The debut LP from this South London band is absurd, playful, and more than a little unsettling, sounding at times like a less romantic Libertines.

Goat Girl

June 24, 2016—the day Britain voted to leave the European Union—was a dreadful one. And yet something hopeful happened that day: Four teens who called themselves Goat Girl inked a deal with Rough Trade. Two years later, following a round of premature hype as one of the UK’s most promising bands, they’ve released their debut LP. Goat Girl, whose members are now in their early 20s, are navigating post-adolescence in a time of queasy division between the young and old. Brexit’s impact remains a cataclysmically uncertain mess; London, which once boasted a thriving indie subculture, has lost much of its creative edge to greed and gentrification. In this crazy, aimless time, they’ve built something distinctly new and surreal.
While Goat Girl are part of the same scene that has produced post-punk quintet Shame and wonky rock group Sorry, they’re quite different from their London peers. At 19 tracks in length, their debut appears daunting but proves to be light and accessible, with plenty of offbeat wit and many an unexpected twist down gothic country roads. It’s an absurd and playful experience, like reading a book of André Breton poems while drunk on cheap cider. The song titles—“Viper Fish,” “Moonlit Monkey,” “The Man With No Heart or Brain”—are unsettling in a goofy way, as are their stage names (singer Clottie Cream, guitarist LED, bassist Naima Jelly, and drummer Rosy Bones). Goat Girl seem keen on making sure they’re not taken too seriously.
That doesn’t mean their songs don’t deal with sincere subjects. On “Burn the Stake,” they make their feelings about Britain’s ruling party very clear: “Build a bonfire, build a bonfire, put the Tories on the top/Put the DUP in the middle and we’ll burn the fucking lot,” Clottie hollers with a sense of sad ennui. Unrelenting in their attack, Goat Girl follow that song with “Creep,” a tune about a gold-chain-wearing menace on public transport who tries to film girls on his phone. “I wanna smash your head in/Right in,” Clottie repeats. It’s a dark humor befitting of a society that often seems to have lost the plot.
There’s a fantastical, post-Libertines quality to the fiddles heard on “Creep” and the jaunty western twang of “Cracker Drool.” Unlike Pete Doherty and Carl Barât, however, Goat Girl aren’t interested in glorifying anything. Clottie’s droll storytelling has an intentionally off-putting effect; nobody’s going to move to London on the strength of this album. There’s an exhaustion in her voice, not to mention two separate songs titled “I Don’t Care.” She sounds as blasé as Lou Reed on a comedown, pissed-off but without the energy to shout. Even house parties seem dull (“You walk inside a dirty room...”), and the boys she fantasizes over only appeal because they make her feel comparatively normal (“You’re so strange, and it makes me feel sane”). “I’m disgusting,” she offers on “Country Sleaze.” “I’m a shame to this so-called human race.”
For all the ugly, there’s a lot of pretty here, too. The gorgeous melodies on “Lay Down” (which has a dreamy whiff of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”) lure you into the band’s humdrum universe in plain sight of the warnings. Clottie sounds most dissociated on “Throw Me a Bone,” a morose, sparse folk song. “If you take me home, then you’ll end up alone,” she deadpans with a nevertheless inviting curl of the finger. Goat Girl don’t exactly welcome you in, but they’ve left the door ajar if you feel daring.


Felix Walworth’s second album of indie-pop under the name Told Slant addresses questions of trauma, confusion, and loss with frankness and intimacy.

Going By

Like other peers in the Double Double Whammy scene (Frankie Cosmos et al), Felix Walworth’s music revolves around transmuting daily ephemera into loftier symbolism. “Floating by you on ice skates/Vodka mixed in pink lemonade/So much love without high stakes,” the Epoch collective member sings on “Wappinger’s Creek,” off their second album as Told Slant. As that title suggests, the songs meander through all the rural and suburban settings central to folksy emo fare. Drinking 40s in the parking lot, sinking “Cannon Balls” into mountaintop swimming holes, and searching out “turtles by the fallen trees”—they’re the isolated, intimate spaces in which small town kids write memories of touch and togetherness.
The album begins plainly with “I Don’t,” a track title indicative of Walworth's penchant for somber declaratives. Those declaratives tend to either turn anthemic in climatic, shout-along mantras—“Tsunami’s” collective plea for comfort sang with their Epoch pals, “isn’t this silly and aren’t you beautiful”—or quietly eloquent. The album’s final moments represent the former transforming into the latter, as the “Tsunami” chorus reappears before their lone voice exasperatedly asks, “so why are we treating each other like animals?” (Walworth, who is non-binary, uses gender-neutral pronouns). That slippage from comfort to desolation and companionship to solitude is the space Told Slant’s music inhabits.
Walworth’s 2012 debut Still Water rarely strayed from the same C/G chords, and was propelled by sparse banjo plucks and morose guitar riffs that echoed one another song-to-song. Here, Walworth retains the simplicity—maybe getting a bit more adventurous with the chord progressions—but deploys it more intentionally toward constructing a cohesive album. The line of “oh oh oh’s” on “I Don’t” foreshadows the choral melody of “Tsunami,” the latter mentions “a can in my hand” following “Tall Cans Hold Hands,” the end of “Delicate” repeats the climax line of “Low Hymnal” (you “can battering ram this life”), and so on.
It’s the same small phrasebook of melodies, guitar parts, and lyrics erupting over and over into different configurations to create a complexly interconnected whole, but the album’s insularity also sounds cabin fever-esque—fitting, considering the city-born Walworth recorded it in self-professed Bon Iver fashion, sequestered to woodsy seclusion. The songs might be tender in their soft-hearted melancholy, but that strict adherence to spare parameters offers them a punk spirit. It’s a testament to Walworth’s compelling songcraft that despite all the repetition, the album doesn’t sound repetitive, but one wonders how many albums further that project can last.
The sparsity makes room to highlight Walworth’s distinctive trembling warble, which teeters precariously, constantly on the edge of breakdown—a performance of radical vulnerability that serves as the lynchpin of the music’s unique poignancy. “Tsunami” begins with a gravelly mumble of “I want to be a good sky on bad day” before choking a register higher into “and today was a bad day.” The weary lyrics bare an “old soul” demeanor—on their debut, Still Water, they sing about feeling “twice their age”— but the vocal fry and cracks through which they’re delivered are socially coded as gendered markers of adolescence.
Walworth’s voice revels in its own messy excess, repurposing vocal transgressions into fundamental elements of their singing style. It’s a critical model for queer listeners like myself: hearing a non-binary voice celebrate its own liminality helped me learn to honor my own trans feminine body. That conscious claiming of the queer body’s deviance (“still my body will be an illegible one,” Walworth chokes out on Low Hymnal) allows their voice to so powerfully transmit the extensive trauma that queer bodies magnetize.
In particular, this album focuses on the trauma of loss. Love signifies more than just companionship for Walworth. “High Dirge” explores how relationships fundamentally tether them to reality: “I need you around the ground needs a figure just to be something at all.” So the breakups they chronicle represent more than just the loss of a friend, but the more total psychological catastrophe of depersonalization. This album’s predecessor explored immobilization—when “today feels a lot like yesterday” and “it feels like we are in still water.” Going By moves forwards past the stagnancy and suffocation of stillness to the downward spiral of decay: losing lovers, losing yourself, losing your hold on reality, losing the will to live. But in that dissolution of identity, there’s a spark of liberation. The existential angst of *being *or what am I?—see Still Water’s “I Am Not” and “I’m Real”— transitions to a question of action—what am I going to do?—to which Walworth answers, “I Don’t.” It might not be salvation, but Going By offers a path out of the murk.


Matty Healy taps Jack Antonoff to help produce a concise, meaningful, pop-focused album about love. It’s cliche, it’s obvious, it’s slyly profound—it’s the 1975.

