C-ORE, Mykki Blanco’s loud, new collaborative project, doubles down on Blanco's outsider status, punk in both aesthetic and practice. Most of C-ORE is a chasm of noise, and the project feels like an entry point to an alternative space where it’s okay to still think things are amiss in the world.

Various Artists: Mykki Blanco Presents C-ORE

Mykki Blanco Presents C-ORE

In Jeff Chang’s 2014 book Who We Be: The Colorization of America, he likens the race to co-opt hip-hop and other subcultures in order to capitalize on a wider consumer base as something of a gold rush. Lady Gaga positioned herself as a benevolent ally to the marginalized despite being white, thin, blonde, and rich. Feminism, once an ideological haven, has now become a buzzword bastardized beyond recognition because we insist on aligning its values with celebrities. What keeps the status quo—particularly as it pertains to money, power, and beauty—intact is a kind of cultural phagocytosis: devouring difference in order to bastardize and co-opt.
Part of the appeal of Mykki Blanco, a multigender-identifying performance artist and musician, has been his refusal to become prey. "I would rather be famous like Insane Clown Posse, than A$AP Rocky," Blanco said in 2012, helping situate the shock-rock roots of his debut LP, Cosmic Angel: Illuminati Prince/ss. At the time, Blanco was amongst a cohort of ‘gay rappers,’ all finding critical acclaim—and fashion week placements. But Blanco didn’t just survive the mainlining, he got harder.
Listening to C-ORE, Blanco’s loud, new collaborative project, feels a bit like fear closing in on itself. Out on his new !K7 imprint, Dogfood Music Group, C-ORE is an album that amplifies the psychic tensions of living under "conventional cultural boundaries and constructs," as Blanco says in the press release. Blanco, Yves Tumour, Psychoegyptian, and Violence put to music a dense prognostication of a world within sight, where subcultures and identities rise up to claim their right to expression. C-ORE doubles down on being outsider and punk in both aesthetic and practice.
"They don’t wanna see a man in a dress succeed," he says, setting up the threat that is "Coke White, Starlight". A reverberating clank, produced by Jeremiah Meece of The-Drum, the song ensnares you with its righteous rage and then pushes you to dance as it clicks into double time. It’s just one of two Blanco tracks on C-ORE—the other is "Paw", an aqueous, drumless, EKG-bleep—but it’s an entry point to an alternative space where it’s okay to still think things are amiss in the world.
Most of C-ORE is a chasm of noise. Like a key scraping at a car door, Violence etches guttural raps onto piano and strobe-synth beats. Airhorns signal his impending verse on "Saturn". The four contributions by Yves Tumour are mostly wordless: "Histrionic" is a three-part suite of dank, hissing, convulsing sound and explosion, which find contrast in the mellow, minimal, hi-hat-driven stutter of "Childish". And one of C-ORE’s real standouts is the "LBCD", by Psychoegyptian. "My rap name used to be Little Soda, Little Child Soldier, Little Not Sober, Little I Might Make You Get Melanoma," he bellows, his taunting cadence like Azealia Banks meets Mark Hoppus. Later, on "Lullaby", he borrows the drunken slur of Kanye-via-Travis Scott. These moments moments of humor help leaven a project that might seem high-minded and self-serious.
Earlier this year, a few months after the release of his third project Gay Dog Food, Blanco announced he’d be leaving music and rap to pursue investigative journalism. C-ORE isn’t a Kingdom Come-like statement of return, but it’s also not a departure. As a collaborative work, it documents multiple experiences of life on the margins of America, of music—putting it all on blast.


On this unsettled solo album, Ought frontman Tim Darcy slowly dismantles the confessional crooner archetype, transforming himself from singer-songwriter to sound sculptor.

Saturday Night

Saturday night has long been pop music’s favorite part of the week—a time for fighting, fevers, and over-excited group spelling bees. But if the cover of his first solo album is any indication, Tim Darcy likes to spend it alone with his plants. His Saturday Night isn’t about going out on the town, but retreating inside his mind, following his wandering thoughts wherever they lead, even if they take him to some dark places. As frontman for Montreal quartet Ought, Darcy has, over the course of two records, emerged as one of indie rock’s most wily and witty wordsmiths, channeling the daily absurdities and anxieties of modern urban life into twitchy post-punk screeds. By contrast, Saturday Night is more intimate in every way: in scale, in production, and most importantly, in its emotional vocabulary.
On the one hand, Saturday Night does exactly what you expect a solo record from a member of a raucous rock band to do: It’s more off the cuff and rougher around the edges, and showcases a more introspective side than the day job normally allows. On the other hand, it’s an assault on that very idea. Over its 11 songs (including one hidden one), Darcy slowly dismantles the confessional crooner archetype until he’s just messing around with the raw materials, transforming himself from singer-songwriter to sound sculptor. And it becomes increasingly clear that, for Darcy, Saturday Night isn’t just a reservoir for songs that don’t quite fit his main band’s m.o., but a portal to a world beyond rock’n’roll entirely.
From the outset, Saturday Night both plays to expectations and subverts them. Opening rave-up “Tall Glass of Water” begins on familiar fidgety footing—though it’s a little more rickety than the typical Ought jam, the frenetic energy coursing through it makes the source easy enough to identify. But one minute in, Darcy brings the song’s smash ‘n’ grab momentum to a dead stop and reboots it as a cool mid-tempo strut—as if he was playing Lou Reed’s Transformer at 45 rpm and suddenly flipped it to 33. “Well the questions are being asked,” he sings, “Is it fate or is it popsicle?” The meaning may not be clear, but the message is: we’re on his melted clock now, and things are about to get surreal.
Saturday Night frontloads its most melodic moments, though even the sturdiest songs are outfitted with booby traps and escape hatches. “Joan Pt 1, 2” is a hit of woozy distorto-pop that free falls into an empty-cathedral chorale. “You Felt Comfort” wraps warm ‘n’ fuzzy guitar strums around frank lyricism (“You felt comfort and release/For a trauma that was making you weak”) in classic Neutral Milk Hotel fashion, before the rhythm suddenly drops out for the final verse as if the drummer was coin-operated. But the swooning “Still Waking Up” is Darcy’s shiniest diamond in the rough. It strikes a perfectly Morrissey-esque balance of aching melancholy and arch meta-humor: “Waking up alone was always a hard day’s night/’Cause my head is full of popular songs/Old ones I never sang along to/Isn’t it funny how that happens?”
But with the gleaming mid-album instrumental “First Final Days,” Darcy draws a line in the sand, closing the book on the album’s more sanguine first act while anticipating the anti-pop provocations that await on side two. The title track is unlikely to join the pantheon of Saturday-night party songs, its claustrophobic psychosis rendered with a dirgey drumbeat, ear-piercing guitar scrapes, and Darcy’s deadpan-to-panicked vocal. (“Let me out! And I’ll run!” he pleads, as if a prisoner to his own song.) “Found My Limit” is less jarring, but its hypnotic avant-folk oscillations and Darcy’s eerie, disembodied voice make it equally chilling. When Darcy gets back to more recognizable song forms on the psych-pop shanty “Saint Germain” and the drowsy piano-bar ballad “What’d You Release?,” they feel corrupted, as if infected by the preceding forays into free-form, found-sound disorder.
But if Saturday Night’s drifting second act carries the sense of Darcy feeling and fumbling his way through the dark, he eventually finds the calm in chaos. The penultimate instrumental “Beyond Me” is Saturday Night’s messiest song—all trembling, corroded strings and random piano plinks—but it’s also the album’s purest, most joyful expression, like the bleary-eyed moment of relief that hits you as the sun rises after a night of brutal insomnia. And with that, Darcy arrives at a place that’s the complete inverse of Ought, both musically and philosophically: Rather than concern himself with navigating the outside world, with Saturday Night, he’s produced a suitably unsettled soundtrack for just trying to keep your shit together on the inside.


The new album from R&B singer Kehlani Parrish is refreshingly self-assured. She’s got a lot to say on these songs, which are blunt, unflinching, and exuberant.

SweetSexySavage

There are a couple of ways to tell the story of Kehlani Parrish’s ascension from a gifted hopeful to a higher R&B court. One is a story of unhindered success: in her teens, Kehlani was the vocalist of a covers band that earned fourth place on “America’s Got Talent” and placed her on the radar of Nick Cannon and most major labels. Atlantic groomed her publicly and behind the scenes for cred and stardom, from 2014 mixtape Cloud 19 to 2015’s album-called-mixtape You Should Be Here to heavy promotion at radio. By 2016, she’d scored nods from both pop and pomp culture: a trendily morose cut on the soundtrack to—brace yourself for the following phrase—the Oscar-nominated Suicide Squad and a left-field Grammy nomination for a Best Urban Contemporary Album that is still a free set on SoundCloud.
The other story is one of overcoming the system. That “America’s Got Talent” stint only panned out after several difficult years—contractual hell, homelessness, depression—and what followed was hardly fairytale. It’s pretty uncontroversial now to recognize turn-of-the-century R&B as overflowing with innovation and talent, but A&Rs remain terrible at knowing what to do with it. For every The Writing’s on the Wall or Aaliyah, there are three slept-on debuts and overlooked follow-ups, and who knows how many shelved, stalled, and otherwise mismanaged counterparts. The 2010s revival is more ephemeral in its streaming numbers and blog buzz, but not much kinder to its potential stars. Despite two hits in “2 On” and “All Hands on Deck,” Tinashe’s Joyride tour was cut short. Kelela and SZA are excellent yet still “rising.” Jhené Aiko is in a group with Big Sean. And Kehlani’s output and talent has consistently exceeded what its promotion would imply. You Should Be Here was a big-leagues album promoted like a mixtape—an increasingly common blurred “indie” and “mainstream” marketing tack—and judging by the album features (Zayn?) and tour spots (G-Eazy) she’s done since, the industry seems to be pigeonholing her with performers who are hilariously out of her league.
It’s even more remarkable, then, that SweetSexySavage is so self-assured: the work of a distinctive artist owning a style that seemingly everyone is attempting. Kehlani doesn’t even try to disinvite comparisons—the album’s title is a direct play on TLC’s CrazySexyCool, and it’s full of nods to the past, like the “Try Again” intro of “Advice.” But unlike so much R&B, SweetSexySavage neither relies on nostalgia nor falls into the traps these throwback albums tend towards: treating R&B as a costume, the musical equivalent of a belly shirt, or recreating in hazy moods and amorphous vibes a genre better known for massive hooks.
The production helps. In addition to longtime producer Jahaan Sweet, SweetSexySavage brings in Pop & Oak—among the more promising of pop-R&B production teams (Usher’s “Good Kisser” is a highlight)—and it avoids many diluted Top 40 names. “Escape” is a sweet mid-tempo ballad that flirts and flutters around the edge of saying “I can’t make you love me,” but it’s also kind of like a Jordin Sparks album cut. The soundtrack cut “Gangsta” is a clever update of 2000s thug-love tracks, like “Soldier” or almost any Ja Rule duet, to the glum mien of movie and radio pop, but it’s rightly relegated to the bonus tracks.
Good production is relatively easy to find, though; voices like Kehlani’s are not. Her closest Y2K peer is probably Kandi Burruss: a consummate songwriter equally adept at hitmaking and candor. Kehlani is a talented vocalist, but on record she’s conversational, with a lot to say. Much of SweetSexySavage is about reclamation: taking all the shit women receive from men, shrugging, and asking, “What about it?”
“If I gotta be a bitch, I’mma be a bad one,” she taunts on “CRZY,” and the track isn’t resigned but an anthem. “Distraction,” arranged like a one-woman girl group, walks the independent-woman walk by setting clear, disinterested boundaries for its come-on: “I can’t say I give my all... are you down to be a distraction?” “Not Used to It” is unflinching in its fear of commitment. On “Do U Dirty,” Kehlani’s a player and proud of it; the dreamy production makes lines like “I’m cold and yet life is colder.../I could fuck you now and years later on you’re going to be stuck just reminiscing” catch listeners off-guard. The bluntness is welcome in today’s music world, full of men reveling in such scumbaggery and women exploring, in song after despairing song, codependence and the wounds it causes. Kehlani’s adept at the latter as well; “Everything Is Yours” is a moody love song steeped in loathing. Kehlani sings “my ring is yours, everything is yours,” and it’s just as much a confession of love as of giving up.
But Kehlani can be more optimistic. She told Rolling Stone that, where Cloud 19 proved “I can sing!” and You Should Be Here showed “I can write!,” her new album says, “I can chill! And have fun!” The single “Undercover,” for one, captures perfectly the delirious headspace of having the most disastrous and unlikely of your crushes reciprocated: “They don't wanna see it happen,” Kehlani sings, “But we say fuck it.” Refreshingly, SweetSexySavage is at its best when it’s most exuberant, giddy in the face of haters and common sense alike.


