Kompakt's Michael Mayer follows 2002's Immer-- one of the best DJ mixes of the decade-- with a less-eclectic but still spacious and inviting sequel.

Immer 2

Many techno/house fans have their issues with Michael Mayer, with the Kompakt cult of personality, with the whole notion of dance music that appeals to people who don't crawl out of the after-after party at two in the afternoon on a Sunday. Or if they want to get technical, they don't like his selections, which generally favor melody or texture or mood over funk. And they don't like his mixing style, which generally favors playing tracks out to their full length and little in the way of hard chops or other mix trickery. They don't like the gothic mood swings of his mixes, his taste for sharp and smelly cheese, or his fondness for trance. And, of course, someone, somewhere was doing something similar, better, earlier-- and never got the fame or the cred that Mayer enjoys.
To which I say: fuck that. Mayer's mixes may offend deep house purists, confuse analog Detroit techno fans, or irritate "minimal" heads who enjoy Richie Hawtin's affinity for making super long, super boring tracks out of a million smaller super boring tracks, but he is certainly, unashamedly "pop"-- at least within the parameters of his genre. He's kind of like the Cure: Sure, he loves to bum you out, but then he'll throw in a "Love Cats" now and then. On the other hand, there is no way a sequel to-- not to put too fine a point on it-- one of the best DJ mixes of all time wasn't going to be something of a disappointment. Four years and uncountable dancefloor trends and trendlettes separate this Immer from the first. And anyone looking for a continuation of Mayer's earlier mixes-- with their combination of utter corn (guest spots from Nena! Tweeting birdies!) and brooding dancefloor discontent-- will be slightly confused by the less ostentatious and dramatic Immer 2.
Immer 2 finally made sense on a drizzly, horrible fucking morning that I spent at my desk with my hungover head in my hands. Since my skull already felt like it was filled with salt water, the crackles and popping bubbles and Sea Quest pings and blips of the opening Someone Else track slowly eased me in, whereas a Jeff Mills blitz might have just sent me running for the Advil. Mayer is nothing if not a master of pacing, and there's no reason why a home-listening DJ mix can't take its sweet time.
After the 4/4 push begins in earnest, the next four tracks feel like traditional house sloughing off all that briny water and seaweed, the skipping jazzy hi-hats and bumping basslines of tracks like Ian Simmonds' "The Dog" and Frank West's "2nd Booty" moving up from the muck and into the light of the mix's brassy disco middle. This is the biggest difference between the two Immer mixes. Whereas the first third of Immer 2 creeps and crackles with the same crepuscular 3 a.m. vibe as the first installment, it's difficult to imagine a track that samples (according to the fine folks at ILM) a Boz Scaggs disco tune-- as cheeky and lovable Justus Köhncke's "Advance" does here-- fitting alongside the portentous hunk of Mahler's 5th Symphony that Mayer dropped on Immer.
The Todd Terje remix of Lindstrøm's "Another Platform" finds Mayer smack dab in au courant space disco territory. It's as trendy (and speedy) a move as he's ever pulled-- for a moment you might think you were listening to a Get Physical DJ. Needless to say, it's also the mix's most incongruous moment. The final third is more Mayer-esque. It climaxes with the SuperMayer remix of Geiger's "Good Evening", an epic trance workout, the kind of anthem you thought was out of fashion in an era of 13 minutes of tics and tocks and clicks and rustles. It's one of the most shiver-inducing singles of the year, featuring the kind of synth blasts in its first few minutes that feel as good a particularly hot and high-pressure shower nozzle. It only goes up from there.
But the changes this time out have less to do with tempo or Mayer's apparently newfound need to boogie. The first Immer, and especially Mayer's Fabric 13 mix, had personality. Immer 2 is far less eclectic-- there's nothing here like the stuttering cut ups of Jackson's M83 mix, the portentous reversed strings of Richard Davis' "Bring Me Closer", the deranged shuffle of Akufen, or the vampire cotillion vibe of Phantom/Ghost's "Perfect Lovers". If fans want to hear this with fresh ears, I'd advise lopping off the Immer from the title, and enjoying one of the better, spacious, and inviting disco-tech mixes of the year without prejudice.


On a triumphant deluxe edition of her 2021 opus, the Philadelphia singer lays the groundwork for growth with several new songs and interludes, including an appearance from Issa Rae.

Jazmine Sullivan: Heaux Tales, Mo’ Tales: The Deluxe

Heaux Tales, Mo’ Tales: The Deluxe

Women deserve everything. On this point, Jazmine Sullivan’s Heaux Tales is unequivocal. Her 2021 mini-opus is a communal emotional audit that pairs nearly every song with a confessional spoken “tale” recorded by a personal friend. With candid intimacy, the Black women interviewed in these snippets revealed hard lessons in love, nuanced vignettes of relationships that thrilled or scarred them. Their perspectives, distinct yet harmonious, cast Sullivan’s music as part of a wider conversation, empowering her to interpret their experiences. Writing about women’s true feelings, in the ways women actually talk about them, Sullivan taps into a creativity and boundless empathy that grants her listeners permission to be equally generous.
Though Sullivan is gifted with a voice that can affect braggadocious confidence as readily as searching anguish, the original Heaux Tales was unassuming: eight songs and six spoken interludes, described in early press materials as a project, and sometimes an EP, rather than an album. Within it, Sullivan and her collaborators drew a picture of lust, heartbreak, betrayal, and insecurity so honest and complete it felt instantly familiar. The new deluxe edition, Heaux Tales, Mo’ Tales, released ahead of Sullivan’s Valentine’s Day tour, extends the story with five additional songs and corresponding tales. We didn’t, strictly speaking, need them—the original album stands alone. But it’s a rare chance to quickly hear a new body of work from Sullivan, who’s typically spaced out her releases (with six years between Heaux Tales and 2015’s Reality Show). Since her mother’s cancer diagnosis last spring, she’s said, time has felt different and “I can’t see myself taking as long as a break anymore.”
Carrying the energy of the original closer, the H.E.R. duet “Girl Like Me,” the new songs adopt a slightly softer sound and more inward focus. They aren’t quite as sharp-elbowed as the original set; they prioritize their characters’ sexual and emotional needs over financial ones, uncovering new strains of hurt and sources of light. Heauxdom, in Sullivan’s telling, was never strictly about money. Except for “Donna’s Tale,” whose narrator observes (as Venus Xtravaganza once did) that even women in conventional marriages exchange sex for security, the album rarely touches on actual sex work. Its characters are empowered by getting money for sex and by giving it, too—“I pay his rent if he nasty,” Sullivan quips on “Put It Down”—but inevitably the field tilts towards the weight of men’s entitlement. Heaux Tales recognizes women’s right to operate with equal impunity, and the debt they’re owed for putting up with poor treatment this long. When Sullivan imagines life as a millionaire’s housewife on “The Other Side,” singing so longingly of her “dreams to buy expensive things,” I hear in her voice the pain of someone who has paid the price emotionally many times already.
Without dialing back or equivocating, Mo’ Tales uncovers new firsthand accounts and starts calling in loans. When these women can’t get good sex, they make it for themselves: “I fuck for sport. I fuck like it’s being taped,” comedian Mona Love says on “Mona’s Tale,” which introduces “BPW,” answering the big-dick sex jams in the album’s first half with a sultry round of applause for the “Best Pussy in the World.” On “Issa’s Tale,” actor and director Issa Rae describes feeling “used” by a selfish sex partner who “pumped me and dumped me” on his way out of town. Her story ends with a gleeful twist: “I’m so glad I was cheating on him.” Sullivan pairs this revelation with her 2021 summer single “Tragic,” a limp-sex lament that riffs on Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ viral procedural challenge to a Trump official (“Reclaiming my time”) to argue for getting off on one’s own. Rae’s story underlines the sentiment with a cheeky new implication: He can’t waste your time if you’re two-timing him.
One of Heaux Tales’ most radical artistic functions is to present vanity and self-interest as a means of balancing a great inequality in the cosmic ledger. In addition to Anderson .Paak as the beleaguered boyfriend on “Price Tags,” Mo’ Tales presents a new male perspective, a more self-aware young man who recalls the moment he finally confessed his feelings to a woman he’d been seeing. “She said, ‘Bro,’” the narrator of “A Breaux’s Tale” says. “When she said ‘bro’ that killed me….Then [she] had the nerve to say she told me she was dealing with other people….She pulled a me on me.” You feel for this dude, getting domed by his own boomerang, but Sullivan follows up with “Roster,” a ballad from girl players to the objects of their affections. “For you, there’s one more slot left in my roster,” she sings, “so don’t catch feelings.” Her bittersweet tone leaves unanswered questions: Did the “bro”-er herself arrive here after past lovers likewise rebuffed her? Could she be denying her own feelings, too? In moments like these, the bonus tracks call out for extra verve and nuance.
The original Heaux Tales ended in loss and resignation, as Sullivan and H.E.R. wondered how else they possibly could have held on to a lover’s wandering attention. Mo’ Tales moves past such immediate concerns and takes a longer look in the mirror. Where do heaux go from here? They demand better for themselves in the first place, Sullivan suggests, and on “Jazzy’s Tale,” she relates her own experience of seeking validation in toxic relationships. The following song, “Hurt Me So Good,” draws its strength and vulnerability from her rafter-shaking vocal power rather than by spilling all the damning details; perhaps she felt less at liberty to embellish on her own story, or perhaps she’s letting go of revenge. She sounds especially raw on the closer, “Selfish,” a drumless, bluesy, demo-like song about learning to be choosey in love. “Lock it up to keep it from/Anyone whose heart is numb,” Sullivan insists, sounding miles away from the opening track, the regrets and humiliations of “piling up bodies.” Every woman could tell a Heaux Tale, but that’s only half the story.


Compiling tunes from the two early Body Talk mini-LPs and adding worthy new material, Robyn ends a great year on a high note.

