On their two new albums, Islands explore two sides of their personality: the largely electronic Taste is bitter and sharp-witted, while Should I Remain Here at Sea? is more freewheeling.

Islands: Taste/Should I Remain Here at Sea?

Taste/Should I Remain Here at Sea?

Nick Thorburn’s music has been downloaded more than 80 million times in the past two years, but a majority of those people will likely always associate his work with a girl who can’t pronounce the phrase “MailChimp.” In a perfect world, the two albums his band Islands have simultaneously released would change that.
*Taste *and Should I Remain Here at Sea? * *are Islands’ first releases since 2013. In the intervening years, Thorburn busied himself by composing for the podcast, Serial, including the tinny minor-chord piano theme that starts each episode. That his band has released these somewhat-different albums on the same day should come as no surprise to those familiar with Thorburn’s output. After coming to prominence as a leading force in the Unicorns, a band that arguably helped lift indie rock out of a self-serious rut in 2003, he formed Islands, as well as several other projects that blur the line between serious and silly, including Mister Heavenly, Th’ Corn Gangg, Reefer, and Human Highway. To say nothing of his solo work that he releases as Nick Diamonds. Basically, he is a compulsive music maker, and his foray into soundtracking the most popular podcast ever made him antsy to get back to Islands.
It also seems to have focused him. *Taste *is a largely electronic affair, while Should I Remain Here at Sea? * *is more guitar-based. But it’s not their instrumentation that gives these albums their distinct personalities. The recording notes show that the band switched between working on Taste and *Should I Remain... *for bursts, completing both within a few months of each other. The resulting two albums seem to offer two ways of dealing with personal devastation: for the first few days you try to make sense of it all while talking to those who are close to you. The wounds are still fresh and you can only speak of it with an air of gravitas. A few days later and you’re able to gain some perspective on the event and perhaps even make light of it. Taste is the bitter sharp-witted album immediately dealing with the fallout. *Should I Remain… *is lighter, looser and more concise, in the same way that you refine your story once you’ve tried telling it a few times.
There’s a heavy theme of a fracturing relationship on both albums, as well as unlikely recurrences of fierce gripes about American cops and benign complaints about California weather. These releases are also united in their robust choruses, which could get stadiums to sing along if Thorburn dumbed it down and wrote more formulaically. But that’s not in his nature: He’s not aggressively courting those millions of Serial listeners. Thorburn’s greatest skill is creating subliminal hooks that will stay with you even if you didn’t notice them at first. A lyrical line will swim around in your head until it offers an unexpected truth, like the advice he offers about dealing with personal tragedies soberly: “Turn to face it, resist the narcotic embrace,” he sings in Taste’s lead single, “Charm Offensive.” It’s the type of line that will come floating to the front of consciousness when you’re thinking about throwing up your hands and giving into your worst impulses.
While Islands have gotten progressively more serious with each release, the band do still know how to keep proceedings from getting too staid. A tap dance solo highlights “Stop Me Now” on Should I Remain…, the whistle line from “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” finds its way into “The Joke,” and one of the most exquisite songs in the collection is given the irreverent title of “Outspoken Dirtbiker.” As far as absurd titles go, it’s no “Don’t Call Me Whitney, Bobby,” but it does showcase Thorburn’s ability to keep his sense of humor when dealing with weighty issues.
The band is in top form here. On both albums, Thorburn shares producer credit with bassist Evan Gordon, who is also responsible for the programming. The uneasy beats on Taste are part of what give that album its kick. Guitarist Geordie Gordon and drummer Adam Halferty also make both albums richer by providing dense textures and strong background vocals. Should I Remain Here at Sea? has the feel of friends blowing off steam the only way they know how, after working so hard on something outside of their comfort zone. The process of the band working through Taste together has united them in this shared experience, and they rock out accordingly on “Back Into It,” the track that opens *Should I Remain… *
This relationship between records makes Islands’ induction to the Two-Separate-Releases-at-the-Same-Time Club a different proposition than more famous double offerings from Guns N’ Roses, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Westerberg, and Bright Eyes. Of course, when all of those acts did it, we weren’t living in the streaming society we are now, and I’d be writing this review to tell you which one of these is more worth your money. For the most part, it’s now just a matter of which one is worth your time, and they both are. These albums may be decidedly separate, but they’re only complete when experienced together.


A set of reissues of the British experimental trio’s non-album work, including a Peel sessions EP, live LP, and posthumous anthology, reveals the group’s restless, radical openness.

This Heat: Repeat/Metal/Made Available/Live 80-81

This Heat’s music has always felt unstable and unsettled. The work that this London post-punk trio created between 1979 and 1981, over two studio albums and a lone EP,  was a charged concoction made from equal parts dub, world music, musique concrète-inspired tape-loop experiments, and progressive rock. But perfection was never the goal: The records were rough, unpolished flashes of an ongoing, ferocious creative process, with nearly all the material starting abruptly and ending with either a hard edit or a slow fadeout. Listening to them felt like catching little snapshots when the studio door swung open for a few tantalizing minutes.
This aesthetic was born of This Heat’s working methods, which found the three men (drummer Charles Hayward and multi-instrumentalists Charles Bullen and Gareth Williams) spending hours recording jam sessions in their studio, Cold Storage, a former meat locker in a disused factory. They would choose the best bits from those experiments to build upon and refine, or use snippets of tape as samples during their live sets. That didn’t end once they got into a proper recording studio. The neck-snapping version of “Horizontal Hold” on their self-titled debut, from 1979, opens with a snippet of a lo-fi demo of the song, and “Graphic/Varispeed,” the 11-minute drone piece that serves as the flipside of 1980’s “Health and Efficiency,” is an unsettling flood of organ tones warped by pitch control. Nothing was left well enough alone. As the working motto for This Heat went: “All possible processes. All channels open. Twenty-four-hour alert.”
The evolution of their songs didn’t begin or end there, as proven by the three reissues out this month from Light in the Attic. Filling in the gaps of the six fertile, volatile years the original trio had together (Williams left in 1982 and, after one last European tour with a pair of replacements, the band dissolved), these collections of live recordings and radio sessions, as well as a posthumously released EP of material from 1979 and 1980, find This Heat feeling their way around this still-fresh material or attacking it from new angles as they stretched the music’s crinkled edges as far as they could.
While they had only been together a year when they entered Maida Vale Studios to record a pair of 1977 sessions for the tastemaking BBC radio DJ John Peel, that material, compiled as Made Available (originally released in 1996), reveals just how clear their collective vision was from the start. Hayward and Bullen were already veterans of the UK music scene, with the former having played in Phil Manzanera’s pre-Roxy Music prog-jazz outfit Quiet Sun. Williams, on the other hand, had never picked up an instrument before being coaxed into the fold. That combination of practiced abilities and naive playfulness was key to This Heat’s sound. On Made Available’s “Horizontal Hold,” Williams wrestles with rumbling bass tones and squealing organ chords while Bullen and Hayward settle into a jagged, stop-start groove; the three instrumentals unique to this recording (“Basement Boy,” “Sitting,” and “Slither”) fold droning tape loops in with clarinet swells and shards of piano, giving them all a grey pallor.
The four songs from these sessions that wound up re-recorded for This Heat and Deceit both gain and lose something in comparison to their later renditions. The Maida Vale recording of “Not Waving,” for example, suggests the sensation of being on a creaking ship with slowly yawing loops and clanking percussion—a fitting accompaniment to a song about drowning. The album version, with its emphasis on piercing organ tones and a more agitated vocal turn, feels like the aftermath, a call from the beyond. It’s far less affecting. Meanwhile, the impact of the oblique rhythms and convulsing guitar chords on the Maida Vale sessions’ “Horizontal” and “Makeshift Swahili” is even greater without the tape splices and unnatural BPM jumps of their later renditions.
Live 80/81 lacks some of the nuance of both the studio albums and Made Available, which could likely be blamed on the very rough sound quality. (According to the liner notes, this compilation comes from recordings made “to cassette using a stereo mic placed near the soundboard.”) But what shines through the murk is twofold: not just the way their experiments yielded such a sturdy framework for each song, but also the extent to which the band was willing to continue manipulating and stretching those forms. That could be something as simple as Bullen’s guitar solo on “Horizontal,” which slips East African-inspired phrases in with some piercing Sonny Sharrock-like flurries. Or it could be slightly more extreme like the more emphatic drumming on “Twilight Furniture” that takes a once-pleasant ramble into a tumble down a rocky bluff.
This Heat’s commitment to treating everything they recorded as raw material is most clearly represented on Repeat/Metal, a vinyl re-release of a 1993 CD (minus a 33 1/3 version of “Graphic/Varispeed,” from the Health & Efficiency EP). For “Repeat,” the band returns to the stunning “24 Track Loop” from This Heat, extending it out to a glorious 20 minutes. The effect was akin to a dub remix or an early hip-hop DJ juggling a perfect drum break, cutting between two records as the dancefloor reached increasingly higher levels of ecstasy. This Heat achieved the same effect through the mixing board and the use of Harmonizer, sending the undulating, narcotic grooves of the original even further into the infinite. The counterpart on the flipside, “Metal,” is another marvel of loops and edits, like listening to a wagon carrying scraps of sheet metal and lengths of pipes trundling along an uneven pass.
In a recent interview with David Grubbs, Hayward called the music of This Heat “a living thing that’s actually forty years old.” He and Bullen have returned to this material in recent years, performing with a gaggle of younger musicians as This Is Not This Heat. The footage of the band that’s available, including their set at this year’s Pitchfork Fest, bears out what Hayward, Bullen, and Williams were attempting to show in the late ’70s and early ’80s and what these reissues confirm: To create music that will remain alive for four decades, it needs to be pliable and open to transformation.


On her 16th album, begun early this year as the UK entered its third lockdown, the Cornwall-based singer-songwriter grapples with personal loss, the cruelty of the world, and the will to keep going.

