The Hives ditch their native Sweden to record in Mississippi, working with  producers such as Pharrell Williams, Jacknife Lee, and Dennis Herring (Modest Mouse, Elvis Costello). They expand their thrashing guitar sound to include more bass and songs that clock in over three minutes.

The Black and White Album

Roll back to 2001-02: A swarm of vaguely retro-thinking garage bands with plural-noun names (the Hives, the Strokes, the Vines, the White Stripes) were credited with reinvigorating rock'n'roll. The press went all breathless at the sight of slightly disheveled boys in tight pants, and the Hives were promptly slapped on the cover of Spin, extensively profiled in The New Yorker, and repeatedly fawned over by the NME. Alas, the new millennium's culture-cycle is especially vicious, and by 2004, when the Hives released their fourth LP (Tyrannosaurus Hives, the follow-up to their stateside breakthrough, Veni Vidi Vicious), most folks had moved on-- which is too bad, because of all the over-hyped revivalists of the early 00s, the Hives might be the most fun.
Although The Black and White Album features the same ecstatic, semi-ridiculous guitar thrashing that characterizes most of the band's previous work, it also sees the Hives expanding their sound to include more bass and songs that clock in over three minutes. This time, the band ditched its native Fagersta, Sweden to record, mostly, in Oxford, Mississippi, soliciting help from a handful of all-star producers: Pharrell Williams, Jacknife Lee, Dennis Herring (who's worked with Modest Mouse and Elvis Costello), and Thomas Oberg (beloved vocalist for a bunch of Swedish rock bands, including Bergman Rock/bob hund). With all that muscle behind the boards, it's not surprising that this is also the Hives' cleanest record to date-- the Hives were never particularly convincing as a garage band (the impeccably-tailored, color-coordinated suits didn't help), and any delusions-of-grit they may have entertained in the past are wholly eradicated here.
The Black and White Album can feel, at times, thematically spastic, spinning more like a mixtape than a proper LP. Pharrell's two standout tracks-- "Well All Right!" and "T.H.E.H.I.V.E.S"-- are both slinky clap-alongs that play remarkably well to the band's party-anthem tendencies: "Well All Right!" sees frontman Howlin' Pelle Almqvist shrieking "People see me and they go/ Ahhhhh! Woo woo!" over pittering drums and perfectly-orchestrated backing chants, a jubilant bit of shameless self-promotion that suits Almqvist remarkably well. Regardless of how you feel about his thick, barky pipes, Almqvist is a captivating performer-- both live and in the studio-- strutting back and forth like a cartoon Mick Jagger, lips pouted, hips popped, voice undulating, part-James Brown, part-John Fogerty. Each vocal track on The Black and White Album sounds intense and revelatory; paired with Pharrell's playful production, the Hives soar.
The Hives' three self-produced cuts are just as jubilant-- with the exception of the instrumental "A Stroll Through Hive Manor Corridors", which is all fart-bass and creepy synthesizers. It's presumably a concept song about life-as-a-Hive, but it's also the band at their most subdued. Jacknife Lee's track ("Hey Little World") is classic Hives, frantic and propulsive, with a few simple riffs and a broad, confrontational chorus ("Whatcha gonna do/ Any one of you?"). The bulk of the record is handled by Herring; on opener (and lead single) "Tick Tick Boom" a wall of guitars is balanced by a wall of vocals, with all five band members worked into a proper frenzy and howling away. At their best, the Hives are frenetic and volatile, jolting, pushing, panting-- it's punk rock at its most polished, with only the barest threat of dissolution.


At 69, the Japanese singer-songwriter and city-pop icon is still working in pursuit of the perfect pop song.

Softly

“There are only two ways for a person to live,” Tatsuro Yamashita recently told Brutus magazine. “You either constantly seek to evolve, or you resolve to hold fast to the same path. The worst is being wishy-washy and doing neither of those things.” Born in 1953, the Tokyo-based musician was always the best songwriter, arranger, and vocalist in all of city pop, but his love of music is boundless, his commitment to evolution wholehearted. He released one of the first city-pop singles, “DOWN TOWN,” with his band Sugar Babe in 1975; it’s essentially a loving riff on the Isley Brothers’ “If You Were There.” Since then, his decades-long solo career has highlighted an undying love for the Beach Boys and various strains of funk, soft rock, and soul. Despite having more than 60,000 records in his collection, Yamashita will comfortably admit that he “[doesn’t] have a lot of favorite sounds,” but he is a voracious listener. During the ’70s and ’80s he’d listen to R&B radio, buy 20-odd CDs, and then create 90-minute mixtapes; now he studies the Global Top 50 charts on streaming services. His new album Softly, his first in 11 years, is a testament to his uncompromising desire to push himself; Yamashita may be 69 years old, but he’s still striving for pop perfection.
He achieves it here because he’s really the same wide-eyed boy from 50 years ago. His love for choral groups and doo-wop was obvious on his 1972 debut Add Some Music to Your Day, released when he was still a teenager, and he opens Softly with a one-minute intro featuring little more than vocal harmonies. Titled “フェニックス” (“Phoenix”), it has Yamashita singing of holding back tears and moving into the future. He crystallizes such sentiments on the follow-up track, “Love’s on Fire,” becoming the mythological symbol of rebirth itself as he announces, “Yes, I’m on fire!” He’s obsessed with his lover, and he knows that their bond will keep him going. A synth-pop track with programmed drums, it’s a bit of a curveball compared to the more traditional instrumentation that has characterized his albums, but the switch-up is a sign of his creative restlessness.
Having likened himself to director Yasujiro Ozu, Yamashita is the sort of artist who largely works within stylistic boundaries. “うたのきしゃ” (“Uta no Kisha”), for example, is one of the most classically Yamashita songs on Softly. It’s built on a sturdy foundation of grooving bassline, uplifting vocal harmonies, and resplendent brass, but it’s all about his sparing use of other instruments: a vibraslap here, a train whistle there, an interlude with an unexpected synthesized beat. Towering above everything is his voice, slightly worn but with the same emotional power he’s always had to transform simple words into transcendent mantras. He concludes the song by repeatedly asking people to ride, sing, and dance to “the music train.” Much like on his 1978 single “Let’s Dance Baby,” he repeats the titular line over and over again with so much conviction that it becomes a magical, magnetic invitation.
Yamashita understands that his songs allow him to verbalize emotions he’d be uncomfortable expressing in real life. “You won’t see me actually saying anything you might hear in my songs,” he’s confessed. (In fact, he has admitted that he never romantically proposed to his wife, Mariya Takeuchi, of “Plastic Love” fame. “We both just kind of went, ‘Should we get married…?’”) This reservation is surprising, given how arresting his most loving songs are. On 1979’s “永遠のFull Moon” (“Eternal Full Moon”), there’s excitement brewing as he sings about basking in the moonlight with a lover, while the 1982 piano ballad “Your Eyes” could handily soundtrack the first dance at a wedding. Such tenderness appears on Softly as well, but “コンポジション” (“Composition”) is notably and refreshingly low-key. He sings about love as a song two people make together, and the only English line, “I wanna play for you,” is sung with such transparent vulnerability that it sells the whole premise; a less accomplished vocalist would render the conceit unbearably saccharine.
Yamashita’s voice, as everyone in his sphere knows, is peerless. Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono, who played bass on Yamashita’s 1977 classic Spacy, considered him one of only three great singers in their scene. “I was really jealous of him, but also kind of fascinated,” he told Brutus. “I think of Yamashita-kun as being like a rakugo storyteller.” The comparison is apt: the traditional art of one-man, comic storytelling involves entertaining a crowd while seated and with minimal props—the smallest changes in pitch and tone become massively important in conveying different emotions and characters. Sometimes his voice is so overwhelmingly forceful that it floods you with pure feeling (1977’s “Love Space,” 1983’s “悲しみのJody (She Was Crying)”), but the subtler performances are equally immense. Every melodic phrase in “Lehua, My Love,” for instance, is an opportunity for Yamashita to inject drama—sustained notes and stressed syllables capture the serenity of the titular Hawaiian flower, but also the heartbreak and romance defining its accompanying mythology.
Whenever Yamashita writes a song, he wants it to be a “microcosm containing an infinite world.” He’s talked about his admiration for J.S. Bach’s “Partita for Violin No. 2 - Chaconne” and how much is conveyed by a single violin. He aims for the same grandiosity with his voice, especially when making a cappella tracks. “Shining From the Inside” is one of Softly’s odes to the lustrous beauty of close harmonies, and is sung entirely in English. Given how superior his pronunciation is to his contemporaries’, he was once asked how he learned the language, to which he responded, “I just listened to records and memorized stuff. I can sing it, but I can’t actually speak it.” Despite the linguistic disconnect, Yamashita recognizes the specific rhythms and moods inherent to English’s phonology and knows when to employ it over Japanese to heighten a song’s mood.
Yamashita is also an expert arranger. You can hear his attention to detail on “光と君へのレクイエム” (which Light in the Attic translates as “Light and Requiem for You”), whose propulsive drum beat is tempered by soft synth pulses. In the past, similar songs like 1991’s “アトムの子” (“Children of the Atom”) could be overstuffed, but Yamashita lets his voice quietly rise above the surface here, like rays of light peeking through blinds. “ミライのテーマ” (“Mirai’s Theme”) is also appropriately even-keeled, with the occasional glistening synth flourish ushering in a sense of new beginnings as he talks about the joy of a daughter’s birth.
Curiously, one of Yamashita’s lyrical tenets is to avoid writing about real people or being too specific. It’s partially a result of his antipathy for the Japanese folk boom of the 1970s, and specifically its lyrical content. “If you put too much meaning into the words, you run the risk of the sound losing its color,” he once explained. Even when he addresses the state of the world on “Oppression Blues (弾圧のブルース),” he does so without being didactic; as with his 1986 track “The War Song,” he simply mourns and allows space for sadness. This all aligns with his thoughts on his favorite film, Sadao Yamanaka's 1937 Humanity and Paper Balloons. He was blown away when he first watched it, as he’d mostly seen post-war films up to then and felt they were “preachy, pedantic, or about ‘enlightenment’ or something—full of excuses.” Yamanaka’s movie “looked at human beings with a high degree of clarity” and was “without pretension.” Yamashita’s songs are much the same: Everything is rendered in matter-of-fact terms, and his arranging and singing give his generalized language a prismatic quality, providing deeper insight into the scope of humanity in ways that labored-over text couldn’t.
Half a century into his career, Yamashita has multiple lifetimes worth of songs written, including those for legendary artists like Yumi Matsutoya and Eichii Ohtaki. “Culture, you know, it may have 100 or 200 different entrances, but there is only one exit,” he has said. He approaches the craft of pop music with utmost seriousness; recently, he even destroyed all his demos, ensuring that no one would release any of his half-baked ideas posthumously. It’s hard to complain, though, when he’s still releasing songs like “Cheer Up! The Summer,” suffused in the breezy atmospheres and unbridled joy of his best work. “We can fly away,” he sings, as string arrangements and vocal harmonies lift higher. It’s irresistible because it’s irresistible to Yamashita. Really, all his music is like this: a natural overflow of his boundless love for—and belief in—pop music.


