On one of the defining albums of her 38-year career, the Everything But the Girl singer embraces her inner disco maven in pursuit of freedom from society’s ordained roles for women.

Record

It’s an odd quirk of British culture that the country’s defining pop rebels often wind up part of the intellectual establishment. Instead of being sent to the glue factory, ex-punks and erstwhile Britpoppers find themselves on the airwaves of BBC 6 Music and the shelves of mainstream bookshops; they write broadsheet newspaper columns and compose serious film scores. This is exactly what Tracey Thorn has been up to in the eight years since the former Marine Girl and Everything But the Girl singer released her third solo album. She’s published two excellent memoirs, guest-edited BBC Radio 4’s “Today Show,” written a New Statesman column, done the music for Carol Morley’s The Falling, released a Christmas album, and reigns as a popular Twitter voice. To Brits, there is nothing surprising about this. In the best possible way, what makes no sense is that Thorn should release one of the defining albums of her 38-year-long career right now.
Your first thought on hearing Record should be: Why has it taken so long for Thorn to embrace the right and true path of disco maven? At 55, Thorn’s voice—the spiritual forebear to the xx’s Romy Madley Croft—has deepened into a brogue that suggests diva grandeur but retains its inherent skepticism, luring you to the dancefloor while raising an eyebrow at your moves. Following the breakout success of Todd Terry’s remix of “Missing,” Everything But the Girl switched jazzy indie pop for jungle and drum ‘n’ bass on their final two albums, to middling effect: The songwriting didn’t change, just the window dressing. On Record, Thorn and co-producer Ewan Pearson build acid basslines and monochrome disco whirl around Thorn’s august voice, giving her center stage to steer the drama and euphoria of what she’s called nine “feminist bangers.”
Thorn’s latter-day solo material has often confronted topics that don’t come up a lot in pop: getting back into dating after divorce, entering menopause as your teenage kids are hitting puberty, the fear of familiar bodies growing boring—some character studies (Thorn remains married to EBTG’s Ben Watt), others not. But she’s never sung about them with so much humor, action, and revelation as she does here. On 2007’s Out of the Woods and 2010’s Love and Its Opposite these were themes rather than stories; worrying signs of diminishment rather than new opportunities. Thorn refuses to see an ending as the end on Record, and the results are wickedly funny and relevant to listeners of all ages.
Record is loosely structured like a fever dream about how expectations surrounding femininity—and what it means to embrace or reject them—shape a life. It starts with Thorn staring down the crossroads of middle age in a song of existential bafflement set, appropriately, to a caper that sounds like early New Order. “Here I go again,” she sighs on “Queen,” sanguine as she contemplates what might have been and wonders which is more real—her, or the fantasy? “I’m on fire/A head full of desire/This is me and someone else entirely,” she marvels, invoking Springsteen for the first time on an album that often borrows his trademark triumphalism to recast a woman’s life as a hero’s journey. (A moment, too, for Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa on drums, playing racing hi-hats so light and dazzling they seem sampled from sea sparkle.)
Thorn looks to her past to figure out how to handle her future: the liberation of being “too tall, all wrong” for boys; the cad who broke her heart but not before teaching her the three chords that gave her a future; anxious first fumblings, contraception, babies, empty nests, and inheritance. Always defiant, she deftly traces these milestones and the changing heart that comes alongside them. “I didn’t want my babies,” she sings on “Babies,” a restrained reproductive anthem with more Boss flair, “until I wanted babies/And when I wanted babies/Nothing else would do but babies/Babies, babies.” The kids grow up and her role changes again. “This won’t make sense to you now,” she sings to her teenage charges on tender dream-pop dirge “Go”: “To wave you out the door/It’s what my love was for/And I know you have to go.” While empathetic, Thorn is also a master of the perfect, barbed couplet that makes you punch the air, cutting her economic storytelling with shots of acid. “Though we kissed and kissed and kissed/You were nothing but a catalyst,” she sings to three-chords boy on “Guitar,” a fizzing new-wave jam that’s wholly befitting of its subject matter.
Almost every song is worthy of that teenage revelation. Wielding a sparse, tarnished palette, Pearson and Thorn build compact and stylish pop songs that build to heart-racing emotional release, though Record’s highlight is its most ambitious song: “Sister,” an eight-and-a-half-minute breakdown built around spindly funk, shattered-glass percussion, austere cowbell, and Thorn’s flinty message of female solidarity. “I am my mother now/I am my sister/And I fight like a girl,” she sings, the effect as seductive as it is menacing. The only track that feels out of place is “Face,” a character study of a woman obsessing over her ex’s Facebook and his new partner that’s brilliantly observed—and crystallized in dubby purgatory—but a bitter outlier to her valiant scheme.
Over the course of Record, Thorn looks squarely at society’s ordained roles for women—mother, lover, caregiver—as a way of figuring out what happens when those expectations have largely been fulfilled. What do freedom and purpose look like? By way of an answer, Thorn ends Record with “Dancefloor,” which flips the fantasy she explored in “Queen” (and sounds deliciously like Stuart Price-era Pet Shop Boys bashing helmets with Daft Punk). When she properly considers it, the idea of running away for a new life is really quite knackering: “Think of what you’d have to pack/If you left and planned on never coming back,” she sings, a line of deadpan despair given weight by her austere tone. “Oh, but where I’d like to be/Is on a dancefloor with some drinks inside of me,” she sings, the tone shifting from anxiety to release. Real escape, it turns out, is much more prosaic. But as Thorn proves on a glorious record, no less transcendent.


On his proper debut album, the underground Virginia rapper sounds both flashy and laconic, seeming at once like an everyman and cooler than you.

Frank

In 2007, Frank Walton bonded with a fellow weirdo Marcus Law over their similarly out-of-date rap tastes. They were eighth graders at the height of the Soulja Boy Era, but Walton and Law tended to the rap of their 35-year-old uncles and older brothers: Wu-Tang, specifically Ghostface; Mobb Deep, specifically Havoc’s murky production; Boot Camp Clik, specifically their pugnacious mouthpiece, Sean Price. They were raised in Richmond, a city without a major rap history, so they acted like any kids without a local scene to plug into—they began building their own.
In 2022, Walton, aka Fly Anakin, has more company. From New York to Buffalo to his own Richmond, the grim atmosphere and coded slang of Giuliani-era New York are everywhere. His old friend Marcus Law—now Henny L.O.—is the co-founding member of their 11-member collective Mutant Academy, which has helped define Richmond’s own scene, and which places Fly Anakin in the middle of it all, surrounded by like-minded peers. He’s not as soft and introspective as MIKE, not as mysterious as Mach-Hommy. He's not a wild knucklehead like Westside Gunn, nor a hardcore street rapper like Benny the Butcher. He brings a bristling, skeptical attitude to the scene, and he sounds good on just about anything you put him on. Like another hero of his, Curren$y, Anakin does a good job of making his records sound flashy and laconic, seeming at once like an everyman and cooler than you. And if we’re talking fundamentals—syllable counts, breath control, cadences, rhyme patterns, delivery—he’s probably the single best pure rapper in the scene.
Frank is billed as his debut, but the distinction probably matters most to Fly Anakin, and to hear him tell it, it doesn’t even particularly matter that much to him: “I called this one my debut because it cost the most money to make,” he says. He might have given it his government name, but in every way, Frank is a continuation of the music he’s been making without fuss or cease for at least eight years. The production is muffled and murky, and his voice cuts through it, pitiless and Ginsu-clean, for 38 sustained and effortless-sounding minutes.
Despite all the Ghostface love he’s shown in interviews, Fly Anakin’s voice hits the track with a crisp forward motion that reminds me more of the Brooklyn legend (and perennial NY rap also-ran) AZ. Anakin throws his syllables like combinations at a speed bag: When he raps a line like “Now all of the lines is getting crowded,” every word somehow sounds like it starts with the letter “D.” Also like AZ, he sounds so commanding over the beat, the syllables locking in place just so, that you occasionally forget to pay attention to his words.
When you tune into the lyrics, you get little glimpses into his mind, like “Two seats ain’t enough when the gang carrying hurt and work” (“Love Song (Come Back)”) or “Why when niggas die they need a go fund but flexing when they on earth?” (“Class Clown”). More often than not, he offers you opportunities to admire the way he pushes word sounds up against each other: “Maneuver wrong and we gon’ move you off the atlas, pawn,” he raps on “Sean Price.” There’s a workmanlike quality to his writing, which eschews confessions or personal detail—the closest we get to autobiography is when he tells us he “got my alias from a bar fight.”
If Frank represents a culminating moment for Fly Anakin, instead of just another brick in his discography, he finds subtle ways to show us. For one, it’s longer than usual, about as much as legroom as he’s afforded himself. For another, he collaborates with some of the artists who first inspired him to make this kind of music, back in 2007. Madlib, who gave Fly Anakin a big cosign a few years ago, shows up as producer for the fantastic “No Dough,” and Dilated Peoples’ Evidence gets behind the boards for “Sean Price.” Richmond hometown hero Nickelus F, a battle-hardened rapper who influenced (and possibly wrote for) a young Aubrey Drake Graham, delivers a hilarious verse on “Ghost.” There’s a track called “WaxPoetic,” and at one point he even works a reference to Soundbombing into an awkward sex rap: “Something rawkus thumping, bomb the pussy like a sound bite” (“Underdog Theme”). For a rap nerd, the kind of kid who found his community trading and memorizing verses, this is as close as he gets to showing us his heart.


Combining modular synth, saxophone, and a medieval lute, Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall create an album of pastoral disquiet and itchy post-punk edge.

