Los Angeles singer and songwriter Dijon Duenas’ solo debut takes a polyglot approach, setting his yearning, falsetto-laden vocals against synthy digital textures and folk-inflected guitars.

Dijon: How Do You Feel About Getting Married?

How Do You Feel About Getting Married?

Baltimore-bred, Los Angeles-based Dijon is the quintessential singer-songwriter for this moment where genre and style have become exempt from classifications and hegemony. His new EP How Do You Feel About Getting Married? was released under the R&B/soul tag, appropriate for his yearning, falsetto-laden vocals and the mood of the synthy, digital textures throughout, but many of these sounds lie in the crosshairs of folk and pop-rock. Dijon cites Joni Mitchell and Feist as influences; his 2019 song “lace,” he’s said, was inspired by Smog’s “Teenage Spaceship.”
When Little Richard died earlier this month, the vital conversation about how rock’n’roll was not invented by white people reopened. Whether it’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Beyoncé’s country stylings on Lemonade, or the often reductive classifications of a folk-leaning artist like Moses Sumney, the message remains the same: Guitar music, despite perception, despite who has dominated the charts, does not inherently belong to whiteness. In 2018, Dijon told the FADER that, as a person of color making Americana-influenced music, he was grappling with a kind of cultural dissonance. “[I’m] fascinated [with] really unironically and genuinely appropriating these symbols, ideas, and mythologies that aren’t necessarily associated with minority music,” he explained.
With Dijon’s latest release, any trepidations about his obsession with guitar music are gone. On “rock n roll,” he sings, “She don’t like rock’n’roll/We talked about it… So I told her that I just got a record and I promise it’s a jam/‘Automatic’ and I wanna see you dance.” That would be Prince’s “Automatic,” from 1999, a reference Dijon goes on to pair with name-drops of the Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, Roxy Music, and, later, Sly Stone and Earth Wind & Fire. Like everything on the six-song collection, “rock n roll” is loud and sparse. Crunchy guitar and big, clubby bass expand and contract as silence peeks in through the synthetic chunkiness.
Genre alloys that sound brand new and genuinely surprising—without being a mess—are always hard to come by. Standout “alley-oop,” the EP’s thunderbolt, pairs tender R&B and digital tinkering with pedal steel and country-ish riffs. Throughout, the sound-jamming is focused, the production glossy. But many of Married’s other hybrids are not so unusual that they sound particularly new. Opener “do you light up?” invokes both early Frank Ocean and Merriweather Post Pavilion without muddying the colors, but it doesn’t amplify them, either.
Polygluttony reigns right now, and Dijon has figured out his place in it. But sometimes his references seem pulled out of a hat, as when he described an earlier song, “Cannonball,” as an attempt to merge Jodeci and Animal Collective. It does sound like AnCo with soul vocals, but there’s more to a Jodeci influence than soul vocals alone—nor does the combination seem entirely necessary in the first place. Essential on their own, Dijon’s inspirations require singular finesse to succeed as a mix.


Crack’s latest album is a delicate balance of fresh and familiar from one of the funniest and most thoughtful rappers working today.

Growthfully Developed

Chris Crack finds comfort in the chaos of non-sequiturs. The Chicago rapper’s songs can jump from wry life-isms to boasts about his status within his hometown to stories of falling in love in bougie grocery stores with no warning. This description may feel erratic, but Crack’s charisma and voice—which sounds like a frayed nerve ending come to life—have a strong gravitational pull. It’s the equivalent of switching between different TV shows with the same actor; the stories might not be the same, but the leading face is always recognizable. “Celebrate Everything Until Further Notice,” a song near the middle of his latest album Growthfully Developed, features a quick passage that neatly sums up his style and humor: “I got thoughts that just scatter my mind/It’s why my hair nappy.”
Surrendering yourself to the whims of a darting mind can be a double-edged sword, and it’s an issue Crack has grappled with in the past. But Growthfully Developed maintains the delicate balance of fresh and familiar as well as any of the dozen projects he’s released in the last three years. In fact, Crack and his on-hand producers are more prone to experiment, adding flourishes to his cherished mid-tempo soul loops. Producers MelloMatt and Turk Money retrofit “Chicago Don’t Make Industry Plants” with booming 808s that grant the underlying vocal samples the pomp of stadium rap; Sledgren does the same with “Pussy Better When You Eat It First.” Both “Uknowwhereihadderat” and “Ate Ball in My Sock” are so plush they wouldn’t sound out of place on a Jeremih or Summer Walker album. They fit well next to the drumless loops and smoldering boom-bap on display, and Crack corrals these disparate beats with ease.
Crack’s music has always been animated and bursting with color, and his writing on Developed is no exception. He begins “Therapy Don’t Work, Try Drugs” with an anecdote about eating hibachi for three nights in a row that leads to the strip club, life advice, and reminiscing on days when you had to ask for a parent’s permission to play with friends. Other distinct scenes race by while leaving an impression—a game of Loteria played over Friendsgiving dinner at the end of “Illuminati Phone Numbers,” demons faced down in a pair of Asics sneakers on “A Blunt Forced This Trauma.” But he’s just as likely to spend songs walking listeners through his unlikely path to success, as he does in the first few seconds of “Jordan Never Did That Move.” Topics change mid-track, but none of them feel adrift or aimless, which is the ultimate method to Crack’s madness.
For all the jokes and acid hurled at haters, there’s a sense of longing across Developed not present on his other projects. Crack is exhaustingly prolific, and a good share of this album’s chest-beating stems as much from a general sense of underappreciation as it does from feelings toward any particular person. When he croons “I’ve been doing this half my life” on “Nine 2 Fives Make You Fake,” it lands with a sense of both frustration and release, a positive and negative affirmation amplifying each other in real time. The stakes feel higher here than they did on last year’s Fool’s Gold debut Might Delete Later, which inflates the album’s sense of purpose.
Said purpose wouldn’t mean as much if the songs weren’t worth revisiting. Thankfully, Crack remains one of the funniest and most thoughtful rappers working today. The formula he’s been tinkering with for the last four years has produced the breeziest and most eclectic album in his catalog since 2020’s White People Love Algorithms. “You can’t put me in no box. I want to be remembered as the trillest and as the guy who didn’t fold,” he said in a recent interview. It’s hard to predict where he’ll end up next, but chances are, Crack will get a reaction wherever he lands.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review incorrectly indicated that Cutta and Sledgren produced “Chicago Don’t Make Industry Plants” and “Pussy Better When You Eat It First.” The former track was produced by MelloMatt and Turk Money, while Sledgren produced the latter song.


Continuing with the harrowing narrative fervor that defined last year's compelling Fishscale and the old-soul loops that have defined much of his career, Ghost's new album may not uncover many new darts but, even 11 years after his solo debut, there's no denying one of hip-hop's most vibrant voices in its comfort zone.

The Big Doe Rehab

Talking about the title of his seventh album, Ghostface recently offered a sleep-inspired explanation: "Dreams-- you can't really remember the dreams-- but I was someplace, I don't even know if it was rehab, but it was mad money in there. When I woke up, the first thing that came to my mind was The Big Doe Rehab." For most people, a dream filled with money would make them think of what they could do with all that cash. Ghost is not like most people. His vision is aptly conflicted; though he's ostensibly in rehab for having too much money, the only cure-- according to the characteristically daffy album art featuring orange medicine bottles filled with Benjamin Franklins-- is more doe. When it comes to the hustle, there is no way out. Continuing with the harrowing narrative fervor that defined last year's compelling Fishscale and the old soul loops that have remained a constant throughout much of his career, Ghost's new album may not uncover many of the verteran MC's still-hidden darts but, even 11 years after his solo debut, there's no denying one of hip-hop's most vibrant voices in its comfort zone.
Of course, his sweet spot is anything but sweet. As usual, the drug-peddling tales here deal in the currency of consequence; in Ghost's world there's no such thing as a simple transaction. Even on the hands-in-the-air anthem "We Celebrate", the boasts are tinged with annoying necessity ("The pool's a pain in the ass/ Fifty grand on Windex, kid/ They keep it clean, the whole bottom is glass") and concession ("If you fat I might take one for the team/ But I gotta get drunk first, know what I mean?"). Elsewhere, the terrors are more substantial. Both "Walk Around" and "Yolanda's House" are entries into the list of Ghostface chase classics (see: "Run"). "Walk Around" starts where most murder-rap songs end-- right after the shots go off. Describing a grizzly corner store scene, the trigger-happy narrator doesn't skimp on the details: "A part of his nose was stuck to my Padres" (trumping Prodigy's similarly gruesome "you've got some stomach on your Nikes" line from earlier this year). Soon, the killer is puking in his friend's car and dismissing claims of insanity ("don't put me in no mental clinics")-- it's a yarn ripe with the tangible vulnerability and irrationality of a first-time offender.
Meanwhile, on "Yolanda's House", the emotive rapper enlists both Method Man and Raekwon to tell his harried tale. "God strike me if you don’t like me," huffs Ghost. "I'm tired and I'm out of breath, the weed got me paranoid." The lines evoke Sam Jackson's famous take on Ezekiel 25:17 from Pulp Fiction. And while RZA may be the Wu-Tang member who can call Quentin Tarantino a close friend, Ghost's intricate crime stories and flamboyant violence-- not to mention his extreme verbosity-- increasingly sound like deleted scenes from one of the director's post-modern epics. On this track, a miraculously revived Method Man has to pull himself together after Ghost bursts in on him mid-coitus while on the run ("She’s asthmatic and you laughin', son/ I bumped my toe on the nightstand just running trying to grab the gun," Meth bitches, pulling up his underwear). These guys are well aware that getting caught with your pants down can often be as endearing as it is embarrassing.
Just as they provided the sweeping musical backbone to Jay-Z's American Gangster, producing tandem Sean C and LV of Diddy's Hitmen crew work their criminally smooth style on five Rehab tracks. But while Jay used the duo's blaring horns to vault himself to triumph, Ghost embodies the sweat on the '70s session man's brow as he relives the pain and hard work of his nostalgic sound snippets. "I'll Die for You" works around purchasing an expensive Marvin Gaye sample by pinching a symphonic bed of strings that uncannily replicates the lush grooves of What's Going On. On the track, Ghost fancies himself a modern martyr ("I die for the babies who can't eat with bare feet who need they mother"). But this Messiah won't die for just anyone ("First off yo you ain't my peeps/ I know we from the same town and shit/ But we ain't that deep"). Unfortunately, given the current internal Wu-Tang Clan war, those disparaging comments sound like they could be aimed at the RZA.
In his songs, Ghostface is always striving and battling and starting a ruckus so, in a weird way, his press fight with the RZA-- involving alleged unpaid dues and the head Clansman's unorthodox (and fantastic) production on new Wu album 8 Diagrams-- is apropos. Even as both the Wu-Tang and Ghostface release two of the best rap albums of this shallow year within one week of each other, the group's problems overshadow their conquests. Fittingly, at the proper ending of Rehab, Ghost isn't chilling on some getaway island, he's rushing headlong into an untold number of cops waiting to shoot him dead, Butch Cassidy-style. There will never be a happy fade out for Ghostface-- and lucky for us he still can't quite figure out why. On "The Prayer", Rehab's acapella conversation with God, an r&b singer named Ox sums up the rapper's ongoing turmoil as well as anyone could: "He said, 'Son you should know you're born to die'/ I said, 'I do, it's just hard sayin' bye'."


