might hear her over cappuccino-machine hisses in Starbucks, but her direct-line moans easily cut through the biscotti muzak. And on The Reminder, her whisper-to-wail control-- exemplified by stark heart-tuggers "The Water" and "Intuition"-- is even more striking than before.
"With sadness so real that it populates the city and leaves you homeless again," coos Feist on "The Park", a desolate, lovelorn lament. The song-- with its references to a relationship torn by distance, omnipotent nature (a carefree bird can be heard mocking Feist's sadness in the background), and a hazy "past" that offers partly-forgotten flickers and flashes-- is a fitting summary of The Reminder's wounded pleas. Leery of a sixth sense, the songstress concludes "Intuition" with a question, "Did I miss out on you?"-- its insolubility packing more ache than a hundred clear-cut break-up songs. Such eternally spotty "what if?" queries needn't always strike such dour chords. On the shaggy, Broken Social Scene-esque romp "Past to Present", the refrain ("There's so much past inside my present") has the singer embracing yesteryear with a proud vitality. But no matter where she sits on love's teeter-totter-- down on the after-the-fact apology of "I'm Sorry" or aloft in heady infatuation on "Brandy Alexander"-- her philosophy-of-self is sound.
After inconclusively rifling though her personal history for 12 songs, Feist finally seems to reach an Emersonian transcendence on finale "How My Heart Behaves": "I'm a stem now...fanning my yellow eye," she sings over wafting piano and harp. Though the song reads like a zen tutorial to her own unsettled emotions, it still finishes with a query: "What grew and inside who?" What she's referring to isn't exactly clear-- and that's the point. Pasts pass. People stay, go. But finding sanctuary within half-realized dreams and faces? Timeless.