The Waeve

Centuries of obscure folk tradition and a mistrust of isolated rural communities have helped birth a rich vein of pastoral horror in British music and film, from Incredible String Band and The Wicker Man in the late ’60s and early ’70s to Broadcast and the Focus Group in the 2000s. On their eponymous debut, the WAEVE—aka Blur guitarist Graham Coxon and former Pipettes member Rose Elinor Dougall—become the latest act to dip into this disenchanted stream. Far from the urbane chatter of Blur’s greatest hits, The WAEVE reflects the turbulence beneath the soil of Great Britain: an album of pastoral disquiet and itchy post-punk edge.
It’s not the record you might imagine from the pen of a Britpop guitar hero and a onetime ’50s girl-group revivalist. For a start, the WAEVE don’t use much guitar, leaning heavily on saxophone, piano, drums, and synth. Coxon even breaks out the cittern (a medieval lute) on “All Along,” where it bumps up against Dougall’s piano and an ARP 2000 modular synth in what might be the catchiest piece of lute work since “Greensleeves.” When the guitar does arrive, as in the warped blues solo on “Over and Over,” it is used sparingly, to shift compositional gears rather than as the sine qua non of rock melody. The lyrics, too, lean on images of nature and antiquity: the “jagged shore” and “ancient tides” on “Undine,” or “silver moon” and “ecstatic, magic night” on “Kill Me Again.”
Broadcast purists might be annoyed by how much the WAEVE borrow from the much-lamented Birmingham experimentalists, down to Dougall’s delivery of the word “surrender” on “Undine,” which comes straight from the Trish Keenan school of detached seduction. But Dougall has the songwriting talent to pull it off: Her 2017 solo album Stellular joined lovelorn synth-pop with Broadcast-esque dreaminess to enchanting effect. Add the saxophone and Coxon’s naively charming vocals, which share the limelight with Dougall’s Keenan-ian tone, and the WAEVE become a far more intriguing beast: a band with its own distinct musical palette.
The saxophone in particular is key. In rock music the sax is often used to mark an almost orgiastic explosion in emotion—à la Don Weller’s fabulously overblown saxophone solo in David Bowie’s “Absolute Beginners”—or played deliberately against type, as a signifier of sleazy grit, as in New York no wave. Coxon wields the instrument as a weapon of dissonance and unease. “Can I Call You,” the album’s excellent opening track, breaks down into a series of droning chords, while a rogue sax calls from the wilderness on “Drowning” like a woodland animal in distress.
In any case, the WAEVE have another trick up their sleeve. The strongest songs on the album come when the band kicks up into a kind of psychedelic post-punk clatter, like Wire in the state of nervy calm before the mushroom tea properly kicks in. “Kill Me Again” combines the post-Pavement lurch of Blur’s “Coffee & TV” or Coxon’s “Freakin’ Out” with a brooding synth pulse and the saxophone’s unhinged melodic commentary; “Someone Up There” is an unlikely cross between Elastica’s sharp melodic wit and Flight of the Conchords’ comic masterpiece of sentient AI revenge, “Robots.”
In his music with the WAEVE, Coxon told Guitar World, he “didn’t want to be Graham Coxon from Blur.” He largely achieves this goal on an album where guitar bends a knee to saxophone and the country is a place of esoteric ritual rather than very big houses. Those looking for Graham from Blur will find it in his laconic vocal turns and occasional guitar explosions, while Dougall’s dreamily dejected melodies will resonate with fans of her solo work. But The WAEVE has its own chemistry, an alchemic mixture of psych, punk, folk, tenderness, and dread, laced with dextrous saxophone tones and a few come-hither drops of terror.


In-demand remixers with an armful of much-loved singles, the hotly-tipped and hotly-contested Crystal Castles don't stay in one place for too long on their debut LP.

Crystal Castles

Crystal Castles prefer traveling light. While the hotly-tipped and already hotly-contested Toronto duo's basement party set-up doesn't look like it'll fill up the passenger seat on a tour van, they also like to play fast and loose with their associations. They've remixed at a Hot Chip-like pace for everyone from Bloc Party to Uffie to Klaxons, but they're not a part of your nu-rave genre (really, who is?), or blog house for that matter. Their debut LP partly picks from 7" and 12"s that have been available in some format since 2005, and it's every bit as difficult to pin down.
The lead track samples DFA 1979's "Dead Womb" and places those vocals atop a cyclical synth loop while they get disembodied and chopped up-- both function as song-length hooks. But the thing's called "Untrust Us" (natch) and by the next one, they're making good on that claim. "Alice Practice" absolutely sears with megaphoned (emphasis on mega) barking and Ethan Fawn's Atari-laced keyboards going on the fritz and racking up free plays. Ah, so this is what an arcade fire sounds like.
They don't stay in one place for too long, but the body of the album can be distilled to an essence of the glassy, ten-lane stare of Last Exit with Ed Banger's egg-frying EQ. Well, except when it sounds more like "Alice Practice" ("Xxzcuzx Me" and "Knights" are a bit interchangeable in their diminishing returns). Whether it's a thank you or challenge to everyone they've worked with, Crystal Castles opens up endless remix possibilities. Though hardly minimal, there's plenty to easily pick apart and work with-- "Good Time" is a veritable toybox with undulating octaves, an almost Eastern-sounding riff and tweaked nice-guy vocals which combine the Knife and New Order. Even if you can't really make out the words, the call-and-response chant of "Courtship Dating" glows amidst fizzy synths and Triple 6 drum clicks. And "Crimewave (Crystal Castles vs. HEALTH)", is a collaboration with the LA noisemongers that builds from now-retro electroclash to a clattering mix of drums.
Just when you think you've gotten your paragraph-long blurb ready for the internet's approval, the last two tracks offer a bait and switch; the mad dash of "Black Panther" is probably what nu-rave was supposed to sound like (the Goth! Team?), and then the record ends on a disquietingly beautiful shoegaze comedown played on an acoustic guitar of all things ("Tell Me What to Swallow"). That they play such hide and seek musically should've come as no surprise anyway; despite the fact that there's literally an Atari game named "Crystal Castles", they named themselves after a She-Ra playset, which is like finding out LeBron James chose to wear uniform number at #23 as a tribute to his favorite Jimmy Eat World song. Then again, it's fitting for a record that draws so much of its power from unpredictability.


Captured Tracks issues an expanded LP version of songwriter Kate Fagan’s 1981 single, a cheeky rejoinder to consumerist status-seeking that became a DIY hit.

Kate Fagan: I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool (Expanded Edition)

New York City was in decline when Rupert Murdoch sat down at Kate Fagan’s desk at New York Magazine in the late 1970s and fired her and some 80 colleagues. It was a classic case of stock market downturn; six-figure earners were losing jobs while graffiti writers scrawled on subway cars. The cultural scene was shifting, too. Originally from Rockville, Maryland, Fagan had arrived in New York at the height of punk in the early ’70s. The hottest spot on the Lower East Side was CBGB: a rock venue born out of the post-Nixon cultural crisis and the home of the Ramones, as well as a community invested in the myth of authenticity.
By the time Fagan lost her magazine job, CBGB’s popularity was rivaled by the glamorous velvet-rope culture of uptown’s Studio 54. Both venues were, in a sense, gentrification projects. After years of financial devastation brought on by suburbanization and deindustrialization, city government was hungry to attract a young, professional, tax-paying crowd. Nightlife—whether it presented itself as populist as CBGB, or as cliquish as Studio 54—drew an emerging creative class who flocked to refurbished Manhattan neighborhoods. Studio 54’s culture of disco exclusivity simply mirrored a changing reality. Disillusioned, Fagan departed New York for good.
In 1980, she visited a friend in Chicago and stayed for a few decades. In the unpretentious Midwest music scene, she felt she’d rediscovered CBGB’s inclusive spirit—at least for a moment. Then she noticed people starting to wear shades at the club, to shop for more expensive clothes. Exclusionary “cool” threatened to creep in again. In retaliation, Fagan picked up a bass guitar she hardly knew how to play, tracked a frolicsome five-note riff onto a rudimentary drum machine, and sang about the bitterness she felt toward “cool.” “I don’t wear the hip clothes/I just shop at AMVETS,” she sneered on “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool.”
The tiny punk-run label Disturbing, which Fagan helped form, released the single in 1981. After the original run sold out, Fagan self-funded another 1,000 copies, which, along with most of her belongings, were destroyed in a house fire. In the decades since, the single’s original pressing has become a collector’s item. In 2016, Manufactured Records, an affiliate of Brooklyn’s Captured Tracks, reissued the single, which sold out, too. Now, Captured Tracks have released an expanded and remastered LP version of “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool,” featuring the single, its original B-sides, four tracks from a romantic new wave rock opera in which Fagan plays a socialite seduced by the post-industrial nightscape of rock and disco, and a previously unreleased ska track.
The songs are lumped together unsystematically, which feels appropriate for someone with a musical career so far-reaching and slipshod as Fagan’s. In her early years, she covered the breadth of the ’80s—new wave, pulsing disco, arch post-punk, ska—spinning through a Rolodex of musical trends without committing to any one sound. In her later career, she would turn to Tammy Wynette-inspired country. Today, she continues to make music in her new hometown of New Orleans, performing locally and releasing the occasional Christmas album. The songs collected here, though smudged with a distinctly ’80s schmaltz, carry intergenerational DIY appeal: high hooks and low production values.
Fagan’s nervy delivery tinges every song. She frequently whoops and yelps as though she’s falling off a staircase to nowhere. The music itches. The percussion sounds less like a supporting structure and more like a tower collapse. And, aside from that phlegmatic five-note riff on the lead track, the bass buzzes with anxious energy, frantically trying to take up space. The mix is sky-wide and reverberant up until the record’s last song, the previously unreleased “Say It,” which sounds as though it were recorded through cardboard. The bubbling 2 tone is reminiscent of Fagan’s later role as co-founder and lead vocalist of Chicago ska band Heavy Manners, though “Say It” achieves greater emotional range than anything in their catalog. Fagan places a shaken soda can of tension right at its center, allowing the chorus to fizz as she delivers a heart-in-throat performance. It’s her best song since “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool.”


An outlier in Kate Bush’s catalog, her seventh album from 1993 finds an effortless perfectionist pushing very hard to locate her next great idea.

