The subdued solo debut from the Fontaines D.C. singer feels alluringly timeless. It’s a combination of novelty and tradition, artifice and honesty.

Chaos for the Fly

In concert, Fontaines D.C. singer Grian Chatten cuts a gruff and slightly two-dimensional figure, strutting around stage like Liam Gallagher who has recently lost an argument over child care. His band’s more thoughtful recent album, Skinty Fia, may have brightened the singer’s public image a touch but, even so, it did little to suggest the introspective depths we see on Chatten’s debut solo album, Chaos for the Fly, a record of rumination, folk instrumentation, and the odd electronic flicker that feels alluringly timeless.
Out go Fontaines’ nerve-wrecking post-punk and driving rhythm section; in come lilting acoustic guitars, strings, synths, drum machines, and backing vocals from Chatten’s fiancée Georgie Jesson. Chaos for the Fly is not just different musically from Fontaines’ three albums to date, it’s more adventurous. “East Coast Bed” has a drum beat that cocks a wink to trip-hop and a synth-arpeggio climax; “Last Time Every Time Forever” employs an unusual, clipped waltz time and occasional dub-style reverb; and “Bob’s Casino” has the rueful jauntiness of a Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra dance number.
What really makes the record vibrate, however, is the combination of novelty and tradition, artifice and honesty. It is Chatten’s unadorned delivery, devoid of knowing looks and pop flippancy, that brings Chaos for the Fly into the long lines of folk tradition. Two of the album’s best songs—“Fairlies” and “Salt Throwers Off a Truck”—could be tunes passed down through generations of public houses, their melodies simple but sharply effective, as if carved into rock. But the album is never entirely in thrall to the past: “Fairlies” employs a muted programmed beat alongside its acoustic guitar strum and rousing string rushes, while “Salt Throwers Off a Truck”’s opening couplet “When February came, it came straight for New York/Any colder, they said, we’ll be skating to work” would be equally at home in a 19th-century ballad or a tweet from your local news station.
Chatten’s vocals sound newly mature, expansive, and tender. With Fontaines D.C., his nasal and stony voice pushes melodies around in a way that dares you to judge them out of tune. On Chaos for the Fly, this bluntly effective tool feels like it has bent without giving, capable of doleful melancholy (“The Score” is Nick Drake with a vicious hangover), whimsical wonder (the fantastic “Fairlies,” with its anachronistic references to ferries and fairies) and Music-Hall yarn spinning (the anecdotal and almost garrulous “Bob’s Casino”). This new-found vocal dexterity helps Chatten sound genuinely at home in lonely waters, in a way he didn’t necessarily do on Skinty Fia’s accordion ballad “The Couple Across the Way,” an otherwise useful antecedent for this album’s adventures.
The effect is unsettling at first, as you grapple with Chatten’s new and rather alien dimensions. You can always go back to Chatten’s cocksure and perhaps more exciting post-punk snarl within the confines of his band—nothing here is going to replace “Boys in the Better Land” in the alternative disco pantheon—but Chatten has made a bold claim here as a folk auteur, whose classical songwriting and tender, veracious touch resonates now and into the past.


The GothBoiClique affiliate takes a Lynchian journey through trap beats, dusty drum breaks, and shoegaze guitar; his vaguely emotive lyrics suggest horrors lurking in the shadows.

Wicca Phase Springs Eternal: Full Moon Mystery Garden

Full Moon Mystery Garden

Like his friends and collaborators in GothBoiClique—the emo-rap iconoclasts who counted Lil Peep as a member—Wicca Phase Springs Eternal has never been afraid of the dark. The singer-songwriter born Adam McIlwee fills his songs with shredded self-loathing and grim atmospheres, elements no doubt informed by his past membership in the openhearted emo band Tigers Jaw. But Wicca Phase’s music has always been a little more opaque and otherworldly than his peers’. The feelings are raw, but his songs aren’t didactic—he wants you to lean in close, to get lost in the mystery.
On Full Moon Mystery Garden, Wicca Phase Springs Eternal deepens the enigmatic air he’s cultivated in the decade or so that he’s been releasing songs under the alias. The images that recur throughout the record—lonely roads, quiet nights, portals to other realms—are emotionally evocative but never too specific; they’re mundane enough to be comforting, but with enough horrors lurking in the shadows to remain unsettling. It’s a Lynchian journey down a lost highway soundtracked by shuddering trap beats, dusty drum breaks, and the dizzy haze of shoegazing guitar lines. On the gauzily poppy “Tonight I’m in Love on My Own,” he sums up record’s allure in a single couplet: “The ambience, the air that I’m after/Is cryptic, it’s mystic, it’s true.”
McIlwee’s misty abstraction has rarely been as moving as on “Dark Region Road,” where he readies himself to descend into an underwater portal, letting love wash over him. Throughout, his writing feels heavily labored and self-consciously poetic, but in a way that suits the grave intonation of his voice. He’s always favored a rough low register flanked by creeping harmonies, and he does here too, in a way that evokes medieval sacred music—when he sings about being chased by shadows or prying open a “forbidden door,” it’s almost as if he’s chanting profane verses, the foreboding consequences of which remain unclear.
This approach, shrouding almost every lyric in darkness, makes for some incisive moments of emotional clarity when McIlwee does allow himself to open up. The simple, direct opening of “I Was on a Back Road by Myself” is a placid meditation on solitude that recalls the unvarnished vulnerability of Phil Elverum’s first records as Mount Eerie. It’s affecting and earnest in a way that much of Full Moon Mystery Garden isn’t, which makes it feel like McIlwee is confiding in you—a small kernel of truth amid the swirling uneasiness of the record as a whole.
This satisfying use of contrast is echoed in the record’s instrumentals. McIlwee and producer Garden Avenue alternate between the bruised beats that defined past Wicca Phase releases, heavy drum’n’bass refractions, and euphoric pop. In part, that’s no doubt to accommodate the wide variety of guests, who run from similarly downcast GothBoiClique regulars like Fish Narc to kaleidoscopic pop mutators like 8485 and blackwinterwells, but the emotional effect is profound. Tension and release exist in a delicate balance—for every moment of ecstatic abandon, like the dreamy “Hickory Grove,” there’s something a little more curdled and unsettling, like the hazy witch-house memories of “I Am the Edge.” As a result, the record feels inviting in places, terse and cold in others. It’s a compelling document of uncertainty from an artist who’s unafraid to offer a guided tour of the muddled headspace where he lives.


The ECM Recordings collects some of the minimalist composer's finest works, including the definitive recording of his undisputed masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians.

The ECM Recordings

There was a time when Steve Reich had few champions. Now he wins the Pulitzer Prize, collaborates with Jonny Greenwood, and on various anniversaries of the composer’s birth, concert halls the world over schedule celebrations of his catalog. But in the late ’60s and early ’70s, during his hardcore minimalist period, labels offered only sporadic commitments, including one-and-done relationships with both Columbia and Deutsche Grammophon. Before the American vanguard of minimalism would be canonized in classical circles, someone would have to demonstrate long-term confidence in Reich’s art.
In 1978, Manfred Eicher’s ECM imprint offered the first issue of Music for 18 Musicians, after famously spiriting the tapes away from a tentative Deutsche Grammophon. (The latter had been sitting on the album for years, after paying to record it in 1976.) Eicher’s trend-spotting sense proved keen: The jazz label’s first “classical” release eventually sold over 100,000 copies. ECM followed up this success as soon as they could, with a collection of shorter Reich pieces from his past, one of which was already more than a decade old. After a third LP—the recorded debut of Tehillim—Reich moved with onetime ECM employee Bob Hurwitz to the label Nonesuch, his recording home ever since.
Thanks to the early ECM albums, three twists in the composer’s early development were more widely appreciated. Here you could identify Reich as the stylistic upstart, the composer achieving a breakthrough, and the artist who—in the aftermath of that breakthrough—needed to plot a new course. Instead of moving chronologically by date-of-composition, the reissue works in order of original release, starting with the event that was Music for 18 Musicians.
Though some classical critics of the era objected to what one described as Reich’s “robot or zombie music,” Music for 18 Musicians has always inspired an enthusiastic response. The piece contained the steady pulse of early minimalism—an influence on all manners of electronic subgenres. There are likewise elements from Reich’s pioneering works with “phasing,” though these do not overwhelm the piece. The harmonic movement that keeps each section of Musicians feeling active was a relatively recent development in Reich’s sound, as well. Musicologist Keith Potter describes the overall effect as “on-the-edge” Reich—with the composer delighting in the apotheosis of his prior techniques while at the same time discovering new ones.
It also helped that his band was in fearsome health. Over 59 minutes, they whip through the opening (which introduces the 11 different chords that will be explored), progress through twelve different meditations on those chords (the third chord inspires two “movements”), before quickly revisiting the initial tour through the sequence and then fading away into silence. Every quality performance of Music for 18 Musicians is capable of unearthing some fresh-sounding detail from Reich’s nests of rhythm and harmony. But this inaugural recording excels in two aspects that make for an unlikely pair: it’s one of the fastest renditions ever, and also one of the most tender.
One moment of power-plus-poetry comes in the thirteenth minute of this recording, during the piece’s “IIIA” section. After this movement has established fast, interlocking patterns for violin, piano, marimba and xylophone, there is a dramatic addition of slow-moving pairs of notes for the cello. When set against the antic performance of the other parts, the melancholic feel embedded in the ensemble’s low-string instrument becomes all the more affecting. The constant churn of the work can tempt you to think of its appeal as ethereal, fit for background listening. But then some unexpected change—a complication of the suggested tonal center, or a transmutation of instrumental color—winds up commanding your attention.
This wealth of textural variation rebuts those objections to Reich’s work as being somehow on auto-pilot. Late in the piece, the melodic construction may seem familiar, but changed—reflecting Reich’s metaphor in the liner notes about the relationship between sections being like “resemblances between members of a family.” Each individual entity within this “family” of movements also possesses multiple humors and whims. It’s the consistently malleable quality of this music that has made the capstone to Reich’s purely minimalist period so fiercely loved by separate and overlapping communities of classical and pop artists. In his book The Rest Is Noise, New Yorker critic Alex Ross recalled observing the fast-spreading appeal of this sound, writing that in the ’80s and ’90s, “...you could walk into any hip boutique or hotel lounge and sooner or later hear some distant, burbling cousin of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.”
Where to go next? Reich took some time to figure this out—eventually composing a piece called Music for a Large Ensemble two years later. It’s shorter and not as formally impressive as Music for 18 Musicians, though Reich continues his quest to slowly investigate all the instruments of the conventional orchestra (adding double bass, this time around). It wasn’t long enough for a recording on its own, even when combined with 1979’s more inspired Octet (later rearranged and retitled Eight Lines). So ECM paired these compositions with a much older one: “Violin Phase.” Eicher’s production of that late-’60s composition has a luxuriant stereo separation that makes it an ideal way to experience the rhythmic ambiguity of Reich’s electro-acoustic layering.
This spare and resonant production aesthetic carries over to the final Reich recording on ECM, on 1982’s Tehillim. Based on his study of Jewish cantillation, it represents the composer’s next big leap forward to the realm of melody. His settings of biblical psalms are flat-out catchy. The rhythmic play is still complex and engaging, but this is the piece that proved Reich’s career would outlast the burst of minimalism’s first widespread acceptance by popular audiences in the ’70s. The recording released by ECM is the chamber version of Tehillim; a later recording conducted by Alan Pierson for Nonesuch has a more vehement force. But vehemence isn’t the only lens through which to explore Reich’s lovely writing. Produced during Reich’s 80th birthday year, this reissue package includes all of the composer’s original liner notes to those three LPs, as well as several session photos and a new essay. But the principal draw is the same as ever. Better than any other comparably sized collection, this trio of albums offers a crisp overview of 15 dramatic years in the composer’s development.


