Opening with crisp, acoustic-instrument performances and ending with rock-tinged, experimental funk, this 4xCD "Bootleg" collection strides through different decades of the Miles Davis story. The powerhouse performance here is a 45-minute stretch that puts the spotlight on a 1973 Davis band that would later go on to form the core of the ensemble on the live album Dark Magus.

Miles Davis: Miles Davis at Newport 1955-1975: The Bootleg Series Vol. 4

Even the most optimistic fan might not have been able to foresee the long-term vitality of Miles Davis' posthumous catalog. Thanks to multi-disc box sets that have unearthed all the (thrilling) studio sessions that went into iconic fusion albums such as In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, and On the Corner—as well as Columbia's more recent focus on unissued live performances in its Miles Davis Bootleg Series—the trumpeter-composer has remained an ever-renewable resource in the catalog. (If the branding reminds you of the label's back-pages approach to Bob Dylan, you're not wrong.)
On the whole, this feels appropriate, especially when the artist under consideration created and then ditched exciting new stylistic languages with Picasso-like abandon. But a nagging question also hovers around each new deluxe set to come off the 21st Century assembly line: How long can the party last, before we get into the realm of record-company rehash?
Unlike "Bootleg Series" sets that are more easily understood as essential, this four-disc volume strides through different decades of the Davis story. So at the outset, we get crisp, acoustic-instrument performances of tunes like "'Round Midnight", while at the far end of the box, we're delivered to the high-humidity atmospheres of the rock-tinged, experimental funk of Davis' 1970s lineups. The set's connecting thread is the Newport Jazz Festival—the legendary, still-running summer concert stage that Davis first stepped onto in 1955 (as a member of a brief "All-Star Jam" that included Thelonious Monk). Later in that decade, Davis took a hard-bop sextet (including John Coltrane and Bill Evans) to Newport, not long before it went into the studio to cut Kind of Blue.
Are these early Davis appearances at Newport classic? Of course. But in the main, the music on the first disc of this box has been available for a while. As has a nearly half-hour portion of this volume's third disc (recently included on the album Bitches Brew Live). Moreover, while Davis certainly made a point of getting his various groups to the Newport festival—both its U.S. and foreign-touring iterations—there's little sense that the destination much influenced his fast-moving aesthetic development. (Unlike, say, the post-Summer of Love concerts at the Fillmore collected in the third Davis Bootleg Series release.)
So instead of being wall-to-wall necessary, this Bootleg Series edition is simply three-quarters-revelatory. But what is legitimately new here is as good as anything else in the Davis-rarity series. The second disc gives us multiple, intense sets by the trumpeter's "second great quintet," which traveled to Newport in both 1966 and 1967. The back-to-back sequencing of these performances shows how fast Davis' music was developing, even from within a particular lineup. (Compare the thrashing, second version of "Gingerbread Boy", from the 1967 date, to the more restrained 1966 iteration.) And the final disc's rarely-heard 1971 band—including Keith Jarrett on electric piano—puts its own spin on some of Davis' most familiar fusion-era tunes (including a cool-strutting "Bitches Brew" that leads into a majestic, slow-burning "Funky Tonk").
The powerhouse performance in the box, however—a true drop-everything-and-call-your-friends-over-to-listen concert—is a 47-minute stretch on disc three, which puts the spotlight on a 1973 Davis band that would later go on to form the core of the ensemble on the live album Dark Magus. For some connoisseurs, Dark Magus represents Davis' point of peak-fusion—propulsive, densely textured, and grooving. But one thing that recording also has is longueurs. (It was a double-album, after all.) The 1973 gig included in this box isn't just more compact, it's nervier, too.
While Pete Cosey's wild electric guitar pyrotechnics sound great on Dark Magus, his playbook of liquid licks also feels fully figured out—it's a command performance by a Davis group member who has had years to drill this particular music. By contrast, his playing on "Turnaroundphrase", the opening tune from this newly issued 1973 set, is more darting in nature, and alive with the sound of the guitarist figuring out a way through Davis' ferocious composition. Likewise, soprano saxophonist Dave Liebman—the only acoustic axe in this lineup—sounds as though he's fighting his way toward a state of audibility. When his keening playing joins up with Davis's own wah-wah-enhanced trumpet moans, the sound reaches flourishes of intensity that rival (and perhaps eclipse) those on Dark Magus. (The 1973 set is such a different-sounding beast, it hardly matters that its setlist is largely similar to that of the latter album.)
The liner notes included with this Bootleg Series release refer to Davis' "heath challenges" during this period, and his reduced range on the trumpet. And yet the 1973 gig still shows Davis' bandleading and arranging skills to be working at a high level, hard living be damned. Despite the fact that those talents weren't intimately connected to the Newport Festival, particularly, they lend this box set a stable, running theme—whether Davis is leading his sextet with Coltrane, his second quintet, or else the various fusion lineups represented here. You can quibble with the inclusion of familiar material in a Bootleg Series package, but you can't argue—not yet, at least—with the unreleased depths of the Davis vault.


On his full-length Backwoodz debut, SKECH185’s hoarsely confrontational rapping finds a perfect match in producer Jeff Markey’s jumpy, abrasive beats.

SKECH185: He Left Nothing for the Swim Back

He Left Nothing for the Swim Back

SKECH185 is ready to smack you in the face with reality. Every verse crackles with the urgency of Savion Glover’s speech at the end of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, the weight of racism and capitalism bending him to the breaking point. SKECH cut his teeth in the 2010s Chicago underground rap scene as a member of the Tomorrow Kings collective before decamping to New York and sharing billing with acts like the Karma Kids and early artists in the Backwoodz Studioz cohort. No matter where he shows up, his voice booms, slicing through a maelstrom of indifference. He has the only guest verse on Armand Hammer’s 2018 breakout album, Paraffin, and he earns it with vignettes packed with gut-wrenching detail: “My mother lost a close friend/She sat with her and watched her fade/Funny the same man who failed with a screwdriver succeeded with AIDS.”
Five years later (and six since his last album, Gunship Diplomacy, as one half of the duo War Church, with Texas producer Analog(ue) Tape Dispenser), SKECH has formally linked with Backwoodz for He Left Nothing for the Swim Back, a full-length entirely produced by Brooklyn-based composer Jeff Markey, an on-and-off collaborator in the New York underground. Last year, Markey dropped his debut solo project, Sports & Leisure, pairing laid-back sample chops and loops with a handful of guests. While Swim may be similar in form, it’s entirely different in sound, laying out waves of abrasive, jumpy beats and samples as thick as smog. It’s the perfect backdrop for SKECH’s hoarse brand of confrontation, and a mirror of the desperate exertion suggested by its title.
SKECH has a knack for blending the tragic and the iconic in dizzying ways, often with jokes that disguise a sharp kernel of truth. On “Badly Drawn Hero,” he sardonically flips Gil-Scott Heron’s famous maxim to reflect surface-level, Target-brand activism: “The revolution won’t have a laugh track or a verse from Black Thought.” He is even more direct in “Up to Speed,” bleakly referencing the way that Chicago’s death toll supplies grist for the news and subreddit content mills: “The headlines had birthdays before they became your entertainment.” SKECH isn’t here to offer clear-cut answers to a world on fire, but he isn’t above holding your head to the stovetop in an effort to shock you awake.
He Left Nothing for the Swim Back is a world of blown-out buildings and bars that descend into “sword fight[s] for dollars.” Memories are shot through with pained melancholy, like the backyard argument turned shootout that powers the opening verse to “East Side Summer.” SKECH cuts the tension by turning directly to the camera as the march of Markey’s beat fades to vapor: “Nothing cool about living through this, fuck how them songs sound/That don’t make you real, we would’ve/Traded that ground for a tire swing.” His stories are as focused and detail-rich as his observational tracks, swerving past comfort in favor of spoonfuls of battery acid.
Markey matches the charged funk of SKECH’s perspective with beats that creak and thump like a steampunk engine in need of oil. A handful of moments—namely the title track and “The River”—verge on industrial and post-punk sounds similar to Algiers or the latest Injury Reserve record, but the rest plays closer to kooky, unnerving boom-bap. “East Side Summer” and “Jay Street” are hollowed-out drum marches retrofitted with tinny organs and wailing saxophone. SKECH keeps pace with every switch-up, but he and Markey are most in sync on the two-part closer “Western Automatic Music,” where the muted drums and warbling synths of the first part are turned inside out on the second. SKECH’s gruff declarations (“The meek will inherit it all because the brave always go first”) fly between metered rhyme and freeform, pounding on the walls of the beats and creating haunting echoes.
For all the rage, sarcasm, and sorrow coursing through He Left Nothing for the Swim Back, one moment tests SKECH’s resolve more than a thousand Kendall Jenner Pepsi protest commercials. Near the end of “The River,” he ponders if young people are even interested in inheriting the fight that older generations pass down: “What do I lose if I leave them? What do I do if they leave this?” The work may be Sisyphean, he decides, but he’ll trudge forward and fight for them anyway. SKECH and Markey have been warping traditional hip-hop into jagged, colorful forms for over a decade, but they fit well into the Backwoodz universe, and Swim has clearly sparked a new resolve in them. After some time away, they sound as prepared for the apocalypse as ever.


Rufus Wainwright’s first original album in eight years isn’t so much a reinvention as an opulently crafted highlight reel, a career-spanning sampler of the singer’s many styles and guises.