The Red Shoes

In Hans Christian Andersen’s short story “The Red Shoes,” a woman slips on some shiny footwear and suddenly can’t stop dancing. It’s all a bit of fun until she’s prancing across graveyards in the middle of the night, panicked enough to force an executioner to chop off her crimson-clad feet in hopes of breaking the spell. British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger took that story and made it into a meta masterpiece with their 1948 movie The Red Shoes. It centers around a phantasmagoric ballet that translates Andersen’s tale, but the film also depicts the backstage plight of its principal dancer. “You cannot have it both ways,” a mad genius ballet director tells her. “A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love can never be a great dancer.” In the end, forced to choose between great passions, she puts on those ruby slippers one more time—and jumps in front of a moving train. The Red Shoes, in all its beauty and tragedy, in its impossible decisions concerning art and life, is one of Kate Bush’s favorite films. She named her seventh album after it.
When Bush’s The Red Shoes was released in November 1993, the 35-year-old singer was reeling. Her mother had passed the previous year. Her romantic relationship with close musical collaborator Del Palmer, who had known her since she was a teenager, was ending. And after spending her entire adult life obsessively cultivating her fantasies into reality through sound and image, she was wary of being swept away by her work. “I’m feeling very tired,” she said at the time. “I’m going on a holiday. I’m really looking forward to not pleasing anyone but myself.” This was no idle threat. Her next album would not arrive for another 12 years.
But The Red Shoes has her once again doing everything: singing and dancing, writing and producing. The record was presented alongside a 45-minute short film called The Line, the Cross & the Curve that Bush directed, wrote, and starred in. It’s a little much: The Line is woefully underdeveloped as it stitches together a string of repetitive music videos via a cockamamie plot inspired by Powell’s The Red Shoes but without a trace of that movie’s lush panache. (In 2005, Bush herself called the chintzy visual “a load of bollocks.”)
The album fares better. It doesn’t rank among Bush’s finest—it sounds more prototypically ’80s than some of the records she actually released that decade, marked by big snares and a brittle sound that a recent remaster can’t properly remedy. It’s an outlier, but hardly a disaster. The Red Shoes finds an effortless perfectionist pushing very hard to locate her next great idea.
The album’s musical unwieldiness is set against Bush’s relatively diaristic songwriting.The Red Shoes is the most confessional album by an artist not known for, or especially interested in, confession. Bush has always taken advantage of the elusive space between art and reality, conjuring characters, rarely doing interviews, always aware of getting burned by a lingering spotlight. “That’s what all art’s about—a sense of moving away from boundaries that you can’t, in real life,” she said around the time of The Red Shoes. “It’s all make believe, really.” The album falters when she falls short of this magical realism. When it comes to her songwriting, Kate Bush’s stories are almost always more engrossing than Kate Bush.
The record’s personal themes of loss, perseverance, and memory coalesce on “Moments of Pleasure,” one of Bush’s most affecting ballads. She sings of the small memories of life—laughing at dumb jokes, snowy evenings high above New York City, a piece of wisdom from her mother—as Oscar-nominated composer Michael Kamen builds these quiet moments into monuments with a heroic string arrangement. Bush ends the song with a series of mini eulogies: for her aunt, her longtime guitarist, her dance partner. “Just being alive, it can really hurt,” she belts at the center of the track, stating the obvious with such conviction that it sounds revelatory.
But sometimes, the obviousness of these songs and sentiments can feel too familiar. Bush stacks up plainspoken laments of heartbreak on “And So Is Love,” backed by a ponderous instrumental that only adds to the staleness; the presence of Eric Clapton—one of a number of big-name guitarists who guest on the album—and his scrunch-faced blues licks does not help. Closer “You’re the One” is a better breakup song, though similarly and uncharacteristically rote. It’s fun to hear the fanciful teller of tales attempt kiss-off lines like “I’m going to stay with my friend/Mmm, yes, he’s very good-looking,” but the song’s near-six-minute runtime, superfluous implementation of the Bulgarian vocal group Trio Bulgarka (who were used to much better effect on her previous album, 1989’s The Sensual World), and unnecessary guitar riffage, this time from Jeff Beck, turn it into a tepid slog.
There’s a grab-bag quality to the album, one that runs contrary to the more conceptual flourishes that show up on some of Bush’s most beloved work, like 1985’s Hounds of Love. This looser, more scattershot method doesn’t totally suit her. She admits as much on the record’s opening track, “Rubberband Girl,” a brash trifle where she longs to be as flexible as a tree, to be able to bounce around and bounce back. And the album’s strangest track, “Big Stripey Lie,” is an angsty, tuneless wreck that sounds like Bush trying—and failing—to take on the industrial and grunge sounds of the early ’90s. The song marked the first time Bush ever played guitar on an album; tellingly, to this day, it’s also the last time she ever played guitar on an album. Elsewhere, there are African rhythms, Celtic stomps, and even some bulbous funk. Before the album’s release, Bush said that The Red Shoes’ more freewheeling approach was meant to coincide with a subsequent live tour, which would have been her first since 1979. The shows never happened.
The penultimate song, “Why Should I Love You?,” took a particularly winding route to completion that speaks to the record’s uncertain process. It was originally conceived by Bush as a winning, slow-motion ballad about the inexplicability of fate and feeling. But then, in hopes of collaboration, she sent tapes of her early version to Prince, who mailed back a drastic revamp that Prince’s own engineer later called “lame disco.” What ended up on The Red Shoes is a disjointed amalgam of the two, a collaboration between two of pop’s most ingenious minds turned into a garish missed opportunity.
Mercifully, Bush’s demo of the song found its way online years later, and the singer also took it upon herself to offer pared-down remakes of several tracks from The Red Shoes on her 2011 project Director’s Cut. These alternate, largely superior takes reveal that the songwriting on much of The Red Shoes is worthy of Bush’s reputation. But, in the early ’90s, as she struggled to balance human comforts with her grand pursuit of art, she cluttered her ideas. In the nearly 26 years since The Red Shoes came out, Bush raised her only child and released two rich and spacious albums of new material. From The Red Shoes’ moment of imbalance, a harmonious new equilibrium was set.


The Swedish rapper’s latest is the most fully realized project of his career. Its blurry, blot-out-the-world vibe glitches between reality and nightmare.

Cold Visions

“Not many brain cells left, but I’m ready for—” Bladee begins his new album, before he’s cut off by Vincent Price’s famous laugh from “Thriller.” So fried he can’t finish a sentence, this madman’s at the brink of collapse. Seized by panic attacks, he threatens to “kill kill kill” and calls himself “a stupid bitch” while ambulance sirens wail and screams lacerate the night. Ten years in, the Swedish rapper is the most famous he’s ever been and still crippled by anguish. “The only thing that’s left is paranoia,” he cries.
Trying to explain Bladee’s bizarre thrill to doubters always felt risky: the more you thought about it, the less sure you were about why you liked him. Here was this young Swede soaking in Auto-Tune and cosplaying as a listless, emo Chief Keef; half the time it was impossible to tell what his verses meant. Still, the twinges of ache in his voice, floating over glassy and gloomy beats, felt inexplicably poignant. His slipshod vocals capture the ennui of modern life like nothing else, or so one long essay put it. Over time, he’s made it easier for true believers and rubberneckers alike, stretching his voice to acrobatic wildness and sculpting a galaxy of surreal lore in the lyrics. Bladee’s version of rap is blemished but beautiful, imperfect and half-coherent in a way that makes banal thoughts feel endearingly askew.
Cold Visions is his most realized project to date, an anxious 30-song album that doubles as a chance for him to reflect on his dizzying ascent. It’s enticingly darker than most of what he’s put out in recent years—the sublime optimism of Crest and 333, the summery bounce of Good Luck and The Fool—and more cohesive than Spiderr and Exeter’s freaky experiments. It’s like his life is glitching between dreams and nightmares. He’s at the Gucci store one moment then lying sleepless, begging for help the next; he’s declaring himself the bloodthirsty king then sitting at McDonald’s where all he can muster is calling it the “Sad Meal.” Bladee reaches max mania on “End of the Road Boyz,” which begins with the ear-splitting shrieks of a viral Roblox squeaker that’s like a bouncer for old heads. Flitting between moods, he unleashes a flurry of saintly warbles and baleful mumbles. “Reality surf might break my mind,” he warns. “Take another breath, it’s great, I’m fine.”
Everything bursts alive here, from the surround-sound vocals to the production roster that’s basically the cloud-rage Avengers. Seamless transitions make F1LTHY and Warpstr’s synthetic blazes melt against the icy trembles of Lusi, Woesum, Yung Sherman, and Whitearmor. Bladee’s delivery is constantly morphing, hurling horrorcore grunts and evil ASMR whispers over smooth rap flows and the kind of helium-high singing he honed on Crest and The Fool. Demented ad-libs shadow pristine verses; words deform into mutant growls. “King Nothingg” is a killer coronation: Bass thuds convulse, synths shiver, Bladee jokes about trauma-dumping and murdering people for nothing. The mix shakes with demonic sound effects yet somehow ends in a dreamy cloud rap reverie. It’s a far cry from the limp Auto-Tune droning of his early days.
Amid the chaos, Bladee pauses to take stock of things with striking lucidity given his usual tendency to abstract and arrive at ideas from oblique angles. He dropped his first solo tape, Gluee, just about a decade ago, back when he was known as Yung Lean’s sidekick. Now at 30, he’s experiencing something like a mid-career crisis. “I got so old, I got embarrassed to even be here, you know?” the intro goes. He’s aware of his immense influence on a new generation of internet musicians, but also feels more personally fucked up and worse off than he was as a fresh-faced 18-year-old. The gorgeously glum “Flatline” conveys Bladee’s sadness about letting someone down—possibly himself?—with some of his most expressive vocals ever, fluttering between hushed murmurs and frail cries; as he repeats how he’s suffocating in “dark feelings,” his tone mirrors the dismay by slowly dropping in pitch.
For as agitated as this album can be, it’s also sweetly silly in classic Bladee fashion. “Lows Partlyy” is eerily joyous, its blooming synths juxtaposing wildly with the depressive lyrics lurking beneath. “Burn down the disco, hang the fucking DJ,” Bladee coos at himself, sounding blissed-out. Some lyrics recall the gibberish aphorisms and cutesy riddles of his 2021 Fool era. He talks about “violently drug abusing weed” and accidentally buying 1,000 Smurfs toys while browsing eBay on shrooms. He scorns people for watching YouTube Shorts and says he paints better than Rembrandt. Lines that might feel dead in print electrify the ear through Bladee’s agile vocals, twitching with odd mouth-noises and tone-switches, like how he randomly chirps “I’m back!” as if he’s returning home from work in the twilight haze of “Flexing & Finessing.”
While Cold Visions may not be his swan song, there’s definitely a feeling of a closing chapter. The album is haunted by ghosts from Bladee’s past; nearly every song makes some kind of allusion to a previous release. He namedrops track titles like “Everlasting Flames” and “Redlight Moments.” Previously established lore about the mystical Drain Gang High School gets developed more on the snarling “Don’t Wanna Hang Out.” Old audio logos rematerialize, like the “Blade” tag taken from the 1998 movie Blade and the Sad Boys “profound sadness” effect lifted from Street Fighter IV. Veteran drainers are combing through this album in group chats, building a master doc to catalog every interpolation and reference.
One minute, Bladee’s wondering whether his cultish fans understand him (“Every time I check the comments I’m thinking like, ‘Do they even deserve me?’”). Later, he doubts whether he’s achieved anything that warrants worship: “The vision is clear, but I’m nowhere near.” It sounds like he’s collected his past lives and sonic memorabilia together for himself as much as for the fans. He’s looking at it all, questioning what his musical accomplishments mean. There’s no clear answer; Bladee hasn’t discovered true happiness or reached enlightenment. By the album’s end, he sounds exhausted yet ecstatic, like he’s shedding a great weight. The music swells and shimmers. “I’m like you, I’m living and I’m learning,” he sings, dissolving into the noise.


