There’s a lot of self happening on the ninth proper Bonnie "Prince" Billy album, a release that finds Will Oldham largely unaccompanied. The result is one of the most intense, spry, and catchy collections of a distinctive career.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Bonnie "Prince" Billy

Bonnie "Prince" Billy

There’s a lot of self happening on the ninth proper Bonnie "Prince" Billy album. Will Oldham played everything himself, recorded it himself, released it himself, and even distributed it himself by hand to record stores. Most significantly, the music on Bonnie "Prince" Billy exudes an individual perspective—nearly every song is written in the first person, and Oldham’s spare acoustic guitar, breathy vocals, and close-up production form a contemplative inner monologue.
There’s one more bit of self about Bonnie “Prince” Billy that’s important: the fact that Oldham decided to make it self-titled. The last time he went that route was on 1994’s Palace Brothers (later re-titled Days in the Wake). That was also the last time he made a full-length album with, for the most part, just his voice and acoustic guitar. The result was one of the finest records in his oeuvre, a suite of intimate sketches studded with now-classics like “Pushkin” and “I Am A Cinematographer". He must’ve thought of that album while making this one*,* and when judged against its predecessor Bonnie "Prince" Billy measures up quite well.
That’s due partially to how perfectly the solo acoustic format fits Oldham’s melding of vocals and lyrics. He weaves them together so tightly that it’s hard to tell singer from song, and that’s clearest when it’s just him and a guitar. His voice shakes, stretches and cracks around notes, approaching rather than hitting them, and his words similarly skirt themes and flirt with meaning. Concrete ideas and images emerge, but nothing is ever so defined that a single interpretation is clear. Often my first impression of a song flips on subsequent listen, when one bent note or one turn of phrase that I didn’t notice before makes me rethink the rest. At best Oldham’s songs are powerfully ambiguous, and that’s true of all of them on Bonnie "Prince" Billy.
This time around, Oldham finds ambiguity in the elusive concept of the self—what it is, how it changes, how it will end. A few of these tunes are ostensibly about relationships, but even those center on the self and its struggle to connect. “I see you go on/ and I go too, but not with you,” Oldham sings in the album’s second song, “Lessons from Stony",  his voice rising with caution. On the next tune, “Triumph of Will", he laments that he and his partner are “never lost together… We are two separate people/ We never will be one.” By song’s end the couple have willed their way to unity, but it’s a triumph that doesn’t last long.
From there, Oldham becomes increasingly pessimistic about love. “All our hearts are stained and every love is tainted,” he declares at one point, and later “there is no heaven for love, it simply dies.” He also becomes increasingly obsessed with mortality, both fascinated and terrified by death of the self. On “I Will Be Born Again” he sings the title repetitively as if trying to convince himself of the impossible. On the deceptively upbeat “This is My Cocktail” he admits fearing two things: “losing my mind, losing my body.” And by the time of “Ending it All (As I Do),” he sounds resigned: “the beginning of ending is already done.” Throughout these musings, his guitar winds around like a stream of consciousness, shifting between simple melodies and looser, less certain structures.
It may sound like Bonnie "Prince" Billy is an intense listen, but much of it is also spry and catchy, and some of it is pretty funny too. One song about a pig kept in a chest at the foot of a bed plays like a surrealist cartoon, and even when Oldham is staring at death, he stays wry and absurd, dropping humorous motifs throughout. A particularly amusing one is his persistent use of the word “fun,” which is held up as a kind of life-goal holy grail. But its attainment is always uncertain, which gives the album tension.
That uncertainty, and Oldham’s sense of the self as constant flux, also give Bonnie "Prince’"Billy a Zen feel—and, by the end, a meditative calm. Closer “Royal Quiet Deluxe” describes driving down a highway to escape a failed relationship, but also to meet something greater. “If we die many times, then let death come to me,” he sings spiritedly—and then suddenly switches into a upbeat epilogue. “This is the last song of its kind,” he croons as if he’s peacefully accepted his demise, or moved on to something new. It’s one of the most sublime moments in a musical career already full of them—and it ends with the album’s sunniest line: “Ain’t it the best?” Once you’ve taken this fascinating journey with Oldham, it’s hard not to agree.


The three improvisers conceived their new album while soundtracking a film for Louis Vuitton, but the results, far from being glamorous or overblown, are intimate and conversational.

Asma Maroof / Patrick Belaga / Tapiwa Svosve: The Sport of Love

The Sport of Love

Peculiar Contrast, Perfect Light, the official film of the Louis Vuitton 2021 fall-winter men’s show, is a suitably opulent and bugged-out curio of high celebrity culture. Saul Williams emerges from a snowy wilderness reciting poetry to himself, Louis luggage in hand, before the Revenant-like vista morphs into a sleek room decked out in green marble and filled with models. Yasiin Bey shows up and starts rapping. The director is Wu Tsang of the Moved by the Motion collective, which also counts among its members the three artists behind The Sport of Love: cellist and pianist Patrick Belaga, saxophonist and flutist Tapiwa Svosve, and producer Asma Maroof. After contributing to the soundtrack to Tsang’s film, the three decided they had more in them: a score to an imaginary romantic film, which I’d love to see if it’s as batshit as Peculiar Contrast.
The Sport of Love, though, is something a little less elaborate than their Louis Vuitton commission: a record of three talented and well-connected musicians inhabiting a sound and style. Maroof, half of the great post-club duo Nguzunguzu, shepherded Belaga and Svosve’s improvisations into a digestible package of just over half an hour. It’s telling that she leaves a snippet of a voice saying “OK!” at the beginning of the sublime Svosve flute showcase “Delicate Distance Between Boulders,” as well as a relieved laugh at the end of “Sport.” On top of the album’s more superficial explorations of what love might sound and feel like, this is an album about the electricity between improvisers finding common ground; it feels more like a real-time conversation than a carefully crafted statement.
Svosve’s saxophone is usually the lead instrument, with Belaga’s cello holding down the low end. In tandem with the romantic themes of the album, it’s easy to dream up associations with the sax-slathered recesses of ’80s cheese—Blade Runner’s “Love Theme,” George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” countless late-night Skinemax themes—but the musicians only hint at that aesthetic without leaning into it the way Nguzunguzu did on their dreamy, R&B-heavy mashup album The Perfect Lullaby. The music is ramshackle and horizontal, rejecting vocals and drums entirely; I can’t recall anyone playing a chord. This is more in the ambient jazz tradition of Marion Brown’s collaborations with Harold Budd on The Pavilion of Dreams, the processed trumpet murmurs of Jon Hassell and Arve Henriksen, the heavy-lidded languidness of Pharoah Sanders’ performance on Promises: left-field players meeting easy listening halfway.
Unlike those artists’ best work, The Sport of Love is not particularly interested in spiriting the listener to another world. For all the effects on Svosve’s saxophone, neither the players nor producer Maroof do much to make their instruments sound like anything other than those instruments. The musicians mostly play long, sustained notes, and the most striking extended technique comes on 15-minute centerpiece “The Stranger,” when the grit at the bottom of Svosve’s tone nearly consumes the notes and leaves only a distant hum. That piece is the only one to feature any outside musicians, namely harpist Ayha Simone and percussionist Mathieu Edward, and by no coincidence the one that most approximates the sweep and voluptuousness of a great romance (Simone’s harp intro also recalls Nguzunguzu’s epic “The Boy Is Mine” flip on The Perfect Lullaby). The Sport of Love may be a score to an imaginary film, but the strongest image it evokes is simply of three musicians discovering how good they sound together.


The 21-year-old Kanye West acolyte and Future soundalike tries again to step out of his elders’ shadows on an EP that is unlikely to quiet his critics.

L.O.D. EP

Desiigner’s schtick isn’t just thin—it’s transparent. His biggest hit, “Panda,” isn’t just two years old—it’s also eerily reminiscent of Future’s big hits. His rise wasn’t just meteoric—it was facilitated by Kanye West, a hip-hop visionary and babbling egomaniac whose popularity is currently at its nadir. Still only 21 years old, he’s got an official debut album languishing alongside Tha Carter V and Madvillainy 2 in rap purgatory. In the meantime, the Brooklyn rapper has released L.O.D. (or Life of Desiigner), an EP that is unlikely to quiet his many critics.
Desiigner’s ability to mimic Future’s throaty ululations is simultaneously his greatest gift and his most damning curse. Without that mumbly warble—which can connote pain, pleasure, or the particular pain of nihilistic pleasure-seeking—“Panda” would probably never have dug its claws into West’s malleable pate and ended up on The Life of Pablo. Not sampled so much as reproduced, the song largely escaped Kanye’s jittery, impulsive tinkering. But with West’s co-sign came increased scrutiny; Desiigner’s 2016 mixtape New English garnered lukewarm reviews, with journalists repeatedly calling out his similarities to Future.
To presume that Desiigner is purposely imitating Future would be unfair; his motives remain unknown. But, at the very least, through shared thematic interests as well as biological happenstance, Desiigner is making music that’s conspicuously similar to that of his Atlantan peer. Future does arch-trap-capitalist anthems, libidinous propositions, and tempestuous, sorrowful ballads. On L.O.D., Desiigner attempts the same to uninspiring results.
He checks off all of the basic rap boxes—his voice, his choruses, and his beat selections are fair to middling. It’s the discreet, revealing bits that are severely lacking. “Hood” opens with the intriguing Auto-Tuned salvo “I know niggas getting bodied in their own hood” but too quickly devolves into baffling lines like, “And I live my life right, like a motorcycle/And I don’t recycle/And I am a psycho.” Even “Tonka,” the most enjoyable song on L.O.D., suffers for its lassitude. Rather than inspiring greater intensity on the rapper’s part, the song’s wild, layered backing vocals clash with his listless delivery. Desiigner has a single gear, instrumental be damned.
There are a few moments on L.O.D. when he doesn’t sound like he’s imitating Future—but they neither depart much from his typical formula nor establish him as an artist with much verve or vision. Stripped of the mystique afforded by the Atlanta trap-rap mumble, “Priice Tag” and “LA to NY” are naked in their aimlessness. His repetitive lyrics might as well be a chalkboard gag from “The Simpsons.” Like Bart, Desiigner invests minimal energy in these stultifying exercises.
The rapper’s backstory makes listening to L.O.D. an especially disheartening experience. It feels like Desiigner—who once slept on his family’s carpeted floors in the Bed-Stuy projects, for lack of a bed, and was shot in the hip at 14—has been saddled with all the expectations of a Kanye West protégé without benefiting from any substantive guidance. West and his G.O.O.D. Music associates haven’t displayed much interest in mentoring this artist they plucked from relative obscurity as a teenager. Watching Desiigner get broken on the music industry’s wheel is maddening, because the failures of L.O.D. aren’t his alone—they’re side effects of a star-hungry system that’s unconcerned with the long-term effects of its machinations.


