The Irish songwriter’s voice shines like a headlight in fog. Her debut abounds with deceptively serene serenades and surprising lyrical shifts.

Aoife Nessa Frances: Land of No Junction

Land of No Junction

The title of Aoife Nessa Frances’ debut album, Land of No Junction, is the product of a happy accident: While speaking to her guitarist/co-producer Cian Nugent about his childhood travels in Wales, she misheard his reference to a train station named Llandudno Junction. But that fortuitous error says a great deal about the Irish songwriter’s methodology: Land of No Junction abounds with deceptively serene serenades and sleights of hand. Drawing from an eclectic array of record-collector reference points—’60s psych-pop, ’70s art-rock, Tropicália, avant-garde orchestration—the album puts you on familiar footing before gradually changing the scenery, blurring the line between the real and the imagined.
When we first meet Frances, she’s pondering the passage of time through the image of withered flora on “Geranium”—a song that demonstrates how patient, attentive nurturing can spur splendorous growth. What begins as a skeletal drum-machine beat eventually yields a melange of rippling guitar lines, hypnotic organ hums, and backmasked swirls, as if Frances were trying to harvest a Spiritualized song inside a terrarium. It’s the first of many sublime musical mutations, but the uncanny allure of Land of No Junction has as much to do with the surprising ways Frances’ lyrics shift from cryptic musings to clear-eyed critique.
Her voice shines like a headlight in fog, luminous and ambiguous in equal measure—though, like fellow pastoral poet Cate Le Bon, her placid diction belies a more restless spirit. “Geranium” and its follow-up, “Blow Up,” share a similar psych-folk melody, but take it to dramatically different places, both musically and topically. Written a few years before Ireland legalized abortion in 2018, “Blow Up” is less an impassioned defense of a woman’s right to choose than a comment on the more mundane ways patriarchy exerts its control. “I’m about to lose my mind,” Frances sings, before concluding, “Tired of being human/Lesser than man.” Her tone is more resigned than enraged, but the increasingly antsy arrangement—courtesy of a rib-poking bongo beat and Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh’s stabbing strings—reveals the beast stirring within.
Land of No Junction is the sort of record that seems to acquire more confidence and force with each passing track. “Here in the Dark” is a powerful portrait of a relationship at the crossroads, the uncertainty in Frances’ voice manifesting in a seasick, symphonic-rock groove that recalls Air’s Virgin Suicides soundtrack; “Libra” delivers an intimate address amid the strobe-lit delirium of a go-go bar dancefloor circa 1966. But those are mere warm-ups for the emotional bloodletting of “Heartbreak,” which frames real-life drama as ’70s soft-rock fantasia with the same grace and gravitas as Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising. In this light, the elegiac title track isn’t merely the record’s comedown closer, but the nocturnal sanctuary where Frances can retreat when the waking world becomes too much to bear. “Leave me with this dream, and wake me after dark,” she sings, just as Oireachtaigh’s exquisite string arrangement sweeps her to slumberland. It’s a temporary peace, to be sure, but as Frances demonstrates throughout Land of No Junction, the smallest, simplest pleasures can have lasting effects.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On his latest album, the prolific Turin producer aims to hybridize dancefloor potency and dreamy ambience.