A four-disc set looks back on the brief, fertile period in which the British band twisted conventional rock instrumentation into increasingly arcane shapes. They still inhabit a class of their own.

Rupt and Flex (1994-96)

In 1994, Seefeel became the first guitar band to sign to Warp Records, at a time when such a distinction actually felt significant. The Sheffield label, founded in 1989, was still synonymous with squirrely bleep techno and high-tech head music from artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre, and electronic music was expected to be just that—the product of circuits and silicon. Seefeel, on the other hand, played guitar and bass and drums, and they even had a singer; despite copious pedals and Cubase software, theirs was a full-blooded sound, rosy as a blush. They had gotten their start on Too Pure, where they were labelmates with Stereolab, fuzz rockers Th’ Faith Healers, even the bluesy PJ Harvey; Seefeel’s early EPs and debut album, 1993’s Quique, earned them comparisons to groups like My Bloody Valentine and the Cocteau Twins. Still, protested bassist Daren Seymour, “We’re not really song people. We’re more sound people.” A new box set confirms the truth of that assertion. Rupt and Flex (1994 - 96) looks back on the brief, fertile period in which Seefeel twisted conventional rock instrumentation into increasingly arcane shapes, forging a singular fusion of ambient, techno, and dub that still inhabits a class of its own, 25 years later.
With Quique, terms like “dream pop,” “shoegaze,” and “post-rock” had attached themselves to the band; it was an era of in-betweenness, when established genres were turning porous, and the spirit of slippage suited the group. Seefeel’s 1995 album Succour—their first and, until the band reunited in 2010, only album for Warp—is the sound of old certainties dissolving. After Quique’s wall-of-sound rush, Succour was skeletal and tentative; even in its heaviest moments, it feels like a strong gust could take it apart.
By 1995, any latent rock-band tendencies left on the debut album had evaporated. You could still just about imagine the players staking out their places in the stereo field like points on the compass—drummer Justin Fletcher due south, bassist Daren Seymour and guitarist Mark Clifford pushing laterally east and west, while singer/guitarist Sarah Peacock’s cool, clear soprano drifted as far north as the frequencies could carry. But the magnet had gone haywire; the needle spun amok as poles swapped and roles blurred. Increasingly, they used a computer to chop up sound into bits to be stretched, bent, looped, and layered. In the studio, Fletcher’s live drums were replaced by purely programmed rhythms. “Seefeel’s methodology makes guitars sound like samples, the synth like a choir, and the human voice like a sequencer,” wrote Simon Reynolds, who identified them as part of a movement “using guitars as facilitators of timbres and textures rather than riffs and power chords.”
Succour opener “Meol” signals the shift that has taken place. The bass and drums, cornerstones of everything Seefeel had done until now, have momentarily fallen silent; this is a strictly liquid landscape, a vaporous guitar etude that twists like ink dissipating in water. It is the sound of pure electricity, exhausted and forlorn, a haunted dial tone singing deathbed lullabies. With “Extract,” clanking steel drums and dread bass return, establishing a dubby post-punk thread that will bind the album together, but the feel of the music remains weightless and disembodied: The song’s main hook is a curlicue of guitar feedback as Peacock’s wordless voice floats above it all, refracted into specks of light thrown by a slowly moving mirror ball.
Not everything on the record is so mellow: The turbulent “Fracture” is a roiled current over jagged rocks; the drums of “Vex” attack elegantly carved drones like a jackhammer in a hall full of marble busts. No matter the tempo or the volume of a given song, however, the mood throughout remains fiercely interior, full of toe-scuffing rhythms and inexpressible woe. The album ends as wearily as it begins, with the two-part finale of “Utreat” and “Tempean.” The first song is just two overtone-laden bass notes pitched so close on the fretboard that they quiver with dissonance. An answering bass tone blasts like an intermittent foghorn, its steady rhythm nevertheless impossible to parse; mechanical handclaps scatter in the background like startled birds. Then, after five long minutes of funereal repetition, “Tempean” provides a two-minute coda, in the form of a single held chord that dissipates into feedback in its final moments: a long held breath, and then nothingness.
The second disc of the box set is composed of Succour outtakes, and if anything, these 12 tracks are even bleaker, as though Seefeel trying to see how severely it could smudge a shape and still be left with the outline of a song. These were not just abstract experiments: To hear Clifford tell it, the band was not happy at the time. Touring was taking its toll; “the whole thing just became a bit of a nightmare sometimes,” he told Perfect Sound Forever in 2003. “In retrospect, when I think about it, it comes through in the music. When I listen to Succour now, whenever I do, I almost can’t see where it came from. It’s strange.” When they embarked upon recording Succour, the band didn’t actively discuss what they wanted to make; they simply plugged in their gear and went in pursuit of something that “reflected whatever state of mind we were in at the time.” The most fascinating finds on this disc are alternate versions that do little more than change the playback speed. “Meol 2” takes Succour’s stately opener and pitches it up to a dulcet shimmer; “Meol 3,” even faster, is a taste of metal on a cold breeze. They do something similar with alternate takes from (Ch-Vox), their third album, on the box set’s third disc, running the tape first faster, then slower, like a feedback-besotted Goldilocks in search of the point at which the drone becomes just right.
(Ch-Vox), released in 1996 on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label, was the band’s final album before calling it quits. (Clifford and Peacock eventually resurrected the group in 2010, bringing on new members Shigeru Ishihara, aka DJ Scotch Egg, and former Boredoms drummer E-da.) Rephlex is long gone, and the album has never been made available digitally, which makes its inclusion here, rounded out with half a dozen unreleased tracks, especially welcome. (Ch-Vox) sounds just as revelatory today as it did 25 years ago. It opens with “Utreat (Complete),” a sparser version of Succour’s standout track—an unconventional move, perhaps, but one that reduced the previous album’s already miserly palette even further. And that, across the next five tracks, is just what they do. Peacock’s voice is almost inaudible on this record, but you can feel its presence, or at least feel a presence, woven into the all-encompassing blanket of shadow. Album closer “Net” is about as dynamic as a house settling on an autumn night, but this third disc’s bonus tracks prove that Seefeel had still more nothingness left in them: Tape experiments play out like a tire slowly deflating, and the disc’s concluding track, “Ashime,” is just a loop of tolling bells, like an abandoned church after the apocalypse.
The box set’s fourth disc gathers a pair of Warp EPs, a couple of live tracks, a nice alternate mix of “Starethrough,” and an Autechre remix. EP cuts like “Spangle” and “Fracture” show the band at their most song-like—the former, in particular, casts a glance back on the dream-pop modes of Quique—while the percussive “Tied” is reminiscent of the industrial/techno/dub fusions that Clifford was pursuing in his side project Disjecta around the same time. (A couple of Rupt and Flex’s tracks sound almost like ambient dubstep, a genre that wouldn’t actually be invented for another decade or more.) This fourth disc feels slightly anti-climactic; after the long, gradual disappearing act that plays out across Succour and (Ch-Vox), to be returned to such forceful rhythms is jarring. But that hardly detracts from the abiding lesson of Rupt and Flex, which does the service of rescuing from obscurity two great, underappreciated albums precisely when they feel more relevant than ever. Ambient—as a genre, a practice, a philosophy—has been spun a million ways since then, and it is currently in the midst of what might be its most popular revival ever. But it has rarely been made to feel so expressive as in Seefeel’s hands—at once deeply abstracted and emotionally direct, desolate yet comforting. They were sound people, not song people, through and through, and Rupt and Flex tracks their determination to become one with a frequency.

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Jessy Lanza's latest is a gorgeous and deadly pop music manifesto, full of pent-up nervous energy set to release.

Oh No

In the last year, in and around Hamilton, Ontario, billboards have been posted around roads warning residents about the danger of the carcinogenic element radon in their homes. The billboard showed a hellish crack in the ground oozing a toxic green light. Jessy Lanza started seeing these advertisements right around the time she moved into her co-producer Jeremy Greenspan’s (of Junior Boys) home to write her sophomore album *Oh No. *She was also convinced right around the same time, that the air quality in their shared home was poisonous. In order to fight the incoming entropy, she surrounded herself with tropical plants to clean the air, and she completed an album that recycled the bad voodoo into something remarkably generative and self-assured.
She told the FADER that in general  she’s “always thinking of ways to alleviate waking up every day and feeling a deep sense of dread.” Oh No in its own way is about harnessing anxiety and estrangement—imagining how all of her bundles of pent-up nervous energy could be harnessed into a productive flow. The music here is what happens when you turn that faucet on and let all the power just stream out. *Oh No *is a gorgeous and deadly pop music manifesto that proves yet again the sad girls are not vulnerable and silent subjects. Or as Lindsay Zoladz once wrote, music in this mode is not exactly “sadness” but an expression of  a “particular kind of strength—one that allows the contradictions, complexity, and emotional range of a lived experience.”
In the last three years since her debut, Pull My Hair Back, it's obvious by just listening to this album that both her singing and production efforts have matured exponentially. The songs are freewheeling collages of  '90s R&B, Chicago footwork, acid house, disco, and wonky minimalist pop, using simple instrumentation to span multiple moods and BPMs. Meanwhile, Lanza’s singing works overtime, lifting boulders and throwing them across city blocks. Her lyrics are blunt and straightforward, but her singing allows her to imbue even the most casual and static of statements with a sense of devastating irony. For example in “Going Somewhere” she treats pandering and all its silent erosion with subtle shifts in phrasing, hiccuping in the middle of lines like “Say you love me” and “Baby I just want to impress you" as if she was almost giggling at the thought.
The exhortations of hurt in Lanza’s songs are not coming from the perspective of someone sulking over their wounds, but a place of triumphant reclamation. The production and her singing on this album reach full symmetry in the album’s centerpiece, “It Means I Love You.” It’s a frenetic blend of footwork surrounding a supine ballad of loss. It tastefully samples a tabla beat from a South African song, and swaddles this percussion in slashing synths. Her voice carries along with the instrumentation in a deathly shadow dance, mimicking its jerky changes in tempo and pitch effortlessly. It all stops just for a moment when she tells the listener, and the beloved, to look into her eyes, because that's when you it means she loves you. In that pocket of seconds, it feels like you’ve been turned into stone.


Christianity is the unwavering focus of Kanye’s gospel album, a richly produced but largely flawed record about one man’s love of the Lord (and himself).

