Few would have expected Ladytron to last a full decade, but here they are in 2011 with a well-chosen comp that includes two new tracks.

Best of 00-10

Early on, Pitchfork contributor Stephen Troussé off-handedly described Ladytron as the second coming of Elastica. It was a good enough comparison for me to remember it a decade later. Like Elastica, Ladytron are a co-ed band built on detachment, androgyny, black clothing, and tons of hooks. Also like Elastica, they were dogged at the start as being vacant fashionistas photocopying the past. A few blinks of the eye later, and Ladytron have been around for a dozen years, and the requisite 17-track Best of 00-10 compilation feels earned. (An expanded version adds 16 more tracks and a huge booklet of photos; depending on your interest in the group, one or the other will certainly qualify as all the Ladytron you'll need.)
Out of the gate, Ladytron dovetailed with and were lumped in with electroclash. They certainly preceded the term, but the group benefited from it and earned quite a bit early attention on the back of it. At the time, they got by on charm, low-rent production, and a few winks. Songs like "Paco!" and "He Took Her to a Movie" feel like defining electroclash documents-- the deadpan vocals, the fairly rudimentary comments on consumerism and sexual politics. Part of the goal, and this was an epidemic in electroclash, was to coat everything in a layer of irony. Trying hard, ambition, giving a shit-- these weren't desired qualities. Cheapness, disposability, peacocking-- these were in style. By that measurement, Ladytron succeeded-- only two tracks from their debut LP, 604, are featured here: "Discotraxx" and "Playgirl", a couple of gossipy girltalk songs, observational character sketches that draw different conclusions about young women growing up quickly. (Compilers: "Commodore Rock" was jobbed.)
It came as a surprise when Ladytron went right out and grew up. Stepping up their tempos, sharpening their rhythms and low-ends, and acquiring a sheen of professionalism, they took a step toward longevity on their next record, Light & Magic (2002). The results weren't as strong as 604, but they carved a way out of what looked like a trendy dead-end. Darkening the tone of their songs and providing more muscle to their sound, Ladytron graduated from a concept into a band. And yet from the record only "Seventeen"-- a lament that could have been penned for the girls who grew up too fast on 604-- is truly first-tier.
The band itself may have gotten that message: Evolve or risk being left out. They evolved: The leap on their next album, Witching Hour, was stark. Bottle service and velvet ropes are entirely absent; a confident, poised blend of goth, shoegaze, and rock instead characterizes the album-- by far their career peak. It's no surprise that five of the 17 tracks here, including arguably its three best ("Destroy Everything You Touch", "Soft Power", "International Dateline"), are from that album.
Ladytron continued their morphing into theater-rock on 2008's Velocifero; the three singles included here-- "Ghosts", "Tomorrow", and "Runaway"-- find them perilously close to Killers territory, but they're talked down from the ledge by Helen Marnie's vocals. With a more demonstrative or earnest singer in tow, the band may have been tempted to graft itself to songs that aim for scope over subtlety. A sense of humor and keying in on specific images or lyrical ideas have always suited Ladytron, so a drift toward more big-tent songs would be unlikely to yield anything other than vague plaudits.
It wouldn't be a 21st century compilation without a few add-ons. There's a new song, "Ace of Hz", and a cover of Death in June's "Little Black Angel". Both are decent songs that won't raise eyebrows tacked onto the back end of a band's best work, but would never be considered career highlights on their own. Some of the playfulness of their early days is missed on Best of 00-10, the loose analog charm of their earliest songs would have given the collection a little more lift. (How odd would it have sounded a decade ago to say a Ladytron comp would suffer from being too leaden?) But these 17 songs collectively are a hell of a strong argument for why you're still reading about Ladytron now instead of, say, Miss Kittin or Fischerspooner or Peaches.


These "Brooklyn hipsters" treat extreme metal with the élan of a ripe young garage rock band or a focused noise artist.

Renihilation

Note the words "Ecstatic Rite", the title of the fifth track on Renihilation, the debut LP from Brooklyn black metal band Liturgy. With its nihilism and necromancy, its demons and doom, heavy metal-- especially this strain-- is most often tagged for its dark, grim obsessions, not its celebration. Liturgy, at a glance, might not seem much different: Frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix writes about meaninglessness, disaster, and apocalypse in terse, declarative terms, and the band's guitar waves and drum cascades sometimes suggest suffocation.
But crank Renihilation again, and notice the way Greg Fox rebuilds his beats when the band relents-- how hard he slaps those cymbals, how he slowly fills the spaces in his own meter, especially during the backend of "Pagan Dawn". Or listen to the intensity of "Arctica"-- the triumphant guitar introduction, the thunderous way the drums roll into it, the sudden stops and stronger restarts. It feels, conveniently enough, ecstatic, the sound of four "Brooklyn hipsters" (as some super kvlt Internet analysts have derided) who go by their given names, wear street clothes, and avoid corpse paint treating extreme metal with the élan of a ripe young garage rock band or a focused noise artist. However harsh the words and however heavy the music, Liturgy have fun with their chosen form-- playing ferociously, writing imaginatively, and, in the process, making a record that reveres black metal's legacy while, at its best, pushes it forward.
For, you know, Brooklyn hipsters, the quartet supplies convincing power and precision. They play hard, fast, and with stamina, storming through these seven three-to-five-minute tracks and using only four interludes (always some combination of guitars, electronics and overtone singing) for rest. But it's not all bustle and blaze. There's lot of space in these tracks, so that even the most tumultuous tunes offer surprising detours.
That's actually where Liturgy are the most compositionally interesting. On "Mysterium", for instance, Fox overruns his own frenetic clip, drumming so quickly that all he can do is start and stop again. Each time this happens, Liturgy pause on sharp, dissonant notes, maintaining a pins-and-needles suspense rather than resolving the drama. Liturgy cites minimalist composers La Monte Young and Glenn Branca and Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan as influences. The record's interludes are obvious homages to those outsiders, but so are these moments, when Liturgy reinforce the tension with choices that run counter to rock'n'roll impulses. The possibilities are infinite and largely unexplored.
Indeed, one of Renihilation's most appealing aspects is what isn't here: From the dissonant guitar shards anchoring the pauses on "Arctica" to the mix of chants and electronics serving as interludes between tracks, Liturgy deliver a stream of ideas that seem like strands for continued exploration and synthesis. It's a captivating listen in its own right, but mostly Renihilation establishes the band's bona fides. Yeah, maybe they're art kids or the sons of classical music critics, but Fox destroys on the drums, and Hunt-Hendrix suffers for his words when he howls. He and Bernard Gann comprise an interesting guitar pair, too, as comfortable marching along the same serrated path as they are spiraling around each other in riffs and counters. Bassist Tyler Dusenbury mostly stays out of the way. Renihilation suggests that Liturgy are more certain of possibilities than, at this point, their ability to achieve them. That is, despite a frontman who roars, "being shall become the eternal return of fire," during a song in which he depicts the modern world crumbling in a natural blaze, the aggressive ecstasy of Renihilation promises an exciting future-- for Liturgy, and for us.


Roc-A-Fella vet balances expert guest spots, grand, sweeping production, and lonely, bitter desperation.

The B.Coming

The first thing you need to know about The B.Coming is that nearly every track has a guest rapper or two, and nearly every one of these guest spots is perfect-- emcees playing to their strengths, finding their voices, bringing their A-games. Redman spits raw maniacal gorilla mayhem all over "One Shot Deal". Bun B brings his gravelly authoritative drug stories to "Purple Rain". Twista contributes what may be his all-time greatest guest verse to "Gotta Have It", wrapping his dazzling machine-gun flow around Chad Hamilton's snare shuffle with James Brown timing and Louis Armstrong nuance. A lot of very talented rappers have worked hard to make sure The B.Coming is something special.
The second thing you need to know about The B.Coming is that none of these guest verses is the least bit important to the success of the album. It's nice to have them around, but the album would not suffer at all without them. Only two things matter here: the production, which is masterful, and Beanie himself, a virtuoso of lonely, bitter desperation.
Beans recorded the album in the weeks between being found guilty on a federal gun charge and beginning his one-year sentence. When that sentence ends, he'll stand trial for attempted murder. He could be inside for a long, long time. Fittingly, The B.Coming is suffused with a sense of dread and regret and emptiness. "Wanted (On the Run)" is based on a standard rap theme-- life on the lam-- but Beans attacks the track like it was "Life During Wartime", breathlessly painting a bleak picture: "You never see the daylight/ Jakes get on your tail, never let 'em see the brake light"-- a stark contrast from guest Cam'ron's blithe confidence.
On the searing, gospel-infused track "Lord Have Mercy", he begs God for understanding and forgiveness: "I do my dirt so my kids can see heaven on earth/ But the pain on my heart weighs heavy, it hurt". But on the next track, the ominously cinematic "Flatline", he's snarling, "Had to try to show a nigga what the metal do/ But didn't succeed; the nigga still breathing." Even on "Look at Me Now", his song for the haters, Sigel sounds defiant and weary; there's not an ounce of joy in his voice.
The album's producers weave a grand, sweeping tapestry to give Sigel's lament the heft and majesty it deserves. Like Ghostface's The Pretty Toney Album, The B.Coming swims in the sad signifiers of 70s soul: glistening strings, weeping guitars, swollen horns. On "Feel It in the Air", producer Heavy D has nothing but mournful noir saxophones for ya, baby. Ty Fyffe slathers "Change" in swooning, melodramatic violins. On "Wanted (On the Run)", da Neckbones give the chipmunk-soul treatment to Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive", mining that track's theatrical sweep with stunningly funky results. Even "Gotta Have It", the album's only remotely club-ready track, drowns in an ugly, metallic synth wash. The tracks build on each other, swirling into a symphony of pain, a fitting soundtrack to one man's dark days.


As a solo artist, GZA was essentially everything that distinguished Wu-Tang Clan from other crews: strictly chess, kung-fu, battle raps, investigative reports, mysticism. This masterful 1995 collection is the most potent distillation of that aesthetic.

