After years of unavailability, these seminal 70s no-wave rockers finally offer a definitive 32-track anthology, containing virtually everything they ever recorded-- even the four from Brian Eno's classic No New York comp.

DNA on DNA

Question for the young'uns who are studying DNA for the first time: Sure, DNA mattered, but were they any good?
"no-wave" (genre): The stunted strand of noise music/performance art where amateurs played fast, disjointed jerks of songs with no development, making vulgar and even physical assaults on audiences who would've settled for being spat on. Immortalized as much for how quickly it burned out as for how many bands it still influences, no-wave is mostly remembered by a single milestone, No New York, produced by Brian Eno, who picked the four bands that had the best names: James Chance & The Contortions, Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Mars, and DNA.
All of DNA's studio tracks and a handful of live ones are here, even the four songs from No New York. Everyone refers to No New York as one of the great out-of-print albums, but if you look around, you can buy it on CD for about $40. But that would be really stupid.
Damn, Francis Crick just died.
People joke that if you've heard one DNA song, you've heard them all, but you really need at least two: one with keyboardist Robin Lee Crutchfield, and another with his vastly more capable replacement, Pere Ubu bassist Tim Wright.
Robin Crutchfield, writing on his website about one of his first gigs, in 1976 at a performance art festival: "I mapped out a perimeter on the Floyd Bennett airfield runway with a stick of chalk and took several objects including a toy piano and a blanket with me to live in a self-imposed cage like an asylum inmate for the day. 'The Death of Sparrow Hart' was a persona I took on, part bird, part autistic child, dancing and sobbing and pecking at the piano, hiding under a blanket and so on."
The single biggest reason to revisit DNA is noise savant Arto Lindsay. Lindsay chicken-chokes his guitar, splintering notes and shattering chords like windows falling out of a skyscraper. He cracks his vocals like a bullwhip, then garbles his lyrics with the patience of dry heaving. "Get out of here/ Go fuck yourself," he moans, then sticks his head back in the bowl.
When a woman suffers a miscarriage, a common cause is genetic damage: The egg and sperm unite but the DNA combines incorrectly, causing chromosomal damage that is too severe to allow the fetus to come to term. Children who are born with mental retardation also suffer genetic irregularities, but landed right at the threshold where the damage did not prevent them from coming to term.
Going off the tracklist here, Blonde Redhead could've just named themselves Egomaniac's Kiss instead.
Drummer Ikue Mori can't or won't lock in with anybody. Her frantic cymbal-bashing works better than when she tries to keep the beat-- which is fine, since the rhythms are numbing. As for when she pounds out a tribal tattoo, if you were sacrificing your daughter to a volcano and Mori were the best drummer you could hire for the ceremony, you'd really feel like an asshole.
Crutchfield on how they got Mori on drums: "Arto wanted her to be our drummer. I was reluctant, for a number of reasons. The first was that she had played violin and had no experience on drums. The second was that she didn't own any drums. The third was that she didn't speak enough English for us to communicate and manage to build a 20 minute set of songs in less than 30 days. And the fourth was that her visa was expiring and she was planning to leave the country... She did have one thing going for her. She was interested in working with us."
Is it true that no-wave bands couldn't play their instruments? With the benefit of hindsight, you can figure out who had talent and who just had attitude, but no-wave is still remembered as a lost oasis of committed, crippling unprofessionalism, of a simpler time when making inept noise with gusto actually could shake someone-- except of course, how inept could it be if it's still worth listening to on a record, in your living room?
Lindsay and Mori later worked with cult composer and improviser John Zorn, for example in the "game improvisation" Cobra, where Zorn herded his groups through painfully elaborate rules to produce music that sounds even uglier than this stuff. The nerdification of noise music suggests that for all the posturing and the awareness of posturing that surrounded no-wave, the downtown scenesters really lost something when it just became "skronk."
Lindsay et al had the sense to kill the project instead of developing it. Arto Lindsay went on to become a fine singer and guitarist, and when he isn't playing extreme improv, he records beautiful albums of Brazilian pop.
Meanwhile, Mori switched to drum machine.


The Japanese composer Midori Takada's newly reissued album is an assimilation of musical modes from around the world. It belongs in the pantheon alongside Steve Reich's most notable works.

Midori Takada: Through the Looking Glass

Through the Looking Glass

In a perfect world, Japanese composer Midori Takada and her works for percussion would be as revered and renowned as that of Steve Reich. Much like that world-renowned American composer, Takada drew influence from a study of African drumming and Asian music, and surmised how these sensibilities dovetailed with that of minimalism, serving as means to break with the Western classical tradition (she originally was a percussionist in the Berlin RIAS Symphonie Orchestra at the Berlin Philharmonic). But with only a handful of works to her name and all of it long out of print—be it with her groundbreaking percussion trio Mkwaju Ensemble, the group Ton-Klami or the three solo albums she released across nearly two decades—her music has been impossible to hear since the early 1990s.
Only last year did two pieces from Takada’s Mkwaju Ensemble appear on last year’s crucial More Better Days compilation, revealing Takada’s singular approach to spartan yet euphoric percussion pieces. Touching on gamelan, kodo, and American minimalism (Takada founded the trio in part to perform the works of Reich, Terry Riley, and other 20th-century percussion pieces), each one built carefully to sublime effect. When Visible Cloaks’ member Spencer Doran released his influential mixes of Japanese music, selections from both Mkwaju and Takada’s solo percussion pieces appeared at crucial junctures.
The rarest of all of Takada’s works though was her 1983 solo effort, Through the Looking Glass, never released on CD and fetching ludicrous sums online for an original vinyl copy. Unable to financially sustain Mkwaju, Takada disbanded the ensemble and entered the studio by herself to realize this music. Over the course of two days, she put to analog tape all four of the extended performances here as well as laying down the overdubs, producing and mixing (with help from an engineer) the album on her own. An astonishing feat in and of itself, Looking Glass is one of the most dazzling works of minimalism, be it from the East or West.
“Mr. Henri Rousseau's Dream” is an assured opening, one that moves at its own slow, hushed pace. Takada astutely layers marimba, gongs, rattles and other ambient bits of chimes, recorder, tam-tam and mimics bird calls with an ocarina. In its understated pulsing of marimba, it brings to mind Gavin Bryars’ work from the same era, most notably Hommages on the Les Disques Du Crépuscule imprint. There appears to be little in the way of linear development as Takada instead crafts and sustains an entire landscape of these small sounds, letting them all levitate in mid-air for twelve heavenly minutes.
With “Crossing,” a bit of momentum builds up from a single struck cowbell. Takada goes back over the original clonk and starts to layer interweaving lines on marimba, each successive line increasing the complexity of the lines. More cowbell comes in and suddenly Takada begins to simulate the ornate polyrhythms of Reich’s Drumming all by herself in the studio. And with the introduction of a crossing marimba pattern and the drone of a harmonium some five-and-a-half minutes into the piece, it moves into its own rarefied space.
“Trompe-L’oeil” moves at a more relaxed pace, with Takada’s harmonium lines swaying like an accordion and her use of a Coke bottle as both reed and percussion giving the piece a playful air about it. It’s a breather before the finale of the album, the fifteen-minute pressure cooker of percussion, “Catastrophe Σ.” Using the harmonium to create a darker mood, Takada focuses on tom-tom, bongos, cymbal and a bit of piano to ratchet up and sustain tension over the course of the piece. There’s a breathlessness to the piece as it gathers momentum that makes it one of the most thrilling percussion pieces of its kind.
While her American influences always had an exploratory aspect to their most famous works, there’s never a moment on, say, “Music for 18 Musicians” where you feel like Reich lets loose his rein even a millimeter. There’s something about Takada and the joy of creating this album that fully emerges in this last quarter-hour, as she builds energy up with her drums, her harmonium and that ever-present cowbell. In the liner notes to this reissue, Takada explained just what she learned in her studies of African and Asian music that led her to abandoned Western classical music as a pursuit way back when. “As a performer, this music asked you to personally examine your own physical transformation and to confirm and share this transformation with your counterpart, group or tribe,” she said. “The music stops short of imposing sovereignty or nationality.” And even as the finale builds to a glorious climax, it too stops short. Takada pulls it all away at the last possible moment, a thrill that allows her listeners—nearly thirty-five years on—to soar to a space well within themselves. It’s a space well worth rediscovery.


On Ella Williams’ second album as Squirrel Flower, the road is a space of intimacy and disaster. Her vivid songwriting and bright, searching voice bring both sides to life.

Planet (i)

Ella Williams was writing tender songs about freeways and driving long before a certain No. 1 hit about a driver’s license came along. Williams, a 24-year-old songwriter who records under the name Squirrel Flower, filled her debut, 2020’s I Was Born Swimming, with meditations on interstates, headlights, and ambiguous lovers who carry her inside when she’s fallen asleep on the road. The follow-up, Planet (i), features songs like “Iowa 146,” “Flames and Flat Tires,” and the uncharacteristically anthemic “Roadkill,” which uses backseat driving (“Slow down/Don’t want to risk the roadkill”) as a metaphor for the nagging weight of imposter syndrome. If automobile companies threw money at indie-rock songwriters the way fashion brands woo influencers, Williams would surely be on their list.
Born into a musical family in Massachusetts—her grandmother a singer, her grandfather the founder of a medieval ensemble—Williams was gifted with a bright, searching voice that she can roughen up when the song calls for it (“Hurt a Fly”) and a knack for imbuing small observations with cosmic weight. She has since lived in Iowa (where she attended college) and Chicago, which explains some of the road imagery, but she recorded Planet (i) in Bristol with English producer Ali Chant last fall; she had just recovered from the coronavirus and realized her antibodies made it relatively safe to travel.
On Planet (i), the road is a nexus of nostalgia and intimacy: “Iowa 146” uses a whisper-sing delivery and gorgeous, fingerpicked guitar melody to capture the sweetness of a night spent on top of a car with a love interest. But it’s also a site of disasters that haunt Williams’s imagination: the careening firestorms of “Flames and Flat Tires,” or the Missouri floods that inspired “Deluge in the South,” which has the openhearted, country-speckled quality of a Waxahatchee deep cut. Williams’ vivid songwriting and versatile voice bring both sides to life.
Planet (i) is bigger and bolder than Squirrel Flower’s previous work, augmenting Williams’ alternate tunings and folkie charm with grand gestures and abrupt tonal shifts. “Roadkill” deploys a key change at the climax, “To Be Forgotten” wrings drama out of a reverb-heavy drum track, and much of the album features airy backing vocals from family and friends. The spiky, acerbic “Hurt a Fly” is an instant highlight, and the rare song where Williams sings in character as someone else. “Took it too far again/Followed you home again,” she deadpans, cheekily impersonating toxic music-scene dudes but cloaking her voice in distortion, as though to create some distance from her own identity.
Like I Was Born Swimming, Planet (i) grows a bit listless towards the back half (“Desert Wildflowers”), and some of its song fragments don’t quite land. The most intriguing among them is “Big Beast,” which sounds like it’s emanating from an antique gramophone before its grainy folk melody crashes into an awkward sludge-metal climax. The payoff isn’t there. Naturally, though, it’s another road vignette, inspired by a time when Williams and her mother were driving around aimlessly and became captivated by a massive storm cloud. If life is a highway, Squirrel Flower wants to dissociate beside it all night long.

