Founded in 1975 to release "Little Johnny Jewel", the debut single by Television, Ork Records had a brief but influential five-year run. This lavishly packaged and thoroughly researched boxed set captures the formative moments of punk and new wave, before those genres had been thoroughly defined.

Various Artists: Ork Records: New York, New York

Ork Records: New York, New York

Founded in 1975 to release "Little Johnny Jewel", the debut single by Television, Ork Records had a brief but influential five-year run. The brainchild of West Coast weirdo Terry Ork and art school dropout Charles Ball, the label was blessed with a number of big firsts. Ork released not just the first Television single, but also the first music from poet and punk rock originator Richard Hell and the first singles by Memphis-based musician Alex Chilton following the dissolution of Big Star. This in addition to great power pop by Chris Stamey as well as new wave groups like Marbles, Student Teachers, and the Revelons.
Compiled by Numero Group, the lavishly packaged and thoroughly researched Ork Records: New York, New York collects the label's complete 13-single catalog along with a number of related releases that never made it to shelves during the label's existence. Among these are a scrapped single by New Jersey's the Feelies and a sidelined 7" by the rock critic Lester Bangs that ultimately saw daylight via Spy Records, an imprint run by John Cale.
In 2015, nostalgia for late '70s New York City can feel oppressive, given its documentation in an endless stream of record reissues, memoirs, films, and biographies. If you grew up during the '90s, your entire cultural coming-of-age might have been spent surfing successive waves of the city's punk-era remembrance—from "Saturday Night Live" reruns to Julian Schnabel's Basquiat biopic, the Strokes to LCD Soundsystem. But New York, New York is a significant artifact.
The music and photographs capture the formative moments of punk and new wave, before those genres had been thoroughly defined. It's a glimpse at iconic personalities in a moment of vulnerability, before they were fully hatched and before anybody cared. By contemporary standards, these songs might not register as wild or controversial. In the context of the '70s—a time of slick pop and bluesy choogle—Ork's artists were from another planet. The first sound on Television's "Little Johnny Jewel" is not a squeal of feedback or an expertly rehearsed riff, but the thin and elastic tone of Tom Verlaine's guitar plugged directly into the mixing board. Hell's "(I Belong to The) Blank Generation" is a bizarre throwback of a different kind—a skewed and slanted remake of the Rod McKuen's jazzy 1959 novelty song "The Beat Generation" that was a far cry from the buzz saw tones and pop minimalism of the Ramones.
Listening back now, the music is familiar because these sounds have become so deeply embedded in the DNA of today's indie rock. Chris Stamey's "The Summer Sun" is nostalgia-tinged bubblegum pop, buoyed by jangling acoustic guitars and backing "oohs/ahhs." Chilton's singles are charmingly stoned and discombobulated proto-slacker rock. A one-off studio project, Prix delivers the pained power pop that Ork probably wanted from Chilton, but the singer was then unwilling to deliver. Others offer slightly fudged takes on the more established downtown bands. The Erasers' clean guitar tones and slanted melodies recall Television. The Student Teachers' stripped down and hookly "Channel 13" is not too far afield from Blondie, whose keyboardist, Jimmy Destri, produced the band's single. These bands weren't necessarily biting a successful style, just taking cues from their peers.
Bangs' "Let It Blurt" is an outlier, in that it is terrible. The music—a Beefheart-inspired and Quine-penned backing track—isn't the problem. It's the singing. Bangs slurs and blubbers about the details of a break-up. The details are ugly and unflattering. If Television's music attempted ecstatic transcendence, "Let It Blurt" represents the opposite end of the spectrum—earthly woe, gracelessness, the sadness and confusion of lonely dudes. Perhaps this was the intent, though. For what it's worth, the critic seems aware that both the song and his lyrics are absurd.
A California counterculture type lured east by Andy Warhol's Factory scene, Ork met Verlaine and Hell when the latter was a clerk at Cinemabilia, a Greenwich Village film memorabilia shop that he managed. He took an active interest in their musical pursuits, set them up with guitarist Richard Lloyd, and when they formed Television, Ork became the band's first manager. In 1975, when the group—by that point in its official, Hell-less lineup—recorded a few 4-track demos, Ork agreed to press a single. The record did well enough to warrant a second release, Richard Hell's first two songs with the Voidoids. Because Ork was a good scenester but a poor businessman, Ball came on to help professionalize the operation.
Initially, Ork's mission was to capture a local scene that had grown up around CBGBs but over time there wasn't much incentive to keep going. The bands were not popular and there was little hope of financial reward. It was hard for bands to get booked outside of New York, even regionally. In the liner notes, the Feelies' Dave Weckerman explains that there was only one new wave-tolerant venue west of the Hudson.
Many of Ork's artists were not particularly fond of their singles on the imprint. At the time, Television's Richard Lloyd told interviewers that he hated "Little Johnny Jewel"—"It worked primarily as a demo," Hell said of his single, "I can't stand to hear it." But the lack of polish is what makes many of these recordings compelling. On Marquee Moon, Television sounded immaculate and artful. Here, the band is sloppy and primitive, but also unconventional and free. On their debut album, Crazy Rhythms, the Feelies sounded tense and jittery, but Ork's version of "Fa Cé La" is fast and blisteringly loud.
Eventually, the money ran out and Ork folded in 1979. Ball would go on to found the influential no wave label, Lust/Unlust and Ork left both New York and the music business, returning to the West Coast. Both have since passed on (Ork in 2004, Ball in 2012). When the label fizzled, punk and new wave were still very much underground. Of the bands that populated the CBGBs scene, only Blondie and Talking Heads had found anything resembling national success.
For all the talk of doom and gloom in today's post-Internet music world, some comfort can be taken in the fact that, even when people were still buying records, Ork's prospects seemed equally grim. The label's biggest hit sold 6,000 units, but, according to the set's liner notes, most releases were lucky to sell a third of that. If you're running an independent record label today, those numbers might not be that far out of reach.
In Ork's case, the label wasn't ultimately a lark or a waste of money—the music was heard. These singles diffused out into the world and found their way into the hands of weirdos in far-flung locales. When promoting Hell's single in 1976, Ork ran advertisements with the singer's phone number and suggested that people, "Call Hell." "I called him," Minutemen bassist Mike Watt told author Michael Azzerad in the book, Our Band Could Be Your Life. "I said, 'Is this Hell?' And he said, 'Yeah.' And I got scared and I hung up." That accessibility stuck with Watt, though. "That, to me, was punk."


On her second album, Taylor Swift straddles the line between country and pop. Still new to Nashville, she took her teen self seriously and demanded others do the same.

Fearless

When Taylor Swift moved to Nashville as a teenager with hopes of becoming a country star, she faced an uphill battle. “Basically, all the record companies went, ‘Ah, how cute. She’s just a little kid,’” Swift said in 2008. “They also said, ‘Give up your dreams. Go home and come back when you’re 18.’” “I would feel like they were deleting me from their BlackBerrys as I was telling them,” Scott Borchetta, president of her label Big Machine, told The New York Times of the Nashville industry’s reaction to signing Swift. She never wanted her age to be “the headline,” or a number that screamed to writers and producers that she was just a starry-eyed hobbyist making music in her bedroom.
On her self-titled debut, Swift established herself as a precocious storyteller who could write love songs vague and ageless enough that anyone might find herself in them, perhaps to prove to Nashville that a teen could do it. Her second album, Fearless, is a rebuke to that approach, with Swift bringing listeners straight to the dreaded football-game bleachers and mean-girl maze of high school. She took her teen self seriously and demanded others do the same, navigating the cloying innocence of a girl who simultaneously experiences relationships like a dog-eared Nicholas Sparks novel and also has the wisdom to know that not all kisses end in a rainstorm.
Fearless straddles the line between country and pop, clinging really only to Swift’s faint, faux-country accent which magically materialized at some point between her hometown of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania and Nashville, and a few bits of fiddle and banjo that flicker in and out of the record. “I write as life happens to me,” Swift told Rolling Stone in 2010, and, on Fearless, it’s clear she’s dead serious; a day before she had to turn the album in, she begged Borchetta to add the track “Forever & Always,” a breakup song inspired by the pop singer Joe Jonas. The songs are diaristic not just in their images of fairytale romance and frustrated heartbreak, but in how Swift writes her lyrics like mini-stories with wordy, narrative structures. On “Love Story,” she rips from the play I’d assume is burned into every average American high-schooler’s brain, Romeo and Juliet, for a tongue-twister of a chorus (“And I said, Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone…”). She sounds almost breathless by its end. She likes to give a play-by-play, stacking minute summaries of a moment on top of each other like she’s story-boarding the perfect montage out of an indelible memory. “And I stare at the phone, he still hasn’t called/And then you feel so low/You can’t feel nothing at all,” she rattles off on “Forever & Always.”
Prior to and after Fearless, there was a conversation in the press about whether Swift could actually sing, especially as she was still considered an underdog in a genre where her peers were vocal powerhouses like Carrie Underwood and Miranda Lambert. On “Change,” the album’s blow-out finale, her voice loud and guttural in the mix, she proves the skeptics (or, as she would say, haters) wrong. But Swift’s talky-delivery and conversational songwriting style—a mixture of personal intimacy and outright fantasy—sounds original and deliberate. With their dramatic arcs and plot twists, these songs often sound like Swift is quite literally speaking as she would to her subject, high off the adrenaline rush of a blindsiding breakup or meeting her new Prince Charming. “When I sit down and write a song, the only person that I’m thinking about in that room is the person that I’m writing the song about,” Swift told Marie Claire in 2009. “And what I want them to know and what I wish I could tell them to their face, but I’m going to say it in a song instead.”
She serves straight Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul with “Fifteen,” half guardian angel and half alarming guidance counselor to high school freshmen everywhere, reminding them there’s so much they don’t know yet, and name-checking her real-life best friend Abigail. At times, the extreme specificity can feel like a misstep, with the album suddenly taking on the dated air of a copy of Swift’s yearbook we’re somehow privy to. Such is the case with “Hey Stephen,” a twee, passed-in-class love note of a song that could be a brother to Plain White T’s’ “Hey There Delilah.”
What’s remarkable here is Swift’s earnest sweetness. In the years following, she would become a master at biting songs about exes, from “Dear John” to “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” There’s little to none of that vengefully confessional sentiment on Fearless. The closest she gets is when she calls Jonas a “scared little boy,” on “Forever & Always,” but even that insult, so wholesome, is still understandably tepid for a young woman wading through the minefield that is her first series of serious relationships. The best songs come when her writing is wielded with knife-like precision, revealing feelings with each cut rather than glamorizing the teen tropes of hanging by the telephone or yearning for crushes.
It’s the fantasies that truly define Fearless; dancing in a storm in your “best dress,” a love that feels like a roller-coaster. While the teen pop stars of the early-aughts like Christina Aguilera or Britney Spears had their highly erotic, sensational hits written by Swedish pop masterminds, there was something novel about Swift being a teenager and writing about her reality in her own terms coming into that same mainstream space, redefining what “teen pop” could sound like in the process. But despite the fact that Swift was drawing from her real life on Fearless, the album speaks less to the actual reality of a teen girl than to a teen girl’s imaginative desires, desires which, for Swift, are remarkably pure.
In 2008, teen pop culture was bending to influences of chastity. Swift’s Disney peers like Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers helped popularize purity rings and one of the biggest YA series and its movie adaptation, Twilight, implicitly preached the virginal values of its Mormon creator. “Love Story,” which culminates in being told to pick out a “white dress” for a wedding, or “Fifteen,” which mourns the fact that her friend Abigail gave “everything she had to a boy,” hit hard with this same audience. Their clean, plucky country-lite production cut through the colorful pop of artists like Lady Gaga and Beyoncé on the radio. As much as Swift was hailed for her ownership over her own image and voice, what she was serving to teen girls was still squeaky clean and parent-approved.
On Fearless, Swift also cultivated an underdog, misunderstood voice with songs like “You Belong With Me” and “The Best Day” that would, surprisingly, continue to haunt her music well into adulthood. “They don't like what I stand for,” Swift said of her classmates in 2008. “They don’t like somebody who stands for being sober, who stands for anything happy.” Even the clunky refrain of “You Belong With Me” (“She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts/She’s cheer captain, and I’m on the bleachers”) became ripe for parody in later years, a testament to how meaningless any of those signifiers are now. Yet the simplicity of that refrain was the clearest window into Swift’s potential as a mainstream pop songwriter. The explicit modesty of these songs may be fixed in 2008, but the songs nonetheless stick with you; Swift’s great remake of “Love Story” in slick 1989-era production is proof of its timelessness.
Fearless remains not only Swift’s best-selling album, but also her breakthrough into the pop charts, a world which would soon become her permanent home (or a permanent cage, depending on how you respond to her recent material). It was also the last time Swift was simply seen as an artist restless with promise and lived-in inspiration who was deemed a “savant” and a “prodigy” by critics before being saddled with the mark of a tabloid celebrity as well. No moment solidified this more than when Swift was called to the 2009 VMAs stage to accept the Best Female Video award for “You Belong With Me,” beating Beyoncé and prompting Kanye West to storm the stage and proclaim Beyoncé’s video better. “I like the lyrics about being a cheerleader and she’s in the bleachers!” West wrote later in an apology.
In Fearless, Swift captures and bottles a girlish sense of romantic excitement and suburban anguish that is all too fleeting, before real adulthood and the depths of the world’s cruelty actually hit her. For the rest of her career, she would uncork this nostalgia like champagne and pour it over her pop mega-hits. “This ain’t Hollywood, this is a small town,” she sings, as if to remind herself that she’s still just the teen girl next door, a country singer with dreams of a bigger stage. In that all-too-brief moment, she was right.