Commitment to Complications strikes the ideal balance between the visceral nature of the  innovative L.A. hardcore group Youth Code's demo and the polish in their work since then.

Commitment to Complications

In their sophomore full-length Commitment to Complications, Los Angeles' Youth Code have fleshed out the “hardcore industrial” aesthetic that's always been apparent in their live shows, where it's unclear if Ryan George's lead-fisted attack or Sara Taylor's black metal-meets-Converge rasp will do you in first. Their demo oozed with punk rawness, and while they sharpened their industrial instincts on their self-titled album, its production was a bit of a ...And Justice For All situation where the fidelity didn't quite sync up with its death-dance electronics and hardcore spirit. Here, they've amassed all their best qualities on one record, and explore more connections between the two worlds they come from.
The four originals on A Place To Stand suggested a meaner, more confident Youth Code, with more intense percussion and George ceding his vocal duties and letting Taylor, who always had a more dominating presence, take over and give the duo consistency and fury. “Transitions” and Commitment's title track stand up to “Consuming Guilt” and “To Burn Your World” as some of the most furious songs the band has made. Both, especially the title track, mechanize d-beat drumming, merging a natural feel with Godflesh-like coldness. There's swing, but it's much too fast to dance to, and staying idle isn't an option. It'd be hypnotic if it weren't for Taylor getting in your face.
With Rhys Fulber's production and guiding hand, Commitment strikes the ideal balance between the visceral nature of their demo and the polish in their work since then. He's the perfect partner for them—he is best known for his time in Front Line Assembly, a key influence on Youth Code, and with his production work with Fear Factory, he's well versed in finding the common space between industrial and guitar-based heavy music. They sound both more familiar to industrial audiences here and more like themselves. George and Taylor don't make a lot of alterations to their core sound, but Fulber allows the drum programming to strike harder and the electronics to creep longer, to feel more fulfilled even when Taylor is screaming about vulnerability and loss. They're hungrier than ever, and even with Fulber's assistance and a coveted co-sign from tourmates Skinny Puppy, Commitment is as much about “don't fuck with us” as it is “we've made it.”
Where Commitment really sets itself apart is that George and Taylor have embraced the moodier side of EBM, including quite a few tracks where they're not at Negative Approach speed constantly. This direction was hinted at with “For I Am Cursed” from Stand and “Distorted Views” from the self-titled, and with Fulber's touch, the band embraces a melodic sense that was deep within them, but buried before in minimalism. It's a needed counterpart from the abundant intensity, and even so, Taylor rarely lets up. “The Dust of Fallen Rome” is one of the album's best tracks, chiefly for Taylor's performance, where she reaches beyond her hardcore scream and plumps new emotional depths. She sounds like she's both reaching for utopia and trying not to drown in hardcore purgatory. She reaches similar heights with “Doghead,” which has a groovier tempo—its fanciness makes for quite the contrast with Taylor ripping her soul apart. Commitment makes huge strides in its production, but it's Taylor who really pushes it ahead of their past works.
Metal and hardcore have been more spiritual influences on them than sonic. With “Shift of Dismay,” featuring guitar from Nails' Todd Jones, the two sides meet at their most base level. When Taylor yells “Let the car crash” at those moments when Jones peaks, it's hard not to think of the cover of Ministry's 1990 live record In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up. Will Commitment cross over to metalheads and hardcore kids who may normally be averse to electronics? It should.


With corroded sounds and anxious, wistful guest features, the London producer’s new four-track EP breaks new ground in four different directions.

Nothing EP

Loraine James’ music often feels like it’s on the verge of tipping into chaos. Competing rhythms run out of sync, throwing sparks as they scrape. Straight lines bend without warning, and smooth surfaces splinter. Rather than conform to a flawlessly efficient rhythmic grid, the London electronic musician’s beats twitch and hiccup, as though driven by a MIDI clock gone haywire. That’s as true of James’ quiet moments as her noisy ones: Even the most dulcet passages tend to jitter and glitch. A similar sort of unpredictability plays out across the breadth of her catalog. James has been putting out music for a while now; in addition to her debut album, last year’s thrilling For You & I, she has a string of Bandcamp-only releases going back to 2015, comprising brightly colored electronica, contorted club edits, and even ambient-adjacent atmospheres. No two records encompass quite the same style; neither do any two songs. Every track feels like the product of a blank slate. Her music is exhilarating in the fashion of a gamble that pays off against long odds, or a gambit that shouldn’t work yet somehow, miraculously, does.
The four-track Nothing EP breaks new ground in four different directions. It is darker, on the whole, than For You & I; that album’s dreaminess has curdled, and its industrial punch—like the noise-rap beats of “London Ting // Dark as Fuck,” a song so concussive it could send clipping. running for cover—feels further corroded here, one fried circuit away from total breakdown. The most obvious change is the incorporation of vocalists, something James hasn’t done much of in the past. Early in 2020, she made an open call for singers on Twitter, and three of Nothing’s four tracks feature the fruits of those collaborations. Rather than spotlighting her featured vocalists, however, James tends to fold them deeply into the mix, where their voices turn murky, communicating more with texture than language.
In the opening “Nothing,” the Uruguayan singer-producer Lila Tirando a Violeta moans, “I don’t feel nothing,” dolefully and almost indecipherably, her voice clouded by reverb, while rapid-fire arpeggios zigzag between vintage trance, the ice-castle maximalism of Rustie, and the jittery dissonance of early-’80s synth pop. The lurching kick/snare sequence balances the knitting-needle bounce of trap hi-hats with clanking metal and what might be a brief snippet of jackhammer. It makes for a jarring take on numbness—not a deadening blanket of sound, but an anxious, needling feeling, like the tingling of a limb that’s fallen asleep.
She goes darker still on “Marg,” featuring the Iranian-born, Liverpool-based rapper Tardast, who grew up in Tehran and came to the UK in 2014. The title is Farsi for “death”; his lyrics, also rapped in Farsi, address the refugee experience in images of slippery ice and clipped wings. Occasionally, he cuts to the chase, as if no metaphor could contain his abjection: “Life’s getting worse every day.” His voice is mixed low, an unsteady burble of mutters and whispers surrounded by splotchy synths and heavy, distorted drums that crumple on impact. Layers of percussion—handclaps, hi-hats, tambourines, laser zaps—fall in uneven volleys, landing just shy of their mark, like shots clustered around a bullseye. Anxious and unsteady, the song feels like a harbinger of things coming apart, its joylessness an indictment of systemic failure.
The tenor of the EP shifts in the second half. “Don’t You See It?” gets its melancholy tone from stately minor-key piano chords; HTRK’s Jonnine Standish sings wistfully of loss and yearning, with a resigned tone that recalls Bodily Functions-era Dani Siciliano. James’ production contrasts forcefully; the beat sounds like it’s been made from a lossy YouTube rip of crunching metal or breaking glass. Standish’s singing is the clearest on the album, and while her writing seems purposefully vague she lands a few truly memorable lines—“Summer is a traitor, ’cause summer’s moving on.” Even so, her voice serves mainly as the foil to James’ jagged beats, the soft underbelly of a hard-angled exoskeleton. At the song’s finale, following a climax powered by the record’s heaviest bass, James runs Standish’s voice through some kind of granular effect, crumbling her syllables like flakes of mica.
The closing “The Starting Point,” the EP’s only instrumental, offers a stripped-down contrast to what has preceded it. The one-note bassline nags at the midrange; the brittle beat has the spikiness of early instrumental grime, while snapping syncopations flash back to UK garage at its rowdiest. Drawing on vintage IDM, what used to be called “abstract” electronica, and the example set by her Hyperdub labelmates, James’ productions have typically been part of a lineage of experimental dance music that doesn’t necessarily cater to the dancefloor, but “The Starting Point,” lean and muscular, proves James’ club mettle. It’s an exciting capstone to an EP that refuses to play by anyone else’s rules.

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Taking cues from their early records, Bloc Party’s sixth album successfully marries post-punk with dance grooves—and confusingly devotes a lot of its energy to spite.

