Even when he’s stealing the spotlight, Mark Lanegan still seems like he’s lurking in the shadows, not so much singing a song as haunting it. So it’s appropriate that Lanegan’s now receiving a tribute that most don't receive until they're dead, the career-spanning collection Has God Seen My Shadow?: An Anthology 1989-2011.

Mark Lanegan: Has God Seen My Shadow?: An Anthology 1989-2011

Well before the Seattle rock scene of the late-80s became fodder for big-screen rom-coms, Marc Jacob-designed runway collections, and ill-conceived trend pieces by easily duped New York Times writers, Mark Lanegan was already plotting a life after grunge. Of all the handsome, long-haired Emerald City singers to front rock bands that sold hundreds of thousands of records in the early 90s, Lanegan ranked a distant fifth in high-school-locker pin-up potential, exuding neither the bare-chested sex appeal of Chris Cornell and Eddie Vedder nor the fashionable misanthropy of Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley. Even within the context of his own band, the Screaming Trees, Lanegan felt like the odd man out, his bronchial drawl serving as a grainy, black-and-white contrast to the band’s kaleidoscopic surges.
In the midst of the Trees' brief run as 90s alterna-darlings, Lanegan refashioned himself as an old soul who wanted nothing to do with a young man’s game, releasing a handful of simmered-down solo releases on Sub Pop steeped in blues and Americana traditions that presented a more natural fit for his slow-and-low singing style. Though it initially counted as something of an anomoly amid Sub Pop’s super-fuzzed roster, Lanegan's 1990 debut, The Winding Sheet, was a harbinger of the label’s post-grunge tilt toward the torn 'n' frayed roots-rock of the Friends of Dean Martinez, Red Red Meat, the Scud Mountain Boys and the like (though today the album is probably most remembered as the record that gave Kurt Cobain the idea to cover Leadbelly). And following the Trees’ official dissolution in 2000, Lanegan’s outlaw ethos would become further entrenched, both on his own increasingly spartan solo releases, and his mercenary approach to collaborating with everyone from Queens of the Stone Age to former Belle and Sebastian chanteuse Isobel Campbell. But despite his considerable C.V., Lanegan typifies the classic singer-not-the-song conundrum, as he's better known for personifying a certain mysterious vibe—with a fistful of tattoos to go with it—than for his deep canon of black ‘n’ bruised ballads. Even when he’s stealing the spotlight, Lanegan still seems like he’s lurking in the shadows, not so much singing a song as haunting it. So it’s appropriate that Lanegan’s now receiving the sort of elaborate retrospective treatment that most artists don’t get till they’re dead.
Though it spans two discs and 32 tracks, Has God Seen My Shadow? is by no means a definitive compendium of Lanegan’s work, focussing squarely on material released under his own name while steering clear of his countless extracirricular projects and growl-for-hire guest appearances. As such, it’s a rather narrow overview of an artist whose interests and pursuits have proven far more eclectic than this stridently low-key collection would suggest. (Even the gnarlier extreme of his own songbook—like “Methamphetamine Blues” and “Message to Mine”—isn’t represented here, while the chronology also stops short of his most stylistically divergent album to date, 2012’s synth-colored Blues Funeral.) But it also underscores how the popular image of Lanegan as the gruff, gravelly-voiced drifter is so often shaped by the company he keeps, the harsher qualities of his voice and personality amplified by his beauty-and-the-beast match-up with Campbell, or his showdowns against the more dramatic Greg Dulli in the Gutter Twins. The intimate nature of Has God Seen My Shadow? thus illuminates those qualities that often get overlooked in Lanegan’s high-profile pairings: his grace, tenderness, and self-deprecating sense of humour.
The set’s first disc employs an odd, loosely reverse-chronological sequence that groups tracks from each of Lanegan’s solo albums, starting with 2004’s Bubblegum before tumbling deeper into the past. There’s a bit of a Benjamin Button effect at play in the march from the wood-cabin minimalism of “Bombed” and the creaky-door unease of the PJ Harvey duet “Come to Me” back to 1994 release Whiskey for the Holy Ghost’s “Carnival” and “The River Rise", the sort of mystical psych-folk odysseys you could easily imagine the Screaming Trees cutting for an MTV Unplugged session with a guest string section. But regardless of era, Lanegan’s work has always been tethered thematically to the twin poles of regret and redemption (this guy sings about saving his soul so much, he had to join the Soulsavers), and Has God Seen My Shadow? is a testament to his unwavering knack for coming up with clever ways to distill his endless bummer into a wickedly evocative one-liner: the seemingly optimistic titular refrain of Holy Ghost’s “Sunrise” is answered with “should’ve covered up my eyes,” while “One Way Street” (from 2001’s Field Songs) sets an instantly despairing scene when Lanegan intones, “stars and the moon aren't where they're supposed to be,” before taking a shot of whiskey and lamenting how he “can’t get it down without crying.”
The collection also shows all those Tom Waits and Nick Cave comparisons Lanegan gets saddled with to be somewhat offbase. Neither as wilfully eccentric as the former nor as outrageously provocative as the latter, Has God Seen My Shadow? posits Lanegan more as a patron saint to wounded romantics like the National. His best songs disarm with their simple elegance and plaintive performances, like the downcast doo wop of “Pill Hill Serenade", the breezy “Kimiko’s Dream House” (a songwriting collab with late Gun Club founder Jeffrey Lee Pierce), and “Last One in the World", which could be the best ballad Keith Richards didn’t bring to the Tatoo You sessions. Disc two of Has God Seen My Shadow? presents a random grab-bag of previously unreleased material that ping-pongs between different periods—from a mellotron-swirled 98-era cover of John Cale’s “Big White Cloud” to a vocal version of the chilling 2001 instrumental “Blues for D” to a handful of raw, acoustic tracks recorded with QOTSA cohorts Troy Van Leeuwen and Alain Johannes in the mid-2000s—and while it may be short on revelations, it reinforces Lanegan’s consistency of vision. So it’s ironic that the set closes with a rare letting down of the guard: a live version of the Jackson C. Frank folk standard “Blues Run the Game” (recorded in Portland circa 2000) that gets derailed by sideman Mike Johnson’s short-circuiting guitar. But with some encouragement from the audience, Lanegan regains his composure to finish the song, putting into practice the philosophy that’s guided his long and winding career for over two decades: the best cure for the blues is to keep on keepin’ on.


German producer builds minimal techno epic from a beautifully textured sound palette. Panda Bear guests.

Black Noise

Though he lacks the crossover name recognition of producers like the Field, Burial, and Lindstrøm, Germany's Hendrik Weber is one of the leading figures in modern techno. As Pantha du Prince, he has up until now released two albums of meticulous, minimal-inspired house music. The last, 2007's This Bliss, found the rare balance between ambient sweep and dancefloor bounce, and it's only grown in stature since its release. In part because of a move from the smaller Dial Records to Rough Trade and guest spots from some indie heavyweights, his new LP, Black Noise, is being met with more excitement this time around. And with good reason: Said to be born out of a period of musical exploration in the Swiss Alps, the record is both a stylistic departure for Weber and an extension of what he already does well.
Weber is unlike most minimal techno producers in that he doesn't look to locate one groove and ride it for the course of a track. His songs open up, unfurl, and regularly change course. With Black Noise he develops this to incorporate a wide range of sounds-- field recordings, atonal noise, and stray percussion all populate the album. Above all, here he aims to reproduce sounds already in nature, and where This Bliss was airy and celestial, this record is gritty and earthbound. It's darker, more forceful, and more chaotic.
From the first moments of opener "Lay in a Shimmer", it's clear that we're in for a different kind of Pantha du Prince album. The track begins with a cluster of noise-- crowd voices, clanging scrapes, the rev of a car engine-- before building into a groove of low-end synths and glistening bells. While the core arrangement is still carefully constructed and precise, the clamor around it makes the song far looser than anything Weber's done to date. Subsequent tracks also strike a balance between the natural and electronic. "Abglanz" combines woodblock percussion with a gritty dubstep instrumental, and "The Splendour" (which features !!! and LCD Soundsystem bassist Tyler Pope) sets pinball plonks loose over a muted minimal backdrop.
The album moves through a few distinct phases while maintaining this earthy, psychedelic quality. In its middle section, starting with "A Nomad's Retreat", Weber plays with asymmetry and extreme textural contrast. He puts gravelly bass next to reverberant synths in a way that shouldn't work but does. He revisits the icy atmospheres of This Bliss toward the end of the record, rendering them grainier but equally haunting. On the gorgeous "Welt Am Dracht" and closer "Es Schneit", eerie vocals drift over taut drum programming and shredded synths flutter around like pieces of confetti. During both stretches, the songs tear and split at certain points, giving way to pockets of noise that reinforce the album's overall theme.
Ironically the only track to stumble is the one that will likely attract the most new listeners. "Stick to My Side" is Weber's much-drooled over collaboration with Animal Collective's Noah Lennox, but oddly it doesn't come together like one would hope-- Lennox's traditionally warm vocals sound detached from Weber's chilly arrangement. That's disappointing considering the duo's combined potential, but it's not enough to derail what is otherwise an exceptional record.
At 70 minutes, Black Noise is a big, dense listen but also the kind of album that rewards investment. Each track is its own micro sound world with enough rich detail to draw you back for deeper investigation. The album is undoubtedly a success for Weber-- if not an outright step forward, then a graceful lateral one-- who probably could have gotten away with not making such a comprehensive shift in sound. Instead he chose to deconstruct his signature style, and the result is strikingly unique.


The shiny, beat-heavy sound of nu-blink-182 works in starts and stops, but feels half as fun as the band used to be.

