The Atlanta rapper tries to testify to the emotional burdens of the YSL case while staying lighthearted, resulting in an album that both lacks depth and is too absorbed in real-life drama.

a Gift & a Curse

On his last album DS4Ever, Gunna’s main concerns were what fast car to drive and pair of designer jeans to throw on. Now, he’s got the weight of YSL’s RICO case on his shoulders. Since he was released from jail in December, the generally tiresome social media conversation—driven by salacious Instagram and YouTube rags, plus a few rappers looking for attention—has focused on whether he “snitched.” But Gunna’s priority isn’t really responding to internet jokes. Instead, on his new album a Gift & a Curse, he’s trying to describe the emotional strain of a case that has torn apart brotherhoods and changed his outlook on life. He’s also attempting to keep the fun and lighthearted spirit of his prior music. The result is an album that is too vague to have much depth and too absorbed in real-life drama to have the feel-good vibes he wants to preserve.
Lead single “Bread & Butter” sets the tone, balancing anger at friends who have turned their back on him with wistfulness for the old days when none of this was on his mind. It’s the kind of confessional, melodic pain rap that is popular in the Deep South, but the AutoTune-heavy singing is too monotone and polished for it to be effective; listen to how a crooner like Tampa’s T9ine lilts to make up for not having a big voice. Gunna could also attempt lyrical vulnerability, emulating the blunt poetics of an artist like Jacksonville’s Lil Poppa. But he is mostly still caught up trying to puff out his chest.
I get it. He rose to the top of the Atlanta hip-hop ranks by being cool; it’s hard to dig in when he’s never really had to. Still, it’s frustrating when you can tell that he’s not being entirely real with you. Such is the case on the overly guarded and painfully slow “Paybach,” where he alludes to friends accusing him of betraying Young Thug by taking the Alford plea: “Switching on my brother are you serious?” he coos. I can assume that he’s wounded and confused by that accusation—but I have to assume, because instead of letting us in, he follows up with the flex “Nigga ain’t gon’ touch me and that’s period.” Similarly, “Idk Nomore” avoids all feelings with threats and hollow platitudes. At one point he sings, “Wanna know how Wunna feel? then listen to my music”—as if that isn’t what we are doing.
He’s better off on songs like “Fukumean,” where he goes back-to-the-basics—smoking good weed, thinking about boobs—deploying the explosive, run-on flow he nailed down around Drip Harder. Or on “Ca$h $hit,” where he continues to be nondescript emotionally but exhibits some imagination in the countless ways he describes getting fits off: “I drip like sweat in the sauna” and “Pop out, when I drip it’s a puddle.” The breezy beat of “Ca$h $hit,” with its low-key woodwinds whirling in the background, is one of the rare instrumentals that has any life to it. Notably, both of these songs come in the middle of the 15-track album, smashed in between lots of seriousness. They’ll be solid singles, but here, they really tear you from the moment.
Gunna is yet another rap star struggling with the expectation that if you hit a low point, you have to be prepared to let it all out by the next annual release date. Of all the tracks on a Gift & a Curse, “Rodeo Dr” feels truest to where he’s at right now. The beat is brisk, the flows switch, and luxury goods are still in sight but he airs some frustration: “Fuck this shit, you know I’m still doing it for Jeff and Lil Keed,” he raps, and that “Fuck this shit” is more moving than any part where being moving is the point. Clearly, Gunna isn’t ready or willing to fully pull at his emotions. I’d rather hear the album he wants to make over the one he feels like he’s supposed to. Maybe now that he’s gotten a Gift & a Curse out of the way, he’ll feel free.


The latest detail-heavy record from this folk-rock group examines the dark side of American spectacle.

The Felice Brothers: Celebration, Florida

Celebration, Florida

In November 2010, the body of a man was found in his home in Celebration, Florida. He had been strangled and beaten with an axe. It was the town's first homicide in its 15-year history, and while the culprit was soon apprehended, the incident was a shock to many of the municipality's 10,000 residents. This kind of thing wasn't supposed to happen in Celebration, which had been founded by Disney specifically to be a crime-free, family-friendly throwback to a way of life that's more imagined than actual. It's unclear whether the Felice Brothers knew of that that crime when they named their fourth album Celebration, Florida, but certainly that dark spot on the town's sunny exterior adds a bit of sensationalism to these songs, which examine the dark side of American spectacle.
As with the album title, this Woodstock band chooses its proper nouns carefully, painting a glaring portrait of America full of Wonder Bread warehouses, used '96 Honda Civics, the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and televisions turned to Fox 5 News. It's ersatz culture defined by its detritus, and it recalls the odd cityscapes of East River Pipe. The Felice Brothers lack F.M. Cornog's sense of wonder, which depicts even the most banal details as the stuff of science fiction. Nothing on Celebration is quite so transformative, but there are imaginative stories in these songs, populated with real characters checking the sticker price, lying to the desk clerk, and arguing with the TV.
The Felice Brothers try to reflect this American jumble in their music, which draws from 60s folk rock (their Woodstock is more The Basement Tapes than Woodstock) and general roots traditions without being specific enough to belong to any particular short-lived revival. They're tinkerers, reimagining Americana as something in flux, steeped in history yet absorbing new ideas. "Ponzi" bursts into a chaotic rumble of programmed beats and industrial stutter, linking Wall Street to the introverted grotesquerie of Nine Inch Nails rat [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| her than the self-conscious luster of hip-hop. Conceptually, it's an intriguing idea. Musically, it ruins one of the better tunes on Celebration, a tense, jerky groove that's more intriguing when it threatens to explode than when it actually explodes.
Therein lies the central complaint: The Felice Brothers may be a bit overeager in their experimenting. Perhaps unleashed by the sprawl of the album's theme, they indulge seemingly every whim, from the Auto-Tuned vocals and low-rider high-hat ride on "Honda Civic" to the bustling horns and accordion solo on the very same song. Celebration is not only a busy album, but a showy one as well: The songs morph and shift so often that they sound like several songs all at once, which tends to dilute their momentum. "Oliver Stone" fades in and out as through carried on a weak signal, until the band turns the dial from one station to the next. Opener "Fire at the Pageant", with its raucous shout-along chorus, can't convey that sense of urgency and pandemonium when it keeps stopping to consider itself in the mirror. Celebration, Florida doesn't simply reflect the hubbub of America as the Felice Brothers see it. The album becomes a part of the spectacle, which is surely not what the band intended.


Nonesuch offers an expanded reissue of this 1981 near-masterpiece, a record that's both a milestone of sampled music and a peace summit in the continual West-meets-rest struggle.

David Byrne / Brian Eno: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

As David Byrne describes in his liner notes, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts placed its bets on serendipity: "It is assumed that I write lyrics (and the accompanying music) for songs because I have something I need to 'express.'," he writes. "I find that more often, on the contrary, it is the music and the lyric that trigger the emotion within me rather than the other way around." Maybe because it's so obviously the product of trial-and-error experimentation, Bush of Ghosts sounded like a quirky side project on its release in 1981; heck, it didn't even have any "songs." But today, Nonesuch has repackaged it as a near-masterpiece, a milestone of sampled music, and a peace summit in the continual West-meets-rest struggle. So we're supposed to see Bush of Ghosts as a tick on the timeline of important transgressive records.
It mostly holds up to that scrutiny. An album that's built on serendipity-- on Brian Eno fooling around with a new type of drum machine, on syncing the hook in a tape loop to a chorus, on finding the right horrors on the radio-- can't score 100%. But even if you cut it some slack, crucial parts of the album don't sound as intriguing today as they once did-- namely, all of the voices.
The sampled speech from various, mainly religious, sources ties the album into a long and prestigious history of artists who used found sound, which David Toop capably outlines in the liner notes. It's still the secret sauce that provokes a reaction from the listener. But what reaction you have lies outside of Byrne's, Eno's, or your control. On the first half, where the voices are least chopped up, it's difficult to divorce them from their origins. A couple of tracks read as satire-- "America Is Waiting" sounds like Negativland with a way better rhythm section-- and others as kitsch. "Help Me Somebody" pulls a neat trick by turning a preacher into an r&b; singer, but the exorcist on "The Jezebel Spirit" doesn't raise as many hairs on the back of my neck now that taping a crazy evangelist has become the art music equivalent of broadcasting crank phone calls. We can't just hear them for their sound or cadences without digging into the meanings, and not everyone will find the meanings profound.
On the other hand, the rhythm tracks still kick ass 10 ways to Sunday, thanks both to the fly-by apperances of Bill Laswell, Chris Frantz, Prairie Prince, and a half dozen others, and to the inspired messing about of Eno and Byrne as they turned boxes and food tins into percussion. Tape loops are funkier than laptops, and the modern ear is so aware of the digital "noodging" of a sample to a beat that the refreshingly knocked-together arrangements of Bush of Ghosts are a vast improvement. At one stage of the project, they dreamed about documenting the music of a fake foreign culture. They largely pulled it off, and you can tell a lot about this far-off place from its music: It's a futuristic yet tribal town made of resonant sheets of metal and amplified plastic containers, that the populace has to bang constantly in perfect time to make the traffic move, and the stoves heat up, and the lights flicker on at night, and to coax mismatched couples into making love and breeding new percussionists.
The seven bonus tracks will provoke more arguments than they settle. The setlist of Bush of Ghosts has changed several times over the years, and the diehard fans will still have to swap left-out cuts that aren't resurrected here; most famously, "Qu'ran", an apparently sacreligious recording of Koran verses set to music, doesn't get anywhere near this reissue. The songs that are here include a few that sound almost finished, including "Pitch to Voltage", and others that would fit almost as well as anything in the second half of the disc. The last cut, "Solo Guitar with Tin Foil", features someone, presumably Byrne, playing a haunting tune on a guitar with an impossibly clean tone-- a fitting end to an album that, for all its transcontinental fingerprints, sounds strikingly free of impurities.
Though Bush of Ghosts was a link in the chain between Steve Reich and the Bomb Squad, I'm not convinced that this talking point helps us enjoy the album. However, Nonesuch made an interesting move that could help Bush of Ghosts make history all over again: they launched a "remix" website, at www.bush-of-ghosts.com, where any of us can download multitracked versions of two songs, load them up in the editor of our choice, and under a Creative Commons license, do whatever we want with them.
As I write this, the site hasn't launched, and even if it were up, I can't tell how lively its community will be, how edgy the remixers can get, and how many rules will pen them in. Nonesuch copped out by posting only part of the album, instead of every piece of tape they owned, and I suspect that the bush-of-ghosts.com site may just be a corporate sandbox for wannabe remixers. But I could be wrong; I haven't tried to submit my mash-up of "Qu'ran" and Denmark's National Anthem yet. What matters is that they started the site and released these tracks, and by doing so, they put a stake in the ground-- not the first one, but an important one-- for Creative Commons licensing, Web 2.0 album releases ("this is an album where you participate!"), and the culture of remixing.
And by handing over their multitracks, Byrne and Eno also make a powerful acknowledgement of their own helplessness. It is a basic but real fact of our time that sampling can work both ways. In the 80s, you could fairly make an argument that Byrne and Eno were the Western white men appropriating all kinds of Others, be they domestic and primitive, or foreign and exotic. Now the world can return the favor: Anyone can rip this work apart and use it any way they please, and you can bet that if some kid in the Third World sends a killer remix to the right blogger, it'll travel faster and farther than this carefully curated reissue. Byrne and Eno counted on a certain amount of serendipity in their studio; today, they can witness the serendipity of what happens to their killer rhythm tracks-- the ones they released, and all the others that people will use anyway. And the strongest message they could send is not only that they've relinquished control, but that they admit they already lost it-- whether they like it or not.


