A sprawling new album from the Buffalo rapper subtly expands his raw and luxurious sound.

And Then You Pray for Me

Westside Gunn has spent his career treating rap music like a high-end commodity through keen juxtaposition: Vivid bars about cooking and selling drugs live side by side with scenic tours of his closet and passport, his sharp voice piercing through mesmerizing beats. If he thinks something is fly, then that’s as powerful as anything the greatest fashion houses could produce, a testament to determination, consistency, and will. On his new and purportedly final album, And Then You Pray for Me, Gunn sticks to his ethos but widens his palette, turning to classic trap music for inspiration.
Westside Gunn and his Griselda Records have staked their claim through boom-bap-style production that echoes the ’90s New York sound of RZA and DJ Premier. Through go-to producers Daringer and Conductor Williams, the Buffalo crew landed on a sound that’s murkier, more desolate, and more melodic than typical golden age fare. Some of the best songs on And Then You Pray for Me stick to the formula and showcase Gunn’s captivating vocals and talent for beat selection and guest recruitment. On the smooth “Mamas PrimeTime,” Atlanta’s JID delivers a show-stealing verse with a slick verbosity that’s not often heard on Griselda tracks. The song represents what Gunn does best, concocting a grimy flyness and sounding raw and luxurious all at once.
When Gunn switches to trap production, it’s like a dominant fastball pitcher turning to his off-speed stuff; it might still get the job done, but the intent is perplexing. Two of the trap beats on And Then You Pray for Me are produced by Memphis mainstay Tay Keith, but the majority are produced by the otherwise unknown Miguel the Plug. The Tay Keith songs—“Kostas” and “Steve and Jony”—are invigorating, enveloping, and somewhat alien, all hallmarks of a genre known for world-beating bombast. Miguel the Plug’s beats, on the other hand, have a lot and very little going on simultaneously. The skittering hi-hats, staid bassline, and rudimentary piano melody of “DunnHill,” for example, don’t do much to elevate the instrumental beyond something you might find on YouTube for free. Gunn has a proclivity for muted production, and it sounds as if he is trying to strip the aesthetic to its core, but the results are not as gritty or compelling as usual.
While not as natural a setting, the trap turn allows Gunn to showcase mixtape legends like Jeezy, Rick Ross, DJ Drama, DJ Trap-A-Holics, and DJ Swamp Izzo, all of whom feature on the album and bring their own strains of rap history. Past projects featured Slick Rick, Jadakiss, Fat Joe, Raekwon, and Busta Rhymes, presenting an important but limited view of hip-hop’s heroes. By featuring musicians outside of New York and its traditions, Gunn expands his views of what and who constitute the regal end of rap.
Westside Gunn balances his trap ambitions with the straightforward Griselda cuts, dotting the album with more raucous songs to suggest a symbiosis between the trap and boom-bap genres. The album has a careening momentum, with more familiar tracks like “Jalen Rose,” “The Revenge of Flips Legs,” and “Suicide in Selfridges” scattered to remind us of his strengths. Westside Gunn has said that And Then You Pray for Me is a sequel to Pray for Paris, his pivotal 2020 album that stood apart with a finely concentrated smoothness and confidence. For a rapper who has always followed his own logic, this exploratory collection makes sense as the de facto follow-up. And Then You Pray for Me is not an extension of its predecessor but an explosion: a broad, loud, and messy exploration of Gunn’s vision for rap and art.


Defined by small acts of joyful resistance, the Edinburgh group’s fourth album is a celebration of music as shared and spontaneous practice.

Heavy Heavy

For the past 10 months, the cavernous Duveen Galleries of London’s Tate Britain—the art gallery named for the sugar magnate who funded it—have featured a Technicolor parade of figures of all shapes and sizes, draped in maps, money, patchwork flags, hoodies, and ornamental masks. Some ride horses, some drag captives. It’s a cacophonous thing, detailed to the point of near infinity, awash with messages but ultimately defined by sheer feeling. It’s beautiful, unsettling, messy, at once engaging and combative: a mix of matte and shiny, rich and rough materials, cardboard, cloth, and wire. It reads like a poem. The work, titled The Procession, is by Edinburgh-born, Guyana-raised, England-returned artist Hew Locke. When Young Fathers producer Graham “G” Hastings visited the exhibition in person, three years deep into the making of his band’s fourth album, he was struck by the way the work seemed to offer “a full stop” to his own group’s effort: a summation of the ideas that he and his Edinburgh bandmates Alloysious Massaquoi and Kayus Bankole had been working on. Their album, Heavy Heavy, shares some of The Procession’s immersive qualities; it invites the listener to join in, to stand up and sing. It might also be the band’s best yet.
Young Fathers have often gestured at meaning but ended up with obfuscation—whether by the nature of their impenetrable yet poetic lyrics or the grab bag of genres and musical conventions they like to rifle through. If 2018’s Cocoa Sugar offered a stiff corrective, zeroing in on tighter, more conventional pop forms, then Heavy Heavy is the lingering afterburn. They carry forward Cocoa Sugar’s lessons (songs should be three minutes long and laden with irresistible hooks) but cast off the stiffness. Here, unburdened, vibes are the only guide. And from the opening woody drag of the bassline on “Rice” to the chug and claps of “Holy Moly,” Heavy Heavy bursts with overwhelming momentum, as if to say, “Keep up, if you can.”
In the midst of sessions for the album, Hastings picked up a National Geographic Through the Lens photobook from a nearby charity shop. He chopped it up and then pinned the cuttings around the group’s Edinburgh studio, conjuring an imaginary audience for the group to sing to and engage in a communal act of music-making. Bankole’s trips to Ghana and Ethiopia during the band’s time off between albums also helped to inform their approach. There, he witnessed singing as a shared, everyday, and often spontaneous practice. Singing can be freeing, and a sense of soulful liberation leads the action throughout Heavy Heavy: in the not-quite-harmonies and ad-libbed improvisations of the ascendant “Geronimo,” the woven call-and-response of “Drum,” the gentle swells of “Ululation.” Early highlight “Tell Somebody” manages to be both dense and delicate at the same time, like cotton candy, or the most inviting cloud.
On these rails, simple meditations like “I need to eat more rice” and “Put it all on the line” become transformative, gospel-like in their affirmation. The album is defined by these small acts of joyful resistance, rather than, as previously, simple rage against the dying of the UK’s ever-dimming light. It’s not a surprise to learn that the trio plumbed the raw, kitchen-sink folk traditions of Roberto De Simone and records by the electric-guitar-and-kick-drum-wielding Rev. Louis Overstreet, whose own bluesy rock’n’roll take on gospel has refused simple definition. Rather than seeking their niche among contemporaries, or finding a reason to be heard, Young Fathers have simply hit the record button and existed (in tight, three-minute bursts). Some old habits are hard to kill: Lyrics often add more texture than meaning, and the scatty opening to “Shoot Me Down” threatens briefly to derail the whole thing—until it evaporates into a wash of vocals that recall TV on the Radio at their most emotive, or Saul Williams at his most soothing.
Heavy Heavy sweeps its listener along, churchlike, and conveys the feeling that resisting the urge will always feel worse than rising up and pushing the air from your lungs. And then, after a brief 10 tracks, it’s all over—as if the procession has marched on, out of earshot. But the invite is still there extended: It’s up to you whether to accept it or not.


The pop singer’s second album is looser, livelier and more ecstatic than her debut, detailing the headlong rush of falling in love.

forevher

Shura emerged in 2014 as a pop star with a contradiction at her core. “Touch,” her lo-fi disco debut single, was a sort of “Dancing On My Own” for a new generation: an eminently danceable song about watching somebody else dance, about wanting to touch one another but being unable to because you’re paralysed by your own thoughts. Her 2016 LP Nothing’s Real was full of pop songs about unfulfilled promise and missed connections. With track titles like “2Shy” and “Tongue Tied,” she channelled the feathery soul of Janet Jackson and early Madonna while singing about being so engulfed in her own mind that she came apart from her body (the title track described the near-death pangs of a panic attack). If Nothing’s Real was all thought, the Manchester-born singer-songwriter’s follow-up forevher is all feeling.
Shura (real name Aleksandra Denton) spent the three years between her first and second records falling in love. The relationship that inspired forevher is a long-distance one, played out between New York and London via Skype and iMessage, and so the album tells a very modern story of intimacy (switching off Airplane Mode as soon as you land to see what your lover sent you while you were flying; being preoccupied with thoughts of the latest nude they sent you).
In tandem, her sound has grown into something more corporeal: While her voice on forevher largely comes through the filter of Auto-Tune, the instruments are looser and more live than they were on Nothing’s Real, with string flutters mimicking skipped heartbeats, and basslines settling into deep, well-worn grooves. If Shura used to hover awkwardly on the edges of dancefloors, now, she gives herself over to them. The psychedelic electronic soul of “religion (u can lay your hands on me)” or “skyline be mine”—all co-produced, once again, with her regular collaborator Joel Pott—could sit comfortably alongside Steve Lacy or Connan Mockasin, with digital flourishes bringing a layer of surreal newness to earthy rhythms.
The hooks of this record, at its most sensual, are less pop choruses than they are ecstatic moans. The swaggering sci-fi funk of “side effects” melts into a refrain that feels ancient and instinctive: “What it is, what it is, what it is, it’s so good.” On “religion,” the sparse, direct hook is simply, “Ooh girl, don’t stop, please/ You can lay your hands on me.” The record’s repeated urge, between clipped scratches of funk guitar and distorted saxophone, is simply to keep on going, keep on dancing, keep on feeling.
Of course, Shura still grapples with light insecurities in the album’s slower mid-section, in particular “flyin’” and “princess leia,” both of which deal with anxious thoughts during long-distance travel. It’s a necessary contrast for a record that mostly revels in new-relationship bliss, but—obviously—less fun. Likewise “tommy,” a voice memo and short ditty depicting an old man finding new love, rings more hollow than the richer funk songs that surround it. Shura is at her most convincing, and her most alive, when she’s fully embodying her own experience rather than narrating someone else’s.
The album’s slightly saccharine title is an indication of its general embrace of romantic cliché—on “forever,” she rhymes "forever" with “together” and coos: “You make me feel like sunshine, feel so good.” It might be clichéd, but as with her neo-soul sound, it’s also an enthusiastic, earnest reclamation: You’ve heard people sing “forever together” on a pop song before, but have you heard a woman sing it to another woman? Throughout forevher, Shura places herself lyrically inside religious imagery (she promises to baptise her love like Jesus on “BKLYNLDN” and makes herself into God on “religion”) and inside romantic tropes, as if asking, why not us? On the cover of the record, she places two women inside the familiar image of Rodin’s The Kiss, washed in blue light reminiscent of a Hockney swimming pool.
The pop canon has, for so long, been totally devoid of women expressing uncomplicated desire for other women, but 2019 might be the first year where queer women are spoilt for choice. LA band MUNA are preaching self-love, Marika Hackman is writing rock anthems about women going down on one another, and Charli XCX and Christine and the Queens stop just shy of making out in the video for “Gone.” This record is, first and foremost, about queer women. It is also about anyone who has experienced this kind of love: as blinding as religion, as cheesy as a Hallmark card, as familiar as a pop song.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


The Tennessee rapper and TDE associate really finds his voice on his second album, one filled with the tensions caused by a cycle of self-loathing and self-discovery.

