Taken line by line, Gary Lightbody's lyrics on Snow Patrol's third album, Final Straw, don't say\n ...

Final Straw

Taken line by line, Gary Lightbody's lyrics on Snow Patrol's third album, Final Straw, don't say much: "Ways and Means" features the line, "Is there a t-shirt I can wear/ 'Cause I'm soaking look at me." "Grazed Knees" contains the banal couplet, "Your breakfast will get cold/ I really have to go." And "Spitting Games" veers dangerously close to high school poetry: "My heart is bursting in your perfect eyes/ As blue as oceans and as pure as skies." But taken together, these not-too-quotable lines add up to a surprising whole: an album as argument, wherein Lightbody pleads with lovers to consider his side of the story ("How to Be Dead"), or to give him another chance ("Grazed Knees"), or simply to notice him ("Spitting Games"). Rather than dwelling the dissolved romances of his past, Lightbody dwells in the here-and-now, speaking not to his audience but to his lovers, and candidly reveals a centrifuge of conflicting emotions and awkward confessions.
Writing in plainspoken lyrics that sound like the kind of speech you rehearse in your head for days, Lightbody has carved himself a niche among confessional singer/songwriters by documenting the gradual accumulation of grievances and recriminations that creates a rift between two people who ostensibly love each other. The problems he describes usually aren't as tangible or as black-and-white as, say, cheating, but Lightbody still manages to make these small predicaments dramatic and compelling.
If the lyrics carry the feelings, then the music itself is restrained: tastefully plaintive vocals and churning guitars generate rigid, unwavering tempos that approximate dance music. It's a more sophisticated sound than that of the band's previous albums, or of Lightbody's side project, The Reindeer Section. In addition to adding guitarist Nathan Connolly, Snow Patrol have brought in producer Garret "Jacknife" Lee (formerly of the band Compulsion), who gathers elements from the Pixies and My Bloody Valentine, as well as from more obvious sources like Radiohead, into a straightforward, polished sound that works well for the first half of Final Straw.
The pristine quality of Snow Patrol's music and Garret Lee's production, however, belies the rawness of Lightbody's words, and too often, the songs suffer from the contrast. It's not that there aren't bursts of noisy feedback or filtered vocals or the occasional programmed beats; it's that each one sounds perfectly placed, too tidy, so overthought and foreordained that the songs sound staid and stolid.
This is especially noticeable in the middle of Final Straw, when Snow Patrol indulge in some Coldplay moments. "Run" exists solely for its uplifting, if oddly fatalistic, chorus ("Light up, light up/ As if you have a choice"), which will surely have concertgoers raising their lighters during the inevitable second-encore singalong. Actually, the song is unapologetically anthemic, until Lee throws in some schmaltzy strings at the climax that practically cry out to score the big smooch in some teen-friendly romantic comedy.
Deploying more upbeat tempos and pop harmonies, "Ways and Means" and "Tiny Little Fractures" try to regain the momentum of the album's first half. But "Somewhere a Clock Is Ticking" crawls along at a slow pace, its gloomy atmosphere not quite enough to sustain it, and "Same" attempts a grand finale that only sounds redundant after "Run". As such, despite the surprising cohesion of its modest lyrics, Final Straw remains less than the sum of its parts.


The UK dance producer’s effervescent debut glows from within, powered by nostalgic ’80s synth and a stacked guest list that includes Rina Sawayama, piri, and Empress Of.

True Magic

Cars and pop music: They’re quite literally built to go together. Enter True Magic, the Ninja Tune debut from Manchester-based producer salute. Engines roar to life and cheers crescendo with each lap as producer Felix Nyajo shifts effortlessly across French touch, glitchy house, jungle beats, UK garage, and soul samples. Traversing genres with a pop sensibility alongside a heavy roster of collaborators, True Magic recalls Settle, the career-defining debut by Disclosure (who are featured on “lift off!”). salute and longtime friend and executive producer Karma Kid inject each track with LED-lit momentum and joyriding ease.
salute’s first full-length has been a decade in the making. In 2014, Nyajo relocated from Vienna to the UK, immersing themselves in the British club scene at a moment when the robust, metallic rhythms of future bass pioneers like Hudson Mohawke and Rustie dominated. That tectonic purple sound influence—chip-tune buildups pieced together with sludgy bass hooks—was audible in early salute releases. Since then, Nyajo has ironed out the aggressive drops, smoothing their style into what they’ve called “fast and soulful house music.” They’ve performed for Boiler Room crowds and worked alongside modern-day pop hitmakers (the 1975’s George Daniel) and fellow rising producers (DJ Boring, DJ Seinfeld, Barry Can’t Swim). Four Tet is a fan.
True Magic demonstrates the extent of salute’s evolution. Its songs are sculpted around glowing ’80s synthesizers, nodding to modern nostalgists like Daft Punk, Alan Braxe, and Kavinsky. The sleek, Weeknd-esque “Maybe it’s u,” featuring vocals from Scottish producer Sam Gellaitry, has the propulsive punch of Discovery and some of Ratatat’s cheese-grated guitar. Blending gritty bloghouse with elements of UKG, drum’n’bass, and jungle, salute emulates the aura of past hits without ripping them off. The results showcase their curatorial skill, fitting each track to their guests’ strengths. Empress Of’s satin vocals are the perfect vessel for romantic longing on “one of those nights”; piri’s cherubic tone in “luv stuck” is matched to bubblegum house on cruise control.
Nyajo locates True Magic’s inspirations in vintage Japanese car advertisements, a colorful, frictionless style of clip that matched shiny new automobiles to sentimental pop soundtracks and fuzzy graphics. A sample of the Japanese jazz fusion group Casiopea’s song “Asayake” on the intro nods to a similar time period, but salute doesn’t linger: They swiftly transition to the rubbery bass of “saving flowers,” with Rina Sawayama. It’s as satisfying as running a series o f green lights. The front half of the album’s French house tilt is abruptly (and thrilling) interrupted by “go!,” featuring Japanese rapper Nakamura Minami, whose high-energy, hyper-animated style previously landed her work in the racing game Need for Speed.
True Magic’s concept resembles a race, but at the end, salute counterintuitively eases off the accelerator. On the dreamy closer “drive,” singer LEILAH softly urges us to “drive faster,” even as the tempo seems to slow, and salute braids a hypnotic daisy chain of “la la las” into a glitchy house beat. Then a robotic voice calls us abruptly back, warning, “You will now return to the real world.” The unsettling closing note snaps the reverie: Like in the slick fantasy of those car ads, True Magic never needed a destination or a finish line. All the better to enjoy the ride.


RZA made his first foray outside of hip-hop with a daring score for the 1999 Jim Jarmusch film about a lonely hitman. The movie plays like a melancholy requiem for the Wu-Tang’s golden era.

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

When RZA met Quincy Jones in 1997, the rap producer had just finished conquering the world. Wu-Tang Forever, the Wu-Tang Clan’s unwieldy double-album follow-up to Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), was No. 1 in the country, and “Triumph,” a six-minute posse cut with no hook, was playing alongside sugary Puff Daddy and Mase hits on mainstream rap radio. The dense, grimy sound RZA pioneered forever altered his genre, and the deal he’d negotiated with Loud Records amounted to perhaps the most decisive industry takeover in music-business history. There would seem to be nowhere to go next, but the man who called himself the Abbott was in awe of Jones, so he humbled himself. What should I do next, he asked the super producer, in order to crest the next wave, to climb the next summit? The answer, Jones told him, was to score a movie.
Around that same time, Jim Jarmusch was toying with the notion of a movie about a sympathetic killer. The downtown New York City filmmaker conceived of the sad-eyed hitman Ghost Dog—played, in his mind, by Forest Whitaker, an actor so inextricable from his role that Jarmusch has said that if Whitaker turned him down, the movie would never have existed—as a Black man living on a rooftop, tending to pigeons and reading from the Hagakure, an 18th-century text on the Bushido code, while he waits for assignments from his mob handler. When a hit goes wrong and the Mafia decides Ghost Dog must die, he goes up against them all, one by one.
The story mimicked the structure of many classic crime noir or kung fu films, but Jarmusch wanted to treat the framework just as he used the Western in 1995’s Dead Man: as a bemused meditation on humankind’s attempts to impose meaning and order on a meaningless existence. His movies were as much about sound as they were sight—Dead Man was as much a vehicle for the wordless score by Neil Young as it was for lead actor Johnny Depp—and for the Ghost Dog score, he had only one man in mind. After settling his script and securing Whitaker’s commitment, he tapped a few mutual acquaintances and requested a meeting with the RZA.
The pair made strange bedfellows at first—RZA in army fatigues, Jarmusch with his silver-white pompadour and black sunglasses, like Lou Reed and Andy Warhol remixed into one person. But for both of them, the story of Ghost Dog had biographical echoes. Jarmusch grew up in 1950s and ’60s Akron, on the street where the Gambino family had their social club, during a time when the mafia’s real-life grip was fading as quickly as pop culture’s fascination with it was booming. RZA, who had gone to school with members of the Castellano family, understood the magnetic pull of mafioso culture better than anyone. He agreed to score the film before Jarmusch had even shot it. The pairing felt like a secret handshake.
Even so, it took a while for RZA to adjust to Jarmusch’s strange, silence-filled style. His first compositions were made with a much more conventional movie in mind—lush, traditionally cinematic, fit for the Hong Kong action flicks that were starting to pop up on American shores, but all wrong for the quizzical, emptied-out stage on which Ghost Dog’s action takes place. In Ghost Dog, the Mafia is a joke, a bunch of cut-rate mobsters with central-casting names like Valerio and Francis and Louie and Vinny, saying things like “forget about it” and “you’re gonna get whacked.” They meet at dollar stores and hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurants instead of red-carpeted clubs, and they fend off their wheedling landlord instead of breaking kneecaps. They are the Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns of the other mob movies, workers with no real boss, and they live by a Mafioso code in the same way a goldendoodle puppy feels the stirrings of wolf ancestry when it sniffs the air. The music had to be a barely felt pulse, the only lingering remnant of a time when warriors clashed steel and clans fought for honor.
Jarmusch told him to go with his instincts, and so RZA went back to craft a score that better suited the mood. Along the way, he tapped into places in his creative mind he’d never been before. When you were making a track for a rapper, there had to be sturdy rhythmic footholds in place. But scoring for a film meant, as RZA put it, “the music can be as awkward as you want it to be.” “Awkward” became a useful byword for RZA’s Ghost Dog work. The tracks are left intentionally lop-sided, full of irregularities; many of them seem like bits that broke and floated free from some larger landmass. The opening theme leaves yawning silences so wide they’re like head fakes, potholes for your ear. “Samurai Theme” is built on a martial-sounding sample that triggers just off the beat, an audio companion to the sight of the ungainly Ghost Dog practicing swordplay. Like J Dilla, who also fiddled with hip-hop’s internal time clock, RZA often smudged the border between intention and accident, but he never experimented with these timing gaps as boldly as he does here.
The centerpiece is “Flying Birds,” a weightless interlude that captures the film’s mood so perfectly Jarmusch returned to it again and again. “Flying Birds” plays whenever Ghost Dog’s messenger pigeons wing their way from one chipped Jersey City storefront window to another, filmed greasy and unbeautiful against gray skies—a vision of freedom, however constrained. For the RZA, it was a strikingly quiet piece of music, untroubled by shouting voices or kung fu samples. You could easily slip it onto a playlist of Warp artists like Autechre or Aphex Twin—a prospect that feels like a given today, but not so much in 1999, the year of the movie’s release, when the worlds of hip-hop and independent rock and electronic music felt much more remote from each other.
In this way, Jim Jarmusch granted RZA entrée into one of the few worlds he hadn’t penetrated—the insular universe of mostly white hipsters, art students, and film buffs who might have admired RZA and enjoyed the Wu-Tang Clan, but who perhaps wouldn’t think to to slot the architect of the group’s sound alongside experimental-music figures like Björk, Laurie Anderson, or Sonic Youth. For all of Wu-Tang’s furious brand extension, Ghost Dog was RZA’s first foray outside of hip-hop, and it came at a pivotal point. As the millennium approached, the pressures on the Wu-Tang Clan had grown overwhelming, and the group was fracturing. Contract squabbling had begun in earnest, and thanks to an onstage outburst by Ghostface at Summer Jam, the Wu-Tang were officially banned from Hot 97, New York’s premier hip-hop station. One by one, the Wu-Tang Clan members asked to be released from their contract with the RZA, leaving each to fend for themselves as a solo star. RZA was unmistakably an icon, but it looked as if his brothers were drifting away from him. The path towards his future collaborations—with Björk, with Yoko Ono—and to the moody, twilit (and Raekwon-reviled) 8 Diagrams begins here.
From this point, RZA would push outward into the artistic demimonde, where he naturally belonged. Soon, he would be consulting on Quentin Tarantino films, writing screenplays. Revisiting Ghost Dog today, it’s startling to see how, despite being written and directed by Jarmusch, it plays as a melancholy requiem for the Wu-Tang’s already-lost golden era, one in which Wu affiliates make unusual cameos (Timbo King and Dreddy Kruger, freestyling on a park bench) and every CD that’s loaded into a player happens to start playing Wu-Tang music. Jersey City in its most unforgiving light evoked the Shaolin of Wu myth, and some of the movie’s most indelible moments are prolonged shots of Whitaker’s impassive face through a windshield as Wu-Tang beats fill the car. Near the movie’s end, RZA himself strolls on camera to pay his respects to Ghost Dog, a fellow dreamer whose dreams changed the lives of those around him. In many ways, Ghost Dog plays like a shadow autobiography of RZA himself. Both are citizens of lost worlds, adhering to ancient codes in a fallen society where the only thing separating the visionary from the fool is commitment.


