With Ernest Green’s pastoral Georgia home as its emotional backdrop, Washed Out’s fifth LP clears the haze from his structured songcraft and winds up feeling inert.

Notes From a Quiet Life

Forgive Ernest Greene his absence; he’s been gettin’ busy living. The Facebook post announcing Notes From a Quiet Life—the fifth Washed Out LP, and first in four years—closed with “welcome to Endymion.” It’s a reference to the 20-acre, Macon-area horse farm he purchased in 2021 and converted into a combination homestead and artists’ estate. The property is central to the album’s promotion: An illustration of a ranch house adorns Sub Pop’s press release, which is mocked up to resemble mid-century letterhead. Last month, Greene posted a short film (also titled Notes From a Quiet Life) about his day-to-day at Endymion: changing diapers in the magic hour, exploring the woods, tending to his mindfully arranged spheres. Washed Out appears as chillwave personified: a Southern-fried bedroom musician, beating an emotional and sonic retreat to the past in the face of an austerity-wracked present. Endymion feels like the future that Greene’s cohort was sold.
How curious that none of this made it to the record. Despite the fingerpicking depicted in the film, this isn’t Washed Out’s For Emma, Forever Ago, or even a folktronica turn. This time, he actively avoids musical influences. Visual artists, primarily sculptors, were Greene’s inspiration: Barbara Hepworth, Donald Judd, Henry Moore. Those are the leftfield citations of a noise musician or an ECM jazz composer, and an acknowledgment that Greene, too, is refining his own well-recognized forms. The life may be quiet, but the notes seem cribbed: The easiest way to describe this record is 2020’s Purple Noon with the fog burned off. “A Sign” snaps the dissolute lovers rock of Purple Noon’s “Paralyzed” to the grid. The fluttering, fatalistic closer “Letting Go” is a modal cousin to the Balearic reggae of “Time to Walk Away” (to say nothing of Chris Isaak’s transcendentally simpering “Wicked Game”). Where “Reckless Desires” used rhythmic koto figures to remain aloft, “Second Sight” is content to deploy the instrument as a vaporwave glissando.
Notes From a Quiet Life is, somewhat surprisingly, the first Washed Out album Greene has produced alone. Perhaps he cleared the haze in order to better reveal the classical structure of his songwriting. The results sound great: punchy snares and widemouth synth bass. And to an unprecedented degree, his voice—a careful baritone that recalls Beck at his most plaintive—occupies a large part of the space. He brings a stateliness to the expected places: the tender “Got Your Back,” with its wordless lullaby of a hook, and the twinkling “Wondrous Life,” which nearly topples into power balladry. But it’s also present on the dissolute lovers rock of “A Sign,” a crush song that generates its heat from overthinking (“But I think I’m falling hard/Am I taking this too far?”) instead of attraction. “Say Goodbye” is a slow strut of a breakup song, so assuring and frictionless it’s like being sent home in a hovercar.
All this plain speaking can be a drag after a while. Even at his most ponderous, Beck is still good for an arresting image or turn of phrase. The sincerity of Notes From a Quiet Life has no whimsy to counterbalance it, and none of chillwave’s day-drunk reverb to muffle it. And Greene’s attempt to augment his conversational clichés with narrative heft—accepting OpenAI’s commission of a Sora-generated music video for the pop-rock heartbreak of lead single “The Hardest Part”—was a grisly stumble, a shortcut to dream logic from the figurehead of a genre that plays effortlessly with nostalgia and memory.
In the mini-doc, Greene talks about the grind of touring for a musician now in his forties, and his attempts to take better care of his body. With that in mind, you could read this album as a purgative act: a rejection of quick-hit stimuli (narcotic synths, Stones Throw-style beatmaking, house music) in order to find something sustainable. Maybe it’s in the languid R&B of “Wait on You,” with its choice combination of a pitched-down vocal hook, lovestruck coos, and a restless rhythm guitar. Or perhaps in the elevated ’90s adult contemporary of “Running Away,” in which he holds his vowels so long he’s in danger of a shot-clock violation. Despite its slightness, Notes From a Quiet Life is still a landmark in Washed Out’s catalog: a true solo turn and a complete break from chillwave sonics. But having finally acquired all this space, Greene seems unsure how to fill it.


Working out of their home studio in the Washington woods, experimentally minded brothers Nathan and Aaron Weaver return to their roots in atmospheric black metal, but they no longer sound like pioneers.

Wolves in the Throne Room: Primordial Arcana

Primordial Arcana

Wolves in the Throne Room’s early albums imbued black metal’s towering riffs and pummeling drums with a striking sense of place. Brothers Nathan and Aaron Weaver shared a deep communion with the forests and rivers of the Pacific Northwest, and they sought to capture that beauty and power in music. Their so-called Cascadian black metal felt like a uniquely North American answer to the frostbitten sound of Norwegian bands like Immortal and Enslaved. On Primordial Arcana, the band’s disappointing seventh album, they sound like they need to come out of the woods.
In the decade since Wolves in the Throne Room released the excellent Celestial Lineage, they’ve seemed adrift. On 2014’s Celestite, they eschewed black metal for a pale imitation of Popol Vuh’s kosmische synth experiments, while on its follow-up, Thrice Woven, they made a conscious return to black metal, with results that took cues from their best albums but felt limp in execution. Primordial Arcana is another misstep. Though WITTR are apparently firmly committed to making black metal again, they’ve started to sound like any of a million other bands aping the Cascadian formula the Weavers helped create. Some of their boldest experiments have been failures, but failure would at least be more interesting than the rut they’re stuck in now.
To the band’s credit, they do still know how to write a stirring black-metal song. “Mountain Magick” opens the album promisingly enough. An ominous synth drone twists itself into a muted melody before giving way to a propulsive riff and a blasting drum pattern from Aaron Weaver, who sounds as spry behind the kit as ever. The rest of the song unfolds with grace, if not necessarily any surprises. Historically, much of the power of WITTR’s best work has come from its ability to entrance the listener through repetition and hypnotic, densely layered riffing. “Mountain Magick” never quite finds that mesmeric groove. All but one track on Primordial Arcana clocks in shy of the 10-minute mark, and while it’s likely the brothers were trying to make their music more direct, they end up sounding like they’ve run out of steam. The lone exception, the imposing “Masters of Rain and Storm,” is the finest song on the album, and the one that most evokes the WITTR of old.
Synthesizers, while not as front and center as they were on Celestite, remain omnipresent in this incarnation of WITTR. The band has cited the symphonic black metal of the ’90s as a key reference point for Primordial Arcana, and when the synths mimic a vast choir or take over a main melody from the guitars, you can hear that influence. Some of the best moments on the album echo Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk-era Emperor. Yet even this feels like a missed opportunity. Rather than using their doubtlessly impressive collection of synths to create something novel, WITTR sound content to borrow from their past. We’re living in something of a golden age for atmospheric black metal right now, with dozens of bands carving thrilling new tributaries of the sound the Weavers pioneered. They don’t sound especially interested in being trailblazers anymore.
The Weaver brothers and bandmate Kody Keyworth did nearly everything themselves on Primordial Arcana, including producing and mixing the record in their newly built home studio in the Washington woods. A lack of outside input can help a band bring a fierce, uncompromising vision to life. It can also excuse self-satisfaction, and unfortunately, it sounds like that’s what happened when WITTR opted not to work with an outside producer for the first time. The Weavers have no trouble sounding like themselves, but another voice in the room might have helped them flesh out some of the underexplored ideas on Primordial Arcana. Like the still life that adorns its cover, the album can be beautiful, but it’s fundamentally inert.

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Broadening its sound and tightening its lyrical focus, the Brighton post-punk band conjures mantras of despair and anthems of pure frustration.

Porridge Radio: Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky

If it helps anyone distinguish Porridge Radio among the UK’s thriving nation-state of young, verbose, and ambitious post-punk bands, Dana Margolin would prefer if you compared them to nu-metal or emo: “They’re as cringe as me,” she jokes in a press release. Whereas their peers emote through cryptic metaphors, wry wordplay, dense allusions, or deadpan humor, Porridge Radio revel in being the kind of people who dream of showing up to your birthday party just to scream “I don’t want to be loved” over and over again. Breathlessly titled like an early Bright Eyes deep cut, Porridge Radio’s third album Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky honors Margolin’s self-appraisal: an inversion of teen-pop that doesn’t engage in time travel so much as allow adult listeners to keep their most immediate and mortifying mindsets close at hand. If they could write uplifting, emotionally mature love songs, I’m not sure they would.
They came close with “Lilac,” the crescendo to 2020’s breakthrough Every Bad, where Margolin hoped for a future of collective kindness and self-care. On Waterslide, it’s clear that didn’t come to pass, as Margolin deals in concerns that don’t resolve themselves in the span of two years: the struggle to define self-worth, a hyperbolic vision of “love” that encapsulates extreme elation and depression rather than any exchange of intimacy between two equal partners. Most pressingly, she writes about the fear of death and the fear of dying, which her feverish inflections on “Birthday Party” imply are two very different things.
As much as the pandemic itself amplified Margolin’s anxieties—Every Bad was released two days after the WHO declared a global pandemic in March 2020—there was also her experience of fronting a buzzing indie rock band when the expectations for doing so were completely upended. Porridge Radio began writing “Back to the Radio,” Waterslide’s delirious opening track, toward the end of 2019, right when the promotional cycle for Every Bad was revving up and Margolin began to absorb everything that would soon be required of her band. How would their friendship survive their first international tour? How would their music be interpreted or misinterpreted? Can vulnerability scale? Understandably, their first response was to self-impose quarantine: “Lock all the windows and march up the stairs/And you’re looking to me but I’m so unprepared for it,” Margolin bellows. It’s Porridge Radio’s first intentional anthem, with a rousing chorus that accrues momentum and mass with each repetition, like a soccer chant shared by a swaying, shoulder-to-shoulder crowd—that is, if it wasn’t written to suit someone drinking away their fear of change in total seclusion.
Processing overwhelming and conflicting impulses within closed spaces is where Porridge Radio’s music functions best. While the vast, tidal expanses of Every Bad often invoked the band’s roots in seaside Brighton, Waterslide is less musically temperamental, its peaks never pushing into the red and its quieter moments indulgently stewing in their indulgently sullen moods. Forgoing their past reliance on blunt force, static, and stabs of distortion, Waterslide broadens Porridge Radio’s sound with honking synths, megaphones, horns, studio luxuries with the patina of junkyard grime—the influence of Rain Dogs smuggled into radio-friendly indie rock vis a vis Modest Mouse.
Still, it’s Margolin alone who determines the trajectory of each song. Even as she reaches her peak of dysregulation on “Birthday Party,” the volume behind her barely rises; it’s not like witnessing a full-blown meltdown, but rather someone about to be calmly asked by a friend, again, “Please don’t make a scene.” Rarely does a minute go by without Margolin recalibrating the stakes of every interaction to an impossible height. The errant lover from “End of Last Year” doesn’t just break hearts—they break everything they touch. On “Jealousy,” Margolin confesses, “Nothing makes me quite as sad as you.” She is an apple rotting from the inside out, an overripe tomato waiting to be cut in half and squeezed into pulp. As she helplessly watches her dog refuse to pick up a stick, she sees a greater metaphor for a cruel, unfeeling world. By the desolate closing track, little exists between heaven and hell.
These aren’t passing states. Most of the time, Margolin anchors a verse’s worth of tangential thoughts and inventive phrasing with a despairing mantra: “Don’t want my body to be touched/Don’t want to mean anything to you,” “It stops the rot from spreading,” “You’re all that I want.” But where this tactic felt like an artist discovering their signature on Every Bad, the thematic reiteration turns all of the self-recrimination and emptiness and brokenness into an emotional brownout as Waterslide progresses. “I want one feeling all the time/I don’t want to feel a thing,” Margolin shouts on “Birthday Party” as a quintessential lyric; if they’re gonna feel nothing, they want it to the extreme.
Still, the intentionality and humor in Margolin’s repetition keeps it from becoming a crutch. Despite noting the influence from the sound and spirit of arena acts like Deftones and Coldplay, Porridge Radio never allow themselves to fully project their pain outward, where it can reach the cheap seats. There’s certainly the potential for catharsis in comparing yourself to a splinter and begging your partner “don’t cut me out” until you’re out of breath. But throughout Waterslide, Margolin instead conjures the sound of pure frustration: desires unheard, needs unmet, people experiencing their most juvenile impulses in an adult body and no longer able to solve them with the cheap thrill of acting out in public.


