On an eerie new record, the anonymous collective strays from its metal roots and takes influence from jazz, telling stories of life on America’s class margins.

Diner Coffee

Diner Coffee, the seventh record by Mamaleek, opens with a real laugh riot: a cacophony of recorded voices erupting, stumbling over one another, overripe with pleasure. When a horde of guitars and drums finally thunders a response to the cascading, borderline uncomfortable guffawing, it’s swiftly laughed back down. For longtime fans of the elusive metal project, two things should be immediately clear: The laughter will always win, and traditional notions of heaviness are often the butt of the joke.
Since debuting in 2008 with their self-titled record, the two anonymous brothers in Mamaleek have reveled in showing how extreme metal’s theatricality and full-throttle dynamics can make its darkness less menacing—even comical. This, to Mamaleek, is both an uproariously good joke, and a deadly serious idea: The guy in corpse paint singing about entrails is no match for, say, an earnest conversation about the state of public housing, which Mamaleek criticized on 2020's Come and See. On that album, they melted jazz instrumentation and blues textures down into music as heavy and fluid as molten iron, using sudden hushes and surprisingly melodic—even funky—basslines to create a sound that felt alive, vicious, and dripping with nausea.
Diner Coffee is both a stranger and more accessible record, the work of a group—newly expanded to a quintet, still anonymous—nearly abandoning their metal roots. But even when they’re at their most placid, an acrid fragrance clings to these songs, deepening the band’s brutal, nuanced stories of life on America’s class margins and proving they’ve still got a bit of necromancy in them. Metal artists have found inspiration in spiritual jazz for years, picking up on the discordant cosmic quests of the Sun Ra Arkestra and the long-distance drones of Alice Coltrane. But on Diner Coffee, Mamaleek play it sleeker, closer to the ground, affecting the swing and tone of bebop even when they’re playing ferocious avant-rock.
A sense of internal conflict pulses through these songs, the profusion of relatively light moments covering the anger like a tarp thrown over a bull. In the verses of “Boiler Room,” Mamaleek churn up a tavern sleaze until it’s so rich you can practically see the flocking on the Bud Light mirror behind the bar. In a yawp that’s part death-metal growl and part Tom Waits pastiche, the vocalist slurps out a list of regrets—all the other jobs he could’ve done if he hadn’t gotten stuck in the boiler room—then marshalls the band as the mood turns violent, saxophones screaming in support. If the lounge-lizard setting feels ironic, it’s only because that’s how the character is presenting himself, the not-so-laid-back guy casually chomping the ice from the bottom of his rocks glass; even the dots of electric piano that twinkle around the edges of the noise are a sign that the prettiest presentation often conceals something awful.
In a recent interview, the band collectively stated that they find diners “comforting and haunting at the same time,” and on much of Diner Coffee, they pulse with the spectral, erotic energy of the Bad Seeds, delighting in conjuring up uncomfortable environments where horror finds peace. There’s a Badalamenti sway to the title track (not to mention a guitar solo that could’ve been on Steely Dan’s Aja), and, sure, that rhythm combined with a lyric about a lonely guy ruminating on the beauty of a cheap cup of coffee does feel a touch on the nose for a band this invested in blue-collar grime. But there’s a righteous fury to Diner Coffee that’s largely missing from David Lynch’s vision of the Pacific Northwest, even as it shares Twin Peaks’ dreamy form of logic.
Mamaleek’s sense of empathy is particularly clear in “Wharf Rats in the Moonlight.” It’s the album’s best song, a patient march through the mental dissolution of a female war veteran whose worldview unravels after hearing Afghani women sing for their own joyful liberation. The song sputters with tension, as trilling woodwinds suggest the promise of light flitting around the edges of confusion. A sampled pinprick of sound, peaceful in tone and breathy like a bow that's just touched the violin's highest string, is repeated just off beat enough to startle. “Now she was the one trapped and unable to express herself,” the singer screams, and the song goes haywire with glitching feedback, harsh static, and what sounds like an overdriven TV. In its textural complexity and expressive power, it’s the closest Mamaleek gets to free jazz.
Like the hollowed-out electronic music of Burial, which critic Mark Fisher described as having “less to do with a near future than with the tantalizing ache of a future just out of reach,” Diner Coffee creates an atmosphere of gloom, hemmed in by molten edges and riddled with reverberant crackles. Moans drift through the distance, calling to mind old barroom songs; guitars sway like a boat knocking against a dock. These aren't simply moments of extramusical flourish, or attempts to elevate these songs even further above and beyond genre cliches. They’re the clearest articulation yet of Mamaleek’s ongoing resistance to the status quo.


Gojira's fifth album is the French metal act's best work to date. This quartet's nothing if not an adroit and agile rock band, one prone to acrobatic guitar lines and rhythmic shifts capable of inducing whiplash.

L'Enfant Sauvage

A little less than halfway through L'Enfant Sauvage, the excellent fifth album from French metal masters Gojira, the tone shifts dramatically. For the first four tracks, the technically sophisticated band extends a blitz of intensity, with drummer Mario Duplantier sending up rapid, precise salvos from behind the field-marshal bark of his brother Joseph. But during the 108-second "The Wild Healer", Mario slows to a steady snare-and-cymbal trot, the guitars circling overhead in two repetitive riffs. They just sit there, too, letting the guitars squeal a bit more and the distorted bass swell through the mix.
Of course, this is just an interlude, as "Planned Obsolescence" rips through the relative silence with the same ferocity as the record's front end. But the pause offers perhaps the most revealing moment on L'Enfant Sauvage, an album that earns the rank of Gojira's best work to date not only because the Duplantier brothers are Meshuggah descendants with a head for melody, but also because it's so well paced. Go back through those first four tracks: Opener "Explosia" appropriately explodes from its haunches and then roars, with Joseph beginning the album-length story about a person's slow fight against self-depravity like he's shouting loud enough to purge the process from himself. But then the seven-minute track eases into a blur of guitars and mid-tempo march, Joseph's growl now enhanced by the hints of a hook. The title track, which follows, builds tension for half of its length by extending one riff, stopping it, and playing it again; just when the tease starts to get tedious, though, Gojira finally spring forward into the kind of violently controlled breakdown that reminds you what a circle pit is for. It's exhilarating because it is so expertly timed. Still, after a minute or two of that melee, the quartet buries itself with a sudden fade, as if they've disappeared into the mouth of an abyss. As a whole, L'Enfant Sauvage is exhausting. But taken bit by bit, it's awesome.
Gojira take most of their twists and turns within songs-- that is, the bulk of L'Enfant Sauvage churns and sprints and charges, with tangents taking shape within the songs rather than dictating them. Though "Pain Is a Master", for instance, opens with a moody mix of field recordings and forlorn acoustic guitar, it rights itself with rigid force soon enough. Aside from a late-song onslaught, "Born in Winter" is Gojira's attempt at a ballad, with Duplantier doing his best solemn grunge moan above a rapid guitar line that serves more as a canvas than a progression. Even amid the heaviest bits, Duplantier sings like he's staring at an arena of lit lighters, letting the glow of this narrative drift toward its end. In that way, Gojira recalls Baroness, a band that uses a much different strain of heaviness toward the same end. As Gojira do with their feverish wizardry, Baroness play to their mid-tempo strength only to then play against it constantly, breaking the pace (and concomitant expectations) with tangents that strengthen the record's general rigors. For L'Enfant Sauvage, that plan works just as well within individual songs as it does across the entire album.
This record revolves around struggling toward transcendence or, at the very least, working to avoid the mire of self-destruction. "One day, we'll wake up from this absolute nonsense," Duplantier charges toward the end of "Planned Obsolescence", a pulverizing piece of thrash that seems to wink, at points, to bands like Shellac before shrieking toward the exit like grindcore on fire. "Conscience awakened, we'll take it from there." A decade into their career, that's a fitting moral for the story of Gojira, a band that's occasionally stumbled (2008's less-than-stellar The Way of All Flesh) after great success (2005's deserved breakthrough, From Mars to Sirius) to arrive at one of the most riveting and challenging metal records of the year. This quartet's nothing if not an adroit and agile rock band, prone to acrobatic guitar lines and rhythmic shifts capable of inducing whiplash. For these 52 browbeating but not-quite-brutal minutes, they recognize that those moving parts aren't enough to make a great album. With that realization in mind, they've done exactly that.


With help from Owen Pallett, the long-running experimental duo maps a sprawling path through seemingly unconnected musical ideas; the result is an enveloping overload of ideas and inspirations.

Songs for and About Ghosts

At least on streaming services, the tracklist of Songs for and About Ghosts may deceive first-time listeners. The third full-length album from Memphis couple Zachary and Denny Wilkerson Corsa as Nonconnah, the 50-minute record is split into four near-equal movements, each brandishing an evocative title—“At the End of Everything, At the Edge of Nothing,” for instance, or “To Follow Us Through Fields of Lightning.” Sample the start of each piece, and Songs for and About Ghosts scans as an eerie electroacoustic beauty. Field recordings of ecstatic choirs or enthusiastic tourist advertisements burble through florid synths or scrims of static, like Philip Jeck taking up residence in DJ Shadow’s stacks.
But those movements are subdivided into five gestural miniatures with subtitles of their own, though they’re not listed on Spotify or Apple Music. Each bit lasts two minutes or so. Sometimes, they are as distinct and disconnected as letters of the alphabet; other times, Nonconnah transition between them so methodically it feels like watching the numbers spin ever higher on an old analog gas pump. The first track pirouettes from triumphant choral samples to luminous glitches and chimes, then jumps abruptly into bludgeoning power electronics that subside into what sounds like baby circuits suckling on electrons. The strings come in, and the track slowly escapes Earth’s orbit, like some leftover from Eno’s Apollo mission. Every piece follows that basic Godspeed You! Black Emperor-like premise, taking a long route of unexpected detours between two vaguely related musical ideas.
That template is like a condensed version of what someone might experience during a day—a volatile admixture of wonder, worry, irritation, and angst that affirms none of our feelings are ever fixed. It could also be a real-time score for scrolling your timeline, bouncing between stories that might enrage, fascinate, or gratify you all within the course of a few minutes. The second movement, “Changed in Autumn’s Feral Depths,” flows from a seraphic hum to a pair of tinfoil-hat brigadiers raving about EMP and chemtrail conspiracies. Owen Pallett’s strings float in over Zachary Corsa’s halting electric guitar but stall the moment they start to seem unambiguously hopeful. It’s as though Pallett recognizes that unguarded optimism is just another opportunity to be let down.
The real lure of Nonconnah’s nonlinear approach is how many layers and ideas there are to uncover here. Historically, this sort of electroacoustic music can be proudly (and often wonderfully) didactic, tracing tiny variations on a single idea for an hour or more. Once they’ve dipped into a sound, for instance, Christian Fennesz, Claire M. Singer, and Francisco Lopez aren’t prone to jar you with something entirely unexpected; instead, they slowly shift the focus to reveal a new level of detail inherent in the sound.
But Nonconnah work like magpies, webbing together their own idiosyncratic renditions of sounds they love. That hyper-distorted barrage of noise during “Fields of Lightning” recalls the pummel of Birchville Cat Motel, softened from beneath by neon synthesizers. The hiccupping guitar-and-Casio loop that opens “At the End of Everything” sounds like The Postal Service fed through William Basinski’s tape heads. One particularly vertiginous span toward the middle of closer “The Willow and the Meeting Twain” feels like Oval’s Markus Popp using field recordings of American county fairs as musical grist. Yes, that’s a lot of references (if only a tiny sample), but that’s the joy Songs for and About Ghosts—it’s a slow-motion carousel of musical surprises, with each new sound causing you to reconsider the context of what you’ve already heard.
The prolific Corsas have been making wide-screen experimental music for a decade under several names, often working with some mix of powerful drones and inquisitive field recordings. It has often been interior music, the result of a pair hunkered down in their home studio. But Songs for and About Ghosts feels like a revelation within their catalogue because it understands the multivalence of our times, neatly encapsulating the idea that outrage, joy and most every other emotion coexist within a click. Songs for and About Ghosts is an overload of ideas and inspirations, each just as likely to pick you up as to slam you back down again.

