The West Palm Beach rapper tones down the intensity of many of his fellow Floridians, favoring more polished beats and a relaxed, casually charismatic tone.

Beautiful Havoc

Florida has proven to be a hotbed of innovative rap talent over the past decade. Born in New York but bred in West Palm Beach, new 300 signee $NOT lyrically embodies the cutthroat ruthlessness of many of the Sunshine State’s rappers, but his new album Beautiful Havoc is a far cry from the overcompressed emo of XXXTentacion or the lo-fi experimentalism of Raider Klan. $NOT’s sound is more amorphous and elusive, perhaps less cutting edge but also harder to pin down.
Beautiful Havoc presents a spectrum of ever-changing moods, reflecting the binary suggested by its title. The tone is mostly relaxed and casually charismatic, anchored by $NOT’s precise and direct delivery, but there’s a creeping negativity on the margins. Lead single “Revenge” is buoyed by a sing-song chorus and melodic bounce, but as the track goes on, $NOT’s flow shifts into something more like a growl, his voice deepening menacingly as he warns us of his propensity for acting out and the “pistol on his waist.”
Like many of his regional peers, $NOT credits Memphis rap as a primary influence, along with the legion of Memphis-influenced cult icons who have emerged online in the last decade, like Xavier Wulf and BONES. But for $NOT the legacy of Memphis manifests more in attitude than actual sound, beyond the Kingpin Skinny Pimp sample that opens Beautiful Havoc on “Watch Out (Intro).” You can hear the South in the frequent moments across the album where the beat pauses and slows to a chopped-and-screwed crawl.
$NOT can be assertive, braggadocious, and brash, but he also demonstrates a soft, even romantic side. His debut full-length, this year’s - TRAGEDY +, was considerably lighter in texture and tone than the work of the rappers he lists as inspirations. It could often be almost delightful, filled with chilled-out guitar lines, cooing backup vocals, and bright synths, though his tongue occasionally slipped into the twisted flow of Three 6 Mafia and their imitators. On Beautiful Havoc, in contrast, a sense of darkness lies just beneath the surface, occasionally giving way to depressive moods. “I don’t wanna talk to nobody ’cause I don’t feel fine,” he raps on the weary “Life”; “I just wanna chill by myself ’cause I’m not OK.” Though $NOT’s sound hardly qualifies as emo rap, there’s often a tumultuous cloud hanging nearby: “Six million ways to die, choose one/And I think livin’ on this Earth is one of ’em.”
$NOT has said in interviews that he struggles to rap over pop beats, but there is an inherent poppiness to Beautiful Havoc’s production and catchy, frequently gentle melodies. $NOT’s music often sounds like a fusion of indie-pop instrumentation (“Demanding” is complete with ukulele and bells) and trap drum patterns. There’s guitar all over the album, but on tracks like “Havoc” and “Who Do I Trust,” the guitar styling is smooth, almost flamenco in feel, as opposed to the punk-inflected sound so common to contemporary rap. His lyrics may be straightforward—full of familiar rap tropes of trust issues, infidelities, and material gain—but the production often borders on the whimsical.
Though the album’s guest appearances can feel like brief cameos, $NOT is confident enough in his own voice not to rely too heavily on any other. On “Mean,” Flo Milli is like a character actor next to $NOT’s smooth leading man. When fellow Floridian Denzel Curry shows up on the flute-driven “Sangria,” it’s like a thunderclap of aggression, a marked contrast to how cool, calm, and collected $NOT comes off.
The Denzel Curry feature illustrates what $NOT shares with his region and how he stands apart. What’s come to define so much contemporary Florida rap is its extremity, emotionality, and intensity. $NOT’s music also contains these qualities, but in a more limited quality; his work is sonically polished and immediately accessible, if not always the most aesthetically distinctive. There’s enough havoc in the world already—$NOT finds time in his music for more elegant things.

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Blending traditional Korean instruments with woodwinds and mallets, the South Korean composer strikes a captivating balance between minimalism and improvised music.

Communion

There are no electronic instruments or added effects on Park Jiha’s debut album, Communion. In 2018, that alone is almost enough to lend an art-music air to the project. Add in the unorthodox instrumentation—Jiha’s trio of traditional Korean instruments, plus bass clarinet, saxophone, vibraphone, and percussion—and her new-music  affinities seem obvious. But when you actually listen to Communion, which contains just under an hour of the Korean musician’s compositions, it’s much harder to fit into one genre. Is it jazz, as the sprawling sax solos and collective improvisation might suggest? Is it minimalism, drawn out in the pulsing grooves established by both Jiha’s yanggeum, a type of hammered dulcimer, and the vibraphone? With its general adherence to conventional tonality and emphasis on ambience, as well as the synth-like quality of the saenghwang (a Korean mouth-organ), is it an acoustic take on modern electronic music?
The only real answer to those questions is “all of the above.” While it may not be strictly representational, the project is dominated by clear, mostly unadorned phrases that almost seem like they might have lyrics that just aren’t being articulated. (Jiha sings as well, just not on this project.) On the title track, where she plays the piri—a double-reed instrument that she says is her favorite—one hears her flair for simple, evocative melodies, made transcendent by her virtuosic ability and lyric style.
Jiha’s gift is in her ability to skirt dull prettiness in favor of exploiting the edges of her instruments, yet not at the expense of tangible, straightforward melodies. It’s a tough balancing act to pull off, and she does it effortlessly. Her occasional dissonance, showcased on the cathartic jam “All Souls’ Day,” is that much more impactful for its rarity. There’s no edginess for its own sake, only unforced and briefly chaotic climaxes that ultimately recede back into the album’s primary vibe: serenity.
Communion, while hardly a project that fades into the background, still has the potential to encourage the listener to do some yogic breathing. It’s melancholy and peaceful without being boring. The production emphasizes each instrument’s natural resonance for a fluid, continual sound—one that doesn’t really suggest any particular time or place. Certainly there are moments in the harmony that evoke traditional East Asian music, but they’re quickly obscured by some soaring solo or pulsing vibraphone. “World music” is a farce of a term, but Communion does feel global in a way that’s unusual.
The project’s overall cohesiveness and clarity of purpose make it almost movie score-like, yet there’s no part of the album that’s intended to underline anything but Jiha’s compelling musicianship. That is what makes Communion so easy to listen to. It’s creative and singular in a way that’s soothing, not alienating.
Jiha’s approachable compositional style and incredibly evocative playing make this album an accessible way into contemporary improvised music. Her debut’s genreless, organic sound makes it almost therapeutic, each piece a meditation on some melody to be explored but never abandoned. It challenges without feeling like homework, and creates ambience without tedium. On the album’s final track, “The First Time I Sat Across From You,” her yanggeum groove begins so lushly it could almost be the backbone to a pop song. Eventually it escalates into a clanging, metal-esque climax before slowing to one of the album’s few full stops. After a breath she begins the groove again, but strips parts away—like an ebbing tide—until there’s nothing left but a single, noteless creak.


Drake’s sixth album sounds good but feels labored. Melancholic and often incisive, it becomes an overlong and very familiar journey through the life, mind, and heart of Drake.