The producer-rapper follows his Pazz and Jop-winning debut The College Dropout with a collaboration with Jon Brion; together they transform West's chattering, seemingly unrealistic ideas into an expansive, imperfect masterpiece.

Late Registration

"Can I talk my shit again?"
Contrary to popular opinion, hubris does have a righteous appeal. Those who claim Kanye West's antics hinder his work are missing the point. His self-importance is obvious, but the arrogance that comes pre-packaged with his insecurity is what makes West the most interesting hip-hop figure of the past five years. That's the reason he landed on "Oprah" and the cover of Time Magazine last week, rather than 50 Cent or Nelly or Slug. It's not sales; it's souls.
That said, at the end of the day, it's his ear, a golden instrument, and his adventurous collaborative spirit that have made him the most fully formed artist of his genre. The sprawling Late Registration is the year's most accomplished rap album, and in turn, he's done something that his heroes-- the Pharcyde and Nas, and father figure Jay-Z-- couldn't do: deliver on a promise the second time around. With the help of co-producer Jon Brion, West has taken his jumbled personae, buoyant enthusiasm, and vision for the grandiose, and transformed his chattering, seemingly unrealistic ideas into an expansive, imperfect masterpiece.
Without Brion, this album probably sounds a lot like its predecessor, The College Dropout-- full of tough horns, jacked soul, and flashes of brilliance. What the former Fiona Apple maestro brings to the proceedings, aside from a conductor's wand and a smile, is the ability to inflate and infuse West's ideas with even more life. A case in point is "Hey Mama", a track that leaked more than a year ago. The song is traditionally purty, dominated by handclaps and a flittering sample of Donal Leace's "Today Won't Come Again"; basically a trad-Kanye production. The Brion redux inserts a moaning vocoder, tin pan alley drums, a xylophone solo, and cascading synth coda, all without mucking up the heart in the middle.
Flashes like this surround the sometimes urbane, often cheeky West with a new resonance. Where would "Crack Music", a blustery martial stomp, be without its soaring choir and biblically extended outro? Probably somewhere on the Game's album. Could Kanye have single-handedly fused the showboating old school boom bap of "We Major" with its build-it-up and watch it all fall down production without Brion or co-producer Waryn Campbell? Not likely. By opening the studio to admired colleagues, he's allowed himself room to think even bigger than the multi-tracked "Jesus Walks".
On the mic, West sounds sharper and more battle-tested, though he'll never have the effortless insouciance of Jigga or teeth-gritting religiosity of Nas. To his credit and detriment he continues to surround himself with superior MCs like Common (on the sober "My Way Home"), impressive newcomer Lupe Fiasco (Just Blaze's life-affirming "Touch the Sky"), and the ineffable Cam'Ron, who continues his magical run with savant-like witticisms on "Gone". Even Houston's Paul Wall manages to fit "illuminate," "insinuate," and "caterpillar" into 16 bizarre bars on the woozy "Drive Slow". All this to go along with curious shouts from two conflicted giants, Jay and Nas, who hang like specters over the album.
Unlike the "great" hip-hop releases of yore, the productions here are so insistent that even a charismatic voice like West's can become an afterthought. Only "Roses" delivers the endearing sentimentality of "Jesus Walks" or "Family Business". "Diamonds From Sierra Leone (Remix)" offers some admirable if dubious political grandstanding, but as with every colossal undertaking, you gotta pay the cost to be the boss. The album's worst track, "Bring Me Down", overwhelms with silly orchestral pomp, courtesy of Brion. It also presumes that anyone still cares about Brandy, who sounds like she's recording her voice through a Cuisinart. "Celebration", too, is a busy, empty exercise in, well, celebrating.
Barring those two tracks, and a few innocuous if unnecessary skits about a fraternity for the financially impaired called Broke Phi Broke, the rest is aces. "Addiction" is unsophisticated in concept but inspired in delivery. "Gold Digger" is also simple but not subtle, tearing into the realm of the obvious with a Ray Charles-aping Jamie Foxx and recycled drums, but succeeding with humor and reverence. Opener "Heard 'Em Say" might be the most bandied about joint here, thanks to the presence of Maroon 5's Adam Levine, but guess what? He sounds great. Off-key and blue-eyed selling his soul, but like nearly every risk here, the syrupy pop works.
"We all self-conscious" has not taken on a new meaning post-Dropout. Conjecture about West revolutionizing the sound of modern hip-hop is mostly a fallacy. Not much has changed, though a few Brion hacks might appear to offer someone like Cassidy an oboe loop or two. In general, what makes West's sound and personality so vital is that it is completely singular. The maddening contradiction, the goofball ridiculousness, and the furious fist-raising still comprise an original voice. Though you'll notice I hesitate to use the phrase "everyman" to describe West. Not every man could have written a headphones album that'll rattle your trunk.


On the second installment of his absurdly ambitious "50 States" project, Stevens presents the 74-minute spectacular Illinois. In the wake of last year's quieter Seven Swans, this album finds the baroque, full arrangements of Michigan reaching stunning, nuanced heights, with the help of a small army of backers-- including a choir and string quartet.