The experimental guitarist who made his name on collaboration steps into the spotlight with a meditative, ominous solo LP. Each of these eight pieces is like a pitch-black room, easy to enter but tricky to navigate.

Both

More than any of his peers in his experimental-music scene, the guitarist Bill Nace has built his career on collaboration. Of his 45 entries on Discogs, only seven are solo, and they’re mostly limited-run, self-released affairs. He’s been much more interested in playing with people across the avant-garde spectrum, from free jazz veterans Joe McPhee and Mats Gustaffson to rock musicians Steve Gunn and Thurston Moore to polymaths Okkyung Lee and Kim Gordon (partner in his most well-known venture, Body/Head).
All this collaboration has defined Nace, but it’s also made him something of a cipher. Because the records he plays on are usually instrumental and abstract, it can be hard to locate exactly which sounds and ideas are his. That keeps his work varied and fresh, and means he sees his comrades as equals rather than supporters. But Nace’s musical personality is oddly undefined for someone who’s been on over 40 releases. Though it’s long overdue, a full-fledged, higher-profile solo album raises the question: Can Nace maintain his shadowy persona all by himself?
As the title hints, the answer provided by Both is yes and no. On eight instrumental, guitar-only tracks—all with plain, numbered names—Nace makes bold, loud noises and active, committed moves. Despite being wordless and non-melodic, each track has a discernible structure. They begin with sounds that at first seem random but, by warping into waves or clipping into rhythms, eventually become motifs. In “Part 2,” what sounds like a guitar cord being pulled out and plugged back in becomes a kind of subconscious beat, while “Part 7” offers two oscillations whose variations in volume build them into mantras. Even on the longest track, the nearly 11-minute “Part 6,” a wide range of sounds gain momentum—and verge on chaos—through basic rhythmic panning. Each piece is like a pitch-black room, easy to enter but tricky to navigate.
Nace’s guitar tone is rough and gritty, continually generating tactile waves that you can grab onto and ride, and the result is both meditative and ominous. Both shares an eerie, hypnotic quality with the unhinged loops of Aaron Dilloway and the darkened seances of Marcia Bassett, aka Zaïmph. But Nace’s repetitions rarely hammer you with a single unwavering sound. Instead he dodges and darts, creating space for you to fill in blanks. In that sense, Both might be more about its listener than its creator. If by the end we still don’t know exactly who Bill Nace is, we certainly have a better idea of how much he can do.


The breathtaking songs of Angel Olsen’s fifth album are fleshed out by a 12-piece string section and deliver grand gestures about romance, authenticity, and being simply at the mercy of how we feel.

All Mirrors

Angel Olsen is a natural at writing mantras for jaded souls. Burn your fire for no witness. Unfucktheworld. Some days all you need is one good thought strong in your mind. No one’s gonna hear it the same as it’s said. While her music has evolved from lamp-lit folk to boisterous rock’n’roll and ritzy synth-pop, she has always emphasized the importance of self-conviction. This steadfast philosophy, coupled with how wryly she appears to withstand heavy emotional weather, has made Olsen talismanic to fans. But halfway through the tour for her 2016 album My Woman, a messy fallout from a breakup made Olsen realize how disconnected she had become from herself. She decided to make her next album as she had her earliest releases, working almost alone (in remote Anacortes, Washington) to focus on bare-bones songwriting. It also meant trying to elude the accrued weight of her identity: Olsen has said that she and her friends often “joke about how dumb ‘Angel Olsen’ is.”
In the songs Olsen wrote in Anacortes, love and, consequently, her identity became an illusion. What ended up on her fifth album, All Mirrors, are bemused questions about why she would suppress her needs, why she had to deny what she was going through, why the past must keep repeating. The lyrics are often softer and less certain than on her first four scalpel-sharp records. If there is one mantra among them, it’s in the stoned ambivalence of “Spring”: “I’m beginning to wonder if anything’s real,” she sings. “Guess we’re just at the mercy of the way that we feel.”
We don’t yet know what the music from those Anacortes sessions sounds like: A few months after its completion, Olsen recorded a second version of the album with show-stopping string arrangements from Ben Babbitt and Jherek Bischoff (and production by John Congleton). She intended to release both records simultaneously, then realized the power of the orchestrated version meant it had to come first. The two incarnations, one lavish and one threadbare, embody that lyric about how feelings shape reality and identity, and pose a striking challenge from an artist variously misunderstood in the past as “sad girl at the bottom of a well,” feminist autodidact, and silver wig-wearing “character.”
Once both takes on All Mirrors stand side by side, they’ll offer an intriguing case study in interpretation and how form suggests content: Is authenticity regarded as a magisterial group effort or just a lone voice and a guitar? Does devastation hit harder at volume or a whisper? The two albums are also a massive, meta juxtaposition of the feminine archetypes that Olsen has wielded over the past decade—fragility and excess, interiority and high drama, submission and rage—that dares us to distinguish between the person and the performance.
For now, though, all we have is the first part, which would be revelatory in any context. The atmosphere suggests a wracked Cassavetes heroine wandering onto a sparkling MGM set and sinking right into its whipped-cream luxe. Eight of its 11 songs feature a 12-piece string section, with modes ranging from gallant high-romance to Gainsbourg hat-tips to twilit softness. Plenty of acts skew symphonic at some point in their career, and it’s hard for any artist to hold their own against such overwhelming staging and the constant threat of pastiche. But everything from the songs’ surprising dramatic arcs to their granular textures feels integral to Olsen’s songwriting. Take the title track, where she sings about being trapped by her past romances and youthful beauty: The backmasked backing vocals intensify that sense of imprisonment; the synth sparkle that follows it takes an unexpected dip from major to minor, like a sudden changing of the light. And that moment in “Spring” where she sings about being at the mercy of her feelings pushes the song from twinkling lullaby to barbiturate reverie, a total surrender to sensation on a record so recklessly physical it should come with its own parachute.
Not that All Mirrors is just a strong wind that blows in and leaves you undone. Olsen has described All Mirrors as an “angry” record, and even when she isn’t explicitly cursing “DREAM ON DREAM ON DREAM ON” on the skyrocketing “Lark” at an ex who failed to register her desires, the synth-abetted production seethes and shudders, grandeur and ruin existing side by side. But it’s a playful album, too, one that traces the full scope of heartbreak. “What It Is” canters along as Olsen mocks herself for giving in to love’s charade: “You just wanted to forget/That your heart was full of shit!” she sings in a cadence that suggests a sarcastically wagged finger. With its elongated violin notes, “Tonight” is fit for the last flush of romance in a silver-screen love story.
Yet Olsen’s tenderness is directed at herself, having arrived at a clarity where she no longer cares to explain “all the things you think you’ve come to understand about me.” Her composure as she sings these words is as still and inky as the sea against the night sky. The remark could apply just as much to the public as her former lover. Each of Olsen’s artistic developments has been heralded as some sort of permanent shift in her work or her commercial aspirations: Now she’s an indie star. Now she wants to be a pop star. Oh, she’s collaborating with Mark Ronson? She must really want to be a pop star. But the wild range of All Mirrors and Olsen’s vocal performance fly in the face of the idea that identity and artistry are fixed, and consequently turn over how much we can ever know each other, and ourselves.
She finds the nuance and enduring pleasure in her game of faces. While “Too Easy” sends up undying devotion, with moony girl-groupisms to spare, Olsen willfully dedicates herself to someone else on “New Love Cassette”—and the lusty mood, lifted directly from Gainsbourg’s 1971 album L’Histoire de Melody Nelson, indicates her pleasure in doing so. We fall in love again and again because a little self-sabotage never stopped anyone. Olsen suggests that nihilism and optimism are closer than you think, that what feels like knowing yourself is almost always revealed as delusion. On All Mirrors, she glories in that tumult, and the sparks that fly illuminate her bravura turn.


The ambient, intimate debut from singer Conner Youngblood uses layered folk impressionism to evoke the kinds of feelings that elude easy definition.

Cheyenne

Unlike the old saying, Conner Youngblood doesn’t write what he knows. He is a 28-year-old Yale graduate, born in Dallas and currently living in Nashville. You would not, however, learn that information—or anything that describes his personal lifestyle—from listening to his full-length debut Cheyenne. “I tried to write songs about chicks... and I think it’s just kind of boring,” he once quipped, eschewing the need to fit what might be on his mind into his work. Instead, Youngblood creates ambient folk soundscapes—songs that blossom gently with intricate musical details and enigmatic lyrics.
He sings with the intimacy of a bedroom artist whose eyes are focused solely out the window at something a bit too far away to make out. Cheyenne, as a result, is impressionistic—when you look closer and closer, it’s not as astounding as it is from a distance. But he imbues these songs with a sensory feeling—like he’s figuring out an event’s significance simply by recalling whatever tiny memories stick in his head. A track like “Los Angeles” sets only a bit of the scene in the actual city. He recalls some moments (“Wednesday morning/Miss an early flight”) and an ever-telling “she,” but it’s largely ambiance. What’s more telling is the contrast between Youngblood’s hushed half-falsetto and a melody that occasionally soars with piano and horns; a tambourine shakes forcefully throughout. There’s something or someone he misses, but he does not seem to be sure how it affects him. The track exists as its own realm for contemplation. And that area is probably not really in Southern California.
The contrast between a real location and its role on Cheyenne is even sharper on “The Birds of Finland” and “Stockholm,” songs Youngblood said he wrote before ever visiting Scandinavia. “I’m a lot of times influenced by places I’ve never been, and just, like, imagining what the place could be like, and writing my version of it,” Youngblood said in 2016. On the triumphant “The Birds of Finland,” Youngblood names a variety of birds: the wren, the hooded crow, the eider. Here, he allows his voice to boom through echoes, as if to suggest he’s more comfortable transposing his thoughts onto birds than speaking them directly.
It’s difficult not to think of Bon Iver. Youngblood’s disappearing voice resembles Justin Vernon’s, and there is a similar bent toward the fake-world-building of Bon Iver. But where Vernon sang verbosely on songs like “Michicant,” rendering a fake place real, Youngblood does the opposite, turning the Swedish capital, for instance, into a figment of his mind. In this light, it is hard to glean much from Youngblood’s lyrics. On “Stockholm,” he repeats the title through an opaque lens and adds few other tangible lines.
Even without a specific time or place—because “Stockholm” is certainly not set in Stockholm—the song resonates. Conner Youngblood’s words fade away and slowly embed themselves into your mind like an already distant memory. His lyrics typically range from bluntly simple to esoteric to borderline nonsensical. On “Lemonade” alone, he sings lines as disparate as “I’m human francium” and “Let me be your lemonade.” There may not be much behind the abstractions, or at least nothing Youngblood chooses to reveal, but they’re connected by an overarching idea that truth exists in feeling and sense, not literal meaning. In this way, Cheyenne is both pleasant and precious: an album that embodies impressionism and idealism and asks for little in return beyond an open mind and a willingness to see the forest through the trees. Even when the picture is still coming into focus.


