This week, the reunited Pixies released their first new album in 23 years. Titled Indie Cindy, the record collects material from three EPs released over the past few months, two of which we've already reviewed. In the interest of avoiding redundancy, we chose to do something a little different...

Catalog

Ed. note: This week, the reunited Pixies released their first new album in 23 years. Titled Indie Cindy, the record collects material from three EPs released over the past few months. Two of these EPs have been reviewed by Pitchfork, and both received exceptionally low marks. In the interest of avoiding redundancy with another standalone review of this material, we’ve instead chosen to explore the band’s back catalog. Though none of the group’s original albums have been reissued recently, they have never been reviewed by Pitchfork.
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The great anecdote about the Pixies is that they formed when a college dropout going by the name Black Francis put out an ad for a female bass player who liked both the punk band Hüsker Dü and the folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary.
The Venn diagram here would be tight. Hüsker Dü made noisy, bleeding-heart records for the underground label SST; Peter, Paul and Mary sang “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” Francis got only one response, from a woman named Kim Deal. She had never played the bass before but presumably saw in his ad some sly humor and the spark of liberated thinking that lies behind a bad idea.
Crucially, the Pixies weren’t from New York or Los Angeles, or even Chicago, but Boston: a famous place but fiercely provincial, with all the reticence of small-town New England and almost no cosmopolitan sheen. We can always depend on Boston for more sports and software engineers. Early on, Francis—a comic-book kid raised in an evangelical church—talked about the band’s music with all the pretense of someone fixing toilets or laying shingle. “You want to be different from other people, sure, so you throw in as many arbitrary things as possible,” he told the writer Simon Reynolds shortly after their 1988 debut, Surfer Rosa. A few minutes later, the band’s drummer, David Lovering, interrupted to describe a video he’d seen of “people shooting eggs out of their ass, right across the room into another guy's mouth.”
The band’s songs were about Old Testament Christianity, UFOs and white women who crave sex with big black men—fixations that in certain contexts can turn ordinary people into outcasts. Francis liked the surrealist movies of Luis Buñuel and David Lynch circa Eraserhead, which use violence not as a real-world dynamic but a metaphor for the roiling inner worlds we can cover up but never quite control. On a Surfer Rosa song called “Cactus,” he begs a woman to cut herself up on a cactus and send him the bloody dress in the mail. For the Pixies, this passes as a ballad. In general they remain solid evidence for the theory that the darkest and most violent thinking is done by the quiet kids next door.
In March 1987, the band went into a warehouse studio called Fort Apache and worked for three days straight, producing 18 songs. The project cost a thousand dollars, including printing, tapes, and beer. Eight of these songs were released as Come on Pilgrim on 4AD, an English label that had built a reputation selling, moody, vague bands like Dead Can Dance and the Cocteau Twins but by 1987 had also released some Bulgarian choral music, the number-one dance-pop song “Pump up the Volume,” and an album by their first American signing, the Throwing Muses. More recently, they’ve released albums by Deerhunter and Ariel Pink, and in general remain a safe home for uncommon art.
Pilgrim is 20 minutes long and more of a hint at what the band could do than anything else. Two of its best songs (“Caribou” and “Vamos”) ended up being re-recorded in more muscular forms; another (“Nimrod’s Son”) unfortunately wasn’t. The other songs from the Fort Apache sessions—which came to be called “The Purple Tape”—ended up scattered throughout the Pixies catalog, also in stronger versions. As much as the band changed and refined their sound over time, they seemed almost romantically attached to a big-bang concept of their own music, like a person who measures every relationship against that first love.
Surfer Rosa is highly combustible music, but slapstick, too. Many of its songs feel half-finished or regurgitated in half-digested form, with verses that run on longer than they ordinarily might, choruses that repeat odd numbers of times instead of even ones, and abrupt shifts in tone and volume. Francis was less of a rock singer than a grotesque impression of one, too angry and too tender, a pantomime of extremes. He sounds new but seems to come from an old place, like an obscure bog predator with alien-looking adaptations.
But for all their radical ideas, the Pixies depended on convention—without it, they would have nothing to pick apart. Like Devo or Pere Ubu before them, they were an art-rock band steeped in the 1950s and early ’60s, a period of music before rock was considered art. Their songs feed back to surf, boogie, doo-wop and early R&B more easily than anything post-Beatles. The notion that they were changing the shape of alternative rock seemed like a nice bonus but immaterial. In an anecdote from the sessions for the band’s 1988 album, Doolittle, Francis told producer Gil Norton that if two-minute songs were good enough for Buddy Holly, they were good enough for him.
Doolittle is their most famous album and for understandable reasons. It’s more even keel than Surfer Rosa and better mannered, too, forgoing the harsh live sound of Steve Albini for the lush, almost folksy one of Gil Norton, who had had previously worked with marshmallows like Echo and the Bunnymen. Its songs take aim at the big things important art is sometimes supposed to: good and evil, environmental ruin, Bible stories, death. “Monkey Gone to Heaven” features some allegory about the ozone layer, which in the late 1980s had the same conversational weight and place as “climate change”; “Gouge Away” flirts with Catholicism. “Hey” is practically their “Like a Prayer,” an oblique gospel anchored by the premise that we too may one day break free our earthly bonds and ascend—a trope art has worked with for much longer than rock music has been around.
It’s in Doolittle's margins—the faux-hillbilly cackling of “Mr. Grieves,” “There Goes My Gun” and “Dead”—that the album becomes what it really is. At heart, the Pixies were a kind of American goth band, fascinated by rural violence, the intersection of lust and danger, creepy innkeepers and the sexual magnetism of strangers who wander into roadside cafés from parts unknown. Their biggest crossover single, “Here Comes Your Man,” is less tied to European dada than the rustic imagery of a pulp paperback: The boxcar, the nowhere plains, the big stone and the broken crown.
About four years ago I moved from New York to Arizona and found myself listening to the the band's last two albums—1990's Bossanova and 1991’s Trompe Le Monde—a lot. It’s true what they say about the desert when they say it looks like the moon. Plants and animals seem proud to have survived the odds. Bossanova and Trompe Le Monde make sense to me here, when it’s 110 degrees by lunch and the concrete ripples in the heat. They’re narrower in scope than Doolittle, and have a tough, inorganic presence, like burnished chrome.
But I think what keeps more people from listening to them is that they seem like albums that don’t care whether you listen to them or not. Bossanova is sweeter than Trompe, but its sweetness exists at an impossible distance. “She’s my fave, undressing in the sun,” Francis whispers on the cryptic miniature, “Ana.” “Return to sea—bye. Forgetting everyone.” Later, on “Havalina,” he spots a javelina—an ornery, boar-like animal not uncommon here—walking across a plain. The music is a slow dance between celestial bodies, heavenly but melancholic. So he sees the boar, and in two short lines, the song is over. Late Pixies songs are triumphs of private epiphany: Small, diamond-bright moments that flash in someone’s eyes and then disappear forever.
By Trompe Le Monde the band had transitioned from seeming like quiet people who liked violent movies to violent people who didn’t make much time for movies at all. This is outlaw music, sharpened by conspiracy theory and too much time with too little human contact. “I had me a vision/There wasn't any television/From looking into the sun,” Francis sings on “Distance Equals Rate Times Time,” splitting “sun” into two syllables as though to make sure you heard him and are duly disturbed. He still howls and screams, but had also developed a new voice, a flat, posthuman kind of monotone. Trompe is more aggressive than anything in their catalog but also more confident. They can handle this now, and they do.
Francis’ allusions to Catholicism turned into overt talk about UFOs, which makes sense when you remember that religion has always just been a way to explain the lights in the sky. A kind of concept album emerges, especially toward the album’s end: a song about the geography of Mars followed by a song about a burnout named Jefrey—“with one f”—sitting on a carpet with a tabla, thinking about outer space, followed by Francis staring into the sun, a gesture made out of the desperation to find new answers.
For however classically far out the Pixies got toward the end, they had also never sounded so grounded. The album’s climax, “Motorway to Roswell,” is half-written from the perspective of an extraterrestrial, but turns on Francis’ question: “How could this so great, turn so shitty?/He ended up in Army crates.” Reality had never made such a decisive appearance in a Pixies song.
The band came together in an unusual way but broke up like anyone else: Creative differences, in-fighting, the collision of fragile egos. Francis went on to make several solo records as Frank Black, one of which is called Teenager of the Year and is the sound of a creative person relinquishing himself of the pressures of being in a famous band and appreciating the practice of not giving a damn. Listen to “Speedy Marie”; listen to “Thalassocracy.” Feel the joy and the lightness. Then return to Trompe Le Monde and you can hear how angry Francis had become.
Kim Deal moved on to focus on the Breeders, a project with her identical twin Kelley whose albums sound like abstract slumber-party music for teenagers with comfortable access to weed. Last Splash belongs in the Library of Congress, and their subsequent albums—Title TK and Mountain Battles—remain object lessons in how bands can remain weird without ever becoming alienating.
After 11 years of separation, the Pixies reunited and went on tour, becoming one of a slew of ’80s and ’90s alternative bands lobbying for heritage status. Francis never fully reconciled with Deal, who played several of the reunion shows but opted out of recent recording sessions and has embarked on her own time-capsule show, touring Last Splash with the Breeders. Deal’s symbolic contributions were as important as her musical ones: The cool, down-to-earth woman who defused Francis’ showy angst. She had actually been fired between Doolittle and Bossanova and subsequently rehired, and on later Pixies albums appears just often enough to reminds you that she’s in the band.
The Pixies have now been reunited for four years longer than they were around to begin with, but are just getting around to releasing a new album, which they have called Indie Cindy. Worse than any of the music is the feeling that a band so deft at challenging the system has become part of it in the most predictable ways, rubbing together the tropes of their old art and hoping they can still start a fire, replacing experimentation with routine, filling Kim Deal’s place with not one but two different bassists over the last five months, breaking up the album into three EPs to gin up interest, and generally reminding us that artists of their stature are businesses, not charities.
Things start decent and peter out quick. “What Goes Boom,” “Greens and Blues,” “Indie Cindy”: these are slick songs, a little overextended and puffed up, intimidated by the band’s legacy but charming in their own way. But part of what made the Pixies interesting is that they always seemed to possess some unquantifiable danger, which they no longer do. Three middle-aged guys seeing what happens when they get back on the horse and try again, they now sound most comfortable when they're being laid-back, “Greens and Blues” and the chorus of “Indie Cindy” especially. The album’s lows aren’t so much bad as routine. “Snakes,” “Blue Eyed Hexe,” et cetera: these are just distractions, breadsticks.
Indie Cindy’s title track is built using the template of Bossanova: Spacey and gorgeous, shattered and dissonant, spacey and gorgeous again. Toward the end of the song, Francis offers the line, “As we follow the bouncing the ball/They call this dance the washed-up crawl,” and then, a simple plea: “Indie Cindy, be in love with me.” Part of loving the Pixies has always been the suspicion that they were gracing us from an alien place somewhere beyond love, where sentiment was never easy or necessary. It may be the most vulnerable line Francis ever wrote.