Unfollow the Rules

At 46, Rufus Wainwright is around the same age Leonard Cohen was when he wrote “Hallelujah,” the song Wainwright transmitted into a million tween bedrooms by way of a powerful device known as the Shrek soundtrack. And he’s the same age his father, Loudon Wainwright III, was when he released History, the 1992 album sometimes regarded as a late-career masterpiece. That’s not to say the younger Wainwright has crafted a masterpiece of his own (or an American Idol standby), but he knows lengthy careers can ebb and flow—it’s literally in his blood—and isn’t shy about comparing his own arc to big-name forebears: When he first announced his new album, Unfollow the Rules, back in February, he described it as an attempt to “emulate the greats of yore whose second acts produced their finest work,” citing Cohen’s The Future and Paul Simon’s Graceland. Unfollow the Rules, we were to understand, is a long-awaited new beginning.
But unlike The Future, which absorbed icy synthesizers into Cohen’s apocalyptic soothsaying, or Graceland, which drew from South African styles like township jive, Unfollow the Rules isn’t the sort of album that’s interested in reckoning with the contemporary pop landscape. Maybe that will come as a relief to Wainwright’s fans, who’ve waited nearly a decade since his last proper pop album, 2012’s Mark Ronson-assisted Out of the Game, and who have always been drawn to the singer’s old-soul aesthetic. Swapping Ronson for veteran producer Mitchell Froom, Unfollow the Rules isn’t so much a reinvention as an opulently crafted highlight reel, a career-spanning sampler of Wainwright’s styles and guises.
Nearly every corner of Wainwright’s discography, save for the operas, is here and accounted for: the swooning piano -pop of 2001’s career-best Poses (“Romantical Man”), the outlandishly lush orchestration of Want Two and Release the Stars (“Unfollow the Rules,” “Early Morning Madness”), the solo meandering of All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu (“My Little You”). He even finds time to revisit the ’70s AOR sparkle of Out of the Game on “Damsel in Distress,” a Joni Mitchell tribute ornamented with Hunky Dory handclaps.
If these reference points seem a little retro, consider that they’re several hundred years more current than the Shakespeare sonnets that occupied Wainwright’s last release. Besides, the singer has spent the last eight years settling into married life, raising a young daughter, and writing an opera about an embattled Roman emperor—not jockeying for relevance or mugging with Kendrick Lamar at the Grammys. That sense of domestic, middle-age contentedness fills the album, from the striding English folk of “Peaceful Afternoon,” in which Wainwright toasts to a happy marriage and hopes his husband’s face is the last he sees before he dies, to the lullaby-esque “My Little You,” in which he regales his daughter with embarrassing dad stories.
When Wainwright does veer from his comfort zone, flirting with sci-fi synths and celestial flourishes, the results range from jumbled (“This One’s for the Ladies [That Lunge]”) to downright grating (“Hatred”). Mostly, though, his songwriting is as sharp and cheeky as ever. “You Ain’t Big” satirizes provincial fame (and packs a decent punchline), while “Alone Time” subverts its plea for solitude (“I need a little alone time / A little dream time”) with harmonies so luxuriant that Wainwright sounds like he’s accompanied by a choir of himself. (Had it been written in 2020, it could be a song about the trials of quarantining with a toddler.)
The album’s sound is sleek and full of grand, sweeping climaxes that occasionally oversell the songwriting. But if Unfollow the Rules is sometimes in want of a unifying idea or theme, Wainwright’s dreamy voice provides a throughline. With its immaculate harmonies and wry humor, “Trouble in Paradise”—a sardonic take on the fashion industry—sounds so much like Queen that the Bohemian Rhapsody producers probably could have slotted it in the film without Bryan Singer noticing. Numerous other songs erupt in layered, multipart harmonies. Wainwright’s tenor voice has matured and deepened—listen to the nasal-voiced 24-year-old heard on 1998’s “Foolish Love,” and then hear present-day Wainwright deliver the wonderful, operatic climax of “Unfollow the Rules.” Suffice it to say, those are not notes an aging Leonard Cohen could have reached.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


On his first album in three years, the Bangkok-based Drain Gang rapper taps into the group’s customary sentimentalism, but the rote lyrics and beats fail to convey much genuine emotion.

Back 2 Life

Thaiboy Digital is an underdog’s underdog. The Bangkok-based rapper (aka Thanapat Bunleang) made his mark as a member of Sweden’s Drain Gang, dropping digitally dissociated anthems alongside his comrades Bladee and Ecco2k, but his deportation from Stockholm to Bangkok in 2015 left him sidelined during the group’s steady rise. Even from a distance, though, Thaiboy has claimed his place in the Drain Gang holy trinity. He may be less overtly experimental than his peers—his more straightforward hip-hop sound sits somewhere between Ecco2k’s dreamy cloud crooning and Bladee’s sadboy swagger—but he’s made up for it with his smooth, silvery flow, a keen ear for infectious ad-libs, and the open-hearted sincerity he brings to his songs. His debut album, 2019’s Legendary Member, is one of the collective’s tightest releases; its pillow-soft beats and heavenly bangers cut to the core of what makes Drain Gang’s universe so mesmerizing.
This has been a big year for Drain Gang, who have dropped a string of acclaimed albums and toured the world. After a fallow couple of years, Thaiboy finally reappeared and threw his hat into the ring as well: Released earlier this year, his single “I’m Fresh” is an ecstatic, 99-second lo-fi sugar high whose drill-inspired rhythm and hypnotically repeated titular phrase make for a blissed-out—and hilarious—hypebeast self-affirmation. But on Back 2 Life, his first album in three years, that same energy is nowhere to be found. Where singles like “I’m Fresh” and even 2020’s “Yin & Yang” dissolved Thaiboy’s feel-good flexing into an ethereal haze, Back 2 Life takes zero creative chances, settling into a monotonous procession of uninspired verses and floaty trap instrumentals that sound like the result of plugging “Yung Lean” into an AI beat generator. It’s a huge missed opportunity to show just what Thaiboy brings to the Drainer empire, and as much as you want to root for him, there’s little reason to reach for Back 2 Life over any other Drain Gang release.
The guiding arc of Back 2 Life follows Thaiboy’s return to the music world after a quiet few years, and even after all this time, it’s clear that being separated from his crew has taken an immense psychic toll. “I had my heart turn cold for likе seven years,” he declares on the opening “Dreamworld,” over a piano bed straight out of Kingdom Hearts. The phrase “seven years” repeats like a mournful mantra throughout the album, suggesting his determination to make up for lost time. Unfortunately, the music doesn’t show that same conviction. Most of the trance-inspired beats on the album come from Loesoe of “Miss The Rage” fame, and while he delivers on Thaiboy’s proclaimed goal of evoking “Future on a legendary DJ Tiësto song,” the sluggish, repetitive tempos and spacey samples are more tedious than transcendental. “Angel” opens on a dystopian synth tone that feels as if it might lead somewhere epic but ends up in cloying lines about “tears flowing downstream” and generic paeans to his wife (including a particularly goofy chorus: “Only your lips I want to kiss/I never miss/Only one kiss, I enter the bliss”). While this fearless embrace of cheesy sentimentality is a huge element of what makes Drain Gang special, it only works when wrapped up in forward-thinking production and imaginative lyrics. Without either, it’s hard to buy into these songs as any kind of genuine emotional release.
Even in the moments where Back 2 Life seems like it’s beginning to gain some steam, ploddingly slow songs invariably nuke the energy. After the title track revs up with an accelerating synth arpeggio, the beat drop goes limp as Thaiboy listlessly intones platitudes over an empty field of reverberating bass. The similarly lethargic “Fate” has the tired sway of a botched karaoke song, as Thaiboy saccharinely sings, “You and me, you and me, forever.” After a dramatic pause, he concludes the thought with the groan-worthy, “...and ever, and ever.” This kind of sleepwalking makes it all the more frustrating when brief flashes of Thaiboy’s originality do peek through, such as in the twinkling beat that powers the Mechatok-assisted “Alive,” or on the Bladee-featuring “The Kingdom,” where Thaiboy raps, “We only got like one life, then we disappear,” letting that offhanded “like” do some major metaphysical heavy lifting.
Where the other members of Drain Gang have used recent releases to interrogate and expand on the collective’s sound, Back 2 Life does the opposite, settling into a shopworn vibe that’s become overly familiar. Most songs show you everything they have up their sleeve within the first 15 seconds, leaving Thaiboy to drift aimlessly, his would-be hero’s journey robbed of its wings. There is a twist at the end of the story, though, when the closer “Never Change” reunites Thaiboy with Drain Gang OG Whitearmor, whose spectral production lifts the song aloft. As his barely there beat stops and starts, Thaiboy’s voice hangs in a still, snowy silence, his calls to “Let it flow, let it flow/Like a river, let it go” echoing peacefully into the dark. The song is a reminder of what Thaiboy is capable of at his peak: rather than simply rinsing over the same clubby rhythms, he glides over the hushed beat with wistful resolve, initiating us into an intimate, celestial world all his own. It’s a shame Back 2 Life doesn’t spend more time there.


Rappers JT and Yung Miami give the menstrual cycle top billing on a debut that showcases their synergy but doesn’t deliver the transgressive goods its title promises.

Period

Periods keep nearly having a moment in music. In 2014, Tacocat took Aunt Flo to the beach on “Crimson Wave.” The next year, Kiran Gandhi, who played drums on M.I.A.’s Matangi tour and performs electronic music as Madame Gandhi, made headlines for running the London Marathon while free-bleeding to promote the truth that menstruating is a normal part of life. Jenny Hval’s most recent solo album, 2016’s Blood Bitch, was inspired by “the white and red toilet roll chain which ties together the virgins, the whores, the mothers, the witches, the dreamers, and the lovers.”
Miami duo City Girls’ debut full-length, Period, gives the monthly cycle marquee billing in hip-hop. On opener “Tighten Up,” the Girls in question—JT and Yung Miami—rap about period sex: “On my period, PMSing/And my nigga fucking on me, and I’m stressing.” Unfortunately, though, the title overstates the album’s menstrual content. There’s certainly no song called “Fuck the Pink Tax.”
Period is an album of high-price pussy platitudes delivered without much pleasure. From “Where the Bag At” and “No Time (Broke N** ga)”—which has nothing to do with the Lil’ Kim hit but does have the same percussion as the Ying Yang Twins’ “Wait (The Whisper Song)”—to “How to Pimp a N**ga” and “Millionaire Dick,” the duo’s wants are conventional: cash and cunnilingus, bags and baubles. Aside from the handful of times they drop the line “cum in his mouth” (a cliché too skeevy to reclaim), their lyrics rarely convey any carnal satisfaction beyond an exchange of services for goods. “Millionaire Dick” features lines like, “I’m one gold digger, shiesty motherfucker/All these bitches mad, I made these niggas spend a bag/Got him working overtime just to fuck my pretty ass.” It’s a gag that could fuel one or two songs, but the album’s titular promise of transgressive lyrics about women’s bodies is never fulfilled. Period is mostly just another collection of party tracks.
It’s through their collective energy, not their subject matter, that City Girls really shine. A track like “One of Them Nights” may be littered with bottle service tropes, but there are no moments of dissonance when JT and Yung Miami each tell the story of the same night from their own points of view. It’s a synthesis of perspective reminiscent of Run-DMC and Salt-N-Pepa, one that suggests City Girls have a lot more to give—not to mention yet another reminder that women rarely get tapped for the same key_and_peele_liam_neesons.gif-level collabs as the dudes. Even last year, two of hip-hop’s most powerful players, Cardi B and Nicki Minaj, were only given discrete verses on Migos’ “MotorSport.” Imagine how much more of a gut punch that track would have been if each of these rappers had been involved in the other’s creative process.
Recent evidence of how insanely good it can be when women rap together is limited: Rico Nasty tapped CupcakKe for “Smack a Bitch (Remix).” Cam & China, twin-sister vets of jerkin’ crew Pink Dollaz, released an eponymous full-length in 2016 that featured some of the gnarliest tongue-lashings of the current decade—but the album’s cultural influence probably peaked when single “Run Up” played on an episode of “Insecure.” In fact, hip-hop’s best recent example of the awesome power of women collaborating may be Lil Bri, Ricci Bitti, and Rap-Unzel’s step-inspired “Over There.” Unfortunately, most people never heard that track because it was part of a challenge on the latest season of Lifetime teen reality competition “The Rap Game.”
Had Period spent more time on menstruation—or any other topic unique to City Girls—perhaps it could have been a game-changer. But despite the lyrical filler, it is a document of unity between women in hip-hop, and that alone makes it something rare and precious.


