Alessia Cara’s moving and mature album is a sleek ode to in-between states, whether they are relationships or her career track as a pop star.

In the Meantime

Alessia Cara made a career of chronicling the aches of growing up as an outsider. She sang anthems for the isolated, the anxious, the self-branded antisocial. Sometimes, she wrote with a cutting specificity; her breakout single, “Here,” gave a panoramic view of a party from the vantage point of the loner slumped near the TV, a beanie slung low over her eyes. The song was a massive hit that sent her into the pop machine, and soon after she signed to Def Jam, Cara released a stream of sanitized songs with Big Messages—the cloying “Scars to Your Beautiful” addressed a girl who cuts herself, the earnest “Trust My Lonely” was a cheesy ode to intuition. Her albums alternated between tracks that harnessed her keen eye for detail and songs more suited for Disney soundtracks (Cara eventually was featured on the Moana soundtrack). But her undeniable voice and her keen introspection made Cara a compelling figure in the pop world, even as she struggled to define what type of star she wants to become.
Cara’s latest album, In the Meantime, is a sleek ode to this in-between state. It’s a record with defined parameters: She tends to herself after a breakup, with a constant eye towards whatever love might come next. This is the kind of album best written at the age of 25, and Cara grasps for profundity when she tackles the first apprehensions about aging—“You live and then you die,” she rasps on “Best Days,” “but the hardest pill to swallow is the meantime.” The song unfolds a lot like the half-baked meditations on Lorde’s “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” from another album about drifting through a quarter-life crisis. The record’s other clear parallel is Adele’s 25, a fellow collection of bracing breakup tracks and a time capsule for fading youth, buoyed by breathtaking vocals.
But where Adele sang about straightforward, straining sadness, Cara revels in clashing emotions. This is an album about feeling everything at once, and Cara cuts through her own chaos with sharp writing. Take the crystalline one-liners underpinning her choruses: “I miss you, don’t call me;” “I’m by myself, you’re somebody else;” “I love you, but you let me down.” She doesn’t let herself off the hook, either; some of Cara’s best writing on the album comes when she names her doubt and delusion. “I fill blanks with my own pride/I tell myself you’re miserable without me” she sings on “Somebody Else.” Her layered vocals bloom into lush harmonies throughout, intensifying the record’s internal feel.
The themes Cara explores here are moving and mature, but she dilutes them when she relies too much on metaphor and conceit. On “Find My Boy,” she auditions a cast of potential love interests—the Brooklyn bro picking up a pizza, the “short and sweet” poet, the dude doing yoga on the beach—and the descriptions drag on over the feather-light beats. In “Drama Queen,” she compares a turbulent relationship against the Hollywood ideals of love, but her quest for “a knight in shining armor” grows weary as the slick percussion ticks on. Cara spends much of the record parsing her tangled reflections on her past relationship, a muddle of blame and want and sting and need. At times, all this conflict jarringly contrasts the sound of the album: crisp, frictionless, pristine pop. She sings about holding in and hiding “explosive emotions” in “Box in the Ocean,” and the song itself tucks them away in bright trumpets and a reggae-inspired feel.
These buoyant tracks build to the closer “Apartment Song,” a sparkling coda that shows Cara luxuriating in alone time. She twirls around her kitchen and peers at the sky, she dances in front of the TV, she changes her number. Cara shines with clarity, exhaling and exalting. Especially for an artist who’s sang so much about the pains of feeling on her own, it’s delightful to hear her find bliss in solitude, holding onto the fleeting joy for as long as she can.

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The 17-year-old Brooklyn rapper Joey Bada$$, the most visible member of the Progressive Era artist collective, is a young man with an old soul, and his debut mixtape showcases a prodigous MC with a vision.

1999

The 17-year-old Brooklyn rapper Joey Bada$$ doesn't sound like his contemporaries. The handful of young rappers with tread, most notably Chicago's Chief Keef or the recently returned-from-exile prince of Odd Future, Earl Sweatshirt, make music with pomp and bombast, as aggressive as it is catchy. But the kind of music Joey BadA$$ makes hasn't sounded contemporary since the mid-1990s, or around the time he was born.
Today, Joey is the most visible member of a young artist collective called the Progressive Era (Pro Era for short), a crew mostly comprised of students from Brooklyn's Edward R. Murrow High School. These kids take musical inspiration from a time before any of them existed, specifically, the era referred to by hip-hop purists of a certain age as the "Golden Age." That time period, however, was dead if not fully decomposed by 1999, the year of this tape's title. While albums from 1999 like Mos Def's Black on Both Sides and MF Doom's Operation Doomsday offered potent alternatives that year to the power-balling of Jay-Z's Vol. 3: Life and Times… and the literal "Bling Bling" of BG's Chopper City in the Ghetto, rap about "keeping it real" was as rare a find as those upholding the practice. Joey Bada$$, however, is doing his best to further the period's legacy of boom-bap production as an authenticator and advanced-level lyricism as a meal ticket.
The young man clearly has an old soul. 1999 opens with "Summer Knights", an interlude produced by fellow Pro Era member Chuck Strangers, that with its shimmering keys, loop of gentle background singing, and words from Bada$$ decrying the lack of rap "style wit no gimmicks," sounds like the direct spawn of Nas' "Memory Lane". "Waves", whose intro regarding the coveted hairstyle of young black men nationwide is the only reference to the song's title, continues in the same manner, with smooth jazz production and Bada$$ rapping, "Like I told you, I know niggas who trash rapping/ Worried 'bout the tending fashions rather than ascendin' passion." There's no chorus, but he drops a 2Pac soundbite about rap not being ready for a "real person" in the middle of two verses. Wack MCs get a break on "FromDaTomb$", but in the midst of "resurrecting boom bap from the tombs," Bada$$ even refers to marijuana using the antiquated term "buddha." It's not enough to simply appreciate the sound: Bada$$ is wholly invested in the period.
For all his "old New York" posturing, though, he's a prodigious rapper, one who could have guested on a revered proving ground like the now defunct Stretch and Bobbito radio show, only to have his freestyle dubbed continuously from cassette to cassette. "Suspect Niggaz", the obligatory posse cut tacked on to the tape's end sounds like friends trying to impress each other, a lunch-table cipher put to record. Its chorus also happens to come from a song on Nas' It Was Written. Bada$$ himself treats every verse as an opportunity to best whomever you'd been listening to prior (his own group members in the case of "Suspect"), a habit that could have been altogether exhausting for the listener if not for his ability to stay on topic. "Niggas don't want war I'ma Martian wit a army of Spartans/ Sparring with a knife in a missile fight," he raps on "Survival Tactics", the song whose video first flung Bada$$ into the internet hype vortex.
Outside of production from his Pro Era crew, Bada$$ has repurposed beats for 1999 from MF Doom, Lord Finesse, and the late J Dilla. They play seamlessly among the newer productions, something Bada$$ was clearly invested in as Pro Era member Chuck Strangers recently revealed to Jayson Greene. "I don't just sit around making boom-bap beats all day," the producer said. "I make all kinds of beats-- this is the just first thing everyone's heard from me. But Joey had a very specific vision for 1999."
Though Bada$$ released the tape on Datpiff, he's managed to get the video for "Hardknock" into rotation on MTV2. So while it could be that he's keeping his label association under wraps for the sake of building a more organic fanbase, he does already have a well-connected management team in place. Regardless, Joey Bada$$ has succeeded at getting the attention he wants for the music he wants to be making. That in itself is a victory in any era.


Mystery Cove, the fourth Monster Rally full-length, is pure, distilled escapism: 42 straight minutes of somewhere else, no SPF required. It is a Hawaiian shirt with an AUX input.

Mystery Cove

Way back in the 10-cent bin, between the 40-odd copies of Whipped Cream & Other Delights and those “Sounds of Hawaii” records made exclusively by people who'd never set foot on Hawaii, Monster Rally’s Ted Feighan has found paradise. “Exotica,” we used to call it: “Space-age bachelor pad music,” that sort of thing. Feighan, having lifted dozens of samples from the original, often-warped wax, realigns them into a sparkling, sun-soaked collage, deftly sliding between opulent slack-key guitars, clattering breakbeats, and shimmering tropicalia, like the Avalanches stuck in Honolulu with visa issues, or the Caretaker on daquiri three. Mystery Cove, the fourth Monster Rally full-length, is pure, distilled escapism: 42 straight minutes of somewhere else, no SPF required.
Feighan largely works in miniature—few Monster Rally tracks run too far past the two minute mark—without much apparent use for vocals. While early highlight “In the Valleys” lifts a few lines from hapa-haole classic “Lahainaluna,” the paucity of voices throughout the rest of Mystery Cove gives the disc its air of seclusion, a paradise far removed from the madding crowd. From chopped-not-slopped big band ditties (“Moondog”) to swanky hold music/“Hotline Bling” schmaltz (“Full Sail,” “After Hours”) to lusty, Herb Ritts-lensed sandblasters (“Tourismo”), this is transporting work.
Mystery Cove isn’t a real place, but Feighan’s fondness for certain sounds (lounge, surf, slack-key guitar) sourced from a certain era (1948-1964, give or take) neatly conjures one anyway: beautiful people, endless beaches, fruit-based cocktails. Alas, like any vacation, Mystery Cove too often cuts things short just when they’re getting good. For all his curatorial prowess, Feighan tends to winnow down his Goodwill findings into 10-or-15 second chunks. There’s plenty of variation between the tracks, just not necessarily much within them; occasionally, a breakbeat is introduced, or a clip will run headlong into another, but the general rule seems to be “cut, spin, fade, repeat.” While that certainly keeps things moving, there’s rarely enough time within individual tracks to get acclimated to the scenery when Feighan’s anxiously clicking his way through the slideshow.
As an exercise in vibe-sustainment, Mystery Cove is a knockout. To that end, it’s probably the most cohesive Monster Rally record to date: a Hawaiian shirt with an AUX input. But that cohesion comes comes at the cost of a bit of adventure; whereas 2013’s more baldly experimental Return to Paradise found Feighan drawing slivers of samba and sweeping mid-century soundtrack work into his world party, Mystery Cove rarely makes it too far off the Big Island. Most of us will take our escapism where we can get it nowadays, and Feighan’s only too happy to provide.


Unlike almost anything that Tim Kinsella has been involved with, Owls' first LP in nearly 13 years, Two, doesn’t need a preemptive warning about its “challenging” nature. Kinsella's pretty much stopped caring about public perception, which has resulted in some of his most honest and direct music.

