With a group behind him that recalls the electronic jazz splatter of ’90s New York, Dave Harrington’s guitar work becomes a psychedelic, soft-hued quest for transcendence.

Dave Harrington: Pure Imagination, No Country

Pure Imagination, No Country

Dave Harrington gives himself some context, which is one of the main challenges of the modern guitar soloist. As one half of the electro-jam duo Darkside, Harrington threaded his glimmering instrumental lines through Nicolas Jaar’s downtempo deconstructions. Their 2013 debut Psychic used this formula to ground their compositions and break through to an audience of head dancers in the international language of minimalist space-funk. After one full-length, the duo put the project on hold and Harrington soon hit a different kind of club scene, gigging relentlessly around New York with a variety of configurations and finding an audience amid the local jam cognoscenti.
On Pure Imagination, No Country, recorded with the Dave Harrington Group, the approach owes more to the ’90s electronic jazz splatter of downtown Manhattan clubs like the Knitting Factory than the beats of the trans-national dance floor. The problem of context is still mostly solved, Harrington’s traditional six-string electric guitar is set against the void of anything-is-possible electronics. The sometimes jazz-like project, then, becomes a quest for the transcendently new and comes back with convincing results.
Pure Imagination surfs the tension between Harrington’s lyricism and a psychedelic sense of structure, unafraid to abandon form. Alternating atmospheres (“Dreams Field”) with the occasional freak-beat (“Then I Woke Up”), the pay-offs come when Harrington plays at his most deeply linear. “Belgrade Fever” superficially resembles Darkside with its tightly coiled guitar lines, but it soon cracks open into a long and moody solo, where Harrington shows off his solution to that second main challenge of the modern improvising guitarist: voice.
Throughout the album, Harrington adeptly switches into a mode where his notes cluster like the blooms of small alien flowers. He can sometimes recall Bill Frisell, though Harrington is more likely to dissolve into abstraction. Pure Imagination might even be divided into the too-easy categories of inside and outside, each setting up the other in constant rotation. While credited to the Dave Harrington Group, the music might be one musician or many, a sense of changing scale that only sometimes resolves into anything as obvious as an actual band. When it does, the results are often fantastically strange. "Neoarctic Organs" is the type of song one might find the house trio playing in an otherworldly underground grotto, with Harrington’s band-leading guitar squiggling in colors.
The speed at which the album moves through different voices and approaches also recalls the ’90s jazz scene. Even at its most chill, it rarely settles into one mood for more than a song. At least structurally, the 11-minute “Patch One” comes closest to bridging Harrington’s disciplines, a long and swelling drift with Harrington’s glacial guitar buried in the hum, finally bursting into the light during a bliss-skronk denouement.
The opposing modes of the album are neatly illustrated by its final two pieces. "No Country" is a float through no-time, occasional rhythms pulsing in the distance like a far-off station. And then Harrington gets about as far in as possible with the album’s conclusion: a mostly straightforward instrumental cover of Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley’s “Pure Imagination,” written for the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Graced with Harrington’s pedal steel, the forces of the void push at the edges of melody and Harrington’s guitar keeps the emptiness at bay.
It breaks open into pedal-steel stardust that might be extended to the horizon by a remix, live improvisation, or loop function. On an album from the post-jazz future, it’s a nostalgic postcard from the far-off past, a universe of melody and form. It is the final destination, a moment of being on the other side of the proverbial stargate—a conclusion to make a listener start all over, to see if this is where it was pointing all along.


Stephen Wilkinson's Bibio project continues to surprise, pushing further out of his comfort zone and venturing boldly into new territory.

Mind Bokeh

After five full-lengths and a few EPs, Stephen Wilkinson's Bibio project continues to surprise. His first three albums combined tape-distressed versions of British folk with warbly ambient interludes, and he gradually added vocals that hinted at proper songs. During this stretch, he seemed like someone who wanted to completely master one idiom before he could muster the courage to move on to another. But on his 2009 album, Ambivalence Avenue, Wilkinson moved outside of his comfort zone. His ear for mood and texture was still there, but suddenly his vocals were up front and he was tossing in hip-hop breaks and dense samples to craft a weirdly bent style of electro-pop. It was an exhilarating record. You could feel an artist stepping outside of himself and venturing boldly into new territory, and the sense of adventure was contagious.
Mind Bokeh is no less daring than Ambivalence Avenue, and it covers just as much ground, but here you can feel Wilkinson bumping up against his limitations. His talent for production is fully intact, but some odd choices sabotage the record. Instrumental sections like the title cut and the closing "St. Christopher" show a sound technician firmly in command of his material, folding twinkly keyboards, crackly loops, and gently insistent beats into tracks that are evocative and detailed enough to reveal more with repeated listens. Wilkinson's terrific understanding of sound is undiminished, and he still moves easily between genres and gets most of the key details right. But the further he explores recognizable song forms, the more often the album stumbles.
In the case of "Take Off Your Shirt", that stumble becomes a full-on face plant. Wilkinson's exploratory spirit is a wonderful thing, but glammy power pop in the vein of Phoenix is something he should absolutely, positively leave to someone else. With its blocky guitar riff and canned beat, "Shirt" is stiff and downright unlikable. Fortunately, it doesn't get any worse, but there are still too many ho-hum moments that feel weirdly off. The six-minute "Pretentious" brings the flow of the album to a halt only two tracks in, with a woozy synth-driven lope that's a bit too close to anonymous chillwave and is not redeemed by the tacked-on vocals. Along the same lines but better is "Light Seep". Here, the repurposed AM radio pop of Ariel Pink would seem to be an influence, as Wilkinson mixes a funky wah-wah guitar with percussion that sounds like a Wurlitzer preset. To my ears, it sounds like a so-so take on something Keyboard Money Mark was doing in the late 90s, but "Seep" is at least listenable and a good example of Wilkinson's eclecticism working for him.
On the plus side, "Wake Up!" is very much a continuation of the best of Ambivalence Avenue, with its surging Dilla-fied samples grafted to a vocal performance that finds Wilkinson filled with yearning, sounding almost desperate. And "K Is for Kelson" is a convincing slice of bouncy indie pop that sounds like it's being sung by a robot on holiday in the tropics. These songs are short and sweet, making their point and getting out, which works to their advantage. But on the lengthier tracks, Mind Bokeh seems to hover in an unsteady place between pop song form and soundscapes, and the flaws-- repetitive melodies that don't quite gel, the voice just a bit too high in the mix-- become more evident. There is enjoyable music here, and I've no doubt that the Bibio project has plenty of life on it. But now that Wilkinson has spent a few years trying new things, a little focus might do him some good.


Blog house may be increasingly used as an eye-rolling pejorative, but don't punish Cut Copy's hugely enjoyable In Ghost Colours, a fantastic summer pop record that feels light, confident, and unencumbered by the dictates of fashion.

In Ghost Colours

For better or worse, Cut Copy swim in the same pool as those electro, French touch, and new wave revivalists for whom fashion, irony, and self-consciousness represent swords to live and die by. In a scene as self-reflexive as this, backlashes are the order of the day, but even still, there are signs-- such as the increasing use of "blog house" as an eye-rolling pejorative, recent records by Calvin Harris, Does It Offend You Yeah?, and Ghostland Observatory, and the parallel rise of Balearic-feeling dance as a worthy substitute-- that this world might be slipping under the weight of its own ubiquity. Based on their patchy and rainbow-chasing 2004 debut, Bright Like Neon Love there was every reason to believe that a new Cut Copy record this late in the cycle would only accelerate the meltdown; after all, there are only so many ways to arrange and re-arrange vibrant art direction, moneyed aloofness, and the right kinds of sounds before the party heads to a new venue altogether.
As it turns out, we needn't have been so cynical-- not when Cut Copy aren't. If the pastichey Bright Like Neon Love felt more like an opportunistic patchwork quilt of other people's sounds and ideas, the hugely enjoyable In Ghost Colours feels light, confident, and unencumbered by the dictates of fashion. More than anything, though, it's a gloriously positive record, one whose cheerily strummed acoustic guitars, shimmering synths, sweeping choruses, and playful sonics maintain a delicate balance; where a lot of summer pop records like this often scream fun to the point of being oppressive (or at least annoyingly instructive), there's nothing remotely show-offy about In Ghost Colours. In fact, it's closer in spirit to the Avalanches' Since I Left You than it is to anything from the past few years. It's a hard record not to love.
In Ghost Colours was co-produced by DFA's Tim Goldsworthy, who deserves credit for simultaneously opening up the band's palette while relaxing their delivery. Sure, as you might expect, there are still blushes of French house and electro scattered liberally all over the show, but they're always deployed in ways that serve-- rather than overshadow-- the song. And while Cut Copy's principle and founding member Dan Whitford may come from a DJ background, the band-led songs come across every bit as muscular and as noteworthy as the dancefloor crossovers. To that end, this is one of the best bridges between electro and rock in a long time; the joins are so seamless that you don't even think of the songs on those terms.
From the first swirling synths and gleaming melodies of curtain raiser "Feel the Love", In Ghost Colours asserts itself as a hugely magnanimous record. Everything here sounds stadium-sized, loved-up, and breezily inclusive. There's the lead single "Lights & Music", an arena rock slow burner with a disco chorus; or the superb, helicoptering house of 2007 single "Hearts on Fire", which gets a welcome reprise; or the sunburst rock of "Unforgettable Season", which recalls Broken Social Scene in its ability to sound in full swoon from chord one; or the carefree "Strangers in the Wind", whose lazy verse and torpid guitar peels owe a little bit to Fleetwood Mac. Elsewhere, "So Haunted" and "Far Away" compete for standout track status, the former sandwiching verses of fuzzy guitar squall around one of the most gorgeous-sounding choruses of the year, the latter an effervescent bit of 80s synth fluff that holds up against the best of Human League and Erasure.
So yeah, you get the point: Pop lovers will find lots to love here, and if there's any justice, this record will keep them swooning through the summer. Regardless of what kind of audience it ultimately finds, though, In Ghost Colours earns its smiles with a combination of ingenuity and easiness that you don't often come by, and for that, even in April, it already feels like a triumph.


In 1975, Willie Nelson changed the rules of country music. His lonesome, noir concept album about a wayward preacher was a big and beautiful dream made real by simple and spare music.

