The follow-up to Renaissance is a powerful and ambitious country album cast in the singular mold of Beyoncé. She asserts her rightful place in the genre as only a pop star of her incredible talent and influence can do.

Cowboy Carter

If Lemonade taught us anything, it’s that you do not fuck with Beyoncé. Her 2016 opus was her seething response to being wronged, giving us the indelible image of a smiling woman in a yellow dress carrying a baseball bat and the enduring specter of Becky and her good hair. We already know what happens when something meddles with her peace—she puts her whole being into righting the wrongs, enacting her revenge with a twinkle in her eye, extra gumption in her voice, and ice in her veins. There’s a particular edge when one of the world’s biggest music superstars has a chip on her shoulder. This doesn’t often occur—of late, Beyoncé has been acting as a beatific Mother in every way—but when it does, boy howdy, look out.
Lemonade, as it happened, may have helped plant the seed for Cowboy Carter, which was “born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed… and it was very clear that I wasn’t.” It seems she is referring to her 2016 appearance at the Country Music Association Awards, in which she performed Lemonade’s Texas country triumph “Daddy Lessons” with the Chicks, who were also once exiled by the entire country music apparatus. As they played the song and after it ended, Beyoncé was met with reactions that ranged from cool sneers to racist vitriol, both in the crowd and online.
At that moment, it was clear that even Beyoncé’s Texas bona fides wouldn’t protect her from the longstanding racism and sexism that still existed in the country mainstream, despite Black musicians creating the spark of country music and Black Americans creating the foundations of the country itself. “Because of that experience,” she wrote, “I did a deeper dive into the history of country music and studied our rich musical archive… the criticisms I faced when I first entered this genre forced me to propel past the limitations that were put on me.” The country music establishment got Beyoncé doing homework. The guns they are a-blazin’.
But, as Beyoncé has clarified, Cowboy Carter—or Act II, the follow-up to the 2022 dance album Renaissance—is not a country album. Rather, Beyoncé has ventured into Louisiana Cajun country, the rivers of Alabama, the streets of Memphis, the great Oklahoma plains, and within her memories of multiracial Texas rodeos to create yet another world in her image. It’s partly rooted in Western tropes but with a pointed look toward the America that’s often erased on the CMAs stage—and in the public school history books. The album’s press release reminds us that the etymology of the word “cowboy,” which comes from the Spanish “vaquero,” derives in part from white ranchers calling their white employees “cowhands,” and their Black employees the diminutive “cowboy.” By using country as a starting point for experimentation and recalling genre-porous artists like Ray Charles, Candi Staton, Charley Pride, and the Pointer Sisters, Cowboy Carter asserts Beyoncé’s place in this long legacy while showcasing the ever-expanding reaches of her vocal prowess.
On Cowboy Carter, Club Renaissance is swapped out for KNTRY Radio Texas, an AM station hosted by an ever-hazy Willie Nelson. Here she re-contextualizes roots music—Americana, folk, country—for a contemporary moment, reminding listeners that Black artists were the genesis of these forms and never stopped playing them, despite what Hollywood or Nashville might have on offer. Even before the album dropped, the associated visuals reignited a dialogue about Black country’s legacy that started in 2018 with the success of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” and Dallas culture critic Bri Malandro’s Yee Haw Agenda. With Beyoncé as conduit, she’s made these historical connections fun, though no one would accuse her of edutainment—she’s performed at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo more than once. Nor is Cowboy Carter an explicit fuck you to those who rejected her back in 2016, but it’s a show-and-prove that she knows better, that she belonged on that stage, and so do all the Black country and rock musicians she’s brought along to Carter Ranch. Well—the album’s “rodeo chitlin’ circuit” conceit, which refers to the venues that would allow Black musicians to perform in the segregated South, may be an explicit fuck you.
Cowboy Carter is also a flex, with Beyoncé proffering what may be one of the most expensive albums ever made in terms of royalties—to my ear she’ll be cutting checks to Dolly, Chuck Berry, Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Patsy Cline, Mickey and Sylvia, and Hank Cochran, all of whose songs are interpolated or covered here. Cowboy Carter plays out like a classic country murder ballad, the wronged townsgal returning to her dusty outpost to pop off her vengeance—“Your bloodstains on my custom coutures,” as she sings in “Daughter.” The concept is thrilling, though it must be underlined that in the grand scheme of things, Beyoncé is still a megastar with a billion in the bank as she kicks through the swinging saloon doors. She may be bringing a small posse of lesser-known artists with her, but as she noted, this is more about “challenging” herself, not an altruistic endeavor. She is one of the only musicians in the world who can force the hand of her haters by sheer will and ubiquity; the country establishment will have to hear her whether they like it or not, and that seems to be enough.
Cowboy Carter is equally a text and a performance, but let’s first talk about the text. Beyoncé rides in on a galloping horse delightfully named Chardonneigh, wearing a latex flip on a rodeo queen’s regalia (though we’ll leave the physics of such a pose to the trick riders), and carrying a partially visible American flag into album opener “Ameriican Requiem,” on which she deploys Tina Turner power-rasping toward the foundation of the American project. “Can you hear me, or do you fear me?” she wails, indicting the hypocrisy of a country built on freedom by enslaved people before planting her own flag in it—she’s American, too.
The message is underscored with an affecting cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” a folk song Paul McCartney wrote in part as a response to seeing the violence and hatred levied at the Little Rock Nine—nine Black teenagers attempting to attend high school in Arkansas after Brown v. Board of Education made school segregation illegal. She’s joined in its hopeful lullaby by a coterie of talented Black women making country music—Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Reyna Roberts, and Tiera Kennedy of “Jesus, My Mama, My Therapist” fame—and elsewhere, extends her influence to Virginia country hip-hop musician Shaboozey (“Spaghettii,” “Sweet ★ Honey ★ Buckiin’”) and the Shreveport artist Willie Jones on “Just for Fun.” The latter song, a gospel-inflected meditation on journeying through your troubles, moves through piano, acoustic guitar, strings, and a percussive stomp that mimics a horse gallop, just one example of the way Cowboy Carter has largely set aside the synths of Renaissance for a more organic, live-to-tape feel of capturing a band in a very nice studio.
Rhiannon Giddens’ banjo and viola on “Texas Hold ’Em” initially set the tone for Cowboy Carter when it was released earlier this year, but there’s not much else resembling contemporary country on the album. Instead, Beyoncé focuses on American folk music and the golden era of country, with cosigns from legends who forged their legacies in the 1960s and ’70s: Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, and most notably Linda Martell, the first Black woman to play the Grand Ole Opry. “Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?” Martell opens in a voice-over on “Spaghettii.” “In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.”
To prove the point, Beyoncé ushers in another horse-gallop trap beat and raps about her shooters, though Martell’s argument might be better exemplified on “Daughter,” a cowgirl revenge track that escalates, incredibly, into Beyoncé belting a stanza from the 18th-century aria “Caro Mio Ben”—in Italian, no less. Or maybe on “Sweet ★ Honey ★ Buckiin’,” where Cline’s classic “I Fall to Pieces” gets the Jersey club treatment while Beyoncé does “body rolls at the rodeo.” “My Rose” alternately recalls baroque vocal arrangements, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and ’60s psychedelia on a song about mother-love; “Desert Eagle” is an unlikely slap-bass strip-club anthem. Or, even more explicitly, “Riiverdance,” which interpolates finger-picked bluegrass guitar with a house piano and four-on-the-floor percussion that may be provided by Beyoncé’s nails, Dolly-and-Patti, “9 to 5” style. It’s as though the Renaissance dancers took a detour through Alabama for a little choreo by the Coosa before dipping back to the club.
Despite drawing from the kitsch and fun of ’70s and ’80s country music, Cowboy Carter has an air of melancholy to it, a quality that reverberates through the scores of songs in minor keys about loneliness on the range. But there’s also a musical theatricality, as when Beyoncé and Miley Cyrus “Leather and Lace” themselves across outlaw country on the ride-or-die track “II Most Wanted.” Or on the phenomenal “Ya Ya,” where the electrified live band is in funky mule mode while Bey kicks, shimmies, snaps, and twerks her way through a working person’s lifetime of bullshit. “Whole lotta red in that white and blue… History can’t be erased,” she belts, before summoning the racial wage gap and predatory mortgage company Fannie Mae alongside a sample from Chuck Berry, country and rock’n’roll creator. The reprieve, as with Renaissance, is to dance out the pain and “keep my Bible on the dash.” They’re not permanent solutions, but at least she’ll make sure you’ll have a good time doing it.
The gutbucket sound of the live instrumentation is unique for Beyoncé, but the flexibility of her voice remains unbelievable. On tracks like “Protector” and “Daughter,” her high notes occasionally modulate down like a slide guitar, a breathy technique that’s distinctly country, but only sounds natural when a vocalist is in total control, as Beyoncé always is. The looseness of the acoustic instruments suits her, particularly when she lets herself be languid in the humidity of a song like “Alliigator Tears,” or sings in her lowest register on “Just for Fun.” She doesn’t have to backflip over a horse for the emotion to resonate.
Beyoncé’s persona has become American iconography, and her magnitude tends to cast a shadow over everything before her, no matter the medium. The side effect of this is that some of Cowboy Carter’s songs feel small and ill-suited for Beyoncé’s stature. “Levii’s Jeans,” her branded duet with Post Malone, is a pale attempt at contemporary country that has already been used in a marketing stunt; the shades of Fleetwood Mac on “Bodyguard” feel stock for an album of Cowboy Carter’s aspirations. On the much-ballyhooed “Jolene” cover, requested and cosigned by Dolly herself, Bey transforms its begging into a warning, re-concentrating the power into her own hands (and christening herself a “Creole banjee bitch from Louisiane,” another thread between Acts I and II). “Jolene” is also one of the most-covered songs in history, a choice that requires confidence that it will, at least in those three minutes, belong to you. Like her version of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” at the end of Renaissance, “Jolene” remains on loan.
But Cowboy Carter is another volume in Beyoncé’s years-long project to surface and pay tribute to Black culture, the way she spotlighted the queer dance underground in Renaissance and HBCUs in Homecoming. It’s still wild that she can provoke this type of dialogue on such a massive scale; for weeks both social and regular media have been locked into conversations about the history of Black country musicians, a sort of correcting the American musical canon. On the gospel album closer “Amen,” a companion to “Ameriican Requiem,” she alludes to the fact that the United States was built by enslaved Black people—“The statues they made were beautiful/But they were lies of stone”—and circles back to the inciting incident of Cowboy Carter: that what she experienced at the CMAs is part of an America that, you may have heard, has a problem. Though lyrics like “Can we stand for something?” might be vague, her message is quite clear. Beyoncé, too, is an American, so do-si-do on that.


