Shields is Grizzly Bear's most compositionally adventurous record. Though full of baroque, detail-rich production and latticework melodies, it also offers an emotionally resonant core. The album is an excavation of loneliness, melancholy, and self-reliance.

Shields

"This is a foreground." That was the last lyric left hovering in the mist of Grizzly Bear's breakout 2009 album, Veckatimest, and it's a pretty good image to describe what it's like to listen to one of their records. The key word there is "a," signifying one of many. Whether it's the ethereal, friendly-ghost vibes of Yellow House or Veckatimest's pristine chamber pop, Grizzly Bear create music in deep focus; what's going on in the margins of their songs is just as important and expressive as the center. Taking cues from artists like Talk Talk and Van Dyke Parks, the Brooklyn four-piece make pop music with an ear for the ambient, asking us to notice the importance in detail, the beauty of texture, and the foregrounds that exist all across our spectrum of perception.
While there's no question that Grizzly Bear's last two records have sounded gorgeous, critics of the band have wondered if that's enough. Shields, the band's fourth and most compositionally adventurous record, should put those concerns to bed. Though full of baroque, detail-rich production and latticework melodies, Shields also offers an emotionally resonant core. The album is an excavation of loneliness, melancholy, and self-reliance. It's also a demanding record, without an instantly gratifying single like "Knife" or "Two Weeks" to hook restless ears. But the rewards that come from immersing yourself in it are odd and profound. Shields feels like a summation of Grizzly Bear's strengths, drawing a line from the muddy, minor key sonic palette of Ed Droste's home-recorded Horn of Plenty and stringing it to the heels of boundless ambition.
Shields' spectacular opener, "Sleeping Ute", is the lone track retained from an aborted early session in Marfa, Tex., and it feels like a continuation down the path Daniel Rossen ambled on his 2012 solo EP, Silent Hour/Golden Mile, which sought solace from a busy life in the elements. "If I could be still as that gray hill," Rossen pines, before giving into an admission of humanness: "But I can't help myself." Chris Bear's drum rolls emulate thunder while chords crest with the rhythm of waves. "Sleeping Ute" moves so evocatively and theatrically like water that it sounds like a big-budget radio play of The Tempest. But as grandiose as it often gets, "Ute", like Shields itself, always retains a certain intimacy. These are dark and anxious waters, the choppy and tumultuous movement of the sea inside.
Grizzly Bear have acquired a reputation for politeness; maybe it was the bow ties, maybe it was the passive-aggressive inflection of their most famous lyrics ("Would you always? Maybe sometimes? Make it easy?"), maybe it was just that Michael McDonald collaboration. But Shields serves as a visceral reminder of how unsettled and uncanny Grizzly Bear's music often feels. (Remember that superbly creepy video for "Two Weeks," full of smiles pulled tight enough to induce nightmares?) The pair of lead-off singles, "Sleeping Ute" and "Yet Again", each find a way of transcending the tension of "putting on appearances," one of Grizzly Bear's favorite themes. The lyrics of the Droste-led "Yet Again" detail repression and repose ("Take it all in stride/ Speak, don't confide"), which makes the payoff-- a final minute of instrumental fury lead by the torrent of Chris Bear's percussion and the squiggling lightning strikes of Rossen's guitar-- that much more cathartic. Dynamic shifts like this give the record an air of uncertainty that contrasts with the sheer beauty of the arrangements.
Grizzly Bear is a democracy. They stand in a horizontal row on stage, and you get this sense of intra-band egalitarianism from their records, too. By now, each of the four members has cultivated his own unique and expressive vocabulary, and each feels integral to the sound of Shields. Chris Bear's drumming is lyrical and swift, moving from delicately timed details to big, booming ruckuses (check out the way his percussive rumbles in the background of the verses of "Yet Again" foreshadow its avalanche of a conclusion), while Chris Taylor's penchant for haunting effects and gently buoyant grooves adds an otherworldly weightlessness to these soundscapes. Droste's voice resounds with ache and longing, and there's a newfound and welcome gravel to his vocals that add a raw, unvarnished quality to songs like "The Hunt" and "Speaking in Rounds".
But Shields showcases Rossen's growth most of all. The songs that sounded distinctly his on Yellow House-- "Little Brother" and "On a Neck, On a Spit" in particular-- were grounded in a familiar folk sound. But from the rollicking strums that propel "Speaking in Rounds" to the creaking, rusted textures he teases out of "The Hunt", Rossen's playing on Shields is a seamless blend of folksy textures, jazzy fluidity, and proggy imagination that feels downright inimitable. Joni Mitchell has called her own idiosyncratic tunings as "chords of inquiry," and this feels like an apt term for the tones and inflections that Rossen conjures too. They're stirring precisely because they're unresolved: the progression that ends "Speaking in Rounds"' chorus, for example, chirps like a series of unanswered questions, each one a little more urgent and insoluble than the last.
And that's a great part of Shields' emotional pull: The album reverberates with a sense of irresolution. This was present before with Grizzly Bear-- Yellow House's "Colorado" concludes with a fireworks display of unanswered pleas: "What now? What now? What now?"-- but never to such a degree. And it's that tension that makes returning to Shields so rewarding. The final one-two punch is a stunner, where the poignant grace of "Half-Gate" gives way to the magnificently epic "Sun in Your Eyes". If "Sleeping Ute" was the start of a sojourn from society, "Sun" ends not with a return but a transcendent kiss-off: "So long, I'm never coming back."
This closing pair of songs speaks to the album's complexity. Despite the formalism and easy-to-love production, Shields' best moments inflict a sense of unease that wriggles under the skin and lingers after the final crescendo. But this collection of unvarnished shipwreck-spirituals is after something more challenging than a feel-good ending. With Shields, Grizzly Bear make certain demands--hold still, listen closely-- that seem downright radical in a busy and impatient world.


Cody Critcheloe’s witty multimedia alt-pop project exults in uncensored queerness on an album that fulfills the musician and filmmaker’s maximalist ambitions.

O

Cody Critcheloe has been vying for cult status ever since he founded multimedia alt-pop group Ssion in the early 2000s. With his early releases, the musician, filmmaker, and visual artist constructed a persona that incorporates a near-religious obsession with ’80s and ’90s rock and pop divas; a uniform of leather jackets, red lipstick, and a painted-on handlebar mustache; and an almost academic approach to dissecting and reconstructing queer culture into clever dance songs. Ssion’s third studio record, O, slickly sums up the many parts of Critcheloe’s career. It not only epitomizes his persona, but contains his best music to date.
An acclaimed music video director who has worked with Grizzly Bear and Perfume Genius, among others, Critcheloe makes clips for Ssion that serve as scrapbooks of the project’s aesthetic and musical touchstones. Madonna has been omnipresent in this pantheon since their 2001 debut album, I Don’t Want New Wave and I Don’t Want the Truth, which included the track “Madonna, Sean, and Cody Critcheloe” (whose title doubles as a Sonic Youth reference). On O, Critcheloe’s theatrically sensual vocals evoke the Queen of Pop circa Erotica. Slow burner “The Cruel Twirl” finds guest vocalist and left-of-center pop diva Róisín Murphy flatly stating, “Madonna still hasn't paid off her student loans, and you know what? Neither have I!”
It’s these witty, self-aware moments that have secured Ssion’s best-kept-secret status within underground pop for the better part of two decades, but what sets O apart from the rest of their records is the way it balances superfan Easter eggs with rock-solid songwriting and production. Although Ssion’s music has always been catchy, engaging, and fun, their DIY approach to recording kept them from fulfilling their maximalist ambitions on earlier albums. O embodies ultra-glossy mainstream excess without abandoning the band’s punk and experimental roots.
Critcheloe co-produced most of the album with Nick Weiss of Teengirl Fantasy and Sam Mehran (Test Icicles, Samantha Urbani), and their ménage à trois of dance, pop, rock, and electro sensibilities gives O plenty of variety. Single “At Least the Sky Is Blue,” a slinky mid-tempo collaboration with Ariel Pink, is built around a keyboard melody that sounds like a malfunctioning busy signal. “1980-99,” which features vocals from Sky Ferreira and former Hole drummer Patty Schemel, is the kind of scuzzy pop-punk pastiche Avril Lavigne can only dream of recording. The album’s eclecticism is most apparent on “Tell Me About It,” a sultry funk track wrapped around a rubbery bassline and injected with the self-assured sexuality of a Top 40 girl group. “Like passion in your pride parade/I live to love and to get paid,” Critcheloe purrs. “Oh, can't you hear these faggots scream?”
As that lyric suggests, O’s greatest achievement may be the way it exults in unadulterated queer emotion. On “Marc & Me,” a track with a sing-song melody that imagines a night out with Marc Jacobs, Critcheloe declares, “Lookin’ at you is like lookin’ at me/Lookin’ in a mirror, liking what I see.” “I know it's not the ’70s/But I'm feeling mighty real,” he quips on the dark, minimal electro number “Free Lunch.” In 2018, so many new artists are embracing their queer identities and heritage, but Critcheloe has spent about 20 years honing Ssion’s droll, campy, dramatic aesthetic—and that work has paid off in their strongest and most timely album yet. O is the sound of the zeitgeist catching up with Ssion, not the other way around.


The Cleveland rapper’s quietly intense new album is fueled by the constant churn of unrelenting self-examination, but that heaviness is offset by his nimble, natural flow.