For his first release in four years, the Strokesiest of the Strokes dials his songs back to basics.  Running a mere five songs and 15 minutes, this EP is a fat-free effort that favors tight, snappy, emotionally direct songcraft

AHJ EP

Albert Hammond Jr. is not the most popular Stroke, nor the most rock-star-stylish, nor the one who attracts an inordinate amount of popular comedic actresses, nor even the quiet one. But he is nonetheless the Strokesiest of the Strokes—if you were to ever dress up as a Stroke for Halloween, you’d be copping Hammond’s one-size-too-small thrift-store sports jacket, skinny tie, Chuck Taylors, and hair photoshopped off of Billy Ficca's head on the first Television album cover.  Accordingly, out of all the extracurricular projects the Strokes have pursued over the years, Hammond’s solo releases have hewed most closely to the band’s bleary-eyed, tousled charm and classicist tendencies.
However, in the five years since Hammond’s last album, the Strokes have moved further and further away from that signature scrappy sound, expanding their sonic vocabulary with notoriously mixed results. Perhaps not coincidentally, Hammond’s new EP sticks to the narrowest of L.E.S. lanes. Where 2006’s Yours to Keep and 2008’s ¿Cómo te Llama? presented homespun interpretations of Hammond’s most iconic inspirations (John Lennon, the Beach Boys, Bob Marley), on AHJ he mines a more easily attainable influence: his own band circa 10 years ago.
Hammond has recently come clean about the various hard-drug habits that plagued him throughout the Strokes’ ascent, which he finally kicked shortly after the release of ¿Cómo Te Llama?. As such, there’s a sense that Hammond is forcefully hitting the reset button here, stripping his songs back down to the basics, and regaining his confidence by playing within his comfort zone. (He handles all the instrumental parts on the record, save for drums.) Running a mere five songs and 15 minutes, AHJ is a wholly fat-free effort that favors tight, snappy, emotionally direct songcraft over the genre experiments and instrumental excursions of ¿Cómo Te Llama? that suggested Hammond was headed down a more ponderous path.
Hammond may not be as casually charismatic as Julian Casablancas, and his songs can be modest and unassuming to a fault—the gently loping "St. Justice" is not so much an opening salvo as a warm-up exercise to check the levels of each instrument. But he brings a convincing poignancy and urgency when required. “Strange Tidings” recalls the dream-pop drive of “Hard to Explain”, yet lines like “If I’m guilty/ It’ll show” and “control is so hard to find” provide sobering reminders of a time when Hammond had to wear long sleeves even on the hottest summer days. But while oblique references to Hammond’s darkest hours abound on AHJ (“Cooker Ship” conjures images of burnt spoons and bottoming-out in the sort of fantastical terms his hero-turned-buddy Bob Pollard would appreciate), the energy here is one of spirited, defiant revitalization. And in the amazingly compact “Rude Customer”, Hammond turns in a song that would’ve been the hands-down highlight on any of the past three Strokes albums. If you're precisely the sort of disenchanted old-school Strokes fan who would respond to that with, "Well, that's not saying much," then the lean econo-pop of AHJ will feel all the more like a gift.


Abel Tesfaye finally delivers on his long-running vision, leveraging a self-loathing villain into an irresistible, cinematic narrative with his most satisfying collision of new wave, dream pop, and R&B.

After Hours

The Weeknd’s latest short film opens with the Toronto singer grinning maniacally onstage. He’s just finished a performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and blood crawls down the side of his bandaged nose, threatening to drip onto his suit. As the audience cheers, Abel Tesfaye walks backstage, his artificial smile intact, until he reaches a hallway where it fades into a frigid stare.
The character he plays is an exaggerated riff on the solipsistic-hedonist persona Tesfaye has been tunneling into since his 2011 mixtape trilogy, where he first introduced listeners to his brand of brooding nihilism. In 2020, he continues to revel in high drama; After Hours dives deep into the textures of pleasure, despair, and how we consciously distance ourselves from our interiors.
After years of attempting to bring the spectral tones of his early mixtapes to a mainstream pop format, Tesfaye finally unites his two worlds. His major-label debut Kiss Land was a languid disappointment, and Beauty Behind the Madness failed to live up to the promise made by the Trilogy tapes. After Hours delivers on the most compelling aspects of Tesfaye’s vision; leveraging a self-loathing villain into an irresistible, cinematic narrative with his most satisfying collision of new wave, dream pop, and R&B.
Even if he is singing about the same things—bacchanalian excess, loneliness as rapture, using women to rehabilitate his poor little life—the fresh vocals and production flourishes do the trick. On “Too Late,” his longtime producer Illangelo (alongside Lizzo producer Ricky Reed and DaHeala) mutate UK garage’s syncopated kicks and pitch-shifted echoes, drawing on the spirit of My Dear Melancholy,’s “Wasted Times.” “Hardest to Love” couples a sharp jungle break with Tesfaye’s longing whispers about remorse and a troubled partnership. Oneohtrix Point Never and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker also lend production on “Repeat After Me (Interlude)” a collage of psychedelic wooshes and Vocoder dubs, while the ghostly eulogy “Until I Bleed Out” uses liturgical synth arpeggios reminiscent of “Boring Angel” from OPN’s R Plus Seven.
There’s always been a cinematic flair to Tesfaye’s music, as if he’s been chasing after his own Purple Rain moment—for now, he’ll have to settle for a cameo in the Safdie Brothers’ 2019 thriller Uncut Gems. He draws on synth-pop nostalgia to mirror the tragic glitz of ’80s Hollywood: “In Your Eyes” includes an arena-sized cheeseball sax solo, while the plinking synths and slick hand-claps of “Save Your Tears” evoke a long-lost Wham! track. Tesfaye can lean a little too hard on these Reagan-era signifiers, but his bleeding-heart melodies and donating an unforgettable hook to the synth player on “Blinding Lights” remind us why we keep listening in the first place.
Like any good villain, Tesfaye is aware of the character he plays, dropping tongue-in-cheek one-liners like “Futuristic sex, give her Philip K. Dick” on “Snowchild.” Meanwhile, “Faith” cranks the gloomy dial up to 11, summoning a death drive reminiscent of the double-decker bus from The Smiths’ “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out.” “But if I OD, I want you to OD right beside me,” he sings. “I want you to follow right behind me.”
Despite all these textbook Weekndisms, Tesfaye wants us to know he’s struggling to reconcile the sinner he once was with the man he’s trying to become. He may not be the dysfunctional addict of the Trilogy years, but he’s also not willing to be the partner a woman might need him to be. What more can you expect out of pop music’s antihero? There is not a single song on the album that colors outside the lines he established nine years ago, but his narrow focus has paid off: He’s finally found harmony between the enigmatic noir-pop that broke him to the blogs and the arena-worthy ambition that launched him into the mainstream. It’s hard to tell where the universe of listeners fixated on filling spiritual voids through sex, drugs, and romance ends and the universe of the Weeknd’s tortured, empty melancholy and drunken, devastating love begins. That’s the beautiful blur of After Hours.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Vanishing Point is the first Mudhoney album in five years, and Steve Turner's erratic soloing, Dan Peters' hyperactive drum fills, and Mark Arm's righteous middle-aged rancor are so defiantly Mudhoney-sounding that they justify the price of admission.

Vanishing Point

Outside of a brief period in the early 1990s, Mudhoney has never been fashionable. And this has been entirely by design-- except for the early 90s part, which the band probably would have rather avoided. When Mudhoney was given a plum spot next to Pearl Jam and Soundgarden on the Singles soundtrack-- the Saturday Night Fever of alt-rock-- it dropped a stinkbomb inside Seattle’s coronation as rock’s “it” city: “Overblown” opened with Mark Arm famously snarling, “Everybody loves us/ Everybody loves our town / That's why I'm thinkin' lately/ Time for leavin' is now.” On the new Vanishing Point, Arm is still playing the cranky contrarian, only now he has two extra decades of pent-up pissiness to vent at wannabe ballers. “You’ve always been the critics’ darling,” Arm bellows at some unfortunate unnamed band-of-the-month on the caustic rant “Chardonnay”. “Get the fuck out of my backstage!”
Arriving at a time when the indie vanguard has about as much to do with punk as Glitter has to do with Apocalypse Now, Vanishing Point is both an anachronism and, if you’re on Mudhoney’s wavelength, a hilarious bulwark against everything that’s annoyingly ephemeral about contemporary underground culture. It sounds like the last stand of Generation X: Vanishing Point is a righteous rallying cry in favor of cynicism, irony, anti-mainstream posturing, and all of those other antiquated concepts that have been deconstructed and discredited in these new, pop-obsessed times. How refreshing that after all the countless trends that once threatened to wipe out bands of their ilk, Mudhoney is still here and not giving a fuck. “I don’t care if you think I’m a prick,” Arm leers gamely over the transgressive garage-rock thump of “I Don’t Remember You”. “It’s clear to me you’re the same piece of shit.”
Like all born-and-bred bastards, Arm has actually gotten funnier and more charming with age. Perhaps that’s because the 51-year old’s barbs are now as benign as the typical complaints of any out-of-touch middle-aged guy. His “piece of shit” riff on “I Don’t Remember You” is inspired by running into a pushy dude from back in the day who slaps his back too hard at the grocery store. On the smart-ass “What to Do With the Neutral”, he mocks anyone who insists he should have a positive attitude; on “Sing this Song of Joy”, he slips into a full-on taunt: “I sing this song of joy/ For all the girls and boys/ Dancing on your grave.” Mark Arm’s primary influence is no longer Iggy Pop, it’s Larry David.
Vanishing Point is the first Mudhoney record in five years, the longest-ever gap between LPs for the band. Given where Mudhoney is at in its career-- still able to tour around the world, but hardly a big moneymaking proposition-- there’s no guarantee there will be another album. So, it’s nice to hear these guys playing about as well as they ever have on record: The tangle of Steve Turner’s erratic soloing and Dan Peters’ hyperactive drum fills on opener “Slipping Away” are so defiantly Mudhoney-sounding that it single-handedly justifies the price of admission. The difference between Mudhoney in 2013 and the Mudhoney of old is that what once seemed highly flammable is now reassuring. Mudhoney projects tradition and endurance, not danger; the band’s appeal these days is rooted in not spontaneously combusting, so that it can still exist when most of Mudhoney’s contemporaries are extinct.
Not that Mudhoney is resigned to being a museum piece. On “I Like It Small”, Arm is back in “Overblown” mode, going on about the superiority of GG Allin, “intimate settings,” “dingy basements,” and (most important of all) “no expectations” over whatever the opposite of those things are. At the start of the song, Arm sounds alone, buried in the kicked-up smoke of screaming guitars and pounding drums. But by the end, a chorus of people has joined him-- he’s a voice in the wilderness with the backing of a no-longer-marginalized army. What else is new?


