Reissues of early recordings reveal a blistering, primordial version of Fucked Up, steeped in the tight-knit Toronto punk scene they called home.

Epics in Minutes / Demo 7"

There are two ways to listen to Epics in Minutes, Fucked Up’s newly reissued compilation of early recordings. You can approach it as a codex that hides the keys to the prog-punk maximalism the Toronto band would ultimately embrace on albums like 2008’s The Chemistry of Common Life and 2011’s David Comes to Life, or you can hear it as a no-frills collection of hardcore ass-beaters. That each method feels equally valid is a testament to what a killer band Fucked Up were from the moment they started playing together—even before they figured out exactly what kind of band they wanted to be.
The Epics in Minutes tracklisting draws on five recording sessions from 2002 and 2003, and this reissue bundles it with a 7" of ultra-raw material from an even earlier demo tape. The primordial version of Fucked Up that appears on these tracks is steeped in the tight-knit Toronto punk scene they called home. They shared members with hard-hitting, elemental hardcore bands like No Warning and Career Suicide, and the songs they were writing at the time fit comfortably alongside those of their peers. This Fucked Up is blistering and direct, without any superfluous flourishes adorning the pummeling drums, driving bass, tightly wound guitar, and Damian Abraham’s throat-shredding vocals. Within a few years, the counterintuitive pleasure of hearing Abraham’s jagged yawp clash with the band’s bright melodies would become a calling card for Fucked Up. Here, his singing just makes sense.
The song that best highlights the power of early Fucked Up is the ACAB anthem “Police,” still a pit-opening live staple nearly two decades after its release. It’s built around an onomatopoeic siren of a guitar riff, a subversive nod to the cops excoriated in its lyrics. Abraham recounts the litany of indignities he’s faced at the hands of the Toronto P.S.: “Sleeping on the bench, they punch me in the chest/Trying to get some sleep, they throw me in the Jeep.” It’s a righteously angry song, but it isn’t dour in execution. There’s a nervy energy to the band’s playing that makes all that piss-and-vinegar fury sound like a total blast. By the time the closing refrain hits (“I can’t stand the police in this fucking city”), everyone without a badge is screaming along.
“Police” is formally straightforward, but the way Mike Haliechuk and Josh Zucker’s guitar parts interlock and play off Sandy Miranda’s sturdy bass lines hints at the deeper, richer melodic vein the band would unearth on later releases. An even stronger hint comes in the form of “Baiting the Public,” which would appear in expanded form on the band’s first proper LP, 2006’s Hidden World. On Epics in Minutes, it’s a brawny diptych of infectiously catchy, sub-three minute hardcore songs, with perniciously sunny melodies underpinning its relentless forward momentum. In retrospect, it’s obvious that the band who put these songs on a 500-run 7" was destined for something grander.
You have to squint a lot harder to find the seeds of Fucked Up’s final form in the Demo 7". Its confrontationally lo-fi production obliterates any hidden melodic nuance, but it’s unmistakably still Fucked Up. Even more so than Epics in Minutes, it sounds like something you’d be impressed by halfway through an eight-band matinee, jotting a note in your phone to look it up afterward. That’s just as precious as the music that more readily suggests Fucked Up’s evolution. Before they were Polaris Prize winners and critical darlings, they were part of a scene, one band among many pouring their hearts into hardcore and hoping somebody would listen.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On their final album, the Japanese psych rockers push beyond the horizons of their previous records. The songs are compact in comparison to their side-long odysseys, but they continually keep you guessing.

Kumoyo Island

Kumoyo Island is a full-circle moment for Kikagaku Moyo, but the circle continues to widen. Earlier this year, the long-haired Japanese psych-rock unit announced an indefinite hiatus to follow the release of the LP, their fifth and final album. They’ve accomplished a lot in their decade as a band, earning fans worldwide thanks to sprawling, spellbinding live performances with two guitars and a sitar, and launching a label, Guruguru Brain, to document a growing crop of Asian psych acts. Returning to the studio in Tokyo where they recorded their earliest material, Kikagaku Moyo were given an unrestricted time limit, and the quintet used this opportunity to venture outside of its already expansive comfort zones. The result is a farewell album that feels like both a reinvention and a culmination.
Kikagaku Moyo began in 2012 as the duo of drummer/vocalist Go Kurosawa and guitarist/vocalist Tomo Katsurada. While spending time in the U.S. during college studies, they attended their first DIY house shows, which contrasted strikingly with venues in Japan charging musicians $300 to perform a 30-minute set. This inspired them to write lyrics in an imaginary language of invented syllables in the attempt to make their music universal, as they played early gigs busking under cherry-blossom trees and outside of train stations. Go’s brother Ryu was asked to join after he returned from India to study the sitar, while bassist Kotsuguy was invited when they found him recording the sound of vending machines for his drone project. This fusion of classical training and playful experimentation is partly what makes the band stand out from legions of stylistically constrained, retro-cosplaying psych acts.
Recent releases have included Kikagaku Moyo’s 2018 album Masana Temples—a relatively mellow collection of songs produced by Portuguese jazz guitarist Bruno Pernadas—and 2021’s Deep Fried Grandeur, a live collaboration with Ryley Walker. Kumoyo Island stands out from both with its busy instrumental arrangements and newfound embrace of Japanese cultural traditions. Taking its name from a wafer sweet, opener “Monaka” augments min'yō folk music with slinky electric guitars. “Yayoi Iyayoi” is a rare song from the band with lyrics in Japanese, beginning as a gentle lullaby before switching into minimalist garage rock. Midway through, it changes once again, adding chiming percussion and airy gang vocals before the riffs soar into the stratosphere. These songs are compact in comparison to the band’s side-long odysseys, but they consistently keep you guessing at what’s coming next.
“Dancing Blue” is one of the funkiest jams Kikagaku Moyo have laid to tape, layering a chicken-scratch wah-wah riff over handclaps and chanted vocals. Unlike other songs on the album, it maintains a consistent mood across its six minutes, making for a nice contrast with the more complexly structured patchworks. “Cardboard Pile,” on the other hand, fades in with a heavy, Boredoms-style groove that sounds like it’s already been building for several minutes, then abandons it completely. The song’s second half cycles through Tuareg-like guitar riffs and regal blasts of brass inspired by the funk music that Kikagaku Moyo encountered during their trip to Lisbon to record Masana Temples. The horns are a natural addition to the band’s wanderlusting sound, and could provide thrilling hip-hop sample fodder in the hands of an adventurous beatmaker.
“Meu Mar” continues to blur the boundaries between cultures. Originally written by Brazil’s Erasmos Carlos, the song’s Portuguese lyrics were first translated into English, then to Japanese. No matter what language the band sings in, “Gomugomu” is a psychedelic pop wonder, shifting between key changes as it bobs down a lazy river of warbling riffs and wailing guitar harmonies. Other short songs like “Daydream Soda” and “Field of Tiger Lilies” feel more like interludes than proper compositions, but they provide a welcome respite from the furious riffage. “Maison Silk Road” sails the album to a blissful ambient conclusion, with heavenly piano chords and curlicues of sitar that circle back to the sound of the band’s 2013 debut.
Kikagaku Moyo’s name translates to “Geometric Patterns.” This came to founding member Go Kurosawa during an all-night jam session when he was so tired that he began seeing grids of shapes when he closed his eyes. It sounds psychedelic, but it’s also something of a misnomer in terms of the band’s unstructured approach, which entails never taking more than two takes for any given song. “Even if someone makes a mistake, that’s the real us and mistakes can sometimes turn into really interesting peculiarities,” Kurosawa has said. As one of the most consistently thrilling representatives of a global psych community, Kikagaku Moyo continue to make unpredictable choices, even on an album that didn’t need to be more than a celebratory victory lap. Kumoyo Island is the apex of their journey, introducing new musical territories while surveying just how far they’ve traveled.


At their best, YACHT gave us Devo's wit, Blondie's grace, and Tom Tom Club's playful energy, all wrapped in a knowing grin and a clever concept. Four years since their last album, YACHT has changed.

YACHT: I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler

I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler

Claire L. Evans is as fascinated by and enamored with ideas of "the future" as she is skeptical and critical of them. She's an ardent "science fiction apologist," a busy writer, an editor at VICE's science and tech journal Motherboard, and a co-creator of 5 Every Day, an app that provides users with "a no-nonsense events calendar and exploration engine" in and around Los Angeles. She's smart as hell, bursting with talent, and pretty damn cool, to put it plainly, someone you can't help but pay attention to when she speaks. Her Twitter is patently great.
Evans is also a member of YACHT, an erstwhile solo project started by Jonah Bechtolt in 2002. Over the course of two albums for James Murphy's DFA label, 2009's See Mystery Lights and 2011's Shangri-La, the pair shared vocal and songwriting duties, crafting disco-touched pop songs exploring cosmic anomalies, hallucinatory excursions, and utopian ideals. It never mattered much that the basis of their sound started as an homage to LCD Soundsystem—hell, even the music video to "Summer Song" was an homage—because their attitudes and charisma elevated the music. At their best, YACHT gave us Devo's wit, Blondie's grace, and Tom Tom Club's playful energy, all wrapped in a knowing grin and a clever concept.
Four years later, YACHT has changed, sort of. Evans, now the sole lead singer, is pictured alone on the cover of I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler, and the title makes clear that she now has something to say. It all seems promising on paper: Evans' credentials posit her as a strong, intelligent voice, and YACHT's punky dance-pop would ostensibly sit well within the latest '80s resurgence. And yet not quite.
For one, although her tone has shifted drastically, the music has remained as upbeat as ever, even goofy in places. At the beginning of I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler, Evans sings, "I only learned who I loved when I left them all in the past," and by its end she's shouting, "Give me entertainment! Death by entertainment!" It makes for a jarring match. When we're told of "mediated war zones and countries full of death" over breezy post-disco grooves and light Rhodes chords in "Matter", it's like a friend making an off-color joke over text—you're pretty sure they're being sarcastic, but it definitely didn't sound that way.
There is some solid songwriting on Future. The juxtaposition of bubblegum new wave and tender synth-pop in "Don't Be Rude" feels effortless and inventive, and "Miles & Miles" is a rousing throwback to those DFA albums. Bechtolt's co-production with Rob Kieswetter recalls Midnite Vultures electro-funk on "Hologram". But for every decent takeaway, we're confronted with "I Wanna Fuck You Til I'm Dead" or the spastic, vibe-killing chorus of "Ringtone", nonsensical amalgams that range from tactless to tone deaf to straight obnoxious. They're YACHT's uncanny valley: lifelike approximations of late-'90s power pop, early '00s Top 40, and blog-house mp3s that somehow aren't lifelike enough.
I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler has good intentions. As Evans told LA Mag, "The central thesis is not that we're disappointed that we were promised jet packs. It's more like, I don't care about jet packs if we still don’t have basic human rights." Songs comment on our increasing tech obsessions, societal violence and inequality, and future fatigue with effusive hooks, lending each decidedly familiar arrangement a fresh immediacy thanks to upgraded production values. Their messages, however, are in turns vague ruminations, condescending truisms, or just foregone conclusions for anyone with an interest in current events. Future is YACHT's would-be critique of our pre-dystopian, post-Internet culture, but it rarely comes off as more than a charismatic cover band singing us yesterday's news.