The heady electronic duo that gave Netflix’s sci-fi success story its signature sound are back for another round, with plenty of nostalgia and some new tricks.

Kyle Dixon / Michael Stein: Stranger Things 2 (A Netflix Original Series Soundtrack)

“Stranger Things,” Netflix’s sci-fi success story, hit the zeitgeist last year with the force of an invisible telekinetic blast from a psychic pre-teen on the run from government operatives. It did this by unabashedly culling references from 1980s pop culture, repurposing the pulpy horror tropes of the era into a story that resonated with a contemporary audience. There’s nothing wrong with “style over substance” as a guiding aesthetic for a series like this; when done well, that sense of surface-level nostalgia can help create a world that feels both familiar and intriguing. With music, however, the same effect can be trickier to pull off. More often than not, when artists wholesale copy well-known motifs and themes, you’re left with an empty pastiche or an uninspired facsimile of a better musician. Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, the two electronic composers who have scored both seasons of “Stranger Things,” don’t have that problem. Their lush, deep music gave the show’s first season a crucial emotional dimension, and their second time around once again steers away from cliché, maintaining the pace they’ve set for themselves while subtly shifting tactics just enough to keep fans hooked.
Discovered as members of the Austin, Texas experimental synth four-piece S U R V I V E, Dixon and Stein have gone on to a level of mainstream success thanks to “Stranger Things” that would have otherwise been unthinkable for a band so heady and niche. In September, they took home the Emmy for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme, putting them in the company of past winners like Randy Newman, Danny Elfman, and John Williams—and raising yet another expectation for the duo to live up to.
The pitch-perfect genre influences that made both S U R V I V E and Dixon and Stein’s first-season soundtrack immediately relatable for ‘80s synth buffs are front and center, yet again, on Stranger Things 2. You can hear echoes of Tangerine Dream and John Carpenter, as well as the ethereal unease of Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells, Part 1” (also known as the theme to The Exorcist) and Mark Snow’s “X-Files” score. Beyond these fan-favorite references, drawn from highbrow and populist sci-fi and horror scoring alike, Dixon and Stein weave in original interpretations of more contemporary soundtrack work. Pale imitations of Hans Zimmer’s Inception score have plagued filmmaking since that movie was released seven years ago; here, “Descent Into the Rift” makes similar bursts of atonal keyboards sound freshly jarring. The track builds around screeches of dying machinery, imploding into darkness, as the void slowly fills with climbing synth blips and misty, creaky chords.
Beyond these well-executed allusions and reinterpretations, Dixon and Stein’s deep knowledge of analog synthesizers lets them explore the full gamut of sounds and moods created by their machines, from ambient, gliding tones to harsh industrial blasts. As soon as you’re lulled into into a sense of security by a warmer, dreamier track—say “She Wants Me to Find Her,” with its almost new age soundscape cresting like a hazy sunrise—Dixon and Stein begin ratcheting up the dread until you’re caught off guard by “It’s a Trap,” which sounds like a bunch of silverware being thrown down a flight of iron stairs in slow motion.
For much of its running time, though, Stranger Things 2 finds the space to be exactly what you’d expect, which is prudent for a sequel at this level of popularity. By the time you reach track 12, “Looking for a Way Out,” Dixon and Stein are revisiting the arpeggiated, squelching synths of the show’s intro theme, unleashing the same unsettling sci-fi aura to maximum effect. One of the longer tracks on the record, “Symptoms,” deploys almost three minutes of wandering, ebullient notes before launching into another Carpenter-esque rhythmic melody. While its title is obviously steeped in the lore of the show, “Eggo in the Snow” sounds exactly like that: a frozen grid trapped on a fluffy cloud of ice.
All of this color and shading comes from Dixon and Stein’s dedication to the art of the synth, which is ultimately what sets their soundtrack work apart from, say, Kavinsky’s opening theme for Drive or Trent Reznor’s more subdued collaborations with Atticus Ross. While Stranger Things 2 may not necessarily be best enjoyed on its own, it’s vivid and complex enough to be more than just a companion piece to the TV series. And if it’s not as in-depth or immediate as S U R V I V E’s full-on cosmic assault, it doesn’t need to be. While staying true to the series' airtight aesthetic, Dixon and Stein continue to find ways to push beyond.


Reissues of Warp's genre-defining compilation and its 1994 sequel.

Various Artists: Artificial Intelligence / Artificial Intelligence II

Compilations like Warp's Artificial Intelligence don't come around often enough. Everything about it was gutsy. Warp had started three years earlier as a dance-oriented label that grew out of a DJ shop. Its founders had fallen in love with Detroit techno and set about releasing music that would further that tradition. But they noticed that in addition to dancing at clubs and raves, people were using electronic music in another way. The iconic cover illustration said it all: A robot, reclining in his living room, quite possibly stoned, with Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd LPs strewn about his floor. They envisioned a post-rave head session, a time for a contemplative and cerebral journey into music's future.
A bit hippie, isn't it? Warp didn't care. And they didn't just suggest these things with a title and images; they laid it all out explicitly on the record's cover. "Artificial Intelligence is electronic listening music for long journeys, quiet nights and club drowsy dawns" and "Artificial Intelligence is the first in a series of 'listening albums' from Warp." These statements now sound like they would be affixed to some sort of Ultimate Chill compilation sold at a coffee shop circa 1999, but this wasn't polite, head-nodding downtempo. Most of Artificial Intelligence was just a click or two away from the music that would have filled a dance floor. Tempos were a little slower and textures were more labored over but the LP was built on techno's sturdy foundation.
The idea was to retreat to a place removed from the utilitarian demands of the dance floor to engage in electronic music R&D.; Everything about the package was presented as a paradigm shift, all the way down to the disarmingly earnest answers to standard questions ("Why did you contribute to A.I."?) supplied by the artists on the inside sleeve. In sum, Warp said "Here is something new and original, and you are going to be hearing a lot more if it," and then delivered on the promise. A genre was born, but Warp's "Electronic Listening Music" term never caught on. Instead, we got the much-reviled "Intelligent Dance Music," named after the popular e-mail list of the same name.
With Warp going out on a limb to place itself at the forefront of "progressive" electronic music, revisiting both newly reissued volumes of Artificial Intelligence more than a decade later is in some ways problematic. You want to hear tracks as music first, but you can't help but listen to it as a historical document. I can say that nearly all of Volume I still sounds great. Richard D. James kicks things off as the Dice Man on "Polygon Window", and while his synths sound slightly crude by today's standards, the datedness is ultimately appealing, the weight of history adding substance in the same way as, say, heavy reverb does to countrypolitan. Autechre here is ridged and steeped in early futurist hip-hop; they contribute two great tracks including the astounding "The Egg", with its heavily chopped and rhythmically precise vocals. Naturally Dr. Alex Patterson brings the most archetypal ambient with the gauzy, sound-effects heavy "Loving You Live". I never particularly cared about Speedy J but the Dutch producer lightens the mood effectively with the bubbly and popish "De-Orbit" and then closes with the drifting "Fill 3".
Relatively speaking, the second volume doesn't hold up nearly as well. Oddly, while it has more variety it also seems more generic. By 1994 there were a lot of people making "electronic listening music" and this doesn't feel like a particularly special assemblage of what was out there. Canned breaks ruin Link's "Arcadian", while a recurring sample of a woman intoning "Feel...strange..." throughout Mark Franklin's "Release to the System", unlike the Richard D. James synth textures mentioned earlier, loses meaning when plucked from its rave-era context. Tracks by Richard Kirk and Higher Intelligence Agency are pleasant and engaging techno but not particularly memorable. The peak again comes from Autechre, whose "Chatter" finds them fusing half-speed Cybotron-style electro with languid acid textures, the soundtrack for breakdancing ecstasy in slow motion.
In the liner notes to the first volume, the Autechre boys then just 19 and 21, respond to the question "Electronic Music. Where next?" with an unintentionally prophetic answer. "When people run dry copying each other, a deeper more creative music will occur where ideas and originality will play a central role." By now they are all too aware that the well of mimicry is essentially bottomless and there may not be as many original ideas as we once thought. Listening to the first Artificial Intelligence compilation is a reminder of how nice it must have been back in 1992 to dream such a thing.


