On their first album in four years, Goldfrapp synthesize all their many sounds and modes to get at the core of their musical identity. They find a beautiful, poppy, platonic ideal.

Silver Eye

It takes Alison Goldfrapp more than a full verse into Silver Eye’s leadoff track “Anymore” before she utters a single word with more than one syllable: “You’re what I want. You’re what I need. Give me your love. Make me a freak.” Reductive? Considering her and collaborator Will Gregory—whose past lyrics would gussy up their earthy emotions and desires in hazy surrealism like, “Wolf lady sucks my brain” and, “Now take me dancing at the disco where you buy your Winnebago”—you might be tempted to think so. Prior to “Anymore,” Goldfrapp hid their most verbally explicit expression of lust (“Put your dirty angel face between my legs and knicker lace”) in an elaborate fantasy about a tryst with a traveling carny titled, appropriately enough, “Twist.”
But the direct approach suits this new album, the group’s first since 2013’s Tales of Us. Ever since the pair swapped the John Barry ambience of their debut album Felt Mountain for the electro-glam of its successor Black Cherry, they’ve staked their identity on being able to assume new identities at will. Wanna double down on that sexy “Spirit in the Sky” shimmer? There’s Supernature. Wanna go pastoral? Check out Seventh Tree. Wanna trade Gary Numan and Marc Bolan for the Pointer Sisters and circa-“Jump” Van Halen? Head for Head First. By contrast, Silver Eye is a synthesis—a combination of all the things the group has done well. “Become the one you know you are,” commands a key track, and they’re teaching by example. Who needs many syllables to express something so fundamental?
Glimpses of past glories are more evident in some songs than others. “Anymore” and its immediate follow-up “Systemagic” return to the synthesizer strut of their electroclash-era albums Black Cherry and Supernature, while “Everything Is Never Enough” shares the bright-eyed poptimism of Head First. But these new songs avoid the genre-pastiche of their counterparts. Silver Eye’s tracks have a sincere, blunt-force feeling that’s new and closer to the actual core of their musical identity. It’s like Kiss taking off the make-up, but, you know, good.
Silver Eye’s more esoteric numbers are even more impressive. “Illuminating his eyes and fur/Ohhhhh….magnificent,” Goldfrapp sighs on “Tigerman,” a come-on to the title character in which attraction to a new lover is treated like a discovery every bit as transformative as making contact with a whole new lifeform. The pulsing jam “Become the One” uses vocal pitch-shifting to make its message of self-realization sound beamed in from an external alien intelligence. (Sometimes, that’s what self-realization requires.) And a trio of ballads—“Zodiac Black,” the song on which producer Haxan Cloak’s haunted atmosphere is most apparent; “Moon in Your Mouth,” a record of absolutely desperate romanticism; and “Ocean,” lead single, album closer, and cri de coeur—combine nature imagery and big, echoey washes of sound to create a sense of space as enveloping, absorbing, and suffocating as anything on the band’s three “quiet” albums. If nothing here quite reaches knockout-blow strength, fine—it doesn’t really need to. Goldfrapp have found their platonic ideal, and that’s ideal indeed.


Griselda’s newest signee alternatingly embraces and cuts against the Buffalo collective’s throwback Mafioso rap.

The Liz Tape

Following a long hot streak that cemented the label’s hallowed standing in the most traditionally minded corners of hip-hop fandom, Griselda has entered the thorniest phase for any rap imprint: expansion. Hitherto a tight circle of brothers Conway the Machine and Westside Gunn and cousin Benny the Butcher, this summer the Buffalo, New York collective branched out with releases from Detroit signee Boldy James and Benny’s Black Soprano Family crew, neither of which threatened their reputation for quality control. Now comes the Griselda debut from Armani Caesar, the label’s self-billed “First Lady,” whose album The Liz Tape alternatingly embraces and cuts against Griselda’s throwback Mafioso rap with gusto.
Armani may not share the blood ties of Griselda’s founding trio, but her biography overlaps. She’s from Buffalo, and she was discovered by Griselda’s late producer DJ Shay, who signed her in 2009, so like Conway and company, she logged plenty of time in obscurity before finding her break. And since she’s on Griselda, it goes without saying that she’s got bars. “Hundred grand flow, chillin’ in the Lambo/Eight bands for the bag, two more on the sandals,” she spits on “Gucci Casket,” with a precision that recalls early Nicki Minaj, without the cartoonish embellishments that eventually turned Minaj’s pressure-cooker flow into shtick.
The Liz Tape spends its opening stretch proving just how well Armani belongs on the label, casting her crime tales against bruising loops and terse, Mobb Deep pianos—“Countdown” even throws in a Redman sample, old-head catnip in its most concentrated form. It also gives her plenty of chances to spar with Conway, Westside, and Benny, and she has a natural rapport with each of them. She’s the Sharon Stone in Casino to the label’s assorted De Niros and Pescis, the new arrival who fits in so naturally you could be convinced she was always part of the ensemble.
And yet, unlike her new labelmates, Armani isn’t a born outsider. As hard as The Liz Tape works to cast her as the Foxy Brown/Lil’ Kim of their crew, the lone woman who punches as hard as her male cohorts, her flows are too flashy and contemporary to be boxed in by Griselda’s East Coast classicism. Her wanderlust sets in on the record’s second half, where she begins to sound less like a Griselda lifer than a talented ringer who saw an opportunity. There’s a sense that, left to her own devices, she’d rather play in 21 Savage and Megan Thee Stallion’s sandbox than Roc Marciano’s, especially on “Yum Yum,” the first ever straight-up strip-club track on a Griselda release.
The Liz Tape stacks its best songs back to back, and they show off her dueling sides. The DJ Premier-produced “Simply Done” is a golden-age fever dream, a frenzy of hard bars, kinetic loops, samples, and scratches—it’s thrilling, in that perfectly predictable way that every first new DJ Premier track you’ve heard in a while is thrilling. “Drill a RaMa,” on the other hand, disposes with ’93-era New York in favor of Atlanta circa now, with Armani and Benny firing off twisty triplet flows and clearly relishing the breather from Griselda’s usual boom-bap.
It’s a rare rapper who’s equally equipped to crush both tracks. By now, Griselda is so established as a trio that some fans may be inclined to write off a newcomer like Armani as a second-tier member. But it’s her willingness to shake things up that makes her such a valuable addition to a crew that, despite its impressive track record, can sometimes be blinded by its reverence for rap’s past. A little modernity looks good on them.

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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 historic collaboration that braided three unique histories of American music into a timeless whole.

