Rhiannon Giddens emerges as a peerless and powerful voice in roots music on her second solo album, a record that traces the power of African-American song from 200 years ago to today.

Freedom Highway

In the middle of a record populated with sexual violence, police shootings, and church bombings, Rhiannon Giddens sings, “My heart it is a-shakin’ with an old, old song.” This has been the simple, guiding principle of her decade-long career in roots music. Her powerful interpretation of American folk reclaims its old vernacular and redistributes it among its oft-untold complex history. After years of soaking up American musical traditions with her long-standing string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Giddens has emerged as a peerless voice of roots-minded music as a solo artist on her new album, comprised of original compositions alongside a few relevant covers, including the Staples Singers’ 1965 title track.
The album’s beauty and gravitas come from how Giddens collapses the last two centuries of American history,  juxtaposing songs about antebellum slave plantations with 1960’s Civil Rights anthems and narratives of 21st-century state violence. The record opens with “At the Purchaser’s Option,” a title taken from a 1797 slave advertisement. The song—a tale of a mother considering the doomed fate of their child born into bondage—immediately establishes the primacy of family across the album. Despite its historical pretensions, Freedom Highway is fundamentally a story of black mothers and their children, a record that traces black women’s eternal labor as they sacrifice for and grieve over the uncertain future of their kin.
Giddens has always been interested in upsetting the continuum of African-American song. She began experimenting with more recent, mid-late 20th-century styles on her solo debut, 2015’s Tomorrow Is My Turn, and she arrives at Freedom Highway with her most expansive and adventurous musical palette yet. Featured prominently are the banjo/fiddle string-band and Piedmont blues stylings she explored so deftly in the Carolina Chocolate Drops, but Freedom Highway weaves hip-hop, gospel, Dixieland jazz, folk balladry, and guitar-driven rhythm and blues into a coherent whole.
It remains challenging to find the right environment that fully modernizes Rhiannon Giddens’ perfectly ornate soprano. But roots expert Dirk Powell, who produced the album, relies on understated, predominantly acoustic arrangements that end up humanizing her vocal approach more fully than the museum-piece elegance of T-Bone Burnett’s production on Tomorrow Is My Turn.
Likewise, the emotional intimacy of Giddens’ first collection of original material is better served by the close collaborators and assorted family members who appear on Freedom Highway than the array of well-chopped session pros who populated her debut. Giddens’ sister Lalenja Harrington, who co-wrote and shares vocals on “Baby Boy,” and her nephew, Justin Harrington, who raps a verse on the police brutality polemic “Better Get It Right the First Time,” provide moments of dramatic interplay that firmly contemporize Giddens’ creative vision.
As a songwriter, Giddens achieves immediacy by imbuing her stories with striking interpersonal drama and emotional depth. On the banjo tune “Julie,” one of several songs that take place during the Civil War, a heart-wrenching exchange between slave and mistress ends with a devastating narrative reveal. On the stomping “The Love We Almost Had,” an otherwise unremarkable tale of romance-that-never-was becomes a tragic statement on the far-reaching bonds of white supremacy.
But the record's most affecting moment comes during “We Could Fly,” a modern spiritual that traces a family’s multi-generational search for enlightened freedom. The song delivers a rare gift from a piece of music: the sense that it’s always existed, that it’s always been sung, that it must have been written in 1854, and in 1963, and in 2016. That shared sense of African-American tradition is the driving force behind Giddens' art as she lays bare the ugly symmetry of America’s history. Here is timeless, striking proof that what was once worth protesting in song 200 years ago remains every bit as vital today.


Kindness' Adam Bainbridge is a member of a group of voracious, industrious artists who consider themselves "pop." The project's latest album, Otherness, isn't just less immediate than other pop music; it's less self-aware, and way less fun. Robyn, Kelela, and others contribute.

Otherness

Adam Bainbridge is a member of a group of voracious, industrious artists—among them Devonté Hynes, Solange, Sky Ferreira, and Kelela—who consider themselves "pop." It's a group that values collaboration, guesting on one another's albums and who, increasingly, are dipping their toes into popular music as producers and writers. “You’ll never guess who I just worked with,” is, these days, a popular volley between Bainbridge and his former flat-mate Hynes, both now in-demand collaborators for more traditionally popular artists. They value the word "pop," presumably, not because they want to be judged against current popular music but because defining yourself as a pop artist means never having to say you're sorry: you can work in whatever idiom you want, with whoever you want, in whatever manner. There's a freedom to pop music not availed to anyone who defines themselves as an indie rocker, or a punk, or a soul singer.
One of the chief curiosities of Otherness, Bainbridge's second album as Kindness, is trying to understand what this freedom means in the context of his careful, quiet compositions. Bainbridge's music sounds nothing like the current maximalist strain of popular music, and it sounds only a little like certains kinds of popular music from decades past. It's more deliberate and varied than Bainbridge's debut album, World, You Need a Change of Mind, a pleasant indie-disco record lacking in ambition.
Bainbridge aims higher on Otherness, setting his sights on pristine studio gems. He expands his arrangements, enlists collaborators (Hynes and Kelela chief among them), and dispenses with the cover songs that buoyed World. Bainbridge constructs his tracks largely with piano, horns, and bass, free of guitar. His lyrical currency is that most pop of topics: love lost and found. On Otherness, Bainbridge is a descendent of artists like Peter Gabriel, Sting, and Bryan Ferry: self-serious rogues who whipped the undomesticated wilds of jazz, disco, and R&B into digestible platters. Such is the M.O. of Otherness: throw everything at the wall, very tastefully.
Bainbridge is a standout producer, and Otherness crackles with crisp filigrees and luxe baubles. The soft-pedaled funk of tracks like "Why Don't You Love Me" and "With You" show lovely restraint, while welterweight breaks and brisk hi-hats keep "World Restart" and "This Is Not About Us" from blanching. "I'll Be Back" is a lavish, slo-mo house lullaby. There is a rare clarity and fidelity to Otherness' arrangements.
But, beautiful as they are, no one inhabits them. The only source of tension on Otherness is the disconnect between the album's sumptuous vistas and the dull songwriting that roams them. Otherness burdens its precision with unimaginative melodies and plodding tempos ("For the Young", "It'll Be Ok"). Bainbridge moans wanly during "8th Wonder" ("I'm thinking about my baby now/ Yeah") before interrupting the track with a jarring guest verse (during which M.anifest shouts out Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car", lest you have any doubts about Otherness' smothering sincerity).
Bainbridge, doleful and even keeled on World, opens up his voice here but proves too thin and affectless for the kind of soulful interjections he wishes upon "This Is Not About Us" and "I'll Be Back". When Robyn takes lead on the jaunty "Who Do You Love?" the effect is like removing your earplugs at a concert, exposing yourself to an almost violent level of detail.
Most irksome is "Geneva", a musty, choral ballad that consists largely of one line—"If you could read my mind/ You know what you'd find"—repeated mantra-like through the song, something that initially scans as quiet reflection but quickly reveals itself to be gibberish (seriously: if you could read his mind—but you can't—you wouldn't even need to read his mind). "Geneva", one trifle repeated ad nauseam, is nearly six minutes long. Otherness is full of moments like this, drawn-out tiltings at romantic windmills that too often resolve themselves in near parody. When Hynes and Tawiah trade deep questions on "Why Don't You Love Me", they sound less like star-crossed lovers and more like two very confused people quixotically locked in song. "With You" features two sultry saxophone solos that mostly smack of The Simpsons and Bill Clinton.
Pop music has plenty of tolerance for vapidity and emptiness, but you've got to be able to sell it. Look no further than Hynes' "It Is What It Is" if you want an example of a banality contorted into substance. You wonder if Bainbridge recognizes that something's missing: "Making pop music that’s less immediate than other engineered pop, sometimes you need a helping hand that explains where it’s coming from or the emotional universe it lives in." Maybe Otherness' emotional universe requires context, but who other than Bainbridge would provide it? Otherness isn't just less immediate than other pop music; it's less self-aware, and way less fun.


The British dance-funk group return with their first album in seven years, not so much cashing in on retro styles but leaning into it like they always did.

Automaton

It’s been two decades since the British group Jamiroquai treadmilled into ubiquity. The British band—a rotating cast of characters with flamboyant frontman Jay Kay as their falsetto-scraping nucleus—reached peak cool with the acid jazz snap of “Virtual Insanity,” a hit from 1997’s Travelling Without Moving that marked the too-early crest of a band shedding the acoustic guitar-plucked pop of years prior. Though regarded as their most notable catalog notch, it never took off in the States beyond the canonical music video, winning the coveted MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year in 1997 but failing to chart on the Billboard Hot 100.
It seemed like Jay Kay’s endless carousel of fuzzy hats was more of a talking point than the tightening song structures of the albums and singles that followed, from the clever interplay between string section and chorus on “Canned Heat” to the sizzle of disco ball fervor on “Starchild.” The subsequent projects didn’t change the formula of “Virtual Insanity” so much as continued to define it. A Funk Odyssey, which arrived in 2001, spiraled into tie-dye experimentalism, 2005’s Dynamite reeled it back to Studio 54 soundtracking, and five years later, Rock Dust Light Star edged into a contemporary feel. Finally, their sound was upgraded from the demo sketch haze of the 1993 debut Emergency on Planet Earth to something far more muscular and refined.
In the seven years since Rock Dust Light Star, preying on a public hunger for nostalgia has been a hallmark for chart-scaling ’90s fixtures like Pharrell Williams and Daft Punk, the latter of whom turned to Chic’s Nile Rodgers for authentic bulletproofing on 2013’s “Get Lucky” and its parent album Random Access Memories. Automaton, Jamiroquai’s eighth studio album, fills a similar gap, but comes to it far more naturally. It’s the highest rung on their ladder, nodding to the signposts of their former style without forgetting them, fuzzy hats and all.
At their best, Jamiroquai extend the thread of their discography to its next potential platform, with a sheen that emphasizes the co-production from Jay Kay and keyboardist Matt Johnson. On single “Cloud 9,” Jay Kay deals out romantic chest thumps over instrumentation that feels alive, from the electric guitars and string hits to the handclaps and vein-popping bass lines. “Something About You” is starry-eyed and mouth-puckering sour, while the urgent “Carla” invites a tired Stevie Wonder comparison that, for once in the band’s history, actually fits.
When they veer into uncharted waters, they tend to muddle the all the previously laid groundwork. The title track bobs and weaves with a vocal melody that doesn’t slot into place until its star-gazing hook, several moments too late. The space funk of “Dr. Buzz” offers political commentary on the laughable state of affairs in North America. Jamiroquai has always been at their best when they lean into the kitsch, even when they want to be taken seriously. Here, it comes across like a moment of unearned gratuitousness.
Beyond that, Automaton may somewhat feel like a return to form (it hit No. 1 on iTunes in 38 countries), but it’s the sum total of a veteran group so agile at their own self-constructed subgenre that it’s easy to miss how far they’ve come. The album is a testament of their talent: No band from the ’90s has stayed so true to its sound while modifying it in real time, yielding some of its best work more than 20 years after its inception. They’re still figuring it out, but somehow, even their mistakes feel fresh.


