Without a major label deal or superstar allegiances, Wiz has turned himself into a hip-hop star by rapping about weed, girls, and smoking weed with girls.

Kush and Orange Juice

Kids love them some Wiz Khalifa. In a recent Washington City Paper review, the rap blogger Noz described a sold-out 9:30 Club full of late-teens/early-twenties fans, all singing along with the young Pittsburgh rapper's entire set. A little bit of YouTube research shows similar scenes-- at clubs across the country, not just the ones in the Eastern corridor. And when Kush and Orange Juice, the new Wiz mixtape, hit the internet last week, it was a #1 Twitter trending topic for most of the day. And though it's important not to put too much stock in something as ephemeral as trending topics, it at least means there are a whole lot of people talking about a rapper with no major label deal and no superstar allegiances. It's pretty impressive.
Wiz's appeal isn't too hard to figure out. Though he lost his deal with Warner Bros. a while back, you never hear any of the bitterness usually associated with big-label refugees. Instead, he talks his shit with a blasé assurance; one chorus on the mixtape goes, "We belong on the top, but we ain't trippin'/ Cuz we'll get there in a minute." For the most part, he raps about only three things: Weed, girls, and smoking weed with girls (usually your girl). His rap style is easy and conversational, a pinched murmur that never leans too hard on punchlines or narrative. He's got this donkey giggle that he lets loose often, and it might beat out Lil Wayne's guffaw as rap's most irritating laugh, no mean feat. He sounds like the kid two dorm rooms down, bragging about whatever insane party he was at last night while he munches Froot Loops out of the box and watches cartoons on the common-room TV. He's charismatic in a completely relatable way.
He's also got a great ear for beats. The tracks are airy, diffuse things, full of smooth 1980s-funk synths and drums that amble along slowly and quietly. His choices in samples suggest a lot of time watching TV while stoned: Frou Frou's Garden State end-credits song "Let Go" on "In the Cut", Disney princess Demi Lovato's Camp Rock soundtrack single "Our Time Is Here" on "We're Done". "Good Dank" is all warm, rippling psych-funk-- its guitars and organs woozy as all hell, its drums completely nonexistent. And rather than bulldozing through these beats, Wiz just dances around them, never letting his delivery settle into a consistent cadence. Often, he sings his choruses in a calm, casual quaver. Sometimes, he skips rapping altogether. On "Up", he spends four minutes just singing the praises of weed over spaced-out Rhodes plinks, ending by repeating, "Everything's better when you're high," over and over.
When a more conventional rapper like Killa Kyleon or Big K.R.I.T. shows up, the contrast speaks volumes. Those guys are both very good at what they do, but they sound almost old-fashioned in this context, nicely breaking up the half-committed shit-talk. Wiz never sounds like he has a lot at stake; he talks like life is a long, unchanging progression of joints and hotel rooms and girls, which, for him, maybe it is. Among his most characteristic lines is this: "While you at home on Twitter, trying to hack her page and shit/ We smoking and cracking jokes on how lame you is." That kind of indolent wit can lead to some truly dubious ideas, like when Wiz sang Beyoncé's "If I Were a Boy" as "If I Were a Lame" on 2009's Burn After Rolling mixtape, or when he tries his hand at reggae on "Still Blazin" here. But for the most part, Kush and Orange Juice is a surprisingly relaxed and easy listen, a great soundtrack for a barbecue or a spring-weather drive. And that's all it wants to be, so mission accomplished.


This brief, quickly assembled EP follows in the darkly psychedelic vein of the Flaming Lips last album, 2009's Embryonic.

The Flaming Lips / Neon Indian: The Flaming Lips With Neon Indian

The Flaming Lips With Neon Indian

Outside of geographic proximity (Norman, Okla., and Denton, Texas, are only 150 miles apart), psychedelia is the only obvious link between the Flaming Lips and Alan Palomo's project Neon Indian. The Lips often veer to the darker side of psych, especially recently (see their 2009 dread-filled opus Embryonic), while Palomo deals in a day-glo take on 1980's pop. So when Wayne Coyne revealed that they were banging out a fast collaboration-- as he put it, "that shit should be ready to go pretty quickly"-- the first question that came to mind was whether the result would lean more toward sun or shadows.
That's settled immediately by the opener on this four-track, 22-minute EP, the ominously titled "Is David Bowie Dying?" It's not completely clear what the lyrics have to do with Bowie's potential demise, but the music feels like an elegy, a kind of spaced-out funeral march. With its slow, crunchy beat, cutting sonic debris, and Coyne's weary intonations, it would fit well among Embryonic's doomy mantras. "Take your legs and run/ To the death rays of the sun," he sings with resignation, followed by a stoic chant of "goodbye, goodbye." It's pretty morose, but hypnotic and fully-realized-- impressively so considering how quickly it was made.
The rest of the record shares those dark qualities-- much of it is stark, cavernous, and full of murky low end. But the other three tracks are less polished, more loose and experimental. Which is not to suggest they're somehow unfinished. Their sounds are more suited to an amorphous form, making it tough to tell exactly what Palomo contributed. Even on "Alan's Theremin"-- an eight-minute soundscape that ranks with the weirdest stuff by either act-- there's no telling what came from that instrument (or even if he actually used one). But Palomo's anonymity reflects an internal coherence. This isn't a case of musicians who just met randomly throwing sounds at each other. As unpredictable as the music can be, very little comes off as gratuitous or out of place.
Still, if you're looking for something as song-like as "Is David Bowie Dying?", stick around for the closer. As with the first cut, its title-- "Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth Part 2"-- makes a specific reference, in this case to a Minutemen song. But again, how the music relates to that title isn't overt. The track sounds more like a krautrock jam, with a muffled bass groove that could've been ripped from a Can outtake. In keeping with the record's vibe, it blows apart near the end, with individual sounds dying off into the ether. It's a dark way to end, but it suggests open space rather than closed perfection. Turns out this collaboration is as much about implication as explication-- as much about what these artists could do as what they actually did.


The New York agit-punks’ latest EP is another menacing, distorted call to arms.

HARAM: وين كنيت بي ١١/٩؟? “Where Were You on 9/11?” EP

“Where were you on 9/11?” is a loaded question. For some, those moments were imbued with grief and personal horror; for others, the horrors came after the clouds of ash had settled, and a new, violent era of American political consciousness dawned. That famous, widespread sense of kindness and solidarity that was said to have briefly reigned in New York City following 9/11 did not extend to everyone; those who came of age post-9/11, in the shadow of the hawkish Patriot Act, remember something different.
Following the attack, hate crimes against Muslims, Sikhs, and people of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent rose sharply, and that toxic Islamophobia has formed the bedrock of both U.S. foreign policy and its xenophobic, right-wing political rhetoric ever since. This is the reality that spawned New York agit-punks Haram, and that they seek to confront via their short, sharp tracks of hardcore aggression and lyrics sung in Arabic. Vocalist Nader Haram, who was born in Yonkers to Lebanese parents, tackled that question head-on with their 2017 debut بس ربحت, خسرت “When You Have Won, You Have Lost” and remain vigilant on the band’s latest EP, “وين كنيت بي ١١/٩؟? “Where Were You on 9/11?” a menacing, distorted call to arms.
On the title track (for which the band provided an English translation), menacing guitars shove over for Nader’s snarling, wounded recollections—“The pilots did their flying/Where did you think I was, on 9/11?” Like so many others of his generation, he was sitting in class when his teacher broke the news. The only Muslim kid in his 5th-grade class at Catholic school, Nader was pulled out of class and questioned by the principal, an experience that left an indelible mark on his understanding of racism and surveillance (which was only compounded when he briefly became a target for the FBI). “In Jesus’ school/Came my teacher/She told me I was there,” he howls through the trauma, biting off each syllable with bared teeth.
”قنبلة بي السماء  (Bomb in the Sky)” offers a sickening snapshot of life under the forever war, its rage and frantic energy packed into under two minutes of gritty punk rock’n’roll. “جهاد, جهادي (Jihad, Jihadi)” is intoxicating, its blunt lyrics—“Kill, Kill, Kill/You destroyed us with your union”—and sturdy groove two-stepping towards the revolution. On the taut, anthemic “(الحل (المقاومة The Solution (Is Resistance),” Nader turns his focus towards the future, bellowing, “When you wake me up/It’s all or nothing/Everything for the resistance!”
That resistance is intrinsic to Haram’s every note and breath as a punk band; there is nothing radical about falling in line with the status quo, and as Nader told Discipline Press back in 2017, “Any minority being threatened in a community…if you’re a true punk and someone that actually believes in it, you have to stand up and defend that shit.” In just under eight minutes, Haram do more for the cause of righteously political punk than performative pretenders have in three decades, and with “Where Were You on 9/11?” they’ve sounded the alarm for all of us to keep waking the fuck up.


The Baltimore rapper continues to earn his “Captain Hook” nickname on an album full of Murda Beatz’s sometimes too-spare production.

