The film actor’s musical debut is full of shadowy theatrics and cryptic gibberish. Rarely do you encounter music this bombastic and unreasonable.

The Mother Stone

No one plays a better creep than Caleb Landry Jones. Watch him sniff out Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out, wild and impatient, like a dog that’s just spotted a rabbit. Look at his sunken, lying eyes in Twin Peaks: The Return. Jones exemplifies the all-American boy gone sour, and most of the time, it’s unclear whether he’s pretending. “You know when you push so hard and you pop blood vessels and go unconscious a little bit?” he says of his acting. “Sometimes it’s like that, when you wake up and you don’t know where you are.” During interviews he erupts into strange, delirious laughter. You can’t watch a single YouTube clip of him without fans commenting, “Joker vibes.”
The 30-year-old Texan began writing and recording music at 16, the same age he made his film debut in the Coen Brothers’ neo-Western No Country for Old Men. Over the years, he accumulated more than 700 songs. His thriving acting career pulled him away from music, until a few years ago, when he landed a meeting with filmmaker-musician Jim Jarmusch. In lieu of an introduction, Jones wrote him a piano instrumental. But they met at a diner, where there was no way for Jones to play his new piece. Instead, he slipped Jarmusch two collections of songs he’d written in his parents’ barn several years earlier, and Jarmusch connected him to Sacred Bones founder Caleb Bratten. Soon, Jones got to work on his debut album, The Mother Stone, incorporating his piano composition into the album’s title track.
There’s a distinctly theatrical bent to The Mother Stone, which is framed as a “parade led by multiple unreliable narrators” who spew their monologues and then vacate the stage. In the video for “Flag Day/The Mother Stone,” stout, crimson-lipped aristocrats lounge in slo-mo, their faces plastered in Warholian neon, mouths agape like Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Sluggish carnival music intensifies the unease. Then, midway through the expansive, seven-and-a-half minute opus, a cymbal crash halts the sinister fanfare. Psychedelic guitar replaces the garish horns. Abstruse sentences escape Jones’ lips like vapor: “It takes a daffodil … to shake the jelly from the stone.”
Spectral harmonies, waltzing strings, what sounds like a dog howling at the moon—all rear their heads in the opening suite. There’s something admirable about how willfully The Mother Stone defies easy listening; rarely do you encounter music this bombastic and unreasonable. (Jones cites the Beatles’ White Album as a major inspiration.) “The Hodge-Podge Porridge Poke” flips alien lasers into bluegrass fiddle. Strange voices materialize as if from a dream: a grubby croak in “Katya,” a gruff deadpan in “All I Am in You/The Big Worm.” In “You’re So Wonderfull,” Jones jauntily sings “you’re so won-der-ful” and foams at the mouth. The full tracklist is 15 items long, with several spilling past six minutes.
But once you burrow deeper, the shadowy theatrics and cryptic gibberish become monotonous; these are not different characters, but the same man rambling on and on. Most of the songs—overwhelmingly sung in a nasally British whine—have the wilted grandeur of a drunk’s last hurrah. The lyrics conjure a hazy aura of doom and gloom, but they don’t amount to compelling character sketches. An ounce of clarity would go a long way towards balancing nutty remarks like, “The solitude I’ve reached has got one foot,” or, “Shakin’ like the main-frame, not warning, like they’re milking/All the sharp tanked slinkies, milling.” (According to Jones, the album’s themes include “abuse, loss, hope, the good tickle, the bad tickle, the runaway train, the perfectly timed flying bus.”) An unreliable narrator should be intelligibly so, if only for a moment. Or else why keep listening?
In its dream-like exhibitionism, anachronism, and novelty, The Mother Stone is a little like Sleep No More, the immersive, Kubrikian staging of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which masked audience members follow silent actors around a dimly lit 1930s hotel, piecing together a deconstructed story at their own pace. Some people will indulge in the spectacle, valuing the sensory thrill over narrative coherence. Others will emerge from the multi-hour ordeal exhausted, wondering what the hell to make of the chocolate sauce and sporadic nudity. Caleb Landry Jones’ music inspires a reaction somewhere in the middle: It’s interesting, even fun while it lasts, but you probably won’t return.


Shabaka Hutchings leads his brass band on a propulsive mind- and body-moving record, advocating through music that change comes from speaking directly about collective oppression.

Black to the Future

For the past few years, the London-born saxophonist and clarinetist Shabaka Hutchings has led three different groups, exploring a distinctive sound with each. The soul prog of the Comet Is Coming gazes ahead; the spiritual jazz of Shabaka and the Ancestors seems to take its cues from the past. Between these bands lies the turbulent, soca-inflected jazz of the Sons of Kemet, which is tied to the present moment. Their latest, Black to the Future, is a propulsive record advocating that change comes from speaking directly about collective oppression. Collective is the key word here, and Hutchings attempts to unite the different strands of the African diaspora, working with vocalists and rappers from both the UK and U.S. Black to the Future is highly accessible, politically engaged jazz that’s more focused on communication than individual experimentation.
When the fusion works, the music seems like it’s about to combust. Though Sons of Kemet is only made up of four players—two horns (Hutchings and Theon Cross) and two percussionists (Edward Wakili-Hick and Tom Skinner)—the noise they make rivals a big band. On “Pick Up Your Burning Cross,” Hutchings’ saxophone races alongside his clarinet, each instrument trying to take the lead. Cross’ tuba brings a grounding current of bass, stirring up turbulent storm clouds on the horizon. The Chicago-based pianist Angel Bat Dawid sings with force, and the experimental rapper Moor Mother peppers the track with her bracing, cryptic asides (“I don’t think you remember me/I was in last place lost the race”). It feels like a whole community singing at once, as does the jovial standout “Hustle.” As Cross and Hutchings blare a united theme, UK rapper Kojey Radical speaks of the indomitability of the spirit. When Lianne La Havas joins Radical on the chorus (“Born from the mud with the hustle inside me”), a call-and-response emerges between the vocalists and the instrumentalists. It’s a small moment reflecting a wider theme: The first step to collective liberation is communal dialogue.
This thrust supplies this music with fire, but it can also lead to forced moments. The fierce attack of horns and emotive spoken-word on opener “Field Negus” portend a forceful lament on the Black experience. And to some extent, it delivers. The sense of menace generated by long held notes of the tuba and calculated rattle of the drums expands as poet Joshua Idehen explores how white supremacy closes off the pathways of a Black imagination: “Lightened up my skin/Bitten down my tongue/I begged you for an inch/Lemme have some liquor and a flatscreen.” The horns swell, mirroring the narrator’s expanding consciousness. As impassioned as this performance is, it’s jarring to hear Idehen synthesize past and current oppression in present social media terms. There’s not really a point in giving Candace Owens more airtime, even if you’re criticizing her. And screaming “hashtag burn it all” reduces what could be a bracing warning into self-parody. Yet even with these qualms, it’s hard to deny the power of Idehen’s palpable exasperation, which makes itself heard through his tortured breaths and targeted intonations. It’s hard to think of a crowd hearing this at a protest and not responding in kind.
Because its purpose is to move minds and bodies, Black to the Future features little visionary improvisation. In the late ’60s, groups like the Art Ensemble of Chicago processed moments of strife through challenging experiments; Sons of Kemet prefer to make danceable, approachable expressions of joy. After the didactic burst of the first half, the second half of the album mainly features pulsating instrumentals. Hutchings can go the limit when he improvises, but he tones it down here. Solos are few and far between, and he rarely veers from the melody at hand. Still, there are pockets of wildness to be found in songs like “Let the Circle be Unbroken” and “Envision Yourself Levitating.” Close to the end of the former, his playing reaches a high-pitched snarl, and the latter ends with the type of performance that makes you wonder how anyone can fit such a staggering series of notes in such a small space. It’s a show-stopping moment, but Hutchings isn’t so focused on drawing attention to himself: While his entire community marches forward, Sons of Kemet provide the soundtrack.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On their first album in seven years, Broken Social Scene distill their sound to a vital essence. The band is focused and renewed, invigorated by the missionary spirit of their best work.

Hug of Thunder

“The cynics fucking hate me. I know that much. They’re not fans.” I’m willing to bet Broken Social Scene ringleader Kevin Drew takes that personally. From the start, Broken Social Scene have made recklessly celebratory music that left their countercultural beliefs buried like dog whistles: “They all need to be the cause/They all want to fuck the cause,” he sang, rather cynically, 15 years ago on the canonical You Forgot It in People, long before virtue signaling and slacktivism became part of the lexicon. But after the Paris terrorist attacks of 2015 inspired a swift return to action following a five-year hiatus, they’re not hiding shit this time around.
Frustrated by people touting concepts of “radical community” and “self-care,” yet spending most of their day treating people like shit online? Hug of Thunder is too. Feel like a washed outcast when confronted by the sterility of festival music and the humiliating sound degradation of digital streaming? Hug of Thunder is too. Tired of nihilism being presented as the only option for rational thinkers? Hug of Thunder is too. While there’s an undeniable power in commiseration, Hug of Thunder is invigorated by the missionary spirit of the band’s best work. Drew and company try to make converts of lapsed idealists and people that remind him of his former self.
2017 has found many of the past decade’s most beloved indie rock acts returning after long layoffs, and as with many of their lead singles, ”Halfway Home” was greeted not with a loud embrace of crackling buzz, but a shrug, disappointed by the lack of novelty rather than marveling at just how Broken Social Scene distilled their essence into four minutes. Which, yes, it sounds just like Broken Social Scene at the times when they’re going to lift you out of whatever hole you’re chosen to wallow in, even if it takes all 30 hands on deck.
The subsequent previews of  Hug of Thunder also gave us “googly-eyed dream-pop,” “passed-out drunk and caffeine-wired studio wizards,” and also “the band with Feist in it.” Broken Social Scene are defined by a kind of utopian collectivism, and the lead-up to Hug of Thunder confirms that their excessive generosity can make them a seriously inefficient singles band. But in the same way that the members of Broken Social Scene renounce their star power to present a unified front, the individual songs of Hug of Thunder are best understood as reciprocal parts of a whole.
After the sunrise incantation of “Sol Luna,” “Halfway Home” gets Hug of Thunder to a height where the breathless plunge of the chorus from “Protest Song” can feel like a skydive without a parachute. On its own, “Skyline” forgoes any hook for mesmeric repetition, getting Hug of Thunder to a cruising altitude where “Stay Happy” can serve as a realistic mantra. “Vanity Pail Kids” has the kind of arrangement that would proudly bleed into an undifferentiated splotch on previous albums, but here, the jazz-handed chorus opens the possibility of Broken Social Scene as an up-with-people Earth, Wind & Fire indie-soul revue. Immediately afterward, the subterranean rumbles of the title track are a peek at what Feist’s Pleasure might’ve been with fleshier arrangements. Affecting as it is on its own, it also serves as a necessary segue between the “Vanity Pail Kids” and the muted soul-baring of the second half.
More so than Forgiveness Rock Record, Hug of Thunder presents Broken Social Scene as a rock band making rock songs, a coherent montage rather than a patched-together highlight reel. Any sort of industry leveling-up is probably out of the question at this point for Broken Social Scene and the possibility that they’re going for “hits” is entirely theoretical. They’ve never had a problem sounding big, but the inevitable point on each record where Drew and former producer David Newfeld couldn’t keep their friends in check has always been a subject of “bug or feature?” discussion. If not restraint, it’s possible that working with big-time producer Joe Chiccarelli (whose C.V. includes Frank Zappa’s Joe’s Garage and Jason Mraz and everything in between) actually provided boundaries. This is especially important as Hug of Thunder starts to loosen its grip in the second half; this is how Broken Social Scene albums usually play out, yet they forgo their typical Side B drift for some of the band's most personable and emotionally urgent songwriting to date. It’s also where the stakes of the album are set, confronting haters head-on: love songs appealing to the disillusioned, grounding exercises for those with their head in the clouds, finding common ground between “Cause=Time” and “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl.”
As if their short time on this earth is running out, the band spends the last 15 minutes of Hug of Thunder getting their point across as clearly as possible on “Please Take Me With You” and “Gonna Get Better,” songs that add “plainspoken” and “compassionate” to their many modes. “Future’s not what it used to be, we still gotta go there,” newest member Ariel Engle sings before punning on the title: “Things are gonna get better because they can’t get any worse.” It’s the band’s most audacious dare to cynics—of course it can get worse, they’ll say. It’s probably gotten worse in the time it’s taken you to read this far. But on the ensuing “Mouthguards of the Apocalypse,” Drew speaks to them like a wounded healer. He’s been there and he’d rather kill his friends than see them roll their eyes at a song like “Gonna Get Better.” “I’m trying for the living and I’m staying so I can leave,” he sings on the record’s final words, underlining the message of communal uplift this band has been transmitting for almost two decades: If you forgot it in people, don’t ever let it happen again.


