Titled after a game of computer solitaire, the Queens musician’s second album uses avant-pop songwriting to capture the nuances of tedium, to strangely captivating effect.

Free Cell

It’s virtually impossible to lose a game of FreeCell. Unlike other forms of solitaire, 99 percent of the deals are solvable. It’s a game of choice and organization. You put down one card, then another, until—like writing a sentence or a song—you’re left with a larger sequence. The Queens musician Lina Tullgren developed a FreeCell habit while on tour, using the game to compartmentalize time while experiencing the swimmy delirium that comes with waking up in a new city every day and having to connect with a new room of strangers in a different time zone. With elements of 1990s slowcore, quaggy indie-rock, and experimental composition, Free Cell successfully captures a dissociative feeling that lies somewhere between boredom and nausea, like sitting in a sauna. It does so with deliberate calculation. While their 2017 debut, Won, felt loose and irregular, with melodies that changed like moods, Free Cell is an exercise in construction and pattern-based songwriting rather than improvisation.
Tullgren was encouraged to play music from a young age by their mother, a classical flautist; after splitting their adolescence between the fiddle and guitar, Tullgren has finally permitted the two to meet on Free Cell. They’re assisted by Brooklyn-based composer Simon Hanes, whose Italian romantic influences—Rossini comes quickest to mind—seep into the music.
The album begins slowly, as Tullgren sings the opening line one syllable per second: “Staring into my golden dreams.” Their guitar picks out a slacker’s riff as strings begin to wince. “Picking up a game to make me proud,” they intone (presumably having won another game of FreeCell). As Tullgren ever so slightly increases speed with each lyric, Hanes’ arrangement takes on strings, horns, brass, and distortion. Free Cell sounds as though it’s hooked onto a pendulum, swinging feverishly between beauty and distortion, vigour and lethargy. Any breakouts of prettiness are either followed by unlovely noise or gibbering riffs going nowhere. Any instance of vitality is tempered by disaffection. It’s a continual frustration that presumably puts the listener within Tullgren’s state of mind—persistently waiting for a moment of relief and clarity that never fully arrives.
Tullgren’s songs are fraught with tension, like elastic bands threatening to snap—but they fall slack just as you expect to get hit in the eye. “Something is slowly, slowly, slowly,” they sing with quickening fervor on “Soft Glove 1” and “Soft Glove 2,” but instead of bursting, the rhythm relaxes back to its starting place.
“Golden Babyland,” is the only song on Free Cell that doesn’t unfurl gradually, but rather coils itself into a tight spring.  Over a taut, irresistible guitar riff, Tullgren turns boredom into destruction: “In the kitchen melting Legos,” they sing, mimicking the liquefied sound of their guitar. It’s a well-wound pop song that seems to be the album’s outlier, until two minutes in, when the song unreels itself into aimless ugliness. Instead of capping off a neat tune with a satisfying ending, they forgo beauty—something they clearly distrust—for the sake of conveying their mercurial state. Tullgren taps at their guitar in a kind of frantic inertia, undoing the twists of the song’s first half. While it’s split almost perfectly into two-minute segments, the second half feels noticeably longer.
Free Cell has a way of drawing out the minutes. The album plays at the same rate as a long afternoon, when boredom turns to drowsiness.  The result isn’t so much an exercise in the ability to withstand tedium, but a study of the nuances of torpor, which often grips with a captivating haze. “Guess I gotta blend some time,” they sing on “Saiddone,” collapsing the concept until it’s nonsensical: “Sometime it’s right now, sometimes it’s next week, sometime October.” Tullgren suspends meaning, shaping vowel sounds so ambiguous that it’s almost impossible to comprehend the words until the end of each sentence. The effect puts the listener in a soupy headspace. Listening to Free Cell feels like standing up too quickly—when all the world feels like it’s on playback half a second too slow.


The Portland, Ore., noise-metal transgressors third record continues the duo’s tradition of exaggerated malevolence. On the whole, Christ, Redeemers is the most dense, belligerent and focused music that the Body has ever made.

Christs, Redeemers

The Body excel in inducing discomfort. You need not listen to a sole note by the Portland, Ore., noise-metal transgressors to know as much: The press photos for their 2010 breakthrough, All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, depicted drummer Lee Buford and guitarist Chip King poised in a window, rifles and binoculars pointed outside in anticipation of incoming targets. The cover of a recent and masterful EP, Master, We Perish, featured a grimacing skeleton bent backwards atop a pile of stone, what’s left of his frame splitting at the midsection. On albums, they've covered songs about dead cops and Sinéad O’Connor’s Thatcher-indicting and race-baiting “Black Boys on Mopeds”; on the stage, King’s small army of amplifiers and Buford’s cannon-shaped drums become the instrumental equivalent of meat tenderizer. In a recent interview with Tiny Mix Tapes, Buford summarized the Body’s extra-musical antagonism with two swift sentences: “I don’t really like most people in the world, or trust them. The guns are less of a thug or violent thing and more of a separation between us and society.”
*Christs, Redeemers—*the Body’s third record and first for the decidedly non-metal Thrill Jockey—continues the duo’s tradition of exaggerated malevolence. As with All the Waters, the action opens with the all-female Assembly of Light Choir singing a hymn of solemn despair. This time, though, they’re sucked into a gyre of noise, slivers of static slowly accreting into a sea of volume. Indeed, on the whole, Christs, Redeemers is the most dense, belligerent and focused music that The Body has ever made. In less than three minutes, “Failure to Desire to Communicate” plows through a near-hardcore rumble before downshifting toward hypnotic, hazardous doom; “Shrouded” buries King’s cries in a blanket of static, at least until Buford’s drums overload the entire frame. Where no song on All the Waters lasted for less than four minutes, only half of these get to that point at all. These relatively brief numbers function as black holes, then, sucking up everything the Body has ever done—the horrific samples and suffocating noise, the guitar so low it sound like a bass and the drums so big they sound like artillery blasts, the lyrics about how “the pain of living holds no victory” and the curdling bleat that delivers them—into impenetrable, intimidating cores. Christs, Redeemers finds the Body at the apogee of their brutality.
Yet the same focus and force that make Christs, Redeemers so heavy are the same attributes that make it less terrifying than its predecessors. In the past, The Body’s uneasiness has depended as much on unpredictability as it has on excessive volume or irate pleas. The Body have thrived on a certain sort of stylistic mania, sonic evidence that the guys holding the guns in those photos might actually be completely insane. During All the Waters, for instance, they played along with a sampled-and-fractured clip of a congregation speaking in tongues, with knee-deep noise and King’s howls battling back with believable animosity; during “Worship”, the closer of this year’s earlier EP, they applied their damaged aesthetic to a 10-minute post-rock mold, building the cacophony into a climax that gave way to a slow-motion comedown.
But Christs, Redeemers feels comfortable and somewhat safe, with song structures that are practically standard and a few techniques repeated often enough to become predictable. The Assembly of Light Choir, for instance, starts to feel like a compositional crutch, with their hall-of-terror harmonies augmenting the despair on half of the record’s tracks in much the same way a coffee-shop guitarist might use a Hammond organ to add gravity to heartsickness. Much the same applies to the album’s ample string sections, their melodrama mostly filling space and time and plainly replicating a feeling that’s already established. All of these tendencies collide for “An Altar or a Grave”, a string-swept doom plod that slinks through a madrigal-choir midsection only to arrive at a coda where King and Buford simply turn up and check out. It’s an obvious string of choices for a band whose sort of audio terrorism has forever hinged on making listeners aghast with surprise—as Buford might put it, on separating their music from others’ society. The most successful statements on Christs, Redeemers balance momentum with instability. “Denial of the Species”, for instance, pushes the hangman guitar, haunting choir, and ghoulish strings beneath a beat that borders on techno. It’s a tease for an onslaught of distortion that never comes, a climax denial buried in a record that typically delivers the promised payload. Once again, it’s the image of the Body projected in sound.
At the very least, this new-found concision and direction might prove useful for the Body in the short-term: This is their Thrill Jockey debut, after all, a chance for them to find freaks within a much broader audience. Why not focus, then, on the most familiar and surefooted side of the band—that hellish, disturbing blitz of doom, noise, and nastiness? Likewise, with the samples and choirs now tucked safely and violently into the kernels of these songs, perhaps they’ll speak more readily to metal audiences, by which they’ve often been overlooked or mislabeled. But the Body haven’t mattered only because they’ve been loud, distorted, and mean, the troika of qualities that Christs, Redeemers spotlights most capably. They’ve mattered because they were able to twist that mess of metallurgh into spaces where it didn’t necessarily belong, into studio experiments with electronics and dynamics and effects that underlined their wrath in unlikely ways. That’s not lost on Christs, Redeemers, but like the terror it once necessitated, it is certainly diminished.


Los Angeles rapper Blu's career trajectory runs counter to that of an artist working to infiltrate hip-hop’s mainstream. NoYork!, a mysterious album that first circulated two years ago, has gradually developed an underground following and now gets a physical release.

NoYork!

