Elvis Costello releases his first Imposters album in a while, and it's the best of all that would imply-- a fiercely melodic record that sinks or swims on the dynamics of his band. Jenny Lewis guests.

Momofuku

Elvis Costello's career has taken so many left turns since his new-wave beginnings that it's nearly more surprising to hear him record a rock record these days than one of his many excursions in other genres. But Momofuku returns him to his band the Imposters-- their first in a while, and likely the sort of record most of his fans have been waiting for. Fortunately, it's the best of all that would imply: a fiercely melodic record that sinks or swims on the dynamics of his band, much in the vein of his relative comeback album When I Was Cruel and at times even Blood and Chocolate. The songs are raw and unfussy, and they show off what must come naturally to Costello: tracks stitched together from several disparate and equally unforgettable hooks, and lyrics filled with deft wordplay and plenty of seething and unsatisfied characters.
Most of all the record's songs are wrested from guitar and organ, whether it's the irrepressible pop of "American Gangster Time", the hushed, percussive groove of "Drum and Bone", or the distorted stomp of "Stella Hurt". Extra flourishes are kept to a minimum, with the exception of copious amounts of backing vocals. Costello fears no overdub on "American Gangster Time" or "Pardon Me Madam, My Name is Eve", while he gets help from a vocal "supergroup" bolstered by Jenny Lewis and several others on many of the record's tracks, be their contributions manically layered on "Drum and Bone" or just subtle coloring from Lewis on "Song With Rose".
From the album's opener, Costello is already aiming at critics in "No Hiding Place" who have grown more anonymous as his career has gone on (while taking note of "The very near future/ When everything will be free"), has no kind words for corruption across the pond in "American Gangster Time" ("It's a drag saluting that starry rag"), and finds even finds strife in, depending on your beliefs, the world's first coupling ("Pardon Me Madam, My Name Is Eve"). Yet while Costello is known for his pith, there's a certain amount of gentleness and grown-ass-man maturity present elsewhere: The honking jazz guitar of "Harry Worth" almost mocks Costello's previous ballroom pretensions, while the lyrics are like an answer to embittered earlier songs like "Almost Blue" or "The Long Honeymoon" as the narrator seeks to bring together dueling newlyweds, assuring them, "it's not very far between tears and mirth." Later, the placid ballad "My Three Sons" is a hopeful ode to estranged parents and finds glimmers of acceptance in growing old.
Even a meat-and-potatoes rock record from Costello would be nothing to complain about, but Momofuku finds small, but significant ways to diversify. Aside from the welcome downshift of "Harry Worth", there's a distinctive country twang (no stranger to his catalog) behind the prideful grand piano banging in "Song for Rose", while "Mr. Feathers" walks the middle ground between woozy Beatlesque melodies and the trashcan symphonies of Tom Waits. There's some percussive feats of wonder as well, from the chaotic clatter that closes out "Stella Hurt" to some of the man/machine editing that marked the material from When I Was Cruel on "Turpentine", one of two songs where the Imposters swelled to nine musicians, including Pete Thomas' daughter Tennessee from the Like on additional drums.
It's a remarkably consistent album, but what unifies these songs is how they were recorded, and how Costello and company play to their particular strengths. Even with all these extra musicians-- all valuable players who acquit themselves beautifully, of course-- it goes to show that Costello's songwriting voice is indelible, no matter who is or how many people are playing. While his omnivorous ears and musical appetite should be lauded, perhaps this is why records like these feel like more natural contexts for him. It lacks any standout single to rally around or champion, but maybe it's better that Momofuku's no-nonsense mood is unbroken. It's the longtime fans who'll be happiest with Momofuku, as the traditional four-piece "American Gangster Time" and closing track "Go Away", with its harsh vocal echo and buzzing organ, might be as close to vintage Costello as we may ever hear again.


Reuniting the Memphis lineup of his long-running band, former Oblivian Greg Cartwright reveals the depth of his appreciation for classic American rock and soul sounds.

Reigning Sound: A Little More Time With Reigning Sound

A Little More Time With Reigning Sound

On their 1995 album Soul Food, which sounds like it was recorded in a deep fryer, Greg Cartwright’s old band the Oblivians released a song with an n-bomb in its title. The Oblivians were Memphis garage-punk kingpins, and Soul Food sums up their scene: white edgelords aping the boundary-pushing rebelliousness of Little Richard and Ike Turner without considering the racist conditions that gave early rock’n’roll its sense of desperation. So what’s a garage rocker to do when he outgrows the need to push people’s buttons? With Reigning Sound, Cartwright has spent the years focusing on craft instead of provocation: slowing down and fashioning songs that tend to sound like well-chosen covers of obscure garage, soul, and girl-group gems.
On the warm, thoughtfully arranged new album A Little More Time With Reigning Sound, Cartwright reunites with Jeremy Scott, Greg Roberson, and Alex Greene—Reigning Sound’s “Memphis lineup,” which helped jumpstart the band’s growth by layering singer-songwriter wistfulness into Cartwright’s customarily hectic garage rock on 2005’s Home for Orphans. In the decade and a half after that album, Cartwright worked in different studios with a fluctuating lineup. In 2011, Abdication... For Your Love was produced in part by the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, and Reigning Sound’s most recent album, 2014’s Shattered, was recorded at the Daptone studios. Like Reigning Sound’s best work, the Daptone/Auerbach assembly line traffics in a kind of amalgamated American music, and the results should have been a match made in cool-dad heaven, but on those albums, Cartwright’s typically clever songs and heartfelt voice were lost in the overwrought production.
A Little More Time is a culmination of a long process of maturation. The seasoned songwriter brings his well-honed gifts back home to Memphis, gathers old friends, and records on 8-track, making a record that feels more like a band standing close together in a room than a guy renting time in a studio with Serious American Music presets on the gear. As on Home for Orphans, the ruminative, slower songs are the ones that really shine, living in the sweet spot between pomade-slick rock’n’roll, festive ’60s soul, and glowing country gold. Cartwright wrote a lot of this album at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown last year, and the songs feel made for staring out the window while cigarette smoke twists into your coffee’s steam. On single “Oh Christine,” Cartwright ditches the wounded Foghorn Leghorn howl that blew through the band’s early albums for a warbly ’70s Dylan croon. A lyrical, Muscle Shoals-style guitar lead guides the band through the verse and pre-chorus before laying down the hook on a bed of keys. Other highlights include the swirling strings and organ that buoy “I’ll Be Your Man,” and the constant build and swell of “Just Say When,” a duet with Cartwright’s old Parting Gifts bandmate Coco Hames.
At its beginning, A Little More Time feels like one of those “back to our roots” attempts that bands make when they’re out of ideas and energy. The opening is a cheeky boogie called “Let’s Do It Again” that winks more than it rocks. Before the title track’s intricate vocal melody kicks in, the juicy organ of the intro echoes a version of “Stop and Think It Over” that Reigning Sound recorded with former Shangri-La’s singer Mary Weiss. The handclaps on the searing cover of Adam Faith’s “I Don’t Need That Kind of Lovin’” call back to the band’s 2002 cover of “Stormy Weather.” Luckily, the rest of the record is an achievement in craftsmanship, featuring some of Reigning Sound’s most layered songs yet. The pastiche of classic American sounds is still present, but Scott Bomar’s production gives the music an unstudied, authentic feel. Keys swell under choruses, strings drop in but don’t overstay their welcome, and Cartwright’s quieter croon has even more hurt and pathos than the sweaty shout he perfected in the 2000s. A Little More Time sounds like a record made by someone who has internalized the old music that they love and is now letting it flow out naturally.
Doing press for the Oblivians’ 2013 reunion album, Cartwright tried to excuse the band’s ’90s antics as “tongue-in-cheek,” and told Memphis Flyer, “I just couldn’t write the nihilistic rock anthem anymore.” Luckily, he stopped trying. That old racial slur still can’t quite be unheard, but on this rewarding album, it is clear that he now has way better things to say.

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On The Night Took Us in Like Family, producer, rapper, and Flying Lotus collaborator Jeremiah Jae relinquishes his production know-how to L’Orange so he can focus on rapping. It's an aesthetic concept record that teasingly ponders the idea of gangster rap from another era.

Jeremiah Jae / L'Orange: The Night Took Us in Like Family

The Night Took Us in Like Family

The chemistry innate to a rapper-producer duo is something worthy of respect, whether the fruits of the dynamic are successful or not. It’s evidence of mirroring, an essential element of identity formation, relationship building, and confidence: I see something of myself in you/your work—let’s try a thing. Ultimately, the best collaboration is about ceding control, which is rare amongst the alpha personalities that dominate rap. But the truth is, most of the best rap isn’t made in a vacuum with just a Dropbox of raw, outsourced beats, but from a certain collaborative dance duet. Take Guru and DJ Premier, Dr. Dre and Eminem, Madlib and MF DOOM, Clipse and the Neptunes, DJ Mustard and YG, Killer Mike and El-P.
What makes this dynamic even more interesting is when one of the partners is multi-talented. Like Madlib or Kanye West before him, on The Night Took Us in Like Family producer and rapper Jeremiah Jae relinquishes his own production know-how to focus on rapping. Jae’s production work on Flying Lotus’ hallucinatory Captain Murphy project and his own projects for Brainfeeder and Warp are often abrasive and off kilter; unlike his partner L’Orange’s production work on The Night, it is hardly ever obviously soulful. Even when Jae tweaks a classic it always sounds a little foreboding, like macerating the hot sugar of Aretha Franklin’s voice by boring into the downbeat and detuning her on his 2010 flip of her "One Step Ahead" (best known as the sample for Mos Def’s "Ms. Fat Booty"). The ghost of that song can be heard on The Night in the smoky, soulful, sped-up swing of "Part Two: God Complex", which one of a handful of short instrumental interludes that helps set the album’s Bogart-soused, B&W tone.
If the clips of film dialogue don’t give it away then the mid-century camp will, from jazz and lounge samples, down to the fingersnaps ("The Lineup"). This is an aesthetic concept record (billed, cringingly, as "noir hop") that teasingly ponders the idea of gangster rap from another era—pre-Scarface, for once. It’s an interesting approach, especially for illuminating the way popular culture has nefariously oversimplified the image of the "gangster"—a phrase often used as a contemptuous shorthand for rappers in particular, and black men more broadly—throughout time.
Like the swarthy-voiced Bogart, Jae’s distinctive mumble—mumblier, even, than Earl Sweatshirt—plays unreliable narrator over these 18 tracks. Call it method rapping. One minute he’s confident and smug (on the fast-slow bop of "The Lineup") and the next he lurks ("Invisible in a drop, invisible you cannot see me, don't let the cops see"). But he’s mostly paranoid, dogged by frauds and foes, and concerned with getting "down like James Brown when them rounds go off." L’Orange builds a gilded stage from a clutter of film, soul, and synth samples, refurbishing the worn 9th Wonder/early-Kanye warped soul template. It’s a pretty seamless pairing; these two have similar ideas about the completeness of a piece of music.


