Chicago violinist and songwriter follows his breakthrough album, The Mysterious Production of Eggs, by adding more guitars and deeper textures to his production, tricks he's been employing live for the past couple of years.

Armchair Apocrypha

At first blush, this record is not nearly as captivating as Andrew Bird's previous three albums, but in his inimitable and subtle way, the Chicago singer-songwriter has here made yet another intricately detailed collection of songs. While Weather Systems and The Mysterious Production of Eggs found him discovering and exploring new territory, this is the album where he's built his house and now settles in and gets comfortable.
In a subgenre stuffed full with mediocrity, Bird has developed a singular style that frees him to add or subtract anything he likes from it-- no matter what he does at this point, chances are you're never going to mistake his music for anyone else's. On Bird's latest album, Armchair Apocrypha, guitar is far more prominent than it once was-- something Bird has been working toward in concert for a couple of years now. This addition deepens the texture created by his core instruments-- pedal-controlled loops of pizzicato violin, drums, and glockenspiel. With the addition of overdubs-- waves of multi-tracked violin, eerie whistling, and dizzying violin cadenzas-- and heavy layering, it all becomes nearly symphonic in scope.
The only thing that tosses and turns more than the music is Bird-- his lyrics are drawn from the kinds of thoughts that keep one up at night: "Do you wonder where the self resides/ Is it in your head or between your sides?/ Who will be the one who decides/ Its true location?" he sings on "Darkmatter", pondering the unknowable without resorting to pedestrian uses of the words "soul" and "God." His wordplay is in top form and serves as a perfect foil for the tension and release of arrangements like that on "Armchairs", where a piano pushes around chunks of listless violin.
Oddly, Bird revisits a song from 2003's Weather Systems, his first album without former band the Bowl of Fire: "Imitosis" is built around a much faster version of the violin parts and vocal hook of Weather Systems' "I", but apart from those ingredients it's completely different-- and much better. The song takes a spiraling dive into Bird's interest in science and psychology and his distrust of the ways in which we use them in our world, spinning into an examination of the nature vs. nurture debate.
These trips through a conflicted superego may not work quite as well without Bird's sonic stamp, or his voice. His singing can leap from a low deadpan to a flying falsetto in a heartbeat, and he varies his verses and choruses to throw you slightly off balance before serving his precisely delivered hooks. Bird never takes a melody where you expect it to go, as on the chorus of "Plasticities", which is practically power pop with its snappy guitar hook and massive vocal melody, but the way it's recorded and arranged it gets under your skin more than it gets into your head.
"Scythian Empires" is one of the most subtle and elegant songs about the futility of battle and conquest written during the current Iraq War, linking brief mentions of Halliburton attaché cases and talk of "exiting empires" to an ancient, extinct civilization. The Scythians controlled vast swaths of modern-day Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan for around eight centuries but now are all but forgotten-- Bird's indirect connection of them to the imagery of the last four years shows the sweep of history that speedily ushers most of our endeavors to the dustbin, and he does it without beating us over the head.
If there's a disappointing moment on the record, it's when "Heretics" pulls back from the drama of its swirling intro and slips into a mixture of spoken and sung lines instead of just going hell-for-leather to a big chorus. Otherwise, the biggest criticism you could level at it is that it's not better than the three albums that came before it-- but that scarcely matters when you're actually listening to it, because Armchair Apocrypha is ultimately another object of strange and unique beauty from this inventive songwriter and performer.


Trust Fund's sophomore album Seems Unfair is an indie rock record with the bright, shaggy-dog qualities of early Superchunk, and it often recalls early Los Campesinos! minus the hyperactive streak. They are at their best when they throw in a soured note or stall the pace just as a song threatens to get too comforting.

Seems Unfair

Trust Fund is essentially Bristol-based songwriter Ellis Jones, whose records and tours are rounded out by a rotating cast of musician friends from around the UK. Seems Unfair is his second album of 2015. Back in February, Jones released Trust Fund's debut No One's Coming for Us, which he broke down in a track-by-track feature with unusually transparent remarks on his inspirations. He says, "I wanted this song to sound like Radiator Hospital" about three different tracks, and then repeats that line about Swearin', Mount Eerie, Tony Molina, Waxahatchee, the Field Mice, Weezer, and Elliott Smith.
Some bands bristle when asked about their influences, as if disclosing them will reveal the shocking truth that they are not original to the world. Jones often frets about people continuing to refer to Trust Fund as a DIY outfit since he signed to Welsh indie Turnstile and received a small advance to make Seems Unfair in a studio rather than his bedroom. Although he's hardly breached intervention-worthy excess, his openness about his artistic debts reads as a very deliberate way of keeping the audience-facing aspect of the DIY ethos foregrounded: this is what made me do this; no form of inspiration is too new to be legitimate.
Even without the handy birdspotters' guide, Seems Unfair makes its references overt: It's an indie rock record with the bright, shaggy-dog qualities of early Superchunk, and it often recalls early Los Campesinos! minus the hyperactive streak. You could isolate patches that sound like Pavement or Dinosaur Jr., too, but Seems Unfair is much more distinct than its predecessor, thanks in part to the precise production of MJ from Hookworms. Jones' extremely polarizing voice also helps matters (in a way): He sings in a chalky adenoidal tone that cuts through its surrounds like wax through watercolor.
Hooks only occasionally pierced the fog of Trust Fund's debut; here, strange and beautiful boy-girl harmonies cut through the careening fuzz, giving extra shape to these songs. There are folky vocal touches in the breakdown of "4th August" and on the title track, where the band cuts through Jones' hushed words with formal choral chants. That song's enjoyably odd beginnings are wasted on a generic, puppyish end, although other tracks on Seems Unfair bring an almost prog sensibility to indie pop: "Scared II" starts full tilt, hangs a while in a highly strung, one-note guitar barrage, and ends on a triumphal cascade of vocals interlaced with a careening solo.
The relentlessly peppy pace carries along Jones' lyrics, which are as guileless as his approach to interviews. He writes about immediate fears but also the fear of change, often with a similarly simple pathos to Waxahatchee's Katie Crutchfield. "Michal's Plan" outlines someone's failed intentions to swim every day; instead, their bathing suit is "wet and festering in a Tesco bag at the foot of [their] bed." Seems Unfair is full of characters who seem to struggle with everyday minutiae, but Jones throws a magnifying glass on what may seem to more worldly observers like small stakes. Supermarkets crop up a lot in his lyrics, their shiny floors the sites of emotional reconciliation ("Big Asda") and the stages for great triumphs: "Baby, we walk like dreamers do/ Skating through the Free-From to world foods," Jones sings on "Dreamers".
Sometimes his plainspoken quality is too much. The driving "Scared II" is about Jones' fear of his partner dying: "Do a wee, brush my teeth, and you'll be gone forever," he sings. Twee is a worn-out, gendered term that's best retired, but Jones' self-effacing use of the word "wee" kind of makes you long for a good shower of territorial pissings. Maybe it's intentional though: Toward the end of the song, he asks his reluctant lover if they "still want to freeze my verrucas?" It's not appetizing, but then Trust Fund are at their best when they throw in a soured note or stall the pace just as a song threatens to get too comforting. Their tussle between coziness and dissonance betrays a surfeit of ambitious ideas, which isn't often a problem with modern indie rock acolytes.


Whether making black metal as Altar of Plagues or electronic music as WIFE, James Kelley has a taste for subversion, and his new WIFE EP surprises again by sounding downright joyful in spots.

Standard Nature

Whether making black metal under the name Altar of Plagues or electronic music as WIFE, multi-instrumentalist/producer James Kelly has consistently asserted himself as an artist who forges his own path. With both projects, Kelly has actually worked within established genre boundaries, but he’s also introduced unorthodox touches that place his work in a category by itself. His take on black metal, for example, captures the primal savagery of early pioneers like Darkthrone and Emperor while simultaneously drawing from a much broader emotional and musical palette.
In a rare best-of-both-worlds scenario, Altar of Plagues has managed to convey Kelly’s love for classic black metal and still exude a sense of freedom to explore goth, shoegaze, and—perhaps most crucially—a sensitive disposition that even the most high-minded black metal auteurs still tend to avoid. If Kelly’s recent shift away from Altar of Plagues’ blast-furnace tonality shocked any of his fanbase, it really shouldn't have. By that point, his penchant for tasteful subversion was well established.
WIFE’s 2014 debut full length What’s Between consisted of lacy electronic music draped around a singer-songwriter frame. Even more drastically, Kelly wore his R&B/soul vocal influences on his sleeve. But when you strip away the surface distinctions, What’s Between is cut from the same moodiness as all of James’ previous work. The new WIFE EP Standard Nature is arguably James’ most truly shocking move to date, not so much because he’s shifted stylistically again, but because this time his music sounds downright joyful in spots.
The differences between Standard Nature and What’s Between jump out within seconds. Opening instrumental “Wide Nine” establishes the beat-driven format that Kelly sticks to throughout the EP’s five songs. But again, Kelly makes his left-of-center approach clear almost as quickly. “Wide Nine,” for example, starts out as if it’s going to sustain its initial club-bound direction and even suggests that it might turn into a dance number. It doesn’t, the beat melting by the 1-minute mark into a hollowed-out scaffolding of its own shape, the remainder of the song playing almost like the morning-after memory of a night of revelry.
Moreover, while each of the five songs abounds with jaw-rattling drops, Kelly shows his versatility by underlaying the rhythmic boom with an array of disparate elements. On second track “Standard Nature,” for instance, Kelly sings in a style that recalls a church choir performing hymns on a high holiday. And on “Lovelock,” Kelly uses a vocoder to channel his inner Tobacco. Meanwhile, “Glass Interruption” features strings that eventually swallow the song’s glitchy first half, only to be swallowed in turn.
On “Native Trade,” Kelly takes soft keyboard swells—the kind we often hear in heartstring-tugging film scores—and scoops them out with intervals of silence, so that the tune stutters while evoking puffy clouds of drama. As always, Kelly weaves different shades of solemnity into a rich meshwork. And as time goes on, Kelly’s music gets more and more refined, so that it evades simple descriptors like “somber” and “dark.” But, where Kelly has utilized myriad shades of gray up to this point, on Standard Nature he expands beyond gray tones and demonstrates a rare ability to make overcast music that bursts with color.
At this point, we can probably bet that Kelly will change his approach again next time. Which means that Standard Nature’s pleasures are likely to be fleeting—like the songs themselves, a suggestion of an idea that’s over before it gets a chance to fully develop. But if nothing else, as Kelly’s body of work has shown, his need for constant evolution is one of his defining characteristics. On Standard Nature, he stays true to that and leaves enticing hints of more twists and turns to come.