On the Baltimore/Portland duo Wye Oak’s fourth album, Shriek, Jenn Wasner replaces her guitar with bass and drummer Andy Stack adds synthesizers to his plate. Wasner's voice also takes up more space on the record; she sings more confidently, and with a broader range.

Shriek

Jenn Wasner was a little worried about reinventing herself on Wye Oak’s fourth album, Shriek. "There is more at stake than whether my feelings get hurt or not," she said in an interview earlier this year, addressing how fans would receive the Baltimore/Portland-based duo’s decision to replace her guitar with synthesizers. "We've been touring in this band, making a living off of it since Civilian, and we are very fortunate that that has been the case, but we're both very aware that it could totally go away.”
She had some reason to be concerned. Wye Oak has been beloved, especially since 2011's excellent Civilian, for the charged interplay between Wasner’s formidable axe-wielding and band mate Andy Stack’s immense, intense drumming. Up until that point, the singer had kept her love of the instrumental and structural aspects of pop and R&B sequestered from her main outfit, seeking other artistic outlets in dancefloor-ready odes to Robyn as Flock of Dimes and last year’s gauzy, Mariah Carey-indebted bauble Dungeonesse, the self-titled album she wrote with Baltimore-based musical polymath Jon Ehrens.
While Flock of Dimes had been ongoing to an extent, Wasner started Dungeonesse to escape a creative funk she had fallen into following Wye Oak’s constant touring behind Civilian. After Stack moved from the East Coast to Portland, she stared down another mental block, this time specifically around the guitar, before realizing she could just hang up the damn thing and make music inspired by her first musical loves as a child of the '90s. That’s when Wasner “sort of fell to the ground in relief and excitement.”
That’s also where the album begins. After a light pitter-patter of synths like raindrops on her bedroom window, Wasner sings, “This morning, I woke up on the floor, thinking ‘I have never dreamed before.’” This chimerical quality suffuses Shriek, as if Wasner still can’t believe she can make the kind of music she has always loved without shunting it into a side project for fear of sacrificing Wye Oak’s identity. But don’t let the soft lighting fool you: Wasner’s bass (Stack now handles melody in addition to keys and percussion) reverberates with nearly the same tension as her six-string, fortifying songs like “The Tower” and “Glory” with a stiff, funky backbone. Even though the latter’s synthesizer solo leaves something to be desired after Wye Oak’s guitar freak outs—nothing on Shriek sends all-over chills quite like The Knot’s “For Prayer” or equally bruising "Take It In"—Wasner’s instrument carves a viscerally satisfying groove into the air.
Her voice also takes up more space on this record, going deeper and flitting over Stack’s melodies with such abandon it’s as if she might float away. Comparatively, her vocals on Wye Oak’s earlier material come out wispy and flat, crunched by the massive noises emitting from her guitar. Even on “Paradise”, with its familiar squalls of feedback in the background and pummeling drums, she sings more confidently and with a broader range.
That specific song makes me long for the old Wye Oak, actually, like thinking you see an old friend on the street that turns out to be a total stranger. Even though no band owes their audience music they don’t want to make anymore, it’s still a little sad reading Wasner in 2009 talk about how much she needs her guitar. “I know it’s cliche,” she said, “but I love it. I would go crazy without it.” Many fans will probably feel the same way—I doubt their new live setup will wrench me apart with the same visceral impact as their Civilian tour—but even the most steadfast relationships change, and it’s clear Wasner has moved on. As she should: the way she was feeling, if the next Wye Oak album were made the same as the last, it wouldn't sound as effortless, and she wouldn't sound as sure of herself. So we'll have to get used to it, and while we're at it, maybe we can enjoy ourselves as much as she did.


The Philadelphia death metal quartet has a blast on its fifth album, veering between styles with uninhibited energy and virtuosic musicianship.

Ontological Mysterium

Unless you’re a band with 14 years of mind-meld chemistry under your belt, under no circumstances should you attempt what Horrendous are going for on their fifth album. The Philly death metal vets have a history of shapeshifting—witness their gradual transformation from OSDM revivalists to progged-out fusion heads between 2012’s The Chills and 2018’s Idol—but this is by far their brashest play yet. In under 40 minutes, Ontological Mysterium gallups, grinds, and glistens through an array of seemingly unrelated death metal subsects, even venturing beyond the genre for the occasional melodic interlude. It’s tempting to view this as a culmination that Horrendous have been building toward, but the freewheeling spirit and outright fun of Ontological Mysterium make it the band’s most drastic departure to date.
With its emphasis on momentum and melody over technical prowess, the wide-open, triumphant intro track “The Blaze” might make you think you’ve accidentally pressed play on an atmospheric black metal classic like Agalloch’s Ashes Against the Grain. Oddly enough, Ontological Mysterium’s other biggest outlier is its delirious closer, “The Death Knell Ringeth,” a lizard-brained groove metal banger that completely counters the methodical opener. In between, Horrendous return to their signature brand of progressive death metal, jam-packing it with more solos, non-sequitur song structures, and unrestrained experimentation than ever. After three albums of ruthless precision and studied evolution—2014 breakout Ecdysis, 2015’s Anareta, and Idol—the eclecticism comes as a shock.
In an interview, guitarist/vocalist Matt Knox explained the new album’s stylistic sweep as a way to “encapsulate everything we’ve ever done.” Indeed, you can hear the strains of doom that crept into Ecdysis on “Preterition Hymn,” the catchy, Symbolic-era Death worship of Anareta on “Chrysopoeia (The Archaeology of Dawn),” and the jazzy, fretless bass-led tones of Idol on “Aurora Neoterica.” But the frenzied way they’ve arranged and sequenced the songs has no precedent in the Horrendous catalog. In this regard, Ontological Mysterium channels an uninhibited energy, a no-holds-barred ethos that runs counter to the careful curation of the band’s past work. When, at the very end of the album, second guitarist/vocalist Damian Herring bellows, “Time is too fucking short,” you might wonder if “carpe diem” was the original creative prompt.
The willingness to pull out all the stops is apparent in Ontological Mysterium’s virtuosic musicianship, but its heightened sense of freedom also brings out Horrendous’ inner metal goofball. It’s hard to imagine the younger, more self-serious incarnation of this band indulging in this album’s pulpy horror and campy riffage. Even Knox has acknowledged that, in the pursuit of different vocal approaches, the band wound up with some that were “completely absurd”—see the “Iron Man”-esque intro of “Exeg(en)esis” or the Peter Steele-style clean baritone that pops up in “Chrysopoeia (The Archaeology of Dawn).”
Despite all of the eye-popping pyrotechnics, the members of Horrendous know when to stay out of each other’s way—the second Herring or Knox start to run counter to the song’s groove, the rhythm section falls into lockstep and bassist Alex Kulick picks up the melodic backbone. When Kulick’s neck slides and Jamie Knox’s drum fills pave the way for the breakdown on “The Death Knell Ringeth,” both guitarists hang back and play rhythm parts. The Knox brothers have been playing with Herring and a rotating cast of bassists since 2009 (Kulick came onboard full-time for Idol), and their innate coordination as songwriters enables them to throw out the subgenre-specific blueprints past albums relied on. For Horrendous, who have always been a workmanlike unit of death metal perfectionists, the whirlwind approach is a breath of fresh air.


The soul singer’s latest is a multi-perspective, multi-genre examination of addiction and family breakdown.