Bloc Party

Once again, Bloc Party have returned from a lengthy hiatus and followed up a baffling, mixed-bag album with one that harkens back to their glory days. Roughly every half-decade since 2008’s Intimacy knocked the post-punk revivalists off their axis, Bloc Party have produced an album that feels like a direct reaction to the one that preceded it. In 2012, Four attempted to console fans aghast that Intimacy’s queasy electronics had sidelined one of the tightest rhythm sections in indie rock. By 2016’s Hymns, that rhythm section (bassist Gordon Moakes and drummer Matt Tong) had quit the band, leaving frontman Kele Okereke and guitarist Russell Lissack to craft a weird franken-child of gospel, dance, and stadium rock by their lonesomes. Like clockwork, here’s Alpha Games, a record that seems destined to bear a sticker emblazoned with the one “return to form” quote the label can track down.
The band’s sixth album checks all the requisite Silent Alarm and A Weekend in the City boxes, if such musical attributes can be reduced to a dispassionate list. This is a tightly wound collection of tracks led primarily by dueling Telecasters and dance beats. It’s mostly uptempo until the band slows for a few stunningly pretty ballads in the second half. The production is unshowy yet full-bodied enough to emphasize the rhythmically minded low end and precision hi-hats. The “new” rhythm section—bassist Justin Harris (of Menomena) and drummer Louise Bartle—has been playing live with Bloc Party for almost seven years now, and their take on the band’s early sound is accurate but chunky, as it was on the live runthrough of Silent Alarm released in 2019. A devoted fan with a magnifying glass could identify every trick Alpha Games lifts from Silent Alarm in particular—the whirring effect Lissack uses on his “Traps” solos recalls both “Helicopter” and “Banquet”; on “By Any Means Necessary,” like “Positive Tension” before it, Okereke sings of a woman hellbent on getting “it,” whatever that may be—but Alpha Games isn’t all nostalgic replication, at least not thematically.
As a singer, Okereke is usually defined by his wide-eyed wonderment. This is a guy who once made the modest prospect of driving to Brighton on the weekend seem like an opportunity for rebirth. More recently, on last year’s arresting solo album The Waves Pt. 1, he turned a simple nighttime stroll into a reverie about the passage of time. On Alpha Games, his eyes narrow into a winking leer in service of a loose, startlingly embittered arc that, amid constant themes of hedonism and brutal honesty, largely revolves around cutting off “frenemies.” It’s tempting to ask why, at this ostensibly stable point in the 40-year-old’s life and career, he’s chosen to focus on life patterns that usually accompany an initial rise to stardom, but it’s hard to imagine an answer capable of undercutting the album’s garishly pulpy lyrics.
Okereke leans hard into a persona that drives a “matte-black ’Rari,” lives at the club, and suffers no fools. Opener “Day Drinker” introduces us to an alcoholic who greets his brother’s intervention attempt by telling him he has a “conniving tongue” and that “God hates the faint of heart, the weak-willed, and the profligate.” The rest of the album is dominated by a similarly caustic tone, ranging from bratty (“You can’t hang with us”) to brutal (“I will die die die and be born again/Before I fuck with you again”), and usually directed at unnamed hangers-on. “The things you do for blow or a little guest list/Have consequences,” he coos on “Rough Justice,” the first of two occasions when he calls out parasitic +1 seekers. Most biting is “Callum Is a Snake,” in which Okereke “officially” washes his hands of someone whose “eyes are too close together,” telling him, “I thought you came from better stock.”
The bulk of the album’s aforementioned stunningly pretty ballads reveal themselves to be crueler than they initially sound, but on “Of Things Yet to Come,” Okereke steps back and offers a more perceptive view of this proudly messy lifestyle. Here, those friends are “lost,” rather than tossed off, as the narrator casts blame on himself and wonders, “Am I best left in the past?” Regardless of the album’s relationship to truth and fiction, “Of Things Yet to Come” is the only time it offers anything beyond one-dimensional characters. It doesn’t hurt that the song concludes with Lissack launching into his finest tapestry of lush, Edge-like guitar textures in a career filled with them.
The few things that work on Alpha Games have little to do with their similarity to, or departure from, Bloc Party’s most celebrated work. This is by far the band’s most successful attempt at marrying post-punk with actual dance grooves: Bartle manages to channel Matt Tong-style intensity while playing minimalist patterns more akin to the programmed beats that eventually overtook the group’s former drummer. Okereke and Lissack’s best performances might recall certain aspects of the ones from their mid-twenties, though with the added perspective and experience evident on “Of Things Yet to Come.” The album’s best hooks feature Bartle duetting with Okereke, a new trick in Bloc Party’s repertoire. These strengths are even more frustrating because they reveal an alternative path to the binary rut in which this band has been stuck for 10 years. If Bloc Party continue to build on the unique strengths of their new members, and if Okereke takes his songwriting as seriously as he did on his last solo release, there’s still a glimmer of hope for the band that was once seen as the most promising member of a flash-in-the-pan scene.


Assisted by frequent collaborators like Bonnie “Prince” Billy, the Vancouver singer-songwriter’s second album is a gentle testament to resilience in the face of emotional hardship.

Only the End

Ashley Shadow believes in the graceful power of acceptance. On her sophomore solo album, five years after her self-titled debut, the Vancouver musician overcomes a series of painful experiences, using natural elements from her home in British Columbia as poetic metaphors. Though largely written in solitude, several of these 10 songs feature frequent collaborators including Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Neko Case guitarist Paul Rigby, and Black Mountain’s Joshua Wells once again handling production. Sounding as if barely a moment has passed since her first album, she has a soothing, country-inflected quiver whose understatement is a big part of its charm.
For listeners in Western Canada, Ashley Shadow may be better recognized by her surname, Webber. During her early twenties, she played bass with cult post-punk band the Organ, whose long out-of-print LPs now fetch triple digits. Webber’s name can also be found in the credits of recordings from the New Pornographers, the Cave Singers, and Lightning Dust, the primary project of her twin sister, Amber. Her biggest moment under the spotlight to date was probably her contribution to Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s 2008 album, Lie Down in the Light, recorded in Nashville and rightfully considered a high-water mark for Will Oldham.
Though not entirely a breakup album, Only the End repeatedly returns to the theme of moving on. On “For Love,” she expresses her admiration for people forced to follow their hearts where they might not want to go. Ushered in with a slow waltz of shakers, the drums pick up steam as she sings a simple reminder that these difficult decisions were made for the right reason: “You did it for love/Not just anything.” Lifted by a triumphant guitar solo from Ryan Beattie of Victoria band Himalayan Bear, “I Will Remember” is her personal plea for support: “Come and show me through the darkest of nights,” she sings with an optimistic lilt. Her voice may be soft, but as the album unfolds its tender strength projects a sense of resilience.
On “From You,” Webber comes to grips with the idea that “everyone has their dark sides,” dropping out the drum kit for a sparse backdrop of pedal-steel shimmer. By contrast, “Grey” features one of the album’s most arresting choruses, highlighted by a buoyant bassline. Following a series of references to the wildfire smoke that has caused dread across the West in recent summers, she delivers a timeless romantic couplet: “After the stormy billows roll/I’ll be by your side forever more.” Her skies may be darkened, whether figuratively or literally, but these hopeful songs feel like attempts to batten down the hatches until the sun beams down again.
“Don’t Slow Me Down” is both the album’s thematic centerpoint and its highlight. This sweet and sour duet with Bonnie “Prince” Billy was written in the immediate aftermath of a romantic split. She uses timeless, elemental imagery—of outrunning the darkness, shaking off the cold—but briefly flashes back to the present to wonder whether an ex-lover ever Googles her name. Oldham’s keening croon is the perfect counterpoint for Webber’s melancholy vibrato, offering a gentle reminder that the future will find her “feeling a calm from time going round.” Like Semisonic taught us, every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

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The British psych-rockers’ third album boasts studied musicianship and strong arrangements—and very little else.

Hot Motion

Prefab rock’n’roll revivalism never hurt anyone. Especially not Temples, a British three-piece who have built their career crate-digging for the trippiest and most aggressively overstuffed ’70s psych-rock. Their third album, Hot Motion, is crafted more or less in the same vein as their previous two. A showing of studied musicianship and strong arrangements, Hot Motion is fuzzy to the touch and easy enough to imagine hearing in the background. Unfortunately, very little lies beneath the surface.
What makes Hot Motion weird is that it is the illusion of a psych-rock record; the melodies here are plucked right from pop songs, even more so than on past records. It’s Pink Floyd and Revolver in the streets, “Knights of Cydonia” in the sheets. Over time, the album reveals itself to be a subtle pop zombie. Take the spacey “It’s All Coming Out,” which follows the structure of a pop song, but just happens to have some weird, vaguely ’80s synth effects that resemble a scrapped MGMT demo. Lyrically, there’s not much to look at: Temples favor aesthetics and flashy production over memorable lines.
“The Howl,” probably the weakest cut on the record, toggles between sounding trippy and actually being a song by the Black Keys. The focus is on the hard-to-stomach snare sound, while the guitar is a jarring El Camino pastiche that sounds out of place on a record otherwise coated in paisley and velvet. The song attempts to be a rallying cry for an unspecified event, but in reality, it’s something you might tap your foot to in a loud bar. “You’re Either On Something” feigns drug-induced deepness while vintage-sounding synthesizers flicker in the background and guitar parts go the way of the baroque. The song sounds good in theory, but beauty and technique don’t count for much when the music lacks any semblance of individuality.
Temples are clearly skilled technicians; they probably could’ve produced this record in their sleep. What’s frustrating is that the project begins and ends at talent. These songs are hollow; you could listen to Hot Motion half a dozen times and feel nothing. What makes matters worse is that Temples have made three albums whose sound can more or less be distilled to “glamping while on ayahuasca.” Consistency can be admirable, but this is a bore.

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The Brooklyn-based duo High Places are most often compared to Beat Happening, a band cherished for their regression-- into musical primitivism, adolescent sexuality, and any other condition that twenty- and thirtysomethings bemoan the loss of in therapy. High Places' indulgence in nursery rhymes aside, the kinship is mostly an ideological one: Like Beat Happening, they exult in the simple.

*03/07 - 09/07*, a collection of the band's first 7" and stray compilation tracks (released through the mp3 subscription service eMusic), shows a group whose comfort zone isn't the folky imperative, but heady, hippyish imprecision. The songs here are almost all identical:

03/07 – 09/07

The Brooklyn-based duo High Places are most often compared to Beat Happening, a band cherished for their regression-- into musical primitivism, adolescent sexuality, and any other condition that twenty- and thirtysomethings bemoan the loss of in therapy. High Places' indulgence in nursery rhymes aside, the kinship is mostly an ideological one: Like Beat Happening, they exult in the simple.
03/07 - 09/07, a collection of the band's first 7" and stray compilation tracks (released through the mp3 subscription service eMusic), shows a group whose comfort zone isn't the folky imperative, but heady, hippyish imprecision. The songs here are almost all identical: polyrhythmic miniatures built by small drums and shakers, clouded by blankets of echo and reverb; deliberately basic structures; short, and in their own way, catchy and pretty. Rhythms suggest provinces a step removed from where other white, arty urbanites tend to dwell: There are flashes of soca, reclined bounces that remind me of Indian music, and though "Sandy Feat"'s swing could be Tom Petty's "American Girl" or David Bowie's "Modern Love", they inflect it they way Brazilian bands like Os Mutantes did (or Paul Simon on Rhythm of the Saints).
High Places' trunk-rattling impulses are juxtaposed with a spacious, almost tranquil atmosphere, with Rob Barber's percussion chiming and floating rather than physically hitting, and Mary Pearson's sweetly flat vocals layered to the point that her lyrics often become indistinguishable. That blur makes High Places' music hypnotic: Pearson chatters away like a light-headed kid on the playground on one song and intones a mantra on the next, and it's only then that you notice how both forms operate on the same principle: repetition induces calm. (Full disclosure: Pearson's sister is a former Pitchfork employee.)
Pearson's vocals and the duo's lyrics are charmingly coquettish: She reduces falling in love to "Oh, you're a pretty boy, a pretty boy" and writes letters to Martians. "Jump In", penned for Pearson's Michigan elementary school, is so full of encouragement that it scans like the transcription of a guidance counselor or junior minister. "Canary" apologizes to animals displaced by ecological warfare-- "we really messed up." The sentiments are frank, but I out them for three reasons: There's nothing wrong with being positive, the band's confident enough to handle it, and they make me happy.
"Universe"'s lyric makes this clear: "It takes a lot of guts to be a little baby in this place." The idea of returning to infancy might resonate as a dippy bohemian nightmare, but in a society where moderate cynicism is considered a higher road to intelligence than acceptance and curiosity, and where sarcasm is considered a social reflex, you'd be hard pressed to argue with them-- it does take guts.