Big Grams is a collaboration between Big Boi of Outkast and the indie-pop duo Phantogram. The two worked together on Big Boi's last solo record, and the project is further evidence that Big Boi doesn’t care so much about being the lead as he is interested in being in the middle of something new and different.

Big Grams

As a solo rapper, Big Boi has been pushing steadily against the old preconception that he was the less-daring half of Outkast. On all three of his solo albums—Speakerboxxx counts— he happily explored his quirks, establishing himself as someone more than just Andre 3000's more stolid counterpart. With Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty,  he pulled off an incredible, boisterously funky reintroduction. Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors paired him with Wavves, Little Dragon and Phantogram among others, and if the results were mixed, it was further evidence of Antwan Patton's voracious ear.
Vicious Lies paved the way for this full Phantogram collaboration. The indie-pop duo featured on three of the songs on Vicious, but on Big Grams they hit a bit more of a stride. This isn't a Big Boi-on-Phantogram beats project, and Phantogram's Sarah Barthel is nearly as central as the OutKast rapper as a lead vocalist. The two trade spots as lead vocalists playfully and Barthel's hooks are integral throughout. Barthel tries some rapping, and the results aren't actively embarrassing.
"Run for Your Life", the lead track, is sparse and spacey, and the synth sounds lifted from Stevie Wonder's Moog on "Boogie On Reggae Woman". Big Boi's raps aren't deep on Big Grams, but they are captivating: His strategically fluttering drawl, doled out in pitter-patter bursts, is a trademark as recognizable as it is versatile. On "Fell in the Sun" he punches quickly with a staccato: "I whip the yellow Cadillac, I like my seats way back / I bust the sunroof open, beams hit the Braves cap."  This track, the lead single, is the obvious standout, and it's here that the collaboration clicks fully. Phantogram's Josh Carter builds up a throbbing wall of synths atop a snappy drum loop, and like elsewhere, horn stabs punctuates: proof, perhaps, that everything Big Boi does deserves a little funk.
"Put It On Her" is one of two tracks on the outing not produced by Carter, and it's certainly the better and more natural of them. (That soulful pump fake of an intro turns out to be a subtle 9th Wonder calling card.) The Skrillex-featuring "Drum Machine", however, sticks out like a sore thumb and bogs down the end of the album. For a record that's so smoothly collaborative elsewhere, "Drum Machine" sounds contrived and clunky. Luckily it is tacked on the end, making it entirely skippable.
The Run the Jewels feature on "Born to Shine" fares better, and not just because of Big Boi's pivotal role in Killer Mike's career. Mike's verse steals the show—"Ric Flair'in' / Long fur coat wearin' / Rolex rockin' / Silk shirt wearin'"—while Big Boi happily takes a backseat. This may be a hallmark of Patton's career:  He's continually building up evidence that he doesn't care so much about being the lead as he is interested in being in the middle of something new and different. Given Atlanta's persistent vitality as a hotbed for innovative hip-hop, it's nice to know that one of the city's elder statesmen is off doing his own thing, carving out another little path for himself long after he helped pave the main road.


Dark Energy, the first release from the Indiana footwork producer Jlin, contains all the hallmarks of the heart-racing house music subgenre—frenzied pacing, arrhythmic kick drums, a graphic command of blank space—but executed with a clear-eyed self-determination. The music's happy/scary tension taps into the thrill and release in activating anger.

Dark Energy

Menace is a sensation endemic to footwork, the Chicago-borne genre of heart-racing house music that is predicated on going harder and better than anyone else on the floor. Dark Energy, the first album from Gary, Ind. producer Jlin, hints at this idea of combativeness, bending all matter of percussion, vocal clips and pre-existing ideas about footwork into submission. Jlin’s talked about the mediocrity that can result from working from a happy place, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some joy at work in her music—it’s found in the process of creating and, for listeners, in the release of the dancefloor. That sly flip—the thrill and release in activating anger—is the emotional ingenuity in Jlin’s music. It’s a certain mindfulness she has in common with Rick Owens, who used her music—and that of pioneering footworker RP Boo—for his FW 2014/15 Paris Fashion Week show. Grim, monochrome upper; mind-altering interior.
Dark Energy has all the hallmarks of footwork—its frenzied pacing, arrhythmic kick drums, a graphic command of blank space—executed with clear-eyed self-determination. This gives the album an opaque, thoughtful quality. It's Jlin’s first release, centered around a track that first went live in 2010 ("Erotic Heart"), which means she’s had time to think about what she’s doing and, more importantly, what she is not doing. While working shifts at one of Gary’s many large steel mills, Jlin spent months perfecting the music, including songs like "Guantanamo",  which cleaves hair-raising dialogue from The Ring with a grip of pin-sharp synths. Her tenacity feels even more significant when you consider that she’s a woman working in the man-saturated field of electronic production, and footwork in particular. For women, producer’s anonymity is both gift and curse.
A bunch of these song titles also invite loose contemplation on narratives of blackness, and/or racialized peoples. "Black Diamond" and “Black Ballet” scan more literally, whereas songs like “Guantanamo,” “Ra” and “Mansa Musa” prompt ideas about history, mythology, imprisonment, culture wars and a clash of civilizations. Jlin doesn’t editorialize, and this record isn’t specifically about identity politics. But she’s from Gary, a blue collar, black-majority city, making a record within a genre created for and by African-Americans at a time when the non-white citizenry is growing increasingly restless and hella loud about owning its art and likeness, its safety and life expectancy. Dark Energy has absorbed some of the shock. It has knowledge of self. Throw it onto the list of recent albums, like Heems’ Eat Pray Thug and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, that take personal, political and temporal stock of our lives and refuse to be one-dimensional in chronicling these experiences.
This sense of brooding becomes music that feels venomous. "Mansa Musa"—the name of a prominent ruler and cultural benefactor of the Mali Empire—clarifies Dark Energy’s happy-scary tension best. Halfway through the album, its fizzy, midtempo gait feels like a break from the intensity. But it’s a feint. Effervescent synths and skeletal drums lift the song up only to have a descending bassline and stiff snares prick its rise, sending it flopping to its death like a deflated balloon.
With the exception of vocal snippets, which appear frequently, Jlin doesn’t bother with traditional sampling. She’s generated her own instrumentation: from the winding, symphonic piano loop that opens the album on "Black Ballet" and the atonal moan of a Chinese erhu violin on "Unknown Tongues" to the guttural synths that skim the bottom of "Ra". Like Jlin it’s unconventional, particularly within footwork. Her homespun mutation of the genre feels like she’s staging an interrogation, and there’s the sense of threat: What do you feel when you hear the hollowed-out militant stomp and shiver of "Black Diamond"? What physical realm does this song slip into and out of as pinched, tweaked-out synths whirr ecstatically to life then stop? Are you having fun yet?


On Dear, the Japanese trio Boris hone in on their most essential quality—the ability to wrest subtlety from thick layers of distortion and amplifier volume.