Illinois

The best travel writers skew their journeys into pointed narratives, writing the story of the landscape by seizing all the weird, awkward bits that make it distinct. On first listen, Sufjan Stevens' latest installment of state-based chamber-folk, Illinois, sounds dangerously similar to 2003's Michigan, all chirping vocals and copious orchestration. Both records inadvertently validate East Coast stereotypes of tough Midwestern values: This is earnest, hard-working music, morally rooted and technically precise.
Still, Stevens has always been a folk singer more in theory than in practice. He routinely ditches folk's scrappy, stripped-down aesthetics, but consistently embraces its stories-of-the-people unanimity. Consequently, Illinois is less about place than spirit. Stevens dutifully celebrates and indicts all the appropriate landmarks, isolating the highest and lowest points in Illinois history, but at its best, the album makes America feel very small and very real: A boy crying in a van, a girl with bone cancer, stepmothers, parades, bandstands, presidents, UFOs, cream of wheat, trains after dark, a serial killer, Bible study.
Musically, Illinois is strange and lush, as excessive and challenging as its giant, gushing song titles. Despite employing a small army of backers (including a string quartet, the Illinoisemaker Choir, drummer James McAllister, trumpeter Craig Montoro, and a pile of extra vocalists), Stevens is more forefronted than on the comparably solo Seven Swans. Manning nearly every instrument in his arsenal (and some beyond-- Stevens recorded the piano parts at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn), Stevens conducts his friends with impressive grace. Stevens' pipes quiver generously; his vocals could be easily (perhaps accurately) read as precious, but they're really more intimate than emo, and always beautifully echoed by his backers.
The colossal "The Black Hawk War" cartwheels slowly into a climax of strings and horns, gurgling and pushing, ostensibly signifying (with much aplomb) the violent return of the Sac and Fox Indians to Illinois. Stevens may be deploying state propaganda, or validating Black Hawk's push home, but no matter how grave its reality, the moment still lands like a giant, neon-cased WELCOME TO ILLINOIS billboard. Trumpets blare, submission looms, our eyes widen, it makes sense: Illinois. Is. The. Greatest. State. Of. All. TIME!
The excellent "Casimir Pulaski Day" (named after an Illinois state holiday honoring the polish-born victor of the Battle of Brandywine) is a heartbreaking story of late winter death, bravely sung over rich banjo; the bubbly "Decatur" (the title of which is, awesomely, rhymed with "alligator," "aviator," and "emancipator") features one of Stevens' most undeniable melodies, the kind of pretty, tinkling cue that sends everyone in earshot twirling through the streets, jazz hands and all. Matthew Morgan yelps solid backing bits (see their gorgeously squeaky harmony on "Stephen A. Douglass was a great debater/ But Abraham Lincoln was the great emancipator!"), while Daniel and Elin Smith (of Brother Danielson, and the Danielson Famile) chime in for a campfire finish, complete with self-applause.
Stevens has a remarkable habit of being rousing and distressing at the same time, prodding disparate emotional centers until it's unclear whether it's best to grab your party shoes or a box of tissues. The gut-punching "Chicago" cagily celebrates the innate (and deeply American) tendency to employ highways as escape routes, ditching old mistakes for new swatches of land, new plates of eggs, new parking lots. Impossibly propulsive, each calm, harmonized, Illinoisemaker cry of "All things go!" pushes harder, promising liberation, by death or by automobile: "If I was crying/ In the van with my friend/ It was for freedom/ From myself and from the land," Stevens chokes, voice shaking over a haze of drums, strings, and shimmering keyboards.
"John Wayne Gacy, Jr." traces, with alarming accuracy, and over a hazy swirl of acoustic guitar and piano, the pathology of Illinois' most infamous serial killer: From 1972 until his arrest in 1978, Gacy was responsible for the torture, rape, and murder of 33 boys and young men, many of whom were discovered buried under the floorboards of his Norwood Park home. Lyrically, Stevens nails the specifics (as a kid, Gacy was slammed in the head by a swing, resulting in a blackout-inducing blood clot in his brain; he routinely donned a clown suit to entertain at a local hospital; victims were typically immobilized with chloroform-soaked cloths), and shifts perspectives gracefully; anchored in first-person, the song's narrator prods Gacy's mother and father, his neighbors, his victims, himself. More than any other track here, "Gacy" highlights Stevens' literary prowess, perfectly packed with nuance and detail.
At seventy-four minutes, Illinois is an exercise in patience; considering how long it takes to dog paddle through all the gooey orchestration, chugging through Stevens' meticulous arrangements and parsing out the melodies, Illinois is a bit of a commitment. Its 21 tracks consist of a handful of transitional snippets (many arresting in their own right), and plenty of good stuff ("The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulder", in particular) is buried way in the back, rewarding those who persevere, and in both theory and execution, Illinois is huge, a staggering collection of impeccably arranged American tribute songs.


The Beatles' first undisputed masterpiece is their quietest and most folky record, reflecting the influences of contemporaries like Dylan and the Byrds.

Rubber Soul

To modern ears, Rubber Soul and its pre-psychedelic era mix of 1960s pop, soul, and folk could seem tame, even quaint on a cursory listen. But it's arguably the most important artistic leap in the Beatles' career-- the signpost that signaled a shift away from Beatlemania and the heavy demands of teen pop, toward more introspective, adult subject matter. It's also the record that started them on their path toward the valuation of creating studio records over live performance. If nothing else, it's the record on which their desire for artistic rather than commercial ambition took center stage-- a radical idea at a time when the success of popular music was measured in sales and quantity rather than quality.
Indeed, at the time the Beatles did need a new direction: Odd as it seems today, the lifespan of a pop band's career in the early 60s could often be measured in months, sometimes in years, rarely in three-year increments. And by 1965, the Beatles were in danger of seeming lightweight compared to their new peers: The Who's sloganeering, confrontational singles were far more ferocious; the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" was a much more raucous, anti-ennui cry than the Beatles' "Help!"; and the Kinks beat the Beatles to both satirical, character songs and the influence of Indian music. By comparison, most of the Beatles music to date was either rock'n'roll covers or originals offering a (mostly) wholesome, positive take on boy-girl relationships.
Above all, Bob Dylan's lyrical acumen and the Byrds' confident, jangly guitar were primary influences on John Lennon and George Harrison, respectively (and the Byrds had been influenced by the Beatles, too-- Roger McGuinn first picked up a Rickenbacker 12-string after seeing A Hard Day's Night). Dylan and the Byrds' fingerprints had been left on Help!-- Lennon, the group's biggest Dylan acolyte, played an acoustic rather than electric guitar throughout most of that record. Even Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" found him strumming an acoustic. (All this at a time when Dylan was beginning to move in the other direction and fully enter his electric period.) Harrison was growing more serious on the political "Think for Yourself", while "If I Needed Someone"-- his other contribution to Rubber Soul-- is practically a Byrds pastiche and his chiming, sure-footed solo on "Nowhere Man" also displays a debt to that band. His deft touch is all over the record in subtle ways-- appropriate for an album full of finesse and small wonders (the ping at the end of the "Nowhere Man" solo, Lennon's exhalation in the chorus of "Girl", the "tit-tit-tit" of the backing vocalists in the same song, the burbling guitar in "Michelle").
The most lasting influences of Dylan and the Byrds on the Beatles, however, were likely their roles in introducing the group to recreational drugs: Dylan shepherded the quartet through their first experience with pot, while the Byrds were with three-fourths of the Beatles when they first purposefully took LSD. (McCartney sat that one out, avoiding the drug for another year, while Harrison and Lennon had each had a previous accidental dosage.)
Marijuana's effect on the group is most heavily audible on Rubber Soul. (By the time of their next album, Revolver, three-fourths of the group had been turned on to LSD, and their music was headed somewhere else entirely.) With its patient pace and languid tones, Rubber Soul is an altogether much more mellow record than anything the Beatles had done before, or would do again. It's a fitting product from a quartet just beginning to explore their inner selves on record.
Lennon, in particular, continued his more introspective and often critical songwriting, penning songs of romance gone wrong or personal doubt and taking a major step forward as a lyricist. Besting his self-critical "I'm a Loser" with "Nowhere Man" was an accomplishment, and the faraway, dreamy "Girl" was arguably his most musically mature song to date. Lennon's strides were most evident, however, on "Norwegian Wood", an economical and ambiguous story-song highlighted by Harrison's first dabbling with the Indian sitar, and the mature, almost fatalistic heart-tug of "In My Life", which displayed a remarkably calm and peaceful attitude toward not only one's past and present, but their future and the inevitability of death.
Considering Harrison's contributions and Lennon's sharp growth, McCartney-- fresh from the success of "Yesterday"-- oddly comes off third-string on Rubber Soul. His most lasting contributions-- the Gallic "Michelle" (which began life as a piss-take, and went on to inspire the Teutonic swing and sway of Lennon's "Girl"), the gentle rocker "I'm Looking Through You", and the grinning "Drive My Car" are relatively minor compared to Lennon's masterstrokes. McCartney did join his bandmate in embracing relationship songs about miscommunication, not seeing eye-to-eye, and heartbreak, but it wouldn't be until 1966 that he took his next great artistic leap, doing so as both a storyteller and, even more so, a composer.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]


With a distinctive singing voice and confidence in spades, the breakout Afropop star swoops through a pacesetting fusion of alté, R&B, Southern rap, mall-rock, and Top 40 pop.

The Angel You Don't Know

Amaarae has a voice like a cracked-open chestnut shell; it can be as silky as its interior, as unforgiving as its spines. On “Hellz Angel,” a highlight from the Ghanaian-American artist’s omnivorous debut album The Angel You Don’t Know, she lattices smoke-wisp intonations before sharpening them into rapped barbs. In a spectacular flip into double-time, she raps over busted fairground synths, “I don’t make songs/Bitch I make memories.” She can’t resist following up with a gag: “I don’t like thongs/Cuz they ride up in jeans.”
She is a nonchalant kind of auteur. Yet The Angel You Don’t Know crackles with innovation, a pacesetter at a time when industry bigwigs are waking up to the long-held truth that Africa is setting the global tempo for pop music. Amaarae’s music bears the Afro-fusion influences of Nigeria’s free-spirited alté scene, as well as Western genres from mall-rock to Southern rap, sultry R&B, and glossy Top 40: disparate musical styles that soundtrack Amaarae’s own life. Born Ama Serwah Genfi, she is based in Accra but has lived in the Bronx, Atlanta, and suburban New Jersey, where Britney Spears’ eccentric masterpiece Blackout blew her mind as a teen. While Ghanaian friends once advised her to stick to Afrobeats or hiplife to succeed in the country, she was firm that diasporic living enriched her art and, smartly, resisted narrowing its scope. In lesser hands, The Angel You Don’t Know’s wide embrace of genre could feel like a mash-up, or a crafty amalgam of trending styles. Yet with her distinctive arid singing voice and close work with producers like KZ and Rvdical the Kid, Amaarae’s freewheeling confidence and singular point of view allows her to swoop through sounds, light as air.
She embraces character with enthusiasm, gliding between subjectivities with the same ease that she flips between American English and Ghanian and Nigerian dialect. On “Trust Fund Baby”—which sounds like Miguel’s slinky “How Many Drinks?” stripped to its skeleton—Amaarae plays a spoiled brat taunting a pathetic lover who needs the “privilege” of WAP like an addict craves their next hit. The Afropop-leaning “Jumping Ship” is an occasion for some righteous male objectification. “Hottie, you’re an item I wanna pay for,” she sings in a murmured falsetto, as picked guitars hit like sun through slotted blinds. You can hear the lusty twinkle in her eye.
Amaarae describes The Angel You Don’t Know as “non stop affirmations and incantations 4 bad bitches.” Her tongue-in-cheek side brings dazzle to the record’s light-hearted moments, particularly on Afropop anthem “Sad Girlz Luv Money” (featuring Moliy), a waist-winding anthem about securing the “mooh-la-la” that’s far more joyous than its title suggests. More imaginative still is “Dazed and Abused in Beverly Hills,” 68 seconds of indie soul that enjoyably parodies (and one-ups) the SZA knockoffs making Shazam-bait for cable-TV syncs. Another track is punctuated by a ringtone and a scream, and the album is bookended by thrilling snippets of hardcore punk, with shredding by L.A. artist Gothic Tropic.
Amaarae is private about her sexuality, but she dropped hints to her romantic life on the 2017 single “Fluid,” from that year’s R&B-leaning Passionfruit Summers EP, and featured drag queen pole dancers in another of her videos. These days she’s even more upfront, and rightfully heedless of gender norms. “I like it when you call me zaddy,” she purrs over 808s on “Fancy,” sounding like a soft butch poster girl looking for fresh meat. The video is a collagist tribute to seductive hits and her punk favorites, from JLo’s proto-OnlyFans camming to a Dream Wife body horror to the bright wigs and office furniture of City Girls’ “Pussy Talk.” It’s the rare moment in Amaarae’s world that doesn’t feel wholly self-created; even then, her authorial voice is clear. In one set-up referencing Missy Elliot’s “She’s a Bitch,” Amaarae wears a black leather bodysuit dotted with cowrie shells, the pre-colonial West African currency that is central to Yoruba rituals, pairing pop imagery with a touch of the divine.
But even bad bitches get the blues. On the purple-hued album closer “Party Sad Face,” she’s stuck at a predictable party and fed up. “Whole lotta gang shit/Peng tings looking out of sight,” she whisper-sings, sounding helpless and sad. She fucks to fill the void, with alté star Odunsi (The Engine) breaking his usual charmer routine for an unsettling turn as an abusive hook-up. “I’m down,” she sings numbly, ambiguously. “Down for the night.” Amaarae said that she left the darkest songs off this album, but—unless she went full Diamanda Galás elsewhere—it’s hard to imagine a more vivid descent into emotional oblivion.
Beyond her chameleonic roleplay, Amaarae’s humble roots are obvious—she dreams of the day she can buy her mom a Bentley. On the dancehall-leaning “Leave Me Alone,” she affirms her own worth with the calm of a zen master, singing, among bright and balmy guitars, “All the diamonds in the world don’t outshine me.” Her polyphonic approach to experimental pop brings to mind author and DJ Jace Clayton’s description of pan-global music in the digital age as a “memory palace with room for everybody inside.” Amaarae puts metabolized sounds through a distinctive prism, hitting on an insight: There’s room in the palace for her.

Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music.


The Atlanta rapper's latest mixtape is a dense, ambitious attempt to cultivate an entirely new style. But what Young Thug brings to the table isn't just a weird, experimental approach to rapping: he also offers presence, persona, mystique, and, potentially, star power.

I Came From Nothing 3

Young Thug's name is so generic that it sounds like an excerpt from a Rev. Calvin Butts speech. It could be a trick of reverse psychology; in contrast to Thug's extraordinarily distinctive style, it seems more a knowing joke, or if he's feeling ambitious, an attempt to epitomize and subvert an archetype. His rap style, too, has this kind of fearlessness; he is obviously and unapologetically a descendent of Lil Wayne at the peak of his experimental phase, where Wayne pushed against the boundaries of a rapper's technical control. At his best, Young Thug embraces that style, but rather than making it a logical endpoint of an artist on the ascent, he uses it as the baseline. It is a given on any Young Thug track that he will be croaking, half-singing, breaking against graphite-on-paper predictability of traditional rap, and performing with such confidence that calling him the product of his influences feels shortsighted.
His latest mixtape, I Came from Nothing 3, is a dense, ambitious attempt to cultivate an entirely new rap style. It is also frequently frustrating, shifting from eye-openingly original to inconsequential from track to track. Unlike Lil B, to whom he might be immediately compared, Young Thug holds onto some traditional frameworks that could give him more of a potential foothold to transcend a cult fanbase. He still makes inventive pop songs. He sticks to a familiar dope boy mystique. And although Lil Wayne is his obvious forefather, he also springs from a less discussed but incredibly influential style of Atlanta-based hip-hop. The creative stew of Atlanta's melodic underground, where Auto-Tune didn't just avert death but spawned new life, perhaps via the influence of ecstasy and the dominance of strip club culture. Artists both well known (Future) and less-known (Kwony Cash) evolved a style that has often seemed less persona-driven and more about songcraft. This is the milieu whence comes Young Thug, who collaborated early with the Rich Kidz ("100 Dollar Autograph") and Cash Out, currently with one of the year's biggest rap songs and a regular Young Thug collaborator ("I Got It").
What Young Thug brings to the table, then, isn't just a weird, experimental approach to rapping, but presence, persona, mystique, and, potentially, star power. These are often things frowned upon by "serious" music fans, imagining themselves as discerning listeners who see through those theatrics, but in rap, where music is so heavily persona-driven, it gives an artist dimension. Of course, the other, most important factor for becoming a star is crafting hits, and when he wants to, even while pushing against conservative ideas of good taste, Young Thug can deliver. I Came from Nothing 3 is less interested in these songs, though, relative to the last tape (see: "Keep in Touch", "Curtains".) Instead, it indulges, heavily, in the bright, brittle synthesizers and continually cheery enthusiasm that often overwhelms.
The exception is "Foreign", a song with a hypnotic marimba loop and an incredibly memorable hook, a track that should make fantasy summer jam playlists across the country. It also manages to transcend Young Thug's cult status most effectively. Most of the LP seems to push deep into its own universe, to the detriment of those not already convinced of Young Thug's vision, but rewarding those already sold. Tracks like "Admit It" and "I Know Ya" epitomize the kind of enthusiastic euphoria that is the currency of this strain of the Atlanta underground. Songs like "Angry Sex" offer a refreshing twist, giving its subject a kind of jubilant triviality.


The material Dean Blunt has released since he cut ties with Hype Williams collaborator Inga Copeland has hewed closer toward pop song structures. With his latest full-length, it seems he's finally decided to open up, to highlight a love for pop music that's always been somewhere underneath.

Black Metal

Though he's said that he doesn't set out to make "difficult" music, Dean Blunt certainly hasn't made much easy over the course of his career. Both as one-half of the shadowy duo Hype Williams and under his own name, the London-based art-pop provocateur has spent the better part of the last half decade turning out dense keyboard drones, giving intentionally obtuse and combative interviews, and putting on bizarre performance art live shows. But with his latest full-length, it seems he's finally decided to open up, to highlight a love for pop music that's always been somewhere underneath the found sound samples and sub-bass firebombs.
The material Blunt has released since he cut ties with Hype Williams collaborator Inga Copeland has hewed closer toward pop song structures. And it's clear even from the opening strains of album opener "Lush"—a straightforward sample of Big Star's sunny-eyed strummer "For You"—that Black Metal is a whole lot more welcoming than past records have been. Blunt pairs Big Star's orchestral sweep with a slowly plodding rhythm section, his own deadpan vocals, and some lazily picked electric guitar parts that wouldn't sound out of place on a Kurt Vile record. "Molly & Aquafina"'s narcotized Americana and "100", which employs a sample of the Pastels' "Over Your Shoulder", similarly value clarity and directness, two qualities absent from much of his preceding work.
Even as he jumps from those indie pop touchstones to the genre exercises on the record's second side—the imploded dub of "Punk", "Hush" and "Grade"'s dizzy rap deconstructions, the pair of occasionally frigid ambient tracks that make up a 20-minute block at the record's middle—Blunt is able to keep their knotty worlds relatively accessible. Pinned together by a series of keyboard drones, "Forever" and "X" both employ distant vocalizations from recurring collaborator Joanne Robertson as an easy point of entry amidst their occasionally abstract spheres. These are light moments, airy passages function mostly to separate the lilting first half of the record from the bleak second. But where Blunt would have once used lengthy drone passages to project alienation, here they function as a seam between the two otherwise disjointed album segments.
All of Blunt's work to date—if you're willing to consider his bizarre public character as part of that work—has been wrapped up in questions of identity. He's constantly concealing personal details and controlling the discourse about him to an apparently paranoid degree, and his sonic persona, shaped by distinctly gnarled postmodern experimentation, is as hard to pin down as his image. So what does it mean that for those questions now that he's appearing on the covers of glossy magazines and making pop songs? He's at once a folk pop troubadour and a downcast dub vocalist—a staid ambient composer and a gruff grime MC. He's everything all at once, or maybe he's not much of anything at all. As with everything he does, Black Metal offers few definitive answers, but this time around the hazy images he's projecting have come into sharper focus.


The Manchester-based producer who shares a label and an M.O. with Demdike Stare turns dance music exuberance into feelings of loneliness and dread.