Panopticon is the Minnesota-via-Kentucky solo project of Austin Lunn. On his new album Autumn Eternal, he borrows from genres like atmospheric black metal, prog rock, post rock, and bluegrass while simultaneously honoring them.

Autumn Eternal

For all the fervor that's supposed to define its spirit, black metal essentially amounts to a set of affectations bundled together into a genre. This is especially apparent when artists outside of Scandinavia adopt hallmark signifiers like facepaint, illegible band logos that look like cobwebs, Satanism, ratty production values, and a harsh, staticky brand of guitar distortion that sounds like static. Not unlike the way rappers across the globe aspire to a constellation of mannerisms that first coalesced in the Bronx, today's black metal artists, regardless of where they're from, mold themselves after an attitude that blossomed within a distinctly Nordic headspace during the genre's early-'90s Second Wave.
Still, it comes as something of a surprise that Austin Lunn of the U.S.-based solo act Panopticon harbors such an open fascination with vague, mythical notions of "the North." His last album was titled Roads to the North, this new album Autumn Eternal includes a track titled "Into the North Woods", and several Panopticon releases feature wintry, foreboding landscapes as cover art that will immediately strike a chord with aficionados. But the "North" that Lunn invokes is actually his adoptive home of Minnesota. And, though the multi-instrumentalist has made a personal principle out of staying reclusive, his isolation shouldn't be mistaken for the misanthropic fury that has driven black metal's most notorious antiheroes.
As Autumn Eternal, Panopticon's seventh full-length, again makes clear, Lunn is an artist capable of appropriating core aesthetics from a number of genres while simultaneously honoring them—a balance that requires no small measure of dexterity. Lunn's manifesto-like notes on Bandcamp betray a sensitive heart that he wears on his sleeve. Clearly, Panopticon's music isn't motivated by hate or nihilism, and one can easily imagine a Henry David Thoreau-like figure retreating to the woods to contemplate personal, spiritual, and environmental concerns while Bon Iver's Justin Vernon nurses his love wounds in the cabin next door. More importantly, Lunn's work lacks the creepy jingoism that some of his Nordic peers have embraced on the slippery slope to Nazi/white supremacist sympathies. The bands that have flirted with ugly racial undertones have, of course, enjoyed the twin benefits of titillating fans and repulsing detractors, cultivating an aura of danger while hiding safely behind suggestion.
Lunn has no need for such coyness because his heart is in an entirely different place. To be fair, it's not like you can understand what he's singing about. And whether or not his intentions truly give this music a more humanistic vibe than other black metal fare is debatable. But his musical agility certainly does set Panopticon apart, Autumn Eternal in particular. As he has in the past, Lunn infuses atmospheric black metal and European melodic/symphonic death metal with prog rock, post rock and, perhaps most audaciously, bluegrass. On paper, those combinations reek of calculation, but Lunn has long proven his ability to blend them into a seamless, irony-free sound, a sound he continues to forge ahead with on Autumn Eternal. Black metal bands have been paying homage to Viking folk tradition for years now, but the results have often been laughable. When Lunn incorporates acoustic roots expressions from the hills of Kentucky, it comes off neither as an academic exercise nor as an attempt to parody his overseas counterparts.
In fact, there's no denying the earnestness of Autumn Eternal opener "Tamarack's Gold Returns", which prominently features violin work by Johan Becker of Chicago's Austaras alongside Lunn's own dobro playing. Where artists following the metal playbook would have fashioned the tune as a one-minute intro, Lunn and Becker go on for a full three minutes-plus before the music gives way to a minutes' worth of a found-sound ambient recording of Lunn spending time in nature. After that, a hail of ornate, baroque-style metal kicks in with lead guitars wailing dramatically over double bass drum rolls before Lunn makes his vocal entrance. Piercing but also bottom-heavy, Lunn's voice emanates brute animal power. He also allows for long instrumental sections where he refrains from singing, which only highlights its impact when he starts to howl.
Autumn Eternal concludes the trilogy that Lunn started with 2012's Kentucky and continued with Roads to the North. Listeners who have followed Panopticon since that point or before will no doubt quibble over whether he's gone too far—or maybe not far enough—with the stylistic variety this time. Other than the myriad twists and turns on the epic "Sleep to the Sound of the Waves Crashing", Lunn generally approaches the new material as if he's streamlining his approach rather than going for more audacious or pointed ways to combine his influences. During one of the blast-beat sections on "Waves Crashing", the mix suddenly strips down to the point where it feels like you're listening to the drums from inside the unflattering acoustics of a rehearsal space while the guitarist tests a new reverb pedal from the adjacent room. Becker's violin on the song switches gears from a rustic Scottish/Irish vibe to film score melodrama. "Pale Ghosts", meanwhile, finds a space for Mono-esque shoegaze within the DNA of furious black metal riffing before the song takes flight into a dreamy passage anchored by a melancholic guitar arpeggio.
Lunn has a way of making these and other elements sound perfectly at home with one another. In truth, nothing on Autumn Eternal jumps out as incongruous, which suggests that Lunn is simply expanding—not trying to radically alter—the black metal formula. Still, by renouncing its obligatory celebration of malice, Panopticon gives the form a much-needed makeover, and with Autumn Eternal, Austin Lunn further uncovers musical potential that's long been overshadowed by too much bad-boy posturing.


The imposing, experimental 18-minute piece from the Tehran-based composer draws upon noise, drone, musique concrète, and the poetry of Xavier Villarrutia.

The Sweat of Earth

Siavash Amini makes music of almost unfathomable complexity. Like a weather system, it might appear relatively static from afar, but inside, it churns. On his recent album Eidolon, released in early July, the Tehran-based composer found inspiration in a 17-note scale formulated by the 13th-century scholar Safi-al-din Urmavi. But even the most technically adept listener might have trouble picking out those tones. In Eidolon’s endless pitch and yaw, there are no fixed points, no hard edges, no firm ground at all—just seasick glissandi and perpetual slippage.
The otherworldly sound of that record, shorn of anything as reassuring as a major triad or a perfect fifth, suggests an interstitial state, placing unexpected and unstable frequencies in between familiar intervals. On his new EP, The Sweat of Earth, a companion to the album, Amini continues to pry open the cracks. The title of the record comes from a poem by the 20th-century Mexican writer Xavier Villarrutia. “Nocturnos,” a meditation on eros and death, turns its gaze upon negative space, envisioning the forms revealed by shadows and the sounds caught in stillness. (“Everything that the silence sends fleeing from things,” Villarrutia writes: “The fog of desire/The sweat of earth/The nameless scent/Of skin.”)
The Sweat of Earth spends its 18-minute run in pursuit of similarly ephemeral sensations. While its dark, glowering tones might, at first blush, scan as noise, upon closer inspection they open up to reveal a sensuousness in keeping with Villarrutia’s richly imagistic poem. The piece begins with a minute of pure white noise, like steam hissing from a grate, before ushering in an expansive buzzing sound, a shapeshifting fusion of prop planes, beehives, and distant foghorns.
The sound comes in waves. There are cycles of crescendo and denouement, so slow they barely register as repetition. In the moments of greatest clarity, clusters of dissonance vibrate at conflicting speeds, at frequencies impossible to parse; the drone gleams like well-scoured stainless steel, a riot of overlapping lines. At its peak, the low end rumbles violently, and background static grows in volume until it resembles shopping carts trundling down a stairwell. From that climax, the piece tenderly flatlines. The final seven minutes are a soft plateau of bell tones, but what appears unchanging on the surface bristles with detail, and the longer the piece runs, and the quieter it gets, the more vivid its depths grow. The paradoxical finale brings to mind another line from Villarrutia’s poem: “Everything that the shadow/Makes heard with the hard/Blow of its silence.”


On her confrontational fourth album, Merrill Garbus wades into the politics of being white in America. It is musically and lyrically ambitious, but its grander themes land with an uncomfortable thud.