66689 Blvd Prequel

It’s easy to imagine Kipp Stone in one of those videos rappers post of the recording process: vibey lighting in the vocal booth, headphones slightly askew, eyes focused just past the mic on the object in his outstretched arm. But instead of a phone opened to the Notes app where he’s jotted down his rhymes, he’s holding a mirror, maintaining unwavering eye contact with himself as he spills out an intricate flow. The East Cleveland emcee’s music is unabashedly confessional, interrogating his every thought to determine its legitimacy. That constant churn is the driving force behind 66689 BLVD Prequel, his sleek and quietly intense new album.
On “Passivist Prayer,” a multi-part opus at the album’s midpoint, he raps, “Where my therapists at?/That ain’t no shoutout, that’s an inquiry.” It’s a sly bar, as much a testament to his writing skills as a muted yelp of despair. The album has many such moments, as Stone unpacks notions of masculinity, his various insecurities, and occasional dips into suicidal ideation. As vulnerable and heavy as his subject matter can be, he never sounds fully weighed down; he also takes time to revel in tiny joys, creating a complicated and often beautiful document of how confusing it is to be alive.
Stone’s impressive agility as a rapper helps his sometimes harsh self-examination go down smoothly. His sound is deeply rooted in Cleveland, combining the light-on-its-feet flow of King Chip and elastic melodicism of Krayzie Bone into a nimble style. It’s remarkable how natural his delivery feels, and how easily he’s able to change patterns on a dime. On “The Sun Is Medicine,” aching lines (“Find the time to fill my lungs with life/Revive the gilded one, my time was bouta fill my cup with cyanide to feel for once”) bounce playfully across the synth bass riff, cleverly disguising the pain within. When Stone raps, “Shit you hate about yourself be what they love you for the most/Watching everybody shine and forgot about your glow,” on “BLVD Intro,” he stretches the ends of bars like taffy, finding a loose pocket inside Tunga’s circular jazz beat.
The palette Stone favors has a lush, inviting aura that tempers some of his more acidic explorations. Though he enlists a committee of producers—including himself on a couple of tracks—the beats all have a similarly airy, luxuriant vibe, consisting of silvery wisps of synth, rippling Fender Rhodes, and crisp, upfront percussion that keeps everything from drifting into the atmosphere. Some of that openness seems inspired by Stone’s first trip to California, a seemingly perspective-shifting vacation he documents twice on 66689 BLVD Prequel. The pensive, self-produced “Petrichor” wraps ghostly vocal notes around gossamer piano and sleepily shuffling snares. He finds himself back at home in East Cleveland, reflecting on the culture shock he felt across the country, feeling like an altogether different man. Over the buoyant drum patterns and cafe jazz of “Vanderhall Venice,” Stone describes the freedom he felt when driving through the Hollywood Hills, “high vibrational with the sun beaming.”
Stone wrote and recorded 66689 BLVD Prequel alone, often spending up to 15 hours locked in the studio in search of the perfect take. The solitary nature of the album—there are no guests other than a background vocalist on a couple of cuts—makes its breadth and technical prowess all the more extraordinary. Stone says he freestyled most of the lyrics, and it’s baffling to think that someone could simply pluck these flows and sophisticated rhyme schemes from the air. It also explains some of his cringier lines (“Keep a dick to your mind, fuck what y’all think” on “18 The Hard Way,” or “pouting like that meme in the corner” on “Lakeshore”), and knowing they came off the top makes them a little more forgivable. 66689 BLVD Prequel isn’t as outwardly angry as 2020’s HOMME, though it’s just as emotionally wrought. It doesn’t seem as though Stone needs to release his demons as much as he needs post-exorcism aftercare. His darkness isn’t all-consuming, but it lurks behind his shoulder, tapping every so often to make its presence known.


The Nova Scotian power pop band offers a pleasant surprise-- this 30-track LP is its best since 1999's Between the Bridges.

Never Hear the End of It

Frankly, I didn't come to Sloan's eighth album expecting a whole lot. The Nova Scotian quartet's last two albums were patchy and sounded like a band that had grown complacent with simply kicking out serviceable guitar pop punctuated by the occasional stab at hard rock. These weren't bad albums, exactly, but after 1999's great Between the Bridges, subsequent releases Pretty Together and Action Pact were disappointingly MOR. So Never Hear the End of It comes as a pleasant surprise. It's the band's best since Bridges and possibly even One Chord to Another, the mid-90s disc that set their standard.
The album is a creative shake-up, the type of thing bands need to do to keep fresh more than 15 years into a career: Never Hear the End of It consists of 30 tracks that mostly flow into each other like a suite, though there are a few more conventional transitions. It's not entirely new for the band-- Between the Bridges didn't have track breaks either-- but they've never taken it nearly this far, giving equal weight to snippets, weird one-off detours, and fully fleshed-out potential singles, of which there are many.
This is a band with four songwriters and four singers, so to a certain degree variety is a guarantee on their albums, but the way this one jumps from ballads to near-punk eruptions keeps it unpredictable. The band also seems very self-aware, especially on "Fading Into Obscurity", a song written from the perspective of a former star that's a mini-suite in itself, moving from section to section with ease, the basic rock sound augmented with mellotron. It could be bitter, but instead opts for sweet humor: "This cake is baked but I much preferred the batter/ Perhaps in part because it had so much potential/ To be delicious and still be influential."
One of my biggest complaints about the album is how little of Jay Ferguson we hear in the lead-- only two songs feature him up front throughout, and they're among the best tracks on the album. I've always loved his voice, a liberally honeyed tenor, and his songs have a melodic ease to them that first recalls, and then transcends, 70s AM Gold. His "Right or Wrong" is a jangling, harmony-stuffed song that touches on the album's underlying theme of self-awareness, while "Before the End of the Race" is a far less self-consciously mature take on the adultery theme of "The Other Man" from a few years back.
An overabundance of self-conscious emotional maturity was a big part of what hampered Sloan's last two efforts, and the band lets itself have more silly fun in this new format. The result is that their artistic maturity is more fully displayed, both on beautifully realized songs like closer "Another Way I Could Do It", which poignantly illuminates the never-ending adjustments required by moving to a big city, to wild leaps out of the band's usual bounds like the punky, almost Wire-ish "HFXNSHC". Even seemingly small things, like the way lead single "Who Taught You to Live Like That?" contrasts big harmonies with a pounding arrangement that makes great use of a limited chord progression signal a creative revival.
Which is all great to hear, because for all their talk of accepting a slow fade in these songs, these four musicians are too good together to go out with a whimper. As a late-career stirring of the creative juices, this album is mostly successful, though among the thirty songs there are naturally a few that don't fully take. Sloan could've just as easily kept churning out good-but-not-great albums forever. To their credit, they've chosen a more difficult, more rewarding path.


The first-ever official live document from brilliant 70s art-punks Wire is finally released on this CD/DVD set, which captures their 1979 performance on then-West Germany's "Rockpalast" show.

Wire on the Box 1979

The iconic London Calling cover shot-- Paul Simonon smashing his white bass-- stems from frustration. Not frustration at The Man or over crusty, narrow-minded punks accusing The Clash of selling out, but frustration over the audience response. Simonon was upset that a crowd at New York City's Palladium was made to remain seated, effectively eliminating the crowd/band synergy The Clash had worked so hard to perfect. Opening bands know this feeling well, and it must be incredibly difficult to play a great show if the audience is having no visible reaction to your music.
Watching the DVD portion of Wire's Wire on the Box, I was struck by the band's energy and passion in the face of a very nearly inert crowd. In an hour-long set filmed for (then-West) Germany's "Rockpalast" television program, the band are tight, focused, even demented in their intensity at times, but partly because of the rules in the television studio: the tiny audience scarcely budges, and only claps politely between numbers. The audience is only four rows deep, and they're sitting on benches. Some audience members even look confused when the camera pans their faces between songs, as if they weren't sure what to expect from a Wire show. Then again, perhaps you can't hold that against them; Wire were a notoriously unpredictable live act in their heyday, and nine of the songs they played in this set hadn't yet been released at the time.
Those songs that were new in February 1979 eventually became the bulk of Wire's third album, 154. But even as the band demoed them for live European audiences that spring (opening for Roxy Music, no less), they sounded fully formed, differing only from their studio versions in density and texture. That Wire were already hitting audiences with new material hot on the heels of their 1978 sophomore opus Chairs Missing is indicative of the kind of band they were and always have been, i.e. never dwelling on the past and constantly evolving. That unrelenting flux is also what makes Wire on the Box an odd release in the band's catalog. It's the second live recording to be released from Wire's original phase, but the first one, 1981's Document & Eyewitness felt like another step forward for the band (if at times an utterly confounding one), whereas this one is uncharacteristically retrospect, a sort of "Greatest Hits Live" album.
That said, if Wire felt the need to throw fans a traditional archival bone, they certainly could have done a lot worse. The performance here is spot-on and the sound is spectacularly clear, though I'd argue that the vocals are mixed a tad too high, which distances them somewhat from the guitars. And the packaging conceit is a brilliant one that should be employed more often: the hour-long show is available to watch on DVD (along with a mumbly but informative 20-minute interview with the band), but also appears in its entirety on a separate CD so that it can be listened to as an album, without the video feed. That makes it a more versatile release, allowing you to enjoy the music on its own terms or to take in the spectacle of late-70s German television with the goofy prog-rock "Rockpalast" logo and seemingly arbitrary camerawork that quickly cuts from shots of all four band members to close-ups of Colin Newman's facial pores.
Newman is in brilliant voice for the set, shouting, yelping, and singing with ecstatic abandon. He and bassist Graham Lewis occasionally acknowledge their meager audience or give the title of a new song, but otherwise, the lackluster assortment in front of them might as well be in another time zone-- you'd think they were playing Wembley the way they confidently range across material from their early output, dishing out a killer take on the Pink Flag title track and a stunning, breathtaking version of Chairs Missing's "Heartbeat". They're clearly most content with the new material, though, ripping through 154 gems like "The 15th" and "Two People in a Room", as well as giving the full apocalyptic treatment to the epic noise wall "A Touching Display", on which Bruce Gilbert's processed bass sears a quasi-melody that I'd previously imagined to have come from a guitar.
More than anything else, this set highlights how singular and amazing Wire were at their peak. They could be flattening and catchy at once, and they were a visual oddity, with skinny-tied Newman and Lewis swirling wildly between drummer Robert Gotobed, who looks almost robotic, and Gilbert, who I swear never looks away from his guitar for all 58 minutes. And what makes the quality and ferocity of the show all the more impressive is the circumstances: How they mustered this much energy and focus for such a wallflower crowd I'll never know, but the end result is an excellent document of an essential band at the height of their powers.


The New Brunswick musician learned collage techniques from a found reel-to-reel tape; here, he brings them to bear on a live-or-Memorex studio deconstruction of his own idiosyncratic songwriting.