Two

There's little chance that listeners unfamilar with Tim Kinsella's work would refer to the angular, incomprehensible melodies of Owls’ self-titled 2001 LP as “pop”, and it’s even less likely that his lyrics, which are cryptic, piecemeal, and pointed as a ransom note, would strike them as “emo”.  Owls is Kinsella’s most accessible project, though, and it’s proven massively influential for countless self-identifying emo groups. Regardless, the funny thing about Two, the project's first release in nearly 13 years, is that as much as it appeases those who would call it “highly anticipated”, it might actually appeal more to newcomers.
Two does sound like a natural progression for the project—“Four Works of Art…” is almost raga-like in its call-and-response drone, not too dissimilar from Owls' opener “What Whorse You Wrote Id On”—but this is not a case of Owls picking up where they left off. Tim Kinsella actually hits notes (even the high ones) and, yes, the unwieldy song titles of Owls have been ditched as well. Mike Kinsella’s drumming is intuitive and fluid rather than fractured, which allows bassist Sam Zurick to actually groove rather than forcing himself within the gnarled arpeggios of guitarist Victor Villareal. A colleague mentioned Real Estate upon hearing “Ancient Stars Seed…”, and there are parts of Two that qualify as “indie rock”—the amiable amble of “The Lion…”, “I’m Surprised…” righting itself into a genuine chorus. Whereas Owls required the kind of sweep-picking mastery outlined in Guitar World columns, a beginner could play some of these songs on guitar.
Unlike Owls—or almost anything that Tim Kinsella has been involved with—Two doesn’t need a preemptive warning about its “challenging” nature, which might disappoint diehards who relish the challenge. Two lacks the explosive, uncanny chemistry of Owls—nothing matches the unbridled exuberance of “Everyone Is My Friend”, the fragile beauty of “Anyone Can Have A Good Time”, the frisky rhythmic interplay of “I Want the Quiet Moments of a Party Girl”, and there's not a lyric that hits as squarely as “It’s not impossible to think of you thinking of me.” Two sounds comparatively normalized, both due to Owls’ own aesthetic softening and the dozens of bands who have co-opted this sound wholesale. It doesn't clearly demonstrate why people follow Kinsella’s every whim, or why he spent nearly two decades being despised.
Ultimately, Two is a showcase for Kinsella as a frontman rather than a bandleader. He’s always been a tough sell, even from the days of the relatively revered-by-consensus Cap’n Jazz, but if you tried to engage with Joan of Arc album titles like In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust (let alone the contents therein) and immediately determined, “Yeah, this isn’t for me,” no one would blame you. But in the past few years, he’s found rejuvenation in old age similar to Mark Kozelek: simultaneously emboldened and embittered by a life in music and a resultant, unflappable fanbase, they’ve pretty much stopped caring about public perception, which has resulted in some of their most honest and direct music.
Two is filled with dozens of obtuse word jumbles that only make sense to Tim Kinsella and others that only make sense if you live in Chicago, but there's also very private thoughts that cloak their own profundity. Two can variously scan as a sly critique of internet culture, or aging within the indie rock community, or just aging in general as an artist of limited earning potential. On “Why Oh Why…”, Kinsella casually doles a withering dismissal of thinkpiece culture: “It’s cute how you assume your experience of the world is the world.” But as a cult artist, he understands the appeal of that cloistered mindset: “Haven’t you ever been new somewhere?/ Haven’t you been envious of membership’s endlessness?”
Two practically demands listening along with the lyrics sheet; this is high-concept, cerebral stuff that's difficult to wrench any kind of visceral thrill from. Opener “Four Works of Art…” is an ingeniously crafted song both musically and lyrically, but it lays out “A way of understanding this historical period” by letting you consider the commonalities between a car filled with trash, Christopher Kubasik, David Petraeus, and a CCR tape—and yet it all rattles around your head in a way that’s more unsettling than the prodding done by Owls’ progeny. Even though Owls serve as a touchstone in 2014, there's still little that quite sounds like Two.


Young singer Antonia Cytrynowicz brings uncanny presence to the jazz composer and saxophonist’s pop-conscious mixture of improvisation and studio overdubs.

Sam Gendel / Antonia Cytrynowicz: LIVE A LITTLE

LIVE A LITTLE

Sam Gendel is at the vanguard of what might be called the Adult Swim-ification of jazz. Like the late night cable block, which has its own formidable music history, the saxophonist’s compositions are both glitchy and luxurious, written for sporadic, needy attention spans raised on the internet. Almost ambient and always restless, Gendel’s music has roots in hip-hop, forefronting boom-bap beats more often than triplets or free-jazz clatter. His approach coolly rejects candlelit supper clubs and university classrooms; his videos are irreverent, funny, and disjunctive with the genre’s ordinary contexts, featuring the composer cruising in a lowrider or eating a banana. As one fawning YouTube user commented, “This is so avant-garde that it’s circled right around and become a sketch show skit.”
If his music sounds like a gimmick, Gendel’s latest record takes the impression even further. LIVE A LITTLE joins the California native with singer Antonia Cytrynowicz, the younger sister of Gendel’s partner Marcella. Cytrynowicz, who was 11 years old when the songs were recorded, improvises vocals while Gendel extemporizes on various instruments. She brings to the album the question mark of extreme youth. Listeners might ask: Is LIVE A LITTLE a pet project for a talented family? A career boost for a nascent artist who couldn’t possibly have found her voice yet? Gendel, though, has an ear for collaborators who challenge convention, and with feet in both the avant-garde and mainstream, he recognizes when the two sensibilities share utopian common ground—such as their relative willingness to overlook age and accomplishment as artistic prerequisites. He’s hardly the first jazz composer to collaborate with kin and kid: Ornette Coleman asked his son Denardo to join his trio when the precocious drummer was 10.
Unlike a drumset, a voice is transformed by a child’s range and timbre. Audiences have to believe a voice—or find its lack of believability compelling. Strangely, the context for Cytrynowicz’s capable soprano is right in front of us: Contemporary pop prizes producers who use Auto-Tune and other digital effects to make adult voices sound childlike. Listen to LIVE A LITTLE without knowing her age, and you’ll think Gendel has simply found a grown collaborator with a natural sense of melody, a modern musical sensibility, and a near-psychic ability to play off of his sax, keyboard, bass, and guitar lines. Cytrynowicz’s phrasing on “Clouds in Me” makes the album closer an earworm; her performances on “Lightly” and “Treasure That I Treasure” are full of feeling, a quality missing in Gendel’s vocals on his own album-length songwriter project, 2017’s 4444. LIVE A LITTLE’s quietly obvious, pop-conscious production fosters a necessary sense of distance.
Cytrynowicz’s improvisations cover lyrical territory commonly considered the province of those more mature in years. Most of her songs think through the appeal and pitfalls of intimacy: “When you come by me/I wonder if I should like it/Or if I should not like it/There is no telling.” Sometimes, she reflects on love’s physical dimensions: “When you touch me/When I like you/When you love saying/You are ready.” Cytrynowicz’s romantic pondering runs counter to a culture that often denies children an inner life apart from corporate-derived, gendered, and pre-censored imagery.
For Gendel, the album is a step into the previously uncharted terrain of cosmic cabaret. He allows himself a more relaxed relationship with the saxophone than he has before, at least on his own projects; rather than processing his tone into murmuring unrecognizability, Gendel erupts into giddy spurts of bebop on “Leap” and lead single “Wondering, Waiting.” The scope of his career is its own argument against snobbery, yet the odd couple at the core of LIVE A LITTLE seems like a particular rebuke of a society that condescends by categorization—whether prescribing culture to children, or predictable career paths to improvisatory musicians. LIVE A LITTLE flips gimmickry on its head. Charting out an oasis for themselves, Gendel and Cytrynowicz reclaim their creative instincts from a patronizing world.


Wilco's adventurous, self-produced eighth LP follows 2007's lighter Sky Blue Sky and 2009's self-conscious summary Wilco (The Album). The best thing about this one is the ease with which they've recaptured some of their old unpredictability.