Certified Lover Boy

The Certified Lover Boy is selectively honest, occasionally heartless, and set in his ways. He’ll text, “I love you,” and pretend he doesn’t; he’ll ask for a sympathetic ear, but scoff and leave “if you throw another pity party” about your own troubles. He’s Drake—past, present, and future—and Certified Lover Boy, accordingly, is referential and reverential, an 86-minute omnibus of all things Drake. Being everything at once, the Drake of Certified Lover Boy is also indecisive and even fatigued. Drake is still trying to balance fame, intimacy, ambition, and insecurity, and he’s still learning who to trust—it’s always trust with Drake—but there’s a malaise that lingers across his sixth album, as if Drake has lost himself in the Library of Drake, less sure where he’s supposed to devote his attention while an emptiness creeps into his life and lifestyle.
The labored environment of Certified Lover Boy is a mild surprise after the album’s quick and billboard-heavy rollout. While apparent rival Kanye West took a month and a half to release Donda, darkening the project a bit more with each preview, Drake announced and released his album in the span of a week and played coy, ultimately sharing no singles and letting Tidal’s chief content officer serve as hype man, a role that included confirming the album artwork, world-famous con artist Damien Hirst’s immaculate conception of 12 pregnant women emoji placed on a stark white background. The cover is puerile and the strangest in his discography, as if he wanted to reach an iconographic nadir before his popularity waned, a wink that he can create seismic social ripples with just an iOS keyboard. In that way, the Hirst cover suggested a levity and even self-effacing irony that is not found on the album.
At various points on Certified Lover Boy, it feels like Drake is trapped in the empire he’s built and the narrator-character he’s created. Luxury and pettiness, common Drake themes, are persistent across the album and it frequently sounds like he’s tired of both. On “In the Bible,” he’s with a group of women who are taking shots at the Tao Nightclub in Las Vegas and murmurs, “You don’t know love, you don’t love me like my child.” Later, on “Pipe Down,” he sings, “How much I gotta spend for you to pipe down?” He’s not pining for a simpler life or even his own past, the way he might have on 2013’s Nothing Was the Same or 2016’s Views, but just something to enjoy, something to appreciate, a greater raison d’être than another trip on Air Drake with limitless tequila—seriously, he sounds forlorn when he repeats, “Lotta ’42 on the flights I’m takin’,” on the Jay-Z collaboration “Love All.”
Further communicating Drake’s opulent inertia is the album’s dark and cloistered atmosphere, a continuation of the cold Toronto sound that Drake and Noah “40” Shebib introduced to the world over a decade ago. There is broadly one tone across Certified Lover Boy—the sort of haze that could color a Monet facsimile—which, as ever, foregrounds Drake as the voice and instrument to shine through the mist. And while the album is his most musically cohesive since Nothing Was the Same, it’s also repetitious. There are pleasant, classic Drake moments, like “Girls Want Girls,“ “7am on Bridle Path,” and “Fair Trade,” but, mostly, the production hums along ably at best. Drake’s vocal performances, too, are mostly fine, the “Drake featurin’ Drake” that he could emote in his sleep. The mid-album cut “No Friends in the Industry” is particularly good, a rare song where he sounds animated and interested in what he’s saying, experimenting with a few different flows.
Also among the early standouts of Certified Lover Boy is the tawdry “Way 2 Sexy,” which samples Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.” The song is knowingly ridiculous, opening with Future rattling off all the things for which he’s too sexy, including codeine cough syrup, and Drake is having fun the way he did on his Scary Hours 2 EP and Smiley’s “Over the Top.” The conceit, as confidently dumb as Right Said Fred’s, is too simple to gum up with worries or inwardness. It’s a recklessness that he adopts on “Papi’s Home” and “Girls Want Girls,” where he ribaldly declares himself a lesbian, like the cleverest little boy at sleepaway camp. There’s always been room on Drake albums for these lighter tracks—“Worst Behavior,” generously, is like nothing else on Nothing Was the Same—but they’re fewer and farther between on Certified Lover Boy, immediately among the more self-serious Drake releases.
And seriousness can be OK because Drake albums are always long—Certified Lover Boy is 15 seconds shorter than the deluxe edition of 2011’s Take Care—and submersion into his solipsism is expected if not outright required. When Drake feels something, you’re meant to feel it, too, but he’s feeling everything on Certified Lover Boy, never committing to one particular mode. There is the tough Drake of “No Friends in the Industry” and “Knife Talk,” the tender Drake of “Fountains,” the flippant Drake of “Papi’s Home,” the reflective and regretful Drake of “Fucking Fans,” and even more. The album, in turn, feels more like a survey than an immersion, no particular emotion sticking or leaving a strong impression.
There are also broad contradictions—like when he seems to desire marriage on “Race My Mind,” only to dismiss fidelity on “The Remorse”—and more immediate hypocrisies, as on “TSU,” the song that regrettably credits R. Kelly due to an orchestral sample from “Half on a Baby” and finds Drake rapping, “We used to do pornos when you would come over, but now you got morals and shit/I got like four on the wrist and an adorable kid.” It’s a phenomenon he addresses on the first track, rapping, “Lived so much for others don’t remember how I feel.” There are enough styles of Drake that it’s become natural for him to fulfill one of his own archetypes when, at this point in his life and career, he is laying bare his uncertainty, attempting to square the idea of himself with what he really believes. Still, the music works well when he gives in and combines his styles and eras, as on “In the Bible,” “Pipe Down,” and “Get Along Better,” songs that are subtle evolutions of Drake, bridging gap the between past and present.
Certified Lover Boy opens disorientingly with a swirling, pitched-up sample of the McCartney-Lennon-written “Michelle.” It’s an exceedingly loud loop, a disembodied voice competing with Drake’s “Champagne Poetry” lyrics. Almost impressively, it makes no sense. The obvious reaction is that sampling the Beatles is a flex, but Drake’s clout and wealth have already bought him a Michael Jackson hook enmeshed well enough into its song that Jackson was credited as a featured artist. (There’s also a longer, knottier version of the story where it’s not actually a sample of the Beatles but rather the Singers Unlimited, and the beat is actually seven years old, but Paul and Yoko are still going to collect royalties, so “Champagne Poetry” isn’t necessarily coming cheap.) Sometimes you have to throw your hands up and say, That seems like something Drake would do, whether that means calculated corniness, rote gaudiness, or mandated petulance. He’s the executive producer also forced to take centerstage, knowing he’s got to give the audience what they want while working on the bigger picture. With much of Certified Lover Boy, Drake seems to be doing what he thinks Drake would do, and ticking the box is taking its toll.

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The appealing second album from this Colorado group is a pastoral in the extreme, with drifting textures, whispered vocals, and lyrics about the forest.

Hidden Lands

The idea that technical proficiency shouldn't be a barrier to artistic expression was a cornerstone of punk rock, and it's also been a license for acts of all stripes to create shitty music. That only partially explains what Candy Claws were up against when they decided to compose their second album, Hidden Lands, on keyboards of which they had no prior knowledge. They're not the first act to trade in their guitars for synths, but often it's a choice of a band looking to make a reinvention of their sound. For Candy Claws, Hidden Lands is likely to be a lot of people's introduction to the Fort Collins, Colo., group.
The lyrics of Hidden Lands were composed by running Richard M. Ketchum's The Secret Life of the Forest back and forth into a translation program, and Candy Claws took notice of how the slightest changes could lead you to think differently about otherwise prosaic phrases. Those whispered words bleed into the sonic fabric of clippity-clop percussion, Theremin-like swoops, and aqueous keyboard textures, but it's almost like the music itself has undergone some transformation that makes it sound distinctly alien and out-of-time.
In terms of precedent, Candy Claws occupy a realm similar to Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs or the back half of Animal Collective's Sung Tongs and Feels. These sounds seemed to exist in an eternal alternate reality. There's a lightfooted bossa nova going beneath the dubbed-out studio tricks during "On the Bridge", and each melodic turn ends up being just a step away from what you'd expect. Chords don't really progress so much as melt down and morph into interesting new shapes on "Warm Forest Floor" and "Hiding", while "Sun Arrow" gives Black Moth Super Rainbow's caricatured synth blurts an herbal bath.
Which is not to say that Candy Claws lack edge-- they just use it judiciously. Hidden Lands starts out with its most amorphous track (imagine if Sung Tongs led off with "The Softest Voice" instead of "Leaf House"), nearly seven minutes of gentle prodding and exploratory chords taking a long bridge to nowhere in particular. But as it draws to its calming close, the fanfare of "Sunbeam Show" blares like an alarm clock, signaling a magisterial procession before evolving into a sleigh-bell led waltz on the chorus. Meanwhile, the tropical vibe of the two songs that precede it seem to have given the alternately wobbling and playful "The Breathing Fire" sunstroke. It's all so strange that the most shocking sound of all is a militaristic bass riff on "Silent Time of Earth".
For an album composed almost entirely on synthesizers, the textures are remarkably downy, perhaps too much so for listeners accustomed to having some sort of abrasive counterpoint. I'm not sure there's a single kick drum or hi-hat on the record. It's an immersive experience, but one that must be consumed in a specific manner. Like the Microphones' The Glow, Pt. 2, Hidden Lands demands to be heard on headphones. In the wild, the album drifts off as a cumulous cloud, even though close listens reveal how the vocals are almost the only thing that exists in the center space. Thanks to intricate stereo panning, the instruments sound like they're conversing with one another from across the room, dodging in and out of the mix as percussion fills in spaces in the left channel that synths leave on the right. It's no wonder that they need eight musicians to tour this thing. And it's true that it's tougher to find a way in here than it is with more explicitly escapist sounds. But if you're intent on total engagement, it's also tougher to find a way out.


Grounding her second album in moments of real vulnerability, the Australian singer-songwriter zeroes in on her guiding concern as a musician: how we seek and create safety.

Flood

The opening song on Stella Donnelly’s second album seems to pick up where the Australian songwriter’s 2019 debut left off. Beware of the Dogs was full of cheerfully barbed indie-rock songs about victim-blaming, toxic masculinity, abortion rights, racists, and politicians happy to let the environment burn—songs that resonated in the moment because hoping for change didn’t yet feel totally futile. Leading Flood, “Lungs” is sung from the perspective of a child who sees through the dodgy landlord putting profit over people like her working-class parents and shrugging off the threat of asbestos. It’s stark and lovely, straight-backed with confrontational pride in its clipped disco beat, pounded piano, and wasp-sting guitar; Donnelly’s sweetly biting voice lends itself to a righteous kid’s worldview. But instead of coming off as a polemic about housing rights, as it might have had she written it three years ago, the first-person observations give “Lungs” a new kind of intimacy. It brings Donnelly closer to what seems to be her guiding concern as a songwriter: how we seek and create safety, which she essays with captivating tenderness.
To make Flood, however, Donnelly had to remove her creative bowling bumpers. After three years on tour, she’s said, she had become controlling to the degree that it was affecting her mental health. Enduring Australia’s extreme lockdowns took the sting out of her catastrophizing and pushed her to become “a little bit more comfortable with the unknown.” To counter her perfectionism, she opted to write her second album on the piano, an instrument she had barely touched in years, and she pushed her band to embrace the same unfamiliarity. The effect is naturalistic and enveloping. (It’s a tonic, too, to hear a talented young songwriter resist the apparently universal allure of going synth-pop.) The softly brushed “Restricted Account” is so loose and comfortable it suggests someone playing dreamily at home, unafraid of being overheard. Donnelly leaves a huge amount of space as she propositions a crush to “take me for granted/Take me on,” letting Julia Wallace’s flugelhorn play the chorus melody before she then sings it—like a rehearsal for how it might feel to “be your lover” that gives both parties time to feel out the idea. The sense of care for others lives in the music: Warm beds of male backing vocals and high, gently insistent piano notes coax out the title track, which touches on the challenges of trying to look after someone in a bad place. “I’m taken out to sea in the flood/When I try to dry your eyes,” she sings.
Flood’s first line, from “Lungs,” goes: “Maybe it’s the last time that I’ll see you putting too much salt on the story,” and whoever it’s sung to, maybe it also stands as Donnelly’s challenge to herself. Beware of the Dogs was spiked with little lyrical fireworks—gleeful punchlines, casual references to masturbation. The writing here is subtler, and acute even when she’s describing far less clear-cut scenarios than those of her debut. The sweetly brisk “How Was Your Day?” sets the scene for its rocky relationship with everyday images of people doing their best to ignore looming danger—like the “white-knuckled mum in the passenger seat”—and Donnelly outlines the polite detente between a doomed couple in pristine spoken word. Then the chorus cracks open and the lava churns out: “You said, ‘I can’t do this anymore, I can’t do this anymore/We let our patterns of bad behaviors take over/I’m no longer keeping score/Levelheadedness has made way for a disastrous love, I know it, you know it.’” It’s a mouthful, but it feels true to life: a desperate but comically reasonable eruption from someone who is sure there’s more out there for them than reasonableness.
Donnelly has an eye for the fault lines that threaten to reduce the status quo to rubble. The riled-up, monomaniacal housemate in “Medals” makes everyone feel uneasy, “like watching a movie next to a chain smoker”; the sweetly sing-songy “Move Me” observes, “You were always clumsy in a good way/Now it’s turned to something we all fear.” To try to save them, she insists, “I wanna be yours ’til there’s no me,” a relatably foolhardy attempt to scaffold someone else’s instability.
Balancing out Donnelly’s astute observations are moments of real vulnerability—often accentuated by paring back the band’s usual genial dynamic. She sings to piano and a rising haze of reverb on “Underwater,” a song about escaping someone intent on destroying her security that’s as shocked as emerging blinking into the daylight. She channels a chorister’s poise for “Oh My My My,” a song for her late grandmother, and you feel the effort of her maintaining her composure. “Part of me died,” she sings in a grave register, a theme she picks up across Flood: where and in whom we place our trust, and what happens when they can’t hold it anymore.
That theme recurs in the minimalist “This Week,” one of the album’s many highlights. It’s a song about taking the small but integral steps to recovery from some rupture, where any deviation from a careful path might upset the whole endeavor. The sighing horn fanfare that crops up midway feels like a begrudging celebration of that work from someone perhaps not inclined to self-compassion; given Donnelly’s usually conversational tone, the rare quiver of vibrato that creeps into her voice as she ventures, “I feel better,” is immensely moving. It’s as if she’s stepping outside those limited bounds for the first time in a long time, confident that she can take a risk and still find a soft place to land. Her quiet yet spirited second album offers one too.


