The prolific Kenyan-born, Berlin-based electronic musician departs from his typical use of field recordings, but environmental sound still makes its mark on his immersive, long-form explorations.

Dissolution Grip

KMRU is not the call sign of a radio station, though it could very well be. The calendar of this imaginary broadcaster would vary in format and genre. Shows would change frequently: evolve, morph, disappear. To tune into KMRU would mean being surprised. Some shows would feature lengthy abstract drones, others would venture into the territory of techno, or focus on cerebral minimalism, and some would feature guest instrumentalists and vocalists. Yet for all that unpredictability, to pull up KMRU on your radio dial would invariably entail hearing field recordings—sometimes in their raw, undigested form, but far more frequently augmented by all manner of digital techniques and aesthetic practices.
But of course KMRU isn’t a radio station; KMRU is a lone individual (if an impressively prolific one). That taut quartet of letters is a compression of his family name: Kamaru. First name Joseph, born in Nairobi, Kenya, and relocated to Berlin, Germany, he has over the past few years become a widely referenced figure in contemporary electronic music, excelling in all the sounds mentioned above. Throughout it all, field recordings have been central to his work—quarried for their textural qualities, or sliced and diced into corrosive soundscapes, or laid bare to serve as vicarious sonic travel aids.
But on his new album Dissolution Grip, the first release from his own label, OFNOT, he manages to remove field recordings entirely while nonetheless amplifying their presence. (If KMRU actually were a radio station, this radical shift would suggest a change in management had occurred.) During his studies with artist and composer Jasmine Guffond at Berlin’s Universität der Künste, KMRU developed a technique of rendering field recordings into visual representation, then interpreting those images as graphic scores. Yet despite the absence of bird song, traffic din, and quotidian clatter, KMRU’s emphasis on long-form immersive explorations persists.
The album fades in quickly. Within a split second, the opening track, “Till Hurricane Bisect,” rises to an unsteady hum, like a drum kit’s cymbal resonating to nearby traffic. Halfway through its 15 minutes, you might mistake the piece for the audio of a wartime documentary, due to a hovering, whirring noise, like a helicopter overhead, sweeping the territory. The most chilling sounds, though, are close-ups: little knocks that will have you pausing the music to check if someone is trying to get your attention. His under-recognized gift for melody is evident when a slow monosynth line emerges—a green shoot, a hopeful moment—before it is suffocated by clanging.
On the title track, tonal moments toward the end sound very much like KMRU is singing along, intoning with the synthesized drones. It may simply be a trick of the overtones, or perhaps a deep man-machine empathy. Elsewhere amid its 13 and a half minutes are toothed zithers and euphonious timbres, palpitating murmurs and demanding noises—in other words, many of the emotional cues one might expect from KMRU, just rendered through different means. To listen is to wonder what is being represented, or reconstituted: from sound to image and back to sound again. Here and on the closing track, the 12-minute “Along a Wall,” the music begins to resemble a Sarah Davachi organ piece or a Harry Bertoia sound sculpture—or, more than anything, old-school space music. Having moved to Germany from Kenya, KMRU has tapped into the country’s storied vein of kosmische: rather than field recordings of our planet, an offworld sound born of technology.
The album title does leave a lingering question. What exactly is in a state of “dissolution”? Is he implying that field recordings have loosened their hold on him—and if so, will we listen back to it as a pivotal point in his career, or simply one among many exploratory works? But don’t take Dissolution Grip to be the conclusion of KMRU’s engagement with everyday sound, at least not for now. As early as the end of October, he’ll have yet another album out, Stupor, this time on the Helsinki-based Other Power label. It is packed with ordinary noises transformed into music rich with drama and compositional heft. Its opening track interweaves oscillating purrs with the voices of children at play and the beep of a truck backing up. In other words, classic KMRU.


Doves' fourth album is another sterling example of why Doves should be household names and why they probably won't ever be.

Kingdom of Rust

The story of Doves puts lie to the old adage that "it's all about the music, man." Because if it really were all about the music, Jez and Andy Williams would be the most famous brothers to come out of Manchester, Jimi Goodwin would be the go-to Britpop duet partner for Jay-Z and Kanye, and all those "Viva La Vida" ringtones you hear going off at Urban Outfitters would be replaced by a digitized symphony of Doves' "Black and White Town".
But as their back-story includes no tabloid-baiting tales of fraternal fisticuffs or marriages to Hollywood starlets, Doves could be the most unassuming, unsung band to have scored back-to-back UK No. 1 album debuts; on North American shores, their ascent has been somewhat hampered by the fact that their opening bands (the Strokes in 2001, the Rapture in 2002) have blown up bigger than the headliner. And unless one of the Doves starts dating Jennifer Aniston anytime soon, it's unlikely that Kingdom of Rust will radically change their stature. Rather, Doves' fourth album is another sterling example of why the Doves should be household names and why they probably won't ever be: their unwavering flair for producing mountainous, Wembley-worthy pop anthems that are nonetheless invested with a palpable degree of grace and humility.
While the past decade has seen the indie kids go dance and the dance kids go indie, Doves' 1998 formation was ironically predicated on an abrupt, 180-degree break from their former house-production guise as Sub Sub, absconding rhythmic propulsion for a space-rock sway. But more than any previous Doves album, Kingdom of Rust is built for motion and acceleration, leading its songs to unexpected and often exhilarating highs: Slow-percolating opener "Jetstream" counts down to lift-off with a hi-hat-triggered techno bed track that gradually intensifies into a tremorous, tribal clatter; "The Outsiders" blasts potholes into the Autobahn with a brawny Krautrock beat. Even when the band seemingly reverts to its familiar astral balladry on "10:03",  the reprieve is short-lived-- Goodwin's sweet, moonlit serenade is eventually upended by a creepy chorus of ghostly voices, launching a psych-rock eruption that suddenly transforms the song from Kingdom of Rust's most elegiac moment into its most unsettling one.
Perhaps this restlessness is indicative of certain frustration on Doves' part in seeing their efforts eclipsed by less imaginative, more mawkish Britpop bands, and in turn, a desire to distance themselves from the sad-sack pack; it's hard to imagine the likes of Elbow turning in something quite as fierce and paranoid as "House of Mirrors", a fuzz-soaked stomper punctuated by jarring, bump-in-the-night sound effects. For a band whose Allmusic.com descriptor list includes the terms "earnest," "reflective," and "lush," Doves are just as effective at being aggressive, to the point where Kingdom of Rust's serene turns feel more listless than usual: the dark, orchestral manoeuvre "Birds Flew Backwards" exposes the limitations of Goodwin's haggard voice, while "Spellbound" feels like an echo of previous capsized lullabies like "Sea Song"..
But then some tricks are worth repeating: Doves' most enduring and admirable quality-- from 2000's "The Cedar Room" to 2002's "There Goes the Fear" to 2005's "Black and White Town"-- has been their ability to render everyday urbanity in joyful, fantastical form, and to this canon we can add Kingdom of Rust's "Winter Hill", a paean to innocent, hand-held romance sent skyward on a pillow of Spiritualized swirls. It's just the sort of song that should earn Doves a return appearance to the UK top 10, but such an accomplishment is ultimately a moot point for these guys: They don't need high chart placements to make them feel like they're on top of the world.


The collaborative LP from Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett feels like an overheard discussion between two existential misfits. They sing songs about writing songs, covering each other in the process.

Courtney Barnett / Kurt Vile: Lotta Sea Lice

Lotta Sea Lice

Philly country-psych zen master Kurt Vile and Australian indie-rock orator Courtney Barnett are at once an odd couple and a perfect union—not so much a mirror image of one another as a negative exposure. Vile rarely rocks out as rambunctiously as Barnett, and Barnett doesn’t ever zone out to the same degree as Vile. And where Barnett can pack an impossible amount of observational narrative detail into a single couplet, Vile often spends his songs lingering on the feeling of lingering. But on a musical level, the two encroach on common twangy turf whenever their respective songs settle into a country-rock groove. And ultimately their differing songwriting styles serve the same function—they’re coping mechanisms against the absurdities and indignities of the modern world, navigating them toward an inner peace that always seems just a little out of reach. (That they just so happen to share first names with the preeminent power couple of ’90s alt-rock only makes their partnership seem all the more pre-destined.)
Their debut collaboration, Lotta Sea Lice, thus feels less like a collection of traditional duets than an overheard discussion between two misfits who just met at an Existentialists Anonymous meeting. Unlike most he-said/she-said pairings, there’s no romantic role-play here, no cheeky entendres, no faux-frisson milked for dramatic tension, no song that’s ever going to replace “Islands in the Stream” or “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” on hipster karaoke-bar playlists. Instead, we’re treated to an intimate, fly-on-the-wall perspective on two peers talking shop about their songwriting methods. They’re the sort of chats that tend to happen behind dressing-room doors or around backstage festival buffets and swag lounges; here, they’re set to a roots-rock soundtrack that’s as casual as the conversation.
But these seemingly mundane interactions are elevated by the audible bonhomie that Vile and Barnett exude when communing with one another. On the opening “Over Everything,” the two compare notes on their peculiar creative processes (he finds inspiration in solitude; she “speed-read[s] the morning news”), practically singing over one another with the excitement of two new acquaintances slowly coming to the realization that they’re actually long lost soul mates. After trading lines, Vile and Barnett sing the final verse in harmony as if sealing their friendship by blood pact, before mischievously steering the song’s breezy acoustic lope into a stormy, twang-tangled extended outro.
But there’s a lot more to Lotta Sea Lice than the mere novelty of hearing two celebrated musicians singing songs about writing songs. “Let It Go” taps into more deep-seated anxieties about staying motivated, with the war between creativity and lethargy reflected in the tension between the song’s slow-dissolve, dew-drop guitar lines and restless, hiccupping drum beat (respectively provided by the Dirty Three dream team of Mick Turner and Jim White). And where the windswept country shuffle “Continental Breakfast” is a charming paean to Vile and Barnett’s long-distance friendship, it’s also a glimpse into the dislocating, Groundhog Day-like effect of touring for a living: “I cherish my intercontinental friendships, we talk it over continental breakfast,” Barnett sings, before adding, “In a hotel/In East Bumble, Wherever/Somewhere on the sphere, around here.”
True to the album’s songwriter-workshop vibe, Vile and Barnett reveal more of themselves through a couple of covers and song swaps that allow them to get out of their own heads and dig deeper into the dirt. Originally recorded by Barnett’s wife Jen Cloher, “Fear Is Like a Forest” is a perfect fit for the album’s psychoanalytical themes, but gives the duo the opportunity to lean into a Crazy Horse grind (given an extra churn by Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa). And with Vile taking the lead, Barnett’s 2013 saloon-blues set piece “Out of the Woodwork” (translated here in proper Vile-speak to “Outta the Woodwork”) acquires a more ominous, black-cloud intensity. But the album’s most arresting moment comes when Barnett seizes Vile’s “Peeping Tomboy” and makes it her own, clearing up the original’s meditative haze for a stark, aching solo-acoustic interpretation, making lines like “I don’t want to work but I don’t want to sit around/All day frowning” feel less like an indecisive slacker’s mantra and more like the desperate pleas of an emotionally paralyzed agoraphobe.
As those self-covers attest, Lotta Sea Lice is very much a middle-ground meeting—there’s none of the wild abandon that marks Barnett’s signature songs, while the duo never approach the hypnotic allure of Vile’s most entrancing work. This is a lazy-Sunday-hang of a record: cozy, congenial, and only periodically exerting the energy to get off the couch. (It’s also unconcerned with being a little silly—though, fortunately, “Blue Cheese” boasts enough of a fetching honky-glam swagger to forgive throwaway lines like “I met a girl named Tina/That girl, that girl supplies the reeferina.”) Fitting for two songwriters raised on ’90s alt-rock, Vile and Barnett bid us adieu with a winsome cover of Belly’s 1993 acoustic reverie “Untogether,” which Turner infuses with lysergic, Mazzy Star-like guitar slides. “You can’t save the unsavably untogether,” the duo sing in harmony, obliquely referencing the inherently fleeting nature of their alliance, as their solo careers and family lives inevitably beckon once again. But Lotta Sea Lice is a testament to how two artists can finish each other’s sentences even as they live worlds apart.