Interview 2016, another strange between-album release from Death Grips, is an intense instrumental EP that showcases the production chops of Zach Hill and Andy Morin.

Interview 2016

Death Grips aren’t above ditching highly-anticipated festival appearances. They didn’t lose sleep after sabotaging their own record deal, and they sure didn’t mind selling thousands of tickets for concerts they never intended on playing in the first place. By any reasonable standard, this band doesn’t give a shit. So it’s been surprising that, in recent months, Death Grips have actually shown generosity to their fans, punctuating the interim between proper albums with low-stakes instrumental work.
In the opening weeks of 2015, the band preceded Jenny Death  with a full-length “soundtrack“ titled Fashion Week. At roughly 48 minutes (the second-longest runtime in Death Grips’ catalog after Exmilitary), it certainly had the bulk of a typical album, but the absence of frontman MC Ride, their furious heart and anguished soul, ultimately rendered Fashion Week unnecessary. And now, just prior to the release of their next album, Bottomless Pit, comes another unusual instrumental release: “Interview 2016,” a 32-minute clip that depicts the band playing for actor/TV host Matthew Hoffman in a darkened room before sitting down for a conversation. Had the band not legitimized the soundtrack by uploading it to SoundCloud (and later, other streaming sites), the release would probably be written off as a curio, rather than an entry in the Death Grips canon. Now that it’s isolated, we can see Interview 2016 for what really is: an instrumental EP that abandons Fashion Week’s uneventful expanses for a cramped space that shows Death Grips in confrontational mode.
As with the last soundtrack, MC Ride’s absence diminishes Interview’s intensity, but its brevity gives them space to compensate, narrowing the focus for a sharper sound. Other than the ambient interlude “Interview E,” the EP mainly sees Zach Hill and Andy Morin doubling down on Jenny Death’s unhinged hardcore with a proliferation of over-driven drums and basslines that seem as if they’re fired from from a Gatling gun. And even though there’s not a clear human voice in the mix (save from a quick “Hi Everybody!” in “Interview F”), the instruments do plenty of talking. Listen closely to the slippery percussive sample smattered across “Interview C,” or the barking undercurrent of “Interview F:” the effects themselves are undeniably alien, but they still manage to communicate.
The dynamic and varied arrangements keep the EP from slipping into a formlessness; “Interview B,” the standout of the set, periodically diverts to an eerie, faintly Eastern chorus that pops open suddenly like a trap-door into the void. And lest the din grow dull on punishing cuts like “Interview A” and “Interview D,“ Hill and Morin temper the racket ever-so-slightly through silvery, distant-sounding refrains that comfort even as they contort, like possessed library music. They even transmogrify Hill’s drum fills into an arpeggiating melody on “Interview C.”
While MC Ride might be perceived as the alpha and omega of Death Grips, Interview 2016 underscores that Hill and Morin are quite formidable on their own. This release is far more interesting than Fashion Week, a full-length twice its size, and it suggests that Death Grips' strength as an instrumental entity shouldn’t be underestimated.


The Japanese quartet evolve their perspective and sound, exploring the decadent grooves of city pop as they contend with growing up.

Chai

CHAI’s songs glimpsed a band seemingly in a perpetual state of youth. Moles and blemishes became irresistible chocolate chips through their eyes; donuts were equally, if not more, important than a passionate crush. But on their new self-titled album, the exuberant Japanese band seems to be growing up, confronting changes in their personal tastes as well as their own bodies. “Every minute we age/More wrinkles than yesterday,” vocalist MANA sings over the effervescent synth-pop of “From 1992.” Despite the difference in her reflection, she embraces her look with confidence: “I don’t care/I want my skin to peek through my jeans full of holes.”
This more mature perspective accompanies a gradual shift in the quartet’s sound. They made their name with speedy, rambunctious pop music infused with the immediacy of punk, their live-wire antics charged with a sense of youthful spontaneity. But on their last album, WINK, they began to venture outside of rock, channeling the casual, feel-good energy of Mac Miller and ‘90s R&B for unhurried pop jams that felt like daydreams. The band further settle into R&B and funk on their self-titled album, luxuriating in the decadent ‘80s grooves of Japanese city pop as well as the hydraulic bounce of bass music.
The dance floor serves as the ground on which CHAI explore their own politics of Neo-Kawaii, reclaiming beauty standards and self-love in their own image. “PARA PARA” is a sultry electro-disco anthem for a night out; the band turn their bedroom mirror pep talks into self-empowering hooks. “I should practice my kissing,” MANA sings in the chorus, as if to manifest what’s in store for her later. She leans into vanity on the bouncy, elastic “LIKE I NEED,” snapping selfies to fish for attention on Instagram. At its best, the peppy dance production can sound as invigorating as their old punk music.
CHAI’s more explicitly political efforts unfold rather predictably, their messaging losing power as they paint in broad strokes. The riotous new wave statement “NEO KAWAII, K?” is built to cause a scene, but its instructional lyrics can feel flat. The stomping funk number “We the Female!” can seem similarly one-dimensional; its all-for-one hooks—“I’m human, how about you?” and “Mighty, yet feminine”—echo as shallow celebrations of womanhood. CHAI’s music resonates more when they get more personal, like on the sparkling album closer “Karaoke,” which conveys their tight-knit connection. As they muster the courage to sing their favorite songs, they reveal the messiest versions of themselves, the band at their most honest and compelling.


For listeners who knew Kieran Hebden from his days in instrumental post-rock outfit Fridge and who might have considered his early recordings under the name of Four Tet as more of a side attraction, his 2003 album Rounds announced the arrival of one of electronic music’s vanguard producers. This reissue adds an excellent live set from the period.

Rounds

The year 2003 was a heady one for listening. On computers in the post-Napster landscape, guitar-rock intermingled with avant-garde classical music as well as “clicks’n’cuts,” which in turn could mix with twee indie rock and the thumps of backpack rap. After Kid A, analog components could fuck with guitars and laptops and soon a slew of new artists were pushing beyond these genre distinctions: DFA’s discopunk was already afoot, Jim O’Rourke had morphed from resplendent indie-pop fingerpicker to laptop noisenik, a producer from Florida named Diplo was mashing together heavy psychedelic rock breaks into something for rap heads, while underground hip-hop was getting strange and musty thanks to Madlib’s myriad personas.
The Class of 2003 also offered up three upcoming producers who embraced every sound on their hard drives and within one month that year, they all released their breakthrough efforts. There was Prefuse 73’s One Word Extinguisher, the soon-to-be-renamed-Caribou’s Up in Flames, and Four Tet's Rounds. The first melded IDM’s glitches to backpacker breaks while the second mashed it to psychedelic sunshine pop; Rounds, the third album for Kieran Hebden's project, grabbed at all of the above while also including jazz and folk. For the listeners out there who knew Hebden from his days in instrumental post-rock outfit Fridge and who might have considered his early recordings under the name of Four Tet as more of a side attraction than main gig, Rounds announced the arrival of one of electronic music’s vanguard producers.
The album opened with a recording of a dog’s heartbeat before Hebden lets it bloom into free meter drum rolls that evoked the amoebic pulses that defined late 60s experimental jazz before tightening it all up with a beat that headnodded at hip-hop without quite being beholden to it. That three distinct rhythms (cardiac, jazz, hip-hop) could effortlessly convene on “Hands” augured Hebden’s formidable beat skills, which even in the present tense pull from house, 2-step, Afrobeat, and dubstep while remaining singular.
It makes sense that Hebden so easily drew from multiple genres. As he revealed in a recent interview, Rounds was comprised entirely of samples. But that he draws from the most arcane source material available speaks to Hebden’s touch; on Rounds, his obscure sources serve the overall poignancy of the music. So while “She Moves She” retains the crisp snare and hi-hat work that underpinned millennial R&B productions, it’s the twinkling glockenspiel line that gives the track its emotional heft. Same for the harp line that intermingles with the iron lung beat of “My Angel Rocks Back and Forth.” Sampledelic or not, Four Tet’s music feels personal rather than patchwork.
The media catchphrase for mixing the pastoral airs of folk music with electronic music’s low-end became “folktronica,” a term Hebden detested and kicked against with each subsequent release. He embraced the fiery, brassy tones of spiritual jazz for his follow-up Everything Ecstatic and soon after began collaborating in earnest with free jazz drummer Steve Reid (while also producing for folk-jazz-noise-nonsense freewheelers Sunburned Hand of the Man). And when that generation-gap crossing collaboration ended with Reid’s passing in 2010, Hebden dove headfirst into modern dance music, taking in two-step, jungle, dubstep, techno and house, reconfiguring these heavier rhythms into something suiting his own manner. And as Pink recently showed, Four Tet’s knack for instantly-identifiable melody remains undiluted, no matter how strong and dancefloor-filling his new tracks are.
While touring for Rounds, Hebden began to slough off the “folk” tag of his live shows, pushing at the parameters of what a laptop could do onstage. The bonus disc on this 10th anniversary edition of Rounds reveals him at the height of his powers. Recorded live in Copenhagen, it finds Hebden taking the melodies and beanie-nodding rhythms of Rounds further and further out into the cosmos. “She Moves She” dilates from four to 10 minutes, with Hebden finding new pockets of space amid the string twangs and kick to add skittering samples and blurs of noise. A metallophone sample similarly gets rubberbanded-- at times resounding like a Balinese gamelan orchestra, other times flickering in even patterns like Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians-- before turning into “Spirit Fingers”.
The most astounding transformation occurs on “As Serious As Your Life”. The track’s taut drum break suddenly has Tibetan chimes, ghost notes, scraped strings, and electroacoustic gurgles mingle with its snare and hi-hat before the recognizable part of the song drops. But soon Hebden mutates it into a 15-minute monster that gobbles up every single genre tag in the process, until it’s a dervish of noise. As the original album proved and this reissue reinforces, Four Tet showed a new generation of listeners that much like 60s jazz before him-- which could embody soul, gospel, blues and primal howls while still sounding like “The New Thing”-- 21st century laptop music could be as serious as your life, too.