Hex

Jon McKiel’s life and music changed forever when he bought a haunted reel-to-reel. When the equipment arrived at his home in rural New Brunswick, the singer-songwriter discovered a tape still wound into the machine, full of odd song fragments and guitar noodlings recorded by its previous owner. Who was he? When did he make those recordings? What dreams did he have for his music? Nobody could say. McKiel and his co-producer Jay Crocker (better known as JOYFULTALK) dubbed the anonymous artist Bobby Joe Hope, welcomed him as a full collaborator, and even named the subsequent album after him. The songs on 2020’s Bobby Joe Hope sampled snippets of his unfinished songs into unusual sound collages that disrupted McKiel’s solid, if familiar, guitar rock and inspired him to work new sounds and styles into his repertoire.
Hope doesn’t appear on Hex, but the ghost of his ghost lingers. McKiel and Crocker have further refined their recombinant techniques, only this time they sample McKiel himself, assembling his own studio experiments into unusual amalgams of blues, dub, soul, folk, tropicália, and more. The songs are compellingly disorienting; their melodies are as tight as the grooves are strange—hypnotic, slightly off. McKiel and Crocker continually blur the distinction between live performance and manipulated recording. “String,” which sounds like Paul Simon lost in the Bush of Ghosts, layers a crisp guitar over a slightly distorted one, their melodic lines twining together. It’s like listening to someone play along to the stereo in the next room, and in its uncanniness the moment is both unsettling and unexpectedly beautiful.
Everything on Hex seems both familiar and foreign. The title track stacks a distorted and truncated guitar lick over a busy bassline and a drumbeat that sounds like it’s been borrowed from a ’90s rap sample of a ’60s jazz tune, but it’s the free-floating saxophone that tilts the song just off its axis. The jangly pomp of “Everlee” is so recognizable as a Byrds reference that you might get that right-on-the-tip-of-your-tongue frustration from trying to name the tune. Closer “Memory Screen Pt. 2” warps a breezy guitar strum until it nearly breaks, then descends into windswept collage of guitar distortion, disembodied voices, and what might be whalesong, or static off an EVP mic. Each tinkers with a different idea, deploys voice and guitar toward new ends, yet they all fit together like puzzle pieces.
Otherworldly as it often sounds, Hex is primarily concerned with the fate of this world. McKiel’s cover of “Concrete Sea,” by Terry Jacks (an underrated singer-songwriter as well as an environmental activist), presents the city as an environment unfit for humans: “No one is meant to be living here in a concrete sea,” he chants. “Everyone, including me, wishes he could be set free.” McKiel resents the erasure of wonder, the mundane encroaching on everyday magic—a timely concern now that bands are proudly using AI to write songs. McKiel finds humanity in a bit of confusion, and on this oddly affecting album he comes across as a medium, closely attuned to the unknown and unknowable as he deciphers missives from another plane.


Chaz Bear’s latest is a loose and lively psych-funk melange—the sound of a one-man band learning how to jam.

Mahal

Although Toro y Moi surfaced as part of the slo-mo synth-pop movement lumped together as chillwave, the project’s sole member has always been an aspirational avatar for indie rock’s huddled masses. South Carolina’s Chaz Bundick, who later changed his last name to Bear and relocated to the Bay Area, has sung with equal detachment about bullshit jobs, breakup sex, and meeting James Murphy (“at Coachella,” he deadpans). But more than the often-fragmentary lyrics, what feels most representative of whatever remains of the indie zeitgeist is Bear’s unshowy eclecticism: He can remember when he first bought Radiohead’s OK Computer, but he’s also a house producer and heavyweight hip-hop collaborator. In a quiet victory for slacker SoulSeek jockeys everywhere, his work for EDM juggernaut Flume scored Bear a Grammy nomination. But it sounds like he’s on the job nonstop—“Everything is time management,” he told an interviewer—and he has enough existential anxiety about the point of it all that a 2015 album was titled What For?.
Mahal, Toro y Moi’s seventh studio album and first for indie stalwart Dead Oceans, posits convincingly that what Bear does is also supposed to be—as he told the same interviewer—well, “fun.” The title, a Tagalog word that can mean “love” but also “expensive,” is apparently an intentional response to the question posed by What For?. Bear, whose father is Black and mother is Filipina, further gestures to his maternal heritage with a cover photo that shows him perched in a decked-out jeepney—a colorful minibus that has for decades been the predominant form of public transportation in the Philippines. From an opening engine rev, the vehicle is a spirit guide across the album, a loose and lively psych-funk melange that transports him through styles and time periods with ad-hoc gaudiness and unassuming joie de vivre. It’s an album filled with jubilant funk-star yawps, goofier and more open than his previous full-lengths, with an uncharacteristic amount of guests. Instead of What For?, Mahal seems to ask, “Why not?”
Mahal is as fastidiously layered as the rest of Toro y Moi’s style-shifting discography, but Bear leaves the edges rough, connecting the tracks with radio tuning noises and relishing in unvarnished instrumental expression. Wordless opener “The Medium” has a pleasantly baggy glam-rock stomp, smoothed out by Bear’s psych-soul keys, but it really takes off thanks to a gnarly lead guitar part by Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Ruban Nielson. “Millennium” is more disco-splashed, with Bear singing about champagne and celebration, but the payoff is a wonderfully wobbly synth solo by fellow chillwave lifer Neon Indian’s Alan Palomo. When the tempos slow, the playing evokes a muggy summer atmosphere, like the sweltering blues-guitar frug on “Mississippi”—one of several Mahal tracks performed entirely by Bear. But the album also has plenty of variety: Saxophone and flute waft over the woozy space-lounge ballad “Goes by So Fast.”
Although lyrics are usually secondary with Toro y Moi, Bear has found an endearing way to blend cryptic social commentary with wry humor. The enjoyably musty clatter of “Magazine” boasts a lilting hook sung by electronic-pop futurist Salami Rose Joe Louis, and Bear’s verses hint at corporate offshoring and environmental degradation as well as the death of physical media, a theme that carries over to the barcode-stamped album artwork—but what jumps out most is when he sings, “No more drama, please, no more dramamine/Imma throw up it up all over all the seats.” On the light-hearted, Archie Bell & the Drells-by-way-of-the-Marvelettes curio “Postman,” the indie-rock superman goes to the U.S. Postal Service and leaves empty-handed except for bills; if you can’t muster a stupid smile when Bear goes, “She forgot to put it in the mailbox…/What the fox?,” I don’t how to help you.
Because Bear has been so reticent about his personal life in his lyrics, the fleeting moments when he seems to allow glimmers through are sneakily thrilling. On “Last Year,” waltzing jazz-pop that lands somewhere between the Sea and Cake and Belle and Sebastian, he indirectly addresses the malaise that so many have experienced during the global pandemic. In an allusion to therapy, he sings, “I learned to love myself last year/Breakthroughs in conversations/Session went well/Yeah, I kept my chill.” With the inclusive imagery of “Déjà Vu,” a sauntering noise-rock anthem befitting Yo La Tengo or Stephen Malkmus, he nods toward a multi-faceted vision of America so casually that you might miss it. Musically, the record often sounds like a one-man band learning how to jam; lyrically, although still oblique, it feels like an introspective artist rediscovering the importance of community.
If nothing else, Mahal is a reminder that keeping time is better than relentlessly managing it. Bear has hopped between genres since his earliest singles, and he has already corralled his disparate influences into fully realized statements like 2013’s expansive Anything in Return and 2011’s taut Underneath the Pine. On paper, the Toro y Moi album that Mahal most resembles is the guitar-oriented What For?, but this time Bear sounds confident enough to relax. “Hustles got you losing touch,” Bear warns on the sweeping finale “Days in Love.” Less hustle, more flow.


On their fourth album, the Montreal trio begins a new chapter, one robust enough to hold the intense emotions in frontwoman Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s vocals.

Shadow Offering

Braids’ fourth full-length was inspired by a solar eclipse, a phenomena that provides a neat metaphor for frontwoman Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s voice—at once dark and luminescent, fleeting and slightly dangerous. Over the course of their existence, the Montreal trio have evolved from a low-key synth-pop group into a daring orchestral ensemble, and Standell-Preston’s singing has led the way. With each record, the group further excavates the powerful clarity in her broad vocal range, treating it with a lighter touch and greater space.
Aided by producer and Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla, the band continues to expand their once-restrained electronic palette. On “Upheaval II,” they lean into the funk of the electric guitar, its low register a grounding foil for Standell-Preston’s vocal acrobatics. When songs include swarming synths, they’re for texture, not shape: “Just Let Me” layers them atop a steady foundation of piano before letting them fall to the background as a shimmering guitar arpeggio takes hold. Standell-Preston reserves her falsetto for sudden moments of grandeur, using her clear, full-throated vibrato to lend direction to the band’s more ambient passages. If 2015’s Deep in the Iris was a departure from the lighter fare of their early releases, Shadow Offering is the start of a new chapter, one robust enough to hold the intense emotions in their lyrics.
There’s a fiercely diaristic quality to the songwriting on Shadow Offering, an outpouring of grandiose metaphors rooted in personal experiences. On “Eclipse (Ashley),” Standell-Preston pairs images of the sun’s eclipse with the entirely earthly experience of self-actualization. It’s a relatable contrast, reflecting the human inclination to filter even rare astronomical events through the lens of personal milestones. Many of the songs center on Standell-Preston’s fraught relationship with men, moving from abstracted figurative language about a troubled relationship on “Just Let Me” to the entirely literal expression of anguish on “Fear of Men.” Her honest writing can make even well-trodden topics, which encapsulates most of the record, seem bright and novel. The confidence with which she discusses her poor taste in men on “Young Buck”—“Young buck 22-year-old who treats me badly/ The blaring example of what I am drawn towards/ And should strongly move away from”—would be funny, if the experience of doomed relationships weren’t so resonant.
However, Standell-Preston’s stream-of-consciousness honesty buckles under the weight of larger societal injustices. On the 9-minute epic “Snow Angel,” her enunciation sharpens as she rattles off buzzwords with the outsized confidence of an amateur slam poet: “Fake news and indoctrination/Closed borders and deportations.” She questions her own position in the oppression of others—“Am I only just realizing the injustice that exists/Cloaked in white privilege since the day I was born”—before returning to platitudes about global crises, conjuring images of polar bears on ice floes and young people glued to social media. It’s not that Braids are incapable of canny political commentary—”Miniskirt,” their glorious slow-burner from Deep In The Iris, built its power from explicitly calling out rape culture through personal anecdotes. But these shallow, unstructured critiques of hegemonic systems come across as ignorant, and, at worst, narcissistic, like an ayahuasca trip gone horribly wrong. Braids underwent a small reckoning with their own privilege in 2018 after former bandmate Katie Lee accused the band of performative allyship; “Snow Angel” comes across as a tone-deaf response, in which white guilt and self-hatred smother any possibility of genuine engagement.
While it’s hard to argue that Shadow Offering redeems itself from the bizarre ramblings of “Snow Angel,” it can perhaps be cordoned off as a misstep along the pathway to embracing maximalism. The remaining record reflects the band’s continued emphasis on Standell-Preston’s striking vibrato and range, the inclusion of more acoustic instrumentation fitting of the vacillations in her singing. Like U.S. Girls’ Heavy Light, Shadow Offering evokes excess and mania with the hip-swinging rhythms of funk and new wave, packing each inch of the record with small inflections layered for the greatest possible impact. The band’s effusiveness often feels torrential, which makes its more inane moments come off as collateral damage. On Shadow Offering, Braids isn’t afraid to steer dangerously close to the eye of the storm.