The 1975: Being Funny in a Foreign Language

Being Funny in a Foreign Language

Beneath the 1975’s brilliant sheen lies a sense of doom. Look around you—can’t you sense it, too? Millions of us scrolling through social media with glazed eyes and fragile psyches, unable to find connection beyond the confines of our bedrooms, snorting Adderall and watching porn just to register a pulse. You know, we live in society. On past records, frontman Matty Healy explored these maladies with a comic, clumsy edge, stuffing his lyrics with Donald Trump tweets, writing songs about FaceTime sex, and opening an 80-minute album with a speech from climate activist Greta Thunberg. The 1975 aspire toward sincerity and radicality, to make music that’s actually meaningful. Then they look in the mirror and chafe at their own reflection.
Unlike 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships and 2020’s Notes on a Conditional Form, both of which attempted to capture the hyperactivity of thumbing through tabs, the 1975’s latest album, Being Funny in a Foreign Language, tames the group’s taste for excess and plays up their fundamentals: goopy ’80s guitars, pumping drums, schmaltzy saxophones, and infuriatingly good hooks. With production help from Jack Antonoff, at 44 minutes, it’s the band’s shortest and most focused album yet, one that perpetuates a simple message: Love will save us. It’s cliche, it’s obvious, it’s slyly profound—it’s the 1975.
And if any contemporary pop star is prepared for the eye rolls and scorn that an album-wide cliché as trite as love will save us inspire, it’s Matty Healy. Call him what you will—a satirist, a postmodernist, a tacky romantic, an “ironically woke… post-coke, average skinny bloke calling his ego imagination,” per “Part of the Band”—but he’s speaking from the heart. “One could criticize me for loads of things, but you can’t criticize me for being insincere,” he recently told The New York Times. “Annoying, whatever. But I’m not insincere.” Being Funny is as sincere as the 1975 have ever sounded, and also as hopeful. Without the thematic discursions and stylistic detours of past records, Healy’s glamorous love songs finally take center stage, their message as convincing as ever: Maybe love, cliches and all, is the answer.
Earnestness offset with humor, sociocultural critiques bookended by dick jokes—the 1975’s raison d’être is on full display on the album’s eponymous opener, an epic orchestral number whose doubled pianos and billowy vocals pay homage to LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends.” Healy sings of surviving in the digital age, of wading through targeted advertisements and pharmaceutical addictions and political identities, rattling off a string of lines like “I’m feeling apathetic after scrolling through hell/I think I’ve got a boner, but I can’t really tell,” and, “You’re making an aesthetic out of not doing well and mining all the bits of you you think you can sell.” By positioning our cultural ills as urgent, life-threatening predicaments, Healy offers a useful framework for interpreting the rollicking pop-rock fervor to come. Here’s a way forward, he seems to be saying, winking at us, one that feels good; one that sustains.
Being Funny presents this fervor with renewed force, replacing the band’s computerized production with natural studio instrumentation. (Their ground rule when making the record was to “play it and record it. Real instruments.”) The songs pop when they erupt with energy, when the band’s joy and zeal are palpable. Take “Happiness,” a glistening, limber, and exceptional proof-of-concept. It was originally conceived during a jam session where the band performed their parts with “locked eyes,” per Healy, who gives an astounding vocal performance. “In case you didn’t notice/I would go blind just to see you,” he sings, boiling with desperation. The towering dance groove on “Oh Caroline”—the one that blends Bruce Hornsby and Carly Rae Jepsen—could likely be a hit at any point in the past 40 years. It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s magnificent in its breadth—it makes you believe, however reservedly, that you, too, can “find [yourself] in the moonlight.”
Even when their songs reek of camp, Healy has enough moxie to elevate a potentially horrible idea into an eloquent exclamation point. How many bands could pull off “I’m in Love With You,” a song designed for wedding dancefloors and roadside make-outs? It’s silly, sure, but it’s also a pristine, precise celebration of commitment and in-person infatuation amid pop music’s “Texts Go Green” era. “Looking for Somebody (To Love)” boasts the physicality of a Bruce Springsteen song, its colorful guitars, pulsing synths, and massive drums slashing like lightning around Healy’s hound dog voice. At first the song seems like just another rumbling good time, but then Healy’s writing deepens: “Maybe we’re lacking in desire/Maybe it’s just all fucked/But the boy with ‘the plan’ and the gun in his hand was looking for somebody to love.” Throughout the record, the 1975 repeatedly suggest that human connection can lift us out of loneliness, reestablish our place in the world, and separate us from our screens. According to Healy, the stakes for doing so have never been higher.
In Being Funny’s quieter moments, the group treads somewhat new territory. Antonoff lends his soft hand to guitar-centric folk rock songs, like “Wintering,” whose chorus feels like the theme song for a bad ’90s sitcom, or “When We Are Together,” which boasts all the inoffensive flourishes native to an Antonoff-assisted track. But the standout ballads come when Healy channels his R&B chops. The stunning “Human Too” features a falsetto reminiscent of Justin Vernon, while the pop standard “All I Need to Hear” sounds like a song every American Idol contestant would’ve clamored to perform in 2007. It’s simple but inimitable, general but specific—in a word, it’s honest, an elusive quality that separates the 1975 from their mainstream rock contemporaries.
In the music video for “All I Need to Hear,” Healy walks around a wooded area in a trench coat, staring into the sky, then a pond; he’s quick to point out a swan that enters his periphery. Speaking into his phone, he monologues about capital A-Art, identity, the facade of reality—the usual Matty Healy talking points. We don’t hear what questions he’s being asked, just snippets of his answers. “It sounds like a pretentious thing to say, but there’s a lot of figuring stuff out on this record: musically, philosophically, emotionally,” he says as the camera catches him paddling a canoe. As always, the 1975 are his vessel to seek and not to know; to risk cringiness for the sake of sincerity; to crack a joke at the wrong time; to grab someone by the shoulders and say that you love them. This is what they live for.


The new age composer’s late-blooming renaissance continues with a compilation attempting to span the sounds and moods of a long, eclectic career.

Beverly Glenn-Copeland: Transmissions: The Music of Beverly Glenn-Copeland

For almost the entirety of Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s life, the music was there but listeners were not. Then, one day in 2016, an intervention wholesome enough to feel scripted arrived: one spam-bound email from a record collector inquiring about back stock. Now audiences come to gather in the company of an artist who has spent three-quarters of a century revolving around the sun with one soul and two selves. The openly queer Black artist once shunned by peers and forced to flee sexual reprogramming has arrived at a moment where everybody wants to be his friend.
A palm-reader’s premonition in the 1970s that Glenn-Copeland would attain success in winter years was fulfilled when two reissues of his masterwork Keyboard Fantasies turned a trickle of interest into a surge. Look to pick up a copy online and you’ll be met with recommendations for Midori Takada and William Onyeabor––other brilliant musicians of the 1980s who became hot commodities on the market after decades of quiescence. If you were to walk into a listening bar either side of the globe in the last few years, chances are you’d catch the dinky, DX7-rendered electric piano on Keyboard Fantasies’ “Sunset Village” gliding out of a set of ludicrously expensive speakers. Hidden from view for so long, Glenn-Copeland was reborn as the North Star of new age.
That’s where the tale might have ended, were it not for the artist’s keenness to be actively involved, rather than just regarded as a dusty curio. A lifetime of withheld yeses poured forth from Glenn-Copeland: to lectures, to podcasts, even a segment on Canadian television where he flew to Tokyo and thanked his benefactor in person. Having appeared in concert just once between 1980 and 2018––a period in which Beverly transitioned, moved to the water’s edge in New Brunswick and found long-sought stability with his current wife, Elizabeth––he embarked on tour, delivering lieder-indebted torch songs and age-old spirituals that stretched well beyond Keyboard Fantasies’ synth miniatures, in performances as stately and dignified as the stained-glass murals that adorn his record sleeves and stage production.
Following a crowd-sourced documentary in 2019 which took his story wider still, Transmissions is the first formal attempt to gather works from across Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s career in one place. The physical copy spans just nine tracks and 47 minutes (although the digital edition extends past the hour mark), which appears slight for an artist who could easily command double the runtime. Given the wide variety of styles and moods across the compilation, as well as the potential for emotional overload, a gentle introduction might be an act of mercy. At numerous points, it can seem as if you’ve flipped over to a different record entirely.
The white-knuckle, fluent jamming of the Toronto jazz ensemble who feature on “Erzili”––which closed out 1971’s Beverly Glenn-Copeland––feels impossibly separate from the plangent synthesizer tones and steady tug of double-bass on the newest solo song here, 2018’s “River Dreams.” Three tracks from 2004’s little-known Primal Prayer make it the most represented of all Glenn-Copeland’s albums, another twist. Recorded under the alias Phynix, it captured Glenn-Copeland as he rebounded from a health scare with gaiety in abundance. The jaunty, cruise-ready instrumentals that lead them off only really make sense when Glenn-Copeland swoops down on deck and begins to warble. Transmissions opens with one of these: “La Vita” surges forth in Italian with operatic flair, a sharp rejoinder if you came expecting to be soothed, before melting into what most listeners would recognize as the conventional A1 of Glenn-Copeland’s oeuvre, Keyboard Fantasies’ “Ever New.”
Across Glenn-Copeland’s songbook are pearls of wisdom about grace, forgiveness and spiritual ablution; given what we know of the artist’s history, it’s easy to find yourself shrinking in your seat. Two haunting numbers from 1970’s Beverly Copeland reflect the climate he grew up in: “Sometimes,” Beverly beckons on “Durocher,” “I get to thinking what’s the use of going on? What’s the use of loving when hatred is so strong?” Solace lies in “Don’t Despair”: “Tomorrow may bring roses...tomorrow may bring love.” Glenn-Copeland’s voice anchors it all, a rich contralto capable of zooming up octaves and hushing a crowd from fifty paces. This is most evident in a rendition of “Deep River,” captured during Utrecht arts festival Le Guess Who?, where Glenn-Copeland performed in 2018 at the invitation of Devendra Banhart and Moor Mother. In between that enrapturing flutter, he breaks into a speaking voice somewhere between compère and camp leader, inviting the assembled throng to chant with him and his band, Indigo Rising. The audience, hesitant to encroach at first, slowly creeps into the recording before finding full voice at the climax. The effect is riveting.
While the sequencing on Transmissions does fortify a greater understanding about Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s gift, the comp essentially ties a bow atop an established feel-good story. The same themes recur with every review, interview, and radio special: joy, acceptance, redemption, magic. What does it say about us that we’re all lusting after hope? It’s inevitable, perhaps: the coalescence around his music is a welcome unifier in an ugly age. From his belated emergence on the world stage in the wake of Keyboard Fantasies, through feature-length films and right up until this compilation’s release, people have jostled non-stop to place their hand upon this beacon of light. Glenn-Copeland has obliged each one.


On their last album, Foxygen sounded like a band trying to survive. On their latest, they reach for the sky, making an audacious timpani crash of an album that satirizes its own grandiosity.

Hang

“What are we good for if we can’t make it?” Sam France wondered on the last Foxygen album, …And Star Power. It was a pertinent question, since for a while there it didn’t seem like his band would make it. At the height of their dysfunction, Foxygen seemed to break up every week; they quickly became as known for their onstage meltdowns as their eccentric classic-rock pastiches. Music came so effortlessly to the group, but the mechanics of simply being a band seemed beyond them. When the duo launched what they called their Farewell Tour in 2015, it wasn’t so much a fake-out or an in-joke as an acknowledgement of the possible: For a band like this, any tour could be a farewell tour. So what would their legacy be if one of those breakups had stuck? As well received as their breakthrough record We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic was at the time, would anybody remember it a decade later if that had been the end? All the goodwill in the world doesn’t buy a band much if they no longer exist.
Fascinatingly overstuffed and unscripted, …And Star Power in hindsight feels like a placeholder, the work of a band trying to survive long enough to make another one. For their extravagant follow-up, though, Foxygen set out to demonstrate just how much they’re capable of when they’re playing the long game. Recorded with a 40-some-piece orchestra and dubiously billed as the group’s “first proper studio album,” Hang is the kind of investment of time, money, and patience a band can only make if they intend to stick around for a while, an audacious timpani crash of an album that satirizes its own grandiosity in real time. Though France still sings in a kind of spin-the-wheel Jagger/Bowie/Reed impression, he and Jonathan Rado have dropped their usual grab-bag approach in favor of a more disciplined homage to the theatrical rock records of the late ’70s, particularly the Broadway-adoring budget busters of Billy Joel, Elton John, and Meat Loaf. There’s a commitment to concept here rarely found outside of Destroyer albums.
Conducted and arranged by Trey Pollard with assists from indie-rock’s go-to maximalist Matthew E. White, the assembled big band isn’t just for show. It’s at the center of every track, from the sumptuous, Philly soul strings of the IMAX-sized opener “Follow The Leader” to the frolicsome brass of the Sunset Boulevard tribute “Avalon,” which culminates in a swinging hot jazz breakdown right out of The Muppet Show. The drummer takes an actual tap dance solo.
Hang hits peak artifice at its halfway point with “America,” a song as wide in scope as its title. Feeding off the faux-importance of its arrangement, France belts out a succession of clichés about dreams, patriotism, and heroism, and dusts off an old-fashioned critique of entertainment industry superficiality (“You only play yourself when you’re in Hollywood!”) Somehow the track isn’t even the album’s most elaborate parody of bygone songwriting conventions. That distinction goes to the mock magnum opus “Rise Up,” which opens with a command to “pull yourself up from the fires of hell” and “follow your own heart,” and concludes with the time-tested revelation that the thing “you’ve been searching all your life”—you probably know where this is going—“was with you all the time.”
The danger with any record this high concept is that it’ll be easier to admire than to enjoy, and Foxygen haven’t completely avoided that trap. Between its mammoth arrangements and France’s singing-in-the-shower gusto, Hang is sometimes just too much. Even though it’s barely a half hour long, it demands such constant attention that it can be hard to make it through the whole thing in a single sitting. And to the extent that the record is a joke, the sheer scale of the project makes Foxygen over-commit to it. By the album’s final stretch, when France sings about flamingos in two consecutive songs, the band seems to be itching for a change of pace, one of those sudden stylistic leaps that used to come one after another on their previous records.
Not coincidentally, then, the album’s most refreshing song is the one that most breaks form. With “On Lankershim,” the band takes a breezy detour into the well-groomed A.M. country of the ’70s—for three easygoing, slightly out of place minutes they become the Eagles, at least until France adopts Jonathan Richman’s Hippie Johnny-despising drawl to sing about an actress friend of his (“You know, she says she can get me paaaaaaaarts.”) With Hang, Foxygen have proven their capacity for lavish spectacle, but they’re still at their best when they give themselves the freedom to roam.


