These first seven albums constitute the first act of Waits’ remarkable career, even as these reissues complicate that journey from assembly-line singer-songwriter to eclectic iconoclast.

The Asylum Era

Tom Waits had one of the wildest trajectories of any rock artist in the 1970s—or possibly ever. A regular presence in San Diego’s coffeehouse folk scene in the late 1960s, he was living out of his car when Herb Cohen, the manager for the Mothers of Invention and Linda Ronstadt, discovered him and helped to secure a record deal with the fledgling Asylum Records. David Geffen and Elliot Roberts had just opened the label in 1971, but already it was a home to some of Southern California’s finest singer-songwriters, including Jackson Browne, Judee Sill, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young. Waits was plugged as a like-minded artist, based on songs like “Martha” (covered by Tim Buckley) and “Ol’ 55” (covered by labelmates the Eagles).
As the decade progressed, Waits grew weirder and woolier, indulging his penchant for weapons-grade schmaltz as well as his fascination with Beat jazz and the seedier byways of Los Angeles. With each album his voice curdled more deeply into a whiskey growl, often sounding like Louis Armstrong after a bender. His songs sprawled into strange recitations about gutter characters: strippers and barflies, hucksters and grifters, vagrants holding up lampposts and waitresses slinging hash. During it all, Waits maintained strict control over his craft—his music rarely seems haphazard—but bent his songs into new shapes to portray characters and convey emotions that didn’t have much of an outlet in pop music at the time. If his peers and labelmates were Laurel Canyon, Waits was the more sordid Tropicana Motel.
Waits’ current label, Anti-, is reissuing his first seven records, first on CD and on LP over the next few months, chronicling his time at Asylum. Newly remastered but without any bonus material, they form something like a road trip through an America that maybe never existed except in Waits’ own head, or perhaps a novel about an artist defining himself against pretty much every major trend. However, just because they show Waits getting comfortable in his own skin and learning how he could present himself to his fans, these albums comprise more than simply a prelude to his remarkable run of records in the 1980s and 1990s. These seven albums constitute the first act of a remarkable career, even as these reissues complicate that trajectory from assembly-line singer-songwriter to eclectic iconoclast.
Let’s back this Cadillac up a bit. While his teenage friends were playing psychedelic rock and protest pop, a young Tom Waits was discovering his parents’ record collection of big bands and crooners. He got more out of Bing Crosby than he did from the heavy guitar rock coming out of California at the time, but when he started performing, he was a folkie by necessity: He couldn’t afford a band, and coffeehouses were the only venues that would offer him a stage. Many of the songs on his 1973 debut Closing Time were written when Waits was making the rounds in San Diego, like “Ol’ 55,” an ode to the car that carries him away from his girlfriend’s bed on an early morning. It’s the only song with any daylight on this otherwise night-owl collection that’s set in bars and walk-ups and incorporating language he heard eavesdropping while working the door at the Heritage, a folk club on San Diego’s Mission Beach.
These are some of Waits’ most composed songs, the ones that hew closest to popular forms and structures. That’s not a criticism; this is just one melodic, highly structured mode that made these songs coverable by folk singers and shitty country-rock bands. They’re also some of his most focused songs: “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You” is an ode to missed opportunities, Waits never leaving his stool to tell the story of two strangers who never become anything more. Tender in its depiction of the low and the lonesome, the song is his first glimpse of this barroom milieu, which he would explore much more fully on subsequent albums. It might have sold poorly, but Closing Time reveals an artist who was obviously more than just another SoCal singer-songwriter.
Released in late 1974, The Heart of Saturday Night represents a significant step forward, with Waits inching closer to his signature setting and sound. It’s a concept album about the American Saturday Night and the sense of freedom or obligation or possibility contained in those hours. He’s not interested in the sinner-saint/Saturday night-Sunday morning dichotomies; the morals associated with organized religion have very rarely informed his lyrics. Rather, his characters are motivated by something ineffable, unnameable: “Tell me, is it the crack of the pool balls, neon buzzin’?” he asks of no one in particular on the title track. “Is it the barmaid that’s smilin’ from the corner of her eye? Magic of the melancholy tear in your eye?” Everybody wants a little romance, a little drama, a little signal that all these late nights and early mornings, dive bars and cheap beers, desperate glances and furtive hookups might actually add up to something like a worthwhile life.
Waits captures the melancholy but not exactly the excitement that Bruce Springsteen (his elder by two months) was conjuring in his similarly jazzy, relentlessly loquacious compositions around the same time. But the Boss exuded youth and all the promise contained therein; he was an optimist, a believer in the redemptive powers of rock’n’roll. Waits sounded old before his time, his voice deepening into a growl and his characters sloshing in their resignation. He was 25 going on 70 as he sang “San Diego Serenade,” his most bittersweet break-up ballad.
Elsewhere, he just sounds out of time. The Jazz Age saw a brief resurgence in the 1970s, thanks to movies like The Great Gatsby and novels like E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, but those works depict America as a font of wealth, luxury, and frivolity. For Waits, jazz conveyed deprivation and poverty, down-and-outers making the most of a few bucks and getting by on gumption and ingenuity. He convened a small band behind him, some sessions musicians who’d played for Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie, among others. They lend “Diamonds on My Windshield” and “Fumblin’ With the Blues” a rhythmic elasticity, a Spartan quality that reflects the details of Waits’ world as ably and as convincingly as his lyrics do.
Waits took to the road, extending his persona to the stage and refining it in front of often hostile audiences who didn’t know the Tropicana Motel from the Chateau Marmont. His third album, Nighthawks at the Diner, benefits from those experiences even if it doesn’t really reflect them. It’s a live album, but only sort of. Waits and producer Bones Howe assembled a small audience of friends at the Record Plant in L.A., rolled out a piano and a microphone, and let Waits bend their ears for a few hours. It’s not a real nightclub, more like a Hollywood film set. He introduces it as “Raphael’s Silver Cloud Lounge,” then dives into a superlatively loose set that blurs the lines between song and stage banter. Where does his intro end and “Emotional Weather Report” begin? Is the eleven-minute “Nighthawk Postcards (From Easy Street)” a real song or just a long aside to the audience?
Nighthawks offers the best glimpse of Waits’ world so far, and what’s remarkable is the keen detail, the rich observations, and the sly turns of phrase. A street is full of “used car salesmen dressed up in Purina checkerboard slacks and Foster Grant wraparounds.” Eyeballing a smoky barroom he sees, “Stratocasters slung over the Burgermeister beer guts, and the swizzle-stick legs jackknifed over Naugahyde stools.” Few songwriters make such a meal of proper nouns. Waits has a hundred different ways to describe the moon in the night sky and a thousand different ways to describe a taxicab. One is “piss yellow,” another “bastard amber Velveeta yellow.” To see those words on a page is one thing; to hear Waits deliver them in his Satchmo growl—adjusting his cadence with the timing of a stand-up comedian, deploying the word “Velveeta” like a raunchy punchline—is something else entirely. This live/not live album is a pivotal release for Waits, one that demonstrates the depth of his world and the extent of his dedication to evoking it in fine, eccentric clarity.
To distance himself even further from what he perceived to be the popular image of the rock star, Waits traveled from one show to the next in a jalopy, stayed in fleabags instead of luxury hotels. Rather than coke and heroin, he indulged a vice more in fitting with the world he depicted: booze. Even by his own admission, Waits drank a lot—much more than this persona he was adopting demanded. That friction between him and the industry he had reluctantly joined is the theme, sometimes subtle and occasionally not subtle at all, running through his fourth album, Small Change.
The milieu is familiar, but he makes it all sound fantastical. “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)” is another song that sounds like it was recorded at 3 a.m. in a bar, but what sets it apart is how Waits presents the setting as nearly surreal: “The piano has been drinking, my necktie is asleep,” he observes from his bench. “The telephone’s out of cigarettes, and the balcony is on the make.” It sounds like the world he has carefully crafted on his first three albums is unraveling at its seams. “Pasties and a G-String” de-eroticizes its low-rent burlesque as a phantasmagoria of despair and boredom. Even “Step Right Up,” with Waits playing the carnival barker on some seedy midway, turns advertising slogans into dark magic.
As wiseacre and rambunctious as that particular song may be, Small Change is electrically charged with a pathos that comes across as both false and real, with Waits playing the raconteur masking his very real sadness behind expressions of sadness. “Bad Liver and a Broken Heart” launches a counteroffensive against his congenital sentimentality, as he slyly undercuts his own pieties: “The moon ain’t romantic, it’s intimidating as hell,” he crows. Deeply embedded in the underbelly, Small Change is nevertheless Waits’ most personal, even is most confessional album, somehow refracting the real person through the persona.
It didn’t take much for Small Change to outsell Waits’ previous albums, and it finally established him as an artist who could headline instead of support. Over the next few years, he would tour elaborate productions that occasionally incorporated fake snow and stage props. He used a cash register as percussion for “Step Right Up” (foreshadowing the pots-and-pans percussion on 1983’s Swordfishtrombones). Now that he had established his particular sound, Waits set about exploring it thoroughly over the next three albums, making slight adjustments and tinkering with various sounds and styles. Strings became more and more prominent, especially on 1977’s Foreign Affairs. Waits’ fifth begins with an instrumental called “Cinny’s Waltz,” which acts as a Technicolor overture for the songs that follow.
The tracks are austere, usually just Waits and a piano. Still, these are some of Waits’ most cinematic compositions, both musically and lyrically. “I Never Talk to Strangers,” a duet with Bette Midler, sounds like a rehash of “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You,” and “A Sight for Sore Eyes” plumbs the same nostalgia as “Martha,” among other songs. But Waits stretches out on the album’s second side, spinning wild yarns about hitmen and hitchhikers.
Waits always borrowed heavily from Hollywood, not only its grandiose soundtracks but also its neglected glamour and noir tableaux. In 1978, he took his first role in Sylvester Stallone’s Paradise Alley, as a piano player named Mumbles. It wasn’t a stretch; the character was based loosely on him to begin with. Later, “I Never Talk to Strangers” would inspire Francis Ford Coppola to write and direct 1981’s One from the Heart. So it’s fitting that Waits opens Blue Valentine with “Somewhere,” from Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story. The song, like the musical, began onstage but was soon translated to the big screen, which parallels the trajectory Waits himself was taking. It must have seemed like an odd cover choice at the time, and Waits gives an odd performance by rounding his vowels and flattening the ends of his words into hisses and moans.
On the other hand, “Somewhere” makes perfect sense thematically: His characters may be hard up, but they’re still dreaming about that promised “place for us.” “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis,” a minor hit at the time and a fan favorite for decades after, is one of Waits’ most devastating tunes. He sings in the voice of the title character as she describes a happy life to an old friend: She’s married and off the dope, pregnant and hopeful. Someone might have stolen her record player, but “I think I’m happy for the first time since my accident.” The last verse arrives like a punch in the gut, as she admits she’s making it all up before asking to borrow some dough.
That Minnesota sex worker may be Waits’ richest character, a dreamer who spins an elaborate yarn that even she doesn’t have the heart to maintain. If women have stayed at the margins of his world, usually playing strippers and molls and closing-time hook-ups and more generally serving as fuel for his very masculine sentimentality, here Waits gives a woman a starring role and manages to create a deeply complex and contradictory character. His voice might sound low and gruff, but his performance isn’t mannered or distracting. Rather, he’s deeply sympathetic, especially as he reveals her very modest dream: “I wish I had all the money we used to spend on dope,” he muses. “I’d buy me a used car lot and I wouldn’t sell any of ‘em. I’d just drive a different car everyday dependin’ on how I feel.”
In the context of Waits’ nearly fifty-year career, 1980’s Heartattack and Vine is often discussed as a transitional album, a pivot away from the jazzier settings of his Asylum records and toward a much wilder and weirder mode. And certainly there are clear signposts pointing the directions he would head in the new decade. But in the context of this reissue series, Heartattack and Vine sounds less like a transition and more like a goodbye to those back alleys and underbellies, those barrooms and speakeasies that he once inhabited so easily. On subsequent records that setting would be much less prominent, so it’s fitting that “In Shades” is an instrumental, a smooth, organ-led interlude saturated with nightclub chatter and silverware clatter. Waits himself is missing from the milieu, as though he has fled the scene already. And he ends the album with “Ruby’s Arms,” one of his tenderest compositions. It’s his goodbye to a lover he leaves before the sun comes up, something like a prequel to “Ol’ 55” that brings everything full circle. But it’s also a goodbye to every barfly and every hoodlum and every itinerant on some “inebriational travelogue” he’s met along the way. “I will leave behind all of my clothes I wore when I was with you,” he sings. And then he ends the album with a fond farewell as he rides off into the sunrise: “As I say goodbye… I’ll say goodbye.”
Bon voyage, as well, to the grizzled persona he inhabited throughout the 1970s. No longer a cult figure, he had become what you could reasonably call successful, the music industry bending to him rather than him accommodating its demands. But perhaps the most significant change—the one that really took him out of himself—came in 1978, on the set of Paradise Alley, when Waits met screenwriter Kathleen Brennan. In addition to becoming his songwriting partner, she inspired him to sober up and to expand the sound and scope of his music. “I didn’t just marry a beautiful woman,” he told The Guardian in 2006. ”I married a record collection.” He would never again be quite as prolific as he was in the 1970s—seven albums in seven years—but he would never again be truly alone again in a song.