With a long bench of guests from 2 Chainz to Ne-Yo, the singer’s fourth album is sometimes catchy but astonishingly hollow and derivative.

cybersex

The singer, songwriter, and producer known as blackbear is devoted to brands; it’s one of many ways in which he’s old-fashioned. The songs on his new album cybersex, released sure enough on Cyber Monday (his 27th birthday) bristle with product mentions. There are spots for Gucci, Timberland and, blackbear’s potential favorite, Wilhelmina Models, whom he brags on “Thursday/Froze Over (“Interlude”)” about sharing carnally with G-Eazy (another example of the artist’s inherent conservatism is his unrepentant, unblinking misogyny.) His interviews, even the ones conducted by phone, come with a monotonous, Patrick Bateman-esque recitation of what he was wearing as he discussed how little he cared about music. You imagine his publicist sending multiple emails to the reporters: “Don’t forget, you said you’d include that he had on a…yep…yep, it’s spelled R-A-F…”
cybersex is blackbear’s fourth full length, but it’s the first that he’s released since signing what he touted as a $10 million deal with Interscope and the project has all the bells and whistles of the industry playing catch-up with a genuinely new sound. His talents are for melody, mimicry, and self-promotion and he has marketed himself as a polished answer to what critics have called SoundCloud rap. cybersex scans as a major label affair, with a bloated 14-song, 51 minute tracklist, shiny Rap&B hooks scattered chaotically like glitter on hotel bedsheets. The record has a dream list of features for someone whose teenage years coincided with the death of blogroll-rap. Appearances, some energized, some dutiful, are made by Cam’ron, Paul Wall, T-Pain, Rick Ross and Ne-Yo, among others.
Ne-Yo and blackbear have known each other for a third of the younger man’s life, since he was releasing music as Mat Musto (he was born Matthew Musto). Their meeting marked the beginning of the near-decade that blackbear has spent termiting his way in and around the industry. His writing assist on the 2012 Justin Bieber hit “Girlfriend” granted him insider cred and his prolificacy, social media presence and nose for fashion trends did the rest. His explosive popularity, seeded by his 2015 record Deadroses and several appearances on Kylie Jenner’s snapchat, culminated this year with the Gucci Mane-featuring hit “Do Re Mi” and a burst of tabloid coverage linking him with the actress Bella Thorne.
As a public figure, blackbear is so objectionable in his self-pity, mean-spiritedness, and obliviousness—after Lil Peep’s death in November he criticized the 21-year-old as a swagger-jacker who glorified drugs—that it’s tempting to dismiss his music on the basis of the lyrics alone, which can’t help but to reveal those qualities. But there are germs of musical talent in evidence on cybersex, particularly on a string of R&B songs that display his melodic abilities. The first of these is “Playboy S**t” but the best is the Ne-Yo feature, “Top Priority,” a sweetly sung, inescapably catchy R&B song that features the mentor in A+ vintage form, as he serenades his old flame, Ms. Independent.
There are fewer rap songs and they are significantly weaker. On several, blackbear and his featured guest (Rick Ross, Cam’ron) seem to expect each other to carry the weight and the results (“Glo_Up,” “Bright Pink Tims”) sound like a dresser being dropped down a flight of stairs. Even on the stronger tracks, blackbear’s lack of originality is near stunning. “Top Priority” shamelessly rehashes the “ho to housewife” trope and the high-point of “Gucci Linen,” outside of the 2 Chainz verse, is a hook which references Nelly Furtado’s 2001 hit “I’m Like a Bird” and Nelly’s 2002 hit “Hot in Herre.”
Then, there are the lyrics and boy, are they awful. “Thursday/Froze Over” begins with a recitation of the most famous men who have had sex with the same women as blackbear, who, along with the aforementioned G-Eazy, apparently include Bieber and Bruno Mars. On “I Hope Your Whole Life Sux,” women are compared to foodstuffs—“Instagram be feeling like the grocery store I pick and choose”—and on “Candayapple,” he boasts of a companion that “She my accessory, you know that ima flaunt her.”
These sentiments are a natural outgrowth of vibes expressed on Drake’s Take Care and in the Weeknd’s entire discography. blackbear appears to have studied both artists closely and, like the two Canadians, his melodic gifts will yield a handful of hits—“Down 4 U,” the T-Pain feature on cybersex, might be a contender. But unlike Drake or Abel Tesfaye, blackbear has little interest in perfecting his music, exploring new sounds, or earning pop stardom; he has repeatedly told interviewers that he plans to quit within the next couple of years. “Music’s a hobby to me,” he said to Noisey. “I have stocks and bitcoins, I consult for things and whatever, I dress girls for Coachella.” His lack of investment helps explain why listening to cybersex feels the way it does. Initially appealing and often catchy, it reveals itself relatively quickly as a shallow record made by an emotional idiot, stocked with brand names and old ideas, signifying nothing.


On the follow-up to her 2017 album For organ and brass, the Swedish composer delves even deeper into microtonal interplay, balancing heady theoretical terrain with a rare emotional resonance.

CHORDS

The title of Ellen Arkbro’s CHORDS couldn’t be much more succinct—or accurate. Her longform compositions, first encountered on 2017’s stunning For organ and brass, consist entirely of rich harmonies rendered in obscure tuning systems, unfurled one at a time. Melody, rhythm, lyrics, and other beloved chestnuts we tend to enjoy in music are unflinchingly cast aside. Listening to Arkbro’s work means listening to chords and nothing else.
If that sounds dull, or strict, or technical, then you haven’t heard these chords. Though in interviews Arkbro enthuses about high-functioning academic subjects like septimal intervals, the ultra-complex computer program SuperCollider, and “microtonal tuba,” her music is infused with a profound emotionality that transcends its heady origins. Passing through the gates of extreme rigor, CHORDS finds private infinity in a handful or stretched-out drones.
The A-side returns to the organ with “CHORDS for organ.” Here the instrument is rendered bare and unaccompanied, and the first impression is one of scale—a mammoth stack of tones that swells, churns, and undulates in place. Notes are added and taken away with a technician’s cool remove. Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley recently described the experience of working with frequency relationships as being akin to becoming a “witness to phenomena,” a comment that finds much purchase here. Arkbro’s cadence has a strikingly chunky quality; she plops each new harmonic shift down with the matter-of-factness of a butcher weighing meat. Yet this absence of romance or theatricality works in the music’s favor, allowing us to hear the depth and power of the organ without feeling manipulated or needled into some calculated epiphany.
These austerity measures are a step or two away from her debut. Comparing the albums, CHORDS is notably more severe, and also more mercurial. For organ and brass at times recalled the muted yearnings of Arthur Russell’s Tower of Meaning, but CHORDS feels less expressive and more like a force of nature. It may inspire awe, dread, deep calm, or nervous discomfort, but that’s on you. The press release describes the album as built from a “carefully selected combination of tones,” but you get the feeling that the tones selected Arkbro, rather than the other way around. The longer you sit with them, the more they speak.
On the B-side, Arkbro shifts her focus to the guitar, though it sounds particularly alien here. Could this be a function of tuning? Or has Arkbro returned to the world of software, where she worked until recently? We hear each string sounded one at a time, strummed with a dirge-like solemnity, in a languid cascade. The action is really in the decay, where the strings resonate together in beautiful stasis, though it doesn’t sweep you up with the same immediacy as her organ works, which essentially feel like limitless explorations of those same fading harmonies. I’m reminded of Morton Feldman’s search for “sourceless” sounds. “The attack of a sound is not its character,” held the composer. “Decay, however, this departing landscape, this expresses where the sound exists in our hearing—leaving us rather than coming towards us.” A piece built entirely out of these floating evaporations could be an experience. Though “CHORDS for guitar” moves in the direction of this mystery, it doesn’t quite arrive. It’s almost majestic, almost hypnotic, and almost feels sublimely empty, but not quite.
This is not a blow to Arkbro’s work, however. Her debut showed a young artist composing with remarkable assuredness and clarity of vision, and CHORDS is a strong, occasionally astonishing next step. Give it a close listen and try to resist being entranced by the subtle, pulsating viscera of the A-side. A single note hangs in the air, oscillating with a sludgy tremolo. A second joins, and suddenly the interaction of the two causes a fluttering. But then there’s something below, a deeper moan, answered by the jackhammer drill of the next combination. Time seems to freeze as you sit there, parsing out this gentle paradox of stillness and movement. When Arkbro reintroduces a long-neglected lower octave—forget it. This could go on forever.


Alabama Shakes escape their "retro-soul" box for good on Sound & Color, a strange, mystical and unexpected record with traces of Curtis Mayfield, Erykah Badu, MC5, and the Strokes. This is stadium soul with one eye peeking toward another galaxy while hands and feet and throats desperately try to suss out life here on Earth.