A third Libertines album once seemed about as likely as a fifth Smiths LP. Like recovery, Anthems for Doomed Youth takes things one step at a time. It's an absorbing listen front to back, rich with mood and gorgeous melodies.

The Libertines: Anthems for Doomed Youth

Anthems for Doomed Youth

Over a decade after their heyday, the Libertines are still the only post-Britpop British indie band with an enduring mythology. That mythology began before the band even existed, written into being in Pete Doherty's journal. Like a lovelorn teenager, he scrawled "Doherty/Barât" across countless pages, in which he also laid out his and Carl Barât's poetic ambition: "To gain a measure of immortality in the plastic bubble of popular culture. A tricky task—unless one happens to be equipped with the belief, the talent, and the fervour."
Such was the price of admission into the world of the Libertines. You didn’t need a military jacket and crude tattoo stick'n'poked in a Camden bedsit, just the belief that belief itself was enough to transcend unfavorable circumstances, whether class or humdrum surrounds. They called this state of mind Albion, framed as a fantasy of a kinder England rooted in kitchen sink drama and Galton and Simpson comedies. But Doherty knew it couldn't last. "Look at the Sex Pistols," he said in 2002, before the Libertines had even released debut Up the Bracket. "They split up and there’s bitterness and sourness." He told Barât that they would meet the same fate, and they did.  Their Albion became oblivion.
Considering the interim decade of hubris (Barât's truly awful solo records) and reckless devastation (the crimes resulting from Doherty's enduring addictions, now supposedly kicked), it's a huge surprise that the Libertines' unlikely third album doesn't reprise old glories. On Anthems for Doomed Youth, the immortal Albion dream is dead, their erstwhile fantasy mocked and incinerated like an effigy on bonfire night.
Anthems is littered with fragments of various past demos, but one old song appears wholesale. "You're My Waterloo" dates from 1999, a smoky piano ballad about the blossoming all-but-physical romance between Doherty and Barât. As lovely as it is, the intervening 16 years make tragic lines like "I'm so glad we know just what to do and everyone's going to be happy" just sound mawkish. Sharper is "Fame and Fortune", a shanty about Camden good old days that would be self-aggrandizing if it wasn't so self-mocking. "Dubloons down for a double bluff/ Dip your quill or your bleeding heart and sign there and there and there," Barât sings, sending up the naivete of bohemians doing business.
For fans, it's always galling to see a band dismiss the parts of their past that they fell in love with. But Anthems isn't bitter or dismissive. Opener "Barbarians" is a gimlet-eyed spaghetti western rallying optimism for the broken. Lifting the guitar from Sixpence None the Richer's "Kiss Me", the title track starts out as a grand proclamation about the futile spoils of war and revolution, espoused with Barât's typical camp flair. But then he shreds the glorious fantasy, revealing an ignominious reality with a comic turn of phrase: "In the pub that night, racking out the lines of shite/ Putting to right all of the world's great wrongs." When righteous belief is its own life force, an array of beer mats is as good a map to conquer as any.
There's no romance in the songs where the duo confront their demons (Barât has also struggled with addiction and depression), but they're still full of fight. On "Belly of the Beast", Doherty sounds as if he's trying to slap himself out of the fug with every syllable of "It was a smacked-up, cracked-up, bone shark smacked -down day." Single "Gunga Din" has a reggae lilt, and Doherty's portrait of the cycle of veins, drinks, panic, and suffering is flinty, in stark contrast with the chorus' sloppy, rueful rush about having weak moral fiber. On "Heart of the Matter", the guitars echo "Don't Look Back Into the Sun", but whereas that classic praised a chancer's luck, here the pair express sad surprise that they're still going, having made it this far on a "crooked little smile."
It's a reminder of the beguiling poetry of the Libertines, the world of Biggles and Bilo, ships and maidens, which they indulge on "Fury of Chonburi", a tale of conflicted, enduring devotion among "pig men" (their mutual pet name). It's one of the only ragers here, alongside "Glasgow Coma Scale Blues", tumbling pub rock with a brash theme tune quality. Anthems is an absorbing listen front to back, but lacks the iconoclasm of Up the Bracket and 2004's self-titled record. Still, it's rich with mood and gorgeous melodies, and a pervasive doomy streak. The record's two love songs that don't concern Pete'n'Carl are both PSAs about the danger of believing in eternity: "Iceman" showcases their Kinks-y knack for storytelling in an acoustic yarn about a figure best avoided; "Dead for Love" is affecting noir cabaret that warns that death is the only true forever.
Given how easy it is to hate what the Libertines became, it's strange how endearing they remain, how magnetic Barât and Doherty's deep, despairing love. And how successful: The music that the two frontmen made apart was often disappointing—Barât’s knees-up theatrics ("je regrette, je regrette that I haven’t had you yet") more than Doherty’s occasionally lovely work alone and with Babyshambles. Yet their enduring facility together—as much as their third record swears off such cosmic promise—is almost, just almost, enough to make you believe in soulmates.


After the relative disappointment of Paper Tigers, Vladislav Delay's fourth Luomo album rewires the project, forging new emotional and sonic territory, marshalling enormous amounts of studio wizardry and compositional effort to map out a new (effortless-sounding) textural and sensual approach to house and pop music.

Convivial

After 2006's disappointing Paper Tigers, I had wondered if Finland's Sasu Ripatti might quietly abandon Luomo, his moniker for a seductive, dub-laced brand of vocal house that resulted in two of this decade's most gorgeous albums, Vocalcity and The Present Lover. After all, Ripatti had a strong 2007 with excellent releases as Uusitalo (propulsive tech-house) and Vladislav Delay (swirling fractal dub). By comparison, it appeared that Ripatti had exhausted the possibilities inherent to the Luomo project, and that every new release was doomed to intensify a sense of diminishing returns.
In retrospect, Paper Tigers sounds better than I remember: a stately, hypnotic collection featuring some of Ripatti's most refined house productions. But it exists almost entirely within the shadow of the first two Luomo albums, inviting the warmth of recognition rather than the flushes and chills of surprised fascination. Ripatti's work as Vladislav Delay hardly shocks these days either, but there's a sense with Luomo that the stakes are higher. Standing still is anathema to the Luomo aesthetic, the value of which resides not merely in the bewitching, spangly depths of Ripatti's arrangements, but also in the vague sense that, at his best, he forges new emotional as well as sonic territory, marshalling enormous amounts of studio wizardry and compositional effort to map out a new (effortless-sounding) textural and sensual approach to house music.
So it's with a sense of relief bordering on exhilaration that I come to the fourth Luomo album to discover a substantial rewiring of this particular aesthetic. While retaining the voluptuous shimmer characteristic of all Ripatti's work as Luomo, this album distances itself from the stutters and glitches he previously used to imply conflict and self-contradiction (puncturing house's habitual self-assurance). Instead, Convivial parades an immaculately structured, insectile busyness: clean and clearly etched, each sound placed with infinite care and burnished to a hyperreal sheen. If Vocalcity was murky and enveloping and The Present Lover gaseous and giddy, then Convivial is more like the rush of pure oxygen, offering a sound that is so sharp and so vivid it sears as much as it energizes.
It's also Ripatti's most unabashed foray into "pop" territory. Where previously the producer mostly oscillated between simple refrains and rigorously fractured vocal cut-ups (occasionally leaving his anonymous divas to wander in a confusing hall of mirrors), Convivial ushers in an array of guest vocalists whose contributions resemble (to a greater or lesser extent) "proper songs," filled with the coherent emotional arcs of complete verses and choruses.
"Love You All", a brooding gothic electro-ballad somewhere between the first Junior Boys album and Depeche Mode's Violator, forms a far outpost into this unfamiliar territory, its stuttering groove, morose strings, and eerie arpeggios creating a dense, almost claustrophobic topographic framework for Sascha Ring (Apparat)'s languid-but-tense verses and overblown falsetto choruses. It's a world away from the open-ended, near-formless echo-chambers of Vocalcity, or even the expansive curving surfaces of The Present Lover; compared to those albums, its exacting subordination of sonics to songfulness seems almost totalitarian.
But it's precisely this sense of discipline that makes "Love You All" (together with Convivial's other highlights) so marvelous: The pressure that these full-blown song structures exert upon Ripatti's sonic largess creates an unbearable sense of momentum that makes the best tracks here almost explosive with a joyful sense of possibility. You can almost hear the delight with which Ripatti puzzles out how to imbue the transitions from verses to choruses on "Love You All" with the kind of anthemic surge that pop masters take for granted. And it is from within this process of symbiotic adaptation-- the careful entwining of the producer's trembling sounds along the snaking contours of songcraft-- that the hoped-for sense of emotional breakthrough emerges.
The (relatively) weaker moments on Convivial are those which could most easily be mistaken for a reiteration the sound of the previous Luomo albums: On the understated chug of "If I Can't", (Scissor Sister) Jake Shears' bittersweet multi-tracked sighs mirror a little too closely the conflicted, stuttering divas of old, a resemblance Ripatti underlines by providing some of his most archetypal bruised, woozy synth chords. But even here, there's a sense of economy and structure that lifts the song above its immediate forbears, with every synth quiver and scraping dub echo carefully sustaining the ambiguous development of Shears' performance.
But while it's pleasing to see Ripatti further hone his familiar sound, I can't help but prefer the alchemy of the new: The best moments on Convivial transpose that unmistakable air of aching longing onto a broader, less predictable sonic palette. "Gets Along Fine" might ride a familiar wistful bass riff, but the core of its appeal resides in the astonishing combination of bleeping synthesizer and pseudo-African percussion in its chorus, which makes it simultaneously the most aggressive and purely joyous Luomo production to date, the muscular assault of its universalist affection like an embrace so fierce it crushes. The marvel, and perhaps the necessity of the Luomo project, is bound up in the shock of physical intimacy; pleasurable, overwhelming, and at times a little scary. "Am I really feeling this?" "Is it you who is making me feel this way?" Yes, and yes.