16 years after their original underground classic, Matt Sweeney and Will Oldham reunite for an album that plays like the continuation of a decades-long conversation.

Matt Sweeney / Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Superwolves

Superwolves

A few years after he’d decided to start calling himself Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Will Oldham released a song called “A Wolf Among Wolves.” It’s about a person who doesn’t feel properly seen, and it’s exceptionally sad, even for the guy who wrote “I See a Darkness.” “Why can’t I be loved as what I am?” he sighs. “A wolf among wolves, and not as a man.” Wildness, ferocity, heart, all the things wolves tend to signify—the way he sings, it’s as if they’ve all been drained away by loneliness. In the years since, Oldham has made collaboration central to his work, partly, as he recently told GQ, in the hopes of “turning aspects of an innate introversion into something that resembles extroversion.” And while he’s had innumerable artistic successes, both on his own and with others, he never sounds more at home, more fully himself, than he does when writing and recording with guitarist Matt Sweeney. Not for nothing did they name their first album together Superwolf.
Now, 16 years after Oldham’s tender singing and Sweeney’s cable-knit guitars made the original an underground classic, they return with Superwolves, an album that is, just as its title suggests, both a continuation of Superwolf and something more. On the album, the duo let us in on a decades-long conversation, their respective instruments virtually finishing one another’s thoughts. Their bond is so deep, and their knowledge of one another is so profound, it’s essentially impossible to hear the boundary between them.
Oldham and Sweeney began work on the material that would eventually become Superwolves five years ago, using the same process they had before: Oldham wrote his lyrics as pure text, then sent them to Sweeney, who set the words to melody and wrote the music. Sweeney has a lover’s sense of Oldham’s tendencies as a singer, and he arguably knows how to write for Oldham’s strengths better than Oldham does. They move in tandem, Sweeney coaxing Oldham into following his line in the chorus of “Make Worry for Me,” the singer thinning out his voice and letting it break over the word “me” in a way that makes it sounds like a soft howl.
On the page, “Make Worry for Me” is a chest-thumping song about power and horror, the kind of thing you’d expect from a main character of a Nick Cave song. But Sweeney’s slinking guitar and sinuous verse melody complicate the mood. “You’ll be shaking, you’ll be trembling, and you’ll moan,” Oldham sings, and as with many Bonnie “Prince” Billy songs, it’s hard to say whether we’re supposed to be terrified or turned on.
Oldham has always had a light touch as a lyricist, but on Superwolves, figuring out the perspective can be like watching shadows thrown by a candle in a drafty room; you have a pretty good idea where this is coming from, but what you’re seeing keeps shifting. “Good to My Girls” is sung from the point of view of a madam reflecting on how an indifferent cosmos compels her to treat the women in her charge with care. But squint a bit and it could easily be about a new dad taking up his responsibilities, confronting his mortality, and shutting out the outside world. Oldham sympathetically depicts a woman whose life has crawled to a halt as she anticipates a deity who never arrives in “God is Waiting,” then sharply makes his own declaration of faith: “God can fuck herself, and it does—hardcore,” he assures us. The tone shift is jarringly sudden, undermining the woman’s dignity. In “My Blue Suit,” Oldham observes that his partner looks better in his clothes than he does, and how he’d like to be rolled up in her pocket for a while. It’s a nice little subversion, the man being possessed by the woman for a change. Or it may just be that Oldham thinks his wife looks hot in menswear. As lyrics, these songs resist simple interpretation, something Sweeney must have been keenly aware of; his settings, and Oldham’s performances, give Superwolves an all-too-human ambiguity.
In the course of making the album, Oldham became a husband and father, and in 2020 he lost his mother to Alzheimer’s. Throughout Superwolves, he sings with a mix of sadness and self-assurance, powered by the clarity and purpose that major life events can bring. “Shorty’s Ark” begins as a playful roundup of animals (“Killer whale, pocket wolf, rhinoceros, and hound”), but even as he takes pleasure in these simple joys, Oldham keeps an eye on what’s unfolding in the cosmos: “They’ll remind us of eternity, so they won’t have to die.” Even “My Popsicle,” an ode to his young daughter, feels tinged with death, as if Oldham were conscious of the likelihood that songs like this one will be what she turns to when he’s gone.
Sweeney is attuned to these subtle changes in the weather; his playing seems to predict storms before they register in the lyrics. Oldham sings from the beyond in “Resist the Urge,” his narrator consoling the mourning by insisting “You’re not without that much of me, I wasn’t just a body” while Sweeney plays a soft rag behind him. His guitar is gentle and sweet, and its kindness cuts against the hardness of grief.
Sweeney’s playing on Superwolves is so full it has the paradoxical effect of making his instrument seem to disappear, and his poetic phrasing often says more than a single guitar should be capable of. Even the ineffable Mdou Moctar takes his cues from him; when the Sahel star and his band step in to fill out “Hall of Death,” a rolling Tuareg rock song that nevertheless could’ve been on Oldham’s bluegrass-tinged live album Funtown Comedown, Sweeney’s milky, phased-out guitar sets the pace.
Sweeney is ultimately a session guitarist, albeit one of the highest-profile session guitarists of his generation; versatility is part of his job description. Whether he’s playing with Iggy Pop or Adele, Sweeney himself is always beside the point. Oldham, too, has always preferred to set up camp a few steps away from the culture at large, staying just close enough to make sure what he has to say can be heard. These are solitary ways of being—the rambler and the freelancer are both essentially alone, after all. It’s not difficult to understand what they see in one another.
Perhaps more than most of their peers, Sweeney and Oldham’s particular forms of solitude have been shaped by their ongoing proximity to others; the original Superwolf was the product of two loners delighting in how easily those solitudes intertwined. Superwolves’ success, then, is unimaginable without the 16-year hiatus between albums. Both artists needed to wander, to lose themselves, to become strangers again—even if only in their artistic partnership—so they could come back together and find that the rearranged pieces somehow still fit.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Pinch & Shackleton is a welcome return to the seminal dubstep producers' peculiar roots. Rather than a summing of styles, it plays as a vision of what bass music was a half-decade ago.

