Liz Phair’s indelible, essential debut album has been reissued with three crucial bedroom tapes that further define the innovative and unselfconscious songwriting from early in her career.

Liz Phair: Girly-Sound to Guyville: The 25th Anniversary Box Set

If you, like me, were a mopey and searching 13-year-old when Matador first released Exile in Guyville, then perhaps you, too, consider it the sacred text of your youth. Now, 25 years later, Exile remains a kind of sanctified codex for girls: the map that pointed us toward adulthood, or something like it.
Liz Phair began making music in 1991. She was newly graduated from Oberlin College and had prodigally returned to the leafy, affluent suburbs of Chicago, where she’d come of age a decade before. Back in her parents’ house, she wrote and recorded three cassettes of candid, yearning indie rock that she never expected anybody else to hear or pay attention to. Eventually, those tapes got dubbed and passed around by the few friends she’d shared them with—rarified talismans exchanged among the privileged. Imagine what it must’ve felt like to cram one into your car stereo that summer, to hear such a pure and instinctive voice opining the vagaries of romance, love, rejection, and what it means to want more than you’ve got.
Back then, Phair called herself Girly-Sound. The appellation itself feels like a key to Phair’s particular brand of feminism. Rather than trying to pass amid the brooding, self-serious punks of Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood—the scene she called Guyville—she both embraced and trumpeted her girliness, even when it required admitting to certain plainly uncool vulnerabilities.
Those three tapes—Yo Yo Buddy Yup Yup Word to Ya Muthuh, Girls! Girls! Girls!, and Sooty, which were collected and beautifully re-mastered for inclusion on this reissue—contain some of the least self-conscious music I’ve ever heard. Some of that can be attributed to the intimacy of her chosen recording space—anyone who’s ever stomped upstairs, yanked a diary out from under the mattress, and started scrawling hysterical proclamations in it understands the heavy emotional sanctity of the suburban bedroom. But Phair possessed an uncommon frankness, and nerve to match. The indie ethos of the early ’90s was supposedly about candor and integrity, but it often manifested as its own kind of neurotic performance—an alienating mix of frigid indifference and unearned righteousness. Phair seemed, in her way, entirely allergic to its bullshit. She just said what she felt, without negotiation.
Which isn’t to say she didn’t suffer from the scene. The clowns of Guyville, with their apathy and dispassion, animate these songs, unnerving and frustrating her. She wants consequences: “Whatever happened to a boyfriend? The kind of guy who tries to win you over?” she wonders on the first verse of “Fuck and Run,” which she initially recorded for Girls! Girls! Girls!. Her bluntness on the chorus—“I want a boyfriend/I want all that stupid old shit/Like letters and sodas”—was so deeply revelatory to me as a teenager. I simply did not know that people could say this sort of stuff out loud. What a brave and wild thing, to be that honest about what you longed for! I still thought hunger itself was a sin. The women I admired—Kim Gordon, Kathleen Hanna, PJ Harvey—felt radical in part because they appeared so needless. Phair had desires, and some of them were embarrassing, and she sang about them anyway.
Somewhere along the way, Phair had the idea to model Exile in Guyville after the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, though its homage was more theoretical than explicit. She was responding, at first, to the vague but salient idea of the Stones as a kind of bastion of louche male insouciance and to the hegemony of the rock canon more generally. That she hadn’t actually heard that record before she started making her own only seems indicative of the strange pervasiveness of those ideas: If you were hanging around dudes, Keith and Jagger were in the air. Their significance was nearly extra-musical.
The album isn’t a song-by-song response, as it was sometimes positioned. It’s sexy like the Stones, and, in moments, unbearably tender. But it’s also funnier than anything the Stones ever did, and infinitely more self-deprecating. “Divorce Song,” a jangly, buoyant guitar jam about a road trip that turns catastrophic, feels like a tiny, domestic movie: “And it’s true that I stole your lighter/And it’s also true that I lost the map/But when you said that I wasn’t worth talking to/I had to take your word on that,” Phair sings. Who hasn’t had one of those arguments with a partner or lover, where a thing that once felt indestructible starts to collapse, only you’ve still got to check into a motel with that person and eat pancakes across from them? This is Phair’s sweet spot as a narrator, seeing and recounting the real, oafish transactions between imperfect people, all the terrible moments we know but can’t bear to articulate.
Though she would later explore her range more fully, in 1993, Phair sang only in a low, monotone voice that felt close and confessional. She’d taught herself how to play guitar, and because she hadn’t been schooled in all the foundational moves, she inadvertently invented her own kind of scrappy and idiosyncratic style. She also didn’t seem particularly interested in persona, which allowed her fans to believe they were being let in on some kind of secret. Listening to Exile in Guyville still feels this way: Like someone is telling you that all the weird, uncomfortable things you think and worry about are, in fact, just ordinary fears. Those feelings, it turns out, are simply the fallout of being alive.


The masterful singer-songwriter offers her lightest, most earthbound record in years, finding newfound inspiration in the sweetly silly sound of barroom rock’n’roll.

Lucinda Williams: Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart

Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart

The first song on Lucinda Williams’ new record, “Let’s Get the Band Back Together,” is a frail hymn of possibility in the guise of a sweetly silly rocker. The genius of Stories From a Rock N Roll Heart—her first new album in three years and the first since her stroke in 2020—is how she marries these two impulses. Behind her, the band acts like a Tuesday-night bar band: greasy but tame, rowdy but contained, carefully rehearsed but slightly wobbly at the edges. They sound like the kind of outfit that might cover George Thorogood or Bonnie Raitt, the Wallflowers or the Gin Blossoms—whatever keeps the tap dispensing watery beers—and over this groove, Williams reminisces about “staying up all night playing poker and pool/Playing Dylan and the Boss, and we thought we were cool.” There’s a survivor’s wonder in her voice: The fact that there even is a band, this many decades later, to get back together is cause for celebration. Enough hearts are still beating, enough friendships are intact. Hey, we could.
It’s also the lightest music she’s made in a decade. Over the past 10 years, Williams has peered into some darkened corners—depression, addiction, mortality, abuse, despair—and her music has often darkened with her. Perhaps a brush with death refreshes your senses for all the good old slights and discomforts of daily life, because the songs on Stories From a Rock N Roll Heart are earnest and earthbound. She indulges in the luxury to be jealous, self-deprecating, horny. These are also the most quotidian and diaristic songs she’s written in years. “Driving down Sunset/I’m stuck in traffic/With the sun coming in from the west/So I cover my eyes and I wait for the light to change/And I think about you/And it’s kinda strange/but I think about you,” the opening gambit from “Stolen Moments,” is just point-blank more words than Williams generally allows herself. Her songs have worked in brilliant broad strokes—God is a big rotator, there’s a big black train coming, she oughta know about lonely girls—but the writer we meet on Stories From a Rock N Roll Heart is a notebook scribbler, a noticer, an observer.
On “Last Call For the Truth,” she’s also back in the corner booth. “Give me one more taste of my lost youth/Then it’s last call for the truth,” she sings, which reads dire but comes out sounding wry. She’s been singing about lost youth ever since she had it, and now that it’s gone, she sounds fonder than ever. “Celebrating our lack of social graces/Staying true to our ragtag mystique,” she sings, with more than a touch of “2 Kool 2 Be 4 Gotten”—this might even be the same bar, with the same characters, or maybe Williams is the only regular still hanging around from those days. Maybe those are her words notched in that stall.
In order to bring this booze-soaked vision to life, Williams recruited bar-rock legends: Tommy Stinson of the Replacements, Patti Scialfa, and, of course, the Boss himself. Bruce Springsteen’s spirit looms large over the record, lending his background vocals to “New York Comeback” and “Rock N Roll Heart.” The mood on the latter is rousing, and it’s certainly reassuring to hear Springsteen and Williams howl together about a “blue-collar kid in a no-win town,” but Lucinda does Lucinda better than she does Bruce. She’s far more convincing when she snarls “Nothing’s the same as it was back when/You can’t go home again” on “This Is Not My Town,” her voice edged with ambivalence, even contempt. It’s always more personal and sour when she leaves mythology behind for observation.
Even as she’s lost some of her range, Williams’ voice remains sui generis. She’s never sounded more tender or unguarded as she does on “Where the Song Will Find Me,” leaning into her vibrato, letting the holes and pockmarks in her voice tell their own stories. It’s a hymn of helpless devotion to songwriting itself, and maybe the purest love song she’s ever written. As it comes to a close, Williams steps into the spotlight: “I find myself alone in the madding crowd/On the buckling New York streets, people talking loud/Sitting on a stool in the corner of a bar/The errand of a fool has carried me this far/To a place where the song can find me.” The songs—she’s still devoted to them, and they are still visiting her.


Pickpocket's Locket finds Frog Eyes sounding almost muzzled—it's a quieter, toned-down version of the band. But despite the record's deliberate transparency of production style, the musical structures are as hard to parse as they have ever been.