Shordie Shordie / Murda Beatz: Memory Lane

Memory Lane

Every city with a buzzing rap scene can relate to Baltimore: Throughout the 2010s, as the city’s rap scene caught fire, tragedy after tragedy prevented artists from taking off the same way that their punch-in, flow-obsessed neighbors in the DMV did. The 23-year-old rising star Lor Scoota died in 2016 and local phenom Young Moose became the target of a Baltimore Police Department raid that resulted in him being imprisoned for eight months.
Despite all this, Baltimore’s rap scene is thriving today. The loudest (and most nasally) voice in the city belongs to Shordie Shordie, who rose to prominence as the designated hook-man of Peso Da Mafia before leaving the group to try his hand at a solo career. Shordie’s melody-first approach to songwriting made him stand out in his former group. Reading the lyrics to his 2018 breakout single, “Bitchuary,” you’d think the song sounded closer to a questionable argument you hear through thin walls than a tense, flirty back-and-forth, but that’s Shordie’s appeal: Any vulnerability he’s willing to show is always going to be cloaked with a hook you want to sing in the shower.
Memory Lane, Shordie’s follow-up to 2020’s >Music, is set on convincing you that he and “Nice for What” producer Murda Beatz have unrivaled chemistry—and for the most part, their ideas are in lockstep. The lone-producer project is new territory for Shordie, but he seems comfortable with Murda Beatz taking control. Early standout “Same Niggas” is the bread-and-butter that makes up the bulk of his discography. The subtext of every “Fuck you” he snarls is “And it don’t have to be this way.” This is just the first of several songs he spends licking his wounds—he’s a scorned lover, and he doesn’t care who knows it. “Keep your cheating to yourself and your phone, I don’t wanna cry,” he sings a song later on “Stuck in Between.”
Shordie continues to push himself as a writer, slowly becoming worthy of the “Captain Hook” nickname he adopted while with his former group. Even so, Memory Lane is a bit of a mixed bag; for every fleshed-out story of love and loss, there’s a song that’s all hook with a blasé verse added as an afterthought, like the Frank Ocean-flipping “Moral to the Story.” Shordie makes up for that miss with “LOVE,” where his cries for “L-O-V-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E” and make-up sex are a welcome, yet unexpected callback to “Loveeeeeee Song.”
Murda’s skeletal production is effective at establishing simple feelings like sadness and lust. Superstars like Drake and Cardi B flood the space on Murda’s beats with their charisma. Shordie, on the other hand, needs beats that aid his storytelling. Too often on Memory Lane is he left to do the emotional heavy lifting with his singing. These synergistic problems are only magnified by the one rapper/one producer format; a producer with a tag as recognizable as Murda’s should be bringing Shordie closer to being a household name. Instead, Murda’s contributions feel closer to the guy who you have to force to turn in his part of a group project. The album’s closer, “Ride with Shordie,” with a beat made up of just string plucks and handclaps, whisks you away to a beachside bonfire, and leaves you wondering if there were other songs with more imaginative production culled from the final tracklist. Shordie’s no stranger to stretching his voice to add an extra layer of emotion to the track, but Murda’s beats sound like they’re waiting for a second act that never begins.
In 2019, Shordie told The Fader that it could sound like he was just doing “the easy part” with Peso Da Mafia, since he was focused on hooks. Going solo has let him flourish creatively; his hooks have only become a deadlier tool in his arsenal. At their simplest, Shordie’s love stories are lucid daydreams of what a situationship could’ve been, but when he puts it all together on Memory Lane, they’re storyboarded short films detailing the ups and downs of young love.

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Much like the cinematic remake, which functions as nothing but an advertisement for the entire Warner Media library, the Space Jam soundtrack is soulless and gratuitous.

Various Artists: Space Jam: A New Legacy

Space Jam: A New Legacy

We are in the midst of IP hell, and every day there are fewer escape routes. Anything in pop culture that has ever made a profit will inevitably be revived or reimagined or rebooted or remixed or whatever other word will convince you that the old nostalgic thing you love is now the new nostalgic thing you love. Up next is 1996’s Space Jam, originally born out of a pair of commercials starring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny that were designed to sell shoes and market-test whether the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes property could be made relevant to a new generation. It was a success, so they were like, “I guess this should be a movie now.” It’s a franchise born out of real integrity, which is why it makes perfect sense to return in a 2021 landscape where the sole purpose of everything is to become a bullet point on some CEO’s letter to shareholders.
Even though Space Jam is an obvious hour-and-a-half commercial, if you’re of a certain age, like I am, the franchise reserves a warm place in your heart. I mean, c’mon, it had Michael Jordan and tons of other cool NBA players and Bugs Bunny and the whole gang. I wanted to wear their Tune Squad jerseys and to visit Moron Mountain, and the way the movie alternated between reality and the cartoon world blew my mind on endless Cartoon Network rewatches. But it was the soundtrack, too. What would it be without R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly,” Seal’s “Fly Like an Eagle,” or Quad City DJ’s “Space Jam”? So many of the memories I, and many others, have for the movie are tied to those songs.
But, please, I beg you, put down the nostalgia goggles for a second. Space Jam’s sequel, Space Jam: A New Legacy, is full-on #brandedcontent. This time, it stars LeBron James instead of Michael Jordan. And if you watch the movie trailer, you’ll notice that it doesn’t just feature Looney Tunes, but also characters from It, Mad Max, and A Clockwork Orange—you know, all the things kids love these days! It’s not an advertisement for shoes and cartoon rabbits, but the entire Warner Media library. And, of course, the soundtrack is no different.
Yes, all of your favorite brand ambassadors—oh, sorry, I mean artists—make appearances on the soundtrack. John Legend, who hasn’t turned down a sponsorship since the W. Bush era, shows up for two tracks. One is called “Crowd Go Crazy,” and it has this annoyingly bright instrumental that might remind you of the ending credits theme for a second-tier Disney Channel musical. I’m 95 percent sure if you play the track backward, it contains some sort of subliminal “Don’t cancel your HBO Max subscription” message. Legend’s other track, “See Me Fly,” captures Chance the Rapper as he shoves a bunch of half-assed basketball references into his verse. It’s unclear if he’s ever watched a game or if he prepared by repeating terms he heard in a Stephen A. Smith clip. There are some bizarre lines, too: “You better look at every shot like it’s your shot at freedom,” he raps. Thanks for the motivation, I guess, Mr. Rapper.
But it has to get better, right? Well, is your idea of better “Control the World,” where 24kGoldn miserably whimpers about heartache on the most milquetoast guitar loop? Or maybe it’s Cordae’s lyrics on “Settle the Score,” which makes Porky Pig’s rap sound like that Big L and JAY-Z radio freestyle. Or what about Big Freedia’s “Goin’ Looney”? Do you mean to tell me that “I’ma duffy-daffy duck, quack, quack if you buck” over a heartless bounce beat complete with handclaps and bed creaks doesn’t get you absolutely psyched?! The fun keeps going. Joyner Lucas, Lil Tecca, Saweetie, and more all appear to collect their checks. Normally I would say they deserve a temporary ban from Spotify’s RapCaviar playlist as retribution for putting something so terrible into the world, but being included on this soundtrack is embarrassing enough. The only people who get off unscathed are Lil Baby, Kirk Franklin, and Just Blaze, because “We Win” is so bizarre that it’s the only song on this entire album worth a shit.
I get it. You’re probably wondering what the point is of railing so hard on a soundtrack and franchise that is ostensibly made for kids. But right now, in pop culture, almost anything that is mega-popular hides behind the excuse that it is “for kids” or “just entertainment” as a way to duck criticism. If it sucks, it sucks, no matter how fun it was intended to be. But whatever, I’ll probably still pay for a ticket to see the dumb movie, and whoever owns AT&T stock will get the last laugh. My soul has already been ripped out, put through a shredder, and thrown into an incinerator. It wouldn’t be right if Space Jam: A New Legacy and its soundtrack didn’t bunny hop on the ashes.

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There's an added element of showmanship to the Oxford band's third album that establishes it as a point of no return. It's easy to hear Holy Fire as a more muscular complement to Wild Beasts, though its overt commercial appeal aligns Foals with the Cure in stadium mode.

