Though written during the throes of identity crisis and recovery, the official debut from Boston-based indie-folk artist Anjimile Chithambo radiates the happiness and pride that come with stability.

Giver Taker

Boston-based singer-songwriter Anjimile Chithambo’s life changed when they realized they could rebuild themself. Born in a Dallas suburb to conservative, Presbyterian immigrants from Malawi, the 27-year-old indie-folk artist, who records mononymously as Anjimile, spent the past decade whittling away at music as a hobby-turned-coping method. The experience of coming out to their parents as queer eventually inspired “Maker,” a song that compares a redefinition of gender to one of faith—and paved the way for Giver Taker, their first album on Father/Daughter. Written during the throes of a personal decline and recorded after reaching safety on the other side, Giver Taker recounts a difficult climb to sobriety, the loss of loved ones, and the gradual understanding of their identity as a nonbinary trans person. It’s not the struggles that define the album, but rather the joy and resilience that permeates it.
A grant from a local arts group gave Anjimile the budget to create Giver Taker the way they envisioned: by hiring longtime bandmate Justine Bowe of synthpop group Photocomfort and New York-based artist and producer Gabe Goodman. Together, Bowe and Goodman add layered depth to Anjimile’s compositions: Sunlight peeks through piano chords on the title track, strings and bass clarinet shimmer throughout “In Your Eyes,” and vocal harmonies enliven “Baby No More.” Childhood favorites like Madonna and Zimbabwean musician Oliver Mtukudzi surface in Anjimile’s pop refrains and African polyrhythms, while their teenage appreciation for Iron & Wine influences their approach to finger-picked guitar. Though the album was primarily written while in rehab and experiencing a quiet identity crisis, Giver Taker proceeds with the radiant happiness and pride that come with securing a sense of stability in life. Even when they quote Shakespeare in the heartfelt ballad “Ndimakukonda” (the title means “I love you” in Chichewa, their parents’ native language), Anjimile emphasizes gratitude by reworking the love song to address friends instead of an ex-partner.
It’s hard not to compare Anjimile to a young Sufjan Stevens, both because of their warbling vocal deliveries and their ambiguously religious lyrics. While the songs on Giver Taker center around life experiences with family, grief, and love, a thread of faith weaves through each: the calls for help in “Not Another Word,” the stubborn refusal of death in “Your Tree,” the reckoning with hereditary traits in “1978.” Like Sufjan, Anjimile subverts the platitudes of Christian music by softly treading along the metaphoric ridge where spirituality adjoins hope. “I’ll walk the line to meet you there,” they promise at the album’s end, singing just above a whisper. Tucked throughout are soft piano, stirring banjo, and frail falsettos—the result of Anjimile’s first year taking testosterone—that recall the holistic intimacy of albums like Michigan and Seven Swans.
Though they’ve released several records over the past six years, Anjimile has declared Giver Taker to be their debut full-length. It’s a choice that reflects their significant growth in style and sound: Whereas their earlier material veered towards melodic art-rock, the music on Giver Taker sounds radically gentle and confident, as if made by someone who’s experienced a rebirth. Even the stripped-back reworkings of songs from 2018’s Colors and 2019’s Maker Mixtape feel revitalized. It’s most evident in “Maker,” a song that unfolds like a mantra of self-actualization: “I’m not just a boy, I’m a man/I’m not just a man, I’m a god/I’m not just a god, I’m a maker.” A transcendental evolution from gender identity to spiritual calling and, finally, to creative purpose, it’s the centerpiece of Giver Taker, the album where Anjimile takes pride in their voice and the person they’ve become.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The darkly austere alt-country group Freakwater has kept their simple, gothic sound consistent through the years, but on their eighth album they overhaul it almost completely. It's their most cinematic album yet, with the music functioning almost as a soundtrack to their short, violent songs.

Scheherazade

When Freakwater made their first recordings in the late '80s, they set a template that would serve them well for the next 27 years: a darkly austere country sound rooted in the sisterly harmonies of Catherine Irwin and Janet Beveridge Bean. Making good use of a minimal backing band—often just their own guitars and an upright bass, with flourishes of pedal steel and electric guitar—they updated the downcast vocals of the Carter Family and wrote songs set in some alternate-reality American past. It seemed like there was a ghost or a corpse on every album. Freakwater had a simple, yet powerful palette to match the Appalachian gothic tone, and that combination has kept the band alive and relevant even as many of their alt-country peers have fallen by the wayside. Their best albums—especially 1995’s Old Paint—sound less like products of a particular scene and more like the sepia-toned recordings of eccentric artists dislocated from history.
Even when they’ve put a full decade between albums, Bean and Irwin have never strayed far from their recognizable sound or their bleak subject matter. But on Scheherazade, their eighth album overall and their first since 2005, they overhaul it dramatically: For the first time since they recorded demos in the Bean's parents’ basement, they ventured out of Chicago and recorded in Louisville, the city with which the band has long been identified. They also recruited a slew of Northern Kentucky musicians, including Sarah Balliet from Murder by Death, Morgan Geer form Drunken Prayer, and Evan Patterson of Young Widows. Noted Louisville resident Will Oldham doesn’t show up, disproving my theory that he is required by law to play on every local release. On the other hand, Warren Ellis of the Dirty Three and the Bad Seeds does play violin and flute.
It’s the largest cast and crew they’ve assembled under the Freakwater banner, and as a result, Scheherazade sounds fuller and looser, a bit rougher around the edges, with more rock in the arrangements. It’s their most cinematic album yet, with the music functioning almost as a soundtrack to Irwin and Bean’s short, violent songs. On the very first song, "What the People Want," somebody throws a baby down a well, accompanied by tense swirls of strings. On "Down Will Come Baby," they rewrite the old, twisted lullaby "Rock-a-bye Baby," and the band navigates a series of key changes that lends a vertiginous effect, as though the cradle is in freefall.
The presence of so many imperiled infants on Scheherazade is oddly reassuring, a nice reminder that this is a Freakwater album after all. The tight harmonies that marked their previous efforts here come slightly unraveled; they sing against each other as often as with each other. These are some of their most visceral performances, as rough-hewn on quiet numbers like "Ghost Song" as one heavier numbers like "Take Me With You," which features roof-raising hollers by Bean. There’s something invigorating about hearing two alt-country veterans take apart their tried-and-true sound and reassemble it slightly askew, and Scheherazade is not only their most modern-sounding record; it might be their best since Old Paint.


On his latest nine-track triumph, the Griselda star finds an easy chemistry with Harry Fraud, whose syrupy samples lend poignancy to these stories of hustling and survivor’s remorse.

Benny the Butcher / Harry Fraud: The Plugs I Met 2

The Plugs I Met 2

Like executors of a late painter’s estate, Griselda operates markets of self-imposed scarcity: $60 screen-printed hoodies, $200 limited-press vinyl, thrift store Wrestlemania gear showcased like lots in a Sotheby’s auction. Of late, Benny the Butcher has ratcheted up the entrepreneurial spirit, enjoining Facebook fans to “get paid with me” via crypto-based schemes. An acolyte of Jay-Z’s pre-“retirement” oeuvre, Benny internalized the elder rapper’s ideal of hustling as a stepping stone to the C-suite. But as Griselda approached rap stardom, even that ladder had been pulled up: there’s no modern-day equivalent to heavy rotation on turn-of-the-century Hot 97 or 106 & Park, just like there’s no analogue for the working, touring musician in the age of COVID and Spotify. It makes a certain sense that the heir of ‘97 Hov would also be a Facebook scammer. What is drug dealing if not a pyramid scheme? How else are we supposed to get rich now?
The latter question looms ominously over The Plugs I Met 2, a nine-track triumph produced by Harry Fraud. Benny is rarely regretful, but his diaristic verses cast back forlornly, weighing risks and consequences like someone who’s narrowly avoided a wreck on the interstate. On “Survivor’s Remorse,” he considers his divergence with an old associate: “I thought about this rap shit and had to stick to the business/Changed my mind, he didn’t, now he doin’ 20 in Clinton.” Where so many of his peers rap about drug trafficking with a listless, stony-eyed fatalism, Benny establishes clear stakes and cause-and-effect throughlines. Over the course of an album, these endless calculations build into something like a manifesto. “Close my eyes and the voice in my eardrums tell me, ‘fore the feds come/To turn these breadcrumbs to a hedge fund,” he rhymes forebodingly on the intro.
Plugs 2 is haunted by casualties of wrong-place-wrong-time (that Benny salvaged a guest verse from Chinx, a charismatic Queens rapper murdered in 2015, is almost too on-the-nose), but Fraud’s lush production makes it an archly buoyant affair. With Benny, Fraud finds the chemistry that’s eluded him on work with Action Bronson, who demands the spotlight, and French Montana, who makes his producers do the heavy lifting. Fraud’s syrupy samples assume poignancy in the company of Benny’s melancholy street rhymes, his spacious percussion a welcome change of pace from the flinty loops Griselda usually favors. The winding, layered arrangements reveal intricate details, such as the rich transition between pre-chorus and hook on “Overall” and the subtle beat switches deployed throughout “Live By It.”
The ’97-vintage Jay-Z that Benny idolizes had learned to live with regrets, briefly enjoying the spoils of stardom before morphing into the board room-dwelling robber baron of his later catalog. Accordingly, Plugs 2 maintains a smirking joie de vivre—just so long as you’re on the right side of it. On “Live By It,” Benny dons a UPS driver’s khaki uniform in order to facilitate a home invasion, because “A record deal will get you lit, but a robbery makes you super famous.” His rags-to-riches setups are always relayed with a knowing wink: “This magic that I’m making, Pyrex classes was my major/It’s hard to tell a butterfly from caterpillar stages.” He doesn’t second-guess his choices or suffer crises of faith, mostly because he can’t afford to.
Admittedly, it’s total catnip for tri-state rap purists. In addition to Chinx’s exuberant posthumous appearance, there are guest spots from French Montana and Rick Hyde; around the tape’s halfway point, Fat Joe wanders into the frame and rhymes “pipe dreams” with “Weinstein.” But Benny and his collaborators never stoop to empty homage. “Longevity” has the most enthralling Jim Jones verse in years, delivered from the perspective of a grizzled veteran who, glory days behind him, has begun to fear obsolescence. His recollections are relayed in an uneasy wheeze: “If you a hustler in the street, well, here’s some candid advice/Dope is an iPhone wet, to save it, you jam it in rice/But you probably never cooked up a thousand grams of the white.” It’s like the wistful final act of every mafia movie—half the wiseguys are washed-up dads, the other half are six feet under, and distance throws everything into devastating relief.
In happier times, Benny wouldn’t make a very sympathetic protagonist: he’s a bully who neither relishes nor laments a life of organized crime. But as in the most riveting contemporary grifter sagas, there’s a vicarious, revenge-fantasy thrill in a shameless crook betraying the trust and institutions that failed the rest of us. There’s nothing left to lose and everything to gain.

