Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit an inimitable album of New Orleans music, home to the deepest grooves and an enormous foundation for funk, rock, and rap.

Look-Ka Py Py

It is most urgent for me to consistently remind myself that music, most often, didn’t just materialize from nowhere. Most urgent, especially, when confronted with an album or a band that sounds as if they arrived on the wings of some unseen miracle, like someone holy opened their palm somewhere, and out came the Meters, fully formed and already spiraling through a series of immersive grooves, each of them sounding like the birth of a new universe.
But the reality is that someone beat a drum somewhere once. Someone sounded an alarm with a voice that summoned another voice and then another. The reality is that the drums and the voices and the dancing might have taken place in American streets or in American fields, but these traditions were carried over by a people who were forced to be here, forced to work and build and care for land that wasn’t their land, families that were not their families. Their music and celebration was a reaction to that series of ongoing thefts.
And so, in New Orleans during the late-18th century, there were Sundays and Congo Square. For those people enslaved in the Spanish-dominated city, Sunday was treated as a day of rest. Enslaved peoples would take their free afternoon and gather right outside the city, the only place city leaders would allow them to congregate in groups. The space in which they gathered was originally given the name Place des Negres, and then Place Congo, and then Congo Square.
There, hundreds of enslaved Africans could gather to dance, to make music with bamboula drums, bells, gourds, banjos, the instruments of their hands and voice. These gatherings continued well after the Civil War, even when white officials attempted to quell the celebrations, in part by re-naming the area after Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard. But the music and the dancing continued.
These gatherings held together the sounds and traditions of African music, but they also enlivened the ability for improvisation—to grant an improvisor and their audience a doorway to emotional and physical release, or freedom, however brief. For those who know, for those who have ascended to some place—literally or otherwise—with no firm plan on how to descend, improvisation, when aligned with other equally adventurous folks, can be exhilarating. A promise that for each moment you decide to reach your arms out into the air, another set of hands will emerge, ready to pull you along towards whatever is next.
By 1969, the Meters were New Orleans Notorious, a band that you’d heard even if you didn’t know you’d heard them. In their earliest forms, they played as the Neville Sounds: Art Neville (keyboards), his brothers Aaron and Cyril, George Porter Jr. (bass), Leo Nocentelli (guitar), and Ziggy Modeliste (drums). When Aaron and Cyril left, the foursome became the house band for Allen Toussaint at Sansu Studios by day and tore through the New Orleans club circuit by night. It’s always fascinating when a band releases two albums in close proximity, particularly in the same year, and particularly if the two albums are a debut and a so-called sophomore effort. There are those who say you are writing your first book or making your first album your entire life. That everything you’ve lived before the point of creation overflows and pours itself into that first creation. Thus, making any second effort more challenging, with a sometimes shorter timeline, a more shallow well of inspiration to pull from, and so on. But there are moments that feel like an artist is saying, “Well, no. I’m still taming the overflow, and I have learned to do it better than I did the first time, and I can’t wait to show you.”
The self-titled Meters debut was released in May of 1969 and was steered by its opening track, “Cissy Strut,” which was honed for a couple of years as the band’s opening song. While the debut has its brilliant moments, it only suffers (and barely suffers) from what many great debuts suffer from: an attempt to prove everything at once. The Meters wanted to demonstrate the band’s total ability, to show off their immense capabilities in navigating the second line sound of New Orleans and their lack of selfishness, a band so tight that its members didn’t mind sacrificing some time so that another member could chase a melody.
Their second shot, Look-Ka Py Py, was released just seven months later, before the year kicked its last bit of sand down the hourglass. And it is here that the miracle of the Meters flourishes: the band that was on stage tearing the Ivanhoe apart night after night found a way to become that same band on record. It is sort of a reverse effect, their debut album free of pressure, imagined or real. The longest song on the album is three minutes and 18 seconds, and the rest of them barely push past 2:45, each unfurling into what feels like effortless jam sessions, where the band tries to keep up with each other on a quest to find some shared sonic revelation, and then when it is found, the song ends. Take “Funky Miracle,” one of the few songs that doesn’t end with a fade-out, and instead ends with a collision. Modeliste’s drums bump up against the rest of the band, and then a hard stop. Silence before the exit. It is the equivalent of a nod, a gesture. We did it, through the beautiful mess of sound, we found each other.
The album is best defined by Modeliste and Neville’s tug-of-war. On an album with no spoken language, language is born elsewhere. Out of instrumental gestures, out of silences, out of two sounds crawling atop each other over and over. The Meters do all of this well on Look-Ka Py Py, but Neville and Modeliste do the latter the best. They spend most of “Little Old Money Maker” trying to outpace each other in small bursts while Nocentelli plays a mediator, getting his efficient and measured guitar licks in between the delightful grappling. This interplay works best when the two lead each other toward a room of their own, where they can be at their most adventurous. “This Is My Last Affair” opens—as most tracks on the album do—with Modeliste announcing his entry, but then Neville takes over and soars for nearly three whole minutes.
The Meters were an adventurous band, obsessed with the collective sound over individual accolades. George Porter Jr. is one of the greatest bass players who has ever lived, and what makes him great is his unsung work. Every band of more than two people has to have one member at least somewhat content with doing what they do, doing it like no one else, and doing it to serve the greater good without showing off too much. It’s easy to point to songs on Look-Ka Py Py where members of the band get to show out. “The Mob” sees Nocentelli wading to the front of the line, for example. But the labor of Porter is always there, underneath everything else. Another testament to the fullness of this perfect record, a fullness that is as spectacular as it is labyrinthian. If there is an album worth getting lost and wandering through, let it be this one.
Lately, I’ve been considering this idea of doing work for the greater good, even if it means that people don’t know you by name, by voice, by any single aesthetic. In some ways, the Meters are still what they were in 1969. They’re famous far beyond New Orleans, of course. But they’re still a band that some people certainly have heard without knowing they’ve heard them. At a party a few years back, a DJ flipped Cameo’s “Rigor Mortis” into the Meters song “Rigor Mortis” (admittedly, a thrilling moment for me, specifically) and as the latter reached its final 30 seconds, there were a couple of people I was with who did the thing I sometimes do. The “I know this song…but I don’t know this song” gesture that takes place when a series of familiar but unknown sounds descend.
To say that this is, in part, because the Meters were primarily an instrumental band seems too easy. But maybe the real thing I’m trying to unlock is what happens when a band is so good, and so precise, that they make music that serves as an efficient backdrop to anything and everything. The Meters are so good that they can blend into the atmosphere; they can become the air. This, too, is a miracle—one that does not render the band forgettable in any form. It does, in fact, tie them to that old New Orleans history of a people, otherwise bound by their torturous obligations to a land they didn’t choose to be on, seeking a way to transform the world as they knew it for a couple of hours every Sunday. Until, through their movement, through their sound-making, that corner became a new corner. That is where the sound echoed until it was the only sound.
One of my favorite samples, all time, is Amerie’s “1 Thing,” which borrows from the Look-Ka Py Py song “Oh, Calcutta!”—the nine seconds from 1:41 to 1:50 in the track. The Amerie song fractures and loops those nine seconds and runs them over and over again to craft a beat that never gets exhausting and never feels stale. For the brief second in the loop where Modeliste’s drums vanish, I find myself panicked, aching for them to return, like a child watching their beloved parent cover their face with two hands.
There’s some heartbreak in the way the Meters were sampled and the amount they were sampled, particularly in the late ’80s and early ’90s. “Cissy Strut” alone was sampled 71 different times. Even more familiar was 1970’s “Hand Clapping Song,” with its repetitive chant of clap your hands now, people clap now being sampled in 92 different songs. They never got properly credited or compensated for some of those uses. In a 2008 interview, Gary Porter mentioned that the band had been sampled over 140 times, and only about two-thirds of those were properly paid off, in processes that took years.
And so, the miracle of the Meters is also the miracle of restraint. It isn’t just there in the length of the songs themselves, but also in knowing that every movement in every song could be stretched into an epic, and choosing, instead, to offer a small window into a dazzling moment, and then moving on to something else. Let the legacy of the Meters be a great many things, but at the core, I believe them to be a band invested in wonder, in exuberance. In the kind of delightful childlike awe of finding a miracle around every corner, and therefore, eternally seeking new corners.

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The British folk duo returns with a heartfelt collection whose polished production belies the emotional complexity of the lyrics.

Blue Hours

Soft-rock duo Bear’s Den, made up of songwriter Andrew Davie and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Jones, originate from the British nu-folk scene that spanned the late 2000s and mid-2010s. In 2006, Jones started the Communion record label and publishing company alongside Mumford & Sons’ Ben Lovett, and Bear’s Den toured alongside both Mumford and early Communion signees Daughter in 2013. Performing fairly standard if tender folk rock (“Guard your hope with your life,” Davie pleads on early single “Elysium”), they took a more modest, intimate approach than their artsier peers or their commercially-minded label co-founders. Helmed by indie-rock producer Phil Ek, 2019’s creative breakthrough So That You Might Hear Me traded in aphorisms for precise, poignant examinations of growing up around alcoholism (the expansive “Hiding Bottles”) and the difficulty of self-forgiveness (“Evangeline”). They continued this self-questioning streak with the moving “Favorite Patient” from 2020’s Christmas Hopefully EP, where Davie fears he can’t support his partner, burnt out from early-pandemic days working in the ICU. On their latest album, Blue Hours, Bear’s Den reunite with longtime producer Ian Grimble to further examine issues of mental health. It is a moving, often heartfelt collection of songs, but the polish belies the complex sentiments Davie writes about companionship and isolation.
Davie largely focuses on the benefits and challenges of intimacy, particularly moments when closeness borders on codependence. His tender approach becomes an advantage when he discusses enmeshed relationships and avoidant partners: Any of Bear’s Den’s peers would love to write a line like “You were dreaming in my nightmares/I’m dreaming in yours.” On the title track, the only way to get inside his lover’s head is to do so literally, crawling around and examining every synapse to find the issues. Even when the band nails a soaring, string-led anthem like “Shadows,” a simple line like “I should know better/But with you I don’t” complicates the chorus’ affirmation.
Davie journeys inward, too, writing about his lack of clarity with an often surprising amount of it. “Spiders” overcomes its underweight motorik beat with some self-lacerating but thoughtful lyrics, the extrapolation of the phrase “stain on your conscious” into “a mural” and a “memorial for all those you tried to be.” “Selective Memories” is the most impressive tonal balance the band has ever struck, with lyrics about losing a parent to dementia, examining confusing feelings with newfound bite. There’s still sentimentality in the song, in a verse where Davie hopes his mom can meet his future granddaughter, but Davie ultimately decides that he’ll let his bad memories slip away in the absence of closure. For a band hell-bent on reassurance, forgiving through forgetting is a surprisingly harsh conclusion.
Barring the occasional crescendo on songs like “New Ways” and some surprisingly heavy low-end on closer “All the Wrong Places,” Grimble’s glossy production doesn’t lean into that darkness enough. Every song sounds clean and punchy, but the refined atmosphere is at odds with the band’s newfound comfort with messiness. Strong lyrics aren’t enough to distinguish “Spiders” from every other moody slow-burner on the record, and for all his growth, Davie still leans heavily on open-ended phrases: “all you cannot see,” “all that I can’t undo,” “all that you are.” It’s a forgivable quirk, especially as the track “All That You Are” dates back to the band’s earliest days, but the repetition increasingly feels like a way to avoid specifying what lies in that “all.” The title track of Blue Hours acknowledges the difficulty of holding “darkness and light” simultaneously, but at their best Bear’s Den can delicately but purposefully navigate the more challenging shades of gray.