Ocean to Ocean

For nearly three decades, Tori Amos has been one of pop’s most compelling personalities, combining a keen knowledge of musical composition with southern Gothic overtones, otherworldly poetics, and a sharp wit. On her 16th album, Ocean to Ocean, she continues to alchemize those qualities into an alloy like no other.
In interviews about Ocean to Ocean, Amos has said that she was inspired by the natural landscapes and dense mythology of Cornwall, the peninsular English county where she’s lived since 1999, as well as the loss of her mother, close observations of her late-twenties niece, and the lockdowns and chaos that have loomed so large over the past two years. The resulting album—which she began working on earlier this year, when England entered its third national lockdown—grapples with grief and the cruelty of the world, and how those things are felt both cosmically and personally.
Amos has long been celebrated for her cutting lyrics, and on Ocean to Ocean, the gravity of her subject matter means they leave an even deeper wound. “Metal Water Wood,” which Amos has said was one of the first tracks she wrote for the album, contains the extremely timely lament, “I know, dear/It has been a brutal year”; the song stomps in circles, its fractured chords echoing the “shattered dreams of mine” that have turned Amos’ life unfamiliar and unsettling. On the title track, over pianos and guitars that roil like storm clouds, Amos gazes despairingly upon the world and growls, “There are those who don’t give a goddamn/That we’re near mass extinction/There are those who never give a goddamn/For anything that they are breaking”: An indictment of all those who are ruining the planet, it’s a protest song delivered with the plainspoken candor of porch chats and phone calls. And “Birthday Baby,” the album’s closer, could be a minor-key rallying cry for all those who celebrate the anniversary of their arrival on Earth by toasting their very survival.
Loss is woven throughout the record, particularly the death of Amos’ mother. “Flowers Burn to Gold” is a spare, gorgeous eulogy in which Amos and her piano take center stage as a choir of backing vocalists occasionally swoops in to comfort her. On the sinewy “Speaking With Trees,” Amos speaks to her mother while a serpentine guitar winds around her: “I’ve been hiding your ashes under the tree house,” she sings, contemplating the unknowability of nature and the way it connects us all.
"Spies,” the album’s midpoint, is one of its highlights, pairing a straightforward ’90s alt-rock chug with fantastically vivid lyrics (“They may say they're on holiday/Grabbing a latte in a coquelicot beret”) and heaven-sent elements like icy strings and arpeggiated piano—as well as a baroque bridge, which breaks from the beat and ratchets up the surrealistic imagery. Its propulsive rhythm makes “Spies” too urgent to be a lullaby, but it is designed to calm: “Knowing this may help you to/Help you close your eyes/Get some shuteye,” she soothes at the song’s close, seemingly to herself as much as to her audience.
On “29 Years,” Amos addresses her legacy as an artist and as a woman, and how the process of figuring herself out in public has affected both sides of her. A plush electric piano and razor-wire guitars engage in a back-and-forth while Amos calls back to ancient myths, with a chorus of furies moaning, “How does this happen?” Then the song opens up, and Amos’ vista widens: “These tattered bits of me/I’ve been piecing/For 29 years,” she muses—still in search of “a most elusive truth,” but using all of her talents to bring herself and her listeners ever closer to it.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Marrow have been making the rounds in Chicago for a few years, and even though they're still in their very early twenties, the band's members have impressive resumes that include work with Chance the Rapper and Tweedy. The group tout themselves as being schooled in jazz and classical, and it’s something you can hear consistently in how they compose the songs on their debut.

The Gold Standard

Marrow have been making the rounds in Chicago venues for a few years now, and even though they're still in their very early twenties, the band's members have impressive resumes. Lead singers Macie Stewart has toured with Chance the Rapper and Liam Kazar with Tweedy, and both were members of the now defunct hip-hop group Kids These Days. Still, even with their city’s cred behind them, Marrow is very much a blank slate.
The Gold Standard doesn’t feel like a cohesive debut statement by any means. You get the sense the band was trying to display range, settling for writing an album filled with certain types of songs rather than a unified collective vision. They can do classic rock on "She Chose You", they’re Edward Sharpe-leaning faux-folk on "Ocean of Glory", and then spinning apocalyptic, Hozier-sounding ballads with songs like "Cities" and "Leave Grounds Stay".
Marrow tout themselves as being schooled in jazz and classical, and it’s something you can hear consistently in how they compose their songs. The group likes using a diverse smattering of instrumentals, from horn arrangements to classical piano to violins and harp. It’s like they made a list of what sounds they wanted on the record and then ordered them up like a diner’s Hungry Man Special, though it doesn’t feel like overkill.
There’s an authentic-sounding tinkering, improvisational quality that emanates throughout The Gold Standard’s instrumentals; music boxes break down on "Darling Divine", cowbells ring and guiros scratch at the tail end of the "Mother of Maladies", a xylophone dings under an electric guitar solo on "Quarter to Three". Though, this improv quality becomes their downfall when it sounds like they got stuck in a groove and couldn’t get out. "Corsicana" plays like a completely anonymous and derivative piano ballad and the nearly six-minute "The Gold Standard" is severely tedious, coming off like a somber pre-performance guitar tuning with slow percussion before erupting into repetitive, roaring guitar solos.
Still, there are diamonds here. The album’s lead single "Paulson" is a furious, head-banging, shred-heavy rock song with Stewart’s voice like a bolt of lightning; you can practically see the spotlight on her. The charming "Mother of Maladies", carried by a peppy organ melody, is sweet, waltzing in a sort of theatrical romance as Stewart sings of how love feels. "Every night I am with you, I feel it/ Every night’s not every night enough," she sings. And as ho-dunk as "Ocean of Glory" might be ("You could make love to me when I’m older/ You’re a bootstrap, I’ll pull you closer," Stewart and Kazar sing), at the five-minute mark the song feels like opening a trap door and finding a party as it wigs out into frantic psychedelia.
You wonder why they didn’t make a whole new song; then again, letting a saccharine, cult-evoking sing-along dissolve into a shrilly-sung wacky trip isn’t an entirely bad move either. Still, on the whole, The Gold Standard feels like Marrow are in the midst of trying to define their sound, throwing things at the wall and seeing what will stick. They're a band that can build a great three-minute song, but they lose themselves in the construction of anything bigger.


The four-year-old pop phenom and famous pig’s second album is a charming and self-assured celebration of family, friendship, and muddy puddles.

Peppa Pig: Peppa’s Adventures: The Album

Peppa’s Adventures: The Album

Peppa’s Adventures: The Album, the second LP by UK singer-songwriter and television star Peppa Pig, arrives at a critical moment for the young artist. Only 4 years old, and one of very few pigs working in the music industry today, Peppa’s rise has been as rapid as it was unlikely. Her 2019 debut, My First Album, was an unexpected smash upon release. The record racked up 136 million streams, reached No. 1 on the UK Independent Albums Breakers chart, and won accolades from fellow pop renegades Charli XCX and Lil Nas X. As Peppa readied her sophomore effort, critics wondered: Was My First Album a fluke? Or is Peppa equipped to play in the UK’s crowded pop big leagues, alongside more established stars like Dua Lipa and Ed Sheeran?
On My First Album, Peppa made a careful study of Brian Wilson’s sunny melodies and progressive pop structure. She hews closely to this formula throughout Peppa’s Adventures, particularly on the wistful “Perfect Day” and on “Recycling,” which evokes Fiona Apple in its percussive use of glass bottles and tin cans. Reaching further into pop’s past, she interpolates British and American folk music on the cheery “The School Bus Song” and the contemplative “Winter Days.” The traditionalist approach to production pairs well with Peppa’s efficient songwriting. She’s adept at mining the mundane stuff of suburban life for glittering moments of camaraderie. “Perfect Day” celebrates the simple pleasures of friendship, particularly poignant after more than a year of social distancing. “Digging With Mr. Bull” turns the inconvenience of road construction into an exhilarating block party. Loveliest of all is “North Star Lullaby”; Peppa wrote the elegant, understated song for her 2-year-old brother, George. “I’d fly to space if I had wings,” she sings, her voice a near-whisper, “and play with George on Saturn’s rings.” The lullaby’s verses, written in iambic tetrameter, demonstrate a gift for poetic construction well beyond her years.
Yet Peppa’s Adventures is most compelling when Peppa departs from her standard chamber-pop formula. Lead single “Bing Bong Champion” is an ambitiously maximalist shot across the bow at those who called My First Album a Sarah Records retread. A tribute to sport in a fraught Olympic year, it moves with the grand air of Taylor Swift’s “State of Grace.” Chimes and brassy horns abound, but Peppa, a nimble vocalist, ably holds her own. On the bridge, she assumes the role of coach and leads her backing singers in rhythmic cheering. It is among her best work to date.
Similarly expansive is the opener and title track, “Peppa’s Adventures,” a celebration of the natural world. Like her contemporary Lorde’s “Solar Power,” the song throws off the past year’s miseries and flies through life with every pore open. “Adventures” relies heavily on a fiddle riff that recalls, or perhaps revives, the heyday of Mumford & Sons, the Lumineers, and Edward Sharpe. It’s a little gauche and though it doesn’t quite sink the song, it does raise questions about Peppa’s taste.
This minor concern aside, Peppa has proven herself a graceful navigator of a pop scene often hostile to her species. When My First Album debuted, in 2019, on the same day as Iggy Azalea’s In My Defense, Azalea cruelly threatened to turn Peppa into “a breakfast special.” In light of such attacks, Peppa’s unapologetic embrace of her identity is all the more inspirational. She oinks without shame; she celebrates “jumping in muddy puddles” on no fewer than four of this record’s nine tracks. “Birdy Birdy Woof Woof” demolishes preconceived notions about animal vocalists—“The birds go woof, and the dogs go tweet!”—as Peppa enlists friends and frequent collaborators Suzy Sheep, Pedro Pony, and Candy Cat to sing in one another’s styles.
The other political moments of Peppa’s Adventures are not as successful. “Recycling,” for all its delightful percussive flourishes, fails to consider the impact of the UK’s recycling programs on Southeast Asia, where landfills overflow with Western waste. A brief reference to private spaceflight in “The School Bus Song” is similarly ill-advised, given that billionaire astronauts continue to exploit the working-class and classroom-working listeners whom Peppa courts.
Peppa is, of course, a very young artist; one hopes that she will refine her political sensibility as she matures. Her influence, within and beyond the pop scene, is immense. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Peppa’s most devoted American fans have developed British accents and adopted her slang. Peppa seems to have borne up remarkably well in this position of influence, with all its attendant pressures. She clearly benefits from the closeness of her family and friends, who appear throughout Peppa’s Adventures. As her profile rises, and her music reaches an even wider audience, Peppa will need their support to stay grounded. If her abundantly successful new record signals one thing, it is this: Peppa is some pig.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Anenon is Brian Allen Simon, an electronic producer and saxophone player, and his third album Petrol is a major step forward for him. It's a portrait of his native Los Angeles, and the setting is somewhere just past sundown, the sky steadily leeched of color as lines of cars streak toward the horizon.