Jesus Is King

In 1964, in the small, rural community of Longdale, Mississippi, a group of black worshippers at the Mount Zion Methodist Church were ambushed by the Ku Klux Klan. The attackers, some of whom were allegedly dressed in police uniform, broke one man’s jaw, viciously beat others, and ultimately burned the building to the ground. In the midst of the chaos, a woman named Beatrice Cole launched into a spoken prayer of despair: “Father, I stretch my hand to Thee, no other help I know. If Thou withdraw Thyself from me, where shall I go?” Improbably, the Klansmen retreated. Such was the power of the gospel.
“Father I Stretch My Hands To Thee,” an unsmiling Methodist hymn written by Isaac Watts in the early 1700s and turned into a rousing standard by black gospel singers over the next century, has since transcended the church pew. It is ostensibly a favorite of Kanye West, who sampled Pastor T.L. Barrett’s version on 2016’s The Life of Pablo, in a song that opens with a non sequitur about a bleached butthole. Three years and a religious rebirth later, the motif returns on West’s ninth album, Jesus Is King. “Follow God,” whose title is as literal as gospel can get, is organized around a sample of a burning vocal: “Father I stretch, stretch my hands to you,” goes the singer of an obscure 1974 track, Whole Truth’s “Can You Lose By Following God.”
Recorded (and, apparently, re-recorded) in the months after he announced a recommitment to Christianity, the album is West’s first offering in the wake of Sunday Service, the performance series he’s turned into something of a global church brand. As West sells it, figuratively and literally, Jesus Is King is a repudiation of his past sin, an absolution, a blank slate from which to spread the word of a very specific God, one whose blessings rain down on a cul-de-sac in Calabasas and a ranch in Jackson Hole. He’s always presented as religious—“Jesus Walks” imagined the club as a holy temple back in 2004; the Kardashians’ labored, glamorous Easter photos have become something of an annual tradition; Pablo was explicitly an album about faith—and yet the timing is notable.
By most accounts, fewer and fewer Americans identify as Christian, and a steadily growing number describe themselves as atheist or agnostic. The religious, meanwhile, identify as more devout. Consider the power of the evangelical right on the political landscape, into which West has inserted himself in recent years, causing some of the turmoil that presumably sent him seeking refuge in Christ this spring. (In a recent piece for Vibe, the writer Kiana Fitzgerald, who shares with West a bipolar diagnosis, put forth a moving theory connecting spiritual fervor with the experience of mania.)
Though Jesus Is King followed what is now a characteristically chaotic album rollout for West, the result is much more focused than his 2018 album ye. His mythical rap-camp format, popularized with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s Hawaii origin story, unifies the contributions of producers as disparate as Timbaland, Pi’erre Bourne, Boogz, and Evan Mast of Ratatat into 27 minutes of pleasant, if not entirely transgressive, textures. Some of the hallmarks of 20th-century gospel are evident, and warmly applied: the rise and fall of a formidable choir; the velvety growl of a Hammond organ; an undulating piano; rhythms that stretch through history and geography, all the way back to West Africa. It is a markedly more cohesive and enjoyable album than I believed him capable of creating at this juncture.
Jesus Is King nods to a handful of moments from the past 15 years of West’s career. The gospel-soul sample deployed on “God Is” harkens to his early days as an in-house producer at Roc-A-Fella. The maximalism of his leather-skirt phase is all over the expansive soundscape of “Use This Gospel,” whose Kenny G sax solo might be the 2019 equivalent of throwing Elton John onto a hook, just because you can. Elsewhere, the stark, confrontational attitude of 2013’s Yeezus is echoed in the battle drums that propel “Selah.” His raspy pleading on “Water” recalls the era of loosies that produced “Only One” and “FourFiveSeconds.” Throughout, Auto-Tuned vocals draw a line from 2008’s 808s & Heartbreak all the way through to the anguish of Pablo.
Though Jesus Is King offers some resolution to the darkness hinted at on Pablo, it lacks the deeply human searching that made that album effective and moving. Life is not black and white, and neither is the experience of communing with any god. The most interesting moment, thematically, comes in the inherent tension between a reunited Clipse—Pusha-T and his older brother No Malice—on “Use This Gospel” for the first time in several years and at different stages of self-reflection. They connect the relatable universality of gospel as delivered on Jesus Is King by Fred Hammond, Ty Dolla $ign, and Ant Clemons, whose singing collectively comes closest to expressing the inspiring, sustaining gentleness of a warmly held faith. Think, for example, of the mountain to be traversed on “Climbing Higher Mountains” or the storm to be crossed on “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” Whereas much traditional and contemporary gospel invokes struggle, salvation, and transformation, Jesus Is King is largely focused on the ways in which religion has served Kanye himself. “How you got so much favor on your side?/‘Accept him as your lord and savior,’ I replied,” he raps on “On God.”
If West’s mission is, as he told Zane Lowe in an interview last week, to convert people to Christianity, he’ll likely have to search a little deeper. Beyond superficial gestures at biblical references and the capitalist leanings of American prosperity gospel, there is virtually no indication here as to what it means to follow Jesus. That is, other than to perhaps sit back and wait for Him to give you a Forbes cover and a billion-dollar sneaker brand. It’s hard to take West seriously when the obstacles he distresses over are Instagram likes and steep tax rates (the IRS, he complains, wants “half of the pie”). Rather than the grace, justice, and love that characterizes faith at its most transformative, West internalizes the religious entitlement that props up the wealthy and powerful, validating months of jokes about his ambitions as a megachurch pastor.
Revelations in recent weeks—that he admonished his wife for wearing tight clothes, asked collaborators to abstain from premarital sex, and began keeping a Christian scorecard that includes limiting himself to two curse words a day—suggest his interpretation of the gospel has been more dogmatic than faithful. Historically, it has been the vulnerability with which he expresses his own hypocrisies and moral failings that have made West a uniquely compelling artist; unfortunately, there is very little of that complexity on Jesus Is King. (An exception is “Follow God,” where an argument with his father prompts consideration, however shallow, of what it means to be “Christlike.”)
There is not enough depth here to distract from his politics, or to complicate them. It’s an album of slogans, dashed-off and too short, and as he continues to test the edge between spontaneous and half-finished, it gets harder to ignore the facts hovering outside the frame. His call for the abolishment of the 13th Amendment, for example, is in direct opposition to his avowed support of a racist, punitive, incarceration-obsessed president. Yes, the bassline on “Water” is one of the best I’ve heard in a long time, but a moment like this feels like a consolation, not a highlight. Kanye albums used to stretch our perspectives and imaginations. Now they illuminate the contours of his increasingly shrunken world.


Harnessing the allure of the occult and the power of self-help, the Los Angeles garage rockers break free from their roots and ascend to the realm of spiritual psych-jazz rockestra.

Death Valley Girls: Under the Spell of Joy

Under the Spell of Joy

Death Valley Girls ringleader Bonnie Bloomgarden has said that her band’s initial bucket-list goal was to meet Iggy Pop. On their first two albums—2016’s Glow in the Dark and 2018’s Darkness Rains—they set the bait, in the form of sassy, saxy garage rock that hit the sweet spot between the Stooges and Shangri-Las. The gambit worked: Not only has Iggy given the group his blessing (calling them “a gift to the world”), he starred in the video for their 2018 single “Disaster (Is What We’re After),” spending its entire four-minute runtime chowing down on a cheeseburger with pure Warholian ambivalence. But now that they’ve fulfilled their dream of meeting Iggy in the physical world, Death Valley Girls are challenging themselves to commune with him in the metaphysical one, by channelling the animalistic abandon and sax-blasted ferocity of the Stooges at their Fun House freakiest. Under the Spell of Joy is not a soundtrack for eating cheeseburgers—it’s music for barfing up the poison in your soul.
Death Valley Girls have always dabbled in the language and iconography of the occult—the title Under the Spell of Joy isn’t much of a thematic stretch for a group whose repertoire already includes “Love Spell”—but this time they dial down the camp to harness its sinister allure and ceremonial grandeur. They’ve also grown their flock of parishioners, adding Delta 72 frontman/Cat Power sideman Gregg Foreman on keyboards, album MVP Gabe Flores on sax, and a small cast of singing children to enhance the commune vibe. And yet, for all its black-mass organ drones, apocalyptic sax squeals, and demonic girl-group chants, Under the Spell of Joy is an album that radiates positivity, a psych-punk self-help manual that suggests finding happiness in a world of shit requires some black-magick intervention.
Recently, Bloomgarden has spent less time name-dropping musical heroes than philosophical ones, like psychedelic oracle Terence McKenna and occult historian Mitch Horowitz, and their liberation philosophies permeate her lyric sheet. She spends most of this record floating—up in clouds, through dreams, into alternate realms—as a means to free herself from the demands of everyday life and realize her true potential. “Highlight what you see, this is the dream,” she shouts atop the hypnotic bass throb and scrambled sax frequencies of “Hypnagogia,” before enshrining her self-affirmations as a daily ritual: “Rise, shine, and repeat!” The winsome Ronettes-via-“Sister Ray” romp “Bliss Out” is even more explicit in its live-for-the-moment directives: “Be here right now, ’cause we’re all gonna die,” Bloomgarden sings, leaving us with the reassurance that “we’re just traveling time/we’re all in the sky/so bliss out.”
But even as it revels in new-age proselytizing, Under the Spell of Joy never treats inner peace as a given—it’s something achieved by going on the offensive, by engaging in continual struggle. The title track’s heavy soul-punk stomp transforms its circular mantra—“under the spell of joy/under the spell of love”—into a war cry, while the “10 Day Miracle Challenge” reframes Horowitz’s namesake motivational strategy as a blistering garage-punk attack on complacency and insecurity. Under the Spell of Joy’s most effective advice arrives in the form of its mesmerizing centerpiece “The Universe,” where Death Valley Girls not only offer a design for life, but immediately put it into action. “Live freer than the freedom that you trust/Dream bigger than the things that lift you up,” Bloomgarden preaches, as the band break free from their garage-punk roots and ascend to the realm of spiritual psych-jazz rockestra atop a cloudbed of misty organ drones and saxophone smog. It’s quite the dramatic turn of events for a band whose concept of joy used to involve watching horror movies on TV and going to the disco. But Death Valley Girls are ready to forgo simple pleasures in pursuit of eternal ecstasy.

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Frederikke Hoffmeier’s voice is the thread that holds together her apocalyptic mood pieces, a cinematic take on noise that’s driven by dead-eyed focus.

