On Night Thoughts, Suede delivery a sweeping semi-concept album about addiction and desire. Once the poster children for porcelain-skinned druggy excess, they’re now the embattled survivors sharing cautionary tales of bad decisions and dreams unfulfilled.

Night Thoughts

Blackstar isn’t the only album released this month to take on added poignancy in the wake of David Bowie’s passing. Suede are releasing a new album mere weeks after Bowie did the same—just like in March 2013, when both parties released comeback records following decade-long hiatuses. And while the timing may be purely coincidental, it’s an uncanny circumstance for a band that, throughout the '90s, provided the most resounding reminder of Bowie’s early-'70s supremacy, and helped rehabilitate his rep amidst a career nadir for a new generation of pretty things. Listening to Night Thoughts now is like hearing a eulogy from a favorite son—from its quasi-conceptual structure to its stardust-speckled guitar riffage to its abundance of misfit anthems and concert hall-crumbling ballads, the record is a testament to Bowie’s steely determination to make every song a seismic event.
That said, Suede are like the faithful scions who inherited the old family home, but didn't do much redecoration. They never shared their godhead’s flair for radical reinvention and experimentation; their discography effectively imagines an alternate 1975 where Bowie never went to Philly and continued to mine the dark majesty of the Aladdin Sane/Diamond Dogs era on through the '80s. The parameters of their sound were pretty much set with their first two albums—1993’s snappy, scrappy self-titled debut and 1994’s darkly ornate Dog Man Star—and the records that followed slid back and forth between those extremes. Bloodsports, their laudable 2013 return effort, hedged its bets by positioning itself smack dab in the middle of that spectrum, with the album’s invigorating first side balanced by a weightier second act. Their comeback now assured and their bravado fully restored, with Night Thoughts, Suede once again leap up off the dancefloor to swing from the chandeliers.
Night Thoughts isn’t a rock opera per se, though it gamely assumes the form of one. Several songs bleed into one another through swirling interstitials; the opening track is reprised in the penultimate position, Sgt. Pepper’s-style; and it sounds like at least half the recording budget was spent on the orchestra. It’s also accompanied by a fitfully bleak feature-length film (directed by NME photographer/Libertines documentarian Roger Sargent) that shows a drowning man’s reminiscences about the familial tragedy that’s driven him to commit suicide in the sea. (The band previewed the album last fall with front-to-back live performances synced up to the film.) But the songs themselves don’t actually form a linear narrative arc, reference specific characters, or directly correlate to the visuals. They’re more discrete portraits of passion, ostracization, betrayal, and depression—hardly uncharted territory for a Suede record. But the sheer, fetishistic intensity with which Brett Anderson delivers his lascivious lyrics—coupled with the balcony-baiting, pomped-up performance of the band—makes the wounds feel newly opened and the bruises freshly pressed.
That Night Thoughts’ cinematic companion piece centers around the story of an unglamorous middle-class family—rather than, say, the freakish, fashionable deviants that populate the band’s signature songs—underscores an essential truth about Suede today: They are no longer young people, and no longer speaking for them. Once the poster children for porcelain-skinned druggy excess, they’re now the embattled survivors sharing cautionary tales of bad decisions and dreams unfulfilled. Night Thoughts is framed by the opening "When You Are Young" and its late-album echo "When You Were Young"—shore-crashing surges of symphonic psychedelia that dissipate into Anderson’s rueful ruminations about the idealism of youth and the impossibility of recapturing it. While the album’s title may hint at seedy suggestion, Night Thoughts is more about those traumatic, sleep-depriving memories that have you tossing and turning and "tumbling out of a single bed."
It’s a record about addiction, to be sure, but to an intoxicant more elusive, potent, and damaging than any street drug: desire. And like any stimulant, the highs are ecstatic (see: "Outsiders," a stained-sheet celebration of odd-couple consummation, or the nostalgically trashy "Like Kids") and the lows are crushing (see: pretty much everything else). The titles tell you exactly what you’re getting yourself into—"I Don’t Know How to Reach You," "What I’m Trying to Tell You," "Tightrope," "I Can’t Give Her What She Wants"—each song more desperate and depraved than the one before, culminating in the latter’s intimations of violence ("The keys are falling from her coat/ As I weave my fingers around her perfumed throat"). Though a master of evocative detail, Anderson doesn't care much for narrative exposition—rather than set a scene, he prefers to thrust you into the thick of the moment where it’s all about to fall apart. And depending on your disposition, Night Thoughts concludes with either with a happy ending, or a dispiriting one. The swashbuckling, orchestro-ballad finale, "The Fur & the Feathers," finds Anderson valorizing "the thrill of the chase"—an optimistic suggestion that even the most bitter, agonizing breakup can’t diminish the rush of romance, or the brazen affirmation of a damaging, heart-ravaging habit that’ll inevitably lead to more sleepless nights. For the sake of Suede’s ongoing renaissance, let’s hope it’s the latter.


Chock full of woozy sing-alongs and pulsing ballads, Brendan Canning's debut solo album suggests he's just as responsible for Broken Social Scene's life-affirming guitar pop as Kevin Drew.

Broken Social Scene Presents: Brendan Canning: Something For All of Us…

Something For All of Us…

As the chief songwriter and vocalist for Broken Social Scene, it seemed reasonable to expect Kevin Drew's solo debut, Spirit If..., to sound quite a bit like a BSS record. The first volume of Arts & Craft's Broken Social Scene Presents series, Spirit If... even flaunted its affiliations and similarities. Bassist Brendan Canning's record, Something for All of Us, seemed a surer bet to follow the trend set by the side projects of Andrew Whiteman (Apostle of Hustle) and Jason Collett: elaborating on themes and sounds given secondary status on BSS albums. Instead Something, chock-full of woozy sing-alongs and pulsing ballads, suggests that Canning is just as responsible for BSS's life-affirming guitar pop as Drew.
Maybe it shouldn't be a surprise-- Canning, with Drew, was a founding member of BSS. But even playing in a band that sits dead-center in the underground rock sound spectrum, splitting the difference between pop/rock, noise/tunes, jam/punk, Canning seems like the median. After toiling for the mostly forgotten By Divine Right, he had his spotlight-turn on You Forgot It In People's "Stars and Sons". Since then, he has seemed content to work quietly as the band's melodic gut, counting out orbital, song-serving basslines. Canning-- curly locks, rimmed glasses, professorly beard-- even looks the part of MOR rock daddy. But you can hear Canning on Something; hear his clockwork eighth-notes on the can't-stand-still post-rock of "All the Best Wooden Toys Come from Germany"; hear his propulsive under-thrum during bangers like "Hit the Wall" and "Possible Grenade"; hear him even as Something credits Drew and BSS drummer Justin Peroff (as well BSS contributor Lisa Lobsinger, on vocals) as major contributors.
Something is a Broken Social Scene Presents release, and the group does do a good job showing off and helping along Canning: from the cover, which cartoonishly features Drew, Peroff, and Whiteman, among others, to the familiar, rippling horn of James Shaw or Drew's buddying up on the choruses, his recognizable pipes mixed graciously low. Drew, a more unique singer and stronger writer than Canning, was also more likely to lapse into bullshit poetry or break out J Mascis as indie bling. Canning doesn't strut or preen nearly as well, but he is patient, good-natured, and seemingly in love with slip'n'slide guitar rave-ups.
Something is far from exact in its arrangements and structure; where Galaxie 500 smoothed over many of the distinguishing points of the Velvet Underground, Canning takes his six-string terrycloth and spreads around any number of mid-1990s guitar rockers. "Churches Under the Stairs" is the simplest brand of alt-rock-- throbbing bass, lots of tom hits, and two guitars splashing in a kiddie-pool of distortion. Lobsinger's honeyed exhalations turn the rolling piano chords of "Antique Bull" into a fulfillingy forgettable Breeders song. "Chameleon" morphs a little, sure, but you'll know exactly where it is at all times, a lilting drone followed by martial percussion and tentative trumpets before the tempo picks up and the group chorus-- inevitable from the very first moments-- gets its fingers deep into some of that feel good: "You/ You can throw your arms up/ You/ You can be at ease/ Stick to things that remind you/ Of where you used to be." There's little risk-taking, but Canning is more than capable of the high-pitched acoustic balladeering of "Snowballs and Icicles" or the red-eared, last dance crawl of "Been at It So Long".
Something succeeds because Canning knows his strengths, or perhaps because his strengths aren't particularly volatile (see Drew, Kevin), but when he tries to carve out too ripe a melody-- the repeated choruses of "You bet your life boy" on the title track grow stale-- he sounds a bit out of his league. There's little defense for the blockheaded funk-rock of "Love Is New" which wonders-- for four full minutes-- what Girls Against Boys might've sounded like sober. Mostly, Something lives up to its everyman title by removing the truly heart-pounding moments of a BSS record and replacing them with a sense of community, easy friendship, and a kickass guitar pedal collection.


Leyland Kirby has a prolific work ethic, and his latest releases are certainly evidence of that: a culling of material from his 20-hour long The Death of Rave album as V/Vm, and a three-hour album under his own name that closely resembles his work as the Caretaker.