Dear

For all the much-deserved praise Boris get for their endless experimenting, the Japanese trio has never been afraid of using the types of melodies that hardline noise fans tend to curl their noses at. At times throughout Boris’ prolific career—during any given live performance, even—you sometimes get the impression that there’s a hair band trying to get out from under the rolling waves of feedback and guitar distortion. It is, in fact, this willingness to toss aside stylistic rules that, for better or worse, has defined Boris’ zig-zagging trajectory since 1992.
In the past, Boris have taken shape-shifting to such an extreme that they’ve even released drastically different versions of the same album, including 2005/6’s Pink, 2006’s Vein, and 2008’s Smile. The band has put out so many versions of its myriad releases that Henry Rollins once referred to its discography as “a heaven and hell” for record collectors. It comes as no great shock, then, that Dear started out in a different form.
Originally conceived in 2015 as the album Boris would end their 25-year career with, the writing sessions for Dear “yielded three albums’ worth of material.” Then the band went on tour in 2016 performing Pink, one of their most overtly poppy albums, in full. On returning, drummer/vocalist Atsuo, guitarist/vocalist Wata, and bassist/vocalist Takeshi wrote more songs and whittled the entire pool down to a single record. Oddly, playing the Pink material prompted a shift back towards the heavier style the band is best-known for, but the band issued a press statement saying “we don’t feel comfortable calling Dear a return to our slow and heavy style.” Fair enough, but that’s pretty much what the new album is.
Titled Dear as a musical thank-you letter to fans, the new album finds Boris honing in on their most essential quality: their ability to wrest a kind of endless subtlety from thick layers of distortion and volume. When we look back on Boris’ legacy, what will likely stand out is that, along with the most artful of their drone/sludge peers, Wata and Takeshi made it possible for audiences to discern color and detail within the fabric of guitar tones that had once been thought of as blunt instruments of force.
Again, Boris marry heaviness with melodic vocal lines that fall slightly askew of the cleaving attack of the guitars. It sounds as if they were still seeking to reconcile a relationship between two clashing parties that might be ill-suited for one another after all, but where the odd-couple dynamic becomes the draw. At times, Takeshi has no qualms about exaggerating his inflections to sound like the third-generation grunge singers whose voices rule over modern rock radio. You can easily imagine the straight-ahead riff-rocker “Absolutego,” for example, as an early demo by Alice in Chains, when they were still grooming themselves in the image of ’80s metal.
All three members also counterbalance that approach with less stagey singing that gives the music a sense of reserve to match Takeshi's flamboyance. Dear features a substantial amount of chanting as well. When any of the three members’ voices are treated with heavy reverb—on “Kagero,” “Deadsong,” and “D.O.W.N. (Domination of Waiting Noise.),” for example—the effect is both serene and haunting, as if the band were performing a funeral ceremony for itself. (The noncommittal wording of the band’s official press release suggests that it’s still hedging on whether or not to retire.)
Meanwhile, on “Kagero” and “Deadsong,” demonic, throat-curdling whispers over molasses-slow doom riffs recall Thomas Gabriel Fischer’s tortured lamentations on Celtic Frost’s 2006 doomy comeback Monotheist. Both of these songs, as well as others on the album, contain delicate ambient elements, such as single guitar strings plucked with a certain resonance to resemble piano keys off in the distance. None of these choices reveal anything new about Boris, but the execution is especially discreet—about what you’d expect from a band that’s been exploring for a quarter century and no longer feels the need to force anything. Even the intentionally choppy edits don’t disrupt the album’s graceful flow.
You can read certain lyrics on Dear as the band’s self-reflection on its current position: “It looks like it’s our destiny/It looks like I’ve seen it before” (“Biotope”) or “Nobody wants to pick up that nostalgia/An appalling sight” (“Memento Mori”). But that would probably be a stretch. In truth, Dear doesn’t make any grand, final gestures. It does, however, compel you to wonder again how much more there is to express in the overlap between sludge, drone, doom, and shoegaze—areas that Boris have returned to time after time. After all this time, the answer still isn’t clear. And maybe that’s the beauty of Boris’ story if it does in fact end here.


The Berlin-based producer’s fourth full-length trades his customary techno for 78 minutes of grimly beautiful music. It’s a long, bleak, challenging album that envelops the listener in darkness and fog.

Silent Cities

With his last album, 2019’s World Order Music, Levon Vincent found a home for both the cavernous techno he’s best known for and the synth-based minimalism that has cropped up from time to time on his releases. But one track indicated a third, unforeseen direction that Vincent’s music might take. “She Likes to Wave at Passing Boats” consisted of little more than a rudimentary house beat and an incredible wall of string synths, yet Vincent highlighted it as a “surprise favorite” on the album, and no wonder. There’s always been something urban and dystopian about Vincent’s music, and “Passing Boats” presented Vincent as Vangelis, lighting up his subterranean sound world with a flash of Blade Runner blues. This sound suited him, and it made for one of the most powerful productions of his career.
Vincent’s fourth album, Silent Cities, expands on the basic idea of “Passing Boats” across 78 minutes of grim, architectural, often astonishingly beautiful music. Though titles like “Birds,” “Tigers,” and “Mother Amazon” suggest lushness and greenery, the album’s simple construction and sheer scale make it hard to picture anything other than urban vastness and desolation. Among electronic music’s evocations of cities, it’s comparable to Burial’s Untrue, 2814’s Birth of a New Day, Deepchord Presents Echospace’s Liumin, and DJ Sprinkles’ Midtown 120 Blues in its depth, scope, and imagination. You want to soar over this city, explore its hidden streets and back alleys, discover what every pinprick of light on the horizon belongs to.
While most sonic cityscapes suggest hustle and bustle, Silent Cities is minimal and streamlined in its construction, with tracks that move glacially over long run times. This isn’t a crowded thoroughfare but a sleepy industrial hinterland or empty parking garage. It’s easy to connect this sparseness to the depopulation of city streets during COVID-19 lockdown; in fact, though Vincent recorded the bulk of the album pre-pandemic, he finalized it in 2020 while looking out at the emptiness of his adopted home of Berlin. But while the cover features Berlin’s Fernsehturm TV tower, it also incorporates the Empire State Building from his hometown of New York. Like the city in Babe: Pig in the City, which cribs landmarks from all over the world in its skyline, Silent Cities is all cities, distilled into one grander and more mysterious than any that could exist in reality.
Four-on-the-floor techno beats are largely absent. Instead, we hear irregular kick drums accompanied by a near-constant tattoo of eighth-note or 16th-note hi-hats. Synth strings meander slowly above a yawning void of bass, accompanied on a few tracks by a tinny artificial piano that sounds like it was ripped out of a Chicago house track and jettisoned in a back alley. Effects are sparse aside from a chilly pall of reverb and the intrusion of dubby chords on “Birds” and “Mother Amazon.” Sometimes this music sounds like trap, as on “Gattaca.” At other times, it sounds like early-2010s producers like Cooly G, CFCF, and Kuedo, who preferred pretty chords and simple synth patches to side-chains and sub-bass. What it certainly does not sound like is dance music—nor does it sound like ambient music, as you’ll learn when “Birds” bleeds into the red in its final moments.
Silent Cities boasts a sly melodicism that makes it much more interesting than if Vincent was simply holding down minor chords on synth pads. Counterintuitively, it also makes the music sound creepier; so does his use of just intonation, which unlocks weird, microtonal harmonies. The melody of “Everlasting Joy” lingers slightly too long on one note until it sounds less like a hook than an unwholesome guffaw. “Gattaca,” “Sunrise,” and “Wolves” are based on the robust chord progressions and bright synths associated with anthems, but they circle endlessly instead of building to anything. On “Moonlight,” a single synth lead is backed by bass and drums, and it’s hilarious how the hi-hats race madly to the finish line while the melody chases its own tail in circles. We get a sense of grandeur and triumph with no release or climax, contributing to the album’s consistent feeling of being awed by your surroundings but still hopelessly lost.
It’s remarkable how much Silent Cities diverges from the trajectory of Vincent’s full-lengths while still feeling like his prior work. This is a long, bleak, challenging album that envelops the listener in darkness and fog, and that’s also true of World Order Music and his stunning self-titled album from 2015 (and, to a lesser extent, 2017’s For Paris). Vincent says this is the first album he made with no expectations of dancefloor play, instead optimizing it for listening on headphones, preferably while navigating a city. The parts of his music most alluring to the casual listener—dimly lit atmospheres, evocative synth sounds—are at the fore of Silent Cities, but that doesn’t make his music easier to get a grip on. Instead, the mystery deepens with each listen, until it expands in your head into a world bigger and more sprawling than even Vincent himself could imagine.


Tom Jenkinson of Squarepusher gathers a live band to play fast-and-busy jazz fusion, including versions of some of his early classics. The chops are there, but the broader point is less clear.

Elektrac

Squarepusher’s Tom Jenkinson is not a man prone to inertia. Since his breakout in the mid-’90s with the frenetic avant drum’n’bass of Feed Me Weird Things and Hard Normal Daddy, his career has assumed a sort of pinball trajectory, bouncing from prettified electroacoustic music to solo bass noodling to a period spent composing for a robotic band (see 2014 EP Music for Robots), clinging to instrumental virtuosity as a guiding precept. In this respect, the live-band project Shobaleader One is simultaneously a clean break and business as usual, being both the start of a new phase and the point at which a few older ideas fully germinate.
The Shobaleader One concept came to life in 2010, with an album titled Squarepusher Presents Shobaleader One: d’Demonstrator. Incorporating elements of R&B, heavy metal, and Jenkinson’s own treated vocals, it purported to be the work of a live band, but was probably just the work of Jenkinson himself. But d’Demonstrator did attract some fellow travelers, and early in 2016, Shobaleader One emerged as a genuine touring entity—Jenkinson on bass, plus three musicians going by the names Strobe Nazard, Company Laser, and Arg Nution, taking on keyboards, drums, and guitar, respectively. At their gigs, this “space-pop” quartet set about reworking a number of Squarepusher standards through the medium of hyperspeed jazz-funk, their identities concealed by masks that look like malfunctioning Tenori-on.
While not explicitly presented as a live album, Elektrac seems to be taken in part from concert recordings, though were it not for the light applause that punctuates each track you might not notice. The recordings are crystal-clear, and there is no doubting the chops of the band themselves, who handle their task with virtuoso ease. Some tracks here feel well suited to a Shobaleader overhaul. A sprint through “Coopers World” from 1997’s Hard Normal Daddy imagines it as the score to some hardboiled ’70s cop-drama, all sticky wah-wah guitar and limber-fingered keyboard runs. “E8 Boogie” is pretty much a showcase for Jenkinson’s genuinely startling warp-speed bass plucking. Elsewhere, there’s some entertainment in watching the outfit stretch to cover distant corners of Squarepusher’s artistic mien. Company Laser nearly blows a circuit trying to replicate the drill’n’bass flurries of “Journey to Reedham,” while the ensemble show impressive restraint on a blissfully centered take on “Iambic 5 Poetry,” the pretty, vibes-laden standout from 1999’s Budakhan Mindphone.
These enjoyable moments are balanced by stretches where you realize you’re not so much enjoying Elektrac as being subjected to it. “Don’t Go Plastic” and “Squarepusher Theme” solo interminably, while a mid-album turn towards the heavy turns out low points like “Megazine”—Daft Punk gone metal gone wrong—and a rather cold and lifeless technical riffer called “Delta-V.” Jenkinson has explained he wants Shobaleader One to sound like “an insane band.” But nothing here verges on the elemental extremity or deranged humor displayed by earlier groups fusing jazz and metal—Lightning Bolt, for instance, or John Zorn’s Naked City. Instead, these tracks balance loudness with a rather fussy and joyless quality; fun to play, probably, not so much to listen to.
In a 2016 interview with Q magazine, Jenkinson described Shobaleader One as a reaction to the current state of electronic music production. “Software companies, partly in order to further their business aims, have made it so easy to make electronic music that the format in general is beginning to assume a troubling air of painting-by-numbers pointlessness,” he said. Look closer at Shobaleader’s gleaming metal carapace—can you see the jazz snob poking through? The idea that an album of finicky jazz-funk covers is the answer to anything in 2017 is a little rich. But more broadly, I’d say Jenkinson’s assessment is flawed. The increasing availability of production software has enabled the rise of music-makers otherwise marginalized for geographic or economic reasons—think localized sounds like grime, or gqom, or, if you want to go back further, those early jungle productions that gave Squarepusher its initial impetus. As ever, it’s not so much about the tools, but what you do with them. And while it’s laudable that Jenkinson is always moving, never resting, Elektrac feels a bit of a sideshow: a flexing of technique with little to display but its own shiny spectacle.