Passed Me By

Exuberance is dance music's usual purview: ecstasy, adrenaline, abandon without end. But there's a whole subset of club music that dedicates itself to the inverse of what we're expected to seek amidst a sweating, heaving crowd-- loneliness, terror, misery, dread. This isn't a new phenomenon; Simon Reynolds has written of how the collective serotonin depletion that followed Britain's acid house effusions turned breakbeat hardcore and drum 'n' bass down darker paths. That music, at least, continued to engage the body, as does its direct descendant, dubstep, thanks to breakneck tempos and spleen-crushing bass.
Enter Andy Stott. The Manchester-based DJ and producer is no stranger to dance music of the most visceral kind. In the latter half of the 2000s, he was best known for steely, speaker-destroying dub techno. Recently, especially under the pseudonym Andrea, he's tried his hand at shuddering, breakbeat-fueled dubstep and 160-BPM juke. But on a new album for Modern Love, he reinterprets techno in dirge-like fashion, slowed to a funereal shuffle and weighted down by a lead blanket of reverb. The term "death disco" has never felt so apt.
It's a modest album, just six tracks and a short, introductory sketch-- some 33 minutes in total. It's the tempos that you notice first: his 4/4 thump moves sluggishly, like a 12" 45 spun at 33 or even slower. House and techno usually lope along at somewhere between 120 and 130 beats per minute; Stott paces his tracks at 100, 90, even 80 BPM. Forget "peak-time" club music: these are trough-time beats. And it's not just a question of speed; every sound is warbly and unstable, like a warped record pitched way, way down. Handclaps and hi-hats crumble into bit-crushed detritus; kick drums and bass frequencies turn to a jellied slush, like solid ground liquefies during earthquakes.
The murky sonics often recall Philip Jeck, who uses vintage turntables with a 16-RPM setting to attain an otherworldly rumble. On a couple of tracks, ethereal female vocals float hazily over the top; "Execution" is suffused with a gravelly death gurgle that wouldn't be out of place on a Sunn O))) record. A pervasive hiss and crackle drives home the idea that we're trawling the depths of vinyl's pockmarked grooves, like one of those microscopic photos that turns a record into a lunar landscape.
Dissonance makes it even more hair-raising. "North to South" plunges darkly careening tones-- a Doppler-effect buzz with the skid of braked vinyl-- through bright, queasy synthesizers. (Kompakt fans may hear an echo of Wolfgang Voigt's M:I:5 project.) "Intermittent" revels in the seams as it patches together strings, bells, and vocal fragments into a rough-cut collage. In the song's last few bars, you can hear Stott's debt to disco edits as he finally lets a tightly cropped loop unfurl into a full phrase of music that, sped up, is recognizable as 90s R&B.
Only one track doesn't fit the mold: "Dark Details", which throbs at dubstep's quickened pulse. Still, even here, the percussion's muted clang gives the impression of hearing a rave piped in via plumbing-- some club, miles away, suddenly bubbling up from your sink, and stinking of muck. Like a counterbalance to its uncharacteristically spry tempo, "Dark Details" is followed by the slowest tracks on the album, the demonic "Execution" and the torpid "Passed Me By", a song so bleak it could make Burial look optimistic by comparison.
Ah yes, Burial: you couldn't not mention him, really. Burial's haunted melancholy certainly paved the way for Stott's even more despondent take on dance music, and Stott is hardly alone in his doomsayer's approach. You can hear similar sounds and affect in Shackleton, Raime, Holy Other, and in moments of Demdike Stare, a project of Stott's label-mate Miles Whittaker. But where Burial and Shackleton use the flickering syncopations of dubstep and garage to keep their music moving, Stott's 4/4 beats, reduced to a deathly crawl, give his music an even more hopeless cast. "Drag," the name associated with Salem's style of music, would be apropos-- suggestive, as it is, of a body being towed, or a boulder pushed uphill. Where club culture mythologizes a circuit of endless nights and after-parties, Passed Me By suggests physical and spiritual exhaustion, Sisyphus collapsing beneath the dead-eyed twinkle of the disco ball.


The first Crystal Castles album without vocalist Alice Glass is also the first safe album from an act that once would have recoiled at such a thought.

Amnesty (I)

Perhaps it was only a matter of time until Crystal Castles redirected the anger they once reserved for the rest of the world toward each other. After singer Alice Glass quit the band due to "reasons both professional and personal," she announced her intentions to go solo. Producer Ethan Kath fired back with a statement containing all the sensitivity of a Donald Trump tweet. “i think it can be empowering for her to be in charge of her own project,” he wrote. “it should be rewarding for her considering she didn’t appear on Crystal Castles’ best-known songs.” Then, for posterity, he listed more than a dozen of those songs. “people often gave her credit for my lyrics and that was fine, i didn’t care.” Clearly, he kind of did.
Just the mere act of continuing Crystal Castles seemed distasteful to many fans who’d assumed, as Glass had written, that her departure meant the end of the project. But Kath didn’t just replace Glass; he tried to scrub her from the band’s legacy. While it may be true that Glass was never the driving force behind Crystal Castles’ sound, on stage she was their star attraction, the group’s spiritual link to the punk community and the wild card that made their shows such a frightening spectacle (she always appeared on the cusp of coming to blows with anybody within reach). To many, she was the group, yet the band’s current press material doesn’t make so much as a single mention of her. Never mind that she’s pictured right there on the cover of their first album, or that her name adorns one of their signature songs; in Kath’s revisionist history of Crystal Castles, she made no meaningful contributions.
So Kath’s first Glass-less Crystal Castles album, Amnesty (I), arrives under uncomfortable circumstances. Its cover certainly doesn’t make it feel any less gross. (Is that photo of several nearly identical girls intended as commentary on how easily Kath believes women can be replaced?) Even the presumptuous (I) affixed to the title could be interpreted as a taunt, a sort of “there’s more to come” for anybody questioning the legitimacy of his new lineup.
But Kath’s never seemed too concerned about being cast as a villain; bad press has trailed the group since its earliest days. As he attempts to make the case that Crystal Castles was his project all along, the new music does a better job bolstering his claims than any written statement ever could. Amnesty never tops what came before, but its best moments come impressively close. Even though the band’s hostile electro-industrial fusion is less of a novelty than it was in 2008, nobody else is producing it quite like this, and Kath’s incinerating hellscapes are as jolting and tactfully concise as ever. He owns this sound.
Of course, once again, Kath owes his success in part to a strong collaborator. Inheriting the unenviable task of replacing one of the most singular frontwomen of the last decade, and under such tumultuous circumstances, new recruit Edith Frances proves more than capable. Though she lacks Glass’ violent temperament and scorched-earth conviction, she possesses a more controlled, refined voice that shines on Amnesty’s dreamier tracks, particularly “Char,” the most openly emotional pop song Crystal Castles has ever done. Her lavender soprano just barely brushes against the rotted-out trap beat of “Sadist,” and it’s so outmatched by the raved-up synths of closer “Their Kindness Is Charade” that the effect is heartbreaking.
Too often, though, Amnesty doesn’t give her the freedom to put much of her own stamp on the material. With its ghostly shrieks, “Frail” is so closely patterned after the old Crystal Castles playbook that many people assumed it was a leftover from the Glass era when Kath first shared it. The convulsing “Enth” feels similarly like the product of a time capsule. It’s as if Kath went out of his way to keep recording songs that sound just like the ones he did with Glass.
And so as good as it often is, Amnesty feels like a missed opportunity, the first safe album from an act that once would have recoiled at such a thought. It could have played into the strengths of the band’s enigmatic new singer, embracing the more nuanced identity she could bring to the project. Instead, Frances and Kath evoke earlier iterations of Crystal Castles, where they could have moved forward. Fans can debate whether that’s disrespectful to Glass, but it doesn’t do the current band any favors, either. You can’t take full advantage of a new chapter if you’re too stubborn to even acknowledge that it is a new chapter at all.


Still drawing from the canon of jangly, guitar-centric 1980s college rock, the Melbourne band’s latest infuses the easygoing vibe with nuanced political songwriting.

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Endless Rooms

Endless Rooms

Most bands are distinguished by their frontperson; Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever are distinguished by the absence of one. The Melbourne indie rock band has three guitarists who alternate lead vocals—Fran Keaney, Tom Russo, and Joe White—and while they’re all capable singers, none is a natural made-for-the-spotlight type. Between their personable, if modest, voices and the relentless, high-octane jangle of the guitars, the effect is like one of those periodic R.E.M. songs where the bassist sings lead, except Michael Stipe doesn’t return after it’s over. It’s just always a different guy who’s not Michael Stipe up next.
While vocals may be something of an afterthought for this band, the guitars themselves are anything but. They’re Rolling Blackouts’ reason for being, and they spout from every crevice of the group’s third album, Endless Rooms, like jets in an especially luxurious whirlpool tub. The album never stops paying off with fidgety riffs, voluptuous tones, and sparkling flourishes. Though the band’s purview remains 1980s college rock, they mine so many shades and distinct variations that each song feels like a pull of a slot machine. Wound by nervous, frenzied guitars, “Tidal River” teeters with the volatile edge of Heaven Up Here-era Echo and the Bunnymen, while “Blue Eye Lake,” with its accents of post-punk and psychedelia, conjures the nocturnal shimmer of the Church. “Dive Deep,” meanwhile, takes a turn toward the glammy with the record’s slickest, showiest lead guitar heroics. For a band that arrived so fully formed, their sound has only continued to grow richer, the details around its edges more articulated.
Endless Rooms’ surface pleasures have a way of masking how purposeful their songwriting can be. Written amid the pandemic and the Australian wildfires declared one of the most destructive wildlife disasters in modern history, these songs fixate on class disparities and environmental destruction. Along with a memorable image of jet skiers speeding over ailing reefs, “Tidal River” is thorned with suggestions of climate change. “Ceiling’s on fire, the train’s leaving the station/It’s January and we’re on vacation,” Russo sings, with just enough of a wry edge in his voice you can miss how dead serious the subject matter is. On “Saw You at the Eastern Beach,” he conjures a landscape in decay: “The petrochemical factory glitters like so many precious stones, even through the bay windows of the quarter acre homes.”
As incensed as they read on paper, these lyrics never sting enough to upset the music’s easygoing vibe, not even on “The Way It Shatters,” where White pushes back against rising anti-immigrant sentiment in the county (“If you were on the boat, would you turn the other way?” he sings). Some of that comes down to the band’s casual, every-dude presentation; Rolling Blackouts are too much of a hangout band to humor any notions of their own importance. They’re more interested in making a lovable rock’n’roll record than a pointed political statement, even though at its best Endless Rooms happens to be both.


Collecting a few leftovers from their 2020 album The Main Thing, Real Estate continue to expand the sound of the band as well as their song lengths to mixed results.