Holy Fire

For nearly two minutes, "Inhaler" does not sound like the triumphant return of one of Britain's most successful modern bands. In fact, it sounds claustrophobic-- hookless, even. During what feels like the chorus, Yannis Philippakis can't quite get hold of a melody that sounds like it might never resolve. All the while, he's being cramped by increasing amounts of reverb. But then, at about the 1:45 mark, he yells, "and I can't get enough... SPACE!" and then Foals break the song wide open with a riff that's startlingly low-slung and grunge-y for technically proficient guys who otherwise proudly wield their guitars pecs-high. You can easily hear a throng of festival-goers absolutely losing its shit during this extremely self-reflexive moment, and there's more like it on Holy Fire, which is a good thing. On 2010's Total Life Forever, a band once known for spindly, inscrutable songs like "Mathletics" made a shift to expansive and emotive rock in a way that was both surprising and completely logical. With Holy Fire, there's an added element of showmanship that establishes it as a point of no return.
"Inhaler" makes even more sense in the context of Holy Fire's sequencing, as it's preceded by "Prelude" (natch), a four-minute instrumental of build-and-burst dynamics that splits the difference between the Alan Parsons Project's "Sirius" and Interpol's "Untitled" in terms of fostering arena preparedness. There are key moments when everything drops out except for Philippakis' and Jimmy Smith's pinging guitars, and you imagine the floodlights cast on the audience right before the beat drops again. It's hard to hear "Prelude" as being meant for any other purpose.
Not everything about Holy Fire is this obvious, though there is a crowd-pleasing streak where Foals embrace how they can make their most populist, personal, and direct music all at the same time. While leagues more melodic and softly produced than anything on their debut, Antidotes, Total Life Forever singles such as "Blue Blood" and "Miami" still dealt in post-punk terminology, high-fretboard riffs, fractured drumming, verses and choruses fitting at odd angles. "Everytime" and "Bad Habit" (whose verse melody is perilously close to that of TLF's "This Orient") are considerably more tapered and pop-savvy, making the hooks feel like bigger payoffs by gracefully ascending towards them. A similar refinement happens on the maddeningly catchy "My Number", which reshapes the cyclical chants of "Total Life Forever" into a song that's 85% hook; deceptively chipper funk-rock surrounding a bitter declaration of romantic independence where the latter sought eternal companionship. At least in contemporary terms, it's easy to hear them as the muscular, brooding complement to Wild Beasts' limber, libidinous take on wounded British masculinity, although their more overt commercial appeal puts them in the lineage of the Cure in stadium mode, circa Wish.
That's also cause for relief; based on the success of "Spanish Sahara", you'd be forgiven for thinking Holy Fire's title and imperious cover art indicated that they were continuing down that spacious, grandiose path while using U2 as their proverbial North Star. The weakest patches of Holy Fire come when Foals try to repeat "Spanish Sahara". Though Flood and Alan Moulder's production is worth every penny and does everything in its power to make Holy Fire spacious and sparkling, "atmospheric" Foals tends to obscure melody every bit as much as Antidotes' acrobatics. Likewise, while Philipakkis' voice is becoming more versatile and expressive, his lyrics depersonalize what appear to be very personal songs with stock metaphors: "I'm the last cowboy in this town," "Every time I see you, I wanna sail away," "It's times like these when I'm on my way out of the woods," "I know I cannot be true/ I'm an animal just like you."
Though a dead heat in terms of overall quality, and similarly prone to cooling off considerably in its second half, Holy Fire is better proportioned than the top-heavy Total Life Forever. Prior to the nearly beatless and occasionally stirring final 10 minutes, "Milk and Black Spiders" slowly builds from a bed of pinprick harmonics to a stirring chorus in Holy Fire's most effective use of the slow build, and "Providence" at the very least gives its lyrics some feral embodiment with an ear-grabbing octave-shifted riff.
Holy Fire is undoubtedly a very good, ambitious record, one that operates on an artistic economy of scale, where the lustrous production and singles like "My Number" and "Inhaler" do the heavy work of confirming Foals' headliner status. The rest has the easy task of proving the Oxford band to be more emotionally substantial and idiosyncratic than any of their mainstream peers. Like Total Life Forever, Holy Fire threatens greatness, and whatever disappointment comes from missing the mark is mitigated by its scope: A bomb needs to be operational more than it needs to be accurate.


The debut from the it-boy bedroom pop auteur manages to feel both excitingly personal and a bit disingenuous.

Gus Dapperton: Where Polly People Go to Read

Where Polly People Go to Read

Gus Dapperton makes sweet and frustrated sex songs for a generation that is increasingly not having sex. And how appropriate for these songs to be written, produced, recorded, mixed, and mastered all by the same 22-year-old. The lonely have to do everything themselves.
Where Polly People Go To Read is the young autodidact’s full-length debut, released on the streaming-focused label AWAL, which was expanded last year with a $150 million investment by the publishing company Kobalt. And Gus Dapperton is a good bet, averaging over a million monthly listeners on Spotify for just two self-released EPs. Born Brendan Rice and raised in New York, his sound is a hodgepodge of gauzy pop-rock, evoking Tame Impala, Mac DeMarco, and the 1975, rendered much more bedroom-y by an omnipresent Roland TR-626 drum machine that he bought off eBay. The sense throughout is feelings through a filter, a nostalgia for someone else’s nostalgia.
The songs—not to mention Gus’ foppish stage name or his aggressively idiosyncratic fashion sense, with colorful eyeshadow and very baggy fits, even when he’s just wearing boxers—manage to feel both excitingly personal and a bit disingenuous. The confusion is greatest when he’s being opaque, like on the opening to “Eyes for Ellis”: “Finn loves Ellis/But a skin-tight hope/A thin sequella come amicable/A pinch won’t dwell about the brittle-boned.” If that’s hard to follow, at least he seems aware: “I’m a lot of words for a wannabe,” he sings on the next track. Or consider the album title, which would seem a bold, straightforward claim to polysexuality if Gus hadn’t told an interviewer, “Polly people, poly as in ‘many,’ is this term I invented.”
But you can deal in some light misdirection when you’re so magnetic. His self-directed, million-view music videos usually involve Napoleon Dynamite-like expressive dancing, except everyone is hotter. In casting extras, he often does that only-unique-faces-and-bodies thing that the 1975 did in the “TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME” video and Lil Yachty on the cover to Teenage Emotions. It’s welcoming, and that was certainly the case with the video for “My Favorite Fish,” where some dancing takes place on the roof of a moving boat. The song features an adorable couplet, “I don’t usually fall in love/I’m not used to fa-la-la-la”—the album has a few gems like that, like “I’m not your hero, but I’m here” on “Sockboy”—and it has a catchy, benign funk that wafts in as John Mayer likely wishes he sounded like now.
Much of Gus’ first two EPs had that cushioned vibe to a fault, often so relentlessly soft as to be cloying. Yet at a few key moments on Polly People, he moves beyond a caricature of a bedroom pop star to sound like a fully dimensioned artist. It happens whenever he adopts a semi-guttural, pained growl: the sound is there when he says “I feel like I’m famous” on “World Class Cinema,” or when singing about a love interest’s love interest on “Fill Me Up Anthem.” It sounds like it really hurts, the emotion even more jarring and precise when contrasted with the aimless horniness elsewhere.
Gus didn’t invent this delivery—it’s a defining move of his fellow viral Gen Z auteur Corbin, of whom Gus is a confirmed fan—but it nevertheless transforms his musical persona. In his weakest moments, he might sound like he’s grinding it out alone with this old gear because he is a safe guy and a Casio keyboard is a neutered instrument. But with just the little growl, the cuteness shows a crack, and it’s clear he’s using easy tools and the accessibility of pop to process difficult emotions. Sure, sometimes Polly People sounds like Urban Outfitters smells, but thanks to these moments of humanity, you might find yourself willing to forgive him.


These two albums from the 1980s, now reissued with bonus tracks, aren't anywhere near Paul McCartney's best, but both have their moments and they shed light on his long-time love of R&B.

Paul McCartney: Tug of War / Pipes of Peace

Tug of War / Pipes of Peace

Paul McCartney's team-up with Rihanna and Kanye West on "FourFiveSeconds" earlier this year was met with surprise and bewilderment by some, but if you go back far enough you'd see it's just par for the course in the mind of Macca. Ever since the Beatles covered the Cookies back in '63, McCartney has been testifying to his love of R&B. "Smokey Robinson was like God in our eyes," he once said. There was a reason Billy Preston's Rhodes solo fit so perfectly in "Get Back", after all. Paul McCartney was an R&B lover before he was ever a Beatle.
In McCartney's solo material, however, you have to fast forward to 1982's Tug of War and 1983's Pipes of Peace to hear how that R&B influence evolved in his distinctive sound. It is within these two misunderstood albums in the Macca canon that the square root of "FourFiveSeconds" can be discovered, particularly upon the release of this latest pair of deluxe editions as part of the ongoing Paul McCartney Archive Collection series.
In one sense, Tug of War plays out like the album we might've gotten had Lennon and McCartney taken up Lorne Michaels' famous $3,000 offer to reunite on "Saturday Night" in 1976. George Martin sits at the controls on a Fab Four-related project for the first time since Wings' "Live and Let Die" (unless you count the 1978 soundtrack to the unmentionably awful "jukebox musical" Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band). The specter of Lennon's tragic death and the unresolved differences between the two lifelong friends loom large across much of this material, especially the jubilant "Ballroom Dancing", the symphonic title track and "Here Today". The latter is the album's most direct reflection on Lennon's death, and it's a song McCartney has been regularly incorporating in his concerts the last couple of tours. Whatever Paul might not have said in the press at the time of Lennon's assassination, he certainly said here.
The nucleus of Tug, however, is McCartney's yin-yang pair of collaborations with Stevie Wonder. Of course we all know "Ebony and Ivory", pure ground-zero Macca schmaltz tethered by a goofy yet endearing analogy to the synchronicity between the piano's keys. Strangely enough, the song's message has grown more urgent over the years, while the utterly Triple A orchestrations of the music itself grows as dated as that Joe Piscopo/Eddie Murphy send-up on "Saturday Night Live". The key moment comes earlier on the album with "What's That You're Doing?", a tour de force of Hotter Than July-era Wonder funk that can be seen as the ColecoVision to the PS4 of "FourFiveSeconds".
Some critics derided McCartney for aging gracelessly upon the release of the electro-tinged Pipes of Peace in '83, right as he turned 41. However, a good listen to the album today reveals some ways it was ahead of its time. With the ballad "So Bad", McCartney confirmed his aforementioned Smokey worship by paying homage to Robinson's "Quiet Storm" era, emulating the Motown great's cool falsetto to such perfection that Smokey himself had a little bit of a rough time emulating it on his own cover from The Art of McCartney. Then there is "Tug of Peace", an early, primitive version of a mash-up that brought together the title cuts of these underappreciated albums. The blend is clunky, but it foreshadows his electronic music work as the Fireman and on Liverpool Sound Collage.
Then there's "Say Say Say", written in collaboration with Michael Jackson. The song was a simpatico matching of minds, combining Paul's harmonies and Jackson's meticulous sense of rhythm. Mark "Spike" Stent's magnificent 2015 remix of "Say" on the bonus disc of the Pipes reissue stretches the groove to nearly eight minutes, buoyed by a rocksteady 4/4 handclap beat that conjures up visions of the New York City Breakers dancing in your head. On "The Man",  the Macca/Jacko duo sways a little closer into Paul territory with its strummy acoustic charm and Wings-esque bombast, showing that beyond "Say Say Say" and "The Girl Is Mine", they were a potent creative team before it all imploded in a dust of Beatles royalties and Nike ad money.
The extras dug up for the Tug of War reissue (the Super Deluxe Edition of each also contain DVDs of era-appropriate ephemera) make for some interesting listening—demo versions of "Wanderlust" and "The Pound Is Sinking", and a version of "Ebony" with just McCartney on electric piano. But those pale in comparison to the veritable alternate LP included in Pipes of Peace. The previously unreleased "It's Not On" sounds like Ween, while the tremolo guitar that floats across another rare cut, "Simple As That", could be the secret template for The Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?". Elsewhere, proper album tracks like "Average Person", "Keep Under Cover" and "Sweetest Little Show" in demo form sound like they could have been leftovers from Ram. In all, this reissue series continues to shine a new light on McCartney's varied solo output, finding new stories they tell.