The Sun’s Tirade

Chattanooga MC Isaiah Rashad wears his anxieties. They bleed through the rap revelry in verse, as if they could consume him at any moment. Is he about to stunt, or is he about to self-destruct? It makes his songs more like inkblots in a Rorschach test: What you see in them may depend on where you currently are on the spectrum—longing, laboring, or lost. Rashad appeared fully-formed on his debut Cilvia Demo as a young rap star in the making constantly humanizing himself before eyewitnesses with bars like “I done grown up for my child’s sake.” It was clear early on that he wasn’t afraid to publicly grapple with his demons. “Now, I’m praying that I make it to 25/They be calling doctors for my health/And ‘no’ is kinda hard to say to drugs/’Cause I been having problems with myself,” Rashad rapped on “Heavenly Father.” He turned 25 this year, but it was a rocky road getting here.
In the two quiet years since Isaiah Rashad released Cilvia, his inactivity fed his addiction, and vice versa. During a stint on Schoolboy Q’s Oxymoron tour in 2014, he got hooked on a potent brew of Xanax and alcohol, a concoction used to numb himself during an ongoing battle with depression. Drug dependency threatened to derail a promising career and almost getting him dropped from Top Dawg Entertainment on a handful of occasions. “I can’t admit, I’ve been depressed/I hit a wall, ouch,” he raps on “Dressed Like Rappers” from his long-awaited follow-up, The Sun’s Tirade. It’s an album that examines the strain of family ties, smalltown spokesmanship, and self-awareness. The Sun’s Tirade is brutally honest and open, a record saddled by substance abuse and melancholia. These are soul-baring cuts lined with pent-up emotions from the tour, which “BDay” hints at in a single lyric: “How do you tell the truth to a crowd of white people?”
Fittingly, though, Rashad really finds his voice on The Sun’s Tirade, an album filled with the tensions caused by a cycle of self-loathing and self-discovery. The tension is usually built up in his cadences with his uncanny sense for when to give and when to pull back. His voice can deflate in an instant or shrink to a mumble or mushroom into singsong. Raps tumble, sputter, and croak, stretching his timbre’s range and depth. On “Tity and Dolla,” he tries on a slippery inflection that’s whiny and exaggerated, which later morphs into something snappier at the octave change. His voice nearly cracks on “Park” as he staggers through verse rapping quick hitters like “I’m tryna be Nicki Minaj/Rich as a bitch in the drop” and “Bitch have you tutored the pastor/I know the root and the master/I know the coupe was a casket.” “Rope // rosegold” showcases flows on opposite ends of the spectrum, the first an impassioned croon, the second something more intoned, canceling out the animated performance. On every line, he works toward lucidity.
The Sun’s Tirade remains heavy with sound and subject. Rashad often reveals his deepest misgivings and uncertainties and scales his woes with liquid courage, intoxicated and numb. But instead of a disorienting album that tries to replicate those druggy highs and lows, the songs are clear-eyed, sobering, and even more detail-oriented than Cilvia Demo with monster guest verses from TDE associates Kendrick Lamar and Jay Rock and complementary ones from other contributors (SZA and Kari Faux, among others). There is even more precision and purpose in the raps here and an even stronger sense of identity. Take a standout like “Free Lunch,” which shows off his impeccable rhythm and timing, wading through a groovy tune tied together by a personal anecdote: The only numbers Rashad remembered as a kid were the last digits of his social security number, which was his access code for the free lunch program. Rashad connects the past and present together in an effort to understand his future.
The sonic template of The Sun’s Tirade is laid bare on “Brenda”: “Mix that Boosie with that boom bap.” There’s a similar palette to Cilvia Demo—as indebted to J Dilla production kits and Common’s Electric Circus as it is to Lil Wayne and Scarface—but this is far more adventurous on the back half. There’s a robotic Mike WiLL Made-It beat (“A Lot”), “Stuck in the Mud” splits itself in two with varying moods and textures, and the double-time “Don’t Matter” is the most uptempo thing he’s ever rapped on. These added dimensions bring variety to an otherwise uniform soundscape. Rashad has a way of making styles his own, shaving influences down until they bear his signature while paying homage along the way. “Silkk Da Shocka,” which carries on Rashad’s legacy of songs named after Southern rappers (there’s also the smooth 2 Chainz salute on “Tity and Dolla”), is a spiritual successor to “West Savannah” in aim and sound, moving in tandem with the Internet’s Syd over a slow-rolling, bluesy riff. The songs create a similar aesthetic blend to Cilvia Demo, processing regional rap staples through a soul filter.
But The Sun’s Tirade isn’t just Cilvia Demo: Redux. It’s a complex portrait of a man in transition. The album is an evolution for an artist who still may have his best in store. Development and maturation are themes unfolding in both Isaiah Rashad’s lyrics and personal life, and that overlap produced one of the great rehab records in recent memory, a collection of songs that both diagnose and medicate. “Can I sleep for a while? Can I work on myself?” Rashad asks on “Stuck in the Mud.” Wallowing in isolation and self-pity nearly drove one of rap’s most promising talents to implode. The Sun’s Tirade is a moving triumph to facing your demons and coming out on the other side one step closer to whole.


After playing imaginary rock stars for years, Kings of Leon finally found success. And they follow that with a sense of victimhood.

Come Around Sundown

If you had to single out a band as the embodiment of everything supposedly small-stakes and emotionally bankrupt about indie rock culture, who would it be? I imagine you wouldn't pick the almost painfully sincere and Billboard-topping Arcade Fire, but you're not Caleb Followill. Despite Only By the Night's elevating Kings of Leon from self-imagined superstars to actual superstars, Followill has spent the leadup to the release of Come Around Sundown in attack mode, throwing ill subliminals at Richard Reed Parry (the dude with the helmet), preemptively turning down Glee, and calling their breakout hit "Sex on Fire" a "piece of shit," the message being "look at these effin' hipsters, we're the real deal." Aw-shucks posturing aside, KoL have always been savvy about how they position themselves, and this is a classic political move: galvanizing a majority with a sense of victimhood.
But after hearing Come Around Sundown, here's the thing about this "us vs. them" tactic: I don't believe it, in large part because I don't think Kings of Leon do either. Come Around Sundown indeed feels like an awfully political work of art, though it's not necessary falling into the philosophy of red state/blue state. Rather, Kings of Leon themselves come off like jaded and wearied political lifers who've finally realized what it takes to win the game they're playing: That compromise is an end, that saying nothing at all is often saying the right thing.
Those sort of mixed messages permeate Come Around Sundown. The rise of Kings of Leon has coincided directly with their ability to be compared to U2, and just as you suspect they follow fame with a loose, modest comedown album pumped up to stadium status grandeur against its own will. At its core, first single "Radioactive" is a pleasingly aerodynamic piece of radio rock, a two-note bass riff giving an alley-oop to the most emphatic, hollering hook on Sundown. So why the gospel choir on the chorus? Well, that's just what the biggest of the big do, and the staggeringly exploitative video uncomfortably suggests the idea of it as soul-by-osmosis. Duly acknowledging the midnight tokers, "Mary" is full of headslap, "Sweet Leaf"-deep metaphors. Meanwhile, "Birthday" is a barstool rabble-rouser on first glance, but it's little more than an exhibit for what's become the stock characterization of women on Kings of Leon songs, namely, the kind of mythical, hell-raising maneater who still manages to make her submissive victim sound misognystic. Fact is, even if Kings of Leon sound almost nothing like the guys who made Youth & Young Manhood, they still have no trouble recognizing the archetypes that trigger an immense sense of self-satisfaction from people who insist rock achieved perfection in 1974.
At the very least, the powerfully encoded titles of "Pickup Truck", "Beach Side", "Back Down South", and "Mi Amigo" aren't a real indication of what they deliver-- though there's the occasional pedal steel and fiddle sigh, Kings of Leon stop shy of the "we're a country band now" pandering that prolonged the careers of Bon Jovi, Kid Rock, Jewel, and Darius Rucker. But even if they did overemphasize their Tennessee twang, these songs in particular call out Come Around Sundown for lacking the lowest common denominator of all pop: hooks. Even if this still packs amphitheatres, what are the crowds suppose to sing along to? At this point, you should no doubt be used to Followill's bizarre accent, which sounds wholly averse to enunciation, but tonally, he remains one of the most grating singers in rock. Regardless of what incarnation of KoL you're talking about, the vocals should have depth, warmth, or swagger, but Followill lacks grit, instead gilded with a squeaky, mewling edge that is unwisely amplified by featuring him punishingly high in the mix at all times.
A shame, really since KoL do have their charms-- the rhythm section is often agile, inventive, and propulsive when the tempo allows it, and like the similarly positioned Coldplay, there are hints of a wellspring of eccentricity that they haven't been able to fully tap into. But as in political debate, nuance is rarely acknowledged and incremental progress is often mistaken for none at all when it comes to bands at this level. You're either in or you're out, and for some reason people tend to think that being against Kings of Leon is akin to being against drinking whiskey or getting laid. That's not necessarily Kings of Leon's fault, but Come Around Sundown is, and it ends up being no different from a lot of the phony populism in the air these days.