The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter’s debut builds out her production while retaining the layered harmonies of her a capella work.

Madison McFerrin: I Hope You Can Forgive Me

I Hope You Can Forgive Me

Madison McFerrin has many sides: She is lonely, she is scared, she is godly, she is trying. On her debut full-length, I Hope You Can Forgive Me, the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter explores the joys and pitfalls of evolving into new versions of yourself: the thrill of leveling up and the fear of losing people attached to the old you. She hopes that through the change, her loved ones will still be there to meet her.
McFerrin, the daughter of jazz icon Bobby McFerrin, debuted in 2016 with a collection of spare a capella anthems. They relied on little beyond her voice and light hand percussion, showing off her crisp, airy singing, curlicued melodies, and intricate harmonies. By her 2019 EP, You + I, produced by her brother Taylor McFerrin, she began fleshing out her tracks with bass, guitar, and synth. The result was a lusher electro-pop sound, the relaxed instrumentation accentuating the effortless quality of her vocals.
Her latest project is her most dynamic and elaborate, while retaining the vocal emphasis and layered textures of her a capella work. On the slow-burning R&B song “Run,” eerie harmonies crescendo into twitchy breakbeat-style percussion. On “Utah,” a nimble funk bassline and finger snaps keep a steady groove. Though the instrumentation adds depth and dimension, McFerrin’s delicate and probing vocals are still the focal point. On the opening track “Deep Sea,” her ghostly, languid vocal layers actually recreate the feeling of being underwater.
I Hope You Can Forgive Me captures the messy, confusing headspace that precedes future growth. Her anxiety is evident on songs like “Utah,” where a debate about where to live reflects suffocating tension in a relationship, and “OMW,” on which she asks another person to carry on, wanting her own time and space. But McFerrin also insists that others recognize her worth: “You gon see me and believe in God herself.”
In the music video to “(Please Don’t) Leave Me Now,” McFerrin’s old self shows up for her new one. We see the singer, pale and cowering on the grass: She is lying in her grave. Another version of McFerrin, glowing and confident in a lemon-yellow dress, stares down at her. The song’s lyrics become a conversation. “Please don’t leave me now,” the living artist sings. “I ain’t ready,” says the dying one. Finally McFerrin rises from her grave and, in the company of friends, dances on it—a reminder that the closing of one chapter is an opportunity for celebration and rebirth.


In the last year of his life, David Bowie completed his remarkable final album, Blackstar, as well as this curious jukebox musical for which he wrote a few new songs.

Lazarus OST

In the last year of his life, David Bowie completed a pair of linked projects: his remarkable final album, Blackstar, and a curious jukebox musical for which he wrote a few new songs, Lazarus. Bowie, the most theater-minded of rock stars, had had ambitions to mount a stage musical for a long time; Diamond Dogs, in fact, had evolved from a scrapped musical based on George Orwell’s 1984. Lazarus, co-written with Enda Walsh, also has a literary source: it’s a sequel to The Man Who Fell to Earth. Officially, to be more specific, it’s a sequel to the Walter Tevis novel that was the basis for the 1976 film in which Bowie starred, with Michael C. Hall (of “Dexter” fame) playing his role, the alien Thomas Newton.
Bowie recorded the three new Lazarus songs during the Blackstar sessions with saxophonist Donny McCaslin and his group, but only “Lazarus” itself actually appeared on Blackstar; a second disc with all three recordings has been appended to the soundtrack album. The show’s cast recorded the first disc on January 11 of this year, immediately after they’d learned of Bowie’s death, and the solemnity of the moment mutes the hypnotic delight of his songs. (Near the end, we hear forty seconds of his original recording of “Sound and Vision,” and it’s as if a conference room’s ceiling has momentarily peeled back to reveal the sky.)
The central problem is that Lazarus is billed as an original cast recording, and it’s kind of not; it’s impossible to hear these “actorly” renditions of “Changes” and “It’s No Game” and “Love Is Lost” and so on without thinking of the cracked actor who defined them, and whose phrasing these performers ape at almost every turn. To put it more plainly: there is no song in Lazarus of which Bowie did not record a better version. And, despite some nicely considered arrangements (“The Man Who Sold the World” takes after Bowie’s mid-1990s reworking), a lot of these songs weren’t actually built for the stage: when Sophie Anne Caruso sings “Life on Mars?” as a scenery-chewing torch song, it’s suddenly clear how much of its power came from Bowie’s arch detachment. As translations of Bowie’s musical aesthetic to theater go, Lazarus lags far behind *Hedwig and the Angry Inch—*in which Hall also starred for a while.
The three previously unheard Bowie recordings on the second disc, a bit under twelve minutes of music in all, are of a piece with the Blackstar material, if not as audacious or as polished as “Blackstar” or “Lazarus” or “Sue.” “When I Met You” is the jewel-in-the-rough of the bunch—Bowie’s backing vocals body-checking his warbling lead out of the way, the band a little out of tune and too into stomping out the rhythm to care. The “Lazarus” performance, whose guitar riff eventually just turns into “Purple Haze,” is the strongest thing on the cast album, possibly because Bowie’s own performance wasn't casting such a long shadow.
Unsurprisingly, the newly released songs are full of intimations of mortality—but it’s also too easy to listen for farewells and forget that they were written for dramatic personae, by a songwriter who adored masks. “Killing a Little Time,” whose shuddering groove recalls the double-time tricks of Bowie’s mid-’90s records, includes a refrain of “I’m falling, man/I’m choking, man/I’m fading, man.” But the line that Bowie clearly relishes growling is “I’ve got a handful of songs to sing/To sting your soul/To fuck you over”—which would work just as well on somebody’s first record.
So is this it for Bowie’s music? Nah, there's still more in the vaults: there were several more songs recorded at the Blackstar sessions, and according to producer Tony Visconti, Bowie recorded demos for another five songs shortly before his death. This isn’t his grand final statement (that was Blackstar), it’s a cool little postscript tagged onto an earnest, unthrilling tribute.


The Australian garage rock band’s first album in eight years is a modest and welcome comeback even if they don’t crash out of the speakers like they once did.

Eddy Current Suppression Ring: All in Good Time

All in Good Time

Aside from an occasional one-off live set, Eddy Current Suppression Ring have been gone for eight years—a veritable lifetime in garage rock. That’s nine albums from Thee Oh Sees, a dozen by Ty Segall, and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s entire 15-album discography. Before they walked away for nearly a decade, the Australian quintet built a reputation with three albums and a pile of singles that balanced regimented order with rock’n’roll disarray. Their often-motorik rhythm section offered a foundation for Mikey Young’s guitar fuzz and frontman Brendan Huntley’s slovenly speak-sung lyrics. At their best, they were wild and untenable, offering up the screaming tension of “Anxiety” and the fast-paced churn of “You Let Me Be Honest With You.” They had songs impressive enough to get placed in AT&T commercials and Spoon sets. When they went away, Young kept carrying the torch, crafting some of the decade’s best post-punk with Total Control while working feverishly as a prolific studio engineer.
All in Good Time is an apt title for ECSR’s unceremonious return—an acknowledgment of both their long hiatus and the patience required to appreciate this album for what it is. This is not the ECSR whose explosive guitar work defined their best album, 2008’s Primary Colours. They’re back with the same formula and aesthetic as their earlier work, but they don’t sound nearly as invigorated or inspired.
The song that announced the new album, “Our Quiet Whisper,” finds the quartet in a more reflective zone. Huntley—who performs under the name Brendan Suppression—sounds disenchanted and sensitive as he sings about an inconvenient political climate where “actions speak louder than words.” The band’s overall actions, meanwhile, are unhurried. The song adopts a gradual pace, and when a guitar solo does happen, it’s low-key. That’s the overall tone of All in Good Time: staid, steady, humming along.
Where they found prior success by striking the balance between organization and wildness, All in Good Time could stand to be a lot more combustible. Huntley, whose voice is historically among the band’s wildest and most energizing forces, sounds pensive on several songs. There are attempts at ratcheting up the energy, but while Huntley shouts and Young leans into distorted power chords on “Vicariously Living,” the band’s overall mid-tempo approach keeps the pace sluggish. Young’s guitar often adds weight and volume to the album, but on “Medieval Wall,” his chutzpah only reinforces the same lackluster hook instead of diversifying their approach.
ECSR were always a band who excelled at building anticipation; “I Admit My Faults” was a master class in distributing Huntley’s shouts and Young’s shredding in the perfect spots here and there while otherwise letting the groove take its time. All in Good Time’s best songs are longform expressions of that same restraint. “Voices” builds quietly from silence, and as Young’s guitar varies up enough to move the song in new directions, it’s the perfect backdrop for Huntley’s nonchalant observations about writer’s block and nagging doubts. He sounds tortured when he’s asking for some quiet—the perfect sentiment on a song where Young’s well-placed licks repeatedly interrupt the album’s best groove. “Shoulders,” meanwhile, is all simmer and no boil, and as a result, it just spins in place. No riveting individual performance from any of the band’s members dives in to rescue a tepid melody that repeats again and again.
When the energy and momentum drag, it’s Huntley’s reflective and empathetic lyrics that stand as the album’s greatest strength. There’s a song where he encounters Brendan Suppression from the future; he’s not offered a grim warning, but encouraged to take better care of himself. Huntley extends that care outward as well, singing on “Like a Comet” about how someone came into his life and reshaped him completely. So much of the time, Huntley’s observations are insular, which colors the album’s overall tone. But as Danny Young’s drums rev up and Huntley sings about the tremors running through him, the music becomes celebratory, and the album suddenly feels light, like it’s inches above the ground.
That lightness sticks around but curdles slightly on the closing track “Modern Man.” Huntley sings about making a wish on a dandelion, and then he talks about how you shouldn’t trust your neighbor and should maybe padlock your garden hose. The band breathes life into a gradual jam by carefully picking the right spots for synthesizer stabs and guitar licks. The key to Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s most successful music is balance, and while the band struggles to recapture some of their old magic, Huntley finds that same sweet spot in his lovingly unromantic storytelling.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Mary Chapin Carpenter's lean and haunting songs often sound best when they're given room to breathe. The production here by David Cobb (Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson) is just the ticket.