Produced by Mo Troper, the full-length debut from Brenden Ramirez’s power pop project surges with quiet confidence and an open heart.

Who’s a Good Boy

Brenden Ramirez is a power pop quick study. After playing in all manner of rock bands growing up, Ramirez studied jazz guitar at Willamette University, a pursuit that took him as far as Nepal, where he briefly taught at the Kathmandu Jazz Conservatory. His music degree had a focus on improvisation: the antithesis of power pop, a style that seeks to replicate the anarchic impact of the ’64 Beatles under strict lab conditions. But there are times on Who’s a Good Boy, Ramirez’s debut full-length as Bory, when he slips into power pop suddenly yet naturally, like a childhood friend appearing in a dream.
Some of that familiarity can be chalked up to Ramirez’s post-grad employment. Soon after moving to Portland in 2018, he joined the backing band of local power pop omnivore Mo Troper, who produced and played on Who’s a Good Boy. “I don’t think I even knew what power pop was until I met Mo,” Ramirez admitted to Willamette Week earlier this month, “which I think is a common occurrence for people who meet Mo.” That experience is evident from gems like the lead single “We Both Won,” a jangling post-breakup anthem that beams its arpeggiation like a forced smile. “North Douglas” is a plea to visit a partner’s childhood home, outfitted with dual guitars. The chorus peals like church bells, melodies and countermelodies folding into each other.
Just like another Troper-produced power pop record released this year, Diners’ Domino (to which Ramirez contributed additional guitar), there’s a naturalism to the lyrics that contrasts with the almost formalist arrangements. But where Domino felt like an internal monologue, Who’s a Good Boy has a second-person intimacy. Some tracks seem to open in the middle of an argument: “Don’t take this the wrong way.” “I’m sorry for being weird.” But Ramirez’s breathy tenor defuses tension. “To find the words in my head/It takes a while,” he confesses on the opening track, the dream-pop apologia “The Flake.” The desire to connect is palpable. His guitar yowls in parallel motion with his refrain; the production is so saturated, it laps at the speakers.
Despite the measured chime and judicious use of handclaps, this is at heart a prototypical PNW indie-pop effort. Warm but guarded, intricate and muted, reminiscent of the Shins and David Bazan and especially Elliott Smith. The blown-out instrumental break on “Five-Course Meal” is Smith through and through: the choirboy coos, peaking guitars and Mellotron wash could have appeared on anything after XO. There’s a jolt whenever you spot a familiar chord change, or recognize the melodic contour of a closing word. It feels less like homage and more like Bory’s vocabulary.
One track toward the end of the album suggests how that voice might be further developed. “Sidelined” is a sure-footed ballad with a sticky guitar motif. Like “North Douglas,” it’s torn between devotion and desire. “I know you want to be of use/But you’ve got nothing to prove,” Ramirez sings on the third verse. Then he casually breaks off a tender, probing guitar solo. When the chorus kicks in, you can practically hear a club singing along. For all of Bory’s self-deprecation, Who’s a Good Boy has a quiet confidence. Thematically, it’s concerned with being understood. Bory’s stylistic and emotional openness ensure that it is.


Drawn mostly from a palette of piano, guitar, and chopped vocal fragments, Ulla Straus’ new direction in ambient music represents a departure from her previous albums. It’s glitchy, but also human.

foam

There’s a point where ambient music stops being ambient—where the artist, rather than guiding you through your inner world, pulls you into theirs. On foam, her best album yet, the American musician Ulla Straus, who records simply as ulla, deftly slips across that line. In a way, she’s been moving in this direction since her first release. Floor, a 2017 cassette on Lillerne Tape Club, was two side-long cuts of pure ambience. Tumbling Towards a Wall, from 2020, was something new, all tactile textures and gurgling rhythms, a kind of fireside glitch that recalled Jan Jelinek’s Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records. Her last LP, last year’s Limitless Frame, moved further into the material world, with pianos and woodwinds drifting through its nighttime fog.
All of these records are excellent, but foam represents a breakthrough. The album draws mostly from a palette of piano, guitar, and chopped vocal samples. It’s glitchy, but also human. You picture hands on the piano keys, and a woman singing those sad notes—if not in the flesh then in a memory, or a dream.
The more important change here, though, happens under the hood. foam is subtle, delicate, and sometimes ethereal. But it also demands your attention. This is an artist not providing a canvas for your thoughts and feelings, but communicating her own, however abstractly. Unlike, say, the Going In series from the Bunker New York, foam is not something you zone out to—the peals of noise on the opener, “song,” signal that early on. This is, no doubt, music for contemplation. You might take it in while staring at the ceiling, into the middle distance, or out the rain-soaked window of a bus. But you wouldn’t ignore it, any more than you’d ignore someone who’s lowered their voice to tell you a secret.
foam has the glued-together feel of a collage, each juxtaposition imbued with meaning that even its creator might struggle to explain. Most tracks are fragmented, with staccato rhythms built from thin slivers of sound. Others come whole, played on one instrument, seemingly without a sample in sight. One is “marina,” a beautiful guitar piece that reveals Straus to be the rare electronic artist who could play unplugged.
For an electronic album, foam is brought to life by something surprising: the honesty and vulnerability of a singer-songwriter. This is nothing new for Straus—she said she made Limitless Frame “as a way to hug myself.” foam, soothing as it is in places, is not so pure a salve. The mood is one not of comfort, but of a delicate subject being carefully breached, a memory pondered, an invitation to, as My Bloody Valentine put it, “tiptoe down to the lonely places.” But the overall effect is not brooding, somber, or sad. It’s intimate, even romantic. It’s certainly the warmest record Straus has ever made.
Given Straus’s versatility as an artist, foam relies a little too heavily on its core aesthetic in places. Ghostly voices, splashes of piano, and glitchy artifacts are the defining features of most of these tracks, some of which sound like different versions of one another. The album’s detours are some of its best moments (for my money, “marina” is the best thing here). Still, she’s hit upon a beautiful mode of expression. Each of these fluttering bursts of sound seems to convey a tender, personal truth. Far from getting old, this musical language reaches perfection at the record’s conclusion: “foam angel,” a bittersweet piece that’s part ballad, part lullaby, part hymn.


On Cut 4 Me, an ambitiously catchy collection featuring production from Bok Bok, Nguzunguzu, Girl Unit, Kingdom, Jam City, and others, the Los Angeles vocalist Kelela Mizanekristos gives dark dance music a more pop-friendly spin.

Cut 4 Me

It used to take ages for underground sounds to find their way into mainstream pop music. Information moved more slowly, recordings took more time to produce, and there were layers of cultural gatekeepers to be navigated in the process, so subcultures that craved obscurity could usually find it. The internet and digital recording technology have changed that. Now, if your timing’s right, you can see a specific synth sound or drum programming technique make its way from some nobody producer’s SoundCloud page to pop radio in maybe a couple of months, but sometimes in just weeks.
The shadowy postdubstep underground bass music scene, for instance, is currently finding itself thrust into the spotlight by Kanye, Drake, and their legions of followers who've adopted increasingly dark-toned aesthetic identities informed by artists like SBTRKT and Arca. This scrutiny and appropriation will only intensify in the wake of Lorde’s Pure Heroine, which transmuted minimalist bass music that would've qualified as avant garde only a few months ago into chart gold. So what does a musical community with a preference for operating under the pop-cultural radar do when mainstream artists start knocking it off for parts? The smartest and most productive thing would be to launch its own competing, alternative product: And now it has, in the form of Kelela Mizanekristos.
Raised in the Maryland suburbs around D.C. on a diet of 1990s pop-R&B divas before relocating to the bustling L.A. bass scene, Kelela is attempting to do what dozens of top-tier singers, songwriters, and producers are also trying, which is to take the moody sounds of the sorts of electronic musicians orbiting club nights/labels/collectives like Night Slugs and Fade to Mind, and give them a more pop-friendly spin that will appeal to listeners who don’t normally go in for severely dark dance music.
Unlike other singers working at similar aims, Kelela is tight enough with the Fade to Mind/Night Slugs crews to collaborate with them directly, so her beats come straight from the source: Bok Bok, Nguzunguzu, Girl Unit, FtM founder Kingdom, and other affiliated artists who’ve helped define a booming, severely stripped-down sound pieced together from bits of techno, grime, R&B, drum & bass, and dubstep’s pre-neon days. It’s well-constructed launchpad that she’s acquired for herself, and she doesn’t waste it.
Cut 4 Me is an ambitiously catchy record as well as being an aesthetically ambitious one. Essential to this is Kelela’s decision to play against the beats' moodiness—that juxtaposition drives the album’s likability. The beat by NA for “Do It Again” is horror-movie creepy, with a hypnotic John Carpenter-like keyboard figure looping over booming haunted house drums, which she decided to use as the foundation for an slow-motion sex jam straight out of the Aaliyah playbook. The Nguzunguzu-produced “Enemy” is as twitchily abrasive as the most staunchly underground first-wave dubstep, so she tops it with a cotton-candy pop-R&B vocal that could have been lifted from a turn of the millennium Brandy B-side.
Kelela’s an unlikely diva for a scene that’s attracted more than its share of dance music purists who don’t go in for frippery like vocalists, but it works. She also needs to close some of the gap between her ambition and what her voice is capable of—it’s a perfectly good voice, but lacks much of the expressiveness and power that singers who don’t come by those things naturally need time to develop. But this kind of works, too. A full-blast diva would obliterate the subtlety that the beats rely on, and the spunky-newcomer charisma that her performance projects imparts crucial warmth to their icy sounds.
The voice can be worked on, though. The more important things that Cut 4 Me teaches us about Kelela are that she has the taste to pick out a fantasy all-star team of collaborators, the talent to make herself heard over their beats, and the intelligence to get it all together at the exact right moment. That’s all instinct, and that can’t be learned. If she wants pop stardom—if not the five-star kind like Rihanna, then at least the cultishly-adored kind like her former tourmate Solange—she couldn’t be in a better place.


