So far, this extensive reissue series has seen the Cure transform from a spiky post-punk act (*Three Imaginary Boys*) to a spooky new wave one (*Seventeen Seconds*), and from a grand, glacial rock band (*Faith*) to a fiercer, darker one (*Pornography*). That's more than enough to make for a striking career in itself: It's 1983, and the Cure is already epically great. But there's a difference between a great rock act and the kind of long-running international pop favorite this band was bound to be, and the music that comes next is what makes that difference.

The mid-80s are the years

The Cure / Robert Smith: The Top / The Head on the Door / Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me / Blue Sunshine

So far, this extensive reissue series has seen the Cure transform from a spiky post-punk act (Three Imaginary Boys) to a spooky new wave one (Seventeen Seconds), and from a grand, glacial rock band (Faith) to a fiercer, darker one (Pornography). That's more than enough to make for a striking career in itself: It's 1983, and the Cure is already epically great. But there's a difference between a great rock act and the kind of long-running international pop favorite this band was bound to be, and the music that comes next is what makes that difference.
The mid-80s are the years in which the Cure ceases to be a rock band and becomes a vehicle to plumb Robert Smith's imagination. Asian art, psychedelics, hallucinations-- with the act's lineup effectively swapped to bits, Smith takes up the reins of the studio, and he seems to see each individual song as a chance to literalize some particular dream of his, using pop arrangements to create little worlds that feel astonishingly visual. It's a shame these reissues can't include the band's already-compiled singles from this era, because it's in their ever-changing styles that you get the best sense of what he was doing: trying on a joyous fake-jazz strut for "The Lovecats", making "The Caterpillar" sound like a broken-down music conservatory for fairies, doing bratty, funky synthpop on "Let's Go to Bed" and chilly electro on "The Walk". Rock bands sound good within the context of being rock bands; pop songs like these carried their own context with them, each one a dream to step into.
The Top (1984), however, is not that Cure. Yes, "The Caterpillar" is on here, and "Dressing Up" has a sexy pop-song elegance that's certainly new. But this full-length is the sound of a rock band stretching out in a much less controlled and occasionally bitter way: There are shades of gnarled psychedelia scattered throughout. Songs like "Give Me It" and "Shake Dog Shake" scream and blurt with a grim, bristly rage. The band's signature dirges suddenly feel formless and lethargic in a bad way. The rough home and studio demos on the bonus disc are hard listening in spots, but also instructive: In hearing Smith labor to make this material whole, you get a better sense of how the scattershot styles of the album could be stemming from the same source.
Around the same time, Smith was also recording and touring as a guitar player for fellow goth travelers Siouxsie & the Banshees-- which is part of how we get the Glove, a psych-pop side project for Smith and Banshees bassist Steve Severin. This series is kind enough to include a deluxe package of the band's sole, hard-to-find full-length, 1983's Blue Sunshine. With singer Jeanette Landray taking Siouxsie-like leads on most tracks, the sound is about what you'd expect from a Cure/Banshees crossover, or at least one entranced by Beatles psychedelia. (The band's name comes from Yellow Submarine; around the time this was released, the Banshees were enjoying a hit with a cover of "Dear Prudence".) For most of the record, though-- "Like an Animal", or the Smith-sung "Mr. Alphabet Says"-- what you'd expect is something fairly great, and a definite treat for Cure and Banshees fans who haven't gotten their hands on this yet.
Then there's The Head on the Door (1985). Saying that this is the Cure's most focused pop album-- with a crucial new band lineup solidified, Porl Thompson's guitar on board, and everyone sounding keen and intent-- might seem like a massive compliment, but that designation turns out to be a bit tricky. The singles here were the band's most straightforward to date: An ingratiating rush of guitar on "In Between Days", a jolly twinkling love song on "Close to Me", sappy 80s drama on "A Night Like This". The songs in between make for the sole 80s Cure album you could think about playing at a beach party-- check the strangely Van Halen-ish sustained chords on "Push." And Smith's dreamy imagination of far-away places gets pleasantly touristic: plinking atmospherics on "Kyoto Song," super-speed Spanish guitar on "The Blood". It's a tight, terrific package, and more imaginative than albums this controlled usually get, but it's oddly removed from one of the qualities people have always loved best about the Cure-- the deep, sprawling sound of an album like Disintegration.
But then there's Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me (1987), the place where every one of these things comes together. This band is best remembered for Disintegration, yes-- it's the kind of epic, single-minded "statement" that asks to be put up on pedestals. Thing is, you don't get the kind of teenage-bedroom devotion this band got by making epic, single-minded statements. In order to get people to dress like you-- to make a whole world out of your music-- you have to offer them a whole world, one that encompasses all of their moods, every waking moment of their days.
The 18 tracks of Kiss Me's double-LP do exactly that. Every major mode of the Cure is here, and sounding better than ever, each one a realm of its own. There's grand, tormented wailing ("The Kiss", "Fight") next to tender, sunny numbers ("Catch"). There are creepy-crawly Orientalist nightmares ("The Snake Pit", "If Only Tonight We Could Sleep") and slow, sparkling romances ("One More Time"). There are bitter shouts ("Shiver and Shake"), all-pop numbers ("Just Like Heaven"), and complex intersections between the two ("Hot Hot Hot", "Why Can't I Be You?"). Smith's lyrics even find, among the usual animals and anguish, a set of linchpin images that reflect in each of those directions. There is a mouth on the cover, and the songs are full of devouring-- both the devouring mouths of desire and the fear of being consumed. Christmas gets to evoke both gaudy colors and sad nostalgia. There's the deep, dark water that would soon be all over Disintegration, and there's an endless romantic push and pull: someone so perfect that Smith asks "Why can't I be you?" and someone else so perfect that Smith asks, "You want to know why I hate you?" Some of these songs play out mixed-up emotions-- weird crossovers of depression and joy, love and loathing, anger and resignation-- that we barely have names for. Bitter torture and giddy excitement and desire, desire, desire: They all come together into one almost maniacally impassioned thing.
This is the world of the raccoon-eyed, mumbling, moping, endlessly sensitive late-80s Cure fan in one gorgeous, totally immersive package, and it's one of the most convincing, emotionally whole, and individual albums of the decade-- an entire imagined land, complete with sounds, visions, and styles, huge on romance and drama. If you were only ever to buy one Cure album, most people would point you to that landmark Disintegration, and there's every chance you'd be amazed by it. But for the whole breadth of the Cure-- and what seems like the whole head of Smith-- in one glorious package, this is the one that matters.


Bombay Bicycle Club frontman Jack Steadman taps Charles Bradley, De La Soul, Horace Andy, and more for a crate-digging, sampledelic record that feels safe compared to the risks he took with his band.

God First

God First would like to be judged by its front and back cover. Given its playful, soul-boutique image and impressive list of guest vocalists, Mr. Jukes cuts an immediately likable image for a producer/curator—enigmatic but impeccably connected, a locus for funk, old-school R&B, golden age hip-hop, and modern pop. If all of this suggests a up-and-coming, Mark Ronson-style polyglot, take advantage of the first two minutes of God First. Because after the queasy orchestration of the opening “Typhoon” gets its sea legs, Jack Steadman’s vocals come in and, oh right, this is the guy from Bombay Bicycle Club.
This drastic rebrand shouldn’t come as a surprise. Since emerging as teenage festival-folkers nearly a decade ago, Bombay Bicycle Club spent the first half of their run accumulating commercial goodwill they would subsequently gamble on increasingly bold artistic shifts. This is all relative: they’re not exactly Talk Talk or Radiohead, but there’s a sizable difference between the “quiet is the new loud” retread Flaws and turnt up-is-the-better-loud So Long, See You Tomorrow, which maintained the band’s Patsavas-core framework within EDM razzle dazzle. Steadman’s new style doesn’t really feel risky either since his trajectory from acoustic-toter to soul crate-digger is encouraged every month by basically every single men’s magazine in existence.
The fundamental irony here is that Steadman sounds far more conservative in his new role. Albums of this type usually tend to feature risk-averse writing anyway, resetting itself with every guest vocalist despite staying firmly within the realm of professionally sung relationship vaguebooking. While a capable producer, Steadman isn’t yet a confident one, never pushing the luminaries to do anything other than the exact thing one would expect from them. With all due respect, “Grant Green” is the kind of rafter-reaching Charles Bradley could do on cue, while Steadman’s shellacked samples provide him an Animatronic version of the Extraordinaires as backup. The cluttered De La Soul/Horace Andy feature “Leap of Faith” has more in common with his track-stuffing on So Long than actual hip-hop production meant to facilitate flow. He attempts the density of Prince Paul without any of the depth or dexterity—plus De La sounds like they’re saving the primo material in case there’s another Gorillaz album.
The discrepancy between Steadman’s skill set and the kind of music he’s trying to make here is hard to overlook: “Angels Your Love” is a sampledelic tapestry modeled after the Avalanches, albeit with a much lower thread count. Steadman loves his breakbeats, but isn’t willing to get his fingers dusty—God First’s safe place is a spirited boom-bap whose non-quantized, chunky drums still manage to sound rigid as an 808 and as clean as any Bombay Bicycle Club record. Hell, even the Steadman solo features (“Ruby”, “Typhoon”) would’ve passed for maybe the eighth or ninth most adventurous tracks on So Long. If you’re a former Brit-popper who can wrangle Charles Bradley, Horace Andy, BJ the Chicago Kid, Lalah Hathaway, and De La Soul onto your album and you’re not Damon Albarn, you do it and figure out the rest later. Perhaps the next Mr. Jukes project will find Steadman willing to show us his soul, but for now he’s only comfortable showing us his record collection.


The first two full-lengths by Modest Mouse, out of print for many years, have been reissued by Isaac Brock's Glacial Pace imprint. Heard now, they are a reminder of the group's insular, visionary oddness.