Merge offers a deluxe reissue of Superchunk's excellent mid-90s record. The album proper has worn very well, and the inclusion of a live set from the period and rehearsal tapes is welcome.

Foolish

In certain key ways, Superchunk's Foolish perfectly sums up what made so much early-1990s indie rock so great. It was rambunctious enough for kids who craved the caffeinated buzz of punk rock at its catchiest. It was also tender enough for kids who loved hearing their own human-sized romantic foibles reflected in indie's everyperson approach to the love song. Foolish can be plenty fast and plenty noisy, but it skips the meathead aggression that's a nasty side effect of so much fast and noisy music. It's unafraid of getting down to personal angst, but smart enough not to get all gross and mawkish about it. It was made by a group who could have walked off stage and gone to their day jobs without having to change out of their Rock Band costumes. These are the kind of songs about bad breakups, worse parties, and lonely walks home that you and three of your friends might have written.
Except you probably wouldn't have, or couldn't have. Like a lot of early-90s indie music, Foolish still projects a D.I.Y. spirit, a welcoming vibe of accessibility, community, small-scale ingenuity. But there's nothing about the album that really says "anyone can do this." In fact, it still sounds like a major statement, albeit one from a self-effacing band. You knew from "Slack Motherfucker" that Superchunk would not be destined to play college-town gigs for a couple of years and then disappear. They were just more driven than the bulk of their contemporaries, a work ethic that's pretty obvious from at least album no. 2 onward. You don't come up with that many intense and memorable choruses, or play that tight, thanks to luck. And while they had an anti-pretentious streak that was a godsend in the messianic years of grunge, Foolish is where the band's ambition really blossomed for the first (but not the last) time, a dozen songs that turned small-town heartbreak into loud and weirdly triumphant anthems.
A big part of that is the sound of Foolish, and how that sound perfectly complements the more adventurous songs. But then, despite their rep as a smoking live act who do their best to simply translate that vibe in the studio, Superchunk have always had a real knack for picking the right producer for a specific set of songs, almost from the start. Steve Albini's typically unembellished recording on 1991's No Pocky For Kitty accentuated the wiriness of its very frantic tunes. John Reis added an almost claustrophobic, garage-rock intensity to the rawer set that would make up 1993's On the Mouth. Those albums weren't exactly static, though they did get a lot of mileage out of punk's joyful bashing. But Foolish is very much a big-canvas album, full of stark, quiet-loud shifts, songs with more breathing room, and grander peaks.
Given that producer Brian Paulson's the guy who recorded Spiderland, he seems to have been the perfect choice to give Foolish the appropriate weight and ferocity. Mac McCaughan and Jim Wilbur's guitars on "The First Part" clang and scrape as fiercely as any of the post-hardcore bands coming out of D.C. at the same time. But there's also a real bottom-end under all that trebly attack, the kind missing from most classic indie albums of the period, give or take the similarly minded Archers of Loaf. Paulson keeps things crisp and booming in the low-key moments, going full-tilt when the band decides to get loud. Painful examinations of an exhausted relationship, like "Keeping Track" and "Revelations", start out at a slow-burn and build to a thrilling climax or three, the wave of feedback coming almost as a relief after all that pensive tension. Foolish is a heavy album, musically and emotionally. But it's also never a drag. That controlled sense of pacing extends not just across the songs but the whole album. There's still plenty of that old joyful bashing, the caustic moments balanced by speed and sweetness. Heart-punching breakup songs like "Driveway to Driveway" are also bright shout-alongs.
This remaster sounds just fine to me, maybe a little louder in the top end as usual, though my much-played and more-than-a-decade-old CD copy also sounds plenty fine. The real benefit is that Foolish is once again available on vinyl; while clearly aimed at longtime fans, the newly appended live set and handful of other bonuses are still largesse on the part of Merge, one the few labels that actually bothers to include something of value if you're going to repurchase an album you've already owned in multiple formats. But the original album remains the main draw, especially if you just came onboard with last year's swift and colorful and totally fun Majesty Shredding. This is probably the darkest album Superchunk ever made, but however serious Foolish gets, there's always more of the giddy thrill of hearing a group friends who sound like they're having a blast playing together, even if they're also pushing themselves to go further, giving the songs that much more all-or-nothing intensity than everyone else around them.


The Chicago singer/rapper known for her diaristic, relationship-dissecting R&B builds her new mixtape around inherently private and frequently drama-filled voice messages.

Voicemails

Whether providing the wisdom of an elder (Solange’s “Tina Taught Me”), a representation of the song’s subject (Drake’s “Marvin’s Room”), or just some comedic relief (Frank Ocean’s “Be Yourself”), voicemails are long-established as a versatile storytelling device in hip-hop and R&B. So it’s no surprise that Tink, the Chicago singer/rapper known for her diaristic, relationship-dissecting R&B, has chosen to build her new mixtape around a method of communication that’s inherently private and frequently drama-filled. On Voicemails, her first full-length since leaving Timbaland’s Epic Records imprint in 2017, Tink tells her latest romance saga more vividly than ever before.
Voicemails follows a woman named KeKe, with occasional interjections from two men in her life, DeShawn and Chris. As KeKe, Tink sings about struggling to decide whether to stay with the unreliable DeShawn or to pursue a new beau, Chris. It’s an extension of themes already well explored in Tink’s Winter’s Diary mixtape series; teasing out the emotional highs and lows of a relationship is her bread and butter. But Tink remains gripping as she highlights the tension between devotion and deception, longing and heartbreak. “I don't wanna throw this away, but boy, sometimes,” she sings on “I Need Ur Love,” her sweet and airy voice twisting in anguish.
Throughout Voicemails, Tink explores the spectrum of emotions that make KeKe a complex and captivating character. On “Stabbed in the Back,” Tink flexes her equally punchy and melodic rapping, flowing over an electric guitar-sampling trap beat with finesse. She’s distrustful of her man and paranoid over past betrayals, yet resolved in her strength: “I ain't work this hard just to turn around and quit,” she says with urgency. The standout “Ride It” puts Tink’s sensuality on display; her voice oozes through a snaking melody like a slow-motion version of Rihanna’s “Needed Me.” She’s earnest and romantic (“Having sex like I’m your woman”), while guest Dej Loaf is more brazen (“Might just fuck him on the interstate”). Each track further opens up KeKe’s shifting emotional landscape, illustrating the case both for and against leaving DeShawn.
Tink’s songwriting is vibrant, but it’s the album’s voicemail interludes that really propel the telenovela-scale dramatics. “Bad Side” finds an enraged KeKe stuck at home with DeShawn’s baby for four days, while on “DeShawn’s Interlude,” the hapless dad insists that he only missed her calls because his phone fell in the toilet. By the time Voicemails comes to a close, you’re waiting at the edge of your seat to see if KeKe will ditch him. “I done fell in love with the real thing/Even though you make me mad, I could never leave,” Tink raps on the tape’s closer, “Falling in Love,” keeping things open-ended. (Later, on Twitter, she all but confirmed that KeKe ends up with Chris.) By presenting Voicemails as a work of autofiction, blurring the lines between herself and her character, Tink revitalizes the tried-and-true confessional R&B she’s served up for years now. In Tink’s world, voicemails aren’t dead, and neither is love.


The SAULT vocalist’s new album explores faith and self-love through warm, lustrous neo-soul.

Heaven

Cleo Sol named herself after the sun. The UK singer is a vocalist for the enigmatic collective SAULT, which makes experimental R&B, funk, and disco-inspired music that speaks to the complexity of the Black experience. Over the past few years, she’s also released three balmy neo-soul albums that are in the lineage of Stevie Wonder and Erykah Badu and suffused with warm optimism: She sings about following your dreams, finding salvation in love, and honoring a higher purpose. Her music is radiant like a blooming peony, tender like butter left out on the counter. Sol’s latest project, Heaven, explores her usual themes of faith and self-love with a newfound ease and confidence.
The piano-driven pop arrangements of her 2021 album Mother left a lot of room for Sol’s storytelling to take the stage. Heaven is a warmer, funkier, and more sonically diverse album, prioritizing the interplay between slick bass and synth and Sol’s voice as much as the lyrical messaging. Throughout, her falsetto is beautiful, floating over the production like fog drifting across a snow-capped mountain range. On “Go Baby,” she repeats the titular phrase over a meandering piano and gentle backing vocals, turning the directive into a twinkling meditation. And on “Nothing on Me,” Sol luxuriates in a fleet-footed bossa nova groove, occasionally weaving in her voice as a wisp of texture.
Sol’s work cultivates inner joy that she then extends outwards. Released after the birth of her child, Mother was an empathetic project that demonstrated understanding toward her mother while also holding her accountable for the harm she caused. A similar sense of compassion guides Heaven; Sol examines relationships with friends, lovers, herself with sensitivity and care. “Miss Romantic” is a plea to a friend—or perhaps to herself—to stop humoring a man who continues to disrespect her. Sol is firm and direct as she lists the man’s many offenses, but ends the song on a string of sweet affirmations that underscore her deep affection for the other party: “You are brave, you are true, you won’t lose, trust in you” she croons, her voice echoing across a gentle guitar line and squiggly synth.
Throughout the album, Sol keeps her storytelling diffuse and open-ended. On “Golden Child, (Jealous),” a breezy track with bird song and flitting drums, she repeats, “They’re just jealous of your mind/They’re just jealous ‘cause you’re kind,” leaving who “they” are unanswered. She is similarly vague on “Old Friends” as she expresses sadness about a relationship that ended, with lyrics like, “Distance and pain/Made my life feel smaller” and “Years have gone by, tears still stain my pillow/You played games with my emotions.” She always delivers her lines with poise and intention, but sometimes her writing can seem emotionally flat.
Despite a few trite lyrics, there are many transcendent moments on Heaven. Sol is able to pivot between multiple emotional states—gratitude, calm, yearning—within the space of a single vocal run, like on album standout, “Heaven.” Her voice descends from an ethereal falsetto to a lower, golden-toned vibrato like red wine cascading from a glass carafe. The song establishes a mood so engrossing that notes seem to suspend in the air and reverberate around you even after the music stops, its beauty lingering like heat on your skin after a long day in the sun.