Drawing on samples of nature and science recordings, the experimental duo crafts a motley, riotous album from the Folkways Records archive.

Return to Archive

When Moses Asch founded Folkways Records in 1948, he set out to create a repository of all the sounds of the world—folk music and protest music and indigenous music and jazz, but also sounds of the office, of the junkyard, of the bottle-nose dolphin. “I decided that I would become like an encyclopedia,” he declared. “You don’t eliminate ‘A’ because nobody buys ‘A,’ but keep ‘B’ because ‘B’ is popular.” Asch promised that not a single title would go out of print, an offer that attracted educators, scientists, and activists who prized longevity above mass appeal. The result is one of the most remarkable audio archives ever created: Across 40 years, Asch released nearly 2,200 albums, an average of one per week. After his death in 1986, the Smithsonian Institution acquired the Folkways archive and stored it in a climate-controlled fireproof vault. Any title can now be replicated on demand by a CD-producing “Moe-bot,” an ultra-modern solution that realizes Asch’s promise beyond his wildest imaginings.
To celebrate Folkways’ 75th anniversary, the Smithsonian invited Baltimore sound-wranglers Matmos to record an original album that would sample this vast catalog. Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt, a duo as likely to find inspiration in a Whirlpool washing machine as in the work of Polish composer Bogusław Schaeffer, were especially drawn to records from the 1950s and ’60s, the era when portable equipment first made it easy to record everything from toads to time clocks. Matmos came back with a counteroffer: The album would feature no original music, only samples; and those samples would come exclusively from these early nature and science recordings. Return to Archive is the motley, riotous result, a suitably retrofuturistic collage incorporating over two dozen records ranging from Sounds of Animals to Sounds of Medicine, International Morse Code to End the Cigarette Habit Through Self Hypnosis.
Daniel and Schmidt let the archive guide them. Some sounds play nicely together, as in the dozens of snippets on opener “Good Morning Electronics,” finely diced and snapped to an eighth-note grid to create a whirlwind tour of jungles, laboratories, and sci-fi worlds. Others, like the mud-dauber wasp in its eponymous track, demand space to themselves. Matmos work up an entire band from the buzz of the insect’s flight, sculpting bass, percussion, and distorted electronics through careful sampling, processing, and sequencing. It’s an impressive performance even if it lacks the novelty of the group’s previous tracks crafted from crayfish synapses and cow uteri.
Matmos best portray the social milieu of the early Folkways era when they wryly juxtapose its rosy self-help rhetoric with the smothering lifestyle of 1950s suburban America. On “Lend Me Your Ears,” the Shakespearean phrase is sung by a 12-year-old boy and an adult woman, both subjects of Alfred Wolfsohn’s experiments in extending the range of the human voice on the Vox Humana LP. As their voices strain against their physical limits, a barrage of mundane sounds interrupt their performances—a ringing telephone, a melody of doorbells, and most ominously, from Sounds of Medicine: “Sounds of the Bowels–A Normal Hungry Man Smoking a Cigarette Before Dinner.”
Instead of cleaning up the samples, which hiss and pop with surface noise, Matmos lean into the abrasiveness by inviting noise musicians to manipulate the vinyl itself. Daniel and Schmidt mailed their own copy of Speech After the Removal of the Larynx to the noise artist and instrument inventor Evicshen, who made resin duplicates of the LP that skip and repeat. Her turntablist performance serves as the foundation for “Why,” a mad mashup of frog croaks and infants’ speech that hurtles forward with a gritty techno beat. Aaron Dilloway transfigured his copy of Sounds of the Junkyard by recording portions onto quarter-inch tape and creating the rhythmic industrial loops in the chaotic climax of closer “Going to Sleep.” These moments of excess charge Matmos’ surgically sliced and quantized samples with thrilling unpredictability. Like John Oswald’s pillaging of the Elektra roster on Rubáiyát Plunderphonics or Madlib’s remix of the Blue Note discography on Shades of Blue, Return to Archive works because of an affinity between artist and subject: Like Asch, Matmos are building their own endless encyclopedia, one that both documents and playfully remakes the world around them.


Remix album greatly improves on last year's disappointing Any Minute Now.

Nite Versions

Not the biggest fan of remix albums, I can do redemption. Any Minute Now got good enough marks but damn did it bomb big for me, especially since its cranky leadoff single "NY Excuse" was in arm's reach of "Yeah" in 2004's punkfunk marathon. Soon word of Duran Duran-repping "Nite Versions" of AMN tracks fluttered about-- self-done electro retakes fitted for the floor but still uncompromisingly rock-- and a few popped up on that punch-drunk Radio 1 broadcast mix the 2manyDJs brothers did for the BBC back in January. When the NV'd "Krack" slowed down summer jams to slurry, breaking up the BPMs like "Jamrock" did in hip-hop sets, I had a feeling: A whole album of this shit and we'd have a cruder, crunchier Homework.
Figures, Soulwax lead off NV with a cover of Daft Punk's "Teachers", names changed for a who's who of dance-rock forefathers (which to my chagrin, includes the goddamn the Who). In the vein of "AC/DC aren't a metal band, they're a dance band," "Miserable Girls" grinds hard enough to get on one of those X-Games comps, seering guitar lead and convicted vox trapped interminably in echo. Still these are tracks before new-wave anthems, breakdowns before makeup, with emphasis on the vertical and the power of repetition. Even the vocal hooks are kept to snippets: "It's not you, it's the e talking," or "compute it!" or once is enough, "James Brown is dead."
Like for Munk or LCD Soundsystem, the authority (or something) of live sound plays a part in the NV lure, but Soulwax never overstate. When the comicbookishly dark holds on "Slowdance" give out for the bridge, those sixteenths on the high hat effect a lot on their own; "I Love Techno" benefits from heavy-handed drum pounds that hold back the song's twitter and Blondie bassline; the legendary "NY Lipps" mash between "NY Excuse" and "Funky Town" speaks for itself. These are simple tracks, sure, confident enough to lay their soundmakers bare (and vice versa), but such staunch anti-pussyfooting/anti-mysticism makes Soulwax a bit more democratic, palpable too. They play what's humanly possible for a quartet, and in fact, rumor has it they may even be playing these nite versions live in Philadelphia at the NYE Making Time party. And if they play NVs track-for-track, as they're peerlessly mixed on the CD, those minor strings that course teary-eyed closer "Another Excuse" won't drop the ball.


Captured in Chicago in March 2023, the singer-songwriter and his band achieve a sort of dream state, finding otherworldly new forms for familiar songs about rebirth and revelation.

Resuscitate!

One of the words that Bill Callahan uses most frequently on Resuscitate!, a live album recorded in March 2023, is “dreams.” We’re coming in and out of them on “First Bird.” They’re places of transmogrification, danger, and in fact the ultimate reality on “Coyotes.” “Dream, baby, dream,” Callahan seems to ad lib on “Natural Information,” a song about pushing his infant daughter down the street, now reinforced with the greatest lesson this wised-up dad could ever teach her. It’s 11 years since Callahan released his 15th album, Dream River, a record he intended to be the last thing the listener heard at night, guiding them tenderly to their sleep state. Since then, marriage, fatherhood, and a new embrace of expansive thinking have taken the 58-year-old songwriter to a whole other metaphysical plane. I often think of beautiful coincidences as being like an eclipse—two celestial bodies lining up for just a second that you’re lucky enough to catch—and Callahan has become a stargazer for those moments in his writing, especially as he observes the habits of his young family; his melodies, too, have become more open, transcendent, reaching for something beyond.
That night at Chicago’s Thalia Hall, Callahan and his band attained a sort of dream state, sounding generative and otherworldly. “The date was mid-point in the tour,” Callahan writes in the accompanying notes, “so I knew we’d be as hot as we were going to get. Not too green, not too brown.” (He also notes that he tries to work only with venues, such as Thalia Hall, outside the Live Nation/Ticketmaster nexus, and maybe that freedom wriggles in.) In opening song “First Bird” alone, Callahan, guitarist Matt Kinsey, tenor sax player Dustin Laurenzi, and drummer Jim White voyage further than most bands ever do in a whole set. It starts off sounding like a mysterious night on the plains, full of skittish life forms, prowling bass, flashes of woodwind. As Callahan grows more fervent, the instruments vibrate with anticipation, and then come to tumble in and out of sync with their leader’s mercurial, deeply felt phrasing. It peaks with Callahan cawing “Tall! Tall! Tall!,” as if he were that titular first bird; after six minutes, the squalling guitar propels a full-band tumbledown climax. Even though parts of this ensemble have been playing together for a long time—and any group with White as its center has magic on its side—the telepathy between them is astonishing.
I saw Callahan in London at the outset of this run, in November 2022, and as a veteran fan, it was perhaps my least favorite show of his that I’ve seen. The setlist dwelled largely on his post-pandemic records, as this night in Chicago did, with scant exceptions. I love YTI⅃AƎЯ and Gold Record as much as the next person who loves joy, but why forsake your sweet Smog children! The playing was so digressive—the version of “Coyotes” on Resuscitate! lasts nearly 13 minutes, and many others run to around seven minutes—that I rued what felt like indulgence standing in the way of the old classics.
Yet it doesn’t feel that way on this album, and not simply because Callahan has trimmed the 15-song setlist at Thalia Hall that night to a tidier 10. The quality of the recording captures the glorious tumult in the band’s interplay, making it visceral and elemental: how Laurenzi’s sax shifts from arid to buttery on “Coyotes”; how the rhythm section is held back on “Drover,” as if by the song’s shepherd, then allowed to burst free. In Callahan’s notes, he described Chicago as “America’s heart,” and you can hear this band connecting its ’90s post-rock scene and contemporary jazz tendrils in their playing: “Naked Souls,” a lament about people grown dead inside, becomes a kind of spiritual, Callahan backed by the deep vocals of Pascal Kerong’A, and Natural Information Society’s Joshua Abrams and Lisa Alvarado join for “Natural Information” (surely named in tribute to their verdant jazz group), a puckish incantation that melts into a happy drone and softly nudging horns.
Something else that keeps any potential sprawl in check is the sense that Callahan has had an awakening he fervently needs to transmit, as the name of this record suggests. He has a standup’s sense of timing, and with the combination of a knowing pause and his wise, wry voice, it’s not hard for him to get a laugh out of a little aside like “if I believed in souls—and such—and judgment day” on “Keep Some Steady Friends Around” (the only Smog/pre-2011 song played). On the waltzing “Pigeons,” in which he plays a chauffeur extolling the merits of marriage, he savors and deepens every syllable of “plenipotentiary,” almost as if he’s a little bashful at his enthusiasm, or maybe just doing his best Sam Elliott impression. But often his pauses seem less like someone priming for a laugh than a receiver waiting for the feeling to strike him: “Dreams are thoughts in lo-tus!” he exclaims on “First Bird,” as if the image has just blossomed in his mind’s eye.
Most revivifying are the moments where this man, usually still as a lake, becomes roiled by feeling: “I’m your loverloverloverloverloverloverloverloverloverlover man!” he exalts on “Coyotes,” breathless with ecstasy. On the recorded version of “Partition,” his instruction to “Microdose!/Change your clothes!/Do what you got to do/To see the picture” is a vivid suggestion. But here, it sounds like a racing insurrection against stasis: Callahan at his most cataclysmic, Kinsey stabbing at his fretboard, the band in a sort of junkyard tailspin that even encompasses a brief broken funk interlude. Like all the wildest dreams, you sense they couldn’t recreate this glorious mess if they tried—but its suggestion to venture beyond knowledge, and to trust what you find there, is eye-opening.