NINE

Pop-punk’s appeal has always been the fusing of the hook-filled sentiments of pop music with the direct current of punk. They are two prongs that any band, particularly those that find something close to mainstream success, are forced to straddle. This dilemma—how to, in the misquoted words of Donnie and Marie Osmond, be a little bit pop while also being a little bit punk—is one that blink-182 has been struggling with for years now.
The apex of their fame revealed serious fissures in the group’s long-term stability, leading singer and guitarist Tom DeLonge to leave the group after their 2003 self-titled album, start the new band Angels & Airwaves, and get really into U.F.O. conspiracies. He’d rejoin for 2011’s Neighborhoods, but since 2015, DeLonge’s place in the band has been taken by Alkaline Trio singer Matt Skiba. Blink picked up their first Grammy nod with 2016’s California, and the band now seems singularly focused on making sure the brand endures into the future, which never really seemed like much of a priority during their most erratic years.
With NINE, their eighth album, blink is in search of a more sustainable kind of success. They’re aiming at a more youthful audience, maybe the kinds of kids who inadvertently came to pop-punk by way of Lil Peep, but blink-182 have long held appeal to people who didn’t cut their teeth in the punk scene. Take drummer Travis Barker, who is all over the last decade of hip-hop, from Run the Jewels to Lil Wayne to Young Dro. He tends to work with artists who aren’t exactly in vogue, usually aggressive, Generation-X rappers, like LL Cool J, Cypress Hill, and Xzibit, or the younger and critically unacclaimed, like Machine Gun Kelly and Yelawolf. But Barker has benefited tremendously from hip-hop’s du jour reverence for pop-punk, emo, and alternative rock, repositioning himself into something of a Rick Rubin-esque Svengali of a younger generation of SoundCloud rap. Over the past year, he’s shown up on songs by Lil Nas X, XXXTentacion, and Ghostemane and executive produced EPs by $uicideboy$ and 03 Greedo.
It’s Barker’s drum programming that shapes the sound of NINE more than anything else. His beats have always sounded a little bit like Pharrell’s, with that booming bass sound you can hear being so clearly played by a human hand on a drum machine. There are shades of Barker’s hip-hop work all over NINE, particularly on a song like “Hungover You,” which opens with an uptempo, danceable drumline and ends with a pattern of bass tones begging to be blasted out of oversized trunk speakers.
This is a clear bid for the kind of success currently enjoyed by bands like Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco. Blink-182 worked on NINE alongside pop songwriting teams like Captain Cuts and the Futuristics, as well as Ali Tamposi, the co-writer of Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger.” It’s impossible to hear a song like “I Really Wish I Hated You” and not sense the Chainsmokers lurking in the corner. “On Some Emo Shit” pulls from the same well of lazy Big Apple tropes (“I thought I saw you at the Bodega,” “Thinking back to times in Manhattan and that SoHo Gallery”) as Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York.” It’s a song that sounds written to accompany B-roll of the fictitious Brooklyn of TV Land’s Younger, a show about a middle-aged woman masquerading as a millennial—an experience that’s probably relatable to the members of blink-182.
Even if their sound is somewhat refurbished and compressed, blink-182 still avoid guest features and a full pivot from pop-punk to pure pop. Their flirtations with light EDM and hip-hop backbeats aren’t exactly new—“Run Away” sounds a lot like Linkin Park at their peak, with stuttering drums and manipulated vocals scattered across the rest of the album. There’s still plenty of speedy guitar playing and a lot of mournful rage. Mark Hoppus’ lyrics largely stem from his recent personal experiences with depression, but with the new sound, there’s also a new commitment to offering advice and inspiration to younger fans, like on the song “Happy Days,” where the band addresses a kid whose head is filled with “dread and doubt.”
It’s surprising how well the new sound works, though the voice of Skiba doesn’t always mesh comfortably with the production. As always, angst and unrequited affections are aplenty, but it all feels far too tame. Skiba and Hoppus wail to high heaven on “No Heart To Speak Of,” nothing approaches the bleeding feelings of “Josie” or the paranoia that permeates 1999’s Enema of the State.
Blink-182’s late-career work has largely been overshadowed by Tom DeLonge’s sincere effort to prove that aliens really do exist, in its own way a less surprising late-career pivot than a developmentally arrested band courting of a younger crowd. DeLonge has moved on, but he’s stayed weird in a way the rest of blink hasn’t. The band fits neatly into their shiny new suit, but they look better naked.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On this London group’s first LP for Impulse!, saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings uses jazz’s cultural memory as a rich language that informs an entirely new conversation.

Your Queen Is a Reptile

American jazz has often been described as an accumulation of cultural memory—music that survives by staying in touch with its own history. But the music of Shabaka Hutchings, the 33-year-old saxophonist and bandleader of London’s Sons of Kemet, insists that memory isn’t enough. Hutchings is a fixture in many projects, including cosmic jazz trio the Comet Is Coming, Afrofuturist outfit the Ancestors, and occasionally as a guest player with the Sun Ra Arkestra. His work with Sons of Kemet is notable for its fervent politics and open-borders approach to genre. On the group’s third LP, Your Queen Is a Reptile, Hutchings merges his classical clarinet and jazz orchestra training with the music he’s heard growing up in the Caribbean, traveling in South Africa, and living in London. “That’s an aspect of being a part of a musical diaspora,” Hutchings says in the press materials for Your Queen. “Not being from the place that jazz is born from means that I don’t feel any ultimate reverence to it. It’s just about finding ways of reinterpreting how we’re thinking about the music.” For Hutchings, jazz’s cultural memory is not just something to recite, but a rich language that informs an entirely new conversation.
On Your Queen Is a Reptile, that conversation covers a lot of ground with a limited vocabulary. Rendered only with tuba, saxophone, drums, and voice, Hutchings’ compositions are diverse and rhythmically ambitious. He’s not only leveraging jazz, but a broader sonic lexicon including Afrobeat, dub, Caribbean soca, and grime. Your Queen is thematically aspirational as well—as the group’s first LP since the 2016 Brexit vote, it directly challenges the conventions of nationalism and the British monarchy. In their place, Hutchings offers his own version of a royal family, comprising visionary black women like Yaa Asantewaa, the Ashanti queen mother who fought against British colonialism in the early 20th century; the longtime radical activist Angela Davis; and Hutchings’ own great-grandmother, Ada Eastman. Hutchings’ coronation of these remarkable women is a celebratory act, but he’s also commenting on the arbitrariness of all inherited hierarchies. Royalty is a dangerous ideology, and Hutchings counters it with a high court of trailblazing women whose achievements, rather than their bloodline, inform their worth.
On “My Queen Is Mamie Phipps Clark,” named for the social psychologist who researched the detrimental effects of segregation on African American schoolchildren, Hutchings melds sprawling dub and nocturne jazz. Led by Congo Natty, an English producer and vocalist  who helped popularize jungle in the early ’90s, the track pays respect to dub’s Jamaican origins as well as its rebirth as 2 Tone ska in late-’70s London. Natty’s vocals seep to the song’s periphery on a wave of reverb while Hutchings’ sax paints in broad brushstrokes in the foreground. Theon Cross subs grumbling tuba for dub’s signature bass, letting out wonderfully guttural brass belches, for a fun and accessible fusion of genres that evokes the Specials’ woozy “International Jet Set.”
“My Queen Is Albertina Sisulu,” an homage to a noted South African nurse and anti-apartheid activist, is an Afrobeat shimmy that suggests furious dancing. Cross’ tuba and Hutchings’ tenor tangle phrases, while drummers Sebastian Rochford and Moses Boyd provoke them with anxious raps on rims, hi-hats, and djembe. Hutchings plays in sweetly curving licks before fracturing into staccato blurts. His instrument often reaches manic, searching measures, bringing to mind something saxophonist Evan Parker once told him. “He said: ‘You need to play as if it’s your last chance to play,’” Hutchings recently told The Wire.
Hutchings has said he wrote lead single and album highlight “My Queen Is Harriet Tubman” as an interpretation of Tubman’s initial escape from slavery. The effect is urgent—the drummers mimic the pace and posture of someone running for their life, at times slipping and hitting a cowbell or snare with added force, but never losing speed. Saxophone and tuba reach bumblebee frenzy, sputtering by the end of their turbulent flight. It is an exhilarating and highly original piece of music that showcases Hutchings’ ability to translate politics to melody.
Sons of Kemet are most effective when they transpose concept to instrument this way. But despite the group’s skill for conversing between genres and generations, words are Your Queen’s greatest weakness. Guest vocalist Joshua Idehen delivers his poems with a bravado that at times distracts from Hutchings’ nuanced compositions. On “My Queen Is Ada Eastman,” Idehen’s vocals don’t arrive until minute three, and when they do they dampen the song’s energy. His diction can be a bit goofy, and lines about London winds that “shiver my thin moustache” don’t necessarily help. The poet redeems himself, however, with a simple phrase that seems to speak to the resilient immigrant experience in post-Brexit Britain: “I’m still here,” he repeats.
Your Queen is Sons of Kemet’s first release on Impulse!, the label that was home to Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, and Pharoah Sanders at their peaks. This adds another dimension to Hutchings’ relationship with American jazz, placing him among the players whose work he’s trying so hard to subvert and deconstruct. It is a peculiar achievement for him in some ways, but it is also a testament to his talents as a composer and player. Hutchings may not feel any “ultimate reverence” to the genre, but its tastemakers see a lot of promise in him. Given the passion and innovation he’s breathing into contemporary jazz, why shouldn’t they?


Like Battles' Mirrored, this Kompakt remix album delights in the goofy-unto-surreal things electronics can do to the human voice.

DJ Koze: Reincarnations: The Remix Chapter 2001-2009

It was fitting that Germany's Stefan Kozalla-- aka DJ Koze/Adolf Noise and one-half of techno-pop duo International Pony-- wound up the dance producer tapped to remix Battles' slippery electronic-rock single "Atlas" back in 2007. Obviously there was the track's queer bounce, the future-retro glam-rock rhythm partly inspired by Battles' interest in German "schaffel" techno, a sound pioneered by the Kompakt label, one of Koze's benefactors. But also: Go back and listen to Battles' Mirrored. Then throw on Reincarnations, this bulging new collection of Koze remixes. Rhythmically, they have next to nothing in common. Instead, they're two albums that delight in the goofy-unto-surreal things electronics can do to the human voice.
There's hardly a track on Reincarnations that's not peppered with tweaked vocals. Koze is a devotee of the ancient art of the vocoder or its modern-day software plug-in equivalent. He loves to use gender-flipping filters to turn his singers into robot androgynes. And he's not above a David Seville-ian blast of pitch-shifting just for fun. Sometimes, as on the sublimely silly "Minimal" by Matias Aguayo, the vocal is outlandish enough that Koze can more or less stay out of its way. And other times, as on Matthew Dear's "Elementary Lover", Koze the remixer overstuffs the track's four minutes-- from arch, starched whiteboy funk to a Venusian stadium rock outro. If you're cringing slightly at the thought of yet another techno remix album filled with identikit instrumentals, know that Koze's vocal play on Reincarnations adds new facets to already interesting tracks and turns boring cuts beguiling.
And lest you think his cut-ups are all laughs, there's nothing comedic about Koze's take on the laid-back funk of Heiko Voss' "Think About You". Instead he stretches the "I" in the "I think about you" refrain into an angelic background hum that sets the whole track swooning. It's a subtle move that points up the other thing that makes Reincarnations so listenable: Koze's craftsmanship, which is often put in the service of the kind of spaced-out, gentle loveliness that characterizes the "Think About You" remix. He may have a shameless a weakness for novelty shock tactics, but Koze's also a big softie with deft touch. The aforementioned "Atlas" remix is on the one hand truly perverse, stripping away that big, booming, instantly recognizable schaffel beat for fractured mid-tempo micro-rhythms. But its oddness becomes enchanting when the drums drop out entirely for a twinkling breakdown straight out of the late-1990s IDM school of music box melodies. Indeed, Koze's breakdowns alone elevate many of these tracks, even the "already good" ones: the water-torture pauses in Sascha Funke's "Mango Cookie"; the rave-y bleeps colliding with smeary swells of strings on Malaria's "Kaltes Klares Wasser (DJ Koze & the Tease Remix)".
Reincarnations isn't flawless. Koze's take on Lawrence's "Rabbit Tube", for instance, settles for the kind of passable but generic minimal techno that's so temple-clutchingly dull across an entire album. But the fact that the "Rabbit Tube" remix acts more as a palette cleanser here, slipped between Koze's sonically restless techno-pop (Wechsel Garland's "Swim", with its long, silty intro) and dancefloor experiments (the drunken jazz of Noze's "Danse Avec Moi"), points out how effectively Reincarnations is programmed, if nothing else. That ear for sequencing means Koze's fashioned that rarest of remix albums: the kind might play start to finish, and more than once.