Andrew PM Hunt’s fourth album as Dialect blends vaporwave, field recordings, and sketch-like fragments into an unbroken whole. The result owes as much to collage as to composition, with an emphasis on flow.

Under~Between

Andrew PM Hunt’s fourth album as Dialect begins with a guided meditation. “Under the galaxy,” whispers a woman’s voice, framed by the sounds of bubbling water and burbling electric piano; a soft metallic tapping punctuates the rhythm of her words. “Under atmosphere/Under sky/Under clouds.” She continues to drill down, drawing our gaze past trees, ground, bedrock. Under crust, under lava. “Keep going,” she urges, her voice never rising, as woodwinds and strings rustle gently around her.
It’s a remarkable opening. The whispered instructions (the voice is that of Hunt’s collaborator Hannah Bitowski) clear the mind and focus attention. And the insistence upon a vertical line cuts against the way that music typically moves forward in time. It underscores the spatial qualities of Dialect’s music, which trades rhythm and melody for tone clusters and splotches of color, closer in spirit to an abstract painting than a conventional song.
Blending chamber music with vaporwave, gathering together field recordings and sketch-like musical ideas—minimalist pulses, cinematic drones, streaks of synth and zither—Hunt’s work as Dialect has always had more in common with collage than musical composition. “It started as a way to find a home for a bunch of disparate recordings I had knocking around that felt like they didn’t fit anywhere else,” he told The Wire recently; he approached his debut album, 2015’s Advanced Myth, “by treating the material as if I was making a mix of other people’s music—different styles and approaches being collaged together with unexpected connections and big emphasis on the flow.”
Flow is paramount on Under~Between; the album’s 11 tracks proceed as parts of one unbroken whole, with little to delineate them. As on Advanced Myth and its successors, 2015’s Gowanus Drifts and 2017’s Loose Blooms, Hunt continues to work like a painter or collage artist, not so much writing music as manipulating shapes. This time, for raw material he used a set of pieces commissioned by the Immix Ensemble, a new-music chamber group based, like Hunt, in Liverpool, England. In a video of a 2016 performance by Dialect and Immix Ensemble, his writing for the group shuttles between the pulse minimalism of Terry Riley’s In C and more lyrically expressive modes. Here, however, remixing the group’s recordings of his own compositions, conventional melodic phrases are few and far between, leaving the play of pure texture and color in their place.
Following the opening track, reeds flutter and bows bounce gently against strings in “Yamaha Birds 1,” throwing off bright harmonics that mimic the chattering of a forest canopy; the faintest tonal shading leads from there into “Flame Not Stone,” in which wordless, electronically processed vocals and trilling synthesizer continue the avian theme. A piano melody takes shape, like a constellation coming into focus against a milky galactic backdrop. Held chords and a flourish of strings guide the way into “Stacks,” where marimba pulses and a splash of saxophone briefly hint at Japanese ambient music. The album’s first half comes to a head in “Ringing the Web,” in which a quick-moving saxophone solo, not much louder than breath itself, marks the album’s emotional peak against a porous backdrop of innumerable overdubbed layers.
It goes on like this—non-hierarchical, unstructured, free-flowing. There are few signposts; even after more than a dozen listens, I’d be hard pressed to tell you exactly what happens and at what point. There’s a risk, making music this abstract, that it can leave little to grab onto, and Under~Between’s diaphanous qualities can at first make it seem insubstantial. But the closer you lean in, the more it opens up. Every track is home to at least one event that happens there and only there, one sound that pipes up once and is never heard again before diving back down into the mix, drawing your attention under once again.
Hunt has said that one of the album’s influences is Joanna Macy’s Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory, which examines the Buddist doctrine of Pratītyasamutpāda. Sometimes known as “interdependent co-arising,” the term describes the idea that all things are interconnected. That, presumably, is the source of the second half of the album’s title. In the opening “Under~Between,” when Bitowski finishes drawing her line from the heavens to the earth’s core, she shifts her attention to the idea of betweenness. “Between forces/Between sounds/Between light,” she continues, still whispering. Her list is more abstract this time; there’s an apples-and-oranges quality to some of the terms she reels off: “Between rivers/Between families/Between oil/Between sex.” At their root, though, they are all things that connect other things: routes, conduits, relations. The beauty of Under~Between is how elegantly it illustrates the idea of interdependence, tangling together seemingly unrelated sounds so that they are impossible to tease apart, and creating a space for peaceful contemplation in that web of interconnectedness.

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The Atlanta indie-rock quartet’s debut album stands out from their contemporaries’ laid-back melancholy with complex instrumental interplay that inspires lean-forward listening.

Mamalarky

Mamalarky’s tenderly tangled indie rock has the internal logic of ridiculous jokes shared between band members after spending weeks on the road together. The young Atlanta-based quartet’s touring plans were curtailed like everyone else’s in 2020, but they’ve had more than enough time in each other’s company to develop an idiosyncratic musical language. The sum of friendships and collaborations dating back to their teenage years, the band’s debut album melds flashy instrumental moves with head-sticking hooks and lovesick lyrics welcoming anyone into their private world.
Singer/guitarist Livvy Bennett met drummer Dylan Hill on the first day of middle school in their hometown of Austin, and they joined forces with keyboardist Michael Hunter (a member of shaggy rock revivalists White Denim) in 2016, first calling themselves the Wipeout Gang before settling on Mamalarky—a name they have jokingly mocked for its similarities to a Joe Biden catchphrase. The band’s 2018 debut EP, Fundamental Thrive Hive, shows slightly less restraint than their debut album, with Hunter’s synth flourishes veering towards zany, but the foundations of their sound were already in place. During a stint in Los Angeles while Bennett joined alt-rockers Cherry Glazerr, bassist Noor Khan entered Mamalarky’s orbit after they put out a call for musicians on Tinder. Swiping right proved to be the correct decision, as they leveled up into a tightly stitched prog-pop unit.
While Mamalarky are ostensibly an indie-pop group, they stand out from the laid-back melancholy moods of contemporaries like Soccer Mommy or (Sandy) Alex G with complex instrumental interplay that inspires lean-forward listening. Whether tearing into the album’s fast-paced songs or swaying through its quiet numbers, Hill is rarely content to play a simple backbeat, punctuating stop-start rhythms with splashy fills like exclamation marks in the middle of a sentence. Basslines bob in lockstep with the guitar’s rapid zigzags, and Hunter paints with splatters of synth in moments like the dazzling conclusion of “Cosine.” On Mamalarky’s most energetic rippers, “Fury” and “Schism Trek,” they sound as frenzied as Deerhoof, while the simple and affecting “You Make Me Smile” recalls the understated arrangements of that band’s former guitarist, Chris Cohen.
Bennett’s vocals hold down the melodic structure of Mamalarky’s various approaches, with a sardonic chanted delivery on “Drug Store Model” or a soft lilt through “Hero.” She repeatedly evokes feelings of fleeting romance, from the sweet reminders of “You Make Me Smile” to the sweaty sheets of “Almighty Heat.” This falls apart on “Schism Trek,” when someone’s absence painfully takes over her imagination: “You are my muse, you are my crush/I sit and think of you too much.” With the exception of tossed-off references to “the Hilton and Bill Clinton” midway through “Fury,” her lyrics avoid the world outside her head, and even then sound years removed from current events.
With this much creativity, it’s unfortunate that the band falls into predictable patterns on wordless bridges or codas that start to feel samey after 10 songs. The spidery instrumental “Singalong,” on the other hand, is a smart sequencing choice to mix up the album’s flow, while “Big Trouble” has the most notable tweaks to their formula. Its warbling sound matches the look of the group’s charming lo-fi videos as they swap out choruses with affirmative shouts and gleefully messy guitar solos. In unexpected moments like these, Mamamlarky sound like they’re capable of inventing a new musical dialect altogether.

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Led by the exquisite brio of Brandon Flowers, the Las Vegas band returns with one of their biggest and best albums, a marvelously absurd collection of synth-rock gems and arena anthems.

