Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the Meat Puppets’ 1984 album, a sun-baked, country-fried, acid-addled cowpunk album that could have come from nowhere else but the Arizona desert.

Meat Puppets II

On July 8, 1976, a Grumman Goose seaplane refueled at Red Lake, Ontario on its way to the Hudson Bay. The aircraft had trouble staying in the air with the extra fuel—on board were also five people, ten 50-gallon tanks of propane, and a substantial amount of sports fishing equipment. Then, south of Churchill, Manitoba, the left engine stalled. Too heavy to fly with one motor, the plane dropped out of the sky. The wings were cleaved off and the tail twisted upward as it plowed 100 yards through a forest. The pilot broke his knee, but the passengers remained, miraculously, unhurt; they all fled the plane at once, as it now contained a cocktail of propane and gasoline that had been very thoroughly shaken. One of the passengers, a 17-year-old Curt Kirkwood, volunteered to walk to Churchill for help.
During that walk, Kirkwood made a decision: He was never going to do anything that he didn’t want to do. What he wanted to do was play guitar in a rock’n’roll band and stay perpetually high. And so he worked hard to make his way from a solidly middle-class upbringing to the margins of society. After graduating from a private Jesuit high school, he dropped out of a private Jesuit university. Then he dropped out of a public university. Then he moved back home to Phoenix, Arizona and worked a series of odd jobs—bussing tables, mowing lawns, driving buses. He quit those one by one, too. Eventually, just as he intended, music was the only avenue left open to him.
Kirkwood formed the Meat Puppets in 1980 with his younger brother Cris, an inventive bassist with an incurable coattails complex, and their friend Derrick Bostrom, a drummer who steered the band toward punk rock with his collection of hardcore 7-inches from the burgeoning Los Angeles scene. But the trio’s tastes proved too wide-ranging for the strictly policed boundaries of hardcore; they were just as likely to listen to the Grateful Dead or Lynyrd Skynyrd, Petula Clark or George Jones, Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart. They bonded over a love of drawing, filling thousands of pages with doodles inspired by Francis Picabia and Vincent van Gogh, Jack Kirby and Walt Disney. They also bonded over drugs, fueling their shared “trip” with mountains of weed, acid, and MDMA.
By the early ’80s, the tenets of hardcore had calcified into a strict code of conduct, with pummeling guitars, slam dancing, and shaved heads all de rigueur. On the underground punk circuit, the Meat Puppets’ long hair and psychedelic jamming were widely disdained. It was only a matter of time before the band’s volatile mix of influences would breach containment on Meat Puppets II, a sun-baked, country-fried, acid-addled cowpunk album that could have come from nowhere else but the Arizona desert. With its release in 1984, the Puppets proved that hardcore’s independent network of bands, labels, and venues could be harnessed for much stranger deeds.
Chances are that if you listened to college radio as it transformed into alternative rock in the late ’80s, your favorite band’s favorite record was Meat Puppets II. The album earned the respect of contemporaries like R.E.M., Violent Femmes, and Melvins, but it inspired awe in younger acts. Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil speaks of II in reverent tones; Lou Barlow has called it a “blueprint” for Dinosaur Jr. Of course, the Puppets’ most consequential fan would be Kurt Cobain, who invited the band to play three songs from II on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York. After that performance, the Meat Puppets would forever be linked to the grunge movement and cited as the primary influence of its tragic figurehead. Yet the Meat Puppets always lagged behind, even on the trail they helped to blaze. It took 10 years for them to catch up to the success of the bands they’d influenced with II; in the meantime, they labored away in the underground as their peers signed to major labels. Finally, caught in the whirlwind of Nirvana’s rise to superstardom, the Puppets experienced their own brief moment in the sun—only to crash down again.
Phoenix in the early ’80s was home to a tumultuous punk scene centered around Madison Square Garden, a dilapidated wrestling ring in the bad part of town. Its denizens made the Meat Puppets look conventional: Frank Discussion, lead singer of the Feederz, was a follower of Situationist philosophy known for killing rats onstage. Killer Pussy’s Lucy LaMode threw dead fish at her audience as she sang songs like “Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage.” JFA, or Jodie Foster’s Army, was formed just a few weeks after John Hinckley Jr. tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan to impress the actress—the group’s name was a dark bit of satire from a band whose singer was only 14 years old. The Puppets reveled in this chaos even as they sought to branch out from the local scene. “There was people in Phoenix before us that influenced us, that never made it out,” Curt would later say on a New York public access show. “We’re the first band that got outta there.”
They began sending out recordings, making connections in the L.A. punk scene that had inspired them. The song “Meat Puppets” first appeared on a Los Angeles Free Music Society cassette, and then “H-Elenore” became the only track from an Arizona band on the SoCal punk compilation Keats Rides a Harley. The L.A. band Monitor invited the Puppets to record a song for their debut album in exchange for some studio time, which they used to produce the In a Car EP, five tracks of red-hot hardcore that scream by in as many minutes. These early songs outpaced even the fastest bands in Los Angeles. “We were gaining fans out there, because I guess we could play fast and were totally insane,” Curt told journalist Greg Prato. “We had developed this way of playing a lot faster than most of the punk rock.”
The Puppets’ technical precision and lunatic live shows grabbed the attention of Joe Carducci and Greg Ginn at SST Records, home to an increasingly diverse stable of underground DIY bands including Black Flag, Minutemen, Saccharine Trust, and Hüsker Dü. Ginn, SST founder and Black Flag guitarist, asked them to record their debut for the label, leading to a long and contentious relationship. The Puppets recorded the self-titled album over a three-day acid bender on Santa Monica Boulevard. This was a looser and more varied outing, featuring roaming psychedelic detours as well as hyper-focused hardcore. It was also their first recording to hint at their desert origins through covers of Western hits like the Sons of the Pioneers’ “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and Doc Watson’s “Walking Boss.” The Puppets’ version of the former is a piss-taking parody with bratty, mocking vocals, but “Walking Boss,” an indignant workers-rights song, is played straight, making plain the band’s sincere debt to folk and country.
But between their debut and Meat Puppets II there’s a rift the size of the Grand Canyon. Ask each member to explain the band’s sudden evolution and you’ll get three different answers. Bostrom told Carducci that “from the beginning of the band Curt and Cris could play anything, and now that he also could play anything they were no longer a punk band.” Cris demurred, telling Matthew Smith-Lahrman that “to us there wasn’t that big of a shift between Meat Puppets I and Meat Puppets II.” For Curt, though, it was simple: “Because I wrote it, and Cris and Derrick wrote most of the first one!”
The shift in songwriting duties goes a long way toward explaining the Western-gothic tone that permeates II. Explaining how exactly Curt wrote such compellingly oblique poetry on his first set of songs is more difficult. The drugs certainly helped. Two of the album’s best tracks, “Lake of Fire” and the instrumental “Magic Toy Missing,” were written during an acid trip while Curt’s friends were at a Halloween party. “‘Lake of Fire’ was kind of like, ‘Oh, the bad people! They're out tonight—look, it’s Frankenstein and the Mummy!’” he told Prato. “‘Magic Toy Missing’ was from looking at the moon and it was making a kaleidoscope happen, when you’re tripped out like that. I tried to make a musical version of the Spirograph sort of thing that the moon was doing. I wrote them both in about 20 minutes.”
But any attempt to write off Curt’s songs as the product of an altered state only tells half the story. He drew on a language of religious fervor that was deep-seated and purely American:
Where do bad folks go when they die?
They don’t go to heaven where the angels fly
They go to the lake of fire and fry
Won’t see ’em again till the Fourth of July
Now people cry and people moan
Look for a dry place to call their home
Try and find someplace to rest their bones
Before the angels and the devils fight to make them their own
The drama of perdition is painted with such simplicity that it seems cribbed from a children’s rhyme, the Book of Revelation compressed into a two-minute sketch.
Curt constructs a new character for II: the slacker-prophet, who, like an omniscient desert flâneur, observes everything that happens from his position of relative idleness. “Plateau” describes striving toward the afterlife as scaling a grand plateau where “holy ghosts and talk show hosts are planted in the sand/To beautify the foothills and shake the many hands.” But our narrator remains unbothered; he knows that “there’s nothing on the top but a bucket and a mop/And an illustrated book about birds,” nothing to meet the newly deceased at their goal other than mundanity. These songs seem like they’ve always existed, like they’ve been channeled from some hymnal lost and forgotten in the sand. But Curt, when pressed, will pause and shrug and say it’s “probably just desert stuff.”
Expressing these strange allegories of doomed America required something new of Curt. Now that he’d written these haunted honky-tonk songs, he dropped his hardcore screaming and adopted a vocal style somewhere between a bored drawl and a strained caterwaul. It also required buy-in from his bandmates, who he recalls as having to be convinced of the Puppets’ country pivot. But Cris and Bostrom didn’t seem to mind. In fact they savored the opportunity to get high—this time the drug of choice was MDMA, scored off an ASU chemistry prof and gulped down in double-locked capsules—and play like their heroes. Bostrom loosened up and played simpler, more expressive drums like his idols Ringo Starr and Keith Moon, while Cris filled up the newly created space with busy, percolating bass lines inspired by Phil Lesh. These were not trendy names in Los Angeles’ punk scene in 1983, but the Puppets embraced their most unfashionable impulses, sticking up for the mainstream yet somehow becoming outsiders even to the outsiders.
The Puppets didn’t immediately reveal their new direction on II. Album opener “Split Myself in Two” could pass as a hardcore song, maybe, with all three Puppets racing each other to the end until they are overtaken by the washes of distortion pouring out of Curt’s guitar. Except that the lyrics give the lie to any punk rock posturing: For those paying attention, the song serves as the introduction to Curt’s mystical main character, who sells his soul for “the card that said I never would fall.” For the rest of the song, and the rest of the album, he’s in a panic about the return of the devil, who “said I’m leaving now but I want what you owe me/I’ll be back in a little while.” Similar paranoid encounters litter the album, as if the singer is on the run across a degraded West that, despite its scope, is still claustrophobic and mean.
“Lost” finds him on the highway in search of a safe haven. It’s a road song worthy of Johnny Cash, but if he’s been everywhere, man, Curt has been nowhere, doing laps around the desert. A shuffling beat and a walking bassline propel him forward, but he’s “lost on the freeway again/Looking for means to an end,” running out of favors and running out of friends. He does his best cowboy impression, complete with unhinged “Yahooo!,” and it’s almost believable; more authentic is his dexterously picked guitar solo, which has a twang more befitting the Grand Ole Opry than the Whisky. The inverse of this suffocating West is Curt’s inner world. “I can’t see the end of me,” he sings on “Oh, Me,” “My whole expanse I cannot see.” It’s a classic stoner conceit of glassy-eyed introspection, finding freedom in his mind as he’s caught wandering the arid plains.
Despite the freewheeling drug use, the Puppets were focused on what they knew would be their statement album. “We recorded it a lot more carefully,” Bostrom told Prato. “We sat down and tried to make the arrangements different, we worked more closely with [SST producer] Spot, chased more people out of the studio—it was just the three of us working intently.” They completed the record in May 1983, but their statement would be delayed. SST did not have the record mixed until November of that year, and it wasn’t released until April 1984, an eternity in the quickly evolving world of punk rock.
Still, II pissed off the punks. Playing these navel-gazing, shit-kicking songs on the hardcore circuit was never going to be easy, especially opening for Black Flag, who were a lightning rod for aggressively macho crowds. But the Puppets didn’t even try to meet them in the middle; if anything, they ran in the opposite direction. They treated their audiences to 15-minute-long Grateful Dead covers. They played selections from Elvis and the Beatles. They practiced their harmonizing with Everly Brothers tunes. In return they were spat at and physically threatened. Not to be intimidated, Curt and company would then scream obscenities and play sloppily on purpose. A portion of the audience would always stick it out anyway, drawn in by their audacity. As with the Replacements, the Puppets put on a good show even when they were bad.
The more pressing concern during the ’84 tour was the Puppets’ deteriorating relationship with SST. Despite a four-star review in Rolling Stone that called II “one of the funniest and most enjoyable albums of 1984,” the band could not find their record on shelves no matter where they went. Were copies sold out, or were they not being distributed at all? It was impossible to say, but after the delay in the album’s production, it was easy for the Puppets to sense that they were not a priority for their label. The root of the problem was a clash of cultures: Bostrom explained to Jim Ruland that touring with Black Flag was “grueling and authoritarian,” an exercise in rigor and discipline that epitomized the strict SST ethos.
Beginning with their next album, Up on the Sun, the Puppets began doing things their own way. They bought an RV and reached out to Frank Riley, who booked artists like Violent Femmes, the Replacements, and R.E.M., to schedule tours outside of the SST bubble. They invited Los Angeles Times music critic Robert Hilburn to Phoenix as part of a push for mainstream press. Their intentions were increasingly clear: They wanted to get signed to a major label. Yet in the second half of the ’80s, the work began to suffer. The critically lauded Up on the Sun was followed by a series of hit-or-miss records. “You get into a whole different level of slogging and careering, whereas nothing after Up on the Sun is nearly as brilliant,” Bostrum admitted to Prato. “You get this success and you want to take it further. The only direction that you think to go in is like, mainstream. We’re doing songs that are less quirky, with a greater attempt to replicate standard kind of pop sounds, and not having quite as much success with it.”
Meanwhile, their peers were leaving them behind. By 1990, the Replacements and Dinosaur Jr. had signed to Sire, Hüsker Dü and R.E.M. had signed to Warner Bros., and Sonic Youth had signed to Geffen. A possible deal with Atlantic for the Puppets’ sixth album Monsters was blocked by Ginn, leading to litigation on both sides. Finally, they signed to London Recordings for 1991’s Forbidden Places, which sold 60,000 copies—their biggest hit so far, but still far short of their ambitions.
Help came from an unlikely source. The Puppets learned they were favorites of grunge wunderkind Kurt Cobain through an interview in Spin; shortly thereafter, they were invited to open a leg of the In Utero tour (Cobain used the tour as a sort of showcase of his influences—other openers included the Boredoms, Half Japanese, and Butthole Surfers). Backstage at the Buffalo show, Cobain made an announcement: He had just signed on to play MTV Unplugged, and he wanted the Meat Puppets to play, too. The recording would be in less than two weeks.
It was a gesture of solidarity from the biggest rock star in the world. MTV wasn’t thrilled. They had imagined Cobain’s guest stars would be Eddie Vedder or Chris Cornell, not a pair of unknown brothers playing songs from a decade-old album. But on the night, the Kirkwoods were there, hiding behind matching shoulder-length, curly brown hair. Curt used a quarter to pluck Pat Smear’s red, white, and blue Buck Owens guitar while Cris borrowed Krist Novoselic’s acoustic bass. “That’s Curt, and that’s Cris,” Novoselic introduced them to the crowd. “No, that’s Kurt, and that’s Krist,” answered Cris. “No, I’m Thing 1, and that’s Thing 2,” Curt rejoined. The band, backed by Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl, played languid versions of “Plateau,” “Oh, Me,” and “Lake of Fire,” with Cobain swiveling in an office chair like a preoccupied child, his voice a softer take on Curt’s wild warble.
The performance garnered publicity on a level completely unprecedented for the band. After Cobain’s death by suicide the following April, MTV ran Unplugged on a loop. DGC released MTV Unplugged in New York in November 1994, giving the Puppets the unenviable fortune of being guest stars on a posthumous album, lauded as a favorite of the deceased. The material benefits were undeniable. The next Puppets album, Too High to Die, released in January 1994, was certified gold, selling more copies than all their other albums combined. But the band had trouble processing its sudden success and the tragic circumstances surrounding it. “At that fucking point in my life, for Kurt Cobain to come from out of nowhere… I mean, I had no fucking association with the guy, none whatsoever, until —BOOM!—there he was,” Curt told Option magazine in 1995. “When you’ve been dogged all your life, and all of a sudden some little champion comes through for you… I don’t know what to say. I wish my thoughts could come out more completely.”
The Meat Puppets had finally reached their peak, and on the other side was not a plateau but a cliff. During an arena tour with Stone Temple Pilots, Cris began using heroin, forming an addiction that quickly led to his ouster from the band. Tragedies piled up, including the deaths of his wife and one of his best friends. Meanwhile, Curt gamely kept on with different iterations of the Puppets and a short-lived supergroup, Eyes Adrift, with Novoselic. On the day after Christmas, 2003, Cris was arrested for attacking a security guard outside a post office in Phoenix; he was shot in the back during the confrontation. He went from the ICU to federal prison. Finally, after getting clean in prison, Cris reconnected with Curt and the Meat Puppets reunited (without Bostrom, who would eventually rejoin in 2018).
One of the highest-profile gigs for the reunited Puppets was All Tomorrow’s Parties 2008, where they were invited to play II in its entirety. The concert served as a long-delayed victory lap for the album that made their name. The Puppets still point to II as their defining moment: Bostrom said, “It will speak to people for the longest… It stands up in the pantheon of rock n’ roll in ways that the other records don’t.” It’s a strange and twisted monument, but out in the desert, it casts a long shadow.