The fearless work of the late avant-garde pianist is celebrated with a momentous new anthology, showcasing his immense talent and passion.

“Blue” Gene Tyranny: Degrees of Freedom Found

Degrees of Freedom Found

When he was in kindergarten, the late avant-garde pianist “Blue” Gene Tyranny brought his favorite records to show-and-tell. He made tape recordings of sounds in his backyard, sang in his Lutheran church’s choir, and even attended additional Baptist services to accompany them on piano. At 11, he took composition classes at Trinity University, where his teacher sent him off with Charles Ives and Harry Partch LPs after their first lesson. For one of his early assignments, he unintentionally composed a 12-tone piece. He soon befriended composer Philip Krumm, and the two put on events where Tyranny performed music by John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Anton Webern, as well as theater pieces from Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Yoko Ono, and La Monte Young. He was 14 at the time.
Despite his stage name, Tyranny was a kind, funny, and self-effacing person who uplifted others whenever possible. In David Bernabo’s 2020 documentary, Just for the Record: Conversations With and About "Blue" Gene Tyranny, sound engineer Philip Perkins notes that, when playing in live ensemble settings, every musician except Tyranny was generally given a solo: “He’s supporting everyone else… that’s who he is.” Those who knew Tyranny considered him one of the greatest pianists alive. And while such praise didn’t lead to sizable fame, archival releases from the label Unseen Worlds—most notably the reissue of avant-pop masterpiece Out of the Blue and the live album Trust in Rock—have helped bring his music to a larger audience. Degrees of Freedom Found, his first posthumous release through the label, is even more momentous: a six-disc anthology featuring 380 minutes of music recorded between 1963 and 2019, complete with extensive liner notes from Tyranny himself.
Tyranny’s closest brush with fame arrived in the early ’70s when he went on tour with the Stooges as their pianist (he and Iggy Pop first played together in the ’60s blues-rock band the Prime Movers). On stage, Tyranny would appear in tattered clothing, with light-emitting diodes in his hair, his sweat occasionally leading to electric shocks. While he wouldn’t continue down this punk path, his resolute spirit remained. During an early-1980s live performance of Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives, an opera where Tyranny plays the role of “Buddy, the World’s Greatest Piano Player,” shards of a broken mirror cut up his hands and left his piano splattered with blood.
Such dedication to the craft comes alive on Degrees of Freedom Found. Tyranny’s secret to conjuring deep emotions lies in the tension between structure and spontaneity. While this balancing act isn’t as obvious in his pop works, the solo piano and piano-centric pieces on this collection make his methodology clear. As he navigates the opening piece “A Letter From Home,” taking crooked and diagonal paths along the way, Tyranny maintains a stately, lovely demeanor: an apt reflection of the stream-of-consciousness reminiscing that appears on Out of the Blue’s extended take on the track. Whether at small or grand scales, his compositions were fully-realized.
Revisiting and reworking compositions was a common practice for Tyranny throughout his career. “Tango for Two,” for example, was originally composed in 1984 as a solo piano piece for the International Tango Collection. On the version here, Tyranny is credited with piano along with an “electronic orchestra,” resulting in a barrage of synthesized instrumentation with technicolor flashes and unpredictable evolution. “The 36 Chords from the Driver’s Son,” another mesmerizing highlight, has seamless modulations and a quizzical structure—there’s power in the gentlest keystrokes and grace in the most rambunctious clanging. The music from “36 Chords” draws from “The Driver’s Son,” a sprawling journey whose 80-minute 1999 performance acts as the box set’s centerpiece. With four other performers providing vocals, synthesizer, and percussion, it is a full-fledged epic, well-deserving of Tyranny’s description of it as an “audio storyboard.”
Tyranny loved avant-garde music for its potential to extend “beyond the particular circumstances of both your life and the whole history of music.” As he explained in Sonic Transports: New Frontiers in Our Music, “To try as much as possible to circumvent Puritanism in the United States and elsewhere is the task.” His political intent is most prominently showcased on “Harvey Milk (Portrait),” a track from 1979 that features a speech from the openly gay San Francisco politician, soundtracked by Tyranny’s sparse electronic blips. The second half is voiceless—a stark depiction of Milk’s assassination the previous year. This simple change creates an uneasy atmosphere: a meditation on lost hope.
Music provided opportunities for Tyranny to open himself up to unfamiliar terrain, which was the primary goal of his collaborative work. One of the most striking examples appears in “On the Road to Blountstown (A True Story),” a song that was largely improvised when Tyranny and musician Leroy Jenkins had 10 minutes left during a 2001 set and no material left to play. In the introduction, Jenkins shares a story about being stopped by a sheriff and taken to jail. Next, Jenkins vocalizes atop his viola and Tyranny’s piano, both musicians in perfect dialogue. As Tyranny’s piano dances alongside the shrieking strings, he runs through multiple emotions to flesh out the story’s drama.
He could also find inspiration in more lighthearted fare. “How to Swing a Dog,” from 1984, is a boisterous improvisation that features playwright Roger Babb talking at lightning speed from the perspective of a dog; it’s one of the liveliest tracks on Degrees of Freedom Found, and it emanates classic early-’80s art-school humor. On 2019’s “The Forecaster Hopes,” the newest composition, a 1960s electronic analysis of natural, quotidian sounds becomes the source material for generating “quasi-random rhythms” for his string arrangement. The song is at once steady and erratic, defined by a hopeful aura: a musical embodiment of someone moving through life itself. As the final track on Degrees of Freedom Found, it serves as a capstone to this exhaustive overview of Tyranny’s career. It’s the sort of music that leaves you in awe: a reminder that music always did the same for him.

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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Scott Walker’s 1995 turn to the avant-garde, a dense and operatic work of geopolitical and psychosexual pop music.