Sound & Color

Two years ago, Alabama Shakes performed at the White House as the Obamas sat in the front row, just a few feet away. The Athens, Ala. band were part of a "Memphis Soul" revue celebrating that city’s groundbreaking '60s sounds, which famously featured black and white musicians working together to make lasting hits like "Hold On, I'm Comin'" in the thick of the civil rights era. The visual symbolism of the event was powerful, a historically rich triumph of the unity that soul music has often portended: As the nation’s first black president looked on, multiracial Shakes frontwoman Brittany Howard led her band of white instrumentalists—along with Memphis greats Booker T. Jones and Steve Cropper—on the classic 1967 blues track "Born Under a Bad Sign". Barack and Michelle nodded their heads in respectful rhythm. Malia seemed mildly amused. Sasha, meanwhile, was bored. Like, remarkably bored. Her flat stare was the type usually reserved for dentist waiting rooms or Target customer service lineups. Her obligatory golf clap at the end of the song was wan to the point of noiselessness.
Howard, for her part, could probably see where the youngest Obama was coming from. During the performance, the singer paced impatiently, seemingly humbled by the pageantry and also perhaps feeling a little constricted by the antiquity of it all. It wasn’t that Howard and her band didn’t know their blues; the working-class quartet came from a small town in the mythic South and cut their teeth on hours-long sets of covers. And when the frontwoman belted, "Hard luck and trouble been my only friend/ I been on my own ever since I was 10," the lines held pointed meaning for Howard since she lost her older sister—and only sibling—to cancer when she was around that age. But for all their preternatural grit, sweat, and passion (along with every other age-old signifier of rock'n'roll authenticity known to man), Alabama Shakes were never quite comfortable with the retro-soul box many placed them into upon their arrival in 2012. To be fair, their debut, Boys & Girls, certainly deserved the tag, its vintage moves elevated mostly by Howard’s gale-force delivery, an instrument that could have blown Otis Redding back. The band’s effortless charm, instant familiarity, and Great Recession recovery anthem "Hold On" made them easy to root for, and the album went onto sell more than 700,000 copies. It felt as if they could be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at any moment.
And yet, the idea taking on the mantle of '60s soul was never part of the plan for Alabama Shakes. In interviews, they casually distanced themselves from the pure revivalists of Daptone Records while repping for theatrical sensationalists like Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, and My Chemical Romance; their origin story had Howard noticing bassist Zac Cockrell because he was wearing an At the Drive-In shirt; when the band hit "Saturday Night Live" recently, Howard wore earrings emblazoned with Prince’s face. "We just don’t wanna own the classic R&B title and let people down," guitarist Heath Fogg diplomatically stated around the release of Boys & Girls, "because when we go electronic on the next record it might break some hearts."
Sound & Color is not an electronic record. But it is strange and mystical and unexpected—more Houses of the Holy than "Holy Cow". It’s got past lives and future people, traces of Curtis Mayfield, Erykah Badu, MC5, the Strokes. There’s a song called "Shoegaze" that could find a second home on the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You. Bon Iver collaborator Rob Moose provides eerie string arrangements that slowly encroach on songs like ivy climbing up a fence while the band and co-producer Blake Mills tweak tones and rhythms to make guitars and drums and bass and keyboards sound genuinely exciting—fresh, even—in 2015. This is stadium soul with one eye peeking toward another galaxy while hands and feet and throats desperately try to suss out life here on Earth.
Of course, Howard is at the center of it all. Over the course of the last three years, she’s managed to take complete control over her unbridled voice without losing a smidge of spontaneity. She’s no longer just building toward an ecstatic climax (though there are several of those here), but rather exploring the upper reaches of her register, cajoling instead of hollering, taking on operatic cadences. The singer, who took part in both raucous Baptist services as well as a cappella hymns in the Church of Christ growing up, layers her vocals on almost every track, offering harmonies and ghosts that can’t help but follow her around; on one bipolar love song, what sounds like ghoulish laughter echoes behind Howard as she pours her being into the words "gimme all your love!" Is she reveling in her desires? Sending up her larger-than-life voice? Smiling into the void of unrequited love? Yes, yes, and yes.
As a lyricist, Howard excels at spinning down-home profundity that make her sound her age, 26, and years beyond. Along with her tales of haunted love, cautious optimism, and impassioned pacifism come more impressionistic songs that mean to find connections between epochs and space. She and her band travel through the blues back to a bad sign—or is it a good one?—on "Gemini", a six-and-a-half-minute excursion into zero-gravity funk. Whereas Alabama Shakes once seemed destined to relive the history of others, they invent their own genesis here, as weeds grow near the Tennessee River and eyes reveal dreams that eventually must wake up. And just as the song comes to a close, it keeps going for a little while longer.


Ill-starred and long overlooked, the Detroit shoegaze band finally gets its due with a new Numero Group compilation.

Majesty Crush: Butterflies Don’t Go Away

Butterflies Don’t Go Away

In 1994, shortly after most of their musical dreams collapsed, Majesty Crush played a show opening for alt-rockers Belly. After seeing them perform, lead singer Tanya Donelly pulled aside the band’s bassist and told him point blank, “I think everyone in your band needs therapy.”
The bitter comedy in Donelly’s observation wasn’t that Majesty Crush had hit a low point; she had simply noticed the askew intensity that kept them going. An American shoegaze band that merrily sang about wanting to assassinate politicians and be debased like an animal while crafting tunes just as dreamy and gorgeous as their UK peers, Majesty Crush were upfront with their desires to the point of repulsion. Butterflies Don’t Go Away, Numero Group’s new compilation of the band’s only album and few EPs, explores this tension: a melding of the unsavory and sweet, raw lust and desire amplified tenfold by tense basslines and waves of pillowy distortion. It would have been enough to send them far beyond the Midwest and on to bigger things—if only anything, internally and externally, had gone right.
Majesty Crush originated in Detroit at the dawn of 1990. The start of a new decade had brought the end of Spahn Ranch, a sparse, gothic post-punk band featuring Odell Nails III and aspiring music journalist Hobey Echlin. Itching to start a new band, Nails turned to his roommate and high school friend, David Stroughter. The duo turned back to Echlin to be their bassist. Michael Segal, a local record store clerk who had introduced Stroughter and Nails to A.R. Kane’s 69, completed the lineup on guitar. A.R. Kane’s album would become the new band’s Rosetta Stone: evidence for how to make noisy, echo-filled songs about deeply intimate desires, as well as how being Black did not exclude you from making such music.
By 1992 Majesty Crush had begun to self-release singles and rise in the Detroit scene, powered in part by Stroughter’s stark intensity on stage and the band’s unwillingness to be confined by genre. Dali, an Elektra subsidiary, came calling; before 1993 even started, the band was making plans to record its debut. That record, Love 15, is presented here in full and stands as one of the most unheralded shoegaze albums of the ’90s. Opener “Boyfriend” is a sly wink: Its plumbing cymbal crashes and jet-engine guitar squall invoke the overwhelming barrage of other albums of the era before giving way almost immediately, opening up to real song, full of gliding guitar notes and Stroughter’s roughly sultry vocals about how he’s going to take another man’s girlfriend and make him squirm while he does it. Not that the band was afraid to be loud. “Seles” and “Grow” are beyond generous with the feedback, all the better to accent the unfettered debauchery within both. Still, there were few dream-pop bands of the time who could produce something like “Penny for Love”: easily the catchiest song the band ever wrote, with a rhythmic energy as infectious as the singing, even if Stroughter is talking about selling his body so he can buy time with someone else’s.
The band also mined songs from earlier singles to great effect. Reworked tracks like “Cicciolina” began to sound more alive, swapping the timid tempo of the original for a more confident propulsion and psych-y finale to match Stroughter’s obsession with the adult film actress. “No. 1 Fan” achieves its true form here, its oil slick bassline wrapping around the song as sheets of distortion crash in throughout. Stroughter coos about John Hinckley Jr.’s obsession with Jodie Foster with honey in his voice: The uglier the emotion or impulse, the more the band seemed to relish in transforming it into something bewitching.
No matter how seemingly skeevy the thematic territory, there was a pained honesty at the group’s core. So “Feigned Sleep,” a love song filled with the same breathy melancholy and tension of “Fake Plastic Trees,” feels just as sincere and appropriate as the rest of the album. The brooding beat of “Brand” is the backbone to a song about the endless consumption of every comfort in sight (cigars, alcohol, sex); Stroughter may be surrounded by everything he’s ever wanted, but there’s no hiding how hollow inside he sounds singing the pained notes of the chorus. There was depth to the depravity and the band harnessed it to make something immaculate. It all came crashing down when Dali folded a month after the album’s release. Majesty Crush were left holding whatever copies they could scrounge from the office.
The band soldiered on with the Sans Muscles EP a year later, but cracks were glaringly apparent. By this point they were crafting shoegaze so formulaic it bordered on parody (“Space Between Your Moles”) or trying to recreate the terrible funk-rock then creeping into alt-rock radio and coming out sounding like sentient leather jackets (“If JFA Were Still Together”). Still they had one last ember of beauty inside them. “Ghost of Fun” is the longest song the band wrote, stuffed with guitars that twinkle and reverb to the point of overflow, swaying and sagging with a rhythm that weighs heavy on the shoulders. It’s a final tale of dark longing—about an adult knowingly chasing after a teenager—that compresses the band’s entire existence into a little less than seven minutes, hauntedly dreamy at one moment, nightmarishly noisy by its end. It’s a worthy coda, even if Stroughter’s lyrics feel spewed out rather than plucked from his soul.
A short tour with an up-and-coming band called the Verve followed, but by then it was too late. It would be their last EP, and Majesty Crush would sputter out in 1995, having finally lost their grip on the reserve of intensity and chaos that fueled them. Any hope of a proper second chance for the original lineup ended in 2017, when Stroughter was killed by police at age 50.
At a time when so much shoegaze and dream pop has been rediscovered, when CDs long forgotten in the used bin can morph into canon-reshaping classics, Majesty Crush remain unfairly forgotten, another apparent casualty of the major labels’ frenzied search for the ’90s’ next big thing. Maybe it was their explicit rawness that doomed them from the start, their unwillingness to sound or to be just like their peers. Yet to be forever denied something they wanted seems so tragically fitting for this band, one so nakedly upfront about desire. “I’d kill the president,” Stroughter sings over and over on “No. 1 Fan,” proclaiming his willingness to do something unthinkable just to get the attention of his latest obsession. Even that wasn’t enough at the time. But maybe now it will be.


Head Wound City, a supergroup drawing from members of the Blood Brothers, the Locust and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, convene for an album of abrasive, low-stakes hardcore.

