On his so-called R&B album, it’s exceedingly difficult to square the real-life allegations of the Florida rapper with the toxic content of his songs.

Heart Break Kodak

Kodak Black stands accused of sexual assault. It’s an inconvenient truth, but it’s the lens he invites when he releases a so-called R&B album on Valentine’s Day. Over the course of 17 tracks, the Florida rapper grants entry into his troubled affairs with women through a combination of crooned love letters and woeful screeds. But with an open case for sexual assault lingering (he’s currently locked up on unrelated charges), Heart Break Kodak feels like a witless, noxious provocation.
Throughout the mixtape, the streets and unnamed lovers wage a war for Kodak’s heart. Strained relationships and conflicting interests are a theme as universal as music itself, and fans will likely delight in hearing him croon about letting go as he does on sing-song opener “Running Outta Love.” Much of his appeal comes from his diaristic lyrics and his depiction of a broken system’s impact on his life. Investment in this narrative makes it hard to separate what the world has done to him and what he’s done to the world in the wake of his fame. On the melancholic “I Get Lonely,” for example, he positions himself as a victim of the state, deploying lines like, “I don't be tryna be violent, life could be much greater/But they wanna see me in prison, wanna see me on them papers.” Fans of Kodak love him for this. It’s as if the story he has to tell and the skill with which he tells it eclipses any of his real-life transgressions.
Legendary author, filmmaker, and all-around hip-hop historian Nelson George summarized this very issue in an essay on the genre’s delicate relationship between fans, authenticity, and censorship published in his 1998 book Hip Hop America: “They see everything as a plot by white people to destroy black men when, the truth is, some of these brothers have seriously fucked up and deserve both the censure from our community and jail time.” George, coincidentally, was writing about another of South Florida's native sons: Uncle Luke who, in light of the Parkland school shooting, took to Twitter to paint a picture of how black men are treated compared to their white counterparts, using Kodak as an example. Both points are true: Crime does happen, but politicians and law enforcement also salivate at a chance to lock up these men. There continues to be an attack on rappers and black men in general (see: Meek Mill), but it’s equally true that those same folks have also done irreversible harm to others—especially women.
Lovers of hip-hop extend a certain amount of creative license to rappers and the graphic content in their lyrics. Plenty has been afforded to Kodak since his breakout single “No Flockin’.” After all, there is a context and a functional (though misguided) purpose to intra-community gun violence and selling drugs. These actions are often the result of societal failings trickling down into personal ones, and regardless, everything in the verse isn’t and shouldn’t be taken as gospel truth. But sexual assault is a different kind of social ill. Certainly, misogyny and patriarchal violence are built into American culture and Heart Break Kodak is a product of both. But when attitudes become allegations, what some refer to as “calling in” must become calling out.
The piano-laden “Hate Being Alone” is Kodak’s best attempt at courtship here, and it still rings hollow. While he makes it through the song without undermining his own intent—no bitches or hoes, only bae—no amount of charm can make even his “sweetest” moments appealing. It’s hard not to think of his alleged victim, of the woman from his Instagram Live, of him slapping a stripper’s ass unprompted (and getting kicked off stage for it), of his disdain for dark-skinned women. This isn’t someone who has made a convincing case for deserving anyone’s company. The version of love or lust displayed on Heart Break Kodak is one-dimensional and, more often than not, it’s selfish. The expectation that his partner should put up with his laundry list of ongoing trials and tribulations lingers in every corner, and when she chooses otherwise, she has somehow failed him and, as he claims on “Loyal,” made him heartless.
Though he seems apologetic at times—particularly when he’s offering amends to his mother on the sincere “Corrupted”—his relationship to women remains, at best, complicated and, at worst, altogether toxic. As Elizabeth Méndez Berry wrote in her 2005 Vibe essay “Love Hurts”: “When you get paid big money to call every woman a ho, at what point do you start believing you're a pimp?” It’s not that rap should close itself off from the R&B musings of those who have questionable dealings with women. Future’s HNDRXX, Young Thug’s Beautiful Thugger Girls or Chief Keef’s Thot Breaker, all from last year, deserve every bit of the praise they were offered. It may even be important and necessary that rappers embark on this frontier of balancing their tough-guy personas with matters of the heart. But whatever artistic merits Heart Break Kodak may have, they are sullied by these allegations.
It’s been five years since Rocko’s “U.O.E.N.O.”—a single that featured Rick Ross’ infamous “molly all in her champagne” date-rape lyric. The line spurred one of the first times in recent memory that discussions about rap and rape culture converged in the public discourse on such a grand scale. Ultimately, apologies were doled out, but little has changed since then. Artists get a slap on their hand while their transgressions hover over their music, following them but never falling on them. Record labels keep supporting them and media outlets like this one continue to cover them. It says something about whose trauma takes precedence, whose stories are worth telling, and which survivors are worthy of not having their abuser given a platform. How, after all, does one engage the conversation without also indirectly aiding the bottom line? Hate streaming—whether toward him or his critics—still counts.
Which brings us back to Heart Break Kodak. At this stage, there's nothing salvageable about it when the only maybe-acknowledgment of the pending charges is a now-deleted line from last year’s single “Tunnel Vision” where he claims, “I get any girl I want, I ain't gotta rape.” (The line now goes, “I get any girl I want, any girl I want.”) The entire fiasco is a shame, really. For someone who’s self-aware enough to rap something like, “Jumped up out the womb like my daddy the devil/My son jumped up out the womb like his daddy the devil” from a prison phone on “When Vultures Cry,” it seems he would rather let arrogance derail him. Even with this take on an “R&B” album, his fans aren’t going anywhere, and that’s their choice. But ultimately, Kodak won’t be redeemed by his romance any more than he can be saved by apathy.


As they hide out from the cops, root through garbage, peer paranoid through the blinds, and dig their nails into their hands just for something to do, the protagonists on the Mountain Goats newest are linked not by place or time but by a particular spiritual stance. And a horn section.

The Mountain Goats: Transcendental Youth

Transcendental Youth

In the introduction to Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of Cheryl Strayed's advice columns, the writer Steve Almond uses the term "radical empathy." I underlined it and wrote in the margins of the book "John Darnielle." I cannot think of two words that better sum up the strange powers that the Mountain Goats frontman has spent two decades and a small shelf's worth of LPs tirelessly honing. "Radical" because the space he's carved out in the musical landscape ("I hide down in my corner, because I like my corner," he seethes on the opening cut of his latest album, Transcendental Youth) stands a sizable and defiant distance from what's cool. His songs hinge upon lines ("Every dream's a good dream, even awful dreams are good dreams if you're doing it right") that would run the risk of sounding like the inspirational posters that lined the walls of your 9th grade English teacher's classroom if Darnielle delivered them with anything less than the tenacity of a rabid dog playing tug-of-war for the last bone on earth. And "empathy" because the degree to which he inhabits his characters is so thorough that it's a little disorienting. We are talking about a guy who has written from the perspective of a 4th-century Danish peasant, a gun-clutching Macon County outlaw, an agoraphobic science fiction novelist, and a moon-dwelling cannibal and has still somehow tricked most people into thinking that he is "a confessional songwriter."
Since retiring his boombox and committing to a full-band sound in 2002, Mountain Goats albums have roughly fallen into two categories, what I'll sort-of-inadequately call "tight concept" and "loose concept." The former are bound by narratives or formal conceits-- That Record About The Painfully Slow Dissolution of A Marriage (Tallahassee), That Secular Record About The Bible (The Life of the World to Come), That Record About What Happens When Junkies Living In A House Together Stop Being Polite And Start Getting Real (We Shall All Be Healed). The latter category-- records like Heretic Pride and All Eternals Deck-- is more of a mixed bag: They don't quite have the blunt impact of the tighter concept albums, but the upside is that they give Darnielle's imagination some room, freeing him to whip around from consciousness to troubled consciousness. And Transcendental Youth, the Mountain Goats' latest, is a fine example of that latter category. As they hide out from the cops, root through garbage, peer paranoid through the blinds, and dig their nails into their hands just for something to do, its protagonists are linked not by place or time but by a particular spiritual stance-- crouched and desperate, but waiting patiently for a sliver of light.
For as attuned as Darnielle is to the desperation of the everyman, his music's humanism extends to honoring the pathos of famous people. (A sampling of song titles from All Eternals Deck: "For Charles Bronson" and "Liza Forever Minnelli.") Two of Transcendental Youth's best songs-- both of which rank among the most searing and immediate things he's written since The Sunset Tree-- were inspired by troubled musicians who didn't live to see better days. Darnielle wrote "Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1" after Amy Winehouse died, but he says the song is for "all the other Amy Winehouses in the world who aren't famous, whose deaths go uncelebrated." With its driving, obstinate tempo and pithily life-affirming proclamations ("Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive"), "Amy" is one of the more anthemic songs the Mountain Goats have put to tape, and it has potential to become a staple in the band's fabled and cathartic live shows. It's perhaps the highest compliment one can bestow upon a Mountain Goats song to say that it has lyrics that would feel really good to scream at the top of your lungs in a room full of hundreds of other people who are also screaming at the top of their lungs; by that measure, "Amy"'s chorus of "Just stay aliiiiive" ranks pretty high.
The terrific "Harlem Roulette", on the other hand, whips us back in time to 1968, where Frankie Lymon is in a Harlem studio putting the finishing touches on a song called "Seabreeze". Darnielle has a knack for the fine balance between hyper-specificity and universality, and the power of "Harlem Roulette" comes from the way it whiplashes between external banalities ("Just a pair of tunes to hammer out/ Everybody's off the clock by 10") and hulking, private tragedies (a beat later: "The loneliest people in the whole wide world are the ones you're never going to see again.") It's also a song about the gulf between appearance and reality: Someone who'd seemingly achieved a great deal and tons of adoration at a young age can still be one of the loneliest people in the world (Stars! They're Just Like Us!), and what seemed like an ordinary studio session became, in retrospect, tragic. Lymon went home from the studio, took his first hit of heroin in years, and, at the age of 25, overdosed.
The debate's been raging since 2002: At this point it's safe to say that there will always be people who think the Mountain Goats' urgent, lo-fi sound was better suited to transmit stories that raw. But Transcendental Youth does have one wrinkle that adds some emotion range-- a horn section, arranged expressively by up-and-coming avant-symphonic artist Matthew E. White (an omnivorous music fan who leapt at the chance to induldge his inner Mingus, Darnielle recruited White after seeing him perform live with Sounds of the South, a show featuring Justin Vernon, Phil Cook, and Megafaun and admiring his 60s-inspired compositions). They're a fitting addition because, like Darnielle's lyrics, the emotions they transmit are complex and many-hued. The brass is bright but defiant on the upbeat "Cry for Judas", as well as the muted, stunning closer "Transcendental Youth". "Sing, sing for ourselves alone," Darnielle commands, and the horns shine like sunsets or sunrises, hellfire or salvation-- you're never quite sure.
Song for song, Transcendental Youth doesn't have the consistency of the Mountain Goats' strongest records, and it lacks both variation and character motivation around the middle. "White Cedar", "Until I Am Whole", and "Night Light" are powerful but strike similar emotional chords and end up feeling like a mid-album lull. There's also a vividness of external detail that feels missing from some of these songs: The narrator of the stirring but vague "White Cedar" "woke up on lockdown," but in a classic Mountain Goats song we'd know exactly what he did to get there. Not every character on Transcendental Youth is as memorable as the stars-- the Alpha Couple, the fallen high school running back or the Denton Death Metal dudes-- of the band's sterling back catalog, not every line as immediate or cathartic to yell as fan favorite "No Children"'s "I hope you die! I hope we both die!" But in the moments when he articulates the trivialities and tragedies of his narrators most convincingly, Darnielle finds equal grains of humanity and empathy in people crouched in the darkest corners and blinded by the brightest spotlights. It's not spirituality, escapism, or even optimism, exactly, that he's espousing-- all you know is it's some kind of light.