I Sell the Circus—Robert Pollard's restorative 15-song debut as Ricked Wicky—boasts a consistent, hi-fi spin on the beery arena rock that Pollard has spent the last 15 years alchemizing.

I Sell the Circus

Before Guided by Voices, before Boston Spaceships, before the Circus Devils, Go Back Snowball, Acid Ranch, Psycho & the Birds and all the rest, there was Ricked Wicky. Well, sort of; when a then-teenaged Robert Pollard dreamt up his very first band from his Dayton bedroom, the name Ricked Wicky shone down from the imaginary marquee. Through dozens of bands and hundreds of records, Pollard—whose inhuman output rarely leaves him holding much in his back pocket for very long—held onto Ricked Wicky. Why he'd resurrect it now—with Guided by Voices' second act retreating into the rearview—isn't hard to figure: though they managed six LPs in four years' time, you increasingly got the sense Pollard's famously overactive mind was starting to wander. So, after a few shaky years and far too many diminishing returns, Pollard's looking to cast off expectations, refocus his efforts, and get back to what got him here in the first place.
Ricked Wicky finds Pollard joined by a few familiars—right-hand man Todd Tobias and Earthquake Glue-era GBV drummer Kevin March—and one complete newcomer to the Pollard fold: Nick Mitchell, a Dayton guitarist who Pollard stresses is "no relation" to ex-GBV axeman Mitch. Nearly all of I Sell the Circus, Ricked Wicky's restorative 15-song debut, was laid down on analog tape at Dayton's Cyberteknics; the sound is clean, crisp, and most of all, consistent, a comparatively hi-fi spin through the beery arena rock, prog-addled balladry and post-R.E.M. jangle that Pollard's spent the last 15 years alchemizing into something all its own. I Sell the Circus isn't a particularly surprising record, but in Pollard's recent catalog, it's among the most satisfying: 15 would-be anthems and stumbling serenades, no muss, little fuss.
I Sell the Circus bounds out of the gate with a five-song stretch to rival that on any Pollard record of the last half-decade: the sunny "Well Suited", the strutting "Death Metal Kid", the spry jangle of "Guts", the champagne-on-an-empty-stomach stumble of "Cow Headed Moon", and the slick, swaggering "Piss Face". Delicately accented—a dab of pump organ here, a sliver of slide guitar there—and blithely catchy, this five-song run is post-millenial Pollard at his finest: nimble, lively, just mercurial enough.
While it starts off strong, Circus does get a little paunchy around the midsection."Uranus Flies" isn't much more than shits and giggles, while "Even Today and Tomorrow" only differentiates itself from the dime-a-dozen proggy Pollard ballads that pepper Pollard's every release only through Nick Mitchell's stately steel-string runs. Pollard passes the mic to Mitchell (who, God bless him, sounds for all the world like Bob Pollard just before) for the egghead-baiting "The Intellectual Types"; sure it's dumb, but it's just the right kind of dumb.
Pollard being Pollard, certain quirks are inevitable: throwaway lyrics, overstuffed tracks, underwritten hooks, flagging energies. But the overall impression one gets from Circus is that of engagement: Pollard clearly wants this thing to work, wants to find a few guys to play with who he doesn't feel held back by, and despite the occasional foible here and there, his dedication to Ricked Wicky's cause rings out throughout nearly all of I Sell the Circus. One regal instrumental ("Tomorrow"), another hall-of-mirrors ballad ("Rotten Backboards"), and several more-than-serviceable rockers later, and Circus goes out on a high—"A Real Stab", a stirring slab of straightahead power-pop that seems to gather strength as it charges towards the finish line.
Pollard could've kept GBV going: if nothing else, the money's probably better. Or he could've peeled off a few picture-perfect pop songs for any number of washed-up rockers without an idea between them, collected a few fat royalty checks, and spent the rest of his days holding court at home in Dayton. And he could've just as easily retreated into weirdness, content in the knowledge that the loyal servants of the Fading Captain would continue to lap up just about anything he had to offer. Instead, we get Ricked Wicky: recognizably him, but with what—after a few rocky years—feels like a renewed sense of purpose. If Circus isn't a front-to-back triumph, it's got enough juice in it to forgive the occasional misfire. Whether Ricked Wicky proves an ongoing Boston Spaceships-style reboot or just another nifty diversion remains to be seen; we'll know more in June, when their second album's due. For now, though, he's done teenage Bob proud.


Citing Gwen Stefani and Grimes as influences, the L.A. duo’s heartfelt take on bubblegum is a sensitive sort of bombastic pop that wants you to be sensitive, too.

Magdalena Bay: A Little Rhythm and a Wicked Feeling EP

A Little Rhythm and a Wicked Feeling EP

Magdalena Bay take pity on bubblegum. From their L.A. apartment, bandmates Mica Tenenbaum and Matt Lewin create the kind of pop songs that, at first pass, appear destined for radios and stadium tours the world over. As influences, they cite not only Gwen Stefani and Britney Spears, but celebrity pop songwriter Julia Michaels and the elaborate, pop-inspired production of Grimes’ Art Angels. Over the past three years, they’ve released a string of EPs and singles that embrace the bratty, shimmery sound of ’00s pop radio hits. On their latest EP, A Little Rhythm and a Wicked Feeling, the band’s DIY approach culminates in their most confident project to date, a sensitive sort of bombastic pop that wants you to be sensitive, too.
As bass-heavy as Charli XCX and as melodically minded as Carly Rae Jepsen, these songs are not unlike the hyperactive computer pop popularized by PC Music. What sets Magdalena Bay apart is the gentleness of their lyrics and spacious, mood-building production. “Airplane,” the EP’s balmiest moment, is about the pressure of the rat race: the craving for a hectic work week, the urge to “[bend] over backwards” as your “heart breaks.” Tenenbaum tries to detach, reassuring herself that “I’m breathing, I’m feeding my soul.” Such a sincere, thoughtful sentiment seems almost misplaced against the song’s irreverent synth fireworks, but the result is endearingly camp—the playful, theatrical sensibility that serves as a vehicle for genuine sensitivity. In the words of Susan Sontag, “Camp is a tender feeling.”
Of course, the duo’s source material is more ostentatious: Their favorite eras of ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s pop were defined by incandescent production and ridiculously earnest style choices. Magdalena Bay’s self-conscious, homegrown approach is less interested in imitating bubblegum pop than pushing the limits of its meaning. “How to Get Physical” calls back to Olivia Newton-John’s legendary ’80s banger, which Dua Lipa also mined for her recent single “Physical.” But where those songs demanded that we “get physical,” Tenenbaum is more coy, wondering “how to get physical when you’re not made for dancing.” The track itself is sugary and ecstatic, like diving into a vat of fruit punch—you can hear the liquid sloshing as she sings about “cheap wine taking over me.” It’s that pairing of campiness with attention to detail that prevents these songs from sounding like flat emulations of No Doubt circa 2002.
A Little Rhythm’s slick vocal hooks, glimmering synths, and final crescendos are the same tools Top 40 pop writers use to craft a hit—and the same conceits PC Music and its ilk aim to subvert—but here they’re used to different effect. “I feel your breathing in my bedroom when I’m by myself,” Tenenbaum murmurs on “Oh Hell,” against a backdrop of hovering synth and sticky 808 kicks. The lazy tempo, glittery flourishes, and washed-out, doubled vocals aren’t the stuff of mainstream radio. Magdalena Bay aren’t performing a simple genre flip, or attempting to appeal to the masses; they’re building something personal and seeing how big it can get. Rather than obscuring emotion, their manufactured sound invokes its own kind of nostalgic joy. A Little Rhythm and a Wicked Feeling is a reminder that exaggeration or artificiality don’t have to mean soullessness; pop music is supposed to be a loud, flashy monument to earnest, embarrassing emotion. Listen to it shamelessly, euphorically, with love in your heart.


A split EP between the prepared-piano composer and the noise musician explores their shared affinity for sounds that balance beauty with unease.

Prurient / Kelly Moran: Chain Reaction at Dusk

Chain Reaction at Dusk

If all you had to go on was a passing familiarity with Kelly Moran’s delicate prepared-piano music, you might have scratched your head at her participation in Hospital Productions’ annual noise hoedown Hospital Fest, where she appeared in December 2018. The New York pianist and composer looked like an outlier on a bill that included the thrash-metal titans Power Trip, Japanese junk-metal noisemaker Linekraft, and Autoerotichrist, whose R. Mason ended his set covered in his own blood. But spend time with Moran’s 2018 album Ultraviolet and you might hear something extreme and uncompromising in its own way, its plucked strings and inky pools of electronics imbued with a prickly tension that remained stubbornly unresolved.
A similar spirit runs through Chain Reaction at Dusk, a split album between Moran and Hospital Productions proprietor Dominick Fernow, aka Prurient. The pair met in 2018 when both were booked to support Oneohtrix Point Never at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, bonding over a shared interest in drone and noise synthesis and the avant-garde piano compositions of John Cage and Erik Satie. This record, recorded in 2018, in advance of Fernow and Moran’s U.S. tour with Merzbow, demonstrates the artists’ clear affinity with one another. Both artists dig into the pulsating repetitions of systems music to strike a balance between contemplative beauty and anxious disquiet.
As on Ultraviolet, Moran’s side melds prepared piano with granular synthesis. Her three tracks often feel like an extension of the territory she explored on that album—particularly “Helix III,” which bumps the intensity of Ultraviolet’s “Helix” up a couple of notches with the addition of chiming synthesizer arpeggios. Moran’s pieces here often draw on the qualities of religious or spiritual music: “Hymn” commences with droning church organ before Moran mixes gentle piano progressions with flurries of shimmering struck notes. “Red Storm,” meanwhile, strikes a similarly numinous tone. In places it resembles a gleaming, hi-fi version of Laraaji’s hammered dulcimer music, or the brittle, trance-like improvisations of Michael O’Shea: music aligned with new-age tropes, but presented with a dark, ambiguous hue.
It’s tempting to think of Prurient’s side of Chain Reaction at Dusk as a response to Moran’s music, although given the ground Fernow has covered with his longest-running project, it’s difficult to say that for sure. The fiery extremity that often characterizes his work is largely absent, though this isn’t a complete curveball. Recorded using a bank of vintage analog synths and sequencers, its two tracks feel broadly in line with the music Fernow was making circa 2011’s Bermuda Drain, a fully realized album—albeit one that proved divisive among the noise-bro contingent of his fanbase—in which Fernow dug into melodic electronic music, inspired by the minimal techno he encountered while on tour in Europe.
“Tokyo Exorcist” echoes some of the religious connotations of Moran’s contributions, its liturgical synth bringing to mind kosmische explorers like Klaus Schulze or Tangerine Dream. It would probably work neatly as the soundtrack to a gory Italian giallo, and Fernow’s dour spoken-word interludes—and the occasional tolling of a distant bell—further contribute to the atmosphere of spooky disquiet. We get a little more of the classic Prurient sturm und drang on “Help if I May Ask,” which commences with a firehose of white noise that finally abates to reveal a canvas of pallid synths and cryptic vocal asides, layered until incoherent. Towards the track’s end, Fernow treats the faithful to some trademarked Prurient vocal pyrotechnics. But the music remains muted and atmospheric, and the effect is more starkly enticing because of it.
Split records often sit awkwardly in their respective artists’ discographies. But Chain Reaction at Dusk works because it feels like it was designed to form a coherent whole. Moran and Fernow may come from different worlds, but they are also adept at moving between them, and this record stands as a reminder that a shared sensibility often offers a more interesting meeting point than a space merely delineated by the strictures of genre.