The iconic UK rave duo belatedly celebrates its 30th anniversary with a mixture of new songs, re-recordings of classic tracks, and remixes from the artists they’ve inspired.

30 Something

A 30th anniversary is special for any band that makes it that far. For an electronic act forged in the spontaneous white heat of rave, it’s close to a miracle. Yet 30 Something, which belatedly marks UK rave veterans Orbital’s three decades in the trenches, offers a comprehensive argument as to why Paul and Phil Hartnoll have endured where the likes of N-Joi and SL2 have not. With a mixture of re-recorded hits, new songs, and remixes, the collection looks back on the fraternal duo’s origins while celebrating their late-blossoming influence.
This might be the key difference between 30 Something and Orbital 20, the singles collection that marked the group’s 20th anniversary. The two new remixes on that record, from Global Communication’s Tom Middleton and fidget houser Hervé, felt tacked on, only tangentially connected to the Orbital world. Thirteen years later, the duo’s rave-influenced, genre-hopping sound has rarely sounded more relevant, having found its reflection in producers like Lone, Logic1000, Jon Hopkins, and Shanti Celeste, all of whom feature here.
30 Something’s 15 remixes include a few incandescent highlights. Hopkins’ take on “Halcyon & On” adds a cute shuffle that wraps the song’s sunrise melancholy in a warm, fluffy blanket, while John Tejada cleverly cuts up the much-loved synths of “Impact.” Beyond the warm, self-referential glow of clever curation, though, most of the remixes feel like pale imitations. Orbital’s back catalog may be inconsistent but at their best—basically the first two albums—the band walked a spellbinding line between techno’s hypnotic sprawl, rave’s discordant riffs, and ambient house’s refined melodic beauty, with a little live rock noodling for good measure. It’s a difficult path to follow, and many of the remixes end up falling flat on their two-dimensional behinds. ANNA’s beefed-up take on “Belfast” feels too functional compared to the original’s heart-string-tugging choral charm, while Joris Voorn flattens out the cinematic quirks and kinks of “The Box” to leave us with a platitudinous tech-house number.
These remixes may dominate the 24-track collection, but the group’s original work wins out in spirit. Orbital have contributed two new songs, as well as a new mix of “Where Is It Going?,” their collaboration with Stephen Hawking for the 2012 London Paralympics Opening Ceremony. Infected with the bittersweet bite of nostalgia, “Smiley” and “Where Is It Going?” feel particularly poignant, both musically and thematically. The former lays clips of ravers talking about a police raid in August 1988—including a 20-year-old Paul Hartnoll describing how he was allegedly beaten by uniformed officers—over a clattering breakbeat, serpentine synth riffs, and moody chords. And the latter song’s celebration of the Large Hadron Collider feels particularly stirring in a world where the rigors of science have taken a beating from populist politicians.
The album’s peak is a set of new mixes of six of the band’s classic songs: “Impact,” “Satan,” “Chime,” “Halcyon,” “Belfast,” and “The Box.” (Well, five and a half: “The Box” never quite did it for me.) The 30 Something reworks are based on live versions that Orbital have been road-testing since they first stumbled onto the stage, which makes them something close to the definitive takes: towering, adrenaline-fueled, ever-expanding arrangements that wring every ounce of emotion, propulsion, and excitement from the songs’ once humble hearts.
This is the Orbital that millions of festival goers have bugged out to ever since 1990, when they made their first live appearance supporting the Shamen; this is the Orbital that a vast television audience experienced when UK national broadcaster Channel 4 aired the duo’s epochal 1994 Glastonbury gig. More importantly, this is Orbital at their scorching, sweeping, and melodic best. Orbital are a band that—on “Chime,” say—can work the atonal scramble of rave and into a neo-Gothic cathedral of electronic sound, all flamboyant melodic peaks and picturesque descents; a band who—on “Halcyon” or “Belfast”—can move you to tears with an elegiac sample even as the rhythm keeps your feet pumping. Would actual live versions of these songs have been better? Perhaps. But these live-inspired versions feel more universal, celebrating Orbital’s work as whole, rather than highlighting one specific gig.
Right from the start, Orbital were different: a duo of Crass- and Butthole Surfers-sampling, Doctor Who-loving punks-turned-ravers who valued live performance over DJ sets, progression over repetition, and impact over genre. At its best, 30 Something shows why this singular spirit has helped Orbital to become a group for the ages, an electronic act with soul and craft who never forgot the heart-rending and occasionally dumb rush of rave. Orbital’s second victory lap is inconsistent, but it is undoubtedly well earned.


Extreme-metal titans and prolific collaborators the Body team with New York-based industrial duo Uniform on a brutally satisfying—and surprisingly melodic—joint album.

Uniform / The Body: Mental Wounds Not Healing

Mental Wounds Not Healing

On Mental Wounds Not Healing, two compatible bands bring out the best in each other. The joint LP from Portland extreme-metal titans the Body and New York-based industrial duo Uniform finds both outfits pushing the most intense elements of their respective sounds into the red while scaling new melodic and compositional heights. Recorded around the same time the Body were finishing last month’s I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer, these seven songs are so brutally satisfying, they might leave some listeners wishing the collaboration were permanent—an impressive feat when you consider the strength of each act’s individual catalog.
Composed of ex-Drunkdriver vocalist Michael Berdan and guitarist/programmer Ben Greenberg, formerly of the Men, Uniform have spent the last few years cutting a serious figure in the harshest corners of Brooklyn’s music scene. In 2017, they released the excellent Wake in Fright, and two tracks from that album ended up on “Twin Peaks: the Return.” Since their 2010 breakthrough, All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, the Body’s Chip King and Lee Buford have remained both consistently thrilling and impossibly prolific. They’ve also put out numerous collaborative works during that time, with acts such as New Jersey black metal fiends Krieg, Louisiana sludge merchants Thou, and the intense grindcore enthusiasts in Full of Hell.
It’s been well established that the Body play well with others, but Mental Wounds Not Healing—which takes its title from a lyric in Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train”—is nothing short of artistic kismet. Versatility has always been key to King and Buford’s approach. Aside from King’s awesome howl, the Body have never really stuck to one sound: Waters of the Earth featured deceptively angelic vocalizing from the Assembly of Light choir, and although a familiar intensity binds their subsequent albums together, they’ve also proven themselves to be anything but purists by taking cues from modern pop and deconstructing their own catalog. On Mental Wounds, the boundary between their malleable style and the signature sounds Uniform bring to the table—blasted electronic beats and Berdan’s cruel sneer—is perfectly blurred, as the two acts lean into every complementary facet of their aesthetics.
Fans of both bands might be surprised at how melodic Mental Wounds can be. “In My Skin” begins as a torrid dirge before opening up to reveal fuzzy synths and lovely strumming; King’s endless scream is the cherry on top of its sludgy sundae. Closing track “Empty Comforts” carries all the anthemic sweep of a classic cut from Nine Inch Nails (who the Body have covered), its back end charging forward with a soaring guitar line of modern-rock radio proportions. Wrapped in layers of harsh static and noise, these relatively conventional elements never sound an inch out of place.
A worthy addition to both the Body’s and Uniform’s catalogs, Mental Wounds is also a useful introduction for listeners who are new to either group. With only a few years and two full-lengths under their belt, Uniform are still a band on the rise, and this inspired joint effort will undoubtedly raise their profile in extreme-music circles. For the Body, an acclaimed duo with an imposing corpus of work, the album provides an ideal entryway into their harrowing, protean, and consistently ingenious approach to metal. Mental Wounds Not Healing is a brutal, beautiful experiment—and a seamless collaboration that sounds more like the birth of a great new band.


On his fourth album as King Krule, Archy Marshall reckons with love and newfound fatherhood, but he still sounds beset by existential doubt.

