The timing couldn’t be better for AFI’s triumphant comeback; instead, they just sorta came back. This new LP works a “back to basics” operating principle, but it’s a “basics” that doesn’t serve them.

AFI (The Blood Album)

Stick around long enough, and once-popular bands will experience a critical reassessment completely independent of their new music. To wit, AFI: their 2003 major-label debut went platinum in 2006 on the strength of teens now old enough to give Sing the Sorrow its due props as some kind of alt-rock masterpiece, one that unified Fuse-punks, emo theater kids, mall-goths, and glam metalheads in a food court flashmob. Tilt your ears a certain way and you can hear Sing the Sorrow’s echoes in contemporaries like Touché Amoré, White Lung, and Deafheaven. During their surprising 2014 Coachella appearance, a sizable crowd witnessed a limber, vigorous performance of their hits that attested to frontman Davey Havok’s wholesome lifestyle choices. And while it’s been over a decade since they’ve appealed to anyone outside their core audience, the same could be said of peers like Jimmy Eat World, Deftones, and even Taking Back Sunday, who all made vital additions to their catalogs in 2016. With a self-titled record whose artwork is a blatant callback to *Sing the Sorrow, *the timing could not be better for AFI’s similarly triumphant comeback. Instead, they just sorta came back.
It’s a shame that The Blood Album missed the Vine era by three days, as it can be very seductive if you catch the right six-second frame: witness the call-and-response gang vocals that burst out of a very special goth episode of High School Musical, at least five choruses that scribble within the framework set by 2003’s “Girl’s Not Grey,” Havok’s “do try this in study hall” flights of poetry, the parts of Jade Puget’s solos that remind you that he has the name and the chops of a guy who’d have graced many a *Guitar World *cover in the ’90s.
Of course, those parts are going to be awesome. You know what else is awesome? Pretty much everything about the video for “The Leaving Song Pt. 2”—the whole Prom of the Living Dead dress code, the capoeira/circle pit choreography, every totally necessary behind-the-back guitar twirl, the close-ups on Havok’s lip ring. This is a clip that gets AFI. If The Blood Album is going to convince anyone who’s checked out since “Miss Murder,” it needs to likewise feel like expert stunt work or at least “The Crow goes crossfit”—we all know when the chorus is gonna come, but Havok needs to bring in the chorus with a roundhouse kick.
Still, at least half of The Blood Album’s songs feel virtually interchangeable and the other half sound like AFI wrote this stuff in the time it takes to play it. Even if all of the reflexively satisfying moments are consolidated into a highlight reel, that still leaves 40 minutes worth of custodial verses, downstroked basslines, and palm-muted chugging that never feel the need to justify their existence. When Havok’s words aren’t doused in purple highlighter, they’re exposed as basically meaningless, or, worse, like any Cure-inspired, vague song about introspection or sputtering relationships you can hear on any average indie rock record. “Am I coy enough? Am I boy enough?,” he whinges, and given that it slow dances to the same mannered waltz, “Snow Cats” could impart the blood oath devotion of “Silver and Cold” if delivered with any kind of flair or dynamics. Produced in-house with the assistance of KROQ-core vet Matt Hyde, nearly everything on The Blood Album plays at nearly the same exact drive-time volume and tempo.
Maybe that was the point. On every album since their commercial heyday, AFI have tried to challenge diehards: Crash Love was a brazen pop record, while 2013’s Burials diversified their wardrobe. The Blood Album presumably promises some kind of “back to basics” operating principle, but it’s a “basics” that doesn’t serve them, let alone recall the pulpier early phase on which they made their name. AFI shouldn’t be expected to resurrect the late, great Sing the Sorrow producer Jerry Finn, nor do they need to hire Marc Webb to blow a video budget that no longer exists for bands like them. The Blood Album just isn’t allowed to be boring.
If AFI wanted to reinvent themselves with streamlined and sober pop-rock, more power to them, but that’s not what The Blood Album does. There are still those moments that simultaneously speak to their strengths (“Hidden Knives”), but also bring up the question, why listen to AFI? This band doesn’t work in any specific musical genre so much as they do smeared-guyliner dramatics that never go out of style yet are in dire short supply right now, the developing of which is its own kind of craft. Without them, The Blood Album is virtually indistinguishable from any of the regrettably-fronted pop-metalcore bands playing in threes at a House of Blues near you. Perhaps it’s all worth it if The Blood Album spurs a rejuvenated interest in Sing the Sorrow and Black Sails on the Sunset, but the triumphant return of AFI is still ready when they are.


The Hype Williams producer's first album as a solo artist is a remastered version of a free, 30-minute mixtape he originally released in February. It's the latest reminder that he thinks about pop music very, very differently than you do.

The Narcissist II

The Narcissist II is the latest reminder that Dean Blunt thinks about pop music very, very differently than you do. It is the first album for Dean Blunt as a solo artist after several releases with his recording partner Inga Copeland (first as Hype Williams and then as Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland), though Copeland makes appearances here. A remixed and remastered version of a free, 30-minute "mixtape" Blunt dropped in February, The Narcissist II is is the least substantial release in a discography that avoids substance by design. A droopy-eyed, unromantic collage of synthesizers, movie dialogue, and baked vocals, The Narcissist II comments on the ephemerality of modern media consumption by being ephemeral itself.
In particular, The Narcissist II replicates a very specific type of listening: hunching over a laptop, dozens of Chrome tabs open, crawling down a Youtube rabbit hole. You know the drill: locate an obscure track, listen to half of it, click on something "related" in the right sidebar, pause it, tab over to a Soundcloud page... tab back. It is consumption via distraction: do this often enough and you'll encounter no end of noisy vinyl rips and shitty covers. This is the best metaphor for The Narcissist II: distant, half-heard clips; novel, obscure, and impossible. The samples blur into the original until The Narcissist II is the noisy rip, the shitty homage.
This is why, during the course of The Narcissist II, at some point nearly everything will seem like a sample. The simple chord riff that beautifies the title track, the Nuggets-y guitar riff that populates "XXX", the descending organ that buoys "caught feelings"-- anything could be pilfered, because it all sounds familiar. And then there are the elements that actually are stolen: a single, guttural "uhnf!" from Rick Ross, the melody of Biz Markie's "Just a Friend" splayed over "Are You as Good as I Remember", ongoing movie dialogue sketching a nasty domestic dispute. (The latter being the first time, perhaps, that the menace and violence in Blunt's music has been made explicit.) At the start of "Direct Line 2", the harsh, hot sound of a cell phone placed too close to a speaker crackles; I wince every time, and search for my phone on my desk.
The Narcissist II, though, is better at providing an experience than truly memorable music. This is the salty electro-dub of Excepter minus the forgivable nature of generative music, and the flaky, paper mache edits of Ariel Pink minus any obvious affection for the source material. Blunt, always conversant in hip-hop, actually steps up to the mic on the closer, "Coroner", on which he tells you that "That sweet apple-bottom gonna get candied." Blunt's delivery is flat, ugly, and devoid of braggadocio; for the first time I consider that his taken surname might not be wholly weed-inspired. This isn't great music just like addled Youtube-ing isn't a great way to experience art. Like a lot of free internet mixtapes, The Narcissist II is compelling but ultimately shallow, and shallow is a fault, even if that's what Blunt was aiming for. Next tab.


On her debut LP, the Miami-born, NYC-based DJ and producer Jessica Gentile honors the nightlife that raised her. She draws on dancehall, Miami bass, and trap, with enough space to breathe and glitter.

After Hours

After Hours opens like a dream sequence. Seagulls circle the sky, waves crash onto empty beaches. A crackly police scanner reveals a cop and dispatcher discussing arrests. It’s hard to tell if it’s dusk or dawn; twilight tends to warp time. But these are the protean hours that a certain set live for and that Jubilee recreates on After Hours. Where other dance albums often focus on just the club, for Jubilee, everything before, after, and in between is just as important.
On her long-awaited debut full-length, the Miami-born, Manhattan-based DJ and producer née Jessica Gentile pays tribute to the nightlife that raised her. Influenced by countless drives through Miami, the LP takes on a breezy, balmy feel different from Jubilee’s past Mixpak releases. Where her last three EPs (Pull Ova, Jealous, and JMZ Riddim) were harder and more percussive, After Hours is dreamier and more melodic. She still draws on many of the sounds she’s known for—dancehall, Miami bass, trap, among others—but this time, her music is concerned not just with the immediate moment but also with reflections on past ones.
Each track stands as its own memory and its own vignette, but as memories are wont to do, the edges bleed together, so that After Hours also functions like a 38-minute, South Florida-obsessed club mix. On “Stingray Shuffle,” Jubilee playfully references the shuffle that beachgoers do to avoid getting stung in shallow waters. A prickly, arpeggiated motif dances across a pounding beat, reminiscent of Frankie Knuckles’ “Your Love,” except faster and with a Detroit techno nod to DJ Stingray. “Sawgrass Expressway,” named after the expressway that runs through Broward County where Gentile grew up, also draws on house and techno, but with a sparser, more robotic feel. Both tracks are made for the club, but here they suggest spaces outside of it—getting ready beforehand, or barreling down an open road after.
At the club proper, lead single “Wine Up” is a dancehall jam with a chutney soca feel, by way of synthesized dhantal rhythms. A repeating four-note motif gestures toward Gyptian’s “Hold Yuh,” while Bronx-based dancehall artist Hoodcelebrityy demands the room, to “Wine up gyal, w-wine up yuh body!/Wine up gyal, r-r-ride di riddim!” Similarly, on “Bass Supply,” Miami mischief-maker Otto Von Schirach raps, “Swing that ass, swing it round and round!/Pound that shit, on the fucking ground!” Jubilee, meanwhile, interpolates the Miami bass track with an array of effects that she triggers as if playing Bop It—water droplets, slide whistles, unruly springs, 808 cowbells.
All throughout, Jubilee builds a consistent sense of place, shaping a loose narrative. In some ways, the album pivots on the track “JMZ Interlude,” which finds the listener ejected abruptly from the bawdy world of Von Schirach into the busy city streets. Using her 2014 Brooklyn-inspired “JMZ Riddim,” the interlude sketches the familiar scenario of trying to catch a ride to the next spot. Exclamations of “Brooklyn bruk!” cut through the cacophony of honking cars and blaring sirens. By the time the car doors slam shut, a slightly off-kilter stop/walk light starts ticking for what feels like forever. Finally, the ambient “Snooze Button” ushers in a brief daydream and some relief. At least, that’s one interpretation. The narrative arc of the album isn’t entirely clear-cut. But then again, neither are many nights out.
Either way, there’s no denying that After Hours is a meticulously produced affair. Every bass line and syncopated rhythm and subtle inflection fits precisely one into the other. Yet it always maintains enough space to breathe and, very often, to glitter: the same prickly pattern we first hear on “Stingray Shuffle” recurs throughout the record, shape-shifting just so to evoke different images and moods. On “Opa-Locka,” an homage to the city just south of Broward County, bells twinkle like stars over a spry reggae rhythm. The atmospheric “Spa Day” feels like speeding past the ocean, with the sun glinting off its corrugated surface. A slow-winding kizomba groove anchors the track, and 909 toms bounce from one side of the listener’s sonic periphery to the other as bits of conversation float by.
By the end, on album closer “Beach Ball,” swells of ambient noise rise and fall like columns of warm air, buoying bobbing flutes and skittering hi-hats. The tiniest gleam of morning light stains the horizon, easily blotting out any memory of police dispatchers or hungry gulls. Waves lap gently against the shore, and we feel it in our lungs: that these are the hours we live for.