Pickpocket’s Locket

The past three years have brought a great deal of grief and uncertainty into Carey Mercer's life and music, but these days, the singer and songwriter's demeanor possesses a kind of aloof geniality. In concert, he seems just as content to talk and joke as play, like a charismatic acquaintance regaling you with stories at slightly uncomfortable length. In the muted and gently loping songs on his band Frog Eyes' latest LP, Pickpocket's Locket, too, Mercer playfully mulls over a couple of musical ideas rather than pushing past them quickly or distending them quickly into cracked-mirror reflections of themselves. The approach would have been quite different just a few years ago. The tremulous, haunted tenor of the early 2000s—or for that matter, the percussive, histrionic assaults of  2004's The Folded Palm, or the breathy, epic-poetic narration of Tears of the Valedictorian and *Paul's Tomb: A Triumph—*is a far cry from the more polite and conversational parlance of this album.
Pickpocket's Locket’s finds Frog Eyes sounding almost muzzled: The drums are hit with brushes and felt-tipped mallets, the guitars and bass are often acoustic, and a lot of the prime sonic real estate is taken up by bright piano chording and string arrangements from Mercer's erstwhile bandmate and former roommate —Spencer Krug of Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, and Moonface. Mercer’s vocal is dry and up front, speaking colloquially, and just from the padded studio room instead of from a mountaintop created by delay or cathedral-like reverb. Despite the record's deliberate transparency of production style, though, the musical structures are as hard to parse as they have ever been; the high dramatics and longform organization of earlier, heavier records feels more intuitive, while it can be pretty difficult to determine where verses and chorus begin and end here.
This element of the album points to why—despite his close association with consummate "songwriter" types Dan Bejar and Krug —Mercer's work calls for a different mode of listening, more like one would use with avant-garde music. Its surface-level structural complexity can add up to a net overarching simplicity, if one hears it first as an inchoate whole before worrying about picking it apart. Eventually, the important musical phrases distinguish themselves; in Mercer's case, in any song, a few distinguishing paeans create signposts. "Death Ship"s dense, "Thunder Road"-paced libretto is filled with sneered, ear-catching lines like "I floated to the New York on the back of a log" and "A man shot in the hand from indiscreet fire" which serve as organizational dividers. The ecstatic closer "Rip Down the Fences That Fence the Garden" is built around several belted and bright melodic phrases—"In the dawn, by the river I shall swaddle my wrath!" The goal in these lyrics is preserving attractive sibilance and meter at least as much as cosmic suggestion. Still, there are powerful shadows of meaning. Pecking at the edges of Mercer's neo-Modernist poetry are images of seediness and criminality— political corruption ("Crystal Blip"), lechery ("Two Girls"), and betrayal ("Rejoinders in a Storm"). But even the darkest moments feel perversely comic; the album lacks, certainly, the staring-into-the-abyss ruminations on mortality and human cruelty of previous releases.
In these clearer sections, Pickpocket's Locket proves itself to be increasingly rewarding upon repeated listens, but it still fails to deliver anything particularly remarkable. All of its component gestures can be found on other Mercer projects. The restrained sound palette resembles parts of FE's Carey's Cold Spring, the poppier moments recall Mercer's contributions to Swan Lake, and heavy piano work also anchors excellent Frog Eyes records Valedictorian and 2003’s The Golden River. The main distinguishing feature here is Krug’s string arrangements, but disappointingly, these can feel childishly simple and precious in the same, borderline irritating way as the heavy counterpoint in Krug's own solo work—see the layered, scalar instrumental melodies on Sunset Rubdown’s last two albums, in particular. At their best, Krug's charts here lend Mercer's more modest songs a baroque quality, reminiscent of the modest string work on records like John Cale's Paris 1919 or Robert Wyatt's Shleep (see, in particular, the effective, wry figures in "The Beat Is Down").
Mercer has long been someone worth keeping up with in indie rock; his voice has, since his early recording, been commanding, immutable, and seemingly impervious to trends. Fans have grown with the subtle changes in his mode of attack, and given the specificity of his style, sometimes it's easy to overlook the significant ways his approach has drifted since his formative releases. It's startling to realize Pickpocket’s Locket is the odd Carey Mercer release you can almost mellow out to. Once you delve deeper than the pleasant aesthetic, however, it's hard not to wish for a few more distinguishing moments to hold onto.


The Canadian indie rock band sorts through a largely subdued grab bag of material on this career-spanning set, highlighted by offbeat experiments and homespun, intimate moments.

Broken Social Scene: Old Dead Young: B-Sides & Rarities

Old Dead Young: B-Sides & Rarities

Broken Social Scene have been soundtracking intimate firsts since the internet was a little baby and made a lot of noise when you turned it on. For over two decades, the Canadian collective has written anthemic, heart-on-your-sleeve indie rock songs that make you want to sit on your crush’s lap at a house party or shotgun a beer in a cornfield. For fans of a certain age, their work has become synonymous with being a teen: Lorde is one of those fans, and she memorably interpolated “Lover’s Spit” into “Ribs,” making an adolescent anthem of her own. Old Dead Young, the band’s new career-spanning B-sides and rarities collection, won’t necessarily give you the same ecstatic lift of their more beloved material. For the most part, these 14 tracks are a pretty subdued listen. They’re not the band’s best songs, and most of the record isn’t particularly memorable. Old Dead Young is best appreciated as the first retrospective from a band whose music is already all about self-mythologizing and looking back at the past.
Despite being essentially a grab bag of ephemera, Old Dead Young plays like an actual album, sequenced like any Broken Social Scene record, shifting between styles and collaborators. Opener “Far Out,” originally from a pre-order EP released in anticipation of 2010’s Forgiveness Rock Record, is a delicate ambient interstitial, twisting and turning like a toy ballerina in a jewelry box. It segues into the 2001 track “Do the 95,” where Kevin Drew’s vocals feel like baseballs being flung at you from inside a batting cage. The mood grows more hushed around the album’s midpoint. “This House Is on Fire,” an outtake from Forgiveness Rock Record, evokes being stuck inside during a snowstorm. It’s so tender it’s almost a bit twee. “National Anthem of Nowhere,” a Broken Social Scene version of a song written for Andrew Whiteman’s Apostle of Hustle side project, is just as chill, but not nearly as schmaltzy. It’s calm and searching.
The collection’s latter half features its strongest and most complicated material. “Stars and Spit,” from 2006, is loud and jangly, with pops of synth, scuzzed-out guitars, and cavernous percussion. It’s a mashup of “Stars and Sons” and “Lover’s Spit” made by producer David Newfield and originally released on a 7" single from 2006. While definitely a bit gimmicky, the song is also oddly compelling. “Until It’s Dead” is equally experimental but far more muted. It integrates sampling with cool-toned, krauty guitars and synths. “All My Friends,” meanwhile, is a beautiful but sardonic song about having friends in magazines and telling “little lies” while having “massive dreams.” Most of the record feels up-close and personal, but “All My Friends” is so homespun and raw it feels particularly intimate.
These songs feel like an old photo album of Polaroids and disposable camera pictures from the band’s formative years, even if none of them feel all that essential. They’re less varnished and intoxicating than the songs that would make the final cut on a studio album. But that’s the appeal: Sometimes it’s the outtakes—the photos where everyone is blinking and has beady red eyes—that feel the most candid, the best representation of the past, decades out.

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Grand Hustle rapper Young Dro has managed to hold onto relevance in an ever-changing rap landscape with sheer giddiness and force of personality. On his third album, Da Reality Show, he gets a little reflective, seeming comfortable enough in his skin to reflect on the highs and lows a long rap career can bring.

Da Reality Show

Grand Hustle rapper and former T.I. sideman Young Dro has been surprisingly good at maintaining relevance in an ever-changing rap landscape. To anyone not paying attention, his return to the mainstream with his viral Vine hit "FDB" in 2013 was probably out of left field, but in truth he's been around the whole time: producing a steady stream of mostly solid mixtapes and using his always slightly-offbeat eccentricity to keep the songs exciting. Da Reality Show, Young Dro's third major-label album, is an acknowledgement of Dro's place in the current rap landscape; it's at once an album that could have easily dropped shortly after 2006's Best Thang Smokin'**, yet still feels refreshingly new without being forced.
Dro has been making music since the early '00s, but we're coming up on 10 years since his first major album, and Da Reality Show is a celebration of and a reflection on a life well-lived, full of goofiness, giddiness and sobering reminiscence.  He's feeling himself—"I kilt the streets and made history", he boasts on "Coupe"—and very few are as good at doing that as Dro is, with as many undertones. On the song "Dead", he raps: "Hope yo ass be ready for the fed/Hope yo ass be ready for the lead/Hope you ready for the hospital bed/dopeboy, dopeboy, now the nigga dead" as a way of calling out another dealer as a sucker. It's typical braggadocio, but in it also is a glimmer of awareness about the inevitabilities of trap life.
This introspective honesty carries the back half of the album.  "I know how it feel to be numba one/I know how it feel to be numba nothin’”, he raps soberly on “Feeling Myself”. Dro seems comfortable enough with who he is to put his real self on record, and the record carries the gravity that comes with seeing both the highs and lows a long rap career can bring.
He also has a natural sense of how he fits into the sounds of rap radio today without compromising his essence.  The album finds Dro perfectly at ease with the sound of current Atlanta and making it work for him instead of the other way around. The Zaytoven-assisted "Ugh" is a melodic and busy hymnal, and amid Zaytoven's menagerie of sounds, Dro's is the best instrument. He glides through it,  crooning then rapping like his words are drum kicks to making playful ad-libs and ad-libbing on top of those ad-libs. It's an effortless energy and showmanship that he carries into the next track "Parallel Park". The church organs that surround the song are appropriate; Dro captures your attention and is as theatrical in his style as an Atlanta Megachurch Preacher.
Da Reality Show would have probably been better off holding onto this momentum, because the traditional attempts at inspirational anthems in the back half feel a little forced, and lack the freewheeling excitement of the rest of the album. At the end,however, Dro allows himself to really get sentimental on "Hood Gospel", reflecting on lost love and the murder of his mother. The pain is audible in his voice, but so is the full-hearted joy and wonder at his rise from those traumatic experiences to where he is now. It is a beautiful moment and a reminder that behind all the boasts about exotic-colored cars and women, there is a man who just wants to share his testimony.


Massive Attack's new EP is a welcome reminder that the group have always excelled as both producers and curators. While retaining their old sound, they offer carefully judged and effective updates, including appearances by Young Fathers, Tricky, and Azekel.

Ritual Spirit EP

Massive Attack made not one but three of the defining albums of the '90s, and are nearly single-handedly responsible for founding trip-hop, which, depending on who you ask, is either the most prevalent or worst genre of the decade's latter half. They were probably guaranteed to weather some tough times after the turn of the millennium, and they did. Their once-genre became a punchline, and band members splintered off one by one, leaving only Robert "3D" Del Naja, his increasingly claustrophobic production style, and a cloud of drama.
Times are friendlier to Massive Attack now, though. Half a decade on, 2010's Heligoland holds up surprisingly well, and "trip-hop" isn't quite the epithet it used to be. This year, one of the biggest new crossover pop stars cross-audience is a guy who used to be produced by Doc McKinney of—of all people!—Esthero. As such, Massive Attack have spent much of the decade in a long, protracted process of getting the gang back together. The group's been occupied with soundtrack work for documentaries on tax evasion and global warming, and a live show that skewers, in Del Naja's words, "utopian tech companies"; that live show featured both longterm vocalist Horace Andy and former Tricky collaborator Martina Topley-Bird. And Tricky himself appears on Ritual Spirit, an EP produced entirely by 3D from material on remix-your-own app Fantom. (A second EP, with songs by Daddy G, is due later this year.)
It's instructive to think of just how many ways this EP could be awful, how many gimmicky collaborators or landfill house vocalists could be on the album. But Massive Attack play it mostly conservative. Aside from Young Fathers—whom Del Naja called "currently the best fucking band in the world"—and newcomer Azekel, the personnel on Ritual Spirit have been around: British rapper Roots Manuva and Tricky himself, whose single "Take It There" is such a return to form it almost works best as speculative history: What if Tricky had stuck around for Mezzanine? It's also the most diehards-only track of the four—suffice it to say, if you always found Massive Attack's post-'97 schtick contrived and 3D's lyrics ridiculous, you probably won't get through this one without some eye-rolling.
"Dead Editors," with its EKG opening, begins like a 100th Window cut, but reveals itself as something with more interesting things to say: In 2010, Marshall rejoined the group with a vow that he would "bring the black back to Massive Attack," and the line that appears near-verbatim on "Dead Editors"; it's also noteworthy that Ritual Spirit features entirely black collaborators and engages significantly more with rap than Heligoland. Feverish "Ritual Spirit" hangs somewhere between meditative and heatsick, Azekel's vocal like a smoke curl; meanwhile, "Voodoo in My Blood" captures its collaborators' best impulses: a more driven version of Young Fathers' polyglot rock, a more dynamic version of Del Naja's often-of-late meandering work. Massive Attack were always equally as good producers as they were curators; it's promising that, as much of their old sound as they've retained, they've kept this as well.