Despite the typical bloated-album problems like pacing issues and forced collaborations, A Boogie hardly ever loses his Bronx edge.

Hoodie SZN

In New York, time moves at its own pace: Facebook is still the social media of choice, CDs are still handed out on the street, and radio DJs still have the power to break a song. Likewise, the 23-year-old Bronx rapper A Boogie Wit da Hoodie feels like he belongs in a long-gone era. When A Boogie drops in one of his petty, lovestruck tracks on his latest album Hoodie SZN, the quotables could double as a teen in 2008’s AIM away message sent from a T-Mobile Sidekick; when he gets violent, he makes me think that the melodic and stick-talking Tim Vocals has been spiritually resurrected. But it’s all part of what has made A Boogie one of New York’s most essential—and most popular—artists. Because despite Hoodie SZN’s 20 songs facing the typical bloated-album problems like pacing issues and forced collaborations, through it all, A Boogie hardly ever loses his Bronx edge.
Over the last two years, the bright melody and AutoTune flow of A Boogie—that Lil B famously compared to Dej Loaf’s—has become a New York staple. The Bronx’s Lil Tjay, Brooklyn’s Jay Gwuapo, and Long Island’s Lil Tecca, are three emerging New York stars and collectively they have all found inspiration in the vocals of A Boogie. It’s why on Hoodie SZN’s “4 Min Convo,” A Boogie says, “I hear too much me in niggas’ songs, so I had to switch it up.” Thankfully, A Boogie never really does switch it up—the last time he did he released his straining, pop-crossover dud International Artist—and the album’s best moments come when the Bronx songbird embraces his signature style.
The aforementioned “4 Min Convo” is A Boogie at his most engaging and melodramatic. He uses a piano-heavy CP DUBB beat that could believably be an A Boogie-type beat to balance both the spitefully loving and ruthlessly savage aspects of his personality. The track has no hook and is one long verse of A Boogie rambling and venting, then later thanking Drake for inspiring him to record his jaded view on relationships. The intro track, “Voices in My Head,” follows much of that same blueprint as A Boogie questionably compares himself to both Malcolm X (“And I be feelin’ like Malcolm, I got the X on my back”) and Michael Jackson (“I feel like I’m the rappin’ Michael”), in his softest, threat-filled melody. That same vocal success carries over to “I Did It,” in which, despite A Boogie confessing to his infidelity, he irrationally blames his cheating on his lack of trust in women. It’s the exact type of borderline insane and candid take on love that has made A Boogie’s views on the subject come across genuine.
Currently, rappers of A Boogie’s prominence sacrifice project consistency for features intended to maximize streaming numbers—Kodak Black recently admitted to this in an interview about Juice WRLD’s guest spot on his album. Hoodie SZN’s weakest moments come when A Boogie sinks into collaborations, where his vocals begin to mirror the imitators he wants to separate himself from. On “Swervin,” the London on da Track production cannot save yet another strained A Boogie and 6ix9ine collab in which the incarcerated Brooklyn rapper sounds like he’s repaying a favor. And A Boogie’s personality is diluted by the sight of Juice WRLD, as the Chicago emo-rap superstar strangely sings about demons and angels as if he’s unaware this is an Uptown bottle-service club album. But when A Boogie does find a guest he has chemistry with, like on “Come Closer,” the guitar-heavy duet with Queen Naija, they feed off of each other, as she cleverly flips his own pettiness against him.
Hoodie SZN does not offer any new realizations about A Boogie. The Bronx rapper hardly breaks from the moody, tough-talking to hide his heartache sing-rap formula, but with A Boogie that’s when he works. Because if New York dislikes anything, it’s change. And as long as A Boogie stays the course, his music will be loved, appreciated, and endlessly shared throughout the city’s ancient, but still thriving Facebook feeds.


On what is billed as his proper debut LP after several years’ worth of cassette releases, the Greek producer fashions a wide-ranging attempt to move beyond his dub influences.

Epitaph

Dimitri Papadatos, better known as Jay Glass Dubs, makes dub music from an outsider’s perspective. The Greek producer’s discography, mostly on cassette, amounts to a series of terse statements of discontent. His 2016 release New Teeth for an Old Country glimmers briefly before plunging into noir dub abstraction, as if tracing his native country’s historical timeline from glory to turmoil; 2018’s Plegnic steeps in Athenian nostalgia and ennui by interpolating samples of laïkó, or Greek mainstream pop. Papadatos, far from Kingston or Bristol, seems both preoccupied and at odds with the site specificity of his work. He often emphasizes his self-described “counter-factual” approach to the Jamaican genre by discussing local sound system culture that he was adjacent to, but never really part of.
On Epitaph, which is billed as his “first proper solo LP” (after a considerable catalog of album-length releases stretching back four years), Papadatos moves away from narrow definitions of the genre. He’s excluded the word “dub” from his track titles, choosing instead to pulse the genre's heavy reverberations directly through the veins of his show-don’t-tell effort. Like Papadatos’ other projects, Epitaph is about more than bass: It also incorporates traces of archaic Greek songs, punk rock, choral music, and breakbeats. A sinister religious fervor helps unify the 10 tracks, as do heavy drums and minor-key synths, with the odd touch of blaring saxophone throwing things back off kilter. To purists, dub music carves out the contours of space with a steady heartbeat; Epitaph is as maximalist and nonconformist as a dub record can get without abandoning ship altogether.
Papatados also makes use of his own vocals, to varying degrees of success. Opener “Seikilos & to Console Him” begins with an extraterrestrial take on religious chanting, but the mood is quickly broken by violent hammering and shouting. (The title and elements of the song come from the “Seikilos Epitaph,” the oldest known musical composition.) Papadatos’ incantations infuse the music with a mystical charge, but he struggles to hold onto this quality on “A New Model for Emulation,” which comes off as muddled and flattened by distortion.
Where the first half of Epitaph is caught in a murky undertow, its second half ascends to a higher vantage point. Synths descend from the firmament, pierce through the hollowed percussion on “Intro,” and gain strength among clanging cymbals on “Laid Down.” The drum machine mimics a factory assembly line before a gleaming synth melody emerges from the clamor. When Papadatos’ vocals re-enter in “To My Benefitors,” there’s a psychedelic new calm in his croon, rising like dissipating mist among the low-end echoes and resonant twangs. Lest you forget his dub-contrarian roots, “Reckless” toys with a dizzying matrix of disembodied incantations, throaty drones, and what sound like slivers of glass harp over a tyrannical reverb. The track careens anxiously towards another bold climax only to conclude in an abrupt cliffhanger.
These frequent twists and turns can make for gripping listening, but they’re also the album’s main stumbling block. In a recent interview, Papadatos said he worked on Epitaph over the course of two years, along with a large collection of other projects—and it shows. What he calls his “melting pot” of influences displays impressive range. But as a transgressive take on dub music, Epitaph never quite settles on a final place to rest.


In the early ’80s, New Zealand’s Roy Montgomery was part of foundational Flying Nun band the Pin Group. His first solo work since 2001 is a 4xLP set that, at its best, plays like a shadowy dream.