The unhurried new album from English indie pop trio Saint Etienne centers on a theme of geography. Across 19 tracks, the band offers a day-in-the-life snapshot of their native London commuter towns.

Home Counties

The ninth studio album from English indie pop trio Saint Etienne explicitly references place in every aspect of its presentation, from lyrics to artwork to the title itself—which is English slang for a loosely-defined ring of commuter communities that surround the city of London. For American listeners, the closest comparison would be the outskirts beyond the edges of New York’s outer boroughs or the suburbs in general. But neither of those exactly matches the ambience of a setting that Blur guitarist Graham Coxon once described with an image of blue tit birds pecking for the cream at the top of home-delivered milk bottles.
Like Coxon, Saint Etienne’s chief lyricists—frontwoman Sarah Cracknell and keyboardist Bob Stanley—paint pictures of a seemingly idyllic place that becomes a stultifying enclosure for its inhabitants. With Home Counties, they take listeners on a tour through their native world via 19 tracks that, according to the band, thread together a day-in-the-life snapshot of the entire region. Geography naturally plays a prominent role. “The trains took us away from the smoke,” Cracknell narrates in a spoken passage from the moody, bossa nova- and flute-tinged organ epic “Sweet Arcadia.” Her narration runs “from Fenchurch Street through Limehouse, West Ham, Barking, and over the fields to Laindon, Dunton, Pitsea, Benfleet to Southend on Sea.” Other songs evoke snapshots of trips home across the moor, commutes to and from the town of Whyteleafe “on the rail-replacement bus,” and an apple tree up a winding hill, and so on.
Though the entire album plays on its characters’ relationships to the mundane, Cracknell and Stanley refrain from spelling out much of anything about the lives of those characters. Few things are as universal as mixed feelings towards the place you grew up, but *Home Country’*s message takes a backseat to the music. According to the band, for example, “Whyteleafe” imagines David Bowie if he’d ended up as a working stiff who daydreams out the bus window of “the Paris of the sixties/The Berlin of the seventies.” You’d never know it, though, unless you were told. Likewise, good luck finding the hints of post-Brexit England that Cracknell has recently said the band laced into the new album’s storylines.
After recruiting Cracknell in 1991, Saint Etienne settled into a pattern of framing each album around a theme while also varying their musical approach. This time, the band’s trademark dance element no longer serves as the music’s primary backbone thanks to more fleshed-out arrangements by producer/multi-instrumentalist Shawn Lee. In spots where Lee plays live drums, he provides a solid counterpoint to Stanley and fellow keyboardist/co-founder Pete Wiggs’ electro-thump. Across the board, though, the musicianship shows a level of seasoning and poise that precious few bands manage after becoming comfortable with their identity. It’s that sense of comfort that keeps Saint Etienne grounded when they step out on the album’s many musical limbs.
Saint Etienne have never been the type of band that hits you over the head with attitude or attack. They sound especially loose and unhurried here. You’d expect an album with so many hookless detours to lose steam. Much of “Sweet Arcadia,” for example, consists of keyboard haze that’s devoid of rhythm. And you won’t be tapping your toe to “Angel of Woodhatch,” which closes the album out with dour cello, flute, and soft steel drum percussion. Nevertheless, the sweeping, open choruses of songs like “Magpie Eyes,” “Whyteleafe,” and “Take It All In” steal the show, and those songs are actually supported, not diminished, by the more abstract moments. Saint Etienne never identified as Britpop, and fair enough. But with Home Counties, they give us a glimpse of what cutting-edge ’90s pop could have become if it had evolved into adult music with a more earthbound point of view.


Guided by the inquisitive lyrics of singer Audrey Kang as she narrates the process of searching for self through song, the band’s lush third album feels like a ride-along to the creative process.

A Color of the Sky

Lightning Bug have previously wrestled with the fragile alchemy of the artistic process. On their third album, the billowing A Color of the Sky, singer Audrey Kang zeroes in on a fascination with self-discovery through song, contemplating music’s ability to illuminate deeper truths in both its author and receiver, and artistic labor’s unlikely transfiguration into bliss. Underneath the record’s enveloping shoegaze swoon, these quiet musings bring us close enough to feel the vulnerable intimacy of its creation.
A Color of the Sky is the New York group’s most direct and fully rendered work to date: a beautiful collection of songs paying direct homage to the dreamy atmospheres, curling synthesizers, and blown-out guitars of slow-burning art rock and blistering shoegaze greats: Mazzy Star, My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Cocteau Twins, the Stone Roses. Yet Lightning Bug re-imagine this canon in the context of an entirely new plot. Like Creation Records fan fiction, a ’90s 4AD reboot, or a shoegaze memoir, A Color of the Sky builds upon a familiar palette, reconfiguring foundational sounds in order to reexamine them.
Lyrically, the album amounts to an extended meditation on the struggle inherent in the creative process. “If I empty me of all myself, am I a vessel or a shell?/Mining for the substance in the dark and precious well/Pour out my convictions till I'm hollow as a bell,” Kang sings on “Song of the Bell.” Her voice’s delicate confidence tells its own story. The record’s driving momentum and spiritual haze simultaneously pit enchantment and disillusionment against each other. The evolution from simple song to sonic universe is almost always made clear by each track’s gradually intensifying production, effectively mimicking this dialogue. Most songs build upward from a quiet voice and an acoustic guitar, drum, or synth into a sea of lulling feedback and fluttering ambience, direct conversations bleeding out into layered fantasies. Each song has a brief moment when the whimsical textures dissipate, and Kang is left alone, looking directly into the mirror.
“When you’re playing or writing a song, you have to enter your own little world to access it. I think that’s another way of ‘coming back to yourself,’” Kang told Stereogum last month. Kang articulates this dance on opener “The Return”: “But as I starе into the heart of my own twisting fire/The songs yet to be written flock around me like a choir.” She reckons with the need for the work of others to communicate her own feelings: “I turn to poetry/I turn to the books I read/To say what I mean,” she whispers on the album’s title track. She interrogates the phenomenon of the phantasmagoria, how signifiers can feel more real than what they remind us of: “How colors feel stronger and feelings so true/That even the flowers smell more like you.” Narrating the process of searching for the self through song, A Color of the Sky feels like a surreal ride-along to the creative process. Even so, it can be difficult to make out these lyrics through their quiet exhaled delivery behind a haze of effects, like pulling back a curtain only to reveal a cloud.
Listening to A Color of the Sky can feel, at times, like playing all of your favorite shoegaze, alt-rock, and dream-pop records at once, Zaireeka-style. Moments feel plucked directly from their source, recontextualized as subtle elegies to the loyal comforts of a treasured record collection. From the Bends-era heavy chords of “I Lie Awake” to the Loveless-like harsh whisper-squeals of “Song of the Bell” to the patient Talk Talk tribute “The Chase,” a collage of lush synth tones and fuzzy warmth orbits each track like an atmosphere, evaporating into thin air, and drifting away like a memory.
A Color of the Sky’s immersive textures beckon, while its meta-aware poetry keeps the listener at a distance. Yet Kang’s attempts to demystify the nature of songwriting somehow pull us in closer, providing a glimpse into the process of creation. Lightning Bug’s ability to transform the vulnerability and struggles of producing meaningful art into a gorgeous and deeply affecting record is its own sort of magic trick. A Color of the Sky wears its derivative textures as a superhero might don a form-fitting costume, transforming tales of creative defeat into high-definition triumphs.

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The New York nightlife veteran’s new album chronicles pandemic survival in the city and the difficult joy that’s followed.