Sofia Jensen’s gentle indie-folk debut is a portrait of growing up with soul-baring lyrics and occasional breakthroughs.

Practice

Sofia Jensen is singing about you. Probably not you, but “you,” as in the subject pronoun, present on all 10 songs of Practice, the debut album from Jensen’s indie-folk project Free Range. Jensen is an 18-year-old songwriter venturing into warmly lit acoustic territory after spending their adolescence exploring the electric guitar and fronting a rock band. With Free Range, they’ve created an outlet for looking inward, a space to reflect and digest after closing the book on childhood. When they take inventory of everything that’s changing around them, it’s enough to start furiously purging thoughts through the pen, but for Jensen—whether the subject is a friend, a family member, a former or present partner, or anything in between—there is no sufficient self-reflection without a whole lot of “you.”
There’s a real sun-setting-on-summer picture that comes into focus as Practice unfurls. Jensen sounds like the high school graduate who didn’t graduate so much as survive, with joviality all but flattened and self-assurance just starting to crystallize. The shift from electric to acoustic makes sense for a songwriter who also seems to be discovering that it’s easier to find footing in peace and quiet: “I asked if we could go up to the countryside/Where I could feel time,” Jensen sings on “Free Range,” a slowly ascending mountain hike of a song that exemplifies the band’s innately unrushed disposition. On Practice, bassist Bailey Minzenberger and drummer and producer Jack Henry handle Jensen’s fragile compositions with appropriately gentle hands, keeping to a softwood framework built from snare brushes and acoustic chords that wouldn’t translate any worse in a living room than on a stage.
Jensen’s voice stays in a mid-range octave with a slightly wounded creakiness. When the band finds its own character, as they do on “Free Range” and the slide-guitar-touched opener “Want to Know,” an alchemy occurs that emboldens Jensen, their openness inspiring the supporting players to open their own doors as well. But when the arrangements are more formulaic, such as on the rocking-chair-like “For Me to Find,” Jensen seems timid, as if passing the day beneath a comfortable security blanket of folky sounds. Although they don’t often feel particularly complex or ambitious, the song structures tend to serve as soft, functional landing pads for the soul-baring lyrics. They tie together Jensen’s abundant internal monologues and dialogues as a neutral rug might a colorful room.
One tune in particular stands clearly above the field. “Growing Away,” which was fittingly the last track that Jensen wrote for the album, is a fine-tuned breakthrough from start to finish, the type of song where you can hear the level-up as it’s happening. Jensen gets as real as ever, reflecting on getting sober and embracing lucidity through the pain of atrophy. The band lifts and illuminates them with precise readings, pulling back at just the right moments to shine more light on the best lines and a perfectly placed electric guitar solo. Every melodic turn is unexpected yet faithful, every rhyme clever without sacrificing sincerity, no crack in Jensen’s voice gratuitous, no harmony unproductive. For Jensen, 90 percent of growing up might be learning how to let go, but if the other 10 percent feels like this, then bring it on.


Dave Hartley’s latest album is his most ambitious record yet, one that takes him out of his bedroom and places him out on the open road with deep shades of mysterious Laurel Canyon folk-rock.