Dolly Parton / Linda Ronstadt / Emmylou Harris: Trio

Trio

More than once, Linda Ronstadt has recounted the blunt welcome she received when she left her sleepy hometown of Tucson, Arizona for Los Angeles in 1964. “Honey, in this town, there are four sexes: women, men, homosexuals, and girl singers,” Judy Henske, a singer-songwriter and an employee at a folkie coffee shop, reportedly advised the new arrival. It would be Ronstadt’s introduction to the rest of her life.
To be a girl singer, as indicated by rock’n’roll memoirs by men and women alike, was often to be shunted aside and leered at, pitted against one’s peers, at the mercy of the guys in charge. Even Ronstadt felt the hot flush of competition when she first saw Emmylou Harris performing at Los Angeles’ Troubadour in the early 1970s. But Ronstadt realized that she could be jealous, or she could make a friend. When the pair finally met in 1973—while on tour with Gram Parsons and Neil Young, respectively—a lifetime friendship sparked from their shared love for another girl singer: Dolly Parton.
It would take another 14 years for Harris, Ronstadt, and Parton to release Trio, their first full-length album together. Their mutual admiration had blossomed when Ronstadt and Harris crossed paths with Parton in Nashville in the early 1970s, and they’d started singing together occasionally in the back half of the decade. Plans for a proper LP, however, got tangled in the contractual obligations of their escalating stardom and ever-expanding professional lives. Making Trio allowed each of them a long-overdue opportunity to assume a new identity in an industry that had long tried to pigeonhole them.
Trio opens with “The Pain of Loving You,” a song that Parton co-wrote with country singer and television presenter Porter Wagoner. Wagoner’s hit TV show had provided the charismatic young Parton with an early break in 1967, and though she’d only signed a five-year contract, she stayed on for seven. As a gracious parting gesture, she wrote “I Will Always Love You” and dedicated it to him. In 1979, Wagoner returned the favor with a $3 million breach of contract suit, claiming that his tutelage entitled him to a cut of Parton’s solo earnings. The dramatic falling-out between an established country star and his one-time protégée was big news—big enough that it was picked up in Billboard and on the United Press newswire. Harris and Ronstadt would have been aware of it all, even in their Los Angeles singer-songwriter enclave.
Meanwhile, their own career trials had only strengthened their bond. For decades, Ronstadt kept the yellow rose that Harris presented to her after an exceptionally nasty encounter with one of Neil Young’s bandmates in 1973; a few months later, she invited Harris out for an extended convalescence in California as she grieved the death of her former singing partner, Gram Parsons. Through difficult tours and indiscriminate egos, the friends extended comfort to one another. They, too, had butted up against powerful men in their industry who sought to fuck them one way or another.
“The Pain of Loving You” becomes a place where the women can relieve themselves of that burden, dissolving their individual identities along with their aches. “You just can’t stand to see me happy/Seems you hurt me all you can,” sings Harris, who’d spent much of Trio’s recording tangled in a private custody battle and found support with her singing partners. The pace of the song is gently upbeat, riding on a loose mandolin chop and a light rhythm section. In the chorus, the three come together, cresting a high that sounds almost flustered (“Never knowing what to do”) before slipping back down into a resigned sigh (“Oh, the pain of loving you”).
Trio radiates a sister-bestie energy, aided cosmically by three women who were born within 18 months of one another. Ronstadt once compared singing with Harris and Parton to trying on their voices, like “getting to wear the dress or the face or the figure of the prettiest girl on the block.” The three boasted serious vocal talent: Ronstadt landing blows with her bold and forthright soprano, Harris weaving with the strength and flexibility of willow branches, and Parton floating like a butterfly with her bright warble. Their braided voices had a special quality right away. “The sound that we made together surprised and astonished the three of us,” Harris recalled of their first time singing together, at her house in Los Angeles in 1975.
That sound shines brightest when the women maximize the spine-tingling charge of close bluegrass harmonies. George Lucas, who was dating Ronstadt at the time and directed the video for “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” offered a surprisingly astute assessment of his former beau and her friends: “It’s not just the voices. It’s the cultures behind the voices that blend, and their struggles.” Appalachian poverty, Arizona ranch life, rural restlessness, countercultural sea change, grown-woman heartbreak, and personal triumph all shade the emotional backdrops of Trio.
The fluid vocal harmonies belie the years it took to finally record them. In 1979, the women began working with Harris’ then-husband, producer Brian Ahern, on a pop-leaning record, but didn’t like the results and shelved it. The next several years seemed to evaporate in other commitments—tours, albums, films, and family life. The three nonetheless found ways to connect, recording one another’s songs and appearing in different combinations for duets. They palled around on a 1977 episode of Parton’s variety TV show, Dolly, performing the folk ballad “Bury Me Beneath the Willow,” which they’d first sung back at Harris’ house. Parton opened the episode with “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” a tune Ronstadt had recorded for two different solo records, her 1969 debut Hand Sown ... Home Grown and 1973’s Don’t Cry Now.
Though “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” didn’t make it to Trio, it was typical of the country-rock crossover that Harris and Ronstadt were pursuing on the West Coast. Harris had shifted from her role as duet partner to become a bandleader, strumming originals alongside songs by the Beatles, Merle Haggard, and the Louvin Brothers. Ronstadt’s own setlist grab bag overlapped Harris’ with selections from Bob Dylan and Hank Williams, plus Los Angeles contemporaries like Jackson Browne and her former bandmates in the Eagles. Harris made a live staple out of Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors,” recording it for 1975’s Pieces of the Sky, while Ronstadt cut “I Will Always Love You” for Prisoner in Disguise the same year.
In Parton, they spotted a talented peer, a kindred spirit, and a potential ally. They saw the generous, self-effacing humor, high-femme indulgence, and butterfly-knife business acumen that Parton would eventually parlay to become a full-blown cultural icon. Her effervescent disposition was a thrill to the more introverted Californians, whom she likewise recognized as devotees of a musical lineage that endured hard times with grit and grace. Country music was an integral part of the singers’ DNA, and each woman had developed a different relationship with the genre. The Tennessee-reared Parton had the closest bond by way of geographic proximity. In Tucson, the social traditions of Ronstadt’s music-loving family and dispatches from border-town radio stations kept young Linda up to her ears in song. Harris, meanwhile, had turned her attention to the 1960s folk revival as a teenager, following a childhood shaped by her Marine Corps father’s multiple relocations.
The singers’ nostalgia for the music of an earlier time shines through the album’s final two songs. Though both originated in the South more than a century ago, the sorrowful ballad “Rosewood Casket” bears a dulcimer sparkle, while the gospel-rooted “Farther Along” leans into its hymnal history. Trio shifts into the 20th century on the forlorn “Hobo’s Meditation,” a 1932 song by early country star Jimmie Rodgers, and the mawkish 1958 pop number “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” The tuberculosis-stricken Rodgers lived hard and died young at the dawn of commercial radio, and “Hobo’s Meditation” empathizes with the down-and-out drifter who wonders if the afterlife will improve on his earthly lot. Even Ronstadt, however, can’t keep the first-person descriptions of boxcars, cops, and brakemen from sounding almost like a caricature to modern ears. “Making Plans,” which dates to 1963, has aged better, drawing out the song’s waltzing, honky-tonk heart.
The Grand High Trio bestowed a de facto blessing on their selections, creating a mini repertoire of classics that resonated with these giants of their field. The songs abetting Trio’s nostalgia cuts become valuable endorsements of other girl singers (and songwriters) whose talents had not earned them the same celebrity. The women borrowed “My Dear Companion” from the Kentucky dulcimer player Jean Ritchie, whose expertise in folksong, Appalachian life, and her charming, many-stringed instrument had trickled down to Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Joan Baez. “I’ve Had Enough” came from Kate McGarrigle, who, with her sister Anna, wrote songs that would be sung by both Ronstadt and Harris throughout their careers. (On Prisoner in Disguise, Ronstadt’s take on Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” follows “You Tell Me That I’m Falling Down,” an Anna McGarrigle co-write).
Parton’s original “Wildflowers” is Trio’s lustrous centerpiece, carried on shimmery swipes of autoharp and bass that plods along like a friendly neighborhood dog. Parton takes a more prominent lead here, delivering the refrain—“Wildflowers don’t care where they grow”—as warm supporting vocals from Harris and Ronstadt supply the same variegated beauty. The women trade off vocal leads throughout Trio, but the tunes feel shared more than divvied up. Though Parton typically wrote more of her own material than Ronstadt or Harris did, the group’s pluralistic approach to curation and performance gives Trio a sense of camaraderie and collaboration.
Across the album, acoustic guitars, fiddles, and strings breathe unencumbered, a credit to the uniquely attentive ear of engineer and producer George Massenburg. By the time Massenburg signed onto Trio, he’d worked with Ronstadt, Little Feat, Randy Newman, and Earth, Wind & Fire; prior to that, he’d developed groundbreaking technology for audio equalization. His technical affinities were a strong match for an ensemble of singers who wanted to capture their full, glorious union and the nuances of their individual voices in a clear mix. The session band included longtime studio collaborators Russ Kunkel and David Lindley, guest spots from Ry Cooder and Little Feat's Bill Payne, and picked up bluegrass cred from guitarist John Starling and fiddler Mark O'Connor.
Working from this stable foundation, the women found the recording process easier, and the fruits of their labor sweeter. “The only big disagreements would be, ‘Are we going to use autoharp or dulcimer on this song?’” Harris told one interviewer with a smile. Parton fondly recalled Ronstadt’s perfectionist approach to vocal takes as “a pain in the ass sometimes,” though it strengthened her own singing. All three singers’ vocal talents had ripened by the time they were making Trio, and Ronstadt in particular was at a new personal best. She credited her enhanced powers to the technical demands of her recent stint on Broadway, where she’d starred in The Pirates of Penzance. Though Ronstadt takes a melancholy lead on “Hobo’s Meditation,” she belts a stunner with “Telling Me Lies.” Songwriter Betsy Cook penned it with Linda Thompson, who was divorced and operating free of the “Richard-and-” prefix of her songwriter ex-husband when she first released it on her solo debut in 1985. The arrangement—electrified keys, a little jazz guitar sting at the end—stands apart from the album’s country focus, but that didn’t stop the song from picking up a Grammy nomination for Best Country Song in 1988. It’s a buried treasure in Ronstadt’s vast catalog.
At times, Trio flags with its numerous slower ballads. Rolling Stone concluded its review by suggesting that the album must’ve been more fun to make than to hear, which occasionally rings true. “To Know Him Is to Love Him” is a light, sleepy number that breezes past in a sigh (and to know the song’s author, Phil Spector, is perhaps just as likely to despise him). Massenburg, the album’s producer, recalled that Nashville “loathed” the record. “I don’t think anybody liked the idea of three women singers. I don’t think anybody liked the idea of us not being in a niche,” Ronstadt reflected in a 2016 BBC documentary. “It wasn’t rock’n’roll, it wasn’t country, it wasn’t this, it wasn’t that. It was old-timey music.” In the same documentary, a former Warner Brothers executive noted that the record’s traditionalism was a poor fit for the commercial pop trends then bleeding into country radio. Regardless, Trio found its audience in the women’s overlapping musical circles, selling more than a million copies within five months of release. It’s not quite a historic compendium of essentials, but it certainly wasn’t the lead balloon that the country music machine had predicted.
It would take another dozen years to make a companion volume, Trio II, which arrived in 1999. Plans for a third were suspended permanently in 2013, when Ronstadt retired from singing after being diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder. The public face of the women’s lasting friendship remains an endearing sight to behold, as when Ronstadt made a rare public appearance to co-present with Harris at a 2019 MusiCares gala honoring Parton. The woman of the hour pulled Ronstadt into a tight, full-body squeeze, eliciting a spontaneous laugh. Good friends can be hard to find, but heartache, harmonies, and country songs make enduring adhesives. Trio is a testament to the invisible bonds that hold fast through personal, professional, and artistic growth: a love letter to the wildflowers who find one another, growing free and strong wherever they might go.


BlocBoy JB has a habit of starting or promoting things that become more popular than he is. This seven-song mixtape is his attempt to combat that.