Petrol

Anenon's Petrol is bookended by the sounds of freeway noise, so you don't have to look very far to find the meaning behind the title. But it's fortuitous that the album, with its viscous, reverberant swirls of reeds and violin, has the same dusky resonance as the color. If this is an album about Anenon's native Los Angeles, the setting is somewhere just past sundown, the sky steadily leeched of color as lines of cars streak toward the horizon like rivers full of embers.
Anenon is Brian Allen Simon, an electronic producer and saxophone player, and Petrol is his third album. It represents a major step forward for him. His debut, 2012's Inner Hue, evoked Tycho and the Field in its shimmering ambient sketches and crisp drums; 2014's Sagrada went further in its pursuit of a new kind of beat music composed using acoustic instruments, Fender Rhodes, and tons of reverb. But its rhythms lacked distinction—"Lights and Rocks" was basically an Aphex Twin pastiche, and the TR-808 sounds elsewhere on the album seemed out of place—while his saxophone melodies sometimes scanned as rote. But Petrol, a looser, messier album, does a better job of communicating new ideas, and its emotional depth feels less gestural and more genuine.
The album's raw material comes from an improvisation session alongside violinist Yvette Holzwarth and bass clarinetist Max Kaplan; back in his studio, working with the drummer Jon-Kyle Mohr, he reworked those tapes, cutting and resampling them into their final, hybrid electronic form. The opening "Body" is typical for the album, with cool, analog-style synthesizers and the humming of distant cars creating a buoyant cushion for Simon's melancholy saxophone riffing. The mood is evocative of Vangelis' Blade Runner soundtrack, but elsewhere things are less placid and misty-eyed; the drums on "Once" and "CXP"  recreate the head-over-heels tumble of drum 'n' bass, inspiring greater urgency in Simon's sax work. "Mouth" and "Petrol," meanwhile, bring to mind Philip Glass' work. Simon has described how the album was partly inspired by the experience of standing on a pedestrian walkway above the freeway—"I found a sense of Zen in that as I was making the record," he told the Fader—and it's easy to hear parallels between the spinning chrome wheels his music evokes and the sped-up industrial choreography of the Glass-scored Koyaanisqatsi.
But some of the finest moments on Petrol turn out to be the simplest. "Hinoki" is nothing but two minutes of downcast sax melody over fathomless reverb, and "Panes" takes a similar idea and adds a bassline fashioned from bleating bass clarinet. In the first few seconds of "Panes," a human voice is briefly audible—as far as I can make out, it says "Maybe"—before it disappears into the murk again. It's the only voice on the album, but its appearance seems fitting; if Petrol's twin themes are the way that cars and distance define the experience of Los Angeles, that snippet of speech is what creates a sense of human scale before the album's lonely denouement, when everything that has come before disappears beneath the din of freeway noise.


Over a three-night stand in London last December, the UK group evolved from rousing post-punks to an irreverent dinner-theater act. Yet the soundtrack of all-new songs feels like a natural evolution.

Black Country, New Road: Live at Bush Hall

Live at Bush Hall

There’s a long, storied tradition of alt-rock band names that employ superfluous punctuation (and annoy the music journalists forced to type them out), but in the case of Black Country, New Road, that comma is significant. It effectively elevates an arcane regional reference into a mission statement for a group of musicians that—be it through scandal, aesthetic fatigue, or sudden personnel changes—has taken a scorched-earth approach to the past before setting out for unchartered territory. What is “Black Country, New Road” if not a more poetic way of saying, “Been there, done that”?
For most bands, the release of a new album marks the start of its next chapter, heralding the impending cycle of promotion and touring and audience expansion. But for Black Country, New Road, albums are tombstones marking the end of an era, and an opportunity for reincarnation. Their debut, 2021’s For the first time, was a collection of early singles whose panicked spoken-word narratives and staccato, scabrous guitars could’ve tricked you into thinking Black Country, New Road were another pack of post-punk chancers—that is, if you ignored the avant-jazz orchestration and klezmer delirium burbling underneath. Then, on 2022’s stupendous Ants From Up There, they went from being Britain’s most imposing new indie band to its most inviting, embracing a theatrical maximalism that threads Springsteen with Sufjan. Frontman Isaac Wood switched his default setting from antic to romantic, sashaying through the slowly unfurling, sax-sweetened anthems like a drunken Jarvis Cocker rallying his fellow mis-shapes out of the pubs and into the streets, or a Matt Berninger who spends the whole show dangling from the balcony.
In its tightrope act between fragile and fearless, Ants From Up There was the sort of album where every song felt like a mic drop, each falling higher than the last, culminating in an epic, album-closing triptych that would cement Black Country, New Road’s place in the UK indie firmament even if they never released another note of music. So what could Wood possibly do for an encore? Quit the band, of course, mere days before the album’s release. On the cusp of a career breakthrough, he chose his mental health over impending stardom, opting for a quiet life working in a cake shop.
But if Black Country, New Road are miles away from their doomy post-punk origins, they still adhere to that genre’s core philosophy: Rip it up and start again. Instead of searching for a new singer, or delegating frontperson responsibilities to one of their own, they decided to share the load, with bassist Tyler Hyde, saxophonist/flutist Lewis Evans, and keyboardist May Kershaw taking turns at the mic. Rather than try to mimic the charismatic intensity Wood brought to their repertoire, they opted to scrap the entire songbook and write all new material for their summer 2022 festival dates. And rather than try to fine-tune these new songs into proper recordings for their next studio album, they decided to make a movie.
Filmed over a three-night stand in London last December, and unveiled on YouTube last month, Live at Bush Hall is hardly the typical concert doc. At Bush Hall, Black Country, New Road ceased to be England’s buzziest indie band and instead turned themselves into the country’s most irreverent dinner-theater act, organizing each evening around a fake play concept, complete with costumes, DIY stage props, and souvenir programs detailing imaginary plot synopses set at a farm, an Italian restaurant, and a high-school dance, respectively. But even if Live at Bush Hall wasn’t intended to be the next official entry in their canon, the accompanying soundtrack album certainly earns its right to be considered as such. Notwithstanding the occasional bit of stage banter that makes no sense without the film (“Happy prom night!”), Live at Bush Hall is as cohesive a statement as any other record in the band’s discography.
Where the glorious peaks on Ants From Up There had to be earned—you don’t get to experience the rapturous chorus of “Snow Globes” without first taking the five-minute trek up the mountain to get there—this iteration of Black Country, New Road go straight for the joy, opening the shows with a celebratory theme-song tribute to themselves, the aptly titled “Up Song.” As Evans squawks out a sax melody that sounds like “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” being played at a school recital, the band unleashes a torrent of wild, piano-pounding, old-time rock’n’roll that climaxes with an ecstatic group hug of a chorus: “Look at what we did together!/BC,NR friends forever!” But within that cheeky refrain is a serious, blood-pact reaffirmation of the group’s unshakeable camaraderie. “Up Song” is more than just a readymade curtain-raiser; it’s proof that a band can, within months, lose its most integral member, reallocate musical roles, scramble to write an entirely new setlist (all while violinist Georgia Ellery withstood the strong gravitational pull of her other, equally buzzworthy band, Jockstrap), and come out sounding wholly reenergized.
None of Black Country, New Road’s newly anointed vocalists can match Wood’s natural, scenery-chewing gravitas—nor do they try to. But each singer subtly carves out a distinct personality that helps nudge BC,NR toward both giddy new heights and devastating new depths. Where Wood could invest pop-cultural references with the metaphorical weight of scripture, the messaging and delivery here are more matter-of-fact and heart-on-sleeve. Hyde recounts the push-pull of a toxic relationship on “I Won’t Always Love You,” her deadpan tone transforming the song into a piece of post-rock cabaret, while the stirring, string-quivering “Laughing Song” is as vulnerable and tender as a fresh bruise, with Hyde not only eulogizing a failed relationship but also admitting her own self-sabotaging role in its demise. Evans, conversely, plays the lovestruck fool on “Across the Pond Friend,” a swashbuckling serenade detailing those rare weekend getaways when long-distance relationships become IRL couplings, where even the most mundane activities (“On our last night/We watched a film and had a cry”) feel like minor miracles.
With songs like these, Black Country, New Road creep ever closer to becoming the prog Belle and Sebastian, and even without a Stuart Murdoch-like figure at the center, Evans makes for a highly capable Stevie Jackson, an eager foil who personifies this band’s playful spirit and tough-twee sentimentality. But the tracks helmed by keyboardist May Kershaw have no precedent in this band’s catalog. Her two leads are a study in contrasts: “The Boy” is a fantastical multi-sectional fable about a wounded bird that sounds like Björk singing a Celtic sea shanty over a Steve Reich movement, with frequent shifts in perspective and arrangement—she even calls out the chapter breaks. And then there’s “Turbines/Pigs,” a nine-minute masterstroke of candelabra-lit piano balladry where Kershaw strikes the sweet spot between the gentle melodicism of the Carpenters and the gothic folklore of Kate Bush to paint a portrait of a would-be witch stewing in self-pity: “Don’t waste your pearls on me,” Kershaw sings, on the verge of tears. “I’m only a pig.”
But just as the song is about to fade to black, Kershaw’s piano rallies the group for a hair-raising three-minute crescendo as if casting a spell, reframing the song’s outsider subject as a superhero. The story it tells could very well be the band’s own: Pushed to the brink, their future uncertain, Black Country, New Road magically summoned the strength to survive and thrive, and Live at Bush Hall is their champagne-popping send-off to a tough, turbulent year.


The Toronto duo of Anna Mayberry and David Psutka take folk music as a starting point, but walk an unfamiliar path, warping the genre with a dose of future shock.