Body Talk

"Fembots have feelings, too." When we first heard Robyn sing those words, on a single promoting what would become a three-volume set of mini-LPs all bearing the name Body Talk, it was easy to focus on the Swedish pop singer's quirky sense of humor. But on this new full-length edition, "Fembot" also reveals itself as a compelling statement of purpose. Playing off contemporary pop's age-old diva-as-robot trope and cautioning that fellow droids who "burn out" are "ready for demolition," Robyn is a pop star who first and foremost projects a need for emotional connection.
If that's Robyn's artistic credo, then Body Talk is living, breathing, cybernetic proof. Melding dancehall with bubblegum pop, heartbroken love songs with hilariously catty weirdness, and euphorically catchy melodies with propulsive rhythms, Body Talk-- which combines the five-song Body Talk Pt. 3 with, outside of Pt. 1's uncommonly wise "Cry When You Get Older", the highlights from the first two mini-albums-- is a deeply affecting pop record. Robyn may not have released three full albums this year as first implied, but her first true full-length in five years is one of the year's best.
What sets Robyn apart from her contemporaries is the three-dimensional complexity of her character, and all sides are on display here. There's plenty of don't-fuck-with-me attitude in the icy electro-throb of "Don't Fucking Tell Me What to Do", which introduces a shit-talking heroine who may be flawed but won't be anyone's pawn. And with production by Diplo, the mock-outrageous Jamaica homage "Dancehall Queen" proves she's not kidding. But she's also sensitive enough that, during one of Body Talk's most inspired moments-- the soaringly tuneful electro-pop ballad "Call Your Girlfriend"-- she tells her boyfriend exactly how to break it off with the other woman to inflict the least emotional damage.
However, the highlight from this Year of Robyn remains the gorgeous "Dancing on My Own". What's especially remarkable is that there was any room for improvement: The track appears here as an amped-up "radio remix" with bonus synths giving the lovelorn chorus an extra wallop. But then again, Robyn is a master of re-invention: "Indestructible" and "Hang With Me" were first released as emotive acoustic ballads, and later given revved-up Eurodisco overhauls that ramped up the intensity without sacrificing an ounce of their bittersweet charm. Those are the versions included here, and both lend further ammunition to Body Talk's already military-grade stockpile.
Robyn's willingness to experiment with album conventions may feel like an ingenious gimmick, but there's no artifice to the desire for human connection that underlies her vocal quiver and party-starting kickdrums. She communicates heartbreak so convincingly that some of her most devoted fans actually wonder online about her presumed loneliness. She also attacks the charts from the fringes. She explores the fringes from the charts. She should be universal. So why isn't she? With Body Talk, Robyn ups the ante for pop stars across the radio dial and raises her own chances of appearing on yours. And for all her three-album talk, she never forgets that cardinal rule of showmanship: Always leave them wanting more.


As pleasant and groovy as it is, the collaborative album never feels like a true Roy Ayers work.

Roy Ayers / Adrian Younge / Ali Shaheed Muhammad: Roy Ayers JID 002

Roy Ayers JID 002

Adrian Younge never wants you to forget he’s the man behind the music. Whether he is offering a sinister take on Philly soul for The Delfonics' William Hart, serving splatter flick grooves to Ghostface Killah, or even making music with his own soul band, Venice Dawn, the producer and instrumentalist promotes his own mythology as a vanguard of old school grooves by adding the words “Adrian Younge presents…” to the records he helms. Now, there’s the Jazz is Dead series, which sees Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad (partners on 2018’s The Midnight Hour) team-up with musicians they admire to record LPs at Younge’s Linear Labs studio in Los Angeles. Released in March, Jazz is Dead 001 acted as an introduction to the project by gathering one song from each future installment, including collaborations with such dignitaries as Marcos Valle, Azymuth, and Brian Jackson. Roy Ayers JID 002 is perhaps the most consequential edition of the endeavor. Yet, it rarely feels like the true jazz legend is operating on the front line.
The first question that must be asked is why such an ugly naming system? At 79, Ayers hardly ever records anymore—this is being promoted as his first studio album in 18 years—so any new music attributed to him should be a capital-E event. But by fixing a number to his name, Younge and Muhammad frame the piece as very much their venture. Ayers is credited as co-writing every song and playing his famous vibraphone on seven of the eight cuts, so we can assume he had some agency over the final product. But since fuzzy guitars, low frequency drums, and heavy basslines have long been a staple of Younge’s productions, it’s his fingerprints we see all over Roy Ayers JID 002. And while Ayers’ playing is still smooth and lucious after all these years, his instrumentation is often buried low in the mix. There’s nothing like his 1970s vibraphone-led wanderings like “Mystic Voyage” or “The Third Eye,” and his singing voice never comes to the forefront of the arrangements. Rather than a lost Ayers classic, the album feels more like an interpretation of his music through Younge and Muhammad’s lens.
That’s not to say that Roy Ayers JID 002 isn’t a nice listen in its own right. Using Fender Rhodes piano, electric bass, monophonic synthesizers, mellotron, flutes, and many other toys, Muhammad (operating here as an instrumentalist and not the DJ that A Tribe Called Quest fans remember) and Younge forge a stoned and surly suite that incorporates 1970s R&B, psychedelic soul, and West Coast jazz. The borders of each jam are blurry; tracks are allowed to bleed into one another, further imbuing the record with a dream-like quality.
There are signposts to Ayers’ past throughout. The most obvious attempt at mimicry is “Synchronized Vibration.” Its soft-filtered grooves, female vocal harmonies, and references to that big star at the center of our solar system hark back to his most famous hit, “Everybody Loves The Sunshine.” Ayers early traditional jazz work is recalled on “Shadows of the East,” while the more propulsive Harlem rhythms of “Solace”—distinguished by Phil Ranelin on trombone, Wendell Harrison on tenor saxophone, and Greg Paul on drums—act as a reminder that Ayers’ Coffy soundtrack was a touch point for Younge’s brilliant work on Blaxploitation spoof Black Dynamite.
The album signs off with a kick. “African Sounds” features a spoken word vocal from Younge preaching love, unification, and the memory of historical black struggle: “We have the choice to use our colors and sound to rebound against the hate, to circumvent the illusion seen through the misty shades of America,” he asserts. Ayers’ vibraphone rings in the background, the grandee playing the role of session musician with dignity. And that’s the biggest issue with Roy Ayers JID 002.  Though Younge and Shaheed Muhammad may enjoy casting themselves as career revivalists, Roy Ayers JID 002, as pleasant and groovy as it is, never quite feels like a true Roy Ayers work.


The folk musician’s latest album is a bittersweet collection full of silence and space. Delivered with empathy, his historical subject matter feels rooted in the present.

Jake Xerxes Fussell: Good and Green Again

Good and Green Again

The son of a renowned historian and writer who learned to play guitar from blues legend Precious Bryant, Jake Xerxes Fussell has been dirtying his hands in history his entire life. With his string of vivid folk albums over the past seven years, he has interpreted old songs with a sense of wonder. He’s gawked at peaches growing on a sweet potato vine and sold fish that just might have diamonds in their mouths, and his wide-eyed awe at such spectacles could make you believe they were real. Even his blues songs have a sense of play to them, a lightness of mood and rhythm that turns a song like “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues,” about harsh working conditions for spoolers and seamstresses, into something exuberant: Speaking out against exploitation became its own joyful reward, its own act of self-liberation. Because Fussell conveys such a sincere and convivial empathy toward his subjects, his music never comes across like homework.
His fourth album, Good and Green Again, gently upends that equation. Still inventive and imaginative, still grounded in his dexterous picking and robust vocals, it’s his most bittersweet album, with a melancholy lingering in each song, no matter its subject matter. Even “Frolic,” with its crisp Telecaster notes, thick brushstrokes of pedal steel, and choo-choo “vocables,” sounds forlorn, or at least caught up in some daydream; it’s less about running and skipping and more about our memories of childlike abandon, when we had no burdens upon our shoulders. Fussell thrives in this setting, not just because his voice carries such sadness gracefully but because he sounds like he’s responding to the present moment. As with previous albums, he roots these historical songs about marching soldiers, crumbling buildings, sinking ships, and parting lovers squarely in the present, which is no small feat.
Working with producer James Elkington, Fussell splits the folk band that backed him on 2019’s Out of Sight. Most of the musicians return, but rarely together. Drums are almost entirely absent, and most other instruments are flourishes rather than leads. The music, as a result, is somehow both sparser and richer: full of silence and space, but also alive to the ideas and memories that might fill them. Elkington, who also plays guitar and piano, highlights the subtle details in the arrangements, like the brushed snare that sounds like a strummed guitar on “In Florida” or the soft uillean pipes on the closer “Washington” (inspired, in a roundabout way, by the first president, not the 42nd state). “Rolling Mills Are Burning Down” pits Fussell’s gentle guitar picking against Elkington’s sympathetic piano, conveying no sense of emergency. Instead, the song is a eulogy for a world that is crumbling before his eyes, as though he’s watching forces at work that he cannot control or change. That sense of powerlessness only makes the song more painfully relatable.
Loss informs all of these songs, especially the centerpiece, “The Golden Willow Tree.” At nine minutes, it’s the longest song Fussell has ever recorded, an epic saga of seafaring espionage and brutal betrayal. Assembling his version from pieces of different songs associated with the Carter Family, the Child Ballads, and Georgia folklorist Paralee McCloud, Fussell recounts the story of a sailor striving to win his captain’s favor by scuttling an enemy ship, and he sings with a sense of resignation about the misdeeds men commit during wartime. The music drones and crests, as though sloshing against the bow, with Fussell repeating the chorus—“sink her in the low and lonesome water”—and changing it subtly each time. Even at nine minutes, it never tries your patience.
As the album title suggests, with every loss comes some hope of renewal. Mills may burn and boats may sink, but there’s always the chance that we might build something even better in their place. Such disasters become opportunities—a hard lesson in the midst of tragedy, but a comforting thought once the dust settles. Good and Green Again chronicles that cycle of death and rebirth, and Fussell savors the fresh perspective the past gives us on our present.


Their debut LP vented disillusionment with hard-charging punk and shouted choruses, but on their followup, the Leeds band channel their misery through a soft-focus dream-pop shimmer.