Merge / Tomlab / Remote Control / Moorworks


Teen Suicide return with a sprawling new album that meditates on the anxiety and indifference of love and mortality.

Teen Suicide: honeybee table at the butterfly feast

honeybee table at the butterfly feast

You face your own mortality in little ways every day: blood on your knees after a fall, brakes that engage a moment too late, the feeling when you swim in the deep blue sea and suddenly a wave hits you in the face. Losing your breath can be the kind of event you barely register until it’s almost too late. That’s a simplified version of what happened to musician and producer Sam Ray last fall, when he suffered an asthma attack, stopped breathing, and woke up in the ICU. Jacked up on prescription steroids and worried there might not be another chance, he scrambled to complete the next album from his project Teen Suicide, honeybee table at the butterfly feast. It’s an alternately lovely and grating record, full of experiments that probably should’ve stayed on the cutting room floor.
For over a decade, Ray has been making homespun noise pop albums under various names, including Teen Suicide and American Pleasure Club, as well as an ambient project, Ricky Eat Acid. He mostly deals in introspection, sharing big thoughts about true love by way of emo-tinged vocals, tape hiss, and looping flutters of keys. On honeybee table, he meditates on love as he’s done on past records, always through the lens of mortality. Each track on the album daisy-chains its way back to a central thought: I almost fucking died. “new strategies for telemarketing through precognitive dreams” is a dreamy shoegaze song that concludes with reflections on watching the world end; on “groceries,” a trip to the store becomes a vehicle to explore Ray’s fears of amounting to nothing in the grand scheme of the universe.
It’s a lofty goal to write something profound about capital-D Death in the context of our unglamorous, everyday lives. In the best moments, he seems up for the task. The looped percussion and keys on “get high, breathe underwater (#3)” feel like being underwater, or watching life pass from within a dream. “I don’t wanna die/I don’t wanna live this way,” Ray sings, like a mantra. Occasionally he’ll pepper in a glimpse of the mythological, like a “big black bird” that “flies out of the flames.” He’s anxious but also blasé about his own mortality, a tension that produces some of the most interesting conceptual work on the record. It’s beautiful and messy to hear him ferment the world around him, to contemplate his relationship with being so tenuously alive.
Same goes for “i will always be in love with you (final),” the first song Ray wrote after he was discharged from the hospital. Made of tape hiss and acoustic guitar, it’s a heart-on-your-cardigan-sleeve emo-pop slow jam that should by all accounts be corny but ends up being tender and warm to the touch. Ray’s work has been compared to Phil Elverum’s projects, a connection that’s particularly clear here as he constructs small, intimate songs about mortality, love, and endurance.
honeybee is at its best when Ray sings unsparingly about facing death. But at 16 tracks, the album is overstuffed, and not in a substantive way. It’s just too long, like Ray decided to dump the entire contents of his hard drive. “violence violence,” a very out-of-place grindcore track, is an excruciating listen. “coyote 2015-2021” starts out pretty with its horns and wispy guitars but eventually falls stagnant. It’s one of the biggest problems Ray’s run into over the course of his career: His sprawling compositions capture the excitement of first-thought-best thought creativity but lack the direction that comes with a little curation and revision. Embarking on the journey with him, watching him figure it out in real time, can be both fascinating and frustrating. After all, not every idea is your best—nor, thankfully, is every day your last.


On the latest release from Phoebe Bridgers’ new label, the California singer-songwriter takes an anxious yet clear-eyed look at the slings and arrows of late adolescence.

Nervous at Night

At 22, Pasadena songwriter Charlie Hickey sits astride the chain-link fence between youth and adulthood. His debut EP, Count the Stairs—released on Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory imprint—positioned him as the next existential soft-rock wunderkind in the Bridgers family tree, not far from regular collaborators Christian Lee Hutson and Harrison Whitford. But Hickey forgoes their gritty melancholy: Nervous at Night, his debut full-length, lingers in the occasionally too-twee space between bedroom and pop as he navigates the travails of growing up.
“No one here has to pay their rent/Well, it’s not like I do,” Hickey quipped on last year’s dancey single “Ten Feet Tall.” On Nervous at Night, he saves the social satire for the soulful, quasi-R&B of “Springbreaker” (“Springbreaker, you said you ended up at the chateau/What does that mean?/As if that could be an accident”) but mostly channels his wit into affection, penning couplets fit for ironist valentines. On “Missing Years,” Hickey loses his fake ID—and metonymically his identity—but when he’s with his love interest, he sings, he’s “not missing.” Producer Marshall Vore, another Bridgers associate, submerges these acoustic confessionals in watery electronics, stacking production to simulate a boombox at the bottom of a pool. Blue and lurid, a sense of murky, digitized isolation oozes from the vocoder and staticky percussion. The artificial 8-track textures scrub away the edge of emo gloom from Hickey’s earlier music, giving “Missing Years” the waltzy sparkle of Jimmy Eat World’s “Hear You Me.”
On tracks that function as paroxysms of guilt, self-loathing, or simple insecurity, Hickey sings with refreshing open-heartedness. His lyrics can read like drunk texts—“Couldn’t bring myself to get that cracked screen fixed/So when you sent me your love, I only got half of it,” he sings on the vulnerable piano ballad “Choir Song (I Feel Dumb)”—but their half-treacle, half-truth yields the unfiltered immediacy and accidental wisdom of AIM away statuses. Rich with references to cultural ephemera—Love Island, Call of Duty, Zipcar—the record’s zeitgeisty Gen Z nostalgia enhances more than just its scene-setting. On opener “Dandelions,” Hickey recalls seeing 12 Rules for Life in a bookstore and mourns the halcyon, dandelion-wishing days before he knew the darkness of the world or Jordan Peterson’s viral tirades. The song’s dissociative synths and omniscient future tense (the “Canadian doctor… would overdose on Klonopin, next year this time”) deftly depict a person trapped between yearning and anticipation.
The title track is the life of the party, showing up late but bringing the booze. With glittery guitars and a pre-chorus that recalls the antsy zeal of Boys Like Girls, Hickey scores an uptempo pop hit with a windows-down breathless refrain. “I don’t drive, I don’t have a car/I’ll still meet you wherever you are,” he sings, and it feels like we’re already off and running. The fantasy falters when Hickey reaches for trite paradoxes—worrying his silence was loud, fearing arriving more than flying—or loses specificity to fill the meter. But he vies to redeem himself by literalizing clichés, as in “Missing Years,” where his crush crashes into his life, totaling their car.
In moments like these, the just-a-kid shtick is a strength. There’s truth to the unspeakability of certain adolescent experiences; sometimes it is impossible to explain a feeling, especially when they’re as enormous as they were when we first felt them. Even when Hickey relies on easy rhymes, the shapes of his emotions reveal themselves in the firework Swiftian bridges, outsized metaphors, and conviction of his vocal performance. The story is a familiar one, but the baroque strings and underdog spirit leave us rooting for the hero, and for Hickey himself.


The Baltimore band’s spectacular fourth record is all groove, riffs, and passion. It is not a crossover hardcore album that looks to transcend the genre, but one that tries to elevate it to its highest visibility.