Since their inception, Clutch have amassed a global reputation as the platonic ideal of stoner rock. Psychic Warfare marks a return to the bluesy, boozy rock of their early catalog, with more than enough wacky stories to go around.

Psychic Warfare

If Mastodon are kings of the sludge-rock world, then their past co-headliners Clutch are the jokers. Since their start in 1991, Clutch have amassed a global reputation as the platonic ideal of stoner rock, with frontman Neil Fallon regarded as one of rock’s most talented auteurs. Like Baroness and Lo-Pan, they’re not afraid to roll up their sleeves and crank out a filthy blues jam (1998’s The Elephant Riders more than gives the Black Keys a run for their money), but the band does so with a cartoonish flippancy that their peers lack, which in turn injects the genre with a much-needed sense of humor. “I have a great luxury that I'm a professional liar—that's what a storyteller is,” Fallon said in the album's press release, going on to add, "It's the one socially acceptable way to completely deceive people, and that's what they want.” Liars tell the best tales, for sure – and when they're packing guitars, all the better.
Where Brent Hinds and company purvey AP lit-inspired epics and extensive experimentations in genre, Fallon and his partners have but the boogie and the bellylaugh—and in the hands of this foursome, that’s more than enough. Clutch’s last record, 2013’s Earth Rocker, marked their biggest triumph to date: a playful, occasionally psychedelic LP that wasn’t afraid to go prog once in a while (it’s also one of the best driving albums in recent memory). Psychic Warfare, recorded in Texas and produced by Machine (who manned the boards for both Earth Rocker and 2004’s  Blast Tyrant) isn’t as overachieving, instead marking a return to the bluesy, boozy rock of their early catalog.
After a nondescript intro, Psychic Warfare starts with one of the band’s strongest songs to date: “X Ray Visions”, an ode to conspiracy theories, drugs, sex, and horoscopes all rolled into one. Over the span of three-and-a-half minutes, Fallon manages to incorporate visits from Republican apparitions (tapping out a telegram in a motel room, he’s “quickly overtaken by the angry spirits of Ronald and Nancy Reagan”), a raucous refrain that renders quacky sci-fi concepts like “x ray visions” and “energy weapons” undeniably badass, and the best musical role-call since Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz” (when’s the last time you introduced yourself as “on the mic…SCORPIOOOOOOOO!”?). It’s a contender for one of the best hard rock songs to date, so it’s unfortunate that the rest of the album–except, perhaps, the “Highway Star”-cribbing “Firebirds!”–fails to capture that divine, batshit energy, despite Fallon’s tales of supernatural lust (“Sucker For The Witch”), cyclops’ revenge (“Behold the Colossus”), decapitated bodies and three-legged mules (“Decapitation Blues”).
Perhaps it’s the abundance of one-three-five chord progressions, or the scarcity of skyward solos (although “Noble Savage” is a shoe-in for Rock Band 4) – or maybe “X Ray Visions” is just a hell of an act to follow. Either way, Psychic Warfare settles into craggy cruise control by “Sucker For The Witch”: haggard verses festooned by Fallon’s goofy imagery and anchored by the no-bullshit percussion of drummer Jean-Paul Gaster and bassist Dan Maines, which in turn give way to stadium-ready choruses. Occasionally, they dip into Texan blues (“Our Lady of Electric Light”, “Son Of Virginia”) – a welcome bit of contrast that comes at the expense of lost momentum, with mid-album “Doom Saloon” being the worst offender.
Clutch work best when they keep the pulley of punchlines and pummeling riffs running at max speed, and as a result, Psychic Warfare proves a tad too meandering to eclipse Earth Rocker or Blast Tyrant. But guffaw, gawk, pump your fist you will—and in the self-important, super-serious world of heavy music, that’s worth more than you think.


Deerhoof follow their excellent The Runners Four with another turn away from hyper-complex pop and no wave, and toward accessible, foot-stomping rock.

Friend Opportunity

There's a high you get from the classic 1970s "art-rock" of Yes, Genesis, or King Crimson-- and when it hits, there's nothing like it. I'm not talking about the way other music peaks, like a dance track where the beat kicks in and the crowd goes berzerk, or metal music that gets louder and louder until your skull caves, or gutbucket singers who can make your heart jump out of your chest. With art-rock, there's a lot of mumbo-jumbo and funny time signatures, and sometimes there's like 10 or 15 minutes of really boring shit (see: Yes, "Awaken"). But when the "good part" hits? Holy shit-- the band crescendos and the singer, smooth as silk but loud as God, rams Buddha down the throat of a giant silver dragon. If I sound like I'm growing a mullet, I've done my job.
Deerhoof, an indie band who have released plenty of discombobulated pop and no wave albums, have lately turned toward accessible, foot-stomping rock. It worked on The Runners Four, but it works better and quicker on their new album, Friend Opportunity. We've been using the term "inde prog" mostly to describe bands that quick-cut between ideas and construct mini-suites out of mini-songs. But on this record Deerhoof take everything that clique of indie bands has worked toward-- add the suddenly popular twee vocals-- and ride it like an h-bomb.
If it weren't for Satomi Matsuzaki's little-girl voice, this music would be demagoguery: concussive beats, stabbing horn fills, pounding drums, a guitar chord that lands like a 10-ton weight on a 20-ton trampoline. I've never been more aware of the attack of an electric piano. And while a new love of knob-twiddling and loop-peddling brings more tonal colors, they're here for percussion, not atmosphere.
I didn't even want to make out all the words, in case I'd screw up the Obi Wan-spanks-Zelda Hero's Journey I had in my head in tracks one through nine. Snatches of story-like lyrics-- the stage-setting of "The Perfect Me", the flashes of conflict, warnings that "It's a trap"-- imply a narrative arc, with a detour for a new character on "Cast Off Crown", drummer Greg Saunier's sole vocal performance and a mini-epic that crams introduction, exposition, and resolution into three minutes.
The rest of the vocals are held down again by the high, heavily-accented singing of Matsuzaki. And the more song-like Deerhoof's music gets, the more obviously she becomes a barrier to new fans. The bleep-bloop speak-singing of "Kidz are So Small" seems to be the dealbreaker-- like you shouldn't take anything so sweet and cute seriously. (Listen to that gristly bleep in the background: that's a fucking droid, dude.) But wait 'til you hear the climactic "Matchbook Seeks Maniac": Jesus, Matsuzaki is the homecoming queen from Saturn, complete with silver glitter makeup and hip-side death ray. She rides the album's peak in the main chorus-- "I would sell my soul to the devil/ If I could be the top of the world"-- and when she belts the title phrase? It makes me quail.
Only thing is, after that 24-minute binge we get the 12-minute hangover of "Look Away". Like a rambling, shapeless homage to Yes' "Sound Chaser", it's listenable and it has a great instrumental traffic jam at the midpoint, but on this record it's just an appendix. All of a sudden the band is back to silences and blank stares, sustained tones and reverbed guitars. They're "deconstructing pop," which means they're asking questions. But on Friend Opportunity, Deerhoof work best when they blast right to the answers.


Radiohead's Thom Yorke joins forces with Nigel Godrich, Flea, Joey Waronker, and David Byrne percussionist Mauro Refosco (the band he used to bring his solo album The Eraser to life) for the project's first studio album.

AMOK

The Eraser was Thom Yorke's attempt to liberate himself from the burden of being frontman for the most over-analyzed rock band in the world and explore more insular and austere forms of electronic production. Atoms for Peace is likewise his attempt to liberate himself from the burden of being Thom Yorke, shirking the added psychoanalytical interpretations that solo releases inevitably attract by receding into an all-star cast (complete with a name-- cribbed from a Dwight Eisenhower speech and subsequent program by way of an Eraser track-- that sounds like some one-off 1980s charity-single supergroup). From the similarly greyscale Stanley Donwood cover art on down, AMOK is essentially Yorke's follow-up to The Eraser, backed by the band that performed the album's songs during a handful of live dates over 2009-10: producer/multi-instrumentalist Nigel Godrich, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, David Byrne percussionist Mauro Refosco, and drummer Joey Waronker (a.k.a. the 21st-century Jim Keltner).
Actually, "performed" is a gross understatement—in the hands of Atoms for Peace, The Eraser's songs were utterly transformed from skeletal synth sketches into full-blooded, festival-rocking workouts that gave Yorke occasion to test out the dance moves he would later flash in the "Lotus Flower" video. So there's good reason to believe that vibrant energy would spill over to AMOK. The new record is certainly a more colourful, layered work than The Eraser, and suggests all those late-night, Fela Kuti-soundtracked benders Yorke's talked about in interviews were as much educational as they were recreational. But if the opening "Before Your Very Eyes" faithfully assumes the jittery cadence of 70s Afrobeat, it doesn't seem all that interested in acquiring the same force, preferring to skitter rather than swagger. And it sets the tentative tone for an album that's intricately assembled and rhythmically complex, but oddly inert. "I made my bed, I'm lying in it," Yorke sings early on, a fitting advertisement for the unpredictable artistic course he's charted throughout his career. But over the entirety of AMOK, you get the overwhelming sense that, this time, his sheets are tucked in too tight.
Surprisingly, what this thing really needs is more Flea. While some Radiohead fans may view the union of Yorke's fragile, world-weary croon with Flea's cock-in-a-sock showboating as pure sacrilege, Mr. Slappeh De Bass commendably spends much of AMOK reminding us what a tastefully melodic player he can be when he keeps his right thumb in check. The album's most invigorating moments come when he takes the lead, like on the hypno-funk throb of "Stuck Together Pieces" and the mid-song ramp-up on "Dropped", whose accelerated, slippery groove indicates that Kevin Shields isn't the only 90s alt-rock icon currently getting mileage from his old drum'n'bass records.
But Flea can't carry the rhythm section alone. AMOK was reportedly built through a process of Yorke and Godrich handing over their laptop demos to the rest of the band for their embellishment. But Waronker and Refosco seem more intent on studiously replicating every last click and cut than giving the songs extra width. Instead, AMOK subtly applies its intensity through textural density—like with the fuzzy synth oscillations on "Before Your Very Eyes" that threaten to vaporize Yorke's vocal, or the eerie post-apocalyptic drones that permeate the title track's dubstep strut. But in each case, they set you up for a climax that never comes, with the songs pulling back or fading out just as they seem ready to erupt into something more fierce. For all the rhythmic chicanery at play, AMOK feels strangely static and contained, giving a perpetual sense of jogging in place.
This wouldn't be such an issue if Yorke assumed a more commanding presence, but his diffident vocals here-- which favor the hushed, high-register end of his range-- suggest a desire to, if not disappear completely, at least dissolve into the clattering backdrops. For all the electronic abstraction heard on The Eraser and Radiohead's King of Limbs, Yorke's performances were for the most part assertive and forthright, making the songs more impactful than their brittle structures initially suggested. On AMOK, Yorke's lyrics tend to drift in and out of decipherability, his impressionistic protest songs hinging on appropriations of well-worn phrases ("the will is strong, but the flesh is weak") or withering mantras ("care less, I couldn't care less"). And the more intimate the songs get, the more distant he becomes: the synth-swaddled soul ballad "Ingenue" counts as AMOK's most humane, romantic turn, yet also its most inscrutable.
And that's ultimately the most frustrating thing about AMOK: the fact that you can hear the great potential in every song, and so easily imagine how the hand-clapped hook of "Judge, Jury, and Executioner," the percussive breakdown of "Unless," and the creeping exasperation of "Reverse Running" would absolutely pop with a more vigorous attack. No doubt, like The Eraser, these songs will go down a like a storm in a live setting. But, given the caliber of players Yorke has on hand this time around, it's disappointing that we still have to make that assumption.