Due in Color

Munich’s Ilian Tape label is a family affair. Its founders are brothers Dario and Marco Zenker, and dance music runs in their blood: Their aunt, Dorle Zenker, ran the iconic nightclub Ultraschall, ground zero for the city’s techno scene. The label’s tightly knit core roster, in turn, resembles a kind of chosen family; a number of its artists, like Skee Mask and Stenny, have released exclusively on the imprint. Turin’s Andrea also belongs to that list. He came on board in 2012, after meeting the Zenker brothers at a gig in his hometown, and he’s since become one of the label’s most prolific artists, racking up eight EPs and one album that encapsulate the breadth of Ilian Tape’s distinctive, homegrown sound.
Though the label’s origins lie in the minimal and dub techno of the late 2000s, over the past decade it has gradually mapped out a dynamic zone where techno, jungle, drum’n’bass, electro, dubstep, and bass music freely commingle, and even the most heavyweight club tracks are imbued with an aura of elegance; there have even been a handful of purely ambient releases. (Daniel Avery has described the label’s signature as “broken beauty.”) Andrea’s productions have encompassed all those sounds, but his new album, Due in Color, goes further; neither strictly ambient nor conventionally dancefloor focused, it feels like an attempt to hybridize club potency and ethereal atmospheres.
Andrea’s debut LP, 2020’s Ritorno, was steeped in the lush textures of Detroit techno and ambient jungle, and it came bookended with a handful of purely downbeat experiments. Like Ritorno, Due in Color begins with a pair of gauzy mood-setters flush with luminous synth pads and acoustic textures—tapped ride cymbals, tactile snares, possibly the sound of dripping water—run through gargantuan reverb. And I mean gargantuan: like, cathedral-in-a-cave-in-a-canyon huge, the kind of reverb that would turn a nightclub soundsystem into soup. The tracks’ burly dub and drum’n’bass rhythms suggest a muscle memory of dancing, but the proportions are all off. Andrea recorded most of the album while clubs were shuttered in 2020 and 2021, and it feels like he is surveying an imaginary space, separating the idea of clubbing from the actual thing.
The first half of the album pursues that concept across a succession of drum’n’bass-fueled tracks that turn the genre’s hallmarks inside out. Some of Andrea’s EPs are among the label’s most bruising releases, but on “Remote Working” and “Silent Now,” the drums are all but swallowed up beneath waves of layered synths and gelatinous bass. The impression is one of drum’n’bass frozen in amber, every intricately detailed strand of rhythm floating suspended in a honeyed glow. “Lush in End” pushes deeper into the viscous depths, burying jungle rhythms beneath heaps of glowing distortion, like Tim Hecker remixing Shed.
The album’s second half moves into more explicitly ambient and downtempo territory. The swinging “Chessbio” evokes the jazzy feel of Carl Craig’s “Bug in the Bass Bin”; the more muted “Hazymo” breaks out the shuffling breaks of vintage Ninja Tune or Mo Wax. “Dove Mai” is a beautiful fusion of heavyweight bass with vaporous synths, but the twinkling piano and wispy pads of “Am Der,” in contrast, feel slight—too pretty, too sentimental. Occasionally, it feels like Andrea is letting all that voluminous reverb do too much of the work for him, filling in gaps where, perhaps, a more idiosyncratic idea might have been allowed to take shape. But at its best—for instance, with the gorgeous pads and mammoth sub-bass of the closing “Return_Lei”—Due in Color offers a unique proposition: the dreamiest ambient music, given the massive scale and physical presence of an earthshaking club soundsystem.


Life Without Buildings, a mathy art-rock band from Glasgow fronted by one-of-a-kind vocalist Sue Tompkins, only issued one studio album, 2001's long out-of-print Any Other City. This reissue affirms that no one since has sounded quite like them, and to even try would miss the point.