Tune-Yards: I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life

Merrill Garbus has an ear for the insidious forces that shape a person’s sense of self. She’s written complex songs that allow pleasure, guilt, and confusion to coexist without contradiction. Her music understood that you could be a feminist and hate your body, bemoan gentrification while enjoying the spoils of its sprawl, loathe violence yet find it incomprehensibly liberating. Moreover, she conveyed that you could wholeheartedly adore and respect the music of other cultures while still feeling a profound moral ambivalence about being a Connecticut-raised white woman releasing records that draw liberally—and ultimately, profit—from African and Caribbean rhythms and singing. These messy nuances were a tonic.
Tune-Yards’ ascent over the past decade parallels a huge shift in social consciousness. Garbus released her debut, BiRd-BrAiNs, in 2008. The follow-up, 2011’s w h o k i l l, brought discussions about police brutality, race, and social inequality to the fore in an indie-rock arena that was hardly talking about these issues, much less making the space for musicians of color to explore them on their own terms. Its prominence was simultaneously a biting indictment of a myopic culture and genuinely valuable for listeners who had never before been challenged to consider these topics. But were Tune-Yards to debut now, perhaps they wouldn’t get a pass. Black artists now have a long overdue voice in alternative music, and consumers (particularly of the kind of music Garbus makes) are hyper-conscious of representation and who has the right to tell a story.
Garbus is also acutely aware of this—how the platform her identity has afforded her and the cultures on which it was built look right now—and sets out to explore these tensions on I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life. It’s a purposefully confrontational piece of work, mercifully aimed more at destroying her ego than buoying it like Macklemore or Amanda Palmer have done in the past. But the subtle “creep” that was once her specialty becomes a deluge. The voices of white guilt are practically the totality of the work. It’s frequently a difficult listen, and not for the reasons Garbus intended.
On Tune-Yards’ third album, 2014’s Nikki Nack, Garbus and collaborator Nate Brenner added R&B to their joyful noise, making for a slower, stronger record. For I Can Feel You..., Garbus immersed herself in the history of dance music, and the breadth and delight of her studies often shows. “Heart Attack” opens the record with a fiery disco whirl full of drama and opulence, spiked by Garbus’ rat-a-tat vocal assault. “Honesty” turns her sampled vocals into clarion chaos, fragments of lyrics occasionally blooming out from the choppy rhythm: “Do you really wanna know?” she wails, and it plays like a wickedly sly challenge to remember the music’s radical black, queer origins.
Lead single “Look at Your Hands” also makes heavy use of a sampler, but it’s strangely prosaic for Tune-Yards—the gated drums pop, but fail to enliven a tedious vocal hook about ownership that sounds more like being in the club with a very high friend who’s truly appreciating his fingers for the first time. The slow songs also feel a little indolent and uncertain. “Who Are You” drifts on a gauzy dancehall chirrup, and “Home” is dread-less dub. There are moments of sensuality—the mournfully slinky “Coast to Coast,” “Now As Then” with its libidinous anxiety—but the music’s bodily satisfaction jars against gauche lyrics that kill the vibe. Perhaps that’s the point.
Garbus educated herself on whiteness while making the album by reading, joining activist groups, and undertaking a “six-month-long workshop on whiteness at East Bay Meditation Center.” When the United States is ruled by a UN-certified racist, it’s a pretty good idea for any white citizen to learn about issues of racial privilege and injustice, to do their best not to perpetuate them, and to listen. But there is a fine line between accountability and aggrandizement, and I Can Feel You... often succumbs to the latter.
Much of what Garbus addresses is true but without inquiry. “Coast to Coast” impugns liberals (herself among them) who waited until it was too late to speak out against injustice and mocks their blinkered utopian suggestions to “build a sky, build it big enough to hold us all.” “Colonizer” sounds like Mr. Oizo’s “Flat Beat” reassembled in a haunted junkyard, accurately detailing the dominance of Caucasian beauty standards and the racial stereotypes that give white women the benefit of the doubt not afforded to women of color. Despite its unarguable premise, it is a uniquely indigestible song: “I use my white woman’s voice to tell stories of travels with African men,” Garbus sings in a sour sing-song. “I comb my white woman’s hair with a comb made especially, generally for me.” She continues, “I turn on my white woman’s voice to contextualize acts of my white women friends/I cry my white woman tears carving grooves in my cheeks to display what I meant.”
These are not new themes for Tune-Yards, but they are newly inelegant. Compare “Colonizer” to a verse in Nikki Nack’s “Water Fountain” where some change from a slice of cherry pie is a “blood-soaked dollar” that “still works in the store,” a sweet, violent parable about American capitalism. The title of “ABC 123” is a joke about how nothing is simple in the “new reality,” and is accordingly muddled. The relentless tirade spins like a runaway disco ball and touches on wildfires, white centrality, Garbus’ “pre-polluted fetus,” greed, the NSA, and how only unity can win the next election. She acknowledges the deep roots of racism (structural and internalized) on “Honesty” and “Private Life,” and wonders what community looks like in a godless society on “Who Are You?,” asking, “Communion is old, but what makes a community whole?” Some subsequent lyrics about global warming suggest that this universal environmental catastrophe will ultimately unite us. Perhaps it will.
It’s a bleak, complex prospect that’s more appealing to parse than the fear of being berated for one’s complicity that colors much of the record: Discussing internalized racism with the Financial Times, Garbus said, “In a callout culture, where the most horrible thing is to be shamed online, it still feels scary to talk about that.” Talking about systemic racism is crucial; centring white helplessness in its face, as Garbus does here, less so: As soon as a white person frets that they’ll never be enough to bring down an unjust system, she saps energy from a more important conversation. And for all Garbus’ emotional risks, her adventurous music no longer feels like the place to have it.


Twenty years ago, U2 graduated to superstardom with The Joshua Tree, an album that's survived all those years in the spotlight as a masterpiece. Now the disc gets the requisite set of B-sides and rarities, plus a DVD.

The Joshua Tree: Deluxe Edition

U2 started out as a scrappy band riding the punk wave out of Ireland, but from the beginning they clearly had their sights on America. And indeed, the States ate up U2's bombast, landing both War (1983) and The Unforgettable Fire (1984) in the U.S. top 20. The group fed off that enthusiasm, criss-crossing the country as much as its schedule allowed. The more the band's fan base grew, the harder U2 worked to get even bigger, and in 1987 they enjoyed their breakthrough into superstadom thanks to The Joshua Tree, which went on to sell 10 million copies in the U.S. alone.
Funnily enough, while The Joshua Tree once and for all catapulted U2 to permanent superstardom, the album marks something of a conscious refinement of the group's sound. The album was nowhere near as strident as War or as radically overwrought as The Unforgettable Fire (which was, lest one forget, recorded in a frickin' castle). Reunited with producers Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, it's as if the band finally took a moment to ponder the wide-open American spaces it had been traveling through for years and applied those musical and cultural observations to its songs. It's an album made for dusty, empty flyover country.
U2 have always flirted with charismatic Christianity, and the Joshua Tree songwriting process finds the band in a particularly reflective mood; "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and" "With or Without You" are steeped in religious imagery, but even their constant radio rotation hasn't robbed these introspective songs of their potency or effectiveness. Smartly, U2 balanced those personal songs with more universal tracks, often with an emphasis on forgotten people and forgotten places around the globe: "Red Hill Mining Town" (about the mid-80s UK miners strike), "Exit" (inspired by Norman Mailer's Gary Gilmore tome The Executioner's Song), "Mothers of the Disappeared" (about Argentina's murdered political dissidents), and "Bullet the Blue Sky" (about U.S. meddling in Central America).
"Bullet" is one of the few Joshua Tree non-singles to remain a live U2 staple-- its bluster hints at the band's current broad aesthetic-- but it's slightly out of place among a record mostly characterized by its grace, subtlety, introspection, and beauty. That holds especially true for its more mysterious (or at least less overplayed) second half, which roughly begins and ends perfectly with the ballad "Running to Stand Still" (about heroin addiction) and gentle outro "Mothers of the Disappeared". In between, "Trip Through Your Wires" is the rare blues track to prominently feature co-producer Eno's favored novelty, the Omnichord, while "One Tree Hill" and the apocalyptic "Exit" showcase wickedly screwed up and uncharacteristic guitar solos from the Edge.
No question, the disc deserves this anniversary treatment, but other U2 albums need the remastering more. As for the 14-tracks disc of B-sides and extras, it's best to keep expectations firmly in check. U2 aren't known for hiding away gems, or for that matter, sharing their studio experiments-- not even the reggae-tinged version of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" shows up here. What we get instead is mostly the usual array of previously released tracks and familiar rarities-- best among them are "Spanish Eyes", "Silver and Gold", the original version of "The Sweetest Thing", and "Deep in the Heart"-- plus a handful of tracks new even to hardcore fans. Of those, "Beautiful Ghost/Introduction to Songs of Experience" and "Drunk Chicken/America" are moody spoken word pieces. The Patti Smith-styled "Wave of Sorrow (Birdland)" is similarly a bit out of character for the band, which explains what it's doing here.
While the haters were already on board, it was with its next album, Rattle and Hum, that the group's egos finally overtook their ambitions, and it took a near fatal break and the resounding triumph Achtung Baby to set the band back on track. But to this day U2 's Joshua Tree breakthrough-- and, in particular, Bono's insistence on living up to the messianic role his fans and admires foisted upon him-- still resonates as a lingering source of scorn, suspiciousness, and ridicule. If you don't doubt that, then try to sit through the (videotaped, not filmed) July 4, 1987 concert at an outdoor venue in Paris, the 40-minute Outside It's America documentary, and the music videos stuffed onto the set's DVD.
About the only remarkable thing about the concert is that it starts with "I Will Follow" rather than "Where the Streets Have No Name". As for the doc, it plays like a Rattle and Hum test run that will leave you throwing things at your screen as the band goes shopping, signs autographs, and poses for photos. There is, however, a rare glimpse of U2's sense of humor that teases their future neo-ironic rebirth hidden on the DVD: footage of the fames Dalton Brothers, the band's country alter-egos, who opened a few dates on the Joshua Tree tour (replete with Adam Clayton in drag). But after a couple of minutes of their shtick, you'll want to throw stuff at them, too.


Setting tinnitus-inducing noise-pop against a tension-wracked Joy Division-meets-Ministry backdrop, this Brooklyn trio drenches lovesick indie pop in sheets of deafening static and distortion. Plenty of bands may have tapped the trebly, ecstatic side of shoegaze in recent years, but none have imbued it with this band's frustrated aggression or lacerating, industrial feedback.