Modest Mouse: This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About/The Lonesome Crowded West

The Modest Mouse of the 2000s was very of its time, when indie rock was turning more porous and mainstream. The Moon and Antarctica from 2000 clothed their decrepit strains in major label finery and production by someone outside of their local bubble, Califone's Brian Deck. The record also let in influences that were not yet entirely indie-approved, such as dance music on "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes". Morbid lyrics and backmasked guitars notwithstanding, "Gravity Rides Everything" was catchy enough to sell Nissan Quest minivans. Moon, though clearly a classic now, caused debates over whether Modest Mouse had "sold out," something people still earnestly fretted about as the Internet was upsetting old hierarchies.
This commercial openness was quite a shift for a band defined by a sense of isolation in its own secret world. The Modest Mouse of the '90s had also been very much of its time, when indie rock was less of a popular genre than a refuge from them. Weird bands from nowhere places strained their quirks through a punk filter, and their styles were narrower but, perhaps, deeper than those of their polyglot descendants. Modest Mouse fit the mold. Formed by singer and guitarist Isaac Brock, drummer Jeremiah Green, and bassist Eric Judy in the Washington suburb of Issaquah, they had a kind of insular, visionary oddness.
Modest Mouse quickly found purchase in the Pacific Northwest scene. In 1994, they made their first EP with Calvin Johnson in Olympia for his twee-punk label K Records, as well as a single for Seattle's Sub Pop. They also recorded the album Sad Sappy Sucker, which sat on the shelf until 2001, when it did indeed turn out to be their most K-style record—bright, baggy, and loose at the seams. During this time they veered off into a wilderness of their own devising, debuting with the darker and tauter This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About on Up Records in 1996. That and their second Up album, 1997's The Lonesome Crowded West, have just been reissued by Brock's Glacial Pace label. Both are excellent, but it's the more fully formed Lonesome that consummates an era.
From the start, Modest Mouse were instantly recognizable: Judy's ropy bass and Green's drumming, heaving from a caveman bash to a disco skip, are indispensable to the rangy, volatile sound. But it's the guitars that really define it, so strange and particular—Brock's hearty riffs, string bends, harmonics, and whammy-bar tremolo push up toward trebly extremes of panicked intensity. The songs break down into wheezes and coughs as the band pounds the ends of bars until they curl up like sheet metal.
But they weren't completely ex nihilo. Like other '90s indie groups, Modest Mouse reflected their region before pulling free from it on later albums. There's grunge in the whisper-scream dynamics here, metal and punk in sections of breakneck thrash, twee in the richly jangling acoustic guitars and in Brock's voice, always petulant and pleading. There are also outlying indie touchstones—"Might" sounds like Built to Spill if someone had knocked Doug Martsch on the head, other songs evoke the Pixies by way of Pink Floyd. Even alt-rock is absorbed in the patchwork pop of "Lounge", a medley of surf-rock, hot jazz, and chamber music with shout-rapped lyrics. But Modest Mouse were already fortifying their hermetic island on Long Drive, where they pitted the jarring against the lulling in diverse ways.
The great theme of both albums is travel, or more essentially, how motion through space feels. This is also intricately bound up with the physical geography Modest Mouse inhabited. The urban paranoia of post-punk seeps into wide-open rural, looming industrial and encroaching suburban vistas, all alike in their sinister, hypnotic repetition. With the first words of Long Drive, "traveling swallowing Dramamine," a sense of drugged conveyance through some grand monotony settles over us. We seem to glimpse empty landscapes with twisty bits of things blowing through them in the window of a train. Strip malls and parking lots, monuments and steeples, empty fields and dark forests scroll by in a purgatorial loop. This becomes overt on "Convenient Parking", a dusty practice riff with broken springs.
For Brock, these enclosing physical confines are tantamount to mental ones; he's always moving forward without getting anywhere different, and he confronts this existential emergency with disdain and terrified awe. The music cultivates its particular urgency by devising and then breaking free from psychic traps. "From the top of the ocean/ From the bottom of the sky/ Well, I get claustrophobic," Brock bellows on Lonesome's "Teeth Like God's Shoeshine", an image that would return in different form a few years later on "Ocean Breathes Salty". The earth and heavens are not mediums but inescapable masses, crushing us in the seam where they meet. The feeling of being stuck in a small town inflates to cosmological proportions.
Home-schooled in religious hippie communes, Brock was primed for this visionary vocation. His lyrics are marked by a war between militant atheism and kind of crypto-Christian mysticism, a tension that twists his perspective into strange shapes. On these records, the pavement is steadily encroaching on the wild in ways that feel spiritually symbolic. Brock wants to wrench apart ground and sky, prefabricated towns and consumer culture, to find an exit hatch into some deeper, more meaningful state of being which, as he suspects on "Exit Does Not Exist", is a fantasy.
Modest Mouse never captured their particular rural paranoia better than on Lonesome's "Cowboy Dan", a minor key dirge that takes us to a jet-black desert rustling below the occasional shooting star. It's a folkloric tale of a cowboy who tries to shoot down God as revenge for mortality, with eerie calls and groans floating out of a vast, breathing darkness. "I didn't move to the city, the city moved to me," he cries, via Brock's rabid goblin croak, "and I want out desperately," a theme that first began to develop on Long Drive's "Beach Side Property".
It's all about inverted insides and outsides: huge landscapes that feel like small cages, civilizations that breed a savage misanthropy, disbelief that feels like religion. "Doin' the Cockroach" begins with the elusive dichotomy, "I was in heaven, I was in Hell/ Believe in neither but fear them as well." Brock excoriates riders on the Amtrak for "talking 'bout TV," punctuating his condemnations with pleas to "please shut up." He also slips in one of the best of the obscure aphorisms that would come to increasingly infiltrate his litany of complaints: Some number of years "down the road in your life, you'll look in the mirror and say, 'My parents are still alive.'" I think it's about getting older, but it's open to numberless interpretations, all of them with the indescribable ambient menace of a bad dream.
The Lonesome Crowded West fine-tunes forms that were introduced on Long Drive. "Teeth Like God's Shoeshine" and the sprawling "Trucker's Atlas" draw the erratic thrust of "Breakthrough" into sleeker, more commanding arcs. "Lounge (Closing Time)" is a less novelty-based, more structurally balanced version of "Lounge". And "Shit Luck" is even more potent than"Tundra/Desert", with two-note power chords growling up and down the neck in breakneck syncopation with wailing string bends. The record also refines some new looks that would soon be developed, such as the scratchy rural funk jam of "Jesus Christ Was an Only Child" and tender, ringing ballads such as "Heart Cooks Brain" and the gentle confessional "Trailer Trash".
With Moon, Modest Mouse caught a new wave of spacey psych-pop alongside the likes of The Flaming Lips, and it let them out on a foreign shore: mainstream success. Good News for People Who Love Bad News (2004) went platinum, produced hit single "Float On", landed the band on SNL and earned a Grammy nomination. To me, that was the last real Modest Mouse album—and even it was on the verge—as the personalities that made the group unique got diluted by new personnel, i.e., someone as externally defined as Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr. We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank (2007) was the band's first number one album, but it felt like an ending, and only an EP of leftovers from the last two albums has emerged since.
Lonesome came out right on the hinge between indie rock's regional phase and its global one, in 1997, the year I got my first email address, and I still have the original LP I bought around then. Listening to albums you loved that long ago often feels like looking at old photos, but the remarkable thing about these reissues is that their thrill feels contemporary, a present sense of physical and psychological danger. Indeed, something you notice in an almost manically retro indie music climate is a striking absence of nostalgia. Things are fucked now, with no inkling that they were ever any better, no state of grace to return to.
The end of the '90s were packed with epochal last gasps of pre-Internet indie rock that came out just as Radiohead's OK Computer was becoming the avatar of the next, more mainstream phase. Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Pavement's Brighten the Corners, Elliott Smith's Either/Or—all exhausted blazes of glory, like light bulbs flaring brightest as they burn out. The Lonesome Crowded West stands tall and defiantly weird among them.


Joined by his Imposters in the studio for the first time in a decade, the silver-tongued songwriter turns tunes from abandoned musicals into a surprisingly cohesive record.

Elvis Costello / The Imposters: Look Now

Look Now

More than a decade ago, Elvis Costello suggested his recording career may be over. “I’m not of a mind to record anymore,” he told Mojo. “There’s no point… In terms of recorded music, the pact’s been broken—the personal connection between the artist and the listener. [The] MP3 has dismantled the intended shape of an album.” For a spell, it seemed Costello was making good on that promise. After 2010’s sprawling National Ransom, he effectively retired from the studio, resurfacing only for Wise Up Ghost, a collaboration with the Roots that they actually initiated. Earlier this year, Costello revealed he survived a bout with a “small but very aggressive” cancer, so his return to the studio for the sumptuous Look Now, his first album with the Imposters in 10 years, is especially welcome.
Costello stayed busy throughout the past decade, pouring his energy into themed-based shows, whether reviving his Spectacular Spinning Songbook after a quarter-century or transforming his memoir into a solo tour that partly played as an homage to his dear departed dad. Just last year, he and the Imposters—the name he gave to the Attractions after dismissing perpetual pest and bassist, Bruce Thomas—celebrated the 35th anniversary of Imperial Bedroom, the 1982 album where Costello’s sophisticated songcraft really flowered.
During this self-imposed studio exile, Costello continued to write, something he proved with new songs during each tour. He kept his eye on the other sort of stage, too. He had two theatrical projects in the hopper with Burt Bacharach—one based on their 1998 album, Painted From Memory, the other a new concept—and toiled away on a musical adaptation of A Face in the Crowd. None of these came to fruition, due to the complexities of Broadway financing, but their pieces are, in part, the fodder for Look Now.
Imposters drummer Pete Thomas cobbled a few of the demos Costello had sent into a playlist, modeling it after Dusty Springfield’s sultry 1969 classic, Dusty in Memphis. Intrigued by the sequencing, Costello began to fashion an album from these homeless tunes and stray songs, poaching from his unfinished musicals and rifling through his cupboards of compositions. Echoing Momofuku, the 2008 album that marks the last time Costello recorded with the Imposters, Look Now plays at first like a simple set of songs that eschews grand concepts for immediacy.
Despite their statliness, these tunes are startlingly direct, both emotionally and melodically. They carry only the vaguest air of Costello’s signature cleverness and no trace of anger. Opener “Under Lime” is Costello’s explicit sequel to “Jimmie Standing in the Rain,” a 2010 tale of a down-on-his-luck cowboy crooner. “Under Lime” chronicles a dark backstage exchange between the washed-up singer and a young female intern. It’s a dazzling tune, a miniature five-minute musical where the dexterous arrangement matches wordplay so witty that the title’s lime comes to represent alcohol, stage lights, and the grave. It suggests the arrival of a rich, audacious song cycle. But the rest of Look Now proceeds at a gentler, empathetic pace, lingering upon the bittersweet plights of their protagonists—usually women, always etched with kindness—instead of rushing toward a conclusion.
These details abound because this material had an unusually long gestation. “Suspect My Tears,” a gorgeous ballad that functions as a showcase for all the melodic tricks Costello learned from Bacharach, first aired during a 1999 duo tour between Costello and pianist Steve Nieve. Costello revived “Unwanted Number”—a sensitive girl-group pastiche written from the perspective of a teenager dealing with an undesired pregnancy—from a 1996 film loosely based on Carole King’s time writing at the Brill Building. He penned “Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter,” a densely layered confection, with King herself around the same time. Rather than forming a patchwork, these disparate origins inspire a surprisingly cohesive album, as they follow a distinct, deliberate point of view—lush, complex, and proudly mature, music that champions tradition while shunning nostalgia.
As a collection of tunes, Look Now is a triumph for Costello, a showcase for how he can enliven a mastery of form with a dramatist’s eye. But as an album, Look Now is a success because of the Imposters. Unlike Imperial Bedroom or Painted By Memory, the focus isn’t studio trickery or strings but rather the lean muscle of a band who has spent decades following their leader’s every whim. They are a sharp, supple outfit that can swing and sigh, sometimes within the same number, as when they effortlessly pivot between bossa nova verses and a radiant chorus during “Why Won’t Heaven Help Me?” This subtle sophistication and palpable flair make Look Now more than a mere set of songs—it’s a record worth getting lost within.