Jimmy Lee

Raphael Saadiq’s solo career has been haunted by the ghosts of tormented men and women. One such figure hides beneath the catchy pop melody of “You’re the One That I Like,” a song from his 2002 debut Instant Vintage about losing a love interest to addiction. Another lurks in “Grown Folks,” a concerned-but-scolding soul track off his sophomore album Ray Ray, about parents who can’t seem to prioritize their children. And even “Good Man,” from his 2011 retro-R&B album Stone Rollin’, is filled with contempt for the would-be patriarchs that just can’t get it together.
He’s walked a fine line between approaching these self-destructive figures—stand-ins for the ruptures and trauma in African-American communities—with empathy and pity. Which is perhaps why his latest album Jimmy Lee feels like a long-held exhalation. Named after his late brother who died of an overdose around the time Saadiq left legendary R&B group Tony! Toni! Toné!, Jimmy Lee is a multi-perspective, multi-genre examination of addiction and family breakdown that pushes Saadiq to his most humanizing work yet.
Jimmy Lee is Saadiq’s first solo album since 2011’s Stone Rollin’, but his fingerprints are all over the past few years of Black American culture. “Mighty River,” which he co-wrote with Mary J. Blige for the 2017 film Mudbound, earned the duo an Academy Award Best Original Song nomination. On the small screen, Saadiq has served as composer for HBO’s Insecure since 2016. But his greatest artistic feat since Stone Rollin’ has by far been serving as executive producer of Solange’s 2016 album A Seat at the Table.
Working with artists like Solange (and Kendrick Lamar, who also features on Jimmy) seems to have emboldened Saadiq. Both the charging blues song “Kings Fall” and neo-soul groove “I’m Feeling Love” offer sympathetic, heart-rending perspectives on addiction from within the storm, while the Motown-steeped protest song “Rikers Island” brims with an urgency and mourning the artist has usually reserved for love songs. Mid-album cut “My Walk” slides gritty, beating synths beneath his easy blues and soul cadence; it’s his biggest musical departure, and also the album’s most frankly autobiographical track.
The R&B legend still stays close to the sounds that raised him, as on the straight-up gospel song “Belongs to God.” But even that inclusion belies an artist more willing to embrace loose ends, disorienting interruptions, and the unknown. On Jimmy Lee, Saadiq shout-sings, whispers, and croons with new abandon. It feels like a refutation of his old reserve, and it also represents a welcome stretch from Saadiq before he takes his sound all the way back to his beginnings: He recently announced that a Tony! Toni! Toné! reunion is in the works.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Jakub Alexander records ambient techno music under the name Heathered Pearls. His debut Loyal had all the heft of a desert mirage, which was its chief attraction but also its chief flaw. Although the rosy glow of his synthesizers remains the main draw on Body Complex, he injects more physicality: Per the title, you can actually dance to many of these songs.

Body Complex

Jakub Alexander's debut album as Heathered Pearls had the all the heft of a desert mirage. That was its chief attraction, but also its chief flaw. Loyal offered track after track of beatless shimmer, and it was gorgeous, but after a while, you could be forgiven for wanting something a little more substantial to sink your teeth into.
Body Complex retains Loyal's delectable lightness but wisely injects a little more variety and a lot more physicality. Per the new album's title, you can actually dance to many of these songs. Although the rosy glow of his synthesizers remains the music's organizing principle and main attraction, six of the new album's 10 tracks feature crisp, boom-tick drum programming. His beats aren't terribly ornate or advanced, but they're utilitarian in a way that suits listening as well as dancing. Like a square black frame around a watercolor, they help to delineate all the washed-out frequencies they contain.
The shoegaze- textured "Personal Kiosk" balances murky chords with scraped cymbals, while "Perfume Catalog" attaches a muffled machine beat to gauzy choral pads and high-end shimmer; it sounds a little like some heavenly fusion of Actress, 10cc's "I'm Not in Love"—or the first few seconds of it, anyway—and Newworldaquarium's "Trespassers", still the high-water mark for the treble register in techno. "Warm Air Estate", featuring a singer named Outerbridge, points to a possible next step for Alexander's project: actual songs. His vocals remain indistinct, but the mere presence of a voice, with a clearly defined bassline, makes for the most corporeal music Heathered Pearls has made yet.
Still, the atmospheres remain Heathered Pearls' selling point, with their tantalizing combination of magic-hour sunlight and gooey haze. "Cast in Lemon & Sand" and "Artificial Foliage" both sound a lot like Victorialand-era Cocteau Twins with the attack softened and the reverb blown way out. Cocteau Twins are, like Kate Bush and New Order, one of those acts that far too many artists try to emulate without really understanding what makes them tick, but Alexander gets it. Maybe that's not surprising, given that his alias sounds like a mockup for one of Vaughan Oliver's sleeves for 4AD. Alexander, who A&Rs for Ghostly and selects music for Tycho's design-centric ISO50 blog, is nothing if not knowing when it comes to the combined power of word, music, and image, which makes his choice of song titles a little bit surprising. "Perfume Catalogue", "Sunken Living Area", "Holographic Lodge"—they read almost as parodies, as ironic commentary on ambient music's frequent role as a kind of lifestyle accessory. Fortunately, Body Complex never gets bogged down by ambient music's wallpaper associations. This isn't music for living rooms; it's music for living in.


The Welsh brothers earned a rep for festival anthems that bridge big-room functionalism with subtle experimentation. On their debut album, they go in search of transcendence.

Good Lies

“Functional” is a dirty word in dance music. No one wants to be merely functional, nor find themselves on the receiving end of utilitarianism. You don’t want to be invited to a “function,” either—you want to go to a party. Yet culture has been tacking in the direction of the functional for a while now. Music is composed to study or sleep or chill to. Algorithms anticipate our desires. Any creative act can be made into content, which computers then sell ads in front of. There are brand “activations,” which is just another word for functions. All this matters rather a lot for the state of dance music, which, at its core, is meant to serve a specific purpose. Even its name issues a command: Dance.
But the best dance music knows all this and blithely ignores it. Instead, it deftly undercuts function with surprise, or pairs it with emotion in sweet harmony. The brothers Overmono have garnered a reputation as both virtuosos of the functional (see the Pavlovian hooks of 2020’s “Everything U Need” or the following year’s “Bby”) and explorers of what lies beyond it (just listen to those plush plucks disintegrate on 2019’s “Le Tigre”). Occasionally these two modes meet, and deliver something like the heart-bursting “I Have a Love” remix. It’s in these moments, when Overmono bridge the gap, that you grasp what they’re all about. The pair grew up on either side of the same small Welsh town, Monmouth, 10 years apart in age, split between separated parents but tethered by a shared upbringing in music—under their dad’s professional tutelage, in the choral and mining band traditions of Wales, and then digging through record bins and banging out rave tapes in the woods. Good Lies, their debut album, inhales the vapors of dance music’s countercultural emergence and steers against the functional course in search of transcendence.
There’s something almost unnerving about the precision with which Overmono operate: The scant palette they draw from—globular basslines, glassy percussion, an array of disembodied vocals—is unerringly clean. Even seeing two brothers teaming up after successful solo careers (Tom Russell as techno titan Truss, younger Ed as breaks magician Tessela) feels uncannily symmetrical. But there’s grit, too, and the tension between the rough-edged and the machine-tooled makes the whole exercise all the more vivid and enveloping. It’s in the straining vocal chops and bit-by-bit build of “So U Kno,” and the glossy, luminous, Frank Ocean-on-acid swirl of “Walk Thru Water.” Not a drop of Smerz’s syrupy, breathless delivery is wasted on the title track as it rattles along with all the tumult of falling in love. They’re happy to take things slow, too. “Vermonly”—one of a handful of more sedate tracks here—sits like a mottled antique mirror in the midst of the album’s energetic closing run, as if inviting you to pause and take a more considered look.
The most abiding moments on Good Lies come when the Russell brothers set aside their laser guides. Closer “Calling Out” sounds like it’s happening in reverse, all hollowed-out kicks and retracting synth stabs. The hiss and stray wind chimes that periodically cut through the tight swing of “Cold Blooded,” and the in-and-out float of its stringy vocal, make it feel like chancing upon a new favorite song as you scroll across the radio dial or drift between Room 1 and Room 2. There are missteps—“Sugarrushhh” is a little aimless; “Skulled” is the sort of love letter to hardcore rave that Burial has done better—but none so big as to lead them off course.
The Russell brothers haven’t been shy about their ambitions to take this show to the big stages; the sky-touching chord progressions would have given it away if they hadn’t. At times, you can almost picture the confetti cannons going off—never more than when they flip Tirzah’s bluesy register into an ecstatic swoon on “Is U.” But Good Lies makes clear that Overmono haven’t sacrificed intimacy or immediacy to the prospect of festival slots and pyrotechnics. Just as the pair’s name conceals a certain domesticity (Overmonnow is a suburb of Monmouth), fuzzy tracks like “Calon”—Welsh for heart—and the undulating “Arla Fearn” offer a sense of grounding that helps the big emotional swings hit. Good Lies toes a fine and, yes, functional, balance. There’s beauty in all this precision too—like an Eames chair, a perfectly weighted spoon, or the cone of a 15-inch subwoofer pushing air out of the bass scoops.


Old age suits the country singer well. On his latest album—featuring three newly penned tunes—Willie sings with a kind of chagrinned humor, as if nobody is more surprised by his longevity than he is.

Ride Me Back Home

Perhaps the only thing more impressive than the fact that Willie Nelson is still at it—it being writing, recording, touring, and toking—is the fact that he’s still good at it. These 86 years seem to have sharpened his focus and his sense of humor, so there’s not that feeling he’s going through the motions when he plays “On the Road Again” for the millionth time. Nearly six decades after he wrote “Crazy,” he has largely avoided the pitfalls that have snared so many older country and rock artists, instead emerging as a grandfatherly influence for yet another generation of country misfits like Sturgill Simpson and Margo Price (both of whom played Willie’s Outlaw Music Festival last year). To be active, relevant, and beloved as an octogenarian in the business—that’s the dream of any artist.
In recent years, Willie has even managed to enter something of a renaissance phase of his career, with a string of albums that include his first new songwriting credits in decades. Apart from his largely overlooked collection of Sinatra covers (which I’ll argue surpasses Dylan’s handful in terms of interpretation, insight, and just plain ol’ enjoyment), he has made his own thoughts on mortality, technology, and creativity the focal points of his recent work. Old age is his new favorite subject, or the subject he knows most intimately, or maybe just the subject that lends itself to the best punchlines. He sings with a kind of chagrinned humor, as if nobody is more surprised by his longevity than he is.
That’s a welcome trend that continues on Ride Me Back Home, which features three newly penned tunes. That doesn’t seem like very many, but they frame this album with warmth, empathy, and humor. “Come On Time” finds him challenging the very notion of time to a fight, as though he might spar his way to another couple years on earth. “I say come on, Time/I’ve beat you before,” he sings over a chugging rhythm section. “Come on, Time, what have you got for me this time?” His desperation barely veiled by his humor, he knows he’s bested before the fight even begins, and all he can do is try to make something out of it: “I’ll take your words of wisdom and I’ll try to make them rhyme.”
Buying the farm, at least for Willie, is inextricably linked with making music. “One More Song to Write” sounds so breezy that its insights might initially sound modest, but this gracefully melodic tune might hold the key to his long career. “I’ve got one more song to write, I’ve got one more bridge to burn,” he sings. “I’ll know when it’s right, I’ve got one more song to write.” For all his prolificity—is there even an authoritative album count anymore?—he’s always chasing that next tune, that next rhyme, that next show. He’s always thinking about the future.
It doesn’t really matter to Willie who came up with that next tune or that next rhyme. At his best, he can rewrite a song just by singing it, and he can suss out new depths just by adapting it to his own jazzy meter. The slight delay in his delivery on Guy Clark’s “Immigrant Eyes” subtly reinforces the song’s dusty two-step rhythm as well as its very timely sentiments about family, immigration, and empathy. Likewise, he capers over the lyrics of Mac Davis’s “It’s Hard to Be Humble,” having a blast singing the word “egotistical” and chuckling with his sons Lukas and Micah over the notion of him wearing “skintight blue jeans.”
Ride Me Back Home is Willie’s thirteenth album with producer/co-writer Buddy Cannon, the Pancho to his Lefty, and it casually evokes the old Texas dancehalls where Willie cut his teeth long before he embodied the outlaw country ethos. There’s a roominess to the music, a jovial looseness in its rhythmic complexity, and something like celebration in its exploration of these grave subjects. Nothing on here sounds rehearsed or calculated. Instead, it sounds like Willie has been living with these songs for so long that he can play them as easily as inhaling and exhaling.