Tilt

He was supposed to fail upwards. A photogenic genius with a golden voice, a half-gone gaze, a hotness so soft it felt mildly taboo. He had been a child star, and we all know how that goes, but on this occasion, TV and Broadway conspired to let one off unscathed. He flushed rebellion from his system early—joined low-rent gangs and toppled Beverly Hills outhouses, got himself expelled from a school or two—before flying to Europe to beat the Vietnam draft with the Walker Brothers, his pop trio of pretend siblings.
England loved him. He was 22 and allergic to fame, which made him untouchably cool—forever staring off-camera in an existential reverie, dreaming of Playboy bunnies laying wreaths at his tomb. This sort of fame required rebellion of a higher order. He denounced hippies, fled to a monastery, studied Gregorian chant. He ditched his wildly successful band and went solo, covering the Belgian bohemian Jacques Brel and dreaming up originals that would be, he opined, “very Dylan Thomas, very Kafka.” But his records were selling, so nobody minded—and besides, he was doomed to fail upwards. When his first front-to-back masterpiece, Scott 3, slowed sales, the business people gave him a TV show. When Scott 4 flopped, in 1969, they pondered promoting him to Vegas.
But Scott Walker had a superpower, the unique ability to fail again and fail better. Within a half-decade of that late-’60s crossroads, his sales were circling the gutter and credibility had flown the coop. He failed in flummoxing ways—sold out and became less famous—and would, in some corners, be seen to fail until the bitter end. But by 1995, as his last act dawned, the pressure was letting up. Walker was finally free to fail exactly how he wanted.
Tilt premiered at a playback party in London that year. Mojo noted bewildered faces and, eventually, begrudging recognition of a “record to be greatly admired, if not enjoyed.” Was it good? Nobody had a clue. The Telegraph sheepishly pronounced it a “masterpiece” in a review so hedged it felt like its own retraction.
Before its U.S. release through Drag City in 1997, the album received a trial by fire in the UK, where the border between idiosyncrasy and pretension is vigilantly patrolled. Some felt Walker was trespassing. “I hate Tilt, absolutely hate it,” said longtime devotee Marc Almond, one of the few to put his cards on the table.
Despite little consensus on its merits, Tilt became a byword for artistic ambition and integrity. Walker had chased his muse to the bottom of the charts and tunnelled somewhere surreal and strange, to an outré-rock Atlantis. In the peripheral public eye, Tilt catapulted him from pop’s left field into a freaky avant-garde interzone. Amid the confusion, he had slipped out of his lyrics entirely. More than ever, Walker was attuned to mass human despair—to trauma, nationalism, war as a contemporary issue—yet icky about little feelings like his own. His internal battle between political urgency and emotional deflection suspends these sadistically cryptic songs in a dream world. Tilt’s most gasp-inducing swells accompany lines like:
I knew nothing of the horses
Nothing of the thresher
Or:
We had more in or going out
You were responsible for the rolling stock
The house is on fire, but Walker refuses to dial 911; instead, he devises encrypted distress signals.
While the lyrics bide their time before scaring you shitless, the music is less patient: Stretches of near-silent skitters and scrapes portend percussive blasts, which in turn summon infernos of celestial guitar, tremulous strings, and mammoth church pipe organ. Each part springs from a death-black silence—“like a great hands and mouth coming out of the dark at you,” as Walker once said, though at the time he was describing how it felt to have too many fans. His voice is formidable: at once rent with terror and devastatingly vulnerable, with vibrato like a loved one choking up mid-sentence. Listeners need not comprehend “Rosary”’s addled narrator, or spend days decoding his monstrously sexual cri de coeur, to know they should fear for the singer’s soul.
In the ’70s period when Walker really was sliding out of his mind—alcoholically anesthetized, sleepwalking through MOR slosh—he was prolific, effortless, his voice plain gorgeous. He spent the decade undercover in the spotlight, a neurotic heartthrob slicking up for the suits. He smiled at the camera on record covers. Something was horribly… right.
In 1978, he finally pulled himself together, turned his frown its usual way around, and masterminded the Walker Brothers’ swan song. Led by a now-classic suite of Walker originals, Nite Flights debuted the songwriting idiom that Tilt went on to master. Lead single “The Electrician,” he said, describes the intimate relationship between torturer and prisoner, based on stories of C.I.A. agents who would fly to South America, strap suspected rebels to beds, and wire their genitals to electrode-firing hand cranks. It established a chilling Walker archetype: the spiritually corrupt narrator in the throes of excess, deriving sexual frisson from political power.
Nite Flights attracted enough cognoscenti buzz to secure Walker a solo deal with Virgin. Meanwhile, Julian Cope’s 1981 compilation, Fire Escape in the Sky, was helping dispel Walker’s fusty air for a new crowd of post-punk freaks and gourmands. But Walker’s 1984 comeback, with the mutant AOR oddity Climate of Hunter, threatened to alienate the aliens, not to mention his paymasters. He identified himself as music’s “great leper”: a bubonic prophet lurking under the bridge, dooming any A&R who strayed across his path.
As Climate of Hunter made its way from the shelf to the bargain bin, Walker went missing, presumed drunk, lost in another peculiar seclusion. Two and a half years passed before his suffering manager, Ed Bicknell, finally made contact with his client.
“What have you been doing?” Bicknell demanded.
“I’ve been painting,” Walker said.
“Really? Oils or watercolors?”
“No, man,” Walker replied. “Walls.”
He was scoring odd jobs as a painter and decorator.
Virgin put its sacred cow back on the market. Prospective producers included David Bowie, David Sylvian, the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Reid brothers, Brian Eno, and Daniel Lanois. Walker shrugged. Eno and Lanois had the most success, ensnaring him long enough to record some master tapes that Walker disowned and reputedly threw in the Thames.
Virgin snapped. Walker went missing (again), then resurfaced to cameo in a soft drink ad. The Sunday People offered rewards for sightings of a man now lost to himself.
“I’ve become the Orson Welles of the record industry,” he told The Independent. “People want to take me to lunch, but nobody wants to finance the picture.” He was exalted but not in the way he envisaged; forever in demand to sing as anyone but himself; a noble outsider teleported into a pop star’s perpetual flop era.
Nine, ten, eleven years passed—not only an eon in industry time but long enough to start a new life, study botany in Veneto, get to know your convolvulus from your crocuses. Or to clean up and get filthy rich in Vegas. But Walker had endeavored to be boring once, and his lost years haunted him. Now, passing 50, he craved a reinvention.
“I’m looking for that Francis Bacon, in-the-face, whoops factor in the sound,” he said of Tilt, speaking to Mojo in 1995. “I’d like people to sit and listen to it,” he added, “get into it through the words.”
Walker had written most of Tilt between ’91 and ’92, in the heyday of capitalist triumphalism. Amping his “Electrician” style with a new modernist extremity, he sketched geopolitical outlines, lashed the canvas with grotesquerie and psychosexual suggestion, and disrupted linear readings with a smear of voices from history and myth. It was serious contemporary art, which he mused had become a matter of “who combines better than who, who combines this way or that way.”
Working alongside Walker, Pete Walsh captured the whoops factor with brutally analog production: no samples, guide tracks, or compression; a cavalcade of clangor and quiet. Though Tilt sounds operatic by pop standards, a song like “Patriot (A Single)” revolts against refinement, colliding Walker’s vintage-velvet baritone with vanguard composers like Messiaen and Penderecki. “The Cockfighter” wants you to cry out in shock, its metal mechanics evoking Magnus Lindberg’s Kraft—a concert-hall transplant of Einstürzende Neubauten industrialism—as Walker splices excerpts from the trials of Queen Caroline and Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann into a wet-nightmare narrative of what he calls “national eroticism.”
However you spin it, Tilt’s bewildering lyric sheet is strewn with unidentified remains. Displaced images, fished from mysterious backwaters of history, hint at a logic just beyond the frame. Some demand scrutiny; others seem happy in suggestive soft focus.
“Patriot (A Single),” named for an American missile, opens and closes with disjointed phrases that, together, form the date that America launched the Gulf War. (“That’s why I call it a single—a single disc,” Walker said of the circularity.) The next line, “See how they run,” playfully alludes to a standard of another circular song form, the “infinite canon.” In the verse, Walker draws each melody eerily off-course:
I brought nylons from New York
Some had butterflies
Some had flecks
The hum of panic in Brian Gascoigne’s string arrangement is no false alarm. As the writer and researcher Robert Nedelkoff explained in Seth Sanders’ zine A Nest of Ninnies, Soviet aircraft bombarding Afghanistan in the Gulf War dropped nylon parachutes carrying Butterfly Mines. The oddly pretty market scene appears to be a smokescreen, Walker’s narrator a fighter pilot.
Sometimes a phrase resists you until, like a crossword clue, it gives in, and an arid verse blooms. “Bolivia ’95” opens with a wink toward the song’s subject, Che Guevara: “Doctorie, give me a C/For this Babaloo.” Guevara, a former physician born Ernesto, is “Doctor E.” The C gives his nom de guerre.
But in those eight words, Walker also conjures a cosmos of suggestion: the Afro-Cuban god Babalú-Ayé, said to heal earth and man, more explicitly referenced later on; the “C” as South American cocaine specter, cemented in the next line’s plea to “opiate me, doc”; the I Love Lucy character Ricky Ricardo, played by Cuban-born actor Desi Arnaz, whose signature song is the “Babalú”; and, as Nedelkoff has noted, a melody transposed from a ’60s series called Daktari, set in an East African zoo run by white Americans.
Ardent Scott Walker loyalists have despaired at the song’s cryptography, particularly its “Lemon Bloody Cola” chorus. But through that little opening lyric, “Bolivia ’95” cracks open. It encompasses not only Guevara’s C.I.A.-assisted capture and his execution by Bolivian forces, but also imperial America writ large. In this light, the rest of the song may implicate the stealth imperialism of Cocacolonization, U.S. interventions in coca production, and a raft of related hypocrisies and horrors that made headlines as Walker was writing Tilt.
If it all sounds exhaustingly dense, take solace in the occasional Easter egg hidden in plain sight. In Sundog, Walker’s 2017 lyric collection, he adjusts one phrase in Tilt closer “Rosary” to invite a startling read of the next. Here is Walker’s updated transcription:
Cum morning
My beads on a face
We hear the song anew: the orgasmic, caged-animal moans; the promise of “all the trembling vein that you can bear”; the possible, surely-he-wouldn’t “pearl necklace” pun of “Rosary”; and the final, giant aural signpost:
I kiss holes for the bullets
In case of thigh
A perfect Walker gag: On an album condemned to appear hopelessly intellectual, the grand finale is, in some dimension, the confession of an orgasm addict—a howling paean to misbegotten blow jobs and the lustrous drizzling of semen on skin.
Walker’s final lyrics in the Sundog book—all written towards the end of his life, and sadly unrecorded—wade further into filth: one “dildo-smacked cheek,” two erections (one “mighty,” one “vengeful”), a demand to “dump on me for money,” one “nipple-zit” (“sucked”), a “felch” made flesh, and a chorus of “Thrust to shove/Like my love.” You can peg Tilt as the first masterpiece of Walker’s elliptical era, but “Rosary” illuminates a less-documented path: away from the sugared, black-coffee existentialism of Scott 4 and toward an indecorous, Brel’s-eye view of the species.
Even without his Rabelaisian wit, his moral intensity, Walker would remain canonical—a North Star for failures everywhere. Listening to Tilt, letting that great hands and mouth pull me into the void, one thought keeps leaping out: What a relief that you can even do this.
But is it good? Allow me to answer a question with a ques—only joking. Yes, Tilt is good. Scarily, maddeningly good. It is like an old mansion full of haunted arcana: revolving bookcases, secret rooms, a golden pouf to perch on sipping ancient eau de vie. Even the easiest pleasures, like the stained-glass daybreak in “Bouncer See Bouncer,” arise from such obscure surroundings their beauty is always sudden, a second too quick for your defenses.
Then again, Tilt is not so good that you should lock it away in a trophy cabinet. It is an album you can listen to. A gravitational weight, yes, and bad company in crowds, but not all that inhospitable. He welcomes you to go in easy, trusting your imagination. You can internalize the sound cues, the rattling chains, the freighted blackouts and flickers. Or you can hunt for his passionate emotion, hidden but desperate to be found within the lyric sheet. Rummage for psychic flotsam, cross-examine the non sequiturs, reverse the verses, noun the verbs, discard what won’t fit, squint and twist and flip until an inkling—of maternal neglect, American hubris, or some other unutterable thing—shimmers into view, as if through a frosted window.
To intercept Walker’s signals can be brain-mangling work. You can lose an evening to it, head hitting the pillow full of flowcharts with things like “‘tooth fairies’” at the top and “incest?” at the bottom. You might find that work torturous. But I want to suggest it is just like the torture that made “The Electrician” sing: the lethally intimate zap, from the crank to the groin to the heart, that feels, for a second, like love.


Deerhunter toured with Nine Inch Nails this summer, making a stop at Colorado's famed Red Rocks Amphitheatre. That canyon found the Atlanta noise-rock quintet at a precipice. In the few months prior, Deerhunter had added a new guitarist, Whitney Petty, to replace the departed Colin Mee. Lead singer Bradford Cox had released his debut solo album, *Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel*, under the name Atlas Sound. The band's third album, *Microcastle*, and its would-be surprise bonus disc, *Weird Era Cont.*, had both leaked half a year before they were due in stores. Unimpressed NIN

Deerhunter: Microcastle / Weird Era Cont.