These reissues of Zeppelin’s first three albums are remastered and are packaged with bonus discs that include previously unreleased live material and studio cuts. However you feel about them and their brand of ultra-huge arena rock, there has never been another band like them, before or since.

Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin / Led Zeppelin II / Led Zeppelin III

As time moves on and “The 60s” and “The 70s” become not so much historical periods as media creations, it's harder to take for granted what the significant cultural touchstones of those eras actually mean to current-day society. Some of the artists that were once universally appreciated are slipping from memory, while others are having difficulty translating to new generations. The furor greeting each new Beatles enterprise shows their music and image are indeed proving timeless, and they remain relevant for teenagers and septuagenarians alike—but other giants from the late 1960s and early 70s aren’t having it so easy. The Who’s stock has plummeted in the last decade, and it’s getting tougher to find anyone under 35 who cares about a note of their music made after 1971. The Rolling Stones have been at it so long that it’s difficult for younger people to believe that they were once actually good. Pink Floyd still reach some alienated kids, but their most devoted fans are among the graybeard audiophile set. And then there's Led Zeppelin.
Zeppelin occupies a unique place among this group of bands, in part because their position was hard to pin down while they were active. They were unimaginably popular from 1969 to 1980, but critical respect was elusive. Their suspect reputation has been somewhat overstated (in the U.S., Rolling Stone panned them early on but eventually came around, while Creem and Circus took them seriously all along) but Led Zeppelin never quite registered with the intelligentsia. They made the heaviest hard rock records ever recorded, but their lyrics tended toward loopy mysticism when they weren’t either stealing ideas outright or wallowing in a kind of hedonism where misogyny was a given.
In 2014, Led Zeppelin is typically viewed through one of three lenses: those among the 50-plus set who were actually there hear their music with a nostalgic ear, remembering the days of their youth. There are those who grew up with the assumption that Led Zeppelin were important—let's say 30 to 50 years old—hear them filtered through a second wave of nostalgia, from movie titles like Dazed and Confused and the memory of classic rock radio. To these people (including me), Zeppelin defined an otherworldly image of '70s rock deities, conquering the world on the strength of volume, arena shows, and the baddest riffs the world had ever heard. And then there’s the younger set for whom Zep might seem a little comical, a faintly embarrassing relic from another era even as a certain amount of the music remains undeniable. In one sense, this latter group have more in common with the skeptical critics of the first wave, possessing expectations of "what music should be" that don’t necessarily apply for a band that sounds like this.
These reissues of Zeppelin’s first three albums are an attempt to reach all of these people, using every tool at the band and label’s disposal. The primary reason these sets are being presented and received as a Big Deal is that they are the first reissues of the digital era (and here I’m using the term to include CDs, which means we’re going back more than 30 years) to include bonus material. The reissues are remastered and are packaged with bonus discs that include previously unreleased live material and studio cuts. The PR push surrounding a big reissue in 2014 inevitably involves sharing things that can spread on social media and hence reach younger kids, while other elements—unheard versions, improved sound—ostensibly entice older fans to re-buy the records.
Jimmy Page, always Led Zeppelin’s sonic architect, heard the blues differently. He heard it as sound first, rather than a form or tradition or product of personalities—maybe that’s why he felt so cavalier about "borrowing" from blues records without attribution, since you can't copyright a sound—and he understood the trance-inducing element of blues repetition better than anyone: blues as a consciousness-expanding ritual. All of this is clear from the very beginning, as Led Zeppelin is one of music's most assured and fully realized debuts; individually, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham were great players, but the whole of their sound somehow exceeded the sum of its parts. But even above the instrumental virtuosity, Led Zeppelin is a triumph of production, each part clear and forceful but adding up to something even more powerful.
Just about everything Zep would do at one point is presented here somewhere—trance-rock (“Dazed and Confused”), gorgeous acoustic folk (“Black Mountain Side”), catchy guitar pop (“Good Times Bad Times”), updates on straight blues (“I Can’t Quit You Baby”). They’d do most of these things better later, but this is where they appeared first. Zep sounded so brilliant right out of the gate because Page was already a veteran of the music scene when they started; working as a session guitarist and later with the Yardbirds, he took in the scene and saw what was missing. As much as Zeppelin understood music, at this point words were more or less just sounds.
Led Zeppelin also set the tone for a decade of dippy lyrics. If Zep was never accepted as hip in some circles, it’s partly because of the knuckle-dragging worldview of songs like “Dazed and Confused”. It’s hard not to laugh or cringe in 2014 when hearing a line like “Every day I work so hard, bringin' home my hard-earned pay/ Try and love you baby but you push me away,” but it’s equally difficult not to acknowledge that Robert Plant delivers them with a certain histrionic power. And then a bar later, John Bonham’s slow fills and Page’s terrifying guitar screech come in, and the true meaning of the music is found.
It’s truly impossible to oversell how brilliantly these records are produced; “rock” as an idea is really a ’70s idea, and Led Zeppelin established what that would mean and what it would sound like, which was as much a matter of arrangement as it was knowing where to set the microphones, how high to mix the bass. You can hear that on the bonus disc to the first album, which was recorded live in Paris in 1969 and aired on radio. The recording fidelity, for a release by such a major band, is remarkably poor—which goes to show how well the vaults have already been cleared out—but there’s no doubting just how much this band could rip in their first year. Of particular note is the attack of Plant’s singing, as he comes over like the unhinged 22-year-old he was. The earliest live recordings by bands are so exciting in large part because the vocalist hasn’t yet learned how to pace himself; Plant sings these songs like Zeppelin might last a year and this is his one chance to get it right. By the late ’70s, purely as a matter of survival, he’d learn how to coast on stage.
There is no arguing with a riff. It’s a conversation-ender, something resistant to analysis that strips away the intellectual to situate the music in a purely physical space. Of the 100 greatest guitar riffs in the history of rock music, Jimmy Page might have written 20, and a good number of those can be found on Led Zeppelin’s second album from 1969. If you or someone close to you has ever been within 10 feet of a radio tuned to a classic rock station, you’ve heard them all, many times—maybe too many. For every young person who discovers “Whole Lotta Love” and “Heartbreaker” and “Living Loving Maid (She’s Just a Woman)”, there’s an older person who gets sick of them from overplay and doesn’t need to ever hear them again. Part of the challenge and excitement of revisiting a record upon reissue is trying to hear the music again with fresh ears, seeing if you can tap into that feeling of discovery that came from hearing it the first time. When I’m able to mentally put myself into this place— the kid who got his driver’s license a month ago, driving around listening to II on tape—the reissue sounds as thrilling as ever.
Every track on this record is musically brilliant, and in the span of just a few months it’s amazing how much Page had enriched the band’s sound. Chiming acoustic guitars provide the contrast to the crunch in a whole new way on “Ramble On” and “Thank You”, offering yet another template for mixing folk with proto-metal. “Whole Lotta Love” might have gotten the band sued by Willie Dixon, but there was no sonic precedent for it in rock music—it’s a sound that would have been unimaginable without the rise of drug culture. If you are not a drummer, it’s hard to imagine listening to “Moby Dick” very often, but better evidence of John Bonham’s genius is found elsewhere on the record. Zep’s rhythmic underpinning, especially the locked-in tandem of Jones and Bonham, was always their secret weapon, the thing that divided them from contemporaries like Black Sabbath. They could swing, they loved James Brown and Motown, and they took pride in the fact that people would dance at their shows. The bonus disc is a mildly interesting amalgam of alternate mixes and rough takes—the kind of stuff anyone but the most dedicated obsessives will listen to only once—and there’s little advance here lyrically from the debut, but II is still close to perfect.
III is, indirectly, Led Zeppelin’s own version of Pink Floyd's Meddle—the folky, pretty early record that was never too popular and hence a favorite of indie types skeptical of such a massive mainstream band. That it opens with “Immigrant Song”, one of their top few rockers, only makes the later acoustic loveliness that much more affecting. The strings laid atop the acoustic guitar on “Friends” foreshadow “Kashmir”; “Tangerine” has an amazing tension between the minor-key verses and the open, joyous chorus, as good an example of any of Zep as a pop band. The melancholy ache of “That’s the Way” is Zep with their guard down—it goes down as easy as a great Cat Stevens song—and then by the end of the record things start to get a little weird, with the heavy acoustic hoedown of “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp” and the acid-fried chug of the blues standard “Shake ’em on Down”, a nod to the hypnotic one-chord version by Mississippi Fred McDowell. III has easily the best bonus material too, including a fantastic unreleased version of the old blues song “Keys to the Highway”. Depending on your age, you might remember III as “the one with the Viking kittens song” or “the one with that pretty song that played during an interlude of Almost Famous”; for someone who doesn’t necessarily want to be inundated with songs and riffs that became clichés, it might be the best place to start.
For some, the interest in these sets is the remastering, an alleged improvement in sound, which makes sense for a band so song-oriented. I’ve always thought that Zeppelin, like Neil Young, were best heard from nice-sounding pressings from the ’70s that were utterly ubiquitous in used LP bins in the ’80s and ’90s. Back then, you could collect the entire Zeppelin catalog for something like $30, where the inferior sounding early CD masters would run you more like $150.
These days the gap between different versions seems to be closing. I attended a listening session for these reissues in New York, hosted by Jimmy Page, and at one point he was asked which version sounded best, vinyl or CD. Page responded with saying the best version was the original analog tape, but “unfortunately I can’t invite you all ’round to listen to it.” Suffice to say that these remasters sound very good, a bit louder but not overly so, but we’re likely reaching a point of diminishing returns. That said, I’m very glad these new remasters and the attendant publicity push exist, to get us all listening to and talking about Led Zeppelin again, where they stand and what they might mean. However you feel about them and their brand of ultra-huge arena rock, there has never been another band like them, before or since.