Though the music is often engaging and exciting, Low in High School is Morrissey’s second consecutive release that feels regrettably tethered to his increasingly alienating public persona.

Low in High School

“I make this claim, now let me explain,” Morrissey sings after he first utters the title of “Jacky’s Only Happy When She’s Up on the Stage,” a standout track on his bizarre and ambitious new album Low in High School. Ironically, this is one of his recent statements that needs the least defending. Some zealous fans have suggested the song—which tells the story of a woman devoting herself to the theater after a bout of heartbreak—is an allegory for Britain leaving the E.U. (particularly after a live performance where he chanted “Brexit!” repeatedly at the end). But it plays more like a thinly veiled confession from Morrissey himself. “Jacky cracks when she isn’t on stage,” he admits in its final verse, as the audience flees the room.
Morrissey has courted controversy and dared his fans to abandon him throughout his entire career, but Low in High School marks his second consecutive release that feels regrettably tethered to his increasingly alienating public persona. 2014’s muddled, exhausting World Peace Is None of Your Business was a career-low that’s now nearly impossible to hear. Shortly after its release, the album was removed from record distributors and streaming services due to a clash with his label: a move that feels as bluntly symbolic as, well, the conceit of a Morrissey song. If later solo highlights like 2004’s You Are the Quarry felt like catching up with an old friend, Morrissey’s music is now more like scrolling through their Twitter feed and remembering why you stopped hanging out in the first place.
Since we first met him fronting the Smiths in the ’80s lamenting how pop music said nothing to him about his life, Morrissey has been adamant about imbuing his records with deeper political ambitions. But Low in High School returns him to his most utilitarian purpose: a spokesperson for youthful melancholy. This theme surfaces both in the album title and its cover art—Morrissey’s first in over two decades not to feature his own visage. The first single, “Spent the Day in Bed,” even plays like the 58-year-old’s spin on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a magical day spent shirking one’s obligations, delivered with a prescriptive, winking omniscience. “I’m not my type,” he sings in its funniest line, “But I love my bed.” Fortunately, that song, with its squelchy production and barely-there verses, feels like a pit-stop on the record more than a statement of purpose. For better or worse, Morrissey shows up to work.
Like World Peace, Low in High School pairs him and his band with producer Joe Chiccarelli, who delights in exploring new sounds. While that impulse mostly served to gloss up underwritten material on World Peace, the adventurous atmosphere is more welcome this time. A dramatic army of horns elevates the swaggering opener “My Love, I’d Do Anything for You” to resemble superhero theme music, and the woozy keys in “I Wish You Lonely” make its glittery disco more infectious. The pomp and circumstance also inspires Morrissey to stretch his voice into long-abandoned territory, occasionally slipping into a breathy croon or the playful falsetto of his younger years. A few songs are some of Morrissey’s most engaging, exciting work of the 21st century.
Other songs get your attention for the wrong reasons. “Give me an order and I’ll blow up your daughter,” he slurs angrily in the anti-troops polemic “I Bury the Living.” In a catalog filled with questionable manifestos disguised as anthems, this is his most unwieldy, tackling war, class, and suicide over seven interminable, mean-spirited minutes. Other epics about police brutality in Venezuela and Morrissey’s own sympathy for the people of Israel (“I can’t answer for what armies do/They are not you”) are more straightforward though they’re far from effective, let alone enjoyable. His lyrics expose the same insensitivity as his abhorrent comments blaming victims of sexual assault. He portrays the people of Venezuela as helpless and God-fearing, while opponents of Israel are merely jealous barbarians. As he ages, Morrissey’s worldview gets smaller and smaller, and his political musings all arrive with a crushing lack of subtlety or nuance.
In a recent interview, Morrissey pinpointed Low in High School’s driving concern: “Can young people ever be carefree again?” The album’s most agreeable moments are when he posits romance—as opposed to bitter provocation—as the answer. In the breezy, stomp-clap swing of “All the Young People Must Fall in Love,” he vaguely takes aim at Trump and delivers the titular command as a beacon of hope for his devoted legion of loners. In a song called “When You Open Your Legs,” he sings proudly about getting kicked out of a club at 4 a.m. for public displays of affection, bellowing, “Everything I know deserts me now.” The sentiment is echoed in the stark piano ballad “In Your Lap,” which counters observations of apocalyptic chaos with dreams of oral sex. These are not his most delicate works of fantasy, but at least he’s practicing what he preaches. We all walk home alone, he’s reminded us time and time again, and if nothing else, Morrissey’s faith in love remains devout.


Expanded reissues of the hip-hop legends' first four albums.