GZA: Liquid Swords: Chess Box Deluxe Edition

Liquid Swords: Chess Box Deluxe Edition

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will have many great minds gracing its lecture halls in 2012, but 45-year old rapper Gary Grice, aka GZA, will almost certainly be the only one who actually claims "Genius" as his job title. Yeah, the accomplishments of MIT alumni in the fields of genetics, engineering, and computer technology are certainly impressive, but are any of those fuckin' with Liquid Swords? When I read literature on the aforementioned topics, I seem to recognize only the proper nouns and maybe the prepositions, so in the interest of confirming the greatness of Liquid Swords, I'll defer to someone who had a lot more experience with genius than I do: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." And really, there's hardly a hip-hop record, Wu-Tang or otherwise, that demonstrates how knowledge is power in more easily understandable terms than Liquid Swords: You're certainly not on GZA's level, but he rarely goes over your head.
There's never been a shortage of "real hip-hop" acolytes ready to explain why Liquid Swords sent MCs into hiding in 1995. But the question with a reissue like this one is, "Why has it endured?" Because while the deluxe packaging certainly makes it a worthwhile purchase, it's far short of revelatory: In addition to a long interview with GZA in the liner notes, you get something described as a "working" chess set and a bonus disc of instrumentals in case you're the type who likes to spend a night with friends arguing about who gets to be RZA during "4th Chamber" karaoke. As to why it needs to come out in 2012, it's simultaneously welcome and wholly unnecessary in the same sense a Beatles, Velvet Underground, or Led Zeppelin reissue is: It'll never again be the sound of contemporary pop music, but it's equally impossible to imagine a time when it fails to be a rite of passage for the discerning, a "phase" of intense immersion and compulsive consumption almost inevitable after first contact. It's more informative and worthwhile to view its impact on listeners than other artists, and Liquid Swords is the easiest entry point once people start going beyond the Wu-Tang group LPs.
The reason? It's the most potent distillation of the Wu aesthetic as laid out on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Whereas Tical, Ironman, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, and Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version extrapolated upon themes and personalities that necessarily had to be curtailed in the interest of cohesion, GZA as a solo artist was essentially everything that distinguished Wu-Tang from other crews: strictly chess, kung-fu, battle raps, investigative reports, Five Percenter Islam. Most crucially, out of everyone in Wu-Tang's original formation, GZA is the only one who didn't seem to have much interest in being a star. Nor was he promoted as one, even if he did end up stealing the Wu's "Chappelle's Show" skits. Which still worked out: You didn't need to be a star or get much airplay to go gold back in 1996, and do you even know which track here was the first single? Do you recall ever seeing any videos from Liquid Swords? The album's lack of commercial ambition is also reflected in its status as one of the least sexual hip-hop records ever made. Off the top of my head, there are probably two total lines which acknowledge women as physical beings.
That asceticism was to expected, since on Wu-Tang's introductory posse cut "Protect Ya Neck", GZA was everything he would be for the duration of his career. In a single line, "First of all, who's your A&R?/ A mountain climber that plays an electric guitar," he conveys a righteous, hard-earned wisdom of someone who'd seen and experienced more things as an artist and a human being than everyone else in the Clan. Which was true. He's the oldest member of the crew, and like RZA, he had a formative and demoralizing crash course in industry rule #4080 that led to a long-forgotten curiosity of a debut in Words From the Genius. Those lessons inform GZA's lyrics to a great extent, whether it's a casual but fatal dismissal during "Shadowboxin'" ("Check these non-visual niggas with tapes and a portrait/ Flood the seminar trying to orbit this corporate industry") and especially on "Labels", the track here that might lose new listeners most quickly because something like 85% of the companies GZA puns upon no longer exist.
And so then, Liquid Swords is a consummate MC's album, and finding a weak line on it is nearly impossible. What makes it all the more impressive is that he's rarely, as the similarly stentorian Chuck D once put it, rhyming "for the sake of riddlin'." He's not beyond a well-timed "motherfuckin'" to pad out his cadences, though, and it's most likely the record with the most consistently astounding use of simile, that easily and frequently abused stepbrother of metaphor. "Lyrics are weak like clock radio speakers," "I bang like vehicular homicide and July 4th in Bed Stuy," "that's minimum and feminine like sandals." Outside of RZA's phenomenal third-eye verse from "4th Chamber” (yell "lynched the prominent dominant Islamic, Asiatic black Hebrew" on the subway, it's fun), there is almost nothing here that can't be easily understood by a teenager.
GZA's rhymes here are incredible, but Liquid Swords isn't just GZA's only great album, it might just be his only good one (though fine arguments have certainly been made on the behalf of Legend Of The Liquid Sword). It's hardly surprising that the man who told his peers during the height of hip-pop commercial fusion "make it brief son, half short and twice strong" didn't have much patience for rap derived from classic verse-chorus songwriting. But nonetheless, his later albums would make it abundantly clear how everything went right for him on Liquid Swords in terms of hooks and beats and song structure. (Listen to the chorus of "Did Ya Say That?" from Legend of the Liquid Sword or pretty much any track produced by someone not named RZA to get what I mean.) Really, 17 years after the fact, I'm still struck by how a record of such grim subject matter and "opium scented, dark tinted" music could actually be kinda fun. It's a crucial balance and even the most unhinged of the Wu are willing to exchange a bit of their own levity for GZA's gravitas. Ol' Dirty Bastard shows up in the only way that makes sense, refereeing a match between GZA and Inspectah Deck by yelling "duel of the iron mic! It's that 52 fatal strike! NUH!" Which is meant to convey absolutely nothing other than "this is the illest rap battle ever." Ghostface Killah sips rum out of the Stanley Cup while asking the toughest metaphysical questions on "4th Chamber". "Shadowboxin'" has no hook, but the interplay between Method Man and GZA made it a surprising interloper during frat parties in the late 90s. Catchy hooks abound, as with the playful reminiscence of the title track, the insatiable yet calm list of demands on "Gold", the impossibly bugged-out synth hook from "4th Chamber" tracing the flight of a mosquito.
One of the many great things about Liquid Swords is that while it's an unimpeachable work of lyrical mastery, of fierce intellect and sound morals, it's in no way a record for prudes.  Yes, there are plenty of high-minded theological dissertations, particularly the Killah Priest solo curiosity "B.I.B.L.E.".  But the criminology element is every bit as present as on Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. While Raekwon and Ghostface sounded high off their own supply, embodying Mafioso and druglords dealing with the extreme emotions, rewards and larger than life personalities, GZA is far more objective about the situation. After a classic skit ("I think you do know him"), he announces the start of "Killah Hills 10304" by yelling "LIFE OF A DRUG DEALER" in case you're unaware of the subject at hand. But even with that kind of straight talk, GZA still hovers slightly above the situation and his associates are indeed like chess pieces, functional pawns and slightly higher ranking associates who are still ultimately disposable-- the surgically-altered drug mules, solemn terrorists, low-level dealers and anonymous fiends.
The more important contrast to Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, RZA's self-described "summer album," Liquid Swords was clearly meant for winter warz. During the first round of solo releases, RZA created a sonic template that masterfully mirrored the personality of every MC, and this is his most cohesive and visionary work largely because GZA was already so fully formed. Even the kung-fu samples are the most seamlessly integrated, from the unnerving retelling of a failed assassination which begins the LP to the slain warrior who ends it, befallen by a decapitation replete he always assumed he'd inflict on another-- it's impossible to shake the grotesque sounds of his final breaths, where his slit neck emits a wailing winter wind. It's the most horrific effect on Liquid Swords, but not by much: the soul and funk guitars were originally pressed to vinyl and hot wax, whereas here, they sound like they were brought out of storage from particularly forbidding meat lockers. The lo-fi digital hiss of Alesis cymbals and snares evoke dirty, crushed snow and black ice. The slightly off-key hook from "Cold World" would later be sung by D'Angelo, but it's the bundled-up, shearling and Timberland's rocking dude on the cover of Brown Sugar, not the simmering lothario on Voodoo. And yet, there are still strange pockets of warmth: the minimalist patches during "Cold World" that evoke the eerie, disorienting calm of city streets abandoned during a snowstorm, that guitar bump in "I Gotcha Back" flickering like a trashcan fire, the juking Willie Mitchell riff in the title track that RZA admits was a rare straight rip, but a very inspired one all the same.
I won't begrudge any purist who wants to hear the crackle of "Duel of the Iron Mic" or the dense murk of "I Gotcha Back" enhanced by vinyl. But to these ears, Liquid Swords is a winter album meant to be heard in winter which is why most of us grew enamored with it as a portable experience, lodged into CD players or Walkmen, and stuffed between layers of puffy coats on subways, school buses. Even a solo listen in a car feels fairly inadequate, you almost have to ice grill a neighboring passenger while you're listening to it, knowing that they're plotting on the same gold. It's a record to make your surroundings as cartoonishly violent as Liquid Swords' chessboard cover, when you recognize that you're, as GZA memorably puts it, "trapped in a deadly video game with just one man." I've lived in Los Angeles for the past six years and really haven't found a lot of times appropriate to listen to Liquid Swords. That's not an indictment of its quality; it's a confirmation of its monomaniacal genius.


Diplo's latest solo release, the Revolution EP, features four originals and two remixes, with a guest list that includes Action Bronson, Mr. MFN eXquire, Angger Dimas, Mike Posner, Travis Porter, and RiFF RAFF. Everything sounds expensive and well-made.