Don’t Think That

Memphis rapper BlocBoy JB’s most important contribution to pop culture may never earn him the credit he deserves. He created the now-viral “Shoot” dance for a song of the same name. Fortnite ripped it off, Usain Bolt performed it as a celebration during his soccer debut, and it appeared at the World Cup this summer. A microcosm of the ways rap culture dominates culture at large without concomitant representation for the people who create it, “Shoot” will likely leave BlocBoy JB behind as its originator. BlocBoy’s year-capping, seven-track mixtape, Don’t Think That, feels like an overture made with relevance in mind, an effort to stay seen amid a fast-moving attention economy. Its songs are good but mostly inessential.
Don’t Think That isn’t as strong as Simi, JB’s Drake-cosigned May breakout stacked with vivid off-brand quips and threats so bizarre they seemed only half-serious. He was respected in the hood like a preacher wearing Gucci and Louis sneakers, and you were dancing with the devil while he danced with Cinderellas. Bars about guns seemed almost whimsical; the songs themselves, fun. But these new tracks don’t press zonked-out shoot-’em-ups into minor-key thumpers. This is due, in part, to fewer Tay Keith beats. No beatmaker had a better year than he did, from “Look Alive” to “Nonstop,” but he produced only two songs on this tape, “Club Rock” and “Bacc Street Boys.” BlocBoy sounds best scooting through them, his voice sloping perfectly into their gaps. JB and Keith share an undeniable chemistry, one not even Drake could replicate in several attempts. His absence here changes the tenor of the entire tape. Beats from Babyxwater, DMacTooBangin, and Kyle Resto box BlocBoy into the sounds of the rap moment—spaced-out trap and Auto-Tune—and his songs lose their signature.
The hooks aren’t as catchy here, either, and the verses aren’t as snappy as those of Simi. Like many of those songs, these only have one verse, too. But Simi’s verses were more purposeful and conscious of their economy, creating a 48-minute jaunt with a nice arc. In this 15-minute run, though, getting eight or 16 bars a pop means getting short-changed, especially with JB’s tottering rap style. The writing is less imaginative, plucking the lowest-hanging fruit for punchlines. He even recycles one such line—about “pulling cards like Yu-Gi-Oh”—from Simi. For a stopgap release, Don’t Think That is serviceable, producing at least one daring maneuver in “Crip Lit,” a left-field half-ballad that slathers Auto-Tuned croons onto guitar licks. But nothing about these songs indicates even lateral movement, much less progress.
Still, BlocBoy can quickly seize momentum. Even when the songs are inert, his fitful performances suggest forward motion. “Rich Hoes” sounds like the scooped-out guts of G-Eazy’s “No Limit,” but BlocBoy salvages it with flows that fold where they shouldn’t. He jerks them out of pocket and then thrusts them abruptly back on beat. His greatest strength is that his raps are almost casually slapstick in performance and execution. And his sense for swing is almost as pointed as his comedic timing. He likes to drag out rhyme schemes, changing up the pace to throw you off. Stretching a scheme like this is an underrated skill that requires patience and finesse, like lining up dominos in an array. It’s one that BlocBoy regularly deploys.
JB is at his best when he uses these lurching flows to construct lasting images. During one sequence of “Club Rock,” he spends $20,000 on soap while reminiscing about taking his gun to school and wearing matching Dickies. But he gets even better on “Bloc”: “Shots in your stomach, bitch, how you gon’ eat?/I’m gettin’ head while I’m brushin’ my teeth/Walk in this bitch like my name Mr. T,” he raps, sketching out a caricature. Such moments drive his songs, but there just aren’t nearly enough of them on Don’t Think That. This is BlocBoy JB’s attempt to stay as current as the things he helped make popular but are now more popular than he is—the “Shoot” dance and Tay Keith’s production, namely. In so doing, he only widens those gaps.


The Baltimore rapper switches between singing, rapping, mumbling until there's almost no difference between the words and the beats.

Poltergeist Slim

When I heard the name Poltergeist Slim, I knew it could only belong to one of two types of people: a long-dead cowboy, cursed to ride the range for eternity, or a SoundCloud rapper. In this instance, it references the latter—it’s the evocatively titled new album from Baltimore rapper Ghostie—but it’s easy to imagine some long-lost piece of wax under the same name, recorded by a one-eyed and illiterate ranch hand, forgotten until some lucky soul rescued it from the bottom of a bargain bin and reissued it on 180-gram vinyl.
True to his name, there’s not much information out there about Ghostie beyond his affiliation with the collective Antiworld and the prolific catalog he’s amassed over the past several years. One thing is clear from his SoundCloud—Ghostie is a worker, regularly posting beats available for purchase or lease via the Cash App. With the exception of “Crash,” co-produced by BioQuery, and “Depressed Today,” co-produced by Koobideh, the entirety of Poltergeist Slim is self-produced.
Like any skilled producer-rapper, from Kanye West to DJ Paul, Ghostie seems keenly aware of his strengths and weaknesses as a vocalist, treating his own voice as just another shade in the palette rather than the centerpiece. When he’s rapping, Ghostie’s voice is full-bodied and deep-throated, reminiscent of fellow Internet-bred rappers like Denzel Curry or Night Lovell. When Ghostie sings, as he often does, he comes across much softer, with a monotone edge that betrays Kid Cudi’s influence. For better and worse, Ghostie’s voice bleeds into the instrumentals and eventually blends into his surroundings. His flow is consistent but fluid, sometimes aggressive, always expressive.
What keeps Poltergeist Slim fresh are Ghostie’s fickle stylistic allegiances. Ghostie switches modes frequently, sometimes in the space of a single song. “Pay For It All” opens with abstract wailing until a crunchy and compressed drum 'n' bass beat drops and Ghostie’s flow kicks into high gear. “Allyall” opens with an acoustic loop that wouldn’t sound out of place on an early Baths album, but it’s soon joined by a funky bassline that transforms the track into the tape’s most laid-back jam. Ghostie’s beats are as diverse as his collection of flows: there’s a little bit of chiptune on “Fever,” and the beat to “Sorri in Somali” is built out of the infamous bed-squeak sound effect, invented by Lil Jon and perfected by Baltimore club. Sandwiched in-between the more turned-up tracks are a number of vocal-driven ballads, like “Depressed Today,” which more explicitly convey the melancholy that lurks underneath the tape.
At 20 tracks, Poltergeist Slim can start to feel sprawling and unfocused, but it’s the kind of project that wouldn’t actually benefit from cutting down. The album’s most interesting attributes are at the edges, in the kind of castaway tracks that are clearly the result of fucking around. The best example of this is “Fuck Words,” which fully delivers on the promise of “post-verbal rap” that many critics identified with the rise of Young Thug and the fear contained in the pejorative “mumble rap.” Rap has toed this line for years, and Ghostie is the first I’ve heard that’s brave enough to cross it. This is actual mumble rap—there are literally no words in the entire song, with the exception of the hook “Fuck words.” His chops as a producer and a rapper are formidable enough that it doesn’t come across as just a joke.
Rap fans often queue up along a dividing line: Do you care more about bars, or do you care more about beats? For someone like Ghostie, there’s little difference between the two, just as there’s increasingly less space between country and rap: every sound has its own unique resonance and capacity for expression. The latest generation of rappers are trying to find new ways to express their sadness, and they’re looking for ways beyond language and its failures to do it. “Fuck words” isn’t just a gag or a gimmick—it’s a creed.


Beyoncé follows other, uh, great ideas like Garth Brooks's proto-emo character Chris Gaines and T.I. vs. T.I.P with a split-personality 2xCD record.

I Am... Sasha Fierce

Though she's only 27, Beyoncé goes out of her way to be an old-fashioned celebrity, the type offended by Pete Wentz blogging about Oscar the Grouch or Britney Spears Twittering her life away. "I feel that, especially now with the Internet and paparazzi and camera phones, it's so difficult to maintain mystery," she said earlier this year. "It's almost impossible to have superstars now, because people will never get enough." And, in our TMZ-addled world, her reluctance to entertain most questions about her personal life is both refreshing and a bit stubborn. She's a megawatt anachronism in sky-high heels and a frozen smile. So, without much outside interference, Beyoncé's fan-artist connection relies almost wholly on her music-- the only place to find the "real" Beyoncé is on her albums. With that direct relationship in mind comes I Am... Sasha Fierce, a supposed window into the soul of Beyoncé as well as her hair-flipping sexpot alter ego who happens to be blessed with the ultimate "Project Runway" moniker.
The "split-personality" gimmick is now a tired and, more often than not, hapless pop theme (see: Garth Brooks's proto-emo character Chris Gaines, T.I. vs. T.I.P, the street vs. boardroom dynamic of hubby Jay-Z's Kingdom Come). Sasha Fierce will not disturb that unfortunate trend. Unlike 2006's underrated funk-fest B'Day, which held together remarkably well as an LP and saw Beyoncé ditching sap for sass, this record isn't supposed to coalesce. Speaking once again to her penchant for the outdated and obsolete, it's a 2xCD affair also available in a deluxe edition with five additional tracks. (Didn't anyone tell her about Christina Aguilera's recent diva-fied double disc disappointment Back to Basics ... and that you're supposed to put the deluxe edition out six to eight months after the regular edition?) Sasha Fierce puts Beyoncé back into the "singles artist" column-- only the blindly devout would consider slogging through the deluxe edition multiple times; only the foolishly puritanical would deny the occasional high-gloss super hits.
Nobody wins the Beyoncé vs. Sasha battle-- often, the listener loses. On the Beyoncé side, while tracks like the effective (and affecting) gender-bender "If I Were a Boy" and the stunning love-as-god power ballad "Halo" (courtesy of "Bleeding Love" scribe Ryan Tedder) find the singer both strident and exposed, there's lots of wispy nonsense seemingly dug out of Celine Dion's scrap pile. Her twist on "Ave Maria" is vocally impeccable, but it reads more like recital fodder rather than a true confessional. Flip to Sasha, which is more listenable overall, but also more pandering. There's the one that sounds like past Beyoncé hits ("Single Ladies [Put a Ring on It]"), the one that sounds like "A Milli" ("Diva"), and the one that sounds like Rihanna ("Sweet Dreams"). For someone famous for effortlessly sparking trends, there are a surprising amount of opportunistic retreads here.
Beyoncé is a capital-S Star, and one glimpse of her onstage makes it clear why she's earned her right to operate above the fray. But an album isn't a concert, and there are simply not enough Sasha Fierce songs worthy of her or our time. (The hopelessly benign "Smash Into You" will provide a prime bathroom break moment on her next world tour, though.) While this LP is more painstaking than B'Day, the extra effort dulls any emotional wallop; B'Day, in all its hectic glory, offered a much more vivid peek into the elusive mind of Beyoncé than Sasha Fierce, which often reads more like projection than reality. Considering the wealth of characters this multi-talent is currently amassing between movies and alter egos, the notion of Beyoncé is more splintered now than ever. Sasha Fierce doesn't help her put the pieces back together.


The British singer-songwriter’s harrowing, physical folk music forces you to confront an awful and awesome kind of beauty.