On her debut album, the Toronto singer-songwriter and producer draws variously from gospel, folk, and adult-contemporary influences; no matter the style, every song is a showcase for her powerful voice.

Alpha

Light has always been a precious resource in Charlotte Day Wilson’s music. The Toronto singer-songwriter and producer’s vast voice is like a canyon that the sun can’t access; the percolating soul and quiet storm that surround it flicker like candlelight. “I went to a funeral today just so I could feel something,” she sang on “Funeral,” from her 2018 EP Stone Woman. It’s a particularly bitter line in a catalog that has often traced life’s hard edges.
Her debut album, Alpha, is an escape from the twilight. Darkness once consumed Day Wilson, seeping down into the bottom of her lungs. Now, she’s preoccupied with luster and scope. Her voice—and what a voice, deep and passionate, cast in the mold of Anita Baker—feels less crepuscular, less intimate, and more capable of levitating cars and uprooting whole forests.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on “Mountains,” a stirring gospel number featuring full-throated choral chants, handclaps and foot stomps, and the sound of rain in the background. Day Wilson, raring to add to the sense of grandeur, describes scaling peaks and searching valleys. Yet the lyrics scan as insular and personal, like a classic break-up song. “Mountains” is co-written by one of the kings of the form, Babyface, and gives Day Wilson license to curse her broken heart and even call on the spirit of Travis’ mopey classic: “And when it rains only rains on me.” The teetering-on-the-brink drama is ratcheted up to incredible levels. Day Wilson is the kind of performer who can pull off approaching every one of her hurt feelings like it’s worthy of an Iliad.
A sense of spiritual power defines much of Alpha. The background vocals on “Strangers” are immediately reminiscent of the haunting yet angelic Auto-Tuned voice Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon deploys. “If I Could” is just one song that leans on religious imagery: “I’d bathe you/Wash you of the sins that plague you/Rid you of the burdens, and you’d be free once more,” Day Wilson sings. The body of the artist with the bourbon-soaked lounge-singer shimmer now sounds inhabited by the spirit of a transcendent preacher. This is music for baptizing groups of worshippers in rivers. Yet Day Wilson funnels the evangelism into a focus on the self, always looking inward.
There are more mellow moments to balance the weight. “Keep Moving” is the kind of adult-contemporary song that would have lit up Reagan-era radio: muted drum pads, spacey keyboards, chugging guitars. “Take Care of You,” guest starring Syd, could pass for a Destiny’s Child deep cut. Unsurprisingly, the most traditional soul joint is the team-up with Day Wilson’s occasional collaborators BADBADNOTGOOD: “I Can Only Whisper” features the band’s stoned and surly late-night grooves. There’s more folk-influenced fare, too: On “Lovesick Utopia” and “Adam Complex,” Day Wilson sings over acoustic guitars and other mild orchestral flourishes. Her power isn’t particularly suited to light fingerpicking, but neither are unwelcome to the ear.
It’s been five years since Day Wilson embarked on a solo career after the dissolution of her band the Wayo, but this is her first album, and she uses the space to cover plenty of stylistic bases. It all comes together in a varied and well-sequenced record. But wherever you dip in, you’ll land on her voice—the kind of instrument that stressed-out commuters can reach for to help ease their anxiety in traffic. It would be simple for Day Wilson to cut an album of Stax-style soul tunes or smooth jazz standards and call it a day. The immaculately mixed Alpha is instead built on weighty writing and daring arrangements in which Day Wilson stays front and center, never allowing the production to overshadow her presence.

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On his third album in 18 months, the UK hitmaker applies a scrapbooker’s instincts to festival-ready house anthems. But despite the diaristic hints, we learn little about the artist.

Fred again..: *Actual Life 3 (January 1 - September 9 2022) *

Dance music is often framed as an escape from the everyday, but Fred again.. treats it more like a scrapbook on Actual Life 3 (January 1 - September 9 2022), his third reality-based album in 18 months. As on its predecessors, Actual Life (April 14 - December 17 2020) and Actual Life 2 (February 2 - October 15 2021), the 29-year-old hitmaker born Frederick John Philip Gibson collages together voice notes from friends, Instagram videos, and samples of important records from his life, offering a (purportedly) personal peek at the comings and goings of a top-level musician/songwriter/Ed Sheeran collaborator.
Diaristic songwriting is an unusual approach for house music, a style that tends to avoid the quotidian in favor of dreaming of promised lands. It worked for Fred again.. on “Marea (We've Lost Dancing),” a 2021 single that sampled a conversation with the Blessed Madonna about COVID-19’s devastating impact on the dance music industry, turning her somber reflections into an anthem that gave comfort during lockdowns and fueled elation as clubs re-opened their doors. On Actual Life 3, the source material includes a live recording of 070 Shake’s “Nice to Have,” which Fred has said is his most listened-to song of the year (on “Danielle (Smile on My Face)”), and his friend Delilah Montagu singing her song “Lost Keys” on Instagram (on “Delilah (Pull Me Out Of This)”).
The album’s backstory is far more remarkable than the results. Fred is an extremely competent producer: His drums, drizzled with the slightest hint of UK garage, swing and punch like they should; his piano melodies are robust with the requisite hint of tenderness; and everything radiates an expensive sheen. But there is nothing discordant in his music, nothing to make you sit up and wonder how the hell he pulled that off. In sound and style, there’s nothing on this record that Disclosure didn’t do a decade ago—or MJ Cole 10 years before that. “Delilah (Pull Me Out of This)” may well feature a vocal taken from a friend’s Instagram video but, beyond a slightly degraded sonic quality, there’s little to distinguish it from a million other vocal fragments throughout dance music history. Equally, it’s nice to know that Fred likes 70 Shake’s “Nice to Have”—but so do the millions of people who have listened to it on Spotify.
What makes this all the more frustrating is that Fred again.. is, by all accounts, a very interesting musician. He’s sung for Brian Eno, made a collaborative mixtape with drill star Headie One, and knocks up ambient sketches on the fly when he can’t find the right tune to listen to. But if these personal quirks do enter Fred again..’s music, they aren’t present here. It would be tempting to call Fred again.. the Ed Sheeran of house music, given his scrubbed-down sheen. But Sheeran at least strikes a personal chord with his legions of fans. Actual Life 3, for all its plundering of Fred’s browser history, feels too imprecise to make the kind of impression that “Marea” once did. The sentiments expressed in songs like “Bleu (Better With Time),” “Berwyn (All That I Got Is You),” and “Clara (The Night Is Dark)” are more Hallmark card than dark night of the soul.
After three Fred again.. full-lengths in the span of 18 months, we’re no closer to knowing who he is or why we should care about his intimately documented life, beyond the fact that he has fashionable friends, likes listening to music, and has experienced his share of grief in recent years. Of the three records, Actual Life (April 14 - December 17 2020) is probably the most interesting, its gently mournful air reflecting the claustrophobic times in which it was made. But three albums of this indistinct sadness—think Burial meets Disclosure as James Blake looks on longingly—is too much. Actual Life 3 clearly couldn’t have been made by just anyone, but it sometimes feels like it might as well have been. The documentary approach to music can work extremely well—Joy Orbison used samples from his personal life on his excellent 2021 mixtape Still Slipping Vol. 1 to create music that burst with familiarity, depth, and insight—but it often feels like Fred again.. is pulling away from the big reveal, chafing at the idea of giving too much away. There’s no essence revealed here. You hope that recording Actual Life 3 was cathartic for him, but for the listener it feels slightly indulgent, with the troublesome hint of a memory card full of vacation photos.
Actual Life 3 has moments of brilliance and will certainly connect with big festival crowds. The distressed ending of “Kelly (End of a Nightmare)” is genuinely exhilarating; “Delilah (Pull Me Out of This)” has an irresistibly white-knuckled, belly-tickling momentum; and “Eyelar (Shutters)” places a beautiful synth-trumpet melody at the center of its laconic shuffle. But music that focuses on reality tends to work best when it is doggedly cinematic or highly relatable; Actual Life 3 is neither, instead frequently slipping into mundanity. Real life is all well and good, but most people get enough of it from just living.


With Heaven Adores You, the soundtrack to last year's Kickstarter-funded Elliott Smith documentary of the same name, we get sweet, refreshing peeks at the real person behind the Sad Guy cartoon people know best. The endearing scraps, and at least one previously unreleased masterpiece, help rewrite the details of an important story.