Revolution EP

A pile of asses locked into prime twerking position, coalescing to form a giant fist that unmistakably resembles an iconic symbol typically used to represent those who are fighting against oppression: not the most subtle image in the world—but then, Diplo's never been one for subtlety. The Ferry Gouw-designed cover art for Diplo's latest solo release, the Revolution EP, is tasteless, provocative—and, given pop culture's current watercooler fixation with twerking, quite timely.
Then again, Wesley Pentz had a leg (or two) up on Miley in culturally co-opting the dance style. The bounce-heavy title track to last year's Express Yourself had an accompanying video that spawned one of the most NSFW hashtags in recent memory. Ever the canny opportunist, Diplo rode the wave he hath wrought into 2013, staging a failed attempt to assemble a record-breaking twerk session (a record that, rightfully, was finally set by bounce queen Big Freedia in NYC late last month) and putting out a video for that EP's "Butters Theme", which questionably integrated Pussy Riot-esque balaclavas into his endlessly ass-shaking meme.
On a purely musical level, Express Yourself was a considerable success for Diplo. His try-anything, be-everywhere ubiquity continues to reflect itself in an endlessly growing list of collaborators, and the EP's six songs came with a list of features that rivaled most full-length rap releases in length alone; but in the midst of an especially collab-heavy year for one of the world's richest DJs, it nonetheless affirmed that Diplo could still deliver shiny, sour-sounding party music when his name's not buried in production credits. On the outset, the similarities between that release and Revolution—six songs (this time, four originals and two remixes), a load of guest appearances, more drops than a container of Visine—suggest a desire to replicate Express Yourself's mid-level triumphs as exactly as possible.
As Diplo's first solo release in nearly a decade, Express Yourself benefited from a lack of set expectations, and it came out smack dab in one of Diplo and Mad Decent's most commercially fruitful years in recent memory. But that was the past, and Revolution arrives near the tail end of a creatively soft year for Diplo: collaborations with Snoop Lion, Usher, and the Weeknd—as well as a not-exactly-timely "Gangnam Style" remix—proved ultimately unmemorable. And then there was Major Lazer's sophomore LP, Free the Universe, which took the pirate-radio giddiness of its predecessor and dulled its edges with collaborative bloat and a genre-hopping lack of cohesiveness that yielded more misses than it did hits.
One of Free the Universe's few memorable cuts was "Bubble Butt", a boneheaded exercise in bass salaciousness that, as the title suggested, found Diplo's attention wavering south yet again. Revolution kicks itself off by completing his gluteal trilogy with "Biggie Bounce", a song not dissimilar to its predecessor that features contributions from Jakarta-hailing EDM upstart Angger Dimas, as well as an impossibly douchey verse from Atlanta pop-rap auteurs Travis Porter. With a rolling snare sample, hissing-steam percussion, and a deceptively deep low end that pairs nicely with a flatulent horn line, "Biggie Bounce" is a fine example of Diplo at his most texturally engaging, particularly when the track doubles into chopped-up vocal samples and gym-teacher whistles halfway through.
Everything on Revolution sounds expensive and well-made, as much a testament to Diplo's resources as it is to his effortlessness in turning out productions that resemble city-crushing gizmos as much as they do future Mad Decent Block Party crowd-pleasers. Specifically, he's perfected the art of the almighty drop, and Revolution's spring-loaded twists and turns are what stand out the most, from the spacious hiccups that dot the title track's wordless chorus to the bass-siren assault that emerges from "Crown"'s thick trance-worshipping synths. The EDM explosion in the U.S. marked the first time in Diplo's career that he wasn't at the forefront of a trend in populist American dance music; he's a smart guy, so he's found a way to integrate himself into the conversation cosmetically, but regardless of where you stand on the bass-face divide, the garishness of Electric Zoo-esque fare is just the latest style that happens to fit Diplo like a glove.
Zooming out from Revolution's more appealing micro-details, however, reveals the EP's fatal flaw in the form of cohesiveness. What made Express Yourself a considerably distinctive statement was its ability to jump from genre to genre and still manage to hang together as a unified body of work; Revolution sounds less considered and more like a small-scale data dump, a collection of also-rans that makes poor use of its guest stars; the title track's Guetta-fied diva-electro expansiveness, bolstered by faceless vocalist Kai, resembles a worn copy of the low points on ex-Mad Decent affiliate Rusko's otherwise enjoyable sophomore effort, last year's Songs.
The watered-down boom-bap of "Rock Steady" boasts appearances from Action Bronson, Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, and RiFF RAFF—but the only rapper whose presence sticks is the latter, purely by virtue of being the least mechanically talented of the three. RiFF RAFF's featured on "Crown", too, but he's barely distinguishable when cast about the track's synthy fromage and Mike Posner's caterwauling. Revolution is rounded out by uninspiring remixes of its title track and "Biggie Bounce" from respective producers Boaz van de Beatz and (fittingly) TWRK; their inclusion furthers the suspicion that this release wasn't too carefully thought out.
Diplo's always been one for having too many cooks in the creative kitchen, both to his advantage and detriment—but what's dismaying about the waste of talent on Revolution is that he would've ostensibly done better working with the people just lingering right under his nose. Mad Decent's 2013 has been considerably strong in terms of curation, with solid releases from talents like Dillon Francis, LIZ, Jahan Lennon, and a little-heard tune from some guy named Baauer. As mainstream dance's enfant terrible, though, Diplo's never been one to follow anyone's advice but his own, and Revolution is evidence enough that what he can do isn't always going to turn out as well as what he should've done instead.


Neil Young's first four albums, remastered and gathered together in a pricey (but impressive) box set.

Neil Young: Neil Young / Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere / After the Gold Rush / Harvest

It's getting hard to keep up with Neil Young. In addition to a new studio LP, 2009 has seen the release of the green-car concept album Fork in the Road, a new live set (Dreamin' Man Live '92), and of course the 10-disc Blu-Ray/DVD/CD extravaganza Archives Vol. 1, which documents the first 10 years of his musical life. Not to mention that just over a year ago Sugar Mountain - Live at Canterbury House 1968 came out, so that even seems relatively new. We're drowning in Neil Young this year, which for hardcore fans (and it seems like the percentage of his fanbase that meets this criteria increases every year) isn't such a bad thing.
Add to the above the "Neil Young Archives Official Release Series," which is the umbrella term for the wholesale reissue of Young's catalog in remastered form. The first four albums, from 1968's Neil Young to 1972's Harvest, were released on CD under the banner a few months back, which made the Archives set even more confusing than it seemed initially. Since much of Archives turned out to be previously issued material, with some albums appearing almost in their entirety, it stood to reason that it would serve as the best way to hear these songs for a while. Anyone ponying up between $100 and $300 for Archives surely already had all those albums, and they'll probably want the better-sounding versions in their original form, too. Young, like Bob Dylan, is almost impossible to read as far as stuff like this goes. It's easy to say that he's ripping people off by getting them to buy the same music over and over. But so many of his puzzling moves over the years, such as refusing to put out On the Beach on CD even though fans were clamoring for it, would seem to be to his financial detriment.
Here's one more for the shelf: the first four albums have been packaged in two limited edition box sets. The CD version is pressed on 24-karat gold discs, and the packaging is new; the vinyl is pressed on 180-gram records (as opposed to 140-gram for the standard issue of the LPs). The vinyl set, which is what I listened to for this review, is going for $150, which certainly isn't cheap. It packages the records in extra-heavy gatefold sleeves that will probably outlive me, and includes full-size reproductions of the original inserts, but there's no extra documentation otherwise. For me, there's an irony in listening to these deluxe versions, because I've long regarded used vinyl copies of Harvest as a litmus test for record stores. If they're selling a used copy in excellent shape for $4 or $5, it's my kind of shop; if they're selling it for $8 or $9, I'm probably somewhere in the New York Metropolitan Area. Fact is, Harvest was the #1 selling album of 1972, and it continued to sell all through the 1970s. Literally millions of copies were pressed, and used copies are very easy to find. It's a record that shouldn't cost a lot of money.
Which is not to say it's not a great record. All four of these albums, in fact, are excellent-- records that everyone should have in their collection eventually, in whatever format. I say "eventually" because Neil Young is an artist you shouldn't force yourself to get into; his most devoted fans are so convinced of his genius, and so bent on tracking down every last bootleg, that it's easy to hear a few songs and decide that Young isn't such a big deal. Sometimes it can just take a little while to come around to his music, and you need to be in the right frame of mind.
Harvest, whatever your copy ends up costing you, closed out one of the stronger four-album career-opening runs in pop history. Of course, Young had some practice before he went solo, so he had a head start. After gigging around Canada as a teenager in the garage-rock outfit the Squires, he headed out to L.A. and hooked up with the newly forming Buffalo Springfield in 1966. They were a band with a few songwriters, each of whom had their own personality, and Young's songs ("For What It's Worth", the group's biggest hit, wasn't one of them) revealed an emerging and distinctive voice. In 1968, he left the band and started his solo career, releasing Neil Young at the end of the year.
The album bearing only Neil Young's name is the one that sounds least like him. It's a fine psych-tinged folk-rock set with colorful arrangements and top-shelf instrumental contributors like guitarist Ry Cooder and visionary keyboardist and arranger Jack Nitzsche, who would continue to work with Young periodically through the 70s. But Young himself sounds oddly tentative throughout, as if he weren't quite sure what he wanted his music to sound like, and this is his most restrained singing on record. There are echoes of the great music to come, like the ballad "The Old Laughing Lady", and the arrangements are lush and inviting, but Neil Young in a sense represents a road not taken, and it's most interesting now in comparison to what was to come.
The opening riff to "Cinnamon Girl", the song that kicks off Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, erases the memory of Neil Young completely in about five seconds. In the months following the release of his debut, Young hooked up with a ragtag trio of musicians from a band called the Rockets, renamed them Crazy Horse, and found his raison d'être. Where the performances on Neil Young were eminently professional, the sophisticated and exacting parts executed with polished precision, Crazy Horse were loose and sloppy, privileging groove and feeling above all. Many of Young's seasoned contemporaries considered them an embarrassment, but for him they represented a new way of thinking about music, one that favored intuition and stayed true to the moment. A year later he would hook up with the hugely successful Crosby, Stills and Nash; Young would eventually call CSNY his Beatles, while Crazy Horse was his Stones. By this logic, they were making music on the level of Sticky Fingers from the jump.
Discussion of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere usually gravitates toward the two extended guitar workouts, "Down By the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand". Both are masterpieces of rock minimalism, demonstrating the power of repetition as the Crazy Horse rhythm section of Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot cycle through the chords and Young solos endlessly in his grimy, deeply-felt tone, playing off the subtle, prodding rhythm work of guitarist Danny Whitten. But the more compressed and accessible moments on the record are just as powerful. The title track is a brash, rollicking country-rocker in the vein of the Band, while "Round & Round (It Won't Be Long)" is a gorgeous acoustic ballad that finds Young, Whitten, and violinist Robin Lane engaged in three-part harmony on the achingly slow chorus. Best of all on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Young sounds comfortable and confident, singing with the versatile (and hugely influential) voice that has changed remarkably little in the 40 years since.
Everybody Knows was a sort of big bang for Young, a dense moment of creative explosion that saw possibilities expanding in every direction. So its follow-up was anything but a retread. With his newfound confidence, Young was poised to stretch, and After the Gold Rush sounds a bit like an overview of the Great American Songbook but with one guy writing almost all the songs. Members of Crazy Horse appear in various combinations on a few of tracks, and songs like "Southern Man" and "When You Dance I Can Really Love" have the hypnotically stoned but sneakily intense groove of the previous record. But more precisely crafted songs like "Only Love Can Break Your Heart", "Birds", and especially the astonishing title track, which has become a rock standard, show Young's gift as a writer of original melodies of extraordinary beauty in full flower. It's an aspect of Young's work that can be overlooked: the guy can write a simple tune over a chord change that hollows you out completely. Sure, the record has a phrase or two that might sound a little dippy to those with an aversion to hippies (Young was one of those, though of a very individualistic sort), but After the Gold Rush is basically unassailable. There's a reason why it's the favorite Neil Young album for so many.
Which brings us back to Harvest, Young's mainstream breakthrough. Stepping away from Crazy Horse and hooking up with Nashville session musicians he dubbed the Stray Gators, Harvest finds Young experimenting again with a richer, more painstaking studio sound, but one informed by the spontaneity he'd found so inspiring. It's probably his best sounding album, and the ear tends to gravitate to the rhythm section in particular, as bassist Tim Drummond and drummer Kenny Buttrey are almost absurdly in the pocket throughout. (Here I should note that, while they certainly cost a lot of money, the vinyl pressings of these four albums live up to the hype: whisper quiet and clear but full and punchy-- these records have never sounded better).
But Young's songs, though not up to the level of Gold Rush, continue his winning streak. "Out on the Weekend" and the title track set the table for a mellow, rootsy, and breezily melodic album, which later songs like "Heart of Gold" and "Are You Ready for the Country" continue, but Harvest has a more tormented side as well. "A Man Needs a Maid", recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, is one of his stranger creations, an affecting portrait of loneliness undercut with a clumsy, lunkheaded chorus refrain, the sincerity of which has never been quite clear. "Old Man" is something of a signature song, laying out the wizened, long-view outlook that didn't fit with his chronological age (by the time of the record's release, Young was 26). And then there's harrowing and radiant "The Needle and the Damage Done": at just over two minutes, it's far too short, almost painfully so, just like the lives of the junkies it was written about. Soon enough, two people close to Young, Crazy Horse's Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry, would die from drugs.
The unexpected success of Harvest, combined with the grief and guilt Young felt after Whitten and Berry died, would send Young into a dark and raw place with his next few records as he famously "headed for the ditch" to escape the middle of the road. Hereafter, an always-fascinating mix of success and failure would define Young's career, and along the way he'd make some pretty lousy records along with the great ones. To embrace Young as an artist after Harvest would mean accepting his many flaws (including the questionable business decisions, like the many confusing releases of this year), which have made his career unusually rich and varied as well as maddeningly inconsistent. But all that would come later. Enjoying this brilliant four-album run requires no special commitment.