Texan singer/songwriter Jess Williamson ditches the bucolic sound of her stark debut for a haunted urban malaise that feels far more natural for her.

Heart Song

Native State, the 2014 debut record by Jess Williamson, depicted the Texan singer/songwriter’s journey back to her home state from a stint living in NYC, ditching the city and its discomforts for the wide-open country of her heart. Driven largely by banjo and other folksy instruments like dobro and dulcimer, Native State’s sound lumped Williamson into a loose constellation of mournful, folksy musicians, despite the fact that her spindly, spine-tingling voice took her songs in places most of her supposed peers would never dare to go. But Heart Song, Williamson’s sophomore effort, raises the question of how native Native State really was, as it finds her ditching bucolic Americana and returning to a place of urban malaise that feels far more natural for her.
What remains unchanged is Williamson’s stunning voice, which remains as compelling and remarkable as it was on Native State. Her rich, lip-curled contralto has an uncanny familiarity to it, hitting a spot somewhere between Cat Power and Angel Olsen, with moments of early Joanna Newsom’s yawp. But the way she wields this voice is unique. On Native State, that voice often seemed set off in opposition to the rustic instrumentation, but on Heart Song everything seems fused together as one.
Her writing, while evocative in any setting, feels more suited to these ominous all-night-diner/on-the-road soundtracks than to porch-mystic musings. Opener “Say It” captures this transition well, conjuring a quasi-Lynchian vision of a weary, wary woman conversing with a lover: “We could do better than this cheap motel/But somehow here I feel the most like myself.” On the slowly unfolding and percussion-less “Snake Song”—which references Will Oldham’s apocalyptic folkie forbearer Palace Brothers with the lyric “There is no one what will take care of you”—Williamson offers the sharp line “I have made friends with those too jealous to let the love come in/And I’ll never talk to them again even if I again talk to them.” Each track relies heavily on reverb-soaked electric guitar lines, a stark simplicity that works in tandem with Williamson’s soaring, interrogative voice.
The atmosphere on Heart Song is so strong and captivating that it pulls the more experimental moments into the center as well, like the mariachi deathsong closer “Devil’s Girl.” The best first-person storytelling manages to exist both inside and outside of the narrator’s head, a state which Williamson achieves deftly with cleverly written—and most importantly, delivered—lines such as “It’s evil how the best men I know are in and out of hospitals/Fighting some devils/…. Well maybe I am just the devil’s girl.” “Devil’s Girl” is actually an older song of Williamson’s, but the music been recast for Heart Song, scrapping the previous bluegrass/folk trappings in place of something rawer and more emotive.
At only seven tracks, Heart Song feels almost too brief. Its ghostly instrumentation and measured pace distort your sense of time in a manner similar to stark classics like Songs: Ohia’s Didn’t It Rain. Williamson has evolved subtly over her two records, and Heart Song lifts her finally and definitely out of the world of “folk” into something deeper, more uncanny, and out-of-time. Heart Song never tires nor loses its tension, as if Williamson’s voice has finally found its proper milieu.


Peter Sagar is a former guitarist for Mac DeMarco, and his charms are not dissimilar from DeMarco’s own. Here, he incorporates yacht rock and R&B tropes for a thrift store synth-pop sound.

Fresh Air

Since leaving Mac DeMarco’s touring band in 2013, Peter Sagar has been releasing music as Homeshake. His first two albums albums, In the Shower and Midnight Snack, were not terribly far from DeMarco’s own charm. They were endearing and melancholic, but also introspective and kind of gross. His sound was pleasantly ramshackle, born from groovy guitars, echo, and a lilting, almost bored singing voice. Sagar’s music oozed a languorous, supine, stoned feeling, and he played the guitar as if it were a balloon animal: his riffs were elastic, contorted, and silly.
Overall, on those two records, Sagar’s spin on slacker rock was easy listening, malleable and affecting in the way DeMarco’s rock was anthemic. Both Sagar and DeMarco sell versions of the world that you want to inhabit: devil may care, but anxiously millennial. And of all the musicians spawned from DeMarco’s smokey den (Alex Calder and Walter TV among them), Sagar always seemed poised to be the one to breakout.
On his third album, Fresh Air, Sagar incorporates new tropes, including AM-radio yacht rock and quiet storm R&B, into his practice. He’s incorporated the off-kilter guitar playing of his earlier work into his new sound, cleaved from cheap synthesizers and drum machines, and the result could be described as thrift store synthpop, or as it might have been called eight years ago: chillwave. Generally, this vibe suits Sagar. The architecture of his sound has always held some of the funniest parts of the ’80s at its core. And here, the pure sleaziness he is able to extract from his instruments can be gloriously campy, or unexpectedly elegant and morose. But he’s also capable of laying down the cheese too thick.
In the album’s title track, he pairs together white noise and funky guitars into an inexplicable but personable ballad of loneliness and stress. In the background, a faltering metronome chimes in, giving the song an even more broken down feel. On “Call Me Up” and “Every Single Thing,” Sagar adds unforgettably sugary synth riffs that are equally danceable and mopey. Yet, he also has a tendency to stretch his voice way past his range, sometimes with effects, or through plodding vocal gymnastics. If anything, his voice might be a big reason some of this music falls flat. On “Timing,” his voice is far too brittle to carry the mercurial beat.
But his aesthetic, for better or worse, has not veered too far from his earliest efforts. On early cassettes, and previous albums, the low-quality trappings of his recordings were appealing. Three albums in, it seems like Sagar still has some learning to do. All over Fresh Air lay old tropes: bursts of static, helium-inflected voices, scratchy sound, guitar noodling. The album also lacks cohesive pacing; its level of energy is low enough that it easily becomes background listening. While there isn’t quite anyone who possesses Sagar’s style in the wide world of indie rock, he’ll have to add a few more tricks, lest he fall into rote routine.


Capping off one of the decade's great bodies of mood music, the Clientele continue to conjure and charm through their evocative music.