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At turns soulful and spirited, the debut album from the British singer balances rabble-rousing political energy with a nonchalant chumminess.

English Rose

Connie Constance’s music has a neo-soul sheen and a bloody punk heart. Performing live last year, the British artist moved with Ari Up swagger: She wore pink eye makeup smeared like a bandit’s mask, mashed her feet to the floor, and let her colorful box braids fly. Yet her mutable singing voice can take on the measured care of jazz, and, on her debut album English Rose, convincingly pulls off spiky indie-disco anthems and melancholic pop as well. An unruly energy remains throughout, though, and at times Constance’s serrated rasp sounds like it could tear out of her throat.
Constance, 23, grew up in Watford, a green suburb at the tail end of the London tube line, where she’s said she felt like an “anomaly” as a mixed-race kid. English Rose’s title track revisits the gnawing feeling of being an outsider in your home country with a spare, subversive cover of the Jam’s 1978 song, originally a paean to a fair-skinned beauty. Constance’s should-be-definitive version takes the historically white privileging term “English rose” and refigures it as a symbol for the porous, prismatic nature of British identity. Another of the album’s lyrics sums up her inclusive point of view: “Our British blood ain’t all the same.”
Blunted vowels, dropped consonants, and liberal f-bombs lend a devil-may-care chumminess to Constance’s music, whether singing about relationship strife or airing insurgent political views. Her rakish edge fuels the anxiety-ridden “I Want Out,” where staccato speak-singing and two-tone ska synths construct a slam-poetry “Ghost Town” for the Brexit era. The guitar-driven “Bloody British Me” sends up armchair activists with a hot-blooded fury that’s no less vivid for a couple of lyrical clangers. (“Pick up the penny[...]/But I can’t buy a penny sweet,” she sings. Yes, we know: Everywhere is contactless now.) A nonchalantly lovely chorus is memorable for happier reasons, evoking Lily Allen’s ability to flip from sanguine to sly in the space of a beat. “Stuck in the mud/Can't move forward,” Constance sings sweetly, before raging, “Forward?/What's that?/Fuck that!”—a chant sure to animate any young, impassioned British crowd.
When not rabble-rousing, Constance’s voice takes on scratchy, sonorous depth that brings to mind the subterranean soul of fellow London artists Nilüfer Yanya and King Krule. In less individualistic hands (and with less swearing), the torchy piano ballad “Bad Vibes” could be shmaltz fit for a reality-show montage; on English Rose, it is a rough-cut gem. “Blooming in Solitude,” co-produced by Mura Masa, has a beat like ‘90s trip-hop stuck in reverse, and the lively Dave Okumu (The Invisible) co-write “Give & Take” recalls the wry hyper-literacy of ‘00s UK indie shape-throwers. Meanwhile, the bass groove and sultry sighs of “Yesterday” bring crimson sensuality: “We love like we’re animals,” she sings, one of the album’s many refreshingly frank takes on sex.
While Constance is adept at gear-shifting, English Rose might have felt stronger with a less scattered approach to genre. Still, the record is buoyed by her chameleonic voice and spry lyrical perspective; she co-writes on every song, excluding the Jam cover, adroitly shifting from indignation at systemic racism (“black boy in prison for selling a little green”) to poignant personal reflections on identity. “Same shades making me invisible,” she sings, a plaintive reflection on erasure. Constance’s work has also offered corrective: In a video for the luminous pop-soul single “Fast Cars,” she runs riot in a Marie Antoinette-esque pompadour, a pointed reminder of the central role of women of color throughout British history—a motivating impulse shared with filmmaker Amma Asante’s Belle, or millennium-era R&B star Jamelia’s baroque fantasy “Money.”
Constance’s outspoken mein brings to mind the recent work of black British writer Reni Eddo-Lodge, who powerfully dismantles the phrase “angry black woman” as symptomatic of white patriarchy’s “suffocating dominance and delicate fragility.” A new generation has no time to play that game: Constance sings of herself, with pride, “I can’t put a saddle on a wild beast.” On “Bloody British Me,” she is unapologetic about her ambition, secure in the power of sharp edges to leave a mark. “I won’t be tamed if I want a legacy for my name,” she sings, sounding carefree amid glimmering guitars. Constance’s liberated defiance indicates high promise as her musical focus sharpens; for now, hers is an entirely fresh take on youth in revolt.


Written and recorded in a guest-filled marathon session, the Texas legend’s second live outing with producer Statik Selektah carries a spirit of friendly competition.

Trillstatik 2

By rap standards, Bun B’s aged like merlot. Across a prolific career, he’s worn a number of hats—Gulf Coast underdog, chart-topping ambassador, grieving flagbearer—ultimately assuming the mantle of elder statesman. Now in his fourth decade of recording, he’s eased into the role of goodnatured mensch, an avowed wife guy who’s happy to share the spotlight with younger Houston-area acts. (There are Trillburgers to move, after all.)
Bun’s post-UGK catalog continues to grow at a steady clip. Through no fault of his own, he suffers a similar conundrum as Big Boi, whose commendable solo projects are outshadowed by OutKast’s cultural milestones. Ridin’ Dirty and Underground Kingz remain unsurpassed for their rare collision of genius; Bun’s latter-day records are distinguished by songwriting and beat selection, even if they lack the barbed humor and knotty internal rhymes of his groundbreaking work. For better or worse, they are workmanlike, hard-hat-and-lunch-pail rap albums.
Trillstatik 2 leans into Bun’s blue-collar ethic. Recorded during a 12-hour marathon, it’s his second live outing with Statik Selektah, the tireless DJ, producer, and satellite-radio host. Staged in a Lower East Side storefront aromatic of its usual tenant, a fried-chicken joint, the session featured upwards of a dozen rappers hopped up on complimentary tallboys of Monster Energy. Around 8 p.m., the street entrance was choked by a hundred thirtysomething men, clouded in fruit-scented vapor and angling for glimpses inside; you’d have thought a new Foamposite colorway dropped. By midnight, the spectacle had mellowed to a simmer, red-eyed technicians hovering while a saxophonist recorded interludes. In the middle was Bun, perched on a desk chair and scribbling into a lined notebook, 10 hours in and no worse for wear.
The finished product—uploaded to streaming not even a day later—bears little evidence of its spontaneity, a feat reflective of Statik’s broader philosophy. A spiritual disciple of DJ Premier, he’s maintained quality standards across a packed release calendar by programming bright samples into contemplative loops. While his cookie-cutter technique makes for a structural uniformity, his punchy melodies inject life into rigid drum patterns. On “Only Life I Know,” Statik wrangles a bedeviling guitar lick into an arrangement dour enough to make Harry Fraud blush; “Building Bridges” contrasts Paul Wall’s marble-mouthed couplets with ceremonial horns. Where the wistful chords of “Ain’t No Tellin” might have been overly maudlin, Statik slows the instrumental to a somber tempo suitable for 38 Spesh’s animated verse.
Statik’s beats suffer for their lack of edges. His layering technique makes for an uncanny digital polish, each sample clipped just so; the snares feel like an afterthought. It’s an identifiably East Coast approach, yet the music itself is shorn of regional character. On “Devastating,” Bun is shoehorned between Styles P’s precision and Propain’s Texas drawl, their idiosyncrasies sanded away in pursuit of some holier hip-hop ideal. It’s a neat party trick, but the effect is flattening: There’s no thematic coherence beyond a shared devotion to bars.
Sometimes that’s more than enough. Bun remains one of rap’s great voices, and his showmanship compensates for lyrics (“I hit Jamaica to politic with the Rastas/You hit Jamaica and order jerk chicken pasta”) written against the clock. With a family affair like Trillstatik 2, you take the good with the bad. You can’t, for instance, hold Papoose’s terrible punchlines on “Every Hour” against him—that’s just what he does. On “Acetone,” Boldy James turns in a typically brilliant verse over a solemn piano instrumental, toasting “Uncle Bun” as “UGK alumni”; when Bun clocks in, Statik switches out the percussion, washing the keys with a sturdy bassline in deference to his gravelly voice.
Trillstatik 2 can’t surmount the foibles of its many contributors (“Still wearin’ Yeezys, despite the controversy,” Flee Lord crows on “Only Life I Know”), but the abundance of middle-aged male energy makes for more of a cypher than a jam session. There’s an undeniable air of competition among ostensible collaborators, each rapper intent on outshining the next. So long as there’s a flame, these guys are eager to carry the torch.


Taylor Vick, a prolific Oakland songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, has made a generous and gorgeously empathetic chronicle of the aftermath of love.