What Mountain

The future wasn’t supposed to sound this way. In 2017, folk music can feel borderline ubiquitous—from the hokey balladeering of Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers to the latest lovingly restored private press side on Drag City or Tompkins Square, it tends to offers a space to retreat from the modern world. Besides a few exceptions—rare maverick figures like Grouper or Richard Dawson—it is notable how little contemporary folk sets out to interrogate its own structures. To that short list, you can add ANAMAI. Their second album What Mountain takes folk music as a starting point, but walks an unfamiliar path, warping the genre’s familiar signifiers and shattering its bucolic reverie with a dose of future shock.
ANAMAI began as the solo project of Anna Mayberry, a Toronto-based experimental dancer and co-vocalist of noise rockers HSY. But the project found a new direction when Mayberry shared her early songs with David Psutka, aka Egyptrixx, and soon the pair had joined forces as a duo. On paper at least, the two share little musical common ground. Mayberry grew up in a close-knit folk community, where she learned traditional songs from her elders and practiced singing in close harmony. Psutka, meanwhile, has taken an unconventional path through electronic music. While his Egyptrixx project rose to attention through a string of releases on the UK label Night Slugs around the turn of the decade, he briefly slotted into a post-grime club movement before switching lanes for 2015’s Transfer of Energy (Feelings of Power), a record with harsh, metallic textures influenced by industrial noise acts like Ramleh and Anenzephalia.
Aspects of all of this are present in What Mountain. Mastered by seasoned metal engineer James Plotkin, it feels like the product of a strange, sometimes unprecedented collision. Moments recall the enigmatic chamber folk of groups like Espers, other times the avant-garde computer music released on labels like Editions Mego, but the lines it draws are porous; often it sounds like both at once. Alone, Mayberry might pass as a conventional folk singer. She has a pretty but strangely blank voice that purrs, and curls like burning newsprint. But backed by Psutka’s rhythmic synth throbs, her vocal augmented by digital effects, her songs expand into another realm, sprouting with cryptic possibilities and hidden metaphors.
“Some State” and “Crossing” offer a sort of New Aesthetic take on folk music, Laurel Canyon by way of Silicon Valley. On the latter, intricate fingerpicked guitar drifts through deep lagoons of reverb, and Mayberry sings about a journey across a lake that plays strange tricks with spatial and temporal dimensions. Elsewhere, a restrained heaviness enters the frame. “Hailstorm” multitracks Mayberry’s vocal over chinking, Slint-like melodic motifs and watery ripples, while “Brother Green, Sister Blue” and “Sun Saw” deploy sludgy, Sunn O)))-like guitar drones with clinical surety.
The mountain of the title feels significant. Mayberry returns over and over to images of nature, but they feel like metaphor, a looming symbol of something—sometimes to represent emotional devastation or mental blockage, other times to suggest new avenues of exploration. The cavernous, reverb-laden opener “The Choss” is titled after a climbing term for loose or unstable rock, implying territory untrod. (In a neat moment of disorientation, after two minutes of desolate ambience, Mayberry suddenly drops into the track; we hear the clatter of equipment and a few muttered words, like she’s taking a seat at an open mic.) On perhaps the album’s most arresting track, “Air to Blood,” she speaks of climbing the mountain as guitars snag and groan like thunder at the horizon. “Discarding your touch,” she sings, “It’s something I’ve done/I’m breathing all wrong…”
While formally exciting, What Mountain doesn’t fully deliver on its promise. Its blankness of affect can come over a little stifling; there is evidently a lot bound up in these songs, but sometimes you hope for something more concrete in the way of climactic revelation or emotional resolution. Still, if the pair’s ambition was to jolt folk music, then this stark, challenging record is a step in the right direction, rich with possibilities.


Philadelphia singer-songwriter Francie Medosch’s band combines the weepy twang of old-school country with the cozy intimacy of DIY rock.

The Holey Bible

Like tourmate MJ Lenderman and his other band Wednesday, Florry are a part of a crop of rising DIY rock acts whose influences are more in the vein of Kris Kristofferson or Drive-By Truckers than anything 4AD or Sub Pop released in the ’90s. Singer-songwriter Francie Medosch started out as a teenager recording tense, depressive lo-fi indie rock, but during the pandemic, she had a realization: She wasn’t depressed anymore. “I think it’s cool to have art that reflects where you are in the moment,” she said then. She’d also been revisiting old favorites like Gram Parsons and Neil Young, planting seeds for the folksy new sound that would take hold on 2021’s Big Fall. Florry’s second proper album, The Holey Bible, posits an alternative to nihilistic indifference: What if instead of dispassionately accepting disaster as inevitable, we use the bitter end as a motivator to make the best of what time is left?
Though Florry’s sound has always had a homespun quality, on The Holey Bible, Medosch and her backing band—complete with 12-string guitar, fiddle, mandolin, harmonica, and plenty of pedal steel—push further toward old-school country. Medosch lets her melodies wander somewhat aimlessly, her voice meandering like she’s strolling through her rural Pennsylvania hometown. Even in moments where her androgynous yowl threatens to break, like when she pleads, “Try to make seeense” on “Big Winter,” her understated confidence makes it feel intentional.
That nerve translates into Medosch’s lyrics, which tend to feel like accounts of daily life, footnoted with the things she wished she could’ve said but didn’t. “The show was good and the beer was cheap,” she sings on the spunky opener “Drunk and High,” addressing a would-be lover: “You can take me home in my SUV, you can tuck me into bed, but you can’t kiss me.” On the especially twangy “Take My Heart,” Medosch recounts a memory of a sex dream that turns out to be surprisingly emotionally poignant: “You took my trust and placed it inside of you/That’s something I need, it’s something you can teach me.” But not all love songs address another person, and Medosch’s are full of love for life in general, like the fervor of summer (“Hot Weather”) or the exhilaration of the open road. “I’m the travelin’ amoeba takin’ you for a ride,” she proclaims on “Cowgirl in a Ditch,” underscoring the odd thrill of feeling microscopic in a world so vast.
All the while, Medosch and her charmingly nasal drawl strike a note of realism that keeps The Holey Bible from tipping into toxic positivity. On the gentle, plodding “Song for My Art,” she captures the persistent moral back-and-forths of the creative life, reckoning with her desire to be understood while simultaneously fending off insecurity, egotism, and writer’s block. “You hate your art but you love it too/You hate your love but you love it too,” she sings. The Holey Bible doesn’t care to gloss over human imperfection and frailty. Nothing is ever guaranteed to work out, Florry seem to say—but isn’t it worth sticking around just in case?


Former Joanna Gruesome guitarist Owen “O” Williams’ new group taps into the chiming sound of ’80s college rock, channeling a wide range of jangly inspirations.

Dead Meat

Joanna Gruesome’s breakup felt premature in 2017, but in hindsight it was more a beginning than an end. Since the Cardiff noise-pop ensemble disbanded, its members have spun off a constellation of new, interconnected bands, among them the jittery indie-pop quartet Ex-Vöid and the lacerating punk act Sniffany & the Nits, both of which released endearingly scrappy debut LPs last year. On their heels comes the debut from yet another group featuring former Gruesome guitarist Owen “O” Williams, this time cast into a lead singer-songwriter role: the Tubs’ Dead Meat, the crispest, jangliest record yet from this crowded Venn diagram of scrappy guitar bands.
Ex-Vöid and Joanna Gruesome weren’t shy about peppering their records with jangle either, but the Tubs commit to chiming ’80s underground rock as a driving inspiration, playing up every tuneful lick for maximum pretty persuasion. Dead Meat pulls from a vast spectrum of college rock, ranging from the melancholic, shimmering guitar pop of Felt to the nervier churn of Pylon and, on its most kicking tracks, the melodic rush of Bob Mould’s Sugar albums. It all works because the Tubs have a record collector’s love for this sound. They see jangle not as a narrow style but a vast and varied world of moods and muses.
Williams sings in a woeful quiver that’s just pronounced enough to stand out against all those pleasing, whirling guitars, although he occasionally channels the fiercer punk record this band just as easily could have made. His lyrics tend toward the dour. Cast against post-punk guitar slashes and bright guest vocals from fellow Gruesome vet Lan McArdle on “Sniveller,” he curls his voice into a contemptuous sneer as he derides himself as a “bootlicker,” an “arselicker,” and a “sniveling sycophant.” On the title track, he’s even more self-lacerating, admonishing his grimy flat and lax grooming habits. He’s got a bad rash on his groin and he can’t even be bothered to refill his steroid cream.

Though Williams doesn’t overplay the squalid details, he has described his blunter lyrics as a way of pushing back against the romanticization of mental illness, including recent books and empowerment memes that have celebrated it as “a superpower.” In these songs, mental illness is primarily a threat to happiness and personal relationships. On “Round the Bend,” Williams sings about “another manic episode” as if it’s a routine pain in the ass. It’s only on the stinger that he processes the broader implications: “Soon you’re going to be sick of me.”

In another setting, lyrics like that might cut, but ringing guitars have a way of disarming sobering sentiments. A great jangle-pop record’s primary objective is to go down easy, and Dead Meat always does. The album saves one of its niftiest nods to the genre’s heyday for last, nodding to The Queen Is Dead on “Wretched Lie,” right down to the frolicking Johnny Marr guitars and “Bigmouth Strikes Again” chipmunk vocal warps. It offers a bit of context for the 25 minutes of music that preceded it, a reminder that this niche style was once one of the dominant aesthetics in independent rock. Dead Meat’s sound may be a throwback, but it’s so tunefully crafted that it charms the way it did the first time around.


Chinx's second posthumous album misses the mark, but these scraps and drafts are still a reminder of his promise.