Two Latin-trap stars join forces for a slickly produced and familiar-sounding Watch the Throne-style joint album.

Los Dioses

From a business perspective, Ozuna and Anuel AA represent the vanguard of the 21st century artist-driven model. Each artist has their own label—and owns their master recordings—and has marketing and distribution deals with major-label reach. They frequently work with peers, and carefully choose English-language collaborators to expand their audiences. Growing up at the same time in different parts of San Juan, they entered the music industry from different angles but remained friends, their paths occasionally crossing as they racked up views on YouTube and dominated the charts.
So their first collaborative LP Los Dioses makes a lot of sense on paper. Combining star power in service of world domination is a tried-and-true recipe for success (Watch the Throne, Oasis), and their goals seem to dovetail quite nicely. Anuel has spent the past two years since his release from prison staking out mainstream territory with the Shaggy riddim-riding “China” and his duet “Secreto” with the Colombian singer (and current novia) Karol G; a collaborative LP with one of Latin music’s biggest stars is the next logical step to commercial success. And while Ozuna has been one of the most bankable artists of the last few years, his last album Nibiru was disappointingly saccharine, making the prospect of rubbing up against Anuel’s grit even more appealing, even if the latter rapper has been forced to apologize for bigotry in his lyrics.
And it works, with some caveats. The title track’s beat is a fresh reminder of the flavor and syncopation that Latin artists and producers can bring to trap. “RD” captures this feeling too, even if the lyrics are disappointingly focused on sex tourism. And the drill beat on “Maria” knocks, but it feels a bit like cosplay when contrasted with actual drill rappers like Sie7etr3. It might not break any new ground, but the A-level production is consistently excellent.
Across Los Dioses’ 12 tracks, Anuel and Ozuna dabble in several branches of the musica urbana family tree, with a well-sequenced mix of trap, drill (“Maria”), R&B ballads (“Perfecto”), and reggaetón. “Perreo” is a relatively straightforward but undeniably propulsive dancefloor anthem. They even dabble in the increasingly popular Mexican folk revival on “Municiones”—yet more evidence of the rising influence of Natanael Cano’s Trap Tumbado movement. It’s slickly produced, with a familiar roster of beatmakers (Tainy, DJ Luian, Subelo Neo, Mambo Kingz) responsible for some of Bad Bunny’s biggest hits.
But Los Dioses’ lyrical concepts are somewhat tired, packed with mostly boring tropes about disposable women, expensive cars and jewelry, and smoking weed. And Ozuna’s pitch on “Perfecto”—that he’s kind of a bastard, but he won’t apologize so don’t hate him—is at once baffling and impressively brazen. In spite of this, the songs are somewhat redeemed by the vocal performances. These are two artists that understand the unique timbre of their voices—the sweet softness of Ozuna’s croon, the gruff rumble of Anuel’s growl—and how they play off of each other. It’s especially prevalent when they harmonize on hooks (“100”), each occupying their own register, with a combined impact neither could deliver on their own.
Los Dioses is a perfectly serviceable—enjoyable, even—LP. But in a space defined by artists riffing on established genres, the ones that distinguish themselves add new flavor and personality with each release. And after Bad Bunny’s monumental 2020 obliterated the boundaries of both what urbano sounds like and how its stars engage with their audience, making an impact requires more than doubling down on big-name collaborations. While Ozuna and Anuel remain some of Spanish-language music’s biggest stars, Los Dioses will do nothing to prevent them from being eclipsed.

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The Scottish band’s excellent third album features some of their darkest and most detailed songs. Wholly beautiful and delicate, it was Stuart Murdoch’s first reluctant step into the spotlight.

Belle and Sebastian: The Boy With the Arab Strap

The Boy With the Arab Strap

Stuart Murdoch spent the heart of his 20s suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, engaging his intellect with music, film, and literature while daydreaming about being in a band. Indoors and alone for seven years from the end of the ’80s into the early ’90s in his native Scotland, he found comfort in piano and guitar and began to shape delicate character studies and cultural references into song. By the time he recovered enough to re-engage with the world, he had amassed a cache of evocative songs, often set in childhood or schoolyard settings where he was found absent. This is Belle and Sebastian’s second-most-well-known origin story, but it’s the key to understanding why one of the most gifted songwriters of his generation decided that he wanted to be an ensemble player rather than a star.
Most famously, the group itself started in a Scottish university music business classroom, when a ramshackle collection of friends and acquaintances conspired to flesh out and record a backlog of Murdoch’s songs for a class project which they would call Tigermilk. Sixteen months later, Murdoch’s treasure trove had fueled another album, If You’re Feeling Sinister, and three more EPs. This early work was gossamer and beautiful, coaxing and charming listeners at a time when the major strains of ’90s indie and alternative music—Britpop, grunge, and alternative rock—were either completing their transformations into leaden knuckle-dragging or confusing rote quirk for real charm. Murdoch’s songs were instead a welcome embrace of classicism and craft, recalling ’60s pop and homespun ’80s indie but locating something more intimate than either.
By the time of their third album, 1998’s The Boy With the Arab Strap, Belle and Sebastian truly became a full band, kicking off what would be a tumultuous half-decade or so transforming from a vehicle for Murdoch’s voice to something more democratic and professional. True to Murdoch’s vision of a gang of musicians, four different songwriters and voices appeared on The Boy With the Arab Strap, creating a patchwork effort that at the time frustrated a portion of their audience, disappointed that after a year without any new Murdoch compositions, he had given one-third of this album to other songwriters. Only one song on the album dated back to Murdoch’s long-suffering early days—”Sleep the Clock Around” naturally; on Arab Strap, Murdoch’s characters finally grew up and into adulthood. Fatalism and missed opportunities color the record, with Murdoch grappling with his quick ride from bedridden isolation to notoriety. Mortality even rears its head: “He had a stroke at the age of 24/It could have been a brilliant career,” Murdoch sings on the record’s opening line. Three songs later, on “Ease Your Feet in the Sea,” Murdoch is reflecting on a friend’s suicide.
As a live act, they were still trying just to put one foot in front the other, but the band’s arrangements also began to demonstrate true ensemble playing, taking on more lived-in qualities and highlighted by the addition of Chris Geddes’ Fender Rhodes and his love of Northern soul. Bagpipes close the exquisite “Sleep the Clock Around” and bassist Stuart David’s sluggish story song “A Spaceboy Dream” is redeemed by its jazz-exotica outro and, in particular, the contrast it provides to the punch and force of the organ-led stomp of “Dirty Dream #2.”
Arab Strap and its follow-up, 2000’s Fold Your Hand Child, You Walk Like A Peasant, feature some of Murdoch’s darkest songwriting, but the band itself was nevertheless tagged heavily with the lighthearted “twee” tag—in large part due to the wan vocals of other three songwriters. On top of David’s contribution came cellist Isobel Campbell’s whispered and lovely “Is It Wicked Not to Care?” and a pair of meta-indie narratives from guitarist Stevie Jackson—one documenting a missed opportunity to meet a legendary record executive and one about a day out with an American fanzine writer. Oddly then for many new listeners, their introductions to the band were these second-stage songs. To the uninitiated, it was these tracks that crystallized the idea that B&S were effete and too precious, a reaction most clearly articulated by Jack Black’s acerbic record store clerk Barry in High Fidelity, whose biting reaction to hearing a few seconds of the album was that it was “sad bastard music” that “sucks ass.” (Pitchfork’s original pan came to similar conclusions.)
The band started out as literal students of music and this dialogue with the past is baked into what they do. Soon, though, it would become outmoded. Arab Strap came out the year before Napster was developed, just before a golden age of deep discovery in which the initial mind-blowing concept that all music was now effectively available. This threw the experience of being a Belle and Sebastian fan into stark relief. To date, the band had been more discussed than heard, a secret once passed on primitive message boards and dubbed cassettes. Early records were difficult to find in the U.S. in particular and Tigermilk, restricted at the time to 1,000 vinyl copies, became in effect the last sought-after newly released album that was impossible to hear until Martin Shkreli wrote a seven-figure check to the Wu-Tang Clan.
Most egregious—or delightful depending on your opinion of the band—was that the members refused to do interviews, letting the music do the speaking for them. It takes an almost perverse amount of effort for an eight-piece band to feel reclusive, but the sense of anonymity magnified the intensity of praise around them. The mystery fueled the cult-like following that wound up chasing them into the spotlight by voting them Best Newcomer at the 1999 Brit Awards over prohibitive favorite Steps. (If you wanted a clear idea of who was on the internet in 1999, it’s this: The indie band beat the teen pop band in a nationwide popularity contest.)
Stuart Murdoch was in some ways the last old-school indie star. The late ’90s featured a group of talented, fringe singer-songwriters—Elliott Smith, Cat Power, Stephin Merritt, Will Oldham—but Murdoch still felt like he was crafting his own world with its own internal logic. The sound of Arab Strap is a little slipstream in which the more precious end of Gen X indiedom thrived, a petri dish that would eventually spawn everything from the core Etsy aesthetic to sensitive-couple films like (500) Days of Summer. (Summer Finn’s yearbook quote—”Color my life with the chaos of trouble”—is from the title track and highlight of Arab Strap.) This record arrived at a turning point for the band and in many ways the group became to be defined by it. The quiet confidence of songs such as “The Rollercoaster Ride” or “Ease Your Feet in the Sea” would eventually be discarded for more overt flourishes and the happy-clappy, feel-good pop of later Belle and Sebastian albums. This is, instead, the sound of a very reluctant step into the spotlight.
The central truth of music in the digital era is that while it’s easier than ever to locate an audience, it’s more difficult to maintain one, and more difficult still to foster an intensity of admiration from a fanbase if they don’t have to put in the effort to seek out and experience shared secrets such as an indie band with difficult-to-find records. It’s a type of IRL-only fanaticism that the social media era doesn’t allow for; the economy of likes is a volume-play and the slot machine of swiping up or down your feed demands scannable content and recognizable names. Waving your arms frantically to get people to pay attention to your private obsessions isn’t a game with many rewards, let alone one that many people play. There aren’t hot takes about nobodies. The Boy With the Arab Strap is one of the more context-laden records of its era but it doesn’t suffer from the lack of noise around it, and in many ways is better off without it. The stakes of having to be a proper band clearly weighed on Murdoch and his cohorts in subsequent years and much of the music the group made between Arab Strap and 2003’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress sounds oddly labored. Here they sound like promise and hope; a gang of misfits so comfortable being out of step with the world that they created their own.