Any Other City

Long live the singers who never intended to be singers; they're the ones that make you feel like there are still new ideas under the sun. Life Without Buildings were a short-lived, mathy art-rock band from Glasgow fronted by a painter/sometimes-spoken-word poet named Sue Tompkins, who ended up in a band almost by accident and sang like a kindergarten playground bully reciting her older sibling's copy of Horses from memory. No one since has sounded quite like Life Without Buildings, and to even try would miss the point. Their music valued invention, risk, wonder, imagination, and—perhaps above all other virtues—fun. And like very few bands, they were smart enough to walk away as soon as the fun stopped. "When the band began of course none of us really thought anyone would be interested, so there wasn't anything at stake," guitarist Robert Johnston recalled about a decade after their amicable break-up. "For Sue, I think it turned from a laugh into being a commitment she'd never signed up for." Lucky for us, though, that laugh was caught and forever immortalized on tape.
Released on Rough Trade's Tugboat imprint in 2001, Any Other City is Life Without Buildings' only proper record. (There's also the very good live album, Live at the Annandale, which was released in 2007, a few years after the band broke up.) It came out to mild hype but has grown to be a cult favorite in the years since, its reputation all the more storied and elusive because the CD went out of print and it has never been available on vinyl in the U.S. until now. That the band has yet to capitalize on the reunion show/deluxe-reissue trend keeps with the lack of careerist tendencies that defined its entire run. There's a story that, in 2001 at what would end up being the Strokes' first-ever headlining show in London, Life Without Buildings got bumped down to a supporting act at the last minute. Even if it's apocryphal, I suspect this tale gets repeated by fans so often because it cements LWB's underdog status—their indifference about jumping through the hoops that would have made them the Next Big Thing and the inability of most people to appreciate them in their time. Reviews of Any Other City were either breathless raves or pans that questioned the sanity of anyone who could listen to it in full. "I remember one [review] that said only mad people could like us," drummer Will Bradley said years later. "I was happy with that. Not long afterwards, we seemed to get a lot of guys coming to our gigs with fresh head wounds, like unstitched lobotomy scars."
The most distinct (or to those who prefer the safety of convention, the "maddest") part of Life Without Buildings' sound is Tompkins' singing, which lands somewhere between scatting, talking, and speaking in tongues. "No details, but I'm gonna persuade you!" she insists with electric charisma in the record's first seconds, and opening-line mission statements do not get much truer than that; all you'll want to do for the next 45 minutes is follow her blindly, even when you don't know where the hell she's headed. To Tompkins, language is bubblegum—something exhilaratingly sugary to chomp, crack, and stretch between her fingers. In that opening song, "P.S. Exclusive", she repeats the phrase "the right stuff" 44 times, but it's too dynamic to ever grow repetitive; it's almost like she's playing a game with herself to see all the different ways she can pronounce it.
Tompkins' lyrics often resemble collages. Familiar words are stammered, stuttered, and chopped up until they sound disorienting and strange—which is a sensibility that carries over to the visual art she's been making since she left the band. (A line from the program of one of her recent gallery shows could easily double as a description of a Life Without Buildings song: "Through her typed and spoken works she represents snatches of material gleaned from the everyday, distorting meaning by metering their arrangement and delivery.") She delights in found phrases, homophones, and the serendipity misunderstanding. In fan favorite "The Leanover", she chants "If I lose ya, if I lose ya, if I lose ya in the street" enough for it to start sounding like "if Illusion Street." Or something else entirely. On the song's entry on SongMeanings.net, there is a long comment written by someone who was once convinced that she was saying "a Fallujan street" and that the song was about the Iraq War. Although this theory has been debunked, I have no doubt that this poetic misunderstanding would delight Sue Tompkins.
For all its art-rock leanings, Any Other City never feels too self-indulgent. A lot of this has to do with the interplay between Tompkins' freewheeling style and the dependable (though wonderfully crooked) backbone provided by Johnston, Bradley, and bassist Chris Evans. Inspired by Pittsburgh math-rock heroes Don Caballero, Life Without Buildings were first an instrumental band before they convinced their art-school friend Tompkins to meld her spoken-word poetry with their antic, skittering sound. (Even the band itself is a kind of collage.) Sometimes the disconnect in their sensibilities is a little too wide (the tonal palette of "Young Offenders", the most overtly Don Caballero-esque, is a bit too dull for Tompkins' bold, primary-color exclamations), but more often it creates a novel and unique energy. One of the band's signature songs is "New Town", in which Johnston's quiet, steadily chugging riff and Bradley's muted beat suddenly explode alongside Tompkins' vocals in the chorus. "Looking in your eyes/ I'm looking in your eyes!" she shouts, as combative as she is jubilant, issuing these words like a challenge for everybody else to look, live, and love a little bit more emphatically.
The reissue mostly leaves the original record to speak for itself. The only extra included here is a 7" containing the more ramshackle original versions of "The Leanover" and "New Town", which are interesting because they let you hear Tompkins working out phrasings and pronunciations she'd sharpen on the record. When Any Other City came out, most people assumed her vocals were heavily improvised, but as the spot-on renditions replicated on Live at the Annandale Hotel proved, they're actually carefully metered and display an extraordinary sense of rhythm. Life Without Buildings were most impressive—and influential—in the way they balanced sheer technical skill with a sense of ecstatic playfulness, which is a sensibility carried on after them by bands like Ponytail, Perfect Pussy, Marnie Stern, Los Campesinos!, and more. Hopefully this reissue will add more names to that list.
It's hard to talk about Tompkins' vocals without using the word "childlike", which is too often an annoying cliché people use to infantilize female vocalists and refrain from taking them seriously. (Many of the 2001 pans of Any Other City are tainted with sexism; in one baffling comparison, an NME reviewer faulted Tompkins for not sounding like Whitney Houston.) Here, though, it's apt. This record is all about the wild wisdom of youth; here are four musicians who have managed to recreate that sense of wonder and invention and play that most people (and, let’s face it, bands) lose when they get older. “Look around!” Tompkins insists. “Just information in the leaves, in the leaves, in the leaves!” The phrasing is a little awkward, like an expression stammered out before you knew the proper rules of grammar, or a big word uttered before you knew how to pronounce it right. But who cares. If the sound doesn’t exist, she seems to be saying, invent it. Which is exactly what Life Without Buildings did.