The Beach Album

When was the last time New York dance music was “hot”? Some would probably argue the answer lies in the culture’s initial Brooklynification in the early 2000s, as chronicled on the margins of Lizzie Goodman’s Meet in the Bathroom. Older heads might cite the decade leading up to 9/11 when local rhythm undergrounds, hip-hop and house, became world conquerors. Historically minded utopians often argue the city is always popping, a kernel of truth held onto most tightly by romantic transplants.
When you come of age in New York club culture, as Eli Escobar has, you recognize how connected its ups and downs are to the state of the city. By that measure, everything great happening in those clubs right now (hint: a lot) takes place in the shadow of 2020: the pandemic, the protests, the failed civic response, the officially shuttered nightlife and its roar back to life. All this turmoil is at the heart of Escobar’s The Beach Album, which got its title because the forty-something New Yorker recorded it in a house on the city’s Ramones-immortalized Rockaway Beach, where he and his family spent lockdown. Here is not only the period’s trauma, but the deeply complicated joy taking place afterwards.
An Upper West Side kid who began playing records, throwing parties, and making beats as a late-’80s/early-’90s teen, Escobar has been a presence across the city’s clubbing spectrum ever since. His career began in the dusk of hip-hop’s golden age and hit professional cruise while he paid his dues as an all-night-selecting worker bee during Manhattan’s bottle service days and blog-house phase. Now Escobar is one of the city’s most popular and hardworking DJs, sidestepping the festival and global circuit to gig locally several times a week: playing specialty big-room house or techno at queer party nights, street-soul and classic hip-hop on hotel rooftops, or a signature ’80s-heavy “sad boy electro” at Bushwick dives. At Tiki Disco, the decade-long outdoor summer institution he throws with DJ Lloyd and Andy Pry, the sound is an endless string of iconic dance tracks for packed Sunday afternoon crowds. The selections are egalitarian, the crowd-reading is precise, and the layered mixing superlative.
Escobar brings this sociological awareness and cultural fluency to The Beach, the latest and best in a series of sample-heavy mixtapes he produced during a creative burst early in the pandemic. 2020’s There Are Ghosts Everywhere in New York City grafted soul music onto community monologues and throwback interviews with neighborhood residents, while 2021’s Lullabies for a Sleeping City was a downtempo beat-tape on the theme of quiet urbanity and resilience. Though dancefloors were shuttered at those times, Escobar never stopped making songs for movement and release: grimy funk-house loops, pop-techno compositions, modular synth experiments. What ties The Beach together is how its tracks—which in Escobar’s eclectic style runs the gamut from hip-hop interludes to epic Balearic fantasias—accept the weight of the pandemic without getting swallowed by it, the context deepening the grooves. Another generation’s death disco—or, more precisely, Midtown 120 Blues—comes into view.
The album sounds like both a diary of shut-down seclusion and a strangely hopeful vision of living through it. The endurance is centered in the myriad of sampled voices populating The Beach, many of them joyful chops from gospel records and older raps, bringing a classic Prince Paul vibe to the chronicle. Some are overt in how they address the circumstances. The female singer on a short, electronic-dub-heavy ‘80s R&B groove entitled “If It Takes a Miracle” makes her point by finishing the title’s sample line (“...to survive this time”). The vocal loop over the deep, minimalist drum-machine freestyle, “Findaway2day,” insists that “you’ve got find a way baby,” as keyboards raise the harmonies skyward, an intermittent trumpet couplet strikes an anthemic pose, and the pops of vinyl underneath collapse the timeline continuum, crashing all the survival crises bore by the various dance communities Escobar serves into a wonderfully uplifting evocation.
Other voices taunt and bubble and babble, providing the irreverence that good-time dance tracks require. When the male rapper on opening bass-sequencer groover “Daywun” carries on about the need to “repeat the funk-funk-funk—you got to,” it seems less a sonic reflection of when all the indoor-days bled into one another than an age-old call to move. No interpretation is necessary of Escobar’s exquisite vocal chopping on “Down All Day,” a disco-techno monster whose sound harkens back to Carl Craig and Lil Louis classics; its wordless skat functioning as the driver and the ride. “Down All Day” hints at the chaos of letting yourself go, while clearly presenting the loose-joint constraints which great DJs can wind tightly into mixes of rhythm that keep a crowd up. Eli Escobar knows that this is how you honor the city’s tradition without becoming a prisoner of it. To bring that beat back, to make it hot again, the first thing you have to do is survive.


The synth-pop group offers a remarkably assured debut, with 10 pristine pieces that eschew dramatics for concision.

Nation of Language: Introduction, Presence

Introduction, Presence

After Ian Devaney’s first band—the polished, punk-tinged rockers Static Jacks—fell apart in the early 2010s, the singer sought comfort in recreating the synth pop of his youth. What started as a nostalgia trip would eventually morph into a proper band, expanding to include ex-Static Jack member Michael Sue-Poi and synth player Aidan Noell. The band took its time, trickling out singles piecemeal before finally releasing their debut album Introduction, Presence, four years after forming.
The time put in shines through; Introduction, Presence is a remarkably self-assured debut, 10 pristine pieces of synth pop that eschew dramatics for concision. Songs like “Rush & Fever” and “On Division St” reach the glory of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and The Human League through an attention to craft that many bands with the same influences fail to notice. The album is full of miniaturized synth flourishes and clear, crisp drum beats that were probably fussed over for months until they came out just right. Sue-Poi’s bass lines are the secret weapon,  having learned Peter Hook’s lesson that the bass can be a powerful melody instrument.
Despite the shimmer, Introduction, Presence is a decidedly forlorn work, haunted by the ever-present specter of past mistakes and accumulated hardship. “I’m wasting away/I took the long road home and it never paid off for me,” Devaney sings in the album opener “Tournament” in a downcast voice that echoes through the entire record. Yet while nostalgia and longing inform the album, they never consume it, and the band knows when to push forward. “Turn the pages/Try to find another way,” he sings achingly at the end of“The Motorist,” desperate to escape this moment in his life.
Introduction, Presence doesn’t offer any great reinventions. Notes of Altered Images, early Depeche Mode, or even modern contemporaries like Black Marble are impossible to ignore while listening. But their understanding of the genre they’re working in—its workings, tropes, and trappings—is so refined that they are able to boil it down to its barest essence, saving catharsis for just the right moment.
That moment arrives with the album’s final song, “The Wall and I.” It shines as their most anthemic cut through just a few well-placed, dramatic keyboard notes and some unexpected guitar chords. Devaney sounds just as trapped in his circumstances as he always does, but for once it feels like he might transcend them as well. “I stared up the wall and he said/‘I don’t know’ is not an answer to the question,” he wails in the chorus, realizing he can no longer hide in indecision. Not necessarily a comforting epiphany, but fitting for an album built on making peace with the past, and taking small steps to something grander.


The Chicago percussionist, bandleader, and composer offers a moving, frequently ebullient album that doesn’t shy away from the terrors of America’s past and present while managing, somewhat incredibly, to find hope in the country’s future.

America the Beautiful

Russian composer Igor Stravinsky was an American when he rearranged the “Star-Spangled Banner.” He had left Paris in 1939 and was in the process of establishing residency in the U.S. when he decided to put his spin on the national anthem of his new country, where he would end up living for the rest of his life. His 1941 arrangement of the “Star-Spangled Banner”—which landed him in mild trouble with the Boston police—premiered in the early days of World War II. It keeps the melody intact, but he shades it with subtle blue harmonies that tweak the song’s strident sense of empowerment, rounding into a finale that, while still triumphant, is somewhat cracked. America, in Stravinsky’s telling, is weaker than it insists, but it still has the capacity for good. It takes less than 15 seconds with Kahil El’Zabar’s America the Beautiful to understand that he feels the exact same way.
The Chicago percussionist, bandleader, and composer came up through the influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, serving as its chairman from 1975 to 1983, and he would go on to play with everyone from Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp to Dizzy Gillespie and Cannonball Adderley. America the Beautiful, his second album of 2020—following June’s excellent Spirit Groove—is built around his rearrangement of the hallowed title track. It’s a moving, frequently ebullient album that doesn’t shy away from the terrors of America’s past and present while managing, somewhat incredibly, to find hope in the country’s future.
For El’Zabar, “America” begins with the drum. Specifically, the hand-pounded pulse of an African drum that sets the pace for his ensemble, which includes trumpeter Corey Wilkes, cellist Tomeka Reid, and the late baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett, who makes his final recorded appearance here. They set the familiar melody into place, but they immediately saw holes in its bright optimism with uneven, uncomfortable harmonies. The symbolism is obvious, but no less moving for it: the notion of America’s beauty has been wounded, but crucially, it’s still afloat. Like John Coltrane’s quartet expanding the boundaries of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things,” the ensemble takes us far away from the song’s founding idea, only to return to it with a refreshed vision. That the melody is muddier and more difficult to make out when the group states it again near the end of the song is only part of the point; one gets the sense that, for El’Zabar, what matters most is that it persists.
“America the Beautiful” isn’t the only standard El’Zabar reconstructs. Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro Blue,” here titled “Sketches of an Afro Blue,” is heralded by the string section, who recite the melody as if they’re making a dire announcement. The percussion nearly goes out of sync, wobbling on the edge of phasing out and keeping things from getting too comfortable, while Reid flies all over her cello’s fingerboard, spraying notes and nearly gasping into harmonics. There’s a relentless emotional heaviness to El’Zabar’s composition that’s virtually invisible in the original. Their take on Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band’s canonical “Express Yourself,” however, explodes like a box of compressed sunshine. While Bluiett’s baritone puckers and shouts, Reid and violinist Samuel Williams saw at the rhythm like they’re playing with a string band, connecting a timeless anthem of Black joy to music being made by Black people in this country over a hundred years ago.
But El’Zabar’s intermixing of brightness and lamentation is at its best in the original “Freedom March.” An eight-minute showcase for Bluiett, it unwinds slowly, sounding like both halves of a jazz funeral happening at the same time, the dirge and the celebration coexisting in a way that’s coherent, but not easy. Bluiett struts alongside the ensemble as they make their way through the tune, punching out deep runs with a chortle and pinching into a high scream. He’s all over the place: He beckons from an adjacent alleyway, then falls into place and plays alongside his bandmates for a few moments before growing restless and popping back out again. Taken together, it all suggests that the titular freedom means not only the freedom of expression, but the freedom to keep marching, to keep pushing, to find within confusion and anger—and joy and beauty—the raw materials needed to build something new.
Which makes the drum that kicks off the album feel even more auspicious. Throughout America the Beautiful’s frenetic explorations, it’s the percussion that keeps the ensemble grounded. El’Zabar, who performs most of it, plays in a way that’s intricate and complex, lacing together a number of interwoven sounds sourced from African music, Latin jazz, and funk. At times it feels like an argument for Black culture as both a consistent force in this country and a rebuke to the chaotic excesses of white supremacy’s most demonstrative displays of power. If we understand the word “politics” to mean the way we organize our mutual action, this is explicitly political music: “Now’s the time for us to collectively invoke a confluence of trust and imagination that will enlighten a future path towards ethical humanity,” El’Zabar writes in the album’s statement of purpose. It seems strange, in the waning months of 2020, to hear someone express hope for our country’s future—to suggest that anything like “ethical humanity” is still possible on a societal level. But then again, Americans have been guiding their country toward the light since the days of its broken birth. Most just weren’t called “American” at the time.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a six-song EP from 1992, a record that alchemized the sound and provocative aggression of Nine Inch Nails.