Tim Kasher's post-emo band tackles topics both deep and mundane on its latest Saddle Creek release.

Happy Hollow

Wait, people actually care about lyrics? Without them we couldn't have the same powerful, personal connections with people who make songs? Okay, fine. Words are important. But screams are better. That's something Cursive frontman Tim Kasher seemed to understand a decade ago, when he ripped out his heart, sewed it on his sleeve, and called it Such Blinding Stars for the Starving Eyes. But around Y2K, a funny thing happened-- he seemed to decide he'd rather his lyrics be understood than his voice be heard.
The result of that millennial crisis was Domestica, Cursive's first concept album, which told of the messy decline of a relationship in stanzas even the tinnitus-stricken could discern. Kasher still screamed plenty, but mixed in were plain-English zingers like, "The night has fallen down the staircase/ And I, for one, have felt its bruises." By the time The Ugly Organ dropped in 2003, even his throatiest bray had taken on tone.
For the scream-deprived, the band last year offered The Difference Between Houses and Homes, a career-spanning compendium of B-sides and rarities that had a whiff of posthumousness to it. Now Happy Hollow confirms the death: Cursive's salad days are over. They're officially a words band, more interested in meaning than feeling. And they're celebrating by tackling some big topics.
Happy Hollow is simultaneously Cursive's most and least worldly album yet, with songs encompassing both infinite realms (the universal "Big Bang") and mundane ones (suburban lead single "Dorothy at Forty"). All the while, Kasher mixes messages and metaphors, bitching far too much for his own good.
The first seven songs kill, but the album's second half drags on longer than a Def Jam debut. Even so, there's still stuff to dig. The single is a surging mass of vitriol- and trumpet-packed orchestral emo, while "Bad Sects" is one of the best American Football songs never written. The latter lays down a slow, stargazing groove while Kasher unveils a feathery, unexpected falsetto. It also features the album's consummate lyrics, accessing the spiritual through the quotidian: "A new recruit, 25 years old/ He joined the habit with a chip on his shoulder/ Some nights he'd proclaim his preference/ But only flat-back drunk on a bottle of Jameson."
Tales of lost faith permeate the album. "This is all we are, we simply exist," sings Kasher by way of an introduction on "Opening the Hymnal/Babies", though it's unclear at first whether the line constitutes an apostasy or just an observation. If you ask the brassy "Big Bang" it's the former: "In a world of entropy, why can't we just simply be," goes the song's pivotal line, kicks underlining each word. On "Dorothy at Forty", a meditation on hypocrisy in picket-fence America that uses The Wizard of Oz as an allegory, Kasher sings, "Dreamers never live, only dream of it." His storytelling may have grown more abstract since Domestica, but his existential observations have never been pithier.
Cursive could be a great rags-to-riches story: Catholic schoolkids purge repressed childhood memories by starting emo band, grow up to be a sort of Hold Steady for high schoolers. But the band's maturation has come in awkward fits, as if forced. Growth is something bands can't force-- it either happens or it doesn't. And even when it works out, people will still say your first album was your best. That's just life. Tough reality, but Tim Kasher will probably write an album about it someday.


A geographical move (from the Pacific Northwest to the Carolinas) and a more settled, comfortable sound both seem like logical progressions for the Sub Pop band, who here go for texture and shade over size and scale.

Cease to Begin

Following the success of their debut Everything All the Time and the subsequent departure of founding member Mat Brooke, the remaining members of Band of Horses moved from Seattle to Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, and set to recording their follow-up, Cease to Begin, in Asheville. Thousands of land-locked miles from the Great Salt Lake, this cross-country change of scenery is subtly apparent: If Everything All the Time was a Pacific Northwest indie album with flourishes of country and Southern rock, then Cease to Begin reverses the equation. Putting a different regional spin on their tender-hearted indie rock, however, doesn't change up the sound too much-- the guitars still churn and crest majestically, Bridwell's vocals still echo with grandiose reverb-- but simply creates an atmosphere evocative of something like autumn in a small town.
This geographical move and musical development both seem like logical progressions for Band of Horses, and not just because Bridwell originally hails from the South. The trio sounds more at home on Cease to Begin, and more confident writing about this specific neck of the woods. As a result, they shed many of the comparisons that dogged* Everything All the Time* last year: Every review had to mention the Shins, My Morning Jacket, or the Flaming Lips (me: guilty). Cease to Begin finds them opening up their sound, drawing in more ideas and giving the music the loping quality of a long walk down a dirt road.
As crunchy guitars give way to light strings on "Ode to LRC", Bridwell sings about a stray dog and a "town so small how could anybody not look you in the eye or wave as I drive by." He's one of few indie artists who can sell a line like "the world is such a wonderful place" or get away with singing "la-dee-da" with open-hearted amazement. On "Detlef Schrempf", for example, he sings, with heartfelt gravity, "Watch how you treat every living soul," and still somehow sounds bold and genuine.
On the other hand, Cease to Begin's looser vibe preempts the big moments that gave Everything All the Time its gravity. Listeners looking for another "Funeral" or "Great Salt Lake" may come away disappointed, making do with only the airborne rush of opener "Is There a Ghost". These songs go for texture and shade over size and scale, an admirable shift even if Band of Horses don't always pull it off. On "Cigarettes Wedding Band", they can't churn up enough bile to convey Bridwell's bitter lyrics; instead of contrasting the album's sweet-tea tone, the song simply reflects it, revealing the limits of their range. Still, Bridwell does accomplish the nifty trick of turning an accusation into a formidable pop hook: "While they lied-dee-die! Lah-dee-dah! While they lied!"
As they move southeasterly, Band of Horses may bear some derision as dad-rock at best, or as granola at worst. And yes, there are moments here that support those stereotypes: The sequencing of two downtempo ballads ("No One's Gonna Love You", "Detlef Schrempf") slows the album's first half almost to a halt. But even if Cease to Begin is a little creaky and uneven and even if it never finds the resting spot the album title promises, Band of Horses do guitar-based indie very well-- well enough, at least, that the next generation of American indie bands may bear comparisons to them. The album closes with "Window Blues", a slow, aching number that fades into a simple "Rainbow Connection" banjo outro that gives the album a snowglobe quality, despite the warmer Carolina climate. These songs depict a personal world in great detail, contained within a small space. Sure, Band of Horses could stand to shake it up a bit, but for now Bridwell seems content just to enjoy the view.


The second album from Seattle soul-rock quintet Pickwick finds the band with a renewed sense of harmony. But some songs make you wonder if it would have benefitted from more discord.

LoveJoys

The sophomore album from Seattle soul-rock quintet Pickwick starts off with “Turncoat,” a track that quickly brings to mind the slinky bass-and-drums groove of the Bee Gees staple “Stayin’ Alive”—only slowed to a crawl, as if the band were re-imagining Saturday Night Fever as made by Dark Side of the Moon-era Pink Floyd. When frontman Galen Disston’s falsetto trails off on the word “hide,” so that it sounds like “hiiiiiiiigh” during the chorus, it’s like hearing Barry Gibb sing Floyd’s “Breathe.” Pickwick blend the two styles with impeccable agility—perhaps too impeccably, as “Turncoat” immediately forces the listener’s focus onto flashy exterior style markers that don’t give a sense of the album’s character.
LoveJoys arrives four years after Pickwick’s full-length debut, Can’t Talk Medicine, but it’s actually the band’s second attempt at a follow-up. Forty songs into the process, an internal dispute over musical direction precipitated the exit of percussionist and in-house producer Kory Kruckenberg. His departure isn’t mentioned directly, but it is perhaps lurking between the lines when Disston makes musical references like “Hate to see you go/I lined up all the memories for the show” on “Never Gonna Be Enough.” Either way, the breakup left the remaining members with a renewed sense of harmony as they started from scratch with producer Erik Blood (Shabazz Palaces) at the helm.
But “Turncoat” and other songs make you wonder whether this album would have benefitted from more discord. Where Pickwick’s boppy live show is galvanizing enough to inspire even the most dance-averse audience member to move a little bit, the downtempo turn of the new album hints at a darker, more internal place. Ultimately, though, neither the music nor the lyrics go all the way there. On several songs, Disston sings about what appear to be romantic entanglements that are clouded by uncertainty—fertile ground, of course, but he doesn’t provide enough detail for listeners to relate or feel the sting when he gets worked up into an Otis Redding-via-Bernhoft style lather.
“Even I had left you by the end/You left me too, no finding you/Where you are,” he croons on the Ethiopian jazz-tinged “Light It Up (Let It Burn).” It would help if we knew where Disston’s narrator was in relation to this other person. To his credit, though, he doesn’t point fingers much, which leaves the songs on LoveJoys short on both villains and heroes—a lot like real life. There are also points where he gets the overall feeling across without being explicit. On the somber Zero 7-type album closer “Ammonia,” he sings almost entirely in falsetto, and yet makes the song rise and fall with him in a remarkable show of dynamic control.
It also helps that the band plays “Ammonia” with a bit of an edge, pointing to raw nerves underneath its gliding musical proficiency. When Pickwick push themselves beyond just mashing-up soul with other forms, they begin to arrive at a style of their own, such as on “Ascension,” where Garrett Parker’s bass throbs as if it were a cello run through a wah-wah pedal. The song bristles with a feeling that approaches but doesn’t quite reach anger, as drummer Alex Westcoat lags behind, strolling his way through the otherwise urgent groove, while bright horns spike the air.
With every note on LoveJoys, Pickwick’s execution is formidable and fluid. But on “Ascension,” the band sounds urgent, casual, hopeful, regretful, and sexy all at once. It is at those moments, when they put feeling over style, when their music truly stands out.