Bonfires on the Heath

Who could have guessed, as the first decade of the new millennium came on like a clean slate, that the Clientele would have a multi-album career in them? A follow-up to the band's 2000 singles collection, Suburban Light-- so ingratiating and familiar it felt like the distillation of some heartsick indie-pop ideal-- seemed less impossible than superfluous. When something feels perfect, you don't necessarily want want xeroxes, however much you may think you want more in your life. Yet here we are, as the first decade of the new millennium slumps to an ignoble close, with the fourth Clientele album. (Fifth, if you count Suburban Light.) And thankfully the band never really did attempt to reconjure the magic of those early singles, perhaps realizing that leaning on the same reverb-blurry signature would have dimmed the original's charm. What made the Clientele special proved surprisingly durable across multiple releases, fidelity upgrades, and songwriting shifts.
That special something at first felt impossible to convey. Atmosphere. "Vibe." Put on a Clientele record and you're entering a space, one crafted as much through sound as lyrical associations, which tend toward the kind of quasi-cinematic string-pulling that makes for the band's own brand of enjoyable cliché. It's lonely without tipping into alienation. It's in tune with the power of memory without being deadened by generic nostalgia. It's someplace where changes in the weather can leave people dumbstruck. And if the music itself were a hair more melodramatic, its wistfulness would probably be unbearable. But the band's restraint, skirting emotional didacticism while still providing room for listeners' own specific states, appeals to humanity's more evanescent (and maybe pop-resistant) feelings. If you're never going to hear unfettered joy on a Clientele record, they're never woe-is-me slogs, either.
That said, despite the band's admirable disinterest in repeating themselves, Bonfires stumbles when the Clientele ditch the musical framework they've perfected to carry these less-than-obvious emotional states. For new listeners, think heartsick, echo-wobbly strum carried along (just barely) by the shuffle of 1960s AM gold. The Clientele are not, despite the guitars and their era-specific sound, a rock'n'roll band. You can't imagine them whipping a club full of Hamburg drunks into a chair-flinging frenzy. That sort of energy sounds feigned and forced coming from a band known for music fragile enough to be shattered by a forceful cough from the audience. Bonfires tracks like "I Wonder Who We Are" and "Sketch" are stiff approximations of cutting loose. If not quite as cheesy as interstitial music in a Mike Myers vehicle, they're still pretty ersatz.
Still, we're talking a handful of uptempo misfires out of 12 tracks. The Clientele aren't vain or foolish enough to try rocking out for a whole album. And even the ersatz shit sounds lush as hell. If the early Clientele singles made a virtue of trad indie pop's innovation-through-cheapness recording values, those values actually added to the music's character-- reverb can cover a lot of empty space on both the songwriting and production end of things-- then maturity as a band (and slightly bigger budgets, presumably) made that Clientele-specific sense of place all the more 3-D. The sound of Suburban Light was as smudgy as a head under the effects of cheap wine. Bonfires retains just enough of a fuzzy edge-- a Clientele album without fuzz would be the work of another band entirely-- while its clearer bursts of guitars, bells, organs, piano, strings, and horns lend a gentle eeriness, like bright radio melodies heard through the bleary ears of pre-coffee early morning.
Crucially, in terms of this tension between clarity and fuzziness, fire and varying intensities of late-summer light seem to have replaced rain and early spring's lingering dimness as the band's go-to tropes this time out. Bonfires is an indian summer record if ever there was one, music for the dizzying strangeness of unseasonable warmth as the trees begin to brown and sweaters come out of storage. The title track conjures images of watching kids through sleep-deprived eyes as they crowd around piles of burning refuse, the guitars peeling and quavering like weak flames. Frontman Alasdair MacLean even drops the line, "late October sunlight in the woods," if you needed a no-nonsense scene-setter. The next track's called "Harvest Time", a similar late-decade thickening of the band's patented murmuring drift, paring the lyrics down even further to leave just wordless long notes that hover between grown-ass swoon and little boy longing. But that title, though: Throughout Bonfires, it's as if the band's trying to beat the synesthetes at their own game, making an album impossible to describe without using colors like ochre and umber and sunset red. You may not be able to recall its melody without prompting, but damned if you wouldn't be able to describe the image it paints with lyrics you could inscribe on a matchbook.
The best of the Bonfires extends the Clientele's great project: building, through hyper-evocative descriptive fragments and music to match, one of the great imaginary places in pop. The Clientele's suburb is obviously the product of an English coming of age, but it's also just dreamily vague enough to mirror the lives of listeners almost anywhere. (Unless you happen to live in one of those William Gibsonish fourth-world megalopolises with no green spaces.) The vibe of Bonfires is strong enough to almost feel the leaves crunching underfoot and smell the smoke cutting through the growing chill in the air, an indie-pop equivalent to Brian Eno's windswept and stone-solid world-building circa On Land. It's not an album you can dance to, but it's one you can live in and with, alone, which is rare enough to be applauded. The band's steadily curated one of the decade's great bodies of mood music. In an odd way, it strikes me as almost cousin to Sufjan Stevens' quixotic attempt to bring each state in the union to life: The Clientele seem to be trying to capture the light and air and meteorological conditions and attendant emotional baggage of each season, with a disarmingly straight-faced grace and wonder that makes it one of pop's more laudable long-term career moves.


The 21-year-old singer-songwriter’s third album is serene folk-pop with a mellow soul tinge and the melancholy clarity of someone twice her age.

Atlanta Millionaires Club

Few R&B albums have a pedal steel; few alt-country albums have a rap feature. Faye Webster’s Atlanta Millionaires Club somehow has all of the above. Even stranger, she manages to smooth these apparent contradictions into serene folk-pop with a mellow soul tinge. A musician and photographer known for monochromatic, winkingly humorous portraits of Atlanta hip-hop figures, Webster is releasing her third album at just 21 years old. It has the melancholy clarity of someone twice her age, and a dreamy transience perfect for an overcast Sunday.
Webster’s very first album, 2013’s Run & Tell, was polished traditional folk, inspired by country and bluegrass passed down by her musician mother and grandfather. While not adventurous, it’s remarkably pleasant; it’s hard to believe it’s the work of a 16-year-old, much less one who’d only been writing songs for two years. After a brief stint at college in Nashville, she returned home to Atlanta and recorded a self-titled 2017 album for Awful Records, the musical collective better known for its roster of left-field rap acts. Alongside artists like Father and Ethereal, Webster was an anomaly, but her arty individualism represented an important common value. Faye Webster kept the pedal steel but traded twangy guitars for soulful orchestral accents and groovier rhythms, gliding on the spun-gold thread of Webster’s voice, now sounding less like Emmylou Harris and more like herself.
She’s not a particularly powerful singer; she aims for the wistful plaintiveness to match her self-deprecating acceptance that things sometimes work out for everyone else but you. The album cruises with a casual slackness that can camouflage the precision of its production, like the horn flourishes that enliven light-stepping tearjerkers “Hurts Me Too” and “Jonny.” Kacey Musgraves and Natalie Prass are apt comparisons, but Webster sounds equally at home on a country song as she does singing hooks for Awful recording artists. Father murmurs a nonchalant verse on “Flowers,” the most unusual song here, with a molasses-slow boom-clap and tinkling music-box melody. “What do you prefer?/I don’t have that much to offer,” Webster sings, shifting into whispery sing-song.
Webster’s hyper-modern brand of cool moves with a swiftness that can make her interest in internet rap seem vintage, and her throwback non-musical passions—baseball and trick yo-yoing—seem trendy. Yet her sharply observed and simply stated lyrics land with immediacy. “The day that I met you I started dreaming,” she sings on album centerpiece “Kingston,” a lush, slow-building fantasy of romantic escape. She writes with refreshing obviousness about life as a homebody (“My dog is my best friend, and he doesn’t even know what my name is”), or how it feels to end a relationship with someone who’s also in the entertainment biz (“Right now your picture is all over Atlanta, no matter which way that I drive”). Even at her lowest, she doesn’t sound sorry for herself, preferring to let the pedal steel do the crying.
Plenty of currently trendsetting popular music resists precise categorization. In the case of a Khalid or a Diplo, this impulse can lead to stream-friendly mush. Webster is a bit too weird to fall into that trap; even when her path appears incongruous, one never has the sense that she’s acting other than as she intended. Idiosyncratic yet understated, Atlanta Millionaires Club wraps in a little of everything without doing too much of anything.


The posthumous Phife Dawg album, a showcase for his dexterous vocal style, reveals what had become most important to the rapper’s life in his post-Tribe years.

Forever

Four days after the 2016 presidential election, the surviving members of A Tribe Called Quest appeared on Saturday Night Live to perform songs from their just-released reunion album, the improbably great We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your service. The group recorded the album before Donald Trump’s victory—as Dave Chappelle, who hosted SNL that night, repeatedly argued, Trump was merely sticking his finger in existing fault lines—but the results gave it new gravity. It was a moment of philosophical as well as aesthetic triumph for Tribe, their prescience made obvious.
Not all its members made it there to gloat. During the second verse of the galvanizing “We the People…,” when Phife Dawg’s vocals kicked in, Q-Tip and Jarobi shuffled to the stage wings, making room for a giant banner with Phife’s face to be unfurled. NBC’s cameras zoomed in on the late rapper’s picture until the living ones reappeared in the frame to play hypeman for their friend, their backs turned to the studio audience, egging on a static image.
The performance was less than eight months after Phife, born Malik Taylor, had died from diabetes-related complications at the age of 45. In the nearly 20 years between The Love Movement and We got it from Here, Phife, dogged by ill health and still frustrated over the dynamics that led to Tribe’s breakup, released little music. Forever, his first posthumous album—assembled by his longtime DJ, Dion Liverpool, from largely unfinished demos—reveals what had become most important to Phife in his post-Tribe years: family and a particular kind of integrity, where teaching a child to read and not fucking up a cypher are interconnected parts of one worldview. It also shows a dexterous vocal style that is more easily transposed across eras than longtime listeners might have imagined.
Phife and Q-Tip met when they were children attending the same Seventh Day Adventist church in Queens. But where Q-Tip was free to pursue his secular interests—his father was a jazz collector, and the opening verse to The Low End Theory recounts an informed back-and-forth about musical styles between father and son—Phife’s family adhered more strictly to the faith. He wasn’t permitted to hear hip-hop, much less participate in it, except in surreptitious doses outside the home. This is perhaps why, if Q-Tip could turn moodily inward or grapple with abstract social issues, Phife’s raps always felt more purely social. He was trying to intimidate or entertain, always playing to the block parties in his memory.
Though much of the derision he faced was unfair—Phife’s sly irreverence was a valuable counterweight—there are certainly points on Low End and Midnight Marauders when he sounds quaint next to Q-Tip, as if he were shadowboxing Run while his contemporaries built a spaceship. Forever unlocks in Phife’s vocals a keen adaptability. See the alternatingly rambling and staccato flows on “Dear Dilla,” or the way he moves, on the title track, from Fred Astaire tap dances over the top of the beat to grooves deep in its pocket. Despite song structures that inevitably recall rap from the early and mid-’90s (the trio of cautionary moral tales on “Only a Coward,” the voicemail-dotted “Sorry”), Phife’s voice is allowed here to feel muscular and modern.
Forever’s production descends from Tribe’s work with the late J Dilla, especially on The Love Movement. (It includes the aforementioned Dilla tribute and another song that features his younger brother, Illa J.) The beats skew warm and attempt at points to replicate the signature Ummah swing. This is a familiar musical mode for Phife, but not the only one he works well in. The lone solo album he released during his life, 2000’s Ventilation: Da LP, is a minor but deeply enjoyable take on the more caustic, post-Premier New York rap from the turn of the century, the kind of record for which “dated” is not pejorative. Forever misses some of Ventilation’s bite, even if the gentler tones are fitting given the new album’s themes.
Throughout Forever, Phife raps proudly about taking care of his family members; the album’s first verse, one of the parables from “Only a Coward,” is about a rich rapper who won’t do the same. The peace Phife seems to find in domestic life is especially moving when complicated by stories about his decaying body, delivered optimistically: On “Fallback,” he dreamily imagines a life with “no more dialysis,” and on “God Send,” the answered prayer of a kidney donation is presented as a blessing, with no apparent bitterness about Phife’s own organs failing. But even a listener who stumbled onto this album with no knowledge of real-life events would feel that buoyancy punctured by some of the guests, who address Phife as a deceased person. These eulogies were surely heartfelt on the parts of those rappers and singers, but they make that listener long for cameos like Busta Rhymes and Redman, who meet Phife on his playful level.
The most moving moment on Forever is when Phife laments playing phone tag over the final two years of Dilla’s life. Here and elsewhere on the album, Phife’s penchant for peppering his raps with specific details (often proper nouns—fashion labels, street names) merges with his increased willingness to talk about periods in his career when he felt slighted, disrespected, or simply sad about the way things broke with his lifelong friends. It remains heartbreaking that he lost his life so soon. But in the same way that facts from outside the text color Forever’s relative optimism about Phife’s health, the existence of that final Tribe album resolves some of the lingering anxiety about the group’s dissolution that seemed to haunt him for so long.