Mary Chapin Carpenter: The Things That We Are Made Of

The Things That We Are Made Of

“What to Keep and What to Throw Away,” a key song from Mary Chapin Carpenter’s 2012 album Ashes and Roses, tells the story of a recent divorcee sorting through her ex-husband’s belongings. With its sparse, second-person narrative and hushed fingerpicking, it plays something like a passage from Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking put to music. Heard in the context of Carpenter’s remarkable recent work, this song is perhaps her defining track: a propulsive series of quiet thoughts expressed with a novelistic eye for detail in her immaculate, articulate whisper. But it also feels like a mission statement.
Just like the narrator of “What to Keep and What to Throw Away,” Carpenter followed Ashes and Roses by taking stock of her own career, reimagining some of her finest compositions backed by a symphony orchestra. Songs from the Movie from 2014 was a pleasant enough album but, like Joni Mitchell’s similarly-minded Travelogue, it couldn’t help but feel like an epilogue: the kind of statement an artist makes once she’s said everything she set out to say. That album’s sense of finality may be partly why the arrival of The Things That We Are Made Of—Carpenter’s 14th album and her first produced by David Cobb (Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton)—feels like such a pleasant surprise.
Cobb’s sparse, raw production is a welcome change of pace for Carpenter, an artist whose lush, country-leaning work has often slipped comfortably into adult contemporary radio, belying her characteristically complex songwriting. On Things, Cobb knows exactly how to complement Carpenter’s work to make her music sound as urgent and intimate as her lyrics. The minimal electric guitars that linger in the background of “The Middle Ages” are sparse and haunting, while “What Does It Mean to Travel” floats with a spacey Ghosts of the Great Highway weariness. Single and centerpiece “Map of My Heart,” meanwhile, is the jauntiest song Carpenter has put her name to since the ’90s and serves as a reminder of just how influential her particular intonations have been for today’s crop of country-pop crossovers.
It is in this song that Carpenter summarizes the theme of the album in two crucial lines: “I learned how to travel/Just what I can carry.” From the literal journey at the heart of “Livingston” to the more symbolic one in “Deep Deep Down Heart,” nearly every song on Things is tied to the road, giving the album the feel of a long, lonely late night drive. Like many long drives, however, this one gets a little dreary near the end: “Note on a Windshield” tries and fails to transcend the banality of its central metaphor, while the closing title track aims for hymnal and lands closer to lullaby.
The album does itself no favors by stacking all of its most exciting moments at the beginning, and crowding the five-minute ballads together at the end. Still, these are small concerns for a record whose very presence feels like a refreshing return to action. With 11 songs in just under one hour, Things is Carpenter’s briefest collection of new material in over a decade and serves as a fine entry point for newcomers. It is not her most revelatory work, but it is a strong, concise statement from an artist moving more swiftly and confidently than ever—carrying only what is absolutely necessary, and leaving the rest behind.


Jeremiah is Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s prophet. The Hebrew emblazoned in dirty copper on the cover of their Slow ...

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven

Jeremiah is Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s prophet. The Hebrew emblazoned in dirty copper on the cover of their Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada EP belongs to him: tohu-va-bohu, it reads: void and waste. The lengthy passage on the sleeve of that EP is lifted from his book. Blase Bailey Finnegan III, the Providence street preacher whose rantings appear on the two first Godspeed You Black Emperor! releases, is his avatar. The music of Godspeed, for all its bombast and lament, extends Jeremiah's ministry into a new millennium. Preaching in a vocabulary drawn from Boston hardcore, in a spidery array of radical leftist rhetoric, Godspeed You Black Emperor! have delivered a blistering (albeit politically imprecise) homily on the new world order.
That said, the Canadian nontet's Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven is a massive, achingly beautiful work, alternately elegiac and ferocious. However, Lift plays like an oddly transitional album: much of the first disc presents a refinement of the sound that crystallized on 1999's Slow Riot EP, while the second disc flirts with moments of vertiginous shoegazing, looser rock drumming and reckless crescendos of unalloyed noise. Succinctly, the first disc is easily continuous with their earlier work; the second disc might just be the future. The disparity is immediately striking.
This is not to suggest that the first disc is not wonderful-- it is, but mostly as a cultivation of ideas and sounds embedded in F#A#oo or Slow Riot. The waltz-like grace of the opening part of "Storm" (titled "Levez Vos Skinny Fists Comme Antennas to Heaven") is dominated by rising cello and violin which evolve, with the addition of guitars and martial drum taps, into a loud triumphal procession. Blaring trumpets seem to announce the advent of some head of state, and the whole affair proceeds with military discipline and measured effect. The violent explosion never comes: the parade merely approaches and recedes.
The second part, "Gathering Storm," begins in entwined guitars: one bowed, one screwdrivered, one gently plucked. With the entrance of the cello, violin and rumbling toms, the guitars begin to shriek in distortion. The effect is amped-up slowcore sludge that's all tension and no release, merely dissipation and noise reminiscent of Cale-era Velvet Underground performances. Seven minutes later, "Cancer Towers on the Holy Road Hi-Way" ends the track in crushing paranoia with locomotive percussion thundering toward breakdown. (It is also Jeremiah who predicted that destruction would come from the North.)
The second track, "Static," opens with a looped recording of a supermarket welcome message, giving way to indecipherable megaphone vitriol. Sparse piano and drone frames the static-drenched field recordings with mournful effect. "Chart #3" is treated guitar drone and distant buzzing similar to records released by the Fatalists or James Plotkin. Piercing static and high frequency ambient yields to the monologue of a fringe Christian preacher. "When you see the face of God," he intones, "you will die and there will be nothing left of you, except the god-man, the god-woman, the heavenly man, the heavenly women...," girded by skeletal string arrangements.
Near the end of the first disc, "World Police and Friendly Fires" initially reminds me of Erik Frielander's Watchman compositions, and his work with Greg Feldman on John Zorn's Bar Kokhba. Eventually, however, "World Police" erupts into thick, layered drone rock (think the Dirty Three, but less dispersed) that sounds like a heavy metal riff slowed to quarter-speed and suddenly accelerated into wailing guitars and slashing strings. It is, I think, the first disc's finest moment. The final part, "The Buildings They are Sleeping Now," is a quiet whoosh of fragmentary strings and deep noise. The disc simply falls apart; the last moments are so inaudible that you're never sure when the music has actually stopped.
Murray Ostril introduces the second disc with his reminiscing on the heyday of Coney Island. The sentiment is so politically and religiously neutral that it stands apart from other Godspeed field recordings: nostalgia for the good old days. Nothing more. The second part of "Sleep," "Monhein," is dominated by Efrim Menuck's wailing screwdriver-on-frets effect. From this plodding dirge comes an incredible air raid siren of sound, flagging and rising over the military percussion. But instead of the familiar tension and release, Godspeed opts for maddening sustain. When the drums die out, all that remains is the tremulous scream.
After a Labradford-like introduction of repetitive guitar and subtle chimes, "Broken Windows, Locks of Love Part III" erupts into sheets of noise somewhere between Loveless and Pangea. The advent of nimble, almost hip-hop drumming, is a shock, and a loose, raucous jam coalesces, recalling Cul de Sac's country-surf-kraut concoctions. Part of you will say: why can't it all be like this?
The final track, "Antennas to Heaven," begins with an old mountain folk tune, which is inevitably consumed in processed machine noise. Echoey chimes and looped glockenspiel reverberate through "Edgy Swingset Acid" while Francophone children dreamily play and sing. The playground, however, is weirdly menaced by liturgical organs that soon give way to a momentary burst of dense, jangly rock. On "She Dreamt She Was a Bulldozer She Dreamt She Was Alone in an Empty Field," guitars and bells tick-tock over delicate dark ambient, counting the moments as the instruments flare up on fire and descend like a sunset. Godspeed You Black Emperor! have apparently expanded their emotional repertoire of indignation and grief to include joy. But the appropriately titled "Deathkamp Drone" is ghostly electronic gloom. The track's final moments are a wash of humming synths, echoing guitars, and pins-and-needles noise that comes just a little too close to human screaming. By the time the piece ends, the tide is way out.
Real innovation in a leaderless nontet must be geologically slow. Lift Your Skinny Fists succeeds precisely because it utilizes Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s numbers in a way that previous works did not. Lift opens up its sound to various voices and influences within the collective, letting moments of pop/rock, ambient and even hip-hop blossom where once there was only gravelly symphonics and aural landscape. Those moments were, for me, nothing short of thrilling. This is why Lift shouldn't be accused of merely preaching to the converted fan who has long since accepted the grandiosity of their sound and the vague rhetoric of their dissent. They show signs of doing what they condemn the world for not doing: changing, evolving, experimenting with new approaches, growing. And that's why Godspeed You Black Emperor!-- along with Jeremiah, Blaise Finnegan and every other prophet of doom-- might all turn out to be wrong. Perhaps it does get better before it gets worse.