The Whole Love

Maybe the most challenging thing about Wilco's sixth and seventh LPs-- into the formalist, featherweight Sky Blue Sky and retrospective-in-repose of Wilco (The Album)-- is just how unchallenging they were. These records seemed at times curiously unambitious, coming as they did from one of the most forward-thinking American bands of the last decade and change. Wilco made their early reputation on their creative restlessness, their ongoing identity crisis, but since 2004's A Ghost Is Born-- still, by some distance, their most difficult work-- their music's seemed something of a retreat from their early-decade boundary-shoving. Wilco's great strength lies not just in Jeff Tweedy's world-weary inscrutability, but the ways he and the band matched those stark, sometimes startling sentiments to expectation-defying deconstructions of Americana. The best thing about The Whole Love, Wilco's adventurous, elliptical eighth LP, is the ease with which they've recaptured some of that old unpredictability: From Being There through A Ghost Is Born, the band's best work has always perched itself upon the edge of traditionalism and experimentation, and The Whole Love is the first of their albums in years not to shy away from such risks.
As soon as opener "Art of Almost" whirrs to a start, you'll know something has changed. A glitchy motorik groove crashes into swarming strings before giving way to a slippery Tweedy melody; then it's elegant bass ooze and keyboard creep, over which Nels Cline drapes a searing kosmische capper. Fraught and foreboding, the song is easily the most daring thing they've put to tape since A Ghost Is Born, a interstellar spin on Wilco (The Album)'s highlight "Bull Black Nova". It seems at first as much statement as song: The self-produced Whole Love is the first LP the band laid down entirely in their practice loft, and the brash, voluminous "Almost" feels like six musicians bottling themselves off from the world and pushing each other towards their breaking points. Though nothing else on Whole Love quite matches the exploratory zeal of "Almost", The Whole Love's littered with enough alluringly off-balance arrangements and instrumental left-turns-- Cline's screaming guitar interludes on "Born Alone", the  gurgling keyboard underneath the otherwise old-timey "Capitol City", countless rhythmic exchanges between drummer Glenn Kotche and bassist John Stirratt-- to lend the record much of its precipice-teetering feel.
When The Whole Love's not defying expectations outright, it's tweaking them gently. "Capitol City" comes across like Hoagy Carmichael for the "Boardwalk Empire" crowd, a moddish organ gives the bouncy "I Might" the spring in its step, and Tweedy's deft verse-ending vocal turnaround on highlight "Born Alone" is as sharp as it is sly. Much of The Whole Love's midsection draws from this lineup's folk-rock foundation-- splitting the difference between Being There's rockier material and the sunlit Sky Blue Sky stuff-- but these songs seems to bend and sway a little differently than they have in the past. The band, unchanged since the Sky Blue Sky days, seems increasingly comfortable as a musical unit; Cline in particular, whose hotshot contributions to Wilco's last two LPs sometimes felt like glorified session work, is both everywhere and nowhere, subtly coloring in the backdrops yet unafraid to step out into the spotlight. Kotche and Stirratt's aforementioned interplay does wonders even on the quiet numbers, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen mirrors Cline's dialed-down everpresence, and Tweedy himself is still underrated as both player and arranger. Dressed-up with detail as The Whole Love can be, they know just when to it pull back.
In pre-release interviews, Tweedy's suggested many of The Whole Love's lyrics were born of phonetic garble later wrestled into verse. That much would seem to be true of lines like "The Magna Carta's on a Slim Jim blood, brother" from "I Might", but when Tweedy sings, "I wish you were here," on "Capitol City"-- and then, seconds later, corrects himself with, "And yet I wish I were there with you"-- his meaning's certainly clear. This back-and-forth between alluring nonsense and open-hearted sentiment isn't new for Tweedy, but here the sharp split leaves The Whole Love feeling a bit muddled. He's a devoted romantic one moment, detached and random the next, with far fewer of the knife-twisting standout lines that characterized the band's earlier work on either end of the spectrum. Tweedy's crushed-charcoal voice is as rich and immediate as ever, and though he brings it on the big numbers like "Monday" descendent "Standing O", he occasionally loses a syllable or two to nonchalance during the quieter moments.
The Whole Love bows out with "One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley's Boyfriend)", a gently unfurling umpteen-minute heart-stopper loosely centered around a weekend with the Iowan author's paramour. The gorgeous, gripping "Sunday Morning" proves The Whole Love's second major triumph, epic in length but intimate in effect. Unlike "Art of Almost", "Sunday Morning" does nothing to push out the band's boundaries; it is, rather, a very good, very long Wilco song, one that could've appeared on nearly any of their post-A.M. albums. But its length, coupled with its minute-to-minute success rate, leaves it feeling at once impressively ambitious and completely natural, the very midpoint mined by Wilco's three or four agreed-upon masterworks.
It took Jeff Tweedy years to get comfortable with his place in Uncle Tupelo, and a few more to truly settle into Wilco's first act. After a few years of constant sonic flux and personnel shifts, Sky Blue Sky and Wilco (The Album) found the band feeling more resolved than ever, a consistent lineup settling into what seemed increasingly like a signature sound. But Wilco's always seemed their most creatively surefooted atop uneven ground. So the weird, winsome Whole Love is certainly Wilco's least consistent LP in a while, but inconsistency has its own rewards. At its best, The Whole Love finds Wilco casting aside the caution, reveling in their own contradictions.


On her most accessible album yet, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith draws out the organic qualities of her Buchla 100 modular synth. But The Kid sparks a bodily pleasure alongside her music’s cerebral delights.

The Kid

With each new album, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith folds more of her voice into the effervescent, kaleidoscopic electronic music she’s made since borrowing a neighbor’s Buchla 100 synthesizer as a recent Berklee graduate. The L.A.-based composer, who’s one of the few artists to rely on the rare modular system as her primary instrument, has released at least one LP a year since 2015, but her latest record The Kid stands apart as her most immediate and accessible yet. Though its narrative follows a human lifespan through four developmental stages, from newborn bewilderment to a calm acceptance of death, the album flows seamlessly from its initial burbles to its melancholy finish. There are no chapter markers, and if you’d rather ignore the concept behind the compositions, Smith makes it easy to enjoy the music without mapping it to a story. Then again, it’s a story that doesn’t take a lot of concentration: If you’ve been born, grown up, and encountered death, you already know it by heart.
While some contemporary synthesists (like SOPHIE or Arca) emphasize the artificiality of their medium, Smith prefers to draw out its organic qualities—the way sounds churned from electricity can sound like weather, or rustling leaves, or burrowing animals. On The Kid, she loops humanity into that ecosystem, entangling her vocals in fluttering arpeggios and corkscrewing bass. Though her voice drives most songs on The Kid, she never treats it as separate from the rest of her arsenal. It’s not an embellishment slapped on top of an otherwise complete instrumental; it’s wholly integrated into the complex webbing of each piece. There’s a stunning moment on “A Kid” when the beat falls away and Smith sings through filters at several simultaneous pitches. She sounds like an organ that’s learned to articulate syllables, both singer and instrument at the same time. Distorted, multi-tracked, shifted, and still addictively tuneful, Smith’s voice humanizes the work without breaking the spell she casts while commanding her machines.
That the human body is inextricable from the rest of the world seems to be the point. While writing the album, Smith took inspiration from the work of British philosopher Alan Watts, whose lectures tend to emphasize the interconnectedness of all life. People might be isolated sensorily, but all of us come from, and return to, the earth. Smith seizes upon this concept with joy. Her compositions, some of which incorporate orchestral instruments played by the Stargaze collective, overflow with texture and detail. Compared to her more reserved prior albums, 2015’s Euclid and 2016’s EARS, The Kid at times plays almost like Grimes’ alien electro-pop or Caribou’s house-indebted beats. There’s stomp and bite to tracks like “To Follow & Lead” that Smith has never quite indulged before. Without sacrificing her ear for detail, she’s engineered an album that sparks a bodily pleasure alongside her music’s continued cerebral delights.
Even as The Kid rolls to a stop on an explicitly mournful note, Smith extracts as much joy as possible from the sadness. “To Feel Your Best” confronts the thought that everyone you’ll ever love will die with the same verve as the Flaming Lips on “Do You Realize??” Against the chirps of her synthesizers, Smith sings, “I’m gonna wake up one day and you won’t be there/’Cause I care that’s why I stare… I’m gonna miss miss miss will miss your face.” It’s a sobering thought, to memorize the contours of a loved one’s face because you’re pretty sure you’ll outlive them, but Smith treats it gently. There is beauty in that impulse, as there’s beauty in all the human impulses The Kid excavates—and celebrates—so gracefully.


The Pittsburgh rock quartet’s newly reissued debut is a relentless, intentionally chaotic document of twentysomething existential dread.

Hayday

If “I Wanna Be Your Dog” encapsulated Iggy Pop’s fleeting, acquiescent lust, then singer-bassist Lydia Slocum and guitarist-producer Sebastian Kinsler take the trope of romantic possession to full surrender. On “Dog Song (Wet Jeans),” originally released in April 2021, the future Feeble Little Horse bandmates admit defeat in an imbalanced relationship: “I get sick with every touch/Spill it out, I’ll lick it up/I just let you piss on me/Lifted your leg, I was your tree,” Slocum murmurs over a tinny beat and twisted guitar riffs. It’s messy, unexpected, and hypnotic—an early indicator of the group’s bizarre noise-pop appeal, revisited as a bonus track on Saddle Creek’s new reissue of the Pittsburgh quartet’s debut, Hayday.
Feeble Little Horse first released Hayday in October 2021, just months after the current iteration of the band materialized. After Kinsler, guitarist Ryan Walchonski, and drummer Jake Kelley invited Slocum to add vocals to their gnarled mixes, an album swiftly took shape, galvanized by Slocum’s frustration with a recent breakup. Within 24 hours of their first proper writing session, they’d already outlined nearly half of the record. Devised from the band members’ shared love of Alex G, dream-pop experimentalists Sweet Trip, and loud as hell local guitar bands, Hayday is a relentless, intentionally chaotic document of twentysomething existential dread.
One of the first songs Feeble Little Horse wrote together was the album’s centerpiece, “Chores,” where Slocum bemoans a partner’s domestic shortcomings by way of rousing, discordant riffs. “Don’t you know manners, big boy?” she asks with a jeering lilt, dissing his fashion sense and his habit of looting her leftovers. While “Dog Song” illustrated Slocum’s self-effacing side, moments like “Chores”—delivered deadpan, with a snarky laugh—set her back up on two feet.
The peculiarities of Feeble Little Horse’s music tend to draw focus, but their lyrics are often just as perturbing and wry: On “Kennedy,” they channel the song’s grisly namesake curse as Slocum recounts a picnic ravaged by ants and envisions peeling off her skin layer by layer. Walchonski and Kinsler’s distorted chords lend a sense of unease to “Drama Queen,” where Slocum flirts with the idea of settling a dispute with a brawl: “Take a little hit, it’s alright/We could use a heavy fist fight,” she sings, as if through a villainous grin. Some of her most vivid imagery comes packaged in the deceptively saccharine melody of “Termites,” where she likens heartbreak to watching the world rot. Insects are swarming across her body, she can hardly eat without vomiting, and—worst of all—words of affirmation have lost their meaning: “I suck on old compliments to see if there’s still a taste/‘You could have anyone’—you were lying to my face!”
Despite all Hayday’s oddities, Feeble Little Horse understand their limits. “The goal is always to make these songs as weird as we can without destroying what makes them cool,” Kinsler has said, and the band roots that balance in melodic pop structures and an unflinchingly sardonic perspective. On the sweeping “Tricks,” Slocum evokes the anxiety of navigating a pool party and arrives at a hopeful personal revelation: “You are too cool to take a swim/But I look so dumb I already jumped in,” she coos. It’s not self-criticism—it’s that she finally feels secure enough to take the plunge.


The Australian multi-instrumentalist pushes his wispy electroacoustic music into warmer, more melodic territory.

Simian Angel

The Australian multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi has made the single LP side his canvas. His wispy electroacoustic pieces tend to work best at 15 to 20 minutes a pop—compact enough to retain their focus, yet roomy enough to reward immersion. Simian Angel demonstrates Ambarchi’s mastery of the form across a pair of aqueous ambient explorations shot through with loosely tangled melodic lines.
Simian Angel has the free-associative drift of his loosest improv pieces and a sublimated sense of groove. It opens tentatively, with a watery, synth-like tone drizzled over Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista’s patient, pitter-pat conga slaps. Two minutes pass like this, then four; in the background, counterpoint synth pads glisten like frost on a field. Whatever instrument Ambarchi is playing—on the sleeve, he is credited simply with “guitars & whatnot”—his melodic figures have a searching quality, like water trickling downhill. Gradually, his tone fattens, and as Baptista trades the congas for gentle shaker rhythms, the spectrum fills with a thrumming, organ-like buzz. It ends as gradually as it began, settling into the root note like an old house cooling after a hot summer’s day.
On the B-side, the title track offers a more vigorous take on the same basic material. It opens with a twangy, percussive pattern played on the berimbau—an acoustic string instrument capable of psychedelic pitch-shifting and tremolo effects—that gives the track a forceful push. That momentum carries “Simian Angel” across its 20-minute runtime, even though Baptista sits out for long stretches. Here, Ambarchi uses his guitar first to conjure those organ-like tones (an effect he achieves by running his instrument through a Leslie speaker, whose tremolo is closely associated with the sound of the Hammond organ) and then a bright, crisp facsimile of acoustic piano. Both tracks are powered by melodic instincts that have rarely played such a dominant role in Ambarchi’s music. Over the years, he’s shown us plenty of sides to his playing—brainy, brawny, barely there—but on Simian Angel, we get a glimpse of something new: something sensitive, probing, and even whimsical.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Working from an old, dog-eared indie rock blueprint, this Melbourne trio delight in redrafting the lines. The French Press shines just as bright as their last EP, but the songs cast darker shadows.