The prolific band returns with a brief and seething left-turn: a furious homage to the scummiest, crustiest hardcore of the early ’80s.

A Foul Form

Osees are a hardcore band now, but if history is any indication, they probably won’t be for very long. Every album from John Dwyer’s astonishingly prolific project—formerly known as OCS, Oh Sees, Thee Oh Sees, and on and on—has played like a pull of a slot machine, a randomized jumble of garage, psych-pop, and krautrock, cut with varying degrees of experimentation. But the project’s 26th album, A Foul Form, is a departure even for a group that feeds on departures, a furious homage to the scummiest, crustiest hardcore of the early 1980s. It’s the first Osees record in a while that even this band’s feverishly devoted fan base probably couldn’t see coming.
Recorded in Dwyer’s basement on what must have been the shittiest equipment he could muster, A Foul Form is only 22 minutes, one of which is a closing cover of “Sacrifice” by British anarcho-punk pioneers Rudimentary Peni. The mix is bare yet inventively sadistic. With their cassette-tape fidelity, these tracks are nearly all rumble, but that low end is thorned with a protective layer of shrill feedback and harsh static pops that stab at anyone who succumbs to the temptation to turn up the volume. It’s as if the intrinsic causticness of hardcore wasn’t enough. They had to booby trap it.
A Foul Form is an angry record, though like the classic hardcore it emulates, it can be difficult to pinpoint where the genuine fury ends and the self-aware histrionics begin. For much of the album, Dwyer seethes about greed and society’s callous disregard for human life. On “Perm Act,” he blasts violent cops “eating in their car while you’re gasping in the dirt.” On “Frock Block,” he targets the church-sanctioned bigotry of pearl-clutching priests: “Being yourself is simply not a crime/You won’t burn in hell for all time.”
It’s all fittingly scathing, but there’s whimsy under the surface, especially in Dwyer’s berserk vocal performances. His taunting, sneering voice cycles through loose impressions of iconic punk singers—Henry Rollins, Iggy Pop, Ian MacKaye, Johnny Rotten—without ever assuming a final form. It’s like he’s method acting every punk band he grew up listening to all at once. Sometimes he adopts a British accent just to drop it after a few words.
Some levity, too, surfaces from the inevitable tension between the band’s attempts at pure genre exercise and their quirkier tendencies poking at the margins of these recordings. Scribby riffs and skronky keyboards prod at “Fucking Kill Me” and “Too Late For Suicide,” as if trying to break through the simple song structures and draw out the longer, weirder dirges in the five-piece lineup’s DNA. But the vigilant nature of A Foul Form never quite allows them to get there. Even if Osees are just moonlighting, they’ve committed completely to the act.