After a well-received debut album (2007’s Exile-produced Below the Heavens) and a placement on XXL’s annual star-making “Top 10 Freshmen List” paid off in a major label deal with Warner Bros, Los Angeles rapper Blu plotted a career trajectory that seemed to run counter to that of an artist working to infiltrate hip-hop’s mainstream. He didn’t pine for the A-lister referrals and feature circuit ubiquity that lubricate the most well-oiled artist rollouts. He didn’t hobnob with hitmakers or kowtow to the will of radio. Instead he launched into an exploratory series of experiments: a romance-themed solo EP that introduced him as a quirky but capable producer, a one-track dump of inscrutable rough mixes for an album he lost, a Madlib-produced album Madlib denies involvement with, and a spattering of beat tapes. Much of it arrived defiantly unmastered under pseudonyms on Bandcamp, and none of it sounded like the triumphant follow-up to Below the Heavens, whose legacy now stalked Blu’s every endeavor.
It wasn’t until Blu had successfully conditioned his audience to quit telegraphing his next move that he made his power play: reports from 2011’s traveling hip-hop festival Rock the Bells said that Blu showed up to his set handing out copies of something called NoYork! that may or may not have been the ill-fated Warner album. (Blu denies doing it, but the Warner deal dissolved several weeks later.) However NoYork! slipped out, it was a hard left turn in a career full of them, but one that reinvigorated his artistry instead of adroitly maintaining a low profile as previous releases had. Over the last year or so, Blu has been remastering and reissuing some of the odd curios of the Warner era, and NoYork! has finally gotten a physical deluxe edition release via Blu & his producer buddy Mainframe’s New World Color imprint.
If this is the album Blu intended to give Warner, it’s a maverick move. NoYork! finds Blu tapping a cadre of California instrumental hip-hop luminaries and decamping into the hyperkinetic synth haze and shambolic percussion of the Los Angeles beat scene. NoYork!’s team of Low End Theory mainstays load up the album’s front end with squelching synth workouts like Dibia$e’s “SLNGBNGrs”, which arrives like Pac-Man on power pellets and rides a corroded keyboard groove to a chaotic finish, the dizzying synth undulations of “Soupa”, and the double-time borderline Nintendocore of Daedelus’s jungle-informed “Hours” and Flying Lotus’s “Everything’s OK”. Later, Knxwledge and Sa-Ra affiliate Shafiq Husayn bring us home from the arcade with a series of productions full of airy jazz loops, but as a whole NoYork! is a manic trip into an 8-bit k-hole.
NoYork! manages to duck other releases’ air of intentional self-sabotage thanks to Blu’s renewed lyrical attack. Where releases like 2011’s j e s u s were off-putting because the rhymes tumbled out in fractious fits and starts, oftentimes more chants than verses, NoYork! strikes a balance between the verbose storytelling of Below the Heavens and the studious weirdness of his recent work. “Everybody Nose” details a childhood hip-hop obsession that turned into a rap career, then devolves into a list of beloved 1980s clothing lines and rappers in verse three. Blu bounces wistful rhymes and love raps off sung choruses from Jack Davey and Suzi Analogue early on and then coldly juggles words with friends on the album closing West Coast rap summit “Doin’ Something”. Elsewhere singsong refrains about hating work hold court with nonsensical homages to the cadence and storytelling MF Doom. NoYork!’s rhyme experiments are rangy but self-assured, and Blu finally sounds more invested in making great rap than throwing the mainstream rap audience off his trail.
Billing this physical release of NoYork! as a deluxe edition is a bit misleading, though. It’s actually shorter than what’s been circulating on the net for the last year and a half, losing the Madlib and Samiyam productions (and the feature from psych rap recluse Edan) that padded out the album’s hazy comedown side but gaining a sleek digipak and a poster. The mixes don’t appear to have changed either, and it’s now apparent that the aged tape hiss feel of a few of these songs was an intended effect and not the result of them being unfinished, as was the case with many 2010s Blu releases. This version of NoYork! doesn’t offer any new revelations about the record, but as the physical document of that time a gifted rapper blew off a promising record deal to geek out in the studio with friends and then came out with one of the defining documents of his scene, it’s still a win.


Alynda Segarra’s powerful eighth album exudes a glorious irreverence. Their self-described “nature punk” songs are both intimate and immense, and they’ve never sounded more honest or self-possessed.

Life on Earth

Fifteen years ago, Alynda Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff chose their band name to celebrate outsiders who threatened the status quo: “the riff raff” being “the weirdos and the poets,” they once said, “the rebellious women and the activists” whom society disregarded. These were the people who kept Segarra going as they carved an itinerant path from their fractured Bronx upbringing to their longtime home in New Orleans, from the Lower East Side hardcore matinees of their youth to their escape hopping freight trains. Their voice traveled, too, growing from the forthright grace of Gillian Welch through the brash fortitude of Bruce Springsteen or Joe Strummer: a person talking straight to you. Where Segarra invoked Whitmanian transcendence on 2014’s “The Body Electric”—a feminist indictment of the murder-ballad tradition from their Americana breakout, Small Town Heroes—they directly triangulated the past, present, and future on their 2017 masterpiece, the rallying cry “Pa’lante.”
In that anthem describing the immigrant experience in America, Segarra ferociously called out to those “who had to hide,” who “lost their pride,” to “all who came before,” carrying the fight forward. The song is cracked open, traversing a continuum of historical struggle that is ongoing. Watch the 2021 documentary Takeover—about the NYC chapter of Puerto Rican revolutionary coalition the Young Lords and how they occupied the South Bronx’s Lennox Hospital in 1970, seizing it as “The People’s Hospital”—and when “Pa’lante” soundtracks its final moments you will see not only what art is capable of but what it is for.
Segarra’s eighth album is titled Life on Earth, seeming to ask, by its final notes: How will you spend yours? They transform their sound with glowing synthesizers and sunstruck hooks to answer this call. Segarra has made powerful records in the past by working within vernacular traditions, or constructing autofictive characters and concepts, like on 2017’s The Navigator, where they sought to reclaim their Puerto Rican identity. But Segarra has never sounded more honest or self-possessed than on Life on Earth. They have found a fresh collaborator in indie-rock producer Brad Cook (Waxahatchee, Bon Iver) and opened a new chapter. Dressed like a Fabulous Stain on the album’s cover—the inside typography evoking anarcho legends Crass and reading “BLESS ALL BEINGS RUNNING FOR THEIR LIVES”—Segarra has, in some sense, circled back to the raw openness of their earliest homespun releases. They once identified as a folk singer, but their sound now exudes a glorious irreverence, maybe a way of saying that old traditions, or at least their present iterations, cannot serve the current crises, which these songs consistently take on.
In these self-described “nature punk” songs, Segarra isn’t writing about the natural world so much as writing through it. They use their new sonic tools to channel the plant wisdom of the 2017 activist text (and stated influence) Emergent Strategy, namely the urgency of seeing all life as intertwined, and forming networks of solidarity by favoring “critical connections,” as author adrienne maree brown writes, over “critical mass.” Their biomimicry also often simply rocks. Segarra names the elements—the air and moon, flora and water, bees and butterflies—and channels their unruly beauty into the songs’ unvarnished surfaces and sing-shouting abandon. Beyond the open strums of “Rhododendron,” Segarra collages images of “night-blooming jasmine,” “naked boys,” and a “police barricade,” the kind of soul-steadying tune that can validate and alleviate pain in a single bar. “Everything I had is gone,” they sing. “I don’t know what it’d take to carry on.” Songs about flowers are still songs about survival in Segarra’s world.
Listening to Segarra’s stories, connections come alive, honoring another tenet of Emergent Strategy: “Transform yourself to transform the world.” Accordingly, Segarra threads Life on Earth with songs of self-reckoning, where electronics quake like new life about to spring. “Trying to avoid running into my ex on Broadway,” they sing on the brooding, skyscraping “Pierced Arrows,” knowing it takes work to not look back. On the lonesome “Nightqueen,” they sing of betraying their own heart in favor of an “addiction to freedom,” which proves futile. When they insist, over the slinking beat of “Jupiter’s Dance,” that they “can’t start a fire without my heart”—the restless spirit of Springsteen never too far off—it seems to say: access to one’s own emotions is the ultimate spark.
Life on Earth’s first track finds wolves appearing at the front door of an unsafe home. “You got to run, babe/You know how to run,” Segarra sings, a line inspired by their own youth that could also serve as an epigraph to their continued narration of the immigrant experience in America, particularly dehumanization at the hands of ICE. On the devastating title track, Segarra depicts a “girl in a cage with the moon in her eye,” who sings, “Life on Earth is long,” which is to say that it is hard; the benevolent world of this ballad makes it almost bearable. The lightly rapped “Precious Cargo” is a stark reminder that it was none other than Woody Guthrie who set Segarra on their train-hopping artistic path a decade and a half ago. Over a cool trip-hop beat, the song shares the story of a man swimming across a river with his children, of a border crossed, a family torn apart; of shivering on a cold jail floor with a foil blanket and calling out to Allah. In 2019, Segarra personally visited ICE facilities in Louisiana with Freedom for Immigrants, and worked to free two men from these inhumane jails. At the end of the song, as Segarra calls out the names of Southern towns with ICE centers, their words give way to those of one of the detained men: “Immigrants are suffering,” he says. “This song is my life.” “Precious Cargo” makes witnesses of us all.
“I am asking you to, as bell hooks says, FALL IN LOVE WITH JUSTICE,” Segarra wrote in a searing open letter to the folk community in 2015. Life on Earth exudes a prayer-like love for humanity, as Segarra’s depiction of resilience extends to memories sparked by “a terrible news week” on the penultimate “Saga.” “I was a kid, I was lonely,” they sing. “He pushed me down on the concrete/Oh, I can’t speak.” Trauma, once lodged, works to silence us from within, the song suggests; breaking free is a triumph, emboldening each note of “Saga.” That’s especially true of its final moments, where Segarra incants, heartbreakingly: “Nobody believed me.” “I’ll just make it through this week,” they sing, “And I’ll get out alive.” Segarra follows in the lineage of Fiona Apple, Sharon Van Etten, and other modern songwriters who have processed abusive relationships in daring songs. The brassy conviction and even biting humor of “Saga,” and Life on Earth, is proof of regaining control.
Segarra, who is 34, has said they spent much of their 20s feeling like they were born in the wrong era, wishing and demanding more of folk musicians who too often remained silent on issues, particularly racial injustice. But within our seasons of uprising, and an increasingly inclusive and critical culture, Segarra has found more to relate to. Where The Navigator’s “Pa’lante” included a 1969 recording of the late poet Pedro Pietri’s Nuyorican epic “Puerto Rican Obituary,” Life on Earth samples the voice of a contemporary, poet Ocean Vuong, whose books and interviews form treasured survival guides, and whose work also narrates the immigrant struggle in the United States. Appearing midway through “Nightqueen,” Vuong’s words, originally recorded for the “On Being” podcast, give Life on Earth its title; when his tearful voice enters the frame, it’s chilling. “As a species, as life on Earth, we’ve been dying for millennia,” Vuong says. “But I don’t think energy dies. It just transforms.” Vuong’s voice glides in over droning synths and the gentle buzz of horns, and feels as adaptive and generative as the plant life that inspires Segarra. This is yet another connection, another way forward.
Among its powers, topical music can make us feel with unforgettable intensity what we already essentially know about the time in which we live, reorganizing our priorities, clarifying the questions we ask of the world and ourselves. Life on Earth leaves questions lingering inside of you. Segarra’s melodies, some so beautiful that they seem to have existed forever, make them stay.