R M H Q: Headquarters

New Zealand guitarist Roy Montgomery has been involved with so much vital music that it’s hard to believe he’s spent most of his life not making any at all. In the early 1980s he was part of foundational Flying Nun band the Pin Group, then went silent for about a decade. He shifted into overdrive in the ’90s with free-rock outfit Dadamah, guitar duo Dissolve, and a string of excellent solo albums. The last of those, Silver Wheel of Prayer, came out in 2001, and since then he’s been quiet again, save for a few collaborations and an imaginary soundtrack.
For anyone still under the spell of Montgomery’s mesmerizing ’90s work, there’s a lot of lost time to make up for, and apparently he thinks so, too. Motivated by some serious life events—including serving as volunteer firefighter during the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes, and losing his friend and Flying Nun colleague Peter Gutteridge—Montgomery decided to get playing again while he still could. As he told The Wire, he vowed to “stop taking for granted always being able to return casually to composition and recording.”
There’s certainly nothing casual about R M H Q, whose title stands for Roy Montgomery’s Headquarters. Montgomery has exploded his own creative floodgates to produce nearly three hours of music, available as four CDs in a set, or four LPs released individually. Each disc has its own title, lasts about 44 minutes, and works well as a stand-alone album. But R M H Q is especially compelling when you take it all together, or even just skip around from track to track. Montgomery’s self-made approach to writing and playing becomes deeper the more ways you hear it, and he varies that style throughout 30 pieces while always sounding like himself.
Montgomery’s musical self is most tangible on the first disc, R: Tropic of Anodyne, the only one he sings on. His chillingly low voice has a somnambulant quality, as if he’s walking stoically through his own subconscious. Add his patient, slow-burning guitar, and these first eight songs become like a shadowy dream, the kind where figures are hard to make out and events feel mildly surreal. There’s naturally some darkness to R: Tropic of Anodyne—Montgomery seems to be working through some issues—but it’s a hypnotic darkness, and often a cathartic one, especially when he lets loose on guitar. There’s some wry humor here, too: take “You Always Get What You Deserve,” a wizened variation on the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” that makes accepting fate sound pretty cleansing.
R: Tropic of Anodyne is RMHQ’s strongest chapter, with the most consistent, compelling tone. As if to prove his music isn’t always so downbeat, Montgomery spends the rest of R M H Q exploring a wider range of timbres. Through three albums of instrumentals—mostly centered on guitars, with some drum machine accompaniment—he sounds alternately eager, inquisitive, reflective, world-weary, and optimistic. In some spots he’s even giddy: on the second disc, M: Darkmotif Dancehall, he spends six minutes in “Six Guitar Salute to Peter Gutteridge” riding a bouncy, beatific wave. It’s a pretty positive album marked by rising tones and soaring crescendoes—classic post-rock from a guy who helped create that genre, whether or not he intended to.
On R M H Q’s final two discs, Montgomery seems most concerned with testing out guitar styles, mixing weighty strumming, gradual string massaging, twangy extended chords, and a wealth of reverberant effects. Most of his playing throughout the set has a ringing, chorus-y hue that makes it immediately layered and atmospheric. That effect dragged down his last record, 2012’s Music from the Film Hey Badfinger, but because his playing on R M H Q is subtler and more varied, it’s now more a signature than an impediment. Often, it strikes a mood that enhances the emotions in Montgomery’s songcraft.
As a result, your own mood may determine which parts of R M H Q hit hardest. I’m partial to the times Montgomery plays with abandon, as on “Riding” (from disc four, Q: Transient Global Amnesia). He piles chords until they cascade like a waterfall. But his more subdued moments—see the dusty, moonlit “And Later We Looked Up at the Stars,” on disc three, H: Bender—are just as gripping. And any mood will likely be affected by the set’s denouement, the 20-minute “Weathering Mortality.” Montgomery confronts his own expiration date, and his response—glorious chords that rage against dying light—typifies the life-affirming drive of R M H Q.


Like Dr. Dre's Compton: A Soundtrack, which featured few artists from its titular city, the soundtrack to Spike Lee's Chi-Raq is largely devoid of Chi-Town talent. Without an abundance of homegrown voices, nothing about Chi-Raq feels authentically Chicago.

Chi-Raq OST

Chi-Raq suffers from Spike Lee's worst tendencies as a storyteller. The movie attempts to speak on Chicago's heartbreaking gun violence and gang culture, but it's not so much a narrative as a succession of overwrought messages and ham-fisted editorializing bolstered with history and current-events lessons, heavy statistics, and too many ideas bogged down by rhyme in an ode to the source material, Aristophanes' Athenian comedy, "Lysistrata".
The soundtrack doesn't fare much better. Like the movie—whose trailers were met with head-scratching and rebuttals from Chi-Town rappers across the board—the music was met with controversy before even being released, when DJ Slugo, a Chicago native working as the film's music supervisor, was discovered running an unnecessarily complex payola racket for soundtrack placement. Upon getting caught, Slugo apologized, writing "This is not the way Spike Lee nor his team operates and I take full responsibility for my bad decision," but the mini-scandal casts a harsh light over this collection.
Like Dr. Dre's Compton: A Soundtrack, which featured not many artists from its titular city, Chi-Raq's original motion picture soundtrack is largely devoid of Chi-Town talent. The city's hip-hop elite—Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco, Common—are nowhere to be found. Like wise, OG's like Twista, Crucial Conflict, and Shawnna are absent, and the new crop of progressive Chi-Town MC's—Mick Jenkins, Chance the Rapper, Rockie Fresh—aren't here. (Vic Mensa appears briefly in the movie as a hype man, but has no role in the soundtrack.) Most egregiously, save for a beat from Young Chop, there are no notables from the drill scene present—not Chief Keef, not Lil Durk, not G Herbo, or any of the other young talents who could have furthered dialogue about Chicago's horrendous and shameful bloodshed. The movie argues against intra-community crime through a lens of respectability politics—it all but ignores the systemic causes that have made the Windy City a war zone. The Chicago PD—currently under pressure for the cover up of Laquan McDonald's murder, not to mention Homan Square, its Guantanamo-like black site—is treated like an afterthought. Without an abundance of homegrown voices, nothing about Chi-Raq feels authentically Chicago.
Some of the numbers seem picked from Lee's wishful thinking. Kevon Carter's "WGDB" (for "we gotta do better," the de facto slogan of the respectability movement) is an incredibly sanctimonious string-and-keys lamentation replete with clunky (and false) observations like "We're the only race that shoots and kills themselves" and the laborious opening lines: "Everybody's talkin' about brother Bill Cosby/ Looks like our favorite dad was drugging girls." It's a song that would make sense within the context of a Hamilton-esque musical, but it's not presented in the film as a performance number—it just seems to be Lee believing his audience should be condescended to with simple answers to complex issues.
The disconnect is an extension of Lee's heavy-handed and off-center vision. Nick Cannon, who plays a gang member named Chi-Raq, comes through with two songs in character—the uplifting "Pray 4 My City" (whose lyrics are flashed across the film's opening credits with ebonicized spellings—dey, dat, dis, cuz, Lawd) and the Young Chop-produced thuggery-by-numbers of "My City". Both songs feel like they're trying to bring Afterschool Specials back. There's no true gravitas in any of it, and the only place where these songs fit is in Lee's movie, with its reliance on outdated tropes, such as a ridiculous preponderance of gang colors and a reference to Brooklyn as "Bucktown".
It's not all bad. Treasure Davis' "Simple" is a sunny and bouncing number about on-and-off love; Sam Dew's "Desperately" is yearning, body-grinding boudoir music; Mali Music and Jhené Aiko's Caribbean-tinged "Contradiction" is perfectly tailored for break-up and reconciliation. When Mali sings "If you say that it's over/ I won't die," you're not sure if he's coming or going, but it doesn't matter, because the song just works.
And here's a troubling thing: R. Kelly—still one of the most reviled and gifted artists in R&B—comes through with the album's best song. It makes so much sense—Kelly is as much a Chi-Town icon as Michael Jordan, Barack Obama, or Oprah Winfrey. And "Put the Guns Down" is topically in line with movie's message, especially with a guest verse from Tink, who notes that kids are "Fifteen, buying a tool/ Just to feel more safe when they gotta make it home from school." It's targeted, but not pedantic and—most importantly—it's girded by a four-on-the-floor track that actually entertains. When R. Kelly sings, "Just do your dance, get in your zone/ No, they can't take you out that," meaning and music come together as they do nowhere else on this album.
And that's the state of Chi-Raq, a movie that uses a term for a city that no one in the city actually uses: a soundtrack about said city that uses very few voices from the despair it seeks to shed light upon. Its best number comes from guy who is all but a pariah in the urban community, which all but ensures that none of these messages are going reach the people who need to hear them most. And that may be the real tragedy here.


Beck’s 13th album is his most overtly pop record, one filled with sunshine and sadness, but feels connected to little more than a good idea.

Colors

At the very start of his career in his early twenties, Beck’s voice blistered and cracked just thinking about the pop zeitgeist. “MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke Crack,” he declared, on account of everyone being so bright and perky. About a year later, in 1994, Beck scored his first and biggest hit with “Loser” and became the toast of MTV. From that moment on, he’s been the weirdest guy in music’s normiest rooms, mixing non-sequitur rock sleaze and sad-bastard folk with a cut-and-paste hip-hop sensibility and an Ambien flow. Beck was, essentially, post-genre before that became the dominant trend of music listening in the streaming era. But in the last decade, he’s made the most focused, conventional, and polished albums of his career, 2008’s Modern Guilt and 2014’s Morning Phase—tasteful records that didn’t make the pop charts bend to his quirks like they once did but still garnered acclaim from the establishment. With them, Beck officially became a legacy artist.
This, of course, is when someone like Beck normally would do something unexpected, like make a falsetto’d electrofunk homage to getting freaky on the Sunset Strip. Ostensibly, Beck’s 13th album, Colors, is a left turn—his most overtly pop record. He reunited with Greg Kurstin, who played in his live band before becoming a staple of Top 40 songwriting and production with Kelly Clarkson, Adele, and Sia. Together, they aimed to make an album that “was uplifting, had a lot of energy, and made you want to sing along.” Yet Colors is more like Beck’s downtempo records, Morning Phase and its spiritual predecessor Sea Change, in that it is largely bereft of color. Sure, he plays word association games under the guise of rapping on a couple songs, but even the sonic elements that are supposed to instill his songs with a sense of zaniness—like pan flutes, 808s, and pitched-up vocals on the title track and early single “Wow”—feel more like following pop trends than starting them. The precise Beck-ness appears to be somewhat missing.
There are, however, other artists you can hear on Colors. Album highlight “Dear Life” is Elliott Smith doing the Beatles, down to the jaunty piano line punctuating existential woes. “No Distraction” proves there’s room for more than just Bruno Mars to retread reggae-lite Police hits for the modern age, turning a lament about the attention economy into a love song about choosing your partner over your phone. “I’m So Free” is like the best late-era Weezer single: put aside the trying-too-hard-to-be-an-anthem lyrics and the furious, cringe-y rhymes, and it’s a very catchy power-pop cut.
While donning the various masks of pop music, Beck searches for answers to or an escape from the doldrums of modern life. “Seventh Heaven,” a song that sounds so beachy the sun practically glints off its synths, is actually about hiding away with someone who temporarily makes things seem brighter, living in the hope of leaving the shadows only to say: “We’ll shoot for the empire/Land in the dust pile.” On the twinkling toe-tapper “Square One,” Beck sings of lowered expectations and “learning to enjoy the ride,” but pivots midway to a love song when it becomes too much of a bummer. Even “Dreams,” the album’s best and earliest single (released two years ago), returns to the theme of finding freedom, albeit temporarily through sleep. History is filled with major-key bummer jams from the Supremes’ “Baby Love” to the Smiths’ “Ask,” the tension sharpening each element. The songs on Colors don’t possess that kind of contrast—they just feel out of sync among their upbeat soundscapes, neutral choruses, and quietly disappointed verses.
There’s no harm in becoming bright and perky, or whatever you hated in your early twenties. It’s a rite of passage, even. But for Beck, it’s always been a game of pivots, as if each album represents a man with either an endless supply of ideas or a man completely out of them. Beck has been working on Colors since 2013, and by the sounds of a recent interview, spent a lot of time trying to get the balance of “not retro and not modern” just so. He more or less nailed that bit, but what’s lacking from his Big Happy Pop Record is some kind of strong emotion that could elevate these songs above the “well crafted but innocuous” camp—something more than an idea. I heard the sunny, percussive single “Up All Night” wafting through a department store recently. It put me in a decent mood while I waited in line to buy socks.