Swedish Italo disco producer's latest album features frequent collaborator Sally Shapiro, as well as CFCF.

Casablanca Nights

The title of producer Johan Agebjörn's new album isn't necessarily a reference to the 1942 Bogart-Bergman film or to the Moroccan city where it was set. Instead, it's almost certainly a nod to Casablanca Records, one of the most prominent labels of the 1970s. While it did sign the likes of Cher, Kiss, and Parliament, Casablanca was best known as a haven for disco artists, including Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, Santa Esmeralda, Village People, and a deep roster of one- and no-hit wonders. It's even rumored that Steve Guttenberg's character in the Village People film Can't Stop the Music was based on Casablanca founder Neil Bogart (no relationship to Humphrey).
It's no shock that Agebjörn would invoke this bellwether of pop history for his latest album. He is one of several Swedish producers enamored with various American and European strains of disco, and his two albums with Sally Shapiro reveal a steadfast belief that heartache is best conveyed via soft vocals, shimmery synths, modulated bass lines, and pulsating beats. Casablanca Nights is his chance to play curator as well as producer, hand-picking such acts as Shapiro, CFCF, Friday Bridge, and Le Prix. The album plays like a label sampler you might dig out of the dollar bin and wonder why none of the artists made it bigger.
Despite that title, Agebjörn isn't abandoning his signature Italo disco-derived sound for a more American style. His production remains exquisitely lush and luxuriant. On "The Last Day of Summer", the relatively robust vocals by Queen of Hearts stand out on the album, and it's too bad she doesn't appear more often. Many of the vocalists blur together over the course of Casablanca Nights, although Shapiro remains Agebjörn's most captivating muse, her expressive vocals illuminating each one of her songs.
Most of Agebjörn's songs create the same sort of yearning, thumping dancefloor melancholy, differentiated more by their lyrics than by their instrumentation or their tone. As Casablanca Nights makes its way to morning, he introduces a few new sounds and tricks, to varying degrees of success. "Alice", a collaboration with Le Prix, Fred Ventura, and Shapiro, is the most intriguing detour, drumming in some new wave influences from the early 1980s to counterbalance the 1970s sounds. Thanks to the halting chorus and the dynamic boy-girl vocals, the combination of styles is intriguing, not only because these two eras have such different concerns but mostly because similar experiments on Casablanca Nights prove much less compelling.
By the time the requisite chill-out closer comes along-- "Stranger (Chill Remix)" with Halftone-- Agebjörn has already thoroughly chilled out to a sequence of downtempo songs like "Le Noir et le Blanc Sur le Piano" (where Shapiro sings in French) and "Memories of Satie" (with CFCF). Intriguing in their reach if not necessarily their execution, those two numbers weigh down the second half, such that "Stranger" doesn't sound like the sunrise to end Casablanca Nights, but an abrupt finale that plays to a long-empty dancefloor. Granted, Agebjörn's intention isn't historical re-creation or even dance-party endurance, but a kind of musical evocation that opens up more conceptual possibilities than perhaps he's willing to explore. Yet, this time-machine quality means the music serves similar purposes to its influences: The songs are meant to be immersive, enveloping, and most of all transportive. Where disco went far beyond mere escapism in the 1970s, Casablanca Nights only gets you out of 2011 for a few sweet minutes.


"He not busy being born is busy dying."
- Bob Dylan, "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding"
"Live flesh ...

John Coltrane: The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording

"He not busy being born is busy dying."
- Bob Dylan, "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding"
"Live flesh and coursing blood, hearts, brains, souls spluttering fire!"
-LeRoi Jones, "Black Art"
April 23rd, 1967. John Coltrane appears for his penultimate public performance before a crowd at Babatunde Olatunji's Center for African Culture in New York City. Three months later, liver cancer would claim his life. He would play once more in front of a live crowd, but the last available live recording is documented here. On this set, he's bolstered by drummer Rashied Ali, bassist Jimmy Garrison, pianist Alice Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders on tenor sax and Algie Dewitt on bata drum (a Yoruba instrument). For legions of jazz aficionados around the globe, this final live document is something of a Holy Grail. And now, thanks to sound engineer Bernard Drayton (who still had possession of the master tapes), anyone with $15 can finally get their mitts on one of the most historic documents in all of 20th century American music.
Coltrane spent the last years of his life engaged in a mission that few could understand. As witnessed on A Love Supreme and other recordings during those later years, his ultimate objective was that of a continued spiritual awakening. Whereas the objective itself was not that difficult to grasp, Coltrane's means of attaining it were far from conventional. Abandoning the preconceived notions of tonality, and immersed within a musical state of dissonance, Coltrane's music became a communicative attempt at reaching a higher plane.
Spawned during one of the most tumultuous eras in history, Coltrane's ideas were reflective of a period in which the foundations of American life trembled to the core. Influenced by the nation's entrenchment in war, its social and political upheavals, and its civil rights and protest movements, John's music deserted almost any semblance of traditional form in a move toward celestial harmony and universality. In the early months of 1967, faced not just with the chaos of society, Coltrane waged his own personal war with death and his music again shifted. What's documented here is that personal warfare, replete with bursting explosions and a splattering of machine-gun notes.
No sooner than Billy Taylor can introduce John as "one of the most remarkable forces in jazz today," Coltrane comes up front and center on "Ogunde," opening the set with a warm, bluesy moan. But this is only temporary. Almost immediately, the rest of the band in tow, Coltrane embarks on a trans-dimensional flight, bleating and coaxing sounds from his sax, and escalating at a fever pace to the highest register with guttural whoops and hollers. "Ogunde," based on the Afro-Brazilian song "Ogunde Varere," is an almost thirty-minute wall of dissonance, peppered with shrieks and howls. It's as if Coltrane is expending every imaginable source of personal energy here to create a swirling maelstrom of noise.
Coltrane and Sanders swap solos: John rips out with a weeping wail before ascending into a full-blown shriek attack; Pharoah begins playfully, reeling off a fiery solo, dancing around a theme, and then descending into a grunt-filled rage. Ali focuses on polyrhythms and spacial dancing, consistently adding dimensions and crossing barriers, taking the band into something otherworldly, while Garrison's bass remains muscular, anchoring the sound and expanding the framework. Alice Coltrane's percussive plonks and thuds drift in and out of the background before she rolls out her own deft solo, scrambling around the melody and filling the space rapidly with sixteenth notes while the saxophonists quietly wait for their scorching return. Soon, Coltrane roars back in, the band following on his comet's tail. Coltrane and Sanders successively spit out anguished yelps while the band soars into wraithlike dimensions, teetering on the precipice of a volcanic eruption. From here, the track remains full-throttle until it ends with Coltrane and Sanders invoking the spiritual via an ecstatic rite of fire.
After Coltrane humbly gives his thanks to the elated audience, Jimmy Garrison steps into the spotlight for a lengthy bass solo that introduces Rodgers and Hammerstein's "My Favorite Things." A staple of Coltrane's set since the early 60s, "My Favorite Things" had now morphed from The Sound of Music's simple innocence into something altogether beastly and monstrous. Garrison flexes his chops for well over seven minutes with brawn and grit, piecing together a skeletal structure and beating the path for the others' departure into unknown terrain.
What follows is music overflowing with such emotional and spiritual intensity that it floods your living room. Coltrane's bleats and squeals are drenched with a searing pain. It's like the sound of rending flesh, the tune ripped apart and broken into sorrowful hollers and moans. With the band thundering behind them, the two sax players are intent on dousing every inch of that NYC block with their incendiary fury. Explosions, barking yawps, shrill high-register runs, and throaty, rasping groans-- the place sounds like it's going to spontaneously combust. Occasionally, there's slight recognition of the Rodgers & Hammerstein theme as Coltrane references the motif before descending into death howls and mournful prayer. If "Ogunde" was a full-throttled blare, "My Favorite Things" clambers rapidly out of this realm and into permanent celestial gravitation. Coltrane maintains velocity at this pace for nearly twenty minutes, caught in a firestorm from which no one will walk away unscathed.
For every intent and purpose, this is difficult music. It's the demanding sound of a man faced with impending death, yet unafraid to carry forward and remain steadfast to his intense, singular vision of music as a universal bridge. With every note, Coltrane chases a higher power in an attempt to transcend the corporeal. For the unprepared listener, it might all be too much-- not only because of the sheer intensity of noise levels or dissonance, but because this is the sound of a man who knows every breath he draws inches him one step closer to the grave. Yet, the sadness this evokes is overwhelmed by the pure beauty of a man being rebirthed, recreated, and reimagined. The Last Live Recording is a deliriously scattered mess of joy and pain, intermingled and bound up within Coltrane's unbridled and luminescent energy. And now it stands as his parting gesture: one last moment bursting out at the seams with elation and ferocity, an awe-inspiring testament to life.


The Atlanta rapper and singer Kodie Shane is the most talented member of Lil Yachty’s motley crew, and on this EP—a bite-sized compilation of old tracks and new ones—everything clicks.