Three years after the landmark Silent Shout, the Knife's Karin Dreijer Andersson returns as Fever Ray. Fans of the Knife will not be disappointed.

Fever Ray

That the Knife's 2006 breakthrough Silent Shout didn't set the dominoes on a series of similarly grotesque and unnatural sounding imitators is less an indictment on its impact than a comment on its inimitability. The current apex of ten years' collaboration between siblings Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer, it's one of a handful of albums from the past decade that one might argue sounded like nothing before it. In the three years since, the Dreijers have treaded lightly, touring and remixing in carefully managed bursts before quietly receding back into silence altogether.
When news of a Dreijer Andersson solo project called Fever Ray broke in October, one would have been forgiven for wondering if the duo hadn't secretly made good on their threats to call it quits. God knows, they still might. The point is, you'll get no clues here: although every bit as alluring, this debut has as much in conflict as it has in common with Silent Shout. The sounds often square, but the ferociousness has been subsumed by a slow drip of anxiety and dread. The macabre nursery rhymes have given way to lyrics that imply a sort of domestic cabin fever. It's still of the same creator, just not from the same swamp.
Things move slowly here; they slither instead of stomp. The house-inflected, booming low end of Silent Shout has been scrubbed away, leaving Karin's voice naked and upfront, anchoring the songs in a way it hasn't previously been required to. Although no less inscrutable, her lyrics adjust. Where those on Silent Shout had a witchy scale and ambition appropriate to the hugeness of the songs, Fever Ray's words feel so interior as to seem slightly unhinged. Indeed, one of Fever Ray's most remarkable aspects comes from how Dreijer Andersson funnels little moments of humor, banality, remembrance, mania, and anxiety through her deadpan affect to create a central character worthy of any psychological horror. You might even reasonably suggest this record is about psychosis. "I've got a friend who I've known since I was seven/ We used to talk on the phone/ If we have time/ If it's the right time," she declares conspiratorially, amidst pattering drums and faintly tropical synths in "Seven". In the morose, slumbering "Concrete Walls", she slows her voice to a pained yawn, which repeats the final couplet to a resigned fade: "I live between concrete walls/ In my arms she was so warm/ Oh how I try/ I leave the TV on/ And the radio."
In addition to many of the same plasticky percussions and goofy synth sounds that the Knife made their stock in trade, Fever Ray also brims with fragile, more finely articulated sounds, such as the delicate mallet instruments that punctuate "Now's The Only Time I Know", the bamboo flute that wanders through "Keep the Streets Empty For Me", and the grinding guitar sound in "I'm Not Done". The album moves at roughly the same pace and with the same general tone, rendering some of the songs indistinguishable at first, but committed listens will reveal this to be as nuanced and as rich of a production as anything either Dreijer has done.
The highlights are many. Opener "If I Had a Heart" is a shivering, timely meditation on greed, immorality, and lust for power that dovetails nicely with AIG and Madoff ("This will never end cause I want more/ More, give me more, give me more"); "I'm Not Done" is a pressurized squall that culminates with Karin dueting with a helium-voiced version of herself; while seven-minute closer "Coconut" rumbles on a pattern of synths and staccato drums before a ceremonious wall of voices arrive at the midpoint to march it to a close. Except, "close" implies it was written: the more time you spend with Fever Ray, the more you become convinced that these songs aren't written so much as they're temporarily let out. They're too starved, too eerie, and too transfigured to have been anything but.


A second installment of John Prine covers includes some of the legendary songwriter’s best-known material, illustrating how his legacy—and the definition of Americana—has shifted since 2010.

Various Artists: Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine, Vol. 2

During the last 10 years of his life, John Prine underwent a profound reappraisal in Nashville. In 2010, when the first installment of Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows was released, he was a niche influence, beloved by many but still considered something of a cult figure. In 2021, however, he’s the granddaddy of left-of-center country music: a benevolently eccentric artist who deftly blended pathos and humor, as well as a businessman who founded and steered Oh Boy Records, one of the longest-running artist-owned indie labels in Nashville. He located a different kind of success and then scribbled out a roadmap on an Arnold’s napkin for subsequent artists who’d been edged out of the mainstream. Especially with his swan song, 2018’s The Tree of Forgiveness, Nashville finally hailed his artistry, his business acumen, and his determined longevity.
During that same decade, the Americana scene has undergone a tectonic shift, with these two tribute albums serving as fine points against which to measure the change. Vol. 1 featured a dozen acts from various scenes, as though “Americana” extended to the art-country croon of Lambchop, the punk-country DIY of the Avett Brothers and the classic-rock swagger of the Drive-By Truckers. Vol. 2, however, suggests that the roots world has grown narrower, suppressing its twang as well as its eccentricities. Most of these covers, especially on the album’s second side, sound stark, solemn, and very, very serious; they’re missing Prine’s wry sense of humor, his beatific sense of wonder.
Partly that’s down to the song choices. The first volume bypassed some of his best-known songs—“Sam Stone,” “Hello in There,” “Paradise”—in favor of deep cuts and fan favorites, allowing the artists to draw on their personal connections with the catalog. This second volume includes all of those best-known songs, suggesting that this generation of artists must contend with Prine as a public figure. John Paul White’s version of “Sam Stone” somehow sounds even graver than the original, turning it into a funeral rather than a protest. Sturgill Simpson fulfills his ancient destiny by covering “Paradise,” and it sounds exactly like you would expect, no more or less.
Prine’s peers don’t fare much better. The oldest artist here—Emmylou Harris—gets stuck singing about the loneliness of old people on “Hello in There.” She sings beautifully, but the song needs a younger voice to draw out the empathy and compassion. Bonnie Raitt has been singing “Angel From Montgomery” since before Oh Boy hung out its shingle, but her umpteenth version doesn’t find a new angle on the material. On the other hand, Iris DeMent brings a knowing poignancy to “One Red Rose.” She was Prine’s best duet partner for years, with a voice like an arched eyebrow, so it's heartbreaking to hear her sing one of his songs by herself. Prine’s absence is crushing.
Nathaniel Rateliff invests “Pretty Good” with a preening weirdness that suits the material, and when he gets to the line, “All them gods are just about the same,” he sounds like the Cheshire cat puncturing spiritual pieties with a big grin. Tyler Childers sings “Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You” like there’s a barroom brawl going on around him, subverting country drinking songs by sounding slightly sloshed himself. But the best moment here is Amanda Shires’ “Saddle in the Rain,” which adds a mirrorball flair to the muted country funk of the original. By changing the voice from male to female, she teases out some of the sexual implications of Prine’s lyrics (“He could drink my wine and eat me like a sacrament”), adding shrugs and winks, eye rolls and middle fingers. It’s transformative, witty, fun. Too many of the songs on this tribute sound predetermined, as though Prine’s reputation now forestalls any radical reinterpretation, but Shires shows how his songs welcome and even thrive on irreverence.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The North Carolina rapper’s fourth album clarifies her identity and the depth of her talent over lush blends of R&B, gospel, reggae, and trap. It’s a vivid affirmation of self and community—and a rap clinic.

Please Don’t Cry

For years, Rapsody has done the exhausting work of reminding people that Black women aren’t a monolith. On 2019’s Eve, she named each song after a Black woman, using each muse to build out bespoke worlds of sounds and images. The concept subtly applied to Rapsody as well: from a prominent Uncle Luke sample, to a fun refrain about big ole butts, the North Carolina rapper chipped away at the idea that her love of lyricism is antithetical to sexuality and fun. She’d clearly heard the puritan calls to “Listen to Rapsody,” a thing goobers like to say to diminish other female rappers, and felt misrepresented.

Please Don’t Cry sets the record straight. Taking a hammer to the idea that she is merely a lyricist or conscious rapper—her own monolith—Rapsody clarifies her identity and the depth of her talent over lush blends of R&B, gospel, reggae, and trap. The record is a vivid affirmation of self and community, and a rap clinic. She sounds unleashed.
Rapsody frames the shapeshifting album as a verklempt therapy session with storied actress Phylicia Rashad, who encourages her to let the feelings flow. She obliges, cycling through styles as she reflects on her career and struggles. Please Don’t Cry is clearly a reset. It’s her first album without production from longtime mentor and label head 9th Wonder, and though the record has traces of Jamla Records’ soulful boom-bap, there’s more sheen than dust. Besides Eric G, Rapsody sources the production entirely from outside her label, tapping A-list vets like S1 and Hit-Boy and fresh faces like BLK ODYSSY. She also recruits more singers than fellow rappers, departing from the posse cuts of her past work. The result is an album festooned in tones and melodies, its mix of modern and classic sounds evoking humid Dungeon Family funk, uplifting Miseducation spirituality, and moody TDE medleys. The beats alone relay Rapsody’s raging multiplicity.
At 41, Rapsody’s got nothing to prove, but plenty on her mind, and lots of ways to share it. From the opening lines of “Marlanna,” her real name, she’s in constant flux, reintroducing herself as a vocalist and composer as much as a lyricist. “The one they call boring, still boarding/I’m unseen, I’m morphine, I tried to ease your pain/Now I’m morphing, some never change, I had to,” she raps, her pitch rising with each line. “DND (It’s Not Personal)” flips Monica’s “Don’t Take It Personal” into a balmy G-funk ode to solitude. Rapsody’s voice swings between peeved and pianissimo as she details her perfect day alone, building to a clever “Juicy” interpolation that somehow also has shades of 2Pac: “Me days are the best days/Days like these days, I’m on the beach sippin’ lychee,” Rapsody sings. Impressively, the music never strains under all these currents. It is sumptuous and referential without feeling cluttered.