Boston's Horse Jumper of Love are a self-proclaimed "slow rock" trio whose combination of wan croons, melancholic strumming, and ramshackle production place their music in Microphones territory.

Horse Jumper of Love: Horse Jumper of Love

Horse Jumper of Love

Boston's Horse Jumper of Love are a self-proclaimed “slow rock” trio that, despite declaring themselves a band, more strongly resemble a solo project. A few years into their career, the group’s already busted into the top tier of the Boston house show scene—a considerable accomplishment for any young rock band, considering the scene’s predilections towards snoozy folk and hostile hardcore. But while Horse Jumper of Love's live performances recall the low, slow burn of bands like Silver Jews and Arab Strap, their Bandcamp output hinges on one man: lyricist and frontman Dimitri Giannopoulos, whose combination of wan croons, melancholic strumming, and ramshackle production place the group’s erstwhile recordings in Microphones territory.
Like their local, recently-disbanded contemporaries Krill, Horse Jumper of Love seek to balance the intimate with the acerbic. Now, with the arrival of their full-length debut, the time has come for those two spheres to merge. Drummer Jamie Vadala-Doran and bassist John Margaris plod at a tortoise-like pace, dragging their leader’s acoustic arrangements out of the bedroom and into the open. These songs’ momentum may be minimal—Carissa’s Weird look like the Casualties by comparison—but their warmth proves deceptively hypnotic, making the deviations more attention-grabbing. On “Ugly Brunette,”the trio draw the listener into a lull by way of syrupy, straggling chords only to repeatedly trip up the beat, the whammy-wailing hook swaying like a drunkard. The leisurely arpeggios on “Spaceman,” meanwhile, spiral gently into the void until they’re swallowed up by a fuzzed-out roar. There's suspense in the slump.
Where Giannopoulos the musician seeks to pit sheltered songs against haggard arrangements, Giannopoulos the lyricist is up against the universe at large. He’s openly admitted in an interview with the Allston Pudding that as a teenager, he thought “nothing was real,” angst worsened by the cultural and linguistic divides inherent in his Greek-American upbringing. Rather than tell meandering stories à la Slint, Giannopoulos repeatedly shifts his focus to hyper-specific (if awkwardly-worded) motifs: “America towels,” “July 5th,” and “i love you very much forever,” the latter two of which title transitional lo-fi interludes. He’s a natural at creating sensual, oddball imagery ("Peel an apple with your nails/and there is dirt and there is juice,” “I talk with your teeth,”) but his descriptions feel distant and needlessly vague.
For a full length record, Horse Jumper of Love is actually pretty scant. Three of the eight songs comprising its less-than-thirty-minute runtime are inconsequential ambient pieces that serve little purpose aside from creating the illusion of momentum and progress down in the doldrums.(Their inclusion feels inevitable, given Giannopoulos’ prior dabblings with electronics in the band’s early material and with his solo project the Meat Tree.) The penultimate track, “Sun Poisoning,” proves downright unlistenable; Vadala-Doran, a serviceable percussionist on the rest of the album, suddenly fumbles around like a novice, struggling to keep in step with his bandmates’ funereal pace. The result is a meek introduction to a modest band that feels simultaneously overdue and undercooked.


If My Morning Jacket's albums have mostly come together like a revival meeting-- a group playing live, working together to create something larger than its members-- frontman Jim James' first solo album, Regions of Light and Sound of God, emerges from something closer to meditation.

Jim James: Regions of Light and Sound of God

Regions of Light and Sound of God

For a guy defined by his band's take on "roots" music, Jim James' head has always been in the clouds. For the first few My Morning Jacket albums, he often recorded his vocals in an abandoned Kentucky grain silo, one of the few places that could give him the otherworldly reverb he desired. On any number of great My Morning Jacket songs-- "Gideon", "The Way That He Sings", "Circuital", "Golden"-- there's that moment when James cuts loose the sandbags and lets his voice pull the songs heavenward. It's a move drawn from gospel, but although his awareness of mortality is a matter of public record, James has never really affiliated himself with a particular religious ideology. He's a seeker with a strong moral compass, cobbling together beliefs from wherever, and relying on his music to help him transcend the earthly realm.
If My Morning Jacket's albums have mostly come together like a revival meeting-- a group playing live, working together to create something larger than its members-- James' first solo album, Regions of Light and Sound of God, emerges from something closer to meditation. James holed himself away in his Louisville home studio, writing and piecing together songs, playing most of the parts himself. It's process-based music, and he admits it in the album's first seconds. On "State of the Art (A.E.I.O.U.)", James breaks his creative process down to its primordial elements-- vowels, nursery rhymes-- like he's leading a workshop on discovering one's inner poet. Like everything he does, it's deeply self-conscious, wholly earnest, and just a slight bit goofy. And like so many artists chin-deep in Pro Tools, James distances himself from the claim that he's using production devices (computer software or metal silo walls) as creative crutches. As "A.E.I.O.U." slithers to life with a sinuous piano figure, James relates his manifesto: "I use my state of the art technology/ Now don't you forget it: it ain't usin' me."
Mastery over technology is a fitting metaphor for Regions' core theme: exceeding limitations in the interest of personal reinvention. Where in title and subject matter, Circuital marked a return to form for My Morning Jacket, Regions sees James pushing outward in all directions, stylistically and emotionally. At one extreme, there's the shimmering, nearly New Age "Of the Mother Again", suggesting the inevitability of change and the joy of falling in sync with nature's cycles. At the other end, there's "Dear One", with a retrofuturistic rhythm bed that sounds like Stereolab, and a title suggesting both a romantic ode and space exploration vehicle, on which James sees a relationship as a galactic journey: "You always pushed the boundaries of my soul/ With life and love we've finally gained control."
Though his hippy undertones might suggest otherwise, Regions is about asserting control. Even on "Mother", the dewiest track, James follows one lyric about nothing staying the same for long with another-- "close your eyes and its gone"-- that draws the song to a dramatic pause, before bringing it back with a funky rhythm section in tow. It's a theatrical moment on an album full of them-- Regions opens by channeling Traffic's 1971 glam-fusion epic "The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys", and throughout, James is as comfortable as ever in his Mr. Fantasy guise. Even in My Morning Jacket's earliest moments, he's styled himself a ringleader capable of sonic wizardry, a strummy Southerner cut from the showy mold of Elton John or Wayne Coyne.
On "A New Life", he turns a simple folk song into a showtune, in a way that nods toward Bowie's Hunky Dory. As the song plays out, James adds bits of musical scenery, as if stagehands keep rolling new canvas backdrops behind him. By the end, "Life" blossoms into musical theater, balancing sweetness and schmaltz in a way that only James can. He can't make an album without cheese, this much is obvious-- the less said about the well-intentioned Martin Luther King ode "God's Love", the better-- but as "A New Life" shows, when he's able to rein it in, the results are engrossing. (And when he can't help but crack up the second time he sings "I think I'm really being sincere," you know he's in on his own joke.)
Regions' best moments come when James' sense of wonder and fear are most palpable. On "Know 'Til Now", he channels a face-to-face-with-the-sublime feeling that leaves him wordless, though far from exultant. Sounding like a VHS recording of an old 16mm reel of a clipped sample of a long-unheard soul revue, "Know" took more than a few James fans aback as the album's first single. Yet as "Wordless Chorus" showed, he's uniquely capable of letting the spirit move him past the limits of language, and the lyrics to "Know" offer a glimpse into what feels like an inner monologue-- "How could I have known/ How sweet it could be!"-- before he steps aside and lets the music take over. Instead of the beatific skyward glance we might expect, however, the song's sultry, Lynchian coda aims backward to My Morning Jacket's own genesis, painting from the same color palette as the doo-wop influenced "They Ran" from the band's 1999 debut. On "Know"'s companion piece, "All is Forgiven", however, James finally lets his voice, spirit, fears, and hopes loose. As he wails, he's complemented not by a children's chorus or a pipe organ, but by a sweltering saxophone and mid-tempo rhythm section. It's a surreal effect: a sidelong glance at the expectations for such a song.
Isolation can often lead to indulgence, but not here. In less confident hands (including those of a younger Jim James), creative solitude could easily result in an unwieldly conceptual opus. Blessedly, Regions is the opposite: a svelte, sweet collection clocking in at under 40 minutes-- the shortest album of his career. While addressing the same themes he's been tweaking for more than a decade now, James adds a new trick to his ever-expanding repertoire: transforming the boundless possibilities of solo creativity into a cohesive one-man show.


The experimental artist's new LP tilts its attention towards new age music, its three tracks flowing into each other subtly enough to qualify as passages rather than discrete songs, building and releasing with a patient determination.