Imploding the Mirage

To understand how far queer culture has come in public acceptance, look no further than the immaculately coiffed, straight, Las Vegas Mormon striving to live down every one of those adjectives. Since 2004’s Hot Fuss, Brandon Flowers of the Killers has chipped away at his weaknesses. From the ambisexual roundelay of “Somebody Told Me” and the way he stressed the rival “beautiful boy” in “When You Were Young,” to the cheeky interpolation of Bronski Beat’s epochal he’s-leaving-home anthem “Smalltown Boy” on his solo track “I Can Change,” Flowers has telegraphed a primal longing: Why didn’t God make him a gay musician? Instead, God made Flowers a singer-keyboardist who sets his larynx ablaze from the effort of caring. He writes songs for the young dreamers who hope to be rhinestone cowboys; he wants to see thousands of Brandon Flowers bloom. As tacky and bombastic as a Fourth of July celebration, Imploding the Mirage has more bangers than a Killers album should 16 years after their debut and without copping to “maturity.” This band remains as absurd—marvelously so—as ever.
How quarantine may enervate this most arena of rock bands we don’t know; for now, though, Imploding the Mirage, with key production and songwriting assists from Jonathan Rado, gives no indication Flowers has downsized his ambition to make the loudest, grandest rock album in an era that sees too few of them. The man who allowed the queer-ish dance act Pet Shop Boys to remix “Read My Mind” also adores early Bruce Springsteen: the riffs, the scale, the penchant for florid twaddle. But Flowers doesn’t write Springsteen songs, he writes concordances to Springsteen songs, set to pillowy synths and with drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr.’s beats frisky enough for audiences aware of but not infatuated with dance music—like, say, Springsteen’s. Girls still excite him here—the ones who smoke cigarettes and “breathe in the blowback” and “fight back.” And the Killers are liberated, sort of. “I’m throwin’ caution,” Flowers wails on the first single, abbreviating “throwing” like an honor roll Springsteen student. Is that Can’s “Moonshake” in the nervous opening tap-tap of “Dying Breed”? Does he really sing, “What kind of words would cut through the clutter of the whirlwind of these days?” on “My Own Soul’s Warning”? Smile like you mean it, Brandon!
Applying the lessons learned about sustained ecstasy from previous producer Stuart Price, the Killers sequence Imploding the Mirage so that the circumference of each mushroom cloud of a song expands as the album goes on. “My God,” a prayer and exultation, corrals a choir and Weyes Blood doing their “All These Things That I’ve Done” thing while Flowers pushes his voice toward tones and stresses unheard by mortal man, all for the sake of the adage: “Don’t push/Control is overrated.” Then he loses control again on the next track, the glistening “When the Dreams Run Dry.”
In 2004, when the Killers released “Somebody Told Me” and especially “Mr. Brightside,” the embrace of their wobbly, lurid Technicolor psychodramas coincided with the post-Napster generation’s discovery of a version of the 1980s their older siblings shunned. Flowers may even own a stack of CD-Rs on which songs with gated drums and synth strings compete with a singer determined to outsing and out-hair them both: bands like, who knows, Survivor. In other words, Flowers likes the tacky ’80s; he remains a Las Vegas boy born with eyes sharpened by neon. But here’s the difference: Rather than record treacly updates of  “The Search Is Over,” his mission is to find the Neil Tennant in Survivor, as much a quixotic mission as a genuine what-the-fuck moment: a cishet performer who queers anonymous Wembley Stadium tubthumping with bizarre word combinations. After a few listens to the new album, I couldn’t tell you what “imploding the mirage” means. Whether Flowers knows himself is worth debating. The brio is the point.
Sixteen years after Hot Fuss, the Killers benefit from a gradual acceptance of gender fluidity, sheer grinding persistence, and, thanks to COVID, an aversion to male hair trimmings that results in an Icehouse-era generosity. No one quite sounds like them in 2020. No one will sound like them in 2031. They remain inscrutable and delirious, trying for big, cool with small. As he puts it on the title track, “Sometimes it takes a little courage and doubt/To push your boundaries out beyond your imaginings.” Get comfortable aging alongside Flowers as his Talmudic wisdom deepens.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Dave Keuning played guitar on “Running Towards a Place.”

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Three 6 Mafia’s tireless frontman has done it all as an artist and collaborator, which is why it’s disappointing to see him combat his ageless production with uninspired guest features on his new deluxe album.

The Hustle Still Continues

Juicy J has been everywhere. From selling mixtapes with his Three 6 Mafia groupmates on the streets of Memphis to making pop songs with Katy Perry and Fall Out Boy on his way to the Billboard Hot 100 top 10; from rapping about demonic occultism to winning an Oscar for Best Original Song at the Academy Awards. Three 6 Mafia stampeded into the rap game with sinister horrorcore lyrics in the mid-’90s, not mimicking extraterrestrial life like OutKast or the gritty, low-riding Houston music of UGK but rather, showing us that a Southern group could create raps that make us squeamish. Their deliveries were cold, their pianos brooding, as if they were narrating a horror film, and the new generation has respectfully copied their style. Denzel Curry riffed Three 6 Mafia cover art, and Isaiah Rashad’s “Lay Wit Ya” samples “Ridin N Da Chevy.”
But ever since Three 6 Mafia disbanded, Juicy J has abandoned the pursuit of cohesive solo albums and instead opted for blockbuster collaborations that can get him chart placement. There is no doubt that the dynamic keyboards that Juicy made famous as a producer have become a staple in the rap game. That’s why, on his deluxe album, The Hustle Still Continues, it’s disappointing to see him combat such ageless production with uninspired guest features.
Rico Nasty and the late former Three 6 member Lord Infamous appear on “Take It,” where Nasty—an artist who raps like she’s having a shouting match with her therapist—is solid with her frenetic delivery. But the repetitive, unimaginative chorus makes the song sound like a worse version of “Juicy J Can’t,” from the Blue Dream & Lean tape. Logic, who somehow is featured on two songs (as well as an adlib that becomes a nuisance), remains an underwhelming rapper with lines that inspire a fake laugh and a head shake like in a Seinfeld scene (“Was never one for the academics/But knew the everyday struggle,” he raps). “She Gon Pop It” meanwhile pairs Ty Dolla $ign and Megan Thee Stallion—an interesting matchup on paper. But Ty’s melodic alchemy doesn’t gel with what a vocally-pounding rapper like Megan can do. It’s a missed opportunity on an album that has a few of them.
Juicy J remains naturally charismatic. He can tell a silly story and keep you engaged like an uncle at the cookout. He is never trying too hard, and it works. On “Kicked In’,” he recalls a time he took too many mushrooms, rapping, “I done ate too many grams, it got me out here geekin’/Hit the weed to calm me down, but that shit got me tweakin’”—a tale that might have been on a Three 6 album or two. (He then adds that he needs to head back home because he got a text from his “old lady.”) It’s a lighthearted narrative that’s effective from a rap legend who’s blossomed into a legitimate hitmaker. Juicy J is 46 years old. And contrary to belief, rap isn’t just a young person’s genre. The older generations can still drop quality work. But going from a 15-track album to a 25-track project doesn’t do Juicy J any favors here. Instead of building upon a decent record, he turns it into a cash grab.

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Hip-hop video entrepreneur Cole Bennett directs an inevitable, overstuffed album with a lot of big-name features and little curatorial vision.

All Is Yellow

You can spot a Lyrical Lemonade video before you see the bright cartoon carton in the corner. Over the past decade, 27-year-old Cole Bennett has wedged his way into the hip-hop landscape—first as a high schooler hungry for the latest releases and then, quickly, as a director who could anoint a new artist, or at least a new single, with a propulsive, technicolor video. Watch enough of his work and you’ll recognize his go-to moves: the swirl of neon as a sneaker streaks across tile, the animated jolt that brings a chain wiggling to life, the isolated words that twitch dramatically into the foreground. Bennett knows how to zero in on what’s working in a song, how to amplify the mood or emotional register that makes it compelling. With this, he’s built an empire; he reportedly turned down a $30 million offer to retain control of Lyrical Lemonade as the video production house expanded to include merch, a festival, and now, inevitably, an album: All Is Yellow.
Bennett has an undeniable gift for recognizing nascent talent—his videos provided early signal boosts to rappers like Juice WRLD and Ski Mask the Slump God. In theory, he could harness that skill to power an album, to curate a dynamic tracklist that captures some distinct point of view about the sound of rap today. Instead, he stuffs 35 artists into 14 tracks, most of which feel like half-baked thought experiments. Gus Dapperton and Lil Yachty? Why not! Jack Harlow and Dave? They have zero chemistry, but hey, maybe! Sheck Wes hurls ad-libs in the background of “Fly Away” before JID shows up to rattle off melodramatic mixed metaphors: “The journey is a battle/The travel is evil/Let’s spread our wings/Fly like an eagle.” Gothboiclique’s Lil Tracy clumsily interpolates Blink-182. The total effect is cramped and frenetic and unrelenting, like a Jenga tower that collapses over and over and just keeps adding pieces to the pile.
After a while, chaos becomes its own kind of consistency. But it’s hard to discern a purpose in the album’s thicket of lukewarm beats and sporadic bursts of melody. “Hummingbird” comes out of nowhere, with UMI cooing a treacly verse (“It’s been a while since I was 17 again”). Juicy J’s lecture at the end of “First Night,” a convoluted diatribe against one night stands, is even more confusing. Lil Durk’s melodic flow gets boiled down to a spangly punchline: “I’m trying to prove that I’m a star!” All Is Yellow mostly seems like an attempt to justify its own existence, as if enough high-profile features can amount to a spectacle. Sometimes it almost works; there’s a thrill in hearing Eminem’s voice right after Cordae and Juice WRLD finish rapping over his “Role Model” beat, or in the way Lil Yachty commands attention as he glides through “Fallout.” What’s conspicuously missing is Bennett’s ability to highlight these moments that make a given artist feel unique and worthy of your time; he flattens the lot, then stacks them all together.


Released in 1991, the Milwaukee trio’s fifth album marked a return to the misfit anthems that had made the Femmes cult heroes in the first place.