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After two decades fronting Stereolab and her side project Monade, Laetitia Sadier makes a strong solo debut.

The Trip

For almost 20 years, Laetitia Sadier has been fronting the dazzlingly retro-futuristic Stereolab, and she's also made room to indulge in a playful dream-pop side project, Monade. But The Trip, her first album under her own name, still feels like a coming-out party. Following Stereolab's recently announced hiatus (the band's upcoming Not Music was culled from the sessions for 2008's Chemical Chords) and the disbanding of Monade, Sadier is finally on her own. She didn't waste the opportunity: The Trip is breathtaking, a rich collection of torch songs and subtle, meandering melodies that clear away the distracting frenzy and Byzantine flourishes of her past groups to expose the humane beauty of her voice.
The Trip was produced by Emmanuel Mario, who recorded Monade's last album, and Richard Swift, the American lo-fi songsmith who makes his own quirky chamber-pop albums for Secretly Canadian. Both are smart matches for Sadier. Mario brings the wisdom that comes with familiarity, knowing how to capture the airy voluptuousness of Sadier's voice without indulging in the drama of its detachment. And Swift, who could make even the most self-serious artist sound whimsical, brings levity and fluidity to the collection, allowing its melodies to amble without Stereolab's laser-focus. Both producers capture Sadier's aesthetic through an appropriately sepia-toned lens, but also leave the palette clean enough so that the emotional weight of the tracks-- be they smoldering or melancholic-- comes from her voice. So, in lieu of bouncy pop melodies, cool, jazzy exotica, or cerebral genre experiments, The Trip is full of autumnal ballads. The instrumentation is graceful and measured, giving Sadier's willowy songs a cozy underpinning.
Sadier's lyrics and delivery, though a wonderful and essential part of Stereolab's aesthetic, have sometimes felt secondary, as if they are chasing bandleader Tim Gane's instrumental ideas. But The Trip is gentler and less melodically direct than her work with that band, so pointedly narrative (and disarmingly personal) lyrics can drive the hazy arrangement. Like on "One Million Year Trip", a haunting number that explicitly deals with her sister's suicide. The light krautrock pulse and gentle, ascending synth chords are muted and stay out of the way, and the tune's power comes from its vocal. "She went on a million-year trip and left everything behind-- her skin, her hair," Sadier sings, "She has a long way to travel, so I will open my heart, and let the pain run along as there is no point in holding on."
Though notably subdued and tinged with sadness, the album isn't a downer. There are a few brisk moments to the dreamy collection-- most notably Sadier's striking version of Les Rita Mitsouko's louche disco rocker "Un Soir, Un Chien", which toys with the playfully mechanical synthesized textures of her former band. She even manages to turn Wendy & Bonnie's somber folk ballad "By the Sea" into a sexy, propulsive swirl of regret.
It's not that Sadier sounds fundamentally different here than she does in Stereolab-- her voice still oozes ethereality and sophistication. But The Trip feels like an expansion into new territory. Without Gane and his spacey-cool affectations, Sadier is free to revel in warm, rich balladry. You sense an artist known in part for her detachment leaning in close to share a secret.


After a lo-fi triumph, Stuart McLamb records his second LP in a proper studio, supplementing his melodic gifts with reverb and colorful arrangements.

Libraries

The jaunty, irrepressible indie pop of the Love Language's 2009 debut was borne of a personal tailspin: Stuart McLamb wrote and recorded it after retreating to his parents' house, licking his wounds following a brutal breakup and his subsequent collapse. The songs he produced, however, were anything but self-pitying. With nothing but his melodic gifts and an appealing sense of wry resignation, McLamb spun his despair into music that felt more like a whoop of joy than a cry of loneliness.
On follow-up Libraries, McLamb sounds less down and out but, oddly, more downbeat. The scrappy, lo-fi production of the debut is gone; he recorded the album by himself again but did so in a proper studio, and the record glimmers with soft-pedaled production touches. McLamb's handsome, worn croon is here blessed with the spiraling reverb it demands, and his colorful arrangements swell impressively to fill the new sonic space. "Pedals" announces his intentions out of the gate with an Arcade Fire-size arrangement given a sonic full court press. Like many former lo-fi musicians, McLamb alternately luxuriates and gets lost in his plush new surroundings. On several songs, he evaporates in the arrangement, "ooh"-ing wordlessly in the background as barroom piano and shimmering tremolo guitar swirl around him. The heart-catching "This Blood Is Our Own" is a standout example, beginning as a Stones-y blues ballad before an ethereal countrypolitan string section touches down, sending the song into a delirious coda that hits the same swooning heights Cass McCombs did last year on "You Saved My Life".
The pace on Libraries is more measured and the mood more muted, however, which means nothing here hits with the same immediacy as the first record's "Lalita" or "Sparxxx". Where the debut tapped the effervescent spirit of Merseybeat and the wintergreen harmonies of Dexys Midnight Runners, Libraries nods more to Burt Bacharach, and the record can sag occasionally under the drowsy weight of his influence. Of the album's 10 songs, only the trashcan percussion of "Heart to Tell" and the bone-crack backbeat of "Brittany's Back" match the debut's ragged exuberance. Others, like "Horophones", are well-meaning, well-written mid-tempo tunes that lack an animating spirit. McLamb is still a fantastically talented pop songwriter, though, one with the unerring ability to write melodies that seem to have tumbled out in a spontaneous rush of joy, and several songs here-- the lazy-Sunday-stroll shuffle of "Anthrophobia", for instance-- reveal this talent operating at its peak.


A workmanlike quality—both charismatic and chilling—has grown since Guided by Voices reformed for their lackluster 2012 album Let’s Go Eat the Factory, and it’s carried over into their sixth comeback full-length, Cool Planet. The line between exhilarating and exasperating is still being straddled to the point where it's starting to chafe.

Cool Planet

When Guided by Voices played the Colorado stop of Riot Fest last summer, it might as well have been a time warp. The set was eerily similar to the group’s performances in their mid-1990s prime, all wobbles and grumbles with an occasional flash of off-kilter transcendence. But there were elements of the performance that were jarringly different as well, namely an exhibition of cold, canned efficiency that almost utterly undermined the air of confusion and chaos that Robert Pollard and company once brought to their music. That workmanlike quality—both charismatic and chilling—has grown since GBV reformed for their lackluster 2012 album Let’s Go Eat the Factory, and it’s carried over into their sixth comeback full-length, Cool Planet. The line between exhilarating and exasperating is still being straddled to the point where it's starting to chafe.
Cool Planet coasts on the same mix of curdled ballads, power-pop sparklers, and tossed-off oddities as its most recent predecessors, but there’s a decided kick to the album’s handful of true gems. “Authoritarian Zoo” could be accused of setting the bar too high too early; it's a hammering anthem in which Pollard croons with slightly out-of-tune relish about animals and paranoia—the kind of mangled pileup of imagery that once informed GBV’s best pop songs, and still does. “Pan Swimmer” continues the trend of vintage Pollard made fresh, a 62-second hook-burst that explodes like a time-lapse blossom, while the sprawling-by-comparison “Males of Wormwood Mars” represents the record’s most inspired three minutes. Over an infectious drum fill and riffs that shift between gentle jangle and chunky distortion, Pollard weaves a magic-realist-meets-sci-fi narrative that could pass as a Soft Boys b-side.
The tipping point from mosaic to mishmash happens somewhere near “Psychotic Crush”, a promising squiggle of psychedelia—complete with mocking guitar figure—that ultimately can’t pay its vast debt to Status Quo’s “Pictures of Matchstick Men”. “Table at Fool’s Tooth” is more successful in its stately yet shambolic, punk-meets-Jethro-Tull pastiche, but on “Hat of Flames”, GBV curiously flops at trying to copy GBV—namely every other song from Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, the period of the group’s own catalog that their current incarnation has most avidly tried to revive. When stacked against inspired tracks like “Cool Planet”, whose apocalyptic power-pop veers spiritedly from triumphalism to fatalism, a backpedaling rehash—let alone half an album of them—just doesn’t cut it.
Ballad-wise, Cool Planet spectacularly disappoints. Save for two stellar, simmering delicacies sung by Tobin Sprout—“Narrated by Paul” and “Ticket to Hide”, both of which shout their gleeful Beatles references even as Sprout himself whispers, especially on the sumptuous, piano-led former cut—the album is strangled by its slower moments. Pollard barely shows up on “Cream of Lung”, a dull muddle that sounds as lively as if it were recorded while he brushed his teeth. “Bad Love Is Easy to Do” fails in its attempt to be direct and sentimental, but worse off is “Fast Crawl”, which spoons out meandering sludge in unsavory lumps. Where GBV’s slovenly, dilapidated grandeur once felt vital and radical, it now putters along crankily, the sound of a band muttering to itself rather than playing to anyone in particular, themselves included. There’s a certain charm to that, of course. It’s just not always enough.