Run-D.M.C.: Run-DMC / King of Rock / Raising Hell / Tougher Than Leather

Here are some things about Run-DMC that you might already know: They were the first rap group to go gold, platinum, and multi-platinum, to perform on American Bandstand, to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone, to land in rotation on MTV, to endorse a sneaker, and to tour the country. Here's what that impressive list of accomplishments tells you about the group's music: just about nothing.
It's hard to hear Run-DMC's music as music in 2005. For 20 years, their singles have been dorm-room staples like Hendrix and Marley; they danced with Steven Tyler on a hundred VH-1 video countdowns, their fedora-clad images have fossilized into pop consciousness. The group hasn't been relevant to rap in nearly 20 years; most of the music played on urban stations' old-school mixes comes from years after the group's peak. More importantly, the group spent the twilight of its career making embarrassing career move after embarrassing career move: performing at the VMAs with Kid Rock, endorsing Virgin Cola, releasing the god-awful 2001 failed-comeback album Crown Royal (featuring collaborations with douchebags like Fred Durst and the guy from Third Eye Blind), and performing at every college in the country again and again and again even though DMC's voice was clearly gone and Run had to help him with all his lines.
Now that the group's first four albums are being reissued, it makes sense to ask whether they're worth buying, especially since multiple hits collections have already compiled their essential singles. The simple answer is no. Every one of these studio albums has filler, especially now that they've been loaded down with bonus tracks, and the excellent compilation Together Forever is still available at finer used record stores nationwide. But Run-DMC remains probably the most important group in rap history, and its albums deserve careful scrutiny, as historical documents and sometimes as more.
The group's self-titled debut album, released in 1984, remains its most powerful and immediate studio record, the LP that forever tore rap away from disco and made it its own thing. Famously, the album's production removed all the glossy live-band funk popular on the rap records of the day and replaced it with a harsh, spacey stripped-down electronic boom. Album opener "Hard Times" is a good case in point: Producer Larry Smith lays down a spooky, chilly electro beat, nothing but a few drum-machine ticks and claps, some heavy breathing, a couple of synth stabs. Run and DMC toss lines back and forth in a tag-team style that never really caught on, yelling rather than flowing, building up to the end of the verse where they're both yelling in tandem. Lyrically, it's nothing special; their street reportage is just another take on their first single "It's Like That", which is itself a vanilla version of Melle Mel's rap on "The Message".
But musically, it's spare and hard and densely compelling, and it probably sounded terrifying in 1984. The rest of the album sounds pretty much like this, hard empty beats with yelled old-school catchphrase-slinging rapping, and it's a strong and forceful time capsule from an era when rap's hardness came from its sound rather than its lyrics or its' practitioners' biographies. The only real misstep is "Rock Box", a track that buries a decent banger under layers of unbearable hair-metal guitar wheedling. The amazing early live track "Here We Go (Live at the Funhouse)", included on the reissue, proves that Run-DMC were actually better rappers onstage than they were in the studio, but then that track is already on Together Forever, as are five of the original album's nine tracks. So Run-DMC is pretty great, but you probably don't need to own it.
King of Rock takes "Rock Box" as its starting-off point, adding a whole lot of heavy rock guitars to the group's musical palette. The new approach endeared the group to suburban America, but it meant that they'd never again capture the dystopian heaviness of their debut. Fortunately, they improve on the precedent of "Rock Box", finding more effective ways to throw rock into the mix. The title track rests on a huge, stomping AC/DC riff, and the two rappers sound pretty amazing yelling over it. "Can You Rock It Like This", with its 80s synth and glossy oriental plinks, could be a Duran Duran song until the rapping starts. This is effective stuff, but it lacks the sonic oneness of the debut and thus carries an exponentially lesser impact. The rapping hasn't gotten much better; they say it's "never ever old school" before biting Melle Mel again on the token social-message track. Today, their lyrics sound archaic to the point ridiculousness ("You're a funny-looking slop eating shish kabob/ You're the reason that my eyes are on the doorknob," "Why don't you find a short pier and take a long walk?"). "Roots, Rap, Reggae" is a truly shitty and forced collaboration with Yellowman, and it captures absolutely none of what makes rap or dancehall great. The album offers little more than the still-thrilling rapping-over-guitars charge of the title track, but again: greatest hits.
Raising Hell is generally considered to be the group's all-time classic, and it certainly has its share of classic moments. Rick Rubin had by this point taken over production from Larry Smith, and he kept the group's thunderous stomp while adding a host of sly sampled musical touches: unbelievably funky bells on "Peter Piper", a great cartoonish piano line on "You Be Illin'", a dirty Southern-rock guitar riff on the title track. Run and DMC had also stepped their rap game up; "It's Tricky" is basically as good as the two of them ever got, spitting quick-tongue witticisms and yelling booming threats with equal abandon. The album, however, has a ton of filler: the goofy human-beatbox jam "Hit It Run", the ridiculously tossed-off dis "Dumb Girl", the utterly blatant Slick Rick bite "Perfection". And "Walk This Way". "Walk This Way" totally fucking sucks, a weak and half-baked novelty-rap jam which got them (and Aerosmith) all over MTV but which sounds no better for having anticipated the commercial possibilities of rap-rock.
That record was the group's commercial apex (it went triple platinum), but the band took too much time off after its release, spending a couple of years making a shitty movie and losing a court battle against its record label. During those couple of years, the landscape of rap changed completely; 1988 was the genre's quote-unquote Golden Age, and Run-DMC looked like relics next to young, more skilled rappers like Rakim and Big Daddy Kane and hungrier crews like Public Enemy and NWA. Tougher Than Leather found the group playing catch-up, enlisting a new producer in Davy D and rapping on the Marley Marl-ish breakbeats popular at the time rather than the booming drum machines that they'd always used.
On tracks like "They Call Us Run-DMC" and "Radio Station", they sound confused and out-of-touch, kicking old-school applause lines over anemic drum breaks. They also revert to formula a few too many times, coming with tracks that essentially amount to sequels of previous hits: adding weird parental angst to the honking goofball punchlines of "You Be Illin'" on "Papa Crazy", awkwardly attempting to shoehorn breakbeats onto a "King of Rock"-style banger on "Soul to Rock and Roll", biting Slick Rick again on "Ragtime". But parts of Tougher Than Leather are just great, especially "Beats to the Rhyme", which found Run and DMC quick-tongue rapping in tandem over an amazing state-of-the-art busy breakbeat with awesome sonar pings like Timbaland would use 10 years later. Tougher Than Leather is a failure, but it's a noble one. The reissue includes "Christmas in Hollis", maybe the first time they would allow themselves to become cartoon characters, kicking it with Santa, DMC chilling and cooling just like a snowman in a line that seems touchingly naïve in the Jeezy era.
And that's it. Nobody is going to be reissuing the group's 1990 album Back From Hell anytime soon, and the group became an old-school signifier, someone for rappers to quote or reference but never hire for features or anything. The group was essentially irrelevant only five years after releasing its first single-- to put that in perspective, Bow Wow has been popular for a longer time. The group was hugely important in changing rap and making it an industry force, but you can't really say they had much influence on the way it sounds today. They removed the flash and gloss of the disco-rap of the Sugar Hill label, and they influenced a young LL Cool J, who influenced Boogie Down Productions and Eric B & Rakim, who influenced the Juice Crew and Public Enemy and NWA, and on and on and on, as rap would undergo sea change after sea change. By the late 90s, much of the music was flashier and glossier than it ever had been in the Sugar Hill era, and any changes that Run-DMC made were changed themselves to the point of being unrecognizable. And so what we have now are four historical documents, each with at least a handful of thrilling moments. And most of those thrilling moments are on Together Forever or other singles compilations, so unless you're a historian or a rich person, save your money.


Much more than a Caribbean summer playlist, Bad Bunny’s latest album is a melodic discourse that questions the powers that be and a call to action that encourages diasporic joy, perreo, and rest.

Un Verano Sin Ti

Bad Bunny moves with intention. Quickly after releasing Un Verano Sin Ti, he made stops that reflect two major themes of the album. The first was a cute, intimate celebration at the last Puerto Rican social club remaining in Williamsburg, Brooklyn: the Caribbean Social Club (also known as “Toñita’s” after one of its owners, Maria Antonia Cay). As one of the most regarded Latinx-owned bars to survive the area’s gentrification while also preserving Boricua history, its existence symbolizes resistance. The day after, he appeared in the Bronx to record a music video for one of the album’s highlights, the upbeat hip-hop dembow fusion “Tití Me Preguntó.” Sporting a T-shirt honoring bachata legend Anthony Santos—whose “No Te Puedo Olvidar” is sampled at the beginning of the track—he was seen turning up with Dominican youth, taking part in the street revelery known simply as teteo. This release-week schedule reflects two of Un Verano Sin Ti’s animating forces: Benito’s bori pride and appreciation of Dominican culture.
Recorded in his native island of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, Un Verano Sin Ti is a cohesively packaged voyage through the various sounds synonymous with the Caribbean region—reggaetón, reggae, bomba, Dominican dembow, Dominican mambo, and bachata, among others. The album’s 23 tracks are conceptualized through an A side and B side scheme that separates high-energy party and fun sonidos from tranquility and conscious thinking. Its enticing musical patchwork further lures listeners into El Conejo’s universe of experimental arrangements, sharp and nostalgic synths, and unexpected genre fusions. It’s a loving ode to Caribbean culture that embraces marginalized scenes within Latin America, from the ostracization of Black-rooted genres like bachata, dembow, and mambo to the criminalization of reggaeton.
Since his early Latin-trap beginnings (which he nods to here on “Dos Mil 16”), Bad Bunny’s adventurous tastes have catapulted him to become one of the most prolific global tastemakers. That versatility, paired with impeccable delivery, wordplay, and lyricism, has permitted him to exist creatively in a way no one else in Latin music, specifically within El Movimiento—to push the boundaries of gender conformity and fashion, for example, while simultaneously branching out to wrestling and acting. His range is represented throughout his discography, which spans pop-punk-meets-trap tracks like “Tenemos Que Hablar” (from 2019’s X 100PRE), “Hablamos Mañana” (2020’s YHLQMDLG), and “Yo Visto Así” (El Último Tour Del Mundo, his second album of 2020 and the first all Spanish-language album to hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200). As he’s gone on to become Spotify’s most-streamed artist two years in a row, Bad Bunny has set records never before seen in the industry. Yet, despite all the accolades and fame, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio can still be found in a narrow, Puerto Rican-owned bar in Brooklyn.
In this tiny, symbolic bar in New York City, he celebrated another muse for the project: the vacations he spent on the west coast of Puerto Rico as a kid. The album’s gratifying transitions illustrate a summer in el caribe—what it feels like to be on those beaches, the colloquial phrases and dialects of the Spanish-language Caribbean. The sound of seagulls in the track-to-track transition between “Agosto” and “Callaita” perfectly evokes the texture and atmosphere of the beach. With dazzling eclecticism, Bad Bunny touches on nu-disco, psychedelia, electro-pop, and house on reggaetón-based songs like “Party” with Rauw Alejandro, “Tarot” featuring Jhay Cortez, and one of its most political tracks, “El Apagón.” The second half brings a wealth of unexpected collaborations: On “Ojitos Lindos” and “Otro Atardecer,” respectively, Colombian cumbia-electro group Bomba Estéreo and indie-pop band the Marías adapt seamlessly into the project’s world.
The B-side also serves as a melodic discourse on Puerto Rican livelihood. Puerto Rican duo Buscabulla joins for “Andrea,” an indie-pop song that touches on femicide and gender violence. “El Apagón” (“The Blackout”) is a middle finger to those privatizing the island’s electrical grid and beaches, furthering the displacement and gentrification of communities in Puerto Rico, the world’s oldest colony. “Que se vayan ellos/Lo que me pertenece a mí/Se lo quedan ellos” (Let them go/What belongs to me/They’ll keep it for themselves), sings Bad Bunny’s girlfriend, Gabriela Berlingeri, in the outro. “Esta es mi tierra” (This is my land). The song’s beginning rhythm is the pulse of bomba, a genre birthed by enslaved Africans to preserve tradition that today symbolizes resistance and liberation.
The truth is: perreo, whining the waist, and shaking ass are all forms of protest and expression, and activated equally throughout the album. While the B-side feels designed for whining down and deep thinking, the A-side sets the tone for teteos, cookouts, and beach parties, keeping reggaetón culture at the forefront with appearances from native legends like Tony Dize on “La Corriente” and Plan B’s Chencho Corleone on “Me Porto Bonito.” A major part of the production influences belong to the Dominican Republic, though actual Dominican artists are conspicuously absent. “Después de la Playa,” which opens with synths that transition to a Dominican mambo a little over a minute in, is one of the only songs to credit a Dominican artist by name: Against a foundation of guira, tambora, and piano, you hear, “I’m here with el Apechao”—a reference to Dahian el Apechao, an instrumentalist, singer, and composer with an impressive history of collaboration with mambo and reggaetón artists alike. The lack of visible representation for more Black Dominican artists on an album so indebted to their influence feels like a missed opportunity.
What it means to properly appreciate culture runs deep, especially when you’re a global phenomenon with omnivorous tastes and a vast audience, and Bad Bunny has space to continue learning. Since the mid-2010s, he’s introduced and defined trends for El Movimiento in both music and fashion. Every album rollout brings a fresh aesthetic: From intricate hair designs and brightly colored short-shorts to skirts and punk leathers to the beach-ready boonie hats of Un Verano Sin Ti, he’s constantly evolving. As he did with ’80s synths, romantiqueo (pop reggaetón centered on heartache and love), and emo lyricism, this album sets the blueprint for what’s next and the message is clear: The Caribbean deserves its flowers and will continue to claim space. Bad Bunny’s diasporic summer playlist is the sound of a world preparing for positive healing and joy.


The rising Afrobeats artist refines her style on a glossy, tightly woven EP.