Elliott Smith: Heaven Adores You Soundtrack

*Heaven Adores You* Soundtrack

Years before he moved to Portland and adopted the name "Elliott," Steven Paul Smith was a sunny and unassuming kid growing up in the Dallas suburbs, living a surprisingly all-American existence. He played football; his family went to church occasionally. He played clarinet in middle-school band and was elected Byrd Symphonic Band president in 1982; he cracked up his friends with goofy impressions. His best friend was a fellow "Dungeons & Dragons" obsessive named Steve Pickering (nickname: Pickle), with whom he recorded dozens upon dozens of original songs, sometimes under silly pseudonyms like "Johnny Panic."
In the countless interviews that Smith’s friends and loved ones have granted since his death, this picture—the funny motherfucker, the expert mimic, the shameless clown, the amiable music obsessive—has remained elusive to fans, who only have his music and his public persona to hold onto. But on Heaven Adores You, the soundtrack to last year's Kickstarter-funded documentary of the same name, we finally get some sweet and refreshing peeks at the person behind the Sad Guy cartoon. Take, for example, "Untitled Guitar Picking," from 1983. It is exactly what it sounds like—a couple of minutes of a kid who has listened to some Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd records working out what it sounds like when you arppegiate some minor chords. (Pickering, who was manning the tape deck, lent it to the filmmakers.) It's completely unremarkable, and yet its presence is unaccountably touching.
"Picking" is one of the few pieces of Smith juvenilia that made its way onto the Heaven Adores You soundtrack: There’s also a version of the edgy, seething "Fear City," included on 2007’s canonical New Moon collection, except here it's "Don’t Call Me Billy." It's the same song, right down to the cadence and harmony of the chorus melody, except with patently ridiculous lyrics: "You can call me Max, or Dave, or Tommy, Ron or Fred/ But just don’t call me Bill, man, cuz I go out of my head." It’s like learning Kurt Cobain wrote a parody version of "I Hate Myself And Want to Die," and it’s both astonishing and somehow healing to hear. These aren’t exactly the most lasting contributions to Smith's recorded works, but like watching the Beatles goof off in the studio in an era when they were purported to have all hated each other, or hearing Biggie rap the "buffoons eating my pussy while I watch cartoons" line from Lil Kim's "Queen Bitch," they help rewrite the details of an important story.
There is much more to Heaven Adores You than endearing scraps, however, and none of them are more important than the version of "True Love" that appears here. The song dates from the early Jon Brion sessions of From a Basement on a Hill, before Brion allegedly confronted Smith about his escalating drug use and Smith packed off, with his then-girlfriend Valerie Deerin and all of the two-inch reels from the sessions, to producer David McConnell’s Satellite Park studio. The song, with its graceful pirouette from major to minor every few bars and Brion’s glimmering mallet percussion in the background, is one of Smith’s few true unreleased masterpieces, and although it has floated around on YouTube for years, it is gratifying to see it on an official Smith release.
Like all of Smith’s material from this period, "True Love" plays on a glassy mixture of beauty and sickness, a sound Smith was chasing out of a love of The White Album but that so many of his friends and fans heard as the sound of rock bottom. His lyrics, in the brutally frank tradition of this era of his songwriting, didn’t discourage any bleak readings: "All I need is a safe place to bleed/ Is this where it’s at?" he croons, allowing the pits and crags in his voice to show. Along with "True Friends/See You In Heaven," it is one of the few missing puzzle pieces from the darker end of Smith’s life story, and having it restored here is a kindness.
For those are really invested in Smith arcana, there are the requisite strange omissions and inclusions to gripe over: Why include an untouched version of Figure 8 album cuts "L.A." and "Everything Means Nothing to Me" when there are so many alternate versions of the same songs being circulated on bootlegs? As the rock version of "Christian Brothers" or the rough-but-still-revelatory version of "Coast to Coast" here demonstrate, Smith was a constant reviser, as alive to the mutability of his musical ideas as anyone this side of Elvis Costello. You could rework his songs over and over and over again; the melodic and emotional DNA that was in them would show through every time.
But traveling in this direction leads always to the same tiresome spot: The rueful zone of What-Ifs, the lingua franca of dead musicians. Let’s clear the air once more, once again using a young Steven Paul Smith recording on Heaven Adores You to do so: "I Love My Room." It is over five minutes long, and Smith recorded and wrote it when he was thirteen years old. It is, without question, the silliest five minutes of music that will ever have the name "Elliott Smith" affixed to it. Here are some of the lyrics: "When I was thirteen, I was in a marching band, there were so many loved ones/ They used to flock around me and tell me all my plans/ They all loved my hands." He absolutely belts it, his voice landing somewhere between John Lennon singing "Dr. Robert" and "Weird Al" Yankovic singing "My Bologna." The song has something like five different sections, several key changes, backing harmonies, the whole nine. This is Smith’s untrammeled musical gift, bounding freely and unencumbered. It is gawky and innocent and heartbreakingly pure.


Fiddlehead’s second album doesn’t stray far from the band’s foundational qualities: gruff but approachable, intense without being aggro, emo but not emo.

Between the Richness

Here’s footage of 10,000 or so people hanging on Pat Flynn’s every word at Have Heart’s 2019 reunion show—possibly the biggest hardcore gig ever. Yet it’s probably not that difficult to imagine Flynn at his day job as a high school teacher; the skill sets are pretty similar. Hardcore bands and teachers revered decades down the line both tend to honor teenagers’ inherent distrust of authority as well as their desire for guidance. As life gets complicated in adulthood, clear-cut instruction in making sense of the world is harder to come by. In the wake of his father’s death in 2010, Flynn found himself yearning for a similar desire for clarity, and that’s where Fiddlehead came in. Originally formed as an outlet for Flynn’s grief, the Boston quintet finally released their debut LP, Springtime and Blind, in 2018, wondering if they’d outlived their purpose. Then came marriage, fatherhood, impending midlife crises, a handful of throwback hardcore projects, and now, three years later, Fiddlehead’s vital sophomore album, Between the Richness, wherein Flynn leads a communal reckoning with all of the complicated shit that takes us from our twenties to the grave.
“All the years have changed/Ten folded like a day/Old Death’s dulling sting/To new life blooming,” Flynn howls on “The Years,” grappling with the 10-year anniversary of his father’s death and the simultaneous birth of his own son. At a lean 25 minutes, Between the Richness doesn’t stray far from Fiddlehead’s foundational qualities: gruff but approachable, intense without being aggro, emo but not emo. Fiddlehead claim Archers of Loaf (not Pavement) as a primary influence, and they occasionally show allegiance to the sonic signatures of shoegaze and slowcore—the melancholic guitar interplay of “Joyboy,” the reverb elasticating Flynn’s vocals toward the end of “Loverman”—if not those styles’ timid disposition. Still, Fiddlehead’s “post-hardcore” is more lifestyle descriptor than musical tag. Think of those parents with neck tats pushing strollers. Even if Fiddlehead bookend Between the Richness with an e.e. cummings poem and write lyrics in Latin, they’re not putting on airs; they still aim to win over the old heads who saw them open for the likes of Gorilla Biscuits and Hot Water Music.
Lineage is important to Fiddlehead, though not as much as fostering an active community. The soul of Between the Richness came into being in the 200-cap rooms where Fiddlehead wrestled with their liminal status—not yet a legacy band but significantly older than most of their labelmates on Run For Cover; too punk to be centrist indie but far more polished than whoever is the Have Heart of 2021. Similar to Japandroids on Celebration Rock, Fiddlehead reconsidered their original plan to break up after one record and asked: How could LP2 speak to the people who were yelling out their debut’s lyrics? “With this album I was really trying to ensure that the live experience would be as optimal for outward expression of emotion as possible,” Flynn has said. “Eternal You” briefly recasts Have Heart’s shout-and-point anthems as streamlined power pop before eventually giving way to a spoken-word recitation about friends drifting apart. “Million Times” and “Down University” work up rousing hooks while avoiding the gaudy, winking Buzz Bin mimicry that’s overrun their scene; they’re more in the spirit of beefy post-hardcore acts like Quicksand and Civ who somehow managed to sneak onto MTV.
It’s no slight to call nostalgia a binding thread of Between the Richness—flipping through the formative staples of a boxed-up CD collection will invariably lead to revisiting the major decisions that got you where you are. It’s ironic that Between the Richness came out the same day as an album steeped in the minutiae of adolescence, since it’s often about the same exact thing. “Back to acne high school drama/Cataclysmic sweethearts,” Flynn wails on “Million Times,” a song that interrogates the teenage desires and traumas that haunt adulthood. Flynn has to know that “What’s love if not a war for peace that never ends?” will be his definitive line, equally likely to be tattooed on someone’s neck or used as their high-school yearbook quote. “Down University,” fluent in the language of aspirational education (“Hyde Park! Precious Blood! Latin School! USMA! Emmanuel! BC! Columbia! Graduate!”), slyly plays on Flynn’s dual role as guidance counselor and singer who offers solace to those who’ll never set foot in a hall of higher education.
Despite the record’s hefty concerns and classic “harder, better, faster, stronger” second-LP upgrades, Fiddlehead’s defining quality is their modesty. Springtime and Blind sounded constitutionally self-effacing, trusting a blunt, burly, no-frills style of pop-punk to deliver its emotional payload, tempering the hype that could’ve come from its devastating backstory and sterling pedigree (Flynn and drummer Shawn Costa were both in Have Heart and guitarist Alex Henery is an alumni of soft grunge kingpins Basement). Likewise, Between the Richness doesn’t go out of its way to announce its significance. Instead, Fiddlehead ensure that their fans—whether it’s the same 150 people who saw them in a skate shop, people still stuck at home imagining the experience of seeing “Million Times” live, or the sprawling crowd from Have Heart’s historic Worcester gig—will do the yelling for them.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Last year, Richard D. James returned with a new Aphex Twin record, ending a prolonged drought. Since then, he's kept busy, and three records into his return, James is sounding more energized than ever. Orphaned Deejay Selek revives his AFX moniker and provides a stark contrast to the labyrinthine twists of Syro. These songs soar with a burly kind of grace.