Wreckless Eric, born Eric Goulden, is a cult power-pop artist who got his start on Stiff Records in the late 1970s. His new album, amERICa, is rooted in classicist rock gestures but fixated on the contemporary United States. It isn’t complacent or satisfied; he anatomizes his surroundings with the wide-eyed thrill of discovery.

amERICa

"Several Shades of Green", the opener on Wreckless Eric’s amERICa, is flush with memories of "the hit parade," feckless backing musicians, and silly jackets recommended by magazine stylists. The music—a spare backbeat and bass guitar lollygag, busied by skittish piano runs and a modest choral section—belies the ragged, bemused delivery of an artist reflecting on his time as a journeyman power-pop artist on Stiff Records in the late 1970s. "If I’d known then, what I know now," goes the chorus—but it’s a tease. He stops and snickers at the temptation. That nimble maneuver—to reminisce, but jettison nostalgia—makes it a great opener for amERICa, an album rooted in classicist rock gestures but fixated on the contemporary United States.
Wreckless Eric, born Eric Goulden, wrote a lot of songs about the music industry. "Take the Cash (K.A.S.H.)", for instance, urged artists to get paid up front. And peers such as Nick Lowe memorably looked at the era’s intersection of fandom and commerce in songs such as "I Love My Label" and "Rollers Show", too. But Goulden’s return to the show business theme—which, perhaps because it seemed crass in the wake of punk, faded from rock lyricism forever and today thrives in rap—acknowledges the chasm of time between then and now. With distance, he gains lucidity.
It’s the same with the Englishman’s observations of the United States, which are dappled in telling detail and really rather astute. "White Bread", for instance, looks at the normalized delusions of a Middle America gun nut. On the rustic "Sysco Trucks", Goulden hovers over the wholesale food business: remote diners, kitchens, and markets all stocked with the same goods. There’s a critique implied, if not of capitalism at large then at least of monopoly and its subtly unsettling consequences for common cuisine. As he lightly notes, "Everything we’re eating comes from somewhere." The slaphappy typography "amERICa" is a bad indicator of Goulden’s tone; he’s mistily allusive, often playful, but never ham-fisted.
Wreckless Eric recorded amERICa at home in upstate New York. He played many of the instruments himself. The palm-muted guitars and roaring refrains of his old work remain, but the record is more reserved and instilled with zany, fanciful flourishes. Goulden rarely grasps for big, beaming hooks. Instead, reverse reverb and spectral keys temper his creaky, pliable voice. And that blurred, homespun atmosphere makes amERICa sound modern; it puts him in league with bedroom revivalists such as Home Blitz, who ply weirder, less commercially aspirant versions of Wreckless Eric’s classic power-pop sound.
Many artists of Wreckless Eric’s era and tradition have imitators, but few of yesteryear’s outliers can catch up with their descendants, let alone best them. amERICa is that rare record. Goulden is grownup, with all of the stereotypical benefits: an air of wisdom, emotional texture, and, perhaps most cliché of all, a seasoned voice. And yet, amERICa isn’t complacent or satisfied; Wreckless Eric anatomizes his surroundings with the wide-eyed thrill of discovery. His American flyover reveals simmering cultural disturbances and essential beauty alike—a late capitalist hellscape beneath "Bobbie Gentry’s Mississippi skies."


Conceived of as a celebration of the right of protest, Fatima Al Qadiri’s Brute is a piece of music ideally suited to a time of shadowy corporate manipulation and apocalyptic political theater.

Brute

Since the beginning of the year Boeing has been running an ad called "You Just Wait" to celebrate the aircraft company’s centennial. In it, Boeing forecasts an extremely optimistic vision of 2116—a future where Boeing’s cutting-edge research helps create a spotless and conflict-free world replete with colonies on Mars, regular travel to the Moon, unlimited clean energy, and smiling innocent children. It's a startlingly ironic piece of corporate lip-service that sidesteps the company’s long history of defense contracts and early pioneering in the military industrial complex. I first saw the ad in the gym, being broadcast across an array of large flat-screen televisions—a dramatic commercial break that followed ominous speculations on the incoming results of the South Carolina primary.
The album I was listening to at the time was Fatima Al Qadiri’s Brute, a piece of music ideally suited to a time of shadowy corporate manipulation and apocalyptic political theater. Qadiri started writing Brute last year while recovering from a knee injury in Kuwait, unable to move much for more than a month. The injury coincided with the height of the horrific news cycle that included the events of Ferguson, Baltimore, and more. Reminded of the first large-scale protest she attended as a freshman in college and shaken by the sheer scale of the police force that met the protesters, she conceived of Brute as a celebration of the right of protest, which is funny when you’ve listened to its 11 songs and realize there isn't all that much celebrating going on. If anything, the album runs as direct counterpoint to the optimistic future that Boeing presents in its ad.
This is made immediately clear by the album’s disconcerting cover: a dead-eyed and inhuman Teletubbie in SWAT gear. The art was designed by the artist Josh Kline, borrowing from his piece Freedom, which the New Yorker described as an "elegy to lost hope and broken promises." This is an equally apt description of Qadiri's dystopian music: Starting with "Endzone," Fatima creates an ominous découpé from live recordings of the unrest in Ferguson. The sounds of gun shots, walkie-talkie beeps, explosions, crowds screaming, overwhelming confusion, and the weaponization of sound via the police’s use of LRADs (Long Range Acoustic Device) is mixed together with a slow burning thump—resulting in a heart-palpitating minute of music. In fact, the album’s three best moments come from the songs that feature extended sample use. In "Blows" Al Qadiri opens and closes the track with a now-infamous report by MSNBC news anchor Lawrence O'Donnell chastising the excessive police brutality at Occupy Wall Street. And in the album’s closer "Power," arguably the album’s only danceable moment, she deftly inserts a cutting interview with ex-LAPD sergeant Cheryl Dorsey on the abuse of police power in the middle of a dizzyingly spacious and confident sonic environment.
These moments bring Qadiri's music somewhere outside the usual purview of electronic music: Brute is in some ways closer to a piece of Brechtian theater than a traditional album. But outside of the successful manipulation of samples and found sounds, there are large blocks of shapeless tracks that excessively borrow from her previous projects. The descending chord progression and sweep of vocals in "Blood Moon" feels like it was copy-and-pasted from "Hydra," a track from her Desert Strike EP. "Breach," with its swooping helicopter sample and belching bass, is similarly a pastiche, mixing elements of Desert Strike and her last two albums: Asiatisch and Future Brown. There are far too many of these moments in Brute: "Fragmentation," a moody and string-heavy track in the album’s back half, might have been cut from Asiatisch and retrofitted for Brute.
Overall Brute is a frustrating mish-mosh of middling and artful. When it’s working, there is a certain panache in the high-powered, informationally dense musical speedballs she creates. Tracks like "Oubliette" (a reference to claustrophobic French dungeons) and "10-34" (the police code for riots) are perfect examples of the push-and-pull animating Qadiri’s most interesting work. When you listen to some of these songs you feel as if you’re being followed. As a conceptual piece, it’s unlike any politically driven electronic music being made today. It illustrates how exhausting and draining it is to be attuned to the problems of the world, but also how worthwhile it is keep yourself awake and see through the artifice.


The Philadelphia-based artist uses damaged acoustic guitars, piercing electronics, and unsettling vocals to construct a grotesque and hermetic world, conjuring visions of abject terror.

Extreme Fantasy

Ugliness is underrated these days. Somewhere down the line, as the underground gave in to poptimism, the freaks made peace with the cheerleaders. But not Morgan Garrett. Reared in the small town of Portsmouth, Ohio, and based today in Philadelphia, Garrett is no stranger to the darker end of the human experience. His hometown is known as the epicenter of America’s opioid crisis. The collapse of the steel industry paved the way for swarms of pill mills that gradually devastated the region. Garrett’s willfully isolating music feels inextricably tied to the ghosts of this upbringing; an uneasy morass of atonal electronics, quavering vocals, and ragged guitars, Extreme Fantasy openly explores the depths of loneliness and fear. Appalachian hymns are mutilated and swathed in ear-scraping feedback, while his electronic “melodies” arrive twisted beyond all recognition. If Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers could be expressed in sound, this would be it.
Though Americana has always loomed large in Garrett’s various musical projects, Extreme Fantasy makes his folk fascinations much clearer. Like Royal Trux’s Twin Infinitives or Smog’s Sewn to the Sky, Extreme Fantasy is technically a guitar album, but the instrument is less a vehicle for melodies or chords than a rickety can to be kicked and batted down the pavement. On the opening “Fall & Walk,” a buzzsaw guitar riff ruthlessly cuts through Garrett’s queasy electronic soundscapes, initiating the listener into his hermetic and grotesque world. When Garrett’s acoustic guitar first appears on “Mercy & Grace,” it’s hopelessly out of tune, as if Garrett were twisting the pegs as he plays it. There’s not much time to ruminate on this, however, as squeaking feedback and crashing drums begin gnawing into the track like termites. Every note feels precisely determined to elicit maximum discomfort.
Jandek’s mutilated country is the clearest forebear for Garrett’s sound, and the deranged exorcisms of Throbbing Gristle and Bill Orcutt figure into his stew as well. Garrett fearlessly throws himself into this legacy of confrontational music with a gripping conviction. On “In bed with anger,” his mangled strumming is swathed in nightmarish noise, and his processed and doubled vocals sound as if they were harmonizing over some hellish campfire sing along. In between the dissonant yodeling and off-tempo drums of “Life after life,” an iPhone notification pings in the background. Perhaps Extreme Fantasy’s most striking quality is the way damaged acoustic textures haunt contemporary electronic sensibilities, subsuming shiny, clean digital tones in a torturous murk.
At 26 minutes, Extreme Fantasy’s relative brevity comes as something of a relief. Even so, Garrett retreads the same territory too often for it to remain completely fresh throughout. But his vision is undeniable. To say that this music isn’t meant for most people would be a gross understatement, but by the same token, accusing it of being unpleasant to listen to seems like missing the point. Whether it’s the blast of apocalyptic feedback that commences “Fall & Walk” or the unnerving skipping noise that courses through the title track, Extreme Fantasy plays like an uncanny catharsis, diving headfirst into the disturbing depths to confront demons that few artists dare to acknowledge. It’s shocking to watch Garrett unravel these sickly shapes, leaving their entrails strewn out on the floor for us to gape at. In its willingness to be so ugly, it strives toward a different kind of beauty.


Saturday Looks Good to Me's Fred Thomas creates a record that ranges between early Paw Tracks' folk abstractions and the recent outpouring of lo-fi dream beat.