The gruff-voiced rapper and dusty-groove producer are a perfect match as they connect for a seamless ride to the heart of the gangster.

Alfredo

Hip-hop’s obsession with the Italian Mafia has always been curious. While there’s certainly something perversely romantic about Hollywood’s paeans to La Cosa Nostra, the characters at the heart of these stories—both in real life and on screen—were incorrigibly racist. Mafiosos said and did awful things to black people. And yet rappers have been glorifying dons and capos ever since Kool G Rap and DJ Polo’s Road to the Riches, idolizing men in custom suits smoking cigars who often saw them as less than human.
Alfredo, the collaborative LP from rapper Freddie Gibbs and producer the Alchemist, tugs at the root of this fascination. From its Mario Puzo-esque cover art to the various gangster-movie samples throughout its 35-minute runtime, it celebrates the mafioso aesthetic while simultaneously acknowledging its ugliness. And at its core, the Mafia’s role in hip-hop has always been one of aspirational criminality, based in respect for the hustle above all else. Rappers who rap about selling drugs in the trap don’t want to be holed up in a dilapidated vacant home, they want to be dining on fine china in designer clothes. Mafiosos showed them how to do that, all the while thumbing their noses at a WASPy aristocracy that saw them as second-class citizens.
Throughout the album, Gibbs and the Alchemist’s reference points suggest a deeper understanding of this dynamic. Its anti-heroes aren’t white mobsters with mulignan in their mouths like John Gotti or Tony Soprano, but Harlem kingpins Frank Lucas and Bumpy Johnson, black gangsters who lorded over a black neighborhood selling drugs to black people. When those figures do appear, like in the sample of Chazz Palminteri as Joseph Bonnano in the TV series Godfather of Harlem on “Baby $hit,“ their naked disgust for black people is laid bare. An extended sample of the ’70s blaxploitation flick The Black Godfather (“Look at Me”) suggests the kind of narrative that a dope game rapper like Gibbs might aspire to: a street kid clawing his way to the top, wresting control over his neighborhood’s criminal enterprise from its white interloper.
Gibbs has long exhibited a mastery of this duality, with a rap flow so seductive it makes a life of crime sound extremely attractive...until he drops a bar so foul and gnarly it lifts the veil. He doesn’t rap in the abstract either, nor try to justify any of it; on “Skinny Suge,” he raps, “Man, my uncle died off a overdose/And the fucked up part about that is, I know who supplied the nigga that sold it.” And while the Alchemist’s upbringing—white, Jewish, born in Beverly Hills—stands in stark contrast to Gibbs’, his gift lies in crafting bespoke beats that suit not just a rapper’s flow, but their entire style and ethos. He makes it easy for Gibbs to be Gibbs.
And on Alfredo, that style is vintage luxury, bathed in elegant piano with faded textures colored by time that sound even more beautiful now than when they were new. On “Look at Me,” he plucks the high note from the Moments’ song of the same name, warping it into a warble that swirls around strings and horns. And the first notes of “Scottie Beam” are so opulent that you’d expect to hear Rick Ross’ deep, velvety purr regardless of whether or not you’d peeped the album credits.
For his part, Gibbs skates over these beats, effortlessly gliding in and out of the pocket. Even the moments of stark contrast feel natural. On “Something to Rap About,” Gibbs channels the Merovingian from the Matrix trilogy—who memorably likened cursing in French to “wiping your ass with silk”—barking obscenities over a somnambulant Miami Beach cocktail lounge type beat. And on “Baby $hit,” the most buoyant of Alfredo’s compositions, he balances his drug kingpin image with his life as a father: “Rabbit potty training every morning, ho, I’m cookin’ dope and cleaning baby shit.”
By this point, neither Gibbs nor the Alchemist have much of anything to prove—the former has been rapping circles around nearly everyone for the last five or six years, and the latter has been a go-to beatmaker for A-list rappers since the turn of the century. But their pairing here seems particularly inspired, even within the context of each other’s individual producer/rapper collaborative albums. The two have been working together since at least 2004, but ever since their 2011 collaboration on Curren$y’s “Scottie Pippen,” Gibbs has been sharpening his raps to the point where it seems like he can slice through any beat. And it’s somewhat stunning that even amid a career full of rap classics, the Alchemist’s current production run may represent a new high-water mark. As neither party seems content with letting this be their last collaboration, Alfredo is likely just a taste of what they can accomplish together.


Prog-esque band finds a middle ground between math-rock and technical hardcore/metal.

The Moon Is a Dead World

Let's face it: Prog has never been cool. Your first guitar teacher, the one with the Yes shirt, was not cool. The kid I knew who worshipped Neil Peart, and had a license plate that read "DRUMGUY" was not cool. And no matter how much you may love Genesis, that won't erase the fact that Peter Gabriel eventually left Phil Collins in charge. On the other hand, Gospel are cool. Cool enough to get approval from the white-studded belt, sideways trucker hat, back pocket bandana crowd, and the unadorned (and girlfriendless) music geek crowd.
What makes Gospel so cool? It could be the patchwork of functional King Crimson via Converge riffs, sprayed out drum work that's reminiscent of Damon Che of Don Caballero fame at his drunkest, and Dazzling Killmen-esque guttural yells. Then again, it could just be that the band sprawls out on a nice medium ground between math-rock and technical hardcore/metal. It's not a crowded genre as the years have shown that heavy bands with prog influences end up becoming black metal, Dream Theater, Ruins, or a brutal prog era Weasel Walter project.
It's a good thing Gospel have an entertaining drummer: His corrugated beats are the highest item in the mix. We're actually allowed some prominently displayed keyboard work as well, which is abnormal for a non dancepunk album that's fit to be sold at Hot Topic. But how do you get the kids with scene hair to listen to mutant prog? Just make all the tracks hover around the five-minute mark. Cautious? Of course. But the nine-minute "A Golden Dawn" proves why this works-- it's by far the poorest song on The Moon. It fails to shimmer and ends up sounding like an outtake from a Trail of Dead practice.
Gospel use the tools of the trade to fix the problems attention deficit listeners (hardcore kids) had with prog. The spiraling arms of the guitar lines and the splotchy drums of "Yr Electric Surge is Sweet" bridge the gap between the rage of hardcore and the extensive rehearsal of prog. "And Redemption Fills the Emptiest of Hearts" evens manages to inject a perverted version of the most standard of hardcore gimmicks, the breakdown. Sure, they disguise it a little, but not enough to displease the ears of Norma Jean kids, and then they move straight into King Crimson-inspired keyboard and synthed guitar interplay. They even go so far as to make Tool palatable to the underground with the Middle Eastern guitar lines and echoing soundscaped instrumentation of "Opium". (I was digging Gospel until they made me reference Tool and lose what little cred I had as a music reviewer.)
Tricking the kids would be shameless if I didn't wallow in Gospel's message. Granted, they're displaying their influences a mite too visibly. Gospel strip down their influences to compensate for many of their favorite band's substituting polish for violent energy. Maybe Gospel are cool because they are smart enough to meld prog with today's updated hardcore. But knowing today's hardcore scene, maybe Gospel are just cool because Kurt Ballou of Converge recorded their album and Converge make some of the hippest hoodies on the market.


The 67-year-old soul singer's third album on Daptone feels like his most straightforward and best to date.

Changes

It’s easy to root for Charles Bradley, the 67-year-old soul singer who has spent the last few years enjoying a breakout career on Daptone Records. Bradley’s underdog narrative has remained as genuinely endearing as it has perpetually marketable, and Changes, his third album, feels like his straightforward best to date, the result of an improved dynamic between the singer and his band. If he ever sounded awkwardly patched in on previous recordings, Bradley now seems to command ownership of his songs like never before. It’s an accomplished skill in the world of retro-soul, and Bradley sounds vital instead of nostalgic because of it.
Changes’ lyrics are immediately and sometimes overly familiar, but Bradley’s unmistakable voice is the obvious draw throughout. For a guy who has often been affectionately pigeonholed—Bradley has earned a tagline as the “The Screaming Eagle of Soul”—the new album instead finds him at his most versatile and complete. The record opens with a soulful gospel rendition of “God Bless America” in which the singer delivers an organ-laced testimony; the same keys pop up in funkier form on follow-up “Good to Be Back at Home.” After spending much of his seventh decade as a first-time international headliner, Bradley sings about the mixture of relief and disappointment in his return trip. Like other songs on the album, the song is vaguely and upliftingly political: On “Changed For the World” Bradley tells us "Heaven is crying, the world is shaking." Half singing, half preaching, he warns “God is unhappy, the moon is breaking / Blood is spilling, God is coming.”
Musically, Changes fits squarely into the Daptone house sound, but the session players—primarily from Menahan Street Band but also Bradley’s touring group The Extraordinaries—are more restrained here to make room for Bradley's big presence and even bigger voice. But the album is nonetheless inflected with the referential post-funk and hip-hop drum sounds of  label guitarist Thomas Brenneck and company. Near the end of “Nobody But You” a horn line quotes the unmistakable saxophone from Seals and Crofts 1972 hit “Summer Breeze,” whereas the opening piano-laced drum break on “You Think I Don’t Know (But I Know)” conjures up Freddie Scott’s  “(You) Got What I Need,” now perhaps better known to all as the sample chop Biz Markie finagled into “Just a Friend.”
Much of the album is about love: searching for it, being wronged by it, basking in it. Of the spare forty-minute tracklist, “Things We Do For Love” might be the most satisfyingly retro offering, complete with a dose of doo-wop accompaniment and a nimble, romantic groove. The album’s greatest accomplishment is in its most unexpectedly personal moment though, in which Bradley wrestles an out-of-character Black Sabbath ballad about a breakup into an agonizing paean to his late mother. After spending a lifetime estranged, Bradley patched up his relationship with his mother in time to serve as her caretaker before she passed, and also early enough that she got to see his career finally take off. In her absence and in the midst of post-success family quarrels, Bradley sounds heartbreakingly alone when he wails “I’ve lost the best friend I’ve ever had.” “Changes,” and its accompanying video, show the singer at his most emotionally unhinged and dramatically vulnerable.
A few years ago, Bradley’s success seemed more romantic in its improbability. “We found an authentic soul man that liked our music,” Brenneck glowed of his band’s initial collaboration with the singer in 2012. Changes somehow feels more natural, in which Bradley comes off as an obvious star, like he's belonged here the whole time. Surrounded by talented revivalists half his age, the singer remains a precious commodity: the real thing. He’s not reenacting or revisiting, he’s on his first run through. And it's still inspiring to watch him live it out at last.