Solo debut by the one-time frontman of shoegaze heavy hitters Swervedriver gets better the further Franklin gets from the blistering guitar attack of his earlier band.

Bolts of Melody

Back when Adam Franklin was blowing cool about cars and guns as Swervedriver's head honcho, his drowsy drawl was the perfect complement to the group's blistering effects-pedal attack. His work under the Toshack Highway moniker was certainly less spirited than what he's best known for, but he's always had a sleepy way about him. It's only here on his first official solo album where Franklin actually sounds tired and worn-out, both in a good and bad way. While Bolts of Melody deftly illustrates that his way with a tune hasn't diminished in the slightest, his attempts to split the difference between rocking and reclining leaves the album worse for wear.
Bolts of Melody starts off with a relative bang, and while "Seize the Day" says what it needs to say in just over two minutes, it comes off as a half-hearted nod to his previous days. The same goes for the oddly muted "Shining Somewhere". "Syd's Eyes" is presumably meant to pay homage to Syd Barrett, but it sounds more like a watered-down pastiche of Franklin's swinging 1960s touchstones (the "Space Oddity" homage "Walking in Heaven's Foothills" is much more flattering.) The other nominal "rock" track on Bolts, "Birdsong", sounds like Franklin getting in touch with his inner Eric Clapton. And I'm talking about the arena-rockin' Eric Clapton that epitomized the worst excesses of the 80s. That the track also appears in a stripped-down acoustic version does the album no favors.
Aside from that misstep, the album's less energetic tracks are what save this record. Gentle psychedelic songs like "Sundown" and "Morning Rain" might find Franklin gazing more at his navel than his shoes, but he sounds much more comfortable and confident taking it easy. Only the appropriately titled instrumental "Theme from LSD" tops the latter track's hypnotic groove, though both feature stellar wah-wah pedal work that would make Jimi Hendrix smile. And while the album starts off on the wrong foot, it ends on a strong note. One would think a track called "Ramonesland" would be an upbeat album closer. Instead, it's a dreamy seven-minute tour that encapsulates everything good about this album. There's a line midway through the track about a girl playing the Red House Painters, where Franklin says they sound "fucking depressing." It might be a toss-away zinger at that sort of introspection (which Franklin willfully indulges in throughout this album), but it comes off as knowing irony: The most depressing tracks on Bolts of Melody are those that superficially sound the least depressing.


*Collapse *is a strange and beautiful record that refuses categorization, traipsing through the fields of house, free jazz and musique concrète on the way to something inscrutably Other.

Collapse

Field-recorded sounds have been part of popular music almost as long as portable recording devices have existed. Our desire to capture the world as we hear it with the purpose of sharing with others is intrinsic to humankind, as are our desires to tinker and to put forward a best face; in experimental electronic music, we often see all three of these desires play out at once. A great example of this is Collapse, the latest album by Japanese artist Seiho, a genre-fluid record which follows in the footsteps of its forebears in the hopes of creating something new and distinct out of fresh ideas, beat culture and curated found sounds.
Collapse is a strange and beautiful record that refuses categorization, traipsing through the fields of house, free jazz and musique concrète on the way to something inscrutably Other. Despite being ostensibly an “electronic” record, Seiho proudly boasts that “very few samples were used in the making of the LP,” instead utilizing live instrumentation and sounds captured in personal recordings of animals, machines and nature, which he sculpted into many of the beats, rhythms and chirps put on display.
The idea of turning found sounds into electronic music is nothing new, of course. Matthew Herbert and Matmos have been releasing records with beats made from hand-crafted sound recordings for years, with two of the most famous examples coming in 2001 with the former’s Bodily Functions and the latter’s A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure. Both of those records derived their power in part from their slavish devotion to specific themes (sounds from bodies and medical procedures, respectively). One spin of Collapse, however, and you can tell that Seiho is going for something else, something freer and less constricted by subject matter; rather than focusing on a world bodies or industrial machines, Seiho wants you to hear the wandering world that passes in front of him. And wander it does—over the course of only thirty-three minutes, Collapse darts and dashes from sound to idea to sound like the speed-shifting brain of a manic teenager. Not one track of the ten lingers on a single musical idea for long. Even the track (possibly ironically) titled “Deep House” doesn't have a single deep house or even house-inspired idea coursing through it.
For this reason, it’s easier to see Collapse as a single work with repeating index points rather than a collection of “songs.” There’s jazz-concrète (“The Vase”), actual deep house (“Exhibition,” “Plastic”), and whimsical IDM (“Peach and Pomegranate,” “DO NOT LEAVE WET”); many songs, such as “Edible Chrysanthemum,” touch multiple indexes. In many ways, this record is a kindred spirit to last month’s Brainfeeder release Fool by Dutch artist Jameszoo. But while that record felt messy and basement-made, Collapse is neat and pristine, as if every careening moment has been carefully crafted and controlled so that no matter how wild it gets, it will never fall apart.
There’s no question that Collapse is a fascinating, inspired record. But the obvious challenge in making music this inherently fidgety is that it can be tough for a listener to stay engaged for long stretches of time, let alone the duration. As a result, some of the tracks get boring (“Deep House,” “Rubber”) and others start or end interestingly but can’t sustain the momentum throughout.
“Edible Chrysanthemum” and “DO NOT LEAVE WET” manage to hold on to their ideas just long enough to sink in deeper than the rest.  The first begins with pleasant mechanical hums and aviary trills, then picks up a mock-gamelan beat (maybe samples of sticks on glass) before giving way to a mournful near-jazz of horn, piano and percussive clacks. Album closer “DO NOT LEAVE WET” is easily the warmest and poppiest track: Beautiful, rich and full, and featuring a wider range of instrumentation of '80s funk and R&B, it invites jamming in summer mornings en route to the beach, or maybe afternoon mojitos. The song plays almost like your reward for staying put, and underlines that with a bit more focus and clarity, Seiho might evolve into an important voice in the new guard of experimental electronicists.


M.I.A. returns with a politically charged but confusing album that lacks bite and bounce, presenting only glimmers of what once was.

AIM

When revisiting the culture that informed her 2005 debut album Arular, Maya Arulpragasam painted the 2000s with a rose-colored tint. “We had way better fucking music. People were having way better sex. People were eating way better food. It’s like we had progression,” she told Rolling Stone last year. She concluded that in 2015, broadly speaking, art was boring and safe, due to the lack of “fireworks,” the repetition, and the disappearance of the “new.” It was a recalcitrant comment, sure, but also unsurprising coming from M.I.A. What felt unnatural was all this nostalgia. M.I.A. has always been an artist interested in constant reinvention—the past, it seemed to her, was nothing compared to the future. Her music, her art, her years of public confrontation were once prophetic.
But today it’s increasingly clear that many pieces of her creative legacy, from the caustic inhuman sheen of Maya* *to the bullet casings that litter “Paper Planes,” have either been plundered or misinterpreted. The fake patois of Drake’s “One Dance” blaring from car windows all around the world, the ubiquity of greasy synths and rattling gun-shot samples in dance music (see any of the artists in NON or Fade to Mind), and the globalization of American and European pop music all can trace a thread back to M.I.A.’s experiments, both failed and successful. Her evaluation of art in the present was another middle finger pointed at watchful eyes, and now, with the release of her fifth album, *AIM, *it’s become an unintended self-criticism of her own inability to light the fuse.
The lead-up to *AIM *was not without expected provocation. Before the album had a name there was a music video. It was searing and combative, an addictive piece of agitprop that once again aligned M.I.A. as one of our best political artists. The video for “Borders” depicted a dramatization of border crossing that was at once complicated, blunt, and grandly rendered. The song was empathetic about the global refugee crisis, (“We’re solid and we don’t need to kick them/This is North, South, East and Western”) yet it was also a polemic against media saturation and the endless panoply of issues both serious and inane (borders, politics, identities, privilege, being bae, breaking the internet) that made any action impossible. When she summons these topics through the course of the song, she cooly punctures them with a simple question, “What’s up with that?” Overall, it was the type of sobering political gesture that was much needed in the music discourse. Then the controversies started.
She was dropped as the headliner for London’s upcoming Afropunk Festival after clumsily targeting Black Lives Matter and the activist inclinations of musicians like Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé, asking if questions like “Muslim Lives Matter? Or Syrian Lives Matter? Or this kid in Pakistan matters?" would function into the dominant conversation in pop music. Then she got mad about MTV overlooking “Borders” for this year’s VMAs, accusing the media corporation of “racism, classism, sexism, elitism” and essentially policing what kind of voices were institutionally sanctioned. And naturally, she threatened to leak *AIM *(which she also threatened to do with her last album), and claimed that Interscope refused to clear samples for a Diplo-produced version of “Bird Song.” After the predictably rocky months of rollout, the 17 songs of *AIM *read as a disappointment, lacking bite and bounce, and presenting only glimmers of what once was.
For what went wrong, look no further than what might’ve been the big pop hit of the album, “Freedun,” a collaboration with smoldering One Direction malcontent Zayn Malik. The song was apparently written over Whatsapp, and it certainly contains all the half-baked charm of a group text thread. “I’m a swagger man/Rolling in my swagger van/From the People’s Republic Of Swaggerstan,” she begins, extremely inauspiciously. It’s the forgivable brick from someone with a history of lyrics that are at the very least provocative or allusive. But this specific brand of poor writing haunts the album. In “Bird Song,” her avian puns are grating: “I believe like R. Kelly, we can fly/But toucan fly together/Staying rich like an ostrich.” Her voice seems flatter, inelastic, and without her early inventiveness.
At the same time, *AIM *isn’t saved by some world-beating or state-of-the-art production. Neither M.I.A. nor or her collaborators (including Skrillex and longtime producer Blaqstarr) come close to the vibrancy of her previous work. Take “Foreign Friend,” with its half-hearted drum beat, sleepy progression, and clunky construction. Its pallid form turns the song’s sharp narrative about cultural assimilation into a trying slog. This has never been a problem with her music before—even when it didn't work, it was wild and freewheeling, intelligently and deftly compacting rhythms from around the world under a single flag.
But these songs are diffuse, thin on hooks, and often recycle through old warhorses of polyrhythmic percussion and splattered sampling. It’s telling that “Visa” samples her debut single “Galang” in its back half. It creates a bizarre effect, like listening to M.I.A. do karaoke over her own music. “Visa” also heavily references—almost eulogizes—her past work (“They call me Arular, trendsetter, making life feel better/Breaking order like a leader now follow”). It’s as if she is well aware of how newness has escaped her, as much she feels it has escaped the world at large. This recursive comment would work better if the album were explicitly framed as a referendum on her career up to this point: the boredom and frustration of the present as an endless reflection of the past. Instead, whatever grand vision *AIM *is hoping for becomes muddled. While the highlights offer glimmers of hope, like “Ali R U OK”—an incisive narrative about capitalism’s degradation of immigrant hustle—*AIM *is in desperate need of a clear identity or throughline.
Diplo once said, “Albums now are a hit song and 11 other songs that are attached to it.” “Borders” will live on as one of many crown jewels in some future retrospective of M.I.A.’s music, but AIM is otherwise her dullest album. For all the accusations that she’s been blithe, unaware, or plain reckless with her messaging, there has never been a more crucial time for pop music that wrestles with globalization, transnational suffering, and the plight of immigrants. While she may never have been the most articulate and thoughtful messenger, in *AIM, *M.I.A. demonstrates her legacy as an artist eager to tackle issues that are volatile and antagonistic. But at this point her music is more potent in theory than execution.