Legends Never Die

On May 17, 2015, Lionel Pickens, known as the Coke Boys rapper Chinx (or Chinx Drugz), was killed in a drive-by shooting while sitting behind the wheel of his Porsche in Queens. Chinx was a street savvy rapper with solid pop instincts and singsong sensibilities (not unlike his label boss French Montana) who was cut down just as he’d begun to blossom. His posthumous debut album, Welcome to JFK, was a reflection of his promise, and served as both a finely-curated introduction and a proper send-off. JFK was a swan song capped by the closer “Die Young” with the powerful and prescient final bar “I pray I be okay when I grow up a little bigger/If I don’t, tell my babies daddy was a real nigga.” As endnotes go, it doesn’t get more fitting than that. So releasing another record postmortem, with a myth-building title like Legends Never Die, feels suspiciously like a branding play, less concerned with eulogizing Chinx’s art and instead setting its sights on his legacy. In its rush to glory, Legends Never Die becomes the one thing a legacy album can’t be: forgettable.
When remembering Chinx’s brief career, listeners should refer to his Cocaine Riot mixtape series, which fully captured his bellowed melodies and joyous dope dealer romps without the stakes. In an attempting to build an obelisk out of scraps, the stakes are simply too high on Legends Never Die and these hard-drive cloggers couldn’t hope to live up to them. The songs are all clearly outtakes from the same cobbled together sessions and recordings that birthed Welcome to JFK—it has the same cast of producers (Blickie Blaze, Young Stokes, Lee on the Beats, Austin Powerz, and Remo the Hitmaker) and many of the same guests (Montana, Meet Sims, and another verse from the late Stack Bundles), only worse execution. The feature verses are bland and the album is poorly sequenced. The middle section is scattered and uneven, sandwiching a grating poacher tune like “Slide Up in Ya Bitch” in between a ballad (“Yeah I Do”) and a ride or die anthem (“Real Bitch”). The album should end with the Montana-assisted “Legendary,” but doesn’t. None of these tracks are among Chinx’s best or even his most fun work, and attempting to use them to cement his legend, ironically, seems shortsighted.
Despite missing its mark, Legends Never Die isn’t without purpose—it's still refreshing to hear new Chinx verses and hooks, which are surprisingly earwormy. In a way, the album unfolds as the Book of Chinx, recounting how he lived and died: getting rich selling coke, living a luxurious lifestyle, and trading shots with bitter enemies and jealous rivals. A song like “Around Me,” which applies “fuck nigga” repellant, reads like his mantra and there’s some haunting foreshadowing in lyrics like “Shit a nigga seen, couldn’t live through it/Nigga used to stop at the red light/Now a nigga dip through it.” (There’s even a bar about coming through the block in a Porsche.) But inside these songs he’s present; he wins, he reflects, he prays, he jokes, he loves, he loots, and he lives. For 50 minutes, Chinx breathes again.
When Legends Never Die is working well, it embodies Chinx’s spirit, showing off his versatility in the process. The strobing “For the Love” finds him in full croon, delivering one of his strongest vocal performances of his career with Meet Sims at his back. On “Crown Royal,” he wades into a wave of heavy 808 bass with choppy cadences crowning himself a coke kingpin (“Got the accolades on the corner/Dope from Peru, sniff from Tijuana”). “Like This,” which features smooth Chrisette Michele background vocals, is radio ready with plush synth arrangements and a hook that rattles around the brain. He does his cleanest writing on “Match That,” challenging competitors to match his accomplishments and drawing parallels in the same breath.
In fits and starts, you can hear the gears turning; Chinx was finding his rhythm and might’ve developed into an astute craftsman given time. Now, all that remains are the drafts he left behind. Legends Never Die won’t preserve his legacy, but it’s another reminder of what could’ve been.


A new reissue of Elton John’s pivotal seventh album highlights its whimsical, rough-hewn charm just as the artist was becoming a superstar.

Elton John: Honky Château (50th Anniversary Edition)

Elton John has said that Honky Château did for him what Revolver did for the Beatles: It pried open the gilded gates, lifting him “onto a higher plane” as an artist. In 1972, when Honky Château went to No. 1, ending the Rolling Stones’ five-week reign with Exile on Main St., Elton was still a rascal. He had just turned 25 with seven records to his name, and he had yet to ascend into bona fide rockstardom. He was still small-time enough to be coerced to record outside of England to cut down on costs, his day could still be ruined if a hot American album arrived at an import shop a day late, and he still wore somewhat flat shoes on stage.
In its quaint intimacy and drama, Honky Château was a signpost of Elton’s imminent success, and four back-to-back classic records were waiting in the wings. The title honors Château d’Hérouville, the French countryside studio where it was recorded, the same one in which Vincent Van Gogh painted and Frederic Chopin had a mad love affair. Many fellow ’70s musicians, from Brian Eno to David Bowie, claimed the Château hosts centuries’ worth of something supernatural, with some going so far as to suggest that each record made there—think T. Rex’s “The Slider” and Bowie’s “Pin Ups”—holds a certain mystic quality.
Elton’s signature whimsy cloaks Honky Château like mist, so palpable that it almost confirms that fabled spirits must have come to his aid. The 50th-anniversary reissue continues to phantomize the soul-stirring and profound sentiments first cast in 1972, while remaining a tender portrait of Elton pre-rhinestones, as a fledgling celebrity. It boasts the option of a double LP or double CD, the latter featuring eight live recordings from Honky Château’s inaugural performance at London’s Royal Festival Hall in addition to bare outtakes from the Château, as well as a 40-page booklet. In these early recordings, Elton’s passion and dedication pleads to be heard. Whether nitpicking intros almost to the point of nausea or infusing vitality into each syllable like a mad scientist, a young Elton is constantly straining towards vein-popping perfection. And he’ll stop at nothing until he gets it.
“Rocket Man,” a smash hit that was finished on his first day at the Château, sent Elton spaceward, much to Bowie’s chagrin. The common thread of “man in space” drew frequent comparisons, including from the Starman himself, who once agreed with a radio host who implied that Elton was riding his coattails. Longtime collaborator Bernie Taupin said in 2016 that the true inspiration for “Rocket Man” came from a 1951 short story by Ray Bradbury, about an astronaut father who leaves his wife and son for months on end to patrol planets and sweep stardust. Elton’s version of the tale soars on an electric slide guitar that melds the ordinary with the cosmic, defining how quietly devastating it is to have something you must leave behind.
Honky Château wears many hats, some more crooked than others. The springy step of songs like “Honky Cat” and the morbidly satirical “I Think I’m Going To Kill Myself” are split by the cozy love song “Mellow.” The record then momentarily darts to two consecutive ballads that—despite pure intentions—miss the mark: the humanitarian anthem “Salvation” and the freedom-seeking “Slave” (neither of which Elton has performed since the 1970s). Though the attempt at activism seems sincere, it’s an odd diversion from the otherwise whimsical material on Honky Château. The pursed-lip, head-bobbing dueling piano and guitar groove of “Susie (Dramas)” is a more worthy overlooked gem. Elton’s tough-guy piano riff could strongarm any rival instrument into submission, save for guitarist Davey Johnstone’s street-smart, tomcat electric.
One track on Honky Château stands alone, without fanfare or hit-making fantasies of lonely rocketeers. Not unlike the rose of its “Spanish Harlem” inspiration, “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” gracefully slips out of the sullied fog that blankets New York City streets at dawn. Drawing from Taupin’s disappointing experience as a first-time visitor—arriving with starry eyes only to have the illusion shattered by a gunshot outside of his hotel room window—Elton sings of a silent observer who wades through disillusionment as reality bears down on him.
Though wonderland ideals of the big city fall short, the innocence of Johnstone’s childlike mandolin promises something better. As the track pieces together a mosaic of the madness of the “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” that parade past him, lucky to be doomed, Elton insists, “I thank the Lord for the people I have found.” It is a message of unshakable resilience, as when the gunsmoke clears, the observer is forced to toss city hopes aside and search for beauty elsewhere: in his fellow man. This is not without conscious effort and the help of a certain cosmic grace (he does not sing, “I thank the Lord for the people I have met,” after all), but as the song draws to a close, the lasting truth of shared humanity is resplendent in spite of adversity.
On Honky Château, Elton nurtures his budding legacy as he navigates out of his youth. From his time standing wide-eyed and naive at the edge of recognition to his time spent facedown in the gutter of disenchantment, one nameless, cockeyed hope of “making it” still tantalizes him, and will eventually carry him into lasting eminence. Much like what haunts the walls of Château d’Hérouville, the charm of Honky Château lingers in low lamplight, crystallizing Elton’s last anticipative, moonshot glance towards stardom before it swallows him whole.


Syrian singer Omar Souleyman’s Wenu Wenu is technically his first proper recording, having been cut in a studio in Brooklyn rather than on site at one of the thousands of weddings he’s performed over the past two decades. Four Tet's Kieran Hebden, who produced, made the wise decision not to try and improve on a sound that doesn’t need fixing.

Wenu Wenu

It seems wrong to refer to a musician with a 20-year long career and a catalog of recordings that allegedly runs into the mid-triple-digits as having a “debut” anything. But Omar Souleyman’s Wenu Wenu is in fact technically his first proper recording, having been cut in a studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn rather than on site at one of the thousands of weddings he’s performed over the past two decades around his home in northern Syria, where his reputation as a performer par excellence once drove an entire economy of bootleg cassette recordings.
Souleyman’s milieu is dabke, a style of folk dance music found at social gatherings across large swaths of the Middle East, built around intricately filigreed instrumental leads, exhortative singing, and pounding, trance-inducing rhythms. It’s an old style, but in recent years it’s had a creative renaissance as dabke artists, realizing that the form shares structural similarities with Western electronic dance music, began incorporating synthesizers and four-on-the-floor drum machines into their compositions.
While many of them have used the possibilities that electronic instruments offer to build epically rococo arrangements, Souleyman’s take on dabke is almost brutalist in its simplicity. Live, and on the five LPs of material he’s released through the American ethnographic music label Sublime Frequencies, the music is performed by Souleyman and his accompanists Ali Shaker (electric saz) and Rizan Sa'id. Sa'id plays dense bursts of melody on a synthesizer emulating traditional reed sounds over a relentless beat, and with Souleyman’s inimitable quavering bark laid over them, the entire mix is overdriven to a point you more commonly encounter with punk bands.
This combination of vivid minimalism and in-the-red performance is as essential to his popularity with Western avant garde audiences as his striking uniform of white thawb, red keffiyeh, and aviator shades, which adds a retro ABSCAM visual flair and produces an interesting aesthetic frisson when combined with the music’s techno-futuristic glare. Kieran Hebden, who produced Wenu Wenu, made the wise decision not to try and improve on a sound that doesn’t need fixing.
Wenu Wenu succeeds at capturing the hypnotic energy of Souleyman’s incredible live performances, but backs off the overdriven sonics to give the music newfound room to breathe. In the process we can finally appreciate some of the nuances in Sa’id’s playing, like the funky inflections in his basslines and the finger rolls sequenced into his drum patterns. Hearing the keyboards more clearly also gives the sound more stylistic flexibility. Synthy horn stabs in the earwormy titular opening track evoke 80s and 90s club pop, while the ersatz strings and fretless bass in the midtempo “Khattaba” add a not unwelcome layer of glossy schmaltz to the mix.
While some of those choices in synth patches were undoubtedly Hebden’s, they’re never obvious. There are touches here and there—the subtle modulated delay on a synthesizer lead, the odd filter sweep—where his participation comes through, but it never sounds like he’s trying to make Wenu Wenu a Four Tet album, or make Souleyman fit the parameters of Western dance music or, god forbid, sound fashionable.
Still, the music here can compete against any kind of dance music being made right now, and succeed. Dabke lives or dies by its ability to make people move, and although Souleyman is no-frills, and borderline gruff compared to other dabke performers, there’s something in his stentorian singing that’s irresistible. It’s still best experienced live, but after 20 years of mostly bootleg-quality tapes, there’s finally a recording worthy of calling the next best thing.