Glow On

Brendan Yates is the frontman of the biggest thing in hardcore and he understands that makes him an entertainer first. “If it makes you feel alive!/Well, then I’m happy to provide!” he screams on “Blackout,” a single from Turnstile’s spectacular fourth album Glow On and a synopsis of the entire Turnstile experience: there’s chunky power chords, a blindingly bright alt-rock hook, drum machines, and a Latin funk breakdown, and also it’s about wanting just one moment in the spotlight before you die.
The Baltimore quintet’s genre fusion and their belief in its transformative power are equally responsible for frequent comparisons to Rage Against the Machine, 311, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and maybe even Incubus—bands far outside the purview of hardcore. Turnstile are “alternative rock” by the literal, ’90s definition where no style of music is incompatible with punk if it’s played with speed, force and a genuine respect for its originators. Glow On is not a crossover hardcore album that looks to transcend the genre, but one that tries to elevate it to its highest visibility.
The band’s third LP, 2018’s Time & Space, came tantalizingly close. It was easier to just shrug off its few shortcomings and celebrate the fact that a hardcore band could sign to a major label and use their resources to bring in Diplo, Sheer Mag, Will Yip, and a Ms Lauryn Hill backup singer covering the Gap Band for about 30 seconds. But genre-hopping ain’t the instantaneous draw it used to be—Time & Space simply couldn’t introduce the suburbs to Gang of Four or Public Enemy or George Clinton or dub through rock radio and MTV like RHCP, RATM, and 311 did before them. The guest spots and interludes often played out like distractions or diversions, proof of a band with impressive taste and connections still sorting out what it meant to be Turnstile.
Yates has spent a lot of the past three years sorting out that exact thing. Whereas Time & Space was an expression of familiar anxieties about social media and self-actualization, today Turnstile are thinking about the function of art, the pressures of commerce, and the friends they’ve lost along the way, particularly Power Trip’s Riley Gale. But these solemn concerns enrich and deepen Glow On rather than weighing it down. Yates may be shirtless and airborne 90 percent of the time he’s on stage—just acknowledge the heavy heart he brings to lyrics like “Too bright to live/Too bright to die!” and “Still can’t fill the hole you left behind!” as he readies another roundhouse kick.
But first, Glow On shakes off the emotional baggage of the past three years with a pinwheeling synth line that could lead them on any number of paths. Could they further pursue the skate-house fusion from their Share a View remix EP with Australian lo-fi producer Mall Grab? Does it signal a shift towards the power-pop that Yates, Pat McCrory, and Daniel Fang play in Angel Du$t? Or the jangly indie of Yates’ Free the Birds side project? Glow On has Mike Elizondo behind the boards, a guy who co-wrote “In Da Club” and “The Real Slim Shady” and produced the Mastodon and Avenged Sevenfold albums that royally pissed off metal fans—does this suggest similar kingmaking ambitions for Turnstile? The synth squiggle and the song it introduces, “Mystery,” hint at any and all possibilities before settling into a unified theory of Turnstile—it all comes back to the riff and the groove.
As with older songs like “Real Thing,” “Gravity,” or “Fazed Out,” Glow On’s best riffs initially sound sourced straight from the lizard brain—the sort of thing a teen might play when they get their first distortion pedal. That same teen might also remember how the intro to “Waiting Room” made them feel like dunking themselves through a basketball hoop once the beat dropped—and that’s why Franz Lyons’ bass riffs are the only thing you hear before the chorus detonates on “Holiday” and “Mystery.” If “Endless” and “Fly Again” were played any faster, if they changed chords more quickly or tried to get a little trickier with syncopation, it would displace a groove that Turnstile have so sharply honed—the perfect tempo and rhythm to trigger a reflexive nod from even the most antisocial hardcore head. Free the neck and any other form of movement might be possible; there’s a song here called “Dance-Off” and it’s sort of about the meaning of life.
As it turns out, Turnstile weren’t infiltrating the dancefloor on Share a View as a one-off experiment but as intensive R&D for Glow On’s savvy integration of auxiliary percussion and electro post-production flourishes. Layering handclaps and cowbell underneath a standard drum kit alters the DNA of “Dance-Off” into heavy funk that could set off a wedding reception. The bleacher-stomping beat of “Holiday” recalls peak Sleigh Bells while inverting their ratio of metalcore to indie pop. At its most daring, Glow On creates syntheses so novel that they might predict the future: “Underwater Boi” matches the waterlogged tones and vocal manipulations of Spotify’s Feel Good Indie playlist to screwfaced, palm-muted guitars; “Blackout” punches in 808s, tambourines, and a timbale breakdown, modulating from the timbres of Miami bass to Miami Sound Machine to the Miami Dolphins locker room. The release of the Dev Hynes collaboration “Alien Love Call” as a single initially felt like Turnstile seeking a blessing as they ventured into Blood Orange’s realm of woozy, wavy R&B. But the respect and exchange of ideas is mutual—Glow On closer “Lonely Dezires” reacquaints Hynes with the kind of snotty post-hardcore he hasn’t touched since his old band Test Icicles broke up.
“You really gotta see it live to get it,” Lyons croons on his one vocal feature, “No Surprise,” musing on how the human experience can only be realized in the physical realm. It’s deep shit for a 46-second song. But it’s also an unexpectedly meta moment: Turnstile, and really most legendary hardcore bands, have surely heard “you gotta see it live to get it” about themselves. In many cases, it’s true, though it’s a form of advocacy that sometimes feels like a way to avoid granting hardcore artistry a deeper analysis—especially when the genre has produced vital, brutal, ambitious, subversive, and flat-out fun albums while completely online. Besides, show a skeptic the most insane Gulch or Drain set and they still might only fixate on the risk of getting kicked in the skull. While Glow On will absolutely go off in person, Turnstile’s greater feat is getting across the camaraderie, positive energy, and unlimited possibilities of hardcore for people who might only experience it on record, on a Spotify playlist or, Lord willing, a Tony Hawk soundtrack. Windmill kick to “Mystery” in the comfort of your bedroom, punch the steering wheel instead of a stage diver when Yates shouts “BOOM BOOM BOOM” during “T.L.C. (Turnstile Love Connection)”—seeing Turnstile live is no longer a prerequisite to “get” Glow On. Being alive will suffice.

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Produced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Halsey’s spectral fourth album confronts the thrill and terror of getting what you want. It’s their strongest work to date.

Halsey: If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power

If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power

When Halsey’s first album, 2015’s Badlands, took off, “New Americana” was its designated hit. The track is a self-conscious attempt to define a generation “high on legal marijuana/Raised on Biggie and Nirvana,” a flimsy but easily digestible thesis statement for critics who saw the Tumblr-poet-turned-pop-star as a “millennial built in a lab,” as a New York Times profile put it then. But the album’s true promise came 10 tracks later, on “Gasoline”: “Do you tear yourself apart to entertain like me?” The pull toward self-immolation saturates Halsey’s music, and they’ve spent every album since drawing a big circle around it, in grand metaphors and gaudy costumed concepts. It’s in the way they call themself a hurricane, in the overdetermined tragedy of their Romeo and Juliet-themed album, in the formulaic pop songs they made later—even within the ache of their Auto-Tuned lines on the Chainsmokers hit that threatened to define their career. They turned the examination of their psyche into spectacle: splashy breakup songs with big-name features, an EP structured to take place in a single room.
On the surface, Halsey’s latest album, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, fits this tradition of grand gestures. The singer, who uses she/they pronouns, is releasing the record alongside an IMAX film of the same name; there have been no singles, only increasingly gory, fantastical trailers and a theatrical unveiling of the album art at the Met. But the record itself has a tight, internal focus: It’s about walking the line between self-preservation and self-destruction, control and compulsion, the thrill and terror of getting what you want. Instead of sieving these themes through an elaborate architecture, Halsey lets horror—of the body, of the mind, of mortality—radiate outward. The result is alluring and spectral. It’s their best work yet.
Largely that’s because they sound so good: clear and cool and lilting. Nine Inch Nails members and film score mainstays Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross produced the record, and the pair seem eager to announce their unlikely place in pop music. On the opening tracks, they create a psychedelic Gothic fairytale—wisps of wind, icy piano, panoramic synth blur, a churning undercurrent listed in the credits as a “menacing beat”—while Halsey sings about loneliness and crowns and Judas (“Jesus needed a three-day weekend/To sort out all his bullshit”), but mostly about a pervasive sense of doom. “Don’t wait for me,” they cry over the chaos, “it’s not a happy ending.” Reznor and Ross spend most of the album experimenting, careening through genres and hinting at a danger that’s never fully realized. They cram songs with texture, reverberating screams and screeching sirens; the busyness can feel like a distraction. The sound is sometimes abrasive, but rarely shocking. The rollicking “honey” oscillates between frenetic drums and guitar, with Dave Grohl behind the kit and a cyborg inflection that leaks in from hyperpop. “I’ve been corrupted,” Halsey sings on “Lilith,” and a spasm of glitch submerges the last note.
If there’s an organizing framework to the album, it’s dissonance. Halsey wrote the album as they fell in love and navigated pregnancy; the writing zigzags between stability and self-sabotage. Every bit of sweetness is anchored in devastation. “Only you have shown me how to love being alive,” they hum on “Darling.” On “Ya’aburnee,” the delicate closing song and the conclusion to all this examination, they can only express commitment in the direst terms: “You will bury me before I bury you.”
With no features, the atmosphere of the album becomes unsettlingly claustrophobic. The effect is intoxicating on “Whispers,” where Halsey actualizes and criticizes their innermost thoughts. The premise might be hokey or campy from a lesser writer, but Halsey is so good at parsing their competing impulses, so brutal in their self-assessment: “This is the glimmer of light that you’re keeping alive when you tell yourself, ‘I bet I could fuck him,’” they murmur. It’s a line that feels ripped from their first album, a further reiteration of what Halsey has been telling us since the beginning; though its sound is varied and its production heady, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power rarely offers a new dimension. But for a pop star who has tried to write sweeping anthems about being young in today’s America, this is the song, and the album, that seems most likely to resonate: scrolling through a screen at night and surveying the wreckage, looking for a way to slow your own sacrifice.

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Push the Sky Away scans as the Bad Seeds' post-Grinderman comedown album, to be filed alongside their statelier turns. But where those usually find Cave in pensive, piano-man mode, the sound here is uncharacteristically weightless and eerily atmospheric.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Push the Sky Away