Aphex Twin / AFX: Orphaned Deejay Selek (2006-2008) EP

Orphaned Deejay Selek (2006-2008) EP

By God, it's looking like Aphex Twin has gone full Energizer Bunny on us—which, given his interest in robots that bang drums, actually makes perfect sense. This time last year, Richard D. James was seven years into an extended hiatus (or nine, or 13, depending upon the alias) when Warp launched a hot-air balloon emblazoned with his logo into the skies over London. Since then, the occasionally press-shy, always unpredictable artist has cranked himself up to a fever pitch, and there's no evidence that he's headed back to his hermitage any time soon.
In the past year, we've been treated to a wealth of new, or at least new to us, music. First there was Syro, Aphex Twin's triumphant return. Then, just four months later, came Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2, an EP of more abstracted material, inspired by the intersection between robotics and acoustic instruments. Right around the same time, James launched a series of anonymous accounts on SoundCloud, where he unloaded more than 100 previously unreleased tracks from his voluminous archives.
If the title of the new release is to be believed, we're still in archival territory. (To that end, the cover art riffs on Warp's very first release, Forgemasters' "Track With No Name", from 1989.) That the record is credited to AFX and not Aphex Twin is probably significant, although, as with all things related to James, there's room for interpretation. The AFX handle has come to mean different things at different periods: In the '90s, with the Analogue Bubblebath and Hangable Autobulb series, it meant rugged, percussive workouts with a touch of acid. For 2005's Analord series, it came to stand for lyrical, all-analog jams. Orphaned Deejay Selek is closer to Analord and provides a stark contrast to the labyrinthine twists of Syro. These songs soar with a burly kind of grace.
But Orphaned Deejay Selek is no Analord 12. For one thing, many of the Analord releases sound positively lo-fi compared to the eight tracks here. The separation of the sounds in the mix, and the way they stake out a position in space, is nothing short of spellbinding.  He's also not kidding about the "deejay" part of the title: These really are some of the most straightforward pieces of music that James has put his name to in years. They're far more focused on rhythm, on that ineffable quality known as the groove, than either of his other recent releases.
James dives right in at 144 BPM on "dmx acid test" and doesn't let up, tearing through five tracks at the sort of tempos that haven't often been heard in techno since the '90s. "acid test" puts twin 303s through their paces while he lays down hissing, snapping electro rhythms; that track seamlessly gives way to "oberheim blacet1b", a slightly more baroque variation on the same theme that gives free rein to his wild, microtonal tunings. "simple slamming b 2" is just what the title suggests, right down to the four-to-the-floor kick drums and rolling, 16th-note hi-hats.
Towards the end he slows down. "NEOTEKT72" riffs on deliriously detuned synthesizers over a loosely funky beat, full of lanky tambourine and cowbell patterns; the closing "r8m neotek beat" recalls the spindly minimalism of 1994's GAK EP. The slowest track here might be the most surprising: "midi pipe1c sds3time cube/klonedrm" bumps away at 100 BPM, with wheezing synth-flutes and sad, sour bongo drums like some half-melted rainforest diorama in a gone-to-seed wax museum.
But the keystone of the entire record is the one with the most understated title: "bonus EMT beats". In DJ parlance "bonus beats" used to mean two- or three-minute filler cuts, often found on the B3 of a standard 12-inch EP, in which the A-side's beat, and maybe its bassline, was given a brief, stripped-down reprise. They were DJ tools, basically, meant to be juggled with. "bonus EMT beats" is clearly a rework of "dmx acid test": it's got the same hard, dry snare thwack, the same staggered kick drum, the same ricocheting rimshots. The bassline's been muted and the reverb pushed way up. It rolls so naturally that it may take you a moment to notice what's changed: the bonus beat is in 5/4 time, whereas the original counts out in four. What's stunning is that James could take a cadence so unusual and make it feel so natural. For nearly five minutes, he wails away like a prog-rock titan on a drum throne. Usually, drum solos like this one make for an easy punchline, and you suspect that James may be teasing us here—breaking it down, building it up, toying with the reverb, refusing us so much as a note of melody, self-indulgent to the max. And on and on it goes. Three records into his return, on the most Spartan cut of the bunch, James is sounding more energized than ever.


Odd Future's first nod toward accessibility is still another fascinating, bizarre, expectation-defying piece of work.

BLACKENEDWHITE

As Straight Outta Compton nears its 25th birthday, it's nearly impossible for gangsta rap music to be legitimately shocking. We've heard thousands of drug-dealing tall tales, bloody murder threats, and clinically minded sex propositions, and these days that stuff just breezes past. If anything, the Young Jeezys of the world are less precise and less disquieting than the Spice 1s of old. So when L.A.'s teenage Odd Future crew snarled its way into the public consciousness earlier this year, the effect was truly jarring-- in part because it was so unfamiliar. Here are 19-year-old kids talking about sniffing coke and giggling about rape-- rec-room shit-talk that stings like a slap to the face. Crew leader Tyler, the Creator gargles kidnapping threats in a burned-out rasp way beyond his 19 years. Earl Sweatshirt, the crew's missing-in-action 16-year-old cult hero, tells you all about the chopped-up girl and cop locked up in the trunk of the car he doesn't have a learner's permit to drive. So when the OF duo MellowHype open their new full-length with a story about blowing off a final exam, it's a relief in a full-body sigh sort of way. Compared to their crewmates, these kids are downright cuddly.
Hodgy Beats, the rapping half of MellowHype, is a Wiz Khalifa stoner-rap type who raps in a high, spaced-out mutter that still makes him sound way more alive than the crew's other resident stoner, the somnolent Domo Genesis. He's not soft-- "ligaments will dissolve" is a typical threat, and he has no problems rapping over gun sounds on a track called "Gun Sounds". On "Loco", he namechecks 1960s Black Panthers with authority. But compared to a nutcase like Tyler, he's actually humane. Tyler makes two appearances on BLACKENEDWHITE. On the first, he leaves six cops dead. On the second, he offers up this: "Fingers in the middle of bitches' bodacious buttcracks/ Enough fuckin' atheist rappers to get a nun slapped." This is Tyler on his best behavior, but these are still the two gnarliest moments on the full-length. They're also the two most immediately arresting. With his laid-back approach, Hodgy can be a weird fit for Odd Future-- a technically sound rapper who can adapt to a lot of different styles but who never sounds like a paradigm-shifter. He's a strong supporting player but not much of a lead. So it's a good thing Left Brain, the other half of the group, is around.
Left Brain, who doesn't rap, is every bit the lo-fi beat experimentalist that Tyler is. The two-minute album opener "Primo" has great little keyboard plinks interrupting smeary synth wooze before everything slows down into a glitched-out, screwed-up crawl. That's a whole lot of movement for a two-minute introductory track, but it's typical of the whole record. Left Brain's tracks always mesmerize, but they never sit still. "Gun Sounds", "Dead Deputy", and "Fuck the Police" all work as muffled, homemade versions of the apocalyptic crunk bangers that Lex Luger makes for Waka Flocka Flame. "Brain" and "Chordaroy" are damaged, decayed takes on the lush, string-drenched yacht rap that the Neptunes have been making for a few years. "Loaded" is frankly jaw-dropping, an evil blaring creep that sounds like what might happen if an ominous synth-drone type like Oneohtrix Point Never tried making rap beats. (Note to Oneohtrix Point Never: Try making rap beats.)
Parts of BLACKENEDWHITE point toward what might happen when the Odd Future kids leave their terrifying self-created universe and engage with the world at large-- something that's almost inevitable now that major labels are knocking down their doors. "Hell" has a beat that's made partially out of someone muttering "what the hell" on a loop, but it also has an honest-to-god R&B chorus, the first I've heard from these guys. After the crew has killed god knows how many women on tracks, bonus track "Based" features C. Renee, the first female rapper I've heard on an Odd Future song. (The R&B chorus doesn't really work; the C. Renee verse absolutely does.)
But even as it nods toward accessibility, BLACKENEDWHITE works as yet another fascinating, bizarre, expectation-defying piece of work from a group of young artists who don't make anything else. And unlike the others, this one features zero rape threats. For neophytes, Tyler's Bastard is still the place to start; he's the group's figurehead and most talented member, and you really have to confront how fucked up these kids are if you have any interest in engaging them. But BLACKENEDWHITE pushes them closer to humanity without sacrificing the weirdness that's so central to their appeal. They're not out of surprises yet, and they probably won't be for a long time.


Not a follow-up (or even a cousin) to their groundbreaking 1981 record My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, this surprising and rewarding pop record has been described by its creators as "electronic gospel."

David Byrne / Brian Eno: Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

There's nothing like a nice surprise from musicians you love. In 1981, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and producer Brian Eno united for one of the most fruitful partnerships of the post-punk era to release My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a groundbreaking record that made prominent use of sampled soundbytes and disembodied voices in place of singing. The album, recorded between sessions for the Talking Heads' essential Remain in Light LP, was released with surprisingly little fanfare, yet pioneered and popularized methods that have since become part of our musical lexicon.
Last April, Byrne revealed that the partnership would be revisited for the first time in 27 years, for another full album. But while Everything That Happens Will Happen Today reunites this iconic duo, the record shares almost nothing in common with its predecessor-- down to the process. Where My Life in the Bush of Ghosts resulted from hours of close collaboration, the self-released Everything That Happens occured when Eno asked Byrne to add lyrics and vocals to a number of tracks the producer had created independently. The two began passing tapes back and forth, and then onto a series of session players and studios until the record was complete. Described by the duo as "electronic gospel," the album is a beautifully melodic, unpretentious offering-- and nothing whatsoever like its predecessor.
One of the first sounds here is an acoustic guitar-- an early sign that this is a very different sort of album from those these two have made together in the past. The disc opens with one of its strongest songs, the expansive "Home", fitting the duo's description. Byrne sings long, drifting phrases to lyrics that temper domestic nostalgia with a bit of honesty. His outlook here is generally positive-- or maybe more accurately, tinged with hope or determination: "Chain me down but I am still free," he sings on the catchy chorus to the fluid "Life Is Long", as Eno's arrangement incorporates understated brass and a wall of keyboards that burst with melody.
Most of these tracks are strikingly immediate, considering the relaxed creative process that brought them to fruition. "Strange Overtones" has a great shuffling beat with a hooky bassline and a giant chorus-- Byrne sings directly about the process of songwriting, mulling what a chorus should do even as he sings it. It's the kind of effortless pop song Talking Heads might be playing today if they'd stayed together. The album does have a few less satisfying moments, though, which tend to come when the easy flow of the music is disrupted. The buzzing synth hook and plodding beat of "Wanted for Life", for instance, feels somewhat out of place amid the billowing textures that surround them, and the echoey, spoken passages of "I Feel My Stuff" are plain awkward.
Still, it's a welcome release from this duo-- the kind of assortment that makes one hope they don't stop here. Byrne will be touring this material without Eno, but hopefully, as Eno accumulates more tracks in the future, he'll remember the off-handed brilliance of this album's best moments and pick up the phone. Whether we're talking about this record in 30 years the same way we talk about My Life in the Bush of Ghosts today is of little consequence-- it's an enjoyable listen in the here and now, which is all an album has to be, even when created by giants.


Does Kristin Hersh have the most terrifying voice in rock? Many singers embrace higher drama or shred\n\ their vocal ...