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On his second full-length album, the guitarist and producer’s songs are engorged and confident, powered by deft performances and focused storytelling.

Gemini Rights

Steve Lacy once called his commitment to DIY songwriting and production “the bare maximum.” The phrase—and the TED Talk it appeared in—championed humble tools like the jailbroken iPhone on which he recorded his 2017 solo debut as assets rather than limitations. If he could land a spot in the Internet’s lineup, score Grammy nominations, and book recording sessions with Solange and Ezra Koenig just from fiddling around in GarageBand—all as a teenager—why would he depend on professional studios and equipment to create? The motivational pitch struck a chord with aspiring musicians, but Lacy’s solo work had its limits.
Although his snippets, demos, and beat loops impressively melded rock, funk, and R&B into rich blends, the songs rarely amounted to more than appetizers. Lacy’s best and fullest works (Ravyn Lenae’s Crush EP, the Internet’s Hive Mind) tended to be collaborative, his cowriters and bandmates fleshing out his sprawling ideas. His second album, Gemini Rights, affirms the value of collaborators to the guitarist and producer’s process. These songs are engorged and confident, powered by deft performances and focused storytelling rather than raw talent.

Lacy reset his approach to recording to make the album. After he struggled to write using his tried-and-true phone and laptop setup, he found success working in studios alongside other artists and professional engineers. The change in venue and method shows at every level. Where lyrics often functioned as placeholders in his past music (see “Something something something” from “Basement Jack”), here they are rooted in experiences. Gemini Rights was inspired by Lacy breaking up with a boyfriend, and the songs mine the turbulence of that headspace even as Lacy sings of other lovers.
He sashays between relief, regret, longing, and resentment. “If you had to stunt your shining for your lover, dump that fucker,” he croons on “Static,” dour guitar and keyboard melodies gleaming in the background. On “Mercury” his voice swings from delicate, dolce murmurs to an impassioned Auto-Tuned singsong. “Oh, I know myself, my skin/Rolling stones don’t crawl back in,” he sings, his emotions as mixed as his metaphors. The writing doesn’t always succeed at being intimate, but it is at minimum expressive, a change likely attributable to the singer Fousheé, who is credited on half the songs.
Lacy foregrounds his voice more than he has previously, harmonizing with himself and his sisters on “Helmet,” dueting with Fousheé on “Sunshine,” and cooing in an airy falsetto on “Give You the World.” The falsetto is his shakiest and least personal instrument, skewing mechanical on “Amber” and “Cody Freestyle” in ways that pantomime big feelings rather than articulate them. Although he’s often compared to Prince and Stevie Wonder, Pharrell and Solange are more apt reference points—they also struggled to harness their voices early in their careers.
Lacy’s lower, more talky notes are fuller and more playful, complementing his fluid guitar work. Highlight “Bad Habit” pairs bright guitar riffs and funk synths with pleading vocals, Lacy voicing his shyness with a knockout earworm on the chorus. On “Helmet,” theatrical adlibs and a plump bassline fill an otherwise defeated moment with warmth. “I tried to play pretend (Oh-oh)/Tried not to see the end (Ah-ah)/But I couldn’t see you the way you saw me/Now I can feel the waste on me,” Lacy sings. He’s more interested in understanding the failed relationship than litigating it.
As Lacy zooms in on particular feelings and moments in his tales of modern heartbreak and courtship, he tends to sound detached and distant even when he speaks in first-person, and not in a dissociative way. There’s little tension or depth to the songwriting even when it flares with color, a longstanding shortcoming in his artful but often straightforward music. Gemini Rights does not set out to resolve that tendency, but the album turns toward the path. For the first time, Lacy’s virtuosity is in service of his vision rather than the extent of it.


Jack Dangers ambles on in an almost hypnotic fashion through modern electronic music.

At the Center

Meat Beat Manifesto main man Jack Dangers has made a career out of continually being at the forefront of electronic music. From his early industrial-tinged material with then-collaborator Johnny Stevens, to explorations of trip-hop, house, jungle, dub, and beyond, Dangers has never remained in one place for too long. At the Center, his first full length of all-new material since 2002's RUOK?, continues the evolution by combining his signature break-beats and samples with jazz provided by flutist Peter Gordon, drummer Dave King, and keyboardist Craig Taborn.
From start to finish, At the Center covers a wide range of moods. The disc begins with "Wild", a slow, slinking number that builds layers of breaking beats, flute, and organ. It slides almost seamlessly into "Flute Thang", which lives up to its name with extensive flute soloing over piano arpeggios and short guitar bursts. "Bohemian Grove" has a middle-eastern flair, with prominent sitar over string swells, while, "United Nations Etc. Etc" evokes Daft Punk with a muffled, bouncy bass line and twisting keyboard noodling. Finally, the disc's closer, "Granulation 1", is a creepy combination of haunting background surges and off-kilter piano, leaving the listener quite a distance from where he or she began.
The album ambles on in an almost hypnotic fashion, sidling from track to track, switching between purely instrumental tracks and ambient soundscapes with vocal samples. Two such tracks, "Want Ads One" and "Want Ads Two", feature a comical voice-over reading want ads from a newspaper over atmospheric noise. The combination of styles creates balance, and it keeps the listener from getting too comfortable with the disc as a whole. The bulk of the album is jazz-fused, however, and the musicians play off of each other superbly, never stealing the spotlight, but never coming off as tacked on either. For this record, at least, Meat Beat Manifesto sounds as much like a band as a single musician, something Dangers has never really done before.
The real strength of At the Center is just how contemporary it sounds. Dangers never succumbs to the temptation to phone it in, and he never relegates himself to simply giving in and playing generic pop music. For an artist to consistently push the envelope for over 15 years is a marvel, yet Meat Beat Manifesto can easily stand shoulder to shoulder with the current round of lap-top composers, most of whom are building off of his work in the first place.


A clearinghouse of pre-jailtime work, Weezy's latest album is neither a hint of what's to come nor a clear reminder of why we care so much in the first place.

I Am Not a Human Being

Lil Wayne is not back. Not yet. As of this writing, he's due to be released from the Eric M. Taylor Center at Rikers Island on November 4. But even when he switches from inmate #02616544L to Dwayne Carter, free man, will he return as the world beater who stunned us with mixtapes like Dedication 2 and albums like Tha Carter III or will he continue to explore (um) riskier sonic territory á la Rebirth? And, considering his penchant toward exuberant rhymes and a lifestyle blissfully unaware of the word "no," will we ever see the same Wayne that stomped straight into the camera rapping "I'd rather be pushin' flowers than to be in the pen sharin' showers," in the "A Milli" video? On July 22, 2007, just hours before he would be caught with the .40 caliber pistol that would eventually land him in jail, I saw Wayne end a triumphant NYC show at the famed, fancy Beacon Theater by blaring Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" through the speakers. That night he was funny and dangerous and unpredictable. So: Even when Wayne ends his eight months of forced containment, will that Wayne really be back?
As we prepare to find out, we first get I Am Not a Human Being, an album's worth of material recorded before his jail stint and featuring some tracks originally intended for his proper return LP, Tha Carter IV. The record is supposed to act as a reminder of his existence and a precursor to his freedom. And, since it's a genuine hip-hop record with Wayne rapping most of the time, it helps to put his guitar-torturing, choke-throttling Rebirth incarnation to rest. I Am Not a Human Being is the latest in a long line of songs and videos Wayne has appeared on since entering Rikers on March 8; we've seen green-screened versions of him in clips with Eminem, along with his Young Money cohorts Drake and Nicki Minaj. These appearances are meant to show his resiliency and relevancy but oftentimes come off a little depressing-- since he's usually standing in front of an obviously phony and confined backdrop, the videos emphasize his absence more than anything else. I Am Not a Human Being draws a similarly conflicted response. He's there but he's not there.
We get Wayne spouting classic Weezy-isms-- explicit sex, cartoonish gunplay, and allusions to the intricacies of the digestive system abound-- over at-least-decent original beats, several of which attempt to replicate the space-snap wallop of his biggest hit, "Lollipop". But there's a lingering sense that the rapper is not in top gear; his flow is often slow and static, his wordplay lively yet less energized than what we're now used to. When he says, "I been fly so long I fell asleep on the fuckin' plane," or, "So far ahead of them, I feel outdated" in this context, the lines could be taken as a boasts or sighs. And while Wayne was presumably aware of his impending jail term during the recording of some of these tracks, you'd never know it. The most real-life anxiety shown is on the title Run-D.M.C.-style track, when he admits, "Still get a stomach ache every time I see cops." It's a far cry from his "A Milli" invincibility: "Tell the coppers: 'Hahahaha!'/ You can't get him, you can't stop him."
There is one distinct upshot. The finest three songs on I Am Not a Human Being all feature the man who has quickly become Wayne's best-ever counterpart, Drake. The two rappers' contrasting qualities-- Wayne is coarse and random and hoarse while Drake is smooth and exact and clear-- bring out surprising sides of each other. On the sweet-soul track "With You", the Pretty Toney-style beat and Drake's croon draw out Wayne at his most human. Meanwhile, the superhero-synth track "Right Above It" would seemingly fit well on an idealized Tha Carter IV with Drake rhyming breathless as Wayne handles the Auto-Hook. The two have teased at a full collaborative album and, considering the tracks here-- along with worthy past collaborations like "Miss Me" and "I'm Goin' In"-- it has the potential to be one of those rare dream projects that lives up to its promise.
Speaking of Drake, he had this to say about I Am Not a Human Being when talking to MTV recently: "I think it's just a lotta Wayne songs that... you know, it's just that pre-... it's that pre-... it's that stuff that people wanna hear-- but I think Carter IV is gonna be on another level." Not really a sticker-ready quote. His hesitation is justified-- this release has neither the conceptual, lasting power of Tha Carter III nor the inspired spontaneity of Wayne's best mixtapes. And since it was recorded before such a traumatic, life-changing event, it's likely to serve more as a clearinghouse than an indication of what's to come. In one of the more lucid moments in the must-see documentary The Carter, Wayne-- then 25-- looks into his crystal ball and says, "[When I'm] 28, 29 you'll be lookin' for a Lil Wayne album to be full of rap-- the best rap. Full of singin'-- the best songs, not the best singin'. Full of music. Not just whatever you look for now." Wayne has already done better versions of almost every song on I Am Not a Human Being, which was released on his 28th birthday last week. It's not exactly what we're looking for now.