Half a Human EP

Every two and a half years or so, Real Estate return with 10 or so songs of meticulously casual and collegial music that evokes various phases of the past four decades of indie rock without being beholden to any particular era. Martin Courtney wistfully reflects on the way imperceptible daily changes add up to a world you no longer recognize. Fatherhood, solo albums, tectonic cultural shifts, and the dismissal of a foundational member have not altered what Real Estate do or how their music is critiqued; all five of their albums have earned aggregate scores between 76 and 79 on Metacritic. “Another good record from Real Estate. They’re still doing their thing. Just another Real Estate record,” Courtney joked about the reception of 2017’s In Mind, and so they made a protracted effort not to be taken for granted on 2020’s The Main Thing. The existence of a quickie EP like Half a Human is proof that Real Estate are indeed operating with a newfound sense of purpose.
Half a Human’s premiere event shared visualizers to accompany its six songs, most of which recreated the experience of staring at Winamp visualizer while passing a bowl in a dorm. The band also put on Zoomin’ With Real Estate, a “variety show” where Courtney hung out with fans on various social media platforms, bassist Alex Bleeker performed solo material, and guitarist Julian Lynch showed off his rig. It’s by far the most lavish rollout any Real Estate release has ever gotten, maybe even their first lavish rollout.
But the main purpose of Half a Human lies in the mere act of releasing reconstituted leftovers from The Main Thing, giving at least another nudge to see it the way Real Estate did—their New Adventures in Hi-Fi, a chance to hear a band known for economical songwriting and brisk albums brimming with more ideas than they can handle. Though nothing immediately pops like their yacht-rockin’ Sylvan Esso collab “Paper Cup,” Half a Human takes strides to make every inclusion at least objectively interesting—an instrumental of twinkly, harmonized guitars, one that imagines an alternate history where they stayed on Woodsist as a shaggy jam band with a wah-wah guitar solo and an exploration of ambient pure moods.
But a radio edit of the title track tacked onto the end serves as an unintentional critique of Half a Human—it’s just too easy to remove the two minutes of synthesizer drift and end up with a perfectly enjoyable Real Estate song about the deceptive nature of passing time. The song part of “Half a Human” is just as ambient as its actual ambient outro, the downiness of Courtney’s unruffled voice, the slight dissonant notes in the jangled guitars, and Kevin McMahon’s sympathetic production fading not so much into the background as into other Real Estate songs.
The bulk of Half a Human is tied up in the title track and “The Garden,” lengthier excursions that challenge Real Estate’s current perception as merely a jam-adjacent band. As with every time Alex Bleeker takes the lead, “D+” stands out by default; his proudly untrained warble is what can pass for assertive within Real Estate. But while he’s never been given more than one lead on any Real Estate album, Bleeker’s contributions are never “the one where the other guy sings.” At least in spirit, “D+” suggests what Real Estate want to become in their second decade: an indie rock gateway to the gateway albums of the Grateful Dead—Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty, the ones that allow newcomers to start their jettison of Deadhead cultural baggage. But even “D+” doesn’t challenge the lingering familiarity of Half a Human—the type of diehard that might check out Half a Human probably heard the Bleeker solo album from whence it came.
In about six months, the 10th Anniversary cottage industry will turn its attention to Days and will certainly focus on its context as much as its content. In light of how emotionally raw and extroverted solo artists are the indie rock vanguard, how did an unassuming group of guys from suburban New Jersey playing gentle, chiming indie rock become the toast of “the super young, hip Brooklyn scene”? But Half a Human already challenges the pat compliment of “consistent”: if this were really true, why doesn’t, say, “Time” or “Paper Cup” generate the same excitement as “It’s Real”? Is it, as Courtney suggests, a matter of whether or not they’re cool anymore? Would “Ribbon” or “Soon” be as beloved as the Days deep cuts they could conceivably replace had they been written 10 years earlier? Are the core values of Real Estate just incompatible with the expression of urgency or reinvention? Or, the melodies aren’t quite as concise, Courtney’s gnomic expressions of wisdom a little more forced, their pivot to extended guitar jams is more admirable than compelling. Real Estate are just living the truth of their music, no more immune to the passage of time than their subject matter.

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On his third project of 2016, 2 Chainz continues to show the way to rap successfully past the age of 40: He has some of the most enduring, daring, and funny verses in the game.

Daniel Son ; Necklace Don

You can’t find “Duffle Bag Boy” legally. The song, which hit #15 on Billboard back in the fall of ’07, doesn’t exist on iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify, or Tidal. (There’s a rip of the music video on Youtube, but it’s censored and missing the intro where Lil Wayne says “Weed and syrup ’til I die…as a matter of fact it’s gon’ kill me.”) In fact, almost the entire Playaz Circle catalog, the duo 2 Chainz got his start in during the 2000s when he still went by Tity Boi, was scrubbed from streaming services some time in the last four years, presumably due to a copyright claim against the duo’s name. So if you’re just tuning in, it might look like 2 Chainz crawled out of the darkness in 2011, fully formed, drinking champagne on the airplane. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
For one, 2 Chainz knows how fortunate he is. Daniel Son ; Necklace Don, his third project this year, is informed—at points consumed—by the circumstances in which Tauheed Epps grew up. From “Ghetto”: “Used to stay with my cousins, heat the house up with the oven/Airport tried to make us move without paying us/We told ’em, ‘We ain’t budging.’” At the end of that song, he gives a quick monologue where he says he’s “thankful for everything that [he’s] been through, for every seed that’s been planted.” And that’s what makes his insane, Technicolor flossing so joyous—it’s grounded in grainy cartoons watched over stolen cable.
That’s not to say 2 Chainz is a stickler for realism. *DS ; ND *has rims on ambulances, weddings at Benihanas, condos on Jupiter. He buys mansions just to shoot dice in; he leaves his mom’s house with a thousand Nikes. Or maybe he’s at Waffle House, snapping you back to real life: “Patty melt with the hash browns, trying to avoid all the pat-downs.”
The last quote is from “Big Amount,” which sounds like you’re playing *Ocarina of Time *deep in College Park. After 2 Chainz wears Yeezys to dinner and honks at pedestrians and pours water (Voss only, nothing less) on women, Drake pops up with his best verse all year. He raps about not wanting to rap, calls himself “a J. Prince investment,” is visited by the ghost of Michael Jackson, pays tribute to Bankroll Fresh, and has a nervous breakdown when someone suggests staying at the Marriott.
It’s funny, it’s specific, it’s vivid—because when you’re rapping next to 2 Chainz, you don’t have a choice. Speaking generally, it’s tough to rap through middle age. (Nas might be the only famous rapper to succeed in dealing with that transition in long form.) Those who enjoy do critical success on the other side of 40 tend to be narrow-lensed specialists like Raekwon, or to be totally unmoored from questions of time or conventional identity like DOOM or Aesop Rock. 2 Chainz is joining that short list because his style is equal parts daring and durable: he’s going to write the most distinct, disorienting, and immutably *fun *verses in the entire genre.
And he’s developed into an excellent technician. On “Get Out the Bed,” the passage “Gladiator, tell your neighbor/Gun on table, Buick LeSabre/Do ya now, do ya later/Dice game, pool table/Two flavors, too anxious” is razor-sharp, as is “Kilo” or the YFN Lucci-assisted “You in Luv Wit Her.”
But again, 2 Chainz isn’t going to leave the past behind. The tape’s penultimate song, the DJ Spinz-produced “Blessing,” blends the excess with heartbreak. It opens: “When I’m alone in my room, sometimes it look like the mall/In the back of my mind, I ball harder than y’all/I used to have an old school that I sat on some dubs/For the first time in my life, mama knew I sold drugs.” It’s the at-what-cost moment that bridges cold nights from his childhood with the gloss of the present. Unsurprisingly, 2 Chainz brings it to life the way few others could.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Kesha's whiskey-soaked 2010 debut, a ridiculously fun and somewhat fraught album whose garish aesthetic is being channeled anew.