Carly Rae Jepsen's third album E•MO•TION is as solid and spotless as any pop album you're likely to hear this year, the result of several years working alongside a storied list of contributors. It is flooded with winning moments, even if it lacks the personality of great pop records.

E•MO•TION

Carly Rae Jepsen's ambition for her new album E•MO•TION could not be clearer. "We had the biggest single in the world last time and didn't have the biggest album," her manager Scooter Braun told the New York Times in July, referring to her 2011 breakout hit, "Call Me Maybe". "This time we wanted to stop worrying about singles and focus on having a critically acclaimed album." It's an ambitious campaign, but the Shellback-produced opener "Run Away With Me" announces it with clarion synths that sound like battle-call horns: Carly Rae is at the gates with an army, hellbent on returning home with your love.
In many ways, she succeeds: E•MO•TION is as solid and spotless a pop album as you're likely to hear this year, the result of several years working alongside a storied list of contributors. More than 200 tracks were workshopped in sessions with some of the pop world's most prestigious hired hands, including hitmakers Max Martin and Jack Antonoff, neither of whom made the final cut. In the end, just 12 made the album, with six more filling out the deluxe edition.
The hand-picked collaborators that do appear on E•MO•TION include Sia, Devonté Hynes, and Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij, all of whom contribute excellent work (Hynes, on the twinkling Prince-inspired ballad "All That", and Batmanglij, on the weird, warbling "Warm Blood"). The synth and drum programming, handled by Ariel Rechtshaid, may be his best, building off the sound he developed for Haim's Days Are Gone. I can think of a few fans and gearheads who would pay good money to have Rechtshaid break down the sounds on this album, as he's done in the past.
But whatever lessons we learn from *E•MO•TION—for example, *that this palette of '80s synth sounds and Madonna hat-tips will probably endure for eternity—we don't learn much about Jepsen. The best pop stars distill attitudes and emotions into gestures so perfect they can take on a life of their own. This is why pop icons inspire endless memes: Rihanna for when we give no fucks, Beyoncé for when we're feeling imperial. We have Drake for performative vulnerability, Taylor for performative generosity. Jepsen, on the other hand, hasn't captured the Internet's imagination in the same way. Her best performance is still as a shy, boy-crazy brunette, a role she reprises on the "driving the speed limit on the zeitgeist" first single "I Really Like You". Her efforts on E•MO•TION to break new ground around this reductive portrait are fitful and unconvincing. (She told the Guardian she "spent an entire week vaping" to sound "gritty" on the song "Your Type", yet she sounds no different on that track than on any of the others.) Ultimately, you can listen to Carly Rae Jepsen for days and still have no idea who she is.
This may seem like a surface-level concern, but it's an important one, because E•MO•TION is all surface. It's unfair to deeply scrutinize lyrics on a pop record—the goal is to write smart, but skew broad—but E•MO•TION fails to tell us who Jepsen is or wants to be. The economy of her writing is impressive, especially on songs like the shadowy "Warm Blood" or the booming closer "When I Needed You". "LA Hallucinations", her collaboration with members from little-known indie rock bands Zolas and Data Romance, stitches a bubblegum vocal to a no-frills electronic production. (It is also the rare pop song to include the word "BuzzFeed.") But the album mostly feels like the conclusion of a team determined to create an unassailable pop product.
That's why it falls short of its ultimate goal of setting the world on fire; for all its ironclad hooks and studio precision, Jepsen's third album, like her second, lacks the personality of the most memorable pop records. There's an unshakeable vagueness to her—her last album was simply called Kiss, and this one bears the generic title E•MO•TION, with inexplicable punctuation. It may be flooded with winning moments—the bridge on "Gimmie Love"! the build to the last chorus on "All That"!—but E•MO•TION as a whole sounds like a slab of blank space. If only Jepsen had written her name.


On Joey Bada$$'s debut LP B4.DA.$$, the rapper revisits golden era sounds and aims for greatness.

B4.DA.$$

One of the longest shadows in hip-hop is cast by a 14-month stretch from September '93 through November '94. Arguably the last and finest run of hip-hop's golden age, this period is bookended by the releases of De La Soul's alt-rap classic Buhloone Mindstate and Redman's surreal, grimy *Dare Iz a Darkside—*and encompasses so many distinctly earth-shaking individual statements it's almost beyond belief. Midnight Marauders, Enter the Wu-Tang, Illmatic, Ready to Die, Doggystyle, The Diary, Hard to Earn, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, *Resurrection—*even the stuff that hasn't crossed over to the same extent, like Black Moon's Enta da Stage or O.C.'s *Word…Life *or Del the Funky Homosapien's No Need for Alarm, reign as certified classics, each with their own stories to tell and unique elements that made them stand out in rap's busiest creative flourish of the coming-of-age '90s.
As profiles and reviews have regularly pointed out, Joey Bada$$ wasn't alive for any of these albums' release dates. That's not really the issue here, though it's easy to draw conclusions from that fact; when the weight of influence an artist carries has the additional weight of history piled on, that can't be good for the backbone. But as his career has developed, from the claim-staking mixtape 1999 to the moody regrouping effort Summer Knights to a litany of guest verses (A$AP Rocky's "1 Train"; the remix of Madgibbs' "Knicks"), he still hasn't strayed far from that two-decades-past area of influence, a narrow purview that's resulted in some fine mood music but little that's been transcendent or reinventive. Official debut B4.DA.$$ keeps that frustrating formula going.
And make no mistake, B4.DA.$$ is a case of squandered resources rather than some expected mediocrity inoffensively met. It sets a compelling mood well—a restless-youth disbelief in actually making it, even when all the evidence is laid out in front of him, until finally the cloud cover breaks and it all starts registering. (One of his most unguarded moments of cynicism-shaking excitement comes at the end of "Piece of Mind": A jailed friend admits that he caught Joey's new single on the radio and Joey's reaction—"oh, you heard that shit!"—is pure, hard-earned pride.) And even at their most obvious, the beats nail that East Coast melancholy winter sensation, whether coming from vets of the era Joey nods back to (DJ Premier on "Paper Trail$"; a Roots/Dilla reconstruction on "Like Me") or Pro Era hands like Kirk Knight ("Big Dusty"; "Hazeus View") and Chuck Strangers ("Escape 120"; "Black Beetles"). Some of the homages are blatant to the point of distracting; if you can hear Statik Selektah's beat for "No. 99" and not scoff at the idea of putting a Canal Street "Scenario" knockoff in the middle of an otherwise moody album, I envy your reserve. But the heavy traditional soul-jazz/boom-bap backing is at least well-executed, and the occasional shakeup via drum'n'bass-adjacent uptempo breaks ("Escape 120"; bonus track "Teach Me") is welcome. You could do far worse than to pick this record up for meditative late nights or bad-weather commutes, where it's best to just zone out and let the vibe sneak up on you.
But the catch for an MC aiming his sights at the pantheon of stylistic greatness circa '93-'94 is that the people who appreciate that music the most—especially the people who came of age with it as their soundtrack when that shit was new—are also the least forgiving when it comes to lyrical complacency. And with a voice and a flow barely distinct enough to be instantly recognizable just yet, there's no margin of error for Joey here. There aren't enough intricate lines to make up for the ones so flatly familiar they feel like placeholders: check one-verser "Christ Conscious" and its opening-line "Motherfuckin' microphone checker/ Keep that grip tight, like my Smith & Wesson" couplet, then realize that there's still Namedrop 101 references to Ike Turner, "Dragon Ball", and Thriller-era Michael on the way. There aren't enough unexpected detours to compensate for the constant quasi-iconoclastic invocations of other artists' well-known hooks, with "Paper Trail$" and its nuance-draining "Cash ruined everything around me" maybe the most egregious. And most disappointing of all, there's not enough spark to the rhymes to excuse the goofy metaphors ("Hazeus View": "I'm a titan, like Zeus I enlighten 'em/ Kick flows till it's kung fu fightin' 'em"). He's still relatively young, but Joey's experienced enough worth sharing that it feels like his words are inadequate to even cover its scope.
And that's what separates albums like this from records you just kind of shrug at and move on from. Joey's less than a month into his twenties and he's already lost a close friend in Capital STEEZ, is trying to figure out his place in the rap world (and the rest of the world) under a social media microscope, and has to live up to being the type of new-hope torch-carrier who can get friggin' Primo to do a beat for him. Through all of this, he still has to develop and evolve, in public, after already setting a precedent for himself as an ambassador for the aesthetic of a previous, endlessly revered and long-lamented era. That he can hint at who he really is beneath the simplistic words and still-developing voice is a good sign, and with the opportunity to vent on this record—dealing with money woes ("Paper Trail$"), strengthening familial ties ("Curry Chicken"), reflecting on a childhood he's growing out of yet still strongly shaped by ("O.C.B.", short for "only child blues")—he's gradually but noticeably building up a real identity on record. But if that next level's within reach, there has to be one obstacle to overcome: Firsthand truths take longer to sink in when they're delivered with secondhand styles.


After 28 years of being held by many as the gold standard for indie-pop, 1986's C86 compilation is getting a lavish reissue with two bonus discs assembled by one of its original curators, former NME writer Neil Taylor, who also supplies copious liner notes.