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Pairing Midwestern hip-house with Los Angeles G-funk, the South Central native emphasizes subtly bumping grooves and gruff, hypnotic rhymes.

Black Moses EP

Channel Tres emerged in 2017 with the single “Controller,” an effortless slice of hip-house that sounded like Dâm-Funk mixed with Todd Terje and infused with the swaggering bodaciousness of West Coast rap. The five songs on his self-titled EP extolled the virtues of life’s simplest pleasures—driving with the top down, drinking Hennessey, and stealing your girl—with ounces of bounce to spare. Lyrically, Channel Tres often shares less with the G-funk of his native South Central, a regular sonic reference point in his instrumentals, and more with the gleefully vulgar, verging-on-pornographic tracks of Detroit ghettotech producers like DJ Assault.
Channel Tres’ second EP adopts an almost identical structure to his first. Both are five tracks in length, and each opens with dreamy, warbly intros just over a minute long. As on his debut, the order of the day here is the scintillating blend of hip-house that Godmode, also home to Yaeji, has come to specialize in. Though Channel Tres’ most obvious reference points are Moodymann and Galcher Lustwerk, the twinkling flutes, rumbling congas, and clean bass guitar on a song like “Brilliant Nigga” echo house classics like Larry Heard’s “And So I Dance” or Deep Aural Penetration’s “Into the Kick With Tito,” while the whining synths and regional roll call on “Sexy Black Timberlake” recall Channel Tres’ roots in California funk.
Channel Tres comes from the Lil B school of songwriting; comparisons to various celebrities abound. “Sexy Black Timberlake” assumes the mantle of Justin Timberlake; on “Raw Power,” a bit of performative shirtlessness makes him feel like Iggy Pop on the cover of (you guessed it) Raw Power. The EP’s title inevitably invokes the soulful aura of Isaac Hayes. Even when he insists it “ain’t about me,” Channel Tres’ subject is pretty much always himself.
Like his production style, Channel Tres’ voice is heavy on the low end, clinging to the gruffer side of his register.  His strength is timbre, not technical flow, and he’s much more adept as a tour guide to a dubby soundscape than eyewitness to events. On Channel Tres, that quality oozed charisma; here, it just sounds like a little too much cough syrup. The limits of his languid flow are most apparent on “Black Moses,” which features a welcome interruption from JPEGMAFIA. Hostile and high-pitched, JPEG’s delivery has a dangerous energy that can’t be captured in a bottle. Channel Tres sounds over-the-counter by comparison.
Black Moses isn’t a tremendous step forward for Channel Tres, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing for an artist who emerged almost out of nowhere two years ago and still hasn’t released a full-length album. But it’s beginning to look like he is being underserved by his chosen format. Though part of the appeal of Channel Tres’ music is his ability to distill the feeling of a deep groove into a pop-sized package, some of his rhythms demand more than just a few minites on the dancefloor. These songs all yearn for an extended remix by Kerri Chandler or Masters at Work—maybe it’s time to stop echoing Moodymann and start cutting him a check.


The post-punk/proto-industrial group is now down to just founding member Richard H. Kirk, who fills the first Cabaret Voltaire album in 26 years with invitingly rough-hewn sounds.

Shadow of Fear

Shadow of Fear, the first new Cabaret Voltaire album in 26 years, finds the UK post-punk/proto-industrial act reduced to just one person: founding member Richard H. Kirk. That has been the case since the project was resurrected in 2014 at Berlin’s Atonal Festival, two decades after the longest-running incarnation of the group (Kirk and fellow multi-instrumentalist Stephen Mallinder) parted ways.
Keeping Cabaret Voltaire as a solo act seems to be by design—an insistence on moving the project forward rather than trying to cash in on the past. Kirk apparently turned down a lucrative offer from Coachella to reform the group, and when he finally began to perform live as Cabaret Voltaire, he played nothing but new material. “I always make it really clear that if you think you’re going to come and hear the greatest hits,” he told FACT in 2017, “then don’t come because you’re not. What you might get is the same spirit.”
Shadow of Fear falls comfortably under Kirk’s rubric. The eight songs on the new record are all original compositions written and developed over the past six years, yet there’s no mistaking it for anything other than a Cabaret Voltaire album. While not as pulverizing as the group’s early recordings nor as sleek as the techno and house-inspired work found on 1993’s International Language, it blends the various eras of the group into a mostly satisfying whole.
Much of the album’s throwback sound is due to simple technology choices. Kirk’s recent Cabaret Voltaire performances didn’t make use of laptops, but rather stuck to his array of older synths and drum machines. According to the press notes for Shadow, when he tried to upgrade his setup for the recording, his computer melted down.
Working with older gear lends an invitingly rough-hewn quality to much of the album. The heaving melodic groans and guitar flickers on “The Power (Of Their Knowledge)” are underpinned by a tinny preset beat from a cheap keyboard, and “Microscopic Flesh Fragment” slowly builds from an off-kilter, never resolving drum sample into a dark, soupy dub-inspired tangle. Kirk also makes a direct connection to Cabaret Voltaire’s past on “Papa Nine Zero Delta United” via a wonky drum machine rhythm that is almost a mirror of the one he, Mallinder, and original member Chris Watson used on their 1979 single “Nag Nag Nag.”
At the same time, Shadow of Fear belies its creator’s intentions to keep Cabaret Voltaire, as he said in that FACT interview, “breaking new ground and moving forward.” For someone who has clearly kept up with the evolution of electronic music, as proven by his own club-ready releases or the remixes he’s done for Factory Floor and Powell, Kirk doesn’t apply the same contemporary approach to this material. The most current-sounding track on the album, “Universal Energy,” is a squirrely excursion into Chicago-style acid house.
The album’s title seems to nod to the gloomy anxiety that seems to be following our every move these days. Cabaret Voltaire, past or present, is the ideal soundtrack to an era of doomscrolling and persistent creeping dread. The group once presaged a dystopian future in tense early tracks like “No Escape” and “Spread The Virus.” That time has come and Kirk is once again a prescient musical messenger. In the hiccupping, strangely groovy final track “What’s Goin’ On,” a sampled voice asks the song’s title, sounding harried and fearful. The answer, according to another sample on the track: “Take a look.”

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On their latest album, the Atlanta duo paints a more intimate portrait of their city but struggles to personalize their homages. They hit their stride when they speak directly to the people.

Ghetto Gods

EarthGang dedicated Mirrorland, their major label debut, to the many sounds of Atlanta. Staging their hometown’s rich musical heritage as a wacky carnival, Olu and WowGr8 melded Battle of the Bands drumlines and Dungeon Family funk, trap bounce and Sunday service call-and-response. That tentpole approach sometimes obscured the two people running the circus, but it allowed EarthGang to both showcase their many influences and present greater Atlanta—a sprawling metropolis often portrayed as unwieldy and fractured—as a unified whole. That commitment to capturing every aspect of their homeland continues on follow-up GHETTO GODS, a portrait of Atlanta that centers the city’s inhabitants. But even within this more intimate framework, EarthGang still struggle to personalize their homages to their beloved home.
The lack of live shows at the beginning of the pandemic helped recalibrate EarthGang’s relationship to the city. They used to think of touring and repping Atlanta as the best way to support it. “But really, being back home gave us a chance to actually be there, answering the phone calls, pulling up on people, checking up on our little cousins,” Olu said in an interview last year. That heightened sense of presence guides EarthGang as they navigate a plague-stricken Atlanta. Amid the ambient desperation and uncertainty, they find a new appreciation for the quiet comforts of kin and community.

Much of GHETTO GODS spotlights EarthGang’s relatives, friends, and peers, casting them as overlooked gods. The title track pairs triumphant horns with deferential references to Olu’s mother and WowGr8’s grandfather. On “Lie to Me,” a psychedelic synth loop wafts as adrift influencers and ballers distort their means. “American Horror Story” probes the lingering impact of the Middle Passage on Black families. EarthGang’s cursory storytelling tends to make these individuals feel more like census data points than deities—especially the women, who tend to be sex objects, generic muses (“Black Pearls”), or transient voices peripheral to the music (“Jeans Interlude,” “Neezy’s Walk”). But everyone belongs.
When EarthGang speak directly to the people they aim to honor, they hit their stride. “Strong Friends” offers refuge to stalwarts who rarely get a chance to be vulnerable. “Check in on your strong friends/How you been, my nigga?/I’m here if you feel like talkin’,” WowGr8 croons over a bluesy beat, the sentiment simple yet pointed. “Eyes On Me” is just as casual, venting frustrations about rap money failing to uplift distressed friends and relatives. The spare and airy beat, reminiscent of DJ Ayo’s moody work on Polo G’s Die a Legend, gives EarthGang ample room to clear their heads and find their words.
The rapping on GHETTO GODS features less filler and empty showmanship than EarthGang’s past releases, but their writing remains anonymous. Their lyrics rarely feel as expressive as their modular flows, which swerve into breezy melodies or bouncy triplets with ease. Nor do they outwardly compete with each other. Their verses tend to be almost symmetrical in terms of length and emphasis. The two are familiar enough with songwriting best practices that their music structurally works, but as every guest rapper (except a rambling CeeLo) upstages them, it’s hard to overlook how little happens in Olu and WowGr8’s verses. Even when they rap with purpose, they fail to offer distinctive turns of phrase or convey a unique perspective, which is ironic considering their constant promotion of Atlanta as the city of a million misfits. Their love for their home is palpable, but there’s a difference between flying a flag and weaving one.