Produced by Beau Sorenson and recorded at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone, Melissa Ann Sweat’s fourth album under the alias is a searching work of elemental folk minimalism.

Lady Lazarus: Impossible Journey of My Soul Tonight

Impossible Journey of My Soul Tonight

You don’t need much to make a Lady Lazarus song. Verses, choruses, a bridge? These are surplus to requirements. Accompaniment? Maybe just a splash, but it’s entirely optional. Flashy singing and lyrics? They’d just get in the way. A beginning, a middle, and an end—even these you can skip. The song should sound like it’s already been cycling forever when you press play, and like it might keep on like that forever.
To make a Lady Lazarus song, all you really need is a scrap of piano melody, played loosely but with a lot of feeling, sustained and reverbed to gather the harmonics into a self-generating ambience, and a handful of refrains, as direct as you can make them, in a plainspoken first-person register. That, and a voice capable of casual beauty and laidback ardency. Oh, and you need to be Melissa Ann Sweat, whose particular experiences, daring sincerity, and healing drive add depth to simplicity, so the whole exceeds the sum. That’s the tricky part.
Impossible Journey of My Soul Tonight is Sweat’s fourth album as Lady Lazarus, and her second recorded in a professional studio, John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone. For Sweat, it’s an ornate affair; she plays not just piano but also keyboards, electric strings, and electric vibraphone, while producer Beau Sorenson adds atmospheric synth pads and textures. But for anyone this side of Grouper’s standards, it’s still a work of elemental folk minimalism. Without big peaks or tonal shifts, the music laps over you, the accompaniment no more than shining mist blowing off the songs’ soft, regular waves.
The album opens with “I Know What It Feels Like,” bathing a a few enigmatic but heartfelt phrases in glimmering Rhodes chords and strings—a song that tunes you into its subtle atmospheric fluctuations and then dissipates as dreamily as it appeared. On “I Recall July,” the endless restarting of the piano phrase and the low-tide tug of a saxophone cultivate an air of hushed anticipation. “Give a Little Bit of Yourself, Babe” is Sweat’s version of going big, which means the wavelets mass into gentle swells, but on “Golden Heart,” we’re right back to music that proceeds not by momentum, but touch by touch, thought by thought, feeling by feeling.
Lady Lazarus’ songs have often been about searching for love, home, and healing, things with complex and contradictory interrelations. Impossible Journey of My Soul Tonight seems to rearrange them, and resolves a long-building chord of self-actualization. On “Driving the Streets of Your Town,” Sweat, who lived in Austin and elsewhere before she returned to her native Santa Cruz County, describes cruising alone at 4 a.m. through streets she left at 18, taking stock of what’s still there and what’s gone. This quiet moment, which has the introspective solitude that has distinguished her best songs since “The Eye in the Eye of the Storm,” 10 years ago, comes near the beginning of the album, where the lyrics are all about waiting and remembering. But by “Golden Heart,” illusions are dissolving. The tenses of Sweat’s verbs of longing are changing from present to past, clearing the way for something new. By the end, an open-ended vision of solitude and freedom has emerged, one that will resonate with anyone who has sought home elsewhere but found it within, or anyone who’s still trying to.


The inaugural release in a new Captured Tracks compilation series surveys a generation of college-rock bands that drew sustenance from the chiming guitars of R.E.M. and the Byrds.

Various Artists: Strum & Thrum: The American Jangle Underground 1983 - 1987

If you spent your formative years reading zines such as The Big Takeover and Puncture, you may experience a Proustian tingle while perusing the tracklist for Strum & Thrum: The American Jangle Underground 1983-1987. It’s the inaugural release in Captured Tracks’ Excavations series, a set of compilations highlighting music from the 1970s through the 1990s that influenced the label’s roster. To give you an idea of the underdog status represented, cerebral Homestead Records stalwarts Salem 66 are probably the comp’s best-known act.
At a time when Sonic Youth were imploring people to “Kill Yr Idols,” Strum & Thrum’s musicians were emulating them: They drew sustenance from the Byrds’ radiant Rickerbacker tones; the spare, poignant intro to the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin”; and early R.E.M.’s rambling approximations of Roger McGuinn’s guitar sound. Post-punk and no wave are nowhere to be heard in their orderly compositions. These groups almost uniformly privilege the guitar, and rarely do they disrupt a steady beat—although Start deviate from the prevalent 4/4 and Sex Clark Five dabble with quasi-prog-rock chord progressions and tempo switches. The stylistic niche plowed by most of the 28 acts here is narrow and, culturally and aesthetically, white. Not a scintilla of blues, funk, soul, jazz, or dub exists in these prototypical indie-rock songs. (The main points of Sasha Frere-Jones’s 2007 essay “A Paler Shade of White”—namely, that ’00s indie rock was defined in no small part by its aversion to the rhythmic expressions of mid-20th century, African-American popular music—could apply to Strum & Thrum.)
Music historian (and former Matador general manager) Johan Kugelberg regards the era documented here as American indie rock’s “Dark Ages.” Nevertheless, vibrant scenes were sprouting in college towns and small cities. Captured Tracks has dug deep to find gems from those microcosms. Luckily for these artists scorned by major labels and commercial radio, the college-radio infrastructure was burgeoning, connecting their smart, concisely constructed rock with students and zine-readers nationwide. The uninitiated, and those not alive during Reagan’s bleak reign, can learn much from Strum & Thrum about this stratum of sensitive-person rock.
The deities to which the majority of the comp’s artists genuflect are the Byrds and R.E.M., with occasional nods to the Smiths and Scottish label Postcard’s roster (Aztec Camera, the Go-Betweens). A substantial chunk of the album sounds like outtakes from Chronic Town and Murmur: For instance, the staccato rock of Holiday’s “Change” is essentially R.E.M.’s “1,000,000,” but with vocals influenced by the vivacious delivery of Kate Pierson, of the B-52’s. Strum & Thrum wholeheartedly champions verse-chorus-verse song structures, with no extravagant solos and few deviations from standard rock instrumentation.
With sonic innovation and political commentary off the table, these bands focused on writing catchy melodies, wittily rendering romantic entanglements and youthful musings, and generating those all-important guitar tones—the “jangle” and its close kin, the “chime.” The radiant timbres here generally signify innocent wonder and indomitable joy, despite the chronic threat of nuclear war fostered by American and Soviet leaders. Columbus, Ohio’s Great Plains slaughter doom with “When Do You Say Hello?,” a song so jittery it makes the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner” seem like it’s in first gear. The Ferrets mine party-starting gold with “She Was Unkind,” which audaciously fuses riffs from the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the Kinks’ “She’s Got Everything.” The Springfields’ Sunflower” attains a peak of Rickenbacker bliss via a fey paean to nature that could make Brian Wilson sigh.
Some of the more interesting songs here skew darker, including “Seven Steps Down,” by Salem 66, a Boston group, founded by three women, that crafted some of the most alluring hooks of the ’80s underground yet never transcended cult status. You can hear seeds of Helium and Liz Phair in their surprising dynamics and bewitching earworms. The modestly triumphant 28th Day rocker “Pages Turn (Alternate Version)” offers an early example of Barbara Manning’s ingenious songwriting and poignant vocals. On Riff Doctors’ “Say Goodbye,” singer Donna Esposito expresses the bittersweet feeling of liberation after a soured relationship, but the music radiates a restrained elation, a trick also perfected by the Smiths. The most rhythmically robust song here, Absolutely Grey’s “Remorse” is an emotional roller coaster in which Beth Brown sings, “I feel a bit remorseful now that you’re dead/But no more darkness in your head” like a female Gordon Lightfoot, her mossy tone catching with overwhelming emotion.
Taking cues from reissue specialist labels such as Numero Group and Soul Jazz, Captured Tracks has unearthed deep cuts from a stratum of rock that’s been swathed in apathy for over three decades and puts them into context. While it might be a stretch to say that Strum & Thrum’s artists influenced many of today’s indie rockers, it nevertheless represents a vault full of potential holy grails for fans of, say, Car Seat Headrest or Cloud Nothings. Captured Tracks owner Mike Sniper wants Strum & Thrum to prove that America’s ’80s underground rock bands merit the same respect as those from their more heralded British and New Zealand counterparts on labels such as Creation and Flying Nun. That’s a tall order, but even if he hasn’t quite succeeded, Strum & Thrum does an admirable job casting some much-needed light on those “Dark Ages” of American indie.