Red Headed Stranger

Red Headed Stranger, Willie Nelson’s 18th studio album, arrived in the world on May Day, 1975, to little fanfare. It would prove to be an ominous year. Two of Nelson’s fellow Texans and country music heroes, Bob Wills and Lefty Frizzell, would die. At the Country Music Awards, Charlie Rich would set fire to the slip of paper that announced John Denver as Entertainer of the Year. Denver topped mainstream country charts with his friendly ditty “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” which traded places with the lush, bright, radio-friendly productions of Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy,” and Linda Ronstadt’s “When Will I Be Loved.”
It was the year of Tonight’s the Night, Blood on the Tracks, Physical Graffiti, Metal Machine Music, Zuma, Horses, and Born to Run. And it was the year that Willie Nelson finally signed a record deal that allowed him “quote artistic control endquote” as he described it to Rolling Stone. In the span of about a week, summoning a core stable of musicians to a little studio in Garland, Texas, and for just $4,000, Nelson made an album that defied logic, transcended the industry-defined borders separating country from rock’n’roll, jazz, blues, and folk—and it became an artistic and commercial success. Red Headed Stranger remained on the Billboard charts for 120 weeks. It was as if he’d written himself a permission slip for the next four decades of his career. On first listen, one studio head wondered aloud whether it had been recorded in Nelson’s kitchen. It sounds like just Willie and his guitar, another remarked. Waylon Jennings, who was present for the initial listening session, leapt to his feet. “That’s what Willie is all about!” he reportedly hollered.
Nelson’s first four decades had been hard-earned. He was on his third marriage, father of four kids. He had washed dishes and sold encyclopedias door to door until he decided that it went against his beliefs to push them on people who couldn’t afford them and took a job peddling vacuum cleaners instead. He had done his share of time in a trailer park and he had seen his own house burn down. He had played honky-tonks across from Texas to Washington, and he’d worked as a radio disc jockey with the handle “Wee Willie Nelson.” One particularly despondent night, early in his Nashville days, Nelson walked outside Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge—the famous songwriter haunt where he warmed barstools alongside Kris Kristofferson, Hank Cochran, and Roger Miller. Nelson laid down on a snow-covered street and waited for a car to run him over.
The story is one Nelson tells frequently of his Nashville days. For more than 10 years, he made a name for himself recording well-received albums that failed to get the same acclaim as the No. 1 hits he wrote for others; he resisted record company producers and their suggestions of “different styles” while at the same time demanded better marketing for his records. Was it worth it working for nothing to fit someone else’s mold?
It’s those dark minutes, lying in the snow listening and half hoping for traffic, that were on his mind when he scribbled the first few lines of 1973’s Shotgun Willie, his first true outlaw country anthem, on the back of a “sanitary napkin” envelope in a hotel bathroom. “Mind farts,” his good friend Kristofferson bluntly offered. Nelson remained unvexed. “I thought of it more as clearing my throat,” Nelson said. That album contained what remain some of the most beloved songs in the canon of Willie—“Whiskey River,” “Slow Down Old World,” “Sad Songs and Waltzes”—and it set the stage for an album that would challenge an industry’s prejudicial notions, one that would earn Nelson overwhelming and long overdue respect not as a country artist but as an artist, period.
The song ”Red Headed Stranger,” written in the 1950s by Edith Lindeman Calisch and Carl Stutz, is the dark tale of a bereft cowboy, “wild in his sorrow, riding and hiding his pain,” who goes into a grief-stricken rage. It was a song Nelson used to play as a disk jockey on Fort Worth radio and it stayed in his head long after. In the spirit of fieldworker blues, gospel, country, and traditional Mexican songs that reverberated through the rows of Texas cotton Nelson picked as a child, it follows an ancient plot. It’s a murder ballad, a noir tune of damaged characters and fateful, human errors. When his own children were small, Nelson sang it to them as a lullaby.
On a long drive from Steamboat Springs, Colo. to Texas, the song got in his head again. As he sat behind the wheel, Nelson envisioned the Stranger’s song as part of a larger story, mapping out the narrative in chapters. In his telling, the Stranger of the song becomes a Preacher who discovers his wife in the arms of another man and kills them both (“And they died with their smiles on their faces”). Doomed to wander the countryside alone on his horse, he seeks a redemption that may never be realized. Nelson worked his old ballads into a roster of country standards that, he reckoned, would naturally inhabit the Preacher’s mind. Eddy Arnold’s “I Couldn’t Believe It Was True,” a brief, jaunty number, stands in for the moment when the Preacher discovers that his wife has forsaken him. In the next iteration of the recurring theme, “Time of the Preacher,” the recognition of loss sinks in: “And he cried like a baby/And he screamed like a panther.”
Deliberately spare arrangements echoed the Stranger’s existential loneliness. Relying mostly on guitar, piano, and drums, Nelson summoned a small crew of musicians in the studio—his sister, Bobbie Nelson, longtime drummer Paul English, Bucky Meadows, Mickey Raphael, Jody Payne. Little else was needed to evoke the sound of the Preacher’s violent ride, the relentless, loping, strumming gait: “Don’t fight him don’t spite him/Let’s wait till tomorrow/Maybe he’ll ride on again.” The horse in the studio was, of course, Trigger, the Martin guitar Nelson had customized in Nashville a few years earlier, Frankensteined with a pickup from his old Baldwin guitar and named after Roy Rogers’ television horse. Nelson heard Trigger “as a human sound, a sound close to my own voice.”
Musically, Nelson has always subverted plain, pure song with utter, starlit mystery. He had an uncanny ability to bend the listener’s perception of time. “I could put more emotion in my lyric if I phrased it in a more conversational, relaxed way,” he wrote in 1988. His vocal phrasings snake around the surfaces, altering its inflections, anticipating a beat or falling just behind it; his guitar appears to stretch and shorten the meter without ever breaking it.
As a single punched into a dusty jukebox, Fred Rose’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” is a beautifully realized if painful love song, the harmonies on the line “Only memories remain” landing with a little sting. Threaded into the Preacher’s story, it becomes the heart of the album. Like Nelson and Trigger lingering on certain phrasings, parsing missed chances and regrets, the Preacher and his black stallion haunt the canyons, retracing steps. He’s mindful that the love he lost is a place to which he can never return, but he can’t stop himself from trying to get back there.
Country music had always been one of the truest genres, gritty and realistic songs of broken hearts, the farm, the factory, the bottle. But until Red Headed Stranger, music critic Chet Flippo wrote in Texas Monthly, the genre had offered scant escapism and “almost no fantasy.” Nelson, for the first time, allowed country music to dream big and beautiful. Nelson converses with the genre’s roots but sends them into uncharted and previously forbidden territory, fusing his essential influences—the tragic brilliance of Hank Williams and the melodic expression of Django Reinhardt. His anti-heroic story has elements of Homeric myth, a moody, Sergio Leone sensibility, the devastating lyrical force of Cormac McCarthy, whose Border Trilogy Red Headed Stranger in many ways prefigures.
When he left Nashville for Austin in 1972, Nelson had gladly traded his jackets and ties for bandannas and jeans; he’d grown his own red hair long. And in casting himself as the title character of Red Headed Stranger, he had chosen for his story an essentially archaic thing, tough and worn and mythic; an incessant wanderer and broken spirit, at war with himself. The artist lying on the street in the snow.
You can have an appreciative listening of Red Headed Stranger as a clear, uncomplicated tale about manhood and morality and infidelity, about the characteristic lonesomeness of the cowboy drifter, about some bygone notion of Americana, as listeners and critics did in 1975, layering on desperado descriptions. It is possible in 2017, when interpretations still overwhelmingly shrink to the literal-minded, to return there too.
And yet that would be missing out on so much. Sure, by 1975, Nelson had weathered and been implicated in his own share of stormy relationships, allegedly standing on both sides of infidelity. But to dwell on a reading of Red Headed Stranger primarily as a tale of manhood and waywardness or as one entrenched in bygone notions of America feels dated, particularly if you are anywhere on the margins of that story. Women, empathetic listeners by nature and necessity, learn to be very good at imagining ourselves into narratives framed around the literal experiences of boys and men. And in Red Headed Stranger, the story that resonates loudest is not the most obvious one but a universal one, about what it means, in dark and thrilling ways, to follow your instincts when you have everything at stake and nothing to lose.
With Red Headed Stranger, arguably the biggest artistic gamble of his career, Nelson framed it as an album about creativity and risk, about bad decisions and lonesome paths, about learning to listen to instincts, and, moreover, about distinguishing instinct from impulse. If Shotgun Willie was Nelson’s newfound manifesto, Red Headed Stranger forged into mythic weirdness acknowledging that this is a kind of wandering that can never end. Such is the nature of the itinerant solitude and perpetual dissatisfaction of the artist—the life that the restless and relentlessly prolific Nelson chose for himself—on the road again.
As the album draws to a close, after searching in Denver dance halls and in strangers’ arms, the Preacher claims to have found some version of solace and maybe even love, if we can take him at his word. His declaration is followed by one of the album’s wordless instrumentals, quiet and beckoning as a campfire, as Mickey Raphael’s harmonica reverberates and fades out. The memory of the lyrics of the previous song linger like smoke: “I looked to the stars, tried all of the bars/And I've nearly gone up in smoke/Now my hand’s on the wheel/I’ve something that’s real/And I feel like I’m going home,” the Preacher-Stranger had just sung in “Hands on the Wheel.” It’s not clear, though, whether he’ll ever truly arrive, or if he’d let himself stay long.


On her most fully realized album to date, the prolific Chinese artist serves up an enthralling blend of dread and beauty that feels quintessentially her own.