My Diary EP

Although Jackline Acheampong only recently started making music, she has long been a student of the craft. The 22-year-old Ghanain Afro-fusion artist, who records under the name Gyakie, was 8 when she began accompanying her father, the legendary highlife singer Nana Acheampong, to his studio. In August 2020, during her second year of college, she released her debut EP, Seed, a freewheeling project she wrote and recorded during lockdown. While its wide-ranging genre experimentation didn’t always coalesce, her talents alchemized on “Forever,” a sticky-sweet single whose simple yet vulnerable lyrics announced Gyakie as one of Ghana’s fast-rising Afrobeats talents.
My Diary, Gyakie’s second EP, is a glossier and more tightly woven improvement on its predecessor. Even though the six-song set feels like a direct thematic extension—most of her lyrics still concern love and desire—the production is stronger and her writing is significantly more self-possessed. If Seed attempted to encompass a multitude of sounds without landing on a specific identity, then these songs allow Gyakie to streamline her thought process—sometimes to a fault. As her lyrics dance between feelings of longing and fear, she occasionally finds herself in creative stasis.
The EP opens strong with the Altra Nova-produced “Audience,” a partly sultry, partly somber jazz number. Right away, you can hear the adventurous spirit from her past work, but the motives are now more concrete. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Gyakie, we’re about to have a good time,” she begins, reassuring herself and her listeners before igniting the party with the freestyle-esque riffs of “na, na, na, na” that make up the chorus. The Davido-assisted “Flames” and the clever, bittersweet Afropop track “Something” are also highlights that showcase her growth as an artist.
If Seed allowed Gyakie to exhibit a sense of freedom as an emerging act, My Diary is occasionally too careful in its approach, creating a sense of self-imposed restriction. While it’s refreshing to hear Gyakie move beyond the winning formula that made “Forever” a hit, she is still trying to find a sound that is uniquely hers. Closing song “Waka Waka,” a reggae fusion track, illustrates the ambiguity, beginning with high energy but struggling to maintain its flow. Beneath the tension in her lyrics—trusting in someone else and guarding her own heart—there is a sense that, had she allowed herself the chance to freefall a bit, she might have returned with a more daring project. At its best, My Diary feels like the precursor to a grander, more confident reinvention to come.

Flip the Music / Sony Music West Africa / Epic


Initially out last year on a small vinyl-only edition, this collection of skewed country-soul greatness deserves to be heard by more ears.

Poor Moon

Last year, the tiny North Carolina label Paradise of Bachelors issued Poor Moon-- 13 tracks of skewed, country-soul greatness from Hiss Golden Messenger-- in a vinyl edition of 500, each hand-numbered at the lower right corner of the cover. Poor Moon represents just the second release for Paradise of Bachelors and its first collection of new songs; the year before, the imprint debuted with Said I Had a Vision, a collection of mostly ignored and lost would-be soul hits by a small-town Southern producer and tunesmith named David Lee.
Last week, the California-via-New York label Tompkins Square reissued Poor Moon on CD, giving an album that had quickly sold out in its original form a chance to benefit from wider distribution. Tompkins Square is one of the few extant imprints that could give Poor Moon a proper and permanent presence, or one with an aesthetic that fit not only Paradise of Bachelors but also Hiss Golden Messenger. For the last decade, after all, Tompkins Square has dug deep into both the past and present to deliver soulful music in all its numerous guises, whether that's meant box sets of astonishing gospel performances or the one-man-string-band exhortations of Frank Fairfield. Poor Moon thrives on an absolute Pan-American musical alchemy, where classic country and bar-band rock, pristine bluegrass and subversive funk whittle their own way into the same perfect grooves. This is new music that uses the past like a catapult-- into songs that understand their pedigrees without kowtowing to them. Tompkins Square is a readymade home.
Hiss Golden Messenger is, at its core, Durham, N.C., songwriter M.C. Taylor and New York multi-instrumentalist Scott Hirsch; in the late 1990s, Hirsch and Taylor anchored San Francisco's the Court & Spark, an intriguing act that attempted to till the soil between indie rock and alt-country scenes long before listeners seemed so Fleet Foxes-ready. Poor Moon is the fourth Hiss Golden Messenger album, but it feels in a sense like a debut, or at least some grand curtain finally being pulled back. By far the band's most developed effort, Poor Moon was recorded with a cast of 16 guitarists, string players, horn players, drummers, pickers, and singers and revisits several tunes from past Hiss Golden Messenger albums-- in effect, funneling the band's widespread oeuvre into this one discrete moment.
It works: Poor Moon is a fantastic, on-repeat record that recalls the aesthetic risks and rewards of the best stuff produced by Laurel Canyon's singer-songwriters and, decades later, the stylistically daring musicians associated with New Weird America. Hiss Golden Messenger pairs an instant accessibility with careful complexity; the hook of opener "Blue Country Mystic", for example, is inescapable, but the song's sudden twists and sprints and minute musical details provide a framework of constant unpredictability. There's a beautiful bluegrass trot in the middle and a string-lined country-soul template at the end, but those are exceptions. Instead, Poor Moon largely depends upon the band's ability to hide the seams of its polyglot proclivities. Traces of funk and dub ripple warmly beneath the banjo of "Drummer Down" and the keyboard flourishes of  "Jesus Shot Me in the Head", while "Super Blue (Two Days Clean)" washes psychedelic warmth gently over an incisive bar-rock clip. The sidewinding acoustic guitars of the instrumental "Dreamwood" rise from a haze of nocturnal field recordings, suggesting Sir Richard Bishop sitting in with the sounds of a surrounding swamp. These innovative melds put Hiss Golden Messenger in the company of contemporaries like Megafaun, Doug Paisley, and Lambchop, all acts who have lifted from the past with steady visions for the future.
Poor Moon is something of a religious album, but Taylor judiciously applies the same nothing-sacred mentality to his faith that his band delivers to its variegated music. Tying a tight knot between self-definition, self-discovery, and the possibility of self-obliteration, "Jesus Shot Me in the Head" slowly reveals itself to not only be a meditation on giving into God but arguably giving up on life, too. "Daylight" questions the need for good-versus-evil, light-versus dark binaries, suggesting that essential truths get lost at the border between black and white. The same tension ribbons through "Super Blue", the first-person tale of a junkie whose forced sobriety starts to kill him-- at least until he kills it with shots and lines and spontaneous trips down south. "There's a big black horse on a nice straight course/ My bets are fixed/ All right," Taylor sings, his unequivocal sneer embracing and exploring every aspect of addiction all at once.
Taylor uses this album almost like a journal, teasing out various scenarios and debating the proper balance between keeping faith and giving up on it. Musically, for instance, "Under All the Land" might be the album's most easygoing tune, cutting an unlikely path between reggae swagger and country sway. But as Taylor works through his religious indecision, that backdrop makes it clear that he's working again through an age-old debate about service versus selfishness, or about the meaning of freedom in the face of commitment. "It's hard to tell which are kings and which are men," he half-moans, revealing some level of discomfort with both classes. That same blue-collar directness shows up again on "A Working Man Can't Make No Way", an exasperated acoustic rollick surrounded by sighing steel guitar. Here, Taylor puts the woes of the Bible-reading, all-toiling commoner in the harsh daylight of reality. No matter how much the narrator works, heaven inevitably takes his parents; earning a simple wage strips any leisure time he could have ever had, rewarding his allegiance with no earthly sanctuary. Ever so gently, our man rebels: "My bosses can just go to hell," Taylor sings, easing the imprecation skyward. "Tell 'em all I don't give a damn."
It's difficult not to revel in the fortuitous timing of Poor Moon, an album that treats hard times like the only through-line of existence but keeps pressing ahead. At a moment when the international economy seems on the brink of unfathomable faults, when people's rights are being questioned on the basis of religion, and when battles of lesser evils are the only ones seemingly left to be won, Poor Moon offers a steadying sort of balm. Never pedantic or didactic, never extreme or aggressive, Poor Moon is a warm hand on a cold shoulder, a vintage piece of soul music for new times in need.


Mogwai's latest full-length is technically a soundtrack, featuring reworked material from their musical contributions to a BBC 4 documentary on the atomic age.

Atomic

Mogwai's latest full-length is technically a soundtrack: It comprises reworked material from their musical contributions to last year’s BBC 4 documentary Storyville - Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise, a chronological history of nuclear disaster (and innovation) from Hiroshima onward. However, unlike the previous works the Scottish post-rock innovators have scored (Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, The Fountain, and "Les Revenants") the source material doesn’t have a clear-cut narrative*.* With no outside narration or interviews to provide context to the film's archival cortège (save a series of statistics at the conclusion), director Mark Cousins takes a bold risk and assumes the audience's familiarity with everything mentioned in "We Didn't Start the Fire." It's more an obtuse high-art music video than it is a traditional documentary. Atomic, on the other hand, is anything but esoteric. Despite its minimalistic approach, the album poignantly illustrates the binary oppositions that cropped up in Hiroshima’s wake: life and death, hope and fear, war and peace, atomic and organic.
Mogwai have always thrived on textural contrast: the fission of twangy strings against somber snare hits, the disintegration of brittle synthesizers beneath a tide of feedback, a violin crying out in silence. In keeping with the film’s themes, several tracks on Atomic sound corrupted. Beneath the uplifting fanfare of opening track "Ether," for instance, one can hear a faint, dull drone, as though the band recorded the track on nuked recording equipment. The unsettling murmur continues throughout the entire record, and even in moments of rare purity—such as the tender duet of guitars and violin on "Are You A Dancer?"—the mechanical roar is never far behind.
The majority of the album distances itself from rock and sticks to a doom-ridden breed of new-wave. "SCRAM" sees the group sequencing a stream of staggered synth lines into hypnotic orbit, like a Cold War Calder mobile, while "Weak Force" resembles a piano ballad performed by a forlorn android. The record’s final track, "Fat Man," is the most methodical and magnificent by far. The band take a lone, unassuming piano riff and bombard it with sharp guitar tones, the corruption further catalyzed with steadily-increasing doses of the aforementioned aural radioactivity; there’s a cinematic swell, and then... silence.
Considering the conditions of Atomic's conception, the album’s departure from the band’s preceding full-length, 2014’s Rave Tapes, shouldn’t come as a surprise. Sure, fans expecting a Stuart Braithwaite shred-fest may find the LP a disappointment. But like all good concept albums (and soundtracks), Atomic’s sole allegiance is to its subject. And when you’re dealing with the pinnacle of human innovation and the symbol of death, that subject deserves to take center stage.


On Steven Ellison’s sixth album, his sweeping jazz-funk feels limitless. It sounds more like a sketchbook with FlyLo crafting each minute with great care and technical dexterity.