These Japanese avant-rockers have a decade-long history but no releases until now available outside of their home country; this collection of two EPs includes tracks like "Sonic Youth" and "This Heat", named for bands they admire.

Neji/Tori

Nisennenmondai are a band of small attactive Japanese women who play pummeling, dense instrumentals. Their name translates to "Y2K bug" or "year 2000 problem," and they've been around for 10 years, making albums, zines, live CD-Rs and handmade clothes. Still, they haven't released an album stateside. Neji/Tori, two of their earlier EPs bundled together, at least postpones that release gap in their discography. But their biggest problem is that on record you can't get the contrast between their physical size and the size of their music. It's that contrast that struck visiting U.S. musicians like Prefuse 73, who called them both "tiny" and "diminuative" in a Dazed & Confused interview. "The drummer was as big as my hand," he said, before waxing romantic on their technical prowess. That contrast between size and sound is probably startling, but size doesn't matter much overseas. They may be dainty when compared to their U.S. counterparts, but their proper context is within Japan's lush experimental scene, from Koenjihyakkei to Boredoms and Merzbow, where women can be responsible for the harshest sounds.
The two EPs here were released in 2004 and 2005, respectively. Tori's titles are in Japanese, but Neji's songs are named for their influences. "Sonic Youth" is aptly named, as bassist Yuri Zaikawa slows her nimble runs to approximate Kim Gordon's sturdy, deliberate plucks. But many other tracks show clear influences even if they're not named for them. "Kyaaaaaaa" partially turns into a rumbling surf tune, and "Ikkkyokume" snakes into a chase song for a 1960s spy flick. "2534" could have been called "Lightning Bolt", as their influence is clearest here (the band is also one of Nisennenmondai's stateside supporters). At just over one minute, it's their shortest song, but the best cuts here are the longer tracks, where the repetitiveness pushes forward and retreats over each iteration.
Nisennenmondai's eagerness to depart from tonality and form is inherited as much from the free jazz tradition as from these named influences. Zaikawa and drummer Sayaka Himeno set up pins for guitarist Masako Takada to strike down via her looser, messier playing. Her approach doesn't contribute much to the overall "small women with big chops" image of the band-- she's not as muscular, her parts not as technically impressive-- but her guitar morphs while the others stay the same. No matter what sits on top, an undulating groove hides beneath noise, thanks to the Zaikawa and Himeno's precise rhythm. They'd be fun to watch, not for their size, but for how quickly and often Himeno's hi-hat must turn to shards. It almost seems a shame to put much distortion and noise over them, but their cleanest, most repetitive tracks, like "Kyuukohan", clearly fall behind the ones that combust. Nisennenmondai are pummeling, but not because they use repetition as a way of imprinting songs to your memory. They're bigger than that.


The Brooklyn-based MC comes into his own on his third album. It's hard to separate the stark tone of Ka's voice and narrative from the equally stark mood music he embeds it in. As a rapper/producer, he has that finely-tuned awareness of how a track works from every angle.