Leyland Kirby Presents V/Vm / Leyland Kirby: The Death of Rave (A Partial Flashback) / We Drink to Forget the Coming Storm

At the onset of 2006, the sound collagist Leyland Kirby started a project called VVMT365 that entailed releasing one new track every day for an entire year. He finished with 602, and this was in addition to three albums as V/Vm and one as the Caretaker. One of those albums, V/Vm's The Death of Rave, was 20 hours long. Calling Kirby's ethic "prolific" stretches the word too thin. Keeping up with his catalog is like watching the wheels of a car accelerate: It makes sense for a second, but quickly becomes a blur.
Kirby's music is cloudy and abstract, but the concepts behind it are clear enough to put on a sandwich board. Rave, part of which has just been remastered and released in physical formats, is based on old techno tracks slowed down and blown out to the point of sounding like ambience. Admittedly, I wouldn't have had any clue that this was the case without Kirby's direction, which is to say that there are times when his concepts lead me into thinking about the music in a way that the music wouldn't on its own. (Kirby, who seems like a thoughtful guy but never presents himself as academic, would probably say that context is interesting but doesn't mean much unless you get some emotional use-value from the music itself.)
Rave is hollow music, with the weight and presence of an empty room. Most of its sounds don't start or stop so much as they bleed in from some unseen edge. Little changes, and when change is present, it's gradual. Even when something threatens to happen—and Rave is music of constant, if subtle, threat—Kirby holds back. In 2014, the idea of music based on salvaging the decaying and half-remembered strains of anything feels ironically old-hat, but in 2006, it was new, so Kirby was a pioneer, as were Ariel Pink and Burial. Even as new releases, their albums had the grain and anonymity of a relic, like something made before being abandoned and left out to rust.
It makes sense that Kirby has always favored longer projects with little discernible rise or fall: His music is more an environment than an experience. Even my favorite stand-alone albums of his—Eager to Tear Apart the Stars and the Caretaker's An Empty Bliss Beyond This World—are things I usually play on loop, three and four times over. They recede into the background, less the object you focus your eyes on than the tint of the glasses you're wearing.
"In the past, I've done stuff and just thrown it out there, like the 365 project, but in the end it was too big," Kirby told Resident Advisor in 2009. "No one really noticed it." His reformation has been marginal. Earlier this month, he uploaded a new album to his Bandcamp page called We Drink to Forget the Coming Storm. The project was in part to celebrate his 40th birthday. It is three hours long.
Kirby's albums as the Caretaker—much of which sounds like early romantic composition or old ballroom jazz trapped in amber and playing from some distant room—have always been more legible to me than his other projects, and more heartfelt too. As the vandalistic aggression of V/Vm mellowed it left him with nothing but sentiment: tenderness, beauty, the saturation of a moment fully lived. Normally, Caretaker music is based on loops of old 78 RPM records; We Drink, which bears cosmic resemblance to that project, is mostly piano, digital strings and synthesizer choir—a less grainy sound than some of his others, but no less static or removed.
Kirby tells a funny story about how surprised his friends were to hear how melancholy Caretaker music was since Kirby always seemed to be out partying. But like a night at the bar that transcends banality and expectation, there's something about the Caretaker's and Kirby's music that often feels perfect but impossibly distant—the kind of moment you know you can never recall clearly but know you want to relive. Like so many of his albums, he gave away We Drink for free, but noted the suggested price of a birthday whisky.


This five-disc set, which includes concert footage, B-sides, and demos, delivers what box sets of this kind almost never do: the thrill of discovery.

1999

It does not require a particularly close reading to see 1999 as a text about partying in spite of looming disaster, or even to stave it off. There’s that coda to “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” (“You and I know we gotta die someday” sandwiched between one lyric about giving yourself to God and another pledging to “have fun every motherfucking night”); there’s the title track, which opens the album by signaling that the whole thing might be a fever dream, and ends with Lisa Coleman cooing, “Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?” It might have been tempting, in 1982, to see Prince’s experiments with synthesizers and programmed drums to be of a piece with these anxieties, emerging sounds turned against emerging fears. It might be tempting, now, to let those once cutting-edge technologies—which now read as obvious date markers—cast those same anxieties as relics of a far-off era.
But those competing threads that Prince drew out so well—a smirking nihilism and a kind of empathy that posits lust and humanism as the same thing—have never disappeared from pop music, and his ability to marshal the Reagan years and the LM-1 for his own purposes, the way he had already done with the tropes of rock and funk, has rarely been replicated, before or after the Berlin Wall came down. And so 1999, which is now being reissued by Warner Records as part of a five-disc set that also includes B-sides, demos, unreleased songs, and concert footage, is the rare record that has come to define its era while also existing outside of it, a masterpiece that immediately precedes the albums Prince fashioned, conspicuously, as masterpieces.
The album proper sounds, as it always has, like a computer breathing. (The songs have been remastered, and while they sound rich and clear on car speakers and in headphones, it feels beside the point to listen to “D.M.S.R.” out of anything but the nearly-blown monitors inside an overheated First Avenue.) Even a massive, mainstream hit like “Little Red Corvette”—the first Prince song that charted higher on Billboard’s pop chart than the R&B one—begins as if it’s climbing out of a digital muck. “Delirious” sounds like it comes from a very sexual lab experiment that went exactly according to plan. The music is unfailingly funky while still remarkably controlled, precise in the way that a purposefully askew movie prop is precise.
And still, 1999 sprawls: ten of its 11 songs clock longer than five minutes, spiraling outward or, in the case of “Automatic,” locking into a long groove that asks, as we all have at one time or another, ‘What if the aliens fuck?’ It is exploratory without ever becoming impenetrable, “indulgent” but never boring. There is as always the tonal slipperiness that makes Prince’s music so rich to revisit: All the in-jokes and scathing subliminals of “All the Critics Love U In New York” come just two tracks after “Free,” which is marked by disarmingly sincere patriotism. Of course, there’s only one utterance of the word “sincere” on the album: “I sincerely wanna fuck the taste out of your mouth.”
The demos, alternate takes, and edits of 1999 album tracks, which are mostly confined to this set’s second disc, almost invariably give the impression that Prince and his bandmates arrived at the correct stopping point when assembling the final version of the record. But this reissue includes a number of truly essential B-sides from the album’s rollout, like the tender, piano-only “How Come You Don’t Call Me Anymore?” and the brief, buoyant “Horny Toad.” (Devoted fans will recognize songs like the stuttering “Purple Music,” which was included in live sets for years and has been floating around in various forms since the ‘90s; it also features “Moonbeam Levels,” which was first released on the posthumous greatest-hits album 4Ever.)
The final disc of the set, the audio from a concert that took place on November 30, 1982 in Detroit, is brimming with the energy that Prince routinely brought to stage. (Also included is a DVD of a show from a month later, in Houston.) And while there are more of those edits and alternate versions than almost any fan will want to wade through, some of these completely (or mostly) unheard songs, like the shimmering “Money Don’t Grow on Trees” or “Rearrange,” which cleverly juxtaposes a playful vocal with a serrated electric guitar, deliver what box sets of this kind almost never do: the thrill of discovery, the feeling that a genuinely great song is, at last, free.

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Producer Arthur Rizk’s band plays heavy metal in the traditional sense: catchy, operatic choruses and chugging riffs that you only need to hear once before you can air-guitar along.

Dreamkiller

Dreamkiller plays like the training montage soundtrack in an imaginary 1980s film where an unlikely, tormented protagonist faces terrible odds beneath a sky constantly on the verge of biblical rain. If this seems an oddly specific setting for a 35-minute metal album in 2022, then remember that Sumerlands is led by Arthur Rizk, the Philadelphia-based producer who’s had a hand in setting the atmosphere for many of the past decade’s most crucial heavy releases. With Sumerlands, he uses this gift for meticulous scene-setting to explore a very particular fantasy, building a dreamworld real enough to live inside.
This is heavy metal in the traditional sense: The songs have catchy, operatic choruses and chugging riffs that you only need to hear once before you can air-guitar along, all presented with a high-quality gloss so it doesn’t take much to imagine them blasting from the speakers in an arena. “We dance on the edge of a knife/So much closer to death than to life,” the quintet’s new vocalist Brendan Radigan commands in one of the record’s best choruses, with absolutely no context for why our situation is so urgent or precarious. And yet we know exactly what he’s talking about: In fact, we are right there with him—dancing, raging, defying mortality.
Accordingly, the pleasure of this music is somewhat counterintuitive to usual metrics of good taste. Between Rizk and guitarist John Powers, there is an unspoken agreement: Why let one note of a solo ring when you can embellish it with a ton of little hammer-ons? Why say “I’m feeling sad” when you could say “The stars have freed a million sorrows to the winds”? Should Radigan’s voice—a sharp blast of autumn wind, soaring through desert plains—be presented organically to showcase his natural talent? Not even remotely: It must be coated in unearthly effects so that when he harmonizes with himself it sounds like a keyboard on the church organ setting. Does a song called “Force of a Storm” that incorporates imagery of a “tempest” and “shelter lost” and people “cast into the fray” get the message across? Not without thunder sound effects to really seal the deal.
In other words, subtlety is not the goal. The musicianship is meant to inspire awe at the uncanny, studio-tweaked precision, and the words are meant to summon vast, eternal feelings. Innovation is not the point either. The familiarity and immediacy of the music are crucial to its appeal. At the same time, what other recent record sounds like this? Dreamkiller is too inspired, too heartfelt, to be filed away as mere pastiche. Compared to the doomier, Sabbath-indebted haze of 2016’s self-titled debut, Dreamkiller adopts a warmer tone, closer to classic rock. If the pleasure of Sumerlands was imagining the sound of some rejected demo tape unearthed in an old metalhead’s basement, then Dreamkiller aspires toward a kind of bargain-bin ubiquity. Songs like “Edge of a Knife” and “Twilight Points the Way” could have been hits in another era—singalongs for football stadiums, uniting the dorks and jocks in the bleachers.
Despite the big picture drama, Rizk uniquely understands the importance of nuance. Crucial choices in the production and arrangements keep the songs’ balance of ridiculousness and craftsmanship at an optimal level. Rizk has a Stratocasters Only rule in the studio (fed through Marshall stacks) but even those uninterested in the associated gear will note how joyfully each element blends into the mix: how the woozy, fiery solo hits three and a half minutes into the title track, or how the fade-in riff of “Night Ride” signals an evening filled with danger and adventure. On any given listen, any of these moments could feel like the climax. It’s a record built to be replayed, transforming us all into the leads in the action movie playing on loop somewhere deep in our subconscious.


After selling his gear and nearly abandoning music, the Finnish producer returns from the Arctic tundra with a terrifying portrayal of nature’s violence.