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Inspired by Australia’s lush temperate rainforest, the Melbourne producer’s second album emphasizes melody and background texture more than big drops or bass lines.

Salt Water

On an international stage, contemporary Australian electronic music is most often identified with the EDM-inflected, festival-ready production of an artist like Flume, or the chill, algorithm-friendly compositions of lo-fi house, the preferred vernacular of DJs like Mall Grab and DJ Boring. Melbourne-based producer Roland Tings—real name Rohan Newman—sits somewhere in between, with a sound built for big rooms that still feels precise and considered. Though his live performances are energetic and immersive, his rhythms are more apt to nudge the body than shove it. Salt Water arrives four years after his self-titled 2015 debut, but it’s the kind of sculpted, careful record that sounds like it could have taken much longer: refreshingly untempted by current trends or timely rhythms, resolutely committed to doing its own thing.
At earlier solo shows, Newman improvised drum loops on a TR-8, lending his sets an acid-house flavor that was classic without being nostalgic. Recently, after a few stateside tours with the likes of Chrome Sparks and Com Truise, he’s expanded his act, adding a live drummer and the occasional guitarist alongside his Juno 106 synthesizer. On his own time, he says he prefers listening to ambient and rock over electronic music, and the cross-genre influence is felt throughout his own work.
Salt Water was recorded during a year-and-a-half period Newman spent living on Australia’s southern coast, near the Great Otway National Park. The ecological theme extends beyond song titles like “Rainforest” and “Sun Drops Behind the Hill”: The album has an organic essence, lush and alive like a rave in a foggy jungle. Each instrumental track functions as an equal member of an ecosystem. Brief stabs of acid sound like distant birds; percussive samples become a chorus line of cicadas; quietly thundering bass takes the shape of a storm cloud on the horizon. On “Rainforest,” “Up Close,” and “Circulating,” cascading voices float in and out of the mist, harmonizing with the acoustic surroundings until the exact words and their meaning is inseparable from the enclosing environment.
Deeper into the album, cuts like “In a Cloud” and “Water Music” lull the listener with spacey, reverb-drenched synth lines. Newman’s work is euphoric and ecstatic without the melodrama of trance music. His songwriting begins with the overriding melody rather than an undergirding drum sequence, and he emphasizes background texture more than big drops or bass lines. For Roland Tings, ambience isn’t just what’s happening around the drums—it’s the main attraction. Just as spending time in nature is more about soaking up a feeling than seeing one thing in particular, Salt Water prizes the space between beats as much as beats themselves.


The rebirth of LCD Soundsystem is marked by an extraordinary album obsessed with endings: of friendships, of love, of heroes, of a certain type of geeky fandom, and of the American dream itself.

American Dream

Of course James Murphy fell for his own rock’n’roll myth. This is the guy who entered the realm of semi-stardom 15 years ago with “Losing My Edge,” a song that both poked fun at and paid tribute to music snobbery, that imagined a miracle man who witnessed every “seminal” underground event up-close, that used a list of cooler-than-thou names as an impenetrable shield. It made sense for him to concoct his very own “I was there” moment on April 2, 2011, when LCD Soundsystem played what was billed as their final show at the most storied venue in New York City. It was instantly legendary, the underdog’s big day. A perfect ending. Too perfect, maybe.
As an ace student of the game—“LCD is a band about a band writing music about writing music,” he once quipped—Murphy knew that he couldn’t just reunite for a lucrative victory lap, playing his most popular songs on Spotify to the genre-agnostic, dance-friendly demographic he helped cultivate throughout the 2000s. It would ruin the legacy and go against everything LCD stood for: integrity, respect, a sly but genuine love of just how much music can shape a human being’s identity. So even though a new album was always planned since the band officially reformed 20 months ago, the intervening hit-filled gigs could feel odd. Yes, they sounded great, and all the members looked excited to be playing together again, but the context was tweaked. LCD Soundsystem were no longer on the cusp of a cultish zeitgeist. Murphy still sang “this could be the last time” during “All My Friends,” though the line’s tang of finality was dulled.
For his part, Murphy recently promised to never make a show of LCD’s retirement ever again. But as much as the band’s fourth album, American Dream, marks a rebirth, it’s also obsessed with endings: of friendships, of love, of heroes, of a certain type of geeky fandom, of the American dream itself. These are big, serious topics for a project that essentially started as a goof, but it’s the direction Murphy has taken since Sound of Silver’s “Someone Great” combined his affection for bubbling synths with a poignancy about the fleeting nature of life. Now, as a 47-year-old father of a young child, Murphy is using his long-running affection for bygone post-punk and art-rock sounds to carry on traditions; the album includes pointed references to Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Suicide’s Alan Vega, and David Bowie, all of whom passed in the years since LCD’s last record. Whereas Murphy once took on all of these influences lightly and cleverly, they feel heavier across much of American Dream’s 70 minutes, with the lingering responsibilities of a disappearing history becoming more apparent.
On paper, that might sound like a bit of a slog, but this is not the case. Roughly half of the album is buoyed by the twitching rhythms and spirited mumble-rants that Murphy, who once again plays the vast majority of the instruments himself, is known for. Soon-to-be live scorcher “Emotional Haircut” is ostensibly a lark about an old rocker dude trying to cling onto some youth by-way-of a trendy new ’do—but it doesn’t stop with the easy joke. The song’s intensity comes from Murphy’s identification with this character who absorbs pummelling frequencies at very high volumes in order to quell the anxieties of aging. “You got numbers on your phone of the dead that you can’t delete,” he yelps as the music notches up to a panic. “And you got life-affirming moments in your past that you can’t repeat.” It’s at once funny, terrifying, and strangely reassuring.
A similar emotional brew rumbles through the burbling “Tonite,” which reads like an updated treatise in defense of a certain type of outmoded music nerd—or, as Murphy oh-so-knowingly puts it, “a hobbled veteran of the disc-shop inquisition sent to parry the cocksure mem-stick filth with my own late-era middle-aged ramblings.” It’s a pep talk for those who’ve felt duped by late capitalism’s gobbling up of punk values in the name of branding and moneyed elitism. Sure, this might be easy for James Murphy to say—as a Coachella headliner and Williamsburg wine bar owner, he’s not exactly in the DIY trenches—but, as music recedes ever further into the background of popular culture, such bemused wishful thinking can’t hurt. Fandom comes up again on “Change Yr Mind,” where Murphy wades into comment sections, both parroting and rebuffing those who doubted the return of LCD Soundsystem. After a litany of taunts and self-doubt elbowed between Robert Fripp-style guitar shocks, the singer comes to a simple epiphany: “You can change your mind,” he repeats, as the static track cracks open. This is the freeing sound of losing followers.
The idea of change, and whether or not it’s truly possible, has been a recurring theme for Murphy, and American Dream has him taking some legitimate steps away from his renowned style. While the album’s classic-sounding LCD tracks are comfortably familiar, they can also feel redundant, unnecessary reminders that struggle to supplant Murphy’s own past glories. So the record’s newfangled moves don’t just offer variety, they provide American Dream’s most rewarding moments and serve as the best justifications of this reformed group’s continued existence.
Take album opener “Oh Baby,” Murphy’s attempt at the type of unsettlingly pretty tick-tick slow burner that turned Suicide into subversive NYC icons. The song is decidedly mid-tempo. And Murphy isn’t rambling here—he’s crooning. Very convincingly. Sexily, even. It’s a breakup song (Murphy went through a divorce around the time LCD disbanded in 2011) stuck somewhere between a bad dream and reality. And unlike so many LCD songs, which are marked by the hyper-specificity of an obsessive-compulsive creator, “Oh Baby” feels spacious and inviting. You don’t have to be a laid-off record store clerk to fully understand this song’s intricacies. Like Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream,” which has been covered by everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Neneh Cherry, “Oh Baby” is the type of track could be successfully pulled off by creep-show genius Ariel Pink or Rat Pack redux Michael Bublé.
Murphy keeps dreaming on “I Used To,” another winning outlier. He seems to be peeking through to the past, to his formative rock influences, trying to confront their mysterious force. The searching song is brought further into focus by its stalking bassline and hulking, unfussy drum beat—turn your ear the right way, and this is what a Led Zeppelin post-punk album could have sounded like, with a stinging guitar solo coming halfway from hell. Staying in this more diabolical lane, the nearly 10-minute centerpiece “How Do You Sleep?” is tempestuous, ecstatic, and utterly, utterly savage. Sharing a name with John Lennon’s infamous 1971 takedown of Paul McCartney following the dissolution of the Beatles, the song is almost certainly a salvo aimed at Murphy’s estranged DFA production partner, Tim Goldsworthy—aka the guy Murphy’s label sued for nearly $100,000 in missing funds in 2013, aka the guy who called Murphy an over-therapized bully and a sociopath, and admitted to having “weird reoccurring dreams of ‘Game of Thrones’-style deaths for him” in the recent New York rock oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom. So, yeah. These two men no longer like each other.
For all the bad blood, though, “How Do You Sleep?” is not a guns-out rocker or a punch line-stuffed lyrical skewering. It’s painstaking in its build, amassing ominous percussion and gargantuan bass synth tones before the full rhythm finally straps in after more than five minutes. Meanwhile, Murphy mixes enigmatic taunts with more direct swipes, hollering from deep in the mix: “I must admit: I miss the laughing/But not so much you.” This is venom, but it’s expertly controlled venom. The song works astoundingly well without any backstory, as a universal, fist-pumping broadside directed at former friends everywhere, but it’s even more damning with its likely target in mind. You almost feel pity for Goldsworthy—but then the beat connects and, well, he must have done something wrong to deserve such an epic shaming. And still, there is a bittersweet element in acknowledging the loss of someone who’s still living, a haunting presence no longer felt.
Another ghost inhabits the album’s final track, “Black Screen,” but the situation is flipped: The person is no longer alive yet they are sorely missed. No name is mentioned in the song, but there is reason to believe it is a belated message for David Bowie, who befriended and collaborated with Murphy in the last few years of his life. In fact, Murphy was once considered to be a co-producer on Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, though in the end he only officially contributed percussion to a couple of tracks. Since some of LCD Soundsystem’s best tracks have been thinly disguised love letters to Bowie’s influence, why didn’t Murphy fully take the chance to work with one of his deepest musical loves? “Black Screen” gives us some answers. “I had fear in the room,” Murphy sings in his smallest voice, “so I stopped turning up.” This is not a flip comment; it is sorrowful. Regretful. Painfully vulnerable. The song glides along a straightforward sonar-blip beat, with Murphy recalling his relationship with his idol in quiet awe, eventually conjuring an image of interstellar infinity. It concludes with pulses and piano that would not sound out-of-place on the dark side of a Bowie art-rock opus—an ending that could go on forever.