Cash Money / Universal Motown / Young Money Entertainment


Issued suddenly through Bandcamp on New Year’s Day, the three-song Hyperion EP is a succinct, explosive encapsulation of the Brooklyn black metal band's evolution and progression during the last decade. This band keeps improving incrementally, avoiding major statements of reinvention or re-emergence in favor of doggedly refining what it is they’ve done from the very start.

Hyperion EP

In a Brooklyn metal scene that can sometimes seem too precious, drunk on high drama and revisionist approaches, Krallice have emerged as workaday heroes. In only eight years, they've issued five LPs, a single, and an EP of sometimes absurdly rich, long-form black metal. Krallice’s records have served as their manifestos, their music as their answer to every online "hipster metal" kerfuffle in which they’ve been unwillingly implicated.
This isolationist approach came into focus last July, when Krallice self-released the excellent and compact Ygg Huur online with no advance notice or industry assistance. Though the move felt logical after 2012’s independently issued Years Past Matter, Ygg Huur’s hype-free entry still felt like a statement about the ability of signal to transcend noise. The new Hyperion, actually recorded two years before Ygg Huur, supplies the exclamation mark for that thought. Issued suddenly through Bandcamp on New Year’s Day, the three-song follow-up is a succinct, explosive encapsulation of Krallice’s evolution and progression during the last decade. The EP format prevents the band’s trademark intricacy and density from ever crossing into exhaustion; from the feedback-laced beginning to, 24 minutes later, the celestial end, Hyperion always thrills.
Taken together, these three songs speak to vastly different approaches to the band’s black metal background. "Assuming Memory" recalls Krallice of yore, its 10-minute expanse sweeping from a ruminative opening to pirouetting solos to a soft-focus close that drifts into a shoegaze haze. The title track, on the other hand, mirrors the concision of Ygg Huur. Krallice ricochets between sets of complementary riffs and rhythms, as though trapped among the overclocked paddles of a pinball machine.
But it’s between these two bookends, during "The Guilt of Time," that Krallice hits a new compositional apex. It's so sly and subtle that it's easy to miss it. After about three minutes of rather conventional surges and stops, the band settles into a drift and lingers there before emerging above a sustained blast beat, Colin Marston and Mick Barr's guitars soaring above the rhythm section as though it were a ski jump. The guitars hold that position, locked inside a piercing little back-and-forth riff; meanwhile, Weinstein breaks his beat to pound out syncopated drum phrases that suggest warped snippets of military marches or maybe even a funk band. What sounds like a sustained, full-band blast beat, then, is actually a reinforced feint. This is a new level of hyperactivity for Krallice and one of the most thrilling, difficult two-minute clips of the band’s career. After you notice it, you have to hear it again and again, standing back to marvel at the sheer audacity of the moment.
A little less than three years passed between the release of Years Past Matter in 2012 and Ygg Huur last July. It was the longest break in Krallice’s career, as they’d issued at least an album every year (except 2010) since their self-titled debut. Now, though, they appear to be back on pace, and the consecutive successes of Ygg Huur and Hyperion reinforce what (aside from the songs themselves) has long been most admirable about Krallice. This band keeps improving incrementally, avoiding major statements of reinvention or re-emergence in favor of doggedly refining what it is they’ve done from the very start. Hyperion’s lyrics are loaded with references to astral objects, solar bodies, and mythological figures. But this is the work of a delightfully earthbound and centered band—part of a scene, sure, but apart from it, too, more focused on the work itself than the worry around it.


The Kompakt proprietor releases the third volume in his flagship mix series, featuring tracks by Cortney Tidwell, Massive Attack, and more.

Immer 3

It's only produced two previous chapters over the last eight years, but it wouldn't be a stretch to hold up the Immer series as a blueprint for the rushy, melodic, and morose brand of minimal that Michael Mayer and Kompakt have perfected over the last decade. Part of that is just simple math. Unless you count the minute shifts in Kompakt's aesthetic over the years as part of Mayer's creative legacy, the rangy German hasn't exactly been prolific. Sure, there was that memorable Fabric mix, the Speicher series of full-lengths and 12"s, the retrospectively unremarkable solo album Touch, the immediately underwhelming Superpitcher collab Supermayer, and other one-offs and quick-draws. But spread over 12 years, and for a guy who is still routinely held up as a genre figurehead, that's actually not so much.
Better to point to the more intangible things that Mayer developed and honed during that period: his taste, his tempo, his belief in techno as a more fluid, utilitarian, and lovelorn instrument. It's this underlying aesthetic that's informed his best work, his most inspired live sets, his most fruitful signings-- basically the dude's entire legacy-- and nowhere has that been more directly vocalized than in these mixes. They might not happen any more regularly than the World Cup, but it's hard not to feel like the Immers are Mayer's most personal works, the best distillates of everything he loves most.
So it's reassuring to know that Immer 3, still dutifully, almost stubbornly, works within the same parameters as its predecessors. Comprising an Ewan Pearson refit of Cortney Tidwell's possibly overplayed-by-now "Don't Let Stars Keep Us Tangled Up", Closer Musik's twerky "Departures", and the DJ Koze remix of Ben Watt's "Guinea Pig (Vocal Variation with Julia Biel)", Immer 3's opening trio is predictably slow to get off the ground. It isn't until the grinding chords and everything-but-the-kitchen-sink electro house of Tim Paris' wonderful "Edges of Corrosion" that the tempo moves into aerobic territory. Mayer standbys Smith N Hack and Poker Flat alum Raudive provide a stretch of lonely electro leading into the record's highlight: a Gui Boratto remix of Massive Attack's "Paradise Circus". Boasting Hope Sandoval on vocals, a sequence of perfectly interlocked rhythms and melodies, and some of the most desolate piano chords this side of Max Richter, "Paradise Circus" is basically Mayer catnip. It'd be beautiful anywhere, but in these surroundings, it feels especially potent.
Things get a bit lighter after that; Popnoname's "Hello Gorgeous" trades in early-80s synth-led quirk while Superpitcher's exclusive Charlotte Gainsbourg remix ("The Operation") marries her cold, Gallic pop sensibilities with his full-bodied production ethic to striking effect. The mix's other standout moment comes with Culoe de Song's "The Bright Forest", a lush bit of almost-downtempo that ratchets up the drama with syrupy strings and a meandering piano lead. Since the only signature piece missing by this point is some suspiciously earnest Europop, enter Kinky Justice's "New Day" to close things out.
There's an abundance of rhythmic texture and eddying female vocals and broody strings and disco accents, all of it wrapped up in a familiarly understated presentation that prizes atmosphere and accent above force and momentum. It's heady and subtle and stylish and worryingly comforting in that it doesn't sound massively different from anything Mayer was doing in 2002. In fact, by the brute force of his own persistence, he's managed to give this sound the sort of longevity-- and by extension validity-- that a lot of early-Kompakt skeptics never thought it would enjoy. Maybe it even explains the title: Immer means "always."


The smoky-voiced R&B multi-instrumentalist charts the ups and downs of a relationship with the help of guests like Jay Electronica and Floating Points.

YU

The Leeds-based singer Rosie Lowe debuted in 2013 with “Right Thing,” a brooding R&B-soul hybrid that made the aftereffects of a breakup sound like being submerged in a sensory deprivation tank. Her atmospheric 2016 LP Control explored the emotional give-and-take of modern dating, and despite being cloistered by a few too many glazed, anonymous synths, there were quietly compelling songs (see: the body-image treatise “Woman”) to bear out Lowe’s songwriting finesse. For follow-up YU, Lowe improves on her formula by expanding her circle. Calling on a diverse group of collaborators ranging from Jay Electronica to Floating Points, she assembles a warm-blooded pop/soul/funk hybrid that charts the ups and downs of a relationship.
Lowe’s lyrics can sometimes scan as overly simplistic, as on the icily aimless “Valium,” but her songwriting blooms when she leans on more fantastical metaphors. Early highlight “Pharoah” struts on a swaggering bass line and a hypnotic organ sample from Pharoah Sanders’ 1977 “Memories of Edith Johnson,” while Lowe conjures Egyptian gods and goddesses: “My hair is Nu/My face is Ra/My eyes are Hathor/But worlds apart.” On the simmering “Mango,” she plays Eve seducing Adam, ratcheting up the double entendres: “I adore the selection you bring/It’s your platter that makes my tastebuds ring/…And I’ve been looking for some fruit for my tree.”
Her gravelly, soaring voice is supported by Lowe’s longtime producer Dave Okumu, who adds dynamic, rubbery synths that feel like HD upgrades of his work on Control. On the disorienting highlight “ITILY,” a sweeping synth line underpins Lowe's moony thoughts of an affair: “Don’t wanna come on strong but he has gone out/And he won’t be home for another three hours.” The warped effect mimics the head rush of forbidden romance, with the repetition of the one-line chorus (“I think I love you”) drilling in its obsessive side-effects.
YU’s guest features occasionally come across as half-baked. The pop-minded “The Way,” driven by a jaunty bass guitar, is a bright spot until Jay Electronica settles into a long-winded, tacked-on guest verse addled by clumsy references to UK landmarks as well as the groan-inducing couplet, “Show me the way like Glinda Good Witch/My heart’s so tired like BFGoodrich.” Elsewhere, she casts a who’s-who of singers to fill in as a Greek chorus to better effect: Jamies Woon and Lidell, Kwabs, and Jordan Rakei make up the head-spinning, processed backing vocals on “Birdsong,” which also features a skidding, Jai Paul-ian electric guitar.
YU comes to us via Paul Epworth’s Wolf Tone Records, which may account for its vague sense of boutique-y, almost-too-tasteful A&R-ing (Epworth has steered Adele and Florence and the Machine’s music to similarly refined ends). Yet Lowe’s sophomore album retains a distinct point of view, with her folkloric sensibility and forward-thinking production shining through despite some smoothed-over platitudes. Lowe is only growing as an artist, and YU heralds a bright future.