Rakka

An imagined pandemic salvaged the career of the elusive Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti. For nearly two decades as Vladislav Delay, Ripatti pulled together strands of minimal techno and beat-driven bombast, ambient glow and gnarly dissonance, making strange chimeras of oppositional moods. Delay’s best work, like 2000’s Multila, suggested hearing the thrum of a distant nightclub in some dangerous, unfamiliar land—enticing but ominous, as though reaching the source would be more trouble than it was worth.
After 2014’s sublime Visa earned his music a role alongside the likes of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Hildur Guðnadóttir in the soundtrack to The Revenant, Ripatti disappeared. As if balking at the prospect of wider success, he sold most of his studio equipment and retreated into isolated experimentation. “I seem to self-destruct,” he later admitted. During the last few years, though, Ripatti repeatedly ventured far above the Arctic Circle, to locations so remote the sun sometimes doesn’t rise or set for days or months on end. Those arctic hikes helped inform his score for Ivalo, a Finnish television series where a mysterious virus that makes people exceptionally evil takes root in the icy region and spreads.
Ripatti’s motifs for the show are what you might expect, like haunting electronic passages that suggest something monstrous and unspeakable or a curious pattern that reflects an investigator’s unresolved questions. But his experiences in the far North prompted Ripatti to consider the impact that such a harsh climate can have on a body and mind, how it can make simply living resemble an endless war, a struggle you will eventually lose. Rakka—his first album of new material in six years and the most compelling work of his career—is a breathless, terrifying newsreel about those battles with nature.
In recent years, a horde of producers have approximated the sensations of black metal, originally a bristling response to the pleasantries of Scandinavian society and the perils of its environment. From WIFE to Ben Frost and even Fuck Buttons, these experiments have often been fascinating and occasionally thrilling. But with Rakka, Delay comes closest to replicating the form’s primal frisson—that is, music that feels as ecstatic as it does existentially doomed. He harnesses the power of blast beats without actually using them and mines the urgency of screams without ever opening his mouth, getting to the core of black metal’s function without co-opting its form.
From end to end, Rakka thrives on instability and the fear it fosters. Its beats lock into a grid for only a minute or so at a time, allowing you just enough space to settle into a groove before dropping you into some cacophonous abyss. And its tones are so brittle that the sounds sometimes crumble like iron gone to rust, flaking into dust. “Rampa” slams between a minimal techno tick-tock and drum’n’bass bedlam during one 30-second span, between a rapturous nod to reggaeton and an industrial rush so acerbic it might make Prurient squirm during another. “Raajat” begins in a trance, its fluorescent hums swaddling arrhythmic paroxysms. But Delay slowly makes each element more severe, until the long tones suggest suffocation, the rhythms a fistfight. You fret over what comes next.
This unpredictability is a simulacrum for the harshest aspects of nature, the sort that threaten human survival in a million different ways. During “Raataja,” concussive bursts of jungle drums and sudden surges of curdled static cut across a pretty loop of pink noise, like barbaric gusts of wind during a snowstorm. Just when you adjust to the cycle, Delay sustains the fusillade, a tireless series of body blows. But they vanish in an instant, leaving you to reel from the whiplash. In the two seconds of silence before closer “Rasite” begins, you recognize just how severe and exhausting those six minutes had been. Even “Rasite,” which wants you to believe it is a comedown, is a feint, emitting slow sighs of placid sound that ultimately coil, like a snake ready to strike. Delay offers reprieves only for the glee of taking them away.
Many of the sounds here—eerie drones that hover like shadows, beats that are too big for their surroundings—recall Wolfgang Voigt’s recent work as GAS, especially 2018’s sprawling Rausch. But GAS’ records are forest baths in the dark, an invitation for immersion even if the night can seem a little scary. The environment that Rakka frames, however, wants to expel you without warning, pause, or mercy, if it cares about you at all. Here, nature’s very existence is a threat to your own.
Rakka is compelling no matter the context, a breathless cycle of terror and retreat that mirrors stresses as ancient as extreme climates and as modern as our frenetic news cycle. But it’s also accurate. I’ve spent extended chunks of the last five years in the woods—sometimes above the Arctic Circle, sometimes trudging through feet of snow on the rim of the Grand Canyon. I listened to Rakka for the first time without knowing anything about it and immediately found myself transported beyond my headphones and back to those wild places, intoxicated by the rush of circumstances that could have killed me. Thanks to the ubiquity of cameras capturing the world’s most isolated locales, you can now see what the world looks like from the side of some razor-thin, windswept perch in the Rockies; turn up Rakka and close your eyes, and I swear you can also understand how electrifying it feels.


The first collaborative EP from Young Thug and the producer Carnage is an intriguing proposition, and it’s dazzling at times. But it seems to scratch the surface of their potential chemistry.

Young Thug / Carnage / Young Stoner Life: Young Martha EP

Young Martha EP

The Guatemalan-American DJ and producer Carnage has been teasing Young Martha, his collaboration with Young Thug, since December. Meanwhile, Thug—perhaps owing to his ceaseless work flow—seemed practically unaware of the EP’s existence until recently. Carnage did a couple interviews behind the EP, and Thug, in turn, spared a few nondescript promotional tweets. (He did show up for the “Homie” video shoot, at least.) A lot can be gleaned from these respective levels of interest in the project. For Carnage, Thug presents an interesting challenge: an erratic and unruly MC who springs in and out of the pockets of the zaniest productions. For Thug, though, these are just B-sides. Beautiful Thugger Girls, his ambitious, oft-acoustic mixtape from June, was a lofty auteur’s gambit; the stakes are significantly lower here, a beta testing area for new flows.
Still, there was reason to be intrigued by this pairing. Young Thug is rap’s foremost eccentric; match him up with an unlikely beatmaker and the results are usually sublime. Carnage’s rap productions are often weird in their own right, wobbly things that buzz and drone. Young Martha isn’t a perfect marriage, or even the finest taste of their respective sounds, but it can be dazzling in spots. The four-track EP, which includes a year-old SoundCloud one-off, is just a small sampling of what we’ve come to expect from Thug—frantic inflections, screwball punchlines, unconventional mechanics. But Carnage gets a chance to stretch his legs a bit, too.
Young Thug entertains his wildest whims, a practice that has produced quite a bit of brilliance from the prolific artist. Carnage recently revealed that Thug “will go in the studio and finish 10 songs in a day,” and carries around a hard drive with over 1,000 of them. He described Thug as a “musical genius” who has so much material that he probably forgets many of the songs he’s recorded. One imagines that sessions for an EP like this offer an opportunity to experiment and push the limits of new cadences. At this point, Thug has so many it must be a bit like Seth MacFarlane doing voiceover work. The belching “Homie,” almost a variant of a flow on “Harambe,” and the unruffled hum on “Don’t Call Me” are broadcasts from two entirely different worlds. In a snap, without much effort, “10,000 Slimes” dissolves from a yodel into something resembling spoken word poetry.
The ebbs and shifts on Young Martha are all charming and ear-catching, but the writing isn’t as striking as anything Thug has done in the last 18 months. There are a handful of his characteristic, absurdist jabs, for example, “If a pussy nigga play with me/Swear to God, Kirk Franklin can’t save him” or “Put that fuckboy on the newspaper/In the sea with some tons strapped to his ankles.” But for the most part, his writing is less graphic than we’ve grown accustomed to. The issue isn’t just that he’s showing less; he’s both more indirect and less colorful. Some bars are strictly narration. He relies almost entirely on motion to keep songs going. Songs are built on filler, but when they kick into full gear, he rips through as if using muscle memory.
Carnage has worked with his fair share of rappers—Lil Uzi Vert, A$AP Ferg, and Lil Yachty among them—but Young Thug is by far the most dynamic artist he’s produced for, and on Young Martha he takes the opportunity to try on some new sounds. The jelly synths on “10,000 Slimes” are amorphous enough that Thug can adjust the swing of his rhythms without consequence. The cathedral organ on “Homie” and the church organ on “Liger” provide two contrasting tones and textures, and Thug tweaks his raps accordingly. Thug can push Carnage to take more risks, and Carnage can continue to expand Thug’s palette. The chemistry here might lead to a breakthrough, if nurtured. Carnage has already revealed that Young Martha will be a series, in the vein of the Slime Season trilogy, culminating in a collaborative album. There are reasons to look forward to future installments, but the first is merely scratching the surface.


Arriving at a moment when his worldwide stardom was in eclipse, this 1996 album was the most daringly personal statement of George Michael’s career.

Older (Super Deluxe)