Space Heavy

A King Krule song tends to sound woozy, even slick, until you get close enough to smell the rot. Blue notes curdle in grimy pools of reverb. Hooks wilt in the muck. Then he sets loose that monstrous voice and it hulks through the swamp, holding each delicate line aloft like a swaddled newborn. It is the voice that protects the poetry, neither viable without the other. Each signals vulnerability and strength; each signals the pursuit of absolute authenticity. Since 2017’s The OOZ, Archy Marshall has cooled the fire in his lungs. But even his prettiest songs seem negotiated out of that old pact with rage.
Marshall is now 28, father to a four-year-old girl, and he wrote much of his fourth King Krule album in C major. But aside from naptime ballad “Seaforth,” Space Heavy subverts the key’s easy charms. His chords are arpeggiated as if by torture, drawn and quartered across wide, yawning bars. Any melodious pleasantries occur in spite of Marshall and Dilip Harris’ production—the clogged frequencies and sonic glop that make Krule’s dwellings so oppressively dank. The contradictory feeling of claustrophobia in vast spaces evokes the sound worlds of Arthur Russell and, lately, Mica Levi and Tirzah—expressionistically abstracted, gorgeously inhospitable. Even Space Heavy’s alt-rock songs sound twinned in spirit with Levi’s recent LPs, stirring the sonics of grime and dub into some listless form of ambient grunge.
Marshall seems pretty sad, as usual, and that seems to make him angry, as usual. But not angry like he was—perennially thwarted by the social system or romantically pummeled by whatever woman. “Flimsier” spins a gorgeous, creaking lament for a disintegrating relationship; “Hamburgerphobia” comically frames a lover’s jibes as “harsh” but “valid.” “From the Swamp,” a sunnier postcard from domesticity, describes a nagging temptation, a nostalgic throb, that he finally resists. “If it’s from the swamp,” he murmurs, flirting with the anthemic, “Then back it goes.”
As his melancholia comes up against the demands and rewards of fatherhood, Marshall experiences love in “a fugue state,” feeling himself “separate into the minutest minuscule gaps of time and space,” as he grumbles on “Hamburgerphobia.” His existential displacement manifests in a preoccupation with space: He sings of vacuums, pauses, in-betweens; empty heads, chests, and stomachs; the incomprehensible gap between one consciousness and another; the way parental love can close it.
The fixation on transitory states reflects Marshall’s long-held antipathy for rock and pop form, his shift from the primacy of hooks to vaporous transitions and antic ad-libs. On Space Heavy, his most straightforward, live-sounding production since 6 Feet Beneath the Moon yields mixed results. The barren feel suits uproarious highlight “Pink Shell,” with its James Chance-via-Big Black jitters, and Ignacio Salvadores’ sax contortions on the otherwise dreary “That Is My Life, That Is Yours.” By contrast, “If Only It Was Warmth,” a fierce plaint in live recordings, sounds pallid and defanged, though the similarly economical “Wednesday Overcast” gleams, closing the album with conspicuous neatness: “My head was empty/My life was discreet/A lot has changed/Now a lot means to me.”
What is haunting, and Krule-ian, about those lines’ delivery is their palpable anhedonia—he sounds, for all his resolute purpose, as fatalistic as ever. His supposedly fulfilled narrators are granted a fate little better than nihilism. Their burly melancholy emanates from a dysfunctional masculinity that muddles ego and love and self-loathing, that stokes paranoia and distorts beauty, but that can express vulnerability because it needs, above all, to not be fake. One interpretation of Space Heavy’s limited scope is that Marshall, knowing all this, has grown wary of masterpiece thinking and the macho ideal of tortured genius. His songs have always felt close to home, charcoal-smeared with London dusk and the nocturnal cadence of London jazz. On Space Heavy, for the first time, the great London singer-songwriter’s ambitions feel accordingly local, too.


With trickles of piano, synth, and viola, the Los Angeles-based collaborators shape a tranquil vision of a Nordic landscape that feels just beyond the edge of reality.

Jeremiah Chiu / Marta Sofia Honer: Recordings From the Åland Islands

Recordings From the Åland Islands

Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer originally traveled to the Åland Islands, an archipelago in the Baltic Sea that looks like paint splatter on a map, to help two friends set up a small hotel. Once there, they were so entranced by the islands’ dreamlike atmosphere that they decided to settle in and capture their impressions. The music Chiu and Honer made on Recordings From the Åland Islands recalls Terrence Malick shots—endless golden-hour sunsets, slow-motion leaves rippling in the breeze, the whole bit. I have never been to the Åland Islands, but the place that Chiu and Honer depict on record is impossibly beautiful, the kind of fragile paradise that might be better left unspoiled by human observation.
Chiu and Honer met in the Chicago improvisational scene, and they’ve been playing together for so long that their disparate instruments—Chiu works mostly with modular synthesizers, while Honer plays viola—blur together. Honer’s long bow strokes and wide vibrato smooth her viola down to the same sleepy frequency as Chiu’s synthesizers, and field recordings (chirping birds, snatches of human voice, a few muffled clanks) add to the sense of unreality. Every sound feels either softened or melted; even the hand percussion has liquid edges.
Chiu is also a visual artist, and these pieces explore texture more than movement. Chiu thickens the mix with reverberant keys, then Honer thins it with her viola, like water drizzling onto canvas. You’re never quite sure if what you’re hearing is played “live” or manipulated, and sounds keep darting over the porous border. I can’t say for sure what is happening on “Stureby House Piano,” but whatever it is, it transforms an audibly creaking out-of-tune grand piano into a skyward flock of piano-key-colored birds.
Recordings From the Åland Islands is so tranquil and beautiful that you might easily imagine it playing in the background of a prerecorded relaxation meditation. But a surprising amount happens in these pieces, and once you pay attention, you start chasing sounds: a distant clang on “By Foot, by Sea,” like a flagpole pinging in wind; the full-body shudder of distortion that passes through “Anna’s Organ.” There is a depth of field to their work, a sense of smaller sounds scurrying beneath bigger ones, that distinguishes it from the sort of kitsch you might hear piping from the corner speaker at a high-end spa.
Their process recalls the “rainforest electro” movement in Latin America, where musicians and artists are recording and reworking the sounds of the Earth as a means of reconnecting with it. In Chiu and Honer’s music, the natural world is half human conception, half unknowable Other: Spend enough time in it, and you will sense that intelligence, fleet and mysterious, moving just beneath the surface. Something is alive in their work, and it feels like it’s always rounding the next corner, just out of your reach.


Philadelphia’s Mannequin Pussy thrash swiftly from the playful to the chaotic. Their latest LP combines punk, shoegaze, death metal, and more, with the ferocious push-pull energy of a mosh pit.

Romantic

Brevity is among Mannequin Pussy’s strengths, but a controlled volatility is the Philadelphia quartet’s calling card. The mood of any given song can zap with a disconcerting swiftness from the playful to the chaotic. This dynamic persists on record and on stage. Opening for Colleen Green at Baltimore’s Metro Gallery last August, the band kicked up a series of shoegaze-y whorls, detonating their abrupt thrash-punk before the audience could let its guard down.
Beginning in New York City, Mannequin Pussy was formed by childhood friends Marisa Dabice and Thanasi Paul, and their early demos set an ineffable foundation: indecipherable, sub-minute hardcore bursts, propelled by Paul’s sharp drumming and Dabice’s lashed punk chords. By 2014 debut LP Gypsy Pervert, the melodies buried in the group’s sound had clawed their way to the surface. Paul swapped out his drum kit for a guitar, and the band’s lineup reshuffled, while track lengths expanded modestly. Significantly, Dabice found her footing as a singer and songwriter, as evidenced by smart standouts like “Clue Juice” and “My Baby (Axe Nice),” where second-wave American punk and 1990s cuddlecore made uneasy common cause.
For all of Pervert’s advances, it never quite gelled as an album. Romantic does. Its volcanic peaks and gauzy valleys hew to a sequential logic; neither a build nor a decline, but rather, the ferocious push-pull of a mosh pit. Dabice’s vocals have taken on a bitter insistency that suits themes best described as interpersonally political. *Romantic *also benefits from a consistent, road-tested lineup that includes bassist Colins Regisford and drummer Kaleen Reading. This tautness allows the band to double down on what it does best and roll a few dice.
All lurch and glossolalia, “Pledge” suggests a lost My Bloody Valentine single harboring the paranoid stoicism of death metal. “Meatslave One” is a 56-second lamentation of smart-phone narcissism dressed in grunge flannel. The turbulent “Emotional High” and “Kiss” treat friend-dynamics from near and distant removes, respectively, with no punches pulled. On “Beside Yourself,” the don’t-look-back anthem that closes the album, the four mass their voices in angelic chorus to leaven what is a jagged, collective scorching of earth.
A wild energy animates the 20-minute Romantic, as it spills out in every direction. This is most evident on “Ten” and “Denial,” when Dabice’s personality is especially harried and panicky, her lyrics Jenga-stacked and tripping over themselves, the songs supercharged. “Ten” rails against that kind of depression that can confine you to your bedroom, buckling so hard that the song risks shaking itself into pieces. “Denial,” a jangly, introspective self-inventory, explodes in wracked gasps. “Pick yourself up, baby, everything’s gonna be fine, but if not, so what?” she counsels, pleading. “You’ll get it right the next time/You should stop getting down on yourself, everyday.” These are words to live by.


Today we commemorate the 20th anniversary of Christopher Wallace's death with a review of his 1997 sophomore album L**ife After Death, released 16 days after he was murdered.