The Night's Gambit

Ka's voice isn't overexcited. It's not larger-than-life, not a caricature, not a distillation of TV rap fantasies. His voice doesn't swell with braggadocio or bristle with rage. It's cool, but not cool in the way some people flaunt themselves and their own unflappable attitude, or callously disregard the lives of people they look down on. It's the cool of someone who, by necessity, has figured out how to detach himself from the emotional stress that would otherwise knock most people in the dirt. What's the point of embellishing something you already know is intense in itself?
The initial appeal of The Night's Gambit and Ka in particular is lyrics, and it'd be easy enough to just lay out a string of them to prove it. The Brooklyn rapper's thoughts scan well on paper, then unspool in a delivery that lets the internal rhyme structure provide the emotional emphasis. “You Know It's About” offers a scene of a street business days gone by with shifts of tense that make old memories fresh, emphasizing the cycle he can't believe he's not still stuck in: “With a toast to rap that roasts your fabric/ The friends, if conflict ever ends we're post-traumatic.” After that opener, the album is a litany of scenarios that play up guilt, betrayal, anxiety, resilience, and everything else that reduces interpersonal workings into a high-stakes chess match. Not for nothing that the three biggest thematic presences in intros and outros are games of strategy, martial arts philosophy, and the church-- tactical, adaptive maneuvering cut through with deep moral weight.
Maybe that seems a bit Recommended If You Like GZA. But while the Wu MC has the bearings of someone doing scientific analysis, Ka's vibe is more like that of a true-crime reporter, trying to find a balance between laying out all the facts and trying not to let that excess of knowledge take a toll on his soul. Reformation narrative “Our Father” packs in enough observations, introspective and looking outwards, to drive this home clearly. But it also puts its point across by situating the rehabilitated perspective in the first verse and the vivid criminal revenge he's trying to atone for in the second. A mid-album stretch of cuts gets even more Scorsese with it, pervaded with criminal guilt on “Barring the Likeness”, restless brass ring-grabbing on “Nothing Is”, and calculating, whistling-through-a-graveyard iciness on Roc Marciano team-up “Soap Box”. And when he really does get double-meaning conceptual a'la “Labels” on “Off the Record”, it's a brilliant recursive trick: the rap he classics he references aren't evoked as mere namedropping, but reflections of how many different artists found indelible, unique ways to tell similar stories.
It's hard to separate the stark tone of Ka's voice and narrative from the equally stark mood music he embeds it in. As a rapper/producer, he has that finely-tuned awareness of how a track works from every angle. Some moments of upfront beauty shine through, as the soul-blues guitar licks and electric piano on “Jungle” cut through like a cold wind, and the aching, wordless hum that intermittently pierces the organ drone of “Knighthood” turns a meditative dirge into a hairs-on-end spiritual. But, like his voice, a lot of his production's pull lies in how its sparseness deeply sinks in just through exposure. The interpolation of that riff of doom from Black Sabbath's “Black Sabbath” on “You Know It's About” is a telling point of reference. Like the source material, he draws a lot of strength from the same insistent tritone, but turns its immediate menace into lurking dread by pushing it into the background and melting it down into bass frequencies.
Last year's Grief Pedigree showed a DIY auteur with one of the more unique and underreported stories in hip-hop. Despite the exposure that comes with his professional working partnership with Roc Marciano and a base in the ironclad diehard world of 1990s-steeped NYC hardcore hip-hop, the stakes of his come-up seem more personal than anything. His outlook on that recent groundswell of support has the levelheaded perspective of someone hitting his stride in his forties: “Of course this isn't over night sensation music...it's the music of the sensations you get over the course of the night”, he quipped on Twitter. And his work's total lack of compromise has the drive of someone who only got stronger when he stopped trying to do things on some other label's terms. If The Night's Gambit has that same imprint, the same ruminative, clinical yet human scale as its predecessor did, it also seems to have the renewed idea that this voice has something that really needs to be heard. Listen, then listen closer.


Long-fermenting LP from Deftones vocalist Chino Moreno features guests Mike Patton, Melissa Auf Der Mar, Zach Hill (Hella), Mary Timony (Helium), and Rob Crow (Pinback).