Produced by Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos, the multi-national group fuses Argentine cumbia, Peruvian chicha, and Turkish psych into a giddy sound that leans unabashedly retro.

Let The Festivities Begin!

Los Bitchos’ Let the Festivities Begin! is retro, wide-reaching, and as festive as the title promises. The London group’s debut, produced by Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos, resembles the soundtrack to an early-’70s gap year, an amalgam of influences and instruments that runs decidedly groovy. Here, we coast on vibes and guitar licks, navigating a surf-rock odyssey by way of Argentine cumbia, Peruvian chicha, and Turkish psych. Happily, its disparate parts turn out to be as cohesive as they are giddy. And if it never amounts to much more than that, so what? Better a good trip than a navel-gazing one; better a quick romp than a slog through the cerebral.
The eddying guitar on this entirely instrumental album leads easily into daydreams. This is a record predicated on fantasy—its accompanying press release references Tarantino films, cowgirls “swaggering into a saloon,” and panthers “prowling through a desert.” Its wordlessness makes the album a screen, something on which to project yourself or your preferred alternate reality. Opener “The Link Is About to Die” is a sleek, muscular saunter: Someone’s ordering a whiskey shot in a Nudie suit. “Pista (A Fresh Start)” feels like arriving by Camaro to a small mountain village wearing sunglasses, toting a pistol, and harboring a dark secret.
These unapologetically backward-facing songs’ main ambition is to excavate a vibe. Standout “Las Panteras” alternates between trotting and running, steadily ticking cymbals and sinuous guitar toggling between restraint and effervescence. It whips itself into a frothy psychedelic frenzy and sweeps the listener up in the process. “Good to Go” lassoes a Morricone opener into ’80s synth pop, where “Tropico,” another highlight, fuses the same dancey synth with propulsive cumbia and further embellishes with Anatolian guitar. Rather than feeling forced, Los Bitchos’ stylistic marriages are balanced and delightful. Even the most unexpected element never feels tacked on.
It’s difficult to separate the music from the band’s image. Los Bitchos’ members—with ties to Sweden, Australia, Turkey, and Uruguay—all boast Jane Birkin bangs and ’60s wardrobes, and in videos like the one for “Pista,” they lean fully into the cheeky schtick of a retro B-movie. There are captions in bubbly mustard-yellow serif fonts, pinafores, berets, and menace in the woods. Where the production can feel overpolished, it’s also easy to imagine these songs given further room to roam in a live setting (this relatively sedate KEXP set features a keytar). Where the packaging leans twee, it’s also the opposite of self-serious or pretentious—Los Bitchos promise neither more nor less than a good time, as easy and palatable as the champagne of beers. And that’s just what they achieve, for better or for worse. Let the Festivities Begin! is music to dance to, to roll a joint to, to solve a decades-old mystery to, but it isn’t a masterwork that unfolds with multiple listens. It’s exactly what it promises, and that’s a party.

Buy: Rough Trade


The Chicago multi-instrumentalist and composer’s second album crisscrosses genres and eras, sprawling in its ambition and surprisingly precise in its attack.

Open Arms to Open Us

In an illuminating prologue to his second full-length album, Chicago instrumentalist, composer, and vocalist Ben LaMar Gay writes of his doubts as to what he could leave behind for “the young people in my life” when faced with “the crumbling of societal facades.” He finds the answer in rhythm, “the one trueness that travels great distances and constantly survives the crumbling of facades.”
Rhythm, it turns out, is also a potent tool for opening up what could be a borderline fearsome work of experimental music to the popular ear. Open Arms to Open Us sounds simultaneously like everything and nothing, bringing to mind Bitches Brew, hip-hop, New York experimental math rockers Battles, Kid A, raga, samba, free jazz, D’Angelo, and the chipmunk-ed vocals employed by rave producers. But in its conglomerate totality, the album is too multifarious to bear more than a passing resemblance to any of the above. It’s a remarkable piece of musical pathfinding, sprawling in its ambition and surprisingly precise in its attack, an album where a zither jam (“Nyuzura,” featuring British-Rwandan singer Dorothée Munyaneza) gives way to triangle-assisted drone (“Slightly Before the Dawn”), which then cedes the floor to hip-hop tuba bounce (“Dress Me in New Love”).
LaMar Gay’s vision of musical “Pan-Americana”—reaching beyond the sawdust and spit image of classical Americana to include North and South American culture—binds the project together. In addition to rich baritone vocals, organ, balafon, cornet, zither, and a host of percussion instruments, LaMar Gay also contributes some fantastically sharp songwriting on Open Arms, such as the gorgeously gloomy, minor-key dread of “Oh Great Be the Lake” and the grandiloquent “Aunt Lola and the Quail,” a wealth of ideas never coming at the expense of brevity.
For all this, Open Arms is very much a collective work. Chicago rock band Ohmme apply vocal textures to “Sometimes I Forget How Summer Looks on You.,” Dorothée Munyaneza sounds fantastically acute against the tightly-sketched zither of “Nyuzura,” and A.Martinez’s poetry brings an earthy clarity to “I Once Carried a Blossom.” Matthew Davis’ tuba playing is a low-end highlight, while Adam Zanolini’s soprano saxophone brings an unsettling ambience to “Slightly Before the Dawn.”
Inevitably, in an album about the possibilities of rhythm, it is the drums that drive great swaths of Open Arms, their muscular embrace reaching out to bring us back to a place of deceptive familiarity. To believe in rhythm is to trust Tommaso Moretti’s pulsating beat to sweep the listener beyond the obtuse chord sequences of “Sometimes I Forget How Summer Looks on You.” with the grace of a good museum guide; it is to have faith that Moretti’s masterful hi-hat and snare skip on “Bang Melodically Bang” will transform a gnarled musical base into an unlikely tail shaker, and his caterpillar shuffle will make “Lean Back. Try Igbo” into an unlikely earworm.
To trust in rhythm, in other words, is to believe in the power of music to reach beyond generic boundaries to new—and surprisingly welcoming—worlds of opportunity and sound, where the traditional logic comes second to the philosophy of the beat. Open Arms to Open Us is adventure writ large, a rhythmical hymn to boundless possibility.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Mobile, Alabama rapper’s debut album is weighed down by streaming bait, but thankfully it does include a handful of his highest highs.

Moon Boy

There are a shit ton of rappers from the collection of thriving rap scenes in the Deep South solemnly singing about their grief, heartbreak, and tough upbringing over melancholy guitar and piano loops—I understand if you’re overwhelmed. Mobile, Alabama’s Yung Bleu is yet another, but he’s found a sweet spot amid the trendy sound. A deep dive into his catalog of mixtapes (see: the Investments series and Bleu Vandross trilogy) reveals that Bleu has built on a foundation laid by staples of the last decade or so of introspective Southern hip-hop: Like Starlito, his writing is often a self-examination of the fears, trauma, and racism he wishes he could forget; his ability to convey warmth when singing about violence might bring to mind Kevin Gates; he can craft a hook with the careful precision of his mentor Boosie. These layers have turned Bleu into one of the scene’s most obvious stars, so much so that at the end of last year, Drake hopped on the remix to Bleu’s take-me-back-anthem “You’re Mines Still,” which has been on an endless radio loop for months.
Bleu’s debut album Moon Boy is complicated, though. He’s a talented rapper who merges the confessional-like detail of his rap inspirations with soulful melodies that sound like he should join his local church’s choir, but also, he really wants to be a streaming juggernaut. With that, comes an uneven listening experience. Moon Boy is a reflection of the current popular rap landscape, where albums aren’t made to be consumed as a whole but instead for fans to sort through and playlist their favorites. This thought process has been amplified by streaming: Just ignore the songs that you don’t like, it’s not as if you paid 20 dollars for it. But I can’t quite do that. Am I supposed to pretend that “Unforgiving,” an extremely dull collaboration with Davido that feels more like a business deal than anything else, doesn’t exist? Or what about the whiny love drunk coos of “Ghetto Love Birds” alongside A Boogie Wit da Hoodie? Or the flat-sounding piano beats of “Dark Clouds” and “Angels Never Cry” designed to melt into any playlist? Or Chris Brown continuing to torment the music world with hooks that sound like they were recorded in the AIM away message era?
Moon Boy is weighed down by streaming bait, but thankfully it does include a handful of Bleu’s highest highs. It’s compelling how easily he can switch between tones, as the project seesaws between old war stories filled with agony and intimate ballads about love and the pain love brings. It works because Bleu is equally comfortable on both sides of that spectrum. He can carry sweet-sounding duets with H.E.R. and Kehlani and then use a weathered delivery to contemplate his past over a downbeat instrumental. He lilts, “And we come from duckin’ hundred round drums/And the school system treat us like we dumb/That’s why I’m in the hallway/Eighth grade, I was trappin’ in the hallway,” on the intensely personal yet self-effacing “Die Under the Moon.” Similarly, on the Jeezy-assisted “Shoe Box,” his writing is concise, emotional, and somehow still catchy.
Yet it’s not enough. I know, it’s hard to argue with success, and Moon Boy will inevitably rake in more numbers than Bleu ever has, but this is not a review of financial achievements; it’s of an entire project. Albums should be more than playlist fodder, but complete bodies of work that make you want to soak in and live with them. Yung Bleu is one of the premier voices of an exciting regional rap scene. To want him to live up to that is okay.

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Bowie issues a new version of his most immaculately constructed album, the most important tactical transition in a career built upon aesthetic reinvention.