Otero War

*Otero War *exists in two alternate universes: the first is a sci-fi dystopia helpfully described by Caveman on their website and illustrated by Marc Ericksen, the guy behind the cover of *Mega Man 2 and, more importantly, Twitter cult favorite Bad Dudes. But that’s not the real story here. Like the two Caveman albums before it, Otero War could be an accessory to a generic and fictionalized network-tv retelling of “indie rock in the 2010s.” And as with the soundtracks from any season of “Nashville,” “Empire,” or “Vinyl,” Otero War *is a collection of interchangeable,  time-stamped simulacra that’s enjoyable on a superficial level, but mostly exists for the greater discussion of “who is this one based on?”
The timetable for making an indie rock album dictates that Caveman will always be playing catch up. Their debut *CoCo Beware boasted folk harmonies, candy-coated keyboards and chillwave’s ironic referentiality; in other words, Caveman were a quintessential 2009 band in 2011. Meanwhile, the best song on 2013’s Caveman *shared its title with Chromatics’ best song. Given this pattern, *Otero War *should logistically be cribbing off 2014’s year-end lists.
And yes, to the degree that Volkswagen’s ad agency were once influenced by Beach House, singles “Never Going Back” and “80 West” are influenced by the War on Drugs and the non-singles are actually styled after Singles. Being a knockoff brand isn't all bad, though: Sure, you have to get rid of the guitar solos, the engrossing ambient interludes and Adam Granduciel’s compelling battle with emotional devastation and perfectionism; but if you don’t the time to get Lost in the Dream**, Caveman offers a decent smoke break of Boss-gaze in nearly half the time.
Matthew Iwanusa certainly can't be said to lack commitment: He puts his back into this, foregrounding his brassy, sterling vocals amid a polished, flawless-sounding mix. If Iwanusa wanted to front an arena-ready Coldplay acolyte, or appear on The Voice as the “edgy” rock guy, he probably could. Or, he could just as easily be a jingle writer or the new Billy Joel for all we know, as the broad melody of “80 West” immediately triggers the thought of an impending Bosom Buddies* *reboot.
Which, right—that sci-fi plotline. The lyrics of Otero War are so damn vague (“it’s just the way I am, what a feeling”) they could retrofitted into basically any kind of hero’s journey*.* For the most part, Caveman songs embody the kind of implacable, but manageable discontent that mostly drives people to buy stuff to snuff it out. Call it “sync-indie” or “montage-core” or, more accurately, corporate rock.
None of this makes *Otero War *bad music; Caveman have developed their craft, and all of those 3 PM slots at summer festivals aren’t gonna fill themselves. And yeah, Phil Collins, Billy Joel, Brooooce—every generation tends to advocate for music they may have uncritically absorbed as a captive audience. Catch a snippet of “Never Going Back” or “Life or Just Living” in the wild and it’ll be worth a Shazam search. But how often is anyone a member of a captive audience in 2016?Otero War is a centrist indie rock record at a time when a center doesn’t really exist and there are vastly more interesting and inclusive things going on just outside the frame. But if you happen to miss out on all of these bands at the moment, not to worry: the next Caveman album will probably sound just like them.


At first blush, it's tempting to refer to the third album from Hannes Norrvide's coldwave project Lust for Youth as "pop"—but his ideas of pop are strictly filtered through post-punk, so the newly minted trio's International is more a logical step forward from his no-fi previous recordings than a giant leap.

International

Minds typically go to dark, severe places when describing Lust for Youth: the blackest winters of Hannes Norrvide’s native Sweden, mental and physical prisons, Joy Division songs. So when a Lust for Youth song is built on Norrvide singing “this time he crossed the line” with typical, Teutonic austerity, you figure it's not going to end well for whoever he's talking about. And you’d be right—the song's about disgraced Tour de France champion and lawsuit magnet Lance Armstrong (“He spins the wheels down Champs-Élysées to acquire his seventh title for his people to admire”) and takes its title (“Epoetin Alfa”) from a drug frequently abused in the cycling world. But little else about International’s shimmering opening track resembles Norrvide’s past work, allowing you to hear that lyric in a meta sense. Lightness, melody, quality production, collaboration —these were forbidden zones on Perfect View and Growing Seeds, and on International, Norrvide is stepping over boundaries with no plans to go back.

If the word “international” instantly triggers a word association with “jet set”, you’re on the same wavelength as Norrvide here. It’s enough of a surprise that a guest spot from Iceage’s Elias Bender Rønnenfelt on “Epoetin Alfa” results in plangent, pinging guitars more reminiscent of Studio than his own band; the subsequent “Illume” confirms Norrvide’s alignment with Scandinavians fascinated by tropical locales, but he does so without the signifiers. “New Boys” and “Running” conjure the buoyancy of Air France and Tough Alliance without the birdcall and bongos, or the subversive playacting.
Norrvide isn’t quite ready to cross the line into the 1990s, though—his ideas of pop are strictly filtered through post-punk, so International is more a logical step forward from his no-fi previous recordings than a giant leap. Incorporating live member Loke Rahbek and producer Malthe Fischer, Lust for Youth are a trio now, and the arrangements of International are at least three times as sophisticated and accomplished; what were previously one or two-note synth figures are now one-bar riffs and full chords.
The crystalline, retro-futurist synths and spotless production could allow for comparisons to Depeche Mode, Human League, and Pet Shop Boys, but that’s if we’re being generous. Norrvide’s not really a lyricist or a personality; he's more of a moaner than a crooner, one who traces the longing melodic lines and placeholder verbiage typical of Bernard Sumner. Though the sound’s more open and inviting, Lust for Youth still remain a mostly unknowable act—the chorused guitars of waltz-timed ballad “After Touch” bear more than a passing resemblance to Def Leppard’s “Hysteria” and render Norrvide’s stiff vocals an afterthought. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the highlight of International is “Armida”, when Norrvide passes the mic to Danish electro-pop singer Soho Rezanejad; it’s still a Lust for Youth song in that it’s centered around the idea of control, but  Rezanejad can sing about losing it, letting go, and moving her feet in a way that would be unconvincing had Norrvide said the same things.
And even if the cold storage atmosphere no longer defines Lust for Youth, Norrvide’s still got his defense mechanisms. “Ultras” and “Basorexia” are perfectly serviceable instrumentals, but they don’t function as interstitials—they just kill whatever momentum Lust for Youth attain with their pop songs, to say nothing of the five-minute spoken-word cut “Lungomare”. Rather than lending International depth, it shrinks the album into an admittedly accurate recapture of top-heavy, single-centered records of Norrvide’s preferred influences. Still, International is Lust for Youth’s third full-length in just two years, so it isn’t likely to be an endpoint, but an indication that they might truly cross the line into pure pop at some point—just, not yet.


These Australians became radio mainstays at home after missing the grunge gold rush, but their debut EP remains a potent encapsulation of alternative rock in the early 1990s.