On his debut EP for Hessle Audio, the Jordanian producer brings regional rhythms and Arabic maqam scales to cutting-edge club music.

Petals EP

Far from the strained dichotomy espoused by the “fuck art, let’s dance” brigade, much of the greatest dance music is shot through with a wildly experimental instinct, from jungle to footwork to singeli’s galloping club deconstructions. Toumba, a producer and DJ from Amman, Jordan, knows this well. Petals, his debut EP for forward-thinking UK label Hessle Audio, is a record of dextrous rhythms, advanced sound design, and microtonal melody that is shot through with the joy of communal celebration.
Toumba has released a handful of records since his 2020 debut EP, and those familiar with his 2022 EP Rosefinch, for London’s Hypnic Jerks label, or his mix for Untitled #909 may recognize some of the traits on Petals. Both Rosefinch’s “Multipack of Limes” and Petals’ “Istibtan” reference the writhing keyboard melodies of traditional Jordanian wedding music, while Petals’ “Identity Crisis” and Rosefinch’s “Sa7rawi” share the two-stepping dembow rhythm of dancehall and reggaeton.
What is particularly impressive on Petals is how Toumba finds new ways to unite the sounds of Jordan with the percussive puzzles of modern club music. “Petals” moves with a lurching swing characteristic of southern Jordanian styles, while the drum-machine palette nods to trap. “Hazzeh” incorporates elements of dabke, a Levantine Arab folk music, over a vicious electronic bassline. And “Identity Crisis” uses the Arabic maqam modal system and a refined collection of electronic whirrs and clicks to suggest a Jordanian Kraftwerk, with all the German act’s classically graceful glide. This track demonstrates Toumba’s skill as a sound designer particularly well: The drums punch with clinical efficiency, and the synths are warm and perfectly rounded, with just enough space in the mix for each element to relax and resonate.
“Petals” is the EP’s standout. The rhythm is deliciously—perilously—entertaining. The drums sound perpetually on the verge of collapsing out of time, with each new element threatening to be the last straw. The odd melodic touch suggests the slightest hint of an underlying tune, but the rhythm alone is enough to carry the show. “Hazzeh” is similarly tangled and drum-heavy, combining rock-hard thump, screwface bassline, and the kind of whooshing, perma-climax electronic effect used to stoke tensions in  darkened rooms.
Toumba framed “Sabah Fakhri” / “Tidallal” as an attempt to channel “the modern UK club sound” that he absorbed while living in the country, and similar influences commingle with Petals’ Levantine vibes. The title track may have a South Jordan swing, but it feels not unlike the teasing lurch of a classic J Dilla MPC beat; “Hazzeh” has the air of classic dubstep to its bass strut; and the eerie synth sweep of “Istibtan” brings to mind the hard-faced industrial emotion of Sheffield bleep.
Toumba is by no means the first producer to combine sounds from the Arab world with dance production from the U.S. and Europe; Natacha Atlas was doing it way back in the 1990s. But he may be the first artist to do it with such party-starting precision in the no-friction, free-for-all continuum of modern dance music, where reggaeton lives happily alongside UK funky, bassline, jungle, ballroom, and more in the blends of adventurous DJs. You could spend hours pondering the cultural fusions on Petals; you could also lift a dancefloor with its kinetic, vivacious spirit. This makes Petals a seamless addition to the Hessle Audio catalogue alongside records like Anz’s “Loos in Twos” and Shanti Celeste’s “Cutie,” and a reminder of the artfulness of the most vital dance music.


This collaboration between experimental guitarist Richard Pinhas and Oren Ambarchi, Merzbow, and others sounds like rock music echoed out into the stratosphere.

Reverse

Save for a brief hiatus in the ’80s when he became disillusioned with music, guitarist Richard Pinhas has spent the last five decades making records, both solo and with many groups including ’70s French space-rock innovators Heldon. Lately he’s been more productive, and collaborative, than ever: Reverse is his 14th release this decade, and like most of the others it features a fine supporting cast of accomplished players.
That cast began with Oren Ambarchi, a partner with Pinhas on their excellent 2014 album Tikkun. The pair recorded guitar drones in an initial session, stripped away the parts that they felt didn’t work, and then added contributions from five collaborators including noise legend Merzbow, percussion master William Winant, and Pinhas’s own son Duncan on synths. That’s a lot of large personalities to fit into one space, but Reverse never feels crowded or dominated. Its expansive mix of sounds comes off as democratic.
In fact, if there is such a thing as a star of Reverse, it’s one of its lesser-known participants, drummer Arthur Narcy. On three of the four tracks in an album-length suite called “Dronz,” Narcy’s playing creates a sturdy spine for his colleagues to wrap tones around, while also being agile enough to respond to their amorphous improvisations. In some spots, as during the gradual climb of “Dronz 2 - End,” he starts with a steady beat and tweaks it into abnormal shapes to match the guitars’ thickening clouds. He takes the opposite tack on opener “Dronz 1 - Ketter,” coagulating jazzy sounds until they become metronomic.
The textures that Pinhas and company surround Narcy with are in constant motion, and are dense enough that something new is revealed with each listen. The sound the group conjures is too spacey to be called noise and too busy to be called drone. Its base is rock’n’roll, though there’s little in the way of riffs or single, discrete notes. Reverse sounds more like rock music echoed out into the stratosphere, extracting the essence of guitar chords the way the shining light of a star distills the core of something long gone.
Pinhas has called making Reverse a healing process, coming as it did during a stressful period in his personal life, including the passing of both of his parents. There is a therapeutic aspect to the way the music continually opens up the world, suggesting that looking forward can help alleviate the past. That’s true even in the album’s only drum-less track, “Dronz 4 - V2,” whose whirring treble feels more like a cathartic scream than a medicinal potion. In the sure hands of Pinhas and his comrades, Reverse is big enough to contain emotional multitudes.


The soul veteran puts her own spin on songs by the Who, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and more.

Bettye LaVette: Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook

The 1960s being what they were, the crossover game tended to work two ways: The rock groups that covered soul songs made the pop charts; the R&B artists that went the other way didn't. It wasn't for lack of trying, of course, and if you gather up every notable soul cover from Otis Redding's powerhouse 1965 rendition of the Stones' "Satisfaction" to the sweltering revamp of Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" that Tina Turner recorded 10 years later, you'll have an alternate version of the classic rock canon that stands up to the original articles and then some. And among the better tracks will be Bettye LaVette's fantastic Muscle Shoals-tinged 1972 cover of Neil Young's "Heart of Gold", which was recorded during sessions where Patterson Hood's father David played bass and subsequently led to her Drive-By Truckers collaboration, The Scene of the Crime, three years ago.
A good portion of LaVette's career revival these last several years has hinged on her transformative skills as an interpreter, especially in the way she can take her ragged yet lush voice and wring out new emotions from songs you thought might not have any tears left. Her first release on Anti-, 2005's I've Got My Own Hell to Raise, set that comeback-era standard with covers of songs from the likes of Sinéad O'Connor and Aimee Mann, selections that people called "unlikely" until they actually heard them. Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook pulls off a similar gambit-- only this time, that vintage tradition of the rock-done-soul cover is applied to a baker's dozen of well-known selections from the annals of 60s and 70s post-British Invasion bands. No obscurities here, either-- you've got your Elton John, your Rolling Stones, your Moody Blues, your Pink Floyd and four selections from all four members of the Beatles (group and solo), plus the show-stopping cover of the Who's "Love, Reign O'er Me", from the 2008 Kennedy Center Honors that inspired the project in the first place, as a bonus track. (Check it on YouTube; the awed, choked-up looks on Townsend and Daltrey's faces are priceless.)
Interpretations winds up following that Who cover's powerfully sorrowful lead. If you're looking for upbeat moments, the closest you'll get is the dynamite gospel-accented version of the Beatles' "The Word" that opens the album and a deep funk take on Derek & the Dominos' "Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad" 10 tracks later. Between them, it's all elegiac ballads, whether the songs were that way from the get-go ("Nights in White Satin") or not ("It Don't Come Easy"). But if you don't mind the mostly downbeat backings-- which run the gamut from lush orchestral soul to spare, semi-acoustic country blues-- the material here gives you as fine a showcase as any for how well she can convey pain, heartache, rapture, and love as a singer.
Maybe the easiest track to point to is the most left-field one: Led Zeppelin's synth-drenched soft-rock flirtation "All My Love" is stripped down and rebuilt as a smoky number reminiscent of the Dixie Flyers' early-70s work with Aretha Franklin, and in place of Robert Plant's weightless murmur is a deeply hurt-sounding yet tough performance from LaVette. While the album's other great moments take a similar approach-- a stirring update of the Stones' "Salt of the Earth", her swooning glide through Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here," and a version of McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed" where her raspy take on Sir Paul's wordless post-chorus vocalizations is worth the price of admission alone-- it's a template that fits across the board. And while it wouldn't fit such a dignified record to call it payback, it's hard not to appreciate the karma of some of the most well-worn rock standards of LaVette's hard-fought early years rendered new again through a voice time almost forgot.