Flamagra

You’re Dead! was such a momentous piece of work, and such an inflection point in Flying Lotus’ career, that his earlier albums can now sound conventional by comparison. They were original and daring, but remained planted in soil tilled by pioneers like Dilla and Madlib. You’re Dead! offered a different vision: ecstatic, shapeshifting, deeply collaborative, and with a remarkable ability to mask its making. Where most beat music foregrounds surfaces and processes—the fingerprints on the pads of the MPC, the dust in the grooves of the wax—the 2014 album flowed like magical liquid with no discernable source. Where beat music is grounded, You’re Dead! was pure vapor, a lungful of atoms returned swirling into the universe.
You’re Dead! was an album about mortality, one colored by the passing of friends, peers, and family members; it reflected the increasingly cosmic scope of Steven Ellison’s work as Flying Lotus, in which spiritual jazz could exist side by side with sick jokes, the sublime with the ridiculous, fanciful, and ribald. This time, on his sixth album, there is no explicit theme; the through line holding Flamagra together seems to be the creative process itself. Ellison spent the past five years working on the album; 10 tracks swelled to more than two dozen. For a while, it was envisioned as a collection of just beats, no jazz. The jazz eventually wormed its way back in, thanks to longtime collaborators like keyboardists Brandon Coleman, Dennis Hamm, and Taylor Graves; multi-instrumentalist Miguel Atwood-Ferguson; and, especially, bassist Stephen Bruner, better known as Thundercat, a key member of the Brainfeeder brain trust and a co-writer of the majority of these songs. The album’s guiding metaphor was a flame on a hill. “Then I went to this party and heard David Lynch saying the words that he wound up saying on the record,” Ellison says. “And I was like, ‘That’s it, we’re just going to go in that direction.’”
For all the clarity that the image of a flame on a hill might suggest, there is a lot of murk and confusion. There’s a lot of everything; fortunately, that goes both ways. There are bouts of thick, gloopy overload but also instances of crystalline focus; there are serpentine jazz-funk rave-ups and moments of profound stillness. In keeping with a lot of beat music, many of these tracks are relatively short. The abundance of minute-and-a-half miniatures means that, for all the viscous density of the stacked keyboards, and all the nervous momentum of Thundercat’s agile fretwork, there’s plenty of room to breathe. On a sensory level the music sounds incredible, crafted with a technical dexterity that only accentuates its vast dimension.
Sweeping, prismatic jazz-funk predominates, but there is no shortage of surprises. The 89-second “Andromeda,” a co-write with Thundercat, sounds like Flying Lotus’ take on Radiohead’s version of post-rock. “Say Something,” even shorter, might be Tom Waits soundtracking a Wes Anderson film. “Pygmy,” a late-album highlight, drizzles Thundercat’s high-necked bass melody over rainforest samples and a beat that swishes like a rushing river; it’s as moving as it is simple.
The album feels, above all, like a sketchbook—synths from “Takashi,” a funk-lite tune built from Jackson Pollack-like layers of spattered keys, turn up 11 tracks later on “Debbie Is Depressed,” and their recurrence is more than simple déjà vu; it’s a peek into Ellison’s hard drive, a glimpse at the way ideas from a given session are carried into new contexts. Some of the record’s most sketch-like pieces are its most rewarding: Consider “Pilgrim Side Eye,” a cartoonishly swaggering funk miniature that flips, in its final seconds, into gorgeous, sighing chords, soft as baby’s breath. The song, an instrumental, is over in 91 seconds; jazz great Herbie Hancock is in there somewhere, scampering around within the antic changes, but the horizon is egoless. All virtuosity is channeled back into the spirit of group interplay.
Tierra Whack pulls off the most striking star turn, on “Yellow Baby,” the album’s sparsest track—just a spindly, ramshackle beat, all errant claps and snares, underpinning the Philadelphia rapper’s wild gyrations. Ellison builds the barest of scaffolding for her to dangle from, and she makes the most of this rickety playground, sounding giddy as she lags dangerously behind the beat. Flying Lotus is known as a maximalist, but here he shows how much he can do with simple materials, especially when paired with the right partner.
Even in two- and three-minute doses, 67 minutes of this stuff is a lot. A handful of tracks could probably have been set aside for a separate EP or a deluxe edition of the album. And for all the bold-print clout of the assembled guests—Solange, George Clinton, Toro y Moi, Little Dragon’s Yukimi Nagano—one wishes for more standout songs on par with You’re Dead!’s “Never Catch Me,” featuring Kendrick Lamar. Ellison comes closest on “More,” featuring Anderson .Paak at his raspy, declamatory best. The hook is an expression of existential yearning boiled down to its essence: “There’s gotta be more to life than myself… Gotta be somethin’ more that I can’t tell.”
It’s here that the album comes closest to the big-picture soul-searching of You’re Dead! But even when he sets his sights on closer targets, it’s clear that Flying Lotus is a rare talent with enviable range, more next-level bandleader than mere beatmaker. No wonder that David Lynch gets a surrealistic spoken-word solo at the dead center of the album: The shock-headed director’s self-contained universes are an obvious influence on Ellison’s own art. True, Flamagra may not comprise nearly as elaborate a world as those that Lynch conjures, and it doesn’t push Ellison’s art forward in the same way that You’re Dead! did. But the afterlife is a hard act to follow, and in the light of that flame on the hill, Flamagra makes for an engaging way station.


The first official release from Seattle-based Fleet Foxes may be largely influenced by vintage folk and rock LPs, but this pastoral psych-pop band does something special with these elements. Fusing classic rock, church music, old-timey folk, and epic, reverb-drenched harmonies, the group's brilliantly rustic songs never go quite where you expect them to, instead taking more scenic routes to arrive at perfect, natural conclusions.

Sun Giant EP

The opening track on Fleet Foxes' debut EP is the perfect introduction to this Seattle band, whose carefully fashioned songs reward more active listening than your typical indie-roots outfit. "Sun Giant" begins with their soft harmonies reverberating in what sounds like a cathedral space. With no accompaniment, their sustained a cappella notes fade slowly, adding gravity to this hymn of contentment: "What a life I lead in the summer/ What a life I lead in the spring." The only other instrument is Skyler Skjelset's mandolin, which enters late in the song playing a delicate theme as singer Robin Pecknold hums quietly.
The Sun Giant EP-- sold on tour and digitally through Sub Pop, with a proper release forthcoming-- contains familiar sounds, but Fleet Foxes make something new and special with them, following their own musical whims as closely as they follow tradition. (Maybe more closely.) These five songs-- modest but never spare, atmospheric but never as an end in itself-- change shape constantly, taking in elements of classic rock, church music, old-timey folk, and soundtrack flourishes. Already mistaken for Southern rock (there's not enough boogie in Nicholas Peterson's drums for that), Fleet Foxes will bear repeated comparisons, both praising and disparaging, to groups like My Morning Jacket and Band of Horses, but those connections are based on superficial similarities like geography or the heavy use of reverb. In fact, Fleet Foxes' touchstones are much more diverse than that-- and not necessarily so contemporary. Until recently, their MySpace page listed Judee Sill, Crosby Stills & Nash, and Fairport Convention as influences, although now it reads "not much of a rock band." That's not especially true. You could also make a case that Fleet Foxes' demonstrative harmonies recall Fleetwood Mac; that their rearrangement and recombination of traditional styles hints at the Band or, more recently, Grizzly Bear; that their short, evocative instrumental phrasing bears similarities to Pinetop Seven.
Such comparisons accompany the arrival of most young bands, but Fleet Foxes' songs inhabit a very specific, very rural space that's as much a product of how these songs are assembled as it is of how they sound. Like a novelist writing intricately winding sentences, the band craft hummable melodies that never quite go where you expect, but sound neither manipulated nor directed. After the quiet title track comes "Drops in the River", which builds gradually as the band patiently add instruments-- strange ambient clattering in the background and simple floor toms in place of a drum kit, accentuated with tambourine and a snaky electric guitar. Halfway through the song, Fleet Foxes reach a dramatic peak, and their next move is surprising: The music ebbs momentarily, as if to build anew through a second verse, but then picks up at that same dramatic level. Like the rest of the EP, "Drops in the River" possesses an intriguingly blunt concision, as though Fleet Foxes have no time for the luxury of long, slow crescendos or meandering jams. They focus their arrangements finely, emphasizing Pecknold's rustically impressionistic lyrics as much as their organic and inventive sound.
"English House" and "Mykonos", the longest and most obviously "rock" songs, comprise the EP's rising action and reveal more of Fleet Foxes' range. The former is a graceful downward rush of guitars and percussion, with a falsetto chorus trimming the music like Christmas lights in the rafters. "Mykonos" doesn't travel as far as its title suggests, but thrives on the tension between Pecknold's wordless vocal intro and the band's intricate harmonies. Of course, it careens off in new directions. "Brother, you don't need to turn me away," Pecknold pleads, bringing the song to a dramatic standstill. Then the band just runs away with the song again.
The Sun Giant EP ends with Pecknold alone once more, singing "Innocent Son" with only a few brusque strums as accompaniment. With only the sparsest elements, he turns the song into a sort of rough county-road soul, his voice unceremoniously fading out on the final words. This song, and the others here, reinforce the impression that Sun Giant is more than a tour souvenir or a promotional teaser for a proper release. It's a sovereign work: a statement EP, supremely crafted and confident.


Commissioned as the soundtrack to a line of prefab homes, this 1986 ambient masterpiece doubles as a frame for the smallest, most quotidian sounds. It’s a testament to the act of listening itself.