Signs of Satanic Youth

Despite the best efforts of satellite-radio stations and CNN documentaries, trying to distill an entire era of music into a tidy package inevitably yields myopic results. However, if you needed to provide a new listener with an instant snapshot of how alternative rock really sounded during the early 1990s in all its stringy-haired, secondhand-flannel glory, you could do far worse than Signs of Satanic Youth, the recently reissued 1993 debut EP from Australia’s Magic Dirt.
North American readers of a certain vintage might recognize the band as laggards of the post-Nevermind feeding frenzy; their first proper full-length, 1996’s Friends in Danger, had the misfortune of coming out on Warner Bros. in the U.S. at the moment when major labels stopped caring about finding the next Nirvana. But like fellow Aussie hopefuls You Am I and Spiderbait, Magic Dirt rebounded from their stateside failure by becoming an alternative institution back home, where their increasingly polished garage-rock maintained a recurring presence on the Australian charts and festival circuit.
In their infancy, though, Magic Dirt were a much gnarlier proposition, one that pulled various strains of scabrous ’90s guitar rock—from the apocalyptic screech of Sonic Youth and the constant unrest of early PJ Harvey to the grooving grunge of the Singles soundtrack—into their vortex. With Signs of Satanic Youth, we hear a band taking the tentative first steps out of the murky underground only to get pulled right back in, a tug-of-war that would arguably make Magic Dirt the only band in the ’90s who felt at home opening shows for Pavement and Silverchair.
This reissue marks the EP’s 25th anniversary, but it’s a bittersweet celebration. Magic Dirt’s bassist and co-founder, Dean Turner, passed away in 2009 from a rare form of tissue cancer, a devastating loss that seemingly spelled the end of the band until the announcement of a short upcoming tour. But getting Signs of Satanic Youth back in print was a long-standing wish of Turner’s, and it’s an especially fitting way to commemorate him, given that his ominous low-end was so integral to this formative phase.
Grunge was the product of fusing 1970s hard rock and 1980s hardcore; on Signs of Satanic Youth, Magic Dirt prefered to ricochet between the extremes, with Turner manning the gear shift that sends songs like “Eat Your Blud,” “Supertear,” and “Choker” careening between psychedelic sludge and mosh-pit mayhem. But if all that wah-wah splatter and bassline grime instantly fossilize the EP, the restless performances of singer and guitarist Adalita liberate it. Her tinfoil-chewing sneer and visceral lyricism (“Why do you always have to bleed on me?”) anticipate the raw-throat catharsis of Karen O and White Lung’s Mish Way. Moreover, her sing-outside-the-lines style on the raging “Touch That Space” and conversational candor on the yearning fuzz-pop reprieve “Redhead” point the way to the disorderly oration of Courtney Barnett, who admitted she had Magic Dirt on her mind when she wrote “Pedestrian at Best.”
Signs of Satanic Youth dissolves into a haze of backward-looping effects that blissfully undulates for nine minutes (and went on for another 25 on the original CD). It’s an early display of the latent experimental streak that Magic Dirt would periodically indulge on their subsequent path to Aussie-rock sainthood. But if the untitled piece’s initial function was to provide a moment of serenity after five caterwauling songs, it serves an even greater therapeutic purpose today—as a salve for a band still grieving the loss of a crucial member, extending the halcyon days of a life cut short too soon.


Following an unlikely breakthrough, the Connecticut quintet known for its euphoric live shows delivers a solid LP that avoids some major pitfalls of jam bands in the studio.

Dripfield

Even if you don’t like jam bands, Goose might win you over. Since forming in 2014, the Norwalk, Connecticut quintet has grown into a live force with buzz far beyond the sometimes insular jam band ecosystem. (How many jam bands get hired by Ezra Koenig to officially remix a Vampire Weekend song?) Watching their viral set at Peach Fest 2019—which, like many Goose sets, you can stream in full on YouTube—I thought wow, these guys can play. But it wasn’t just their virtuosic performances: Between the sprawling solos, they had actual songs that I walked away humming. Then, in March 2020, while the world was trying to stay afloat during COVID, Goose made headlines—and actual money—from their well-produced virtual events and tours, becoming industry news.
While their first two studio albums were good-enough collections of songs written to sound even better live, Dripfield is being positioned as Goose’s first real album: an introductory statement to coincide with their relentless touring and mainstream breakthrough. Right away, you can hear what makes Goose different from their contemporaries. Unlike other jam albums that go straight into showing off, this hour-long LP takes its time to unfold, opening with the slow and lush “Borne.” Guitarist Rick Mitarotonda is an unusually smooth vocalist, using his voice more as a melodic instrument than a megaphone for any ego or brand. There’s also multi-instrumentalist Peter Anspach, who plays most of the album’s keys and finds a way to make his contributions a highlight of every song.
Most of Dripfield was written between Mitarotonda and Anspach, who now seem to understand that a studio album can be a separate entity from their live show, showcasing different skills and atmospheres. The testing of the studio’s potential with “Borne” continues with a seamless transition into “Hungersite,” which features the album’s best riffs and a guitar solo you can sing along to, all propelled by the stellar rhythm section that help this album sound the way this band could once manage only on stage: big.
Dripfield marks the first time Goose have worked with an executive producer, and they made a fitting choice with D. James Goodwin, who has recorded Bob Weir as well as jam-friendly indie acts such as Kevin Morby, Bonny Light Horseman, and Whitney. While he seems to have been chosen to bring some indie cred and help curb the jam excess, he could have used his power to veto “Slow Ready,” a midtempo slog with no payoff, and “Honeybee,” which is a fine Fleet Foxes imitation and little else. Luckily, the album bounces back with “The Whales,” a welcome change of pace that goes for “Touch of Grey” jangle. This is the tempo best suited for Goose in the studio, and it carries through the live highlight “Arrow” and the joyful “Hot Tea,” both succeeding with delightful weirdness in their horn parts, courtesy of Stuart Bogie.
All of this helps make Dripfield the rare jam studio album that doesn’t have to be heard live to be understood. Just because it doesn’t suck, however, doesn’t make it outstanding. Many of the songs have been a part of Goose’s set for years, and those performances remain the best way to experience them. And like most albums in the genre, each song could benefit from some actual hooks and could be cut down a verse or two. Yet Dripfield accomplishes something that is hard to do in the studio. Goose jams are carefully constructed to pull us into the grooves slowly yet surely; often I found myself getting lost and forgetting what song I was even on, content to let the music ride out. The same way we rarely remember the beginnings of our dreams, stumbling into the action and following the loose threads, Goose have a distinct ability to put listeners in a trance, even stopping time for a little bit. It’s one of the defining powers of jam bands, and Dripfield has enough humble peaks and valleys to bring us into their world.


The New Jersey-based indie-rock underdogs, more popular than ever before, embrace synths on their sixth studio album.

Going Grey

Over the past five years, the Front Bottoms have called the bluff of every guitar band that’s complained about how they need the right look, the right sound, the right press or the right connections to make it in the depressed market of 2010s indie rock. Early on, the New Jersey duo were typically described as folk-punk—even after they went electric on 2015’s Back on Top and subsequently crashed the Billboard top 50, “Late Night With David Letterman” and Coachella. But while artists in that eternally uncool genre often use strident politics to stake some claim to credibility, Front Bottoms were chatty and chummy instead, writing songs about swimming pools and drug addiction that brimmed with the beery bonhomie of a dorm-room bull session. Though their touring partners and point-and-shout-along shows suggest a tangential relationship with emo’s fourth wave, they’ve eluded any clear scene, releasing albums on both ’80s/’90s college-rock mainstay Bar/None and ’00s pop-punk juggernaut Fueled By Ramen. Front Bottoms have nothing to prove to people who’ve only recently heard of them, and yet whenever a grassroots success story starts to get mainstream attention, there’s the assumption that any alteration to their sound is trying to do just that. This is especially applicable in the case of Going Grey, which defies its title by dipping into the same fountain of youth as so many of the band’s Alt Press peers: ’80s pop.
It’s worked for Paramore, Now, Now, and Dreamcar, but in an extremely loose way, Front Bottoms’ trajectory can be best paralleled to that of Tegan and Sara—another duo that cemented their rep with brisk, loquacious dispatches from anxious twenty-something existence, then upgraded to a pastelled sheen shortly after making it to a major label. But Greg Kurstin and Jack Antonoff are nowhere to be found on Going Grey. Instead, singer-guitarist Brian Sella and drummer Mat Uychich self-produce with the help of Nicholas “RAS” Furlong, an Avicii collaborator who has written for Blink-182, Papa Roach and All Time Low in the past year. And though there’s nothing necessarily cynical or opportunistic about the sound they land on, the Front Bottoms approach synthesizers and Auto-Tune like guys who’d likely be just as happy playing as an acoustic duo, should it come to that. “Trampoline” and “Grand Finale” take the path of least resistance toward a sonic evolution by tacking on pitch-corrected vocals and puffy-paint synth leads; they end up sounding like demos for a "listens to Chvrches once" remix of what would otherwise be some of this band's least inspired writing.
Even if the retreat from guitar results in the most stylistically diverse Front Bottoms album, none of that really matters. Nor does Sella’s ability to ensure that every song on Going Grey is both hummable and quotable. We could talk all day about how “Don’t Fill Up on Chips” has an exquisite percussive arrangement, or how its chorus is one of their stickiest. It all comes down to how good words like “Feel most complete when we’re asleep/My head even with your hips, I’ll hug your knees” taste in your mouth before singing them back at Sella.
This is where the dividing line lies with Front Bottoms. It’s a relief, maybe even a revelation, for a guitar band to speak in this vernacular, to write about sex and friendship with an unpretentious candor that most avoid in favor of poetry or obscurity. The very same quality ensures that many will never make it to a song of theirs named “Bae,” let alone one that begins with an equally slangy, “When you realize the crew you roll with/Is actually what makes you anxious.” But a casual line on the chorus—“I gotta move my car/I gotta move your couch”—justifies the title. This isn’t a song about trying to act cool, but about how relationships rest on the essential, unglamorous terms of endearment that go unnoticed by everyone besides the ones who share them.
At its best, Going Grey brings little moments like these to light, tempering their exuberance with an embrace of adult obligation or a recognition of nostalgia’s futility. But too much of Going Grey seems oddly unwilling to risk offense—the concepts of “Far Drive,” “Everyone But You,” and “Grand Finale,” songs about various lovelorn states, could be the work of any pop-punker with a passing AP English grade, feeling as perfunctory and indistinct as the hyper-compressed, airless music surrounding them. Stella’s still got his tics, but by this point, they can feel like shtick. “You Used to Say (Holy Fuck)” exists mostly for its chorus, but it’s memorable for its profanity rather than its emotional payload. Elsewhere, he trips over stilted rhymes (“She started talking backwards/But nothing good it brings her/So next time that she sees him/It’ll be peace sign, middle finger”) or forced pop-culture nuggets (“You be Rachel and I’ll be bong rips”) with the indiscriminate, self-assured enthusiasm of a mid-level battle rapper or a “Weekend Update” host. Long-time fans will still hear it all as work of the Front Bottoms; newcomers may hear it in a Banana Republic. People over the age of 35 may possibly misremember some Barenaked Ladies song from their college years.
Whether it’s in ten years or even sooner, mark my words, the popularity of the Front Bottoms will no longer be treated as a shocking development. The day will come when we’ll hear about how their early live shows became the stuff of local legend, or how Talon of the Hawk defined someone’s entire 2013, or how “Twin Sized Mattress” inspired them to pick up a guitar. There are stories to be told about how Front Bottoms became one of the most successful indie rock bands to emerge in the past decade, but they won’t likely include Going Grey.