The Drought

“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats/And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief/And the dry stone no sound of water.... I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” These parched words, written almost 100 years ago by TS Eliot, in The Waste Land, could easily double as an epigraph for Puce Mary’s The Drought. Starting with the title, the record concerns itself with a primordial lack: a rotting, shuddering collapse both personal and global. Though rooted in industrial music and power electronics, The Drought sidesteps those genres’ stereotypical displays of machismo and fetishistic celebrations of strength. Instead it evokes an absence of power, the failure of industry. Puce Mary (aka Frederikke Hoffmeier) soundtracks a life spent vacantly shuttling between insidious digital isolation and alienated bodily contact, set against the background of a looming apocalypse.
The Drought is extremely cinematic. Many of the timbres will be familiar to fans of recent highbrow horror excursions like The Witch and Under the Skin. Pealing strings stretch across grey skies while thudding toms, roaring static, and claustrophobic low end seep into the mix. But there is no easily digestible three-act arc to be found here. Hoffmeier’s previous titles, Persona and The Spiral, are revealing. The Drought moves with a steady foreboding worthy of Bergman, obsessively tracing the same terrain over and over again. If The Spiral suggested a descent, The Drought traces a circle. The film it conjures is a slow-motion 360-degree pan across an ashen landscape.
Opening with a pair of desolate instrumentals, the album really comes alive on the third track. “To Possess Is to Be in Control” pivots on Hoffmeier’s laconic voice intoning a droning micro treatise on desire. It winds up with a vaporous cloud of haunting half melodies and floating whistles (catcalls?), and then she dives right in: “It makes me sick to open my body to you, to give you all I have. If I could possess you, like I possess my own body….” Her last line—“To possess is to be in control”—is answered with staccato bursts of noise, sharp as a knife’s blade. Hoffmeier seems to be tearing her way out of the track, writhing and snarling while simultaneously keeping her cool.
The theme picks up two songs later with the album’s centerpiece. “Red Desert” similarly presents alienation and dread in the midst of code-red atmospherics. Air-raid sirens hover while Hoffmeier sighs, “I find myself feeling like decades have passed. I’m an old woman now, and I have lost my attraction. I’m tortured by a feeling of drowning under you… and I feel desperate.” So far, so literal, but just after the one-minute mark, a mournful organ gently announces itself, sounding like a not-too-distant cousin to Eno’s “The Big Ship.” In an album almost completely devoid of traditional musical gestures, this intrusion gives The Drought a much-needed dose of the holy.
But having arrived at such an affecting moment, Hoffmeier seems reluctant to let it breathe. It’s too bad, because while the non-vocal tracks are uniformly impressive and powerful, they lag slightly behind. “Fragments of a Lily” churns like a gabber track with food poisoning. “Coagulate” shimmers and radiates with the cold light of black metal, and “Slouching Uphill” closes the album on an escalated note, teetering on the brink of violence. But it’s the voice that brings The Drought together, giving the album a sense of movement and purpose beyond a set of well-executed mood pieces. As it is, the record is thematically unified and executed with a steady, unwavering hand, but it also feels like a concept album waiting to happen. Over only a few years, Puce Mary has emerged as one of the most exciting and promising voices in noise music. The Drought’s glacial intensity and dead-eyed focus force you to approach it on its own terms, but one senses that Hoffmeier is just getting started.


Drawing inspiration from narrative thrust of video-game soundtracks and sound design of trap and trance, the London producer revels in melodramatic builds and spaced-out bliss.

Eternity

Video-game soundtracks have often drawn upon club music for inspiration: Just think of the drum’n’bass of Soichi Terada’s music for Ape Escape, the hard techno of the PlayStation Ghost in the Shell game, even the straight-up proto-grime in an X-Men game for the Sega Genesis. In the case of London producer Dark0, the inspiration runs in the other direction. His new album Eternity feels as much like the accompaniment to imagined landscapes as the soundtrack to a long night in a warehouse.
Dark0 (Davor Bokhari) is one of the few non-Swedes signed to Stockholm’s Year0001—home to Yung Lean, Drain Gang, and Viagra Boys—but he sounds right at home on the label. Though it is steeped in the sad-boy aesthetic of Yung Lean and his crew, the label has recently expanded into a wide range of electronic subgenres, particularly with last year’s Rift ONE compilation, that overlaps with Dark0’s own work. Since 2013, his releases have blended grime, trap, and club music with crystalline, cinematic sound design. He cites game scores as a touchstone for his music—the producer once recounted an album release party at which attendees played Mortal Kombat X on a projector while moshing and dancing to his music.
Eternity isn’t the soundtrack to a video game, but it feels like one. These are almost story songs, but the tale is told through an EDM structure of builds and drops, rising peaks followed by comedown periods and chilled-out piano lines. Dark0 draws on the melodramatic builds and spaced-out bliss of trance music, which gives a sense of warmth to a sound that might otherwise be cold or robotic. Tender and textured feminine voices are buried under layers of filters and effects, like a distant memory trapped in ice. More than clear voices, Dark0 prefers ASMR choruses on tracks like “zeroGen,” or the shrill, nightcore chipmunk tones of the uncanny R&B ballad “Wait for Me.”
Though he often plays with ambient textures, slower tempos, and abstracted sound effects, Dark0’s music celebrates the anthemic and over-the-top properties of mainstream club and rave styles—big beats, intense drops, and grinding trap drums—but in a somewhat warped form. If James Ferraro or Lorenzo Senni made more accessible club bangers, it might sound a little like the trance-trap fusion of “infinite edge.” The opening title track pairs Rustie-like trap bombast and grime wobbles with a distant Auto-Tuned voice, starting off dark and menacing before fading into a contemplative haze. “Shining Star” pitch bends and shifts like a gentle ray of light before a hardstyle beat breaks through.
Clean, shining piano keys undergird most of the album, grounding its ethereal synths with acoustic resonance. The combination of uplifting keyboard work, ambient soundscapes, and unabashed club textures sometimes suggests a modern reboot of pre-waiting room Moby albums like Everything Is Wrong—the intense piano loop of “Promise” recalls that album’s “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters,” immortalized as the needle-drop that plays over Al Pacino’s worn-out mug at the end of Michael Mann’s Heat. The emotions have a heart-on-their-sleeve intensity that’s more in line with pop , but Dark0 brings an almost compositional precision to his mix of downtempo textures and high-intensity club music—the piano-driven "Nova Bridge" is straight out of a JRPG. There’s as much space for peace and solace as there is for kinetic energy and high BPMs, a reflective cut scene for every frenetic battle. Dark0 places special emphasis on the more fragile parts of songs, the quiet intros and outros that force you to turn the headphones up, making you work to realize their complexity. Sometimes his sounds are just a gentle wave crashing in and out of your speakers, like the disintegrated pulses of “Born From Decay.”
Thanks to the seamlessness with which streaming services are integrated into game consoles, it’s now relatively easy to mute in-game music and replace it with a soundtrack of your own curation—sometimes a necessity when you’re going mad hearing the same intense orchestral cue over and over during a boss fight. Dark0’s music wouldn’t exist if he’d turned down the sound of the games he grew up on, but Eternity is also perfect for that purpose; this is an album in search of images, one that begs to be played over snowy mountain peaks and stunning pixelated vistas. Eternity feels like the ideal experience of losing yourself in a video game: euphoric, enrapturing, and maybe a little overwhelming, as the world around you melts away and all that’s left is sensation.

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The Bloc Party frontman attempts a blazing indictment of institutional racism on his latest solo effort, but too often reaches for stock characters and sloganeering.

2042

My favorite song Kele Okereke has ever written—hell, one of my favorite songs ever written, period—is Bloc Party’s “I Still Remember.” The swooning electric guitars rendered the private, quiet pain of gay adolescent yearning on the scale of a fists-in-the-air epic, tracing every incandescent high and bitter low. The song was a bold move in 2007, when the indie rock scene was even more homogeneous than it is now, and it endures over a decade later, having been embraced by new generations of young queer people.
As with so many other songs in Okereke’s catalogue, “I Still Remember” proves his gift for subtle, powerful songwriting about subjects as personal as they are political. But the clunky conceptual scaffolding of 2042 often obscures this gift from view. Like slowthai’s Nothing Great About Britain, 2042 announces itself as a blazing indictment of institutional racism in the United Kingdom. slowthai’s record succeeded largely on the strength of his storytelling, which gave listeners intimate, ground-level glimpses of life under white supremacy. Okereke reaches instead, too often, for stock characters and statistics, painting a vivid picture of racist oppression while neglecting to flesh out the people who live under that oppression.
On “St Kaepernick Wept,” for instance, Okereke relates the story of a man shot to death by police while his children watched, and then concludes with the blunt clunker of a lyric, “He was just another hand-out for welfare/Headed to the prison-industrial complex.” It’s a strange compulsion that recurs throughout the record, Okereke gesturing broadly at sociological concepts while flinching away from smaller human stories. His stated goal, granted, is nothing less than sweeping, structural change—“Let England burn,” he sings, “so we can start again”—but the broad strokes of his lyrical approach often divest his subjects of distinctions.
The stronger moments of 2042 are undercut, too, by jarring sequencing. In the record’s first half, listeners are rushed from earnest hagiography (“St Kaepernick”) to satire (“Guava Rubicon”) to “My Business,” a rap song with all the edge of the antagonist’s big moment in a Disney Channel musical. Past the halfway point, the record is a smoother listen—more sonically cohesive, more given to the kinds of sweet, subtle love songs that Okereke perfected on his last solo outing, Fatherland. “Natural Hair” is particularly lovely, a lilting flirtation between two black boys, as is “Back Burner,” which traces a love story that feels lived-in, tested by conflict and strengthened by years of togetherness: “No, I don’t fuck with The Smiths, but to The Cure I can get down.”
There’s a speed-bump in this back half, though, which is particularly emblematic of the problems that plague this album. After the sleek, sexy slow burn of “Catching Feelings,” Okereke inserts “A Day of National Shame (Interlude),” an excerpt of British Member of Parliament David Lammy’s blistering indictment of the wrongful deportation of legal Caribbean immigrants. He backs Lammy’s speech with an echoing guitar track, calm and spacey and deeply tonally inappropriate. He follows it with “Ocean View,” a featherlight waltz without any real connection to the ideas Lammy advanced. It’s hard to say whether 2042 would be a more compelling record with more appropriate sequencing, or if this sprawling sixteen-track album would have made, perhaps, for a better set of separate EPs. What’s all too clear, unfortunately, is that 2042 stumbles precisely where Okereke has proven himself so capable of soaring.


They were a cult band from Wisconsin in the ’80s who hit it big in the ’90s with their self-titled debut of brash, devil-eyed songs that hummed with sex, violence, and perverted religiosity.