Pinch & Shackleton

When I was first exploring bass music, Pinch and Shackleton were gateway artists. Both masters erecting sickly, muted environments, their dub(step) was arty and sprawling enough-- both made use of Middle Eastern samples-- to lure an American rock-kid into England's dance culture. The two artists have been quiet lately: Pinch retreated into dance-oriented 12"s in addition to curating his Tectonic imprint, while Shackleton moved to Berlin and released some minimal techno for a minimal-techno label (an excellent one). Announced and released last week by the astute Honest Jon's label, Pinch & Shackleton is a welcome return to each artist's peculiar roots.
Despite obvious common ground, Shackleton and Pinch achieve their thick headspaces in different ways-- Shackleton the austere, death-obsessed perfectionist and Pinch the reggae-savvy producer unafraid to let a mediocre rapper sully his tracks. Rather than a summing of styles, Pinch & Shackleton plays as a vision of what bass music was a half-decade ago, two producers' onetime vision of progress. It benefits massively from a lack of artists interested in these sounds: In 2011 bass music is brighter, or deeper, or more aggressive.
P&S is not very bright or deep or aggressive; its nine tracks often file forward with quiet confidence but without explicit purpose. The duo stresses clarity: Synths float well above Shackleton's exacting percussion (its complexity dialed back here), sub-bass rumble, and vocal samples applied judiciously. When the music floats hazily by, such as during the opening minutes of "Levitation", it is an intentional, manicured float. Four minutes into "Cracks in the Pleasuredome" the duo dials up shards of a Middle Eastern vocal cadence, and I'm reminded of a type of mystical-industrial fantasies Pinch and Shackleton are capable of conjuring. "Selfish Greedy Life" chatters ominously, little demons competing for attention with steam-vent bursts and saucer-like patches. "Monks on the Rum" is the duo's palette stretched on putty, diffuse and manipulated but no less composed.
This is not the foggy, soft-focus paranoia of an artist like Burial, whose work has informed so much underground electronic composition; Pinch and Shackleton don't want to suggest darkness; they want to create it. They do so with familiar tones and structures, but ones that remain effective: see, after three minutes of whispering synths and whinnying flutes, if the bass drop of "Burning Blood" doesn't make you smell something. In 2011, Pinch and Shackleton are a sensory experience; their waters are crystal clear, but sometimes you don't want to know what's at the bottom of the lake. Let's be excited they're showing us again.


The Los Angeles punk duo get sober and burn off the fog of their last release for a crisper, punchier sound.

Bleached: Don’t You Think You've Had Enough?

Don’t You Think You've Had Enough?

Jennifer and Jessica Clavin had a near-cinematic Los Angeles upbringing—daughters of a guitarist who played noise music in the ’60s, the two formed a punk band in their garage in the Valley while still in high school. They’ve run down the West Coast checklist: toying with surf rock, visiting Joshua Tree, playing the Burger Records showcase. On Don’t You Think You've Had Enough?, the Clavin sisters remain unafraid to wear their inspirations on their sleeves. But they sound sharper and more focused than they have in a while.
Some of the record’s most successful tracks, like the slow-burn opener “Heartbeat Away” and the breakup anthem “Rebound City,” stick to basics—distortion-fried power chords, thumping backbeats, bouncing bass lines. Jennifer’s voice dips into twang on “Valley to LA,” recalling fellow West Coast sisters Heart. As with Welcome the Worms, the aesthetic is culled mostly from the sexed-up glam metal of the late ’70s and early ’80s. As if to drive the point home, the music video for “Kiss You Goodbye” recalls the debauched pool party from Boogie Nights, massive hair and all.
But Bleached also try on plenty of new looks. On “Somebody Dial 911,” they borrow from the goths, Jennifer’s puppy-love verses backed by basslines dripping with metallic reverb. On “Kiss You Goodbye,” they reach for gleaming funk guitars and gulped, staccato vocals. Some songs miss the mark—“I Get What I Need”’s creeping, bluesy bassline proves awkward—but most of them work, if only because the band sounds like they’re truly putting their all into their melodies and riffs, rather than leaving the heavy lifting to distortion.
If it feels like the fog that had set in on their last release has been lifted, it might be because the sisters themselves feel a bit more clear-headed. In recent interviews, they talk about the clarity that has come with their recent sobriety, the ways that abstinence from alcohol can reframe friendships, change long nights out, reset the vantage point from which you examine your own past. Aside from the crisper and warmer production, this clarity comes through in their songwriting. On “Silly Girl,” they sing about cutting off a bad influence with the tossed-off dismissal of someone who’s not mad, just disappointed: “Goodbye, time for growing up/ Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” And “Hard to Kill” serves as a slick reality check as Jennifer coolly sings, “You’re so cool/You hate yourself.”
After 11 tracks of scorching riffs and lyrical dunks, “Shitty Ballet” finishes the record on a surprisingly introspective note, with acoustic guitars and a stripped-down vocal performance. Bleached has never sounded this humble or vulnerable—you almost want to lean in to catch the words before Jennifer swallows them. But just after the bridge, as her falsetto slides into its faintest register, they go electric, and the song explodes. Over a whirlwind of fuzzed-out guitar and cymbal crashes, Jennifer’s voice rises to a scream muffled by distortion—“Like, oh my god!” she sings, almost with a wink. After all, control is much more interesting after you've let things fly completely off the rails.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Listening to Madlib's music, I'm reminded of the Black radical maestros responsible for some of the outermost-limits music-making ...

Madlib: Shades of Blue: Madlib Invades Blue Note

Listening to Madlib's music, I'm reminded of the Black radical maestros responsible for some of the outermost-limits music-making of the past half-century: Sun Ra, George Clinton, Lee "Scratch" Perry-- it's an elite club, but by no means an exclusive one. What sets these artists apart from their contemporaries and/or imitators is the fact that their effortless, genuine material occupyies the fringes of acceptable musicality without ever sounding pretentious; they translate their visions direct to tape and send them out into the world to fend for themselves. By definition, such prophets are prolific, and usually to a fault: who has time to edit existing ideas when there are already a dozen more waiting to be made musical flesh? It's a curse/blessing that makes for horribly inconsistent discographies with two or three full-out flops for every single flash of brilliance.
In less than ten years, Madlib has proven himself a logical heir to this peculiar tradition. He's already got more projects under his belt than Sun Ra had hats. Beginning with his role as emcee and producer with the Oxnard, CA-based Lootpack, Madlib has gone on to infiltrate the musical consciousness with an entire backpack worth of aliases: the helium-blunted rapper Quasimoto, the one-man nu-jazz band Yesterday's New Quintet, and collaborations under his more common name with Jaydee (Jaylib) and MF Doom (Madvillian). Like the aforementioned auteurs, Madlib's projects have their share of hits and misses, but the creativity and lack of stultifying concern for critical assessment clearly shows there's a lot more coming down the line.
It's a bit of a surprise, then, that an artist as multi-faceted as Madlib was invited into the dank catacombs of the original Blue Note master tapes for a "remix" project. Though he's certainly not the first to gain access to the house that Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff built, his predecessors-- Pete Rock, Biz Markie, Us3-- were cut from a considerably safer cloth; which presumably explains the decision to package the results as Madlib "invading" the Blue Note catalog, just in case his unpredictability happened to get the best of him. But, gentle executives, your gamble pays off two-fold: Madlib gets a shot at a significantly wider audience and the label has an opportunity to redeem itself for all those Kurt Elling and Joe Lovano records they've been haplessly peddling since the early 90s.
Appropriately enough, Madlib's multiple personality disorder creates the "shades of blue" the title refers to. On one hand, he stars as himself, semi-dutifully remixing Blue Note classics by Gene Harris & The Three Sounds, Donald Byrd, Ronnie Foster and Bobby Hutcherson into outsider works of downtempo and instrumental hip-hop art. With the exception of Bobbi Humphrey's "Please Set Me At Ease"-- which Madlib and guest emcee Medaphoar transform into Slum Village hip-hop-- there's nothing overtly radical about the remixes, but closer listening reveals strange happenings in their murky depths, as the role reversal of foregrounded breakbeat and buried melody on the disc's centerpiece "Stepping Into Tomorrow" illustrate exquisitely.
The rest of the tracks are "new interpretations of Blue Note classics" by Yesterday's New Quintet and its offshoot ensembles Morgan Adams Quartet Plus Two, Sound Direction and the Joe McDuphrey Experience. Don't be fooled: this is entirely the work of Madlib and his uncanny ability to play a disorienting number of instruments, and his equally clever habit of inventing names for each member of the fictional band(s). As a result, these pieces are slightly more linear in construction, relying more on harmony and tempo dynamics than the loops upon which the remixes are largely built, but are similarly genius in terms of both concept and execution. Madlib even goes so far as to fake a live recording for the Joe McDuphrey Experience's medley of Horace Silver's "Peace" and Herbie Hancock's "Dolphin Dance", only to give himself away by chopping up the mix beyond recognition in the middle of the piece.
Judging from the results of this encounter, I'd like to see Madlib let loose upon the Saturn catalog, or crafting a Yesterday's New Quintet record of Parliament-Funkadelic tunes like the one he concocted in tribute to Stevie Wonder last year. But if his creative impulse moves along at anything remotely attuned to the speed it has so far, I'm sure there'll be five or six more Madlib-helmed records to sort through every year from here to Armageddon as he hits and misses his way to defining his own Black radical cosmology.


Despite hit songs on both sides of the Atlantic and Best! Band! Ever! endorsements from UK scribes, Las Vegas-based The Killers' questionably titled debut album is radio-friendly style-over-substance.

Hot Fuss

The Killers' press release is surprisingly straightforward, explicitly detailing the punchcard proving ground that this Las Vegas quartet sprang from before phrases like "bidding war" and "headlining tour" entered their daily vocabulary. But it can afford this bit of honesty, since the British music press has shouldered the load of attendant Killers hyperbole, and because the band's Hot Fuss checks most of its truths at the door to their 800-foot limo.
By autumn 2003, their single "Mr. Brightside" had secured the usual Best! Band! Ever! overstatements from UK scribes, and the song's happily vacant grafting of New Order decadence to Housemartins bop bounced it hard into CMJ and SXSW. Subsequently, the band's dance card attracted Warbucksian suitors of the largest variety. And now, the resulting Hot Fuss drops on both sides of the Atlantic wrapped in this tabloid backstory, unable to separate its hype from its unabashedly referential sound.
Hot Fuss floats boatloads of blasé lyrics about the pressures of being fabulous and the politics of fucking over an easily sippable blend of 80s and 90s British pop influences, rarely pausing to test the end product. Top-shelf mixing and attention to melody helps out the record's appeal as lifestyle music for sheltered bloggers and female professionals who still wear cool hairstyles. But damnit if that demographic leaves little room for a life of The Killers' own. Where are they, besides their wily references to past pop pros and a vague sense of Sin City cynicism? Not anywhere, really: The Killers are just the latest band to be born too quick inside the popular music vacuum, where expectations for broad accessibility kill dudes' potential for deeper creativity quite fabulously dead.
This is disappointing, since Fuss' better moments make The Killers' knack for hooks and cool poses clear. Vocalist/keyboardist Brandon Flowers has replaced his tonsils with melodrama; he's hijacked Jarvis Cocker's accent to make his Vegas-boy rep sound that much tighter. "Brightside" isn't getting near the dejection of The Stills; it has no illusions about being anything other than a provocative single. Its relentless keyboard 'n' guitar racket shuns dourness altogether, as Flowers remarkably makes lines about a girlfriend getting off with some other guy resonate as some kind of weird triumph. "Somebody Told Me"'s deadpan couplets about having a "boyfriend who looks like a girlfriend" are similarly clever, but the cut's a brazen rewrite of The Strokes' treble-kick heroics. Yes, Casablancas, et al ripped off pieces of their sound, too, but that's the difference-- they already did the ripping. The Killers' recombination arrives too late to be recognized as first-tier thievery. At this point, Hot Fuss is just bringing it from what's already been brought.
Hot Fuss opener "Jenny Was a Friend of Mine" establishes Flowers' admirable love for tones lost to rockers' rising fears of sounding too fruity. But as the album's singles follow in quick succession, rocking a sound softer than post-punk but full of the stuff that came right after it, The Killers can't figure a way to add resonance beyond adding more keyboards, more layered guitars, more cribbing of established tastemaking currency (check the intellectual-property-case-waiting-to-happen that is "Change Your Mind"). In other words, Hot Fuss has no use for subtlety. It revels in its appearance as The Shit from day one, allowing for filler-type indulgences like the impossibly aimless-- and quite possibly shitty-- "Everything Will Be Alright". Meanwhile, Fuss' UK version excises the brazenly contemporary raggedness of "Change Your Mind" for the astoundingly inane "Indie Rock 'n' Roll", a blaring joke of thick-chorded guitar and arrogant, pitch-corrected yowling that gives out cornholes to every unknown American group valiantly trying to find the cracks of creativity in its titular sound.
So, it's plain that The Killers have made a record more concerned with artifice than artistry. If the intent is to place their album's principal teases on the next Now That's What I Call Music compilation, then bravo. But why does it try to squeak by as another deft pop reversion when it actually seems to be a revisionist cash dance? For the kids, I presume. But Hot Fuss is not hardcore; it's hard evidence that it's tough to focus on making great rock when you're preoccupied with cultivating an image.