On Car Seat Headrest's first proper new album for Matador, frontman Will Toledo reaffirms that he is ahead of the pack as an imaginative singer-songwriter, capable of crafting dynamic indie rock.

Teens of Denial

Sometimes, drugs are no fun. The rad night you imagined, watching 2001: A Space Odyssey and brushing against the outer boundaries of your consciousness, becomes a six-hour hell of wondering Did I leave the oven on? or Did I look weird when I said that thing to that one person or Do I just think I looked weird but was I probably not that weird despite the person obviously thinking I was? and so on. But I’ve never heard someone sum it up as succinctly as Will Toledo does: “Last Friday, I took acid and mushrooms/I did not transcend, I felt like a walking piece of shit/in a stupid-looking jacket.”
That’s from an eminently quotable song called “(Joe Gets Kicked Out of School For Using) Drugs With Friends (But Says This Isn't a Problem)” on Car Seat Headrest’s new record, Teens of Denial, wherein Toledo feels both boundless and deeply, deeply lame as he tries to sort out his life and shake off the chemicals. He doesn’t transcend, but he sees Jesus. He coins a perfect phrase for emotionally distraught, image-conscious young hedonists—“teens of style”—and becomes sort of disgusted by them, even though he knows he and them are all one and the same. He says “Mmmhmm” a lot, which is all you can do during a gnarly trip. Built around some delicate chord changes, Toledo’s pensive singing voice, and a backing band that slowly comes in as the trip gets worse, it actually sounds like a guy walking around town while sifting beautiful thoughts from the bad ones—a perfect pairing of form and content.
It’s the best song about being a confused, chemically dependent 20-something I’ve heard in years. Its appearance on Teens of Denial, Toledo’s first properly recorded album of new material for Matador, is the moment you realize he’s running ahead of the pack as an incredibly imaginative, insightful singer-songwriter who’s also capable of crafting a dynamic rock song. Teens of Denial follows last year’s Teens of Style, a collection of re-recorded tracks taken from his prolific Bandcamp output. *Teens of Style *presented Toledo as a promising young voice, but maybe anyone would sound promising if given the chance to curate and improve upon their best moments over the last five years. Teens of Style was already great, but *Teens of Denial *is such a leap forward that it still manages to surprise. Recorded in a studio with a real band, it’s a continuation of Toledo's every-Matador-band-in-a-blender sound: Yo La Tengo’s soft-loud dynamics, Guided By Voices’ jagged pop iridescence, late-period Malkmus’ guitar theatrics, all bundled with emotive, immersive lyrics detailing a frazzled state of mind.
Thanks to Andrew Katz’s propulsive drumming, some cleaner production, and Toledo’s increasing ambition, it sounds more expansive—a firm declaration of talent, rather than a tease. He packs more ideas into “Vincent”'s paranoia, “Unforgiving Girl (She's Not An)”'s romantic euphoria, and the allusive, epic “The Ballad of the Costa Concordia” than some bands put into entire albums. On “Concordia,” an almost 12-minute track about navigating one’s inadequacies after a life of substance abuse that slowly builds to a towering release, Toledo seamlessly drops a whole Dido verse in the middle. It comes out from nowhere, but it works. (An earlier version of the album included an excellent song “Just What I Wanted/Not Just What I Needed,” which daringly interpolated the Cars’ “Just What I Needed,” but a copyright snafu led to its cutting. The revised version, “Not What I Needed,” sounds fine, though the censored mp3s making their way around the internet must be heard.)
Even with the bigger budget and brighter environs, Toledo's underriding DIY sensibility comes through. You can hear it in the margin-scrawl messiness of his lyrics, which forego neat-and-tidy narratives for  abstractions, like he's snatching flitting images that run through his brain. More important than this deft lyrical touch, though, is his ability to display it within a musically engaging song. Unlike some indie-rock songwriters, Toledo's lyrics don't just sit on the page. The choruses don't arrive at the expected moments or follow traditional shapes, but they hit hard nonetheless: The high harmonies on “Joe Gets Kicked Out” and “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” are destined for festival singalongs, while “Fill in the Blank” is a burly, driving rock song that might even drive Car Seat’s sensitive listeners to mosh a little.
Teens of Denial is guitar-driven music filled with booksmart lyrics concerned largely with depression, which naturally means that Toledo has been championed in some circles as an “indie rock savior,” whatever that means. It comes at the same time as a widespread feeling that the idea of “indie rock” itself on the wane. These arguments are often folded into an increased irritation at what might be called “white male ennui,” the root cause of so much stylishly produced music over the last however many years. But depression is colorblind, and Toledo treats sadness not as a stopping point, but as transformative. (At any rate, he’s also multiracial.) There’s an honest reckoning with what his wallowing has led to, and rapturous exhortation when logic alone cannot solve a problem. “I’ve got a right to be depressed,” he yells on “Fill in the Blank,” moments after calling himself out as a little whiner. It’s an emotional conclusion that comes at the beginning of the album, a neat reminder that even after a moment of clarity, there’s always farther to go.


West Coast pop-punks' first release in four years is the political concept album you didn't know they had in them. While never very lyrically insightful or poetic, American Idiot is certainly the band's most ambitious record to date, with a consistent narrative spun throughout its 13 tracks-- two of which boast runtimes in excess of nine minutes. Life-changing? Not a bit, but there's something to be said for having the balls.

American Idiot

Green Day were always innately suburban. THC and apathy themed their 1994 single "Longview"; their breakthrough album, Dookie, was a precocious jumble of power chords and smart aleck prurience, a blend of The Descendents and flinty Buzzcockian spark. They didn't have any answers-- they just wanted weed and entitlement. That cul de sac selfishness and bratty pose carried through to the sugar-pap mallpunks Green Day spawned on the backslide of the 90s; unfortunately, the trio's undeniable early flair for songcraft did not.
In 1999, pop-punk exploded with the arrival of Blink-182's Enema of the State, and the brand gleefully deteriorated from there, bottoming out in the young and hopeless days of a dollar-store post-millennium, where the suburban trash culture that Billie Joe Armstrong once dismissively skewered has blended dangerously with a shifty political climate, causing volatile upheavals in blue collar comedy and bicameral nimrods. Now Green Day are back to pull the pin on the grenade.
2000's Warning only scored the band two modern rock hits, and in contrast to the million-selling marks of previous records, was something of a commercial flop. By this point, their hit-making, image-cultivating offspring had bid them good riddance, and those disillusioned by Green Day's populist stature were no longer listening. If they had been, they'd have heard some of the grit and dynamics that gave birth to a much wider sonic palette on American Idiot, the band's first album since, and unquestionably their most ambitious to date.
As a songwriter, Armstrong's penchant for economy is still present-- he'll never be a wordsmith or a magic melody maker. But Idiot's slicing power chordage reaches to Green Day's old English and Cali punk influences with tingling fingers, adds acoustic instruments without sounding forced or contrived, and lyrically grapples with the cultural predicaments and awkward shittiness of "subliminal mind-fuck America," circa 2004: "Now everybody do the propaganda/ And sing along in the age of paranoia." Armstrong delivers the title track couplet like a command at the revolution day sock-hop, and its instrumental viciousness is enough to shatter punchbowl glass.
Like Bad Religion, whose recent The Empire Strikes First was not only a reaction to U.S. politics and culture post-9/11, but a powerful return to cynical form, Green Day's dissent and frustration has inspired a new strength of craft in them as well. Armstrong's frustration comes out in seething anger: The ragged, rousing "Letterbomb" is both a melodic powder keg and a blaring bullhorn promoting the destruction of complacency, while the album's title track is energizing and provoking in the way effective punk revivalism should be.
"Nobody cares," Armstrong screams shrilly in "Homecoming", one of the album's two extended set pieces, and the line gets at American Idiot's greatest feat, besides its revitalization of Green Day's songwriting. Rather than preach, it digs out the fuse buried under mountains of 7-Eleven styrofoam trash, the cultural livewire that's grown cold in the shadow of strip-mall economics. Armstrong's characters are just misunderstood and disaffected individuals, told to get lost by a nation of fair and balanced sitcom watchers. They're apathetic suburbanite kids, grown up to find that life in the longview sucks.
"Jesus of Suburbia" and the accompanying epic "Homecoming" are American Idiot's summarizing ideological and musical statements. Bookends, they respectively establish and bitterly conclude the record's storyline. Musically, they roll rapid-fire through vignettes of enormous drum fill rock, plaintive piano, Johnny Rotten impressions, and surprisingly strong harmonies. "Suburbia" references the melodies of "All the Young Dudes" and "Ring of Fire"; "Homecoming" surveys both the Ramones and the Police's "Born in the 50s"; and both songs owe their form and pacing to The Who. The album does drag on occasion-- the labored pacing of "Wake Me Up When September Ends" is a little too much, the price of ambition. But then there's "She's a Rebel", a simplistically perfect anthem of the sort the band's vapid followers (or their handlers) would likely muck up with string sections.
For all its grandiosity, American Idiot keeps its mood and method deliberately, tenaciously, and angrily on point. Music in 2004 is full of well-meaning but pan-flashing sloganeers whose tirades against the government-- whether right or wrong-- are ultimately flat, with an overarching sense that what they're saying comes packaged with a spoil date of November '04. Though they do fling their share of surface insults, Green Day frequently look deeper here, not just railing against the political climate, but also striving to show how that climate has negatively impacted American culture. Ultimately, American Idiot screams at us to do something, anything-- a wake-up call from those were once shared our apathy.