Microcastle / Weird Era Cont.

Deerhunter toured with Nine Inch Nails this summer, making a stop at Colorado's famed Red Rocks Amphitheatre. That canyon found the Atlanta noise-rock quintet at a precipice. In the few months prior, Deerhunter had added a new guitarist, Whitney Petty, to replace the departed Colin Mee. Lead singer Bradford Cox had released his debut solo album, Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, under the name Atlas Sound. The band's third album, Microcastle, and its would-be surprise bonus disc, Weird Era Cont., had both leaked half a year before they were due in stores. Unimpressed NIN fans were writing blog posts comparing Cox to Geddy Lee.
Like Trent Reznor, Cox is a classic outcast. But the real question is why Deerhunter aren't opening for Radiohead, as their friends in Liars and Grizzly Bear have done. Admirers and detractors of Deerhunter's 2007 breakout album, Cryptograms, all seemed to agree on one thing: Despite its status as an underground hit, it didn't explore totally new sounds. Radiohead didn't invent krautrock or avant-garde electronic music, either-- let alone UK post-punk, American alt-rock, or the Beatles. Instead, what they've done is use a stunning assortment of shrewd instrumental ideas to express contemporary anxiety and alienation, all in the form of pop songs, on albums conceived to be more than the sum of their parts.
Deerhunter don't sound a lot like Radiohead, but they've absorbed the UK rock icons' outlook as fully as anybody. If Cryptograms holds any "encoded message," I argued in a Pitchfork review, it's this: Deerhunter are a pop band. Microcastle/Weird Era Cont. proves me half-right. It sidesteps much of the art-damaged squall of previous Deerhunter records, but it doesn't embrace 1950s and 60s pop as intensely as lead singer Bradford Cox had intimated in early interviews. If Cryptograms brutalized the pop ideal like a guitar-wielding David Lynch, leaving the follow-up Fluorescent Grey EP an exquisite corpse, then Microcastle resurrects it, scar tissue and all. The resulting 2xCD set captures urgent and imaginative songs that reorganize 4AD haze, off-kilter indie pop, crashing garage-punk, forward-leaning krautrock, and hypnotic Kranky ambience into a singular-sounding call-to-arms.
Here, the band comes into their own by applying their own inspiringly distinctive, bleakly appealing sensibility to whatever ideas happen to move them. Fist-pumping first single "Nothing Ever Happened" shares most of a title with a Pavement deluxe-edition bonus track while sounding a lot like Magazine's more straightforward, hard-charging side. Another standout, "Saved by Old Times", pipes in the Black Lips' Cole Alexander for a dual-channel monologue disorientingly reminiscent of the Velvet Underground's "The Murder Mystery". (If you play it backwards, Cole namedrops Johnny Cash.)
"I take what I can/ I give what I have left," Cox sings softly, as if explaining his musical approach, on "Green Jacket", a piano-based track at the center of the album. It's part of the languid song suite that ends the first side of the album's vinyl edition and breaks the disc up much the way ambient interludes divided Cryptograms. Only this time, the lull lasts just 10 minutes, not 20, and even at its least structured it's always more accessible. "Microcastle" applies the quiet-quiet-loud structure of the Breeders' "No Aloha" to a slack, laconic rumination on starting anew. With treated mbiras, "Activa" turns the dream-pop of Cox's Atlas Sound solo work into a nightmare vision of wasted lives.
Despite an outsized and often compelling persona, Cox is in some ways absent from Microcastle. The first recognizable voice we hear belongs to guitarist Lockett Pundt, on second track "Agoraphobia"; Pundt's gentle, repetitive wordplay-- "Cover me, come for me, comfort me"-- cozies up against sunlit psych-pop (OK, about wanting to be buried alive for someone else's sexual gratification). Bass player Josh Fauver wrote most of "Nothing Ever Happened". The guitars are big, bright, and unusually unfucked-with. There's a finger-tapping guitar solo. All credit to Moses Archuleta for the propulsive drums.
Deerhunter's slight shift toward directness mirrors, to an extent, the move Liars made with their harder-rocking self-titled album. It doesn't mean Microcastle breaks entirely away from album-unifying concepts. On bell-splashed Cox-Pundt collaboration "Little Kids", getting older means getting deader. By Pundt-led "Neither of Us, Certainly", it's a fate devoutly to be wished. Cox's 50s and 60s pop influences play a small but significant role, linking the wordless, Flamingoes-esque opener "Cover Me (Slowly)" to the warped Everly Brothers waltz of finale "Twilight at Carbon Lake". The Beatles' "Please Please Me" claimed that "there's always rain in my heart"; on dynamic single candidate "Never Stops", there's always winter. In the end, "Twilight" says smell ya later to "the frozen shit that was in your heart."
If you thought the bonus disc would just be crappy outtakes, then you don't know Cox. Weird Era Cont. is surprisingly great in its own right, allowing Deerhunter to join Los Campesinos! in the two-good-albums-in-2008 club. This record sparkles right from the ghostly noise-pop of "Backspace Century" and the jerky dance-punk of "Operation". The girl-group bounce of "Vox Humana" puts Cox's underrated lyrical skills on full display, while "Vox Celeste" throws the neo-shoegaze gauntlet down in the face of the reunited My Bloody Valentine. Reverb drenches Pundt's voice on the luminous "Dot Gain". Instrumentals make a fine return, too, ranging from Faust-meets-Animal Collective loops to noise-music drones. "Focus Group" is a sweetly chiming Smashing Pumpkins-esque guitar anthem that nearly rivals "Nothing Ever Happened" for skewed pop immediacy.
The only song that appears on both discs is "Calvary Scars", which recounts a boy's willing, public crucifixion. It's a dual theme Deerhunter also explored on their self-titled first album's scrawly post-punk barb "Adorno", which mashes up crucifixion and suicide. On Microcastle, "Calvary Scars" is an ambient lullaby with mouthlike percussion; Weird Era Cont.'s "Calvary Scars II / Aux." is the track's heavier-sounding apotheosis, with an extended coda that's a bit like the live version of "You Made Me Realise", followed by a meditative electronic hum that's a bit like... the ringing in your ears after the live version of "You Made Me Realise". Or the calm after a cataclysm. There's a clear parallel with Radiohead's "Morning Bell", which appeared, in different versions, on both Kid A and Amnesiac.
From "Agoraphobia" to "Neither of Us, Uncertainly" to "Calvary Scars II / Aux.", sacrifical suicide could be a metaphor for artistic creation. On Microcastle/Weird Era Cont., Cox sacrifices himself-- or at least, his colorful persona-- for the sake of Deerhunter's art. On stage, he really does sacrifice his illness-damaged body. "I take what I can/ I give what I have left." From a band who, unlike their peers No Age, have studiously avoided politics, spreading the idea that salvation can be found, or at least glimpsed, in art-- let alone in stupid pop records! That you probably downloaded for free!-- is a politically potent act. Hope. Change. At the very least, a reason not to slit our throats before President Palin decides to nuke the world in 2017.


This 20-track collection of music by the prolific Spanish ambient producer feels like submerging into a warm bath for 95 minutes.

Warmth: Warmth: Retrospective (2016-2021)

Retrospective (2016-2021)

There might be ambient musicians better at tugging at the heartstrings or bottling the great sad mystery of the world, but if you want to bliss out until your eyes roll back into your head, you could do a lot worse than listen to Warmth. Under that moniker, Spanish producer Agustín Mena makes some of the most physically pleasurable ambient music imaginable, blurring synths and field recordings into grand, luxurious drones that spread across the stereo field as if wrapping the listener in an embrace. Retrospective (2016-2021) compiles tracks from six albums in as many years, plus “Taiga,” from the odds-and-ends Wildlife Addendum, and “Growth,” from his Archives label’s Heights compilation. It feels like being submerged in a warm bath for 95 minutes.
Though Warmth’s albums since 2016’s Essay sound more or less of a piece, they can be split into a crop of earlier, longer albums (Essay, Home, Parallel) and later, shorter ones (Wildlife and onward). By presenting most of his older tracks in edits of about four or five minutes, Retrospective avoids the stasis of his earlier work even as its sheer length gives the listener more opportunities to luxuriate than ever before. Some may miss the way tracks like “Home” and “Odessa'' were allowed to simmer longer in their original versions, but on Retrospective, divisions between tracks become irrelevant once you’re deep enough in the album that it starts to fade in and out of your consciousness.
Wherever there’s gauzy, dense, drumless ambient, Rafael Anton Irisarri isn’t far away. The Black Knoll Studio engineer worked with Mena on his last two albums, 2020’s Life and last year’s The Darkest Place, and here he gives some of the older tracks a touch-up, pumping blood into the low end and excising a bit of errant hiss. Though Mena is adept at creating textures that sound like no instrument in particular, Irisarri’s remaster breaks the illusion of a wall of sound just slightly, and the moving parts that figure into Mena’s music are more clearly visible. The growling low end of “The Darkest Place” sounds more sinuous than ever, and it’s easier to appreciate how the little sonar pulses that show up often in Warmth’s music act as bassline, melody, and structural reinforcement all at once.
Even considering Mena’s prolificacy, six years and six albums might not seem like enough of a milestone to warrant a retrospective. But Retrospective isn’t about charting the progression of his sound, which has been subtle, to say the least. It’s about capping off a run of good work and offering a new context in which to enjoy it—not to mention an excuse to package it in a spiffy 2xCD jewel case with an awesome new photo from in-house Archives photographer and erstwhile bear researcher Alexander Kopatz. This compilation doesn’t tell us much about Warmth that we don’t already know, nor does it cast Mena’s work in a new light. It just gives us more of his music in one place, and with music this single-mindedly blissful, more is better.

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In a Fluxus-inspired work for saxophone, drums, and string quartet, the New York-based musician strikes a boisterous balance between composition and free improv.