C86

In pop music, 82 seconds can be an eternity. That’s how long Primal Scream’s “Velocity Girl” lasts, and the song was enough to have crystallized an entire era and established an undying narrative. As the opening track of C86—a 22-song cassette compilation of British indie bands released by the legendary music magazine NME in 1986—“Velocity Girl” has become iconic. Around the time of its release, Primal Scream’s frontman, Bobby Gillespie, left his post as the drummer of the Jesus and Mary Chain. Disentangled from that band's major-label whirlwind, he resumed activity with the virtually unknown project he'd initially formed in 1982. Primal Scream then proceeded to reduce the pop song to its subatomic essence: quick, breezy, quirky, and above all, exquisitely small.
“Velocity Girl” sounded humble, but it was not without ambition. It falls shy of the minute-and-half mark, and shyness can be heard in the song’s desperate refrain: “Leave me alone,” Gillespie pleads in a Glaswegian warble as guitars ring like chimes around him. It was the sound of soaring punk rock as filtered through the Byrds, and its expression of angry introversion— told in an almost Morrissey-esque manner, via the tale of a troubled, sensitive young woman— was only the first stage of evolution for Primal Scream, whose sprawling 1991 album Screamadelica would all but eclipse their formative work. Regardless of what the future held for Gillespie, “Velocity Girl” became C86’s signature song, and it’s the track that, more than any other on the tape, helped turn C86 from a comp into a genre.
After 28 years of being held by many as the gold standard for indie-pop—and of being a hefty influence, direct or otherwise, on everyone from My Bloody Valentine to Belle and Sebastian to the Strokes—C86 is getting a lavish reissue with two bonus discs have been assembled by one of its original curators, former NME writer Neil Taylor, who also supplies copious liner notes (drawn in part from his upcoming book, C86 & All That:Indie 1983-86). These 50 bonus tracks represent an additional fifty bands that Taylor claims should have been contenders to be on C86 in the first place, and his claim is correct. Not only does the expanded reissue provide context and insight, it’s packed to the back teeth with song after head-spinning song. One of the joys of C86 has always been its impressive lack of filler, and even expanded to a staggering 72 songs, this holds true.
Two words pop up most often in discussions about C86—“jangle” and “twee”—and although those who make those associations aren’t inaccurate, the descriptors don't tell the whole story. Inspired largely by the bands on C86’s ancestor, 1981’s C81 compilation—which featured, amid various post-punk, industrial and ska luminaries along with the wiry romanticism of Josef K, Orange Juice, and Aztec Camera, three alumni of Glasgow’s Postcard Records—the jangly, twee bands on this reissue wholeheartedly embrace their forebears. The Pastels, who had yet to install themselves as stalwart upholders of the C86 torch, crawl along forlornly with “Breaking Lines,” while Miaow—who recorded for Factory Records and were led by NME writer Cath Carroll, later immortalized by her unabashed fans in Unrest—brought a jaunty spring to their indie-pop step. McCarthy, featuring future Stereolab mastermind Tim Gane on guitar, waltzes wistfully with “Celestial City”. On one of the bonus discs, B.M.X. Bandits (featuring a pre-Teenage Fanclub Norman Blake), finally get their due with the charmingly remedial “E102”; in 1989, the band cheekily titled their debut album C86. A mere three years after the release of the compilation, it was already being mythologized.
While some stereotypes affiliated with C86 have been overstated over the years, there is an aching, shimmering delicacy at the heart of the compilation's more elfin contributors—but the ghost of punk past still lingers. Razorcuts named themselves after a line from Buzzcocks’ “Love You More”, and their track that appears here, “Sad Kaleidoscope”, is an unabashed homage to Pete Shelley’s warbling, wimp-punk songcraft. The Buzzcocks don’t get mentioned often as an influence on the C86 school, but on this reissue, the evidence is everywhere—from Pop Will Eat Itself’s buzzing “Mesmerized” (made before they became sample-heavy provocateurs, and before frontman Clint Mansell scored Darren Aronofsky films) to Talulah Gosh’s lo-fi, pop-punk romp “I Told You So” (made before sugar-spiked singer Amelia Fletcher formed the more refined Heavenly). The Wedding Present fall loosely into this camp, too, even though their song for the original C86 tracklist, “This Boy Can Wait (A Bit Longer)”, demonstrated just how much mastermind David Gedge seemed to want to one-up his peers in regard to heart-pounding desperation, Smiths-inspired cleverness, and an inhumanly hyperactive strum that put many thrash guitarists of the time to shame.
The line between C86’s jangly, dreamy representatives and its more distortion-smothered counterparts is blurred by bands like 14 Iced Bears. An oddity both then and now, the group’s song featured here, “Inside”, alchemically combines droning noise, hushed melancholy, and a nearly nauseating aura of discordance that presages My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything by two years (a time when MBV themselves had barely begun to absorb the influence of C86). But 14 Iced Bears aren’t the only group on the box set that prophesied shoegaze: “Go Ahead, Cry” by 14 Iced Bears’ Sarah Records labelmate, St. Christopher,is underlain with an atmospheric smear of static that might as well be a wormhole to the next three decades of noise-pop.
On the other end of the gentleness spectrum, Meat Whiplash’s “Here It Comes” is Cure-indebted goth with a Metal Machine Music fetish, a bizarre formula that nonetheless feels as much like proto-shoegaze as anything on the 4AD roster in 1986. And the Jesus and Mary Chain, one of the prime sources of C86’s DNA, are officially canonized in the compilation's canon with the inclusion of “Inside Me”,  from its 1984 debut Psychocandy. The similarity between the titles of 14 Iced Bears’ and JAMC’s tracks isn’t likely intentional, but it’s eerily telling: again, the specter of introversion—of masking one’s mumbling sweetness behind sheets of lacerating, pseudo-psychedelic treble—is raised, and loudly.
Every precious stereotype associated with C86, however, is blown out of the water by the box set’s avant-garde contingent. Big Flame’s “New Way (Quick Wash and Brush Up with Liberation Theology)” is a Manchester-bred doppleganger of Minutemen’s funky, sardonically militant post-punk; Stump exhibits bona fide musical virtuosity on “Buffalo”, even if it’s bent toward a Carl-Stalling-meets-Captain Beefheart cartoonishness that ultimately provides one of C86’s most singular, brilliant moments. The Nightingales—a veteran of the '77 punk scene that included ex-members of the Prefects, who toured with the Clash for their legendary White Riot Tour— feed wobbly folk into post-punk on “Part Time Moral England”, right around the time that their contemporaries Mekons were beginning to do the same. The spirit of '77 manifests itself in an entirely different way on Pigbros’ “Hedonist Hat”, a clanging, churning, art-rock spasm that draws reverently from Brian Eno’s 1977 album Before and After Science. Partly in defense of these perpetual C86 outliers—the geeks so weird that they make the other geeks nervous —The Guardian recently a piece titled “C86: The myths about the NME’s indie cassette debunked”. As well-intentioned as it is, it misses the point: The sounds may be different, but the souls are simpatico.
As eclectic as C86 is, by no means does it try to encompass the entire British indie scene circa 1986. As Taylor recounts in his liner notes, “The aim […] was to take an aural snapshot of the moment. Were these acts representative of the state of a certain kind of indie music at that time? Very much so. Was C86 intended to be the be-all and end-all of independent music at that time? Of course not”. In fact, some bands refused to be included, fearing it would lead to being pigeonholed—like the June Brides, one of the major players in the admittedly loose-knit scene that C86 gathered together. That’s been rectified by the reissue, with the June Brides’ horn-punched, Burt Bacharach-like gem “Just the Same” serving as the first song on the box set’s first bonus disc. And some bands that were surely nowhere near being seriously considered in the first place— such as Happy Mondays, whose undercooked “Freaky Dancin’” is a minor skirmish of the dancefloor havoc they’d go on to wreak— serve more as a historical curiosity than a corrected omission.
Hindsight has been more than kind to C86, but not everyone agrees on its place in the indie firmament. In Marc Spitz’s new book Twee: The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film, Sarah Records cofounder Matt Haynes maintains that, “Even by the time it was released, C86 was being treated as a term of abuse, and most of the writers [at NME] were embarrassed by it. These days, people tend to think of it as a landmark moment, but… I think that’s a slight rewriting of history.” Revisionism, though, is the prerogative of the reissue curator—and that prerogative is exercised impeccably by Taylor, who glosses over none of the conflict or confusion of the era in either his liner notes or his choice of bonus material. This reissue triumphs by celebrating, rather than denying, the richness and invention—the dissonance and paradox—at play within a small scene of bands whose joyously erratic racket was much huger than their humble songs could contain.


On their second album, this proudly gratuitous Philadelphia quartet dives headlong into extreme gore and extreme sonics, making a real-life mess of death.

Posthumous Humiliation

Pissgrave had only one option: to get more extreme. In 2015, the Philadelphia band released one of the most disgusting death metal albums in recent history, Suicide Euphoria. A more frenzied version of Revenge’s blasting war metal, the album led with cover art where bones floated in what’s most politely called brown death goop. Posthumous Humiliation makes the gore even more clear, sporting a ripped-open face with its jaw prominently split in two. If you’re familiar with goregrind’s frequently exploitative, voyeuristic tradition, it’s nothing new, though most goregrind bands wouldn’t pass the muster of a tastemaking, subgenre-agnostic label like Profound Lore. As such, some potential Pissgrave fans may actually be turned off by such a blatantly malevolent image. But the music matches it: Posthumous Humiliation is gratuitously violent, getting off on its own vulgarity. It is not the first great death metal album of 2019 in spite of being reprehensible but because of it.
Pissgrave are again chiefly driven by war metal’s savagery-above-all approach, but the crucial difference comes this time with intensity. Despite its fury, war metal—black metal concentrated on speed and near-endless blasting, nothing else—is tight and controlled. Pissgrave are not sloppy, but they understand that carnage is messy, and their music should reflect that reality. Humiliation is louder and noisier than Euphoria, as Demian Fenton and Tim Mellon render endless sheets of mangled guitar noise, screamingly incoherent but cohesive. Blown-out riffs, torrential blastbeats, and vocals so low they seem subterranean crowd the same space, inseparable in their pain. “Emaciated” has what you could loosely call guitar solos, so damaged they make Kerry King’s Reign in Blood squabbles sound like the disciplined work of some YouTube shredder. Even when these leads suggest something familiar, like the swells and carnivorous bird pecks of “Into the Deceased,” they feel wonderfully senseless.
As with the cover, those guitar sounds may suggest that Pissgrave only provide denim-and-leather’s version of shock and awe. But there’s more here. Where their chaos ultimately leads is not as important as its blistering, tumultuous course, akin to Cecil Taylor’s percussive, jarring piano flights or Australian extremists Impetuous Ritual’s howling towers of noise. They seem free and unplanned, not deliberate. Each track is a new trial, a chance to live again through a cycle of misery and pain. Are the opening blasts in “Canticle of Ripping Flesh” and “Celebratory Defilement” the same as opener “Euthanasia?” Not quite—it just feels that cyclical, the ultimate source of Pissgrave’s bloodlust. “Catacombs of Putrid Chambers” seems like it offers a different path through Incantation-like dirges, yet it’s ultimately the same torture.
Despite how frenzied, blurred, and gory Pissgrave can become, they sometimes charge toward a horizon of approachability. For Euphoria, it was the thrashy, Power Trip-via-Absu tune, “The Second Sorrowful Mystery.” Here, the closing moments of “Rusted Wind” draw upon Dissection’s melodic mournful passages. Melodic? Yes, this record really is that fucked up. “Wind” is the funeral procession that follows Humiliation’s wave of violence. It’s as though they’re grieving, if not exactly remorseful.
It’s tempting to dismiss Humiliation as a mere edgelord monument, propaganda with no core. But you’re missing the point: Even if you’re incapable or uninterested in hurting anything, your internal life can feel ravaged and violent and chaotic. Pissgrave’s utter depravity proudly maps those feelings on Posthumous Humiliation; some days, this mess may be the only thing that makes sense.