A New Wave of Violence

Conservative regimes have always provided a boon for punk rock. The Reagan and Thatcher years famously birthed hardcore as we know it; more recently, George W. Bush’s two terms spurred on a generation of bands that expanded the boundaries of post-hardcore, screamo and grindcore. With right-wing demagoguery making headlines and xenophobia on the rise around the globe, another musical backlash could be just around the corner. That might be the idea behind the reunion of Head Wound City, a supergroup whose lineup includes some of the Bush era's most forward-thinking punk musicians: Jordan Blilie and Cody Votolato of the Blood Brothers, Justin Pearson and Gabe Serbian of the Locust and the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Nick Zinner. Up until now, the band’s only formal output was a 10-minute EP written and recorded in the span of a week in 2005. Following some reunion shows in 2014, Head Wound City have now produced A New Wave of Violence, their fittingly-titled full-length debut.
More so than in the past, Blilie and Votolato seem to take the lead on A New Wave of Violence--these songs all bear a close resemblance to the Blood Brothers’ work circa Burn Piano Island, Burn. Of course, Johnny Whitney’s high-pitched squeal and glam affectations are dearly missed, but many of that band’s other signature elements are here: Blilie's dark humor and throat-shredding screams, the pummeling rhythms, songs that barrel forward with a punishing intensity. Votolato, as always, manages to make an impressive racket, with guitars that alternately crash down in waves of fuzz, roar like a jet engine and buzz like a cloud of hornets.
As with Piano Island, Ross Robinson returns to the boards, lending his skilled hand to the proceedings--few producers can capture the live energy of hardcore bands with the sort of fidelity that Robinson does. The upgrade is immediately apparent; where the Head Wound City EP’s sound was defined by DIY muddiness, A New Wave of Violence brings each element in the mix into sharp focus, even as the overall effect is one of crushing heaviness. These songs are felt as much as they’re heard, with every riff, scream and drum hit practically leaping out of the speakers.
Opener “Old Age Takes Too Long” provides a representative sample: a steady march of floor toms, chugging, palm-muted guitars that give way to thunderous choruses and an almost Misfits-like sing-along refrain of “Whoaaa-ohhhh.” “Born to Burn” and “Palace of Love and Hate” are scorched earth campaigns that sprint through multiple verses and choruses in under two minutes (only three of the ten songs here extend beyond the three-minute mark). Longer tracks like “I Cast a Shadow for You,”“Avalanche in Heaven” and “Love is Best” recall some of the Blood Brothers’ best-loved songs–multi-part miniature epics like “Cecilia and the Silhouette Saloon” and “Camouflage, Camouflage”—but in keeping with Head Wound City’s proclivity for brevity, are much more tightly scripted.
If you’re looking for a hardcore record that fires on all cylinders, you won’t be disappointed by A New Wave of Violence: here you’ll find a set of skilled players tearing through 25 minutes of music with relentless energy. That said, the latest incarnation of Head Wound City does feel both more straightforward and less ambitious than nearly all of these musicians’ previous projects. You’ll find few of the Locust’s loopy synth lines or breakneck tempos; Zinner seems content to let his guitar follow rather than lead and in the absence of Whitney, it’s hard not to hear Blilie as vaudevillian straight man in search of a foil. That’s only by way of comparison to the band members’ past work, though and Head Wound City is clearly a vehicle for these guys to let their hair down and play some explosive music free of any expectations. Judged on its own merits, A New Wave of Violence is a fine hardcore record, one that manages to balance chaotic intensity with a workmanlike precision that few punk bands can muster.


On her breakthrough project, executive produced by Phonte, the polymath rapper-singer displays her love of classic hip-hop and tries to soothe the sting of survivor’s guilt.

Closer Than They Appear

California-via-Boston rapper Lyric Jones’ latest album Closer Than They Appear begins with a crisis of conscience. After spending the last eight years honing her skills, she devotes the early moments of her biggest album to date to reflecting on the deaths of Breonna Taylor and Sandra Bland and wondering if her career was worth the blood, sweat, and tears. “Survivor’s guilt cause many ain’t beating the odds/Often faced with ‘That could’ve been me’; fuck the facade,” she says on “Face to Face.” Jones uses her art as a balm to soothe the sting of systemic oppression and finds confidence in her ability to rap anyone under the table. On Appear, her sincerity and musical range are her greatest weapons.
In many ways, Jones is a formalist, a craft-first MC and a classically trained musician who’s released music professionally since 2012. Appear feels like a breakthrough, amplifying her rapping and singing voice on a scale several steps beyond her similarly varied 2014 EP Love’s Trail Mix. The album is executive produced by Phonte, a fellow rap/R&B polymath whose experience in groups like Little Brother and The Foreign Exchange undoubtedly helped pinpoint Jones as a kindred spirit. She doesn’t coast on the co-sign. On standout track “Cruisin,” Jones and Little Brother, including Rapper Big Pooh, kick bars while riding their respective state highways—I-405 in California, I-85 in Virginia, and I-95 in North Carolina—and she holds her own over Focus…’s crisp breakbeat: “At times it often takes removing caution tape/To let the right ones cross it safe/And pretty soon I’ll be in awesome shape.” Rap is clearly a healing element for Jones, and her energy reflects the good vibes.
She brings just as much energy to rapping without pretense and simply wearing her love for classic hip-hop on her sleeve. “2020 feels heavy, singing D scales/Lyte as a rock, this audio too detailed,” she spits on the Nottz-produced “Rock On,” shouting out Heavy D, MC Lyte, and Audio Two in two easy-to-digest passes. Her bars are battle-tested and referential, hitting with the snap you’d expect from someone who can rap and play drums at the same time. While there are plenty of showcases sure to make backpackers of all ages smile, Appear has more in store than straightforward bar-fests. Jones regularly jumps between rapping and singing in a light and airy voice contrasting with her mid-register rap tone. The beats shift and morph accordingly, taking on elements of flamenco, disco, and the more adventurous side of modern R&B occupied by artists like Kaytranada.
Whether flirting with Vic Mensa over H0wdy’s roller-rink-ready beat on “Show You How” or weaving through Phil Beaudreau’s guitar strums on “Angelina,” Jones’ transitions are effortless. She credits Phonte with Appear’s mostly stellar sequencing, which brings cohesion to the project’s various sounds. It shines brightest in the album’s first quarter where the first three full songs all flow seamlessly into one another. The effect works so well it draws attention to the more jagged transitions elsewhere. Opening track “Objects In The Mirror” is a pretty but unnecessary introduction, sapping momentum from the thundering drums on “Face to Face.” The short interlude between “Cruisin’” and “Show You How,” where Jones interrupts her own desires to shoot her shot with a new love interest, feels more like a random voice memo than a fully fleshed-out thought.
In an Instagram post celebrating the album’s release, Jones recalls meeting Phonte at Atlanta’s A3C Festival in 2019 after a decade of keeping her dream collaborator on her vision board. “I saw an example of individuality, versatility, and I was so inspired at how Tigallo was RESPECTED in various side music scenes,” she explained. These were all qualities she possessed before meeting her idol, and they’ve been supercharged on Closer Than They Appear. Standing on her largest platform yet, Jones’ dreams are finally within reach.

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In 1973, Neil Young played the inaugural show at the Los Angeles club, The Roxy. The reissued recording captures a night that turned his famously bracing album into something warmer and vibrant.

Neil Young: Roxy - Tonight’s the Night Live

Roxy - Tonight’s the Night Live

Walk the city blocks of Los Angeles and imagine its bohemian yesteryear, when strung-out sex parties and impromptu jamborees emanated from the storefronts and bungalows. Neil Young’s foothold in the musician circles of Topanga, Laurel Canyon, and Hollywood are well documented. Further proof of his contribution to the cultural fabric of Los Angeles is that he consecrated some of the city’s most celebrated clubs. A new reissue of live performances from his celebrated diamond in the rough, Tonight’s The Night—released in conjunction with Record Store Day—aims to recapture the intrigue tied up with Young’s tenure in L.A. in the early 1970s.
When the now-famous nightclub The Roxy flung open its doors in West Hollywood in September 1973, Young and his band, the Santa Monica Flyers, were invited to be its inaugural live act. They were fresh out of a makeshift recording studio in Hollywood, where Young, pedal steel player Ben Keith, multi-instrumentalist Nils Lofgren, and the Crazy Horse rhythm of bassist section Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina had been recording live jam sessions. These hours in the studio also served as a musical wake for two friends who’d recently died, Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. Young meditates on the loss in its namesake opener: His friend had overdosed on heroin and cocaine, and Young identified too acutely with the tragedy: “Out on the mainline,” as he put it.
Young and the Flyers spent the summer months of 1973 playing through their grief, forming the bones of what would become Young’S 1975 album Tonight’s The Night. They worked from 11 p.m. until sunrise, cruising—or flying, if you will—down Santa Monica Boulevard to sleep off the daylight hours at the Sunset Marquis hotel. When they hit The Roxy with the brand new songs they’d been rehearsing for months, the group was a lockstep machine that propelled, for example, “Tonight’s the Night,” “Albuquerque,” and “Tired Eyes” from insular meditation on death and its trappings to an amped-up catharsis to adoring fans. In the studio, Tonight’s the Night was imposing and dark, it sliced through the speaker like a razor. Live, though, these songs from Young’s famous “Ditch Trilogy” become warmer, more vibrant and alive. It’s a testament to Young’s indelible songwriting that a slight alteration in speed or sound can change the emotional tenor of his songs, and it's what makes this reissue a worthy addition for both avid Young collectors and casual fans.
Roxy - Tonight’s the Night Live imbues the songs with the spirit of a specific place in time, at the Sunset Strip’s newest digs, where Young’s soon-to-be label boss David Geffen was a face in the crowd. Young tips his hat to Geffen specifically in a chatty interlude included between “New Mama” and “Roll Another Number (For the Road),” and there are other improvised bridges like polka mainstay “Roll Out the Barrel,” which the audience audibly digs via claps and whoops. That a group of people could be so jubilant about songs they’d never heard before is unfathomable in today’s firehose of festival reunions, but it speaks to the magnitude of Young’s pull in 1973.
The existence of alternative studio versions of Tonight’s the Night have long been the subject of much speculation among Young scholars. While this release won’t scratch that itch, it is still a perfect time capsule back to a wilder L.A., featuring nine songs from the original album played in a different order and in a more joyful spirit. "Walk On," from Young's 1974 album On the Beach, appears too. If the original recordings of Tonight’s the Night are a honey and hash-soaked lamentation, Roxy - Tonight’s the Night Live is a salve for such palpable tragedy in the grand tradition of a live communion.


Danny Brown’s ear for talent outweighs his larger-than-life persona on a mixtape that finds him ceding center stage to accentuate and support the voices of other rappers in his crew.