Darius Jones: fLuXkit Vancouver (its suite but sacred)

fLuXkit Vancouver (i̶t̶s suite but sacred)

“I always want my music to have that quality where things seem familiar but different,” New York saxophonist Darius Jones said recently. “Like when you remember something somewhat differently than how it has actually occurred.” Jones executes that plan triumphantly on fLuXkit Vancouver (its suite but sacred), a four-song suite with drummer Gerald Cleaver and four string players from Vancouver, British Columbia. The music echoes Jones’ past work as well as the avant-garde jazz that has informed his oeuvre. But there is always something new going on; sometimes it seems as if the music had changed since the last time you listened.
fLuXkit Vancouver’s fascinatingly amorphous quality comes in part from Jones’ interest in Fluxus, an art movement from the 1960s and 1970s that emphasized event-based works where the process was as important as the outcome. Sometimes an individual Fluxus piece would include a “fluxkit,” a box containing a score, instructions, and everyday objects, all intended for use in performance. Jones considers the album’s cover art, liner notes, and score, which combines traditional and graphic notation, to be just such a fluxkit. His goal was to mix media into something, as he put it, “where art and music meet.”
You don’t have to have access to his entire fluxkit to appreciate Jones’ vision. The four pieces here equitably combine composition and improvisation, placing the act of conception on the same plane as the act of performance. It’s all there in the opening track, “Fluxus V5T 1S1,” which starts with Jones in a prayerful mode, playing slow, heavy tones over Cleaver’s snare and the reverent sounds of violinists (and brothers) Jesse Zubot and Josh Zubot and cellist Peggy Lee. Soon, Cleaver inserts a beat that’s followed briskly by James Meger’s stair-climbing bass, and the ensemble coalesces around that structure. But Jones doesn’t join them, instead breaking out with a contrasting theme, delivering a multi-layered performance that’s both razor-sharp and unbounded.
An aura of indeterminacy continues throughout fLuXkit Vancouver, but don’t mistake it for indecision. This is a fearless, even boisterous record, with Jones’ penetrative playing matched solidly by everyone on his team, especially Cleaver and Lee. “Zubot” is named for the two violinists, both of whom contribute mightily, but the drummer and cellist steer the ship, slapping and sawing a course for Jones to sail through. Cleaver’s tom-led rolls set the tone for “Rainbow,” an 18-minute journey that includes a strikingly minimalist bass solo from Meger, and a few rushes of all-together crescendo that evoke Charles Mingus’ most assertive ensemble works.
By the time the 17-minute closer “Damon and Pythias” arrives, Jones’ writing and playing reach their apex. Surprises abound: springy violin plucks, violent sax stabs, and, most frequently, rhythmic surges that have the force of massive waves. It’s all part of keeping the process right up front. Jones initially made a grammatical error in the album’s punning title—“its suite” rather than “it’s suite”—but decided to add a strikethrough rather than correct his mistake. That’s the spirit of fLuXkit Vancouver: Jones lets us see it all, making the world feel like a wide-open place.


On their 2010 album Blackjazz, the Norwegian jazz/prog collective Shining absorbed metal into their approach, and it yielded a hard, precise music that felt unlike previous jazz/metal fusions. Since then, they've only grown more cold and olympic, but on International Blackjazz Society they let a hint of exciting uncertainty creep in.

Shining: International Blackjazz Society

International Blackjazz Society

On their 2010 album Blackjazz, the Norwegian jazz/prog collective Shining absorbed metal into their aesthetic, and it seemed to focus them. On earlier records the band, organized around multi-instrumentalist Jørgen Munkeby, were more elusive, but Blackjazz was an album made entirely of jagged shapes, like the irregular, violent architecture of a cliffside. It feels aggressively assembled, as if its ideas of metal and jazz were less harmonized than magnetized together. The follow-up, 2013’s One One One, reduced them into an atomically unstable industrial rock band. While thrilling, the album could have the remoteness of a formal exercise.
International Blackjazz Society sounds like a compression of these two approaches, but it evolves into something distinct as you listen. Unlike One One One, the songs here don’t simply accelerate until they expire. There’s more space in the arrangements, and the songs expand into the room they’re afforded. Some of this shift can be credited to new drummer Tobias Ørnes Andersen, who plays industrial music with more patience and tension than previous drummer and founding Shining member Torstein Lofthus. "Thousand Eyes" feels like stoner metal, of all things; the riff is a little more drunk than the band usually allows. "House of Warship" is free jazz, which is actually new territory for Shining; even their freest moments on previous records seemed premeditated, a kind of organized collapse. Whenever Munkeby plays saxophone on International Blackjazz Society the songs sound as if they’re sprouting fractals.
Still, even as the band relaxes into new atmospheres there’s an extreme, ascetic discipline on display. The architecture of their music is modernist, a series of inelastic and inorganic shapes colliding with the velocity of a distant level of "Tetris". On International Blackjazz Society’s final track, "Need", you can feel this refined performance begin to rupture. It’s as unhinged as it is straightforward; as it acquires mass in the choruses it seems to list off the ground into some new, uncertain gravity. For all the blur and motion of their music, this hint of deeper chaos might be the album's most exciting moment.


The shiny soul-pop of Lizzo’s major label debut is something of a thesis on internalized and externalized confidence—so much so that the music can feel like a means to a greater end.

Cuz I Love You

The precise moment of Lizzo’s transformation has been viewed nearly 200,000 times. In 2014, the same year she released her frenzied rap debut Lizzobangers, the rapper-singer-flautist participated in a web series called The What’s Underneath Project. In her episode, Lizzo sits on a stool before a brick wall and speaks warmly about the evolution of her self-image while shedding her clothing one piece at a time. First goes a plaid shirt, then a pair of retro Jordans, and a beanie, until she’s wearing just a bra and panties. Makeup mostly scrubbed and a teeny weeny afro forming a halo around her face, she is finally, fully herself. This literal disrobing, she has said, prompted an unexpected revelation that would go on to shape her life and her art.
That experience inspired her to write “My Skin,” the breakthrough rap-ballad from her 2015 album Big Grrrl Small World. In an accompanying essay, she described the song as “a summoning of bodies: all shapes, sizes, and shades to unite in their pride, and wear their skin like the gift it is.” Since then, she has sharpened that sensibility, becoming a tireless cheerleader for herself and for millions of people she’ll never know. Cuz I Love You, her first full-length on Atlantic, is something of a thesis on internalized and externalized confidence—so much so that the music can feel like a means to a greater end. The rollout for the album, featuring magazine covers and late-night talk show appearances, has been one extremely long yaaaaaaas, centering her welcome approach to body-positivity and self-love as much the soaring mid-chorus notes of the single “Juice” and her uncanny ability to play a flute while twerking.
Lizzo is clearly a talent. On songs like the soul-tinged “Cuz I Love You” and the naming-and-shaming “Jerome,” she bellows from somewhere deep within, her voice so powerful that it’s a surprise to learn she spent much of her life ashamed by it. Her pledge to be “ARETHA FRANKLIN FOR THE 2018 GENERATION” is evident, if not quite actualized; this generation’s Natasha Bedingfield is maybe more accurate. Songs like “Juice” or the equally upbeat “Soulmate” have enough sheen and universality to stand in for Bedingfield’s mid-aughts empowerment anthem “Unwritten” in any given rom-com or yogurt commercial. (Lizzo faced a minor scandal last year when she allowed one of her songs to be used in a campaign for Weight Watchers. Fans were critical of the decision because WW, despite a recent rebrand to health and wellness, reinforces diet culture, putting it fundamentally at odds with interpretations of Lizzo’s fat-positive principles. She eventually apologized.)
Despite her obvious skill and charisma, some of the album’s 11 songs are burdened with overwrought production, awkward turns of phrase, and ham-handed rapping. It’s hard to imagine her earning a spot in the pantheon of great, or even good, rappers when the opening lines of “Like A Girl” have the energy of an “SNL” sketch: “Woke up feeling like I just might run for president/Even if there ain’t no precedent/Switching up the messaging/I’m about to add a little estrogen.” Later, alongside perpetually cool labelmate Gucci Mane on “Exactly How I Feel,” echoes of the Black Eyed Peas’ triumphant, if soulless, stadium-pop ring hollow. There are highlights throughout—nearly every song has multiple captivating hooks—but the album’s peak comes at its end, with “Lingerie,” the sexy closer that is essentially orgasm-as-song. It is tongue-in-cheek, but somehow the most sincere Lizzo we hear.
She joins the proposition for genreless music at an interesting time, with artists as varied as Halsey and BTS and Khalid confirming the inevitability of such a future. “I’m the genre. My voice is the genre,” Lizzo said in a recent interview. And that’s technically true; she is what ties together the fun, anti-gravity pop of “Tempo,” featuring an inventive, compelling verse from Missy Elliott, and the pussy-hat optimism of “Better In Color.” But really, much of Cuz I Love You sounds like an improvement on any given major-label writing session. “Soulmate,” for example, plays like it could just as easily, if more cloyingly, be performed by someone like Meghan Trainor. (Lizzo and Trainor share a producer in Ricky Reed.)
In a piercing essay last month about the value of identity politics, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams wrote of recent “demographic and technological changes” that have “[bolstered] demands for inclusion and raising expectations in communities that had long been conditioned to accept a slow pace of change.” She continued: “These changes have encouraged activists and political challengers to make demands with a high level of specificity—to take the identities that dominant groups have used to oppress them and convert them into tools of democratic justice.” Of course, Abrams was focused on the activism galvanized by marginalization.
But the point is universal, even if the stakes are lower outside the realm of electoral politics. A similar phenomenon has clearly manifested in arts and culture, and in music in particular. An artist’s identity and how it is narrativized are by necessity inextricable from their work, making the task of assessing an album’s merit increasingly layered and complex. In fact, Lizzo does have a genre, something like empowerment-core, and she offers songs for an astonishing array of demographics: thick women, independent women, women in general, anyone struggling with body image, people who are single, people who wish to become single, etc. Lizzo’s music performs an important social function. The sound might disappoint, but there will be people moved to transformations of their own thanks to her songs. And that’s important, too.


The man behind King Krule returns with a new album, short film, and book. A New Place 2 Drown evokes a septic world filled with flickering halogen bulbs, sticky synth keys, and corroded outputs. Marshall has made tremendous strides as a producer, gorgeously reproducing the gloom and loneliness of early '90s hip-hop and finding a way to integrate it into his own style.