This reissue of a 2001 album from Kieran Hebden’s post-rock trio captures the band’s shift from live instrumental jams to the more intricate, experimental style that he’d pursue as Four Tet.

Happiness (Anniversary Edition)

Long before Four Tet ascended to the top of this year’s Coachella lineup, Kieran Hebden was still best known for his high-school band: a gently post-rocking trio called Fridge, whose music was as abstruse as their name was mundane. Fridge started out in the mid 1990s with Hebden on guitar, accompanied by Adem Ilhan on bass and Sam Jeffers on drums. By the first Four Tet release, 1998’s Thirtysixtwentyfive EP, Fridge already had two albums under their belt, and the two acts would co-exist until Hebden’s solo career took off following his breakthrough Four Tet album, 2003’s Rounds. One more Fridge album followed, 2007’s The Sun, at which point the band went into deep sleep.
Happiness, released in 2001 and newly remastered and reissued, was Fridge’s fourth studio album. From a contemporary vantage point, it might be the band’s most revealing work, for the way it dovetails with Four Tet’s earliest solo releases. On 1999’s EPH, Fridge still sounded like three musicians in a room—deviously talented musicians in a chamber lined with silk drapes and filled with arcane machines, perhaps, but it was still music you could imagine being forged in real time by humans. By Happiness, which followed two years later, the band’s music fell somewhere between live-sounding instrumental jams (“Tone Guitar & Drum Noise,” “Drums Bass Sonics & Edits”) that built layers of detail out of simple riffs, and supplementary studio experiments (“Sample & Clicks”)—sometimes within the same song. The album’s opening number, the self-explanatory “Melodica & Trombone,” illustrates this well: The song’s first half sounds like talented kids fooling around in the instrument closet, and the second half is a nervy ambient presence that looms like low-hanging clouds.
The similarities with Four Tet’s early output—specifically his first three albums, Dialogue, Pause, and Rounds, released between 1999 and 2003—are abundant. Those albums may have been the work of a solo producer, but a song like Rounds’ brilliant “She Moves She” pulsated with the chaotic throb of live performance, helping Hebden win over a fanbase that had little truck with electronic music’s loops and repetition. (Interestingly, after several albums that leaned heavily on house and techno, Four Tet’s most recent solo single, “Three Drums,” uses a live-ish sounding breakbeat that wouldn’t have felt out of place on Rounds.)
There are considerable similarities between the two acts, as well: Both Happiness-era Fridge and early Four Tet favor the sound of treated musical instruments—the guitars, pianos, melodicas, and xylophones that helped give rise to the hated “folktronica” tag. A number of songs from Happiness, notably the smudgy, reverb-heavy “Cut Up Piano and Xylophone,” with a melody as alluring as a spin on a desert ice rink, and the sparkling “Drum Machines & Glockenspiel,” could have fit snugly onto those first three Four Tet albums, which is a compliment to their gratifying yet unusual melodic charms.
The big difference is that Four Tet’s music is perfectly balanced between clean, minimal lines and ornate production trickery, while Happiness is a little overloaded. “Drum Machines & Glockenspiel” spins off in its second half into a headache-inducing mess of squeaking recorders and assorted percussion that seems to go on forever, partially undoing the finely tuned poise of the song’s opening half. It’s not the only song that is too drawn out: Four of the 10 tracks here (including “Five Combs,” a bonus cut originally issued on the Japanese edition of Happiness) pass the nine-minute mark. Even if sprawl is part of the album’s charm, these songs could still stand a good edit. The way they ramble on suggests there’s no domineering arm on Fridge’s collective tiller, in contrast to Four Tet’s more focused solo work.
Happiness should not just be seen as a Four Tet adjunct. On two of the album’s strongest songs—the languid, almost countrified guitar rock of “Long Singing” and the brooding “Five Four Child Voice” (a song that could almost pass for Pavement’s more experimental moments)—Fridge sound most like a band and least like a Hebden solo project. Fans of Tortoise, whose “Why We Fight” Hebden included on his 2004 Late Night Tales compilation, will also find plenty to calmly crunch numbers to. In a year that has seen Kieran Hebden bumble to the top of the dance pile, resurrect shoegaze electronica with “Three Drums,” and team up with guitar cosmonaut William Tyler for the brooding “Darkness, Darkness,” Happiness is a glimpse back at the beginnings of a brilliantly illogical success story: part history lesson, part after-school jam, all loose limbs and unbridled inventiveness.


The debut album by Juan Zaballa, a Buenos Aires-via-Far Rockaway singer/songwriter gleefully indebted to the Ramones.

Olden Goldies

On “I Wish I Knew,” the fourth track on his full-length debut, Olden Goldies, Juan Zaballa shows that he can capture the speed and spunk of classic Ramones on an acoustic guitar. In no uncertain terms, his rhythms and vocal melodies telegraph from where Zaballa draws his influence. Just in case, though, the Buenos Aires-via-Far Rockaway singer/songwriter name-drops the legendary Forest Hills punks when he sings about “Sharing good times with you/Listening to Ramones.”
As anyone who loves the Ramones can tell you, their music captures a powerful sense of nostalgia and by-gone innocence. Zaballa discovered the band at the ripe old age of 8, so it isn’t surprising that they have such a strong hold on him. Eight of the 15 songs on Olden Goldies are built on Johnny and Tommy Ramone’s signature groove, as Zaballa does his best Joey Ramone impression over top of them. Zaballa also favors a similarly naive mode of expressing himself. “I Wish I Knew,” for example, could be a love story straight out of the “Happy Days” era. “I know you like fruits, amusement parks too/And staying up all night,” Zaballa sings to his lost (presumably high school) sweetheart. On “Far Rockaway,” he references the subway ride to to the Queens neighborhood the Ramones immortalized on “Rockaway Beach.”
But Zaballa knows he has to do more than simply cop the tone and style of his glue-sniffing, cretin-hopping heroes. He laces several of his riffs with off-color, borderline jazzy chords that would certainly have made Johnny Ramone wrinkle his nose in disapproval. Ironically enough, Zaballa breathes new life into lo-fi pioneer R. Stevie Moore’s introvert anthem “I Like to Stay Home,” by giving it a Ramones makeover and cutting it down to 43 seconds.
Half of Olden Goldies is clearly indebted to the Ramones, and the other half shows Zaballa indulging his taste for garage psych. He accents most of his Joey Ramone-styled verses with a mic-distorting bark that suggests a bridge between the album’s two primary modes. But the song sequence alternates haphazardly between them, making for a disjointed listen. And Zaballa doesn’t follow-through on what could have been fruitful side detours: the ambient Rhodes-like piano swell at the end of “Another Juan,” for example. When Zaballa does veer off the path, such as on the cloud-like guitar-keyboard loop at the base of “Kaya” (a loving ode to his smoking substance of choice), it only highlights how much more variety he has up his sleeve.
By Zaballa’s own admission, Mac DeMarco didn’t actually “produce” this album in the traditional sense, and it shows. Worse, the lack of production makes for a strangely colorless tribute to the rock’n’roll era. It’s odd to say about a pompadoured, rockabilly wildman who alternates between English and Spanish, but Zaballa’s records could use more of his own character.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Mac DeMarco engineered the album.


The teenaged duo Let's Eat Grandma explore the nightmarish whimsy of nursery rhymes and folktales with a distinctly English flavor on their chilling and impressive debut.

I, Gemini

Every now and again we need a reminder that, as a society, we really have no business condescending to adolescents, especially with art that insults their intelligence and fails to speak to the depth of their experience. I, Gemini, the debut album by teenaged English duo Let’s Eat Grandma, inadvertently nudges us to remember that we have just as much to learn from teenagers as they supposedly do from us. “Wise beyond its years,” so to speak, the album begins with the funereal beat and keyboard swells of “Deep Six Textbook,” a song that Let's Eat Grandma enshrouded in a haze of gloom.
On “Textbook,” with just a few simple ingredients—including handclaps, glockenspiel, an ethereal keyboard solo that sounds like bagpipes emanating from a dream state, and heaps of reverb—multi-instrumentalists Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton make typical musical expressions of “sadness” seem one-dimensional by comparison. In just about any other musician's hands, the crawling solemnity of “Deep Six Textbook” would be melodramatic if not outright suffocating. Somehow, though, Let’s Eat Grandma and producer Will Twynham (Mary Epworth, Kiran Leonard) manage to make dour moods both enticing and multi-faceted.
From there, I, Gemini assumes a more playful cadence on its second track, the warped Latin-tinged pop “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms,” which recalls Blondie and the Tom Tom Club’s early-‘80s singles. Still, Hollingworth and Walton maintain an air of frosty gravitas throughout the album, even when it’s clear that they’re trying to be whimsical. This is all the more impressive considering that the pair’s high-pitched, squeaky voices at times sound like they belong more to elementary school-aged children than teenagers. Of course, the contrast between the childlike vocals and the daring experimentalism of the music can be rather unsettling.
One can only presume that Twynham and Let’s Eat Grandma are playing up this contrast on purpose in order to re-create the mood of fairy tales that pit children against menacing threats. But other than the misguided rap on “Eat Shiitake,” Walton and Hollingworth don’t exactly come off as naive. In fact, their unwavering air of groundedness that makes for a more chilling effect. Musically speaking, the pair’s control is, in fact, exceptional—especially when you consider how so many adult artists use similar instrumentation to sound like they’re knocking around in a toy store. For all its baroque weirdness, evoking at times both Kate Bush and St. Vincent, I, Gemini holds together remarkably well.
Let’s Eat Grandma have clearly learned to make maximum use of space. Even on the intentionally ramshackle, wobbly-groove of “Sax in the City,” I, Gemini never sounds haphazard. Whenever Walton and Hollingworth reach for a new instrument, they sound assured, not like they’re trying to give the impression that they’re finger painting with sound, and certainly not like they're going to let the music unravel. “Chocolate Sludge Cake,” for example, opens with two and a half minutes’ worth of gentle recorder flutters that recall Peter Gabriel’s flute playing on Genesis’ forays into pastoral English folk during the early-‘70s. The song then blossoms into chaos as Let’s Eat Grandma sing about the different cakes they're going to bake—apple, coffee, chocolate, etc.
Genesis tunes like “Supper’s Ready” and “Firth of Fifth” became classics not only because of Gabriel’s hammy strangeness, but because that band was subverting music and imagery that had been deeply embedded in the English psyche while forging the sound we would come to know as prog. Let’s Eat Grandma appear to tap-into the same collective unconscious of nursery rhymes and folktales, with a distinctly English twist. With I, Gemini Let’s Eat Grandma not only hold their own with their predecessors, but they also create a world that demands you come to it on its own terms, not the other way around. An impressive achievement from musicians of any age.