Buy: Rough Trade


A veteran of Sun Ra’s band of astral travelers, saxophonist and bandleader Marshall Allen carries on the jazz legend’s legacy of uplifting spirits and upending musical expectations.

Living Sky

According to a recent study in the journal Science, astronomers have solved Saturn’s enduring mysteries: Its rings are far younger than we thought; its “missing moon” accounts for its “puzzling tilt.” On the new album Living Sky, alto saxophonist Marshall Allen sounds much younger than his 98 years. Under his direction, the Sun Ra Arkestra carries on the mission of its namesake—a pianist, composer, bandleader, and poet who often claimed to be from Saturn—by playing jazz from a marvelously slanted perspective.
A lovingly packaged, remastered reissue of The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra—the jazz legend’s first release, recorded in 1961—recently reminded us of Ra’s earliest moves away from conventionally organized songs. Here were the first stirrings of a more organic and collective approach, fusing jazz and other traditions into an Afrofuturist form that still sounds singularly prophetic. As Ra, who died in 1993, said in the 1974 film Space Is the Place: “We work on the other side of time.”
Living Sky follows on the heels of last year’s Swirling, which had been the first new studio release from the Arkestra in 21 years. The new one sounds as buoyant as its predecessor, yet more moodily mysterious. It continues a process of mining Ra’s rich legacy while also presenting new music meant to further his intent, which was always as much about uplifting spirits as upending musical expectations. (Living Sky was recorded during the pandemic and, like most of Ra’s output, can be heard as both a challenge and a balm.)
Allen, who played on Futuristic Sounds, and has been immersed in Ra’s music for more than 60 years, is the clearest embodiment of that aesthetic. On “Chopin,” (based on Frédéric
Chopin’s “Prelude in A Major”) his alto saxophone issues squeals, smears, and arcing figures that sound as oddly pleasing as on the version Ra recorded live in 1990 on Pleiades: A Jazz Symphonique. Gone are Ra’s stately, blues-tinged piano intro and synthesizer. This new version moves to the same Afro-Latin groove, but it’s more drone-like and slowed into something like a polyrhythmic lullaby. As throughout the album, there are subtle and delicious shifts of foreground and background: here, Vincent Chancey’s high-pitched French horn, muted trumpets, and sweet-toned strings move about like, well, planets in orbit.
Ra first recorded “Somebody’s Else’s Idea” in 1955 as a simple theme atop an ostinato with a bebop interlude. He remade it, indelibly, in 1970, the theme now a chant, the song a statement of personal empowerment via lyrics sung with declarative force by June Tyson. Now, it once again becomes an instrumental, loosely swinging and vaguely processional, with baritone saxophonist Knoell Scott wordlessly chanting the theme over shifting tones. Some tracks coalesce and then drift off, much like cloud formations, as with “Day of the Living Sky.” Here, Allen plays the kora, a harp-like instrument, employing it not for flowing lines, as in traditional West African music, but instead plucking urgent, bent tones and strumming soft-voiced figures. Two Allen compositions accumulate force in forthright fashion, with steadily growing intensity. “Marshall’s Groove” fairly oozes over cymbal strikes and a slow-walking bassline for nearly half its 11 minutes before settling into the swinging groove, its interlocked reed, horn and string statements nodding to Ra’s jazz and R&B roots. “Firefly,” a gently swaying ballad, gets thrown gloriously askew by dissonant strands of harmony and streaks of soloing from Allen’s alto saxophone.
Ra’s Arkestra and his compositions were always mutable organisms, his every performance animated more by ideas about collective rituals than by repertoire. Only two of these seven songs were composed by Ra, yet his presence and his ideas seem to burrow beneath or hover above them all. The 19 musicians gathered make music dotted with the sonic details of Ra’s past. If they can’t quite recapture the full force or stark originality that characterized their lodestar during his lifetime (who could?) they can and do evoke his broad range of moods and colors, which seem to befit this moment. And they get us to lean in and listen, with just the right tilt.


On his second solo album, the former Drive-By Truckers member sticks with what he does best, offering detailed and evocative songwriting in a bar-band setting.

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

The first time most of us heard Jason Isbell was on "Outfit", his initial offering on the Drive-By Truckers' 2003 album Decoration Day, the group's first with the Alabama native. An extraordinarily perceptive and sensitive song, especially coming from a 24-year-old, "Outfit" finds a working-class father lending advice to his rock star-wannabe son, narrating along the way his own story of teenage rebellion curtailed by the adult responsibilities he ultimately came to cherish.
"Don't sing with a fake British accent" was one of dad's more memorable dictums, and regardless of how true-to-life "Outfit" may have been, it's a charge Isbell has taken to heart. During his five-plus years with the Truckers, Isbell impressively gained a songwriting reputation on par with the band's longtime principals, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley. Yet while Hood's unconventionally hoarse yelp attracted twang-wary indie fans and Cooley's gunslinger drawl was irresistible no matter how you felt about country, Isbell's booming, manful voice irredeemably marked him out as the least hip of the Trucker singers for the duration of his stay. Being the overweight guy in the group for a spell probably didn't help either.
Even when Isbell slimmed down considerably, however, he still retained the voice of a guy who takes ham with every meal. When Isbell sings it's not hard to picture an artless blooze belter at some sadly anonymous roadhouse. Now add in the fact that since leaving DBT he's delved much more deeply in musically treacherous blues-rock waters than his erstwhile mates. What it all amounts to is a guy who has just released his second solo record in less than two years and who nonetheless seems destined to be eternally underrated. His occasional bar-band leanings may cause some to miss that Isbell is an invigorating songwriter and one of the better lyricists of his generation.
Indeed, Isbell has had trouble catching a break. His 2007 solo debut, Sirens of the Ditch, mildly disappointed some of his staunchest admirers with its lack of historical or regional specificity, spoiled as they were by the likes of DBT songs like "Outfit", "Decoration Day", "Danko/Manuel", and "The Day John Henry Died". Yet what Isbell's achieved over the course of that album and his self-titled newest is no less admirable for its paucity of proper nouns, finding unique ways to approach sex, politics, and isolation while delivering rousing, hooky rock'n'roll. So while "Seven Mile Island" does reference a real place, and "However Long" definitely does seem to reflect an Obama-spurred sense of societal optimism, they're not the album's real lyrical standouts. That honor belongs to the ruminative "Streetlights", which shows us an itinerant musician calling home from some faraway bar, and especially "Soldiers Get Strange", an utterly spellbinding snapshot of a serviceman who comes home from overseas and finds a return to marital sex and "toeing civilian lines" to be a psychological impossibility.
Many of the songs on Isbell's sophomore release don't necessarily aim for (or achieve) such profundity, yet they still compel through sheer verve and Isbell's unwillingness to let an unhip sound or idea discourage him. Sure, "Blue" sounds like Los Lonely Boys filtered through RHCP's "Under the Bridge", but it's still a damn fine song, Isbell showing off his ability to at least be evocatively oblique when he's not exactly hitting his lyrical mark. And if you're going to ape 1960s Stax soul, you might as well dive in headfirst like Isbell does on "No Choice in the Matter", an unrepentant throwback that nonetheless nails the warm horns and spindly guitar sound of a classic Otis session perfectly. Sometimes all that's needed is a big, singalong-ready chorus-- they're never as easy to craft as you think, yet Isbell delivers on "Sunstroke", the barnburning "Good", and especially "Cigarettes and Wine". The latter is just as much about faded male vitality as it is sex, drugs, and drink, and is hence destined to be a crowd-pleaser with those ruefully eyeing receding hairlines and spreading paunches. Yep, the only "hip" here is the aching one that's sooner or later going to need replacing.


The hotly tipped 20-year-old singer-songwriter debuts with a cool, confident record that occasionally blends into pleasant monotony.

Collapsed in Sunbeams

After releasing her debut single “Cola” in 2018, 20-year-old London poet Arlo Parks won the approval of virtually every possible tastemaker. Michelle Obama put her on a playlist; Hayley Williams nearly included her as a tour opener, and Phoebe Bridgers covered Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” with Parks on piano and harmonies. While prepping her debut album, Parks collaborated with festival favorites Glass Animals and R&B newcomers MICHELLE. It’s not hard to see why she has so much support; Parks’ songwriting is affectionate and friendly, never straining too hard, always cool and collected. Nearly every song has a message of comfort—on the opener, she sings, “You shouldn’t be afraid to cry in front of me,” while the chorus of “Hope” goes, “You’re not alone/Like you think you are,” over light trip-hop. In a vacuum, any one of these songs are charming, but on Collapsed in Sunbeams, they all blur into a pleasant sort of monotony.
As a songwriter, Parks uses pop culture references and proper nouns as shorthand to set scenes, hoping to build “a complete world that people can immerse themselves in.” This is often endearing; the pre-album single “Cola” mentioned Gerard Way, and the clunkiness of “I’d lick the grief right off your lips/You do your eyes like Robert Smith” on “Black Dog” just makes the song feel more intimate. In a lot of instances, those attempts at immersion get so repetitive that they ironically serve as distractions. There are so many names—Charlie, Caroline, Millie—that it’s hard to keep track, and there are so many references and words of affirmation that it’s hard to remember who said what to whom. It doesn’t help that songs like “Hurt” (the Charlie one) are aimless sketches about aimless characters, where the point is that the references and platitudes don’t add up to anything.
Parks’ eclectic influences show up in her lyrics (Thom Yorke, Nujabes, and Jai Paul all get name-drops), but not her music. Whether the producer is Paul Epworth or usual collaborator Gianluca Buccellati, everything sounds too sweet. Every other song has a dry drum kit with atmospheric vinyl cracks and floaty keyboards. Even the moments that change things up feel undercooked: “Just Go” is extremely light disco, while “Porta 400” opens with a string sample that almost immediately disappears in the mix. The distorted bass of “For Violet” sounds like it might lead to something darker, worthy of the Massive Attack on Parks’ playlist, but within 45 seconds Parks is back to geniality: “Wait/You know when college starts again you’ll manage!”
“Violet” is one of a handful of moments where the comforting atmosphere starts to crack—it hints at a more compelling album actively at war with its own themes. The breakthrough “Dog” depicts helping someone through a mental health crisis (“At least I know that you are trying/But that’s what makes it terrifying”), but on “Violet,” she gives up on helping, instead repeating, “Nothing’s changing and I can’t do this, I can’t do this.” The best songs flip the formula altogether, finding universality in specific themes instead of dressing up universal themes in specific imagery. Early single “Eugene” adds a layer of complexity and heartbreak to a traditional pop subject: Parks’ character falls for a straight girl, a painful variation on unrequited love where reciprocation is inherently impossible. On “Green Eyes,” the love is reciprocated, but ends after two months in fear of homophobic attacks. When Parks inevitably offers a platitude—“You gotta trust how you feel inside and shine”—there are actual stakes to give those lines some meaning.
Repeated listens further reveal the weight missing from the production and melodies: When she stands up for herself on penultimate track “Bluish,” there are few pop-culture references or proper nouns, just simple and effective lines like “never had the chance to miss you” and “please let me out of you.” Sunbeams could use more of that directness. Otherwise, it’s easy to imagine someone walking into a coffee shop, nodding their head to the supportive chorus wafting over the speakers, and never thinking about it again.