Broken EP

Let’s begin, as we must, with death by cock and ball torture. A man walks into a dark and grimy basement decorated like a makeshift temple. He offers a rose to a ramshackle altar, then lights a candle. As he undresses, the camera lingers on each piece of his suit, then notices the barbed wire tattooed above his clean-shaven genitals. He climbs into the chair in the center of the room, purified, an offering. The motorized chair clenches around his body like a fist. Needles pierce his hand, and he groans in pleasure; a robotic claw pinches at his stomach, his scrotum, his dick. He moans again, in ecstasy. Then the machine and its appendages disembowel him completely and feed the slurry of his guts through a metal sphincter, which, if I may, draws to mind the harmony between a camera lens and an anus. So much for Bob. Trent stands up from the spot where he’s been watching in the waiting room and enters the same chamber of worship. He’s next.
This is “Happiness in Slavery,” the revolting, hypnotizing, beautiful video that accompanied Nine Inch Nails’ Broken EP in 1992. The man fed to the machine is played by Bob Flanagan, a performance and video artist who lived with cystic fibrosis and made gruesomely provocative art from his station inside the late 20th century’s techno-medical apparatus. He was likely best known for nailing the head of his penis to a board in front of a live audience to Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer”; that’s how Trent Reznor heard of him, anyway. They made a natural pair: the scrappy, squalling poster boy for the newly mainstreamed industrial movement and the professional masochist who carried on in the tradition of COUM Transmissions, the violent and depraved performance-art collective that gave rise to Throbbing Gristle, the first band to claim “industrial” as a descriptor for themselves. The sound of metal chewing meat and actual metal chewing actual meat fused together again.
By the time he recorded Broken, Reznor had gotten everything he’d ever wanted and hated it. He wrought a lucrative career from a childhood fascination with music; he also seethed about the indignities of Reagan-era capitalist machinery only to find himself its shiniest new cog. Like his contemporary Kurt Cobain, Reznor came of age gagging at the pap that slicked MTV, the tired rock bands with aerated hair surfing the last dregs of glam. He grew up in a part of Pennsylvania where nothing happened. As a kid, he latched onto the juvenile antics of shock rock outfits like Alice Cooper and KISS that he saw on TV and suggested that something, somewhere, might be happening. Eventually, he found his way to the Chicago-based industrial label Wax Trax! and their mainstay act Ministry, who taught him that songs could be hideous and irresistible at the same time.
After a fleeting college stint, Reznor dropped out in 1984 and moved to Cleveland, where he briefly suffered the humiliation of playing in a new wave band. He quit that, too, and scooped up a job cleaning toilets at a local recording studio in exchange for a little money and a lot of free studio time. He taught himself MIDI and began scratching out the jagged synthpop demos that would ultimately mutate into Nine Inch Nails’ debut album, 1989’s Pretty Hate Machine.
Released on the independent label TVT, Pretty Hate Machine moved exponentially more copies than any other record in the proto-industrial scene. It helped that some minor controversy attended NIN’s first single: While recording the video for “Down In It,” a weather balloon filming an aerial shot got away from the crew and ended up in the hands of the cops, who took it for a snuff film. The authorities tracked down the very much alive Reznor, who either got the footage back or refilmed it. Though you can now see the uncut version, MTV ultimately axed the shot of Reznor lying completely dead on the pavement, glooped up in corn starch that suggested early-stage decomposition.
The fresh FBI file may have boosted Nine Inch Nails’ reputation, but the songs powered themselves: all hard edges and taut screams, galvanized by production assistance from British producer Flood (known for his work with Depeche Mode and Soft Cell) and Adrien Sherwood and Keith Leblanc of the New York industrial hip-hop ensemble Tackhead. With these new collaborators, Nine Inch Nails coiled the clang and scrape of Skinny Puppy and Front 242 tightly around hooks as delicious as anything in Duran Duran’s chart-swallowers—a winning contrast. Reznor’s rural American alienation glittered in cellophane. It turned out there was a massive untapped market of teenagers who felt the same frustration and despair, who found themselves stranded in the hinterlands of life, who hated everything but loved to dance about it. Pretty Hate Machine sold 350,000 copies; then Nine Inch Nails thrashed their way through a daytime slot at the inaugural Lollapalooza in 1991, and the number swelled to over a million.
It all came so close to never happening. When Reznor first delivered Pretty Hate Machine to TVT, label head Steve Gottlieb scoffed. He took the sour, abrasive collection for a failure, the complete deflation of the promise he’d heard in Reznor’s demos. Gottlieb almost canned the release, then decided to put it out anyway, and then found himself with a megalith under his roof. Still, the windfall didn’t sway him. Rather than allow Reznor the creative leeway he craved, Gottlieb boxed him in further. He tried to push NIN toward his own vision of a commercially successful band: chipper remixes designed to play in the worst possible clubs, lazy music videos decorated in hot, anonymous women. The conflict reached a fever pitch when TVT buried a collaboration with Ministry’s Al Jourgensen and Paul Barker, a cover of Black Sabbath’s “Supernaut” recorded under the moniker 1000 Homo DJs, after Gottlieb held Reznor’s performance rights for ransom.
“I hate them,” Reznor said of his label in a 1991 interview with the Boston Globe. “I thought maybe we’d prove ourselves and they’d leave us alone, but it’s turned into, ‘OK, you’ve sold this many records, but you could sell—well, add a 0 to it—if you use this producer or do this house mix.’ What are you talking about!? That’s the mentality I’m dealing with.” Deep in the music industry, moving units, and amassing fans, Reznor found out that a shitty boss was a shitty boss no matter what kind of job you had.
Nothing seemed to motivate him so much as an adversary. Instead of combing down the bristles on his music, Reznor took it darker. After Lollapalooza wrapped, he set out on a second, secret tour, recording songs under aliases at studios across the country with the full-band, guitar-heavy sound he’d honed onstage. He sluiced the bile he’d been fermenting into tighter, hotter, toothier songs than he’d ever written before. The thin layer of arch coolness that protected Pretty Hate Machine flaked away, leaving a raw, festering core. He collected this burst of work under the name Broken, and put it out as a six-song EP (with two hidden bonus tracks—a cheeky cover of an early Adam and the Ants song, “Physical,” and a fleshing-out of a track Reznor had recorded with the industrial supergroup Pigface, “Suck”). It served as a kiss-off to TVT as he ditched them for Jimmy Iovine’s new label, Interscope, and launched his own incubator imprint, Nothing.
Broken amplified the elements that sucked listeners into NIN’s chaotic live shows, hoisting the guitars in the mix and deepening the beats with a smattering of acoustic drums. Reznor went nastier, figuring he might shake the specter of pop success. Instead of derailing, he only gained momentum. In October of 1992, Broken debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 chart while Pretty Hate Machine hung around at No. 173, three years after its release. In 1993, the Recording Academy awarded NIN’s first Grammy, in the Best Metal Performance category, to the single “Wish.” (Three years later, their mud-covered Woodstock ’94 performance of “Happiness in Slavery” would score a trophy in the same category; NIN hasn’t bagged a Grammy since.) The deeper Reznor dug, the deeper the world burrowed. At the daybreak of the ’90s, his misery was a lightning-hot commodity.
But Broken didn’t just moan. Alongside the inflammatory anger and paralyzing dejection, Reznor kept his keen ear for pleasure. He found the erotic charge in surrendering to the fullness of your pain, the frisson in the place where suffering obliterates the ego. Sex—real sex, the improvisational, scriptless, scary kind, not just the mechanical performance of studied acts—works the same way. It storms you until all the “you” washes away. With Broken, in the grind of “Last” and the shrieks of “Gave Up,” Reznor split new layers of skin into a thundering eroticism. These songs would pave the way for “Closer,” the brutally romantic single off of NIN’s 1994 watershed The Downward Spiral, an album that would, in fact, flow abundantly through radio and MTV alike.
To accompany the Broken EP, Reznor worked with directors Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson (Throbbing Gristle’s in-house synth pervert and half of Coil), Eric Goode, Serge Becker, and Jon Reiss to make a series of videos, each more prurient than the last, all of which make the “Down In It” video look like a Pixar short. The full sequence would come to be known as the Broken movie; though NIN never officially released it, Reznor passed around VHS copies to his inner circle, each marked with a unique glitch so he would know the source of any bootlegs. It circulated like a snuff film, copy to grainy copy; years later, Reznor would leak it himself as a hidden digital download on NIN’s website.
In the video for “Wish,” the only airable segment from the series, Reznor flails in a sea of starving men, beautiful under Sleazy’s lens. Latex opera gloves cling to his biceps; fishnets crisscross his pasty legs. He scrapes out a distorted guitar riff and screams about fist-fucking. Sleazy fixes a lascivious gaze on the scene. Men grope each other, glistening; they reach for Reznor through the bars of the cage that enclose him and his band, grabbing at his long, greasy hair as he staggers around the stage.
For over 20 years, starting with that first Lollapalooza, “Wish” has been a staple of the band’s sets. Live videos from the ’91 tour show Reznor in a similar stance as he makes his way onstage: slouched and hobbling, dusted in corn starch and streaked with grime, bent over the mic with his forehead to the floor, rolling around in torn glitter tights and creased combat boots, almost weeping. Rather than lead the crowds that have gathered for him, rather than stand upright and fling his arms wide and bask in their love like a rock star, he makes himself an offering. He submits.
He does the same in an alternate, safe-for-work video for “Gave Up,” filmed in the house where Charles Manson’s followers murdered Sharon Tate (and where Reznor would complete much of The Downward Spiral), featuring a baby-faced Marilyn Manson in the accompanying band. Reznor cradles himself as he whispers into the microphone in the middle of a dimly lit studio setup. It’s got to be the first rock video to show someone playing an Apple computer; the track name “Fuck you steve” flashes on the screen just before the band erupts into the first pre-chorus.
Reactionary glosses of Nine Inch Nails position them as little more than an expression of male power jutting out into a submissive culture, a plume of hot violence that makes impressionable teens do terrible things. More than anything else in Reznor’s catalog, Broken troubles that story. NIN found power in the venting of rage, sure; plenty of fans attached their own frustrated anger to what Reznor spewed. But those vents let in as much air as they let out steam. Throughout Broken, apertures appear: words whispered close to the ear into near silence, fractured and terrified screams. Reznor discovered his falsetto on Broken and found it to be a bidirectional valve, a vulnerable emission. As “Happiness in Slavery” thunders to a close, he repeats the song’s title over and over. “Happiness” comes out as a defeated whisper; “slavery” as a cascade of corroded, enfeebled shrieks—the last gasp of the mutilated, not the victory call of the mutilator. He twisted his voice into a stark departure from his idols and mentors in Ministry. In place of Al Jourgensen’s blockaded sneer, Reznor pressed a bleeding fissure into the wire.
“Smashed up my sanity/Smashed up integrity/Smashed up what I believed in/Smashed up what’s left of me,” Reznor squeals in that same pathetic register on “Gave Up,” his voice digitally lacerated and mixed with the vocalizations of his beloved golden labrador, Maise. “After everything I’ve done, I hate myself for what I’ve become.” Over a brisk one-two step—a rhythm you could almost skip to—Reznor collapses at the bottom of his fully realized aspirations, finding them as hollow as anything else. Broken occurs at that pivotal point where self-loathing softens into self-exploration, where the nadir of your suffering both obliterates the known world and expands its borders. It made way for the ugliness of The Downward Spiral, but it also cleared space for its tremendous and spare beauty: the painful sweetness of “Hurt,” the impossible delicacy of “A Warm Place.” Broken jettisoned venom and turned over newly fertile soil.
Like the monolithic albums on either side of it, Broken sold more than a million copies. Its slim volume towered over the decade that followed, as the seat of the beleaguered outsider became one of the readiest places to park a megaphone, as industrial metal thinned into Korn and curdled into Limp Bizkit in parallel streams. Turgid masculinity ruled MTV again, drained of its eroticism, all openings walled off. But there was a moment, captured in Broken, when the world’s leading industrial pop star was a sub for the masses, laying bare his worst impulses and then chasing them all the way down the pipes to searing, mangled bliss. The corollary to “fuck everything” is “there has to be more than this.” And maybe the “more” of the world is sealed by a door you have to bite open.