The first album in six years from Jonathan Meiburg and co. returns to the band’s patient style of baroque, naturalistic art-rock.

The Great Awakening

Shearwater had largely stayed out of politics until the grim state of American affairs caused Jonathan Meiburg to change his tune in 2016. This trajectory describes at least several thousand other indie artists, but Meiburg was ahead of the curve: Shearwater concerned themselves not with their usual ornithological studies nor geographical arcana on their atypically strident Jet Plane and Oxbow, released at least 10 months before the wave of newly activated resisters rose in November. It would be completely logical for Shearwater to continue in this direction, but while there’s been unlimited material to spark outrage, Meiburg has discovered outrage itself is not a renewable resource. After spending at least a half decade buckling under the oppressive weight of worldly horrors and hopelessness, The Great Awakening bravely and perhaps naively offers counterprogramming, going inward to imagine a landscape unscarred by human treachery.
As the first Shearwater album in six years, The Great Awakening is a return to form by default. Meiburg’s projects in the time since have been logical extensions of Shearwater’s ornate, earthy, and occasionally academic mien—collaborating with former tour openers Cross Record to make frequently stirring music as Loma and penning A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey, a celebrated work on his most frequent subject. But his previous two Shearwater albums felt intended as a response to the increasingly precious pretense of his “Island Arc,” pivoting towards rock musculature and scene-chewing synth-pop. Animal Joy and Jet Plane were the first time Shearwater sounded conversant with larger trends in indie rock, whereas The Great Reawakening is as much of an about-face sonically as it is spiritually, revisiting a baroque, naturalistic form of art-rock with almost no contemporary peers.
“Enough of this sad dreaming of country life,” Meiburg booms during “Empty Orchestra,” The Great Awakening’s pulse-quickening outlier; it’s a wish to be fully marooned from modern civilization and also a likely shout to Roxy Music, a suitable comparison that started emerging more on Jet Plane. It’s probably the latter, given the King Crimson easter egg in the record’s first line:  “Here comes your heart attack/Starless and bible black/And here is the endgame.”
From that point forward, The Great Awakening imagines life taking shape after a spiritual death, emerging from pitch black to a blank slate of blinding white. In his authorial and musical pursuits, Meiburg is unafraid to practice patience to document a beauty that can’t be forced. “There’s no reason to cry,” he intones early on, letting the sentiment linger for nearly six minutes without rushing towards a resolution. The Great Awakening often unfolds at the pace of time-lapse video of land masses forming or plants springing into bloom, orchestrated with enough horns and strings to skew prog, though quiet enough to pass for minimalism. On “Everyone You Touch,” Meiburg is close-mic’d enough to hear his breath and fingers sliding across the fretboard, though the production and his mannered vocals render it both intimate, opulent, and ghostly, like watching an esteemed stage actor rehearse in an empty amphitheater.
Many have paid homage to Mark Hollis since he stepped away from the music industry, but few have walked it like they Talk Talk talk it quite like Shearwater; at their best, Meiburg has conjured not just the incapacitating enchantment of our surroundings, but its terrifying, destructive, and unknowable capacities. But The Great Awakening lacks the latter as counterpoint compared to the band’s peak on 2008’s Rook, as the unyielding prettiness sets a mood that blunts the dynamic arc. “Laguna Seca” recalls the bristling mood of Jet Plane, though Meiburg’s stentorian howl renders “fortune favors the undertone of ugliness” as a biblical proclamation rather than a commentary on 2022. Yet even the gnarlier elements—distended, tribal drums and an unexpectedly acute melodic angle on the chorus—never exert their will on the listener. The run of “Milkweed,” “Detritivore,” and “Aqaba” is quintessential Shearwater in both their titles and the tendency to let the middle of their albums coast by like a warm, welcome breeze.
The Great Awakening is often so sonically captivating that it doesn’t take much for Shearwater to engage: “Xenarthran” and “There Goes the Sun” are barely louder than what surrounds them but land with more impact, with the faintest arpeggiated bassline or implied percussive pulse having more in common with Kompakt microhouse than their peers in indie rock’s aughts-era drama club. Likewise, although the references to encephalons and armadillos let you know that Meiburg is back in his bag, it’s a moment of unadorned poetry that best gets his point across. “God lives in the mind/But in the mind it’s alive,” he beams, offering the best and perhaps only way out of our worldly hell.


Jazz pianist Robert Glasper assembles an all-star cast in search of a sound that might reflect the tenor of the times; the meditative results are shaded by politics without wallowing in it.

Collagically Speaking

There’s a now-famous clip of the soul and jazz icon Nina Simone pleading with her peers to do more with their art. Her voice is declarative, her eyes full of vigor. “I choose to reflect the times and the situations in which I find myself,” Simone tells the interviewer. “How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?” The video gained traction in 2015 when director Liz Garbus included it in her Netflix documentary on the singer, What Happened, Miss Simone? Jazz pianist Robert Glasper, who helped produce a tribute compilation that accompanied the film, answers Simone’s call to action with Reflect+Respond=Now, a supergroup featuring Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah on trumpet, Derrick Hodge on bass, Taylor McFerrin on synthesizer, Justin Tyson on drums, and Terrace Martin on synth and vocoder. Their debut album, Collagically Speaking, feels shaded by the chaos of contemporary politics without wallowing in it. It is a largely meditative offering that functions as a reprieve from the daily flood of negativity and presidential tweetstorms.
Mixing Quiet Storm R&B, 1970s jazz-funk fusion, cosmic soul, and instrumental hip-hop, Collagically Speaking features a cross-section of top-tier musicians lending their voices to the fluid set. They have all made significant waves on their own, either as established solo artists or well-known studio musicians. The genesis of the band goes back one year, to the Robert Glasper & Friends showcase at the 2017 SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas, where Glasper, Scott, Hodge, McFerrin, and Martin were joined by Marcus Gilmore on drums. The performance resembled an improvised jam session: Sonnymoon’s Anna Wise sang a verse from her work with rapper Kendrick Lamar; rapper Phonte Coleman spit a few bars as well. Collagically Speaking feels equally loose and spontaneous, as if the group is working song to song to find the right groove. That approach succeeds, for the most part. The almost 10-minute “Resting Warrior,” with its rubbery bass line and fiery trumpet solo, is a clear highlight: an eclectic funk-jazz hybrid reminiscent of Weather Report and Sextant-era Herbie Hancock. Just like the jazz icon, Martin sings through a vocoder on “Colors in the Dark,” using the modified wails to add angelic tinges to the track’s slow-churning arrangement. The song elicits a deep sense of peace; “Resting Warrior” conveys fury and rage.
While the album’s open-endedness largely works to its benefit, Collagically Speaking occasionally meanders. Played back to back, “Awake to You” and “By Design” feel like one 13-minute composition that lingers too long without adequate progression. Between Martin’s manipulated vocals and Tyson’s hypnotic percussion, “Awake to You” draws a direct line to beatmaker J Dilla’s head-nodding production, but without rhymes from a like-minded MC, the arrangement is monotonous. Conversely, “HER = NOW” makes great use of space. Hodge sets the stage here, his fluttering bassline a worthy complement to actress and poet Amanda Seales, who delivers an energetic spoken-word verse about the grand complexities of womanhood. “Don’t fear our strength,” she declares against a backdrop of bass and slow-rising synths. “Step up and step in to replenish it. We are solid, because we are the bridges that make this world connect.” Actor Terry Crews appears near the end of “The Night in Question” to discuss what true creativity is (short answer: be different, don’t do what everyone else does), and on the closing track, “Been on My Mind,” rapper Yasiin Bey offers his own definition of love. “Love is God’s signature on all of creation,” he says. “Love is the reason why everything that you love is here.”
Simone’s call for artists to reflect the times was a plea for political music that spoke truth to power—a perspective rooted in the civil-rights struggles and anti-war movement of the 1960s. While Collagically Speaking isn’t the political firebrand that Simone called for, it’s equally vital for different reasons. In an era of uncertainty, Collagically Speaking is a means of regrouping in times of intense conflict. It’s made to replenish, to help recharge when the burdens of life become too heavy. In an era of “turn up,” Collagically Speaking is a turn-down record that can help you forget the existential despair. Just for a moment, though: The combat continues tomorrow.


The soft and luminous six instrumental tracks on Sprague’s latest release convey a sort of serene estrangement from the everyday.