Violent Femmes

Billie Jo Campbell was discovered at age 3 while walking down a street in Los Angeles with her mother. A photographer approached, told the mother that Billie Jo was adorable, and asked if she wouldn’t mind her daughter appearing in a photo shoot at a house in Laurel Canyon. The mother—“a free spirit,” Billie Jo explained—promptly set up an appointment. They later learned that the shoot was for the cover of an album by an obscure acoustic-punk trio from Milwaukee about to release their debut. In the photo, barefoot Billie Jo wears a cute white dress and strains to peer inside a darkened house through a window. She had no idea that this was an apt metaphor for the band’s songs, which capture that precise moment when childhood innocence is corrupted by the obsessions of the adult world—sex, violence, perverted religiosity, and omnipresent death.
Years later, when Billie Jo was a teenager in the ’90s, she realized that the album was pretty momentous. “This was my bragging point,” she recalled in 2007. “I’d be at parties, and if the girls in the dorm knew you were trying to meet cute boys, they’d tell them I am on the cover.”
What’s amazing about this story isn’t just that Billie Jo Campbell was still recognized, well into her college years, as the kid on the cover of the Violent Femmes’ self-titled 1983 LP. It’s that people knew what the cover even looked like. “I think the majority of people found out about our music because somebody had made a tape and played it at a party. I’ve heard that so many times,” said Violent Femmes’ singer-songwriter Gordon Gano in a 2016 interview, still cherubic even in his early 50s. “A few years ago, I had somebody that was a big fan say, ‘What does your album cover look like? I’ve never seen it because it’s always been on a tape that somebody made.’”
Violent Femmes are perhaps the greatest mixtape band of its era—they were to Maxell what Drake now is to Spotify playlists. Long after the Femmes’ initial wave of underground fame came and went in the mid-’80s, choice cuts from their first album kept popping up on countless tapes dispensed throughout teenage suburbia. For those that encountered the Femmes in this manner, the band’s songs were akin to outsider art—found musical data that offered bracingly unfiltered takes on lust and alienation and the yearning to belong, written on an acoustic guitar by a misfit kid who sang in an untrained pubescent whine. Mixtapes gave Violent Femmes renewed life divorced from the context of their own up-and-down career, infusing songs from their first and most successful record with the adolescent angst of each subsequent generation of middle-schoolers in search of a spokesman.
This is the art of the mixtape, finding songs that will expose your innermost self to whoever is receiving the tape. And Violent Femmes songs were catchy and simple enough to work especially well as plainspoken musical messages. If you wanted a killer kick-off for your “I’m an Edgy Outsider and Want to Be Appreciated As Such” mix—one of the most popular mixtape genres—a common choice was “Blister in the Sun,” in which Gano snakes allusions to heroin and premature ejaculation behind Brian Ritchie’s relentlessly busy bass line, like a shoplifter stuffing cigarettes down the front of his jeans. And the perfect closer for that tape would inevitably be “Add It Up,” a relentless rant that argues against involuntary celibacy on the grounds that it can make you homicidal. (“Gone Daddy Gone” also worked in this slot, particularly if the tape had an “all marimbas” theme.)
The other most popular mixtape genre was “I’m Into You and This Is My Way of Showing It,” and Violent Femmes delivered there as well. Gano wrote the most romantic song on Violent Femmes, “Good Feeling,” when he was just 15. An affectingly pure expression of fairy-tale love, “Good Feeling” is a rare moment of unfettered tenderness on an otherwise brash record, revealing the nice young man behind the bravado who was raised by a Baptist minister and a theater actress. Gano actually wrote a collection of gospel songs around the same time as Violent Femmes, but Ritchie, an atheist, refused to record them. He and excitable stand-up drummer Victor DeLorenzo—who was the oldest member by several years—were more comfortable with the nervy “Please Do Not Go,” in which Gano pledges to “patiently pray, pray, pray, pray, pray” for sex rather than salvation.
Gano and Ritchie later admitted that the members of Violent Femmes had virtually nothing in common except for music. But in the beginning, at least, that was enough to bond them together, because nobody else in their hometown of Milwaukee, Wis. took Violent Femmes seriously. The affectations that later endeared them to fans —the ramshackle instrumentation, the spitefully witty lyrics, Gano’s habit of wearing a bathrobe in public—stigmatized the Femmes in the Milwaukee club scene. They were forced to busk in the street with acoustic instruments because nobody would book them.
According to legend, Violent Femmes were “discovered” in 1981 by James Honeyman-Scott of the Pretenders, who invited them to open for his band during a performance at Milwaukee’s Oriental Theatre after seeing them busk outside the venue. Gano had just graduated from high school, and it was rare of the Femmes to perform indoors on an actual stage.
This story became an oft-repeated talking point in press releases after the Femmes became semi-famous in the American indie underground. But as the band members themselves were quick to point out, Violent Femmes were hardly set up for a professional career after that minor acknowledgment. As always, they were left to fend for themselves, eventually borrowing $10,000 from DeLorenzo’s father to fund recording sessions at a studio in Lake Geneva, about 50 miles southwest of Milwaukee. Producer Mark Van Hecke later described the studio as being “in a state of collapse. You’d go into the studio and there would be this equipment, and the next day you go in there’s a piece missing because it got repossessed.” Van Hecke’s intention was to give Violent Femmes a classic Sun Sessions sound, though this naturalistic approach required lots of takes, as the band tended to move around a lot while playing. For Van Hecke, working with the Femmes was an act of faith—he had previously tried to shop a three-song demo to a few dozen record labels in New York and Los Angeles, and all of them said no. “A lot of people thought I was nuts and this was shit. I knew it wasn’t,” he said later.
Nevertheless, Violent Femmes were oddly confident in themselves. “When we made the first album, we thought it was destined to be considered a masterpiece,” Ritchie claimed in 2015. The first prominent person to agree that Violent Femmes were destined for greatness was New York Times music critic Robert Palmer, whose rave review of two performances opening for Richard Hell at the Bottom Line and CBGB in 1982 was instrumental in getting the Femmes a deal with Slash Records.
Palmer, a blues scholar who had just published the definitive history *Deep Blues *the previous year, compared Gano to his most obvious antecedents, Lou Reed and Jonathan Richman. But Palmer also heard a new strain of Americana in Violent Femmes’ revved-up, snotty confessionals, likening songs to “the discursive, rambling structures of folk-era Dylan.” In a subsequent review of Violent Femmes’ second album, 1984’s overtly spiritual Hallowed Ground, Palmer detected “a subterranean mother lode of apocalyptic religion, murder, and madness that has lurked just under the surface of hillbilly music and blues since the 19th century” in the Femmes’ knowingly primitive music. Perhaps Palmer was also thinking of Violent Femmes’ “Gone Daddy Gone,” which lifts a verse from Willie Dixon’s “I Just Want To Make Love To You,” or the teenage murder ballad “To The Kill,” in which Gano fantasizes about vengefully hunting down his ex in Chicago, like so many Delta musicians decades earlier.
Flash forward to the ’90s, and Palmer’s conflation of Gano’s songs with the timeless quality of the blues felt truer than ever, even as Violent Femmes also seemed more contemporary than ever. In the ’80s, Violent Femmes were strictly an underground phenomenon; a slow but steady seller, the self-titled debut finally went platinum in February of 1991, though it didn’t actually crack the Billboard 200 chart until later that year. By then, Violent Femmes had achieved a measure of mainstream recognition thanks to the alt-rock explosion. They became a fixture of nostalgic movie soundtracks—Ethan Hawke sang “Add It Up” to needle Winona Ryder in Reality Bites, and Minnie Driver blasted “Blister In The Sun” on the hip underground radio show that John Cusack obsesses over in Grosse Pointe Blank. Violent Femmes even appeared in an episode of “Sabrina The Teenage Witch”—mean girl Libby casts a spell on Gano, making him serenade her with “Please Do Not Go” while Sabrina and her aunts do an awkward skank.
Violent Femmes’ influence was now discernible in the legion of underground rockers who had codified Gano's quirky vocal style into what is now commonly recognized as the "indie guy" voice. In years to come, Gano’s vocals—recently described by author J.K. Rowling as sounding “like a bee in a plastic cup”—would echo in Stephen Malkmus, Jeff Mangum, Colin Meloy, Alec Ounsworth of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and countless less heralded reedy young men.
Violent Femmes remain a band out of time. They are rarely mentioned with the “canon” bands of ’80s American post-punk—lacking the sales and accolades of R.E.M., the Replacements, and the Pixies, the Femmes don’t signify an era so much as a time of life. Violent Femmes is children’s music for teenagers—uber-elementary sing-alongs that have their time and place, and then are set aside as facile once they’re outgrown.
But Violent Femmes deserves better. If the blues survived because of the oral tradition of passing down songs from one singer to another, Violent Femmes endured because the tunes were shared via word of mouth at dorm parties and high school keggers. (Even the girl on the cover learned about Violent Femmes that way.) And don’t discount those precious mixtapes, a primitive form of social media that worked exponentially slower than the internet but were ultimately no less effective at creating a lasting legacy.
For young people growing up in the internet age, Violent Femmes is part of a shared language. In 2013, after a period of estrangement marked by lawsuits and public in-fighting, Violent Femmes were persuaded to reunite for a performance at Coachella. “As soon as we started out the set with ‘Blister in the Sun,’ when that riff hit, it was like a swarm of insects coming towards our stage. They all started running from the other stages,” Ritchie recalled. All these years later, whenever teenagers listen to songs from Violent Femmes, they also hear themselves.


The second full-length from this noisy Bristol duo is more accessible than their first but sacrifices none of that record's visceral power.