On their fourth album, Parquet Courts enlist Danger Mouse to produce an album of joyfully absurd, danceable rock music. It is straightforward but alien, simple but endlessly referential.

Wide Awake!

As familiar as they seem (four white guys, guitars), Parquet Courts don’t have many peers. Their music is both passionate and removed, rock not as a vehicle of emotional release but the simple venting of calories. Over the course of six albums, the band has explored a sound rooted in punk and early-’70s art rock that relies on the past without seeming sentimental about it. Even their romantic material is prickly, hug-proof, more occupied by the anxiety of having feelings than the relief of surrendering to them. They are a rock band refreshingly unconcerned with what it might mean to be a rock band. Like the restless minds whose contours they mirror, a good Parquet Courts song is neither happy nor sad so much as stupidly, consumingly alive.
Their last album, 2016’s Human Performance, sounded like the work of serious young men exploring their seriousness, an outlaw vision of inner journeys and crumbling connections. Three of the band’s members had hit 30, an age at which some are struck by the delusion that they have figured out something essential about the universe. Parts of it sounded like the Velvet Underground, even Bob Dylan. But Wide Awake! marks the moment when the false wisdom subsides and one is left to concede that life is shaping up to last a long-ass time whether you know anything about it or not. One of the band’s singers, Andrew Savage, recently described it as an attempt to make a punk record you could put on at parties, the presumption being that even earnest people need space to act dumb. Parts of it remind me of “Louie Louie”; my favorite song on it is called “Freebird II.”
The album was produced by Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, whose recent clients have included Red Hot Chili Peppers, U2, the Black Keys, A$AP Rocky, and a variety of other artists with whom Parquet Courts do not seem in league. Burton compresses the band into a kind of cartoon: blunt, cranked-up, surface-oriented. The album’s punky songs (“Total Football,” “Freebird II,” “Almost Had to Start a Fight/In and Out of Patience”) are about 80 percent yelling and feature fake crowd noise; its pretty ones (“Mardi Gras Beads,” “Death Will Bring Change,” both written by co-frontman Austin Brown) seem to have been run through a Japanese photo booth, saturated with sparkles. These are not actual moods, but the idea of moods, outsized and distorted. Savage in particular often sounds like he is drowning in words, or needs the assistance of a fire department.
The shift is natural. Despite their garage-rock overtones, Parquet Courts have always been a band about artifice, about pushing sounds to the point of hyperbole. Not the Velvet Underground, but Roxy Music, Devo, bands that presented their music less as a naturally occurring substance than the product of design, straightforward but alien, simple but endlessly referential. As with Human Performance, the broad strokes of Wide Awake! are familiar but the details are often excitingly out of place: the G-funk breakdown on “Violence,” the ’70s variety-show groove halfway through “Normalization,” the pub-rock piano on “Tenderness.” The band is moving rapidly toward a magic zone in which their sound is defined as whatever they happen to be playing at the moment, a unity achieved by attitude instead of style.
One gets high on this much past. I can’t listen to the gang choruses of “Before the Water Gets Too High” without thinking about Houston but also New Orleans, about rising water as a symbol not only of environmental catastrophe, but the sustained indifference America shows to its poor. Or Savage screaming about why society can’t afford to close an open casket on “Violence” without thinking not only of Freddie Gray in 2015 but Emmett Till 60 years earlier.
As metaphors, these are perfect: clear, precise, and yet invisible. For all of Savage’s sloganeering (part Soviet propaganda, part Barbara Kruger) there is something almost delicate about these turns, how he puts you in the mind of broader narratives without rubbing your face in them. One of the album’s most boldface lines—“What is an up-and-coming neighborhood and where is it coming from?,” screamed halfway through “Violence”—is as applicable to New York in 2018 as it was about 25 years earlier, when the New York Times declared that gentrification in the city was dead. If Wide Awake! does have a more abstract resonance, it’s somewhere in there: An experience of the past as not only alive but continuous, uncontainable, something we’d have an easier time handling if it ever seemed to stop.
At the heart of the album is a tension between the individual and the group, between the angst of freedom and the lull of dependence. Take “Freebird II,” a song Savage wrote about his mother, who struggles with homelessness and substance abuse. The music is celebratory, extroverted—less the sound of a son mourning than spring pledges hosing each other down with beer. On the song’s last line—“I feel free like you promised I’d be”—Savage is joined by a gang chorus, a dozen people shouting in barroom singalong. The paradox is simple but effective: Sometimes we feel closest to people in the moment we let them go.
By contrast, the album’s dreamiest, most internal-sounding song is “Mardi Gras Beads,” which lingers on the image of someone floating through the crowd, beads around their neck, surrounded by people but lost in a daydream. It makes sense that the band’s foundation is punk: No other style has struggled harder to reconcile the promise of community with the burning need to go it alone.
The tension is resolved, at least momentarily, on the album’s last song, “Tenderness.” As punctuation, it arrives as a sigh—warm, catchy, off its guard, everything the band ordinarily isn’t. “Nothing reminds the mind of power like the cheap odor of plastic/Leaking fumes we crave, consume, the rush it feels fantastic,” Savage sings, his voice hoarse and exhausted. “But like power turns to mold, like a junkie going cold, I need the fix of a little tenderness.” You can almost hear him ripping away from the hug, then turning reluctantly back.


After Ash Ra Tempel dissolved in the mid-’70s, the krautrock band’s leader Manuel Göttsching explored ambiance and minimalism. Improvised at home in an hour, E2-E4 became an electronic music landmark.