Hill, Flower, Fog

In Emily A. Sprague’s indie-folk project Florist—sometimes accompanied by her bandmates, sometimes solo—the Catskill, New York native makes music of startling intimacy. Her last album, the self-explanatory Emily Alone, was as unadorned as a Shaker chair, stripped down to mostly acoustic guitar and voice. “Death will come/Then a cloud of love,” she sang, a philosopher of monosyllables. But on Sprague’s albums under her own name, she trades language for the mercurial sounds of modular synthesizers, her undulating drones as formless as galaxies. If Florist’s music is a pen-and-ink line drawing, an Emily A. Sprague recording is more like a trick of the light captured on fogged film.
At these two poles, the opposite sides of her music mirror each other. Recorded in the wake of her mother’s death and a move out West, Emily Alone was about grief and solitude. In sound and materials, the electronic Hill, Flower, Fog is a world away from that album’s hushed, introspective folk, but it is also, in its way, a record of mourning. She recorded its six instrumental tracks in a single week in March, in the early days of the pandemic. “I found myself suddenly a part of that stream which flows now separate from the reality we used to know,” she wrote upon first uploading the album to Bandcamp in March, just four days after she had finished it. (The RVNG Intl. edition has been expanded and resequenced.) “It is meant as a soundtrack to these new days, practices, distances, losses, ends, and beginnings.” Rather than fear or discord, though, she emphasizes a grounding tranquility.
Hill, Flower, Fog is cut from similar cloth as its electronic predecessors Water Memory and Mount Vision. Soft and luminous, its cycling patterns trace gentle shapes, generally favoring major over minor keys. They seem targeted largely at the subconscious; once the closing song’s patient andante arpeggios fade to silence, it can be hard to remember many details about the preceding 40 minutes. At the same time, Sprague’s sounds are more sharply defined than before; she has replaced the diffuse pads and gaseous tone clusters of previous albums with cool, woodwind-like leads and bright chimes. Lush as a dewy field, “Moon View” opens the album with what sounds like a duet for music box and pastoral recorder; “Horizon” likewise plays crisp tintinnabulations off reverberant held tones, syncopated delay sending ripples across the song’s placid surface.
That palette doesn’t change much; all six tracks play up the contrast between pin-prick details and drawn-out echoes. The mood throughout is wistful but unburdened, as if acknowledging the pain of the present moment but also resigned to it, and determined to persevere. The slow, steady quarter notes of “Rain” capture a quiet sense of wonder. “Woven” is constructed around wavering open fifths that faintly recall the drones of Indian classical music; around them drip all manner of squiggles and accents, soft as melting ice cream. The nine-minute “Mirror” proceeds as though Sprague had simply set the dials on her modular rig and gone to make a cup of tea; it pings and burbles with a mind of its own, its rhythm like the aftermath of a rainfall, when the dripping from the eaves and the trees creates its own aleatory symphony.
In a break from the extreme abstraction of Sprague’s previous electronic work, Hill, Flower, Fog is accompanied by Greetings from Hill, Flower, Fog, a limited-edition book of her own photographs, which she says relate “moments of pause, peace, and communion experienced at home.” They are simple images of familiar objects. Bougainvillea bobs against a sunbleached wall; the full moon floats in rose-tinted dusk; shadows fall across a deep green lawn. These small moments are charged with a sense of the ineffable; each one feels like a fleeting record of time’s passing. In its aimless repetition, free of moments of tension or drama, the music of Hill, Flower, Fog conveys a similar sensibility—a kind of serene estrangement from the everyday. The year has presented us with much to rage against; Sprague’s benevolent music gives us reasons to be grateful.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Bob Dylan’s moody 1975 epic is often referred to as his “breakup album,” but it might be his most welcoming LP, its music projecting an undeniable warmth.

Blood on the Tracks

One doesn't have to be a broken-hearted straight male (or even a Nobel Prize voter) to fall in love with Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, but it might help. Filled with open-ended and often gender-specific pronouns, the yous, hers, hes, shes, and theys remain unnamed on all but one of the 10 songs on the moody 1975 epic, each a glowing invitation for listeners to fill in the blanks with their own nearest available emotional devastations. Often referred to as Dylan’s “breakup album,” it’s likewise become just that for many listeners, both expressing and absorbing great aloneness. Dylan himself professed confusion about the album’s popularity. “It’s hard for me to relate to that,” he said the year Blood on the Tracks was released. “I mean, people enjoying that kind of pain.”
But as plenty have pointed out in the wake of Dylan’s Nobel for Literature, his music is about far more than just his lyrics, and Blood on the Tracks is a prime example of just what that more constitutes. Beyond the emotional wreckage, Blood on the Tracks might be Dylan’s most welcoming LP, its music projecting an undeniable warmth. The disc-opening “Tangled Up in Blue” uncorks the feels via an experimental narrative that fights conventional linearity, but the reasons to keep listening are contained in the first 11 seconds of forward motion before Dylan’s voice enters. Only after that do lyrics even matter, and (on Blood on the Tracks, anyway) he is pretty fantastic at both.
Blood on the Tracks is pleasing and complete enough to visit repeatedly, until the syllables become words, the words resolve into meanings, and all of it becomes internalized, a space accessible even without the presence of the album. Perhaps the least dated of Dylan’s recordings, there is a nakedness to everything. Untainted by the politics and cool of the ’60s or the gated drums and overdubbed productions of the ’80s, Blood on the Tracks hits with the same immediacy in the 21st century as it did in 1975.
Just as much as Pink Floyd or any other mid-’70s LP-minded artist, Dylan uses the studio to create and sustain a mood on Blood on the Tracks, and this mood is what survives. Drawing from two sets of sessions and at least three configurations of not-fully-identified musicians to capture a singular batch of songs, the album is a full package of writing, performance, and atmosphere. Withdrawing an early version of the album on the eve of release, musicians from sessions in New York disappeared into the credit of “Eric Weissberg and Deliverance,” and musicians recorded later in Minneapolis received no credit at all. Though he received no separate title on the album itself, it is also the first album on which Dylan himself served as sole producer, assembling musicians on his own, sometimes to confusing effect. While staying within the parameters of folk-rock, Dylan finds a rich array of approaches, moving between the vivid brightness of “Tangled Up in Blue” and “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” the soft-voiced late-night guitar/bass duets of “Shelter From the Storm” and “Buckets of Rain,” and the pained autumnal crispness of “Idiot Wind.”
“Nobody sings Dylan like Dylan” ran one of Columbia Records’ ’60s advertising campaigns, but by the early ’70s consumers were deluged with multiple generations of New Dylans, each expanding from territory that once belonged almost exclusively to Dylan, from Joni Mitchell to Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen to Patti Smith. After a few years in the wilderness, when Dylan recorded for David Geffen’s Asylum Records (and Columbia released Dylan, scraping up unissued sessions without his consent), Blood on the Tracks might be seen as Dylan’s own assertion that nobody wrote Dylan like Dylan, either. For fans at the time, it was a revelation, both a few notches less cryptic than his ’60s surrealism, but no less mystical, folding in techniques of his old finger-pointin’ (“Idiot Wind”), blues-strummin’ (“Meet Me in the Morning”), vision-havin’ (“Shelter From the Storm”), and story-tellin’ (“Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts”) self, all while tapping into powerful new realms of vulnerability.
As a writer, Dylan had been through about three lightly overlapping phases over the previous 15 years—young and Woody (1960-1963), young and visionary (1964-1968), and young and happy (1969-1973), and Blood on the Tracks built on them while promising something more. Officially retired and raising children during the early ’70s, Dylan had deliberately downshifted into a less complex lyric style beginning with 1969’s Nashville Skyline, in part hoping to shake some of the obsessive global audience he’d attracted. New Morning and other country-pop sessions from the period found Dylan playing with some of the brighter textures he would employ on Blood on the Tracks, but his reluctance to write in the symbolism-laden voice of his earliest years soon resulted in a period when he “more or less had amnesia,” as he later told an interviewer. Returning to active songwriting in 1973 and the road in 1974 with the Band for Planet Waves, many of his latest songs seemed to lack the all-seeing perspective of his earlier work.
Dylan would say Blood on the Tracks was influenced by lecture classes he took with painter Norman Raeben in New York in early 1974. “You’ve got yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in the same room,” he said of the new lyric writing approach that resulted. Heard most vividly in the long-arc narratives of “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Simple Twist of Fate,” verses and lines present images like shuffled postcards connected by what Dylan referred to as a “code.” It is here that thinking of Blood on the Tracks as a “breakup album” becomes reductive, missing out on much of what the collection of songs has to offer, the “breakup” as much a concept as the bandshell concert loosely framing Sgt. Pepper’s. Just as much as relationships are about more than their breakups, breakup albums are about more than their relationships.
Though the disintegration of Dylan’s marriage might easily be spotted in nearly every song on the album, there are also meditations on the ineffable passage of time (“Tangled Up in Blue”), a transitory love affair in the present tense (“You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”) and media jackyldom and other bummers (“Idiot Wind”). For that matter, a full third of the LP’s second side is concerned with “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts,” a nine-minute 16-verse ballad that bucks the album’s signature themes of time regained, implacable loves, and unnamed names. Though remaining convincingly jaunty throughout with a light melody that catches the details in forensic clarity, its drawn-out story is a chore to decipher. Unlike the ambient emotional narratives of the rest of the album, the linear ballad requires a full and present attention, a reminder of one of the ways that music consumption is different than reading. Reportedly once considered for a film adaptation, the screen may’ve suited its stage-directed characters better than folk-rock. Further separating it from the rest, the blood spilled on this particular track doesn’t seem to be Dylan’s own, detracting from the album’s bigger picture and only underscoring the unifying power of the other nine songs.
Drawing on a range of songwriting tricks (including an open “E” tuning that assures that very few will play Dylan like Dylan, either), Blood on the Tracks emphasizes a feeling of raw expression. Singing live in the studio (with the exception of the overdubbed “Meet Me in the Morning”), Dylan placed his usual focus on capturing in-the-moment performances. And though his reputation for studio and onstage spontaneity is well-deserved, Blood on the Tracks also presents songs that he had spent almost all of 1974 writing and reworking. Personal, perhaps, the songs easily transcend their would-be biographies. If Dylan’s attitudes towards his partners sometimes stand out as patronizing—“You’re a Big Girl Now” acting as an equally infantilizing bookend to 1966’s “Just Like a Woman”—they reveal more about the nature of hurt than anything useful about the songwriter.
One glimpse into the making of the album comes through the version that Dylan very nearly released, scrapping it at the last moment, after jackets and test pressings had already been made. Playing an advance copy at a family gathering in Minnesota in over the holidays, Dylan—at the behest of his brother—decided he wanted a brighter sound, less of a downer. Flexing his superstar muscle and anticipating Neil Young, Kanye West, and others, he had the album recalled, pulling together a band of local folkies in the days after Christmas 1974 to rerecord half of the songs. The New York acetate (most recently offered in 2015 for $12,000) is all late night atmospherics, mostly just Dylan and bassist Tony Brown, the sound of the former’s coat-buttons brushing against his guitar strings. Though tracks have come out via various box sets, bootlegs of the New York sessions—sourced warmly from the acetate—are every bit as magical as the final product, a classic all its own, minus a clunkier “Lily, Rosemary, the Jack of Hearts.”
In Minneapolis, Dylan brightened up the sound (changing keys on “Tangled Up in Blue,” striking a lighter keynote) and toned down some of the crueler lyrics (especially on “If You See Her, Say Hello”). If atmosphere was lost (and it was, especially without the pedal steel-drenched “You’re A Big Girl Now”), then accessibility was gained. Charting at #1 on its January 1975 release, Blood on the Tracks is arguably the last Dylan album on which a majority of the songs became standards of their own, part of the invisible canon shared at coffee houses, college campuses, or anywhere bright-eyed young pickers might congregate. In that way, it is also maybe Dylan’s last album of originals to qualify as “folk music” in both senses of the phrase: the popular genre defined by the presence of idioms and acoustic instruments, but also the great shared body of songs with lives and language that exist apart from their studio recordings and original performers. With the Byrds and many others achieving their own hits with his tunes and Dylan himself often circulating unrecorded work via folk music zines and songwriting demos, this had long been the expected fate of Dylan's songs.
Imagining Dylan as a simple songwriter, the template of Blood on the Tracks—sad boy with an acoustic guitar and a handful of chords—might seem basic, until one tries to replicate anything about it, or even just strum the songs at home. Blood on the Tracks lives alone in Dylan’s catalog, that open “E” tuning (which Dylan refused to explain to his musicians) often preventing the songs from sounding exactly right in the hands of others. It lives on in its own peculiar way. Dylan has seemed to keep “Tangled Up In Blue” in particular to himself, rewriting the song several times, both casually (playing fast and loose with the pronouns), and more formally, including a near-total rework released on 1984’s Real Live. One of the few older songs Dylan has performed consistently in recent years, even newer verses have emerged over the past half-decade. Nobody covers Dylan like Dylan either, apparently.
Though the albums on either side of Blood on the Tracks both made it to #1 and contained hints of the same songwriting territory, via Planet Waves’ “Going, Going, Gone” and *Desire’*s “Sara,” especially, they were only just hints. Some of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks persona remained visible via the two legs of the Rolling Thunder Revue, but the original open tuning never returned, and Dylan would soon bury his vulnerability, too. The surrealism would resurface in full force for 1978’s Street-Legal, but the musical appeal didn’t. It took another few decades for Dylan even to return to the warm string-band sound of Blood on the Tracks, coming closest on his two 21st century albums of standards, Shadows in the Night and Fallen Angels. For a restless musician, it was a combination of factors that only came together once, locking together to transmit themselves through the years.
Even roughly 40 years later, Blood on the Tracks broadcasts hurt and longing so boldly it has become a stand-in, the type of shorthand a song licensor would deploy at the push of a button if it wasn’t so expensive and maybe too predictable. It manages a balance of old pain resolved and wounds so fresh they seem as if they might never heal, brutal personal assessment and doubt, unnecessary cruelties and real-time self-flagellation. While Blood on the Tracks can be a constant companion to listeners during periods of initial discovery, it (and Dylan’s whole catalog) has also become something to be lived with over a long period and put away for special occasions. Functioning like a literal album, the density of the passed time and pressed memories in “Tangled Up in Blue” grow richer with each passing year. As with the narratives of the songs themselves, Blood on the Tracks continues to absorb yesterday, today, and tomorrow, promising it can sustain new listeners as much as new meanings, should it ever have to be called back into service.