David Bowie: Station to Station [Deluxe Edition]

Station to Station [Deluxe Edition]

When rock stars do too much cocaine, they tend to do ridiculous things, like drive cars into motel swimming pools, or hire hit men to snuff out their bassist, or make Be Here Now. David Bowie, on the other hand, produced Station to Station, an album he allegedly doesn't remember making, but which, ironically, stands as his most immaculately constructed album, and the most important tactical transition in a career built upon aesthetic reinvention.
Arriving in the wake of 1975's glam-rock-shunning, Philly-soul-fetishizing Young Americans, Station to Station offered proof that Bowie's fascination with American funk and disco was no one-off lark. But if Young Americans often felt like a studied genre exercise, Station to Station filtered that rhythmic influence through some of Bowie's other obsessions at the time: the austere Krautrock of Neu! and Kraftwerk, the occult, Nazism, and, yes, a whole lotta blow. And yet, for all the tales of late-night black-majick ceremonies and Hitler-salute scandals that surrounded its release, perhaps the most bizarre thing about Station to Station is that an album of such sinister orgin would turn out to be Bowie's highest charting album ever in the U.S., peaking at No. 3.
By the mid-70s, it was customary for pop stars to sing of their disillusionment with fame (see: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Neil Young's On the Beach) but they usually did so in an insular, introspective fashion, after they had gained some distance from the storm. By contrast, Station to Station finds Bowie expressing his weariness while the party was still rages on around him; even in the midst of his "Golden Years", he's yearning to "run for the shadows." In essence, the album is a cry for help from the champagne room: On the hymn-like piano-ballad "Word on a Wing", the career chameleon decries this "age of grand illusion" (tellingly, this LP's Thin White Duke persona would be the last character Bowie introduced), while the title track's momentous prog-disco suite-- with references to Aleister Crowley and Kabbalism-- charts a course from spiritual void toward ecstatic religious reawakening. "It's not the side effects of the cocaine," Bowie declares as the song hits its funky, 4/4 stride, "I'm thinking that it must be love." Rarely have delusions been rendered with such grandeur.
This repackaged 3xCD Station to Station arrives as part of an ongoing campaign of deluxe Bowie reissues, and this one's primary selling point-- a remastered version cut from the original analog tapes-- should pique the interest of more than just ardent audiophiles. For all its futurist intimations, Station to Station's most integral elements are acoustic-- E Street Band member Roy Bittan's luxuriant piano rolls, drummer Dennis Davis' dexterous grooves, and Bowie's sax-squawking, which meld to glorious, otherworldly effect on "TVC15". The new master perfectly mediates between the album's surface elegance and underlying menace.
And in lieu of any studio outtakes or rarities, we get a complete, two-disc version of Bowie's famed March '76 Nassau Coliseum concert, a long-time bootleg that also provided bonus-track fodder for Rykodisc's 1991 Station to Station issue. The need for another mid-70s Bowie live album may seem minimal given the relatively recent reissues of David Live (1974) and Stage (1978), but the Nassau concert is a rousing document of the Station to Station-era line-up (with Yes keyboardist Tony Kaye subbing in for Bittan and Stacey Hayden in the place of Earl Slick) eagerly applying its slick, polyrhythmic panache to glam-rock warhorses like "Suffragette City" and "Panic in Detroit", and compacting "Life on Mars?" and "Five Years" into Broadway-scaled medleys. In retrospect, the Nassau show represents something of a last lap around the arena for Bowie as the show-stopping, populist entertainer, before he laid his early-70s material to rest for a while and delved into the more experimental terrain of Low, "Heroes", and Lodger. To paraphrase another enigmatic pop icon who had a conflicted relationship with stardom: first he took Long Island, then he took Berlin.


On her second solo album, the trailblazing punk and Chicana icon sketches a new route forward from her 1970s roots, with contributions by Kathleen Hanna, Alison Wolfe, and more.

Blueprint

Of all the titles held by Alice Bag, the lead singer of the 1970s punk band the Bags—Chicana icon, trailblazing musician, memoirist, public speaker, mother—one of the most important and least touted is her role as a feminist archivist. Since launching her own website in 2004, she’s used it as a platform to track protests, events, and key figures in the Los Angeles punk scene. This project has led her to champion rising Latinx bands like Downtown Boys and Trap Girl, only some of whom are based in L.A., in the name of creating a more inclusive and representative history of punk—helping to evolve the kinds of communities she dreamed of as a kid. On her second solo album, Blueprint, Bag expands that sentiment by sketching a new route forward from her traditional punk roots and encouraging her collaborators and listeners alike to color it in.
The guest list on Blueprint makes the contours of Bag’s vision clear. Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and Allison Wolfe of Bratmobile add high-pitched wails meant to dramatize the plight of working women on “77,” a battle cry for equal pay (as of 2012, American women earned an estimated 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man). A more exciting touch comes from Spanish singer Martin Sorrondeguy of queercore groups Los Crudos and Limp Wrist, Mexican-American musician Lysa Flores, and American-Chilean singer and poet Francisca Valenzuela, all of whom join Bag as backing vocalists throughout the album, giving poppier punk songs like “Turn It Up” an exuberant touch. Bag has said that she re-recorded some of her vocals to match her guests’ energy, suggesting that collaboration and solidarity can yield stronger results, in the recording studio as on the streets.
Instead of rapid-fire punk percussion or aggressive guitars, this album largely revels in upbeat rock and ambling ballads. “Adrift,” the slowest song on the record, uses a piano waltz to play into Bag’s story about a broken relationship. On “Invisible,” she sings instead of shouting, each romantic croon about disappearing from sight accented by plucked violin and deep cello. She sounds comfortable refuting the angry feminist trope, even when that means using ska-like trumpet and saxophone on “Stranger” or “Blueprint” to get her point across. Bag knows punk is about spirit more than sound, and she hides nuggets of wisdom throughout to remind listeners of those responsibilities: “In this life you’ve gotta amplify/What you want multiplied,” “She won’t need to check her compact/’Cause her actions are her mirror,” “Having enough is a state of mind.” Her respected-elder status saves the lyrical lessons from sounding like cheeky preschool lessons (though “Shame Game” veers close with its finger-wagging chorus). Challenging punk stereotypes isn’t new territory for Bag—she invented the genre “punkchera,” a blend of punk and ranchera music, through live performances years ago—and she makes the variety of sounds on Blueprint come across as both flippant and authoritative.
This year marks 40 years since the Bags released “Survive,” their first and only single issued while they were together. It is, essentially, a song about resilience. If Alice Bag was wondering back then whether her Chicana resilience could last, then Blueprint is proof that she’s only grown more powerful. On “Se Cree Joven,” the only song on this album sung entirely in Spanish, she reclaims her age from men who scoff at her.  She’s been a crucial force in punk in many ways, and while her 2016 solo debut showed she’s still got lessons worth sharing, it’s the accessible, open-ended, and inclusive music on Blueprint that underlines how essential Alice Bag’s work still is.


I Love You, Honeybear, Josh Tillman's second full-length as Father John Misty, is by turns passionate and disillusioned, tender and angry, so cynical it's repulsive and so openhearted it hurts.

Father John Misty: I Love You, Honeybear

I Love You, Honeybear

Early last November, a handsome, bearded songwriter going by the name Father John Misty appeared on "Letterman" to perform a ballad called "Bored in the USA". Blazer pressed, shirt-collar open and eyes shut tight in concentration, Misty, whose birth name is Josh Tillman, sat at his grand piano, that great totem of solitude and opulence, wringing out lyrics so alienated you wondered how he made it out of his yurt, let alone to the spotlit world of late-night TV.
After a line about his own irrelevance ("By this afternoon I'll live in debt/ By tomorrow, be replaced by children"), Tillman turned away from the piano and took center stage. Magically, the piano played on without him. Strings swelled, lights glowed with multicolored gels, Tillman put one fist to his hip and pouted like a glam doll—it was all an act, and why should we have expected anything else? As the song plowed into its bridge—"They gave me a useless education/ And a subprime loan/ On a craftsman home!"—laughter filled the room. Canned, of course: How could anyone laugh at someone so miserable, and about such shallow, middle-class problems? The audience took a second to decide whether or not they should clap.
"Bored" is one of 11 songs on I Love You, Honeybear, an album by turns passionate and disillusioned, tender and angry, so cynical it's repulsive and so openhearted it hurts. Misty is at root a folksinger: Someone who uses natural-sounding arrangements and first-person songwriting to give the audience the impression that he's revealing the depths of his soul, which in a fucked-up way, he is. Because he sings sweetly, you imagine him to be sensitive; because he plays the acoustic guitar, you imagine him to be closer to a naked, more old-fashioned way of life, one in which we might frolic in the grass unafraid. This is an artist whose origin story starts on top of a literal mountain, abetted by psilocybin mushrooms—the story of a seeker in earnest, the kind that sounds even more credible when told by someone who has a beard or used to be in Fleet Foxes. Tillman is both.
Not all the jokes on Honeybear are as funny as "Bored in the USA" and several don't even register as jokes. Tillman often seems to play a failed, bitter version of what you might expect him to be from his headshots—an Andy Kaufmanesque hustler whose seams don't just show, but are constantly in danger of splitting. What should be the sweet story of a one-night stand ("The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment") turns into a vicious, nitpicky list of his conquest’s faults, while a bar night ("Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow") becomes a tirade against a guy trying to hit on Tillman’s wife. "Why the long face, jerkoff?" he spits. "Your chance has been taken/ Good one." For someone fond of glockenspiels, Tillman says the word "fuck" a lot.
Tillman is a wordy writer. At times, the music on Honeybear almost acts as a palliative to his lyrics, blunting the edges and keeping the mood friendly enough to get you from one excoriating piece of satire to the next. Fans of the Beatles and Sufjan Stevens will find that songs from Honeybear sit comfortably in their Spotify "Mountain Drive" playlists; fans of stand-up comedy will find the album as thorough, sad and bitterly cathartic as any good hour-long special. For all his poetic undercurrents, Tillman is a showman that way: He knows how to get his message across in a form people can clap to.
Honeybear is conflicted music that leaves me with conflicted feelings. Tillman is funny, but his humor is driven by meanness and self-loathing; he’s sweet, but he can’t manage to say anything nice without smothering it in jokes, like a dog compulsively trying to cover up its own shit. He opens the album by forecasting the apocalypse but most of the time comes off as the kind of mystic who gives up and embraces the debauchery, the patrician in some yoga sex ring, a bimbo Nero who fiddles while Los Angeles burns and occasionally gets sidetracked gloating about how hot his wife is. Yes, he gets high, but he never really leaves the dirty, dirty ground.
In the end, his sincerity is a sharper weapon than his humor. Honeybear’s last couple of songs in particular—"Holy Shit" and "I Went to the Store One Day"—arrive at the strange clarity people sometimes feel in the wake of drug trips, where life’s simplest lessons are suddenly presented to you, quiet and nude: Love people, stay open, be real. Admittedly there are an infinite number of barriers to these ideas, not least of which nobody seems to agree what the words "love," "open," and "real" actually mean, but my guess is that Tillman would acknowledge that failing isn’t as important as never trying at all.
Despite attempts to draw lines between himself and his persona, the story of Honeybear is at least in part a story of Tillman’s own recent marriage, which seems to have slowed his pace and made him reconsider questions of intimacy and closeness, the way marriage can do. The album ends with what were apparently his first words to his wife: "Seen you around. What’s your name?"—a question asked without editorializing. A few lines earlier, he had us at the brink of their deaths. "Insert here," he sings plaintively, "a sentiment re: Our golden years." I’ve chewed on that moment for a while now, feeling alternately as though it was a cop out and as though his point might be that trying to compress his and his wife's future into one line would be corny and disrespectful. At least I know he means it when he says he isn’t sure what to say.