Zero Gravity EP

Viral bubblegum rap star and self-proclaimed “King of the Teens,” Lil Yachty first introduced his motley crew of young stooges, the Sailing Team, on the Summer Songs 2 posse cut “All In.” It was a bubbly team theme that could double as a nursery rhyme. “All my brothers with me!” he shouted in the intro. That distinction somehow excluded R&B phenom Kodie Shane, the crew’s sole female voice, and unequivocally its most talented member. Her short, sweet verse stood out brightly from the half-cocked joke raps, ending with confidence: “I’m tired of talking, can you cut my check?” Shane established herself early on as more than a wave-rider—she’s a rising tide lifting all boats. If Perry is Yachty’s first mate, then Kodie is their anchor. Following the breakthrough, her new EP, Zero Gravity, makes a strong impression.
Born in Atlanta but raised in a Chicago suburb, Shane is a product of both nature and nurture. As a baby, she traveled on tour with her sister’s platinum-selling R&B group, Blaque, and later returned to Atlanta, where she recorded her first songs at 14. It was local guru Coach K—a manager of Gucci Mane and Young Jeezy, and mentor to Shane—who later introduced her to Yachty. For much of the past year, Shane has been toying with ideas and tinkering with form: Her 2060 EP, released in March, trended toward the productions of trap it-boys Metro Boomin and TM88 before randomly, dramatically turning to sample things like Rufus & Chaka Khan’s “Ain’t Nobody.” It was scattered, but it showed off the range and arsenal of a prodigious writer who has spent her life around musicians. A few months later, the sugary, genre-scanning Little Rocket explored Shane’s pop sense.
A highlight of it all was 2060’s Yachty duet “Sad,” a candy-coated jam about unrequited love and the solace that can sometimes be found in bitter moments. Shane and Yachty are kindred spirits who pull the best out of each other, and their collaboration provided an important benchmark for Shane: the precise moment where everything clicked. It’s no surprise, then, that “Sad” resurfaces on Zero Gravity, which is, as its title implies, a study in weightlessness.
Zero Gravity is a bite-sized compilation of old tracks and new ones, showcasing Shane’s seemingly limitless potential; it’s compact but full, animated yet balanced, marrying the buoyancy of Yachty (on a song like “Losing Service”) with the lucid journaling of Tink. She, like Tink, is a rapper and singer who blurs the line between the two (see: “A Ok”). But she’s far more explosive, with an impish warble that quickly morphs into a liquid falsetto, a playful chirp, or even a mopey whimper in a snap. This dynamism is obvious on the hook-heavy “Drip in My Walk,” which is the song most in-line with the Yachty canon here. She cycles through a few subtle inflection changes before settling for flat out exuberance, her natural state.
Listening to Shane feels rejuvenating. There’s a very particular energy to some of her songs that replicates tumbling around in a bouncy house. But there can be a delicacy to them, too, when her writing ventures into mature(r), more thoughtful R&B. In any mode, Shane meticulously crafts tunes that stay with you. She has the nuanced ear for melody that continues to elude Yachty, but her hooks are equally infectious, as she unspools skipping refrains with sweet, almost chant-like variations. Shane is a more complete songwriter, too; her ideas find resolution, especially on “Drip in My Walk” and “Can You Handle It”—the former seeing an extended basketball metaphor through to the end. Still, she fits her team’s bubblegum aesthetic perfectly. Even as her songs constantly move, they’re easy to follow. Yachty may be the internet’s star of today, but all signs point to Shane as a star of the future.


Guided by her spellbinding whistling, the Los Angeles musician’s debut album is as sumptuous and wistful as a vintage film score.

On the Lips

Some things are best left unsaid. But for Molly Lewis, they might be better whistled. In her wonderfully quirky world, lyrics are omitted and replaced with high-pitched chirps and trills. Across her debut album On the Lips, Lewis invites you to sit back and relax in her so-called Café Molly universe, where the music is as glittering and enticing as the romantic world it conjures up.
Lewis’ idiosyncratic gift makes it easy to picture her as the lounge act hidden in a Guillermo del Toro film or at the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks. She knows how weird her career path is, dialing up the humor in the opening track: “Good evening,” she whispers. “Tonight I’ll be”—pause for dramatic effect—“whistling.”
Once you get past the initial eccentricity, Lewis’ whistling eventually becomes so familiar and immersive that her vocalizations feel as mundane as the soft crooning of a jazz singer. Song after song, her abilities are astounding—how she quivers the final note of “Cocosette” or sustains such a clear and steady tone on “Slinky” is impressive, even after multiple listens. She maintains your attention with wistful production flourishes, courtesy of her backing band. That might be a brief saxophone solo on the swaying “Lounge Lizard,” a distant choir on the tragic, Nancy Sinatra-like “Crushed Velvet,” or the gentle plinks of a piano on “Moon Tan.”
On the Lips is the kind of inviting ambient record that neither distracts entirely nor melts into monotony. Take “Slinky”: The opening synths and steady percussion resemble underwater submersion, but Lewis’ whistling persuades you to come up for air, beckoning you to her like a siren. Rather than dissolving into tedium, Lewis molds the accompanying background melodies to enhance and be enhanced by her vocalizations, a balance that makes On the Lips a singular joy.
Lewis’ cover of Jeanette’s 1974 track “Porqué Te Vas” keeps the same funkiness as the original, but she adapts it to her own loungey sound. It might be one of the more compelling tracks on On the Lips; driven by the slightly faster tempo, Lewis playfully chases after the track’s rolling guitars and percussion. On the Lips delights in taking things slow. Her songs feel romantic, full of longing—a fact only amplified by the listening instructions she offers in the album insert, which recommend ambient lighting and being dressed in ornate silk fabric.
The charming “Sonny”—which is dedicated to Kenneth “Sonny” Donato, former MC for Lewis’ Café Molly show series and Charles Bukowski associate—contains the same fantastical, expanding wonder as an Alexandre Desplat score and the vintage nostalgia of Jon Brion. Lewis’ music feels this way for a reason; she referred to her work as “soundtracks” back in 2021 and has been featured across film and TV, including last year’s Barbie. On the Lips succeeds as an introduction to her mystifying world: Its whimsicality leaves you spellbound, hoping to hear just one more faint whistle even after the final track fades out.


Spanning the sessions for 1997’s Time Out of Mind, an illuminating new edition of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series both subverts and magnifies the legend of his haunted, trancelike comeback album.

Bob Dylan: Fragments - Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996-1997): The Bootleg Series, Vol. 17

The official story surrounding Time Out of Mind goes something like this: Bob Dylan, stricken by the death of Jerry Garcia and sensing a hellhound on his own trail, turned to his beloved old blues records to exorcise the quickening dread he felt upon realizing that the bell also tolls for Zimmerman. Dylan, who was only 55 at the time, read his resulting lyrics to producer Daniel Lanois, who was stunned by their unearthly power, and the pair headed into the studio to fashion a record falling somewhere between a seance and a last will and testament.
Like all of the stories surrounding the creation of Bob Dylan albums, this one bears traces of myth and marketing. Typically, his Bootleg Series either subverts received knowledge (Trouble No More, Another Self Portrait) or magnifies legends (More Blood, More Tracks, The Cutting Edge). Fragments might be the first release that manages both. The series can feel overwhelming by design or aimed only at the highest-security-clearance Dylanologists, but Fragments presents us with a clear chronology: Disc One gives us the final studio album, remixed and scrubbed fresh so we can avail ourselves once more of its glorious shadows and submerge ourselves in its delicious mood. The remaining four discs—two of unreleased outtakes, one previously available, and a live set—repositions Time Out of Mind as a rebirth rather than a farewell.
What becomes abundantly clear over the course of the set’s six hours is that Time Out of Mind is primarily the story of a mood, and one ensemble’s single-minded pursuit of it. The making of this album was protracted, painful, and in all ways alive, and the album’s dour countenance was largely the product of theater and shadow. Dylan, ever the role player, was inhabiting a persona, slipping into a black jacket and working the character for fresh angles. Lanois accentuated the gloom and submerged the album in a damp chill of effects pedals and reverb until Dylan seemed to be speaking to us from the beyond. But—as the new mix on Fragments underlines—his baleful pallor was stagehand’s makeup, the gushing blood just red silk scarves.
The story began, appropriately enough, in a picaresque old playhouse Lanois dubbed the Teatro, filled with storybook touches—cob-webbed 16mm projectors, dusty mirror balls. Dylan and Lanois started with looping jams inspired by Charley Patton’s old 78s. Accompanied by bassist Tony Garnier and drummer Tony Mangurian, they built the tracks on top of those primordial beginnings. The mighty, roaring sound that emerged spooked everyone to attention: “The hair on my arms went up,” recalled sound engineer Mark Howard.
But Dylan, predictably, wasn’t settling in. He couldn’t work this close to his home and his family, which, by now, included six children and multiple grandchildren. They decamped instead to Criteria Studio in Miami, a space with a hallowed history (Aretha Franklin’s Young, Gifted and Black, the Allman Brothers’ Eat a Peach) and the ambiance of an airport security detention center. Lanois, shrugging, packed up all of his priceless tube microphones and moldering tape loops and relocated without complaint to this concrete box. But it was the beginning of a split between the two that would define and nearly overwhelm the sessions. The two stubborn visionaries seemed destined to remain at loggerheads. Lanois rarely spoke to Dylan before and after takes, and entire days unfolded in icy, uncomfortable silence.
Dylan, meanwhile, seemed determined to complicate things as much as possible. He reportedly felt haunted by Buddy Holly, and in tribute, he created his own ghostly version of the Crickets, pulling from his touring lineup, session-player royalty, and beyond. All in all at least 12 musicians found themselves crowded in Criteria, with Bob Dylan as their bandleader (“Two of everything, like Noah’s Ark,” marveled pedal steel guitarist Cindy Cashdollar). Dylan would try songs out in different keys, abruptly switching in the middle and expecting the band to remap their own chord progressions without a moment’s hesitation. The playbacks were a disaster, musicians crashing audibly into one another as they struggled to adapt. Lanois, listening with Howard, knew that he might only have a few shots at catching each song before his tempestuous leader grew bored and moved on, so he ordered musicians to simply not play if they couldn’t navigate the changes.
Whatever else was happening in the studio, the musicians achieved a rambling, spacious, loose cohesion. Guitar lines seem to be on the verge of wandering entirely out of sync with the drums only to fall in on beat with a satisfied breath. These are not driving rock numbers, and yet they were three or four drum kits rolling away at any point. The music came on like a big, black thunderhead, rolling forward with guitar echo merging into a clatter of drums.
The unreleased outtakes on Fragments reveal some of the extraordinary moments they littered along the path. On Disc 2’s take on the folk standard “The Water Is Wide,” Dylan leans into the performance as if he might reach out and touch the shoulder of his beloved. It’s as devoted as he ever sounded, and behind him, Garnier and Mangurian play so subtly and understated they register as lighting. Disc 5 gives us the original haunting take of “Can’t Wait” that raised Howard’s arm hairs: Over a hard backbeat, Dylan’s block piano chords and impressively tasty riffing from Lanois, Dylan chews the scenery with the unhinged glee of a Shakespearean actor let loose in a Hollywood blockbuster. The song is mesmerizingly dark, but hearing Dylan bite down with panther’s teeth on “I’m getting old,” it’s easy to conclude that he was feeling nothing but the opposite.
The extra discs yield the usual Bootleg pleasures: The Disc 2 version of “Cold Irons Bound” features stunning alternate lyrics about “stones in the pathway hurled” and “clouds of blood,” while the live versions of “’Til I Fell in Love With You” and “Standing in the Doorway” inflect the songs with sinewy hints of roadhouse blues, soul, gospel. But the true glory of these recordings is witnessing session legends like Mangurian, Jim Dickinson, and Bucky Baxter—giants whose playing pushed the blood through the veins of American song—sound momentarily lost, reverent, uncertain. The performances on Fragments surely represent some of these players’ most unguarded and searching work. Years later, they still spoke of these sessions with a mixture of anxiety and awe.
This lingering unease points to what makes Time Out of Mind special in Dylan’s discography, maybe even singular: More than almost any of his studio albums, it was the product of cult-like group obsession. Everyone from Lanois to Dylan to the phalanx of hired guitarists behaved like people gripped by a shared trance. Sessions stretched to 10 hours while Lanois drove Dylan to try “Not Dark Yet” again in E-flat, then in B-flat, until Dylan finally snapped, “If you haven’t got it now, you ain’t getting it.” Whatever their disagreements or tensions, everyone toiled under the mutual assumption that there were spirits in this material, ones that only they could coax out.
Their struggle centered on two songs—“Not Dark Yet” and, ironically, “Mississippi,” a song written for and left off of the final album. There are multiple versions of both songs littered across Fragments, and it is fascinating to hear them expand and contract, changing shapes and keys and tempos. For Dylan, the song had always been the thing: His catalog had always boasted the folk virtues of pliability. You could speed his songs up, slow them down, throw rock drums behind them or do any old thing, and the songs would remain, somehow, themselves: “Desolation Row” remains recognizably “Desolation Row” on take 5 and Take 13. But something different happens to “Not Dark Yet” and “Mississippi” when the players fiddle with them: They become different songs.
Listening to the evolution of Time Out of Mind’s most beloved song, “Not Dark Yet,” shows how these lurching, unsteady sessions wound up yielding their particular exhausted glitter. The first alternate take is in a different key, sending Dylan’s voice into a higher register and the song into ill-fitting sunlight; it’s a harmless little ramble. The second take, on Disc 3, is slower, and in the same key as the final version. You can hear Dylan’s voice settle into the tired languor that defines “Not Dark Yet.” But although you get a tantalizing glimpse of its potential, the view is blocked by a marching-band triplet fill on the drums and some Hornsby-esque piano trills. It doesn’t feel gloriously endless, as it does in the final studio version; it simply feels long. It wasn’t until the band stumbled into lockstep, all musicians’ frills burned away, that the song’s dark shadow loomed into view.
But the story of Fragments—the story of the album Time Out Of Mind isn’t, but almost was—rests with “Mississippi.” No song undergoes so many fitful revisions. On Disc 2, it’s an uptempo, zydeco-inflected rocker. On Disc 3, the band works it into a gut-wrenching funk that Lanois loved but Dylan rightfully discarded. The definitive version of “Mississippi,” which wasn’t released until 2008 and included on the fifth disc, is suffused with air and light. If “Not Dark Yet” sounded like it was in the beginning stages of evaporation, “Mississippi” felt like fumes itself—far too ethereal and light for Time Out of Mind.
Dylan, with his typical foresight, understood this implicitly. This is why he saved “Mississippi” for 2001’s Love & Theft. Critics and fans hailed that one as a rebirth: here, seemingly, was Dylan riding high, Time Out of Mind’s Edgar Allan Poe rags tossed off in favor of a natty bowler hat and a riverboat gambler’s mustache. But Fragments reveals the truth of the matter: The man who croaked about walking through “streets that are dead” already had his glittering blue eyes on the next horizon.