Violent Femmes: Why Do Birds Sing? (Deluxe Edition)

Why Do Birds Sing? (Deluxe Edition)

Do you like American music? Gordon Gano sure does, and he wants to tell you all about it on the Violent Femmes’ fifth and second-best album, Why Do Birds Sing? Opener “American Music” starts with a rushed count-off and a slow chorus, and then the Milwaukee trio launches into a celebration of pop songs in all their weird majesty, undercutting any nostalgia with a healthy dose of self-deprecation. Of course, that title points to a vast ocean of notes and melodies and rhythms, all of which the Femmes attempt to cram into three minutes and fifty seconds. The song is overstuffed, in the best way possible, with knowing nods to Phil Spector’s wall of sound and Aaron Copland’s everyman symphonies, Motown and Sun Records, blues and jazz and girl groups, folk and punk and psychedelia, and those out-of-the-way scenes that produce oddball combinations of these various traditions.
In other words, the song is everything the Violent Femmes do better than anyone else. “American Music” has their habitual street-busker approximations of pop trends, as well as the acoustic punk shuffle that immediately became their signature. Most of all, it’s got Gano playing the sympathetic creep, but this time he’s creeping on his favorite songs. The son of a preacher and a Broadway actress, he loved old hymns and old blues and weird folk even when he was an awkward teen scrawling lyrics in his school notebook. Those obsessions persisted into adulthood with the Femmes, along with a very particular strain of teenage alienation those songs address: neediness mixed with snottiness, anxiety mingled with bravado, rebellion duking it out with conformity. All of those ugly feelings made the Femmes one of the great post-punk bands of the early 1980s, with one of the most confidently eccentric debuts of the decade.
But “American Music” is not simply a mission statement. It’s also something like an apology for the purposefully obscure albums that followed their first album. They saved all their weird-ass Americana for their sophomore album, Hallowed Ground, which sounds like it was made by a band that just huffed the contents of The Anthology of American Folk Music. It’s full of skewed hymns like “Jesus Walking on the Water” and bizarre murder ballads like “Country Death Songs.” Albums three and four lacked even that power to alienate, however, revealing a group harried and unfocused after years of relentless touring.
In other words, they knew Why Do Birds Sing? would necessarily mark a comeback, and 30 years later it still hits with the force of a band finally getting back to what it does best. Working with producer Michael Beinhorn—best known for helming albums by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Soundgarden—the Femmes pared back down to a trio, with Gano on guitar, Brian Ritchie on acoustic bass, bouzouki, and a thousand other random instruments, and Victor DeLorenzo on brushed snare. Each song contains clever musical flourishes, like the tympani on “American Music,” the jangly Byrds guitar on “Look Like That,” and the soft-rock Eagles harmonies that disrupt “I’m Free,” but every song is grounded in that familiar acoustic stew. Drawing from the deep pool of songs the misfit Gano wrote back in high school (where he allegedly wore a bathrobe to class every Monday), it builds on the gangly grooves of their debut, finds new inspiration in the detritus of American pop culture, and finally gets around to the business of growing up.
And for the most part it works. The oddball suicide anthem “Out the Window” sounds like a Gashlycrumb Tinies panel set to music, both humorous and grim as Gano ponders the human inclination toward self-annihilation. “Hey Nonny Nonny” rewrites a staple of 16th-century verse as an outcast’s ode (he really was paying attention in English class), but even better is his rewrite of a much more recent poem: Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” The band alters the lyrics to include some nonsense (“What’s your favorite color of your favorite car?” could be a Marc Bolan pickup line) and to better match Gano’s persona, but that only makes it more affectionate than ironic. He sounds like your friend singing along to the radio and mangling the words, which speaks to something essential about the Violent Femmes: Even when he’s got a clever lyrical conceit, Gano always comes across as relatable, less like a rock star and more like your friend who has a car. Behind his pimpled nihilism lies a disarming sense of empathy.
There is, of course, a fine line between bitter and fucked up, between anguished and sinister. The Violent Femmes toed that line on previous records, but a few moments on Why Do Birds Sing? slip into ugliness. A live favorite from their earliest shows, “Girl Trouble” sounds like the theme to an Elvis beach movie porn parody, but its refrain—“I got girl trouble! Up the ass!”—is juvenile rather than jubilant. “Dance Motherfucker Dance!” is a three-minute joke without a punchline, and “Fat,” a live cut on the bonus disc, entertains an ugly revenge scenario: “I hope you get fat,” Gano taunts, but only so she’ll be less desirable and therefore desperate enough to take him back.
“More Money Tonight,” the album’s climax and the live disc’s encore, remains squirrelly 30 years later, impossible to pin down. “I always felt that I was different, always thought that was good,” Gano sings, and for a brief second you get a sense of him as the bathrobe-clad teenager whose sense of wonder is only just being squelched by the larger world. But then the song descends into a revenge scenario, as he proclaims himself a rock star who’ll “make more money tonight than you’ve ever dreamed of.” Scrawled across the back of his algebra homework, such a lyric might be relatable, but when the Femmes play the song onstage, it seems awfully petty. Gano briefly becomes unsympathetic—a calculating rock star rather than an obsessive fan. On the other hand, this is the Violent Femmes we’re talking about. They weren’t exactly Bon Jovi in the ’80s; they weren’t even Soul Asylum in the ’90s. So maybe they know the joke’s on them for using their modest cult status to mock the haters. It’s certainly powerful to hear so many people singing excitedly along to Gano’s loner anthems, celebrating that feeling of being different that they all have in common.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On the Pains of Being Pure at Heart's third album, Days of Abandon, frontman Kip Berman is a young romantic in a state of flux. Once a starry-eyed daydreamer pitching woo at anybody in earshot, Berman now sounds like a guy who's  looking to reconcile his youthful idealism with the complexities and complications of post-adolescent coupling.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Days of Abandon

Days of Abandon

On their third album, Days of Abandon, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart frontman Kip Berman is a young romantic in a state of flux. The Pains' still-stellar self-titled debut and 2011's Flood-helmed, fully Corgan-ized Belong put precious little distance between Berman's heart and his sleeve: these were head-spinning, chest-swelling records, drunk on romance, dizzy with possibility. Abandon doesn't completely ditch the heart-bursting intensity that powered the Pains' previous work, but it's no longer its driving force. Once a starry-eyed daydreamer pitching woo at anybody in earshot, Berman now sounds like a guy who's seen his share of heartbreak, and is looking to reconcile his youthful idealism with the complexities and complications of post-adolescent coupling.
For some, Belong's buzzsawing guitars and brazenly romantic lyrics were all just a bit much. Still, given the leap between the debut's mid-fi melodrama and Belong's amplified alt-rock ambitions, it seemed only natural that Berman might take the Pains into bigger, more bombastic places on his new record—and that notion dissolves just a few seconds into "Art Smock", Abandon's delicate, Felt-referencing opener. From the very first notes, Abandon is subtler, more graceful and, sure, more "mature" than any Pains record before it. The spindly, hushed "Smock" might just be the single most delicate song in the Pains catalog, but more tellingly, it's easily the most nostalgic as well, a sweet-and-sour remembrance of a relationship-that-wasn't. So many of Berman's songs seem to take place in the immediate present: whatever's being felt, it's being felt right then and now, and the vibe of "all we have is this moment" gives his best songs their crackling urgency. Up against those early records, "Smock" feels more reflective, more wistful. It's a look at the present through the lens of the past, in which Berman allows lived-in experience step in and take over for all that untempered passion.
This fine-tuning of Berman's emotional outpouring—more pragmatic, less excitable—carries throughout much of Abandon. "Tell me that we're still so young," Berman sighs atop the high-test twee of "Beautiful You", before adding, "But you’re wrong, so wrong." On "Until the Sun Explodes", Berman's in a hospital room, at the bedside of his betrothed, making big promises. This is hardly Berman's first song about unwavering devotion, but with its implication of mutual addiction and somewhat startling reference to "funeral clothes", it's probably his most complicated. As he sings on bouncy lead single "Simple and Sure," Berman wants something that just feels "absolutely right." But that's the ideal, not necessarily the reality; sometimes, things get messy, and you wind up gurney-side, looking on helplessly as the object of your affection breathes through a tube. These wrinkles—anxious memories, telling recollections, none-too-idyllic scenes from the past—are all over Abandon. Berman's certainly turned in sweeter, more rousing sets, but he's never written anything that feels quite so true to life.
In the wake of Belong, Pains underwent a fairly seismic personnel shift: several original members—singer/keyboardist Peggy Wang, guitarist Chris Hochheim and bassist Alex Naidus —have either left the band or taken diminished roles, leaving just the core lineup of Berman and drummer Kurt Feldman. On Abandon, the pair are joined by Beirut's Kelly Pratt and A Sunny Day in Glasgow singer Jen Goma; when she's not matching Berman harmony-for-harmony, Goma—like Wang before her—takes the lead on several of these tracks. Goma's sweet yet knowing tone makes a good foil for Berman's delicate heart-to-hearts, as her spry turn on the buoyant "Kelly" is maybe Abandon's finest moment, its sputtering drumbeat at one point all but backing up just to make sure it doesn't miss anything she's saying.
Musically, Abandon's the fizziest Pains record yet. Gone are the plumes of distortion, and in their place there's a crisp, effervescent gallop, splitting its time between dreamy balladry and spotless indie-pop. Granted, it's not all perfect: the sun-dappled insurance-commercial chug of the too-rousing-by-half "Coral and Gold" gets smothered by its own bombast, while elsewhere, Pratt's lighter touches fade gently into the background. But there's a newfound patience to just about everything else here, a deliberate, well-heeled sound that sits well with Berman's more ruminative lyrical turns.
On first contact, Abandon can come across as muted and brittle, lacking the laid-bare emotional charge that carried its predecessors. Berman's in fine voice (faux-British accent and all) throughout Abandon, and—the overblown "Coral and Gold" aside—these melodies are sturdy, even regal. But it's certainly a less thrilling record than what came before it, more refinement than reinvention, more likely to gather its thoughts than spill them out to anyone within earshot. the fact that Berman didn't try to outdo the grandiose Belong is a good thing, but Abandon can't help but come across as a transitional record, the first entrant in the Pains' "mature" period, with the promise of more to come.
Berman's called Abandon the most personal Pains record to date, and there's no reason to doubt him: he's applying the lessons of his own life to this music, all the tiny triumphs and harrowing heartbreaks that come from being young and in love. So as good as Abandon is, one can't help but think the more he goes through, the richer and more resonant his music will become. "He’d come to my garret, and we’d make something like love," Goma recalls halfway through the bustling "Life After Life". Still, she says, "The flowers he gave me have wilted/ But I keep them, like I keep him." Some love lasts forever; most dries up like tulips in a vase—but with every heartbreak comes a well-earned lesson, a souvenir to keep until the next one comes along. On Abandon, an increasingly wizened Berman seems to've picked up plenty.