On Lushlife's latest full-length, the Philly rapper and producer's curatorial instincts have kicked into overdrive. Unfortunately, despite an impressive roster of guests, Ritualize fails to add up to much.

Ritualize

Lushlife is a true Philadelphia hybrid, an artist who has spent his career bridging the gap between the city’s hip-hop and indie rock scenes. First as a mash-up artist and more recently, as a rapper and producer, he’s worked to convene dissimilar sounds and musicians in service of his vision. On his latest full-length, Ritualize, his curatorial instincts have kicked into overdrive. "We on that lush Primavera sound," Lushlife quips on the title track. And indeed, the credits for the album read like the lineup for an eclectic music festival, ranging from singer/songwriter Marissa Nadler to little-known Philly rapper Yikes the Zero.
This time around, Lushlife has even outsourced some of the production, abandoning the warm boom-bap of his earlier, self-produced work in favor of collaborations with Philly electro trio CSLSX. The end result is a soaring, cinematic sound rooted in live instruments that’s more M83 than Mobb Deep. There’s an impressive range on display here, from the orchestral prog of "Burt Reynolds (Desert Visions)" to the William Basinski tribute "Integration Loop." Many of the album's guests add to the richness of the production as well. RJD2 gets a co-production credit on the heady, multi-part "Toynbee Suite," I Break Horses contribute swells of psychedelic guitar and spectral backing vocals to "The Waking World," and Ariel Pink stops by for some unabashed Vangelis worship, helping evoke the neon glow of Blade Runner’s slick, wet streets on"Hong Kong (Lady of Love)."
While all this music provides ample grist for the mill, Lushlife rarely manages to wrest the listener’s attention away from the backdrop. He essentially has one flow—a breathless, nasal, Ghostface-esque cadence—but lacks Tony Starks’ charisma or storytelling ability. Lyrically, his bars are peppered with signifiers of taste: he’s shouting out Roky Erickson, Mary Timony, and Isabella Rossellini, sipping on barleywine and La Fin du Monde. Thanks to his straight-faced delivery, however, all these references feel humorless, like Das Racist without the irony. He attempts to squirm into a few interesting perspectives—for example, Mark David Chapman’s on "The Waking World"—but largely trawls the surface, delivering punchlines like, "He hold the heat standing outside of the Dakota watching/ While Holden Caulfield just telling him when to let the glock spit." At one point he refers to his style as "Bottle Rocket rap," which certainly doesn't help the perception that this is hip-hop music for the Wes Anderson set.
These deficiencies come into sharper focus when Lushlife is forced to share space with more seasoned rappers. Philly lifer Freeway sounds revitalized on "Strawberry Mansion," following serious health issues last year; while his performance isn’t quite "Cannon"-level here, hearing him rap over a sunny, synth-driven instrumental is a thrill unto itself. By his own high standards, Killer Mike’s verse on "This Ecstatic Cult" sounds phoned in but even so, he manages to run circles around Lushlife without lifting a finger. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the best verse on Ritualize comes from the hungriest emcee of the bunch: North Carolina rapper Deniro Farrar. Farrar's deliberate, grime-influenced flow sounds genuinely menacing set against "Incantation"’s  spare backdrop of echoing snare hits and palm-muted guitar (Lushlife and CSLSX wisely let the otherwise busy beat drop out before Farrar gets on the mic).
While there is no shortage of interesting ideas or capable musicians on Ritualize, in the absence of a compelling vision, it doesn’t add up to much. As Lushlife surely knows, the thrill of a good mash-up comes from the tension of two disparate ideas rubbing up against each other and there are far too few of those moments to be found here. Ultimately, Ritualize feels like a party with plenty of interesting guests but little conversation—it’s hard not to blame the host.


Sean Carey's new album is the first he recorded in Bon Iver bandmate Justin Vernon's April Base studio in Fall Creek, Wis. The warmth, reverb, and dusty textures here form something much larger than S. Carey has ever done before, but his real talent lies in making these songs seem tiny set against the world around him.

Range of Light

S. Carey recently posted a series of pictures to his Instagram that correspond to each of the songs on his new album, Range of Light, but even without the visual aid you can practically see these images while listening*.* Each song possesses a filtered approximation of natural beauty, and the outdoor environment is a renewable resource for Carey’s songwriting: summer lakes in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, nights in Marfa, Tex., and the deserts of Arizona and California.
Range of Light is the first album Carey's recorded in Bon Iver bandmate Justin Vernon's April Base studio in Fall Creek, Wis.; he cobbled together his 2010 debut All We Grow while on tour with Bon Iver and built 2012's electro-folk Hoyas EP on mostly just a laptop. The warmth, reverb, and dusty textures here form something much larger than S. Carey has ever done before, but his real talent lies in making these songs seem tiny set against the world around him.
Even though Carey’s canvas is large, Range of Light is all detail—including his voice, which remains whisper-quiet and occasionally climbs to a hushed tenor akin to Sufjan Stevens. His voice is more up front than before, which gives these songs more shape as he interacts with the ceaselessly beautiful soundscapes, breaking up the serenity with songcraft. The syncopated “Crown the Pines” uses Justin Vernon’s falsetto as another background texture, but the busyness of the whole thing serves as a perfect jolt for the record.
A trained percussionist in both jazz and classical music, Carey’s arrangements add a sense of rustic whimsy to Range of Light—there's tapping on glass bottles, spoons on thighs, and what sounds like someone walking over gravel. Carey achieves his greatest successes when working in a more transportative mode, though: the stately “Alpenglow” builds to the end like a thawing post-rock opus, and closing track “Neverending Fountain” provides a cathartic ending. It's easy for these songs to stir the listener, and even easier for them to to whisk the listener away to a secluded piece of earth.
Paradoxically, Range of Light can sound a little too on-the-nose about embodying the majesty of nature and its meditative properties; there are greyscale cuts that possess cautious wonder and tumble-dry jazz tones, like Talk Talk left out in the cold for too long. Carey's destinations and recollections can retreat to a sleepy, melancholy safe zone. Regardless, Range Of Light is the first album that defines Carey apart from his bandmates and contemporaries, as his developed, earnest, Midwestern glow bursts through the album's cracks.


Young NYC band continues to grow on its dynamic second EP, which recalls everything from Stereolab to Björk to Cocteau Twins.

Color Your Life

Twin Sister are a Brooklyn-by-way-of-Long Island quintet that do so much so well. Their songs have a remarkable sense of atmosphere and romanticism. They nod at their heroes-- maybe Stereolab and Björk, maybe Cocteau Twins or 1980s pop-- without overtly stealing. They seem to know they are capable of great things; perhaps ostentatiously, they released a trailer for Color Your Life, just their second EP (following November 2008's brief but occasionally stunning Vampires With Dreaming Kids). The EP features six songs, one of which is the instrumental "Galaxy Plateau", a stormy, harmonium-lead bit of futzing that is completely inessential. Even then, it's handled with such grace, it never feels presumptuous. Almost earned.
Twin Sister's singer, the mousily enchanting Andrea Estella, has the sort of breathy, committed voice that untangles knots. It sits all over the mix on Color Your Life, a significant, if not monumental leap forward for the band. Sometimes Estella is high up, as on "Milk & Honey", a wrenching ballad about what so many of their songs are about: the promise of love and the confusing moments at the beginning and end of every relationship. It's a gorgeous song that quakes and quivers before abruptly ending. The respite is brief before they sharply enter the best thing they have done to date. "All Around and Away We Go" is a magical thing, driving and relaxed at once. Pitchfork's Ryan Schreiber recently compared the song to Andrea True Connection's disco chestnut "More, More, More", and despite the seeming incongruity, that's right on. Twin Sister thrive when things are hushed, as on Vampires' arresting "I Want a House" but they seem unhappy with those simple moves. "All Around" takes them to a new and better place.
The rest of Color Your Life weaves in and out with little urgency. "Lady Daydream" is similarly lush, and full of heartfelt declarations-- "If you can't find the sea, I will take you there," Estella sings on the chorus. Seven-minute opener "The Other Side of Your Face" seems to be the unfinished cousin of "All Around and Away We Go"-- it never quite leaves the launching pad. Closer "Phenomenons" is polished and, strangely, almost radio-ready if it had an actual chorus. But that's not who this band is, either. In full, this is a mood record from a band that is still perfecting how to be not-too quiet. Power and volume often come easily to young bands. If things are reversed for Twin Sister, then they probably don't have very much to worry about.


Just weeks after releasing a new album and accompanying 7", the Portuguese batida producer completes the triptych with a dynamic and defiant four-track EP of tough, percussive club cuts.

S/T EP

Few words and little fanfare accompanied the release of S/T, Nídia’s latest EP on Lisbon dance label Príncipe. It made a surprise landing in early June, while across the U.S., collective rage about police brutality and state-sanctioned racism was boiling over and spilling into the streets. “We have to be more friendly and humane,” wrote the Portuguese producer, who grew up in outer Lisbon’s Vale de Amoreira housing projects, in a statement announcing S/T. “COVID taught us that we are nobody without each other,” she added. “Since I stopped judging and hating human beings my life has become as colourful as the LGBTQ flag and as firm as Martin Luther King’s fist.” While the creation of the tracks predates the current protests, the EP contains some of Nídia’s most urgent and invigorating beat work—a reminder that the batida rhythms she crafts are themselves a form of dissent.
“Calm music is for couples,” Nídia told The New York Times in 2018, shortly after moving back to Vale do Amoreira from Bordeaux, where she spent her adolescence. “When something comes out of the ghetto, it can’t come softly. It has to have strength.” That strength is evident across Nídia’s catalog, but particularly on S/T, which packs four relentless entries into a lean 16 minutes. S/T marks the third installment of a triptych, following Nídia’s Badjuda Sukulbembe 7" and her latest LP, Não Fales Nela Que A Mentes, both of which arrived earlier this year. Those records are considerably more lax and spacious than S/T. The meditative Não Fales Nela Que A Mentes lopes and ripples, while Badjuda Sukulbembe is as thick and agitated as a kettle of simmering molasses. S/T detonates any previous calm, however. Nídia has said that her community’s music should be “like an explosion in your face,” and S/T is evidence of the young producer’s pyrotechnic touch.
The record is propelled by sharp synthesizer, insistent percussion, and the occasional squawking command. Opener “CHEF” tosses laser-beam bleats over snare patches like peppery spices—the more seasoning, the better. “Jam” dials up that intensity, looping a frantic, soccer-stadium synth melody over skittering breakbeats. Perhaps the song’s title stems from its resemblance to an over-caffeinated jock jam—one better blasted in the club than at a sports arena. While “CHEF” and “Jam” are optimally explosive, “Hard” and “Nunun” are the most dynamic cuts on S/T, maintaining velocity as they change shape. The latter pusles with organic, wooden percussion. It clatters and thumps as Nídia extrudes beams of glowing, ambient tone to glide between the polyrhythms.
If strength is Nídia’s impetus for making music, it is fully realized on “Hard,” a militant dancefloor decree. Her longtime calling card, “Studio da Mana” (“Sister’s Studio,” the name she gave to her home recording setup) chirps out early in the mix, followed by dueling horn phrases and girding beats. Here, the percussion is tinny and rapid—like horses galloping on streets paved with sheet metal. Nídia’s rhythmic stride is in full force: equal parts battle march and ecstatic gyration. Listening to Não Fales Nela Que A Mentes and Badjuda Sukulbembe now, it seems like they weren’t so much relaxed as they were bracing for disruption. S/T offers that catharsis—a work of urgency that makes dancing itself feel like a form of civil disobedience.