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: The French Press

The French Press

With their debut 2015 EP, Talk Tight, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever proved to be one of those special bands that arrives seemingly out of nowhere with a fully realized aesthetic. No tentative baby steps or half-formed experiments for this lot; Talk Tight exuded confidence and purpose, yielding five propulsive, jangly pop gems that felt instantly familiar. And its appeal was cross-generational. If you were raised on ’80s college rock, you could revel in nostalgic nods to the Feelies, the Clean, the Go-Betweens, and countless other Velvets revisionists. Younger fans could hear the sort of band the Strokes might have turned into had they aged more gracefully, or imagine what Real Estate might sound like after downing a case of Red Bull.
But while working from an old, dog-eared indie rock blueprint, the Melbourne band take great delight in redrafting the lines. With three distinctive singer-guitarists—Tom Russo, Fran Keaney, and Joe White—at the helm, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever don’t operate so much like a traditional rock band as an improv theater troupe riffing on a pre-established theme. The locomotive rhythm may be locked in, but each member is free to ride it wherever they please. A Rolling Blackouts song rarely retraces its steps, often eschewing standard verse/chorus/verse structure for a parade of changing melodic motifs that are passed around the singers like hot potatoes. In the case of Talk Tight highlights like “Clean Slate,” that meant you essentially got three great songs for the price of one.
It’s a trick that (the now abbreviated) Rolling Blackouts C.F. still pull off with great aplomb on follow-up EP The French Press. Its six songs shine just as bright as those on Talk Tight, but they cast longer, darker shadows. You can sense the subtle change in temperament within the first 30 seconds of “French Press,” where the band work a taut motorik build reminiscent of Broken Social Scene’s anxious anthem “Cause = Time.” Taking full advantage of their Forster/McLennan-style dynamic, Russo and Keaney play the roles of brothers—one traveling abroad, the other stuck at a miserable desk job—as they try to converse over a patchy Skype connection. But as the song’s incessant forward motion intensifies, the technological divide comes to symbolize the emotional one at the core of their relationship: “Brother don’t you know,” Russo sings, “that jealousy’s a curse, and what’s worse is the silence/Strange… you’re moving out of range.”
“French Press” sets the tone for a record filled with seemingly innocuous scenes that suddenly turn tense. Even the songs that more readily evoke Talk Tight’s carefree kicks—“Julie’s Place,” “Colours Run”—bound about at a more furious clip, powered by blurry-handed acoustic/electric strums liable to leave blood on the pick-ups. Just as Rolling Blackouts’ music provides an instant sense of comfort through its ’80s indie-pop signifiers, lyrically, they make you feel right at home by dropping you in the middle of intimate scenes populated by first-name-basis characters. But that also means we’re sometimes privy to conversations we’re not supposed to hear. Atop the twitchy twang of “Sick Bug,” White’s yearning reminiscence of an old flame (“I close my eyes to take you back/She touched my leg”) triggers a frantic torrent of “I want you! I want you! I want you! I want you!,” crystallizing that moment when the decorum of romance gets steamrolled by the indignities of desire.
Even as The French Press mellows out, it never really settles. The casual lope of “Dig Up” puts a sunny, soft-focus filter on a portrait of a relationship’s painfully slow demise (“The walls are closing in all around us/I feel the moment’s passing us by”). And the swooning, harmony-rich chorus of “Fountain of Good Fortune” offers a precious taste of honey to chase Russo’s bitter-pill critique of organized religion: “I’ve been washed, I’ve been anointed/I’ve eaten the body of the Lord/It’s from the fountain of good fortune/Brings dirty, cloudy water/That pollutes the mind of anyone around.” Like Talk Tight, The French Press is brimming with vim, vigor, and open-road abandon. But what makes it an even more compelling listen is that, this time, we get a clearer glimpse in the rear-view mirror of the stressors they’re trying to escape.


On its first soundtrack in seven years, the Texas band mirrors the subtle landscape and beauty of the national park that the namesake documentary captures.

Explosions in the Sky: Big Bend (An Original Soundtrack for Public Television)

Sorry, but everything isn’t actually bigger in Texas. Take the mountains: The state’s gnarled ranges, wrought by volcanoes and warped by erosive epochs, are just half the height of the country’s great mountains, minor summits that seem like sentries for the West’s true marvels. They are eccentric and beautiful, though, especially the Chisos, nestled against the contested crook of Texas’ southern border inside Big Bend National Park. Serrated and strange like the mighty Cascades, intricately colored like castoffs of the Colorado Plateau, the Chisos are an amalgamation of American geologic splendor, built on the diminished scale of a child’s model sports car. They don’t wow; they mesmerize.
The Chisos must have made an apt prompt for Big Bend, the first soundtrack from Texas’ maestros of epiphanic atmospherics, Explosions in the Sky, in seven years. Big Bend grew out of the band’s work on the score for a splendid Nature documentary about the park, which premiered earlier this year. “Chisos,” its prelude, begins as a slow country shuffle, twilit guitars framed by a keyboard melody that cannot choose between a smile and a sulk. Likewise, just when the piece begins to shudder in anticipation of the kind of climax that made Explosions famous, the song begins to disintegrate, lazily vanishing into an endless sunset. Like the Texas peaks themselves, the moment—and the best of Big Bend at large—forgoes big drama in favor of something subtly spellbinding.
Big Bend itself is a “vibe park,” a place more striking on the whole than any of its specific highlights—there is no Half Dome, Grand Teton, or Grand Canyon. The harsh Chihuahuan Desert surrounds lush mountain meadows, while the Rio Grande flows just miles from incredibly arid expanses. Webbed together by a staggering array of wildlife, Big Bend is a gestalt of actual nature. Big Bend, the album, threads together 20 instrumental miniatures across an hour. Each frames an animal or an idea from the documentary, like bats that hunt on the ground or reptiles that appear to disappear into the desert. The pieces form their own subtle ecosystem, each informing the other rather than overriding.
There are, of course, moments when Explosions in the Sky do what you would expect—shape a sky-wide crescendo of glowing electric guitars, the rhythm section reinforcing an endlessly romantic frisson. “Sunrise” conjures an imagined Tim Riggins montage, where the Friday Night Lights star wakes up alone and hungover just in time to make a game-saving play. The piano of “Nightfall” first rises like a Nils Frahm fantasy. Marching drums and crisscrossing keyboard-and-guitar drones soon summon a bygone moment when the likes of Explosions, Sigur Rós, and M83 made dewy-eyed music that suggested everything was still possible.
But the bulk of these pieces explore less familiar terrain. “Autumn” unfurls like a brief Tangerine Dream homage, with distended synthesizer tones decorated by a neon guitar filigree. The sequential “Climbing Bear” and “Woodpecker”—two animals whose unexpected squabble over acorns makes the entire documentary worthwhile—convey both mischief and wonder with gentle acoustic guitars and restrained drums. Loping loops of pizzicato violin and pencil-thin guitar give “Swimming” a sense of childlike joy. It is perfect for the documentary’s footage of beavers cavorting in the Rio Grande; without the film, it is perfect for a brief afternoon reverie, a fleetingly rare moment of mental free play.
Explosions in the Sky began their work on Big Bend in the final half of the Trump presidency, as tension about inhumane policies at the Southern border escalated. They are releasing it now, amid another border crisis under yet another administration. The band hints at this troubled story of colonialism during “Human History,” the album’s finale and most clearly distressed six minutes. The music wallows, its circular piano and skittering electronics vying for vanishing air. That’s as close as they come to a statement—understandably, perhaps, given the nature of the Nature commission.
Perhaps now—that is, on an album about a natural wonder that has sometimes prompted humanitarian crises—seems like the moment for Explosions to be more direct, to reenlist the political undercurrents of their earliest work. But Big Bend honors the things we haven’t ruined in spite of our efforts, celebrating a wilderness our borders have yet to break. After nearly a quarter century, Explosions in the Sky have learned to leave us with the implication, not the epiphany itself.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Chicago punk trio disbanded in 2016, but their final album serves up the chaotic blend of post-hardcore, noise rock, and Midwest emo that made them beloved.

Saw You Up There

The punk rock trio Yeesh formed at Bennington College in 2010, but they quickly relocated to Chicago and became a favorite in the city’s basement scene. Where other bands recreated  the tried-and-true formula of sloppy yells and melodic riffs, Yeesh brought shape-shifting post-hardcore and a studio-quality live sound. They released a boisterous debut in 2015, swiftly signed to Tiny Engines, and dropped their gnarled sophomore album Confirmation Bias in 2016 before calling it quits — though not without the promise of a posthumous full-length.
Two years later, that album has finally arrived. Saw You Up There is a fitting farewell for Yeesh, emphasizing the chaotic blend of post-hardcore, noise rock, and Midwest emo that made them such a beloved local act. Their arrangements are consistently surprising—singer-guitarist Alex Doyle and bassist Greg Obis often swap instrument registers so that the guitar chugs through low chords while the bass tackles the higher range. On “The Crossing,” they play off one another, pausing a wave of noise to break into an impromptu frenzy of math rock. Drummer Peter Reale frequently changes lanes, shifting from a barreling drum pattern to cymbal showers on “Escape Plan” or hitting every sixteenth note on “Shagohad” without crowding the field. On paper, Yeesh may sound like another Dischord-obsessed guitar band, but in execution they channel the personality of satisfyingly aberrant acts Unwound and The Dismemberment Plan. Saw You Up There lets Yeesh flaunt what makes them special: subtly complicated bridges, melodic basslines dipped in grunge, and two-guitar refrains played on one.
It’s tempting to award Obis extra credit for Yeesh’s slick balance of levels and EQ. As he did on the band’s early releases, Obis doubles as a mixer, fine-tuning the album’s hairpin turns. (At his day job, he’s an audio engineer at Chicago Mastering Service, which is co-run by Shellac bassist Bob Weston.) He draws out Yeesh’s slyest moments, like the amplified distance between Doyle’s howls and the microphone on “Concave,” or the warp of a guitar string bend on “Collective Sin.”
Looking back, it’s strange Yeesh never gained crossover word-of-mouth fame the way PUP or Pile have. They embody the perpetual tragedy of DIY scenes in that way: professional-level bands whose sound is far bigger than the 100-cap spaces they’re stuck playing. Saw You Up There is a steadfast parting gift that asks what Yeesh could’ve been in a few years. On emotional closer “Victory Lap,” an ode to the inevitable changing of the guard in music scenes, Doyle is stuck wondering the same thing: “The race is run, but you won’t get off the track/From the top, boys, let’s do this again.”