E2-E4

Some classic albums have origin stories that threaten to eclipse the music itself. My Bloody Valentine almost bankrupted Creation over Loveless. Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska was just a cassette demo that he carried around in his pocket before deciding to release it. Brian Wilson’s inability to finish SMiLE caused him a mental breakdown. Add to these E2-E4, the marvelous extended electronic work by Manuel Göttsching, former leader of the key krautrock band Ash Ra Tempel.
After the dissolution of Ash Ra Tempel in the mid-’70s, Göttsching began working solo as Ashra, moving away from his earlier band’s wooly psychedelic rock and toward structures based on ambiance and his interest in Terry Riley-style minimalism. Both the trance-inducing repetition of 1975’s Inventions for Electric Guitar and the softer drones of 1976’s New Age of Earth showed his mastery of these forms, and he would build on them. In December 1981, having just returned from a tour with his friend Klaus Schulze, Göttsching was alone in his home studio and decided to create an improvised piece as an exercise, and also to give himself a tape to listen to on an upcoming trip. Moving between his battery of synthesizers and sequencing devices, he settled on a gentle two-chord vamp on his Prophet 10, to which he added an array of pinging electronic percussion and simple melodic figures. And over the second half of the piece, he laid down an extended guitar solo. Cut live without overdubs in a single hour, E2-E4 became, upon its eventual release in 1984, an electronic music landmark.
E2-E4 has an elusive appeal, one that is mysterious even to its maker. In 1981 and ’82, Göttsching was partway through planning a new solo album—it was quite complicated, with different sections and laborious themes. He wasn’t sure what to do with this new music, which came so easily. By 1981, Göttsching had made many pieces at home on his own for many purposes, but this one was lightning in a bottle. Like the longjumper Bob Beamon—whose one perfect jump at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics set a world record that he never came close to reaching before or since—Göttsching puzzled over his flawless moment. He listened to his creation over and over, trying to figure out why it worked so well, looking for some reason it wasn’t as good as it seemed. But he was at a loss. There were no mistakes, no incomplete ideas. It wasn’t too loud or too soft or too derivative. For one magic hour, the perfectly realized music floats in space, inviting listeners to admire it from the outside and then dance within it.
There are two things to hear in E2-E4: what the music is, and what the ideas within it would become. It’s sublime as a present-moment listening experience, with beautiful textures and a glorious symmetry. E2-E4 is like one long pop song stretched over 60 minutes, which is to say it’s sort of like its own DJ set. It plays with pop structures, but on a much larger canvas—a change that might last for a few bars in a pop single might last, here, for four minutes. At the 23-minute mark, there’s a several-minutes-long section where Göttsching starts flanging the tones and it feels something like dub; it’s kind of like a bridge. At the 3:35 mark, a pinging melody first enters, and that feels like a verse. As with many pop songs, there is an instrumental break, and in this case, it’s a guitar solo that lasts for a full album side. Göttsching vibrates with his riff in harmony, winding out fluid lines in the middle register that function as a rhythmic counterpoint and shifting melody simultaneously.
If three chords form the skeleton of punk, then two chords are the soul of techno, the minimum the music can move and still be changing. Göttsching’s guitar solo is reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, with its clean but expressive tone that mixes a touch of jazz and blues with a more free-floating pointillist psychedelia. And Göttsching’s guitar work highlights one of E2-E4’s most appealing qualities: that the music sits precisely at the point where the human meets the machine. The great bulk of the music is synthesized and sequenced, a Rube Goldberg-like device that winds through pre-programmed sections, but when his guitar enters, we hear the touch of a musician brought up playing classical music on nylon strings. The human hand and the circuits also switch roles, though. If the warm tone of the machines can feel almost human, like an invitation—a friendly and welcoming sound perfect for the communion of the dancefloor—Göttsching’s tightly controlled guitar work sometimes has a mechanical quality, existing in clear relation to the sequencer’s grid.
So that’s the music as it plays. But for those interested in the larger sweep of history, it’s impossible not to listen and hear how ahead of its time this record was. Simply put, E2-E4 sounds a great deal like techno would when it emerged roughly a decade later, and it came from someone with no interest in dance music. As he was contemplating releasing E2-E4, Göttsching visited Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Records, his then-current label, on Branson’s houseboat in order to play him the tape. In a beautifully told story from the liner notes of this reissue, Göttsching says that Branson was rocking his baby in his arms as the tape played, an apt image given the gentle undulations of the chords. “Manuel, you could make a fortune with this music,” Göttsching quotes Branson as saying, and indeed, a fortune would be made from the ideas found on E2-E4. But Göttsching wouldn’t be the one to collect it. Göttsching eventually issued E2-E4 in 1984 on Klaus Schulze’s label, and it didn’t sell well, moving only a few thousand copies. But a handful of those wound up in the right hands.
E2-E4 is also the story of formats. When Göttsching first contemplated releasing it, he realized that its 58-minute length presented difficulties. It was conceived as a single flowing piece, but an hour was generally considered too long even for a single LP, if one wants it to sound good. A skilled disc cutter was able to get a 30+ minute side down in 1984, and thanks to the record’s popularity in clubs, it still feels like a vinyl artifact. Which is one reason this exceptionally well-done reissue is so welcome. Great care was taken in getting the cut right. The 31-minute side, though at a relatively low volume, is clean and clear, even in the inner grooves. One could argue that a seamless digital version of the piece is the “real” version, but if vinyl was good enough for Larry Levan—who, unbeknownst to Göttsching, made the record a regular part of his sets for a time at the Paradise Garage—it’s good enough for me.
The music’s reputation in dance music circles reached a peak when three Italo producers approached him about re-working the tune for a dance music 12” in 1989. That record, released under the name “Sueño Latino,” turned out to be an international hit, and a 1992 remix from Detroit producer Derrick May brought the music full circle. Which gets back to one of E2-E4’s essential qualities: cut in a single hour, it wound its way across the world, morphing and changing with formats and remixes, finding new contexts, a music that is constantly in the process of becoming.


J.G. Biberkopf's Ecologies II: Ecosystems of Excess is an often fascinating record of music that sits between the club, gallery, and lecture hall. It stumbles most when it sounds like the last.

J.G. Biberkopf: Ecologies II: Ecosystems of Excess

Ecologies II: Ecosystems of Excess

Jacques Gaspard Biberkopf makes music for turbulent times. A Lithuanian producer with roots in Berlin’s club underground, his music—a liquid, digital audio collage of distressed electronics and manipulated field recordings—suits a world buffeted by technological disruption and tidal waves of capital. It isn’t dance music, exactly—too abstract, too spacious. But Biberkopf works with the club in mind, such spaces being, as he told FACT, “a total, immersive environment, rather than a stage with a predefined fourth wall.” Like, say, Hyperdub boss Kode9 or the Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey, Biberkopf straddles the worlds of dance music, art practice and academic theory, in search of something profound or meaningful to say about the times in which we live.
Ecologies II: Ecosystems of Excess is a sequel to his 2015 EP Ecologies, and continues with many of its themes. This is a sort of speculative fiction in sound, dealing with the dawning of the Anthropocene, defined by scholars as the epoch of humankind: one of mass extinction, climate change, deforestation, oceans choked with plastic. Biberkopf is into collapsing boundaries—between the real and the virtual, the organic and synthetic, the gallery and the club. At times, Ecosystems of Excess gestures towards dance music: see the pulsating trance synths that cut through “Transfiguration I: Enlightenment”; or “New World Order,” with its thudding, pressurized beats and flicking halogen hats. Elsewhere, it feels like a 2016 update of music concrete, as pioneered by figures like Bernard Parmegiani or Pierre Schaeffer. Processed electronics intermingle with heavily treated field recordings, tracks stretch out into protracted drones or twitch with sudden jump-cuts, and everything collapses into texture.
The influence of critical theory and contemporary art runs throughout the record. The titles here—“Technocracy,” “Wetware,” “Eruption of the Amorphous”—gesture to sci-fi and cyberpunk, or resemble chapter headings plucked from an ambitious philosophy Ph.D dissertation. The LP, meanwhile comes packaged with an art book by the design studio Maximage, in which surreal landscapes are overlaid with an essay by the writer Deforrest Brown Jr. that blurs the edges between academic theory and avant-garde poetry.
This aesthetic is echoed in the music, which appears to resist clear interpretation. On “Eruption of the Amorphous,” voice software recites hollow platitudes. In the depths of “From Infinity To Here,” you can discern snatches of narrative—the splash of water, the rattle of a subway car, distant sobbing—but try to piece it together and you end up lost. The best moments here are those that set out to fool the ear. “Preacher” samples an African-American minister and makes him sound like a vein-popping MC of the Def Jux school. “Realer Than Real,” meanwhile, employs that common trope of 21st Century club music: the crack of gunshots. In a moment of pleasing absurdity, though, it chooses to blend it with the sound of panicking geese and cocktail jazz piano.
Like recent records by Rabit and the Haxan Cloak, Ecosystems of Excess feels very tactile: you feel it as much as hear it. But its tone of high academic seriousness is something of a stumbling block. An artist like Holly Herndon works with similar conceptual ideas, but makes them feel like a playground, not a lecture. Ecosystems of Excess can be formally daring and grimly thrilling in its bold, dystopian vision. But it can feel rather enervating, inducing a sense of paralysis and alienation. Right now, just a glimpse of the way forward would be very welcome.


ZZ Top’s 1973 breakthrough was a masterful melding of complementary styles, cramming Southern rock and blues boogie through the band’s own idiosyncratic filter.