Michael is Chaz Bundick's (Toro y Moi) first full-length as Les Sins. It finds Bundick turning away from his thin, genial voice and natural melodic gifts, choosing instead to embrace rhythm and lean, shadowy beat construction*.*

Michael

Like his contemporary—and occasional label boss—Dan Snaith, Chaz Bundick is a curious and intellectual pop craftsman whose heart can’t help but push him toward the dancefloor. As part of the chillwave vanguard making blurry, wistful electronic pop at the tail end of the '00s, he wrote songs like “Blessa” and “Talamak” under the name Toro y Moi, staining slow-motion house party jams with young adult angst; even as he graduated to more cosmopolitan, mature songwriting with follow-up efforts Underneath the Pine and Anything in Return, his interest in danceable music lingered, and he refracted it through the prisms of funk (like on the winning "Still Sound") and R&B. While his star continued to rise, he quietly released a handful of singles under the name Les Sins, pulling from the sounds of French touch and British bass music on songs like "Lina". The humbly covered Michael is his first full-length as Les Sins, and it finds Bundick turning away from his thin, genial voice and natural melodic gifts, choosing instead to embrace rhythm and lean, shadowy beat construction.
Bundick has name-checked influences like German producer Danilo Plessow (who records deep house as Motor City Drum Ensemble) and Four Tet in interviews surrounding the release of Michael, and the similarities between their work and his are evident throughout the record. He likes to cobble beats together from a wide assortment of percussive samples, including fragments of his own familiar voice that have been chopped up and warped beyond recognition, and he’s more than willing to craft hooks and engaging passages using unconventional means and sounds. Opener "Talk About" and highlight "Bother" both hang on aggressive spoken samples, the former cribbed from Nas cut "One Love" and the latter delivered by Bundick himself; the skittering "Toy" is built around a spectral, cycling flute-ish melody that’s tonally incongruous given the menace of the rhythm that surrounds it. Choices like this grant the record a playfulness and lightness that serve to balance its darker, occasionally amelodic tendencies.
With that said, the best moments on Michael are the ones that hew closest to Bundick’s work as Toro y Moi, which remains his flagship project. If you imagine a spectrum anchored at either end by the sonic extremes Bundick has explored—perhaps a piece of lounging, bachelor pad pop like "How I Know" at one end, and the shocking, guttural assault of Michael’s "Call" on the other—it’s clear he does his best work somewhere near the middle. The irresistible "Why", featuring vocalist Nate Salman, would slot in perfectly alongside dance-oriented Anything in Return highlights like "Harm in Change" and "Rose Quartz" if Bundick was singing it instead, and it’s the most memorable moment on Michael by a wide margin. A handful of songs scattered throughout the album’s back half succeed in large part because they embrace tones and textures that Bundick is clearly comfortable deploying, from the spacey synth line gliding through "Bellow" to the bold, bright piano melody that stars on closer "Do Right". These tracks feel distinct and separate from his work as Toro y Moi, but without completely forgoing the skills and unique palette that makes those songs stand out. And although Michael is likely destined to end up a minor effort in Bundick’s expanding catalogue, his talent and radiant passion for new musical ideas and a wide breadth of sounds render the album a worthwhile effort for even casual listeners.


The One Direction member’s solo debut pays fine tribute to classic rock’n’roll and shows off his exceptional voice, if not his enigmatic persona.

Harry Styles

Harry Styles is a master of the middle distance. Look at him turning his right cheek to the camera, strands of wet hair hanging lank, a rogue petal clinging to a clump above his ear: “Sweet Creature is available now. Album is available in ten days. I am available always.” He remains an enigma after spending a half-decade in the world’s most popular boy band and dating one of the world’s biggest pop stars. And yet there’s something about Styles’ combination of roguish charm and eagerness to please that renders him exactly that: available. Leave the right Instagram comment at the right time, and he might show up on your doorstep the next morning with a bag of bagels and coffee with room. The ability to tap into this liminal space between intimacy and detachment is what makes Styles—and Harry Styles, the solo debut he’s releasing about a year and a half after One Direction’s dissolution—so captivating.
If you only know one thing about Harry Styles, it’s probably that the album bucks the established trends governing bids for young male solo pop stardom. Styles is uninterested in walking the trail blazed 15 years ago by Justin Timberlake’s Justified, the one along which young male stars signal their newfound maturity by embracing hip-hop, R&B, and overt libidinousness (c.f. Justin Bieber, Nick Jonas, Zayn Malik). He doesn’t seem to care for the Sheeranesque stadium-folk being churned out by One Direction bandmate Niall Horan, either. Instead, Harry Styles wants to be a rock star—your father’s rock star, or maybe even your grandparents’ rock star. And so this sounds like the work of a musician whose desert island discs include Revolver, Tattoo You, and Vinyl: Music From the HBO Original Series - Vol. 1.
Styles’ debut isn’t subject to the same pressures that defined late-period One Direction, and its songs don’t need to hold up over a year-long stadium tour. It’s still exceedingly easy to hear Styles and his band—spearheaded by jack-of-all-trades executive producer Jeff Bhasker—tip their caps to a wide variety of rock legends and also-rans. “Sweet Creature” catches Styles taking a crack at his very own version of “Blackbird”; the laughable “Woman” opens with a piano flourish out of Prince’s “Do Me, Baby” before settling down into an Elton John strut. Styles’ stabs at hard rock (the one-two punch of “Only Angel” and “Kiwi”) sound like the Rolling Stones and Wolfmother, respectively. And lead single “Sign of the Times” is a skyscraping Bowie ballad that manages to sound like both fun.’s “We Are Young”—one of Bhasker’s biggest hits—and Coldplay’s “The Scientist.” Take issue with Styles’ taste at your leisure, but there’s no denying his comprehensiveness.
His vocal performances are invariably the best parts of these songs. Styles has described his stint in One Direction as “a democracy,” and every song featured a fight for breathing room between four or five hungry young singers. Here, he has space he can use. “Sign of the Times” jumps out of your speakers when he shifts into his thin falsetto, and it climaxes with a series of desperate howls. He makes a convincing alt-country troubadour on “Two Ghosts” and “Ever Since New York” by throwing on a little twang and a healthy helping of world-weariness. The down-home boogie of “Carolina” tests the limits of his nascent swagger. And I’ve never heard someone record their own backing vocals with the enthusiasm and panache Styles brings to Harry Styles. Every hoot, yelp, and chant are delivered with an impish grin, one that makes it hard not to crack a smile of your own.
Going it alone gives Styles the space he needs to soar as a vocalist, but it also throws his shortcomings as a writer into sharp relief. Vague allusions, stock characters, and cliché turns of phrase aside, Styles struggles most with writing about women, a shame given that *Harry Styles *is supposed to be “a song cycle about women and relationships.” The subject of “Only Angel” turns out to be a “devil in between the sheets.” The irrepressible Southern flame at the heart of “Carolina” ends up a “good girl” out of the Drake playbook. “Kiwi” is devoted to a “pretty face on a pretty neck” with a “Holland Tunnel for a nose” (because it’s “always backed up,” he quips). “Two Ghosts” only succeeds because it leans on a handful of references to Styles’ most famous ex, and it’s not even the best Taylor Swift song in his catalogue.
This parade of sexy badasses is amusing but unmemorable, and Styles’ reliance on trite depictions of wild women is disappointing in part because he seems otherwise unbothered by the demands of traditional masculinity. He shrugs off his imagined secret love affairs with other members of One Direction and wins plaudits for the respect he shows his largely female, largely teenage fanbase. Harry Styles might tell you plenty about its namesake’s aesthetic interests and his grown-up turn-ons, but it’s lacking the emotional depth that’s so readily ascribed to him. You finish the album waiting for his pen to catch up with his persona.
There’s one moment in which Harry Styles transcends its big-name influences. Closer “From the Dining Table” opens with a startling scene: a horny, lonely Styles, jerking off in an opulent hotel room before falling back asleep and getting wasted. “I’ve never felt less cool,” he admits. The writing is frank and economic; it sounds like Styles is singing softly into your ear, a bashful mess. It’s the only song on the album that invites you to consider what it must be like to be Harry Styles: unfathomably famous since before you could drive, subjected to unrelenting attention everywhere except bunker-like studios and secluded beaches, forced to zip around and around the world for half a decade when you’re supposed to be figuring out who you are and what you want. And yet “From the Dining Table” sounds less like a complaint than a confession meant for you and you alone. It’s intoxicating, and it ends Harry Styles on the most promising possible note.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the Arizona band’s third album, a giant canvas of rock and pop songwriting that wears its heart on its sleeve.