Three albums in, the Oregon-based multi-instrumentalist still sounds as though she’s composing music en plein air.

Invitation

The American pop psychoanalyst Thomas Moore wrote that each of us have three selves: the Eternal Self, who arrives at birth and never changes; the Practical Self, who is shaped by events and experiences; and the Unfolding Self, who is yet to be. On her third album, Oregon-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Heather Woods Broderick is most concerned with this third self. Having found Moore’s ideas recorded in her mother’s diaries, Broderick inspirits her third album, Invitation, with his belief that one must reject passivity and persistently choose to accept life’s invitation. Though it is unstinting in its beauty, at times the album feels like Broderick was too lethargic to RSVP.
Having spent the majority of her musical career as a backing singer for the likes of Sharon Van Etten and Alela Diane, as well as playing with Horse Feathers and Efterklang, Broderick’s first challenge is to stand apart from her own backdrop. She shares in the concern that her voice is all too easily subsumed by her scenery, and often, it’s a deliberate kind of defeat. “I take it my words are getting lost rolling over my tongue,” she sings on “Nightcrawler.” “I Try” makes her efforts plain: She wants to keep her unfolding self alive not by being “the motionless body of the honeybee, but to have the stinger in me.”
Growing up alongside brother Peter (himself a prolific member of the Portland indie-folk scene) amid the disparate sounds of the Maine countryside—nightjaws cawing, pine trees tossing in the wind—Broderick’s early sense of song was inextricably tied to her natural surroundings. Three albums in, she still sounds as though she’s composing music en plein air. Where 2015’s Glider carved canyonscapes of echoey electric guitar, Invitation recreates the landscape of the Oregon coast. Strings create the album’s wind, while Broderick’s piano arpeggios sound like waves redistributing pebbles and her airy backing vocals engender a sense of three-dimensional space. It’s a kind of musical landscaping not entirely dissimilar to that of Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, who once compared himself to a gardener: “Listening to my music can be compared with walking through a garden and experiencing the changes in light, pattern, and texture.”
Broderick’s landscape is imputed with feeling, which she recalls with geographical specificity on “Nightcrawler”: “It all takes me back to when I was in a moment of love/Thirteen miles outside Athenry, on the way to my brother’s house.” Each track is augmented with naturalistic details, whether the ricocheting percussion that marks footsteps on “A Stilling Wind” or the orchestra of crickets ushering day into twilight on “Daydream,” but Broderick’s quiet subjectivity hardly imposes itself. Her voice sounds shaky and uncertain on opener “A Stilling Wind” as she feels her “feet swinging in the atmosphere,” and on the string-heavy “Quicksand,” overpowering instrumentation swallows her up completely.
As a songwriter, Broderick thrives in the abstract rather than the pictorial and representational. Her recollections dither between specific and poetic, but her lines seldom seem to cut through. Much of the imagery she ekes from the landscape turns to cliché; a gull “with broken wings/Fever and dreaming of flying away” on “Quicksand”; “fleeting as sun-dappled water” on “My Sunny One.” “White Tail” might be the album’s best song, as Broderick’s elongated vocals take up welcome space at its center. “To remain, in a swollen sphere of all things,” she sings, striking a sumptuous presence over gently brushed drums. Then, in a moment of vitality, she strikes her piano keys in quick repetition; set against the sounds of slide guitar and crickets at dusk, the song sounds almost as deliriously romantic as Yo La Tengo’s instrumental “Green Arrow.”
In turning to pop psychology and her mother’s old journals, Broderick makes it clear she was looking for answers. Sometimes it feels like a futile effort. Despite Invitation’s cinematic and often successful composition, Broderick succumbs to the passivity she’s supposedly working to renounce. The songs are ambient rather than immediate, more decorative than they are distinct. The title track comes as an exception, as Broderick cries out “I accept” in a voice that feels pained, present, unfolding. The rest of Invitation seldom finds equal vigor.


The debut EP from TikTok’s favorite teenage shoegazer includes breakout song “Your face” and other delicate acts of genre worship.

Pandora EP

No one can tear TikTok scrollers away from their cherished dust bunny shoegaze—not fatigue, not the U.S. Senate. Gen Z loves the ashen ’90s rock subgenre as dearly as a worn pair of Uggs, and through TikTok, they’ve helped facilitate its contemporary revival. But if every teen were suited to spreading the good word, there’d be fewer paintings of Joan of Arc. Not everyone can have the reach of 19-year-old Natalie Lu, known as Wisp, whose 2023 debut single “Your face” led to thousands of TikTok plays and, now, Interscope releasing her first EP, Pandora.
For a while, “Your face” inspired people to post sullen slideshows demanding romance and videos lusting after pink supermarket cookies. The song, currently approaching 50 million Spotify streams, is a spring storm; its vocals sound soaked and distant like a lost dove or Deftones, and its guitar parts are made of chilled spiderwebs or Souvlaki. The months passed. Wisp assured fans that she was “a broke college student,” not an industry plant, and then she got signed. Now her TikTok and Instagram are full of shades of blue and angel wings—world-building for Pandora, which includes “Your face” and other delicate acts of shoegaze worship. But Pandora never becomes more interesting than that.
So every song on Pandora expertly fries its wistful melodies and Lu’s breathy voice hangs over them like a snowdrop. “See you soon” starts with the sound of the whistling wind and ends with Lu swearing, “I’d give all the stars to see you soon.” It creaks and stings—it does feel good to listen to. The most attractive aspect of shoegaze is how it takes shiny, sexy things—sports car guitar riffs, thunderclap drums, Kazu Makino’s singing voice—and covers them in pond scum. The point of this sopping-wet distortion is to make you believe you have an anonymous valentine: You don’t need the glamor of rock’n’roll, because restraint is more impressive.
But shapeless repetition… not so much. That’s the issue with a cotton-ball wall of sound like “Enough for you,” which follows “Your face” and is generally indistinguishable from it. Like the rest of Pandora, “Enough for you” floats on Lu’s windchime vocals and a loose guitar loop; it sounds like untwisting a Twizzler, and that’s about as deep as it goes. “Your eyes gaze into mine/But sparks don’t seem to fly,” Lu exhales like she’s sleep-talking. Another sweet nothing on an EP frosted with them.
But what about the other things—the painful things, the rejection, the dark nights and sinister crows—that Wisp’s favorite references, bands like Have a Nice Life and Whirr, turn into unforgettable art? Pandora doesn’t touch them. The EP has a filter on, reusing only the prettiest parts of shoegaze without expanding on it. That’s the point of a lot of music on TikTok, to be fair—to luxuriate in evocation. It won’t progress a genre or your life, but few things do. No need to quit your daydream. There’s love in it, at least.


Just six months after their seismic Big Black Coat, the Canadian electronic duo shifts into a lower gear but stays on the vanguard.

Kiss Me All Night EP

Big Black Coat was the sound of Junior Boys injecting their trademark sound (blue-eyed electro-soul and bedroom-confessional IDM) with techno vigor. Six months after Canadian electronic duo released their most stylistic quantum leap of their career, the Kiss Me All Night EP returns to the quiet, introspective feel Junior Boys were known for, all without compromising on their recent musical advancements. This isn't a record to light up the dance floor; it’s a record you put on at the beginning of the night, with its more minimal, ear-expanding instrumentation acting as a preamble to the harder, faster beats to come.
That’s not to say that Kiss Me All Night completely drops Junior Boys’ newfound edge, it just dials back the rave. It draws more on European traditions of deconstructing dance music, rather the hot-blooded abandon other artists may see as the genre’s purpose. Teasing this border has always been an ace up Junior Boys’ sleeve, like on the EP’s opening track, “Yes.” The song coldly spirals around a recurring sample of a slurred vocal repeating “yeah” over and over, the pulsing synth swells becoming more and more hypnotic with each listen. Frontman Jeremy Greenspan’s whisper-croon weaves around the sample, always a blend between passionate lover and emotional car wreck. “Baby Fat” also makes good use of his vocals, as he softly sings of loves lost supported by a pop-rock guitar riff like something Lionel Richie would have pulled out in the mid-’80s.
The centerpiece here is “Some People Are Crazy,” the closest thing Junior Boys will ever come to a power ballad, which it turns out sounds a lot like a tropical house banger slowed down 200 percent and thrown into the deep end of the Milky Way. It’s a cover of a song by British soft-rock icon John Martyn, a subtle touchstone for Junior Boys’ bookishly futuristic funk. Warm tones bubble atop a skittish drum beat that easily drifts through the middle of the record. While the original is a masterclass in electric piano and ultra-slack bass lines, the band have done a stellar job at folding “Some People Are Crazy” into their own mythology, retaining just enough of its retro feel to keep the through line between the past and the present. Recently, Junior Boys have adopted Prince as a rather prominent influence, but while Big Black Coat dipped into the Purple One’s electro-tinged “Controversy”-era, the languorously sexy “Kiss Me All Night” recalls the emotional maturity and erotic playfulness of *Parade**, *with its metronomic disco beat and robotic keyboard stabs.
Since the songs on Kiss Me All Night are good enough to warrant an official release but don’t quite mesh with the boldness of Big Black Coat, the EP feels a little light—at worst, an addendum, at best, a victory lap. However, it is still another transformation for Junior Boys, more proof that by continuously and decidedly evolving their musical identity, they will continue spinning gold out of their detail-oriented, almost scientific approach to dance music.


Neil Young's Tonight's the Night is a harrowing record about loss and death. Yet it often sounds like a raucous party thrown by a bunch of lovable knuckleheads having the time of their life.