The Hollow

When Keeley Forsyth sings, you become acutely aware of the body emitting her voice. Not what it looks like, necessarily—not its age or shape or gender or skin color—but its raw physicality, its fundament of bones and sinew. She sings with her whole chest: diaphragm tightening, air filling the lungs, muscles twisting up the length of her throat, unleashing a presence that drips with the blood of the flesh that produced it. Some singers try to make their art sound effortless; Forsyth emphasizes the physical strain.
Perhaps this sound was born of desperation. In 2017, Forsyth, who has been acting professionally since she was a teenager—mostly on British television, though she also has recent credits in Guardians of the Galaxy and Poor Things—suffered a psychological and physical breakdown that left her tongue paralyzed for a month. The desperation of that experience was palpable on her 2020 debut, Debris, an album of haunted minimalist folk that she released at the age of 40. Limbs, which followed in 2022, was more conventionally beautiful. But on The Hollow, her third album, she puts her gale-force vibrato in the service of her most intense music yet.
“I’ve always enjoyed making people feel a bit uncomfortable with the sounds and music I make,” Forsyth once told The Quietus; here, it sometimes feels as if she wants to terrify. The album begins with stately restraint; over slow-moving organ tones, her voice mournful and controlled, she sketches an agonizing search for meaning intercut with a single jarring image of physical desolation, “Veins like dry stalks/That can never bring water.” The title track, which follows, begins with liturgical grace, but her voice—digitally layered, quavering severely—assumes the sound of a sob lodged in the throat, her words at first nearly unintelligible. A dirgelike mantra (“There is no help here/Not for me”) gives way to a startling cry—“Shake my life/Out of my mouth”—delivered with larynx-rending force.
Forsyth and her producer, Ross Downes, continue to channel the same influences that informed her previous music, principally Scott Walker’s Tilt and Meredith Monk, along with the spiritual yearning of Arvo Pärt and the cerebral goth of This Mortal Coil. Even when she raises the hairs on the back of your neck, she evokes an awesome, awful beauty. On “Eve,” she offers a tender tribute to her grandmother, who raised her: “Nothing can/Tear us apart/Let the body lay down/And die.” (On The Hollow, even the songs in a major key are about death.) On “Turning,” she is borne aloft, chanting and bellowing on the surging floodwaters of Colin Stetson’s arpeggiated saxophone; it’s a romantic landscape painting rendered in sound.
Forsyth’s lyrics have never been sharper, or stranger. “Slush” is an onomatopoeic poem about children playing in snow that assumes the doomy menace of one of Grimm’s fairy tales. In “A Shift,” she layers two songs in parallel: One is a spoken-word text about an actor donning their costume, the other a wailing rendition of “We Are Women, We Are Strong,” an anthem from the miners’ strikes of the early 1980s, a provocative fusion of class solidarity, feminism, and creative labor. On “In the Corner,” some of her more oblique constructions—“storm fallen days” and “an infinite glass secretion”—remind me, faintly, of ML Buch’s surreal menagerie of “flesh on air” and “flames shards goo,” but shot through with horror instead of twee.
The album takes its title from a mineshaft that Forsyth stumbled upon while wandering the countryside near her home, and much of the record feels charged with the sort of uncanny power that holes in the ground can hold over the imagination. In her most striking lyrics, Forsyth maps an eerie intersection of landscape, spirit, and the human body—“crossroads of flesh,” as she puts it in “In the Corner.” Branches grow through her sleeping body; dust wakes within her, a specter of death brought to life. The lyrics abound with roads and bridges, brown fields, clouds scraping at the land: scenes straight out of Breugel, terrifying images of what we might call the Old Wyrd Europe, where nature and fate are intertwined.
Most of her songs are mercifully short, many under three minutes long, as though Forsyth was aware that music of such intensity could easily overwhelm. The gentlest song is one of the shortest: “Creature,” which closes the record. Over spare, searching piano from her frequent collaborator Matthew Bourne, she sings, “There is no help here/Not for me,” reprising a line from “The Hollow.” But rather than desperate or harried, she sounds at peace. If the hollow is a destabilizing rupture, it is also a sanctuary—and a vessel, a source of strength; a resonant chamber, empty until sound spills forth.


The Brooklyn band’s second album offers a reverent spin on the alt and indie-rock canon. Their songwriting has grown tighter since their debut, but their music is unlikely to inspire strong emotions.

Twentytwo in Blue

When I think of Sunflower Bean’s Twentytwo in Blue, the first thing that comes to mind is “lovable.” And I swear to you that was before I read frontwoman Julia Cumming making the following statement in a press release for her band’s sophomore album: “I think one word that always comes to mind when I think about this record is lovable.” True, organic endearment could be just as important for an aspiring rock band in 2018 as a crossover hit or a crucial sync placement. Probably more realistic too, and Sunflower Bean are a proper charm offensive: They’re young, but come off as experienced beyond their years. They’re stylish, but not styled. They’re clearly a rock band, but they’re also kinda chill and never sound like they’re here to do either to an extreme. They’re a coed trio outraged in the “Can you believe this shit?” default of the current moment; in a recent Billboard interview, Twentytwo in Blue was credited with the foresight to anticipate #MeToo, the Stoneman Douglas High School protests, and Black Lives Matter. If you could focus-group the platonic ideal for "lovable rock music for 2018" into existence, it would sound and look a lot like Twentytwo in Blue.
This is about the same place they ended up on their delightfully ragged debut, Human Ceremony; sure, it was a low-stakes rummaging through the alt and indie-rock canon, but its appeal rested in watching it performed with such reckless glee. Twentytwo in Blue is no less reverent; smartly compartmentalized into upbeat pop-rock shuffles, silvery ballads, a waltz-time showstopper, and the late-album filler with Nick Kivlen on lead vocals, they’re never more than two degrees removed from Fleetwood Mac, our generation’s classic-rock common denominator. Sunflower Bean are just much more efficient these days, like they’ve spent the past two years studying underlying song structure rather than pure sound. All 11 tracks are streamlined, sleek, and ensure the chorus hits when expected, as expected. There’s no filler, just songs that at least leave a strong first impression, even if they end up being the only one it leaves.
It all bodes well for Sunflower Bean’s prospects. They’ve carefully honed a resume for festivals that prefer to book rock bands that don’t actually rawk, which are really most of them. This professionalism doesn’t cut against Sunflower Bean’s aims to create a lovable album, but it definitely undermines making one specifically about the experience of being 22—“independent,” but also “busted and used” as the quasi-title track puts it, a variant of Taylor Swift describing the same age as “miserable and magical.” All members of Sunflower Bean are actually 22 and rather than exploring those extremes, Cumming and Kivlen play the most lovable role of all: the level-headed friend who’ll hear you out with no judgment.
On “Twentytwo,” Cumming exhibits superhuman empathy, a voice of feminist allegiance who understands the draw of toxic masculinity even while condemning it. Meanwhile, “I Was a Fool” and “Puppet Strings” are breakup songs with enough distance from their blast radius not to be poisoned anymore. But when “Burn It,” “Crisis Fest,” and “Human For” vow to burn your hometown to cinders, take the patriarchy with it, and establish “the drum” as the universal religion, they just sound like 7 p.m. at Coachella instead. It’s the result of what someone might hear if they were equidistant from concurrent Haim and White Reaper sets. It’s a perfect union if anyone finds the former too glossy and the other too gritty, but in occupying this middle ground, nothing here would qualify as potentially divisive protest music. In fact, there’s nothing divisive about Twentytwo in Blue at all, which means Cumming and I were just slightly off the mark—without the ability to inspire any strong emotion one way or the other, it has to settle for “likable.”


Mega Bog is the malleable rock band masterminded by multi-instrumentalist Erin Birgy. Happy Together flits through a sound that is familiar and far-out, transforming the mundane into jazzy wonderlands.

Happy Together

Mega Bog is the Seattle- and Brooklyn-based band of Erin Birgy and her merry crew of players. Together, they have the power to transform the mundane into jazzy wonderlands. The group’s second album, Happy Together, bubbles and abstractly teems without ever feeling excessive. Birgy flits through a sound that is both familiar and far-out. Mega Bog often summon the spirit of David Bowie with enigmatic lyrics and twinges of glam concretely based in guitar music. It’s freaky in the best way.
Happy Together begins with a dizzying sensation comparable to tumbling down a rabbit hole. The uneasy spirals of “Black Rose” evoke a soupy free fall into a new reality; the lyrics are equally spooky. The supernatural “Blackout” is paradoxically sunny—still a tough nut to crack, but it’s considerably more inviting. “My heads in a bed of improbable palm trees on an ugly, cold Chicago night,” Birgy murmurs, the words dripping like honey.
Above all, Mega Bog’s sound is malleable. Birgy’s vocal character fluctuates from an operatic soprano to a wispy sage to a windswept Gold Dust Woman. The band itself is flexible, with members fading in and out while also working on their own projects. Performers on Happy Together include the multi-instrumentalists Zach Burba and Will Murdoch of iji (which Birgy has played in), Hand Habits guitar virtuoso Meg Duffy (seen recently on tour with Kevin Morby’s band), and Big Thief’s James Krivchenia (who also mixed and mastered the record), among others. “It’s hyper-sexual, Aquarian music,” Birgy once said, but rather than collapsing into some sort of Hair style free-love fest, Mega Bog’s shape-shifting is carefully constructed.
Take “Diznee,” a swirling saxophone showcase that bobs along madly while spouting tongue-teasing lyrics like “Soda fountain on the fritz/In the ritzy/Underground Billy Goat bar.” The track is an absolute circus, always threatening to spin off its axis, if such a center even exists. The zippy dream that concludes “Diznee” flings Happy Together into a surrealism that is both sinister (“London”) and mystical (“She’s History”), but like a disco ball, it always encourages dancing through the darkness.
This feels particularly pertinent on the haunted, interstellar “192014.” “So when it’s your turn to start working towards the light/And how do you plan on giving me back any of my precious time?,” Birgy asks over spasming saxophones. Speaking of horns, “Diznee,” “192014,” and the sprawling “Worst Way” all celebrate the honking saxophone. Whether yelping, screeching, or beeping in joy, Mega Bog’s use of the sax adds a wonderfully freewheeling detail to an already complex mosaic.
Then there’s “Fwee,” a Happy Together standout that meditates on inner peace following a period of trauma. “How could I have known,” Birgy asks carefully, each word melting like a pad of butter, “There’s a person out there who means me no harm.” As Birgy walks through her own realizations, “Fwee” twists and turns alongside her, weaving spindly guitar through husky ’70s harmonies, before finally dissolving into psychedelic chaos at the climax of its lyrical consciousness. “Fwee” is an outlier on Happy Together, in that it is the most temporal. Its concerns are bodily as much as they are mental. Whether Happy Together is boogieing through a lively cacophony or laying low, Mega Bog never lose sight of the end goal: exploring purity and joy that take a variety of forms but never evaporate.


Dreamcar is a new supergroup featuring three-quarters of No Doubt with AFI frontman Davey Havok. This eponymous debut is a testament to the new wave crushes of their youth.