Mark Kozelek's sprawling, cathartic fifth album as Sun Kil Moon feels like the work of a songwriter clearing his palate.

Among the Leaves

Minimalism isn't a word you'd think to apply to Mark Kozelek's fifth album as Sun Kil Moon: As noted in  our interview with the man last week, it's 17-songs-long (plus a five-song bonus disc with alt and live versions of album tracks), and boasts titles such as "I Know It's Pathetic But That Was the Greatest Night of My Life", "The Moderately Talented Yet Attractive Young Woman vs. the Exceptionally Talented Yet Not So Attractive Middle Aged Man", and "Not Much Rhymes With Everything's Awesome at All Times". Among the Leaves is the opposite of the emo navel-gazing session that those titles might imply, but in terms of sheer volume and loquacity, the record certainly feels like the work of a songwriter clearing his palate: It's a fairly cathartic, sprawling creative outpouring.
In terms of paring back, though, the deluge is executed with minimum musical verbosity: Sun Kil Moon's last album, Admiral Fell Promises, featured just Kozelek playing nylon-stringed guitar in a Spanish-influenced fingerpicked style, and it's much the same here, save for a handful of songs where he's backed by a small ensemble-- banjo, violin, light drums. The Spanish flourishes are condensed to an occasional trill and the odd bout of dramatic inflection (the tremulous waltz of "The Winery"), with Kozelek embracing the genre by being less the flamboyant and romantic artist presenting small and considered masterpieces; more an observer content to sit back on warm, dusty street corners, casually chronicling what he sees (or imagines) and throwing in oblique personal reflections from his 20-plus years as a songwriter.
In Stephen Deusner's review of Admiral Fell Promises, he wrote that the split between Sun Kil Moon and Mark Kozelek is "a way to document the complex lives of his songs, which are never quite finished but always hold the potential for rebirth and transformation." At their sparsest and least lyrical, the songs here are all finished in a sense, even when Kozelek openly sings about how he thinks certain efforts could be better ("It's a chore to write half a dozen/ Some guys lay back and rest on their laurels like lazy old hacks/ Well I wrote this one and I know it ain't great," he admits on "Track Number 8"). However, the casualness and immediacy of his recollections (a homeless girl outside his door, watching cats in the street), and the repetitive nature of much of the playing, indicates that he hasn't worked much of the material up a great deal. "King Fish" is the only song here performed on electric guitar, swaying pendulum-like with a dour heft that recalls the absorbing, weighty tone of Ghosts of the Great Highway, yet its relatively basic way with transition and lack of development over its near-seven-minute duration (there's a little closed-eye, loping-head guitar jam toward the end, that's about it) again makes it seem fairly unadulterated.
This lack of formality and sense of true "finishedness" may well feel frustrating, whether you preferred the bittersweet fullness of Ghosts or the compact, elegant sculptures of Admiral Fell Promises, perhaps the two furthest removed cornerstones of Sun Kil Moon's releases to date. Certainly, some of the songs here, particularly towards the end-- the record clocks in at 73 minutes-- feel a little lazy or unnecessary. Kozelek's main way of increasing the drama or tension of a wiry, rankled song like "That Bird Has a Broken Wing" is to raise and layer his voice, a trope that gets a bit tired after a while. There are plenty of moments of graceful, serene beauty, however, that pull their weight as part of such a large body. The dry stroke of "Young Love" feels forlornly romantic; the title track could easily be the theme to a cerebral family drama, such is its quintessentially warm, accepting tone (and sweetly syrupy violin); the song with the ridiculously long title bows and sparkles like birds hopping on a telephone wire in the wind.
Deusner posed a question in his review of Admiral Fell Promises: "What makes a Mark Kozelek solo album different from a Sun Kil Moon album?" While the mostly solo Among the Leaves really serves only to muddy any answer to that question, it poses another: What's Kozelek gunning for on this record? It's uncompromisingly long, but often courtly and sweet, the kind of familiar furniture that feels as though it could easily soundtrack a beautiful moment. He's rancorous about touring and how much he hates London ("UK Blues"), and magnanimous whether singing about the woman he loves ("Track Number 8"), women he's cheated on ("That Bird Has a Broken Wing"), women who have stalked him around the world ("I Know It's Pathetic"), or died and broken his heart (he names the subject of "Katy Song" on "UK Blues", and her presence hovers elsewhere).
The lyrics are uncharacteristically jokey in parts: the "guys in tennis shoes" who replaced the hot girls who once made up Red House Painters' audiences on standout song "Sunshine in Chicago"; citing a crowd member in Ireland who moaned that he hadn't had such a bad time at the show since seeing Bill Callahan ("UK Blues 2"). There's little poetry or affect to the words, which are concerned with fairly straight storytelling about Kozelek's personal and impersonal relationships rather than anything particularly lyrical. Overall, you get the impression he isn't really trying that hard, that bettering his bests isn't a notion that interests him, 20 years after the release of Red House Painters' debut album. He's the kind of talented songwriter that can mostly pull that off; though for a record so spare and simple, Among the Leaves comes off as strangely confrontational.


Using a bespoke tuning system, the Finish producer builds his songs inside an otherworldly ecosystem of sound using the pulse of electro, funk, and classic IDM. It is simply alluring.

Sunshine 3

Aleksi Perälä believes in the power of vibration. The Finnish electronic musician, who lives in rural Wiltshire, England, is a follower of something called the Colundi Sequence: a musical system, created by his friend Grant Wilson-Claridge, that harnesses microtonal differences in pitch to create sparkling, crystalline fields of sound. “You know that feeling when you hear a really amazing song and your hairs go up on your body?” Perälä once asked an interviewer from Resident Advisor. “Colundi is that feeling all the time.”
For Perälä and Wilson-Claridge, Colundi isn’t merely academic or aesthetic: It has a mystical dimension that they claim unites physics, math, astronomy, psychology, “human bio-resonance,” and more into an all-encompassing belief system that even they struggle to understand. Of course, it’s possible that this is all bullshit. Wilson-Claridge co-founded Rephlex Records, where the young Perälä got his start, with Aphex Twin, the most notorious prankster in electronic music. Rephlex shuttered sometime after 2013, allegedly so Wilson-Claridge could devote more time to Colundi, but Perälä has remained remarkably, scarily prolific: His discography since 2007 numbers some 30-odd albums, including at least 17 volumes (or “levels”) of The Colundi Sequence series.
You don’t need to understand the intricacies of Colundi to appreciate Sunshine 3, the third and apparently final installment of a series for the Dutch label Clone Dub. The way the album fuses clean-lined machine rhythms with the vivid detailing of classic IDM is plenty thrilling in its own right. His drums, which toggle between four-to-the-floor pulses and the syncopated snap of classic electro, have the satisfying thwack that has distinguished recent Aphex Twin recordings, full of crisp snares and sternum-thumping rimshots, while his layered pads and staccato counterpoints have an almost three-dimensional feel. Beyond the considerable funk behind his grooves, every element exists in a state of perpetual flux: timbres morphing, proportions shifting, patterns rising and falling in the mix, all of it almost imperceptibly in constant motion.
But Perälä’s fondness for unusual tunings, even if you don’t buy into the more fanciful aspects of Colundi, might help explain why Sunshine 3 feels subtly but crucially different from most electronic music. There’s a shivery, tingly quality to Perälä’s synths. The spectrum seems to shimmer as if swirled with phosphorescence. It’s an almost psychedelic experience, like looking at an object—or even into thin air—and suddenly becoming aware, with a kind of dizzying, microscopic certitude, of every single molecule playing its tiny part.
That vibrancy has something to do with Perälä’s use of dynamics: Unlike a lot of contemporary electronic music, it’s not mastered to make it seem uniformly, oppressively loud. Look at one of these songs’ waveforms in a standard audio-editing tool, and you’ll see that it appears unusually slender compared to the “brick-walled” casualties of the loudness wars. Every sound is given room to breathe, and the results can be intoxicating, as physical as slipping into a warm bath. At the same time, that richness of tone can, after an extended duration, leave you feeling almost queasy: It’s a surfeit of frequency, more than we’re used to.
Given the vastness of Perälä’s catalog and the consistency of his style, it’s not always easy to differentiate his records in terms of quality. But several tracks here stand out among his most immediately appealing work. The slow, skulking “NL-L56-18-07450” is built around a single chord that flickers with a strange kind of brightness, a quality you can’t quite put your finger on. The perpetually detuning synth lead of “NL-L56-18-07474” lends an eerie, M.C. Escher-like feel to his stair-stepping arpeggios. And the closing “NL-L56-18-07441” (as usual, these titles do not exactly lend themselves to DJ requests) offers the rare instance of Perälä’s music in beatless mode; it sounds every bit as expansive and immersive as you’d expect.
But the highlight of them all is “NL-L56-18-07443,” whose major-key riffing sounds uncharacteristically sweet, even naive. The wistful melody is such that it’d probably be a pretty great tune even if Perälä availed himself of a simpler system of tuning. But as it is here—chiming and pinging, luminous as dewdrops on sunlit gemstones—it feels like a glimpse at an unknown dimension, a secret frequency beamed in from another world.