Experimental singer/songwriter Jenny Hval's latest album finds her reckoning with longing and self-doubt, tentatively considering domesticity, fantasizing about rebirth, and wrestling with sex and gender. As with all her work, she finds new ways to provoke, and new parts of your brain to light up.

Apocalypse, girl

Experimental singer/songwriter Jenny Hval's work is cryptically pleasurable, prone to breeding obsession, and full of surprises. As she mentions several times throughout Apocalypse, girl, she recorded her latest album when she was 33, and like a lot of people in their Jesus year she found herself at an existential crossroads. Apocalypse, girl has plenty of what-does-it-all-mean moments—Hval reckons with longing and self-doubt, tentatively considers ideas of domesticity and traditional standards of satisfaction, and fantasizes about spiritual (or possibly even literal) rebirth—but she seems to have come out of her crisis even more committed to following the challenging path she’s chosen for herself.
Musically, Apocalypse pushes boundaries that were barely visible on her last album. For all its noisy interludes and sharply angular melodies, a lot of Innocence Is Kinky was straightforward, held down by fairly conventional arrangements of guitar, drums, and keys. Working with producer Lasse Marhaug (who met Hval when he interviewed her for his fanzine in 2014) and an ensemble of skilled improv players that includes members of Swans and Jaga Jazzist, she deconstructs her pop sensibilities while still assembling catchy and memorable compositions. There’s a dreamy kind of ambiguity to how the songs are put together: Pop melodies emerge from washes of abstract sound, and sometimes they’ll take charge of the song, but sometimes they simply fade back into the churn. Standout track "Heaven" starts off with vocals over the white noise sound of falling rain, then pivots into moody, Björk-like electropop, and finishes in a tonal cloud of strings and harp.
Hval takes a similar approach to her lyrics, floating intriguing bits of concrete imagery in a matrix of stream-of-consciousness abstraction—Queens-bound subway cars and a scrap of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" tumbling past enigmatic, impressionistic lines like "I separate from feelings/ Complex harmonic notion/ Harmonic notion." As a lyricist, Hval sometimes feels like she has less in common with traditional songwriters than with text artists like Jenny Holzer and Tracey Emin. Like them, her deployment of words lands hardest when it hits a gnomically confrontational tone. And in terms of gnomic confrontation, it’s hard to beat the phrase "soft dick rock."
Halfway through "Kingsize", the album opener full of pungent abstract lines like "I beckon the cupcake, the huge capitalist clit," Hval pauses the song to whisper the question, "What is SOFT DICK ROCK?" How you react during the silence she lets hang in the air for a beat after the question—whether you laugh out loud or frown perplexedly—will probably determine how you feel about the rest of the album.
The most obvious and immediately gratifying answer to Hval’s question is that soft dick rock is simply the spirit of fragile male ego and fear of women that rock music (among other pop styles) has sustained for the better part of a century. Baby boomer guitar gods hogging stages well into their senescence are soft dick rock; so are younger and more critically well-defended artists keeping the patriarchy alive and breathing in the counterculture.
But "soft dick rock" could also be music that runs counter to rock’s testosterone-driven nature. "That Battle Is Over" is Apocalypse, girl’s most straightforward pop moment, with a shuffling quasi-hip-hop beat, an unhurried organ progression, and Hval singing with an uncharacteristically bluesy inflection. The lyrics are about reckoning with the legacy of an older generation’s revolution, and the question of whether the advances they made are actually doing Hval any good. The relationship between the reference and the subject matter, potent and intriguingly ambiguous, emits a weird frisson that’s as fascinating in its own way as her voice. Like all of her best work, it finds new ways to provoke, and new parts of your brain to light up.


Following up his collaboration with saxophonist Sam Gendel, the Los Angeles bassist returns with a dreamy album that dissolves jazz structures into ambient, vaguely psychedelic forms.

WILKES

In his new survey of jazz in the 21st century, Playing Changes, Nate Chinen writes that “to be a successful jazz artist today, on some level, is to be a conceptualist.” In Chinen’s suggestion, it is not enough—or maybe besides the point—for an artist to rely on virtuosity alone. It’s more important, he recently told an interviewer, to have “something to say,” as opposed to just the chops to play. Listening to the dreamy, slightly psychedelic debut album from the Los Angeles bassist Sam Wilkes brings Chinen’s point to mind: By evaporating his own performance, Wilkes has allowed it to condensate into a sound bigger than his own bass.
Over the last couple years, as a session player, Wilkes has proven himself an adaptable spark plug for other musicians and their ideas. He’s backed the electronic duo KNOWER on tour and shines in the kitschy, funk-versions-of-classic-songs cover band Scary Pockets. He has also poked around the Los Angeles jazz scene. A few months ago he partnered with the saxophonist Sam Gendel on Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar, a remarkably intimate conversation of an album in which the two Sams play for and off each other and tinker with electronics in a warm, low-stakes environment. The fluency of that dialogue was less about their vocabulary than their good company and ideas.
At least in composition, Wilkes’ debut is a more deliberate affair, and supported by a bigger cast that includes the drummer Louis Cole and guitarist Brian Green. In addition to the writing, production, and arrangement on most songs, Wilkes is frequently credited with contributing “all other instruments,” an obscurance that has the funny effect of shedding performance in favor of production, as though he were bandleading from behind. WILKES also extends the collaboration with Gendel, but the album doesn’t train a spotlight on the saxophonist so much as gather the music  around him, propping up his horn and coaxing out the best performance of his young career.
The opener, “Welcome,” is the only track not credited to Wilkes: It’s a sighing John Coltrane number that immediately establishes Gendel as the album’s protagonist and Wilkes’ ambient electronics as the stage. Coltrane’s original is a near-standstill ballad; Wilkes’ version replaces the glossy chatter of the studio band’s vamping with ambient tones that cradle Gendel’s saxophone and nudge his swooping, elongated breaths into an elegantly floating performance. (More even than in the original, you can hear how “Welcome” riffs on and stretches out the “Happy Birthday” melody into a distorted, psychedelic meditation not unlike Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner.”)
Much of the album’s background production is characterized by a similar wispiness that lends each track a vaguely psychedelic feeling—an afterglow environment more than a hallucination event. “Hug” presents itself immediately as a dreamy wall of noise, both graceful and a little bewildering in its constant, minutes-long build. The transition from upswell to dissolve is signaled by the fade of Christian Euman’s crashing drum performance. Wilkes regenerates the theme into a downtempo conga groove that glides even further away from the trauma of the opening.
Free of the ambient detours and psychedelic landscaping, “Run” is the most traditional jazz performance on the record, and here Wilkes finally puts his bass forward as the gentle, throbbing center of the rhythm section, a plush scaffold Gendel climbs and eventually launches away from with a soaring solo. It’s not the only moment on WILKES that snapped me into the players and made me want more performative interplay, more actual session recordings. But WILKES feels more nebulous than that. It’s also a remarkably easy record to listen to, inviting in its warmth but also not too smooth. It sounds like Wilkes dreamed up a sound and figured out how to make it real.


The singer-songwriter finally embraces that label on her ninth solo album, unspooling songs of unhurried beauty and great detail.

Tara Jane O’Neil

Tara Jane O’Neil, the one-time bassist for the Kentucky math-rock band Rodan, has made nine solo records under her own name since 2000. In a 2014 interview with Fact, O’Neil remarked, “I’m not writing confessional singer-songwriter stuff, but I do think that my life informs the music I make.” Three years later, she has embraced the “singer-songwriter” label, at least according to the press release penned by her friend and author Maggie Nelson, but Tara Jane O’Neil isn’t really a confessional. Instead, the album whittles away some of 2014’s Where Shine New Lights’ experimental ambience and places O’Neil’s voice and lyrics in the spotlight. The result is a slow-burning record whose warmth stretches across its 11 track like the sun crosses the sky.
Tara Jane O’Neil requires a certain amount of attention, otherwise its unhurried beauty can get lost. Details matter here. In some places, you can see a clear line to O’Neil’s darker, earlier work. Opener “Flutter” begins with traces of Where Shine New Lights’ ghostly tremors thanks to James Elkington’s spooky eerie pedal steel playing. A haunted feeling lingers through the earlier part of the record as O’Neil sings of “the sun, a black star,” “ghost breath,” and “graves and jewels.” The woozy trumpet of “Sand” could soundtrack a spirit’s waltz across dunes; “Let the flow and the coyote lead you/Let the moon be in the morning sky, blue/Let there be another in the making,” she sings on the celestial “Joshua.” The restorative power of nature has been an abiding trait of O’Neil’s music, but here the instruments and lyrics seem more intertwined than ever.
But Tara Jane O’Neil really takes flight in its center, when songs open up and turn brighter. O’Neil’s soft voice and the quivering guitar offer a feeling of blissful peace, as she touches on love (the upbeat “Laugh”) and unity (the euphoric “Kelley”). And then there’s the standout track “Cali,” an anecdote about folk’s favorite subject. “You called me California true bird,” O’Neil sings in a moody, minimal drawl. It would be too easy to say that O’Neil resembles Joni Mitchell here, but “Cali” truly does contain the windswept contentment. On these tracks, O’Neil’s voice conveys the light strength and easygoing introspection of Judee Sill and Mitchell’s Laurel Canyon compatriot David Crosby. After these moments, Tara Jane O’Neil’s sun begins to set as it moves again into a bookending coolness.
These songs ask for nothing more than patience, attention, and a willingness to submit to a lush idyllic. They lack structural tension and contain few, if any, surprises. Because of this, there is not too much to pick apart. O’Neil presents first-person narratives, and as a listener, we are left peering through a small window into her internal world. But while remaining as obtuse as ever, O’Neil’s newfound appreciation for singer-songwriter-dom presents some of her most personal work yet.