Crimson Poem

Since 2017, the prolific Chinese artist Yikii has been releasing albums that have become increasingly robust and difficult to pin down. Initial records like ❀ [no pain] and Gentle Nightmare were sketch-like, with curious dabbles into glitch, ambient, industrial pop, and various beat-driven ephemera. 2019’s Flower’s Grave, released on the inimitable Shanghai label Genome 6.66Mbp, proved a breakthrough: Yikii tastefully employed post-club collage aesthetics to create a gothic spectacle. Crimson Poem is her most fully-realized album since, and it serves up an enthralling blend of dread and beauty that feels quintessentially her own.
There are comparisons that can be made: the chilling, ethereal bliss of ’80s Japanese acts like Pale Cocoon, the electronic-pop madness of Hanayo’s Gift, the queasy compositions of Danse Noire labelmate bod. None feel exact, though, one reason being Crimson Poem’s use of microtonality. The string-laden opener, “-47 °C,” gives a taste for how it’s implemented to instill terror, but it’s not until “Noctambulist” that it becomes overwhelming. Crooked piano melodies and the faint sound of crying open the track, and then it all tumbles into a whirlwind of noise that arrives like a locust swarm. There’s simultaneous decorum in the strings, and this juxtaposition between stately and sour moods makes everything feel uneasy, like the music’s always on the precipice of being pleasant without ever reaching it.
Given that her compositional strategy involves engaging the listener with drawn out moments of suspense, it’s apt that Yikii cites horror video games like Fatal Frame as an influence. On the shapeshifting “Phantasmagoria!,” a series of brash synth stabs unexpectedly appears, and she forces you to feel the resulting anxiety, as if a monster’s started chasing you down an empty corridor. Even when the track moves into mellower territories, there’s a continual sense of uncertainty for what’ll come next, and this ambient, creeping anxiety keeps Crimson Poem exciting even in its repetitious moments. “Scavenger’s Daughter,” for example, is a ceaseless barrage of cycling electronics, but the periodic inclusion of an unrelenting beat ensures the threat of violence never dissipates.
Most crucial to Yikii’s music is her voice. Her simple melodies, child-like coos, and talk-singing are inspired by nursery rhymes, and her songs can sometimes feel like they’re being sung by a demon-possessed child. “Doll’s Synaesthesia” showcases that best, as music-box melodies bolster the song’s kindergarten-creepy aura. Like the sudden presence of a voice in a horror game, Yikii’s singing can immediately trigger panic. While the strings and piano on “Liminal Space” already sound ghastly on their own, hearing her reverberating vocals makes the track macabre, as if she’s an empty soul whimpering from the grave.
The problem with “dark” or “scary” music is that it’s often too content to begin and end with a haunted mood. More raucous styles, on the other hand, can rely too heavily on jump-scare tactics or feel soulless in their dependence on sound design. Yikii is the rare artist who can channel apprehension in a manner that isn’t gimmicky, mainly due to the variety of styles used. “Five Layers of Crimson Snow” mixes traditional instruments and synthesized vocals to create a beguiling digital eeriness. “Every day is a dull routine,” she explains, singing of a malaise familiar to anyone who’s ever walked this earth. She clarifies further: “Dead bodies and sadness everywhere.” Throughout Crimson Poem, Yikii activates your fight-or-flight response, reminding you that nothing is more human than having fear rattle your bones. On the carnivalesque “Disillusionment,” she sums up our collective experience with a wish: “I just want less pain/I’m afraid.”
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Sanctuary reissues all three studio albums from the influential UK shoegazers.

Slowdive: Just for a Day / Souvlaki / Pygmalion

Just for a Day / Souvlaki / Pygmalion

Swooning, washed-out rock from over a decade ago: Why should these reissues matter? The obvious answer: because this band still sounds incredible. Listening back, it feels like Slowdive were both the first and last word on this particular form of guitar-pop dreaming. It's the same sense you can get from Galaxie 500, Mazzy Star, My Bloody Valentine, or the Cocteau Twins, four bands with whom Slowdive have plenty in common. The 1980s were full of earthy rock from punk's tail end, full of glittery pop and bouncy indie and spandexed anthems-- these people all pitched in to the reverse process of guitar music going slow, slurry, and stylish, going silent-cool, and staring off into space.
Loads of acts still work along these woozy, languorous lines, and loads of acts traced the lines out before these turn-of-the-90s groups came along. But each of those artists staked out a patch of territory that feels definitive, a sound complete enough that there's no point following down its path. (Who in the world would think he could squeeze more out of Mazzy Star's tricks than Mazzy Star already did?) No, revisiting these bands is a little like trading in some modern guitar-pop for a Beatles record: The first shot doesn't sound dated, or less sophisticated, and it doesn't necessarily seem "better," or more original, either. It's just a workable, fully-formed thing on its own, which might be why most of the acts that feel like Slowdive today-- say, Ladytron, Lali Puna, Broadcast, or M83-- are coming at that mood and atmosphere from very different directions.
A year ago, we were saying roughly the same thing about Catch the Breeze, a Slowdive compilation that was more Portable Summary than Best Of. Two discs, packed with long stretches from the band's three albums and most of the highlights from their singles and EPs-- this was a big enough chunk of their five-year career to make it easy to take a pass on the rest. Now comes the complete follow-through: remastered reissues of all three LPs, in full. The first two, Just for a Day and Souvlaki, come in the now-standard two-disc format, packaged with a lot of the same extras that already wound up on the compilation; the last, 1995's long out-of-print Pygmalion, comes back to life in its original form, which is probably the best and biggest news here. Yeah, yeah: Reissues, duplication, hard-earned money, blah blah blah. But in the long term, all those kids you see picking their noses everywhere will have two solid options for investigating this band-- the short way or the long one.
The gist of it: Frontman Neil Halstead has remained the same kind of songwriter throughout his career, from Slowdive's shoegazing to Mojave 3's dreamy "country" (someone did try to beat Mazzy Star!) to his solo folk; his songs are warm, uncomplicated, full of some strange weepy longing, and slowed down to a narcotic drawl. What's surprising is how many different ways he's found to present them. The best starting point is 1993's Souvlaki, already a bit of an Essential Slowdive in itself. Across this record, the band kicks up a swirl that matches Halstead's sleepwalking pop perfectly: Guitars stretch and swirl in slow-motion layers, and the vocals seem to be calling desperately out of them, even when they're just lazy chants. This stuff manages to be both pillowy-soft and passionately deep-- shades of the way My Bloody Valentine could blur heaviness into an out-of-focus lull, or the way Galaxie 500's drowsy strum could come out with a fist in the air.
A significant chunk of Souvlaki wound up on Catch the Breeze, but anyone hoping the remainder was forgettable is out of luck: Even as collaborator Brian Eno led this album off into a few dub-deep explorations, Halstead's pop songwriting hit a peak, and the album's tracks wound up good-as-"Alison" almost straight across. (Same goes for the cover of "Some Velvet Morning" on the bonus disc-- just Slowdive putting the swirl on someone else's dreamy, narcotic country songwriting.) It's a slightly different scenario for the band's first album, 1991's Just for a Day, which the anthology ignored in favor of the early singles and radio sessions that now stock its bonus disc. Not so surprising: It's a straight line from those singles and EPs to the sound of Souvlaki, whereas Just for a Day is more of a sweet-dream detour. It was in 1991 that the NME said Slowdive could "make Cocteau Twins resemble Mudhoney," and the fluffy sprawl of this record seems to be trying to prove them right. There's a lot less weight to it, and if anything in Slowdive's catalogue will seem dated, it's the overgroomed production on these songs. Still, there's something terrifically oceanic about it-- tracks start out softly floating and then whip themselves up into gorgeous, overbearing squalls.
Most important, though, is the reissue of Pygmalion, which should knock down the album's eBay asking price by a good fifty bucks. This is a detour of the best sort, and a Slowdive album in name only: With this record, Halstead pushed the rest of the band to the sidelines, dropped the notion of a "band" altogether, and recorded at least two tracks that I can't imagine being rivaled-- ambient pop dreams that have more in common with post-rock like Disco Inferno than shoegazers like Ride. Some of it is all woozy layers: spare touches of guitar, vocal phrases looping and phasing around one another, slow-rolling sampled drums. Some of it takes on the warmth and empty-room minimalism of the "folk" Halstead would go on to make. More than just "some" of it appears on Catch the Breeze-- five tracks out of nine, from an album that's not exactly consistent. But the sound here is so singular that's much better appreciated in album form, failures and all, and there's good no reason an album this fascinating shouldn't be in print.
The fluffy-sweet turn-of-the-90s record: That one is fans-only. The pop-rock record with the influential swoon: Anyone whose rock tastes run to the "dreamy" needs it, or at least needs "Alison" popping up on the mp3-player shuffle. The post-rock obscurity that's worth $12 just for "Blue Skied an' Clear": You won't find anything else quite like it. Swooning, washed-out rock from the 90s-- why should these reissues matter? I keep listening for reasons they wouldn't sound as good as they did a decade ago, and on at least two of these records, I'm not finding any at all.


In the past, Oneohtrix Point Never-- the main project of producer Daniel Lopatin, also of 1980s pop revivalists Ford & Lopatin-- had drones and moods and thematic movement that hinted at on-screen drama. The new OPN album is coming from somewhere else.