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In the context of her catalogue, this feels like a coming out party for Ramona Gonzalez's Nite Jewel. Compared to the electro-pop project's more lo-fi beginnings, the music here is forthright and clear.

One Second of Love

It makes a certain kind of sense that Nite Jewel's music sprung from the underbelly of L.A. Despite its unpolished aesthetic and Ramona Gonzalez's professed aversion to more conventional ideas about glamour (there she is, spewing neon vomit at a swanky photo shoot in the clip for "Artificial Intelligence"), her music exists in the realm of gauzy fantasy: it is a dream world made reality. Up until now, all of the slinky, lo-fi electro-pop that Gonzalez has made as Nite Jewel has been molten and surreal, conjuring Dali paintings with drum machines and keyboards melting in place of clocks. Some of the moments on her 2009 debut Good Evening and her 2010 Am I Real? EP shone brighter than others, but they all crafted an atmosphere of mystery: it was nearly impossible to glean any specifics about the lyrics, not to mention the persona of the singer uttering them. Her latest LP, One Second of Love prompts a question that most artists who've carefully cultivated a sense of enigma have got to confront sooner or later (just ask the Weeknd or Lana Del Rey): what happens when mystery evaporates?
In the context of her catalogue, then, the cover of One Second of Love feel like the Nite Jewel equivalent of Meet the Beatles. The image-- like the music it represents-- is forthright and clear; you immediately get the idea that this record is her coming out party. And from the opening moments of "This Story", there's an obvious change in her sound: with its lucid, minimalist production, One Second of Love is the first Nite Jewel record that sounds like it takes place in the waking world. It's also an attempt to bring the poppier impulses to the forefront of her songs. The press release cites plenty of avant-garde influences, but also-- perhaps most importantly-- the 1990s R&B-pop of TLC and SWV.
The expertly minimalist lead-off single "One Second of Love" makes an early argument that this new sound is definitely a step in the right direction. The track has a buoyant, danceable beat (it's been said that Nite Jewel makes the kind of dance music that you can't actually dance to, but this is Gonzalez's strongest ever rebuttal to that claim), and an uncluttered atmosphere that blooms-- thanks to some Gary Numan-like synths and backing vocals from Julia Holter-- at just a couple of choice moments. The ballad "In the Dark" slows things down but still boasts one of the record's catchiest choruses, while the funk-inflected, sputtering-yet-smooth "She's Always Watching You" sounds like the Dirty Projectors covering Sade. "These girls are always smilin'/ At these late night events," she sings, perhaps professing some of the stresses of living out married life on a stage (her husband, Cole M. Greif-Neill of the Samps and formerly Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, plays on the record and in her touring band). "Baby, can't you see that I am through?/ Cause she's always watching you."
One Second of Love runs into some problems in its second half, particularly during the slower, starker tracks like "Unearthly Delights" and "No I Don't." Even on her lo-fi records, Nite Jewel's best when anchored by some kind of beat; Good Evening tracks like "Bottom Rung" and "Universal Mind" show how vague and occasionally downright tedious her music can become when it's not tethered to some kind of driving pulse. And because One Second of Love eschews Good Morning's layered, kitchen-sink atmospherics, its dull moments feel exceptionally dull because the atmosphere is so thin. Though the gentle groove of the penultimate track "Autograph" provides a late jolt to the album, its back half feels particularly disappointing given that the A-side boasts some of Nite Jewel's strongest material to date.
In the end, One Second of Love is enjoyable but slight: its stronger moments render the weaker ones particularly forgettable. "One Second of Love" and "She's Always Watching You" show that minimalism do occasionally suit Nite Jewel well, but in cleaning up her sound she's also scrubbed away too many of the textures that made her music so distinct. Still, One Second of Love marks an unmistakably huge progression for Gonzalez as a songwriter: she's developing a keener ear for melody and a more confident delivery. This record isn't quite the breakout statement that it seems to be shooting for, but its highlights are ample proof that there's more to Nite Jewel than just smoke and mirrors.


On his new album, the New Orleans-based Benjamin Booker makes retro music feel modern, reflecting on racism in America while drawing on blues, soul, and gospel.

Witness

You’re in the Deep South and it’s so hot that a thick film of sweat has become the top layer of your skin. You’re in a small, weathered-and-worn black church, the type that’s walls seem to shimmy and shake when the folks inside get a little too excited. A bright piano riff dances through the congregation. The choir sways and sings in unison as the strongest member of the choir reveals herself to be Mavis Staples. At the end of his second verse, the choir’s leader, Benjamin Booker, croons, “everybody brown can get the fuck on the ground,” before he takes us to the bridge: “see we thought that we saw that he had a gun.”
This is the atmosphere that New Orleans by way of Tampa Bay artist Benjamin Booker paints on the title track of his sophomore album, Witness. The gospel-inspired, Staples-assisted song examines what exactly it means to bear witness to something heinous, like the incessant murder or, to be frank, lynchings of black and brown people at the hands of the state. Will you just stand there, take action, or go on with life because this is all routine? Booker doesn’t come armed with solutions in hand and he doesn’t need to. He’s curious and angry as all hell about the wave of racism being reported, televised, think-pieced, and podcasted on a constant dystopian loop.
Booker’s eponymous debut from 2014 was a youthful collection of spirited punk and blues rock that captured the aura of aimless youth and Southern blues. Its riffs were as raw as exposed flesh wounds, successfully evoking luminaries like the Detroit Cobras, Blind Willie Johnson, and the Stooges as well as contemporaries like Alabama Shakes, Courtney Barnett, and Ty Segall. Witness bears only a few jolts of the adrenaline and delicious chaos that oozed all over that album. One such instance is the brisk, high-energy opener, “Right on You,” which is about the inevitability of death creeping up behind. On the highlight “Motivation,” Booker expresses pain and frustration through polished arrangements and clear lyrics.
But the raw, carnal fervor of Booker’s punk numbers is still present—and sometimes it’s more pronounced—on Witness’ acoustic and naked electric blues and soul, when the opposing forces of a lush or refined landscape and Booker’s gravely voice work in concert. “Believe,” the album’s strongest track, uses this new direction keenly. Booker finds himself lamenting an overwhelming feeling of confusion and hopelessness while an amalgam of electric blues, gospel, and soul swell behind him.
While Booker has grown into his comfort zone as a songwriter on Witness, he had to leave home to find it. As he explains in an essay about the creation of Witness, a bout of writer’s block and a thirst to escape that aforementioned dystopian loop of racism in America led him to do just as his hero James Baldwin did in the late 1940s. Baldwin flew to Paris without speaking a lick of French; Booker, meanwhile, arrived in Mexico without speaking a lick of Spanish. Both felt it necessary to escape America, her porcelain hands tightly wrung around their throats. But Booker spent only a month away. After getting into a physical altercation outside of a club, he came to the realize that hostility can’t be escaped; it’s right on you, and it’s best to confront it.
There isn’t a clear answer for how one should react to bearing witness. Some people bear witness and get politically active; some take up respectability politics, refusing to acknowledge what’s true. Some people get broken down, mentally and physically. In his essay on Witness, Booker also cites a passage from “Reflections of a Maverick,” a conversation between Julius Lester and James Baldwin published by The New York Times in 1984. Baldwin, armed with the artist’s duty when acting as a witness, says: “I know what I’ve seen and what I’ve seen makes me know I have to say, I know.” In that sense, Baldwin and Booker are in kind. Booker reacts by looking inward, examining current political, personal, and cultural strife, and conversely making retro music feel modern. But he speaks for no one other than himself, to let it be known no evil goes unseen.


After producing a convincingly jittery, grimy portrait of late-Bloomberg New York on 2013’s NYC, Hell 3:00 AM, experimental producer/composer James Ferraro has accomplished a similar likeness of his adopted hometown Los Angeles with Skid Row. It should come as no surprise that it's short on sunshine and mellow vibes, and long on looming existential dread.

Skid Row

Even before the ongoing coast-to-coast exodus, Los Angeles has always held a mythic allure to New Yorkers. To a nearly surreal extent, every meaningful aspect of living in New York is inverted there, like some kind of Gulliver's Travels opposite-land paradise–a place of endless cars and infinite residential square footage, where generalized anxiety is something to be worked on rather than bragged about and people seem to enjoy going to bed at a reasonable hour.
Despite all the breathless endorsements from transplants that swear that they've never felt so good before, L.A. does have a substantial dark side–a populace dealing with PTSD after years of gang violence compounded by police violence, the reactionary paranoia wafting in from Orange County, its ongoing ecological disaster. It's a place where you can stand in the window of a multimillion dollar loft downtown and gaze out over an ephemeral shanty town that blooms and evaporates daily, cocktail in hand, feeling like nothing so much as a sci-fi villain.
After producing a convincingly jittery, grimy portrait of late-Bloomberg New York on 2013's NYC, Hell 3:00 AM, James Ferraro has accomplished a similar likeness of his adopted hometown Los Angeles with its follow-up, Skid Row. It comes as no surprise that his L.A. album is short on sunshine and mellow vibes, and long on looming existential dread. There's not much of New L.A. in his portrait, no bohemian Brooklyn expats chillaxing in a pleasant new climate. Ferraro's L.A. is a dystopian vision stitched together from its drought-stricken everyone's-a-reality-show present and the bad old '90s, where the riots, the OJ trial, and the LAPD's corrupt culture blurred together to cast an ominous shadow on the city's carefully cultivated image.
His urban pessimism remains undulled–as does his passion for oppressively ugly recording techniques–but Ferraro's switched up some of his musical approach. While Hell 3:00 AM sounded like a nightmare version of contemporary R&B, Skid Row does something similar with L.A.'s native funk styles, which have recently been revived in less bleak ways by the likes of Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar.
Ferraro's take on funk strips away all of its organic sensuality and joy, leaving a creepy husk that's still fascinating to inspect. "White Bronco", which kicks off the record after one of the computer-generated spoken word introductions that have become something of a Ferraro trademark–this one featuring a pair babbling about gated communities and "burning Priuses on the highway" and conducting a transaction for an iced latte–slows a slow-jam groove down even slower until it sounds eerily narcotized and its minimalist synth bass riff takes on a menacing aspect. Ferraro's monotone listing of facts from the Nicole Brown Simpson murder trial mixed in with samples of TV news surrounding the Rodney King beating conflate the two sensational acts of violence like someone who's either heavily intoxicated or just suffered a head injury. At the two-thirds point of the song, Ferraro hits a vocal lick that sounds like Snoop's "'G' Thang" flow, and it feels like some kind of sick punchline.
Ferraro's freer with hooks on Skid Row than he was on Hell 3:00 AM, and there are songs like "Thrash Escalate" and "Rhinestones" that sound like they could slap if they were sped up a few percent. He might be starting to come to terms with his innate pop talents, or it could just be a new tactic of dispensing hints of traditional pop pleasures into the gloom to keep his audience off balance.
Skid Row isn't really about those singular moments though, or about walking away from it with a hook stuck in your head. They're just elements in a solidly built cohesive whole that feels like a J.G. Ballard novel filtered through late-night Ableton sessions, and a worthy addition to the long line of punk albums about Los Angeles that render it as a city built on fantasy with a nihilistic streak that runs to its core.