Push the Sky Away

Push the Sky Away is the 15th official album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, but it could almost be their first. After 30 years together, the band has effectively come full circle, having completed its evolution from untamed beast to rock dignitary and, via the fearsome alter-ego offshoot Grinderman, back again. Factor in the recent resignation of Mick Harvey (Cave's right hand man since their Boys Next Door days in the late 1970s), and the sudden deep-sixing of Grinderman (as a recording entity, at least), and the Bad Seeds' reliably black essence now more closely resembles a blank canvas.
Push the Sky Away scans as the Bad Seeds' post-Grinderman comedown album, to be filed alongside statelier turns like 1997's The Boatman's Call and 2001's No More Shall We Part. But where the Bad Seeds' mellow records usually find Cave in pensive, piano-man mode, Push the Sky Away presents an uncharacteristically weightless, eerily atmospheric sound; in lieu of crossover ballads like "Into My Arms" and "People Ain't No Good", we have foggy reveries built upon ominously rumbling bass lines, twitchy rhythmic tics, and hushed-voice intimations. It may not erupt with same force as the Bad Seeds' stormiest gestures, but the underlying menace fuelling it remains.
The approach bears the influence of Grinderman as much as the Bad Seeds' decidedly more raucous 2008 release, Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!. Though Grinderman was often seen as the Bad Seeds' wild child offspring, it was also a vehicle through which Cave and his increasingly prominent foil, Warren Ellis, could experiment with textures and loops (to the point of spawning a remix album). These production intricacies form the bedrock of Push the Sky Away, which is less a showcase for Bad Seeds' powerhouse prowess than a reconstructed fever-dream memory of it, transmuting the familiar into something foreign. There's a sense of the Bad Seeds expanding their sound and unlearning it at the same time. (Drummer Jim Sclavunos wins the Take One for the Team Award here, tempering his usual thunderous thrust for stragetically timed snare-rim taps and brushed-skin driftiness.)
The freer, more exploratory bent extends to Cave's lyric sheet. True to the album's desolate, dead-of-night air, his songs are less narratively focussed, more stream-of-consciousness haze, countering Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!'s gritty urban milieu with impressionistic images of mermaids and the sea that reinforce the sense of a mind floating away. Tellingly, Cave has said his writing for the album was inspired by "Googling curiosities," and his lyrical logic follows the same circuitous path as an extended, after-hours web-surfing session, bouncing between subjects profound and frivolous, indulging life-long obsessions and newfound, fleeting fascinations. Bad Seeds albums used to inspire you to reacquaint yourself with folk tales and the Old Testament; this one will have you brushing up on quantum physics, astronomy, and "Hannah Montana".
That last bit shouldn't come as a surprise: Over the past decade, Cave has shown a greater eagerness to interact with contemporary pop culture, from the Oprah shout-out on Grinderman's "Kitchenette" to the comically perverse Avril Lavigne fixation that formed a subplot in his 2009 novel, The Death of Bunny Munro. But where these namedrops have felt like humourous incongruities in Cave's fire-and-brimstone universe, Push the Sky Away straight-facedly acknowledges how modern phenomena like Wikipedia and Miley Cyrus hold as much sway over the populace as the Bible and Robert Johnson once did, while translating brooding ballads into text-speak and slang ("We No Who U R"). And where more recent Bad Seeds standouts like Abattoir Blues' "There She Goes, My Beautiful World" and Lazarus' "We Call Upon the Author" saw Cave writing songs about writing songs, Push the Sky Away goes one meta: The album's most elaborate track, "Jubilee Street", is answered by "Finishing Jubilee Street", a spartan, spoken-word account of a dream Cave had just after he completed work on the former.
For all the album's wandering spirit, the first eight tracks on Push the Sky Away are neatly structured into two complementary, four-song halves that mirror one another: each comes outfitted with an ominous opening salvo ("We No Who U R", "Mermaids"), an icy glare that thaws into an open-hearted address ("Wide Lovely Eyes", "We Real Cool"), and a scenery-chewing set piece ("Water's Edge", "Finishing Jubilee Street") that hearkens back to early Bad Seeds storytelling turns like "The Carny". (Fittingly, original bassist Barry Adamson rejoined the band following the album's recording.) The simmering tension of each side is eventually unleashed through a slow-boiling, show-stopping epic. The aforementioned "Jubilee Street" is built upon a repeated "Hey Joe"-like chord progression that, thanks to Ellis' mesmerizing violin lines, grows more grandiose with each passing cycle, reaching such dizzying heights that you almost forget you're listening to a song about a murdered prostitute. But even that pales in comparison to side two's colossal "Higgs Boson Blues", which begins as a solitary 3 a.m. strum in the vein of Neil Young's "On the Beach" but, over seven writhing minutes, ends up traversing the entirety of modern history, from "the missionary with his small pox and flu" to the birth of the Devil's music to the anticipated death of a certain teen-pop starlet who "floats in a swimming pool."
"Higgs Boson Blues" is named for the elementary particle whose discovery last year was hailed as the most significant breakthrough in contemporary physics, one that essentially provides the missing piece in explaining the structure of our entire universe. But its discovery after 50 years of intense research has also led to something of an existential crisis among physicists, who are now left with no theory to prove, and asking themselves, "What now?" One can imagine Nick Cave asking himself the same question as he entered his fourth decade fronting a deviant rock band that had seemingly mined every last shade of noir. But in this album's quietly defiant title-track denouement, he finds a renewed mission statement: "If you got everything and you don't want no more/ You've got to just keep on pushing, keep on pushing/ Push the sky away." Because when you can't see the sky, you can't see your limits.


This prescient reissue delivers a crucial set of Nigerian songs that show the country absorbing and beaming back singular versions of disco, boogie, electro, and early rap.

Various Artists: Doing It in Lagos: Boogie, Pop & Disco in 1980s Nigeria

When Nigerian soldiers stormed Fela Kuti’s Kalakuta Republic on February 18, 1977, they not only burned the compound to the ground, imprisoned Kuti, and threw his mother out of a window (she would later die from the injuries), but also altered the course of Nigerian music. For most of the decade, Fela’s Afrobeat ruled the country. But in the wake of this raid that placed the genre’s fiercest proponent behind bars, bands started to look away from the heavy percussion and politically conscious themes of Afrobeat and Afrocentric rock. Their ears instead turned more towards what was happening in the U.S.
Waves of reissues from the motherland act as a mirror darkly. Look for the roots of the blues or guitar heroes, and the likes of Ali Farka Touré and King Sunny Adé get introduced to the West. Fervor for muscular funk at the turn of the century led to a Fela renaissance and the awesome Nigeria 70 set. Now, as people obsess over the likes of William Onyeabor, the post-disco sound of boogie, as well as rubbery Reagan era synth-pop, the Soundways label presents Doing It in Lagos: Boogie Pop & Disco in 1980s Nigeria. It is as prescient a reissue as can be hoped for, delivering a crucial set of songs that show the country absorbing and beaming back singular versions of disco, boogie, electro, and early rap.
The title track comes courtesy of Hotline, who make a falsetto boast of “We are fearless/Don’t get near us” as the bass pops, tasers get triggered, and UFOs wobble all around it. Closer to Cameo and Parliament’s cartoonish cosmic funk than Fela’s Afrobeat, it’s loose-limbed and woozy enough to anticipate the sound of New Amerykah Part One. “Don’t Give Up” has the stop-start punk-funk feel of A Certain Ratio, with popping bass and dub effects that flare up at unexpected intervals. Lexy Mella’s “On the Air” programs the drum machine in such a way that it anticipates the skeletal groove of “Sign O’ the Times.”
A handful of Doing It in Lagos’ tracks—including the incessant, itchy wiggle of “Holiday Action,” the metallophone-laced slink of Terry Mackson’s “Distant Lover,” and the taut yet silken moves of Peter Abdul’s “Don’t You Know”—could be mistaken for sides of such early ’80s dance labels as Tabu, SOLAR (Sound of Los Angeles Records), and Salsoul. This is no coincidence, as the liner notes explain, for these imprints were widely popular in the country. So much, in fact, that SOLAR opened a branch office in Lagos and modern soul bands like Shalamar, Skyy, and Rafael Cameron performed before packed crowds in Nigeria.
Some of the tracks emulate that surface slickness and clichés of the era, chanting about getting funky, having disco fever, dancing all night, and shaking your body. But listen closer and that same sense of power that Fela inspired in his countrymen comes across. Odion Iruoje’s “Identify With Your Root” conveys a message about heritage and pan-African pride delivered with a patter lifted from the Sugarhill Gang. He shouts out countries and adds that, no matter where you are in the world, “you’re still an African.”
And then there’s the undeniable ear candy of Oby Onyioha’s “Enjoy Your Life.” Set atop a gurgling, flanged-out boogie bass—with strings and horns added to the mix for good measure—Onyioha’s sweet styling brings to mind the likes of Teena Marie and Chaka Khan. “Have a ball/Baby it’s your life,” she purrs, “It’s no sin to enjoy your life… Get your chance now/Before you find it’s too late.” Onyioha conveys a sense of female empowerment with total joy. It might be the most honeyed iteration of carpe diem to be had on a Nigerian pop song, even if it isn’t delivered with the type of force that Fela wielded.


Drummer Louis Cole’s sidelong blend of hard funk and soft pop—aided by guest spots from Thundercat and Brad Mehldau—remains delightfully sly and off-kilter.

Time

The mark of a great chord progression is a peculiar mixture of surprise and inevitability. On first listen, you find yourself confused by the way that one chord follows another, refusing to follow the well-trodden path: jumping when they should step and bounding when they should glide. Eventually, once the song has burned itself into your brain—once its course has remapped your own neural pathways—you’ll have trouble imagining a world where these curious patterns didn’t exist. But even then, even after no matter how many plays, that harmonic dodge-and-feint will still produce the tiniest frisson of wrongness. It’s among the sweetest dopamine hits that music is capable of producing.
Louis Cole’s instrument of choice is the drums, but he definitely knows his way around a killer set of changes. Time, his third album, is brimming with strange, counterintuitive progressions—chords that seem to slip sideways, tumbling into one another, jostling and pivoting just when you don’t expect. An unusual mixture of hard funk and soft pop, like Zapp and Burt Bacharach stuck in an elevator together, Cole's is a sly, jubilant sound; it makes good use of the way funk also thrives upon a sense of wrongness, a screw-faced delight at things gone awry.
Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label turns out to be a good home for Cole’s music. A falsetto singer and secret sentimentalist, he doesn’t often sound much like his labelmates, even if he has played with Thundercat, who returns the favor here on “Tunnels in the Air”; Dennis Hamm, Thundercat’s live keyboardist, also turns up, laying down a ripping piano solo on “Trying Not to Die.” But Cole’s gently twisted perspective fits FlyLo’s mischievous M.O. He’s got a squirrelly sense of humor and a barely veiled obsession with death. This is a guy who, seven years ago, in his early days of uploading DIY videos to YouTube, paired a lovely, sentimental instrumental called “Clouds” with stock footage of nuclear bombs going off. At times, he’s come dangerously close to looking like a novelty artist: His biggest viral hit to date is a lo-fi video—both the graphics and his getup could easily be mistaken for a cable-access leftover from the mid-1980s—called “Bank Account” in which he films himself in split screen, playing keys and drums, and singing, in his frictionless coo, “I don’t want to check my bank account.”
On Time, his off-kilter demeanor takes many forms. Album opener “Weird Part of the Night” is a charging squelch-fest sung in celebration of the workaholic night owl. The uptempo “Freaky Times” tackles a tried-and-tested trope, the sex jam loaded with double entendres, while indulging in both the silly (“Fantasies in my pantasies,” goes the refrain) and the bizarre (“Softer than a corpse whisper,” goes one of his come-ons). “When You’re Ugly,” the album’s crisp funky second song, contains the immortal advice: “When you’re ugly/No one wants to talk to you/When you’re ugly, there is something you can do, called/Fuck the world and be real cool.” Some of his gags are strictly musical: “After the Load Is Blown,” a bruised, end-of-the-relationship slow jam, just goes ahead and quotes Lenny Kravitz’s “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over.”
But many of the album’s most powerful moments come when the grin slips. You can hear it in the feather-light touches of “A Little Bit More Time,” a deathbed plea set to a 1960s easy-listening pastiche; you can hear it in “Real Life,” in which Coles’ bruising drum work squares off against a lightning-like solo from jazz pianist Brad Mehldau, all of it soothed by one of the album’s downiest choruses. And you can especially hear it in the record’s many ballads, like “Everytime,” a middle-school slow-dance number par excellence, or “Phone,” a gorgeous love song featuring some of the album’s most delightful chord changes, or the closing “Night,” another mortality-obsessed song in which he imagines remembering, in his last moments alive, a nighttime drive with his lover. For a guy who loves him some rascally grooves, there’s something almost shockingly unguarded about these witching-hour ruminations. Just as he doesn’t fake the funk, he doesn’t fake his feelings, either. As his sidelong chord changes suggest, he’s led primarily by his own weird muse.