Nightlands: I Can Feel the Night Around Me

I Can Feel the Night Around Me

Dave Hartley pinpointed the inspiration for his Nightlands project with the title of a 2012 song: “I Fell in Love With a Feeling.” Hartley—also the bassist for the War on Drugs—makes records that embrace the most atmospheric, ephemeral elements of pop and soft rock. Reverb-coated harmonies, gentle rhythms, and major-key melodies permeate his work, riding high on good vibes without digging for much substance beneath it. After all, his songs suggests, the longer you think about what you’re feeling, the less you’re really feeling it. Hartley’s most memorable recordings, like “I Fell in Love With a Feeling,” aim for a sense of cozy familiarity over any kind of innovation—like Dirty Beaches if they’d been into Bread instead of Suicide.
I Can Feel the Night Around Me is Hartley’s most ambitious record yet, one that takes him out of his bedroom and places him out on the open road. On its best songs, he trades his breezy pop chops for earnest, soul-seeking Americana, like on “Lost Moon”—a swirling ballad that attributes a sense of playfulness to the assumed textures of folk music. Over starry synths and acoustic guitars, Hartley rides a high, lonesome sound that mimics the whine of a pedal steel before twisting into something more like an air horn. Like the best folk music, it’s mysterious and open-ended, comfortable and enveloping.
The following track, “Depending on You,” is another highlight, with a chorus that floats like a band of helium balloons untethering toward the sky. During this opening stretch of songs, Hartley’s music is distinctive and confident, but his lyrics still feel like placeholders. Days go by, yellow moons turn blue, horizons fade. His penchant for layering his voice in tight ribbons of harmony is a pleasant sound, but it depletes most of his sentiments of their emotional resonance. On “Easy Does It,” he lingers on some inner demons but struggles to make them seem real. “There’s a shadow man living inside of me,” he sings, “He’s been there since the day I was born.” Instead of elaborating, however, Hartley just wraps things up with a multi-layered sigh and moves on to the chorus.
I Can Feel the Night Around Me centers on moving on, whether that means hitting the highway or breezing through its 41-minute runtime before anything can harsh its mellow. After a faithful cover of Phil Spector and Gerry Goffin’s “Only You Know,” Hartley ditches most of the Laurel Canyon charm and retreats to his more characteristic, carefree chillwave. The highlights that appear in the second half—like the motion-sick power-pop of “Fear of Flying” or the drowsy bossa nova of “Moonbathin”—are also the record’s most seamless transitions to amiable background music, something to help clear your mind after a stressful day. “I just want to hear you say, ‘Easy does it,’” Hartley sings repeatedly in a track of the same name, and it’s one of the only sentiments here that he really sells. For anyone looking to bask in that simple pleasure with him, Nightlands creates a space where you can feel it all around.


Working without his longtime collaborator Scott Hirsch, M.C. Taylor enlists guests Jenny Lewis and Aaron Dessner as he explores the heaviest questions and realizes there are no answers.

Hiss Golden Messenger: Terms of Surrender

Terms of Surrender

The phrase “terms of surrender” implies defeat, but surrender can mean also liberation. On his fourth album for Merge Records, Hiss Golden Messenger’s M.C. Taylor splits the difference between the two meanings of the phrase as he tries to make sense of his own increasingly complicated life. Working within his established roots-rock sound, he explores the heaviest questions—how to be an artist, a parent, a citizen—and realizes that there may be fewer and fewer answers as the years go by.
To do so, he enlists two big-name indie-rock guests: the National’s Aaron Dessner contributes guitar and piano, and Jenny Lewis sings backing vocals. But a quieter fact of Terms of Surrender is that the album has no involvement from Scott Hirsch. A longtime collaborator going back to pre-Hiss bands the Court & Spark and Ex Ignota, Hirsch has produced, engineered, and/or played on almost every Hiss Golden Messenger album. His unusual bass patterns helped lock the band into its distinct grooves; his production felt spacious without being sparse. Without him, an intangible element of Hiss’ “secret sauce” has disappeared.
Instead, Brad Cook—former Megafaun bassist and collaborator with acts like Bon Iver, Whitney, and Kevin Morby—handles both bass and production, and fills the frame with ill-fitting sounds as if over-compensating. The album isn’t a mess, per se, but it is cluttered, and it often feels like Cook should’ve adhered to Coco Chanel’s rule of removing one thing before leaving the house. There are just too many elements competing for space, and none of them seem to agree which is the star.
Hiss Golden Messenger have dipped into dub textures before (2009’s “O Nathaniel,” 2012’s “Born on a Crescent Moon”) and they do so again on Surrender’s “Old Enough to Wonder Why (East Side—West Side).” But then tinny banjo plunks appear like gnats, disrupting the wide-open sense of space. Taylor’s voice, meanwhile, feels squished among layers of guitars, keys, and synths. At times, it’s difficult to make out what he’s singing—a shame, as Taylor has a knack for examining existential anxiety with honesty and empathy. On the sweeping opener “I Need a Teacher,” Taylor yearns for “beauty in the broken American moment.” With “Happy Birthday Baby,” a tender song written for his young daughter, he hopes she’ll think better of him than he does of himself.
But the arrangements of songs like “Down at the Uptown” and “Katy (You Don’t Have to Be Good Yet)” feel more in service to broad-strokes Dead-and-Dylan worship than to Taylor’s songwriting. A striking line like, “I’m a little bit lost and a whole lot of things you can’t hang with” gets lost in the anodyne folk-rock mix. Sometimes, Taylor’s lyrics seem to arrive from an entirely different record, one that’s better and more focused. His best songs put his ruminations on spirituality, family, loneliness, and humanity at the center, but here he sounds like the only thing he’s surrendered is his spotlight.

Buy: Rough Trade
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In contrast with its American and British counterparts, the set positions Italian house as almost exclusively euphoric, a perfect sound to emanate from a land of chiseled Adonises and the Tuscan sun.

Various Artists: Welcome to Paradise: Italian Dream House 1989-93

In the summer of 1989, Massimino Lippoli, Angelino Albanese, Andrea Gemolotto, and Claudio Collino made a dance track that sampled a German record (Manuel Göttsching’s 1984 proto-techno masterpiece E2-E4), got a remix from a Detroit legend (Derrick May), gave the track a Spanish title (“Sueño Latino”), and made it into a big hit in Ibiza. Few of its fans could trace the track back to its originating country, which wasn’t a glitch so much as a feature of Italian dance music of that particular era, expertly mimicking sounds and trends from elsewhere while seeming to come from—if not nowhere—then from some idealized land. In compiling Welcome to Paradise: Italian Dream House 1989-93, a twenty-two track collection of this rather fruitful five-year-period, Dutch DJ/producer Young Marco searches for a golden thread connecting them all, a defining characteristic of “Italian dream house.” Of late, it’s appeared to influence a new generation of producers. I can hear it of late in Anthony Naples’ forthcoming “Sky Flowers,” on the Early Sounds roster and the re-booted Rome imprint, Vibraphone Records.
American house music has its roots in resistance and empowerment for its queer and minority cultures and the British variant that soon followed reveled in a darker, druggier edge. Yet Italian house music, as Young Marco configures it here, is almost exclusively euphoric, the perfect sound to emanate from a land of chiseled Adonises, columnated ruins, and the Tuscan sun. Not a care from this earthly realm arises here. Almost every selection here can trace its lineage back to Larry Levan’s Paradise Garage and the evocative house productions rendered by Larry Heard (as well as the house music beginning to emanate from New Jersey), with Open Spaces’ flickering “Sunrise Paradise Garage” being a particularly luminous example, a perfect meld between dark room deep house and sun-kissed Balearic.
For a country whose greatest literary work describes *paradiso *in precise detail, such beauty is a given. And for most Italians, utopia connotes the unblemished beauty of Botticelli’s Primavera and almost every track here showcases a chord progression, an airy atmosphere, a heavenly choir of voices, or a breathless drum machine build that suggests dance music perfection. Edenic ambience wafts in on K2’s “In My Garden” and a gurgling river and that telltale loon sample flow throughout the beatific build of Last Rhythm’s “Last Rhythm (Ambient Mix).”
On the set opener, Key Tronics Ensemble’s “Calypso Of House (Paradise Mix)” is nine dreamy minutes that encapsulate every sound to come: ever-ascendant house piano, quickening house rhythms, heaving synth strings, gauzy ambience that’s revealed once the beat drops out, and a rambunctious vocal trill that punctuates the track. Even a track entitled “Paranoia” (credited to Don Pablo’s Animals, who boast no less than five singles with the word “Ibiza” in them) feels anything but.
The second volume highlights Italian dream house’s primary obsessions. Or, as two words whispered put it, “sex” and “spirit.” Not to be confused with the progressive house legend, Sasha’s sublime “A Key to Heaven for a Heavenly Trance” highlights the set, taking a pattern of tribal drums, divine sweeps of keys, and a burbling synth line that resembles “Voodoo Ray.” Similarly, while Leo Anibaldi would make his name doing dark, acid-tinged techno through the rest of the ’90s and into the 21st century, his submission “Elements” (from 1991) shows off a lush side of his productions that he would soon turn away from. Misty new age atmospheres and elegant piano lines coupled with a tough beat to make a deep house beauty.
So rich and creamy is each track here that listening straight through both sets feels almost too decadent, akin to gorging on gelato every day. There are no earthly cares to be found within the house music here, making for a sense of release even amid the spiritual release that such music originally brought its audience. Even the utterance of the word “problem” on Now Now Now’s track of the same name gets immediately swaddled in heavenly voices. It’s as if one is up on a cloud, now looking down on such difficulties of the world.


Listening to the newly expanded and finally-back-in-print edition of Jawbreaker's Dear You felt like discovering that once upon a ...