City Center

Last year, Grouper released Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, a record that was not only a personal breakthrough for Liz Harris, but arguably for the Type label as a whole-- an LP so insidiously ingratiating that it just had to be pop at its core, right? So what now that Fred Thomas, he of the erstwhile retro-pop outfit Saturday Looks Good to Me, is now recording as part of City Center on the same imprint?
City Center doesn't necessarily come off like a true pop record, but where Grouper made a point of sounding fully submerged, City Center never go so far that they can't come up for air. Somewhere between early Paw Tracks' folk abstractions and the recent outpouring of lo-fi dream beat, most of City Center is content to drift in and out of its aqueous surroundings like a buoy. The major chords and ringing ambience of "Killer Whale" make for a welcoming entrance point, though Thomas' vocals sound like they've been suspended in some kind of gelatin. If you're looking for a commonality between Coldplay's "Yellow", Bonnie "Prince" Billy's "So Everyone", and Animal Collective's "Who Could Win a Rabbit", it's the same ringing B-major chord that begins "Open/House"-- likewise here, amidst punchy synth kicks, it heralds an unusual display of scrutability even while erratic panning, processed steel drums and plate reverb give it distance.
You hear echoes of Thomas' past work on "Gladest" and "Summer School", which hide otherwise sure-footed progressions under bobbing, waterlogged percussion and bell-timbres. Lyrics are, at best, implications and vocal melodies are content to eddy away with no plans of return. Ultimately, it's the dynamic between melodic resonance ("Young Diamond") and found-sound obfuscation (the four minutes of "You Are a Force" are pregnant with stay amp hum) that defines a debut that I'd call "promising," if only it gave any sort of indication that it was looking to become a part of some sort of artistic arc, as opposed to a stasis with plenty of breathing room-- even when City Center may appear impenetrable, it's still welcoming. C'mon in, the water's great.


With their third release, the five-song Small Sound EP, Tennis complicate the easy breezy beautiful schtick with some positive results. Some of that is up to producer Richard Swift, who gives their throwback sound a few new wrinkles.

Small Sound EP

Tennis' Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley are a Pinterest-ready married couple. Perfect prep narrative (I mean, c’mon, even Vampire Weekend don’t sail), pretty pop songs, that sort of thing. But perfect and pretty get boring after a minute, and the two have come to realize that. With their third release, the five-song Small Sound EP, Tennis complicate the easy breezy beautiful schtick with some positive results.
The effort works off last year’s Young and Old, which the Denver-based band recorded with Black Key Patrick Carney acting as producer. Carney helped Tennis park the boat in the garage, upping the fuzz considerably from debut Cape Dory. Here on Small Sound, producer Richard Swift helps Tennis grow. “Dimming Light” starts with a sour riff that evokes Mac DeMarco, but ends strong with straightforward piano layered atop a tense synth line; hearing its arrangement, it's easy to imagine Swift coming in and taking over. Even with his own music, Swift tends to wear his vintage influences on his sleeve. If this guy can make the new Shins groove, he shouldn’t have too much trouble infusing 1970s flavor to Tennis’ Brill Building aesthetic from a decade earlier.
But Tennis aren’t Fitz and the Tantrums or anything quite so gaudy. Moore, Riley, and drummer James Barone work within their limitations to create an EP that offers subtle twists to their throwback thing. What sounds to be bassoon immediately funks up “Cured of Youth”, while Moore actually gets an opportunity to belt on the standout track. Organ lines, too, are peppered throughout the EP, but never overpower. “100 Lovers” sees Moore recalling an ex who was a real heartbreaker, her astutely noting, “100 loves will make you bold, 100 more will make you cold.” It’s the stuff of 60s Girl Group gold, but it goes to show you that while the music can progress, the lyrics won’t necessarily follow.
At their worst, narrative-heavy buzz bands like Tennis are the indie rock equivalent of YouTube novelty songs. Lyrics about coconut groves are precious, sure, but it’s hard to feel like there’s a future in that. It’s not to say blissed-out guitar pop isn’t a viable path—look at where Beach House have masterfully taken their sound—but Moore will never have Victoria Legrand's vocal depth. She’ll always sound sweet and innocent, better cooing atop a retro riff than leading listeners into dark corners. Moore sounds positively determined on the EP’s single and strongest song, “Mean Streets”, but when she chants the line, “Born and raised on the mean streets/ That’s where she learned how to keep the beat,” it’s hard to imagine she’s speaking autobiographically. Only so much change can be achieved over two LPs and one EP.
To liken Tennis to the liquid state of being would be insulting, but they do seem to take on the shape of the container they’re in. Essentially, each producer adds something new to the sound. Maybe by the next LP, they’ll have built something with real dimension.


Spanning the years between her debut and Blue, this 122-song set documents the hard work of exploration, revision, and rejection that shaped the songwriter’s first masterpiece. It is a humanizing wonder.

Joni Mitchell: Archives Volume 2: The Reprise Years (1968-1971)

When the drummer Russ Kunkel was just 21, Joni Mitchell arrived at his garage apartment in Laurel Canyon to play him a few new tunes alone. It was the summer of 1970, and Mitchell had slowly been drifting toward real stardom on the strength of three albums and hit renditions of her songs by the likes of Judy Collins and Tom Rush. Kunkel, meanwhile, had already played with Bob Dylan, B.B. King, and Mitchell’s new beau, James Taylor.
But as he told me in April 2021—just over 50 years since he first heard the tunes that would become Blue—he was a touch starstruck, dumbfounded that Mitchell would not only deign to perform for him but also ask him to join in. Her confidence and control, however, calmed him as he drummed along on his knees and bongos. When he arrived in the studio months later, he again followed her cool lead. “It was so easy, because Joni is such an amazing rhythm player,” he told me. “She dictated the grooves. I just listened.”
That sense of ease is a pernicious theme in discussions of Mitchell’s first six or so albums, as though their songs just arrived as gifts. Enchanted, inspired, divine, genius: Mitchell has invariably been portrayed as such during her era of intense personal upheaval, her own moment of putting blood on the tracks. It’s as if her preternaturally graceful playing and singing on record meant she were simply some blessed conduit, not a serious craftsperson off record.
At its best, the second volume of the Joni Mitchell Archives—a titanic effort to sort through six decades of her musical dustbin, beginning last year with the innocence-losing early days of Volume 1—dispels such notions of effortless grace or any other divine spark. It, instead, documents Mitchell’s deliberate, determined progress as both songwriter and performer. She toils over tunes just to discard them. She wrestles with minuscule but monumental shifts in language. She tries complicated arrangements only to clear them away like brambles. Meanwhile, onstage, she emerges as a chameleonic charmer, able to adapt to any night’s assorted demands.
With these Archives, Mitchell joins the recent ranks of Bob Dylan and Neil Young, songwriters who have been reductively deified as touched geniuses for far too long and who are showing their work through massive troves of old recordings that dispel those notions of effortless perfection. They have revealed themselves as working craftspeople, made “divine” only by a fawning music press and rapacious record companies. We are haunted by the illusion of their presumed untouchability even now, still elevating gifts and grifts as opposed to craft and commitment. It’s delightful to see Mitchell put truth to that festering lie. Indeed, these 122 tracks capture Mitchell at the moment she went from hitting singles and the occasional triple to clearing the bases with routine grand slams. Spanning the three years between her debut, Song to a Seagull, and her landmark fourth album, Blue, Volume 2 is a monument to real effort.
Nowhere is this clearer than “A Case of You,” her unsparing portrait of love’s sweet poison that’s so canonical it’s been covered nearly 500 times. It debuts here as part of the Blue demos cut in Los Angeles’ A&M Studios in the summer of 1970. The song is mostly there—its staccato dulcimer sway, its “Oh, Canada!” outburst, its defenseless moment where she prepares to bleed. The first verse, though, isn’t. “You’re just as silly as a northern fish,” she sings, replying to the lover who says he’s “constant as a Northern Star.” She laughs self-consciously at this speck of juvenilia.
Just three months later, Mitchell shared the stage of London’s Paris Theatre with Taylor. They were smitten—in a few weeks, she’d pass the holidays with his family in North Carolina, caroling, buying records, and painting his portrait. “I’m not gonna be singing right away, but I might breathe heavy,” mutters Taylor as he tunes, just before they unveil the near-finished version of this song about her ex. There are no more fish in the first verse, only a scathing rebuke to the lover’s swagger: “Constantly in the darkness—where is that at?” she sings, the withering glare almost audible. “If you want me, I’ll be in the bar.” It’s a snapshot of a breakup so crisp and raw you long to stick around to see the wreckage. Mitchell would continue teasing out phrases and contractions before recording “A Case of You” that winter, but at least she had found the mot juste for the song’s devastating premise.
Like the Beatles’ Get Back, these moments on Volume 2 illustrate the ordinary labor involved in making something that ultimately seems extraordinary. During two home-recording sessions in her New York apartment, for instance, Mitchell sits at the piano or guitar to play or sing, searching for a phrase that might spark a new tune. She tries two different strumming patterns (including one clearly indebted to her old friend Neil Young) for “Midnight Cowboy,” an early character study of a cosplaying and hopeless urban outlaw. Both missed their mark; until now, the song never made it to record.
And in a moment of vulnerability, Mitchell admits during her Carnegie Hall debut she’s “just begun to pick out a few tunes on the piano” but has only one finished. (The exquisite version of “Blue Boy” that follows her confession was actually recorded two weeks later.) It’s strangely reassuring to imagine a moment where Mitchell is just learning to write at the piano, not yet a master. She was conjuring fundamental new paradigms for herself on an instrument that soon became critical to her career.
Mitchell was contemporaneously drilling down on the precise language and arrangements that marked the best work of her first four albums. Several early songs here border on logorrhea, with verses overloaded in alliteration and internal rhyme and rafts of florid images that crowd out the song’s conceit. Recorded within a four-year window, both “I Had a King” and “River” deal with former partners who have been dispatched. During that gap, though, Mitchell shaped the sense of economy that made possible a self-indictment as sharp and simple as “I’m so hard to handle/I’m selfish and I’m sad.”
Early in the set, Mitchell adds overdubs of peacock harp to a home demo of “Roses Blue,” its prickly notes meant to reinforce the song’s spooky mystique. She replicated the effect on 1969’s Clouds, but she soon dropped the desire to overcomplicate her songs. Time and again on Volume 2, the alternate versions of Mitchell classics—“River,” “Urge for Going,” “The Fiddle and the Drum,” “Blue Boy,” “Ladies of the Canyon”—include some unnecessary element, like the French horns that end “River.”
Perhaps her 1968 appearance on John Peel’s Top Gear—the only Peel Session of her career, where he introduces her with a review that lauds her as the “yang to Bob Dylan’s yin”—helped convince her that she didn’t need to accessorize her sound. The John Cameron Group cluttered “Chelsea Morning” with bass and flute, distracting from the wild swings of her voice. When she subsequently issued the song on Clouds, it was just guitar and voice, as she even sang her own jubilant backing vocals. Mitchell’s music would get plenty ornate as she marched through the ’70s; her austerity in this era afforded these songs intimacy and, in turn, gravity.
Though most of these revelations-via-revisions arrive through home demos or discarded studio sessions, the lengthy live sets—or occasional excerpts of them—that dominate much of Volume 2 show another kind of growth. Mitchell is dark and alluring at Ann Arbor’s Canterbury House in early March 1968, but she’s at ease in the Ottawa coffeehouse and cultural locus Le Hibou a week later. She’s actively parsing new ideas, working through several songs that never made an album. “Dr. Junk” is the hilarious and tender romp for a Southern dentist who collected spare car parts. “Come to the Sunshine” is a mystic ode to the magic that love may impart, especially the ineffable feeling that you’re temporarily connected to some kind of cosmic wonder. “Share in the quiet of knowing,” she urges.
Jimi Hendrix sat at Mitchell’s feet that night at Le Hibou, twiddling the knobs of his new tape machine as he recorded her set. “Fantastic girl with heaven words,” he wrote after they stayed up late, partying and smoking and listening to recordings he’d made. (His tape machine and her performance were stolen the next day; the reel miraculously resurfaced just as work on Volume 2 began.)
That anecdote of colliding young superstars is a reminder that this is Mitchell in sheer ascendance. Less than a year later, after all, she made her Carnegie Hall debut, her parents and Bob Dylan among those in attendance at a masterful $5 gig, included here in all its glory. Fans throw her love notes, protest when she suggests the concert is almost done, and sing along to “The Circle Game.” A year after that, she strums her strings and pushes her voice to such extremes during “Big Yellow Taxi” you worry she may break both. The take comes from the 1970 benefit concert that helped launch Greenpeace, so Mitchell is emphasizing the environmental seriousness that underpins (and also undermines) the refrain of a song so gleeful it can scan as a gimmick. Witnessing bits of Mitchell’s stepwise transformation into a public figure—occasionally fleeting, sometimes reluctant—is Volume 2’s other point of true inspiration.
The live performances may start to seem repetitious or perhaps like filler, especially when taken alongside Volume 1. How many slightly different versions of “Conversation,” “Gift of the Magi,” or “Marcie”—just a few of the staples that appear on both sets, sometimes multiple times—must one endure before hearing unreleased gems like “Hunter” (a great song about a stray cat) or “Jeremy” (a great song about a stray addict)?
To date, the lone flaw of these Joni Mitchell Archives is that they often feel like monstrous information dumps as opposed to carefully constructed paths on which you might wander and delight. Even Cameron Crowe’s longform interviews, which shape the bulk of the liner notes for both sets, feel burdensome. There are amazing tidbits, of course, like Mitchell’s contentious but caring relationship with Georgia O’Keeffe and her disdain for David Crosby. They’re often surrounded by loads of routine Mitchell lore.
That, of course, is picking the tiniest nits. It is good to read Mitchell speak, which she rarely does publicly as she nears 80, and to hear her search for her own essence at this pivotal moment, even when it feels like déjà vu. Given the famous vulnerability of her first half-dozen albums, which she actually laments during an on-tape conversation during Volume 2, how much more could there be?
“I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes,” she later told Crowe in Rolling Stone of this era. Whatever else remains unheard may feel like Mitchell’s very marrow, something much too intimate for any of us to know. There’s so much to hear and ponder on the generous Volume 2; even if it leaves you wanting more, that absence of deeper secrets is crucial to the set’s humanizing effect. At last, Volume 2 shows the work behind the beginning of Joni Mitchell’s masterworks, at times so seemingly effortless even her collaborators wondered if it existed.