Three CDs clocking in at over an hour a piece, 36 different artists from all over the world-- how could ...

Clicks + Cuts 2

Three CDs clocking in at over an hour a piece, 36 different artists from all over the world-- how could I possibly sum up Clicks & Cuts 2 in just 700 short words? There is no way, hombre. But I have an idea; let me just take a suitably minimal approach and sum it up in two:
It's excellent.
Notice I didn't say, "It's fantastic." I reserve that two-word review for Mille Plateaux's Modulation and Transformation 4. That 3-CD set, released in 1999, turned my head all the way 'round when I heard it. This was back when Mille Plateaux had a roster that ranged from the sine wave tones of Ryoji Ikeda to the comparatively thick drill-n-bass of Panacea, from the vast spaciousness of Terre Thaemlitz to the microscopic fixations of Curd Duca. What an incredibly varied field of music that comp contained, something for the curious in every subgenre of experimental electronics. No, Clicks and Cuts 2 can't quite compare to that.
Notice also that I didn't say, "It's okay." That was my two-word assessment of the first Clicks + Cuts compilation, released at the time that Mille Plateaux realized there was a revolution afoot, and that it had done as much as any other single label (if you include their associated Force Inc and Force Trax imprints) to set it in motion. That compilation was not a statement about the label per se, but a presentation about a very narrowly defined permutation: the world of glitch techno. The variety the label is known for wasn't relevant to that particular statement, which explains why artists who'd released brilliant work on Mille Plateaux (Gas, Thaemlitz, Oval), but didn't fit in with this aesthetic were omitted.
Clicks & Cuts 2 far surpasses its predecessor, primarily because this compilation is open to a much greater variety of sounds. The focus here, in both the music and the MP-standard expository liner notes, is on making music from botched transmissions. A fine image from the liner notes comes from Philip Sherburne, who says, "The pearl is an error, a glitch in response to impurity." He's right, of course. A shard of something winds up inside the shell of an oyster and the creature goes to work on it, smoothing out the harsh edges to avoid irritation of its muscle. To my ears, it's not so far from this image to the music of Jan Jelinek (who chips in here with an incredible track called "The Videoage [re-edit]," possibly a remix of "Rock in the Video Age," though it sounds new to me).
Unlike the first volume, not all the tracks are minimal; in fact, the rhythms and styles are all over the place. Hell, to my ears, a good percentage of the music here even borders on pop, with relatively conventional melodies and instrumentation. Here is a true blueprint for one possible music future, not the dry, academic lecture that was the first Clicks + Cuts compilation. In addition to summing up the glitch genre thus far for the acolytes, Clicks & Cuts 2 also serves as a perfect introduction to this world. It's accessible, and yes, even fun (you just know if Matmos is invited to the symposium there are going to be a few giggles). I have to think anyone with open ears would find something here to love.
Take Frank Bretschneider's "Walking on Ice," for example. Though it does indeed have a few snaps and pops, this track is, in fact, a dead ringer for Boards of Canada! It would be impossible to imagine such a warm, snaking synth melody and hip-hop inspired beats fitting in with earlier incarnations of the Mille Plateaux theory. It's applying the glitch to the song, which seems a natural progression.
Coming from another sphere completely is Austrian guitar genius Fennesz, who contributes "Menthol," a jittery dissection of processed harmonics with gurgling melody bubbling beneath. It's the kind of track that seems completely random at first blush, but reveals careful, intricate patterning upon closer listening, and it makes me salivate for his latest Endless Summer. Of course, there's not a 4/4 rhythm in sight.
The ever-mischievous DAT Politics offers the distorted, fucked up (but funky!) bubblegum tune, "Hardwai." It's like a fax of Alvin the Chipmunk stuck in a blender with Alan Sutherland and uploaded to a Linux server. And Rude Solo gets all toyland electro with the fantastic "Tight," complete with a killer vocal sample, not at all far from the best of Two Lone Swordsman's Tiny Reminders.
There are, of course, a fair number of 4/4 techno bits with clicks and so forth-- this isn't a complete departure from the first collection. But these tracks, which can seem ho-hum when stacked back to back, blend nicely with the more experimental work (the choppy beat static by Thomas Brinkmann on "0100" is particularly striking) and the aforementioned poppier material. The sequencing is exceptional, the tracks first rate, and the working thesis of the label is becoming clearer. Clicks & Cuts 2 is a vital compilation that shows where this strand of electronic music has been and where it might go.


After a decade-plus of singles, collaborations, and live sets, the leftfield German electronic producer releases a debut LP under his given name. Fatty Folders stands as the most accessible and robust barometer of his work to date.

Fatty Folders

Techno thrives on agendas. Whether innovation, futurism, rebellion, or austerity, such creative constraints help rein in the limitless possibilities of synthesizers and samplers. Roman Flügel is not exempt from this. A veteran of leftfield electronic production, Flügel has released professional DJ mixes and collaborated on a jazz/techno hybrid; he works under different aliases (Soylent Green, with collaborator Jörn Wuttke in Acid Jesus and Holy Garage) for varying styles. (Several years ago he made waves with his "Dirty Dutch" anthem, "Geht's Noch?".) Many of his releases are 12" singles, utilitarian in purpose if not sound. So naturally one of the greatest aspects of Flügel's debut LP under his given name, Fatty Folders, is how untethered and adrift it is. This is not to say that Folders is experimental, just that it's difficult to place. As best I can tell, Flügel has no overriding purpose other than to produce gummy techno, the kind that sticks to the roof of your mouth (and the kind you happily leave up there).
Flügel has seen a decade-plus of singles, collaborations, and live sets receive near-unanimous praise. His 12"s, while diverse, have tended toward the mechanistic and throbbing, though he's always been slightly out of step with his contemporaries in the German scene, eschewing the severe austerity of Ostgut Ton and the lush minimalism of Traum. (Dial, a Hamburg-based label whose releases often seem rote and plain before revealing intricacies, is as good a home as any for Flügel.) Folders collects a handful of tracks from recent EPs and singles but offers mostly new material and, as such, stands as the most accessible and robust barometer of his work to date.
Folders doesn't offer any kind of narrative-- not of Flügel's career, not of a broader music scene, not even intra-album. On display instead is the sheer variety of sounds Flügel conjures, and how vibrant they seem in his arrangements. If Flügel has a trick-- though he is not really the type of producer who relies on them-- it's saving his tiniest, most erudite melodies for his bangers and getting big-eyed and starry during his softer moments. "The Improviser" falls into the former category, its rude, burping bass barely ceding any ground to the dubby vibraphone sounds that sneak in. On the other end of the spectrum, the panning, glowing sunrays of "Krautus" would be at home on any Field record, and "Don't Break My Heart" sounds like a pleasant Saturday morning in a clock repair shop.
If there's one true monster track on Folders, it's the previously released "How to Spread Lies", a patient, autumnal mid-tempo caress that relies equally on a descending piano melody and a subtle, four-note bassline. That it's been out for over a year won't matter to anyone but the most vigilant Flügel fans. (Considering both "Lies" and "Geht's Noch?", it would be somewhat ironic if the versatile, understated Flügel were remembered mostly for a few standout tracks.) Fatty Folders is a summation of Flügel's career not in sound but in scope: It's multifaceted, rich, and cagey. He's worth the investment for casual techno fans, even if you only have time for the CliffsNotes.


Tegan and Sara are celebrating the 10th anniversary of their vanguard fifth album with a compilation of covers from Hayley Williams, Chvrches, Bleachers, Grimes, Kelly Lee Owens, and more.