The Chicago band’s second album dials back their beaming, golden-hour soft rock to a gentle lull.

Forever Turned Around

Whitney’s music lives in the harmonious space where contemporary indie rock melts into ’70s soft rock. It’s part of what makes them so easy to enjoy, like a nuzzle from someone else’s dog. They sound nice, simple, scruffy, which doesn’t always amount to compelling music, but the band’s palatability works in their favor. At this point, Whitney are a phenomenon, a commodifiable entity. They’re legends in their hometown of Chicago: They have their own holiday and a beer named in their honor. Even to the casual indie-rock listener, they’re inescapable. And rare as it may seem, the reason for the fervor is because they’re actually good.
Their second album, Forever Turned Around, is welcoming and wooly, yet slightly more isolated and somber than its 2016 predecessor. There aren’t any standouts here, no “Golden Days” equivalent that you could bop along to at a cookout. Instead, Whitney dial it back to a gentle lull. Forever Turn Around ends up being meandering, sleepy sometimes to a fault, a charmingly doe-eyed take on the kind of classic rock revivalism that plays well at music festivals.
Forever Turned Around is a study in environments for falling in and out of love, finding beauty in the little things, and meditating on the passage of time. The imagery comes in the form of redwood trees, rhododendrons in bloom, and dewy grass on a cool morning. On “My Life Alone,” co-frontman Julien Ehrlich sings of “lonely nights/Waiting for the sunrise” and passing the time by watching “rivers roll,” while swelling horns and honeyed guitar stretch into AM-radio rock territory. “Valleys (My Love),” a reflection on the late stages of a relationship, is a more effective environment for Whitney to explore what it means to feel lovelorn. Fingerpicked guitar meets vintage organ, warming the space around Ehlrich’s words like blush blended into a cheek. The lyrics feel stark in comparison: “I feel like I’m holding on/To a place in your heart that’s long gone,” he sings, his voice heavy with melancholy.
At its worst, Forever Turned Around is a bit boring. If you listen to it too many times you might forget it’s on; it blends into the background easily. But the mood it conjures is surprisingly rich. The album plays out like a gorgeous day at the end of the summer and the bittersweet calm that follows as the weather gets cooler. It encapsulates the idea of the saddest and most perfect time of year: You put on a song as buoyant as “Giving Up,” or “Rhododendron,” and you see a version of yourself that you may have lost touch with. Whitney haven’t changed much since their last album, and truthfully we don’t expect them to. They’ll keep releasing beaming soft rock albums coated in golden-hour light. But dependability is its own kind of virtue. Like holidays and beers, Whitney are the same each time.

Buy: Rough Trade / Vinyl Me, Please
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The duo’s latest album reaches back into their past but gets stuck in a strange middle ground between big-budget indie and low-budget pop.

Crybaby

It’s fitting that for a duo who have counseled and comforted innumerable teen weirdos throughout the years, Tegan and Sara have spent the last decade of their career in a strange state of arrested development. With the release of 2013’s Heartthrob, the twin sisters made a surprising—and, crucially, successful—pivot to bold, sharply-written ’80s-inspired pop, the kind they listened to as kids. That album and its lead single, the cheeky and still-dazzling “Closer,” were some of the pair’s most commercially successful records to date; unsurprisingly, they have been drawing from the same well ever since, to quickly diminishing returns. First came 2016’s Love You to Death, which spawned the brilliant single “Boyfriend,” but otherwise paled in comparison to its predecessor. And then there was 2019’s Hey, I’m Just Like You, a sweet but altogether patchy album of teenage demos redone in the band’s 2010s style.
Crybaby attempts to return, at least in part, to the hook-driven indie-rock of the band’s earlier records. Working with producer John Congleton—who, ironically, is better known for working with artists like Angel Olsen and Sharon Van Etten to make their records sound bigger, not smaller—the pair actively attempt to scuff up the pristine finish of their recent output, bringing guitars and live drums back to the fore and embracing shaggier song structures and roughed up vocals.
At the same time, Tegan and Sara clearly can’t entirely let go of pop music. So Crybaby is stuck in a strange middle ground between big-budget indie and low-budget pop: it’s all yelped vocals and the kind of vocal processing that Skrillex and Diplo popularized with “Where Are Ü Now,” which then proceeded to dominate pop for the next five or so years. The overwhelming flavor of Crybaby is pitched-up ornamental vocal sample, and it gives the album an embarrassing pungency, like milk left out of the fridge a minute too long; the technique appears on nearly every song, and it means that even the best songs here—brash opener “I Can’t Grow Up”, lovely would-be country ballad “Faded Like a Feeling,” the devastatingly weary “Whatever That Was”—feel like they’re demos recorded in 2014.
At times, Crybaby does actually manage to identify potential new paths forward for Tegan and Sara. “I Can’t Grow Up” plays like a brighter, more melodic take on electroclash, with its yelped, anxious verses (“You spin me ‘round again/Twist my head until you hear ‘pop’”) providing some of the record’s most exciting, full-blooded moments. Touching on ideas of reliving unhealthy relationship dynamics over and over, it’s an appealingly spiky song, one far more sharply realized than much of the rest of the record. Not every song feels as deft, and many lack the incisive specificity that is the Quins’ trademark: The maudlin synth-ballad “Yellow” in particular, with its chorus of “this bruise ain’t black, it’s yellow/My sweet heart sings out like the devil” feels unusually confused, caught up in swampy attempts at wordplay.
It’s understandable that Tegan and Sara are caught in some endless transit between the pop-punk of their 2000s output and the gloss of their 2010s work; the past few years have seen the pair release full-album reinterpretations of both The Con and So Jealous, write a memoir, and have that memoir turned into a TV show. But Crybaby displays neither the maturity of a band in a retrospective era, nor the sense of fun of a band trying not to grow up; instead, there’s something loose-ended about it—like it’s a companion piece to all the mythmaking and nostalgizing, rather than the other way around.


On Savage Mode, the dry-voiced and deadpan trap rapper 21 Savage recounts a life that has known nothing but violence. It's his strongest release, thanks to sleek production by Metro Boomin.

Savage Mode

By the time 21 Savage (real name Shayaa Joseph) committed to rap full-time, he’d seen and gone through hell: early trouble in school, getting shot, having multiple friends murdered. His entire career thus far plays like the PTSD aftermath of these horrors. When he raps, his deadpan delivery never betrays any hesitation or doubt. His voice dry and grainy, he recounts a life that has known nothing but violence, countering with the same violence back like a shield. His matter-of-fact delivery and unchanging cadence feels like the product of a hardened soul, and a desire to prove to be more terrifying than what lurks around you—a superman complex that says if you’re not the hunter, you’re the hunted.
With Metro Boomin’s brooding, eerie production fitting onto his raps like a skin-tight costume, his latest release, Savage Mode, is his strongest and bleakest work. Credit Metro on another great job as a producer: Shaping his characteristically infectious sound to match the demented heaviness of 21’s verses, he creates a brooding collection that enhance 21’s disaffected cool. Savage Mode is vibrant despite being grim and understated; it's a street record where heavy lines like *“*Wet your mama’s house, wet your grandma’s house, keep shootin’ until somebody die/So many shots the neighbor looked at the calendar, thought it was Fourth of July” somehow bounce, and you find yourself nodding and flailing your arms. Those lyrics come from the plodding-yet-bouncy “No Heart,” which finds 21 sneering at “fake tough” rappers. When he raps, “Seventh grade I got caught with a pistol, sent me to Pantherville/Eighth grade started playin’ football, then I was like fuck the field/Ninth grade I was knocking niggas out, nigga like Holyfield/ Fast forward nigga, 2016 and I’m screaming fuck a deal,” he establishes what separates him from the rappers and shit talkers that claim a street life they don’t lead, but it also stands as an explanation for so much of the bleakness of the music and the performative apathy in how he treats violence; he’s been consumed by it in the most formative years of his life.
The grimness of so much of the album tends to make the few moments of sweetness hit harder. The album’s one tender song, “Feel It,” is staid and unimaginative but nonetheless unashamedly vulnerable and loving. “These streets so dirty I just want someone who really there/Can’t fake love, just want someone who really care” he raps, suddenly switching off the menace for a second; when he follows it with “I’m savage to these niggas but to her I’m gentle” you believe him. This same softer note comes through in the dreamy, contemplative “Ocean Drive” as he raps about the places rapping has taken him that he never thought he’d see.
There’s a lot to like and find invigorating about Savage Mode, but as a project, it is too conventional for its own good, never deviating from or adding anything fresh to the predictable beats expected of a trap record. It swims in violence, drugs and sex and only offers faint sketches of anything deeper. Sticking so squarely to the script precludes any possibility for 21 Savage to expand or break away; instead, it just sort of meanders about in well-trod territory.  Luckily, at only 9 tracks, the project doesn’t overstay its welcome. Just because something is predictable doesn’t stop it from being a good ride.