Free Company

Music briefly deserted me last year after a boy kicked my heart in the ass. No song was capacious enough for all that I felt. Not a fists-in-the-air empowerment anthem, not a fuck-you punk tirade, not even a gently masochistic ballad. Obviously, the happy stuff was out, too: the grand swoon of Wolf Parade that had scored my daydreams; the Taylor Swift hook he sang to me that one afternoon, our legs swinging from the highest platform of a children’s playground. It was a little like that stage of grief where food turns to cardboard on your tongue. Nothing tastes good; nothing sounds good. You starve; you sit in silence.
Free Company is an album I wish I’d had last autumn. Taylor Vick, an Oakland songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who performs as Boy Scouts, has made a generous and gorgeously empathetic chronicle of the aftermath of love. Through sunny arrangements and spare songwriting, Vick compresses the dust of her romantic disappointment into a glittering jewel. She loves the subject of her songs, but she loves herself, too—loves herself more, enough to step away and carry on, alone, with her head held high.
Though Boy Scouts’ backing tracks are hazy and dreamlike, calling to mind tour mate Jay Som, Vick’s writing is direct, sharp, more bee-sting than butterfly. Free Company lulls the listener with short sentences and single syllables, until a tripwire of a lyric—“And now you’re mad at me/And I’m no longer twenty-three”—sends you sprawling headfirst into her perspective. Like the prose of Sally Rooney, Vick’s lyrics explore the vast complexity of human emotion by reveling in the simplicity of its expression. The indelible chorus of “All Right,” for instance, makes a meal out of a mere eight words: “I’m all right, I swear/I’m all right, how dare you?” In a song that explores weighty, existential questions—the existence of heaven, the permanence of souls, the mortifying ordeal of being known—Vick’s verbal economy keeps her feet planted firmly on the ground.
This is not Vick’s first album as Boy Scouts. Her substantial Bandcamp output stretches back nearly a decade, studded with bedroom recordings and borrowed instruments. (On 2016’s “Homeroom Breakfast,” she offers endearing thanks to “rosie’s piano,” “scott’s guitar,” and “ben’s bass.”) What is clear in the arc from those records to this one are Vick’s substantial gifts not only as a writer, but as an editor. A throwaway line from “Homeroom Breakfast”—“Everything great has an expiration date”—resurfaces on “Free Company,” sharpened to a sad, subtle point in the service of a stronger song. A kind of emotional editing is evident, too. Vick has always contended, in her music, with rejection and resentment. But on “Free Company,” the woman who once wrote, “The world doesn’t need me like the world needs you” now writes from a position of hard-won, sober self-respect. “I don’t know why you’d fall through,” she sings. “I never did for you.”
The arc of Free Company is shot through with tender compassion, even for those who’ve wronged her. On marvelous opener “Get Well Soon,” she offers her best wishes—but “no balloons, ’cause they just die, too”—to a former love. She doesn’t apologize for asserting herself: “Hardly a fight when you know I’m right.” In the depths of her grief, on “In Ya Too,” she likens herself to “the desert sprawl—empty, but still forceful.” She is still adjusting to aloneness, but she is learning to love its strange rhythms, its small pleasures. On “Momentary Love,” perched in her “favorite place,” she lets her thoughts wander to an old love during a moment of solitude. The memory still makes her ache, but that’s okay, she sings: “This doesn’t keep me sane/But the views up here lessen the pain.”
We’ve devised no end of performative mechanisms to distance ourselves from our more unsavory emotions. But on “Free Company,” Taylor Vick dares to feel everything. Reflecting on the death of a friend, on gorgeous closer “You Were Once,” Vick sings, “I knew I’d never be the same again/I know it now and I knew it then/There is only so much you can pretend.” Vick wants her listeners to know both the fullness of her grief and the strength and spirit with which she freed herself of it. She renders each subtle swell of anger, embarrassment, and regret with something almost like gratitude, the retreat of each wave only affirming the solidity of her place on the shore.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The pop-star-baiting, credibility-seeking, Noel-Gallagher-approved (and then shunned), surly major label rocker Jake Bugg turns in one of the most baffling collections of music in recent memory.

On My One

As a surly young major label malcontent, Jake Bugg has been put through all the authentic rock rites. Slagging off popstars? Endlessly! Posing with naked dollybirds? Right here! Album with Rick Rubin? 2013’s Shangri La. Gallagher patronage? Mais bien sûr. Which brings us to 2016, where at the ripe old age of 22, Nottingham-born Bugg confessed that his newfound wealth had opened his eyes to the benefits of voting Conservative. “Coming from a working-class background, if you didn’t go left, you’d be resented,” he told NME in March. “But after having a few albums and touring a while, maybe financially it’s better to be right-wing. So you’re stuck in the middle.”
If he's not quite moving to the Isle of Man yet, his political ambivalence still isn’t particularly surprising. Despite Bugg’s much-toted council estate background, his skifflin’ songs have always hidden a ruthlessly individualist streak: a sorry-not-sorry attitude about escaping his past (while exploiting its downtrodden character for poverty tourism ballads and cred) and sneery dismissals of his less ambitious friends. “When you’re the kingpin, people wanna take you down,” he sang on Shangri La, in what he unconvincingly claimed was a song inspired by The Wire. As Bugg’s first record without the help of cowriters or much of a producer (Jacknife Lee worked on three songs), his third album On My One is the test of whether he can indeed stand alone and swim without his authenticity armbands.
Uninspired as Bugg’s previous records could be, they were at least coherent: 2012’s Jake Bugg coasted on dusky pre-Beatles bonhomie, while Shangri La had a rockier sting in its tail. The prevailing impression left by On My One is of a young man desperately grasping in the dark for his musical identity, and coming up with one of the most arrestingly baffling collections of music in recent memory. Lead single “Gimme the Love” is a swaggering slab of maxed-out radio dynamics in debt to Kasabian and Second Coming-era Stone Roses, written at the label’s insistence that Bugg give them a single. He makes his feelings on the matter evident in a tirade of jibbered lyrics about airplay, fakery, and the “middle road well bode the game played.” He recently explained that his people had reservations about the bombastic track. “People would say to me, ‘How’s that gonna sound on the radio next to Little Mix?’ That was the wrong question. It should be, ‘How are Little Mix gonna sound next to this?’” (Like sweet, sweet relief.)
Bugg has not been blessed with a natural singing voice (just hear him honk “LAYDEH!” on “Hold on You”) though on doleful acoustic numbers like “All That,” he finds a low husk that suits him well enough. It transpires that one of the benefits of having external producers and songwriters may have been their rather more judicious understanding of this limited vocal range. “Love, Hope and Misery” elicits the kind of “bless him for trying” pity of *The X Factor’*s audition week: a lovely, dramatic torch song whose poise is shattered by Bugg crooning like a stuck sheep. The words “I'm just a maaaaaaan” have rarely been sung in a less convincing fashion; the chorus does not grow any less painful after a dozen listens. It’s like watching the Titanic hit the iceberg again and again.
“Ain’t No Rhyme” is equally embarrassing. It’s here that Bugg deals with his political uncertainty in a Beastie Boys-inspired rap. It’s his “Straight Outta Clifton” moment, a visit to his old stomping ground that manages to be utterly graceless about his money-grabbing friends, and sound like a government PSA warning young people about the perils of prison. “C’mon Kurtis/Just put down the knife,” he urges. “I knew from his eyes he wasn’t gonna think twice/Put your mask on before committing crime/These kids need to think about time inside/Cos a dagger through the heart comes at a price.” It is miraculous that he doesn’t start the song with the words, “I’m MC Bugg and I’m here to say.”
The diversity of On My One shows that Bugg certainly isn't short of musical inspiration. There are country ballads, like the title track (“I'm just a paw boy from Notting-hum”), while “Bitter Salt” is “Keep the Faith”-era Bon Jovi. “Livin’ Up Country” and “All That” evoke Ryan Adams circa Heartbreaker (or, less favorably, Britpop also-rans Cast). He’s trying, and his time with Rick Rubin has made him into a decent producer. But the lyrics expose Bugg as a young man with nothing to say about society, masculinity, love—anything other than his arrogant, dull disgruntlement at being “three years on the road, 400 shows... no place to go.” His love songs are muddled and mean, one verse accepting blame for a relationship’s downfall, the next telling a girl, “it's all your fault because I won’t do what I’m told.”
On My One is Nottingham slang for “on my own,” subtly illustrating how isolated Bugg seems to feel from his upbringing, and from the major label system that’s got him this far. An album this terrible is certainly the product of some bad decisions by people who don’t have his best interests at heart. To the outside world, it shouldn’t matter that Bugg is a bit manufactured, or that he had help writing his early material. But there’s a difference between being capital-A authentic and being convincing. All the effort he put into diligently slagging off pop music in order to shore up his own indie credentials (even One Direction’s Louis Tomlinson called him on it) has backfired massively. On My One is precisely the kind of mistake that pop stars make when they think they’re smarter than the system.


On this compilation, artists in Young Dolph’s circle keep the rapper’s legacy of love and loyalty alive, giving the project a clear sense of purpose.