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The second album from these Florida up-and-comers features carefully crafted, smartly executed, and reasonably lively garage-rock that finds them sounding comparatively settled since their last LP, 2009's No Seasons.

Glazin'

Garage rock was never an album's game, and-- in the midst of yet another revival-- that hasn't changed. Scuzzbucket strum and teenage truth will always fare far better as short, sharp shocks; then as now, the impact of a song like the Seeds' mighty "Pushin' Too Hard" is dulled by the half-dozen soundalikes on the LP from whence it came. Good as many of them are, that this new crop has yet to produce a truly classic LP isn't terribly surprising-- the song's the thing, cohesion's almost antithetical. So it is with Floridian up-and-comers Jacuzzi Boys' sophomore set, Glazin': five fine 45s masquerading as a fun, slight 10-song LP.
Between their sweetly shopworn lyrics, their not-quite-frenetic pacing, and all those ooh-augmented choruses, there's nothing new under the Glazin' sun. The Boys have settled down some since their last LP, 2009's No Seasons: volumes mostly steer clear of the red zone; the songcraft's less rollicking, more measured; and the occasional glint of pop sheen flickers at its surface. Singer/guitarist Gabriel Alcala's maintained the snide edge in his voice, but he doesn't have the fire in his belly he did a couple of years ago. At this point, these teenaged kicks of their work feel less lived than lived-in, lacking the manic edge and the neuron-branding melodies of the genre's leading lights. The songs go down easy but, with a few exceptions, leave little aftertaste. When you're constantly flipping a 45, that's a good problem to have; when you're talking an LP-- even a shortie like Glazin'-- the amnesiac feel foregrounds what's lacking.
Opener "Vizcaya" is a blast, a rallying cry of ascending melody and youthful insouciance that gets it done in record time. And the one-two punch of closers "Los Angeles" and "Koo Koo With You"-- the first, a half-affectionate, half-dismissive take on left coast life, and the second, a shapeshifting half-nonsensical come-on-- are far and away the album's best. Brimming with personality and oddly pitched humor, they're really the only tracks on Glazin' that don't sound like covers of songs you can't quite place. (They would've made for a killer single.) Elsewhere, "Silver Spheres" throws a little Detroit thunder in there to fine effect, and the bouncy "Libras and Zebras" feels especially effortless. As for the rest? Carefully crafted, smartly executed, and  reasonably lively garage-rock that's all just a little too on-the-nose to inspire much beyond agreeable indifference.
In an era when the surfeit of garage-rock bands need to push personality and melody harder than ever, Glazin's got a bit of both, an abundance of neither. The beefy but slightly sterile production buffs out some of the gnarl of their earlier work, which doesn't do them many favors. And the once-raucous band's performances seem a bit reeled in, too. More than anything, though, Glazin's sneer'n'strut is just too much of a pretty good thing: One or two at a time, these songs work wonders, but over half an hour, the Boys' retrograde sneer and strut proves a bit too safe and samey.


While living on houseboats in Sausalito, California, Deftones broke away from nu-metal and recorded the melodic highlight of their career, a moody album born of sex, Sade, and cocaine.