Dear You [Expanded Edition]

Listening to the newly expanded and finally-back-in-print edition of Jawbreaker's Dear You felt like discovering that once upon a time I was a giant asshole. Somewhere between teendom and quasi-adulthood, Dear You had been my jam of choice, a big slab of music as irrationally depressed and eager to rock as I was. After listening to it for days and nights and weeks, I began to work backward through the band's catalog. As these albums took prominence, Dear You dropped out of rotation, and eventually wound up on some nameless secondhand store's shelf to inflict its half-life of misery on someone else.
Coming off the yelping enthusiasm of Unfun, Bivouac, and the stellar 24 Hour Revenge Therapy-- whose songs argued the politics of being a legitimate punk-- Jawbreaker disappointed their indie-thrall fanbase by signing to Geffen for a one-million-dollar, three-album contract, and far worse, selling out their music: Dear You was a slick symphony of guitar and singer Blake Schwarzenbach's soft, post-surgical vocals.
Dear You is emo in denial; a tight-sweatered cry of loneliness, heartbreak, and wallowing in sadness that apes the band's punk roots. "Sluttering" and "Fireman" are love-as-revenge songs in the key of Sylvia Plath. "Jet Black", a paean to alienation, opens and closes with Christopher Walken's car crash monologue from Annie Hall, converting the clip's original surrealistic humor into more grist for the whiny mill. And while these songs admittedly held fast to Jawbreaker's melodic chops, it's clear the band had dulled their edge to appeal to the radio-friendly commercial punk explosion that dominated the mid-90s airwaves.
The problem with Dear You wasn't Jawbreaker's decision to renege on their long-standing anti-major-label policy, but that the album, plainly, is a dramatic step down in quality from Revenge Therapy, despite the fact that it took much longer to record. Songs often wander too long, and their lyrics strain for depth in pursuit of the album's overall sad-sack mood. Unlike Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, whose fatalistic tone ends at a cul-de-sac into rebirth, or Lou Reed's unapologetically despairing Berlin, Dear You waffles between manic and depressive, unsure of which it wants to be.
Tracks like "Chemistry", "Save Your Generation" and "Bad Scene, Everyone's Fault" do manage to inject a small dose of joy into the proceedings, but are obscured by the frantically waving arms of a drowning band. Even "Basilica", a seemingly redemptive number with a more positive outlook, meanders, droning and repeating its vaguely threatening request, "I'm asking you on a date for the rest of your life." That Dear You killed Jawbreaker is no surprise, given how little it sold by major-league standards, and how divisively fans reacted to it. The question is: What happened to the band that merged ragged perfectionism with lyrics that read like fiction?
This expanded edition offers no answers. No new ground is covered here for fans of the original release, though the inclusion of "Sister" and the Psychedelic Furs cover "Into You Like a Train" are quick and dirty little gems. The eventually tiresome "Friendly Fire" is as close to a transition between Revenge Therapy and Dear You as you're likely to find, but are also available on the band's somewhat more worthwhile Etc. collection. Only the throwaway "Shirt" has been previously unissued, and it, along with a baffling, unnecessary remake of "Boxcar", illustrates that the disintegration of Jawbreaker was not worth mourning, especially with so many bands gladly assuming their former position in the underground.


On her second album, the New York pop songwriter broadens her sound without sacrificing brevity, fitting grander ideas into the same compact frame. It’s one of the best little pop albums of the year.

Janky Star

Grace Ives works on a miniature scale. The New York musician’s early releases include an album of chirping ringtones and a covers EP of children’s nursery rhymes. Built for simplicity and repetition, these were fertile proving grounds for the synthesizer enthusiast. Pounding with warped vocals and a buzzy bassline, “Row Row Row (Your Boat)” is transformed into something like an Arular outtake; electro-pop legend M.I.A. was, after all, the inspiration for Ives’ preferred synth, the Roland MC-505. Using only that groovebox, she wrote and produced the entirety of 2019’s 2nd, a collection of pocket-sized pop songs that packed girl-group harmonies, skittering drum-n-bass beats, and Daft Punk robotics into just 22 minutes. On Janky Star, Ives broadens her sound—adding guitar and piano, and layering her dynamic vocals—without sacrificing brevity, fitting grander ideas into the same compact frame. It’s one of the best little pop albums of the year.
On Janky Star, Ives searches for slowness and tranquility, not a small task for a musician who experiences “sensory overload” from any song over two minutes. But she sounds convincingly calm at a leisurely pace, starting from the opening synths, languid and aqueous, on “Isn’t It Lovely.” “You’re such a starry night baby/I can look up and relax,” she sings as a hypnotic mantra, like a spirit guide who’s still clinging to her own ego. “Lazy Day” slinks along an R&B groove like a CrazySexyCool B-side while she sings the praises of sobriety and the unhurried search for meaning. “Feels OK to repeat it,” she says, mindful of the pressure of constant forward momentum.
At other times, she gives in to her restless energy, like on the alt-pop romp “On the Ground.” But even here, the beat is deferential to her voice: “Hold it,” she commands, before a cascade of Omnichord-like synths kick in. But her best songs encompass both modes: “Loose,” the first single from Janky Star, starts with the familiar thuds and bleeps of her 505, her vocals syncopated like a cover of “It’s a Small World” performed in a SUNY Purchase basement. But things crack open on the chorus, her voice unspooling over breakbeats—“I’ve been loose/Every night,” she coos, snapping back to her animatronic posture after the chorus’s final directive: “Wind me tight.” The song calls back to “Mirror,” the stand out closer from 2nd, which similarly tempered the snap of her sequencer with stoned, sleepy vocals.
Her voice—versatile, elastic—bends into every role in her ever-expanding one-woman show: the nostalgic romantic watching sunsets and singing wispy falsettos on “Lullaby,” the melodramatic Valley Girl (“Like, oh my god”) on “Loose.” Justin Raisen, Janky Star’s co-producer, provides a richer backdrop for her flexible vocals, pushing beyond her Roland to include guitar, piano, and percussion. Raisen, who helped craft the sounds of Sky Ferreira, Kim Gordon, Yves Tumor, and Charli XCX, brings a similar controlled chaos to the album. “Burn Bridges” crams a bevy of styles into exactly two minutes—glimmering tro-house beats, freestyle freakouts, larger-than-life prog rock percussion—at times switching between the two within the same verse. On “Shelly,” Raisen builds out a power-pop paradise with a circular guitar groove, building from a central riff like the Go-Gos with a loop pedal. Raisen, the self-proclaimed “Dr. Dre of trash,” is a natural fit for Ives’ experimental pop, tilting the balance off-kilter with a cartoonish drum fill or helium-high backing vocals whenever things veer towards conventional pop structures.
The diversity of styles can at times make for a disjointed listen, but at 10 songs in just under 30 minutes, never a boring one. Ives writes to the mold shaped by the production style on each track; the album feels more like a collection of small, discrete episodes, rather than one serialized narrative. There’s the raspy rocker on “Shelly,” who frequents diners and has a thing for red lip liner. “I wanna 1-2-3-4-5 her,” she sings about the eponymous apple of her eye with the giddy energy of Rick Springfield or Tommy Tutone. And “Burn Bridges” isn’t just a pop song, but a song about pop. She sings the praises of the 109 organ and writes about a love song that sounds like “‘White Iverson’ but with the toms on the one” (followed by a Phil Collins–esque, tom-heavy fill). On “Back in LA,” she’s in the thrall of a woman on the opposite coast: “She turns right on red,” she sighs, a shock to any native New Yorker.
Janky Star is like a pop-up book, each song springing into a self-contained life and then winding down as quickly as it began. But there’s a recurring motif across the album, too—yearning for a life worth living, and for the stillness needed to appreciate that life; for all she’s claimed she had “f-figured out” on 2nd, she’s still searching for self-acceptance. “What a mess, what a lovely mess,” she sings on “Lullaby,” not mad, but reflective. “It’s nothing to be sad about/It’s just something I’ve been thinking about.” Ives might not be on the precipice of superstardom, but she is, in her own way, an embodiment of her album’s title: a janky star, rough around the edges but still gleaming with an irrepressible light.


Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward refine and improve their sound, creating a sequel that actually improves on the original.

Volume Two

It's really not supposed to go this way. Actors from Eddie Murphy to Don Johnson to Lindsay Lohan record albums so that we can laugh at their hubris and casually dismiss their efforts. The story is so common it's created a Hollywood archetype: the actor-turned-singer-turned-punchline. But Zooey Deschanel is rewriting the script. With She & Him's Volume One, her first collaboration with M. Ward, she proved that not only could she act, write songs, and sing, but she could do them all very well, with a sparkle of personality glinting in those big eyes and bigger voice.
Volume Two picks up almost exactly where Volume One left off, with Deschanel still playing a smart, sensitive young woman often on the unrequited end of love but never letting romantic disappointment get her down: "Sometimes lonely isn't sad," she declares on the stately opener "Thieves". She's still the headstrong heroine, though: "Why do I always want to sock it to you hard?" she wonders on "Over It Over Again", sounding as playfully frustrated as Loretta Lynn. And Ward remains content to cede her the spotlight, toiling behind the camera. He dresses her songs in deceptively simple SoCal folk rock, dusty cowboy-trail country music, and crisp Brill Building pop. The similarities to Volume One don't make Volume Two redundant, but reassuring: It's not typecasting if the role is this complex.
On the sequel, Deschanel seems more confident as a singer, songwriter, and vocal arranger. She still has more personality than range, but has learned to maneuver around the parts she can't nail in order to sell them. Transforming herself into her own version of the Watson Twins, Deschanel often backs up herself and channels 1960s country gold classics on the languid "Me and You" and the plaintive "Brand New Shoes", pointing to older styles but never sounding beholden to the past. Her ah-has and mm-hmms make her cover of Skeeter Davis' "Gonna Get Along Without You Now" sound impossibly perky, as if she's lighter for having dumped that creep, and on closer "If You Can't Sleep", Ward layers her humming into a gentle orchestra that add [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| s to the song's lullaby sweetness.
He has a lot of tricks like that up his sleeves. If Volume One seemed a bit compartmentalized, each song working one idea or genre, Volume Two sounds much more synthesized as Ward mixes so many styles into each song. It never plays like an M. Ward album, though, as he tailors the music to fit her deceptively simple songs. As Deschanel fashions a romantic metaphor out of the myth of Orpheus, Ward adds some Beach Boys orchestration to reinforce that sense of longing, that rolling snare suggesting a slow, painful look backwards. An unlikely protégé of Owen Bradley, Ward adds countrypolitan strings to many of these songs, but never crowds her vocals or steps on her lines. In fact, it's easy to forget he's even there, so that his verse on their cover of NRBQ's "Ridin' in My Car" has the force of a surprise cameo, turning the he-said/she-said story into a hipster Grease.
Even as they look to the past for inspiration-- specifically, to some never-was heyday of 60s radio-- they aren't making a period piece on Volume Two. What makes the album so distinctive isn't just the sound of her voice, the quality of her songwriting, or even the resourcefulness of his arrangements, but their joint insistence that these old sounds have as much to say nowadays as they ever did. In that regard, She & Him has given Deschanel her best role yet, one that shows off her charm and intelligence to best effect-- one that she is essentially writing for herself.