On his unabashedly personal new LP, indie rocker Gary McClure takes stock of his life, in distortion-heavy songs often filled with regret and loss, ugliness and shame.

American Wrestlers: Goodbye Terrible Youth

Goodbye Terrible Youth

From 1999 to 2013, the American Wrestlers front man Gary McClure played guitar in the English shoegaze group Working for a Nuclear Free City. Despite being signed to the relatively small label Melodic Records (which just celebrated its 100th release in 2015), the band had big ideas and an even bigger sound—big enough, in fact, to land them a video game contract with Sony: they wrote “Silent Melody” for Infamous. Their dexterous, almost chameleon-like style stemmed from influences as disparate as Bill Evans and the Grateful Dead, and it managed to be psychedelic without sounding dated or hokey. Eventually, as band members began to focus more and more on solo projects, McClure took his omnivorous songwriting spirit elsewhere. He moved to St. Louis to marry Bridgette Imperial, and together they formed the core of American Wrestlers, whose self-titled 2015 debut was a similar grab-bag of musical influence.
With Goodbye Terrible Youth, however, McClure seems to be turning his searchlight inward. The six-minute bedroom-rock epics from the 2015 album are absent here, as are the eight-track Tascam recorders they used to record it. The obvious shadow of other artists has faded, and what’s left here is an aging musician looking through himself to create something new out of the old. After all, the album’s main subject is described in its title: terrible youth. McClure isn’t shy about his memory. He doesn’t wince when he looks back. These are unabashedly personal and reflective songs, often filled with regret and loss, ugliness and shame. But, as McClure boldly sings on “Hello, Dear,” “Where goes youth, I go.”
The album begins with “Vote Thatcher,” a death-obsessed track that speaks to a familiar theme for McClure: brutal policing. “I can always look to my son,” he sings, “to be stoned by policemen.” “Kelly,” the sixth track on 2015’s American Wrestlers, is also about police brutality, particularly the death of Kelly Thomas, a 37-year-old homeless man who was beaten into a coma by six police officers in 2011. It seems like a strange thing to begin an album about youth and memory with a song about modern policing, but there’s more to it. “My life for your throne,” McClure mourns on “Thatcher,” “I still can’t believe you died.” The words echo over a haunting synth melody. What is he bargaining for? Who is he bargaining with? We don’t get an answer. And as much as the album is about McClure’s own experience growing up, it’s also about the people who don’t live beyond youth. In this way, the music reflects both promise and tragedy in equal parts.
Heavy guitar distortion—a staple in McClure’s work—colors over many of the songs on Terrible Youth. In “Give Up,” the album’s lead single, the constant buzz of rhythm guitar wins out over a catchy riff. “Amazing Grace,” a beautiful track about surrendering to happiness when the sun comes “bright across the rooftops,” bathes in a gentle hum, almost like sunshine itself. McClure’s use of distortion doesn’t evince ecstasy like it does for the Japandroids, nor does it mimic playfulness like it does for Youth Lagoon.  The distortion here is something else, something distressing. “Metal moans will multiply,” McClure sings on “Terrible Youth,” “we’re death in motion.” If the “metal moans” behind the distortion represent anything, it’s the discomfort of remembering where we’ve been, and as McClure suggests, where we’re going.
What holds Terrible Youth back from becoming a really coherent, powerful statement is a kind of haphazardness in its arrangement. McClure doesn’t write choruses, he writes contrition, and sometimes this makes it difficult to take hold of any single resounding emotion in the music. Songs like “So Long” and “Blind Kids” rely on chord changes, but it’s rare for those changes, those shifts of feeling, to build toward anything greater.  And beyond casting an ‘80s sheen over the album, synth rhythms and melodies aren’t given any other direction or purpose—they rev the engine without propelling the car.
Although the scattered nature of some of the songs keeps any single narrative from taking shape, the album is a significant improvement for a band that’s still coming into its own, still, in other words, in its youth. When the heartache of memory gets to be too much, American Wrestlers are there to show us, as McClure puts it best, that “All that weight/It could be but it’s make believe/And when it stops it’s nothing.”


Mike Gordon’s debut album warps ’80s pop, rock, and R&B with idiosyncratic production, yielding strange, murky songs full of anxiety and longing.

Two Star & the Dream Police

Mike Gordon’s mangled mix of pop, rock, and soul sounds like it’s made of scrap metal and polished with sandpaper. Across Two Star & the Dream Police, his magnificent debut album as Mk.gee, the 26-year-old from New Jersey subverts recognizable forms—’80s R&B ballads, Phil Collins-inspired downtempo anthems, Michael Jackson-meets-Arthur Russell pop-rock grooves—with unusual tones, tempos, and textures. His distinctive, distended guitar playing and Prince-indebted singing are pinholed through murky, twitchy mixes that refuse to stay still. Despite the elusive and exploratory nature of his music, Gordon is a master of melody, chiseling gorgeous, richly detailed pop songs from seemingly cluttered compositions. Two Star is as singular as it is familiar, an original and expansive record that feels at once timeless and uncannily contemporary.
Although Gordon’s been releasing EPs and mixtapes since 2017, even landing a track on Frank Ocean’s Blonded Radio, many people first encountered him in 2021 as Dijon’s wiry, wild-haired guitarist. In a live performance of Dijon’s debut album, Absolutely, the pair play off one another in conspiratorial glee, Dijon in his olive fishing vest and Gordon with his ’60s-issue Fender Jaguar, both bounding about a gear-strewn dining room with childlike awe, howling and harmonizing and clapping until they can hardly stand up straight. Before Dijon met Gordon, the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter’s brand of guitar-backed R&B was charming but safe, a collection of Blonde-lite songs that didn’t always extend past emulation. Gordon, however, offered Dijon a new rhythmic architecture, and freedom, to channel his gifts. “The real spirit of the record came when I formally met Mike,” Dijon recalled in a 2022 interview. Absolutely marked a significant leap for Dijon’s music, and he credited Gordon as an invaluable catalyst. “I think he might be creating or transmitting from an alien planet,” Dijon said in another interview. “It feels like this is the first music I’ve ever made.”
Dijon appears to have helped Gordon make a similar leap of his own. Before Two Star, Mk.gee’s solo releases sounded like an offshoot of Toro y Moi or Unknown Mortal Orchestra, a pleasant array of sunny side-chained guitars, syncopated drums, and funky basslines. Two Star, though, signals a sea change for Gordon, who abandons easily deciphered mixes and clean song structures for strange, defiant choices that blister with anxiety and longing. Warbly electric guitar, spiraling saxophones, distorted synths, and two-bit toms splinter and scatter; Gordon’s raspy voice sounds as if he were in the next room, singing from a seated position on the floor. This is perhaps Dijon’s most obvious influence; before Two Star, Mk.gee was a tepid vocalist, but here he belts, coos, and moans with soulful, skin-tingling skill. And though the album has no obvious narrative, the oblique songwriting doesn’t detract from Gordon’s raging emotions. He’s desperate to be seen and to see, to stop hiding from the hard stuff and give himself to someone or something else, to embody a sense of self that feels safe and sustainable, at least for a little while.
Aside from its obvious influences—Prince, D’Angelo, the Police—Two Star’s closest contemporary analogues are Jai Paul’s Bait Ones and Bon Iver’s 22, A Million. Like both, Two Star rejects crispness and clarity in favor of manipulation and obfuscation. If “Are You Looking Up?” had been recorded more conventionally, it could well be a hit. Instead, nylon strings scrape against the mix’s ceiling, the drums a two-dimensional pock beneath the clipped bass, the sound of crunching metal curdling in the background. Yet Gordon’s feral, pitch-shifted singing practically dares you not to join in. “If you want to go then baby go wide,” he cries, sounding as if he’s performing from the side of a highway. The lyrics, though opaque, balloon with feeling, the ingenuity of the form capturing something indelible about its content: Gordon aspires to arrive at an amorphous truth, to lay himself bare without sparkle or shine, seeking “a miracle to cut me slack.”
Even “Candy,” a jam remnant of Scritti Politti and Chaka Khan, roils with weirdness. The wormy, highly processed guitar twiddles about in a manic staccato, tangling with a slippery synth pad and gated snare. It appears to be about entertaining your darkest urges—“I’ve done some bad, I won’t fake it/I got patterns, don’t think I’ll shake it”—but the music is all glitz and funk, a contrast that gives Gordon’s mischievousness a satisfying edge. The slow jams are delightfully disjointed, too, like “Rylee & I,” whose lead riff sounds like a guitar being chewed up and swallowed, or “You got it,” where droning hiss and synth shrieks flesh out an otherwise plaintive ballad. These potentially jarring choices don’t scan as off-putting, because Gordon’s a meticulous craftsman; what might be alienating or clunky in another artist’s hands here feels revelatory and just right, every decision an intuitive effort to get to the core of a feeling. If anything, Gordon’s experimentation only makes him sound more human, the messy elements in his music communicating something truer than cleanness ever could.
No song better illustrates Mk.gee’s gifts than “How many miles.” On its face, it’s a slow-footed R&B track about self-realization, with a downtrodden Gordon muttering, “I thought that I lost me/After all this time, I couldn’t remember me.” But look closer, and the complexity of its construction reveals itself—a fizzy guitar lick melting into a filtered vocal chop, a rising string synth blossoming into a swell of twinkling lights. Gordon’s lissome guitar playing and mesmeric singing are so plainly moving that it’s hard not to wish the song had been around sooner so that it could’ve been a companion during different life phases, offering a suffusion of hope and warmth when you needed it most. That’s the magic of Two Star & the Dream Police: Nothing in contemporary music sounds quite like it, yet it seems to have always been with us, hovering just outside the realm of possibility.


Toronto’s foremost experimental soundscaper also turns out to be a surprisingly tender country-soul crooner on an album divided between psych-soul workouts and solitary acoustic ruminations.