Dreamcar

Most supergroups are predicated on a paradox: old masters trumpeting a sonic restart with the knowledge that, at least musically speaking, shedding the baggage of the past is but a pipe dream. A supergroup’s members can pray for rebirth all they like, but nostalgia inevitably creeps in. Dreamcar, a new band comprising AFI frontman Davey Havok and everyone in No Doubt not named Gwen Stefani (guitarist Tom Dumont, bassist Tony Kanal, drummer Adrian Young), don’t fall into that trap. On their eponymous debut, the quartet takes an alternate route down memory lane.
Speaking with Billboard earlier this year, Havok framed the album as an adolescent time capsule of sorts, one that “immediately... evoked moments of [his] musical upbringing.” “That new romantic period was something I was very enamored of when I was very young,” Havok said. The latter portions of AFI and No Doubt’s discographies could be seen as a testament to Dreamcar’s new wave crushes (as could Havok’s synth side project Blaqk Audio). The former band went full-on Cure over a decade ago with their breakthrough album Decemberunderground; the latter group’s long-awaited return, 2012’s Push and Shove, often resembled a Duran Duran covers album, with Stefani filling in for Simon Le Bon.
Dreamcar, then, represents the inevitable offspring of this love affair—a spitting image of its parents’ influences, as opposed to the parents themselves. In other words, what we have here is neither Tragic Kingdom slicked with eyeliner, nor Sing the Sorrow spruced up with ska, but a bunch of erstwhile punks nodding to the greats like bobbleheads, while Havok wails his heart out. Following an eternity of plucking off paint-by-numbers pop-rock basslines, Kanal is back on the offensive, channeling Peter Hook through textured, punchy progressions on “Kill For Candy” and “All of the Dead Girls.” Dumont’s antsy riffs—which typically flit around the mix just out of reach, flickering like dying neon—are the clear product of years of Andy Taylor worship. They’re anchored by Young’s disciplined work behind the kit, a far cry from his No Doubt days, which showcased a more pugnacious spirit.
Were it not for this fortified mid-tempo framework, Havok’s incessant whinging on Dreamcar (directed at exes, paramours, and other cheery folk) may very well have torpedoed the quartet’s maiden voyage. That alt-rock’s designated theatre kid would take an even more zealous approach to new romantic songcraft on a new-wave-revival exercise comes as no surprise, of course. And Havok’s brooding occasionally blossoms spectacularly, like on “Born To Lie”, an open-eyed kiss-off with harmonies that arch and intersect unexpectedly.
All too often, though, he simpers like he’s trying to open his heart and study SAT vocabulary at the same time. “Did you see that candy girl selling pretty dreams?” he ponders midway though “On the Charts,” “A rainbow smile to tame the storm/In haute couture pristine?” Even the songs that take a more comedic approach—such as “All of the Dead Girls,” a vaudevillian ode to goths, and maybe necrophilia—threaten to collapse under the weight of lines like “Whatever their tone, beyond moribund/Bathing in bleach and Rose 31.” And yet, ironically, the lyrical setbacks also help emphasize Dreamcar’s greatest strength: It’s a simple labor of love, as opposed to a grandiose spectacle, and in doing so, it sidesteps the usual supergroup cesspool.


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 the infamous 1974 album Pussy Cats, produced by John Lennon, the moment a would-be titan consigned himself to a tragic cult figure.

Pussy Cats

If people know of Pussy Cats, they know at least two things: That Harry Nilsson shouted his voice so hoarse that blood hit the microphone, effectively destroying his golden, three-and-a-half octave range forever. And that it was produced by John Lennon during his so-called “Lost Weekend,” the 18-month stretch from 1973 to 1975 in which Lennon and Yoko Ono briefly separated and he disappeared into drugs and drink.
To listen to Pussy Cats, it’s long been assumed, is to get a peek into the broader Lost Weekend of the early ’70s—how it felt, how it sounded. This was the blowsy era, immediately post-Beatles, when rock stars could get away with recruiting four or five of the usual suspects (here, it was Keith Moon, Ringo Starr, and session guys like Jim Keltner and Klaus Voormann), bang out a few Bob Dylan covers, and call it an album. It was an era when all the hippie icons were lousing around the Playboy Mansion, when the euphoria of the late ’60s had petered out but all the main players were still onstage. This was the time in which Lennon allegedly punched a waitress while being ejected from a Smothers Brothers gig, his famous spectacles tossed aside in the scuffle.
Reading about this era is funny until it’s depressing. Hearing Lennon talk about the beach house where he, Nilsson, Ringo, and others partied until they were sick every night instead of making Pussy Cats is deflating, as is Lennon’s revelation that “One day I realize, Jesus, I’m the producer, one day they’re going to be asking me where the tapes are.” Stories like these, lapped up by periodicals and repeated in interviews, defined and calcified what “rock star excess” looked like, and Nilsson was there for nearly all of it.
If any one person could embody the notion of late-’60s rock stars going to seed, that person would undoubtedly be Harry Nilsson—one of the most talented songwriters of his generation, feted by all four Beatles, bedecked with Grammys, scoring hits while seemingly not even trying, squandering studio budgets and burning bridges while carousing with anyone who would join him. Nilsson was present for the only known post-Beatles reunion of Lennon and Paul McCartney—Stevie Wonder was also there. Mythical, and yet the result was atrocious. The name of the bootleg (“A Toot and a Snore in ’74”) came from cocaine, and it sounds that way. Wherever a famous ’60s icon was debasing themselves, Nilsson was there, supplying the drinks and collecting the stories.
In 1974, the golden aura from 1971’s triumphant Nilsson Schmilsson had dimmed, but not yet faded away—he was known as a troubled, troublesome guy, but generally worth the effort, a risky investment that could still pay dividends. Pussy Cats is considered the moment he leaped over the brink, a sort of album-length Leaving Las Vegas in which a would-be titan consigned himself to a tragic cult figure. For many Nilsson fans, it is too painful and disheartening to listen to.
But this strange and seemingly radioactive album has persisted in the cultural imagination as more than just a cautionary tale. Nilsson himself denigrated the original material he brought to the Pussy Cats sessions—“Most of those songs will be originals, even though I don’t like my songs very much right now,” he told NME in 1973. “Still, we’ll do them anyway because I haven’t got anything else to record.” He was a little too hard on his own work, because there are at least three classic Nilsson songs to be found on Pussy Cats: “Don’t Forget Me,” “All My Life,” and “Old Forgotten Soldier.” “Don’t Forget Me,” in particular, is one of those moonlit reveries that Nilsson picked like bits of food from his scraggly beard; it’s a wry, pickled, devastatingly sad song that many artists have reached for in the ensuing decades, from Macy Gray to Neko Case to Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold to Marianne Faithfull to Joe Cocker. It’s part of the American songbook now, and it slunk into the world on the flea-bitten back of Pussy Cats.
The most infamous song on the album is the first one—a cover of Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross.” In popular Nilsson lore, this was the song, the one that did it, the moment when Nilsson, aware that he was developing a node on his throat, simply screamed through it. It’s accumulated a reputation as a sort of aural suicide note, an act of self-immolation—but it’s also a tremendously powerful performance, and one of the most indelible tracks Lennon ever worked on as a producer.
The arrangement for “Many Rivers to Cross” is so slow that the song seems on the verge of simply stalling out, the drummer wandering away or the guitarist setting down his instrument to get a glass of water. It’s unnervingly slow, and heard today, it reminds me faintly of the codeine-glazed gravitational pull of screw music. At the time, it recalled the hymn-like feel of Lennon’s recent solo work, particularly Mind Games, released the previous year. Apart from the tabloid exploits and benders, this was also a particularly introspective moment in Lennon’s life, one in which he reconnected with his son Julian, reconciled with the other Beatles, and formally dissolved the group. He might have been flailing, but he was also searching. In his music at the time, it sometimes seemed like he was slowing down his songs until he could unearth the secret message his subconscious had buried there.
This was the same stately pace of “Many Rivers to Cross,” and Nilsson’s vocal take is so evocative of Lennon that Nilsson-heads still bicker over whether and where Lennon is singing backup. But Nilsson wasn’t channeling the bright, boyish tenor of “Strawberry Fields Forever” or “A Hard Day’s Night.” This was therapy Lennon, primal-scream Lennon, the one you can watch cowing an audience into frightened silence performing “Mother” and screaming all the way inside himself. On “Many Rivers,” Nilsson puts himself inside the space, and in his guttural screams, you can hear, among other things, the sound of one man trying to inhabit the voice and cultural footprint of his idol.
The relationship between Nilsson and Lennon is one of the many sad subtexts of Pussy Cats—it was Lennon who uttered the famous “Nilsson is my favorite group” line in a 1968 press conference, and Nilsson waited years for the opportunity to work with him. Where some chalk up Nilsson’s hemorrhaging vocal cords on Pussy Cats—and his failure to halt the sessions and deal with this problem—to self-destructiveness, Nilsson confessed to something more tender and timid: “I was afraid that if he stopped it, we wouldn’t do it again, we wouldn’t finish it. So I just said nothing.” Viewed this way, his screaming isn’t an act of self-destruction; he is giving everything he has to impress his hero.
Lennon, for his part, had just walked away from a warlike session with Phil Spector trying to record his oldies album Rock ’N’ Roll—pistols were pulled, and things had gotten dicey and unstable in the particular way of Spector recording sessions. It was in the midst of this hellish scene that Lennon announced his intention to walk away and produce Nilsson. The sound that Lennon sought on “Many Rivers” was oddly similar to Spector’s Wall of Sound, but through Lennon’s ear, the Wall of Sound was crumbling—the drum hits felt like debris hitting the floor.
Their cover of the Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for Me” carries the same solemnity. Reverb and echo soak into every crack, making the song feel inescapable, pressing down like a heavy blanket or ambient anxiety. The pace was, again, glacial; the mood, again, devotional. Nilsson’s voice may have been disappearing as the tape rolled, but his tenderness wasn’t—he leans into every note, drawing it out as if the session’s end would take all life’s happiness with it. When you’re at last call, every song feels like a hymn.
It’s impossible to discuss Pussy Cats without circling around the ruination of those vocal cords. Whatever others hear in these performances—poignance, pathos, or even evidence of a certain personal failing—I hear a peculiar bravery. Yes, Nilsson was in the process of losing his most prized possession, but he did nothing to hide or disguise the wreckage. His voice, in all its degradation, is as closely mic’d as it was on A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night, his album of songbook standards from just a year earlier when his voice was in its prime. His vocals on “Old Forgotten Soldier” are hollowed-out, whispery, and you can hear air whistle out of his throat without producing so much as a squeak. But Nilsson leans forward, steps into the light. He lets you see and hear all of him. He was a studio musician, after all, so petrified of performing that he gave no concerts. Whatever secrets he divulged about his soul he left on tape.
The low points on Pussy Cats are harder to dignify. Nilsson’s cover of Johnny Thunder’s “Loop De Loop” is about as appealing as a smoker’s cough, transparently awful and without purpose. It reminds me of an A-student filling in one straight column of bubbles on a test and turning it in with a shit-eating grin. The “Rock Around the Clock” cover is another embarrassment, an all-star band featuring Ringo Starr and Keith Moon unable to keep it together and reverting to middle-school levels of competency. It’s the sort of misfire that has earned Pussy Cats its lamentable reputation, and the reason it can never entirely transcend it.
But everything that makes it seem lamentable is also the source of its power. The cover of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” conversely, is loud and clattering. You can picture the blood draining from the face of the label exec listening to it on playback, calculating royalty payments and revenue loss, just as you can imagine Lennon and Nilsson sniggering to each other over the mixing board. But there is also a deranged urgency to the playing; it catches an edge. Listen to the drums; that’s Ringo Starr playing alongside Jim Keltner. Has Ringo Starr ever drummed so hard? Whatever was driving him—creative urgency, cocaine, a simple panicked desire to not lose the beat—the result is a moment of delirium captured at the back of the song. It’s good chaos, a productive mess.
After Pussy Cats, Nilsson’s life and career slid into denouement. He was finished as a recording artist by 1980 and entered a quieter phase of life, marked by relative sobriety and stability. He made music for movies and more or less disappeared from the public until his death in 1994. In some ways, Pussy Cats was the final statement from Nilsson when he was still in the thick of it, still the amiable-genius drinking buddy of every rock star. Picture-book drunkards like Nilsson live their lives in cheerful, elegant gestures of failure and small, pained declarations of success. Pussy Cats contained a little of both.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Brian Eno's new solo album, first created for an art installation, consists of four tracks spread across 75 minutes. It suggests that there's a reason Eno's name has become synonymous with "ambient" and why his thoughts on the music remain the gold standard.