Evolving from the lo-fi sound of his home recordings, the New York singer-songwriter significantly steps up his studio chops, but his songs’ emotional register often remains frustratingly oblique.

Fink

To call your record Fink is a risky proposition. Is it a wry joke? A self-own? In the case of the debut studio album from the lo-fi artist Sean Henry, the loaded title feels out of step with the record itself, which too often shies away from leaving much of an impression at all.
Given the poignant origins of Fink’s title—his father, now deceased, spray-painted the word in their basement where the two would stare at it and laugh, a foreboding memory turned familial relic—you might expect the album to feel similarly charged, either through detailed storytelling or palpable emotion. After all, on Henry’s 2015 demo tape, It’s All About Me, he spouted 16 songs’ worth of intimate musings on friendship, love, and life as if he had anecdotes to spare. According to Henry, the very word “fink,” which felt shocking and powerful in childhood, has begun to seem strangely relatable as he has entered adulthood. Yet these songs come up short of expanding upon that sentiment, and it’s difficult to tell if that’s because Henry’s lyrics cut off before exploring his stories deeper or because his vocal delivery is equal parts detached and campy, a sneaky way of pointing out emotions instead of feeling them.
Fink is a hit-or-miss collection of songs focused largely on anxiety. Henry’s style has been termed “soft grunge”—heavy guitar pop with a sad undertone, like if Heatmiser covered DSU, that’s fleshed out with a backing band he assembled in New York. His brand of lyricism concentrates on simplistic imagery and hyper-repetitive lines, which works for a song like “Party Fiend,” where his nagging pleas reveal a weary dejection. But the brunt of the album fixates on forced imagery (“Gum in Hair”) and middle-school existentialism (“Virgo,” “Are We Alive?”). Even when handling a subject like depression, on “Hard Down,” Henry reaches for surface-level descriptors (“Hard down/I want no one around/When I’m down, I’m down”). It’s possible he purposefully uses flat language to mirror depression’s crippling effects, but his yappy singing has the effect of both underselling the emotion and slighting the subject matter. The album’s touchstone influences—Elliott Smith, Sparklehorse, (Sandy) Alex G—root their songs in deceptively intricate lyrics to tackle subjects like the cyclical pain of self-sabotage or the heartbreak of addiction. Henry never quite accomplishes that on Fink, despite addressing similarly personal topics.
What Fink lacks in lyrical depth and delivery, Henry compensates for with studio savvy. His knack for affecting chords and catchy melodies, present even in his early material as Boy Crush, blossoms here with pedal-laden electric guitars and a heaviness his lo-fi home recordings didn’t capture. Opener “Imperfection” pairs an unassuming acoustic guitar part with cushy synth, a complement to the droning guitars and percussive bounciness of “Those Imaginary.” “Going Backwards Again,” despite its limited lyrics, gets a jolt of life from reversed guitars in the style of the Beatles’ Revolver, the type of musical detail that moves you the way a profound statement might. The biggest-sounding track on the record, “The Ants,” is a perfect combination of Henry’s skills. Sinister electric guitars build towards a taunting call-and-response bridge where an angry session squashing ants reaches a point of mania, his short phrasing playing up the emotion.
While the production on songs like these elevates what Sean Henry can do instrumentally, it simultaneously widens the gap between that and his lyric-writing skills. His messages feel muffled, as though he had chosen a few journal entry phrases without doing the work to explain their importance, either through more elaborate lyrics or more expressive vocal delivery. That lack of intricacy in Fink is odd, given the wide range of subject matter he covered in It’s All About Me. If nothing else, Fink showcases Henry’s newfound strength writing grittier music, even if his words get lost in the shadows of his guitar.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a landmark of mainstream ’70s soft-rock, the peak of Linda Ronstadt’s power as a singer nonpareil.

Heart Like a Wheel

As their taxi rode uptown in the Manhattan predawn, the singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker leaned over to Linda Ronstadt and told her about a song. This should not have been a memorable occurrence; among their early-’70s country-rock circle of musicians and writers, songs were one of the only things worth talking about—creating them, selling them, matching them to the right singer.
But something about a lyric struck Ronstadt. Writing in her memoir, Simple Dreams, more than 40 years later, she recalls the memory like it just happened: “Jerry Jeff’s face was barely visible in the gray light… He bent his head low, closed his eyes, and softly sang for me all he could remember of the song.”
By this point, Ronstadt had already recorded a handful of albums with her original mid-’60s folk trio the Stone Poneys and as a solo artist. She’d covered old standards and worked with contemporaries like Michael Nesmith, who had written her biggest hit to date, “Different Drum.” Still barely in her mid-20s, Ronstadt had already recorded dozens of other people’s songs, the vast majority of them by men. Perhaps that’s why the opening verse of Anna McGarrigle’s unrecorded ballad “Heart Like a Wheel” hit her like it did:

Some say the heart is just like a wheel
When you bend it you can’t mend it
And my love for you is like a sinking ship
And my heart is on that ship out in mid-ocean

Just a couple basic metaphors, but look how they build. A bent wheel becomes a maritime catastrophe, and a vague “some say” becomes a tragic “my love… my heart.” In four short lines with barely any words longer than one syllable, we see a person try to connect their personal pain to a universal experience, only to acknowledge that real-life heartbreak is more awful than any folksy adage can convey. “I felt like a bomb had exploded in my head,” Ronstadt writes. “It rearranged my entire musical landscape.”
She carried “Heart Like a Wheel” around for years, obtaining a reel-to-reel copy of McGarrigle’s demo and begging various managers and producers to allow her to record it. On an endless series of tours and jam sessions, in the studio recording background vocals for Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” and “Old Man,” in front of The Johnny Cash Show’s cameras, Ronstadt grew into a respected, if commercially undistinguished, representative of the new California sound. But she kept this one spare tune close, envisioning it as a string-laden ballad. Eventually, she begged Capitol to let her leave so she could join Asylum, a more artist-focused label recently founded by another friend, David Geffen. They agreed, but asked for one more album.
Ronstadt entered the Sound Factory in Hollywood to record her final Capitol sessions in the spring of 1974. Since Geffen was now invested in her success, she effectively had two labels working to make her new record a hit. Thanks to constant touring and collaborations with seemingly every rock musician under 30 at the time, she had acquired mesmerizing control of a voice that was growing more powerful and evocative all the time. With Ronstadt’s help, producer Peter Asher assembled an unbelievable cast of studio ringers, including members of the Eagles, who started as Ronstadt’s touring band just a few years earlier; Andrew Gold, her ace guitar player and multi-instrumentalist; and background singers including Cissy Houston, Clydie King, and Emmylou Harris. Most importantly, she finally had the clout and support to record “Heart Like a Wheel,” which Asher layered in strings just as she imagined.
Heart Like a Wheel, as the record was inevitably titled, represented a huge creative leap for Ronstadt in every conceivable way. The title track was the least country- or even contemporary-sounding song she’d ever made, while her cover of the Everly Brothers’ immortal “When Will I Be Loved,” was the hardest she’d ever rocked. She sang Hank Williams with her friend Emmylou, then turned two songs by other friends into career-defining statements: her version of J.D. Souther’s “Faithless Love” drifts on banjo and soft percussion that underline its aching, rueful lyrics, while she completely transforms Lowell George’s druggy-trucker paean “Willin’” into a swaying power ballad.
The latter song is possibly the greatest example of Ronstadt’s artistic talent in those halcyon days. The Little Feat version of “Willin’” sounds like a sloppy celebration, but Ronstadt found the yearning in it, the loneliness of a job built on back roads and amphetamines. For George’s great chorus, “If you give me weed, whites, and wine/And you show me a sign/I’ll be willin’ to be movin’,” she slows each syllable down and enlists Gold and Herb Peterson for stunning three-part harmonies that only became longer and more affecting in concert. “Willin’,” with its romantic visions of “Dallas Alice” and its pro-drug message, was the farthest that straightlaced Ronstadt ever drifted from her actual emotional life. And yet she found its heart, and sang it with as much personal conviction as she sang McGarrigle’s wounded hymn.
Heart Like a Wheel sounds—and looks—like it was made to turn Ronstadt into a superstar. More than anything, it resembles the wildly popular records that Richard Perry was producing at the time for Harry Nilsson, Barbara Streisand, and Ringo Starr: a powerhouse voice backed by top-flight studio musicians and a tracklist that drew from 1950s classics and young songwriters alike. It cannily walks the listener through all aspects of Ronstadt’s vocal talent, from the bluesy opener “You’re No Good” to her plaintive voicing on the ballads and her arena-trained capacity for belting on “When Will I Be Loved.” Even the record design seemed like a fresh start: on the cover, her face is afloat in a sea of black and her name is spelled out in sleek, art deco lettering. Especially compared to the country-gal imagery of her earlier work, this is clearly Ronstadt Mach II.
The reinvention worked. Heart Like a Wheel spent nearly a year on the Billboard album charts including a week at No. 1. “You’re No Good” became a No. 1 single while “When Will I Be Loved” and “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You)” reached the Top 10 as well. The album was nominated for two 1976 Grammys including Record of the Year. Decades later, this kind of popular domination seems almost unbelievable, since the record feels a little slight. It flies by in less than 32 minutes, and despite all the consummate talent involved, no one’s contributions stand out. The songs exist purely to serve that soaring alto, and a number of them would be improved on the road. On Live in Hollywood, recorded in 1980 but only released this spring, Ronstadt sings three Heart Like a Wheel tracks and the difference is striking. The band genuinely jams on “You’re No Good,” even including a bass solo, and the tempos of “Faithless Love” and “Willin’” are slowed just enough for Ronstadt to wring maximum emotion from each line.
Nevertheless, Heart Like a Wheel made Live in Hollywood possible. In the second half of the ’70s, Linda Ronstadt became more than just a pop star. She sold-out arenas and brought mainstream attention to cult songwriters like Warren Zevon and Elvis Costello, appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone and Time, and was deemed the Queen of Rock. There had never been a female artist like her in American history, and few male rock acts were so fluent in classic songs and new ones alike, so capable and respected as a bandleader, or possessed of such a stunning, technically masterful voice.
No, Ronstadt never played an instrument in concert or on record. She never wrote her own songs, either. She had one power, but it was a superpower. Viewed from one angle, Linda Ronstadt’s career is the story of a woman gradually recognizing the power of her own voice. She had the tone early, but you can hear her control improve in each successive album. Her breaths sound more natural, her vibrato becomes more pronounced. By Heart Like a Wheel, she’d mastered it. In the ensuing years she was equally at home singing Pirates of Penzance on Broadway, making albums with big-band legend Nelson Riddle or the top Mariachi bands in Mexico, and harmonizing with Dolly Parton, Aaron Neville, or Kermit the Frog. She seemed to grasp that her voice was some supernatural gift that she had a responsibility to cultivate and share, and every time she went looking for bigger audiences, she found them eager to listen.
So what made her feel so connected to Anna McGarrigle’s little poem of lost love? As a young woman fighting her way out of a male-dominated music scene, she must have related to the deep ungendered sorrow in the song’s lyrics, but she must also have been looking for a tune that could be fully hers. She needed a lyric that she could feel more deeply than anyone else, and a melody she could bless with her unwavering tone. There was a world of music in her mind, and this one whispered verse turned out to be the key that opened it.