Her first full-length since the dissolution of hers and Dean Blunt's Hype Williams project, abstract beatmaker Inga Copeland's latest is a strange, singular record that offers as many questions as it does answers. It's not an easy listen, but she wouldn't have it any other way.

Because I'm Worth It

Hype Williams never made it easy. In an age where a cloak of mystery seems more rule than exception, Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland's (presumably) fake names and slippery interview tactics always felt like an altogether different beast. They somehow managed to combine total transparency with a shroud of secrecy; with all those obfuscations flying around, you could never be too sure where anything stood with them, even when they seemed to be giving it to you straight-up. Their music similarly existed in the cracks between genres: too out-there for post-dubstep, too amorphous for IDM. With no neatly packaged narrative to bounce off of, listeners had to seek answers in the music itself: no mean feat, when—much like its makers—that music never quite seemed to stay in one place long enough to wrap your head around it.
Copeland and Blunt parted ways in 2013, after the release of Black is Beautiful, a record that stripped away some—but certainly not all—of the willful obtusity of their previous shapeshifting. As Blunt offered up the Redeemer—a presumptive breakup record that sported some of the most straightforward, soul-baring music of his career—Inga Copeland issued the brief, bracing Don't Look Back, That's Not Where You're Going EP, an occasionally puzzling, frequently beguiling array of corroded electronics and clamorous calls-to-action. Now, Copeland's returned with her debut full-length, Because I'm Worth It, another strange, singular record that offers as many questions as it does answers. It's not an easy listen, but Copeland wouldn't have it any other way.
Opener "Faith OG X" begins with a discomfiting crackle of static. It's soon overtaken by a queasy, lurching synth, and then, two minutes in, a thought-swallowing, concentration-decimating beep. The effect of this incessant ping proves wildly disorienting; after a few spins, you'll learn to anticipate it, but you'll never quite get used to it. That's true for much of Because I'm Worth It, a nebulous, deviously off-kilter listen, impossible and intriguing in roughly equal measure, constantly rearranging itself for maximum discombobulation.
Over the whinny-and-pop of a door on a hinge, "Advice to Young Girls"—produced in conjunction with her fellow UK beatmangler Actress—finds Copeland in direct-address mode. "Sneak out the window and meet your friends on the corner," she urges. "Together, you're strong. You walk the streets: face the city, face the night. The city is yours." "Advice" is Worth It's finest hour, a near-perfect meeting of music and message; between Copeland's uncompromising aesthetic and her appeals to self-expression and sisterhood, "Advice" feels bold, urgent, necessary.
"Advice to Young Girls" is one of few vocal-centric tracks on Worth It; most of the rest is given over to Copeland's clattering, claustrophobic production. At barely half an hour, Because I'm Worth It is a dank, foreboding listen, a difficult space to accustom oneself to, at once enervating and intoxicating. The murky, pitched-down voice buried near the back of "Insult 2 Injury" is largely obscured by its sputtering rhythms and frosty synths, while the dank, zero-gravity dancehall of "Inga" finds her voice slathered in effects, rendering them half-incomprehensible. This is slippery, expectation-upending stuff; even after umpteen listens, you'll never quite feel as though you've acclimated yourself to the darkness.
There are moments—the morse code tappings of "Serious", the jolting beat and transmogrifying synths of closer "L'oreal"—that seem just little too hermetic, too impenetrable, lost down the hall of mirrors Copeland's built around them. And while the briefer pieces—"Serious," again, and the strange, sinewy "DILIGENCE"—help tie everything together, neither holds a candle to the denser, more enveloping darkness that surround them. Taken together, though, all these abstractions and interjections forge a dingy, disquieting dreamscape that seems to operate by its own laws of physics. The oft-bewildering Worth It is, like every record Copeland's put her name to, a deeply challenging, deliberately unorthodox listen. But you're not likely to hear another record quite like it anytime soon, and the impression it leaves isn't an easy one to shake.


On what may or may not be the final album from his legendary space-rock project, Jason Pierce finally sounds as though he has a hold on his passions, preoccupations, and demons.