The tidal flows and layered writing aren’t just for show. Like Denzel Curry on Melt My Eyez and Kendrick on Mr. Morale, Rapsody has been going through some things, and her expanded toolkit of vocal tics lets her express her shifting emotions. She’s conflicted on the watery “Look What You’ve Done,” thankful for the way the Grammy nomination for Laila’s Wisdom gave her career a second wind, but irked by backhanded compliments. “Don’t lift me up throwing shade at my sistas that made it out with ass and bass/Support what you like, you ain’t gotta show love using hate,” she snaps.
She details her own sexual experiences on the reflective “That One Time” and steamy “3:AM,” examining doomed relationships with women that nonetheless fortified her sense of self. “You my lesson, blessin,” a sultry Erykah Badu sings on the hook, capturing the spirit of grateful heartbreak. On “Loose Rocks,” an elegiac track about dementia eroding a loved one’s memory, Rapsody sounds on the verge of tears, her impassioned verses garlanded with cool melodies from Alex Isley. The fluid vocals enhance her lyricism, allowing her to emphasize the feeling of words as much as their meaning.
That doesn’t mean there’s not still plenty of her signature wordplay. Amid the soul-searching of reggae-tinged “Never Enough,” she breezes through the Fugees’ discography: “Blunted on reality like Wiz Khalifa/Like a nappy head through all my logic, theories, and my thesis/Add pussy to it so it reach ’em.” The spacey “Asteroids” finds her “out the window like the Joker in the foreign,” while the triumphant “Back In My Bag,” which flips the Afrobeat song “Love and Death” into booming trap, has her bouncing on niggas like Sanaa Lathan in Love & Basketball. Amid the gushing and weeping, she is playful and sly. She’s having the time of her life. In fact, this spectrum of emotions is her life.

By the end, Please Don’t Cry is as much a flex as it is a clarification. Lyricist is just one of Rapsody’s titles, and she relishes the chance to show all the flows, cadences, and deliveries she’s mastered. She’s no saint, cudgel, or fantasy. She’s not even an apologist for pussy rap, which she says bores her on “Diary of a Mad Bitch.” She’s just herself, a veteran b-girl who found her voice and kept evolving. Watch her work.


Saying "au revoir" to longtime friend and collaborator Nicolas Fromageau, Anthony Gonzalez goes it alone for M83's third LP, a mammoth collusion of synth gasps and distorted swirls that's darker and more urban than its meadow-bound predecessor, Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts.

Before the Dawn Heals Us

Although critics consistently nudge away the term, M83 create high-concept emo embossed with glittery snow angels, packing more synthy bombast than a Tangerine Dream/Mineral mash-up. 2003's Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts found the duo lazing on their backs in an Antibes field, watching stars and birds gently collide above green mountain tops. A pleasingly disembodied traipse through the French countryside, it was a lesson for anybody who thinks electronics have no soul.
After saying "au revoir" to longtime friend/collaborator Nicolas Fromageau, Anthony Gonzalez goes it alone for album three, upping the drama (there's even a track called "Teen Angst") by layering electro-acoustic sci-fi backdrops atop often-campy dialogue (written by his brother), and then buoying it all with by a massive noir choir. From the buzzing nighttime Blade Runner skyline of the cover art to lyrics investigating car wrecks and dislodged brains, this is a mammoth collusion of synth gasps and distorted swirls, darker and more urban than its meadow-bound predecessor. If Gonzalez had gone ahead with only epic Vangelis modulations, Before the Dawn Heals Us would collapse under hollow ponderousness. Instead, he weaves a rock backbone into his tangerine-dream landscape with steady doses of highly effective live drums, gigantic post-MBV guitar, and sharper, more defined songwriting that helps to beef up the diaphanous symphony.
As those familiar with the group would expect, the icy Sigur Rós estuaries and incidental glaciers are ably glorious (as are the commingling interludes, tentative minimalist pairings with children's voices, drifting sound-streams, and assorted channel surfs), but the larger success belongs to denser, more propulsive Kevin Shields-style hooks. Launching amid the urgent, ghostly sighs of "Tina" draped over a frantic drum/synth meltdown, "Don't Save Us From the Flames" is a coiled bit of apocalyptic pop compulsion with a J.G. Ballard storyline: "A piece of brain in my hair/ The wheels are melting." Also built on rock'n'roll, "Fields, Shorelines, and Hunters" punts a precipitous Milky Way barnstorm of cascading feedback, drum buildups, and vocal cut-ups that lead into the even headier "*", which breaks orbit, uncoiling the previous track's static energy with a patch of cathartic shoegaze glaciers from Saturn. (If you close your eyes, you might feel like you're levitating.)
Still, however cathartic, these baroque bursts will more than likely overwhelm listeners pragmatic and/or cynical enough to reject the purple poetry of a John Hughes first kiss or a flitting cliffside Robert Smith love note. It's interesting that M83 don't receive the same sort of "vainglorious" tag as Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes. Borrowing a page from Oberst, Gonzalez even opens the new record with a dramatic monologue: Languid drum rolls and chiming guitar/key-drifts pile up alongside a breathy "They say I made the moon" spoken by American actress Kate Moran, and culminating in "raise your arms the highest they can, so the whole universe will glow." Which, really, is what Gonzalez attempts to do over the course of these 15 tracks. (As we later learn, closing your eyes could perhaps kill the sun). But where Oberst sounds out of place on Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, Gonzalez confidently weds ones and zeros, forgoing millennial chilliness for depth and color.
Which is one of a million reasons why Gonzalez is hard to frame. Not exactly a singer/songwriter or a dance-floor hero, Gonzalez is less about shoegazing or rock-boy myopia than the unbounded and gargantuan romanticism of a Vincent-Gallo-esque auteur: Entering the realm of M83 is less about Mogwai-esque post-rock than it is about going along with the ebbs and flows of Gonzalez's nearly faceless otherworldly flights of fancy.
As with most ambitious undertakings, there are dull spots and moments when the dialogue, sentiments, or other indulgences can try a listener's patience. But more often than not, Gonzalez strikes gold, admirably upping the ante from the subtler Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts and creating a massive, teeming, gaudy edifice that at its best dazzles like its own misty solar system. And even when it implodes, the unintentional fireworks of its collapse create compelling, stunning patterns that leak like colored ink through the nocturnal cloud cover.


Kurt Vile's albums draw you in with the vibe, but you return to them for their human qualities, the way they offer a manner of seeing the world. His tossed-off musings on b’lieve i’m goin down remind you that every sage worth a damn knew that life was absurdly funny and tragic simultaneously.

b’lieve i’m goin down

Kurt Vile has a persona, and you know him by now: He is the weird quiet kid in the corner, the one who seems at first lost in his own world and disconnected from everything around him, but turns out to be smart, observant, and low-key hilarious. So while his albums draw you in with the vibe—the impeccably recorded and mixed songs that shuffle bits of folk, new wave, or country in the mix but are always squarely down-the-middle rock—you return to them for their human qualities, the way they offer a manner of seeing the world, a glimpse at a perspective that feels both voyeuristic and easy to connect to your own life.
You have to feel for Vile when he does early interviews for one of his records and he’s asked to characterize them. Music writers look for a story, an angle, a hook, and he gamely tries to give them one, a reason why an upcoming record is different from his last few. In the case of b’lieve i’m goin down, he pointed out that it was darker, an album from the night, written in the lonely quiet hours after his wife and two children had gone to sleep. (My favorite quote on this came from his interview with Rolling Stone: "It’s definitely got that night vibe…KV’s Night Life—it’s my sequel to Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly"). But Vile’s albums mostly vary in smaller details; they are collections of songs that generally draw from a similar handful of influences, and Vile’s style as a guitarist, songwriter, and especially a vocalist keep them relatively uniform. His arc so far has been a process of refinement, of gradually figuring out settings in which the songs work best.
On b’lieve i’m goin down, that means he’s incorporated a bit of banjo and a bit more piano and has eased off just slightly on the reverb. The essential quality of his music is no different, but the banjo picking draws out a bit of folkiness, and piano shifts things slightly from capital-R Rock to singer-songwriter territory. But many of these songs could have just as easily been found on either of his last two full-lengths, which in his case is not a bad thing.
Something that has changed over the years is that Vile has grown steadily funnier, and his lyrics have grown more sophisticated. Humor was always part of his music, but on b’lieve i’m goin down it’s an animating principle. Lines like "When I go out I take pills to take the edge off or to just take a chillax, forget about it/ Just another certified badass out for a night on the town" scan as goofy on the page, but in the context of the arrangement of "That’s Life, tho (almost hate to say)" they become something else entirely. The song is a dark, doom-laden thing, with fingerpicked guitar out of "Can’t Find My Way Home" and a bleak undercurrent of synth, something in the realm of Nick Drake in "Black Eyed Dog" mode. In this setting, Vile’s tossed-off musings, where punchlines alternate with striking imagery ("I hang glide into the valley of ashes"), remind you that every sage worth a damn knew that life was absurdly funny and tragic simultaneously.
The quotable lines are many. It’s been a while since I heard a description of a hangover as evocative as "A headache like a ShopVac coughing dust bunnies"; "I’m an Outlaw"’s banjo accompaniment might make you think of a folk ballad, but Vile’s outlaw is like one you’ve never seen, one "on the brink of self-implosion, alone in a crowd on the corner, in my Walkman in a snow globe going nowhere slow." "Pretty Pimpin" describes a moment of existential confusion in front of the bathroom mirror, with Vile brushing a stranger’s teeth before realizing "they were my teeth, and I was weightless"—whoops. "Lost my Head there" has a piano riff like the theme from an early '80s sitcom, but played a step too slow, like you’re about to watch the usual ridiculous "Three’s Company"-style misunderstanding happening in drug-induced slow motion. But then it turns out to be a tune about its own creation, and Vile’s description forever colors how you hear it: "I was buggin’ out about a couple-two-three things/ Picked up my microphone and started to sing/ I was feeling worse, than the words come out/ Fell on some keys and then this song walked out."
As compelling as Vile’s words can be, much of the magic lies in his delivery. Like Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Dylan, Vile’s singing voice has acquired an unstable accent of indeterminate origin that shifts to suit his musical decisions, rather than connecting to genre or region or even his own upbringing. Most often, he’s got a nasally twang unlike that of any other native Philadelphian, and it helps his low-key murmur cut through the wooly mid-tempo haze. That twang makes his music feel more grounded and conversational, and there’s also a bit of a "Hey, it’s me again" quality the first time you hear it on a new album, an aural watermark that never leaves you any doubt that you are listening to a Kurt Vile record.
Vile’s signature qualifier is "I guess…"—the phrase shows up frequently in his songs. It’s easy to believe he’s never quite sure of what he’s seeing or exactly how he’s feeling. Vile’s version of reality is always slightly confused, a blurry approximation of what’s out there, one in a state of constant revision. This could strike some as lazy, like he can’t be bothered to whittle the blunt stick of his music down to a fine point, and it’s this perpetually fuzzy quality that leads people to label Vile a spaced-out stoner. But from another angle the uncertainty feels honest, an acknowledgement that a great deal of life involves making it up as you go along. Or as Vile puts it on "Dust Bunnies", "There ain’t no manual to our minds, we’re always looking, baby, all the time."
Vile now plays "rock" in the most '70s sense of the word—album oriented, guitar solo-friendly, very much about long-haired dudes sitting in a room playing instruments. That he’s hitting his peak as an artist at a time when rock music of the type he practices is falling out of favor and is becoming just another genre instead of the center of the musical universe only adds to his appeal; this is not an artist concerned with being in step. Vile’s relevance to the music world at large rises and falls, but he keeps plowing ahead, secure in the knowledge that in an examined life there will always be more to explore, another bleary morning with another unfamiliar face looking back at you over the bathroom sink.