Ishi

It’s great to have a shortcut to inner calm, and M. Geddes Gengras' latest release, Ishi, possesses that functionality. The experimental artist's new LP comes off of the two avant-reggae albums he recorded with Sun Araw and Jamaican legends the Congos, as well as last year’s Collected Works Vol. 1 The Moog Years, a collection of compositions for modular synthesizer that existed somewhere in between John Carpenter’s creepiest film scores and the more electronics-based parts of last year’s compilation I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age Music In America 1950-1990.
Ishi finds Gengras continuing to take cues from the latter comparison point: its three tracks flow into each other subtly enough to qualify as passages rather than discrete songs, building and releasing with a patient determination. The music moves unhurriedly from moment to moment in a way that traces the clear outline a strong compositional foundation, producing an atmosphere that's both serene and substantial.
It’s tempting to call Ishi ambient music, but it possesses too much presence to fade into the background. It possesses an insistence that just stops short of dominating your attention. Although Gengras’ current mode relies heavily on slow-attack synth pads, he frequently works in dissonant leads and unexpectedly harsh tones that can disrupt the peaceful mood you might find yourself lulled into. It’s a soothing record, but one that’ll still keep you on your toes.
Combined with the rich synthesizer sounds that Gengras comes up with, that serene quality means Ishi is a good record to keep handy (along with a pair of good headphones). It's a sonically dense record, with deep, sustained low end and deft arrangements that are complicated but not cluttered. The bass lines move at whale-song pace throughout, above which bits of melody—flickering clusters of sequenced notes, sounds that resemble synthesized wind—fade in and out hypnogogically.
Ishi is remarkably well designed to block out the world around you. The serene energy it gives off it makes for an effective psychic refuge—put it on in a train station during rush hour and it immediately begins to block out the atmospheric anxiety hovering over the crowd, like an umbrella against the rain. The headspace it produces is calming but frequently, dreamily surreal, and it often seems like a better place to live than the world outside it.


On two collaborations—one for tape loops and acoustic instruments, the other for woodwinds and electronics—the New York composer and improviser brings an inquisitive, playful approach to experimental music.

Ben Vida / Lea Bertucci / Robbie Lee: Murmurations // Winds Bells Falls

Murmurations // Winds Bells Falls

Lea Bertucci’s music seems to obey laws of physics that only apply at the quantum level. It can give the impression that the listener is hearing the music from multiple directions at once, or that each iteration of a given tone exists in alternate timelines. Sounds unfold in one direction and suddenly shift into reverse. The New York composer and improviser has mastered a technique of manipulating tape loops that creates disorienting sensations of absolute groundlessness, and she bases much of her other work in beds of harmonically rich drones. One moment can extend into what seems like infinity, or be looped again and again in overlapping, arrhythmic coils.
Bertucci recently released two collaborative albums that stand in stark contrast with each other, but both revel in this uniquely playful, if sometimes unsettling, style of surrealism. Winds Bells Falls, which she made with multi-instrumentalist and frequent Mary Halvorson collaborator Robbie Lee, focuses exclusively on her live tape-looping practice. Bertucci records and contorts Lee’s improvisations on celeste, chimes, baroque flute, and contrabass recorder in real time, while Lee responds to the sound of his own playing swirling and dissolving in front of his ears. Bertucci’s method for looping and manipulating tape is physical and expressive, her fingers guiding the wheels of a reel-to-reel machine slower and faster, sometimes jerking them to produce slippery spasms that ruminate and decay. She first explored these techniques in an improvised setting with vocalist Amirtha Kidambi, but while that duo’s work is brooding and turbulent, Winds Bells Falls is often bright and gleaming, like light glinting in a funhouse mirror.
Lee’s broad choice of instruments means the album never sits still for long, but each individual piece is based around very specific tones and timbres: the round, full bodied resonance of the celeste (a keyboard instrument that strikes metal bars or bells rather than strings), the breathy toots of the gershon (a 15th century European instrument made out of animal horns), the metallic ring of feet-tall orchestral chimes. Much of the music is simple and spacious, despite the layers of tape-manipulated echoes that murmur and sputter with varying levels of opacity. On “Bags, Boxes, Bubbles,” layers of electronic hiss seep up under Lee’s dissonant celeste chords, but the overall mood is languid, almost serene. Looped clacks of fingers on recorder keys pile on top of pained, moaning tones on “Azimuth” before morphing into elephant-like wails and petering out. When Winds Bells Falls starts to approach chaos, it quickly peaks before settling back into an eerie, pacified quiet.
A similar ghostly intensity permeates Murmurations, Betucci’s first collaboration with veteran electronic musician Ben Vida. In a reversal of roles, samples of Bertucci playing wind instruments become source material for Vida’s modular synthesizer as they are stretched and compressed until rendered barely recognizable. Murmurations is much more solemn and poised than Winds Bells Falls, the continuous interplay and spontaneity replaced by a singular vision of grandeur and foreboding. Deep swells of bass drone, synthesized by Vida, often overwhelm the mix, pushing Bertucci’s flute and saxophone to the margins as they seem to echo in the distance. The duo constantly plays with spatial perception in this way, with certain instrumental or vocal textures close enough to the listener’s ear to resemble ASMR—a technique Bertucci refers to as over-amplification—while others reverberate in some far-away digital environment.
In the final seconds of “The Vast Interiority,” a short piece that consists of warped, half-uttered phrases by both Bertucci and Vida, the pair start to crack up. It highlights a paradox at the heart of Murmurations: The music may be easily read as stoic, but at its heart is a dynamic and persistent playfulness. It is the sound of two musicians on intersecting and exploratory paths, each pushing the other into previously unconsidered territories and endlessly curious about where to go next. The tension between the uneasy sounds and the playful attitude with which they were conceived offers an opportunity to question why these tones and frequencies are often considered imposing. In that inquiry lies the magic of Bertucci’s music—it allows for the emancipation of “difficult” music into the realm of fun.


After three albums packed with peach-sweet melodies, a move to the West Coast inspires one of indie rock’s most underrated songwriters to supercharge his sound and upgrade his showmanship.

Baby Grand

It wasn’t obvious, before the release of Baby Grand, that the Love Language needed to find a new direction. Over the last nine years, Stuart McLamb and a rotating set of musicians brought his lovely, vulnerable songwriting to life with equal parts subtlety and sincerity. They could get loud (see: their charmingly noisy 2009 self-titled debut and “Calm Down” from 2013’s Ruby Red), but a certain lightning-bug placidity was their main mood, with lush horns and peach-sweet melodies that went down easy. Many indie bands past and present have spent entire careers refining elegant sounds like these, and if McLamb chose to do the same, it’d be hard to blame him—especially considering how consistently swell the results have been.
But McLamb packed up his Raleigh home while working on Baby Grand, the Love Language’s fourth full-length, ditching familiar Southern comforts for Los Angeles. (A press bio claims that work on the album began in “a cavernous Virginia hammock factory,” which adds a quirky wrinkle to this mythology.) Relocating to the West Coast to find oneself is a well-worn cliché by now, but the record’s supercharged sound suggests that the move had a profound effect on McLamb’s songwriting: From the glittery avalanche that opens the album, on “Frames,” it’s clear that he’s embraced a new level of showmanship.
The increase in energy isn’t always for the best: The charged-up burn of “New Amsterdam” recalls his former Merge labelmates Arcade Fire’s own brand of throbbing arena music, but its chugging chorus makes for the album’s weakest moment. For the most part, though, McLamb and the gang wear these changes well, zapping bolts of electricity into hidden corners of tunes in a way that livens up the band’s typically solid songwriting. “Castle in the Sky” opens with a gentle acoustic strum before bursting wide to reveal miles-long shoegaze textures and an impassioned drumbeat of the sort favored by classic-rock synthesists like the War on Drugs. “Juiceboxx” is all neon synths and pleasing falsetto vocal takes, melting into the kind of gooey instrumental breakdown fellow L.A. denizen Ariel Pink occasionally allows himself.
Even as these risky choices broaden his sonic palette, McLamb’s music retains the swaying, moonlit quality that has made him one of the most underrated indie songwriters of the past decade. At his best, gorgeousness spills from his every lyric; witness the lush balladry of “Let Your Hair Down” and the gently swaying “Independence Day,” which finds McLamb unspooling imagery about the titular holiday and sand-buried grand pianos before announcing, atop a pounding chorus, “I’d go with you to L.A. if you could just decide/Where you’re going, if you’re going that way.”
On the album’s highlight, closing track “Glassy,” McLamb is already there, and the move has given him a new sense of peace. Over swaths of horns and folksy guitar, he sings sweetly of day-tripping, before remarking, “And the City of Angels won’t save us/But maybe we’ll be famous before we die/If we’re still alive.” It’s a beautiful and nakedly sincere song, streaked with the woozy, lovestruck feeling of falling for a new city and embarking on a new phase in life. Baby Grand would be enough to make you jealous of McLamb’s contentment, if his generosity in bringing listeners along on this transformative trip didn’t elicit such gratitude. If it doesn’t send you down an Echo Park Zillow hole, the album at least makes a convincing argument that leaving your old life behind can lead you to a whole new form of bliss.


Weezer's ninth studio album features contributions from Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino, along with Blue Album producer Ric Ocasek's return to the soundboard helm. The album is one of Weezer's most enjoyable in recent memory.