And Nothing Hurt

Jason Pierce does not make casual records. Since the start of his career, nearly four decades ago, the co-founder of Spacemen 3 and the center of the Spiritualized universe has dived headlong into sounds, styles, and themes with ecclesiastical obsessiveness. In Spacemen 3, he created a funhouse of droning guitars and drugs, tunneling between primitive rock’n’roll and shamanistic hum as if following the true path to deliverance. And in Spiritualized, the audacious band through which he’s pursued pharmaceutical and romantic salvation for the past quarter-century, he has compromised nothing, sparing no expense or indulgence. A gospel choir quoting Elvis, an ambulance-siren orchestra embodying addiction, a string ensemble stretching for heaven: Spiritualized have always aimed to match the grandness of Pierce’s subject matter, monumental stuff like sex and death, God and despair. Pierce does not cobble songs into albums; though erratic, he aims to make masterpieces, unified responses to our biggest anxieties.
More than any previous Spiritualized album, however, And Nothing Hurt feels like a mere set of songs, an accessible group of tunes that may be painstakingly constructed but are only casually connected. This isn’t (despite the title) an extended metaphor for the release of heaven or heroin, and there’s no lingering feeling that these songs were written from the doorstep of certain death. And Nothing Hurt isn’t a trembling reaction to the sounds of Pierce’s past, like the middling Amazing Grace, or a maximalist exposition of them, like Let It Come Down. Pierce simply distills and gathers the essence of what has often made Spiritualized so powerful—hypnotic hymns of self-doubt, charging rock songs about confusion, swooning R&B odes to love—setting aside his past compulsion to make an overarching statement in favor of making a compact album. Some of these songs, like the romantic “Let’s Dance,” are as soft and warm as Christmas lights strung above a dive bar; others, like the caustic “The Morning After,” are as cutting and jarring as teenage pain. Taken together, they feel like Pierce coming to comfortable terms with his legacy.
During the last decade, he has often talked about writing like a grownup, about being a little truer to the experience of someone in his 50s than songs that recount afternoons spent with “me, my spike in my arm, and my spoon” tend to be. He finally does it on And Nothing Hurt: Pierce sings about the exigencies of adulthood, the anxieties of older age, and the realities of a lifetime spent letting people down. Even when he describes teenage terror, as on the righteously wailing “The Morning After,” it’s through the lens of a parent and someone who survived his own adolescent hell.
Pierce finds new resonance in the pedestrian, forging comfortable new connections to the rest of us. When he wants a relationship to end, he lies and says his cell phone is broken, the Spaceman becoming the ghost. He dances to Big Star’s “September Gurls” in a bar that’s closing, content to waste hours falling for a new paramour. He longs for a weekend getaway in the California desert and worries, like the rest of us, about the grumpy cop filling quotas on some built-for-speed backroad. Even the loftiest songs here, like twilit closing pair “The Prize” and “Sail on Through,” depend upon a newfound directness. Pierce wonders about the meaning of life (could it be love?) and questions his ability to keep up his end of any bargain. “Gonna burn brightly for a while,” he croons in his modest way, “then you’re gone.” There’s nothing to parse, no hidden meaning to unpack in Pierce’s feelings about this moment in his life.
If And Nothing Hurt feels only loosely connected as a whole, the individual songs are another matter entirely. Each is a meticulously realized testament to Pierce’s endless pursuit of perfection. He spent years shaping these songs alone, building the sounds with scraps culled from his record collection and with parts written for nearly 20 musicians and recorded in 10 studios, including his bedroom. At various points, Pro Tools—designed in part to help musicians juggle a massive number of inputs with relative ease—forbade him from adding anything else. That intricacy is the real delight of And Nothing Hurt. Despite the grandeur of these tunes, and the way they seem built to fill both regal concert halls and big, dark rock clubs, the best way to listen to them might be at home with lights out or eyes closed, headphones clamped tight. You can ignore the forest of the songs themselves and marvel at the trees within them, as if this were GAS or Grouper, not some survivor of space-rock bluster.
Listen closely to “Here It Comes (The Road) Let’s Go,” for instance, and you’ll notice a serialized electronic melody, moving up and down with the rhythm section like a ghost in the machine. It is the foil to Pierce’s sharp gospel guitar lick, framing a musical tug of war between the influences of Pops Staples and Tod Dockstader. And there’s the power electronics spree that knifes through the Sousa-sized horn march of “Let’s Dance,” as if Merzbow were battling the London Philharmonic. These are bold juxtapositions, contrasting compositional elements so at odds that they run the risk of coming across as gimmicks. But Pierce’s authorial scrupulousness and the same slavish devotion to an ideal that made Ladies and Gentlemen... a masterpiece and Spacemen 3 an institution gives these songs, one by one, their power.
Two years ago, Pierce mentioned that this album might be his last, largely because he fears repeating
himself. Just last month, though, he recanted, admitting that this has been a refrain for much of his career. Either way, there could be worse exits. Pierce has spent a career wrestling with his passions, demons, and preoccupations in Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized. Perhaps for the first time, on And Nothing Hurt, it sounds as though he has a hold on them—and not they on him. That’s a life’s work, tucked into 48 minutes.


The Oklahoma roots songwriter expands his increasingly experimental and genre-resistant songbook without sacrificing his empathetic, poetic core.

LP5

John Moreland’s enormous voice never overshadows the small moments documented in his songs. In the past, his lyrical terrain—busted faith, regret, the losers in every fight—read as textbook “country,” earning him an opening spot for Jason Isbell and praise from Miranda Lambert. But the y’alternative marketing sometimes overpowered his increasingly experimental and genre-resistant songbook. On LP5, there’s no mistaking it, with its resulting mix of swamp-dunked soul, elevated AOR chords, thick grooves, multi-tracked vocals, drum machine clicks, and hovering ambient synths. Moreland’s heartland visions of devils, heretics, and existential discomfort were already kaleidoscopic; LP5 mutates his sound to match.
Opener “Harder Dreams” starts by zooming as far out on the map as the screen will go, to a celestial kingdom where gods watch human drama on TV, placing bets on the outcomes of wars and other mortal complications. Moreland’s last album, 2017’s Big Bad Luv, released by British indie label 4AD, seemed to reflect the mood of a country disillusioned by its institutions. “Harder Dreams” picks up the conversation, forgoing any exposition about the state of the nation to cut directly to the disconnect. “What good’s a letter in a language you can’t read,” Moreland asks, baffled as to how to communicate across the vastness.
It’s not the only time the gods, or just the Christian one, appear. Moreland was raised in the church, and though he doesn’t consider himself religious, the language of the faith you grew up in is hard to shake, and it dots these songs like little black circles. There’s a strain of Christianity that effectively teaches a person how to hate themselves, cementing a feeling of worthlessness and a distrust of your own body. Moreland recognizes its manifestation from a mile away: “You gave me a restlessness/Lives deep down in my soul/And a pretty good reason to keep right on being alone,” he sings on “Terrestrial.”
Moreland’s no stranger to mining his woes for good songs, and that kind of pain and apostate self-hatred could fill an entire album. But recognizing the damage wrought by toxic theology is just his starting point. “As a child, I repented my nature,” Moreland sings. As an adult, he suggests we leave that kind of thinking behind. Is hell all we can imagine for others because it’s all we can imagine for ourselves? Moreland thinks we might be capable of telling a better, more helpful story.
A few of Moreland’s best songs here grapple with the struggle to excise damnation from his personal lexicon. Over the the funky choogle of “A Thought Is Just a Passing Train,” he describes shame as a cancer. “Go easy on your heart,” he adds, following up that sentiment with “I’m Learning How to Tell Myself the Truth,” a composition about untangling infernal knots. It might not be possible to let go of the ache completely, Moreland admits on “When My Fever Breaks,” a gorgeous love song he began writing while dating visual artist Pearl Rachinsky, and finished years later, after their marriage. “But darling when you reach for me/It feels just like infinity,” Moreland sings, able to forgo his propensity for “howling at the universe” long enough to allow a moment of transcendence.
Moreland’s songs have long dwelled in the contested middle ground between doing the right thing and not being able to figure out what the right thing is. On LP5, he articulates what it feels like to get it, however briefly, and let go. And he doesn’t always need words to do so. Near the end of the album sits a stirring instrumental, “For Ichiro,” an ode to outfielder Ichiro Suzuki. Though less than two minutes long, its bubbling synths and plinking piano—part Satie, part Japanese “environmental music,” part Joe Jackson “Steppin’ Out” sparkle—evoke the feeling of uplift. Moreland follows it with the record’s most overt country song, the acoustic guitar, harmonica, and organ reverie “Let Me Be Understood.” The song coasts on “For Ichiro”’s trade winds: “Friend I’ve been restless/I’ve been unwell/But I have a heartbeat and a trial to tell,” he sings. The mysteries of the “monumental yonder” will still be here tomorrow. Sometimes salvation means just staying alive and never giving up on those trying to do the same.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The death-metal trio is at its most complex on this pair of companion albums. Beneath the labyrinthine riffs lies some of the group’s sharpest, most distinctive music yet.

Anthronomicon / Helionomicon

There’s a riff that resurfaces throughout Ulthar’s two new companion albums, mutating into different shapes over the course of the combined records’ 80 minutes. It’s a descending, rapid-picked four-note motif that crashes down with all the devastating fury of cosmic debris raining from the sky. Throughout Anthronomicon and Helionomicon, the death-metal stalwarts wind the riff up and release it again in new forms—compressing it, stretching it out, raising it up and down octaves, always retaining its harrowing power. Each time it returns, it’s like sinking back into the same ceaseless nightmare, the kind you can’t wake up from.
Anthronomicon and Helionomicon constitute Ulthar’s most ambitious statements. Until now, the band’s output has largely resembled an exercise in ugliness. The trio—which includes members from Mastery, Tombs, and Vastum—practices a style of pummeling, blackened death metal, alternating between throat-tearing shrieks and gurgling roars over a stampede of riffs. But on this pair of albums, Ulthar take the form of planetary journeymen: Their guitar melodies are more melodic than ever, and they fire off in all directions at once, as if leading the listener down a reality-distorting wormhole. The band has never sounded so technically dense, its constantly morphing time signatures calling to mind Chthe‘ilist’s noxious odysseys, or Gorguts’ swirling fret workouts. Beneath the twisted complexity lies some of the band’s sharpest, most distinctive music yet.
Across both albums, Ulthar largely pick one approach—churning, never-ending death-metal riffage—and stick to it. If 80 minutes of this sounds like a lot, it is. Dividing these records into two separate albums, as opposed to billing them as one double LP, feels purposeful, as though acknowledging that spending more than 40 minutes in this world is a daunting task. But in halved doses, Ulthar’s gnarled, writhing sound proves deadly.
Running through eight tracks in 40 minutes, Anthronomicon is the more potent of the two; shorter song lengths offer concentrated opportunities for Ulthar to demonstrate their melodic capabilities. “Cephalophore” announces the band’s arrival with a triumphant opening riff, stomping into a chugging midsection that alternates between galloping chords and atonal plunges into the lower end of the fretboard. Shelby Lermo’s guitar tone has a staticky crunch to it—a cross between Entombed’s trademark buzzsaw timbre and the hiss of old Darkthrone—and “Fractional Fortresses” funnels this crackling distortion into a sickly opening riff whose feedback hangs in the air over the song’s first 15 seconds. After a minute spent plowing ahead atop a classic black-metal charge, the first instance of that recurring thematic riff appears, acting like a searing chorus for the song between dives back into the muck.
Death-metal albums often live or die according to how successfully they can avoid sheer repetitiveness, and for the most part, Anthronomicon keeps the ideas coming. Halfway through “Flesh Propulsion,” just when it begins to feel like the album may be rehashing itself, Ulthar drop the floor out from underneath with a delirious thrash-metal breakdown. When that starts getting too comfortable, the trio begins deploying one coiled pitch-bend after another, bringing the song to a wickedly dissonant conclusion. “Saccades,” a highlight of the entire two-album project, voyages between unholy tech-death onslaughts and moments of pure ghoulish bliss; Steve Peacock’s croaking howl could keep Gollum up at night. The band soon follows it with a droning passage of alien ambience, hinting at the interstellar abyss to come on LP number two.
Where Anthonomicon focuses Ulthar’s ambitions, Helionomicron unravels them into a sprawling universe of ideas. Like Blood Incantation’s psychedelic sagas, the two tracks on Helionomicron operate on a gradual build, laying the groundwork over cresting 10-minute stretches before finally exploding into frenzied peaks. Wading through those extended arcs can get tiresome, but when it works, the payoff is remarkable. On “Helionomicron,” Lermo and Peacock really dig into the recurring four-note melody, adding garish flourishes and ritualistically pulling it apart over the track’s first seven minutes. After a drifting synth interlude, the track roars back to life in its thrashing second half, bringing its many puzzle pieces together for one thrilling final blitz.
Comparatively, “Anthronomicron” never quite achieves the same layered sense of cohesion. Over the course of its 20 minutes, Ulthar continue to dip back into their cauldron, pulling forth craven black-metal riffs, grinding blast beats, and yet another extended iteration of that recurring guitar melody—but no matter what they try, it can’t help but feel exhausting. As hypnotizing as being trapped in an endless void of demonic licks can be, the majority of the riffs on the second half of Helionomicron sound like restatements of what the band has played already, albeit with less energy than before. When the album finally reaches its conclusion with a four-minute drone of eerie extraterrestrial noise, it’s a relief.
Taken together, these two LPs demand a serious investment—one that may not always completely justify itself. Even so, Anthronomicon and Helionomicon represent a great leap forward for Ulthar. More than ever before, the trio has located a sweet spot between the soaring melodies of black metal and the skull-crushing beatdown of death metal, locking into an airtight group dynamic and crafting some of the band’s most peculiar, abstract riffs yet. Ulthar’s operative mode may be one relentless, full-scale assault, with little in the way of reprieve. But what an assault it is.