The 28-minute EP continues Fetty Wap’s steady decline from promising trap balladeer to one-dimensional chant rapper.

Bruce Wayne

Fetty Wap broke through doing pop rap things only Eminem and Lil Wayne had done, but now he only ever makes headlines when trading barbs with mayoral candidates in his hometown, or when drag racing his Mercedes CLS AMG drunk on a suspended license, or when people are facetiously petitioning to have him perform “Trap Queen” at Nancy Reagan’s funeral. His new mixtape, Bruce Wayne, is an attempt to change the narrative.
In the intro, scanning a radio dial produces nothing but his biggest songs, before segueing into Wayne’s “So Different”—the implication being he’s still making hits. The tape, named after Batman’s absurdly rich business-inheriting alter ego, aims to draw a flimsy parallel between Fetty and a billionaire crime-fighting superhero: Like Wayne, he suggests, he uses his power and status to give back to his community. (It’s worth noting that Wayne also poses as a superficial playboy as a cover for his late-night heroics.)
“I am Bruce Wayne, I’ve done a lot for people,” Fetty told Complex. “It’s not about bragging, but inspiring people to always give back.” The mixtape, released on his birthday and dedicated to his late grandparents Bishop Willie Lee Maxwell and James Eugene Hagans, is often exactly the opposite of what he claims—full of empty swag raps like, “A million in my bank, hunnid in my jeans, baby/I don’t mean to brag but they know it’s me, baby,” on a song literally called “Westin”—but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Its real problems are twofold and compounding: Fetty is an often lazy writer-performer who has lost command of his once stirring voice.
Though “Trap Queen” approached romance from an exciting new angle, turning an unlikely setting into the perfect space for an outpouring of affection, Fetty has never been much of a songwriter. His Pyrex sonnets and lullabies relied almost entirely on his wailing croons to convey tenderness and devotion. In the mixtapes and EPs released since 2016, he’s struggled to find the same mastery that made songs like “My Way” and “679” so potent, dipping more into barefaced raps and singing with far less zeal. Bruce Wayne continues Fetty’s steady decline from promising trap balladeer to one-dimensional chant rapper. His themes are largely the same but executed more poorly. Most of these songs have one meandering verse that goes nowhere. The hooks are way less catchy, and too often he’s prone to saying the most basic thing. Even his Batman angle is somewhat simple-minded and ineffective: “Let a nigga know, is it beef, is it beef?/Somethin’ in the air, Batman in the streets/Jordan 14s, Batman on my feet/Bitch I’m Bruce Wayne, stock’s up, come and see,” he raps on the title track. Contrary to what he claims, the market says otherwise.
In Fetty’s best moments, which, coincidentally, were also his biggest successes, he was a real ham. He sang like he was proposing in a crowded restaurant, performing not just for his lover but anyone watching. Bruce Wayne is far more muted and understated, especially on “So Different,” which slaps the “Hotline Bling” drums onto moodier synths as Fetty murmurs half-assed come-ons like “He a worker, I’ma boss now/You should know the difference.” But there are some flashes of those same garish tendencies that once made him trap’s Sisqo. The verse on “What We Do” explodes into howling, using its moaned pleas to coax a girlfriend into a threesome. “I love your face, your eyes, your style/Baby, if you with a vacay pick an island,” he warbles on “Look at Me.” There are moments where his subdued manner works, too, like the gleaming “Star Struck” or the closer “Hit Some Corners.” But for most of Bruce Wayne’s 28 minutes, there’s nothing really worth relishing. Where Fetty’s histrionic performances once demanded attention, these largely bore.
Stranger things have happened, but it’s hard to see a path back to ubiquity for Fetty Wap. It took a collab with both 6ix9ine and A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie for him to even sniff the Top 40 for the first time in two years. Time has revealed him to be a flash in the pan; though more than the “one-hit wonder” he is sometimes made out to be, he burned himself out quickly and he has already maximized the utility of his only weapon. Across Bruce Wayne, on inert R&B tunes like “All for You” and “Wavy,” he tinkers with new interpretations of his old songs trying, to find something that works. His commitment is admirable, but simply listening to the tape is an act of charity.


The multi-instrumentalist and composer’s concept album about Black existence cites everything while saying nothing. The record collapses under its own inertia.

The American Negro

The cover of The American Negro recreates a lynching postcard, perverse mementos that 19th and 20th century white Americans would pass around like trading cards. Some postcards would center the victims, gawking at their violated bodies with lurid satisfaction. Others would emphasize the crowd of onlookers, inviting the viewer, presumed to be white, to participate in the day’s activity. Adrian Younge gestures at this grim history and its continuation into the present—the date on the postcard is crossed out—but no moment on The American Negro ever brings these charged subjects to life.

Paired with a podcast series and a short film, The American Negro is intended as a big picture look at Black oppression and resilience. In theory, Younge should be suited to unearth the past. His well-documented reverence for bygone days is built into his love of analog and tape, and his music often goes to painstaking detail to recreate the textures of the classic soul records he cherishes. At first glance, that’s what’s happening here. Younge positions this album as message music in the vein of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, and Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly. Appropriately, he rolls out an orchestra, a Fender Rhodes piano, a Hammond B3 organ, harpsichord, glockenspiel, wah pedal—you can practically smell the mothballs and afro sheen. But there’s no vision driving all this period porn. Younge is a student of history, but never its vessel.
Younge structures the album as an audio odyssey, pinging between free verse and the luxe, throwback soundscapes that are his calling card. Despite its outward elegance, though, the record is clumsy and inert. Younge, who wrote and performs all the spoken word pieces and is the album’s primary composer, has no presence as an orator. His awkward and stilted verses, written as rebukes to white supremacy, are tedious and unmoving. Though he frequently uses terms like “we,” “I,” and “you,” he’s often detached from his own message, his words broadcast from a sterile nowhere. “Have we learned anything?/Do we know who we are and where we belong?/Does our skin reasonably elicit fear and negative judgment?” he asks on “Revisionist History.” He sounds like a Russian Twitter bot raised on a strict diet of Hidden Colors quotes and Nas’ “Ultra Black.”
Even if his performances were more inspired, he’d still be hamstrung by his clunky lyrics. On “Intransigence of the Blind,” he contorts “We all come from Africa,” the stock phrase of people who think racism can be sloganeered out of existence, into a goofier shape. “I am the descendant of the chattel/And I am your brother/We are descendants of the Motherland/As every human shares the same African mother/Mitochondrially,” he says, sounding like Brother Sambuca. Elsewhere, on “Jim Crow’s Dance,” he tortures a metaphor until it breaks: “They argue that we should look at the stats/To better understand our circumstances/But statistics are records, and you can’t really listen to records that are cracked/Because the music skips.” It’s genuinely shocking that the line isn’t followed by finger snaps.
Younge is clearly writing from a place of real indignation, but his hamfisted diatribes are so lifeless and incoherent the record collapses under the inertia. He constantly invokes the past without engaging with it, naming multiple songs after victims of racist violence (“Margaret Garner,” “James Mincey Jr.”) and referencing Jim Crow, the TransAtlantic slave trade, and police brutality. There’s no narrative or thematic links to his time traveling other than “Black people were there.” Younge speeds through Black history like a bullet train, texture and detail and context stretching into a blur.
This lack of focus undermines the beauty of Younge’s arrangements. The record traffics in grandeur and importance without tethering them to perspective, curiosity, or imagination. No people or passions grace his elaborate stages, giving The American Negro a vacant, bloodless feel. The American Negro is a concept album without an essence, agitprop that doesn’t know what it’s agitating for, citing everything and saying nothing.
I often wondered where Younge sees himself in all this history. He’s pictured on the cover, hanging; he’s credited with playing over 20 instruments and conducting the orchestra; he even slips into the first person occasionally. But what does this music authorize him to say and be that the institutions of this country don’t? What about these compositions embodies his contradictions and convictions? Did making these songs clarify his experiences as “an American negro,” or further obscure them? These questions are rhetorical, but I’m awestruck by how ill-equipped this record leaves me to answer them.

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The Chicago singer and multi-instrumentalist leaps fearlessly between voices and sounds. His constant dissatisfaction leaves no question that his true colors are loud and clashing.