On two reissued albums and a sprawling collection of arguably finished songs, this Georgia band did everything you want great indie rock to do. Now, everyone has a chance to hear it.

The Glands: I Can See My House From Here

I Can See My House From Here

Drive 100 miles outside Clarke County, Georgia, and any Glands fans you’re likely to locate are either former Georgia Bulldogs, diehard record dweebs, or some confounding anomaly. But the closer you find yourself to Jittery Joe’s or the Georgia Theatre, institutions of Athens’ iconic indie rock stature, the more likely you are to hear something like this: the Glands’ 2000 self-titled second LP—not Reckoning, Wild Planet, Gyrate, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Black Foliage, or any of the college town’s other landmarks—is the finest thing ever committed to tape in or around The Classic City.
Athens isn’t known for keeping sounds to itself. From R.E.M. to Elephant 6, from the B-52’s to the Drive-by Truckers, no other place of its size has reliably exported so many great bands in the last 40 years. The reason why the Glands were never afforded their proper due is, even for easygoing Athenians, still something of a sticking point. But the new box set I Can See My House From Here—a lovingly compiled, handsomely presented collection of the Glands’ 1996 debut, Double Thriller; an expanded edition of 2000’s the Glands; and Double Coda, a 23-song collection of unreleased material—makes an awfully convincing case that the Glands’ warm, weird, rangy music deserves to be heard far beyond northeast Georgia.
For years, leader and singer Ross Shapiro ran Gyro Wrap, a downtown eatery that doubled as a reliable source of income and hangouts for aspiring musicians; later, he owned the now-shuttered Athens outpost of regional record store chain, Schoolkids. Shapiro was a consummate record nut and a Deadhead of some distinction. (He and eventual Widespread Panic bassist Dave Schools used to see the Dead together in the 1980s.) He was something of a loner, too; sure, everybody knew or knew of Ross, but very few knew Ross. Everybody in Athens seemed to know the Glands; upon the release of their self-titled LP in 2000, as Trucker Patterson Hood remembers in the set’s liner notes, it played from every store’s stereo system and out of every open window, the strains of “Livin’ Was Easy” carrying you down Broad Street and all the way home.
The Glands have their origins in the wee hours, as Shapiro and company—drummer Joe Rowe, bassist Derek Almstead, and just about anyone else still standing—would close down the bars, slip back to Ross’ place or a tiny downtown studio, drink coffee, and jam until they couldn’t see straight. These booze-and-caffeine-assisted sessions seemed, even to those involved, like little more than late-night fun, a way to pass time before passing out. “I just assumed it was going to be some kind of weird, heavy townie music,” producer David Barbe remembers thinking before Shapiro played him a few tracks from what would become Double Thriller, the Glands’ debut. But Shapiro had somehow wrestled those bleary sessions into full-fledged songs—strange, scuffed-up songs, but songs nevertheless, one minor miracle after another.
The self-assured, color-saturated, detour-ridden Double Thriller is a remarkable debut. Shapiro brings just about everything to the table throughout Double Thriller, a Spirograph swirl of regal Kinks-worthy melody, Pixies-style squawk, hushed balladry, and McCartney-inspired bounce. One song rarely sounds like the one before it. Neither does Shapiro, as his laconic Tom Petty drawl and pinched Ray Davies upper register share space with a louche Reed-meets-Bowie whisper and a half-scatted funk mumble.
This music is omnivorous almost to the point of overextension, and there’s always something just a little off in every Glands song, glotted with distortion or buried in the muck. No matter which version of Shapiro’s stepping to the mic, though, or how much he bends off-kilter arrangements around these tunes, what’s most striking about Double Thriller even 20 years later is how well it all hangs together. With hooks this sharp, everything else can get a bit slippery.
Shapiro and company self-released Double Thriller on their own in 1996, with another version (sporting a different tracklist and a ghastly cover) arriving on Bar/None in 1998. The follow-up came together in much the same fashion as Double Thriller, with an uptick in confidence inspired in part by the band’s live debut. But where Double Thriller is a very good record, the Glands is miles beyond it and most everything else. Multivalent, charmingly homespun, and endlessly catchy, the Glands’ self-titled LP is a fractured pop dynamo, one sun-dappled aw-shucks anthem after another, strung together with yarn and masking tape.
All the things you want an indie rock record to do, the Glands does almost as a matter of course. It’s slack without being sloppy, catchy without being cloying, clever without being, well, “clever.” Opener “Livin’ Was Easy”—as close to a mission statement as the nonchalant Glands would ever allow—is built around a chorus so good you can’t believe somebody else didn’t come up with it first. Fragmentary ideas rub up against shoulda-been hits. Fidelities intersect. Good hooks get shoved aside by even better ones.
It’s a record that never seems to wear out its welcome; you can float across its blithely catchy facade, scanning the surface for the chorus, but plenty of secrets lurk in the cracks, too. You may hear “Livin’ Was Easy” 10 times before you spot the harmonica, 100 more before you catch that falsetto sigh just before the third chorus. As Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, a longtime Glands fan and one-time tourmate, puts it, “The combination of clarity and wooziness couldn’t be more apt when discussing the Glands.”
Shapiro never was the easiest lyrical read. Most of these tunes play out as little vignettes, kind of a “14 Short Songs About Athens” compendium—you’ll get a first name, maybe a destination, a beginning or a middle, but rarely an end. When he sings about himself, hints of loneliness and frustration occasionally enter the frame, but the overwhelming feeling is one of bemusement. Shapiro’s just taking it in, all the babies on the grass and couples getting coffee, some he knows and some he doesn’t. He sings his way through these tunes like an old excitable friend bending your ear at the bar, semi-drunkenly relaying gossip, cataloging grievances, goofing on acquaintances, and cracking bad jokes. There’s a reason Athens fell so hard for the Glands: Here’s someone everybody wanted to know but many considered unknowable, letting you in one bent hook at a time.
Double Coda is not actually the third Glands LP, which Shapiro never got around to finishing despite several false starts. After he died from lung cancer in 2016, bandmates Rowe and Almstead and producer Barbe sorted through a trove of unreleased material that dated back to 1998 and whittled it into the 23-song Double Coda. They opted for tunes that felt close to done. What’s immediately striking is the lack of post-production clamor that characterizes its predecessors. The mismatched fidelities and fragmentary push-and-pull that gave those first two LPs their rickety charm are largely gone, replaced by 23 discrete tunes with clear beginnings and ends.
The crush of stripped-down ballads just past the halfway mark and the semi-skeletal arrangements on a few would-be highlights disrupt any notion of continuity. But if you take Double Coda as a collection of Glands songs rather than a proper LP, it’s a gift. Shapiro’s songcraft—surefooted, strange, singularly him—is on full display here, from the sly shuffle of the stoner’s lament “So High” to the Daniel Johnston-worthy tender balladry of “Save a Place For You.” There’s oddball digi-psych (“Electricity,”), a Stonesy ripper (“Feelies”), and piano jazz (“Piano Jazz”). The ambling “Great Waves,” the plaintive “Clover,” and at least half a dozen others feel like first-ballot hall-of-famers. Shapiro might not have meant for us to hear these songs this way, but the sudden arrival of 20 or so great “new” Glands songs is an act of pure benevolence.
“All our friends say goodbye,” Shapiro sings to close out Double Coda, “but you and I remain here.” There’s a lot of coming and going throughout this music, but a lot of staying, too, of taking stock and making the most of what’s right in front of you. College towns like Athens are transient by design, and if you’re not careful, surrounding yourself with all that turnover can do a number on your psyche. Shapiro was drawn to Athens not just as a temporary stopover but as place to make a life. He went to school there, worked there, formed a band there. Fame and fortune may have eluded him, but he still got the better end of the deal: Shapiro and his Glands gave people something to remember even after they, and he, moved on.


The widespread dissemination of punk’s DIY ethos coincided with an explosion of affordable studio technology, leading to a largely unheralded revolution in home-recorded pop.