Swans are a band that conjure primal forms of power. Their second studio album since re-forming is among the group's longest and it manages to expand on their sound while simultaneously summarizing everything they've recorded before.

The Seer

Swans are a band that conjure primal forms of power: thunder and lightning, fire and brimstone, master over slave, predator over prey. Their earliest albums came out in the wake of New York's no wave scene, a loose, radical contest to see who could make rock'n'roll sound as ugly as possible while still retaining the rhythms and forms that made it rock'n'roll. Swans, not central to the scene, countered with the possibility of wiping out rock altogether. The result was something that sounds sort of like monks chanting in front of a jet engine. Frontman Michael Gira once compared being in the band to "trudging up a sand hill wearing a hair shirt, being sprayed with battery acid, with a midget taunting you"-- a description that could just as easily describe listening to them.
During the late 1980s and early 90s, Swans went through a goth phase, incorporating sparkly synths, reverb, acoustic guitars, and other signposts of what most people would call "music." But whenever things felt too comfortable, Gira would flatly drop lines like, "You never say you know me when I'm inside you," or, "I'm so glad I'm better than you are." Beauty and ugliness have never been as relevant to their music as the possibility of turning music into a space of confrontation. In the parlance of reality television, Swans aren't-- and never have been-- here to make friends.
After a nearly 15-year break during which Gira focused on the dark Americana project Angels of Light, Swans reformed. Since then, they've released two albums, one studio (2010's My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky) and one live (2012's We Rose From Your Bed With the Sun in Our Head). "[The reunion] is not repeating the past," Gira said in 2010. He is currently 58 years old and often photographed in a cowboy hat, not smiling. At two hours, The Seer is among the group's longest studio albums and, in a sweeping gesture that only the most confident and egocentric artists can pull off, it manages to expand on their sound while simultaneously summarizing everything they've ever recorded before.
The band's current palette includes a whole trunkload of acoustic instruments: bells, accordion, clarinet, dulcimer, a chorus of bagpipes, and what's referred to cryptically as "handmade violin thing." With the exception of some amplifier distortion, the album puts incredible emphasis on the human body's capacity to beat the shit out of an instrument in a far more satisfying way than machines ever could. (As an instructive gesture, Gira spends the first four-and-a-half minutes of "Mother of the World" panting in rhythm.) Noise has never been as much of a concern in Swans' music as pure dissonance; of the way certain combinations of notes literally cause the air to vibrate more violently than others. At its most chaotic, like the climax of "The Seer", the band doesn't just sound aggressive, it sounds like it's bursting apart.
The tracks on The Seer aren't songs but incantations, riffs piled on riffs shifting and evolving for as long as half an hour at a time. Sometimes Gira sings; often, there's a zombie-like chorus behind him. One section fades into the next in ways more reminiscent of a soundtrack than an album, and even relatively contained tracks like "Lunacy" start and end with winding, immersive passages as the band comes to a boil. Like airplanes, Swans take their taxiing and descent as seriously as their flight.
Stylistically, the album draws a jagged line through a universe of serious, apocalyptic music, from country blues to free jazz to drone and the brutal, hypnotic guitar rock Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth made while Gira was still moaning into the void. A big group of guests are important here. Former Swan Jarboe contributes, as do Karen O, and Ben Frost on my personal favorite credit, "fire sounds (acoustic and synthetic)." The bigger the group, the more familial the feeling and the more heightened the illusion is that the music is not coming from inside its players but existing, like a spirit, somewhere outside and between them.
In the same way it would be hard to get the full experience of a good movie by only watching half of it, The Seer demands its two hours. To paraphrase something the author Ben Marcus said in a trenchant conversation with Jonathan Franzen about the value of experimental fiction, it is not a record for someone deciding whether or not they'd rather be listening to music or playing paintball. Of course this doesn't mean you need to peel off your own skin while listening to enjoy it. It has made my experience of cleaning the house, for example, feel very, very consequential.
At each step of Swans' career, they've been somehow tied to whatever "dark" genre was most culturally prominent, but The Seer affirms what they really are and what their legacy will probably be: A psychedelic band that rejects the musical template of psychedelia the 60s gave us. Vision has always been a metaphor for both political counterculture and religious mysticism. Prophets, pulling back the veil, "seeing through" things in an interest of revealing what they believe to be the raw, burning truth-- this is what Swans have always been about, and what The Seer seems more explicitly occupied with than anything they've ever done before.
Gira had come out of art school, and even Swans' most mature sounding music is rooted in the kind of catharsis through self-negation that was at the conceptual heart of 70s performance and body art. One piece from his student days involved him being blindfolded and led naked into a roomful of strangers with a tape player strapped to his body, playing a prerecorded confession of his sexual desires. The piece's coordinators had found women willing to do the same. The crux of the piece was Gira and the stranger crawling around in the room until they found each other, at which point, they'd have sex.
In the world of Swans, the pain of catharsis is always in service of elevating to some higher plane of being. Granted, most people probably prefer to find this in exercise and not public sex, but when sifting through Swans' apparent bleakness, it's important to recognize that their goals are and always have been to remind us of the ways extreme states of being, however intense, a unique kind of blessing. One of their live albums was called Feel Good Now, which is as succinct a self-summary as any artist could offer: Later, Swans bluntly suggest, you'll be dead.
Is this music primal? Yes. Intense? Absurdly so. On "A Piece of the Sky", Gira sings that "the sun fucks the dawn." Why the sun can't just come out normally is unclear. But there's still room for music like this, music that claws its way unapologetically toward wherever it thinks answers might be hiding. After all, without Icarus and his wings, we might never know how high the sky went or how hot the sun got. For 30 years Swans have challenged the boundaries between beauty and ugliness, music and noise, catharsis and abuse. To borrow a verb from their own violent, polarized world, The Seer is the album that transcends them.


Twenty years after their debut, Pearl Jam reissue the LPs that marked their peak cultural impact and transformation into the world's biggest cult act.

Pearl Jam: Vs. [Legacy Edition] / Vitalogy [Legacy Edition] / Live at the Orpheum Theatre, Boston