As recently as last year, So Stressed were a ferocious post-hardcore trio. Now, inspired by the contentment love brings, they make blithe, breezy, and unapologetically melodic pop music.

Pale Lemon

“Contentment has either no need of artistic expression or few resources for it,” observed the critic Clive James. “In that regard, all the great art we know of carries within its compass a guarantee that its creator is not content.” It may be a liability, then, that So Stressed seem so happy. The Sacramento rock band’s new album, Pale Lemon, is a full-throated celebration of an enduring relationship—one that’s not euphoric so much as stable, tranquil, and satisfying. Most great love songs are about wanting or losing; having means happiness, and happiness tends to write white on the page. You can hardly fault the band for enjoying healthy relationships. But making that contentment interesting is the daunting challenge this record sets out to meet.
So profound is the fulfillment expressed on Pale Lemon that it has occasioned a radical transformation of the band’s sound. As recently as last year’s Please Let Me Know, So Stressed were a ferocious, turbulent post-hardcore trio that seemed at home among the mosh pits of suburbia. Now they make pop music that is blithe, breezy, and unapologetically melodic, rejuvenated by pedal steel guitar and flourishes of kalimba. Their new album shares more of an affinity with Pavement or the Wrens than with Spazz or Dystopia; “Miniature Flag” even features a sprightly flute solo, a choice that almost veers into yacht-rock territory. This is the sound of a punk band with nothing left to scream about. So Stressed have traded in their sleeveless denim jackets for blue blazers and Hawaiian shirts.
It is a fascinating reinvention, and one rendered successful by the versatility of their songwriting. “Cream & Gold” has the pleasant, languid mood of a summer heatwave, adrift in the slow twang of electric guitar and Morgan Fox’s listless, somnambulant vocals; the brief melodica solo that swells midway through it is an inspired and lovely touch. “Very Long Cloth” offers a great deal more intensity, but its soaring back-and-forth chorus and anthemic verve push the song closer to mid-2000s indie rock than to the band’s former punk severity—it’s more buoyant enthusiasm than feral squall.
This, of course, accords with Pale Lemon’s theme of romantic harmony. One line in “Very Long Cloth” is a clear thesis: “The things that you’ve done/The things that you do /Always ensure that I love you.” A sentiment like this is difficult to quote without sounding mawkish. The affection expressed throughout the record—earnest, sincere, and unflaggingly devout—would make any lover blush, but the lyrics rarely lapse into greeting-card cliché, despite their undisguised passion. These are honest confessions of a feeling that can be hard to articulate aloud: “I’m so thankful that you are here”; “You are my home”; “I’ve never been so close to anything before”; “Right now I don’t want for anything else”; “I couldn’t be here if you weren’t here”; “I miss you when I sleep because I don’t dream.” Each of these lines comes from a different song. This is the ardor that courses through the album—and it rings utterly true.
If the contentment at the heart of Pale Lemon bristles with some other emotion, it’s fear—fear of being discontent again or, more precisely, of screwing it all up. Abiding love always bears a faint trace of danger, because if it feels that good, for that long, you become desperate to hold onto it. So Stressed understand this peril. Pale Lemon is a record of happiness fraught around the edges with anxiety: “We’re standing on thin ice,” Fox sings on “Snowshoer,” the album’s emotional climax. “I am shivering but it is nothing new.” On “Onion Paper” he lays it bare: “If I’m scared it’s because I don’t want to end up without.” That’s the thing about contentment: It’s always under threat—by time, by crisis, or by death.


A new reissue of Let It Be includes four discs of live material, demos, alternate takes, and lost mixes, shining a light on the brilliant and tumultuous process of what would become the Beatles’ final album.

Let It Be (Super Deluxe)

By 1969, the dream was ending. Since their early-’60s arrival as a mesmerizing foursome of Elvis and Everlys-inspired child savants, the Beatles had continuously and spectacularly leveled up: from chipper and prolific chart dominators in England to beloved Liverpool exports conquering America, to shaggy-haired counter-culture superstars lurking subversively in the pages of teenage glossies, to society-shifting psychedelic pioneers and avant-garde astronauts. All of it seemed ordained by magic. The run between 1963’s Please Please Me and 1968’s The Beatles (known colloquially as the White Album) remains credulity-straining in both its breadth and brilliance. But all things must pass. And by 1969, the Beatles were barely functional.
The problem was basically everything. Their fame was such that even having begged off touring three years previous, they remained far too well-known to walk comfortably down any street. They had legal issues and Apple—the utopian multimedia company they had recently founded—was quickly devolving into an untenable boondoggle. In 1967, their beloved longtime manager Brian Epstein died of an overdose, a casualty of Beatlemania’s ceaseless pressure cooker. The four-month sessions for the White Album had both tested relationships between the Fabs and emboldened each of them to pursue the possibilities of what might be accomplished alone. And yet, against what feels like common sense, the Beatles reconvened just 10 weeks later in January, intending to find some way to top themselves yet again.
For a rock band in 1969, “getting back” was all the vogue. Following Bob Dylan’s self-conscious rejection of psychedelic pageantry John Wesley Harding and the magisterial traditionalism of the Band’s first two releases, the hip move was a return to basics. Paul McCartney, the Beatles’ self-appointed problem-solver, saw in this trend an opportunity to address a creative issue while exploiting a commercial possibility. Put on notice by Dylan, the Band, and the Rolling Stones’ roots-adjacent ’68 masterpiece Beggars Banquet, McCartney suggested they try their own hand at a stripped-down, informal approach, one that would reconnect them musically to one another and re-establish their working man’s band bona fides.
It wasn’t a horrible idea, but it wasn’t quite feasible. The Beatles were simply too massive to do anything on a remotely small scale and soon enough, the project had morphed into a documentary that was to precede their first live performance in three years. Serious consideration was given to holding the concert in the ruins of a Roman amphitheater in Tunisia—not exactly what you’d call modest. They finally settled on the more practical but still strenuous plan of three weeks of filmed rehearsals and then a concert on the rooftop of Apple Corps at 3 Savile Row in London. Even without the trip to Africa, the brief was still unreasonable: Write and record a new album in front of rolling cameras and then get your live chops up to speed for a performance to be viewed by millions. It turned out to be the first time that they were not completely up to the challenge.
Sessions commenced at the Twickenham Studios soundstage in southwest London, a drafty and vibeless space, not at all like cozy Abbey Road, where nearly all their greatest recordings had taken place. The demands of the movie shoot required the band to convene at a 10 a.m. call time, disrupting the conventional evening-to-early-morning flow of their process. Lateness was a persistent issue. John Lennon, in particular, seemed to be shocked to learn that such a thing as 10 a.m. even existed.
The days at Twickenham were fraught and not particularly creative by their established standards. The bickering that had become a feature of recent sessions reached new levels of hostility. George Harrison needled McCartney about his lack of spontaneity. Paul complained about everyone’s level of preparation. Ringo couldn’t finish “Octopus’s Garden.” If the idea was to set aside grievances and establish a new esprit-de-corps, then the environment could scarcely have been less ideal. The sessions eventually migrated to the more pacific setting of their own studio at Apple Headquarters. Slowly the band began to find their way, and an LP began to take shape. All of this and more is covered in forensic detail on the new five-disc reissue of Let It Be with the (Super Deluxe) appendage, an accompaniment to Peter Jackson’s forthcoming six-hour re-imagining of the original documentary.
The tumultuous aftermath of the Let It Be sessions is reflected in the byzantine miasma of versions of the album which emerged, and continue to emerge. To wit: The group initially turned over dozens of hours of recorded material to engineer Glyn Johns, tasking him with separating the wheat from the chaff and providing a mix suitable for release. The results were deemed unsatisfactory by Lennon, Harrison, and Starr, who outvoted McCartney and turned the tapes over to Phil Spector to remix. Spector gave many of the songs the maximalist treatment for which he was renowned. McCartney hated it, but that was the version that was first released to the public in 1970. McCartney eventually won the argument, in a sense, shepherding to market the de-Spectorized Let It Be… Naked edition in 2003. This is where things more or less stood until the new box set, which now includes a third mix of the LP, helmed by George Martin’s son Giles, and a separate disc restoring the 1969 Glyn Johns mix that the band initially rejected. Make of it what you will, but the very notion that no one can seemingly figure out what Let It Be should sound like to this day is important for understanding just how confused the band was in the moment. Constant tinkering of this sort with Revolver or Rubber Soul would be tantamount to a desecration.
The new Giles Martin mix makes for an interesting hybrid of the original Phil Spector and Let It Be… Naked versions. Notably, Martin makes the decision to restore Spector’s heavily orchestral treatment of “The Long and Winding Road,” and the edit seems like the correct one: It’s a track that always worked better as show tune camp than a philosophical cudgel. Other changes like the aggressively close-mic’d mix of “Across the Universe” provide no improvement over the raft of existing versions. The truth about the 2021 manifestation of Let It Be is that Martin and his engineer Sam Okell haven’t really cracked the code either. It still feels like the awkward, intermittently exciting, sometimes deeply-moving collection of misfit toys it has always been.
The original Glyn Johns mixes are certainly rough and ready, so much so that you can understand the group’s nervousness about releasing them. Parts of it, like “Medley,” sound like a rag-tag forerunner to Harry Nilsson’s 1974 Lennon-produced freakout Pussy Cats. An early take of “Teddy Boy,” which would later surface on McCartney’s self-titled 1970 solo debut comes across as anarchic and stoned as Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes. Johns clearly had a weirder idea in mind for what Let It Be might have been, and his original mixes make a persuasive case for his vision. Distracted, exhausted, and locked in contretemps by the time they finally issued the LP, the Beatles had seemingly forgotten what they were even trying to do in the first place.
Plagued by uncertainty, they delayed the release of the album and opted instead to start an entirely different one, recording Abbey Road in February 1969, only three weeks after sessions for Let It Be concluded. The culminating rooftop concert was a fraught bit of business. As sound and lighting preparations were being made for the afternoon of January 30th, the band wasn’t even certain they would go through with it. George was in a mood and Ringo was having trouble seeing why it all mattered. Finally, John Lennon, asserting himself as bandleader for perhaps the final time, had the last word: “Oh fuck—let’s do it.” They plowed through 42 minutes of takes until the cops showed up and issued a noise ordinance. It was slapdash and strangely perfect. The first rooftop performance of “Don’t Let Me Down,” included on disc two of the new box set, ranks on a short list of the best things the band ever recorded.
So much of the material included on the extra discs—the rehearsals, the outtakes, and the jams—is uncomfortable and fascinating. You see and hear their future together and then you feel it slipping away. There’s a moving take on Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass” which would become the title track of his classic solo debut, after it had been deemed unworthy of being on a Beatles release. No wonder he was frustrated. Paul walks us through the soon-to-be Abbey Road standards “Oh! Darling” and “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” while John previews the stand-up routine polemic “Gimme Some Truth,” which wouldn’t emerge until 1971’s Imagine LP. Even Ringo painfully efforts his way through a touchingly tentative “Octopus’s Garden.”
In the years that followed, the Beatles would splinter viscerally while never quite being able to quit one another. Ringo played on All Things Must Pass and Lennon’s epochal solo debut, Plastic Ono Band. Paul and John nurtured a public animus that provided a tissue-thin veneer over what was plainly the hurt feelings of two estranged siblings. The finely-rendered Abbey Road LP allowed the group to put the dream of the Beatles to bed with a fan-service-worthy flourish. Let It Be was just before all that, when the emotions and the tunes were too raw to gloss over.