White Pony

The extended universe of nu-metal in 2000 included rapping clowns, rappers who wore clown makeup, clowns who did not rap but used turntables and wrote lyrics about Chuck D, and rappers who sounded like Chuck D and vehemently denied using turntables. Two of the genre’s most iconic songs were named “Nookie” and “Freak on a Leash.” It was deemed an evolutionary merger of hair metal and hip-hop, and yet, if there’s any unifying factor in what came to define the state of popular rock in the second Clinton term, it’s that no one seemed to be enjoying any of it.
Nu-metal was angry music—some of it sourced from childhood trauma and the despair of rural and suburban America outside the so-called monoculture; some of it sourced from the toxic masculinity ingrained in that monoculture. Yet, this was the music that moved millions of units during a prosperous time for the music industry. It also created a context where Deftones could make an album about sex, drugs, and druggy sex that cemented their reputation as rock’s most unmarketable weirdos.
White Pony may have transcended the dubious genre by fashioning a truly new form from post-hardcore, industrial, trip-hop, shoegaze, ambient electronics, and synth-pop. But Deftones were once undoubtedly rap-metal. What’s more rap-metal than lead singer Chino Moreno dropping in on Korn’s 1996 album Life Is Peachy to help cover Ice Cube’s “Wicked.” In both chronology and sound, Deftones’ 1995 debut Adrenaline was stuck between stations: not quite rap enough, but somehow missing out on the inconceivable moment when stone-faced post-hardcore acts like Helmet and Unsane were the subject of seven-figure bidding wars. Deftones’ sophomore bow, 1997’s Around the Fur, had no real bars, per se, but its aggression and imagery played just as well at Warped Tour, Ozzfest, skate parks, mosh pits, and other places where metalheads and hip-hop fans tangled dreads.
The sonic genesis of White Pony came from Around the Fur’s second single, “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away),” which was nothing short of nu-metal’s “There is a Light That Never Goes Out.” Not only was it the first indication of Moreno’s fatalistic romanticism, but it was also the band’s first embrace of outright melody; it’s the closest thing to a classic Smashing Pumpkins song to come out in the same year as Adore. Critics took notice—it was chosen as SPIN’s No. 12 single of 1998—but it never stuck on radio and as a total outlier on Around the Fur, it was an obvious fork in Deftones trajectory. Going further down that path would mean courting tastemakers who would likely still snicker at the name “Deftones,” but it also left them without an easily identifiable target market.
It’s easy to see things from the perspective of Maverick—the band’s label at the time—when Moreno, bassist Chi Cheng, guitarist Stephen Carpenter, drummer Abe Cunningham, and turntablist/synth player Frank Delgado turned in the masters for White Pony in 2000. The concept of mixing nu-metal with new wave wasn’t entirely original—after all, Orgy scored a major hit with a cover of “Blue Monday.” But despite its sharper dynamics, louder vocals, glossier production, and a wealth of earworm choruses, White Pony was still not as obvious as playing New Order songs in drop-D.
White Pony debuted at No. 3 with over 117,000 copies sold—enough to earn the top spot on Billboard in any given week in 2017, but the kind of numbers that led to a stern talking-to from the label in 2000. “I remember [Maverick] sitting me down and pointing [out that] Papa Roach and Linkin Park had sold six million albums while [White Pony] hadn’t sold a tenth of that,” Moreno recalled in a 2010 interview. Even though Moreno had spent the past three years trying to prove to skeptics that he and Fred Durst had nothing in common, his immediate reaction to Maverick’s needling betrays his rap-metal roots: “First, I wanted to stick this idea up my ass.”
Lead single “Change (In the House of Flies)” could most accurately be described as a heavier version of “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)”—they tuned their guitars lower and played at a slow grind, and Moreno’s lyrics were more inscrutable and unsettling (“I took you home/Set you on the glass/I pulled off your wings then I laughed”). “Change” was a deeper, darker shade of rock, but not heavy in a way that was going to move major units in 2000.
Maverick didn’t hear a second single, which was a self-fulfilling prophecy given their unwillingness to release one for nearly eight months after “Change” peaked at No. 3 on Billboard’s Alternative Rock chart. “Pink Maggit” is the last song you’d consider for a single, seeing as how it’s the last song on White Pony, seven minutes long, and the drums don’t come in until it’s nearly halfway through. (It is also titled “Pink Maggit.”) But Maverick thought there was something to the chorus—“’Cause back in school/We were the leaders”—and given how directly benchmarks like “Last Resort” and “One Step Closer” spoke to the high school outcast, the wheels at the label began to turn.
This is how the song that defined White Pony—and Deftones’ career for the next several years—isn’t even on the record. “They asked me to rewrite [“Pink Maggit”] as a three-minute song,” according to Moreno. “They kept hounding me about it, so I was like, ‘Watch this.’” The new version was written in a day, and Paul Hunter was hired to direct the ensuing video, a savvy move given how his clips for Eminem and Dr. Dre dominated the summer and those two never had much trouble infiltrating rock audiences. Deftones were afforded all of the financial and promotional firepower that could be mustered by a booming major label in 2000, and Maverick decided, in their infinite wisdom, that White Pony was best served by a video treatment that amounts to Never Been Kissed scored by Fred Durst. It stalled at No. 27.
Time has been about as kind to “Back to School” as it has been for Fieldy’s haircuts or Wes Borland’s eye contacts, but the rationale behind its creation makes it an unintentionally perfect appendix to White Pony. Moreno made this song out of spite, wanting to be contrarian while seeking the approval of authorities and popularity amongst his peers. For all of their heightened ambitions, for all of the infusion of cash and drugs, Deftones crucially but quietly maintained the same shitty, relatable, adolescent emotions that fueled Adrenaline—I mean, there’s a song here called “Teenager.” Deftones never come off as too cool for school—an indispensable quality for a band if they’re gonna record while living on houseboats in Sausalito. They sing about partying with strippers and being abducted by aliens and riding in cars with Tool’s Maynard Keenan without ostracizing their diehard fanbase.
At the very least, “Back to School” proved that Deftones were impressionable, enthusiastic, and willing to follow even their most dubious ideas to fruition—Chino Moreno made a trip-hop album in 2006 and a witch house album in 2014, each at least five years beyond its genre’s sell-by date. Their influences and interests were scripted onto their work like stickers on a Trapper Keeper; the title of “Feiticiera” was “some Portuguese name I read in a magazine and liked,” whereas “Pink Maggit” was taken from a random shot at Nas taken by Kool Keith on his first Dr. Dooom album. Given the eventual fate of “Pink Maggit,” it’s ironic that the line itself mocks Nas as a sellout for agreeing to an elaborate and expensive video treatment.
White Pony is the most coherent and novel expression of Deftones’ varied influences. The band’s covers of Sade’s “No Ordinary Love” and the Smiths’ “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” date back to 1995, around the time when Deftones were defined by the aggro hooks of "Bored" and "7 Words" ("suck, suck, suck, suck, suck, suck/they fuck with my head"). When they compiled all their covers on 2005’s B-Sides & Rarities, they proved to be true believers in MTV and alternative rock radio, providing something a little-left-of-the-dial that won’t leave you completely exiled from the center. You never have to guess what Moreno likes about these songs; the cruel swing of Drive Like Jehu and Jawbox’s “Savory” is the instrumental basis for “Feiticiera” and “Knife Prty,” while Moreno’s vaporous, seductive vocals draw heavily from Cocteau Twins and the Cardigans.
But of all the influences that came to the fore on White Pony, none was more crucial than cocaine. Deftones had always been a party band, recording Around the Fur while living and getting fucked up together in a Seattle apartment complex. Fur sure sounds like a weed album—the pinched snares, rubbery bassline, and bloodshot vocal EQ’ing underlying “My Own Summer (Shove It)” are the raw elements of a dub song.
Meanwhile, White Pony was made in a studio once occupied by Fleetwood Mac during Rumours. Moreno called it a “cocaine concept album,” though the “concept” part seems redundant. Plenty of the album’s sonic details make its intentions clear—the neck pick that brings in the final chorus of “Digital Bath” bursts like a ruptured vessel, “Knife Prty” is bisected with blood-curdling, otherworldly shrieks from Rodleen Getsic and turntablist Frank Delgado’s contribution to “Korea” has the uncanny resemblance to the sound of a credit card trying to scrape the last caked-on line from a mirror. That song, in particular, lays Moreno’s obsessions bare and captures White Pony in all of its grimy debauchery: “strippers and drugs and [explitive]" he told the Washington Post in 2000. The main riff of “Korea” is an atonal cluster of notes, it’s impossible to replicate Moreno’s verse melody on piano and the bridge is engineered for a mosh pit. Every song feels overlayed with a blindingly white sheen.
Where most DJs in the nu-metal era were relied upon for the occasional wiki-wiki scratch or looking cool in the video, Delgado was instrumental in the world-building of White Pony: a constant, hollowed-out whoosh pervades “Digital Bath” like the immediate, incapacitating rush of the first hit, while he scatters abrasive percussion in the margins of “Rx Queen” like empty beer bottles and pizza boxes. Drake, the Weeknd, and Future have defined pop in the new decade by plumbing the spiritual void of the VIP lounge, but White Pony is the exact opposite, fully embracing newfound decadence as an escape from misery, the high life always the solution rather than the problem. The hook on “Digital Bath” succinctly expresses White Pony’s spiritual ethos: “I feel like more.”
The rock star clichés that accompany coke-induced bloat would come later—Deftones were fined $1 million for turning in their 2003 self-titled album late, while 2006’s Saturday Night Wrist found Moreno struggling terribly with weight gain and writer’s block, hounded by label-funded song doctors and swapping out producers ranging from Dan the Automator to Bob Ezrin. But on White Pony, Deftones liked the drugs and the drugs liked them. Moreno strove to write about something other than his own experiences, a way of separating the band from their autobiographical past work as well as the subject matter of their nu-metal competition which Moreno mocked as “me, myself and I.” When asked where most of his songwriting ideas came from, Moreno bluntly answered, “drugs.”
“It was probably five in the morning—we were still up partying—and I just pictured this whole scenario of having this girl, bringing her downstairs and taking a bath and like, out of nowhere, just reaching back and . . . electrocuting—basically throwing some kind of electrical device in the bathtub and then taking her out of the bath and drying her off and putting her clothes back on.” This was Moreno’s origin story of “Digital Bath” during an extensive and not altogether flattering interview from 2000. “Knife Prty,” the most elaborate and exotic track on the album, was inspired by an actual dance party on their tour bus with Abe Cunningham’s cutlery collection. Moreno said, “I made up this fake scenario of some kind of underworld society of knives, people who just get off on these erotic fantasies.”
White Pony explicitly indulged in BDSM, blow, and bloodsport while making good on the original promise of nu-metal to revitalize rock by separating it from classic rock canon. “The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin—those bands haven’t influenced us in any way,” Korn bassist Fieldy told Chuck Klosterman. “Nobody in the band ever listened to that stuff. Our musical history starts with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and early Faith No More. As a band, that’s where we begin.” For Deftones, it was Faith No More and Primus. “I always thought that Northern California had all the integrity,” according to Cheng.
On the other side of the U.S., the Strokes and White Stripes were bringing their version of sex and drugs back to rock’n’roll. Of course, New York’s “New Rock Revolution” recodified the de rigueur critical theory that Velvet Underground, Television, the Ramones, and, of course, New York City were at the center of the universe. For all of the legitimate criticism of nu-metal’s dopey lyricism and intolerable misogyny, there was always a rather blatant, though underlying classism that often came with it; these bands emerged from Des Moines, Memphis, Jacksonville, and some of the most unglamorous parts of California’s interior. Nu-metal was also a welcoming arena for musicians of color, though it was mocked as suburban white-guy music by no less of an authority on the subject than Ben Folds.
It’s understandable for Deftones to run from their rap-metal past, but it allowed White Pony to be seen for what it is—a model of personal evolution that was aspirational and relatable compared to what came next. The Strokes attended Swiss boarding schools, Julian Casablancas’ father ran a modeling agency, and Interpol showed up in suits on their very first day. Meanwhile, here’s Deftones, who, at least until the stylized vampirism of White Pony, didn’t strike an image of cool or even conventional anti-cool. They were five skateboarders from Sacramento with dreads and risible facial hair, inspired by bands that critics reliably misunderstood—the early work of the Cure and Depeche Mode had about as much credibility as nu-metal.
Even if White Pony didn’t sound that much like the Cure or Depeche Mode or Smashing Pumpkins, Moreno understood how each band was never meant to be reality programming. Nu-metal was smothered by the stench of its own machismo and stale beer, and Deftones recognized that separating nu-metal from rap wasn’t as important as allowing it to be a platform for romantics and dreamers—its rallying cries were “I feel like more!” and “I could float here forever!” bravely and enthusiastically embracing the possibility of transcending the mundanity that pervaded their lives in Sacramento and cities just like it. White Pony was the change Deftones wanted to see in themselves and they watched you change right along with them.


John Darnielle's latest is a richly detailed collection of songs about the beautiful melancholy life of a goth, and the long journey between life in the dark and death in the light.