In 1993, the Brazilian fashion designer Anselmo Feleppa died of an AIDS-related brain hemorrhage, and George Michael lost the love of his life. The couple had been together for only two years, although Michael would forever speak of them as his happiest. Dazed with loss, he sat down at a piano less than a year later in Notting Hill and was astonished to find a keening ballad, complete with lyrics and arrangements, fall in his lap. For a studio perfectionist like him, this was nothing short of a miracle. He’d already let two album cycles sail past him—a purported second volume to 1990’s Listen Without Prejudice and a duets project called The Trojan Souls—because his own material wasn’t up to his exacting standards. Yet barely a week after writing the song, which he called “Jesus to a Child,” Michael performed it at the Video Music Awards on MTV Europe, standing at the footlights and singing an undisguised paean to the man he loved, complete with lyrics that addressed the secrecy of their relationship: “Sadness in my eyes/No one guessed/No one tried.” “For anyone watching ’Jesus to a Child,’ I was coming out,” he said later. “For anyone who had a clue about any kind of symbolism, I was coming out.”
Of course, Michael’s sexuality, he would later deadpan, was the worst-kept secret in show business—it was rumored that Michael broke off his Sony contract after he heard Tommy Mottola mutter a gay slur under his breath when he thought the pop star was out of earshot. And yet in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” climate of the ’90s, it was expected that Michael would work to keep the secret and preserve the delicate fiction of his heterosexuality. Gay pop stars did not come out—unless circumstances conspired to out them, as they eventually did for Michael.
After he wrote “Jesus to a Child,” Michael found himself newly energized, and the second track he wrote, “Fastlove,” was, if anything, even more boldly autobiographical. Where “Jesus to a Child” was chaste and tender, “Fastlove” was unsentimental and frank: “All that bullshit conversation/Baby can’t you read the signs?” The subtext, for those bothering to parse it, was obvious. “It’s all about cruising,” Michael said in the Showtime documentary Freedom, which he worked on up until his death in 2016. “Blunting out that pain with fast love.” Even the BMW Michael mentioned in the lyrics was his own.
This track took him months to complete, which was more his typical pace. For years, Michael had been chasing synthesis as album delays mounted, seeking to merge the raw propulsion of his funky early dance tracks with the refinement and poise of his ballads on Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1. “Fastlove” represents that moment of fusion, running as fast and purring as softly as the sports car into which he silkily invites his lovers. With its sleek Patrice Rushen sample and Michael’s breathy vocal, the song was such a pure aphrodisiac that it was easy to miss the frank grief haunting the lyrics. “In the absence of security/I made my way into the night… I miss my baby tonight.”
Older was the most daringly personal statement of Michael’s career, and it arrived, not coincidentally, at a moment when his worldwide stardom was in eclipse. He’d always been elusive as a public figure: After releasing 1990’s Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, he refused to promote it in any way, which included appearing in his own videos. “Freedom! ’90,” the album’s biggest hit, was a middle finger to star machinery itself, and a grand-scale refutation of his role as pop savior. But perhaps because he was nearly a decade removed from superstardom, perhaps because he’d been partly undone by grief, he approached the songs on Older with an autobiographical abandon that makes the album unique in his slim discography. “Spinning the Wheel” openly addresses gay partnership during the AIDS crisis, with Michael’s narrator chiding a promiscuous partner for putting him in in danger. Like “Monkey,” the big hit from Faith in which Michael cajoled a partner to drop a dangerous drug habit, the song radiates compassionate anger.
Sex was never far from the surface of Michael’s music—this was the guy who inaugurated his solo career with a song that literally shouted “HOO-AH, sex!”—but apart from the occasional lusty outburst, it was often indistinguishable from melancholy, loneliness, or devotion. Sex, like grief, permeated shadow spaces in the psyche. It was a mood, a color, and it could haunt any moment of tenderness, familiarity, or desolation. On the title track, he sings the opening lines—“Strange, baby/Don’t you think I’m looking older?”—with the exact same melody and cadence as the “hot just like an oven” lines from Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing.” It was a self-conscious gesture from an artist who very badly wanted to write timeless music on par with his idols. But it was also a playful acknowledgement of a sort of carnality that rarely makes it onto the dancefloor: the heat of longtime familiarity, lust as expressed by an aging body.
The title alone was a bold statement. Older, in the world of pop music, is categorically the least interesting thing you can be. At least old represents a solid state, a fait accompli. Old can be a pose, a statement. Older is ongoing, humdrum, an ellipsis rather than an exclamation point. But Michael endeavored to reclaim this state, own it, make it sexy. The irony was that Michael was only 32 at the time, but he had the elegant remove of a bachelor in his fifties, and the mood of the Older ballads was straight out of Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.
Any reckoning with age brings with it intimations of mortality, and the pall of death hangs heavy over Older. “You Have Been Loved,” which Michael has called his favorite on the album, depicts a Catholic woman standing at the grave of her son, struggling with her faith. Again, the shadow subject is Anselmo—the senselessness of his loss, Michael’s own attempts to contend with his desolation. The lyrics are so wrenching and plainspoken, they scrape lows that are shocking for a pop song—“I’ve no daughters/I’ve no sons/Guess I’m the only one living in my life”—but the song rests on a redemptive note. “‘Take care, my love,’ she said/‘Don’t think that God is dead.’” If “Jesus to a Child” was the farewell—“The love we would have made/I’ll make it for two”—“You Have Been Loved” is the absolution. Few pop songs about the power of love leave such a cold shadow.
The deluxe package, which could swallow a living room floor when unfolded, unearths some genuine gold. Most notably for fans, EP-only and B-side tracks like the aching “Safe,” which suggested Michael was a Massive Attack fan, and the simmering, midtempo “You Know That I Want To” find a home outside of George Michael forums and unauthorized YouTube uploads for the first time. Michael’s own standards hamstrung his output, but the flip side of that precision means the few cast offs in his discography are bewilderingly perfect and finished-sounding.
The collected remixes add to the story of Michael as a quiet force in dance music even as he became more closely associated with dusky balladry. The “A/C Summer Remix” of “FastLove,” which features sultry sax tootling from Wham! collaborator and ’8os sax-cheese king Andy Hamilton, is welcome. But the nine-minute extended workout of “FastLove Pt. 2” is a revelation, a sparkling night highway of vocoder, arpeggiator runs, and bubbly synth pads.
There are some polite, restrained live versions of hits—“Freedom ’90,” retitled “Freedom ’94” here, shows none of the grit or fire of the studio original, even if Michael is in predictably fine voice. The same goes for a gospel choir-boosted rendition of “One More Try”: The vocal take captured on Faith remains Michael’s high point as a singer, a miracle of pristine tone and abandon. Michael’s perfectionism meant he was reliably excellent on stage, but spontaneity was never his strong point. He has always sounded most at home in the studio, where he could stone-cut to his painstaking and agonizing heart’s content.
Older’s commercial reception was muted, perhaps befitting an album that dealt with such weighty themes and held itself at such a cool remove from the pop marketplace. “Fastlove” peaked at No. 8 on the Hot 100, “Jesus to a Child” at No. 7, and that was more or less it for Michael, at least in America. On the fateful night of April 7, 1998, Michael would take a break from work to walk in Beverly Hills’ Will Rogers Memorial Park. A man named Marcelo Rodriguez approached Michael in a public restroom. Unbeknownst to Michael, Rodriguez was an undercover police officer on “potty patrol”—the properly humiliating name given to the ludicrous task of patrolling public restrooms for sexual activity. After he left the restroom, Michael found himself arrested for “lewd behavior.” He passed the time in his holding cell browsing a copy of the National Enquirer, brooding over the certainty that next week’s cover would carry his own face.
Michael handled the incident with unparalleled grace, appearing on multiple talk shows to discuss it. He expressed embarrassment over the incident but emphasized, over and over again, that he felt no shame. The secret was “out,” now: He no longer was obliged to maintain the delicate fiction. But for anyone with a clue, he had revealed himself to the world already, or at least to whoever was smart enough to listen, on his own terms.


Running his instrument through a bevy of effects, the virtuoso cellist summons a powerful, mesmerizing sound variously evoking shoegaze, classical minimalism, drone, and doom metal.

skins n slime

Oliver Coates was anointed a prodigy in the mid 2000s after notching up preposterous exam scores at London’s Royal Academy of Music. He has since shouldered the burden of excellence—embedding in lofty orchestras, accompanying Terry Riley and Steve Reich, scheming with fellow maverick Mica Levi—while hatching plans to vanquish the “Catholic-style guilt” that frightens virtuosos into musical obedience. In this spirit, the cellist occasionally spritzes out some outré dance music to dispel the musty air of academia. His 2018 album, Shelley’s on Zenn-La, did just that, drizzling puckish beats with heavily manipulated cello and lysergic synth globules.
On the records preceding skins n slime, Coates moved easily between genres yet tended to keep his superhero costumes—the classical virtuoso and the electronics whiz—on separate hangers. Any mix-and-matching occurred primarily in the arena of live solo performance. (Thanks to support slots with Radiohead and Thom Yorke, his arena of solo performance now includes actual arenas.) On stage, he plants a cello between his legs, feeds it through effects units and loopers, and summons currents of mourning and ecstasy. Skins n slime bottles the shows’ volcanic intensity by galvanizing raucous shoegaze, minimalist classical, macabre drone, and lashings of plutonic metal, despite rarely reaching for more than a few instrumental elements.
To promote the album, Coates playfully coined a “pastoral metal” hashtag, which feels about right: On songs like “Butoh Baby,” wing-beating melodies soar over scorched-earth synth that channels both wraithlike black metal and the low-end abrasion of sludge and drone. While Coates favors simple, stately toplines, the record’s underbelly suggests fathomless depths; instead of sprawling outward, like Shelley’s on Zenn-La, the songs pirouette before plunging into the abyss. The album’s splicing of beauty and horror invokes the morbid logic of Greek mythology, where stirrings of triumph tend to foreshadow nasty surprises.
The “slime” of the album title is another Coates neologism, describing what he calls “a viscous and melting approach to live sound” employed on three songs. The base ingredient is a slow, improvised melody on overdriven cello. At predetermined intervals, automated loops and reversals crash back in waves, washing the song into harmonic flux. The flirtation with chance may sound suspiciously academic—like a sort of anti-virtuosity flex—but Coates pulls it off: Doused in chorus and distortion, the slime of “Caregiver part 2 (4am),” “Caregiver part 5 (money),” and the Fenneszian “Reunification” adds a celestial sheen to the album’s peaks.
Coates takes almost sadistic pleasure in contorting, abrading, vaporizing, ensliming, and otherwise transmogrifying the instrument he has played since childhood. One moment, the primordial howl of “Caregiver part 5 (money)” evokes a bagpipe elegy bending through Highland winds; the next, it could be a shoegaze fragment wondrously magnified, as if you were peering down a microscope at autopsied My Bloody Valentine spangle. On “Butoh Baby” and “Caregiver part 1 (breathing),” one or two beatific melodies circle the brink of a crescendo, only for the would-be finale to snag and loop. Like an opera director mercilessly drilling a climax, Coates perpetually re-enacts these flashes of joy until, after a while, they feel like one long expression of melancholy.
Coates wrapped the album last Christmas in Glasgow, working in those graveyard hours when, he says, “caregiver” cleaners would materialize to sweep away the night’s excess. Something in the album’s contrasts—its synthesis of infinite drone and infinitesimal melodies—evokes the grandeur of those small acts. Healing overtones ring clearest on “Honey,” a blaze of cello in six parts, reminiscent of the palliative techno popular at European dance festivals. In the hands of crowd-pleasing DJs, this brand of endorphin-balancing ambience sends hectic ravers peacefully into the night. Coates, by contrast, omits the rousing beats and renders his strings as beams of distortion that radiate an angelic glow. The song’s gentle repetition does not leave you content, but rather as a visitation might: stunned, faintly spooked, yet convinced, in the way you can feel a sneeze coming, that profound change is imminent.

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On their second collaborative album, the Toronto saxophonist and Vancouver singer find common ground in the beauty of mundane moments and minuscule gestures.

Joseph Shabason / Nicholas Krgovich: At Scaramouche

At Scaramouche

Joseph Shabason and Nicholas Krgovich are ideal musical counterweights. On their second collaborative album—following 2020’s excellent trio record with guitarist Chris Harris—the Toronto saxophonist and Vancouver singer balance each other’s occasionally opposing impulses. Both artists are fascinated by the beauty of mundane moments and minuscule gestures, but Krgovich brings a Zen-like tidiness to his lyrics, while Shabason playfully messes with ambient music, art-rock, and adult contemporary. By significantly expanding the cast of contributors, At Scaramouche dances past the quiet contemplation of their debut, rediscovering the collective joys of being with other people. Yet even when their squiggly grooves lift off the ground, Krgovich’s plain-spoken koans keep his feet planted.
Though it was recorded before the pandemic, Shabason, Krgovich, and Harris’s Philadelphia unwittingly anticipated the periods of isolation that lay ahead. After demoing the songs remotely, they worked up the music in a series of brief studio sessions where Krgovich wrote his lyrics on the spot. His songs about practicing the Japanese tradition of year-end deep cleans or embracing the boredom of being stuck in traffic made those experiences sound like epiphanies, but they also sounded deeply lonely. It took the Talk Talk-esque “I Don’t See The Moon,” where the three musicians’ voices harmonized into one, for SKH to make good on the album’s themes of togetherness.
In comparison, At Scaramouche sounds like a lively, social affair. On the burbling groove of “In the Middle of the Day,” Krgovich’s whisper-soft voice is joined by the luminous Dorothea Paas and Chris A. Cummings, accentuating lyrics that patiently stretch across instrumental bars. They cited Japanese new age as a key influence on the largely beatless Philadelphia, while this album is propelled by the lithe rhythms and electronic programming of Kieran Adams, a drummer for U.S. Girls and The Weather Station, among countless others. Guitarist Thom Gill and bassist Bram Gielen—two of the Toronto musicians invited by Owen Pallett to play on the Mountain Goats’ 2019 album In League With Dragons—tip the busier songs, fleshed out with tasteful flourishes of trumpet, lap steel, and vibraphone, into full-band territory.
Shabason may still be best known for his work with Destroyer on 2011’s Kaputt, where he surprised many listeners—including himself—by making the sax sound cool again. Since that influential album, the Hogtown horn player has become increasingly experimental in his many solo projects and collaborations. At Scaramouche includes audacious musical decisions such as the electronic wind instruments of “What Comes Back,” venturing into an uncanny valley like the MIDI trumpets of Destroyer’s Your Blues. On the album’s second side, “Soli II” and “Templeton Park” both feature overstuffed arrangements that softly sway as they melt in the sun. It’s possible to imagine the album’s sequencing as a chronological narrative: The players seem to slow down as day becomes night, eventually collapsing into a mess of limbs and instruments.
While the music of At Scaramouche is more densely packed than Philadelphia, Krgovich’s lyrical preoccupations remain small in scope as he visits the former location of a childhood McDonald’s or returns to the dog park day after day. Like Phil Elverum wringing meaning from a screening of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Krgovich makes references to Grimace or Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime show sound personal and poetic. Only occasionally, when he name-drops the album’s guitar player or sings about Destroyer .wav files, do the inside jokes become alienating. On the two songs that star his poodle Shelley (“Templeton Park” and the wonky motorik pop highlight “I Am So Happy With My Little Dog”), he shares a feeling of gratitude for the “little muppet” that helps get him out of his head. Krgovich might want a break from his inner monologues, but with songs like this to accompany them, they become universal meditations.