Clarity

When Jimmy Eat World started recording their third full-length LP, Clarity, they suspected it would be their last. Formed in Mesa, Arizona during the era when major labels were absorbing alternative rock bands as if through osmosis, they signed to Capitol in the mid-’90s, and the first album they recorded for the label, 1996’s Static Prevails, performed below expectations. They knew if they didn’t sell significantly more on the second attempt, the label would drop them.
They also assumed this would be the last chance they’d have the budget to make a really big album—not “big” in the sense of volume and speed, but more in the way even a small painting can seem big, the enormity of the subject suggested by how finely-wrought its details are. They would record every idea they had in search of this effect. Organs, synthesizers, vibraphones, and any kind of percussion instrument they could find—including timpani—blanketed the floor of the studio like unruly houseplants.
The band’s sound was also in a state of mutation. When they were teenagers, they debuted as a skate punk band, but after hearing the glacial prettiness of Denver emo band Christie Front Drive, the spaces between the chords and even the individual notes in Jimmy Eat World songs started to grow. By the time they recorded Static Prevails, their songs were unknown landscapes, the ground giving way to sudden pitfalls. Their inner dynamic was starting to change too; during the writing of Clarity, their original lead singer, guitarist Tom Linton, whose scorched Jawbox-y growl featured on at least half of Static Prevails, withdrew from the microphone almost entirely, ceding lead vocal duties to Jim Adkins on all of Clarity except for one song. It wasn’t a conscious choice; Adkins just tended to have the first idea for lyrics as the songs were forming in the band’s practice space. But Adkins’ vocal register also hovers at a considerable distance above Linton’s; it is birdsong high, conveying more emotion and energy and way less exhaustion. Listening to him sing was like being tuned into someone’s innermost thoughts and hearing them echo off their chest cavity—nothing gets in the way between you and the ache in his voice.
By this point, Jimmy Eat World had been categorized as an emo band. Not that they welcomed it. Like a Groucho Marx routine on loop, emo was a club no self-respecting punk would belong to. Guy Picciotto, member of flagship emo bands Rites of Spring and Fugazi, said he never recognized “emo” as a legitimate genre of music. “I just thought that all the bands I played in were punk rock bands,” he said. “What, like the Bad Brains weren’t emotional? What—they were robots or something?” Other bands acted as if they’d been accused of something unseemly when it came up in interviews, putting as much distance between the genre and their music as they could. Whatever reverence or weight it may have acquired in the past decade, “emo” still sounds pejorative on a phonetic level—the kind of word that triggers an eye roll as you say it, like a muscle spasm. There’s something inherently immature and unformed in the designation, evoking the miseries of the hopelessly teenaged, voluntary adolescents adrift in torments they should’ve outgrown by now.
But at the tail end of the ’90s, the rock music people thought of as emo wasn’t even beginning to live up to that expectation. It was mostly still just different groupings of former hardcore kids writing records that were dynamic in mood and sound, anchored in punk but taking cues from dub and space rock records, sinking into every pocket and gap that opened up in their songs. (It’s a phenomenon that can be heard on records from 1996, like Texas Is the Reason’s Do You Know Who You Are? and Boys Life’s Departures and Landfalls.) Emo didn’t have the classic rock pretensions of grunge and alt-rock, nor was it anywhere near as crisp and accessible as pop-punk, which was then growing exponentially more popular. Emo, instead, was rock music in a confused state, made by and for confused people.
I hated emo in high school—Saves the Day, Dashboard Confessional, all the sad boys with guitars getting airtime on MTV2. Any band that wielded emotions I felt acutely every day made me feel like a vampire exposed to daylight. Resentment, alienation, unrequited love—these already made up the emotional landscape of one’s teenage years, high school hallways without end. There was something mortifying about listening to music that echoed that experience so directly back at me. I preferred indie rock bands whose lyrics were opaque enough to disintegrate in your grasp. This, it seemed to me, was fundamentally more adult and dignified, as if abstracting your angst instead of contending with it was obviously the more mature thing to do.
On first contact, Jimmy Eat World can sound too simplistic and straightforward, all text and no subtext, all dumb feeling with no mediated surface, which made liking them automatically embarrassing yet difficult to resist. When I saw a copy of Clarity in my high school library, though, something about the cover—four cryptic photographs taken from a grid of sixteen, the rest of which revealed themselves as you unfolded the booklet—made the band feel complicated all of a sudden, as if these were shadow realms that loomed beyond their popular hits. Some of the images were captured at such a microscopic level of detail it’s hard to grasp the whole they must have been cropped from: pinholes of light playing on a watery surface; a flashlight illuminating what looks like a cave interior; the net of a screen door, possibly after rain, making the world beyond it look like wet squares of paint. The photos so often resist interpretation, it’s like they’ve captured something in the midst of being remembered, a lost detail of someone’s life gradually coming back into focus.
Instead of being greeted with the loud rasp of a guitar, Clarity begins with an organ drone slowly filling the room with its single note. (According to Adkins, this was the band’s “punk rock” way of opening the album, punk in this instance being less about loud music than a devotion to the unexpected.) A snare drum and a ride cymbal sway evenly out of the mists of the drone. Before Adkins sings, it could pass for a Low song, and was in fact inspired by the emptiness of Low’s early sound, frail and temporary in its construction but deliberate in its every movement, like the hem of a dress floating above the ground.
When Adkins was working in an art supply store between tours, he went to a coworker’s art installation and saw a woman cleaning a flight of steps with the skirt of her white dress. She ran past him, across a courtyard, toward a table set with candles and glass tumblers, and patiently brushed the dirt from her dress into the glasses. It took Adkins a moment to register that he was watching performance art, that what he saw had some kind of meaning beyond its own momentary occurrence, though he also had trouble settling on what that was exactly. By the time he set the scene to music in the first song on Clarity, “Table for Glasses,” everything had burned away from the memory, leaving only the image of the woman in the white dress stamped in his mind: “It happens too fast/To make sense of it/Make it last,” he sings in the chorus, each second being eaten away by the next, until the original context is gone, and the song cracks open and blooms.
Each song on Clarity feels this dense and intentionally constructed, each instrument settling over the previous one like a new layer of paint. The band wasn’t hostile to glossy production styles; they grew up on the popular rock and metal music of the ’80s, and drummer Zach Lind routinely cites Mötley Crüe’s Dr. Feelgood as the gold standard of rock production, the refined texture of the instruments and the impact they have when they’re all roped together in the mix. You can see this approach bearing out in Clarity’s “Believe in What You Want,” where synthesizers fill up the guitar tones with glare like overexposed light in an old photograph.
But they also knew when to scale back, when their slightest gesture would have the greatest impact. The verses in “A Sunday” are played by the full band, but in the chorus they retreat, leaving Adkins in isolation like the universe has tightened around him, and even though the song itself doesn’t slow down, the world seems to spin a little slower. “12.23.95” shrinks the world of Clarity down even further, to the dimensions of something a musician in the present day would likely record in their bedroom. Synthetic percussion whirs like film in a projector and synths chirp like they’re emitting from a video game cartridge. And the song itself is small: two identical verses (“Didn’t mean to leave you hanging on/I didn’t mean to leave you all alone/I didn’t know what to say”) and a chorus (“Merry Christmas, baby”) and it’s over. But it’s this very smallness that makes the album so big; you can feel all the darkness closing in around Adkins’ voice as he sings this song, as if he were recording it at 4 a.m. and trying to pack as much genuine feeling into a four-track recorder as possible.
It’s in this mid-section of Clarity that one gets the sense that the songs are trying to freeze a moment in time, to trap the briefest glance or gesture in its own frame and preserve it there. The two-song climax of the album, “Just Watch the Fireworks” and “For Me This Is Heaven,” feels like it takes place at the same emotional scale as “12.23.95,” quiet and stirring, but the songs flare up around this feeling like the edges of a parachute. “Fireworks” starts and stops like an interrupted thought that keeps building on itself, strings sawing forcefully in the distance like they’re filing down a raw nerve. “Heaven” is a feat of miraculous clockwork, each section of the song seeming to trigger a new spiral of notched countermelodies which fit perfectly into the phrases beneath them.
Even though they were dumping most of these elaborate overdubs directly into ProTools, the band still wanted to incorporate the older innovations of analog tape—the drum loop that hovers over “Ten” like a pointed crown was cut from tape, and they plotted the length of “Goodbye Sky Harbor” according to the length of the reel they were recording it to: 16 minutes. Adkins, inspired by the Anthrax songs based on Stephen King’s work, lifted the lyrics directly from the John Irving novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, taking up the diminutive title character’s perspective, queasily aware of the date and circumstances of his own death and believing himself a direct instrument of God’s will. The acute timing of the guitars and drums in the verses make the song feel like it’s inclined away from the earth, like an airplane taking off. Then after three minutes, the song ends, drifts, unravels, and loops around itself, arranged so that every new development would register a measure after the listener expected it. Elements are introduced then stripped away. When almost every inch of sound has been deleted except for Adkins’ wordless vocals, something sputters like an old engine block, rapidly ascending in pitch and resembling the rat’s nests of snare rolls you might hear on an IDM record from the same year.
When the band finished Clarity, Capitol didn’t schedule a release date for it, which made the band fear they’d never get one. They took what seemed the most likely lead single, a perfect crystal of power-pop called “Lucky Denver Mint,” packaged it with “For Me This Is Heaven” and a few songs that weren’t going to make the Clarity tracklist, and released them as a self-titled EP through an emerging punk label called Fueled by Ramen. As a result, “Lucky Denver Mint” got playlisted by the Los Angeles alt-rock radio station KROQ, and shortly thereafter it was acquired for the soundtrack of the Drew Barrymore-led romantic comedy Never Been Kissed, complete with a movie tie-in music video. Capitol, as if responding to this sudden flutter of attention, awarded the album a release date, and Clarity came out; it was received well critically, but even with a soundtrack placement, it gained little traction on rock radio or MTV. Jimmy Eat World were unceremoniously dropped from Capitol.
But the band saved enough money from touring to record a follow-up to Clarity without the assistance of a label. Their songwriting was getting sharper, the songs more direct with fewer moving parts. One of them, “The Middle,” inspired by an email they received from a fan who was having trouble fitting in at her school, addressed the pressures of youth in such a compact, cathartic way that it did figure-eights through the charts, spending 36 weeks there; it remains their signature song.
Yet, for all of the commercial and aesthetic success that came out of 2001’s Bleed American, Clarity’s influence looms larger; you can hear it working into the finer threads of Julien Baker’s recent production choices, in nearly every honeycomb of compressed feeling that pronoun makes. It’s a touchstone because of how carefully made it is, refinement the seemingly anti-punk rock move that ultimately registers as punk. You can tell the band wanted to make something deep enough to wander through, to find a place for yourself inside. Clarity may have been a transitional record, catching a band that hadn’t quite arrived blurring in mid-movement, but that blur had more depth than the band ever did in perfect focus. The closer you examined it, the more you could glimpse the entire world within it.

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The underrated British folk icon Michael Chapman collaborates with Steve Gunn on what he is calling his “American” album.

50

50 serves a number of roles in Michael Chapman’s gargantuan catalog, which encompasses nearly that many albums. As the title suggests, it is a commemorative album, in this case marking half a century as a performing artist. In 1966, the young guitar player finagled his way into a show at a Cornwall jazz club, an unknown talent who turned his audition into a residency. Three years later he recorded his debut, Rainmaker (recently reissued on Light in the Attic), and played the same stages as some of the most inventive and influential folk guitarists of the era—although Chapman bristles at the categorization. He may never have achieved the notoriety of Bert Jansch or John Martyn, and his exploits in the rock world (connecting Mick Ronson and David Bowie, nearly joining Elton John’s band) may overshadow his music, but Chapman’s accomplishments aren’t that of a professional hanger-on. His playing was progressive even for the most progressive era of British folk music, showcasing a complex grammar of picking and strumming based on a vocabulary that commingles blues, jazz, country, raga, and rock.
Chapman has described 50 as his “American” album, and it seems remarkable that he has not recorded on this side of the Atlantic before. Throughout his career, he has been enamored with and inspired by American music and mythology, writing songs like landscape paintings of the West. He’s recorded not one but two albums called Americana, but this is the first time he has actually conceived and recorded a full album in the States, which makes 50 sound like the culmination of a lifetime’s fascination with the former colony. The Yanks he recorded with suggest an attempt to secure his legacy, to trace it from one generation to the next: Steve Gunn produces, plays guitar, and leads a band that includes most of the Paradise of Bachelors roster: James Elkington and Nathan Bowles, along with Jimy SeiTang and Jason Meagher.
There’s some intricate give-and-take between Chapman and the band, as the musicians he has influenced take the opportunity to influence him. Because this is Gunn producing, the songs are focused and succinct, with no little jamming or rambling. More than anyone else in this new generation of folk-derived guitarists, Gunn is less concerned with solo artistry and more fascinated by the chemistry between a band of distinctive musicians, and he brings that dynamic to 50, which isn’t too far removed from his last two albums. The riffs sound coiled and compact, as though propelled by some outside source, and the solos rarely announces themselves as such. Somehow the album sounds American, especially on the high-lonesome “That Time of Night” and the haunted “Falling from Grace,” and that suits Chapman’s brusque cadence and seen-it-all voice perfectly.
Even as it draws on new and old songs, 50 presents a startlingly current and nearly apocalyptic vision of America; it’s album full of brimstone and brine, perhaps more perfect for this moment in history than we’d like to admit. “Memphis in Winter,” which he originally recorded for 1999’s The Twisted Road and revisits here, depicts a hellish urban landscape “where the river comes a-rolling/where the levee tends to break/where to walk the streets at night well it’s not a risk that you would take.” Convoluted syntax aside, it’s a dread-filled update on the crossroads mythology, and Chapman’s guitar shudders with either fear or frost. Even direr is “Sometimes You Just Drive,” which sounds like a roadtrip through Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” Chapman’s guitar slices and stabs, unsettling the listener as he ponders a harsh world and wonders if he’s lucky to still be alive: “Sometimes you live, and sometimes you just drive.” Chapman is still doing plenty of both.