Carving out an intensely introspective space in the overlap between electronic and acoustic sounds, the Los Angeles trio’s third album traffics in melancholy and occasionally ecstatic moods.

Communicating

Listening to Hundred Waters can feel like climbing into bed and pulling the duvet over you like a protective shield. The Los Angeles trio’s intimate, intricate music is perfect for when you’re longing for a safe, cozy refuge: It has the power to transport the listener to a hermetic space where there’s magic in the air and normal rules don’t apply. Nicole Miglis sings in a serene murmur, melodies twist and turn, and the lines blur between electronic and acoustic sounds. Voices sound like machines and vice versa; the moon peeks out of the shadows and rings like a bell. Hundred Waters’ music is remarkable in part because of its intense introversion, so the title of their third album, Communicating, is unexpected. Miscommunicating would have been just as fitting: These songs explore the gaps and barriers that keep us from connecting with the people we love.
Much of Communicating rings with melancholy, though there’s no anger or anxious prickle to these songs—more like a dull, lingering ache, the kind you feel when you’ve left something unsaid and lost your chance to say it. Miglis’ voice is still frequently put to textural use: The midsection of the title track is overwhelmed by warped, wordless roaring, and on “Blanket Me,” she chants the titular phrase until the individual syllables melt into meaninglessness. But Communicating also features some of her most direct lyrics and singing to date, and much of the album will undoubtedly resonate with listeners struggling to make connections or find meaning in their lives, despite their best efforts. “Prison Guard” is a futile plea for emotional liberation set to a martial beat; begging a “great defender” for relief, all she can muster is, “This isn’t where I’m supposed to be.” She spends the gorgeous “Parade” wandering the streets, full of sorrow and desperate for some kind of purpose.
These songs don’t vary much in tone or tempo, but there’s a quiet flexibility to the band’s piano melodies. While the two notes hammering at the heart of “Prison Guard” throb like something out of Bing & Ruth’s catalog, “Parade” hews closer to stark takes on conventional pop—think of a cross between Fiona Apple and Imogen Heap. The latter approach is particularly satisfying, and it gives Hundred Waters room to embrace sturdier song structures without giving up much in terms of atmosphere. It only starts to falter with closer “Better,” which sounds a hair’s breadth away from anonymous “Grey’s Anatomy” soundtrack fodder.
A few songs express the album’s central themes—isolation, disconnection, existential doubt—in brighter, more propulsive ways, and it’s there that the album really shines. Lead single “Particle” is the only holdover from Currency, a stopgap EP released in May, and it’s also the only song on the album you might imagine hearing on the radio or a popular Spotify playlist. The elements that situate the song within today’s pop landscape—the kind of chipper, wordless hook you associate with the band’s label boss, a featherweight drop a few bars into the chorus—coexist peacefully with Miglis’ yearning for a partner who’s “drifting farther and farther away.” Near the song’s end, when she leaps into her upper register to howl, “I can’t hear you,” you’re hearing her at her most powerful.
“Particle” isn’t the only song on Communicating that benefits from a little extra energy. “At Home & In My Head” percolates until it explodes into a climax fueled by Zach Tetreault’s drumming; “Firelight” strikes a surprisingly optimistic note as it flips between a dreamy waltz and skyscraping digital shoegaze. And on the sparkling, shimmying outlier “Wave to Anchor,” the band opens up the throttle, digs into an honest-to-goodness 4/4 pulse, and puts its virtuosity to work in a song that builds to astronomical scale: splashy hi-hats, squealing feedback, a glowing key change—the whole nine yards. A glittering synth flies through the arrangement like a firefly with a jetpack. And while Miglis is still searching for some greater meaning—you can hear her repeatedly asking, “Who have I lived for?”—“Wave to Anchor” radiates the kind of joy and hope that are absent from much of Communicating. It’s a song that invites you to imagine what could happen if a band that has mastered cocooned whispers decided to throw back the covers and let the light in.


Good Sad Happy Bad toys with a warped minimalism that feels new for Micachu and the Shapes. The record feels intimate and casual, with soft, acoustic guitar and childlike keyboard arrangements. It is their least polished release, but even with the band’s music messily chopped, looped, and jangled, the emotional messages always ring clear.

Micachu and the Shapes: Good Sad Happy Bad

Good Sad Happy Bad

Micachu and the Shapes revel in making enjoyable noise. Since their relatively conventional-sounding art-pop debut Jewellery, the band has pushed their experimentation further every new release, from crafting homemade instruments to recording live arrangements alongside orchestras. And now, just a year after releasing her harrowing avant-garde score for the film Under the Skin, Mica Levi has returned to her band to release Good Sad Happy Bad.
Perhaps in the aftermath of composing a soundtrack for a major motion picture, Levi wanted to bring simplicity back to Micachu, as Good Sad Happy Bad toys with a warped minimalism that feels new even for this band. The record counteracts the fuzzy, almost punk rock energy of their last album Never, settling for soft, acoustic guitar and childlike keyboard arrangements. Even the production of the record is spare and unedited, with warbled vocals and frequent inclusions of studio chatter on songs like "Dreaming" and "Crushed".
The record feels intimate and casual in this unrefined state, but the line between relaxed and lazy is shaky on Good Sad Happy Bad. When all the tinker-toy elements align, it works beautifully, as on "L.A. Poison" with Levi singing softly about the loneliness of urban life over mechanically looped strumming guitar and a simple kick-drum. "Oh Baby" sounds like a murky, blues-leaning lullaby, as if its keyboards are being played underwater while Levi croons above them. But the off-key, off-tempo energy of tracks like "Hazes" and "Relaxing" feel thrown together and messy, even if it was purposeful.
The biggest shift here is to be found in Mica Levi’s voice, which is strained and echoed as she sings wearily about bad feelings. You can barely understand her at times, but Good Sad Happy Bad is fundamentally a gloomy self-help record, with its assurances delivered realistically. "It’s gonna be okay," Levi repeats in a chipper, sing-song voice at the end of "Sad". On "Thinking It" Raisa Khan relays how she wants to get better at working out and being healthier so she can enjoy her old age. On "Sea Air", all Levi wants to do is breathe in the ocean air because "all that crap means nothing to [her]."
Although Good Sad Happy Bad is certainly the band’s least polished-sounding record, the combination of the scattered arrangements and Levi’s ruminations on sadness shrewdly underline the topsy-turvy feeling suggested by the title. Even with the band’s music messily chopped, looped, and jangled, the emotional messages always ring clear. "It’s only suffering," Levi sings on "Suffering", her voice suddenly lilting the phrase as the song gains tighter, harder percussion and guitar as the song nears its end. "That keeps my conscious clean."


After a brief hiatus, the restlessly creative group returns with a compelling but disjointed record about self-fulfillment.

GINGER

The BROCKHAMPTON boys are looking for a way forward. After releasing four albums in quick succession and forcing out  their best rapper, Ameer Vann, when he was accused of sexual misconduct, the group experienced severe burnout and anxiety. So, they took a six-month hiatus to both regroup and disperse. Abstract put out a solo record and the band’s $15 million RCA deal ushered them out of their communal North Hollywood house and scattered them across Los Angeles; they now meet up at a central home studio, called the Creative House, to record. The album that came of all this upheaval is GINGER, a compelling but disjointed record loosely about self-fulfillment. Even the prettiest BROCKHAMPTON songs can feel cramped, but many of these songs, though each endowed with their little moments, are disorganized or inefficient.
GINGER was, somewhat oddly, born out of a burgeoning relationship between members of BROCKHAMPTON and the actor/performance artist/fledgling rapper Shia LaBeouf, who now leads a weekly group therapy session at Abstract’s place. As Abstract tells it, LaBeouf became something of a guiding light. “We want to make a summer album,” Abstract told GQ in June, a sentiment that has been confirmed by his group mates in recent days. He specified: “Feel-good. Not too sad and like, ‘Oh, our life sucks,’ just more like, ‘Just enjoy what’s in front of you.’”
It’s unclear whether that was a troll or a misunderstanding, but GINGER is not a feel-good summer album. There is little on this record that suggests enjoyment of anything. The mood can be boiled down to a dejected Joba verse on opener “No Halo”: “Been goin’ through it again/Been talkin’ to myself, wonderin’ who I am/Been thinkin’, I am better than him/In times like these, I just need to believe it’s all part of a plan/Lost a part of me, but I am still here.” Being here—present and accounted for, momentarily clear of the debilitating fog that is dysthymia, and usually in between traumas—is what classifies as a win on GINGER. The album is murky and often lovelorn. Pry open any verse and you’re likely to find a lyric about being neglected or counted out or abandoned at its center. It isn’t as pessimistic, jittery, or moody as iridescence but it’s still rather cheerless.
That cheerlessness isn’t a problem, in and of itself, but the writing gets bogged down by the narrow perspective. At the root, BROCKHAMPTON is a group of misfits explaining all the different ways they don’t fit in. That’s at least part of the appeal: they speak to many brands of loneliness. But they’d benefit a lot from, instead, figuring out what they have in common. This unwillingness to find some semblance of comfort in the bond they’ve made, to reconvene as an oddball in-group, feels like a huge source of their dysfunction as a unit. They are constantly trying to piece together broken personal histories amid massive success, like decorated detectives obsessing over an unsolvable cold case.
Romil, Jabari, and the rest of the BROCKHAMPTON production team keep the crew laced with weird and ear-bending beats that shift, split, or branch out enough to accommodate the myriad of performing styles. In the early stages of GINGER, things all click into place: the trilogy of haymakers at the outset—“No Halo,” “Sugar,” and “Boy Bye”—makes it seem like the crew has unlocked its full potential. The bristling cameo from UK rapper slowthai is a nice touch, too. But as the album wears on, things come undone and songs splinter into pieces.
When it comes to the BROCKHAMPTON creative process, the group has always had too many cooks in service of eclecticism. But there are moments on GINGER where it seems like each artist on a given track has their own song in mind. The title track is a broken array of vocal performances that nearly becomes grating. On “I Been Born Again,” a hookless parade of verses, the writing is cluttered and confused. Kevin used to be their star, his gravity pulling everyone into rotation around him. Even on the worst of the Saturation trilogy, there was a sense of alignment, if not continuity.
Just about everyone delivers a standout performance that’s striking at one point or another, and many members seem to sense that they’re growing (“My attention to detail is in scale with classic impressionists,” Dom McLennon raps on “If You Pray Right”). It’s just that they’re growing apart, at least musically. There is little here that suggests holism. They like to call themselves a boy band, but boy bands are, at the very least, in sync.