In 2011, Pearl Jam celebrate the achievement of having been Pearl Jam for a very long time. It's their 20th anniversary, and they're marking the occasion with a blowout, yearlong victory lap: a massive curated festival, a career-spanning documentary directed by Cameron Crowe, and loving reissues of their second and third albums, Vs. and Vitalogy. It's an unusually protracted foray into the limelight for what was once a chronically spotlight-averse band, but they seem to be wearing the moment lightly, savoring it for its valedictory worth and gladly soaking up the adulation. In the years that spanned the original release of these two albums, they spent most of their effort scrambling to escape stardom, and Vs. and Vitalogy bear their struggle's deepest marks.
This willful abdication of fame has become their most well-known, oft-told story, and seeing these records given lavish repackaging only highlights that it feels like ancient history now. Consider: The opening salvo in Pearl Jam's war against commercialism was their decision, for 1993's Vs., not to make a video for MTV, a situation with no present-day analogue. Their protracted feud against Ticketmaster seems similarly remote now that Pearl Jam seemingly never stop touring: whether you live in Albany, West Palm Beach, Ljubljana, or Katowice, Pearl Jam probably just stopped by or will be there shortly, treating their entire discography like an all-you-can-eat buffet. These days, few bands are more comfortable in their own skin than Pearl Jam, and the monolithic mass culture bearing down on them in 1993 has vanished into thin air.
But even if the media context has long crumbled, the sound of a young band absolutely freaking the fuck out is still loud and clear on Vs. and Vitalogy, and it makes them Pearl Jam's most resonant and affecting records. Their huge-selling debut, Ten, hit with an impact that could not be repeated, and they would go on to make some very good music later in their career. But as a band, this remains their most vital and endearing period-- the last time the entire world cared deeply about what Pearl Jam would do next.
Their music, as always, remains the least complex part of this equation. Pearl Jam's retooled take on classic rock was often lumpy and flat-footed, and they sounded hopelessly unfashionable next to their punk-influenced contemporaries. But focusing on these flaws, as most rock critics did and still do, misses out on the music's signature virtue, which is communication. It is this burning and self-evident need for human connection, more than anything else, that has always elevated and redeemed their most dubious efforts, and it was a quality personified by Eddie Vedder, an empathetic lead singer who transmitted a vivid emotional intensity. At its most winning, Pearl Jam's music exudes his best personality traits: warm, earnest, generous, passionate, and, yeah, harmlessly dopey sometimes.
Consider, for example, Vs.'s cringe-inducing gun-control song "Glorified G". "Kindred to being an American," Vedder pronounces in a hokey fake-jingo accent, over a corn-pone Skynyrd guitar lick: it's the sort of wince-inducing mess we get when he attempts to be caustic. Vs. is filled with this sort of clumsily wielded, early-90s political indignation, and it can make for precarious listening. Nevertheless, Vedder's anguished tenor anchors us through some rough waters-- including "Dissident", which, for some reason, focuses on the Lifetime movie-worthy story of a lonely spinster giving shelter to and falling for a charismatic young revolutionary, only to surrender him to the authorities. It is a profoundly ludicrous song. But the way Vedder hollers "she gave him away," you'll catch yourself momentarily shaking your head in disgust at the woman's cowardice. Hell, even "Glorified G" boasts a killer bridge.
In retrospect, however, Vs. appears as the moment where it became crystal-clear that Pearl Jam's ballads were ultimately stronger than their rockers. For all their clenched fury, songs like "Go", "Animal", and "Blood" mostly just thrashed awkwardly in place. "Daughter", by contrast, is plaintive and lovely, and "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" has survived nearly two decades of dorm-room slaughtering intact, an effortless and sunlit acoustic ballad that Rod Stewart could have written for Every Picture Tells a Story.
By the time of 1994's Vitalogy, Pearl Jam had spent a lot of energy on extra-musical fights. Recorded during breaks on their strenuous Vs. tour and subject to the communication breakdown of the entire band, Vedder took his strongest hand yet in the album's direction, pushing further from arena rock pyrotechnics. Somewhere in there, the original drummer-- good-natured hesher Dave Abbruzzese-- was fired due to "personality conflicts." (Read: he enjoyed being famous.)
The resulting album is still a defiantly weird beast, though not really in the way Vedder intended it to be. Under his direction, Vitalogy became their "experimental" album-- which, in Pearl Jam lingo, translates to "the one with all the most transparently awful ideas." On "Spin the Black Circle", we are treated to the spectacle of an empathetic, intuitive surfer straining to be a splenetic NYC punk rocker, while the band behind him falls over itself trying to keep pace with a simple hardcore riff. The polyrhythmic chanting of "Aya Davanita" sounds like corporate-retreat weekend warriors seeking their inner third eye in a drum circle. The accordion-and-tuba spoken-word of "Bugs" is an avert-your eyes, car-crash attempt at Captain Beefheart surrealism. And "Hey, Foxymophandelmama, That's Me" is an eight-minute sound collage featuring snippets of dialog from mental patients.
Here's the funny thing, though, about all of Vitalogy's ill-advised wandering-- it paid off elsewhere. Through all these misadventures, you can hear what was once the most rigid rhythmic backbone in rock began to stretch and pull like taffy, so that when Pearl Jam relax into a Stooges/MC5 proto-punk groove on "Last Exit", they sound rough, loose and limber like never before. In the snarling, adenoidal "Satan's Bed", Vedder actually manages one or two acerbically funny lines. It all came together on "Corduroy", which moves fluidly from quiet brooding to seething explosions to, in the chorus, a simple, humane plea, set to Vedder's single greatest melody.
"Corduroy"'s famous plea, of course, was from Vedder to his own too-adoring fans. "I don't wanna be held in your debt," he sang shakily to millions-- and, entranced, they screamed it back at him. The poignancy of Vitalogy, and the source of its actual weirdness, is how it veers from Vedder's impulse to hide from everyone and his instinctual desire to reach out. Nothing captures these warring impulses better than "Nothingman" and "Better Man", two folk-rock pillars of their catalog that are as open-hearted and yearning as anything they ever wrote. Even when he was trying his hardest to scowl at the world, Vedder couldn't help feeling, all over the place, for everyone. Misanthropy was always unbecoming on him. Most of his best, most beloved, and resonant songs are about other people's problems: "Nothingman", "Better Man", "Daughter", "Elderly Woman". In concert, the kiss-off of "Corduroy" has become Pearl Jam's most joyful, communal moment.
Live, Pearl Jam have always been a legendarily intense experience, and they've made an alarmingly consistent practice of making at least momentary believers out of anyone who sees them. The Vitalogy and Vs. reissues come bundled with a recording of the band at their early peak, at a 1994 show at Boston's Orpheum. It's a rousing set, and it opens compellingly, on Ten's slow-burn "Oceans". But years of live-Pearl-Jam-recording fatigue has dulled the impact of another official release-- this is a band that once decided to officially release every single show of a world tour, after all-- and Live at the Orpheum Theatre contains no real revelations. As they have done for years, they cover Neil Young's "Fuckin' Up" (the version on Live on Two Legs hits harder.) They play "Even Flow"; they don't play "Jeremy". The only real surprises are when Vedder drastically changes the words to "Immortality", and when he brings out Mudhoney's Mark Arm for a vicious rip through the Dead Boys' "Sonic Reducer". (Unable to bring himself to utter the dreaded g-word, he introduces Arm as "one of the forefathers of... uh... all the great music that everyone listens to.") It's a fine set, but it's hardly necessary.
In the ensuing decade-plus after Vs. and Vitalogy, Pearl Jam have gone from utter exile to a comfortable perch on the fringes. That's where they sit now, finding refuge in their live shows, which have developed a traveling-cult aura that clearly recalls the Grateful Dead's. For the members of Pearl Jam, however, the live shows don't just bring together their faithful; they rewrite the band's own troubled history. In 2011, it doesn't matter what song they drag out in concert: "Lukin", the one-minute punk brain-fart from No Code? The poignant but relatively rare B-side single "I Got Id"? The ukulele song from Binaural? No worries: The crowd knows every word and will go absolutely apeshit for it. They can thrash joyfully through "Spin the Black Circle" as if Jeff Ament and Mike McCready didn't grit their way through the recording session. Hell, they can even play "Bugs" live now if they want. These days, they have the aura of happy, weathered warriors, proud to have just made it out together. The live show remains the most optimal set of conditions to give yourself over to their ham-fisted grandeur; go see them, if you have a chance. They'll be by soon.


With impressive performances and a few promising moments, the young Brooklyn post-punk band clearly knows all the right moves—but it’s hard to tell what moves them.

Projector

A band as studious in the rock canon as Geese knows the value of a good narrative. The quintet were actual high schoolers while making their debut album, Projector, and it arrives with a virtually cinematic tagline: In a world at the mercy of TikTok teens, here comes a good old fashioned Brooklyn buzz band restoring New York post-punk to its rightful place as the only music that should matter.
That’s the hype talking, not Geese—but Projector doesn’t go out of its way to contradict it. Their very first single after signing to Partisan, hell their first single ever, is nearly seven minutes, a SparkNoting of Talking Heads’ scope of influence over the past 40 years. Ask five music nerds between the ages of 18 and 55 what it sounds like and they’ll provide a different but accurate answer. Cameron Winter’s lyrics are a portrait of the aspiring Brooklyn indie rock artist as a young man, loosely connected images of empty house parties, grubby tour vans, and the way alcohol sublimates minor romantic misunderstandings into the raw material for generational classics. Even the title itself—“Disco” somehow both vague and impossibly vast—suggests “signature song” was its starting point.
Geese also acknowledge the necessity for a proper mission statement. Despite being the unequivocal highlight of Projector, opener “Rain Dance” was wisely avoided as a lead single, assuming an audience that longs for the days of reading a 10/10 NME review weeks before they rush to Sam Goody and see what all the fuss is about. Geese sprint from the starting gun, an urgent performance that gives little indication of Projector’s largely mid-tempo pace. Dan Carey—the producer who has become a veritable Max Martin for young post-punk—provides a muscular mix that leaves enough space for ear-turning, barbershop harmonies and whirring synths. “Bring me back to life,” Winter asks somewhat sheepishly before it morphs to “Coming back to life!” a minute later. And once you’ve declared yourself the resurrection, “Low Era” submits that there’s only one thing left to do—strut.
Geese are an impressive band, full stop. But is Projector the result of prodigious talent meeting uncanny inspiration or just what happens when kids in their formative years apply their seemingly unlimited enthusiasm and attention towards a singular obsession following a well-worn path? Geese repeatedly trace over the tessellated guitar harmonies and cut-time rhythms of Women while disposing of the meat locker ambience that amplified the severity of their lyricism. They can slice and dice like the Rapture, but their interest in proper dance music only goes so far as naming one of their songs “Disco.” In Projector’s most promising and only original moments, Geese make a tentative embrace of a reverberant grandeur that puts them more in line with U2—probably the least cool band they’ve been compared to in their short career, but still the most popular band that ever legitimately could call themselves post-punk. Geese know all the right moves, but what really moves them?
As “Low Era” indicates both literally and figuratively, Geese have yet to find their voice. Winter jives in a half-falsetto (“Some are born with the psychic inflection,” big if true!) before settling on his dominant mode, an affected yawp broad enough to evoke Julian Casablancas, James Murphy, and maybe those times when Will Toledo does his caricature of the two. What Winter hasn’t done yet is develop a distinct narrative personality that can make his blasé delivery feel earned, rather than a conscientious stylistic tic. Projector is rife with clever phrases that infect Geese’s teenaged fixation on minute social interactions with the similarly teenaged tendency towards obtuse metaphors to distract from what they really mean. Even granting Winter authorial license, his ambitious, occasionally resonant, and often belabored lines about NYC ennui and what it all means scan like the thoughts of people whose worldview was largely shaped by listening to Is This It.
Maybe they’re not Greta Van Fleet with a dog-eared copy of Meet Me in the Bathroom, but if Geese were in the middle of a four-band bill at the Mercury Lounge in 2002, would we remember them now? Would they still be considered legit post-punk prodigies if they were 20 and from Brookline, Massachusetts instead? Would Geese be better served if they were deemed 2021’s answer to the Stills rather than the Strokes? Maybe, but none of these hypotheticals are true. Nearly every one of their reference points may have once been intended as subversion, incubated in New York’s grimiest clubs, but for as long as Geese have been a band, Talking Heads are a classic rock institution, the Strokes can headline festivals in off-cycles and win Grammys for recapturing even a hint of their former glory, and CBGB is a restaurant at the Newark Airport. Projector is best appreciated not as the work of post-punk’s resurrectors but its cocky, charismatic trust fund kids: unconcerned with the legitimacy of their inheritance and confident that there’s no way they can fail.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Kanye West’s stint in Wyoming created an album born from chaos for chaos’ sake. Though it can be somewhat fascinating, it is undoubtedly a low point in his career.