The daughter of sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar has spent years exploring the instrument’s possibilities. Recording in Berlin with Arooj Aftab and Nils Frahm, she zeroes in on the nexus of music and memory.

Anoushka Shankar: Chapter I: Forever, For Now EP

Chapter I: Forever, For Now EP

Over the past 25-odd years, Anoushka Shankar and her sitar have carved a wide, idiosyncratic path through the landscape of Hindustani classical and contemporary pop music. The daughter and protege of sitar virtuoso Pandit Ravi Shankar—hippie icon, the world’s best-known Hindustani classical musician, and the “godfather of world music”—she spent the late ’90s and early aughts perfecting her grasp of Hindustani classical sitar, releasing three albums of strictly traditional ragas that showcased her precocious virtuosity on the instrument (she made her solo live debut at just 13). Then, much like her father, she began to venture further afield, writing and performing music that more accurately reflected a life lived across three different continents.
On 2005’s Rise, she re-imagined the sitar as a thoroughly modern instrument, weaving it into a patchwork tapestry of jazz, pop, flamenco, and Asian Underground electronics. She followed it up with 2007’s Breathing Under Water, a collaboration with Karsh Kale that blended her elegant sitar and piano with his glitchy, jungle-laced tablatronic soundscapes. There would be experiments with flamenco (2011’s Traveller, produced by Javier Limón) and chopped-up hip-hop (M.I.A. collab “Jump In,” off 2016’s Land of Gold), all part of Shankar’s quest to “de-exotify” the instrument.
Now 42 years old, with nine Grammy nominations under her belt, Shankar is firmly established as the 21st century’s most innovative sitar player. Her father’s shadow, long as it is, has receded, and with it the immense pressure to live up to her name. She’s now confident enough to turn her gaze inwards, writing music from a space of vulnerability that she rarely afforded herself before. The 2020 EP Love Letters—written after the dissolution of her marriage with English filmmaker Joe Wright—seethed with anger and heartbreak, eschewing her complex, densely layered compositional style in favor of sparse arrangements for cello, piano, and sitar. Compared to the artfully assembled bricolage of her earlier work, Love Letters sounded almost organic, a natural accretion of harmony and rhythm.
Shankar pushes further into this new direction on Chapter I: Forever, for Now, the first of a planned trilogy of “mini-albums”—she’s already in the process of mixing the next one. Each EP is meant to be an intimate snapshot of a particular instant, with Shankar as a Rothko of the sitar, painting expressionist scenes in blocks of vibrant color (serendipitously, raga literally translates to “color” or “hue” in Sanskrit). The first chapter’s genesis lies in a lazy summer afternoon spent in the garden with her two young boys: A half-forgotten lullaby emerges from subconscious depths, a melody that carries with it phantasmal memories of similar scenes playing out across generations.
The four songs on Forever, for Now—recorded at Berlin’s Funkhaus complex, with Arooj Aftab producing and Nils Frahm sitting in—all exist in that sun-dappled moment, expanded out into infinity. Percussion, music’s time-keeper, only makes one brief appearance: The woody tones of Frahm’s slit-drum anchor Shankar’s soaring sitar runs toward the end of “What Will We Remember?,” in the coda to five and a half minutes of exquisite improvisational sitar alap. The rest of the EP floats free, liberated from the tyranny of the metronome. Its only sense of pulse and propulsion comes from the interplay between sitar, keys, and the bass drone of the harmonium.
Opener “Daydreaming” is a meditative duet between Shankar’s pensive sitar and Frahm’s bright and gentle piano that’s based on an old Carnatic lullaby that Shankar’s grandmother would sing to her. The two instruments weave around each other in a delicate dance, every intricate detail of their waltz blown up to cosmic proportions (an Arooj Aftab specialty). On “Stolen Moments,” Shankar’s sitar speaks in bittersweet tones, evoking the pang of sadness that accompanies the realization that all moments full of wonder and joy must eventually pass.
On “Sleeping Flowers (Awaken Every Spring),” Shankar gets to show off a little, sitar notes twisting and turning in fluid counterpoint to Magda Giannikou’s accordion, each musician egging the other on. But even mid-shred, Shankar’s playing never loses its sense of wistful wonder, as though enchanted by the memory of that warm summer afternoon and the experience of a singular moment fully lived and felt. On Forever, for Now, Shankar offers listeners an invitation to join her, immerse themselves in the here and now, and find transcendence in transience.


This companion EP is a more modestly scaled counterpart to this year’s Rave Tapes, offering remixes of three album tracks with a trio of new songs. It has a little bit of something for every type of Mogwai fan.

Mogwai: Music Industry 3. Fitness Industry 1. EP

Earlier this year, Mogwai released their eighth album and then reissued their second one, and listening to both in tandem, one could reasonably conclude that the Scottish art-rock quintet have either evolved considerably over the past 15 years or not at all. Sure, Mogwai songs are no longer the ticking time-bombs they once were; now as reliant on sci-fi synths as nuclear guitar blasts, their once forbidding 10-minute-plus epics have been pared down to more digestible, pop-friendly forms. But on an album-to-album basis, that change has been so incremental, it can seem like Mogwai have stagnated. While the sneak-attack tactics of old have been replaced with more carefully orchestrated ascents, their music has nonetheless retained the slow-roiling tension and uneasy atmosphere that defined the band’s early efforts.
In lieu of rewriting their formula, Mogwai have instead opted to outsource any radical reinvention to producer friends who don’t so much provide them with remixes as wholesale rethinks. After subjecting their 2011 release, Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will, to a nigh-unrecognizable full-album overhaul, the stop-gap Music Industry 3. Fitness Industry 1. EP presents a more modestly scaled counterpart to this year’s Rave Tapes, complementing remixes of three album tracks with a trio of new songs. Collectively, the EP has a little bit of something for every type of Mogwai fan: those who just want them to stick to the same-ol'-same-ol', those who want to see them steer their sound into new directions, and those who’d prefer they dismantle it completely.
EPs have traditionally been the format where Mogwai showcased their more pensive material, so it’s a wonderful shock that Music Industry 3. Fitness Industry 1. leads with the purest, catchiest vocal track the band has ever attempted. Picking up on the motorik momentum first introduced on Hardcore’s “Mexican Grand Prix”, the glimmering dream-pop anthem “Teenage Exorcists” feels very much like a conjuring of Mogwai’s own adolescence, applying My Bloody Valentine’s beautiful blur to Stuart Braithwaite’s dancefloor confession. But while it’d be intriguing at this point to hear Mogwai attempt a whole album in this mode, the EP proves there are limits to their student-disco aspirations: the promisingly titled “HMP Shaun Ryder” proves to be a textbook Mogwai move from ominous, vibraphoned lurch to ape-shit guitarmageddon onslaught, meaning we’ll have to wait just a bit longer for the band to embark upon its baggy phase. (And, alas, “History” offers more of the same, albeit in more pastoral, less dramatic fashion.)
But rather than feel tacked-on incongruities, the three Rave Tapes remixes found on the EP’s second half provide a welcome, unpredictably outré counterpoint to the linear songs heard on the first. In the hands of Blanck Mass—a.k.a. Fuck Buttons co-founder Benjamin John Power—the Italo-prog excursion “Remurdered” is reborn as “Re-Remurdered”, which deploys the original’s synth line not as a melodic motif, but as the rhythmic foundation for its convulsive electro-funk. And tellingly, the other two remixes tackle Rave Tapes’ two meditative closing tracks in sequence, as if Mogwai were admitting that the album’s anti-climactic comedown was in need of a do-over. True to his hauntological m.o., enigmatic producer Pye Corner Audio recasts the oscillating refrain of “No Medicine for Regret” in a ghostly, post-apocalyptic fog, but uses it as the springboard into a light-headed acid-house odyssey, while German composer Nils Frahm reduces the vocoderized ballad “The Lord Is Out of Control” to a gorgeously spare piano melody, before introducing a skyward surge that channels the angelic grace of vintage Sigur Rós. All told, the final score for Music Industry 3. Fitness 1.: Remixers 3 Mogwai 1.


The fourth album from the R&B collective is a peak example of their combined powers. It simplifies their sound with soft-focus blues, plush arrangements, and deep-in-the-ground grooves.