The unfortunate thing about Peaches is that she's turned into a one-woman referendum on the worthiness of the genre ...

The Teaches of Peaches

The unfortunate thing about Peaches is that she's turned into a one-woman referendum on the worthiness of the genre we'll go ahead and call electroclash: the widespread misconception that this stuff is all hucksterism and schtick can be traced pretty directly back to her lyrics and Fischerspooner's stage wardrobe. The one possibly good thing, for our bar conversation and general sense that Something Is Happening, is that this makes her a little like The Strokes used to be: we all know she's out there, and most of us feel obligated to have some sort of opinion about that. So now that her album, The Teaches of Peaches, has been re-released to the U.S. with a second disc of bonus material, and I've devised a brief questionnaire to help you sort out your feelings.
1. What is Peaches all about?
Sex. This starts with a triple-punch: you (a) look at her crotch on the cover, (b) put on the first track, which is called "Fuck the Pain Away", and then (c) Peaches leads in with the immortal words, "Suckin' on my titties": she doesn't work up to it at all. The remainder of the album includes a lot of grunting and squealing and songs about sucking on different things.
2. Am I meant to find that sexy, or revolting, or shocking, or what?
Peaches is really big on crotch-shots lately, only she's made it official Peaches policy not to shave her bikini line, so all of these crotch photos feature pubic hair straggling out under her panties and down her thigh. I'm guessing that, however you feel about that mental image-- hot, foul, offensive, or lame-- is pretty much how you'll feel about this record.
3. What, precisely, is the point of that?
There is an interesting aesthetic element to it: electro is captivated by the idea of machines as clean, perfect things, next to which the human body-- particularly sex-- seems messy and organic, maybe even scary or disgusting. Sweaty, sticky, hairy: this is the world of Peaches. It's possible, if you're so inclined, to read it as a performance-art take on pro-sex feminism; it's also possible to read Peaches as the sort of person who thinks she's "challenging" supposedly "inhibited" people, who are actually just indifferent, irritated by the crazy woman sticking her bits in their faces. Which of these is actually the case is not really important.
4. So is the music any good?
Sure, totally... it's pretty okay. Just like the lyrics, the sounds are stripped down and dirty, all stiff, minimalist grime: here in the capitol of Electroclash sleaze are the echoes of post-punk electronic abuse, ghetto-tech booty-bass, and the grind-fests of the nastiest hip-hop. Remember how Salt 'n' Pepa's "Push It" sounded when it came out-- all fuzzed-up and raunchy? This is what Peaches tends to shoot for.
And she's reasonably good about it, apart from one thing: her dedication to the sex-show antics sometimes comes at the expense of the tracks themselves, which makes her failures pretty grueling for the listener. "Fuck the Pain Away", on one hand, is great: big blurts of bass and stiff drums pump away under one of her better vamps (and better lyrics: "I.U.D., S.I.S., stay in school, 'cause it's the best"-- good lord, is Peaches self-aware?). The pure forward motion of "Cum Undun" actually manages to get off the ground a little, revving up progressively into one of Peaches' most effective tracks. On the other hand, you get stuff like "Diddle My Skittle", an interminable miasma of crawling beats, static noise, and dull babble. Yes, sure, there's "only one Peach with the hole in the middle," but six tracks in, talk like that is pretty much just wallpaper.
Every track is memorable, though rarely on a musical level. "AA XXX" actually has an unconfident nuance to its sex-talk (that's double-A as in cup size, not stimulator batteries); "Lovertits" strips its beats down to the barest strut to accommodate that rather talented squeal, and "Hot Rod" milks a loving chuckle out of its chorus, which runs, "Come on/ Hot rod/ Give me/ Your wad." There are also some rock moments, like "Rock Show", which is way too much of a theatrical gag to work on a record, or the clumsy "Sucker", which I like to imagine certain people would be crazy about if only it were a lost Sleater-Kinney drum-machine demo.
5. What's up with the new material?
Covers, for one thing, which strikes me as a pretty lame thing for Peaches, of all people, to be doing. Jeans Team's "Keine Melodien" originally sounded like a robotic Prussian dictator stomping his army over a hill, where Peaches minimizes it to an ominous cruise; her version of Berlin's "Sex (I'm A)" invites unflattering comparisons with Teri Nunn. The only new track is "Casanova", which pairs Peaches up with Mignon for a surprisingly playful and girly romp.
And then there are remixes, obviously. Tobi Neumann's reworking of "Set It Off" bulks up the beat and adds actual dynamics, with which Peaches seems to have only a passing familiarity. You'd think Kid606 having his way with "Fuck the Pain Away" would be fascinating, but you'd be wrong: he's a lot more restrained than usual-- no splattering snare drums-- and he uses a lot of major-key loops to rewrite the track's fairly grim tone. It's plunderphonia of the least order: "Look at me, I worked a bunch of different samples together."
Also, there are two videos. Enjoy.
6. So should I buy it?
God, I have no idea. Do you prefer listening to stuff because it's "interesting," or because it's "good?"


The Oakland rock band responds to tragedy with grace on their most musically diverse and lyrically affecting album yet.

Shannon and the Clams: Year of the Spider

Year of the Spider

Two years ago, after a series of misfortunes left her questioning everything, Shannon Shaw did what anyone in the midst of such crisis would do: She visited an astrologist.  The vocalist and bassist for the Oakland rock band Shannon and the Clams was advised to channel the power of Durga, a vigilant Hindu goddess who can be recognized by her eight arms; Shaw, a noted arachnophobe, caught onto this irony right away. “I was getting protection from the thing I feared the most,” she explained. These tentative but notable steps outside her comfort zone drive Shannon and the Clams’ sixth studio album, Year of the Spider.
Since forming in 2009, Shannon and the Clams have infused garage rock with flourishes of ‘60s doo-wop and neo-psychedelia; their last record, 2018’s Onion, was especially indebted to that era. On Year of the Spider, they dig even deeper into their old-school repertoire and its various off-shoots: “All of My Cryin’,” written and sung by guitarist Cody Blanchard, struts with a disco flair before bursting into ABBA-lite harmonies. The atmospheric synths of “Midnight Wine” approximate those of Suicide, while the eerie “Snakes Crawl” feels like a take on classic country. By incorporating a wider array of subgenres without losing their core identity, Shannon and the Clams create music that’s familiar without feeling redundant.
Year of the Spider is not only the most musically diverse Shannon and the Clams record, but it’s also the most lyrically affecting. The highlight “Mary, Don’t Go” references a stalker who forced Shaw to move out of her apartment. The chorus evokes the heartbreak of bidding farewell to her roommate: “I’d like to protect you, but what if I can’t?” “In the Hills, In the Pines” mourns shuttered fixtures of the Clams’ Bay Area DIY scene and the relationships that fizzled out as a result: “And the people I knew/They just fled in the night,” Blanchard sings. The Motown saunter of “Vanishing” backdrops Shaw’s heartbreaking reflection on her father’s diagnosis with cancer: “Open up, open up/You’re still here/Weary mind, bleary eyes/You’re not vanishing.” While Year of the Spider is devoid of love songs in the most traditional sense, Shaw depicts the bond between her family, her community, and her friends with just as much passion and empathy.
Sometimes, Year of the Spider can feel a bit cluttered. “I Need You Bad,” a song addressing the deep, hidden parts of the self, is a melodramatic ballad that gets in its own way. The thrashing cymbals of “Godstone” nearly wipe out Shaw and Blanchard’s harmonies altogether. But if these are the result of trying new things, then they are minor blips in Shannon and the Clams’ progression. Year of the Spider’s centerpiece is its deceptively chipper title track, which summarizes the traumatic period Shaw experienced prior to writing the album: “I know that change is good/But it hurts, and it is frightful,” she bellows over an instrumental that weaves early R&B with a surf-rock riff. For all the struggle that inspired the record, Shannon and the Clams embrace the change with grace.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Dolly Parton’s star-powered, overly reverential, 30-song rock album aims straight down the middle.