Recorded in Los Angeles, the songwriter and guitarist’s sixth solo album is ambitious yet effortless. Even his lead guitar seems almost to melt away into the delicate arrangements.

Other You

Steve Gunn had a note in his head, but his voice couldn’t find it. While tracking harmonies for Other You, his sixth solo album, he was struggling to hit his mark, so producer Rob Schnapf took a recording of Gunn’s voice and digitally shifted the pitch to match the intended note, then instructed him to sing along. The proper target in place, Gunn managed to join in with his digital simulacrum—the “other you” of the title. If this is starting to feel like a very neat metaphor, this idea of aligning yourself to who you can’t yet be and finding a way to get in tune with it until it stretches you into becoming that new thing—well, welcome to Steve Gunn’s L.A. record, baby.
Like the city in which it was recorded, Other You is a sprawling and decentralized tangle of ideas, people, sounds, and, yes, vibes, all of it lit in the merlot purples and maraschino reds and Pacific Ocean blues of a Southern California sunset. It’s the most ambitious album he’s ever made, and the first one in which his guitar-playing—a singular sound that typically draws together the hand-punched tin of old-timey rag with the needle-nose scribbling of Tom Verlaine—is largely undistinguished. Where on Gunn’s earlier albums the guitar functioned as an exceptionally well-honed vessel for his personality, both the delicacy of his arrangements and the calm clarity of his band on Other You make it feel as though that same personality has been distributed across the entire ensemble; even when it’s the lead instrument, Gunn’s guitar sometimes seems to melt away. As a result, Other You sounds unlike any previous Steve Gunn album, but it’s impossible to imagine it being made by anyone else.
Gunn has said that recording in L.A. gave him the space to try out new sounds and compositional approaches. That includes bringing in a number of guest artists who buy completely into his vision. Julianna Barwick’s vocals shine like a cold sun through the dust of “Good Wind,” a perfect complement to the resolute and earthy runs Gunn pulls from his acoustic guitar; alternating between a pair of notes so close she sounds like she’s flipping over a sheet of paper, her vocals are a dome under whose safety the song’s passages are able to thrive. While Gunn sings of “Leaning on the window, feeling more alive” in “Morning River,” Ben Boye turns the ends of the lines around with his piano, as if he’s holding the words up to study them in the light. Even the gorgeous ballad “Reflection” is streaked with a screaming handful of chords from Jerry Borgé’s synth.
Like a plane taking off, Gunn’s songs move at a rapid horizontal speed while their vertical lift feels gentle and eventual. This upward draft is stronger than ever on Other You, owing in large part to Schnapf’s close-tracked production. Everyone’s parts occasionally seem to run into one another, and the album at times feels dewy, like a book left overnight on the beach. In the title track, which opens the album, Gunn sings of unearthing “precious metal memories” and taking them “down to salvage [to] find out what they’re worth.” He’s talking about how the buried self may (or may not) be of much greater value than one would think, that true potential can be plucked from the dirt. But he may as well be talking about the value of sharing the ineffable things we already know about ourselves but can’t quite see or articulate—the non-rational, difficult-to-quantify stuff that springs from the loamy soil of the self. The band here isn’t really playing together so much as they seem to be growing from the same source, like trilling koru of sound that gently roll upward and outward as they depart from Gunn’s vocals at the center of the song.
He retreats from the center in “Sugar Kiss,” the album’s sole instrumental, co-written with Mary Lattimore. As arpeggios trickle from her harp like pebbles over glass, Gunn brushes away at a 12-string guitar set so deep in the distance it virtually becomes a percussion instrument, while Schnapf uses his guitar to bow drones of feedback back and forth across the channel like he’s playing a cello. Matt Schuessler responds like Cecil McBee to the rest of the Alice Coltrane group on Journey in Satchidananda, his bass reacting to the angelic environs with a series of gulping surges that both ground the song and slacken to let it float back up.
But Gunn is not merely the ghost animating Other You’s remarkably ornate machine. The vocal melodies here are among the tenderest he’s ever written, and they carry the same sense of inevitability that he invests in his guitar lines; they sound so natural, it can be easy to overlook their formal complexity. Even when he pushes into new territory, as he does in the cosmically adrift “Reflection,” he doesn’t come across as lost so much as patiently awaiting an outcome. An underlying security, whether in himself and his abilities or in his surroundings, is at the heart of what makes Gunn’s music feel so distinct—the anxiety that exists in his catalog always seems to resolve in the musical equivalent of a centering exhale, which is really just another word for acceptance—and on Other You, the mood never wavers.
Steve Gunn isn’t the first person to take a trip to Los Angeles with the intention of shifting their perspective, only to discover that the possibility they sought was within them all along. There’s something about the way the long light on L.A. evenings paints everything it touches that compels you to find greater meaning in the moment, even if the moment is fairly ordinary; a grand context seems to demand a grand explanation. This light shines through Other You at a low angle, illuminating it like a dinner party on a terrace. Here, surrounded by friends, at ease in the gloam, suspension reigns. Things may be rough, and exhausting, but in this present moment, there is an overwhelming sweetness.

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Following 2009's Rick Rubin-produced Music for Men, the Portland trio's fifth album was handled by UK pop mastermind Xenomania, perhaps best known for helming Sugababes and Girls Aloud's clever post-millennial bubblegum.

A Joyful Noise

The Gossip made their pop move with 2009's Rick Rubin-produced Music for Men, whose slick coat of gloss propelled the already-UK-famous Portland band into further heights. He tightened their bluesy sound into something that resembled dancepunk, funneling frontwoman Beth Ditto's unequaled soulful wail into clipped bursts of angst and joy. Despite the mechanical boxed-in feel of that album, the band kept their personality intact, producing their most listenable effort even if it wasn't always terribly original. But Music for Men wasn't exactly the bid for American stardom the trio (and their label) might have hoped for, and fifth album A Joyful Noise seems to address that directly. Here the reins are given over to UK pop mastermind Xenomania, perhaps best known for helming Sugababes and Girls Aloud's clever post-millennial bubblegum.
At first glance, it seems like business as usual: Opener "Melody Emergency" has Ditto bleating over a Led Zeppelin lurch more muscly than anything on Men. But when we get to first single "Perfect World", something feels very different. In some ways a stadium-sized rework of their biggest hit to date in "Heavy Cross", it shows how Xenomania's approach veers away from Rubin's. Where the latter turned the band's taut funk into a claustrophobic machine, here the sound is spread wide open, and the admittedly sparse band loses its concentrated strength-- an issue that plagues the rest of Joyful Noise. Xenomania's overbearing synth accents provide a new level of tactile texture, but they just as often overcook the already bland songs, so that tracks like "Into the Wild" sound like cheap jingles drained of the band's essential idiosyncrasies. Too often, Ditto's voice attempts to reach smooth plastic-soul Adele heights, stretching out syllables unnaturally, where before we could revel in her voice cracking into anguished screams.
Xenomania's touch begins to feel invasive over the course of the album, sometimes working in the band's favour-- the irresistibly slick "Move in the Right Direction"-- but more often drowning the group in detrimental cliches. "Get Lost" is an awful attempt at a *True Blue-*era Madonna pastiche, replete with a cringe-worthy chorus about "dancing to the beat of a different drum." Ditto's always been about pulling obvious bits of musical history and making them her own, but here she just feels completely out of ideas (see also her talk of "victims of love" on "I Won't Play"). The same goes for the confused "Get a Job", which aims to be a spiky electroclash jam with ill-advised preachy lyrics about a "rich girl" who "lives every day like a weekend." Hard to swallow coming from someone who lives as a touring artist.
All complaints aside, much like Music for Men, Joyful Noise is an inherently enjoyable pop album at its core, endearing even for all its missteps and pandering. It features Ditto's best-ever performance on the tender "Casualties of War", recalling Ray of Light-era Madonna (an easy touchstone for Gossip despite all their subversive politics) in its siren-like clarity of tone and voice. Her abrasive and relentless shtick is replaced by a tender vulnerability that's more heart-rending than we're used to from Gossip. "Casualties" is where Xenomania's expert studio hand works best, keeping the song restrained to a bubbling-under simmer that would have seemed impossible in the bulging veins and rushing heartbeats of their earlier work. It's enough to give hope for Gossip's future direction and their still unrealized potential as "pure" pop stars, but it's the sole promising moment on an album that ranges from average to disappointing. In the end, Joyful Noise feels like a stopgap.


Roman Fl\xFCgel is one of techno's great shapeshifters, recording everything \n\ from crunching electro, drum & bass so spare ...