With help from some outside producers, Chvrches’ try to launch themselves into the mainstream. The result is an uncomplicated, unsurprising collection of steely synth pop.

Love Is Dead

The onus on any band naming their album Love Is Dead is to either prove it or prove it wrong. Uncompromising statements have been Chvrches’ currency since the beginning: short, punchy phrases that alternately empower and eviscerate. The title of the Scottish trio’s third album refers to what singer Lauren Mayberry has called society’s “death of empathy” and it accompanies 13 songs designed to get more people than ever to notice that message. It’s fair enough that, seven years in, one of the bands responsible for poptimising indie-rock might want to launch themselves ruthlessly at the mainstream. But on Love Is Dead, Chvrches misjudge the moment a few different ways.
A Chvrches song used to make you gasp—take the fantastical melodies of 2013’s “The Mother We Share”—and even in the trio’s more straightforward moments, they conjured audacious drama. The drop of 2015’s “Clearest Blue” wasn’t just striking because it ripped off Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough,” but because it refashioned it as an EDM confetti bomb and got away with it. The trio always prided themselves on their resourcefulness—the fact that a damp Glasgow basement and a phalanx of obscure synthesizers wielded by members Iain Cook and Martin Doherty made their 2013 debut The Bones of What You Believe one of the few DIY (in spirit, if not label) albums to break the UK Top 10. So it’s strange that they should let outside producers in for the first time.
Assisted by ringer Greg Kurstin (Sia, Beck, Foo Fighters) and British pop mastermind Steve Mac (One Direction, Ed Sheeran, Shakira), much of Love Is Dead is stout and uncomplicated, keeping Chvrches’ ever-skyward outlook earthbound. “Get Out” opens with static claps on the beat; Mac’s “Miracle” features a lumbering “whoa-oh-oh” chorus better suited to Imagine Dragons. Kurstin’s presence recalls his work on Tegan and Sara’s excellent 2013 album Heartthrob, a pop transformation as giddy as it was sensitive to their style—heights that Love Is Dead reaches for but doesn’t often clinch. Besides, Chvrches have always been a smart pop band that is now, for some reason, second-guessing its instincts.
Love Is Dead’s straightforward gait often keeps Mayberry hemmed in, curtailing one of pop’s most dramatic ranges to one-note verses and structures that value repetition over surprise. The dazzling parts of a Chvrches song transcend a clichéd lyric but the lack of spectacle here makes the clichés glare (”Can’t live forever with my head in the clouds/Can’t predict the weather with my feet on the ground,” Mayberry frets on “Wonderland”) as Mayberry often leans on simple rhymes beaten into bruising choruses (”never, ever,” “get out, get out,” “deliver-iver-ance”). There are few moments as inventive and heart-seizing as “Graffiti,” in which Mayberry invokes names youthfully scrawled on a bathroom wall as a vivid metaphor for the precariousness of her generation’s future: “I’ve been waiting for my whole life to grow old,” she sings tenderly: “And now we never will.” It’s bleak yet hopeful, resignation tinged with beauty.
Maybe it’s a case of attempting to simplify the medium to amplify the message. Despite some pat songwriting, Love Is Dead features some of Mayberry’s most pointed lyrics, aimed at hypocrites and ivory tower-dwellers, and underscoring her commitment to the fight against them. A line about bodies “washing up on the shore” (which she’s explained is about dead refugee children) fits awkwardly in “Graves,” though otherwise, the song matches “Graffiti” for starry-eyed pleasure when Mayberry’s vengeful presence finds its truest calling. And again, despite its labored chorus, the simmering verses of “Deliverance” render tension elegantly. The first warns religious bigots that they’re on shaky ground, each line starting with “careful when;” the second finds Mayberry asserting hers is solid, each line starting, “Trust me…” Somber and seething, it ranks among her best work.
Mayberry searches relentlessly for light in the dark. Her insistence on standing for what is right and never turning a blind eye also reads as a fight to resist desensitization, a powerful theme for a pop record. But Love Is Dead often sounds desensitized, unyielding, and defensive. “I always regret the night I told you I would hate you till forever,” Mayberry repeats on “Forever” with a blunt force that doesn’t really sound remorseful; there’s neither anguish nor pride when she yells, “Maybe I am just too much for you” at the song’s climax. “My Enemy,” a moody duet with the National’s Matt Berninger, has a numbed quality, though the tone fits their exchange about how inflammatory emotions across a political (or perhaps romantic) divide can kill any possibility of discussion.
It’s only towards the end of the album that a welcome softness arrives. The blocky structures loosen up on “God’s Plan” (aka the inevitable one where Doherty sings), and “Wonderland” and “Heaven/Hell” bound in on basslines worthy of New Order, adding some much-needed euphoria and human physicality. The latter in particular is fittingly cosmic for the moment that Mayberry challenges other people’s ideas of how she should wield her power as a woman in pop. I feel guilty praising her defeated turn on “Really Gone” in case it perpetuates stereotypes of what pop femininity “should” look like—i.e. vulnerable—but nevertheless, it’s a lovely coda to a demanding album. Her Scottish accent breaks through as she sings, “I’m holding on, I’m holding on,” in a voice so high and forlorn that she seems to be doing so by her last nerve.
Whereas Chvrches sounded futuristic when they first emerged, it’s this lack of softness on Love Is Dead that makes it sound dated upon arrival, out of kilter with the current pop moment. Steely synths are out of fashion; kin like Years & Years, the 1975, Christine and the Queens, Troye Sivan, and even Paramore offer a playful tenderness that Chvrches avoid, or maybe even fear. Love Is Dead is admirably righteous, but it’s chilly, lacking the rallying impact of peers who have shown that empathy is more powerful than polemic. If Chvrches prove anything on their third album, it’s that pop that truly galvanizes in moments of hardship is never without love.


The Australian duo’s debut full length features warm, pleasing vocal lines and electro-pop beats, but it never coheres to tell the kind of story they want to tell.

Backwater

Kllo’s Simon Lam and Chloe Kaul are masters of juxtaposition, infusing their bubbling electro-pop beats with mellow R&B vocals and a churning, ever-present sense of yearning. Fittingly, they named their album after the bodies of water that “rest beyond a current’s reach,” those seen as “stagnant and turbid.” Backwater, the duo’s debut full length, is a collection of songs written while the cousins “waded in figurative backwater,” experiencing the excitement of a world tour but also while homesick for their hometown of Melbourne. At their best, the songs on Backwater capture the mixed feelings Lam and Kaul experienced while writing them, artfully weaving heartache through intrepid pop hooks. However, despite their claims that this is their most adult music yet, the songs don’t feel like they have matured much from the disjointed lyrics and pleasant-but-homogeneous electronic beats of their last EP, Well Worn.
As with their previous releases, Kaul’s voice is consistently a treat, pouring smooth like cream into coffee as it twists through a backbone of Lam’s UK garage-inspired beats. On “Last Yearn,” Kaul’s tenderness adds layers of emotional complexity to otherwise straightforward lyrics about the end of a relationship. When she sings, “Where are we going?/I need some closure from you/Where do we go from here?” her crooning injects the loneliness of ending a relationship with the softness of remembering why you loved the other person in the first place. On album highlight “Downfall,” her voice draws out short, abstract phrases about loss and attempted resilience and suspends them in an ether of skittering drums and synth. Kaul is a sonic anchor as the instrumentals somersault forward at a thrilling pace, making the song at once exhilarating and comforting.
Still, the beauty of Kaul’s vocals can only take the album so far. The lyrics, more often than not,  function like hashtags that declare the theme of an Instagram post rather than like poetry that captures life experiences with nuance. The album deals extensively with heartache, but rarely provides details that make the narratives feel personal or unique. On “Dissolve,” Kaul sings, “Called it forever/We’re caught in the game/Well maybe we’re both to blame/Putting this under pressure.” In just four lines, the song addresses unfulfilled expectations, confusion, regret, and anxiety, but never elaborates on why or how the narrator experiences these myriad emotions. “Nylon” starts with potential, a slower, more contemplative track on which Kaul laments that she doesn’t want to die young and needs “someone to rely on.” It feels like she is about to make herself vulnerable by delving into her fears and insecurities, but again, she only skims the surface. Why is she afraid she’s going to die young? How does she express this fear? What does it look like when she relies on someone else? Her lyrics evoke these questions but never answer them.
Of course, dancefloor music evokes emotion viscerally and physically, not necessarily linguistically. But, when words take a back seat, the music has to tell a story; it has to build or wallow or surprise the listener to remain captivating. Much of the instrumental narrative on Backwater lacks conviction. The lyrics generally circle around the same themes throughout, and the dance beats follow suit. Many of the songs are longer than necessary and the looped and distorted backing vocals can be distracting rather than cohesive, as on lead single “Virtue.” The ocean of synths throughout the album create an ethereal ambiance consistent with their earlier work but are rarely distinct from one song to another. These sonic elements give Kllo’s music a rich sheen that makes them pleasant to listen to, but that doesn’t always stick after the music stops playing. The duo clearly have good stories, but need to expand the range of emotions they use to tell them.