The offbeat Chicago rapper’s knowing, laconic vocal style fits into the spare beats on his latest mixtape. It is deceptively cool and unpredictable.

VTM

Chicago rapper Valee’s latest mixtape VTM is a low-key, understated project, which is exactly where he shines. Produced entirely by frequent collaborator ChaseTheMoney, whose spare beats carve an enigmatic space with plenty of crevices, VTM is a record whose star raps with demure, evasive style, sticking to the shadows, floating across a tonally ambiguous canvas. Though it builds on the sound of contemporary Midwest street rap with a Southern influence, Valee’s style is unique, sidling up to the listener and working his charms with understated delicacy. Catching his wavelength can require an adjustment; VTM captures an offbeat artist who knows what he’s doing and is just waiting for everyone else to catch up.
Valee is quiet and of slight build, not the type typically pegged as a star. His personality in concert comes less through in-your-face energy than quirky side-steps. He’s known for pulling his pet yorkie, Firarri, out of his backpack on stage. He has a knowing, laconic vocal style, which emerges casually, a self-effacing cloud of smoke. That his often blunt lyrics often play with familiar steal-your-girl subject matter only draws attention to how unorthodox his light-touch vocals and sly flows really are. The way he banks on the familiar in service of the novel extends to his lyrical approach, too, which can suddenly veer quirkily, coolly comic. (“OG Gas so loud it sounded like we gettin’ yelled at,” goes one particularly vivid line on “Vtl.”) There’s something Zen-like about how his focus remains on the here-and-now, on tangible objects rather than the abstract.
His unembellished lyrics find their power enhanced in the way Valee's words drip-drip-drop from rapper to record, delivered as they are with a naturalistic, intuitive sense for flow. His fluid verses often seem less like they were rapped than splashed onto paper. Though his voice is faintly reminiscent of Gucci Mane’s at its most whispery, Gucci has a fairly regimented sense of rhythm. Valee’s style, particularly on the airy “Diamonds,” seems to drift, to slip into its own capricious pocket above the beat’s strict rhythmic demands.
Though they tend to clock in around two minutes, his best songs are unusually sophisticated compositions, thanks to his love for style’s understated ostentatiousness. (Towards the back half, “Dat Way” and “Sketchy,” despite the latter's strong concept, veer towards the generic, sleepy versions of popular Atlanta rap styles, but you’d hope these throwaways won’t make up much of his future.) On “Started Off My Day (Hey),” over a creaking beat that channels the feeling of picking sleep from your eyes while stumbling to the kitchen, Valee sketches a sing-song flow pattern, then disrupts it, taking a long pause for effect: “Sip syrup, sip syrup, that’s twice a four today/And yesterday.../A eight.” This phrasing—the deliberate use of shrinking lines to a lackadaisical poetic effect—feels central to understanding his unpredictable style.
This artful composition and the perplexing mood of the production come together to create a tone of total uncertainty. This contrasts with Valee’s casual sense of control, his placid recounting of objects and images, often of conspicuous consumption: “Tempurpedic mattress, sheets were satin.” When subjects fall outside this range, they’re glossed over, immaterial to him. In “Vtl,” he recounts what could be a dramatic story before dismissing it with a typically unbothered shrug, one which could be taken literally or in the meta sense, about his rapping: “Police pulled over me and I switched topics.” The police are reduced to an irritation on a level slightly below being stuck in an aisle seat on an airplane.
Throughout his work, this seemingly superficial focus on surfaces, on the tactile and material, set against a musical tone of confusion, simultaneously draws attention to what isn't discussed, to what's happened beyond the trivial. In each instance, what would have been the focal point of other, more “serious” artists’ work is relegated to the background, to loom large in our imaginations. Which of course makes enjoying the experiences and lighthearted wit of Valee’s day-to-day that much more alluring. His focus on quiet humor and the here-and-now is an anchor of confidence in a troubled world. One compact couplet captures the dynamic of his delightfully, deceptively deep approach to coolly delivered quips in two succinct lines. The order of the two lines reinforce their hierarchical importance to his world: “Did some pretty fucked up stuff, I don’t know why I ain’t in hell yet/I bought my bitch a yorkie pup and she ain’t even clip her nails yet.”


On his 10th album, Marilyn Manson embraces the tropes that made him a menace and a rock star and a stalwart of goth. This is his turf, and rather than expand it, he seeks to defend it.

Heaven Upside Down

There’s something quaint, in retrospect, about how Marilyn Manson’s early albums were once considered so dangerous they were blamed for the Columbine High School massacre—as if one man smearing on eyeliner and screaming about the antichrist could alone move a couple of teenagers to deadly violence. Manson made for a convenient scapegoat in 1999. Given how sunny the rest of the country looked on the surface, he stood out like an infected sore on a CoverGirl model, embracing nihilism and evil, cutting himself onstage, baiting transphobes with his drag performance as effortlessly as he baited Christians with his purported cahoots with the devil. Twenty years on, it’s easier to see that Manson was merely processing the same cultural toxicity that might have moved Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, not encouraging it and certainly not engendering it. In some ways, he’s a herald of the nightmare we’re in now, the original American edgelord, the man whose rumored surgically-enabled autofellatio dominated lunchroom conversations in elementary schools across the country.
On Heaven Upside Down, his 10th album, Manson embraces the tropes that made him a menace and a rock star and a stalwart of goth. Songs called “SAY10” and “JE$U$ CRI$I$” sound like someone making fun of witch house band Salem—it’s telling that, in 2017, Manson doesn’t come off like a parody of himself but of his musical descendants. Unlike 2015’s The Pale Emperor, which had buckets of bass-heavy glam rock decadence coursing through its veins, Heaven Upside Down adopts a serrated industrial tone more reminiscent of 1998’s Mechanical Animals, with a smattering of juicy guitar licks that harken back to Manson’s 1994 debut Portrait of an American Family. A tinny ‘90s guitar tone powers “WE KNOW WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE,” whose chorus, naturally, comprises Manson screaming the title twice over a power chord riff. “KILL4ME” similarly sees him asking his lover for a blood pact as eagerly as a blue-balled teen might beg for a first handjob. If nothing else, the God of Fuck is reliable.
That’s not to say there aren’t grooves here. While the lyrics to “Tattooed in Reverse” might trot out clumsily—it starts with “fuck your bible” and then Manson rhymes “showhorse” with “of course” right after making a “stable” pun—the song boasts a chorus as catchy as anything since “The Dope Show.” “Blood Honey,” meanwhile, is a visceral ode to kink that, like good sex, saves its most explosive moments for last. Even “SAY10,” with its absurd refrain of “You say God, I say Satan” that echoes nothing so much as Cake’s “Sheep Go to Heaven,” kicks hard enough to keep the Halloween party going. After all, the only reason anyone ever panicked about this guy is that he had a good enough grasp on pop to sneak his satanic earworms into the brains of the youth. No one would care if he couldn’t write hooks, and hooks he’s still got—dressed up, as ever, like the Babadook at a wine party.
Many of these songs rehash some of Manson’s earlier and even recent musical ideas. “Saturnalia” begins with a vocal riff almost indistinguishable from the hummed pre-chorus to Pale Emperor standout “Third Day of a Seven Day Binge,” while “KILL4ME” courses atop the Gary Glitter stomp-clap that’s boned up plenty of his songs over the years. But Manson has always seemed most comfortable deeply within the confines of his genre, repetitive as he may have become. This is his turf, and rather than expand it, he seeks to defend it, to reiterate his idiosyncratic spot in popular culture so no one forgets it’s his.
The shock value of his work long worn off, Manson now occupies a curiously nostalgic space among rock lifers. To listen to his albums is to indulge the same impulse that’s tacked “666” to the end of so many Twitter handles. It’s a gesture of affection for the kid you used to be, back when the number of the beast (or the weed number or the sex number) held the power to freak out your parents, your classmates, your teachers. It’s funny now because of how serious it once seemed. In 2017, the open horror of the world easily eclipses anything Manson’s recorded in years. Whatever value his music still holds derives from what you remember of him, and how sweet the memory of your thrill or disgust now rings.


Dave Grohl’s lawful-good lifestyle presents an eternal conflict between being unable to hate the guy and being unable to enjoy the music he continues to make.