A Place to Bury Strangers: A Place to Bury Strangers

A Place to Bury Strangers

Never underestimate the power of the perfect guitar effects unit. The Jesus and Mary Chain's landmark Psychocandy would have sounded vastly less godlike without its use of a discontinued (and allegedly broken) Japanese fuzz pedal. Dinosaur Jr.'s J Mascis dredged his mythic decibel levels from road-worn Marshall amps, but his stoner racket wouldn't have been the same if he hadn't funneled it through the grinding fury of a Big Muff. In the right hands, one little black box can mean the difference between pummeling and decimating.
Few people understand this better than Oliver Ackermann, frontman for thunderous Brooklyn three-piece A Place to Bury Strangers: Under his catch-all company name Death by Audio (it's also a music venue, recording studio, and collective), he custom-builds and designs his own hand-wired pedals, which are used by everyone from Lightning Bolt and Serena Maneesh to Wilco, Spoon, and TV on the Radio. Not coincidentally, anyone looking for a quick description of his own band can look to the names he gives these things: Interstellar Overdriver, Supersonic Fuzz Gun, Total Sonic Annihilation.
With a bandname that's linked to both the Gospel of Matthew and the writings of British occultist Aleister Crowley, A Place to Bury Strangers represents something of a second coming for Ackermann. He was previously a member of defunct Fredericksburg, Va., dream-pop revivalists Skywave, whose records were all but baptized in the drones of (don't jump out of your checkered Vans!) the JAMC and My Bloody Valentine. After their breakup, Skywave's remaining members formed the like-minded two-piece Ceremony, and Ackermann moved to New York where he hooked up with drummer Jay Space and bassist Jono Mofo, turned up the volume, and began masterminding the wrecking-crew colossus that would become this album.
Compiling mastered versions of the band's early CD-Rs and mp3s, A Place to Bury Strangers' self-titled debut LP sets tinnitus-inducing noise-pop against a tension-wracked Joy Division-meets-Ministry backdrop. Plenty of bands have tapped the trebly, ecstatic side of shoegaze in recent years, but none have imbued it with this band's frustrated aggression or lacerating feedback.
What hits first is the reverberating distortion: The brutal textures announce themselves in pangs of blown-out guitar, crunching against the propulsive bassline and distant, static-soaked drums of opening track "Missing You". Thirty seconds in, the tempest recedes, revealing the song's love-wasted verses and murky, chiming guitars (think the Chills' "Pink Frost" and you're close), only to sneak up again for a shattered, metal-twisting chorus. The group's versatile squall can crumble majestically, as on the slow-motion starfighter explosions of "The Falling Sun", or growl like a wounded mountain lion, as during the pitch-shifting tumult of "My Weakness". And on "To Fix the Gash in Your Head", it even evokes the late-80s peak of Wax Trax! industrial bands, fleshed out by treble-heavy synth, buzzsaw guitars, and primitive, pre-programmed drum loops.
For a dude creating such awesome bedlam, Ackermann's uneven monotone comes off Ian Curtis-bummed. The hammering, Factory Records-esque beats and blistering effects-pedal descent of "She Dies" take place on a "white-letter day" ("There's nothing for me now," Ackermann wearily intones). Finale "Ocean" barely glimpses its bassline's steady shore through waves of resigned heartbreak. But the epic atmospheres are rarely as dense as I might be letting on. What matters most is the substance behind the style, and here, even morose falling-out songs like "Another Step Away" are saturated with slender indie-pop melody, notwithstanding the occasional weak lyric about how there's "no photograph that can capture who you are" (totally rhymes with "shooting star").
A Place to Bury Strangers can pull beauty out of eardrum-puncturing bleakness, but the most tuneful offering here, "Don't Think Lover", is gentle and romantic-- when not exploding at the seams. "Don't think lover/ Love lasts forever," Ackermann sings, and it's never quite clear whether the sentiment is optimistic or misanthropic. The stalking "I Know I'll See You" seems to play off the know-my-love-too-well urgency of the Smiths' "Hand in Glove", with Ackermann even warning, "Don't take my hand/ 'Cause I'll take it away." Like the Italians Do It Better label's similarly moody After Dark compilation, A Place to Bury Strangers may not be easy for would-be record buyers to find-- it's currently limited to 500 copies and put out by, um, Killer Pimp Records-- but it's worth every effort.


On her arid and beautiful debut, the dancer, actress, and composer charts her climb out of paralyzing depression.

Debris

The dancer, actress, and composer Keeley Forsyth released her debut album at age 40, after almost half a lifetime spent acting in Saturday night soaps, children’s television, and most recently, a Marvel film (she played “Mottled Prisoner” in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy). In 2017, Forsyth experienced a physical and psychological malaise so intense that it resulted in the temporary paralysis of her tongue. Her turn to music—that cooing thing we recognize in our mother’s bellies long before we understand speech—makes a certain therapeutic sense. Forsyth rediscovered her voice through the medium, and Debris charts the laborious process of making herself heard. It’s the musical equivalent of emerging half-paralyzed from a car wreck and relearning to wiggle each toe.
Forsyth’s voice, by some distance, is the most remarkable and beguiling sound on the album. Forsyth has Peggy Lee’s vibrato, Nico’s asperity, and some of the avant-garde operatics of Diamanda Galas, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a comparison that does her justice. Her voice is intuitive and somber, and occasionally, the instrumentation on Debris fails to contend with it.
Forsyth first heard Matthew Bourne, the experimental jazz musician and composer who collaborated with her on Debris’ largely accordion-led arrangements, while listening to BBC Radio 3’s left-field show “Late Junction.” Bourne is known for his spare and spartan solo work, but he and Forsyth struggle to find common ground occasionally on Debris. The problem is most pronounced on the string-heavy track “It’s Raining,” which sounds more like a score for a BBC period drama than something from Forsyth’s arid world. Typically, the starker the instrumentation, the more effective the song. Producer Sam Hobbs seems to understand this; he takes care to leave in the sticky sounds of Forsyth’s mouth, the pulsing of machines, the tap of a spacebar when the recording’s complete; anything that brings Forsyth, and her desire to be heard, to the fore.
Bourne’s arrangements work best at their most ambient, as on the album highlight “Lost.” “Is this what madness feels like?” Forsyth asks. Echoes of her voice drag for so long that they become circular and indistinguishable from the rest of the arrangement. The listener experiences a terrifyingly accurate simulation of Forsyth’s trauma. We are immersed; we are implicated. Nothing on this album is intended to be heard from a distance, and at its best, it’s terrifying.
For an album that’s largely about depression, there’s very little interiority on Forsyth’s part. She is not a self, but a sound. The lyrics document her shifting relationship with the natural world, as depression transforms her into a voyeur of her own life, rendering people into puppets, angels into mocking spirits. Her bleak poetry verges on cliché: Forsyth’s “shadow” is “engulfed”; a broken house is rendered into a “house of thorns,” and, in a moment of juvenilia, she waits for “volcanoes to melt us into oblivion.” It’s a forgivable lapse; what Forsyth lacks in poetic originality she more than makes up for with intensity.
We are conditioned to expect a note of resilience or redemption at the end of a despondent piece of art. There’s a slight hint of hope when Forsyth sings “A large oak/Descended/Grew/Roots” on the album’s penultimate song, and titling the final track “Start Again” certainly signals some potential for change. In it, Forsyth goads herself towards the direction of something new: “Oh Lord, where should I go?” she asks. The relief isn’t found on the album itself, but in the fact that with it, Forsyth can finally be heard.


Recording deep underground in a West Virginia cave, Haley Dahl creates vivid, ambitious chamber pop with a flair for the grotesque.

Madison

Several years back, Haley Dahl was nursing a broken heart. So, in a poetic gesture, she became obsessed with a different type of void: caves. Dahl, who performs as Sloppy Jane, realized that a cave—a natural echo chamber—would be a great place to record an album. After exploring many options, she chose West Virginia’s Lost World Caverns as her underground recording studio. Over two weeks in 2019, Dahl, 21 fellow musicians, and a film crew trekked below the earth between 3 p.m. and 8 a.m. to record. The descent was only the first logistical difficulty: Getting a piano underground took a day in each direction, and the humid conditions required stationing the recording equipment in a car aboveground and dangling the wires through a hole.
Dahl possesses grand visions but also, crucially, the determination to actually realize them; Sloppy Jane is exhibit A. Dahl started the band as a Los Angeles high schooler, working with a series of collaborators that at one point included Phoebe Bridgers, whose Dead Oceans imprint, Saddest Factory, is releasing Sloppy Jane’s new record, Madison. Now based in Brooklyn, the band has evolved from a punk project to something more like avant-garde chamber pop, with performances that have featured Dahl spewing blue paint in a suit that she one day plans to eat.
Dahl has said that Madison was “written as a grand gesture for somebody who I was trying to make love me.” Time and again, the songs feel caught between the hoped-for romance and a hard-to-swallow reality. “Party Anthem” is trapped in a prison of unrequited love, but the band’s rousing orchestrals makes Dahl’s regret sound bombastic. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be/Everything I needed to be,” she belts. On the downcast piano ballad “Jesus and Your Living Room Floor,” she wonders if it’s easier to be appreciated in the afterlife. As the music gradually expands into dramatic distortion, it’s apparent that the effort of underground recording was worth it: Every instrument, from a thick drum to the careening guitar that eventually joins in, sounds massive.
Madison is full of beauty, but Dahl’s explorations of heartache and insecurity don’t shy away from ugliness. She pictures herself collapsing on the ground covered in ants, or swallowing fast-setting concrete and plunging into a lake; her voice quivers as she describes herself as “imprisoned in a wedding pigeon body with a tin-can face.” On “The Constable,” she spots a man cruelly kicking a dog, and rather than recoil, she’s aroused: “And God/I wanted that dog to be me.” The anguish she wrings out of that “God” is a gut punch.
Dahl often juxtaposes her grotesqueries against whimsical instrumentation, making them feel especially twisted, but also a little romantic. “Judy’s Bedroom,” a grim singalong that evokes the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours,” recounts the real-life murder of the titular character by her husband. “Judy does whatever she pleases/Cause she’s with Jesus now,” Dahl sings with macabre warmth. “Lullaby Formica,” a dreamlike, horse-themed take on the “Ten Little Indians” nursery rhyme, ends on a grim but touching note: “If you become a carousel/Or if you’re sold for glue/Or if you’re cold to me/My tongue will stick to you.”
Dahl is an imaginative lyricist and her imagery, while hardly direct, is always delicious. But it is testament to her strength as a composer that her instrumental arrangements are equally evocative. “Bianca Castafiore” (like the opera singer from Tintin) is a topsy-turvy instrumental in which Dahl performs wordless vocal acrobatics, “whoo-hoos” and “oohs” somersaulting through the air. “How come you only touch me when you brush my hair?/You don’t care,” sings Dahl on the title track with jaunty, theatrical desperation. A third of the way through, the song’s symphony sours, and the audience lets out an “aww.” But Dahl is more than capable of carrying the show.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The scars in Ka’s music come with lessons he feels duty-bound to pass on. The Brooklyn rapper’s two new albums set hard-earned wisdom to the lushest music of his career.