The Los Angeles producer’ upbeat second LP is a short, feature-heavy collection that emphasizes his charmingly loose funk and synth-pop arrangements.

Ephemera

Jim-E Stack has hovered around the fringes of electronic indie-pop music for a while now, first crafting homespun hybrids of club and dance music on 2014’s Tell Me I Belong. He’s worked with left-of-center pop artists as a producer and songwriter since, providing reverb-heavy synths and shuffling, distorted kick drums to songs by Charli XCX, Empress Of, and Caroline Polachek. On his second solo LP, EPHEMERA, Stack moves past the sample-happy instrumentals of his debut and instead teams up with several former collaborators for an upbeat 20-minute set emphasizing funk and synthpop arrangements that feel charmingly loose and lived-in.
Stack pieced together EPHEMERA over the past few years from sessions with artists working on their own projects, but despite the title, the album doesn’t feel like a total hard-drive dump. Empress Of is laid-back and in high spirits on “Note to Self,” a chugging synthpop track with pitch-shifted vocal accents and shimmering piano. The song barely feints at a chorus, but the fractured details add up to a jubilant shot of self-confidence. Stack keeps the breeziness going on “Sweet Summer Sweat,” propped up by a hazy guitar loop and honeyed vocals from L.A. artist Dijon. Midway through, a lean club break packed with echoing sirens and cycling drums adds a euphoric kick of momentum.
As EPHEMERA bends from blissful songs to more melancholy interludes, Stack builds on moods rather than memorable hooks. Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon lumbers over “Jeanie,” a scuffed R&B track submerged in guitars that resemble Jai Paul’s watery electro-funk (see also: the yearning, ruptured instrumental “Be Long 2”). The garbled “Lost Man” fares better, with an assist from London rapper Octavian over a snapping backdrop that calls back to Tell Me I Belong’s mid-tempo highlights.
Stack doesn’t linger in the downcast headspace for long. On “Can We,” a gauzy pop song featuring Kacy Hill, he offers more solid structural and rhythmic ground. Stack produced the bulk of Hill’s airy second album this year, and the pair’s alchemy together feels weightless; here, Hill’s voice is slightly pitched up, dancing over rolling drums, whizzing synths, and funky guitar licks. EPHEMERA doesn’t make much of an effort to break new ground, but on “Can We,” Stack dials into his sweet spot, melding a dulcet vocal delivery with his own understated, soothing flourishes.

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After a decade in the game, the Memphis rapper releases his first major-label album. Guests include Rick Ross, Big K.R.I.T., and 2 Chainz.

Live From the Kitchen

Memphis' Yo Gotti is the latest subject in the rap industry's ongoing, long-term study: If an album is released in a Best Buy and no one is around to purchase it, does it exist? As it pertains to Live From the Kitchen-- the rapper's first major-label album, despite having been in the game for over a decade-- the answer might as well be no. To be fair, 16,000 people bought it in its first week, but amongst his fans, there's little doubt that Live instantly took a backseat to the mixtapes and tracks that preceded it. That's something close to a shame, because it's a solid, listenable, blue-collar rap album, the sort of thing that used to start careers as opposed to branding them dead on arrival.
Live From the Kitchen sounds like a professionally mastered mixtape, which explains why it succeeds artistically while failing commercially. On the one hand, Gotti stays in his lane, repeating the textbook trap music that he's been pumping out for years with slight updates from producers du jour like Lil Lody and Mike Will. On the other, the updates are very slight, and any of these songs could be dropped into an installment of Gotti's Cocaine Music mixtape series without anyone being the wiser-- it's hard to expect many people to pay for something that they've routinely been given for free over the course of a few years.
It is that consistency that is Gotti's calling card, and he carries it over to Live From the Kitchen with ease. He is a classic example of a rapper succeeding as much for how he sounds when saying something as opposed to what he says, but his lyrics have a striking directness that has allowed him to build the type of grassroots fanbase that can serve as a livelihood, even if they don't show up to retail stores. "Testimony", the album's opening track, is a perfect example: Not only does Gotti sound inherently right over DJ Montay's synth horns, but the outlining of his upbringing as a street dealer features no hint of braggadocio or cinematic theatrics. The tone isn't as much somber as it is unflinchingly matter-of-fact, which is an approach that still holds its appeal even during the reign of Rick Ross.
But the corollary here is that, although Gotti can easily work off of this blueprint, he rarely, if ever, transcends it. As far as dealers-turned-rappers go, there's a reason why he has never reached the heights of T.I. or Young Jeezy or Gucci Mane. He has neither the personality nor the pop instincts of those guys, and that becomes a problem over the course of a full-length. Tracks like "Harder" and "Cases" are perfectly fine Southern rap records, but for the top songs on the album, they're distinctly void of anything that would make them standout amongst a deluge of similar-sounding songs that flood the market on a routine basis.
Maybe the fate of Live From the Kitchen-- which, just to really hammer it home, had its lead single released in May of 2009-- is merely illustrative of the industry being the survival of the fittest. But it's hard not to sympathize a bit with Yo Gotti, who willingly entered into the major-label system because, well, that's just what rappers do, even though his fate seemed more or less preordained from the start. His debut album as a "rap star" will be followed by many mixtapes that sound just like it and are basically just as good, but unfortunately for him, that works out way better for the listener than it does the artist.


The first career-spanning Pavement comp contains their best-known songs as well as concert staples, fan favorites, and at least a couple of curveballs.

Quarantine the Past

Pavement have a fairly small catalog-- five full-length albums and a handful of EPs, plus a compilation of early singles. Over the past decade, their B-sides, radio sessions, and assorted rarities have been repackaged into a series of excellent reissues, which has made it easy to be a Pavement completist without blowing a lot of cash. It's all very accessible, but it's not easy to know where to start. Quarantine the Past, the first-ever Pavement retrospective compilation, solves this problem by providing a cheap and easy entry point to the band that represents the breadth of their songbook. The best-known songs are featured-- "Cut Your Hair", "Gold Soundz", "Here", "Shady Lane", "Spit on a Stranger"-- but so are concert staples, fan favorites, and at least a couple of curveballs. The sequence is non-chronological, zig-zagging through the catalog and evenly distributing the obvious classics throughout the running order.
It's important that a Pavement best-of not only focus on their singles, which often erred on the side of novelty and levity. The dark horses here are essential in sketching out the group's range, from the punky blast of "Unfair" and "Debris Slide" to the loose, stoned sound of "Heaven Is a Truck". "Grounded" is majestic, "Shoot the Singer" is wistful, "Date With Ikea" is a suburban anthem. "Embassy Row" is like an alternate-universe Pavement that could compete on modern rock radio with the likes of Weezer, and "Box Elder" is a platonic ideal of simple, lo-fi indie pop. Fans of the band may look over the tracklisting and wonder why some of their favorites didn't make the cut, but every song on this thing is an unimpeachable gem, and the collection presents a well-rounded summary of their distinct and varied body of work.
Pavement were mainly a vehicle for the songwriting of Stephen Malkmus, who penned almost all of the band's material. In terms of rock archetypes, Malkmus is a true original. He's erudite but bratty, laid-back yet buttoned-up. He's an inscrutable goofball, a pragmatic romantic, an aloof charmer. His music is loaded with references to cultural history-- one of these songs is an imaginary history of R.E.M.-- but his nerdy impulses and arty affect is consistently overwhelmed by his casual coolness. There's an impossible ease and haphazard grace to this music. A lot of bands work very hard to make you appreciate their meticulous craft or browbeat you with hooks, but Pavement tossed off brilliantly composed pop songs with a shambling, carefree swagger. They made it sound easy, and maybe it was. The best kind of genius tends to come very naturally to people, like a side effect of just being themselves. In "Frontwards", Malkmus sings "I've got style/ Miles and miles/ So much style that it's wasted," and that's pretty much him and his band in a nutshell.
Malkmus' lyrics, central to the band's appeal, alternate between whimsical nonsense and epigrammatic quotables. The songs seldom slot neatly into readily identifiable emotional states or refer to specific experiences, instead falling into the liminal spaces between thoughts and feelings. Malkmus' words indicate context and supply the listener with rich imagery, but the real poetry is in the way his phrases flow with the melodies, and are offset by evocative guitar textures and unexpected noises. The group never compromised tunefulness for artiness, but mystique and abstraction were among their core values. In retrospect, certain lines ring out like statements of intent-- "We need secrets," "Tricks are everything to me."
The very best Pavement songs delight in curiosity and imagination, drawing connections between images and ideas as if everything in the world was full of character and significance. This is part of why, for example, a playful joke about the voice of Rush's lead singer in "Stereo" never gets stale. It's in the middle of a song that may as well be a sub-genre unto itself, bouncing about gleefully, utterly fascinated by the all the obscure details of the world. They found the magic in the mundane, and could make small enthusiasms, silly in-jokes, and skewed observations seem profound and glorious.
A decade after the band's dissolution, Pavement's music has proven itself to have an evergreen quality. To be sure, it's all very much of its time and no band aside from perhaps Guided By Voices better epitomizes the sound and style of 1990s indie rock, but the material transcends its era as much as it defines it. This compilation exists mainly to get an entry-level Pavement product on the market to coincide with their reunion tour, but it has a value beyond crass commercial necessity. Unlike other cross-generational legacy bands like the Pixies, Sonic Youth, and Talking Heads, Pavement's songs fit together comfortably as a jukebox-friendly hit parade.
Some tracks, like the Spiral Stairs showcase "Date With Ikea" and the early EP cut "Mellow Jazz Docent", shine brighter than in their original contexts, while numbers like "In the Mouth a Desert" and "Gold Soundz" come out sounding like modern standards. As much as their albums excel as unified works, no one ever needed to hear those records in full to fall in love with "Cut Your Hair", "Shady Lane", or "Range Life" on MTV, college radio, or someone's mixtape. Quarantine the Past doesn't replace the albums, but it's a highly listenable alternative that is as much a treat for nostalgic older fans as it is a valuable gateway for new listeners.