Ullages

“Hollow Visions.” “Yellow Eyes.” “Tough Luck.” The song titles on Eagulls’ 2014 self-titled practically form a Friday Night Lights locker-room mantra for the sort of outcasts who spent their high-school years getting stuffed into lockers. And yet their hard-charging goth-punk anthems channeled disillusionment into a full-contact sport, with vocalist George Mitchell screaming himself hoarse as if leading a team downfield to annihilate an opponent. Now, after tearing up the turf on their debut, the Leeds band spend their second album trying to build mountains.
As its anagrammed title suggests, on Ullages, everything has been rearranged, but nothing has changed. The band’s marauding gusto and shoegaze overdrive has been replaced by patient builds, soft-focus interstitials and a dream-pop shimmer. (It’s an evolution highly reminiscent of another band of Brits who traded in goth gloom for Big Rock ambition—The Horrors.) But despite the dramatic scenery change, Mitchell remains committed to ripping out his heart and giving us a close-up of the bruises. The crystalline sound simply allows for an unobstructed view of his anguish and anxiety.
It also lets Mitchell get as close to embodying Robert Smith as you possibly can without the jet-black palm-tree hairdo and badly applied lipstick. With the throat-shredding barks of old tempered into a yelp, Mitchell wields more control over his voice. Slow-dissolve anthems like “Euphoria” and “Velvet” feel like the biggest breakthroughs here—their stewing sense of despair doesn’t so much erupt as gradually bubble over, as Mitchell invests their verses with the gravitas of choruses through each increasingly impassioned pass. Ullages also betrays Mitchell’s gift for painting his greyscale world with colorful details and knowing, self-deprecating humor: on the sashaying “Psalms,” an inquiry to a palm reader opens with the comically dreary line, “Is our future grey as the slabs on our drives?” And when he sings, “When all the fruits from all my labor plummets over me” on the Bunnymen-esque “Lemontrees,” you realize he’s only writing about this tropical citrus source because it yields the heaviest foodstuff to drop on his head.
But with its predecessor’s white-knuckled intensity in much more limited supply here, Ullages can sag under the weight of its misery, and struggle to rise above pure Cure karaoke. It doesn’t help that mid-tempo churns like the soggy-ember torch song “My Life In Rewind” and the “Fascination Street”-grooved “Skipping” respectively use cassette-replay and broken-record metaphors to comment on the often cruel cycle of life, while coming off like repetitive slogs themselves. And the sense of inertia is compounded by an album-closing pair of ballads—“Aisles” and “White Lie Lullabies”—that follow the same route from quietude to climax, both gradually obliterating Mitchell’s presence in a cathedral-toppling avalanche of noise. Eagulls’ debut made its catharsis feel communal—a shout-along salvo like “Possessed” was effectively a group exorcism performed in a sweaty, overcrowded basement punk dive. Ullages opens up a greater sense of space for Eagulls to soar, but can feel more distant and isolating as a result.


Angry Angles captured legendary Memphis garage-rock wildman Jay Reatard in between projects and on the brink of his solo career.

Angry Angles

Angry Angles captured Jay Reatard at a pivotal point in his career—which, up to that point, hadn’t resembled a career at all. On paper, the short-lived band was just the latest in an erratic string of projects that the Memphis-based garage-punk wild man had been tearing through since the late ’90s, chief among them the Reatards and the Lost Sounds. During that time, he always kept a handful of side projects on the back burner, but Angry Angles seemed different. When formed in 2005, immediately after the breakup of the Lost Sounds, Angry Angles seemed poised to become Reatard’s new big thing, the group that might propel him to the next level of cult infamy. Instead, the band imploded in 2006, leaving a trail of singles in its wake.
*Angry Angles *collects those singles, along with previously unreleased bonus material, and as such it comprises the entire studio output of Angry Angles. Seventeen songs nailed to the wall in a little over a year is nothing to sneeze at—and neither are the songs themselves, despite spackling the slim gap between the Lost Sounds and Reatard’s storied solo career, launched in ’06 and cut short by his death in 2010. With bassist/singer Alix Brown (cofounder with Reatard of the indie label Shattered Records) and alternating drummers Paul Artigues and Ryan Rousseau (the latter a Reatards alum) in tow, Reatard synthesized everything he’d done up to that point. Borrowing some of the Lost Sounds’ retro-new-wave roboticism, but rendered in a more vivid, visceral Reatards-esque spew, Angry Angles tracks like “Crowds” and “Apparent-Transparent” are lobotomized post-punk, whiplash anthems for 21st-century dehumanization.
“Apparent-Transparent” also features one of Brown’s most striking vocal performances, a voice-processed call-and-response with Reatard that pays unabashed homage to Devo. There’s an actual Devo cover on Angry Angles as well, a beautifully bruised rendition by Brown of “Blockhead,” along with reverential versions of classics by Wire (“The 15th”), the Urinals (“Black Hole”), and Reatard’s mentor Greg Oblivian (“Memphis Creep” by the Oblivians). Churned together, these four bands pretty much comprise Reatard’s chemical makeup—not that he was ever shy about his influences, or his hooks. There are some great ones on these songs: the scabbed pop-punk of “Stab You Dead” for one, or “Can’t Do It Anymore,” which mixes feral riffage with a singsong chorus designed to stick in the head like a pickaxe.
Two versions of “Things Are Moving” are included here, but they’re anything but redundant. On the original single version, distortion is smeared across Reatard’s manic chants and punch-drunk guitar; on the abridged alternate version, that noise is whittled to a finer point. “Things are moving around me all the time,” Reatard howls on both. It sums up exactly where he was circa-Angry Angles. His romantic relationship with Brown ended the same time the band did, leaving him to pour his scattershot energy into his burgeoning solo career. Brown moved on to Golden Triangle, then a DJ career; Rousseau moved back to his home state of Arizona to revive the formidable Destruction Unit (an outfit Reatard was originally a part of). And Reatard funneled his turmoil into his 2006 breakthrough solo album, Blood Visions, an album that sounds more and more like a masterpiece as time goes by. Angry Angles* *is a blurry, inconsistent snapshot of his liminal state between dude-in-a-million-bands and burgeoning solo icon—ragged here, refined there, and brimming with vitality.


Ariana Grande’s live album is both a capsule and a capstone, encompassing a nine-month, 102-show tour at what might be the peak of her career.

k bye for now (swt live)

We didn’t need an Ariana Grande live album. The sweeping, hour-and-a-half-long recording of her Sweetener world tour offers faithful renditions of recent and past hits; very little is new here, beyond a pre-recorded cover of a song from a Cole Porter musical. These are recitations, not re-interpretations. Videos circulated over the summer of Grande crying during some of her concerts, but on the recorded tracks selected for the album—stitched together from various tour stops, so that she shouts out a different city nearly every song—she is polished and composed. Even if a live album may not have been necessary, k bye for now gleams. It is both a capsule and a capstone, encompassing a nine-month, 102-show tour at what might be the peak of Grande’s career.
While k bye for now may not have much new information, it builds on our understanding of Grande as an artist. We know she has a dazzling voice, but we get to hear it swoop and pierce while the audience shrieks around her. We know she’s lurched and leaned into hip hop aesthetics; on the live album, we hear her chirp into raps over recorded features from Nicki Minaj and Big Sean. We also see different shades of some tracks. “Break up with your girlfriend i’m bored,” a song that can come across as glib and brash as its title, becomes huskier and tender. Sighs and coos trickle into spaces where production was left sparse. “Side to Side” crackles with a live band. The sing-songy flow of “7 rings” becomes more lilting and precise; after the line, “Happiness is the same price as red bottoms,” she blurts out, “Just kidding!”
While the tour focused on Sweetener and thank u, next, Grande weaves in past highlights from her catalog that demonstrate how much she’s grown. The titanic Zedd banger “Break Free” is fun, but can’t compare to the nuance and texture of a song like “God is a woman.” “Break Your Heart Right Back” sounds flimsy and disposable when followed by “NASA.” k bye for now becomes a way to track throughlines of Grande’s career: how feathery murmurs bloomed into dynamic tapestries, how flamboyant love ballads led to delicate pop anthems. One of the live album’s greatest assets is the juxtapositions created by the newly shuffled song order; thank u, next tracks glow brighter beside the softer edges of Sweetener songs. The pleas of “Needy” are more urgent and lovely when preceded by “Breathin,” a galvanic song about anxiety attacks. “Thank u, next” becomes even more stunning when “no tears left to cry” bleeds into it, coaxing a way forward through loss.
Like any live album, k bye for now strains to transmit the feeling of an actual concert, and banter about costumes and dancers is a clumsy reminder. Recordings only capture part of what illuminated the Sweetener tour—not outfit changes or neon lights, but the power of a woman confronting trauma. At a Brooklyn show this past summer, sobs slipped out of me during “get well soon.” Grande was singing about flashbacks, dissociations that wrench you out of your body—feelings I had barely described to other people, and had never heard sang back at me. In the live recording, her voice drops to a low, raw shudder. But just a few tracks later, you can hear her laugh.


Multi-instrumentalist Zach Phillips and singer Ma Clément craft alluring jazz fusion songs in miniature. It is heady but not stuffy, precise but not rigid, dense but not cluttered.

Flaming Swords

Zach Phillips places a premium on preparedness and growth: the rehearsals are plentiful, the recording sessions are brief, and the next opportunity for collaboration is always just over the horizon. Since founding the eclectic label OSR Tapes (now known as “la Loi”) in 2007, the Brooklyn-based songwriter and bandleader has released music under myriad monikers—Horse Boys, Nals Goring, Jordan Piper Philips, GDC, Bruce Hart—and with several side projects—Blanche Blanche Blanche, Perfect Angels, etc. When his new partnership with Belgium-based vocalist Ma Clément produced the homespun God’s Trashmen Sent to Right the Mess, it sold thousands of copies and landed them a spot opening for Stereolab. Flaming Swords, the first studio album from Fievel Is Glauque, makes God’s Trashmen seem humble by comparison. Cramming highly technical and conversational fusion compositions within sub-two-minute songs, the album has the allure of a puzzle box with no right or wrong answers: just barrages of instrumental hooks and Delphic ponderings of the human condition.
Whereas God’s Trashmen compiled mono cassette recordings across five sessions from five permutations of musicians between 2018 and 2020, Flaming Swords was recorded live in a single evening in Brussels during summer 2021 by a septet of old and new collaborators. As their arrangements grow more complex and texturally rich, Fievel Is Glauque benefits from this immediacy. Johannes Eimermacher’s piquant alto sax leads the opener and title track as Gaspard Sicx’s drums engage Phillips’ keys in a coltish tussle. Clément’s sugary soprano and Eric Kinny’s lap steel swiftly diffuse the kineticism, transforming licks of Biblical fire into a smoke-filled speakeasy. When the rhythm fluctuates, Clément matches it with her phrasing.
It’s one of the most apparent evolutions from God’s Trashmen. Now composing alongside Phillips, Clément has more opportunity to flex her paradoxical ability to ground a piece with ethereal musings. Whether tiptoeing sylph-like across Sicx’s skittering cymbal taps on “Days of Pleasure,” sprinting through a recitation of a French apology letter for the belated arrival of a James Last cassette on “Boîte à Serpents,” wringing every drop of aching fragility from the brief runs of “Constantly Rare,” or soaking up the paranoia of Eimermacher’s swarming locust notes on “Wrong Item,” her range is subtle but stunning. While Clément’s approach can be taken as reticent—favoring cloudy poetry delivered with a lilt—its gentle cadence serves as an olive branch on an album that may otherwise seem daunting.
Phillips declines to prompt listeners to think or feel a certain way about Flaming Swords. “If this music is ‘for’ anyone, it’s ‘for’ the people who play it,” he told Post-Trash. You’d be forgiven for taking that as stubbornness. Fievel doesn’t willingly invite comparison to anyone—let alone contemporaries—and Phillips scoffs at the idea of making music to tap into a market. One could stretch and call them philosophically aligned with the recent wave of “viral jazz,” at least as far as refusing to adhere to strict concepts of what jazz, prog, or avant-whatever represent. Incidentally, Fievel has more in common with the Rock in Opposition movement of the ’70s: Flaming Swords, like Black Midi’s Hellfire, could be regarded as current endpoints of divergent paths from The Henry Cow Legend. But when pressed for influences, Phillips eagerly points fans toward Uruguayan music: specifically, a 100-song compilation titled La Otra Mitad. This affability is woven into Flaming Swords’ tendency to confound: It’s a mysterious friend who’d love it if you understood better, but you’re going to have to work for it.
Still, wispy threads present themselves. The album’s title references the Book of Genesis, where the flaming sword prevents humanity’s re-entrance into Paradise. Fievel implies that quixotic notions are our flaming swords: that the uncritical embrace of idealism and the attempt to control what can’t be controlled block our route toward truth and inner peace. The neurotic introspection of “Save the Phenomenon” wrestles with confirmation bias (“Give me what’s better wrong”) while “Porn of Love” accuses romcoms of distorting our perceptions of romance much in the way pornography can warp one’s view of sex. The conversation between a swordsman and a poet that ends “Days of Pleasure” is most telling: Each participant is envious of the other, longing for what could be and lacking appreciation for what is. The presentation of these ideas is akin to that of a Rorschach: blotchy, based on feelings sparked by intonations, enforced by the re-jumbling of jumbled sequences. We’re all sifting through the mess together.
Flaming Swords is heady but not stuffy, precise but not rigid, dense but not cluttered, and contemplative but not lacking good humor. It exists as a fitful reflection of Phillips’ past decade and a half as a musician and a refinement of lessons learned across dozens of projects, suggesting that the technical music of today need not adhere to a regressive worship of the past nor succumb to a cold, cynically quirky vision of the future. It can be as heartfelt as it is cryptic.  It can simply be, a dilated and present moment that translates the psyche as it naturally operates: nebulous, frenzied, contradictory, and beautiful.