Replica

Everyone who reads about music has a list of descriptors made meaningless by overuse. "Hazy" (rhymes with "lazy") is right up there for me, but another that makes me wince though I've used it myself dozens of times over the years  is "cinematic." It's the term we reach for with instrumental music because movies are where we first learned about the emotional impact of abstract sound. If we'd have grown up in the silent era, we'd be leaning on different adjectives, but given our level of "moving image + instrumental music" saturation, "cinematic" is what comes to mind. Fair enough. In the past, the music of Oneohtrix Point Never-- the main project of the busy producer Daniel Lopatin, also of 1980s pop revivalists Ford & Lopatin-- fit this term. Albums like the Rifts collection and 2010's Returnal had drones and moods and thematic shifts that hinted at some kind of on-screen drama. And Lopatin has said that he's been influenced by film music and would love to work on movie scores. But the new OPN album, Replica, which also happens to be Lopatin's best work to date by far, is coming from somewhere else. This is music that exists independently, each track a tiny universe with its own cracked logic.
A few people have mentioned the Books to me in reference to this album, and the comparison holds water. It's not that Replica sounds anything like the Books-- though it uses tight loops of sampled voices, the voices exist to convey texture rather than language-- but Lopatin shares with them a fresh ear that creates an uncanny sense of wonder in the music. Also like the Books, Replica puts a premium on silence; just as important as all the odd, hard-to-place sounds is the space that frames it. And the combination of unusual textures and all the room, plus the way the music seems unbound to any particular era or aesthetic, makes the whole thing feel playful. The music is by turns dark, ethereal, frightening, and silly, but regardless, it carries in it a feeling of joy. There's a real sense of discovery here, or possibilities being probed, and that feeling is infectious. You can hear the person making it getting deep into what these sonic elements could mean, and he's bringing us down into this fantastic place with him.
Aside from the intricate production detail, what's most striking about Replica is how well-constructed these tracks are, which is especially impressive given the record's brevity (the first nine average less than four minutes each). Each has an arc and the music is constantly changing, but the tracks go into unexpected places. The opening "Andro" starts with a lonely, distant synth tone and fuzzy layers of robo-voices before becoming overtaken by noisy samples and, eventually, an explosion of percussion from what sounds like a a digital jungle. "Sleep Dealer" starts off like a pop version of a Steve Reich tape piece, zeroing in on percussive phonetic ticks and a loop of a human sigh, but it gradually resolves itself in an almost geometric way, as the relationship between the various samples snaps into focus just before the ending. The title track pulls us out of the machine by starting with a simple piano figure and then folding in bits of synth and finally a buzzing drone, becoming something alien and foreboding after starting so warm and melancholy. Lopatin doesn't just introduce sounds, add loops, and fade out; his pieces move, tripping from one place to somewhere far away over the course of just a few minutes.
A couple of tracks, like "Submersible" and "Remember", come closer to the pure synth drone work that marked earlier OPN material, but even these are full of weird surprises, like the distorted and warbly vocal loop at the tail end of "Remember" that manages to sound like a field recording of some ancient religious rite, even though it's probably something like a processed syllable taken from a life insurance advertisement. "Remember", like the album as a whole, feels peculiar and just out of reach, and it makes me realize how hard it is these days to find music imbued with genuine mystery. A huge part of the fun with this record is that these sonic miniatures are truly puzzling even as they remain accessible and highly musical; Replica is "experimental" music that also feels open, and somehow, despite coming out of two speakers like all my other records, it manages to feel participatory. I can feel myself filling in space and making connections as I listen.
Most film music is functional and is meant to reinforce images and amplify what's happening in the story. It is manipulative by design, serving to bend the affect of the viewer in accordance with the director's wishes. These 10 tracks are packed with detail and rich with feeling, but they are also, to a strange degree, devoid of manipulation. Even though they're uniformly stirring, they don't point you in any direction in particular, and you could see each listener creating his or her own meaning. Instead of pushing, they serve mostly to draw you closer and remind you of the power of sound as sound. Lopatin may have used samples from 1980s commercials to create many of these tracks, but Replica doesn't use nostalgia as an end in itself. This is music that digs deeper and burrows beneath the level of shared associations to discover the sparkling emotional potential of carefully arranged vibrations moving through the air.


Inspired by a series of window views, Japanese ambient pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura’s 1982 album Music for Nine Postcards has a disarming presence, cutting sweetly into the listener’s reality.

Hiroshi Yoshimura: Music for Nine Postcards

Music for Nine Postcards

Sometime in the middle of composing the songs that would become 1982’s Music for Nine Postcards, the late Japanese ambient pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura visited the then-new Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in the Shinagawa ward of Tokyo. He was taken with its pristine architecture, with its view of the trees in its courtyard from the interior. Yoshimura imagined his nascent work in relationship to that space, and inquired about having the finished piece played there; the museum agreed. The titular nine postcards, nodding back to that view from the Hara Museum, refer to a series of window views. In the songs’ titles, and in the few translated texts surrounding the release, he links them to broadly drawn images of the natural world: clouds, rain, a tree’s shade.
Ambient music is often linked to a kind of psychic interiority, but Yoshimura—who overlapped with the post-Fluxus contemporary art scene of 1960s and 1970s Tokyo—made music responding to and designed to exist in physical places: for train stations, runway shows, and so on. In 1982, a version of Music for Nine Postcards was the first release in Satoshi Ashikawa’s Wave Notation series; Ashikawa and Yoshimura defined and advocated for what they termed “environmental music,” “music which by overlapping and shifting changes the character and the meaning of space, things, and people,” wrote Ashikawa. “Music,” he argues, “is not only meant to be something which exists alone.” Influenced by figures like Erik Satie and Brian Eno, this developing sound also progressed with a specificity and gentle sense of intent, responding to urban sonic overload (and, perhaps, to developing ideas about media: an awareness that culture doesn’t just reflect reality, but actively produces it).
Music for Nine Postcards, then, is an intervention conducted through near-stillness. Composed with a minimal setup including a Fender Rhodes piano, the songs collected here are built around simple melodies that Yoshimura modulates in small, affecting ways. In a 1999 text reprinted in this reissue’s liner notes, he likens his process to planting a “seed” as a means of seeking “a prime number.” There’s little texture in them beyond the keyboard’s warm finish: a phrase will move alongside a complementary droning tone, and perhaps a harmony will wander in, but Yoshimura’s pieces rarely build. Despite this lack of sonic density, however, they have a disarming presence, cutting sweetly into the listener’s reality.
The effect is multidimensional: melancholy, wistful, invigorating, consoling. In a sense, though these sounds are conversational in their way, Yoshimura leaves quite a bit of room for the listener’s mood and memories. The record’s effects are, like the nature iconography he invokes, delivered with broad, almost neutral strokes. But space—even, or especially, the crowded and overwhelming urban kind—is necessarily emotional. It is loaded with memory, or whatever abstract something floats in the air when humans have been feeling their way through a place—and he taps into this characteristic of our every-day beautifully. Yoshimura’s practice shines light onto corners of feeling that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Yoshimura and Ashikawa’s ideas about sound and space remain relevant, especially as public space becomes ever-more fraught with anxiety and the infrastructural and social fractures that result from austerity. The mediations proposed on this album are intimate in scale but effective and timeless, unadorned such that they maintain a universality. Yoshimura’s output extends far beyond what’s captured on this release, and a resurgence of interest—and the promise of further reissues—hopefully means more documentation around his work will be available in English. But these Postcards alone have a solidity, the kind of sounds you want to carry throughout your life.


And so it's come to pass: the great wheel of revivalism spins, dredging up the next phase of music ...

Up the Bracket

And so it's come to pass: the great wheel of revivalism spins, dredging up the next phase of music history to be paraded about-- it was only a matter of time before we came around to The Clash. But just as calling The Clash "punk" belittles how their sound had evolved by the movement's curtain call, it would be unfairly dismissive to brand The Libertines Clash knock-offs. You'd have to throw in a line or two about singer Pete Doherty sounding uncannily like an English Julian Casablancas to be more dismissive. British Strokes for British folks, as they say.
All cards on the table, though: Up the Bracket does emulate, thanks in no small part to production care of ex-Clash founder Mick Jones, but it never truly imitates. Like The Clash before them, The Libertines draw primarily from decades of rock tradition-- blues, dub, a healthy whiff of the English countryside, and a few gorgeous rock riffs straight from the brainstem of Chuck Berry-- and fuse them into an unruly and triumphant monster of an album. The band burns through a range of emotions with fearless abandon, and just when one track seems about to split into pieces, they pull it all together only to threaten glorious collapse again on the next song. From their plaintive anthems to fuck-all barnburners, this is some of the most fun I've had with a CD in ages. Rarely does a band approach such a wide array of attitudes with equal proficiency.
"Boys in the Band" traverses miles of territory in four short minutes; funk-fused riffs lend a dangerous swagger to Doherty's ultra-confident vocals before, curiously, the whole thing pulls a 180 into barbershop-style harmonies. It's not as crazy as it sounds, but it's twice as fun. Later, the band find themselves in the throes of a token heartfelt ballad-- even one that delivers unexpected quaintness and delicate folk sensibilities-- as old-time cymbal washes make such an obvious track better than it has any right to be. But before the glow fades, they take us right back to hook-laden rock with the title song, recalling The Clash's finest moments, complete with vocals lifted from Joe Strummer's back pocket.
There's an almost indescribable wealth of rock lurking on Up the Bracket, and rarely is it less than blissfully entertaining. In just thirty-odd minutes, The Libertines pretty much do it all. Call it calculated, call it derivative-- hell, there's so much to this album, you can call it just about anything you like and probably not be too far from the truth-- but if you don't hear it, you'll be the one missing out.


Former "biggest band on the planet" continues its yeoman's work, making anonymously dependable riff-rock for those who want that sort of thing.

Backspacer

If you're between the ages of, say, 25 and 35, chances are you either significantly overrate or underrate Pearl Jam. Either you carry a certain nostalgist's sentiment for one of your early rock touchstones (I fall into this camp), or you view them as the root of all that was overwrought and evil about mid-to-late-90s guitar music. Sure, everyone knows PJ sold eleven trillion albums between 1991 and '94, but still I imagine it's difficult for relative young'uns to reconcile how strong an opinion so many people in a specific demographic have about a group that hasn't been commercially or critically relevant for over a decade.
Backspacer, the group's ninth studio album, seems to suggest in its tossed-off 37 minutes that Pearl Jam have no greater concern and regard for what they do than the rest of the world can muster. Virtually the whole record settles into the same formula the band's been dutifully churning out since the dawn of the millennium-- lively but almost utterly hookless riff-driven hard rock. Lather, rinse, repeat. And when I say "riff-driven" I really mean "almost entirely riff-dependent," because musically the riffs themselves are typically the only things worth your attention.
PJ's long-dormant punk and hardcore proclivities (ugh, "Lukin") have been rising to the surface with greater regularity in recent years, and I'll admit in short bursts this bulldozing approach can be somewhat satisfying. The opening four songs kick-start and then keep up a certain pleasing level of propulsiveness, with the goofily fast-and-loose "Gonna See My Friend" (hey, is that an actual bassline I hear?) and Thin Lizzy-ish double entendres of "Johnny Guitar" being particularly listenable. Sooner or later, however, you remember these guys wouldn't know a melody if it bit them in the ass. What's worse, this chugging blitzkrieg negates the power of the band's greatest weapon, Eddie Vedder's voice, which can display its craggy richness and masculine grace only when the band isn't trying to break land-speed records. (I know some folks hate Ed's singing, but it mostly seems like they're reacting to the fact that his voice launched a thousand Nickelbacks, which is like hating "The Simpsons" because of "Family Guy" or "American Dad".)
The gentle "Just Breathe" might seem like the perfect opportunity for Vedder to finally dust off those resonant pipes, but instead he sings the tune with a distractingly country-ish catch in his voice, plus the tune is numbingly syrupy and the lyrics, after a promisingly pointed start ("I'm a lucky man to count on both hands the ones I love") devolve into tedium. The same hit-or-miss sensitivity marks "The End"-- Vedder inexplicably finds it necessary to remind us he's "just a human being" on one song and "just another human being" on the other-- but at least "The End" manages to land on the right side of affecting thanks to its painfully honest depiction of romantic dissolution ("This is not me/ You see/ Believe/ I'm better than this/ Don't leave"). Still, we have to rely on "Amongst the Waves" to deliver anything remotely resembling the soaring anthemics that used to be a PJ trademark (what I wouldn't give for a "Light Years" even). The back half of the album sure isn't inclined to help, largely abandoning even the modest steamrolling enjoyment of the record's initial jolt in favor of thoroughly forgettable mid-tempo dreck, save for "Supersonic", which nonetheless sounds like a band trying to be the Ramones minus the fun.
It's an extremely odd thing to say about a band that for three or four years was the biggest rock megalith on the planet, but nowadays Pearl Jam are the very definition of anonymously workmanlike, seemingly plugging along with their heads down from one colorlessly unimaginative album to the next. Once upon a time this was a group that was on top of the world and yet still took all kinds of bizarre chances, recording shit like lengthy tape experiments and songs about bugs-- often ridiculously self-indulgent, sure, yet always surprising. Now, paradoxically, with the spotlights long since extinguished, Pearl Jam seem content to do things by the book.