The moody London indie folk trio return with a stripped-back record inspired by long-distance longing.

Stereo Mind Game

For a microgeneration of angsty teens, the music of London indie folk trio Daughter was a formative soundtrack to aimless Tumblr scrolling and late nights aching for connection. In particular, the band’s 2011 breakout “Youth” provided solace to struggling adolescents with its trembly vocals and tormented lyrics comparing romantic disappointment to “heaving through corrupted lungs.” Their raw emotionality and billowing, gothic production would go on to influence future critical darlings like Julien Baker and Ethel Cain; Cain fell for the band’s live performances, while Baker praised the wilder, denser 2016 follow-up Not To Disappear on the Talkhouse.
After a video game score and a record from frontwoman Elena Tonra’s side project Ex:Re, the band scales back for its third proper album Stereo Mind Game. Inspired by Tonra’s long-distance relationship, the album wrestles with connection and distance. On the jaunty, cinematic “Swim Back,” Tonra longs for more straightforward communication, scheming to “find a hole in the ocean” to travel to her lover. On “Be On Your Way,” she relinquishes ownership of them and vows to meet in other circumstances. She becomes a reluctant optimist: On a previous record, a line like “I have a feeling we’ll repeat this evening” would be a fatalistic concession to toxic patterns, but now, it’s an earnest promise to a lover.
In contrast to the bluster of Daughter’s first two records, Stereo Mind Game at times can feel undercooked; an antsier arrangement on the relatively restrained “Dandelion” would better pair with the song’s when-will-they-text-back anxiety. But elsewhere, the embrace of negative space helps the individual elements hit harder. On “Party,” the simple guitar strokes and drum beats help foreground Tonra’s tense writing: “I could stop if I want, I just don’t want to yet/I’ll creep the volume up, I’ve got to drown myself out,” she sings about her relationship to alcohol.
While Daughter’s past work could tend toward depressive myopia, Tonra stretches herself as a writer on Stereo Mind Games. On the percussive, almost-spoken-word track “Junkmail,” she leans toward Florence Shaw and away from Florence Welch, flatly intoning observations like “You can’t edit the scenery to view it better” and “Should I pay for viewing your faint lookalike?” The ticking ballad “Future Lover'' winds up the best song on the record by dialing down on doomy imagery and adding a singalong chorus. The smaller stakes of Stereo Mind Games feel healthier and rewarding; the music is still vulnerable, but anguish no longer consumes every moment.


The Los Angeles songwriter balances autobiographical odes to love and loss with dreamlike imagery on her soft, hopeful debut.

An Orange Colored Day

Arima Ederra started writing her debut, An Orange Colored Day, after an especially poignant afternoon in the park with a group of friends who had each lost a parent. As the sun was setting, painting the field before them orange, two friends jumped from a tree and started running. Ederra jumped after them, and soon after, she wrote “Free Again,” a warm, exploratory song that revels in the freedom and safety of childhood. The song’s ethos—optimistic but informed by a sadness right outside the frame—defines the album. These soft, reggae-inflected R&B lullabies insist on cherishing beauty, even when Ederra has to find and create it for herself.
Throughout the album, Ederra situates specific imagery about love and yearning in a cocoon of wonder and gratitude, signaled by gentle guitar melodies, crystalline steel drum tones, and twinkling keys. Grief and joy are especially intertwined in the way Ederra sings about her family. “Drugz/Wooden Wheel,” written after Ederra spent her last $50 on a gift for her mother, transforms a moment of anxiety into a meditation on familial gratitude. She sings, “I can’t buy drugs, I spent my money on my mama/I bought her roses by the dozen, she lives for me and my brother.” She builds up momentum, quickening her vocal delivery as she repeats “Girl, what you crying for?/It’s coming back to you now.” “Yellow Cabi,” a gentle piano ballad, is a beautiful tribute to her late father, who was a cab driver. Her voice is tender and honeyed as she details his late nights driving alone, providing for his family. These meandering, golden songs flit between the autobiographical, which can be lonely and heavy, and the fantastical, which serves as an emotional foil and a reprieve.
Despite its themes of loss, Ederra’s music maintains a sense of hope. Her songs often take on a prayer-like tone, allowing her to think beyond immediate circumstances. “Faith is what makes us beautiful,” she explains, “like being able to see the unimaginable, or being able to believe that things can be better.” Opener “Letters From the Imaginary” establishes a wonderstruck tone with its shimmering harp and cloudlike layered vocals. Ederra invites us to jump head-first into her dreamy narrative: “Take my hand now,” she sings. “I’ll show you worlds above the clouds.” “Dual Skies” is about someone mourning the loss of a younger brother. But it’s also one of the most triumphant songs on the album: Ederra’s voice is eager and determined as she sings over a bright, staccato synth tone. She again uses the language of the imaginary to assert that love transcends time and space, existing eternally between the people who have shared it, even when they “love between dual skies.”
Like a potter pulling shapes out of clay, Ederra reaches into the haze of grief and unearths new visions of her future that are full of beauty and emotional safety. Engaging in fantasy can sometimes feel like escapism, but here it is an act of self-determination. In “An Orange Colored Day,” she uses particularly ornate imagery—tranquil gold faces, love beaming through cracks in windows, a heaven soft as skin—to reposition loss as an opportunity to honor enduring love. Ederra chooses to remain hopeful in these moments, to prioritize a version of herself who has grown around and through her pain, even when that person can feel far away, like a figment of her imagination.


Friends of Friends offshoot Young Adults' latest release is an EP from Daniel.T., a Southern California house upstart who’s put out promising nu-disco singles as one half of Cosmic Kids. Tetrachromat is his sunniest and most musically varied offering so far, painting the producer as an enthusiastic cultural omnivore.

Tetrachromat EP

Over the past few years, L.A. has spawned an Internet-friendly coven of young dance producers. The growing label Friends of Friends and its offshoot, Young Adults, have helped shape a loose aesthetic, with the sub-label focusing on a more explicitly niche template of chilled-out, lo-fi house music, providing a home for releases from Suzanne Kraft, Marvin & Guy, and slow-mo house deity Mark E. Their latest release is an EP from Daniel.T., aka Daniel Terndrup, a SoCal house upstart who’s also put out a few promising nu-disco singles as one half of Cosmic Kids.
Tetrachromat is his sunniest and most musically varied offering so far, painting the producer as an enthusiastic cultural omnivore. Terndrup’s ear is tuned to a certain feel-good, typically Californian frequency: his favored warm and atmospheric sounds connect him to a nebulous lineage populated by Balearic pop, space disco, and SoCal neo-psychedelia. The EP begins with the warmly burbling "Mission Hill Morning", a track that calls to mind the gentle late-aughts disco put out by Oslo label Smalltown Supersound, and concludes with the slightly-too-on-the-nose uke-strumming of "The Sun & the Sky", which Terndrup fleshes out with genial whistling and sing-song vocals. It’s PCH music for commuting into the city for parties, a "Ventura Highway" for the laptop generation.
Wisely, Terndrup places his best track right in the middle. The woozy "Planetesimal" features the EP’s heaviest build-up and its biggest payoff, in the form of a giddy, insouciant synthesizer line that cascades over the sounds of sputtering engines like a stretch of Rainbow Road. This is exactly the kind of sound that often gets called colorful, and Terndrup seems to know it—the term "tetrachromat" refers to a person who possess an extra cone in the eye, leading to an enhanced ability to see color (a less-than-reliable test for the condition was passed around online earlier this year, after a certain meme got the Internet talking about color perception.) After the warm bubble bath of the first half, the chilly "Laced" comes as something of a surprise, though Terndrup incorporates enough equatorial flourishes to suggest a strong connection to the rest of the material.
Terndrup’s flexibility with his sound can sometimes project a lack of confidence—the title track, a mellow cloud of contentment disturbed by a wildly ebullient melody, suggests a more restless producer than the EP’s general mood describes. Still, the sense that he has further to go in terms of editing and honing his sound doesn’t detract from his ability to filter a wide range of influences into an appealing and well-crafted aesthetic.


With their skate-punk shout-alongs and double-tapped guitar heroics, this D.C. duo embodies the sound of emo in 2019.