Reign Supreme

On August 24th, Danny Brown hopped on Twitch, a video game social network to play “Persona 5” with some virtual pals. After a while, he started playing new music, songs he insisted wouldn’t be released and were not part of the album he’s working on. Brown’s spent the last 10 years building a world so precise and nuanced that the playful tape emitting from his speakers had to be something different—something outside of Brown’s exacting grasp. That record, now circulating on the web, is a compilation from Brown’s Bruiser Brigade, a loose collection of Detroit rappers in their late-20s-to-mid-30s that have been his affiliates since he was an upper-and-downer-addled gangster rapper in the mid-2000s.
Live-streaming an album on a communal, shared social media platform is antithetical to Brown’s style; his is a world of controllable chaos, emanating from, and ending with, him. So, perhaps it makes sense that the only logical place this Bruiser Brigade tape, Reign Supreme, could land would be in a temporary social setting. This is clearly music Brown likes, but not an album he’s comfortable owning entirely. Tossed off, it’s devalued while still whetting the collective appetite of Danny Brown’s biggest bingers. As one of rap’s quickest-evolving emcees, this live-hosted one-off event makes perfect sense. It’s a testing ground for new ideas, old loosies, and whatever else Brown feels like pulling from this experiment. And yet, there’s a feeling that the Bruiser Brigade crew is perhaps overlooked.
So strong is the gravitational pull of Danny Brown’s personality that the other artists in his Bruiser Brigade orbit inevitably get swept up in his stylistic tics. The rapper’s airhorn snarl, miles-long grin, and the long come-up that preceded his evolution into Detroit’s best attraction are all key elements of Brown’s reputation, and they’ve established his extravagant voice as one of the most distinctive in hip-hop. So the Bruiser Brigade compilation Reign Supreme, which spotlights other members of his crew, presents a challenge: How does Danny Brown champion lesser-known talent on a record hosted, presented by, and featuring him?
Thankfully, Brown’s ear for talent outweighs his personal theatrics on Reign Supreme, a cohesive tape in which his voice accentuates Bruiser Brigade’s other voices, rather than consuming them whole. Led in by the siren call of Danny Brown’s laugh, the ZelooperZ solo track “Liar” opens the album with the MC sifting through various dramatic flows before landing on one that works. ZelooperZ dances around the beat’s pocket, moving in and out of hi-hats and woozy synths. The similarities between his and Brown’s vocal styles are palpable, but ZelooperZ stands out thanks to his buoyant, unpredictable flow. If Reign Supreme is a demonstration of what Bruiser Brigade’s quieter soldiers can do, “Liar” is the record’s call to arms.
The crew’s most visible member aside from Brown, ZelooperZ is the only rapper on the project who gets his own solo track. Dopehead, Kash Tha Kushman, and Fat Ray each get opportunities to spit their best bars, but it’s a bit disappointing to see them relegated to secondary roles, considering how effortlessly they charm the listener and paint their hometown.
A collaboration between Dopehead and ZelooperZ, “Everybody Like Me” is a hyped-up number propelled by a hypnotic horn line and thumping drums that seem to be riding an amphetamine high. Despite having been on the scene since 2011, with his debut Plaid Palm Trees, Dopehead sounds the most in touch with rap’s youthful contingent, employing a half-yelled, choppy flow and delivering nihilistic aphorisms like, “Smoking that kushy bitch/Everybody like me lit/Everybody icy bitch.” While he and ZelooperZ have a tangible, effortless synergy that makes the track one of the best moments on the compilation, ZelooperZ’s flow on the track comes so close to imitating Brown’s, you might find yourself double-checking the credits.
These occasional moments of stylistic confusion are unavoidable with a clique so tight. But, for the most part, Reign Supreme defines the role each rapper plays in the Bruiser Brigade universe: Danny is the king, ZelooperZ his right-hand man, Dopehead does SoundCloud recon, Fat Ray is the old-school holdout, and Kash is the unrepentant speed demon, wary of ever letting his foot off the gas for fear that whatever he’s running from will catch up. His crew shrinks his shadow a bit, shaping a world where Danny Brown is simply the marquee name on a bill stacked with memorable talent.


Colter Wall is one of country music’s most exciting young voices. His debut album is strange and stirring, rarely ever rising above a gentle rumble.

Colter Wall

During the mid-1990s, a new back-to-basics movement swept through country music. Johnny Cash kicked off his fruitful American Recordings partnership with Rick Rubin; Willie Nelson released the sparse, unadorned Spirit; and—in the city of Swift Current in Saskatchewan, Canada in June 1995—Colter Wall was born. Blessed with a curious, slurring baritone that burbles like smoke from a chimney, Wall writes country songs as stark and traditional as they come, accompanied by little more than an acoustic guitar. To call him wiser than his years would be an understatement: veteran songwriters go to great lengths to sound so gruff and world-weary. The 11 tracks on his self-titled debut are strange and stirring enough to make him one of the genre’s most exciting young voices.
Rarely ever rising above a gentle rumble, Wall’s songs zoom in on haunting scenes and resolve in unexpected ways. They gain their intensity from his vivid, fragmented storytelling. The album begins with “Thirteen Silver Dollars,” a spirited ramble that finds our narrator lying in the snowy streets of Saskatchewan before a cop comes to take him away. Wall never explains how he wound up there (“For now we’ll say I had no place to go,” he offers) or what happens next—there’s not even a second verse. Instead, he closes with a rousing repetition of the chorus, proudly naming the few possessions he owns. It’s a fitting introduction to an album built from small details, conjuring larger pictures with what’s left out.
Wall’s aversion to narrative spans the record and makes these songs a lot more hallucinogenic than their earthy arrangements suggest. “Kate McCannon” is told through one of folk music’s oldest tropes: the dual love song/murder ballad. But Wall offers little time for reflection, fading out shortly after the cathartic and inevitable round of gunfire in the song’s final couplet. “I ain’t in the business of making excuses,” Wall sings earlier in the album, and he doesn’t. As often as he references guns and drugs and death, Wall is too plainspoken for his stories to ever feel glamorized or romantic. Like Springsteen on Nebraska, Colter Wall surveys mankind in its most fragile states—betrayed, lonely, desperate, dangerous—as a means of addressing how much we have to lose, how easily it can all fall apart.
“You Look to Yours” offers the album’s most useful (and timely) bit of advice: “Go about your earthly mission,” Wall sings, “Don’t trust no politicians.” Tellingly, the wisdom doesn’t arrive from Wall himself but from a series of women eloquently turning him down in various seedy bars, their kiss-offs echoing in his head as he stumbles home alone. Hummable and warm, it’s one of the album’s most upbeat songs, effortlessly summoning the honky-tonks Wall sings about with a lazy swing. “Motorcycle” is another moment of levity with a cheerful melody that masks the death wish driving its lyrics. The friction in Wall’s delivery highlights the genre’s ability to blend pain and joy past the point of differentiation: a power he seems to harness intuitively.
The album was produced by David Cobb—the go-to guy for breakthrough acts like Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, and Chris Stapleton. But Cobb takes a decidedly unmodern approach, letting Wall’s songs speak for themselves. The two songs on the albums that Wall didn’t write (Townes Van Zandt’s “Snake Mountain Blues” and the traditional “Fraulein”) slip seamlessly into the tracklist: an indication of just how gloriously out of touch his writing is. In the slow, ominous “Me and Big Dave,” Wall revels in his outsider mentality while conceding to the dangers of a life spent alone. “This whole world’s full of ghosts,” he concludes, “I believe that most people can’t see.” It’s one of the album’s most powerful lyrics, sold with a fierce and frightening conviction. For 40 minutes, Colter Wall brings you face to face with his ghosts until they’re so familiar you can hardly remember life without them.


The English six-piece’s debut is a high-wire act combining jazz fusion, disco rhythms, and high-gloss art rock.

The Dots

The English six-piece ALASKALASKA have spent the last two years in the same South London melting pot as jazz revivalists Sons of Kemet, post punks Shame, and Afropop modernist Rina Mushonga. A wonderful cross-contamination must have occurred, because their debut LP The Dots is evidence that they have soaked up their surroundings: Combining jazz fusion, disco rhythms, and high-gloss art rock, The Dots is an ambitious first album boasting attention to detail and a natural gift for pop melody.
What strikes you initially about the songs are their radiant, body-moving grooves—early single “Meateater” being the most immediate example. A dizzying smash-up of polished synth pop, canned percussion, and blurting saxophone, it’s a track that seems allergic to genre and untethered by era. Bandleader Lucinda Duarte-Holman’s crisp voice cuts through the tangle of keys and woodwinds like an Exacto blade dividing tinsel. Over time, the record’s precise composition and production details start to peek out. Opening suite of songs “The Dots,” “Bees,” and “Moon,” are ripe with sonic curios: Whether it’s a buried baritone harmony,  a gooey bass riff that Thundercat would co-sign, or a skronking sax phrase that flaps overhead like a passing seagull, each element feels simultaneously effortless and deliberate.
This might be a result of ALASKALASKA’s dual areas of expertise: Duarte-Holman met multi-instrumentalist Fraser Rieley and guitarist Calum Duncan during a pop music course at Goldsmiths University, while the remaining members are heavily enmeshed in the jazz scene. It would be easy for one camp to overpower the other’s native musical tongue, but what emerges instead is a whole new dialect of their own design.
While The Dots is awash in dimensional, multicolored compositions, ALASKALASKA are able to pare things back when necessary. “Sweat” is a slow-burning sex hymn draped over a frame of plucked strings, whining drones, and what sounds like the faint creaking of bedsprings. Duarte-Holman is hushed here, letting the words slip out of her mouth; “Sweat baby,” she sings. “Salt never tasted so good.” The Dots is packed with quick sketches of daily life like this, each rendering familiar dilemmas—sexism, resentment, PMS—without beating you over the head with the subject matter. Maybe that is the trick to ALASKALASKA’s music: They push everything right to the brink and then pull back at precisely the right moment.


With panoramic proportions and gleaming finishes, the band’s sprawling eighth album luxuriates in the rhapsody of sensation itself. You don’t listen to Once Twice Melody, you dissolve into it.