Weezer: Everything Will Be Alright in the End

Everything Will Be Alright in the End

Rivers Cuomo has taken your shit for over two decades and he’s had it up to here. Midway through Weezer’s ninth studio LP, he airs his grievances on a song called, not coincidentally, “I’ve Had It Up to Here”—the most valid of which is that people think he’s somehow insincere. You could describe Weezer’s 21st century output in many derogatory ways and most of it would be warranted, but “dishonest” isn’t one of them. Pick anything he’s done over the past 15 years and ask yourself, “What label exec concerned with the bottom line would possibly cosign this?” Rivers Cuomo is making the exact kind of music he wants to make—it just so happens that it sounds like music for the masses and has no currency whatsoever. Yet, in his finest mock-operatic metal voice, Cuomo brings “I’ve Had It Up to Here” to a head with, “If you think I need approval from the faceless throng/ Well, that's where you’re wrong.” The important word here is “faceless.” Cuomo does seek approval, but on Everything Will Be Alright in the End, he realizes that he needs it from a familiar source that he knows quite well: people who may have once been Weezer fans.
That said, you’ll have to give the overt apology “Back to the Shack” a second chance, and I realize that’s a tall order—if recent Weezer has ever driven you to punch a total stranger, this one leads with the chin. There's Cuomo’s tendency to treat The Blue Album’s goodwill as a renewable resource, the lyrics peppered with meta references about Weezer’s past—namely, his lightning bolt guitar strap and that one time he let drummer Patrick Wilson sing lead. You might roll your eyes when he rhymes “rockin’ out like it’s ‘94” with “more hardcore,” and they will bug out when revisiting 1994 somehow means doing fourth-wall rhyme-bustin’ that was perfected on “El Scorcho” and responsible for “Beverly Hills”. And then there are the wincing, “What year is this?” jokes that will certainly be criticized for “lolz rockism”: taking himself to task because “I forgot that disco sucks,” thinking that the radio and “those stupid singing shows” are even in competition anymore, or that they had any effect on Weezer.
But something about this song sticks, and it’s not just the hook, though that’s a big part of it—even those who despise Weezer can admit Cuomo has an inexhaustible, infuriating ability to write melodies that lodge themselves in your brain after one listen, whether you want it there or not. During the second verse, Cuomo drops the yuks and sings, “I finally settled down with my girl and I made up with my dad.” He could not be more direct about what “Back to the Shack” truly means beyond its reprise of “Pork and Beans”'s message about being true to one’s self: those represent the twin engines that powered The Blue Album and Pinkerton’s emotional train wrecks, and there's the possibility that “Back to the Shack” might be a sly, sarcastic rebuke against armchair producers and YouTube commenters, a la Danny Brown’s Old: you don’t want the old Rivers Cuomo, so do you want him to rock out like it’s ‘94 or do you just want him to sing about it and make a record of his (broken) heart?
Because you’re only getting one in 2014, and Everything does occasionally rock out with the same joyous abandon of The Blue Album, albeit without its wide-eyed naivety. If you really want to go out on a limb, this is as close as Cuomo is getting to his own version of Benji—a rock lifer moving forward by clearing out his past, the songs almost entirely dedicated to his relationships with his career, women, and his parents. “Cleopatra” and “Foolish Father” have subjects that are pulled right from Cuomo’s mid-'90s diaries—namely, powerful women who frighten and leave Rivers Cuomo, and absentee fathers. Twenty years later, the lesson here is the futility of hating someone who likely did their best, to forgive them and to forgive yourself.
That part resonates, as does the lived-in wisdom applicable to the songs that are about being in Weezer, even when they sorta aren’t. The generality of “Eulogy for a Rock Band” actually works in its favor when you consider it could very well be about rock music itself (for cryin’ out loud, Cuomo’s favorite rock group just declared rock dead). Meanwhile, the platitudes of “Ain’t Got Nobody” give way to a startling, lucid account of Cuomo’s abandonment issues that have spanned his entire life, from childhood to confused, needy rock stardom: “My daddy loved me/ No one could touch me/ Until he went up and left me lonely/ That’s human nature/ We fail each other/ And keep on searching for another.”
Of course, Cuomo ensures that you don’t have to read that far into Everything Will Be Alright in the End, keeping the melodies up front and the gimmicks mostly in his notebook. The effect of Blue Album producer Ric Ocasek will likely be overstated: the lyrics on any previous Weezer album were not the producer’s fault, and from all accounts, the guitar tones and keyboards on that record were all Cuomo’s idea anyways. Either way, these are simple, effective songs that will settle for constant rotation in your head if MTV’s not an option: “Lonely Girl” isolates the second verse of “Only in Dreams” and reworks Cuomo’s Japanese curio “Homely Girl” into a legitimate buzzy throwback. Meanwhile, Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino—no stranger to criticisms about elementary-school lyricism and stunted relationship dynamics—lends guest vocals to “Go Away”, which is a decent song but an even more important pledge of allegiance.
Heck, even the confounding decisions and filler that inextricably form latter-day Weezer albums are kinda charming. The whistle-core of “Da Vinci” will probably be the only way you’ll remember that Foster the People made a record this year. Meanwhile, the closing, mostly instrumental “The Futurescope Trilogy” probably belongs on Cuomo's unreleased space odyssey Songs From the Black Hole and doesn’t stack up to “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)”, the batshit piece of musical theater that proved Cuomo can set new positive benchmarks for himself in the 21st century.
Everything Will Be Alright in the End doesn’t set a new benchmark for Weezer, but hopefully it can go lengths to ridding them of the ridiculously unfair catch-22 they’ve faced. The past couple of weeks have seen a surprise Thom Yorke album dropped on BitTorrent, the first Aphex Twin record since 2001, and a lavish reissue of Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore, and almost none of them were subject to the kind of truly wacked-out, incomprehensible standards given to Weezer’s ninth album. Granted, Rivers Cuomo hasn’t done himself many favors, as his music has been marked by refusal to evolve in the slightest either emotionally or sonically. Even still, why couldn’t Cuomo just do this in peace? Because even though Weezer and Pinkerton were never embraced by critics in real time, they sure seem to have been embraced by a lot of people who grew up to be critics, who in turn have relished every opportunity to bash Weezer albums as a way of separating themselves from an embarrassing part of their lives where the perspective of “No One Else” and “Pink Triangle” felt like the truth.
There have been many ways to qualify praise for Weezer and with each successive listen, Everything Will Be Alright in the End certainly earns the typically backhanded compliments: “actually not terrible,” “certainly better than Hurley,” “probably their best since...Maladroit, that was good right?” Or, Everything could be accepted for what it is and be held to a more manageable standard: how good does a Weezer album have to be before it can be considered actually good?  As it turns out, about this good.


Here We Go Magic frontman Luke Temple’s new project is his most cohesive yet. As Art Feynman, he emerges as a cool purveyor of dub-kraut.

Art Feynman: Blast Off Through the Wicker

Blast Off Through the Wicker

When Luke Temple and his band emerged as Here We Go Magic in 2009, they made knotty, hypnotic folk with long patches of ambience used to highlight Temple’s earworm melodies. They went on tour with Grizzly Bear—the two were simpatico—before releasing Pigeons in 2010, Temple’s first curveball. Since the release of Pigeons—a beguiling album that leaned on krautrock—Temple has used his records as test cases for various styles and sounds. A Different Ship was anxiety-inducing in its delirious survey of the pop landscape, while his last two solo records, A Hand Through the Cellar Door and Good Mood Fool, both incorporated R&B, reggae, country, and folk to mixed results.
What’s most puzzling about Luke Temple’s career is that he has often touched on intensely appealing ideas over the course of his various projects and records. Blast Off Through the Wicker is his most thorough work in years because it adheres to a particular set of sonic ideas over its duration. Under the guise of a new name and sound, Temple has switched up once again, emerging as Art Feynman, a cool purveyor of coked-out dub-kraut. Blast Off is the first Luke Temple record in which he nixes wholesale change from song to song, instead tweaking precise details to highlight the underlying structure of the entire record. It is, finally, a cohesive sound, and his music is all the better for it.
Blast Off is also Temple’s most intensely personal effort, a record that seeks to find meaning in mundanity and celebrate the profound; Temple himself points to animism—giving a soul or meaning to inanimate objects—as a key concept. On “Slow Down,” Temple examines this philosophy. Over busted drums and a vibraphone-sounding synth, Temple sings, “Slow down/Don’t crush yourself to make a diamond.” Ironically, it’s the advice Temple has always suffered from ignoring. For too long he’s been chasing too many sounds at once. Blast Off is his first deep breath in years.
“I Rain You Thunder” would fit in nicely on an early Brian Eno rock record, the electronic work taking precedence over form yet still carrying the bulk of the melodic weight. On “Party Line,” Temple occasionally interjects over house-inspired synth stabs. He has no problem getting extremely quirky on Blast Off. “Hot Night Jeremiah” is also ardently peculiar, a skittering track made of nothing more than Temple’s whispers, light drums, and a slinky-bounce of a synth line. It’s the sort of song that would unwittingly stick out on an earlier Temple album; a one-off experiment best left to B-sides and unheard demos. But when placed correctly within an album like Blast Off, in which the surprises occur within the record’s general scope—not in spite of this scope—it’s very welcome.
Count “Small House Blues” as another in this vein, where lilting drums and delayed keyboard give way to Temple’s funkiest vocal performance on the record. His falsetto is both delicate and strutting—a goofy surprise that eventually becomes an enduring gift. “It’s just the two of us in this small house,” he sings. The line captures the loving charm of Blast Off Through the Wicker. The digs may occasionally seem claustrophobic, the host a bit eccentric, but it’s still a stay worth remembering.


My Bloody Valentine's output during the band's miracle years between 1988 and 1991 still feels like a gift.