Life After Death

Life After Death, The Notorious B.I.G.'s second and final full-length studio album, which also serves as his first posthumous release, begins where its predecessor, 1994's Ready to Die left off: with the narrator dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The blast comes courtesy of a large-bore cartridge from a high-powered revolver, while his best friend and confidante—played by label boss and possible svengali, Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs—listens in disbelief, possibly willing him back to life, possibly imagining an alternate reality where Christopher Wallace remains alive.
Ready to Die, Biggie’s previous album, also began with heart-pulling cinematic flourishes, featuring a decade-spanning montage that played as a mini saga telling the tale of a small-time street thug who was raised in a dysfunctional home and turned into a formidably successful rapper. But where the first album started with a feeling of hope arising from the muck and mire of urban poverty, Life After Death announces itself in much starker fashion.
The proper arrival of this album comes on “Somebody's Gotta Die,” a pure revenge tale. It begins sometime within the last record’s timeline, with Big “sittin' in the crib dreamin' about Learjets and coupes, the way Salt 'shoops', and how to sell records like Snoop,” when a fellow small-time drug dealer and jailmate informs him that a mutual friend has been shot for robbing a crack dealer in a most ruthless manner (“pistol whipped his kids and taped up his wife”). Big's reaction is immediate: “Is he in critical? Retaliation for this one won't be minimal ’cause I'm a criminal; way before the rap shit, bust the gat shit—Puff won't even know what happened.” We’re settling into a bloody noir, complete with well-developed minor characters harboring demented pathos and subtle foreshadowing—all this before any hints of a radio single.
This feat of storytelling is repeated two more times on the first disc of this double album alone. On “Niggas Bleed,” Big is a bagman sent to secure a large drug transaction, but his greed has him thinking about a double-cross: “I kill them all, I'll be set for life,” he imagines. He decides to call up his friend—a flashy and hard-hearted cutthroat from the Southwest who was once featured on America's Most Wanted—to partake in a heist that involves a female Puerto Rican hotel worker who used to be drug boss, and a Jamaican with long dreadlocks and a taste for Asian women. It’s a tour de force—a time-shifting tale that devotes a whole verse to the backstory of a murderous misfit straight from an Elmore Leonard short who substitutes kerosene for gasoline because “fuck it, it's flame-able.”
But “I Got a Story to Tell,” the recount of an after-hours creep with an NBA player’s girlfriend that culminates in physical assault and robbery, may be the most absurd tale of the bunch, because it's reportedly true. “Story” highlights Biggie’s gifts as a raconteur. Inside his braggadocio, cars are colored with verve: a “cherry M3” BMW, a “marine blue 6 coupe” Mercedes, a “champagne Range” Rover. For his fictional tales, names and locales are doled out like characters in hardboiled pulp fictions: “Arizona Ron from Tuscon,” “Gloria from Astoria,” and “Darkskin Jermaine” who “nearly lost half his brain over two bricks of cocaine, getting his dick sucked by Crackhead Lorraine.” But, when it comes to the truth, he's shy on specifics. No names, no states, no boroughs, or other signifiers are mentioned. When pressed by his friends as to the identity of the cuckold, he brushes it off: “One of them 6' 5” niggas—I don't know.”
Double albums tend to be overblown, self-indulgent cash grabs, but Life After Death warranted the approach. Beginning with the 1994 Quad Studios shooting of Tupac Shakur in New York City, the Notorious B.I.G—along with Combs, Shakur, and Suge Knight—was at the center of a multifaceted rivalry. It was a struggle between N.Y.'s Bad Boy and L.A.'s Death Row records that surpassed label affiliation to become about coastal loyalty, arguments about commercialism vs. art that spread from the music industry to the public, whispers of motives and allegiances ran from the streets to the urban criminal underworld. Big easily had more than one album's worth of material to talk about.
Not only did he have more drawn on, he had more ways to talk about it than anyone else. More than anyone one else in rap ever, Big was able to break language and bend syntax to speak about things in ways that were unforeseen yet seemingly unavoidable in hindsight: “At last, a nigga rappin' 'bout blunts and broads, tits and bras, ménage à trois, sex in expensive cars, and still leave you on the pavement,” he rapped on the No. 1 radio single “Hypnotize.” He continued: “Condo paid for, no car payment. At my arraignment, note for the plaintiff, 'Your daughter's tied up in a Brooklyn basement.' Face it: not guilty—that's how I stay filthy.”
Big was a master of flow, sounding unforced and unlabored over a bevy of pristine, hi-fidelity maximalist beats that seemed to always bow to his intent. His voice was that of a gentle giant; a sumo ballerina who could deashi and pas de bourrée, henka and plie. Few terms in any tongue can capture the way Big was light on his words while heavy on thought. He made his slams look like pirouettes even over the most grating pop moves like “Mo Money Mo Problems,” which showcased Combs' predilection for turning ‘80s R&B hits into ‘90s rap tunes—a push and pull between producer and artist that remains unmatched in hip-hop to this day.
This infamous tug between Combs' pop predilections and Big’s gully tendencies is all over Life After Death: the way the sequencing goes from the Herb Alpert-sampling “Hypnotize” to DJ Premier's Screamin' Jay Hawkins chop on “Kick in the Door” to a boudoir ballad with the R. Kelly-assisted “Fuck You Tonight” to black glove tough talk with The Lox on “Last Day” to lavish ballerism on the René & Angela remake “I Love the Dough” with Jay Z. It's a wrenching of the ridiculous that Big wins at every turn by being on “that Brooklyn bullshit” on “Hypnotize”; by making “Fuck You Tonight” unprofitable without a heavily-edited radio version; by squeezing so many words and skillful mispronunciations and imagery like wearing precious stones “in beards and mustaches” into “I Love the Dough.”
Despite being 24 cuts deep, the album never wears on—the quick twists, deep moods, dark humor, and mastered artistry more than hold your attention. But, still: Like even a good movie, you're ready for it to end when it ends, and it climaxes with songs that deliver on the promise of the era of conflict (and death and rage and extremism) that surrounded Big in 1997. Due to his assassination 20 years ago on March 9th, the last three songs—“My Downfall,” “Long Kiss Goodnight,” and “You're Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)”—were never enjoyed by the public at large while Big was alive. Today, it's almost impossible to hear them as anything other than war songs for the dead and those about to die. These numbers are both a declaration of intent and pauses for remorse; clarion-song and elegy alike, heavy instrumentation for the trenches and pews, all hymnals of well-earned paranoia and odes to a dawn of violence.
And, though the ending is undoubtedly full of salvos from a reluctant warrior, there's a glimmer of hope that says that the young heart of Christopher Wallace from Bed-Stuy—not the Notorious B.I.G. from Bad Boy—was still beating beneath all that armor. On “You're Nobody,” he's mingling with “thorough bitches” who rode around in a fruit-colored two-door Acura and—in a telling, but coded move—he hearkens back to the determined aspiration of his breakthrough hit “Juicy,” rapping his perceived future into existence: “As my pilot steers my Lear,” he drops seemingly apropos of nothing but rhyme and boast. But, looking deeper, further back, past the blood on his friend's sneaker from the opener, you recall how this all began:
He was sitting in the crib, envisioning Learjets, visualizing coupes, lusting the way Salt “shooped,” and wanting to sell records like Snoop Dogg. Big may not have been around to see it, but he saw it before it happened. He created an alternate reality and lived it until his death and after.


Recorded in 1990 at a small Santa Cruz club, this joyous live document flips the energy of 1991’s Weld on its head, swapping out incendiary arena rockers for oddball picks and warm, woolly vibes.

Neil Young / Crazy Horse: Way Down in the Rust Bucket

Way Down in the Rust Bucket

Neil Young entered the 1990s acting as if his erratic 1980s never happened. He spent the bulk of the ’80s sowing wild oats while in an unhappy union with Geffen Records. The label was so aggrieved by the mercurial singer-songwriter’s behavior that they filed suit against Young, accusing him of purposefully delivering uncommercial albums. Perhaps they had a point: Once he returned to his old home at Reprise, he started making music like he had in the old days. Buoyed by the creative and commercial rebirth of 1989’s Freedom, Young reconnected with Crazy Horse, the ambling backing band who had supported him through good times and bad since way back in 1969. Picking up a fuzzy strand left hanging from Rust Never Sleeps, the 1979 album that represented their last great triumph, Young and Crazy Horse knocked out Ragged Glory at his Broken Arrow Ranch in a few weeks. The quick sessions resulted in an album with a spontaneous feel; it was the liveliest and loudest Crazy Horse had ever sounded in the studio.
As a full-bore rock’n’roll record, Ragged Glory was an ideal album to take out on the road, which is precisely what Neil Young and Crazy Horse did, spending the first four months of 1991 roaring through North America’s arenas with supporting acts Sonic Youth and Social Distortion in tow. Young’s decision to bring a pair of prominent alternative rockers on tour underscored the wild, untamed character of his work with Crazy Horse, with its swirls of distortion and primitive thump. The ensuing live 2xLP, Weld, and feedback-laden Arc EP tapped into the arena-sized aggression that fueled the band at its peak, all the way back to 1979’s incendiary Live Rust. Way Down in the Rust Bucket, the 12th live album in Young’s ongoing (and now absurdly active) Archives series, flips that energy on its head. Here, Crazy Horse aren’t interested in assaulting their audience; instead, they’re grooving along alongside them.
Some of this change in tone is surely due to the change in venue. Way Down in the Rust Bucket captures a November 13, 1990 gig at the small Santa Cruz club the Catalyst, a hometown bar that became Young’s regular stomping ground in 1977, when he spent the summer figuring out whether his ill-fated group the Ducks had a future. The Ducks didn’t survive 1977, but Young’s connection to the Catalyst endured; it became a place for him to limber up before heading back out on the road. That’s precisely what happened in November 1990: With two months to go before a big arena tour, the time was ripe to kick off the cobwebs. Playing in their own backyard—for fans who were close enough to be friends, and friends who were more like family—shaped the concert from its setlist to its execution. Gone are expected crowd-pleasers like “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” “Powderfinger,” “Rockin’ in the Free World” and “Tonight’s the Night,” all swapped out for oddball selections designed to scratch some itch of the band: American Stars ’n Bars’ cornpone romp “Homegrown,” a revved-up reading of the Re·ac·tor deep cut “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze,” plus the inane blues stomp “T-Bone.”
As silly as it sounds, “T-Bone” provides the key to unlocking many of Way Down in the Rust Bucket’s charms. It’s not much of a song—there are no other lyrics than “Got mashed potatoes/Ain’t got no T-Bone"—yet hearing Crazy Horse lock into a primal rhythm then remain there for nearly seven minutes, as Young delivers each repetition of its lone line as if it’s a new punchline, is as invigorating as his elongated solos. There’s a direct line connecting this rave-up with “Farmer John,” a frat-rock classic from Don & Dewey by way of the Premiers that wound up as a touchstone on Ragged Glory: They’re party tunes played by a band intent on having a hell of a good time.
Young spent 1990 absolutely giddy with the monstrous, transportive racket he could make with Crazy Horse, but those high spirits don’t always come through on Weld. Blame some of that on the arena setting; blame some of it on timing. During those early months of 1991, Crazy Horse toured as Operation Desert Storm descended on Iraq, so Young sobered up, putting an earnest and angry version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” in a prominent position in the set list, then leaning into the group’s harder edges. Way Down in the Rust Bucket, recorded just months earlier, has no socio-political undertones and no angst; here, “Fuckin’ Up” doesn’t play as self-immolation, it’s merely a heavy shrug. Crazy Horse’s immense volume camouflages a sweet hippie heart, an empathy that’s apparent in both the selected songs and the warm, woolly performance. This is a joyous record, where even the melancholy epics “Like a Hurricane” and “Cortez the Killer” skirt sadness. Crazy Horse lumber toward bliss, goosed along by a leader who seems so enraptured by his own solos he doesn’t want to break the spell. Context also gives these seemingly endless workouts a different vibe. They’re surrounded by garage rockers and reconstituted anthems of the counterculture, songs designed to be played and heard in a communal setting. For a dirty, grungy rock’n’roll band, there’s no better place to hold communion than the local pub, where the separation between artist and audience can be so thin, it may as well be nonexistent. Maybe that’s why Way Down in the Rust Bucket feels transcendent: It captures the world’s greatest bar band in their spiritual home.