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Newly reissued by Drag City, three albums from the early ’90s capture the Japanese psych titans at their most mystical.

Ghost: Ghost / Second Time Around / Temple Stone

Japan’s Ghost have always seemed more like an arcane religious sect than a traditional band. In the 1980s, they avoided traditional rock clubs, performing instead in fields, ruins, woods, caves, and temples. Since they sidled into Western consciousness via their self-titled debut album on Hideo Ikeezumi’s P.S.F. label in 1990, Ghost have built a discography rife with solemn psychedelia, opiated folk rock, and confounding improv.
Newly reissued by Drag City, their first three albums—the self-titled debut LP, 1992’s Second Time Around, and the 1994 live document Temple Stone, all originally recorded for P.S.F.—capture the group at its purest and most mysterious, like a Japanese analogue of Popol Vuh. In a 2004 interview, lead singer/guitarist/banjoist Masaki Batoh observed that Ghost’s creativity stems from unknowable origins: “Music falls from highest sphere. We don't make music. It's born naturally.”
Ghost was my gateway into the splendors of Japanese psychedelia. The image on the cover captures the enigmatic pastoral air permeating the album: Batoh—long-haired, rail-thin, and behatted— and the rest of the band pose on a grassy, mist-shrouded hill before massive speakers, ancient sculptures, or perhaps both. Opening track “Sun Is Tangging” begins with a triangle tap and shaken shells before a horrifying scream and rumbling drums puncture the calm. This enlightening kick in the ear eventually gives way to a languid folkadelic sway, with Batoh cooing inscrutable lyrics (“Sea Mous melt and sleep/While my evil eye’s closed/Think about your rough land/All the bitch and milk snow, pun is dry”). His cyclical acoustic guitar riff, Noriaki Hagiya’s mournful oboe, and Mu Krsna’s conga slaps cohere into a hypnotic fantasia. Batoh proves an inelegant crooner who often sounds tipsy, his accented English hard to decipher, but that only adds to Ghost’s charm.
Ghost’s salubrious infatuation with Can surfaces in “Guru in the Echo,” whose chunky, Jaki Liebezeit-esque tom-tom tattoos lead into a grandiloquent strain of garage rock bearing traces of the Hombres’ “Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out).” Hearing Ghost bust out of their dominant restrained mode is exhilarating. The three songs bearing “Moungod” in their titles carry a whiff of ominous ritual—replete with monk-ish chants and rickety hand percussion—and reveal Ghost’s kinship with nomadic improv ensemble Taj-Mahal Travellers.
But the real meat of Ghost resides in the ballads—which distinguished the band from most of their P.S.F. comrades, who favored overwhelmingly distorted power chords and swift tempos. The wispy “I’ve Been Flying,” a song of gentle escapism, floats on Batoh’s acoustic guitar and featherlight vocals reminiscent of Nick Drake. One of Ghost’s most moving and inventive songs, “Ballad of Summer Rounder” balances between elegance and shambles until the drums and bass propel the piece into a defiant work of empowerment. After a poignant, fragile flute solo by Taishi Takizawa, the track morphs into a chaotic, Faust-ian rock entanglement. On the lacily beautiful “Rakshu,” the mood is gloriously devotional; Hagiya’s valedictory oboe part sends the listener to the exit feeling shaken to the core.
Ghost expanded their timbral palette on Second Time Around, adding Celtic harp, lute, vibraphone, and bouzouki to the group’s arsenal. The predominant style is folk rock that yearns for a mythical, unspoiled past, but without the baggage of sentimentality. On the title track, Ghost locate the golden mean between starkly menacing and triumphantly majestic, while the band makes intimacy sound vast on “A Day of the Stoned Sky in the Union Zoo,” where Ogino’s heroic recorder solo moves with plumed-serpent aplomb. “Awake From a Muddle” is a dramatic, flute-powered ballad with obliquely beautiful acoustic plucking. As often happens with Ghost in this era, the song revs into a higher gear and ascends the mountain with puffed-out chest. On mantric rocker “Orange Sunshine,” Ghost, flaring into prog-rock pugnacity, achieve the rare feat of making acoustic guitars sound heavy and ominous. Second Time Around peaks on “Forthcoming From the Inside.” After a trance-inducing acoustic guitar and flute intro, the track jump-cuts to an urgent rhythmic thrust, thanks to Iwao Yamazaki’s vigorous tom bumps; think Can’s “Vitamin C,” but not as funky. One wishes that Ghost ventured into this hard rhythmic-attack mode more often, as it contrasts nicely with their folkier inclinations.
Temple Stone contains spiritualized iterations of songs from Ghost’s first two LPs, recorded in the Seiryu Temple and Waseda Salvation Church. The production is remarkably vivid, given where the recordings were made. The songs vibrate with more intensity than in their album versions, as if performing in sacred zones had elevated the members’ chops. The traditional “Blood Red River” is a revelation, its fractured blues and noisy free-jazz explosions evoking a wracked combo of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and the Red Crayola’s free-form freakouts. A lot of live records come off as redundant, but Temple Stone renders Ghost’s early, magisterial material in boldfaced italics.
Following Temple Stone, Ghost transformed into a slightly more conventional rock group (they even did a Rolling Stones cover), adding White Heaven guitarist Michio Kurihara and developing a facility for prog rock and more overtly political stances, as exemplified by song titles such as “Change the World” and “Tune In, Turn On, Free Tibet.” Collaborations with Magic Hour and Damon & Naomi showed that Ghost could adapt to blown-out and hushed Western indie-rock protocols, respectively. But as interesting as those excursions are, Ghost created their most distinctive and enduring music on these first three albums.


The Sheffield duo's sophomore album dials down its predecessor's twee, hyper-romantic delight in favor of songs that emphasize rhythm and atmosphere, with lyrics confronting more emotionally complicated subject matter. But that's not the most drastic shift.

Paradise

Slow Club's first album, Yeah So, was a twee, hyper-romantic delight, full of charming little indie folk songs ideally suited to mix tapes and teen television soundtracks. The Sheffield, England duo could have kept going in that direction indefinitely with potentially great commercial rewards, but instead they've opted to make a second album, Paradise, which dials down their perky sweetness and emphasizes rhythm and atmosphere with lyrics confronting more emotionally complicated subject matter.
This isn't to say that Slow Club have become unrecognizable. One of the most impressive things about Paradise is the way the band have retained so much of their character while shifting their tone considerably. A few of the songs here-- the rollicking "Where I'm Waking" and the wistful "Hackney Marsh"-- would have made sense on Yeah So, but for the most part, the melodic and lyrical sensibility of that record has been filtered through a different set of influences. There is still a sweetness to their sound, but it's balanced out with a range of more difficult emotions and a darker tonal palette.
The most drastic difference between Yeah So and Paradise is that Charles Watson and Rebecca Taylor have largely abandoned close harmonies. Instead, Taylor has asserted herself as the dominant vocalist, with her voice taking the lead on nearly every track, while Watson provides complementary harmonies or focuses on his guitar. This was a brilliant decision on their part. Watson has a pleasant tenor, but Taylor's voice is much more colorful and expressive. Though she supplied the high points of previous singles "Trophy Room" and "Giving Up on Love", her vocal performances through Paradise are a revelation: Her phrasing is consistently thoughtful and surprising, full of subtle cues that invest her straightforward lyrics with remarkable depth much in the same way a great actress can draw rich character detail out of a threadbare script.
Taylor's best performances-- and not coincidentally, Paradise's two best songs-- take her voice in very different directions.  The ballad "You, Earth, or Ash" is so stark and delicate that her voice often seems naked, barely accompanied by the minimal plucking of Watson's guitar. She sounds wounded and fragile, but her tone is very adult and dignified; she gracefully transitions from moments of self-assured beauty to sounding as though she could spontaneously break down into tears. She is more girlish on "Two Cousins", the set's percussion-heavy opener, leaning hard on her upper register and reaching up further still to underscore particularly anguished lines. The song, about a pair of estranged family members, cycles through two choruses-- the first one carried by a trebly, diagonal synthesizer part and the second more focused on her voice, which rings out with heart-breaking clarity as she sings the tune's gutting conclusion: "I look into your eyes/ You don't know who I am."
In both songs, and throughout Paradise, Slow Club display remarkable skill in tugging at heartstrings, but they do it without being particularly manipulative or overly saccharine. Led along by Taylor's confident voice, the duo has evolved from being among the best of an indie pop field overcrowded with cutesy duos to carving out a distinct niche for itself that opens up further opportunities for creative growth.