The Portland songwriter captures a mood of ordinary enchantment on her spacious and stirring new record.

Found Light

Laura Veirs writes bookish, patient music that draws you in slowly and steadily, the images developing at the tantalizing pace of unshaken Polaroids. After 20 years, 11 albums, and numerous collaborations with Americana giants (Bill Frisell, Béla Fleck, Neko Case, k.d. lang, Sufjan Stevens), the quality of her latest record is less surprising than its immediacy. Found Light opener “Autumn Song” is instantly mesmerizing. Veirs’s vocal line, doubled by This Is the Kit’s Kate Stables, draws infinity signs inside a circle of pensive nylon strings, which then evaporate into harp-like layers as subdued basses and trombones fill in below, spreading the landscape under the sky. As “night stitches day,” “day stitches night,” and “thought stitches thought,” Veirs spins a lyrical cocoon around the precise mood of ordinary enchantment, dreamlike yet wide-awake, that can steal over a rainy Sunday spent measuring out your life with coffee spoons.
Some things haven’t changed: Veirs, who lives in Portland, synthesizes a magpie reading list (this time, the credits acknowledge Lynda Barry, John Keats, and Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani) into compact, allusive songs, her voice a strong, calm river where Pacific Northwest indie and contemporary Americana sail side by side. But everything else has changed. On her last record, My Echo, Veirs dealt with the end of her marriage to Tucker Martine, who produced it, as well as most of her other albums. Found Light is her first time co-producing and arranging her songs, and her first time recording her guitar and vocals together rather than in isolation, which perhaps accounts for the record’s intimate, holistic feeling. The impact of the life change cannot be overstated, but the impact of the process change should not be overlooked. In both cases, it seems, Veirs has more space to breathe, and she inhales it deeply.
The sound of Found Light is bright yet mysterious, part crystal and part smoke. Spindle-wound like British folk but frayed like Scandinavian jazz, the accompaniment adds veins of light and webs of shadow to Veirs’s hard, shining words. Like “Autumn Song,” “Ring Song” draws incisive details on revolving cycles of time and light. Throughout the record, Veirs tends the weedy patch between the archetypal and the specific until it blooms with exquisite turns like “I pawned my wedding ring at the Silver Lining/I felt sad; I also felt a weight go flying,” a feeling so real the melody sails away with it. The song is enriched but unladen by the spun gold of Shahzad Ismaily’s drums, bass, piano, and synthesizer. As the record’s co-producer, his gentle, open-ended sensibility is perceptible yet sympathetic.
These two rapt, billowy songs—along with others, like “Naked Hymn,” a sensuous ensemble piece with Charlotte Greve’s alto sax and Sam Amidon’s fiddle and banjo—are Found Light’s consistent but not exclusive highlights. There are also the times when the record eases toward the minimal electronics implicit in sparkling arrangements like these. Tawny analog synths eventually light up the snapping groove of “Signal” like a synaptic switchboard, while “Eucalyptus,” powered by a galloping electronic rhythm, seems like it might go full “Tom’s Diner” until it becomes a cathartic electro-acoustic rave instead. And there’s the invigorating crunch of “Seaside Haiku,” a rain-lashed rock song with a sublime ellipsis trembling in its center.
The occasional bluebird-embroidered country-folk tune pleasantly drifts by, but most often, Found Light is riveting, and even its plainer moments are essential to its narrative arc. Much of its power is derived from Veirs’s writing, a smoothly scrolling prosody of passing seasons, phasing moons, and streaming clouds; of slowing sundials and gleaming mirrors and dreamlike Aegean shores. It’s a world in which each thing burns with a particular scent, or a taste, or, most often, a color: blue flames, yellow coats, green kites, black flags, white roses, orange patterns on a wall. On the edge of this vibrant new world, Veirs names everything she feels and sees, with breakthrough frankness and the occasional whip-sting of vengeance, and it’s thrilling to share in that freedom with her.


When your band is best known for sharing an apartment with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, there's clearly a lot ...

Metric: Old World Underground, Where Are You Now

When your band is best known for sharing an apartment with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, there's clearly a lot of room for the development of a slightly more personal hype. Such is the case with Metric. Reportedly starting their band based on a mutual distaste for white Toronto funk bands, Metric melds together the usual suspects (The Cure, XTC, The Velvet Underground, New Order) for a new wave-tinged exploration of off-kilter indie rock.
You may remember frontwoman Emily Haines from her work with Broken Social Scene and Stars. Here, she seldom attempts the kind of mesmerizing, super-hushed whispers of BSS's "Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl", instead showing off a nicely breathy sing/talk and a clear affinity for vocal fluctuations and cadence changes. The subject matter is even more varied than her vocal range: spanning topics as diverse as a friend's altered clothing aesthetic ("On a Slow Night"), to the importance of social status ("The List"), to the inquiry of whether it's "wrong to want more than a folk song" ("Wet Blanket"), Haines has an array of lyrical targets on display and she, more or less, handles the shooting range.
One of the most stunning successes on Old World Underground, "Succexy" takes issue with the political agenda of the U.S. government from a more creative stance than the indie world's typical anti-Bush rhetoric and generalizations. Instead of placing the blame purely on the government, Haines claims, "All we do is talk, sit, switch screens/ As the homeland plans enemies." Slipping between power chords and her own serpentine synth lines, Haines juxtaposes sex and war without sounding lost in her own thoughts.
Metric aren't overly adept from a technical standpoint, and their melodies sometimes feel a bit too simplistic, but, in attempting a mix between accessible dance-punk and new wave, they do deliver where it counts: their rhythm section is incredibly tight, and drummer Joules Scott-Key's delightfully funky meter is particularly notable. Still, the band rarely attempts anything out of the ordinary, and their lack of innovative arrangements often translates to a tendency for existing ideas to overstay their welcome.
With Emily Haines' previous work as a frame of reference, you'd be right to assume that Metric does maintain an aura of talent, with the band serving as a hard melodic edge to her serene, plaintive vocal. Though still searching for their place in the ever-evolving world of indie rock, Metric, in their current incarnation, promise great things sooner rather than later.


Though they made their name on last year's raucous stomper Gallowsbird's Bark, nothing on that album hinted at ...

Blueberry Boat

The Fiery Furnaces' debut, Gallowsbird’s Bark, pegged them as a whimsical but rootsy New York band, one compared numbingly often to The White Stripes. Most of the clean garage revival was as predictable as a Guy Lombardo tribute, but the Furnaces stood apart, both for their The Band-meets-Syd Barrett nuggets and their lyrics, which read like a ransom note made from ripped-up atlases. Frontwoman Eleanor Friedberger sang "I went to" as often as James Brown goes "unh," and her brother Matt coupled raucous guitar leads with a piano that rollicked like a fall down the stairs.
Yet nothing on Gallowsbird's Bark hints at the ambition of The Fiery Furnaces' second album, the 76-minute Blueberry Boat. The 10-minute opener, "Quay Cur", sets the stage: After a two-minute overture with loud, blatting organs that pump like they're driven by bellows, Eleanor is introduced in the character of a child who lost her protective locket, "and now I'll never never, never feel like I'm safe again," she says. The adventure starts: They cut to the next section, where the guitars come in on a deluge of nautical imagery-- and then the frenzy gives way to an acoustic interlude that finds Eleanor singing gently in... Inuit?
The Furnaces pull off other mini-operas on "Blueberry Boat"-- on which Eleanor faces off against a gang of pirates-- and "Chris Michaels", whose different parts run together so quickly that its story is almost mashed to gibberish. Matt Friedberger, who-- unlike on the band's first album-- wrote all of the material, emerges as a pop auteur. Matt has acknowledged the influence of The Who's rock suites, "A Quick One, While He's Away" and "Rael", but instead of taking a single theme and expanding it into one lengthy song, Matt is more likely to concatenate half-dozen seemingly separate ideas in a way that makes every piece-- even a straightforward track such as "Straight Street"-- feel epic.
So much stuff is jammed into Blueberry Boat that you'd think Freidberger put some of it in for kicks. The Noah's Ark of retro guitars and garish prog keyboards initially seems random, and on the evidence of the Furnaces' live shows, these versions aren't even definitive: Their sets rework, split and remake their repertoire into one breathless block of music, one on which a song might show up for only one verse or come back three or four times. But this isn't arbitrary: Matt and Eleanor are just reworking and sequencing the songs for different contexts. The process resembles the way a DJ sets up a mix, and-- like in a club setting-- the final product should be judged not simply on which pieces they use, but on how well those segments work as a whole and how the band controls the energy in the room.
Blueberry Boat's 13 tracks form a perfect flow, sticking short tunes between the mini-operas, building up through "Chris Michaels" to the brief respite of the "Paw Paw Tree" before exploding into "I Lost My Dog", the album's dizziest travelogue. As scrambled as Matt's palette may sound, a close listen reveals how perfectly he evokes each song's content: The sighing tones near the start of "Blueberry Boat" sound like waves lapping the bow of their vessel, "Mason City"'s beat chugs softly, like a train gliding into a station, and on "I Lost My Dog" Matt captures the frenzy of running all over town by switching instrumentation with every verse.
The lyrics keep pace, repeating the encyclopedic references and buckshot wordplay of the last album, but extending the narratives. Matt pulls us in and out of the fantasy-- as on "Spaniolated", where Eleanor starts as a grown-up slacker, only to find herself abducted before regressing back into childhood and given pills "to keep from growing taller." Gallowsbird's Bark told similarly meticulous stories about Eleanor's real-life wanderings through London or New Jersey, but this time the songs grow into elaborate fictions, and the stakes are higher, with battles and abductions belying the cheerful arrangements.
The Furnaces sound tighter here than on their debut, but they still retain a sense of carelessness and spontaneity-- listen to the rambunctious piano interlude on "Blueberry Boat" or the distracted spit off his guitar solos. Matt sings more on this record, with a delivery similar to Peter Gabriel in his Genesis days, and Eleanor's melodic, speak-singy vocals show a wider range and more force. Eleanor pushes her crystal-clear enunciation with a more aggressive delivery, especially when she slips into character, such as when she stands up to a mob of pirates and swears, "You ain't never getting the cargo of my blueberry boat."
John Darnielle's Last Plane to Jakarta devastatingly parodied The Strokes approach to their second album, joking that they would use their money and clout to make a two-album monster with eight-minute jams, tuba solos and a Gregg Allman guest spot. Whether that sounds like a dream or a nightmare, the joke was on us: The Strokes' second album sounded mostly like their first. But The Fiery Furnaces have made the kind of rock behemoth Darnielle described, a record for the overgrown part of our brain that craves engrossing complexity. The exuberant overload of Blueberry Boat will thrill and transport you with the ineluctable force of a great children's story, one whose execution matches its imagination. And like all the best children's stories, it takes off once the kids break the rules-- when they're dragged away from safety but have enough curiosity and faith in themselves to enjoy the adventure. We're just lucky to trail behind and pick up their breadcrumbs.