Once Twice Melody

Beach House’s Once Twice Melody begins “out in the summer sun,” dawning strings and downy acoustic guitars sketching a scene of pastoral bliss, and ends, 17 songs later, reaching “into the darkness,” where “the universe collects us.” It is a fittingly epic span for a pair of Baltimore stargazers who have never been shy about courting infinity. Between those two ephemeral points, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally luxuriate in the interplay of shadow and light, the scent of night-blooming flowers, the rhapsody of sensation itself. The first album that they have produced on their own, it hews to Beach House’s trademark dream-pop reverie—eight albums in, it is clearer than ever that they have no interest in breaking character or changing up the scenery—while billowing outward in every direction. The operative term is more, the operative mode superlative: bigger but also gauzier; more sumptuous, more diaphanous, more dazzling. You don’t listen to Once Twice Melody, you dissolve into it.
From the current vantage point, Beach House’s entire career looks like one long, gradual process of transformation, a slowly winding path leading up to this point. Over the years, they have made subtle tweaks to the languid slowcore template they fashioned on their self-titled 2006 debut. The organ-heavy Depression Cherry wrapped itself in velvety drones that bristled with dissonance; 7 was darker and more muscular, tinged with a syrupy hit of shoegaze. They have never abandoned the attributes that make them inimitably Beach House; compare Once Twice Melody with a record like Devotion or Teen Dream, and it’s clearly the same band, yet profound changes have taken place.
Their evolution brings to mind the Ship of Theseus, a classic philosopher’s paradox. Imagine a vessel that, over the course of many years, has had all of its parts replaced: mast, rigging, sails, hull, all the way down to the very last nail. After a century’s worth of repairs, not a single original piece of the boat remains. It looks identical, but can it truly be said to be the same ship? Beach House, in contrast, have steadily upgraded their materials, replacing oak with titanium and sailcloth with Kevlar. They have swapped clean-toned electric guitar for surging shoegaze fuzz, traded the thrift-store keyboards and rickety home-organ rhythm presets for hi-def synthesizers and powerhouse live drumming, while Legrand’s ambiguously imagistic lyrics have become more grandiose and diffuse. The essence of their sound has remained the same, yet the contours have changed: They have transformed themselves from a weathered wooden boat into a gleaming, streamlined spaceship; from a twentysomething’s dogeared Moleskine into something as vast and ineffable as the metaverse—a rush of pure vibes, ephemeral and enveloping.
With 18 tracks and 84 minutes of running time, Beach House have plenty of room to try out different things, but Once Twice Melody invariably sounds phenomenal. There are feathery acoustic guitars and rosy vocoders, watery analog synths and chord changes that explode like fireworks against the night sky, and all of it has been mixed to emphasize its nuanced contrasts and swollen dimensions. In their soaring choruses and sumptuous arrays of synths, guitars, and percussion, they have taken on the proportions of spectacular, stadium-sized alt pop. (Guest drummer James Barone’s controlled wallop goes a long way toward establishing the record’s blockbuster footprint.) Where once they sounded indebted to bands like Mazzy Star or My Bloody Valentine, here they’re chasing a shiny brass ring bearing the fingerprints of Air, M83, even Tame Impala.
Their supersized instincts often serve them well. Driven by chugging electric guitars and a hint of the Cocteau Twins’ chiming leads, “Superstar” is a feast of texture set to heartstring-tugging chord changes. The stately “New Romance” boasts one of the sugariest hooks of the band’s catalog, with an irresistible (and meme-ready) chorus to match: “Last night I’m messing up/Now I feel like dressing up/ILYSFM.” The spangled “Over and Over” is slow and radiant, a Moroder-influenced power ballad whose celestial choirs boast megachurch wattage.
Along the way, they pull out some surprising references. Extending Legrand’s wistfully looped vocals over a driving 4/4 beat, “Only You Know” approximates the muted ecstasy of the Field’s 2007 melodic techno classic “Over the Ice.” The instrumental breakdown of the closing “Modern Love Stories” recalls the strummy acoustic grandeur of David Bowie’s “Five Years.” “Another Go Around,” lilting and luminous, could be mistaken for an Elliott Smith cover. There’s a rising set of chords in “The Bells” that’s a dead ringer for a passage from Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” These echoes may be unconscious but they hardly seem accidental: The lyrics are peppered with phrases that sound like half-remembered bits of hallowed songs—“all the parties”; “a lust for life”; “there’s a light going out tonight”—and in the lullaby-like penultimate song, “Many Nights,” Legrand sings of “many nights/By your side/Listening high/To Suicide.” In part, Once Twice Melody is an album about shaping a life around listening, about the simple pleasures of losing yourself in music.
It is also a record about nameless yearning. The album is shot through with dozens of references to the skies and the stars, to light itself: “A flicker in the sky reflects the dying light”; “Sunshine in her lap/Centuries of light”; “Out of nothing comes the moonglow.” “The stars were there/In our eyes,” Legrand sings in “Superstar.” In “Pink Funeral,” she returns to the theme: “The painted stars they fill our eyes.” And on “Runaway,” someone’s hair is “melting into silver stars.” Though individual songs may be about love or memory or desire, the cumulative effect of all this brilliance feels like a leap into the sublime. As she sings in the closing “Modern Love Stories,” “A dark mouth surrounds us, into the stardust.”
There is no shortage of arresting imagery reflected in the glare of these slow-motion glitter bombs: swans on a starry lake, or headlights running up a wall, or, from the excellent “Sunset,” “spider silk and sweet nonsense,” which sounds almost like a metaphor for Legrand’s own lyrical impulses. But in a few places, she falls back on frustrating cliché. Certain stock phrases feel like placeholders for more interesting lines that never found their way to her notebook. Secondhand images betray their borrowed provenance: “Red sunglasses and a lollipop/See her dressed in the polka dot” sounds like Lolita via Lana Del Rey, a threadbare narrative hand-me-down. And in the otherwise gorgeous, country-kissed “The Bells,” Legrand’s couplets feel like well-worn tropes cut-and-pasted into her rhyme scheme: “Something somebody told me, think the plane is going down/You can’t take it with you, so let me buy you the next round.” It’s hard to shake the feeling that you’ve heard this story before. Legrand’s best lyrics, historically, have been vivid, cryptic, full of mystery, like folktales poorly translated from forgotten dialects. Where they were vague, they were provocatively so. But here, Legrand sometimes seems like she’s chasing moonbeams, hoping they will land on the object or feeling she’s trying to name.
Still, Beach House lyrics aren’t meant to be parsed on the page; they are as much about the sound of Legrand’s voice as the meaning of the words. Like everything else here, she, too, simply sounds incredible. Having abandoned all traces of the husky contralto that defined the group’s earlier records, she is all breath, and the softness of her tone suits the album’s gossamer materials: From the Stereolab-like la la la of the opening “Once Twice Melody,” she’s the embodiment of spider silk and sweet nonsense, a presence as ethereal as her songs.
Occasionally, amid Once Twice Melody’s overflowing cornucopia of feeling, I find myself wishing for something else: something weirder, more erratic, less narrowly focused on that insistent eyes-closed vibe. In their all-encompassing pursuit of mood, Beach House occasionally have trouble moving past the mood board, and they sacrifice risk on the altar of ambition. Shooting for the moon is a time-tested strategy. But what about digging into the muck? That’s what Low—a band whose essence is as unchanging as Beach House’s—have done with their last two albums, and the result was a pair of records that were not just enthralling but also genuinely surprising. For Beach House to turn the rapture up to 11 may be unexpected, but the sounds themselves are, by and large, familiar.
Yet as a slow drip of pure serotonin, Once Twice Melody delivers. It can be tempting to wonder if the album is too long, but the more time I have spent with it, the harder it has been to decide which tracks I might cut. They all—the ballads, the anthems, the lullabies, the synth-pop throwbacks—serve a purpose in fleshing out the enormity of Beach House’s spellbinding universe. The sprawl, the surfeit, is the point. You need plenty of room to summon a mood as widescreen as this. It’s a long way from the summer sun to the dark embrace of the universe, and on Once Twice Melody, Beach House are determined to cover the entire distance.

Buy: Rough Trade


On the third La Sera album, Katy Goodman, former bassist for the now-defunct Vivian Girls, finds the right balance of joy and heartbreak. An album that could be sad based on the lyric sheet is stuffed with delirious fret runs, muscular drum fills, and sunny guitars soaked with reverb.

Hour of the Dawn

Where Vivian Girls’ rough edges and droning harmonies suggested mystery, Katy Goodman’s La Sera has to this point made no such attempt at obfuscation: Here was the Vivian Girls bassist, here’s what was on her mind when she wasn’t with her bandmates. But Vivian Girls are no more, meaning Goodman’s instincts have run in a less solitary direction for Hour of the Dawn, La Sera’s third album. "I wanted the new La Sera record to sound like Lesley Gore fronting Black Flag," Goodman says in the album’s press material. "I didn't want it to be another record of me sad, alone in my room. I wanted to have fun playing music and writing songs with a band."
How fun it is when album opener “Losing to the Dark” strikes that aggressive pose, the guitars pinballing off the walls as Goodman snarls about a boy who doesn’t seem to need her until he’s too drunk to take care of himself. “What a shame it must be to have to be in love with me,” she sings, both heartbroken and spiteful. Not that she’s suddenly gone mean. Hour of the Dawn is largely made up of romantic songs carried to their open-hearted potential by Goodman’s high, floating voice. She’s in love with people and with memories, from summer’s promise to the town that used to be filled with her friends. An album that could be sad based on the lyric sheet is stuffed with delirious fret runs, muscular drum fills, sunny guitars soaked with reverb. Vivian Girls’ girl group harmonies were usually cloaked behind a curtain of feedback. Here, Goodman stands in front of the band, her voice shining like a lighthouse on the shore.
The Lesley Gore-fronting-Black Flag comparison is apt, since you could imagine the tougher directions the music would lean toward were Goodman’s instincts for melancholy and tenderness not there to soften the impact. The resulting sound is closer to Best Coast with more focus on the jamming. “Kiss This Town Away” leans into surf rock and a country singer’s sense of lament; the nimble picking of the title track builds to a triumphant outro even as she expresses unease about whether a new day will really bring something better. “10 Headed Goat Wizard” is straight-up Beatlesesque pop, like something you’d hear at the end of an episode of “Mad Men” and not even realize it was anachronistic.
The moments where she lets the band get heavier are interesting: “Control” chants like the flip side of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2” while “Storm’s End” groans like its title, which is possibly a “Game of Thrones” reference (which Goodman has talked about in interviews) but probably doesn’t need to be read into beyond that. (Or does it? Okay, it doesn’t.) That’s when Goodman takes steps toward establishing herself beyond what she’s known for, which is personable if not always easy to distinguish from itself. Hour of the Dawn sounds like a summer record, meant to be played when emotions are high and the sun is out. Most importantly, it shows what she’s capable of when the shine has worn off.


The jazz and R&B legend's songs have been sampled by everyone from Will Smith to Prince Paul. This compilation shows her immaculate work on its own.