The Savannah sludge metal band Black Tusk's first album since the death of co-founding bassist and vocalist Jonathan Athon is a joyous wake, not a somber funeral. Athon's tracks were completed before his death, enabling his bandmates to finish Pillars of Ash in his absence, and it's their strongest record yet.

Pillars of Ash

The latest album from Black Tusk has all the swampy, sludgy goodness listeners have come to expect, and if you don’t know the backstory, you might not know that it’s overshadowed by tragedy. After a string of splits and EPs, Black Tusk were hard at work on their first full-length in five years, the follow-up to 2011’s roiling Set the Dial. One November evening, the bassist and vocalist Jonathan Athon decided to take a break from recording and take his Harley through the cypress-lined streets of his native Savannah with his girlfriend Emily.
A driver ran through a stop sign and into his motorcycle, critically injuring both riders. While Emily recovered, Athon incurred irreparable brain damage, requiring an induced coma. You can't take positives from a tragic situation like this, but Athon died upholding the ideals that made the sludge metal band he co-founded so great: careful risk-taking, hometown pride, unconditional (if unconventional) love, and most importantly, a bullheaded devotion to living life as if it could end in an instant.
When a key member of an active band dies, the entire venture incurs trauma, often accompanied by creative moratoriums and existential crises. This is especially true for Black Tusk, a trio of lifelong friends who have distributed the musical weight equally and distinctly among themselves from the get-go: guitarist Andrew Fidler and drummer James May are the scathing screamer and middle-range complement, respectively, to Athon’s mucky growls, and their tripartite howls instantly set them apart from their peers. It would have been understandable if they'd followed the lead of their idols Motörhead and laid down their instruments, to have resigned out of respect. But Athon’s tracks were completed before his death, enabling his bandmates to finish the record and tour behind it (Corey Barhorst, of Niche and Kylesa, will take Athon’s place on the road). Pillars of Ash, then, should be considered Black Tusk’s latest album first, tribute second: this is not a somber funeral, but a joyous wake, not to mention the band’s strongest album yet.
Pillars of Ash doesn’t alter the formula of the past two albums, but rather accentuates them with doubled-up aggression; slip on a pair of headphones for the album’s 35-minute duration, and your ears’ll be ringing for an equally long period of time. With a fellow sludge-punk—Toxic Holocaust frontman Joel Grind—behind the boards, Black Tusk’s sound is in the hands of a talented technical wizard, and his mix ramps up the volume without obscuring the churning melodic backend, or the high-low contrasts of Fidler and Athon’s vocals, which take center stage on tracks like "God’s on Vacation" and "Still Not Well."
Of course, source material is everything, and Black Tusk’s refusal to repeat themselves makes for a dynamic, diverse listen: a welcome respite from the paint-by-numbers paradigms that often dominate the modern inclination of the "swamp metal" the group helped pioneer alongside fellow Savannah natives Kylesa and Baroness. Despite the after-the-fact uneasiness of "Walk Among the Sky"—a barnstormer that reimagines death as a chance to take a transcendent stroll, rather than a six-feet-under slumber—the track sprints circles around the reaper, its rapid-fire key-changes and frequent, furious digressions never letting up. At the same time, "Desolation of Endless Times" and "Punkout" honor the group’s punkish roots, making ample use of Fidler's yelps and Athon and May’s pogoing percussion.
The band may toss an occasional nod to Slayer ("Born of Strife") and Motörhead ("Bleed on Your Knees"), but there's no cribbing of influences here. Rather, Black Tusk's combination of sludge, rock, hardcore, and death metal remains fluid, fertile, and most importantly, full of life, in spite of the tragedy that threatens to define it. Far from funereal, Pillars of Ash has plenty of love for good ol' heavy-metal melodies: "Black Tide" packs in all the sugary stomp we’ve come to expect from Torche, while the Athon-dominated "Desolation of Endless Times" (particularly its intro) could soundtrack an MMA highlight reel. With Athon’s passing, this LP may mark the end of the Black Tusk we fell in love with—but it’s the highlight of the band’s catalog, and the best tribute they could have imagined. There’s no telling what the future will hold for Fidler, May, and Barhorst as they soldier on without their friend and anchor, but judging from the sound of Pillars of Ash, their spirits are far from crushed. And Athon’s? Well, he’ll live forever, with every press of the play button.


Japanese heavy rock heroes release two LPs at once, but they aren't what you'd expect: one is electropop and shoegaze, the other a metal grab bag.

Attention Please / Heavy Rocks

Boris have never been one for hedged bets or bridled ambitions. In the past 15 years, the Japanese trio has released more than 20 albums of heavy eclecticism-- stoner bludgeons and thrash blasts, dense drones and noise screes. They're the band with Atsuo-- the screaming, gong-banging drummer with one of those arena-rock, hands-off microphones-- and Takeshi, a multi-instrumentalist who plays a double-necked guitar so often and well that it doesn't seem like an affectation. Michio Kurihara, one of the world's best psychedelic guitarists, works as Boris' touring sideman. From former labelmates Sunn O))) to fellow Japanese sonic explorers Merzbow and Keiji Haino, they've also collaborated with a long list of experimental luminaries. All of this seems to be part and parcel to Boris' methodical quest to build a legacy of expansive, new heavy music, where no form is too sacred to break, no idea too mainstream to incorporate. If that's their plan, it's largely worked.
Accordingly, there are few release-day gestures more rock star than issuing two albums at the same time, as Boris will do with the slight electropop-and-shoegaze departure Attention Please and the requisite metal grab bag Heavy Rocks. What's more, this is the second Boris LP to sport the title Heavy Rocks; the first was released in 2002, and nearly a decade later, it still stands as one of Boris' best efforts, a landmark distillation of stoner metal and noise rock built with enviable precision and aggression. This moment, then, is not only Boris' look-how-popular-we-are exclamation but also their look-how-much-we've-grown assertion; essentially, Attention Please and Heavy (Heavier?) Rocks are logical next steps for the Boris legacy. But riddled as this pair of albums is with confounding musical indecision and listless stylistic repetition, they mostly serve as reminders of how remarkable and inventive Boris have been and often threaten to be. Heavy Rocks was sturdier back in 2002, while the appropriately titled Attention Please-- even if the more interesting of these two discs-- is a flimsy showcase for Boris guitarist Wata as a would-be college-rock frontwoman.
Heavy Rocks does the things you expect a Boris album to do: It explodes open with "Riot Sugar", a brutal blues-metal march with a rote, ragged riff and background grunts from the Cult's Ian Astbury. "Missing Pieces" alternates between spare guitar drift, gnarls of noise, and an epically forlorn crescendo, while the other 12-minute-plus tune, "Aileron", growls and swells before drifting off into a piano-and-distortion haze. For fans of Boris, the material is a double-edged sword: It's the sort of motley metal that brought you to the fold one way or another, but that means you've already heard it-- all of it, from the massive soundscapes on Pink to the dynamic sizzle in Amplifier Worship-- several times before. Here, it's all offered like a mixtape, with no narrative arch or musical momentum.
Attention Please at least offers something fresh for Boris. For the first time in the band's long run, Wata takes lead vocal. Her consistent presence offers an atmosphere of patience, plus a cohesiveness that Boris have long since foregone. Sure, she leads the band through several different looks, from the tense, pretty opening title track to the dance-metal anthem "Party Boy". During "See You Next Week", she drifts like a ghost between a world of broken drum machines and guitars meant more for texture than melody. There's a ruminative instrumental for acoustic guitar, and "Spoon", a blustery tumble that-- Wata's willowy vocals aside-- favorably suggests the sound of 1990s American modern rock radio. What's best, the trio doesn't give up on its heavy metal experience; though this album suggests a stylistic mix of new wave and Mazzy Star, Boris play with the rumble and roar of a loud rock band. The bass line during the chiming "Tokyo Wonder Land" is a menacing throb, the guitar solo an acid-damaged roar. "Les Paul Custom '86" emerges as a dance number through sheets of noise, anchored by a riff that would have fit Earth in 1993. Those tell-all touches and Wata's command suggest that this is the better, if unforeseen, avenue for Boris' future. Though not fully developed, this is a space where they might actually explore without the constraints of reputation and expectation.
The heavy metal landscape of 2011 is tailor-made for (and, sort of, by) Boris. Sure, the black metal kids are busy retrenching against boundary breakers like Liturgy and Altar of Plagues, and a whole lot of older burly bros will tell you that stoner, thrash, and melodramatic metal were done better the first time. They're not necessarily wrong, but those sorts of attitudes provide a welcome contrast for the tone of inclusion and acceptance for ideas that permeates not only some of the moment's most exciting metal but also music at large. Whether it's the elegiac folk singer heading for stacks of finely orchestrated keyboards or the black metal band backing its melee with a pure and purposed disco-punk throb, a whole crop of young acts now seem open to the possibilities within their forms. Their audiences largely seem interested in tagging along, too. After all, we obtain and hear music in radically different ways and contexts now than in 1996, when Boris were making their recorded debut as a noisy sludge-metal band from Tokyo. Boris' post-modern eclecticism is, in theory, perfect for this moment. But pastiches and piss-takes-- by and large, the sort of material that's scattered between Attention Please and the second Heavy Rocks-- can only satisfy so much. Boris seem to be racing to stay current, to show that they can change as rapidly as these hyper-wired times. With each new addition to a catalog that's becoming more adulterated each year, we're learning that maybe they can't.