The Welsh electronic musician continues his run of home-listening albums with a quiet, unassuming record that splits the difference between low-key dance music and ethereal ambient.

9 Airs

There’s a distinctly pastoral tinge to Leif Knowles’ music: an air of dewy grass, verdant clearings, mist burning off of rolling hills. Though mostly created with synthesizers, Leif’s records are imbued with the sounds of rainfall, birdsong, and wind chimes. Even some of his synthetic elements suggest natural phenomena: Hissing white noise swishes like reeds; bass tones cleave the air as forcefully and unexpectedly as thunderclaps. Some of these atmospheric qualities are undoubtedly linked to the Bristol-based musician’s many years as a resident at Wales’ Freerotation festival, where DJs spin avant-garde dance music to an intimate crowd gathered on the grounds of Baskerville Hall, a historic manor house nestled between fields and woodlands.
Even in the years when he was focused primarily on the dancefloor, Leif’s music cast a wide net: On the title track of his debut album, in 2013, he sampled a decades-old harp composition of his father’s about Dinas Oleu, a picturesque landmark in Snowdonia. Over the past few years, he has increasingly moved away from club convention. His 2019 album Loom Dream delved into dubby, slow-motion grooves that reward horizontal listening; last year’s even more serene Music for Screen Tests, an unbroken 54-minute suite, was meant to soundtrack a selection of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests—short moving-picture portraits in which subjects would sit as still as possible before Warhol’s film camera for three minutes or so. Commissioned for an exhibition at London’s Barbican, the pieces are a blend of gentle patience and jittery rhythms, nicely capturing the unsteady stillness of Warhol’s films.
9 Airs continues in the vein of those two albums, although it feels less cohesive: No overt themes hold it together, and it runs a wider stylistic gamut, from intricate IDM to airy drones. Calm but rarely entirely beatless, it occupies a kind of mellow middle ground—neither dance music, exactly, nor textbook ambient. In some ways it feels like a collection of disconnected parts, although that is also part of its idiosyncratic charm. It’s a quiet, unassuming record with a restless, exploratory feel—chillout music, but with an emphasis on out.
Acoustic melodies provide 9 Airs’ throughline, at least in its most commanding songs. “Seven Hour Flight to Nowhere” opens the album with floating chimes and the knife-sharpening whisk of backmasked harp plucks. The sparkling stringed textures are reminiscent of Four Tet’s frequent use of the instrument, but Leif’s wafting rhythms have a looser, more tentative feel. The piano takes the lead on “Hiding in Plain Sight,” a downy approximation of UK techno with all the bones swapped out for feathers and blades of grass. And “Low D” begins with an airy swirl of low D whistle—another instrument from his father’s repertoire—before morphing into a coiled, breakbeat-inspired rhythm, like some strange fusion of medieval folk and drum’n’bass.
Those songs constitute 9 Airs’ rhythmic peaks. At the far extreme are some of the record’s most captivating pieces. A mournful swirl of voices, “Hold Gem Cut” summons an almost occult power, as though the wind were sharing wordless secrets. And “Wake Up Now” is a lullaby-like piano etude in which the squeak of the chair is clearly audible beneath increasingly distorted overdubbed layers. Its lo-fi quality reminds me of Sonic Youth’s rumbling “Providence”; as it grows louder it becomes hard and brittle, wearing its damage like dented armor. This is not simply milquetoast ambient, but an expression of something darker and more complicated.
The rest of the songs lie somewhere in the middle between these two poles. “Every Weather” periodically interrupts one of the album’s most dulcet loops with a concussive explosion of drums, like strobes flashing in the club. The organ-like tones of “Emotional Risk Assessment” are gracefully melodic but also curiously aimless; the track lasts six minutes, but it could just as easily go for 60 without feeling much different. The album closes with “Tapping on a Hollow Body,” which is just that: a low-key rhythm that sounds like it’s been rapped out on the body of an acoustic guitar, while strummed chords melt into a watercolor wash of reverb around it. Leif ends the song in the most unassuming fashion possible: There’s a squeak of fingertips on coiled steel strings as the reverb recedes; then a car engine revs, we hear what might be tires on gravel, and the whole thing fades to silence. Even when he’s disappearing, Leif excels at infusing his music with a sense of place.

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Originally released as part of a three-disc set, Prince fires on all cylinders at these live recordings from the early ’00s, a testament to his late-night blues and funk reveries.

Prince: One Nite Alone, The Aftershow: It Ain't Over!