Long Live Young Dolph

The pressures of the music marketplace are not often conducive to respecting real-life tragedy. When an artist unexpectedly passes, there’s a demand to hear their musical last words, both from listeners who wanted more time with a person they love and from cynical industry forces. On one end of the spectrum are the verging-on disrespectful posthumous albums of Pop Smoke, stitched together from scraps of low-fidelity vocal stems; on the other, the tribute that Lil Peep’s family has paid to him by bringing his early work to streaming services and clearing samples instead of excessively mining unreleased material.
In the wake of Young Dolph’s death, so much of the discussion and coverage of him focused not just on his relentless grind or effortless flow but on his deep sense of community, charity, and kinship. Dolph paid his success forward in many facets of his life, leaving behind a material legacy in a way few musicians do: he cared for his family, invested heavily in his hometown of Memphis, and closely mentored a new generation of rappers. Where others might lend only clout or co-signs, Young Dolph gave the hand-selected artists who formed his Paper Route Empire stable the reins of their careers outside the major label system. Long Live Dolph is then a fitting reflection of a man who supported future stars, a tribute straight from the acts he so actively embraced.
What Dolph meant to the artists he worked with and mentored—and especially to the next generation of Memphis rap—is apparent in the heartbreak of Jay Fizzle’s “LLD.” At first, Jay tries to undo and obscure the reality of Dolph’s death, then he tries to understand it, before realizing all he can do is live out the potential Dolph saw in him: “Tryna OD off these drugs to erase the whole situation/But I know this shit ain’t good for me/You wanted what’s good for me.” Singer Ricco Barrino’s aching voice comes in with a message from Dolph’s wife and children: “Even though you’re gone, your legacy lives on.” It’s keeping that throughline of love and loyalty alive that now defines Paper Route Empire and gives Long Live Dolph such purpose as a project.
The portrait that’s drawn of Dolph is of a man who would have given the Polo off his back to anyone who could benefit from his encouragement. “Role Model” opens with a sample from an interview with Dolph and then-new signee and pupil Kenny Muney, who recalls listening to Dolph’s High Class Street Music mixtapes when he was younger. Muney’s role model then became his friend and biggest supporter, but by the end, Muney has become the role model, carrying the torch that brought light to his life. “Proud” is classic Key Glock, his voice fried like he’s been up all night, eyes bloodshot as much from the high as the tears he’s been hiding. Over a cut-throat Bandplay beat, he speaks with the Grim Reaper, making deals for his lost comrade’s soul. Though Glock is more than equipped as a solo artist, he and his older cousin had once-in-a-generation chemistry that’s hard to recapture, and in many ways, his contribution to Long Live Dolph is the most effecting. The hustle is a way for him to cope with the hole in his heart: “Just the other day, caught myself cryin’/Then I wiped my face, shook that shit off, and got back on my grind.”
The EP’s second half pays tribute to Dolph less in lyric and more in spirit, with rappers Big Moochie Grape and PaperRoute Woo capturing the kind of classic Southern trunk music that Dolph did so masterfully. Sosa 808’s beat on “In Dolph We Trust” is glistening and baroque, flipping “Carol of the Bells”—once a staple of the DJ Paul and Juicy J production toolkit—into an ornately menacing march. Joddy Badass and Snupe Bandz’ “I Like” shifts the project into a more chilled-out and romantic mode, a welcome comedown from the intensity of the first half that nevertheless comes off a bit hollow compared to the brutal emotionality. The one new Dolph verse, on Chitana’s “Love for Me,” sees him getting serene, almost tropical, but that peacefulness takes on a bittersweet tinge when you remember why you’re listening to this album.
Even in a rap landscape where personal trauma and mental illness are unpacked in chart-topping hits, the members of Paper Route Empire reach a level of sincerity and emotional reflection that’s still hard to come by. In between the denial and unreality of tragedy, the confusion and rage at a world that continues to take Black men from their families so senselessly and constantly, there’s a sharply defined sense of resolve. The next phase of Paper Route recognizes that the best way to pay tribute to their teacher isn’t just to put respect on his name, but to put the principles he lived into action.

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Kompakt co-founder Wolfgang Voigt curates the latest in the label’s ambient series with a compilation of dark and moody tracks that reflect the best of what modern-day ambient has to offer.

Pop Ambient 2019

When Kompakt launched its first Pop Ambient compilation in the winter of 2001, CDs were selling in massive quantities. The notion of paying $15 for one in order to get an hour-long mix of instrumental electronic music seemed perfectly normal. Kompakt even sweetened the pot on that inaugural CD—it included a trippy QuickTime video that you could play on your computer.
At that moment, ambient music was still understood within the context of rave, and hearing these sounds in a “chill room” while coming down from a night of drugs and dancing was for many still a recent memory. In the two decades since, ambient music has grown more ubiquitous while also losing some of its distinction. Vastly improved tools for the creation and dissemination of electronic music have led to a flooded market, and playlists of “functional” music have proliferated, giving casual music fans easy access to ambient music for any occasion. But in this time of plenty, individual artists can find it harder to stand out. In this climate, as the Pop Ambient compilations continued to arrive each year, it was hard not to wonder about the point of it all. Do these comps make sense in the streaming era?
For Pop Ambient to matter, a given record has to be coherent over its complete length. We should approach these releases as playlists, an invitation to a music experience that lasts for an hour-plus, with considered flow and sequencing. And since Pop Ambient is assembled by Kompakt co-founder Wolfgang Voigt, the man behind the influential ambient project Gas, we can hear each set as a reflection of whatever he’s into at a specific time. Pop Ambient 2019, which delivers as a playlist as outlined above, has something in common with the first edition, in that much of the music on it seems to exist in relation to Voigt’s contemporaneous ambient work. In 2001, that meant the warm, fizzy textures found on the 2000 Gas album Pop. And here, that means darker tracks with moody strings and gradually shifting drones redolent of Narkopop and Rausch, the two most recent Gas albums after a 17-year hiatus.
The most striking section of Pop Ambient 2019 comes in the middle of the set, where the Gas influence is most prominent. The tracks by Kenneth James Gibson and Morgen Wurde, are dark, throbbing coils of energy. Gibson’s track recalls the see-saw feedback drone of early Stars of the Lid, while Wurde’s “Schien Immer” is a drafty, vaporous swirl of gloomy strings positioned against a bright keyboard shimmer, like watching two suns on the same horizon, one rising, one setting. Gregor Schwellenbach’s tense and swaying “Rot 2,” which follows, also features strings, but in a neoclassic mode that brings to mind Arvo Pärt or Morton Feldman. The three tracks together work like a suite, and this 23-minute stretch of the compilation is heavenly, rich with feeling while emotional specifics remain just out of reach, representing the best of what ambient music has to offer.
The back half is heavier with synth-driven drones, and tracks by Thomas Fehlmann and Leandro Fresco take mix gliding, steady-state tones with soft whooshes and bass pedals that help them to breathe. Selections of generic ambient (see series mainstay Triola’s limply melodic “Arden”) are par for the course for Pop Ambient, but the set’s modest ambitions and comfort with slipping into the background make them relatively easy to overlook. Eighteen years in, Pop Ambient 2019 makes a solid argument for the continued existence of the series, ranking among the best of its installments.


The underrated Irish post-disco singer returns with her second album in two years after a lengthy dry spell. The songs flit amongst genres, united only by her fearless, restless spirit.

Take Her Up To Monto

Fans of underrated Irish post-disco singer Roisin Murphy rejoiced last year as she finally concluded a lengthy dry spell with the release of her third record, Hairless Toys, ending eight years of near-silence from Murphy since 2007’s excellent Overpowered. It turns out, however, that the levee really broke when she decided to get back to work, because just one year later Murphy is issuing yet another record of additional songs from those same sessions.
Unlike other past examples of second records culled from a previous session, Take Her Up to Monto offers neither a strikingly different type of songs as with Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac, nor are they obviously lesser leftovers like on Jay-Z & R. Kelly’s Unfinished Business. Instead, Take Her Up to Monto is more like Disc 2 of a quasi-double album, offering a set of nine tracks that display a similar tone and feel to the eight songs on Hairless Toys, and maintaining the same high level of quality established by its predecessor.
That’s not to say though that Take Her Up To Monto is identical to Hairless Toys. Murphy has called the songs of her latest “more extreme: more dynamic or more complex or more pop ... If they were siblings, Hairless Toys would be the nice child and Take Her Up to Monto more of a problem child.” It’s not a dramatic shift, but an evident one—as stable and consistently enjoyable Hairless Toys was, Take Her Up to Monto follows that sonic blueprint but ups the ante with even more experimentation and risk-taking, showcasing Murphy’s range and depth as a songwriter to a fuller extent.
Opener “Mastermind” is six-and-a-half minutes of the type of effortless nu-disco of which one could easily imagine Murphy making entire albums. Murphy’s soulful contralto is perfect for the genre, as easily capable of call-and-response as it is of deep-throated dancefloor roars. “Mastermind” is a clear example of how Murphy could be a champion disco diva if she really wanted—imagine her as the voice of a future Hercules & Love Affair album!—but the rest of Take Her Up to Monto attests to Murphy’s greater aspirations.
What elevates *Take Her Up to Monto—*and all of Murphy’s records, frankly—is a fearless, restless spirit. Multi-part tracks like “Thoughts Wasted,” “Ten Miles High,” and “Nervous Sleep” toss the rulebook out the window as Murphy merges genres, sounds and feelings. “Thoughts Wasted” is perhaps the album’s highlight: Beginning with a echoey piano riff, the song starts off as a pop song before violins arrive for a startling minimalist bridge with countermelody that would be more expected on a Bang on a Can album. When Murphy’s voice re-emerges, it’s accompanied by a ghostly choir that signals that song's third act, a spoken word tour-de-force. Even though lyrics are relatively inscrutable, when Murphy delivers the line, “Humans are fucked,” it pierces.
On “Nervous Sleep,” the album’s penultimate and longest track at nearly eight minutes, Murphy offers what is more or less a prog epic. Beginning with reverbed whispers, machine bleeps and gently intoned vibraphones, Murphy conjures an aura of sleepy noir that is more enigmatic than nervous. The laconic pacing is perfectly controlled as Murphy calmly shares a story of a couple having problems, her voice sliding mellifluously from narrator to woman to man to chorus.  At the end, the song begins breaks down and fade away into air much like those last moments of consciousness before sleep takes you away.
Murphy has expressed surprise over the years that she never became a pop star. In the States, she is criminally under-appreciated and even somewhat unknown. But her sensibility has always been too wide-ranging, too challenging, to satisfy the tastes of a mainstream audience. Even the album’s title, a reference to a classic Irish folk song, and cover, a photo of her at a construction site wearing a worker’s jacket and hardhat, say “curious experimentalist” rather than “pop star.” But for connoisseurs of high-end electropop, disco, and dance music, Murphy has so much to offer. Let's hope now that she's turning out new music at a rapid clip that more people will begin to notice her.


Two reissues of the late composer’s work highlight the attention he paid to the malleability of language and the way its sound often conveys more than its substance.