Temporarily abandoning the guitar, the prolific garage rocker channels his indulgences and comes away with an unusually focused album.

First Taste

Ty Segall races through ideas as though they’d disappear if he didn’t commit them to wax as soon as possible. The records pile up: In 2018, he expanded his vast discography by four albums, and earlier this year added a noise-drenched live album called Deforming Lobes for good measure. First Taste, his first studio set since last year’s sprawling double-LP Freedom’s Goblin, suggests Segall may be warming to the concept of restrictions. He recorded First Taste without a single guitar, seemingly renouncing his allegiance to garage-psych skronk. Relying entirely on keyboards, percussion, and stringed instruments of different persuasions, the album winds up sounding like… well, like a lot of other Ty Segall records, really.
Segall has a catholic definition of psychedelia, opening the door to prog freak-outs, a bit of fractured folk, cascading vocal harmonies, and spooky synths. None of these accents change his basic architecture. He’s still working from a common vernacular—a bit of Led Zeppelin here, a bit of T. Rex there—not intending to recreate the past as much as to give his flights of fancy some context. It’s hard to sound weird without a baseline for normality.
The new additions brighten First Taste, giving it a bold and intense sheen. But make no mistake: To a garage rocker, every instrument looks like a guitar. A Greek bouzouki and a Japanese koto can still make a racket if they’re strummed like a Fender Telecaster, and double-tracked drums don’t hurt, either. Consequently, First Taste is sometimes just as frenetic as Deforming Lobes. But as a producer, Segall is intent on leaning into empty spaces and absences—to play with the elements of light and shade that Jimmy Page brought to Zeppelin.
Segall, though, remains a patron of low-rent scuzz-rock, so First Taste can sound cheap—intentionally so. He pushes levels into the red on “The Fall” to accentuate its breathless velocity, and he uses schoolyard recorders to bring unruly circus energy to “I Sing Them.” This elevated trash isn’t the only trick in his toolbox. First Taste is sharply paced, sequenced for maximum impact as two separate vinyl sides but also effective as a seamless 41-minute listen. The over-saturated “Taste” serves as a frenzied fanfare for the entire affair, while the malevolent, tarry grind of “I Worship the Dog” is paired with the sweet, steady-rolling “The Arms.” “Lone Cowboys,” an epic suite crammed into four and a half minutes, concludes the album with the suggestion of more music lurking around the corner.
Leaving the crowd wanting for more has never exactly been Segall’s style, so the album’s sudden end isn’t merely bracing—it’s a source of perspective. Abandoning the guitar has sharpened his senses as a record maker, making him cognizant of his excesses. By trimming slack and channeling indulgences into bursts of pandemonium, he comes away with an unusually focused album. If the songs don’t linger as long as the sound, chalk that up to Segall being a “first idea, best idea” kind of guy. This time, he concentrated on production. Maybe next time around, he’ll turn his attention to the tunes.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The coming-of-age film reveals the life-changing power of some of Bruce Springsteen’s most famous songs, but its soundtrack doesn’t measure up.

Various Artists: Blinded by the Light (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

In the new movie Blinded By the Light, the lead character Javed is saved by rock’n’roll, delivered into salvation by two scuffed Bruce Springsteen cassette tapes. Born in the U.S.A. and Darkness on the Edge of Town transport Javed away from his dreary English hometown of Luton, suggesting all the directions his life could lead if he only followed the gospel of Springsteen.
Generations of listeners have seen their own dreams reflected in the songs of Springsteen. For Javed, Springsteen is a lodestar, guiding him as he figures out how to develop a personality separate from his family. Teenage rebellion may be a cliché, but Javed isn’t merely interested in breaking curfew. He’s the son of Pakistani immigrants, whose father is determined to follow tradition in a new homeland—a country also populated with far-right skinheads who spit on Javed as he’s walking home.
These scenes of racial discord anchor Blinded By the Light, offering a reminder that the movie isn’t entirely fiction. It’s a cinematic adaptation of Greetings From Bury Park, the 2007 memoir from Sarfraz Manzoor, a British journalist and documentarian, and its best moments are grounded in how Javed, the fictionalized version of Manzoor, squares his familial obligations with his own burgeoning dreams. The film has a less secure grasp on music—the catalyst for his emotional evolution—a problem accentuated on its accompanying soundtrack.
Given the Springsteen’s centrality to the plot, the Blinded By the Light soundtrack taps into the deep reservoir of Boss classics written and recorded between 1975 and 1984. As part of his participation in the project, Springsteen gifted the producers “I’ll Stand By You,” a song he originally composed for the 2001 adaptation of Harry Potter & The Sorcerer’s Stone. The fact that “I’ll Stand By You” could be so easily swapped from a fantasy film to a coming-of-age comedy hints at how the song is a pro forma ballad in the vein of “Secret Garden,” Bruce’s smash from the Jerry Maguire soundtrack.
“I’ll Stand By You” provides a sedate contemporary coda to the bustle of the film, murmuring reassuringly over the film’s credits and slotted toward the end of the soundtrack, after all the rousing, restless anthems have been aired. These are the songs you know by heart even if you’re not much of a fan, the songs that form the backbone of any Bruce greatest hits collection: “Dancing in the Dark,” “Badlands,” “Hungry Heart” and “Born to Run,” augmented by relative rarities of live versions of “Thunder Road” and “The River” from the 1970s.
Tellingly, this list of Springsteen songs lacks anything from Tunnel of Love, the melancholy masterpiece released in 1987, which is when Blinded By the Light happens to be set. Its absence is deliberate. Tunnel of Love is steeped in middle-aged disappointment, not adolescent yearning, so its songs don’t quite suit Javed’s journey, but the deeper reason they’re missing is that it suits the film’s thematic purposes to have Springsteen portrayed as he was in his glory days of the late ’70s and early ’80s. That generous, working-class rebel stands in direct contrast to Javed’s world, whether it’s the Pakistani heritage at his home or the big-haired New Pop evangelicals on his campus. Neither camp understands Bruce. The father’s complaints are predictable, but the college DJ dismisses Springsteen as “history,” even though Born in the U.S.A. went triple platinum in the UK just three years prior. They may be on opposite sides of the cultural spectrum, but these naysayers are united in their belief that Springsteen says nothing about British life.
All this helps paint Springsteen as a conduit to liberation, a theme the film handles with heavy hands by plastering lyrics on the screen and mocking anybody who believes synthesizers are the sound of the future. This didacticism trickles down to the soundtrack, where the Pet Shop Boys’ “It’s a Sin” and A-Ha’s “The Sun Always Shines on TV” help paint the steely, cold landscape of Thatcher’s Britain, while Heera’s pounding Mideastern disco cut “Maar Chadapa” and Amer Chadha-Patel’s stiff New Wave protest “Get Out of My Way Fascist (Pigs)” are no more than period accents. Bits of dialogue are scattered throughout the record to help make the case that Springsteen is not merely Javed’s savior, but protector: At one point, Javed and a friend chant the lyrics to “Badlands” as a way of warding off a bunch of racist louts.
It’s a moment that’s crucial in the film but on record, it’s corny and clunky, as are all the dialogue snippets and the pair of drippy original songs from composer A.R. Rahman, for that matter. Both are contextually necessary, though, because without them, Blinded By the Light is a pretty rote Springsteen best-of collection, diligently hitting the expected beats but carrying none of the urgency, spectacle or grandeur of Bruce’s original albums. As they’re presented here, none of Springsteen’s songs have the power to change a life. Instead, they can merely soundtrack it.


Percussionist Ches Smith has played on over half a dozen Xiu Xiu releases, but in recent years he's been consistently active on the contemporary jazz circuit, playing with guitarist Mary Halvorson, saxophonist Tim Berne, and others. His first album as a composer and bandleader on the iconic ECM label burns with a subtle heat.