The Con X: Covers

Tegan and Sara released their fifth album, The Con, on July 24, 2007, but the original reviews read more like misogynist clippings from the 1970s. NME called the sisters “little more than twin airbags.” This website offered a confusing and offensive attempt at a compliment stating that “Tegan and Sara should no longer be mistaken for tampon rock.” The press could only see the siblings, then 26, through the lens of their queerness. Writing for Rolling Stone, Robert Christgau, the self-styled “dean of American rock critics,” was confused that this wasn’t, in fact, the focus of their music. “As lesbians who never reference their oppression or even their sexuality,” he wrote, “Tegan and Sara don’t have men to lash out at, put up with or gripe about.” So he gave them something to gripe about: The idea that music made by queer artists should inherently contain shame and struggle is gross, and also overlooks the loathing that oozes from within on The Con.
Besides, they reference those qualities on the record’s very first song. “I Was Married” is a landmark piece of music about gay rights, written by Sara about the civil ceremony she undertook with her American partner so that they could live together in the Quins’ native Canada. It’s practically an a capella song, underpinned only by a small piano motif that turns with clockwork’s ornate simplicity. Sara sounds awed by the sense of ceremony, but equally defiant about her right to it, her voice catching on its distinctive sour, saturated edges. “They seem so very scared of us,” she sings. “I look into the mirror/For evil that just does not exist/I don’t see what they see/Tell them that, tell them that.”
The album starts with these solid institutions, but then The Con falls apart, a profound mutual depression (induced by dying relatives and relationships) obliterating any certainty of self. Longing and self-sabotage chase each other around the void, bodies fracture, senses muddle, time slackens and speeds erratically, and reason slips out of bounds. “I can’t untangle what I feel and what would matter most,” Sara rues on “Relief Next to Me.” On The Con, Tegan and Sara excelled at capturing the shipwrecked upheaval of depression.
Produced by Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla, The Con backs up this profound unease with artful invention, and lurches frequently between brittle acoustic-electric melancholy and manic power pop. Sara’s half of the record comprises small, strange, coiled pop songs with spidery arrangements. Tegan’s punkier material seems more straightforward on the surface, but is unhinged by her manic longing, like the breathless momentum at the end of “The Con,” and the chorus of “Nineteen,” where she grits her teeth so hard they could shatter in her jaw. The Con was vanguard, released a decade before pop punk would get its artistic dues and anxious, DIY pop (Sky Ferreira, Chairlift, Waxahatchee) became the sound of a generation. It’s become a touchstone for a wealth of diverse young artists who grew up with a healthy disregard for genre.
To honor its 10th anniversary, the Quins are celebrating themselves with a covers album that highlights the work of these young acts (plus some older affiliates), and benefits their LGBTQIA foundation. Both its triumphs and failures enhance what was so special about the original. Given that compact vocal earworms are Tegan and Sara’s stock in trade, the project might have made more sense as a remix album, though a few artists bring that spirit of reinvention to their covers.
Welsh producer Kelly Lee Owens’ version of “Soil Soil” takes just one lyric and steadily inflates it through a luminous glacial wash. Chvrches’ “Call It Off” and Shura’s “The Con” pull a similar trick, effervescing into the ether. Artists like MUNA (“Relief Next to Me”) and Mykki Blanco (on a brilliant, haunted “Knife Going In”) intuitively use anaesthetized, monstrous vocal tones to key into The Con’s sense of psychological dislocation, as do Grimes and HANA (under the name Trashique) on a disappointingly defanged version of “Dark Come Soon.” The best cover on the whole record is relegated to a bonus track: Cyndi Lauper’s version of “Back in Your Head” is manic, chattering, and exuberant, and easily trumps Ryan Adams’ rasping punk interpretation. (The Quins toured with both artists early in their career.)
But Adams’ straightforward cover, like others here, shines a light on the enduring strength of the Quins’ songwriting away from their knotty arrangements (something evident as far back as 2002’s If It Was You, another record that deserves revisiting). There’s a ceremonial beauty to both Bleachers and Paramore’s Hayley Williams’ plainspoken contributions. For “Burn Your Life Down,” Jack Antonoff (who would collaborate with the band on 2013 pop breakthrough Heartthrob) sings close to the microphone, muffled and conciliatory over silvery, treated piano. Tender vocal wibbles and orchestral glints fidget in the background, almost Sufjan-like, but vanish rather than peak. Williams, a long term T&S champion, strips away the white-knuckle guitar chaos of “Nineteen,” a song about teen melodrama, and taps into the innocent side of its romantic youthful delusion. Both versions have a kind of candlelit intimacy to them, acting as votive offerings to the originals.
Other covers show how Tegan and Sara could have tamped down their experimental tendencies and attempted to follow “Walking With a Ghost,” their one radio hit from 2004’s So Jealous, into the mainstream. Canadian Vine star Ruth B (“I Was Married”), Sara Bareilles (“Floorplan”), and City and Color (on a quite horrible “Hop a Plane”) give their songs a saccharine, vocal-oriented sheen that might have seen them taken up as pop-leaning a capella group standards, while PVRIS make “Are You Ten Years Ago” into serviceably overwrought, haunted goth pop, though their slickness steamrollers the original’s panic.
Tegan and Sara could have pursued these simpler routes, but they didn’t, taking an artistic gamble in an industry where the odds were already stacked against their success. Thank god artists like Paramore, Against Me!, and AFI could see in them what critics couldn’t, taking them on the road and noisily singing their praises while the indie press were too cool to take the twins seriously, and that artists like Antonoff, Chvrches, and MUNA picked up their mantle and ran with it. Although shameful to reflect on how crassly The Con was dismissed in 2007, it’s remarkable how much has changed in a decade, and how much credit Tegan and Sara can take for that.


The Buffalo rapper continues his unlikely ascent into hip-hop stardom with an album of feverish excess and the best raps of his career.

Pray for Paris

There was a time when Westside Gunn and his Griselda cohorts Conway and Benny the Butcher were just some Buffalo rappers warming themselves on the flame sparked by Roc Marciano’s Marcberg. To rap fans who longed for the days of Mobb Deep, Griselda were refreshing, a no-frills trio that recaptured an old-school spirit without being ’90s revivalists. Despite the harsh grayscale atmosphere of their production, the bars had the colorful touch of mid-’00s Atlanta trap, and their swagger felt timeless. Steadily the energy behind Griselda has grown, and now it’s at an apex that nobody saw coming.
Earlier this year, at Virgil Abloh’s Off-White fashion show, the designer and influencer played Westside Gunn’s gutter rap while models strutted down the runway and a man tap-danced. Virgil’s message with the tap dancer didn’t connect, but the cosign gave Griselda an unlikely path into fashion and art spaces typically not welcoming to gritty artists like them. It’s a space that Westside Gunn is obsessed with, and his new album, Pray for Paris is an attempt to leave his crew’s past as a niche underground act behind. His new vision is of going high-art: The album cover was designed by Virgil; the intro is a clip from the record-breaking sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi; and a recent Instagram caption included the obligatory Kanye-style spiel about how he’s not a rapper, he’s an artist making misunderstood “Rare ART.”
Yes, this all sounds like an unbearable pivot. But Pray for Paris is one of the best albums to come out of the Griselda camp so far, good enough to help you forgive the obnoxiousness and make you understand why the crew now have a cultural cachet that rap legends are dying to be attached to: Eminem signed them to his imprint, Jay-Z has become their unofficial mentor, and Kanye West has been seen floating around the three.
To Westside Gunn’s credit, the more overblown his personality becomes, the better his raps get. He blurs the lines between reality and fiction to the point where the streets of Buffalo come off like City of God’s favelas, and his lifestyle raps make him out as the Great Gatsby of Upstate New York. The beat to “Euro Step” sounds refined enough to play during a sit-down dinner in a castle while he describes some snapshots from his life: purchasing a Goyard leash for his Saint Bernard, drinking wine in France with a specialist, and whipping coke with an Avian watch on his wrist. Pray for Paris is consistently this insane, all while switching flows on a dime and rapping on pristine beats. “Bulletproof Bentleys parked outside the Whitney,” he raps on the second track’s graceful DJ Muggs production.
Westside Gunn’s revolving door of guests thrive in this space, though it means he’s sometimes outshined. Gunn wastes a spiritual Alchemist beat with a pitch-lowered misstep on “Claiborne Kick,” but he’s saved by Boldy James’ unmatched precision. But Gunn doesn’t fumble frequently; usually he tosses his guests into the fold and let’s them sink or swim. Tyler, the Creator can’t keep up “327,” but who could when Gunn talks about cooking dope like watching flowers bloom? Tyler makes up for it with his soulful “Party Wit Pop Smoke” production, while Gunn goes on the album’s most unhinged three bar stretch: “Blood on the Salavator Mundi, we rock cocaine/Tie-dye Dior floss, stickin’ niggas up at Christie’s/Eugène Delacroixs for half price, leather strings and Rickys.”
But even with all of the decadence, Pray for Paris is at its best when Westside Gunn just raps over a grimy beat alongside his Griselda crew. On “Allah Sent Me,” they all share a verse, and their chemistry shines. On “George Bondo,” all three fight for the moment: Westside Gunn prays on a Persian rug, Conway hits the Roc Nation brunch and intimately mingles with an R&B singer, and Benny the Butcher orders a hit at the Venetian. It all feels like a part of Westside Gunn’s vision for Griselda, which may be deranged, but only a mind that determined could take a crew that was destined to exist in a corner of underground rap to having their own ecosystem.


The reformed "classic-era" GBV have produced an album with the collagist careen of Bee Thousand and Propeller and but it ultimately comes up short in the songs department. The best moments come courtesy of Tobin Sprout.