Robert Ashley: Automatic Writing / Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)

Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) / Automatic Writing

“Say what you mean and mean what you say” is sage yet impractical advice. Societal conventions often throw a spanner in the works of meaningful communication. These fragmented thoughts swam into focus while listening to the late American composer Robert Ashley’s 1979 album Automatic Writing and 1985 opera Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) in circling sequence. The two works were recently reissued together, the former marking its 40th anniversary and the latter documenting a 2019 production of the opera at legendary New York performance space the Kitchen. While aesthetically poles apart, they make for a complementary pairing, because they illuminate Ashley’s interest in the interplay of speech and convention from opposite directions.
On Automatic Writing, which comprises one 46-minute piece, Ashley repeats the line, “My mind is censoring my own mind,” or a slight variation of it, a dozen times. The composition is based on a recording of the composer’s involuntary speech, a symptom he attributed to a possible “mild form of Tourette’s.” “It is against the ‘law’ of our society to engage in involuntary speech,” he wrote in the liner notes of a 1996 reissue of the record. “That’s why we are embarrassed to talk to ourselves. That’s why Tourette had to leave the room.” Ashley came to record himself because he’d noticed repetitions in the phrases he muttered and wondered how these unconscious patterns related to his work as a composer. Could he find music within the mysterious workings of his own body?
In his searching, Ashley distorted his voice to the point of granular gesture on Automatic Writing. (Save for a few moments of clarity, it is only possible to understand what he says by reading the transcription that accompanies the release.) In a rare example of an echo being more legible than its origin, the emotional resonance of his mouth sounds is underscored by a whispered French translation of his involuntary speech performed by long-time collaborator Mimi Johnson. The faraway melody of an organ and the murmurings of a Polymoog, the latter evoking a crate of old-fashioned milk bottles jiggling against each other in transit, hold the space for the two voices. Layered together, these four sonic elements—or characters in an opera, as Ashley saw them—have a proto-ASMR quality, textural and sensual.
Where Automatic Writing puts Ashley’s own (involuntary) language under the microscope, Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) takes a widescreen view of the ways in which societal conventions can inhibit communication. On the page, it’s a hugely ambitious project: a domestic narrative (Linda is abandoned by her husband Don and has to make a new life for herself) laid atop a historical one (in 1492, the Jewish population of Spain was forced into exile by the country’s Catholic leaders). Yet instead of sweeping dramatic scenes, the story unfolds through social transactions that range from the awkward to the absurd, the kind that consumer society runs on: an encounter with a busybody family that gives Linda a lift to the airport after she finds herself abandoned (“Good luck trying to/Use your ticket. We would help you/If we could, but probably/It would only make things worse”); an exchange at an airline ticket counter (“Where were you when your husband left?”/“I was in the toilet at the turnoff”); a conversation with a doctor Linda met at a party in which she tells him about the dream she had the night before, which goes about as well as anyone who has ever tried to tell a stranger their dream. (“I’m sorry. What I meant that last night I dreamed as/I ordinarily do, and I wanted you to know that the dream/Was a common one for me, which I thought you could/Not know unless I told you.” “Just a moment, please.”)
It’s not just what the characters say but the way that they say it that tickles the senses. And they do say it, rather than outright sing it, often delivering lines—solo and in unison—at a thrilling sing-song pace, in clear-as-a-bell tones. “The essence of my music,” Ashley explained in a 2003 interview with The Wire, “is that the syllables go by as fast as they do in the American English language and the pitch stresses, which make one syllable more important than the other syllable, are all within a range of half an octave. It's like you squeeze it in one direction and expand it in another direction.”
What connects these two works is the malleability of language and the way the sound of it conveys as much as the substance. The line that Robert Ashley repeats on Automatic Writing has resonance for both: “My mind is censoring my own mind.” These seven words that sprang unfiltered from his interior world gesture to the way that self-awareness obstructs expression as much as they do the freedom that can come from breaking with societal convention. It’s this gift that the avant-garde opera pioneer left today’s artists: the precedent to take the form in whichever direction satisfies the senses.

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On his second solo album, the saxophonist and Destroyer collaborator grapples with intergenerational trauma by turning interviews with his mother into gorgeous and empathetic ambient music.

Anne

Though he’s only begun releasing music under his own name recently, Toronto saxophonist Joseph Shabason has already used his horn to flesh out two of the decade’s best experimental rock albums. He played a key role on the War on Drugs’ 2014 breakthrough Lost in the Dream, but his greatest impact can be heard three years earlier on Destroyer’s masterpiece Kaputt. Frontman Dan Bejar had largely completed his soft-rock opus before asking Shabason to improvise over the recordings, where his ghostly saxophone lines proved to be the perfect complement to Bejar’s alternately hedonistic and weary narrator, hanging over every story like a heavy cologne.
Shabason has history in ’80s-style synth pop with his project DIANA, but his work on Kaputt functioned more like a metropolitan take on Jon Hassell’s music, using foggy atmospheres to paint a cocaine-fueled cityscape that exists in the mind. That influence solidified on his 2015 debut, Aytche, a collection of synth-treated saxophones that hovered between jazz and ambient. With Anne, Shabason follows impulses hinted at on his debut and enlists several collaborators to help him craft an album superior in every way. The most important of those is right in the album’s title: Shabason’s mother, Anne, whose vocals, taken from a series of recorded interviews with her son, provide the album’s throughline.
This technique appeared on Aytche’s best track, “Westmeath,” in the form of a foggy recording of a man reflecting on his father’s eventual suicide after surviving the Holocaust. Shabason, whose grandparents were survivors as well, says that he partially concealed that speaker’s voice as a sign of respect. With Anne, he and his mother bravely reflect on intergenerational trauma in frank discussions where nothing is held back sonically or emotionally.
Anne’s recordings are as personal and specific as you might expect of a candid conversation with her son; every stammer and background noise adds a degree of intimacy to the hypnotic soundscapes Shabason builds around them. Though her diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease looms large in the album’s background story, the recordings focus primarily on her memories as a child and a parent. It’s captured powerfully on “Deep Dark Divide,” in which she admits, “You grew up with the feeling that you were worthy, you were worthy of that support. I don’t think I grew up with that feeling.” Shabason methodically builds up synth and saxophone lines until they blur into one, crafting a somber illustration of the “deep dark divide” she alludes to.
Shabason finds new ways to transform his horn throughout Anne, and, thanks to a subtle use of field recordings, instrumentals fit like natural pauses in the album’s conversation. The heartbreaking centerpiece “Forest Run” opens with a brief dialogue about the need to appear “perfect,” and the frustration in her voice is palpable. No wonder: Children expect perfection from parents, just as parents do from themselves, but that idea often crumbles before the inevitability of age and illness. Shabason’s instrumental response, built around a gorgeous synth progression, functions as wordlessly and powerfully as a tender hug.
Two other crucial collaborators appear near the end of Anne. Gigi Masin, whose ambient classic Wind was an important influence on Aytche, melts into “November” with a gorgeous synth bed for Shabason’s steadily rising sax. And finally there’s Bejar on a bonus track, “I Don’t Want to Be Your Love” (to be released digitally in late January), which anyplace else might threaten to steal the show, but here functions perfectly as a coda. Rather than a lost chapter from Kaputt, the song sounds like an evolution of it, or more accurately an evaporation, with Shabason’s sax turned into an glimmering echo. Simply expanding that one-of-a-kind sound is enough of an achievement, but Anne is more than that. It’s the sound of Shabason finding his voice, primarily by listening to another. The generational chasm between parents and children can feel deep and dark, but Anne, both the album and the person, builds a bridge with light and tremendous empathy.


The remarkable EP from the New York-based artist is a one-of-a-kind debut, filled with small details, warm soul, and great emotional depth.

direct line to My Creator

duendita’s soul music speaks to the heart and spirit. Ordained by her connection to the ups and downs of the human experience, she is a gateway to the divine. With her achy, bass-coated tones, the New York-based singer builds altars that hold space for love, ancestral reverence, and a blessed existence for all of the black and brown people on earth. duendita’s remarkable debut direct line to My Creator is the body around which these principles orbit. Created over the span of two years, she wrote and produced the 10-track EP that captures her musings in just 30 minutes. It’s a style of concision recently adopted by rap contemporaries who’ve also opted for pithy offerings to the heart of the music. But over unhurried instrumentation, duendita wallows in her melodies and gives the project a lasting feel.
Born and raised in Queens, New York, the Afro-Latinx artist channels a sentimental blend of life experiences in her work. The vibrations of her identity, faith, and enduring familial lineage anchor the foundation of duendita’s art. Before releasing direct line to My Creator, she shared the single “pray”: a testimony to the pain and isolation that manifests in black and brown communities as a result of being underserved and denied access. As she dips into her deep and jazzy range, duendita spirals in a staccato rhythm while grappling with the emotions of a daunting reality. To soothe the heaviness, she spends the chorus pouring love into her people and reminds them of their place in her prayers.
But the first real song on the EP is a sobering track, “blue hands.” Written as a response to the 2016 killing of 23-year-old mother Korryn Gaines, duendita bellows a mournful six-line incantation for the protection of black girls and women from police violence. Although it begs for more time to sit with this dulcet lamentation, the song’s brevity allows its lyrics to be unpacked with each quick listen. Her breathy ad-libs mist over the track as if she’s gasping for air but her sadness turns optimistic as she warbles the lingering phrase, “I wish you a long, long, long black life.” Her sisters can disappear at the hands of cops with ease, but with “blue hands,” she brings them visibility and places the humanity of women at the forefront. This level of intention is present in all of duendita’s songwriting as she wades through a cascade of feelings.
At times, the ebb and flow of the EP can sound like one continuous mega-track, but that cohesiveness is a sign of duendita’s fluidity. She falls apart in the pursuit of romance, the blows of anxiety, and finds solace in her ever-present spirituality. It’s an emotional depth reminiscent of the soul legend Sade—one that’s honest and backed by music that’s equally as pure.
The album amounts to an enormous statement from an artist who values small, intimate details. In a few videos on her Instagram account, deundita sits with her microphone, keyboard, and drum machine and experiments with acoustic notes like the celestial ones she created for the EP. On the wistful ballad “September,” she plays cinematic chords that wail like singing bowls. She ends her first opus strong with the vulnerable cut “Bury Me” as her hums fade-out in harmony. direct line to My Creator leaves a margin for imperfection and its sometimes patchy vocals and odd notes are symbols of truth. In duendita’s openness about lovers, grief, and racial oppression, the singer starts the work of reclaiming her birthright of joy and healing. She makes it feel possible for the rest of us.


The North Carolina songwriter summons a vast network of real-life characters for an empathetic, intensely personal record about death, rebirth, and transformation.