The San Francisco rapper and Dallas producer are still having a good time on their lush and laid-back fifth album together.

The Night Shift

Larry June’s style couldn’t be more straightforward: Aspirational flex raps and checklisted wellness routines delivered with such serenity, it’s like he’s a walking valium pill. It’s an adaptable approach: Whether he’s gracing his trademark West Coast post-hyphy beats, dreamy disco-pop, or velour sample loops, he rarely sounds out of place. He’s able to flex this versatility with the hyper-malleable Texas producer Cardo, with whom he’s made five projects in the last four years. Unlike June’s work with production duo LNDN DRGS or the Alchemist, which tend to marinate in one sound for an entire project, his team-ups with Cardo boast more song-to-song variety. The Night Shift, their fifth album, maintains that spirit with warm and sultry beats to cruise to.
Cardo has produced stadium-ready megahits for Travis Scott and Drake, contemplative ballads for Kendrick Lamar, and frenetic beats for Pi’erre Bourne and Baby Keem, all of which are tied together by an enveloping sense of scale. The best Cardo beats are the epitome of surround sound, landing around you like a dome. On previous collaborations, Cardo gravitated towards the wavy rhythms of hyphy; The Night Shift more or less sticks to that script, with lush, swinging rhythms on tracks like “Chops on the Blade” and “Pop Out.” June’s mellow confidence normally keeps things from getting dull, but his boasts can sometimes go from charmingly basic to eye-rollingly cliche. Take the first verse of “Glasshouse Knockin’,” which sounds like it was penned during one of his many stock portfolio meetings: “My numbers is different, my hoes is brilliant/My snow Sicillian, I’m countin’ a million” he says, a scenario we’ve heard him describe hundreds of times before.
Cardo’s hyphy work is smooth—the distorted swing of ”GRGP” inspires Bay Area legend Too $hort and Detroit street rapper Peezy to get loose, and when Cardo pushes June offshore musically, things perk up. Early highlight “Ocean Cuisine” mixes a string sample and tinny hi-hats with a bouncing drum line as June plots to fill his garage with several different kinds of coupes. It’s peppy without knocking June out of his BPM comfort zone, and enough to give guest 2 Chainz room to run off with one of his most memorable features in a minute (“Told him it was chess, not checkers, like an A-cup”). “Love of Money” keeps up this momentum with jazzy saxophone and booming 808s that could soundtrack a night a a 5-star Michelin restaurant. The right beat will make even the most cliche Larry June bars sound first-time fresh.
Like his Bay Area forebears $hort and E-40 before him, June has built a legacy on dependable homegrown lifestyle raps. And while The Night Shift doesn’t contain anything too surprising, his music with Cardo remains among the most fluid and fun in his catalog. The pleasure in a body of work like The Night Shift comes from its configurations, the constant tinkering that can unearth new dimensions within a classic formula.


Big Boi is known for his voracious, omnivorous listening habits and willingness to abandon his most successful musical formulas; on his second proper solo album, he teams up with artists like Phantogram, Wavves, and Little Dragon, and the result is a puzzling mess.

Big Boi: Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors

Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors

Big Boi is known for his voracious, omnivorous listening habits and willingness to abandon his most successful musical formulas. Since he's spent the last few years sharing festival stages with indie rock and electronic acts, it makes some sense that he might want to make a record influenced by indie rock and electronic music. So here on his second proper solo album, he's exchanged the deep, dirty funk of 2010's Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty and his half of OutKast's nearly decade-old double solo LP Speakerboxxx/The Love Below for collaborations with artists like Phantogram, Wavves, and Little Dragon.
Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors is on the one hand a genre-busting statement of artistic restlessness but it's also a mess. You can try looking at it from a few different angles: as an outgrowth of rap's artsy ambitions, a compilation of indietronic-rap fusion tied together by one voice, or even simply as the new Big Boi record. But each approach carries its own particular set of frustrations when confronted with the 17-track whole.
Some of its weakest moments are actually the ones with the most potential. Teaming up with A$AP Rocky and Phantogram on "Lines", for instance, makes good sense on paper. Rocky's among the most successful of the current crop of upstart boundary-pushing rappers and Phantogram (who contribute to three of the album's tracks) have demonstrated an ability to infuse traditional pop structures with a sonically adventurous spirit. But the finished product refuses to cohere into the quasi-ambient electro-pop-rap gestalt the line-up promises. The rappers' verses and Sarah Barthel's breathy, multi-tracked choruses basically stand politely next to each other without interacting in any meaningful way.
Other questionable team-ups fare much worse, like the lineup of Big Boi, pop-rapper B.o.B., and snotty surf-pop savant Nathan Williams of Wavves on "Shoes for Running". The terminally schlocky B.o.B. comes at this potentially challenging collaboration with the same staunchly middle of the road approach he takes to everything, while Williams yelps his way through a hook that would be embarrassingly twee even if it wasn't presented in the context of a rap record. Imagine a weak, more self-consciously indie-fied song from the Judgement Night soundtrack and you're getting there.
The album's saving grace is Big Boi. No matter what setting you place him in, he remains one of the most dextrous, technically capable, and thoroughly entertaining figures in hip-hop. He's still unapologetically lecherous, still styling all over less-smooth fools, still repping for the Dungeon Family and OutKast. (Although the latter trait is starting to seem cruel considering how many people are still holding out hope for a proper sequel to Stankonia and how much more unlikely that possibility seems with every passing year.) He's also still apparently unable to phone in a half-assed verse no matter the circumstances, so at least the flimsiest songs on Vicious Lies still has his performance holding them up, even if there's nothing else helping out.
A few tracks do live up to their potential, and to Big Boi's ambitious vision in general. "In the A" brings him together with T.I. and Ludacris over a noisy, chaotic funk beat dripping with wah-wah guitar, siren-like synths, and stripper-pole drums that's got enough of the familiar Big Boi energy to bring its differences into compelling focus. (T.I. and Luda both living up to their habit of delivering their strongest material in cameos on other artists' tracks helps as well.) And the deeply louche "Raspberries" upholds Big Boi's reputation for making sex music that sounds like it's being beamed in from several years into the future.
He also clicks with Swedish electro-pop group Little Dragon, who appear on three tracks. "Descending" is sweetly sad and atmospheric, with Big Boi and Little Dragon vocalist Yukimi Nagano trading verses over a delicate fingerpicked guitar and a reverb-laden minimalist bit of drum programming straight out of a Prince slow jam. But on "Higher Res" and "Thom Pettie"-- maybe the best cut on the album-- the group shows a surprising facility for producing the kind of booming, nasty beats that suit Big Boi the best. Out of the lengthy list of collaborators on the disappointing Vicious Lies, they're the only ones he should hit up the next time he goes in to record.


On Wildheart, Miguel makes good on all of his cross-genre dabbling of the past five years. The album soars with shiny guitar lines and sky-high vocals, while Miguel explores a sex-positive attitude that focuses on pleasure and partnership instead of one-sided pursuit.