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One of several recent drummers to combine electronic processing with instrumental chops, Booker Stardrum swings like a pendulum between chaos and order.

Temporary etc.

It might seem counterintuitive for a drummer to embrace electronic music. After all, some say drum machines have no soul, while others still insist that groove boxes will put drummers out of business, even if that idea is less prevalent than it was 30-odd years ago. But electronic music is a fundamentally time-based art, and no one understands the intricacies of clockwork better than drummers, a species with a heightened perception of the relationship between muscle and millisecond. A raft of drummers have recently fused their instrumental practice with electronic processing, putting a percussive spin on electro-acoustic composition, from the laptop-aided layering of Greg Fox and Eli Keszler to the drill ’n’ bass mechanics of RRUCCULLA.
Add to that roster the impeccably named Booker Stardrum, a member of Cloud Becomes Your Hand and a collaborator to Lee Ranaldo and Nels Cline. Stardrum’s second album, Temporary etc., slips and slides between propulsive stickwork, programmed sequencing, and glowering metallic drones—like 2015’s Dance And, never settling in any one terrain for long. But where Dance And often dissolved into post-punk mulch that obscured the origins of Stardrum’s sounds, Temporary etc. wipes away some of the dirt and leaves his signature in sharp relief.
The distance between the two albums is immediately apparent with Temporary etc.’s “Drim Dram II” and “Drim Dram III,” variations on a theme established on his debut album. Where Dance And’s “Drim Dram” submerged incessantly tumbling toms in a muddy swirl, “Drim Dram II” and “Drim Dram III” are crisp and kinetic, with the cartoon brightness of vintage Raymond Scott. Rapidfire patterns mirrored between drums and electronic tones mimic popping popcorn. If it’s not always clear how Stardrum is generating these hybrid sounds, the force of his wrists and forearms is the unmistakable driver behind his flexible timekeeping.
“Wisp” approaches the kit as a kind of action painting, almost athletic in its bold strokes and brusque gestures. In “Five Finger Cloud,” boomy toms and brushed snares circle each other warily, sketching out polyrhythms that are devilishly difficult to parse while Jon Hassell-like pads and gentle sax add dimension. When he hones in on the groove, Stardrum’s pockets are as deep as Jeff Bezos’. But his atmospheres are just as compelling as his beats. The opening “Dome Ship” conjures a hazy mix of church bells and a horn section, gradually giving way to a freight train’s relaxing clatter. Descending synth riffs and voluminous reverb add a soothing quality to the grinding rhythms and machine-shop whine of “Swimming,” like a kind of industrial lullaby.
Sometimes, Stardrum abandons rhythm entirely. During the beatless “A Passage or Time in a Hanging Truth,” softly stacked horns bend in pitch, like light through water. He smears the keening sounds of European sirens until they vibrate with the microtonal hum of Ligeti or Xenakis—it’s like the THX “Deep Note,” overcome by seasickness. On the seven-minute highlight “Trash Island,” he begins with a collage of scraped and battered drums and cymbal hits. Without warning, the drums stop, only to reveal glistening organs before the scratching and bashing returns. And on it goes, swinging like a pendulum between chaos and order, violence and idyll—cycling, turning in circles, as only a drummer knows how.


Centering her own voice for the first time, Caroline Shaw proves to be a master of collapsing boundaries, whether between her performer-composer roles or the corporeal and the immaterial.

Caroline Shaw / Sō Percussion: Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part

Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part

Caroline Shaw’s itemized accomplishments are many: she’s composed celebrated works for vocal and string ensembles, helped to shape Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, and in 2013, she won a Pulitzer Prize in music for Partita for 8 Voices, becoming the youngest person ever to do so. Though her definitive Partita is a stunning display of human voices in motion, Shaw has never been the lead vocalist herself on an album; she appears most often as a composer, violinist, or ensemble member.
But with Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, her second album of the year with the exploratory New York ensemble Sō Percussion, Shaw centers herself in a project that captures her earthy inspirations while flexing her capacity for sparkling compositions. Across 10 songs, Shaw gathers some common threads of her music—rhythm and air, literary inspirations, hymns—into a singular work that feels like a gentle invitation to listeners who may not yet recognize the strength of her combined powers.
Shaw is a master of collapsing boundaries, whether between her performer-composer roles or the corporeal and the immaterial. Her voice as a singer and composer shines in these songs, each one like a renewed announcement of Shaw’s “place in the family of things,” as Mary Oliver put it. Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part unfolds like the edge of the woods at twilight: As skittering rhythms clink into place, “To the Sky” swells upward and erupts with the exuberance of wildflowers. “Other Song” glides in on a draft, building up a tumbling overlap of percussion and electronic flickers. Marimbas and steel drums resonate like heavy raindrops, while other percussive rustles bring to mind the dry overlap of wind and cicadas whispering in the trees.
Shaw dissolves the idea that heaven and earth are separate, mutually exclusive places; instead, they are connected by the sky, sand, soil, and sea that she often invokes. She begins from the leap of “To the Sky” before touching back down to the ground on the title track; she returns to the shore from “The Flood Is Following Me” with the knelling “Cast the Bells in Sand.” Sō Percussion are most often serene, but some of their lightest touches are most dramatic. With lyrics culled from James Joyce’s Ulysses, the sound of scraping stones on “A Veil Awave Upon the Waves” triggers a sharp prickle of physical awareness as Shaw contemplates the vacuum of waiting.
Ulysses likewise appears in “The Flood Is Following Me,” and Shaw’s allusions to distant, seemingly unknowable characters stretch further still. “A Gradual Dazzle” borrows its lyrics from Anne Carson’s poem “Room in Brooklyn,” inspired by the Edward Hopper painting of the same name. Hopper, a famous interpreter of solitude, depicts a lone woman facing a blue-and-brick skyline as sunlight spills in through three windows. Shaw carefully stitches these solitary creatures into a sense of belonging, sheltering them in her open and unencumbered compositions.
Throughout her work—including on January’s Narrow Sea, with Sō Percussion, Dawn Upshaw, and Gilbert Kalish—Shaw draws on old Christian hymns, recasting them in a fresh spirit. With “To the Sky,” Shaw transforms an 18th-century song from the Sacred Harp hymnal into a jubilant, sweeping piece that exudes wonder. She closes the album with “Some Bright Morning,” a song from the more recent annals of hymnody. “Celestial shore” has long been one of Christianity’s cooler turns of phrase, and Shaw makes good use of its imagery. Smoothing the music into lightly droning waves, she sounds as though she’s singing from the edge of the horizon, turning hope for eternal release into a reflection on the scale of eternity itself.
Shaw’s deft way of distilling the secular from the sacred also works in reverse. Strip the drum track, and ABBA’s “Lay All Your Love on Me” cuts close to a grandiose pipe-organ choral arrangement; Shaw’s sparse reinterpretation invokes the divine qualities of a great pop song. It feels akin to a benediction, even as it rings with a kind of light desperation. Such is the quality of devastating loves, as described in hymnals and Hot 100 singles alike: surrendering some of your flesh and blood in earnest, knowing that it could invite profound betrayal.
Whether inverting an old song or sculpting a whirlwind from dust, Shaw’s work highlights the divine in the ordinary. With Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, she reaches toward the peaceful bewilderment of feeling ensconced in the great web of everything, the mysterious force which exists in the words of a 300-year-old hymn, the open canvas of the sky, the pop song leaking through the radio. These things are not apart from us, she suggests; when we tune into the right wavelength, it is we who are a part of them.

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This 40th anniversary three-disc reissue of the second Ramones album is littered with alternate mixes, all attempting to achieve a precise balance of muscle and effervescence.