Lightbourn

For over a decade now, Matthew “Doc” Dunn has served as the Canadian ambassador to the New Weird America, acting as a conduit between the DIY avant/improv enclaves in his native Toronto and the broader international freak scene. He’s helped organize local weekend festivals featuring the likes of Oneida, collaborated with psych-folk figureheads like MV & EE and Woods, and amassed a discography stacked with more CD-Rs than the clearance rack at your local Staples. He’s an artist who thrives in both communal free-for-alls and extreme seclusion, whether leading his 20-person “hillbilly raga” collective the Transcendental Rodeo or overseeing all the instrumentation on the meditative drone-jazz pieces that comprise his solo releases.
Two albums released this year exemplify Dunn’s penchant for both collaboration and isolation—yet rather than serve as a study in contrasts, the two records prove to be natural companion pieces. Earlier this year, we heard Dunn corral his current free-psych ensemble, the Cosmic Range, to become Meg Remy’s backing band on U.S. Girls’ In a Poem Unlimited, where their improvised sprawl got vacuum-sealed into taut disco-funk like a splatter of toothpaste getting sucked back into a shiny silver tube. But on his first solo effort in five years, Dunn proves he’s got some velvet for sale of his own. Like previous releases under his own name, Lightbourn finds Dunn in multi-tasking mode, handling everything from guitars to drums to vibraphone. But unlike his previous releases, it reveals Toronto’s foremost experimental soundscaper also to be the city’s most tender country-soul crooner.
Even if you weren’t aware of Dunn’s experimental-noise roots, Lightbourn counts as a late-summer stunner on its terms, thanks to its churchly warmth, beguiling nocturnal atmosphere, and disarming vulnerability. Like In a Poem Unlimited, the album revels in the sultry, soothing qualities of mid-’70s pop, but unlike Remy, Dunn is concerned less with the political than the spiritual: the precariousness of love, the humbling grandeur of nature, the fear of an uncertain future. Dunn sings in the honeyed, high-register voice of a Laurel Canyon folkie, but Lightbourn’s soft-focus patina (courtesy of Jennifer Castle producer Jeff McMurrich) tends to blur the edges of his words, lending the album’s familiar, golden-oldies forms an enigmatic aura.
Lightbourn is divided evenly between plush, psych-soul workouts and solitary acoustic ruminations, and the tracks that fall into the former camp are the most immediately alluring. On “Lovebeams (for T.B.),” Dunn hitches a plaintive, sepia-toned serenade to a frisky drum beat like the Band bound for the boudoir, while Remy and (occasional U.S. Girls backing vocalist) Isla Craig’s harmonies cast the song’s gritty groove in a heavenly glow. Dunn’s also fond of stretching out his rhythmic foundations until the carnal turns cosmic: With the fever-dream funk of “Mind of My Lover,” he initiates a holy communion of Astral Weeks and Maggot Brain, as he and Remy repeat the titular chorus line in a mantric trance while floating inside a lava lamp of Eddie Hazel guitar globules.
But Lightbourn’s acoustic reprieves are ultimately no less transfixing than its extended excursions, with Dunn’s exploratory ethos coming to the fore even in his more typical singer/songwriter turns. On the spectral lullaby “The Catching Wave,” each of Dunn’s existential lyrics is punctuated by a cluster of kosmische organ tones, like an early-’70s soft-rock station bleeding into a contemporaneous European pirate-radio broadcast. And on folk reveries like “Roads” and “Simple One,” he effectively unspools a single extended verse over his glistening fingerpicking, with the songs’ repeated melodic cadences transmogrifying into hypnotic textures unto themselves.
But Lightbourn’s opposing affinities for the intimate and the epic converge to beautifully woozy effect on “Love Is Everywhere,” a hit of hazy-headed gospel-soul guided by an omnipresent organ hum that functions as a lighthouse beacon in Dunn’s dark night of the soul. “Love is everywhere,” Dunn sings in the chorus, a familiar sentiment he embellishes into “My love is everywhere you are,” transforming a universal hippy-dippy platitude into an intensely personal, wounded expression of romance in the face of absence. It’s Dunn’s entire career distilled into a single lyric—an all-encompassing, free-ranging musical vision quest that, with Lightbourn, gets fine-tuned into a pure, direct statement of emotional clarity.


As one might expect that with a title like 'The Absent Universe," the reissue of style-sampling Italian composer Luciano Cilio's Dell'Universo Assente is a spare album, its pleasures revealed through careful listening rather than quick snippets. Not a single note or gesture feels out of place.

Dell'Universo Assente

“Luciano Cillio (sic) seems to have released an album almost by accident, spirited away from him as he slept.” So wrote Jim O’Rourke in the liner notes for a limited edition reissue of an album made in 1977 by an obscure Italian musician composer named Luciano Cilio back in 2004. It was the lone album that Cilio ever released, and he took his own life in 1983, at the age of 33. It’s not a casual assessment by O’Rourke, as it actually suggests the deep level of intimacy of Cilio’s sound.
That reissue reinforced that closeness. Originally entitled Dialoghi Del Presente (translation “Dialogues of the Present”) but retitled Dell’Universo Assente (“The Absent Universe”), it looked like a blank white cover. Only when held in your hands and inspected closely did the near-invisible cover image appear, a hand-drawn spiral in light silver ink. That CD reissue quickly disappeared, but thankfully it now receives a wider reissue some ten years on, both on CD and vinyl from the meticulous Italian label, Die Schachtel.
It’s hard to draw an exact parallel to Cilio’s music. O’Rourke triangulates it somewhere between Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, Bill Fay’s Time of the Last Persecution and the debut album from This Heat. But in its punctilious attention to acoustic instrumentation in space, Dell’Universo Assente comes closest to approximating what the next Mark Hollis album might have sounded like, had Hollis continued along Laughing Stock’s and his 1998 self-titled album’s trajectory, moving away from words and song, ever closer to a distilled sound couched in silence. The effect of Cilio’s music reminds me of Jess Harvell’s line in the above review, stating “how startling, isolated moments of sound, or a formless wash of sound, can wring emotions out of listeners as powerfully as any conventional melody.”
Born in Naples, Cilio studied architecture and music, learned sitar, guitar, and piano yet was essentially a self-taught composer that interacted with progressive rock and experimental theater in early 70s Italy before realizing this, his lone album. Arranged in four movements with an interlude, scored for acoustic guitar, mandolin, strings, piano, woodwinds and percussion, the album is wordless, yet features a lone instance of voice to devastating effect.
The “prima quadro” clocks in near eight minutes, opening with a bittersweet finger-picked guitar figure that—as it slips into a minor key—finds itself shadowed, first by piano, then soon after by cello and string quartet. Fans of Rachel’s or the first Jóhann Jóhannsson album might immediately swoon. But as the strings explore the minor key, near the 2:30 mark, Cilio cagily swaps out the timbre of the bowed cello with Patrizia Lopez’s voice, multi-tracking her until she creates a spine-chilling chorus. At 3:50, Cilio performs yet another aural hallucination, as the female vocal then transmogrifies into a soprano saxophone line. Two minutes after her entrance, Lopez's voice disappears completely; without a single word uttered, body-leveling emotions are nevertheless conveyed.
The second movement puts the woodwinds in a subterranean setting, prepared percussion flitting around the flute, oboe and soprano sax, the string section entering to push everything deeper into the gloom. A lightness appears courtesy of an elegant and lyrical two-minute piano solo that comprises the third movement, while the fourth movement opens with tuned percussion before saxophone enters, reminiscent of a restrained free jazz section, building up speed with the introduction of guitar and other woodwinds. Cilio’s crystalline finger-picked guitar returns for the “Interludio,” as gorgeous a melody as Robbie Basho or John Fahey plucked, if taken at a slower pace. Cello and woodwinds also arise, but the album soon distills back to Cilio’s lone guitar for the end.
As one might expect that with a title like “The Absent Universe,” it’s a spare album, its pleasures revealed through careful listening rather than quick snippets, but not a single note or gesture feels out of place. And in recapping the juxtapose of instrumentation, it feels like something is still lacking, that the deep, solemn unnameable emotions conjure by Cilio –which in hindsight feels sorrowful, knowing that this would be his lone statement into such a universe– are scarcely touched upon. Perhaps that is what O’Rourke’s above quote signifies: a sound so intimate as to have not been recorded and pressed to disc, but instead pulled from the subconscious, transmitted instead to each listener individually. Later in the notes, Jim O’Rourke writes of the music as feeling like “this enormous weight that is bearing on its creators, the absolute need to exorcize it from their lives.” Cilio is a heavy listen, but one that can ultimately feel redemptive.


A new 55-song compilation from the UK art-pop duo is as definitive as it gets, pearl after pearl of fabulous singles from one of the best to ever do it.

Pet Shop Boys: Smash – The Singles 1985 – 2020

Smash – The Singles 1985 – 2020 (2023 Remaster)