Ovalcommers

If Markus Popp is misunderstood, he has no one but himself to blame. When your interviews include answers like, "My music is embedded in a very concrete, completely tangible, everyday workflow far less occupied with theoretical notions of debatable authorship and digital discourse," to questions like, "Dude, did you, like, work out the songs beforehand or pretty much put this album together in the studio?" you can expect people to miss where you're coming from.
Two misperceptions about Popp are that he makes ambient music and all his work sounds the same. In the watershed year 1994, the ambient label almost applied, due in part to Oval's composition process at the time. That year, Popp, along with then-collaborators Sebastian Oschatz and Frank Metzger, decided to take copies of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II, apply a magic marker to the CD surface, and record and manipulate the ensuing tracking errors. This resulted in a beautiful audio object called Systemische, a record that proved hugely influential in the experimental electronic community. And yes, it was generally placid enough to be categorized alongside Music for Airports.
But I defy anyone to listen to Ovalcommers' first track and think of Brian Eno. It begins with a two-note riff that prudent car alarm manufacturers should consider licensing, and then slides into a massive pit of raging black sound, full of bassed-out distortion and explosions of static. The opening siren continues to wail and actually takes on a pathetic quality as it drowns inside the din; you begin to feel sorry for that annoying little sound, so overwhelming is the clamor surrounding it.
Though every Oval record has a unique flavor, Ovalcommers is the most radical shift yet, one that easily dispels the second misperception. We saw glimmers of this development in 1999 with Szenariodisk, a gorgeous EP (my favorite Oval record next to 94diskont) that found Oval cutting exceptionally detailed sound figurines out of slabs of sonic chaos. At that point, Oval's sources began to acquire a prickly edge, as an increasing amount of information being stuffed through an ever-narrowing pipe had caused the protective coating to fray. Still, on Szenariodisk, controlled, icy beauty was the order of the day. On the full-length follow-up, Ovalprocess, Popp reigned in the discord and experimented with conventional sounds (the album is filled with organ chords), creating a warm, enveloping environment that throughout could still be called "pretty." The adjective seldom applies to Ovalcommers.
On this record, every sound is in constant danger of being shoved into the red. The most common elements-- sampled guitar plucks, an organ-like synth patch laced with static, modem transmissions, assorted drones-- appear and reappear over the course of the record, yet they remain in constant motion. Any complaints I've had recently about the "grid" that rules over time in computer-generated music do not apply here; the patterns of Ovalprocess would take years for me to understand completely. Loops are used as accent, not to drive composition.
Most prominent of these is the thing that set Oval apart initially: the now ubiquitous CD skip. It seems a relief when it first appears on Ovalcommers as Track 1 becomes Track 2 (the idea of Popp naming his pieces now seems silly) and the initial blast slips down to a manageable level. The CD skip has been incorporated into every past record except for Dok (a strange release that now sticks out of the catalog like a sore thumb), and Ovalcommers is no exception. People are tiring of the sound and I can relate. If nothing else, it's puzzling. Why has it stayed around so long, even outside of Oval? Why didn't Christian Marclay's memes multiply in the same way? Despite it all, for me, an Oval record without the trademark skip is like a Built to Spill album sans guitar.
Most of those who've run with the glitch have used it in a minimal context, but Oval is moving in the other direction. This is an album packed with abrasive tones of unimaginable density and uncertain origin. Oval shares with Autechre the ability to craft sounds that defy explanation. The human hearing system simply was not built with this record in mind. It's like trying to graph the emotional intent of a tropical storm. The listener has to fight a million years of evolution just to pay close attention, and when he does, there is no system of classification in place to describe it. It's clear that Oval has left pastures of beauty behind and is ready to ride wild and free in Merzbow country. Calling this album ambient is a joke; with Ovalcommers, Popp brings the noise.


The legendary punk band's 11th studio album is its first without Bruce Gilbert, making it an unexpected turning point despite appearing more than 30 years into Wire's career.

Object 47

Object 47 marks an unexpected turning point in the 30-year history of Wire: It's their first album that doesn't feature all the original members. When drummer Robert Gotobed (née Robert Grey) temporarily fired himself from the band in 1990, reasoning that drum machines had rendered him redundant, the remaining members shortened the bandname to Wir. For whatever reason, the recent departure of Bruce Gilbert-- who made only minimal contributions to the Read & Burn 03 EP-- hasn't led to the same symbolic gesture.
The album opens with a rush on "One of Us", with Graham Lewis' sharp and strongly melodic bassline, Grey's efficient beat, and a Colin Newman vocal that may be his best since the band reunited in 1999-- his refrain ("one of us will live to rue the day we met each other") is both ominous and oddly celebratory. In fact, the track is so strong that the rest of the record feels like a bit of a let-down in contrast. At least at first. While none of the other songs share the opener's bracing immediacy, they eventually reveal more subtle charms and innovations on repeated listens.
Part of this replayability stems from the fact that the album's nine songs are widely varied. "Perspex Icon" finds Newman layering guitar tracks and filtering his voice to fit the straightforward punk his bandmates give him-- one of few times the band attempts to compensate for Gilbert's absence with overdubs. On "Circumspect", they simply let Newman's circular guitar figure get swallowed by undulating bass while he sings in a subdued, almost tired tone. "Four Long Years" is effortlessly rhythmic, but it still has that very distinctive sonic coloration-- mechanistic but warm-- that's characterized Wire's reunion records.
The sound of Object 47 is generally clean. Even when the vocals are being run through processors and the guitars are distorted, it still feels managed, and a lack of high-range makes it inviting and easy to listen to even at its noisiest. This rings especially true for the buzzing "All Fours", featuring feedback courtesy of Helmet's Page Hamilton. The clear production doesn't serve "Patient Flees" as well, though-- it's the only track here that genuinely doesn't work. The list of spoken words that stands in for a chorus just doesn't have the intended impact, and the floundering verses can't make up for it. Still, on the whole, it's another strong outing from post-comeback Wire. Though Gilbert was an essential member and his contributions are missed here, there's still no mistaking Object 47 for the work of any other band.


Black Bananas boasts the same personnel as Jennifer Herrema's other post-Royal Trux band, but she fashions it as an alternate-universe RTX, one that isn't afraid to absorb modern influences like synth-pop, hip-hop, French-touch house.

Rad Times Xpress IV

The institution of classic rock-- and all the FM-radio stations, VH1 specials, and "Disco Sucks" rallies it has propagated-- is built upon a certain they-don't-make-'em-like-they-used-to purism. But the genre's most esteemed icons have ultimately survived because they've occasionally been willing to break down rock's rigidity to absorb decidedly non-rock influences, be it the Stones flirting with reggae and disco on Black and Blue, Paul McCartney trying his hand at new wave on McCartney II, or Neil Young's infamous synth-pop odyssey Trans. None of these may count as those artists' definitive works but, given that rock'n'roll itself began as an unholy union of blues, jazz, folk, and country, these sorts of sacreligious stylistic detours and genre experiments were arguably truer to the music's original spirit than anything that tried to milk fresh inspiration from the I, IV, and V chords.
Jennifer Herrema's first band, Royal Trux, understood this all too well, as she and partner Neil Hagerty broke down and reassembled their 1970s blues-rock foundation into all sorts of distorted shapes over the course of a tangled, tangential 10-album discography. But since that band dissolved in 2001, Herrema has been following a more linear path with her post-Trux outfit RTX, who, with each successive record, have been gradually refining and polishing themselves into the last hair-metal band standing-- a stance so antithetical to prevailing indie-rock mores, it's practically avant garde. If Royal Trux were about deconstructing rock mythology, RTX aggressively reasserted it, from the cover-art drawings of Herrema that look like they were cribbed from some daydreaming high-school student's notepad, to giving their studio albums titles such as JJ Got Live RaTX that suggest they're some long-lost concert bootleg, to the intra-band references (RTX being an acronym that first appeared in the 1990 Royal Trux track "RTX-USA") that casts Herrema's entire oeuvre as some sort of secret-society code waiting to be deciphered.
The narrative gets even more convoluted with the arrival of Black Bananas, which boasts the same personnel as RTX; copped its name from an RTX song lyric; and whose debut album title, Rad Times Xpress IV, makes a smidgen of sense only if seen as the fourth RTX effort. (It also includes a song titled, confusingly enough, "RTX Go-Go".) And RTX's penchant for straight-up sleazy rock'n'roll carried through to the new band's first public offering last fall, a faithful cover of the Stones' "Before They Make Me Run", complete with an uncannily Neil Hagerty-like guest vocal from Kurt Vile that actually makes the song sound more like Royal Trux than anything RTX ever attempted.
But that cover selection proves prophetic not for its form but for its source: 1978's Some Girls, arguably the Stones' most stylistically varied album, what with Mick Jagger channelling his New York-nightlife escapades into the Studio 54 strut of "Miss You" and the CBGB snarl of "Shattered". Following the same logic, Herrema fashions Black Bananas as an alternate-universe RTX who aren't afraid to absorb more modern influences like synth-pop, hip-hop, French-touch house, and (for 10 seconds of "RTX Go-Go" at least) dancehall, while guitarist Brian McKinley lays off the usual Eddie Van Halen histrionics in favor of lysergic Eddie Hazel funk. The album doesn't so much begin as burst its dam, with opener "It's Cool" arriving in such a thick surge of wah-wahed guitars and phased-out synths, it takes you a minute to realize the song actually adheres to standard blues structure.
In accommodating all of these disparate sound sources in a limited-range but densely textured mix, Rad Times Xpress IV finds a direct antecedent in Royal Trux's 1998 classic Accelerator (which essentially sounded like an arena-rock band playing inside of a vacuum cleaner) while feeling remarkably of a piece with contemporary strains of chillwave and electro-rock. (To wit, Black Bananas' first North American tour sees them opening for Sleigh Bells.) Where past RTX albums faithfully approximated the flash and thrash of 1980s metal with all the diligence of a Civil War reenactment, Rad Times Xpress IV illuminates how well that music lends itself to more experimental renderings (the tape-decayed boogie of "TV Trouble" and "Hot Stupid" sound like Aerosmith as produced by Ariel Pink; "Rad Times" crosswires Kraftwerkian funk and KISS crunch) while the songs seemingly engineered to hold onto RTX's denim'n'leather constituency yield surprises: "Acid Song" is actually a sultry slow jam, and "Killer Weed" rides its Ted Nugent riffs into a dubby denouement. However, even as its title track excitedly welcomes us to "The future! The future!," Rad Times Xpress IV doesn't shy away from referencing Herrema's notorious junkie past, as "Foxy Playground" recounts all the times and ways she "could've died." But instead of playing up the pathos of that sentiment, the song's slinky bounce effectively plays it for laughs, and for good reason: Twenty-four years into her musical career and still busting skulls, Jennifer Herrema is not about to let a little rumination on mortality get in the way of a rad time.