Tonight's the Night

In February 1972, Neil Young put out an album called Harvest and it became massive, going platinum and becoming the best-selling album of the year. In addition to changing Young’s position in the marketplace, the album’s runaway success made a mark on record shopping for years to come. Anyone who went to a store before the vinyl revival began in earnest can tell you that used copies of Harvest were utterly ubiquitous—like Cat Stevens’ Teaser and the Firecat and Carole King’s Tapestry, there was seemingly no thrift shop or garage sale without one. With Harvest, Young built on the commercial breakthrough of his work with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, mixing two sounds beloved by aging baby boomers—rootsy country-rock and intimate singer/songwriter folk. Harvest was the right record for this weird, post-‘60s moment, and a shaggy Canadian singer-songwriter with the shaky voice was suddenly something approaching a pop star.
Harvest had its share of wistful and breezy songs, but a number on the second side called “The Needle and the Damage Done” was a sign of things to come. It was a song, in part, about guitarist, singer, and songwriter Danny Whitten, Young’s friend and a member of his frequent backing band, Crazy Horse, specifically Whitten’s addiction to heroin. “The Needle and the Damage Done,” recorded live in concert and solo, set a template for a certain kind of song about drug abuse: It’s beautiful, elegiac, precise—a focused lament written with a great deal of craft, like Elliott Smith’s “Needle in the Hay” or U2's "Running to Stand Still." While he always excelled at this style, Young’s approach to songwriting was about to shift drastically. “‘Heart of Gold’ put me in the middle of the road,” he famously wrote of Harvest’s big single in the liner notes to his 1977 collection Decade, perhaps thinking of his album in the bins next to those by massive sellers by Cat Stevens and Carole King. “Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch.” Tonight’s the Night, a noisy, harrowing scrape along the guardrail that sends sparks flying upward, was Young’s most moving dispatch from his chosen place.
As summer turned to fall in 1973, 18 months after Harvest hit stores, Neil Young was 27 years old. He was learning that bad things can start to happen when you reach your late twenties, especially when you’re drinking too much and doing too many drugs and are hanging around people who do the same. Your late twenties is when you might find that certain people who once seemed like “they like to party” are going much further, and the situation is getting dangerous. Bodies that seemed indestructible in youth start to give out; good times suddenly aren’t so good anymore. In August of ’73, when Young started the sessions that produced the bulk of Tonight’s the Night, he found himself in the heart of such a scene, and the center could not hold.
Two events in the previous 10 months had shaken Young to his core, and they shaped how this album came to be and how it was heard. In November 1972, Young was rehearsing the band he dubbed the Stray Gators to take them on tour in support of Harvest. Whitten was asked to join the group but it quickly became clear that his addiction had advanced to the point where playing shows was impossible, so Young fired him and gave him $50 and a plane ticket back to Los Angeles. Whitten died of an overdose of valium and alcohol within a day, and Young was overcome with guilt about his friend’s death. In June of ’73, two months before the Tonight’s the Night sessions, Bruce Berry, a roadie for Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young and beloved member of Young’s particular L.A. scene, died of an overdose of heroin.
So Tonight’s the Night comes freighted with a certain amount of legend, and people generally encounter it now through the lens of 40 years of rock writing. If you’ve read enough about music, you’ve read the above “ditch” comment, and you’ll have it somewhere in your mind the first time you press “play” or lower the turntable arm. The general understanding on Tonight’s the Night is that it’s dark, it’s depressing, a record about loss and destruction and the end. If you listen to it knowing these things, you’re in for a surprise. Because it is those things, but it’s also so much more. Tonight’s the Night is shocking the first time you hear it because for a record on the receiving end of so much first-generation rock criticism focusing on its sorrow and grief, it often sounds like a raucous party being thrown by a bunch of lovable knuckleheads having the time of their life.
After the repetition of the opening “tonight’s the night” refrain on the opening title track, the first two words on the album are “Bruce Berry,” and the album’s connection to Young’s deceased friend go deeper. In August ’73, after some sessions at the L.A.’s Sunset Sound, Young decided a proper studio wasn’t the right setting for the album he had in mind. So Young’s producer David Briggs had the idea to record at a Studio Instrument Rentals, which was started by Bruce Berry and his brother Ken. In addition to renting equipment, S.I.R. had a small practice space in the back with an elevated stage. A mobile recording truck was parked behind the building and a hole was knocked in the wall to run cable to the truck. Young’s band now consisted of the Crazy Horse rhythm section of Billy Talbot on bass and Ralph Molina on drums, young guitarist and sometime Crazy Horse member Nils Lofgren, and steel guitar player Ben Keith, who had worked with Young in Nashville on Harvest. Over the course of a month, they’d assemble in the evening with Briggs at S.I.R. to drink and do drugs and play pool and shoot the shit until they were ready to climb onstage and make music.
The Tonight’s the Night songs recorded in the practice space were cut live in this fashion, with no overdubs and minimal editing, and the album itself is one of the most sonically raw albums ever released by a major artist. The band is loose and well-oiled. At times Young is too close or too far away from the microphone, and his voice is often straining at the upper end of his range. Young was recording the month after Steely Dan had released Countdown to Ecstasy, and the rich possibilities of the recording studio were reaching a zenith, but he was recording in a dimly-lit room with a drunk band in the back of a retail store, noisily banging into microphone stands on takes that would eventually be used on an album by a label owned by Warner Brothers.
This off-the-cuff feel defines the album. Working with Young, producer David Briggs was about capturing performances, not making records. The album begins with a ghostly bit of tinkling piano and guitar that sounds like a brief warm-up, the kind of thing that would be cut from any record without a second thought. But here it’s perfect, lending the kind of “here we go!” feeling of the best album-openers. Young’s words on Berry are personal and almost uncomfortably specific, basically saying, “Here was this man; here is what he did, and now he’s gone.” Young talks about Berry picking up Young’s guitar and singing late at night after gigs when everyone was gone, and being moved deeply by a voice that was “as real as the day was long.” That kind of “realness” is the animating idea of this album. The meticulous craftsmanship that had carried Young to the top with Harvest had no place here; now it was time to make some noise.
Tonight’s the Night is an album not so much about death as about mourning. And while we might like to think of mourning as a dignified pursuit grounded in ritual—a black veil, food at the door, loved ones at beck and call—the truth is that mourning can be messy and out of control and it can sometimes look like something else entirely. Sometimes mourning can even look like a macabre celebration, embracing life with one arm while the black figure of death is curled inside the other. That’s where Young and his band found themselves during this period. “Lookout Joe,” one of a couple of songs on Tonight’s the Night recorded in December ’72, has a couplet that conveys the record’s reckless spirit perfectly: “Remember Bill from up on the hill?/A Cadillac put a hole in his arm/But old Bill, he’s up there still/Havin’ a ball rollin’ to the bottom.”
A few songs seem at first to exist more for the people playing them than the listener, but that conspiratorial sense of community between the musicians turns out to be a huge part of the appeal. “Speakin’ Out” is the sound of a band feeling their way through the most basic chord changes possible, the kind of structure even the most intoxicated and most damaged musician could handle with no problem. The meaning lies in hearing these people in this room playing together, the feeling they conjure by the presence, and not in Young’s lines like “I went to the movie the other night/The plot was groovy, it was out of sight.” Tonight's the Night's beauty lies in its imperfections. “Mellow My Mind” has a similarly unfinished feel, but the strain of Young’s voice is so palpable, every half-baked couplet swollen with ache, that it’s almost unbearably affecting.
“Roll Another Number (For the Road)” is a song about the end of a long night of incapacitating inebriation performed by a band that sounds like they’ve just experienced a long night of incapacitating inebriation. Young has always been, on one level, of the hippie generation’s true believers—he did, after all, title the first volume of his memoir Waging Heavy Peace. But he can just as often be repelled by the soft-headedness of the movement. “I’m not goin’ back to Woodstock for a while,” he sings on “Roll Another Number,” explaining that he’s “a million miles away/From that helicopter day.” The road so many of his generation had taken led him here, drunk on a dark stage singing songs about death and loss to nobody.
Sometimes songs are knocked together and passed around, something to be used as much as something performed. And for songs like these, you grab whatever’s at hand. Such a loose and generous approach led Young to a place where he could lift the melody of a song someone else had written wholesale and call his creation “Borrowed Tune” without shame or apology. “I’m singing my borrowed tune, I took from the Rolling Stones/Alone in this empty room, too wasted to write my own,” he sings over minimal piano, voicing a melody first found on the Jagger/Richards composition “Lady Jane.” Young’s Stones’ interpolation and blues changes suggest that the building blocks of music belong to us all, and we should take what we need and turn the raw material into a new expression. That feeling, of the possibility of transformation, extends to the record as a whole. There are so many loose ends, frayed connections, and smudgy borders, no single song has any one specific meaning. Listening to the album becomes an act of authorship, as its slurred words and pugnacious spirit are mapped onto your own life.
Ben Keith’s pedal steel guitar playing is often astonishing in its beauty, which provides a layer of tension with the often-sloppy playing and rough sonics. In Keith’s hands, the pedal steel imbues every song with a symphonic grandeur, and also a feeling of life-affirming dignity. His show-stopping number here is the gorgeous ballad “Albuquerque.” While Young sings about disappearing western landscape (“So I’ll stop when I can/Find some fried eggs and country ham/I’ll find somewhere/Where they don’t care who I am”), Keith conjures up huge, rich clouds of notes. No matter what else is happening on a given song, how loud the party gets, Keith lends a note of pathos, ensuring that the undercurrent of grief remains.
Whitten’s loss is honored by the inclusion of “(Come on Baby, Let’s Go) Downtown,” a song he composed with Young and sings, heard here on a version recorded at a 1970 Neil Young and Crazy Horse gig. That “Downtown” wound up on Tonight’s the Night is kind of a twisted joke, because the song itself, despite being a joyous rave-up, is actually about scoring heroin. Whitten’s death seems impossible when this song crackles with so much life. It’s both a celebration and a lament. Hearing their voices in unison on the chorus is a kind of prayer, two music lifers realizing in a moment the power of what they could do together. And the album as a whole takes this idea and extends it outward, first to Young’s fellow musicians, and then to us.
The three albums later grouped together as “The Ditch Trilogy” include the 1973 live album Time Fades Away (culled from the shows Whitten had hoped to play on) and 1974’s On the Beach. They are very different documents bound together by the force of Young’s vision. Though Tonight’s the Night was recorded before On the Beach, it wouldn’t be released for another two years. This turned out to be to the album’s advantage, because its final presentation highlighted the fact that it was snapshot of a moment in time, and gave Young the opportunity to inflate its myth.
When it finally emerged, it came inside one of rock’s greatest sleeves, a spooky high contrast black-and-white photo of Young printed on blotter paper. On the LP itself, the Reprise label, usually tan, was black, and there were cryptic carvings in the run-out groove, “Hello Waterface“ in the A-side and “Goodbye Waterface” on the B. An insert included with album features notes from Young with a sort of apology (“I’m sorry. You don’t know these people. This means nothing to you.”) and a lengthy article about Young written in Dutch.
The article, as it turns out, was a harsh pan of a show from Young’s tour following the completion of the Tonight’s the Night material, undertaken a year and a half before the album’s release. These shows, which are now the stuff of legend, were theatrical. “The stage set was very strange,” reads a translation of the liner notes. “At the back a large palm tree; next to the piano and loudspeakers were hanging all sorts of women’s boots and there were hubcaps laid all around. We were in total darkness when Neil and his band—Ben Keith, Nils Lofgren, Ralph Molina & Billy Talbot took the stage and slowly began playing the 1st number ‘Tonight’s the Night.’ The sound was miserable, the band’s coordination was miserable and Neil’s piano and singing were miserable." During these shows, Young would often mix songs with long rants about his deceased friends. He was toying with his place in the entertainment machine, trying to figure out how to sneak these heavier feelings in. His “Miami Beach” routine was a way of externalizing the artifice of your typical music performance to make the real feelings at the core that much more intense. It was a rock show designed to feel like a seance, a way of communing with the dead.
But in the end, Tonight’s the Night is really a record about life. Like a drunk at the end of a long night or a boxer barely on their feet, the record staggers, stumbles, and lunges forward; it’s prevailing mode is “unsteady.” Nothing lands where it should, and it feels like it could collapse at any moment. But while a lurching gait can be a marker of damage or dysfunction, it can also be a sign of defiance. Because some force, whether it's from outside or it’s something you bring on yourself, is trying to cripple you. But guess what: you’re still standing.