Even before he perfected them, Neil Tennant respected pop singles enough to hate them. As a journalist at the beloved, now-shuttered British music magazine Smash Hits in the early ’80s, his reviews of the 7-inches were exacting. “We all make mistakes,” he wrote of Culture Club. Laurie Anderson? “I dozed off.” Amusingly, he suggested that the monster hook of Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round” was not catchy enough. Even if he wasn’t always spot on, Tennant was a fan who refused, in SH parlance, to be fobbed off with pap.
Tennant and his Pet Shop Boys bandmate Chris Lowe have made at least six great albums, but their music never met a more elegant repository than the single format. It suits the medium and the medium suits them. The duo is one of the few acts that still record B-sides—very good ones—despite these being an endangered species in modern Western pop. Go looking for a pop B-side now and you often won’t find much more than sped-up or slowed versions of the main event, but a single release in the pre-streaming era was, Tennant noted in 2020, “More like a manifesto: This is where we are now.”
Hence SMASH, a towering 55-song remastered singles collection from the pop art fabulists. As the Pet Shop Boys’ fourth greatest hits release, it expands on previous compilations—1991’s Discography, 2003’s PopArt, and 2010’s Ultimate—which are now truncated, dated, or both. SMASH’s rules of admission here are strict: only officially released singles are included here, and all versions are the 7" or CD versions serviced to British radio, with a couple of asterisks. “New York City Boy” is switched out for its more economical US radio edit, and “How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?” a 1991 double A-side in the UK with “Where the Streets Have No Name,” is not included. When asked about the omission recently, Lowe replied, “It doesn’t sound like a single.”
Sometimes the single versions here are superior to the album edits, 12-inch mixes, and other edits, but not always. It is also possible to imagine a more nuanced and inventively sequenced gloss of Pet Shop Boys’ career than this chronological survey. But there is particular value to this nerdy historicism given the poor cataloging of single edits by streaming services and that the pop single was Pet Shop Boys’ primary way of reaching the great record-buying public. This is what we heard: a murderer’s row of fabulous singles from one of the best pop duos to ever do it.
By the mid-’80s, Britain’s Satanic Mills had festered into a waste land of Thatcherite individualism. Underneath an urbane veneer was a vipers’ nest of greed and vice where the only thing that mattered was the cash in your pocket and who you’d got in your bed. All of which is to say that SMASH opens with “West End Girls.” The single, a US and UK No. 1 hit, is an irresistible stroke of pop genius enrobed in sophisti-jazz and flared synths, crowned by Tennant’s deadpan hook and a post-“Rapture” pseudo-rap, and it is still the most concise example of Tennant’s ability to see past facades while also admiring their gleam.
Tennant never wrote a song when it could be a one-act play; Lowe never settled for a synth when an orchestral hit could do. The singles of their imperial phase, which Tennant defines as spanning 1986-88, are among the cleverest to ever top the British charts: as packed as Heaven on a Friday, with any white space filled with cosmic whirrs, plainsong chorales, and heraldic horns. “It’s a Sin” mixes sacred chants with hair metal camp in a satire of anti-gay Catholic doctrine; “What Have I Done To Deserve This,” a gorgeously grown-up Dusty Springfield collaboration, teeters between resolve and despair in one of her best performances committed to record. Author Luke Turner was right when, writing about this period, he said that the Boys “smuggled queer kink into the living rooms of millions.” In “Rent,” Tennant relishes the flip-flopping power dynamic of a sugar relationship. “You dress me up, I’m your puppet,” he purrs. “You buy me things, I love it.” His kept narrator is no Baby Doll with daddy issues: They may even hold all the cards. And Tennant finds the tenderness within the arrangement. “I love you/You pay my rent” might be the greatest love story the Pet Shop Boys ever told.
Only a former altar boy could write this well about pride, envy, and lust—how others can awaken the worst of us—and do it without adjectives (Tennant abhors them). 1990’s operatic “Jealousy” features a paranoid narrator who unravels while waiting to hear their AWOL lover’s keys in the door. “Where did you go, who did you see, you didn’t call when you said you would,” Tennant sings bitterly, among sweeps of orchestration that are so pristine that they almost seem to mock his worry. Nine years later, after Tennant came out, Nightlife’s “I Don’t Know What You Want But I Can’t Give It Any More” says the quiet part loud: “Is he better than me? Was it your place or his?” And while their great B-side “The Truck Driver and His Mate” (not included here, of course) sexily imagines “man to man” diversions in a rest stop, 1999’s cosmic country ballad “You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk,” details the knottier side of life with what Quentin Crisp called the “great dark man” and we would call trade. The title alone packs a kitchen sink drama’s worth of conflict into a sentence.
They never considered their music political. “I don’t really like the idea of people projecting themselves as important humanitarian figures, which is the tendency for rock personalities these days,” Tennant said in 1989, recounted in Chris Heath’s essential book on the Boys, Literally. Even so, you suspect that Tennant took more issue with virtue-signaling egos than artists who genuinely wanted to help. On the sublime “Being Boring,” a deeply personal elegy to Tennant’s friend who died from AIDS, the singer is both reflective and quietly furious that the plague kneecapped so many young queers’ ability to dream. SMASH’s segue from the introspection of 1990 Behaviour to the post-ecstasy rave of 1993’s Very tells a story about an LGBTQ+ community that needed to mourn as well as release. The thunderous gay dance anthem “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing” captures it well, as Tennant sings “I feel like taking all my clothes off/Dancing to the Rite of Spring.” It’s about “falling in love and going bonkers,” says Tennant in the liner notes, but doing all that to Stravinsky’s barbaric ballet says something about queer joy as resistance, and finding courage to celebrate despite a backdrop of cruelty.
Two decades after Tennant seethed at dunderheaded critics on “Yesterday, When I Was Mad” (essentially Pet Shop Boys Versus America in a song), Super’s “The Pop Kids” cast their earlier life in a rosier light. Over time, infatuations and reveries take a back seat to finely drawn portraits of domesticity—not really the stuff of most pop songs, much less queer pop. 2002’s “Home and Dry,” with its wistful Johnny Marr guitar and synths that somehow evoke a sea shanty, lovingly details a hard-earned harbor at the end of a transatlantic schlep. The Xenomania-produced banger “Did You See Me Coming?” would be an inspired second dance song at a wedding, when the mushy stuff is done with and you just want to bop with your baby.
The album weakens a little in the last of its three discs, but there are remarkably few true duds. Tennant and Lowe’s recent singles can rival their famous hits, even if they don’t quite match them, particularly the brilliantly dotty Purcell flip “Love Is a Bourgeois Construct,” and the Casiotone reggaeton of “Twenty-Something” which, I promise, is a grower. Best of all is “Memory of the Future,” here in its majestic Stuart Price single mix, a dance between minor-key melancholy and a major-key plea for connection that also finds time to reference Proust.
“It’s in the music,” Tennant sings in “Vocal,” a sledgehammering rave track from 2013. “It’s in the song.” Wasn’t it always? On SMASH, Tennant and Lowe’s everyman haikus and walloping anthems assemble in mile-markers of an unparalleled career. Pop music will always be sacred, but finding connection in a dead-end world is also holy enough to be hymned. The 1997 Eurodance knockout “A Red Letter Day” showcases Tennant in the unlikely mode of a moony lovefool. “Like Christmas morning when you’re a kid / Admit you love me and you always did,” he sings, amid godly incantations and trance 808s. You can hear him beaming. It’s enough to touch your heart to hear Tennant, sin far enough in the rearview to wink at, so full of faith.


Just like any diamond unearthed after many years, J Dilla's long-lost solo album The Diary is flawed, but still precious.

The Diary

By now, it's difficult to talk about James Dewitt Yancey—the accomplished producer and aspiring rapper known as Jay Dee, and more commonly J Dilla, or just Dilla, who passed away in 2006—without dipping into hagiography. His legacy means many different things to hip-hop fans; he brought Pharcyde (and much of hip-hop) into adulthood on Pharcyde's 1995 album *LabCabinCalifornia, *placing warm and sunny beats under the L.A. quartet's disillusioned musings on identity, purpose, and struggles against commerce. He supported De La Soul as they directly campaigned against rap's material excess on Stakes Is High. He collaborated with Q-Tip on A Tribe Called Quest's Beats, Rhymes & Life at the exact moment that the group's personal expansion and internal tension began to forecast their end.
These are the formative years, a pivotal part of  the origin story that places him in the pantheon. But the tale behind The Diary twists the narrative. It goes back to at least 2002, years after Dilla had contributed to the then-flowering neo-soul movement by bringing a softened low end and melodic, hazy middles to Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun and D'Angelo's Voodoo. Along with his continued work with Tribe, his efforts on Q-Tip's Amplified*,* as well Common's Like Water for Chocolate* and Electric Circus, *Dilla provided a safe space for forward thinking hip-hop and smart R&B to meet on their own terms and grow beyond the sum of their parts.  At a time when hip-hop and and R&B pairings were still being done as mash-ups that simply dropped a dollop of peanut butter into a chocolate cup, Dilla was experimenting with new flavors and cutting-edge swirls of tastes. It was all prescient and revolutionary and it's exactly why MCA, his then-record label shelved his solo debut Pay Jay, the album that has been dusted off and presented to us almost a decade and a half later as The Diary.
Dilla's most noted collaborators had been progressive, socially conscious writers who waxed about the big ideas about their immediate society in grand terms. But precious little of that sentiment was to be found in his own raps. As a producer, he was thoughtful and intimate; as a rapper he was brash, confrontational, and unrepentantly materialistic and misogynist. Nary a song on this project goes by without either a mention of wealth, an intimation of violence, or a dismissal of women. And sometimes he manages all three with neck-breaking economy. "The Shining, Pt. 2 (Ice)" is barely over one minute long but still manages to house uncomfortable lyrics like, "Jay been nice with his since Dre said he was a n-gga for life/ And bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks—that's what I'm thinking when I'm dickin' your wife/ Yup/ Big truck jewels in the truck with tools/ You don't want to pop shit tonight." On "The Creep (The O)" Dilla paints himself as a serial womanizer and incorrigible cuckolder. "You could stay out with Craig and them," he raps to the listener, personified as a man whose woman he's cheating with. "Mo' time for me to bang out/ Shit, I love when you hang out/ It's nothing else to do but send her home to you/ I'm through, 'til the next time we screw." The latter couplets are repurposed from the Notorious B.I.G., but the sentiment is all Dilla. As far as hip-hop trespasses go, it's quotidian by early-'00s standards, and tame by current ones. But it's obviously not what label execs expected or wanted from the guy who produced songs like Common's "Between Me, You & Liberation" and Erykah's "Kiss Me on My Neck (Hesi)."
Despite being intended as Dilla's first true solo album, *The Diary *is not what people who are seeking an entry point should gravitate to. For that, listeners are better directed towards the upcoming collection, *The Fantastic Box: A Jay Dee Production *in order to get a concise overview of his themes and sounds; or directly to his magnum opus Donuts, the last album released in his lifetime, which shows him at the height of his production mastery. In many senses, it's hard to understand who this record is directed towards. The Diary was released in conjunction with Record Store Day, an obvious move at collectors and archivists. But a quarter of these songs have already been released in some form; and Pay Jay has already widely circulated in bootleg form. The Diary comes off as a play for completists that was prefaced with a listening party at a trendy hotel and a gastronomic orgy in New York—events for the committed and connected, not the everyman. It’s an over-reaching approach that attempts to make a blockbuster out of what should be an arthouse film.
The bookends of the album—the cinematic intro, the proclamations, the heavy-handed ad-libs on the closing track—are conceits that try hard to position The Diary as an important record, but they're unnecessary. The tracks—namely Supa Dave West's "So Far," Hi-Tek's "The Creep (The O)," and Karriem Riggins' "Drive Me Wild"—are playfully bouncy enough to get  heads bopping, shoulders bouncing, and hips grooving while still smart enough to be cerebrally rewarding to beat nerds. They're all incredibly short, as well. Like most numbers here, they clock in at under three minutes, all but begging for expanded editions masterminded by Dilla collaborators and devotees like, Madlib, Kanye West, and Flying Lotus. (Seriously and please.)
There are still moments, like the touchingly personal title track, where we are reminded Dilla was a beast of an MC when he wanted to be. On "The Shining, Pt. 1 (Diamonds)," Dilla lights up like a late-90's Jay Z. An obvious take on Jay's "Girl's Best Friend," it's a song-long metaphor as love song to bling and plays like Dilla's radio concession. But Dilla may as well have been prophesying his legacy:  "You so special, you multifaceted/ You can cut glass with it/ It's so brilliant /Go spend a little dough, look like you sold millions/ Plus you everlastin'/ And drastically important when sportin' your ghetto fashion." That was Dilla—multifaceted and brilliant—and The Diary is notable for presenting an official release to his intended debut. And, just like any diamond unearthed after many years, The Diary is flawed, but still precious.