Throwing Muses

Does Kristin Hersh have the most terrifying voice in rock? Many singers embrace higher drama or shred their vocal cords with icier shrieks, but there's an eerie steadiness in Hersh's voice-- an enthrallment that goes deeper than the mere sound of her singing, part crow, part Wicked Witch of the West and part vengeful alternative rock icon. Of all the artists who've invoked the cliché of losing control to their inspiration, Hersh is one of the few to make it convincing; she delivers her most harrowing lyrics with a delicate serenity, and her simplest with a frightening, reeling delirium.
Her voice and surreal images were the key to the success of Throwing Muses, before the group disbanded. Hersh didn't want to break up the Muses, the band she's led since high school: It ended in the mid-90s for financial, not creative reasons. And that's the only way to explain how, when some funding came through, they could reform and cut a new album that sounds like they'd never been apart. Often, critics give a veteran band extra credit when they reunite-- props that were perhaps due long ago and never offered, or just bonus points for not having dropped dead in their autumn years. I can't think of many albums that need fewer crutches than this one. Without rivaling University or The Real Ramona, it's different from, yet far rawer than, anything since their debut.
Fans will suck up the nostalgia as Hersh brings back not just her last rhythm section (Bernard Georges on bass and mainstay David Narcizo on drums), but also founding Muse Tanya Donelly, who adds seraphic harmony vocals. After several years of sporadic collaborations they jumped into the project without even rehearsing: They cut the album in just three weekends with minimal overdubs, giving it a clean and "live" sound that sticks solidly to an unembellished power trio. There are no acoustic tracks, no slow or atmospheric ballads (like University's "Crabtown")-- nothing but torrential, skidding, hard rock, right from the almost anthemic first track, "Mercury", which cuts through different ways of opening the throttle before it wrenches into the chorus.
With such a consistent sound the songs bleed into each other, but Hersh's writing is still intriguingly unpredictable. Some of the songs are catchy almost after the fact-- like the perfect riff and matter-of-fact weirdness of her delivery on "Portia", or the erupting chorus on "Pretty or Not". Others sound like they were Frankensteined together from the verse, chorus and bridge of completely different songs and smoothed out by the guitars: You've got the mood change from dark to ecstatic on "Half Blast"-- if Donelly had written any songs here, this would be the one-- or the way "Solar Dip" jerks between time signatures. And that's not to ignore the grinding dirges like "Speed and Sleep" that just pound themselves into a dark hole.
Throwing Muses skip the production polish that brightened up albums like University, but they've found the perfect sweetener in Donelly's backing vocals. As limited as her contribution may be-- she sticks to backup and only sings on half the songs-- her lines are melodically gorgeous, high and pure against Hersh's lower, somewhat raspy vocals. But her presence alone isn't what makes this so joyous. Throwing Muses are the counterpart-- or maybe the antidote-- to the driven, enraptured solitude of her solo material; they deliver a release and an excitement that's been missing from her work for years. Their reunion is heavy, driven stuff-- as inherently inexplicable as the best, darkest Muses work-- but it's also ecstatic. This band has seized an opportunity that may never strike for them again, and they're celebrating it as though there were no tomorrow.


Jon Hopkins has hovered around the edges of dance and indie rock for several years, playing with Brian Eno, Coldplay, and King Creosote—and even seeming to take a backseat on his own records. But Immunity, the producer’s breakthrough fourth album, bounds and writhes with its own life force.

Immunity

Jon Hopkins is a respected keyboardist and sonic technician who instills ambient music and acidic techno with a classical sense of composition, but he tends to work around the edges of things: He got started backing Imogen Heap. He’s played keyboards for Brian Eno, a clear influence, on albums such as Small Craft on a Milk Sea. Tagging along with Eno, he wound up co-producing and performing on Coldplay’s fourth album. He also created subtle electro-acoustic atmospheres for the Scottish singer-songwriter King Creosote on the exquisite Diamond Mine EP, and crafted an acclaimed string-based score for the British sci-fi film Monsters. It’s not a shabby cv, but it's not quite a name-making one, either.
This habit of putting himself on the periphery seeped into his own albums—until now. Insides from 2009 was impressive but felt faintly impersonal, streaming by like dazzling but disconnected vignettes in a film. But Hopkins’ breakthrough fourth album, Immunity, bounds and writhes with its own life force. It’s looser and oilier, more limber and dangerous. The aggressive dance tracks darkly obliterate everything else, while the wet and sunny piano-ambient ones wash out into the sounds of wind, waves, and gulls. The latter is impeccably done on “Sun Harmonics,” where the boundary between electronics and coastal recordings dissolves.
Lots of electronic music creates its own hermetic world, but on Immunity, Hopkins finds ingenious ways to let the world in. He created the album’s warm, alive feel by shunning digital perfection in favor of the analog synthesis of original sounds, both electronic and physical. The ambient prelude of the haunting, scrambled glitch-house opener “We Disappear”—a key unlocks the door of Hopkins’ London studio and his footsteps lead in—is more than idle window dressing: He is ushering us into the tactile space that suffuses the record. He drums on desks, plays salt shakers, slows down serendipitous recordings of nearby fireworks, boosts the kick-drummed rattle of a window. On “Form by Firelight,” which sounds like Kanye West’s “Runaway” remixed by Wolfgang Voigt, Hopkins processes beats and melodies right out of the piano, tapping the pedals and striking the strings. Spacious, with carefully shaped resonance, its delay-flickered counterpoint shows off Hopkins’ classical background.
This emphasis on our admission to a physical space naturally makes us feel like we have privileged access to Hopkins’ private emotional space as well. Immunity is said to be inspired by the arc of a night out, and whether or not that matters to the listener, it gives the album a holistic pace and flow, from heroically hurtling along on molten bass synthesizers to hovering gorgeously on gathering ambient breezes. Around the monstrous dancefloor anthems “Open Eye Signal” and “Collider”—the first oozing forward in anticipation, the second climactically crashing down at sharp threshing angles—there is the lyrical ambient landscape of “Abandon Window” and the cunning merger of both styles in “Breathe This Air.” The title track, with a trickle of legato piano turning a rickety rhythm, brings back King Creosote to add discreet vocal colors for a dreamlike conclusion. It all adds up to a remarkably visceral, sensual, confident electronic record that stays absorbing from beginning to end, and should finally catapult Hopkins to stardom in his own story.


Brooklyn producer Harry Fraud handles all of the production on Smoke DZA's latest project. Fraud's diamantine, jazzy cuts push Smoke DZA to give one of his best performances yet.

He Has Risen

Brooklyn native Harry Fraud doesn’t have the pop radio presence of the bigger Southern producers, but he’s become a recognized force in the Gothamist lane, working with New York rappers like French Montana, Action Bronson and a favored collaborator, the Harlem native Smoke DZA. Fraud is a hip-hop classicist, spinning sample-based beats from jazz, soul and funk cuts, often over mellow, indica-drenched percussion. He handles all the production on the new DZA album, He Has Risen, assembling a deck of diamantine, jazzy cuts, the sort of beats that often get described as "dusty" but that glint and often dazzle when played.
Smoke DZA, a confident-if-scattershot rapper, has a history of being overtaken by his production. He announces on the opening track here that he’s done with being modest, and on the first couple of listens, it’s difficult to believe him. Everything about his approach, from the low-key mobster shoutouts on “Badabing’s Theme” to the consistent recitation of his smoker’s credentials, signals low stakes. The Harlem rapper’s go-to boast is calling himself Kush God, about the least ambitious superlative imaginable.
DZA’s low-stress attitude functions as a smokescreen, concealing the high quality of He Has Risen, which slowly sneaks up on you. There’s chaff here, though it’s buoyed by the cigar-lounge cool of Fraud’s beats. But on several songs, the Harlemite rises to a level we’ve not seen from him in previous runs, where he’s been content to stay in the lane of the alternately tough-talking and wisecracking stoner. On “The Plot,” he sheds that veneer for real poeticism, evoking a world of “card swipers" and “con artists” where criminality saturates the atmosphere. “Morningside Sunset” is driven by observation-laden bars layered over insolent sax lines, as DZA adds singular details (buying someone a prosthetic leg) to the familiar painting of a kingpin’s life. The closest DZA has ever come to this level of achievement was his 2014 album Dream.Zone.Achieve. But that project featured 21 tracks and almost as many producers. By contrast, He Has Risen is focused, digestible, and perfectly paced.
Make no mistake though; much of this stuff would fall flat without Fraud’s atmospherics. Squeaky brass lines on “Heard Dat” leave the track ringing in your head, while “It’s Real,” a collaboration with The Alchemist, fills negative space with a droning chorus of voices. DZA, like many latter-day New York rappers, is a mild eccentric steeped in too many traditions. Beats like these help him forget what he knows, stretching himself to stranger observations, to broader song concepts. The strange contours of Fraud’s beats on He Has Risen move him off the comfortable grid and onto new terrain.


The Calgary-based band Women came to an end with the tragic death of guitarist Christopher Reimer; Matt Flegel and Mike Wallace from the band have picked up the pieces with their new project, Viet Cong. "Cassette", originally a tour-only release, is the group's scrappy introduction to the world.