The posthumous ambient music of the mercurial genius featured on “S-Town” is a peek into the sounds of his quiet and fascinating life.

John B. McLemore: Witness Marks: The Works of John B. McLemore

Since its release on March 28, 2017, the podcast “S-Town” has been downloaded over 40-million times, a figure that suggests just how many people have heard about the John B. McLemore, the mercurial genius from Bibb County, Alabama. In 2012, shortly after McLemore first connected his computer to the internet, he contacted Brian Reed, a producer at the documentary radio show “This American Life” to investigate what he believed to be an alleged and covered-up murder in his hometown. The real story, as Reed and “S-Town” point out, was McLemore—a renowned antiquarian horologist (an old clock repairman), an architect of intricate hedge mazes, an amateur expert in climate science, and an eloquent autodidact. Reed detailed McLemore like a character ripped from the pages of a Southern Gothic novel but in the middle of reporting his story, John B. McLemore killed himself by ingesting his own tincture of potassium cyanide.
From an extensive Reddit fan community to a mountain of essays dissecting the ethical and aesthetic merits of the show, “S-Town” has produced its own cottage industry of errata and commentary in the year since its release. And perhaps the most unusual finding from McLemore’s life comes from the ambient musician and painter Tor Lundvall. Right around the time McLemore was in contact with Brian Reed, he was also emailing Lundvall to express admiration for his work and to ask him if he could upload a mix of Lundvall’s work (including his own remixes and original compositions) to YouTube.
Lundvall consented, and he and McLemore began a two-month-long exchange of emails and letters. One of the exchanges included five ambient pieces McLemore composed—using manipulated field recordings collected around his property along with synths, drums, and piano—in 2003. Lundvall only learned of McLemore’s death after “S-Town”’s release when he revisited the Youtube mix and saw commenters eulogizing McLemore. Since that discovery and after listening to “S-Town,” Lundvall and Dais have decided to make McLemore’s music public, and that collection, Witness Marks, provides a fascinating new way to understand the life of the most interesting man in podcasting history.
Witness Marks’ five pieces come with an important set of listening instructions: McLemore wrote that it “requires a nearly Isolated listening environment...It should be heard After Midnight, in the Late Fall of the year, and, not surprisingly, a Very Long Attention span is a Prerequisite.” Comprised of field recordings and instrumentation, the songs range from 55 seconds to over 22 minutes. Each composition is dark, sprawling, intricate, but rough, and almost DIY. The album’s first six minutes, on its opener “Clock Chimes in the Mist” is this hypnotic collage of clock chimes and the interlocking of gears—giving a listener a meaningful peak into the personal emotion behind McLemore’s craft as a horologist. Taking the song’s title almost literally, slowly a kind of sonic fog rolls over the sounds of the clock, creating this undeniably spooky feeling. But it all breaks, and a chintzy synth line, drum machine, mournful piano, and later rain sounds slither their way into the scene. The piece hangs together, but the sudden, almost random shift in the middle shows McLemore might’ve been still learning how to sew together a song, and the seams in many of these pieces are still showing.
McLemore did show real chops as a fledgling ambient musician. On the album’s second track, his cover of Lundvall’s 2001 song “Dark Spring,” he creates an evocative backdrop with the sound of a thick rainfall and swirling noise that is soothing and just a little screwy—like encountering a Irv Teibel new age field recording if it was passed through a funhouse mirror. The collection’s best song, “His Darker Paintings,” is both simple and inventive: It’s just a manipulation of recordings of dried seedpods being shaken like a rain stick, mixed with insect chirps and other environmental sounds. And right towards the end, those noises disappear and a creaky door opens, the sound looped over and over again, till the album ends, with the image and noise of a door left ajar being the last thing we encounter. It’s absolutely haunting.
Yet, even as I listened to the album over and over again, discovering new bits and pieces of sound each time, I kept feeling like looking at these songs on a purely musical level might be missing the point. The final lines from McLemore’s suicide note rang in my head each time I played Witness Marks: “Sometimes I just spent hours playing my records...Sometimes I sat in the dark and listened to the creaking of the old house,” he wrote. The album is the closest someone will get to hearing what McLemore heard on his farm—its field recordings of crickets, dog barks, clock machinery, and all the rest. As Ryan Martin, the co-founder of Dais notes, the album is attempting to “capture the universe” of McLemore’s home, and listening to Witness Marks, it’s hard to say he does not succeed.
In a way, Witness Marks is as tricky to critique as “S-Town”: As a personal work that might never have been intended to be consumed by a public audience. If we take the music for what is—without all its baggage—it is the work of an incredibly skilled amateur who showed great potential. But it is impossible to look at the work in a vacuum. As another accessory to “S-Town,” it gives the podcast’s giant audience a new way to understand McLemore. From that angle, like the show, it feels beautiful and painful all at once to listen to even one minute Witness Marks.


The Australian producer trades the moody house of his breakout hit, “Winona,” for big-room techno suggestive of the kinds of clubs he has gotten used to playing in recent years.

Like Water

In the fall of 2016, YouTube tastemaker Slav posted a video of a track by someone called DJ Boring. It quickly went viral; currently, it has more than six million views. With its soft pads and acid glow, “Winona” is moody and midtempo, with an undeniable if familiar vibe—maybe undeniable because of its familiarity. Some tracks become instant classics because you’re not sure if you’ve heard it before, or want to hear it again, or both—so you rewind. “Winona” became a standard in the “lo-fi house” scene, which took up the expressive techno of Larry Heard sort of how Boards of Canada took up the eerie crispness of RZA. It stood out not only because of its emotional efficiency, but also its star: a teenaged Winona Ryder, beloved once again after her magnificent performance in the first season of Stranger Things. In a sample from a TV interview, she says: “It is difficult to be judged… I remember one casting director… who stopped me and said: You are not pretty enough to be an actress. You have to find something else that you want to do.” When heard on a bedroom laptop, her words sounded like a welcome call-out of misogyny. When heard at, say, 5 a.m. while rolling on a dark, crowded dancefloor, they could feel like falling into Narcissus’ pool, but also a call to change, somehow. The ambivalence is as affecting as the 909 groove.
Since releasing the track on DJ Haus’ E-Beamz label, DJ Boring, also known as the Australian-born, London-based Tristan Hallis, has put out increasingly direct dance music on Shall Not Fade sublabel Lost Palms and his own Vienna. His new Like Water arrives on Ninja Tune’s vital Technicolor imprint, joining the ranks of club faves like Peggy Gou, Octo Octa, and Hieroglyphic Being. Its four tracks sound like the big rooms Hallis was playing in before all the rooms closed; the songs were engineered for the eye-popping A/V set he created with New York-based visual artist Amir Jahabin. If his previous work played with sentiment, this EP is pure sensation.
Like “Winona,” the opening title track features vocals, but here it’s just a gurgling voice repeating, “Like water.” Is it a metaphor? The sound palette is pretty wet, with drippy percussive hits and a flowing melody. Or is it a command? It’s banging enough to work as a set crescendo, that moment after which your pals stumble to the bar for refreshment. (It’s definitely a moment when combined with Jahabin’s video, which swaps the neon colors of rave-standard fractals for pastels, the geometric forms for sleeves of French fries, and the clichéd trains-and-tunnels content for a deeply strange road trip starring grinning risographic blobs.)
“Another Day” is even splashier, with echoes of the early swing of Herbert, the swagger of Cajmere, and the teeth-grinding brightness of Orbital. Indeed, Boring’s current sound as heard on the EP carries the torch for those torch-spectacled brothers, among the first to move techno from the club to the stadium, for better and worse. “Stockholm Syndrome” might convince the EDM hordes to stop selfie-ing and dance, but given the possible collapse of festival culture, it may never get the chance. Whatever. It starts out dewy, a kind of dubby techno that gradually solidifies into bright Chicago house, as if dried by the sun—the sound of brighter days ahead.
The EP’s highlight is its closer, “Seems Like Yesterday,” whose nostalgic title fits in with its sound, an assemblage of blasts from the past: Depeche Mode’s pop-concrete samples of hammers and sticks, and the happy-sad rush of Eurodisco, for sure. But mostly, well, trance. While Lorenzo Senni has occupied himself deconstructing it for Warp, and Boring’s labelmate Octo Octa, along with Eris Drew, propose it as a pleasure principle, on “Seems Like Yesterday” Boring refreshes trance’s potential for high-speed romance. Its “yesterday” is the millennial poise of DJ Sasha, whose epic “Xpander” is a kind of template. Boring repeats a simple melody for seven minutes or so, but it widens and grows. Halfway through, a shivering synth crystallizes a hook. If “Winona” was a teenage crush, “Seems Like Yesterday” is young love in all its stupid glory. Its heart is on its sleeve, in its synths. Gloriously, there’s no difficulty in it at all.

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The Bay Area producer’s debut—an unconventional blend of footwork, IDM, ambient, and bass music—is lively, dynamic, and above all, original.