With the production help of James Ford (member of Simian Mobile Disco, and producer for Arctic Monkeys) and Aaron Dessner of the National, Mumford & Sons has successfully created perhaps the most adequate commercial rock album of 2015. It’s fine. But fine is nowhere near good, and when the music is this empty, it might actually be worse than bad.

Wilder Mind

Mumford & Sons didn't have to be awful. A British neo-folk band, liberally applying the trappings of Americana, they made big songs well-suited to big stages, and they made them about as well as possible. But awful they were, nonetheless, a band so determined to be huge that they willed themselves into anonymity. Their latest effort, Wilder Mind, is a "rock" record in the least interesting sense of that word—a pastiche of the genre’s most common elements, from big percussion, electric guitars, and warm synths, to poignant but ultimately surface-level lyrics. It has all the elements of radio-friendly 2015 American rock'n'roll, with very timely nods to Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, but what it’s lacking in is any kind of originality, or message—and most importantly, it’s lacking in banjo, the only thing that ever set the band apart from the bro-rock horde in the first place. With the production help of James Ford (member of Simian Mobile Disco, and producer for Arctic Monkeys) and Aaron Dessner of the National, the band has successfully created perhaps the most adequate commercial rock album of 2015. It’s fine. But fine is nowhere near good, and, when the music is this empty, it might actually be worse than bad.
Love songs are low-hanging fruit, and on Wilder Mind, Mumford picks from the lowest branches. The first words uttered on the album's opening track, "Tompkins Square Park", are "Oh, babe," and like a boyfriend offering a generic apology, the song that follows sounds like it could be applied to any romantic situation at any time. There’s so little actual heart present in the songs, so little heartbreak, that it’s hard to imagine they were written from any kind of real place. This is music without any real center, designed only with montages and "Grey’s Anatomy" climaxes in mind. What the album sounds like, above all else, is easy money. These are songs that reflect emotion but generate none. They don't have feelings, they have #thefeels. The ‘I’ in these songs feels heartbreak but not too much; longing, but not too much; joy, but again, not too much. The influence of Dessner’s production is obvious in the richness of the arrangements, but where the National’s enormous sound is countered by obtuse and specific lyrics, Mumford matches a big, general sound with big, general statements of longing, and it falls flat. Petty and Springsteen are storytellers, bringing tangible and unique perspective to their personal narratives and those of their subjects. Mumford is telling the tale of the everyman, in that their narrative could be literally about every single man.
Songs like "Believe" are so lumbering that they are almost vulgar. "I don’t even know if I believe/ Everything you’re trying to say to me," Mumford sings in his best Chris Martin-soft-voice, before laddering up to a loud, crunchy apex of sound that explodes into a plea for some kind of redemption. The conflict on Wilder Mind is pedestrian—the confusion of someone with nothing real to lose. On "Cold Arms", the only song on the record that provides a vague respite from the formula, pairing Mumford’s plaintive vocals with a single electric guitar, he sings of a relationship where he and his partner are simultaneously "bloodshot and beat/ and never so alive." There’s no evidence of life on the track itself, which follows every imaginable rule so closely that all traces of life are erased.
Many of the songs on the album reference specific locations in New York City, from the aforementioned opener to the galloping "Ditmas", which names the small Brooklyn neighborhood, home to many members of the National, where the album's demos were recorded. But they make no reference to any location outside of their titles, and listened to sequentially, it seems as if any of these songs could switch titles with the next one with no discernible effect. They are 12 variations on vaguely Don Henley-inspired arena schlock, and in this transition, they've found a new bottom. Mumford & Sons' only hope to stand out was lost in favor of a cheap imitation, and not even a banjo can save them now.


The Miami producer and vocalist’s expertly curated, shamelessly horny new mixtape revels in reggaeton’s queer and femme club underground.

Arepa Mixtape

Arepa Mixtape, the new record from MJ Nebreda, seems designed to leave blue denim stains on basement walls. The Peruvian-Venezuelan producer and singer’s newest release is a clubby reggaeton thrill, one that revels in the genre’s sauciness, sex, and singular sense of humor while providing curative carnal nourishment. The troublemakers in these songs know it’s okay not to be liked. They come quick and make money fast. They post thirst traps for themselves and no one else. Here, being messy and sexy is a way of life—and a perreo sucio is the only appropriate soundtrack.
The Miami artist has only been making music for three years, but Arepa already positions her as a deft newcomer. Nebreda is credited as a writer and producer on every song on the tape. She sparkles as a curator, too, perhaps a result of her former role in A&R. She twists together sticky dembow riddims, chonga aesthetics of excess, and raptor house’s mind-numbing drum loops. On top of all the heat is her insolent voice, which frequently feels like it’s about to break into an orgasmic moan. “Muy Fina” is a full-on playground taunt in which Nebreda and guest Gini Santana assume the role of “pretty bitches” demanding that trifling men cough up (“Better to transfer that money to my PayPal,” they spit in Spanish). In these moments, Nebreda channels reggaeton icons like Glory and Jenny La Sexy Voz—women whose sex appeal was foundational to the genre’s commercial triumph, even if they were almost never credited for their indelible, generation-defining hooks.
Nebreda’s irreverent one-liners often feel liberatory, but never rely on strained or corny empowerment tropes. “Calor,” featuring fellow Miami producer Nick León, is a linguistic romp, the verb tenses and grammatical gender limits of Spanish stretched into an elegantly bratty rhyme: “A mi me sobra lo que a ti rest’/Así que vengase pa’ca/Que te lo compartex.” And then there’s the unabashed horniness. On the title track, she uses the yonic form of the arepa, a Venezuelan national dish, to represent pussy. She and guest Calacote slur the hook on “Agua Sin Gas” so that it ends up sounding like “I’m gonna fuck” in Dominican slang. Later, on “Teta” (Spanish for “boob”), Nebreda threatens to lick your belly button.
Arepa doubles as a showcase of the producers and vocalists defying fixed interpretations of reggaeton as misogynistic and homophobic. This genre has always had ample room for the queer and the femme; all you had to do was hand over the mic. Across Arepa, the pronouns are fluid and so are the genders of whoever you’re fucking. There are appearances from fresh faces like trans and non-binary Puerto Rican artist Ana Macho and the Toronto-based Dominican experimentalist Móry, as well as more established names, like neoperreo matriarch Ms Nina. With a crew of equally ungovernable baddies in tow, Arepa’s directive to misbehave and shake your ass is irresistible.
Arepa illustrates that the most promising artists in reggaeton aren’t signed to Columbia or Universal; they’re building dembow riddims in their bedrooms and raving on the weekends. Only a handful of tracks here sound rough around the edges. “Teta” drills through raptor house bedrock, but the Mussa Medusa verses land in a lo-fi haze, resembling demos more than final products. This is technically a mixtape, so that unpolished finish adds its own charm. Reggaeton is often a pleasure practice, and Nebreda seems less interested in perfection than immersive ecstasy. In the fantasia of Arepa, everyone is a ruthless man-eater or a drop-dead vixen who deserves to feel good.


A new reissue of the UK group’s 1979 album captures David Sylvian and his bandmates as they evolved from their glam-influenced early years into the experimental electronic pop of their final two LPs.