Tres Hombres

“Billy Gibbons’ guitar sound isn’t the way it is because he uses a quarter as a pick or anything as simple as that; it’s because he’s in touch with a different sector of the cosmos that we know nothing about.” So said experimental noise musician Kevin Drumm, in a 2003 interview with Pitchfork. You can also find message boards arguing whether Gibbons actually uses a peso for a pick instead. But when it comes to testimony from the lanky ZZ Top frontman himself, the truth always comes with a side of Texas Tall Tale. This is a band that splashed around in a bayou near Houston’s upscale Tanglewood subdivision on their second album and called it Rio Grande Mud—from the start, they mastered image and mystique. Take the band name itself: the trio of guitarist Gibbons, bassist Dusty Hill, and drummer Frank Beard either pays homage to their Southern blues heritage (combining B.B. King and Z.Z. Hill) or else a “green” heritage (combining two brands of rolling papers); the story remains slippery, eons later.
Such elusiveness has served the band well, allowed a late-’60s blues-rock dinosaur to survive and thrive well into the 1970s and then on into the MTV decade, so that their contemporaries went from Jimi Hendrix to Michael Jackson, from Molly Hatchet to Madonna. Or as their longtime roadie David Blayney’s put it in his 1994 book Sharp-Dressed Men— “the band with the midnight shades, the Father Time beards and the pile-driver counterpoint…to many lovers of rock, it’s like they have always been there.”
How does a band that rose to success along with Southern rock and the urban cowboy archetype outlast the trends and become a paradigm of cool for the likes of hardcore punks Steve Albini and Black Flag, Chicagoans Kevin Drumm and Tortoise, a group referenced by avant-guitar weirdoes and wankers alike? How did that self-proclaimed “little ol’ band from Texas” break concert attendance records and come to signify the cosmos? It sure wouldn’t have happened based on ZZ Top’s first two records, which are full of muddy production, slapdash songs (outside of a few highlights), and licks by turns stinging and sloppy, as if summoned from a late ‘60s British blues-rock power-trio hangover. No, the answer can be found on their third album, 1973’s Tres Hombres.
Early ZZ Top shows had them performing to exactly an audience of one (as in 1970, when they played the National Guard Armory in Alvin, Texas, and Gibbons bought the guy there a Coke at intermission to make sure he stuck around the for the second set), but a relentless touring schedule put them before plenty of ears in the early part of the ’70s. They shared bills with Uriah Heep, King Crimson, Brian Auguer’s Oblivion Express, Earth Wind & Fire, and African funk band Osibisa, as well as Cheech & Chong. But, as Blayney recalled, an early gig with the Allman Brothers Band was the real catalyst: “[Duane] Allman’s guitar technique seriously influenced Billy Gibbons…he slowed down a touch, became more precise in his fretting, played fewer but tastier notes.” Quarter, peso, or regular pick in his palm, Gibbons’s right hand grew ascendant.
Had the band simply returned to a cinder block studio in Tyler, Texas, where they cut their first two albums, that sort of tone might have never been clarified. But thanks to bigger shows and higher placement on the marquee, ZZ Top’s notorious manager Bill Ham afforded them the luxury of traveling to Memphis to record in a real studio, the legendary Ardent, where Isaac Hayes cut Hot Buttered Soul, Led Zeppelin mixed III, and Big Star recorded their star-crossed albums. Working with engineer Terry Manning (the start of a relationship between band and engineer that would stretch into the ’90s), ZZ Top finally put the band’s deceptively simple tone down to tape.
Tres Hombres is a top sirloin steak of an album, lean yet beefy, not a trace of gristle to be had on 10 songs that clock in just over 33 minutes. It twines together both the Texas blues and its hard-rocking British variant, with Gibbons taking cues from the likes of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green. But it also stakes out its own ground. The record struck a nerve with metalheads and punks, prog-rockers and hipsters. In its songs, tales of highway succubuses and Greyhounds abound, the supernatural mingling with the folksy, Jesus with good ol’ boy ghosts.
The end result changed the ZZ Top’s fortunes forever, even if the initial critical response was muted. NME found the songs “virtually indistinguishable, the lyrics unmemorable.” Rolling Stone said they were “only one of several competent Southern rocking bands.” Tres Hombres nevertheless went Top 10, hung out on the charts for 81 weeks, and gave them their first gold record, even though the album’s lone single, “La Grange,” broke down just outside the Top 40. ZZ Top would forever sound like a Texas roadhouse blues band, even as they now filled stadiums.
In hindsight, it’s hard to fathom American rock culture without Gibbons’s lecherous "har-har-har," much less the opening one-two of “Waitin’ for the Bus” and “Jesus Just Left Chicago.” The latter pair was foundational for classic rock radio’s Twofer Tuesdays (along with Zep’s “Heartbreaker” and “Living Loving Maid” and the Rolling Stones’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” and “It’s Only Rock’N’Roll”), in which two songs began to be thought of as one. That opening hiccup of snare, bass drum, closed hi-hat, and the three-chord lick of “Waitin’ for the Bus” has the kick of a flank-strapped bull, the crunch of a crushed beer can, and the tang of sauce-slathered beef ribs. Featuring Gibbons’s dual turns on both harmonica and wah-wah guitar, and boasting a boogie rock strut, “Bus” has a blues structure lyrically and thematically, its narrator singing with a paper bag in hand and dreaming of a gleaming Cadillac instead of public transport. Said “Bus” then rear-ends right into “Jesus Just Left Chicago.”
The latter is a slower 12-bar blues with added measures that pits Gibbons’s trembling nasal sneer against the lurch of the rhythm section. His clean, chiming tones on his sunburst 1959 Les Paul (an instrument he called Mistress Pearly Gates) drift across the song like buzzard down. Gibbons even slips in and elongates the country blues lick from Robert Johnson’s "Love in Vain" for good measure. Thanks to a tape-splicing mishap, there’s almost no space between the two songs, and the happy accident means one tune in 4/4 and one in 6/8 serve as conjoined twins. The band has had the “Bus Jesus” pairing on their setlists ever since.
No song better defines the ZZ Top crowd’s aesthetic than “Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers,” and it’s also the tune that’s been covered by the most baffling array of acts, ranging from Motörhead to Van Halen to Coheed and Cambria. It all but certifies the band’s shit-kicker credentials, right down to the “can of dinner” boast. And the original album’s inner sleeve verifies that with 13 photos of peculiar small-town characters that seem pulled from the song—there are fields of oil derricks and mariachi bands in roadhouse bars, longhairs and good ol’ boys downing Schlitz.
Speaking of Tres Hombres and its visuals, the LP’s centerpiece is pretty much the pinnacle of the album-gatefold-as-artwork, opening to reveal an aorta-plugging spread of Tex-Mex courtesy of Leo’s Mexican Restaurant on Lower Westheimer in Houston. The going rate at the time for the meal depicted at the center of Tres Hombres was $2.99, and it came out of brainstorming session the band had with longtime artist Bill Narum, responsible for drawing freehand the band’s early album covers. “We talked about how the album was once again a return the brotherhood of the Texas border and threw around some ideas to reflect that,” Gibbons recalled in an interview. Narum stepped out and returned with the meal, which, rather than being shot at Leo’s, was instead set up at photographer Galen Scott’s studio, along with a bottle of the Howard Hughes-brewed Southern Select beer and an antique radio tuned to 1570 on the AM dial, a Mexican clear-channel station that could be picked up in the States. It’s the station the band would immortalize in 1975 with “Heard it on the X.” And the photo almost didn’t happen: when they took a break during the shoot, Scott’s German shepherd hopped up on the table and wolfed down the entire platter.
A peculiar figure named R&B Junior serves as an inspiration for “Master of Sparks.” As Gibbons recollected to the Houston Chronicle: “[R&B Junior’s] family had a spread outside town with a ranch-hand on hire who was a talented welder. We got together to construct a steel caged ball, complete with escape door and a surplus pilot’s seat. We figured that chaining this ball up and rolling off the back of a truck would provide a thrill. At 60 miles an hour, that thing would spark up the night sky like nobody’s business.” A sly shift in perspective at song’s end reveals that the narrator in the song burns to a crisp amid the highway flares, meaning that one of the heaviest songs in the ZZ Top catalog is narrated by a dead man.
That line between reality and fantasy might be stretched thinnest on the band’s most infamous track, “La Grange.” It was named for a small Texas town that boasted a destination called Chicken Ranch, a local institution since the 19th Century. “La Grange” paid tribute to what would later be called “the best little whorehouse in Texas,” though said house was shuttered the same year that Tres Hombres arrived. The song has since ubiquitous across American culture. You can hear its nimble, clacking shuffle (equal parts John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillun” and Slim Harpo’s “Shake Your Hips”) on everything from Striptease, Armageddon and Dogtown and Z-Boys to remakes of “The Dukes of Hazzard” and Walking Tall. It was the entrance music for Texas wrestling royalty the Von Erich brothers. In the 40 years since its release, “La Grange” has been in commercials for motorcycle insurance, Wrangler jeans, and NASCAR. But Gibbons is a sly one, hmmming and hawing as he spreads a rumor and then interjects, “But now I might be mistaken.”
Take ZZ Top at beard value and you might miss the wink going on behind the cheap sunglasses. Or mistake them for any other Southern rock band. Jon Tiven’s assessment of the group in 1976 is most revealing in that regard. “On stage they look like nothing other than a bunch of dumb shits from Texas, three boys who just walked off the set of “Bonanza” and are heading out after the show to eat three sirloins apiece,” he quips. But as the story progresses, Tiven’s first impression falters. Gibbons opens up to talk about mandala formulas, meditation, Rastafarian cults (Gibbons was an early fan of the Wailers), and how to “impart a consciousness which will elevate the listener.” Perhaps that Tex-Mex spread from Leo’s really does contain the body and blood of Jesus, and maybe there is a stretch of Texas highway that leads to a different sector of the cosmos.


On his second album produced by Steve Gunn, the underground folk icon sings about age and regret with authority and grace.

True North

The British folk guitarist Michael Chapman has spent at least half a century writing and singing about age, regret, and longing. On “An Old Man Remembers,” from his third album, 1970’s Window, he presciently offers, “An old man is lost in his dreams/As he waits for the fruit of his schemes.” Even then, young Chapman sensed the span of time—how quickly the present morphs into past, how laden it becomes with memories. Now, at 78, he’s caught up in number to the old soul he’s often inhabited in song.
True North is Chapman’s second consecutive project with stylistic and spiritual descendent Steve Gunn. Chapman dubbed their first collaboration, 2017’s 50, his “American” album, because he recorded it with the likes of James Elkington and Nathan Bowles. For True North, Chapman sticks closer to home, gathering with Gunn,  cellist Sarah Smout, and pedal steel legend BJ Cole at Mwnci Studios in West Wales. The precipitous landscape serves as a fitting platform for subtly psychedelic exploration and deep reflection. In fact, True North situates four new tracks among updates of Chapman’s older, more obscure material. He gives himself over to memory’s full sway, until the project feels a little like thumbing through a souvenir album, Chapman singing about the postcards that help remind him of places held dear.
Chapman catalogs two such spots with the new instrumentals “Eleuthera” and “Caddo Lake.” Named after the Caribbean island where Chapman likes to vacation, “Eleuthera” begins with the exchange of cerulean blues for lingering grays. Chapman’s phrasing is pensive, but Cole’s pedal steel softens the brooding. Sounding at first like a soft flute, Cole wends his instrument so deftly that it practically becomes the deep breaths Chapman takes between his fingerpicked phrases. “Caddo Lake” is another waterscape homage, equal parts meditative and meandering, thanks in part to Smout’s cascading timbre. These are less homages than mementos, as though Chapman can carry them easier in his mind by freeze-framing them in song.
A loquacious player, Chapman’s fingers often fly at the pace of thought. He taught himself to play guitar by listening to the likes of Django Reinhardt and Wes Montgomery and even trying to replicate the sound of two guitarists on a record at once. He eases back on True North, working from a kind of muscle memory. “I like to think these days I play more atmospheric guitar than technical guitar,” he’s said. True North’s opening track, “It’s Too Late,” feels more than it sounds, its arrangement brimming with anguished sustain. Chapman’s starched voice bemoans the trick time played on him. “I never knew I wanted you until it was too late,” he sings.
At Chapman’s age, the impetus to look back necessitates a looming finality; in response, he oscillates between bouts of melancholy and tranquility. On “Full Bottle, Empty Heart,” he plays his guitar ponderously, spaciously. But his phrasing turns somber as he confesses, “I never minded all the miles/Seems like I was born to roam/But I just wish you’d walk right in, and take this roamer home.” The earthy voice of fellow British folk icon Bridget St. John underscores the heavy reality of the line, “I got nothing more to give.” The sentiment returns on “Youth Is Wasted on the Young,” originally collected for an archive of Chapman’s assorted castoffs. Here, it’s restrained to the point of being sparse, as if the interim threw the credo into relief.
Rather than end on this dark note, Chapman lets loose on the jaunty, acoustic “Bon Ton Roolay,” originally recorded live for 2015’s Journeyman. The song shifts the Cajun phrase “Laissez les bon temps rouler” into a Haltwhistle dialect, as Chapman joked during the earlier live take. Delivered as an enthusiastic solo number, Chapman gives over to the moment—the best way to enjoy time’s ceaseless progression. His laughter comes unexpectedly, presenting a happier message than True North’s other meditations on life and what’s left of it: The journey goes fast, so find jubilation where and when you can.