The Detroit rapper channels the lawless energy of mixtape Nicki and Wayne on his latest.

Brolik

Detroit rapper and world-class shit-starter Sada Baby paints his hometown as a cutthroat circus on par with Gotham City—and himself as its reigning supervillain. He’s a performer and showman, taunting foes and innocent bystanders alike with the demented glee of a classic wrestling heel, and his new tape, Brolik, helps solidify him as the unlikely usurper of the throne in rap’s most competitive city.
Sada raps like someone who hands out tapes from his trunk around 7 Mile, and as if to underscore his local-(anti-)hero status, his releases are becoming less and less accessible online. Whoop Tape was uploaded only to his SoundCloud page, and Brolik can be listened to exclusively through the mixtape database DatPiff (and its corresponding YouTube channel). Fittingly, his projects have the raw, unbottled prowess of the Lil Wayne and Nicki Minaj mixtape runs, and on Brolik, Sada sounds like he could rap forever.
At his best, Sada straddles the line between hilarious and intimidating. Brolik finds the perfect balance between the two: It has the enthusiasm (and by association, the tomfoolery) of his more high-powered verses, yowled as if he were cutting a promo (“8 Legged Ape”), and the more sinister snarl of his grimmest provocations (“Bison Dele”). One moment, he’s a self-proclaimed Krampus terrorizing foes on Christmas, the next he’s pulling pistols out in public and giving out halos. Over the keyboard-powered bounce of frequent collaborators RJ Lamont and Helluva, his flow sounds spring-loaded.
His punchlines aren’t as remarkable as on Bartier Bounty, but the imagery is often just as absurd: he’s spoon-feeding hollow-tips like they’re baby food; his money looks like caesar chicken salad. “Never fuck with a mask ‘cause Jim Carrey ain’t no street nigga,” he barks on “WWF.” He compares himself to Mr. Fantastic and Spock in a three-bar span. There isn’t a single moment where he isn’t completely certain of himself or of your inferiority.
For all Sada Baby’s singular showmanship, his 2018 single with fellow Detroit street rapper Drego “Bloxk Party” was proof that he works just as well in collaboration. He is comfortable on Brolik no matter who the dance partner is, able to attune himself to their movements and match their energy. On songs like “The Big Red Whoop” and “Triple Threat Match,” he moves in lockstep with lesser rappers like FMB DZ and ShittyBoyz BabyTon, working with and not around them. On the exhilarating “Mood,” Sada rips through a devastating, hookless verse while his partner and hype man Skilla Baby just eggs him on.
Brolik is full of patented Sada puffery, but there are a few affecting moments hidden in the margins, hinting at a poignant origin story. “Anything a street nigga been through, I done went through it,” he raps on “Mood,” and there are plenty of indicators most of those experiences have been traumatic. He can be brutally honest about addiction (“I really live that pill life/I ain’t glorifying, it’s horrifying; it feels right”), and he presents rap as his salvation: “I remember I was broke as shit/I remember I ain’t have hope for shit/’Member couldn’t hit the road for shit/Now I can’t get home for shit,” he raps on “Kut N Kordial.” It’s these memories of hardship that seem to fuel his ferocity.


The singer-songwriter’s latest album is steeped in Caribbean texts that have influenced her musicianship. In its shades of love and grief, it sounds like life as it arrives.

Una Rosa

Xenia Rubinos didn’t think she’d be able to make music again. After a period of extensive touring and personal hardship, she visited a curandero, who saw in her a “pérdida de espíritu”—loss of spirit. It’s now been five years since her last album, Black Terry Cat, and her third project, Una Rosa, isn’t a neat bookend to the period in between, nor is it a balm or salve. It’s better, truer to the joy and pain of the past that flicker into the present like unwelcome thoughts.
In its shades of love and grief, Una Rosa sounds like life as it arrives. It’s also a record steeped in Caribbean texts that have influenced Rubinos’ musicianship, alongside the jazz, hip-hop, and R&B that shaped her first two albums. And it’s her first project to cite its Latin sources so consistently and directly, adding another texture to the spirit of struggle that runs through her best-known work.
While Rubinos has always been a futurist, Una Rosa comprises very particular Caribbean reference points of the past. A melancholy flute plays a music-box version of Puerto Rican composer José Enrique Pedreira’s danza “Una Rosa,” the same melody a young Rubinos heard from her great-grandmother’s flower lamp—the album’s main visual inspiration. Rubinos hums the tune as if trying to recall its origin. Bright, icy synths cure the memory. Elsewhere, there’s the corta venas bolero “Ay Hombre”; the ad for spiritualist Santiago Aranegui’s radio program about “the mysteries of the universe” at the end of “Cógelo Suave”; the echo of an old Cuban yambú floating over the worker’s lament of “Working All the Time.” The clave often grounds the album, as on “Sacude,” which builds into a limpieza around the mantra of “Sacude sacude y Dios que me ayude,” with Rubinos as the sonero of her invented rumba.
Then there’s the spiritual bath of synthesizers, modulation, and even Psycho strings—the dark, electronic-acoustic interplay that has kept Rubinos’ music so undefinable. Her layering of the personal and political runs counter to the labels she’s resisted as a Latinx artist throughout her career. Released last October, “Who Shot Ya?” is a silvery condemnation of police and the cops who killed Breonna Taylor, the detention of children at the U.S.-Mexico border, and the wealthy who reap profit on stolen land. The song interpolates Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff” alongside verses from poet José Martí’s “Yo soy un hombre sincero” and a fanged allusion to Héctor Lavoe’s 1976 salsa “Hacha y Machete,” a song about strength in community. The liberationist implications of each are here compiled into a call to action: “Alguien preguntará más tarde/Que hiciste?/Hacha y machete/O dormiste?” (“Someone will ask later/What did you do?/Axe and machete/Or did you sleep?”).
These musical pieces fit seamlessly into Rubinos’ inventory of memories, her urge toward complexity directed as far inward as outward. “Don’t Put Me in Red” opens with a series of increasingly urgent wordless vocalizations—given subtitles like “mispronounced misspelled misunderstood” in the music video—and expands into a ballad about the red “Latina lighting” Rubinos is often placed in while performing: “the color you think I’ve spent my life in,” she sings.
Across the album, Rubinos doesn’t need to name her feelings for them to be realized. Often, it’s just the shape of an emotion stuck in the throat. “Did My Best” is a trick candle of grief whose vocals expand slower and with more uncertainty than the steady synth loop behind them. “I never thought I’d have to write this song,” she sings. On “What Is This Voice?,” she ends the album by repeating the fragment “I am so/I am so,” unhurried. Like the rest of Una Rosa, the phrases don’t beg to be whole, only felt.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Wave 1, the first new material from Com Truise, aka Seth Haley, in two years, plants itself at the intersection of synth-funk, electro, and fussy 80s computer-pop. On the EP, Haley seems unconcerned with the trends of the day, blissfully mining Reagan-era pop at its most meticulous.

Wave 1

In 2011, Seth Haley's Com Truise couldn't have been more of-the-moment. A vintage-synth freak with a nostalgic moniker diving headlong into the sounds of 1983? In that long, hazy comedown from 2009's summer of chillwave, Haley was practically popping a wheelie on the zeitgeist. He took full advantage, too, offering up the superb Cyanide Sisters EP and the almost-as-good Galactic Melt LP in the same calendar year. But, apart from 2012's soggy early-days comp In Decay, we've heard next to nothing from him in the interim. Wave 1, Com Truise's new seven-song EP, is the first in a planned series that, as Haley told DazedDigital, concerns "the world’s first Synthetic Astronaut on this journey to a planet—each release represents the next stage in his journey." The chrome-plated, pristine Wave 1 plants itself at the intersection of synth-funk, electro, and fussy 80s computer-pop. Haley, returning from a two-year absence, seems content to reemerge as a man out of time: unconcerned with the trends of the day, blissfully mining Reagan-era pop at its most meticulous.
Opener "Wasat" whirrs to a start like a spaceship preparing for hyperdrive. Just 15 seconds in, and it's all systems go: a punctilious synth stutters like a long-lost Bambaataa track while a couple more streak past in a flash of light. The needly high-register synth and burbling bass at the center of "Mind" are almost conversant, trading garbled interstellar transmissions atop the crackling of the drum machine. Haley's fastidious—forever searching for the perfect beat—and even his fizziest synth never seems to trail too far afield. In the past, his exacting approach has occasionally tipped over into rigidity. But on Wave 1, his chosen sonic touchstones—whether it's pre-Purple Rain Prince or Cupid and Psyche-era Scritti Politti—share his fondness for clean lines, sharp edges, and inorganic rhythms. Haley's fussiness persists, but on Wave 1, he comes by it honestly.
Wave 1 peaks with "Declination", a slick, bright-as-the-sun pop deconstruction with vocals from Ford & Lopatin's Joel Ford. Haley's never quite known what to do with vocals, but Ford's an ideal fit for the otherwise all-instrumental Wave 1, his roboticized falsetto sliding its way into the nooks and crannies of the bustling track, bringing some curious new shades to the all-pastel palette. Haley's never seemed particularly concerned with innovation; as Andrew Gaerig wrote in his review of In Decay, he's a "grid-worshipping…pure stylist," more interested in playing within the lines than expanding on them. By injecting a little human warmth into this carefully delineated, fiercely technical music, Ford does as much to push Wave 1's sound forward as Haley himself.
Apart from the the splattering "I Would Die 4 U" drum patterns sitting underneath "Miserere Mei", Wave 1's post-"Declination" tracks find Haley retreating into the tried-and-true: burbling bass, squelchy zero-gravity synths, blunt-ride rhythms. These songs are sleek and glorious-sounding, each squiggle and thump given its own space. But, by leaving no space for error, Haley also doesn't allow much room for feeling, and after a half an hour of vaccum-sealed rhythms, a skipped beat or a flubbed intro never sounded so right. After a few years of silence, Haley's still a stickler for detail, still more concerned with perfection than innovation, still mixing up "crisp" and "mechanical." But by burrowing down into a few key sounds rather than stiffly approximating a dozen-plus, the intermittently funky, unshakably finicky Wave 1 is a mostly welcome return.