Quiet Life

Before they became synonymous with heady, ethereal synth pop, Japan started out under the sway of Bowie and Bolan. On their first two albums, Adolescent Sex and Obscure Alternatives, both released in 1978, singer/guitarist David Sylvian affected a nasal sneer while the rest of the band (drummer Steve Jansen, bassist Mick Karn, keyboardist Richard Barbieri, and guitarist Rob Dean) backed him with icy, funk- and glam-infused rock. They even had the cheek to cover the decidedly unhip “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” a song from the 1964 Broadway musical Funny Girl. But as the chemistry within the band tightened and their interests expanded to include Kraftwerk, Roxy Music, and Brian Eno, they were eager to grow. “We got the first album completely wrong, so we did another and that was wrong as well,” Sylvian recalled in a 1986 interview. He felt so strongly about this that he regarded Japan’s third LP, 1979’s Quiet Life, as the band’s proper debut.
There’s a measure of truth to Sylvian’s ahistorical take on Japan’s discography. As heard on a new deluxe reissue, Quiet Life presaged the mature beauty of the band’s final albums and Sylvian’s eventual solo career. The barbed agitation of Japan’s early work gave way to a controlled, sensual sound built from droning synths, bleating saxophone, and complex, jazzy rhythms, with Sylvian floating above it all like the omniscient narrator of a sci-fi noir film. Alongside other albums of the era like Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Kaleidoscope and PiL’s Metal Box, Quiet Life served as a bridge between post-punk and the burgeoning new-wave scene.
Japan’s first step away from those so-called mistakes was a blatantly commercial one. In hope of capitalizing on the success of Obscure Alternatives’ overseas success, their label, Hansa, put the group in an L.A. studio with Giorgio Moroder. The band had already written “European Son” as an homage to the Italian producer’s sequencer throb; rather than produce a version of that song, Moroder insisted they collaborate on something new. The track that came out of that session, “Life in Tokyo,” melds two distinct artistic approaches: Karn’s sliding fretless bass figure and Sylvian’s lyrics of urban disaffection fit perfectly with Moroder’s signature synth pulses and disco diva backing vocals.
While the single failed to chart, the session with Moroder bolstered Japan’s confidence as they continued woodshedding new material for their third album. What came out of the rehearsals were dynamic changes in their sound, placing new emphasis on the interplay between Karn’s rubbery bass playing and Jansen’s oblique rhythms, with Barbieri and Dean coloring in the edges with textural chords and quick melodic hits.
The biggest shift came as Sylvian began to adopt a restrained croon inspired by Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry. This new timbre allowed him to vary the emotional temperature of Quiet Life’s material. Some of the snarl of the early albums remains on “Fall in Love With Me” and the ragged “Halloween,” but other tones were creeping in. On the Moroder-inspired title track, his voice evokes the exhaustion and tension inherent in his lyrics, which speak to the strange tug-of-war between the desires for pop success and anonymity. And on the somber album closer “The Other Side of Life,” Sylvian is overcome with wistful yearning, as if already nostalgic for his time in the group, which would disband within three years.
Some of the band’s changes of that period manifest as growing pains on Quiet Life. The plodding cadence and honking sax lines of “Fall in Love With Me” sit uncomfortably between the disco-pop shimmy of the title track and the hissing drum machine and chilly atmosphere of “Despair.” The LP’s second side is even more oddly paced. The faltering beat and glam guitars of “Halloween” do a poor job preparing listeners for a skewed cover of the Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” which sets a Fripp-like guitar whine against a Motown backbeat, followed by the stiffly funky prog-pop of “Alien.”
Japan’s label didn’t seem to know what to do with Quiet Life. Outside the UK, Hansa pushed the title track as a single, but on their home turf it was relegated to the B-side of the band’s ill-fitting cover of Smokey Robinson’s “I Second That Emotion,” included here in both its 7" and 12" versions. They also issued a live EP that featured only one song from the freshly released album. (That EP and a variety of mixes of the singles from this era make up the second disc of this set.)
The album and its accompanying singles failed to make a commercial dent in the UK, but the band was still a sizable draw in Japan’s namesake country. On the tour for Quiet Life, Karn recalled in his memoir Japan & Self Existence, fans chased down their taxis and stuffed their phone numbers into the men’s pockets. The screaming during the band’s concert at Tokyo’s Budokan indoor arena in 1980 bears out their popularity there. Unfortunately, that live document, which comprises the third disc in the set, sounds like it was sourced from an audience recording, and the music is muffled and ugly to listen to.
Everything would eventually fall into place for Japan, albeit briefly. After breaking ties with Hansa, they would sign with Virgin Records and produce two confident and stunning albums, 1980’s Gentlemen Take Polaroids and 1981’s Tin Drum, scoring an unlikely No. 5 hit in the UK with the poignant single “Ghosts.” But to get to that point, Japan had to go through the period of growth that resulted in Quiet Life, straining against the limits of their abilities as songwriters and musicians in order to move beyond them. As heard in the context of the group’s history, this album, however imperfect, feels rich with possibility and promise.

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After years of wild thrash metal, Metallica simplified everything and became the biggest rock band in the world. The Black Album’s dark, muscular sound would permanently alter the course heavy music.

Metallica

June 29, 1990: Deep in the guts of Toronto’s CNE Stadium, four shaggy, sweaty, booze-swilling horsemen of the apocalypse are hatching a cultural coup. James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, Lars Ulrich, and Jason Newsted just opened up for Aerosmith, their childhood heroes. Judging by the muffled roars emanating from the arena, Steven Tyler’s got the world wrapped around his finger. The same will be said for Metallica within a year’s time. They won’t settle for anything less than a supervillain death grip.
Granted, Metallica’s approach up to this point has proven hugely successful, a byzantine war machine powered by a spartan tactic Ulrich will later outline to critic David Masciotra as simply: “not fucking up.” Judging from their generous album sales, sold-out tours, Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance Vocal or Instrumental Grammy nomination, and hard-won laurels despite crickets from the establishment, “not fucking up” should ensure that their wallets remain as stuffed as the arenas.
But these are the guys who gave us Kill ’Em All; they won’t stop until they’ve slayed Poison, Mötley Crüe, Ratt, and every last one of those platinum-blonde, spandex-wearing false heirs to the heavy metal throne with their own weapons: massive riffs, clean vocals, sharp arrangements, and layered mixes that gush from the speakers like knife wounds. They’ll even tap Bob Rock—the man behind Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet, an anti-Metallica album if there ever was one—to ensure the heist goes off without a hitch.
Naturally, Metallica will name this declaration of war and independence after themselves. It’s the best-selling album of the past 25 years, with currently over 20 million copies sold worldwide, more than Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The U.S.A. or Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. Even if you handed out three Black Albums to every citizen in Ulrich’s native Denmark, you’d be left with a warehouse full of CDs. Few bands have achieved such ubiquity so that if you know literally one thing about metal music, it is the six-note opening riff to “Enter Sandman.”
Though Metallica were neither unknowns nor underdogs when they recorded their fifth studio album Metallica, the status quo as dictated by music critics, disc jockeys, and MTV framed them as such. Throughout the ’80s, Metallica and their Big Four peers—Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax—challenged metal’s emergent portrait of pomp by way of extreme fundamentalism. In her 1992 book Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology, Deena Weinstein compared thrash metal to the Protestant Reformation, framing it as a reaction to corruption: “Both movements [the Reformation and thrash metal],” she wrote, “charged that the established form had become corrupt through extravagance, and both supported a return to the essential message, stripped bare of all adornment.”
Metallica’s rapid ascent throughout the latter half of the decade—from Golden State basement fiends, to Big Four figureheads, to Grammy nominees—shattered the cultural status quo. The group’s first studio three albums—1983’s Kill ’Em All, 1984’s Ride the Lightning, and 1986’s Master of Puppets—are a trio of bloodthirsty, whip-smart chimeras. Their din bears traces of blues, punk, hard rock, progressive jams, and—thanks to bassist Cliff Burton’s virtuosic strivings—even classical music. By identifying the genres’ cathartic common ground and amping up the drama, Metallica reframed the heavy metal revival as a serious movement, as opposed to a perennial retread.
Burton’s tragic death in September 1986 intensified Metallica’s ambition. Shortly after Burton’s death, they’d recruited a new bassist, Flotsam and Jetsam frontman (and lifelong Metallica fan) Jason Newsted; and two years later, they released ...And Justice For All. Between its extensive runtimes, unusual time signatures, and arcane arrangements, it remains a fan-favorite whose genius is often overshadowed by the fact that it sounds like it was recorded through a tin can. Its ramshackle mixing kills the dynamic frisson: Hetfield and Hammett’s dueling riffs collapse into a static, mind-numbing roar; Ulrich’s fills hit like raindrops instead of the usual mortars; Newsted’s bass lines are nearly impossible to make out, positioned so far back in the mix that a group of fans took it upon themselves to release a bootleg, bass-boosted version of the album titled ...And Justice For Jason.
Nevertheless, ...And Justice For All positioned Metallica within striking distance of the mainstream. The LP debuted at No. 6 on the Billboard Charts—a feat practically unheard of for a metal band at the time—and went platinum within nine weeks. It was their most successful crossover to date thanks to its music video for “One,” which got them on MTV. And yet, remarkably, the band looked back on their latest triumph with disappointment. As Metallica’s fanbase grew, more non-metalheads came into the fold. This influx of casual listeners created a communication gap, which was particularly evident in concert. Speaking with Masciotra, Ulrich identified the album’s associated “Damaged Justice” tour as the end of the honeymoon and, arguably, Metallica as most people knew it. “Early on the tour, we started wondering why the songs were so long, progressive, and all-over-the-place,” he said. “We felt that the material did not connect well live because it was too introverted and cerebral.”
In Ulrich’s view, Metallica had taken the progressive side as far as they could. The only way for the band to move on was to look back, to invoke the bad-asses who’d inspired them, and so many others, to pick up guitars and drumsticks in the first place: barnstormers like Motörhead, Black Sabbath, the Rolling Stones, and so on.
Also, the next album needed to not sound like shit. In a huge leap of faith, Metallica began their years-long relationship with Bob Rock—a straight-shooting, detail-oriented guitar band guru who’d manned the boards for Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, and other arena mainstays—to take the reins on production. He accepted their offer after witnessing them live: “I had bought the Justice record, and I just didn’t get it,” he later told Masciotra of the album, which he described as thin. “Then when I saw them play live after the Cult, and they walked off stage, I thought, ‘That’s not the band on the Justice record.’”
Far and wide, Rock’s production comprises Metallica’s greatest source of controversy. While it may be tempting to paint Rock as a sinister interloper, Adam Dubin’s behind-the-scenes documentary A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica positions him, instead, as a grizzled studio sherpa nudging the band away from clunky performances or technical mishaps, often to considerable pushback from his charges. “Lars, will you make the next couple versions a little more peppery off the top? A little more weight into it?” he says Ulrich at one point, like a parent asking his son to clean his room. Lars seethes, “If you want weight, I’m your fucking guy!” Elsewhere, he reminds Hetfield to sing and play at the same time, only to get another tantrum in response: “You wanna hear it with vocals? Go sing it.”
The producer left a new mark on the group: he turned Hetfield from an untrained screamer to a seasoned rock singer, pushed the frontman to step up his lyrical game and brought Newsted out of the shadows, recasting him as the stoic yin to Ulrich’s frenzied yang.
And then, of course, there’s his showstopping mix: the subject of countless late-night road-tests and in-studio arguments, and the long-awaited antidote to the muddled palettes of Metallica albums past. Nowhere is this more evident than in the intro to “Enter Sandman”: Hammett’s riff creeps in from the background, a night-stalker inching closer by the minute. Hetfield swoops in behind him, the violent churn intensifies and, upon Ulrich and Newsted’s entry, finally overflows in a froth: cacophonous, chilling, and definitively anthemic.
Metallica’s twelve tracks may be sorted into three categories: angsty arena anthems, furrowed-brow ballads, and tamer, hybridized takes on Metallica’s famous pit-starters. Aside from “Holier Than Thou” and “Through the Never,” which offer red meat for the black-leathered fans of old, the album skews simplistic, melodically and lyrically. Whereas Ride the Lightning and ...And Justice for All prioritized instrumental stunts over melody, Metallica bets it all on Hetfield, a paradigm shift made all the more noticeable by his bandmates’ restraint. Instead of firing off fills, Ulrich keeps it simple, locked in 4/4 throughout (“It’s a little bit like building a house,” he crows in A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica, chest puffed, shit-eating grin on his face, “If you have a good foundation, then…”) Newsted mostly swears by the root notes, but gives millions of would-be bassists their first homework assignment with “My Friend of Misery”’s percolating refrain. While he’s given plenty of room to show off his solos (”Don’t Tread on Me” and “Of Wolf and Man” are particularly fiendish), Hammett’s riffs skew tamer, more deliberate, and subservient to the Hetfield’s pained yowls.
Hetfield pivots between devastating croons and razor-throated yells like a seasoned “American Idol” contestant. “I’m your dream/I’m your eyes/I’m your pain” he sneers on “Sad But True,” a song Rock labelled the heavy metal “Kashmir.” This technique inevitably draws the listener’s focus to Hetfield’s lyrics, which, while perfectly suited for stadium sing-a-longs, aren’t exactly Pulitzer material. You can see the low-hanging rhymes coming from a mile away—“real” and “feel,” “be” and “see,” “you” and “do.” More damningly, it saps his revealing personal narratives of their latent emotional heft.
“The God That Failed” is a bittersweet ode to Hetfield’s mother, a Christian Scientist who succumbed to cancer because she refused to treat it through any means other than faith. And yet, for every devastating couplet (”The healing hand held back the deepened nail/Follow the God that failed”), there’s two chunks of clunky poetry not far behind (”Find your peace/Find your say/Find the smooth road on your way”; “Pride you took/Pride you feel/Pride that you felt when you’d kneel.”)
The simplicity proves far more successful on “Nothing Else Matters,” an acoustic ballad which, however ham-fisted, stands as one of the album’s most revolutionary moments. Here, smack dab in the center of metal’s hyper-masculine universe, we have one of the genre’s most fearsome luminaries singing the praises not of Satan, sex, or the good sweet leaf, but rather a woman. Given the overarching cultural context, Hetfield’s insistence that he’s “Never cared for what they say/Never cared for games they play/Never cared for what they do/Never cared for what they know” scans as a middle finger to all the meatheads who think intimacy and metal are mutually exclusive. His solo acts as the band’s closing argument, undeniable proof that vulnerability could both rock and sell.
August 12, 1991: At midnight, the coup officially begins. The metalheads don their old concert tees and rush, rapt and stoned, to their nearest record store, where they await Metallica’s fifth album coming in droves. The makers of A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica are on hand to chronicle one such release party, and ask the faithful for their thoughts on this monumental album, and what they think it all means. “Reality, man…some shit you just can’t change.” responds one particularly impassioned mullet-man, shouting over his equally-stoked friend. “Listening to the words, it talks about people who, I don’t know, either can’t forgive, or the people that die unforgiven by others,” a soft-spoken young woman posits, reverent, as if contemplating a Rothko.
Just like Metallica’s lyrics, the band’s fans’ insights scan as invariably vague, slightly naive, and unflinchingly, impossibly earnest. It’s only appropriate that these remarks comprise A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica’s opening scene: They’re candids of the Black Album’s power as a tabula rasa for a young, embittered generation, saddled with their parents’ wars and religious scorn. When the hesher in the “Metal Up Your Ass” t-shirt proclaims, “My parents don’t think anything about Metallica, they just ignore it,” he’s really gesturing to a generational victory: Mom and Dad with their heads in the sand, while the kids raise hell and make history.
Heavy metal had officially set up shop on the main stage. As if to prove their point, they hit the road in 1992 with Guns N’ Roses (the only band who rivaled their power at the time; their contemporaneously released albums Use Your Illusion I and II moved 14 million units altogether) for a massive, effects-heavy arena outing. During the band’s run-through of “Fade to Black” at the August 8 stop in Montreal, Hetfield lost track of the band’s complicated pyrotechnics setup and found himself standing atop an erupting grate, leaving the frontman with second- and third-degree burns and forcing his band to the sidelines for several days.
The real burn, though, was still five years off. In May 1996, MTV screened Samuel Bayer’s surreal, melodramatic visual for “Until It Sleeps”—the moody, ur-Godsmack lead single from the Black Album’s successor Load, which removed thrash from the musical equation even further. Five seconds in, we spot Ulrich, dressed like one of the cock-rockers he loved to loathe: thick black eyeliner, shorn head, silver earrings. He drags his hands down his face, his lips curling in a cartoonish gesture of exasperation as if struggling to understand how he ended up in the get-up to begin with. Elsewhere on Load, Hetfield sings in a voice that would usher in the sound of post-grunge and butt rock for the next decade: “Careful what you wish you may regret it/Careful what you wish you just might get it.”
The words drip with meaning now, knowing Metallica’s long road through the turn of the 21st century would be filled with charges of “hair cuts!” and “sell outs!” as well as their own much-derided suit against Napster. There was Newsted’s famous quip from their episode of VH1’s “Behind The Music:” “Yes, we sell out: every seat in the house, every time we play, anywhere we play,” spoken just a few years before he departed the band in early 2001; his acknowledgements of Metallica’s rise in the public sphere and identity crises embedded therein, however lighthearted, nonetheless presaged the physical and existential temper tantrums captured on 2004’s tell-all documentary Some Kind of Monster. Metallica, however, remains the final bastion of focus: a hubristic request for grace masquerading as a show of force, the prophetic turning point for the world’s biggest ever metal band.