Liv.e’s brilliant second album bends her expressive R&B into fearsome new shapes, acknowledging all the nuance and pain on the long journey to personal truth.

Girl in the Half Pearl

Couldn’t Wait to Tell You, Liv.e’s debut LP, flipped through the pages of her diary quickly enough to animate her scattered musings on young romance while preserving each entry’s distinct perspective. Its allure rested on Liv.e’s charismatic storytelling, in her belief that “everybody got a love story” and her ability to play every role in those tales herself. Aggressively non-linear and rich in lo-fi charm, Couldn’t Wait to Tell You kept the proceedings light and easy. Even in the album’s darkest moments, Liv.e never felt more than 30 seconds away from a cathartic breakthrough, rescued by a tempo shift, a false ending, or the affirming words of a guest feature. She tore through dreamy realizations like outfits ripped off a garment rack, theorizing that a change of heart could be as easy as a change of costume.
Girl in the Half Pearl cuts to the scene after the diary slams shut, when your face crashes into the pillow before a long and sleepless night. In place of Couldn’t Wait to Tell You’s rose-tinted psychedelia, Liv.e builds a mirror, surgically examining the ugliest parts of her subconscious and clawing toward her worst impulses and most frightening thoughts. Healing is a minefield of doubt and confusion, crossed only by necessity. Liv.e doesn’t waste time idealizing the process. “When I looked inside my brain, there were all these webs of pain,” she groans on opener “Gardetto.,” somersaulting over a wave of pitch-shifted oh nos. She strains like a petulant child, burnt out before the work even begins: “I just wanna play with my toys/I’m too young for the world’s big problems.” Girl in the Half Pearl delves into the rich tension between deciding to change and taking the first step, dwelling in both the pain and promise of learning things about yourself that you sometimes wish you could forget. It’s a mesmerizing documentation of Liv.e’s ongoing rebirth that dares you to keep your eyes open during the scary parts.
Liv.e heads a formidable ensemble of producers in soundtracking Girl in the Half Pearl’s compounding existential crises, eliciting career-high performances from accomplices new and old. Frequent Remi Wolf collaborator Solomonophonic and West Coast new age keyboardist John Carroll Kirby pull out all the stops for the fluorescent “Wild Animals,” wrapping its knowing eye roll to conniving men in trickling piano and the evergreen warmth of a brushed drum backbeat. Ever-reliable L.A. lysergist Mndsgn carves out a sizable chunk of real estate across the record, but lends a particularly inspired hand to “Find Out.” He digs deep in the crates, unearthing a jazzy, snare-less loop that thumps like an aching heartbeat, giving Liv.e’s decision to trade love’s rollercoaster for “precious time alone” the perfect dose of last-kiss sweetness. She walks away, a trilling synthesizer swirls in the mix, and the gut-wrenching resolve of her parting words (“I guess we’ll find out…the hard way”) cuts like a knife.
But true to the record’s “know thyself” thesis, Liv.e tackles the bulk of the production solo, rediscovering herself through electronica and noise, and dousing her R&B foundations in a stunning coat of fresh paint. The most satisfying moments push her to undertake fearsome experiments with her voice. She crashes into the breakbeats of “Ghost” with a metallic howl, roaring with frustration as she bitterly acknowledges her need for security—and recalls how it was denied to her in the past. “I know I said I don’t need the help/Just wanna get back home,” she cries, and the syllables begin to catch in her throat before suddenly vanishing, swallowed by grief. On “Clowns,” Liv.e lures you into the tense moment before the emotional dam between two people bursts. At the breaking point, teasing percussion and sickly sweet strings erupt into gory pyrotechnics. “Can’t be clowns for this long, so baby what do we make it?” she screams, her words sparking against the blown-out crash of the drums.
For years, Liv.e has found a home among some of Black music’s most critically lauded experimentalists like Earl Sweatshirt, Pink Siifu, and Black Noi$e. If you come to Girl in the Half Pearl looking to find a soothing voice in the wilderness, you will instead find a complex maze of battered beats and warped shouts. The gripping soundscape doesn’t allow you to watch its protagonist’s transformation from the safety of the back row—it shoves you through the screen. If Liv.e’s going to “break the mirror 90 times” because she can’t stand to see herself, you’re going to help her sweep up the glass.
When Liv.e announced Girl in the Half Pearl, she described it as a send-off for “people pleasing” behavior, and the album succeeds precisely because it feels so authentic and uncompromising: designed to serve only the needs of its creator. In burying the tender apology of “Snowing!” under a blanket of static, in applying a different vocal style and post-production technique to each vocal line of “Six Weeks,” in refusing to condense the long struggle of finding yourself into a catchy chorus, Liv.e affects an irresistibly magnetic anti-charm. She leads by example, by meeting herself in the present and holding her own gaze. Girl in the Half Pearl doesn’t fixate on the light at the end of the tunnel. It chisels into the rock slowly, humming along to the sound of each strike.


An eight-disc box set tells the complete story of the talented yet star-crossed UK folk-rock duo, tying up loose ends and illuminating areas previously shrouded in darkness.

Richard and Linda Thompson: Hard Luck Stories (1972-1982)

Hard Luck Stories (1972-1982)