Wildheart

As perhaps the last vestige of grown-folks carnality in mainstream music, modern R&B trades in the archetypes of masculinity; sweaty abs and dirty talk pushed by loverboys (Usher) and bad boys (Jodeci). Prince's flamboyance remains one of the biggest exceptions in the genre's long and storied history, and the years since his purple reign are dotted with lonely acolytes: In 2003, André 3000 took a shot at hip-hop's rancorous masculinity—with the help of a smoking pink gun—on his rap-&-B manifesto, The Love Below. Some might say the tension of conforming to one-dimensional manhood contributed to D'Angelo's post-Voodoo unspooling.
The current R&B landscape is painstakingly virile: From Jeremih to Trey Songz, Ty Dolla $ign to PARTYNEXTDOOR, men are singing about sex and love. But all of these supposed libertines are focused on the primacy of male pleasure, treating their sexual experiences with all the reverence of a bunch of wadded-up tissues. On Wildheart, his third full-length album, Miguel, the writhing, pompadoured soul singer, has a similar focus, but it's sex-positive instead of sex-obsessed, a crucial difference. Languorous and detailed, it transcends the genre's established narratives with a focus on pleasure and partnership instead of one-sided pursuit. If Frank Ocean is young soul's prismatic, consciousness-expanding Marvin Gaye, Miguel's the reliable Al Green. The first words on this album—"Don't ever sell yourself short... Trust your intuition... You know the plan, conjectures of society," from the reverb-y opener "A Beautiful Exit"—are a testament to how Miguel's grown from radio-baiting R&B archetype to a maker of high-concept, genre-splicing pop music.
Miguel has occupied a unique space in the awkward "alt-R&B" narrative of the last few years. Amidst the washed out presets and drum machines and drugged-out boasting of his peers, he was a guitar-toting outlier, more of a throwback to a sensual showboat like Ginuwine instead of a self-loathing narcissist like the Weeknd. The nag champa-tinged smokiness of earlier songs like "All I Want Is You", or the glowing synth arpeggios on "Adorn" and fuzzed out scales on "Gravity" expressed something more wholesome, hopeful, and musically psychedelic. (Even when he sang about drugs on "Do You…" it was all just a metaphor for love). On Wildheart, Miguel makes good on all of his cross-genre dabbling of the past five years, but unlike the track-based experiments that dotted his two prior LPs and five mixtapes, he extrapolates the heavy funk across an entire album.
Miguel has long cited Prince, Freddie Mercury, and James Brown as inspirations, and on Wildheart he works through these icons. The album soars with shiny guitar lines and sky-high vocals, which reflect the mythic possibilities of California and his hometown of L.A. Unlike All I Want Is You or Kaleidoscope Dream, W**ildheart is almost entirely self-produced save for a couple of assists, including Cashmere Cat and Benny Blanco on the Cali soul-riffing "…Goingtohell". So Miguel is writing for Miguel, and he knows that his voice, heady like good coffee, will soar over the crunchy bass guitar lines of "A Beautiful Exit" and the sultry, obsessive "FLESH".
When he wants to go digital, on "The Valley" and "Destinado a Morir (Enter.Lewd)", dilated, ragged synths and stretched-out strumming serve as a glowing bedrock over which he exhales explicit lyrics. The titular valley in the former refers to California's porn industry and he sets the scene like an R-rated kid's playground song: "lips, tits, clit, sit." It's the blood-red prelude to Wildheart's tender morning-after first single, "Coffee", and his writing is even raunchier than Kaleidoscope Dream's "Pussy Is Mine". The sequencing belies the real turn-on: Miguel knows where to find those hard-to-reach spots, and will bring you coffee in the morning, too.
Focusing on Wildheart's overt eroticism is one way of listening, but it's impossible to overlook just how seriously he's taking craft. Like, sure, Miguel's take on #surfbort, "Waves", might be a vivid metaphorical construct, but the silky stack of harmonies on the bridge is absolutely stunning—maybe the album's most dazzling moment. Lenny Kravitz, another soul-subverting California dreamer, creates an airless cocoon of lust and lush guitars on "Face the Sun". "What's Normal Anyway" has careful guitar ripples and a steady beat, sturdy footing for Miguel's backstory to all of the skirt-chasing: "Too proper for the black kids, too black for the Mexicans, what's normal anyway." And the quiet moments explode without veering into bombast; think about the simple chord changes and placid drum loop of the Smashing Pumpkins' "1979" with a wistful story about a California stricken of sunlight—and that's "Leaves".
On Wildheart, Miguel complicates his lothario backstory in a way that few of his peers have managed. A song like "What's Normal Anyway" speaks to multiple experiences of alienation, in both life and love. For Miguel, humanity is found between partners and between the sheets. And Wildheart's success might signal a shift in modern R&B, which is to say that perhaps we will finally move on from minimalism and petulant misogyny and sluggish synths to follow Miguel, along with Leon Bridges and Frank Ocean—the latter slated to return this summer—toward the next era of soul, one where sex is not an arbiter of masculinity but something that's simpatico with fun and feelings.


Working with synthesizers and samplers from the 1990s, the Tokyo producer channels the uncannily ersatz sounds of vintage video-game music into a post-vaporwave take on deep house.

Floating Mountains

There’s something profound about the uncanny, half-rendered graphics of 1990s technology. The same way space-age art from the 1950s sought to capture the unattainable dream of travelling through the stars in small flying cars, the eerily smooth computer models of ’90s games like Myst carry an unmistakable sense of yearning—a reach for perfection that comes up almost laughably short, but in the process becomes beautiful in an entirely new way. Beyond those unfinished edges, the mind can run wild with the world-building possibilities in a way that it no longer can in an era in which every detail comes alive in Ultra HD resolution. Going back and listening to music or watching movies from that era, the technological seams are always so much more obvious than they were at the time, but the imperfections begin to take on their own alluring quality. That’s the space Tokyo producer Soshi Takeda’s music inhabits.
Takeda hasn’t released much until now—just a small string of wonky new-age singles and glistening elevator-funk releases, as well as a sublimely groovy tape last year that pulsed with a warm, analog glow. But Floating Mountains, his new release for 100% Silk, takes his sound in a different direction. Using only hardware and samplers from the ’90s, Takeda captures the era’s flat, crystalline sounds, sketching evocative landscapes out of their cold, digital sheen. Like a post-vaporwave take on deep house, Takeda’s production is still very much indebted to Larry Heard, albeit more Sceneries Not Songs than Ammnesia. His dance music feels meant for meditation more than actual dancing, a slowly enveloping mist of pulsing bass and synths that shimmer like crystals suspended in midair.
Throughout Floating Mountains, Takeda pulls off a trick where he immediately drops the listener into the thick of a deep trance, then gradually loosens up the rhythm until it becomes almost playful. The title track abruptly opens on peak time at the club, all dense chords and hypnotic hi-hats, before a snaky MIDI melody makes its way to the forefront and carries the track away to Balearic bliss. It’s the type of song you could accidentally leave playing on repeat for an hour without realizing, let alone caring. Takeda’s music naturally lends itself to this endlessly looping quality—“Ancient Fish” evokes turn-of-the-century video-game music, channeling the same plastic Pacific Island simulacrum as the Final Fantasy X soundtrack with its ominous steel drums and urgent, dungeon-ready congas.
The songs on Floating Mountains function best in dimly lit rooms where the imagination can summon images that aren’t really there. That’s particularly true on “Deep Breath,” included here as a digital bonus track after being featured earlier this year on the excellent 2nd Life Silk compilation. Cruising on a seemingly straightforward arpeggio that somehow becomes darker and more mysterious the longer the track goes on, Takeda delicately layers its loungey beat with the soft sound of rain sticks, light hand percussion, and, finally, a mesmerizing Ash Ra-worthy guitar bridge. It’s the deepest kind of head-nodder, the kind that slowly sneaks up on you until it becomes an almost spiritual experience. Floating Mountains is full of these moments; Takeda is forever finding new ways to pull back the curtain on his icy textures, revealing oceans and valleys of feeling. It’s magical in the way only the most artificial sounds can be.

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The Atlanta rapper is a far better singer than he is a rapper, which is all too clear on his latest project.

Nuthin’ 2 Prove

Nuthin’ 2 Prove is why Lil Yachty should not be spitting bars. The best of his music avoids contemporary punchline-obsessed rap in favor of gummy, vibrant new-age euphonies—or at least it kind of does. Each of his releases since his 2016 debut Lil Boat has been conflicted with what makes Yachty pop, parading his lighthearted nursery rhyme raps, that, along with his crimson dreadlocks, have made him a favorite of teen hipsters. When he bellows and trills, regardless of what’s actually coming out of his mouth, the results are leagues better than when he tries to do his best rapper impression on songs.
Contrary to what the album’s name implies, he has a lot to prove lately. The streets aren’t checking for Lil Yachty like they were in 2016. There are rappers purporting to be cloned in factories and others using electrified brass knuckles to batter hotel television screens; having red dreads isn’t the definitive representation of risqué any more. Now, he’s just another slightly established rapper whose music needs to stick if he wants to be at the BET Awards next year. This uncertainty and desperation would mean that a title like Nuthin’ 2 Prove must be a play on words, to lull the listener into a false sense of relaxation while preparing to overload their senses. But the album’s opener, “Gimmie My Respect” doubles down on cruise-control Yachty. It’s a weird way to begin something absolutely necessary for his continued success.
The first half of Nuthin’ 2 Prove is obsessed with challenging his lyrical criticism with a surplus of leaden rhymes and weak deliveries. There’s no reason in the world Yachty should enter a song before the beat drops with empty, serious rhymes. Even next to Lil Baby and Juice WRLD, two melodic rappers who are able to successfully hide their weaknesses behind unique melodies, Yachty sounds drained of his energy. “SaintLaurentYSL” benefits from Lil Baby’s transfixing chorus before Yachty spits a verse in stop-motion that’ll piss off even the most tolerant of listeners wise to his ways. There’s no coincidence that the first half features guests on five of its eight songs. Yachty attempts to blend his stinkers with those of his guest features, with his own rhymes acting as filler in between. It leaves a sour taste in the mouth.
The silkiness of his robotic hum sounds more appealing than ever before, tempered by years in the industry to refine his more grating tendencies. And while his bars often fizzle out, his love-laced stanzas are well-crafted. “Worth It” is a nostalgic, soothing ploy for natural beauty, as he ends each line with a joyful cannonball that makes the next one splash with fresh energy. “Stoney” lives tranquilly at the bottom of an ocean, with Yachty’s voice seldom rising above a cat’s enthusiastic purr.
Even when love isn’t the focus, Yachty’s just better when he isn’t rapping at all. “Everything Good, Everything Right” is the platitudinous 2016-era Yachty that radiates enough solar energy to power the Lightyear One. Its carnivalesque atmosphere is mesmerizing because he can’t sing worth a damn, but his commitment to encapsulating an overly sweet experience with equally saccharine notes is just heartwarming. It’s a high point on an otherwise confused album that knows what it’s good at and what it’s not, and yet still chugs on anyway.
Nuthin’ 2 Prove is obsessed with the idea of respect as a measure of talent and he frontloads the album’s rap half with features from more capable rappers, hoping to siphon off some of their clout. This makes the atmosphere much more leaden than it needs to be like he’s banging a point into the listener’s head that isn’t quite understanding it. It’s a slog, but then you get something like “Next Up” which is a clever mix of melodic rap and straight-forward bars that is both fast and loose with a breezy air reminiscent of his past highlight “Minnesota.” It’s peak Yachty, perfectly in his element, sandwiched between blithe harmonies and light-hearted swag rap. He could have the world in his hands if he stayed there longer.


Fleshing out its classic indie-rock sound with synths, Auto-Tune, and other hazy production touches, the North Carolina duo searches for dream-pop atmospheres in the muggy Florida landscape.