Leave Home

For the Ramones, Leave Home was an aspirational album title. Despite the critical hosannas, the Ramones didn’t sell many copies of their 1976 debut, a situation that made the make-believe brothers from Queens restless to break out of their borough and conquer the world. The solution seemed easy: take the couple grand extra Sire gave them for a second album and record a colorized version of their first album. All the essential elements remained in place—the songs still zip by at the speed of light, every hook ramming into the next—but everything seemed bolder and louder than what came before, as if the problem with the debut wasn’t the formula but the execution.
Stardom eventually would happen for the Ramones, but the hits they craved never materialized. If anything, Leave Home marked a step backward in that regard, peaking at 148 where Ramones went to 111. But by falling short of the group’s grand ambitions, the album crystallized the conundrum at the heart of the Ramones: no matter how badly they yearned for hits, they couldn’t help but sound like variations of their basic selves.
Maybe this consistency is part of the reason why Leave Home often gets dismissed with the praise that it merely offers more of the same. To an extent, that’s true: often, it seems like the Ramones are determined to deliver an answer to their debut, writing responses to their glue-sniffing escapades, Nazi flirtations, and horror film infatuations. They even cherry-picked another old frat-rock hit (1960’s “California Sun”) to reiterate that their heart lied in the music made before the Beatles. But viewing Leave Home through that prism undersells how the record sounds and feels very different from its predecessor.
Part of the Ramones’ charm is how they seemed like renegades from an underground comic book—a degenerate answer to the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, celebrating all the glories that slithered out of the sewer. On the debut, all this filth still seemed nasty, but there is a slight shift in tone on Leave Home that pushes the band toward caricature. Some of that derives from the album’s comparative thematic lightness: The group may still be huffing fumes, but they’re not selling their bodies on a street corner; the inherent scuzz and sleaze no longer feels quite so dangerous. Instead, the band sell their rebellious stance with a smile, turning a freak show taunt into the rallying cry of “Gabba gabba, we accept you/We accept you, one of us.” Elsewhere, the band shows hints of heart—they’re advocating for the woman subject of “You’re Gonna Kill That Girl,” and their griping about Sire on “Swallow My Pride” reveals some of Joey’s soul—but those moments are overshadowed by hooks so oversized they seem cartoonish.
Like before, the hooks are extrapolated from singles that cluttered the AM airwaves in the ’60s and early 1970s, and if the trash aesthetic doesn’t seem as artful here as it does on Ramones, blame it on the decision to try for a hit. Never mind that the Ramones’ version of a hit was decidedly low-rent—all the group wanted was to play the catchy parts as loudly and quickly as possible—because the Ramones could never differentiate between what would appeal to a larger audience and what was best left unsaid. They’d throw away their most immediate melody on “Carbona Not Glue,” a song that couldn’t make it on the album due to legal reasons, and they’d play their sweetest harmonies with the intensity of a buzzsaw. Sure, the record sounds beefier than what came before, but the group didn’t write straight rock songs for Leave Home because they were besotted with pop. They churn out bubblegum garage and ragged love songs, camouflaging their fizziness with brawn.
To that end, it makes sense that the 40th Anniversary Deluxe edition of Leave Home is littered with alternate mixes, all attempting to achieve a precise balance of muscle and effervescence. The great majority of the unreleased cuts on this three-disc set are devoted to slight variations on the original trackings. A new mix by the album’s engineer Ed Stasium gives the record a heavier bottom end and trims some of its trippy phasing. There’s also a bunch of raw mixes that were knocked off during the group’s first days at Sundragon studio, all followed by a plethora of alternate mixes cobbled together from original elements Stasium discovered during the assembly of this reissue. While none of these variations are startling, they are clarifying. Every one is labelled after one of the group’s obsessions—“Psychedelic,” “Bubblegum,” “TV Track,” and “Doo Wop”—highlighting how thoroughly the group was rooted in the junk culture of the ’60s.
The deliberate intent of all that studio dithering is brought into sharp relief through the inclusion of an April 2, 1977 gig at CBGB’s, a show performed about three months after the album’s release. It’s a different set than the one included on the 2001 expanded reissue of Leave Home, which housed a concert given at the Roxy in Hollywood on August 12, 1976, about two months prior to the tracking of Leave Home. And while the live recording suffers from some dodgy audio, it’s a welcome tonic to the onslaught of mixes that demonstrate how even the most primitive of rock stars could never stop fiddling with faders.
On top of the live show and mixes, this deluxe edition rounds up the rest of the stray songs surrounding the release of Leave Home. Notably, “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” and “Babysitter”—songs added to the respective U.S. and UK releases of Leave Home when “Carbona Not Glue” was pulled from the record under the threat of a lawsuit from the titular cleaning company—and the B-side “I Don't Care” are added here. Alongside the proper album, the result is about 40 minutes of astounding music. The Ramones were masters of minimalism but, oddly enough, they benefit from this plethora of vaguely differing mixes. These extra tracks underscore just how much work it is to make something simple sound effortless.


Captured by the ubiquitous NYC Taper, this 2016 live collaboration from harpist Mary Lattimore and keyboardist Elysse Thebner Miller is magic. Over two extended pieces, the duo is perfectly ascendant.

Mary Lattimore / Elysse Thebner Miller: And the Birds Flew Overhead

And the Birds Flew Overhead

Mention the harp, and it conjures images of angels aloft at the gates of heaven. Despite a CV that includes the likes of Thurston Moore, Kurt Vile, and Sharon Van Etten, the harpist Mary Lattimore has her work cut out for her, as far as escaping the tendencies of such history to position the instrument as merely a placid, New Age-friendly sound. Her music can be deeply relaxing, but her strings never feel escapist.
For all the images of clouds and light-filled vistas that her chosen instrument can imply, Lattimore’s work is evocatively tethered to life on earth, be it the “Wawa by the Ocean” on the Jersey Shore that she once frequented or “Jaxine Drive” on the opposite coast. While And the Birds Flew Overhead is specific—a recording of a 2016 live performance between Lattimore and keyboardist Elysse Thebner Miller during Three Lobed Recordings’ “Sweet Sixteen” series of concerts at King’s Barcade in Raleigh, N.C.—the two extended pieces evoke a more ethereal state. Recorded by the ubiquitous NYC Taper and pressed by Wooden Wand on their Footfalls label, Overhead captures a magical live performance, one that might’ve evaporated otherwise.
Improvisations between two stellar players tend to fall into two camps. In one, the players stake out their respective territories, feel each other out, and then attempt to find some middle ground. The other, which is far rarer, involves a subsummation of ego wherein they instead move like longtime figure skating pairs, gliding as one towards a higher ground. The press release for Overhead cites Cluster and Fripp & Eno, duos who also moved as one, but the comparison that holds the most water is Raul Lovisoni & Francesco Messina’s Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo, a late 1970s album of Italian minimalism that also uses harp and synthesizer to sublime effect.
The opening moments of “Grips on a Baby” reveal Lattimore and Thebner Miller already perfectly in sync and ascendant. Thebner Miller’s slow-morphing chords provide a gentle foundation while Lattimore’s plucked strings rise and billow like gauze curtains, or like a tiny set of chimes, nudged on by the wind. The serene vibe established, I wish it were possible to give a blow-by-blow of what transpired over the next 18-minutes—but the two move so effortlessly that even the most-discerning ears will find themselves unplugging and simply going along with their drift.
Strings gurgle like a wellspring underfoot, mechanized purrs arise like an outboard motor from across a great lake. Whether listening back to a Soundcloud link or to the sidelong vinyl, there always seems to be an unaccounted-for length of time, the soundwaves on the former all orange and the latter nearing the label. Soon there’s the sound of applause, marking the sudden end of a seemingly infinite journey.
“Victor, 1993 (End of a Holiday)” is a briefer trip, but it’s no less immersive. Lattimore’s rings rap against the wood of her 47-string Lyon and Healy harp, giving the piece a more percussive element; she then deploys electronic effects to add psychedelic eddies to those strings. As the piece continues, Thebner Miller’s droning chord organ mirrors Lattimore’s melodic figures and the two move at a more stately pace, slowly allowing space to emerge between the notes before the piece draws to a close.
There’s been no shortage of music from Lattimore released in the past two years. But this album is a breathtaking example of a spontaneous musical performance that pulls off that rare feat of transporting its audience nearer the gates of heaven.


The Detroit indie rocker’s second album fluctuates between alt-rock and garage pop, turning up her amp and doubling down on her uncompromising style.

Midnight

Sometimes empowerment arrives by way of motivational speeches or transformative adventures, and sometimes it arrives in anger. It did for Stef Chura, the Detroit-based indie rocker funneling passive-aggressiveness into music. “There are some conversations that I need to have that I haven’t,” she told her local alt-weekly. “Instead, I put them in songs.” Whereas her jangly debut full-length, Messes, wrestled with sadness—a close friend had died suddenly, an event that convinced Chura it was time to take the leap into music—its follow-up, Midnight, wrings catharsis from annoyances. By turning up her amp and doubling down on her uncompromising vibrato singing style, Chura defines her Saddle Creek debut in the image of the emboldened ’90s alt-rock feminists that came before her. She’s blossomed so much as a musician, she even surprised herself.
Chura has mastered the art of playfully selling herself short, but Midnight should put an end to that. When she sings, she sounds as self-assured as PJ Harvey and as liberated as Alanis Morissette. Producer Will Toledo of Car Seat Headrest contributes bass, guitar, organ, and synths, but if it weren’t for his duet on “Sweet Sweet Midnight,” you’d likely forget all about him in the shadow of Chura’s commanding presence. It helps, of course, that she’s blowing off steam. On “All I Do Is Lie,” an exoneration of an ex-lover, and “Method Man,” a romp through the vexations of a one-sided relationship, her raspy voice pierces through spiraling noise pop. “Scream” confronts the suppression of feminine anger and finds its own solution in elongated, cacophonous hollers. It’s unfiltered and raw, the sound of someone who no longer gives a fuck. The vocals on Chura’s debut had a snuffed quality; here she and Toledo push them to the forefront, though they would’ve demanded the spotlight anyway. Even her quiet croon on lo-fi piano ballad “Trumbull” is engaging, as if overhearing a friend who’s unaware she’s not alone.
As she fluctuates between alt-rock and garage pop, Chura finds exhilarating ways to exorcise her angst. She busts out solos that teeter between full-volume shredding and coolly indifferent fret-sliding, waving her guitar like a middle finger. On the bluesy “Degrees,” she waits until the end half to burst through the door with a classic rock tone, scaling her way up the guitar neck in a headbang-worthy moment. Elsewhere, like on “They’ll Never,” she opts for a cleaner, air guitar-worthy solo reminiscent of the Strokes. Chura sounds her best when letting loose on all fronts. So it comes as a surprise when she counteracts her own brisk songwriting with album closer “Eyes Without a Face,” a crisp, double-tracked Billy Idol cover that forgoes a memorable ending for a leisurely, dragged-out conclusion.
Several of Midnight’s most rewarding tracks—“Jumpin’ Jack,” “3D Girl,” and “Method Man”—are treasured but shelved demos finally seeing the light of day. Perhaps this helps to explain how Chura manages to sound so much like a modern-day Morissette: She’s fed up, she’s plugged in, and she’s confident enough in her craft to morph these ideas into the anthems she imagined. Midnight is a growth spurt without the usual growing pains. Toledo contributes subtle handiwork throughout, but no studio trickery could replicate Chura’s intensity. From her fuzzed-out garage guitar tone to her grainy music videos, she’s bringing back the ’90s rock truism that angst is transformative—so long as you get it out.


Inviting guest vocalists into his fold for the first time, the London tuba player delivers a collection of taut pop songs deeply rooted in Afro-Caribbean soundsystem culture.