Buy: Rough Trade
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In her debut theatrical work, the Philadelphia poet and experimental musician rails against the racist underpinnings of the housing crisis against a backdrop of free jazz.

Circuit City

Across three days in June 2019, Camae Ayewa, better known as Moor Mother, presented her first theatrical creation, Circuit City, at Philadelphia’s FringeArts. That Ayewa should stage such an ambitious multimedia work—part musical, part choreographed poem, part play—while also preparing Zonal’s Wrecked and her solo album Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes speaks to the Philadelphia poet and experimental musician’s work ethic. She has a good reason to be so prolific: Ayewa’s work is dedicated to the struggle against a system of oppression that spans generations. As she says early in the piece, “There’s been so much trauma, I don’t even know where to start…. I don’t even know what year/I got my momma’s years, my daddy’s years all mixed up inside of me.” Staring down “the cold way of life’s limitations,” her work is an acknowledgement that the fight against oppression must be as tireless as the inhumane systems that perpetuate such trauma.
Set in the living room of a corporate-owned housing complex, Circuit City may well be the first theater production ever to feature an essay written by an attorney from the Housing Unit of Philadelphia’s Community Legal Services. Like the production itself, the music addresses decades of neglect in low-income public housing, police brutality, redlining, and the fear of eviction—bleak topics that might not promise the most engaging listen. But such is Ayewa’s presence and steely delivery that the four extended pieces nevertheless lodge you inside the mind of someone who lives with such daily indignities. Paranoid, claustrophobic, yet determined to “circuit break,” the album forges ahead in a style similar to that of Who Sent You?, the smoldering free-jazz album she released last year as a part of Irreversible Entanglements. That band supports her here, providing a roiling backdrop of horns, drums, keys, and standup bass augmented by visceral electronics from Ada Adhiyatma and Steve Montenegro and backing vocals from Elon Battle.
On Who Sent You?, Ayewa’s voice fit neatly into Irreversible Entanglements’ pocket, glinting with wit and candor. She is more forceful and didactic here, pushing into the red when the music starts to boil. Amid the frenzy of frequencies and crashing cymbals on “Act 2 - Circuit Break,” Ayewa worries at the word “breaking” as Keir Neuringer’s alto and Aquiles Navarro’s trumpet shriek around her, sounding breathless, then frenetic. In the album’s cathartic final act of UFO bleeps and droning horns, she shouts, “You can’t time travel/Seek inner and outer dimensions/Without free jazz!” But while she blends visceral electronics with jazz, Moor Mother steadily moves beyond the confines of any one sound or discipline. The album might not be an ideal entry into her oeuvre, but it reveals Ayewa to be one of the most uncompromising artists in any field.
The most disarming voice on the album belongs to Elon Battle, who assumes the spotlight in “Act 3 - Time of No Time.” Against a backdrop of simmering electronics, echoing horns, and clattering percussion, Battle sings an alien torch song whose trembling falsetto brings to mind ANOHNI—a refreshing change of pace before Ayewa’s voice returns to the fold. As the tension builds, she reels off snatches of numbers and figures that feel disjointed at first (“20 million,” “70 thousand”) but build to a striking command: “Say my name/So my children will know where to find me/Once they take away our homes.”
When Circuit City ran last year, the accompanying notes referenced the 22,000 eviction filings recorded annually in Philadelphia, along with an unknown number of illegal evictions—a burden that primarily falls upon women of color. In the wake of the global pandemic, devastated city budgets, and widespread economic free fall, low-income housing is in even worse shape now. Even if COVID-19 were to vanish from the earth tomorrow, the urban housing crisis would remain unresolved. It will take a concerted, communal effort to even begin to clearly see, much less address, this issue that strikes at the very core of our humanity. Moor Mother’s Circuit City intently illuminates the threats facing poor people of color in their very homes. Putting avant-garde tactics to humanist ends, her album is a powerful indictment of a vicious, racist cycle that needs to be broken. As she reminds us at the album’s finale, “You can’t go to war without a drum.”

Buy: Rough Trade
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On his debut LP, the Toronto producer and singer/songwriter Tommy Paxton-Beesley, aka River Tiber, sums up the chilly, forlorn pop sound that has defined his city.

Indigo

A sample of River Tiber’s track “No Talk” floated in the back half of Drake’s “No Tellin,” sounding like it was playing in a room adjacent to the studio. After that, the Toronto producer and singer/songwriter Tommy Paxton-Beesley started appearing everywhere, collaborating with BADBADNOTGOOD (credited as a cellist on what might one of their best songs “CS60”), Kaytranada, Freddie Gibbs, Mac Miller, and Pusha T. A few weeks ago on Beats 1 Radio, before Zane Lowe played a River Tiber song featuring Kaytranada and Pusha T, he said “I don’t even know what is going on in Toronto right now, but I know that the music sounds like the city looks.” It’s a strange statement on it’s face. What does Toronto look like? On an architectural level, the city is notoriously brutalist and disquietingly postmodern, filled with imposing and amorphous grey concrete and anonymous skyscrapers. Standing from his perch on CN Tower, Drake (aka rap game Jon Stark), the King of the North expresses all the wistful aesthetic those kind of buildings exude. But then demographically it’s incredibly heterogeneous, even for a city on the eastern seaboard, rivaling, if not beating out New York in terms of diversity. Which makes its mix of genres an incredibly interesting melting pot.
So when Zane Lowe talks about the music and the look of Toronto being symmetrical or at least related, what are you supposed to conjure up? If there is any signature sound that is popular in Toronto right now, it’s a melancholic and atmospheric R&B centered around parties gone sour, vape batteries gone dead, and text messages from an ex, from dvsn to Charlotte Day Wilson to Alessia Cara. On his debut album, *Indigo, *Tommy Paxton-Beesley takes a deep swig of that syrup, delivering what is probably one of the best representations of a regional vernacular that keeps getting more and more interesting.
*Indigo *opens up with the “Genesis,” a very loud but perhaps overly ambitious statement song that mimics all the grandeur of James Blake’s Overgrown. It has the feeling and warble of a UFO tractor beam, slowing pulling up a man into unknown. It’s also a good litmus test for what to expect from the record’s rather eclectic combination of instruments. Beesley creates a chilly yet undeniably organic environment from a strange combination of cello, violin, tuba, trombone, percussion, synth, a Rhodes organ, guitar and his own heavily processed voice. “Genesis” is like a good night at a bar, perfectly crowded, but leaves room for chance, and ends just when you want it.
In the following song “No Talk,” (the one Drake sampled) Beesley emerges more clearly, letting his voice becoming more present, multiplying it into a purposefully asymmetrical chorus of inarticulate coos. And then in “Acid Test” the third song on the album, flaws slowly start to emerge. He shares the same jam-band impulses of his collaborators BADBADNOTGOOD, laying down hammy drum solos and full keyboard sweeps freely. It can make his music sometimes overly crowded, very busy, and almost distracting. This is most evident in a song like “Maria,” an uncomfortable echo chamber of off-the-mark vocal processing and dramatic synths. Or “Clarity,” which contains a chord progression that sounds lifted from a soap opera. He works best in pared down and cloudy accompaniments. “West” [ft. Daniel Cesar] pleasantly resembles Chance’s “Summer Friends,” and it creates the same feeling of sleepy nostalgia. In “I’m a Stone” his voice is at its clearest, and amidst slippery synth arpeggios and trickling guitars, his singing seeps through like codeine.
Overall, Beesley successfully gathers all the ambient influence of his city into a set of sounds that harnesses many of the best things we might expect from music in Toronto. It’s cynically romantic, urbane, and just a tad bit mopey. Like his city’s architecture, the music in *Indigo *can at times feel homogenous and out of reach, but it leaves a lasting impression, like leaving an air conditioned room for a humid street. You want to lay there, curled up, protected by the cavernous world that Beesley creates in Indigo.


Brooklyn electro-pop outfit TEEN offer dense, synth-swirling tracks about sexuality, love, and the cultural dictates of desire that can feel claustrophobic and exhilarating at the same time.

Love Yes

Analog synthesizers are too often used as signifiers of styles gone by, blunt aural semiotics that yell at the listener: "Hey, remember the ’80s?!" TEEN's Love Yes is packed with 'em—nothing new for the Brooklyn quartet—but the album is more than just a repackaged relic. While there are synthpop flourishes and occasional sonic nods to the Human League or post-hiatus Roxy Music, Love Yes is an evolutionary step forward for the three Lieberson sisters—drummer Katherine, keyboardist Lizzie, and singer Teeny—along with bassist Boshra Al-Saadi. After experimenting with ’00s indie and R&B on their last couple of records, TEEN is starting to find their very own sound rather than bogging themselves down with referential collage.
Though their first album, 2012’s In Limbo, dragged in many places, Love Yes feels like it's set on hyperspeed. There are so many ideas, tempo changes, and harmonies packed into some of these songs that they feel a little bit claustrophobic—but also exhilarating. Lyrical themes condense around the dizzying (and sometimes nauseating) experiences of sexuality, love, and the cultural dictates of desire, eliciting a heightened, visceral nervousness. Opener "Tokyo" is essentially a double-time waltz, with heartbeat-pulse syncopation at the chorus' core, and acrobatic harmonies arcing over intertwining synth lines. It is a lot, and it feels as terrifying as it is captivating.
Love Yes is at its best when it opens up some breathing room, as in "Gone for Good," an airy, harmonic meditation on what we're actually doing when we say we're letting someone go without truly doing so. "Another Man's Woman" has the cadence and percussion of a schmaltzy ’80s ballad as it examines jealousy from all sides, but the song takes so many lyrical and melodic left turns that it ends up tweaking saccharine clichés rather than embracing them.
The Liebersons are the children of innovative modern composer Peter Lieberson, whose influence and loss is addressed on the chilling, beautiful "Please," and TEEN have always had something of a prog core; the band’s jazz and classical structures have been both its greatest strength and weakness. Their lyricism and composition is agile, their communication is as taut and strong as 6-gauge copper wire, and their musicianship is unquestionable. They sound like no-one else, especially on Love Yes. But they also have an unfortunate tendency to get mired in the intellectual component of songwriting and performance. When their intricacies are played to effect, as on "Tokyo" or the ode-to-id "Animal," it's thrilling. On too-busy songs like "Example" and the title track, though, it's just frustrating.
That impulse to complicate is thankfully mediated more thoroughly and evenly on Love Yes than on previous efforts, only poking through here and there. It is also striking that this very complex album was recorded entirely live; the music seethes with precarious energy. But now that TEEN have grown into fully-fledged adults, they’ll have to stay vigilant and make sure that an overabundance of technicalities don’t override their music’s emotional connection.