Medicine at Midnight

A quarter-century after they rose from the ashes of grunge, climbed Billboard pop charts, vacuumed up Grammys, and conquered stadiums worldwide, the Foo Fighters return with another album of inconsequential music. When you’re a band of this size and tenure, new albums aren’t necessarily born of personal inspiration but out of a fraternal pledge to those around you: your band, your fanbase, your road crew, a new line of Ram trucks. The guys of the Foo Fighters—who have this wonderful shabby chic Venice Beach dad look now—continue to plow through albums with one thankless goal in mind: to keep the dying institution of rock alive. And with his cheerful indefatigability and his commitment to the primacy of guitars, Dave Grohl is the generational rock spokesperson the future deserves, Bruce Springsteen without the tunes.
Influence, legacy, and musical quality aside, Bruce and Dave might be the last two musicians still living inside of the remaining slipstream of monocultural rock’n’roll. They are both performers and entertainers above all, both icons of endurance; both give an outsized amount of themselves to their fans, on stage and off. Bruce performs four-hour shows and pulls a beaming crowd member up on stage every time; Grohl tours with a broken leg on a throne made of guitars and drum battles a 10-year-old. They both possess the innate ability to charm anyone who heaves into their view. And—as if by providence—both Bruce and the Foo Fighters played the inauguration afterparty of President Joe Biden, whose broad call for healing and unity was epitomized by two artists who call for healing and unity in the broadest possible terms.
Grohl’s lawful-good lifestyle presents an eternal conflict between being unable to hate the guy and being unable to enjoy the music he continues to make. Foo Fighters seem to approach their formative rock, hardcore, and punk influences with the prompt, “What would be fun to play on Guitar Hero?” If the Guitar Hero reference feels dated, wait until you hear their new music. Their 10th album, Medicine at Midnight, adds very little to their extensive catalog of interchangeable power pop and hard-rock sing-alongs. But you can’t hang them on their own music, because Foo Fighters would never dare to give you enough rope to do it.
A Foo Fighters record rolls out in the same way Taco Bell rolls out a new menu item: A nominal twist on the same five or so ingredients. Produced once again by pop impresario Greg Kurstin, Medicine at Midnight is supposed to be the band’s party record, their dance record, their Bowie’s Let’s Dance record, even. Charitably, they could be talking about “Shame Shame,” a creeping acoustic number that signals a slinky new direction until Grohl rampages all over the chorus. Maybe they are referring to the title track, a geriatric, leathery blues anthem for men who love the feeling of a new John Varvatos jacket. Because every generation gets the “Miss You” it deserves, the song has a starchy groove and background chorus of women singing about “rain on the dancefloor.” You can try to fit Dave Grohl into a sparkly white suit, but underneath he’s always just wearing jeans and a T-shirt.
This is the issue with half-heartedly trying on a different costume every few years: All Foo Fighters songs exist in the same empty universe. There are no backdrops or scenes, no people, no roads, no cars—just a blank slate for anthemic oratory and rights-free guitar riffs. And because this blank slate is so predictable, and because there’s no dimension or interiority to any of Grohl’s songwriting, the songs become line items: ones you imagine working pretty good at their live show or ones that have no real reason to exist. Grohl has an expressive, agile voice, but it has only ever worked in the rock idiom, which should give “Waiting on a War,” “Love Dies Young,” and possible highlight “Holding Poison” a spot on setlists for the rest of the band’s time on Earth. The rest, truly, who cares?
When Bruce entered his mid-career doldrums in the early ’90s, he was off with his “Other Band,” not exactly minting hits or critically revered music—even going so far as to admit he was making “generic” songs to pad out his setlists. Grohl has ended up in a similar spot without ever leaving the comfort of the Foo Fighters. And while Bruce ranges freely and embraces darkness and doubt, Grohl keeps his rictus smile, holding on to the hand fate dealt him. “I just want to stay alive and play music, especially after Nirvana,” Grohl said in a recent interview with the New York Times. “When Kurt died, I truly woke up the next day and felt so lucky to be alive, and so heartbroken that someone can just disappear. I decided to take advantage of that, for the rest of my life.”
On the other side of every Foo Fighters song is a darker, wilder, more interesting world that Grohl has cordoned off out of self-preservation. Instead, he writes music out of a sense of duty and fear, knowing that choosing the wrong path could end the healthy, inspiring enterprise he has worked tirelessly to create. As the Foo Fighters’ legacy becomes tied with epic and communal live shows steeped in their long and narrow canon, it feels like a bellwether for rock’n’roll itself. Where rock once held limitless sway over pop culture, now the fate of traditional arena rock rests in a band whose music suggests they are terrified of seeing it die, gripping their songs so tight that they are strangling the life out of them. Foo Fighters’ greatest achievement, “Everlong,” still outshines every other song in their catalog, because it is their guiding principle: to remain in perpetual motion, to never stop feeling this good, to sing along with you forever. But everything dies, baby, that’s a fact.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Like a crooner in outer space, Dent May makes glum sounds that sound happy, with old-fashioned panache. But the production of his latest collection is dense and muddled.

Across the Multiverse

The Mississippi-born, L.A.-based musician Dent May is many things: ambitious singer-songwriter, gifted multi-instrumentalist, self-styled virtuoso with old-fashioned panache. He has a voice like Brian Wilson’s, which is certainly appealing. He affects a winsome persona—intergalactic lounge singer, spaceship yacht-rock star—and remains committed with conviction to the bit. He prizes breezy, irrepressible melodies, songs in a quaint and cheerful key—and then likes to playfully, even mordantly, undermine them. He cuts an endearing figure in his thrift-store tuxedos and his horn-rimmed glasses: there’s something of the young Harold Lloyd about him, winning smile and all. May’s charm is seductive, but his music doesn’t quite stand up to his likable character.
On Across the Multiverse, May’s overarching conceptual trick is making glum songs that sound happy. “Hello Cruel World,” the sprightly opener, bounds forth like a buoyant showtune, as May greets misery with a wry grin. “Hello cruel world/Are you real or just a dream?” Dent croons, his high spirits belying the melancholy. “And will I ever find some meaning/Like them pretty folks on TV?” The sentiment is of course ironic: May is hardly looking to television for truth in earnest, while the archaic idiom (“them pretty folks”) seals the joke with a wink. In other words, the song is deliberately trite and facile; that doesn’t make it interesting.
He continues to smirk through the hit parade. “Picture on a Screen” develops an unoriginal image: the distance between virtual longing and the analog world, which it may surprise you to learn can be vast. (Sample revelation: “Imagining you look at me/Pretending this is reality.”) On the blithe, bouncy “Dream 4 Me,” May tells of a night during which he has “Wandered the streets to rid [his] head/Of looming existential dread,” a crisis disguised, yet again, by an upbeat melody that exaggerates a touch of mirth to bitterly comic effect. “Take Me to Heaven,” meanwhile, awash in a riot of sparkling synths, puts a fine point on the record’s thesis: “Visions are haunting me/Like every night and day,” May confesses. “No more letting them sink in/There’s no need to get heavy.” And if there’s no need, why bother? “No more teary-eyed midnights,” he insists. So he braves despair and plinks contentedly away at his piano.
The anguish May strains to repress throughout Across the Multiverse would stand a better chance of affecting the listener were it articulated with style or wit—or with specificity. May’s shtick, one feels, obliges him to write in sardonic platitudes and tongue-in-cheek banalities, when the dramatic tension he’s after—sunny melodies, overcast man—would almost surely be better served by sentiments more genuine, unfamiliar, and sincere. “I’m running out of words/That make sense to you lately,” May sings toward the end of the album. “I’m choking on cliches.” That he is: Across the Multiverse is inundated with them. His writing clangs; there’s scarcely a compelling lyric on here.
Musically, May has taken his multihyphenate fervor too far. The musician once satisfied with building an album around a single instrument is beleaguered by instrumentation; we’ve come a long way since the era of The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele. But here, the wall of sound is strangely, stultifyingly uniform, a thick slab of piano-led clangour—like the din of a bustling room overwhelming a lounge singer’s best efforts. Dense and muddled, the production is such a mess that song after song sounds the same. May could afford to simplify, strip down, and refine. Talent and charm of his caliber could only benefit from a renewed focus on the fundamentals.


Perhaps familiar from her time in Okkervil River, the multi-instrumentalist builds fascinating webs of sound around skeletal songs on her solo debut.

D A Y S

For an artist only now releasing her solo debut, Sarah K. Pedinotti sports an impressive résumé. The New York multi-instrumentalist is a member of Okkervil River, led the twitchy pop act Railbird, played live in the Secret Machines, and worked as a songwriter with the chamber-pop outfit Cuddle Magic. She’s made versatility a calling card, playing keyboards in an audacious indie folk outfit and bass in a florid psych-rock band during the same span. It’s no surprise, then, that Pedinotti’s interests as a solo artist are broad. On D A Y S, her debut as Lip Talk, she draws freely from indie pop, psych, R&B, and electronic music. The claustrophobic sound evokes late nights spent tinkering in the studio, busy hours squirreled away while the rest of the world is sleeping.
For all their adventurousness, the songs on D A Y S do share some elements: fuzzed-out guitars, leaden minor chords, swaddling synths, reedy vocals. As an arranger, Pedinotti values texture and weight over fidelity, her layers of instrumentation shaping complex cocoons of sound. The interlocking rhythms on songs like “Ad Junkie” and “Disneyland” reach toward the maximalism of Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief. Soulful numbers such as “After All” tilt toward Frank Ocean’s songcraft, while “Gold ^ Pink” and “w i n n e r s” feel like sketches for Lorde songs, wrapped in wool. They collectively suggest Pedinotti as a sort of meticulous set designer, producing rich and varied environments for her words, from the siren-like synths and booming drums of “Artemis” to the subterranean noise and syncopated percussion bubbling beneath “Fuk It Up.”
As interesting as much of D A Y S sounds, though, the underlying songs can feel flimsy, like a lean-to carefully decorated with Christmas lights. The bones of these tunes feel half-formed, like sketches or demos rushed out the door. The melodies are often far more forgettable than the atmospheres they inhabit, and the lyrics don’t reinforce them. “I imagined characters in the songs like scenes in a movie, emotion expressed like colors on a canvas,” Pedinotti has said of her songs. But these vague platitudes feel like placeholders left on reference tracks. Generic nonsense undercuts the otherwise sticky chorus of “Lemon Drop,” while the soulful vocals of “After All” belie lyrics that don’t bare much soul at all: “I don’t know what to do with myself,” she offers in the chorus.
But during the delicate and minimal “Doublethink,” one of D A Y S’ strongest songs, all these elements do come together. Pedinotti begins alone at the piano, hammering out staccato chords before judiciously adding embellishments like synth flutes and plaintive saxophone. Her voice traces lilting, lullaby-like melodies, her nuance bringing her complex character into focus—not just melancholic but bemused, weary but also wiser. Pedinotti manages to communicate a knotty set of emotions and build a memorable song in the process. This refinement is what’s missing from so much of D A Y S, a record that, for all its richness, feels largely devoid of coherent songcraft or a singular vision. If these songs are indeed like scenes in a movie, they could benefit from a tighter script and better dialog, meant to match the impressive cinematography.