Various Artists: Uneven Paths: Deviant Pop From Europe 1980-1991

When punk first emerged in the mid 1970s, it promised revolution in the simplicity of three chords and the revelation that you too could start your own band. But as punk’s energy grew increasingly diffuse by the start of the 1980s, other musicians realized that even without three chords—much less a guitar—making music remained a graspable possibility. With the increasing affordability of drum machines and 4-track recorders, anyone, skilled player or otherwise, might press up a single or three. A new world of self-expression lay within easy reach, even if success remained as elusive as ever.
An array of peculiar pop fusions, fascinating detours, inconsequential blips, and woeful failures comprises the Amsterdam label Music From Memory’s latest compilation, Uneven Paths: Deviant Pop From Europe 1980-1991, which digs across the continent for square pegs and songs that briefly asked “What if this could be pop?” before dropping off the map. Last year’s Brazilian set Outro Tempo, which covered the same era, provided a similar sense of a parallel world. Compiled by MFM main man Jamie Tiller and fellow DJ Raphael Top Secret, Uneven Paths is equally ambitious, though ultimately not quite as evocative as its predecessor’s track-by-track chain of alternate universes.
Across its 21 songs, this vision of ’80s pop embeds strands of mutant DNA from genres like bossa nova, jazz, folk, new wave, spoken word, and world music. Mixing violin, heavy drums, a Peruvian melody, jazz saxophone, and murmured longing, Pete Brandt’s “What You Are” evokes Arthur Russell, a far more famous proponent of deviant pop’s DIY approach. Similarly open-ended approaches lead to oddities such as “Nomad Song,” credited to a German jazz-fusion group called Ströer Duo and the American spoken-word performer Howard Fine. With his dry, vocoded delivery, the song at times verges on turning into “O Superman,” though flutters of harmonica and references to Occam’s razor keep the song decidedly off-kilter.
Chance personal encounters and happy accidents abound. The French poet Lou Blic made the acquaintance of saxophonist Philippe de Lacroix-Herpin through a mutual friend but lost touch after recording one 7”. “Minéralité” pairs Blic’s words with hiccupping downtempo jazz and a looped snippet of tribal chant. Belgian new-wave group Nightfall in Camp met vocalist Marie Mandi right before recording at their flat, inviting her to purr lines about her daily routine for the ethereal “Cada Dia.” And the rattling rhythms of “Happy New Year” came about after a glitch erased all the programmed beats and samples on the German trio Härte 10’s completed album, requiring them to try to recreate it all in a night.
Not every jumble of sounds works out. Some of these paths are, indeed, uneven, and when they fail, they make for some wincing face plants. A faux-tribal beat on Miko & Mubare’s “Komoma Ya-Ya-Ya” might appeal to DJs, but the overly dramatic proclamation that “We must all speak in one tongue” ruptures its rhythmic spell. Frenchman Patrick Forgas’ lecherous growl about “sexy move” might work better were it not repeated incessantly against a backdrop of monkey noises. And some songs just plain fizzle. The French fusion band Nonobstant’s wobbly pop song “Jessica” falls flat, and John Makin’s “No Lie” is just a live track from an English singer tackling Brazilian samba.
But some hybrids are just too enticing to ignore. Violet Eves’ “Listen Over the Ocean” is a simmering Italo ballad that reimagines what shoegaze might have been had it consisted of shimmering vibraphones instead of guitars. A recording of the Greek musician George Vanakos talking about how much he hates disco makes for a woozy, lo-fi outsider disco track in “I Hate Disco… Not the Dance.” British post-punk Brenda Ray melts melodica, dub effects, and doo-wop vocals into a heady confection on “Dancing Thru’ the Night.” And Xavier Jouvelet’s “Oeuf En Clock” posits perhaps the most intriguing “what if” of the set: What would Sade’s quiet-storm sultriness have sounded like had they arisen in France instead of Britain? The unanswered questions raised by Uneven Paths might be the most intriguing of all.


The Montreal shoegaze band display far more confidence on their second album than on any of their previous releases, breaking out of the murk to offer distinct, tactile sensations in the form of glam rock stomp, slo-mo pop, desert blues, and dirty electroclash. Somehow, it all fits.

Wait to Pleasure

It’s fitting that so much talk about shoegaze plays up security-- the sound is womblike, it blankets you, places you in a waking dream and so forth. And it’s as welcoming to musicians as it is to listeners, as volume, reverb and distortion can be used to minimize mistakes while bands that stay within the established boundaries are often rewarded by its intense loyalists. Case in point, No Joy; if you like shoegaze, you liked No Joy’s 2010 debut Ghost Blonde, as it was a solid, satisfying entry into the genre that didn’t take many chances. But it was hard to feel invested in the Montreal group. As anyone who owns more than one Asobi Seksu, Brother Kite or A Place to Bury Stangers record can tell you, bands who successfully learned how to synthesize fuzz and pop fizz from Loveless or Psychocandy keel over fast once the training wheels come off. Last year’s Negaverse EP did at least acknowledge a need for a new direction, even if it ventured further into murk. However, the clarity and concision of Wait to Pleasure throws everything into reverse, and while their second LP puts No Joy in a position to make mistakes, with risk comes reward, and they also show far more growth and confidence than they previously had to this point.
The easiest way to understand the difference between Wait to Pleasure and its predecessor is to think about the tactile difference between heat and humidity. Whereas the latter was sticky, immersive and overwhelming, Wait to Pleasure offers 11 distinct, tactile sensations that are often diametrically opposed yet placed consecutively; opener “E” slowly boils over after five minutes of glam rock stomp, while the slo-mo pop of “Hare Tarot Lies” calmly lazes in unseasonal warmth. The breakneck pace of “Lizard Kids” leaves the scent of burnt rubber on desert highway after the white hot sensuality of “Blue Neck Riviera”’s dirty electroclash. “Ignored Pets” sizzles, “Pleasure” soothes. It’s a cohesion based on interaction rather than similarity, maintaining a flow that displays No Joy’s subtly expansive range and adds a cumulative, positive effect to already strong individual components.
It’s all the more impressive that they’re able to do so while maintaining the raw elements of Ghost Blonde. While adept at diaphanous cooing, Jasamine White-Gluz and Laura Lloyd*’*s vocals take on far more of a lead role with piercing, major-key hooks. The guitars are still singed by redlining distortion, but within the context of Wait to Pleasure’s sweeter production, they tend to caramelize rather than corrode. And between “Lizard Kids” and “Ignored Pets”, they’ve established a stylistic template that distinguishes a No Joy song from those of their peers-- combining the pummeling, barely contained pace of a punk rhythm section with shoegaze’s distended high end, rushing through a light net of harmonized vocals that are reverbed to the point of being mere phonetics.
It can be tough to make out the intentionally wordless lyrics from the expressive ones, so the incorporation of synthetic elements tends to bring out their humanity. “Lunar Phobia” follows a continuum of bands whose names served as adjectives for their own sound (Lush, Curve), beat-driven without crossing over to dance music, and tricked out with a wealth of intriguing effects and layers: bird call vocal samples placed against wafting harmonies, juddering kick drums swapping with backmasked snares, tremolo guitars and raw feedback. “Blue Neck Riviera” goes even further into rhythmic clangor, the blackened, deadpan vocals and clacking drum machines recasting Ladytron as lo-fi nightcrawlers before it revisits the Negaverse album cover, taking off toward the rainbow horizon in its second half.
While improving on the sheer sound of Ghost Blonde on nearly every level, No Joy are still more suggestive than declarative. Allusive titles such as “Night Slug”, “Blue Neck Riviera”, and “Wrack Attack” come off as evidence of an inherent playfulness as well as a wide range of interests, even if No Joy’s lyrics are too deep in the mix to tell if they actually do refer in any way to the techno label, Florida’s Emerald Coast, or "Saved By the Bell". A certain kind of impersonality might seem like a cost of doing business in this genre, but within the context of Wait to Pleasure, there’s compensation in hearing No Joy express themselves as a band rather than as people. If you like shoegaze, you’ll probably still like No Joy, but *Wait to Pleasure’*s triumph is making it far less of a requirement.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Pavement’s divisive final album, full of clamor and clarity that presaged the end of the underground.