ye

There is something about the crumbling of American civilization that makes you want to say “fuck it” and go full cowboy; cue Kanye West and friends cosplaying Wyoming as a concept, living out a dude-ranch fantasy beneath the Tetons. It was there, in Jackson Hole—the most economically imbalanced city in America—where Kanye threw together his eighth album in the midst of a public unraveling that, in a society where celebrity wasn’t deified, would be the stuff that ends a career.
In the month leading up to ye, during which he and his team of producers and songwriters created the 24-minute album in its entirety, West proudly donned a Trump-autographed MAGA hat, sputtered that slavery seemed like a choice, and offered a steady stream of empty platitudes urging his followers to “stop thinking so much” and “google dopamine.” He was broadly considered “canceled,” a term we use because we at some point collectively decided to project our sociopolitical hopes and fears onto millionaires. And then, in keeping with his tradition of elaborate, immersive rollouts, he chartered private planes for 150 or so influencers to listen by Jackson Hole campfire to seven tracks he farted out to meet his arbitrarily self-imposed deadline. Those who are obsessed with money assume goodwill can be bought. Even “free-thinkers” know nothing really comes for free.
If West has successfully pulled off anything this album cycle, it is managing expectations with all the shameless savvy of his in-laws, the Kardashians. Of course, Kanye West was never really going to get canceled. West knows better than anyone that a few decent beats to remind people of The Old Kanye are usually enough to replenish one’s goodwill, bleak as it may be. And while ye, whose diminutive title feels appropriate, may be vacant of soul and full of punchlines like, “Don’t get your tooth chipped like Frito-Lay,” it is at the very least not West’s alt-right album—that’s where the bar is set now. Nor is it the Performance Art 101 bait-and-switch some fans had hypothesized. Instead, ye reveals that the past month’s flailing attempts at iconoclasm were building up to exactly nothing: It is an album born from chaos for chaos’ sake, an album that can barely be bothered to refer to that chaos with anything more committal than a Kanye shrug.
It would be convenient to say that ye fails because of his persona. It remains unclear exactly when West lost the map: Perhaps it was recently, or perhaps he has always been an ideologue representing nothing more or less than the hyper-individualist dogma of Kanye West. Until this year, the music had always been great enough to ostensibly eclipse the man himself, had we wanted that. But for most of the 2000s, loudly declaring West an asshole was, in itself, a certified asshole move, the party line of drunk uncles and least-favorite cousins. And besides that, the intersection of his art and persona was made clear eight years ago when he toasted to his own douchiness before anybody else could.
If anything, ye compresses the Kanye West character, making everything about the artist feel smaller, blurrier, like you are squinting at an image once larger than life. We have reached the point where West’s once-constant churn of ideas—usually inspired, regularly awkward, but always like nothing else out there—is barely meeting the standard of “Lift Yourself,” the desperate troll banger that preceded ye,  corralling every meaning of the word “scat.” The problem with ye is not that it was made by an unrepentant asshole, but that it is thoroughly, exhaustingly boring—a word I never imagined would apply to a generation’s most reliable innovator.
As an art-making ethos, “first thought, best thought” works great for beat poetry and hardcore. For most pop stars, including those deemed geniuses, a few weeks to create an album start to finish is hopeless. To be fair, West has pulled his share of buzzer-beaters: a decent chunk of Yeezus’ vocals were written and recorded in the 48 hours before deadline and for all we know, he’s still fixing “Wolves.” Those last-minute edits registered as the neurosis of a perfectionist—annoying, definitely, but at least a sign of care. But ye feels rickety, almost, as if removing a bassline would send the whole thing toppling. The lyrics riff on events of the past month, sometimes the past week. When West announced the album alongside four other G.O.O.D. Music productions in late April, none of ye’s seven songs existed. You could argue that this isn’t exactly a shocking development. If there’s anything that unites the divergent sounds across West’s catalog, it’s their reactionary nature—antagonistic responses to his previous material (in the case of Yeezus) or the state of rap at large (on his earliest popped-collar mixtapes) or to his public perception (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy).
But ye responds petulantly and exclusively to reactions deliberately provoked by West himself, the kind of thing you’d expect from a YouTube celebrity whose last name is Paul. It’s as if he’d completely forgotten the music was the reason we loved him in the first place. “Yeezy Yeezy trolling OD, ha!/Turn TMZ to Smack DVD, ha!” he scoffs in an anesthetized Juvenile flow on the aptly-named “Yikes.” He is referring to his recent visit to the gossip site’s headquarters, where he was duly humiliated by a newsroom employee after suggesting slaves should have simply emancipated themselves and invoking the right-wing dog whistle of black-on-black crime in his hometown of Chicago. Somehow, still, he sounds proud. “Yikes” offers no further insight into West’s beliefs because there is not much more to say. Instead, he flips Russell Simmons’ rape allegations into a cringey #MeToo punchline; his conclusion is relief that it isn’t him in the hot seat. “Wouldn’t Leave”—a minimalist re-conjuring of The Old Kanye where Young Thug, PARTYNEXTDOOR, and Ty Dolla $ign’s voices melt into one—presents a telling glimpse into the Kardashian-Wests’ psyches. “She told you not to do that shit/She told you you was gonna fuck the money up,” West casually reminds himself on the outro, presenting the past month’s careless fuckery as a quirky tale of how boys will be boys while exposing the foul inner mechanics of brand management.
It is dark, dark, dark, as one might expect of a record that opens with a song called “I Thought About Killing You,” which pretty much does what it says on the tin. “I think about killing myself, and I love myself way more than I love you, so…” West rambles over a queasy, almost negligible beat that builds into a sped-up, uncleared sample from PAN’s 2017 mono no aware ambient compilation. These are not easy statements to hear, no matter how casually West presents them, and they’re contextualized further by the album art: an iPhone photo of Jackson Hole’s horizon, snapped en route to the listening session, on which West has scrawled “I hate being Bi-Polar its awesome” [sic]. As West sells it, ye is an album devoted to the stand-off between visceral self-loathing and baroque levels of narcissism, further complicated by mental illness and a recent opiate addiction. Listening to “Killing You,” it’s unclear whether West’s violent thoughts are directed at his wife or towards himself, or if he even means it at all: maybe a homicidal fantasy is just another badass way to start an album, an inverted “Ultralight Beam.” It is the work of a broken man, whatever the case. But to meet West on his terms here feels impossible. In his world, self-expression justifies itself, and speaking your most twisted thoughts out loud is an act of bravery, one that makes “I Thought About Killing You” not just a fine thing to write and share, but a work made from a place of love. Art, then, is a way of existing beyond reproach, an excuse for everything.
“People say, ‘Don’t say this, don’t say that’—just say it out loud, just to see how it feels,” West encourages further in “Killing You,” still speaking plainly, without much emotion. It is the most coherent distillation of his creative mindset that West has offered all shaky-ass year. Just do whatever, this attitude suggests: All art is good art so long as it feels honest, and anything goes so long as you worship yourself. ye is a record made entirely from this “Just say it out loud” ethos—from the dead-eyed dad jokes (“None of us would be here without cum,” is an immediate contender for worst-ever West punchline, and that’s considering “Swaghili”) to the production, a re-gifted grab-bag that borrows indiscriminately from almost every pre-existing West epoch.
That “Ghost Town” is ye’s clear highlight feels loaded: handled at the front half by John Legend, stolen on the back half by recent G.O.O.D. signee and emo-rap heiress apparent 070 Shake, and held down by a grungy refrain from Kid Cudi, it is the track where West’s contributions are most easily ignored. He gargles a few half-finished thoughts, his tone not so much sad as dazed, re-using the verse melody from “Runaway” over a sample chop that, at one point, sounds a whole lot like his work with JAY-Z on “Otis.” Shake’s performance is unexpectedly magnetic, yelping, “I put my hand on the stove, to see if I still bleed/And nothing hurts anymore, I feel kinda free.” It’s an ode to total numbness, and somehow it’s also ye’s emotional climax, an irony as apt as it is depressing.
By the time you’ve considered settling in, the album’s basically over, saving its most retrograde sentiment for last. “Violent Crimes” is certainly a spicy title for a song about West’s 4-year-old daughter, North, who he fears will one day become hot, illustrating these fears in disturbingly specific detail. (You can almost picture Nas in the Jackson Hole ski lodge, resting a solemn hand on West’s shoulder: “You’re 40 now, Ye. It’s time for your ‘as a father of daughters’ song.”) Over dull, sappy keys, West speculates about the ways in which North’s teenaged body might one day make his life difficult, warning, “Don’t do no yoga, don’t do pilates,” as though her hypothetical puberty was a personal affront—this from the guy who once defended, in all caps, Bill Cosby’s innocence. Of the many “father guarding their daughter’s virtue” ballads I have heard in my life, “Violent Crimes” is unquestionably the most uncomfortable listen. “How did he think this would go over?!” I wondered incredulously on first listen, but the simplest answer is, he probably didn’t. And just like that: the eighth Kanye West album, out with a whimper.
So to seek answers within ye—answers that do not involve fucking Stormy Daniels lookalikes while tripping on DMT, at least—feels foolish. And maybe Kanye West doesn’t owe us answers. Maybe we cared way too much, projecting all that genius onto a guy who wore shutter shades and never missed an opportunity for a mayonnaise pun. Maybe it created a dynamic that’s turned out to be actively toxic to both music and politics. Maybe we should abolish the word “genius,” or just find heroes who give a shit. But I can admit that after ye ended unceremoniously the third or fourth time, I put on “Family Business,” and I thought about the kid from Chicago who wanted to be the biggest rapper in the world, who now lives in an empty-looking concrete mansion in Calabasas, who has stopped trying.


The advance singles for Justin Bieber’s Purpose showcased his best performances to date while hinting at a successful transition beyond teen pop. And yet, the full record too often comes off like a redemptive PowerPoint presentation while suggesting that the singer’s idea of "adulthood" involves the ability to convey pettiness without emotional intelligence.

Purpose

Purpose is less an album than a deliberate act of repositioning. As much as 2012's Believe was intended as Justin Bieber's micro-adjustment into adulthood, the advance singles for Purpose, "What Do You Mean?" and "Sorry", are his first hits without any traces of teen-pop. They're designed much in the spirit of "Where Are Ü Now", his single with Skrillex and Diplo from earlier this year, where Bieber's voice fluctuated through animated throbs. Produced, respectively, by MdL and Skrillex (who contributes six productions to the record), "What Do You Mean?" and "Sorry" are vivid tropical house tracks that sound like sunlight drifting down through palm fronds. Bieber's voice often resembles a breath contorted inexpressively through notes; here, he lets it weightlessly fall through textures. They are his best performances to date, allowing him to flex a rhythmic playfulness without communicating an iota of legible emotion.
Purpose doesn't particularly follow up on the advances suggested by his previous release, the 2013 R&B experiment Journals. That record was Bieber's first attempt at casting himself as an adult, but its efforts, alternately curious and anonymous, went largely unnoticed. For its part, Purpose mostly suggests that Bieber's idea of "adulthood" is the ability to convey pettiness without emotional intelligence. On new single "Love Yourself", an Ed Sheeran co-write that also functions as a gentle kiss-off, Bieber sings "If you like the way you look that much/ Baby, you should go and love yourself." Lyrically it's needlessly mean, neither funny nor clever, and it doesn't do much to justify the severity of its perspective.
The songs on Purpose have a similarly inanimate feeling; they seem to radiate more than they move. "No Sense" feels oddly hookless and almost willfully ugly, and when Travis Scott surfaces toward the end of the track, he registers as just another cold texture. Nothing here has the captivating, lopsided construction of Journals' "Confident". "No Pressure", featuring Big Sean, comes close with its shimmering, processed acoustic guitars—though the song might have appeared lighter and more nimble in the hands of someone like Usher.
In general, vagueness, indecision, and faint befuddlement suit Bieber best. "The Feeling", produced by Skrillex, describes a liminal, unstable state ("Am I in love or am I in love with the feeling?"), and the track fittingly seems to slip in and out of focus. Halsey, who released one of the worst singles of the year with "New Americana", proves an ideal counterweight to Bieber, and together the two effortlessly convey the gentle intensity of a crush. At these moments, when Bieber is allowed to remain a lithe and fluttery element zippering in and out of a canvas, he sounds most comfortable.
But when Bieber is required to slow down and emote, he sounds adenoidal and aggressively blank. "Life Is Worth Living", a piano ballad in which every chord seems indifferently faxed in, is one of the many songs on which Bieber struggles to justify himself to the public. "My reputation's on the line, so I'm working on a better me," he sings. As much as this record is part of his long campaign of rehabilitation, he struggles to convey a remotely sympathetic perspective. His similes tend to get terrestrial when he's talking about himself: "It's like you're stuck on a treadmill/ Running in the same place." On the title track, he sings, "Look at all the promises I've kept," as if gesturing to a PowerPoint presentation.
The second half of the album is monochromatic and depressing, especially as it runs out to 20 tracks in certain versions. (Two of the bonus tracks, "Been You" and "Get Used to It", are pneumatic, funky disco pop tracks that sound only slightly removed from this year's Jason Derulo album; they're better than nearly anything on the album proper.) Near the end of the album is "Children", an embarrassing and overwrought attempt at social consciousness. It might be an attempt at writing his own "Man in the Mirror", an outward gaze among so many shallow inward ones. "What about the children?" he asks meaninglessly. "Who's got the heart?" The question hangs uneasily.