Emeralds member Steve Hauschildt has said his second album for Kranky in two years uses technology as a way of expressing androgyny. He moves into intellectual electronics without losing the playfulness that initially made his work appealing.

Sequitur

Blacklight posters. Telescopes. Stacks of VHS tapes. A grainy video of a comet traveling across the pitch black expanse of space. If Emeralds, the Cleveland-born synth and guitar three piece, are known for anything, it's their ability to take empty nostalgia and flip it into deep introspection. It's a skill that speaks to their musical prowess as much as it does their sincere love of things that many people would initially write off as ironic.
As solo artists, each member has taken their love of ephemera and abstract ideas in different directions. John Elliott went cosmic, making music that sounds like it was conceived on a space shuttle, while Mark McGuire's burrowed further into his guitar, creating gorgeous ripples of dusky sunlight-tinged music that sounds like the work of a band instead of one guy. Steve Hauschildt, on the other hand, is steadily molding soft drone, spa-ready new age, and breathy keys into something that isn't quite dance music, but isn't fully ambient either. On Sequitur, his second album for Kranky in two years, he manages to make the jump into intellectual electronics without losing the playfulness that made him appealing in the first place.
The most immediately noticeable aspect of the record is that Hauschildt is now singing. Sort of. His vocals are masked by a vocoder, rendered borderline indecipherable. This isn't an accident. In the press release for the record, Hauschildt explains that he wants to make an album that uses technology as a way of expressing androgyny. By mixing male and female tones, he's arrived at a vocal sound that isn't exactly either. It's a heavy concept to broach, especially when he could just as easily carry on without explaining it at all, but Sequitur is an album for thinking to above anything else.
Across eight tracks, he combines layers of glittering synth with smooth washes of mechanical hum. There are moments when this stuff fades too far into the background, like in the pretty but overly repetitive "Vegas Mode", which is technically accomplished but lacks heft. "Kept", the most explicitly ambient piece on the record, demands attention due to its gummy web of textured keys that pulse with vitality. If "Vegas Mode" is Hauschildt straddling multiple genres and not really pulling it off, then "Kept" shows that maybe he would be better served tackling one thing at a time. Which is not to say that Sequitur is a bad album. More than anything, it's a hint at what Hauschildt's capable of.
Today, you could walk into just about any remaining record store and pick up a wide array of deluxe reissues of long haired dudes from previous decades messing with synthesizers they wanted nothing more than to understand. It's great that they exist. Those records are often mind bogglingly ahead of their time, and are a clear influence on a new crop of electronic music obsessives, but they often feel like curiosities-- as if the end result was just experimenting with the equipment rather than using it to make fully formed pieces.
With the academic concept behind Sequitur, Hauschildt initially seems like he's part of that school, but when the album reaches closer "Steep Decline", everything's overwhelmingly human. On that track, cavernous drums boom across a tangle of triumphant keys, and it sounds like Hauschildt's attempting to drag emotion from a sterile soundscape. He'll certainly make better records, yes, but right now Sequitur feels like a step forward for a genre that could happily stay the same forever.


I Decided. attempts to bury Big Sean’s wide mean streak and present the 28-year-old in a mature light.

I Decided.

2015’s Dark Sky Paradise was a massive and hard-earned leap forward for Big Sean. When pressed, he’s a very good rapper, and the right selection of beats framed his words with a sense of new importance. The album was also unapologetically mean. Of course, its breakout hit was “I Don’t Fuck With You,” but the same bitterness was applied across the LP to foes and exes alike. Perhaps no rapper is as obsessed with his own dick as Big Sean, and given the opportunity to brag and scorn, he found a comfort zone. I Decided. attempts to bury that mean streak, and present the 28-year-old in a mature light. In short: It doesn’t work.
On I Decided., Sean continues to recount his come-up—a banal narrative for a platinum-selling artist who’s cracked the Top 5 with each album. The record’s new twist is that Sean is quickly growing weary of fame and being in the public view. Bemoaning success is certainly a quick ticket to earn more success (see: Graham, Aubrey; West, Kanye), but Sean conveys no details or feelings to make his struggle compelling. “I don’t want [paper] if it can’t change shit drastically, dramatically,” he claims on “Halfway Off the Balcony,” but there’s no sense of what change he wants, and therefore nothing to connect to. It doesn’t help that he still leans on forehead-slap lines like, “Everything gold like I just practiced alchemy,” from the same song.
Sean also badly wants to show us that he is an album artist, not a singles rapper. “Voices in My Head / Stick to the Plan,” is a two-part would-be epic in which nothing of consequence happens. Over a spare, diffuse beat, he hears voices telling he “could do better.” Then the always-powerful Metro Boomin tag appears, as does a captivating beat, and Sean runs down the various distractions in his life—women, money, fame, “negative energy,” etc.— but the undertone is that “the plan” is making hits. In attempting to demonstrate how layered and complicated he is, Sean reaffirms what we already knew about him—he’s better when rapping well-delivered nonsense over heavy beats.
And so the best moments remain the pop songs. “Bounce Back” has already gone gold, and it sticks to the Dark Sky Paradise script as much as anything else on the new record. Sean does an honest-to-God Cartman impression on the song, suggesting that he’s at his best when he doesn’t take himself too seriously. The other single, “Moves,” is equally effective—Sean’s agile flow is his best weapon to distract you from his litany of clunkers, jokes about Jason Statham and Mini-Me and Channing Tatum all blurring together into a rubbery and enjoyable bounce.
On the album’s best song, “Sacrifices,” Sean raps, “I came a long way from that ‘Marvin & Chardonnay.’” Quite literally, it is a true statement: The Finally Famous single came out over five years ago, and like the rest of the world, Sean has had thousands of days to deal with life’s quotidian pressures. But while he has become incrementally more skilled over the years, not much else has changed. Throughout I Decided., Sean conflates the passing of time with growth and progress. Nothing on I Decided., however, suggests that he has gained perspective worth sharing or to which he should devote a whole album. He continues to be a talented pop act attempting to be something he is not.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the debut album from Belle and Sebastian, a little-heard school project that defined the sound of one of indie rock’s most beloved acts.