Terror Twilight

With the release of their second album, 1994’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Pavement seemed poised to become the next Nirvana—or at least a cooler, funnier, unrulier R.E.M. They conceded to releasing videos that could actually get played on MTV and lollygagged their way through a “Tonight Show” appearance, but their ambivalence to join the raging alt-rock revolution was made plain by album highlight “Range Life.” It used the most uncool sound at the time (throwback ’70s country rock) as a platform to take shots at the biggest bands at the time (Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots). To fans, “Range Life” was a form of quiet, casual protest against the increasingly homogenized world of post-Nirvana alt-rock; to detractors, it was proof of indie rock’s inherently elitist disdain toward the tastes of common people.
In a SPIN interview from April 1994, lead singer Stephen Malkmus revealed that, actually, both sides had it wrong. “‘Range Life’ is supposed to be a person from the ’80s country-rock era, like Lone Justice or Dream Syndicate, not being able to keep up with what’s going on today,” he said. “It’s not a really a diss on [Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots]. It’s more like, ‘I don’t understand this MTV world.’ Like Brian Wilson’s ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times.’”
Here was Malkmus, at the very peak of his hype, forging a spiritual kinship with an obscure subgenre of a previous generation that had been deemed unfashionable by the shifting cultural tides. Maybe he knew that it would only be a matter of time before he’d find himself in a similar position.
The next year, Pavement’s infamously difficult Wowee Zowee doubled down on their refusal to conform to the modern-rock marketplace—a possibility that seemingly died for good the moment the alt-bros started hurling mud bombs onstage during one of their Lollapalooza sets that year. But surprisingly enough, the crisp, crystalline follow-up, 1997’s Brighten the Corners, had all the markings of a concerted crossover bid. And where Pavement’s earlier albums spawned a hundred sloppy ’n’ sarcastic indie bands in their misfit-preppie image, by ’97, their influence was impacting the biggest rock acts in Britain.
Blur’s Graham Coxon famously credited Pavement with inspiring his band to ditch Britpop for lo-fi noise on their caustic 1997 self-titled release. Elastica’s Justine Frischmann—then in the process of dismantling her own band’s pop appeal—became Malkmus’ duet partner and London crash-pad host. And though they seemed to exist in a completely different aesthetic universe at the time, Radiohead were professed fans, too. Pavement had gone mainstream, if only by proxy. But the indie culture that they once epitomized and still very much inhabited was rapidly shifting away from their brand of wry, off-kilter fuzz-rock, toward sensitive singer-songwriter expressionism and dramatic post-rock impressionism. The country-rock cosplay fiction of “Range Life” was slowly becoming their reality.
So for a group that always sounded torn between playing ball and throwing the game, Pavement’s fifth album, Terror Twilight, was a suitably conflicted, ambiguous document of a band that wasn’t sure if it was ready to break big or break up. On the one hand, it presents us with a group that still hadn’t completely given up on the idea of expanding their cult—for the first time in their career, Pavement hired a big-time producer to take a more hands-on approach in reining in their stray slack. On the other hand, Pavement hardly resembled a hungry band with their eye on the prize.
From Stockton, California (where Malkmus formed the band with childhood friend Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg) to the University of Virginia (where Malkmus befriended percussionist/band mascot Bob Nastanovich), to New York (where superfan-turned-bassist Mark Ibold and Nastanovich’s old drummer pal Steve West came into the fold), the logistics of Pavement were always a challenge. By the late ’90s, all five members were living in different states spread across the country; the simple act of getting a practice together often required calling a travel agent. At a certain point, Malkmus wondered if all the frequent-flyer miles were worth it.
Following a long Brighten the Corners PR campaign that left him “pretty fried,” Malkmus told Rolling Stone that maybe it was time for the band members to lay down some roots, sparking whispers of a breakup. After settling in Portland, he debuted a clutch of new songs at a couple of local acoustic shows in 1998, an uncharacteristic move that suggested if there were to be another Pavement album, it would be a Pavement album in name only. Nastanovich later admitted as much: "Pavement music at this stage is Stephen Malkmus," he said in a 1999 interview. "He’s the main songwriter, and the other four guys in the band are trying to make his songs as good as possible.”
But for Malkmus, that process wasn’t happening nearly fast enough. As detailed in Rob Jovanovic’s 2004 Pavement bio, Perfect Sound Forever, Malkmus was growing increasingly tired of the band’s long-distance-relationship status and, once they were finally in the same room together, he’d get frustrated with the time it took to bring everyone up to speed. “I think he realized that we were at one pace, and he was at another pace,” West recounted, “He didn’t really want to have the patience to coax us along in music creativity.” With their time together at a premium, the band opted to focus on Malkmus’ readymade batch of songs, at the expense of developing ideas brought forth by Kannberg (who, despite bringing his power-pop A-game to the band’s most recent releases, would get no spotlight turns on the finished album).
After a by-all-accounts dispiriting attempt to get the album off the ground in Portland, the band decided they needed a professional second opinion. Through their UK label head, Laurence Bell of Domino Records, they learned that another high-profile Brit had joined the Pavement fan club: producer Nigel Godrich, fresh off the consoles for Radiohead’s game-changing OK Computer and Beck’s celebrated space-folk detour Mutations. At the recommendation of the latter, Pavement hired Godrich over the phone without so much as a face-to-face meeting. But once the two parties got down to business, it soon became clear that Pavement’s haphazard work ethic didn’t so easily adapt to the producer’s discipline.
Being a big fan of the band—and recognizing they didn’t exactly have a Radiohead-level budget to work with—Godrich offered Pavement the starving-artist’s special, forgoing his usual fee for future royalties and crashing on friends’ floors to keep expenses in check. But Godrich still had technical standards that were far more elevated than what Pavement were used to working with. After scrapping the band’s initial plan to record at Sonic Youth’s rehearsal room studio in Manhattan, Godrich moved operations to a proper 24-track facility nearby and then over to London’s famed RAK Studios for overdubs.
Where the band previously used the studio as a sandbox, often emerging with a whole extra album’s worth of outtakes, Godrich had them focus on 12 songs, which were whipped into shape through a militaristic, blister-inducing regimen of repeated takes. (Only one, an instrumental freakout dubbed “Shagbag,” didn’t make the final cut.) And with the producer naturally conferring with Malkmus on most creative decisions, other band members started to feel disconnected from the process. (As Nastanovich claims in Perfect Sound Forever, over a week into the sessions, “I went to talk to Nigel and it was pretty clear that he didn’t know what my name was.”) In the end, Pavement were no longer the sort of band that left the mistakes in, even if it meant taking certain members’ contributions out: During the overdub sessions, West’s drum tracks on three songs were re-recorded by High Llamas drummer Dominic Murcott (ironic, since West was initially brought on to be the rhythmic anchor after the 1993 departure of wild-card original drummer Gary Young).
On an album-by-album basis, Pavement tended to alternate between clamor and clarity. Terror Twilight, however, wound up pulling them in both directions at once. Depending on your vantage, it is either the band’s most polished, pop-friendly album or their darkest, most volatile one—laid-back in the classic West-coast Pavement style, yet atypically on edge at the same time. But Terror Twilight is the sort of counterintuitive album where the most melodically intricate songs feel so effortless, yet the slapdash irreverence that once came so naturally to Pavement feels more forced.
The superior tracks further refined the eloquent songwriting Malkmus had introduced on the 1996 stop-gap single “Give It a Day,” where his signature, Velvet Underground-schooled drawl starting to give way to a more byzantine, classically British melodicism. “Spit on a Stranger” and “Ann Don’t Cry” also chipped away at the popular caricature of Malkmus as the aloof, inscrutable slacker, foregrounding the romanticism that’s always been lurking beneath the sardonic surface, where phrases that are difficult to understand allow him to access emotions that are difficult to express. (“My heart is not a wide open thing,” he sings knowingly on the latter track, a rare moment of candor where he fesses up to his aversion to candor.) If Malkmus had sung the line “bring on the major leagues” back in 1994, it would’ve been interpreted as a withering comment on moving up the corporate-rock ladder, but on Terror Twilight’s wistful serenade “Major Leagues,” it sounds like he’s bracing for the familial responsibilities that lay ahead in middle age. Godrich’s trademark atmospheric production finds its most natural fit with these more serene songs, casting them in a moonlit, magic-realist glow and letting the guitars sparkle.
When they weren’t supporting Malkmus’ improved pop craftsmanship, the Pavement of the late ’90s were gradually turning into the world’s wooliest jam band. It’s a side of the band that really came to light on the Brighten the Corners tour, where songs like “Type Slowly” would get substantially stretched out and beefed up. They also frequently test-drove a new track called “And Then” that took the Slint-like mid-sections of songs like “Stop Breathin’” and “Transport Is Arranged” and invested them with a more ominous intensity. “And Then” would find a home deep into Terror Twilight’s second side, where it appeared with new lyrics and a new title, “The Hexx.” The Terror Twilight recording dials back the nasty psychedelic fuzz of the ’97-era live versions for more of a trembling chill, with Malkmus dropping creepy couplets (“Epileptic surgeons with their eyes X-ed out/Attend to the torn up kid/Salivate and reckon with all the sick things that you did”) as if entering a two-sentence horror-story challenge.
“The Hexx” made a convincing case that Pavement’s future lay in weightier guitar workouts. However, the band’s other attempts to flex their rock muscle on Terror Twilight felt a bit like they were puffing out their chests. “Platform Blues” might have made more sense stitched into Wowee Zowee’s unwieldy sprawl, but feels too scattered to fill the role of centerpiece track—its spastic rave-ups (powered by guest harmonica-honkin’ from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood) come off like bar-band blooze delivered with air quotes. “Billie” disrupts one of Malkmus’ prettiest verses with an ugly sore-thumb of a chorus. And while “Speak, See, Remember” follows the same loose-intro/motorik-rock-out template as Wowee Zowee highlight “Half a Canyon,” it’s executed with half the focus and intensity. Compared to the unabashedly posh, big-ticket indie rock albums being released by their peers in 1999—like the Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin and Guided by Voices’ Ric Ocasek-tweaked Do the Collapse—Terror Twilight’s willful oddness meant Pavement remained an island unto themselves.
Despite the break-up murmurs, Terror Twilight was received by critics not as an assumed swan song, but a genuine next-level move.  The A.V. Club opined that “the time and effort invested in the new Terror Twilight seems to indicate that the group has no intention of throwing in the towel.” And for a while there, that seemed to be the case. Asked about his lack of songwriting contributions on the album, Kannberg told Rolling Stone there just wasn’t enough studio time to hash out his ideas before optimistically speculating he’d “just have more songs for the next record.” In Lance Bangs’ 2002 Pavement documentary Slow Century, we even see the band workshopping a new song during rehearsals for the Terror Twilight tour.
That song, “Discretion Grove,” would soon see the light of day, but not on a Pavement album. It was the lead single from Malkmus’ self-titled 2001 solo debut, the first in a series of consistently enjoyable if far less-hyped albums with his current band, the Jicks (who he’s now fronted for nearly twice as long as Pavement—I guess there is something to be said for living in the same city as your bandmates). That first Malkmus record surfaced 14 months after Pavement played their final shows together in November 1999 at London’s Brixton Academy, at the end of a six-month promotional campaign where Malkmus reportedly turned more insular and unhappy over the course of the tour. Shortly thereafter, Domino announced the band would be “retiring for the foreseeable future”—a somewhat vague communique that further muddied the waters between those who wanted a proper break-up (Malkmus) and those who were anticipating a hiatus (everyone else). Ever since, it’s been hard to listen to Terror Twilight without sensing the 1000-point-font writing on the wall. After a decade of playfully confounding listeners with his elusive wordplay, Malkmus opened “Ann Don’t Cry” with a line so frank and literal, it essentially became Pavement’s epitaph: “The damage has been done/I am not having fun anymore.”
Even now that he’s several years removed from the difficult circumstances that spawned the album, Malkmus’ estimation of Terror Twilight hasn’t exactly improved. Tellingly, it’s the one Pavement album that never received a deluxe 10th-anniversary reissue, a circumstance that can’t help but feel like an implicit judgment of the record. In a 2015 interview with Pitchfork, Malkmus half-jokingly called it “the accidental child of the Pavement catalog,” and in a 2017 Talkhouse podcast interview that detoured into an extended tangent on the album’s recording process, he quipped, “No one really cares about this album that much.” That’s not entirely true, of course: Kannberg holds a much more positive opinion of the record. And there’s evidence to suggest that Terror Twilight’s overtures toward pop accessibility didn’t fall completely on deaf ears—Grammy-winning bluegrass outfit Nickel Creek’s mandolin-tinged cover of “Spit on a Stranger” helped propel their 2002 album, This Side, into the Billboard Top 20.
But if Terror Twilight was by no means a perfect album, it stands today as a perfectly emblematic one—of the band's demise, yes, but also the demise of the very underground/underdog idealism that Pavement represented. In its aesthetic tug-of-war between hi-fi futurism and contrarian weirdness, Terror Twilight portended an indie-rock landscape on the brink a dramatic sea change—a brand new era where Apple commercial syncs and selfie-sticked festival culture dictate that advertising looks and chops are indeed a must. Also, in their own oblique way, the album’s dark undercurrents and convulsive outbursts seemed to be subliminally preparing us for the more unsettled, chaotic world that awaited us on the other side of the new millennium. So maybe Terror Twilight is not merely the flawed, premature final act of an often brilliant band, but more like a savvy act of planned obsolescence from a group smart enough to sense the times were a-changin’, and honest enough to admit that they just weren’t made for them anymore.