Somewhere City

More than any indie rock sub-genre, modern emo is largely driven by “the kids”—the fans, the bands, even the industry benefactors are often high school or college kids, with almost no degree of separation between them in the message boards and Facebook groups that make the whole thing run. As a result, recent influence spreads quickly, which is both exhilarating and frustrating to anyone trying to follow the scene’s rapid turnover. If Origami Angel’s Somewhere City is unrecognizable as a scene-defining emo record for someone who stopped paying attention around The Hotelier’s Home, Like NoPlace is There, it’s because Origami Angel wasn’t the kind of emo band that existed en masse five years ago.
Ryland Heagy and Pat Doherty emerged from a void created in 2016 by Modern Baseball’s newfound desire to transcend the Philly party emo they once perfected as well as the cancellation of one-time next big thing JANK—all of a sudden, there was a wave of bands fluent in memes, math rock, the lingua franca of therapeutic self-empowerment, and community building.
Among this group, Origami Angel’s chops and brand stewardship immediately stood out. They released entire EPs themed around Pokemon, full of strident skate-punk vocals and tapping runs they’d be more than happy to map out on Guitar Hero. They were undeniably fun, but Somewhere City gives them a newfound sense of purpose. In Somewhere City, “watching Danny Phantom, eating Happy Meals” is encouraged as a form of self-actualization, people expose their raw feelings without judgment, and if things get awkward, there’s always a sympathetic “whoa” or “woo!” waiting from your new best friends.
They’re one of those duos that sounds bigger than two people through hyperactivity—the tapping runs, Drop-D dissonance, power chord sequences and handclaps of “Doctor Whomst” are held together by sheer momentum, a quality that does more to keep Somewhere City coherent rather than its conceptual underpinning. Origami Angel never let up for more than five seconds, save for the twinkly arpeggios that serve as Somewhere City’s introductory scene setting (and even “Welcome To…” ends in gratuitously overdubbed gang vocals). The production is cleaner and brighter compared to May’s four-track EP Gen 3, but the hyperspeed approach actually has the effect of downplaying the impressive sophistication and complexity of Somewhere City’s musicality.
If Somewhere City finds itself unable to bridge a generation gap, it’s not due to any of its musical qualities—for anyone over the age of 30, they can be heard as celebration rockers taking the baton or beer from Japandroids or Fang Island. But after decades of being dismissed as strictly a vehicle for solipsistic, suburban angst, emo in 2010s has swung in the opposite direction, and Somewhere City’s relentless positivity can exert an uncomfortable peer pressure on the listener to conflate great intentions with art itself. Are you feeling sad and alone? Origami Angel will be there for you with chicken nuggets and a shoulder to cry on. Did you know that you’re special just the way you are? Did you ever wish every song on Bleed American had the message of “The Middle”? There’s no doubting Origami Angel’s sincerity, but its tendency to immediately reframe any uglier emotions undercuts their conceptual ambitions and makes the “I Just Want to Sell Out My Funeral”-style montage that recaps the nine previous songs feel a bit unearned. Somewhere City is an invigorating place to spend a half hour, but Origami Angel would be wise to explore the darkness on the edge of town.


Numero Group turns up an outlier in the new-age icon’s catalog: an album of vocal music that, while a lesser work, offers a glimpse of a seldom-seen side of Laraaji.

Vision Songs, Vol. 1

The new-age renaissance of the past few years has been especially beneficial to Edward Larry Gordon, who since 1980 has been better known to noise and new-age fans alike as Laraaji. Revived interest in the genre has led to an ongoing reassessment of his massive body of work. He’s played with Blues Control and Sun Araw, and his blissed-out explorations on zither and bells have even been the subject of remixes. In addition to touring the new-age conference circuit, Laraaji has made appearances at eclectic festivals like Big Ears and Moogfest, while many of his most prominent works have been reissued, from transcendent albums like Celestial Vibration and Essence/Universe to the Brian Eno-produced Ambient 3: Day of Radiance.
Leave it to Numero Group to find the outlier in Laraaji’s vast catalog: a set of aslant lyrical songs that only ever saw the light of day via a limited batch of self-released cassettes in 1984, when Laraaji had his public-access show on New York television. A few songs have been pruned from the original tape, but the set nevertheless reveals a rarely heard aspect of Laraaji, in which he improvises vocal takes in what the notes call “a bulk download—a visionary zap of vertical energy.” The songs spontaneously arose from social settings in the spiritual community, and they feel as loose and blousy as yoga pants.
Hindu chants bubble up and evolve at not too far a remove from the Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda ashram tapes from that same era that saw reissue last year, though the urgency and gospel-rooted sound of that set is replaced by something decidedly more informal here. Laraaji’s telltale zither is deployed to different ends. While on his more expansive albums, his open-tuned style conjures cumulus clouds and body-melting drifts, here he uses the instrument in much the same way that a folk singer does an acoustic guitar. It harks back to Laraaji’s earliest days in New York City, performing as a comedian and taking part in hootenannies in the Village and at venues like the Bitter End. On “Is This Clear?” his plainspoken style and open-tuned strumming brings to mind Richie Havens, while at other points, Laraaji’s singing isn’t all too far removed from that of Cat Stevens.
Whereas his instrumental works deliver bliss, songs like “I Can Only Bliss Out (F’Days)” make that quest overt, setting it to a slinky Casio drum machine. His chintzy keyboard riffs on “All of a Sudden” provide a steady pulse until the midway point of the song, where they begin to hiccup and blip like Mister Rogers’ trolley derailing. On Vision Songs, Laraaji isn’t as interested in songs or even singing so much as in delivering uplifting messages, which come across as new-age boilerplate (“We shall be released into pure light/And we shall be reborn again”), weird mindful details (“Brush your teeth like you got it right now”), and endearing if slightly awkward aphorisms (“Growth can change us and change can grow us/New can take us into the beyond”). There are brief glints of enlightenment to be heard here, but more often than not, Laraaji’s makeshift songs come across like daily affirmations as heard in a hotel lounge.


Bland production and weak songwriting hamstring the personalized nature of Younger Now, making it merely a suggestion of the kind of artist Miley Cyrus could be.

Younger Now

Miley Cyrus has long been seeking a musical identity. Just before the release of her popsplosion album Bangerz, she seemed destined to go back into the family business. Her string of 2012 covers—released as a series of videos called the Backyard Sessions—were deep-voiced and sultry. On “Lilac Wine,” she volleyed between Nina Simone’s sinuous vocal timbres and the romantic drama of Jeff Buckley, both of whom once performed the song. But it was her version of “Jolene” that made it clear she understood the nuances of her godmother Dolly Parton’s music—and her father Billy Ray’s music—and that perhaps these little studies would guide her future output of slick pop-country.
Then, in early 2013, Miley uploaded a video of herself dressed in a frog onesie doing her best twerking impression. It seemed innocuously silly, in line with having “no swag” as she told Sway in a 2010 interview—but it wasn’t. This kicked off a Miley’s lewd ‘n’ twisted era: the topless Terry Richardson photoshoots, the crotch-grinding of Robin Thicke at the VMAs, all leading to a psilocybin-tinged friendship with Flaming Lips’ frontman Wayne Coyne. Together, the two concocted Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, a 23-track album of drug-fueled self-indulgence that fits in, somehow, cameos from both Big Sean and Ariel Pink. Dead Petz was basically a collegiate hippie fantasia played out on our Twitter feeds and TV screens.
And now, she’s over it! Her latest album, Younger Now, is supposed to be a vision into her post-neon maturity and a clear idea of who Miley Cyrus is, but as a statement of reinvention, it’s merely a suggestion of the kind of artist Miley Cyrus could be. Younger Now blends pop-rock and pablum country fare that is so restrained, so thinly produced, it seems like her lovably goofy personality was hobbled throughout the recording process. Even before she read the funeral rites for Ratchet Miley, Cyrus teased the kind of performer she was becoming. A recent cover of Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” showed a self-assured pop star reclaiming her Appalachian roots while still maintaining the post-Disney cool facilitated by Mike WiLL and Pharrell.
Instead, Miley delivered “Malibu,” her first single after giving up her bong and getting back with Liam Hemsworth and a preview of the lifelessness to come. Even though “Malibu” is supposed to be a paean of reconciliation, it is far too breezy and pappy to evoke any sense of passion (which she excels at). Even when collaborating with Dolly Parton on “Rainbowland,” the muddy production leaves Miley uninspired—it’s not until a voicemail from Parton teasing, “You probably wrote this about some boy you loved” at the end of the song that we get some clarity.
The album is not without bright spots. The quiet “I Would Die For You” gives Miley room to explore the depth of her voice and the song’s stripped-down percussion makes it one of the least soupy tracks here. She sounds strongest on “Miss You So Much,” where the power and mourning in her voice become the stars of the song. Though it was written about a close friend’s boyfriend who overdosed, Cyrus had been hanging out with her beloved grandmother the day she was recording: “It made me kind of think about her, the more I started singing it.” Miley’s connection to the transcendent spirit of love and grief is just the realest thing on an album full of limp deliveries.
Even though Younger Now has these few successful moments, it’s hard to reconcile—much less care—about this harmless Miley. The odd country-pop lope of “Bad Mood” and the thoughtless strings and horns that pepper the arrangements of the forgettable ballads that close the album do little to take away from her unapologetic abandonment of rap music and culture. “I can’t listen to [hyper-sexual lyrics] anymore. That’s what pushed me out of the hip-hop scene a little. It was too much ’Lamborghini, got my Rolex, got a girl on my cock’ — I am so not that,” she told Billboard in May. This was, naturally, met with a maelstrom of ire on Twitter and elsewhere for “[disrobing] her black culture cloak after profiting from it.” Aside from insulting people who viewed her music as a commodification of rap culture, it’s hard to take Miley’s “I am so not that” declaration seriously when her Bangerz Tour was a pervy “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” romp where she both simulated an orgy and straddled a hot dog as she rode it through the air. If she’s asked about her past performative sexuality, as she was by NPR, she will dubiously cite riot grrrl impresario Kathleen Hanna as a totem for it being feminist and acceptable.
Like so many of us at the age of 25, Miley’s imagination is galvanized by pop culture, but she is often missing its original context. She finds inspiration on the surface and cherry-picks what to use for herself without understanding the work’s original point of view, whether it is Hanna’s Bikini Kill days or twerking born of bounce music in New Orleans. The irony is that when she is working with material from other people’s toolboxes she sounds the most engaged and the most like herself. Her search for the next new sound that defines Miley Cyrus as someone who contains the filigrees of a pop star, the chops of a songwriter, and the agency of a woman who is in full control of her art should continue beyond Younger Now, because there is precious little to be found here.


Rundle has made her name performing mournful, minor key compositions, swelling with gothic drama, and her latest is her heaviest and most uplifting work yet.