The Venezuelan artist's latest single-track piece contains some of her most delicate and astonishing work.

Since releasing her initial solo EPs in 2012 and working in the producers’ room for Kanye West’s 2013 album Yeezus, the Venezuelan-born artist Arca has made a name for herself using  dextrous and playful mutations of electronic music’s familiar forms. Vocals appear on nearly all of her full-length works, but until her self-titled 2017 album, they were shrouded in icy digital effects. Arca allowed her to stake new ground as a singer, an artist who used the (mostly) unmodified sound of her voice to great effect alongside carefully orchestrated synthesizer production. Arca’s latest, a 62-minute single titled “@@@@@,” calls back to her early music both in its name and its slippery, wandering structure. But it integrates what she learned from molding raw vocals to her unmistakable sonics, resulting in some of her most delicate and astonishing work.
Framed as a radio broadcast by a character named Diva Experimental, “@@@@@” corrupts the listening environments into which it was released. Though it moves much like a mixtape, flitting from sequence to recognizable sequence (Arca calls them “quantums” and has named and demarcated them with timestamps), the song appears on streaming services as a solid hour of sound. If an algorithm eats it up and sorts it into a playlist, it will profoundly disturb the usual automated flow. If a listener hopes to hear a specific moment in the outsized track, they’ll have to pan through its length by hand, dropping their cursor in a precise spot on the progress bar like aiming the needle of a record player at a specific groove. By its nature, “@@@@@” reintroduces some measure of physicality to the listening process, disrupting the inscribed habit of letting Spotify’s impartial code do all the work.
Throughout the piece, moments of turbulence—stuttering drum beats, chopped and looped vocals, detuned synth leads, all familiar gestures in Arca’s music—give way to serene oases. The conceit behind the music proposes a world surveilled by omnipotent AI, a dystopian future that feels a heartbeat away from our own technocratic present. Fear courses through the music, punctuated by palpable relief. An ominous background drone gets crowded out by a sample of near-maniacal laughter; the panopticon looms, and the Diva frolics away from its gaze.
Arca invites moments of play and serenity even within the piece’s most oppressive tones. Her voice, muted and processed but recognizable in its grain, coos from beneath the roar of an electric guitar or a cascade of irregular beats. During the quantum “Psychosexual” (around the 23-minute mark), a digitally deepened and abraded voice invites the listener to “shake that pussy, bitch...I don’t care what genital you were born with/You can shake that pussy.” Pussy is rendered as a construct, a state of mind rather than of biology.
As in her previous work, the most compelling moments on “@@@@@” are also its most mournful. “No me lo digas, no lo digas,” Arca repeats near the track’s halfway point—don’t tell me that, don’t say that. Her voice is pitched up to an icy soprano, but unmistakable in rhythm and phrasing. Beneath her words, a chorus of background voices hums and a sparse beat lurches forward. “No lo digas/No lo digas/A menos que lo sientas/Porque no quiero que haya resentimiento.” Don’t say it unless you feel it, because I don’t want resentment. Her voice warps in the tangles of the machine she’s using to manipulate it. The quantum builds to an emotional peak, never losing its charred undertones but finding in them an opportunity for romantic vulnerability, a place to beg a partner not to dissemble, to lay bare their needs.
In the stunning climactic quanta, “Form,” Arca’s voice slithers beneath a membrane of effects—garbled, bedazzled, and Auto-Tuned. Her words come through only in glimpses, language forming and then dissipating. No percussion accompanies her, only languid washes of synthesizer. Her voice, in all its processing, shines through with immense tenderness. Her music has never sounded so warm or so intimate; never before has she beckoned quite like this.
Under seemingly omniscient surveillance, the question arises of how to communicate with others while remaining unintelligible to the hostile infrastructure that hosts our words. How do we find each other across gulfs that want us separate, alienated, desperate? Music, especially future-tuned music like Arca’s, slips beneath language. Its structures can be algorithmically analyzed, its emotional overtones guessed at by machines, but what it does to people, how it moves them and binds them to each other, can be unpredictable, harder for a computer to grasp. How do you survive in an environment spilling over with the stress of being watched? You look for what surprises you, for confusion, for those moments and objects which feel as if they hold the power to repel the gaze of the watcher.


As radical reinventions go, Third-- the first Portishead studio album since 1997-- is surprisingly natural. Darker and bleaker lyrically than their previous work, Third is a sort of re-debut-- the band's sound after it has excised every possible remnant of trip-hop from it.

Third

Can an album really be a departure if it's the first thing a group's released in 11 years? It ideally would be for a genre-bound band turned brand name like Portishead: As much as there is to miss about the mid-late 1990s, the time for any trip-hop revival is far into the future, and picking up right where they left off in 1997 would make Portishead some kind of sad cipher coasting on the fumes of an exhausted trend-- something they've always been above. If the voice of Beth Gibbons wasn't so ingrained in the consciousness of a whole generation of indie kids, you could look at Third as a sort of re-debut; it posits that the sound of Portishead can actually exist even after the group excises every possible remnant of trip-hop from it.
As radical reinventions go, Third is surprisingly natural. You can credit Gibbons as the familiarizing factor: She possesses a voice that seems impossible to shackle to just one musical setting, even if it already sounds perfectly at home in brooding downtempo ambience. As the most recognizable component of the group, she has the most established stylistic tendencies-- subtle quivers, an ability to go from hushed to piercing without laboring over the transition, an aching timbre that expresses anxious vulnerability better than nearly any other singer-- and she slips back into them comfortably when she needs to.
But it's also a style that works in more contexts than we've previously heard, something she hinted at with Rustin Man on 2002's folk and jazz-influenced Out of Season, and Third is the culmination of this. Pitted against the jarring mechanical stop-starts of first single "Machine Gun" or the chase-scene-paced opener "Silence", Gibbons sounds like both a defiant accuser and someone clinging on for dear life. Quieter numbers, like the slow-build electronic ballad "The Rip" or the softer moments of the cabaret highwire act "Hunter", highlight the fragility in her voice. And since almost every song on Third addresses some sort of emotional or mental helplessness-- typically a deep and profound sense of loss and isolation-- it's almost as though this shift in sonic identity is there to mask the fact that this is an incredibly bleak record lyrically. Gibbons' wounded tone can take commonplace-on-paper sentiments ("I'd like to laugh at what you said but I just can't find a smile"; "I can't deny what I've become/ I'm just emotionally undone") and give them a kind of pathos that's almost uncomfortably voyeuristic to listen to.
As for how the music itself has changed, long story short: Third is a psychedelic rock album. It opens with a rhythm that's nearly twice as fast as almost everything else Portishead have done, the percussion on most of the songs is frequently muffled or buried under layers of noise and sometimes just stops short of being non-existent (though it's heavy and propulsive when it does make itself known), and their keyboards and strings have graduated from relaxed tension into dissonant rumbles and shrieks. There's a brief acoustic folk song ("Deep Water"), an abrasive and jittery electro-industrial number ("Machine Gun"), free jazz horns ("Magic Doors"), analog freakouts from the United States of America-fueled early days of electronic psych ("The Rip"), and a song that sounds a bit like Clinic's droning, rhythmically dense garage-kraut, except somehow spookier ("We Carry On"). Portishead as you previously knew them are represented, barely, by the last song on the album-- the sleepwalk-paced, David Axelrod-esque "Threads"-- and even then, its intermittently fuzzed-out tension-and-release dynamic would've made it one of the harshest-sounding songs on Dummy or Portishead.
You could say that this would be unrecognizable as a Portishead album without Gibbons' voice, and you'd be sort of right; guitarist and contributing songwriter Adrian Utley mentioned in a recent New York Times article that one of the rules they set for Third was that they couldn't fall back on any instruments-- or even any trademark sounds-- that they'd used on previous albums. But their style here isn't particularly out of character, comparatively experimental as it is; Utley's guitar still twangs sharply when it's not doing things like interjecting "Iron Man" growls in "Hunter" or splintering into Syd Barrett-isms at the coda of "Small", and the melodic identity that he and Geoff Barrow built on a foundation of minor keys and sinister grandeur still holds sway. In the terms of a group that was frequently lumped in with film composers as much as Bristol axis peers, Portishead's Euro-cool John Barry intrigue has been pushed into the disquieting territory of John Carpenter's compositions and Bernard Herrmann's Alfred Hitchcock scores.
Keep in mind just how out-of-nowhere this all seems: The notion of a new Portishead album had, for many fans, fallen out of the realm of possibility. If Third had come out in 1999 or 2000, maybe writers would be calling it Portishead's answer to Massive Attack's Mezzanine, another third album by trip-hop icons eschewing dinner-conversation music by embracing anxiety and moodiness. Released today, it instead feels like a staggering transformation and a return to form that was never lost, an ideal adaptation by a group that many people didn't know they needed to hear again.


Jack Antonoff’s stately sophomore effort as Bleachers has all the affectations of an over-the-top pop masterpiece, with some soaring anthems. But it’s a largely uneven album.