Intra-I

Over the past half decade, Theon Cross has reconstituted the tuba’s image in the popular imagination. Whether bolstering the Shabaka Hutchings-led Sons Of Kemet, providing the oomph for Kano’s live shows, or in his own role as bandleader and solo artist, he’s elevated the instrument from bulky backing brass (or, worse, comedy prop) to core constituent. His debut album, 2019’s Fyah, added a booming rumble to the conversation, exhibiting deft interplay between tuba, sax and drums. On Intra-I, his horn is central to the party. Inviting guest vocalists into his fold for the first time, Cross delivers a collection of taut pop songs that’s deeply rooted in the annals of Afro-Caribbean soundsystem culture—spanning sweaty clubs, hall parties, and funeral rites.
“Roots,” graced by British-Zimbabwean MC Shumba Maasai and his deliciously rolled “Rs,” channels Roots Manuva and the late Ty in a revival of “bouncement” era UK hip-hop. “Play To Win” sounds like a live-action version of Dot Rotten’s explosive “Bazooka” instrumental—a beat that accepts few imitations. These nods to the past, and a repeated refrain of “Watch what the future holds, then aim higher” on “Roots,” resemble a motto of sorts for Cross and his contemporaries. But there’s a risk associated with having such clear touch points. The influence of soundsytem-rooted genres like soca, dancehall, UK hip-hop, and grime has been a sustaining feature of London’s ebullient young jazz scene pretty much since its inception; but what was once striking and new can easily slip into more superficial territory. However, Cross consistently avoids the sighing recognition that comes from watching yet another jazz player do a rendition of a grime song. Tracks like “We Go Again” and “The Spiral” funnel heavy, hip-swinging grooves through moody pop compositions, allaying any such fears of gimmickry.
Underlying the jubilation are moments of mournful contemplation. Cross’ father, whose taste and passion for reggae have had a lasting influence on the tuba player, passed away in 2020. “Watching Over (Bless Up Dad)” and “Forward Progression II” both pay tribute, the former with sermonic drones and the latter with a heavy-stepping, trumpet-led exaltation. Cross’ playing is charismatic, and the dense rumble he draws from his instrument is potent; he imbues these songs with unguarded emotion—conjuring the scuffle of feelings borne out, in the Caribbean tradition, at a Nine Nights wake.
In 2019, Cross spoke of the influence that parties at his grandmother’s home have had on his music—with zouk, soca, calypso, and reggae music filtering through from those moments to his later years. If the result of that was Fyah, then Intra-I is the soundtrack for a new generation of music lovers to grow with. Cross hasn’t just connected his instrument with the soundsystem culture that informs his music, he’s made it an integral component of that tradition. For this tuba player, the air kicked out by speaker cones is just the same as the breath he pushes through his mouthpiece.
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The Austin experimental musician’s grand, romantic ambient album is inspired by dreams’ blissful connotations and cryptic communications.

Oneiric

Dreams can be revelatory, but there’s always a catch. Sometimes you find that the beautiful poetry that came to you in your sleep sounds like nonsense once you open your eyes and write it down. They end at inopportune times, just before you’ve reached your destination or climbed in bed with your crush. You don’t have much control; hence the fascination with “lucid dreaming,” which lets you find your own way around your dream world instead of being jerked around by your subconscious. And then there’s the simple fact that they’re not real and you eventually wake up.
oneiric, the new album by Mari Maurice as more eaze, is interested in that maddening unreality. Its title is an adjective related to dreams or dreaming, and its shifting synth pads and endless-city artwork bring to mind the vaporwave subgenre known as “dreampunk,” but Maurice seems just as inspired by dreams’ bliss-out connotations as the way they seem to communicate to us from the other side of a wall. These six tracks are permeated with voices that bubble just below the threshold of comprehension, and though you could spend a few spins of oneiric just trying to make out what they’re saying, Maurice uses them like Burial, Jan Jelinek or Philip Jeck use static: as a way of both enhancing the texture and heightening the emotional stakes. Maurice has cited an unrequited love as an inspiration for the album, and it’s poignant to picture the splintered language of dreams as a metaphor for never really knowing what to say to someone else.
oneiric derives much of its power from its arrangements, which feel grand and romantic even while hewing close to the ambient drift of previous solo releases Towards a Plane and Yearn. “a romance” sighs with strings, white noise, and undulating pads, occasionally interrupted by a weird, wet, loudly mixed noise that made me think of an accidental stomach gurgle during sex. “the neighborhood” is nearly silent for long stretches, yet its 11-minute length and the sheer beauty of the sounds that do show up—a candle-flicker of guitar in the first half, a blossoming house chord in the second—give this low-lying track the feel of an epic. “a romance” and “the neighborhood” make up more than half of the album’s runtime by themselves, and it’s easy to forget what you’re listening to for a while and let them coil away in your subconscious.
The middle of the album breaks away from the gauzy sweep of the first two tracks by paring down the track lengths to four or five minutes apiece and introducing noisier sounds like a computer-startup harp swell on “heartbreaker” and squealing Auto-Tune on “we don’t talk about it.” (The latter is the only moment on the album to suggest Maurice’s sideline in hyperpop, whose irony and pop-culture literacy oneiric otherwise rejects.) But the vibe picks up again with “crii,” an unnaturally slow minimal house track built around two uncertain little pinpricks of chord, its unquantized beat gradually building but never quite turning into a groove. It’s an almost-banger in the vein of Jan Jelinek’s “Tendency,” too subdued and lethargic for clubs but somehow carrying itself like an anthem.
“Each song is on the verge of communicating some deep truth but not quite being able to articulate it,” Maurice says, and this deliberate tilt towards abstraction is a far cry from the candid conversations and domestic samples (flushing toilets, various canines) that appear throughout her work both solo and with her best friend, claire rousay. oneiric’s reduced emphasis on recognizable sounds and relatable sentiments makes it a more interior album, one about specific states of mind experienced by its creator rather than the sad transience of the world. But as oneiric retreats deeper and deeper toward its own center, it’s hard not to get sucked up along with it.


The Las Vegas rock band’s fourth album is categorically soaring and sometimes pleasant, but it is so broad and hollow that it is difficult to feel anything these guys are feeling.

Origins

Imagine Dragons have become a case study for rock music fading out of the zeitgeist. The rise of the Las Vegas rock band in 2013 coincided with the lull in the format’s popularity, yet, remarkably, they were a runaway success. Their breakthrough hit, “Radioactive,” stayed on the Hot 100 chart for a record-setting 87 weeks. They turned down their guitars and turned up every expensive synth pad known to man, and exactly one collaboration with Kendrick Lamar later, they were one of the biggest new rock bands in the country.
How did Imagine Dragons become so huge despite the fact that the average American couldn’t pick out a single Dragon in a lineup? Their sound is kind of like the machine learning output of the Lumineers, the Chainsmokers, and a SoulCycle playlist. After the breakout success of “Radioactive,” Imagine Dragons’ sophomore record, Smoke + Mirrors, topped the Billboard chart in its first week. Their third album, 2017’s Evolve, sold 147,000 copies in its first week, an incredible amount in the streaming era. It had the inescapable “Thunder,” a song that bored itself deep into the collective consciousness thanks in part to a mind-numbingly catchy chorus and ubiquitous Microsoft and Jeep ads.
Since Imagine Dragons scaled to a mass audience so quickly, their songs have had to stay just as huge. They make low-hanging-fruit music, which can be great in theory, but because of all the styles it stitches together, their songs something more distant and mutated. On their new album, Origins, Reynolds finds himself on the other side of the personal darkness that shaded Evolve, emerging with a more positive outlook, a world-weary curiosity now turned outward. Reynolds feels compelled to turn his attention to this modern life, outlining his grievances in language that feels almost too accessible: “How many artists fear the light? Fear the pain, go insane?” he asks on “Bullet in a Gun.” On closer “Real Life” he ponders, “Hey, turn your phone off, won’t you look me in my eye?/Can we live that real life?” Do we live in a society? Imagine Dragons are almost positive we do.
The music is categorically soaring and sometimes pleasant, because sometimes the algorithm finds you where you want to be found. The anthems—“Natural,” “Bad Liar,” “Machine”—lean heavily on the trusty loud-quiet-loud dynamic that buoyed the bands’ past hits. Reynolds, though, uses that tension to increasingly hollow effect. Stylistically, the singer tries on enough hats to differentiate Origins’ collection of music from the more homogenous Evolve, in particular, the Bleachers-meets-Coldplay pop of single “Zero,” a nod to soul music on “Cool Out,” and the “Wake Me Up”-core country textures of “West Coast.”
But with its tired aphorisms and eerily familiar sonic environments, it never adds up to be much of a comment on the music Imagine Dragons is referencing. Since their songs scan like a competent survey of the entirety of mid-aughts pop rock, there’s no real personality to identify within the songs. Origins wants to conversate with the current moment, but it never amounts to a coherent statement. In TV terms, it’s like a hoary crossover episode of “Black Mirror” and “This Is Us.”
Although Origins leans far too heavily on Instagram-quote culture—the idea that any snippet of thought, removed from context, can build a base of inspiration—Reynolds is a passionate and versatile singer. It courses through his veins. In June, HBO released a documentary called Believer, which follows Reynolds as he learns about LGBTQ Mormon youth and their struggles to find an identity within an oppressive church. In Believer, Reynolds tells a story with a powerful message—the film showcases Reynolds as a likable, empathetic figure who works hard to earn a new point of view. Listening to Origins, you wouldn’t know that this was the same person behind the music, that this was the same person singing, “Nothing ever comes without a consequence or cost, tell me/Will the stars align?” with such embarrassing conviction. Reynolds has a story to tell, but the music fails to be the ideal delivery system.


It Follows is a horror movie with a compelling score by Disasterpeace, aka Rich Vreeland, an electronic artist who’s best known for a series of video game soundtracks.