Columbia University composition grad Mario Diaz de Leon combines an interest in Karlheinz Stockhausen-style modernism with a love of metal, noise, and ambient drones. He's collaborated with members of Wolf Eyes and written for chamber groups, and on his latest album, he combines his interests seamlessly into music that throbs with snarling exuberance.

Mario Diaz de Leon: The Soul Is the Arena

The Soul Is the Arena

If you don't follow classical music, it might surprise you to hear a living composer professing admiration for metal, noise, and ambient drones. But that's how things have been for decades now—going back to the early 1980s, when guitar-centric composers like Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham started fusing underground rock with post-minimalism. Today, it's common for young conservatory talents to name-check alt-derived noise artists alongside modernists like Karlheinz Stockhausen.
In that respect, Columbia University composition grad Mario Diaz de Leon is on-trend: the promotional material for his latest release of chamber pieces cites both Stockhausen as well the abrasion specialists in Wolf Eyes. (Diaz de Leon comes by the latter reference point honestly, having collaborated with group member Nate Young in a duo that goes by the name Standard Deviance One.) When he's not working in chamber-music mode, Diaz de Leon also sometimes goes by the moniker Oneirogen—a guise which finds him splitting his attention between an electric guitar and a synth setup, ultimately creating a wash of doomy chords and spacey soundscapes. It's a sound that can make sense on a Liturgy bill.
What makes Diaz de Leon stand out from his peers, though, is his ability to distill these influences into a balanced aesthetic. Plenty of people can write a one-off "amplified" piece for chamber musicians, but few artists have built a language as stable and rewarding as Diaz de Leon's. His first solo-composer album, Enter Houses Of, was released in 2009 on John Zorn's Tzadik label, and showed him to be adept at weaving opulently distorted electronics with virtuoso acoustic-instrumental parts, written for players drawn from the International Contemporary Ensemble. The noise throbbed with snarling exuberance; the woodwinds doled out haunting harmonies.
The Soul Is the Arena is Diaz de Leon's latest chamber-music album since Enter Houses Of, and it's both shorter and more all-encompassing. In three different pieces that collectively stretch just over 40 minutes, he gives listeners two riff-rollercoaster duos and a 20-minute, chamber-band essay of grim, beguiling beauty. The opener, "Luciform", is a duo between Diaz de Leon's electronics and flutist Claire Chase (a recent MacArthur "Genius Grant" awardee). Over the course of its 13-and-a-half minutes, Chase's flute sometimes often carries the melodic line, while the electronics swoop in big, sine-wave-surfing curves behind her. At other points, Chase's breathy sound is just a complement to the rampaging crunch of the composer's programming. The fast switches are what keep the piece interesting.
The second duo piece is the album's title track, and it asks for Joshua Rubin's bass clarinet to go into reed-squawk mode. (Rubin manages this risky, awkward move with impressive grace.) Later on, the instrumentalist and the pre-engineered sounds partner up for a memorably precise and glitchy passage. The work packs a hell of a lot into nine-and-a-half minutes—so much so that you might need a little bit of a breather. Diaz de Leon has you covered on that count with the album-closing "Portals Before Dawn" (on which he plays synths alongside a sextet of instrumentalists from the International Contemporary Ensemble). The composer tried a similar strategy to close out Enter Houses Of, but this longer, more gradually surging and receding composition gets more out of the composer's ambient fascinations. Diaz de Leon hasn't put out an uninteresting release yet, but this compact and wide-ranging album is now the best introduction to his refined feel for instrumental extremity.


The Colombian-Canadian singer-songwriter’s latest EP refines her stylish, reflective pop but leans on too uniform of a palette.

Bad Premonition EP

Tei Shi’s first two albums wore their love for 1980s and ’90s pop and R&B on their sleeves. Moving from sugary, Britney-inflected pop to glistening ballads, the artist born Valerie Teicher synthesized her influences into charming, occasionally experimental pop delivered in a breathy,  luminous soprano. Since an acrimonious split from former label Downtown three years ago, Teicher has entered a phase of reinvention. On 2020’s independently released Die 4 Ur Luv EP, she leaned into energetic dance songs that occasionally spun their wheels. On Bad Premonition, she refines her approach. It’s a solid if relatively slight set that displays all-too-fleeting glimpses of her songwriting and vocal strengths.
The new EP’s six songs breeze by, outfitted with straightforward hooks built around Teicher’s fluttering vocals. “Grip” is the best, a sleek statement of self-worth that pulses with a satisfying charge. “Thought this shit was free and you got me cheap,” she sings. “But it gets ugly when you don’t play clean.” As on Die 4 Ur Luv, many lyrics touch on themes of asserting self-worth and could double as jabs at the music industry. During the downtempo “Mona Lisa,” one of Teicher’s loveliest songs to date, chiming keys and curlicuing synths accent a blunt message. “You’re so full of shit and you know it,” she sings in a sweetened falsetto. On the title track, she ratchets up the drama, describing an impending disaster she feels powerless to stop. She yearns to be “at the right place at the right time,” a frustratingly familiar refrain for independent artists that Teicher warps into her own surefooted pop song.
A few misfires stall the energy. Clanging synths and clicking, syncopated drums flatten “Familiar,” an otherwise atmospheric song about searching for an elusive sense of identity. “Bad Premonition” builds on similarly sparse elements—metronomic synth lines, a stomping beat—but becomes too repetitive by the time its delicate bridge finally strips away the clutter. The sameness undercuts Teicher’s strong lyrics and dexterous vocals. The fidgety, bilingual “¿Quién Te Manda?” features bassy, Y2K-style co-production from Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly, but it closes with an overlong outro that feels like subtraction by addition.
When Teicher deviates from her usual palette of metallic synth, Bad Premonition soars. The wistful standout “Color” casts breakbeat pop in a flood of sunlight. “Is it safe on the other side?” she asks on the song’s blissed-out chorus. “’Cause I feel like I died/In a ray of, in a ray of light.” Invoking Madonna’s late-’90s touchstone as much as the afterlife, Teicher blossoms the idea of being a small part of a bigger universe into a radiant song that perfectly suits her featherlight voice. Though her stylish, tasteful pop doesn’t always achieve the same highs, “Color” underlines Teicher’s delicately emotive power to induce a head rush of longing in an instant.


Sleek but not too sleek for slap bass, the Brooklyn quartet’s third album is a dispatch from the gray area between stoicism and comedy.

Big Time Things

For a cheekily suave album from a band named Office Culture, Big Time Things is pretty down-to-earth. Where 2019’s A Life of Crime was a collection of vignettes from the graffitied alleys and grimy back rooms of a hard-knock city, the Brooklyn quartet’s latest finds poetry in the benign challenges of normal adulthood. Over sophistipop arrangements peppered with strings and horns, singer-songwriter (and occasional Pitchfork contributor) Winston Cook-Wilson tells stories so acutely ruffled that they take on an ironic liminality. Though the band can sometimes come across a bit disgruntled, the album takes on a flippant, carefree attitude. It would make a charming soundtrack for a rundown lounge with velvet walls and stiff pours.
A weary, sardonic humor underlines Cook-Wilson’s writing on Big Time Things. Past Office Culture albums were more plot-driven, but here the lyrics lean into Seinfeldian normalcy. “Things were bad then/But they’re better now,” Cook-Wilson sings on the wry, anticlimactic chorus of “Things Were Bad.” “Elegance” contrasts nuanced, self-deprecating verses with a chorus themed around altruism and simplicity, an emotional duality that hovers above the record. The most memorable moment comes on the title track: “Stop, I feel nervous/I smell rust…Wondering if it’s you I should trust,” he repeats in a deadpan refrain. “Seems like big time things/Are bothering both of us.” The hook calls to mind an uncomfortable dinner with a romantic partner, quietly knowing something is wrong but playing dumb to avoid conflict. The tonal ambiguity of Cook-Wilson’s delivery allows the song to sound at once dejected and affirming.
Steely Dan is the most obvious touchstone for the cosmopolitan, freewheeling instrumentals on Big Time Things, as well as Kaputt-era Destroyer, late-1960s Scott Walker, and even Haruomi Hosono’s Pacific. On “A Word,” chintzy bass slaps complement shuffling drums and loungey horns. The warm strings on “Little Reminders” flesh out a complex, deconstructed waltz. Opener “Suddenly” gradually morphs from blocky funk into swirling baroque pop. “You were a road I could travel on/Till opportunity knocked at the gate,” Cook-Wilson croons over sinewy violin and cello before the arrangement disintegrates into a wiry guitar solo. It plays like the hypothetical product of a seasoned jazz band operating within the drab surreality that defines Paul Thomas Anderson films like Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love.
At times, the group can sound like they’re trolling by writing cuts this smooth. Over the course of the album’s 44 minutes, Cook-Wilson and his collaborators blend compassion and frustration so seamlessly that it’s hard to tell whether they’re about to start laughing or crying. Office Culture is a fixture in a sphere of bookish New York City rock bands like Adeline Hotel and Wilder Maker; their lackadaisical, almost wine-drunk disposition is what sets them apart. Landing in the gray area between stoicism and comedy, Big Time Things offers the clearest snapshot yet of their fascinating dichotomy.


The post-hardcore sludge-punk trio Metz have spent the last five years becoming the most brutalizing band in Toronto. For their debut, they've distilled their set-list standards into 29 minutes of pure but artfully rendered chaos.