The Bell

Ches Smith is best known to indie rock liner-note devotees as a percussionist who has appeared on over half a dozen Xiu Xiu releases (going all the way back to Knife Play). In recent years, he’s been consistently active on the contemporary jazz circuit—lending his talents to a series of celebrated albums by artists such as guitarist Mary Halvorson and saxophonist Tim Berne. The music of both those composers occasionally strays close to avant-rock, which helps explain Smith’s in-demand status around jazz’s cutting-edge galleries. But he also led those bands through quieter, softer passages, proving his depth and range.
For his first album as a composer and bandleader on Germany’s iconic ECM label, Smith has chosen a subtlety that seems influenced by his most recent bandmates and peers. It’s a stylistic course that will be broadly familiar to fans of Manfred Eicher’s jazz-and-classical imprint, and less so to fans of Women as Lovers. But The Bell isn't placid, either: In the company of pianist Craig Taborn and violist Mat Maneri—an experienced pair of collaborators—Smith forges a quiet intensity. There’s heat here, even if it takes some time to feel it.
Things begin calmly. The album’s title-track opener announces itself with a lone, delicate smack of pitched percussion, before the other players enter. Though the nine-minute piece never strays very far from a static and spacious feel, there’s often something new happening: Smith moves from the bell-like elements in his kit to some vibraphone shimmers, or thrumming timpani playing. Maneri moves from a low drone on his viola to high-pitch wisps of brief, almost-scratchy timbre. Collectively, the group’s sound is constantly tempting you into a false sense of ease that individual players delight in subverting with little tics—adding extra notes to minimalist phrases before they become too predictable.
While all The Bell’s tracks were composed by Smith, the group’s status as "an improvising trio" is clear during "Barely Intervallic," a cut where Smith indulges skittering, freer playing. "I’ll See You on the Dark Side of the Earth" and "I Think" follow the big-canvas, pensive-but-driven feeling of "Isn’t It Over?" In the album's final third, "Wacken Open Air" gives up its theme right away, the better to let us hear the group work the spare material into a potent acoustic riff. Maneri deals in some lyrical soloing toward the end of "It’s Always Winter Somewhere." And the finale, "For Days," re-establishes the set’s quiet equilibrium.
The largely hypnotic, not-quite-repetitive quality of the music will, for some listeners, call to mind Taborn’s own Junk Magic, an early-21st century triumph of electrified chamber jazz (and an album that also featured Maneri). But The Bell isn’t just some less kinetic, acoustic redo of that project, with Smith holding down the percussion chair. Despite the album’s restricted range, it suggests a malleable aesthetic, likely the result of the year and a half these improvisers put in together before recording their debut outing. You can imagine this band doing a wide variety of impressive work, in the very near future: perhaps adding in some electronics, or including compositions from all members. But for now, it’s persuasive enough as a demonstration of Smith’s continued career shift into contemporary jazz.


The deluxe edition is a continuation of the album’s block-spinning flexes, the pertinent one being that even his B-sides are unforgettable.

Tyler, the Creator: Call Me If You Get Lost: The Estate Sale

Welcome to Tyler, the Creator’s The Estate Sale, where everything is out of your budget. DJ Drama returns as host, hyping up Tyler like a proud uncle greeting you at the finish line with Gatorade and grapes. Though these eight songs are cut from the Call Me If You Get Lost sessions and tacked on to the 2021 album like a deluxe edition, they flow thematically like a post-album EP. No longer an underdog, Tyler is growing into life as a star. The high of a sold-out arena tour has worn off. It’s like he expected success to patch up old wounds but as it turns out, you cannot perform kintsugi with gold trophies and your psyche. He opens with an earnest thank you to his supporters.
In his early years, Tyler could be something of an edgelord, delivering violent lyrics about sexual assault through a mischievous grin. As he’s evolved in his artistry, he’s replaced shock value with boasts whose imagination and precision—“I got a jelly bean, Kelly green Rolls/And the guts off-white like a jalapeño”—are almost outdone by the Goblin-like freneticism of his delivery. Fellow Californian Vince Staples rides into “Stuntman” like he’s behind the wheel of a monster truck: “No, you can’t be my girl, bitch, are you dumb?” If you have beef, he suggests you duel him in Milan—if you can afford the flight, that is. Tyler’s own biting, almost Pusha T-like inflection over the New Boyz-type beat could’ve spawned a dance trend in the early 2010s.
The stylistic adventurousness of The Estate Sale offers insight into the sounds that would become Call Me If You Get Lost. He brings back his love for ’80s synth-funk on “Boyfriend, Girlfriend” and taps into New Orleans bounce and Southern trap across “Dogtooth” and “Stuntman.” A$AP Rocky gushes about spoiling his lady on “Wharf Talk,” while Tyler croons with the angst of his Flower Boy and IGOR eras. The breezy and soulful “What a Day” and “Heaven to Me” bring in a John Legend sample and an unreleased Madlib deep cut to complement the album’s leisurely, jet-setting atmosphere.
As he adjusts to the altitude, Tyler’s position as a community leader presents itself as a new source of anxiety. On “Sorry Not Sorry,” he glimpses guilt and helplessness about not leveraging his status for Black liberation: “I can’t save niggas/I’m not Superman, but I could try.” On “What a Day,” he shouts out Black women, especially the ones who raised him. Twenty seconds into original album track “Massa,” a drum beat cuts Tyler off when he begins to idolize his passport. “Heaven to Me” diverts that incomplete thought with a tender ode to domesticity—date nights, water-gun fights, loved ones in the kitchen, and seeing a piece of yourself in the children you helped to bring into the world.
When I first heard Tyler associate himself with his Baudelaire persona on Call Me If You Get Lost, I didn’t think of the French poet: I thought about the orphans at the center of Lemony Snicket’s children’s novels A Series of Unfortunate Events. Constantly on the run, they’re never in one place long enough to unpack their suitcases. The cover of The Estate Sale depicts Tyler in a similar position—gazing into the distance, suitcases in hand—though he would probably call them valises now. An estate sale insinuates the death of its owner: death of preconceived notions of success, death of ego, death of self-destructive nihilism. After the success of IGOR, Tyler took a solo joyride: “Bought another car ’cause I ain’t know how to celebrate.” A chapter-closing gift for fans, The Estate Sale is a lake house afterparty.


The Australian singer’s second album exudes a chic kind of vulnerability. It is a warm and delicate pop album about life as a young gay man.

Bloom

I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that Troye Sivan gets it. The Australian YouTuber-turned-pop star has all the qualifications you’d look for in a modern-day gay icon—a devoted army of long-time fans, elfin features, celebrities and designers on speed dial—and the good sense to recognize how meaningless and outmoded that kind of title is. “I just don’t represent everybody, because I’m extraordinarily lucky,” Sivan told British style magazine Another Man in May. “I come from a middle-class white family in Australia, and all of my dreams have come true by 22. I had the easiest coming out in the world… There are plenty of other people who need to be heard first.”
Give him an opportunity, and he’ll happily rattle off the names of other musicians at the vanguard of queer representation: Sam Smith, Halsey, Kehlani, Perfume Genius, Kevin Abstract, Hayley Kiyoko. He invited Kim Petras on tour as an opening act and deftly handled the ensuing backlash over her work with Dr. Luke, making donations to the Ally Coalition and RAINN. His humility would feel performative and cynical if it weren’t so thorough. Blink and you might forget why Sivan is holding court on these topics in the first place: He’s an evolutionary artist, one whose existence and career is the product of decades of baby steps and boundary-pushing. Being gay is an integral and visible part of Sivan’s art, just as much as his voice or his choice of collaborators.
Bloom, Sivan’s second studio album, is best described in terms you rarely see associated with male pop stars: delicacy, transparency, and vulnerability. He sings about experiences that are commonplace for young gay men in 2018 but feel totally transgressive in a broader pop context. He wrote opener “Seventeen” about sneaking onto Grindr with a fake ID and hooking up with older men, and the title track captures bottoming for the first time in all of its agony and ecstasy.
The subject matter draws headlines, but it’s less revelatory than what’s between the lines. You can feel the power dynamics underpinning each of these songs shifting in unpredictable ways. Sivan starts both “Seventeen” and “Bloom” in a playful mood, teasing his partner, flirting, issuing commands. He’s an object of desire, and that puts him in control. “I got these beliefs that I think you wanna break,” he taunts on “Seventeen.” “Got something here to lose that I think you wanna take from me.” Just a few seconds later, he’s lost his footing: the older man he’s sought out for a virgin fling might not be so easy to manipulate in the heat of the moment. The “Bloom” pre-chorus is a nervous whimper—“I need you to tell me right before it goes down/Promise me you’ll hold my hand if I get scared now”—just before Sivan relaxes and enjoys the ride.
There’s a remarkable amount of tension in those moments, and Bloom would feel exhausting if every song was built around those kinds of formative experiences. It also offers less complicated pleasures, songs that are simpler yet still breathtakingly tender. Sivan is comfortable with desperation. He knows how it can feel like life and death hinge on scheduling a second date or sending a postcard. Lead single “My My My!” feels euphoric because of the interplay between its growled verses and pulse-pounding chorus; it feels uniquely Sivan’s because of the stakes. He’s found a guy who makes him feel like he’ll “die every night,” and when he reaches the bridge, he dares to dream of a life spent that satisfied. (He calls his lover a “treasure” and inhales sharply through clenched teeth, and it feels like the most consequential breath he’s ever taken.) Sivan also has a knack for gorgeous, concise imagery. On “Plum,” a relationship that’s nearing its end is “like bitter tangerine/like sirens in the streets.” He wants to “skip stones on [the] skin” of a boy who tastes like Lucky Strikes.
Bloom’s fragility makes for an interesting contrast with its surprisingly conservative sound. Sivan largely works with the same team and palette that defined his 2015 debut Blue Neighborhood: mid-tempo, richly hued post-Lorde pop. And while there are some welcome flourishes from unexpected sources—Ariel Rechtshaid and cult fave Jam City add celestial sparkle to regretful ballad “The Good Side,” and massive closer “Animal” swerves from a menacing rumble (courtesy of Rechtshaid, Jam City, and the Haxan Cloak) to a bridge clearly inspired by Frank Ocean’s Blonde—too much of Bloom congeals into a tasteful, muted lump. Beyond “My My My!” and the title track, its melodies and arrangements lack the urgency that defines its writing.
You can draw an interesting comparison between Sivan and his friend and collaborator Ariana Grande. They duet on “Dance to This,” an understated celebration of the pleasures of domesticity: Why go out on the town when you could stay in and have a party for two? Sivan and Grande have both made albums about how love and sex can make you feel: safe, secure, and joyous in one moment, nervous but thrilled in the next. Bloom isn’t as consistent or engaging a musical experience as Sweetener, but it still feels meaningful. If Sivan is the product of baby steps, then maybe this is one of his: bonding with one of the planet’s biggest pop stars over quiet moments with the men they love, with absolutely nothing to hide.


Memphis garage-rock fixture Greg Cartwright continues to unearth intriguing corners of 1950s and 60s rock and pop.