Sky Lake

As long as rock has competed to be the predominant sound of youth culture, there have been artists in its ranks who want to expedite its concession speech. Adam Levine recently moaned about feeling ostracized from rock music while “all of the innovation and the incredible things happening in music are in hip-hop,” and Matty Healy has made the false genre binary a bedrock principle of the 1975’s album rollout, repeating the same things about rock’s obsolescence that you might’ve heard from Thom Yorke or even Billy Corgan in 1998. Even an indie-rock paragon like Dave Longstreth ended up singing the same tune once he started dabbling as an R&B hired gun. Though his claims about indie rock “miming a codified set of sounds” were predictably taken out of context, he wasn’t exactly wrong—even the most exciting guitar-based music tends to be the result of incremental sonic evolution that still honors past modes. There’s evidence of that process in It Looks Sad.’s Sky Lake, a low-key record from a modest North Carolina duo that immediately scans as modernist indie rock but would have been virtually inconceivable a decade ago.
Sky Lake isn’t a game changer, but a reflection of how the game has changed. Jimmy Turner and Alex Ruiz’s reference points cut off more or less in 2009—a year defined by the emergence of aqueous, sample-based beatmaking and the kind of mid-fi, beachfront guitar rock to which It Looks Sad. initially warranted comparison. These two tendencies often came together in a cocooning aesthetic accompanied by escapist signifiers—at once a retreat toward nostalgia and an expression of millennial malaise before anyone had a term for it. It was frequently dismissed as a fad, but the course for the next decade had been set. In particular, the trend that has clearly influenced It Looks Sad. during the four years that separate their first EP  from their debut album is the convergence of vibey rap with vibe indie rock leading to (Sandy) Alex G’s muted appearance on Frank Ocean’s Endless, a kind of 2010s “Walk This Way.”
Turner views Auto-Tune as a go-to sonic tool similar to distortion or reverb, and he sings through all three effects on the opening “Shave.” It’s one of the numerous experiments in pure texture on Sky Lake that could pass for interludes, none longer than two minutes, yet there’s a sense that It Looks Sad. see them as the main point of the project. “Light” is a wisp of a song, barely 80 sounds of amorphous vocal processing, a melody trying to find its path through the amniotic production drip; it was also the album’s first single, drawing a clear break from “Kaiju,” their 2015 digital single, which hewed more towards strident, tuneful emo and unaccountably racked up over 6 million Spotify streams despite zero mainstream coverage and a tiny touring footprint.
While even the band’s own press release admits it’s trite to use “dreamy” to describe a dream-pop album, and the title admittedly does have a “dream-pop album generator” feel to it, Turner’s lyrics are rooted in reality. Sky Lake actually exists—it’s a small, woodsy enclave in Orlando where Turner grew up and an AirBnB can be had for about $40 a night. The album shares an engineer with Julien Baker’s Turn Out the Lights, but Calvin Lauber here provides the exact opposite of that record’s piercing clarity. The muggy, enveloping Florida heat hangs all over Sky Lake, giving it a tactile, earthy sense of place that’s rare in this mode of indie rock, bolstered by the off-kilter images that dot Turner’s somnolent vocals: palm readers, three-legged dogs, sand disappearing into the ocean, bike rides through blue-black evenings.
It Looks Sad. still occasionally broaden their range by treading too heavily on other bands’ turf. Play the mesmeric guitar instrumental of “Graves” to Zachary Cole Smith and it might take him a minute to determine whether it’s an outtake from Is the Is Are. As much as the presence of pure ambience and guitar-less vignettes situates It Looks Sad. in the current day, it also shows where their strengths lie. And their overall approach really isn’t that much different than it was on “Kaiju” or their 2014 Self-Titled EP. “Drool” evokes shoegaze sublimity grounded in the most mundane desires—“All I really wanna do is sit around and drool with you always/You watch TV, I fall asleep.” Meanwhile, “Everyday” and “Palme” are the kind of propulsive, plaintive, and hooky indie rock typical of Tiny Engines, only gilded by Auto-Tune vocal ripples, brittle drum chatter, synth countermelodies, and a generous application of Floridian humidity. While there isn’t always a clear who to Sky Lake, it’s a fully-developed where.


This new LP is the first in a six-album series from ambient artist James Leyland Kirby. It’s an extreme continuation of the concept—memory loss—that guided his 2011 masterpiece, An Empty Bliss...

The Caretaker: Everywhere at the End of Time

Everywhere at the End of Time

Ambient music has a habit of all running together, but on 2011’s An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, James Leyland Kirby devised a series of ways to stand out. He invoked the purgatorial ballroom of The Shining with his project’s name, the Caretaker; layered it with Alzheimer’s studies; and spun it through loopy, languid edits of Jazz Age 78s. The results were soothing to the ear, lucid to the imagination, and rich with historical feeling, all unified in a meditation on degradation, memory, and time. There was also an implied provocation in Kirby’s sweet, almost jaunty treatment of losing one’s mind. Ambient masterpieces like Empty Bliss often cause me to think, “I’d take six more albums of that.” But in the event, I’m not as sure.
Everywhere at the End of Time has been planned as a six-stage release. The first three will come out as downloads and LPs between now and next year, when they will also be compiled in a CD set; the last three follow the same pattern from March 2018 to 2019. The premise is that the Caretaker, one of Kirby’s long-running aliases, has been diagnosed with early onset dementia. The music will chart the patient’s decline, ending in the alter ego’s “death.” Memory, incarnated as resurfacing bits of music from throughout the Caretaker’s oeuvre, will progressively smear and recombine.
In short, it’s an extreme continuation of what Kirby did on Empty Bliss, his most popular release to date: lingering on the precipice where pleasant reverie slips into the abyss. As on that album, pitches laze, overtones huff and puff, lines elongate, surface noise crackles, and scratches slash out a rhythmic rain. But mainly, the loops just play, stuck somewhere between dreamlike and deathly, until suddenly, ominously, they stop. Roaring Twenties horns turn from saucy to sloe-eyed, poky and dopey, as if a heavily opiated combo kept losing its place in a Gershwin tune.
“Here we experience the first signs of memory loss,” Kirby writes in liner notes. “This stage is most like a beautiful daydream. The glory of old age and recollection. The last of the great days.” But we begin to hear more severe signs of breakdown around halfway through it. On “Slightly Bewildered,” the instrumentation becomes an almost toneless mooing, the loop wrapping around with a stagger. “Things That Are Beautiful and Transient” is inside-out, the melody an inner voice, its harmonic field the foreground. A winning gentleness pervades later tracks like “An Autumnal Equinox” and “The Loves of My Entire Life,” but by the end, even gentleness has taken on a desperate tinge, as though if the dancing stops, everyone dies.
It’s a testament to Kirby’s cunning composition that it sounds like he’s playing long stretches of the source material intact, when in fact, he is drastically altering tiny snippets and composing them into smeared but credible pieces. He mulches and reconstitutes an era, but he is not very interested in historical footnotes. He’ll talk a lot about process and concept, but you have to turn to Who Sampled to tell you that, say, the title track of Empty Bliss is derived from Layton and Johnstone’s 1929 recording of “The Wedding of the Painted Doll.” As Kirby goes all in on this coup de grâce, one can’t help but notice that he’s using other people’s music to channel the subjectivity of other people’s medical condition, and wonder where that gets us.
Empty Bliss rested on studies of Alzheimer’s patients and music, which seemed to keep a respectful distance from real, specific suffering. But there is something a little unseemly about Kirby “giving the project dementia” and reveling in it across hours of pleasurable music, especially after he announced it in such a confusing way that he had to clarify that he himself had not been diagnosed with dementia. If not exploitative, it’s at least an unduly romantic view of an illness. We like to dabble in madness through music, in the abstract. But an actual disease? Why should we want to experience dementia by proxy, aesthetically, or think we even can? I watched my grandmother succumb to it for a decade before she died, and it was very little like a “beautiful daydream.” In fact, there was nothing aesthetic about it.


This six-track EP from Peter O’Grady is moodier and more penumbral than anything he’s done before, with a much wider range of tempos and rhythm.

81b EP

Peter O’Grady has not had the career that most people might have expected from him in the nine years since he turned UK bass music on its ear with a tune called “Hyph Mngo.” Didn’t matter that nobody had any idea what the title meant or what its pitched-up vocal lick was supposed to be saying, if anything: Arriving just when the dubstep scene was getting stale, the song offered an escape route to greener pastures, and fans (plus legions of imitators) eagerly followed in its wake. “Hyph Mngo” exerted massive force on shaping the bass/techno/house hybrids that continue to dominate large swaths of underground dance music, but O’Grady—better known as Joy Orbison, and sometimes simply Joy O—has never made anything like it again.
Instead, he retreated into a world of progressively sterner, murkier beats, many of them released on his tiny labels Doldrums and Hinge Finger. He’s given us plenty of bangers—just see “Ellipsis” or virtually any of the tracks he’s made alongside Boddika for the SunkLo label—but it’s as though, having gone full Icarus on his debut single, he decided to strap on a lead apron and welder’s mask. There’s a heaviness, a sluggishness, to all his subsequent work: Even at their most powerful, his beats often have the feeling, familiar from nightmares, of trying to run but finding the limbs unwilling. And in the past couple of years, his productions have only gotten foggier, more abstracted, and less forthcoming as they’ve come swatting their way through a muggy haze.
It might be surprising to realize that in all this time, O’Grady has yet to release a proper long-player. (The lone entry under the “Albums” tab on Discogs is actually a sprawling DJ mix for the Tokyo streetwear label Cav Empt.) 81b, a six-track EP for his own Toss Portal label, makes for his fullest and most satisfying statement to date. It’s moodier and more penumbral than anything he’s done before, drums glinting like mica amid dark swirls of synth and static.
It’s more versatile, too, with a wider range of tempos and rhythms. Although three tracks lie comfortably within his fleet-footed broken-techno wheelhouse, “COYP” and the title track both fall back to 100 beats per minute. The latter’s a hypnotic, slow-motion house jam that sounds a little like some of Andy Stott’s slow-motion experiments of a few years ago, just flooded with color; the former relaxes into a springy, dembow-flavored groove without going overboard on overt dancehall references. In fact, it’s not very overt about anything: The track consists mainly of scratchy drums and charcoal bass shading, with some iridescent synth pads smeared across the surface. It’s a smart choice of tempo, allowing him to get the most out of his textures without worrying too much about whether or not people are dancing.
Like “Faint” and “Ellipsis,” tunes made instantly recognizable by their striking spoken-word vocal samples, the opening “SEED” uses a short but potent snippet as a calming center of gravity amid shuddering kick drums and needling bleeps. “You’re falling,” intones the voice, reinforcing the vertiginous feel of his lurching groove. It’s a fine track, particularly for the way he teases out the tension across its buildups, breakdowns, and one killer false ending, but it’s also the least surprising cut here. He’s better on “SIN PALTA” and “BELLY,” the tunes where he ventures the furthest afield from his previous work. Last year’s TOSS PORTALEP had a track called “98 Koln” in which, if you squinted, you could hear a callback to Cologne’s Kompakt label (cf. Dettinger, M:I:5) at the end of the 20th century; “BELLY” sounds similarly enamored of classic minimal techno, this time emulating the modular squelch and crystalline hi-hats of Ricardo Villalobos. In its wandering melody and long, undulating groove, it might as well be an homage to Villalobos’ 2004 masterpiece Thé Au Harem D'Archimède.
The most unusual cut of all is “TENNOV6TEEN,” a glowing miniature nestled at the heart of the record. It bubbles along at his habitual 132 beats per minute, but there are no drums, just nervous bass pulses and staccato synth counterpoints that rattle like pebbles in the tide. It’s at once plaintive and stoic: There’s a melancholy undercurrent to the melody but a stone-faced character to the way it just rolls on and on. It marks a major shift from both the ecstatic overdrive of “Hyph Mngo” and the screw-faced swagger of his peak-time anthems. In its refusal to do any of the things dance music is supposed to do, it might be the most true-to-form thing that Joy Orbison has released yet.