Goths

Save for perhaps lumberjacks, there is no scene more everlasting than goths. The candles and coffins, the bats and spiders, the milky-white legs under jet black jeans that fill up the corners of goth culture are all just the artifacts for its everlasting creed: death is real, and it waits for us all. The true goth compass points toward the final darkness and woe unto those who must lease their time here in the light, squeezing cantaloupe at the grocery store and forgetting to call the guy about the broken sump pump. Goths, the latest from the Mountain Goats, is about the journey between life in the dark and death in the light, and ultimately trying to find a home somewhere between.
That elusive, literary home for John Darnielle—the lead singer and songwriter of the Mountain Goats for 26 years—has been a theme in his writing lately. Whether on his 2015 album Beat the Champ or in his 2017 novel Universal Harvester, Darnielle writes about the larger, decades-long journeys that play out in the rural American diaspora. Though setting these stories in bloody wrestling rings in South Texas or spliced into unsettling VHS tapes at a local video store in Iowa, at the center of both is a question: Where can we go when our youth, our vocation, or our family has left us? The same question applies here to Goths, a question buried underneath its fables about a singer in a California goth band in the ’80s.
At this point in his career, Darnielle is in his own private league of songwriting. His verse is effortless, his detail impeccable, and the joy with which he animates these weary souls languishing in Long Beach rock clubs make every word just glow. Goths is Darnielle’s most evocative work since the occultist All Eternals Deck and even though it remains loosely conceptual like Beat the Champ, it’s all tethered to this palpable, too-casual melancholy, the kind that comes with telling a cautionary tale one too many times.
This type of emotion was always present in the Mountain Goats of the ’90s and early ’00s, when it was just tape hiss, a guitar, and Darnielle, who then had nothing to more to give than his swollen heart. Since the band adopted their hi-fi lineup of bassist Peter Hughes and drummer Jon Wurster—and peppered songs with Memphis-soul horn arrangements and the occasional men’s chorus—it’s been a bit harder to sink your teeth into a Mountain Goats song, and vice versa. But for the first time in Mountain Goats’ history, there’s no guitar on the album, replaced instead by Darnielle on piano or a warm Fender Rhodes. This slight tweak in tone makes the band more like the silk paper on which Darnielle writes, illuminating the lyrics and making the story and verse more accessible. Goths sounds nothing like goth rock, but maybe, Darnielle seems to suggest, every goth rocker is destined to write their own bookish, soft-rock opus about nights doing cocaine while listening to Bauhaus.
For indeed, the life of a goth all starts out great. After a jaunty, baroque tune about the lead singer of Sisters of Mercy packing it in and moving back to his punk roots in Leeds, the lens shifts to the West Coast of America, trying to understand how goth rock works in California thousands of miles away from Batcave, the London nightclub at the center of the UK scene. Darnielle takes us to the Los Angeles suburb of West Covina where, on “Stench of the Unburied,” a young vamp cruises the highways in a Pontiac Grand Am, drunk and alive, seeing visions of his car going up in flames, all while listening to KROQ play Siouxsie and the Banshees. The prime years of the young goth culminate with “Wear Black,” a gorgeous hymn for the timeless language of black, a sigil of goths worldwide. No matter what happens, Darnielle sings, one must wear black in the light, in the dark, in the present tense, or in my absence.
On the back half of the album, the fast life of a goth becomes untenable. Our singer is older now, playing shows to no one on the Sunset Strip, ostracized and broken, recalling how they were once paid in cocaine (“Paid in Cocaine”) and now refusing to open for Trent Reznor (“Shelved”). Darnielle adds more and more space to the songs, slows down his delivery as if it is almost too difficult to admit that “the ride’s over.” By the quiet end, he’s almost thankful for his grim middle-aged fate, “hauling these songs to the light from the mouth of the grave” playing “really big festivals every other summer in Brazil” (“For the Portuguese Goth Metal Bands”). What was once a consuming identity has now calcified into a useless signifier, the passion for the music of the Cure, March Violets, and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry all displaced into trying to pay down the interest on the mortgage. “Nobody wants to hear the 12-bar blues/From a guy in platform shoes” Darnielle sings, hapless and dejected.
This hollow feeling of Goths lingers. Either you fear age dulling the passions of your youth, or you are living it right now. It’s like when you bury a loved one when death is no longer a pose, but an endless stream of paperwork and phone calls and garbage bags full of old clothes. This ultimate mundanity is detailed on the most haunting song on the album, “Abandoned Flesh,” an ode to the “suffocated splendor of the once and future goth band” Gene Loves Jezebel. Darnielle blithely tells the history of the unheralded band from their Wikipedia page. A band’s whole career, the theater of death and the comfort it created has a half-life in the real world, reduced to an anecdote, or quite literally, to an epilogue on a dainty Mountain Goats album about goth. This final turn by Darnielle is what makes him a songwriter nonpareil: macabre humor, tales that weave in and out of fiction, and the smile he cracks after leaving a gaping hole in your heart. Beware, ye goths, life waits for us all, too.


The prolific composer and Radiohead member crafts a diverse, dissonant, and beat-heavy score that matches the alternate realities of Lynne Ramsay’s psychological thriller.

Jonny Greenwood: You Were Never Really Here (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

The ball-peen hammer is a blunt-force instrument, yet the hole it leaves in a human skull is surprisingly tidy. That much, at least, is what we are led to believe by writer-director Lynne Ramsay’s striking film You Were Never Really Here, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as Joe, a hirsute, hammer-wielding bundle of hurt—a hired retriever of kidnapped children who is himself covered in the many scars of a damaged upbringing. In its own quiet and sidewinding way, Jonny Greenwood’s exceptional score is as surprising as Ramsay’s film. It is as calmly brutal as Phoenix’s dead-eyed shuffle, and as tender as the way Joe clasps the hand of the dying man he has just dispatched with a bullet to the gut.
You Were Never Really Here is a film about violence and men and power. It is also, in its own uncomfortable way, a film about love, duty, and compassion. Greenwood’s score responds with remarkable restraint, refusing to over-dramatize yet never shrinking from the fundamental sadness—and strangeness—of Ramsay’s world. Departing sharply from the baroque piano compositions of his 2018 score for Phantom Thread, Greenwood cycles mainly between three principal modes here. The album’s bookends are gentle mood pieces for swelling synthesizers and strings. Then there are severe, atonal fugues that make the most of the orchestra’s spectral properties, detuning the strings until they throw off the dull pewter gleam of a migraine. Most surprising of all, he fires up his banks of electronics on several tracks, approximating coldwave or proto-techno.
The score plays up all of those contrasts, sometimes within the course of a single track. After the verdant opener, “Sandy’s Necklace” begins like Sonic Youth tuning their guitars before easing into a murky sort of funk—swinging groove, plucked guitar—fleshed out with orchestral percussion and a bleak string melody. But “Nausea,” which follows, could almost be LCD Soundsystem demoing a rickety New Order cover. It’s a coiled study for synth and drum machine, which, along with its out-of-time drums, is the closest thing Greenwood has composed for a movie that sounds like a Radiohead song. A few tracks later, he returns to the uneasy electronic mood with “Dark Streets,” a John Carpenter-like sketch whose shifting pulse mimics Ramsay’s own jittery storytelling: While Joe’s steely focus drives the film’s pacing, the narrative is pocked with grim flashbacks and even grimmer glimpses of a kind of alternate reality, as though we were witnessing his psychotic break from behind his own heavy lids.
Greenwood flirted with harsh dissonance in his score for 2007’s There Will Be Blood, but his string arrangements here up the otherworldliness by an order of magnitude. With ethereal drones, he evokes 20th-century avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis’ shimmering music of the spheres, and with relentless slashing and sawing motions he channels the dull ache of self-loathing; one late cue sounds like the early-20th-century German composer Paul Hindemith tackling Psycho’s shower scene. (The reference may be intentional: Hitchcock’s film plays in the background of an early scene, and in a darkly comic moment, Joe even does his best impersonation of those iconic stabbing strings.)
In the context of the film, Greenwood’s writing is remarkably unobtrusive. When Joe gets behind the wheel, the new-wave flavored tracks are used in a way that is stylish and propulsive, but for long stretches of the film, the score falls silent, making way for Paul Davies’ hair-raising sound design, as well as some inspired AM-radio staples (“Angel Baby,” “I’ve Never Been to Me”) whose incongruity only heightens the film’s tension. The soundtrack wisely opts to leave those out; heard here, they would lose their counterintuitive power and break the eerie, bruised mood that Greenwood so skillfully evokes. The restraint of his score is a testament to his interpretive abilities, but even as a standalone album, You Were Never Really Here is an engrossing listen.


After a 12-year hiatus, the Norwegian duo returns with an especially airbrushed take on easy-listening pop. At their best, the Kings sound deceptively effortless, but the facade is sometimes too smooth.

Peace or Love

Europeans have mastered the art of taking it easy in a way that elicits American envy—how else to explain the plethora of hygge coffee-table books, the popularity of travel vloggers, and the eternal appeal of striped bateau shirts? In that sense, to describe Kings of Convenience’s work as easy listening isn’t disparaging. It’s simply an acknowledgement that the Norwegian duo’s music, particularly Peace or Love, the follow-up to 2009’s Declaration of Dependence, makes languid, pleasant pop seem deceptively effortless; the album is so smooth that its seams are barely visible. The record’s 11 tracks are a Quaalude dream, a set of gossamer songs so refined that they take on sedative properties.
Peace or Love is, more than anything, evocative: of early-aughts indie pop (Feist duets on the tracks “Love Is a Lonely Thing” and “Catholic Country”), yachting as a lifestyle, bossa nova, the soundtrack to Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Chad & Jeremy’s “A Summer Song.” If songs can sound the way sea breezes feel, or like an iced coffee in a piazza, these do. Which makes it even more confounding that the duo of Eirik Glambek Bøe and Erlend Øye recorded this album five times. “It’s very, very hard to make something sound simple,” Bøe says in the record’s press release—a very, very Norwegian understatement.
All sweat and other signs of effort have been completely scrubbed from the album, if ever they were audible. On certain tracks, like “Fever” or “Angel,” which sounds like the fraternal twin of Flight of the Conchords’ ‘“Foux du Fafa,” this airbrushed effect works well, especially in concert with lyrics that border on the absurd. “Angel, she’s an angel,” Bøe sings, deadpan, “Though she might be promiscuous.” On others, like “Song About It” or “Comb My Hair,” this sleekness occasionally has the uncanny gloss of packaged lunch meat, over-engineered and too distant from its composite parts. These tracks’ success pivots on an axis of earnestness—when they’re cheeky, Kings of Convenience pay winking homage to saccharine ’70s pop, and when they’re serious, they deliver music engineered to play over speakers at a tony rooftop bar. There’s a disjunct between “Comb My Hair’s” abject sadness—why bother with personal hygiene?—and its high-fidelity treatment, bright and affectless.
The uptempo “Rocky Trail” showcases Kings of Convenience at their faux-casual best: traveling at a clip, unspooling a winsome, jaunty guitar line, just two guys harmonizing about a failed friendship with a man carrying “a world on his shoulders that needed lifting.” “Brave enough to go climbing a wall so high that no sunlight is seen through winter,” Bøe incants, “Brave enough to go traveling around the world without money to eat or sleep for.” It’s the laminating of reality that Kings of Convenience do so well— buoyant sounds that make traveling penniless and hungry seem as toothless as a walk to the supermarket. Peace or Love, even more than the rest of the band’s oeuvre, renders the prickly, inconvenient parts of living smooth; it soothes, it backlights, it finesses.
At the end of a decidedly rocky 12 years, in which the band’s members saw relationships form and dissolve, felt label pressure, and confronted the onset of their 40s, it’s easy to understand the appeal of ease, or at least the facade thereof. Perhaps, despite Americans’ envy of European leisure, it’s also a distinctly American trait to look for cracks in the mirage. Still, Peace or Love is often as anodyne as its moniker would suggest, in need of a few fissures. It’s hard to separate these songs from their production. Both are panna-cotta smooth and occasionally cloying. It begs the question: What might have been left on the cutting room floor after 12 years of collaborative work and the frantic effort to erase the ensuing evidence?

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