Gone Now

Jack Antonoff has achieved a rare type of success in pop music by ignoring everything going on around him. As the sound of radio has grown sleeker and sexier, Antonoff’s music remains bold and bombastic. He’s worked as a producer and songwriter on music beloved on a wide scale (Sara Bareilles’ “Brave,” Zayn and Taylor’s “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever”) and more cultishly appreciated (Tegan and Sara’s “How Come You Don’t Want Me,” Grimes’ “Entropy”)—but you know his work when you hear it. Antonoff’s first solo album as Bleachers, 2014’s Strange Desire, was a lovable exploration of the ideas at the core of his sound: all the piano breaks and gated-reverb drums, the gang vocals and the ceaseless, head-spinning barrage of hooks. But to the world at large, it was less of a breakthrough than a sturdy business card. By the end of that year, he’d be better known for accompanying one of the world’s biggest pop stars on her biggest album yet.
In an interview with Pitchfork, Antonoff discussed his guiding principle as a collaborator: “If I ever work with someone else, all that I think about is: Do you want to make the best album you’ve ever made in your life, or not?” It’s a lofty standard, but one he also sets for himself as a solo artist. The best song on Strange Desire was called “I Wanna Get Better”: While its title was a response to hitting rock bottom, it’s a sentiment that also applies to the heights of his success. In fact, if there’s any major similarity between Antonoff and Bruce Springsteen—an artist he frequently cites as an inspiration—it’s his unabashed ambition: a conviction so earnest and ingrained that it could be mistaken for humility.
Regardless of what people think of Gone Now, Antonoff's stately and uneven sophomore album, he’s already mythologizing it and shaping a world around its songs. Antonoff clearly believes that Gone Now is his masterpiece, and everything around the record suggests as much. He’s somehow touring the bedroom where it was conceived as a “moving, living art installation”: an act of hubris so indulgent even Jay Z waited 20 years before attempting it. From beginning to end, Gone Now has all the affectations of an over-the-top pop masterpiece. There are spoken-word samples, saxophone solos, and sound effects; guest appearances, multipart reprises, and allusions. In the opening lines of the self-reflexive first track “Dream of Mickey Mantle,” Antonoff is romanticizing the album’s creation: “All the hope I had when I was young/I hope I wasn’t wrong/I miss those days so I sing a ‘Don’t Take the Money’ song.” Here, he poses the driving question of Gone Now: Is Antonoff really as great as he thinks he is?
Occasionally, you’re inclined to believe him. Early singles “Don’t Take the Money” and “Everybody Lost Somebody” are worthy additions to his catalog, soaring anthems made all the better for their insistence on indulging every pleasure center at once. Other songs take a refreshingly nuanced musical approach, like the gentle pulse of “All My Heroes” or the stark synths in “Nothing Is U.” Too many songs, however, get lost in a middle ground, like “Hate That You Know Me,” a Carly Rae Jepsen collaboration that bursts and fizzles like cheap fireworks until reaching its triumphant but all-too-brief conclusion. The otherwise pleasant “Goodmorning” loses its appeal by spawning a series of recurring reprises throughout the album: its reappearances quickly become grating and only increase the massive debt Antonoff already owes to the chorus of “All the Young Dudes.”
With all its repeating themes, it’s easy to search for some kind of narrative within Gone Now. Antonoff’s lyrics, however, often feel hollow. “Let’s Get Married” is built around an honest instinct, responding to feelings of hopelessness by bringing your loved ones closer. But Antonoff’s oversimplification of the subject matter clashes with the momentous music, creating an effect like watching someone proposing on the Jumbotron at a half-empty stadium. The conversational lyrics in closing number “Foreign Girls” are almost charming in their banality (“I walk to the pawn shop/Now I’m at the pawn shop”). At the end of the record, Antonoff’s aimlessness sounds like an admission of defeat, like even he is unsure what all the preceding fanfare was for.
By aiming for the textbook definition of a big-picture pop album, Antonoff has ended up with the epitome of a vanity project: an album that revolves entirely around one person, made more enjoyable the less you expect from it. This is likely not the most memorable work Antonoff has to offer this year (or even this month for that matter, with Lorde’s highly anticipated Melodrama, which Antonoff co-wrote and co-produced, due in two weeks). In a recent New York Times profile, Antonoff discussed his post-fun. rebranding, from primary member of a massively successful pop group to lone wolf auteur: “I remember immediately—immediately—feeling like, ‘I don’t want to play ‘We Are Young’ when I’m 35,’” he said, “‘I don’t want to be defined by this.’” By now, he’s accrued a strong enough songbook to successfully render that single a mere footnote to an enviable and flourishing career. Somewhere even further down his resume, there’s a place for Gone Now.


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 Annie Lennox’s 1992 solo debut, a joyous and liberated pop album with a prophetic message about the disillusionment of fame.

Diva

From the very beginning of her rise to international stardom, Annie Lennox desperately wanted to transcend her own fame. Her breakout single as one half of Eurythmics, 1983’s “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” encapsulated her anxieties as a frontwoman in the increasingly panoptic public eye: “Everybody’s looking for something,” she warned. Her androgynous fashion in the song’s music video—the buzzed, radioactive orange hair, the tailored men’s suit—was a form of defensive armor against a tabloid culture fixated on, as she phrased it to Rolling Stone at the time, the “bum-and-tits thing.” Even then, barely a year into her global ascent, she doubted her ability to define her own image: “Of course, you’ll never find a way around it.”
But before Lennox dreamed of escaping fame, fame provided an escape. Eurythmics co-lead Dave Stewart’s privileged upbringing (he once lamented to Rolling Stone that working-class kids in his hometown of Sunderland, England brushed him off as a “richie”) and the band’s promotional cycles—which grew progressively more outlandish, leading up to a £50,000 launch party in Antibes for 1989’s We Too Are One—often obscured Lennox’s own childhood poverty. Born on Christmas Day to a shipyard workman and a housewife, she was raised in the tenements of Aberdeen, Scotland, where she and her parents shared a cramped two-room unit. Longing to experience the bustling cultural hub of London, she enrolled in the Royal College of Music as a flutist. To supplement the small grant she received from the conservatory, she worked as a waitress at a vegetarian restaurant, where eventually she was introduced to Stewart. The two dated and formed the short-lived mod band the Tourists. By 1981, they’d romantically separated and reinvented themselves as the experimental arthouse duo Eurythmics.
Like an international spy, Lennox used clothing and makeup as tools of professional disguise, continuously shapeshifting: 1985’s Be Yourself Tonight introduced the ethereal femininity of “There Must Be an Angel (Playing With My Heart)” and the vamping Motown singer in “Would I Lie to You?,” while 1987’s Savage added a deranged vixen to her repertoire. Unlike David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust or Elton John’s Rocket Man, Lennox’s stage personas were firmly grounded in postmodern interpretations of life on Earth, from the grandiose excess of the French royal court to the listless drudgery of the Friedanian housewife in “Beethoven (I Love to Listen To).” While many of Lennox’s characters served as commentary on societal perceptions of fame, wealth, and gender, they more immediately were an attempt to defer judgement on her personal life, which was nevertheless devoured by UK tabloids. Her rotating forms of self-presentation were a crucial attempt at self-preservation.
But even if her facades had successfully warded off the media’s leering eye—even if she hadn’t been dubbed “Britain’s most tortured rock star” after a brief, failed marriage to a Hare Krishna devotee and an appearance in the Al Pacino flop Revolution—Lennox might still have justifiably burnt out by the end of the decade. Eurythmics were incredibly prolific, releasing almost an album a year starting with their 1981 debut In the Garden. Almost every album begot an international tour, with little downtime to recuperate. “I had this vision constantly towards the end of the Eurythmics period,” Lennox later told Q, “my life was a bus, but I was running behind it. I just could not catch up with that fucking bus.”
By the time she and Stewart released We Too Are One, their seventh studio album, both seemed irritable and detached from their art. Lennox often barely spoke a word in interviews. Stewart, the posh eccentric, was increasingly frustrated by the way Lennox’s magnetic presence had come to overshadow his contributions. Whether intentional or not, the album’s cover—Lennox’s blue eyes sharply front-and-center, with Stewart blurred into the background—summarized the tense disparities in their dynamic. The duo quietly split a year later without officially acknowledging a hiatus.
Though Lennox continued to accept awards for her work with Eurythmics through the following year, she badly wanted to step back from the band’s constant pressures. In addition to the grueling release schedule and public scrutiny, she had experienced a deep personal loss with the stillbirth of her first child immediately prior to recording We Too Are One. Upon receiving the Brit Award for Female Solo Artist in 1990 (her fourth since 1984), she told reporters that she was retiring for two years “to refuel my batteries, relax with my family, and get involved with the causes I feel very strongly about.”
As Eurythmics faded, it seemed as if Lennox could finally find peace in privacy: In 1988 she married the documentarian Uri Fruchtmann, and in 1990, gave birth to a daughter, Lola. But after a decade of constant reinvention, Lennox, understandably, felt a bit listless at home. “When I was pregnant, I had a lot of time to fill,” she told Maclean’s. “I just discovered that there was this itch, because I wasn’t writing.” Diva, her solo debut, was born from her deliberate attempt to withdraw from the spotlight.
She began writing the album during her pregnancy with the help of synth whiz Marius de Vries, recording at her home in Maida Vale before and after Lola’s birth, alongside producer Steve Lipson (who had recently worked with Simple Minds). After years in Eurythmics, Lennox initially felt paralyzed writing without Stewart’s guidance, and she struggled to create art out of her contentment. “Sometimes I feel I’m just not miserable enough,” she later confessed. Lipson, according to Lennox, dealt with her writer’s block by telling her she was on her own: “You’re the writer, that’s your gig,” she recalled him saying. “I’m not going to help you, go downstairs and do it.” After 15 months of wrestling with her newfound artistic independence, she finally completed the record.
Diva broke dramatically with Eurythmics in style and substance: Where her work with Stewart trafficked in restless anxieties, her solo work was a step towards the wistful, patient resolve of womanhood. That maturity is reflected in her directness, as if motherhood had diminished the returns of wry metaphors. “Precious” celebrates Lola’s birth with effusive gratitude: “I was lost until you came,” she sings, her words thick with sentimentality. The protagonist of “Legend in My Living Room” leaves home at 17, just as Lennox had, an atypically autobiographical and unsubtle portrait of her early aspirations. “Have mercy,” she pleads—it’s difficult to tell if she’s singing to the audience, or to her younger self. Though she only occasionally addresses the “diva” persona in her writing, the pressure of celebrity underscores her anxieties throughout: the existential ennui of “Little Bird,” the regrets of “Cold,” the longing to be accepted in her own skin on “Stay by Me.”
For an album so difficult to write, the music goes down deceptively smooth. Songs about heartbreak, loneliness, the loss of a child and of youthful innocence are adorned with punchy synths, jazzy bass, and tropicália melodies. Lennox’s first and favorite instrument is the piano; it’s her go-to for live performance and what she used to compose the record. In Stewart’s absence, her compositions find room to breathe. After a decade in the shadow of buzzing electronics, her piano feels utterly liberating on Diva—the cascading notes of “Why” accent the elongated vowels of her croons, while the run that opens “Stay by Me” conjures the image of a virtuoso at the keys before launching into an appropriately ’90s trip-hop beat. But the song where Lennox sounds most musically free is also the album’s heaviest thematically. “Walking on Broken Glass” pairs a Carribean-inspired piano line with a mirrored melody on pizzicato strings, and like so many of Eurythmics’ best records, it takes an incredibly depressing concept—romantic abandonment—and maps it onto an irresistibly danceable tune.
Despite the velveteen, varied instrumentation on Diva, Lennox’s voice is the album’s most essential and expansive element. While Eurythmics often incorporated guest singers, Diva’s vocals are entirely hers, from the smooth curves of her balladry to the perhaps regrettable rap-singing on “Money Can’t Buy It.” Her voice was always a central component in her previous band, but here her vocals become a veritable one-woman orchestra. From the harmonic overdubs of “Walking on Broken Glass” to the soulful belt of “Precious,” she sounds entirely fluid. “Little Bird” offers the broadest sampling of her vocal bag of tricks: She chants, she reaches into her falsetto, she sings backing harmonies that range from Greek chorus to men’s choir. When the instrumentation is heavy-handed—canned synth strings, Law & Order basslines, over-the-top percussive flourishes—her voice marries the melodies.
Lennox approached the promotion of Diva as an ironic exploration of its title. “I’m singing about how people respond to the act of performing and also how I respond to it,” she told Billboard. The accompanying video album adds texture to her concept of a “diva who has seen better days.” Directed by Sophie Muller, who also worked on the video album for Eurythmics’ Savage, the 10 clips examine identity and beauty with an unwavering fixation on Lennox’s striking visage. “Why” opens on a barefaced Lennox with dampened hair, an almost jarring image after a career of wigs, face paint, and costumes. Then, with eyeshadow and feather boas, she gradually transforms herself into the titular diva, becoming barely recognizable beneath a massive feathered headdress. It’s a peek into the machinations of celebrity, the pains Lennox took to keep a mask between public perception and her own self-image. In the video for “Little Bird,” she appears as a ringmaster, extremely pregnant with her second daughter Tali and surrounded by look-alikes dressed as her personas from past music videos, from the Big Brother boss of 1983’s “Sweet Dreams” to the contemporary diva from “Why.” The women compete for the spotlight, crowding Lennox out of her own performance. It’s a bold metacommentary on both the visual iconography of her career and the media’s propensity for conflating the character onstage with the person beneath the costume.
Though many of Diva’s singles still resonate, it’s Lennox’s cynical, camp approach to celebrity culture that remains most futuristic and profound. From Lady Gaga’s concept of a “Fame Monster” to personas like Marina Diamandis’ Marina and the Diamonds, exploring the darker side of fame through exaggerated precautionary tales has become a well-trodden path for avant-pop stars. Even in the world of bubblegum smash hits, there are echoes of her influence: The miserable rich girl drowning in diamonds on “Money Can’t Buy It” shares a strange, sad kinship with the lonely star of Britney Spears’ “Lucky.” And thanks to a chance meeting via a shared manager, it was Lennox who encouraged the members of the Spice Girls to evolve their individual styles into the group’s now-iconic five distinct characters—Emma Bunton would be not just a cute blonde, but Baby Spice. In an ironic twist, Lennox helped to conceptualize one of the most hyper-commodified pop vehicles in recent history.
In a decade marked by the meteoric rise of prefab boy bands, the explosion and subsequent implosion of Britpop, and the tragic, paparazzi-fueled death of Princess Diana, Diva is a prophetic warning about the acceleration of fame. Even at the time of its release, Lennox recognized the dangers. “I don’t see an end to it,” she said of Madonna’s ascent at the time. “It’s a kind of power craving that I think is rather insatiable.… Are we supposed to admire power for its own sake?” In her eerily predictive manner, Lennox identified Ivana Trump as a bellwether for the growing influence wielded by, as she put it in 1992, “people famous for being famous.” Public recognition was no longer correlated to talent, she argued, but was instead fueled by the craving for power and control. The same MTV that drove Eurythmics’ success would soon pivot to fame-hungry reality programming: The Real World premiered the month after Diva’s release.
In a rare happy ending for the tabloids’ “tragic Annie,” Lennox was able to exit the endless carousel of celebrity. Though Diva immediately topped the UK album chart, she did not tour the record, instead taking time to care for her daughters and pursue anti-AIDS activism. Her records since then have been infrequent, never attempting to match the breakneck pace of Eurythmics. Many are cover albums, perhaps a subtle way to step into new personalities without excavating her own past selves. Lennox was keenly aware of what she called the “Faustian deal” between exposure and artistic fulfillment. “I can deal with it now,” she reasoned just after Diva’s release, “because I think I can jump off anytime.” Diva was the fitting beginning to a tactful denouement, a graceful and grandiose leap into a more private life.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Dave Grohl's directorial debut, Sound City, pays tribute to the classic L.A. recording spot of the same name. For the soundtrack, he enlists musicians like Paul McCartney, Trent Reznor, Stevie Nicks, and Rick Springfield to cut an album at his studio.