Underground rap's biggest breakout of 2008-09 finally releases his major-label debut; plus, a look at the best of his many recent mixtapes.

Gucci Mane: The Burrprint: The Movie 3-D / The State vs. Radric Davis

In March 2009, Atlanta rapper Gucci Mane came home from prison after serving six months for violating parole. Then, in November, Gucci violated again and went right back to prison for another year-long bid. That means Gucci only had about eight months of freedom in 2009. In that time he still managed to release, by my count, six mixtapes (including the three-in-one-day Cold War series) and one official album. He also found time to crank out an absurd number of guest-verses, videos, and live shows, buried a long-raging feud with Young Jeezy, and made minor stars out of proteges OJ Da Juiceman and Waka Flocka Flame. Along the way, he became rap's most divisive figure, with the internet peanut gallery lining up to call him everything from a borderline-retarded grunter to rap's last, best hope. If you followed rap in 2009, you had to have some opinion on Gucci. He had quite a year.
For the uninitiated, Gucci is a tough sell. The sheer volume of his output means there's no go-to entry point. He delivers all his lyrics in a marbled monotone so thick that his lyrics can be hard to make out on first listen. He never highlights his punchlines (or anything else, really); they just float by. He favors one simple, monotonic type of beat: a tense, sproingy, synth-based thing that always just sounds cheap. He raps way, way more about his cars and jewelry than anything else.
Over time, though, those liabilities become strengths. Because he mushmouths his punchlines so hard, you have to listen harder and more often to hear them. And it certainly helps that his punchlines are often dizzily funny and inventively intricate: "Popping Cris, think that I need Alcohol Anonymous/ 45 in the club, I could kill a hippopotamus." His deadpan is great for "wait, did he really say that?" reactions. And even if his actual delivery rarely varies, he has some bottomless number of actual flows; he attacks the beat differently on every verse, putting inflections and pauses in unexpected places and still always finding the beat's pocket. His unrelenting focus on materialistic shit rarely rankles because he's better at rapping about that stuff than just about anyone else. Both his monochromatic beats and his staggering productivity give his work a sense of immersion, hitting the same note again and again with immensely satisfying results-- like a daylong sick-day binge on James Bond movies.
And with Gucci, there's also a sense of shared experience. People are listening to this guy; he's not just another voice in the internet echo chamber. He's ascended to a very particular type of cult stardom in an age when rap stars aren't supposed to exist anymore. He's found his audience by elevating ignorance to expertly absurdist art, thus making his 2009 a worthy successor to Cam'ron's 2004 or Lil Wayne's 2005. He's been on a very, very serious roll.
The October DJ Drama collaboration Movie 3D: The Burrprint remains the greatest of Gucci's 2009 mixtapes, in part because it's the purest example of his aesthetic. This is wheelhouse Gucci: Drug- and money-talk over simple, eerie Casio beats with no crossover attempts and almost no guest spots from rappers outside Gucci's close-knit camp. Gucci's boasts and put-downs are playful but matter-of fact throughout: "You are not the owner of that car that is a loaner/ I got money stacks that's tall as you cause that's just my persona." Even when he's describing crack houses in detail, he keeps telling jokes and making up goofy metaphors. There's one song about turning down ugly groupies and another about how he has to hang out with his shadow because he's so far beyond everyone else. The members of his inconsistent 1017 Brick Squad crew all nail their verses on the trio of posse cuts.
But the mixtape's greatest asset might be its sneakily melodic sensibility. Gucci's delivery has a casual singsong elegance that you never quite see coming, and the result means virtually every chorus is memorable-- something unthinkable from almost any other rapper. And since Gucci almost never raps over other people's beats, that means you're getting an hour's worth of full-on songs, something that not even Cam and Wayne offered during their peak-era runs.
You'd think that instinctive ear for hooks would convince Warner, Gucci's label, to let him do his thing unencumbered on the official album, The State Vs. Radric Davis. But lead single "Spotlight", a tone-deaf Usher collab that keeps exactly nothing of what makes Gucci likable; it had people doomsaying before the album ever came out. Mostly, though, the LP does a good job keeping Gucci's culty selling points intact on a larger stage. Regular collaborators Zaytoven and Fatboi turn in several beats each, and many of the other tracks, from name producers like Jazze Pha and Scott Storch, sound a lot like Zaytoven beats. Big-name guests like Wayne and Cam bring their A-games because they know they're dealing with a rapper on their level.
Most importantly, Gucci maintains his singular weirdness throughout. He keeps finding unexpected ways to say the same stuff: "I be runnin' gunnin' stunnin' with a hundred killers riiiiiidin'/ And you snitchin' bitchin' tattle tellin' and scared to stand besiiiiiide me." He says some stuff that barely makes sense: "Eat rappers like Jeffrey Dahmer/ Dope color Sinead O'Connor." He has one song about wearing all-yellow everything and another where guest crooner Bobby Valentino offers to fuck you in front of your father. He sings the chorus of Amy Winehouse's "Rehab" mid-verse. There are a few missteps, like the run of mid-album R&B tracks that saps some momentum. But the LP has a energy rare to major-label rap efforts. Like Wayne's Tha Carter II, it translates Gucci's mixtape triumphs into something more digestible and immediate.
Of course, the album came out when Gucci was back in prison and sold way fewer copies than expected. Gucci's detractors took the opportunity to declare his regional stardom a grand illusion. Those detractors should take a good, hard listen to the late-album track "Worst Enemy"-- a rare introspective moment where Gucci extends something resembling an olive branch to Jeezy and frankly discusses his own self-destructive tendencies, all without compromising his dense, frantically hopscotching sense of wordplay. So: When he feels like it, Gucci can talk about serious matter with the same infectious verve that he uses to call your jeweler a loser. Artistically, at least, he's just getting started. And now that he's going to be locked up for a while, the world has a chance to catch up.


On Sage Elsesser’s Def Jam debut, smooth gospel samples set the tone for a worshipful exploration of the ancestral wisdom that guides his present.

Ways of Knowing

Family runs deep in the life and music of Sage Elsesser. In the eight years since he first began sharing songs on SoundCloud as Navy Blue, his relatives have maintained a constant presence: glimmers of light amid his sparse, brooding compositions. On Ways of Knowing, his major-label debut, Elsesser draws them into the foreground and leans on their wisdom as he navigates life as an adult. The loops remain hypnotic, the bass lightly funky. But the murkiness that defined much of Elsesser’s early work gives way to the understated confidence of a man who draws strength from the roots of his family tree.
Elsesser pushes those roots deeper as he reaches toward the sky. Messages from the ancestors weave between lessons learned from lovers. His confessional style—honest and open, never sentimental—makes him sound mature beyond his 26 years. How does a young man achieve such clarity? Ways of Knowing reveals its source: a family that nourished him spiritually, while providing him the freedom to grow, learn, and make mistakes.
“Pillars” is the cornerstone of these themes. The song zooms in on brief moments with Elsesser’s grandmother: a daily kiss on the forehead, the sight of her late husband reflected in her grandson’s face. Their connection recalls fond memories, which lead to the acceptance of their inevitable farewell. It’s here we see the clearest signs of growth. No longer content to dwell in darkness, this Navy Blue finds joy in solemnity. When he offers a glimpse into the wreckage of his real-life relationship with the model Binx Walton on “The One” and “Fall in Love,” he lays bare his flaws and insecurities, looking back not with regret, but with hope for a better future. It’s as if he had his mother in his ear in the booth, reminding him that “expectation presents grounds for disappointment.”
More than any of Elsesser’s other records, Ways of Knowing carries a worshipful tone. Not of any particular deity—even the Yoruba Orishas he references are less gods than guiding spirits—but that of the self, the ancestors, and the threads that link them. He finds an attuned collaborator in producer Budgie (best known for The Good Book, a multi-volume collaboration with The Alchemist) and his trove of obscure gospel and R&B records. Budgie’s production across Ways of Knowing is elegant and focused, its textures subtle, with flourishes that occupy the periphery, lest they distract from the message. Even his smoothed-out ’90s R&B loops sound spiritual, like the quiet storm melody from Mike Davis’ album cut “Call Me” that he loops for “Chosen.” And, in a last-minute addition to the credits, Frank Ocean collaborator Om’Mas Keith—whose contributions to Blonde memorably became a subject of legal dispute—is also named as a producer on several tracks, and plays piano on “Freehold.”
It all makes for a gorgeous record that’s subdued without being sleepy and cerebral without becoming a third-eye word salad. Elsesser’s words carry the weight of wisdom—some his own, from a life lived passionately, but most passed down from his ancestors. Rhythm from his father, a Rastafarian drummer; perspective from his grandfather, who instructed a young Elsesser to read Frederick Douglass to understand the plight of his people; the tenderness of his mother, whose words encourage him to love himself; and the nuance of vanity from his grandmother, who raised a family full of artists, models, and style icons. It took all of them and more to create Navy Blue.
Correction: An earlier version of this review included a lyric about Navy Blue’s grandmother’s grave that could be misinterpreted. It has since been removed.