BRAT

The first thing to know about the music of NNAMDÏ is that he has a million vehicles for it. The multi-instrumentalist, singer, and rapper born (and formerly known as) Nnamdi Ogbonnaya jumps at every opportunity. He’s a label head. He’s a gifted instrumental polyglot. He’s stylistically ravenous: two of his many side gigs include drumming in mind-warping time signatures for an instrumental math-rock band and playing bass and singing backup in another known for plainspoken poignancy and extremely simple parts. His holistic hustle has earned him widespread admiration among DIY peers in Chicago; when Melkbelly got a call to open for Foo Fighters at Wrigley Field, their singer wore a NNAMDÏ T-shirt.
The second thing to know about the music of NNAMDÏ is that he sings with the patternless precision of a Whac-A-Mole champion. He bounds deliriously between voices and phrasing styles, up and down his vocal register, as if alter egos are fighting over the controls. It’s a universal accelerant: It conveys both a sort of invincibility when he sounds ecstatic and of unraveling when he sounds tortured. On BRAT, the latest of several albums released under variations of his own name, his internal deliberations grapple over ego, selfishness, and the gift or indulgence of a life devoted to art. “I’m a big brat/I can’t pick a side,” he sings, with an audible grin.
Hearing all of this materialize into NNAMDÏ’s most ambitious album is exciting, but not always fun. The moments when he sounds invincible give way to equally intense self-doubts, and his songs overflow with confessional lyrics. “Bullseye” lands the album’s first instant hook, a short blast of Vitamin D that exists on an astral plane inhabited by Tierra Whack and maybe no one else. But as quickly as it hits, it withdraws on “Everyone I Loved,” where NNAMDÏ laments drifting apart from his family, who are “all having trouble understanding why I chose this route.” (The son of Nigerian immigrants, including a double PhD holder, NNAMDÏ earned a degree in electrical engineering and has discussed in interviews how his restless ambition is connected to his upbringing.) “Everything I loved now turns me off,” he sings in an Earth, Wind & Fire falsetto, up until that last word, which he drops with a spiritless thud.
BRAT opens acoustically, closes thunderously, and along the way squirms across ground-scraping beats, twinkling guitars, and most sounds in between. It’s sure to divide listeners who tend towards maximalism from those who don’t, and it certainly provokes questions about what gets lost in genre fusion. But NNAMDÏ’s constant dissatisfaction with any one sound leaves no question that his true colors are loud and clashing, and he’s not afraid to admit to uncertainty. This is what’s powerful about the final two tracks of BRAT, where a longer arc starts to take form. On “It’s OK” and “Salut,” he stands still, straightens his spine, and lets out an overdue exhale. “There’s no need to pretend you’re OK if you’re not,” he concludes, finally sounding satisfied.
NNAMDÏ is a clear natural talent, and also a malfunctioning fountain of ideas spraying in every direction. In saying a million things, BRAT doesn’t quite say any one bold thing. Most of NNAMDÏ’s recorded work has sounded like this—occasionally overwhelming and alienating—but sooner or later, he’s likely to focus all of these ideas into a tighter-tuned vision and construct a masterpiece. The singular voice, the personal rawness, and the sheer skill for craft are all there on BRAT, ready to snap together.


The British grime producer follows last year’s tender ode to fatherhood with a stark EP that attempts to come to terms with his father’s MS that is as inventive as it is vulnerable.

Primary Progressive

After listening to Mr. Mitch’s last album, Devout, a sweetly stirring homage to fatherhood, I wanted him to adopt me. But the Primary Progressive EP makes me wonder if I should adopt him—or at least let him sleep on my sofa—so sharp is the emotional drop between the two records. Primary Progressive is as heart-wrenchingly sad as Devout was joyful, a record that takes the gurgling domestic contentment of the grime-adjacent producer’s last album and pulls the rug sharply from beneath it. And with good reason: Primary Progressive addresses Mitch’s father’s battle with primary progressive multiple sclerosis, a form of the illness that Mitch calls “essentially the worst kind you can get.”
Miles Mitchell has long been one of the most idiosyncratic producers on the grime scene, producing cotton-candy “Peace Edits” while his contemporaries were pumping out irascible “war dubs” and bringing ambient elegance to grime on his brilliant 2014 album Parallel Memories. On Primary Progressive he continues to strike out on his singular path, addressing the raw despair and grinding powerlessness that accompany a debilitating disease that has no clear cause and no known cure.
Of the five tracks on this largely instrumental EP only one, “Show Me,” directly addresses his father’s disease. But a heavy sadness hangs over all the songs, seeping into the instrumental cracks like rain in a cold afternoon storm. “Settle” employs a sped-up vocal loop à la Burial, its isolation and repetition driving home the mournful message over a cushion of synths. Opener “Restart” is even more minimal, consisting of little more than minor synth chords and a rueful keyboard line that brings to mind Daft Punk’s “Something About Us” evaporating off into space.
While Primary Progressive’s subject matter might be new, the new-age synths and digital gloss aren’t far removed from Parallel Memories’ lush soundscapes. The big difference here is that Mitch has brought the drums back, giving them the kind of front-line role they haven’t enjoyed in his work since 2013’s “Viking.” “Restart” and “Show Me” borrow the 4/4 pulse of house, slowing its skip down to a stately stroll, while “Closure” and “Settle” could just about work on a slightly emotional dancefloor. The latter’s drums are particularly pronounced, the rhythm’s fierce house/dancehall snap suggesting defiance in the face of a terrible disease. The EP’s shift into post-genre UK bass is best exemplified by “Phantom Dance,” whose stuttering beat sits somewhere in between dembow strut and IDM scuttle, allied to a synth melody that suggests Selected Ambient Works Volume IIs and the Arab tone system. Clearly, we are no longer in grime territory.
“Show Me” is the obvious standout. Over a circular synth motif and descending bassline, Mitch quietly bares his soul, his caramel-soft vocal cradled in a subtle layer of Auto-Tune. It’s the intimacy of the song that gets me, as if Mitch were reciting a quiet prayer rather than singing for public consumption. At one point his voice even appears to crack, a sign that all the digital vocal trickery in the world can’t hold back the force of pure emotion.
This bravery is part of what makes Mr. Mitch such a special producer. It was brave to make peace when other producers were waging war; brave to devote an album to fatherhood; brave to make an EP about MS. Primary Progressive is a bold step forward.


Man, I hate when an album doesn't match up to the review I had planned for it. Months ago ...

Achilles Heel

Man, I hate when an album doesn't match up to the review I had planned for it. Months ago, I'd artfully conceived a righteous corrective of all the bum raps David Bazan has received over the years, both from this esteemed institution and others. Valiantly, I'd position myself between the mournful singer/songwriter and the sharp arrows of our vicious kind, praising him as one of the finest modern practitioners of the lost concept album arts, while simultaneously mocking the IndieWorld reflex to immediately disparage anyone who dares discuss something so bourgeois as religion. Oh, the gleeful self-satisfaction that would be had!
Then I heard the album. No glee.
For starters, Achilles Heel finds Bazan taking a respite from the song cycles that have graced his last two fine efforts, Winners Never Quit and Control. And while the Lion certainly has a right to an intermission from his musical Decalogue, losing the narrative push sucks the heart out of these songs, leaving a mope-rock shell that's less than filling. Only the murder-tale of "Discretion" harks back to his previous style-- a short-story remnant of Bazan's minstrel talent, its bright light is obstructed by heavy-handed stand-alone songs about unhappiness in a socialist utopia, state infidelity, and bands dying in tour vans.
And then, there's the Jesus. While Sufjan Stevens has done wonders for hypnotizing indie folk into singing along with Sunday School lesson plans, Bazan continues to be the face on the scene dartboard for people's transposed aggression against the likes of Jerry Falwell. With hands pressed firmly over ears at the mere mention of the J or G words, most of these non-conformist conformists miss the context of Pedro's deity name-dropping, which is often as critical of organized religion (and better informed) as any of the Lion-haters claim to be. To his credit, Bazan never sounds like the kind of Christian robotically following clerical orders, but like a man looking for something, anything in which to find solace from an oppressively bleak world.
Unfortunately, Achilles Heel does little to explain those subtleties behind its Daniel-in-the-Lion's-Den cover art. While Bazan nastily skewers the kind of bible-beater he's not in "Foregone Conclusions" ("You were too busy steering the conversation toward the Lord/ To hear the voice of the spirit begging you to shut the fuh-uck up"), he turns in an unbelievably limp defense of faith just one track later. "The Fleecing" appears to be a form of response to his hipster detractors, but crumples under vague answers and a flimsy sheep metaphor, ultimately coming off as preachy as people blindly expect Bazan to be.
Whether it's the lack of plot, insight, or collaborators, Achilles Heel also finds Bazan's music stuck in a room with no exits, with one loping distortion-pedal crawler after another. Save "Discretion", gone are the thunderstorm drums that underscored the pathos of Control, sunk in the mix are the keyboard counter-melodies that have brightened past efforts, and what's left is Bazan wailing the rules to Rock Paper Scissors in "Arizona". "Keep Swinging" half-successfully attempts an evolution of his approach with its cutely awkward bass groove and jarring harmonies, but it's mired in formless fuzz and distortion. The surprising falsetto of the green-with-envy "Bands with Managers" and the deceptively peppy "Transcontinental" could make the A-team of the Pedro catalog, but it's telling that the latter track's "1, 2, 3, 4" drumstick-clack intro could lead into any track on the album.
With Achilles Heel so topographically uniform, it's tempting to declare the well dry for Bazan's sound, particularly considering how closely he veers to self-parody within this album's boundaries. But after a quick refresher with his last two albums to remember why I wanted to defend his work in the first place, I'm willing to give David the benefit of the doubt, labeling Achilles a stumble rather than a death knell. With concept albums coming back into style like neon clothing, it shouldn't be hard for Pedro the Lion to revert to reminding us in ten thematically related songs or less how ugly mankind can be. Then maybe I can use that review I've got stored up for him.


Mogwai's eighth album outside their soundtrack and remix work has been framed in terms of its increased use of electronics. The instrumentation has indeed shifted, but Rave Tapes digs hard into a place they've consistently circled back to throughout their career.