Lux

In 1985, Brian Eno released a CD called Thursday Afternoon. The hourlong work was the soundtrack to a video piece, a project notable for two uses of technology. One, the video was meant to be viewed on a television placed on its side (there's a YouTube rip out there that requires you to rotate your laptop). And with its 61-minute runtime, Thursday Afternoon was promoted as the first piece to be created specifically for compact disc. Before the arrival of the CD a couple of years before, works of such duration had to be spread across sides. And since Thursday Afternoon was an immersive ambient piece in the classic Eno mold, the idea that you could absorb it uninterrupted in one hour-long session was important.
Thursday Afternoon seemed to drift in place; it was music that seemed not so much "played" as "allowed to exist." Its structure brought to mind wind chimes, as a handful of individually pleasing elements-- a few notes of piano, some light synth treatments-- knocked around the space arbitrarily but seemed to benefit from the lack of order. Eno's first true ambient work, Discreet Music, from 1975, was his first example of the form; there, he generated a handful of electronic synth tones and allowed them to cycle through chance patterns (the title track from that album also pushed the limits of technology, with over 30 minutes of audio on a single LP side). And now, Eno's new solo album, first created for an art installation, is another. Lux consists of four tracks spread across 75 minutes, but you don't really know where one ends and another begins and it doesn't matter. Like those earlier works, a small number of sounds that complement each other are set loose in a space and allowed to move around in different configurations, with subtle patterns sometimes emerging from the randomness. The most prominent of these sounds is single piano notes played quietly, which further connects the work to Thursday Afternoon in the Eno lineage. But where the 1985 album felt submerged and ghostly, Lux is clear and bright, with the crisp higher harmonics allowed to come through.
The other Eno work that comes to mind with Lux isn't a CD, but yet another boundary-pushing use of technology, and that's his iPhone app Bloom. The basic elements of light, thin drone mixed with piano notes that strike, decay, and play against other notes is also the central idea of Bloom. The danger with a program like Bloom, where Eno creates a generative system that allows the listener to make his or her own ambient pieces, is that it raises the question: What purpose does the artist himself serve at that point? He's possibly invented himself out of existence. But if Lux does nothing else, it suggests that there's a reason Eno's name has become synonymous with "ambient" and why his thoughts on the music remain the gold standard.
Thursday Afternoon was assembled to accompany a "visual painting" and Eno studied art, and it's best to think of his music using the language of design-- the colors used, their proportions, how they are laid out and balanced in the space. Eno is brilliant at getting things just so. So Lux has a mix of space and sound that feels right; no one element dominates or becomes grating over the course of 75 minutes, even though all repeat over and over. Piano notes linger, there are light plucks on what could be a harp, and everything is bathed in Deep Listening-levels of reverb. While it accomplishes Eno's long-stated goal of changing the mood and feel of a room, "tinting" the atmosphere, it refuses to enforce any feeling in particular.
It's easy to forget that Eno's ambient work doesn't always fit his strict definition. Music for Films sounds like it-- it's very suggestive of particular feeling-- and the brilliant Ambient 4: On Land conjures an entire landscape, one filled with swamps and strange creatures. But Lux is squarely in the tradition of music that can be ignored but holds up (sometimes just barely) to closer scrutiny. It turns any living room into an art installation where interesting things may or may not happen, and its lack of direction and specificity is in its own way brave. Sometimes it's hard to not say anything; Brian Eno is doing just that, once again, and beautifully.


Three members of the Most Serene Republic reach into the vaults to dust off their teenage, pre-Arts & Crafts recordings.

The Most Serene Republic: Pre Serene: Thee Oneironauts

Pre Serene: Thee Oneironauts

"The smartest thing a record label can do is sign a bunch of kids at 19, and then trick them into documenting their lives for the next six to 10 years." So mused Ryan Lenssen, a founding member of the Most Serene Republic, upon the release of the band's most accomplished record, 2009's ...And The Ever Expanding Universe. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lenssen was 19 when the Most Serene Republic began releasing their take on baroque, kitchen-sink pop, in the process becoming the became the first non-Broken Social Scene-related project to sign to Arts & Crafts. Now they dig back into their vault to remaster and release eight tracks from Thee Oneironauts, a band that Lenssen and two other members of the Republic played in when they were 18. The resulting collection, Pre Serene: Thee Oneironauts, is as gawky as a middle school yearbook photo: It sounds like it was made by teenagers who play immoderate amounts of Zelda, like to write songs about 1980s movies that they think are really awesome, and do not yet feel the artistic need to disguise or complicate either of those artistic impulses. O sweet, guileless youth.
Thee Oneironauts shows that even at an age when most would-be musicians are fiddling with distortion pedals and refining their teen angst, current Republic members Lenssen, Adrian Jewett, and Nick Greaves (along with non-Republic-an Emily Hunt) were always in the business of bleeding heart earnestness and ornate compositions. Unfortunately, Thee Oneironauts were unable to unite either of those things in intriguing ways, and this collection of their recordings comes off as skittish, cluttered, and excessively maudlin. "Today Is the Day" sounds like the work of a young band equally enamored with the Postal Service and the fact that synths can sometimes sound like rocket ships, while the tone and lyrics of the unreasonably long "St. Germain" aim for romantic but miss the mark. We now know that these guys would later develop into better songwriters, but this record doesn't offer much evidence in support.
Still, Thee Oneironauts' most cringeworthy moment, "Zoltar Speaks" (yes, it's a song told from the point of view of Tom Hanks' character in Big) serves as a pithy thematic summary: This is a document of the anxieties of growing up. It's full of the sort of details and feelings that few of us sensible grown-ups would commit to tape (the lyrics to "The Breath" sound like facts that the band members memorized for their high school history class: "1896: the first movie shown/ 1912: the Titanic went down"), and there's a certain charm to a document like that. But this one is something that only very loyal fans of the band will be able to appreciate; the rest will probably be left wondering why they took these recordings out of the vault in the first place.


Nathan Williams treats his Ghost Ramp label's inaugural release, an EP featuring guest spots from Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino and Fucked Up's Damian Abraham, like a 24-year old's first apartment: Maybe you'd only want to spend 15 minutes in this ramshackle mess, but hey, he's enjoying his freedom.