Surround

Hiroshi Yoshimura was sitting with his eyes closed. Beneath him, a mat. Beside him, several stones. In his hands he held a soprano saxophone. It was September 1977, and he and the musician Akio Suzuki were staging a performance titled HOT BREATH. For the next 12 hours, their time would belong to the act of listening. The 36-year-old composer wanted his music to be “as close to air itself” as possible, and it’s easy to imagine that on that Saturday, he captured something at the level of particles. Above his head hung a paper structure dubbed the “cloud mobile.” It twirled as a result of his movements and his playing, and maybe the opening of a nearby door. If he longed to be part of something grander, something interconnected, Yoshimura got there one modest gesture at a time.
Yoshimura, who died in 2003, believed that any given artwork—like individual human existence itself—represented a single thread of a much larger tapestry. He joined the Taj Mahal Travellers in 1974, and under the leadership of Fluxus artist Takehisa Kosugi, the free-improvisation group held concerts in the city and in nature, often accompanied by footage of the ocean. Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports would arrive at the tail end of the decade, bringing with it something new: kankyō ongaku, or “environmental music,” a style of site-specific sound art. Yoshimura’s first foray into the genre came with 1982’s Music for Nine Post Cards, created to be played back at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art. The spirit of the piece recalls something he once said of a Harold Budd performance: “full of kindness and refinement, allowing us to open up our hearts without limits.” Yoshimura’s compositions were similarly self-effacing and similarly transformative, meant to affect the way we interact with the world.
Yoshimura would spend his career writing songs for public spaces, and the fullest realization of that was his 1986 LP Surround, commissioned by Misawa Homes Institute of Research and Development as a set of soundscapes for the company’s prefabricated houses. The task was daunting: He had to make people’s homes—the most intimate, comfortable place in anyone’s life—even more hospitable. The album’s most arresting quality points to his solution: It encourages an appreciation for everyday beauty. Yoshimura was keenly receptive to the sublimity of the world around him; he’d once spent an entire day looking heavenward, playing his piano to the steady drifting of clouds. Such dedicated practices may have informed the natural rhythms at the heart of Surround, where patient metallophone and guitar-like melodies swim in reflecting pools of limpid electronic tone. The synths on “Something blue” are as charming as they are inviting, every phrase like a cresting wave to float upon. It sounds like Eno’s “1/1” if the latter were twice as fast and suffused with childlike whimsy. It’s this playfulness that sets Yoshimura’s music apart. The music of forebears like Erik Satie, who he loved since high school, could often be construed as forlorn; Surround’s brand of introspection is eminently hopeful.
Comparing Surround to the work of Yoshimura’s contemporaries helps clarify the uniqueness of the Japanese composer’s vision. In the 1980s, Steve Roach and Michael Stearns constructed interplanetary fantasies, Budd & Eno’s The Pearl turned new-age reverberations into mythical dreams, and Ambient 4: On Land was dark and moody, filled with atmospheric intrigue. Yoshimura’s work is far more down to earth, unconcerned with imagining new locales. In “Green shower,” a woodwind-like melody trickles down like rain, landing in a pool of rippling synths. When a higher-pitched tone arrives, it does so with the warmth of a sun breaking the horizon. Conjuring entire landscapes out of a few meager layers of sound, Yoshimura seems to encourage listeners to focus their senses and notice how much music already surrounds us.
For decades, Yoshimura wrote down his thoughts about music in notebooks. Perhaps most insightful was when he mused, “My music is not mine, but the sounds which are not mine are also my music.” As John Cage had with 4’33”, Yoshimura found that anything could be compositional material, that he was a mere participant in the universe’s collective symphony. This is especially apparent on his albums incorporating field recordings, like 1986’s GREEN or 1993’s Wet Land, but similar ideas also animate Surround. On “Water planet,” glistening synths intermittently appear, one note at a time—sometimes offering a semblance of melody, but mostly just sparkling amid diaphanous drones. The song resembles an important precursor to environmental music: suikinkutsu, a Japanese garden ornament where water droplets echo inside jars.
Music this tender feels like a generous embrace. That is the prevailing impression of Surround’s 11-minute centerpiece, “Time forest.” Its synths oscillate without pause, tremolo pulses in constant motion. Halfway through, deep synthesizer chimes offer a welcome sense of stability amid the soft tumult. “Serenity might be the supreme music I am aiming at,” Yoshimura once said. He wasn’t endorsing escapism; he detested rock’n’roll for pursuing just that. His music instead prized hyper-awareness of one’s surroundings. Even his peers making kankyō ongaku couldn’t quite reach this careful balance. At times, their works could be too dramatic, or leave one drifting aimlessly. With Surround, each new development is vital, and its quietude is a site for active engagement.
In the original liner notes for the album, Yoshimura requested that it be played at a low enough volume to allow space for conversation. He wanted its contents to be on the same level as, say, the patter of footsteps. Turn the title track up to 11 and you can hear the emotional pull of its synth pads. Bring it down several notches and all that remains is a low hum ringed by a faint glimmer—it feels, quite beautifully, like walking through mist. In a way, Yoshimura’s work is the antithesis to musique concrète: If those composers exerted dominion over nature, reconfiguring sounds through tape-spliced collages, then Yoshimura was merely surrendering to it.
Yoshimura made his way through the world via sound, once declaring, “I look with my ears.” He gives us a chance to experience that on “Time after time,” the magnum opus of his entire oeuvre. There’s a startling clarity to each mallet strike, and when hearing it alongside the ambient noise of one’s living quarters, everything—the rustling of dog tags, the clanging of silverware—seems imbued with an extra glint. His music can be understood as an alternate version of Pauline Oliveros’ deep-listening practices, except without the long-form drones and extended retreats. To become extraordinarily attentive, he simply gives you the sparest of sounds. At his concerts, Yoshimura had performers wear paper bunny ears to signal that people should listen closely. On Surround, he asks us to be like a rabbit grazing in the evening stillness, perfectly attuned to our surroundings.


DJ Khaled is a savvy curator; too often, that’s all he is. His latest collection of star-studded rap party bangers offers the rare opportunity to isolate what, exactly, he adds to a track.

God Did

On stage at the VMAs this year, clad in an ash-gray suit with slime-green sneakers, DJ Khaled couldn’t stop screaming. He and Offset were there to present the contenders for the Best Collaboration award. Khaled is arguably the person best qualified for this gig, given that he’s built a musical empire by recruiting big names to hop on his beats. But instead of offering any insight into the logic behind his vast catalog of all-star team-ups, every few seconds, he squinted at the crowd and bellowed the title of his new album: “GOD DID!” The moment went viral, as DJ Khaled appearances tend to do; being a meme has often eclipsed his music. At least this time he wasn’t also getting slimed.
This is what we’ve come to expect from DJ Khaled: excess, repetition, excessive repetition. He makes catchphrases first, songs second, and in the 15 years since he started releasing music, his signature mantras and affirmations—another one, major key, we the best—have stuck harder than most of his actual songs. His past three albums, in particular, were stuffed with paint-by-numbers hip-hop, full of juddering bass and air horns. Khaled operates more like a party planner than a producer: He knows who to invite, and what’s required to set the mood, all while recognizing that his own appearance will never be the main attraction. Frequently, the only way to identify a DJ Khaled track is hearing him shouting his own name. He stays in the background for most of God Did’s 18 tracks—but once in a while, he finally tiptoes out of his usual templates. It’s not enough to salvage a bogged-down album, but coming from him, even a little experimentation is surprising.
Rather than kicking off the record with a grandiose inspirational message, as he’s often done in the past, Khaled saves it for the outro and introduces God Did with less than a minute of Drake at his pettiest. “They act like we friends/Whole time is pretend,” Drake sings over delicate music-box synths, with no corkboard affirmations in sight. It’s an elegant diversion from Khaled’s standard, thump-focused fare, which makes it all the more overwhelming when the title track barrels in. “God Did” is an eight-and-a-half-minute exercise in bombast: screeching tires, spiraling electric guitar, the back-to-back steamroll of Rick Ross handing off to Lil Wayne handing off to four straight minutes of Jay-Z. Jay’s sprawling verse should be its own track—even the joy of hearing him brag about monogrammed pockets and “pushin’ Fenty like fentanyl” wears out eventually—but “God Did” is ambitious, the first time since Khaled’s early records that he’s reached for actual grandness, instead of empty proclamations of it.
Khaled is a savvy curator; too often, that’s all he is. God Did offers the rare opportunity to isolate what, exactly, DJ Khaled adds to a track. He stitches a snippet from the Lox vs. Dipset Verzuz battle into an interlude with Jadakiss, and the shouts of the crowd invigorate a stretch of sterile, focus-tested songs. Khaled’s craft is clearest in his remix of Kanye West’s “Use This Gospel.” He updates the 2019 track with an Eminem verse that slots easily over chiming bells and rolling drums, raps sputtering into hyperspeed. It spins out into a bass drop, turning a pensive song from Jesus Is King into a banger to wake up a party, or at least something to blast at the gym.
All-purpose intensity is the appeal of Khaled’s albums, which have the subtlety of shotgunning a Red Bull. Many of the tracks on God Did can’t sustain the energy, though. Two out of three Migos phone it in on “Party,” opening with energetic ad-libs that peter out conspicuously. Gunna and Roddy Ricch wilt on “Fam Good, We Good,” sounding bored by the time they reach the chorus. Even Lil Baby can’t resuscitate “Big Time” from a plodding beat and the absurdity of Future’s very first line: “Rainbow Audemars ’cause my bitch bisexual.” “Staying Alive” unfolds like a caricature of a Khaled song, ticking off the requisite expensive sample as Drake interpolates the Bee Gees through Auto-Tune.
Some of the album’s most appealing melodies and hooks seem more incidental than intentional, the logical outcome of combining stars and beats, then backing away. Restraint can pay off—the late Juice WRLD shines on a track that’s just him, and 21 Savage could rap over an iPhone alarm—but you’re left wondering what could happen if Khaled took a more active role. Putting Latto and City Girls on the same track is a winning idea, but on “Bills Paid,” their verses are cordoned off from each other. SZA gets confined to the chorus on “Beautiful,” when she could’ve added zest to Future’s croaky raps about eating shrooms and burning sage. What would a DJ Khaled album sound like if he were more director than set decorator, if he harnessed the power of collaboration to push artists beyond their comfort zones? In a few moments, God Did hints at the possibilities. But when it comes down to offering new wisdom or proudly repeating the tried-and-true, we already know where DJ Khaled stands.


The new reissue of Tom Petty’s benchmark 1994 solo album has a sprawling quality inherent to the album that makes it feel less like a curio for obsessives than a deep interrogation into its success.