Prolific Princeton, N.J., artist releases his debut full-length, which works as a polite companion to his Cyanide Sisters EP.

Galactic Melt

It hasn't even been five months since Ghostly re-released Com Truise's formative Cyanide Sisters EP, and already Princeton, N.J.'s Seth Haley is back with a full-length debut. That Galactic Melt has been pretty much in the can for that entire time tells you something about Haley's formidable work ethic; in addition to Truise, he operates under at least three other pseudonyms, none as fully-realized but each as prodigious.
Haley's rapid-fire turnover plays incredibly well on the Internet. He's something of a cottage industry, dispensing original tracks, remixes, podcasts, and accompanying boxfresh graphic designs to his blog readership and Twitter followers with impressive regularity. By capitalizing on the immediacy of the formats, he's also charting his own evolution in realtime. When he writes, "I thought I'd switch it up a little" in reference to a remix he's just posted for Ana Lola Roman's "Klutch", he's acknowledging that his listeners know what he means by "it," and how it's been switched; everything is laid out with a clear progression, one small evolution to the next.
The comparative slow lane of a regular label release schedule, though, has a habit of slowing down the flow of music, crumpling up its timelines and deforming expectations. This usually doesn't matter to the end listener; what's new to our ears is good as new. But since Galactic Melt sounds more like a polite and brotherly companion piece to Cyanide Sisters than it does a proper follow-up, it's hard not to feel like the tactic of waiting to market has robbed Haley of some of some of his momentum.
Part of the problem is Cyanide Sisters. As debut EPs go, it was an accomplished enough turn to raise questions about what Truise might do for an encore. The answer, as it happens, was, well, a slightly more muted version of the same. Don't get me wrong: with its staccato, bonus level synth stabs, keening psychedelia and 1980s-drenched drum sounds, Melt is still very identifiably Truise. But with the exception of the banging double whammy of "VHS Sex" and "Cathode Girls", there's nothing much here to suggest that Truise has upped his game in any meaningful way. Whether you consider that a disappointment will depend on how much mileage you get out of Haley in this mode.


On their first release for the D.C. punk band Priests’ label, the duo finally let a little light into their rough-and-tumble rock songs, celebrating in spite of hardships.

Alienated

If you’ve ever seen the Funs perform, you may have noticed the duct tape. Jessee Rose Crane and Philip Jerome Lesicko, who constantly swap instruments between songs, brandish guitars and drums that look as if they will fall apart during the next tune. But they are the perfect tools for the Funs’ sort of rough-edged indie rock—janky, excessively noisy songs that rattle around like loose, rusty parts. The Funs don’t waste time replacing a slightly busted microphone; they slap on adhesive and keep going, an approach that stems from the way they handle life, too. The Funs chose their name, after all, as an optimistic gesture amid the hard times of their early years, including the untimely death of Crane’s brother. They’ve turned an abandoned funeral home outside St. Louis into a recording studio. Still, their sound—grungy, tarry, tough—has rarely conveyed such optimism.
Alienated, their first release for Priests’ Sister Polygon label, finally allows unquestionable rays of sunlight into their songs, hints of the hope for which they’ve long waited. But it begins with a disclaimer on “Enemy,” where Crane aims desperate shrieks inward. “I am my enemy,” she howls, delivering a warning against getting too comfortable when things look up. “Don’t tell me that there’s nothing left/I guess at least there’s still my breath,” she continues. After this sobering first step, Alienated turns the corner, pivoting to the cool-headed “Moderate Overkill” and the anti-romantic pop of “Forget Me Not.” During “Into the Mirror,” Lesicko’s voice is clear and content—a big deal, aptly underlined by big-hearted bashing.
As singers and instrumentalists, Lesicko and Crane haven’t advanced much on a technical level despite a steady stream of releases during the last decade. But that’s kind of the point—to move swiftly, honestly, and imperfectly through the challenges of the world, all the time. Lesicko’s drum fills in the chorus of “Forget Me Not,” for instance, never get off the ground, like a flapping bird that hovers just a few inches above the earth. But he plays with fire, matched by a passionate three-note guitar solo from Crane. It’s the color and tone that matter, not the technique.
For “Power,” the album’s 10-minute finale, the Funs uncharacteristically tackle a grand, conceptual design. It’s like a mumbled, guitar-narrated spin on The Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come for Free closer, “Empty Cans”—two versions of the same song, coming to a full stop and starting over, but with a critical perspective shift. The first half thrashes and fumes until it dies, while the second frames the same chords in softer light, like a sunset panorama. Lesicko achieves flight this time with a high-tremolo solo that ushers the album toward its gentle fade. It’s a notably vivid exit for a band that’s so often captured the opposite mood, a rare moment of unadulterated joy worthwhile of a lifelong search.