Superstructure

Roman Flügel is one of techno's great shapeshifters, recording everything from crunching electro, drum & bass so spare it sounds as if it was made out of twigs and debris, and every shade of house-- from tribal to deep to proto-micro to acid revival. But Pitchfork readers without deep crates probably know him best as the creator of two of the most inescapable techno anthems of the past two years: "Gehts Noch?" (under his own name) and "Rocker" (as one half of Alter Ego). These two riff wraiths would do Angus Young and DJ Pierre equally proud.
There's very little anthemic about Superstructure, however, and even less that's rockin'. Instead, Flügel's collaboration with vibraphonist Christopher Dell turns the concept of "jazzy techno" on its head. Fading in on some liquid synth pads and gently brushed, twitchy hi-hats reminiscent of the straighter Farben tracks, the opening title track is quickly upended by a fountain of vibes from Dell. Flügel's beat constructions tease and hint at traditionally club friendly sounds like house and techno and even a kind of lopsided hip-hop without actually coming out and stating them, as Dell sprinkles runs of vibes like Pollock tossing pigment. "Habitation" recalls the starved drum & bass Flügel has made under the Eight Miles High alias, while "Miniaturisation" provides what you'd expect, an almost microtonal duet for drums and vibes that barely resolves into anything as coarse as a groove. "4 Door Body Cell" hews closer to traditional techno, but it's traditionalism pales compared to the more outre experiments, whether they congeal or not. (They usually do.)
Dell is a classically trained vibist whose insistence on repetition has put him at odds with "free" jazz orthodoxy even as it puts him in close proximity to techno. And at its best Superstructure has a hands on, jammed feeling that rubs with productive friction against the rigidity of drum machines. Superstructure is a dark but not oppressive album; the cover, featuring thin white line schematics over a solid black background captures the feeling as much as anything. Dell and Flügel have made an album that recognizes jazz as an engine for improvisation rather than organ or piano samples to be draped over a 4/4 beat. At times it reminds you of everything from the crooked spines of Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch to the astro-black portamento funk of Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band. There's no randomization function that can make an album like this.


Following a 2019 episode of police harassment in front of his own building, the Detroit house legend’s latest goes hard on depth and funk, but there’s often an ache where the fun used to be.

Taken Away

If you’re black in the U.S., anything from shopping for prom clothes to being a firefighter to minding your own business in your own home can prompt people to call the cops on you. When people call in the police, the force might drag you half-naked into the street; they might pull out your tampon during a cavity search in the middle of that street; they might well kill you. In 2019, according to the Los Angeles Times, “Getting killed by police [was] a leading cause of death for young black men in America.”
This shouldn’t happen to anybody; it shouldn’t happen to one of the most gifted musicians to come out of Detroit. But because this is America, it happened to Kenny Dixon, Jr., better known as deep-house hero Moodymann, whose career spans 25-plus years and an influence that can’t be overstated. Dixon was sitting in a van outside his own building in Detroit when someone reported “suspicious behavior” and the cops rolled up with their chaos. He made it out alive. Echoes of the conflict are all over his new album.
Taken Away dispenses immersion therapy like last year’s woozy beaut, Sinner, and stinks of George Clinton like 2014’s self-titled long-player. But there’s often an ache where the fun used to be. There’s funk, in both senses of the world. “Goodbye Everybody” summons Lowell Fulson’s “Prison Bound,” swapping the original’s bluesy stomp for a roiling swamp of what sound like detuned bells and percussion that hisses like tasers. It’s closer in spirit to Erykah Badu than, say, boompty house. The crisp breaks and comfy swing of “Let Me In” could be legit Badu, or even Mary J., but Moodymann counters the grace of the (uncredited) female voices with spite: “You’ve never been a good soul to anyone/Especially me.”
Some tracks are plush. “Let Me Show You Love” is maybe the most flat-out gorgeous thing he’s made to date, a velveteen expanse of sparkling melodies and little sequin-bright effects and blissed-out whispers. The purple chords and compressed tumble of “I Need Another ____” are horny as hell, but the “relief” that Dixon and his female companions call out for sounds as material and existential as it is sexual. “Just Stay a While” lights up the room with a fiber-optic bassline and irresistible beat; a quiet-storm interlude blows through every now and then, increasing the humidity without relieving it. If the vocals were glamorous, the song could be Luomo. Instead the sentiment is: “My back’s against the wall.” And not because nobody’s dancing. “Slow Down” does just that, buoyed by overlapping vocal vamps and a warm piano riff, and it’s just the sound of summer, complete with kids enjoying themselves. Until sirens interrupt.
Most of Taken Away is fascinatingly ambivalent. A couple tracks lose their balance altogether. “I’m Already Hi” is a person-to-person skit backed up with some light jazz and scatting. It’s fine if what you want from one of the greatest house producers alive is a skit; if not, well, it’s over soon. Less funny are the album’s opener and closer, two versions of “Do Wrong” built on Al Green’s “Love and Happiness” but without much of either. Mixed deep in a midtempo shuffle of organ and tambourine and preacher calls, Moodymann sourly brings receipts to a no-good ex. “You’ve got me back in church,” he sneers, in a way that sounds more like he’d been punished than redeemed. Green was perhaps the most tender of soul singers; he also, among other cruelties, beat his pregnant wife with a boot when she refused to have sex with him. Moodymann chants, “You better find a way to love me/’Cause if you don’t, somebody else will,” while Green eggs him on with wait-a-minutes and yeahs. The groove might get your head bopping with a bad taste in your mouth, wondering if she’s better off without him.
Regardless, Moodymann remains a master of repetition as a form of challenge. In his 1996 epic “I Can’t Kick This Feeling When It Hits,” he takes a quick hit of Chic (“What am I gonna do?” from “I Want Your Love”) and copies it over and over in a feat of disco endurance; the expression shifts from ecstasy to paranoid chant to paralysis and back. He’s also an expert at tension and release. His 1999 classic “Shades of Jae” holds back the kick so long that the samples of crowd cheers seem to shimmer in desperation. Title track “Taken Away” uses both strategies—but to ruminate. Moodymann shatters the crystalline grief of Roberta Flack’s “Sunday and Sister Jones” like a brick through a window. In Flack’s telling, a reverend’s wife wails and warns God not to let her husband die, or she will too: “Lord, if you take him away,” she sings, “I don’t want to live another day.” They both pass. “Sister Jones was taken away,” Flack mourns. Moodymann picks up her phrasings and lets each one glint in the cold glint of his groove, closer in tempo and timbre to Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy” than his usual hedonism. The “taken” brings to mind the endless chain of handcuffs, stretchers, coffins; the “away” becomes prison and beyond. Sirens again disrupt focus. When the hi-hat finally opens up about halfway in, it’s less a longed-for exhalation than just a moment to breathe. If you can.


Surfing between piano-driven minimalism and hazy synth experiments, the Maryland rapper’s latest mixtape seeks the next evolution of DMV rap.

Sorry 4 Da Ooze

For more than half a decade, the DMV’s street rap scene has been dominated by ominous piano melodies and skittish triplet flows. The most exciting rappers of this generation have embraced this framework while finding subtle ways to push the style forward. Think Q Da Fool, who with his 2017 mixtape Rich Shoota Vol. 2 showed that the rapid, punchline-stuffed delivery—pioneered by himself, Big Flock, and Shabazz PBG—could be stretched melodically. Or Lil Dude and Goonew, who rewired that same flow with a hushed edge on 2018’s Homicide Boyz. Or Xanman and YungManny, who branched out with a singles run that flaunted their twisted sense of humor.
Prince George’s County, Maryland’s Tae Dawg is less heralded, but has been playing with ways to open up the regional sound for some years now. With his newest mixtape, Sorry 4 Da Ooze, he lets his impulses cook. He’s just as likely to rap in a shout as a whisper, to cram as many words as possible into a punchline, or dig in his R&B bag. Outside influences mingle with homegrown ones. His ear for beats is all over the place, surfing between instrumentals that pull from more traditional piano-driven minimalism in the lane of local beatmaker Cheecho as well as those that owe more to the hazy synth experiments of DMV producers Sparkheem and Spizzledoe.
His process seems to be to just throw everything at the wall, which in the past has made for mixtapes that were as patchy as they were fascinating. Sorry 4 Da Ooze (the word “ooze” is his thing because he thinks the villain in the 1995 Power Rangers movie is cool) is not an exception, but this time the misfires are dampened by the interesting crevices Tae Dawg finds to work within. It’s rare for a track on the mixtape to be one-note—flow switch-ups happen so fast that you don’t even have the chance to be overwhelmed. On “Thirsty,” Tae Dawg quickly shifts between melodic murmurs and hearty wails. He’s not exactly a good singer, but in bursts he can make you think he is. There’s no leash on “Oozin Rambo,” as he skips from a lightning-quick barrage of violent punch-ins to a middle section where it sounds as if he’s a contestant on Silent Library, trying to scream without making too much noise.
What is predictable about Sorry 4 Da Ooze are the lyrics. Tae Dawg’s punchlines don’t have any punch to them—good thing he’s a captivating vocalist. Gun-toting threats and drug talk are fairly standard in street rap, but his are so blank and anonymous that you generally don’t notice them. When you do it’s probably for a bad reason, like his boring chant of “I fucked a bitch, I don’t like her” on “Go TF Off,” a couple of seconds that feel endless. The straightforward R&B ballad “Hallows & Caskets” puts too much focus on vague memories, missing any hint of DMV flavor.
Generally that’s not the case. Even when Sorry 4 Da Ooze strays from DMV production, Tae Dawg doesn’t let regionality escape him. A handful of trend-hopping ventures turn out surprisingly well: His racing flow elevates the played-out rage synths of “Blasting Off” and he sounds almost as comfortable as Shawny Binladen over the pulsating drill beat of “Ooze Drill.” Still, the mixtape is most effective when Tae Dawg fine-tunes the DMV sound in his mold, firing off feathery pews instead of aggressive gunshot ad-libs on “Get Out Ya Feelings” or breaking up the ordinary triplet flow chest-puffing of “Knuck If You Bucc” with a few lines that feel like they’re being rapped through a school PA system. Listening to Tae Dawg advance the sound of his region inch by inch is a reminder of what’s so fulfilling about following DMV rap.


The one-time Jesus of Cool continues his quest to chill out.