Rave Tapes

Mogwai operate in a small space, where change decelerates into their music in lightly perceptible ways. Rave Tapes, the band's eighth album outside of their soundtrack and remix work, has been built up for its increased use of electronics, with a debt partially owed to the vintage synth scores that have held a sustained (and seemingly ever-increasing) influence over a huge swathe of underground artists. The first song to be released from the album, "Remurdered", certainly hinted that analog sounds would form a more rigorous backbone to their music than before, although they've been dabbling in this area since Rock Action in 2001. In truth, "Remurdered" is something of a red herring. If that song feels like a fuller manifestation of ideas that have taken over a decade for Mogwai to reach, Rave Tapes mostly tells a different story—one that digs harder into a place they've consistently circled back to throughout their career.
This is the second Mogwai album in less than a year, following their creepy 2013 soundtrack to the French TV show Les Revenants. That album is among the most introspective work they've ever recorded—no mean feat for a band so inward facing—and it's a tone they've only modestly advanced on for Rave Tapes. It's not hard to pull all the elements together and theorize at how they arrived at the humorous title for the record, which reads as a direct inverse to the morose worldview of the album and a poke at anyone thinking they’ve "gone electronic." Still, that's hard to square with a track like "Master Card", where the circular guitar motions they so often make remain front and center, and the analog sounds skirting across the surface only serve to keep familiar dynamics intact. The past hangs heavy on the shoulders of these guys, seemingly always keeping them in check even when you think they've reached a point of separation with it.
It's been 17 years since Mogwai’s debut, Young Team. That album emerged with stories of the band members taking on assumed identities and shaving their heads before entering the studio—a totemic representation of their full-blooded commitment to the cause, analogous to going into battle. It isn't hard to figure out who the major influences were on the band back then, but Mogwai had a combative feel that many of their peers shied away from. They had the air of a band that you committed to, that you argued over. There's been a natural fade away from that youthful starting point, as well there should be—it's not really befitting for a group of dads in their late 30s to enter a recording studio like they’re going to bootcamp. But still, there are elements left behind that could benefit from being intact on Rave Tapes, such as the astonishing ebb and flow of "Mogwai Fear Satan", or even odd impulses like getting Roky Erickson to guest on a track. Instead, it's hard to see what this offers that we don't already have.
Rave Tapes is the work of an oddly conservative band, turning away from the openness they once embraced. At some point Mogwai got less interested in testing the boundaries of their music, instead settling for being comfortable working within them. The bass-y keyboard grind that emerges at times is a new appendage, but the material it's dressed up in strains under the weight of familiarity, ultimately resembling an exercise in Mogwai box-ticking. So here comes the Codeine-lite vocal piece ("Blues Hour"), here comes the one with the vocoder ("The Lord is Out of Control"), here comes the one with the funny title ("Simon Ferocious"), here comes the one with the sampled spoken word dialogue ("Repelish"). It's hard to shake the feeling that this is a band trapped in their own creation, occasionally looking for somewhere else to go but unable or unwilling to fully get there.
Most groups don't leave behind the core signifiers that bring them attention in the first place, so Mogwai are far from an isolated case when it comes to looping back on themselves. In many ways they're victims of their earlier snottiness and ambition. The screaming guitars of "Like Herod", the sheer beauty of "Helicon 2", the bratty spat with Blur, the punk nihilism of calling an album Come On Die Young—they don't need to return to such things, but it does make the level of complacency they're operating at now such a baffling and frustrating end game to it all. At this point it feels like there isn't anywhere else they can go with this music, so infinitesimally small are the strides taken toward a better place. Mogwai have worked heavily in the visual realm in the last year, on Les Revenants and a live performance of their Zidane soundtrack. Maybe the cliché about instrumental bands creating "soundtracks for films that don't exist" has a grain of truth for them after all. Here, Mogwai’s cautionary approach all but drowns out the faint echoes of the once brave band struggling to get out from within.


On his self-titled Merge debut, the Bright Eyes star is focused on making escapes-- moving on, moving over, breaking out, hitting the streets, leaving it all behind, don't look back.

Conor Oberst

Both as a prodigy addled with "new Dylan" acclaim and an emo icon with a bratty attitude and nose-grazing bangs, Conor Oberst has been a squirrelly performer, whipping between genres and moods. Still, whether it's Desaparecidos' frantic punk-rock or Bright Eyes' folksy mewling, Oberst infuses most everything he touches with an awkward, frantic desperation; as a vocalist he sounds perennially uncomfortable, muscles tight and prepped to sprint away from the microphone. On his self-titled Merge debut, Oberst is focused on making escapes-- moving on, moving over, breaking out, hitting the streets, leaving it all behind, don't look back. "There's nothing that the road cannot heal," Oberst vows in the Tom Petty-esque "Moab", and he's never sounded more convinced: Conor Oberst figures escapism as its own kind of religion, a workable belief system for kids that can't sit still.
The notion of the road-as-savior isn't new-- for one, see decades of country music, from "Lost Highway" on-- and Oberst again embraces high, lonesome twang as his medium of choice, packing this record with the loose country rock that's ruled much of Bright Eyes' recent catalogue. The pervasive gripe about alt-country is that it's too gracious, too polite and predictable, and Oberst occasionally succumbs to Hank Williams-raising cowboy tropes ["Help me get my boots on, help me get my boots back on!" he yelps in "I Don't Want to Die (In the Hospital)"], but mostly, the genre suits his craggy vocals-- and his seemingly infinite supply of wistfulness.
Like anyone on the hunt for meaning, Oberst is compelled by mystical or metaphysical enclaves (see Bright Eyes' 2007 LP Cassadaga, named after a spiritualist compound in Florida populated, mostly, by psychics), and he opted to record Conor Oberst in the Mexican city of Tepoztlán (the name of his new backing band, the Mystic Valley Band, was inspired by the city-- where, legend says, the Aztec feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl was born). It's not surprising that Oberst ditched the U.S. to make a record about flight, but even from Mexico, he manages to skewer American soullessness: Oberst has always had a knack for spitting out tiny, dismal nuggets-- "There are pink flamingoes living in the mall," he sighs in "Lenders in the Temple"-- that successfully (and succinctly) suggest a kind of cultural and moral apocalypse. Since his days as a spastic, barking teenager, Oberst has traded in a lot of his post-adolescent trembling for a calmer, less unbridled melancholy, but Conor Oberst is still packed with disheartening realities, and Oberst refuses to temper his pessimism, even when it starts to feel heavy and contrived, more like a narrative tic than anything else.
Opener "Cape Canaveral", with its acoustic strums and barely-there percussion, is a lovely, quasi-nostalgic meditation of the 1969 moon mission (the "red rocket blaze over Cape Canaveral"-- an epic escape if there ever was one). The song ultimately transforms into an ode to movement-as-salvation, setting the scene for the eleven tracks which follow. "Hey, hey, hey mother interstate,/ can you deliver me from evil,/ make me honest make me wedding cake?" he wonders. "Atone, I will atone."
"Sausalito" is a rollicking daydream about camping out on a houseboat in California; "NYC - Gone, Gone" is a stomping, distorted burst about leaving New York for Mexico. "Gone, gone from New York City,/ where you gonna go with a head that empty?" Oberst demands. "Milk Thistle", which closes the album, is a grim acoustic song about dying (Oberst never mentions alcohol explicitly, but milk thistle, a purported hangover cure, is often employed, holistically, to treat liver disease-- so it doesn't seem unreasonable to read "Milk Thistle" as a song about suicide-via-whiskey). "Milk thistle, milk thistle, let me down slow," he trembles. "If I go to heaven I'll be bored as hell." It feels like a fitting, if morbid, way to end a record about escaping life-- about escaping everything.


The sharp new LP from the Boston rockers avoids expectation without losing their asymmetrical songwriting style. It feels, in some sense, like their first true album.

A Hairshirt of Purpose

It’s impossible to talk about Pile without talking about their fans. With every album, the Boston rock band’s ascent continues by word of mouth. And yet, Pile reside in a state of relative self-sabotage, as if to punish themselves for all of the adulation. The energy of their recorded material pales in comparison to that of their live shows, where their cult inducts new followers effortlessly. For frontman Rick Maguire, it’s an endless cycle: create explosive songs, win listeners over at shows, watch the fanbase swell, feel unworthy of their praise, and write new songs to out-do what he feels didn’t warrant attention to begin with. In ways, that’s Pile’s weakness: being too good live.
Dig through the band’s discography and their formula becomes clear. Pile stuffs records with hits rather than big-picture concepts. It’s what preserves their material’s immediacy, but it’s also what makes them a band of songs, not a band of LPs. Here, for the first time, Pile offer exactly that: a proper album. A Hairshirt of Purpose orders songs with reason, progresses a narrative across 13 tracks, segues with efficiency, and bookends the record with a proper introduction and ending. Once again, Pile aim to surpass themselves with a formula that eschews expectation without losing their asymmetrical songwriting.
On Hairshirt, Pile are done with deconstructing songs for the sake of it. Tracks like “Hissing for Peace” and “Hairshirt” snarl with spinning agitation, but where they might have included serrated epilogues a few years back, Pile now let them sprint sharply. A guitar solo brews within Maguire during “Milkshake,” but he restrains the urge to reprise the drama of Dripping hit “Prom Song.” The band replaces their trademark, collapsing resolution with slower melodies that, true to reflective lyrical themes of self-growth, trudge alongside cinematic strings and organs. The violins of “Dogs” bolster its emotional swell, while the whistling on “I Don’t Want to Do This Anymore” underscores its self-aware cheekiness. Pile tries their hand at musical themes—like the nervous drumroll that intros three different songs—and the results are impressively cohesive.
Hairshirt spends its time burrowing in the joys of solitude and then cowering from them. Given that Maguire’s vocals sit in the forefront, he masks insecurities behind metaphors for the sake of anonymity, as in the relationship imbalance of “Rope’s Length” or with the internet trolls on “No Bone.” But on “Hissing for Peace”—with its ostensible themes of confidence and shame—it becomes clear Maguire’s self-punishing thought-processes could have turned him manic long ago. (“The spine’s just a snake/That’s ashamed of itself,” he sings, “While leading a meditation on poor posture.”) Maguire delivers recurring mid-song guilt-trips. Occasionally, he deflects onto others; worms become metaphors for politicians unstitching the country’s progress. For all that disgust, though, the record sounds calm. There’s no throat-scratching yelps, save for the holler on “Texas,” and even that requires several plays to expose its enmity.
In the past, a stereotypical Pile song would burst with a mix of feral percussion and strangely coquettish thrashing. Right as the final tracks of A Hairshirt of Purpose threaten to bleed together, the band returns to form with the closer “Fingers.” It’s the only shoehorned Hairshirt hit that utilizes the familiar Pile formula. Even then, it flashes new tricks. Maguire wrote a song that captures the band’s live appeal flawlessly, but by placing it at the end, he highlights their songwriting evolution at large. Pile could have remained in their amorphous realm of rock, but they needed to grow up. Here, as musicians, they did.


Following her brash and confounding debut, the singer-producer slows everything down, recreating the sparse magnetism of her live show.