Patrice Rushen: Remind Me: The Classic Elektra Recordings 1978-1984

When (and if) Patrice Rushen’s two moderate ’80s hits spring to mind, more than likely your memory super-imposes a different voice atop hers. Her triumphant “Haven’t You Heard” broke into the R&B Top 10 in 1980, but couldn’t crack the Top 40. But when Kirk Franklin lifted it wholesale for “Looking for You” in 2005, it charted across the gospel, R&B, and the Hot 100. Similarly, “Forget Me Nots” made the Top 40 and was nominated for a Grammy in 1982, but that beguiling handclap and bounding bassline also laid the foundation for Will Smith’s “Men in Black” 15 years later (George Michael also sampled it). Rushen’s DNA runs through everything: Diddy, J Dilla, Jermaine Dupri, Prince Paul, Q-Tip, and Knxwledge have sampled her, to name just a few among hundreds. “We’re living in Patrice Rushen’s world,” the New York Times recently declared. “We just might not know it yet.”
Rushen started playing music at the age of 3. By the time she was a teenager, she was signed to the iconic jazz label Prestige, recruiting heavyweights like Joe Henderson and Leon “Ndugu” Chancler for her debut album, Prelusion. The pianist grew up within jazz. But it was 1974, and the charts were instead filled with funk, R&B, fusion, and the pulse of disco. What was she supposed to do? Her music naturally started to absorb it all. When Rushen jumped to the Elektra label in 1978 and started cutting sophisticated urban pop that drew on all of the above, she wasn’t alone—jazz stars like Herbie Hancock, Donald Byrd, Roy Ayers, and George Benson had already crossed over. Remind Me: The Classic Elektra Recordings 1978-1984 shows us how her production and arranging provided building blocks for decades of future R&B and hip-hop hits.
Rushen faced harsher critical backlash for her crossover than her male colleagues, and was deemed a sellout by the jazz community. Worse still, her label did almost nothing to support her efforts. She grazed the lower rungs of chart success, but never reached the heights she deserved. Her dancefloor songs still sound featherweight and spry. “Forget Me Nots” and “Haven’t You Heard” remain indefatigable, grooves that belong on the Great Wedding Playlist in the Sky alongside Chic, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Sister Sledge. Lesser-known numbers like “Look Up!” and “Number One” are sharp enough to inspire new imitators and samplers. Her crack session band is buoyant, and her arrangements made alongside Charles Mims, Jr., are sturdy and supple enough to be twisted in all kinds of new shapes. (My lone gripe is that I wish the ebullient “Call On Me” had made the cut.)
Depending on how Melvin “Wah Wah Watson” Ragin’s stinging guitar is sampled, the slinky slow jam “Givin’ It Up Is Givin’ Up” imparts either sensuousness or eeriness, but Rushen’s voice twines with soul singer D.J. Rogers and sends chills regardless. And Rushen’s gurgling electric piano on “Remind Me” shows that despite forgoing her jazz audience for pop, she could still pull head-bobbing clusters from her keys in a manner that brings Herbie Hancock to mind. Her airy vocals might not always stick, but the groove does.
But the ballads keep drawing down the energy. “Settle for My Love” is breathy and wispy, liable to drift past without much notice. “When I Found You” relies on Rushen’s nuanced-but-insubstantial voice. She’s early in her pop career, still figuring out how to write the best lines for the right vocal register: “Let’s Sing a Song of Love” dances just beyond the reach of her backing singers.
By the time of her last Elektra album, 1984’s Now, Rushen had mastered the language of pop, with songs like “Feels So Real” and “To Each His Own” supplying late highlights. And while her own pop career would wind down soon after, her career as a musical director took off. She began working for the Grammys, NAACP Image Awards, and Emmys. Her status as materfamilias of pop was cemented when Rushen served as musical director for Janet Jackson’s early ’90s world tour. Breaking through the constraints of genre at a time when it was an arduous task for a woman, Rushen’s willingness to draw from across the Black American radio dial with sophistication still resonates today. Offering up pathways for Solange, Teyana Taylor, Erykah Badu, Esperanza Spalding and more to explore, Remind Me still sounds like a guidepost for the future.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The onetime industrial futurist, formerly of Throbbing Gristle, casts a backward glance at 1960s electronics and British folk, weaving cut-up voices into a curious shape that floats outside time.

Chris Carter: Chris Carter’s Chemistry Lessons Volume One

Living legend Chris Carter has fruitfully spent the last few years looking back, and there’s been much to see. In the 1970s, he invented sonic weapons for Throbbing Gristle, a fabled four who get the credit (and blame) for igniting music’s industrial revolution but in truth were polymath as the Beatles, if less cheery. In the 1980s, Carter released a few stunning proto-electro records; then, with his partner in life and crime, Cosey Fanni Tutti, perfected a churning, sexualized-yet-not-sexy pop built for people who’d like the back rooms of clubs but are too shy to explore them—a kind of disco aural tourism, with earworm choruses. In the 1990s, he and Cosey went rave, then relaxed into some gorgeous ambient patches.
After the millennium came, Throbbing Gristle triumphantly rebooted, then self-destructed. But reissue culture demands repackaging, and Carter responded with a remastered, revelatory series of Throbbing Gristle and Chris and Cosey albums before he and Cosey took it further, crafting an inspired album of self-made remixes that shrugged off the originals’ icy eros—subsequently slipped into by everyone from the Italians Do It Better glam squad to Kelela—for rumbling, greyscale expanses as rough and tough as anything on, say, L.I.E.S.; Cosey also wrote a masterpiece of a memoir, Art Sex Music. And that was that.
Except, of course, Carter was also looking forward, to his first solo album in 17 years. Chris Carter’s Chemistry Lessons Volume One is a master class of miniatures, largely under three minutes apiece, that offer synth pop’s bubble and fizz, the sweet-and-sour textures of prime IDM, and hits of dub and early techno. It’s an entire table of electronic elements, precisely composed. “Tangerines” charms with concision: some soft claps, a honeyed melody, a pad or two, and voilà, an exemplary 120 seconds. “Tones Map” is part smoke machine, part perfumed garden, all intoxicant. As in any lab, not every experiment is successful: “Post Industrial,” for example, tries to summon a foreboding grit yet remains inert. But late highlights like “Rehndim” shimmer with loungey, xylophonic pings that sound like perennially worthy formulas.
Carter cites time-honored influences for the album: 1960s analog experts like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and also the sort of ancient British folk music Shirley Collins breathed life into around the same time. But this isn’t Space Age nostalgia for a future yet to come. Instead, from these pasts, he’s somehow found a way into a mauve new world where they paved the uncanny valley and put up a call center. The album is full of voices—not Cosey’s or his own or even artificial voices, exactly, but some odd in-between. “I fashioned a new workflow,” Carter told me over email, “using my voice, vocal ‘field recordings,’ and vocal sounds from my archive….I treated them through the vocoder and the V-Synth, [and] through some of my more esoteric modular modules. The processed voices were quite often then re-processed multiple times.”
Layered and smeared and cut up into melodies, the vocals chant and enchant, and at times it’s difficult to tell what’s what. On “Cernubicua,” sirens call among deep blue waves of filters. The awed worshippers among the stoned “Pillars of Wah” might not be benevolent; later, on “Time Curious Glows,” they form a kosmische chorus. The incantations of beatific opener “Blissters” melt beguilingly like a hard candy, but they differ from pop’s current fascination with vocal sweeteners like Auto-Tune that seduce with an illusion of smoothness. Carter’s work is slippery, not slick; there’s a banality in the gloss of “Durlin” that’s meant to disorient, and it really does. For a little over an hour, the past and future spin, dissolving in fields full of chatterboxes. It’s a world not unlike the present one.


On their debut LP, the co-ed Ann Arbor quartet Pity Sex offer post-coital pop-punk that's melodic and punchy enough to be attractive, but rumpled and lethargic enough to let you know they're not trying too hard.

Feast of Love

Well, if you end up liking this record, it’s not going to be easy to tell your friends what you’re “into these days.” But whatever shock value or comic relief you get from Pity Sex’s name, there’s no phrase in the English language that more accurately foreshadows the concerns of this co-ed Ann Arbor quartet-- which is to say, the effect of sex on exceptionally self-pitying people. Their debut LP Feast of Love is post-coital pop-punk, far enough removed from the physical act where any intimacy or legitimate emotional connection has given way to the neediness and self-loathing that drove these poor souls to pursue their couplings in the first place. And of course, they're saddled with the additional depression of realizing that another person isn’t going to fix them; in fact, it always makes it worse. Feast of Love, sure. But the whole affair just makes Pity Sex kinda sick to their stomach.
That much is conveyed on “Wind-Up”, where Brennan Greaves demands space to nurse an incapacitating hangover or the fact that he just cannot fucking deal right now. Hell, maybe he just woke up still drunk, as there’s an illicit giddiness to “Wind-Up”; ripping through their most anthemic riffs and a righteous fuzz solo, Pity Sex are having a blast here, even though Greaves' droopy vocals try to tell a different story. His counterpart Britty Drake isn’t much better off on the subsequent “Keep”, where a surprising melodic (mis)step occurs in the tipsy chorus, possibly because she’s too despondent to reach the next higher note in the scale. The two have about equal billing here, though Feast of Love doesn’t sound like a concept album or a back and forth conversation. When Greaves and Drake trade verses on the acrid “Drown Me Out”, it's a standoff between two friends who might be getting a little sick of telling each other about their failed romances as well as hearing about them. Misery loves company on Feast of Love, but it also wants some damn space.
Which makes a lot of sense-- after all, Feast of Love is a record of limited scope, to put it lightly. It’s also limited to 10 songs and 28 minutes, so it never has the opportunity to get too oppressive. Plus, the music itself could not be more adept at channeling Pity Sex’s particular brand of hangdog horniness-- melodic and punchy enough to be attractive, rumpled and lethargic enough to let you know it's not trying too hard…which in turn makes it more attractive depending on your tastes. The distinctions are incremental on Feast of Love and even after so many listens, I’m still taken aback by how "Fold" makes no concession to being a grand finale, ending the LP with zero fanfare. Within the record's narrow musical arc, “Hollow Body” establishes itself as the “ballad” by ditching the drums and distortion, while the whammy-bar abuse on “Drawstring” sonically embodies the masochism of the lyrics-- "Your name is a a drawstring around my neck/ tighter with every breath." And while happiness appears to be comically unattainable on Feast of Love, at least there’s ownership of one’s misery on “Honey Pot”, where Greaves snarks, "I'll take what I want/ I'll concede to all my faults...I won't feel guilty when you kiss me."
Though not as lyrically sharp as either Waxahatchee or Speedy Ortiz and more affiliated with pop-punk despite its shoegazy alt-rock leanings, Feast of Love is a record that finds Pity Sex as part of an uninentional "moment" for slack, sexualized indie rock. So the initial temptation is to think of it as reactionary-- is it possible that these bands are interested in a reclamation of 90s indie rock ideals at a time when “indie rock” rarely means “guitar rock” and deals with the actual, mundane mechanics of relationships even more rarely? Doubtful. Judging from their unsurprisingly active Twitter feeds, none of the aforementioned appear the least bit interested in being scolds. Nor do I think an album like Feast of Love is a reaction to the countless thinkpieces about how the self-involvement of 20-somethings or the romantic complications caused by technology somehow didn’t exist before 2013. Nah, but it is a nice refutation of both, and though every sound on Feast of Love existed before the end of the first Clinton term, Pity Sex's tales are as timeless as the band’s name-- self-pitying people are still having sex and nothing seems to stop them.