The latest installment from the prolific SF-based psych rockers finds frontman John Dwyer handling more of the instruments and taking the pace down a notch.

Castlemania

Over the past decade, San Francisco's Thee Oh Sees have morphed from a showcase for skronk-savant John Dwyer's sensitive side into the hardest working band in garage-rock. Their output is prolific and their live show combustible. But on Castlemania, Dwyer opts to go it alone. With the exception of live-band regular Brigid Dawson-- who, along with the Sandwitches' Heidi Alexander, contributes some backing vocals-- the shaggy-banged songwriter handles almost all of the instruments. Drummer Mike Shoun and Guitarist Petey Dammit aren't out of the picture permanently. They're just off-duty until the fall, when Thee Oh Sees are scheduled to release yet another full-length record.
Castlemania is a fairly introspective affair, at least by Oh Sees standards. It's Dywer's most melodious batch of songs since 2006's mostly acoustic Cool Death of the Island Raiders. Without the heavy full-band artillery he leans toward skewed bubble-gum pop, fleshing out the guitars and drums with flutes, bells and thrift store synths. It was recorded, at least in part, at Dywer's former group house. "This here is the last record worked on at 608c Haight Street in San Francisco (very near and dear to my heart and heavy in my memories) before control was assumed by rich assholes," he writes in the liner notes.
Not that this is Thee Oh Sees' answer to Nebraska. Even at his most reflective, Dwyer's songwriting retains a sinister, "Sesame Street"-on-LSD sensibility-- simple melodies and creepy lyrics, frequently delivered in a whacked-out monster-voice. "It don't feel too good to be dead in the 21st century/ I am dirt but I can be/ A home for wayward hungry seeds," Dwyer growls on "I Need Seed", deploying a Looney Tunes-worthy narrative in a song about death. It's summery retro nuggets pinned into the red, shot through with a healthy dose of drugs and dread, while "Pleasure Blimps" finds him singing of machines stripping away flesh over shimmering glockenspiel lines and 12-string guitars.
All in all, Castlemania is a fairly loose and scattered record. There are plenty of oddball tangents, including a stripped-down and spooky cover of West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band's "I Won't Hurt You" and the forlorn mellotron and sax instrumental, "The Horse Was Lost". Songs frequently melt down into racket rather than stop on a dime. But it's good to hear Dwyer step away from his backing band's big guns, if only for a moment.


Up to now, Scott Herren-- the shy, lanky Atlantan responsible for Prefuse 73's fabulous glitch-hop debut Vocal Studies + Uprock ...

One Word Extinguisher

Up to now, Scott Herren-- the shy, lanky Atlantan responsible for Prefuse 73's fabulous glitch-hop debut Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives-- hasn't made his name as a purveyor of confessional music. The closest he ever came was the laptop catharsis of Delarosa and Asora, which had no secrets to tell; rather, its intricacies of meter and texture gave your head something to do while your guts spilled out over it. Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives was hard-edged and fast-cutting, immersed in early rap techniques and sensibilities; it didn't express feelings, it steamrolled them. But One Word Extinguisher shows a range of emotional grappling usually foreign to instrumental hip-hop. It's clear that Herren was coming back to the studio night after night not just for skills and thrills, but for a measure of solace. Make no mistake: This is a breakup record.
"The never-ending battle" is what Herren calls the break-up that lasted for the year-plus during which this album was in production. "I locked myself in my room working, disconnected the phone, bummed out as fuck," he told CMJ in March. "You can't talk to anybody, you feel like shit, and it's the only thing you have to express yourself." A year of unspeakable suffering channeled into sixty ripe minutes: In the hands of anyone else, it could be torture. This sorrow, however, sparks with a sweeping wail of queasy ahhh's that carry stunted hopes for a soon-to-be-doomed relationship. Vocal scraps and a blood-curdling scream announce the descent of the mask of hip-hop rage, as an eightfold synth-scribbling bomb drops right into "The End of Biters", the first of several sucker-punching cutfests in the illustrious tradition of the edit record. Next comes Diverse's self-absorbed "Plastic", a screed that rails with righteous indignation against "pop trends and predetermined top-tens." All this over-the-top rebuke is obviously an escape from something.
Things begin to come into focus as "Uprock and Invigorate" bounces in with its edges exposed. Warm, fretless bass, flitting Rhodes, drizzling sawtooth, and a brittle snare become intent on stocking up and locking down with every passing bar. But beneath the surface lies a hint of tension between the percussive exoskeleton and its syrupy core, an orderly contest of soul-versus-machine that momentarily eclipses the sense of loss. The rest of the album projects this kind of tension into a giant battle of the sexes. "The Color of Tempo" mangles its feminine samples with a virile beatbox pattern; "90% of My Mind Is with You" breaks up heavy panting with a deliberately difficult, meter-defying beat, and ends with a series of mournful, defeated R&B; samples. There can be no more doubt when, on "Female Demands", a girlfriendish voice casually tells Herren to "fuck with the beat here" only to be throttled by digital effects; the rest of the track feels like a giant damaged gynorcism. Before we know it, we're desperately trying to forget her, bumping with another woman who croons "you... you... you..." on the offs.
Meanwhile, straight meters are often sprinkled with triplet ligaments, propelling the beat with an uncommonly light touch. But Prefuse's rhythmic sophistication isn't just about alternating threes and fours-- as the lesson goes, it takes two interlocked meters to make African music. While Herren rarely tries to stand up in two meters at once, he often relies on the juxtaposition of mildly divergent rhythmic feels within the same beat, proving his mastery of some of the subtler tensions available to the instrumentalist. This gives him access to some very subtle tensions-- though many tracks seem like tricks to distract us from the ongoing devastation. Sooner or later, it sinks in that we're in the company of an emotional fugitive, sealed in a room with machines whose perfect control, he is convinced, will allow him to avoid the inevitable emotional reckoning. Through scorn and bombast, through distraction and self-parody, through the sheer weight of craft, this Prefuse tries to wear his sorrow down, to crush himself, to explode the emptiness. A thrilling listen, but how could such a mission succeed?
I'm not sure how he did it. There's a glimmer of hope in the open restraint of "Choking You", a sawtooth shuffle scattered with chirpy, chalky bits. Another late track calls a gender truce, as a skeletal crunch frames some lightly doctored female vocals, giving a cold, sweet impression, like melon rinds left out in the rain. And the last track, in spite of its metric and sexual duplicity, offers a baffling promise of balance. Unexpectedly, the music becomes its own consolation.


Blonde Redhead have long been maligned as self-consciously artsy, drawing facile comparisons to Sonic Youth and a host of No-Wave ...

Misery Is a Butterfly

Blonde Redhead have long been maligned as self-consciously artsy, drawing facile comparisons to Sonic Youth and a host of No-Wave acts-- references that owe as much to their bandname's tribute to a DNA song as to Blonde Redhead's often discordant noise-rock. That rhetoric, of course, should've been shelved after the release of Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons. I only felt I should mention it again because, apparently, many of their party-line detractors never got the memo. By Melody, much of Blonde Redhead's feedback-laced art-rock had given way to brittle pop and arm's-length romanticism, yet somehow they still caught flak for the sound they had already largely outgrown. Just saying, is all: What used to be true is now tired, and, with the release of Misery Is a Butterfly, such knee-jerk dismissals can finally be considered irrelevant.
On Melody, the band's artistic growing pains had already become evident, most notably in the wide-eyed, fairytale pining of "This Is Not", a vibrant synth-ballad that-- like the first protuberance of wing from a cocoon-- threatened to split the seams of their style-damaged rock wide open. That's not just flowery critic-speak, either-- Kazu Makino and the Pace twins (Amadeo and Simone) split from Touch & Go Records and financed their latest recording themselves, because, according to Simone, they "didn't want to have any kind of limits with what [they] wanted to do as far as expenses; with Touch & Go, sometimes things were a little tight."
The confidence that led them to strike out on their own-- even before 4AD expressed interest in the album-- is impressive. But more striking is how clearly that confidence has translated to their music. Freed from all constraints, Blonde Redhead are beautifully reborn on Misery Is a Butterfly. True, feelings of loss, insecurity, and outright alienation do factor heavily into the record's thematic vision (this butterfly isn't called "Misery" for nothing), but the band's sense of assuredness surrounds the album's themes of vulnerability.
Misery Is a Butterfly was recorded before being shopped to a label, but judging by the sound of the album, its eventual release on 4AD seems to have been an inevitability. From track one, the record is lacy and moody, perfectly suited to the one-time home of the Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil. The word "lush" doesn't quite capture the fluttering whirls of strings, keyboards, and delicately plucked guitar that open "Elephant Woman"; I'd go so far as to label such enveloping richness of instrumentation "baroque," perhaps even "rococo."
For Blonde Redhead's latest incarnation, the softer production simply serves as polish for tarnished, tired guitar, drums and keyboards. Here, the bristling energy that once held would-be sympathizers at bay has been turned inward, resulting in an unprecedented illusion of warmth. "Anticipation", for example, ventures into completely foreign territory for the band; it's vulnerable, yet remains emotionally available, and is breathtaking even in comparison to the band's most typically pretty compositions. Never before have Makino's gentle whispers seemed so genuine or close at hand. The psychedelia-inflected title track and the fractured desolation of "Falling Man" also offer inviting hints of the underlying humanity Blonde Redhead had, until now, been so reluctant to display.
Of course, even now, that humanity may be little more than an apparition. Their tales of heartache and desperation have cast Makino and Amadeo Pace-- the emotional heart of the band-- as tragically misunderstood, tortured poets who pin misery on their sleeves, never conceding that anyone else could be capable of understanding their pain. And despite the more inviting nature of Misery's music and production, they remain insular and distant here, as well. Only on "Anticipation" are Makino's vocals as beckoning as their musical surroundings; elsewhere, Blonde Redhead remain as they've always been: beautiful and vacant.
But they excel at being just that. It bears repeating that Misery Is a Butterfly is a gorgeous achievement. Parrying the double-edged sword of pathos in music-- the "emo" trap, if you will-- Blonde Redhead have perfected their own unusual strain of perceived insincerity. They said it themselves, and it still rings true: "Fake can be just as good." Though this album's lustrous ornamentation is often placed at odds with its halting vocals, Blonde Redhead are wise enough to embrace their own imperfections. They once espoused the merits of loving another despite our faults, and it shouldn't be hard for fans to seize on that sage advice. Misery Is a Butterfly makes it easy.