Birdman’s presence is largely intrusive on the pair’s joint project. It’s YoungBoy’s versatility that keeps the album afloat.

YoungBoy Never Broke Again / Birdman: From the Bayou

From the Bayou

Only one of the three music videos for Birdman and YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s joint mixtape From the Bayou features Birdman. And in that video, Birdman and YoungBoy never occupy the same room, a detail that captures the spirit of their collaboration. Over 13 tracks, they appear together five times, their ideas rarely intersecting, their performances disparate. For most of its runtime, the tape centers YoungBoy, who croons, yelps, and wails with his usual intensity and anguish, sharing glimpses of his life under house arrest after another jail bid. But YoungBoy’s caterwauling only barely conceals the emptiness of the project. Although Birdman postures as a mentor and fellow artist inspired by his young partner’s talent and drive, he is foremost an investor, and YoungBoy stock is hot.
YoungBoy and Birdman first teased From the Bayou in March 2018, when YoungBoy’s career was taking off on the strength of mixtapes and notoriety. Artistically, the collaboration made little sense. Birdman has one mode—stuntin’—and YoungBoy is a restless shapeshifter. But YoungBoy was buzzing at the time, and both artists had ties to Antoine “Fee” Banks, who manages YoungBoy and previously worked with Young Money. There was, at least, a veneer of brand synergy and shared history to the team-up. In the three-plus years since announcing the collab, however, YoungBoy has become a cultural and commercial juggernaut, his legal troubles, prolific output, and intimate writing swelling into a self-sustaining ecosystem. Though he has also released joint tapes with Rich the Kid and Moneybagg Yo, his music and his enterprise are decisively solitary.
This context makes Birdman’s presence conspicuously disruptive, an intrusion that the tape’s structure seems to acknowledge. After the fourth song, he vanishes, appearing again only on the final track. Previous pairings “We Poppin’” and “Ride” showed Birdman and YoungBoy don’t have much in common besides a shared love of toasting to success, so it’s a relief when Birdman bows out early. But his absence highlights the laziness of the project as a whole. Besides the uninspired reference to their home state in the title, YoungBoy and Birdman don’t even try to bridge their worlds. Plenty of modern collaborations come together through emails, file-sharing, and DMs, but From the Bayou feels computed. This wacky, unused artwork is their most interesting shared moment.

Taken as a YoungBoy solo project, From the Bayou works fine. YoungBoy continues to use music as a confession booth where he unspools his doubts and fears, and channels his rage and defiance. His writing is often lucid and particular, his verses filled with the names of streets and people he holds dear. On introspective songs like “The Bigger End” and “Achievements,” he clings to these memories like a raft, the familiarity of his past briefly nullifying the uncertainty of his future. “Alligator Walk” is all threats, his voice swinging from whines to growls as he glides over a bouncy NoLimitShawn beat. His emotions gush out on “Heart & Soul,” a song filled with teary self-assessments and urgent goal-setting. “I been wanna do right since I touched down/I been watchin’ the way I influence now/I ain’t post not a picture, I moved on/I’m responsible to all these children now,” he raps, claiming his mantle as king of YouTube and the platform’s teen hordes.
YoungBoy’s versatility ultimately keeps From the Bayou afloat, but even his best performances feel meager compared to his past releases. Putting aside this strange Birdman detour, YoungBoy’s music grows more standardized with every release. He continues to opt for functional beats that lean hard on weepy pianos and bluesy guitar loops. He rarely broaches new sounds, flows, or song structures. His free-associative dispatches about healing and pain speak his thoughts but do not probe them. His music steers clear of surprises and risks. He’s consistent, as his fans like to say. So is Birdman.

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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Aimee Mann’s third album, a world-weary showcase of independent spirit and expertly tuned songwriting.