Kings of Leon's schtick is that they have no schtick: They're just four stand-up guys who happen to ...

Aha Shake Heartbreak

Kings of Leon's schtick is that they have no schtick: They're just four stand-up guys who happen to be in a rock band. They're from a small town in eastern Tennessee; three of them are brothers and the fourth is a cousin; the brothers are minister's kids; all four were home-schooled. All of which marks them as outsiders-- people untouched by industry politics or expectations who are just playing rock'n'roll 'cause they're livin' it, man! But Kings of Leon's insistence on their own honest naturalism-- from their time-capsule haircuts to Caleb Followill's overexpressive vocals to their terrible album titles-- seems disingenuous, especially in a genre (Southern rock) that prizes realness and grumbles at pretensions. The Followill clan wouldn't last a week in The Drive-By Truckers' Dirty South.
Aha Shake Heartbreak, the follow-up to last year's bewilderingly well-received Youth and Young Manhood, is an update on the previous album's Southern bar-band rock, with just enough Nuggets-style pop chops to impress hipsters and critics. If the hooks aren't as good this time, the songs are more sculpted and succinct, with a greater sense of urgency and economy. On the other hand, these dozen tracks don't really mean anything. Sure, they're about stuff like women and being in a band, but they sound deeply impersonal, and often obligatory in their lazy misogyny ("Cunts watch their bodies, no room for make up") and lazier obtuseness ("He's so the purity, the shaven and the mourning"-- even Beck is more coherent). Caleb sings about a girl with an "hourglass body" who "has problems with drinking milk and being school tardy/ She'll loan you her toothbrush/ She'll bartend your party," but it doesn't sound like he actually knows anyone like that. Instead, the song's about a rock'n'roll archetype-- the wild heartbreaker, the man-eater, the endearing groupie-- and it never manages to transcend the blandly conceptual.
Elsewhere, the lyrics are so self-referential they're almost narcissistic. Songs like "Slow Night, So Long" and "Four Kicks" are about what hard-livin' good ol' boys the Followills are. In particular, "Soft" is stupid sex wordplay that would be insulting if it weren't so self-deprecating: "I'm passed out in your garden...I'd pop myself in your body/ I'd come into your party but I'm soft." One word: eww. Another favorite topic is the harsh realities of endless touring and low-level fame, as if having a major-label promote you and Dave Eggers worship you in print are such hardships. But on "Day Old Blues" Caleb observes that "Girls are gonna love the way I toss my hair/ Boy are going to hate the way I seem." This boy in particular thinks that's the key to what makes this band such a bunch of fakes: They're more interested in appearances than in their music. Those haircuts don't appear anywhere in nature.
On the other hand, maybe it's just the way Caleb sings that and every other line on Aha Shake Heartbreak. He is a terrible singer, like a drunken Randy Newman with Tourette's-- which would be a compliment if it didn't make you expect more intelligent lyrics. On just about every song here he lets loose a flurry of words in some bizarre approximation of backwater sass, but it just sounds willful and grating. On "Day Old Blues", he turns some lyrics into almost scat-like utterances while painfully overenunciating others. He's shooting for some sort of Southern-slash-Appalachian accent, but ultimately he defies geography and just sounds unnatural.
The album's one redeeming element is the band itself, who-- over the course of one EP and two albums-- have improved tenfold. They're tighter, more dynamic, and much more confident on Aha Shake Heartbreak than they were on Youth and Young Manhood. Granted, they still sound like they're descended from The Strokes and other garage bands rather than from southern royalty like Lynyrd Skynyrd or even Southern pop like The Gants or The Scruffs. Their boogie may have crawled out of Williamsburg instead of some backwater swamp, but Nathan, Jared, and Matthew Followill manage to incorporate vintage elements into their music without sounding overly nostalgic (which is the pitfall of soundalikes Thee Shams). "Slow Night, So Long" finds a twist ending in a slow coda, and songs like "The Bucket" and "Razz" pop and bounce elastically. With its hand-claps and staccato guitars, "Taper Jean Girl" struts such undeniable bad-ass energy that you may find yourself singing along, although you'll want to make up your own words.


Space Zone is the debut album from 18-year-old David Davis, a Chicago-based producer inextricably tied to his hometown's faster-than-fast and repetitive genre of footwork. While he's still grounded in the genre, his best moments here find him exploring outside its boundaries.

Space Zone

Space Zone is the debut album from 18-year-old David Davis, aka Young Smoke. The Chicago-based producer is inextricably tied to his hometown's faster-than-fast and repetitive genre of footwork; Davis is one of the producers linked with Chicago's Flight Musik collective, which is headed up by DJ Diamond, who issued a solid footwork album under that name on UK label Planet Mu. That imprint has spent the last several years making a case for footwork as a genre that transcends functional dance music, in part through their Bangs & Works compilation series; Davis contributed two songs, "Psycho War" and "Wouldn't Get Far", to last year's second installment. Both fit nicely within footwork's sonic constraints; the former is all cinematic strings and maniacal metallic-popcorn percussion, while the latter rides an inspired vocal lick and throws it through various levels of filter.
Given his background, it's understandable to think of Davis as a footwork producer, but Space Zone is something different. The record finds Davis using the genre as a launchpad into weirder territory. The brown-sound frequencies and tightly looped rhythms are still present, but they're placed lower in the mix to dampen their intensity. On a few tracks, you barely notice that they're there at all. Space Zone also shows that Davis has a neon-streaked sense of humor. The title track features a warm, melodic voice intoning, "Welcome to the space zone," as lasers and video-game explosions bounce off of rubbery walls. Elsewhere, you get claustrophobic klaxons, blastoff noises, launchpad countdowns, and robotic voices issuing warnings about "countermeasures." After a particularly stoner-friendly run of cuts on the album's backend, a more traditional footwork number arrives in the form of "High Den a Mother Fucka". Its title underscores the fact that the target audience for this thing probably wouldn't be able to move their feet very fast without doubling into a wheezing cough.
Space Zone's closest analog in modern dance music may be Zomby's epochal Where Were U in '92?,  trading that album's 'ardcore fixation with a focus on hard-hitting juke. Both records showcase a freewheeling ADD-addled sense of speed, with idiosyncratic sounds peppered throughout to keep it fresh. So it's ironic that Davis' most intriguing work comes when he slows things down, from the placid synths and drippy rhythmic squelch of "Space Breeze" to the dreamy synth drift of "Liquid Drug". Here Boards of Canada is the obvious comparison, not so much in actual form but in how he creates cloudy billows of atmosphere that retain a basic level of engagement.
Davis is young and Space Zone sounds like the work of a young artist. A promising young artist, but someone still figuring out his own sound. I've spoken with others about how this record compares to another Planet Mu release from this year from within Chicago's juke scene-- veteran Traxman's hallucinatory, melody-minded Da Mind of Traxman. But ultimately these releases have different aims. While Traxman's expression of songcraft matches and, at times, exceeds the speedy pop burps of DJ Roc's excellent 2010 release The Crack Capone, Young Smoke's not trying to push things forward. Instead, he's trying to take the genre somewhere it hasn't really gone yet, by introducing new textures, giving his productions more space and room to breathe, and infusing the results with a dose of humor. Whether or not he gets there remains to be seen, but joining him on the ride provides its own level of fascination.


At his best, Purling Hiss frontman Mike Polizze simultaneously embraces, tweaks, and subverts all kinds of vintage garage, punk, and grunge moves. This is their most classic-rock record so far.

High Bias

Rock tropes form the language that Philadelphia’s Purling Hiss speaks, and they’ve been fluent for a while. Most of their songs cook up repetitive riffs, three-chord melodies, and simple lyrics sung in both impassioned shouts and cool monotones. At his best, frontman and songwriter Mike Polizze—who began Purling Hiss as a solo project—simultaneously embraces, tweaks, and subverts all kinds of vintage garage, punk, and grunge moves. When his band hits that sweet spot, you feel like you’ve heard all this stuff before, but somehow not exactly like this.
There’s not much subversion on High Bias, Purling Hiss’s sixth album. Their music has always exuded a retro aura, but this is their most classic-rock record so far. In a few instances, it sounds like the band is role-playing: take the convincing Ramones costumes they don in “Get Your Way,” with Polizze stoically singing about “the rock‘n’roll boogie woogie twist and shout.” But even at their most homage-heavy, Purling Hiss muster enough distinctive personality to evade mimicry. And what High Bias lacks in surprise, it makes up for in hooks.
During the album’s best stretches, the hooks seem to never stop. The soaring “Fever” and the revving “Ostinato Musik” feel spacious enough to drive an 18-wheeler through, while the acoustic-tinted “Follow You Around” evokes a ’60s nugget filtered through stoner vibes (and, again, Ramones nostalgia). Hints of the ’90s surface in the hard-grunge riffs of “3000 AD,” delivered with conviction rather than slack distance. In fact, Polizze’s devotion to his material is stronger than ever on High Bias. He’s always been assured and committed, but here he’s settled fully into his skill set, like a craftsman whose easy mastery hides the years of work it took to get there.
High Bias does have its share of sweat, though. Hard-cranked tunes like “Notion Sickness” and “Pulsations” speed and blast like motorcycles stuck above 65. The strain in those tracks can be exhausting, but the sturdiness is impressive, especially in Polizze’s brief but combustive solos. The same goes for “Everybody in the USA,” which engages in another rock trope: the extended, album-ending jam, culminating in six minutes of instrumental amp-burning. That track might test the patience of anyone not already inclined towards Purling Hiss’s well-versed rock devotion, but if you’re happy to ride some riffs into the sunset, High Bias is a worthwhile trip.