Love and Curses

One of Memphis' most popular local celebrities during the 1960s was television personality Watson Davis, who donned death-pallor make-up, exaggerated fangs, and a dapper Dracula tux to become Sivad. He cracked corny jokes and introduced cornier monster movies on WHBQ-TV's "Fantastic Features" and even recorded a few novelty hits, including the stiffly swinging "Sivad Buries Rock and Roll". Just a few years later, however, Davis was off television and mostly forgotten, working as a mechanic in rural Arkansas. Yet Sivad remains a pop-cultural touchstone for Mid-Southerners of a certain age, including Greg Cartwright of the Oblivians and Reigning Sound, who chose Sivad's motto as the title as the Sound's long-awaited fourth studio album, Love and Curses.
That reference works as a grim reminder of the status of so many of Cartwright's influences, who prospered decades ago but are less than footnotes today, inspiring crate-digging musicians but rarely reaching the large audiences they once commanded. If Sivad buried rock'n'roll, Cartwright digs it up under torchlight in the dead of a moonless night, unearthing outer-boroughs girl-group sounds, deep-South R&B rhythms, and universal garage-rock skuzz. It's no coincidence that the only cover on Love and Curses is an obscure single called "Stick Up for Me" by the Glass Sun. Does anyone remember them? Reigning Sound do, and the song's organ-drenched boogie momentum and shouted call-and-response are simultaneously nostalgic and immediate.
Coming across as the period's most diligent archivists, Reigning Sound have over the past few years backed former Shangri-La Mary Weiss in the studio and on tour and worked with Muscle Shoals legends Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, and Cartwright was briefly a member of Michigan garage rock lifers the Detroit Cobras. Love and Curses sounds as much a product of the present as of the past, and the new songs attack with goblin force but vampire sophistication, thanks to another new line-up. The rhythm section of drummer Lance Wille and bass player David Wayne Gay (formerly of Freakwater) add muscle and agility to the stomping "If I Can't Come Back" and "Dangerous Game", while Dave Amels lays down sweeping organ riffs on "Something to Hold Onto" and "Broken Things".
The album never quite sounds as life-or-death urgent as 2004's Too Much Guitar, but that album lived up to its name by burying Cartwright alive. Love and Curses brings his vocals back to the forefront, although he still sings like he's being chased by some unknown specter. In addition to his open-wound rasp-- few singers today can convey grievous pain so easily-- he also has an eye for the cruelties and ironies of romance, which slice through every track. On the stand-out "Debris", he sings about a lover's heart turning to stone and his own turning to rubble, straining his voice like he has to cover his eyes but can't look away. Love can be horrifying, hilarious, gory, and deeply disturbing, so why not have a horror host like Sivad presiding over the chills, creeps, and scares?


It's on their third album this year that rap crew BROCKHAMPTON’s whole gestalt comes into focus. There are more memorable performances, and more fascinatingly unorthodox compositions servicing them.

Saturation III

If the whole BROCKHAMPTON ethos relies on inclusivity and a DIY spirit, it’s no wonder the internet factors so heavily into their mythos. They’re a group of twentysomethings who started making things as a collective through the KanyeToThe forum, who were inspired by The Social Network to move in together. They borrowed their egalitarian blueprint from Odd Future—build community online, work communally, create and share constantly and control the means of production—and grew their fanbase on Tumblr. One of their members is a webmaster.
The collective’s defining contradiction—an imaginative rap crew who prides themselves on independence but pines after signifiers of focus-grouped, factory-made corporate pop—makes more sense under these circumstances; pop stardom as populism. The internet has flattened separate worlds once deemed “real” and “artificial” into the same spaces, creating a playing field where some Tupac fans also worship One Direction unironically. BROCKHAMPTON wholly embody this. Even their insistence on being labeled a “boy band” is an attempt to redraw these lines and reclaim zones once reserved for teenybopper bait and flipping them to mean “black,” or “queer,” or “offbeat,” or “rapper.” This context is important to understanding everything the crew does, from how they make music to how they interact with their fans. They’ve so far struggled to translate their ideology into a working piece of art but on Saturation III, the collective’s objective begins to come into focus. They still paint in broad strokes and their songs sometimes still lack continuity, but they’re truly moving as a unit now, and the star power is all but obvious.
The strongest entry in this year’s Saturation trilogy, III is the first time BROCKHAMPTON have amounted to more than just a group of talented artists rapping in sequence. Songs have the same energies as before and have similar ambitions, but they are staged better and fully rendered. There are fewer clunky lines and clumsy changeovers, more memorable performances, and more fascinatingly unorthodox compositions servicing them. This is much closer to the teamwork they envisioned, weird, web-savvy rap as a pop music performance art. Before, their songs tended to be scatterbrained and incomplete, veering all over the place. Now, things are precise. “Could’ve got a job at McDonald’s but I like curly fries/That’s a metaphor for my life, and I like taller guys/Could’ve got a deal if I wanted but I like owning shit, and I like making shit, and I like selling it,” Kevin Abstract raps on “JOHNNY,” his mission obvious.
Saturation III puts their message of self-belief into practice, a crew of broken kids banding together to form the sort of in-group that always shunned them; creators, dreamers, and lovers finding their voices in fellowship. Self-deprecation is a weapon used to reclaim their identities—“I’m a shithead’s son, and I’m bad at growing up”; “Yeah, I’m ugly and genius”; “Don’t let god see me/I got a lot of demons/And I’ve been sleeping with ‘em.” On “STAINS,” a brief interjection mocks their skeptics by parroting them: “You muthafuckas made three albums, still talking ‘bout the same shit: the one gay, the one selling drugs, the one tryna act like Lil Wayne. What the fuck is this shit, man?” In actuality, they are growing out of these categories; no longer typecast into specific roles, they finally sound as self-assured as they seem.
Their individual development has benefited the whole. Abstract dictates much of what happens in BROCKHAMPTON, which works because he is becoming a more confident rapper, a cleaner performer, and an even more competent hook-maker. Ameer Vann is undeniably the group’s sharpest rapper, often turning tales of personal trauma and turmoil into parables, and on III he maximizes his space. “I used to work for people/I made a couple hundred dollars, wasn’t worth it even/I’m worth a hundred thousand/Not dollars but diamonds/I am mud out the bayou/Rip a page out the bible/Come and crucify me,” he raps on “ALASKA.” Dom McLennon has noticeably improved and is right on Vann’s heels, experimenting more with melody and trading in verbosity for efficiency. Merlyn Wood and JOBA used to be wild cards, but now they fit into the natural flow. Everyone moves with purpose.
There are more exchanges on III, members trading off every few bars or popping up in the middle of each other’s verses. Many of these transitions are effortless, the byproduct of an obvious chemistry built through practice and repetition. Abstract, McLennon, Vann, and Matt Champion swap in and out on “JOHNNY,” each piggybacking on the verse before. On “LIQUID,” members finish each other’s sentences. Several different Auto-Tuned voices segue one into the next on “ZIPPER” before Champion springs forth with a sleepy flow. Collaboration has always been key to BROCKHAMPTON but these songs are better choreographed and feel more rehearsed.
Recently, BROCKHAMPTON trolled their fans, tagging III their “last studio album,” which was funny for two reasons: As Abstract pointed out, they didn’t make these albums in a studio—they’ve recorded all of their music in their shared Los Angeles home—and they never actually planned to stop making music as a collective. “If this was the last one, I’d be really happy,” he said. “But it also feels like we have more to say.” This is a fitting end of a trilogy called Saturation, but it should be just the start of the BROCKHAMPTON experiment.


19-year-old British musician Låpsley makes shimmering synth-pop shot through with longing. The best songs on her XL Recordings debut sound both intimate and enormous, while the less-inspired ones feel like trying to recall something boring that happened to you once.

Long Way Home

Longing is an emotion generated by absence, which makes it tricky to convey well in pop songs. When rendered with economy, on a song like Madonna's "Live to Tell,"  longing becomes part of the atmosphere, something unspoken that is too subtle and subatomic to see. When it's blown up to become the only feeling a in a song, it becomes alienating: Adele songs, for example, sometimes feel like vast deserts of longing in which she is the sole inhabitant.
19-year-old British musician Låpsley combines something of both approaches. Her work, a kind of shimmering synth-pop that also inherits its more reptilian rhythms from trip hop, attracted the notice of the BBC Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac in 2014, who invited her to contribute to a compilation. Now, Låpsley (full name Holly Låpsley Flesher) has been signed to XL Recordings, and her debut album for them expands on the crisp flutterings of her early EPs. Her music tends to be subtle in texture but direct in composition; “Hurt Me,” one of the singles from her debut album Long Way Home, is an adult contemporary pop ballad packaged in a glittering exoskeleton. It unfolds in discrete cellular units, like most songs on her record; a piano, a finger snap, the muted pulse of a kick drum, which eventually combine and flower into a small terrarium. Her vocal moves through this environment with the kind of sublimated warmth that powers Sade records and her many lesser imitators.
The unusual dependence on space in the arrangements can make the interiors of Låpsley’s songs seem uncannily empty, glassy structures with their insides removed so all that’s left is angled crystal. Låpsley’s thick, gelatinous voice is ostensibly intended to seal these isolated textures together, and she makes “Hurt Me” work almost despite itself; the melodrama of her vocal contrasts so much with the percussive decay of the backing track that it feels faintly violent. The song sounds both intimate and enormous as a result. “Operator (He Doesn’t Call Me)” employs the retrofuturism of disco and then refracts it through a second nostalgic lens, a sample of the 1975 Manhattan Transfer gospel single “Operator.” Here Låpsley’s sense of space benefits the song; the sample and the light, rolling disco collide at odd, interesting angles, like light passing through glass.
But in other instances her voice dissolves into an overabundance of negative space, and listening to the less-inspired sections of Long Way Home can feel like trying to remember something boring that happened to you once. Strangely, the most exciting songs on the record are both the oldest and most shapeless. On “Station,” Låpsley’s voice is processed at three different speeds, and all three vocals are arranged so that it seems she’s interacting and harmonizing with three different versions of herself. “Painter” resembles the frozen swirl inside a single marble. Both songs resist verses and choruses; instead they inhabit a central melodic idea until it is sufficiently complicated, then abandon it, while the remainder of the track drains gently away. These songs are her most direct expressions of longing, a form of desire that can be aesthetically assumed and discarded, but which is a vast and illegible universe of feeling when fallen into.


Latest from half of the sadly departed DFA79 always seems to be shouting over itself, a tone that accounts for its virtues and shortcomings alike.