Ways

When, toward the beginning of 2020, Xyla began crafting the tracks that would become her debut album, she was in what she has described as a “vulnerable” place. After six years in San Francisco, where she had moved from Houston to study French horn at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, she had spent a few months in Berlin, soaking up the city’s electronic-music scene. It was a heady time: She clubbed by night and made music by day, gathering inspiration from the unfamiliar city around her. But upon her return to the Bay Area, her spirits came crashing down. She was jobless and mourning the loss of close friends. The fog was thick, the air cold, her outlook bleak. “I was kind of alone and depressed and I’d wake up and all I would do was produce,” she told KQED. “It was the only thing I had the energy to do.”
The remarkable thing about Xyla’s debut album, Ways, is that it doesn’t sound like the product of depression. An unconventional blend of footwork, IDM, ambient, and UK bass, it is lively, dynamic, and above all, original. These are familiar influences, but she has put them together in unusual ways. Ways often feels like a tug of war between competing impulses, chief among them rhythm and atmosphere. The album opens with a characteristic touch of subtle drama: Synths flicker like fluorescent tubes, teasing the promise of imminent action. Instead, they disappear into rising aquamarine chords over the course of the first minute, and the rhythm seems to dissolve. But this moment of stillness is her second fake-out in quick succession: she quickly slams home a crackling, electro-inspired machine beat. It’s exhilarating and soothing in equal measure.
A similar sense of balance distinguishes virtually everything here. “Feel” begins with another UK-influenced groove, crisp and swinging, then relaxes into billowing synth pads while hints of processed voices flit about the edges. “Now” plays a snippet of sampled vocals off pinwheeling arpeggios and an undulating acid line; it feels like a club track where all the hard surfaces and sharp edges have been swapped out for soft, cottony shapes.
The album reaches its emotional peak with the jazz-sampling “Narcissus.” Hi-hats tap like nervous fingers drumming on the kitchen table, and the way the beat stops and starts reinforces a curious mood that’s both ruminative and distracted. Her arrangement captures a curious heart-in-mouth feeling—not quite a fight-or-flight instinct, but a sense that something needs to change, if only the exit strategy would reveal itself. Then, after a few seconds of silence, it does just that: Her drum programming straightens out and plunges ahead, haloed by gentle chimes.
It’s tricks like this that make Ways feel like more than just a smartly produced stylistic hybrid. She makes particularly good use of the double-time cadences of footwork, drum’n’bass, and UK bass: Oscillating between slow passages and fast, her tracks seem to gather strength and then sprint forward, only to fall back into reflective repose. The music’s bright harmonies and airy dimensions suggest cautious optimism, cool fortitude. However low Xyla may have felt while making the album, each of these tracks feels like a signpost to a better place.

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Spanning glam, soul, country, and '70s AM rock, the latest from the indie pop group is a deceptively wry, wickedly tuneful testament to the fragile beauty of faith, in deities as well as in pop.

The Life Pursuit

Every religion began as a cult. In their early years, Belle and Sebastian possessed near-totemic powers for their small but impassioned band of disciples, as fervent as the followers of similarly wistful, self-deprecating, and sometimes sexually conflicted artists like the Smiths, Felt, and Orange Juice a decade prior. The common sacrament was pop, with true believers bearing witness in their communal alienation, badges, battered cassettes, and fanclub memberships. The Scottish group only heightened that devotion by shrouding themselves in mystery-- not answering questions, not appearing in proper photographs, not available in stores.
On sixth proper album The Life Pursuit, Belle and Sebastian want to teach the world to sing, in however imperfect harmony. Where the recent live re-recording of 1996's If You're Feeling Sinister draped their most appealing songs in apposite finery, the band's latest extends their newfound confidence to content as well as delivery, and stands as the finest full-length by Stuart Murdoch and his shifting collaborators since that distant pinnacle. About his early-90s recovery from chronic fatigue, Murdoch told a recent interviewer, "Spirituality and songwriting were my crutches." Spanning glam, soul, country, and 70s AM rock, this record is a deceptively wry, wickedly tuneful testament to the fragile beauty of faith, in deities as well as in pop.
Belle and Sebastian seem to have found new life in their evolution from shy bedsit savants to showy pop adepts. The Life Pursuit's lavishness renders the burgeoning bubblegum of 2003's Trevor Horn-produced Dear Catastrophe Waitress merely transitional, rewarding the Job-like righteous after the trials of the band's mid-career disappointments. Recorded in Los Angeles with Tony Hoffer, who oversaw Beck's divisive Midnite Vultures, the album runs over with flute, horns, call-and-response vocals, and even a funky clavinet (on soul survivor "Song for Sunshine"). The playing, meanwhile, is surprisingly chopsy, down to the breezy guitars and Hammond organs-- a far cry from the days when indie meant never having to say you tried.
Faith, after all, takes work, and if in one sense The Life Pursuit is about belief in the redemptive power of music, it's also a manifestation thereof. On opener "Act of the Apostle, Part One", a girl with a seriously ill mother imagines an escape, plays the Cat Stevens hymn "Morning Has Broken", and contemplates an endless melody before stumbling upon the album's central question: "What would I do to believe?" Ostinato bass, splashy piano, and Sarah Martin's gentle harmonies point the way. Toward the end of the album's loose storyline, on "For the Price of a Cup of Tea", the heroine seeks solace in "soul black vinyl," as Murdoch channels an irrepressible Bee Gees falsetto.
In between the opener and "Act of the Apostle, Part Two", nine tracks later, The Life Pursuit sets aside the nascent narrative to offer several of Belle and Sebastian's catchiest pop songs yet. "The Blues Are Still Blue" and "White Collar Boy" both incorporate glossy T. Rex boogie, Murdoch delivering one of his most indelible hooks on the former and uttering an uncharacteristically soulful "huh!" on the latter. Early mp3 preview "Another Sunny Day" sounds more like earlier Belle and Sebastian, setting country/western guitar licks to a sunny but sad love song that ambles past soccer, midges, Eskimos, and haunted hearts. First single "Funny Little Frog" slyly relates a love that turns out to be from afar, tellingly comparing the feeling to a sound from the narrator's "thro-at." Sharing its efficient Motown guitar style is the lone Stevie Jackson contribution, "To Be Myself Completely", which happily holds its own, observing, "To be myself completely/ I've just got to let you down."
Still, there's little to fault about this album's songcraft, and Murdoch is also at his best detailing some of his famously quirky characters. "Sukie in the Graveyard" makes room for a pristine guitar solo, organs, and horns in a loose, animated tale of a runaway. On melancholic centerpiece "Dress Up in You", Murdoch at first seems to be describing an encounter with a groupie, but ultimately is revealed to be singing from the point of view of a woman to a former rival-turned-star.
Of course, the album also wrestles with the struggle to have faith in God. To be sure, Murdoch's Christian beliefs have been central to his songs since long before you could say "Sufjan." The religious references here have more in common on their face with the Godspell gab of Waitress's "If You Find Yourself Caught in Love" than the sardonically wrought church scenes of "The State That I Am In" or "If You're Feeling Sinister". Amid atypically fancy guitarwork and Martin's breathless scat on "We Are the Sleepyheads", Murdoch recalls, "We talked about the things we read in Luke and John." With the feel of Paul McCartney doing Tin Pan Alley, "Act of the Apostles, Part Two" finds Murdoch returning to the girl from the introduction. "The bible's my tool/ There's no mention of school," he sighs, then merges the album's twin motifs: "My Damascan Road's my transistor radio." Converted to pop, she was converted to Jesus.
Though the music may be even shinier and happier than on Waitress, the girl's religious impulses don't resolve themselves nearly so blithely. Midway through "Part Two", the album climaxes when she determines to find "the face behind the voice": Synths flutter like stomach butterflies as the melody from "Part One" returns and the young protagonist attempts to attend a church service, only to be told to "bugger off." Next she places her hopes in music alone, spending the night with a man who makes her "the village joke." Closer "Mornington Crescent"-- named for a London Underground stop and a laughably complex strategy game-- sketches a final fall from grace, giving itself to sin and countrified guitars out of "Wild Horses".
Only a few bands have managed to successfully reinvent themselves a half-dozen or so albums into their careers. Granted, Murdoch's is a very different group today than the one that caught the ears and hearts of pop-music zealots a decade ago, with different members and a newly unrestrained sound. "Make a new cult every day," Murdoch once sang, but of course, Heaven's Gate and Waco compounds aren't for everyone. The Life Pursuit is a baroque pop cathedral, welcoming the faithful and newly converted alike.


The Swedish folkie's third album is the first to feature multi-tracking. He's still driven by his wandering spirit, but these songs have the feel of someone exploring a nature trail in his own backyard.

The Tallest Man on Earth: There's No Leaving Now

There's No Leaving Now

Around the time he put out his sparse and arresting second album, 2010's The Wild Hunt, Swedish singer-songwriter Kristian Matsson also released a cover of "Graceland". Matsson's music as the Tallest Man on Earth gives off an uncanny, hard-to-place air, caught between his native surroundings and the American folk he reveres. But to hear him tackle that familiar melody put some of the strange and hard-to-pin-down appeal of his music into focus. Rough, loud, and unabashedly nasal, Matsson's voice sounded like it was stripping off the song's varnish and hewing each line into something jagged enough to impale you in the heart.
The best songs on The Wild Hunt, like the rollicking strum of "King of Spain" and the wistful piano ballad "Kids on the Run", had that same directness of melody and threatened just as many splinters. Like so many folkies before him, Matsson assumed the role of the wandering troubadour ("I live until the call, and I plan to be forgotten when I've gone," he declared with early-Dylan aplomb on the title track), and his songs, in contrast to folk tradition, didn't so much conjure a distinct sense of time or place as they did a general feeling of restlessness and ever-forward movement. Keeping with the music's sage simplicity, the loneliness of the bare, echoing instrumentation felt decidedly practical: How can you assemble a reliable backing band when you're sleeping under a different tree every night?
It's clear from the title of Matsson's latest, There's No Leaving Now, that things are a little different this time around: He's putting down his roots. Recorded mostly at home over a leisurely five-month stretch, Leaving is more diffuse and relaxed than his earlier albums. It's also his first foray into multi-tracking: He's added woodwinds, drums, and additional fingerpicked guitars to the mix, giving his songs a fuller sound, albeit one that's still characteristically ragged. The intimacy of tracks like "Revelation Blues" and "To Just Grow Away" forgo the urgency of Dylan and Woody Guthrie channeled on The Wild Hunt for a gentle, pastoral domesticity that sounds closer to Arthur Russell in acoustic mode. Though lyrically still driven by Matsson's wandering spirit and kinship with nature, There's No Leaving Now is an adventure close to home, the sound of someone exploring a nature trail in his own backyard.
Still, the most somber and impassioned songs are the ones that stand out. The title track is a wrenching ballad in the vein of "Kids on the Run", while "Bright Lanterns" shakes an angry fist at nature's indifference to even the tallest of men ("Damn, you always treat me like a stranger, mountain"). The simple, affecting "Little Brother" features the album's strongest vocals, and it derives its power from its lyrical clarity ("Why are you drinking again, little brother/ When your rambling's the hardest part of loving you?"), a quality often absent from Matsson's songwriting. His lyrics can feel like a knotty tangle of ambiguous nature imagery and trail wisdom when you take the time to pick them apart. When he sings, "But the lesson is vague and the lightning shows a deer with her mind on the moor/ And now something with the sun is just different since they shook the earth in 1904," he loses the thread, fittingly, somewhere around "The lesson is vague."
That was true of the lyrics on The Wild Hunt, too, but it was harder to be bothered by their lack of specificity when they were lobbed at you with such urgency. There's No Leaving Now dials everything back a few notches: Matsson no longer sings every line like it might be his dying words. On that transfixing "Graceland" cover, Matsson's voice had only two settings: dead quiet and pushed way into the red. There's No Leaving Now finds him instead exploring the spectrum in between those two extremes, and while its good to hear his sound evolving, the results are mixed. It's a pretty and intimately rendered collection of folk songs, but those moments of jarringly direct, piercing emotion are few.