After releasing three album as sweaty hedonist Hunx (two with His Punx, one by himself), Seth Bogart releases his first truly self-titled record. The fried garage pop and retro balladry of albums past has been swapped for a club-ready sound that plays like a fever dream set inside an episode of "Miami Vice": bright colors, buzzing synthesizers, chipmunked vocals, the smooth confidence of adults on the prowl for meaningful sex.

Seth Bogart

"My name is Brittoni, I'm 22 years old, and I could not live without eating makeup," begins a testimony on an episode of TLC’s "My Strange Addiction." She continues, "You can kind of imagine it just coating your insides with whatever color you’re eating. It’s just like a craving of your favorite kind of candy bar." Consider, if you can, the feeling of those metallic and muted colors sliding down your esophagus, dripping a Pollockian masterpiece onto your stomach lining. The feeling might be queasy—and most likely dangerous for your health—but you’d look beautiful on the inside.
Queasy, vaguely illicit, and beautiful on the inside: This is a good way to describe Seth Bogart’s self-titled debut. After releasing three album as sweaty hedonist Hunx (two with His Punx, one by himself), Bogart has taken back his own name, trading the leather jacket for a hot pink suit and a sharply parted haircut. The fried garage pop and retro balladry of albums past has been swapped for a club-ready sound that plays like a fever dream set inside an episode of "Miami Vice": bright colors, buzzing synthesizers, chipmunked vocals, the smooth confidence of adults on the prowl for meaningful sex. Bogart nods at the trendiness of his genre change on "Eating Makeup," which was inspired by the TLC episode, where he enlists Kathleen Hanna to sing about her growing preoccupation with the titular subject. What begins as a lick or a curiosity turns into a full-blown obsession, and all of a sudden, you’re sprawled in the center of Sephora, covered in opened concealer. Eventually, Bogart concludes gleefully, "everybody’s eating makeup."
It sounds like an appealing fantasy, though much of the album concerns how such fantasies can ultimately turn hollow. "Hollywood Squares" has the energy of a cheerleader rally, but its bombast masks a more tender sentiment as Bogart sings about his fascination with a celebrity culture he recognizes as poisonous: "And I can’t believe that I could be this/ Desperate for a lick of something that doesn’t exist." Elsewhere, he sings about being in love with a phony ("Plastic!"), his fascination with someone who he only sees on the screen ("Smash the TV"), and his failure to fulfill someone’s needs ("Forgotten Fantazy"). The latter is built around a restrained synthesizer melody ripped from the waiting screen of some old Nintendo game, as Bogart, his voice no longer gleeful, considers how his actual self has been consumed by another’s idealized vision: "It’s hard for me to know what you need/ I’m your forgotten fantazy."
The tension between artifice and reality is what gives Seth Bogart most of its conceptual heft, but it obviously helps that the album is very fun to listen to. (The neon synth-pop of "Club With Me," which shines like a cocaine-dusted disco ball, is a highlight.) Not all of the guest singers are as prominent as Kathleen Hanna, but they’re no less successful. Chela’s confident vocal on "Flurt," which is about a tug-of-war with a romantic tease, brims with concealed sadness juxtaposed against the upbeat tempo. I thought about Pool, the new record by Porches, which similarly traded guitars for synthesizers on an album that pondered the worth of going out. The difference here is that Bogart is doing his thinking after going out. The greater depths follow the sparkle of immediate pleasure—a dynamic that reflects the real life process of getting delirious at the disco before contemplating in a more private moment what that was really all about.
The most affecting moments come when Bogart starts off in a quieter mode. "Lubed" rides a hypnotic synthesizer line over piano and melodic distortions as Bogart makes a sensuous offer for some good, consensual fun in the bedroom. The first time we saw Bogart, his greased-up crotch was smack dab in the middle of his album cover, but outsized eroticism (I want to fuck) and burning bedroom eyes (Do you want to fuck?) aren’t mutually exclusive. Then, there’s "Barely 21," the sugar-sweet duet with Rookie founder Tavi Gevinson whose premise—an inconvenient but genuine affair with someone who’s "barely 21"—is loaned an ironic wink by the fact that Gevinson is 19-years-old. But Gevinson’s voice is as pure as the driven snow, temporarily dispelling the real world context. "Cry, baby," they sing, over and over, a reminder that despite appearances, some things just hit you in the heart.


The second studio album from the staunchly insular Brooklyn rap trio is streamlined and crisp, carried by a newfound momentum missing on their debut.

Vacation in Hell

Flatbush Zombies know where they stand. “A lot of niggas is out here trying to be part of hip-hop, and I’m part of it so I’m fucking happy, it’s fine,” Meechy Darko said in a 2015 interview. “ As far as humblebrags go, “It’s fine” really leans into the humility, but there’s a hint of relief in that admission. In an era of dizzying genre shifts Meechy Darko, Erick the Architect Elliott, and Zombie Juice are stiff traditionalists. Removed from rap’s epicenter and comfortable at the margins, on Vacation in Hell, they rap for themselves and no one else. They sound both freed and confined.
Shedding the clunky cinematic husk of their previous album 3001: A Laced Odyssey, Vacation in Hell is streamlined and crisp. In lieu of skits and psychedelia, the Zombies opt for constant movement, passing the mic without ego, accenting each other with choice ad-libs, and avoiding dead air. All this motion produces a sort of newfound clarity. “Crown,” a glitzy collab with pop-rockers Portugal. The Man, punctuates John Gourley’s feathery vocals with fleet verses and builds to Meechy actually singing a beautifully spare bridge: “No one gets out alive/So we live like we already died/No one will ever understand but the sky.” On “U&I,” an ode to brotherhood, Erick Arc Elliott and Zombie Juice tenderly co-recite the chorus and briefly punch in before ceding nearly half the song’s runtime to a gripping Meechy verse. It’s a subtle and touching act of brotherly love.
The greatest generosity seems to have been extended to Erick, whose compositions are ornate and indulgent. Muted key changes are smuggled into percussion-driven slappers like “M. Bison” and “Headstone”; cosmic chords drift in and out of “Crown;” an interpolation of Three 6 Mafia’s “Stay Fly” blips in on “Big Shrimp” solely to accent a punchline; session vocalists and guitarists fill every crag. A$AP Mob producer Hector Delgado (“Misunderstood”), Pro Era stalwart Kirk Knight (“Big Shrimp”), and Macklemore associate Tyler Dopps (“HELL-O”) provide support, but the Architect’s blueprints fit everything together. Again, this is a refinement—Erick has always been the chief designer of the Zombies’ sound—but where 3001: A Laced Odyssey prioritized atmosphere, Vacation in Hell emphasizes configuration. Sounds are arranged with the aim of intensifying moments rather than prolonging them, creating a dynamic soundscape that pulsates and twitches.
These various level-ups make Vacation in Hell competent but not always compelling. Flatbush Zombies have always struggled to make their music as vivid as their logos and merch. Zooted videos like “Thug Waffle” and “Face-Off” and lively early interviews detailing ego-snuffing acid trips primed listeners and critics to label the group as “trippy,” but in reality the music was muddled and meandering, a sludge of halfway effective shock rap and new age trinketry. Lines like “Triple 6 on my coffin, I dance with the devil” (“Bounce”)  and “I love brain, Zombie style” (“Bath Salt”) immediately flatline.
This is a constant through line in Flatbush Zombies’ work. From D.R.U.G.S. to Vacation in Hell, the Zombies have had a tendency to explain an image rather than evoke it. Juice is a habitual violator. On “M. Bison” he raps, “I’m so froze, everyday feel like February,” while on “Reel Girls” he raps, “We fucking in the mirror, can’t see it any clearer.” That’s...how mirrors work? Lead single “Headstone” is a total whiff. The lyrics consist almost entirely of canonical song and album titles. It’s presented as homage but it feels like Wikipedia moderators throwing a cypher. In passing, the lushness of the album can mask all this corner cutting, but as the record stretches toward the 75-minute mark, the rigor mortis sets in.
There will never be a shortage of New York rappers penning lifeless stan raps, and if hip-hop wants them around, it’s fine. But Flatbush Zombies have more to offer. Across Vacation in Hell, flashes of lucidity spirit the Zombies outside of their stiffened corpses and evoke a world of camaraderie and brotherhood amid loss and sacrifice. One of the most arresting images on the record is Meechy mourning A$AP Yams on “YouAreMySunshine.” His flow dragging and his signature croak raspy as ever, he turns grief into fantasy: “I know you’re smiling down sharing backwoods with Biggie/Rocking Aaliyah boat or taking a tab with Jimi/Pimping with Sweet Jones, gold grilling with O-D-B.“ No stan could have rapped that; these are the words of a brother.


In the first part of an ambitious compilation, the NON Worldwide label surveys club music’s avant-garde while confronting hegemonic power structures.