Over the past decade, the Melbourne group’s music has grown lighter, gentler, and more inviting with every release. Here, they trade their minimal-wave roots for unexpected forays into gothic country.

Rhinestones

Melbourne’s HTRK (pronounced “Hate Rock”) have spent a decade ruminating in the shadows of loss. After the deaths of mentor, producer, and Birthday Party member Rowland S. Howard, in 2009, and their founding bassist, Sean Stewart, in 2010, the surviving duo reconfigured its industrial no-wave detachment into an intimate blend of elegiac synth music, slowcore rhythms, and flushed-cheek vocals. Still throbbing with sadness, their dramatically layered sound has grown lighter, gentler, and more inviting with each release. It’s now so sparse, you could almost hear a pin drop amid the amplifier hum. On Rhinestones, HTRK peel back even more layers, further revealing the fragile heart at the center of their music. Vocalist Jonnine Standish’s wispy poetry drapes over ephemeral textures as if she’s whispering a devastating secret in the form of a lullaby. The album plays like a heartbreaking country ballad’s matte-black underside, capturing the desperate solitude of a freshly bruised heart.
Standish and guitarist Nigel Yang resemble a subterranean Everything But the Girl, with Standish patiently spilling gorgeous vocal half-hooks over minimal acoustic guitar, electric delay, and dimly lit textures. Opener “Kiss Kiss and Rhinestones” stirs its country tropes into a blurred-out dream state. Standish’s peculiar poetry draws us in closer as she plays the word “glitter” two ways: “I can make you glitter/I can make you feel glitter than this/Kiss kiss and rhinestones/I’m covered in kisses/From head to toe,” she coos over dewy acoustic strumming. The music recalls the goth-country twang of Townes Van Zandt, decorated with steel-string flourishes that sound like Lindsey Buckingham hammer-and-pulling himself to sleep. Using barely audible synth and vocal layering, they craft an entire universe of sound while simultaneously capturing the feeling of being completely alone in a dark, empty room. The track’s sophisticated subtlety merges with its lo-fi desolation, vivid textures echoing off the walls. HTRK’s music is deceptively prickly; its glittering gemstones adorn deeper emotional wounds.
The album sequences its heavy-hearted vignettes over a brisk 27 minutes that weigh heavier than the sum of their parts, as Standish and Yang soundtrack the confusion of being drawn to that which may eventually cause you harm, or perhaps already has. The songs’ tender tones and blurred edges capture both sensual intimacy and lurking violence. “Valentina” features blossoming acoustic fingerpicking paired with murky electric guitar swells as Standish recalls, “As her petals fall on my bed/A familiar thorn in my hand/Can you remove it from my finger?” The song neatly describes the record’s fundamental ambivalence, caught between the allure of enigmatic beauty and the discomfort of emotional turmoil.
Rhinestones is infatuated with ennui’s disorienting dazzle, and the tragic discovery of what lies behind its knotty, ornamental gates. On “Fast Friends,” Standish comes to terms with the catalytic spark of an instant bond with a new, emotionally unstable friend: “What a house on fire/Crossed electric wire/A bat out of hell/With so many meltdowns/Just makes you seem interesting.” That revelation captures the spirit of the entire record. Rhinestones evokes the mystifying chaos of yearning to know the unknowable and the fool’s errand of trying to love the unlovable. Though it might first seem a worthy, almost admirable task, the duo suggests, in the end, you only wind up breaking your own heart.

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The original David Bowie hits compilation tells the story of Bowie's metamorphosis from quizzical folkie to a conquering colossus, and is partially responsible for cementing his stardom.

Changesonebowie

It's easy enough to think there's no need for a reissue of Changesonebowie, the original David Bowie hits compilation, in 2016. In the 40 years years following its initial 1976 release, it has effectively been written out of Bowie's active discography, banished from the catalog after a rush-released 1984 CD. Changesbowie, a 1990 revision designed for compact disc, swapped out the original hit version of  “Fame” for a remix but otherwise presented a thorough overview of Bowie's hit-making peak, setting the stage for a flood of digital-era compilations that reworked the same territory. The most recent of these was the shape-shifting 2014 set Nothing Has Changed but 2002's double-disc Best of Bowie is something of a standard bearer, offering 39 hits, including all 11 songs from Changesonebowie. All these compilations have had the effect of making the original greatest hits feel antiquated: it would seem an album made redundant by history.
And, yet, Changesonebowie is an important record in the arc of David Bowie's career—maybe not on the level of The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders From Mars or Low, but it isn't a stretch to say that the album is partially responsible for cementing Bowie's stardom. When Changesonebowie first appeared in May of 1976, Bowie was four years removed from his Ziggy Stardust-fueled UK breakthrough, but he had only recently cracked the U.S. market, with “Fame” hitting number one in 1975. He'd remain in the Billboard Top 10 with Young Americans and Station to Station and, this, the compilation that closed the curtain on the first act of his career.
Bowie would soon decamp to Berlin to reinvent himself as an electronic art-rocker, but Changesonebowie isn't especially interested in his progressive side. Some freakiness lies on its margins—the interstellar folk of “Space Oddity,” the coy sexuality of the non-LP single “John, I'm Only Dancing”—but the anchors here are the heavy rockers: “Ziggy Stardust” and “Suffragette City,” “The Jean Genie,” “Diamond Dogs” and “Rebel Rebel.” Riffs rule all, so loud and hooky they obscure whatever faint hint of camp there may lay underneath Mick Ronson's guitars. Those suggestions of a stranger world—all the allusions to aliens, tramps and zombies—are faint transmissions from the depths of the individual albums, but what's here is Bowie at his simplest. This is quite deliberate. He chose the tracks for Changesonebowie, bypassing actual British hits while elevating “Ziggy Stardust” and “Suffragette City” into the canon by their mere inclusion.
That's because Changesonebowie turned into a major hit upon its release. It is one of the handful of David Bowie albums to be certified as Platinum in the U.S.—it earned that distinction in 1981, five years after it went gold upon its initial release—an honor Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Station to Station, Low, and “Heroes**” all missed. Odds are Changesonebowie would be the one Bowie album that you'd find in a record collection in the '70s and early '80s, and it was designed to be that way. It was meant to be cool, stylish and accessible—as glamorous as the Tom Kelley portrait on the cover—which means Changesonebowie deliberately bypasses stranger elements. Absences are abundant, some of them puzzling from the vantage of 2016. “Starman,” his 1972 breakthrough, is absent, as are “Drive-In Saturday,” “Life On Mars?” and “Sorrow,” all singles that peaked at three on the British charts; the Top 10 “Knock On Wood” from 1974's David Live is MIA, too. Nothing from Pin Ups is here, nor is there anything from The Man Who Sold The World, not even the title track which is a modern-day standard thanks to Nirvana's MTV Unplugged In New York rendition in 1994.
Yet, as this economical compilation plays, none of these tunes are missed. There's an elegance to the structure of Changesonebowie, with its near chronological sequencing lending the album a narrative: it is the story of Bowie's metamorphosis from a quizzical folkie to a conquering colossus. As Changesonebowie progresses, the music expands: the brawny glam turns ornate on the second side and then slides into soul, with the funky rhythms supplying an artful ascendance. “Golden Years” ends the compilation on a note of triumph: it plays as a celebration of the self-reinvention showcased on Changesonebowie.
This moment of triumph didn't last long. He traded celebrity for art in 1977, throwing himself off the populist path Changesonebowie carves. But the record itself endured, as records do. Audiences who never found much patience of the cubist synths and uneasy aural pools of the Berlin years would find solace with the songs on Changesonebowie, whether they were heard on this old LP, a new hits collection or, most likely, on the classic rock radio that embraced these songs for the very reason they were included on the comp in the first place: these are the tracks that present Bowie at his hardest and straightest. Collected, they provide a summation of his peak as a rock star and, in some ways, remain an excellent introduction to his work: it doesn't tell you everything you need to know, but it captures Bowie's essence and repackages it as a roaring good time. That's reason enough for Changesonebowie to be back in circulation.


On his fourth album for the Blue Note label, James deftly underlines jazz's flexibility in relation to new pop trends, the way Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis did in the past.

Love In a Time of Madness

Modern jazz fans have a right to feel possessive about the singer José James. In the last decade, he’s been one of the suavest vocal improvisers on the scene. His 2015 album devoted to songs made popular by Billie Holiday, Yesterday I Had the Blues, sounded to me like the most soulful tribute to come out during Lady Day’s centennial.
Steeped as he is in jazz, James has also shown a restlessness with strict genre categorization. He’s described his love of funk, R&B and hip-hop in interviews. And when Blue Note announced his new album, the label’s press release bore a striking quote from the artist: “I could make jazz albums the rest of my life, but I want to reach people, man. I like Jamie xx as much as I like Miles Davis, you know?”
You could practically hear the well-drilled corps of Jazz Defenders grinding their teeth in response. But on this new record, James doesn't discard his old skill set. He’s merely doing his part to underline the music’s flexibility in relation to new pop trends—much as Louis Armstrong and Davis himself did in decades past. (Clive Davis once wrote that Davis asked Columbia to stop labeling him as a “jazz man.”)
James knows all about this history. And so does Blue Note. So while there are indeed trap-music snares in a few songs on Love in a Time of Madness, there are also plenty of James’ more typical textures. On opening track “Always There,” a stark synth line presents a useful contrast with the light-touch smoothness of James’s baritone. During “Closer,” he responds to a looped, low-pitch sample by cutting back on melodic filigree—save for a brief escape, on the line “show you I can be the only one.” In the context of the song, it’s a standard line about romantic prowess. At the level of arrangement, it reminds the listener that James has more to offer when singing over a rhythmic grid.
If you’re dead cold to trap beats or the dolorous mood of the Weeknd’s R&B, the subtle but real changes James works on these styles won’t be radical enough to win your affection. But there might be something else for you here, since the core strength of Love in a Time of Madness is its range of dance-pop appreciation. In the middle of the record, James includes a trio of songs that sound like an EP Prince could have produced for the Time in the early ’80s. Uptempo standout “Live Your Fantasy” contains call-and-response funk and the kind of synth chords Jamie Starr snatched from earlier waves of jazz fusion. “To Be With You” is the sultry ballad. And on “Ladies Man,” James flashes his newly drilled falsetto voice. Hewing this close to the Purple Formula is as risky as anything else James tries on the album, but he executes the play.
There are a couple of songs that simply assist us in identifying this set as a 21st-century pop-crossover record on Blue Note. “Remember Our Love” looks at a failed romance, and counsels sweetness. The downtempo “Let It Fall” has just a hint of social commentary, but stays tranquil. These are the most easily forgotten tracks. James initially envisioned Love as a double-album set, in which social themes could alternate with intimate ones. Even without the protest music, the 12-song version can sound as though caught between imperatives: eager to test the boundaries of a contemporary pop and jazz, but not ambitious enough in scale to do all the work the singer can envision. Still, he’s clearly got the range to make a “big statement” record seem plausible. If he can put everything together, he’ll have more at his disposal than most singers in any tradition.