My Bloody Valentine: Isn't Anything / Loveless / EPs 1988-1991

They exist. I'm holding the CDs right now, and I can tell you, they exist. The remasters of My Bloody Valentine's Creation catalog had been announced and delayed so many times, it became a running joke to ask which would come first, the Loveless remasters or the long-awaited follow-up. The inferred punchline was "neither." Advance copies circulated four years ago, but the leaks came and went and no one was sure if they were real. Turns out they were. And now you can buy them. They're available only in the UK for now, but yes, the My Bloody Valentine remasters exist.
In addition to new masters of Isn't Anything and Loveless, there's also a new My Bloody Valentine release, of a sort. EPs 1988-1991 collects four EPs and a single issued during the band’s creative peak, along with previously unreleased (but widely bootlegged) tracks. This release provides the greatest revelation. Imbibing this material in one large gulp feels like a new window into the band's brilliance. You Made Me Realise, originally released in 1988, is a perennial on any list of the greatest EPs of all time and it vastly improves upon their earlier work. They had experimented with guitar noise, but they'd never succeeded in making something like the title track, which walked a razor's edge between bliss and terror. Kevin Shields was a great admirer of the Beatles' flair for melody, but he'd never written a tune as breezy and memorable as "Thorn". And nothing they'd done before sounded as effortless as "Drive It All Over Me". They were finally a real rock band, with pulsing bass and brisk tempos and guitars that sound like guitars.
By late 1988, Shields put together an extended single and an album that secured MBV's status as guitar-pop innovators. The untitled single that featured "Feed Me With Your Kiss" (it was also released as a four-song EP, all songs are included here) found them becoming sweeter and yet more dissonant, essentially pushing every which way in the general direction of "more." If "Feed Me With Your Kiss" and "I Believe" can't quite match anything on Realise, they at least hinted that an even wider emotional range was within this band's grasp.
Isn't Anything, a singular item in the My Bloody Valentine discography, is the fulfillment of this promise. For some fans, it's the band's pinnacle. It's alternately dark and slow and joyously effervescent; on fast-tempo songs like "Nothing Much to Lose" and "Sueisfine", drummer Colm Ó Coísóig adds Keith Moon-like fills to the end of every bar. On slower songs like "Lose My Breath" and "No More Sorry", the guitars clang and rattle and MBV seem effortlessly dark and goth, having finally found a way to convey mood without forgoing song.
Even more than the greatness of the individual tracks, Isn't Anything crystallizes MBV's unique dynamic. It's an essential document in the noise-pop sphere that was by then already called shoegaze, and much of MBV's influence can be found here rather than on Loveless. But it's also distinctly the work of this one band. At the heart of My Bloody Valentine was the mixture of the crushing power of Dinosaur Jr. and Hüsker Dü and the delicate vulnerability of indie pop; the masculine/feminine dynamic was accomplished not through the brilliant interplay between Kevin Shields and singer/guitarist Bilinda Butcher (whose voices complement each other but often sound quite alike) but by the effect of their voices against the guitar noise. My Bloody Valentine offered a new expression of androgynous sensuality in pop, crafting deeply sexual but also abstracted music, short on specifics but heavy with feeling. And Isn't Anything is where this combination came into full flower. The swooning drone of "All I Need" points directly at what was to come on Loveless, but Isn't Anything needn't exist in relationship to another record. If they had stopped here, My Bloody Valentine's reputation would have been assured. Fortunately, they didn't. Another landmark was around the corner.
But before they got there, MBV offered two more EPs, both found on the 1988-1991 collection. Glider, from 1990, displayed a massive shift in sound from anything they'd done before. The opening single "Soon" was a sensation, famously described by Brian Eno as "a new standard for pop. It's the vaguest music ever to have been a hit." That vagueness is the key to all that would follow, because Shields was taking his early ideas and seeing how far he could push them into the realm of texture and pure sensation. So "Soon", with its drum break and chord changes and melody, sounds like a "song" on the one hand, but everything is blurred until it seems more like a ghosted memory of a song. And this mistiness happens without losing any of its propulsive force or the shock of the noise when the guitars enter. Clearly, things were very different for My Bloody Valentine.
Glider was rounded out by the instrumental title track, which serves as a showcase for how Shields was using phase shifts and disorienting rhythm tricks to create an underlying sense of unease mixed with awe. It sounds slightly "wrong" but also gorgeous, and like little else that had come before. MBV's following EP, Tremolo, upped the ante further. It stands as the true companion to Loveless. Opening with the staggering "To Here Knows When", it takes the woozy disorientation of "Glider" and mixes it with a vocal from Butcher that is impossibly ethereal. It feels constantly on the verge of breaking apart, which imparts a deep feeling of tension, as bruising distortion meets child-like coo. Both "Swallow", with its looped hand drums and Celtic synth line, and the crushing "Honey Power" match the best of Loveless for sheer beauty.
As you might imagine, a perfectionist like Kevin Shields isn't the sort to have unreleased greatness lingering in the vault, and that holds true for the bonus material that fills out the EP collection. "Instrumental 1" mixes drum breaks and guitar noise and sounds less like indications of a possible new direction and more like a tame example of a lot of the music it inspired. The 10-minute-long version of "Glider" is welcome, as it's built on the sort of hypnotic repetition you wish would go on forever. But better are the crunchy pop tunes at the tail end of the disc-- "Sugar", "Angel", "Good for You"-- which complement to the superior material on the EPs.
Tremolo came out in March, leaving a seven-month wait before Loveless made it into the world that November (six weeks after Nirvana's Nevermind). To say that anticipation for Loveless was high would be an understatement, and it delivered in every conceivable way. Few pop albums are routinely described in religious terms but this is one of them. It's partly because, like any scripture worth its salt, it leaves itself open to interpretation. Going back to that Eno quote, there's no telling what many of these songs "mean," even after you've read the lyrics. They bypass the language center of the brain and head for other areas-- where memory, tactile sensation, and emotions lie. It's an album you feel more than one you understand.
By this time, Kevin Shields was less a bandleader than a mad scientist, constantly developing and tinkering with new sounds. He played virtually every instrument (the lone exception being Ó Coísóig's minute-long "Touched") and obsessively tinkered with the smallest details. And the genius of Loveless is its mix, the exact proportions of one sound to the next. The highlights that led off the two EPs are the tentpoles, but really, Loveless is all highlights. I've heard many thousands of albums in my life and it's one of the few that strikes me as being essentially perfect. It's also the album that has turned two generations on to the wondrous possibilities of sound as sound. It's hard to imagine someone like Fennesz getting anywhere near as much traction among indie music fans if Loveless hadn't taught them how to listen for the emotional possibilities of texture. It remains a landmark that hasn't aged a day.
Which leads to one of the many strange and ironic things about this particular reissue: Perfection is offered in two competing versions. Loveless comes in a 2xCD set, one remastered from the original DAT and one from the original analog master. We may never fully understand the reasoning behind this unusual decision. As has been pointed out elsewhere, it's possible that the two discs are mislabeled, and that the half-inch analog master is identified as coming from the DAT and vice versa. Which is neither here nor there when you consider that no one in their right mind would ask themselves, "Which Loveless remaster should I listen to tonight?"
Shields says that the effect of the differences is cumulative and best understood over the course of a full listen. Having listened to the CDs on three different pairs of headphones and two different stereo systems of varying quality, I can say that they are slightly different (one is just a hair louder) but the qualitative distinctions are extremely minimal, at best. And there is a digital glitch on "What You Want" on one of the remasters, which seems both comical and tragic considering how long these have been in the works. So I guess I'll be listening to the one without the mistake, then.
Aside from that detail, the remastering across all three sets is well done. Loveless was famously and appropriately one of the quietest "loud" records of all time. Listening on your iPod, you always have the volume close to max and you never feel like you damage your hearing. And this breathing room pays off in spades in the dynamics of the record; when the guitars surge on "Soon" and "Only Shallow", it can still shake you to your core.
The most important thing is that this music exists and probably sounds as good as it ever will. As a band and as an idea, My Bloody Valentine stand for many things: sonic perfectionism, outsized ambition, excess. But the quality they embody above all is patience. They make you wait-- for the follow-up to brilliant albums, for the remastered versions of those brilliant albums, for that D-chord in the extended live versions of "You Made Me Realise" to finally come to an end. Some bands give you everything you want right when you want it; with My Bloody Valentine, you have to come to them and experience the music on their terms. But the demands they make don't preclude generosity. In fact, they reward your commitment many times over. For years, Kevin Shields has discussed his difficulties in following up Loveless. The talk often centers around money-- how he was not given what was promised, how he lacked the resources to bring the music to life and get it out into the world. These releases will set you back a few bucks, but My Bloody Valentine's output during their miracle years between 1988 and 1991 also stands outside of commerce. It feels like a gift, still.


If you like cerebral rap music, Queens rapper Homeboy Sandman has been your man for some time now. His new album, All That I Hold Dear, utilizes sparkling soul beats and verses that are slightly more modulated than his usual darts of staccato.

All That I Hold Dear

In the past, whether or not you’ve enjoyed the music of Queens rapper Homeboy Sandman has had a lot to do with the way in which you digest rap verses. His delivery is halted, stuttering-- not really a flow so much as a series of strategically layered blocks of wordplay. If you like cerebral rap music, Sand has been your man for some time now, but if you just wanted to turn your brain off, the dissonance of his bars and the aggro-quality of some of his beats might not keep your interest.
But Sandman’s newest project All That I Hold Dear proves to be an enjoyable album both for folks who really listen to music and for those who just skim through it. Listeners who don’t want to have to hear to a song half a dozen times before they can understand and enjoy it should be taken with the project’s sparkling soul beats and verses from Homeboy Sandman that are slightly more modulated than his usual darts of staccato.
The release was produced entirely by M Slago, a Dallas beatmaker reminiscent of 9th Wonder. As with the North Carolina producer, Slago’s beats are hardy and stuffed with plenty of soul. But for some strange reason, he can’t really get his drums to hit and those too-soft snare snaps can dull the music's impact.
Sand here is as incisive as ever, stream-of-consciousness rhymes shading in the complexities of any given theme. “Musician” may have some worried that they're about to receive another in the endless cycle of lectures about the distinction between rap and hip-hop, but they've got a surprise coming. The track is a deft complaint about being perceived as a rapper rather than as a musician and forms a defense of rap as an essentially musical profession. "Like there could never be a logical answer other than the music we make," Sand raps, in response to questions about what differentiates him from his rapping peers.
Another standout, "Relapse", details the kind of pseudo break up where the parties involved continue to circle warily, wondering whether or not they've made a mistake and are meant to be together. And while uncle-rap won’t be burning up the airwaves anytime soon, “Runts” is a touching tribute to Sand’s nephew and niece, which makes up for its triteness with well-observed details about the trials and tribulations of dealing with kids.
All That I Hold Dear is the second Sandman release on which the production is handled by a single producer (the first was Kool Herc: Fertile Crescent, produced by EL RTNC), a smart idea that provides a cohesive platform for the rapper to zero in on his talking points. The project won’t attract many new fans, but even those who haven’t been following Sand should enjoy this pleasant, low-key brain food.