"Cassette" EP

The Calgary-based band Women had the enviable ability of being able to shake up a bunch of familiar ingredients and come out the other side sounding like little else. Both their albums, Women and Public Strain, had the air of works made in isolation, with the band members cut adrift from contemporary movements and prevailing stylistic forces. Women ended in acrimony and tragedy, but two of their number, Matt Flegel and Mike Wallace, have picked up the pieces in Viet Cong, where they work alongside Scott Munro (from Women producer Chad VanGaalen's band) and guitarist Daniel Christiansen. "Cassette" is their scrappy introduction to the world; it’s the sound of parts congealing but not yet feeding off one another, as you might expect from something originally put out as a tour-only release. Now it's been buffed up and cleaned out, and with Mexican Summer behind it and Women’s reputation on their backs, it’s no longer the low-key intro it may have been conceived as during the band’s formation.
There’s something welcoming and likeable about "Cassette", from the awkward lurches in style to the desire to stick something out that’s less than fully formed. Women certainly didn’t operate that way, instead creating a world full of chilly remove. Viet Cong appear to be systematically lessening that bite and opening themselves up to their audience, although traces of their former selves remain. It's a process of steadily rinsing out the old to get to somewhere new. On “Bunker Buster” (not included on this release), the nascent Viet Cong impaled themselves on jagged guitar lines, lost monotone vocals, and lines where they “slowly fall through the snow.” So far, so familiar, but there have been changes since then, some of which hint at a future for this band that could outstrip anything that came before.
Viet Cong's songs are complex puzzles. It’s like they hear the direction a song is going in and then purposefully take a step in a different direction, and from that place they try to figure out the least obvious way to get back to where they started. The thrill of listening to them is in hearing how they deliberately hurl obstacles in front of themselves while trying to maintain a sense of forward momentum. “Throw It Away”, one of their strongest songs, begins as a ringer for the Damned’s “New Rose” before diverting into knotty math-rock guitar lines and Wendy Carlos-inspired synth drones. On “Throw It Away” and the similarly clattering “Oxygen Feed”, they’re stern, frantic, driven by a need to get right up in people's faces. Women’s music was sometimes so out of reach it felt like an intrusion to be in the same room as them; in contrast, Viet Cong thrive on audience-performer conflict.
The cover of Bauhaus’ “Dark Entries”, which sounds like a live recording, is a peak for the nihilistic streak that cuts deep into this band. It’s their most forthright performance, strung somewhere between garage rock and straight punk but with a weirdo edge simmering over the top, recalling the mixture of studied mannerisms and unhinged damage that Clinic could produce at their peak circa Internal Wrangler. When Viet Cong deviate from the bloody path there are mixed results. In placid mode they get back to Women’s altered-states take on the Beach Boys, which was never that band’s strongest look (“Static Wall”); and the attempt at digging up cold wave synth tones and substituting fury for furrowed brow crooning is best forgotten (“Structureless Design”). It’s in those moments that the original intent behind this EP comes bruising back into view—it’s the sound of a group of people finding their way, testing out ideas, sketching out the little details but not coloring in the bigger picture just yet.
What "Cassette" ultimately does is throw down a set of directions Viet Cong could head in and allow us to sit back and wonder which will be the strongest thread. As a glimpse of what a band could be it’s fascinating, especially as the songs leave the impression of a group with strong personalities in the mix, all determined to leave a stamp on the music they make. Flegel and Munro have talked about their day jobs, in flooring and cupcake delivery, respectively. At their best, the band reads as a group of people trying to make beautiful and extraordinary art rise from mundane circumstances. On "Cassette" they’re halfway there, feeling out designs, seeing what sticks, nixing what doesn’t. This is a picture of the process of making music, with all its flaws and triumphs intact.


After a six-year absence and the death of Ol' Dirty Bastard, Wu-Tang return with a psych-tinged record that's divisive-- even within their own camp.

8 Diagrams

The general consensus seems to be that RZA has lost his fucking mind. Rap critics, bloggers, and comment-box choirs haven't taken to his strange new mutation-- and that would be a problem even without fellow Clan members Raekwon and Ghostface lashing out at him. Rae complained in an interview with Miss Info that the production on 8 Diagrams "is not the vibe I want," saying RZA was turning into some sort of "hip-hop hippie." Ghost has been down on RZA, too, quoted in The Village Voice as saying the producer's "fumbling the ball...his music wasn't sounding like how it was when we first came in."
And then there's the small matter of Ghostface's decision to release his latest solo album, The Big Doe Rehab, on the same day as 8 Diagrams. The Wu agreed to push their album back a week, but that hasn't stopped fans and critics from pitting the two records against each other in a polarizing boom-bap vs. psychedelia showdown. It gives you a clearer idea of why Wu-Tang hasn't released a record in six years: When a couple of MCs have worked together under the same creative catalyst this long, it's hard to get them all to move in the same new direction at the same pace-- let alone nine of them.
Or eight. The death of Ol' Dirty Bastard signified the end of the classic Wu-Tang Clan lineup, even without the internal strife that almost assuredly guarantees we won't be seeing a follow-up to 8 Diagrams anytime soon. Russell Jones' passing isn't the only reason so much of this record sounds the way it does, but it had to have started some kind of domino effect that compounded all of RZA's brooding, spaced-out, and detached tendencies. Nothing here will go down well in the clubs or on the radio. Even the bangers sound melancholy or apprehensive, evoking darting eyes more than bobbing heads. After waiting so long, it's understandable that fans wouldn't want a record like this, where the bleak moments outweigh the triumphant ones.
Of course, in due time-- maybe it'll take years-- 8 Diagrams will sink in as a compelling, well-regarded album. And if this really is the end, it'll be the ideal last chapter and a smart bookend to Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). The production moves that stick out like nails on a chalkboard to rap traditionalists-- the acid-funk guitars, the melodic r&b hooks, the live instrumentation-- aren't nearly as off the hinges as some of rap's weirder recent detours (this isn't the Wu's The Love Below). Instead, they push the boundaries of what RZA's traditionally done without breaking too far out of character.
"Take It Back" finds RZA revisiting previous work, snatching the same hunk of Bob James' "Nautilus" he once turned into Ghostface's "Daytona 500", but reduces it to a measured, weaving series of sharp jabs. "Rushing Elephants" and "Wolves" refine his cleaned up soundtrack-influenced style (circa The W), drawing from Morricone-esque touches (heist-film suspense horns, eerie Western whistles, ghostly choirs) and putting some workmanlike but effective breaks beneath to keep the pulse heavy. And the way he assembles tracks still impresses, whether piling on thin sample layers (a guitar from Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang"; the drum machine taps from There's a Riot Goin' On) in "Windmill" until they sound fully fleshed-out, or pulling out surprise changes mid-way through a track: "Campfire" cuts under the last couple of lines in Ghostface's verse for a brief dub-echo interlude, and the otherwise understated symphonic soul of "Gun Will Go" shifts during Masta Killa's verse to something that sounds like the horn riff to Baby Huey's "Listen to Me" played through an old-timey Victrola at 3/4 speed.
The more experimental tracks show how comfortable RZA's become with bucking conventional wisdom. Prototypical message statement "Unpredictable" piles switchblade strings onto muffled wah-wahs and screaming guitars that sound like Maggot Brain-era Funkadelic scoring a blaxploitation Psycho. (The hook: "Wu-Tang is unpredictable." No shit!) "Stick Me for My Riches" has some crossover appeal-- skittering digital hi-hats, bombastic horns, r&b vocals-- but give RZA credit for the risky move of bypassing radio-friendly Akon/T-Pain/Ne-Yo-level candidates in favor of a 1970s vet, the Manhattans' Gerald Alston. Even 8 Diagrams' most contentious track, the Beatles-interpolating "The Heart Gently Weeps", has precedent, since the Jimmy Ponder soul-jazz cover that acts as its foundation was rhymed over by Ghostface on the circa-Pretty Toney white-label track "My Guitar". (Granted, it didn't have John Frusciante noodling over it or Erykah Badu sounding like a 12-year-old on the chorus.) The only time this mad-scientist auteurism comes close to backfiring is the RZA solo showcase "Sunlight": Even with the intrusive, beat-derailing martial arts fight scene coda and one of Bobby Digital's more impenetrable metaphors ("I've been highly misunderstood by those who've met us/ They had ears of corn and heads of lettuce"), it's a thoughtful meditation that aims to justify Islam as a source of theological insight at a time when America is least receptive to it.
So how do the other MCs ride beats like this? Ghostface makes himself scarce in the record's first half, and disappears completely in the second. He pulls off a few good verses, though, spitting Supreme Clientele-level rapidfire free-association ("This is real talk, shank lullabyes/ Ben Franks, we like Jet Blue, we stay hella high") on "Take It Back", and narrating a chaotic grocery store ambush/gunfight/struggle scenario on "The Heart Gently Weeps". Meanwhile, his partner in disaffection Raekwon shows up on half the cuts, and despite his accusations, there aren't any moments where RZA's production undercuts his style; in fact, pretty much every line he's got-- from the uptempo swagger anthems like "Rushing Elephants" and "Take It Back" to the slowly-paced murder story in "The Heart Gently Weeps"-- is hot to the point where fans could start hoping Cuban Linx II measures up.
Method Man opens the album with a sorta-enh verse on "Campfire" (dude doesn't sound quite right making "SexyBack" references) and then spends the rest of 8 Diagrams recapturing the fire he had on Tical, reasserting himself as the Wu's top shit-talker and sounding cockier and more confident than he has in years. GZA doesn't really kick in much for the record's first half, aside from his sharp and briefly ironic verse ("We criticize producers 'til they joints are right") on "Rushing Elephants", but he's all over the last five tracks, popping up briefly to spit at least four lines' worth of jewels and, more frequently, a full verse that's front-to-back intricate like his chess metaphors on "Weak Spot". Inspectah Deck returns to his usual role as the out-of-nowhere scene-stealer (yet another reason "Take It Back" will be a future classic: "Son, I've seen Hell, fell into the palms of Satan arms/ Don that I am, made 'im bow in the face of God"). Even U-God and Masta Killa, frequently overlooked as lyricists, sound inspired (check "Wolves" as Exhibit A).
Still, there's not much real unity on this album-- which makes the album-closing ODB tribute "Life Changes" that much more affecting. While Ghostface is inexplicably missing, the other seven surviving members each get the chance to give their own brief eulogy for Russell Jones: Meth pours out some vodka before finishing off the bottle himself, Raekwon waxes reflective, Deck blames himself for not stepping in to help Jones with his troubles, GZA, Masta Killa, and U-God describe their grief, and RZA refers back to his verse on "Tearz" ("it's always the good ones that have to die") before reminiscing over ODB's Grammy-crashing and fights with the law. Given how many times this album was pushed back, it wouldn't be out of the question to suspect some quality control issues, but RZA himself said in The Wu-Tang Manual that he tended to gear the overall style of an album based on what time of year it dropped, and 8 Diagrams couldn't have debuted at any time other than winter-- perpetually overcast, dark before the afternoon ends, and freezing your eye water.