Dave Grohl: Sound City: Real to Reel OST

Sound City: Real to Reel OST

About halfway during the time that elapsed between Kurt Cobain’s suicide and the release of the first Foo Fighters album, Dave Grohl made his first public, post-Nirvana showing in the most unlikely of places: On "Saturday Night Live", manning Tom Petty’s drum kit for a couple of weed-scented folk-rock jams from Petty's Wild Flowers release. But if the surprise cameo provided little indication of Grohl’s imminent future as the guitar-slinging, camera-ready leader of one of the last arena-rock bands left standing, it was the harbinger of another role he would grow to relish over the next two decades: that of a dutiful gatekeeper of classic-rock tradition. Grohl’s essentially the middle-man who helps the geezers look cool to the kids: He’s got an open-door policy for Rock and Roll Hall of Famers to join him onstage anytime; he’s got enough charm and charisma to coax the most reclusive living member of Led Zeppelin out of semi-retirement; and he’s always on hand to help Grammy Awards producers mitigate the encroaching influence of EDM. This sort of cross-generational appeal has made Grohl not just the nicest man in rock, but its Employee of the Month for nearly 20 years running.
And no doubt, he’s probably the only person who could have made Sound City happen. Grohl’s directorial debut pays tribute to the legendary-- and recently shuttered-- L.A. studio that produced Fleetwood Mac’s 1975 self-titled effort, Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes and what seems like every other album in perpetual classic-rock radio rotation, not to mention alt-rock touchstones like Rage Against the Machine’s debut, Weezer’s Pinkerton, and, of course, Nirvana’s Nevermind. But if the impetus for the film is a certain they-don’t-make-’em-like-they-used-to nostalgia, its accompanying soundtrack release-- also documented onscreen-- is a noble attempt to put the lie to that sentiment. Having purchased the facility’s hallowed Neve 8028 board and installed it at his own 606 Studios, the Foo Fighters frontman used his documentary as an occasion to gather various famed Sound City alumni together to create new music using an old-school tool.
However, “being friends with Dave Grohl” is not the most coherent unifying principle for a stand-alone album, given that his friends here include everyone from Stevie Nicks to Corey Taylor of Slipknot. And a mutual admiration for a bygone recording studio doesn’t provide much of a conceptual conceit to build a record around. Grohl, naturally, sounds the most invested in the cause: His epic showdown with Trent Reznor and Josh Homme on “Mantra” climaxes with a rallying cry (“And all of this will never be the same”) that essentially reads as an indictment against the technological and economic shifts that drove the studio out of business. But other artists, like the Black Rebel Motorcycle dudes on “Heaven and All”, simply show up as if they were cutting their own album. With its hit-and-miss deviations in tone and quality, Real to Reel feels less like a tribute to a studio that created some of the greatest albums of all time, and more like an approximation of a typical Active Rock Radio playlist.
The album works best when embracing the sheer absurdity of its ad-hoc supergroup combinations. Back in 1981, Rick Springfield and Lee Ving (of L.A. hardcore heretics Fear) represented the polar opposites of the rock-frontman ideal. Here, we find them on back-to-back tracks leading various Foo Fighters with equal amounts of bravado and self-deprecation. Springfield’s “The Man That Never Was” makes for a cheeky comment on his own faded celebrity, while Ving’s berserker turn on “Your Wife Is Calling” feeds on the neuroses of the domesticated aging punk. But the 62-year-old Ving is neither the oldest nor most impetuous guest on hand here: After making its surprise debut at last December’s Hurricane Sandy tribute concert, Paul McCartney’s “Cut Me Some Slack”-- which sees the former Beatle backed by the surviving members of Nirvana-- still excites with its “Helter Skelter”-scaled bombast, hoarse-throat howls, and fierce double-timed outro. It’s the best representation of Grohl’s intent for his Sound City mission, to recapture some of the raw spontaneity that’s been lost in an era where so many recordings are clicked and cut with clinical precision.
It’s too bad that many of the other collaborations here feel as generic and laborious as a ProTools tutorial. Grohl, Masters of Reality’s Chris Goss, and half of Rage Against the Machine team up for “Time Slowing Down”, which comes off like a rejected Stone Temple Pilots audition for The Crow soundtrack; “From Can to Can’t”, meanwhile, squanders the power-pop chops of Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen and desert-burrowing bottom end of Kyuss bassist Scott Reeder on a plodding post-grunge power ballad belted with clenched-neck earnestness by Corey Taylor.  But it’s the date with Stevie Nicks that feels like Real to Reel’s biggest missed opportunity: “You Can’t Fix This” is a forced attempt to update the witchy-woman archetype of “Rhiannon”, but its heavy-handed lyrics about dancing with devils forsake mysticism for melodrama. And yet, even Real to Reel’s failures are a testament to the greatness of Sound City Studios-- in that they prove it takes more than the right equipment, the right people, and good intentions to recreate the magic of what once was.


The second album of improvisational jazz from Cloud Nothings’ Dylan Baldi and Jayson Gerycz tones down the bluster, stretching out in slow-moving pieces that rely heavily on space.