Rockstar

Dolly Parton is a feminist heroine who won’t say the F-word, a queer icon who conservatives can’t quit. She’s declined presidential honors from both sides of the aisle in her efforts to stay apolitical. For more than 50 years, she’s maintained an equal focus on the creative and commercial sides of the industry, developing an unparalleled brand management strategy that’s earned her millions. She extends that ethos to her new 30-song rock album, Rockstar, a dense and star-studded collection that sounds like the millennium’s most expensive karaoke party. Dolly Parton has never been one for minimalism, and who else could bring together Michael McDonald, P!nk, and Debbie Harry alongside Kid Rock and the current iteration of Lynyrd Skynyrd?
Parton’s path to Rockstar was a straight shot from her induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022, an honor she initially declined so as not to “stir up controversy.” Rock and country fans volleyed questions about genre, artistic merit, and supposed imposter syndrome before Parton changed her mind, eventually attending the ceremony and performing “Jolene” with Rob Halford, Pat Benatar, Annie Lennox, and more. Parton has said that the experience compelled her to make a “real” rock record, but on Rockstar, the framework of rock music is relatively narrow, with covers of songs by Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Bob Seger, and Peter Frampton. She sings “Let It Be” with the last two living Beatles yelping absent-minded harmonies. Formulaic arrangements keep the arena-size guitars, keys, and drums all turned up to 11. Apart from the occasional piano ballad reprieve, everything frantically signals rock music. The unrelenting emphasis on a single sound obliterates the careful details that made most of the originals so striking to begin with.
Parton delivers an abundance of material that vacillates between boilerplate and downright baffling. Her original song “World on Fire” cribs Queen’s signature stomp-claps, which she revisits when she stitches together “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You.” The contested king of rock’n’roll takes the spotlight in another Parton original, the alarming sock-hop fever dream “I Dreamed About Elvis,” which re-hashes the history of “I Will Always Love You” and imagines the singers in a duet that never happened. She dutifully churns through songs like Journey’s “Open Arms” and REO Speedwagon’s “Keep on Loving You.” And sure, fuck it, get Lizzo to toot a flute on “Stairway to Heaven”! The record ends with “Free Bird,” an 11-minute fart of a closing cliché.
Amid songs first cut by Sting and Elton John and an eight-minute “Purple Rain,” Parton almost branches out when she embraces more contemporary material. Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” is one of the most recent selections, a song that Parton said nearly made her weep the first time she heard it. Cyrus sings alongside her godmother on the re-work, which sags under dramatic orchestral flourishes, and Parton again reminds listeners of “I Will Always Love You” in the coda. 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” gets a faithful lift from original writer (and current Nashville heavy hitter) Linda Perry, but Parton’s sweeping vocals in the chorus don’t quite reach the power that Perry’s original take commands.
Rockstar has a strange storybook quality, in part due to Parton’s penchant for ending some of her lines in a spoken whisper. The record opens with “Rockstar,” where the 77-year-old Parton rebukes her fictional parents in an exchange that echoes Macaulay Culkin’s opening scenes in Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video. The song plays up Parton’s desire to be a “rockstar,” singing about chasing her dreams as former Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora follows along with competently crunchy riffs. There’s more hokiness jammed in the album’s interstitial spaces, as when Parton banters with Joan Jett (“I Hate Myself for Loving You”) and Stevie Nicks (“What Has Rock and Roll Ever Done for You”). She returns to the rock-referential theme with Melissa Etheridge on “Tried to Rock and Roll Me,” but the subject never really finds enough traction to stick.
It seems there is some deeper degree of sincerity to Rockstar, which Parton has also heralded as a tribute to Carl Dean, her reclusive husband of more than 50 years. He gets a nod in the “Carl Version” of “Magic Man,” which otherwise sounds a lot like the Heart version of “Magic Man.” With Dean in mind, Parton also revamps “My Blue Tears,” which she’d previously recorded with her Trio companions Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. This time, she’s got Simon Le Bon, a sentimental tin whistle, and massive-sounding drums. She nods at Trio again when she takes on “You’re No Good,” a signature Ronstadt number, with Harris and Sheryl Crow. But even these songs with a personal legacy for Parton are more interested in upholding the Rock Hall’s hidebound ideals than revealing her own relationship with rock music.
The album’s more tender moments can’t outrun its subtextual baggage. Guest appearances from Perry, Etheridge, and Brandi Carlile gesture toward queer inclusion, but their contributions sit alongside other figures whose presence negates any hope that Rockstar could make the rock institution feel like a more welcoming place. Steven Tyler, whose sexual relationships with minors were public knowledge long before the lawsuits filed earlier this year, makes an appearance on “I Want You Back.” “Either Or” is a horn-heavy duet with Kid Rock, who recently shot up several cases of Bud Light with an assault rifle because the beer company recruited a trans spokesperson. Parton herself insists that she “loves everybody,” but only she seems to benefit from the comfort of the harmonious middle ground she’s staked out. Her ascension to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame highlighted plenty of legitimate open questions, not least that of the institution’s continued relevance. But Rockstar adds almost nothing to the conversation, and the powerful allure of “playing to the middle” feels like a black hole instead.


Nestling heavy-hitting cuts inside a protective ambient cushion, the Bristol producer’s debut builds on his dancefloor sensibilities while making good on his experimental tendencies.

Shadows in Blue

Hodge’s signature is his drum programming. It pecks and prods, at once brutal and exacting, surgical and relentless in its staccato attack. Those drums instantly telegraph to dancers that they’re listening to a Hodge track. The Bristol musician, aka Jacob Martin, has applied that signature to all kinds of canvases in the past nine years. He has made fast tracks and slow ones; bludgeoning peak-time barnstormers and wobbly-legged sun-up jams; broken-beat syncopations and four-to-the-floor pulses.
While the bulk of Hodge’s output has appeared on labels like Livity Sound, Hemlock, and Punch Drunk—hubs for the dynamic, resolutely UK-rooted strain of 21st-century dance music that Hodge has grown up alongside—he has also turned up on European labels better known for house and techno. He’s collaborated with post-dubstep peers like Peverelist and Randomer but also maverick experimentalists like Laurel Halo and Fever Ray co-producer Peder Mannerfelt. No matter how recognizable his touch, Hodge might be one of the most versatile figures in contemporary UK club music. His debut album, Shadows in Blue, makes the most of that flexibility, building on his dancefloor sensibilities while making good on the experimental tendencies that have long lain just beneath the surface of his music.
This wouldn’t be a Hodge record without some certified bangers. A less ambitious producer could have packaged a handful of these tracks into one of heaviest EPs of the year. “Sense Inversion,” “Lanes,” and “Cutie” are all built around his unflinching use of force, with sternum-punching drum patterns forming a protective circle around sullen, slow-moving bass tones. His assault is so coordinated, with layered drum parts hammering away on multiple fronts, that you feel provoked, cornered, as in a fight-or-flight situation. But these are weirder and more graceful than your garden-variety industrial-techno stompers. Take “Cutie,” with its air-raid sirens firing over a tough, rolling beat: Halfway through, its synths thicken and congeal into unexpectedly beautiful melodic forms. The effect is part battering ram, part tearjerker. “Sense Inversion” is largely in keeping with Hodge’s percussive club style, but the beat quickly drops out, leaving ominous synth drones glistening like a patch of black ice; even at full swing, the tape-warped bells smeared atop the beat feel like an unstable fusion of Saturday-night floor-filler and 1950s Bell Labs patent application.
What makes Shadows in Blue so captivating—like a proper album, a notoriously tricky category for a dance producer to master—is the way these heavy-hitting cuts nestle inside a protective ambient cushion. Beginning with the avian chatter and Foley thunder sheets of the opening “Canopy Shy,” the record takes its time kicking into gear, and its exploratory passages are essential to the overall mood. “The World Is New Again,” the album’s first real song, boasts a big, ebullient riff—jagged, almost jaunty—that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Oneohtrix Point Never album. The song’s physically modeled sounds—plucked and hammered strings, vaguely Asian-sounding flutes, something that might be prepared piano—accentuate the uncanny valley between “real” and synthetic instruments, setting up the spongy terrain to come. “Sol,” with its resonant tympani and gaseous radar pings, sounds like Hodge’s bid for soundtrack work; it would be perfect for a submarine-hunt scene. And “Shadows in Blue” is the ideal mix of worlds: It so effortlessly layers classical-minimalist pulses with flutes and strings that by the time the beat finally drops, you had forgotten the very possibility of it turning into a club anthem. Even the glistening breakbeat trance of the climactic “Ghost of Akina (Rainbow Edition)” abides by this principle: It bangs and envelops in equal measure.
It’s a fine time for this kind of album. With clubbing on hold indefinitely, there’s little need for floor-filling DJ tools, even as dance-music fans pine for the energy of the club at its idealized best—as a space not just for socialization but also for experimentation, a place where musical forms might mutate on a weekly basis, thanks to artists’ keen ears and audacious productions. Entirely by coincidence, Hodge has turned up with an album of adventurous club music—as well suited for dreaming as raving—at exactly the right moment. Last week, Hodge made a plea that DJs, once the lockdown finally lifts, become more adventurous in their sets. With Shadows in Blue, he provides the material to do just that.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


This comic-book crossover between MF DOOM, Wu-Tang’s Inspectah Deck, and Boston duo 7L & Esoteric attempts to evoke the heyday of underground rap, with mixed results.

Czarface / MF DOOM: Czarface Meets Metal Face

Czarface Meets Metal Face

Czarface, the hip-hop supergroup consisting of Wu-Tang’s Inspectah Deck and Boston boom-bap revivalists 7L & Esoteric, has never been apologetic when it comes to their nostalgia for the good old days. Drawing from a childhood love of superhero comics, the trio devised the robot ghoul Czarface to serve as their collective avatar. His mission? “[T]o save hip-hop,” Inspectah Deck told HipHopDX in 2013, echoing the rallying cry of rap traditionalists everywhere. Whether or not you agree that hip-hop needs saving, you can’t accuse Czarface of not trying: The group has put out three full-lengths and an instrumental album over the course of the last five years. While hardly groundbreaking, these records have provided a reliable source of low-stakes fun for people who miss things like dusty samples, goofy skits, and dense rhymes. A few of those people have even lent their talents as guests: Action Bronson, Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire, DJ Premier, and half of Deck’s Wu-Tang colleagues.
But as Czarface likes to remind us, Every Hero Needs a Villain. And none is more qualified for the job than MF DOOM (the “MF” is apparently back, DOOM’s near pathological aversion to having his records filed next to each other notwithstanding). He’s the last man standing from New York’s “Golden Era,” an emcee whose once-peerless wordplay was the very embodiment of the synergy of hip-hop and comic-book culture. Following a one-off track with Czarface (2015’s “Ka-Bang!”), DOOM now returns for a full-length collaboration with the group.
As you may know, the last decade hasn’t been kind to the man behind the mask. DOOM was forced to decamp to London after being denied entry to the United States (a country he had lived in nearly all of his life) and announced last year that his teenage son had died. With the exception of his undated Missing Notebook Rhymes verses, he’s sounded increasingly lethargic and dull on the mic, even slurring his speech at times. But he’s remained active, regularly surfacing for guest verses, remixes, and production gigs, even while marquee projects like Madvillainy 2 and DOOMSTARKS remain eternally on the back burner. If nothing else, he’s been a prolific collaborator, working with kindred spirits like Ghostface, Flying Lotus, Earl Sweatshirt, Cannibal Ox, Busta Rhymes, and the Avalanches. It’s as if he’s been searching for his perfect foil, that opponent who can draw out his inner supervillain.
Czarface is not quite that ideal nemesis, though on a few tracks, the group does manage to coax more energy out of DOOM than we’ve heard in a few years. Lead single “Nautical Depth” provides the best example. Here DOOM delivers his most sprightly verse on the album over a grimy bassline, even offering a few flashes of his once razor-sharp lyricism (“No friendly warfare, this ain’t wrestling/There’s nothing staged over here, you’re trippin’, mescaline”). “Phantoms,” the record’s highlight, is even more successful overall. The Czar-Keys beat here is surprisingly modern, building a groove out of bubbly 8-bit chirps that collapse halfway through the track, revealing a chasm of groaning synths below. DOOM kicks things off with a competent but forgettable verse, Deck spits furiously, landing a few satisfying lines (“Stared death in the face, left him with a sore neck”) and even Esoteric, the weakest rapper of the bunch, shows up with a surplus of energy. The real star here, though, is Open Mike Eagle, who barely breaks a sweat rapping circles around his hosts. His verse spins a pun-filled yarn about a supernatural houseguest who chastises Mike for not buying into BitCoin, drives a Rolls-Royce Phantom and plays the exquisite corpse parlor game obsessively. In another era, this is precisely the caliber of storytelling and wit we might have expected from DOOM.
Unfortunately, the rest of the record can’t meet the bar set by these highlights. “Forever People” is clearly meant to be a mic-skills showcase, the dialed-back beat consisting of little more than palm-muted guitar and a looped drum break. But none of its verses are particularly notable: DOOM is mealy-mouthed, Esoteric leans more on references than ability, and Deck’s verse, while dynamic, feels simplistic (“I stay woke like seven cups of coffee”). On “Don’t Spoil It,” Deck stuffs his bars with references to classic rap albums, but the song feels more pandering than clever. And Esoteric, at his best, sounds like a JAY-Z impersonator (Blueprint era, of course); it certainly doesn’t help that he regularly drops lines like “My interest, fly Benzes.”
You can’t knock Czarface Meets Metal Face too much for sounding like a period piece, since that’s so clearly the intention. Czarface has always spoken directly to a specific audience, one that values familiarity over progression. And if what you’re looking for is a hip-hop album that sounds like it could have been recorded 15 years ago, Czarface Meets Metal Face certainly delivers. Everything from the production to the corny pulp-movie skits feels frozen in time. But if you want to be reminded why DOOM and Deck are held in such high esteem, you’d be better off sticking to the classics. Just ask any traditionalist: They don’t make ‘em like they used to.