Animal

Squinting at the paper in front of him, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon recites a few lines in a halting, soporific tone, the kind one expects from an aging humanities professor, which he is. “I’m talking about everybody getting”—he pauses, leaning forward to verify what he’s reading—“crunk, crunk. Boys try to touch my junk, junk.” The year is 2010. Muldoon and his tweed blazer have been summoned by Princeton University’s humor magazine for an arch literary critique of Kesha’s “TiK ToK,” which a student introduces deadpan as “one of the most seminal, interesting, and frankly deeply beautiful songs of the last 20 years.” The segment juxtaposes the mannered rhetoric of the Ivy League with Kesha’s dippy slang. It’s intended to be clever, signaling that these men are attuned to a class and culture and far above her, blah, blah, blah. They sound like total losers.
“TiK ToK”—that wretched and awesome concoction of white-girl rapping, lurid Auto-Tune, and ridiculous quips—was the 22-year-old Kesha’s breakthrough single. By her account, it was inspired by an epic morning when she woke up “surrounded by a bunch of hot babes” and felt she was living it up like Diddy. (Hence the single’s indelible first line.) Immediately, she established herself as everything a good girl shouldn’t be: insolent, hedonistic, and trashy, with a devil-may-care approach to dental hygiene. She droned on about clothes and phones, and deployed vernacular (“crunk” and “errybody” and “po-po”) clumsily borrowed from hip-hop. The single seemed almost designed to irritate: because of Kesha’s fried, bratty voice, or her “oh, whoa, whoa, oh”s that resembled yodeling, or her twisted suggestion that she was attracted to Mick Jagger. It was the first No. 1 hit of the 2010s, one of the era’s many glorious, stupid anthems about getting schwasted because YOLO. When asked why her music resonated, Kesha replied pithily: “It’s not pretentious …. When there’s a recession and times can be hard, dancing is free.”
In a perfect bit of mythology, Kesha Rose Sebert was allegedly born at a party in the San Fernando Valley—a place that looms large in the nightmares of misogynists and pedants because it’s where young women “like” and “um” freely. She didn’t know her father. Her mother, Pebe Sebert, was the bohemian songwriter who co-wrote the 1978 country single “Old Flames Can’t Hold a Candle to You,” which became a No. 1 hit in the hands of Dolly Parton. After securing a publishing deal, Pebe relocated the family to Nashville, often taking Kesha and her brothers to recording studios. She and Kesha would work on songs together for fun after school, eventually co-writing three tracks that appear on Kesha’s debut, Animal.
The family was poor, surviving for many years on food stamps and welfare. Kesha has said that one of her first memories was being told by her mom that if she wanted a kitty-cat stuffed animal at Target, she’d have to steal it. But it was fun to be broke, as the singer reflected in her illustrated autobiography, My Crazy Beautiful Life: “I love making something beautiful out of things that others have thrown away.” This scrappiness, and the refusal to equate happiness with money, would permeate Kesha’s artistic identity—from her crummy bargain-bin aesthetic to the ironic dollar sign she’d insert into her name (and later remove), to the insurrectionary spirit of “Party at a Rich Dude’s House,” which sees her “pissin’ in the Dom Perignon.” In 2005, the Seberts appeared on the reality show The Simple Life for an episode in which Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie attempt to find Pebe a boyfriend. Years later, Entertainment Weekly asked Kesha whether she still hung out with the socialites. “Oh, gross!” she replied, stressing their class differences: “Do you think that those girls dig through the garbage for their clothes?”
Despite her public reputation for being bone-headed, Kesha was smart, at least by conventional metrics. In high school, she was an International Baccalaureate student who loved physics and math and had a reported SAT score of 1500. She was set to attend Barnard College on scholarship, to study comparative religion and psychology. Then Lukasz Gottwald called.
Known professionally as Dr. Luke, Gottwald was a tutee of Swedish pop architect Max Martin who’d just scored his first big hit with Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone.” (Clarkson did not like working with him.) Somehow, he’d gotten his hands on a two-track demo that Kesha had recorded. One of the songs was a “gobsmackingly awful trip-hop track,” a Billboard cover story revealed, in which Kesha runs out of ideas and begins to rap: “I’m a white girl/From the ’Ville/Nashville, bitch.” Nevertheless, Luke loved her “bravado and chutzpah.” The first time he rang the Sebert home, Nicole Richie hung up on him. (This was the middle of Simple Life filming.) He called again, telling Kesha he’d sign her if she moved to Los Angeles. She was 17. She did.
Once she made it there, in 2005, Luke left her to her own devices. In the beginning, she lived with a man who claimed to be her father, but when she arrived at his home and found a real-life character from The 40-Year-Old Virgin, she became convinced they weren’t related (“There’s no way that half of my DNA is made up of someone who has a video game chair,” she said). She waitressed. She lived out of her car for a while. She took modest gigs supporting other artists, writing songs for the Veronicas and singing backing vocals for Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. Other record labels wanted to sign her, but deals fell through because of her contractual ties to Dr. Luke. Still, she seemed triumphant: her gonzo Myspace profile from 2008 describes her record label as “ur mom” and her musical sound, beautifully, like “god having an orgasm.”
It’s this hubris, this crassness, this hilarity that made Kesha’s persona so engrossing. After four years in limbo, Dr. Luke asked her to sing the hook for Flo Rida’s “Right Round.” She initially wasn’t credited on the No. 1 hit, but it still brought some attention to her name. Then, with seven years of material already at her disposal, she spent 2009 working on her debut album with a production team including Dr. Luke, Max Martin, and Benny Blanco. In interviews, Kesha explains its title with ludicrous anecdotes about “almost [getting] eaten by a barracuda” or wanting parrots named Wayne and Garth. But the real implication of Animal is clear: go feral, she urges, surrender to your most primal instincts.
And so the album throws itself into loving and fucking and dancing, anchored by buzzing, acid-bright electronics and booming four-on-the-floors. Call it consistency or repetitiveness: the songs continuously circle back to the same topics—Jack Daniels and “sick obsession”s, broken bottles and glitter strewn across the floor. It was part of a wave of bullish turbo-pop driven by the spiritual need to escape a bummer recession; besides, maybe the Mayans were right and the world really would end in 2012. A too-tipsy Gaga urged herself to “just dance.” The Black Eyed Peas vowed to burn the roof. Then, just in time, Kesha rolled in in her gold Trans Am and proclaimed that the party couldn’t start without her. Even her sad heartbreak songs (“Hungover,” “Dancing With Tears in My Eyes”) existed in the raver universe.
Sometimes Animal fit the times too well: Several songs sound like they could have been shipped off other Dr. Luke and Max Martin collaborators, like P!nk or Katy Perry. But the record is also stranger than you might imagine; music critic Ann Powers once called moments of it “nearly as experimental as an Animal Collective record.” On “Take It Off,” Kesha is titillated by the “freaks” at a drag show, and amplifying the strangeness, the song turns an old snake-charmer melody into a mutant croak. Her kiss-off to creepy old men, “DINOSAUR,” oscillates from sassy cheerleader chants (“You need a CAT scan!”) to a whistling instrumental that evokes Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown.” Of course, it starts off with a campy Jurassic Park roar.
Weirdest of all is “Stephen,” a fanatical plea to a guy Kesha says she’s been “stalking” since she was 15. It opens with stacked vocals à la “Fat Bottomed Girls” and then becomes teen girl peppy: “Why won’t you call me?” Kesha presses, in a spine-chillingly grating mew, hypothesizing the answer in a clipped British accent: “You might think I’m ... crazy.” Puckish details like these carry the record: a little “holla!” sprinkled in a verse, a slurred and giggly “I like your beard” thrown at the end of song.
Whether it was whimpered obsession or boorish indifference, Animal exhibited a silly, puerile attitude toward the opposite sex. One of Kesha’s guilty pleasures was Usher’s “OMG,” which sounds like it was written by a boy who just discovered masturbating: “Honey got some boobies like wow oh wow,” Usher warbled. (“Just the fact that he uses the word ‘boobies’ is horribly amazing,” Kesha told SPIN.) Equally middle-school commentary abounds on Animal. The extended version includes a track called “c u next tuesday,” in which she accuses a guy of being a—well, look at the acronym. On “Kiss n Tell” she sneers at a cheating boyfriend for being a “tool” not a “baller,” and—in the ultimate shot to the adolescent male ego—accuses him of acting like a “chick” and a “slut.”
Behind her asinine attitude was a feminist project: Kesha believed that women had the right to be as lawless, coarse, and pimp-like as dudes. On “Blah Blah Blah,” she found her counterpart in crunkcore icons 3OH!3, the kind of dirtbags who’d slap your ass outside of Hot Topic and then saunter over to the food court for a celebratory smoothie. But instead of the guys being sleazy, it’s Kesha who’s impatient to get some. “Don’t be a little bitch with your chit chat/Just show me where your dick’s at!” she eye-rolls. Kesha thought that if men like LMFAO could make songs “all about how women are pieces of meat,” she should give them a taste of their own medicine. And so “Boots & Boys” takes a literal approach to objectification by equating men to footwear. But her oafish jokes often relied on crude gender essentialism, as shown worst in the line “I just can’t date a dude with a vag” on her later song “Grow a Pear.”
Ostensibly, Animal should have aged poorly: for one, who says “steez” and “crackhead” anymore? Its garish, pitch-corrected vocals came in between JAY-Z declaring the “Death of Auto-Tune and Time crowning the technology one of the “50 Worst Inventions.” But now the stigma has evaporated, and absurdity and obnoxiousness are in vogue. Kesha committed boldly to brainlessness, long before the bimbo revival and aspirational claims to being “no thoughts, head empty.” Her brand of robo-shamelessness has been embraced especially by hyperpop, which is bathed in 2010s nostalgia. You can hear her in the airhead pop of Slayyyter and Ayesha Erotica, both of whom infuse their bubblegum tracks with tawdry flair. PC Music leader A.G. Cook has remixed “Stephen.” But the most worthy heirs to Kesha’s legacy are the anarchic pop duo food house, a.k.a the producers Gupi and Fraxiom, who make smirking, willfully doltish electronica. “Tonight let’s do shit that gets us in cringe comps,” Fraxiom drones on a song that samples “Crazy Frog,” adding a Reddit-poisoned spin to Kesha’s party-all-night mutiny.
The elephant in the room is that Kesha made this record with Dr. Luke, a man who she’s accused of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. Some of the alleged incidents occurred right after she signed her record deal, when she was just a teenager; to this day, she is still trapped in a multi-year legal dispute. This backstory has cast its shadow. As one critic wrote, echoed by many: “It’s hard now to listen to her early hits without hearing them as documents of abuse.”
This unease recalls an observation that the writer Jia Tolentino made, years ago, during the Weinstein reckoning: “One of the cruelest things about [sexual assault] is the way that [these acts] entangle, and attempt to contaminate, all of the best things about you.” What if the things you loved about Kesha were what Dr. Luke saw in her too? Her verve, her temerity, her “chutzpah,” as he highlighted. She initially chafed at some of “TiK ToK”s most memorable lyrics, worried, for example, that it didn’t make sense to brush your teeth with Jack Daniels. But Luke and Blanco kept goading her to make the song “more simple, just dumb.” When she thought of rewriting it, Luke “literally had to fight me off,” she said, good-humoredly at the time.
Besides the “gobsmackingly awful trip-hop track” that caught Luke’s eye, there was another song on Kesha’s early demo: a “gorgeously sung, self-penned country ballad,” as Billboard described. Kesha always had interests outside electro-pop; early on, she and her brother were in a punk band together, and her Myspace profile included a mile-long list of influences ranging from Boards of Canada to Regina Spektor. For the title track of Animal, which she imagined as a segue into future projects, she attempted to emulate the Flaming Lips and Arcade Fire. But, as a 2013 New Yorker profile of Dr. Luke describes, their relationship soured because she wanted her second record to be rock. He insisted that she stick to dim-witted party pop.
It’s tempting to disavow Animal because Dr. Luke wanted to keep Kesha frozen in its bacchanalian image. But it’s worth remembering the songs are hers, too—or hers, period. They tell real-life stories about being shit-talked by ex-friends, preyed on by senile old men, and having a good-ass time. And while Kesha once felt so defined by tragedy that she was afraid of being openly celebratory, she has ventured tentatively back to insouciance; she’s described the ethos of her upcoming tour as “skanky Disneyland that’s covered in glitter.” For what it’s worth, her fans still call themselves “Animals.”
Kesha knew that good times are something you have to seek for yourself, which is why one of the themes she returns to on Animal is fighting: fighting until you see the sunlight, fighting into the magic, fighting for your right to party. These are songs she wrote while piss broke, bumming around crappy bars and barely affording groceries. And yet, they are filled with wisecracking exuberance, not burdened by the anxiety of what will come tomorrow but content to make the most out of now. It’s not a novel perspective, but it resonates nonetheless. Much has been said about the sorry state of the world we’re in, the precarity that young people feel because of the economy and the climate. Animal shows you what it’s like to have little but feel it all: a lingering crush, temporary transcendence in the hands of a DJ, the thrill of going out and returning with glitter still on your face.

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Following a tour together in 2017, Doug Martsch & co. tackle an album’s worth of the Texas singer-songwriter’s work, but they fail to capture the strange and messy spirit that animates his music.