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Composed by Avey Tare, Geologist, and Deakin, AnCo’s second audiovisual album reckons abstractly with the environmental devastation and the potentially horrifying consequences yet to come.

Tangerine Reef

Avey Tare’s voice floats adrift on Animal Collective’s second audiovisual album, Tangerine Reef. Made in tandem with Coral Morphologic, the Miami-based duo who merge art and science by growing and photographing coral, the film’s soundtrack plays out like a defeated, sunken warning. Coral, like the polar bear and the oil-covered seabird, has become a symbol of human recklessness as our species stares down apocalyptic climate change. It’s not cute or warm-blooded, but it’s brilliant with fluorescent color when alive, and it bleaches, like bone, when it dies. As the sea warms, coral acts as an emotional thermometer. Unlike Animal Collective’s more pop-oriented albums, which carry within them a strong, if occasionally flippant, utopian grain, Tangerine Reef feels saddled with existential weight, preemptively mourning a future vacant of the living color Coral Morphologic capture in stunning high-definition video.
Coral Morphologic’s Colin Foord and J.D. McKay first met Animal Collective in 2010 at a screening of the band’s first audiovisual LP, the sticky phantasmagoria ODDSAC. The two groups collaborated on and off over the next eight years and made Tangerine Reef in commemoration of the third International Year of the Reef—an effort by the International Coral Reef Initiative to encourage the preservation of aquatic ecosystems. The album follows AnCo’s Meeting of the Waters EP, another soundtrack to visual documentation of environmental destruction, but it’s closer in tone to Avey Tare’s most recent solo album, 2017’s Eucalyptus. Composed by Tare, Geologist, and Deakin (no Panda Bear this time), Tangerine Reef reckons abstractly with the environmental devastation already wreaked upon the earth, and the potentially horrifying consequences yet to come.
It’s a timely release. Record wildfires are singeing California, and people are dying from heat waves around the world. Global warming should be a hot-button issue, politically, and yet it is rarely spoken of on the campaign trail. A certain fatalism seems to have set in among Americans; Tangerine Reef’s slow, sad notes reflect that ambient despair. Through a soup of effects, Tare sings like he’s watching something precious slip away from him. While his voice was clear and at the forefront of the mix on Meeting of the Waters, he sounds drowned here. And yet it’s beautiful what he’s drowned in, these strange, delicate notes that sound primordial and ancient even though they’ve probably been cranked out of something pedestrian like a guitar. Toward the end of the album’s first track and lead single, “Hair Cutter,” Tare trails off, out of lyrics but still singing, and a bouquet of alien synthesizer notes rise up around him, buoying him. That song boasts the album’s loveliest vocal melody, and its strange melancholy serves as a portal to the rest of the album’s murky psychological excavations.
Coral Morphologic’s wondrous, psychedelic video work dovetails smoothly with Animal Collective’s dazzling electronic pop, but of the two groups involved in making Tangerine Reef, it’s Animal Collective who comes off more sedate. The weight of the music lends the visuals a foreboding feel, as if to remind us of the dangers these organisms face. Without Panda Bear on board, Animal Collective lose the pop edge that has resulted in their most commercially successful music, but this isn’t a project for scoring hits. It’s a meditative, hypnotic experience, and it’s not without the sense of playfulness that has driven Animal Collective throughout their career. Hearing Tare vocalize over a bouncing bassline and offhand organ riffs on “Inspector Gadget” sparks some of the same pleasure as listening to Animal Collective’s earliest albums, back when the band members obscured not only their faces but their voices and their words. Even on vocal-heavy songs, like the lurching “Coral by Numbers,” it’s hard to make out what Tare is saying. It’s as though he’s simultaneously singing and gasping for air—light on diction, heavy on desperation. “The time is now/Now is the time,” he calls out on “Hip Sponge,” like he’s begging for action, for something to change, and nothing does.
In a 2015 Vice documentary on Coral Morphologic, Foord and McKay point out that certain species of coral seem to have adapted to humanity’s incessant pollution. They’ve found organisms thriving even in the filthiest waters off Miami, growing on artificial rock substrate amid unidentifiable sludge and discarded plastic cups. This discovery runs contrary to the common, simplified narrative of human activity wiping out all life by way of environmental disregard; it suggests that the natural systems we’re disrupting are hardier than we think. The two artists aren’t shy about suggesting that Miami may be underwater by the end of the century, but they find a certain macabre poetry in the image. They see coral climbing submerged buildings, recolonizing their space. Perhaps this is the only flavor of hope to be extracted from the persistent narrative that life on earth is doomed. Even cities are organic structures, and whatever happens next on earth may just be life playing itself out, arriving at the conclusion to a story far bigger than any individual.
Tangerine Reef, in its wide, sloping compositions and glacial, dreamy pace, hints at such a frame. Its most human element—the voice—gets decentralized, swept away, blurred over by its overall flow. The music itself is beautiful and expansive, if slow and occasionally stagnant, and the perspective it asks you to take offers relief from the anxious refrain of climate doom. There’s no real protagonist to this story, no hero’s journey, no Superman crashing through the atmosphere to save us from ourselves. There’s not even cosmic retribution in this telling: The earth’s not exacting revenge on its tormentors. We’re not so important to be the targets of revenge. We’re just animals scuttling across the planet’s surface, swept up in a geological saga we barely understand.


These contemporary classical arrangements of traditional folk and Bonnie “Prince” Billy songs are lovely to listen to, but not so clear thematically.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy / Bryce Dessner / Eighth Blackbird: When We Are Inhuman

When We Are Inhuman

When We Are Inhuman is a prickly collection of traditional folk tunes interspersed with Bonnie “Prince” Billy songs, all of them arranged for the contemporary classical ensemble Eighth Blackbird. The mood is both playful and haunted: The arrangements are so spare that the instruments seem to hover a few inches off the ground, and Oldham’s voice, always a little eerie, winds through the space between them, sounding disembodied. The folk tunes were arranged by Bryce Dessner, the Oldham songs by Eighth Blackbird pianist Lisa Kaplan, and taken together, they address approximately the same things: the cruel side of devotion, the animalistic side of love, the devotional aspect of sex. Like all good folk songs, they seem to mix everything up with everything else.
Sex has always been rich soil for Oldham; in his writing, even the most graphic acts (see “So Everyone,” from the 2008 album Lie Down in the Light) sound tender. “Beast For Thee,” from his 2005 album with Matt Sweeney, is one of his most fervent (and horniest) love songs: “Astride my horny horn/You’ll be in glory born/And I’ll be a beast for thee,” he exults. Kaplan’s arrangement, centered around mallet percussion, piano, and plucked strings, is a little anodyne —it sounds like it could soundtrack a bank commercial—but it also reveals a new fragility to Oldham’s promise to be “a beast.” It sounds less ribald than humble, an act of abjection.
Oldham seems to watch the animal kingdom closely, understanding, maybe, that we’re going to share their vantage point on the earth sooner or later, so he might as well learn what he can now. “One With the Birds,” another of his most beloved songs, appears here, with an arrangement that goes the obvious route of suggesting birdsong. But it also makes great use of the piano, with a music-box verse melody so delicate it sounds dreamt and some ominous low notes that rumble out at the end, reinforcing the lurking note of death.
Snuck into the middle is “Underneath the Floorboards,” a piece that Dessner adapted from the Sufjan Stevens song “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” The thematic connection between Stevens’ song and the other material on When We Are Inhuman is unclear, but it probably has something to do, again, with the intimacy of violence: Stevens’ song is a work of empathy, impossible to listen to without feeling an uncomfortable shiver of pity for Gacy. Dessner’s arrangement is macabre, more interested in evoking the things rotting beneath the floorboards than exploring the mindstate of the man hiding them.
There’s another name included on When We Are Inhuman: Julius Eastman. Eastman was a brilliant, contentious, troubled figure in Downtown NYC history, a composer whose acidic intelligence often rattled his contemporaries. He performed and improvised; he blended the minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass with swing and jazz; he sang with Meredith Monk on Dolmen Music. When he died, he was homeless and it took eight months to publish an obituary.
To conclude When We Are Inhuman, Eighth Blackbird offers Eastman’s “Stay On It,” a 1973 piece in which a bright, leaping piano figure gets string double stops daubed over it like Bob Ross clouds. High voices sing “stay on it” in the background, a little off beat and a little off-key. It is the sound of a city block party, full of human bustle and clamor and sidelong interjections from clarinet and violin like honking cars. There’s a peculiar edge to it—something in the slightly soured edges of the harmonies suggests an underlying irony, but it never hardens into sarcasm or cruelty. All of Eastman’s work shared this gnawing, anarchic restlessness.
It is entirely unclear why Eastman’s music is sharing this particular space, or what Dessner and Eighth Blackbird wish to suggest about Oldham’s similarities to Eastman. They both have a subversive spirit, maybe? Eastman’s music has steadily accrued new champions over the past decade, and it’s gratifying to see another high-profile inclusion of one of his vital works. But in general, this confusion is endemic to the project, which is full of excellent performances of strong repertoire without a lot of obvious common ground. Eastman’s work is brilliant, fiendish, devouring—he upended conventions and expectations wherever he performed, and there’s something uneasy and odd about his bookend status here.