Fist of God

At the beginning of "Click Click", guest E-40 says, "MSTRKRFT, what is it doe," dwarfed by a maelstrom of pulverizing riffs that seem to come with their own laser show. What it is, for E-40, turns out to be something of an endurance test: Even the limber-tongued rapper struggles to assert himself through the breakneck pace of MSTRKRFT's power chords. It's like listening to someone trying to rap in a lightning field. This is a telling moment on an album that always seems to be shouting over itself, a tone that accounts for Fist of God's virtues and shortcomings alike.
Jesse F. Keeler still played bass and synths in Death from Above 1979 when he formed MSTRKRFT with producer Alex Puodziukas (aka. Al-P), which is now his primary endeavor. The transition represents Keeler gradually weaning himself off of rock, trading his bass guitar for various consoles and his dance-inflected rock music for rock-inflected dance music. Indebted to Daft Punk's vocal-infused robo-house, Justice's arena-sized stomp, and Vitalic's tooth-grinding tunnels of distortion, Fist of God has an metallic quality that doesn't falter even when riffage occasionally subsides, like on John Legend vehicle "Heartbreaker", where piano phrases seem wrought in gleaming chrome. More often, the tracks are comprised of loops caught perfectly between guitar- and synth-sounds. MSTRKRFT use delay, reverb, attack adjustments, and distortion to carve up these loops, reveling in quicksand bass and scintillating treble. At their most aggressive, the various strands of each track seem locked in mortal combat. "1000 Cigarettes" is like an electro-funk version of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", with Eddie Van Halen as Johnny and a Roland drum machine as the devil.
Fist of God improves on MSTRKRFT's first effort, The Looks, simply by jettisoning its omnipresent vocoder. If anything, it's too well-groomed, despite its wild-out vibe. There's a whiff of genre-exercise in the way strobe-light drum claps telegraph whooshing surges, vocal snips crisply striate each measure on the title track, and each contorting lick moves inexorably through real-time filter sweeps. With an ever-expanding collection of hardware and software, samples and sound banks, analog and digital synths, MSTRKRFT's sound is formally pristine, but a few stray hairs would lend it more character.
As it stands, Fist of God is a roundly enjoyable album with few highs and lows. A couple of the cameos are worthwhile: N.O.R.E.'s turn on "Bounce" suits the record's tone, and the track rates a prestige-bolstering remix on A-Trak's forthcoming mix album, Infinity + 1. Freeway is game and energetic on the alternate mix of "1000 Cigarettes", although he sounds rushed (and you can imagine how gnarly a track must be to rush Freeway), and Little Moe's deep-house diva turn on "It Ain't Love" holds up surprisingly well against the track's dot-matrix abrasion. John Legend's incredibly insipid lyrics about butterflies and rainbows don't do "Heartbreaker" any favors, but neither do they completely ruin it. It's a mystery why Jamal of soul-punk band the Carps warranted two guest spots, as both are profoundly anonymous.
And what the hell happened with "Word Up", the Ghostface collab? His warm-up chatter predicts a firebrand verse that never arrives-- instead, a couple of innocuous phrases ("word up," "do it hard") get cut up in uninteresting ways with clipped rave sirens and gymnastic synth-bass. You have to wonder if they got Ghost in the studio and then couldn't get anything worthwhile out of him, but you can't blame them for attempting to work with what they got-- would you pass up the chance to write "feat. Ghostface Killah" on your tracklist? In a way, this is representative of the album-- it's got all the right moves in place, but MSTRKRFT's handle on content is still slightly lagging behind their facility for tone and form. But if you're just looking for well-turned, rock-friendly, dance-party fodder, you could do a lot worse than Fist of God.


The weird pop veterans return with their 13th album. It's among their most accessible records, reaching for moments of escapism that never entered the frame on 2012's Breakup Songs.

La Isla Bonita

Do Deerhoof ever get bored? In a revolving gallery of evaporative avant-pop weirdos, they churn out album after distinctive album without ever breaching self-parody. As an aesthetic conceit, "weird" only works as long as it's novel—if you're going to wallow in it for two decades, you'd better be prepared to regenerate yourself constantly. But Deerhoof make music like a group of friends who never get sick of each other's jokes. Their 13th album, La Isla Bonita, is among their most accessible, reaching for moments of escapism that never entered the frame on 2012's Breakup Songs.
Between the album's title and the name of its first track, "Paradise Girls", La Isla Bonita promises tropical hues that it only delivers superficially. On a mechanical level, it functions the way Deerhoof's music has always functioned: isolated lyrical snippets pop in and out, refusing to cohere into a narrative, while the guitar, drums, and bass alternately concoct blissful grooves and total disorientation. Deerhoof thrive in the space between the sugar you want and the acid you get.
They're generous with their ironies on La Isla Bonita, starting with "Paradise Girls", a song that inverts its own premise. The title calls to mind women's bodies presented as set decoration for a steamy male utopia—ad copy for sleazy West Coast entertainment. Satomi Matsuzaki's lyrics counter that expectation by describing girls who make their very own paradise: "Girls/ Who play the bass guitar...Girls/ Who are smart." Rumbles of her bass mingle with John Dieterich's itchy guitar riffs and Greg Saunier's spacious drumbeats.
Breakup Songs leaned heavily on anemic synthesizer sounds to round out its eerie, space-age profile, but with La Isla Bonita, Deerhoof sink back into punk rock's bare bones just to see how much they can crank out of them. With a purely organic template behind her, Matsuzaki's voice finds new pockets of space to fill, which helps her nail in her nonsensical lines even deeper. Run through the sour, bass-driven groove of "Last Fad" a few times, and you'll have no idea how the words "Baseball is canceled/ it is running late" keep getting stuck in your head. It doesn't matter—they're there. Matsuzaki slips them in so skillfully you'll want to adopt them as a catchphrase for when everything goes wrong: "Fuck it! Baseball is canceled!"
The record's climax "Black Pitch" sweeps Deerhoof's tight patterns into a satisfying pop catharsis. It starts with something like a threat: "We're gonna want you/ We're gonna want you/ We're gonna want you 24/7," Matsuzaki insists. The riffs behind her stay nervous; Saunier's drums shift and shake. And then the song crests. Matsuzaki sings over herself as if from far away, stretching her syllables until the backing drops out and it's just her and her own echoes, alone in the void.
A big part of Deerhoof's power comes from their inscrutability. They've got the rare talent of affecting emotion without supplying a direct line into any kind of inner narrative, of inspiring release in the abstract. La Isla Bonita doesn't solve any mysteries, but it does cut some new faces on a band that feeds on its own newness.


The Swedish rapper scales back some of his rave ambitions on his most distilled creative package yet as he becomes something approaching a star.

The Fool

The phrase “boy band” usually brings to mind groups that, regardless of whatever genuine fanbase they have, are relentlessly manufactured and market-tested: the Osmonds, New Kids on the Block, BTS. Even a self-described boy band like BROCKHAMPTON has more industry oomph behind them than your average internet-born rap group. The genre-flipping Swedish collective Drain Gang has the features of a boy band—its members are fashion-forward babyfaces, its fans are a devoted and meme-generating street team, its sound is aching and pretty—but the bones are different. As its most prolific member, Bladee is the group’s de facto leader alongside vocalists Thaiboy Digital and ecco2k and producer whitearmor. The Fool is the rapper’s fourth full-length in a little over a year, and despite his busy release schedule, he remains elusive, ambiguous, even a little androgynous, drawing in fans with enough mystery while also sating their appetite for new music.
Bladee’s heavily accented earlier work is still something of an acquired taste, but over the years, he’s proved himself a formidable and surprisingly family-friendly pop stylist: “I’m a good boy on the track, no cussing,” he raps on “Hotel Breakfast.” His work has long circled trance and dance-pop, with its glossy electronic production and sparkling beats, but last year’s Good Luck, a forwardly maximalist album full of euphoric synth lines and high-energy drops, embraced EDM like never before. The Fool scales back those rave ambitions somewhat, and the result is Bladee’s most distilled creative package thus far. The title is a tarot reference, a metaphor that extends to the album’s sound. The record is like a full hand, each card representing a different side of Bladee or character he embodies: on “Let’s Ride,” he’s the reluctantly boastful MC riding a BMX bike and making Rich Homie Quan references; on “desiree,” he’s the sensitive crooner and lover; on “Trendy,” he’s the admitted Joker of the deck.
Long before the cult following of Drain Gang, Bladee emerged as an associate of Yung Lean, who transitioned from a viral meme star to a much noisier, rough-edged experimentalist. In the recent documentary Yung Lean: In My Head, Bladee is only a brief, fly-on-the-wall presence, despite the artists’ close relationship, remaining guarded while Lean opts for transparency. The irony is that Lean’s music is less accessible, while Bladee dabbles in the glittering sheen of hyperpop, to the point of even dropping a recent remix with Charli XCX. The beats on The Fool are bass-heavy and drum-driven, but each instrumental overflows with the sense of dreaminess that’s become Bladee’s specialty; the kaleidoscopic, trance-like synth lines on “Search True” or “Thee 9 Is Up” could easily be expanded into full-length dancefloor cuts.
The heady EDM flavor of his work lends it a euphoric optimism, but Bladee’s reluctance to soak in the spotlight pairs the positivity with an iciness and sense of emotional complexity. Even in his bright vocals, there’s a shyness to his presence. Individual words often don’t stand out; what registers is the quality of his voice, fragile and crystalline, capable of gliding to falsetto with ease. Bladee’s vocals are frequently layered, as overdubs turn him into a chorus of angels. But it’s not just his voice that has become clearer—pop music as a whole is now more in line with his unfamiliar timbre. The word “pop” has grown to encompass a broader range of music than ever, as international styles from reggaeton to K-pop have found mainstream success in the United States, and experimentalists like PC Music have made an impact on chart-topping sounds.
One of The Fool’s track titles points to a much more prefabricated boy band than Drain Gang: “I Want It That Way.” But there’s no Lou Pearlman behind the scenes or industry strings being pulled—Bladee’s unexpected rise as an online heartthrob and trance poet has felt organic and natural. With each release, his production leans more toward dance and synthpop. He seems more and more confident, as something approaching a star, melding the lyrical tropes and trap drums of American rap, the emotions and ethereality of European dance music, and the experimentation of pop’s new international vanguard. Almost a decade ago, when Bladee first started releasing music, it may have seemed unlikely for a Swedish rapper influenced by Eurodance and IDM alike to find a serious mainstream audience in America. Now it doesn’t seem like such a foolish dream.

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