Flava and Chuck. Ghostface and Raekwon. Andre and Big Boi. Eazy and Dre. Eminem and Dre. The history of hip-hop ...

Critical Beatdown

Flava and Chuck. Ghostface and Raekwon. Andre and Big Boi. Eazy and Dre. Eminem and Dre. The history of hip-hop is full of odd couples-- most often, the raving, paranoid madman and his wiser, more stern companion. Hell, even The Sugarhill Gang had Master Gee. Hot-buttered a pop da pop dibbie dibble, my ass. The Ultramagnetic MC's, however, were the first all-lunatic rap group, one that would straitjacket the way from Digital Underground to Company Flow. If they offered anything truly innovative, it wasn't so much in their brilliantly swift, stilted flow or crushing rhythmic density as it was in the establishment of this unique dynamic.
To claim that Critical Beatdown is the greatest hip-hop album of 1988 would take a lot of courage-- after all, it was the zenith of hip-hop's Golden Age, boasting classics from nearly every influential late-1980s rap group. And even if Ultramagnetic's Kool Keith and Ced Gee didn't possess the intricate rhythms of Rakim and Chuck D, or paint vivid ghettoscapes as well as KRS-One or Slick Rick, Critical Beatdown is still probably the hardest, fastest, craziest hip-hop album of that year.
Critical Beatdown's surging psychosis is primarily due to its producers. Ced Gee was one of the most respected, radical maestros of the era, devoting some of his energies to Boogie Down Productions' untouchable Criminal Minded. DJ Moe Love was more interested in using the turntable's sounds than its samples', helping transform DJing into turntablism. Never mind the chilling hisses and heckles or the charred slabs of swollen funk; Beatdown has as much screaming as the average punk or metal album. Those screams, of course, are ingrained in the very fabric of the beat, concealed and crippled amidst the relentlessly fuzzing bass. And like most great rap albums, many of them come from the patron saint of yelps, James Brown, and flurry and flux with such abstraction and chaos that they make the beats feel deceptively fast-paced.
Though many of these samples were standard-issue in the 1980s, they're arranged into patterns like split-second greatest-hits discs. "Ease Back" never sounds particularly innovative, but the bruising conflict between The Meters' "Look-Ka Py Py" and the JBs' "The Grunt" justified the existence of sampling in an era in which to some it was still oddly despised. On "Ego Trippin'", the beat is a mosaic of hacks and howls that sound as if they could suddenly disappear under the monstrous beat. On "Funky [Remix]", the stratifications of snares and basses bring out some gentle, foreign incantations rhythmically chirped by buried female voices. On the record's best track, "Ain't It Good to You", the frantic, proto-drum-n-bass beat breaks into inebriated static and a core that sounds like every sample on the album searing into one another.
Kool Keith and Ced Gee's lyrics often seem as if they're not really about anything at all: The opening track asks the listener to do the one thing it's impossible to do to music-- "Watch me now"-- and things don't get much more clear after that. For instance, Keith's first verse begins, "Uno dos not quarto/ Spanish girls, they call me Pancho/ When on the mic, innovating this patterning," and ends, "I'm in a movie scene/ Ears turn, and needles lean/ To cut scratches." On "Ease Back", he "relates it verbal/ Dissing a mouse and smacking any gerbil/ I bought a Saab, a 1990 Turbo." Keith could have wished for any future model, but he went for the Saab: Now that's lyrical ingenuity. (In a recent Mojo interview, Keith reported that the MC's "read a lot of Popular Mechanics"-- so perhaps that explains his predilection for sensible motoring.)
But despite Keith's reputation, Ced Gee is the source of the album's most insane, digitalk-quantum gibberish, spouting lines such as, "A certified rhyme that I use, confuse, clock the time to a point/ A metaphysical radius," or, "Using frequencies and data, I am approximate." Ced's rhymes are so "approximate," in fact, that they should be studied in seminars alongside general relativity. And despite his philosop-hop, he can still sound as tough as NWA, claiming, "I will melt anyone who even tries to feel an emotion." That anti-sentiment sentiment sounds odd until we find out Ced is a robot: "I'm like a merchandise, a customized item/ Computer rapper for ducks who wanna bite them."
In a year that's already seen too many needless hip-hop reissues (from Nas to Non Phixion), Critical Beatdown's six bonus tracks-- including many of the group's early singles-- are probably not worth seeking out unless you're a bit more ultramagnetic than the casual fan. Those tracks are sparser and slower, and they feature group raps, an unhealthy amount of beatboxing and kind-hearted disco synths. The original 12-inch of "Chorus Line"-- with its punctured vocals and melodramatic reverb-- still has the faint residue of hyper-lunacy, even though Tim Dog is on the mic. The classic "Travelling at the Speed of Thought [Hip House Club Mix]" is a frilled techno fiesta, and is the most mainstream thing Kool Keith has ever done. (And even then, it has a clarinet solo.) For the initiated, though, the reissue sounds slightly crisper than the original, and the extras are nice additions to a flawless album-- one that stands tall today as one of Golden Age's most ageless.


Two friends—one a longtime Neil Young fan, one a relative newcomer—team up for a warm, unpretentious covers EP that serves as an unlikely primer.

Jeff Rosenstock / Laura Stevenson: Still Young EP

Still Young EP

A covers album is a great way for musicians to answer their least favorite question: What are your influences? But Jeff Rosenstock and Laura Stevenson’s EP of Neil Young tunes is more concerned with how we introduce others to the music we love. Still Young reimagines four selections from Young’s six-decade career, blowing up some of his simplest songs to a size more suited to Rosenstock and Stevenson’s punk background. It’s a compact document of two friends sharing and reinterpreting music with total freedom—a warm, unpretentious record that serves as an unlikely Neil Young primer.
Rosenstock and Stevenson go way back: As teenagers, they palled around the same Long Island punk scene, and they’ve played in each other’s bands on-and-off for years, most notably the defunct group Bomb the Music Industry! Their individual histories with Young’s music have been less aligned. “I knew I was supposed to like Neil Young but a lot of the ‘standards’ admittedly are not for me,” Rosenstock says in the EP’s liner notes. Stevenson, meanwhile, says she’s heard Young’s music at home for as long as she can remember. Eventually, Rosenstock caved and asked Stevenson for a Neil Young starter pack. Apparently it did the trick: Still Young is seemingly the first in a series of cover EPs as a duo.
Given their lengthy friendship, it’s no surprise that Rosenstock and Stevenson are a great pair. Stevenson’s voice is light and clear—a perfect foil to Rosenstock’s crackling, conversational whine, itself a marked contrast from his customary shout. Their vocals on “Harvest Moon” are not unlike Young’s duet with Linda Ronstadt in the original. Rosenstock and Stevenson’s take on the song is fairly straightforward, though subtle snare replaces the barroom “broom sweeps” of Young’s original, and the addition of vibraphone and droning guitar give the familiar melody a little tooth. “Through My Sails” (taken from Zuma, Young’s 1975 LP with Crazy Horse), gets the most pared-back treatment, layering harmonies over a simple structure of acoustic guitar and bass.
Sandwiched in the middle of Still Young are two amplified interpretations that some may not immediately recognize as Neil Young songs. The 1970 piano ballad “After the Gold Rush” receives a glowing synth riff and multi-tracked vocals that resemble a late-’80s pop-punk Christmas carol. “Ambulance Blues,” from Young’s 1974 LP On the Beach is another maximalist take on an austere song, and it’s easily the EP’s best offering. Where Young’s original featured muted harmonica and fiddle, Rosenstock and Stevenson stack on drones, keys, and wailing guitar. There’s even a faint siren in the distance—a bit on-the-nose, but fitting for two New Yorkers who’ve surely heard thousands in their lives. Another pal, the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, appears near the end to deliver a terse, gravelly cameo: “There ain’t nothin’ like a friend who can tell ya you’re just pissin’ in the wind,” he drawls. Rosenstock and Stevenson may have recorded Still Young just for the hell of it, but they’ve managed to uncover the best possible outcome of imposing one’s musical tastes on loved ones.


On his latest solo record, the singer-songwriter continues his quiet excavation of self and the tumultuous world around him, exploring how a supposedly ordinary life is often anything but.