Guided by Voices: Let's Go Eat the Factory

Let's Go Eat the Factory

Over the years, there were many Guided by Voices: the R.E.M.-obsessed, fidelity-be-damned early GBV; the high-kicking, hard-drinking, marathon-showing GBV; the Ric Ocasek-produced GBV with those misguided commercial ambitions. But, seven years after the band's 2004 bow-out and a decade and a half on from the peak of their powers, it's the Guided by Voices of the mid-1990s from which their legend truly springs-- all those long, beery Dayton nights with little more than a four-track, a couple 30-racks, and an endless supply of inebriant inspiration. Those few years saw those five knockaround guys wrenching every good idea they'd ever had into some of indie rock's most enduring music: Propeller, Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes, Under the Bushes Under the Stars, and countless singles, EPs and one-offs. That Guided by Voices? They're back.
When frontman Bob Pollard retired the Guided by Voices name in 2004, any and all cries of "why?" were cut with a strong undercurrent of "what's it matter?" At that point, roughly a dozen dudes had passed through the band's ranks, with the Fading Captain himself serving as its only constant. Pollard, in a rare display of predictability, went on to make a mess of solo records with a gang of late-era GBVers; the rock-solid Boston Spaceships, with whom he produced his best hiatus music, found pre-breakup bassist Chris Slusarenko in the passenger seat. But when this so-called classic era band of Pollard, Tobin Sprout, Greg Demos, Mitch Mitchell, and Kevin Fennell splintered sometime around 1996, Guided by Voices changed irrevocably: Pollard's songs grew knottier, flashier, and more professional, with would-be rock star Pollard making what sometimes felt like a last-ditch effort to make music that would place him in the arenas and over the airwaves that his old band had been too rough around the edges to attract. A reunion of that late-era Guided by Voices would've been nice, but it wouldn't have meant much. And, while watching the classic band run through "14 Cheerleader Coldfront" to a sea of upraised fists was a thrill, it's that GBV-- with their scrappy, song-a-minute, attention deficient charm intact-- you'd hoped for another album from.
That album, Let's Go Eat the Factory, couldn't have come from any other Guided by Voices. Spotty, strange, all short songs and shitty sound, it's got the collagist careen of Bee Thousand and Propeller and the tumbling tunecraft of Alien Lanes and Under the Bushes Under the Stars. Recorded at the homes of Tobin Sprout, Greg Demos, and Mitch Mitchell, there's an off-the-cuff, fuck-around charm to many of its best moments that's very much in keeping with those classic-era records. The songs Pollard brings to Factory hew closer toward his leaner, odder, mid-90s songwriting than just about anything he's done since, and Tobin Sprout has clearly been saving some of his best material. Demos, Mitchell, and Fennell are, as ever, playing with more spirit than proficiency, which, like so much about Factory, is as it should be. Factory, with its one-and-done hooks and jumpy construction, just feels like a Guided by Voices record. For the diehards, little else could matter more.
Of the now five GBV LPs from this classic-era band, though, Factory comes up shortest in the song department. Over the years, Pollard's worked most of the lousy melodies out of his system, and though his contributions here vary wildly in tone and texture, he's gotten pretty consistent when it comes to tunefulness. Constancy proves a bit of a hobgoblin here; the more straightaway power-poppers like muscular lead single "The Unsinkable Fats Domino" zip by quickly and not unpleasantly, but they feel just a little overcooked, never quite hanging around in one's head the way some of his stranger contributions do. Throughout Factory, though, he seems more comfortable with his refound surroundings than genuinely inspired by them, and his contributions here, while uniformly solid, display only flashes of the one-man hit-parading of his glory days. Peppy lead single "The Unsinkable Fats Domino" hearkens back beautifully to the shoot-from-the-hip power-popping of old, while soused singalong "My Europa" and stacked-to-the-sky rockers "Imperial Racehorsing" and "We Won't Apologize for the Human Race" bring the trickiness of his later-era compositions down to the basement-level.
But for every sign of life, there's some shrugworthy stuff like the stormy, stuttering "Either Nelson" or the pretty but slight "Chocolate Boy" to match. And, where the classic-era GBV would stitch together bits of different songs to create a 90-second patchwork of pure pop, those seams are better concealed here, to their detriment. The farty flute kickoff to "Doughnut for a Snowman" nods to those sputtering constructions of old, but it feels a bit perfunctory, a sound effect where a fleck of dumbass brilliance like Alien Lanes' "Hit" might've otherwise gone. One gets the sense Bob hadn't been shoring away the best stuff like his old pal Toby, and while he's fully engaged with the proceedings in a way he sometimes hasn't been on his hiatus-era solo records, he doesn't come away from Factory with a single tune that can hang with the dozens of enduring toss-offs that populate the beloved mid-90s records.
While Bob seems to be re-acclimating himself, Factory finds Tobin Sprout more ready to get back into it. Much has been made of how little Pollard's voice has changed over the years, but then again, he's been practicing. Sprout-- whose sweeter-than-honey pipes and breezy songwriting proved Pollard's best-ever foil. The collection finds him sounding younger than ever, his voice cutting through the din of his six striking contributions. "God Loves Us"-- by some distance, the set's best-- finds him flipping a Ben Franklin quote over an effortless guitar chug that proves the album's one true glass-raiser; he seems positively energized by the proceedings, turning in fat-free power-poppers and late-Lennon pin-drop balladry and, in the case of the bifurcated "Spiderfighter", both in the same song. Pollard, to his credit, never seems to treat Factory like a solo LP with a few old friends in tow, but Sprout saw an opportunity and seized it, quietly stepping out of the shadows and stealing the show. Mitchell, Demos, and Fennell's contributions amount more to vibe than dazzle here; then as now, they'd never dream of stepping out in front of the song, and while Mitchell does get some shine on the Beefhearty "The Big Hat and Toy Show"-- his guitar snarling around a loopy Pollard vocal-- they mostly just seem happy to be there, glad to rediscover the collaborative chemistry that comes from playing with the same old guys for years.
A month or so back, a rumor spread that GBV had once again called it quits. The truth of the matter was actually quite a bit more promising-- they'd cancelled all upcoming tour dates, presumably to work on new recordings-- but going by the breathless reaction to the initial news on Twitter, you'd have thought it was 2004 all over again. If nothing else, all the "what's it really matter who Pollard's playing with?" talk finds its definitive answer in the frustratingly satisfying Factory, a record that, if not quite up to snuff with what came before it on a song-by-song basis, still gets along on the enduring brotherhood of its boozy creators. "It's all taking shape in the room," Pollard sings on Factory's penultimate song, and for a guy who's made his fair share of records through the mail, that's the kind of statement of purpose you want him to be shouting. They may never hit upon a run as good as they did 15 years back-- few bands have-- but Factory's a better, weirder shot at it than anybody could've possibly expected. "We are not the way we used to be," Sprout once sang. For now-- and with more on the way-- Factory's close enough for comfort.


Across its 40 minutes, the Los Angeles artist builds a modular synth album that is enveloping and cohesive. What initially sounds static may, upon closer examination, reveal a wealth of movement.

Water Memory

There’s a joke that synthesizer fanatics ruefully share: What’s the best way to get a musician to stop making records? Get them hooked on modular synths. Part building block, part bar puzzle, modular synths are small, often arcane electronic gizmos that, when chained together, are capable of creating soundscapes of incredible complexity. They’re notorious for both their steep learning curve and their status as fetish objects, hence the joke: Synth heads can get so lost in trying to sculpt the perfect waveform, they forget how to write actual songs. But making music on a modular synthesizer can be so absorbing, the act of creation is its own reward. The process eclipses the need for a final product.
You get that sense from watching the videos that document Emily A. Sprague’s own evolving modular setup. Take a clip like “Modular ‘Piano’ Music ~ Eurorack Ambient”: A metal box brimming with knobs, tangled wires, and multi-colored LEDs sits on a desk, spilling forth a soft, burbling sequence of tones. The sound is too organized to scan as totally random, but it’s too random to be properly composed. Every now and then, Sprague briefly enters the frame to twist a knob, though the effect on the sound is often imperceptible. The sound (the “patch”) could conceivably keep doing what it’s doing until the power grid goes down, and it’s so pleasant you could listen for almost as long. Like Eno said of ambient music, it’s the perfect combination of ignorable and interesting, and much of its generative magic would be lost in the translation to a finished recording.
Fortunately, after a year’s worth of exploratory videos and SoundCloud sketches, Sprague, who recently relocated from New York to Los Angeles, finally steps away from the workbench bearing her debut solo synthesizer album. It was worth the wait. Water Memory is more than just a collection of experiments; its 40-minute run is both enveloping and cohesive, with all five tracks building off one another, each developing upon the album’s pastoral and aquatic themes. Sprague’s compositional style stakes out a middle ground between approaches adopted by her peers. It’s not as melodically or rhythmically active as someone like Qasim Naqvi, yet it’s not as austere as Sarah Davachi. What initially sounds static may, upon closer examination, reveal a wealth of movement. At first, the opening “A Lake” sounds like a single held chord. But as you ease into its 13-minute expanse, its elements gradually reveal themselves: Slowly moving bass tones underpin a more mercurial middle layer, and on top, the dazzling high-end dances like the surface of a sunlit body of water.
She’s not always so minimalist. “Water Memory 1,” perhaps the album’s most engaging track, coasts atop a gently cycling sequence of tones, shifting subtly all the while. The short, wistful “Dock” ruminates on a set of tone clusters with a harmonium-like sound, making gingerly stabs at melody. The closing “Your Pond,” the album’s emotional highlight, also hovers in the balance between repetition and actual song form, with a melody that moves like creeping vines, reaching out and then doubling back upon itself. The nine-minute “Water Memory 2” comes closest to resembling her exploratory videos, a clear descendant of Eno’s aleatory approach to setting up a handful of variables and then stepping out of the way.
Throughout, the outward simplicity of the music masks the deep complexity of her sounds. It took me a dozen or more listens to realize that the cadence of “Water Memory 1” is both relatively straightforward and rather strange. Parsed one way, it’s a standard eight-note progression, but once you hone in on its particulars, it sways with an uneven sense of motion, like a pendulum on a planet with two suns.
As it happens, in addition to her synthesizer music and her work producing and recording other musicians in her own studio, Sprague also plays in the indie-folk group Florist, whose acoustic instrumentation and hushed vocals couldn’t seem further from her solo electronic endeavors. Her writing there has tackled some big ideas—a brush with death, an extended convalescence, the loss of her mother—with understated grace. Here, she sets aside those existential themes, but one constant carries over: her eye for detail. Whereas in Florist, it is attuned to trenchant imagery (“What is love if not violet/A beam of light on an autumn afternoon”), here it refocuses on the surface of sound itself. It is hypnotic to behold.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a shining jewel of ’90s pop-rock, an album full of melodies, amphetamines, and hubris.