Aimee Mann: Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo

“Unpopular pop.” That’s the phrase Jon Brion used in 1999 to describe the music scene at Largo, the 120-seat venue in West Hollywood where he ran a weekly residency for more than a decade. Every Friday night, seated at a secondhand piano (that at some point acquired a decorative Viking helmet) and walled in by arcane analog instruments, the star producer, composer, and musical polymath put on a show. Among frequent guests were some of Brion’s most distinguished collaborators: Fiona Apple, Rufus Wainwright, and Aimee Mann. On any given night, John Paul Jones, Jackson Browne, or even Kanye West could appear on the tiny, rug-covered stage.
Owned by Mark Flanagan, a towering Irishman with discerning taste in music, Largo became a haven for the eclectic, sophisticated pop sound Brion championed, played by performers who’d long ago outgrown open-mic nights. Flanagan also filled out bills with pillars of LA’s stand-up scene: Zach Galifianakis, Margaret Cho, Sarah Silverman. Music-loving filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson and Michel Gondry were in the mix, too. Largo became an ersatz salon and fostered some of the greatest collaborations of its time.
This is the environment that nurtured Mann’s brilliant 2000 album Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo. The traditional narrative around Mann’s career frames her as an aberration. Over the course of four decades, she has been a pop flavor of the week who reinvented herself as a singer-songwriter; a folk-rock traditionalist who refused to posture her way into a self-consciously edgy alternative idiom; a woman whose persona isn’t seductive or enraged so much as pensive and, at times, embittered; an artist in a youth-obsessed industry who started doing her best work sometime in her late 30s. All of this made her an outlier in the music industry at large. But at Largo, Mann was among her people.
The gimmick-free nature of her music and public image perturbed sexist, unimaginative major-label executives in the ’90s, when the industry was still printing money and every act was expected to break out with the same velocity as Nirvana. At the beginning of that decade, Mann’s band ’Til Tuesday—a new wave act that had peaked with the breathy 1985 hit “Voices Carry”—broke up, and she launched a solo career. Her power-pop debut, 1993’s Whatever, and somewhat more muted 1995 follow-up I’m With Stupid proved she was a witty, self-possessed songwriter, even as sales in the low six figures disappointed the suits.
By the time she made her third album, Bachelor No. 2, Mann was known for clashing with the industry. In 1999, The New York Times Magazine sent reporter Jonathan van Meter to observe her struggle to get her label to release the record over their protests that it lacked a single. “A single is a record company’s job: to pick out a song that they think is good and make sure people hear it,” Mann complained. “It’s also incidentally, their job to come up with a way of selling records if, say, I don’t have a single at all.”
She wrote the deceptively winsome piano ballad “Nothing Is Good Enough” about this exhausting back-and-forth. “It doesn’t really help that you can never say what you’re looking for/But you’ll know it when you hear it,” she sings. The lightness of her vocal lends a hint of irony to her scornful lyrics, which offended her A&R rep. He assured the Times that not only had he given her specific feedback on choruses that “weren’t working,” he’d also made her a tape of better ones. Mann eventually told van Meter that she’d heard Interscope head Jimmy Iovine had listened to Bachelor No. 2 and demanded, “Aimee doesn’t expect us to put this record out as it is, does she?”
At various points during the recording process, Mann attempted to churn out the hit that would liberate her other songs from the vaults at Interscope. But she still ended up with a release steeped in the aesthetics and values of Largo, a place so hospitable to her sound that Flanagan once jokingly called it “Aimee Mann’s clubhouse.” Out of step though it might have been with a testosterone-damaged late-’90s rock marketplace dominated by Mann’s Interscope labelmates Nine Inch Nails, Limp Bizkit and Marilyn Manson (not to mention a pop sphere populated by and targeted entirely toward teens), the intricately crafted Bachelor No. 2 was a gift to the crowd Brion called “song sluts,” who lined up outside the club every Friday.
More than any album Mann had made up to that point, it’s a showcase for the detail she builds into her music before the recording process even begins. “I kind of like it to sound like a complete song before I get to the studio,” she explained to Performing Songwriter magazine in 2005. “I work hard to make sure both the melody and the words are strong before thinking about recording or production.”
The approach suits her unpretentious attitude toward music-making, which she treats as a craft as much as an art. Throughout her career, Mann has shown little patience for the idea that there’s something mysterious and alchemical behind creativity. “People are a little too in love with this idea of the crazy genius,” she said on the podcast Beyond and Back. “That it’s effortless, that it’s flowing, that you’re born with it. Because songwriting is a skill.”
Yet Mann’s songwriting, particularly on Bachelor No. 2, has its share of magical elements. She has the ability to sublimate a simple folk melody into something weightless and soaring. Her slinky “Calling It Quits,” an initially spare, glum resolution to resign from the rat race, gets an infusion of energy and wonder at the moment she invokes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novella “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”; Mann is as wary of the priceless gemstone as Fitzgerald was, but a few regal trumpet blasts (provided by none other than Flanagan) and the crash of cymbals capture its sparkling allure.
Throughout the album, a handful of producers, including Brion and Mann herself, add dimension to her finely wrought melodies and words. Each recording feels like a faithful translation of her rousing performances, with sing-along refrains and strummy intros intact. As a result, despite its scattered genesis over several stints in the studio, Bachelor No. 2 has the organic flow of a late-night set in a small, hushed room. There’s a piano-bar feel to the instrument’s low, steady ramble on “Driving Sideways.” Keyboards clink like a pair of wine glasses on “Satellite,” underlining Mann’s gentle, devastating diagnosis of a confidant’s loss of perspective: “Baby, it’s clear/From here/You’re losing your atmosphere.” Though they’re by no means minimalistic, these arrangements establish a sense of intimacy that’s hard to find on full-band rock records that aren’t deliberately, performatively lo-fi.
The archetypal bar—not the club or the stadium but maybe Largo on a slow night—makes an ideal imagined backdrop for 13 songs bound together by the kind of world-weary wisdom pop culture associates with such settings. Sometimes Mann is the regular slumped over a tumbler of whiskey, wryly enumerating her many disappointments. Other times, she plays the bartender—listening closely, dispensing no-nonsense advice, offering a gruff sort of comfort. Bottled-up energy builds to explosive choruses in “Ghost World,” smashing the veneer of detachment that surrounds Daniel Clowes’ comic-book heroine Enid Coleslaw, a seen-it-all barfly in the body of a teen girl.
As early as “Voices Carry,” Mann had an ear for sudden, surprising hooks. That talent manifests enchantingly on “Red Vines,” a rumination on the meteoric rise of her younger friend Paul Thomas Anderson that starts out placid but lifts off on Mann’s intensifying vocal before the first verse is through, then crescendos straight into a chorus that lingers on dilated vowels. The dark side of “Red Vines” is the way it frames Mann, still under 40 but a decade past her own bright-young-thing years, as both a cheerleader of Anderson’s success and the only one who foresees his inevitable fall from grace. (That she was wrong in using her experience to predict a downfall that never arrived probably says less about their respective outputs than it does about pop music’s youth bias and the misogyny that pervades all corners of the entertainment industry.) She’s constantly anticipating the misfortunes of others. She knows when they’re bound for disappointment, when they’re deluding themselves, when they’ve lost the plot entirely and need to be cut off for the night.
The best song on the album, and the one that most thoroughly embodies its wary, bruised point of view, is “Deathly.” Warmed up by whispered backing vocals from Brion and Juliana Hatfield, it’s a preemptive rejection from someone who’s been hurt too many times to risk heartbreak again. “Don’t pick on me/When one act of kindness could be deathly,” Mann pleads, her emphatic down-strums and simple rhyme scheme inviting a cathartic sing-along. She repeats the brief but evocative title so many times, it finally morphs into a word that’s even more devastating by virtue of its finality: “definitely.” Because she chooses her maximalist moments carefully on Bachelor No. 2, the song’s stratospheric, almost overblown minute-long instrumental outro lends an epic scale to what amounts to Mann’s refusal to keep experiencing emotions.
It was “Deathly” that inspired Anderson to complete the circle of inspiration, making Mann’s music the centerpiece of his 1999 film Magnolia. It makes up the bulk of the soundtrack, alongside a score from Brion (whose history with Anderson dated back to the director’s 1996 debut Hard Eight, on which he collaborated with Mann’s husband, composer Michael Penn). Unfolding over a night punctuated by violent L.A. rain—and culminating in a biblical cloudburst of bullfrogs—Magnolia follows an intersecting cast of lonely, angry, wounded and regretful characters.
In one scene, an abuse survivor and addict named Claudia (Melora Walters) abruptly ends what looked to be a promising first date with a kind, embattled police officer (John C. Reilly) by speaking the opening salvo of “Deathly”: “Now that I’ve met you, would you object to never seeing each other again?” (“I heard that line and wrote backwards,” Anderson recalled in an introduction to the shooting script. “This ‘original’ screenplay could, for all intents and purposes, be called an adaption of Aimee Mann songs.”) The film hinges on this ugly but understandable impulse, to hurt anyone you could potentially care about before they gain the power to hurt you.
Of the nine songs Mann contributed to Magnolia’s soundtrack, including an apt cover of “One” recycled from a Harry Nilsson tribute album, four also appear on Bachelor No. 2: “Driving Sideways,” the muted woman-to-woman warning “You Do” and an instrumental version of “Nothing Is Good Enough,” along with “Deathly.” Magnolia drew more attention to non-album tracks “Wise Up,” which the cast sings in one surreal sequence, and the emotional steamroller “Save Me,” which earned an Academy Award nomination. (Mann got to perform it at the Oscars, but it lost to Phil Collins’ saccharine “You’ll Be in My Heart,” from Tarzan.) Written for Bachelor No. 2 before being appropriated as a Magnolia single, it’s the flip-side of “Deathly.” Mann’s narrator—“a girl in need of a tourniquet”—begs, or maybe dares, an object of affection to pluck her “from the ranks of the freaks/Who suspect they could never love anyone.”
Mann has said that Bachelor No. 2 could’ve come out as early as 1998, but a combination of label gridlock and the marketing cycle around Magnolia, whose soundtrack hit stores just before the film’s December 1999 theatrical debut, delayed its release until the following May. In the meantime, on tour, an impatient Mann sold homemade EPs of her new music, in what she has characterized as a “real DIY fuck-you-record-company-I’m-selling-it-myself” gesture. And after the no-confidence vote from Iovine, she bought back her masters from Interscope, founded the label SuperEgo, and put out Bachelor No. 2 on her own. That courageous move presaged a future where artists with dedicated fan bases wouldn’t need corporate middlemen to access them.
With a boost in name recognition from Magnolia and the Oscars, sales of the album soared past 200,000—easily outperforming I’m With Stupid. (This was an especially decisive victory for Mann: In 1999, then-Sony VP Gail Marowitz had told the Times that “if Aimee sold 70,000 records independently, she would be making more money than if she sold 300,000 on a major label.”) It was in collaborating with Anderson on a movie that eventually played in more than 1,000 theaters that Mann finally found a wider audience primed to appreciate her pithy, disenchanted songs.
Largo’s is the rare story of a small, independently owned music venue that has a happy ending. Flanagan and friends left the original venue for a larger one, Largo at the Coronet, in 2008. Eleven years later, Brion maintains a monthly Friday-night residency, and in December, Mann and Ted Leo are scheduled to play three nights of Christmas shows. “For a while there,” Mann once said, “I was actually going to call the record Underdog Day.” Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo probably makes a grander, more elegant name for a contemporary classic. But the alternate title certainly would have fit.


Christians Catch Hell, a collection of 18 tracks from Henry Stone and Timmy Thomas' late 1970s Gospel Roots label, transcends record collector arcana by providing a snapshot of the underexplored intersection between disco, funk, and gospel. Despite its fiery title, the prevailing themes here are joy, empathy, and compassion.

Various Artists: Christians Catch Hell: Gospel Roots 1976-79

Producer and label owner Henry Stone, who passed away last August at the age of 93, was the kind of mythic record label executive who turns up midway through music biopics, or as the "other guy" in countless photos of famous artists. He regularly shared cognac at his house with James Brown; he recorded a young Ray Charles; he singlehandedly put Miami on the map with his early '70s label TK Records; and made a star of a worker in his warehouse named Harry Wayne Casey, whose KC & the Sunshine band scored disco hits like "That's The Way (I Like It)" and "(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty" for TK. Just as impressive as his business smarts was his restlessness: though TK was Stone's primary concern, he also oversaw a fleet of smaller independent labels, each of which had a different stylistic focus, but were all loosely linked to R&B.
One of those labels was Gospel Roots, which Stone founded in 1976 with Timmy Thomas, who had himself scored a hit four years prior with "Why Can't We Live Together", a song that has had a particularly big 2015. Like all of Stone's ventures, Gospel Roots quickly amassed a sprawling discography, releasing 50 LPs in just three years. Part of this was owed to the label's canny structure—rather than shelling out for recording and production, Stone snapped up pre-existing gospel masters from regional artists and simply pressed and distributed them through Gospel Roots. According to the extensive notes included with Christians Catch Hell, Thomas rarely met—or even spoke to—the artists whose work he was commissioned to promote. The label expired just three years after it was founded, without scoring a single notable hit.
That backstory makes Christians Catch Hell—a collection of 18 tracks from the Gospel Roots label—seem like yet another in a long line of barrel-scraping reissues of "lost classics," but the music it contains transcends record collector arcana, providing instead a snapshot of the underexplored intersection between disco, funk, and gospel. Despite its fiery title, the prevailing themes on Christians are joy, empathy and compassion; in nearly all of them, salvation and Divine love are contrasted with societal ills. On the loose, New Orleans-style R&B of the Fantastic Family Aires' "Tell Me", vocalist Rachion Conigan asks repeatedly, "What is this world coming to?" describing fractured families and global catastrophes as the band vamps balefully behind him. Later, in "The Color of God", they attack racism, describing God as being "a natural color," existing above toxic, man-made prejudice. Like "Tell Me", the music that accompanies it is a slow walk, full of teardrop guitar licks and heartbeat bass lines.
By contrast, Pastor T.L. Barrett's swooping "After the Rain" comes on like Talking Book-era Stevie Wonder, with big, clanging piano ringing out behind Barrett's fervent reassurances of God's enduring love. And "On Jesus' Program", by the Original Sunset Travelers, is a kind of twilight doo-wop number that edges its way forward slowly, with an unidentified lead vocalist spilling his honeyed tenor over deep-set, creeping music. There are fragments of hundreds of styles on Christians: the wacka-wacka disco guitar on "For the Children", the twinkling cocktail lounge funk on the sweeping "Said It Long Time Ago", and late-night Quiet Storm vocals on the praise number "Spirit Free", which gracefully blurs the line between spiritual and romantic love. Christians subtly connects all of these genres, indicating passages from one to the other while also gesturing toward their common source in gospel music. More than being a simple celebration of obscure artists, Christians is instead a kind of roadmap, tracing the byways that lead from one style to another.
At times, it could do with a bit more heat. With few of the tracks operating above mid-tempo, it begins to sag slightly as it goes on. Fortunately, it snaps back into focus with the late arrival of the title track, a smoky, agonized blues number powered by the impassioned vocals of Rev. Edna Isaac and the Greene Sisters. In the liners, Isaac describes crying while writing the lyrics, and every ounce of that pain turns up in her delivery. Unlike the rest of the record, which presents religion as a rescue, "Christians Catch Hell" focuses on the difficulty of having faith, and the oppression from friends and spiritual forces that accompanies belief. "People who are non-Christians/ Throw stumbling blocks in your way," she cautions, "Satan chooses his disciples/ Puts his seal on them to do his ways/…But I'd rather be a Christian/ And stay with the Lord every day." Like all of the songs on Christians, it didn't turn its singer into a star on par with, say KC & the Sunshine Band. But the conviction of the performance and the clarity of the lyrics suggests that perhaps earthly acclaim was beside the point.