Themselves

Al Riggs has been one of the busiest songwriters in their home state of North Carolina for most of a decade. Not yet 30, the songwriter has steadily churned out fuzzy, self-produced songs, digging into the work of lo-fi heroes and speaking openly about their life with autism. After focusing on guitar-led twang with last year’s I Got a Big Electric Fan to Keep Me Cool While I Sleep, Riggs’ latest album, Themselves, is a definitive pivot in both presentation—according to a press release, it will be their final album under the name—and subject matter. “The trans allegories are through the roof,” Riggs said in a statement, and Themselves coheres these narratives into a series of ghost stories and monuments.
Trading in themes of death and rebirth, Themselves presents Riggs at a crossroads, sending off their former selves in a tide of creative cross-references. As if self-soothing for the discomfort that comes with any kind of transition, Riggs pads out Themselves with cushy synths and restless electronic rhythms. Riggs’ voice wavers as they meander through the record, their low warble tumbling over lines about waiting, what-ifs, and wanting. Their sense of wariness is palpable.
Themselves’ track titles read like the guest list of an unusual dinner party, attended by dead artists: Moomin creator Tove Jansson, monologist Spalding Gray, Peanuts mastermind Charles Schulz, musician Richard Swift, and American Splendor originator Harvey Pekar are among the invitees. Even the cover art bears a wink: Its artist, Box Brown, has penned stirring graphic novels about the singular lives of cult heroes like Andy Kaufman and André the Giant. Like Olivia Liang’s The Lonely City, Riggs lovingly invokes this array of free spirits to relate to their own journey of individual self-discovery, spiraling into their own interior maps.
In “National Freedom Christmas (For R. Swift),” producer and multi-instrumentalist Richard Swift, who died unexpectedly at 41 in 2018, becomes Riggs’ outlet for a prospective redemption. In the surreal scenery changes of “Halloween for Norma Tanega,” the titular California singer-songwriter gets a nod, too, and the connection feels loose but funny: Tanega’s tune “You’re Dead” found a new life through the comedy What We Do in the Shadows, another set of transition-related adventures about vampires adapting to modern life on Staten Island. In Riggs’ world, the underdogs end up on top, whether they’re artists establishing their distinctive styles or yearning lovers seeking affirmation.
Riggs makes use of the year 1987—several years before their birth—as another narrative pillar, opening Themselves in “Chelsea, 1987,” a cradle of New York’s gay community, a mile from where the grassroots political group ACT UP was born the same year. Across the album, plans are set, people disappear, conflicts remain at loose ends. But Riggs reaches a breakthrough with “The Bardo, 1987,” laying their vulnerability plain with the line “Death never gets me/It’s the rebuilding that’s tough.”
Themselves’ heavily annotated structure adds profound dimensions, and following its branches can feel cumbersome, like an elaborate game between Riggs and the listener: How much do you want to know? But the many details buried within Riggs’ songs rarely impede their reach for steady reassurance. There’s no need to be aware of a writer’s fractious, if not justified, pro-labor ribbing of a late-night host to understand the glory of unfettered alone time that Riggs outlines within “Pekar on Letterman.” Their balance of extreme detail and semi-anonymity lands at a middle ground where neither inclination overpowers the other.
Themselves is an intensely personal record, if you let it be one; it’s also an empathetic transmission that aims to crack apart the aches of major changes. As with so much else in life, an open, curiosity-fueled approach yields the sweetest rewards.


The former teen heartthrobs’ first album in almost 10 years is by no means extraordinary, but it’s a respectable showing from a group that has long deserved more respect than they got.

Happiness Begins

Before they could all legally drive, the Jonas Brothers could stop traffic. In Chasing Happiness—the documentary that, in a bit of spectacularly on-the-nose cross-promotion, accompanies the release of their first album in nearly a decade, Happiness Begins—the brothers recount a time in 2007 when they had to be air-lifted to a performance at the Texas State Fair because their fans had caused a traffic jam stretching all the way to Oklahoma. At the time, Kevin, Joe, and Nick were 19, 18, and 15, respectively; they had just finished filming Camp Rock, the Disney Channel movie in which Joe starred opposite a then-unknown Demi Lovato, and, unbeknownst to them, would spend the next several years selling out arenas across the country.
In their earliest iteration, the Jonas Brothers were a bunch of preacher’s kids from New Jersey, signed to Columbia and touring the East Coast mall circuit billed as a punk rock group. Later, after they were picked up by Disney subsidiary Hollywood Records, a necessary branding refresh placed them squarely in the realm of pop-rock. They swapped their Ed Hardy t-shirts for blazers and scarves, and got to work pumping out stadium-sized guitar riffs (“That’s Just the Way We Roll,” “S.O.S.”) and anthemic choruses destined to be screamed by thousands of pre-adolescent lungs (“When You Look Me in the Eyes,” “Lovebug”).
Though those songs will surely have their moment when the trio heads back out on tour, with Happiness Begins, they (wisely) don’t shoot for pure nostalgia. If Jonas Brothers 1.0 was punk rock, and Jonas Brothers 2.0 was pop-rock, Jonas Brothers 3.0 is true pop—which is to say, a little bit of most things you could hear in today’s Top 40. They haven’t made music together since breaking up in 2013, but the brothers weren’t inactive in the interim: Nick released two albums, including a Top 10 single, on his own; Joe found success as the frontman of the electro-pop group DNCE. Reunited, the group have adjusted their sound to incorporate elements from both projects—Nick’s soulful, sexy R&B and DNCE’s light-hearted funk. In 2019, the Jonas Brothers rely on spacious synths and programmed drums; on several songs, guitars aren’t even a notable part of the mix. Nick and Kevin’s Gibsons have never been so underworked.
Often enough, the smorgasbord approach yields solid results. “Only Human” rides a reggae beat that works surprisingly well; it’s a Shellback-produced show of brass (instrumental and otherwise), on which the boys try out new percussive cadences and punctuate their phrases with in-vogue, monosyllabic ad libs. “Don’t Throw It Away” is a feat of falsetto, with enough West Coast breeziness, synthetic shimmer, and rich harmony to recall another dominant sibling trio, Haim. The fizzy, supremely self-assured single “Cool” packages up some of the brothers’ best tricks, old and new: acoustic strums meet vocal processors and a thundering stomp-clap beat.
“Cool” also benefits from a hearty dose of good humor. Laced with celebrity name-drops, it harkens back to “Year 3000”—the group’s first big hit, which gave voice to their dreams of outselling Kelly Clarkson. On “Cool,” Joe reports feeling “like Post Malone” and audibly grins into the mic when he references his thoroughly cool new bride, “Game of Thrones” star Sophie Turner. Though it borders on silly, the song packs oomph that some of the others lack. Notoriously guarded while on Disney’s payroll, the new iteration of the band has inhabited the public eye more fully than ever before—weddings, babies, and family therapy included. One might hope their newfound transparency would translate into a bit more personality and specificity on tracks like “Love Her” and “Hesitate”—two tender, but very generic, love songs that appear on the back half of the album. “I will take your pain/And put it on my heart,” Joe croons on the latter, sounding like someone not entirely familiar with the concept, before the song turns into overproduced soup.
In the late aughts, at the height of JoBros fever, the group’s commercial success was tempered by ridicule in popular culture at large, stemming from some combination of their Disney affiliation, their purity rings, and the demographic of their fan base. There was a South Park parody; Russell Brand mocked them from the 2008 VMAs stage while the boys sat in the audience, stony-faced; Jay-Z rapped, “No I’m not a Jonas Brother, I’m a grown-up/No I’m not a virgin, I use my cojones.” Youth has always been currency in pop music, both as it applies to performers—especially women—and consumers, who, in their teenage years, often have time and cash to expend on artists they care about. But the biggest paydays usually go to label execs; Disney, in particular, has faced criticism for micro-managing young stars and commodifying family values to reap profit from children. It wasn’t hard to imagine the entire Jonas Brothers franchise as a cash grab predicated on marketability rather than genuine talent and hard work. With the added baggage of their openly acknowledged Christian upbringing and the physical markers of their abstinence—a practice deeply at odds with the lifestyle expected of “real” rockers—the brothers had a hard time getting people to take them seriously.
In the intervening years, quite a lot has changed. Social media and readily available production technology have given young artists unprecedented power to create and disseminate their own music without prerequisite label backing. Stars like Billie Eilish and Lil Nas X—17 and 20, respectively—amassed fame through a combination of talent and internet smarts, undermining skepticism about the artistic agency of the very young. The sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll ethos the Jonas Brothers famously eschewed continues to reveal its dark underbelly, casting new doubt as to whether that lifestyle was ever really something to aspire to. And as feminism gains cultural ground, it’s more obvious than ever that discounting the interests of girls and young women says more about societal misogyny than the validity of their opinions.
Happiness Begins is by no means an extraordinary album, but it’s a respectable showing from a group that has long deserved more respect than they’ve received. Though they’ve brought their sound up to date with current pop trends, aesthetically, not all that much about the Jonas Brothers has changed in the past decade: They’re still earnest, charismatic, media-savvy family men. When Nick sings, “When I grow up, I want to be just like me,” on “Cool,” you can kind of see what he means. The Jonas Brothers didn’t need a total reinvention to come back—they just needed a clean slate.


Chicago post-rock band makes its best album yet, both in structure and execution.