On his masterful new album, Dan Bejar moves like a ghost through his familiar and inscrutable universe.

Have We Met

Spend enough time listening to Destroyer and the world will start to resemble a Dan Bejar song—when a bon vivant slips in an unexpected curse word; when a friend tries to place a melody by humming the guitar part; when a common phrase twists into a surrealist riddle via an AutoCorrect mishap. Since he first emerged in the mid-’90s, Bejar has reflected the world in these abstract and broken-sounding ways: “Sing the least poetic thing you can think of,” he recently said of his preferred method of songwriting, “and try to make it sound beautiful.” As cerebral as Bejar’s work can be, the state of mind with which his music is most commonly associated is drunkenness: the predilection to spew nonsense, the bravado in convincing the room you’re fine, even as you spill wine all over yourself.
While he once accompanied these gestures with rambly, glammy folk-rock, Bejar has spent the past decade mining the milder tones of sophisti-pop, soft rock, and adult contemporary: genres so removed from youthful abandon that even speaking their names has a somewhat sobering effect. It’s music that feels connected to middle age, and Bejar has navigated his 40s using its muted horns and lush synths to accompany visions as fragmented and nightmarish as ever. On 2011’s Kaputt, a career peak that served as an unlikely commercial breakthrough, these textures might have seemed like a left turn; by now, it’s just where we expect to find Bejar—in luxurious settings, skeptical, eyeing the exits.
Compared to 2017’s ken, a gothic-sounding record distinguished by chillier tones and pared-down lyrics, his masterful new album Have We Met sets a larger canvas. Produced by bandmate John Collins, the music is sweeping and bold and surprising. “Cue Synthesizer” is the first Destroyer song to feature a prominent slap-bass part; the title track is so wispy and vaporous that Bejar’s voice never actually appears in it. Same goes for the closing moments of the record: a hellish coda of buzzing samples, like a demonic YouTube tab left open by mistake. “Just look at the world around you,” goes a pivotal lyric. “Actually, no, don’t look!” The music is filled with similar retractions: It’s his most inviting, embracing record, until suddenly it’s not.
The more elaborate and professional his arrangements have grown, the more Bejar has withdrawn. His presence has grown so dry and distant that there are moments when Have We Met has the ghostly quality of a posthumous release. Coming from a songwriter who litters his lyric sheets with exclamation marks, the words to “The Man in Black’s Blues” are downright haiku-esque. (“When you’re looking for Nothing/And you find Nothing/Is more beautiful/Than anything you ever knew.”) In the extraordinary “Kinda Dark,” he delivers his apocalyptic verses in a distracted whisper over subdued electronic scenery. When the drums hit and the electric guitar attacks out of nowhere, it feels genuinely startling: the appearance of the looming threat he’s been slowly backing away from the whole time.
This sense of unease spans the record, making uptempo songs like the glittery “It Just Doesn’t Happen” and the soaring “Crimson Tide” sound like dispatches from a doomed adventure. Other songs exist in the cloud of smoke that’s left behind. “The Television Music Supervisor” is one of them—an eerie, ambient ballad narrated from the deathbed of a music-industry gatekeeper, haunted by regret. It’s not the first time that Bejar has addressed someone in his field—“Don’t be ashamed or disgusted with yourselves,” he once told his critics—but its spectral atmosphere makes it feel like a different, darker type of in-joke. “I can’t believe...” go its closing lyrics, fading out on an unresolved final scene.
As of late, Bejar seems to think a lot about getting older. “I feel like the time-release poison could still be inside of me,” he once joked. “I’m ready to completely lose sight of all that is good.” The favored concerns of aging writers—wisdom, directness, sentimentality—remain anathema to his work. Other than the proudly synthetic music that accompanies it, what separates Bejar’s writing from peers like John Darnielle or Bill Callahan is a refusal to follow any kind of emotional arc. You don’t relate to a Destroyer song so much as you find yourself mysteriously pulled inside of it, drawing connections and finding meaning on your own. The effect is elusive but visceral. “It’s called love,” he sings in “University Hill,” moments after listing, one-by-one, the scattered remains of a hacked-up body.
And yet, he can still aim for the heart. In “The Raven,” one of the best songs he’s ever written, the tone feels personal, even nostalgic. That is, it’s precisely the kind of thing we expect from our master songwriters nearing 50—his own twisted way of saying: seize the day while you still can. “Come out, come out, wherever you are/But you don’t/The dead don’t come out,” he cautions. A chilling enough message on its own, but then he continues: “The dead twist and shout/In an invisible world/The Grand Ole Opry of Death is breathless.... Breathless.” Now, we’re back in his domain—an unlikely chorus, a couple puns—as he sweeps us from the world we know toward some strange afterlife, where the audience is as bewildered as us and the artist on stage has never sounded more at home.

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The follow-up to 2002's Title TK-- a tentative first step back into the public eye after nearly a decade of inactivity-- Mountain Battles finds Kim and Kelley Deal proudly flaunting their bull-headed perseverance and their familiar arsenal of quirks, hiccups, sputters, and enthusiasm.

Mountain Battles

It's generally bad critical form to reference the record company-supplied bio in a review, but the one-pager accompanying the Breeders' Mountain Battles is worth mentioning: It's written by Josephine Wiggs, who played bass on the band's first two albums but left in the late 1990s while the Breeders withered in a seemingly interminable state of inertia. That Wiggs has resurfaced after a decade to play the role of Breeders cheerleader speaks volumes about the kind of faith and goodwill Kim and Kelley Deal have accrued over the years, despite a career that's nearly derailed on more than a few occasions due to the sisters' well-documented substance abuse and the group's peculiar recording habits and revolving-door rhythm sections. After hearing Mountain Battles, Wiggs admits her reaction was: "Why aren't I playing on this album?" Her excitement is genuine-- Mountain Battles is indeed the best Breeders album since 1993's Last Splash.
Which, of course, isn't saying a helluva lot, given that the 15 years in between have produced but one official record: 2002's Title TK, whose nine-years-in-the-waiting build-up was far too great a weight for its brittle, often sluggish low-fi pop oddities to withstand. In lieu of a return-to-form, we simply had to be content with the fact that the Breeders had returned at all. However, in contrast to all the uncertainty that hung over the band pre-Title TK, the Breeders approached Mountain Battles from a position of relative stability, with bassist Mando Lopez, drummer Jose Medeles, and producer Steve Albini all returning for another go; the six-year gap between that album and Mountain Battles is easily accounted for by Kim's entry into rehab in 2002 and the subsequent Pixies reunion tours that kept her on the road for the better part of 2004-05. But true to the Breeders tradition of tellingly apropos album titles (the hermetically sealed claustrophobia of 1990's Pod, the breakthrough/burn-out of Last Splash, the work-in-progress feel of Title TK), Mountain Battles suggests that all those Pixies paychecks don't make the Breeders' business any easier. If Title TK was a tentative first step back into the public eye, Mountain Battles finds Kim and Kelley proudly venerating the Breeders' battle-scarred history and bull-headed perseverance.
Like Last Splash's "New Year", Mountain Battles' "Overglazed" is more intro than proper opener: Over an ascendant surge of swirling backward-looped guitars and crashing drums, Kim repeats the song's lone lyric-- "I can...I can feel it!"-- like someone who's just woken from a coma. Or, in her case, it's someone who's reconnected with a muse that only seems to appear every half-decade or so, which would explain her tendency to linger on a feeling: "Night of Joy" plays up the contrast between its sweet, girl-group melody and the song's hauntingly absent ambience (much like Kim's star cameo on Sonic Youth's 1995 creeper "Little Trouble Girl"); the optimistic rebirth narrative of "We're Going to Rise" playfully jibes with the song's lethargic waltz rhythm, as if slowing down the action lets her better savor the moment of peace.
With such deliberately spare presentation, Mountain Battles takes some time to warm up to (and new-wave toss-offs like "Bang On" still carry traces of Title TK's song-sketch incompletion), but then Kim and Kelley Deal's pretty sing-song harmonies and affable Ohio charm can distract us from how difficult the Breeders' music can be-- both for them as players and us as listeners. By this point, that very sense of struggle is intrinsic to the Breeders sound: It's pretty amazing that after all those years of line-up changes and aborted recording sessions, the Breeders pretty much sound exactly the same as they ever did, the quirks, hiccups, and sputters once attributed to a certain amateurish enthusiasm sounding ever more like purposeful components of their bubblegum bricolage. (See: the basement-Zeppelin chug of "No Way".)
No, there isn't a "Cannonball" here, but the buoyant, bass-driven strutter "Walk It Off" makes for a dandy companion piece to Pod's "Only in 3's"; Kelley's power-pop pick-me-up "It's the Love" gleams with a "Divine Hammer" shimmer; and the sisters' voices have never sounded finer than on the country-harmony duet "Here No More". But Mountain Battles' air of revitalization-- the thing that has Wiggs wishing she had her old job back-- is characterized not just by these straight pop shooters, but the apparent glee with which the Deals toss out the curveballs: the Teutonic-tongued oompa-loompa punk of "German Studies", the Spanish-sung slow dance "Regalame Esta Noche" and the bizarro rumble-in-the-jungle group chant of "Istanbul". Once upon a time, bands used to model their careers on copping the Breeders' moves (see: Salt, Veruca). Mountain Battles' greatest success is it makes that very idea seem once again like both an admirable ideal, and an unachievable one.