Hive Mind

The Internet had their big breakthrough with 2015’s spaced-out hip-hop soul epic Ego Death and with its Grammy nomination, they entered into a new echelon where the Miguels and the Weeknds of the world reside. Then, near the peak of their power as an R&B band smudging the lines between rap and funk and jazz, they separated last year to focus on individual projects.
It was a curious decision for a group that had been steadily building momentum for five years, having finally solidified its core creative lineup: The Internet started as a refuge for Odd Future also-rans Syd and Matt Martians and across three increasingly better albums came to include bassist Patrick Paige II, drummer Christopher Smith, and singer-songwriter-producer Steve Lacy. Solo projects can lead to destructive infighting about control, but the Internet seem to be different; after all, they did name their breakout after the term for the rejection of a self-centered existence. Time away from working collectively has only strengthened the bond that powers their songs.
Their fourth album, Hive Mind, is an act of collective conviction. It simplifies and shores up the Internet sound with soft-focus blues, plush arrangements, and deep-in-the-ground grooves. The beats are shapelier, more boldly defined, and yet they still have the capacity to bleed into each other. “They gon’ get us to come together,” a chorus of voices sings on the album’s opening song, each utterance louder than the one before. And just as the title implies, they are more in sync here than ever.
The songs on Hive Mind are more deliberate than those on Ego Death, less likely to liquify into sticky funk codas. The two-act game of cat-and-mouse “Next Time / Humble Pie” is a gorgeous model of the band’s evolution into a singular organism; the song is split in half but the parts are interlinked, mirroring each other. The groovy, Martians-led “Beat Goes On” cracks open to reveal an alternate, ghostly drum ‘n’ bass interpretation. These moments feel less like songs devolving into jam session or rearranging into something wholly distinct from what came before. Instead, they are of a piece with what preceded them, mesmerizing blooms and curves in the arrangements that never sacrifice a song’s momentum. Though less of an odyssey, Hive Mind presents a more holistic sound, the band’s members convening around the presence of their effortlessly cool frontperson Syd.
Syd has been an epigrammatic songwriter since the band’s 2013 litmus test, Feel Good, but her time alone on last year’s Fin shaved her love songs down to their thrilling sparks. Where listening to her previous intimate exchanges on Internet songs felt like eavesdropping or catching a glimpse of a text chain in the periphery, such moments on Hive Mind are less concealed without feeling less sacred. The writing is less distinctive and sometimes less specific, but more inviting.
Her quiet turns are even leaner than in the past, jumping straight into the action. “Thinking ahead of time/Why don’t you spend the night/I know you love me,” she sings on the nearly seven-minute closer “Hold On.” “We can book a flight/Wake up in paradise/Sun up above us.” These are cut-to-the-chase expressions of interest that are frank about exactly what Syd is after; blunt even for a woman who once sang, “I can read your mind even from behind/And fuck what’s in your phone, lemme take you home.” There is significantly less room for small talk, for being clever. “This back and forth is energy wasted,” she explains on “Next Time.” Even when there’s friction, she’s only willing to spare but so many words.
So much of the Internet’s appeal is still wrapped up in Syd’s vocals, which smear across hard, smacking basslines and rap-savvy drum programming. Sometimes her voice is a whimper, other times her volume is barely louder than a hum; both enhance her tales of intimacy. The accelerated relationship timeline of “Mood” is presented in tiny, evocative vignettes that Syd teases out across dribbling, staccato croons. Through breathy, low-toned melodies, “Wanna Be” plots on turning a longtime friend into a lover: “I think she wants to be [my girl],” she sighs. “At least I hope she does, shit.” With Syd as their laconic storyteller, navigating modern romances and late-night temptation, the band is mastering the funk jam as a nocturne.
There isn’t a single note or riff on the album that feels contrived or forced, and the entire thing is incredibly smooth and unsegmented, an endless string of hook-ups blurring together. Steve Lacy sings more, Martians serves as the band’s utility player (keyboard on some songs, drums on others, even contributing the occasional synth line), and everyone else contributes in ways beyond their official position within the band. The aim is to have everything happen as naturally as possible, “like, ‘Who has a drum loop they’ve made? Pull it out, let’s put some chords over it and go from there!’” Syd told Entertainment Weekly. This egalitarian spirit and anti-hierarchical approach to song-making fuel the sleekest, most robust music of their career.


The UK jazz pianist Greg Foat deftly balances the rhythmic and ambient poles of his sound on his collaborative album with veteran Italian artist Gigi Masin.

Dolphin

Greg Foat likes to build up, up, up in search of transcendence, augmenting his keyboard playing with so many choirs, horns, and strings that his music sometimes sounds like a ‘70s Joni Mitchell album stripped of vocals, or maybe Kamasi Washington if he got a gig at a seaside resort. Yet the English musician is equally gifted at beatless new-age meditations, and it’s at this lower altitude that he meets Italian artist Gigi Masin on their collaboration album Dolphin. This might not be the most immediately dazzling or symphonically thrilling album in the formidable run Foat’s kept up since 2011, when his Greg Foat Group debuted with the mincing prog-jazz of Dark Is the Sun. But it’s a subtle breakthrough in the way it balances the rhythmic and ambient poles of his sound.
After opener “Lee” drones without interruption for eight and a half minutes, the drum fill that opens “London Nights” is liable to make listeners wonder if they haven’t stumbled into an advertisement or accidentally shuffled to a different record. It’s the first time the two musicians let any empty space into the album, and it feels shocking at first, like a dreamer rising to consciousness. But Dolphin’s sequencing quickly falls into a rhythm, with its long, drumless pieces (“Lee,” “Sabena,” Your Move” divided by more beat-heavy tracks (“London Nights,” “Love Theme,” “Viento Calido”) and two-minute interludes (“Dolphin,” “Leo Theo.”) The album seems to continually unfurl and coil itself back up again, and at 50 minutes, it’s long enough to feel expansive without overstaying its welcome (the vinyl version is shorter, excising “Your Move”). Compare this to Foat’s prior album Off-Piste, a collaboration with saxophonist Art Themen, where the kitschy cantina jazz on the second half felt jarring after the crystalline compositions on the first.
After stumbling across Masin’s 1986 crate-digger classic Wind, Foat inquired about a collaboration. Certainly this sounds far more like a Foat project than one of Masin’s dusky, stately ambient albums. But there’s a mournfulness to the eight tracks on Dolphin, a sense of lengthening shadows, and “London Nights” is cheerful only in comparison to “Lee.” Angel-choir synth presets take the place of Foat’s beloved Beach Boys harmonies, perhaps due to COVID concerns that required most of the album’s recording to take place remotely, and they lend “London Nights” a slightly gothic tenor reminiscent of the miasmatic German jazz band Bohren & der Club of Gore. This music feels breezy and light while at the same time swelling with sadness. It’s a longtime strength of Masin’s, especially on his albums with Gaussian Curve. If Foat defines the sound of the album, Masin defines the way it feels.
This means Dolphin takes a little more time to sneak up on the listener than most of Foat’s work. He’s the kind of artist who comes on strong off the bat; his music is expensive-sounding, sumptuously arranged, relentless in its pursuit of beauty and transcendence, generally easy to listen to, and surprisingly groovy at times. On first listen, this more muted record will probably scan as enjoyable but not mind-blowing the way your first spin of Symphonie Pacifique might be. Its strengths—its command of mood, its sequencing, its pacing, its understanding of ambient music—aren’t the kind of things that hit the listener in the face on a first listen. Luckily, the surface is seductive enough to draw us in over and over again so we can discover its depths for ourselves.


On his third solo outing as Panda Bear, Animal Collective's Noah Lennox balances blossoming melodic pop with wildly experimental sound techniques, hitting on a stunningly unique sound that's both overwhelming and inspirational.

Person Pitch

Inside the booklet included with Panda Bear's third solo album, Person Pitch, is a list of artists. The first four named are microhouse artists Basic Channel, Luomo, Dettinger, and Wolfgang Voigt. Maybe Noah Lennox, the man behind the Panda Bear, began this influence-naming exercise in a minimal techno state of mind. On the other hand, the inclusion of these four at the top could be significant. We always knew that the guys from his main band, Animal Collective, had an ear out for electronic music, but with Panda Bear, the impact of the DJ seems to run deeper. The music on Person Pitch soundsnothing like proper dance music, but the basic structure-- the use of dynamics, and above all, the sense of repetition-- draws heavily from that context. Which is particularly interesting considering what else is going on.
The Beach Boys always come up when talking about Panda Bear, and not just because he shares their fondness for certain melodic turns: When he allows the reverb to blanch his voice, Lennox can sound uncannily like Brian Wilson. This tunefulness gives Person Pitch an appeal that extends beyond just Animal Collective fans, but the way the songs are put together also gives them an unusual twist. Producers in Brian Wilson's era never worked like this, sampling old songs and instruments and spinning them in wheels of sound that seem like they could go forever. Most of this record consists of intricately constructed, heavily layered, and highly repetitive loops on top of which Lennox sings oddly familiar and touching melodies. But despite its grounding in guitar pop, Person Pitch isn't likely to be mistaken for the work of a band. It sounds like what it is: one guy alone in his bedroom trolling through music history, picking and choosing bits to make something deeply personal and all his own.
The repetition of the music here, though probably engendered by computer, has a strange analog quality. You can almost see the turntables rotating on the opening "Comfy in Nautica", which loops Lennox's sung "ah"'s and handclaps to evoke ritual campfire music, while the deep reverb on his voice puts us in the same liturgical headspace found on his very different acoustic record Young Prayer from 2004. "Take Pills" repeats a tambourine and twangy guitar during its slower opening section while industrial samples that sound like car parts being followed down an assembly line fill in the vast spaces. The field recordings take an aquatic turn on the track's second half, as Lennox picks up his acoustic guitar and moves the party to the beach, singing "I don't want for us to take pills anymore" to the kind of effortlessly melodic line that once expressed thoughts like "da doo ron ron."
Given the presence of such tremendously catchy pop moments on Person Pitch, the record's indulgences feel completely earned. The flurry of tabla that opens the extended "Good Girl/Carrots" sticks out at first but makes sense once Lennox gets the hectic dub chaos out of his system and settles into the second section's hypnotic tune. When the song edges become wispy and shapeless on "I'm Not", which blends Lennox's voice with an indistinct droning synth, the mood and thrust of the album gives the track the appropriate context. "Search for Delicious", reminiscent of the glowing ambient drift of Lennox's side project Jane, won't leave the drone alone, repeatedly knocking Lennox's singing off track like a clumsy but well-meaning drunk. Music of such warped processing would be a specialist's item, but as a breather here, before the simple and childlike music-box closer "Ponytail", it feels right.
I still haven't talked about the 12-and-a-half-minute "Bros", the astonishing track that serves as the album's centerpiece. It's here that Person Pitch's repetition and DJ's sense of timing are most apparent, while Lennox's songwriting hits a melodic peak. The first few bars turn to the golden age of 60s and 70s radio, with some rattling percussion chipped from Phil Spector's Wall of Sound and a chiming acoustic guitar that could be pulled from the Beach Boys' "Girl Don't Tell Me". But as the loops pass on "Bros", the song begins to seem like a glorious travelogue, a journey along a path where all the music's influences are visible along the roadside: the Wilson Brothers in their pinstripe shirts, or the queasy phasing and random sound effects-- a subway, people on a roller coaster, a baby crying-- of Lee "Scratch" Perry. When Panda begins to chant halfway through, we hear an echo of his main band, and when the neo-Latin piano comes in during the latter portion, transforming the track from internally-focused meditation to outwardly-beaming celebration, we get an image of Derrick May's classic techno anthem "Strings of Life" busting into a DJ set to make everyone go crazy.
Person Pitch as a whole-- and "Bros" in particular-- evokes the sunshine of Lennox's adopted Lisbon, Portugal home. But it's the kind of light best experienced with eyes closed-- with the rays filtered through eyelids, turning the world into various shades of red and orange. You can feel the warmth pouring out of the music and see abstractions of its inspirations-- that whole long list and more-- as they cycle around again and again and again. Five of these seven songs have been released in various forms on singles and 12"s previously, so the exceptionally high quality of this music isn't a surprise to those who have been following Panda Bear closely. Still, hearing it all together in one place and listening to it all at one time is both overwhelming and inspirational.