Metz

The biggest lie about punk rock is that anyone can do it. Sure, anyone can do crap punk rock, but there is a fine to art to taking a music fueled by destructive impulses and building it to last. Toronto power trio Metz played their first show in late 2007, and since then, they've effectively applied Malcolm Gladwell's theory about the Beatles-- i.e., that it takes a good 10,000 hours of practice to become them-- to a subgenre not exactly known for its studiousness: post-hardcore sludge-punk. That five-year gap between their live and recorded debuts is not a product of laziness, but rather precision; while Metz quickly established themselves as the most brutalizing band in the city, the process of translating that essence into a record that would sound every bit as devastating and disorienting outside the confines of a circle pit was more protracted and deliberate. After a couple of small-run 7"'s, and a series of sessions helmed by producers including Owen Pallett/Dusted associate Leon Taheny, Crystal Castles engineer Alex Bonenfant, and Graham Walsh of Holy Fuck, they've distilled their set-list standards into 29 minutes of pure but artfully rendered chaos.
From Cloud Nothings' In Utero'd pop-punk to Japandroids' Superchunk-gone-Springsteen heroics to the Men's My Bloody Dinosaur overdrive, 2012 has seen no lack of artists revamping 1990s-vintage indie rock with a more anthemic accessibility and better mastering jobs. Metz pull off the same trick, but work with more angular, insoluble materials: namely, the muscular menace of the Jesus Lizard and the relentless, power-drill discord of Drive Like Jehu. Metz songs tend to start with an isolated element-- Hayden Menzies' thundering, hammer-of-the-gods drum salvos, Alex Edkins' solitary guitar screech-- that immediately triggers a ticking time-bomb countdown for the moment when the band erupts in unison. You can see the storm coming from a mile atway, and yet, when Menzies, Edkins, and bassist Chris Slorach launch into the merciless, firestorm battering of "Negative Space" or the wrecking-ball swing of "Knife in the Water", it still startles like a sneak attack.
But while it ably captures the band's ferocity, Metz is less a recreation of the band's live shows than a surveillance-video document of it, one that's been edited and manipulated to maximize dynamic impact. There's a surface graininess that amplifies the corrosive qualities of the band's sound and the strep-throat rawness of Edkins' voice, but also serves to accentuate some of the more surprising elements in the mix-- like the ascendant "ahhhhh" harmonies that provide a two-second respite from the village-pillaging assault of "Headache". The title of that song and others like "Rats", "Nausea", and "Sad Pricks" provide a handy summation of Edkins' bleak lyrical concerns, but that misanthropy never weighs the album down. Instead, like a pre-fame Kurt Cobain, Edkins channels his anxieties into manic release with a certain insolent swagger: In "Wasted", you get a glimpse of what Nirvana would've sounded like had they recorded their follow-up to Bleach for Touch and Go instead of Geffen.
Though unafraid to temper their inherent ugliness with piano taps and tambourine shakes, Metz stop short of embracing traditional pop-song melody. But they do understand pop-song economy, carefully arranging their riffs, rhythms, and screams in two-to-three-minute bursts that still feel immediate and catchy in the absence of proper sing-along hooks. Live, "Wet Blanket"'s psych-damaged fuzz-bass breakdown often gets stretched out, "You Made Me Realise"-style; on record, it emerges as a tightly wound beast, with a white-knuckled finale that craftily blurs the line between the band's natural, primal energy and studio-tweaked trickery. Recent history is rife with home-recording prodigies who get thrust onto the stage before learning how to perform, or promising live acts who rush-release their albums so that they have something to sell at the merch table, or at least a Soundcloud link to pimp. But while evidence suggests great concerts and great records are becoming mutually exclusive ideals for aspiring artists, Metz prove that, with a little patience, you can still have it both ways.


The Scandinavian synthesizer maven pays dusts off dozens of arcane vintage machines in an all-hardware studio recording meant to summon the spirit of bygone circuitry.

Lindstrøm: On a Clear Day I Can See You Forever

On a Clear Day I Can See You Forever

Robert Moog’s mid-century, tinker-friendly analog synthesizers were originally “hammered out in the pub” and “assembled out of junk,” write Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco in Analogue Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer. The dream was to make sounds like nothing else on Earth, which could be then be made by absolutely anyone on Earth.
But by the 1980s, the dream was fading. Moog’s instruments were, in the end, whimsical and unwieldy. Bigger companies made simpler, more powerful machines. The Memorymoog, in 1982, would be the last thing Moog made for decades, and it was a polyphonic powerhouse. But it lacked touch sensitivity, which meant it basically just played loud, and its presets varied wildly; users switching from machine to machine had to pray the strings didn’t sound like brass. In a Hail Mary pass to stay solvent, Moog salesman David Van Koevering, a former evangelical preacher, repackaged a hundred or so unsold models as “Sanctuary Synthesizers,” added a bunch of pious patches, and sold the lot to Christian music makers. Bankruptcy still arrived.
Then a cult arose around these wooden boxes of wires. Devotees turned the Moog, like relics of the houses of Korg, ARP, and Roland, into a status symbol. Original Moogs are now incredibly expensive, both in terms of cost and the time it takes to learn to use and maintain them. They look great among the fiddle-leaf fig trees on your frenemy’s feed. They are fetish objects at last, prized more for what they are than what they can do.
None of this is Hans-Peter Lindstrøm’s fault. Over the course of his 16-year-career he’s floated to the front of the third-wave analog revival, lifting the wow and flutter of predecessors like Stereolab and Faze Action and sending them into a Scandinavian disco jam-band dimension. Tracks like “Closing Shot,” “Blinded by the LEDs,” and of course the deathless “I Feel Space” demonstrated a command of form and function. Clearly he’s mastered his machinery: On a Clear Day I Can See You Forever arrives in the wake of his performance at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, commissioned on the occasion of the art space’s 50th anniversary and conscripting untold riches to procure some 30 hard-to-source synthesizers and drum machines.
One of them, a Memorymoog, as it happens, forms the foundation of the new album’s title track. He dusted one off and explored what he could do with it in 10 minutes, then played it back in reverse while improvising on the Fender Rhodes; a little perfuming with a Hammond through a wah-wah and some spring-reverbs, and, well, the sum of the parts is the sum of the track. The genius of, for example, those old Boards of Canada interludes was how they dissipated before their mystery ran out. “On a Clear Day I Can See You Forever” instead hopes for meaning through repetition, exploiting the precariousness of its electrical pulses as they stream through metal effects units. A rumble about eight minutes in scared the devil out of my cats, but soon enough they were snoring again in a puddle of sun.
The second track, “Really Deep Snow,” is anchored by a covetable Roland SH-101 and administered by various ARPs, Korgs, and Wurlitzers. It’s another almost 10-minute improv, whose main chords pay tribute to a psalm Lindstrøm heard in church as a child. Its vibe is certainly more Halloween (2018), though, a reincarnation of unholy terror as the anxiety of influence. John Carpenter was, without a doubt, the patron saint of arpeggiated epics; “Really Deep Snow” is a pious tribute, if one is needed.
Which can’t be said of the third track, titled by a lousy joke that feels, well, profane. How about we not appropriate the sacrament of an African American spiritual promising biblical deliverance from slavery in the service of a hardware pun? How about we not “Swing Low, Sweet LFO,” with its plinky Pianet and sugary Prophet 6 sweeps, less offensive than Moby’s appropriation of spirituals for car commercials but also, unfortunately, very much not as memorable?
Still, as in Christianity, redemption comes in the end. “As If No One Is Here” reincarnates a tone poem by Jean Sibelius, itself based on the Finnish national epic Kalevala, which tells the story of a swan being hunted in the realm of the dead. And that’s exactly what it sounds like: a murky suspension of endangered grace. A Roland TR-77 drips like water off stalactites into pools of Yamaha CS-60 chords, deeper than they first appear. Halfway through, acoustic cello and violin cut through like slits of moonlight and everything stills without settling down. Korg MS20 and ARP Solina Strings summon grimmer harmonies. There are echoes of Eno and Badalamenti, though “As If No One Is Here” feels looser than either would allow; perhaps Lindstrøm is better at mixing inspiration than at improvisation new forms.
Nonetheless, in moments, On a Clear Day I Can See You Forever is proof that there’s reason to have faith in these elite objects, these inventions of the dead that still somehow call out to us. Ignore the yuppie collectors who think that owning something improves their worth, or that hoarding these rarities will somehow save them from the grave. Lindstrøm may have timed these tracks to fit on a vinyl record, another sign of putting material concerns over creative vision, but there’s a good 15 minutes of so of beauty within those grooves that just might make a believer out of you.

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The supergroup’s cosmic concerto features lush, lilting instrumentals unfurling from Stevens’ tightly-wound pop choruses, though its glut of sound and ideas becomes wearisome.

Sufjan Stevens / Nico Muhly / Bryce Dessner / James McAlister: Planetarium

Planetarium

Planetarium began in 2011 when Muziekgebouw Eindhoven in the Netherlands commissioned a new work from composer Nico Muhly. He, in turn, brought in the National’s Bryce Dessner and Sufjan Stevens, who invited collaborator James McAlister to contribute beats. It was last year that Stevens and McAlister revisited these performances in a studio setting, building them out to this 76-minute, seventeen-track album. What results is an outsized project whose concept is worn loosely. Each track is named for a celestial entity, and most thematically evoke their namesake through mythic associations—“Venus” twists lore out of summer-camp lust (“Crazed nymphomania/Touch me if touching’s no sin”), while “Mars” considers the relationship between war and love (“I’m the producer/I’m the god of war/I reside in every creature”). Whether through Greek and Roman mythology or contemporary practices of astrology, the stories we build out into our incomprehensible cosmos become a way of accessing our analogously sprawling inner lives; starting from this notion, Planetarium’s lyrics ricochet from micro to macro focus—not infrequently at the expense of clarity.
Given that Stevens’ own work can race between styles, the album feels musically familiar to his catalogue, though Muhly’s arrangements lend distinctive muscle to its orchestral underpinnings. Songs are lush, lilting instrumentals unfurling from Stevens’ tightly-wound pop choruses; Dessner’s polished guitar adds a stadium-sized layer that nods more to the rock opera than the sci-fi soundtrack. But some digressions are less effective than others. About four-and-a-half minutes into “Jupiter,” for example, a cinematic interlude of piano, strings, and trombone fades, and Stevens’ voice interjects, processed such that it feels very intentionally like a radio communiqué from a vintage spacecraft: “Father of light, father of death/Give us your wisdom, give us your breath/Summoner says that Jupiter is the loneliest planet.” Stevens is no stranger to this practice of gravely summoning opaque imagery, but the outer-space literalism of his delivery makes this evocation of the isolation inherent in mortality feel light years more distant than usual, which, as far as I can tell, was not the desired effect.
And despite the occasional urgency of the narratives drawn here, Planetarium is sonically luxurious to the point of sometimes sounding bloated (as such big-ticket pop-classical commissions are wont to be). The four musicians’ amalgam of prog rock, Laurie Anderson-indebted angles, and blockbuster soundtracks nods to a now-retro futurism, but renders it in a smooth, expensive-feeling HD, out of step in an unproductive way. When these songs devolve into clattering piles of space-age electronics, or Stevens messes around with vocal processing and repeating phrases until they become droning refrains, it feels like affect without experimentation—a project that’s interested in styling itself after something avant-garde without much of the curiosity that can make such messes somehow inspiring.
Even with a certain kind of over-the-top Bush-years indie aesthetic long-shelved, excess has worked well for Stevens. His music has a wide-eyed, ecstatic quality that energizes the listener, but here it becomes tiresome. Instead, it’s the slowest and least cluttered instrumentals that feel here the most effectively expansive, capturing the scope of the quartet’s chosen themes without collapsing beneath symbolism and meaning-making. “Sun” gently builds up from a series of uncertain notes to feel unflinchingly hopeful, and the crisp instrumentation of the first passage of “Earth” is a skillful marriage of styles. Singles like the album closer “Mercury,” in which Stevens’ untreated vocals soar above a simple, glistening pop structure, are lovely in their own right, but never quite reconcile with the darker textures found in Muhly’s compositions.
Much of the press narrative around this album has centered the idea that these immense cosmic themes have become increasingly relevant in the last five years of global tumult. Perhaps it’s because of the lack of a center to all this big-question reaching, or perhaps it’s because of its absurd detours, but I found much of Planetarium difficult to get close to. By contrast, an album like Stevens’ excellent 2015 Carrie and Lowell, written after these songs were first composed, can approximate the universal through a series of images that feel both violently proximal and achingly vast. It may make more sense to start with what appears deceptively small: to plumb myth from everyday detail, rather than projecting humanity onto myths.