The solo debut of the Los Angeles composer and Weeknd associate is a sobering, often surreal film reel of fleeting joy, made by a talent whose only agenda is to capture the sounds in his head.

Vanishing Act

“The Weeknd Producer Goes Solo” would be a nice headline for Benny Bock’s latest album. The Los Angeles keyboardist and composer wrote and produced the Dawn FM standout “Here We Go … Again” with The Beach Boys’ Bruce Johnston and a handful of songwriting professionals. Bock’s melodic top line could have been lifted off any classic Motown record and is wide enough to sustain both Beach Boy cooing and a Tyler, the Creator verse. To describe his synths as “silky” is a testament to their comfort and quality, not some cheap shorthand for ’70s R&B. Dawn FM is a sad listen, but Bock helps heighten it to something timeless. However, Bock’s solo debut, the ambient jazz-leaning instrumental cycle Vanishing Act, sounds little like The Weeknd. Vanishing Act is not a playful record. It is a sobering, often surreal film reel of fleeting joy, made by a talent whose only agenda is to capture the sounds in his head, be they jazz or not. For people who don’t follow ambient jazz, Vanishing Act will feel like a revelation.
To make the album, Bock teamed up with Pete Min, the super engineer who’s recently worked with Orville Peck, Diana Ross, and The Strokes. Vanishing Act began as a series of improvised sessions under Min’s direction; there’s a slickness here comparable to the last Strokes record. That slickness–and most of Bock’s tricks–can be heard on Vanishing Act’s opening pair of tracks. Named after jazz pianist Erwin Helfer, one of Bock’s first music teachers, opener “Erwins Garden” is jazz at its most classical and familiar. A deceivingly quaint piano line–played on one of those grand pianos that you’ve seen in every hotel bar lounge–soon gives way to weeping strings that act like a dancing shadow pushing the piano into unknown territory. The following track, “Dynamo,” flips the switch. A sudden and artificial perpetual beat now steers the keys. Bock then takes us on a steady jog throughout that shadow’s glowing darkness, with light just peeking outside our reach. On first listen, one could laugh at these songs that feel like they were commissioned to soundtrack a Blade Runner spinoff for Disney+. (“But don’t make it so sad,” you can hear an executive say.) Upon further listening though, the warmth of these compositions feels like an achievement.
The rest of Vanishing Act repeats this pattern: major-key feels swimming throughout a minor-key atmosphere. There is a case of diminishing returns as the LP loses its element of surprise; nothing here sounds as memorable as those opening moments, but the rest of Vanishing Act rarely bores. In fact, it’s fun to think about these ten compositions not so much by their impressive sound palettes but by the images they evoke. The bass in the title track feels like it’s trying to punch water until it encounters an alien laser beam. “Eight Below Zero” has gleaming pedal steel courtesy of Rich Hinman that evokes an alternative universe in which Stevie Wonder went through a space cowboy phase. The funeral-appropriate “Solid Air” feels like the song The Weeknd wanted to play during the end credits of Uncut Gems. And so on.
Los Angeles is Vanishing Act’s central motif. Bock’s LA is sparse, gray, and weirder than the fantasia of most major Hollywood movies. It’s similar to the rainy LA that Brad Mehldau imagined when writing his own 2000s off-jazz compositions like “When It Rains,” which feels like a looming influence on this record. Listening to Vanishing Act is like seeing a Los Angeles freeway with no traffic. Yes, it’s technically possible, even though it’s something most of us will never see firsthand. Less heartache, more blissache. Unlike Bock’s avant-jazz peer Sam Gendel, who channels yearning through glitches and artificial vibes, Bock uses technology to sound as naked and naturalistic as possible, as if plucking a synthesizer out of a garden. And like Nils Frahm, Bock is skilled with an unflashy use of silence in-between all the notes. This is a record that respects your time and gets that you could use some time to meditate.
The music itself isn’t always  memorable, and it can feel repetitive, but these are forgivable qualities in a solo debut. Like last year’s excellent Theo Alexander release Sunbathing Through a Glass Screen, this cycle can make one feel excited again for more accessible key-leaning compositions that aren’t afraid to neighbor modern classical music. Vanishing Act feels like a soundtrack for a nonexistent movie where the audience is drawn to what’s omitted as much as what’s in front of them. It’s strong and beautiful, even when it feels like something is missing. Maybe that’s the point.


On its Slumberland debut, the London boy/girl indie-pop quartet churns out expertly stagy revivalism with the slightest hint of mutiny, creating shoegaze that looks you square in the eye.

Veronica Falls

At the end of the video for Veronica Falls' "Bad Feeling", Roxanne Clifford, the group's bob-haired singer/guitarist, clad in a dashingly fey polka-dot blouse, picks up an antique book-- the ultimate twee signifier-- and lights it on fire. Given indie rock's recent jangle-pop overload, and the comments that Veronica Falls have made in the press ("people like to romanticize about C86 [but] there were lots of rubbish bands associated with it..."), it's tempting to wonder aloud: is "Bad Feeling" the C86 version of that video where George Michael goes iconoclastic on us and sets his own leather jacket ablaze?
Well, maybe not, but at the very least it's a decent visual metaphor for the band's sound: expertly stagy revivalism with the slightest hint of mutiny. You could have said the same thing of Slumberland labelmates and fellow fresh-faced indie poppers the Pains of Being Pure at Heart when they first burst out the gates with Pastels badges on their sleeves-- the quartet's self-titled debut hits with the same sort of immediacy that that first Pains LP did. Both records do familiar things so well that, occasionally, momentarily, they actually trick you into thinking you've never heard anything like them before.
But, of course, you have. In fact, if you've been paying any attention to Glasgow/London hybrid Veronica Falls, you've actually heard some of these very songs before: The single "Found Love in a Graveyard" made the rounds almost two years ago, and then came "Beachy Head", "Bad Feeling", and "Come on Over" earlier this year. But after a run of strong 7"'s, their self-titled debut finally confirms that Veronica Falls are more than a singles band. Though they operate with a pretty limited sonic palette (boy/girl harmonies; dueling, reverb-drenched guitars; lots of tambourine), there's a sustained momentum over these 12 tracks that even manages to bring in some unexpected influences-- "Beachy Head" sounds like a zombified Mamas and the Papas thrashing at surf-punk guitars with shards of glass.
Given the group's penchant for ghosts and reverb, it's tempting to grab for a familiar collection of low-hanging adjectives: dreamy, ethereal, haunting-- except that, actually, Veronica Falls is none of these things. There's a striking physicality to these songs, and Guy Fixsen and Ash Workman's production makes every tambourine beat hit with the clarity of a shattering window. The guitar sound is immaculate: Clifford and James Hoare's strings don't jangle so much as bristle-- taut chords that dart restlessly in and out of each other's way. There's a clarity of texture-- a specificity even-- to every element of the band's sound. Which makes it something of an anomaly: shoegaze that looks you square in the eye.
Thematically speaking, shit's dark. There's a song called "Misery", there are not one but two songs in which the narrator's lover might be a ghost ("Graveyard", "Bad Feeling"), and though "Beachy Head" might sound like a carefree postcard from indie rock's current backdrop of choice, it's actually about jumping off a cliff and drowning yourself. Thankfully, the record ends on a high in every sense: "Come on Over" is perhaps the most hopeful-- and best-- track the band's got to their name. "Crimson and clover, I'll touch your shoulder," Clifford sings over the mounting tension of a furiously strummed guitar. It's the Veronica Falls aesthetic in miniature: the ghosts of pop past conjured convincingly and intimately enough to feel like flesh and blood.


The latest from the re-reconstituted Dinosaur Jr. proves the equilibrium they discovered on their 2007 comeback Beyond remains intact.