Even though they were reared amid San Francisco’s lo-fi bonanza, it didn't take too long for the Fresh & Onlys to opt out of the garage rock arms race. Their downcast latest effort is a spooky, desert-rock answer to the Cure’s Faith, another record awash in both reverb and metaphysical turmoil.

House of Spirits

Even though they were reared amid San Francisco’s lo-fi bonanza, it didn't take too long for the Fresh & Onlys to opt out of the garage rock arms race. On the Bay Area quartet’s 2012 LP, Long Slow Dance, it swapped lo-fi gristle for nu-romantic vibes, pairing up singer Tim Cohen’s surreal but self-conscious lyrics with shimmering, Smiths-like guitar riffs. But if you expected jangle-pop ebullience while approaching “Bells of Paonia,” the first single from the band’s fifth full-length, House of Spirits, you might come away feeling a bit confused. The song’s stark, fuzz-bleached minimalism is an inversion of what's expected from the typical Fresh & Onlys track; it's zoned-out, rather than urgent, and the chugging chords are blurred by a generous dose of distortion. The drums have been stripped down to the steady thud of a single kick, and sunshine only sneaks in via the barbershop-style vocal harmonies that buoy the chorus. The shift in style takes a little bit to get used to.
House of Spirits finds the Fresh & Onlys in a gloomy place. It’s a spooky, desert-rock answer to the Cure’s Faith, another record awash in both reverb and metaphysical turmoil. “The point of forgetting is so you can live,” despairs Cohen on the chilly “Animal of One”. “The purpose of living is harder to find.” The Fresh & Onlys’ music has touched on downcast themes before, but in the past, these bummin’ sentiments were often tempered a touch of self-effacing humor. Here, Cohen’s gonzo imagery and weirdo-narratives feel more earnest in their evocation of hard times.
To be fair, there’s been a lot going on for the Fresh & Onlys’ over the last couple of years: most of the band’s San Francisco garage rock comrades have split town, bassist Shayde Sartin’s apartment burned down, and Cohen had a kid and temporarily re-located to an isolated Arizona horse ranch, where he demoed most of the record’s songs. On prior LPs, the rest of the band—Sartin, guitarist Wymond Miles, and drummer Kyle Gibson—took Cohen’s home demos and pushed them into headier territory, transforming a mostly acoustic track like "Tropical Island Suite" into the 7-minute centerpiece from 2010’s Play It Strange. On House of Spirits, the divide between the singer's folksier solo output and his work with Fresh & Onlys has gotten a little harder to spot. With it’s clean guitars and bobbing rhythm, “Ballerina” could have easily slotted into River of Souls, Cohen's latest effort with his side project Magic Trick.
On the second half of House of Spirits, the mood leavens a bit. "Hummingbird" and "April Fools" find Fresh & Onlys sounding a little more like their old selves—and if the bulk of House of Spirits is lacking a bit of urgency, the band compensates in other ways. When they were still recording the bulk of their music at home, the Fresh & Onlys worked fast and as a result it sometimes seemed like the clock was working against Cohen’s lyrics, which recycled or smudged only a few words from verse to verse. House of Spirits, then, contains some of his most uniquely weird and vivid work, whether he's contemplating supernatural-style domestic unrest on "Home is Where" or reconciling abandonment issues with a demonic possessor on "Who Let the Devil". Album closer "Madness" finds Cohen reflecting on an LP's worth of emotional unrest with a touch of nostalgia. "Madness has a heart, letting me rejoice in the most peculiar things," he sings. "Your occurrence in my heart, giving me a voice, is the most beautiful thing."
When the Fresh & Onlys' released their first 7" back in 2009, the band was preoccupied with scuzzy psych-rock homage. Since then, they've covered more grounds than most of their Bay Area peers, swapping in stylistic nods to the gothy end '80s LA punk and '80s UK guitar rock. House of Spirits doesn't bring much in the way of sonic surprises beyond a few drum machines and synths, but it does find the band making subtle changes to its M.O., delivering a set of songs that's less urgent, but—in a freaky-yet-endearing way—more personal.


The Japanese composer's first solo album after eight years and a battle with throat cancer is marvelous, using a bounty of textures, moods, and ambience from his esteemed four-decade-long career.

async

Ambient music means many things in the present moment. Brian Eno’s Reflection from earlier this year presented its contemplative side, the recent compilation Mono No Aware posits it as a commentary of modern technology, and ambient musician Keith Fullerton Whitman rhetorically wondered: “What music isn’t ambient in the 21st century?” Its modern conception stems from a now-mythologized moment, when Eno was convalescing in a hospital bed after being hit by a cab, the playback on a harp record so low that it blended in with the sound of rain. It’s environmental, but from its inception, ambient music also has roots as a healing music.
Ambient as restorative comes to mind with async, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s sixteenth solo album. In June of 2014, the legendary Japanese composer was diagnosed with throat cancer and underwent rigorous radiology treatment to combat it. Three years after that diagnosis, Sakamoto returns with an album bearing a sense of mortality surrounding its every sound. Unlike his ’80s heyday where Sakamoto fearlessly embraced pop and found himself in the studio with Iggy Pop, David Byrne, or Maceo Parker, async is more closely aligned with his 21st-century experimental side and his ongoing collaborations with the likes of Christian Fennesz, Alva Noto, and Christopher Willits. But there’s a warmth and fragility to the album here that makes it stand apart from these works.
A careful piano melody opens the album, with just enough space between the notes for a noisy chord to rise up and consume it all, shifting from white noise to solemn organ line, revealing both Sakamoto’s penchant for melody and texture and the gap between each. The copious reverb that surrounds each restrained note on “ZURE” would slot right in with Kompakt’s Pop Ambient series. In conceiving the album, the press release states that async was a soundtrack for an imaginary Andrei Tarkovsky film and the stately theme of “solari” does bring to mind Tarkovsky’s 1972 masterwork Solaris.
But it also hearkens back to Sakamoto’s acclaimed career as a soundtrack composer, scoring Nagisa Ôshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (where he acted alongside David Bowie) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (Sakamoto won an Oscar for Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor) as well as recently scoring Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant. For those familiar with the arc of Sakamoto’s four-decade long career, async seems to echo aspects of it all, as if Sakamoto sought to embrace his many iterations of self. The starbursts of “stakra” go back to his earliest days as a synth whiz kid in pioneering Japanese pop act Yellow Magic Orchestra while the stark and heartbreaking “ubi” recalls the Satie-like simplicity of his most famous composition, “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” the piano shot through with satellite beacon signals. Detuned strings mimic the traditional koto on “honj” and comprise the furious thrashing noise of the title track.
Near the center of the album, this primarily instrumental collection reveals two pieces with vocals, their words revealing another theme to the album. “Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well,” says author Paul Bowles, his voice recorded back when Sakamoto was scoring the film adaptation of his novel The Sheltering Sky. Repurposed here, it’s now set against a backdrop of sinewaves, bowed cymbal and spare piano as other voices gather around it. It’s a striking inclusion, a sentiment that no doubt resonated with Sakamoto as he faced his own mortality.
A few songs later, longtime collaborator David Sylvian’s voice arises, reciting a poem from Andrei Tarkovsky’s father, the famous Russian poet Arseny Tarkovsky. Sylvian first collaborated with Sakamoto in in 1982, adding vocals a year later to the theme from Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence for the elegant ’80s song “Forbidden Colours,” a partnership that’s since carried on into the 21st century. “And all will be repeated, all be re-embodied/You will dream everything I have seen in dream,” Sylvian recites. “Dreams, reality, death, on wave after wave.” There’s an acceptance of mortality, of temporality, a gratitude for the life lived and Sakamoto puts elegiac strings and echoing piano about the poem, the end revealing a hushed melody that ever so slowly brightens in tone. There’s the sense of a weight lifted, the last two tracks bringing a luminous drone forth on “ff” and an ambient drift leading us out on closer “garden,” and in that hanging moment after the record ends, all are healed.


The trio’s second album post-hiatus matches the clarity of its arrangements with an unexpected spiritual lightness. Rarely has Duster sounded so pleasant and peaceful.

Together

Duster aren’t so sad anymore. As they release their latest album, Together, the San Jose-formed trio once known for their uniquely murky and dejected mutation of rock music have admitted as much. “It’s a lot more like absurdism than nihilism,” says multi-instrumentalist Clay Parton in a press release. That’s surprising coming from a group who’ve previously described the feeling their music evokes as “desperate, purring distress,” and for whom nearly every song became a meditation on existence, anxiety, and the slog of the end times. Each member—Parton, along with fellow multi-instrumentalists Canaan Dove Amber and Jason Albertini—carried that heaviness into their solo work as well. One of Parton’s projects is called Eiafuawn, short for “everything is all fucked up and whatnot.” But Together aims at something a little brighter, lending new color to Duster’s music and highlighting the thoughtful songwriting beneath the gloom. If they don’t sound happy, exactly, little moments of beauty and clarity suggest a hard-won lightness.
While it’s hard to unhear the despair in the decades of tape-hiss-coated recordings that preceded it, Together offers opportunities to take a new perspective on a band whose songs so often felt deliberately drab. Opening track “New Directions” makes their intentions clear: Gently plucked and warmly distorted guitar lines weave around a delicate whisper, a familiar formula for longtime fans. But shadowy as the instrumental sounds, there are assurances of constancy and commitment woven into its fabric. “I’ve lost touch, I’ve said too much, been opposites and such,” they sing. “But I’ll take care of all of us.” Even as the guitars spin out into feedback and distortion, there’s a sense of comfort and peace.
The record is full of these little oases—moments of self-possession and earned wisdom that break up the bleakness inherent to their slow, sad songs. “Time Glitch” meditates on the weight of the past over distant guitar feedback before happening upon a more thoughtful realization: “Sometimes, memories are kind.” The heavy-lidded drum machines and warbly guitars of “Sleepyhead” make for one of Duster’s most gentle arrangements to date, as they sing about the search for safety and “a quiet place” to rest their heads. Rarely has this band sounded so pleasant and peaceful.
Together also continues to emphasize the newfound clarity and purpose in Duster’s arrangements and production. There are still fresh experiments—like the kosmische synth swells that open “Escalator”—but this record is largely a refinement of the band’s sprawling, slow-paced sound, giving a little focus and momentum to their once-opaque instrumentals. Tape hiss and distortion carried a big part of the mystery around those first Duster albums; every whisper feels a little threatening when you can’t quite hear what it’s saying. Now, when they do indulge in darkness, it only hits harder. One of the record’s final entries is a static-scuffed track called “Feel No Joy” that evokes the mundane pain of its title. It’s heavy, but the open-hearted songs that precede it make it clear that the title alone isn’t the entire truth—there is joy out there, provided you’re willing to spend long enough looking for it.