Various Artists: NON Worldwide Compilation Trilogy Volume 2: Part 1

In their three prolific years as a label, NON Worldwide have been responsible for some of the most thought-provoking experimental club music out there, highlighting African and African-diasporic voices worldwide. In politically charged multimedia art and joint releases with other like-minded collectives, the label's members have built a community untethered by genre or geographic borders. Their ambitious three-part compilation series is framed as a “genome-wide association study” of the 42 participating artists (or “citizens” of NON’s transnational republic) that outlines their supposed genetic commonalities.
Although co-founders Chino Amobi, ANGEL-HO, and Nkisi are absent from this first installment, Part 1 is a tightly curated collection of songs by both longtime NON associates and new citizens like Klein and Sporting Life. The compilation is front-loaded with its more melodic offerings, including Enterra’s hypnotic “Saskia e Chico” and Hyperdub associate Klein’s fractured R&B ballad “Brother.” After starring on NON and NAAFI’s collaborative 2016 mixtape, Brooklyn singer-songwriter Embaci further showcases her soaring vocals atop sparse percussion and gently fluttering wind chimes on “Hymnal Pine Heart.”
Unsurprisingly, many of the record’s best moments confront complicated racial histories. On “Untitled,” Free at Last takes a slogan (“The world is a ghetto”) not unlike one that’s been emblazoned on NON merchandise or album covers and turns it into an ominous battle cry complete with whirring sirens and militant drums. The Swiss-Congolese producer Bonaventure’s “BLACKFACE” goes one step further, weaving together seemingly disparate samples including ballroom staple “The Ha Dance”  and a “Daily Show” segment about blackface minstrel shows into a jarring collage.
Similar to NON’s 2015 compilation—which featured early work from experimentalists including Gaika, Mhysa, and Yves Tumor—Volume 1 also serves as an introduction to a handful of new acts. You’re unlikely to hear DJ Lady Lane’s driving, industrial-edged “Bad Habits” on any streaming services’ electronic playlists, but it makes perfect sense here alongside former Ratking producer Sporting Life’s mournful instrumental “Bauhaus.” Same goes for John Glacier’s glitchy composition “Broken Macbook: Afflictions,” and Richard Kennedy’s layered, 10-minute epic “Men Are Weak,” which juxtaposes choral and mechanical voices and departs from the New York artist’s more song-oriented debut EP, Open Wound in a Pool of Sharks.
If there’s one voice that comes closest to capturing the disruptive ethos laid out in manifestos and interviews with its co-founders, it’s Californian underground rapper Gita (who’s set to release a full-length sometime this year). She’s said that “Ban Men” was partially inspired by her experiences attending all-black schools in Oakland, and the take-no-prisoners anthem’s subject matter couldn’t be any more current. “Watch out for the ban men, the ban men,” she warns throughout, which feels all too timely given the fact that millions of American immigrants are currently under threat of deportation by government agencies like ICE. NON’s message might promote a borderless world, but it’s clear that there’s still work to be done.


Kompakt records boss mixes another series of Speicher releases and finally issues his debut studio LP.

Touch / Speicher 2

Michael Mayer's gift for the definitive statement has made him a worthy figurehead for microhouse. Sure, it helps that he owns Kompakt Records, but his expertly constructed mixes are so authoritative and lean that they read like blue-sky distillations of a point in time; he's one of few DJs who can communicate the full-bodied landscape of a scene and meditate on its past and future possibilities in the span of 70 minutes.
But despite being responsible for two such landmark mixes in 2002's Immer and 2003's Fabric 13, Mayer's original material has heretofore been consigned to 12-inches. Lost amidst the glut of pre-holiday releases last December, Touch is the full-length debut he has reportedly labored over for years. Dissatified with the album's many previous incarnations, Mayer recorded this final version over a three-week burst last summer; with its light, August atmospheres and simple, elementary sounds, Touch communicates the natural environment in which it was made. It also sounds like it was hatched in a relatively short timeframe, which is no bad thing-- where Mayer's studio mixes have been assembled with a painstakingly precise, scissor-cut aesthetic, Touch generally feels rounder, more casual and certainly more homemade.
Of the eight tracks, only one-- the wispy "Lovefood"-- contains vocals. The rest range from the by-the-books techno of atmosphere-setting opener "Touch" to the proggy (translation: epic and undanceable) no man's land of the album centrepiece "Slowfood". But, a few highlights notwithstanding (both "Heiden" and the previously released "Amabile" ooze slow-cooked energy), Touch never achieves liftoff, nor does it ever really threaten to. Instead, it just kind of blissfully floats around in its own self-contained environment, content to prettily fizzle out into an unceremonious anti-climax.
Mixed a few months prior, Speicher 2 comprises tracks mostly culled from Kompakt Extra's Speicher series, and shows Mayer the clinician at his best. With a small pool of strong source material to select from, Mayer's job is admittedly a lot easier here. As ever, he reveals himself to be a master of momentum, easing into the mix with dark rumblers like Wighnomy Brothers' "Wurz + Blosse", Wolfgang Voigt's "Nachschub", and the bubbling techno of his own brilliant "X". Thirty minutes down the line, he's dutifully moved on to bangers like Freiland's prickly "Jens Harke Mix", the schaffel stomp of Fuschsbau's "Null/Eins", and Naum's spangly "Ari"-- the final track in another functionally and technically sound set.
Like Touch, at times Speicher 2 suffers underneath the weight of Mayer's past achievements-- or maybe that's just microhouse beginning to show diminishing returns. But even if neither of these records ultimately match up to Kompakt's finest, they're still welcome outings, and proof that Mayer is the rare leader from whom "more of the same" is still a welcome proposition.


Yesterday, information came to me. It arrived in the form of a sentence, spoken\n\ by one of the esteemed ...

The Sophtware Slump

Yesterday, information came to me. It arrived in the form of a sentence, spoken by one of the esteemed Pitchfork writers. It told of big-time music critics calling Grandaddy's The Sophtware Slump "album of the year." Now, pardon me if I sound disturbed, but it's fucking March. Consider all the great bands with albums in the 2000 pipeline: Radiohead, The Wrens, Björk, The Beta Band-- do we really want to limit ourselves to Grandaddy this early on?
Atmospheric pop has dominated Critics' Lists for too long. How long ago did Mercury Rev issue Deserter's Songs? Is this all we can aspire to in the future? Where's the goddamn rock these days? Isn't anyone interested in volume? While no one may ever step up to answer these questions, one thing is for certain-- time is running out for this genre, and I have a feeling it's not exactly going to age like wine. However, even at this late hour, The Sophtware Slump manages to sound reasonably fresh, yields its share of unshakable melodies, and excels in production. This is quite possibly the last great entry in the atmospheric pop canon.
The lyrical content of The Sophtware Slump focuses largely on failed industrial machinery-- crashed airplanes, malfunctioning androids, and abandoned appliances-- returning to the earth, or just lying around broken. Undeniably, this is that blasted Radiohead influence rearing its twitchy eye. Yeah, since OK Computer, everyone wants to be them. Really, you can't blame people for attempting their own variations on the theme. OK Computer is, after all, one of the greatest albums our generation has experienced in its time. But bands need to realize that they're not Radiohead, and that no one ever made it into the history books by trying to do what another group had already done better.
The Radiohead influence seems obvious here, coming from a band whose last album, the 1996 (pre-OK Computer) debut Under the Western Freeway, was comprised of light-hearted, Weezer-inspired sing-alongs. But surprisingly, Grandaddy inject the album with an air-tight cohesiveness, and enough of their own personality, emotion and creativity to warrant looking past the fact that someone's already succeeded in recording the ultimate anti-technology album.
But Grandaddy do manage to stir up raw emotion and genuine sincerity over songs that are far hookier and more immediately accessible than Radiohead's. The album's anthemic opener, "He's Simple, He's Dumb, He's the Pilot" gives a glimpse into the album's multi-layered, airy, Godrich-esque production techniques, as well as its general disheartened feel and epic tendencies (the track runs almost nine minutes long).
For the most part, the album's songs are solid to the point that they'd have the potential of becoming indie rock classics if frontman Jason Lytle wasn't content to beat you over the head with them. Out of the gate, these melodies are all enjoyable to an almost surreal degree. And most of them remain that way. The problem arises when Lytle plays the same bars repeatedly without relying on choruses or bridges (as in the almost torturous third track, "Jed the Humanoid"). A few of these tracks also drag on just a little too long.
There are few upbeat tracks on the album, and most of them come toward the beginning. After the heavy-hearted weight of "He's the Pilot," the bouncy "Hewlett's Daughter" serves as a nice breather. "The Crystal Lake" stands as one of the album's highlights with its driving chorus and preprogrammed Cars-inspired keyboard scale. "Chartsengrafs" follows close behind, fueled by buzzing guitars and drawn-out harmonies. And finally, we come to the radio-ready "Broken Household Appliance National Forest," a track about "air conditioners in the woods."
But that's where the happiness ends. The rest of the album wallows in a depression so deep, it'd make your grandparents stock up on canned foods and dress in rags. The Radiohead influence really becomes apparent on the last four tracks. "Jed's Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)" resurrects a verse of "Jed the Humanoid," sung a cappella, before launching into a sparkling, glossy epic and finally settling into the menacing "Knievel Interlude (The Perils of Keeping It Real)." "Miner at the Dial-A-View" kicks in after two minutes, encapsulating the entire album with longing, regretful lyrics ("I dream at night/ Of going home someday/ Somewhere, so far away"), distant melodic beeping, and a female voice giving instructions on the proper usage of the "dial-a-view."
The Sophtware Slump comes to a close with "So You'll Aim Toward the Sky," a spacious five-minute epic that opens with discordant guitar lines over subtle technology-related sound effects. The song repeats four lines over dramatic strings, chimes in the vein of "No Surprises," and Jason Lytle's best Thom Yorke impression. And surprisingly, it's more effective and believable than derived and cloying. When the songs winds down, you're left with a feeling of genuine impact.
Now, I'm not saying The Sophtware Slump even comes close to touching OK Computer, though I can see what about it might drive someone to call it "album of the year" this early on. But we have nine months to go! If we'd said Built to Spill's Keep It like a Secret was the album of the year in January, 1999, we wouldn't have been taking the Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin and the Dismemberment Plan's Emergency & I into account.
So, watch yourself now, 'cause it looks like there's gonna be some pretty crazy hype surrounding The Sophtware Slump this year. And yes, the record is good, but as music fans, we have a duty to expect more from bands than recreations of albums past. We need innovators, not imitators, goddamnit! Think of the children!


The Belgian duo’s debut album pairs punchy, propulsive electro pop with inventive sound design, absurdist wit, and sly jabs at racism and xenophobia.