Gold Record

A man goes to the driveway to try and start his car. The engine keeps turning over but it won’t catch. An older man runs out from across the street and tells the younger one that cranking it more will only make things worse. He invites the younger man in for a beer, which turns into dinner with the older man and his wife. Despite living across the street from each other, the two men had never met, the younger one being “the type of guy who sees a neighbor outside/And stays inside to hide.” After dinner, the older man’s wife shows the younger man a room to rest, which, judging by the pictures on the wall and the things arranged just so, belonged to the couple’s now-dead son. The young man peers through the blinds and remembers that his own children will be home soon. Where had he been going? We never find out. The young man falls asleep and wakes up in the dark to the older couple standing in the doorway. “Son, it’s OK,” they say. “It’s OK. Son. We’re OK. We’re OK.”
Like a lot of Bill Callahan songs, especially the ones he started writing around the time of his 2005 album A River Ain’t Too Much to Love under his old performing name, Smog, “The Mackenzies,” from Gold Record, handles concrete events with the texture and ambiguity of dreams. Callahan’s voice is low—lower every album, it feels like—and his arrangements, while thoughtful and quietly surprising, are almost always anchored by a lone acoustic guitar. Listen at a distance and you might just hear another man in chambray doing his earnest American thing. But listen closer—the funny asides, the way the narratives ramble and unfold like a new idea explored in real time—and you can hear someone exploring how a supposedly ordinary life is often anything but.
His last album, 2019’s Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, focused on marriage and parenthood. As the father of two boys under five, I’d never heard music that better captured the wonder and trials of domestic life from a man’s perspective—a comfort, especially, at a time when the culture was investigating what, exactly, made a good man in the first place. In the past, his characters’ attitudes toward women and children had been coyly misanthropic: They fantasized about kidnapping kids from the grocery store, made blowup dolls out of their ex-girlfriend’s clothes, and found their moral vocation in cunnilingus. One song, 1999’s “Let’s Move to the Country,” teased commitment, ending on the line, “Let’s start a… / Let’s have a…,” but left off the words—“family,” “baby”—the man couldn’t—or wouldn’t—say.
If Shepherd’s man was settling down, Gold Record imagines the sweet old codger he may one day become. He chauffeurs two newlyweds through the desert and feels stupid for giving them advice, even though they asked (“Pigeons”); he grumbles at the pop singer comforting his audience with hollow bromides (“Protest Song”) and reconciles himself to marriage with a woman who hates watching him eat but hates seeing him go hungry, too (“Breakfast”). Reality has borne down on him, but he remains available to wonder: for art (“Another Song,” “As I Wander”), for the babies “with eyes like honey-drunk bees,” for the ways “the moon can make a false love feel true” (“35”). And as though to close the existential loop opened 21 years earlier, he revisits “Let’s Move to the Country,” filling in the words—“family,” “baby”—he’d left off before. In 1999, the song played like the daydream of nervous young lovers getting ahead of themselves; on Gold Record, it plays like nostalgia: Remember when we had plans? Yeah. That was good.
For all its masculine cosplay, the heart of Gold Record is spontaneous, intuitive and feminine, a flock of little dreams loose in the Milky Way. You never sense him straining to make a point or steer the story. If anything, Callahan often seems like he’s following his songs instead of leading them, carefully and open to all paths, the way a birder follows the call from wherever it comes. (He is a meditator, no surprise.) Even ”Ry Cooder,” a tribute to the roots-rock musician and possibly the dumbest song Callahan has written in 27 years, is alive with punchlines, zig-zags, and little surprises a stricter sort of attention would miss. Like all supposedly simple men, Callahan makes a show of putting one foot steadily in front of the other. Then, suddenly, he leaps.
The advice to the newlyweds in “Pigeons,” by the way, is this:

When you are dating, you only see each other
And the rest of us can go to hell
But when you are married, you are married to the whole wide world
The rich, the poor
The sick and the well
The straights and gays
And the people that say, ‘We don’t use those terms these days.’

Callahan is in his mid-50s now, and has been making records for more than half his life. Listening to them in sequence, you can hear a songwriter moving slowly from skepticism and alienation toward gratitude and warmth. Like a lot of artists on Drag City—a label Callahan has now been on for almost 30 years, longer than any other artist on their roster—Callahan comes to his folk music from a place both post-punk and post-hippie, with the individualism and reticence of the former and the utopian intimacy of the latter. He is cranky, but generous, the kind of performer who brings you inside a secret, and who, even in jest, seems to treat his circumstances as a gift.
In a bit of poetic consonance, Callahan became a father just a few years before losing his mother to cancer: The child becomes the parent, the parent moves on to make room for the new child. “I didn’t ever feel like she was being honest or expressing her feelings my whole life,” he said in an interview with Pitchfork in 2019. “As she was getting older, I begged her: Show your children who you are, because we want to know before you die. She couldn’t do it.” It’s a stark quote, harsh and soft at the same time. But in its wholeness, there’s a truth. Gold Record captures both sides: The yen to collapse the spaces between people, and the acknowledgment that some spaces are too cold to cross.

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Seth Haley's most closeup-friendly project is remastered and re-packaged alongside four new bonus tracks by venerable label Ghostly.

Cyanide Sisters EP

The hardest-charging of synth obsessive Seth Haley's many projects, Com Truise debuted in June with a free download release of this very EP. Bolstered by a nascent fanbase from Haley's other concerns (the woodsy Boards of Canada revivalism of Sarin Sunday, the chewy instrumental hip-hop of Airliner, and SYSTM's frazzled electro), a retro-drenched series of mixes released under the Komputer Cast banner, and eventual remixes for fellow 80s flag-wavers Neon Indian and Twin Shadow, Truise built up a modest buzz, enough to be noticed by the folks at Ghostly. Remastered and re-packaged alongside four new bonus tracks, this reissue marks Haley's debut for the label, and immediately foregrounds him as one of the most interesting and promising producers to mine the weird intersection between 80s computer music nostalgia and proggy, electronic funk.
If we gave awards to musicians for art direction, Haley would be a lock for Best Newcomer. From the shock of red-orange and the Designers Republic-friendly flourishes that grace his official site through to his expertly refer- and rever-ential artwork sleeves, one might conclude that Haley's an aesthete, and certainly meticulous. This is relevant insofar as Com Truise's music also gives the impression of being immaculately designed. In the particular world of synthesizer music, everything is iterative, and a sound can always be pushed. This means that doubt is always around the corner, and finished tracks are frequently slowed by anxiety over whether they've been adjusted to paramount effect. Haley, you can tell, knows exactly what he's going for and exactly how to get it.
His detractors might argue that this is because he isn't working from his own vision at all. If there's a knock on Haley, it's that his music is too easily reducible to its influences, and that those influences are as decipherable as the source of his spoonerized pseudonym. It will, for example, be very difficult for anyone to write about this EP without mentioning Boards of Canada's Geogaddi, many of whose more uptempo, tremulous moments are echoed within, most notably on the pulsing synth swirls of tracks like "Tripyra" and "Sundriped". That there is generally a nostalgia angle being worked here probably also doesn't help.
And yet, as you move between the burned out shimmer of "Slow Peels" to the lurching, stutter-stepped prog of "BASF Ace", it scarcely feels like it matters; while a lot of Cyanide Sisters very patently tugs at the archetypes around electronic music and prog and nostalgia and the 80s, it does so with a muscle, gnarliness, and craft that makes it difficult to deny. In other moments, like the classical guitar sampling "Norkuy" and the vocal-led "Pyragony", Truise steps far enough out of character to suggest he's got plenty of other tricks up his sleeve. According to Ghostly, there's a proper full-length due later this year, so it won't be long before we have a better sense of Truise's path. Even if he just kept on mining this particular vein, though, he'd still be better than most.


Following a full-on immersion into art-pop with last year's More, Alexis Georgopoulos' Arp project returns with an EP that strikes a more even balance between electronic instrumentals and vocal-led songs.

Pulsars e Quasars EP

Tussle's music frequently resembled electro-funk-as-astronaut ice cream: dehydrated, alkaline, functional but in an abstemious way. As Arp, ex-member Alexis Georgopoulos has retained his old group's basis in krautrock and modular synthesis but has taken it in freer directions, relaxing out of Tussle's parched technicality across a string of increasingly warm, woolly and hard to categorize records. As Arp's first two efforts form a symmetrical pair, so does new EP Pulsars e Quasars with last year's improbable More.
On the 2007 debut In Light, Arp drifted serenely among cold stars, turning to the ethereal side of Tussle's beat-driven German electronic idiom. Then, he touched down on some clement sunset shore with the grainy, glowing 2010 effort The Soft Wave, hooking into the neo-new-age trend of Oneohtrix Point Never and Emeralds with minimal arpeggio suites. (Seldom has a musician's alias been so on-the-nose as Arp's: It's like if Tim Hecker called himself "Drone" or Axel Willner went by "Loop.")
Having dispensed with the nocturnal and diurnal sides of that aesthetic, Arp made a startling but ultimately comprehensible lateral leap to another part of the '70s electronic pop continuum on More, an art-pop album in the style of early Brian Eno, but more raw-boned and tattered. More omnivorous, too, with sonic touchstones spanning Tin Pan Alley, Motown, '60s garage rock, and '70s glam, all polished to one brassy consistency and decoratively etched with analog electronics.
Following the impeccable abstraction of its predecessor, More's prominent adenoidal vocals and live instrumentation took some getting used to before you could even hear it as the same artist. But there was a sense of continuity in the hushed crackle of analog signals, sealing in the garish songs. If it had come first, Pulsars e Quasars, a more evenly balanced between electronic instrumentals and vocal-led songs, would have made for a less abrupt transition.
Pulsars feels looser and livelier than More, using a pickup band rather than solo multi-tracking. On the title track, a jaunty guitar line, phased slightly green and nauseous, supports a stuffy vocal. After starting simply, the guitars gain definition and start to churn, with waves of distortion like impalpable explosions in the background, toward a cheering cherry sunburst finish. "UHF1" similarly begins in a metronomic place before the guitar phases start swooshing and crumpling in the far corners, pumping in a chaotic energy that cues mutations into dance-rock and heroic noise; in both songs, the instrumental melody is stickier than the faintly droll vocal intoning.
Though the psych-pop songs stand out, the instrumental electronic side of Arp, which gets two fine showings here, is arguably preferable. On "Chromatiques II (Extended Mix)", an elegant decanter of delicate periodic tones gorgeously fills and drains with morning light. Its many voices grow freer and freer, like a starchy choir gradually easing into gospel expression. Meanwhile, "New Persuasion (Version by Le Révélateur)" is a precise and detailed krautrock voyage, with low arpeggios tensed as if about to strike, a lurking bass like footsteps coming up behind you and a synth melody that wafts out like silver smoke on the dark.
There are a couple of weak spots on this EP: "Suns" is attention-getting as a blown-out noise intro but is not a piece you'd return to on its own, and “On Returning”, built on a loop of thickly chugging electric guitar chords, presses onward like a huge, mindless drill. It's pretty boring and one-note, but if Georgopoulos' indulgent, decadent tendencies produce the occasional dud, it seems a small price to pay for the intrigue of looking forward to what he’s going to do next.