Tom Petty: Wildflowers & All the Rest (Deluxe Edition)

Imagine the scene: It’s 1994 and Tom Petty is presenting his new solo album Wildflowers to the suits at Warner Bros. He’s been working on this music for two years with a new collaborator, producer Rick Rubin, and he is excited. He presses play. The first thing you hear is the title track, which sounds like a folk standard. Next, you hear “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” with its booming drums and wrecking ball of a chorus; it sounds like a hit single. Then you hear 23 more songs.
It’s amazing, the label says, but it’s too long.
Somehow, the artist sitting across the table—43 years old; a friend and collaborator of Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and Johnny Cash; an artist who has spent his decades-long career demanding control over everything with his name on it, right down to the price of his albums—agrees. Wildflowers is released that fall; 15 tracks, 63 minutes. It goes triple platinum and many considered it his masterpiece.
The further that Tom Petty got from Wildflowers, the more admiration he felt for it, and the less he understood it. In later conversations with Rubin, he admitted to feeling slightly intimidated: not sure he could ever top it, uncertain where it came from. In the last years of Petty’s life, he spoke optimistically about revisiting the material for a box set and maybe a tour. It was the next thing on his list.
Three years after his death, we have Wildflowers & All the Rest, the immersive collection Petty had in mind, curated by his family and bandmates. It includes, along with the album itself, finally back on vinyl, All the Rest: a 10-song set of outtakes, forming a solid studio album that Petty considered releasing under the name Wildflowers 2. Then there’s Home Recordings, which compiles Petty’s intimate solo demos from the era. Next is Live Wildflowers, a thrilling collection that shows how audiences around the world received this material on stage over the span of two decades. And finally, there’s Alternative Versions (Finding Wallflowers), where you hear Petty and his bandmates experiment with the songs in the studio: a set of performances notable for their minor variations in lyrics and arrangement (and, in one instance, because Ringo Starr is playing drums).
It is a lot to take in. Of course, even before this collection, Wildflowers was overwhelming by design. There are classic albums that feel carved in stone, where every note seems purposeful in communicating a point: your Born to Run’s or Blue’s or Petty’s own Damn the Torpedoes. And then there are albums like this, where the messiness is the point: you come to hear an artist indulge in whatever spirit strikes them in the studio that day. It’s the type of album where one song might be a hopeless acoustic ballad inspired by John Fahey, but the song directly before it might involve goofy non sequiturs about sex while someone rips a guitar solo.
It’s a sprawling quality inherent to the album that makes this box set feel less like a curio for obsessives than a deep interrogation into its success. Like the album itself, these recordings are fascinating, fun, and sometimes unsettlingly intimate. “Don’t Fade on Me,” the aforementioned Fahey-inspired ballad, is presented in an early solo rendition where you learn that Petty’s lyrics about a failing romantic relationship actually started as a desperate intervention from a guitarist to a bassist. (It is particularly unnerving considering Howie Epstein, the bassist in Petty’s own band, the Heartbreakers, was struggling with heroin addiction that would take his life less than 10 years later.)
More than any of Petty’s albums, Wildflowers is driven with autobiographical intensity. It’s telling that even in the earliest forms of these songs, he accompanied himself with harmony vocals and 12-string guitar and piano, as if he wanted to make sure even these versions would sound good blasting from a car radio. And yet, the music is filled with details about addiction and divorce (Petty and his first wife Jane separated a year after the album’s release). An outtake called “Harry Green” is a hushed acoustic song about a high school outcast who befriended Petty back in Florida and died by suicide. He is one of many ghosts who haunts this music, even if the song itself may have felt too confessional to include.
The other outtakes are less revealing but often remarkable: “Leave Virginia Alone” has a chorus so romantic and sugar-sweet that Petty ended up lending the song to Rod Stewart. “There Goes Angela (Dream Away)” is present only on the Home Recordings set, and it’s a fine addition to Petty’s legacy of gorgeous, stoned lullabies. In the liner notes, bandmate Benmont Tench notes that this release marks his first time hearing the song; he confirms this by noting that, had he heard it earlier, he would have demanded they record it.
Because each component of the set feels like its own carefully constructed album, it avoids the historical aura of something like Dylan’s Cutting Edge set—where entire studio sessions were presented with incomplete takes and banter. Despite the length (70 songs across 5 hours, in its longest version), it feels designed to be played from front-to-back. For casual fans, all you need is the standard set, which pairs Wildflowers with the 10 outtakes on All the Rest. But there’s no element that feels superfluous, and the very essence of the album is palpable through each part. On the live set, two outtakes find definitive versions: the riotous “Drivin’ Down to Georgia,” where the Heartbreakers explode in the way they only could with an audience cheering them on. And then there’s “Girl on LSD,” a goofy B-side that Petty can barely get through without cracking himself up. “I’m sorry about that,” he deadpans as the audience roars. “I don’t know what happened to me there.”
This lightness sustains the set. Take the Home Recordings version of “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” a moodier take on a road trip classic, complete with several discarded lines. “Most things that I worry ’bout/Never happen anyway,“ he sings in a whisper, drawling the syllables through its now-familiar, seesawing melody. Listening to all the bonus discs, it’s a lyric you will hear him try to work into multiple songs. It becomes a kind of mantra, a way to check his anxiety and turn it into something lighter, something you can sing along with. For those of us who have always listened to Tom Petty for this reason, there is comfort in knowing you can turn to Wildflowers. And now, you can live in it.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On his second album, the Boston rapper embraces his strengths, grows into his voice as a writer and draws lessons from his come-up.

Cousin Stizz: Trying to Find My Next Thrill

Trying To Find My Next Thrill

Boston rapper Cousin Stizz has spent his career fighting to break into the mainstream. Since signing a major-label deal, he’s worked with big-name producers including Vinylz and WondaGurl, secured guest verses from established rappers like Offset and G-Eazy, and courted the zeitgeist with a variety of on-trend styles: flute-rap, Migos-style repetition, codeine rap. But despite these efforts, Stizz has yet to score a hit after four years in the public eye. The rapper retreats to his comfort zone on Trying to Find My Next Thrill, doubling down on the slow, hypnotic trap on which he made his name. This retrenchment turns out to be a smart move: The end result is Stizz’s most consistent release since his haunting debut, Suffolk County.
Cousin Stizz has always had excellent taste in beats, and for Trying to Find My Next Thrill, he’s tapped fellow Massachusetts native Lil Rich—with whom he’s worked since the start—to executive produce. The pair have sourced a head-turning set of instrumentals: Lil Rich’s beat on “Perfect” sounds like heavy machinery echoing through a wet basement; Take A Daytrip turns in a fizzy club banger on “STP”; and on “Anonymous,” ascendant celebrity producer Kenny Beats punctuates a kaleidoscope of chirpy tones with pillowy drum hits. Stizz anchors everything with his deliberate, subtly melodic flows.
If Trying to Find My Next Thrill has fewer obvious standouts than One Night Only, that’s only because it’s stronger throughout. “Toast 2 That” is a dazzling trap anthem, built atop a twinkling, minor-key instrumental laced with melodica. Stizz’s motivational speeches are well-documented but here, he opens with an outright pep talk (“All my niggas in the jail, man, we always think about you, bruh/Keep your head up high, for real, for real”) before Freddie Gibbs drops a show-stopping guest verse, modulating his speed as he approaches the beat from all sides. On “Off With Ya Head!” Stizz stabilizes a wobbly beat with his unshakable delivery. But here, he allows himself to break character, yelping, “You ain’t stick to the script, now it’s off with ya head!” with the theatrical flair of a deranged monarch. “Perfect” feels a bit rote, but Stizz allows the subject of his desire a response, in the form of a playfully assured verse from City Girls’ Yung Miami (“Top of the Ritz getting ate like a steak,” “Yes, I’m a fool for the carats/Spirit animal is a rabbit”).
In hindsight, One Night Only was an album shaped by growing pains: not only was it full of stylistic experiments, it also found Stizz reveling in his newfound wealth and status in the most generic terms. With Trying to Find My Next Thrill, he’s figured out that it’s not the lifestyle that he leads but rather, the distance between where he came from and where he now sits that makes for his best writing. On “Meds,” he confides that his weed habit is a coping mechanism for PTSD, and on “Soso,” he reminds himself not to get too comfortable. “The Message” finds Stizz in full storytelling mode, narrating the mistakes of his youth with the hindsight of a man who made it out, while on “Traumatized,” he asks a detractor, “How could I stop now? I'm selling hope.” At its best, Trying to Find My Next Thrill reveals Cousin Stizz to be a reflective and self-aware writer, an everyman behind the jewelry and designer clothes.


On their second album since reforming in 2010, the UK’s once-notorious indie rockers settle into the congenial sound of a pretty good band.

The Libertines: All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade

All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade

In Carol Reed’s classic film The Third Man, Orson Welles’ slippery anti-hero Harry Lime justifies his descent into criminality by comparing the cultural output of Renaissance Italy during the turbulent rule of the Borgia family with that of Switzerland. The Swiss, he concludes, “had brotherly love and they had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” It is a reference that the Libertines, with their love of fading Albion, would surely appreciate, though perhaps not when directed at All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade, their second album since reforming in 2010.
During the Libertines’ first run, from 1997 to 2004, the band thrived on a perilous creative chaos, driven by the love/hate relationship between founding members and principal songwriters Carl Barât and Peter Doherty, plus London bus-loads of hard drugs. Unhealthy though it undoubtedly was —Doherty, famously, was jailed for burgling Barât’s flat and the pair needed bodyguards to keep themselves apart during the recording of their second album—this tension produced a thrilling, white-knuckle-scrape of a debut and a follow-up that intermittently sparked on its way to the top of the UK charts. In keeping with this tempestuous history, the band’s third album, 2015’s surprisingly vital Anthems for Doomed Youth, was “born of complexity,” according to Barât. This leaves All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade as the first Libertines’ LP to spring untroubled onto wax.
For anyone who grew up on the Libertines, it’s hard not to root for them. And yet initial signs here are far from promising. “Run Run Run”—the lead single that, ironically, is about trying to escape the past—uses the well-worn line “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to” within the first 30 seconds. Its meat-and-potatoes indie rock doesn’t get much more inspired from there: The line between a good Libertines song and a bad one remains perilously thin. “Night of the Hunter” goes a step further, filching not just its title (from Charles Laughton’s 1955 noir masterpiece) but also its central motif, in this case from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, a borrowing better left unheard. On “Oh Shit,” the Libertines rip off themselves with a spiraling guitar riff that’s a near copy of their 2003 single “Don’t Look Back Into the Sun.”
What are the Libertines without their central tension? Not that different, perhaps, to the Britpop bands they followed into the charts or the legions of wannabes they inspired in the early 2000s, which is to say very much in the classic British rock lineage of the Kinks, the Jam, and the Smiths, albeit without the wistful beauty, artful fury, and naive experimentation of all three. There are moments on this album that speak to a band that once embraced its idiosyncrasies. “Baron’s Claw” has a touch of hot jazz in its sprawling trumpet lines, while “Be Young”’s excursion into reggae is interesting, if not entirely rewarding, helped by the fact that Gary Powell is one of indie rock’s smartest drummers.
These points of interest are outweighed by a run of well-crafted but derivative indie-pop tunes where melodic smarts meet copybook songwriting. “Songs They Never Play on the Radio” borrows the title of a well-regarded 1992 biography of Nico and sets it to a swooning, downbeat melody, while “Man With the Melody” could be latter-period Blur with its twinkling strings, acoustic guitars, and craftily descending, Albarn-esque melody. It’s a perfect illustration of All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade’s central conundrum: The Libertines may be running low on originality, but they can still produce a strong tune when the muse strikes.
This album is no Renaissance masterpiece, then. But it’s not quite Harry Lime’s cuckoo clock either. Stripped of their fraternal bad blood, the Libertines are just a band—and a decent one at that. But, as All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade chugs to its chummy finale, you do almost wish that someone would start burgling someone, if only to see what happens.