Electronic musician Ryan West's latest release as Rival Consoles has a level of warmth and humanity missing from his earlier records. This is his most expressive and emotional music yet.

Night Melody

In a 2014 film made by his label Erased Tapes, electronic artist Ryan Lee West, aka Rival Consoles, said that he’s “always more interested in newer sounds, even at the cost of them not being as rich or dynamic as a violin or cello.” However West’s music has grown more distinctive only as as he’s done the opposite. Last year’s excellent Howl found West embracing warm, analog equipment—a major change from his beginnings as a purveyor of somewhat-derivative mid-90s bleep-n-bass in the vein of Hard Normal Daddy-era Squarepusher. His following records got better in increments but sat comfortably in a modernized IDM groove that felt a little played out. With Howl, all of West’s ideas finally seemed to crystallize into a unique vision.
Night Melody, West’s latest, builds and improves on the framework set out with Howl. Opener “Pattern of the North” starts with an analog synth bleating an arpeggiating melody that seems to hang from the sky before repeatedly disappearing. West’s move toward these analog instruments (which he mentions in the video)—including the powerful and historically significant Prophet-5—is felt all over Night Melody, particularly on “Pattern” and follower “Johannesburg”, and they provide his music with a level of warmth and humanity missing from his earlier records. This is his most expressive and emotional music yet.
Howl’s slow, gently unfurling tunes seemed most interested in laying themselves out for you and just being there to take in, but the crackling *Night Melody—*with the exception of the plaintive “Slow Song”—offers a direct, almost lyrical approach that feels like a sort of wordless storytelling.  “Lone”’s clinking opening beat and skittering melody is perhaps the album’s closest relative to his previous IDM worship, but it draws from the quieter and more reflective moments of beauty found on records like Autechre’s mid 90s Garbage EP and *LP5—*wistful, ghostly sounds that remain fresh.
One reference point for the album emerges boldly on the record’s final two cuts, the beautiful titular cut “Night Melody” and its quasi-diptych closer “What Sorrow”: The first two ‘00s records of underrated German producer Ulrich Schnauss. On 2003’s excellent A Strangely Isolated Place in particular, Schnauss demonstrated an ear for a strange kind of haunting, emotive electronic-music based storytelling which West strives for here. Each song’s careful uses of decaying melodies, soaring synths, and rushes of volume stir a powerful lonely euphoria, strengthened by a sense of restraint.
Ironically, West folded some of the rhythms and sensibilities of deep house, a genre he openly derided a year ago via Twitter, on Howl, and he continues that interpolation on Night Melody. Whatever his ambivalence about deep house as a genre, the results on both records are winning, particularly on Night Melody’s titular track. The invigorating pulse of four-on-the-floor dance has loosened up his music and given it a freedom it was missing before.
With Howl, West transitioned Rival Consoles from skilled also-ran to forward-thinking electronic musician with his own ideas about sound. Night Melody goes one step further: This an album of songs, not sounds; feelings, not ideas. It’s not easy to tell stories without words, but West has been working long and hard enough to hit that point where his wordless miniatures convey as much as some albums.


Roman Flügel has explored hard techno, acid trance, willfully lunkheaded electro-house, and lyrical deep house over his prolific career, but this is the furthest he has strayed from the dancefloor.

All the Right Noises

Roman Flügel has released hundreds of tracks over the roughly quarter-century since he began putting out records, and in them he has explored many permutations of four-on-the-floor dance music: hard techno, acid trance, willfully lunkheaded electro-house, lyrical deep house. The Frankfurt native doesn't tend to stay in any one place for too long. On his 2014 album Happiness Is Happening he delved into glinting synth-pop and Krautrock's motorik chug; earlier this year, his Verschiebung EP explored polyrhythmic drum sounds as dry and scratchy as strep throat.
Even within the context of that panoply of styles, All the Right Noises stands out as something we haven't heard from him before. The moods and sounds may be recognizable from his recent work, much of which has tilted toward contemplative states; glinting synthesizer patches transmit a pensive air, and the analog drum machines maintain a kind of stone-faced calm. But this is the furthest that Flügel has strayed from the dancefloor, at least for such an extended stretch.
It isn't strictly an ambient album. “Warm and Dewy” plows ahead at a quick-stepping 130 beats per minute, battered by tablas and brandishing hi-hats that couldn't be sharper if they'd come straight from the J.A. Henckels factory. (This, too, is new territory for Flügel: The drums sound a lot like he's been listening to Shackleton’s classic Skull Disco fare, in fact). But four-on-the-floor beats are an exception rather than the norm, and even when they appear, they make a beeline away from the functionalist dictates of contemporary dance music. Following the gorgeous, clear-eyed ambient opener, “Fantasy,” “The Mighty Suns” drops us into a curious kind of middle ground: It's fast-paced, but it feels half-speed; the pulse nods to dub, yet the bright keys and faintly naïve melodies echo Kraftwerk. It sweeps you up in colliding waves of contrapuntal melodies, a sensation at once both relaxing and slightly unsettling: You're never quite sure in which direction it will move next.
Rhythmically, the album peaks early, just three tracks in, with the polyrhythmic lurch of “Dead Idols.” Triplets snap against 4/4 rhythms, and an off-kilter clunk pulls the groove into a strange, elliptical shape; the first dozen times you hear it, you can practically feel your brain straining to parse the timekeeping. Shackleton's influence is audible here, too, along with the doomy menace of an artist like Demdike Stare, with wraithlike voices ratcheting up the tension as minor-key bleeps sound an ominous alarm. The rest of the album tackles far more soothing sounds: “Nameless Lake” harnesses the chirps and chimes of Amber-period Autechre; the elegant, strutting “Dust” reimagines Jean-Michel Jarre as downbeat acid; and the melancholy “Planet Zorg” is sad-sack ambient house with a hint of shoegaze thrown into the mix, sparking memories of Superpitcher remixing M83.
But the most satisfying material here may be the simplest. “Believers” offers the merest hint of kalimba plucks spun through delay and the occasional piano chord. Very little happens, and captivatingly so. The same goes for the closing song, which at first listen might sound like a new age spa soundtrack, complete with electronic crickets deep in the mix. Listen closely, though, and you can hear Flügel's playful spirit at work in the song's richly expressive piano and restless synthesizer improvisations. He effortlessly squeezes so many ideas into its barely-there, four-minute frame, it's easy to wish he'd settle in and record an entire album of such quietly masterful pastoral mood-setting.


The latest One Directioner to go his own way tackles big themes, but the music is filled with that same dead-eyed vocal delivery, lazy drumming, strumming, and writing that all pop stars fear.

Walls

The years following One Direction’s dissolution have reshaped Louis Tomlinson. More than just rich-people problems, his life has tumbled into real tragedies and triumphs, like the death of both his mother and 18-year-old sister, as well as the birth of his son. Of course, now he wants to tear down his barriers and emerge fresh, raw, and newly sensitive, like the many references to roadblocks and changing on his debut album Walls suggest. Something isn’t right, though. The heart he so desperately wants to present is missing.
Unfortunately, Walls is just as maddeningly uninteresting as its slate grey, cuffed-light-wash-jeans album cover suggests. The appropriately named album opener “Kill My Mind” is a feeble attempt to create stadium pop-rock, droning on with faux bad-boy guitar while Tomlinson limply delivers, “You’re a nightmare on the dancefloor/And you hate me, and I want more.” “Too Young” is an explicit introduction to the album’s running preoccupation with youth; like many of Walls’ folkier moments, the song is flat coffee-shop music. “Habit” features this same mood but adds in sleepy drumming. “Don’t Let It Break Your Heart” subtracts the drumming and adds in wistful vocal layering, reminding us that “life gets hard and it gets messed up.” Brian Eno had Music for Airports; this is Music for Your John Mayer Cover Band.
When I was in high school, I owned a limited edition Harry Styles doll and read tawdry fanfiction about our favorite Frankenstein, Mr. Larry Stylinson. This was how you engaged in the fandom of One Direction, and fans knew that every One Direction member had an archetype. Harry Styles was the heartbreaker, Zayn Malik the mysterious (read: ethnic) one, Niall Horan the cute one, and Liam Payne was unlucky enough to receive the nickname “Daddy Directioner.” Tomlinson was the “sassy” one who couldn’t sing, which didn’t add up to much. Now on his own, Tomlinson is left with exactly what he is: someone who received massive success when flanked by other, more interesting people. Walls is filled with the kind of dead-eyed vocal delivery and lazy drumming, strumming, and writing that all pop stars fear. There is no attempt to scrape at the soul, to dig deep. The result is a depressing Xerox of people like Coldplay and Oasis, who managed to make soft Britpop with a little more charm and ingenuity.
Tomlinson is best on “We Made It,” where his imitation begins to sound more like a sincere attempt at invention. The dreamy acoustic guitar sounds like the backdrop to the silliest, prettiest, slow-motion Instagram video of a sunset on the beach. Reminiscing about how he used to “share a single bed and tell each other what we dream about,” Tomlinson captures the essence of youth with one line. You can’t hear the stars in his eyes, but you know that they’re there. The rest of the album could have used this tenderness and lyrical specificity, but it’s mostly abandoned in favor of the pop conventions that Tomlinson pledges himself to, remembering how he used to sing “something pop-y on the same four chords/used to worry 'bout it but I don't no more.”
It’s difficult to tell whether Tomlinson is even trying to make music different from his time in One Direction. On “Fearless,” he constructs an entire chorus around the question, “Do you still remember feeling young?” like he can’t quite get himself to move on from the golden days. “Perfect Now” is basically a low-quality rewrite of One Direction’s “Little Things,” featuring galaxy-brain observations of an insecure lover like, “You say to me your jeans don’t fit/You don’t feel pretty and it’s hard to miss.” Tomlinson himself calls this song a “kind of” lyrical extension of “What Makes You Beautiful,” One Direction’s legendary breakout single. Try as he may, Tomlinson has not quite progressed from featured voice to solo artist. For all the major changes in his life, his music seems to be stuck in place. You can take the boy out of the boyband, but not the boyband out of the boy.

Buy: Rough Trade
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