The Black Keys combine with many of hip-hop's top stars-- Mos Def, Q-Tip, RZA, Raekwon-- on a surprisingly well thought-out record.

Blakroc

You might think the remarkably similar and undeniably terrible Black Lips/GZA collaborations from earlier this year would have made everyone involved in the BlakRoc project-- Black Keys plus hip-hop artists, to be reductive-- re-think their decision. But by being so blatant about what it did wrong-- combining notoriously sloppy and notoriously methodical artists-- the Lips and GZA may have actually have provided an unintentional boost.
No such problem exists in BlakRoc-- the Black Keys recently toe-dipped into hip-hop by having Danger Mouse produce their last LP and their reverent, values-based approach to the blues nicely dovetails with the ethos of the MCs involved-- mostly guys who came up in NYC during the late and mid-1990s. And while this simpatico relationship ensures that BlakRoc allays all fears of being about as good as any previous rap-rock full-lengths, for better or worse, it ultimately serves as both the floor and the ceiling. If you're okay with "solid" being the main descriptor for a project boasting such well-known talent, BlakRoc won't be a disappointment.
In the track review for "Stay Off the Fuckin' Flowers", Tom Breihan described it as resembling Edan's "Beauty and the Beat, but with good rapping," which is pretty dead-on in two aspects. Raekwon is still in Gemstar-sharp Iron Chef mode here, in a performance worthy of comparison to deeper cuts from Cuban Linx... Pt. 2. Granted, it widely deviates from the typical subject matter on BlakRoc-- I suppose it's a testament to the respect given the Black Keys that most raps here work within the standard blues-rock tropes of hard times (most notably, "Hard Times") and no-good women ("Hope You're Happy", "Tellin' Me Things").
More importantly, in spite of the presence of tireless self-promoters like Damon Dash, Jim Jones, and RZA, they never go overboard and play up the masturbatory "look at us, we made a rap record with psychedelic rock guitars" angle like Edan and his ilk did, although the acknowledgment of the guys behind the boards make for the most awkward lyric on the whole thing-- "fuck the white ones, the Black Keys got so much soul."
But the Keys and Mos Def make the most of the stoned salutation "On the Vista", the sort of sing-rapping about the kind of "total control" one only feels in a hallucinatory state-- it wouldn't feel out of place on The Ecstatic, and most importantly, it could close the door on Mos relying on Fishbone as being some sort of apotheosis of rock music. Meanwhile, short-lived Dipset hook lady Nicole Wray (the one who made 1998's awesome "Make It Hot" as just plain Nicole) simmers admirably on the streetlamp-lit noir&B of "Why Can't I Forget Him".
And yet for all the brown-acid reverb, BlackRoc often comes off as a resolutely sober affair-- mutual respect leads to no on stepping on each other's toes or letting loose. I suppose the RZA's having fun, even if it rarely feels like anyone else is in on it-- he's strictly in quasi-erudite Bobby Digital mode here, where you actually prefer his nonsensical wordplay to moments when he's actually intelligible. Even if it never really syncs up, the attempt to match Zep-drum reverb to double-time Dirty South flows on "Coochie"-- which isn't available on digital versions of the record-- turns out to be the record's riskiest sonic experiment, but even that seems too restrained. Yes, a song called "Coochie" with Ol' Dirty Bastard and Ludacris is too restrained: Think about that for a second.
But even if the lame parts of BlakRoc are more noticeable than the enjoyable, what really sticks out is how easy this all feels--- not once does anything feel like awkward ambassadorship. For a project that spawned an accompanying tricked-out Camaro, it's a pleasantly modest album. And really, it's cool that a somewhat non-obvious choice like the Black Keys get to be involved with something like this. So, fine if BlakRoc's impact isn't always musical: At the very least, its optimistic approach feels pretty exciting when too many hip-hop fans are more willing to peel off self-satisfied jeremiads about the genre's demise.


The slowcore icons’ new album bears all the hallmarks of their classic records: plodding drums, skeletal basslines, and guitar work that sparkles in the darkness like dew on a cobweb.

Duster

For the better part of two decades, Duster’s small catalog was handed down like a myth. From one smoky dorm room to another, one road-worn Econoline van to the next, their records spread primarily through passionate word of mouth. Their insider status suited their songs, which they’ve since termed “experimental depressed music”—it’s never been the sort of stuff that naturally generates headlines. Nearly every word on those early records is sung in a grave whisper, so their followers responded in kind, keeping the music like a secret.
Listening back, the music that Clay Parton, Canaan Dove Amber, and Jason Albertini made together is diffuse, without much pretense or expectation. Even 2000’s Contemporary Movement, the last album of the band’s initial run and easily their most accessible, feels beautifully haphazard and exploratory. Like many of their labelmates on Up Records at the time—including Quasi, Built to Spill, and Modest Mouse—they found magic in a free-associative take on indie rock, playing their songs as if remembering them from dreams. And then they receded into the shadows for almost 20 years. The story, as it’s most often told, suggests that the band more or less vanished while their legend grew.
But during their ostensible hiatus, the members of Duster continued making music both together and separately. Albertini’s Helvetia carried on the slow, sad spirit of Duster’s best songs, often accompanied by Amber. Parton’s Static Cult label released some of those records, while Parton continued making similarly distraught solo music music as Eiafuawn. So while it’s tempting to view Duster’s recent activity—touring, a Numero Group box set, and now a new album—as a reemergence, the band sees it as a continuation. They just kind of spaced out for a little while.
True to their word, their new, self-titled album bears all the hallmarks of classic Duster records: plodding drums, skeletal basslines, and guitar work that sparkles in the darkness like dew on a cobweb. The songs hiss menacingly in the unpredictable way that their early tape recordings did, as if their four-track had begun to resent them for all the feedback and bummer vibes. They recorded this album live in Parton’s garage, which no doubt supplies some of the songs’ chilly precarity. Per Parton, the only difference now that they’re older is that they buy blank cassettes on eBay rather than “steal[ing] them from the drugstore.”
Even at their clearest, the lyrics on Duster’s older records tended to get clouded out by tape fuzz and static. And yet, you could always tell that, whatever they were singing about, things weren’t going well. Parton has described the overall tone as “purring distress,” a sensation that’s more legible on the new album. “I’m Lost” consists of the dreary refrain “Don’t you know I’m lost?” over an appropriately circuitous guitar riff that feels like getting caught in a thought loop. On “Summer War,” Duster sing explicitly of the apocalypse, of how the “end is coming to take us home.” One of the most surprising moments is “Go Back,” on which the band builds soaring melodies out of ultra-minimal guitar leads, feedback, and static as they sing about lost innocence and a fall from the garden. Like something the Jesus and Mary Chain might pray in a particularly dissociative state, it’s desperate, weightless, and impossibly sad.
In an interview with Vice last year, Parton explained that changing times have only underscored longstanding Duster philosophy. “We didn’t feel like we belonged in this world before,” he said. “And the world is only an even bleaker hellscape now.” Duster holds a mirror to that world, offering existentially troubled lyrics over droney, drawn-out instrumentals. It’s of a piece with the music they’ve always released, but there’s something hopeful in that. Even if you wake up one day 20 years from now and don’t recognize the hellish world around you, you can still press on the way you always have, with your friends at your side.

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For a quarter-century, the Necks have developed a near-mythic status for building hour-long piano/drums/bass pieces that overflow with the tension of contrasts. Vertigo, their 18th album, often finds the trio at their finest, delighting in their instrumental ideas like they’re dancing.

Vertigo

The Necks have developed a near-mythic status. For a quarter century, they've been building hour-long piano/drums/bass pieces that overflow with the tension of contrasts—beauty versus bedlam, melody versus discord, momentum versus inertia. Live, the Sydney trio do it off the cuff, shaping tiny themes with familiar tools into improvised monoliths. Though the Necks draft more concrete plans for their records, they wield that same sense of wonder when they’re composing. At their best, the group’s albums sound meticulous but feel extemporaneous, like synchronized exhalations from a group whose chemistry suggests rock'n'roll’s best songwriting tandems. Made by just three musicians of ostensibly modest avant-garde-scene means, the Necks’ sets and records possess the same gripping power as a sitcom or documentary that might have cost millions of dollars and dozens of people to craft. The largely acoustic answer to New Zealand’s electric the Dead C, the Necks make miracles of efficiency and magnetism.
Vertigo is the Necks’ 18th album and second for the New York label Northern Spy, the group’s first stable American home. Like many of its predecessors, Vertigo runs as one uninterrupted track, with 44 minutes roughly split between two interwoven movements. It does, however, break from the past by increasing the role of roaring electric guitar (played by drummer Tony Buck) and wafting-and-hiccupping synthesizers and electronic accessories (played by pianist Chris Abrahams). These additions largely shape a drone that fluctuates throughout the album and serves as a springboard for the group’s convulsive repartee. The exact nature of the sustained tone changes: Vertigo begins, for instance, with the growl of Lloyd Swanton’s bowed bass and dense sheets of piano runs. Near the halfway point, though, it’s a high-pitched synthesizer purr, countered by a Wurlitzer organ whose every chord dissipates into space. Swanton emerges from the impasse with steady, resonant bass sweeps, briefly conjuring the spirit of Tony Conrad’s microtonal masterpieces. And just before track’s end, an organ, bass, and Buck’s scraped drums cohere into a gigantic sigh, so slow and resonant it suggests plate tectonics.
But these interlocking phases are only the undercarriage of Vertigo, the framework upon which the Necks’ usual, brilliant instrumental interplay moves. When Abrahams inlays beautifully ascending melodies inside Buck’s percussive din early on, the effect is magical. And when Buck divides Swanton’s long, bagpipe-like tones with a stuttering, trip-hop rhythm, you listen in anticipation, trying to foretell what might happen next, only to be surprised by the Naked City-style ruptures Buck soon bangs out. This is the Necks at their finest, playing group games of chutes and ladders and delighting in their instrumental ideas like they’re dancing.
But Vertigo does stumble slightly through its rather obvious series of arcs: An opening swell cedes to a comedown that sends the members out into space, only to reconvene a quarter-hour later. This back-and-forth motion defines much of Vertigo and, by record’s end, it gets a bit tedious. And, in part because of the underpinning drone around which the trio works, the Necks are busier and more restless here than in the past, sometimes moving as if trapped inside a pinball machine. The Necks typically make elliptical music, where restraint and suggestion power tension and momentum. Their last album, 2013’s Open, epitomized that. Vertigo, on the other hand, could do more with less—of, say, the tawdry horror-show electronics so prominent near the 12-minute mark or the shock-and-awe noise that populates the back half. The concept of working over and alongside a drone congests the Necks’ customary grace.
The Necks have always confounded easy taxonomy. Their piano-trio semblance has often shoehorned them into jazz circles, though their pronounced lack of swing and structure has infamously confounded critics in those circles. And though there seems to be a natural spot for the Necks in experimental spaces, their presentation—three middle-aged men playing expensive acoustic instruments, often in esteemed concert halls—can make them a strange fit for the underground crowd. Their love of extended pieces and clattering crescendos even suggests a place in post-rock, though their music is often too incidental and illusory for the templates that term implies. With its part-time, eerie John Carpenter glow and sudden noise-rock spasms, Vertigo only renders the Necks as more vexing and unidentifiable. Though the Necks occasionally slip into predictability across this session, Vertigo epitomizes their career-long unpredictability, or their ability to start at one point and arrive somewhere entirely unexpected. Vertigo is a minor Necks record, destined to stand forever in the shadow of the 2013 opus Open. But, after a quarter century, the trio’s explorations still sound as ecstatic as they do limitless. That, at least, is another minor miracle.