Life Sux EP

King of the Beach was a quantum leap for Wavves, but not so much for Nathan Williams. In the context of the monochrome, fuck-all noise of Wavvves, it was easier to stomach an attitude that hovered somewhere between high, hungover, and hateful. What pissed off a lot of people was the way he could broaden his sonic palette and galvanize his songwriting without even the slightest attitude adjustment: The world would have to start taking him seriously, and it was abundantly clear he had no plans to return the favor. So do you think the tsk-tsking of some critics or Marnie Stern is gonna stop him? In case you missed the point of King of the Beach's opening salvo, here's Williams on "I Wanna Meet Dave Grohl": "You're still never gonna stop me." As such, his follow-up EP is titled Life Sux, it features some of his more famous friends cheering him on, and Williams treats the inaugural release on his Ghost Ramp label like a 24-year old's first apartment: Maybe you'd only want to spend 15 minutes tops in this ramshackle mess, but hey, he's enjoying his freedom.
At the very least, you know where you stand with Wavves: If you're not referenced by name or actually appear on Life Sux, there's a good shot you're a target of Williams' limitless disdain. So then, "Bug": He's cool with Dinosaur Jr., whether he's paying homage with some of his mostly instantly catchy fuzz guitar leads, or just pissing in the wind about the futility of relying on other people. Meanwhile, "I Wanna Meet Dave Grohl" follows in the grand tradition of Local H's "Eddie Vedder" (if not "I Had Mark Arm") in terms of grunge fan fiction fueled by overblown ego and non-existent self-esteem. He switches "meet" with "be" during the brainwash of a chorus, which brings out this strange humanizing quality even though the premise doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense: Whose life ambition is it to meet or even be Dave Grohl when he's quite possibly the squarest dude that qualifies as an actual rock star? Is it because "Krist Novoselic" has too many syllables and doesn't rhyme with anything?
Unfortunately, when his tributes to the Buzz Bin become less overt but no less pervasive, Side B of Life Sux, well, kinda sux: The title of "Poor Lenore" is the first time Williams has implied he's ever picked up a book in his life, but the turgid, 3rd-gen grunge suggests he found that Poe anthology right next to a used copy of Frogstomp. And though "Destroy" is a well-intentioned collaboration in the name of break-shit punk, once Pink Eyes' vocals give Williams the bum's rush, it ceases to have the ability to be heard as anything other than a lo-fi Fucked Up track. If you ever wondered if those dozens of guitar overdubs were really necessary on David Comes to Life, "Destroy" emphatically answers in the affirmative.
Despite its reduced scope, Life Sux is actually pretty versatile depending on where you stand with Wavves-- take it as further confirmation of his permanent immaturity, or a sign that rattling off rudimentary but undeniably hooky punk-pop comes fairly easy to him. Still, with an LP supposedly on its way by the end of the year, you don't have to wonder quite yet if using the brat factor as something of a crutch means that he already reached his ceiling and King of the Beach is the record he was put on this earth to make: one that Weezer couldn't make after they'd discovered branding, Blink-182 couldn't after they thought owning Cure albums meant they had to be taken seriously as artistes, and Green Day couldn't after Billie Joe picked up a copy of No Logo.
Unsurprisingly, the track that gets him out of the artistic cul-de-sac is by far the best thing here: Crazy for You and King of the Beach coyly flirted with addressing the real-life relationship of its creators, and Williams' collaboration with Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino on "Nodding Off" doesn't get much into detail either. Still, it threatens to make even the most jaded Hipster Runoff devotee actually root for them: think Best Coast with more power, Wavves with more pop, or just a more reckless, less cerebral New Pornographers. Of course, even if the heart of Life Sux is a gooey escape fantasy featuring his girlfriend, if he still wants to describe the EP as something you'll probably like "if you hate yourself and other people"... well, you're never gonna stop him.


On their first album in five years, Nick Thorburn’s ever-evolving band takes a pop-friendly turn. With neon synths and disco grooves, these songs are Top 40 at heart.

Islomania

How do you follow the Unicorns? Nick Thorburn has offered a lot of answers over the years. Since that group’s breakup in 2004, Thorburn has filled his time juggling side bands and solo projects. In between, he has scored a film, dabbled in rap, authored a graphic novel, directed and toured with Michael Cera, and composed the theme for Serial. By far his most prolific creative outlet, however, has been Islands, an ever-evolving band that released seven albums in the span of a decade, all of them good and one of them, their 2006 debut Return to the Sea, a pillar album of indie rock’s big-tent era. For a musician who never became a household name, that’s a hell of a CV.
Despite these accomplishments, there’s no denying his discography is front-loaded. Even his best records with Islands never resonated on anywhere near the scale of 2003’s Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone?, which has lost none of its sugar-rush intensity or cult appeal. This may be part of the reason why, without ceremony, Thorburn retired Islands in 2016. He never formally announced his decision, but as he later told Stereogum, “I had nothing left to give and nothing left to say.” Retroactively learning that Islands broke up is a surprise. Learning that the breakup did not stick, however, is not. Musicians who record as voraciously as Thorburn seldom quit for good.
The comeback album Islomania is the group’s first in five years, and like most Islands albums before it, this one is a departure. Ratatat’s Mike Stroud lends some guitar and John Congleton, known for his work with St. Vincent and Angel Olsen, mixed the record. These collaborators might suggest something prickly or texturally askew, yet Islomania is anything but. From its disco grooves to its neon synths, this the band’s most pop-forward album yet, with few of the detours and little of the digressive oddness that have animated Thorburn’s defining records.
As a general rule, when a band writes a song about dancing, as Islands do here with the beach jam “(We Like To) Do It With the Lights On,” they’re making a bid for a larger audience. And sure enough, most of Islomania is optimized for mass appeal. The digitized disco tribute “A Passionate Age” is the closest Thorburn has ever come to Daft Punk; the synth-slapped funk of “Closed Captioning” could easily be reworked into a Maroon 5 or Bleachers track. Though it’s mellowed over the years, Thorburn’s voice retains some of its boyish, indie charm, and a few of the arrangements are dressed with blaring saxophones that hint at art-rock. But the songs themselves are Top 40 at heart—featherlight and direct, more interested in pleasing than in challenging.
Perhaps this radio-friendly makeover is Thorburn’s way of joining the ranks he’s inspired. The Unicorns’ impish spirit has reverberated, however indirectly, through alternative airwaves by way of bands like MGMT and Foster The People and their many interchangeable offshoots. Comb through Spotify’s “Indie Alternative Synth Pop” playlist and you’ll hear dozens of bands indebted to Unicorns’ brand of liberating quirk. If others are profiting from commercialized versions of that sound, why shouldn’t Thorburn, too?
Thankfully, Thorburn sings with such sweetness and sincerity that Islomania never feels like a cash grab. On “Never Let You Down” and “Marble,” you can hear in his voice a bit of Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, and in the music that band’s desire to draw vast, hugging crowds at festival stages. These songs are genuine and open-armed, and there’s always room for music like that. But what’s sorely missing is the fuck-around energy that made even Islands’ later work so exciting; even just a few left-field twists could have gone a long way toward breaking up this very conventional set. Thorburn’s best albums sound like nobody else could have made them. A lot of acts have already made ones like Islomania.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On the fourth installment of his Dreamchasers mixtape series, Meek struggles to figure out exactly where he belongs, caught between his old life and his new one, between superstar and street rapper.

DC4

Since his last major-label release, 2015’s Dreams Worth More Than Money, Meek Mill has been anything but silent. He put out a two-part EP (4/4), and fired up an assortment of beefs with Drake, the Game, Joe Budden, and 50 Cent. The largest course, of course, was with Drake, a Mean Girls meme-war that left Meek’s credibility so pummeled that fast-food chains felt safe enough to roast him. Even his MMG Boss Rick Ross distanced himself from his once proud protege (“I never took an L back when Meek fell…”). If nothing else, his next LP would be his best chance to define the next chapter in his story.
But that LP, DC4, inspires more questions than answers. It’s ostensibly a mixtape, but it’s for sale on iTunes, suggesting the samples were cleared. Conceptually, it’s the fourth in his Dreamchasers series, a concept that defines both his side ventures and his identity. Meek’s struggle is quintessentially American. With the deck stacked against him from day one, his American Dream was laser-focused on climbing out of the South Philadelphia ghetto that claimed his father’s life. His Philly heroes in the State Property crew rapped as tough as they looked, and his hip-hop education played out on street corners.
He brings that energy to every one of his songs, and DC4 is no different. Taking a cue from Nas & Puffy, he starts off with nothing less dramatic than the “O Fortuna”-sampling “On the Regular,” produced by Lex Luger protege MP808. The opening bars serve as a prologue for the rest of the record, listing the things he will rap about: selling dope, going to court, wearing jewelry, drinking alcohol, having sex, smoking high-quality marijuana. Or as he puts it, “Stickin’ to the basics.”
And if there’s a knock on Meek, it’s just that—he’s basic. Struggle rappers are constantly underestimated, dropping countless releases, scrapping for every ounce of recognition they can get. After more than a dozen releases, Meek Mill is really just a struggle rapper that made it. If he started from the bottom, now that he’s here, what else does he have to say?
Not much, it turns out. Meek’s beat selection has always been impressive, especially considering his prolific output. And DC4 may have benefitted further from the relatively delayed release; The track list is loaded from top to bottom with bangers from young producers such as Sound M.O.B. (“Litty”) and the 808 Mafia. The features are a good indication of the sound he’s adopted, with guest appearances from Lil Uzi Vert, Young Thug, 21 Savage, and Migos’ Quavo. He takes a welcome left turn with the blues-guitar driven “Blue Notes,” built off a Snowy White sample, and puts on up-and-coming R&B crooner Guordan Banks with the Pusha T-featuring “Two Wrongs.”
But when it comes to his rhymes, there’s little variety in his style. No matter the tone or mood of the beat he’s rhyming over, his rhymes are yelled rather than rapped. He’s 2016’s version of Bad Boy’s “Madd Rapper”—mad cuz he’s not getting enough “Shine,” mad cuz he didn’t get a tweet from the game’s biggest star. His energy at shows, honed from years of street-corner battles, is infectious. But on record, with his volume always cranked to 10, it really only works in small doses. And while he’s capable of detail-rich narratives, he never manages to focus on any one thought long enough to say anything of substance. Even the serial story of “Tony Story 3” is mired in hoary gangsta tropes.
On DC4, Meek Mill is caught between his old life and his new one. His history with actual “gangsta shit” may have boosted his credibility—and profile—but now, it seems to be holding him back. He’s still prone to the occasional exhibition of garden-variety homophobia, but at least since he’s been in a relationship with Nicki Minaj, there’s been a noticeable reduction in misogyny. He almost certainly would love to graduate from his tough-guy street persona, but it’s as if he feels his core audience won’t let him. “You can't be hard all the time, man,” he told Billboard in an interview last year. “There's both sides to everything. What's wrong with it? Jay Z was a street rapper and he had a girlfriend.”
He’s clearly thinking about how these pieces of his life fit into the larger struggle, but DC4 merely hints at powerful, ugly truths. The album’s cover is a collage of court documents (including his plea agreement) and a mug shot of an 18-year-old Meek, his face bandaged and eye swollen after a beat down from black cops. But he went harder on Funkmaster Flex’s Hot 97 show than he does on record, eloquently questioning the morality of the prison system and Flint’s poisoned water. Time will tell if Meek’s legacy outlasts the embarrassing Drake episode, as the only questions DC4 has answered are related to how he’d like his famous friends to promote his new record. But as an MC, Meek’s considerable potential remains untapped.


The former Verve frontman returns after a hiatus with another Richard Ashcroft solo album, with all the ostentatious orchestration, bumper-sticker mantras, and cursory electro-dabbling those entail.