Languish Arts / Woeful Studies

The Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn depicted in Ka’s music is stark: bleached of artifice, enhanced by religious levels of penance and gratitude. There’s constant talk of being damned, of making the best of bad situations brought about by poverty, police, drug dealing, and the irrevocable nature of street ties that bind. But the beats and bars that Ka conjures never feel one-dimensional. His voice flows through cracks in the street corners where friends were shot down, the directness of his writing birthing dark, cavernous alleyways and cupboards reeking of instant soups and desperation. The scope of early projects like Iron Works and Grief Pedigree is vast and gutting enough on its own, but Ka’s work grew more potent once he began using themes and concepts to canonize his story as an epic in its own right.
The trials and tribulations of Ka’s life—and the wisdom and trauma that accompany them—receive new context on every album, recycled like rainwater. In 2013, he redrew his stories under the guise of chess and other strategy games on The Night’s Gambit, then did the same with the Bushido code on 2016’s Honor Killed the Samurai. He’s looked to literature for framing devices, including The Manchurian Candidate (2015’s Preservation-produced Days With Dr. Yen Lo) and Greek and Christian mythology with 2018’s Orpheus vs. the Sirens (a team-up with California producer Animoss) and 2020’s Descendants of Cain. By 2021’s A Martyr’s Reward, he’d turned the lens on himself, examining his legacy as one of rap’s most consistent auteurs. Many rappers have likened their music to therapy, but the blunt minimalism of Ka’s words evokes the catharsis of uncomfortable revelations unearthed in years of deep thought.
Languish Arts and *Woeful Studies—*his ninth and 10th studio albums, released back-to-back earlier this month—combine the self-analysis of A Martyr’s Reward with an examination of how learned behaviors can fester and exacerbate the seemingly endless cycles of poverty and oppression that affect Black people specifically. Hard-learned lessons of cops who could be “vegan, how they plant base” and kids who go an entire school year with one pair of pants brush up against his hunger for truths both emotional and circumstantial. “The astute listener hear every soup kitchen and bread line,” he says on Languish’s closing track “Last Place.” Having embraced his upbringing, Ka commits his music to clearing the cobwebs for those walking similar paths. Compared to his other albums, the relative brightness of the beats here—all self-produced, except for three by Animoss and one by Preservation—calls more attention than ever to the melancholy in his stories. Healing from trauma takes time; Languish and Woeful continue the slow unspooling in typically beautiful fashion.
Ka’s way with metaphor and prose is genuinely staggering. On Languish opener “Full Cobra,” he communicates his place within hip-hop and his community with consummate efficiency: “I do this quaint rap, true; it ain’t trap, I brung escapes.” The “escape” is both literal and figurative: Fortunate enough to have made it out of the trenches, Ka writes songs that purge bad thoughts from his present as they contextualize his past. The clever wordplay of bars like “I was in a hole, you don’t know the half” (“Eat”) or “We not innocent, we into dollars” (“We Not Innocent”) never overshadows his triumph in being here to say them at all. Every song across these two albums is peppered with lyrical gems like these, delivered in the trademark raspy whisper of a weathered sage.
The minimalism of Ka’s voice and production brings attention to the open space in his songs. Where the typical Ka beat sounds dingy and worn, as if lifted off Turner Classic Movies, Languish and Woeful contain the lushest music of his career. The orchestral strings and occasional bolt of electric guitar that back “Ascension” recall Jay Electronica rapping over Jon Brion’s score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Flutes and a throbbing theremin sample give the counted blessings of “Touché” a queasy mood, while triangle, bass, and horns punctuate Ka’s memories of the comfort of dinners turned celebrations and the anxiety of monitoring police scanners on “I’m Tired.” The second half of “Eat” sets a soulful piano loop against Ka’s poignant ruminations on neighborhood ciphers from his childhood and confronting the bad habits he’s held onto: “From the brokest neighborhood, where you can get a fix/Could’ve easily been there now, instead of pitching this.” It’s a bittersweet moment, his relief at having made it out chafing against the reality of others still suffering.
The world Ka lives in is suffocating in its emptiness, yet his presence and perseverance fill the field with cinematic breadth. The broad perspective manifests in Languish Arts and Woeful Studies’ status as separate albums. Both have clear beginnings, middles, and ends, but there’s no symbolic yin and yang relationship between the two, no dovetailing moments or differentiating production quirks. Setting the records side-by-side simply emphasizes the point he’s trying to make. The scars in Ka’s music come with lessons he feels duty-bound to pass on. For the first time, he steps fully into the role of teacher, claiming the title of griot for his era of wounded street soldiers. His growing confidence in his role as a forebear of the New York City underground seeps through the subtle changes that give both albums their meticulous luster. But it’s the glimmers of hope throughout that make them standouts in Ka’s catalog. To him, those who don’t know their history—of race, of family, of rap music—are bound to repeat it. He’s never sounded more committed to leading by example.


In certain circles, Jeff Rosenstock is one of the most important figures in modern punk, and with WORRY., he has made his magnum opus.

WORRY.

If you know the feeling of being jolted awake at 3 AM by every outstanding obligation in your life, you'll recognize the paralyzing anxiety embedded in the lyrics of Jeff Rosenstock’s third solo LP. To wit: “Ignorance is bliss until the day/The things you ignored all come into focus.” When those things emerge, they will waylay you with the same nagging, needling and relentless tone that knows every single pressure point in your system. Rosenstock has always sung like this, so WORRY. isn’t a case of an artist finding his voice. Rather, it’s an artist finding his muse—it's right there in the title—and making the record of his life.
Rosenstock didn’t really need a magnum opus to solidify his reputation as one of the most important figures in modern punk music—in certain circles, he’s basically an Ian MacKaye figure, a paragon of ethics whose web-based, pay-what-you-want record label gave him legitimate reason to feel salty when Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead were called revolutionaries for doing the same thing years later. However, he was doing this as the leader of a ska-punk project called the Arrogant Sons of Bitches and, later, Bomb the Music Industry! As the names of these acts might imply, this stuff wasn’t bound for mainstream acceptance, though Rosenstock’s sonic and philosophical influence has been acknowledged by verbose and principled young acts like Joyce Manor, Modern Baseball, and Mitski.
WORRY. isn’t an obvious crossover attempt. Rosenstock touches on almost every intersection of pop and punk, whether or not it’s credible: there are flashes of Jawbreaker’s real-talk scene reportage, the synth-spiked sugar rushes of the Anniversary and the Get Up Kids, but also previously canonical touchstones that have become relegated to Boomerism nostalgia: the Beach Boys, the Clash, and Abbey Road. After the beer-hoisting nostalgia of “Blast Damage Days,” WORRY. unexpectedly (and hilariously) hits double time and tries to cram Rosenstock’s entire discography into a Side B medley, breathlessly running through Twista-paced spitfire punk, 30-second blasts of D-beat hardcore and an unashamedly infectious ska song.
WORRY. is rife with similarly invigorating and wildly unfashionable touches—the Reggie and the Full Effect-style electropop intro of “Festival Song,” his voice cracking on the line, “So we made out foooooor the entire ride” like drunken Rivers Cuomo karaoke. “I wanna listen to the Cribs my dear, while we make out in your car,” he sings on “Pash Rash.” Among other things, Rosenstock is mounting a rousing defense of genre—“Stop sneering at our joy like it’s some careless mistake,” he snarls on “We Begged 2 Explode,” where a swaying piano ballad erupts into a kitchen-drinking singalong at a house party.
Punk usually has to sound serious to be taken seriously, and WORRY. is stuffed with so with many sugarcoated melodies it’s almost headache-inducing. Yet there isn’t a single insubstantial lyric here: it’s a record about New York gentrification, the internet, police brutality, liberal guilt, DIY idealism—crucial subject matter that typically inspire chin-stroking appreciation or eye-rolls because of their self-serious delivery.
Instead, WORRY. is an absolute blast and its heaviest stories are presented as some of the most devastating breakup songs of the past year. “Staring Out the Window at Your Old Apartment” plays on the “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” trope: “Someone hung a decorative surfboard up where your records and movies belong,” Rosenstock yells, but they still can’t hide the cracks in the wall that the landlord was never going to fix and the tacky renovations that followed. “You’ve got nowhere to go now,” he moans, in a lyric that exhibits scorn-free empathy for New Yorkers and the shitholes they’ve somehow been been priced out of. Rosenstock fondly reminisces over drinking tallboys by the water on “Wave Goodnight to Me,” written in memory of shuttered Death By Audio (and accompanied by a dead-on video). “I wish it didn’t hurt. I wish I didn’t care,” he brays, knowing that all DIY spaces are living on borrowed time and this one would eventually become the new *Vice *office: “They spent the last five years, yelling, ‘Come on! Come on! Come on! Get out of here!’”
Much of WORRY. is put in this “us vs. them” battleground, but Rosenstock isn’t a scold—he realizes you might not figure out you’re them until it’s too late. “Festival Song” takes easy licks at  “dorm room” music, “sweatshop denim jackets,” “department store crust punk chic,” and, well, you name it: “They wouldn’t be your friend if it wasn’t worth it/If you didn’t have something they could take.” His ire isn’t just limited to AEG and Live Nation pumping more hot air into a bubble that already burst, or Funyuns sponsoring whatever the hell this is. WORRY. was fittingly released right in the middle of October; it began with the NFL “going pink” as a meek gesture towards women jersey-buyers while treating domestic violence cases with less gravity than touchdown celebrations, and ended with Twitter shuttering Vine, a seemingly utopian mode of expression that in reality repeatedly exploited people of color (and still didn’t make a dime).
As much as WORRY. deals in financial insecurity—the #1 worry of all—it speaks to the unshakable notion that American society is one giant game of big-bank-take-little-bank and we’re all “born as a data mine for targeted marketing,” discarded when we’re no longer in a demographic worth exploiting. Needless to say, it's become even more resonant in the past month.
If this all sounds exhausting, well—would WORRY. live up to its name if it wasn’t? But there’s something reassuring about worry, how it is inextricable from daily existence, how it can reveal what’s actually meaningful when total nihilism is always a tempting option. Dropped in the middle of Rosenstock’s surveys of urban cultural decline, “I Did Something Weird Last Night” turns out to be the neurotic punk’s answer to “It Was a Good Day”—“I made out in the van with a girl I like/We were kinda drunk but it seemed alright,” Rosenstock yelps, explaining the title and returning to his apartment, sleeping through classes the next day and wondering when he’ll ever see her again. It’s a beautifully written song about the brief moments when irrational, giddy emotion can shout down the Voice of Worry and allow good things to happen despite everything—and also about the way people can talk themselves out of good things immediately afterwards once worry returns: “if I see you soon, will you want to see me?”; “I hope I’m not reading into this too much, it’s a kiss.”
Rosenstock wrote “I Did Something Weird Last Night” about his girlfriend at the time, who is now his wife; the album’s cover art is taken from their wedding photos. But at the time, he admits, “I was preoccupied with how the magic would end/Because nothing intangible remains sustainable/Hope is a scheme.” It ties into the worry that pervades every interaction on this record, whether it’s with peers, corporations, political causes, anything—if you actually give a shit, have expectations and get your hopes up, you’re going to get played for a sucker. But later on, he shouts WORRY.’s most cathartic and reassuring line and like most others, if you’re not paying attention, you might miss what this album is really about: “Love is worry.”


Spotlighting over a dozen vocalists on a suite of airy, upbeat collaborations, the Canadian producer’s big mainstream moment showcases his slick sound in a variety of different settings.