The Austin band returns with its longest and loosest record, characterized by a new sense of lightness.

...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: XI: Bleed Here Now

XI: Bleed Here Now

Not all tales from the pandemic are tragedies. As Conrad Keely tells it, he rather enjoyed the unhurried pace of lockdown and the long days he spent blissfully reading, cooking, and hiking to nowhere in particular, all a welcome respite from the grind and indignities of playing in an aging band with slumping album sales. “Put simply, it was a dream come true,” he says of the downtime he hadn’t realized he’d needed.
Keely tried to bring some of that same sense of leisure to the sessions for …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead’s 11th album, XI: Bleed Here Now, reasoning that if the band was going to keep carrying on, it shouldn’t feel so much like work. A new six-piece lineup, anchored as ever by Keely and Jason Reece, decamped to an old barn outside of Austin to record, not only to save money but to spare themselves the pressure of tight deadlines. Between takes they’d grill or play soccer and frisbee (or sometimes both at once, via a game they invented called frizball). They spent their evenings luxuriating in wine and conversation.
That relaxed attitude might seem at odds with the fundamental try-hard nature of this band, but it doesn’t curb the group’s signature scope. Bleed Here Now is looser than any recent Trail of Dead album, even though at 75 minutes it’s the band’s longest album to date. It sprawls as much as you’d expect, yet its best moments have a lightness, almost nonchalance to them. True to the album’s punny title, Trail of Dead are still bleeding for their art. But they’re also trying to be in the moment.
Where past records strived for huge statements, Bleed Here Now settles for satisfying standalone tracks. That’s especially true of the album’s exhilarating first half, which plays out as a parade of spirited genre dalliances. In a five-song stretch, they smash cut from the psychedelic jangle of “Field Song” to the Foo-Fighters-by-way-of-Meadowlands anthemic alternative of “Penny Candle” and the Black Sabbath-y vamping of “No Confidence,” then place a roaring hardcore throwback called “Kill Everyone” after a string interlude fit for a Game of Thrones sequence.
While some of the grander swings of the album’s second half inevitably succumb to bloat—it’s as if Keely can’t resist soundtracking the Final Fantasy fan fiction in his head—the record is at its best when it goes small. Bleed Here Now’s sweetest song is its most intimate: “Growing Divide,” a tender, finger-picked plea for climate action in the face of partisan stalemates. “Don’t let the sight of a growing divide make you give up on humanity,” Keely harmonizes with Spoon’s Britt Daniel, their voices enveloping each other for maximum warmth over the sounds of the cresting ocean.
It’s a testament to how approachable, how pleasantly hummable, so many of these songs are that they overshadow the album’s gimmick: It was mixed in quadrophonic sound, a four-channel surround mix considered state-of-the-art in the ’70s but that hasn’t been used much since. You can imagine how rich that might sound, with all that drum separation and all those strings and synthesizers waltzing back and forth between speakers, Zaireeka-style. But you’ll probably have to leave it to your imagination, since nobody outside of the most dedicated Steve Hoffman forum users will have the setup to hear it the way it was intended. It’s endearing, really, the way this band goes the extra mile, even when it hardly matters, but the best thing about Bleed Here Now is how it rarely feels like work, despite all the work that clearly went into it. In their own overachieving way, Trail of Dead have made a hangout record.


The L.I.E.S. label head makes a rare appearance on his own imprint, clearing away the lo-fi cobwebs and digging into tough, percussive dancefloor cuts.

Heart Stopper

Thirteen years ago, DJ and producer Ron Morelli began releasing records by friends and neighbors like Delroy Edwards and Traxx, quickly establishing a very New York take on Detroit techno and Chicago house. Their residue was both greasier and grittier than neighbors like disco gentrifiers DFA; he called his label Long Island Electrical Systems, like a Kraftwerk on the Atlantic. Since then, a variety of renaissances in New York dance music have brought L.I.E.S.’ brand of rough-and-tumble rhythm-making in and out of fashion, but its vision has remained steadfast, even as Morelli himself ditched Brooklyn for Paris a decade ago. L.I.E.S. hasn’t released much of Morelli’s own music over the years, but number 200 is all his own, and it’s a treat. Heart Stopper shakes off the usual L.I.E.S foggy grayscale and turns on some flickering neon. It’s a bouncy beast.
“House Music Revenge” announces Morelli’s shift: A kind of fanfare reverses endlessly backwards; a sample of what sounds like someone saying “woo-hoo” stacks on top of itself, the way an infectious exclamation moves through a crowd; and a nice little package of kicks and clacks invokes a friendly night of dancing. “Rule Is to Survive” is also propulsively reversed, with dry snares and cymbals straining against a tide of thick mid-range gurgles and moans and whispers. The drums win on “Tricks of the Trade (Dub),” a tom-tom workout that succumbs to the pleasure of a well-engineered kick drum and a handclap with a bit of echo. Sometimes the simplest beats are the sharpest, and this one cuts deep. “Gun Smoke” is also tough, although less spaghetti-western aria and more laser-beam residue; its forceful patterns of snare drum and sequencer keep rearranging themselves, occasionally shuddering into fractal takes on four-on-the-floor. But the blustering “Subway Shootout” wins the day, spraying percussion around with wild precision, as if Morelli was playing Duck Hunt with the drum machines.
Vocals are welcome. With its cowbell baubles and call-and-response stabs, “Another Old Beat Track” butches up a Bobby O-style beat by pitching it way down, like the Pet Shop Boys’ “Love Comes Quickly” but not quick at all, and intoxicated but maybe not exactly in, like, love. The singer of “Tangle Trap of Love” feels something. Maybe everything. “All our emotions are caught up,” he moans, his voice in pain and delight. The metallic percussion almost swings, but the steely bassline keeps things caged up, even as the keyboards swan around in echoes of the deadly serious, preposterous glamor of the Liquid Sky clubs. House ghosts anchor the deep and creepy “Time Stands Still,” but they also haunt it: Slips of melody poke through the fog like fingers pulling upon a curtain, show their face as piano-house riffs, then disappear as suddenly as they came. A voice chants distortedly about reality and escape and someone strikes first a prefab tabla sound, then a shivery maybe-marimba, gesturing at a transcendence that never comes.
Or maybe that’s the old style. Morelli closes with “Natural Deaths,” a mid-tempo sparkler closer to the sweeter side of bittersweet than most anything he’s previously released. Droplets of goth guitar threaten to storm, but settle into a cozy pitter-patter gently softening the drum machines. “Ron’s Torture” is similarly comfortable in its sad-sack skin, dressed up in long cloaks of melancholy synths. But the title track is the ultimate treat, a stiff cocktail of filtered congas and chimes on the rocks. There’s a bit of “Big Fun,” a bit of “Testone”; there’s a sense of the radio mixes beaming west from Chicago’s WBMX radio station in the 1980s meeting the rave pirate broadcasts beaming west from the UK and settling into the petroleum used to make Morelli’s records in New York City. This is no nostalgia trip, though. It’s the longtime L.I.E.S. vibe: not looking back, but looking over its shoulders, relentlessly moving on.


The Soft Pink Truth is the project of Drew Daniel, one-half of Matmos, and Why Pay More? is a typically conceptual project based on samples culled from YouTube. Half abstract collage, half dance album, and altogether weird, it's a fitting tribute to the website a decade after its rise to popularity.

Why Pay More?

Drew Daniel of the Soft Pink Truth remembers the first thing he ever watched on YouTube. For most people with Internet access, recalling one's initiation into the era of video streaming is like remembering the first picture they ever saw, or the first song they heard—it's damn near impossible. Daniel, on the other hand, remembers the moment he clicked the play button, saw an Iraqi sandstorm, and set off down the path into one of the biggest repositories of human experience ever constructed. At the end of 2015, he put that self-awareness to the test by dropping Why Pay More?, a musical case study of YouTube and the ways it amuses, alarms, alienates, and unites the modern mind. Half abstract collage, half dance album, and altogether weird, it's a fitting tribute to the website a decade after its rise to popularity.
Rather than look to globally recognized memes to illustrate YouTube's power and ubiquity, Daniel calls on the mostly forgotten fragments floating out there in the algorithmic abyss, waiting to be stumbled upon by accident or odd search (in other words, no Crazy Frog here). His samples come from the clips on the nth page for the search result "party," the 10 videos viewed a collective 10 times, the zeroes and ones that never mattered—until now. Sonic traits most listeners would consider detrimental—poor sound quality, background noise—form the basis of the record's texture. Within the tightly wound confines of "Acappella," for example, an amateur soul performance that sounds like it was recorded in a bathroom finds new life as an echoey sample in a house track. Various explosions, screeching tires, and sarcastic anti-drug monologues find their way into the ragtag mix as well, colliding and collapsing until the junk gets vulcanized into a speedy machine.
Queerness is intrinsic to the Soft Pink Truth: 2014's Why Do the Heathen Rage? sought to expose and deconstruct the homophobic attitudes lurking beneath the surface of black metal fandom, and Daniel's introduction to the project, 2003's Do You Party, drew upon the sounds and experiences of his time as a go-go dancer at Bay Area gay bars earlier in his life. As a musical case study of YouTube—one of the century's near-universal mediums—Why Pay More? requires a broader lens to illustrate the amorphous, anonymous nature of the website. But there are many tracks on the record—"I Love Your Ass," " Fire Island of the Mind," the title track—that bring the queer-as-fuck energy of Daniel's earlier material. "Are You Looking?" assembles results for the terms "Looking" and "Step" into a brittle-sounding dancefloor turn, solidified by a sample from Madonna's "Vogue," a song inspired by (and arguably pilfered from) gay culture; aside from that, the former keyword links a classic term for soliciting gay sex to the act of trolling YouTube, suggesting that something each of us does is queer—that by extension, we all are. It's a sneaky statement that functions simultaneously as a compelling thesis as well as a clap-back to homophobic trolls.
Then there's the title track, which was conceived as a contest/concert at Dan Deacon's Whartscape festival where guests had to guess the track's BPM. Daniel doesn't make that task easy, burying the beat beneath harsh, tinny game show music, warped house synths, and, most unsettlingly of all, a voice-altered clip of what appears to be a demonic android ordering off the Taco Bell value menu. Isolated from its traditional performative context, "Why Pay More?" scans more overwhelming than engaging, putting it in step with the blaring, boorish "Awesome" (hope you like bagpipes) and the cartoonish "Party Pills." Nevertheless, such compositions realize the album's mission of sensory overload—that inevitable, mind-numbing state that we all acquiesced to (however subconsciously) when we clicked on that play button for the first time.