Built to Spill: Built to Spill Plays the Songs of Daniel Johnston

In 1994, Built to Spill took one of Daniel Johnston’s most famous songs—the hymnlike “Some Things Last a Long Time”—and made a glorious mess out of it. Where Johnston’s original was just his tiny voice and some echo-drenched piano, Built to Spill’s was a manned space vessel launch. Frontman Doug Martsch sent his distorted guitar like a kicked-over paint can into every corner, soloing for minutes on end. It was maybe ill-advised and probably a little dubious and definitely fantastic.
In 2017, Johnston’s booking agent contacted Built to Spill with this cover in mind. The idea was to bring Martsch and his new version of the band—longtime members Scott Plouf and Bret Nelson had quit after 15 years—to play a few shows backing Johnston on what turned out to be his final tour. As Martsch remembered it recently, talking to SPIN, the shows went fine, smooth enough—maybe a little weird. Johnston’s stamina wasn’t great. When it was over, Martsch approached Johnston, venturing that perhaps they could do this again. To which Johnston, true to form, said, well, he didn’t know.
Built to Spill Plays the Songs of Daniel Johnston emerges from this fitful meeting of two diffident souls. Martsch shares plenty with Johnston—his frail, sweet tenor, most obviously, but also the childlike clarity of his most memorable observations. When Martsch covers an artist he admires, he usually excavates something unusual—see his cover of the Smiths’ “Reel Around the Fountain” or “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want,” for example, or his sneaky 2003 side project Boise Cover Band, where you can hear that Midwestern choirboy voice tackle two-tone reggae (Dobby Dobson’s “Loving Pauper”), glam rock (David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes”), and even Captain Beefheart.
But Martsch misses the opportunity to commune with Johnston’s music, or to do anything with it, really. On the 11 songs here, he resists the urge to plug in his distortion pedals and sail away. Johnston’s songs are simple constructions, pieces of white drawing paper with only a couple of marks and a few folded lines, and the streamlined trio version of Built to Spill honors this simplicity. Martsch strums an acoustic guitar, Jason Albertini plays simple root bass notes, and Steve Gere’s drum kit ticks quietly. These renditions are subdued, and while they’re sweet, they also feel like rehearsals—nothing of the strange and messy spirit that animates Johnston’s music, nothing of the fairytale darkness that makes it haunting, sneaks into Plays the Songs. “Bloody Rainbow” sounds like “Bloody Rainbow,” but without the little hiccups in Johnston’s voice, without the slight flubs his calloused hands make on the guitar strings. “Honey I Sure Miss You” sounds like “Honey I Sure Miss You” but minus Johnston’s reedy intensity. Martsch has always been a shy vocalist, but he comes off detached here, even a little blank, and his readings here have all the conviction of a Hi, How Are You? sticker.
Martsch’s most expressive instrument, by far, remains his guitar, the outlet for all his unrulier feelings. When he allows it into the mix, things get livelier. Johnston’s rickety “Good Morning You” is polished until it sounds a little like “Fly Around My Little Miss,” from 2001’s Ancient Melodies of the Future. “Heart, Mind & Soul” is one of Johnston’s more devastating creations, a defaced doo-wop song trapped flailing under a rock. Played by Martsch’s new band, it sounds a little like a Sun Records outtake. And “Mountain Top” colors in the arrangements with some lovely background vocals and whammy bar-bent guitar chords.
But otherwise, he doesn’t express or exert himself. It’s too bad. Martsch has a somewhat vexed relationship with trying—the album on which he tried his hardest, 1997’s masterpiece Perfect From Now On, had to be recorded three times and nearly broke him, to the point he could barely bring himself to play the songs on the album’s tour. Anyone who has seen his band live more than once knows there is a gulf of difference between Doug bored and Doug engaged. He seems to be growing more half-hearted as the years go on. Built to Spill’s output has been sparse as of late—just one album in the last decade—and Martsch admits regularly in interviews to long stretches of writer’s block and self-doubt.
In that same SPIN interview, he confessed he looked back on his band’s “Some Things Last a Long Time” cover with mortification. “I think of that song as being so beautiful and delicate,” he said, “and us just rockin’ it out like that—it just seems so random and arbitrary to me in retrospect. Like, what were we thinking?” He may have a point—the cover does go on for a little while, and maybe it gets a little ridiculous—but at least it was a statement. Built to Spill Plays the Songs of Daniel Johnston feels a bit like a shrug in comparison.

Buy: Rough Trade
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When Odd Future tumbled out of L.A. in 2010, the skilled-beyond-his-years Earl Sweatshirt tipped them into the spotlight, but just as the collective took off he vanished. Three years after his first mixtape, Sweatshirt uses his Columbia debut to convey a more varied palette of emotions. As comebacks go, it’s shockingly insular and unassuming.

Doris

When Odd Future first tumbled out of Southern Los Angeles County in 2010, it wasn’t the high-strung antics of the group’s de facto figurehead Tyler, the Creator that tipped them into the spotlight. It was Earl Sweatshirt, unbelievably young (15? 16?) and skilled beyond his years, a methodical wordsmith whose splatterpunk murder fantasies were rendered all the more unsettling by his incredible poise. The video for “Earl” (off the mixtape of the same name), wherein Sweatshirt and company down a risky drug cocktail and party until they begin to decay, was integral in setting the then-unknown collective on its crash course with hip-hop notoriety. But just as Odd Future took off, Earl appeared to vanish. Once a menacing presence over Tyler’s post-Neptunes synth wheeze, Earl was frustratingly absent from the group’s inaugural round of live shows and festival spots as well as the second round of Odd Future solo efforts. The group refused to provide an explanation for the lingering absence of its best rapper when pressed, opting instead to lead fans through a quixotic “Free Earl” campaign immortalized in t-shirts, records, and elaborate satirical fan fiction.
After a winding investigation, Complex was eventually able to trace Earl to a Samoan retreat for at-risk teen boys. It seems his mother, a civil rights activist and law professor, had shipped him overseas to clear his head after behavioral problems bled into his schoolwork. Barring an expository chat with The New Yorker, Earl fell silent after the reveal until turning up unexpectedly on Twitter one night in early 2012 with a new song called “Home” that closed with Sweatshirt giddily announcing his return: “I’m baaaack. Bye.” He appeared on various ephemera afterward: a supremely anesthetized spot on “Super Rich Kids” off Frank Ocean’s Grammy Award winning Channel Orange, an unannounced freestyle on the posse cut “Oldie” from The **OF Tape Vol. 2 compilation, and tracks with OF compatriot Domo Genesis and Flying Lotus’ rap alter ego Captain Murphy. He seemed to pick right up where the maleficent EARL left off, the new verses touting the same deadpanned orgies of bloodletting and misanthropy.
It wasn’t until the end of 2012 release of the single “Chum” that Earl addressed his story in song. Built around a simple, affecting piano figure and clattering boom bap low end, “Chum” was a travelogue of a lost soul seemingly back on track. In it Earl opens up about a life of struggles, from the absence of his father, one-time South African Poet Laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile, after a split from his mother (“I just used to say I hate him in dishonest jest/ When honestly I miss this nigga like when I was six”), to discovering drugs and petty crime, finding a big brother in Tyler, and the fallout from the Complex expose. “Chum” was the most personal and direct he’d ever been on record; it was gobstopping without relying on the trick of sullying the youthful zest of his voice with grim stories of death and defilement.
Loosed from the nauseating gutbucket grit of EARL, Sweatshirt uses his Columbia Records debut Doris to convey a more varied palette of emotions. He challenges the uplifting mood of “Burgundy”’s jazzy Neptunes production, addressing the illness of his grandmother, insecurities about the new material, and lingering issues with his father in one fell swoop (“My priorities fucked up, I know it, I’m afraid I’m going to blow it/ When them expectations raising cause daddy was a poet”). He’s a distant lover on “Sunday”, trading verses with Frank Ocean about trying to tend to withering relationships as studio rats and touring musicians. “Hive” captures the sobering realities of L.A.’s inner city as Earl, his voice just above a whisper, speaks of hopeless commuters biking to jobs that don’t pay their bills (“From a city that’s recession hit/ Where stressed niggas could flex metal with pedals to rake pennies in”). The resignation in his voice in these moments of reflection is every bit as communicative as his unflappable stream of internal rhymes and arresting visual images.
Even in the face of the newfound depth in Earl’s songwriting, Doris’ primary concern is his wordplay, which presents itself in thickets of rhymes so dense they can register as inscrutable on first listen. “Hive”’s second verse opens with: “Desolate testaments trying to stay Jekyll-ish/ But most niggas Hyde, and Brenda just stays preg-a-nant,” a glob of offbeat references, double entendres, made up words, and brilliantly disguised slant rhymes that hit as great exercises in rhyming words well before the deeper meanings can be teased out. Doris is also relatively hookless; where heaping doses of melody helped Tyler, the Creator break form earlier this year with Wolf, here it’s just raps on raps on raps. Guests are frequent, but they either come out rhyming for dear life, as Odd Future affiliate Vince Staples does when he swipes “Hive” out from under Earl in the third verse. Or they play hype man like Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA on “Molasses” and Vince in the spirited pep talks between Earl’s verses on “Burgundy”. The focus never strays from Earl’s fractious, DOOM-influenced songwriting for long, and Doris prefers to dispense it in short, impactful bursts as the “half short and twice strong” EARL did in 2010.
The album breezes by in 44 minutes, but it feels longer. Earl favors droning, lumbering productions full of intriguing sound textures, but he pulls in enough curveballs to give the album a jerky energy. In the first few minutes alone, we get the airy keys and trap drums of opener “Pre”, brash horns and live drums on “Burgundy”, and piddling video game synths battling chunky bass on “20 Wave Caps”. Between the campy drum shuffle newly added to the end of the otherwise austere “Chum” and the shrill violin trills that usher in a shock beat change in the middle of “Centurion”, Doris gets as much of its jollies from settling into dark, forbidding soundscapes as it does from unexpectedly ripping us up out of them. Without the noirish serial killer stories of earlier work to fall back on, Earl has discovered new ways to shock and disorient the listener.
Doris is full on its author’s prodigious abilities as a formidable young voice in L.A.’s resurgent hip-hop scene, but it’s not as concerned with the wider significance of the moment as it is with disbelief it’s actually happening. As comebacks go, it’s shockingly insular and unassuming. Earl remains self-deprecating throughout; he produces a number of the album’s tracks under the telling moniker Randomblackdude. Even when he skirts the mainstream, he does so with cautious optimism. Earl made a television appearance with the Roots on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" this month, running through the boisterous “Burgundy” with eyes closed after a tense walk from the blue room to the stage. It was a peculiar event, the anticlimactic unveiling of a star who’d been the talk of rap circles for three years but scarcely able to relish the attention. With Doris, Odd Future’s Odysseus is finally back and chasing the ghosts out of his head.