Prince had a curious approach to live albums. After Purple Rain put his crowd-stunning skills on worldwide display, subsequent concert artifacts took the form of coffee table books or low-profile home video releases. And he could be a merciless tease. With “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night,” from Sign ‘O’ the Times, Prince offered listeners an onstage clip of the Revolution operating at peak inspiration only after he’d broken up that band. During the compilation set Crystal Ball, the conclusion of a searing live take on “The Ride” is rudely cut off by the forgettable dance number "Get Loose."
These perversions are not unwitting. Prince knew admirers bootlegged his shows. Message boards on his various online “music clubs” were often clogged with requests for official live discs. In 2002, before his Musicology comeback, he gave these hardcore fans what they wanted, at long last. Sort of. One Nite Alone…Live! was a box set that chronicled the tour in support of Prince’s similarly titled piano-and-vocals CD. But these setlists also explored another recent Prince recording, *The Rainbow Children—*a concept album that heralded his conversion to the Jehovah’s Witness faith. Given the outlier that Children was in his catalog, a follow-up live release that repeated the same sermons over its first two discs was met with some frustration. Still, most detractors couldn’t ignore the third CD, which presented a rush of screaming blues licks, rowdy funk-ensemble workouts, and sultry soul, all captured during “aftershow” parties from this same tour.
Years later, Prince carved out this third disc as a standalone title for sale on one of his websites. Similarly, it is now available for streaming and purchase on Tidal, along with the majority of the NPG Records catalog. There’s much to savor from that oft-overlooked wilderness period, but the urgent showmanship of One Nite Alone… The Aftershow: It Ain’t Over! makes it a highlight in Prince’s discography and a gratifying, much-needed connection with his ability to take it to the stage.
While avoiding his biggest hits, this nearly hour-long ride finds Prince engaging with key selections from his repertoire. The opening song, “Joy in Repetition,” dates from sessions that produced Sign ‘O’ the Times, and was later included in the scattershot soundtrack to Prince’s box-office bomb Graffiti Bridge. Here, Prince airs it out for over ten minutes, recasting it as both a band-introduction tool and a showcase for his electric guitar showboating.
Subtle revision of the song’s lyrics is as close as he comes to any lecturing on Aftershow. Prince ad libs a brief bit about his new aversion to “four-letter words,” though the singer’s come-hither delivery ensures that the change does no harm to the song’s slinky vibe. Gradually, his command of the blues emerges as the focal point of the performance. The unhurried stretches of soloing carry a different air than other Prince guitar clinics—such as his famed feature during a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tribute to George Harrison. He obsesses over individual passages with a spiritual ferocity that can stand with late-period Coltrane. It’s indulgent, excessive, and brilliant.
Then George Clinton joins the band, and the intergenerational lineup of funk visionaries gels just like you’d hope. In the early going of “We Do This,” the track has a loose-booty feel that provides ideal support for Clinton’s scat-rap. And while Prince starts out by shooting rhythm guitar darts into the pocket, the jam climaxes when Clinton’s raspiest vocalizations spur some joyous, arcing lead lines from the bandleader. This song is the most compelling meeting between the two artists yet to see the light of day.
The guest-vocalist portion of the show concludes with Musiq’s appearance during a brief medley that mixes his own tune “Just Friends (Sunny)” with Sly Stone’s “If You Want Me to Stay.” After the different extremes advanced by the opening two songs, this selection introduces the more relaxed aesthetic that Prince could use to make these late-night encounters with a global icon feel like casual parties.
Since these recordings date from Prince’s peak period of overt jazz exploration, his backing band is skilled in the art of reinterpretation. The rhythm section of drummer John Blackwell and bassist Rhonda Smith helps transform deep cuts like the instrumental “2 Nigs United 4 West Compton” into something less nervy than Prince fashioned by himself during sessions for The Black Album. On Aftershow, the mood is exultant and celebratory.
“I wanna sing, but it’s too funky,” the artist tells the crowd at one point. And then, after steering the band through a brisk “Alphabet Street,” he mostly dispenses with pop-song singing—all the better to work as a dance instructor for the rest of the album. During the infinity groove of “Peach (Xtended Jam),” Prince reminds concertgoers that this isn’t an arena rock show, but a club (“Ain’t nothing to look at; y’all just party where ya are.”) Then, at the turnaround, he unveils a new rhythm guitar progression: a line that begins with an aggressive stabbing figure, and then rolls on with delirious suavity. It’s a reminder of Prince’s guitar heroics outside the realm of the solo.
The way the whole set works brings to mind black scholar Albert Murray’s understanding of the “Saturday Night Function” during the period of early jazz, which the theorist contrasted with the role of the Sunday morning gospel service. In discussion with Wynton Marsalis, Murray described the Function as “a purification ritual where you get rid of the blues. And as soon as you get rid of the blues, it becomes a fertility ritual. . . . The union of lovers, which is the salvation of the species! . . . If it’s not sexy, forget it.” On his “One Nite Alone” tour, Prince reversed the chronology, putting the sermons during the main gig, and providing erotic release at the aftershow. Both halves of the experience should be fascinating for any fan of this elite composer and performer. But if you’re downhearted by his absence, it may be that you'll want to turn to the blues-chasing set first. Unlike the nudist dip in Lake Minnetonka prescribed to Apollonia during Purple Rain, the purification ritual on offer here is no joke.


On its second post-comeback album, the Scottish duo turns its narrative attention to human behavior in the digital age, to incisive and occasionally nihilistic ends.

Arab Strap: I’m totally fine with it 👍 don’t give a fuck anymore 👍

While Arab Strap always seemed out of step with overground indie-rock trends during their Y2k-era initial run, the Scottish duo’s second act couldn’t have been more perfectly timed—and not just because the current UK indie landscape is over-populated with melody-averse monologists sharing vivid slice-of-life vignettes with a painterly touch. Their first album in 16 years, As Days Get Dark, arrived in early 2021 in the thick of the pandemic, and its thematic concerns—from social media addiction to the porn habits that fill the void in sexless relationships—perfectly aligned with a moment when much of our communication became mediated through screens, and the chasm between virtual connectivity and IRL isolation was widening at a perilous pace. For a hyper-analytical songwriter like Aidan Moffat, all the subsequent cultural turmoil that COVID helped spawn is the gift that keeps on giving.
In a pre-smartphone era, Moffat and partner Malcolm Middleton were the novelistic narrators of twentysomething Scottish life and all the awkward conversations that transpire after the pubs clear out for the night. Now, with their second post-comeback effort, I’m totally fine with it 👍 don’t give a fuck anymore 👍, they stand among indie rock’s most astute observers of human behavior in the digital age. Listening to these songs still feels like you’re eavesdropping on Moffat’s intimate exchanges and innermost thoughts, but now, more than ever, his narratives are firmly plugged into our unsettled collective consciousness. Moffat probably could have written the lyrics to “Sociometer Blues” back in 1998, as a window into a disintegrating dysfunctional relationship: “You take all my time, you take all my strength, you steal my love, you are the worst friend I ever had.” But the sense of exasperation and desperation is amplified upon realizing the song’s object of desire is his mobile device.
Critiquing technology’s dissociative effects is hardly the hottest take, and this isn’t even the only new indie-rock album on the subject to come out this week. But where so much of the discussion around being Extremely Online usually centers on mental health—the way the internet feeds on both ego and insecurity, and how its endless flow of information atomizes attention spans into milliseconds—I’m totally fine with it’s imposing opener, “Allatonceness,” catalogs its corrosive effects in corporeal terms. The song begins with the sound of an old-school modem making a dial-up connection—a cheeky callback from a band that was born at the dawn of the home-internet era, but also an instant-villain origin story of how we got to our current hellscape overpopulated by sedentary keyboard warriors with “atrophied legs.” The song’s queasy, quicksand-thick bass groove further reinforces the symbiotic relationship between habitual computer usage and physical stagnation.
As “Allatonceness” makes clear, Moffat is having a field day digging into the darkest crevices of online culture, and that devious enthusiasm likewise rubs off on the duo’s musical choices. Arab Strap may never fully shake their sad-bastard reputation, but I’m totally fine with it features some of their punchiest productions to date, expanding the cheeky “disco Spiderland” template of its predecessor into more forceful displays of rhythm and discord. Where they once wrote songs about dancing and getting fucked up, “Bliss” actually sounds like a peak-hour electro club thumper, while “Strawberry Moon” suggests the Fall making ‘80s breakdance jams. And “Turn Off the Light” could be the closest this group has gotten to crafting a festival-sized power ballad—though in typically perverse Arab Strap fashion, the song’s seemingly uplifting sentiments (“You came/And showed me the answers”) actually detail one impressionable man’s descent into conspiracy-theory lunacy.
As much as I’m totally fine with it delights in targeting the trolls who make the internet so inhospitable, the album extends the same grace and understanding to its shitposting subjects as you would to any person beset by a self-destructive addiction beyond their control. The sympathetic first-person perspective of “Turn Off the Light” seems to suggest that the roiling cesspool of disinformation can pull in anyone feeling lost and alone. And while it’s easy enough to condemn the deleterious psychological effects of smartphone dependency, for some of Moffat’s characters, it’s the only thing keeping them sane in a cruel world. With its deceptive ’80s soft-rock sparkle, “You’re Not There” tricks you into thinking Moffat is singing a wistful breakup ballad about an ex-lover who’s no longer returning his messages, until you realize the woman he’s pining for is actually dead, and that texting her is the only way he can fill the void in his heart and home. And as “Safe & Well” suggests, the only thing more frightening than getting sucked into the self-promotional hamster wheel of social media is what happens when you live anonymously: Over a mournful folk arrangement, Moffat recounts the based-on-a-true-story tale of a woman who died in her flat near the beginning of the pandemic, and wasn’t discovered for another two years. In Moffat’s account, no horrifying detail is spared—maggots and all.
On I’m totally fine with it 👍 don’t give a fuck anymore 👍, Arab Strap come to terms with the many ways in which the pandemic fundamentally altered the human experience, by turning hostile discourse, endless scrolling, FOMO panic, and polarizing politics into our default mode, while dampening the desire to seek out real-world experience even as the world returns to a state of business as usual. “Sun is shining, I don’t care,” Moffat admits on “Summer Season,” as he opts to drink alone in his flat, reply to his messages, and make noncommittal plans for in-person meet-ups that will probably never happen. It’s the moment where the nihilistic title sentiment of I’m totally fine with it 👍 don’t give a fuck anymore 👍 is felt most acutely, revealing a truth that few would be willing to admit: The only thing more painful than living through lockdown is missing it.


Like citymates Girls, this group of San Fran all-stars matches wry, easygoing tunes with a far-reaching pastiche of vintage trappings.