Timeless

Time was, producers could keep secrets. Samples and drum kits were subjects of intense speculation, while draconian copyright laws pushed crate-diggers deep into obscure backlists. Equipment was expensive and quickly outdated; studio time cost $200 an hour. But Kaytranada arrived in the era of demystified production, with advanced engineering tools and infinite audio libraries mere clicks away. In developing his signature sound, he focused less on discrete elements—his peers could replicate those anyway—than their intricate arrangement. On his 2016 breakthrough, 99.9%, the tempos, syncopation, and layering techniques were Kaytranada’s own, even when the instrumentals and melodies came from elsewhere.
By now, you know a Kaytranada beat when you hear one: The drums are foregrounded with a papery rasp, loud but rarely abrasive. His is such a specific trademark that he risked reaching an artificial ceiling if each record was just an iteration of a theme. 2023’s Kaytraminé preempted any stagnation, pairing Kaytranada’s kinetic drum patterns with Aminė’s chatty rhymes, keeping the temperature low while indulging a shared nervousness. On Timeless, Kaytranada builds on the fusion of 99.9% and 2019’s Bubba, spotlighting over a dozen vocalists on a suite of airy, upbeat collaborations.
True to form, Timeless is structured and sequenced like a DJ set as finely chopped instrumentals cross-fade into the next. The jazzier numbers, like “Video” and “Stepped On,” have a mathematical precision reminiscent of Kaytranada’s earlier work with Robert Glasper. And while the songs themselves lack big dynamic trajectories, the tracklist orbits around “Drip Sweat,” a climactic fireworks display featuring Channel Tres. The simplistic melody recalls early-’90s claustrophobia, augmented by Kaytranada’s stuttering rhythm breaks. Channel Tres leans into his role as a glowering emcee, directing dancefloor traffic between muttered verses.
Timeless is a dance record, but it can be easily adapted for kicking back at home. The busy drum patterns are offset by soft chords and engineering—the whispery snares land like an air conditioner’s muffled rattle. Kaytranada’s touch is also accentuated by a corps of fluttery-voiced R&B stars: Tinashe and Ravyn Lenae are flanked by Canadian counterparts Rochelle Jordan and Charlotte Day Wilson, grounding the electronica with more classic phrasing. On “Still,” Kaytranada’s heavy kicks propel Wilson’s wistful ballad; the rimshots scattered throughout “Hold On” contrast Dawn Richard’s smooth vocals with spiky edges. The intersection recalls a late-’00s moment when hip-hop producers like Dela and DJ Jazzy Jeff were huffing neo-soul’s last fumes, dousing their rustling MPC drums with turntable cuts—a short interim bookended by more decisive movements, condensing techniques drawn from disparate, bygone eras.
And that’s what makes a good DJ set—there’s a little something for everybody. On Timeless, Afrobeat rhythms and funk licks are dressed in R&B elegance; Childish Gambino and PinkPantheress meet the lively tempos with alacrity. If anything, the parade of blends and collaborations dulls the record’s highlights. A winking and mischievous Anderson .Paak supplies the album’s most charismatic performance on “Do 2 Me.” Don Toliver echoes .Paak’s vocal register on “Feel a Way,” yet it’s missing the sly intimacy, bogging down the set’s breezy opening passage.
An angsty Thundercat duet, “Wasted Words,” is limited to 90 seconds and buried on a bonus disc. Over Kaytranada’s hypnotic shuffle, Thundercat scales into falsetto, lambasting his neighbors (“You need to take that hat off/’Cause your whole ‘fit is trash”) for innocuous offenses. It’s a bit out-of-place on Timeless, yet the moody chords and harmonies are tantalizing in context, exposing a tiny hole in the record’s block-party itinerary. But if Timeless feels slighter than its predecessors, it’s no less assured, its purpose no less profound: to get you moving, even in quiet moments.


On her second album, the country-pop singer remains a powerhouse talent who can sing the hell of out every middle-of-the-road style going.

Girl

If you want a representative sample of pop music in 2018, something to throw in a time capsule so that future explorers scouring Earth’s climate-wrecked mess would know exactly how good the radio was on average, you can’t do better than Zedd and Maren Morris’ “The Middle.” The hit is a slightly snazzier version of Zedd’s previous hit, Alessia Cara collaboration “Stay,” with the same vocoder chorus and clock ticks. For Morris’ part, the writers also auditioned Anne-Marie (the former front-runner, who lost it because of the music jobbing equivalent of a non-compete agreement), two members of Fifth Harmony, Carly Rae Jepsen(!), and more than 12 other singers.
This is how plenty of songs are made and Zedd’s career has consisted of making these inoffensive tracks over which singers can belt and yearn and seize the stage; Morris is great at all three. But as the litany of not-quite-A-listers considered suggests, it’s more a conduit for royalties than for star-making: not an A Star Is Born, more a star borne ceaselessly into the pop machine.
And by doing “The Middle” at all, Maren Morris became a flashpoint whether she liked it or not (spoiler: not) for the perpetually nasty debate over country music becoming “too pop,” and what that even means. Last year, she tweeted in her defense after a semi-influential blogger accused her of “[conducting] herself like she is an absolute superstar and hot shit,” on grounds of existing. Girl is full of this reluctant defensiveness, which shouldn’t have to exist but does, both on record and in its promotion. “I’m not setting out to make an EDM album or a big, you know, pop-diva record,” Morris told The Ringer. “I just wanna make a record that sounds like the inside of my head.”
Judging by Girl, the inside of Morris’ head sounds like a Hobby Lobby. An EDM album it is not. A pop-diva record it could be, if the diva is LeAnn Rimes or Faith Hill. It is also not Morris’ dreaded full-Ariana Grande turn. Songwriters Greg Kurstin (Kelly Clarkson, Pink) and Sarah Aarons (Camila Cabello, Khalid)—already well-toward the acoustic side of songwriting teams—only contribute two songs, “Girl” and Brandi Carlile duet “Common.” The rest are written by mostly Nashville songwriters. But it isn’t really a country-country record either; remove the unmistakably twangy verse by the Brothers Osborne, and there’d be no strong tells.
This is less a sign of Morris’ poppiness than just where the music industry is now. Mainstream pop is increasingly welcoming country artists, no doubt noticing the success of one Taylor Swift and, even more, the fact that country radio is now more popular overall than “contemporary hits”/Top 40. Whether this is a sign of boom times or just a sign that the kids have fled to streaming, it’s resulting in stuff like Florida Georgia Line and Bebe Rexha’s “Meant to Be” or the Chainsmokers’ recent single with Kelsea Ballerini, “This Feeling.” Meanwhile, country today increasingly just sounds like ’90s pop-rock: like “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” or “Semi-Charmed Life.”
Country music tends to process this in their music: as Rob Harvilla wrote in The Ringer, “a fun and casual and not-at-all contrived thing country music stars love to do is name-drop pop stars in their songs,” in order to lyrically crash its party. Morris did it in breakout hit “My Church,” and does it on Girl too. On the title track, she does it implicitly, turning country’s “halo” trope—recently done growlingly by Chris Stapleton and hilariously by Keith Urban—into a Beyoncé interpolation. In “A Song for Everything,” she’s more explicit: “What’s your time machine? Springsteen or ‘Teenage Dream’?” she sings, alongside a five-note piano bit that makes it sound like a jingle for the very concept of music. She reminisces about when “Coldplay still played clubs,” like “Losing My Edge” by someone with the edge of a pillow. By lavishing so much time on the identity of her faves, Morris barely has any left for her own.
Too much of Girl is like this. Where Taylor Swift crossed over by writing deeply personal songs, like heart-emoji texts sent to millions of girls directly, and Kacey Musgraves crossed over with a warm, earnest and doggedly untrendy record, Girl crosses over by demonstrating Maren Morris is a powerhouse talent who can sing the hell out of every middle-of-the-road style going. One of Morris’ best traits is her goofy streak, as heard on singles like “Rich” (“If I had a dime every time that you crossed my mind/Well, I’d basically be sitting on a big-ass pile of dimes.”) Girl is best when it can peek out, as on the guitar chug swaggering stomp of lead single “Girl,” or “The Feels”: effervescent bubbly pop-country at its best, words spilling out at the speed of feelings. “RSVP” is the closest the album comes to R&B, particularly in Morris’ vocals, and done coyly, with whirring percussion. “Great Ones” slams into its Southern-rock chorus too inevitably, but the verses do suggest a twitchy novelty that could have been.
But too much of Girl is stifling repertoire: suggesting all genres at once, excelling at none. “Make Out With Me” is undeniably tender, but it’s also basically a Meghan Trainor song, from its retro-repro stylings—the song begins with a faux-crackly “this is the end of side one of this record”—and doo-wop lilt to the bowdlerization of a song clearly about a booty call but lyrically stuck at first base. Taken as a whole, it’s hard to imagine the audience who enjoys every corner of this album. It’s even harder to imagine the artist Morris really wants to be.


After spending decades creating music out of undiscovered noises, avant-garde composer William Basinski lets his hair down on this joyful, funky release.

To Feel Embraced

Disintegration, decay, black holes… these are a few words that might spring to mind at the thought of ambient composer William Basinski, who has somehow made music from all of the above in the past few decades. Two words that probably wouldn’t? Sparkle Division. The unlikely moniker brands Basinski’s creative partnership with his collaborator and studio assistant Preston Wendel. Basinski and Wendel have spent the past four years conceptualizing and recording their debut album To Feel Embraced, and the result is a heady cocktail of free jazz, exotica, dub-lounge, disco, and just about every genre that could be described as “vibey.” Conceived and largely completed in 2016, Basinski and Wendel paused the album’s release due to the onset of a bleak political climate and ongoing environmental catastrophe. But now that things have become inconceivably worse, Sparkle Division figured “fuck it.” To Feel Embraced has floated in like a Golden Record from a distant planet, where things are relaxed, joyful, and funky.
The star of To Feel Embraced is Basinski’s saxophone, which the composer picked up again following Wendel’s persuasion. Known for his ambient masterpiece The Disintegration Loops, in which the record’s sound is derived from the continual decay of magnetic tape strip, Basinski with a saxophone feels like a white-coated scientist ditching his lab to ride a wild horse. He paints freely with his instrument, unbeholden to the confines or high concepts of his previous work. You can glean from the song titles alone that  Basinski is having fun here. On “Mmmmkayy I’m Goin’ Out Now and I Don’t Want Any Trouble From You!” Basinksi’s relaxed phrases melt into a codeine calypso fortified by canned strings and sparse percussion. He is similarly lax on “You Ain’t Takin’ My Man” and “For Gato,” a pair of lounge lizard ballads seemingly  born of otherworldly settings; the former could score one of David Lynch’s seedy Twin Peaks scenes, and  the latter sounds more akin to Flying Lotus’ spacious, astral jazz.
To Feel Embraced is not a project that promotes stasis in any way shape or form—Sparkle Division are far more interested in presenting you with an assortment of vivid scenery. In addition to their flirtations with lounge noir and celestial jazz, Basinski and Wendel dabble in swinging big band (“You Go Girl!”), new age (“To Feel”), and vaudeville (“Queenie Got Her Blues”). “Queenie Got Her Blues” features vocals by Leonora Russo, the late Queen of Williamsburg who died in 2016 and was mourned by locals across the borough. On the brief track, Russo sounds like she’s leading a ragtag marching band, singing and laughing through a tin can while her disciples back her with spirited brass. It’s a sweet and affectionate send-off from Basinski, who referred to Russo as “my Brooklyn mom” (Russo is the stylish nonagenarian gracing the album art, decked out in shining accessories and red lipstick).
“Oh Henry!” is another tribute, this time for the late avant-garde jazz bassist Henry Grimes who died in April. Basinski’s simple, clean saxophone passages are chopped with rattling snare fits and unexpected, staccato bass rhythms, which demonstrate Grimes’ unique command of the instrument. Displaying his technical proficiency on the track was not Grimes’ only priority, he was also concerned with the song’s practical application. “Lotta babies gonna be born from this one,” he said of the track prior to his passing—another indication that To Feel Embraced is an album of serious artists making music that is more concerned with immediate joy and emotional exploration than decay or deep space. After spending decades creating music out of undiscovered noises, William Basinski lets his hair down on To Feel Embraced.