Released on Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder imprint, this is another texture-heavy, blunted take on West Coast instrumental hip-hop.

Outmind

Of all the artists working in Los Angeles' experimental beat scene, Matthewdavid might be the strangest. The producer, whose real name is Matthew McQueen, runs the sound-collage cassette imprint Leaving Records, and as a musician, makes tracks with little regard for traditional structure and composition. His texture-heavy style takes the already blunted traits of West Coast instrumental hip-hop (blown-out beats, woozy atmospherics) and jumbles them up even further to build something uniquely psychedelic.
McQueen's debut full-length, released on pal Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder imprint, throws a bunch of ideas on the table at once-- you've often got tape hiss, field recordings, warped bass, and scratchy ambience all rubbing elbows in the same song. It's a heady, no-holds-barred approach to production that's sometimes very appealing. On a track such as "Like You Mean It", which is grimy and dubstep-leaning but fleshed out with strings and vocal samples, there's this cool kaleidoscopic quality, like spinning the radio dial between three or four vaguely similar stations at the same time.
The flipside is that with so much swirling around, Outmind can feel disjointed and even kind of exhausting. I don't think it's an error in execution-- it seems McQueen wants to keep edges frayed to reinforce the record's hallucinatory vibe. Take "Cucumber-Lime", all gurgling and ambient-- there's an undercurrent of melody that wants to match up with the rolling beat but is always about a half step behind. It doesn't congeal into something more substantial-- and maybe that's McQueen's point, to keep things loose and process-driven-- but to these ears, the song sounds half-formed.
It can be hard to shake this unfinished quality, especially on quieter interstitial pieces like the weirdly minor Flying Lotus collaboration "Group Tea". What ultimately makes up for these shortcomings, though, is that when these songs are working, they really don't sound like much else. The warbling psych-pop-meets-crunching post-dub of "Being Without You"? That thing could warrant its own subgenre. His ambition and willingness to try just about anything in the quest for new, weird sound combinations here is commendable. So even when McQueen stumbles, it's exciting to hear him lay it all out there.


Last month I visited Venice. Along one of the main canals of the Dorsoduro, the southern peninsula of the city ...

Beaucoup Fish

Last month I visited Venice. Along one of the main canals of the Dorsoduro, the southern peninsula of the city, I discovered a building defaced in green graffiti. It read, "DON'T BELIEVE THE HIPE." Something in the combination of the innocence of an Italian's misspelled English and the cosmopolitanism of punk cliches made me chuckle. But after listening to the over- anticipated third album from Underworld, I want to hunt down the mysterious Venician riff-raff author of this scribble (I picture him in a beret, scarf, and JNCO pants) and kiss him. For he is brilliant. You see, you shouldn't believe the hype (and furthermore, don't believe the hip.)
As far back as 1997, the hyperactive music press had been awaiting Underworld's followup to the brilliant Second Toughest in the Infants, or more specifically the Trainspotting epic, "Born Slippy," released like a boogie board on the crest of the electronica wave. Finally, after settling on the ridiculous title Beaucoup Fish, Underworld have finally answered. And it shouldn't surprise anyone in today's age of shattered expectations that Beaucoup Fish is not as great as we'd hoped. But, of course, what we had hoped for was the OK Computer of electronic music. Lofty. The final product lies more like The Bends of house music.
My legs and ass must admit that Underworld that can make me dance. Anyone who knows me, realizes the grand scale of this accomplishment. I have the rhythm of a poodle on his hind legs, begging for a milkbone. Jungle junkies looking for seizure beats and caffeinated tempos look elsewhere. Go pick up some Autechre or Squarepusher. Beaucoup Fish's thump comes direct and in repetition, a 50/50 mix of ambient synthphonies and thudding digital funk with a splash of rock and roll. Actually, Beaucoup Fish succeeds most when miming rock. "Push Upstairs," built on a pounding piano loop, could be a Girls Against Boys number, if GVSB completely got rid of stringed instruments. A pal o' mine complains that "Bruce Lee" sounds like the opening to a Thriller-era Michael Jackson tune. Well, yeah. That's why it's cool.
Unlike other techno groups, Underworld relies heavily on vocals. And a vocoder effect. Lots of vocoder effect. Although, the vocoder might just be covering up some downright silly lyrics. Underworld loves to chant a pastiche of commercial slogans, colors, consumer vocabulary, and whatever words they just think sound cool. Sometimes this works. And when it doesn't, you're stuck with lines like "King of snake/ King of snake/ King of snake/ King of snake." I'm not positive, but the lyrics for "Bruce Lee" might be built on the repetition of "Life is/ Juice from a box/ Bruce Lee." Underworld, being artists and designers, might try to label this "a postmodern commentary on the accursed share of capitalist dogma." Don't believe the hype.
Beaucoup Fish has no meaning in daylight and sobriety. Underworld have crafted a deeply agoraphobic record that demands the ambience of neon-lit city streets, the backseat of a boxy Japanese import, or the flesh-pressed dancefloor of a clubs with names like Fuse, Fix, Flux, Fax and Flick. Beaucoup Fish is a record for quantum body activity-- either let your body completely relax or completely move. As shallow as it sounds, Underworld are just sound cool and sexy. They're as inexplicably addictive as fashion, and just as inexplicably disposable. But isn't that what makes us like them?


Scott Mescudi’s latest tome, the 87-minute Passion, Pain & Demon Slayin’, is the most focused he’s sounded since 2010’s Man on the Moon II, with the same drawbacks that have always plagued him.

Passion, Pain & Demon Slayin’

Scott Mescudi does not make small projects. His shortest album, Satellite Flight: The Journey to Mother Moon, runs 41 minutes, and last year, he somehow wrung over 91 minutes out of the psychedelic acoustic Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven. Grandiosity is part of Kid Cudi’s charm: His world is melodramatic and vast while remaining entrenched in his most personal memories. While his issues are his own (and typically petty), he conveys them as important, as if they fit into a larger universal scheme where things have meaning and happen for a reason. In 2009, he slowly opened the doors to that world, hum-singing “Welcome/You’re in my dreams” on Man on the Moon’s intro.
His latest tome, the 87-minute Passion, Pain & Demon Slayin’, continues that tradition. It’s expansive, and Cudi is as focused as he’s been since 2010’s Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager. But it also comes with the same drawbacks that have plagued the Cleveland artist throughout his career: His albums require full immersion and acceptance of his worldview to function, but it’s still not clear that he has found something new (or anything at all) to say that makes him a unique voice worth hearing.
To start his career, Cudi flaunted his vulnerabilities, endearing him to fans who went through similar troubles. By MOTM II, he took on a more advisory role, calmly offering, “I am your big brother” on “Revofev.” When martyrdom proved fruitless and thankless, he got lost in those troubles, and preferred to steer negative: “You doubt him, don’t know a damn thing about him/What is hip-hop without him,” from Indicud’s “King Wizard.” On Passion, Pain & Demon Slayin’, Cudi has returned to the Man on the Moon attitudes, where he is the pained and wizened sad sack—at once able to offer comfort and vulnerable to his own destructive tendencies.
“Swim in the Light,” for instance, is truly affecting, a sort of meditative moment of ambient hip-hop. The minimalist offering conjures deeper images and feeling buried deep within the track; “you could try and numb the pain, but it’ll never go away,” he advises. But when he tries to expound, as on “Wounds,” he finds himself mired in cliché, suggesting you “dig deeper” to find yourself. It’s a constant theme in Cudi’s work; his songs might feel important, but since he only operates in tired symbolism, does he have anything worth saying? Little on Passion convinces that Cudi is a greater authority on the ways of the world than he’s been before, but growth is not as much a part of his repertoire as the frequent suggestions of ascension would lead you to believe. Like he states on “Swim in the Light,” the problems don’t disappear, so a Cudi experience is simply finding new warm atmospheres to bask in the darkness.
Lyrics have been Cudi’s most frequent struggle. The closing “Surfin’” is a very catchy song that excels on its hook alone, but Cudi finds great difficulty in biding his time between choruses. Forced to say something in the interim, he comes up with “The industry is so full of shit/Welcome, y’all, to the enema.” He’s barely ever been a rapper, which made him more unique and interesting when end rhymes and pacing were of little concern to him.
As usual with his music, Passion’s best moments come from its production. Cudi brought back his career-launching accomplice Plain Pat, and recruited Kanye soothsayer Mike Dean, which lends cohesion and focus to the record. Regardless of its dull content, “Frequency” sounds vibrant, thanks to an instrumental that marries the ambition of Man on the Moon with the spacey calmness of Satellite Flight. The Pat-produced “Dance 4 Eternity” feature beautiful synths that hum around the background with skittering hi-hats that drive the song. And “The Guide” is a menacing whirl, enlivened by an André 3000 verse. At its worst, however, too much of the album blends together—“Kitchen” and “Cosmic Warrior” may as well be the same song. The same goes for “Distant Fantasies,” “Wounds,” and “Mature Nature.”
At this point in his firmly established career, Kid Cudi does not wish to be a savior, and he is less interested in being a brat, as Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven allowed him an outlet to lash out against himself and others. The meaning of his music has gone entirely internal, with the listener left to search for the “Frequency” on Cudi’s terms and in his realm. The 87-minute runtime is both ridiculous and somehow necessary; if the redundancies were cut, some of the self-importance would be lost. The extended monotony allows you to get lost in Cudi’s ego and your own head, clearing room amid the nothingness to discover and create meaning.