Geneva

It may share its name with another second city, but the third LP from the Russian Circles calls to mind a fairly famous quote from one of their hometown's favorite sons. "Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring," Nelson Algren wrote, and Geneva's an October sort of album no matter when you put it on. Geneva feels very much like the city its members hang their hats: rusty and steely and shifty, overcast and a little cold, and-- Algren again-- "battle-colored." It evokes a long early morning's drive down the length of any one of Chicago's city-spanning north-south thoroughfares, blowing through both industrial grit and beatific parkways, eyes peeled for crumbling facades and flashes of chrome and the not-so-occasional pothole.
There were signposts to Geneva all over the spiny, immediate Enter and last year's prettier, driftier Station, but on their third go, the Circles are clearing a path all for themselves. Debts are still due to genre godheads like Mogwai and Slint, for certain, but like the best work of their obvious forebears, on Geneva the Circles have found a way to make three guys in a room sound like a lot more than three guys in a room. Credit where credit's due: a great deal of Geneva's success lies in the string work of cellist Allison Chesley and violinist Susan Voelz, who add a resonant depth to many of the record's best moments, filling in the gaps around these insistent compositions with a kind of sweeping gothic grime. But even without the hired hands, Russian Circles are penning limber, purpose-driven tunes, then playing the hell out of them. And, in their structure and execution both, this is doubtless their finest work yet.
Instrumental prowess is a double-edged sword in just about any genre, but when instrumental's all you do, you run the risk of the dreaded wank with every flick of the wrist. That's something the Circles in general and Brian Cook in particular have handled admirably through the years; they're capable of sneaking thunderous Lightning Bolt-style blastoffs and fingery Yngwie thingys in with opulent drift, while coming across as neither tossers or tossed-off. Drummer Dave Turncrantz gets plenty in, but favors the boom over the barrage, and guitarist Mike Sullivan, as Pitchfork's Cosmo Lee pointed out in his review of Station, often cedes the presumptive lead role for the good of the group. But it's Cook who's come into his own here on Geneva, consistently holding down the low end with inventive but unshowy aplomb. And when he's given a shot at the spotlight-- a position he takes only a handful of times throughout-- the record is his.
The Circles have long done peaks far better than valleys, and there's really only one such dip on Geneva: "Hexed All", a tune they all but give over to Chesley and Voelz, flipping the melee of, well, "Melee" for a supine string-laden swoon. It's clearly meant as a respite from the relative brutality that surrounds it-- much like the first few minutes of "Verses" was to the middle of Station-- but it also works against the album's momentum a touch, the widescreen beauty of Explosions in the Sky reformatted to fit your screen. It's fine, but it's not necessary; the string section is so seamlessly integrated into the Circles' sound on meatier tracks like "Fathom", putting them front and center feels more like a conciliatory gesture than a Russian Circles tune.
The record's second half favors an enveloping crumble over the opening trio's crushing hypnotism; tracks unfurl more patiently, perhaps more gracefully, but with nearly the same sense of purpose that underlies the weightier start-up. Save the proggy "Malko", this stuff is textbook post-rock; songs start soft and slow, more elements get thrown into the mix, and we eventually have our climax. Still, there's a sense of internal dynamics in the tunes that makes this particularly good textbook post-rock; instead of a simple gradual increase in volume, they pull in sounds from left-field, lending the tunes a ratchety, rust-covered feeling that is unusually complex. Nearly all of these tunes die screaming, they just take a bit longer to get there as Geneva goes on. It's more a matter of contrast than anything else; were the running order reversed, you'd sit on your hands through the first half waiting for the impending blowout. I suppose this, too, is like Chicago, with the livelier South Side giving way to the statelier North, both with their unique merits. Either way, Geneva's a record with dirt underneath its fingernails and resolute urgency at its heart, and like the place from which it hails, it's worth the bluster.


The Chicago band’s first full-length is a collection of sweet, brightly colored love songs from the mind of an acid enthusiast, woven from a small used record store’s worth of influences.

Foam

Chicago quartet Divino Niño started out playing distinctive-enough psychedelic garage-pop. With Foam, their first proper full-length after a couple of demo compilations, they forge a richer and more inventive sound. Their squiggly, retro-futurist approach borrows freely but selectively from among a vast pop-rock songbook, the psychedelic explorations of the past, and more recent internet subgenres. This is a collection of sweet, brightly colored love songs from the mind of an acid enthusiast, woven from a small used record store’s worth of influences.
The opening space-lounge fantasias of “Foam” and the Wurlitzer-festooned “Quiero” represent new territory for the band, and though they toy with different styles, they resist flattening music history into mere aesthetic. Songs like the relentlessly tuneful “Melty Caramelo” sound like singles from an especially quirky boy band, but Foam has the energy and anything-goes sense of adventure of early-2000s indie rock. These blithe melodies and lightly carbonated hooks could click into place on any number of Spotify playlists, yet remain subtly, irreducibly weird.
“Ooh la la” backing vocals notwithstanding, Foam is a progressive-minded record. If its references are nostalgic, its spirit isn’t. The band has assembled their touchstones with a connoisseur’s ear and the streaming era’s egalitarian approach: All sounds may be selected to serve the needs of the moment. With a killer mid-tempo chorus and lightheaded glide guitar, the strangely affecting “Coca Cola” sounds like a ’70s AM radio hit by way of post-punk. “Cosmic Flower” plants fibrous roots in British Invasion-era rock as it sways in a vaporwave breeze. The band’s garage foundation shows up now and again, especially on the all-Spanish “Maria,” and though it anchors their music nicely, Foam is more like soft art rock. There is no real kitsch, just cheery, artful clutter.
Two of Divino Niño’s founding members, guitarist Camilo Medina and bassist Javier Forero, are originally from Bogotá, Colombia. It’s tempting to connect the band’s romantic lyrics and soulful melodicism to the lineage of U.S. Latino rock pioneers such as Thee Midniters, or classic South American pop groups like Los Pasteles Verdes. But if their background shows up in their music—outside of Medina’s casual shifts between English and Spanish—it is most likely found in their wide palette of influences: everything from Roberto Carlos to Brandy.
Foam demonstrates that it’s possible to draw from everywhere, without sounding quite like anything else. With so much music so freely available, it’s easy to get lost in the noise, to fall back on a too-familiar sound from the ocean of possible influence. Divino Niño navigate expertly against the tide.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Post-breakout solo releases are supposed to be this-is-my-time proclamations, but the SOB x RBE member’s project feels engineered to bring out his pathos.

Feel My Pain EP

On SOB x RBE’s second full-length, Gangin, the Vallejo boys tasked themselves with repping decades of Bay Area’s sonic history in addition to displaying the star potential of their free-flowing group chemistry. While avoiding clutter, Gangin also delivered a group with four distinct personalities: Lul G, the young tough with the pipsqueak-ish voice; DaBoii, who taunts in a barking sneer; Yhung T.O., the sing-song stylist; and Slimmy B, a bluesman with the group’s most conversational delivery. T.O.’s pop-ready versatility makes him a star, but when he’s not countering his groupmate’s melodies with his plainspoken presence, Slimmy B cuts a captivating figure on his own. The most obvious showcase is his Gangin solo cut, “God,” which is less about salvation than it is about the pain (and small shimmerings of hope, like his son) underlying his worldview. “Niggas dyin’ everyday, who the fuck the shit fun to?” Slimmy asks the listener. Even in the spotlight, he can’t escape himself.
Slimmy B’s latest solo project, the seven-track Feel My Pain, shares this ruminative space right down to its cover, a black-and-white image of him brooding with his hoodie over his face. While trauma speckled Gangin’s boasts, Feel My Pain pulls it toward the center. “Call On” arrives midpoint and features Slimmy B in an uninterrupted confessional, mourning deceased kin and remembering a suicide attempt. The bleakness is only briefly allayed with minor hopes like buying a Bentley coupe and promising his girlfriend a family.
Ideally, post-breakout solo releases are supposed to be outward, this-is-my-time proclamations: You’ve worked to be able to talk your shit, after all. But the album feels engineered to bring out the pathos in Slimmy B’s verses. For one, the excited bounce that threads through his prior solo effort Problem Child is traded in for sparser, more contained production. It’s a big stylistic change even from Gangin; the busy ’80s freestyle beat that backs “Carpoolin’” doesn’t fit within Feel My Pain’s negative space.
While the kinetic energy of his prior work is missed, Feel My Pain does make for a cathartic 18 minutes within Slimmy B’s headspace. There’s an urgency to the wobbly way his consonants spring off the mournful bass lines, particularly on the paranoid “Don’t Love Me.” Slimmy recalls the tears falling and pleading with God as he watched his man’s casket lower, before pledging to kill the murderer (“He gon’ die that’s on my kid”). It’s sorrow-filled imagery made even more heartbreaking by the bleating synths backing his narrative. “Ride 4 Me” is Feel My Pain’s standard AutoTune anthem, but even that holds a deeper significance; romantic platitudes like “You the one I put my trust in” feel binding when you’re this familiar to mortality.
Slimmy B doesn’t spend the entirety of Feel My Pain in a dour mood: He’s back on his bullshit on the final two tracks, playing “NBA 2K18” mid-coitus on “Free Theze” and drops more gun talk while marveling at how “these damn hundreds make a nigga pants sag” in the spry album closer “Like I Do.” The latter works more as a coda than a standalone because it’s told from the perspective of someone who’s survived. That link between excess and escape has been one SOB x RBE’s central dynamics, and it compels from Slimmy’s solo lens.


The second EP from the queer hardcore punk band G.L.O.S.S. conveys a violent and severe world, one in which the only reasonable and intelligent responses are anger and aggression.

Trans Day of Revenge

Hardcore punk can often seem incapable of nuance; Minor Threat songs, as much as they communicated one person’s choices, were elevated to the dogma of the straight edge movement by their audience. But hardcore is a shapeshifting genre, full of inversions and melted  dichotomies. And even as it can act as a conduit for regressive political expression, it can also serve as a metaphor for queer possibility.
Enter G.L.O.S.S., a hardcore band from Olympia, Washington. Their name, an acronym for “Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit,” determines the shape of their music, which resembles Boston hardcore if rerouted through the perspectives and experiences of trans women. (Lead singer Sadie and guitarist Jake are originally from Boston.) Trans Day of Revenge is their second EP; it’s all of seven minutes long, following a demo of about equal length released last year. Revenge, released the day after the mass shooting in the Orlando club Pulse, conveys a violent and severe world, one in which the only reasonable and intelligent responses are anger and aggression.
The EP opens with a swirl of feedback, over which Sadie screams, “When peace is just another word for death, it’s our turn to give violence a chance!” The song describes police brutality and the degree to which this brutality flows from the superstructures that determine who survives in America. “Killer cops aren’t crooked.../they do as they’re told,” she sings. “Black lives don’t matter in the eyes of the law.” Hardcore as a form can often condense language to its most bladed form; Sadie’s lyrics depict queer experience in sharp fractions. “Singing in G.L.O.S.S. is kind of like getting to be a superhero,” Sadie told BitchMedia last year, “like weaponizing a lifetime of anguish and alienation.” “We scream/just to make sense of things,” she sings in “We Live.” “Studs and leather/survivors’ wings.” Her words are precise and rapid-fire but they’re also embedded with sensitive detail that give them the occasional rhythm of poetry.
In the title track she compresses historical and modern indignation into a single verse: “Remember those/Dead and gone/but don’t let the media set us up for harm/HRC, selfish fucks/Yuppie gays threw us under the bus.” In a few seconds, a library shelf’s worth of ideas are touched on: Queer erasure, the particular way in which media tends to flatten the specificities of queer life, the way that even within the queer community, transgender people are treated as inexplicable, illegitimate, politically inconvenient. This is the fragile calculus of hardcore that G.L.O.S.S. maintains, embedding politically complex ideas in emotionally unambiguous music without it flattening into a wave of rhetoric.
G.L.O.S.S.’s music also functions as great hardcore; the songs dazzle for the asymmetry and velocity of their guitar riffs, some of which land so heavily that they resemble columns toppling. The riffs in “Fight” move with such a molecular insecurity it feels as if the song could at any point melt down into shapelessness. G.L.O.S.S.’s songs tend to feel both old and new, the past and the present occurring simultaneously, layered on top of each other so they produce an interesting dissonance located somewhere between noise and precision.
At its best, hardcore is personal; it tends to erase the spatial distinctions between performer and audience, until there is a primordial flow of bodies, ideas, and energy. Growing up, the experience of my own queerness was often unreal and abstract, which combined into a kind of confusion and anger in myself. Trans Day of Revenge takes the anger and confusion one feels in the depths of the margins, and translates them, literalizes them, from a burning abstraction into something almost tangible. “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on the potentiality or concrete possibility for another world,” José Esteban Muñoz wrote in Cruising Utopia. “We’re fucking future girls/living outside society’s shit!” Sadie screamed on the first song on their demo. G.L.O.S.S. advance the possibilities inherent in queerness, even as they depict and reject the present horrors that queerness endures. It is music that is, above all, about survival and survivors. They project a future, both in the genre of hardcore and in the genre of reality.