On their fifth album, the White Stripes' ambitions finally seem to outpace their limited musical vocabulary. Making an almost-entirely clean break with the jet-fueled blues-rock of Elephant and De Stijl, they forsake electric guitar on all but a couple of tracks, working instead with pianos, acoustic guitars, marimbas, and other assorted oddball percussion.

Get Behind Me Satan

White Stripes fans have always known that the time would eventually come when Jack White's abilities and ambitions would outpace the duo's deliberately limited musical vocabulary. And while it may be too soon to proclaim that fated day to be at hand, there are definitely signs on their bold, bewildering fifth album, Get Behind Me Satan, that Jack might be beginning to strain a bit at his self-fashioned yoke.
As far back as their Sympathy for the Record Industry days, the Stripes have been a considerably stranger act than is generally acknowledged-- their tender, borderline-twee childhood narratives, Cole Porter allusions, and dogged devotion to white tees and Santa pants have flown in the face of a garage-punk orthodoxy largely dictated by the iconography of 50s-era B-movies and trashy pulp paperbacks.
Still, the group's past digressions were only faint foreshadowing compared to the ones that populate Get Behind Me Satan. Here Jack and Meg have made an almost-entirely clean break with the jet-fueled blues-rock of Elephant and De Stijl, forsaking electric guitar on all but a couple of tracks to instead work with pianos, acoustic guitars, marimbas, and other assorted oddball percussion.
But even with this reconfigured instrumentation, the Stripes can't resist finding new ways to place unnecessary constrictions onto their work, as evidenced by the fact that Get Behind Me Satan was written, recorded, and released at an extreme breakneck pace. As legend has it, none of these tracks were even fully written before the band entered Third Man Studios in March, and unfortunately, several songs bear the scars of their needlessly rushed delivery. Although raw, combustible immediacy has always been a part of the White Stripes' charm, at some point Jack's desire for spontaneity could resemble sheer cussed laziness, and here the duo have granted a discouraging amount of real estate to what feel like unfinished sketches or works-in-progress.
Jack has cryptically described these songs as an exploration of "characters and the ideal of truth," which apparently can be translated to despair-- and lots of it. There's none of the sunny, innocent optimism of "Apple Blossom" or "We're Going to Be Friends" to leaven Satan's mood; virtually every track drips with loneliness, alienation, and betrayal. Even the album's most outwardly playful song, the bluegrass-tinged "Little Ghost", features a narrator so desperate in his isolation that he falls in love with an apparition. ("When I held you I was really holding air.")
Still, a slight sting of venom appears to suit Jack well, and-- perhaps as testament to his time spent with Loretta Lynn-- Satan finds him delivering his most expressive and nuanced vocal performances to date. Oddly, two of the album's most jarring tracks are among the few to feature electric guitar. The opening "Blue Orchid" maintains the Stripes' impressive streak of stellar singles, as Jack's wild falsetto and processed, strangely electronic-sounding guitar combine for a heightened, spiteful crunch that's unlike anything they've ever done. And even that sounds tame compared to the accusatory "Red Rain", on which the singer-- his voice thick with quavering distortion-- angrily confronts his betrayer ("If there's a lie/ Then there's a liar too/ And if there's a sin/ Then there's a sinner too") with a spellbinding intensity, while a lurching floor of chiming toy bells and Hawaiian slide guitar spins beneath him.
Also exceptional is "My Doorbell", a strutting piano soul number that contains the album's most immediately nagging melodic hook over Meg's effectively funky cavewoman stomp. Meg also contributes surprisingly subtle hand percussion to the quietly self-loathing folk of "Ugly As I Seem"-- a song that illustrates that the gulf separating Jack from freak-folk artists like Six Organs' Ben Chasny or Devendra Banhart may not be as wide as it seems-- and what sounds like tympani to the majestic "Take, Take, Take", an ambitious, Who-like piece that follows an obsessive fan as he asks one favor too many of Rita Hayworth. Unfortunately, tracks like "The Nurse" crumble beneath closer scrutiny, due to their over-emphasis on clever interior rhyming ("the maid that you've hired could never conspire to kill") and soft-focused melodies that never seem able to make their way to the exits.
Other misfires include "Forever for Her (Is Over for Me)" and "I'm Lonely (But I Ain't That Lonely Yet)", two great titles that undoubtedly deserve better treatment than they're given here, and the mercifully brief "Passive Manipulation" which again begs the gentle suggestion that Meg not be allowed to sing lead.
Even with a generous handful of tracks that easily rank alongside the White Stripes' best work, Get Behind Me Satan remains a confounding record, one that wears its "transitional album" tag like a heavy peppermint-striped crown. One can't help but feel that if perhaps the White Stripes had seen fit to take the necessary time to give cuts like "Forever for Her" or "The Denial Twist" a sincere revision or two, we might've been looking at a stone classic. As it stands, there's more than enough here to give Stripes fans cause to celebrate, although it may not inspire much faith that the duo will ever find the patience necessary to deliver upon their promising new innovations.


Drake affiliate and OVO signee PARTYNEXTDOOR follows up his biggest hit, penning Rihanna's summer jam “Work,” with his most assured and confident work yet.

PARTYNEXTDOOR 3 (P3)

As an aspiring songwriter, Jahron Brathwaite signed a publishing deal with Warner/Chappell at 18. The songs the Mississauga-born artist wrote for other artists before assuming the moniker PARTYNEXTDOOR never found much traction, but after darkening his sound Brathwaite caught the ear of OVO co-founder Oliver El-Khatib in early 2013. Fast-forward a few months and his vocals were floating in the background on Drake’s Nothing Was the Same. Since then, Brathwaite has become one of Drake’s closest collaborators, with writing credits and/or appearances on each of his last three solo releases. Earlier this year, Brathwaite scored his first Billboard No. 1, penning Rihanna’s humid Drake-featuring summer jam “Work,” which spent nine consecutive weeks at the top of the charts.
The island vibes of “Work” soak Brathwaite’s third studio album, PARTYNEXTDOOR 3. The album helps prove he’s a lot more than just Drake’s patois advisor. Clothes that don’t quite fit his boss feel effortlessly tailored to Brathwaite: “You heard a lot about Jamaicans, and you wanna know what it’d be like,” he sings with an infectious assuredness on “Don’t Know How;” “Only U” is three minutes of sweat and anticipation erected on top of a skeletal swing; on the cavernous “Not Nice,” he expresses his need to “hold the corner and then slow whine it.” The way physical pleasures intertwine with emotional turmoil encompasses most of Brathwaite’s focus on the album—in Brathwaite’s world, sex is not as a shortcut to intimacy but a reflection of it, even if he has a tendency to latch onto carnality in the absence of intimacy.
Given the time PARYNEXTDOOR 3 dedicates to the aftermath of infidelity, that’s pretty often. “Come and See Me” is tuned to more a nuanced frequency, disguising a lament about uneven give-and-take in a relationship in the clothes of an “R U up?” booty-call anthem. Unfortunately, he’s not always as tuned to his partners. “Why do you act like I’m sexist or something, just for calling you sexy?” Brathwaite asks with genuine confusion on “Nothing Easy to Please,” a line suggesting some of his relationship woes might stem from not understanding women quite as well as he thinks. When he claims that “she knows what I have to calm her down” on “Don’t Run,” it’s both a reference to his sexual prowess and the mindful attention of a supportive partner.
Once again, helping elevate Brathwaite’s lust is his production. He tucks unexpected elements in spots they may go unnoticed at first—you might not catch the whistling littered throughout “You’ve Been Missed” until the fifth listen, but once registered, it’s just another memorable hook amongst a litany of others. These are the rewards of a studio rat given free reign, where awe is found in the novel arrangement of sounds in space.
PARTYNEXTDOOR 3 is stuffed with such moments: the random drops of water punctuating “High Hopes;” the rusted pipes that act as percussion on “Nobody;” the Carlos Santana-esque guitars that weave in and out of “Spiteful. ”And then there’s “Brown Skin,” which could go toe to toe with anything from Fade to Mind’s catalog, and Brathwaite never once sounds unsure of his footing on the track’s ever-shifting surface.
The downside: left unchecked, this freedom can devolve into self-indulgence. There’s absolutely no need for opener “High Hopes” to be over seven minutes long, and on “Problems & Selfless” the atmosphere crosses the line that separates intoxicating from suffocating. When Brathwaite decides to let a song breathe, though, it usually works to his advantage, giving something that clicks room to simmer a bit longer without overstaying its welcome.  On P3, he has earned the right to stretch the edges of a sound that now feels uniquely his.


The expansive debut from the Berlin-based artist features many guests from the fringes of ambient electronic music. It’s a crinkly, supple, meditative opus.