A confession: I have totally fallen for this Gram Parsons mythology. Indoctrinated by years of biased textbooks, hippies' hyperbolic eulogies, and *Entertainment Weekly* features (a Johnny Knoxville/Christina Applegate biopic currently entitled *Grand Theft Parsons* is due next year), I have venerated Parsons to the point where, back in '91, my Parsons figurine necklace saved my life when I should have been shot in the neck. I know he was a narcissistic, condescending, uncontrollable malcontent, probably undeserving of most of my praise. I don't care. Every martyr has his cross. Jesus' was made of wood; Parsons' was made of morphine, booze,

The Byrds: Sweetheart of the Rodeo [Legacy Edition]

A confession: I have totally fallen for this Gram Parsons mythology. Indoctrinated by years of biased textbooks, hippies' hyperbolic eulogies, and Entertainment Weekly features (a Johnny Knoxville/Christina Applegate biopic currently entitled Grand Theft Parsons is due next year), I have venerated Parsons to the point where, back in '91, my Parsons figurine necklace saved my life when I should have been shot in the neck. I know he was a narcissistic, condescending, uncontrollable malcontent, probably undeserving of most of my praise. I don't care. Every martyr has his cross. Jesus' was made of wood; Parsons' was made of morphine, booze, and Cosmic Morphoid Crazydust (or some such opiate).
A Harvard drop-out, Parsons met Byrds bassist Chris Hillman at an unromantic Hollywood bank, coerced him into joining the Crosby-less band in Nashville, and, amidst quiet feuding with Roger McGuinn, made what is deniably one of the Top 20 country records of all time. Today, no noteworthy reviewer is naïve enough to claim Sweetheart of the Rodeo was the first country-rock album. Instead they'll tell you it was Parsons' International Submarine Band's 1968 album Safe at Home, and maybe that they even have the receipts to prove it. But, while Parsons was more of a heroin addict than a pedagogue, if he's taught me anything, it's that there was no "first" country-rock record. Country has always rocked. When Hank Williams sang, "I'll never get out of this world alive," he paved the way for Sid Vicious. If anything, Sweetheart is vastly less rocking than Merle Haggard's late-60s albums-- Parsons was simply the first to disseminate the rock to North Hollywood and Keith Richards' mansion.
The actual album is a blindingly rusty gait through parched weariness and dusted reverie. It's not the natural sound of Death Valley or Utah, but rather, a false portrait by people who wished it was, which makes it even more melancholy and charismatic. Between the shuffling and galloping are the astonishingly doomed harmonies, McGuinn and Parson's hypnotic and enthusiastic vocals, and countless miles of Lloyd Green's pedal steel. The songs, mostly covers, are equally saturated in sincerity and dedication. McGuinn had originally conceived the album as a panorama of American genres from the turn of the century through the synthesizer era until Parsons and Hillman convinced him to focus solely on country. Still, the diversity is there: a plucking Woody Guthrie, a craggy, grisly Haggard, post-motorcycle Dylan, Stax/Volt genius William Bell. But The Byrds have so totally captured a particular sound that the transitions are seamless. The righteousness of "The Christian Life" is perfectly at home on an album with a song about murdering your wife.
The crucial aspects of this particular release, however, are the extras-- especially since an expanded edition already came out in 1997 highlighting some unreleased master tapes. This new double-disc version is about double the price, and somehow managed to miss a few tracks from the '97 version. It also claims everything's been remastered without sounding at all distinguishable from the last edition. To be fair, the second disc offers six International Submarine Band songs (three of which have never been available on CD), but even these are valuable mainly for historians and best heard in the context of the entire Safe at Home album. Suffice to say, it's an underdeveloped band that can occasionally stun you into submission (the steaming "Luxury Liner", or the waltzing tribute to monogamy and masculinity, "Strong Boy") and other times sound like a disorderly, if endearing, garage-rock band with way too much emphasis on tambourine.
Due to contractual obligations, Lee Hazlewood, founder of the LHI label, took all but three Parsons tracks off the original album-- although, by all accounts, he was the auteur of the entire recording. Parsons has come back here with a vengeance: For starters, 19 of the 28 supplementary tracks feature Parsons on lead vocal. Whether you think this package is worthwhile is entirely dependent on whether you think Parsons deserves this much credit. On the album itself, McGuinn's belabored, satirical vocal on "The Christian Life" is adequate, even beautiful, performed like a pop star who sings odes to woe while showering in hundred-dollar bills. Conversely, Parsons sounds like he's had a bloody nose for a week on the bonus track presented here, giving the song a more sincere read than McGuinn's obvious pisstake. He's also drunk and has the stuttered, cracking delivery of someone who was self-schooled in a sand dune (which is strange considering he was a spoilt egoist). Of course, this begs the question of who exactly needs four relatively-similar sounding versions of "The Christian Life" or "One Hundred Years from Now". Well, I do. I've been listening to those songs on repeat for years now. Finally, I can mix things up a bit.
While there are significant, if not epiphanic, variations in the second disc's working demos and rehearsals, the causal Parsons fan will certainly be satiated by the '97 single disc. If you're a Gram man, on the other hand, listening to the gradual development of the plaintiveness on "One Hundred Years from Now" or the original sluggishness on "Life in Prison" is equivalent to bowing at Parsons' altar. Only die-hards will find the second disc worthwhile. But then, everyone should be a die-hard.


Sex was the thematic preoccupation of producer Patrick Cowley, reflecting the strong connection between disco and gay bathhouses in late-70s San Francisco. Fittingly, the first concrete attempt to canonise Cowley as an electronic music auteur is a compilation of his soundtrack work for gay pornographic films.

School Daze

Few musical legacies are as haunted by the spectre of sex—its pleasures and its consequences—as that of disco producer Patrick Cowley. It begins with the sound itself: the shimmering, orgasmic post-Moroder synth patterns of Cowley’s early 80s dancefloor anthems like “X-Factor” and “Get A Little”, and of course the tantric splendour of his 1982 remix of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”. Sex also is the music’s thematic preoccupation, to the point of fixation, reflecting the deep interpenetration of disco and gay bathhouses in late 1970s San Francisco, Cowley’s transplanted home: “Menergy” celebrates “the boys in the bedroom/ lovin’ it up/ shootin’ off energy.” In 1982, Cowley was one of the first public figures to pass away from complications associated with AIDS (before it was even known by that name), a tragic denouement partly captured in the disoriented and shadowed electro-disco of his final album, Mind Warp. It’s fitting, then, that the first concrete attempt to canonise Cowley as an electronic music auteur and innovator comes in the form of a compilation of soundtrack work for gay pornographic films. School Daze collects, for the first time on CD, instrumental work dating from 1973 to 1981, given by Cowley to gay porn production company Fox Studio, the majority finding their way into the films School Daze and Muscle Up.
The standard line on Cowley is that he is a post-Moroder producer, bridging the gap between 1970s euro-disco and 1980s Hi-NRG. It’s a neat story, but there have always been loose ends that it cannot make sense of, like Cowley’s astonishing production work for Sylvester’s 1979 track “I Need Somebody To Love Tonight”, a visionary collision of burbling synthesisers and lilting dub (available footage of the film School Daze features a mind-altering, woozy instrumental remix not included here). Further complications were offered by the reissue of Cowley’s late 1970s work with Jorge Socarros as Catholic, all jerky synthetic new wave whose fusion of Roxy Music and Kraftwerk anticipates the early work of Simple Minds. School Daze completes the picture by tying together all these threads and taking them somewhere else again, suggesting that Moroder was not the origin for Cowley, but the streamlined destination. The “1973-1981” timeframe is as bewildering as was the “85-92” in the title of Aphex Twin’s first Selected Ambient Works: even if this music all had originated from the early 80s, it would for the most part sound amazingly ahead of its time.
There’s a handful of tracks in modes you might expect—“Zygote” is adrenalized cosmic disco, while the title track offers corpulent funk-rock—but School Daze mostly consists of expansive, meditative soundscapes whose ambiguous titles (“Nightcrawler”, “Out of Body”, “Tides of Man”) capture their simultaneous evocation of the intimate and the intergalactic, the immediacy of bodily sensation and the depths of deep space. A few deserve special mention. The 16-minute “Seven Sacred Pools” is luxuriantly expansive ambient dub that could fit onto Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, its heart-murmur bass and multi-tiered synth melodies embracing and decoupling in an eerie underwater consummation. The forbidding “Journey Home” is scraping metallic techno in slow motion, weaving together machinic sound effects with a recurrent didgeridoo bassline with exacting precision. The chiming, swirling “Primordial Landscape” starts off shadowy and restless, fusing Caribbean bounce with funereal dirge, before ascending to the ceiling with iridescent chime loops that prefigure Manuel Göttsching’s proto-techno masterpiece E2-E4. But whereas the electronic music which Cowley flashes forward to is mostly preternaturally bright and sharp, the arrangements here feel flushed and hazy, shadowed by the torpor of dope and the blood-rush delirium of amyl nitrate.
It’s not necessary to frame School Daze by the use to which these compositions originally were put, but it helps. In The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, Daniel Harris writes that gay pornographers of the 1970s “believed they were filming two people, not in the act of fucking, but of merging, of coalescing, a process that involved the dissolution of their separate physical identities as they melted together, losing their definition as individuals.” Cowley’s music here captures exactly that vibe, its slow tempos, meandering arrangements, and persistent sense of disorientation and self-alienation evokes the world of San Francisco bathhouses rather than dancefloors. To listen is to step down those same long, dark tunnels: physical spaces of random encounters and depersonalised unions; psychological spaces of intoxication and longing.


*Death Is This Communion*, High on Fire's fourth album, was one of my 10 favorite albums in 2007, and I was far from alone. If you aren't already in the know, though, let this serve as some sort of wakeup call to the Oakland band's best collection to date. Don't worry about arriving late at the party: Despite the music's unrelenting roll, my entire experience with *Death* has been laid back...I listened to it a dozen times before bothering to check the song titles.