Ariana Grande, a teenage actress turned singer, manages to skirt all kinds of retro with ease on her debut Yours Truly. It's not quite pastiche,  it's bland in spots, but it's certainly not your typical 2013 pop album.

Yours Truly

Ariana Grande, a teenage actress turned singer, is bubblegum through-and-through-- and she’s already changed her preferred flavor. Her debut single, 2011’s 4 Non Blondes-sampling “Put Your Hearts Up”, was a generic Disney radio tune that she now publicly disavows. Apparently asserting control over her career, she's now dabbling in nostalgia, as is instantly clear when Hollywood strings and doo-wop vocals kick off the 1950s-styled “Honeymoon Avenue", the first song from her debut album. But why should you care about any of this? Because the minute her wordless vocals cut through the canned backing, they demand attention; her voice is smoky, world-weary and featherweight all at once, and the first thought that should come to mind is how did you stumble on this old Mariah Carey outtake?
That’s no small statement, but Grande is no small talent. And she’s self-aware. On an album that had a bit of a troubled gestation, the singer switched gears again through its making, opting for a 90s hip-hop soul vibe that awkwardly sits with the more doo-wop-indebted songwriting. Second single “Baby I” is most representative of where Grande is at this stage in her career. It’s a hodgepodge of familiar clichés, from its Britney-esque “yeah yeah yeahs” to the punchy horn riffs that somehow melt into a staggered hip-hop verse. It’s a cross-generational mess of influences, and all the better for it; Grande’s boundless energy means she can power through like no one else, tying hooks into knots with her voice as if it were nothing.
Her four-octave range is almost ludicrously powerful, and though it still feels like untapped potential, she has admirable control for a 20-year-old. Though her songs are simple, every time she runs across a repeat phrase, she’ll attack it differently, and her melismatic loops and athletic scales breathe life into even the most staid of lyrics. Even the most hackneyed songs, like the Grease-calibre cheese of “Daydreamin", are lifted by her intonation, and when she really sounds like she believes it, the results are fiery. Album highlight “Piano”-- a surefire feel-good radio hit in the vein of Katy Perry, but stripped lean-- benefits from Grande at her most impassioned, turning a charming conceit into a life-or-death matter as she shrieks “If I got my piano I know I’ll be okay!” Even this one feels irrepressibly old-fashioned, even if it's not clear exactly what era she's pining for this time-- how many 20 year old pop stars sing about dancing to a piano?
Songwriting is the album’s biggest flaw. Whether or not it’s Grande’s own inexperience or simply major label meddling sanding off the edges, Yours Truly is a very safe record. Mostly written by two of R&B's most mawkish hawkers, Babyface and Harmony Samuels, it’s built on cliché and tradition, and written professionally to a fault. Let's just say that her personality certainly doesn’t come from the lyrics. The blandness seeps into the production as well: the Lex Luger hi-hats and slowed-down southern rap vocals on a few tracks feel remarkably neutered, as if they were sampled from Kidz Bop: Trap Edition. It’s all antiseptic white surfaces, but maybe that works in her favour, because there’s nothing to distract from her vocals.
“I wanna say we’re going steady/ Like it’s 1954,” Grande sings on one of Yours Truly’s most earnest ditties, “Tattooed Heart". It’d be tempting to label her with the Grammy-baiting title of "old soul," but that’d be a bit diminutive-- she’s just a huge talent that admires her forebears, and knows their tricks very well. If her debut album has a strength, it manages to skirt all kinds of retro with ease, not quite pastiche and certainly not your typical 2013 pop album. Ending with its one concession to EDM, the feel-good stomper “Better Left Unsaid", Grande insists that she’s “gonna say things” that she shouldn’t. It’s a low-key sort of rebellion, but it’s encouraging-- if she owns up to that promise, there’s not much that could stop that voice from taking over the world.


Metro Boomin pulls the best out of Gucci Mane on his fourth LP since he was released from federal prison. Together, they are sharp and unhinged.

Droptopwop

Last summer, just two months after his release from a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., Gucci Mane dropped his comeback album. The title made sense at the time: Everybody Looking. Already one of the most celebrated rappers of the century—a cult hero who had caught Billboard lightning a few times—the Atlantan’s profile had only risen while he was behind bars. The generation of rappers who owed Gucci their careers, either by borrowing his creative DNA or as one of his legions of mentees, had finally reached maturity and were dominating rap’s mainstream. Lean and sober, Gucci went on a charm offensive in the press, breaking bread with magazine editors and beaming on Snapchat. Everybody was looking, and Gucci was ready, mostly.
Crucial in all this was that many were looking for the very first time. The thing about Gucci Mane’s work is that it’s best consumed in endless, bludgeoning waves. The jewelry appraisals and the re-up math and the latent paranoia are supposed to bleed into one another like an endless river. But the comeback album is supposed to be a Machiavellian statement of purpose, and *Everybody Looking *was weighed down by more than a few cobwebs. When the house lights came up, Gucci retreated back into his music to work out the kinks.
Droptopwop, his full-length collaboration with Metro Boomin, is Gucci’s first post-prison project that truly gels. This is thanks in no small part to Metro, who Gucci had sought out for production when Metro was still in high school, who has since evolved into one of the genre’s most important architects. And while his reputation as a hitmaker has long been above reproach (he’s scored four top-ten hits in the past twelve months, including Migos’ “Bad and Boujee,” which hit No. 1), *Droptopwop now stands alongside the 21 Savage vehicle Savage Mode *as a testament to Metro’s skill as an auteur.
The beats are spare and disquieting; “Finesse the Plug Interlude” sounds as if it’s playing out of a haunted Game Boy Color. “Dance With the Devil” is built on the shivers you feel when the feds are watching you as you watch your friends succumb to drug addiction, when you have unprotected sex and tremble in the clinic’s waiting room. And while “Met Gala,” which guest stars a furious Offset and includes assists from Southside and CuBeatz, is comprised of familiar parts, they’ve been arranged in a way that’s just a little bit foreign. Imagine hearing Flockaveli* *out of a passing car and then trying to describe it to someone who only speaks a little English.
Though much has been made about Gucci’s radiant positivity, the truth is that he’s still working out fiercely, sometimes uncomfortably dark things in his music. “Helpless” plays around with the titular concept, throwing it into lighter contexts—into strip clubs—but the hook has a sinister subtext. “Tho Freestyle” pays tribute to fallen friends between gas station dead-drops and flying dope in on a drone. There are times, too, when Gucci’s sly sense of humor pokes through: On “Finesse” he raps, “I’m a shyster, I’m spiteful, and I love rifles/And I love white folks/I walk on a tightrope.”
That last quote is the sort of thing Gucci does when he’s at his best: tightly-wound raps that betray a love of language, a comic’s sense of timing, a keen awareness about the way people see him, and the baggage of their preconceptions. *Droptopwop *is a worthwhile listen because Metro draws this out of his mentor by instinct, which makes for some of their most unhinged music in some time. So if you’ve tuned out since the welcome-home party, it might be time to start looking again.


The decorated pop songwriter arrives in the spotlight with a full-length debut whose plush R&B and live-band arrangements strike a tone that’s classic, sexy, and understated.

Jaguar II

The jaguar sneaks up on you. Victoria Monét can relate. One day you could audition for a Darkchild-sponsored girl group that never got off the ground, and nine years later, you could be a celebrated songwriter picking up Grammy nominations for work on Ariana Grande’s thank u, next—and the crowd probably still don’t know your name. So Victoria Monét McCants, who’d always dreamed of becoming a triple threat, adopted the apex predator. It must have worked, because Jaguar II, originally slated as the second in a trio of EPs, was promoted to full album. Slick and professional without feeling impersonal, Monét’s first LP is fresh, populist R&B illustrated in the harvest-gold hues of the 1970s, a vision of plush velvet paintings and even plusher video treatments, an album designed to marry the analog textures of Smokey Robinson with the sparkling earworms of Keri Hilson.
The first Jaguar, released in 2020, was about the good life: Monét wrote a ballad celebrating what squats can do for your butt, a car-sex jam about hooking up with Kehlani (with Kehlani on the remix). Jaguar II lives there too, rolling up with the weed-blazing Lucky Daye duet “Smoke” and turning out for “Party Girls,” a reggae-pop cut with Jamaican heavyweight Buju Banton. This song and the extremely fun, choreo-forward third single, “On My Mama,” are slight stylistic outliers on an album saturated in what Monét has called “elevated soul,” the glossy, Motown-inspired sound she and returning executive producer D’Mile summoned for the first installment of Jaguar. “I felt like a wannabe Quincy Jones,” Monét said of the earlier record. Writing and recording during the pandemic touring freeze, she’d imagined how she would one day present the songs onstage, “thinking about how a Bruno Mars or an Earth, Wind & Fire show would feel.” (The next year, D’Mile’s take on neoclassical R&B comfort food would reach larger audiences with his work on An Evening With Silk Sonic.)
In a sense we have Bruno Mars to thank, because he’s the reason Monét started writing hooks. In 2010, Mars landed his first vocal credit as a featured guest on rapper B.o.B’s debut single “Nothin’ on You,” a surprise No. 1 hit. The younger Monét, with several songwriting credits already to her name, regarded it as a case study for how a well-placed vocal feature could launch a solo career. She decided to specialize in writing pop hooks, promoting herself as a singer by putting her own vocals on demo tracks. Eventually she landed a B.o.B feature too. “I would try to sing them so well that they wouldn’t take me off and replace it with another artist, and sometimes it would work,” she recently explained in conversation with Earth, Wind & Fire.
Speaking of Earth, Wind & Fire: Jaguar II practically counts as a stop on the veteran band’s summer tour. They’re prominently featured on “Hollywood,” and the late Maurice White picks up a credit for a “Beijo” interpolation on “Smoke”; in the video, Monét slaps on a Verdine White mustache to reenact “September.” The ’70s revival aesthetic might recall Foxxy Cleopatra, teen Beyoncé’s Pam Grier-inspired character in Austin Powers, but Monét is taking more notes from the grown Beyoncé of Lemonade and Renaissance, building toward ambitious statements rooted in music that reminds her of family, culture, and home. The legacy guests, EW&F and Banton, are voices from Monét’s memories of family gatherings and her mom’s Sunday housecleaning soundtrack. She taps into her own generational nostalgia for “On My Mama,” a glammed-up flip of Chalie Boy’s 2009 song “I Look Good” designed for feeling yourself on a level only Texas rap braggadocio can match. Monét isn’t rapping, but you could play her right alongside Megan.
Jaguar II sounds like checking in someplace swanky: the arrangements are contractor-grade, rewardingly rich, augmented with the kind of live trumpet and violin you don’t get at home. It’s Monét’s longest release yet, with transitional moments (“Smoke Reprise”) and a track-to-track mix that isn’t quite continuous but clearly intended for fluid listening. The hooks come gift wrapped and hang around longer than Mylar balloons. “We keep it smooth like a Cadillac/With the diamond spinners in the back,” Monét coos on “Cadillac (A Pimp’s Anthem),” a dub-flavored soundtrack for low-riding ladies where a playful allusion to “five with the Black hand side”—as in “gimme some skin”—becomes a period-appropriate flirt.
Monét excels at striking this tone that’s classic, sexy, understated. Even when she makes it dirty, there’s a veneer of fantasy and metaphor, like how it still counts as a dress even if it’s mesh. “Might be too fine to hit it from behind,” she brags on “On My Mama,” a wink-wink you could almost blink and miss. “Stop (Asking Me 4 Shyt),” about hangers-on looking for unearned favors, feels like a complaint that could’ve been lodged by some jazz diva a century ago. “Stop askin’ me for money, get your own/I barely even just got on,” Monét objects, but her line readings feel more influenced by mellow ’90s R&B, so it’s easy to add a modernizing, “Don’t call my phone… bitch.” (Mercifully she does not try to rhyme anything with “Cash App,” whose brand placement is limited to those expensive-looking videos.)
Taking “Party Girls” into the Kaytranada-produced “Alright” is a play-it-straight-through flex that ends with a big-cat growl—arrrgh. But as brand-name producer collaborations go, the first Jaguar’s S.G. Lewis disco groove “Experience” shone a little brighter. And though these days Monét’s deep cuts are much too good to be called filler, the hook-focused writing style fosters songs that bet long on a pretty melody and a broad idea, like cosmic love is divine on “How Does It Make You Feel?” or Hollywood is all glitter on “Hollywood.” Within the sequence, this lighter fare is pleasant, an eminently listenable update on an iconic sound; still, you wish she’d spill about some of these randos with the ridiculous financing requests, drive that Cadillac somewhere and not just spin the wheels. In Monét’s songs, love can be idealized even when it doesn’t work out. In “I’m the One,” her beau wouldn’t recognize her brilliance even if God’s own angels seated her directly on their face.
Sometimes Jaguar II kinda feels like that: Frictionless, full of instrumental flourishes so smooth they risk sailing by unremarked. Monét can sell even a slightly clunky lyric with practiced polish, sounding like the consummate performer even when you know she’s lived it. The only real unguarded moment comes at the end of “Hollywood” (“Dreaming bigger than I ever should”), with a loud giggle-squeal from Monét’s baby, who’s now 2. You’ll have to check the credits to see that it is her daughter’s voice—more meaningful and, in a way, less obvious than the jaguar growl. Even if you get the sense her best work still lies ahead, it’s refreshing to see an emerging star earn their concept album. Simply imagining you are Bruno Mars won’t take you there—but an album like Jaguar II will. It’s the rare species of pop-soul that evokes a real sense of spiritual uplift: We’re not just succeeding, we’re made for better things.