Baldi/Gerycz Duo: After Commodore Perry Service Plaza

After Commodore Perry Service Plaza

No one files Cloud Nothings under jazz. Their moments of spontaneity are rare, and even their occasional jams are contained within tightly structured, reliably hooky rock songs. Though it’s not immediately apparent from their best-known work, both Cloud Nothings guitarist and singer-songwriter Dylan Baldi and drummer Jayson Gerycz have experience with the avant garde. Gerycz has been consistently active in noise circles with several abstract side projects; Baldi came to punk as an avid free jazz listener, searching for a parallel to the extremes he first heard in the holy cacophony of Pharoah Sanders. As Baldi/Gerycz Duo, the longtime collaborators tap directly into their more esoteric roots, abandoning structure with improvised duets consisting of just saxophone and percussion.
After Commodore Perry Service Plaza is the second album of Baldi/Gerycz Duo’s live room improvisations, released just six months after their first, Blessed Repair. The debut took cues from high-energy ’60s and ’70s free jazz, at times sounding like a punk approximation of Rashied Ali and Frank Lowe’s uncontainable 1973 classic Duo Exchange. After Commodore Perry Service Plaza tones down the bluster considerably, stretching out in slow-moving pieces that rely heavily on space.
The 18-minute suite “Hermit Thrush/Vat of Oil” cycles through lulls, allowing long, careful tones from Baldi’s alto sax and almost imperceptible cymbal splashes to break into short-lived swells of energy that recede before gaining momentum. “Frog Congress at Dawn” pares back to muted toms, brushed bells, and auxiliary percussion instruments that sound more rustled than played, chattering back and forth with intermittent sax figures or breathy rasps. Hovering in a soft emptiness, the duo respond to each other’s restrained gestures with contemplative murmurs. When they reach a point where the song could predictably build or resolve, they instead opt to keep pushing forward. The album’s first half hour is a sprawl of soft-spoken tangents that unfold like a glassy-eyed conversation hours into an overnight drive.
The third and final track, “The Holy Retrievers (In Transit),” shatters the calm with high-speed drum rolls that tumble in tandem with clusters of overblown notes. The playing is volatile, but as focused as the more subdued stretches. Even at high velocity, the pair maintain enough control to keep the frenzied blur from devolving into a mindless freakout.
Baldi and Gerycz’s jazz improv may look unrecognizable beside their comparatively accessible indie rock, but both extend from the same DIY impulse. Neither player has any traditional jazz training beyond high school band, and their raw, self-taught style depends more on intuition and communication than technical mastery. The most amorphous corridors of After Commodore Perry Service Plaza move erratically, lingering on certain passages until they fray and crumble. It’s a groggy, confused take on the spiritual upheaval of free jazz, imbued with the sullen atmosphere of a sparsely attended noise gig. If their improvisatory dialogue sometimes feels seasick, Baldi and Gerycz keep it afloat through attentive listening. Their years of playing together have created an attunement that bonds their minimal freeform, which reaches its sharpest clarity in expanses so slight they seem to be on the verge of dissolution.

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On his debut EP as a solo artist, the jazz musician and composer weaves various wind instruments through eight tracks that thrum with kinetic energy.

Afrikan Culture EP

A few years ago, while doing research for a story, I found some archives detailing South Carolina’s “Negro Code,” a 17th-century relic that forbade enslaved Africans from playing or owning horns, drums, loud instruments and any others that could give “sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes.” Whether it’s the sounds of mbira sharply knocking against the balancing rocks in Zimbabwe, a kora ringing through the harmattan breeze in Mali, or drums signaling the start of a rebellion in Palmares, African instruments have a life that reverberates across frontiers. Shabaka Hutchings—bandleader of several acclaimed groups including Sons of Kemet—believes in the galvanizing capacity of African instruments that served to unnerve white inhabitants in the Carolinas, and more so, he is drawn to their ability to soften and comfort. On Afrikan Culture, his debut EP as a solo artist, Hutchings weaves eight tracks that thrum with kinetic energy, submerging listeners into an experience that draws them inward as he simultaneously steps into the role of a solitary performer.
From the opening notes of “Black meditation,” Hutchings maps out the compulsions of the EP—an impatient need to tap into every undiscovered melody. While playing the shakuhachi (a Japanese bamboo flute) he lulls listeners with low and heavy notes. It’s in the surrounding sounds—lightly tingling bells and low-key horns—that Hutchings compels his audience to experience the textures and scents of the places that their minds fall into when they are at peace. On “Call it a European Paradox,” the kora with its hollowed, calabash interior makes every string land like it’s coming from the bottom of a well where the acoustics can induce envy, as easily as they could be inaudible. It takes a particular kind of skill to make the sounds hit as lightly as they do, without losing that unmistakable tension that gives the instrument its solid heart.
Hutchings shared a little about the creative process for the EP, centering the explorations that led him to create an album that produces “a forest of sound where melodies and rhythms float in space and emerge in glimpses.” This fleeting presence is made clear on “Memories don’t live like people do,” a skipping stone’s attempt to crystallize precious moments into a long-lasting escape. Slightly over one minute long, the shakuhachi builds and recedes, falling in and out of step as quickly as memories fade, before it suddenly drops into silence. You are left wondering what the melodies were before they fall off, and you’ll replay over and over, trying to find the note that will become the memory. “The dimensions of subtle awareness” finds Hutchings sitting with mbira—the instrument known among Zimbabwe’s Shona people to summon the ancestors—and deliver messages, warnings, and insight from lost ones. Zimbabwean composers such as Stella Chiweshe, the band Mbira dzeNharira, and the late singer-songwriter Chiwoniso Maraira have leaned on the instrument for its clarity and layers, concealed between chiming metal twines. Hutchings hums along with it, a vocal arrangement you could miss tucked between the ever-present shakuhachi.
It’s not an album that struggles, but it does lag, a strange occurrence for a project that mostly rests on a track’s ability to rearrange the mundane, and intertwine with a listener’s own desire to self-soothe. And maybe that’s where the uncertainty comes because when you think you are about to let out a scream, the melody switches and pulls your body back into stasis. Often it’s in the ways our bodies expel distress that our minds can quieten, and Hutchings doesn’t offer enough room to physically contort oneself back into shape. “Explore inner space” could have been that genesis, but for over six minutes, the flutes, although captivating, are an anchor keeping us in place and ultimately stuck.
To call “Rebirth” the closer would be a misnomer because Hutchings is aware that he is beginning a different course with this EP, and aligning his musicality with something far less tangible than an orchestra—he wants to be a part of your space, transmitting into your private silence. Much like noted peer and fellow multi-instrumentalist Esperanza Spalding did on last year’s release, Songwrights Apothecary Lab, this is an EP of aural inscriptions meant to be as fluid as memory, with the certainty of a lived past. There are wicked things afoot in African instruments—wickedly vivid, and mutable. With Afrikan Culture Hutchings is coaxing introspection while urging us to be less cautious and follow the memories. Even if they last just a second.


After a pop-oriented push on 2012’s One Second of Love, Nite Jewel's Ramona Gonzalez reclaims the murky, DIY vision of her Altered Zones-era releases.

Liquid Cool

As music fans,  we're accustomed to reading about epic clashes between artists and major-label record execs. But even musicians on smaller labels can run into grievances. For Nite Jewel’s Ramona Gonzalez, her disillusioning run came not from Sony or Warner Music or any of their many wholly owned subsidiaries, but from the indie hub Secretly Canadian—hardly the kind of greedy corporate fat cats you picture artists duct-tapping their mouths in protest over. As Gonzalez tells it, though, Secretly Canadian pushed her in a pop direction she was never quite comfortable with for Nite Jewel’s 2012 One Second of Love, forcing collaborators on her and pressuring her to cede the very control she built her career around.
“They were making the process feel toxic because they were putting too much pressure on me to create something that, I didn’t really even know what they wanted me to do, because their version of pop is so unusually different than mine,” Gonzalez explained in an interview. “It’s like, how do you come to terms with the fact that you can do something better yourself, and you’re also not giving money or rights to a basically unknown entity of like, Midwestern bros?”
One Second of Love was good enough for what it was, yet it felt like a half-measure—not quite a complete enough embrace of contemporary pop to land her real radio play, but enough of a departure that her songs lost the rough edges and fragile intimacy that gave her early work its intrigue. (It didn’t flatter the album any that it arrived right after Grimes had made a similar transition from hermetic electro to sugary pop on her own terms, without compromising any of her individualistic spirit.) And so on Liquid Cool, Gonzalez effectively declares a mulligan. Recorded at her own pace, on her own property and for her own imprint, the album undoes its predecessor’s makeover and reclaims the murky, DIY vision of Nite Jewel’s Altered Zones-era releases.
If all that makes Liquid Cool sound reactionary, it can be, especially in its guarded opening stretch, which seems designed to weed out anybody hoping for another fix of One Second’s breezy, R&B melodies. The album’s vaporous opening tracks are almost pointedly light on hooks, but there are rewards for listeners who stick it out. A bittersweet portrait of digital infatuation, “Kiss the Screen” plays like a demo of a would-be hit, and even with its modest production it’s catchier than anything on One Second. Gonzalez delivers it with the enthusiasm of a John Hughes character singing Madonna into a hairbrush.
Nothing else on the record is nearly so personable, but the frolicsome “Over the Weekend” and swooning, house-informed “Boo Hoo” are similarly light on their feet. For an album that begins in such a defensive posture, it ultimately goes down easy. The sequencing gives it a nice little arc, too: it opens hesitantly, but gradually warms up and comes out of its shell before returning to seclusion on the wistful closer “All My Life.”
Liquid Cool’s backstory makes it hard not to root for the album. How inspiring would it be if, newly emancipated from her overbearing label, Gonzalez went on to record her Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, a triumph that proves how musicians are better when left to chase their own muses? Gonzalez never sets her sights that high, though. Instead, Liquid Cool is just another likable if unexceptional lo-fi electro-pop record. But it’s hers, and that counts for something.


One month after releasing 7G, the PC Music founder refines his synthesis of futurist pop and experimental electronic music, flirting with cerebral schmaltz and information overload.