Charlotte Adigéry / Bolis Pupul: Topical Dancer

Topical Dancer

Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul’s Topical Dancer is as blunt and emphatic as pop art—if you don’t get its bright, assertive takedowns, you’re not paying attention. The Belgian musicians take as much pleasure in sardonically dressing down racism, misogyny, and xenophobia as they do in crafting effortlessly propulsive electro pop fit for warehouse parties. That mischievous friction is at the heart of Topical Dancer, a riveting debut from two artists whose music pokes you in the side as often as it makes you move.
Released on veteran Belgian duo Soulwax’s DEEWEE label, Topical Dancer openly draws on that group’s sweaty, mid-’00s-flavored blend of rock and electronic music. (Soulwax also contributed co-production and writing to the album.) Miss Kittin and Felix Da Housecat’s talky electroclash is also a prominent touchstone, but this isn’t a throwback by any means—the album’s brisk, burly synth lines and walloping beats are powerful weapons in Adigéry and Pupul’s arsenal. The pair met over a decade ago in Ghent, forming a friendship that became a working one after Soulwax paired them up to contribute music to the 2016 film Belgica. They put out the excellent Zandoli EP under Adigéry’s name in 2019; Topical Dancer reaffirms their music as the collaborative project it’s always been.
That close kinship is key to an album riddled with in-jokes and oddities. The funky “Making Sense Stop,” inspired by David Byrne, progressively chops up and rearranges each verse’s lyrics until they become gleeful, digital gibberish; the crawling, loungey “Huile Smisse” parodies French speakers who love to hear themselves talk (the title is the French phonetic spelling of Will Smith’s name). Later, on the endlessly replayable “HAHA,” Adigéry’s gut-busting laugh is sampled and rewired into a strutting hook, while the chorus crumples into a choked-up sob. Topical Dancer thrives in these irreverent moments, where the duo’s wry humor injects subversive surprises into dance music’s familiar forms.
In a recent interview, Adigéry and Pupul explained that the decision to focus on hot-button issues came from the pair’s daily experiences as artists from immigrant backgrounds living in Europe: nosy yet excessively apologetic reporters, white Belgians genuinely confused as to why they can’t use the n-word, and the cycle of outrage and finger-pointing that manifests when people get too insulted. Instead of chastising (or, god forbid, canceling), Adigéry and Pupul are more interested in gentle ribbing. Bustling electro-pop song “Blenda” recasts a racist line into a memorable singsong: “Go back to your country where you belong,” Adigéry sweetly intones. “Siri, can you tell me where I belong?” The album’s lyrics, which dart between English, French, and Creole, frequently underline the limits of PC culture with good intentions, even as they sometimes fall flat. “Are you as offended when nobody’s watching?” Adigéry ponders alongside a chattering drum pattern on “Esperanto.” “Are you an attacker or a victim?” Their tongues are planted firmly in cheek, but here it becomes didactic.
The occasional unwieldy lyric is a small, forgivable blunder for an album that rarely lets up its electrifying energy. They cram in as many overused lyrics as possible on “Ceci n’est pas un cliché” (“You’re cold as ice,” “Let’s dance the night away”), creating a Frankensteined earworm above a plucked bassline and fingersnaps. During the pummeling highlight “It Hit Me,” Adigéry and Pupul take turns recounting a coming-of-age moment in pitch-shifted voices against a taut, glowering backdrop of battering drums and wolf whistles. Adigéry remembers being catcalled by a group of men while waiting for a bus; Pupul recalls a love letter that led to a sexual awakening over a bottle of cologne. The song spirals into a delirious clatter of percussion once each of their stories end, succinctly capturing the uncomfortable, nightmarish punch of adolescence.
Even in its more earnest moments, Adigéry and Pupul never take themselves too seriously, which lends to Topical Dancer’s roguish charm. The duo are too busy setting up yet another punchline to make each other laugh, as they do constantly on the caustic six-minute closer “Thank You.” In a delightfully faux-appreciative tone, Adigéry lays into everyone who’s ever given them unasked-for advice: “Couldn’t have done this without you/And your opinion,” she sings; “Enlighten me with your vision/I count my blessings.” It’s a consummate kiss-off and a sarcastic declaration of purpose: You couldn’t tell Adigéry and Pupul what to think if you tried.


Geir Jenssen’s return to ambient techno captures him at his frostiest. It’s his largest-scale and most meticulously crafted release in some time.

Shortwave Memories

Geir Jenssen greeted the last decade with 2011’s N-Plants, a highlight of his long-running career as Biosphere, before spending the next 10 years on low-key experiments in sampling and field recording. Some of these releases are great (Departed Glories, The Hilvarenbeek Recordings). Others are enjoyable if you can get behind the concept (L’Incoronazione di Poppea, half an hour of what sounds like opera samples being sucked up by a vacuum). But none seemed to involve much elbow grease compared to N-Plants or his “Arctic ambient” classic Substrata: They were passion projects, the products of curiosity rather than examples of the craftsmanship he’s capable of.
His new album Shortwave Memories could be seen as a bookend to this period, along with N-Plants. It’s his largest-scale and most meticulously crafted release in that time, and it picks up stylistically where N-Plants left off. He’s limited himself to synths from the late ’70s and early ’80s this time around, but sharp-eared fans will recognize many of the sounds as staples of his arsenal for a while (a chilly preset on “Infinium” first showed up on his two-part “Algae & Fungi” suite from 2000’s Cirque, for instance). Yet Shortwave Memories makes no effort to present itself as a tentpole release, a culmination, or a crowd-pleaser. This is Jenssen at his frostiest, and it’s tonally more akin to Substrata and Cirque than to the antiseptic warmth of N-Plants.
“Tanß” opens the album with nearly a minute of phased, clanking drums before a string synth reluctantly fades in. We hear a lot more of that patch throughout the album, usually ruminating sourly on minor chords. Shortwave Memories is sequenced so all the tracks flow into each other, but it doesn’t build like a DJ set; instead, it seems to continually disassemble and reassemble itself, ducking in and out of long, drumless stretches dominated by those synth strings. “Interval Signal” spends most of its runtime building momentum through subtle tweaks to the central bassline, and the drums don’t enter until two-thirds of the way in, disappearing shortly after as if they were never there. Shortwave Memories is so remote, driven by such strange logic, it’s almost funny.
One reason “Transfigured Express” is such a satisfying ending to the album is because it keeps a groove going for 14 minutes instead of stopping to kill its own momentum. Another is because it’s gorgeous, its bassline blooming into icy florets over a drone weirdly reminiscent of the Residents’ “Hello Skinny.” Technical skill is not usually high on the list of reasons to listen to ambient music, but Jenssen has been composing and playing synths for nearly 40 years, and his chops are obvious. Few artists in ambient electronic music use more interesting chords than he does: His harmonic sensibility verges on baroque pop, setting simple melodies against eccentric chord changes that vacillate between placid and panicked. There’s a whole lot going on here, but it progresses at such a glacial pace it’s easy to think this music is simpler than it is at first.
Shortwave Memories doesn’t come to the listener so much as confront them with an immovable object. Its obstinacy comes not from misanthropy or some affected lack of interest in its audience but from a confidence earned as one of ambient’s most respected figures for over 30 years; chalk it up, perhaps, to an accomplished mountain climber’s taste for a challenge. This is no less an experiment than anything Jenssen released during the last 10 years. It’s just that this time, he’s doing something that he’s really, ridiculously good at.


Over 72 minutes, the emo-rap star explores drugs, heartbreak, and the drugs that lead to heartbreak.

Death Race for Love

Though the speed of his ascent may have felt like it, Juice WRLD didn’t just appear on hip-hop’s doorstep in 2018 in an Interscope Records-signed box with the message, “Here is the new face of rap, get used to it.” The 20-year-old Illinois rapper has been developing his style since 2015, mixing his influences into the perfect recipe: the candor of Lil Peep, the delivery of Chief Keef, and the cheap acoustic guitars of XXXTentacion. That recipe alone doesn’t explain his success; one scroll through SoundCloud reveals thousands of artists blending those same ingredients with a fraction of the success. The truth is Juice WRLD can be magnetic: One line can sound like he found an iPod where the only song that works is My Chemical Romance’s “Welcome To the Black Parade” and the very next like he just finished spinning Bang Pt. 2.
Throughout Death Race For Love’s 72 minutes—there’s no reason a Juice WRLD album should be the length of a podcast and a half—Juice WRLD’s lyrics fall into two categories. Fifty percent of the lyrics are bad (“Back on my bullshit, devil emoji”) and the other 50 percent are also bad, but then they get stuck in your head and ultimately turn good (“Tell me your darkest secret shit you wouldn’t even tell Jesus”). On the album opener, “Empty,” Juice WRLD uses drugs like a Band-Aid to cover up his issues (“I problem solve with styrofoam”) over imitation Zaytoven keys from his go-to producer Nick Mira. That same bluntness carries over into other piano lead tracks like “Robbery” where he chants like an open-mic slam poet and channels John Cusack in Say Anything attempting to get his girlfriend back: “I’m throwing rocks at your window, I need to go home.”
Whenever Juice WRLD is emotional (which is all the damn time) he sounds like he’s on the brink of breaking down into lean-fueled tears, but then on a whim will swerve into bitterness. Like Future, with whom he released a collaborative album, Juice WRLD’s openness has its limits, afraid of having his masculinity questioned—to that point, there is a song here literally titled “HeMotions.”
Juice WRLD is living the Jekyll and Hyde experience. He’s erratic, never committed to his feelings, and still infatuated even when overcome by hatred, as his world revolves around love, until it suddenly doesn’t.
Death Race For Love features three guests: The first is an out-of-place but welcome interlude from R&B singer Brent Faiyaz, another is a zany Young Thug, and the third is a hokey feature from Clever. Next to Clever, it becomes apparent just how elevated Juice WRLD is from his so-called “emo-rap” peers. Juice WRLD isn’t a punk or rock artist trying to make hip-hop once he saw the dollar signs; he’s a rapper with influences outside of the genre. He could have easily taken his music further down the pop-punk lane and left rap in his past. But he didn’t, and it’s why Death Race For Love feels like the real Juice WRLD, wearing his influences and heart on his sleeve, putting his ups and downs into the music in real time.


On this covers EP, the country singer digs into the roots in some of her favorite dark love songs, from Sheryl Crow to Nick Lowe to Hank Williams.