Soulwax's first LP in eleven years is a soundtrack to a Belgian film about two brothers who run a hedonistic nightclub in Ghent, Soulwax's hometown. For the sixteen-track album, the band invented fifteen fictional personas, each with its own sound, aesthetic, and backstory that draw from different decades of club culture.

*Belgica* Original Soundtrack

Soulwax are nothing if not mercurial. The band was founded in the mid '90s as a sort of Flemish take on Britpop, only to trade grunge guitars for analog synths a few years later. Around the same time, founding members Stephen and David Dewaele began moonlighting as 2 Many DJs, whose mashup classic As Heard on Radio Soulwax, Pt. 2 introduced electroclash to the masses and featured, among other things, a conflagration of The Stooges "No Fun" and Salt 'n Pepa's "Push It." (Just think: this was four years before Night Ripper.) Soulwax eventually became more or less synonymous with its side project, as the group remixed fellow dance punk acts like LCD Soundsystem and weirdly — and most successfully — their own material, with 2005's Nite Versions. During their most active period, Soulwax had an uncanny ability to stay on trend, seeming to predict mashup culture, European electro and big-tent EDM consecutively. Today, you could either laud them for their foresight or accuse them of carpetbagging, but it'd be wrong to undersell just how influential they were at their peak.
Lately, though, the band has kept a lower profile, occupying themselves with their Radio Soulwax project, programming a Grand Theft Auto radio station, and laying down the occasional remix. The Dewaele brothers' first LP in eleven years is actually a soundtrack to Belgica, a Belgian film by the Oscar-nominated director Felix Van Groeningen about two brothers who run a hedonistic nightclub in Ghent, Soulwax's hometown. For the sixteen-track album, the band invented fifteen fictional personas, each with its own sound, aesthetic, and backstory that draw from different decades of club culture. Genres range from Studio 1 reggae to indie rock, under pseudonyms like Burning Phlegm, White Virgins, and Noah's Dark. (The Shitz do double duty – no pun intended.) That a band could attempt a project like this with such strict historical verisimilitude is a fascinating technical exercise; the fact that many of these songs are actually decent is just an added bonus.
The album opens with "The Best Thing," a synthpop track starring a vocalist named Charlotte, who plays the role of R&B diva. "You're the worst thing that always happens to me," she sings, over percolating synths. The effect is more Jessie Ware than Janet Jackson, but it's a decent pop song that sounds authentic enough to be an actual, if unremarkable, '90s single. Then it's on to The Shitz with "How Long," a slab of angular indie rock ripped from the pages of NME. (RIYL: Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, The Libertines). Listening to these two tracks together provides a good idea of what you're in for over the course of the album: disparate sounds stacked together in ways that make little sense outside the context of the movie they soundtrack. Sometimes it works: There's probably no reason why Turkish pop should play next to Italian electro, but "Çölde Kutup Ayisi" and "Ti Ricordi Di Me" are legitimately enjoyable back-to-back.
Probably because it's closest to their "real" sound, Soulwax seem most comfortable when they mine club music for inspiration, which is pretty often. White Virgins' "Turn Off The Lights," for instance, sounds a whole lot like Ladytron, which is to say it's a decent piece of chilly synth pop. Better still are Rubber Bands, whose bongo-driven disco jam "Caoutchouc" could be worked seamlessly into a 2 Many DJs mix. Belgica could be seen as the logical extension of what Soulwax has been doing for years, but what made "Radio Soulwax" and Nite Visions great was how the band holistically united various styles with little effort. Nothing felt overthought; it just worked.
Belgica, however, somehow scans as both too varied and not varied enough. Sure, it's interesting to hear Soulwax make hardcore punk with a dude from Sepultura (Burning Phlegm's "Nothing"), but is that really what we want from the band's first new music in more than a decade? In the end Belgica sounds like what it is: an impressive exercise in musicology that never quite transcends its core concept. Soulwax deserve to be celebrated for their ambition and their enormous contribution to the film, but let's hope the next Soulwax album is a Soulwax album.


Josh "Deakin" Dibb's  Sleep Cycle is a short album but a substantial one, a deeply personal work that takes us inside the mind of Animal Collective’s most mysterious member.

Sleep Cycle

Josh “Deakin” Dibb is the Ringo of Animal Collective—the member of a revered psychedelic-pop quartet that gets the least amount of love. Though in Dibb’s case, that’s mostly a function of spotty attendance. He’s the only Animal Collective member still taking advantage of the group’s formative open-door policy, having appeared on just five of their 10 official albums, and his perceived expendability is further underscored by the fact the band’s most successful record to date—2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion—was recorded without him.
Unfortunately, his status as Animal Collective’s resident black sheep was further entrenched by the well-intentioned but ill-conceived Kickstater campaign he used to announce this debut solo album way back in 2009. After crowd-sourcing over $25,000 to fund a festival trip-cum-recording mission to Mali—with promises of an accompanying picture-book to complement the resultant album—Dibb provided scant updates about the project’s status for the better part of seven years, causing many donating AnCo fans to lose their chill. But this would-be scandal failed to address a more prosaic problem: as Dibb recently relayed to Pitchfork, the extended delay was mostly the product of chronic, near-paralyzing self-doubt about the quality of his material and vocal performances.
Now, having long ago donated the majority of the Kickstarter proceeds to a Malian NGO, Dibb has finally emerged with a mostly self-financed, small-scale album that was quietly released this month in a special cassette/book edition for donors (and on Bandcamp for everyone else). But despite all the Kickstarter confusion and communication breakdowns, none of Dibb’s out-of-pocket supporters should feel short-changed. Because whatever anxiety Dibb felt about not following through on his Kickstarter campaign has been channeled into a wonderful little album about overcoming the anxiety of not following through on your Kickstarter campaign. Okay, so Sleep Cycle doesn’t include any lyrics that specifically reference inflated funding targets and comment-section outrage, but this exercise in self-help psychedelia provides a poignant portrait of an artist regaining their confidence one song at a time. It’s a short album—six songs, 33 minutes—but a substantial one, a deeply personal work that takes us inside the mind of Animal Collective’s most mysterious member, while restoring some of the patience and mystique that’s been sucked out of that band’s recent, more spasmodic work.
To date, Deakin's biggest solo vocal was on the swirling Centipede Hz centerpiece “Wide Eyed.” But even if Sleep Cycle’s opener, “Golden Chords,” finds him crooning in a heretofore-unheard higher register, it’s instantly identifiable as an Animal Collective product, its field-recording ambience and hypnotic acoustic oscillations conjuring allusions to Sung Tongs (ironically, another AC album that Dibb sat out). But Dibb’s lyrics are far more lucid and plaintive than anything Avey Tare and Panda Bear were attempting back in 2004: “Stop believing your being’s been shattered and distorted/ because, brother, you’re so full of love,” he sings atop a beautifully aching melody, and though the lyrics are delivered in second person, you get the strong sense Dibb is singing them into a mirror.
As a vocalist, Dibb is positioned about halfway between Panda and Avey—not gifted with the natural angelic grace of the former, yet more plainspoken and less prone to hysterics than the latter. But he knows how to get the most out of it, immersing his voice in his aqueous mixes without obscuring its emotional intent. Amid the phantasmagoric dub-pop of “Just Am,” he sings, “I’ve lost my voice, I need direction,” so he relies on the song’s repeated juju guitar lick, steam-piped beat and drifting piano chords to show him the way. And if unadorned opening verse of “Footy” initially puts some Jeff Mangum-like strain on his cords, they prove resilient enough to withstand the incoming onslaught of percussive shocks. True to its title, “Footy” essentially sounds like Dibb kicking a drum set down a never-ending flight of collapsing stairs, pausing at each wobbly landing before working up the strength for another punt. But just as the song seems like it’s going to completely combust, an encroaching tsunami of analog synths washes the destruction away, representing the victory of inner peace over external pressure.
Sleep Cycle’s weightier tracks are threaded together through brief interstitials featuring street recordings of Malians that Dibb encountered on his African excursion, but they’re more than mere vacation souvenirs—on “Shadow Mine,” he mutters his own affirming words overtop a Malian chant, and the effect is like eavesdropping on the private prayer of someone working up the courage to face the outside world. “Seed Song”, meanwhile, answers the cacophonous chaos of the aforementioned “Footy” with a rippling, pulse-regulating soundscape that provides another vivid reminder of Animal Collective’s mid-2000s masterworks. But the closing, stargazing ballad “Good House” is less about Feels than the #feels. Atop a churchly, Spiritualized-style sway, Dibb dispenses reassuring mantras (“Breathe in without/ Breathe out you’re alright/ Breathe in with all/ Spit out all that rage/ You’re safe now/ Don’t fight”) much as he did back on “Golden Chords.” But here it sounds less like a personal therapeutic exercise than the sage advice of someone who’s survived a crisis of confidence and is now trying to help you cope with your own. And surely, that’s a reward more valuable than anything promised on his Kickstarter page.