Dinosaur Jr.: Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not

Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not

It’s hard to believe that it’s now been more than 10 years since Dinosaur Jr. kicked off the unexpectedly fertile third chapter of their long and storied career. This period has now lasted longer than both the trio’s first original “classic” period from ‘84-89 as well as the second era post-Lou Barlow from ‘89-97. On their latest, the steady and excellent Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not, it’s clear that their well for inspiration has not yet run dry.
Beginning with Beyond in 2007, each of the Dinosaur Jr. “new” records have been relatively consistent in form, structure and quality. Although regularly cited as a return to the original band’s sound, the recent songwriting truthfully draws less from the trio’s first go-around and more from the melodic guitar pop of J Mascis’ underrated solo records More Light (2000) and Free So Free (2002). Of these records, Beyond was perhaps the most songful, with cuts like “Almost Ready,” “Been There All The Time,” and “We’re Not Alone” sweeter than just about anything found on the band’s original three ‘80s records. Farm was noteworthy for signaling that the band’s comeback was no one-off, but also—single “Over It” aside—for delving back into some of the heavier, murkier sounds and textures the band was originally known for. 2012’s I Bet on Sky split the difference and featured for the first time a strong(er) presence of keyboards, including Mellotron on soaring opener “Don’t Pretend You Didn’t Know.”
Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not hews close to Beyond, albeit with an effort to slim things down*. *On the charging opener “Goin Down,” a second of amp hum hangs in the air before the song kicks off, and what follows is archetypal “new” Dinosaur Jr.: chugging, crunching-but-hummable and with a nice bow-tying solo. The even catchier “Tiny” drills it down further, at only 3:12 lasting not a second longer than it needs to.
Better still is the beautiful, floating “Lost All Day,” which connotes a feeling of exactly that; when Mascis’ solo comes in midway, it almost feels like it might swallow the song whole. Though the song never really goes anywhere, it has a sense of circular renewal that lends itself to a moment of mania where you might put the song on repeat and just let it run over and over.
Give a Glimpse does, however, stick largely to well-trod paths, with not a ton in the way of experimentation. As always, it’s Mascis’ guitar that is the main attraction here, the reason for caring. “I Walk for Miles,” the album’s longest cut, begins as a bit of a “been here before” grunge before giving way into a dark, feedback-drenched solo that lasts for a minute before breaking down and restarting all over again, almost never seeming to end. “I Told Everyone” starts off as nothing too special, a toned down version of “Lost All Days’” forlorn, but features yet another excellent Mascis solo worth holding onto.
Interestingly, the one wildcard is that Barlow’s two penciled-in tracks on Give a Glimpse appear to be better and more serious than any of his six preceding tracks on the first three comeback records. While one can appreciate the democratic concession of including Barlow-penned songs on Dinosaur Jr. records, it’s always been his unique bass-playing style, and not his songwriting, that made the band better.
Most of the previous six Barlow cuts had felt like dashed-off throwaways, like the interludes that typically fill in space on Sebadoh albums (the same goes his ‘80s contributions). But on Give a Glimpse, with “Love Is…” and album closer “Left/Right,” it seems like Barlow is finally comfortable sounding like himself on a Dinosaur Jr. record. The duh-duh-duh-dum opening bass line of “Left/Right” especially could drop on *Bakesale or Harmacy. *Fans can cross their fingers hoping it portends Barlow’s deeper integration into the songwriting, but it could just as easily mean the man’s itching to get out again.


La Di Da Di, a vocal-free collection heavy on repetition, feels like a return to something elemental and specific in Battles' history. It's a satisfyingly clean take on what the band does best after the somewhat chaotic, "various artists" feel of 2011's Gloss Drop.

La Di Da Di

Battles’ third album, La Di Da Di, feels like a return to something elemental and specific in the band’s history. It is satisfyingly clean, echoing the bright, shiny flatness of the current digital landscape. It’s as basic as these guys can get, which all said, isn't especially basic: The music feels like a highly-saturated, highly-composed Takashi Murakami print, or a website that needed a lot of programming to make it look as minimal and usable as possible (not for nothing are there songs here called "Dot Com" and "Dot Net").
They could’ve easily gone in a different direction. After a series of early EPs, Battles had their breakout with their 2007 debut LP, Mirrored, a collection bolstered by the single, "Atlas", a propulsive track featuring the sped-up, processed vocals of Tyondai Braxton: part man, part machine, part Saturday morning cartoon. It was bouncy, energetic, instantly memorable, and had an appropriately shiny, cathartic video that found the group performing the song in a glossy, glassy cube. It also meant they had a de facto "frontman."
But Braxton left while Battles were recording the followup, 2011’s Gloss Drop. As a result, the remaining members invited a few guest vocalists to contribute: Gary Numan, Kazu Makino, the Boredoms' Yamantaka Eye. The biggest song was the sunny, poppy "Ice Cream", which featured vocals from Chilean producer Matias Aguayo. It didn’t necessarily sound like Battles, but like "Atlas", it had a great, sexy video and got a lot of traction. Expanding the number of knob turners, Gloss Drop was followed by a remix collection, Dross Glop, that included reworkings by Kode9, Shabazz Palaces, Gang Gang Dance, the Field, Hudson Mohawke, and others.
That’s a lot of cooks, for sure, and when your core group features players like heavy-hitting drummer John Stanier (Helmet, Tomahawk), virtuosic guitarist/keyboardist Ian Williams (Don Caballero, Storm & Stress), and bassist/guitarist Dave Konopka, vocals and additional hands aren’t necessary. These are expressive, inventive players who know how to compose and execute in interesting, affecting ways. They can basically "talk" through their instruments, and it was a good move to strip things back on La Di Da Di, a vocal-free collection heavy on repetition. You might think of Trans Am, Factory Floor, or Zombi, but it’s squarely Battles. The various vocalists on Gloss Drop gave that collection a kind of chaotic or "various artists" feel—here there’s a solidity and feeling of forward motion.
It’s at its best early, especially on the almost-7-minute opener, "Yabba", which starts with a wash of colorful feedback before moving into a tight pulse of keyboards that sound like guitars, guitars that sound like keyboards, and rumbling drums and bells. (This is echoed in the final song of the collection, "Luu Le", which feels like a deconstruction of what came before it.) La Di Da Di succeeds when you’re on the edge of your seat. It’s less successful, mostly in the middle and toward the end, when things start to come off a bit like playful incidental ambient bits or post-rock circus music.
The best songs bring to mind super specific images (here were a few of mine: a landscape of yellow parakeets, an HTML version of the Who, a Magic Rock sculpture, "attack of the Sea Monkeys", the recent Earth catalogue sped-up and painted neon, a mime dressed in a rainbow-colored unitard), and that’s part of what makes Battles interesting. Things drag here and there, mostly when they move away from hyper speed to mid-tempo, and when Stanier’s drums take a bit of a backseat to the instruments piling up in front and around them. During those moments, Battles sound like too many instrumental acts with chops, and lose what makes them special. At 50 minutes, it's maybe a bit too long: when you're working with coiled energy, you can't afford to lose momentum. That said, when they're in the zone, there's not much like it.


Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Black Album, Metallica enlist Phoebe Bridgers, Kamasi Washington, Moses Sumney, Weezer, J Balvin, and many more for this enormous and uneven tribute album.

The Metallica Blacklist

The heavy metal tribute album was once a mainstay of used CD bargain bins. These releases often operated more like promotional tools than true albums, as labels asked their developing bands to bang out a Slayer or Iron Maiden cover in the hopes of perking up the ears of prospective fans. With precious few exceptions—the 1994 Black Sabbath tribute Nativity in Black went gold—these releases were essentially disposable, and they rarely featured artists with their own massive audiences. The Metallica Blacklist, a four-hour, 53-track behemoth of Black Album covers, is easily the most ambitious release of its kind. With contributions from pop stars, indie luminaries, and country icons, the Metallica-approved charity compilation is the band’s latest attempt to position their self-titled 1991 album as a work that transcends the boundaries of metal.
Metallica were already on their way to becoming the biggest metal band in the world before they made the Black Album. Their previous record, 1988’s …And Justice for All, yielded the MTV hit “One” and earned them their first Grammy. Justice pushed Metallica to their physical limits, with barrages of ultra-technical riffs and off-kilter rhythms stuffed into prog-pollinated song structures. Rather than doubling down on complexity, Metallica used Justice’s follow-up to transform into a new kind of heavy band, one that could reach the radio rock fans their thrashier records didn’t. The Metallica Blacklist can only exist because of that transformation: The simplified songwriting lends itself to musical pliability in a way that ’80s Metallica doesn’t, and the most successful Blacklist cuts are the ones that take full advantage of that fact.
Only a handful of songs on The Metallica Blacklist scan as metal. Their devotion to the source material is admirable, but next to some of their more daring company they seem to be missing the point. Slipknot’s Corey Taylor clearly loves “Holier Than Thou,” but his note-perfect interpretation feels out of place. The spirit of the release is better captured by the thumping, maximalist pop of Rina Sawayama’s “Enter Sandman” and the disquieting beauty of Moses Sumney’s “The Unforgiven.” These covers find a nugget of truth in the original and deliver it in a fresh context.
Other tracks use Metallica’s songs like jumping-off points: Flatbush Zombies build a woozy hip-hop epic around a pitch-shifted sample of “The Unforgiven,” splashing wrenchingly autobiographical verses on James Hetfield’s vaguely anti-authoritarian canvas. IDLES turn “The God That Failed” into a bug-eyed post-punk exorcism, while Kamasi Washington pulls off the most impressive feat of the record, discovering a swirling spiritual jazz workout in the little-loved “My Friend of Misery” and enlisting vocalist Patrice Quinn to breathe new life into Hetfield’s cynical lyric.
Of course, on a 53-track album, they can’t all be winners. Reggaeton hitmaker J Balvin drops off a version of “Wherever I May Roam” so half-assed that it seems like he accidentally delivered the demo. Weezer, who scored an improbable hit in 2018 by covering Toto, sleepwalk through a carbon copy of “Enter Sandman” that follows the original note-for-note except when they interpolate a lick from “Buddy Holly.” A group called Goodnight, Texas brings a stomp-clap-hey to “Of Wolf and Man.” By welcoming such an enormous list of contributors, Metallica all but ensured that Blacklist would be an uneven listening experience—and it is.
It’s unclear if the compilation is even intended to be heard in sequence. The tracklist follows the Black Album’s precisely, which means it opens with six consecutive covers of “Enter Sandman” and later forces front-to-back listeners to endure a whopping 12 renditions of “Nothing Else Matters.” As good as some of them are—Phoebe Bridgers’ delicate version feels like a Punisher outtake, and Miley Cyrus enlists Elton John and Yo-Yo Ma for no reason other than she can—listening to the same song a dozen times in a row feels masochistic. There’s some great music on The Metallica Blacklist, but how great can an album truly be if you can’t stomach listening to it in one sitting? The Black Album launched Metallica to superstardom because of its approachability, but in its attempts to offer something for everyone, Blacklist spreads itself too thin.

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On his latest album, Keith Rankin programs a virtuosic MIDI cello, tempering awe-inspiring moments with potent reminders of its synthetic nature.