Apple

PC Music founder A. G. Cook settled on Apple as an album title, he says, because the word evokes so many things: the eponymous tech company (which, historically, has been regarded as the opposite of the Windows-based personal computer, or “PC”); the Beatles’ record label, where the group could stretch their legs and play with genre; the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Eve’s indulgence from the tree of knowledge is an apt metaphor for Cook’s output. Like most things with Cook’s name on it, Apple—his second album this year, following last month’s 7G, a seven-disc collection of sketches and experiments—is a staggering and potent amalgamation of numerous genre influences, but it also has moments of information overload, where its boundarylessness becomes too much.
The crunchy slow jam “Lifeline” makes a strong case for Cook’s alchemical formula. He imbues pop-punk earnestness with the sweeping scope of an ’80s power ballad, an elemental pairing that could easily be saccharine or cloying, and then offsets them with static and mutating vocals, idiosyncratic touches that keep Cook straddling the fence between full-on pop and genre-agnostic experimentalism. “Beautiful Superstar” similarly displays a kind of softness that, on an intuitive level, is almost nauseating. Yet it is so devoid of irony, sincere in its performance, and tight in its production that it becomes irresistible.
Cook’s cerebral schmaltz comes into sharp relief on the album’s brassier songs. “Xxoplex” has harsh Eurodance elements and PC Music’s signature chipmunk whoops, while the maudlin “Animals” sounds like it could have come from Kanye’s Yeezus moodboard. The polarity apparent at each turn on Apple shows how deftly Cook sees the underlying kinships between disparate sounds and makes them work harmoniously together. “Haunted” is probably the best example: Restrained acoustic guitar morphs into synthy Siren calls that sound almost like emergency sirens by the end. But if these formal tricks are meant to be thought-provoking, some of those thoughts boil down to, Wait, why is this happening?
This could also just be PC Music’s curse. Long pegged as the future of pop, they’ve been around for almost a decade, yet their work still urges deconstruction, which raises the question: Are we there yet?
But Cook and PC Music have long banked on pop’s ineffability. The style has no dependable definition, Cook recently told the New York Times, beyond “packaging it to be approachable or consumable.” Today, the form is more amorphous than ever: Late rappers like Lil Peep and Juice WRLD were more avid students of pop-punk than your average 2005 high-school garage band, and artists like Deb Never and Billie Eilish embrace a singer-songwriter ethos while traversing in contemporary rap themes and melodies. Genrelessness abounds, but Cook’s music has nothing to do with restoring the monoculture. His work is confounding and sometimes irritating, but totally singular to his mind. This can’t be the future of pop; no one else could do what he does, even if they tried.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Rivers Cuomo toys with Renaissance Faire shtick on the first of four planned EPs inspired by Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.

SZNZ: Spring

SZNZ: Spring appeared on the vernal equinox, a Sunday; it is the first of four EPs inspired by Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons that Weezer plan to release throughout the year. It’s a fitting gambit for Rivers Cuomo, and not only because The Four Seasons might be considered The Blue Album of Baroque music. The alt-rock icon who once invoked Stravinsky to justify returning to Harvard to learn computer science has always seen himself as a composer who happens to be a KISS fan. Cuomo has yet to go full Gesamtkunstwerk, but on SZNZ, he teases the collision of his opposing interests: After making his tribute to Pet Sounds with last year’s OK Human, why not make his own Der Ring des Nibelungen? Weezer have also found new life on TikTok; why not convert the zoomers to LARPing? Spring is the happy compromise, one that should be almost critic-proof: This is a beloved band with a multi-generational fanbase that’s down for anything Cuomo is selling, even out of morbid curiosity. Maybe Cuomo with elf ears and a creepy Easter bunny playing mandolin behind him are exactly what Weezer fans want now. So SZNZ: Spring may be the Weezer album we deserve, but not only is it not very good; it’s also not good in a way that’s new for Weezer.
On “Opening Night,” Cuomo interpolates the famous allegro melody of Vivaldi’s Concerto No. 1 in E major, Op. 8, RV 269, but that’s about the extent of the EP’s classical heft: Cuomo singing the first 10 seconds of “La primavera” and a clever Brian Bell guitar solo on “Opening Night” are the only Vivaldi we get on the entire EP. From there, it’s Weezer as usual, now playing more relaxed tempos and no songs about California. But whereas all the fun and loud riffs from last year’s Van Weezer were able to hide the usual Weezer lyrical speedbumps, there’s a new feeling of defrosting on Spring that leaves the band exposed; this might be the Weezer release with the least guitar distortion. Producers Jake Sinclair and Suzy Shinn are back from OK Human, now joined by Phoebe Bridgers collaborator (and John Williams’ grandson) Ethan Gruska, and it’s unclear if this group of professionals was tasked to make this defrosting to honor Vivaldi, or just to make the Shakespeare in this 51-year-old’s mind relatable to 14-year-olds.
What we get from all these professionals is a song like “Angels on Vacation,” where the guitars sound like they were recorded in the bathtub of a Cialis commercial. Or “Garden of Eden,” which is about as bucolic as Shrek the Third. Or “The Sound of Drums,” where the band recreates an imaginary Renaissance festival, or “All This Love,” where Cuomo seems to have stolen the coconuts from Monty Python and the Holy Grail for a chorus that sounds more like a parody of music than anything the Pythons ever did. If this EP really does channel springtime, it’s the whiplash of expecting warmer weather only to be hit again with yet more winter. For anyone still invested in alternative rock, listening to Spring might also evoke fellow Hella Mega tourmates Green Day and their own cycle, 2012’s ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, ¡Tré! trilogy, a collection of not terribly written songs magically transformed into terrible music. This is where SZNZ enters new territory. Unlike the expensive-sounding and often pretty OK Human—and a rarity for any proper Weezer release—SZNZ sounds cheap. These are the same Weezer songs we’ve been hearing for decades, and Pacific Daydream is still probably their worst release, yet Spring is proof that there is a difference between songs and recordings, and this is easily their worst collection of recordings ever. In Cuomo’s mind, Vivaldi sounds like GarageBand. It sucks.
Yet poorly recorded Weezer is still major-label alt-rock juggernaut Weezer. Cuomo can sneeze out hooks like no other, and the catchy melodies throughout “A Little Bit of Love” make it the right choice for a single. It’s the one song that could live on another late-career Weezer LP and the only other moment that justifies the EP’s Renaissance theme (in this case, thanks to a steady mandolin), not to mention the only place you can actually feel Scott Shriner’s bass. That’s how dispiriting this EP is; just hearing the bass is a highlight. Still, every Weezer release has at least one “OK, fine” moment, and this is it. The EP also ends on a hopeful note. The conflicting tempos and dynamics of “Wild at Heart” recall the best of The Red Album; it feels like five songs are fighting for attention, with some classic Weezer metal riffs fighting off Pat Wilson’s energized drums to the very end. It’s a thrilling moment of weirdness that has nothing to do with the theme of the EP, and it once again reminds us that Cuomo can still be compelling when he wants to. Hopefully, this weirdness will reappear this summer, and these songs will make more sense when taken with all of SZNZ.
In a recent interview with NPR, Cuomo said that OK Human and SZNZ marked his shift from writing songs on guitar to piano. None of these songs feel any less guitar-driven than past Weezer songs, but what’s notable is what Cuomo says later: that 90% of SZNZ was written during lockdown, with the remaining work now recording and producing the remaining EPs on tight deadlines. That’s how Spring feels: a lot of planning, a shrug to finish. Like OK Human, this is a product of the pandemic. Unlike OK Human, it actually sounds like it.


The Irish-Filipino singer’s elegant new mixtape blends soulful grooves with sci-fi dreaminess.

1822.demos

The stylistic son of Sly Stone, Bootsy Collins, and Maxwell, rising funkster Uly (né Rafino Murphy) invokes the progressive soul music of ‘70s fusion mavericks and their ‘90s neo-soul cubs. His vintage vision includes soft guitar licks, soulful trumpet play, basslines turned right up, snare drums that hit dry and hard, and a falsetto that would make D’Angelo’s heart flutter. These velvety tunes, with all their nostalgic production goodness, feel like placing a grainy, desaturated Instagram filter onto your field of vision.
The Irish-Filipino singer and multi-instrumentalist, who is based in Dublin, has recently made an impression thanks to placements in the popular TV adaptations of two Sally Rooney novels, Normal People and Conversations With Friends. The extra attention follows his work in the alt-jazz trio INNRSPACE, close collaborations with the rapper Nealo, and a series of short-form solo releases, including the 2020 EP if you were a day, you’d be sunday (songs to go walking to), plus a slew of singles and loosies. The title of his latest release, 1822.demos, suggests something half-baked, like a bunch of unloved WAV files sitting on his desktop. But at 12 tracks, this is both Uly’s longest and most fully-formed project yet—a more complete glimpse at his R&B alchemy.
The project begins with an immersion into Uly’s kaleidoscopic universe, putting his eclectic sensibility on full display. “king smooch returns (pt. I-III)” chronicles a smooth loverman’s return to an old part of town a decade after his disappearance. The song is split into three consecutive arrangements, each distinct: First, there is a blast of salacious funk, then a head-bobbing beat, and finally, a dusky slice of lounge jazz distinguished by Uly’s supple horn, which boasts the sleek aura of French nouvelle vague cinema. Mostly, 1822.demos is tender and romantic. “cold mountain air” is an intoxicating, dimly lit ballad. Uly’s voice is warm and conversational, as though he’s making pillow talk under the glow of lava lamps; a massive guitar solo towards the end of the track sends it skyward, recalling Prince’s “Shhhh” in particular. Uly isn’t a straight-up retro revivalist, though: “tryin’” contorts vocals and piano loop into a hip-hop instrumental that would appeal to the odd proclivities of New York rapper MIKE.
The music has a psychotropic streak that complements Uly’s existential queries. “Lately I’ve been thinking about the stars/And how I’ll never get to reach them,” he repeats on “white dog.” The single “emperor’s new groove (for klara)” re-envisions Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun, with Uly adopting the perspective of a sentient android that tries to grasp human conceptions of compassion and love. “Just one minute, I can feel something surging through my body,” he sings, the wondrous sense of new, ineffable emotions swirling in his spider web-delicate voice. Then there’s “slow waltz on the moon,” a duet with singer Chi Chi. It depicts two astronaut lovers trapped in the emptiness of space, knowing that being physically intimate would mean their death. With its soothing melodies, spacious piano chords, and a distant electric guitar, you can almost picture the couple looking into each other’s eyes through the visors of their pressurized helmets, slowly spinning hand-in-hand in grand circles on the lunar hemisphere.
The connection between 1822.demos’ impressionistic psych instrumentation and sci-fi lyrics is a striking departure from the archetypal subject matter you find in soul music. Here, Uly is synthesizing his broad stylistic influences into a cohesive vision. 1822.demos is an elegant, cosmic collection that buttons up the first phase of his solo career. Anyone searching for old spirits—especially the kind dedicated to bygone eras of funk and soul—can get behind him. Uly may be a child of the greatest traditions, but he’s also etching out his own corner.