Sonny and the Sunsets: Tomorrow Is Alright

Tomorrow Is Alright

You've got your throwback acts-- content to fix a backwards gaze, work on their period-appropriate outfits, and match new words to old riffs-- and then there's San Francisco's Sonny & the Sunsets. They cull their sound from time-honored sources on their debut, Tomorrow is Alright, yet they're a wonderful anomaly-- never feeling tied to any particular era, overly beholden to their source material, or like they chose reverence for lack of better ideas. You can throw out influences all day-- Everly Brothers, glammy garage, doo-wop-- but you'll never quite cover it, and this slipperiness is key to their success. Tomorrow Is Alright matches 10 of Sonny Smith's wry, easygoing tunes with a far-reaching pastiche of vintage trappings, never feeling dutifully retro but rather, like their tough-to-pin-down citymates Girls, intangibly classic.
Smith's been kicking around San Francisco for a minute now as both a playwrite and songsmith. The former's written all over Tomorrow's best tunes, which paint slightly askew, slyly funny portraits of wayward spacemen and the women who enslave them, randy youngsters, and Mary Kay test subjects. Throughout the record, Smith himself seems to be playing this unflappable bemused observer character. Smith's bent sense of humor and his sweet, scraggly pipes further sets them apart from their obvious sonic forebears. In no particular hurry to get to his point, Smith comes off as a likeable dude, and that easy charm helps put even the more directly descended songs over. No matter how you dressed these tunes up, they'd still feel cool, confident, and at times, wickedly funny.
The Sunsets, featuring members of Thee Oh Sees, the Fresh & Onlys, and Citay, plus Sub Pop's Kelley Stoltz largely stay in the background, providing sparse but carefully considered instrumentation. Citay's Tahlia Harbour is the lone exception, although even she's used sparingly; her deadpan counterpoints to Sonny's stoney spaceman in "Planet of Women" or rationale-spouting youngster in "Lovin' on an Older Gal" are impeccably timed, a fitting gee-whiz to Sonny's endless aw-shucks. The production's crisp and roomy, allowing each word to linger, each note its own space.
Tomorrow Is Alright feels like the work of a songwriter comfortable with himself and his limitations. Smith doesn't have a knockout voice; he's a natural, unflashy guitarist; and his lyrics skew conversational rather than confessional. Rather than outpacing himself with wild ambitions, Tomorrow Is Alright picks a lane and sticks with it, yet it feels far less reductive than most retro rock due to his easy charm. The couple-three tunes towards the back of Tomorrow that lean just a tad more heavily on older tropes don't leave quite the same mark as the very distinctive early highlights "Planet" or "Too Young to Burn" or "Death Cream", but even those throw an earworm or sweet harmony your way. So many bands put in a lot of work trying to make themselves sound older than their years; with their quiet confidence and no shortage of killer material, the Sunsets make it seem almost too easy.


Wolf Alice proudly carry the banner for Britrock on their second album, a holy site where dead metaphors and teen clichés can spring magically back to life.

Visions of a Life

By the time Wolf Alice released their debut album in 2015, the burden on Brit-rock to define epochs had all but disappeared. Even among the genre’s loyalists, whose last project had been the disastrous Viva Brother, little appetite remained for a generational voice to swoop in and erect totems to their pined-for monoculture. With revolutionary pressures lifted, the gates (and charts) opened for Wolf Alice, a more benevolent and satisfying breed. Their debut My Love Is Cool descended from the Britpop-Libertines-Arctic Monkeys lineage, but it was introspective and, in its most unorthodox moments, spiritually involving. Accusations of a ’90s throwback weren’t unfounded. But rather than a straight lift, the north London group ransacked the era’s spirit—brattiness juxtaposed against morbid obsessions—while musically patching together grunge lassitude, shoegaze magnitude, and rock’n’roll attitude.
The similarly sprawling follow-up, Visions of a Life, is not full of aesthetic surprises, either. It subscribes to a necessary conception of rock as the holy site where dead metaphors and teen clichés can spring magically back to life. It’s populated by dreamers and deceivers, dimwitted bullshitters and their fed-up friends. It’s an album about anxiety and freefall, and about death, both of one’s own hypothetical death and the literal death of others.
Frontwoman Ellie Rowsell’s mortal preoccupations are, for the most part, more melancholic than haunting. Wolf Alice sound best when anchored in shoegaze, the kind that suggests human forms dissolving into celestial matter. Recorded in L.A. with producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen—whose work on Paramore’s After Laughter and M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming looms large—Visions of a Life is an expansive trip. Devoutly 4/4 and unsyncopated, it nonetheless carves out raucous passages in which to burst open. The brilliant “Planet Hunter” drifts in reverie before whirling into conflict. “St. Purple and Green” revitalizes their trademark grunge-folk hybrid, its mantra-like “one step after the other” climax evoking an ascent to the astral plane. And the title track, an epic three-parter, swirls up an abyss-gazing thrash before closing the album, naturally, on a mournful utterance of the word “dead.”
After My Love Is Cool, Wolf Alice starred in On the Road, Michael Winterbottom’s pseudo-documentary about a rock band—Wolf Alice—whose dull tour routine backdrops a fictional romance. “Suddenly I’m acting as myself, which makes you feel very self-conscious,” Rowsell has said of the experience. Her lyrics suggest the feeling isn’t entirely unfamiliar: Visions of a Life laments the characters we play in life and the psychic toll, particularly on women, of keeping up appearances. “Yuk Foo” petulantly skewers a mystery antagonist, affording him no personality, only a barrage of expletives: “I want to fuck all of the people I meet,” Rowsell spits. “’Cause you bore me/You bore me to death.”
While her writing subsists on observation, Rowsell’s scenes are less interesting than the inscapes bubbling underneath. Now 25, she is a fairly young songwriter, but not quite as young as her characters, who do not always know how to handle themselves. To occupy their thoughts, she slips into her speaking voice, whispers wordy internal monologues, over-divulging, withdrawing into generalities, plunging back into the messy entanglements of it all. On downtempo synthpop anthem “Don’t Delete the Kisses,” she both mocks and romanticizes young-adult drift. “I’m like a teenage girl,” she sing-speaks as the protagonist. “I might as well write all over my notebook that you ‘rock my world.’” It seems a strange thing, grasping to qualify the shallow feelings of a character you created, whose thoughts it is your responsibility to populate. But clichéd romance, the song argues, is tedious and shallow only until it comes for you. Then, it’s electrifyingly real.
Cliché is powerful when it identifies the profundity in common feelings, and it’s a particularly effective tool in loud, cathartic rock music. When we are young and precarious, to shut the door on sentimentality just means locking it in our bedrooms, where it’s liable to grow tentacles and start strangling people. You can feel it in “Formidable Cool,” a teen fable whose hapless lead is caught lusting after an unrepentant playboy. (When we’re introduced, he has his “hand in somebody’s knickers” at the social club.) In describing his allure, Rowsell sneaks in a caution against the perils of rock orthodoxy. “Believe in the chorus,” she teases, “Believe in love.” Taking her word, the protagonist bundles into a hasty sexual encounter with him, and is humiliated; Rowsell, an unsympathetic narrator, mercilessly taunts her for her naivety: “If you knew it was all an act/Then what are you crying for?” The moral is: watch who you mythologize. Being Brit-rock’s most tolerable flag-bearer in years, Wolf Alice are uniquely qualified to dispense it.


Poliça's United Crushers is a political record, but it's too exhausted to work as a protest album so much as an album for when all the protest's been sapped out.

United Crushers

"Summer Please," the lead track of Poliça's third album,cuts to the core of the national mood with its first few lines: "It's all shit, it's all shit, it's all shit." It doesn't take a huge amount of observation or wokeness to notice: we're barely eight years off from the US's worst economy and most despairing polls in decades, and the news cycle cuts atrocity with farce hourly. We meme that we're in a cyberpunk dystopia but are actually in the more banal sort, one less suited to blockbusters than slow declines. And winter – though increasingly less wintry – doesn't help, casting everything in a haze of seasonal affective despair.
Though hard to quantify, this national mood – despite perennial handwringing about the supposed lack of protest music – tends to seep into art, and it's natural that artists might feel  compelled to address broader themes such as, to quote Poliça, "social injustice, self-doubt and isolation, the rapidly increasing urban decline in gentrification." Where the Minneapolis group's Give Up the Ghost and Shulamith were intensely personal – claustrophobic in the good way, the way that exposes every crevice of someone's innermost thoughts – United Crushers is equally political, but too exhausted to exactly work as a protest album so much as an album for when all the protest's been sapped out. "Summer Please," a tumbleweed lilt drowned out by pitch-shifted glumness, forecasts the album's mood: immersed, psyche-first, in the crushing malaise of winter in a sick world.
What's curious is that this mostly isn't reflected in the music. Though not exactly a departure from Poliça's sound, United Crushers' arrangements are cleaner, far less dense, and often poppier. The Reznor-like "Top Coat," built atop a massive, cyanide-soaked synth riff, is the successor to "Very Cruel" and "Violent Games," but it is also the outlier. "Lime Habit" almost sparkles, as if spritzed by the titular fruit. "Someway," with its brass stabs, comes off as an alternate-universe pop tune, and "Baby Sucks" alternate-universe disco. "Lose You," though despondent in the lyric, is positively cheery. It takes a close read of the lyrics – and a read, because Leanagh's vocals remain characteristically processed and diffuse – to grasp most of the protest themes, but the lyrics are largely oblique.
While this works for tracks like "Melting Block," a slice of decaying suburban life, things like police brutality are perhaps not topics to be oblique about at this particular moment in time. The most outright political track, "Wedding," is overt and at times searing ("all the cops want in… saying hands up, the bullets in"), yet the otherwise-roundabout lyric and flat affect of its instrumentation leaves the track feeling curiously diffident, even indifferent, which was surely not the intended.
United Crushers is far more successful when it continues to explore Poliça's foremost topic: human connection and the tolls it takes on a person. "Lately," unlike much of the album, is a perfect synthesis of music and message: a love song by someone suspicious of love, with a synth lead that continually skews and hesitates. "Kind" doesn't portray a relationship breaking so much as slowly atrophying, and the track sounds well into doing the same. United Crushers' other preoccupation, and its most haunting, is the alienation of the music industry, how it turns people into quasi-public figures then leaves them to fate. "I saw this record as my last chance," Leanagh told DIY Magazine, and the subtext is most palpable on "Baby Sucks ("giving you less with each note") and "Fish," the simplest track yet by far the most haunting. Over a "Teardrop" percussion riff and hi-hat twitch, Leanagh delivers an eleventh-hour ballad to a distant, unreachable audience "You see me on the stage and you think I'm strong… you hold it over my head and you watch me fall." It's among the loneliest pieces of music Poliça's ever recorded, and it's too good to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Poliça is a group with too much collected talent for that; as in life these days, one only waits and hopes the clouds will clear.