At My Age

No artist gets to decide how they'll be remembered. If, as seems increasingly likely, Nick Lowe ends up remembered as the guy who penned "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love and Understanding" back in the early 1970s, surely the songwriter will be satisfied.
Yet fans and followers of Lowe know there's a nearly endless stream of legitimate second (or first) choices for pick of his defining moment. As a member of Brinsley Schwarz, Lowe helped bridge pub rock to punk. Lowe inaugurated the Stiff label with his single "So It Goes", and more explicitly helped pave the way for punk's indie movement by producing the Damned's epochal "New Rose". He subsequently produced key tracks for the Pretenders and several albums for Elvis Costello.
But maybe most impressive of all Lowe's feats was "The Beast in Me", a song from his 1994 comeback album The Impossible Bird, long after he had faded from pop prominence. Later that same year, the song also became the best non-stunt cover of one-time father-in-law Johnny Cash's late-career comeback. It was a cred-boosting number all around, and proved once and for all Lowe's worth as a songwriter in the classic sense rather than just a snide wit with an ear for hooks. His nickname "Basher" stemmed from his ability/compulsion to just crank out songs, but The Impossible Bird and songs like "The Beast in Me" showed a more considered, thoughtful, patient side to Lowe.
Fittingly and full circle, in many ways Lowe owes this mellow change of direction to "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love and Understanding". Curtis Stigers covered the song on the soundtrack to "The Bodyguard", and in Lowe's own words it was like someone suddenly dumped a bag of money on his doorstep. Free from commercial considerations, Lowe started exploring his love of classic country, soul, r&b and crooner jazz, a path that continues with the new At My Age.
There's been some talk of this most recent stage of Lowe's career as being too sentimental, or sans balls. But while Lowe's hardly up to his old tricks, his new tricks have more than their share of pleasures. If Lowe used to attack pop songs with a punk's cynicism and an ironic streak a mile wide, these days he exudes the illusion that he's settled down and settled in when in fact he's been happily exploring formalism with a sly wink. By his account, he started taking his guitar out to the country and playing old dancehalls, letting the new material breath and live a little until it resembled the pre- and early-rock era he aimed to emulate.
In fact, both Lowe and his press materials have made a big deal about distinguishing the covers from the originals contained on At My Age, and Lowe's last few records have made a similar game of spotting the genuine classic amidst the songs that simply sound like genuine classics. It's a cleverly subversive strategy in its own right, the grey-haired and grown-up ex-punk making music his dad would have liked, though experience has added an air of increased authenticity to songs such as "A Better Man" and the almost imperceptibly skanking "Long Limbed Girl".
Indeed, now Lowe is 58, both his parents have passed, and he's an unlikely first time dad, so it's somewhat hard to imagine him twisting the earnest sentiments of Charlie Feathers' "A Man in Love" to suit his former sarcastic mode. Of course, Lowe can still be funny, too, as he is on "The Club", which begins "If you've ever had someone come along/ Reach in, pull out your heart and break it/ Just for fun/ As easy as humming a song/ Join the club." On "People Change" (which features Chrissie Hynde and some nice Stax horns), he basically dismisses the call of nostalgia with a blithe but affable declaration of "People change/ That's the long and short of it."
"Now, you say those times you had were never that many/ Just be thankful you had any/ And cut yourself a slice of reality," Lowe gently advises, and he seems to have taken his own advice and moved on.
At his age, Lowe's still young enough to get away with making music in his former mode, but he's old enough to know better. Instead of looking to the recent past for inspiration, he's looked to the even more distant past, if only because it's the music that-- square or not-- currently makes him the most happy and content. And for 33 minutes or so, if you follow Lowe's lead and let loose any baggage you might be carrying, you're likely to be as happy as he is, too.


The Chilean-German producer’s steely, slinky polyrhythms are a repudiation of borders and a celebration of the freedom of movement.

Support Alien Invasion

Electronic music has long loved its intergalactic fables, but Matias Aguayo’s Support Alien Invasion has nothing to do with science fiction. No “Cosmic Cars” or Deep Space here: The title of the Chilean-German producer’s fourth album is a repudiation of borders and a celebration of the freedom of movement. The album is a celebration of movement, full stop: Propelled by wave after wave of polyrhythmic hand percussion, these are some of the wriggliest, ripplingest drum tracks Aguayo has ever created.
Years ago, Aguayo was a member of Closer Musik, a duo whose winsome minimalism helped define the Kompakt label’s pop-ambient era. For the past 14 years, as a solo artist, he has gradually moved away from house and techno, at least as they’re typically understood, toward a more expansive—and inclusive—vision. He had a minor hit in 2008 with “Minimal,” a playful rebuke of minimal techno’s tick-tock tedium; on 2009’s Ay Ay Ay and 2013’s The Visitor he focused largely on his own voice, layering chants and beatboxed rhythms into supple Afro-Latin grooves.
Just as important as his stylistic innovations is what he’s accomplished with his label Cómeme (Spanish for “eat me”), which he and cofounder Avril Ceballos have spent a decade developing into a platform for alternative dance music from the margins of the global club scene. What began as a pan-Latin concern has gradually expanded to encompass artists from Johannesburg, Bucharest, and beyond. Support Alien Invasion is a co-release between Cómeme and Belgium’s Crammed Discs, which seems fitting; since 1981, Crammed has blurred the lines between the European avant-garde and its allies around the globe.
This is Aguayo’s first all-instrumental album, which might be surprising, given its political subtext. But the seriousness of the subject matter is plainly audible in the music’s steely tone. Aguayo’s productions have frequently flashed a sly sense of humor, but the mood here is driven, focused, heads-down. His drum programming is as slinky as ever, but there’s a newfound force to it; his drums could double as battering rams. Glowering rave stabs give “2019” the menacing air of European hardstyle over hard-charging polyrhythms that flout the hegemony of the four-to-the-floor groove. On “We Have Seen Another World,” the bass synth blares like a warship’s warning siren. “Insurgentes” is slow and menacing, made all the more ominous by the fact that there’s so little to it—just a side-winding, minor-key synth melody; in place of drums, just steady, time-keeping handclaps, as though the song’s titular guerrillas were counting down to a pre-dawn assault.
Some tracks are subtler. In the “The Fold,” the opening song, interwoven drums and queasy, carousel-like synth streaks establish the unsettling mood that permeates the album, drawing you deep into his imagined borderland. Tonally, it’s a little like stepping from brilliant sunlight into a shuttered room: Your eyes struggle to adjust to the gloom, but minuscule variations of gray soon become clear. Aguayo can be playful, too: The Errorsmith-like “Laisse-moi parler” is sculpted around a bass synth, halfway between a growl and a sigh, that writhes like an outlandish Claymation creation.
Whether in protest or celebration, the album could have benefited from some vocal tracks. “Between the Risings,” a gloomy drone cut, doesn’t add much to the overall picture, and by album’s end, Aguayo seems to run out of things that can be expressed with drums alone. One example of where he might have gone with this material can be found in his own single “Rain,” from late last year. Its shuffling triplet drums are cut from the same cloth, but there, he turned to a South African singer named Mujaji the Rain, a fixture on Johannesburg’s feminist and queer scene, whose woozily ecstatic vocals in English and Zulu—a supplication to the clouds, rain dance as erotic metaphor—make the song unusual. It’s not what she sings, but how she sings it: She intones her lines with an emotion so rapturous it feels almost dangerous; there’s a real sense of things spilling over, of a pleasure that can’t be contained. In its joyful patchwork of identities, the song invoked the kind of communal experience that can’t be restricted by lines on a map. At its best, Support Alien Invasion picks up that cry, wordlessly—a rain dance calling down the force that will wash all borders away.


The duo of Adam Wiltzie (also of Stars of the Lid) and Dustin O’Halloran take their cosmic drones to the score for a French erotic thriller called Iris.

A Winged Victory for the Sullen: Iris OST

Iris OST

The music Adam Wiltzie made with Stars of the Lid, and later with the pianist Dustin O’Halloran as A Winged Victory for the Sullen, was often epic in scope. The cosmic drones both those groups utilized were well suited for soundtracking visual moments that showcased how primordial those sounds felt. Even though the swagger was always turned down a notch in the more piano-focused music of A Winged Victory for the Sullen, an element of the size and drama remained. As calm and ruminative they could be, Wiltzie and O’Halloran seemed at the very least poised to craft sounds that begged for visual accompaniment. They dipped their toes in the visual world with their score for Wayne Mcgregor’s delightfully modern dance piece ATOMOS. Now, the duo have decided to tackle the score for Iris, a French erotic thriller directed by Jalil Lespert (whose most recent feature was the Yves Saint Laurent biopic).
Now, stop me if you’ve seen this movie before: femme fatale goes missing in the middle of the night, her mild-mannered banker husband dangles at the age of sanity, and between them a mysterious rake at the center of the mystery. This plot borders on Mad Libs, and of course, Iris is just slightly meatier, but it doesn’t avoid the essential fact that it is a boilerplate drama. Good music and good musicians have been attached to bad films for years, (Will anyone throw shade at Philip Glass for scoring The Fantastic Four?) but this is a bit of an odd project for Wiltzie and O’Halloran to tackle. Iris does not exactly have the makings of a blockbuster, or the trappings of something more high-minded, and in effect it drags their music into schmaltz.
The score was recorded alongside a 40-piece string orchestra at Magyar Radio in Budapest, but the writing sessions happened before filming began, mostly on modular synthesizer, and the score still bears a slight rigidity based on the way it was first crafted. There is something curiously granular about the way they’ve organized the instruments, so that they function more as discrete parts than as an orchestra. The music itself is often timid and generic, as if the pair are afraid to allow their drones to stretch out. A few pieces, like “Galerie” and “Le Renversement” conjure their idiosyncrasies, if just for a flash. Those tracks strike the balance between theatricality, understatement, and experimentation, reminding me of Burning Star Core’s elegant drone. But overall, the compositions are nebulous and merely pretty in a way that feels almost rote. The separate songs spill into each other, without differentiation, or pace. There is very little difference between songs like “L'embauche” or “Flashback Antoine,” where a rumbling drone is given a sprinkling of pleasant string arrangements. This agreeable sameness infects much of the score, turning the voices of two inimitable musicians into hack work for hire, churning out glossy tones for images of cheap thrill and intrigue.