On his second LP, Lapalux forgoes the patchwork approach of his debut, merging saxophones and billowing synths with results resting somewhere between James Blake's sparsity and early 2000s neo-soul.

Lustmore

On his debut album, 2013's Nostalchic, producer Stuart Howard (aka Lapalux) showed a strong affection for 1990s R&B. He sifted the era's body-rolling sensuality through computerized filters, piecing the threads into cryptic slow jams and bastardized dance tracks. His music, across Nostalchic and several EPs, thrives on a patchwork approach, a mismatched blend of glued-together tape strands, heavy drums, and warped vocals. It's wonky enough to fit alongside that of Brainfeeder label mates Daedelus and Gaslamp Killer, but it's distinguished by a cosmopolitan sophistication, conjuring images of pretty people in dark clubs, sipping mixed drinks in trendy clothes.
The producer establishes a more aquatic vibe throughout sophomore album Lustmore. The compositions are more straightforward than those on Nostalchic, merging saxophones and billowing synths with results resting somewhere between James Blake's sparsity and early 2000s neo-soul. "We Lost", in particular, resembles a Musiq Soulchild track—the instrumental is decidedly Soulquarian; the vocals are mostly indecipherable. "Whenever I think about the album I think about the bar scene in The Shining," Howard told FACT in January, speaking of Lustmore. "There's something about that strange, hallucinatory psychological madness that relates to the music." To that end, Lustmore doesn't really move; it lingers like dense fog until it slowly dissolves.
In a way, the disoriented mood better aligns with another Kubrick flick—1999's Eyes Wide Shut.  But Lustmore suffers from a lack of coherence. Its various feint and detours feel purposeful, but the album buckles under the weight of Howard's ambition, leading to a leading to a disjointed listen. Sultry numbers like "U Never Know" and "Closure" fit into Howard's overall aesthetic, but the mix of straight-ahead singing and woozy ambience feels outdated and timid alongside the more fluid, strange "Sum Body" and "Midnight Peelers".
The guest singers aren’t filtered so heavily, which makes for an easier listen, yet the output feels staid compared with his previous offerings, where he achieved the right mix of airy and bizarre.Nostalchic was tough to get into, but there was a certain charm to Howard’s esoteric style that set him apart. Lustmore doesn’t feel honed in; it sounds like a vast collection of songs that never quite go anywhere. Much like The Shining, there’s no telling what you’ll get from one scene to the next on Lustmore, but it ultimately ends with a thud.
Howard shows flashes of ingenuity on Lustmore's "Don't Mean a Thing", the album's most realized offering. Here, Howard finds a nice groove and stays put, looping the vocals into sporadic bursts while forgoing the stilted patterns of other songs—namely "Push N' Spun" and "Make Money". On "1004", Howard builds a nice shape-shifting atmosphere; the track smoothly transitions into a spacey upbeat gem that punctuates the LP. Ultimately, though, it's tough to discern just what Lustmore aims to be. It's dubbed as a hypnagogic release, but in Howard's quest to explore the void between sleep and alertness, the album frequently veers off the path, leaving me to wonder if there were clear directions to begin with. Instead of a full movie, Lustmore is a collection of half-edited scenes that don't quite gel.


The New York curator and multimedia artist uses droning Farfisa organs and arpeggiated synths to tap into a tripped-out spirit of wonder.

Gryphon Rue: A Spirit Appears to a Pair of Lovers

A Spirit Appears to a Pair of Lovers

Gryphon Rue taps into a specific type of psychedelia on his latest album. It’s the kind of ceiling-staring, mouth-agape feeling you only get from classic droolers like Terry Riley’s Persian Surgery Dervishes or fantastical obscurities like Randall McClellan’s The Healing Music of Rana: albums built entirely around the endlessly hypnotic capabilities of an electric organ in the right hands. Throughout A Spirit Appears to a Pair of Lovers, the Farfisa organ is the main object of Rue’s worship; its delightfully bubbly, buzzing tone cycles in all directions, climbing up and down the scale and doubling back on itself in hallucinogenic fashion. Listening to it feels like going on a trip you may have taken before, albeit not in a long, long time.
Rue, a New York-based multimedia artist who also happens to be the great-grandson of sculptor Alexander Calder, is a student of the old avant-garde. He has curated gallery exhibitions and published essays, and on his radio show Earmark, he’s conducted numerous interviews with classic experimentalists like “Blue” Gene Tyranny and David Berhman. On A Spirit Appears, he works like a distiller, carefully crafting miniature trances that kick in as quickly as they evaporate. Unlike artists like Riley or McClellan, who might allow their drones to unspool into hour-long meditative descents, Rue takes a more streamlined approach, opting for shorter track lengths that spiral like shimmering dust in a crystal ball before settling in order to move onto the next phase. Though he walks in the footsteps of voyagers who came before, Rue’s command over this realm is enticing, his sense of dynamics and texture revealing a finely honed craftsmanship.
A Spirit Appears’ playfulness sets it apart from the many other modular-synth outings crowding the ambient field these days. While there are dizzying arpeggios aplenty, Rue’s sensibility feels more in line with late-’00s new-age disciples like Sun Araw and Dolphins Into the Future—artists who twisted their synthesizers into vehicles for whimsical marriages of sweet, glowing ambience and otherworldly noise. After the spiraling notes of “Watercolor Virus” and “Rainbow Serpent” launch the album with a joyfully lysergic smile, “Acoustic Temple” immediately dives into more haunted territory, hanging on a deep, raga-like drone that feels as if it’s going to swallow the listener whole. After building for a few minutes, the track slowly shifts into an ancient, ritualistic drum circle, conjuring the hypnagogic jams of Monopoly Child Star Searchers with its pounding rhythms and noodly, fluttering keyboard. By the time the track’s over, you might feel like you just got off the tunnel boat in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
Though Farfisas and alien synthesizers dominate, as the record nears its end, Rue adds a drop of the real. On “Grass Light on Flesh,” after cruising on a slowly morphing squarewave tone for five minutes, Rue slowly introduces a field recording of a lone coyote howling in the night. It’s a grounding moment, yet it feels as mystically wondrous as any other sound on the album, as chirping crickets immediately transport us to the starry night this recording was captured on. Even if Gryphon Rue isn’t exactly breaking new ground on A Spirit Appears to a Pair of Lovers, he manages to tap into a wide-eyed spirit of adventure, one that calls back to a chapter of basement-show DIY that feels like it’s becoming more and more distant. There’s a cozy warmth that comes from wrapping yourself up in its warbly, tripped-out blanket.


Patrick Wolf certainly has his drooling admirers; not a glowering, baleful eye is cast on this 20-year-old on the first ...

Lycanthropy

Patrick Wolf certainly has his drooling admirers; not a glowering, baleful eye is cast on this 20-year-old on the first three pages of a Google search for his name. It's easy to see why. For one, the encumbering folklore that drags heavy about Wolf's skinny shoulders is intriguing in all the right ways: He casts himself as a neo-Dickensian laptop minstrel, a wandering electro-folk organ grinder, and a pacifist werewolf bent on a nomadic musical existence. Whether or not you buy into his mythology, though, his debut album confirms better reasons to check his music, not least of which is that the stockpile of personal issues he doles out here contains enough agony and energy to fuel the fires of several puberties.
When Fat Cat Records discovered him four years ago, and saw fit to kit him out with his own mini-studio, he was just 16, but had already chalked up ten years of musicianship. He toured Europe with an orchestra, before going on to form the now-defunct punk band Maison Crimineaux in Paris. (The alias "Patrick Wolf" was conceived there shortly thereafter, with the assistance of a local clairvoyant.) And this impressive background has paid off with Lycanthropy, on which he wraps his folk-pop musings in lush blankets of violin, viola, harp and harpsichord, and tricks out the mix with aggressive electronic textures. His singing voice is fantastic as well, with a broad British accent recalling the caustic androgyny of Suede's Brett Anderson.
Late British author Angela Carter played a formative role in Wolf's thematic development; her novel, The Brotherhood of the Wolf, inspired his lycanthropy obsession. Carter based much of her work on themes of adolescence embodied in erotic folklore metaphor, and here, Wolf occasionally paraphrases or condenses some of her passages in lyrics like, "I was once a boy/ Until I cut my penis off/ And grew a hairy scar of stubborn fire." But if his transformation from boy to wolf is complete, he's still marked by a mortal vulnerability-- a result of an unsettled childhood of bullying and rejection.
"A Boy Like Me" is a perfectly sculpted pop song for the ubiquitous dissolute youth: "A boy like me is told he is both nine and ninety/ And a boy like me should shut those books and join the army." Alienation and teen misery are not rare commodities in music, but Wolf throws up such provocative contrasts ("I want total chaos/ And a holiday home in the east") that his naivete often seems acknowledged-- possibly even a put-on-- just another undercurrent in the clever, serpentine narratives that guide us through this densely self-aware work.
When Wolf brings his considerable sequencing skills to the forefront, Lycanthropy echoes Warp Records prodigy Chris Clark's raw and uncompromising 2000 release Clarence Park. But then, Wolf's influences are so numerous that if occasional snatches of Clark or Nick Cave or Joni Mitchell are briefly detected, they quickly give way to fusions of other artists, or combine to create a sound of their own. Meanwhile, the music itself is polarized and raw, with (naturally) lycanthropic juxtapositions of rustic/urban, ordered/chaotic, naive/cynical.
It may be tempting for some to judge Wolf in terms of his age, but this would be doing a disservice to a lyricist of such courage. If any complaint could be lodged against Lycanthropy, it's that it sometimes lacks subtlety, as it's possessed by a heady, pubescent intoxication that can result in some indiscriminate vocalizing. Still, witnessing such breathless unraveling of the heart and such thoughtless conviction that never quite sounds arrogant is exhilarating-- not to mention rare. Indeed, with Lycanthropy, Wolf has constructed a themed record that deftly manipulates myths while brazenly striding into new, tumultuous territory. On the eve of his virgin U.S. tour this May, it would seem he has more in common with the Pied Piper than with Peter Pan, and his eerie playing will surely seduce many into his following.


Binga's second proper record stands as his most realized and bountiful work yet, synthesizing two decades of UK bass music into something vigorous and modern.