A New Place 2 Drown

Since releasing his first single as Zoo Kid in 2010, the Londoner Archy Marshall has treated his creative output like loose change spilled into couch cushions. He's released hip-hop mixtapes, ambient instrumentals, and remixes of other acts' songs; only some of his output has been under the name King Krule, the moniker he settled on for his 2013 debut full-length, meaning it's flown beneath the radar of casual music fans who were stunned by 6 Feet Beneath the Moon. The work of tracking what he does now has fallen to hardcore faithful, which seems like a smart long-term survival strategy and a sensible reaction to early career hype: halve your visibility, double your productivity, and wait for the universe to catch up.
A New Place 2 Drown is a name given to three new projects—there is also a handsome 208-page art book of sketches, photographs, and poetry from Marshall alongside his older brother Jack, and a short film. And then there is this album. All of it surfaced together this week, and the shared title seems to make an offer to fans and clarify a wish to the larger world. Marshall wants to be swallowed by his work, and he's offering you a chance to join him.
Marshall has often seemed eager for disappearance—journalists have dubbed him "press-shy," a euphemism for "loathes journalists"—but on A New Place 2 Drown, he achieves it completely. His voice was the star of 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, a blood-red streak against black, but here he dissolves it into the grey mist of his beats. Mostly he croons or mutters over crackles, drips, and clanks. He is an element in his landscape now, not a spotlit singer-songwriter or an ersatz modern-day blues singer. There isn't a single guitar audible on the album's drifting, dreamlike 37 minutes, and not a single song you could imagine Willow Smith attempting to cover.
What it shares with his older work is the septic world it depicts, full of flickering halogen bulbs, sticky synth keys, and corroded outputs. He's made tremendous strides as a producer, to the point where his touch exceeds Rodaidh McDonald's work on his debut. His sound is more three-dimensional, a series of shrouded corners and murmured conversations. This is wandering, grey-skies music, finding pleasure and even sensuality in solitude.
Like most others in the sentient universe, Marshall is a professed fan of hardcore '90s NYC hip-hop, stuff like Wu-Tang and D.I.T.C. Unlike everyone else, he gorgeously reproduces its gloom and loneliness, and finds a way to integrate it into his own style. He does this mostly with a succession of sounds so obsessively perfect and tactile they seem like whole songs themselves: The hollow, rounded thunk of the drum track on "The Sea Liner MK 1" precisely mimics the sound of colliding pool balls, and hearing it for only a measly four minutes seems like a cheat, somehow: It is a drum knock so perfect you would cross the street to listen to it.
The formal grain of his music bends increasingly towards hip-hop: The sluggish tempo and tar-thick synths of "Dull Boys" and "Thames Water" suggest across-the-pond admiration of Houston's DJ Screw, as does the halting sing-song of "Buffed Sky". His mumbly, string-of-conscious delivery on "Sex With Nobody" conjures early-'00s indie rappers like Serengeti or Atmosphere. He is steadily narrowing the gap between the rap he admires and the music he makes, and A New Place 2 Drown seems like evidence that he should start producing for rappers regularly.
Marshall's own words are haunting but elusive, ripples moving across the surface of his music that dissipate before your ear focuses on their meaning. But you get a peek into a mind state and a mood with every legible phrase: "I'm pretty sure I'm dying as I speak," he offers on "Arise Dear Brother". "She plays me Barry White, all night/ She drift into the light," he sings wistfully on "Ammi Ammi". The most ringing line, clearest in both its setting and its intention, comes from "Buffed Sky": "I'll fly solo," he sings, drawing out the second syllable of the last word for relish and emphasis. It seems like it's working for him.


Accomplished ambient artist expands his sound to include delicate new elements-- soft percussion, his own voice-- creating distant pop songs.

Similes

You can't blame Matthew Cooper for wanting to try something different. Since 2003, he's been plugging away at an ambient style that is emotionally broad but conceptually narrow. There's only so much you can do with a palette limited to light classical instrumentation and drifting electronics, and Cooper's done most of it. An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death was a collection of Erik Satie-inspired piano pieces. When I Live By the Garden and the Sea drenched similarly plaintive melodies in radiant streams of noise. Copia, his greatest and most fully realized album, was full of hulking themes for strings and winds, while Miniatures (released under his real name) was tiny and fluttering. Life Through Bombardment, the deluxe vinyl box-set collecting his entire oeuvre up to 2009, was more than a collector's item-- it seemed to put a completed body of work to rest.
Whatever his approach, Cooper always goes hard for the same matrix of emotions-- melancholy, wistfulness, yearning-- and those of us who love his music cherish this predictability. His sound has an emotional intensity that is almost unseemly, evocative of heartbreak. That hasn't changed on Similes, his first post-Bombardment album, although the intensity is muffled to make room for delicate new elements: soft, stitchy percussion and Cooper's own laconic vocals. In a distant way, these are pop songs: Verses and choruses revolve slowly through wafting electronic sheens that glint with naturalistic piano. But his voice is so subdued and intermittent that it doesn't scan as a lead. It's just one slowly beating, spreading element among others.
Cooper's singing is weary and muted, in the neighborhood of Ian Curtis or Matthew Dear. He murmurs, so you catch only snatches of what he's saying, which seems appropriate in Eluvium music, always peacefully fragmented. His voice sits still amid the ruffling synths and pin-drop drums of "The Motion Makes Me Last"; the piano keys do the real singing. Cooper's affecting vulnerability is really pronounced on "Weird Creatures", where he cautiously treads the chords like slippery stones over a river. He was wise to limit the vocals to a few tracks, as they're not dynamic enough to withstand a whole album. Much of Similes is more standard, wordless Eluvium fare: the rumbling piano-based "In Culmination", the slow-burning "Nightmare 5" and "Bending Dream", and most of all the long, flickering closer "Cease to Know".
Whether Similes will truly wind up being the start of a new career phase or a footnote for Eluvium remains to be seen-- Cooper sounds so tentative about his singing that it won't be shocking if he follows it with a more characteristic album of instrumentals. If he continues to strive for pop forms, he may have to figure out how to make his voice do more than color his arrangements in monotonous shades. If not, Similes will retain value as more than a curio for its sheer approachability and its unique take on Cooper's well-established style. It doesn't move mountains like his best work, but it satisfies.


The life and music of gospel singer Washington Phillips has been shrouded in mystery for years. His gentle, measured, unearthly music, played on a handmade instrument,  is still a world unto itself.

Washington Phillips: Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams

For a long time, the only thing there was to know about the gospel singer Washington Phillips is that there wasn’t much to know. Born in Texas in 1880, Phillips recorded a total of 18 songs between 1927 and 1929. Two of these songs were lost. The remaining 16—light, dreamy, paranormally gorgeous—were issued two at a time on 78-r.p.m. records, the precursor to the modern LP, then trickled out on vaguely anthropological collections like Negro Religious Music Vol. 2 or Screening the Blues. It wasn’t until 1980 that Phillips’ was given his own dedicated release, and then on a small label run by a high school English teacher in the Netherlands.
Until now—and this is invariably the heart of Phillips’ story, at least as it’s usually told—people couldn’t even agree on what instrument Phillips used to accompany himself. Some said it was a zither, a narrow stringed box about the size of a laptop. Others said it was an obscure keyboard called a dolceola, in part on account of the Columbia Records’ scout (and Phillips’ producer) Frank B. Walker, who referred to it as a “dulceola.” In the early 1980s, a researcher at Tulane University named Lynn Abbott found a picture of Phillips in the Louisiana Weekly holding what looked like two zithers Frankensteined together, confirming only that whatever it was Phillips played, nobody had seen it before or since. In any case, this is what it sounds like: a small music box playing in a large, resonant cave, playful but indistinct, like dandelion fuzz loosed on a spring breeze.
Recent research by the tireless Phillips chronicler Michael Corcoran reveals that Phillips called his instrument the Manzarene, giving rise to the title of a new digitally released collection from the Georgia label Dust-to-Digital called Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams. As mentioned, there are only 16 known Phillips recordings in existence. Though remastered here, they have been released a few times before, including on a still-available Yazoo Records compilation called The Key to the Kingdom. (One version of Phillips’ songs, an LP by the Oregon label Mississippi Records, has a cover obstinately depicting Phillips sitting at a dolceola. Some myths are too beautiful to let go.)
What I personally find remarkable about Phillips’ music is how gentle it is. Here is the American servant of a Christian God who never shouts, never growls, never beats his breast or stomps his feet to prove just how strong the spirit is within him. If early rock-and-roll borrowed the hysterics of gospel and turned them into an expression of sex, Phillips’ delivery—measured, conversational, disinterested in the Buddhist sense—is something I hear in ambient and new age music, or in the transcendent reticence of a songwriter like Bill Callahan, who appears to touch God not by reaching out but leaning back. My favorite song here is “What Are They Doing in Heaven Today” because it sounds like he really doesn’t know. My second-favorite is “Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave It There” because it sounds like he has. No other gospel musician has come as close to convincing me that Jesus’ love might not stress me out.
Ninety years on, with decades of exhumations of gospel and blues behind us, Phillips is still an anomaly. The same 1927 trip during which Frank B. Walker first recorded Phillips, he also recorded Blind Willie Johnson, the Dallas String Band, Lillian Glinn and a handful of other artists who sound more or less like musicians playing music in the 1920s. Even Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground),” an unprecedented recording that appears to capture a ghost crying inside a milk bottle, sounds like the Platonic ideal of a style that has become familiar. Phillips’ music remains weirdly without lineage or context, a sound unto itself.
The blues is built on apocrypha and myth. It cannot be conveniently subjected to the demystifying rigor modern standards demand without being somehow denuded. You cannot—and maybe, to some extent, should not—fact-check the blues. And yet being black music made during the era of American slavery, institutional and beyond, it seems right as a matter of moral, even reparational course to read the stories of people like Phillips—a free black man who lived on acreage his father, uncles and grandfather bought after emancipation, and spent his Juneteenths slow-cooking a hog on the nearby church picnic green—as fully and precisely as possible.
Phillips did not, as it had often been reported, die in an insane asylum, but after falling down a flight of stairs in a government building in Teague, Texas. You can see a picture of this staircase in the liner notes for Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams. It is narrow and wooden and takes a sharp bend to the left about ten steps down. As ambivalent as I am about the mystery of his instrument being “solved”—and as insistently as I feel that explaining what he made his music with will never bring us any closer to the wonder of how—I am startled by the sight of these stairs: So tactile, so ordinary. The greatest mystery (of course) is that Phillips made this all on Earth.