Third Eye Blind

At their first New York label showcase in 1996, in front of music mogul and Arista label head Clive Davis, Third Eye Blind performed songs from their catalog of demos as frontman Stephan Jenkins whacked at a piñata. When it finally broke, live crickets rained down on the industry executives in the audience. At the time, Third Eye Blind were fielding a half-dozen inquiries from major labels and had a rockstar mentality to match, demanding Anchor Steam beer at meetings as a performative signifier of hometown San Francisco pride. Jenkins, never one to pass up an opportunity to put smug superiority over success, intended the stunt to symbolize a Biblical plague (crickets were the closest he could find to locusts on short notice) but it’s doubtful the insects or the suits picked up on his deeper meaning before they scrambled out of the room. “Everybody was upset, including the crickets,” Jenkins said later. The band left without a record deal.
Third Eye Blind built their reputation on these imperfect metaphors. The cricket legend fit a band with a built-in God complex, a band who would walk into an opening slot for Oasis a few days after the piñata incident simply because they told another label, Epic, that they deserved it. That a barely known, unsigned quartet got an encore as openers spoke to their natural fit alongside the great melodicism and even greater egos of the Gallagher brothers.
The level of attention Third Eye Blind received from labels without even an EP to their name reflected the bullish state of the music industry in the pre-Napster peak of the 1990s: CD sales continued to rise, growing by a billion dollars or more year over year. After months of courtship, the band finally signed with Elektra for $1.2 million, a deal reported at the time as the biggest ever for an unsigned act. The band accepted after the label agreed to let Jenkins produce the debut. “I really felt like they gave us their trust,” he later explained.
The outsized label interest also signaled growing demand for Third Eye Blind’s specific sound. Their hooks and clean vocals stood in contrast to the prevailing sound of grunge, which had reached peak cultural saturation by the middle of the decade. Acts like Bush and Stone Temple Pilots had taken the sound of the downtrodden and down-tuned and plastered it over magazine covers and Billboard charts, while Naomi Campbell modeled beanies and flannel for Vogue. In response, a slow but steady reemergence of earnest pop-rock—and a broader return of the brighter sounds and styles of the ’70s—was already well underway when Third Eye Blind made their debut: The Wallflowers, Goo Goo Dolls, and Counting Crows paved the way for a melodic revival with the softest of edges. Jenkins, with a passionate if pitchy falsetto, was a perfect foil to grunge, which he declared too “safe” for his taste: “Nobody really makes a statement,” he lamented. “It’s this self-imposed angst and you’re playing this raw way, but you’re not trying to play well.”
Though the music press painted Third Eye Blind as an overnight success, their path to a debut album began several years prior, in the Bay Area scene of the early ’90s. Jenkins, the son of a political science professor, graduated with top honors from UC Berkeley in 1988. He grew up on the Sugarhill Gang and early hip-hop, and by 1992, he formed the rap duo Puck and Natty with Detroit rapper Herman Anthony Chunn. They managed to get one perfectly raunchy song, “Just Wanna Be Your Friend,” onto the Beverly Hills, 90210 soundtrack and attracted interest from Capitol. Jenkins sought creative control above all else, even the possibility of a record deal, and the duo broke up over production disagreements with the label. But before they disbanded, Chunn wrote the guitar riff that would grow into Third Eye Blind’s inescapable hit “Semi-Charmed Life.” In a move that foreshadowed his own beliefs about song ownership and creative control, Jenkins bought his use of the tune from Chunn for $10,000.
“Semi-Charmed Life” sounds like feeling the sun on your skin after a long winter. The opening snap of the drums, the ringing power chords, and the wordless refrain seem to beam down from some impossibly halcyon era, as if Cheap Trick suddenly became the house band for Schoolhouse Rock. But even a cursory listen to the lyrics reveals a much darker story about addiction, sex, and desperation—“I took the hit that I was given and I bumped again” is pretty straightforward. The song’s popularity may have been slightly surprising to the band: “It’s about crystal meth and oral sex,” Jenkins commented. “We can’t even believe it got onto the radio.” But his rap-singing, a carryover from his Puck and Natty days, fit comfortably next to similar syncopation from other bands on MTV and alternative radio playlists, like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sublime, and Cake.
Those opening “doot doot doots” were a reference to another wayward tale, Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” Where Reed was enmeshed with the downtown New York junkies, Jenkins found himself witness to a crippling speed epidemic among his peers in the Lower Haight neighborhood of San Francisco. “I thought of my life at the time, I thought of Lou Reed and how I thought Lou Reed had nothing on the way that we were living,” he later said. And just as John Cale’s viola embodied the grim embrace of heroin, the unrelenting hooks of “Semi-Charmed Life” were meant to sound like amphetamines—“bright and shiny on the surface, and then it just pulls you down in this lockjawed mess,” Jenkins explained. As he described it, the song was his brainchild—the result of years toiling away in the open mic scene, tinkering with it, even performing an early version for 4 Non Blondes singer Linda Perry when they were both down-on-their-luck musicians. Newly purchased riff notwithstanding, Jenkins couldn’t nail the crux of the song on his own; with an ironic band name and sensationalist lyrics in hand, he went looking for the people who would help him grow it into a hit.
Jenkins tried to build out Third Eye Blind with a few guitarists before eventually meeting Kevin Cadogan at one of Jenkins’ shows. The two began to flesh out their first demos across studios in the Bay Area over the next three years. If Jenkins had the relentless ambition and unctuous wit, Cadogan brought the musical heft and compositional wizardry. He’d trained with instrumental rock legend Joe Satriani from a young age, then left the world of classical guitar for the local ska and punk scene as a teen. For a while, Cadogan and Jenkins wrote and performed as an acoustic duo, fleshing out Jenkins’ rap-singing with bigger chords and a stronger groove. Their bassist, Arion Salazar, had carved out a similarly modest reputation as a member of Fungo Mungo, a major-label funk metal band. After cycling through a cast of drummers, Third Eye Blind rounded out their lineup with jazz percussionist Brad Hargreaves. Together, Cadogan estimated that the band wrote “80 percent” of its self-titled debut before they even signed to Elektra.
Third Eye Blind opens with a single arpeggiated guitar, a deceptively quiet start to an album of wailing breakdowns and breathless choruses. It’s not the most complicated or even most well-known passage on the album—on a record with so many standout riffs, there are more than a few contenders—but those four measures on “Losing a Whole Year” were the first of many battles between Jenkins’ hoarse yelps and Cadogan’s whirring reverb. The final note in the solo is swallowed by a wave of feedback and falsettos, before Jenkins’ voice, moody and gnarled, crashes onto the scene: “I remember you and me used to spend/The whole goddamn day in bed.” Like equal but opposite forces, they keep the record in balance, never tipping too far into the indulgences of the guitar hero or the self-aggrandizing troubadour.
Cadogan, with his decade of formal guitar training, added nimble melodies that seemingly multiplied the band’s lead guitarists. With his penchant for non-standard tuning and flexible pinkies, he wrote “Narcolepsy” to be played as one part, but it’s hard to believe it from the twinkling harmonies in the intro. For the opening chords of “How’s It Going to Be,” Cadogan uses an autoharp, a small 36-string zither that adds an essential, almost imperceptible chime to his strumming. There is hardly a wasted moment of melody—even deeper cuts like “The Background” spin every instrumental into wispy wonders. It was this obsessive experimentation on a familiar format, balanced by a healthy dose of distorted snot rock, that elevated Third Eye Blind above a crowded field of bands in rimless sunglasses whining about loneliness. In an increasingly electronic alternative landscape, it was a reminder of the slightly transcendent qualities of a well-played, well-recorded guitar solo. Sure, crystal meth will lift you up—but Cadogan’s dulcet strumming was a steadier kind of high.
But open tunings and intricate noodling alone couldn’t turn Third Eye Blind into an international sensation. It was Jenkins’ accidentally profound simplicity—a directness that could only come from total confidence in one’s own brilliance—that carried their tunes into the dorm rooms, minivan CD changers, and mixtapes of the masses. While his ego made him more than a few enemies, it made even well-worn emotions feel pressing and huge. It’s not so much that Jenkins was a relatable lyricist—“Jumper,” about talking a friend down from suicide, reads objectively like it was written by someone who has never experienced depression. But with his slight lisp and awkward enunciation, he was heartbreakingly present, like a youth pastor who genuinely thinks a guitar and a good heart is all it takes to reach Jesus. When he belts out “I would understand,” Jenkins really believes his words can save a life—and isn’t it a little cathartic to bask in that hope with him?
Jenkins’ lyrics fought, kicking and screaming, against anxiety and alienation. Third Eye Blind was an antidote to cynicism or numbness in the face of crisis. The band would often cover “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want” in concert, and by all reports it was a total massacre of the Smiths. This seems, in hindsight, like an obvious mismatch—Jenkins is incapable of Morrissey’s all-consuming self-loathing. When Jenkins sang “Let me get what I want,” it was with the belief that he’d actually get it. His lyrics are unrelentingly lucid; they imply that the only way out is through. “When you start talking I hear the Prozac,” Jenkins sneers on “Losing a Whole Year,” as if he felt personally betrayed that his ex would seek pharmaceutical solutions to existential despair. “Want to get myself back in again,” Jenkins cries out on “How’s It Going to Be,” a post-adolescent battle cry for identity wrapped up in a song about a breakup. In a world hurtling towards cold abstraction, Third Eye Blind wanted to feel “the soft dive of oblivion.”
Third Eye Blind was a hit almost as soon as it was released in April 1997: “Semi-Charmed Life,” “Graduate,” and “How’s It Going to Be” topped the rock charts, and the album entered into the Billboard 100 by the following month. Soon enough, they would book tours opening for the Rolling Stones and U2, fitting gigs for a band built as much on the showmanship of its singer as the deftness of its lead guitarist. Jenkins, for his part, instantly took to the role of megalomaniacal frontman with his first taste of fame. “We want to be the biggest band in the world,” he told the Los Angeles Times that year. “But it has to be on my own terms.”
Unfortunately, as Cadogan would realize during the production of their follow-up, 1999’s Blue, he meant that literally: Jenkins was given all the shares of the newly incorporated Third Eye Blind Inc., making him the sole owner of Third Eye Blind’s assets. The band then effectively fired their guitarist before he could quit, abandoning Cadogan after a tour date in Utah and continuing on to play The Tonight Show with a suspiciously similar-looking replacement the next night.
In the end, entitlement won out: Critics noted, in 1997, that “Jenkins and crew have an arrogance that outweighs their talent,” and Jenkins’ alienating business practices didn’t help. Blue never reached the commercial or critical success of their rapturous debut, and without Cadogan to guide their melodies along, no subsequent Third Eye Blind record even came close. The same tenacity that made his debut so vital turned Jenkins’ band into a relic of the ’90s; he is remembered fondly alongside one-hit wonders though, quietly and truthfully, an unsung cornerstone of the power-pop canon.
Third Eye Blind has a mascot, something like a band icon—a pixelated image of a man, falling towards the ground. Jenkins has said that it’s meant to represent the Greek myth of Icarus, whose own hubris led to his downfall. It is, finally, the perfect metaphor for his band.

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