Guitarist William Tyler crafts a spare and meditative soundtrack for filmmaker Kelly Reichardt's quiet frontier story.

Music From First Cow

American history has historically been painted on a large canvas. By purposeful contrast, Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow is very small, a frontier story you can hold in your hand—Reichardt renders her version of America’s emergence as the gentle intimacy between two men, a purposeful pushback against the grand narratives of our past. A quiet cook called Cookie (John Magaro) has made his way to Oregon with an outfit of fur trappers, where he encounters King Lu (Orion Lee), a widely traveled immigrant from China. Both men have no clear future, but no real home to return to; the only possible direction is forward, carving out a transient existence on the outposts of expansion.
The town they find themselves in is home to the titular first cow in the territory, owned by the wealthy emissary of a British trading company (Toby Jones). With some simple ingredients and a little pilfered milk, Cookie and King Lu are able to make quick money selling cakes and pastries to settlers desperate for anything close to a creature comfort, but it’s only a matter of time before the jig is up, the cow is fenced off, and the newfound friends are run out of town.
Reichardt occupies a unique position within American independent cinema; she’s a known name who regularly works with familiar faces, but the compass that orients her vision remains experimental. Films like Old Joy (scored by Yo La Tengo, and starring Will Oldham) and Certain Women are purposeful in their pacing, deliberate and meandering like a walk in the woods, but uniquely concerned with the organic beauty of Western American landscapes. In Japan, there’s a concept called shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing,” which means immersing yourself in the ambience of a wooded environment as you would soak in a tub—Kelly Reichardt’s movies always make me feel like I’ve taken a forest bath for a thousand years, renewed and revitalized like photosynthesis working its natural magic on a shriveled leaf.
William Tyler similarly sits at the crossroads of accessible and avant-garde — he’s the son of the couple who wrote country standards for legends like The Oak Ridge Boys, but his instrumental Americana work approaches post-country. There’s an expansiveness to Tyler’s music that owes as much to ambient music as it does to John Fahey. Merge Records has released Tyler’s score for the film, along with snatches of dialogue, as Music From First Cow. Reichardt applies a tiny lens to an overwhelming subject, so it’s only fitting that Tyler reduces the scope of his work in turn. His score is only one small part of the movie’s audio track, a subtle human presence within Reichardt’s typically rich palette of natural sounds.
Each cue builds on repeated themes, which Tyler introduces by way of lone electric guitar on “An Opening.” The film begins in the present day, but as a single cut takes us back over a century, Tyler’s signature instrument is swaddled with era-appropriate accompaniment, as a familiar tune is translated across varied timbres: toy piano on “Cookie’s Theme,” mandolins and banjos on “Arrival” and “A Clearing in the Field.” Emptiness and absence are key players; on “The Separation,” he lets the notes hang, the harsh slide of a guitar and faint piano keys suggesting the distance between human beings in this unknown landscape. The only time he is surrounded by a full ensemble is on “A Closing,” as our two drifters have been subsumed by a rigid world of capitalist civilization.
Tyler and Reichardt are both artists who flirt with pop structure while remaining committed to a more experimental ethos. But they are more than stylistic kindred; each uses their work to push back against the coming reality First Cow gently warns of. The problem with being an artist on the avant-garde frontier is that frontiers exist to be closed—through their union, William Tyler and Kelly Reichardt express a continued commitment to a harmonious existence between humanity and the landscape it inhabits.


Steve Aoki’s latest EP, 4OKI, is a cheap, placebo imitation of a party.

4OKI

One of YouTube’s stranger side coves is the Binaural Beats channel, a collection of droning, synthesized audio tones that promise to deliver the sensations of “digital drug doses.” In this virtual den of depravity, electronic “opium” sprawls out in an oaky, low thrum, and virtual “LSD” keens along in a piercing wobble that fuzzes out like Timothy Leary’s hairline. Auditory alcohol, helpfully, features an illustration of frothy pints to pair with a skittering, Merzbow-worthy hum. Sadly for all iTweakers, though, these clips only deliver a buzz in the acoustic sense.
Steve Aoki’s latest EP, 4OKI, would slot perfectly into this playlist; it’s also a cheap, placebo imitation of a party. Like Neon Future I and II, the Dim Mak founder’s full-length album set, the four-track effort spackles vaguely futurist clicks and clamors onto staid beats while braying singularly for hedonistic excess; it’s passive EDM calculated to score his cake-flinging, crowd-rafting concert theatrics, where the static nature of the music is muted by frosting wedged into ear canals. In this melee, Aoki’s unrelenting pitched-down vocals and anemic house beats get a dramatic boost; the refrain “Whatever those dope girls sippin’/Is what I’m drinkin’/Pour me one more cup when I'm pimpin’/Pass the keys I’m fuckin’ whipping’’ has a chance at sounding bracing instead of brainless, its attendant bass drop ferocious instead of toothless (“Dope Girlz,” with Shaun Frank). “ILYSM,” with Autoérotique (a Dim Mak signee, as are all the vocalists), might perform a greater alchemy than turning a few callback lines of Brandy’s “I Wanna Be Down” into a hollow frat roar.
Like many party vices, this flip approach could be embraced if it were fun, which it isn’t. Even at a scant 16-minute runtime, 4OKI is tedious; the bottomed-out dubstep yowling of “The drum kick hits and the kids will die” (“Kids,” with Morten) and shrill siren bleats atop various demands to “Bring the Funk Back” (with Reid Stefan) are interchangeable, down to how they evoke two fax machines in a tumble dryer. Even for a showman who’s admitted that touching his DJ equipment during songs is “not absolutely necessary,” the approach suggests an incurious nature. It’s the sort of enforced, one-note debauchery that disrespects EDM fans, caricaturing them unfairly as libertine halfwits.
Aoki seems in no hurry to experiment with his money-minting formula; the trailer of an upcoming Netflix documentary teases a hero’s arc of him defying the expectations of his father, Benihana tycoon Rocky Aoki, and he dismissed the cake-averse as “haters” and “trolls” in a voluble 2014 essay for The Daily Beast. Most likely, he will savvily outlive the current EDM bubble when it deflates in a flurry of glow sticks and flash tattoos; that documentary is, after all, called I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. But if every generation rebels against their parents, it breeds hope for our future–because it means that someday when Aoki pivots back on his artificial hip, desserts at the ready, the new guard will stand in implacable silence, demanding dance music that is more than empty calories.


Accompanied by Joan Shelley, Will Oldham, and others, the Louisville guitarist sets Hebrew psalms and poetry to music with a comforting, candlelit atmosphere.

Psalms

The warm, fingerpicked songs of Nathan Salsburg have always hinted at an obsession with history and tradition. For his first few albums, the Louisville musician expressed himself through solo acoustic guitar, an instrument that he plays with such a second-nature dexterity that it can feel like another appendage. Releases like 2013’s Hard For To Win and Can’t Be Won  and 2018’s Third were elaborate, carefully picked bouquets of twirling steel-string harmony that often glowed with the hope of new beginnings and emanated the scent of dusty vinyl. It checks out: Salsburg is a historic preservationist who has now served as curator for the Alan Lomax Archive at the Association for Cultural Equity for over 20 years, presiding over the late ethnomusicologist’s early field recordings of folk music from around the world.
Last year, Salsburg pivoted, digging into his vast record collections for source material that would eventually become Landwerk and Landwerk No. 2. (“Otherwise they’d just sit around on the shelves,” he said). The two companion albums were built from looped snippets of old 78-rpm records, largely of Yiddish and klezmer music, which Salsburg then gently augmented with his own guitar, playing circular phrases and immersing himself in the auras of the antique fragments. Psalms, his latest release, also adheres to a specific concept, but a bolder one: These 10 songs are almost entirely based on Hebrew psalms from the Old Testament, with music composed by Salsburg over the past five years and recorded last year with a band that includes Spencer Tweedy on drums, as well as Will Oldham and Salsburg’s partner and frequent collaborator Joan Shelley on backing vocals.
Similar to the Landwerk project, Salsburg dives into a specific time and place on Psalms, one that traces to some part of who he is today, turning to his guitar as a sort of notepad. But here, he swaps out the mystery evoked by decontextualized samples for the mystery of his own faith. Salsburg, who says he occasionally felt alienated by the culture of his religious upbringing and has recently grown closer to Judaism on his own terms, envisioned this project as another way to comfortably engage with his religion. It succeeds in familiar ways: Salsburg lets us in on his refreshingly genuine reactions to his journey, sounding every bit as meditative as you might expect, often centered. It’s a fairly niche project, and its parameters are rigid, but it can also be deeply comforting in both its reverent, focused intent and candlelit atmosphere.
Salsburg sings on nearly every track—a rare occurrence in his catalog—and mostly in Hebrew. He chose most of these passages by flipping through a bilingual Book of Psalms and trying out the phrases that struck him, many of which are praises to Hashem’s compassion, natural-world wonders, or in several cases, the act of singing itself. He shows off a grizzled but delicate baritone, calming with just a hint of pitchiness—the perfect amount to affirm that a great natural singing voice is no prerequisite for singing, much less singing hymns.
Structurally, Psalms sticks to familiar territory. Some tracks, like opener “Psalm 147,” fall into the looped-cell rhythms of Landwerk, while others, like the subsequent “Psalm 19,” feature several independent verses and sections. Both styles can work, and  Salsburg sequences Psalms so that it traverses moods and cadences. There are stretches of solemn tension followed by ones of plain beauty and relief. On “Psalm 104,” Salsburg’s acoustic guitar scurries through a soothing waltz that simmers like an aromatic stock, modestly seasoned to proportion by a piano accompaniment from longtime friend James Elkington. It’s the album’s peaceful calm before the (very gentle) storm of its crest, “O You Who Sleep,” the only English-sung track and non-psalm on the album, dedicated to the late David Berman of Silver Jews, who himself once documented his own mid-adulthood reconnection with Judaism. It’s a moving tribute, an appropriate moment for Psalms to cross into folk-rock for the first and last time.
Hearing Salsburg sing and play through the lens of religion—one specific part of his identity—doesn’t carry the same weight as the more holistic self-portraits of his early solo work or the novel archival dives of Landwerk. But it also touches a part of his soul that those prior albums couldn’t: the part that developed when Salsburg was a child, singing Jewish music in the stained-glass-filtered sunlight of his Louisville synagogue, overcome with intangible joy.  For some who have known that feeling, it can become more elusive with time. Like a cantor’s voice resonating through the front doors to a house of prayer, Psalms invites you to come inside, take a seat, and rest in the friendly pews of its sanctuary.