On their second full length, the London electronic trio continue shapeshifting from a forward-facing Kode9/Hyperdub-approved production crew to pillowy dreampop dudes with genuinely charming and well crafted songs at their disposal.

News From Nowhere

Say what you like about Darkstar's shapeshift from forward-facing production crew to pillowy dreampop dudes, but it's probably not a move they made for cred points. After all, back when they were featured players on Kode9's Hyperdub label, the London-based duo of James Young and Aiden Whalley won all sorts of looks for their wonky but thoughtfully-crafted strain of dubstep. The subsequent addition of vocalist James Buttery appeared to position Darkstar at the forefront of a generation of dance acts looking to marry vocals and textured dance sounds in a novel and original way. The ensuing "Aidy's Girl is a Computer" seemed like a bellwether-- for a good six months, it felt like Darkstar was the thinking person's [insert your favorite mildly popular dubstep act from 2009 here]-- on-paper darlings with just the right amount of heat, clearly about to have a moment.
But a funny thing happened on the way to that moment; Darkstar got soft. Not soft soppy-- although this album's detractors might argue that, too-- but soft sonically. Even with Buttery in the fold, a major throughline of 2010's North was Darkstar's constant fascination with how different drum patterns locked together-- a big part of the fun was how they rationalized that into vocalist-led song structures. News From Nowhere is so unbothered by rhythmic invention that it might as well be from a different band. The keening falsettos, new age pads, and chiming bell sounds that signal opener "Light Body Clock Starter" establish an instructive new message that never really fades away: these guys are crooners now, less 2-step than "2 become 1".
You know what, though? This new hairdo doesn't look half bad. Setting aside the occasional meandering instrumental break, there are enough genuinely charming and well-crafted songs here that you can sort of understand what they're aiming at. Sure, by embracing more established pop and indie song structures, Darkstar risk opening themselves up to a world of new comparisons, but to their credit, they also seem to relish the moments when they catch themselves wearing another band's clothes. One of the album's best tracks, "A Day's Pay For a Day's Work" features a melody line that sounds like it could have lifted straight out of Grizzly Bear's playbook. Elsewhere, the hiccuping acoustics, low baritone and pneumatic rhythm section of "Armonica" constitutes a pretty convincing Matthew Dear callback. And then there's "Amplified Ease", a studiously shambolic and very likable sing-song which, as an aside, I'm pretty sure is scientifically traceable to Animal Collective.
It's fun to think about Darkstar's raw materials and what they might do with them one day, but nobody's going to come away from News From Nowhere feeling like they've successfully cultivated their own unique universe. Perhaps in the grand scheme of things, this might end up being thought of as a necessary transition album that bridges some new future territory for them. But even as a functional exercise in sensitive songs and electronic pastels, you could do much worse.


Today on Pitchfork, we are taking a critical look at Steely Dan—from their early classic rock staples to their latter-day studio sleaze—with new reviews of five of their most influential records.

Katy Lied

The notes on the back cover of Katy Lied begin: “This is a high fidelity recording. Steely Dan uses a specially constructed 24-channel tape recorder, a ‘State-of-the-Art’ 36-input computerized mixdown console, and some very expensive German microphones.” The note continues with a laundry list of gear and settings, which are probably real but delivered with a smirk, and then concludes with, “For best results observe the R.I.A.A. curve.”
I shudder to think how many people have listened to Katy Lied without observing the R.I.A.A. curve. But this is the kind of thing dudes in the 1970s did—list the gear used to create an album and then give suggestions to the listener about the equipment and settings they might use to realize it. The recording summary reminds me of those on another LP by an audio obsessive that came out in 1975—Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, which he may have written while on speed and which definitely makes very little sense. But when audiophile musicians put their music out into the world, they hate losing control of it. What if someone listens to their perfectly sculpted sonic creation on a crappy all-in-one portable turntable with a battered needle? And let’s not even get into what it sounds like on earbuds.
The irony of the note on the back of Katy Lied, and possibly the inspiration for its inclusion, is that the album’s sound was, according to the band, deeply flawed. While Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were recording it with producer Gary Katz and engineer Roger Nichols, they employed a then-new technology called dbx, which expanded the dynamic range beyond the conventional limit of analog tape. The system worked by compressing the incoming signal and then expanding it on playback, with some filtering in there to reduce noise. It was more complicated than Dolby, boosting and then lowering a wider array of frequencies, and also, potentially, more effective.
But something went very wrong. “It was better sounding than anything you’ve ever heard to this date,” Katz told Cameron Crowe a couple of years later in Rolling Stone. “Even Aja. Unbelievable. We went to mix it, and the tape sounded funny. We found out the dbx noise reduction system we were using was not functioning properly.” Panic set in and some steps had to be done over with the release date approaching rapidly but they salvaged the record, at least as far as the label and the audience were concerned. But Becker and Fagen could never listen to Katy Lied again. The well had been poisoned, and they heard flaws in what to almost everyone else sounded pristine.
That’s too bad for them because Katy Lied is a very good album. It captures Steely Dan in the thick of it all, still hungry and energized by their early burst of creativity but not taking anything for granted. Before Katy Lied, Steely Dan were a rock band, but this is the record where they became something else.
In 1974, following the shows to support their third album Pretzel Logic, Fagen and Becker decided that they didn’t enjoy touring, didn’t make much money from it, and would prefer to focus on making records. It was like the Beatles after Revolver, except that Steely Dan weren’t especially huge and their lives weren’t especially crazy. More than anything, the shift was an outgrowth of their studio obsession. With no upcoming gigs, they no longer needed a steady band, and Steely Dan became officially what it already kinda was—Becker and Fagen and whatever musicians they deemed good enough to complete their vision.
Katy Lied lives at the midpoint of Steely Dan’s first act. Behind them were three records that were incrementally more sophisticated and less rock-centered. After this one were three increasingly finicky and obsessive albums that would find them reaching for a kind of perfection, albums that found them chronicling the decadence around them from the inside. Where they once wrote about the delightfully sleazy underbelly of life in America from a remove, they started to write more about what they saw around them. Katy Lied is the fulcrum in this progression—it’s messier, less sure of itself, besotted neither with youthful confidence nor veteran polish.
After the departure of Jeff “Skunk” Baxter following the dissolution of their touring unit, guitars moved a half-step into the background. These are songs for piano, jazzier and lighter, and the keyboards are higher in the mix. Listening to it brings to mind nearly-empty cocktail bars after the people with something to live for have all gone home and cabaret shows in seedy theaters. Fagen sings with gusto but if it’s possible for sweat to make a sound, then you could say he sounds a little sweaty. Almost all the drums were played precocious by a 20-year-old genius named Jeff Porcaro, who would become one of the world’s most in-demand session players, and there are many distinctive background vocals from Michael McDonald, who would become one of yacht rock’s most in-demand session singers.
The songs Becker and Fagen came up with are the usual mix of the funny, cynical, and cryptic, but here and there are moments of what seems to be actual sweetness. The brilliance of their songwriting is that they always aimed for complexity and never allowed themselves to be pinned down. Everything was up for negotiation, even when the lyrics were studded with clear meaning. “Black Friday” is a brilliant depiction of chaos, describing what it would be like to make your way out of town and cash your checks when the apocalypse hits. Fagen makes evil sound appealing, suggesting that it might be the only sane response to living in an insane world, but listen with the other ear and you hear the satire and even a kind of yearning from someone who might actually wish for a better world. Meanwhile, Becker plays the best guitar solo on the album, capturing the ragged edge of the moment.
Steely Dan made songs about the destructive force of male vanity that came from two people you knew were speaking from personal experience. They never hold themselves above their characters, but they don’t let them off the hook, either. On “Bad Sneakers,” we see a man bopping around the street near Radio City Music Hall like he owns the place. We feel what he feels but also see how ridiculous he looks, while McDonald’s background vocals suggest grace in his awkwardness, celebrating the energy that powers him even though his actions are laughable. “Rose Darling” is the third track in a row to mention money specifically, but on a more casual listen it sounds something like a pure love song. And then two cuts later, the A-side closes with “Dr. Wu.”
Lodged in the middle of the album that came in the middle of the decade and in the middle of Steely Dan’s decade-long, seven-album run is one of their very best songs, a weary and funny and specific and mysterious ode to longing and loss. “Dr. Wu” gave the album its title (“Katie lies/You can see it in her eyes”) and crystalizes its essential mood. One moment it’s about drugs, the next it’s about a love triangle, and then you’re not sure what’s next or even what’s real, and weaving through it all is the saxophone solo from Phil Woods, connecting dots between musical worlds both corny and elegant, from Billy Joel to Billy Strayhorn.
The characters flailing clumsily throughout Katy Lied are paralyzed by desires they aren’t introspective enough to understand, so all they can do is keep stumbling forward. “I got this thing inside me,” Fagen sings in a bridge on the late album highlight “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)”, “I only know I must obey/This feeling I can't explain away.” Sometimes obeying those desires lead people to something ugly and inexcusable, as on “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies,” a song about a guy who is almost certainly grooming kids for abuse. It’s a Todd Solondz film rendered in sound, and Fagen only shows us the lead-up, forcing us to assemble the pieces in our heads as he hides the crime behind the album’s cheeriest arrangement.
This collision between word and sound—in which the precise moral takeaway and is obscured even as the music makes it go down easy—made the band hard to trust. “The words, while frequently not easy to get the definite drift of, are almost always intriguing and often witty,” John Mendelsohn wrote in a review of Katy Lied in Rolling Stone. But a few paragraphs later he concluded: “Steely Dan’s music continues to strike me essentially as exemplarily well-crafted and uncommonly intelligent schlock.”
It sounds harsh but Mendelsohn captured how a lot of people think about Steely Dan, then and now. This band was always about asking questions instead of giving answers, and Katy Lied came out in a particular moment of uncertainty and confusion. The fact that Becker and Fagen themselves couldn’t bear to hear their own creation only deepens the mystery. They wanted desperately to render their tragically amusing scenes just so, and the sonic purity they’d been chasing would soon be theirs. But here they give failure a kind of twisted majesty.