Folk/Country / Electronic / Experimental


Though a sense of doom lurks at the heart of the venerable band’s eighth album, they remain determined to keep classic guitar-pop alive by slyly twisting and expanding the form.

The New Pornographers: In the Morse Code of Brake Lights

In the Morse Code of Brake Lights

Ever since Chuck Berry motorvated over the hill in “Maybellene,” cars have been a shorthand for freedom in rock’n’roll. The New Pornographers flip this axiom on its head on their eighth album, In the Morse Code of Brake Lights, where all sense of liberation is undercut by a suspicion that whoever is behind the wheel may be headed toward danger.
A sense of doom lurks at the heart of Brake Lights, providing connective tissue between its 11 barbed songs and darkening the album’s sunniest moments. As the work of a collective determined to keep classic guitar-pop alive by slyly twisting and expanding the form, Brake Lights has no shortage of colorful melodies, yet the hooks rarely feel bright, certainly not when compared to the incandescent rush of 2017’s Whiteout Conditions.
Such a shift in tone is deliberate, a reflection of changes within the New Pornographers as well as the culture at large. Always the group’s unofficial leader, A.C. Newman now stands as its lone songwriter and producer. Busy with family obligations, bassist John Collins decided not to share production duties with Newman this time around, while the mercurial Dan Bejar opted to sit out, save a lyric or two. Bejar’s absence has the inevitable side effect of straightening out the group’s sound, but the bigger change on Brake Lights lies in the New Pornographers’ retreat from the bombast of 2014’s Brill Bruisers and the percolating Krautrock rhythms and New Wave sheen of Whiteout Conditions. Stripped of such excesses, the band seems harder and tougher than they have in a while, maybe since the days of Twin Cinema.
A lot has changed since 2005, not the least being a global political lurch toward the right. Newman appears to address the turmoil of Trump’s America throughout Brake Lights: The narrator of “Colossus of Rhodes” sorts through the wreckage of a break-in but still believes in salvation; “Higher Beam” laments that “deep in the culture of fear, we all hate living here”; references to dead malls and cold wars are rampant. Despite these charged phrases, it’s difficult to discern any distinct political position in these songs, because Newman resists concrete narratives. Words pile upon each other, slowing down just enough to allow a certain line to linger; it’s as if he’s writing puzzles to counteract the force of his melodies.
Perhaps Newman’s lyrics are elusive, but enough images catch hold to create a lasting impression. In the Morse Code of Brake Lights feels emotionally direct in a way that’s foreign to New Pornographers, the result of Newman stripping the group down to its foundation and then building back up with the assistance of the string quartet Strength of Materials. When the guitar amps are cranked, it sometimes can be difficult to distinguish the sawing strings from analog synthesizers, but that only emphasizes how densely saturated the album is. The songs are propelled by a giant backbeat and sustained by soaring melodies, but they’re surrounded by a cavalcade of echoing harmonies, carnivalesque keyboards and, on occasion, a ripe guitar riff.
At the center of all the tumult is A.C. Newman and Neko Case, the pair who have wound up as the New Pornographers’ joint frontpeople. By now, their complementary styles are familiar—Case channels her passion with melodramatic flair, Newman is her wry, plaintive tonic—but far from tired. Each vocalist wrings out the confusion, desperation, and fear of the album’s darkest moments, adding shape and meaning to songs designed not to expose their secrets so easily. Case, in particular, has a knack for transforming elliptical tunes into urgent drama—in her hands, “Colossus of Rhodes” plays like an anthem—but Newman lends vulnerability to the delicate strains of “You Won’t Need Those Where You’re Going.” Still, what pulls the album into focus is their vocal interplay. Case and Newman trade lines, finish each other’s thoughts, reveal the unspoken meanings of the songs; they’re old friends who find sustenance in each other’s presence. The essential humanity at the heart of this relationship offsets the dread that flows throughout In the Morse Code of Brake Lights, and gently leads the record toward something resembling hope.

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The PC Music mastermind’s debut solo album is a 49-song extravaganza of sketches, covers, and fully realized pop songs that purports to reveal the inner workings of his creative method.

7G

The PC Music philosophy boils down to two things. One: Normal people can be pop stars. Two: Avoid the middle ground at all costs. Pop music becomes extreme music in the hands of PC Music’s chief architect, A. G. Cook, whose penchant for artifice has yielded concepts like QT, the fictional pop star with a fictional energy drink to promote. So it comes as a surprise that on his debut solo album, A. G. Cook strips away the glossy packaging. On 7G—a 49-track collection of songs, sketches, cover versions, and studio experiments—he hands us the keys to the studio and invites us to take a look around.
Cook’s skills as a songwriter, producer, and A&R have taken PC Music from the fringes to the main stage in the seven years since the London collective was founded. Their exuberant, abrasive tunes attracted attention for hoovering up all kinds of music usually dismissed as naff, cheesy, or empty-headed—subgenres like hardstyle, nightcore, and ’90s Europop—and polishing them as bright as a Jeff Koons balloon dog. Dismissed by some as ironic or parodic, the whole enterprise has ended up as a foundational influence on the current strand of hyperpop bubbling up at the limits of the mainstream, including neon-brushed characters like Dorian Electra, Rina Sawayama, and 100 gecs, who credit PC Music as one of their biggest influences.
Cook has released music through many aliases (Life Sim, DJ Warlord, numerous PC Music collaborations like QT and Lipgloss Twins) but under his own name, he is best known for his work as an executive producer, notably on Charli XCX’s recent run of mixtapes and albums. 7G takes a magnifying glass to this strand of his career, breaking down his work as a pop songwriter and pointing to his diverse (and sometimes unexpected) influences, from Squarepusher to the Strokes. The 49 tracks on 7G are divided into seven “discs,” although there’s no physical version of the album. (The title feels immaterial too—a wink to our high-speed future, with possible conspiratorial overtones.) Each disc takes a different sound or effect as its theme: drums, guitar, piano, spoken word, extreme vocals, and, most characteristically, supersaw and Nord, a beloved line of Swedish synthesizers. Supersaw, the waveform created by Roland for its JP-8000 synthesizer, is recognizable as the sound of trance, as well as in the fizzing melody lines that cut through PC Music confections like Hannah Diamond’s “Every Night.” And against the lemon-sharp supersaw is the soft-as-cream Nord, used by Cook as dreamy cushioning for his Auto-Tuned collaborators.
As an archival collection, 7G attempts to show Cook’s creative process from various angles—cross-sections of works in progress, from half-baked ideas to fine-tuned pop nuggets—even though the instrument-based taxonomy yields some strange sequences, with scrappy experiments followed by full-tilt anthems. Some tracks are simple sketches: “No Yeah” is a 54-second tone-poem of whispered vocals and “Drum Solo” is just that. Others offer clues to the stages of evolution that Cook’s material passes through on the way to becoming a hit: The breathily arpeggiated “Idyll” incorporates a shape-shifting riff that’s also been used by Cook’s alias Life Sim and on Charli XCX’s “Track 10.”
Some of the best bits are more like volatile lab experiments to be handled with rubber gloves: “Waldhammer,” for instance, captures what happens when you pour a test tube of Beethoven into a bubbling vat of white noise, while the digital mirage of “Note Velocity” sounds like an encounter between Steve Reich and the impossible genre of black MIDI. A cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ 1968 psych-pop single “Crimson and Clover” pits guitars against supersaws in a Weezer vs. Scooter deathmatch; no one survives.
Scattered throughout are some fully realized compositions, complete with melodies, hooks, and intricate arrangements. “Dust” opens with ear-scraping horror chords before mutating into stompy sparklepop histrionics. “Life Speed” is a 150 BPM lap of Mario Kart, careening through checkpoints and leaving glittering smoke in its wake. “Lil Song,” a collaboration with Oneohtrix Point Never, floats along like a lullaby. The 2-step gem “Show Me What” shines the spotlight on L.A.’s Cecile Believe and her glitched-out melisma, while chopped-up vocals from PC Music original Hannah Diamond are splattered across the IDM vistas of “Acid Angel.” Outliers all, these not-quite bangers feel a bit restrained, as if they didn’t qualify for the final sprinkling of magic dust that turns a studio sketch into an all-out pop epic. (It’s likely that Cook is still incubating a full album of the latter; last August he took the mic on “Lifeline,” a jacked-up power ballad that doesn’t feature on 7G.)
Elsewhere, a handful of cover versions transform megawatt rock hits into scruffy garage-band jams, as if Cook & co. had frittered away a few empty studio hours by learning other people’s songs. And what rehearsal session hasn’t been brightened by a successful stab at “Today” or “Beetlebum”? Even a confirmed avant-gardist can appreciate the comfort blanket of an old MTV2 staple. The “guitar” disc contains several echoes of this impulse, via washed-out pop-punk (“Undying”) and an “unplugged” rendition of Cook’s 2016 single “Superstar.”
Other covers fall closer to home, including a faithful version of Charli XCX’s “Official” and a fist-pumping take on Sia’s “Chandelier” featuring Caroline Polachek, whose own experiments with artifice—particularly the way she’s trained her own voice to reproduce the glitchy textures of Auto-Tune—have made her a natural ally to PC Music’s cyborg mission. When Polachek first visited Cook’s London studio in 2017, she was taken aback by his “insane dedication” to following through on extreme ideas; that day, he was mixing a note-for-note cover of Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker.” The scale and intensity of Cook’s ambitions are laid bare on this outsized collection, a glimpse at the whirring cogs beneath hyperpop’s pristine casing.