Dust Devil

Across Dust Devil, a notionally ambient electronic double album, Naemi—a Kansan now based in Berlin—crafts songs that rise and fall gently. Each one has a strong point of view but a brittle feel, like they began as sharp statements before the producer whittled them away to nothing. Indeed, like weather.gov says rather poetically about the tornado-like phenomenon that gives the album its name, each song arrives in a haze and when “depleted or the balance is broken,” “will break down and dissipate.” It’s a soft and magical album, big on ambition and small in scale, which is, in my opinion, the proper amount of each.
Naemi, who previously produced under the name Exael, is a member of a loose crew of musicians from Kansas and beyond—most notably Ulla and Huerco S., both of whom appear on the album—working in the more expansive side of electronic music. Expect to hear sweeping vistas of sound, ping-ponging synths, slow laser beams melting across muffled hi-hats, acoustic guitars weaponized into fractal dissonance. These decrepit acoustics share the anti-melody principles of no wave music but not the abrasiveness. The album is quirky, but it’s easy to listen to. Suppleness is part of the approach.
Dust Devil is the opus of this sound, with Naemi gathering together a murderer’s row of young experimentalists as featured guests, talented people who dot the Bandcamps of Motion Ward or 3 X L, whose label head, Shy, appears on this album. They perform an array of musical talents, spoken-word poetry, strumming an acoustic guitar, or cooing the sweetest of nothings over beats that gurgle, buzz, and pulse.
The album opens with “It Feels So Good” featuring “Erika”—who is also known as the fairly popular R&B musician Erika de Casier; so much more well known is she than the rest of the artists it feels like they thought it would be gauche to use her full name—a hazy sweep of sound. The song could easily have been an instrumental; alone it would be a nice piece of ambient music, made of the gentlest version of something between a baby whale’s call and the digitized sound of a trumpet mixed with a harp-like digital twinkle. But with de Casier’s singing, which she does slow and soft enough that she’s almost whispering, the song turns from relaxing to seductive. Brian Eno could never. “It Feels So Good” is likely the closest thing the album has to a “song.” It’s a smart choice to have it open the album, a proper immersion into the album’s warmth before journeying onto the next 13 songs which blur together as they flit in and out of cohesion. Ideas are developed, actualized, and abandoned. There’s not always a ton of development, but not much preciousness either; curiosity reigns.
Despite coming from an electronic music scene, Naemi feels less like a techno producer than a collage artist; imagine an avant-garde take on J Dilla, with crinkles. Texture is substance here; style (or, more specifically, genre) feels largely besides the point. Technically, the production work sweeps between folksy emo (like on the quiet “Day Drifter” with Perila and Ben Bondy’s moody guest track, “Pretty Girl 4K Drone”), trip-hop (the backbeat-heavy “Couch Angel” with Arad Acid and Huerco S.), techno (the anxiously Baeleric “Olivia Prime” with Jason Graf), and an obliterated ambient track that, in principle, is essentially doom metal minus the drums (“Milau” with Zoe Darsee). Tying things together are the tracks’ rise and fall; each fade-out and fade-in arrives quickly, offering a new type of sound but within the same foggy parameters. No sound, whatever its origins, is left crisp. The dust devil brings us on a joyride across the sky before depositing us safely back on the ground.
I listened to the album on the subway one morning. I was on the way to therapy and it was a good soundtrack for gathering my splintered thoughts. At Chambers Street, I was up to track nine, “Ambrosia,” a laid-back neo-soul-ish number with what sounds like a live drum kit and soft singing in Spanish by Daniel Rincón, who goes by NAP. It sounds like something David Lynch would love. The doors opened and a lot of people exited and a few entered, including a man playing muffled rap music straight out of his phone’s speaker and two women pushing a rolling cart wearing headset microphones connected to a small speaker, which they used to offer food, juice, and prayer to all who needed. All the subway clamor blended with the music in a way that felt supernatural, snatches of sound burnished with an elevated aura by their transient nature. I didn’t ask for a prayer because I didn’t need one. I’m not saying Dust Devil is holy music, but I’m not saying it’s not.


Fucked Up guitarist Ben Cook is also a pop poet, and the third album from his nostalgic indie-pop project recalls the grainy, jangly melodicism of college rock.

GUV I

Ben Cook wears dark, chunky sunglasses when he performs as his indie-pop act, Young Guv. Put one way, his thick, plastic rims are shorthand for his musical inspirations—Elvis Costello’s effusive power-pop, the Gallaghers’ psychedelic glam rock. But paired with the hazy tracks on Young Guv’s third LP, GUV I, the frames serve as a disguise: Forget about Ben Cook, guitarist for Toronto hardcore icons Fucked Up. For 23 minutes, Cook transports himself to a simpler time, one that may exist only in indie rom-coms, when watching clouds go by or lying around in bed amounted to romance. But maybe that’s reading too much into it; maybe, on an album bursting with sunshine, the shades are simply a practical choice.
Young Guv’s version of nostalgia is less a carbon copy of a particular genre or decade than a drive-by tour of archetypes. Where 2015’s Ripe 4 Luv or last year’s 2 Sad 2 Funk respectively leaned into yacht rock’s theatrics and nu-disco’s syrupy synths, GUV I recalls the grainy, jangly melodicism of college rock. From the opening movie clip about dropping out of society to the tambourine that kicks off “A Boring Story,” it’s easy to imagine these songs spinning on a dusty college-radio turntable, or blasting from the middle of the quad on a bright spring day.
Cook isn’t shy with his references. “Every Flower I See” is a love letter delivered with an earnestness to match its ringing cymbals and fuzzy major chords, and the first line of the chorus—“Don’t go now”—brings to mind a similarly gushy refrain from Teenage Fanclub. Though anyone with a passing knowledge of C86 will hear plenty that rings familiar, GUV I still manages to find new shades within power-pop’s broader palette. The somber acoustic guitar and vocal harmony of “Roll With Me” feels like an Elliott Smith cover band, until a metallic guitar halfway through takes the track on a dreamier path. The bluesy harmonica on “A Boring Story” adds a playful detour to an otherwise slow and ambling closer.
But such diversions from the formula are the exceptions on a largely homogeneous record. Even at only 23 minutes, the songs start to blend together—ringing guitars and reverb-distorted vocals can only combine in so many ways before they start to resemble the Byrds’ Pandora station. At times GUV I can feel like indie rock cosplay, especially coming from a shapeshifter like Cook. When an artist genre-hops with such agility and totality, with titles and performances as goofy as Young Guv’s can be, it’s harder to lose yourself in the familiar comforts of a fuzz pedal and a charmingly off-key vocal. Even so, there’s an ease to the mimicry; the chiming chords on “High On My Mind” sound like the Bats, and the Bats sound like a laconic Saturday afternoon.
Moreover, Cook is a pop poet—his credits as a ghostwriter for artists like Sum 41 and Taylor Swift outshine his heavier origins here—and his sweetly romantic lyrics and “yeah yeahs” are a natural fit for dusty guitars. His lovelorn anxiety can feel nostalgic in itself: “I am rocky waters/And you are crystal clear,” he sings on “Patterns Prevail,” as if matters of the heart could be so black and white. His most memorable lyrics are just quirky enough to stand out, yet general enough to attach to any romance. “Do you ever watch the clouds while remembering me?” he asks, gently hopeful. As a refrain, it’s awkward—a bit wordy, a bit stoned. But for members of the New Sincerity crowd who own too many band tees, that’s not such a bad thing.


Following the dissolution of the jazz-funk duo Yussef Kamaal, the London keyboardist returns with an urbane, dynamic album that’s deeply rooted in the city’s rhythms.

The Return

Walk the streets of South London and you might catch Kamaal Williams cruising the concrete in a customized Chevy Impala. His swaggering brand of cool-hand jazz makes for potent lowrider fuel—the cosmic keys and snappy drums could tempt even Roy Ayers to ride shotgun. This is music that connects Camberwell to Cali, not just in its affinity for the pioneering cats of classic West Coast sounds but its spiritual kinship to Kamasi Washington, Ryan Porter, Terrace Martin, Thundercat, and other latter-day LA artists. Spanning both sides of the Atlantic, this kaleidoscopic vision of jazz comes cut with a motley set of groovy throwback influences.
Williams (who also produces soulful house as Henry Wu) first laid out his smooth remit alongside drummer Yussef Dayes in the duo Yussef Kamaal. The pair’s still-great 2016 album Black Focus seamlessly blended jazz, funk, boogie, Afrobeat, and hip-hop in a way that captured the culturally diverse districts of the English capital. In doing so, Yussef Kamaal positioned themselves alongside the likes of Shabaka Hutchings, Zara McFarlane, and the Ezra Collective as old-school-minded Londoners who made music that gloriously distilled the city’s plurality. Against the acidic backdrop of Brexit-era Britain, where the struggles of immigrants and institutional hostility toward people of color have been so brutally laid out by the Grenfell Tower tragedy and Windrush scandal, Yussef Kamaal’s music felt like a small antidote to the malignancy stirring in the UK’s soul.
Yet the group’s excellence manifested just once. They split last year, the break so sudden that Williams and Dayes didn’t even fulfill all their gigging commitments as a duo. And now we have The Return, which could easily be the sequel to Black Focus—at least, that seems to be Williams’ pitch. The album artwork and fonts match. He even named his label Black Focus! Most importantly, the music maintains the same softly bumpin’ style, even without Dayes by his side.
As soon as Williams’ celestial keys begin to percolate and swirl on the opening “Salaam,” it’s clear that little has changed. The track’s silky chords and sluggish grooves satisfy like a cold beer in the summertime, with the 1970s R&B flavor highlighting Williams’ eagerness to venture a couple degrees further away from jazz than he did on Black Focus. Hearing the young virtuoso contort classic genres to his will is thrilling. And while Dayes’ rasping drumming—so key to Black Focus’ hippest jams, like “Lowrider” and “Joint 17”—is missed, newly recruited percussionist MckNasty offers his own urbane rhythms. The ethos of “Catch the Loop” is right there in the title: The rubbery bassline and crisp drums, evoking the spirit of the funky practitioner Dr. Lonnie Smith, are just begging rap producers to come snatch a sample.
Much of The Return highlights Williams as a master arranger. On “Broken Theme,” the off-kilter drums and keys sound like they’ve been beamed in from two completely different planets, yet every few seconds, they snap into line, bringing balance to the wild freak-out. The calming “Medina,” meanwhile, is the song most rooted in the tradition of basement jazz clubs. The serene mood is as timeless as whiskey and bitters, and Williams caresses the keys like he has all the time in the universe.
Should you be looking for flaws, there are a couple of strange decisions. “Rhythm Commission” could have been an album highlight had it been given room to breathe, but the two-and-a-half minute running time is barely enough to let the funk sink in. “The Return” swoons with string-led orchestration reminiscent of Jon Brion’s arrangements on Kanye West’s Late Registration, but at just 66 seconds long, the track begs to be developed into a full-bodied number. There was room for this album to grow.
Williams’ ambition appears to have been to present himself as belonging to the same continuum as Yussef Kamaal while establishing himself as a solo artist. Job done. Yet The Return does even more. It’s a sweet snapshot of London 2018—an encapsulation of a newly brewing jazz community, uniting numerous cultural strands that make up the city. When the scene needed him most, Kamaal Williams returned to show the way.