Wasted Days

Sam Binga's defining characteristic as a producer seems to be generosity. To his fans—he's maintained a frenetic release pace since early last decade (often under his Baobinga alias)—but mostly to other artists, as the majority of those releases feature collaborations with vocalists or other producers. This tends to be the first thing anyone mentions about Binga, and while it's refreshing, especially in electronic music, to see an artistic approach other than Genius Lone Wolf, it's also resulted in a highly variable catalog that has obscured anything resembling a signature touch or sound. Wasted Days, Binga's proper debut record, again features a host of MCs and offers a robust 17 tracks (a four-sided LP version is trimmer) but stands as his most realized and bountiful work yet, synthesizing two decades of UK bass music into something vigorous and modern.
Binga is a child of UK rave culture, and his production style has flitted between drum'n'bass, grime, and dubstep. Grime's resurgence, as both a pop and underground phenomenon, has refocused UK music's relationship with dancehall culture, as MCs have increasingly stepped back into the booth. Before grime, though, MCs played a large role in DJ sets, toasting over jungle and UK garage sets. It's this loose, improvisational feel that defines Wasted Days, as vocalists shuffle through tracks Binga has tailored to showcase their slurring patois. Their muddied taunts and boasts offer crucial texture and melody to Binga’s drum-heavy chambers, leaving the tracks in a liminal space between structured song craft and narrative-driven rap.
Putting a precise name on Binga’s productions proves difficult. They have the tempos and streamlined tech-y-ness of modern-day drum’n’bass (the album is on Critical Recordings, the pre-eminent home for underground drum’n’bass in 2015), eschewing cut-up breakbeats in favor of sound design. Its slithering melodies and dub-heavy sound recall grime and dubstep, and rap and footwork has seeped into Binga’s work just as it has general UK dance culture. It’s the rare record for which the imprecision of the term "bass music" is a positive.
At times Wasted Days feels like someone shined a spotlight into whatever dungy corner Kevin Martin’s the Bug project has inhabited the past few years, fumigating the living room and disinfecting the kitchen. The two share a love for UK soundsystem culture, but Binga’s version is far less blunted and menacing. On tracks like "Mind and Spirit" and the title cut (featuring frequent Martin collaborator Warrior Queen) Binga’s productions advance in sustained, athletic bursts, moving explosively between verses. Opener "Believe" largely consists of a rapid bursts of sub-kicks, leaving plenty of headroom for MCs Redders and Rider Shafique’s id-driven swagger.
On "Stormy Weather" and "Reclaim" (which features fellow bass explorer Om Unit) Binga manages to ease off the gas and offer more contemplative work without sounding lame or maudlin. They offer just enough variety, even if the combination of Binga and the MCs suggests harder/better/faster/stronger is the correct impulse. What’s remarkable though is how well Wasted Days comes together, and how easy it is to return to a 17-track collaborative album of indeterminate style; the degree of difficulty in actually pulling this off shouldn’t be understated, and you need look no further than the last Bug album to see how easily this kind of project can bog down. Wasted Days manages to provide a grand stage not just for the MCs but, at last, for Binga’s talents as well.


The new Foals LP feels like the completion of an unplanned trilogy—Total Life Forever embraced commitment, Holy Fire yearned for liberation, and this is the band recoiling from the blowback. At this point, Foals have mastered an arena-funk hybrid that others have only touched on.

What Went Down

Unlike Foals’ two previous albums, What Went Down does not require a drawn-out introduction to explain its intentions. "Blue Blood" captured the surprising progression of Total Life Forever in miniature, slowly evolving from the pinging, prickly riffs that defined Antidotes to a cloudbursting crescendo. By 2013's Holy Fire, Foals were a legitimate arena act and acted like they've been there before, hence, the four-minute, crowd-stoking "Prelude". At this point, Foals have nothing left to prove—they are a big-ticket rock band until further notice, so the opening title track of What Went Down gets right to it with blunt-force, pitch-shifted riffs and Yannis Philippakis promising that you’re gonna hype him up and make him catch a body like that: "So don’t step to me kid, you’ll never be found."
The lyrical aggression is curious, but the confidence is warranted—after planning on an extended hiatus after Holy Fire, What Went Down came together in relatively quick fashion after something "clicked" during preliminary sessions. No surprise that they’re locked in, as Foals are basically a genre of one at this point. This appears more obvious when you consider the bands who’ve ascended to their level in the UK over the past few years; if they’re not adhering to the most obvious NME-bait lad-rock template, they’re following some kind of obvious precedent. Meanwhile, Foals have mastered an arena-funk hybrid that others have only touched on—post-Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me Cure when they wanted to be silly, latter day Red Hot Chili Peppers when they wanted to be serious.
But unlike those bands, Foals aren’t fronted by a self-fashioned icon. The presumptive medley of "London Thunder" and "Lonely Hunter" find Philippakis jetsetting between gigs and considering the ocean as a reflection of his emotional emptiness, the first time he’s directly addressed what it means to be The Guy in Foals. But while Foals are considered the "thinking person’s alternative" to most mainstream UK guitar bands by default, the knuckle-dragging of the title track and "Snake Oil" isn’t that much more cerebral than Royal Blood or Drenge. More often, Foals are a "feeling person’s alternative"—"Mountain at My Gates" and "Birch Tree" are defined by an all-purpose spiritual and/or romantic longing and spacious production, meaning they’re walking the same path as Coldplay ca. X&Y with more pep in their step. What Went Down revels in lurid imagery—love is a gun in Philippakis’ hand, he runs through the streets bloodied from a fistfight, his heart is an old pole dancer and an old black panther.
In that regard, What Went Down feels like the completion of an unplanned trilogy—Total Life Forever embraced commitment, Holy Fire yearned for liberation, and this is Philippakis recoiling from the blowback. "Give It All" initially comes off like an inert songwriting exercise in lyrical juxtaposition, before Philippakis cleverly twists the title into an ironic burn ("Give me the time but not an age/ Give me the look but not the rage...you give me it all"). But by "Lonely Hunter", the tables have turned on Philippakis—he gets lost in foreign cities and makes perfunctory late night calls, only to get back and recognize how it’s not the same as being there ("why must I wait in line for what is mine?").
It’s not a particularly unique viewpoint, though it’s unique in relation to other Foals records. In fact, it’s about the only way to truly distinguish What Went Down from Holy Fire and Total Life Forever. There are superficial differences in aggression—slightly more electronic buzzing, harsher vocals, gristly guitars. It’s Foals’ raw record, but it’s still filet mignon tartare, as raw as you can get when your producer’s two other gigs in 2015 were Florence and the Machine and Mumford & Sons.
Otherwise, What Went Down is the latest example of Foals’ uncanny ability to make records whose basic musical trajectory and quality are nearly equal regardless of the band's intentions going in. And What Went Downis their most consistent, steady-handed work yet—the distance between their purest pop moments ("Miami", "My Number") and their opulent ballads ("Spanish Sahara") has virtually disappeared. It's also significantly less exciting than Total Life Forever and Holy Fire, dynamic records because of their unevenness and ambitious strain—while Foals have realized a sound that's truly their own, they sound far too comfortable in it.


The Floridian singer-rapper delivers tender anthems about his pain and inner demons on his debut LP, executive produced by Kevin Gates.

Ghetto Gospel

Fifteen years ago, Rod Wave probably wouldn’t have been a rapper. Like so many new artists coming out of the Deep South, the Floridian mostly croons about his pain and inner demons in two-minute ballads featuring Instagram caption-worthy one-liners like “Heart been broke so many times, I don’t know what to believe.”
As far as singing rappers go, Rod Wave is much more Kevin Gates, say, Young Thug. Rod grew up on Gates’ tender street rap, and paid tribute to his idol in a recent interview: “You made me understand people like us could actually go far, people like us could actually do it in the game. Just the fact that you could take your pain and turn up with it.” Rod Wave’s Ghetto Gospel is very much in the mold of the Baton Rouge star’s music; Gates even executive-produced it.
Like YoungBoy Never Broke Again, JayDaYoungan, and other Southern rappers belting about their struggles, Rod Wave was amassing millions of plays on YouTube even before Kevin Gates’ involvement. The sound of Ghetto Gospel—bloodletting over somber pianos and country guitars—isn’t far off from earlier singles like “Popular Loner” and “Heart 4 Sale.”But his storytelling has a new clarity, and his voice has developed so much range that I’m surprised he hasn’t already recorded an NPR Tiny Desk. The heaviest single on the album is “Close Enough to Hurt,” touching on the PTSD that he’s mentioned on-record before. On “Poison,” he digs deep to tell tales of the terrors that keep him up at night. “Late at night, I been roaming, I ain’t getting no sleep/It’s hard to stay focused when that pain running deep,” he wails.
Ghetto Gospel features two Gates collaborations. These moments feel like Gates passing the torch in real time, as Rod Wave howls like he’s stuck in the begging-for-love-in-the-rain era of ’90s R&B: “When I think about my past, that shit give me chills.” Compared with Gates, Rod’s hooks are glossy, but he can also strip his music down, like the drumless, acoustic guitar-heavy “Chip on my Shoulder,” that sounds like his street spin on a country-pop record.
Rod is at the forefront of an unofficial subgenre of rap called  “pain music,” and it’s been developing since the days of Boosie and Webbie. Artists working in this vein have also found a way to integrate country and pop sounds into their hip-hop in a way that’s considerably less performative than that song about horses. What’s next is a superstar. Numbers-wise the answer is YoungBoy Never Broke Again, though legal troubles will always hold him back. And Kevin Gates is now a thirty-something that’s sliding into a Gucci Mane-like role. Rod Wave may or may not be that person. If Ghetto Gospel makes anything clear, it’s that nobody sings about their pain like him.