Marked for Death

The music of Emma Ruth Rundle is nearly swallowed by darkness, but Rundle does not seem oppressed by it. Having toured with acts like Deafheaven and Earth, Rundle made her name performing mournful, minor key compositions, swelling with gothic drama. But to classify her music as macabre is to deny its cathartic, even uplifting qualities. On Marked for Death, the follow-up to 2014’s Some Heavy Ocean, Rundle upgrades that album’s gothic folk with a more colorful palette. Here, she strengthens the atmospheric guitar work that comprised her instrumental solo debut, Electric Guitar One, and enlivens her songs with anthemic, weightless choruses. And while her two previous solo releases, as well as her work in the noisy LA trio Marriages, set a precedent for Marked for Death’s more ambitious material, it doesn’t make the record feel any less thrilling. Each of its eight tracks showcase a songwriter testing the limits of her sound and redefining herself in the process.
As we have come to expect from Rundle, the lyrics throughout Marked for Death range from devastatingly beautiful to just plain devastating. The album follows a loose narrative about a doomed relationship, touching on themes of hopelessness and mortality. The opening title track introduces two fatalistic lovers, with Rundle asking a series of questions that progresses from “Who else is going to love someone like you that’s marked for death?” to simply, “Who else would ever stay?” In the following track, Rundle is wrestling with the sacrifices of commitment, detailing an inherent power struggle and loss of identity (“I am worthless in your arms/But you offer this protection no one else is giving me”). It’s unquestionably heavy material, and, in these two tracks, the music is built to carry the load. The guitars are crushing, approaching shoegaze levels of fuzz, while the rhythm remains slow and insistent.
After the lumbering introductory tracks, the tension breaks in “Medusa.” Rundle’s voice, clear and calm, soars like the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan in the song's inscrutable refrain. The album’s finest moments are crafted in this mold, settling on a style of slow-building, otherworldly balladry that invoke the early days of 4AD. In “Heaven,” Rundle’s greatest work yet, she sings over a quietly escalating storm of strings, fingerpicked guitars, and militant percussion. By the time the song climaxes with Rundle bellowing, “I can see fire... I can see in heaven,” you are right there with her. Gorgeous and unsettling,“Heaven” feels like the culmination of all of Rundle's best work, boasting the record’s most gratifying melody as well as its gothiest couplet. “The only church I’ll ever know is in the Earth,” she sings, “The ground below me says ‘Come home now.’”
Like Some Heavy Ocean, Marked for Death also closes with a sparse solo piece—just Rundle's voice, electric guitar, and the lo-fi hum of her amplifier. But while Ocean’s “Living With the Black Dog” was a dark admission of hopelessness, “Real Big Sky” feels like a transcendent turning point. Rundle calls back to the lingering question in the album’s opening track (“Who else would ever stay?”), but now finds her narrator faced with new revelations– no longer fearing death, but keeping a light on to welcome it. It’s a staggering performance, with Rundle’s voice alternately quivering and soaring. In the song’s music video, she introduces the track with a grand statement: “I don’t think there’s anything more exhilarating than seeing natural beauty… Seeing something that there aren’t words for.” Marked for Death finds Rundle grappling with elements beyond her control, but she's closer than ever to becoming her own force of nature.


After making a splash in 2008 with a strong EP and brilliant full-length debut, Fleet Foxes return with a darker album that's equally assured.

Helplessness Blues

Fleet Foxes' unpretentious, crowd-pleasing directness was the key to their rapid rise. Their Sun Giant EP and self-titled debut LP, both released in 2008, brimmed with inviting melodies, evocative lyrics, and open-armed harmonizing that seemed designed to reach a wide variety of listeners. Their bright folk-rock sound wasn't exactly "cool," but that was sort of the point-- it's familiar in the most pleasing way, lacking conceit or affectation. Their expression of their love for music (and making music) was refreshing three years ago, and that sort of thing never gets old.
But clouds inevitably roll in. On the band's follow-up, Helplessness Blues, the mood is darker and more uncertain, adding shade to their gold-hued sound. The change in tone reflects the tumultuous road Fleet Foxes traveled during the album's creation. In late 2009, Fleet Foxes had an album's worth of songs ready, but the tracks were mostly scrapped before mixing. The arduous creative process took a toll on the group members, particularly singer/songwriter Robin Pecknold, who told Pitchfork at the time, "The last year has been a really trying creative process where I've not been knowing what to write or how to write."
The group's persistence paid off, though: Helplessness Blues is comparatively deeper, more intricate, and more complex, a triumphant follow-up to a blockbuster debut. Working again with producer Phil Ek, they've crafted a cavernous record that allows more room for them to breathe and stretch. The album's longer, episodic cuts contain disquieting shifts in tone. "The Plains/Bitter Dancer", for example, begins as a spindly, psychedelic folk tune reminiscent of some of the Zombies' more introspective moments, and then, after a brief pause, bursts suddenly into the type of gangland chorus Fleet Foxes have practically trademarked by now. Elsewhere, shorter songs seem to end mid-thought; the rollicking tumble of "Battery Kinzie" cuts off suddenly, while "Sim Sala Bim"'s heavy-strummed raga quickly unfurls like broken strings. This battle between tension and serenity is new to the band's repertoire, and it lends the album a compelling uneasiness that starkly contrasts the sunnier disposition of their first two releases.
The group harmonies that flowed from Fleet Foxes are in shorter supply here, employed largely to embellish tracks, allowing Pecknold to take a clearer lead role, both vocally and lyrically. He first emerged as an impressionistic songwriter, but he's since become stronger and more descriptive, conjuring vivid imagery of men striking matches on suitcase latches and penny-laden fountains. Mostly, he spends time working out his own personal puzzles, pondering the big questions of existence and meditating on the dissolution of his five-year relationship during one of Helplessness Blues' more difficult creative periods.
The record reflects his determination to deal with the present while leaving the past behind. At times, Pecknold's voice takes an aggressive tone, as on the eight-minute breakup saga "The Shrine/An Argument"; other times, it cracks slightly, exposing his pain on the bittersweet "Lorelai". But the warmth is there. On the album's most intimate track, "Someone You'd Admire", he contemplates the contradictory impulses to love and to destroy, accompanied by spare harmony and softly strummed guitar.
Pecknold confronts more universal concerns as well, starting with "Montezuma"'s memorable album-opening lines: "So now, I am older/ Than my mother and father/ When they had their daughter/ Now, what does that say about me?" He wrestles throughout the record with his own measurements of success, and whether any of it adds up to anything. He asks questions only to come up with more questions, and they all lead into a sort of resolution on the album's title track, "Helplessness Blues". Here, he retreats from the world into idyllic, pastoral imagery and wishes for a simpler life before trying to come to grips with his newfound renown. "Someday I'll be like the man on the screen," he promises at the end of the song.
Helplessness Blues' analytical and inquisitive nature never tips into self-indulgence. Amidst the chaos, the record showcases the band's expanded range and successful risk-taking, while retaining what so many people fell in love with about the group in the first place. And once again, a strong sense of empathy is at the heart of what makes Fleet Foxes special. Much has been made of American indie's recent obsession with nostalgic escapism, but Robin Pecknold doesn't retreat. He confronts uncertainty while feeling out his own place in the world, which is something a lot of us can relate to.


The second full-length from New York folk-pop trio Florist distills their sound to its essence. It finds beauty in simplicity and strength in fragility, full of songs that are quietly commanding.

If Blue Could Be Happiness

In the overall arc of their short but productive career, Florist’s debut album, 2016’s The Birds Outside Sang, was a bit of a left turn. Written and recorded in the aftermath of a cycling accident that left songwriter Emily Sprague temporarily partially paralyzed, the record captures the discomfort of unfamiliar terrain navigated not by choice but by necessity. Unable to play guitar, Sprague wrote most of the album using keyboards, which form the foundation for the record’s claustrophobic first half. It’s an album of detachment and longing, one which evokes the feeling of being held prisoner in your own broken body.
For their second album, If Blue Could Be Happiness, Florist have returned to their comfort zone, the sort of hushed, bedroom folk pop Sprague has been steadily refining ever since she started recording songs as a teenager. But this time, everything feels animated by a newfound clarity and focus. The band—which includes Jonnie Baker and Rick Spataro—has stripped their sound to its essence: finger-picked guitar lines, yearning vocal melodies, the soft shuffle of brushed drums. They’ve done away with embellishments like tape hiss and sing-alongs, and now the production feels at once more crisp and intimate.
At the center of Florist’s spartan sound, Sprague is a lyricist who always sounds like a wise-beyond-her-years naturalist—a sort of upstate New York Phil Elverum in training. But here she claims that role with a previously unseen authority and purpose. When struggling to make sense of a parent’s death, she seeks solace in nature’s logic; when faced with everyday struggles, she finds comfort in the smallness of human affairs. There’s a timeless quality to these songs that makes them feel unmoored from the current moment, a reminder that this too will pass. But Sprague still has an empathetic embrace waiting for anyone who’s trying to cope during difficult times. “If you’re terrified of living, like me, I hope you’ll be fine,” she sings on ”Blue Mountain Road,” “Cause we’re terrified together, in this terrifying time.”
Like Elverum, Sprague has a tendency to cut the most direct path as a lyricist. But on these songs, she manages to withhold her poetic impulses almost completely, as if to ask, why wrap the world up in verse when there’s so much beauty to be found in seeing it as it is? This directness can be disarming, like on “Eyes in the Sun,” where she asks, point blank, “Do you wanna join the road of my life?” She then lays it all out in just a few lines, like her hopes and fears are two sides of the same coin: “It’s been a while but I’m not afraid/Of the things that make me feel something big/Like looking at your eyes in the sun/Like looking at your eyes in the dark.”
While many of these songs could be described as minimal, they’re also musically rich. Round chords ring and synths twinkle on “Glowing Brightly,” as Sprague thumbs through the faded snapshots in her head. On the title track, the band wraps up Sprague’s gentle voice in a warm cocoon of sound. “Blue Mountain Road” opens with distant noises that bring to mind the sound of a freight train while “Instrumental 3” feels like the music you might put on in the drawing room of a creaky old house in an attempt to lure out the ghosts. Nearly all of these songs are driven by guitar lines that are simple yet memorable, a perfect match for Sprague’s earnest, plainspoken profundity.
The concept of mindfulness has become something of a trend lately, peddled by meditation apps, self-help books, and yoga classes as an antidote to the ills of an over-connected life. But a state of mind isn’t something that can be bought, it’s something that has to be earned. Sprague seems to understand this; her hard-won superpower is an ability to communicate to us the beauty and value of things that we often overlook. On these songs, she often cuts through the mind’s noise to focus on what’s right in front of her: a beam of light, a lover’s eyes, the worn texture of a cherished memory. This focus seems to have only intensified following her accident and recovery. In this regard, she brings to mind the late Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, who, following his own brush with death, returned to his craft more present and attuned to the living things around him. Like Sparklehorse’s music, If Blue Could Be Happiness has the power to transform your outlook and change the trajectory of your day, if you will let it.
The album’s arresting closer, “Red Bird,” appears here in the original demo form that Sprague recorded and played for her mother on the day before she died. But even without knowing this fact, the song captures your attention. There’s something intangible and powerful at the core of it, a force you can’t quite put your finger on but which can move you to tears all the same. Sprague traces a delicate, lilting melody with her voice as strings quiver like leaves behind her, summoning a sense of longing that feels ancient and deep. Birds have always embodied nature’s wisdom in Florist’s songs and here they provide comfort, a stable force in the face of impermanence and loss. “I understand the birds now that I’ve learned some things,” Sprague sings in the song’s final moments. If we stop to really listen, maybe we can, too.