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On another of his many genre dalliances, the acerbic singer-songwriter teams with the New Orleans r&b legend.

The River in Reverse

So now that he just did an art-jazz project, it's time for another rock record from Elvis Costello, right? Alas, The River in Reverse, a collaboration with New Orleans r&b legend Allen Toussaint, is another genre dalliance intended to showcase Costello's supposed versatility. Well, here he throws himself headlong into Toussaint's back catalog, naturally selecting more obscure cuts (the guy did write "Working in a Coalmine"), backed by the Imposters and augmented by Toussaint himself and NOLA horn players.
Yes, that's New Orleans, but this isn't a cash-in on recent tragedy: Costello has worked with the legendary Toussaint more than once before (notably on the piano part for Spike's "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror"). And while there is some back and forth concerning songwriting, it's meant to be a "Costello Sings the Songs of Toussaint" songbook record-- a voice-meets-pen LP like those in vogue before the rock era.
Costello sings every song but one, Toussaint's "Who's Gonna Help a Brother Get Further". And that's actually sort of a shame: Costello's proven himself effective in plenty of contexts outside of rock, but all his vibratos and melismas and belted notes seem like so much flailing compared to Toussaint's effortless croon. He has a sharp ear for choosing songs that remain relevant, but this is one genre that eludes him as a performer. Granted, he's never seemed entirely at home on jazz and classical records, but the pairing has never been as jarring as it is here, with new Costello songs standing directly next to the traditionals.
While he belabors notes on the deep cuts from Toussaint's catalog, the Costello-sung covers that frontload the album fall short. Listen to the Costello-Toussaint collaboration "Ascension Day" to hear just how nimble Costello's voice can be, alternately skipping across and gluing together the fluid notes of the piano line. And looking past its crushing self-awareness as an anthem for Hurricane Katrina victims, "The River In Reverse" really works. Penned entirely by Costello, when it hits the line, "There must be something better than this/ I don't see how it can get much worse," the song shifts from a percussive acoustic guitar pattern to a resigned sigh from the horns. Meanwhile, Toussaint's slightly dissonant piano dances low in the mix, Costello cramming in syllables with his usual verve-- all hinting at a range of frustration and discontent bubbling underneath.
These, however, are exceptions. Most of these tracks merely feel professional or workmanlike, sincere recordings that sadly lack inspiration. The River in Reverse could have been vastly improved with more collaboration and fewer ostentatious performances, giving the two big names on the marquee more moments to shine than to strain.


On their first new album in four years, the Irish punk quartet channel pure, visceral panic through screeching sensory assaults and scrap-metal clang.

The Talkies

After laying dormant for nearly a half decade, Irish quartet Girl Band open their new album with a self-administered stethoscope test. “Prolix” isn’t so much a song as a diagnosis—for nearly two minutes, we hear nothing but frontman Dara Kiely’s breathing over an ominous, reverberating drone. But as the track goes on, Kiely‘s breaths turn harder, faster, and louder, until he’s desperately gulping air like a desert roamer sucking on their canteen. It’s the sound of pure, visceral panic—which is to say, on their first album in four years, Girl Band are in perfect health.
“Prolix” isn’t staged—it’s a document of Kiely's actual panic attack in the studio. And coming from an artist who’s made no secret of his mental-health struggles—which precipitated the band’s extended hiatus—the track is a grim reminder that, even though Kiely feels well enough to resume his musical career, anxiety is an insidious affliction that can creep up at any time without warning. But the process of airing out his issues in the press and in past songs has made Kiely less interested in exploring them through his music now—when writing The Talkies, he deliberately avoided the use of the words “I” or “you” to avoid the painful introspection they may trigger. But while Girl Band are no longer explicitly talking about psychosis, they’re still experts at sonically communicating how it feels, through screeching sensory assaults that hit like a migraine and relentlessly pulsate like a heart racing out of control.
More so than 2015’s Holding Hands With Jamie, The Talkies finds each member functioning less like a typical musician and more like a loose lever on a console, crashing in and dropping out of the mix at random moments. Guitarist Alan Duggan has completely unlearned the art of riffs and solos, using his instrument solely for textural dissonance—the more nauseating, the better. Bassist Daniel Fox deals exclusively in gut-rumbling frequencies, while drummer Adam Faulkner avoids the snare like it might be rigged with electric shocks. The result is drained of any rock-band formalism, all scrap-metal clang and kick-drum thump teetering on collapse.
Kiely‘s lyrics mimic this deconstructionist approach, atomizing everyday scenes and conversations into fragments. On The Talkies, you’ll hear references to pop-cultural icons like Ricki Lake, Zinedine Zidane, Bert and Ernie, and the Byrds, though when fed through Kiely’s cut-and-paste filter, they become disembodied figures thrown into a parade of freaks that includes “mental zoo boy,” “Crunchy Percy,” and the “bloke with The Man and The Legend shirt.” Kiely clearly delights in the beautiful absurdities of the English language: The post-apocalyptic chain-gang chant “Aibohphobia” references the (not officially recognized) fear of palindromes while piling them onto prospective victims (“Cain a Maniac! Salt an Atlas! Strap on No parts! Bird Rib!”) with all the merciless fervor of a waterboard interrogation.
Kiely doesn’t so much front the group as submit himself to them: As “Couch Combover” builds into a seasick, distortion-soaked stomp, it sounds like Kiely is puking and crying at the same time. But later in that same song, the squall subsides to reveal Kiely gently singing the track’s chorus, offering a glimpse of the pop singer trapped in a noise band’s body.
By the time we reach The Talkies’ tumultuous seven-minute climax “Prefab Castle,” Girl Band’s balance of composure and cataclysm has tipped toward the latter. The emergency sirens are ringing out, the walls are closing in, and Kiely reverts to his panic-attack gasp. And yet as the song begins its final descent, Kiely recites a mantra with unnerving calm: “When it’s depressed/Still in love/When it’s happy/Still in love/When it’s all sad/Still in love/When it’s anxious/Still in love.” It may not be everyone’s definition of a peaceful conclusion, but after all the punishment Kiely’s endured over the course of this record, it’s a minor miracle he’s still breathing at all.

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Performed on a 132-year-old pipe organ, the latest project from the Australian sound artist dials up the volume and revels in the rumble.

Observation of Breath

The world famously quieted during lockdown. Lawrence English, on the other hand, used the opportunity to get loud. When he wasn’t busy running his label Room40, a gathering place for experimental musicians like David Toop, Merzbow, and Beatriz Ferreyra, or editing archival field recordings from the Amazon rainforest, English logged many hours seated at a 132-year-old pipe organ in his hometown of Brisbane, Australia, feeding air into it until the walls shook.
It wasn’t his first time on the organ. English had already incorporated recordings of the same instrument into his 2014 album Wilderness of Mirrors and 2017’s Cruel Optimism, digitally sandblasting his source material into a blackened fuzz similar to the work of Ben Frost and Tim Hecker. But for 2020’s Lassitude, he took a different route. Rather than covering his sounds in layers of distortion, he simply let the tones be, filling the empty concert hall with chords held so long that they came to seem more like weather systems than compositions. In place of musical motifs or events—melodic figures, rhythmic patterns, even something as simple as an audible step between notes—Lassitude’s two 20-minute pieces simply hang in mid-air, sullen as the silence between two people no longer on speaking terms.
Recorded during the same sessions, Observation of Breath shifts the emphasis from minimalism to maximalism, dialing up the volume and reveling in the rumble. There’s still not much happening in these pieces. “And a Twist,” by far the shortest track at less than three minutes long, is the only one that contains something resembling a melody: Its searching, right-hand figure stumbles uncertainly over quivering mid-range tone clusters, mulling over minor seconds with furrowed brow. On the three remaining tracks, English applies varying amounts of pressure, leaning into his massing tones as though slowly tightening the crank on an iron vise. All three are similar in shape to Lassitude’s spectral drones, but they differ in force.
“A Torso” might be Sunn O))) unplugged: Anchored by a glowering pedal tone for the duration of its 10-minute expanse, it is a charcoal fog of bass. But as you acclimate to the darkness, you begin to perceive a world of detail. The bass sound slowly pulses, like the breathing of a beast at rest. In the high end, a faint whistling pricks the air and is gradually joined by softly shrieking kin, a confederacy of tea kettles. The buzz bristles, porcupine-like; as tones layer, they create secondary pulses, a moiré overlay of trembling air. It’s an overwhelmingly physical sound, one that orients you within the particulars of the space in which you are listening. Shift your head, and the room spins.
“A Binding,” six minutes long, is simpler: a single consonant chord that seems to glow from within, like light through a forest; ghostly tones softly flare up from out of nowhere before disappearing into the murk. It’s gentle, calming. The closing “Observation of Breath,” on the other hand, revisits the gloomy mood of Lassitude. Twenty-one minutes long, it is the album’s most patient piece; outwardly, it seems like a single held note. It starts out muted, like a dial tone wrapped in cotton batting. But, as with “A Torso,” it comes alive over time, thickening almost inaudibly. Pinpoints of light pierce the darkness; overtones fan out in shimmering rays. The edge of the mix crackles like a thing on fire. It changes so gradually as to be almost imperceptible, but if you skip through the track, you’ll hear immediately how it evolves, sections piling up like a fistful of Pantone swatches of different shades of gray.
“Observation of Breath” drives home English’s interest in the combined powers of density and duration: tones packed so thick you can barely pick them apart, extended until they eclipse all other inputs. These may not be particularly original ideas; drone and doom musicians have been attacking similar techniques for years. And other recent recordings—from FUJI||||||||||TA and Kali Malone, for instance—have done more to explore the organ’s expressive dimension. But these comparisons don’t lessen Observation of Breath’s sheer brute power—particularly when it’s heard good and loud, so that the floor trembles and the walls shake, exactly as English intended.

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