The first thing you notice is the rhythm section: large, lumbering drums and hydraulic bass flexes on the nine-minute "First ...

The Secret Machines: Now Here Is Nowhere

Now Here Is Nowhere

The first thing you notice is the rhythm section: large, lumbering drums and hydraulic bass flexes on the nine-minute "First Wave Intact", the lead-off track on The Secret Machines' awkwardly titled debut album, Now Here Is Nowhere. The rhythms are military-precise, locked-in and steady, but they're less heavy metal than Heavy Metal: The band sounds as though they're scoring an intergalactic space battle, or perhaps something more terrestrial, like the lurching onslaught of a thousand warbeasts.
Or maybe it's just the march of the marketing behemoth behind Now Here Is Nowhere, which is one of the first major label albums to be released for commercial download before its official street date. In Phase 1 of the assault, the album was posted on the band's website and on select retailers like iTunes, along with a free five-song EP (containing the well-worth-it outtake, "Cannon"). For Phase 2, Reprise released an early version of Now Here Is Nowhere in a "babypack"-- a simple sheaf of cardboard with minimal graphics and a low price. And now, we've arrived at the final phase of the master plan-- the album's actual release, for which the label presumably hopes all those people who downloaded it or bought the tyke-size version will either spring for the "real" album or at least have told all their friends about it.
It's too early to tell whether this three-pronged attack will actually succeed, but if it doesn't, it won't be the band's fault. Veterans of Dallas-area groups like UFOFU and Tripping Daisy, these three New Yorkers-by-way-of-Texas-- drummer Josh Garza and brothers Ben and Brandon Curtis-- build a classic rock front to launch a full-out musical assault. Garza's imperturbable drums stand strong against Brandon Curtis' guitar explosions and Ben Curtis' psych-rock keyboard scribbles. Early reviews of Now Here Is Nowhere have likened the band to 70s-era Pink Floyd, a comparison that is limited but not unwarranted. "Pharaoh's Daughter", for example, turns on an elegant Dark Side of the Moon chord change and a volley of "Us and Them" voices in the chorus.
But The Secret Machines are no nostalgia act: "Pharaoh's Daughter" counters the Floyd references with a drumbeat practically quoted from Isaac Hayes' cover of Bacharach's "Walk on By". Plus, they deploy a strategy similar to that of The Flaming Lips and Grandaddy: Not only is Garza more Steve Drozd than John Bonham (which could be a compliment), but The Secret Machines create songs that are just as spacey and concept-heavy, if not quite as quirky, as those on Yoshimi and The Sophtware Slump. "Leaves Are Gone" lolls along on the delicate ebb and flow of Brandon Curtis' keyboard cascades, forming a quiet counter to more aggressive songs like "Sad and Lonely". "Light's ON" boasts a better new wave hook than just about anything else to come out of NYC this year, crackling with a palpable paranoia as Curtis decries the intrusiveness of a Big Brother-like observer: "Somewhere there's a record of your whereabouts/ Everywhere you go you leave a trace.../ The light's ON/ We don't know just who our friends are." But there are forces allied against these threats, people who thrive in the underground: "The light's ON/ And we're waiting for the signal."
The nervous lyrics and jittery energy of "Light's ON" underscore the pervasiveness of the military imagery on the album, revealing a directed-- if not entirely legible-- political agenda. On "Pharaoh's Daughter", Curtis describes a brewing rebel movement in life-during-wartime language: "We dressed in uniforms left over from the war/ A tourniquet, an iron vest/ Our emblem was a star." A lone star, perhaps.
Now Here Is Nowhere pulses with a sexual tension that matches the swagger of the Texas-size drums on songs like "Nowhere Again", when Curtis sings, "There's a woman in the mirror in a fiery state/ As she motions to me I start turning away/ She's lifting her dress up/ Trying to keep up." While this erotic energy threatens to undercut the political tensions on the album, it actually humanizes and intensifies them.
The meaning behind all this political and sexual intrigue is a little vague. The "Now" and the "Here" of the album title apparently describe America during its war on terrorism, but beyond that, the album's most specific statement is that rock music, regardless of influences or labels, can still be a subversive agent in society. Although the sound is bombastic, the message is subtler and variable from one listener to another. Now Here Is Nowhere may sound like a full-on assault, but it's actually a covert spec-ops infiltration, as the name Secret Machines suggests; the band step loudly but carry a concealed weapon. Politically, this reticence could have been a cop-out, but aesthetically, it leaves the album open for interpretation, which means it should have a longer life than the current administration.


The Texas singer delivers a smooth, risk-averse R&B album whose nostalgic trappings aim for timelessness.

Gold-Diggers Sound

Gold-Diggers Sound, the title of Leon Bridges' new album, is also a tribute to the place it was recorded, a newly swanky hotel/bar/studio in East Hollywood called Gold-Diggers. It’s good branding for Bridges, who has always presented himself and his music as timeless, which is to say, of a better time, somewhere back in the sepia-toned 20th century. The sense of place suggested by a studio on Santa Monica Boulevard would seem to harken back to that time, and it sets the tone for Bridges’ Hollywood record, which is what this album seeks to be.
What does that mean, beyond the title? Vocal stylings that occasionally sound like those of Frank Ocean; lilting, drawn-out vowels; and an understated delivery that can bely the power of Bridges’ show-stopping voice. Mastering from Daddy Kev, co-founder of the Low End Theory and a Los Angeles musician’s musician par excellence. And features from the talented multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin and pianist Robert Glasper, both of whom helped out on To Pimp a Butterfly, that maximalist portrait of the city.
Gold-Diggers Sound is far from maximalist. In the tradition of Bridges’ work, it’s a smooth, risk-averse R&B record, pleasant to the ear and lacking in any songs that would shake up one’s impression of the Texan soul singer. But it’s an album made with extraordinary care, and while it sometimes flirts with tedium, Bridges’ voice and producers Ricky Reed and Nate Mercereau’s subtle instrumental choices keep many of its songs out of the valley of the bland.
The opening pair of tracks offers a sampler of the record’s quiet strengths. “Motorbike” opens with guitar plucking and quiet drumming, with Bridges allowing his voice to roughen briefly as the song rounds a corner into its first chorus. “Born Again,” which was written in Texas, is sumptuous, with swirling sax from Martin and keyboard from Glasper flattering Bridges’ range.
The impact of both songs, as well as a third, the twinkling mid-tempo jam “Steam,” is blunted by Bridges’ restraint. This is a musician for whom so much is effortless. As a result, there is frequently no sign that he is trying, that he is fully committed to what he is singing. Why, when “Motorbike” reaches that first chorus, do we not get the catharsis of release, hearing what his voice can really, truly do? Why, on the breathtakingly pretty lament “Why Don’t You Touch Me?,” does Bridges decline to give himself over completely to a hook that demands something more than hypercompetence? He seems reluctant to fully express the emotions that the songs on Gold-Diggers Sound gesture toward.
Lyrically, this may be Bridges’ best-written record, with motifs worth paying attention to. A notable one is time—more specifically, time stopping, which makes sense when one remembers that Bridges was living, and for some time trapped, at Gold-Diggers. “Don’t Worry,” a well-structured song on which he sings full-throatedly, with a nice feature from Atia “Ink” Boggs, mentions a clock stopping. “Motorbike” makes passing reference to a similar idea, which is explored most fully on “Sweeter,” a Martin feature on which Bridges questions why so little has changed since the 1960s: “I thought we moved on from the darker days/Did the words of the King disappear in the air like a butterfly?” While the song, released shortly after the murder of George Floyd, is focused on injustice, it really lingers on the idea of being replaceable. A line on “Why Don’t You Touch Me?” does the same, while adding a new thought: “I’m dressing to the nines and your eye’s straying.”
We know, thanks to a recent article in Texas Monthly in which Bridges was admirably candid, that the singer struggles deeply with his own self-worth. On Gold-Diggers Sound, he appears at times to realize that the perfect aesthetic—the right vintage clothing, or even the right studio—may not be the route to self-realization. But Texas Monthly also showed the way that Bridges uses nostalgia as a source of self, to bolster his self-esteem. (“Nostalgia is the antidote,” he tells the reporter.) And on this album, every time it feels as if he’s close to breaking out—and the album’s best songs are replete with moments in which Bridges seems a hair’s breadth away from true passion—he recedes into the background and lets the technical expertise of his studio players, or that timeless-seeming studio itself, take over. For listeners, Bridges’ nostalgia, frequently expressed as seamless sonic perfectionism, doesn’t function as an antidote, but as a shield. The props don’t distinguish him. They only disguise him further.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On its Thurston Moore-boosted debut, the Miami quartet offers an enchanting swirl of indie rock, dream pop, and acid-funk odysseys whose relaxed mood belies a restless philosophical spirit.