Toro Y Moi's Live From Trona is an odd concert album: It was performed in front of no one, amidst the beautiful landscape of Trona—three hours away from Los Angeles.

Live from Trona

Toro Y Moi isn’t exactly the first artist you would imagine releasing a live album recorded in the middle of a desert. His catalog, now seven albums deep, evolved from an intimate version of bedroom-pop that was one of the foundations of chillwave, through 2015’s What For?, an uneven pastiche of guitar rock informed by ’70s adult contemporary as much as it was by Weezer. (There’s even a rap-influenced mixtape in there somewhere.)
A “live album from Toro Y Moi” makes sense, then, when you consider Live from Trona wasn’t recorded from an actual concert or festival appearance: rather, the show was performed in front of no one, amidst the beautiful landscape of Trona—three hours away from Los Angeles and a town home to about 3,000—the perfect showcase for a set of Bundick’s laidback tunes.
Still, how does the beatmaker and songwriter translate live? In a live club setting, it works, because small, indoor venues amplify his layered, dense rhythms that propel his post-2011 output (and accentuate his penchant for catchy, striking riffs). But how does it work from the middle of a canyon? Bundick circumvents this by crafting a set that mostly sticks to the guitar-laden What For?.
This accomplishes a few things: it gives those songs, from an album that didn’t crack the critical accolades of his previous work and was mostly seen as a mild disappointment, a second life. It also fleshes them out in the way only a live performance can. What For’s biggest problem was it didn’t rock: while his demo June 2009, re-released in 2012, also didn’t rock, it was more of a power-pop record, an early recording that made its sins easy to forgive. What For’s smooth adult contemporary sound was five years after “Round and Round” and felt regressive after Bundick created his most dense, funkiest, and obviously Dilla-inspired record with 2013’s sublime Anything in Return.
It’s easy to enjoy Live from Trona as a What For? Part Deux, then, which is to Bundick’s benefit, as his catalog is pretty much bulletproof, with that album his most obvious weak link. Seven of those songs appear here, and they serve as the record’s best run as they sound the most appropriate in the desert. “Still Sound,” a stellar track and stand-out from 2011’s Underneath the Pine, feels limp and exposed live, its crunchy guitar riff in the studio withering outdoors, like a high-res photograph that’s been compressed. (“Say That” escapes mostly unscathed.) This is unfortunately a pitfall of Bundick’s music—if you remove the studio-enhanced sheen, the nostalgic production touches that give his best albums (Underneath the Pine, the Freaking Out EP, Anything in Return) their unique aura—is this some great, unheard, funky Todd Rundgren album?—you’re left with something tepid, like What For?.
The record’s lone new song, “JBS,” featuring jazz duo Mattson 2, has some inspired jamming, but at six-and-a-half minutes, is too long. It’s the kind of thing that might have sounded fantastic if you were there (ironic, considering no one was), but loses its immediacy in recorded form. It’s also the album’s most dangerous turn into self-indulgence, which, to its credit, Live from Trona successfully avoids. The set closes with What For’s pensive closer, “Yeah Right,” which reads likes an artistic statement; it’s a Dear John letter to chillwave. “Who are your new friends? Why did you bring them?” is a subtly devastating line, the kind of thing that stings the most when you resent someone closest to you, and the song, stretched to seven minutes to cap the live set, hits even harder in this version. It feels like Bundick, who will turn 30 in November, is closing the door on the youth-oriented movement he helped ignite back in 2010.
Few live albums are truly essential, and Live from Trona isn’t, either. But by tackling some of his least-loved songs head-on as the centerpiece of this record, Bundick shows a continued willingness to tinker with his work until he’s completely satisfied with the final product, which has been a hallmark of his career. Live from Trona also asks you to consider Bundick’s artistic output as a whole: by exploring sounds we never would have expected to hear from him in 2010, he’s continually evolving. The album leaves you wondering what his next pivot could be.


The enigmatic Brooklyn rapper’s debut album is part airing of grievances, part origin story: a blood-stained portrait of the forces that made him.

Blind Obedience

Crowned Brooklyn’s “Best Rap Alien” by Noisey in 2019, Taphari has continued to nurture the detachment that drew him into the spotlight. In an interview earlier this year, the rapper shrugged off any affiliation—with Brownsville, Brooklyn, even New York City in general—that might force him into dialogue with the past or position him within a clear-cut lineage, pledging allegiance only to “the eternal present and the evolution of the self.” Taphari wears his alienation like a badge of honor, basking in a deep serenity that seems to defy human origin.
Blind Obedience winds back the clock on his otherworldly mystique. Part airing of grievances, part origin story, Taphari’s debut album is a blood-stained portrait of the forces that transformed him into the unbothered loner emerging from the void on the cover. The icy soundscapes of a five-producer team led by XL Big Alex complement the introspective mood as Taphari reveals a war of emotion raging beneath his cool exterior. Wading through illusions in search of an even higher self, he lashes out at friends, lovers, and himself with a blend of cautious vulnerability and venomous lucidity.
Album highlight “Table 42” comes closest to perfectly threading the needle between the two. Catching the rapper off balance, somber piano chords simultaneously trap Taphari in the darkest corner of his mind and spark admissions of his own fragility (“I wish my heart was as resilient as my expectations”) before he fires off one last text in horny desperation. Speaking from within a specific experience lends much-needed weight to his jaded reflections. The beginning of a romantically inclined trio of tracks that closes out Blind Obedience, “Back Soon” glides in on a swooning chorus courtesy of Bayonet Records labelmate Benét; a long-awaited reunion gleams on the horizon. When Taphari swoops in to deliver the ugly post-mortem (“I see your intentions/There was no connection/Attachment is forced”), his deep voice bouncing through the track’s rumbling bass before joining Benét in a trembling reprise of the melody, the contrast is devastating. His mastery of this newfound tenderness lapses on the next two tracks, meandering too far into platitudes to achieve the same clarity of emotion; Taphari best transcends his own alien enigma when he paints a clear target to aim at.
Thankfully, the undefined shadowy adversaries that crowd around him serve Taphari well in his comfort zone: the energized loner anthems found on Blind Obedience’s first half. “Cost You” shines with a sinister glee as his elongated sing-song cadence chops into the beat in the chorus. Dancing with fists balled behind his back, Taphari winks and turns away, letting the track’s menace dissolve in a hail of punchlines as he retreats into solitude with a giggle. And when the bubble of “Table 42”’s intimacy pops, he immediately springs back into razor-sharp cynicism on “Kathy Bates,” fleeing the scene with premonitions that “The water is rising/And the sharks on the way.” Even as he drops the curtain on his reclusive hustle, Taphari can’t resist throwing up a few new walls to guard his heart. For an artist who draws his greatest strength from disenchantment, knowing when to tear them down again is a battle all its own.

Buy: Rough Trade
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At this point, a live album seems like a perfunctory addition to the Official Posthumous Legacy package, right between the ...

Mystery White Boy

At this point, a live album seems like a perfunctory addition to the Official Posthumous Legacy package, right between the unfinished album of demos and the inevitable b-sides compilation. But it's also something of a necessity for Jeff Buckley, who did a fairly exhaustive amount of touring in support of his one modestly successful record. When Columbia signed him, before booking weeks' worth of studio time or letting him put together a backing band, the first thing they did was issue the Live at Sin-E EP as a showcase of his raw talents.
Like any live performance, Mystery White Boy exemplifies both the weaknesses and strengths of Buckley and his band. His voice is, naturally, the greatest asset to the package, but in concert, he was more prone to spiraling off into indulgent falsettos, and often struggled to match the band's intensity. Elegantly dynamic songs like the opener, "Dream Brother," and "Mojo Pin" are given a slightly rougher touch for added climax. Sadly, the latter fails to improve on the fragile perfection of its studio counterpart, with otherwise immaculate drummer Matt Johnson rushing through the frantic triplets of the crescendo.
"Grace" and "Last Goodbye," on the other hand, are honored with impassioned, but far from unique, renditions that do them reasonable justice. On "Last Goodbye," Buckley runs through his only hit with luxurious slide guitar that puts more emphasis on the soaring string arrangements. Elsewhere, variation proves fatal for "Eternal Life," whose temporarily intriguing death metal version fails to enhance the already cringe-worthy bridge lyric.
Several previously unreleased Buckley compositions are presented here, if purely to make the compilation more salable. These tracks often come off as a bit ragged and underwritten alongside the complex material of Grace. "I Woke Up in a Strange Place" is hard rocker that whimpers off, as if there was a killer ending planned that never got written. But "What Will You Say" succeeds by its simplicity with one of the most affecting melodies of Buckley's brief career.
Jeff Buckley's always had a fluid repertoire of covers in addition to his respectable originals, and that's represented perhaps too well on Mystery White Boy. The last 20 minutes of the record are dedicated solely to covers. The off-the-cuff Gershwin classic, "The Man That Got Away," is as enjoyable as anything else here, but certainly didn't need to put in an appearance. The majestic "Kanga Roo" is well worth the 10 minutes it requires to rise into a fury, and Buckley gets extra points for taking on a Big Star song other than "Thirteen," for once. Appropriately enough, the set ends with Buckley's definitive reading of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," here labeled a medley for the impromptu inclusion of a few lines from Smiths' "I Know It's Over."
Such collections are never complete without one glaring omission. In the case of Mystery White Boy, it's the surprising absence of "Lover, You Should Have Come Over." Both the penultimate Buckley ballad and a surefire litmus test for any potential fan, "Lover" begs a powerfully passionate performance, and finds it only in the disc's counterpart home video, Live in Chicago. This seems especially odd and undeserved given that several of the songs from Grace included here have already appeared in live form on previous singles and EPs.
But flaws are to be expected of live albums, even when severe missteps are overlooked in editing and remastering. And despite a selection that leaves something to be desired, Mystery White Boy is a vital document of not only the late Buckley's talent, but of the chemistry and generosity he shared with his bandmates.