With restless vocals and shapeshifting beats, the Harlem rapper’s new mixtape innovates on the chaotic sound of rage-rap.

New Jazz

A majority of the rappers who have treated Whole Lotta Red like the Bible have misunderstood something fundamental about Playboi Carti’s album: It isn’t cool just because of its self-mythologizing spirit. Sure, Carti flexed the same expensive brands you could find at Dover Street Market and also really, really wanted us to know that he gives no fucks, but that’s where the music starts, not ends. WLR is a sensory overload where the beats are loud and explosive, but also extremely intricate; his producers treat this vortex of flows with the same attention to detail that billy woods brings to his lyrics. In the two and a half years since its release, nobody has gotten particularly close to recapturing its magic, though a new rapper tries to do that basically every week. The handful of noteworthy mixtapes that have come in its wake have pushed the style forward rather than recycled it as their own, like Yeat’s 4L or Yung Kayo’s DFTK. Lunchbox’s New Jazz, which dabbles in a big and chaotic sound that has been loosely labeled rage-rap, should be added to that list.
Nearly five years ago, Lunchbox made his name as the teenage Harlem producer who helped shape the grimy yet booming atmosphere of Sheck Wes’ Mudboy, an album that holds up better for its beats than its raps these days. Lunchbox has AutoTune experiments on his SoundCloud page that go back to 2017, yet it wasn’t until he locked in with producers Mowz, Dulio, and Amir that his style came alive. Those three have their fingerprints all over the 23 songs on New Jazz. Its title could signal Lunchbox’s desire to separate his music from the oversaturated scene of rage-rap, but his offbeat and inventive take on the style does that better than any title could.
Lunchbox has taken a backseat as a producer, but he still has the ear of one. He’s well-versed enough in the subgenre to tweak its loopy rhythms and arrangements; vocally, he is restless, rarely ever staying in one tune or mood for long. He broods, then is turnt; sometimes he’s heartbroken, other times he’s so stoned that he forgets about it. On “Healin’,” he repeats the sung hook “I been through pain, I been healing” three times, the AutoTune intensifying with each subsequent line. That final mutation of “healing” stings. With “Matter,” he raps nearly every word with a different flow, lingering on certain syllables for no real reason other than catchiness. His improvisation lacks the range of Young Thug or Carti, but he’s still able to surprise, even within his vocal limits. Maybe it’s because he has a naturally deep and scratchy voice that isn’t entirely malleable, but is cold when he stretches it, like the high notes on “We Aint/He Say She Say.” The flow switches hit you like an unexpected electric shock—and they all happen on songs that are barely over a minute and a half.
The beats are a doozy, too. Particularly Amir’s, which go from zero to warp speed, and sound like different stages of a robot overheating. Like Working on Dying’s F1lthy and BNYX, Amir is a real wizard with synths. There are songs where synth pads gradually bloom as they go, and others where they abruptly morph. The strongest moments include “Who Dat Is,” which feels like two different beats are playing over each other at the same time; “Feel Things,” where the synths are a shade darker and a nice backdrop for Lunchbox’s dramatic lilts; and finally, “Get Me,” where the beat switch-up and nostalgic sample feel blissful. His beats are so immediately identifiable, it’s easy to check out on the couple of tracks without his touch—they are just underwhelmingly standard.
For the most part, New Jazz is exciting. You don’t even always know what Lunchbox is going on about—he gets high, doesn’t trust folks, gets to the bag, you know—but the meticulousness of the melodies and beats goes a long way. It’s the music of a rapper infatuated with the nuts and bolts of rage enough to know what works, what’s played-out, what needs to be reshaped, or lost altogether. Lunchbox is aware that the music needs to hit more than anything else, and that it’s not just a pathway to sell merch to suckers. Now that’s actually cool.


A new anthology uncovers a forgotten history from early 1980s Olympia: a set of playful, experimental, wholly original recordings based on skeletal multi-tracking and looped vocals.

American Rituals

Think of the music of Olympia, Washington, and a familiar history unfolds: Beat Happening and Kill Rock Stars, riot grrrl and a young Nirvana. A heavyweight legacy, but these well-told stories also have a habit of bulldozing the smaller, slighter histories that came before. In fact, the Olympia of the early 1980s was a wide-open creative space where a loose community of DIY musicians drifted across the borders of sound art, new-age music, modern composition, and free improvisation. American Rituals uncovers one of these all but forgotten histories: a set of playful, experimental, wholly original recordings made in the early ’80s by Cheri Knight, a music composition student at Olympia’s Evergreen State College.
Hailing from Western Massachusetts, Knight grew up in a musical family, playing piano and clarinet before her head was turned by the music and ideas of John Cage. Through her studies she discovered the possibilities of synthesis and met the composer Pauline Oliveros, whose philosophy of deep listening proposed new ways of understanding and experiencing sound. But you get the sense, listening to American Rituals, that the real genesis of Knight’s music was the access she was granted to Evergreen’s on-campus recording studio. You can hear her formulating her own musical language using just her voice and simple instrumentation, fashioning a unique sound world out of loops and layers.
Knight utilizes a range of sounds on American Rituals: guitar and bass, piano and chimes, rhythms beaten out by hands or on struck metal. But her voice is at the root of her music. On pieces like “Hear/Say” or “Primary Colors”—they’re less songs than chants or mantras—Knight multitracks her voice and weaves it into tessellating patterns. Some of her music adopts the dry tone of an educational text: On “Prime Numbers” she counts upwards, her vocals panned hard left and right, accompanied by music with a faintly post-punk feel; padding drums and shard-like intrusions of guitar brings to mind a band like the Raincoats. But the track also evokes one of those animated musical interludes you might see on an old episode of Sesame Street, a half-remembered earworm both comforting and strange.
As part of her academic work, Knight spent time at New York’s Zen Arts Center and studied Buddhism. Her music doesn’t generally express spiritual themes, but there’s a devotional sensibility to American Rituals, an underlying sense of mindful practice. “Tips on Filmmaking,” the album’s best track, blends chants, handclaps, and dancing marimba to sound like music from a peaceful ashram. “Breathe” takes the form of a meditation exercise—breathe in, breathe out. Still, there are none of the dizzier nostrums common to new-age music. American Rituals feels relatively clear-headed, guided by an academic sensibility.
There is an umbilical link between Cheri Knight and a later generation of independent music from the Pacific Northwest. The selections on American Rituals first came out on regional compilations and cassettes like 1981’s Dub Communiqué, compiled by Steve Fisk—later producer of Nirvana and Screaming Trees. (That compilation also featured a track by one Bruce Pavitt, who around this time had recently started work on his own zine, Subterranean Pop—the rest is history). On another timeline Knight might have slotted into this burgeoning Pacific Northwest alternative history, but life took a different route. She moved back to rural Massachusetts, where she lived on a farm and raised goats. She still played music now and again, but the playful, experimental sounds compiled here gradually passed into memory.
American Rituals feels of a piece with other recent rediscoveries made by Freedom to Spend and its parent label, RVNG Intl.—releases such as Ursula LeGuin and Todd Barton’s Music and Poetry of the Kesh, or avant-garde autodidacts like Anna Homler aka the Breadwoman, whose sonic explorations sprang from somewhere instinctual and personal. As an anthology, American Rituals is relatively lean, collecting just seven tracks in 40 minutes. But what’s here is worth treasuring: the sound of an artist with a bit of learning and a lot of vision, breathing a new sound to life.


On the American Music Club frontman's best solo album since 2001's The Invisible Man, Mark Eitzel's tone, formerly accusatory, has softened and turned inward. He revels in the inner elements of his voice rather than growling over them, and sounds more natural and inviting than ever.

Don't Be a Stranger

There's something fascinating about how singers' voices change as they come to terms with their innate gifts and limits, honing in on whatever is essential about themselves. Sometimes it happens by slow erosion, like Leonard Cohen's voice growing less beautiful and more wise, or the brass leaching off Richard Buckner's to reveal a deeper layer. Sometimes it happens through trauma, as when Levon Helm lost his voice to throat cancer and then miraculously got it back, intact but scarred, giving his old songs a second life. And sometimes, a vocalist who has been feigning something gathers the courage to be himself: Think of how Ghostface has relaxed into the high, limber whine of his natural register, divulging so much more character than the lower, stiffer tough-guy timbre he used to cultivate. All three of these learning processes bear fruit in Don't Be a Stranger, American Music Club frontman Mark Eitzel's best record since 2001's The Invisible Man.
American Music Club, the cultiest of on-again off-again alt-rock survivors, have been refining their studious brand of Americana-- which emphasizes old-fashioned strains of jazz, lounge music, popular song, and hard rock-- for 30 years, so Eitzel's voice has had plenty of time to weather. A heart attack in his recent past didn't change his voice the way Helm's cancer changed his, but one suspects that it catalyzed the third, most significant development here. Brushes with death have a way of clarifying people's self-images and drives-- basically, of cutting through the bullshit. On Don't Be a Stranger, Eitzel remains as moony and self-lacerating as ever. He still gets into an oracular mood when hanging around with barflies on Main Street USA. But he dials down the tin-megaphone bluster that, even at its best, could feel strained in American Music Club. Now he revels in the delicate inner elements of his voice rather than growling over them, and sounds more natural and inviting than ever.
Eitzel is funny in that peculiarly Eitzel way when describing how this record came about. He took his "horrible demos" to "poor long-suffering" Merge Records, who replied, "Oh Mark. Really?" Merge relented after a friend of his manager who had won the lottery loaned the money to hire producer Sheldon Gomberg and make a studio recording of the songs. They were first conceived for an abandoned American Music Club album, whose long-term guitarist Vudi joins Eitzel here. The windfall paid for a tasteful, sometimes vivid backdrop that favors rich acoustic instruments. There are intimations of Spanish guitar throughout, most interestingly conceived on "Break the Champagne", where tremolos are implied with a Marxophone. The BooHoo Institutional Choir-- presumably, some people who happened to be around-- adds intriguingly dark-colored harmonies.
Allowing his voice to latch more directly than usual to the mobile cadences of jazz and soul, with the soft honk that was always latent in his croon tenderly magnified, Eitzel channels a number of unsuspected singers across Don't Be a Stranger, like Billie Holliday on "I Love You but You're Dead" and Antony Hegarty on "Costume Characters Face Dangers in the Workplace". Standout track "Oh Mercy" could almost be a Bill Withers song, with a smoky vocal line cracking over a cyclic minor melody, and it lays out a perspective to which the album often returns: that of the ghost at the feast. As ever, Eitzel observes other people having fun while fretting about political iniquities and personal inadequacies. The difference is that his tone, formerly accusatory, has softened and turned inward. It's that of someone presiding at a dark corner table, bemused by his own views, rather than proselytizing on a plywood stage.
The lyrics of Don't Be a Stranger are in the one-sided conversation form that Eitzel likes, with reams of subtly altered clichés abruptly slipping off-register into idiosyncrasy or hostility, as when he sneers out of nowhere on "Costume Characters", "I did not mean to scare your sad little brat." The delicate ardor and tenuous conviction that typify that album are most sentimentally expressed on the gently swaying piano ballad "All My Love" and most honestly on "We All Have to Find Our Own Way Out". There are moments of wry irony, as when Eitzel sings, "The guitar was pure evil like the engines on a jet," over gentle nylon strings on the strikingly written roadhouse fable "I Love You but You're Dead". But even when the lyrics edge on generic, as they sometimes do, Eitzel's singing draws me in. If Leonard Cohen's voice is a story about the passage of time and Levon Helm's is a story about losing what is most precious to you, Eitzel's is about the circuitous roads we take in search of ourselves. It's moving to hear him seem to arrive.