On his relentless debut, Aleph, French producer and Yeezus collaborator Mike Levy proves to be the sort of transcendental figure who can fill festival EDM tents with drop enthusiasts while also appealing to listeners who consider themselves nuanced consumers of contemporary electronic music.

Aleph

In order to realize his brutal musical vision with Yeezus, Kanye West enlisted a congregation’s worth of collaborators with a highly diversified range of skills: honeyed indie crooners, European EDM wunderkinds, luminary rock producers, M.I.A.’s former fiancé. Another helping hand was lent by Mike Levy, the French producer who records and performs as Gesaffelstein. He worked on the bruising, stadium-ready “Black Skinhead” and the raucous, emergency-lit “Send It Up” alongside label mate Brodinski and sonic grandfathers Daft Punk, among others.
A quick glimpse at Gesaffelstein’s professional mythology is all it takes to understand the heart of his appeal to West: a shared interest in art and fashion, a personal aesthetic possessed of palpable intensity and ripe with darkness and violence, and an eye towards intellectual concerns broader than music. (It’s captured neatly in his chosen moniker: Gesaffelstein is a portmanteau that combines the German word “gesamtkunstwerk,” meaning “universal artwork,” and Albert Einstein, an inspirational figure.) His debut album Aleph fuses those pre-existing aspirations to ideas about style that feel directly derived from his work with West, with its cover—a jewel case containing a gold disc, the case overlaid with complex patterns reminiscent of circuitry—serving as the most obvious hat tip.
It’s a testament to Levy’s talent, and to the strength of his sonic identity, that Aleph merits comparison to Yeezus in terms of its thematic consistency and coherence. From the ferocious spoken introduction that marks opener “Out of Line” (one of several appearances by Parisian vocalist Chloé Raunet) to the slowly rising sirens echoing throughout “Perfection”, this is an absolutely relentless record: there’s no sunlight to be had on Aleph. Levy specializes in two types of songs: fiery, raging bangers meant for the dank club at the end of the world, and meditative mood pieces that bubble and loom while you’re fighting through the next morning’s hangover. Thoughtful sequencing choices help to amplify the magnitude of the difference between the members of these phylums, and have the added benefit of lending Aleph a natural-seeming cycle of attack and release. When doom-soaked, muscular lead single “Pursuit” glides into the ominous, slowly shifting “Nameless”, it’s as if we’ve been given a well-earned breather after enduring the intense assault of the former.
It’s a trick Levy pulls multiple times without diluting its effect, made possible by the tonal differences between the album’s higher-octane tracks: “Send It Up” relative “Hellifornia” pairs a trunk-ratting hip-hop rhythm with a howling, DEFCON 1-level screech, while “Duel” earns its combative title by pitting a furious, hyper-kinetic beat against a friction-fried synth that refuses to let up. While the album’s dark, dance-ready techno cuts certainly demand their fair share of attention, Levy takes advantage of the album’s quieter moments and displays surprising levels of subtlety and restraint. With its eerie guitar melodies and digital choruses of the damned, the title track could slot neatly into a collection of outtakes from the Drive soundtrack; mid-album counterpart “Wall of Memories” fares even better, bulging and warping underneath a haunted piano line. By making room for both potential floor-filling wrecking balls and quieter, spookier moments on Aleph, Levy sets himself up as the sort of transcendental figure who can fill up festival EDM tents full of drop enthusiasts while simultaneously appealing to listeners who consider themselves more nuanced consumers of contemporary electronic material.
If Aleph has a weakness, it's the album's lack of concision. At around an hour, this is a lengthy, demanding record, and the relentless push that constitutes a major part of its excitement in small blocks renders it somewhat exhausting when ingested as a whole. While some of the strongest songs—the stomach-churning “Hate or Glory”, the piston-powered techno workout “Trans”—are tucked near its conclusion, it takes an effort to make it to the finish line. The importance of brevity is a lesson Levy didn't pickup after working on Yeezus, a similarly dark record that clocks in at a brisk 40 minutes. A distillation of the sounds and themes contained within Aleph into an equally slim package would render his next record truly fearsome.


The Philly singer-songwriter’s third proper album is written and sung with painstaking care and offers an entry point to his sprawling and satisfying discography.

Greg Mendez

“Every time you say you wanna know me/I get anxious/cause I would probably tell you about some dumb shit,” Greg Mendez warbles at the beginning of “Maria,” a highlight from his subtly stunning self-titled album that subtly scrutinizes the whole “intimate singer-songwriter” enterprise. In short, what’s the distinction between indiscriminate confession and honest communication? He then puts this concern to the test by proceeding to tell us about the time he got arrested at a crack den.
Neither an introduction nor the bold redefinition assumed from a self-titled release, Greg Mendez’s third proper album is nonetheless framed as an entry point to his sprawling and satisfying discography. After 15 years kicking around Philadelphia’s DIY scene, he’s more of a peer of Alex G than progeny, though new listeners are likely to hear them drawing from similar wells. “Maria” could be mistaken for a bonus track on the Trick re-release—the kind of breathless, unspooling melody usually played out on a lead guitar rather than the human voice, the uneasy tension between easy listening ambience and abject squalor. Yet unlike the lowlife reportage on Alex G’s “Hope” or “County,” Mendez is both storyteller and subject here.
The nonchalance in his delivery cuts against the shock value, leaving space to interpret the intention behind each painstakingly chosen word. Notice the juxtaposition between the addict’s frantic desperation and the custodial, impersonal performance of cops who’ve seen far too much of this shit—“Krys and I came crashing through the window/But they were waiting.” Was this whole thing dumb shit because it was a stereotypical moment of intoxicated stupidity? “Earlier that day, we were both clean,” Mendez reveals and while sometimes, addiction can be cunning, baffling, and powerful, it’s more often a blunt instrument to the head—“Come back to me, because it’s easy.”
Though not exactly a concept record or a narrative, Greg Mendez is unified in its exploration of how addiction and relationships—platonic, familial, and romantic—can be subject to the same toxic power dynamics. “Here’s a photograph where it looks like I’m having a good time,” he sighs on “Best Behavior,” embodying a depression so total that a tossed-off punchline lands like a blow to the gut. (“But I’m not,” he adds.) Though Mendez is rarely backed by more than brushed drums, soft electric guitar, or a chintzy organ preset, “Best Behavior” is one of the few truly alone songs here, and the narrator sounds incapable of registering any joy, not even for someone listening to their favorite song or landing their big job. “I’m on my best behavior, do you like it?” he sings, dripping with both neediness and sarcasm, only willing to generate enough energy to desire company for their misery.
Mendez’s arrangements throughout are spare but sturdy, reflecting its narrators’ fate of spiraling towards oblivion while resigned to the likelihood that they’ll keep trudging on. The thwarted impulses of “Cop Caller” are underscored by a full-band coda that gets incrementally louder, wanting so badly to break the solemn mood by waking the neighbors. Even the one song that could be called “bouncy” or “jaunty” (“Goodbye/Trouble”) does so by compressing Elliott Smith’s career into a couple of minutes, combining the diaristic dejection of his own self-titled album with the harmonic sophistication that he saw as a way forward.
While only 23 minutes long, it’s quite literally a life’s work, as its final two songs both date back over a decade. Notice that the closer is titled “Hoping You’re Doing Okay”: “Pull your sleeves down though it is 93 degrees,” Mendez sighs in a crushing depiction of dopesickness. Mendez wrote this song in 2009 and in the time since, he has gotten clean, witnessed the coming and going of several generations of Philly indie rock, and made Greg Mendez while on worker’s comp after a concussion suffered on a construction job. What came of the inspiration of “Hoping You’re Doing Okay,” assuming that it wasn’t Mendez writing to himself?
The past half-century of “singer-songwriter” music can make ears numb to the signifiers of “intimacy” that emerge with even the most cursory listen here: real name on the album cover, no gimmicks. Whispery vocals cloaked in an indeterminate hum, like the music was recorded and uploaded to streaming by the very same iPhone. Songs with seemingly placeholder titles (“Maria,” “Sweetie,” “Friend”) that imply their subjects were sitting in the same room as Mendez. And perhaps it’s crass to suggest that Greg Mendez transcends these tropes because he’s been through some shit. Yet, I think back to that opening line from “Maria” and understand why Mendez admits to being so anxious about letting someone get to know him—in less than two minutes, he can express a lifetime’s worth of pain, regret, and resilience.