Hard-luck stories are one of Richard Thompson’s specialties. He honed the skill in the 1970s, writing songs with the knowledge that his wife Linda would provide the sugar to sweeten his salt. From a certain perspective, the tale of Richard and Linda Thompson—a partnership that intertwined romance and creativity—is itself a hard-luck story, one plagued by missed opportunities and bad breaks, and culminating in a public divorce.
The eight-disc box set Hard Luck Stories (1972-1982) tells this tale in full, adding a host of rarities to the six studio albums the duo released during their decade as collaborators. It’s the rare box set where the rarities feel integral to the compilation’s impact, tying up loose ends and illuminating areas previously shrouded in darkness.
During their time together, the Thompsons always seemed to be on the verge of greater recognition, yet success eluded them. Some of this can be blamed on circumstances beyond their control: Their debut, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, was held back from the marketplace during the oil shortage of the early 1970s, not appearing in the UK until 1974; it wouldn’t surface in the U.S. until 1976, when it was added as a bonus LP on the since deleted Live (More or Less). Their attempts at bolder, brighter music—1978’s First Light and the following year’s Sunnyvista—satisfied neither the curious nor the dedicated. Once they finally started to gain a wider audience with 1982’s Shoot Out the Lights, the couple’s partnership fell apart; they promoted the album with an American tour even though it was clear that they were long past the end.
All these unlucky turns have tended to cast a pall over the entirety of the duo’s career, as if they were fated to a miserable ending. Certainly, this impression is strengthened by Richard’s proclivity for sad songs and gloom, but Thompson was too guarded and flinty to traffic in open autobiography—even though his music was so unadorned, it was easy to conflate the two. Linda Thompson helped draw distinctions between the writer and the singer, with a clear, keening voice that stood as a counterpoint to Richard’s gruffness.
The first disc of Hard Luck Stories shows a chemistry that was evident at the start, collecting scraps and strays from 1972, the year Richard Thompson left his groundbreaking British folk-rock group Fairport Convention. As he bided his time with the Bunch, a folk-rock supergroup masterminded by Fotheringay’s Trevor Lucas, he was accompanied by Linda Peters, his romantic partner since the end of the 1960s. Somewhere between the Bunch, sessions for Richard’s first solo album, and a series of live performances (some captured here), the couple found time to marry. Once Henry the Human Fly proved to be an ignominious beginning to his career—legend has it that it was the poorest seller at Reprise Records at that point—the Thompsons formalized their collaboration, touring British folk clubs as a pair and cutting an album together.
The resulting I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight is exquisite, balancing the black depths of “Withered and Died” with the spiritual deliverance of “When I Get to the Border.” Omens and misfortune give the record a heavy, foreboding heart, yet the music never quite descends into grimness. Hope lingers on the edges of the title track; the entire affair benefits from the way the Thompsons, surrounded by a sympathetic collection of supporting players, let this otherwise fatalistic, earthbound music breathe. Some of the gloom lifted on the subsequent Hokey Pokey, in which tempos can be jaunty and the songs often play like gimlet-eyed character sketches. Much of the album feels steeped in old British folk traditions—“Smiffy’s Glass Eye” sways like a sea shanty—yet where I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight appears to float outside of time, Hokey Pokey carries scant evidence of its era. “Georgie on a Spree” lopes along on rounded edges, “The Egypt Room” gets considerable mileage out of its desert trappings, and there’s a slight hippie haze to the ballads, particularly the spiritually settled “A Heart Needs a Home."
By the time Hokey Pokey hit stores in 1975, the Thompsons had converted to Sufism, a sect of Islam that renounced materialism in favor of introspection. Fittingly, Pour Down Like Silver, the album the duo recorded prior to an extended retreat in a Sufi community, is an inward affair. So slow and stately that the rhythm section often provides as much texture as momentum, Pour Down Like Silver wears its austerity with pride. Unlike previous Richard Thompson compositions, songs don’t dwell upon dark twists of fate; sadness is felt deeply but then let go.
Soon, Richard and Linda Thompson let music itself go. Upon the encouragement of Richard’s religious mentor, the duo abandoned the stage and the studio to pursue a monastic life within the confines of their chosen community (which, as both Thompsons have stressed over the years, was not a commune). Linda grew impatient with this lifestyle first, but it wasn’t until Richard decided to return to music that they left their community behind to resume their career. A clutch of unreleased live versions of otherwise unrecorded songs from their 1977 comeback tour are featured on the fifth disc of Hard Luck Stories. They tell a fascinating tale in which the duo pursues a shaggy hybrid of folk, funk, jazz, and Middle Eastern music. Thompson later dismissed these tunes, claiming, “some songs deserve to fall off the radar,” yet these performances, however unwieldy, are a vital transition between the stillness of Pour Down Like Silver and its burnished successor, 1978’s First Light.
On First Light, the two abandoned their ragged fusion in favor of a streamlined folk rock so polished it could almost be classified as soft rock. Spirituality remained a paramount concern in Richard’s songwriting, but his intent could be hard to discern beneath the layers of studio varnish. Still, these gleaming surfaces help highlight the underlying sweetness of Linda’s voice, and some songs cut through the gloss, such as the wistful “Pavanne” and “Layla,” which is so loose, it’s nearly funky. “Layla”—not a cover of Eric Clapton’s song of the same name—pointed toward the lively Sunnyvista, the 1979 LP that closed out their ill-fated stint at Chrysalis Records. Bright and brash, Sunnyvista plays like a breezy riposte to the duo’s heavy-hearted masterworks; even the slow-crawling “Sisters” skirts the pain that lies at its core. It’s the rare Richard and Linda Thompson record that engages with contemporary sounds and ideas.
When Sunnyvista didn’t snag a new audience for the Thompsons, Chrysalis dropped the duo. Fellow British folk rocker Gerry Rafferty offered to bankroll a new album, but Richard bristled at the “Baker Street” hitmaker pushing his duo too far into the middle of the road. The experience still seems to sting the Thompsons: Only a few songs from the scrapped album, dubbed Rafferty’s Folly by fans, appear on Hard Luck Stories, all of which are familiar from other CD reissues. Scrounge up some of the rejected cuts floating around on the internet, such as the original take on the tense, propulsive “Don’t Renege on Our Love,” and it’s easy to hear why they didn’t make the cut: They’re stiff and lifeless in a way Richard and Linda Thompson never were again. Once every label passed on Rafferty’s project, the Thompsons reunited with Joe Boyd, the original producer of Fairport Convention, to re-record the songs for the album that became Shoot Out the Lights.
Shoot Out the Lights hangs heavy in the legacy of Richard and Linda Thompson: It was their first album to garner a significant audience in America and the last they recorded together. The divorce followed so swiftly after the album’s release that the record is sometimes said to have been made as the couple separated, which isn’t quite true. Certainly, it doesn’t take a close listen to determine these are songs written by a man whose restlessness is overtaking his spirit. If Thompson winds up pitying himself a bit too much on “A Man in Need,” “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?”—one of only two songs in their catalog co-written by both musicians—acts as its soulful counterbalance, placing blame for a decaying relationship squarely at the feet of the man beset by wanderlust.
Richard and Linda Thompson closed Shoot Out the Lights—and their joint career—with “Wall of Death,” a song whose central metaphor compares romance to an amusement park ride. The song opens with the refrain, “Let me ride on the Wall of Death one more time”; the line could be interpreted as a desire to give romance another shot, or to run out and find new love. Richard chose the latter route, but his relationship with Linda persists to this day. She invited him to play on her 2002 comeback Fashionably Late, and in 2014 the pair formed the band Family with their son Teddy and daughter Kami, along with various extended relatives. The latter-day mending of fences somewhat tempers the myth of turmoil that hangs over Shoot Out the Lights, and it’s to Hard Luck Stories’ credit that there’s a hint of that reconciliation in the box’s conclusion, in which the duo can be heard tearing through a rendition of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “High School Confidential” taken from their final tour from 1982. The selection neatly dovetails with another rock’n’roll oldie that opens the set (a barreling version of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Rock & Roller” by the Bunch), but it’s more than a nifty trick of sequencing. “High School Confidential” illustrates how Richard and Linda Thompson could conjure joy even during their darkest hour, underscoring Hard Luck Stories’s greatest lesson: No matter how high the peak nor how low the valley, the two musicians never lost their incandescent chemistry.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On the latest from his sci-fi-leaning project Fhloston Paradigm, the renowned Philadelphia producer King Britt shows a more vulnerable side, collaborating with Moor Mother, Nosaj Thing, and others.

After...

On his latest album as Fhloston Paradigm, the renowned Philadelphia-bred DJ and producer King Britt realizes his most adventurous and dynamic self. In the wake of 2016’s 20-year-anniversary show for his legendary group Sylk 130—itself a precursor to neo-soul—Britt closes the book on his earliest endeavors by traveling deeper into space. The 2014 Fhloston Paradigm debut The Phoenix married analog synths, opera, and electronic music for a solid departure from his previous forays into acid jazz, house, and dance music. With AFTER..., Fhloston Paradigm breaks away from the vehicle that inspired his moniker—the 1997 Luc Besson film The Fifth Element—and the mad scientist aesthetic of his earlier work. He hits his artistic stride with a more focused and polished version of the out Fhloston sound.
As important as the unification of genres on AFTER…, then, is the honesty at the core of the album. Playing to his strengths as a selector and composer, Fhloston Paradigm trades rave nostalgia and experimental noodling for a well-balanced marriage of the melodic expertise, emotion, and appetite for the unknown that live across his vast catalog. He does this without ego or exposition. He does it with a deft hand and a decent amount of vulnerability. The result is a release that speaks as clearly to his futurist leanings and creative maturation as it does the jive, groove, and gut-wrenching emotion endemic to Black American music.
Three years removed from Fhloston Paradigm’s Hyperdub debut, AFTER... takes a measured step away from experimental music to embrace something closer to spiritual trance—something decidedly more personal. Lead single “...MATH” is a prolonged statement of peace. The composition recalls the Eastern breathing tradition of pranayama—the practice of regulating and extending the breath—with its respect for space and the cyclical emergence of light. Breaking open the physical form of AFTER… illuminates a life force; a beating, techno-inflected heart is quickly established as the core of the entire project.
Opera singer and frequent collaborator Pia Ercole, whose vocal is a fixture of the Fhloston Paradigm releases, reprises her role as the voice of God. Connecting AFTER… to The Phoenix with the album’s second track, “...LIFE,” she introduces a new direction that hones in on the dexterity of each singer instead of burying them in ambient melody. On the Nosaj Thing-assisted “...THE HEARTBREAK,” electro-pop singer Kate Faust offers a stylistic nod to the ululations of women in mourning and labor—both experiences that push the soul beyond the physical body.
The album has a thematic preoccupation with the nuance of the female range—one of the pillars of soulful house music, and a clear nod to Britt’s earlier projects, including the seminal King Britt Presents Sylk 130 – When The Funk Hits The Fan. In this case, however, the vocals are as primal as they are tender, operatic moments referential of weepy spirituals and Fhloston’s original muse, Diva Plavalaguna—the statuesque opera singer from The Fifth Element. At about the halfway point, though, the technique of layering vocals to an atmospheric end starts to feel overdone.
Where the lack of discernable lyrics on AFTER… could prove frustrating, the ambiguity seems to ask, “What is language after life?” And in a realm where communication is much less literal, AFTER... suggests spiritual ascension might be achieved through sonic exploration, in lieu of a certain messiah. The Moor Mother-assisted “...ALL” is a brooding, bottom-heavy exercise in raw, polyrhythmic electricity; it conjures ghosts and gives voice to clear and present danger.  Puerto Rican Space Program’s album closer “...HOURS” counters that darkness with temple bells and sharp statements that expand and contract at different frequencies against ample bass. It is a prayer punctuated by found sounds and holy tones, affirming ancient traditions and extolling the virtues of life on other planes.
Taken as a sincere meditation, AFTER… suggests that Britt began the project with his own mortality in mind. In it, he revisits and reckons with the unfinished pieces of himself. In the tradition of Kintsugi—the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with precious metals, honoring pieces of pottery instead of discarding them—he gathers scraps of compelling ideas, fleshes them out, and repairs them with gold. Britt has reassembled the very best bits of his past lives as a writhing body electric. Though his previous journeys netted no major losses, Fhloston Paradigm finds itself in AFTER… and finally takes flight.