Five years after the moody Wincing the Night Away and two releases by his Broken Bells project, James Mercer returns to the Shins energized and with his songwriting prowess intact.

Port of Morrow

The Sopranos ended. The United States elected an African-American president. The global financial system more or less keeled over. The U.S. stopped sending people into space and "got" Osama Bin Laden, both in the same year. Harry Potter peaced out-- twice. Zach Braff's career shit the bed. Martin Scorcese won an Oscar, finally. Jeff Mangum returned. R.E.M., LCD Soundsystem, the White Stripes-- called it quits, all of 'em. Michael Jackson died, and so did Whitney Houston. Pop music headed out to the club, mainstream hip-hop more or less went bust, people started buying more vinyl (and, to a lesser extent, cassettes), and "indie" culture traded its guitars for turntables (or, at the very least, pirated audio software and synthesizers that didn't take up too much space in the bedroom).
A lot can happen in five years, the amount of time since the Shins released their last album, the eclectic and overlooked Wincing the Night Away. During that stretch, the band's primary songwriter and sole constant member, James Mercer, also went digital. In 2010, he teamed up with Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton to form Broken Bells, a collaboration that has led to an album and an EP, both of which were light on things like "songs" and "choruses." The problem with Broken Bells is that it took up so much of Mercer's time and didn't provide a proper outlet for one of big-tent indie pop's strongest songwriters. For a few years, the idea of a new (never mind good) Shins album seemed unlikely. Mercer sounded hopelessly adrift.
A deep breath, then: James Mercer has returned to Earth. Port of Morrow, the Shins' fourth studio album in 11 years, is a triumphant return from a project that once risked being reduced to an indie-went-mainstream tagline. It's the perfect distillation of the Shins' back catalog-- the jangly, wistful airs of Oh, Inverted World, Chutes Too Narrow's genre-resistant playfulness, Wincing the Night Away's expansively detailed production. But in other ways, its colorful, detail-oriented approach sets it apart from anything Mercer's done before.
Mercer invited a cast of characters both new (Janet Weiss, production wiz Greg Kurstin, singer/songwriter Nik Freitas) and old (Modest Mouse's Joe Plummer, Fruit Bats' Eric D. Johnson, on-and-off supporting players Marty Crandall and Dave Hernandez) to realize his ornate pop-rock creations. All contributions are felt-- you don't need liner notes to tell how many people worked on this thing-- but none more so than Kurstin's. His multi-instrumental arrangements and behind-the-boards know-how are what make Port of Morrow one of 2012's best-sounding records thus far. Every element here is tricked out for maximum emotional effect-- experience total power-pop pleasure overload from "Simple Song"'s acrobatic pile of guitars, get the chills from the drifting sea breeze-echo of "September", and wrap yourself in "For a Fool"'s string-laden lushness. Needless to say, these songs would sound great on Natalie Portman's humongous headphones.
Of course, Kurstin wouldn't matter if the raw materials weren't so strong: Mercer (who also co-produced) delivers the goods, mostly by being himself. He's either missed out on the last few years of indie's ever-shifting microtrends or simply doesn't care about "the conversation." And thank fucking god for that. More so than any other Shins album, Port of Morrow doesn't sound like it belongs to any particular decade or style, instead hopping around like some fully loaded AM radio dial that cranks out gem after gem. There's the sugary new-wave "Bait and Switch", "No Way Down"'s meat-and-potatoes American pop-rock (right down to the "Jack & Diane"-biting guitar hook), the title track's creeping psych-soul bombast. Most surprisingly, there's "Fall of '82", a Steve Miller Band-meets-Chicago lite-rock hybrid-- muted trumpet solo!-- that also works as a "Summer of '69" update. (These are all good things.)
Lyrically, I've always thought of James Mercer as a cousin of A.C. Newman, another songwriter with a gift for spinning gold from the sounds from the past. Newman's never been shy about writing kinda-nonsensical lyrics that simply sound good accompanying a solid melody (think "Sing Me Spanish Techno", or "Submarines of Stockholm"). Although Wincing the Night Away had dark undertones drawn from Mercer's personal life, he's got a similar knack for writing beautiful words that don't need to mean anything in particular. Along with its other strong points, Port of Morrow proves he hasn't lost that talent, especially when rhapsodizing on matters of the heart. "Simple Song" and "Fall of '82" score points for sharp, nostalgic description, but "September" is the real winner, a straightforward stunner of stumbling affection with a shining pearl of a couplet buried within: "Love is the ink in the well/ When her body writes."
Despite all the hullabaloo about band members getting "fired," the fact is that Mercer isn't a member of the Shins-- he is the Shins, and he always has been. In a recent interview, he expressed his frustration over how to represent that specificity: "Bands I really loved were these auteurs who presented themselves as bands-- Neutral Milk Hotel, the Lilys-- and I just felt, 'Why am I not allowed to do that?'" Consider Port of Morrow, then, the results of an auteur's accepting that role while having a load of fun with his friends in order to realize it. Comeback stories don't get much better than that.


On his third release as the genre-bending alter ego Diane Coffee, Shaun Fleming explores the trap of online intimacy.