Islands' Nick Thorburn teams with L.A. hip-hop producer Daddy Kev for his third record of the year, following his primary band's sophomore effort and the debut of folk duo Human Highway. Busdriver guests, while Flying Lotus and Dntel provide remixes.

Reefer

After five years and as many bands, we know two things for certain about Nick Thorburn: 1) Dude likes to stay busy, and 2) He loves islands. It is in service of both of those quirks that he presents his latest project, Reefer, a partnership with L.A. hip-hop producer Daddy Kev that resulted in a Maui-created, self-titled album. In a year in which Thorburn has already released two albums-- Islands' mediocre sophomore effort and the middling debut of folk duo Human Highway-- one must wonder if the prolific songwriter is spreading himself too thin. But Daddy Kev, who adds a sense of play with his cut-and-paste samples and beat-heavy production, and Hawaii, with its hula melodies and lush vacation living, prove to be an inspiring collaborator and muse, respectively.
Despite Daddy Kev's pedigree, however, Reefer isn't an obvious hip-hop collection; it is more informed by its Polynesian birthplace than a street-wise aesthetic. After all, practically the first word spoken on this collection is "aloha." But despite oozing Don Ho-worthy ukuleles and steel guitar, the album does have one big hip-hop moment: "Crony Island", which, like Island's "Where There's a Will There's a Whalebone", uses Busdriver's flow and some stuttering, heavy beats to infuse jagged edges and a sense of urgency into these languid tropical sounds. Daddy Kev also adds three "interludes" that act like skits on a rap album, breaking up the songs with moments of spoken-word samples set to easy ukulele strums and fuzzy effects.
The rest of the album is just four original songs of Thorburn's whispery warble, minor-key melodies, and cymbal-heavy beats that explore the dark side of tropical getaways-- what, you expected sunny songs from a guy with lyrical obsessions with ghosts and bones?-- and a cover of "Blue Moon" that's spun out of a hollow drum machine beat, ambient twinkles, and Thorburn's surprisingly rich baritone croon. Tracks bleed into one another using the sounds of the surf as a guide, and because crashing waves and dreamy ukulele noodling tie together the songs and interludes, Reefer feels like one long track, a cohesive statement instead of nine separate compositions.
The collection ends with two remixes, which, unfortunately, feel tacked on (perhaps a tactic to keep the short album from being simply an EP?). And though they are nowhere near as good as any of the originals, they at least come from producrtion geniuses Flying Lotus and Dntel. The latter's take on "Hit and Run" (the better of the two) bleeds the track of its slightly sinister organ and melancholic guitar and, instead, leaves a spare, echo-laden shell in their place. And with a robotronic effect added to Thorburn's vocals amidst such a cavernous arrangement, the song suddenly becomes more remote and lonely. It may not be a pleasant listen, but it is an affecting one. "Let It Go", however, which is marked by breezy ukulele and the prettiest, warmest chorus of the album, is, in Flying Lotus' hands, simply a wash of glitchy, ticking-time-bomb beats, spacey videogame effects, and an overall clinical vibe. With barely any vocals or semblance of melody, it bears no resemblance to Reefer's version-- which is perhaps the best song on the album-- but though disappointing, it is an intriguing experiment.
Despite it all, Reefer is Thorburn's best album of the year, and it is so successful because it feels tossed off, like he's not trying so hard. Maybe the islands-obsessed Islands frontman should take more vacations. Although judging from how often the guy likes to work, that's probably unlikely.


Six albums deep into their career, Super Furry Animals have world-built an entire mythology of Welsh mysticism, Beach Boys homages ...

Phantom Power

Six albums deep into their career, Super Furry Animals have world-built an entire mythology of Welsh mysticism, Beach Boys homages, and Pete Fowler's bubbly cartoons to such a point that slipping into Phantom Power comes as a comfortable, pleasant exercise. To some, comfortable may counted as a weakness-- for those who wear their bands like fashion, balling up inside Super Furry Animals' farmer-spun wool sweater won't compare to the Issey Miyake-esque bands peacocking down the runway in a loose web of spangles, layers of veneer, and sprigs of feathers. SFA are past forcing outwardly cool, past design and into craft. This is a warm album you'll want to hang in your closet for a damp day.
The third interior panel inside Phantom Power's liner notes shows a Fowler image of a tired, collapsing horse in burnt oranges and blues. It's a striking tribute to the cover of the Beach Boys' overlooked masterpiece Surf's Up; instead of the slumping Geronimo, a spectral wisp winds around the mare. Though Phantom Power takes its title from the Bush-trimming chrome-plated stomper "Out of Control"-- in reference to both a stormy zeitgeist and the U.S. leader's simultaneously world-threatening and vaporous personality-- it could just as easily reflect the spirits of American legends The Byrds and the Beach Boys which charge the album. This dichotomy is what makes the album so fascinating-- Super Furry Animals rail against the "gulf of misery" created by America (snowballing seas "painted red by bleeding army"), yet more than ever invest their efforts in honey-dipped California harmonies, Mississippi mud slide-guitars, and snapping Stax drumming. The record is living testament that our nation's greatest contribution to the world will be our music.
Super Furry Animals never settle into one mood here, and Phantom Power sees the down-to-earth Welsh band moving away from genre-hopping and rough juxtapositions, and beginning to blend their influences into an evenly spread melange that simply sounds like a highly evolved pop band. The final third recalls their wildest forays into world and electronic music, without sounding apart from the whole. "Valet Parking" runs bossa nova down an open autobahn. "The Undefeated" steals enough ketamine to finish off that Surf's Up horse, melts down, and gets crunk with hillbillies in the lost Black Ark studio before bursting with horns and, literally, machine guns. Before long, bouncing globes of synth have sprung into sweeping strings on the stunning closer, "Slow Life", before segueing into swirling technopop and back again.
But back to the beginning: "Liberty Belle" sees Gruff Rhys topping himself in pure songwriting with a simply lovely, brilliant song about, well, everything that's happening right now. The lyrics work so wonderfully in repeating geographic and avian themes, as Rhys sees birds' fight-or-flight defense mechanisms in cities around the world-- like seagulls suddenly taking to the sky in Abu Dabai-- as a warning cry to mounting global trouble. After repeatedly telling us we're "drowning in [our] oil wells," Rhys relates that imagery of birds fleeing trees in danger to ashes rising in New York City, past "the grimy clouds above New Jersey, past the kids who smoke like chimneys, to the sea." It's the most colorful, tragic, witty, and beautiful passage written about 9/11. In typical SFA fashion the next song is called, rather jokingly, "Sex, War, and Robots".
Upon first listen, "Venus & Serena" sounded like a ballad drawn from the resentment of two sisters forced by a conniving father from a young age to enter competitive tennis. After reading the liner notes, it turns out to be about a boy raised by wolves whose two closest friends were pet turtles. Go figure. But this is what makes Super Furry Animals so enjoyable-- you never get what you expect, and even then the results are layered musically, emotionally, and lyrically. This is the most richly melodic, inviting album they've recorded.
Gruff Rhys' voice doesn't have that to-the-back-of-the-arena power that so many angstful singers seem to rely on, which pushes him into more rewarding harmonies and melody, much like Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman, who were never going to be confused with Sam Cooke, but still managed to write "Artificial Energy" and "Get to You". Like the Beach Boys, The Byrds were an ideal collective. And with other members singing on "Sex, War, and Robots" and the b-side "Blue Fruit", Super Furry Animals sound that way more than ever. In case you still doubt the connection, The Notorious Byrd Brothers, to which Phantom Power best compares, also features a horse on the cover.
The mythos of the American West remains a potent signifier for nostalgia, hardship, and bloodshed. Forty years ago this was best exhumed with cowboy iconography. These days it can be done musically through the two ultimate American West pop bands, and it's what Super Furry Animals are after. If Phantom Power sounds like a tame record to your ears in comparison to the Furries' past extroverted wackiness, dig between the mesas to find the bones, blood, and booze.


Art Angels is Claire Boucher's fourth record as Grimes and her most audacious yet: a gilded coffin nail to outmoded arguments that women in pop are mere frames for male producers' talents. These 14 tracks articulate a pop vision that is incontrovertibly hers, inviting the wider world in.