XVI

Amid the avalanche of best-of-the-year lists, you might have missed Thurston Moore’s Top 30 albums of 2021—likely because it was buried on the Tumblr of his old New York noise-scene compatriot, J.G. Thirlwell. As to be expected from such a seasoned underground archivist, Moore’s list is a cassette-heavy, Spotify-resistant assembly of veteran free-jazzers, experimental sound artists, radical rappers, and new-school avant-guitar contortionists. But in the top slot is an album that, in this context, practically qualifies as a pop record—and it’s one that Moore was so smitten with, he and his partner Eva Prinz just had to release it themselves on their Daydream Library Series imprint.
Where Moore has often used his various platforms to champion proudly inaccessible artists operating on the fringes of the fringe, the debut album from Seafoam Walls, XVI, is the sort of record that could easily appeal to anyone who likes their indie rock on the cerebral side, whether you came of age in the era of Thrill Jockeyed post-rock, chillwave, DeMarco-core, or alt-R&B. In a nod to bandleader Jayan Bertrand’s Haitian heritage, the Miami quartet self-classify their sound as “Caribbean jazzgaze,” a descriptor that might suggest something more visceral than what actually transpires on XVI. For the most part, Seafoam Walls’ songs present a serene swirl of enchantingly chill guitar lines, pitter-pattered drum programming, and Bertrand’s vaporous vocal melodies. But that seemingly relaxed vibe belies a restless creative and philosophical spirit that frequently pokes through the surface mist.
Seafoam Walls began in 2014 as a solo vehicle for Bertrand, who had previously combined Haitian music with indie guitar aesthetics in the more traditional, folk-oriented outfit Kazoots. His vision for Seafoam Walls had already come into focus with the 2016 release of “You Can’t Have Your Cake and Ego Too (Happy Birthday)”—a dose of self-help psychedelia that, half a decade later, receives a proper re-recording on XVI with bassist Joshua Ewers and beatmaking multi-instrumentalist Dion Kerr. This new version retains the original’s essential tension between isolation-tank tranquility and hyperactive rhythmic tics, however, Bertrand wisely ditches the original’s deep, gothic vocal delivery for a higher honeyed croon that adds a more empathetic dimension to his agitated lyrics. Dream pop is normally treated as a sanctuary of sound, a chorus-pedalled cocoon from your problems, but Seafoam Walls remind us that, in our daily lives, therapeutic escapism is an often unattainable luxury. Beneath the dewy guitar textures of “You Can’t Have Your Cake and Ego Too,” Bertrand sounds off on dysfunctional relationships and the inability to have open, honest conversations within them, before delivering a motivational mantra—“fuck her, fuck him, fuck them, fuck all our egos”—that renders the song a gossamer lullaby with a hardcore heart.
Even as Bertrand zooms out to lament America’s cycle of gun violence (“You Always Said”) and the deadening effects of 9-to-5 work culture (“Program”), it’s easy to imagine the songs on XVI as being just a Mark Ronson remix away from turning into Tame Impala-level bliss-pop hits. But the beauty of Seafoam Walls is that, even as their songs adhere to clearly defined melodic and rhythmic lines, Bertrand and co. constantly rearrange and overlay them in unpredictable patterns, making shape-shifting acid-funk odysseys like “A.I.” and “See” feel both intricately constructed and improvised on the spot. By the time we reach XVI’s euphoric, island-bound instrumental closer “Rushed Rain,” we’re a million miles from the dank NYC no-wave scene that first spurred Seafoam Walls’ No. 1 fan into action some 40 years ago. And yet, Bertrand and Moore are ultimately making music from the same place: their eyes closed, their bodies at one with their effects pedals, and their wandering spirits eager to visit all the unexpected places their beautiful noise will lead them.

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With his group Natural Information Society, Joshua Abrams crafts simple loops, primarily with a three-string African lute called the guimbri. Their fourth album takes on a Zen quality.

Joshua Abrams / Natural Information Society: Simultonality

Simultonality

Joshua Abrams makes music about time and patience—music that, as he put it, “offers the possibility of slowing down.” With his group Natural Information Society, he crafts simple loops, primarily with a three-string African lute called the guimbri. A plethora of sonic elements—including guitar, harmonium, autoharp, and all kinds of percussion—gather around him like moss crawling up a wall. The result is a sound that moves forward while simultaneously seeming to freeze time.
The restraint of Abrams’ work matches his long-arc career, which he began in Philadelphia as an early member of the Roots. Moving to Chicago, he formed Thrill Jockey group Town & Country and became ensconced in the city’s jazz and indie scenes. Many of the people he met there, including Cairo Gang’s Emmett Kelly and Tortoise’s Jeff Parker, have performed in Natural Information Society, a rotating collective that recently solidified into a working unit.
You can hear the effect of that consistency on Simultonality, the fourth Natural Information Society album in seven years (alongside an excellent collaboration with Bitchin Bajas). The group moves together like a carbon-based machine, loose enough to allow for surprises but always focused on one goal. Over tracks that often last eight minutes or more, their focus takes on a Zen quality, as Abrams’ loops become so entrancing they seem to create their own private dimension in space-time.
Much of that time-expanding effect derives from Abrams’ unique choice of instrument. With its rubbery, resonant tone, the guimbri traditionally has been used for healing and trance ceremonies, which can sometimes last for upwards of eight hours. And so Abrams’ simple figures can continually hold attention across long stretches because his tone is so rich and multi-layered. Throughout Simultonality, his playing forms the foundation of each song, offering his bandmates a core around which they can circle, fly, digress, and connect.
As a result, the music on Simultonality coaxes you to quiet your mind and focus your attention, but it doesn’t necessarily move slowly. The majority of the songs here surge forward at an energetic clip, with some even sounding nervously excited. On opener “Maroon Dune,” Abrams’ pounding two-note cycle spawns guitar strums and drum rolls that intensify the song even though the pace doesn’t quicken. A shuffling rhythm instantly propels the 12-minute “Sideways Fall,” powering the group through thick sonic terrain (a perfect analogue to the rolling train tracks in the tune’s accompanying video.)
Abrams and his group don’t spend all of Simultonality in high gear. One track, “St. Cloud,” consists primarily of gentle bells and chimes, the musical equivalent of a trickling waterfall. And on closer “2182½,” Natural Information Society swerve into straight-up jazz, supporting the contemplative sax strains of Ari Brown as if they were a mid-period John Coltrane ensemble. It’s a nice glimpse of the diversity this group is capable of, infusing traditional structures with meditative qualities. But overall, Simultonality advances Abrams and Natural Information Society’s signature sound, one that gets even more unique the further it grows and expands.


A Head Full of Dreams is Coldplay’s chance to reassert the eager-to-please exuberance that Ghost Stories deliberately downplayed and prove that Adele isn’t the only artist who can mobilize a monoculture in 2015.

A Head Full of Dreams

On the very first song on their very first album, Coldplay introduced themselves with a heartfelt declaration: "We live in a beautiful world." Fifteen years and some 80 million albums sold later, the British quartet haven’t elaborated on that philosophy—they’ve just amplified it. Where massive success has a tendency to make bands more jaded and aloof, Coldplay only seem more gobsmacked and in awe of life itself. Their songs aren’t just designed to uplift, they’re often about the very sensation of being uplifted. But on the band’s seventh album, A Head Full of Dreams, the band’s relentless campaign to raise our spirits is liable to induce altitude sickness.
Of course, there’s a perfectly logical reason for the album’s oversold optimism—A Head Full of Dreams is a reactionary retort to 2014’s Ghost Stories, a low-key response to a high-profile split that literally wore its (broken) heart on its sleeve. The new album, by contrast, is Martin’s unconscious recoupling record, the sound of a freshly single man stepping out onto the dancefloor to lose his mind and find new love. "You make me feel like I’m alive again," he sings atop the slinky disco of lead single "Adventure of a Lifetime", a lyric that succinctly sums up the spirit of the record like a movie poster tagline.
A Head Full of Dreams is Coldplay’s chance to reassert the eager-to-please exuberance that Ghost Stories deliberately downplayed, and prove that Adele isn’t the only artist who can mobilize a monoculture in 2015. Though written off by detractors as middle of the road, Coldplay’s centrist position is what ultimately makes them so singular—they’re the only rock band that could (and would want to) wrangle Beyoncé, Noel Gallagher, Tove Lo, Norwegian Top 40 architects Stargate, Kendrick Lamar producer Daniel Green, alt-rock lifer Nik Simpson, and “Gimme Shelter” scene-stealer Merry Clayton on the same record. A Head Full of Dreams is emblematic of Coldplay’s burning desire to be all things to all people, rolling up symphonic Britpop bluster, club-thumping bangers, dentist-office soft rock, finger-snapping R&B, and even some trippy touches that remind you of a time when this band just wanted to be as popular as Mercury Rev.
But the album has bigger ambitions. By weaving a spoken-word reading of an inspirational 13th-century Persian poem and a sample of Barack Obama reciting "Amazing Grace" into the mix, the album essentially conflates Martin’s post-rebound optimism with an all-encompassing, heal-the-world mission. His relentless need to take us higher feels most genuine when we get a sense of what got him so low in the first place. "Everglow" and the Tove Lo collab "Fun" bring ultimate closure to the Gwyneth saga with a pledge to enduring friendship (and, to prove it, the former track features Martin’s ex on backing vocals). And despite bearing a title that isn’t going to dispel their poor-man’s U2 rep, "Amazing Day" is a sweet ode to blossoming, post-divorce romance that channels the winsome charm of early singles like "Shiver". Best of all is "Birds", a shot of taut, Phoenix-styled motorik pop that provides a rare moment of intensity on an album that’s all about arm-swaying, Super Bowl-crashing bombast.
Even when A Head Full of Dreams hints at experimentation, it inevitably drifts back onto predictable paths. The title track eases us into the album on a glistening groove but halts its momentum for a now-obligatory "woah oh oh oh" breakdown that sounds like it was focus-grouped into the song. When Martin sings "I feel my heart beating" on "Adventure of a Lifetime", the arrangement drops out, save for a throbbing bassline that mimics the sound of, well, take a guess. And the readymade, gospelized charidee-anthem-in-waiting "Up&Up" sees many of the aforementioned guests get together to sing, "we’re gonna get it together," before Gallagher delivers a send-off guitar solo that essentially turns the track into Coldplay’s Perrier Supernova. At one point in the song, Martin asks, "How can people suffer/ How can people part/ How can people struggle/ How can people break your heart?" He doesn’t profess to understand the root of all our problems, but he’ll do his damnedest to provide a cure anyway.
For all the record's eclecticism, Coldplay remain a band that put the "us" in "obvious," blowing up the simplest sentiments for maximum appeal. Nearly every song is about ascension and transcendence, be it through intoxicants (the Beyoncé-assisted "Hymn for the Weekend"), rocket ships (the unlisted, listless slow jam "X Marks the Spot"), out-of-body experiences (bonus track "Miracles"), large ocean waves ("Fun"), rooftop stargazing ("Amazing Day"), winged creatures ("Birds"), or just sheer force of will ("Up&Up"—and this from a band that’s already written a song called "Up With the Birds"). But Martin has a tendency to sing of extraordinary, mind-expanding experiences in muddled metaphors ("My army of one is going to fight for you … my heart is my gun") and rote "high"/"sky" rhymes. And with his many wide-eyed ruminations on stars and moons and hearts and diamonds, it can sound like he gets his lyrical inspiration from a spoonful of Lucky Charms. Martin recently told the Wall Street Journal that he wanted "Hymn for the Weekend" to be the sort of single that would soundtrack a bottle-service bender at a nightclub and, essentially, that spirit of bonhomie permeates the entirety of A Head Full of Dreams. Except too often, the album’s pat platitudes place us on the other side of the velvet rope, left to ponder the sight of some self-satisfied people having the time of their lives.