These People

It’s been a busy month for ’90s Brit-rock icons on the comeback trail—Radiohead, Super Furry Animals, and even the Stone Roses have all recently resurfaced after prolonged periods of inactivity. But of them all, Richard Ashcroft arguably has the longest climb back up the mountain, even when you take the Roses’ DOA “All for One” single into account—after soaring to the top of the pops in 1997 with the Verve’s platinum-plated opus Urban Hymns, his stock has tumbled down unceremoniously through a series of increasingly soppy solo albums released over the course of the '00s.
Like many rock ‘n’ rollers saddled with wild-child reputations, Ashcroft has been accused of going soft in his middle age. The truth is, Ashcroft was flashing his sensitive side way back when the Verve was doing pretty acoustic versions of “Make It Till Monday” on the promo circuit for their 1993 debut, A Storm in Heaven. However, his solo work has too often highlighted the big difference tenderness and mush, blowing out the resolution of simplistic songs like someone trying to project an iPhone home movie onto an IMAX screen.
In a way, the appearance of the first Richard Ashcroft album in six years is more unlikely than the Roses’ return after 21. After all, in this current gig economy, it’s expected that our favorite groups will reunite for the plum festival guarantees, no matter how acrimonious the initial split. And, having already played the Verve comeback card in 2008, followed by an aborted attempt at rebranding, it seemed like Mad Richard was content to just carry on as Dad Richard. But if the emergence of These People is something of a surprise, its contents are anything but. (Well, other than the fact it took a preaching populist like Ashcroft this long to title a song “Hold On”). The extended layoff has only further entrenched Richard Ashcroft’s desire to make Richard Ashcroft albums, with all the ostentatious orchestration, resurrection rhetoric, bumper-sticker mantras, clunky metaphors, and cursory electro-dabbling those entail.
In hindsight, the early Verve were essentially the missing link between Spiritualized and Oasis, but with Urban Hymns, they anticipated the post-Britpop soft-rock that Coldplay would use to fill stadiums. And though Ashcroft is loathe to own that legacy, he and Chris Martin ultimately share similar goals—namely, to retrofit classic, Glastonbury-sized balladry to contemporary Top 40 standards, and sell it to the masses with life-affirming, one-size-fits all-lyrics. Ashcroft still possesses one of rock’s great voices, his singular balance of grit and gravitas undisturbed by the passage of time. But unlike Martin, there’s an inherent weariness to Ashcroft’s singing that meshes awkwardly with his forays into upbeat dance-pop.
The most thrilling moments in Ashcroft’s discography have come when it sounds like he’s getting lost inside his own music, with the surging sonics and multi-tracked vocals pushing him toward rapture. But here, he’s merely singing about going “Out of My Body” over pro-forma disco-house presets rather than actually doing it. That fish-out-of-water feeling only amplifies his lazier lyrics, whether he’s dropping musty Watergate metaphors on that track, or deploying tired heroine-as-heroin cliches about a woman who goes “straight for my veins” on the arms-aloft anthem “This Is How It Feels.”
These People supposedly addresses socio-political hot topics like Syria’s refugee crisis and government surveillance, but those inspirations yield precious little insight—as per his solo m.o., Ashcroft transforms real-life tumult into nondescript, placeholder lyrics. And while “Everybody Needs Somebody to Hurt” and “Hold On” respectively recycle the “life’s a bitch” sentiments of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” atop neon-flickered electro-pop and sunrise-rave sonics, their pat advice (e.g., “So hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on/You know there ain’t a lot time, but I know that we can make it!”) doesn’t exactly instill you with the fuck-it-all swagger that prompts one to plow into grannies on your morning stroll.
Ashcroft always fares best when he sounds like he’s addressing another person in an intimate exchange rather than megaphoning the entire human race, and there are moments on These People where he reconnects with the steely-eyed conviction and restlessness that fueled his best songs. His reunion with the Verve’s go-to string arranger Wil Malone pays immediate dividends on “They Don’t Own Me,” which plays like a sequel to “Lucky Man,” albeit with the sense of fire-wielding wonderment replaced by hardened resilience. Even better is the atmospheric, dead-of-night rumination “Picture of You,” which mines a haunted melancholy that Ashcroft hasn’t really tapped since “Sonnet” and “The Drugs Don’t Work,” while “Black Lines” yields his most rousing performance in ages. Sure, it doesn’t tell you anything we haven’t heard before: “It’s real life/Sometimes it gets so hard.” But more than just remind us once again about the inevitability of debt and death, the song’s ascendant, string-swept chorus shows Ashcroft still has the ability to make us momentarily forget about it.


A companion piece to last year’s sparkling Silver Ladders, the harpist’s latest dip into her archives assembles improvised sessions into intricately layered songs with a powerful emotional pull.

Collected Pieces II

The joy and burden of remembrance live in Mary Lattimore’s looping, layered harp music. The Los Angeles-based musician often ties her wafting music to particular places and memories, giving voice to fleeting moments. Collected Pieces II, which brings together nine tracks from Lattimore’s archive of recently recorded music, balances the softest plucks with the most powerful strums to delicately illuminate what feels like the full complexity of being.
Collected Pieces II, which follows 2020’s sparkling Silver Ladders, builds on its predecessor, even featuring a home recording of a Silver Ladders track titled “Pine Trees.” Lattimore has done something like this before; her tranquil 2017 anthology Collected Pieces served as a companion to her acclaimed 2016 album At the Dam. Her music is often assembled from long improvisational sessions that she splices into textural portraits, and these archival records present distantly related material that didn’t make it onto her full-length albums, offering another glimpse into her musical world and the memories she’s chosen to soundtrack. Some of the stories she weaves on Collected Pieces II are rooted in specific events, like “Mary You Were Wrong,” which chronicles a broken heart. Others, like “We Wave From Our Boats,” which was born out of musing on lockdown, use narrative as a jumping off point for abstract melodies that illuminate a feeling of uncertainty.
Collected Pieces II’s greatest strength lies in its nuances. The most successful tracks balance lightness and darkness, letting both unfold through intricate details. “Sleeping Deer” uses contrasting layers to showcase depth, placing a rhythmic melody on top of punchy chords and distant echoes. As in much of Lattimore’s music, the song’s melodies expand through repetition, but this time, a gravelly bass swallows a graceful melody, forming a cavernous and ominous vibration. On “Scott Kelly, Returned to Earth,” repetition takes the center stage, too, looping echoing phrases to nostalgic effect. It’s in this meticulous structuring that Collected Pieces II finds its footing.
Despite the overarching air of patterning, Collected Pieces II highlights the varying complexity of Lattimore’s music. The album’s longest piece, “Be My Four Eyes,” shifts between moods with ease instead of stacking melodies on top of each other. At times it’s colored by heart-wrenching wistfulness, other times sparkling airiness. Every moment is driven by a celestial stream of melodies that repeat so many times they begin to collide into each other, forming one glimmering mass. But when Lattimore forgoes these depths, the music starts to feel flat. The album’s weakest moments come when the music leans toward pure brightness, like on “Princess Nicotine,” which is made of high-pitched plucks that merely tread water. It’s one of the least compelling tracks, trading looping melodies and crisp texture for a twinkle that feels stuck in place.
But when Lattimore finds what’s hidden behind filmy plucks and gauzy melodies, her music shines. “There’s a special kind of vibe when you’re at a seaside town in the winter, a serenity and kind of gloominess,” Lattimore told The Quietus in 2020. That’s the feeling Collected Pieces II recalls so well—the feeling of staring out into the mist, at peace but eerily still. Collected Pieces II comes to life when murkiness collides with radiance. And in the moments when everything clouds over, there’s still some hope left to grasp.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche has been successful as both a composer and a performer in the modern classical scene. His album with the elite contemporary classical group So Percussion seems inevitable, in the best possible way.

Glenn Kotche / Sō Percussion: Drumkit Quartets

Drumkit Quartets

Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche has added some impressive entries to his new-classical resume in recent years. With his 2014 full-length debut as a composer, Adventureland, he displayed a facility for rich, percussive-driven works—and also a skill for writing multi-movement pieces that included parts for string instruments and electronics. He’s been equally successful as a performer in this field (as a powerhouse 2015 recording of John Luther Adams’s Ilimaq demonstrated). In light of this, a collaboration between Kotche and the elite contemporary classical group So Percussion seems inevitable, in the best possible way.
At crucial points, the pieces that make up Drumkit Quartets can fail to sound as purposeful as those on Adventureland. The album’s opening and closing tracks give a sense of this indecisive quality, with Kotche’s "Drumkit Quartet #51" receiving two different presentations. The first version is subtitled "Tokyo, Brisbane & Berlin" (indicating cities where Kotche worked on the piece, or else where he made field recordings). Here, competing rhythms for marimbas cycle through the composition amiably, without creating much tension. Kotche’s collage of pre-recorded noises is frequently spare to a point of seeming aimless. A brief haiku by Kotche (voiced by Yuka Honda) has its say in the final third, and the strongest feeling it imparts is a quizzical one.
Texture-obsessed writing isn’t objectionable on its own, but 10 minutes of it is a lot of time for a 51-minute set—especially when the closing "Chicago Realization" of the very same composition generates much more excitement. In this version, Kotche’s denser background recording highlights the subtle turns of the marimba writing and preserves the delicacy Kotche is obviously aiming for.
Presenting different "realizations" of the same piece can make sense when John Cage-style "chance operations" are part of the mix. But these versions just shift around the arrangement of pre-recorded parts, suggesting compositional diffidence. In his liner notes, Kotche makes reference to these pieces being conceived during a period in which he was "touring extensively" with Wilco. He also admits that finishing another of the longest tracks here, "Drumkit Quartet #50," was "challenging." The labor is audible.
Still, sketchbook albums from skilled artists can have their moments. Kotche’s miniatures fare quite well. Two propulsive items—"Drumkit Quartet #1" and "Drumkit Quartet #54"—are full of ingenuity as well as power. The brief, three-movement "Drumkit Quartet #3" moves from dry cymbal work to more resonant pitched percussion with a serene focus. Together with "Drumkit Quartet #51 (Chicago Realization)," there’s enough intriguing work here to make Drumkit Quartets worth investigating. Hopefully Kotche will reconnect with the players of So Percussion again at some point in the future, when he has something more clearly fashioned in mind.