Art Angels

"I'll never be your dream girl," sings Claire Boucher on "Butterfly", the final song on Art Angels, her most audacious album to date. Perhaps she's just being coy, because for many she is exactly that. In the age of the female pop auteur, Boucher's work as Grimes is a glorious addition to the canon, someone who beckons us to the dancefloor with big ideas and bigger beats, and resists simplistic notions of who she can be on a record or a stage. Art Angels is a gilded coffin nail to outmoded sexist arguments that women in pop are constructed products, a mere frame for male producers' talents—that because their music is immaculate, they are somehow not authentic. These 14 tracks are evidence of Boucher's labor and an articulation of a pop vision that is incontrovertibly hers, inviting the wider world in.
Grimes shows that Boucher is the ultimate fangirl study: a D.I.Y. musician whose love of Mariah, Katy Perry, and K-pop has expanded her palette, driven by her fascination with the possibilities of the synthetic and unreal, and ultimately given wings to Art Angels. Here, she closes the gap between the pop she's idolized and the pop she is capable of. Boucher has claimed that the record has two halves, and indeed, the songs line up most easily into beginning- and end-of-the-night dancefloor jams. The former is exemplified by the bright, anxious "Kill V. Maim", with its mocking cheerleader chant over blown-out beats and Boucher working both ends of her register in a propulsive celebration of vocal fry.
Same for "Flesh Without Blood", which is the sweetest fuck-off of 2015, one that highlights that there is much more to Boucher's voice than Visions ever had a chance to reveal. The song is Boucher eating the lunch that Miley packed, may it be #blessed with infinite stadium-EDM remixes. Post-Art Angels, it's hard to imagine anyone will reject a Boucher-penned cut: This is an album, but it's also a resume, and someone who made "California" could certainly be making crossover hits for any marquee Nashville name, while "Easily" suggests that Kesha co-writes should be in Boucher's future.
The late-night closers and their arrangements are where Boucher shows her mastery and discipline as a producer. "Realiti", "Venus Fly" with Janelle Monáe, and "Butterfly" give her a new set of peers: Sure, she's there with collaborator Monáe and Annie Clark as an auteur, but purely as a pop producer she's as deft and clever as anyone we consider a master of Top 40 craft—be it Greg Kurstin or Diplo. The songs are graced with small details: curious skeets of beats, buried samples that only appear once, toxically cute '90s pop guitar. The songs build in unexpected ways, but explode and gratify in the way we hope pop always will. "Butterfly" is a let-tonight-last-forever mutant bruiser with roiling sub-bass, the chorus's side-chained pulse making it like an uncanny valley version of Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out of My Head".
All of this might seem as if Boucher has fashioned a whole-cloth reinvention and is gunning for the Top 40, but neither of these things feel true. Art Angels is a natural progression from Visions; if you strained out some of the processing and murk of the latter, you would find these structures lurking. Boucher's voice is recognizable and familiar, but it's bigger and has more range and depth than on "Oblivion". This album foregrounds her, samples her, piles tracks of her half a dozen high to form melodies and countermelodies.
One of the most notable and striking differences between Art Angels and its Top 40 kin is that these are not love songs. The album is an epic holiday buffet of tendentious feminist fuck-off, with second helpings for anonymous commenters and music industry blood-suckers. Her conflicted, vertiginous relationship with the fast fame that followed Visions seems to have led her to a place of DGAF liberation. Some songs, like "Kill V. Maim", course with a thrilling rage, even a casual misandry. ("I'm only a man/ I do what I can," she sings on the hook). Yet, what's most exciting within Art Angels is the sheer will and fearlessness of Boucher's fight to be heard and seen on her own terms. She's not a human Tumblr, as we called her (somewhat humiliatingly) in 2012; she's a human zeitgeist, redrawing all the binaries and boundaries by which we define pop music and forcing us to come along.


Adam Levine’s band return for their sixth album of smooth, professional, antiseptic soft-rock, which somehow also features Kendrick Lamar, Future, and A$AP Rocky.

Red Pill Blues

Adam Levine’s voice is one of the most benignly ubiquitous sounds in pop. It is air-conditioning, it is tap water, it is a thermostat set to 72 degrees. It’s coming, right now, from behind that potted plant over there. It doesn’t even belong to Levine’s throat alone—it is a sine wave that has also been loaned out to Akon, to Bruno Mars, to Nico & Vinz. It’s a voice that can sound vaguely like the Police, vaguely like Hall & Oates, or vaguely a young Michael Jackson. On 2012’s “One More Night,” it sounded vaguely like Rihanna. Forget his role as actual judge of singers—his voice has been its own franchise for years, rebooting itself year after year.
The fact that there is a band behind Levine, with lineup largely intact and original members miraculously unfired is a fact that seems to surprise even the band’s fans (they call themselves “Marooners.”) Here’s a fun test:  Google “Maroon 5 members” and behold just how many results focus on the fact that yes, the band does have other members. It’s hard to blame these poor Marooners. Pulling my headphones off in the coffee shop where I was listening to this album, I discovered the same Maroon 5 single playing quietly over the system that I had just finished listening to. They are a piece of our built environment, and caring about them seems like a strange philosophical test: Can you care about bathwater or halogen lamps? Do you know that Maroon 5 has recorded five previous studio albums?
They have! Their sixth, Red Pill Blues, generated a groundswell of online response insofar as people wondered if the members knew that “the red pill” is a toxic term inextricably linked to the alt-right (turns out: No, they did not know this.) The band (for the record: Levine, along with Jesse Carmichael on keys and rhythm guitars; Mickey Madden on bass; James Valentine on lead and rhythm guitar; Matt Flynn on drums; and then PJ Morton and Sam Farrar on assorted other keys, MPCs, and filigree) have always had a shrewd and easy touch with soft rock, and opener “Best 4 U” reasserts their dominance here. The keys twinkle with a hint of wry humor; the guitars are there to remind you, distantly, of the existence of guitars, little dots and blobs surrounded by starchy white silence. Levine’s voice murmurs and glints in the corners of the arrangement, and the total effect is exactly as pleasingly immaculate and numbing as all soft rock should be.
The band themselves have always been tight and professional and smooth, and they remain truly excellent at this sound. But this sound alone, regrettably, doesn’t guarantee the kind of chart success that being Maroon 5 dictates. To help scale that mountain, which gets taller every album cycle, they’ve pulled several of One Direction’s songwriters into their orbit. That includes John Ryan, a covert pop operator who has landed co-writing credits on an impressive 27 1D songs and who also loosed Jason DeRulo’s unholy “Wiggle” into the universe. He pops up multiple times on Red Pill Blues, from the spiraling wind-tunnel “whoo-oo-oo” hook of “Wait” to the finger-picked guitar of One Direction dead ringer “Bet My Heart.”
Also pulled into the tractor beam is Starrah, whose onomatopoetic hooks on songs like Jeremih’s “Pass Dat,” Kevin Gates’ “2 Phones,” and Katy Perry’s “Swish Swish” pop up here on “Girls Like You” and “What Lovers Do.” Everything and everyone that pops up on a Maroon 5 album sounds somewhat leached of their essence, though—SZA duets with Levine on “What Lovers Do,” and somehow, that slightly anarchic mischief that enlivens and animates CTRL is gone completely. You wonder what filter they passed her vocal take through to render her so inert.
You also wonder, sadly, the same thing about Kendrick, who wanders through “Don’t Wanna Know” sounding pretty confused about how someone of his immense stature should be spending his cultural capital. A$AP Rocky, on the nonsensically worded ballad “Whiskey” (“I was so young/Till she kissed me, like I’m whiskey”), sounds equally lost, a designer t-shirt left in an Old Navy dressing room. Only Future sounds at home in these antiseptic environs.
It’s this utter lack of libido that ends up making Red Pill Blues so difficult to even finish. Soft rock and sex have a tricky relationship, and so do sex and Hot 100 pop. It’s the ostensible subject, or the ultimate aim, of 99% of the material, but actual, physical copulation is a nasty rumor to most of these songs. On “Lips on You,” Levine offers, in a gentlemanly way, to go down on you; the offer might be sexier if the heart-thump of the drum programming and the new age synth didn’t sound like Sting was servicing you in a Pier 1 Imports store.
The mixing on the album was done by Serban Ghenea, a secret-weapon pop engineer who has mixed hundreds of Hot 100 songs. His songs are distinguished by their naked-smooth surfaces that erase any hint of pumping blood. His work is astonishing, in its way, a series of swooping stainless steel curves that mark out our pop landscape. He’s a perfect partner for Levine, who sounds more appealing the more he transforms himself into a bouncing sound effect. On “Help Me Out,” he rackets around the twinkling synths in his head voice, sounding at least as nimble and half as human as they do. He is the perfect coach for a show simply called “The Voice:” disembodied, inhuman, he dances across the surface like laser light.


Continuing his run of dancefloor-focused records, the German breakbeat specialist tilts his rearview mirror toward grime’s nascent stage.

ISS004

In a fractious dance-music scene, one thing seemingly everyone agrees upon is that Skee Mask is in a class of his own. Munich’s Bryan Müller began tracing the contours of his style on 2016’s Shred, but 2018’s Compro filled in a detailed 3D render for the world to see. Part of why Compro crossed over is how well it functioned as a proper album—a notoriously tricky tightrope to walk in electronic music. It was sequenced to begin softly, accelerate to a roaring full clip, and spin off into the ether at the death. The music, a meld of warp-speed breakbeats and wistful atmospherics, was lethal in the hand of discerning DJs but suited bedroom listening too. It brought memories flooding back to older heads of dancing to Moving Shadow or tripping in lounges to Autechre, while enshrining fresh memories for a new generation of ravers. Müller tipped his hat to electronica’s past while opening a portal to its immediate future.
Flush with confidence and taking more gigs than ever, Müller has crafted his 2019 productions with club sound systems in mind. “Trackheadz,” the walloping standout from springtime release 808BB, and “DJ A.Sieff,” a heavyweight loosie on the Infinite Drift compilation Shiny Zero, are markedly less murky and more direct. When Müller’s trademark becalming pads do arrive, they feel like torches shining into the back of a rave, or a laser tracing curlicues through smoke. They afford a momentary breather rather than an extended spell of reflection.
ISS004 continues to pull away from Compro’s stargazing. Only “Slow Music,” with acid-green synths stalking the corners and drums that crackle like a line-in cable connecting to a live speaker, feels tied to that era. Instead, three songs on the EP explore Skee Mask’s grimewise side. “Play Ha” and “RZZ” are reminiscent of cuts by Wizzbit, Zinc, and DJ Oddz found on the Bingo Beats series. It was an in-between stage where the moodiness of dark garage and drum’n’ bass lingered, dubstep wasn’t quite dubstep yet, and Wiley, while publicly asking “Wot Do U Call It?,” was trying to sell “eskibeats” as the term for what wound up popularized as grime. Müller captures that moment and updates it with hi-def sound design and eye-popping drum programming.
The most exciting of Müller’s eski excursions is opener “Juug.” Each time the drums pull back on the fourth bar, the bass becomes more feral, eventually snarling like a mecha-jaguar. When a breakbeat kicks in at the halfway mark, it feels like listening to a DJ execute a daredevil mix between two genres that bear little relation to one another. In Müller’s hands, it’s as smooth as a tablecloth trick, one of many moments in his catalog that elicits a reaction of, simply, what the fuck.
That the 2010s are ending with Skee Mask as one of its anointed stars is interesting. In the first half of the decade, popular club tunes were colourful and simplistic, with buildups and breakdowns signposted clearly to maximize coordinated release on dancefloors. The period of “deconstruction” that followed, where intense and abstract music lurched toward a form, brought material that was arresting but often a challenge for audiences to enjoy. You could call Skee Mask reconstructed club, if you like; he makes dancefloor-vaporizing weapons, but with galaxy-brain complexity scuttling below the surface. That snatches of grime, breakbeat, ballroom, IDM, electro, ambient, and as-yet-nameless styles find a home in just 28 minutes underlines the praise heaped on Skee Mask. ISS004 is the sound of a highly skilled producer who’s in love with the lot, and can’t wait to show you how good it can all be.