Straying from the niche where he made his name, the fingerstyle guitarist layers his playing with field recordings and electroacoustic techniques, to cryptic but compelling ends.

Axacan

Daniel Bachman made his name as a guitar prodigy when he was still in his twenties, and his early run of releases—first under the name Sacred Harp, and then under his birth name—anointed him as a worthy scion to the greats of fingerstyle guitar. Records like 2012’s Seven Pines showcased a reflective, sophisticated style with an ear for tradition. But perhaps Bachman realized that time would turn this comfortable niche into a trap. More recently, the Charlottesville musician has quietly broken off from the pack of earnest guitar players paying homage to the music of Fahey, Basho, et al. and wandered off down his own path.
A sprawling double LP, Axacan features Bachman’s virtuoso playing, but plenty of other things besides. Across its 73 minutes, we hear thunderstorms, insects, ocean waves, snatches of radio broadcasts, and towards the end of a track called “Blues in the Anthropocene,” the sound of rusty metal tools being hurled into a dumpster. The record takes its name from a 16th-century colony founded by Spaniards around the Chesapeake Bay, an area that today is Bachman’s home state, Virginia. But the colony would be short-lived; the settlers were abandoned by their guides and left to perish. The album’s cover depicts an untouched area of forest, wreathed in cloud. It suits the music. In places, Axacan feels less like a conventional musical recording than an ungoverned wilderness into which the world creeps unbidden.
Bachman took a turn into experimental territory on 2019’s The Morning Star, an album that interspersed his guitar work with drones, field recordings, and ambient techniques. Axacan marks a step further into this terrain. An accompanying essay written by Bachman’s friend James Toth, the guitarist and writer, notes that the record draws influence from electroacoustic music—a mid-century style espoused by composers such as Pierre Schaeffer and Edgard Varèse, who used magnetic tape and rudimentary electronics to explore new ideas in texture and tone. Often this manifests in a way that feels fresh and surprising. “Big Summer” is a short guitar piece that sounds as if it was captured on a damaged tape machine. As Bachman’s fingers slide up and down the frets, you wonder if you’re listening to the bend of strings or the wobble of an analog recording—a neat audio illusion that fades while your ears are still trying to catch up.
Bachman’s guitar playing has become increasingly distinctive over the years. Lonesome and elemental in tone, it has a prickly beauty, gritty like dirt and sharp like pine needles. There is a spaciousness to his style that demands your attention. “Coronach” demonstrates an almost magical command of pacing; over nine minutes, it moves between passages of thrashing motion, eddying calm, and near silence, as if carried along on the breeze. “Year of the Rat” starts with a sparklingly pretty steel-string motif that recedes into silence; then it pauses, you hear Bachman clear his nose, and it begins again. This vérité approach brings to mind the distant roots of American folk music—the songs collected in situ by figures like Alan Lomax, which captured not just the players, but something of the spirit of the rugged places they called home.
What might be most surprising about Axacan is the proportion of its running time in which Bachman’s guitar is altogether absent. Segments of the record appear to be straight field recordings. “Deep Adaptation” is a mysterious soundscape of watery lumps and bumps; “WBRP 47.5” mixes up environmental sounds with a leisurely spin of an analog radio dial. And then there is “Blue Ocean 0.” A drone piece filling a full side of vinyl, it melds lapping waves and birdsong with harmonium and fiddle. It’s neatly done, building gradually to blazing intensity before sinking slowly beneath the water. But strung out to 17 minutes, its sheer scale leaves the album feeling a little lopsided.
There is a sense of weight to Axacan that makes it feel like a spiritual, private endeavor. The field recordings have almost diaristic overtones, as if articulating matters of deep personal significance. Track titles like “Blues in the Anthropocene” and “Deep Adaptation” indicate an environmental consciousness, even as they suggest a sort of cynical realism about the state we are in. Folk music is in its bones a referential music, but there isn’t a single hokey melody or clichéd turn here; Bachman has ruthlessly whittled any sense of sentimentality from his music, and it’s an approach that undoubtedly distinguishes him from his peers. But this record does not reveal its secrets easily, and sometimes feels as if it wants to hold you at arm’s length. It’s easy to admire Axacan’s musicianship, easier still to admire its ambition—even as the spirit of enigma laced throughout this record leaves it dangling just a little out of reach.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Band of Horses’ sixth album unexpectedly delivers on all the qualities that defined their initial success: soaring emotions, crunchy guitars, and Ben Bridwell’s cotton-candy whine.

Things Are Great

There are bands that naturally decline over time, and then there are bands that fall off with such speed and determination you wonder if they ever even had a grasp on their own appeal. In the wake of Band of Horses’ breakout 2006 debut Everything All the Time, Ben Bridwell did all he could to make sure its magic couldn’t be replicated, first by stripping the group of all other original members, and then by shifting away from spikey, Pacific Northwest indie rock in favor of mellow, Southern-hued country rock. That reinvention might have been more tolerable if they’d had another showstopper like “The Funeral” in them, but as 2010’s major label debut Infinite Arms and 2012’s Mirage Rock made stubbornly clear, this band no longer did anthems.
No other marquee indie act of their era seemed as eager to abandon what made them so beloved in the first place. Yet recently Bridwell has been more open about admitting that, yeah, he probably lost the plot for a while. Produced by Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle, 2016’s Why Are You OK was the band’s most overtly “indie” record since their time on Sub Pop, although it was too fussy and self-consciously experimental to recreate the uncomplicated pleasures of their early records. Things Are Great avoids that high-minded trap. Recorded after yet another lineup change, it’s evidence of how intrinsically likable this band can still be, a back-to-basics record without the sense of retreat that term usually implies.
Alongside assists from Lytle, Dave Fridmann, Wolfgang Zimmerman, and Dave Sardy, who give these songs the expected heft, Bridwell co-produced Things Are Great with intentions of honoring the band’s rough edges. As Bridwell now explains it, he had previously tried to disguise his own untrained playing by employing seasoned musicians and expensive studios. In the process, he sanded over some of the impulsivity and odd tunings that made their early output so alluring. “Looking back I realize the way I played guitar was the main identity of the band,” he says.
There’s something unsatisfying about that explanation, especially the idea that, all this time, another good Band of Horses album was just one a-ha moment and flip of the switch away. Yet Things Are Great supports his claims, delivering on all the qualities that carried the band’s first couple of records: soaring emotions, crunchy guitars, the unabashed stickiness of Bridwell’s cotton-candy whine.
The album’s title is sarcastic, as Things Are Great makes clear right off the bat on “Warning Signs,” which opens the album with Bridwell in the midst of a medical and mental crisis. “Small talk with a registered nurse/Not to cry in front of people at work/Well that’s hard, hard, hard,” he sings, his unsteady yowl never sounding more like Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch. The music, too, has re-embraced Built to Spill’s sense of dishevelment, that belief that disorderly feelings call for similarly untidy songs.
Bridwell’s lyrics can be plainspoken to a fault, but here he casts some memorable images. On “Aftermath,” he taps into parental anxiety with an account of falling down the stairs while holding a child. In the tender “In Need of Repair,” he is “sitting in my usual chair feeling the walls around me,” but he still musters the energy to console an old pal who’s going through more shit than he is. He’s less interested in the specifics of traumas than the way people cope with them.
That all may sound heavy, but Things Are Great’s melodies are so breezy, its guitars so giddy with uplift, that these songs sound carefree in spite of their subject matter. It helps, too, that Bridwell often disarms his lyrics with gentle whimsy. Even when he takes that spill with a kid in his arms, he sees the humor in it (“Say what’s that over there?/It’s the baby and me tumbling down the stairs”). The result is a record that’s personable to a degree even defenders of Band of Horses’ last few releases might be surprised by, an album that restores not only the pulse of their first album but also the indelible sense of safety and coziness. Even when Bridwell’s woords read like a Facebook post from a friend who is not OK, his music comforts like a second slice of pie in front of the fireplace.


Temporary Residence's resident ambient artist patiently works with narcotic drones and slowly unfolding chord changes.

Talk Amongst the Trees

Drone music directs a listener's attention to texture. Once you know you're getting long tones and gradual changes, you focus on the sort of details. The timbre is what provides the mood, and is what separates the Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid from the very, very awake sounds of Aube. The best stuff finds that crucial edge between "too pretty" and "too noisy" and rides it like a water-skier pushed along by the lip of the boat's wake.
Matthew Cooper's Eluvium project has on occasion found this edge. I'm thinking in particular of the 15-minute "Zerthis Was a Shivering Human Image"-- the closing track on his debut LP, Lambent Material-- which throbs with damaged energy even as a layer of drone buried deep in the center hints at a ultimate serenity. Perhaps thinking that he'd said his piece with the held tones, the next Eluvium album, An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death was a collection of short piano pieces. Heard by some as kin to the impressionistic minimalism of Harold Budd, An Accidental Memory strikes me as a riff on some of the dramatic cues from the soundtrack to On Golden Pond. Nice enough, I suppose, but insubstantial.
With Talk Amongst the Trees, Eluvium returns to drone with a renewed sense of purpose. While there's nothing here anywhere near the intensity of "Zerthis", the album provides enough tension and variety to keep things interesting. The exquisite 10-minute opener "New Animals from the Air"-- with its billowy mass of backward guitar seeded with overdriven guitar patterns-- is the sort of thick sonic blanket which Windy & Carl used to tuck us under. In a similar vein, "Calm of the Light Cloud" delivers on the promise of its title, filling available space with layers glowing harmonics. Throughout Talk Amongst the Trees, Cooper has it down when he aims for immersive warmth. Slightly darker tracks such as the quiet "Show Us Our Homes", which has two separate metallic seesaw patterns swaying lazily and falling out of sync, and "Everything to Come", with its anxious, distorted whine, retain a sense of relaxed contemplation.
As with Eluvium's debut, this album's peak comes on an extended centerpiece. This time the boost isn't provided by a threat of noise, but by a sense of cinematic grandeur. The 17-minute "Taken" is built from a series of strummed guitar chords that seem to be continually climbing upward on an Escher staircase. As it marches along "Taken" becomes almost heroic, even after you realize that it actually changes little with each passing minute. It's a big effect on an album consisting mostly of smaller, quieter ones. But still, it holds together. That prickliness that pushes my favorite drone tracks over the top is lacking, but it's clear that Cooper had other ideas that happened to turn out quite well.