On his first proper comeback album, the funk legend displays his unmatched vocal chops over polished, modern production.

Steve Arrington: Down to the Lowest Terms: The Soul Sessions

Steve Arrington is a true funk legend. At age 64, the singer-songwriter and producer is now on his third go-round in the music industry. Following a star-making stint as the lead vocalist and drummer in Slave, Arrington produced ‘80s hits like “Feel So Real” and “Weak at the Knees” as a solo artist before he left music altogether to become a minister. Though he technically returned at the beginning of the 2010s, Arrington’s new album Down to the Lowest Terms: The Soul Sessions is his first proper solo comeback. Don’t let the retro cover artwork fool you—there are no “soul revival” or fake-funk tracks here. In fact, the polished, modern production flourishes throughout the album serve to highlight how unmatched Arrington’s voice and vitality remain.
Recorded entirely at the Stones Throw studio in Los Angeles, Down to the Lowest Terms also doubles as a who’s who of the city’s notable beat scene producers. Label boss Peanut Butter Wolf brought together established figures from the roster (Knxwledge, Mndsgn) and rising talent like versatile bedroom producer Shibo to contribute to the album. Arrington’s voice becomes the banner under which these various musicians ride. They bring a remarkable sonic cohesion to the record, and Arrington rarely contorts himself to fit into these tracks, even though they run the gamut from R&B ballads to crushed lo-fi beats.
The best songs give Arrington the room to sprawl out and flex those ever-charismatic vocals, nearly untarnished by the sands of time. Just listen to the cascading background parts on the gleaming slow-burner “Keep Dreamin’” or the tightly-knit scatting passages near the end of “Lord Knows,” one of two tracks that Arrington recorded drums on. Down to the Lowest Terms, especially its first half, is peppered with these kinds of awe-inspiring vocal moments. Hearing him is like watching a veteran tightrope walker take to the slackline for the first time in years and breeze their way through a complex routine.
Arrington’s songwriting also remains refreshingly free of cynicism. It doesn’t matter that the stakes are so low on “Good Mood,” once he drops into a wavering, theatrical timbre just to describe how merely thinking of the sun can put a smile on his face first thing in the morning, you’re hooked in. By contrast, the ruminative “Make a Difference” carries on a lineage of political funk by touching upon the legacy of racial oppression in America. “My great-great-grandmama was a slave,” he murmurs at the start. Not every song is so compelling—the dissonant house number “You’re Not Ready” feels like a cutting room floor loosie—but Arrington’s performances have enough swagger to them to carry him through.
Elsewhere, the two Knxwledge contributions—“Love is Gone” and “Make Ya Say Yie”—envelop Arrington in crunchy slo-mo soul textures à la NxWorries, and the latter’s loping horn melody lets the soul singer commit to some stellar falsetto runs. The mid-album cut “My Favorite Swing” taps into a style of frenetic jazz similar to that of Thundercat, who Arrington worked with on “Black Qualls.” In the same way Prince cultivated and collaborated with up-and-coming talent throughout his career, Arrington’s willingness to garner inspiration from a younger generation that considers him a formative influence creates a powerful feedback loop of creativity. The songs themselves mostly cover well-trodden ground, but the chemistry and musical dialogue between the funk forefather and his collaborators make Down to the Lowest Terms feel wholly new.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Much-loved cult singer and songwriter Mark Kozelek releases both the new Sun Kil Moon record and, under his own name, a disc of alternate takes, rarities, and live tracks to accompany the American release of his book of lyrics, Nights of Passed Over, which is culled primarily from his work with Red House Painters.

Sun Kil Moon / Mark Kozelek: April / Nights

April / Nights

Few songwriters could bear the scrutiny of a book of lyrics, although far too many invite it. Writing good songs is only half the challenge; the other is to set words compellingly to paper, without the securities of voice, chords, and melody to reinforce their internal rhythms and recast their meanings. In 2002, Mark Kozelek, formerly of Red House Painters and currently alternating between a solo project and the loosely defined Sun Kil Moon (which is pretty much a solo project), released a book of lyrics called Nights of Passed Over in Europe, where his cult is even more intensely rabid than his American audience. Culling primarily from his work with Red House Painters, the book argued persuasively for Kozelek as a gifted, intuitive, and insightful songwriter, with an aversion to sentimentality and a way of combining words that is evocative without being showy or clever. His lyrics can stand on their own, even without his low, rich, sad voice and shimmering, patient guitar.
Six years later, Kozelek has reissued Nights of Passed Over in America. A lot has happened during that interim: He has released three albums as Sun Kil Moon and has already reissued one of them, has put out a live album under his own name, and has formed his own record label, Caldo Verde. The label is also publishing this new version of Nights of Passed Over, which is accompanied by Nights, a full disc of alternate takes, rarities, and live tracks. It might seem like an act of supreme hubris if it weren't for the fact the Kozelek often eludes musical associations in favor of literary ones. Despite the persistent comparisons to Neil Young and Crazy Horse at their most compact, his literary influences seem much more useful: Kozelek draws from Raymond Carver when he's in storyteller mode, at other times from Robert Lowell or Norman Dubie or James Kavanaugh. That's a big statement for any musician, especially one who tends to write about his cats.
Nights begins with a live version of "Michigan", from the Painters' 2001 swan song Old Ramon. The song thrums with a palpable sense of desire and a quickly diminishing sense of restraint: "I see through your thin cotton dress/ I don't know if we'll get to rest/ So pull by that store parking lot/ You know I've missed you lots/ Warn me of the cans and nots." Recorded at Union Chapel in London, this version of "Michigan" features only Kozelek's vocals, which are subtle as an internal monologue, accompanied by his acoustic guitar and a rapt audience. That's really all it needs. In a sly stroke of sequencing, he moves directly into "Drop", from the same venue, with its devastating admission delivered in long lines that seem to break the meter: "All the love in an instant makes my life stop/ But then my hate for you makes my feelings altogether drop."
Of course, Kozelek isn't a literary figure, but a musical one, so the CD lives and dies by the sounds that accompany his words. And these are, by Kozelek's own admission, the lesser takes, so occasionally Nights does little more than remind you to pull out your old copy of Ocean Beach. The guitars on this "Jam version" of "Carry Me Ohio" ground out the melody like a cigarette into asphalt, but the nice, twisty solo somewhat redeems this take. Originally released on Cameron Crowe's Vinyl Films label, this acoustic version of "Duk Koo Kim", from Sun Kil Moon's Ghosts of Great Highway, sounds hypnotic as the guitars pick out a steady theme that changes notes even as they repeat the same rhythm. For all its ups and downs, Nights never feels like a vault-emptying exercise. It's more a compendium of Kozelek's marginalia.
Kozelek has updated Nights of Passed Over up through April, his long-awaited Sun Kil Moon follow-up to Ghosts of Great Highway (not counting the Modest Mouse covers album Tiny Cities). The simultaneous release of both works makes Nights of Passed Over seem like one of the most elaborate lyrics sheet ever. These new songs continue his emphasis on steadily paced compositions about lost loves, distant friends, deep regrets, and nebulous sadness, but shifts the setting from the open road to closed-in rooms at the end of long drives.
Not as immediately accessible as Ghosts, April starts with "Lost Verses" and "The Light", two long, slow songs that are together nearly twenty minutes long. This is Kozelek time, and it takes a moment to adjust. But once you do, the nuances of the songs' melodies and arrangements gradually announce themselves, like lengthy jam tacked onto "Lost Verses" and the grinding electric strums that fill the spaces between the vocals on "The Light". Lyrically more than musically, "Lost Verses" makes for an effective opener, as Kozelek seems to consider all the things that he has neglected to write down: "Lost verses well up my eyes and ears," he sings plaintively, fearing that he'll become a lost verse to the people he loves. That sense of faltering memory colors April in shades of rainy grays and deep blues. It's a spring album that still pines for previous seasons.
By the time the moody, acoustic "Lucky Man" comes around, the album has set its stride and maintains it through eight more songs. Bonnie Prince Billy lends backing vocals on the country-tinged "Like the River and "Unlit Hallway", which breaks for a spiky banjo solo. These are the most dramatic departures on April, which expands only minimally on the solemn Americana of Kozelek's previous works. He hits many familiar notes, yet manages to make it all sound new and even adventurous instead of conservative or quaint. He reaches into his fragile upper register on "Harper Road", and maps out a travelogue on "Moorestown" that feels nearly threadbare with remembering. "Tonight the Sky" draws out its meanings with churning guitars, pausing for a lengthy solo that threatens to fall apart with every note. The album draws its power not simply from the quality of Kozelek's songwriting, but from the close intertwining of words and music, which makes his albums much more essential than any book he could ever publish.