Following 2009's stately Life and Times, Bob Mould's latest solo album is so true to fuzz-pop form you might mistake it for an unearthed bonus disc of quality Sugar outtakes. It arrives as a totem of his continued influence on today's mainstream and indie-level artists alike.

Silver Age

Like another revered Minnesotan songwriter, Bob Mould is a don't-look-back kinda guy: The noise-pop trail he blazed with Hüsker Dü in the 1980s was roadblocked by a pair of dirgey, despairing solo releases; his short-lived return to rock in the early 90s with Sugar was answered with a series of increasingly sophisticated-- and occasionally electronic-- solo albums informed by his pre-millennial immersion into New York's gay club scene and contented ease into middle age. Always self-aware but never self-obsessed, Mould's divergent songbook serves as a mood-ring measure of his personal journey from angry adolescent punk to out-and-proud adult, and of his wavering desire to engage with the contemporary alt-rock for which he essentially wrote the playbook. But Mould has, uncharacteristically, spent the last few years taking stock of his past, penning a tell-all autobiography with Michael Azerrad, and overseeing Merge's 20th-anniversary reissues of the Sugar catalog. Now, with his demons fully exorcised and emotional baggage tossed aside, Mould is game to plug in and rev up again.
Just as Sugar emerged in 1992 right as Hüsker Dü's legacy was becoming manifest in both the chart-conquering crunch of Nirvana and the underground-overturning squall of My Bloody Valentine, Silver Age arrives as a totem of Mould's continued influence on today's mainstream rock (Foo Fighters, Green Day) and indie-level (No Age, Japandroids) artists alike. Recorded with the band he used to tour 2009's stately Life and Times-- bassist Jason Narducy and Superchunk/Mountain Goats drummer Jon Wurster-- Silver Age immediately establishes itself as a more roaring, rambunctious affair. In fact, the album is so true to fuzz-pop form that you might easily mistake it for an unearthed bonus disc of quality Sugar outtakes from those recent reissues; the opening anti-sellout screed "Star Machine" could even pass for a 90s-era comment on mallternative-rock chancers. The title track, however, firmly asserts the record as the work of a modern-day Mould when he declares, "I'm never too old to contain my rage," before spitting on the "stupid little kid [who] wanna hate my game." Yet there's a vigor and vitality running through Silver Age that belies those cranky-old-man sentiments; while there is much to admire about Mould's penchant for taking risks and shifting creative course, no fan would complain if he simply delivered euphoric power-pop knockouts like "The Descent", "Briefest Moment", and "Keep Believing" in perpetuity.
The Sugar reissues provide a convenient yardstick with which to measure the strength of the songs here, though they also draw attention to the new album's monochromatic sound*-- Silver Age* would benefit from a destabilizing dose of loopy psychedelia à la "Hoover Dam", or a more direct appeal to heart in the vein of "If I Can't Change Your Mind" to bring greater dimension to the album's workmanlike drive. But just as those classic Hüsker Dü records suggested an infinite depth of noise despite their pancaked production, Mould still covers a lot of ground here while staying in the red. From the dreamy, "Man on the Moon"-style drone of "Steam of Hercules" to the foreboding urgency of "Angels Rearrange", Mould just sounds so perfectly at home when howling in the face of a hurricane-- his voice is as natural a complement to a hazily overdriven power chord as Brian Wilson's is to a harpsichord. Silver Age is a suitably self-deprecating title from an artist whose considerable cachet hasn't always allowed him to cash in; Mould effectively owns up to his contrarian tendencies when, in "The Descent", he admits, "I didn't want to play the song/ That gave people so much hope." But as a showcase of a seasoned master in his element, Silver Age's bounty of direct, distorto-pop hits measures up to Mould's gold standard.


This Atlanta rapper with a cult hit under his belt ("1 Night") brings to mind iLoveMakonnen. He inhabits a post-regionalist rap universe, a space defined by digital platforms rather than geography.

Lil Boat

Atlanta’s Lil Yachty is a pure creation of the Internet. His cult hit "1 Night" found most of its audience through a viral sketch comedy video, and before that, he was being plugged on Twitter by Ian Connor, a stylist and web curator known mostly for his connection to A$AP Rocky. He’s indebted to Lil B, too, with free-form verses that mimic Based Freestyles and a carefree energy reminiscent of the Based God’s Myspace days. In short, Yachty thrives in Rocky’s post-regionalist rap universe, a space defined by digital platforms rather than geography. One of his producers goes by Digital Nas. He is definitive proof that modern rap has no gatekeepers, and Soundcloud rap’s laziest possible copy-and-paste job.
There isn’t a single thing Lil Yachty’s doing that someone else isn't doing better, and in richer details. On Lil Boat, his debut mixtape, he makes a grating mess of these varying influences. The most obvious creative inspiration is iLoveMakonnen, which becomes especially clear on "Good Day," with its creaky falsetto and warbling melody. But Makonnen brings warmth and a feeling of ease to his tracks, while Yachty is constantly straining, as if just getting the words out of his mouth is a struggle. His rapping is jerky and his voice is so flat that Auto-Tune itself seems to buckle under the weight.
Yachty’s main selling point is "fun." This is all supposed to seem easy and unbothered, and it does on cheery tunes like “Wanna Be Us” and “Run/Running.” But everything feels unfinished or undercooked—a handful of songs are just a single verse and a hook, with no clear relationship between the two. So a song like "Not My Bro" opens with a bang and then shrinks back into nothing, a series of pitchy, singsongy whines. It's a lot of things —irritating, boring —but "fun" isn't one of them.
Yachty’s simplicity works in his favor when it comes to catchy hooks. On the better songs here, he sings/raps over bubbly, retro N64-sounding productions (mostly produced by Burberry Perry) that convey childlike wonder and amusement. But the hooks don’t do nearly enough to balance out Yachty’s painful shrieks, and many of his ideas aren’t just basic, they’re sloppily executed. Attempting to form a working model out of the flotsam of the moment is a fool’s errand. But what else is to be expected of a prisoner of shifting tides?


Damon Albarn's latest extra-curricular project is a supergroup featuring Paul Simonon (the Clash), Simon Tong (the Verve), and legendary Afrobeat percussionist Tony Allen. Together, the quartet create a downcast set of politcally aware songs that reflects the mood of life in the UK during wartime.

The Good, the Bad & the Queen: The Good, the Bad & the Queen

The Good, the Bad & the Queen

Damon Albarn has been branded a dictator, a dilettante, even a bit daft. But to be fair, the guy's biggest mistake since entering the post-Blur era has been his failure to recognize it as the post-Blur era. So even as he globetrots to Mali or grooves in Gorillaz, everything Albarn does feels a little bit like a side project, which unfortunately casts his often quite good music as an afterthought rather than the real deal.
If perception is such a big part of the game, though, then Albarn has stacked things in his favor with the Good, the Bad & the Queen-- another name, another band, this one with something for nearly everyone because it features someone for nearly everyone. On bass, Clash veteran Paul Simonon. On guitar, Simon Tong, late of the Verve. On drums, the unimpeachable Afrobeat master Tony Allen. Behind the boards, somewhere, the ubiquitous, beloved Danger Mouse. And Albarn himself on top, his ego and voice the would-be X-factor that ties these disparate kindred souls together.
A name like the Good, the Bad & the Queen, awkward though it may be, implies a certain degree of fun to be had, and on its face you'd think the all-star cast would cinch it, but that's not what Commander Albarn and crew are up to. Feel Bad, Inc. would be a more appropriate moniker for this moody and often dreary outfit. To call the doom-laden tracks on the self-titled disc downbeat would be an understatement. Downtrodden is more like it, as Albarn has (subversively? deviously? deliriously?) instructed or encouraged these purveyors of pulsating grooves to slow things down to a narcotic crawl for most of the record's duration. The results are cohesive almost by default, considering how monochromatic the bulk of the disc comes off. Yet monochrome by design isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially when you're out to challenge rather than entertain.
No doubt, it's risky business to follow Gorillaz's well-selling and critically lauded Demon Days with music designed to move you emotionally rather than physically. An undercurrent of dissatisfaction courses through The Good, the Bad & the Queen, with a mumbly Albarn forcing you to lean deep into the murk to decipher his downer words. "History Song" sets the mood, opening with a simple acoustic guitar motif that's soon fleshed out-- barely-- by the submarine bass, haunted backing vocals, and a surprisingly restrained Allen skittering along. "80s Life" throws in rudimentary piano. And for the most part, back and forth the tracks go, reveling in simplicity despite the surplus of talented contributors, never once shaking free of the self-imposed shackles. Even the melodies sound intuitive and unfinished, as if Albarn didn't feel the need to elaborate on whatever spare demos he unearthed that gave birth to this album.
If there's a direct musical antecedent to Albarn mood music of this bent it's the early Blur track "Sing" (most prominently enlisted on the Trainspotting soundtrack), albeit bolstered by Simonon's dubby throb and set on the same paranoid, post-apocalyptic landscape of the two Gorillaz discs. Likewise, "The Northern Whale" and "The Bunting Song" are as prototypically, provincially English as anything by Blur as well, but they sound like sad, elegiac celebrations of what once was rather than what is, reminiscent in mood of Parklife's "This Is a Low". "The medicine man is here 24-7/ You can get it fast in Armageddon," moans Albarn in the first single "Herculean". "Everyone is on their way to Heaven, slowly." It's like his version of the simultaneously pre- and post-apocalyptic Children of Men-- contemporary malaise and moral decay recast ominously as science fiction.
And what's got Albarn down? Why, war of course. War, or reference to war, permeates or pops up in half the tracks-- "Nature Springs", "Behind the Sun", "Green Fields", "80s Life", "Kingdom of Doom"-- with war's horrors and aftermath alluded to in the rest. No specific war, per se, though one may infer Albarn's disagreement with the engagement in Iraq looms large. Only as presented here, the battle already sounds lost, the sound of a would-be revolutionary or freedom fighter giving up without a fight, weary with resignation as he digs yet another row of graves. "I don't want to live a war/ That's got no end in our time," goes a line in "80s Life", as hopeless a confession as one might hear.
No wonder the disc never really springs to life until "Three Changes", 10 songs in, though lyrically the song remains the same: "Today is dull and mild/ On a stroppy little island/ Of mixed up people" sounds like a mash-up of the weather report and editorial page.
Yet despite the relentless, beautiful gloom, as the concluding title track devolves into a noisy art-glam implosion it does feel like the end of a journey has been reached. But where have we been? And what did we learn along the way? That the world's in a bad place, of course. And Albarn's here to rub your face in it until that sinks in.