This joint project from Efrim Manuel Menuck and Kevin Doria has an overwhelming radiance to match Menuck's work in Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

Efrim Manuel Menuck / Kevin Doria: are SING SINCK, SING

are SING SINCK, SING

Efrim Manuel Menuck’s solo recording career began as a counterpoint to his primary projects’ grandiosity. In contrast with his two main bands—the instrumental post-rock ensemble Godspeed You! Black Emperor and the more vocal and visceral Thee Silver Mt. Zion—his 2011 solo debut, Plays “High Gospel,” was a brittle and frank rumination on the deaths of loved ones and the dawn of new fatherhood. The reedy voice that gave Thee Silver Mt. Zion’s epics their edge sounded wounded and frail when stripped of bombast. But amid High Gospel’s piano hymns and meditative mantras, Menuck also unleashed “A 12-Pt. Program for Keep on Keepin’ On,” a blinding snowstorm of digitized drones and processed vocals that disrupted the otherwise-somber mood. In hindsight, Menuck was building himself a trapdoor—one that’s allowed him to reorient his solo efforts deeper into the realm of experimental electronics.
His latest effort stems from the tour for his 2018 solo album, Pissing Stars, where Menuck performed alongside Kevin Doria of avant-ambient vets Growing. Their onstage collaboration has blossomed into a new entity with the coming-attraction-billboard name “Efrim Manuel Menuck & Kevin Doria are SING SINCK, SING.” Recorded with, by their count, “six oscillators and three large amplifiers,” the duo’s first album together is practically blinding in its radiance. The result feels as overwhelming as anything in the Godspeed/TSMZ canon.
Across his myriad projects, Menuck’s ideological concerns have remained constant: the humiliating effects of capitalism, the authoritarian power of the state, the strength and solace of community. And since becoming a father at the start of the decade, Menuck has regularly invoked his son, reframing these macro ideas through an intensely personal lens. If Pissing Stars reflected the cruel, chaotic world that every new parent worries about bringing their child into, then SING SINCK, SING emits the fragile hope that the next generation will be able to steer toward a better future.
You can immediately sense that change in tenor on the album’s engrossing opening track. Rather than simply rail against abuses of power, Menuck instead asks “Do the Police Embrace?”—a quizzical entreaty delivered inside a carnivalesque swirl of electro-loops. It’s the sound of someone who’s momentarily hit pause on the outside world to get lost inside their own curious thoughts. When Menuck asks, “Do they dance and do they love” and “Do they even have friends,” it feels like an attempt to disarm the oppressor by appealing to whatever’s left of their basic dignity. As his mind drifts toward his family (“I worry for my son”), “Do the Police Embrace?” starts to feel less like a protest song than a sincere plea for love and empathy in a world that so often denies it.
“Fight the Good Fight” and “We Will” are companion affirmations of perseverance—tender, comforting folk hymns that sound like they’re being beamed up into a UFO. But the album’s uncanny fusion of brutalism and bliss reaches its apex with “Joy Is On Her Mount and Death Is On Her Side.” Unlike some of Menuck’s previous work, SING SINCK, SING makes no explicit reference to his Jewish heritage, but with “Joy Is On Her Mount,” he’s effectively reciting yizkor for the natural environments ravaged by the ceaseless march of capitalism. As is the case with all the songs here, Menuck’s voice is only intermittently legible, his words momentarily acquiring definition like a radio station your car stereo catches as you’re driving between cities. But on SING SINCK, SING, that obfuscation is a feature, not a bug. As Menuck and Doria remind us, there is still beauty in this world—you just have to cut through the dark clouds to find it.


O’Rourke’s latest drone project, running to over four hours, is darker and more dreamlike than his Steamroom series, and one of his most meditative releases yet.

Jim O’Rourke: To Magnetize Money and Catch a Roving Eye

For more than a quarter century now, Jim O’Rourke has been sculpting shadows. For some, the American musician is best known for the lush, psychedelic Americana of albums like Bad Timing, or his production work for bands like Wilco, Stereolab, and Sonic Youth. (He was also a member of the latter for a spell, during the Murray Street and Sonic Nurse years.) But since the early 1990s, beginning with albums like Scend and Disengage, the secret heart of O’Rourke’s music has been dedicated to pure electronic abstraction. To call this minimalist output “ambient” or even “drone” doesn’t capture the subtleties of his broad expanses of shimmer and hum. Listen carefully to these pieces, and it sometimes seems that he is molding feedback into storm clouds, or milking frequencies out of thin air.
In recent years, O’Rourke’s drone activities have begun to assume center stage. His practice appears intense, even monastic: He typically devotes five or six hours a day to recording on the Serge, an arcane modular synthesizer from the 1970s; he might spend weeks editing a given session down, mixing it with homemade field recordings, and massaging it all into the desired shape. (“I wish the days were longer,” he has said.) Since 2013, the fruits of his labor have been trickling out under the Steamroom imprint, the digital-only Bandcamp series named after his Tokyo studio. It’s an evocative name, and not so far off from the sounds he achieves. That there are currently 46 releases after just six years—some of them reissues, but most of it new and previously unreleased—says something about his dedication.
To Magnetize Money and Catch a Roving Eye is a kindred spirit to that series. Even by O’Rourke’s standards, it is a mammoth undertaking. Steamroom releases typically consist of a single track that’s somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes in length, but the new album, a four-disc affair, totals nearly four and a quarter hours. The sounds within can be just as daunting. These are not the soft, consonant tones of Streamroom 40, a fan favorite; this music is woven together from ominous rustling noises, glowering low-end throb, and white-hot waves of piercing feedback. The dividing line between musical tone and pure atmosphere is porous: O’Rourke’s synthesizers are more gestural than melodic, and at their edges they dissolve into a vivid, four-dimensional soundscape.
There is an unmistakably dreamlike quality to the music, with hints of birdsong and distant traffic, old trains creaking to life and spaceships powering up, boots in snow and high-voltage power lines overhead. It sounds not just haunting but haunted—not malevolent, necessarily, but terrifying nonetheless. In places, it sounds like O’Rourke came across Grouper’s Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill and decided to take the title literally, coaxing from his matrix of tapes and circuitry a sound equal to that of blood drying on matted pine needles.
There are few repeated motifs, but  for the most part, elements rise into the mix, spread out like inkblots, and are subsumed back into the murk, never to appear again. Some nine minutes into “Part II,” there is an unexpected eruption of feedback, a sustained explosion of surprising force, as though O’Rourke had set fire to Sunn O)))’s backline, but otherwise, recognizable events are few and far between. Seismic rumble melts into glassy shimmer, and vice versa; the music is constantly shape-shifting, yet it all converges into a low, sustained hum.
City-dwellers may recognize this as the standard frequency of the modern metropolis. It is as though O’Rourke had captured and amplified the sounds of everyday life, from the inaudible (magnetic fields, cell-phone signals) to the visceral (rainfall, rumbling subways), rendering them almost womblike. Despite the album’s intimidating scale, it is a strangely welcoming, even enveloping listen. “It’s not a question of patience,” O’Rourke has said, when asked why he likes longform composition so much. “It’s just my taste. I like longer music. It all really comes down to breathing.” In its controlled pacing and deep interiority, To Magnetize Money and Catch a Roving Eye also resembles a kind of breathwork. It is one of his most meditative pieces yet.


The grunge act's first LP in 20 years fails to summon the revolutionary fire that made them such a force of nature in the mid-'90s.

Scatter the Rats

Donita Sparks, the fearless vocalist and guitarist for the Los Angeles grunge four-piece L7, likes to trot out a pet sound bite during interviews. “We’re a meat-and-potatoes rock band with a conscience and some humor,” she told The Current last year. “We just want to [be] meat-and-potatoes L7,” she said in 2015, around the time the band embarked on a reunion tour. To promote Scatter the Rats, their first new material in 20 years, she’s quoted in an updated band bio saying, “I think it’s good for people to enjoy a meat-and-potatoes rock band for a change.”
Any L7 fan could easily identify what constitutes the group’s potatoes: heavy, take-no-prisoners power chords backing blistering solos; bratty vocals often sang (and occasionally shouted) in call-and-response style; solid, no-frills, beat-keeping drums. The meat, on the other hand—the stuff that gives L7 their substance —has shifted slightly over their 24-year career. When they formed in 1985, they were four women from the art-punk scene obsessed with Motörhead, the Ramones, and Black Sabbath. The substance was overtly political and unapologetically aggressive. In their 2019 return, Scatter the Rats, the potatoes are still there, but the meat has gone a little off.
In the early to mid-’90s, they were a force of nature—all scuzzy makeup and wild hair, searing guitar solos and squealing vocals, and stage antics that exemplified their contentious relationship with the very male world around them. (In a frequently cited incident, Sparks once pulled her tampon out on stage and threw it into a crowd of hecklers, shouting, “Eat my used tampon, fuckers!”) In 1991, L7 launched Rock for Choice, a series of concerts that raised money for pro-choice campaigns—Nirvana and Hole headlined the first one.
But while their grunge contemporaries became mainstream darlings, L7 struggled to survive. “At our peak, I really don’t know where the money went,” Sparks told Billboard in 2017. By 1998’s The Beauty Process: Triple Platinum, their revolutionary fire had dwindled to embers, and they were dropped from their label. 1999’s Slap-Happy was a critical flop, and in 2001, L7 went on an indefinite hiatus. Sparks attributed their lack of mainstream success in part to critics pigeonholing them for their gender. “We were not on a political platform,” she said in the same interview. “We formed Rock for Choice, but we were not riot grrrls. We were grown-ass women, not college kids. And riot grrrl was very serious, and we had a lot of fun.”
Scatter the Rats hopes to reinvigorate this legacy. In 2017 and 2018, L7 released their first new singles since Slap-Happy, and hopes ran high: “Dispatch From Mar-A-Lago” was a call to storm the gates of Trump’s private country club, while “I Came Back to Bitch” was an electrifying announcement of the group’s return to fighting the patriarchy. L7, in all their mighty, angry, fuck-you glory, was back.
If Scatter the Rats had sustained the momentum of these singles (neither appears on the record), it would be a resounding triumph. Instead, the 11-song record lacks the forcefulness and murderous moxie that gave L7 their early power. There are hints of it in the frenetic lead guitar line of “Stadium West” and in Sparks’ “Lock us up, lock us up” chant on “Burn Baby,” one of the few subtly political references on the record. “Garbage Truck,” written by the band’s original bassist Jennifer Finch, has Misfits energy with L7’s signature sense of humor. And “Holding Pattern” is an uncharacteristic departure, with minimal distortion and lyrics detailing stuck-in-cement depression. It’s remarkably nuanced and vulnerable, and by far the album’s best track.
Which is why lines that resort to cliché or grab at low-hanging cultural fruit feel not only dated, but cringeworthy. “Murky Water Cafe” somehow falls on both: “Free Wi-Fi come on down,” Sparks sings, grumbling “We’re emojifying our every move/It’s painting bad pictures in my head.” The title track is weighed down by bewildering observations like “Some people say pigeons are rats with wings/These can’t fly, get rid of these things/Leaving a trail, destructive wake/Get ‘em gone, for heaven’s sake.” They sell themselves short by assuming they were just another meat-and-potatoes rock band, and on Scatter the Rats’ weakest moments, they actually sound like one.
The L7 reunion skeptic would say that the Buzzfeedification of media (“Only 90s kids will remember…”) has left the public so beholden to the 20-year nostalgia cycle that they will seize the opportunity to revisit just about anything. But the true shame of Scatter the Rats is that L7 are better than that: They were subversive, they were dirty and mean, and they deserve more than to be just another pop-culture trivia question.