Tigermilk

In March 2020, when the world went into lockdown, Belle and Sebastian asked fans to share their self-isolation experiences. These responses became the lyrics to an audio-visual piece featuring aerial footage of an empty Glasgow and partly narrated by the Scottish band’s chief songwriter, Stuart Murdoch. The result is understated, serene, and heart-ripping: At one point, a father says goodbye to his high-risk son, who was already hospitalized before the COVID-19 pandemic. “If this is God’s experiment,” recites a friend of the band Alessandra Lupo, who co-narrates, “aren’t the good guys supposed to come through this?”
Although a departure in form, the project was a welcome reminder of qualities and themes that have helped define Belle and Sebastian for almost 25 years. From mailing lists, club nights, and a shock victory in an online popularity contest to that viral moment when they forgot their drummer in his pajamas outside a North Dakota Walmart, participatory culture has always been a big part of the band’s story. Their songs are often quiet and serious, their characters full of life yet cast out by a cruel and rapacious human society, their presentation fragile yet unafraid of old-fashioned beauty. The tale of the band’s rise is so unusual that it’s difficult to separate the music from the myth, like a used book you treasure as much for the smell of the paper and the scrawls in the margins as the words on the page. And it starts with Belle and Sebastian’s immaculate oddball of a debut album, 1996’s Tigermilk.
One of the most important myths about the group involves Murdoch’s own period of unwanted isolation. The second of three children born to a merchant navy officer and a midwife, Murdoch grew up in a home in coastal Ayr that still had an outhouse; he did well at school, played soccer, and gravitated toward loud rock bands like AC/DC, Thin Lizzy, and Yes. By his third year studying physics at the University of Glasgow, he’d run a marathon, tried amateur boxing, and amassed an alternate musical knowledge of northern Britain’s robust indie guitar-pop legacy while working as a DJ, roadie, and record store employee. Then, in his early 20s, he was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome. “It came along and took seven years out of my life,” he told a biographer.
Murdoch quit school, stopped working, and moved back in with his parents, bedridden. Severe fatigue, muscle aches, and unrefreshing sleep would trouble him for decades. “It’s never abated,” he told an interviewer in 2018. But while trapped alone with his thoughts, he began dreaming up snippets of melody. “I started writing songs because I had to,” he has said. As Murdoch felt better, he tried and failed to resume university, then stayed in Glasgow, supported by government disability aid. He sang at occasional open mic nights, hoping to follow in the footsteps of his cult heroes, like Lawrence of the ingeniously askew ’80s band Felt. Murdoch also spent a great deal of time on public transportation, observing and imagining the lives of all the “normal” people.
Improbably enough, the band and album were born out of two educational programs. One was a Scottish welfare initiative called Beatbox, a course for out-of-work musicians where Murdoch met founding Belle and Sebastian bassist Stuart David—who’d only enrolled to hold onto his unemployment assistance. The other was a music business class at what is now Glasgow Kelvin College, where one of David’s flatmates, Richard Colburn—the drummer who would, years later, spend hours stranded in a parking lot between U.S. gigs—had enrolled. A four-song demo recorded at the Beatbox by Murdoch, David, and others built a steady local buzz and soon caught Colburn’s attention. Every year, the music course at Colburn’s college picked a single to record, release, and promote. In 1996, it was an album: Tigermilk.
Except that Belle and Sebastian didn’t exist yet. The band name on the demo tape was Rhode Island, and their lineup was in flux. Along with David and Colburn, Murdoch was soon able to enlist guitarist Stevie Jackson, a seasoned ’60s-style rhythm-and-blues player who periodically hosted a Glasgow open mic night. One of the songs from the Beatbox demo was “Belle and Sebastian”; in late 1995, when Murdoch showed David a short story he’d written about a “boy” named Sebastian teaching guitar to a younger “girl” who was still in school, the band had a new name. At a New Year’s party, when Murdoch met cellist, singer, and songwriter Isobel Campbell—a local university student, “Bel” to her friends—their boozy introduction must’ve felt like stars aligning. With the addition of another younger member, keyboardist Chris Geddes, Belle and Sebastian’s Tigermilk-era roster was complete. The full six-piece played only a couple of shaky live shows before recording.
Tigermilk is one-in-a-million in part because of these one-in-a-million circumstances. Tracked in three long days at a proper studio, CaVa Sound, under the expert guidance of in-house engineer Gregor Reid, the album is a vibrant snapshot of a band coming into existence while the tape was rolling. “It was like the first flushes of romance,” Campbell has said. Without even so much as an indie label boss to answer to—Electronic Honey, which originally released Tigermilk, was affiliated with the university course—the album was also an unusual opportunity for Murdoch to realize the musical vision that had been floating through his brain since his years of solitary illness.
Inspired by ’60s chamber-pop like the Left Banke, the Zombies, and Love, the sound was lush and loose: Murdoch insisted on recording his acoustic guitar and scratch vocal first, leaving his newbie group to catch up with his racing tempos. Lyrically, Murdoch’s songs were like great short stories, fast-moving and richly detailed, often about school-age characters (a school setting was universally relatable, he argued, and besides, school was the 27-year-old’s last major source of memories before getting sick) and yet there were usually darker currents beneath the superficial lightness. He delivered all of this nonchalantly, in a wispy yet commanding lilt, with rippling melodic runs and soaring choruses: The tunes were as catchy as his meanings were enigmatic.
Tigermilk’s first track, “The State I Am In,” can be heard as a salvo of artistic intent that carries across Belle and Sebastian’s entire career. The title suggests an earnest confession, the unaccompanied vocal that opens the song furthers that impression. But as the full band gallops in, the song becomes something else, almost like a Trainspotting-era Glaswegian’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” a statement of self that seeks to encapsulate the human condition. Singing about 1975 and 1995, his brother’s coming-out and his sister’s simultaneous wedding day, Murdoch collapses past and present, fictional and personal—“Riding around city buses as a hobby is sad,” opines the fatigue-hobbled bus-riding hobbyist—from the perspective of a witty raconteur who ricochets around all sides of morality. He’s self-obsessed yet fitfully altruistic, variously rescuing and mistreating his “child bride” and, in quasi-biblical parlance, “crippled friend.” The coup de grâce: All of these tangled tales become grist for a priest who turns his parishioner’s confidences into a trashy novel, also titled The State I Am In. When Murdoch gives himself to God, the Almighty hesitates. It all ends with an “oh yeah,” the way a prayer might with an “amen”; the only higher power worth surrendering to, it seems, is song.
The rest of the 10-track, 42-minute album colors in and around the ideas presented in the opening track, like delving into J.D. Salinger’s short stories after reading The Catcher in the Rye. “I Could Be Dreaming” is similarly abundant, as upbeat surf-rock gives way to broader paranoia about workaday life (“They’ve got a knife for every time you take the same train into work”). Before the song is over, the dream Murdoch sings about seems to become a fantasy about murdering a female friend’s abusive lover; he dismisses the violence with the pop fan’s “la la la,” and then Campbell twists the narrative blade with a cleverly selected reading from Rip Van Winkle.
The subjects of Murdoch’s songs, usually women, are as complex and compelling as his first-person narrators. “Expectations” follows a lower-income student whose life-size models of the Velvet Underground earn her a schoolyard rep as a weirdo (although in a 2006 NPR interview, Murdoch described her as “someone I would have thought was pretty hip at the time”). Harassed in the lunchroom, she suffers a teacher looking up her skirt, and her mother remembers having little choice but to endure groping at her department store job. The cycle of aggression continues when our heroine finds someone apparently even lower in the social pecking order, Veronica—“a fat girl with a lisp”—who’ll take the heat for her. Despite all of this, there’s a hook so dainty, so optimistic—“You’re on top of the world ag-aih-ehn”—that it hints at a way of transcending the world’s brutality.
Similarly, “She’s Losing It,” a meditation on a couple, Lisa and Chelsea, who are haunted by past abuse, has a jaunty chorus that sounds like a Folgers coffee jingle. Delicate finale “Mary Jo,” with tender backing vocals from Campbell, focuses on a lonesome character who always reminds me of Eleanor Rigby—though in how she comes fully alive in her dreams, she could be a stand-in for Murdoch. The book she reads: The State I Am In. It fails to satisfy.
By this time, Murdoch was working as a live-in janitor at the Protestant church he had been attending, but the softness of these songs shouldn’t be misread as puritanical. “Drop a pill and then say hello,” Murdoch proposes on “Electronic Renaissance,” a synth-pop reclamation as skin-tingling as the Magnetic Fields’ “Take Ecstasy With Me” a couple of years earlier. “You’re playing with something/You’re playing with yourself,” Murdoch teases over the chugging power-pop of “I Don’t Love Anyone.” He’s always a bit funny, but sometimes he’s funny haha.
Tigermilk also leaves room for a bit of self-mythologizing. Murdoch wrote “My Wandering Days Are Over” after meeting Campbell, and the lyrics contain direct references to Campbell’s job serving drinks to tired businessmen at a piano bar, as well as “the story of Sebastian and Belle the singer.” The moment when Murdoch sings, “I said, ‘My one-man band is over/I hit the drum for the final time and I walked away,’” it’s as if Belle and Sebastian becomes no longer his solo project but a true unit.
After two days of mixing, all that was left to decide was an album title and artwork. Murdoch settled on a photo he had taken of a then-girlfriend, Joanne Kenney, naked in a bathtub pretending to nurse a stuffed tiger. Claiming inspiration from venerable jazz label Blue Note but more often compared to their melancholic UK poet-laureate predecessors the Smiths, Murdoch presented the image in monochrome, a tradition that, with a few exceptions, has carried across Belle and Sebastian’s discography. With its mix of sensuality and childlike whimsy, the shot could hardly have been more strikingly appropriate, and the title, Tigermilk, naturally followed.
Electric Honey manufactured only 1,000 vinyl copies. At Tigermilk’s release party, attendees threw the records like Frisbees. At least one was spotted at a shop the next day. Murdoch continued his job at the church; Campbell’s bartending days weren’t over. The album received just a single review on its initial release, with Scottish arts magazine The List favorably opining, “Let’s hope Belle and Sebastian reach the size of audience they have the potential to seduce.”
But the students at the music business course remembered to send the record to BBC DJs John Peel and Mark Radcliffe, who began to champion the group. The mystique of Tigermilk spread when Belle and Sebastian released their masterpiece If You’re Feeling Sinister later in 1996 via London indie Jeepster, with U.S. distribution via now-defunct imprint The Enclave. They dropped three more EPs, including the demo with the original “The State I Am In,” and a third album, The Boy With the Arab Strap, which brought Campbell and Jackson to the fore on vocals for the first time, before Tigermilk finally received its first widespread release, in 1999. By then, copies of the original vinyl were selling for as much as £850; cassette dubs circulated, but few people could’ve heard the album.
From the beginning, in January 1996, Murdoch had written in response to an offer from Jeepster of his desire to “draw in my audience, instead of bombasting them.” Because the band was averse to interviews, traditional publicity photos, or touring, it’s appealing to think that fans had to find out about Belle and Sebastian for themselves, through word of mouth, hearing them on the radio, or in my case, downloading “The State I Am In” in my first week of college after hearing a classmate name-check them as her favorite band. No music exists in a vacuum, of course—purposefully mysterious 21st-century acts from Burial to Jungle can attest how a lack of information can sometimes be a media angle in its own right—but Belle and Sebastian left space for the already-formidable songs on Tigermilk to grow into listeners’ lives.
When it was made, the album was a pointedly melodic, anti-machismo rejoinder to Britpop’s increasingly lunkheaded swagger and the post-grunge bluster of American alt-rock radio. “There’s no sex in your violence,” Gavin Rossdale grunted on Bush’s “Everything Zen”; “There must be a reason for all the looks we gave/And all the things we never said before,” Murdoch chirps atop a hand-clappy T. Rex stomp on “You’re Just a Baby.” Tigermilk was also a worthy successor to the “oppose all rock’n’roll” ethos of early UK punks Subway Sect, the droll yearning of Glasgow indie pioneers Orange Juice, and the confrontational tenderness of Kurt Cobain’s beloved K Records. By the time of Tigermilk’s 1999 re-release, critics either sneered or swooned accordingly. “Do you want to know how much I hate them? Even their name raises my blood pressure,” a mid-tier Scottish pop singer told The Guardian, amid juvenile complaints about “wussiness.” In those lad-mag, anti-“P.C.” years, it was still acceptable for an otherwise-approving Rolling Stone review to use the disparaging slang term “swish” (Pitchfork’s gonzo original assessment was also positive).
These days, Tigermilk’s radicalism may be harder to perceive, but it’s no less essential. In recent decades, as Belle and Sebastian have became reluctant elder statesmen of a twee movement in music and film, the early caricatures of them have also spread—a 2015 review on this website cast them as “the most sensitive band in indie rock, patron saints for daydreaming boys and girls”—but to buy into that overlooks the depth in these songs. As keyboardist Chris Geddes felt forced to complain to the NME as far back as 1997, “We’re human beings, not sensitivity machines.” And while the notion of male un-macho-ness has been hijacked by a basket of deplorables I’d rather not talk about here, you need look no further than the White House to know what type of man is still truly in power in 2020. Tigermilk might not preach revolution; with its low-key insistence on the notion of art as a source of personal epiphany, it feels revolutionary nevertheless.
In the 2007 book on If You’re Feeling Sinister, former Pitchfork editor-in-chief Scott Plagenhoef suggested that Belle and Sebastian were the last band of their kind. The iPod age, as he saw it, had encouraged indie acts with more adult-contemporary sheen, and the intimacy of early online fandom had been overtaken by breathlessness and trolling. Never again could artists reveal themselves so slowly and deliberately without the public losing interest. Now, with music streaming like water, the idea of one or two people gathering to listen, attentively, to a full-length by an obscure group just because an acquaintance recommended it seems ever more distant. The social safety nets that allowed Belle and Sebastian to form have been cut, the economic model of record sales upended. But for all the trauma on Tigermilk, what I walk away with is its hopefulness.
Technology always changes, and the good old days were seldom really so good. At its best, Tigermilk is proof that pop can foster a community without catering to elitism or attempting to be one-size-fits-all—an off-kilter signpost that “unfashionable, vulnerable music,” as Uncut’s 1999 review put it, can mean “everything” to people who get it, nothing to those who don’t. Side B piano ballad “We Rule the School,” which contemplates the nature of graffiti like Holden Caulfield if he were a character in A Charlie Brown Christmas, contains a lyric seized upon by the band’s fans and adversaries alike: “Do something pretty while you can.” In a vast and indifferent universe, this sounds like as good a gospel as any.

Buy: Rough Trade
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