The Fifth Season

Lafawndah’s debut LP Ancestor Boy announced her on a wider stage as someone willing to take risks and run with them. A brash mix of experimental dance and globally minded pop, the album was as exciting as it was confounding. In that same spirit, The Fifth Season, her first release of original material since then, is another sharp left turn.
She’s lost none of her experimentalism, but this time, she’s channeling it into a more live-feeling body of work. The Fifth Season is minimalist, full of space and light, like a development of her 2018 EP, Le Renard Bleu, with the Japanese composer Midori Takada, and their one-off performance of their piece “Ceremonial Blue” at London’s Barbican Hall. Album closer “Le Malentendu” is a rare example of Lafawndah sharing vocal duties, this time with French rapper Lala &ce. Rather than cluttering the mix, the contrast between the two vocal timbres—Lafawndah light and airy, &ce rich and grounded—opens the track up further, allowing Lafawndah to feel her own limits. It’s a welcome reminder of the sparse magnetism of her live shows, a touchstone in a time of distant connection.
With The Fifth Season, she slows everything down, stripping back the harsh, abstract instrumental productions of Ancestor Boy, affording her the time and space to explore other genres. “You, at the End” is built around a horn motif that subtly grows and adapts while anchoring the track, taking it in a jazzier direction. “The Stillness” is anything but still; it’s a slowly expanding web of drones and polyrhythms, carefully coordinated and vibrating with anxious energy, the feeling that anything could happen.
In all of her work, Lafawndah has centered her voice as an instrument. On The Fifth Season, however, she treats it with the same gravity, care, and potential for variability as a violin. On opener “Old Prayer,” she goes from a quiet plaintive lament to a cry that reverberates, giving the impression that the higher powers she invokes are sung into being through her. Her voice on “L’Imposteur” is layered with a Vocoder-like effect that’s an uncanny mimic of Lafawndah’s own occasional and subtle vibrato; with it, she dresses up as herself, trying on different aspects of her own personality to see which fits. On album single “Don’t Despair,” she sings as close as she can to a whisper without losing her stringent sense of melody, delivering a discordant message of tentative hope.
The Fifth Season is imbued with the tension and power of a live instrumental performance, at once intriguing and nerve-wracking. Throughout the album, Lafawndah embodies a purposeful fluidity of genre and role that makes her difficult to pin down, someone completely comfortable walking in their path no matter how it might appear to an outside observer. With this latest release, she complicates the labels of “dance music artist,” “composer,” and “performer” by synthesizing them, embodying all three at once and allowing herself to get lost in the boundless possibilities of each.

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If the jazz and experimental drummer’s work in other bands often suggests an irrepressible mania, the goal with this trio seems to be delicate chaos.

Verisimilitude

Tyshawn Sorey is one of contemporary music’s most adroit thrashers. To hear him in an ensemble led by saxophonist Steve Lehman or pianist Vijay Iyer is to enter a mind-altering rhythmic chamber. The tempo of a song may start out at a swinging pace. Then you hear a pivot that sounds like a reference to a Dilla motif. Next, it’s being spun through the wringer of free jazz. It’s easy to understand why lots of elite musicians like to have this guy in a band or  why Questlove calls Sorey one of his “drumming heroes.”
As a composer, Sorey is no less bold. But his adventurism has adopted a different profile on his most recent albums for the Pi label. The Inner Spectrum of Variables, a double-disc set from 2016, used an unconventional string quartet to fill out some of Sorey’s contemporary classical designs. On 2014’s Alloy—a trio recording with pianist Corey Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini—the finale was a half-hour composition titled “A Love Song.” Over its first half, the way Smythe meditated over some of Sorey’s modes encouraged you to forget the piece’s claim to jazz-born tenderness. This hint of misdirection allowed the gradual entry of Tordini and Sorey himself to sound all the more ravishing.
Verisimilitude is this trio’s follow-up to Alloy. While it can fit on a single CD, it has an epic scale that follows from the wide-ranging air of Inner Spectrum. And though it never strays from its languid style, the brief opening track “Cascade in Slow Motion” reveals how Sorey can put his compositional materials under pressure. At first, Smythe’s piano picks over the scalar melody, while Sorey accompanies, quietly. Gradually, the drummer puts some more tumult into the ensemble’s texture. Still, it’s the softest kind of full-boil imaginable. If his work in other bands often suggests an irrepressible mania, the goal here seems to be delicate chaos.
Most of the following track, “Flowers for Prashant,” is similarly pensive—until a figure that sounds descended from Middle Eastern music sweeps into frame in the final minutes along with airy wisps of electronic processing. The third movement, “Obsidian,” flows without interruption from this same digital environment. That vibe is interrupted only when Smythe moves over to produce stark, plinking lines from a toy piano. (John Cage liked the instrument, too, but the use of it in a trio format presents new expressive possibilities.)
By the time of the centerpiece, the half-hour long “Algid November,” Sorey’s group makes the most of its deep experience together. Smythe knows how to uncork a fiery line of pianism—bringing a spare section to an unceremonious end—at just the right moment. Throughout, the use of electronics is so restrained that it can be easy to miss. But a gorgeous new melody in the tenth minute refreshes the listener’s patience, with its assurance that not every change in the music is going to be about such fine-grain distinctions. Even as the group recoils from seeming overbearing or obvious, its use of textural opposites—like sustain and dryness—creates a powerful narrative. That all the variety here comes from the work of three players is a marvel. It’s almost frightening to imagine what Sorey could conceive, with a full orchestra at his disposal. The right experimental music impresario should give him the chance.


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 Janet Jackson’s 2004 album, a lush and preeminently sex-positive album that deserves a reappraisal.