This new seven-disc Fall box set surveys every single and B-side the Mancunian institution has released since 1978. It provides a tidy, linear history of a notoriously unstable band.

The Fall - Singles 1978-2016

The last thing the world needs is another Fall compilation. The sheer volume of music that Mark E. Smith (and whoever he’s barking orders at) has produced over the past four decades has resulted in so many anthologies and quickie collections that you could build a house out of the jewel cases. But Cherry Red’s new seven-disc Fall box set instantly crushes them all like Godzilla on Bambi. It’s a survey of every single and B-side the Mancunian institution has released since 1978, providing a tidy, linear history of a notoriously unstable band. As with everything about the Fall, however, even this simple strategy is actually a lot more complicated than it appears.
Back in 2006, The Guardian’s Dave Simpson attempted to track down every former member of the Fall, a list that could fill a small town’s phonebook. And there could likely be another compelling in-depth article written about the effort required to put this box set together. The Fall have released over 50 singles to date, and through almost as many labels, some of which are long-defunct. Singles 1978-2016 is the product of a nearly four-year, Indiana Jones-worthy quest, but with the religious artifacts replaced by an even more elusive, holier grail: proper publishing-rights paperwork. So the fact that this box set exists at all is a minor miracle. What’s even more remarkable is the fact that, while listening to these seven discs attentively in one sitting would require you to book a day off from your job, it rarely feels like work. Even after their fleeting late-’80s moment as a Top 40 threat had passed, and the quality of their albums became more of a crap shoot, the Fall remained an intriguingly unpredictable singles band, one whose cantankerous, chaotic reputation belies their economical songcraft and stylistic malleability.
Singles 1978-2016 emulates the segregated format of Beggars Banquet’s popular 1990 compilations 458489 A Sides and 458489 B Sides. The box set’s first three discs (which are also available as a separate package) chronologically chart the journey from debut single “Bingo-Master’s Break Out” to last year’s “Wise Ol’ Man,” with each disc loosely representing a distinct phase in their evolution: the minimalist garage-punk origins, the semi-pop era, and the post-millennial free-for-all. The other four discs plot a parallel, circuitous course through the B-sides. (It’s a testament to Smith’s uncommon industriousness that the tracklist here is dramatically different than the Fall’s other career-spanning, multi-disc box set of note, The Complete Peel Sessions 1978-2004.) Separating the A-sides from B-sides makes a certain amount of sense, providing both an easy entry point into the band’s labyrinthine catalog and a scenic path for more committed listeners to go down. At the same time, with a band like the Fall, the distinction between A-sides and B-sides was often largely arbitrary—a B-side banger like 1981’s “Fantastic Life” could be just as rousing as any lead single from the same era; an A-side rumbler like 1986’s “Living Too Late” could be just as cold and imposing as any oddity tucked on the flipside.
From the get-go, the Fall were clearly unlike any other punk band. Sure, the surface sneer of gut-punching early singles like “It’s the New Thing” may have aligned Mark. E. Smith with other Johnny Rotten-come-latelys, but his overstuffed lyric sheets were loaded with contrarian critiques of a punk culture that had become just as conformist and close-minded as the establishment it railed against. The Fall are often classified as post-punk—a movement synonymous with anti-rock experimentation and futurist principles—but in their early years, they were more interested in putting a post-modernist spin on pre-punk sounds. They cultivated mutant strains of country (“Fiery Jack”), 1950s rockabilly (“Lie Dream of a Casino Soul,” which sounds like “Tequila” being subjected to electro-shock therapy), and 1960s garage (“Psycho Mafia,” a showcase for original keyboardist Una Baines’ eerily emotionless, ice-picked organ lines). And even as Smith’s lyrics turned increasingly cryptic, he still trafficked in relatable subjects—football, World War II, over-caffeination—that made him more at home with the factory workers at the local pub than the art-school students at the discotheque. But then, Smith had a peculiar gift for rendering everyday English urbanity as dystopian sci-fi. The clanging “I’m Into C.B.,” for example, begins as a cheeky fetishization of trucker culture, before revealing its narrator as a sad-sack, jobless shut-in who uses his radio for devious prankster purposes—an uncanny prophecy of 21st-century online-trolling.
The arrival of guitarist (and Smith’s future wife) Brix in 1983 didn’t so much change the Fall’s sound as embolden it. The haunted-house organ sounds of old were updated to bright synths, the drum-machine tinkering was beefed up into danceable beats, and Smith’s verbal spew was unleashed in more controlled, graceful arcs. And with Brix dropping shout-’em-out pop hooks like cherries on a mud sundae, the band enjoyed a steady six-record run on Beggars Banquet that yielded their most immediate, enduring songs. At the time, they were producing work of such high quality—and at such a high volume—that they could afford to relegate bop-along earworms like “C.R.E.E.P.” and “Oh! Brother” to non-album singles, while punting definitive tracks like “No Bulbs” to stopgap EPs.
Up to this point, the Fall’s B-sides form an alternate canon every bit as wonderful and frightening as their headlining tracks, yielding a wealth of alternate-universe indie-rock touchstones (“2nd Dark Age”), hypno-dirge rants (“Repetition”), and eerily prescient premonitions (from the ominous “Auto Tech Pilot”: “I really think this computer thing is getting out of hand!”). Starting in the ’90s, the bloated demands of the CD-single took hold, with remixes, live takes, alternate versions, and even Christmas songs starting to appear. They’re emblematic of an era when the Fall seemed to be settling comfortably into middle age, even after Brix departed (she later rejoined) and the band’s revolving door began to swing more vigorously. It was a decade spent embracing trends (see: the Madchester-grooved “Telephone Thing”); flirting with elegantly sung, string-sweetened middle-brow indie (“Popcorn Double Feature”); mashing up reggae standards (“Why Are People Grudgeful?”); quoting Paul Simon (“15 Ways”); and twisting to golden oldies (“F-‘Oldin’ Money”). The lager-sloshing 1999 single “Touch Sensitive” could even pass for a Fatboy Slim jam, a fact reinforced by its festival-ready remix.
But after this period of streamlined aesthetic stability, the Fall barreled into the new millennium oscillating violently between accessibility and inscrutability, as if the Y2K bug had bypassed our computers and lodged itself firmly in Mark E. Smith’s brain. On the one hand, the Fall’s later years have seen Smith re-embrace his raw, garage-punk roots, albeit with a more muscular menace. The 2004 single “Theme From Sparta F.C. #2” adheres to his tradition of soccer-stadium-worthy chants, but comes as vicious as a pack of marauding hooligans. “Reformation! (Uncut)” takes aim at the ex-bandmates who abandoned him mid-tour in 2006, wielding its sinister two-note bass riff like a pulse rifle. On the other hand, as his line-up has steadied over the past decade, Smith has been all-too-eager to disembowel his band’s sound—by 2013’s “The Remainderer” and “Amorator!,” the Fall had effectively become an improvisational ensemble, their songs serving as rusted spittoons for Smith’s increasingly slurred, phlegm-soaked invectives.
Strange as it is to say about a seven-disc, eight-hour box set, Singles 1978-2016 is not exactly a comprehensive overview of the Fall’s discography. By its very nature, it must exclude the band’s greatest front-to-back album, 1982’s Hex Enduction Hour, which yielded several certified classics (“Hip Priest,” “The Classical”) but no official singles. Likewise, it can’t include essential album cuts (from early rave-up “Industrial Estate” to 2005 bruiser “What About Us?”) that never made it onto seven-inch. But this is still a staggering monument all the same, an elaborately detailed portrait of a shambolic artist whose astonishing productivity, creative restlessness, and utter disdain for the niceties of civil society know no bounds. This is Mark E. Smith’s lawn, and we’re all invited to get the fuck off of it.


The Oakland-based heavy music band returns with its first album in 6 years. Concise and crystal clear, it feels almost provocatively unadorned.