Mirror Guide

Dayton, Ohio’s Keith Rankin released his first tape as Giant Claw in 2010, a pivotal time in the sound of the Midwest experimental underground. Noise stalwarts like Wolf Eyes, Hive Mind, Skin Graft, and Kevin Drumm had dominated the previous decade with their countless experiments in disquiet. Yet, by the end of the aughts, fellow Ohioans Emeralds began releasing gorgeous, kosmische-informed improvisations on labels like Aaron Dilloway’s Hanson, breaking open the scene’s stylistic barriers and laying the groundwork for Giant Claw’s first releases. Around the time Rankin released those unassuming synthesizer-based cassettes, he also co-founded the label Orange Milk, which subverted the identity of the region and built a global network of boundary-shattering musicians. Emerging from a critical moment in a scene’s evolution, Rankin and his cohorts challenge genre conformity by juxtaposing dislocated sounds in ways that reflect the internet’s most dissociative aspects.
Noise is central to Rankin’s music, but those pockets of pixelated chaos are surrounded by splashes of vibrant color and vaguely familiar fragments of melody. Due to his insatiable appetite for novel sounds, he’s repeatedly upended his production techniques only to emerge with a new aesthetic framework time after time. Synthesizers were supplanted by the plunderphonic bliss of anonymized R&B samples, fractured trap beats, and stuttering loops on 2014’s Dark Web, sounding at times like several SoundCloud windows playing simultaneously. With Deep Thoughts a year later, he recontextualized nominally cheesy MIDI approximations of choruses, pan pipes, and strings by twisting them into complex contrapuntal wanderings—similar to what Wendy Carlos might have conjured after taking a hit of DMT. While 2017’s Soft Channel unified these approaches, it was also more turbulent and unpredictable, full of moments where Rankin tried his best to induce sensory overload, a tactic he once again inverts on his new album Mirror Guide.
Four years in the making, Mirror Guide feels like the opening of a new chapter for Giant Claw. Previous albums approximated the immersive, endless scroll, where images, ideas, and sounds fly by, leaving pockmarks of dopamine spike and withdrawal. What Rankin has created here feels more like an open-environment video game; it is still digitally rendered and hyperreal, but there is space to explore, with variations on recurring motifs and even a central character: a MIDI cello set to pizzicato mode. That soft, synthetic pluck is the first sound that appears on album opener “Earther,” revving up to superhuman speed only to tumble back to a crawl, like a baby bird testing its wings. As the track progresses, percussive hits, synth pads, and an unquantifiable number of other sounds appear, but rather than quash the cello’s momentum, they accent its graceful melodic turns. On Mirror Guide, each element, no matter how aesthetically disparate, works to build a unified narrative.
From the creak of twisted metal to a sharp inward breath, Rankin’s concrete world is full of sounds that resemble reality, but it resides fully in the uncanny valley. Rankin’s programmable cello is capable of feats far beyond the capacities of its corporeal counterpart, often breaking out into spontaneous rapid-fire runs and striking chords impossible to reach with two hands and ten fingers, but the sound is deadened without any actual space to reverberate inside. Constant, rapid fluctuations of tempo give the impression of a machine struggling to imitate the way human performers stretch rhythmic phrasings to express emotion. The climactic moments on Mirror Guide often collapse into glitched static, as if the toil of emoting in such a dramatic way overloads a CPU otherwise capable of seamlessly rendering the labyrinthine environment. The cello is often heard brooding, imbued with human sensitivity, but in the world of Giant Claw, those qualities are clear approximations, hinting at the limits of technology to express the nuances of one’s inner world despite its power to transcend the limitations of the body.
In certain ways, Rankin is a spiritual successor to composer Conlon Nancarrow, whose pieces for player piano from the mid-20th century highlighted the machine’s capabilities to perform works that incorporated multiple tempos and numerous melodies simultaneously. But while Nancarrow took a utopian view of technology, Rankin conveys a persistent skepticism by envisioning a digital virtuoso cellist incapable of fully grasping the nuances of emotional expression. There is plenty of joy to be found in Mirror Guide, and abundant moments of genuine beauty that border on awe, but its brilliance comes from the composer’s insistence on tempering those moments with potent reminders of its synthetic nature. Like a sunset made brilliant by air pollution, the beauty is a reminder of just how deep down the rabbit hole we’ve gone.
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Equally inspired by late Romantic symphonies and experimental electronic techniques, the Swiss composer pushes both classical tropes and ambient conventions to their breaking points.

Matter

Noémi Büchi’s music seems to exist in the abstract realm of ideas, yet the Swiss sound artist sees her work as eminently tangible. “A musician also works with matter, the air,” she says. “It seems to be immaterial because it has a much smaller density than other objects, but after all, everything is material.” Büchi considers sound a physical medium “like stone, wood, paint or textile.” The theme runs through her discography: the titles of her EPs Matière and Hyle are taken from the French for “material” and the ancient Greek for “substance.” Completing the trilogy is Matter, her first full-length album: a maximalist re-imagining of Romantic and modernist classical music using a shapeshifting, futuristic electronic orchestra.
With her 2020 debut, Matière, Büchi seamlessly combined bouncy modular synthesis with quotidian field recordings, like a folk artisan gathering supplies from their everyday surroundings. Matter moves from the craft fair to the museum, drawing from her classical training to twist symphonic music into fantastic sonic sculptures. Büchi’s signing to the Zürich label -OUS places her in a milieu of like-minded artists like Feldermelder and Furtherset, who combine experimental electronics with the grand scope of symphonic music. Büchi is more explicit with her classical influences, however, citing Stravinsky, Mahler, Scriabin, and Ligeti as touchstones. Matter invokes those composers’ ambition and drama as well as their musical tropes. After studying the late Romantic and early modernist canon, Büchi uses whatever she can—modular and digital synthesizers, acoustic instruments and voice, Max/MSP and SuperCollider—to transform their ideas into entirely new, and new-sounding, music of her own.
Büchi composed Matter as if she had an orchestra in her head, with the added benefit that imaginary players don’t have to abide by the laws of physics. Though her ensemble’s individual sections are identifiable, they swirl and collide in noisy aerial acrobatics, sometimes becoming hopelessly tangled. The strings that open the album on “Elemental Fear” build to a crescendo and morph into stuttering percussion, cycling across the field while their centripetal force tilts the track’s trajectory sideways. On “Taking the Train With Mr. Shark,” meanwhile, a propulsive electronic piano rhythm is lifted up by sweeping, romantic strings, lending nostalgic grandeur to what could otherwise be the basis of a techno track. In the album’s densest moments, Büchi pushes symphonic harmony to a breaking point, drawing on both experimental electronic and classical traditions but fitting wholly in neither category.
Matter suffers when this tension between the old and the new is lost. “Uncertainty of an Undefined Interdependence” is more reminiscent of Tim Hecker than Gustav Mahler, placing us too comfortably in the present, rather than in the uncanny space between past and future that Büchi so deftly conjures elsewhere. The late Romantic harmonic progression on the similarly ambient album closer “Prelude for Rational Freshness,” for example, is rendered at once familiar and strange by the song’s buzzing synths, which fall out of tune only to soar upward and harmonize again.
Büchi insists that “each of my sonic fantasies must be possible.” Matter is her proof of concept. With her arsenal of tools, whether digital or analogue, hardware or software, she transforms her Romantic and modernist themes into such unexpectedly beguiling shapes that it appears her imagination is truly her only constraint. As a sculptor of sound, Büchi makes it infinitely pliable: dense as marble but light as air.


Sabrina Fuentes’ debut album offers a flashback of adolescence in New York, filtering teenage themes through a studied imitation of ’90s grunge.

Pretty Sick: Makes Me Sick Makes Me Smile

Makes Me Sick Makes Me Smile

Sabrina Fuentes—the singer and model who formed Pretty Sick when she was 13 and in Catholic school, playing a pastiche of ’90s grunge at DIY venues around New York—is a walker. Her lyrics have always been inscribed with a rambler’s perspective. From the band’s 2017 self-titled EP, in which she addressed the city’s noise (“so loud and dull”) like a lover, to 2020’s “Deep Divine,” which saw her “Out on Allen Street at 7 in the morning/Out on Bowery at midnight in the summer,” Fuentes has made plain that her view of the city hasn’t come from the windows of a bus or taxi cab. Rather, this is someone who has spent their young life right in the nib and the nip of the city, as only a pedestrian could have.
Fuentes is now entering her twenties, and her debut album with Pretty Sick is a walk through her late adolescence—a psychogeographic mapping of teenage memory in New York City. “Yellow roses in Tompkins Square Park,” it opens, with a low rumble of grizzled bass, before launching into a grab-bag of teenage themes: desperate intensity, anhedonia, relationship abuse, substance abuse—all of which take place in Upper Manhattan parks, dive bars, bedrooms, and dancefloors.
The album’s musical influences are obvious and immediate, suggesting a stoner who grew up listening to Nirvana, Hole, and the Breeders. “I have a bad habit of anything I listen to starting to sound mirrored in my own music,” Fuentes said in an interview. It’s unfortunate that she appears to have doubled down on this habit on her debut album. Often, songs sound more like tributes to her influences than reinventions. On “Drunk,” Fuentes lifts Courtney Love’s vocal phrasing from “Violet”—right down to the very last “everything!,” which Fuentes delivers like she’s desperate to hold onto the word. The impact would be more intense were it not such a naked imitation.
Fuentes’ bass playing is wholly indebted to Kim Deal’s just-pedal-through-it technique: self-restraint as a governing aesthetic. The template contrasts well with Fuentes’ leaky, screaming, bleeding singing—Courtney Love vocals over a Kim Deal bassline is, after all, a pretty sick proposition—but it limits the songs rather than expanding them. Many tracks begin with an isolated, minimally emphatic bassline tethered to a tried-and-tested arrangement; the way the band’s songs then tend to explode —from skeletal sludge to a mudstorm of distortion and rolled-off treble tones—makes them feel like a kind of deja vu.
On “Human Condition,” the Pretty Sick world finally comes into focus, marrying dogged romance with adorably adolescent philosophical critique: “The freedom you’re being sold is just submission,” Fuentes sings over a driving, poppy hook, giving her blunt cut of a line some heft, and saving it from coming off as teenage sanctimony.
Fuentes is a singular and compelling lyricist: “The emotion I am most familiar with is longing/The feeling I know best is wanting more/I’d like to trade my glutton heart for songing/But instead, I will remain a singing whore,” she reels off on “Sober,” as though sharing an accidentally poetic journal entry. Even her slipshod meter scans as charming. On “Yeah You,” each line is packed with a few too many syllables, like an overfilled gas tank threatening to explode; the surfeit speaks to the urgency of Fuentes’ expression. Makes Me Sick Makes Me Smile largely reads as a moratorium on teenage feeling—a final weep before the weeplessness of adulthood. A final walk in the park. A final goodbye, it is hoped, to the influences that led her here.