Where the Weeknd's House of Balloons was a debut tour-de-force and Thursday an arduous journey into the internal turmoil of a self-loathing narcissist, the rising Toronto star's third release in nine months exudes a brazen, sexy confidence.

Echoes of Silence

"Baby, I got you/ Until you're used to my face, and my mystery fades," Abel Tesfaye sang on "Rolling Stone". It was a surprisingly self-effacing line for a singer whose mystique is a central part of his appeal. And he's not wrong. By now, we know most of Tesfaye's tricks: his choir-worthy voice, his debauched lyrics, and the rich tapestry of synths and samples that backs it all up. His third full-length in nine months, Echoes of Silence, is more self-referential than ever, repeating lines and themes from previous records, including XO cognac (or ecstasy and oxycontin, if you prefer), questionably consensual sex, and self-destructive behavior. It was novel on his debut House of Balloons, but does it still work three albums in?
Well, it turns out Tesfaye isn't out of surprises: As his fans now know, opening track "D.D." stands for "Dirty Diana", and Tesfaye channels the King of Pop with an eerily accurate vocal facsimile. It's an audacious intro even for an artist whose output has already stretched lyrical and musical themes to depraved extremes. The ease with which Tesfaye can shock and awe listeners at this point feels like something of a victory lap.
Where House of Balloons was a debut tour-de-force, and Thursday an arduous journey into the internal turmoil of a self-loathing narcissist, Echoes of Silence exudes a brazen, animalistic confidence: The production is impeccable but never showy. The songwriting is tighter and more streamlined. The slinky, spectral "Montreal" is the closest thing to a pure pop song Tesfaye has written since "What You Need". And his conversational intonation emphasizes the lingering threat that underlies every lyric.
In lyrical terms, Echoes of Silence is Tesfaye's strongest work. With a clearer and less obtuse narrative arc than Thursday, the album finds his snaky, manipulative persona at its most blatantly corrosive. Album centerpiece "XO / The Host" is a stomach-turning tale of corruption and coercion, featuring one of the record's most uncomfortable moments: After Tesfaye sings of reducing some nameless girl to destitution, the beat goes quiet as he self-satisfyingly mocks, "And if they won't let you in/ You know where to find me... 'cause all we ever do is love." It's transparently deceptive, and it slips into "Initiation", a cringe-inducingly detailed tale of drug-fueled kidnapping and gang-rape told through the part-grunted, part-rapped exhortations of an inhuman goblin.
With drums that stutter and slice more like Trent Reznor than Tricky, "Initiation" handily defines what separates the Weeknd from other R&B acts, folding in the post-punk influences, the industrial touches, and that oddly alluring menace into four minutes of captivating hell. While Tesfaye's voice remains the star attration, Illangelo's production is at a high point on Echoes: From the decadent "Hong Kong Garden" orientalisms on "Outside" to the heart-rending vocal looping on "The Host" to the sleepy-eyed, morning-after bluntness of "Same Old Song", each lecherous tale is lifted by the attentive and elegant production. Those tiny strokes of detail-oriented genius pull Echoes of Silence from "yet another Weeknd mixtape" to its own lithe, cocksure plateau, the same way that the meandering production on Thursday emphasized the numbingly sublime feeling of loss and confusion.
A lot has been said of how Tesfaye has run amok with the introspective R&B of artists like Drake and Trey Songz, but the particulars of self-abuse and excess haven't been profiled so intimately or persuasively by any act of comparable size or influence. Of course, all Weeknds must end: producer Clams Casino guest produces "The Fall", and his mournful melodies and distorted synths climax in a locust cloud of buzzing and whirring, suddenly rendering Tesfaye's self-reassurances shaky and hollow. The album's eponymous closing track is stark naked, a hospital-bed lament so unflinchingly bright it recalls the Knife's "Still Light" in its mournful fatalism. Tesfaye sounds near tears, and as Echoes peters out with his whimpering, "Don't you leave me all behind/ Don't you leave my little life," it's difficult to tell whether he's quoting a nameless victim or gasping the words himself.
Those four minutes of unguarded sparsity -- Tesfaye's quivering falsetto and a funereal piano-- unwind 2011's most exciting, conflicting, and self-mythologizing musical universe. On closer "Echoes of Silence", is Tesfaye's protagonist finally unraveling or merely beginning anew? That his loosely narrative album trilogy seems like it could begin and end at any one of its entry points seems to hint at the latter. It's a chillingly cyclical picture of decay and self-immolation marking the Weeknd's greatest triumph: an emotional thread so confusing we can love, hate, fear, and be revolted all at once.
Tesfaye's recycling of previous lyrics, melodies, and ideas on Echoes of Silence is bound to give fresh ammo to fairweather fans eager to hurl accusations of diminishing returns and unimaginative retreads at the rising Toronto star. But the repetition is akin to devices used by artists as separate as Terius Nash and Dan Bejar, a self-contained world of idiosyncratic artistry that the Weeknd's trilogy ambitiously embraces, rising above the catcalls of inauthenticity and "PBR&B" lashed at it from the very beginning to somewhere else completely its own.
"I used to do this for the thrill," Tesfaye laments on penultimate Echoes track "Next", and even as his world disintegrates into the desolate closer, it's hard to think of anything more morbidly thrilling in 2011 than listening to the Weeknd methodically destroy himself. Echoes may lack the surprise-and-delight factor of House of Balloons, but it's a strong finish to Tesfaye's first trilogy, providing just enough closure to satisfy, and just enough mystery left to entice us back for the next round.


New Jersey’s Mach-Hommy is one of the East coast’s finest working rappers. Building on his cryptic mystique, his latest effort finds him diving into a collection of beats by Earl Sweatshirt.

Mach-Hommy: Fete Des Morts AKA Dia De Los Muertos EP

It would take thousands of dollars to acquire the full Mach-Hommy discography—not because his records are long-forgotten or out of print, but because he’s charging what he sees fit. Market price, cold commerce. Those price tags (upward of a thousand dollars for records like DUMP GAWD: HOMMY EDITION and Dollar Menu 2) give the rapper’s music a cryptic mystique, but they aren’t gimmicky; Mach-Hommy seems profoundly uninterested in gimmickry. To wit: this fall’s excellent DUMPMEISTER, which retailed for the delightfully unsubtle $187, plays like a breathless best-of, no pauses, no frills—just the blunt rhythms of a card number, expiration date, and security code.
For his latest effort, the $111.11 Fete Des Morts AKA Dia De Los Muertos, Mach-Hommy taps Earl Sweatshirt for beats and dives back in. (On his Bandcamp, the record is credited, confusingly, to DUMPMEISTER.) Fete Des Morts is a compelling look at Earl’s influences and instincts behind the board—including a soul bent that bypasses turn-of-the-century Roc-A-Fella—but it transcends because Hommy uses it as yet another venue to argue for himself as one of the East coast’s finest working rappers.
The New Jersey-based Hommy was briefly affiliated with the Conway- and Westside Gunn-helmed Griselda Gang, but has since splintered off into his own section of the genre. His major work is Haitian Body Odor, an LP he sold directly to fans through his Instagram DMs last year, before finally putting it online for free this March. HBO is a remarkable record, dense and patient. Its cover is a portrait of Michéle Bennett, the former Haitian first lady who fled the country in 1986; Hommy litters his writing with the relics of French colonization, class revolt, and Giuliani-era New York. Songs unfurl slowly: “1080p” has a 60-second prelude before its first verse, but once he starts rapping, he goes in fits and starts, lamenting that “nobody love you when you alive,” remembering how his friends blanched at how seriously he took The War Report.
By contrast, Fete Des Morts feels like a series of contained exercises. Songs flow seamlessly into one another; the 70-second exhale of “Henrietta LAX” gives way to “TTFN,” which itself abruptly stops for Mach to mock “social media metrics” and let off a gunshot. Earl’s beats are uniquely post-Dilla in their treatment of vocal samples and in his affinity for warm tones cut by jagged textures. (There’s even an exultant airhorn at the beginning of “Bridge of the Water G-d.”) The artists’ partnership, then, is compulsively listenable: acrobatic writing over no-nonsense beats by another verbose MC, who knows where to leave the crevices.
It’s tempting to classify huge swaths of East Coast rap from this decade as post-Marcberg, full stop. The comparisons to the vaunted half-revivalist Roc Marciano are not unfounded, but Hommy is a more unpredictable writer. He’s more likely to pick up a narrative thread for an extended period, or to start writing in discursive lines, filled with the pronouns and prepositions. There are also stark, fascinating diversions: “Embarrassment of Riches,” which is produced by Navy Blue rather than Earl, opens with an extended bit of singing, before transitioning back into razor-tongued raps.
Structurally, Fete Des Morts frees Hommy to try a quick series of different ideas: a Twitter-nodding crime vignette on “Manje Midi,” a modern-day “Les Mis” on “THEJIGISUP.” The themes he explored in such depth on HBO—familial honor, the weight of tradition—reappear here mostly through implication, while the writing is more overtly concerned with naturalistic, often grim details. And that’s where the EP succeeds so beautifully. It exists, on one level, as a clean, distilled 22 minutes of exceptional rap music. But it also serves as a companion piece to both Mach and Earl’s larger catalogs, continuing old threads and hinting at directions either one might pursue in the new year.