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A new six-disc box set featuring performances from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s offers the definitive document of the latter-day Jerry Garcia Band.

Electric on the Eel

One way to find Jerry Garcia the last weekend of August 1987 was to open an issue of Billboard, where Garcia and the Grateful Dead lingered on both the singles and albums charts. The MTV-assisted hit “Touch of Grey” peaked at No.9, while parent album In the Dark climbed to No. 6—the only two Top 10 hits of the Dead’s career. Another way to find Garcia that same weekend was to pack the car and drive three-and-a-half hours north of San Francisco, deep into the Emerald Triangle, northern California’s much-contested cannabis-growing region, until Route 101 ran along the Eel River. There, at a secluded spot known as French’s Camp, Jerry Garcia and his long-running Jerry Garcia Band jammed on a simple tapestry-draped stage while naked hippies frolicked in the water, a benefit for Wavy Gravy’s Camp Winnarainbow.
A new box set, Electric on the Eel, captures the Jerry Garcia Band on their three visits to the idyllic French’s Camp in 1987, 1989, and 1991. They show Jerry Garcia at both the height of his fame and simultaneously escaping into his not-so-secret identity: himself. Since 1970, Garcia had played outside the Dead in various musical guises, hiding in plain sight at regular no-name jam sessions in Bay Area clubs that—with bassist John Kahn—consolidated into the Jerry Garcia Band by 1975. Though the Garcia Band would remain most at home playing in dark bars, they also became an outlet for the kind of laid-back musical opportunities the Dead could no longer accommodate, like playing for a few thousand hippies in the summer sunshine while Wavy Gravy MCed.
In more ways than one, The Jerry Garcia Band functioned as an escape hatch from the creative and financial chaos of the Grateful Dead—Kahn, Garcia’s frequent musical second-in-command outside the Dead, also served as Garcia’s longtime drug buddy. In the summer of 1986, Garcia fell into a diabetic coma and nearly died. Years of addiction and ill health had taken their toll, and when he came to, he had to relearn how to play guitar. When he took the stage again, in decent health for the first time in nearly a decade, he had a new sense of agency and purpose. You can hear that ravaged clarity even in these low-key sessions.
As Electric on the Eel documents, the Jerry Garcia Band was as unpretentious as the Grateful Dead were convoluted. With the repertoire of a deep bar act, they were a platform for Garcia’s endless guitar variations over a more straightforward rhythm section, plus backup singers to support Garcia’s scarred voice. It is uncomplicated and often sweet, lying at the blurry intersection of rock, R&B, Motown, and gospel, cushioned by the enveloping warmth of Melvin Seals’ Hammond organ and Gloria Jones and Jacklyn LaBranch’s backing vocals. It is music intended for dancing or, at least, feeling good.
The box set dips into Garcia’s bag of trusted extra-Dead originals, including 1982’s charging “Run For the Roses,” 1976’s redemptive “Mission in the Rain,” and 1977’s apocalyptic “Gomorrah.” But most of Electric on the Eel is devoted to a songbook of covers in the emerging jam-band vernacular that Garcia was helping to define. Among the 31 different songs on Electric on the Eel, more than a dozen were new to the songbook since Garcia’s coma, including Bruce Cockburn’s “Waiting For A Miracle,” which became a late-career staple, and “Twilight,” a pining and lonesome deep cut by The Band. Garcia’s voice is especially strong and confident on crisp versions of Los Lobos’s “Evangeline” from 1987 and 1989, neither version cracking four minutes, both bouncing like the streamlined early ‘70s Dead.
Garcia’s vocals, despite ample wear and tear, are in arguably the best shape of his later years. Nearly every track is a sterling example of how someone with a damaged voice can also be an incredible singer. Scratched from years of cigarettes and freebasing Persian heroin, Garcia’s voice flutters and shakes. He doesn’t always sustain notes or land on the right pitch. Sometimes, he transposes verses or forgets lyrics. And yet, his singing is as much a reason to listen to Electric on the Eel as his guitar playing, both filled with a rejuvenating brightness mirrored in Melvin Seals’ buoyant organ, and capable of clarity, articulation, and even power. Garcia had been singing spirituals since his folkie days in the early ‘60s, but—in its post-coma return—his voice finds more grace than ever.
Of course, every track makes its way to the inevitable guitar solo. “I’ll take a simple C to G and feel brand new about it,” Garcia sings on a cover of Allen Toussaint’s “I’ll Take a Melody,” perhaps a rare bit of boasting on Garcia’s part. A staple of his solo shows since the early ’70s, it’s also a song that became his own, in part through his brilliant variations on it. To those tuned in, Garcia’s guitar could unlock the language of the cosmos even on generic bar fodder like Eric Clapton’s “Lay Down Sally.”  When Garcia was tuned out, though, as he was for much of the early ‘80s, it could also sound closer to a musical screensaver. By 1987, Garcia’s playing and singing had both regained their former urgency, the cosmos once again within reach.
Compared to the languid Garcia Band extravaganzas of the ’70s, the Electric on the Eel shows are fairly concise. There is one excellent exploratory jam—a 14-minute “Don’t Let Go” from 1989—but most performances fall under the 10-minute mark. Anchored by drummer David Kemper, who once described the band’s particular groove as simultaneously “having the foot on the gas pedal and foot on the brakes,” the band is flexible and easy, sliding with Garcia as his improvisations stretch.
Most of the music on Electric on the Eel has only circulated as fan-made audience tapes, so these recordings will provide upgrades for deeper heads. But the scope of the set is also a fine way for the Jerry-curious to take a deeper dive into what many consider to be the Garcia Band’s golden period. For some Deadheads, as for Jerry Garcia himself, the Jerry Garcia Band became their own escape from the Dead, and Electric on the Eel shows why, moving with a lightness the Dead had long since lost. Its six discs are both a comprehensive document of the group’s penultimate lineup and a fine introduction to the Jerry Garcia Band at their best, music to make the hassles disappear.


This collaborative mixtape between Gqom Oh! and the Rome-based Crudo Volta collective showcases some of the best music that gqom—a raw, brash dance music coming from Durban—has ever produced.

Various Artists: Gqom Oh! x Crudo Volta Mixtape

Gqom Oh! x Crudo Volta Mixtape

A brash and intriguing sound emerged from a Soundcloud hashtag 18 months ago. It was called gqom (pronounced “gomme”), and the raw, underground-beloved and house-adjacent genre has spread from Southeast South Africa’s shores to the world, partly due to the efforts of the Gqom Oh! label. This collaborative project, following up on that label’s breakthrough mixtape The Sound of Durban, Vol. 1, matches Gqom Oh! with the Rome-based Crudo Volta collective, whose name translates from Italian-to-English as “raw time.” Together the two have assembled this mixtape, which serves as the soundtrack of the *Woza Taxi *documentary, in which Gqom Oh! boss Nan Kolè visited his artists and their families in Durban, providing both depth and context for both the sounds and the genre itself.
Watching the doc as well as listening to its soundtrack alone, we get the sense of pride in Zulu culture in the face of bleak realities and a taste of the free-styling hlanganisa, a Zulu word meaning “putting together.” Kolè’s ability to curate music that both celebrates and honestly assesses Durban’s raw and harsh societal realities makes these 14 tracks potentially the best collection from the genre-to-date. Producers like Dominowe and Mafia Boyz are here, and it’s their respective works like “Africa’s Cry” and “6 to 6” upon which the genre’s breakout was predicated.
However, in “Bhengi yoKhalipha,” a Mafia Boyz contribution whose name translates from Zulu-to-English as “dance retarded,” there’s a definite feeling that you’re getting something more from gqom than ever before. Chopping vocal snatches and heavy grooves breaking against ambient depths make the track sound like it’s Jersey club being played in one of Dante’s circles of hell. As for Dominowe, his tracks “Darbuka Tribe” and “Dark Valley” are respectively songs that push the classic Baltimore elements of 2015’s “Africa’s Cry” into more of an angry wail via harrowing synths and breaks that clang against the deep nothingness of the missing bassline below.
There’s also some work here that hearkens to Baltimore-based producer Rod Lee’s famous single “Dance My Pain Away.” Citizen Boy’s track “Indaba ka bani besibenuza” means “who cares if we dance under the influence of drugs,” hinting the pain expressed in gqom that isn’t “danced away,” but more so reveled in to the point of seeming madness. “Indaba ka bani besibenuza” warms up with crunching staccato drums like another classic Baltimore cut, Debonair Samir’s “Samir’s Theme,” but instead of falling into a manic series of horn stabs, this track meets up with demonic bell tolls and snatches of tribal chants that fall much more in line with the scariest stereotypes of warehouse raves.
There’s tons of excellent underground club fodder on the mixtape, like “Hennesey,” a track in which Emo Kid and WorstHood combine forces and brilliantly answers the hypothetical “What if you put Crime Mob’s 2004 rap hit ‘Knuck If You Buck,’ tech house, and Afro-beat in a blender?” However, it's Julz Da Deejay’s “Quantums and Qo” that hits harder than “just another club anthem.” The white noise, simmering synths and overwhelming series of vocal samples add up to something like the gqom equivalent of MARRS’ 1987 pop-crossover house single “Pump Up the Volume.”
The mixtape and related film exist in order to recontextualize gqom from a genre of music made by scads of producers on Soundcloud into the Zulu face of Durban, South Africa’s urban underbelly. From a city where murders happen at a rate that rivals that of Detroit’s, the idea that 20-plus Zulu youths would be inclined to create music that both revels in said violence while also discovering a progressive sonic space is inspiring. Here, a culture foreign to most is portrayed in it’s most nuanced and honest light, and impressively shines through its own darkness.