Reggaetón’s biggest star closes a career-making 2020 with an album imagining his music in 2030: It’s morose, introspective, and pulls from post-punk and rock en español as much as it does hip-hop and R&B.

El Último Tour del Mundo

From the first moments of his latest LP, El Último Tour Del Mundo, Bad Bunny declares the world his. “Yo hago lo que me dé la gana,” he reminds us of his growing influence. “¿Quién dijo que no?” It’s a hard assertion to dispute: During a pandemic that decimated large swaths of the music industry, his star has only risen. YHLQMDLG, released in March, flirted with the top of the pops and dominated the Latin charts; he’s graced awards-show stages and the covers of Western media’s storied publications; he’s evolved into a vocal ally of marginalized communities, with a willingness to acknowledge and rectify his mistakes; and with the release of El Último Tour Del Mundo, he’s made history with the first-ever No. 1 Spanish-language album on Billboard’s album chart. No other artist had more Spotify streams in 2020.
For El Último Tour Del Mundo, Bad Bunny transports himself a decade into the future, imagining the music he’d play on his final world tour in 2030. It’s not his best record, but that’s almost beside the point. You’ll still find vestiges of his particular nuevo reggaetón sound on tracks like “Te Mudaste” and “Dákiti,” even if the latter is one of its weakest examples, pummeling the dembow riddim into submission with a thumping four-on-the-floor that’s devoid of any actual flavor. But by track four he takes a sharp left turn from the rap and perreo that defined previous LPs in favor of a morose, introspective vibe that pulls from British post-punk and the rock en español of Central and South America as much as it does the hip-hop and R&B of the American South.
For better or worse, El Ultimó Tour Del Mundo’s rock sound leans heavily on producer Marco “MAG” Borrero (and, to a lesser extent, Borrero’s human riff machine Mick Coogan), best known for crafting pop hits for the likes of Flo Rida, Bebe Rexha, and Selena Gomez. The collaboration doesn’t always work; tracks like “Te Deseo Lo Mejor” and “Antes Que Se Acabe” suffer from a saccharine sound that’s generic enough to blend in with Top 40 radio. But when it does, it’s sublime. “Yo Visto Así” and “La Droga” inhabit the same universe of distorted emo rap as the late Lil Peep and Juice WRLD, with grunge guitars ringing out over rumbling trap beats. And “Maldita Pobreza,” a poor man’s lament that effortlessly bounces between buoyant new-wave riffs and booming 808s, evokes Café Tacvba, New Order, and modern-day traperos in equal measure, offering a glimpse of the brilliance that can result from Benito’s experimentation.
These rock tendencies don’t come completely out of left field. Bad Bunny has previously dabbled in pop-punk (“Tenemos Que Hablar”) and metalcore (“Hablamos Mañana”), and even recruited Los Enanitos Verdes’ Marciano Cantero for his and J Balvin’s interpolation of the Argentinian rock band’s classic “Lamento Boliviano.” Each record served to expand the boundaries of urbano, Latin America’s catch-all for the myriad genres in “urban” (i.e. Black) music, eventually stretching it so thin as to render it transparently irrelevant. The new urbano—or el movimiento, as some have taken to calling it—is inclusive, a tent big enough for fans of Soda Stereo and strip-club beats, Pisces Iscariot and pro wrestling, Daddy Yankee and drag queens. Plenty of artists have tried to seamlessly integrate an international aesthetic, treating their tracklists like grocery lists and collecting sounds from around the world without a genuine connection to the music. Bad Bunny succeeds where they have failed because those influences come from within. He didn’t pull the Puerto Rican holiday song “Cantares de Navidad” from a spreadsheet of Google trends; it’s the music of his life. When it’s real, you can feel it.
In that sense, El Último Tour Del Mundo gets at the core of what makes Bad Bunny so appealing. “Maldita Pobreza” isn’t just a trap-rock fusion experiment, it’s a reminder that Benito is less than half a decade removed from bagging groceries in Arecibo, daydreaming of exotic Italian sports cars. He toes the line between rap braggadocio and vulnerable everyman with relative ease—even while crooning about alien sex. Standing on top of the world, with access to abundant fame, wealth, and critical success, he appears free of any pressure to conform, even to previous versions of himself. He’s a beacon of light in barrios around the world, an example for kids with secret skirts or Smashing Pumpkins CDs of what being yourself can look and sound like. When he says he does whatever he wants, we believe him. Maybe we can, too.

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Their LP was only released two days ago but these Sheffield teens are already considered the UK’s biggest new band since Oasis.

Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not

On Monday, the Arctic Monkeys sold 118,501 copies of their debut album in the UK, more than the rest of the top 20 combined. It’s a startingly high figure not just because they’re set to be the Biggest New Band Since Oasis but because of the speed with which they’ve gatecrashed their nation’s public consciousness, going from unknown indie band to No. 1 on the singles charts in roughly six months. Much of the credit for that quick rise is rightly given to the power of the internet: The then-unsigned band first caught the public ear when its demos circulated last year. The Sheffield quartet eventually signed with Domino and the label wisely hosted the buzzmaking tracks, a move that allowed anticipation for the group's studio recordings to spread rather than stall. Two No. 1 singles, a few breathless reviews, and a load of thinkpieces about how The Internet Will Change Music Forever later and in the UK the Arctic Monkeys are suddenly the biggest band of the decade.
It would be nice to think that a democratized music industry would mean the kids are tossing up alternatives to what they're already getting, but the Arctic Monkeys are, at their heart, the same sort of meat’n’potatoes guitar rock that has dominated the UK since the emergence of the Strokes, if not Oasis. They’re a band that neatly sums up what’s already selling, and in a relatively condensed media market the group was always going to be a hit; what’s changed is that they were pegged quickly, mainlined to their target market and the UK mainstream press and radio for six months, then called an organic success story. (America, don’t get smug: Your biggest download success to date is “My Humps.”) And context still matters: When Oasis or the Strokes rolled into town, they were breaths of fresh air, antidotes to a lack of swagger or hooks or artists who wanted and deserved to be rock stars; Arctic Monkeys are yet another in a string of buzzsaw guitar bands with Northern accents.
What’s meant to be different about them are sometimes keenly expressive lyrics and that irresistible backstory. The band’s more starry-eyed backers compare their hardscrabble tales to those of predecessors such as the Specials, Smiths, Pulp, and the Streets. But wringing lyrics from the everyday or articulating the dissatisfaction of many is risky and difficult business and, unlike those listed above, the Monkeys aren’t so much spinning deft tales of quotidian anxiety as just complaining about their first steps into nightlife, run-ins with bouncers, cops, and schoolmates. So they’re the UK’s emo, painting diaristic portraits of small-town and suburban life for teens in a country where fundamentalism is allegiance to a soccer club rather than religion.
Hey, fair play to them—first steps into nightlife, run-ins with bouncers, cops, and schoolmates, these should be the worries in their lives, and of their peers they’re among the best at addressing them. Almost everything that’s appealing about Arctic Monkeys is down to singer Alex Turner, who possesses a gritty voice that gets increasingly appealing the more he allows it to stretch and wander. On sharp, observational, and detail-heavy Saturday Night and Sunday Morning tracks like the “Red Lights Indicate Doors Are Secure,” “Mardy Bum,” and “Riot Van” the band justifies taking their album name from the kitchen-sink drama. (Though it’s still terrible—alas, Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down was already taken). Outside of naming their record, when the band stumbles it’s typically when they’re fumbling around with women (“Dancing Shoes,” “Still Take You Home”) or complaining about the onset of fame (the dreadful “Perhaps Vampires Is a Bit Strong But...”).
The singles are a mixed bag. The Five Minutes With... EP’s “Fake Tales of San Francisco” is a witty call to arms, a plea for bands that say something about their lives, but “From the Ritz to the Rubble”’s whining almost makes you want to side with the bouncers. Of the Monkeys’ starmaking tracks, neither sounds like a No. 1, let alone the first sounds from a burgeoning sensation: “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor” grates every other time I listen to it; better is the offbeat “When the Sun Goes Down,” the only track here that’s three-dimensional structurally as well as lyrically. Should the band release album closer “A Certain Romance” as its next single, the hit/miss ratio will be greatly improved. A long sigh about living among chavs, “Romance” finds the Monkeys moving between bloody-knuckled and wistful as they paint a picture of boredom breeding violence, of being aware of the faults and faultlines in their environment but feeling too powerless or hemmed in by loyalty to raise a fuss. It’s a neat summation of both the band’s M.O. and a teenage life characterized by existential drift and geographic claustrophobia.
And in the end then this is about teenage life—and a pretty specific type of teenage life at that. NME editor Conor McNicholas told The Guardian last year that “there’s a big sofa supermarket by Doncaster train station. I always look at it and think someone’s got a Saturday job there, they’re 17, they’re stuck in Doncaster and they fucking hate it—that’s the person we're publishing for.” I’d guess that to a disaffected, chavbaiting 17-year-old from Doncaster (or Rotherham, or Hull...) this is the perfect soundtrack to moving loveseats around a stock room. Fittingly then the NME awarded this album a 10/10. To the rest of us, however, the album is at times charming, oddly affecting, and certainly promising but understandably something less than life changing.