It Follows OST

It Follows is a classic boy-meet-girls story, only the boy is using a fake name, the girl doesn’t know, and after they sleep together it turns out he’s passed more than fluids—specifically, a curse that makes her the target of an unstoppable, unmerciful demon. The demon takes human form; it can’t be seen by anyone but the cursed, and those who’ve previously borne the curse. (It only targets one person at a time.) It doesn’t run—it walks, stopping only when it’s in range for a vicious attack that leaves the victim’s limbs snapped, and their pelvises crushed by coital rage. It can’t open doors, but it knows how to knock. It’s the dark presence behind one of the more gripping horror movies of recent memory, as well as a fantastic argument for abstinence.
The soundtrack is handled by Disasterpeace, aka Rich Vreeland, an electronic artist who’s best known for a series of video game soundtracks. It Follows is his first film score, and he’s worked diligently to build a cohesive world of ominous moods. There are several recurring motifs: a booming percussion that comes like the monster pounding on the door; a shrill klaxon signaling when danger is near; a pattern of corrupted synths chugging into motion like some futuristic train on its way to the junkyard. A window shatters. A cluster of digital hornets buzz and whine. A jet turbine spins into motion, the air supercharging to an agonizing din, only to die down and leave the room sapped of tension. It’s a score that announces when something is about to happen, only to suddenly upend expectations and leave the room on edge.
It Follows wouldn’t exist without John Carpenter’s movies, and neither would the score. "Title" sounds like an update of Carpenter’s Halloween theme, as a lonely piano line is slowly enveloped by gothic dread. The melody is echoed on "Detroit", the arpeggiated tones brushing up against the sublime as the synthesizers drone from underneath. This is where you’d maybe dock Vreeland and the filmmakers a point for originality, except It Follows comes at a precarious moment for the American horror movie. Everything is either point-of-view or torture porn, and frankly, if someone wants mine a source as fertile as Halloween, they should go right ahead.
Like all OSTs, It Follows makes the most sense when you’ve seen the movie it’s made for—and you should see it, especially if you can watch horror movies in genuine terror of what’s about to happen. But it can work in other contexts, and a quick scan of Vreeland’s work shows he isn’t a one-trick composer leaning on his Casio. I’m most familiar with his score for "Fez", a video game that’s "Super Mario" meets M.C. Escher, in which a pixellated alien explores a slowly decaying cartoon world. "Fez" is a playful, adventurous game in which a sense of whimsy is frequently juxtaposed with the solitude of the unknown. Vreeland’s score conveyed those moods, just as his work for It Follows captures the paranoid fervor aroused by finding your normally comfortable surroundings transformed into a danger zone. Is it your friend you’re looking at, or the monster? How about now?


The Mountain Goats' 2003 LP All Hail West Texas is a lonely album, a product of idle time and summer boredom recorded alone, quickly, in an empty house. A new reissue on Merge includes thorough liner notes from John Darnielle and unreleased material.

All Hail West Texas

All Hail West Texas is a lonely album, a product of idle time and summer boredom recorded alone, quickly, in an empty house. John Darnielle wrote most of the lyrics in the margins of the stapled, mimeographed handouts given to him in the orientation sessions at his new health-care job in Ames, Iowa. It was 1999. Every day he’d come home at three to an empty house, dishes crowding the sink (his wife was away at hockey camp) and pass the solitary evenings leafing through his handouts and editing the day’s work. When a melody came to him, he’d grab his guitar, mute the TV and hit the red button on a dying, decade-old boombox that had documented hundreds of similarly fractured, bleating folk songs since he began recording as the Mountain Goats in 1991.
There were obstacles to recording this way-- sometimes the tape ran out mid-song, very occasionally the phone rang-- and once they were resolved, the composition in question had sometimes already fallen out of Darnielle’s favor. “In those days, a song got exactly one day in which to either resolve its issues or be cast forth from the company of its brethren,” he writes in the reissue’s liner notes. The lucky survivors, though, have a palpable immediacy. Most of the takes you hear on All Hail West Texas were recorded within hours (or, when the juices were really flowing, minutes) of being written.
There’s a common misconception that all Mountain Goats records were recorded this way, but that’s not exactly true. Up until All Hail West Texas’s release in 2002, they were more like compilations-- collage-like assortments of bedroom recordings, live shows, occasional duets, radio broadcasts and four-tracked one-offs. The subject matter was sometimes bleak (especially the many songs that charted in stinging detail the doomed relationship of the fictional Alpha couple) but these variedly textured means of recording lent the albums a feeling of motion: Darnielle seemed more like an eccentric, town-to-town troubadour than an elusive bedroom-folk hermit. But not so on All Hail West Texas. Recording in suburban solitary confinement and exclusively on the boombox gives All Hail West Texas a cohesion and an echoing sense of isolation-- the perfect atmosphere for 14 songs about crushed dreams (“The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton”), long-distance longing (“Source Decay”), and occasional moments of piercing joy (“Jenny”).
While recording All Hail, Darnielle did have a companion of sorts: his Panasonic RX-FT500, a temperamental machine so crucial to the album’s overall vibe that he credits it as a “second performer” in the liner notes. It had been out of commission for about two years (listening to the RX-FT500’s contributions to the Mountain Goats’ discography chronologically is kind of like listening to an alt-folk Disintegration Loops: you can practically chart its slow, gradual decay), but that fateful summer, it came back from the brink of death for an encore performance. “What you have with you now,” Darnielle writes on the inside sleeve, “[Is] the sound of a long-broken machine deciding, on its own and without the interference of repairmen or excessive prayer vigils, to function again.” And perhaps more than any other Mountain Goats record, you get a sense of this feeling in his voice, too: urgency, finality, and a twinge of superstition-- as though he’s not sure the “record” button will still be working by the next take.
The first people we meet are Jeff and Cyrus, a pair of pentagram-doodling teenage metalheads with big dreams for their still-unnamed two-man band (though they’ve been arguing over a few possibilities: Satan’s Fingers, the Killers, the Hospital Bombers). They’re the stars of album opener “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” a song that, if not the definitive Mountain Goats song, at least deserves an undisputed mention in the top 5. This isn’t a statement you throw around lightly about a band this prolific, but “Denton” feels like a dizzyingly succinct crash course in everything that makes the Mountain Goats great. In just two-and-a-half minutes, Darnielle pulls off three whiplashing tonal shifts. It starts off seeming like a light, funny song about a couple of high school goofballs, but then-- with a simple, unexpected pivot in the chord progression—things turn suddenly poignant: the band and the boys’ friendship is abruptly interrupted when Cyrus gets sent to a boarding school-- or, as the now-ominous “Hospital Bombers” suggests, could it be a psychiatric facility?-- “where they told him he’d never be famous.” In its closing moments, though, it becomes defiant, triumphant battlecry: “When you punish a person for dreaming his dream/ Don’t expect him to thank or forgive you/ The best ever death metal band out of Denton/ Will in time both outpace and outlive you.” It’s brilliantly structured and smartly crafted, but it wouldn’t be half as stirring if it were recorded with more polish. “Denton” is an imperfectly sung ode to all the songs that don’t get sung because of the people who put into the singers’ heads that the only songs worth singing are the perfect ones.
As advertised on its otherwise blank cover, All Hail West Texas is comprised of “fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys.” The specificity of the narrative here is something of a joke: this was Darnielle’s first attempt at a concept album and-- somewhat paradoxically-- it succeeds mostly because of how loose the concept is. None of the other recurring characters get the first-name introductions that Jeff and Cyrus do, and it’s hard to follow which songs are about which of the seven people, or where one person ends and the other begins.
But that’s the point-- and even the brilliance-- of All Hail West Texas. Darnielle finds the common humanity in the people he’s singing about, whether it’s the injured high school football star who accidentally sells acid to an undercover cop (“Fall of the High School Running Back”), the blissfully happy couple in “Jenny” or the thoroughly miserable one in “Fault Lines”. There’s no shortage of contenders for “most devastating moment on All Hail West Texas”, but my vote goes to the half-second beat between tracks 8 and 9, the tender “Riches and Wonders” (“We are strong, we are faithful, we are guardians of a rare thing…/ And we dance like drunken sailors, lost at sea, out of our minds”) and the searing pre-break-up travelogue “The Mess Inside” (“We went down to New Orleans one weekend in the spring/ Looked hard for what we’d lost/ It was painful to admit it, but we couldn’t find a thing”). Are these two songs about the same couple? The suggestion that they could be-- that the potent feeling captured in “Riches” is too often something fleeting-- stings worse than knowing for sure.
As the Panasonic RX-FT500’s swansong, All Hail West Texas (which finally came out, first on cassette, in 2002) does mark the end of something fleeting, too. Later in 2002, Darnielle released the excellent Tallahassee-- not only the first “hi-fi” Mountain Goats record, but also the first in a series of concept albums that stick to much clearer narratives. But in the retrospective ruminations prompted by Merge’s new CD/LP reissue of this album, it feels less like a turning point in Darnielle’s career than an undeniable sweet spot. Mountain Goats fans are generally divided between the lo-fi diehards who champion the unpolished virtues of the early stuff and the people who prefer the more finely crafted later records. But All Hail West Texas (as well as the highlights of the previously unreleased material included with the reissue, like “Answering the Phone” and the proto-Tallahassee sketch “Indonesia”) is the best of both worlds: a snapshot of the moment when Darnielle had honed his lyrical and melodic sensibilities well enough to write songs as good as “Jenny” and “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton”, but also perhaps before he actually realized how good and enduring these songs actually were.
Revisiting All Hail West Texas over two decades into the Mountain Goats’ existence makes a central irony in their story all too clear: it’s not a lonely record anymore. A handful of these songs remain the most iconic in the Mountain Goats catalog, which-- thanks to Darnielle’s cult fanbase that seems to be steadily, improbably increasing with each year-- means that some of the lines that echoed off the empty walls that summer in Ames, Iowa have now been screamed by thousands and thousands of different people. When Darnielle put most of these songs to tape in 1999, even to his fans he seemed like someone who’d end up a committed but obscure lifer on the indie cassette circuit; it was hard to imagine there’d ever be a wide audience for the kind of eccentric, homespun music he was making. But remember: people underestimated Jeff and Cyrus, too.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the singular sound and the one-chord wonder of the iconic bluesman’s 1966 album.