It's Cosy Inside is one of those happily obscure records: Released in 1989 by two new age-obsessed brothers, it recalls Animal Collective's homebody side, and stakes itself on the premise that the most cosmic and revelatory experiences you'll ever have will all happen between your house and the backyard.

It's Cosy Inside

It's Cosy Inside is one of those happily obscure records: not essential, but not replaceable either, singular and weird, but so comically gentle that it's easy to see how it was ignored and just as easy to see how it was forgotten. It was released in 1989 on Independent Project Records by two English brothers, Mark and Clive Ives. Their website says they make "Indie Electronic New Age for meditation, relaxation, yoga & shiatsu." Below the text, you can see them, the Ives brothers. One is wearing a dashiki; both are wearing what appear to be sailor hats. They are smiling big toothy smiles. "Hi!" the photo says. "We're friendly!"
Woo have at least 10 albums; It's Cosy Inside is only one of four that I've heard, and the best, too; A La Luna is a close second. Though they were never attached to any particular scene, It's Cosy Inside can easily be connected to a whole subterranean history of quiet, gooey music: certain songs by the English folk/new-age band Penguin Café Orchestra, the audio collage project the Focus Group, the Krautrock/kosmische band Cluster, instrumental interludes by the opera composer Robert Ashley, the homebody sides of Animal Collective, Sun Araw, and several other more contemporary bands. Call it board-game psychedelia, maybe; armchair ambient.
"Ambient" is a word usually used to describe albums that create wide-open spaces: the sky, the desert, the highway at night, etc. Even Brian Eno's imagined airport-- from 1978's Music for Airports-- is a place of wide tunnels, high ceilings, and windows all around. The difference between Woo and most ambient music is scale: It's Cosy Inside is a domestic album whose map is drawn in its song titles: "Wallpaper", "No More Telly", "End of the Attic", "It's Cosy Inside". It gets as far as "Downtown Suburbia", then turns around (and note that this is downtown suburbia). But the album's limited imagined space is also what makes it so wonderful and disorienting: Like the second side of Animal Collective's Sung Tongs, It's Cosy Inside stakes itself on the premise that the most cosmic and revelatory experiences you'll ever have will all happen between your house and the backyard.
Most of it is made with acoustic guitars, gently strummed and run through effects pedals that make them sound slinky and liquid. Sometimes, clarinets come in. Melodies are pretty, sweet, almost sing-songy, but never assertive-- they ebb in, they ebb out. Knowing how little to play in situations like this is probably more important than knowing how much to play, and while there's never any silence on It's Cosy Inside, the album has a barely-there quality-- music as cobwebs, music as mist.
Music this strange certainly has the right to present itself as serious, mystical shit doing all kinds of serious, mystical investigation. It's to Woo's credit that they don't. Every level of It's Cosy Inside*--* from the cartoonish front cover to the song titles to the sound itself-- is chipper and inviting. They're just two smiling brothers in sailor hats making quiet guitar ooze for you to get massaged to. I first heard about them from the reliably interesting Mutant Sounds blog about five years ago. "Hello," one of the post's comments read. "This is my first ever blog-- how exciting to be talking to the computer-- we went to visit a crop circle last week just outside Barbury Castle in Wiltshire, and that was pretty exciting-- but this is-- Wow!!!!" Crop circles, yeah-- "pretty exciting." The post, of course, was signed by Mark Ives-- half of Woo.


Spoon’s eighth album is their most booming LP, most resembling a companion piece to 2007’s masterwork Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Joe Chiccarelli and Dave Fridmann share co-production credits along with the band themselves, and They Want My Soul pulls at familiar threads, fraying things to make them seem now.

They Want My Soul

All these soulsuckers, they’re among us. They’re stealing our privacy, our convictions, the very essence of our being, and leaving behind little more than a “for sale” sign and some vague, constant hollowness. In music, a dwindling whirlpool of funds only spurs on these parasites as they scavenge for scraps of humanity wherever ears can hear. Their thirst is real. And artists—those blasphemous and holy conduits for truth, liberty, and whatever else is missing from our lives—can’t help but succumb. To last more than 20 years in rock’n’roll without sacrificing a lethal amount of one’s soul requires a certain vigilance; to navigate around the pitfalls of both punk and ambition without tripping-up on either can seem just as hard as making a great album. But Spoon, one of the most stand-up bands of their generation, have figured all of this out. On their eighth album, they laugh in the face of leeches, defy gravity, suspend time. “All they want’s my soul, yes, yes, I know!” hollers Britt Daniel, stretching every crevice of his 43-year-old throat. His message is clear: They can’t have it.
Spoon’s soul is theirs alone. It’s not James Brown’s soul, and though Daniel was raised Christian in conservative small-town Texas, it’s not God’s soul, either. It’s not exactly classic rock, not quite post-punk. It’s not the soul of indie idealists blindly conflating modesty and virtue. Instead, this band is about capturing the unknown—those “finer feelings,” as Daniel once put it—and simply letting it float. Many of their songs are meticulously crafted, but they also breathe and break with crackling spontaneity. Theirs is an in-between soul happily seeking limbo as its own destination. It’s manly in an old-fashioned way, but still scuffed-up and vulnerable. It’s allergic to empty sentiment. It’s smart but not eggheaded, tough but not dumb. It’s Costello, Lennon, Can, and the Cure. It’s all-knowing and hopelessly fallible, mysterious with a purpose. It’s going to be crushed by life and love, and it’s going to endure.
They Want My Soul is the quintet’s most booming LP, eons ahead of their Pixies-worshipping beginnings and a far cry from the relatively small-scale charm of their early-2000s touchstones Girls Can Tell and Kill the Moonlight, as well as their self-consciously lo-fi 2010 record, Transference. The album sounds like a proper follow-up to Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, the clear-eyed 2007 LP where everything clicked into place and a restless band finally hammered themselves into stone. Some of the new record’s sonic forthrightness comes courtesy of two indie-hit-making producers new to Spoon’s world: über-pro Joe Chiccarelli, who’s worked with everyone from Frank Zappa to the Shins to Jazon Mraz over the last 35 years, and psychedelic guru Dave Fridmann, who’s helped turn unapologetic weirdos Flaming Lips and MGMT into festival headliners. Spoon, who also co-produced every song on the album, lie somewhere between those two poles—pop and outré—and the triangulations happening throughout They Want My Soul flow out unencumbered. These songs rip and burst and go.
As guitar rock continues its slow and inevitable transition into a bygone art, They Want My Soul pulls at familiar threads, fraying things to make them seem now, if not new. There’s an inherent nostalgia in the kind of alchemy Spoon are mixing up here, and the band is wise enough not to shy away from it. But instead of glowing in the light of good times past, They Want My Soul is constantly negotiating with the memories that make up our minds, trying to decide if they’re traps or blessings. “Do You” plays it both ways, starting off with Daniel wistfully reminiscing about vomiting on a curb—“I was half out of a bag,” he grins—before zooming out with a succinct world-weariness that comes from chronicling humanity’s small giveaways for more than two decades: “You tiptoe for ages, but lose yourself/Flippin’ back pages, unbuckling belts.” Daniel has talked about how he was a “mean and ornery” teenage outcast, and much of his subsequent years have been spent wearing-down that sharpness with empathy while trying to retain bits of its hard-nosed rigor. On the barreling “Rainy Taxi,” he has trouble living in the grays, describing an all-or-nothing romance he can’t help but fall for. “When you stand beside me I feel something stronger than I ever could,” he says with hope, before the ultimatum: “But if you leave you better run away for good.” A happy ending is a boring ending.
And who wants an ending anyway? “Inside Out” finds submissive contentment amidst a drift that hints at eternity. “There’s intense gravity in you,” Daniel lilts, “I’m just your satellite.” And then the track willingly enters that ether as koi-pond synths twinkle in the distance, its tranquility tempered by the fact that Spoon have never made a song quite this pretty before. So have Spoon gone soft? Have they been watered-down by commercially-minded collaborators? Have they crushed the DIY dream by leaving indie utopia label Merge? They Want My Soul makes such questions sound about as petty and irrelevant as the thousands of bands that have come and gone (or come, gone, and reunited) since Daniel and drummer Jim Eno started Spoon in the months just before Kurt Cobain’s death. They didn’t burn out. They’re not fading away.