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After a stressful period of reinvention, the band frolics in greener grass, following its wandering muse wherever it leads.

Drift

Only two years elapsed between the Men’s 2014 album, Tomorrow’s Hits, and its follow-up, Devil Music, but it felt like 10. Up to that point, the Brooklyn band had maintained a furious rate of both output and evolution. The five-album stretch from 2010’s Immaculada to Tomorrow’s Hits is right up there with Sonic Youth’s 1980s run in terms of capturing a primordial punk band’s incremental transformation into an artful, melodically sophisticated rock juggernaut. With each new record, the Men revealed surprising new strengths—krautrock rave-ups, gut-punching power-pop, countrified balladry—that formed the foundation for the next one. But while that winning streak was certainly an exciting thing for fans to behold at the time, the relentless touring that resulted ultimately sapped the Men of their spark.
After finishing up their Tomorrow’s Hits duties, the band didn’t just hit the pause button, they did a full-on reboot. When they resurfaced with Devil Music, they had both shed a crucial member (bassist/producer Ben Greenberg) and abandoned their carefully cultivated sense of ambition. Recorded over a weekend and self-released on the band’s own label, the caustic, caterwauling Devil Music reveled in lo-fi scuzz as if the previous half decade never happened. The Men had regressed back into the band they once were, but, given all they had accomplished in the interim, that made them nearly unrecognizable.
As singer/guitarist Mark Perro would explain, Devil Music was less a calculated back-to-the-garage move than a violent reaction to the band’s creative stagnation. In a 2016 blog interview, he revealed Tomorrow’s Hits was actually already in the can as far back as 2012, but the business of keeping the show on the road prevented this once-restless band from writing new material for a good three years. “Anything I had to say on [Devil Music] was very selfish and pretty frustrated,” he said, “but it goes to show you that music is a beautiful thing, because now that I got some of those songs out, I feel much better.” And so on Drift, the Men frolic in the greener grass that lies on the other side.
While the new album marks the band’s return to the Sacred Bones roster after their DIY Devil Music release, it betrays no desire to live up to or build upon the legacy they once established on that label. (Likewise, their pared-down touring itinerary suggests a reluctance to revert to their old road-warrior ways.) Drift is the sound of a de-stressed band following its wandering muse wherever it leads, with seemingly little concern for how the end results fit together. As such, it is at once their most eclectic record and their most erratic.
Of course, the Men’s earlier albums weren’t lacking for variety, but each of them sounded like the same band trying new things, with a natural ebb and flow to their stylistic mutations. (For instance, on 2012’s Open Your Heart, the ragged country-rock of “Candy” felt like a well-earned comedown after the fuzz-blasted emotional bloodletting of “Please Don’t Go Away” and the title track.) But on Drift, the Men just sound like a bunch of different, unrelated bands. And where they’ve always thrived on the tension between their in-the-red overdrive and their rough ’n’ tumble tunefulness, on Drift, their aggressive and accessible qualities are sharply segregated.
So on the one hand, you have undercooked oddities like the goth-night stomper “Maybe I’m Crazy,” a bubbling cauldron of pulsating synths and no-wave sax squawks that seems to be building toward a violent release that never comes, or the steady motorik cruiser “Secret Light,” which sounds exactly like Damo Suzuki improvising over “L.A. Woman.” And then you have the middle-aged Meat Puppets saunter of “Rose on Top of the World” and the Harvest Moon-glowed “So High,” both gentle mid-tempo folk-rock tunes that, even in light of the Men’s previous rootsy detours, are disarmingly refined and relaxed. They’re pretty songs, but a bit too breezy to do the heavy lifting on an album where the band’s exploratory impulses take precedence over their songcraft.
In that sense, Drift feels a lot closer in spirit to Perro and bandmate Nick Chiericozzi’s Dream Police project, where they workshopped an array of ideas outside the Men’s noise/pop sweet spot (though Drift does throw the circle pit a bone with the rote punk rager “Killed Someone”). In its quieter moments, Drift reveals some uncharted territory for this band to annex: The Six Organs of Admittance-worthy interstitial “Sleep” may clock in at under three minutes, and the lyrics may only amount to repeated incantations of its title, but its mounting maelstrom of acoustic oscillations and trembling strings is transfixing. The hypnotic closing hymn “Come to Me” further reinforces the notion that this band probably has a quality neo-folk record in them.
In their initial run, the Men powered through every style in the classic-rock and punk playbooks and mastered them in five years flat. After Devil Music showed they can always go back to bruising basics when the mood strikes, Drift is the sound of them trying to figure out what to do next—and compared to the maniacal focus and intensity of previous records, the band can sound oddly rudderless here. But they can still stun you with a radical reinvention. In this case, it’s “When I Held You in My Arms,” a Wurlitzer-smoothed, dark-night-of-the-soul ballad that’d be right at home in the most sorrowful depths of Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call. The song reveals a willingness to expand not just their musical vocabulary, but their emotional one as well. This band has opened its heart in the past, but never before have the Men presented such a vivid, despairing portrait of a broken one.


Montreal band makes a very promising start, blending prog's ambition with krautrock's precision. Besnard Lakes' Jace Lasek produces.

Zeroes QC

Plenty of bands have ambition; Montreal's Suuns have their sights set on the brass ring. Zeroes QC, their dank, oily, frequently metamorphosing debut LP, is one of the more industrious first goes I've heard in ages-- sleek, moody space-prog, self-assured, meticulous, and foreboding. More than anything, Zeroes QC sounds like the work of a much older band, the kind who've earned a few months in the studio to tool around, rearrange their pedal boards, try out literally every idea that comes to them. That's a path that often leads to convolution and overcrowding-- ask just about any prog rocker how the 80s worked out-- but Suuns seem to have taken as much care yanking things out of the mix as they did building it up. Helped along by Besnard Lakes frontman Jace Lasek, who produces here, Zeroes QC is a sleek, spacious, confident blend of prog and krautrock.
Zeroes QC seems wholly unaware of the daytime; from the buzzy prog-step that opens the record to the forebodingly lovely ballad that closes it, it's dark stuff. Extended instrumental passages abound, but Suuns aren't big on solos, let alone stacking them three-high; despite the proggy segmentation in the music, Suuns evince an almost laser-guided focus, allowing each instrument its space, never cluttering the mix with too many sound effects. The muscular low-end, the rich but never overbearing electronic flourishes, and the occasional sonic assault shows a great deal of reserve, which Suuns yield like another instrument; one gets the sense they're capable of bigger, wilder sounds, which makes the reigned-in Zeroes QC's terse successes all that more impressive.
From the deep bass wobble in "Pie XI", the wily organ bend in "Armed for Peace", or the saxophone maelstrom that closes out "Gaze", Zeroes QC is more thrilling moment-to-moment than track-for-track. It never drags, and Suuns have a fine sense of pacing, but amidst all the shape-shifting you'll find you prefer certain forms to others pretty fast. In fact, their restlessness can be a saving grace; "Up Past the Nursery", with its clip-clop rhythm and staccato vocalizations, bears an uncanny resemblance to the first couple of albums from UK garage-weirdos Clinic. It'd be easier to overlook if the same thing didn't happen on the next track, "PVC". It's jarring; not only are these decidedly b-roll as Clinic tunes go, but up against the blithe detours that mark the rest of Zeroes, these couple of songs would feel weirdly staid even if they weren't awfully familiar.
Suuns have a friend in Lasek, who brings the improbable hugeness of his rootsier Besnard Lakes material into glitzy and chromatic territory without seeming chintzy or overwrought. He's got the detail-oriented touch of a much pricier producer, and at times, his successes juicing unlikely sounds from behind the boards seem to be Zeroes QC's great strength. His Ade Blackburn routine aside, singer Ben Shemie tends to fall into the backdrop here, his voice a tad wispy amidst the steady stomp of Suuns' formidable bottom end. Compositionally, these tunes can and do wander often. It should be a mess, but it isn't; every note lands perfectly in place, every left-turn eventually circling back around. Sure, they could use a few relatable sentiments to go with their outstretched sound, and the Clinic thing's just gotta go. But few bands this young are operating on quite this scale, and fewer still have the brass-- and the patience-- to pull off a big, glitzy, complex record like Zeroes QC. There are improvements to be made, but next time these dudes hit the studio and start digging in, they'll have really earned it.