Bearing a distinct resemblance to My Bloody Valentine, the Brooklyn shoegaze band’s second album is a patchwork of brainy indie-pop influences with its own absurdist charm.

Agitprop Alterna

For as long as Stereolab have written songs about the ills of capitalism, and Broadcast have named lofty indie-pop albums after Gertrude Stein books, there’s been modish art-school types making records that feel like the musical equivalent of a tattered paperback in a back pocket. It’s the kind of lush, atmospheric rock music that might involve buying a Mellotron off Craigslist, naming your band after a famous British radio host, and writing lyrics that could double as poetry in the right context. Peel Dream Magazine, the brainchild of Brooklyn’s Joe Stevens, fits neatly into this lineage. Agitprop Alterna, the band’s second album, is a 38-minute shoegaze record that feels a bit like a term paper on Bertolt Brecht and Karl Marx, written to a soundtrack of Tropicália, motorik, and library music.
Out of the gate, Agitprop Alterna is a bookish listen that doesn’t sound particularly unique. At first, it’s tempting to call it My Bloody Valentine karaoke: The endless guitar distortion and the well-matched vocals of Stevens and copilot Jo-Anne Hyun distinctly recall Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher. With meditative vocals, outstretched layers of guitar dissonance, and chugging synthesizer, opener “Pill” is prime Loveless pastiche. “Tongue/Pill/I chew/It’s all I do,” Hyun and Stevens sing in calming harmony. The implication is obvious—we’ve all gone numb, relying on drugs to dull the pain of everyday life—yet the song is so undeniably catchy and relaxing that it produces exactly that kind of anesthetic effect. The same can be said for the rest of the record; Agitprop Alterna might be full of grand ideas, but it doesn’t bombard you with information. More often than not, the lyrical content is on the simpler side.
Agitprop Alterna can best be understood as the sum of its influences: a patchwork of brainy indie-pop music from the past 30 years that flows together seamlessly. Soothing drones, a tranquilized drum machine, and Painful-era Yo La Tengo flourishes allow “It’s My Body” to chirp along like a baby bird. The snarky “NYC Illuminati,” one of the record’s least conceptually legible offerings, is dotted in guitar reverb by way of Galaxie 500 and full of late-night stoner truisms like “you stand for nothing at all” or “dressed in fantastic/illusions of starvation.” The equally lofty “The Bertolt Brecht Society,” an homage to the German theater theoretician and playwright, is constructed around a serene vintage organ and a delicate bass groove. Lovely and introspective, it feels as though it were written while deep in thought.
“Up and Up,” the album’s last track, is its finest moment. Competing synth lines rest upon one another like layers of oil in water, and a plodding guitar brightens the scene like light through stained glass. “There are answers the theater will provide/For shallow faces taught to sleep through bigger questions,” Hyun and Stevens sing, summoning Brecht once more. Perhaps those faces belong to us, the song seems to say. It’s a striking—albeit slightly goofy—line on an album with plenty of similarly absurd brain-teasers. Like all the best shoegaze records, Agitprop Alterna is a heady, inward-looking listen. But if you’re able to zone out, or simply to begin walking with no destination in mind, its oversized and introspective ideas make welcome company.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Philadelphia rock band meets the moment with an essential, wide-ranging record that’s mouthy, messy, and self-assured.

I Got Heaven

“To be feminine,” singer and guitarist Marisa Dabice recently said, speaking historically and contemporaneously, “is profane.” If Dabice and her bandmates celebrated that profanity over a decade ago when they christened their band Mannequin Pussy, their new album, I Got Heaven, is a bacchanal. It’s a mouthy, messy, self-assured record that seeks out conventions primarily to taunt them—genre and social conventions, sure, but also the conventional wisdom that says the delicate flower of a woman’s desire wilts if removed from its man-made greenhouse. Like Hole’s Live Through This, perhaps its closest antecedent, it revels in its most uncomfortable contradictions. It shows its ugliest face, and it always comes out on top. It’s hard to imagine an indie-rock record better suited for the moment.
There is nothing on I Got Heaven like the slick romantic catharsis of “Drunk II,” the instant-classic single from the band’s 2019 album Patience. “I still love you, you stupid fuck,” Dabice sings to cap the first verse. That line became something like the band’s calling card, whether wittingly or not, the kind of punchline you spend an entire concert waiting to scream back. It’s vulnerable, almost affectionate, but its power relies on the protagonist’s feeling beholden to someone else against her wishes, if not her will. The stupid “fucks” on I Got Heaven, meanwhile, come from the act of fucking itself, experienced gleefully by people willing to risk their independence and self-sufficiency if it means getting theirs. When Dabice sings, “Rewind yourself, get me off, make me feel so elite,” it’s basically impossible to imagine her ever singing “Drunk II” again.
I Got Heaven is at its best when Mannequin Pussy laugh their way past feeling conflicted. In the title track, Dabice is a dog panting at the knee of a stranger, equally ready to bite or hump depending on how things go. By the time the chorus comes around, though, she’s practically cooing. “Oh, I’m an angel,” she sings, “I was sent here to bring you company.” It’s not a negation of the fantasy—in the very next verse, she wonders aloud what it would be like if “Jesus himself ate my fucking snatch,” her voice nearly breaking into a moan—but an acknowledgment that even a woman playing the dominant hornball role still has to navigate the men who think the whole thing is their gift.
Not that it stops her. “I keep all of my sugar where I know you like it best,” she promises in the very next song. She rides the chorus of “Loud Bark,” her voice rising as it builds toward the climax. “I’ve got a loud bark, deep bite,” she sings over and over, over and over, as the song approaches ecstasy. The twinned meanings of her words tumble over one another, vying for dominance: She wants you to fuck off, she wants to turn you on. Of course, screams of pleasure and screams of pain sometimes feel similar. Bites, too. Desire and fear, connection and protection—when they can’t be separated, why not go with what feels best? “Just tell me what you need!” she shouts in “Aching,” a gasp of frustration and a promise of service all at once. Nearly every line on I Got Heaven is both a come-on and a warning.
Appropriately enough, I Got Heaven is an intensely pleasurable album, and far more adventurous than anything Mannequin Pussy have tried before. Over brushed drums in “I Don’t Know You,” Dabice carries the torch for a distant lover whose secrets she holds close, her voice rising with bruised pride only to fall away. It’s a gorgeous melody, rich with the kind of strident heartbreak Neko Case distills on her best songs, shadow-lit by flickering synths from new member Maxine Steen. “Nothing Like” plays out like VH1 delivered through a choppy antenna signal, its distorted disco beat and the suck of Kaleen Reading’s hi-hats nicked from “Lovefool,” its strummy verses a blown-out take on “Kiss Me.” The heavy crunch of Steen’s guitar in “Sometimes” could’ve been taped off of alt-rock radio 30 years ago; tune your dial just right and you might hear a bit of “Everlong” after the chorus. Even the pummel of the title track is tickled by a synth line from Steen that’s more Fountains of Wayne than Suicide.
Delightfully, even as they’ve become comfortable with straying wherever a good song takes them, Mannequin Pussy have somehow become a better punk band, too. In bassist Colins Regisford’s “OK? OK! OK? OK!,” they shift the rhythm constantly, charging then shuffling, prodding for weaknesses before running a battering ram through the coda. “Of Her,” Dabice’s tribute to her mom, never stops accelerating, its 90 seconds of momentum made supersonic by lightning streaks of feedback and rattles of amplifier clutter. “She gave me her control!” Dabice shouts, and the word “control” echoes and fades and hangs around like smoke in a tiny room, only disappearing fully when the band hits the lights on the way out.
Though all three of I Got Heaven’s hardcore songs appear in the album’s back half, they don’t feel like a back-to-basics reset or an attempt to reestablish the band’s bona fides. They function as release valves, rushes of pure pleasure hissing as they escape the tensions of the songs around them. “You’re gonna fuckin’ beg, and heel, and learn,” Regisford sings in “OK? OK! OK? OK!,” both a command and an encouragement. On an album about wanting things badly but not being able to shake the consequences of wanting them, these songs’ straightforward, uncomplicated adrenaline is an ecstatic relief: Throw your body around, let it hit what it hits, then get your shit together. Still, they’re only one piece of a much more complex picture. Aesthetically speaking, punk is no longer the core of this band; like humor in a relationship, it’s just one of the many things holding it all together.
This is a way of saying that I Got Heaven is a pop album. It operates by a pop album’s rules; it’s unashamed of its ambition and unselfconscious of its artifice, and in that way it’s a perfect reflection of its own thematic commitment to self-definition. The vulnerability that’s always made Mannequin Pussy’s music feel personal and urgent has now given them the freedom to expand in unexpected ways and discover what else they might be able to contain. It never feels like pure product; it’s too moist, too clammy, far too impolite. Like Turnstile’s Glow On, I Got Heaven moves with an intuitive grace that makes it feel stadium-sized without losing its nuance or its grounding in the scene that birthed it. It’s easy to love, and it knows it.