Damita Jo

Don’t let that Cheshire cat smile Janet Jackson wears on the cover fool you—this album is something of a tragedy. Damita Jo carries with it inadvertent weight, like a banal conversation with a loved one just a few hours before a fatal accident. What was intended as a long-form expression of nascent love became, in the eyes of many, something repugnant and shameful—a demonstration of Janet Jackson going even further after going too far.
Because it was released in the wake of the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show—that which spawned Nipplegate—Damita Jo was inevitably associated with a debacle that found a single, metallic, sun-clad boob eclipsing a universally adored artist’s entire body of work, a catalog so astonishingly consistent at its commercial peak that Jackson’s greatest hits has a greatest hits. Overnight, Janet went from “the normal one” to yet another wacko Jackson.
But Damita Jo wasn’t a mere casualty of circumstance. It was a response to the uproar. Humid with shameless sexuality, it pointedly doubled down on the sensuality that for a decade had been pervading Jackson’s artistry (including that Super Bowl performance). Jackson could have reined in this extended meditation on the joy of sex—an “MTV News” report that ran mid-January 2004 suggested that she still had weeks of work left on the album after the Super Bowl. Instead, Jackson completed her vision. “There were people who wanted me to take certain songs off the album ’cause they thought it would pose a problem, but that would be changing who I am,” Jackson said on “Good Morning America” on March 31, 2004, the day after Damita Jo’s release. “And I’ll never do that for anyone.”
Jackson might as well have been attempting to fight a fire by singing it a lullaby. Virtually every interview she sat through during the Damita Jo press cycle touched on the Super Bowl, to Jackson’s visible discomfort. Worse yet, it was clear that it was open season on her body: Jay Leno solicited a kiss on air (“That was great…you’re very good at that,” he said after the peck), UK chat-show host Jonathan Ross noted, “What a pretty face you’ve got,” and David Letterman grilled the usually unflappable Jackson enough to exasperate her. “Can we talk about something else ’cause I don’t want to focus on my breast?” she asked after about 10 minutes worth of Super Bowl questions.
In recent years, Jackson’s career has undergone a general critical reassessment thanks in no small part to Black Twitter and the objectively galling decision to have Justin Timberlake perform at the 2018 Super Bowl. Largely ignored by listeners and received tepidly by critics, Damita Jo is something of a stain on Jackson’s recording legacy, the first in a series of commercial disappointments that quantified how the mighty had fallen.
Yet Damita Jo deserves our attention and, yes, justice, not just as a reparative formality but because its specific depiction of sexuality in a mainstream forum—a superstar’s major-label, highly anticipated album—is extraordinary.
Damita Jo was an exploration of the crucial role that sex plays in a new relationship—a basic truth that is generally glossed over in mainstream pop culture’s sanitized portraits of young love. Art that does examine the simple fact that new couples tend to fuck a lot—like Nagisa Ôshima’s 1976 film In the Realm of the Senses, or Gaspar Noé’s Love from 2015—often finds a legacy of notoriety. Damita Jo was inspired by Jackson’s relationship with producer Jermaine Dupri, whom she had been dating for about a year and a half when the album was finally released.
“It’s an album about love,” Jackson told Ryan Seacrest, and that was a line she’d repeat a few times during that press cycle. You could interpret this as spin for daytime television, or take her at her word: Damita Jo’s thematic foundation of love necessitated frank discussions of sex. Focusing on love didn’t whitewash the sex; it contextualized it. You could further, as many critics did, suspect that Jackson was being provocative for the sake of selling records, or you could trust her as an artist who had long earned that trust. “A lot of people know that sex sells, and I think they use that. For me, it’s something that’s true to me—my friends will tell you that sex is truly a big part of my life,” she told Blender.
Jackson’s matter-of-fact presentation of sex made her quite radical in the face of America’s inborn puritanism. The sex that Jackson had written and sung about, particularly on Damita Jo and its 2001 predecessor, All for You (Jackson’s swinging single album, recorded in the wake of her split from her husband of nine years, Rene Elizondo Jr.) was presented as free of consequences. These were fantasies on top of fantasies, a meta-utopia in which a woman and superstar could express herself so explicitly and remain unscathed by the shame. That Jackson chose mostly mid-tempo R&B of the liminal, undistinguished mid-aughts variety to deliver Damita Jo’s subtle treatise surely wouldn’t convince naysayers who rolled their eyes at yet more baby-making music in a genre full of it from an artist who’d been inviting us to her bed regularly for over a decade.
Sex, Jackson reminds us at the offset of Damita Jo, is as crucial to our conception of her existence as entertaining. “I do movies, I do dance, I do music/I love doin’ my man,” she sings in the title track, whose propulsive hook is heralded by an ascending horn figure, recalling some cheery ’70s sitcom theme song. On Damita Jo, sex is alternately found in a club’s dank corners and is so dressed up in euphemism as to sound like something out of old Hollywood. On “I Want You,” a Kanye West co-production, she coos, “Have your way with me,” over a sample of B.T. Express’s “Close To You” that’s pitched up so that its strings take on the frantic emotional timbre of a Douglas Sirk movie.
Damita Jo further explores the theme of Jackson’s criminally slept on 1996 slow jam “Twenty Foreplay,” that of insatiable horniness. (“Yes, I need it/Twenty-four hours a day,” she cooed on that track.) It is an any time/any place ethos as a lifestyle. On the go-go inflected stroll of “Spending Time With You,” Jackson sings of wanting to “Use all our energy/Under the moonlight making love.” On the album’s first single, “Just a Little While,” which combines frenetic breaks, elements of ’80s new wave guitars, and keyboards almost certainly inspired by Prince’s “Dirty Mind,” she frets about burning her lover out and resolves that lest her unyielding sex drive be a distraction, “Maybe I’ll just lay around/Play by myself.”
Pleasure is Jackson’s principle here. Her songs say little of the object of her desire; these odes are to love itself. They center Jackson and bespeak a passion for passion, sex for sex’s sake. This is never more apparent than in the oral suite of “Warmth” and “Moist,” the former of which rhapsodizes giving a blowjob in a parked car and finds Jackson singing with…something in her mouth that’s clearly supposed to be and very well might have been a penis. (When I interviewed her in 2009 during a Discipline junket, she was happy to uphold the song’s mythos, telling me, “There was something in my mouth” during the recording of the track.) “Warmth” is more a sound sculpture than a song, the murmurs and moans as crucial as its faint hook. “Now it’s my turn,” she says at the conclusion of “Warmth,” which flows into “Moist,” a song about receiving oral sex.
Combined, they constitute “active” and “passive” roles in such configurations and underscore the sense of versatility that pervades open-minded sex regardless of gender. Jackson, she’ll have you know, identifies as a bottom—she reportedly told the sea of gay men that watched her headline the Dance on the Pier at the end of New York’s Pride festivities in June 2004. But her lyrics make it clear that Jackson is more specifically a power bottom (the premise of her smash “All for You”—which finds her demanding, “Tell me I’m the only one” moments after admiring a stranger’s package—totally gives her away).
Damita Jo is not just rare for being a piece of mainstream erotica authored by a black woman—it’s also mainstream erotica that isn’t mired in darkness or shame. At its most explicit, Jackson’s dank 1997 masterpiece The Velvet Rope threw us in the dungeon for some bondage play. Damita Jo, in contrast, is largely upbeat if not precisely uptempo. One of her most unwaveringly R&B-oriented collections (again heavily assisted by the production/writing team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis), Damita Jo’s tone is bright and breezy. Multiple songs conjure island imagery, and yes, those islands are where people fuck.
That aforementioned smile that graces the cover is reminiscent of the impossibly pneumatic men that Tom of Finland drew in all sorts of carnal configurations, who loved every second of the sex they had with each other. Talk about gleeful, powerful bottoms. In an interview with famed biographer David Ritz in Upscale, Jackson took issue with the suggestion that she had a sexual obsession. “Obsession feels like a judgmental term to me, and when it comes to sex, I try to throw judgments out the window,” she said.
But a lack of shame from within does not inoculate the shame that comes from without. While Damita Jo had its share of enthusiastic reviews (notably, Ann Powers’ four-star write-up in Blender), it seemed to bore and baffle many critics, most of them men. For Rolling Stone, Neil Strauss wrote that Damita Jo “smacks of trying too hard,” while David Segal at The Washington Post said the album “has about it a hint of desperation.” For Entertainment Weekly, David Browne said that Jackson “works so hard at being sexy and provocative that she’s rarely either.” Even Alexis Petridis’ otherwise gushing review for The Guardian (“the results are astonishing”) took issue with the album’s “lyrical monomania,” in which “she puns wearingly on phrases like ‘doing it’ and ‘coming,’ like a demented 14-year-old boy.”
While it’s clear today that Damita Jo didn’t have a sex problem, it did have a specificity one. A terrific track like “R&B Junkie” doesn’t have very much to say—it’s a hazy salute to old school R&B in which Jackson references dances like the wop, the cabbage patch, the electric slide, Vaughan Mason & Crew’s “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll”…and not much else. (However inept it is at telling, though, certainly basing a song around a sample of Evelyn “Champagne” King’s glistening boogie classic “I’m in Love” is a way of showing the degree to which Jackson was an R&B junkie.)
Accompanying all the dirty discourse was Damita Jo’s stated theme of presenting sides of Jackson she’d never showed off in public—namely the no-fucks-giving Damita Jo (her middle name) and all-fucks-taking Strawberry. But these characters were lightly sketched, at best. Sure, a Janet Jackson album had never been this sexually saturated, but anyone paying attention knew she’d been DTF for over a decade by that point. And no one would think to cross her after she spat, “No my first name ain’t Baby/It’s Janet/Miss Jackson if you’re nasty,” way back in 1986. So how did Damita Jo enhance our understanding of Janet Jackson? Pointedly, it didn’t.
In fact, these “characters,” which the album more or less abandons explicitly five tracks in, elicit more questions than answers. The album contains a leitmotif of Jackson telling what she’s not telling: “There’s another side/That I don’t hide/But might never show,” she sings in the title track. You could feel duped walking away from this album, advertised as a confessional, knowing about as much about Jackson as you went in. But for an entertainer who kept her nine-year marriage a secret until it was ending (going as far as lying to Oprah about it during The Velvet Rope promo), being hawkish about her own narrative is its own sort of expression. The masks and characters she adopts don’t illuminate different sides of her, rather, they protect something she refuses to disown.
All is redeemed by her winsome delivery, though. Jackson doesn’t have a technically great voice, but she is a great singer (as such, Christina Aguilera is her precise inverse). She wraps her throat around her songs with gusto, performing with conviction and, within an evidently limited range, works with a seemingly infinite palette of soft: giggles, moans, whispers, mews, tweets. She has a nimble sense of rhythm that makes vocal pitter-patter around her beats. She doesn’t have pipes that will blow the ceiling off a church, but she’s such a deft performer and because she, Jam, and Lewis knew exactly what to do to enhance her limitations, propping up her main vocal in pillows and pillows of harmonies (see the luscious “Truly”). Nothing about her voice aesthetically suggests power, but what is it if not almighty power to be able to transcend notions of traditional proficiency?
None of Damito Jo’s singles went Top 40 in the U.S, but the lack of hits means that the album plays today as a single statement without the distraction of external cultural attachments to its songs. (It’s also a reminder that pop culture has no obligation to fairness if songs as sublime as “Truly” and “Island Life” should exist in neglect.) That Jackson’s commercial downturn happened to coincide with an album in which she was adamant about her status as a regular person who does regular-person things like fucking feels like some kind of thematic kismet. Damita Jo’s explicitly rendered humanity—in its intent and its performances—ultimately sells the sexual content of the album as part of a real human’s functions and desires, as opposed to a crass marketing angle. Between songs, on her trademark interludes, Jackson babbles about her love of humidity, Anguilla, dusk, and music, aware that life is in the details that outsiders might find extraneous. The glory and the tragedy of mortality spread across Damita Jo like the smile on Jackson’s face. Here I am, she was saying, naked as the day I was born, take it or leave it. Most people left it. That was their loss.


On this fire-breathing flipside to 2006's stately Body Riddle, the Warp producer issues a visceral take on the art of modern beatmaking.

Turning Dragon

In a recent interview, electronic music producer Chris Clark admitted he's "a bit of a perfectionist" when it comes to producing his beyond-intricate instrumentals. This is an understatement. Considering the Warp disciple's flair for pinpoint micro-rhythms, Clark's compositions come across like the inner whirlings of a beautifully disturbed mind. His beats rev up only to exhale into cleansing waves of static; each synthetic echo is draped with an echo of its own; oscillating fragments drift in and out of songs like unsettling half dreams-- this is imposing music. And without Clark's penchant for bruising emotion, it would be as useless as a stack of crashed, clicking hard drives. The human logic within his wave forms is convoluted but nonetheless present; Chris Clark is the guy with the bomb-rubble room-- a leaning pile of CDs here, gear head mags there, questionably clean clothes everywhere-- in which everything is oddly in its right place.
Across his first three albums, Clark utilized his talents with steely machines and warmer acoustic instruments-- including pianos and drums-- to assemble increasingly fluid tapestries, culminating with 2006's masterful Body Riddle. That album-- which attempted to answer the body's queries from the inside out-- assured its longevity with an all-encompassing attention to detail: Two years later, fresh folds continue to reveal themselves. Turning Dragon takes a detour from Clark's ultimate goal of meshing man and machine into one seamless, clattering bundle. Consisting of material tailored during frenetic live gigs and pegged as a counterpart to Body Riddle rather than a proper follow-up, Dragon finds the robots taking the upper hand. Clark's OCD tendencies are still apparent, but they're conveyed in a markedly brasher manner-- snares snarl, samples fire off semi-automatically, and the compression gets bumped up to Justice levels. It's the fire-breathing flipside to Riddle's contemplative stateliness.
And it's liberating to hear this sonic manicurist doing his best to freak out. Clark wastes no time in addressing his newly hedonistic agenda with the appropriately titled "New Year Storm". Ostensibly, this is his take on straight-up techno, but the near-industrial 4/4 pummels more than it pulses as it attempts to push through the producer's constant barrage of air-raid assaults-- this is what Trent Reznor wants to sound like in 2008. Galvanizing beasts "Volcan Veins" and "Truncation Horn" both employ micro-sampling to punctuate their soaring-BPM onslaughts; in the midst of these recklessly caffeinated raves, Missy Elliott and INXS are nothing but scattershot pawns in Clark's twisted game.
After the record's initial manic three-track bum rush, things settle into a slightly less leg-cracking groove. "For Wolves Crew" is the requisite Chris Clark album-within-a-song stunner: Before the seven-minute epic is through, we've heard the sound of a wood plank falling down metal stairs, a remixed alien transmission, and even some sped-up grime backed by a soothing, circular synth line. The whole disc sometimes risks becoming a tiresome test of modern beatmaking at its noisiest, but Clark is wise to include small-yet-essential breathers into the mix-- "Hot May Slides" acts as a side B sigh before "Beg" and "Penultimate Persian" close this scarily accomplished excursion with genre-melting finesse.
So while Dragon may be billed as a visceral antidote to Clark's impossibly complex Erector Set productions, it still has all the markings of a confessed perfectionist. Yet, as Clark himself said last year, "To make complex music with machines is actually pretty easy-- it's the mastering of technology rather than the mastering of music." While Dragon lacks some of the pathos of Clark's richest work, he's still much more than a mere button-pusher chasing the next plug-in. The struggle between his superhuman technical acumen and his desire to access nothing less than the secrets of the human condition continues to play out here, albeit on a more brazen plane. He's the ideal type of musical perfectionist-- one who realizes flawlessness is unattainable, but strives for it headlong all the same.