Modern country’s prodigal son returns with a 36-song album that says a whole lot of nothing.

One Thing at a Time

Morgan Wallen has met the girl of his dreams; he has fucked up considerably and lost her forever; he is drowning his sorrow in whiskey; he feels the spark of new love; he pledges to change his miserable ways. The 29-year-old Tennessee native’s music portrays life in this never-ending cycle, and at each point along the way, he’s got all kinds of bumper sticker slogans, frat-brotherly advice, and heartfelt apologies to bestow upon his enormous fanbase. Lucky for them, these thoughts arrive to him in great, bountiful harvests so that all his albums are incredibly long, resulting in a thick catalog of frothy, familiar country anthems, spilling forth like a bursting keg to flood the Billboard charts.
After the release of his second album in January 2021, the 30-song Dangerous: The Double Album, Wallen’s hyper-prolific strategy merged with his gruff, reality-show nonchalance (he first found an audience as a contestant on The Voice) to cement him as the crossover country star of the young decade. Then a month later he got caught on video using the n-word while stumbling home drunk over the weekend, and he quickly became something even bigger. Despite the public fallout and some short-lived repercussions (he was disqualified from the Grammys and placed on temporary hiatus by his label), Dangerous became the year’s most commercially successful release, tying a record set by Whitney Houston during the Reagan administration. As of this week, more than two years later, it’s still hanging around the Top 5 albums.
Through it all, Wallen’s attitude has been this: What is the absolute least I can do? There was, in quick succession, a requisite apology tour that included a direct-to-camera vlog posted on Instagram, some talk of charitable donations, an interview on Good Morning America, and a collaboration with Lil Durk. All the while Wallen seemed mentally fatigued and physically uncomfortable, as if the most important lesson he learned from his experience was that a lot of people are watching and it’s best not to make any sudden moves. Recently, the most engaged he’s seemed was an hour-long podcast appearance with his collaborator and friend Ernest Keith Smith, where they mostly talk about working out and their high school baseball careers. When Ernest asks what Wallen did as a teen to inspire his polarizing reputation on the ballfield, Wallen gives a knowing smirk as he chews his Skoal: “Just doin’ the same thing I would do today.”
Herein lies the key to Wallen’s music. So much of his appeal—and any country artist on his level—comes down to convincing the world of their inherent confidence, the distinctness of their personality and unwillingness to change. You love them because you know them, and you know them because they know themselves. “I take a lot of pride in what I am,” sang Merle. “Blame it all on my roots: I showed up in boots,” yodeled Garth. “I was around some of my friends, and we just… We say dumb stuff together… I think I was just ignorant about it,” hedged Wallen.
I imagine the importance of Wallen being true to only himself was a bolded instruction for all 49 co-writers on his latest album, One Thing at a Time. This focus group was seemingly assembled to craft the most true-to-Wallen reflections of his Tennessee realness and repentant heart in the wake of—Note to collaborators: please keep this part as vague as possible—all the mistakes people make in this crazy world. The mistakes we all make.
Part of Wallen’s self-knowledge means understanding that nobody wants to hear him tackle institutional racism or Southern history and trauma in his music. From the beginning, he’s gravitated toward balmy love songs suited for the pleasant hum of a car radio or a Bluetooth speaker on a camping trip; it was his lackadaisical, sepia-toned worldview that made him stand out on breakthrough singles like “7 Summers,” where qualities like flow and mood were more important than writerly specifics, nevermind real-world commentary. Consider this: The most narratively intricate song on this record is called “Single Than She Was,” an ode to barroom flirting complicated solely by the fact that, interestingly enough, this girl already has a boyfriend.
And so the word through Nashville is that Wallen needs a boatload of very catchy, very vague, very laid-back songs about screwin’ up and makin’ amends. Also he’s newly sober! Or, at least when he’s on tour. Well, mostly. A trio of hired guns offer a tune called “Water Into Wine,” which features this touching lyric: “Baby, I just hope you’ll forgive me/I’m tipsy, come kiss me by the time it’s empty.” The heartfelt “Whiskey Friends” lands on this note of introspection: “Looks like I did it again, me and my stupid mouth/I dug myself into a hole in the wall... and I gotta drink my way out.”
Yes and yes, Wallen says, more like this, please. And so the album becomes what feels like five hours of music, all circling the same verse-chorus orthodoxy and covering the same thematic territory. So much apologizing. So much drinking. (If you wonder why there’s a song called “Keith Whitley,” close your eyes for five seconds and try to think of a brown beverage he could rhyme with the “Miami, My Amy” singer’s last name.) “What do you expect from a redneck/Hell, I was born with a beer in my hand,” he sings in the album’s first—and best—chorus, and this is a moment of uplift, not self-pity. He understands his expectations and he’s grateful for them. This is his comfort zone, his kingdom.
Thirty-six songs is too many. I know it, you know it, and I’m willing to bet Morgan Wallen knows it as well. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say he doesn’t want anyone to listen to this record in its entirety, and the length has less to do with any particular vision than spawning as many hits as possible, for as long as possible. Even then it’s kind of a slog. There are some tracks that take a more pared-down approach, with minimalist rhythms and acoustic fingerpicking that accentuate his gift for delivering tugging, bittersweet pop melodies. There are some couplets clever enough to catch you off guard. Meet him on his level and you sometimes remember how he charmed so many listeners in the first place. In “Single Than She Was,” he takes an itinerary of all the things he was able to do with that girl before her boyfriend showed up, which includes giving her a taste of his drink and dancing to Semisonic (unless he’s referring to the “Closing Time” by Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen).
Needless to say, none of this leads to anything interesting enough to change how you think of Morgan Wallen, let alone earn back any of the goodwill from his New Yorker interview days. Not to mention, he seems to have lost a great deal of energy as a singer and performer, leading to a ton of uninspired retreads and some truly generic filler. (Do you think his backing band even remembers cooking up the microwaved Southern rock of “Last Drive Down Main”?) Even the album title seems to acknowledge that Wallen considers this a transitional moment. As on The Voice, he knows it’s up to the audience to decide what happens next. By the sound of it, his lack of agency comes as a relief. And from the continuing success of muted singles like “Last Night” (imagine: acoustic Chainsmokers) and “You Proof” (as in “I need something you-proof”), you can see why he’s not sweating it.
In that same conversation with Ernest, Wallen comes as close as he ever has to acknowledging the dire consequences of repeated bad behavior. It comes in the form of a parable about his childhood dog, a white German Shepherd who disappeared after developing a habit for terrorizing the chickens on a nearby farm. “I think I’m pretty sure what happened to it,” he says, shifting his eyes ominously. The first time the dog came home covered in blood and feathers, he says, the neighbors let him off with a warning. “Just don’t let it happen again.” A few days later, when it happened again, they sent his dog away to “Papaw’s farm,” where, having acquired a taste for blood, it immediately killed another dog. And then? “I think I know what happened to that dog,” Ernest interrupts in a booming drawl. Wallen lifts the bottle to his lips and spits and shrugs to signal the story is over.


The pop-punkers are a bit less frantic as they turn their attention from politics to affairs of the heart, and the results are mixed.

Personal Life

Honestly (and legitimately) distressed by the direction his country has taken in the 21st-century, Hutch Harris of the Thermals can be an angry songwriter. "Pray for a new state/ Pray for assassination," he sang on "God and Country" in 2004, the year of the most soul-deadening American election of my lifetime. They're probably the two most infamous lines in the band's catalog, but they're not even the most crucial lines in "God and Country". Those come near the beginning: "I can hope, see/ Even if I don't believe."
Hope when all evidence suggests you should despair, honest confusion offered in place of stock rhetoric, music that sounds like it's fueled as much by joy as rage: The Thermals' moral indignation is never a bummer. Harris is no demagogue, just another guy looking for answers, just like me and you, and the band typically sounds like they're having a blast. Even at their angriest, the Thermals have turned out some of the giddiest, most super-charged punk of the decade.
This was one of punk's better life lessons, of course: We're regular folks, we've got our eyes open to the bullshit going down, but we're not going to let it grind us into apathy. We're going to use it. The Thermals understand that anger without energy (to gloss John Lydon) leads to cynicism, resentment, diffidence. If you're going to be angry, your music better not be a drag. And melodrama, however well-intentioned, is not the Thermals' bag. You sure as hell can't imagine them writing a grand concept album kvetching about suburban sprawl.
It's coincidental that they titled their new album Personal Life in a year of Big Indie Statements, but it does underline what makes them special. The Thermals were never a "political" band per se. On Personal Life, as on all of the Thermals albums, you get the sense that you're listening to an individual think out loud, puzzle through some shit, register the aforementioned hopes, confusion, and occasional joy. Sometimes that individual just happens to be thinking about the federal government, organized religion, and other ulcer-inducing topics.
Despite some obvious exceptions like "Power Lies", whose title says it all even if the lyrics are fairly vague, Personal Life is mostly relationship songs as far as I can read them. That hasn't dulled the passion of Harris' delivery; he gets just as worked up about love as he does about god and the president. I find that invigorating when compared to 2010's sea of lo-fi mumblers, but presumably his cracked-note intensity will still be off-putting to those who prefer singers with cooler heads and more controlled pipes.
What has changed is the music: This might be the least frantic record the Thermals have yet recorded. Bassist Kathy Foster is driving the songs more than ever; without her, "Not Like Any Other Feeling", with its almost negligible guitar hook, would collapse completely. Sure, there are a few interesting curveballs to make up for the energy deficit. "Never Listen to Me" is probably the closest the Thermals will ever get to dance-rock, which is to say not very close but still closer than you would have expected. But the songs that truly stick, as usual, are the rave-ups like "I Don't Believe You", with its perfect bubblegummy "oh-oh-a-oh" hook.
I have to admit that I do miss the messy, noisy, get-it-done-in-under-two-minutes Thermals. They were just so good at the ramshackle thing, the feeling that they were racing toward the finish line before one or all of their amps exploded. Personal Life is hardly a failure; much of it is excellent. But it's also missing that anger-meets-energy urgency that made the Thermals' early albums so undeniable. It's not quite clear that they've found a new approach to match it, at least just yet.