Tarot Sport

Like any noise group, Fuck Buttons rely on a certain amount of vulgarity and aggression. While they've always possessed a knack for melody that has, for their genre, provided their music with an accessible edge, listeners unaccustomed to blood-curdling screams and metal-scraping drones have had their work cut out for them when searching for the more delicate moments that helped make last year's Street Horrrsing such a stunning listen.
Tarot Sport represents a subtler, more mature approach to songwriting and a sharpening of their craft. But moreso, it marks a comprehensive stylistic shift for the duo's sound, from experimental noise with a buried pop sensibility to a sort of modernized electronic take on classic post-rock structures. And impressively, they've made these changes without sacrificing any of the genre-straddling adventurousness that made them intriguing in the first place.
Perhaps the best way to think about their transformation is to consider how the new material relates to post-rock groups like Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The band has always had an inclination toward sweeping epics (see: "Sweet Love for Planet Earth"), but instead of using scale as a canvas for brutality/delicacy contrasts, here they repurpose the post-rock format as a digital soundscape. Gone are the shrieks and wailing guitar chords that populated Street Horrrsing; instead these songs are built almost wholly with synth and keyboard textures that originate in dance music.
Aiding the shift is producer Andrew Weatherall, who has a long history of infusing rock with dancefloor bounce and drawing the best from his groups. (His helming of Primal Scream's epochal Screamadelica and his remix work with My Bloody Valentine are prime examples.) From the chugging drumbeat of opener "Surf Solar" to the chipped-up electro backdrop of finale "Flight of the Feathered Serpent", the dynamics and textures of techno are the foundation of the record, making a direct link between Tarot and Weatherall's earlier boundary-defying productions.
All of which is prologue to Tarot Sport's actual songs, which by and large are pretty freaking incredible. There's a cinematic, storytelling quality to the music, and the climactic builds of longer pieces such as "The Lisbon Maru"-- with its militaristic drumbeat and huge synth melodies-- conjure the excitement of an oversized movie sequence. "Surf Solar", extended from the clipped-length radio edit that emerged online last month, is anxious and menacing by comparison but hits those notes without the histrionics of Fuck Buttons' previous work-- the band seems just too confident here to rely on screeches to get its point across.
Fuck Buttons also master shorter pieces that shift and redirect the record's momentum. Close in spirit to the tribal romp of "Ribs Out" from Street Horrrsing-- but ultimately more listenable and imaginative-- "Rough Steez" envisions industrial techno as locomotive skronk. And "Phantom Limb" recalls genre-benders like Liquid Liquid and Gang Gang Dance with its cavernous atmosphere and snaky, complex arrangement. When the band returns to widescreen emotiveness for the triumphant closer "Flight of the Feathered Serpent", it feels like a victory lap-- the capper on a record that is a hell of a lot easier to like than even fans of Street Horrrsin**g would have expected. That was a great record, but Tarot Sport is a cut above. Perhaps surprisingly, it's also a welcoming album-- and one of the best of this already fruitful year.


The Swedish sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg's sophomore album was recorded in Omaha with Bright Eyes' Mike Mogis and features guest spots from Conor Oberst and the Felice Brothers.

The Lion's Roar

First Aid Kit is two sisters, Swedish, last name Söderberg. Klara is younger and shorter, the one with the dark bangs cut right across her heavy eyes, who sings with a crooked underbite that she could probably never set straight without wrecking the lovely specificity of her voice, the slight lisp of it, her languid vowels. Johanna, the older one, about whom everything is long (her limbs, her blondish mane), mostly sings harmony; her voice is darker and heavier and comes from somewhere different from her sister's. Klara seems to coax hers out from just under her tongue, while Johanna, her eyes growing wide and distant whenever she has some bars to herself, often appears to be channeling something far beyond her body, beyond the room, beyond even the sky.
Last year, First Aid Kit went to Omaha make their second album, The Lion's Roar, with Mike Mogis, a producer and also a member of Bright Eyes, perhaps the first band that Klara loved. Their debut, 2010's The Big Black and the Blue, released when the sisters were just 17 and 19, was so striking-- with their otherworldly, interlocking voices and uncanny understanding of imagined adult pains-- that the tracks' demo-grade quality was easily overlooked. This time, though, they have all of Mogis' bells and whistles at their disposal: his way of almost imperceptibly coaxing a song into full bloom, his feel for when to gussy-up and when to strip away, but also, yes, actual bells and whistles, or at least one deeply eerie flute tone that lingers throughout, floating in and out of scenes like a sly specter. And a new clutch of friends appears for the closing track, "King of the World", a song so jumpy and earnest and ecstatically terrified by the unknowable future that Conor Oberst seems to have had no choice but to consummate the clear homage to the best of his mid-2000s output by making an appearance himself, along with the Felice Brothers, whose showing as a wheezy, rattletrap backing band nearly redeems their dismal 2011 album, Celebration Florida.
For the sisters' part, their voices are steadier now, and richer, as if they were told enough times how good they are that they're finally resigned to believing it. (It's a shame, then, that Mogis can get a bit heavy-handed with the reverb-- their nakedly mic'd voices are almost always more stunning.) The choruses are big and chewy, even on the most melancholy tracks-- "Blue" is perhaps one of the more charming songs ever involving the phrase "now you're just a shell of your former youth" and would be even without the twinkly glockenspiel and bumpy little bassline. Thanks to Mogis, The Lion's Roar would sound like a very good album even if it wasn’t one-- but likewise would be stunning even if the band had been left to its own devices.
And yes, that's very likely "Blue" as a Joni Mitchell allusion, though the rambling, scatter-pitched confession of "New Year's Eve" may be more of a direct tribute. First Aid Kit have this guileless way of making their influences clear, as if offering up the source code of their art to the world, not as proof of anything but in a spirit of communion-- perhaps most specifically making the offering to girls just a few years behind them, sitting under the grip of some pair of huge headphones in their childhood bedrooms, hearing the Söderberg sisters' words and voices for the first time, feeling something shift inside them, wondering where this beautiful thing came from, and finding clues there even before they know it.
"Emmylou", maybe the best song on the album, and its second single, does this most deftly and most directly. "I'll be your Emmylou, and I'll be your June/ If you'll be my Gram and my Johnny, too," the chorus blurts over bashful drums and wry pedal steel, the sisters shaking out the one-syllable names with giddy relish. Do you know any other song involving young women trying to romance would-be beaus with sweet sweet voices and Americana trivia? "I'm not asking much of you/ Just sing, little darlin', sing with me," the chorus continues, but if all they really wanna do is croon a few numbers, I'll eat my Nudie suit.
Klara and Johanna say they wrote the song before they'd set foot in America. As if to make up for lost time, last year, when they finally came over to the States, they went to California, out to Joshua Tree. It was the birthday of Gram Parsons, who would have been 65 if he hadn't died there when he was 26. They made the music video for "Emmylou" there, wearing caftans and drifting side by side through the scrubby desert like characters in a psychedelic Aaron Sorkin drama. They burn incense at a cross made of colored stones, an ad hoc tribute to the more official ad hoc tribute kept up for Parsons there at the park; they wave the smoke with their small hands; they throw out their arms and let their sleeves flutter out in the wind.
I wonder what they thought about when they were out there-- if they felt new, if they felt homesick, if they were somehow disappointed, despite everything, to not see Gram himself wandering over the hills. I wonder if they thought about how they will most likely outlive him, how one day they will have been making music longer than he was even alive, how one day they will outgrow their caftans and their crosses, how the most beautiful songs they're ever going to write are still waiting for them out there in the future somewhere.


Trouble Maker is about as good as a latter-day Rancid album gets. The Bay Area group examines contemporary political turmoil with a quick, scratchy sound that honors their punk past.

Trouble Maker

Some artists forge their moral compasses through imitation and collaboration; others prefer careful study, or prolonged retreats. And then there’s Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, whose rise to fame entailed 20 years of getting his ass kicked: by addiction, by divorce. But Armstrong has been most notoriously pummeled by the Gilman gutter-punks who fostered his metamorphosis from a street kid, to the ska-core luminaries Operation Ivy, to the leader of Rancid, which rose from the ashes of its predecessor to become of the most successful wrecking crews in the recent memory. Just like Rancid’s Bay Area peers Green Day, Armstrong and company’s mainstream ascent drew ire from their DIY compatriots. “Ever since I started playing punk rock, people have said major labels are shit,” Armstrong told Rolling Stone in 1995, a month or so after the band released their LP ...And Out Come the Wolves, “but I have to be shown… I gotta have my ass kicked before I’m gonna really believe any of that.”
Rancid spent the next eight years heeding that warning, rejecting lucrative deals from a slew of big-shot suitors (including Madonna, whose label Maverick Records aggressively courted the band). Then, at the height of Rancid’s appeal in the early 2000s, Armstrong got another ass-kicking when listeners learned that Warner Brothers–gasp!–would be distributing the band’s 2003 album Indestructible. The label’s attempts to obscure their involvement with the LP through the omission of their logo on the album’s packaging and liner notes only amplified Rancid’s perceived betrayal. In time, the poisoned-well narrative overpowered the music itself, even as the band returned to their previously-held, independently-focused distribution approach. Though Rancid’s subsequent work—2009’s Let the Dominoes Fall, 2014’s ...Honor Is All We Know—offered reliable doses of their usual three-chord fury, the thrill had long since vanished. And like it or not, narrative is everything for a punk band.
Armstrong et al can’t turn back the clock and morph into crusty ruffians again. What they can do is honor their past, which brings us to their ninth full-length, Trouble Maker. It’s no coincidence that the LP’s cover art resurrects the stamped-on logo that graced their eponymous 1993 debut: the 17-track effort finds the band examining contemporary political turmoil–blue-collar identity crises, tense demonstrations, the ever-present shadow of the Man– through the prism of their rebellious past, a little more wizened but just as rambunctious as ever. There are no stylistic experiments, no ballads, no bullshit. Instead, Rancid craft a tableau of working-class grit with quick, scratchy strokes: a whirlwind tour of turbulent political rallies and smoke-enshrouded pool halls, factories, and back alleys.
The band’s arrangements remain ephemeral and formulaic as ever. Mumbled verses? Check. Barked choruses? Check. Breakneck solos, courtesy of Lars Erik Frederiksen? Check. But here, Rancid’s first-thought-best-thought palette belies a deeper line of reasoning: a conscious ploy for permanence, timelessness. “Telegraph Avenue” repurposes “Ring of Fire”’s signature chord progression into a heartland-tinged backdrop for Armstrong’s ode to the Bay Area protester, a modern American archetype: “The ones who stand for freedom of speech/Well, this one goes out to you/Well, I can still hear your voice/On Telegraph Avenue.” Lead single “Ghost of a Chance” and the turbocharged “Make It Out Alive” recast the frontman as a street-punk sage. On the former, he peddles the following pep talk with a sugary hit of cynicism: “Well, maybe someday we’ll get a new start/You never grow too old to dream.” So convincing is Armstrong’s barfly-guru approach—all hoarse sing-a-longs, grizzled half-raps, and punchy, prolonged “hey”s and “woah”s—that you almost forget he willingly gave a multinational shampoo company the go-ahead to use his music in that commercial.
About two and a half decades after their inception, Rancid are, for all intents and purposes, a legacy band. It’s a distinction they never asked for, but one they were nonetheless destined to attain, given Operation Ivy’s cult status and the band’s collective ear for tuneful-if-rugged rock hooks. (Let’s not forget that Armstrong co-wrote P!nk’s 2003 hit “Trouble.”) Rancid’s anti-establishment days may be a figment of the past, but the band’s spirit remains inextinguishable; they’ve just had problems harnessing and illustrating it. While Trouble Maker doesn’t usurp the band’s primordial peak, it’s far and wide their strongest effort since 2000’s excellent self-titled. This is about as good as a latter-day Rancid album gets, and for diehards, that’s more than enough.