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The Canadian singer-songwriter uses the concept album to recreate the quietly stirring scenes of a dead romance. The Neon Skyline unfolds into a wistful, funny, and heartbreaking world of its own.

The Neon Skyline

Andy Shauf writes songs full of drinking and dancing, deep conversation and inside jokes, close friends and old flames—and he’s having a miserable time. Since his 2009 debut, the soft-spoken singer-songwriter has grown increasingly adept at telling stories from the vantage of the next morning’s hangover: plagued by regret, lingering on moments of unease stitched through an otherwise pleasant evening. Like Phoebe Bridgers, he incorporates bits of dialogue into his lyrics that illustrate not just how his characters speak but also how they really feel about each other. Like Jens Lekman, he accompanies himself with hushed, breezy soft-rock that can betray the intensity of his thoughts. Some of his best choruses are wordless refrains, the sound of singing along without knowing what to say.
Shauf’s new concept album The Neon Skyline takes place over the span of one night, as did his last solo record, 2016’s The Party. The story goes like this: Our narrator heads to a bar where he hears that his ex is back in town. From there, he spirals through the course of their relationship from young love to jealous arguments to dreams of starting over. He eventually runs into her and they go their separate ways. But by this point, late in the album, you’ve learned that reconciliation was never the point. In the climactic “Thirteen Hours,” Shauf drifts through a flashback that doesn’t focus on the fight that brought out their true nature, or the injury that landed one of them in the hospital. Instead, the key lyric is about a simple facial expression that suggested how things could never be the same again.
These are subtle scenes to hinge a narrative on, especially one as simple as this. Deeply earnest but wary of dipping into melodrama, Shauf gravitates toward the quietly stirring realizations you’d find in a Raymond Carver story. There is no irony, little closure, and often no moral at the end. He’s now in his early 30s, more than a decade removed from an early adulthood spent playing Christian pop-punk, and he has updated his songwriting to reflect precisely the kinds of social situations that keep polite, seemingly well-adjusted adults awake at night. The mood—wistfulness giving way to self-deprecation, deep insight cut with awful puns—is both familiar and endearing.
The most affecting songs arrive during the album’s mid-section, when a polite question about a friend’s kid in “Living Room” turns into a hallucinogenic vision quest about death and reincarnation and living out our parents’ mistakes. The ambling folk music—which Shauf plays entirely by himself on piano, guitar, woodwinds, and beyond—dims and intensifies to suggest a change in setting. When he sings about an intimate story transporting him into someone else’s home, you feel like you’re there with him.
For all Shauf’s expertise as a writer and arranger, the quality of his music that stands out is his gentle, fluttering vocal affectation. Upon first listen, I was certain he was Scottish. He’s actually from Regina, Saskatchewan and just so happens to pronounce the name “Charlie” in a way that sounds closer to “shoreline.” He cracks a good joke about this in the jaunty “Try Again,” where his narrator approximates a British accent to a response of bewilderment: “What was that supposed to be?” Like any good storyteller, he knows when to punch things up—you could play a drinking game with the number of times he mentions characters laughing at each other. But he also sounds a good deal lighter than he did on The Party, as the story of The Neon Skyline calls for a voice that can drift from bar to bar, mood to mood. How sad can you be when the bartender knows what you want without asking and the jukebox has your favorite song?
The Neon Skyline doesn’t require deep investment in its narrative to enjoy. Still, the closer you listen, the more rewarding it becomes. Shauf is growing increasingly masterful at casting a spotlight on tiny moments that tend to get overlooked in stories about relationships. In “Try Again,” a loaded misunderstanding provides one of the album’s best scenes: “I miss this,” she says, touching his coat; “I miss you too,” he responds; “I was talking about the coat,” she clarifies. The record ends with a similarly subdued revelation, as the narrator allows himself a brief fantasy about how things could have played out differently between them. The thought is momentarily thrilling, and the music is equally smokey and romantic, until he cuts himself off: “Oh, I’m already bored.” He’s learning that there’s a whole world out there—new people to meet, other stories to tell, more nights to regret.

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Singer Michael Kiwanuka’s new album* *is a sprawling soul opus full of longing and self-assessment.  It's a bittersweet offering, growing more melancholy as it plays.

Love & Hate

If you love hard enough, you’ll experience some sort of heartbreak. It’s just a thing that happens, and it doesn’t matter how many dates you enjoy or how many roses you buy. Some people will simply leave you in limbo—with lingering pain, unresolved questions and mounds of regret to sort through. It’s this same fog that permeates Michael Kiwanuka’s new album, Love & Hate, a sprawling soul opus full of longing and self-assessment. The singer sounds perplexed through its entirety, and his voice—a throaty wail the likes of Otis Redding—teeters between hope and hopelessness, perseverance and surrender. Should he stick around, or is it time to move on? And just what is he supposed to do now? Kiwanuka wrestles with these and other queries on Love & Hate, even if he never gets the answers he’s looking for.
Even getting to that point has been a challenge. He won the BBC’s Sound of 2012 and was nominated for a UK Mercury Prize. Following the success of his gold-selling debut album, Home Again, Kiwanuka found himself in a weird space creatively, rubbing elbows with Kanye West, although he wasn’t sure if he belonged. At one point, West invited the UK singer/guitarist to sing on his Yeezus sessions in Hawaii and Paris. “I was lost, absolutely lost,” Kiwanuka told the London Evening Standard in May. “I just felt stupid sitting there with my acoustic guitar with all these producers and rappers. He didn’t tell me what he wanted … I wanted him to tell me what to do because I didn’t know how to do it.” Kiwanuka fuels his music with the same self-doubt, crafting nomadic tales of a man in perpetual movement and unrest. On Home Again, which combined Memphis soul and bluesy folk, Kiwanuka was the understated journeyman, thumbing through his desolation to find personal peace.
For Love & Hate, Kiwanuka linked with producer Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton, best known for his work as one-half of Gnarls Barkley with Cee-Lo Green, and Broken Bells with Shins frontman James Mercer. Here, Burton brings Kiwanuka out of his shell, encouraging him to build songs from scratch in the studio, composing robust tracks that feel equally large and nostalgic. “Cold Little Heart”—the album’s 10-minute opener—is easily the record’s best song, landing somewhere between Pink Floyd’s soul/rock hybrid and Isaac Hayes’ orchestral arrangements. Throughout Love & Hate, Kiwanuka is backed by a full choir, which adds a richness not heard on his previous album. He doesn’t sound so isolated here, and the music itself feels grand and triumphant. On “Black Man in a White World,” Kiwanuka rides a jaunty Afrobeat instrumental to convey his inner racial strife: “I’m in love, but I’m still sad/I found peace, but I’m not glad.” In this instance, Kiwanuka speaks to the hearts of those who want the best out of humanity, even as the world implodes.
Love & Hate is a bittersweet offering, pulling from ’60s and ’70s soul, growing more melancholy as it plays. And while it’s a creative step forward for Kiwanuka, it’s still tough to get a sense of just who he is at times. Names like Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield immediately come to mind, and on “The Final Frame,” Kiwanuka’s spacious guitar chords recall Parliament Funkadelic’s Eddie Hazel. Kiwanuka takes pieces from these icons, resulting in a nice effort with occasional tedium, somewhat stalling the momentum. It’s clear Kiwanuka is still working through his angst. He'll need time to find inner tranquility.


Six years after their elegant high-water mark, Happiness, Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) and Adem Ilhan (Adem) reunite with fellow Fridge man Sam Jeffers on a new record of moody acoustic-electronic instrumentals.

The Sun

About a decade removed from its mid-90s heyday, post-rock has largely succumbed to the same musical limitations it originally set out to obliterate. Torch-bearers Tortoise settled into a predictable, off-kilter groove with 2004's It's All Around You and riff-monsters like Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky sound less triumphant and more manipulative with every touchdown-worthy crescendo. In the current climate, a genuine post-rock stunner like Battles' Mirrored is considered more of a one-off shock than a revitalizing statement. So it's an odd time for cult post-rock heroes Kieran Hebden, Adem Ilhan, and Sam Jeffers to resurface as Fridge six years after their elegant high-water mark, Happiness. The return is especially strange considering the respectable indie success Hebden and Ilhan have achieved as Four Tet and Adem since 2001. Possibly by design, they won't have to worry about The Sun taking off and putting their solo careers on hold. Instead of combining to push their moody acoustic-electronic instrumentals into the future (or at least the present), Fridge come across as a nostalgia act on The Sun-- a hodge-podge of rough sketches dressed-up as a comeback.
While their output ranges from wiry guitar excursions to hypnotic krautrock to Eno wallpaper, Fridge excel most at subtle, scuttling foreplay-- their best work sounds like the first minute of every Sigur Rós song aired-out and deconstructed. As such, Happiness stands as their most complete record, teeming with the meticulously precious production Hebden would later expand upon with 2003's Four Tet effort Rounds. Happiness is a benchmark of homed-in humility, revealing its gorgeousness in shimmers of warm acoustics and careful, cut-up percussion. By contrast, The Sun starts with a track more akin to Hebden's recent scattershot work with drummer Steve Reid than anything in Fridge's catalog. It's a jarring and showy Sun Ra-style introduction adorned with plenty of cymbals and feedback-- a "look what we learned!" moment that plays against the group's taut, minimalist strengths and a telling precursor of what's to come.
Hebden's-- and, to a lesser extent, Ilhan's-- impressive solo material also works against them in this context because we know the heights they're capable of on their own; in that light, most of The Sun sounds like a batch of slap-dash demos for other projects. The pretty-enough "Our Place in This" and Broken Social Scene-esque "Lost Time" lull like in-progress Adem songs, while the rumbling "Oram" and the stumbling "Insects" could very well be sub par left-overs from Hebden's last Four Tet album, Everything Ecstatic. The lilting "Comets", with its simplistic piano chords, loping upright bass, and looping drum machine, has the trio using repetition and tunefulness to its advantage-- too bad it's the exception rather than the rule here.
Free-spirited and Bonnaroo-friendly, The Sun is more of an alternate Fridge history (heavy on the rock-leaning jams of their early albums and EPs) than a progressive follow-up to Happiness. While the band has certainly grown musically, it also seems less patient and focused; much of the record feels like a hastily recorded jam session with a few superfluous electro-bobbles floating above the fray. More than anything, it's the sound of three long-time friends trying to stuff a couple new tricks into old memories and coming up with a discombobulated coda.