Internet Arms

Internet Arms is Shaun Fleming’s third release as the genre-bending alter ego Diane Coffee. The former Foxygen drummer is concerned with digital intimacy—the unbounded sharing that we do under social media’s watchful eye. That’s rich, raw material, and out of it, Fleming is sometimes able to spin a luminous and insightful song. On the title track, he paints the internet as a toxic lover blackmailing you into staying put—“I've got memory of all your history,” he taunts. It’s a far-flung idea—the internet as manipulative partner—made hauntingly realistic by Fleming's insightful characterization.
If only the album were made of more moments like these. But just as often, Fleming veers into pop sloganeering that has nothing to do with his theme. On the pulsing synth-rock opener “Not Ready to Go,”  Fleming describes a situation worth walking away from —“Holding onto someone who’s giving you next to nothing”—his voice nearly breaking in the upper heights of his impressive range. It’s a sharp song, and on this and a few others (“Like a Child Does,” “Stuck in Your Saturday Night”), he successfully follows the map drawn by pop pioneer Robyn and used by other smart synth-pop acts like Christine and the Queens. These new inspirations guide Fleming into more promising territory than the glam-rock cos-play of Everybody’s a Good Dog. But they provide no real insight into intimacy, digital or otherwise.
Elsewhere, he falls back impressions of late ‘70s icons. On “Work It” Fleming borrows the *Stop Making Sense-*era yelps of David Byrne to bark commands at the listener: “You better take it, get it while the getting good,” followed by a triplet of phoned-in encouragement, “It’s worth it, you’ve earned it, just work it.” On the next song, “Good Luck,” Fleming cuts into his own encouraging words with “You won't get far if you're only working hard, here in America.” The vaudevillian instrumentation adds a cheery dash of nihilism, as do the flourishes that unexpectedly push the song into rock opera land (Fleming recently played King Herod in the Signature Theater’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar).
Fleming’s flair for the dramatic sometimes pushes into overdrive, replacing incisive writing with tricks. “Simulation,” “Lights Off,” and “Internet Arms” rely too heavily on digital manipulation to make their points, trying to coerce insight and meaning from Pro Tools plug-ins instead of incisive writing.  Roboticizing his voice to intone “Ain't no problems in my simulation/A state of vegetation/In my personal isolation/Ain't no worries in my simulation” is affect overkill and doesn’t help answer the question he lays out later on in the lyrics — “Who am I without my simulation?”
Ultimately, Fleming doesn’t venture far enough into what disturbs him about our hyper-connected lives to come out of the other side of it with something interesting to say. Ignoring the wisdom in the old expression “The only way out is through,” a distracted Fleming instead attempts to circumnavigate his anxiety about the internet and observe it from the sidelines. He raises questions he doesn’t bother trying to answer and fails to address the many ways we empower online inauthenticity simply by being online and maintaining social media accounts. Addressing those hypocrisies would’ve made for a richer album.  As it is, Fleming substitutes theatrics for insight.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the stellar rise of Miranda Lambert with her second album, one that laid the groundwork for an artist destined for country superstardom.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Miranda Lambert will not tolerate beach balls at her shows. She has her reasons. The finer points change with each retelling, but here’s the gist: She’s opening for Kenny Chesney somewhere in Pennsylvania—“No beach close to here, not even a grain of sand,” she recalls—when someone in the audience lobs something buoyant and spherical toward the stage. It collides with her mic stand, busts open her lip. From that moment on, Lambert vowed to carry a small pink razor blade on stage at all times. “I’m very sorry for whoever’s ball this is,” she says in one of many videos that makes its way to YouTube in the coming years. “But it’s gonna die now.”
It’s a funny tradition—perfect fodder for radio interviews and inside jokes among fans. It also symbolizes some of the qualities that have made Lambert a proud loner in 21st-century country: how she insists on playing by her own rules, how the easy-going customs that work for, say, Kenny Chesney aren’t gonna fly for her. It also happens to be a good example of the way justice is served in her music. After all, the song she remembers singing in that moment is “More Like Her,” one of the gentler tracks on her 2007 album Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. The women who narrate its other songs take to their antagonists with firearms and vengeance; they scour parking lots looking for license plates and descend on unsuspecting creeps like brutal storms. She might sound at peace but there’s a good chance the singer of “More Like Her” was already thinking about buying that razor blade.
Lambert grew up in Lindale, Texas, a small town where her parents worked together as private investigators and eventually worked on Paula Jones’ 1997 sexual harassment case against Bill Clinton. For a few years, Lambert shared the house with women seeking refuge from abusive relationships. She heard their stories and paid close attention to how men weaponized their power, both in the private and public eye. Her memories from childhood involve frank discussions about her parents’ business—“Our dinner conversations were about divorce cases and who was cheatin’ on who,” she would reflect—and picturesque evenings on the porch with her father, perched on his lap with an acoustic guitar, singing country songs.
Lambert started writing and performing at an early age. She sang in the school choir, which didn’t exist until she petitioned to start one. When she was 18, she released a self-titled album with songs pitched between precocious breakup ballads and hometown anthems designed to get the crowd on her side at the local honky-tonks (titles include “Texas Pride” and “Texas As Hell”). She followed the album by auditioning, at the age of 19, for the USA Network’s Nashville Star, a country reboot of American Idol. She was effortlessly charming and became a fan-favorite but Lambert was playing the long game, already thinking from a business angle. “I thought if I could make it through the original song night, then I could get a publishing deal out of it,” she explained to the Dallas Morning News.
She didn’t win—she came in third—but she did make it to the original song night, where she debuted a ballad she wrote with her father called “Greyhound Bound for Nowhere.” Before her performance, she explained that people tend to not take her seriously: “I haven’t been through a lot of tough times in my life,” she concedes, noting that her songs are inspired by the stories she heard in her hometown, the people she came across, the patterns she observed—not necessarily her own experiences. “I’m gonna sing a song that’s about a woman who’s having an affair with a married person,” she says sweetly into the camera with her thick Southern drawl.
“Greyhound Bound for Nowhere” would eventually appear on Kerosene, Lambert’s 2005 major-label debut. Set to a muted Southern rock chord progression, its depictions of misery and broken dreams weren’t exactly what the suits at Epic Nashville had in mind for her. Lambert insisted on writing the album herself; they wanted a hit. They started doing what major labels do, which is supplying material written by powerhouse songwriters with proven records of chart success. Lambert knew her originals were better. “I listened to 20 songs,” she explained to Texas Monthly, “and the label people said, ‘OK, you need to say yes to at least one song, because you’re starting to hurt people’s feelings.’”
She says yes to one song. Otherwise, the album is written entirely by Lambert, although the brilliant title track—still among her signature songs—ends up with a Steve Earle writing credit due to similarities with his outlaw anthem “Feel Alright.” It’s a great record that helped cement a loyal fanbase. But the industry wasn’t totally on board. “I don’t get played a lot on country radio, and I don’t understand why,” she said to Texas Monthly, a few years later, despite the album’s extraordinary sales.
There are a few reasons. Lambert attributed her early success to songs like Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman,” a barnburner that paved the way for hits by women who didn’t follow the path of Faith Hill’s breathless love songs or Shania Twain’s arena pop crossovers. She was also influenced by the Chicks, who followed their muse past the point where country radio was willing to follow. Lambert’s songs were catchy and immediately identifiable to her audience but they owed more to the spirit of classic country than most burgeoning artists at the time. And country radio remains a tough format for women—let alone ones with mercilessly upbeat anthems about burning men’s houses down. (At the time of Kerosene’s release, the No. 1 country single was “Bless the Broken Road” by Rascal Flatts, a song that would later be covered by a contemporary Christian band who barely had to change a word.)
If Lambert felt deterred, she didn’t show it. The follow-up, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, was even more unsparing and uncompromising than Kerosene, louder and tougher. There are three cover songs, all written by women: Gillian Welch’s “Dry Town,” Patty Griffin’s “Getting Ready,” and Carlene Carter’s “Easy From Now On,” a ballad closely associated with Emmylou Harris. Most of the songs take place in the moments immediately after heartbreak, consumed by a need for revenge—“He wants a fight, well now he’s got one,” she sings, armed at the door with a shotgun—or a rebound. “I made a point of not mixin’ love and pleasure in my life,” she sings in “Guilty in Here,” pledging to stick to that divide.
Here is how Miranda Lambert’s best songs work. The verses arrive as uninterrupted trains of thought, her words flowing in a speak-sing cadence that glides through turbulent emotions and complex rhyme schemes that seem to come second-nature. She has an edge to her voice and a preference for simple, intuitive melodies that help sell ominous lines like, “Well, it’s half-past-ten, another six-pack in/And I can feel the rumble like a cold black wind.” But she also sings despairingly about more vulnerable scenes, about love letters on wet paper, leaving you to imagine the tears falling and the texture in your hand.
All this work below the surface allows her choruses to hit like exclamatory onomatopoeias in a comic book. She has a knack for catchphrases: Is it guilty in here or is it just me? He ain’t seen me crazy yet! Country music is built for hooks like these, but Lambert has a way of pacing herself, furnishing her songs subtly so that she never seems like she’s pandering. As soon as she starts railing against her ex’s current flame using a “stitch/pitch” rhyme scheme, you know where it’s going. But it’s how she gets there, the little twists in her delivery, that keep you entertained. Her songs ramp up so naturally you feel like you’re riding shotgun with her, egging her on until you’re shielding your eyes.
If this kind of writing aligned her with the outlaw country legends she was raised on, the glossy production aimed directly for radio play in the mid-2000s. These songs practically bounce from the speaker, bursting in the air like confetti. It wasn’t always to her taste. “I love raw albums,” she said. “I’d love to record an album in a garage and for it to sound like an old Gary Stewart album, without a bunch of overdubbed this and that. But when you’re in the mainstream, you’ve got to fit in. You’ve got to get your foot in the door first.”
Even as she pushed for radio play, Lambert made sure her songs had depth. In the middle of the album, her accompanists step away for a series of ballads that form the greatest work of her early career. The barroom lament of “Love Letters” showed she could write her own jukebox standards, while “Desperation,” with its gently anxious arrangement and lonesome harmonica part, proved that her stories rang true even when she lowered the stakes. “Complicated words slippin’ off of your tongue and ain’t one of them the truth,” she sings, and it’s one of the most damning accusations on a record that begins with threats of a gunfight.
While she could have spent her career racking up the body count with more songs like “Gunpowder and Lead,” her first top 10 country hit, Lambert refused to be pigeonholed. “I feel like I was getting dangerously close to being shoved in that box of ‘She’s that crazy girl who kills people in her songs,’” she confessed to The Los Angeles Times before the release of her follow-up album, Revolution, a commercial breakthrough and creative reset. In its songs, love is still full of pain and deceit and people are not to be trusted. She covered John Prine at the end of the record because she figured he’d agree with this outlook. Like Prine, she saw the span of life as ugly enough retribution. “I kill them a little more softly this time around,” is how she put it.
The success of Revolution kickstarted a prolific and fruitful decade of music. She made a full-blown country-pop blockbuster (2014’s Platinum) and that raw, live-sounding album she dreamed about (2016’s The Weight of These Wings). She was in and out of the tabloids for high-profile relationships; she has had success and failure with country radio. She started a dog sanctuary and a clothing line. She also founded the supergroup Pistol Annies with her friends Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley, a band that remains one of country music’s most reliable side projects.
She found stability, the missing thing that keeps the characters on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend in motion, the hunger that makes it sound so empowering and alive, years later. I think about “Desperation” and the last line of each chorus: “I’m still desperate for you.” Like all the songs, it’s an attempt to describe a sudden surge, a feeling at its peak. Desperation fades; anger subsides; heartbreak heals. Lambert sings knowing she’s got something up her sleeve for whatever comes next.

Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here.


Los Angeles "doom folk" singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe may white-out her eyes and show a fondness for gothic and Greek typefaces, but Apokalypsis shows there is more than meets the eye.

Apokalypsis

The image that Chelsea Wolfe projects dovetails with the general aesthetic put forth by her label, Pendu NYC. Granted, it'd take the tinniest of ears to conflate Wolfe's music with the witch-house stylings of Mater Suspiria Vision or White Ring. Also, while her music is caustic and challenging in its own way, the semi-industrial loop-heavy aTelecine runs laps around Wolfe in that department. Still, the image of her on the cover of Apokalypsis with whited-out eyes, coupled with her fondness for gothic and Greek typefaces, and choice of cover material (particularly her take on Burzum's "Black Spell of Destruction"), makes her a perfect fit for Pendu's combination of high art/fashion/horror/goth signifiers (particularly of an early-to-mid-1970s, European vintage). The first track on Apokalypsis ("Primal/Carnal") is a near-perfect apotheosis of this entire ideal, as Wolfe-- underneath a layer of static and fuzz that ages the clip by a good 20 years-- growls and gurgles like a woman literally possessed. Once you move past this horrific introduction, though, Apokalypsis turns out to be a kind of book completely different from what its cover promises.
The title of the album refers to the Greek root of the world "apocalypse," the root meaning "lifting of the veil." Folks not enamored with the way Apokalypsis was recorded-- an improvement only when compared to Wolfe's first album, The Grime and the Glow-- might feel like the "lo-fi" vibe on some of these tracks is one veil too many, but that choice helps as much as it hinders. On "Mer", the first proper song on the album, the hazy film lends Wolfe's halting, fragmented thoughts an air of expectant mystery that's bolstered by the song's pensive rhythm. That veneer of mystery is less beneficial on "Demons", a straightforward track that's as close to actually sounding like a Sister-era Sonic Youth outtake as anything made in the 21st century. Wolfe's uncanny mimicry of things musically goth-like doesn't end there. She's able to approximate the general pallor and stuttering sample-based rhythms of Dummy-era Portishead (on "Movie Screen"), makes like a superfan of Zola Jesus' The Spoils (on "The Wasteland"), apes early PJ Harvey (on the fittingly titled "Moses"), and even recalls the icy allure and off-kilter harmonies of the Knife (on "Friedrichshain"). It speaks favorably to Wolfe's abilities that she's able to approximate all these different styles successfully, but these tracks don't say much about who Wolfe actually is.
The aforementioned "Mer" might take its cues from performers like Harvey or other like-minded singer/songwriters, but those potential influences are more fully integrated with Wolfe's actual voice. The same goes for "Tracks (Tall Bodies)", a haunting ballad that features Wolfe imbuing a potentially heavy-handed line-- "We could be two straight lines/ In a crooked world"-- with enough pathos to avoid any possible pitfalls. Apokalypsis' crowning achievement, however, is the album's penultimate track, "Pale on Pale". It's a turgid and powerful, metal-like processional fronted by lilting Gregorian-type chants that eventually turn shrill and cacophonous by the time the seven-minute track reaches its conclusion. Its black-mass ambiance (coupled with its de facto coda, the ambient howl-laden "To the Forest, Towards the Sea") is the closest that Apokalypsis comes to realizing the foreboding, frightening airs that Wolfe's image and presentation promise. It's also, not coincidentally, the closest that Chelsea Wolfe comes to sounding less like something else, and more like herself.