My Favorite Mistakes

During a month-long tour opening for Nick Lowe, country singer Esther Rose spent each night enraptured by his ambling 2019 deep cut “Blue on Blue.” Her breakout album from last year, You Made It This Far, originated from feelings of lovesickness and loneliness similar to those in his song, and realizing such inspired her to reimagine the track. Soon after, Rose recorded My Favorite Mistakes, a four-track EP featuring covers of Lowe, Sheryl Crow, Hank Williams, and Roy Orbison. Through these covers, Rose refines her identity, turning the comfort of other artists’ dark admissions into a map where she can find her own space.
On her previous two albums, Rose turned heads with her poignant specificities and nonchalant candor. The songs on My Favorite Mistakes fit naturally in her repertoire, perhaps because these downer anthems were already embedded in Rose the way our favorite songs eventually merge with our DNA. There’s a hint of a smirk to her wispy drawl in “Blue on Blue,” implying that this is a tale of heartbreak as old as time. That’s the thing about dark love songs: “You can sing your guts out and be as creepy and sad as you want,” Rose told Talkhouse, “and then after three minutes, you’re done and you’re OK.”
The EP opens with a deceivingly sunny ray of lap steel and fiddle on “My Favorite Mistake.” While contemporary indie rock artists are turning Sheryl Crow into a belated pop totem, Rose is reaffirming her status as a country luminary. By removing the blues-rock production of the original version and digging up its folk roots instead, she shifts the focus from a cheating partner to the larger question of how to maintain self-worth after treachery.
For someone who grew up in punk rock, Rose is at her most powerful when mimicking country greats. On “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You),” she captures the spirit of Williams in a faithful duet with Lee Walker. She launches into Orbison’s “Blue Bayou” armed with nothing but an acoustic guitar, the barren nature of which makes each whisper-sung octave hit hard. Rose wasn’t exaggerating when she called herself a “reckless optimist.” That’s the unique appeal of My Favorite Mistakes: these are songs for a sore heart, and Rose leans into the sting, but only so her croons can act like a warm compress to soothe the pain.


After seven years, the Flaming Lips' Christmas film finally comes to DVD; not surprisingly, both the movie and its soundtrack reflect the Lips circa 2001 more than the group's post-millennial output, which has emphasized the band's cute and quirky qualities while submerging the strange.

Christmas on Mars

Astronauts with vaginas for faces, a baby's head crushed like a watermelon, Fred Armisen singing "Silent Night"-- the Flaming Lips' maiden foray into DIY filmmaking, Christmas on Mars, features no lack of bizarro imagery for fans who've been patiently waiting the past seven years for its release. The film essentially encompasses everything Wayne Coyne has ever sung about-- the future, outer space, stressed-out scientists, heroism, insanity, the inevitability of death, hope in the face of disaster, the perseverance of the human spirit, mankind's miniscule standing in the universe at large, and, yes, Christmas. And as ridiculous as the idea of Coyne making a sci-fi film in his backyard may be, it was a logical step for a band that's historically found its stage-show inspiration in the local hardware store. But compared to the orgiastic circus of balloons, confetti, and dancing mascots that has come to define the the Flaming Lips' live set-up, Christmas on Mars is a starkly rendered, sometimes ponderous, rather bleak affair. Starring multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd as a Mars-station major trying to salvage Christmas celebrations on the red planet after a Santa-suited colleague's suicide, and Coyne as the mute alien who helps him, the film plays like a 2001 that looks like it cost $2,001 to make.
Its accompanying score likewise marks a break from the Lips' post-millennial recorded output, which, consistent with the band's live evolution, has emphasized the band's cute and quirky qualities while submerging the strange. And yet, even with the complete absence of the band's signature devices-- namely, Coyne's creaky croon and Drozd's earth-quaking drum beats-- Christmas on Mars still feels very much like a Flaming Lips album, fusing synthetic orchestral elements, choral harmonies and electronic effects to create a soundtrack that, like the film, captures both what we imagine outer space to be (a wondrous expanse of psychedelic splendor) and what it really is: a cold, dark, desolate place that's so vast, it's suffocating. Not for nothing is the soundtrack book-ended by an eerily Lynchian ambient piece called "Once Beyond Hopelessness".
Given that the film's production began in 2001, it would follow that the score's origins date back to that post-Soft Bulletin/pre-Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots era. In a sense, Christmas on Mars could be heard as a parallel-universe product of what the Flaming Lips could've turned into had they decided to further experiment with The Soft Bulletin's background orchestral textures instead of streamlining them into Yoshimi's compact electro-pop. With the two-part "The Distance Between Mars and the Earth", the Disneyfied acid trip of "The Horrors of Isolation", and wordless harmony haze of "In Excelsior Vaginalistic", you can imagine what Bulletin standards like "A Spoonful Weighs a Ton" and "The Spark That Bled" would sound like without the actual songs on top of them.
But the score is also a reminder of a time when the Lips were more interested in provoking their audience than pleasing it: The power-drilled drones of "Your Spaceship Comes From Within" play like a one-minute distillation of the half-hour electronic-noise oscillation they tacked onto 1992's Hit to Death in the Future Head, while the slow-motion tribal build of "Suicide and Extraordinary Mistakes" is accompanied by an ear-piercing, high-pitched frequency that harkens back to 1997's four-CD mind-fuck Zaireeka.
As the soundtrack progresses, it actually acquires a logic and momentum that isn't necessarily experienced watching the film, which tends to use this music in brief bursts-- for example, "The Gleaming Armament of Marching Genitalia" is a swell of Wagnerian pomp that soundtracks the aforementioned baby-crushing. On record the track is made more effective by an aftermath come-down with "The Distress Signals of Celestial Objects". In turn, the muted reverberations and droning crescendo of "Distress Singnals" sets the scene for "Space Bible With Volume Lumps", which manifests the film's claustrophobic tension with a ticking glitch beat, analog-synth loops and blaring trumpets.
In Christmas on Mars' closing credits, The Flaming Lips include a special thank you to the band's fans for their support and patience with the film; but for long-time followers of the band, that patience is truly rewarded by the soundtrack album, which-- following a series of tours that have more or less stuck to the same nightly script-- reassert the Flaming Lips' ability to surprise, experiment and freak us out. Tellingly, the Christmas on Mars DVD/CD package is housed in a regular CD jewel-case as opposed to the standard DVD long box-- the implication being that Christmas on Mars is as much a film in service to a soundtrack as a soundtrack in service to a film.


Every aspect of the Texas rapper’s personality locks into place on his latest album, the most deeply personal statement of his career.

Weight of the World

On paper, Maxo Kream has a lot to celebrate. In 2011, he turned a remix of Kendrick Lamar’s “Rigamortis” into a flurry of mixtapes and internet hype that, by 2014, had him opening shows for Chief Keef. All of this was before he released his 2015 breakout, Maxo 187, which shoehorned traditional Houston hip-hop values into rap’s then-current commodification of aesthetic in the wake of A$AP Mob and Raider Klan’s respective come-ups. Maxo’s studio debut Punken and follow-up Brandon Banks established him as a stylist unafraid to mix modern Texas bounce with deeply personal stories tackling the complicated web of crime, family, and lineage. For his trouble, he signed a massive $1.5 million record deal with RCA in 2019, and earlier this year, he became a father.
Rap’s spoils have pushed Maxo far, but on “Cripstian,” the intro to his latest album, Weight of the World, his mind is on anything but. The general paranoia that comes with his well-established Crip ties is bad enough, but his status report is packed with sorrowful snapshots: a cousin who recently died by suicide; a grandmother hospitalized due to COVID; a friend with a million-dollar bail. The beat—a storm of percussion, vocal samples, and synths courtesy of producers teej and Dom Maker—accentuates Maxo’s personal and familial anxieties, especially his attempt to bargain with God to visit his brother in Heaven: “Life without you is a struggle, I even had to scuffle, fight/They say I sacrificed your life like I had joined Illuminati.”
The moment is raw and tender, even by the standards of an artist whose last two albums have all the drug-pushing minutiae and family strife of a season of The Wire. As emotionally forthright as it can be, Weight of the World isn’t content to simply be a Brandon Banks redux. In fact, there is no broader concept or family tree narrative tying these songs together. On Weight, Maxo isn’t just a link in the chain; he’s become the whole piece, his successes, failures, pains, and triumphs forming the paisley patterns on the blue bandana wrapped around his heart.
Maxo’s music is deceptive because of how often he floats heavy subjects across varied beats. A song like Punken’s “Grannies” plays like a modern nursery rhyme, a light and bouncy melody paired with images of neighborhood stabbings, shootings, and illicit secrets. The trunk-rattling 808s and synths Maxo made his name on are still active and booming, but Weight expands his boundaries. His voice cruises over vintage soul samples on “Cripstian” and standout track “11:59.” Live bass and guitar bring new color and dimension to his thoughts of being robbed on “FRFR” and the frank admission of his drug problem on “Worthless,” while “Greener Knots” and “Mama’s Purse” are effectively boom-bap cuts. The fact that Weight features so many different kinds of rap across its 44 minutes and very little of it feels overwhelming or out of place is a testament to Maxo’s growing vision.
Maxo has never shied away from describing how familial ties have bound his life and forged his place within a network of criminals. But while Brandon Banks uses his father’s history and shortcomings as a framing device for Maxo’s coming-of-age story, Weight is told almost entirely through Maxo’s eyes. He’s surveying the battleground of his life with more honesty and maturity than ever. “I boast and brag ’cause it was not supposed to last,” he says at the start of “Whole Lotta,” summing up the album’s ethos. The most arresting record, “Mama’s Purse,” is dedicated to his mother, an examination of her trauma and history of shoplifting that fills in the gaps left by her absence on Brandon Banks. His admission that he “put a price tag on her love but can’t afford how much it’s worth” adds a tinge of sadness to every flex on the album.
And while Weight comes with plenty of trauma to unpack, it never feels portentous or gloomy. There’s still fun and plenty to be thankful for within Maxo’s chaotic world. He’s cutting up, even glowing, on tracks like “Big Persona” and “FRFR,” rhyming about getting his family out of the projects and how he’s moved more bags than Gucci. The secret to keeping every song so effortless and flowing, regardless of subject matter, is in the phrasing. He can boil something as complicated as friends betraying each other down to a simple and clever line like, “Seen niggas turn 12 like 11:59.” The rhyme scheme at the beginning of “Greener Knots” is an intricate chain of connecting memories: an uncle smoking a crack rock for the first time while watching The Rock before Maxo changes the channel to an episode of Rap City featuring the New York rap group the Lox. It’s a smooth first-person recounting of a traumatic experience buoyed by a pop culture reference and Maxo’s clear appreciation for wordplay.
Maxo’s love for rap and all the things it’s helped him accomplish is the beating heart keeping Weight of the World alive. For all the problems plaguing his mind—every family member he’s had to bury, every time he’s had to look over his shoulder for an unknown shooter—Maxo is thankful to have beaten the odds and to be rapping over Tyler, the Creator beats while building wealth for his newborn daughter. Weight is a complicated tapestry of pride, betrayal, and Houston hip-hop glory, every aspect of Maxo’s personality locking seamlessly into place to create the personal statement of his career.

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