John Lee Hooker: It Serve You Right to Suffer

It Serve You Right to Suffer

The sound is solitary, pitch black, endless road. The backing band consists of three decorated jazz sidemen from New York: guitarist Barry Galbraith, bassist Milt Hinton, and drummer Panama Francis. The producer is Bob Thiele, head of the foundational jazz label Impulse! Records. The idea is to keep the tracklist down to just eight songs and let each one inhabit a mood, unencumbered by commercial demands for a single.
They booked just one day in the studio. John Lee Hooker arrives on November 23, 1965. He is in his mid-to-late 40s—his official birth records were destroyed in a fire—and he has been playing the blues for most of his life. After spending his formative years travelling, working odd jobs, and performing live, Hooker had his first hit single with “Boogie Chillen” in the late 1940s when producer Bernard Besman recorded him alone at the microphone with an electric guitar. A second microphone was placed in a wooden pallet beneath his feet to capture the sound of his foot stomping to the rhythm.
Ever since the release of that song, the avenues of his career seemed wide open as he searched for a way to recapture that spark. He recorded with different labels under pseudonyms to avoid a breach of contract with any of them. He released acoustic and electric albums; he played with small bands, horn sections, and second guitarists. Some of his ’50s work for the label Vee-Jay was among his most influential and inspired legions of rock’n’roll artists to come. Ry Cooder once described his music like cats quietly growling at each other in a cage: “It’s the sound of something disturbing,” he explained, “but you don’t know quite what it is.”
Hooker had also tried playing with jazz musicians. In 1960, he released That’s My Story, an elegant set featuring members of Cannonball Adderly’s ensemble on brush-stroked drums, upright bass, and subtle rhythm guitar. “Everybody wanna hear my story,” he sang in the title track, which he recorded acoustic without any accompaniment. He then listed a basic itinerary of places he had called home: Mississippi as a child, then on to Memphis, Cincinnati, and eventually Detroit. “I had a hard time,” he concluded in his low, purring voice. “Now I’m doing alright.”
Some more details: Hooker was the youngest of 11 children. His father was a sharecropper and Baptist preacher who had trouble relating to his son, a sensitive kid with little interest in physical labor or clergy work. When his parents separated early in his childhood, he chose to live with his mother, Minnie Ramsey, and her new husband, William Moore, a local blues musician. Inspired by Moore, Hooker left home at age 14 to pursue a career in music. Throughout his life, he cited Moore as his greatest influence, expressing regret that his stepfather didn’t live to see his style catch on.
Hooker’s own style of guitar playing has been imitated but never matched. As opposed to the 12-bar blues that became a form of mainstream, post-war party music, Hooker’s blues is often based on just one chord pulled to its limits. With his right hand and foot, he keeps the rhythm: the thumping bedrock for his lyrics, which he delivers in an emphatic speak-sing, shaped by a childhood spent listening to church sermons and local blues singers.
Because there is little melodic progression in the songs, Hooker adds the dynamics with his left hand as he navigates the fretboard. These riffs, responding to and anticipating his vocal melodies, become the central element of his work, at its most free-form and traditional. In the latter category is 1962’s “Boom Boom,” Hooker’s signature song that only takes five seconds to lodge into your head. He based the chorus on something a bartender said to him before a show and turned it into a song to play at that venue. When he noticed the instant response, he knew it would be a hit.
Hooker’s operating principle is instinct. In the case of songs like “Boom Boom,” it turned him into a pop artist, writing music refined to its most pleasurable, immediate purposes: no tension, all release. You can hear in these songs an attempt at getting the crowd to their feet, banding together and forming a small utopia. One of his enduring nicknames is the “King of the Boogie.”
In another sense, Hooker’s music is loneliness embodied, evoking a deep melancholy and longing. In a style that influenced Malian guitarists like Ali Farka Touré and Afel Bocoum, he glides up and down the neck of his instrument, sometimes throwing the whole thing out of tune with the force of playing. It sounds dissonant and chaotic, passionate and uncompromising. “As much as it was a joy to perform with him,” Keith Richards once observed, “you would really have to become him in order to play along."
No band understood this strange self-sufficiency more than the jazz ensemble on It Serve You Right to Suffer, Hooker’s lone album for Impulse!. Much of the material was music that Hooker had recorded before, all presented in new, skeletal renditions, as if he was testing the restraint of these virtuosic musicians. (“Just relax,” he instructed them, “as though you were in an easy chair at home, taking a coffee or something.”) As opposed to the acoustic arrangements on That’s My Story, this group decided to plug in, and they played with a ragged, sputtering electricity, constantly on the edge of darkness.
It presents a fascinating challenge. Take “Bottle Up & Go,” one of the more upbeat moments. Drummer Panama Francis and guitarist Barry Galbraith find their rhythm quickly because Hooker sketches it out for them: Francis follows the pulse of Hooker’s right hand, while Galbraith mimics the melodic patterns of his left. On the bass, Milt Hinton has to fend for himself. You occasionally hear him reaching for a chord change that never comes, pivoting forward only to be met with the brick wall of Hooker’s picking and singing.
When everything clicks, it is like falling into a trance. “Country Boy” is an eerie story-song whose narrative might take place during the same travelogue from “That’s My Story.” A man trudges between towns, late at night, in the dead of winter. As Hooker accentuates his lyrics with incidental flourishes high up the neck of his guitar, the rhythm section follows steadily like snow from a dark sky. Hooker sings about lying down from exhaustion on the highway; the band seems to know how he feels.
The sadder the subject matter, the slower they play. In “Decoration Day,” Hooker sings about grieving while the rest of the world celebrates, oblivious to his pain, “just like the flowers that come in May.” The music is inconsolable, led by Francis’ shadowy brushes on the snare. The isolation in Hooker’s lyrics spans the record and makes even the more riotous moments—the desperate yelps as the band roars into action at the end of “You’re Wrong,” a cover of the Motown hit “Money” with trombonist Dicky Wells—feel slightly unnerving.
Unsurprisingly, It Serve You Right to Suffer was not a commercial success, and in the span of Hooker’s vast discography, it never caught on as one of his classics. (The ’90s slowcore band Spain, however, have cited it as an inspiration.) In the late-’80s, Hooker reignited his career with the star-studded comeback album The Healer, and he began to embrace his role as an icon, leaning into the fuller, uplifting side of his work that more directly inspired rock music.
The joyful catharsis of his sound, however, does not exist without its rock bottom, and much of Hooker’s career plays as a battle between these poles. There are blues musicians whose darkness defines them, and there are the ones who find the happy ending they deserve. “I believe in paradise,” Hooker said in 1997. “It’s here on earth.” Among his final releases were albums called Mr. Lucky, Chill Out, and Don’t Look Back. He spoke frequently about retiring but never ended up doing it. He owned several homes in California. He became a Jehovah's Witness and died peacefully in his sleep, well into his 80s.
Late in life, Hooker still enjoyed performing live, often accompanied by famous devotees like Van Morrison, Carlos Santana, and Bonnie Raitt, who once called Hooker’s music “one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard.” Most setlists included a shapeshifting song he formally referred to as “Serves Me Right to Suffer,” a slow-crawling ballad that seemed to resonate more as time passed. During a ’90s performance with Ry Cooder, Hooker sang about living in a memory while the camera captured tears falling from behind his dark sunglasses.
Hooker selected that song as the title track and closer for his 1966 album. But he made one pivotal change. While the version he performed live was a self-lacerating inner monologue, he now delivered it in the second person, directing the message outward: “Serve you right to suffer,” he sings. “Serve you right to be alone.” In the final moments, Galbraith strums his muted strings like an engine failing. The beat is slow, the pauses between Hooker’s words long and pained: “You can’t live on... that way… in the past... Them days is gone.” Then he hums a sad, little melody before the music fades abruptly and unceremoniously. He kept the lights low in the studio. It must have felt dead quiet. But outside, the world was loud and merciless as ever, already moving on.

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Balancing unassuming ambient and downtempo experiments with lush, floor-filling house and electro, the London DJ’s debut album sounds refreshingly carefree.

Tangerine

There’s always been a certain sweetness to Shanti Celeste’s productions. Since 2013, the Chilean-born, London-based artist has filled her tunes with colorful melodies and breezy rhythms, so that even her biggest floor-fillers have felt impressively light on their feet. “Strung Up,” from 2015, was a glistening homage to upbeat ’80s electro, while 2017’s “Loop One” layered swelling pastoral pads over a sturdy kick drum and clacking percussion.
Although Celeste doesn’t shy away from heavier offerings in the DJ booth—her sets are often punctuated with riotous bits of jungle and rave—her penchant for melody and buoyant beats has also colored her curation of Peach Discs, which has quietly been one of electronic music’s strongest imprints over the past two years. Celeste now operates the label alongside Berlin-based Brit Gramrcy, and while she produced Peach Discs’ first release, she’s largely allowed the music of others to define its subsequent run. Aside from records by more established artists like Call Super and Ciel, there have also been gems from up-and-comers like Chekov, Fred, and Videopath.
This year has seen an uptick in Celeste’s own output. Earlier this year, she dropped Soba Dance, a collaborative EP with Bristol stalwart Hodge. Although its three tunes hinted at the thundering percussion often found on the latter’s records for Livity Sound and Berceuse Heroique, Celeste’s playful spirit is all over the record. On Tangerine, she’s allowed that spirit to run free, delivering an effervescent LP that also represents a significant expansion of her sound.
Like many dance-music artists, Celeste has chosen to pepper her first full-length with forays into ambient music, but Tangerine is one of the rare cases in which those efforts don’t feel like forgettable filler. Opener “Sun Notification” is a gently bubbling new-age cut, its soothing melodies rising and falling like the tide. At the other end of the album is “Moons,” a more introspective tune that blends soft synths, the gentle sound of rainfall, and a welcoming sense of calm; the song could soundtrack a quiet visit to a Buddhist temple. “Slow Wave,” on the other hand, takes a different path toward serenity, weaving snippets of Celeste’s own voice into a blissful canopy atop a soft, barely-there drum beat.
Celeste also experiments with her beat-based tracks. “Voz (Instrumental)” almost sounds like hip-hop, its punchy percussion and vaguely Middle Eastern melody bringing to mind classic Timbaland. Upping the tempo significantly is “Want,” a bouncy cut with a klaxon-like synth stabs, an infectiously shuffling beat, and some delicate keys; in less than six minutes, it manages to reference ’90s jungle, rave, and IDM without coming off as derivative.
That ability to freshen up established sounds and styles is one of Celeste’s biggest strengths. At this stage in her career, she’s a skilled DJ who instinctively knows what works on the dancefloor, which helps explain the effortless appeal of songs like “Infinitas” and “Sesame”; although they are, at root, relatively standard house tunes, they’re also unusually lively, bounding along with bright melodies and swinging rhythms that nod to old-school Jersey garage. “May the Day” tackles electro, and its inventive drum pattern and murky swirl of gurgling acid are unlike any of Celeste’s previous work within the genre.
“Aqua Block” perhaps best captures the album’s invigorating spirit. Bursting with energy, the track rumbles along with the enthusiasm of a toddler chasing a butterfly, its pastel melodies impishly darting to and fro. At a time when so many of Celeste’s peers are delving into dark, distorted sounds, she’s chosen to walk a lighter path. It’s not easy to sound this carefree, yet it appears to come naturally to her.