Piecework

Heaviness isn’t measured in volume in Kowloon Walled City’s music. Some of the most crushing parts of Piecework, the Bay Area band’s fourth full-length, are moments of total silence. Tension and release are crucial parts of the doom metal and noise rock they draw from, but those dynamics are rarely executed this patiently—or powerfully. Throughout Piecework, tension is drawn with excruciating pauses that hang longer than you expect, and the release comes not as a booming crescendo but as a relieved exhale. It’s subtle work, and Kowloon Walled City are the rare loud band that asks you to lean in closely to hear everything they’re doing.
Minimalism has always been a weapon in Kowloon Walled City’s arsenal. They’ve never had much fat on their compositions, but on Piecework, even the connective tissue has been excised. The elements are the same as ever, all grinding against each: sparse guitars, rattling bass, bone-dry drums, and Scott Evans’ anxious howl. It’s not as though earlier Kowloon Walled City albums were lush, but even for a band this well-acquainted with negative space, Piecework feels almost provocatively unadorned.
The naked production of the album, which was engineered and mixed by Evans, ensures that every note hits with full force. In this corner of heavy music, the finer details of riffs are often swallowed in squalls of feedback and noise. Evans and co-guitarist Jon Howell seek clarity throughout Piecework’s concise 32 minutes. Their twisting interplay is fully audible even in the loudest moments. As “You Had a Plan” swells to its frantic finale, one guitar holds down the main riff while the other splashes an expressionistic solo atop it. Both guitar parts ring out, crystal clear, into the darkness.
As vividly defined as the instruments are, Evans takes a more impressionistic approach as a lyricist. “She chews the air silently/And through the haze, like a pulse, you sing,” he intones on “Splicing,” invoking one of the album’s many unnamed characters. There’s something tantalizing and just out of reach about Evans’ vignettes, a thrilling contrast to the concrete sound of the music. Even the relatively direct title track, which Evans has said was inspired by his grandmother’s decades-long career sewing shirt collars, defies easy analysis: “Stars shine through tin on plaster/Straight arms won’t stop the world.”
The lyrics were the final element to fall into place for Piecework, the result of a nasty bout of writer’s block that left Evans staring at a blank page for over a year. “Part of that was me wondering, does anyone even need to hear from me? Maybe we should call this. Nobody needs to hear another middle-aged white dude yelling,” Evans told Treble earlier this month. Whether through self-awareness or self-doubt, that neurosis led to the longest gestation period in Kowloon Walled City’s discography: Piecework comes six years after Grievances, a break twice as long as any previous interim between albums. The agony of that gap is palpable in the music. Evans and his bandmates sound wearied by the act of creation, like each riff and drum fill is being extracted at the cost of some of their vitality. But even when the music feels emotionally draining, it lurches forward, stumbling toward catharsis. The stars shine through.

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The Swedish producer Axel Willner's dark, exquisitely detailed fourth album as the Field is a moody work that perfectly balances sleekness and aggression. Cupid's Head is thick and dense, a miles-long oil slick that radiates ultraviolet hues.

Cupid's Head

Everything changes, but Axel Willner stays the same. Since the Swedish producer's debut LP as the Field, 2007's techno-pop landmark From Here We Go Sublime, Willner has patiently augmented the project's sound with each successive release, adding subtle touches that are significant in scope and texture. He operates with a workmanlike consistency, putting out an album about every two years, each with nearly identical packaging—two lines of artfully scribbled text on a beige background. On his first three albums as the Field, this simple design reinforced the Field's overarching aesthetic congruency. Without even cracking the spine of Cupid's Head, his fourth, it's obvious change is afoot, and the visual shift feels significant. Compared to the glimmering, soft-hued soundscapes of 2011's Looping State of Mind, the new record is a moodier work, perfectly balancing sleekness and aggression.
Willner's recent solo performances have abandoned the body-moving tendencies of the Field's full-band shows, favoring drones and formlessness more associated with his Loops of Your Heart project. Cupid's Head is thick and dense, a miles-long oil slick that radiates ultraviolet hues, and it has some overlap with his other project. It also finds the Field occasionally coming full-circle, with qualities that recall Here We Go Sublime. Besides being Willner's strongest collection since that game-changing debut, Cupid's Head's six lengthy jams take cues from Sublime's centerpiece, "The Deal", an intimidating monolith of techno that swells and pulsates over its 10-minute running time. He's moved away from proper and his sense of scope is more epic than ever. Cupid's Head as a record just feels bigger, dwarfing his previous efforts.
In that sense, Cupid's Head brings to mind another texture-focused album from this year: Fuck Buttons' Slow Focus, which saw the Bristol noise duo reining in their noisy squall to focus on diamond-sharp textures and a greater attention towards small-scale detail. "20 Seconds of Affection", Cupid's Head's gauzy closer, kicks things off with a throttling torrent of digital synth slush before giving way to a mid-tempo churn that continually folds itself into three-dimensional shapes, as a wandering bassline lurks just beneath the surface, wobbling with unease. "Black Sea" also has a feeling of up-up-up propulsion—hissing drum machines, interlocking tones, a swirl of transistor-radio noise lapping at the track's feet—before dramatically changing shape in its back half, as menacing arpeggiated tones dominate. The Field project has typically projected easy warmth, a kind of synthesized benevolence, but the intensity of "Black Sea"'s closing minutes is the darkest, most straightforwardly sensual, and most evil-sounding music Willner's made.
Indeed, Cupid's Head is more intense than any other Field record. With the exception of the silvery guitar tones that open the album's epic opener, "They Won't See Me", these songs start at the top and stay there, eschewing patient build for pure relentlessness, a sonic persistence that obliterates everything around you in a comforting, head-clearing way.
There are many transcendent moments of bliss on Cupid's Head—"They Won't See Me"'s high-tension tonal axis, the squishy radiance of "A Guided Tour"—but "No. No…" is the album's greatest moment of awe, with an endlessly looped voices evocative of the Flamingos-warping abstraction of From Here We Go Sublime's title track. Each iteration of the title phrase gradually stretches it further into the void. Over a bed of stormy, amorphous rhythms and off-white static, the sampled voice changes shape—from high-pitched to low, staccato to elongated, specific to indefinable—until there's nothing left but a broken helicopter-blade beat and an unadorned vocal sample that vibrates with a menacing inflection. It's a wellspring of tension on an album that brims with paranoia.
The Field's discography is paradoxical. On the one hand, Cupid's Head demonstrates how much Willner's aesthetic has changed over the last six years. That those changes have been incremental, and that there are clear threads going back to his debut, highlight the singularity of what he does. The landscapes of dance and electronic music have shifted since the release of From Here We Go Sublime—minimal techno, as well as Willner's label home Kompakt, have become niché concerns—so the fact that he's still an innovator in an always-crowded field is a considerable feat. A few artists have taken bits and pieces of his style and applied them in their own way, but no one has been able to sound like Willner, who in turn continues to sound like no one except himself. Cupid's Head is a dark, exquisitely detailed album that rewards patience and further cements the Field's reputation as one of modern electronic music's most satisfying auteurs.


The reclusiveness and mystery surrounding Boards of Canada has never been of much interest to me. When music possesses such an uncomplicated immediacy, the story of how it was made and by whom is less crucial. The macro of Boards of Canada's music is so well ordered, so complete, that the stories of the constituent parts are incidental. I never much cared for Easter eggs anyway; with art like this I prefer to let my subconscious do the work of sorting things out. So I find this band's records easy to take at face value.

*Geogaddi* was three years ago, and

Boards of Canada: The Campfire Headphase

The Campfire Headphase

The reclusiveness and mystery surrounding Boards of Canada has never been of much interest to me. When music possesses such an uncomplicated immediacy, the story of how it was made and by whom is less crucial. The macro of Boards of Canada's music is so well ordered, so complete, that the stories of the constituent parts are incidental. I never much cared for Easter eggs anyway; with art like this I prefer to let my subconscious do the work of sorting things out. So I find this band's records easy to take at face value.
Geogaddi was three years ago, and since that time Boards re-issued Music Has the Right to Children as well as early records like Twosim. With that small flood of material on the market at the same time we were able to digest Boards' career output as a whole and it became clear how deeply committed they are to a core sound that was quite well formed from the get-go. As long as Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin are making music together they will always sound like Boards of Canada.
Geogaddi was a few shades darker than what came before, but the grim hints of violence that record suggested are nowhere to be found on The Campfire Headphase. Instead, the latest record offers perhaps the dreamiest vision of the band yet. The first time through Campfire, I found myself wondering whether Stephen Wilkinson of Bibio had been offered a guest spot. Bibio got a small blip of buzz last year for Fi, his beguiling album of queasy four-track experiments with processed guitar. On the record he was promoted as a "discovery" of Boards, and, after listening to The Campfire Headphase, it's clear why they were so taken with his sound. Boards use of guitar on tracks like "Chromakey Dreamcoat" and "Hey Saturday Sun" makes explicit something about the band's sound that was always just beneath the surface: the connection of the music to the pastoral tradition of British folk. That feeling of nature's green as gold, the stream of sunlight through fluttering leaves, the communion with the environment that always involves a confrontation with death. There's a reason people bring weed with them on camping trips.
Of course, this being Boards of Canada, the guitar is first a sound tool, the familiar timbre of which is loaded down with the weight of emotional memory. So it's bent, stretched, spun in with the thick swirl of sound (The Campfire Headphase is a anything but minimalist) to become another ingredient in the record's stew. It bugs me that most of the songs here with guitar use one very simple picked chord and basically bring the loop in and out in predictable fashion. Perhaps because of the instrument's familiarity it naturally draws attention to itself, and there's no getting around that there's not very much happening with the guitar on most of the tracks where it appears. It adds nice twist, sure, but nothing more.
In terms of mood, Campfire is a sluggish record, weary, pointed edges dulled as if by the march of time. Boards could previously be counted on to offer a display of crisp, forceful drum programming to jar you out of your narcotic haze ("Telephasic Workshop" and "Gyroscope"). The Campfire Headphase is all midrange, the mid-tempo shuffles putting the mind-boggling array of instrumental processing front and center. In the sound generation department, at least, they're still hitting. The best thing Campfire Headphase has going is its unnamable synthesizer sounds. As copied as their aesthetic has been, it's amazing that after all this time they're still flat-out better at coming up with cool noises than just about everybody. The pure exercises in texture, like the minute-long between-track interludes like "Ataronchronon" and "Constants Are Changing" are among the record's high points.
These blissed-out narcotic interludes don't come quite often enough, though, and in fact this feels like a step down from the last two albums. It would be very hard not to step down from the heights scaled by those records, but by subtly altering their approach and adding bits of guitar The Campfire Headphase never really seems to give it a go. The Campfire Headphase is a good album and it's almost, but not quite, a good Boards of Canada album.