After memorizing each track, the shifts in those torching guitar riffs, the names didn't come as much

Death Is This Communion

Death Is This Communion, High on Fire's fourth album, was one of my 10 favorite albums in 2007, and I was far from alone. If you aren't already in the know, though, let this serve as some sort of wakeup call to the Oakland band's best collection to date. Don't worry about arriving late at the party: Despite the music's unrelenting roll, my entire experience with Death has been laid back...I listened to it a dozen times before bothering to check the song titles.
After memorizing each track, the shifts in those torching guitar riffs, the names didn't come as much of a surprise. For instance, "Fury Whip" is the perfect way to describe the lashing opener. It starts with more than a minute of galloping guitar, drums (note Des Kensel's double bass thumping), and bass from new member Jeff Matz, before guitarist/vocalist Matt Pike tears in with his hoarse chipped-tooth snarl. More than ever before, Pike's singing, not just his guitar playing, is a power onto itself. We already knew from his Sleep days he could pick an axe like a motherfucker, but man...maybe it's the cleaner, bigger, ballsier Jack Endino production, or the proper combination of whiskey and cigarettes and time, but Pike's at the point where his vocal and guitar chords have grizzled and wizened perfectly. (Lemmy, sir, watch your back.)
When discussing Death you need to focus on Pike, but also go back to Endino. To the collection (and Jack's) credit, it ends up a deflating experience listening to 2005's Blessed Black Wings in tandem. At the time of the earlier album's release, it seemed like Joe Preston's bass and Steve Albini's production had given High on Fire their most monumental, thunderous sound to date, but weirdly, it's pretty limp in comparison. Musically, Blessed Black was punkier, and in restrospect, the songwriting just isn't as good.
Outside of production, Death is both streamlined and epic. There are a number of rollicking patterns and shifts to the usual hard-edged rock, like the Eastern-tinged instrumental "Khanrad's Wall", the rising clatter drum solo of "Headhunter", or the jangle that establishes itself behind the smokiness of "Waste of Tiamat". The shimmering acoustic intro jangle to "Cyclopian Scape" offers a whiff of pastoral Sabbathian doom before the riff explosion. High on Fire are getting uncanny at knowing when to insert these sorts of details, but for all the awesome adds to the music, it's the rawest moments that feel the best: From its opening Celtic Frost grunt onward, "Rumors of War" rollicks all bad-ass and overdriven like a mathier spin on Motörhead's "Ace of Spades". The fucking mighty "Turk" reels through War Metal until it slides into groovier (but just as heavy) bong waters and "black psychology": "My cage's walls are closing in on me/ The rage that surfaces is not my soul/ It's like a devil taking control/ The violence lives in me and will not leave/ Like a magician with pain up his sleeve." Pike has said he was inspired by conspiracy theories and H.P. Lovecraft on the album (what metal band isn't these days?), and a number of the songs have that enjoyable occult tinge to their lyrics, though maybe nothing as D&D as something like "Surrounded By Thieves" (OK, minus "Cyclopian Scape"'s reptilian alien race, "lemurian throne," and etc).
In terms of Sleep-- because those terms refuse to go away-- this is High on Fire's Jerusalem. Outside of HoF's ascent, it's interesting to see Pike hit his peak just as his ex-Sleep bandmates in Om moved toward theirs with the appropriately titled Pilgrimage-- they continue chiseling into a sparer minimalist realm, while High on Fire inscribe additional accents into their crusty rock. It's rare to see such a cohesive trio split into two groups that both become so powerful, ascending at the same time with such distinct aesthetics. Here, actually, the title track's vocal lines are kinda Om-- that smearier stoner incantation slide-- but Pike and Co. otherwise continue moving deeper into their amphetamine-laced rock monster. Much less the old dope smoke. So, high on a different sort of fire. If you haven't already, make sure to inhale both.


Hip-hop relies heavily on the foundation created by the dichotomy of repetition and novelty. This takes many forms, from the ...

In Search of...

Hip-hop relies heavily on the foundation created by the dichotomy of repetition and novelty. This takes many forms, from the struggle of producers wishing to maintain a semblance of recognition for utilizing old-school techniques, to the desire of new MCs to push the boundaries of lyrical delivery. Recently, this shifting between repetition and novelty has reached a manic pace, to the point where it seems essential fare for a producer to shout over a track or re-use bass sounds and drum patterns to emphasize their signature. In the advertising world, it's called "branding."
The Neptunes are the reigning kings of beat-branding. Throughout their best-known tracks-- from "Superthug" to "Southern Hospitality"-- some elements have remained more or less constant: the bass sound, a gritty, ultimately recyclable sample, and the off-time kick/snare combination that seemed revitalize hip-hop for a minute. But that minute has lasted two years, and the same sounds now cross the board from Britney Spears to Limp Bizkit. Shit is getting ugly, and N.E.R.D. is the truest testament to this fact. Quoth the Neptunes: "In Search Of... seems like a bland title, but for us, it's In search of love. In search of happiness. In search of smiling. In search of that bitch with the big ass. In search of the answer to why my brother smokes crack. It's all of that; it's about being open."
In Search Of... joins Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo (the Neptunes) with hometown friend Shay. (That hometown, incidentally, is the same Virginia area that brought up Timbaland, Missy Elliott, and Teddy Riley.) This album conceivably brings the group back to their "roots," which, in a letter written by Pharrell on the group's website, heavily emphasizes the AC/DC side of things.
The album has had a relatively tumultuous history-- especially over the last few months-- with a domestic release date pushed back by the Neptunes' decision to re-record the album with the help of some live instrumentation. Over a year ago, the original version of the album was released and garnered exactly no glowing reviews (with the exception of a positive write-up in Rolling Stone). Whether or not this was the incentive for the group to re-record is unclear. The result, however, is an album's worth of hot-to-death Neptunes hooks and bass sounds tainted with the despicable addition of rap-metal drumming and distorted guitar posturing.
To backtrack a bit, when the "original" album came out about a year ago, the first single was the "BET Uncut Video"-worthy "Lapdance," which promised to fulfill Pharrell's promised prophecies of hip-hop as revolution via chorus lines like, "The politicians are lookin' like to strippers to me." See, Pharrell has been talking a lot of shit since the Neptunes began to get some serious props, stressing that doing a beat for Jay-Z was a way of "getting their message out" to the masses.
But somewhere between "I Jus Wanna Luv U" and "Pass the Courvoisier," signals got crossed. Pharrell, Chad and Shay took the drum tracks off most of the album, and added a drummer who could easily have cut his teeth in a Slipknot cover band. While Rap-Metal 101 drums bang away in the background, the basslines are replaced by chugging guitar riffs reminiscent of your high school hardcore band. What remains, though, is the exceptional quality of Pharrell's voice, which, unlike the bass sound, doesn't lose its intensity due to repeated radio exposure. The lyrics here are mostly decent, too, with the exception of "Brain," which, before it was re-recorded sounded clever, and now sounds like a frat house anthem. "Provider" hints at the fact that were Pharrell and Chad born twelve years ago, they'd be bumping this album along with Kid Rock's Cocky.
One of the greatest benefits of being multi-million dollar producers is having access to recording equipment that will make your sounds even more super-flawless. This, coupled with the Neptunes' five years of hitmaking experience, make for a "well-produced" album, which generally doesn't mean shit to me. Chalk it up to an oversight on the part of N.E.R.D. And their acronym speaks the truth, and No one Ever Really Dies, maybe we'll get our hands on a third, less compromised version of the album, where the drummer has been fired and the guitar is being used to prop up the reconstituted drum machines.


This gently melancholic album from the ambient artist Suzanne Kraft offers solace while rejecting the soporific.

Suzanne Kraft: What You Get for Being Young

What You Get for Being Young

There are times—times of year, times in life, times in an election cycle, maybe—that an escape is needed. Or a cushion for a weary head. Or a curtain to block out the world. Ambient music is often good for that. It can be comfort music, security-blanket music, spark-a-joint-and-go-to-sleep music. As Kevin Drumm once put it, in a song title from his 2009 album Imperial Horizon, “Just Lay Down and Forget It” music.
But some ambient music manages to stretch, however gingerly, beyond those fallback modes. It can soothe, yet still make you curious. It can calm and unsettle in equal measure. Brian Eno said that ambient music should be “as ignorable as it is interesting.” But what gets forgotten in that formulation is that ambient music, at least the really good stuff, should also be as interesting as it is ignorable.
You may find yourself replaying a piece of music like that multiple times in a single sitting—not just because it’s appealingly immersive, but because every time it plays, there’s a question that goes unanswered. It might be a question you can’t really articulate. It might have to do with process: how the music was made, or what time signature it’s in, or something more abstruse, like where the notes end and the effects begin. (These aren’t necessarily things you even think about consciously, but you tease them out nonetheless, tugging at them like you might with a bar puzzle while your mind was far away.) Maybe you simply don’t know quite how it makes you feel. And in some circumstances—say, for instance, that you know that you otherwise feel just shit-awful—that openness is a good thing. It creates a space of possibility.
Back in the early years of the decade, Suzanne Kraft—Los Angeles’ Diego Herrera, who today lives in Amsterdam—was making Metro Area-influenced house and disco, springy and dubby and slow, good music for the early or very late hour on the dancefloor. By last year’s Talk From Home, also for London’s Melody As Truth label, he had eased into a more contemplative mode: gentle synthesizers, clean-toned guitar, lilting cadences flecked with the LinnDrum’s telltale ping-pong thwack. Much in the vein of his label-mate Jonny Nash’s group Gaussian Curve, it was airy and spacious, and its final track, “The Result,” hinted at something even more ethereal in its beatless synths and fretless bass.
His new album picks up where “The Result” left off. Across much of it, there is almost nothing there beyond synthesizers, a few stray horns, and faint echo in place of connective tissue. Even the cuts with drums are essentially ambient in feel: In “Bank,” a song reminiscent of both K. Leimer and Shy Layers, a tentative drum groove frames watery synths and tendrils of guitar. Something about its overlapping layers makes it difficult to determine where phrases begin and end, and it sways gently back and forth, like a small craft rocked by waves. “One Amongst Others” moves with a similar sort of fast/slow tempo, and it counts out in five-bar phrases instead of four—a structural quirk that leaves you feeling off balance, even if you don’t realize it. Its cool, brooding chords, meanwhile, also have an unsettled air, shifting back and forth in search of the root note like a cat choosing a place to lie down.
Those are the most substantial tracks. “Fragile” offers just two sets of chords fluttering in counterpoint; quiet, scratchy bursts of distortion emphasize the outer surface of the sound, and a momentary bend in pitch gives the impression that the music is about to slide off the tape entirely. The wintry “Zé” is just muted tones and atonal squiggles that move like startled birds. And “Scripted Space,” warm as a freshly baked batch of muffins, is similarly minimalist, with arpeggios tripping up the scale and trickling back down through the delay chain. The sequence of notes is so fleet and slippery that you can’t quite fix upon them, certainly not enough to sing them back to yourself. The delay functions not as a crutch but as a channel, a conduit—not a way of filling space, but of revealing it.
The bookending “Body Heat” and “Further” are more lyrical—particularly the opener, with its mournful, drifting saxophones—but they’re hardly much more substantial; they seem more like conjuring acts than compositions. It’s striking how much Herrera manages with such meager materials. It’s not that the music is calming, which it is; it’s the way it gets under your skin, the way the ripples on the surface suggest hidden forces below. This short, gently melancholy album offers solace while rejecting the soporific. It is a cushion to fall back upon—one just springy enough, perhaps, to set you in motion again.