Team Sleep

Team Sleep features Deftones vocalist Chino Moreno and his longtime friend, guitarist Tom Wilkinson. Along with DJ Crook, the product brings the moodiness of Deftones' later work (their song "Teenager" has been a widely-used but apt comparison point) with little of its hardness, and builds it all from drum loops.
However, that was back in 2001, until someone leaked the album to the Internet, causing the band to quickly shelve it. Since then, the songs have changed considerably and the stable of guest musicians has grown to include Mike Patton, Melissa Auf Der Mar, Zach Hill (Hella), Mary Timony (Helium), and Rob Crow (of Pinback, Heavy Vegetable, Thingy, and probably three other projects started during the nap I took before finishing this review. The man loves to work).
First song "Ataraxia" builds from electronic drums and growling bass, with some bright guitar picking and a bit of piano, before hitting the wall-of-guitar melodrama that Deftones have used in songs like "Be Quiet and Drive" or "Minerva". "Your Skull Is Red" features pulverizing drumming from Zach Hill, but i'ts indiscriminate guitar sludge with a lot of atmosphere but no hook. That and "Live From the Stage" are no more than jam sessions, and the finely-tuned gloss of tracks like "Ataraxia" shows those songs up. Even "Blvd. Knights", with its ill-fit tempo-changing climax and verse parts audible under the heavy guitars in the chorus, point towards hasty execution.
"Ever (Foreign Flag)", however, steps further into ambience while keeping the melodrama and electronic beats. It builds upon the gentler influences beneath Deftones' material (early Cure and Depeche Mode, who they've both covered) but it's far enough removed from Deftones to really justify this project. "Ever Since WWI" is another success, a slow strum that's cathartic without ever dialing up the distortion, likely because of Zach Hill's peerless bass drum action.
Calling Rob Crow a "guest" is misleading; he takes lead vocal duties for four songs, and most of those sound markedly like Pinback. He croons over "Princeton Review", a gentle guitar strum with a skittering loop that shifts tone with an ominous percussive breakdown. Mary Timony is featured on the dour "Tomb of Liegia", an atonal dirge that's the low point of the record.
Unfortunately, while none of the guests are phoning it in (the visible ones, anyway), they never learn much from each other. Even though he's sharing time with Moreno on "Our Ride to the Rectory", Crow's parts could just as easily be cut'n'pasted from one of his own songs. "Elizabeth" is similarly stuck in Pinback mode, though it's spiced up by an unbelievably brief moment of blistering electronic drums. I never thought I'd be calling Team Sleep "conservative," but holding back the harsher elements in this track to seven whole seconds almost proves my point: The artists here could have taken more chances, because this album hints at a fascinating and rewarding listen.
I say "hints" because those moments are few on a record that just drifts by the listener's ears. It's short on hooks, but it isn't necessarily aimless just restrained. It's no surprise that one of the bands' songs was used on the Matrix Revolution; these songs are appropriate soundtracks to hyper-real, stylized encounters. Even the lyrics to the beat-driven misstep "King Diamond" view a male/female encounter in video game terms, with it's "start...restart" shouting and subtle variations. It's the kind of music for which Windows Media Player visualizations were made. If this had been released in 2001, it could have followed the market of electronic-dabbling modern rock compiled on the original Matrix soundtrack, and ran towards success. Today, it's background noise, make-out music for teenagers with lip piercings and caked eyeliner. I respect their effort to blend genre, and while Team Sleep is executed with taste, it's without the risks that should accompany any project calling itself "experimental."


Unbreakable is Janet Jackson's first album since Michael Jackson’s death in 2009 and the dissolution of her relationship with Jermaine Dupri. It's a synthesis of ideas she's collected and tested throughout her career. These are giddy, grateful grown-woman songs; like Janet, they are timeless.

Unbreakable

Montreal producer Kaytranada put out a remix of Janet Jackson's 1993 single "If" in the fall of 2012, but the edit, which reimagines the misty original as bubbling, whimsical house, became a party staple. The remix was unique, not just because it lingered on DJ playlists far longer than most major-label hits, but because it created an entry point to then-rising nu-house operatives like Soulection and HW&W via a cross-generational touchpoint like no other: Janet. That gauzy vocal loop, floating in on an elastic bassline, nudged along by dense handclaps and pin-sharp hi-hats, deaded the lumbering, surly dominance of brostep in one fell swoop. What Kaytranada did with the remix is what Janet’s long accomplished over her musical career: she won hearts and bridged imaginations on the dance floor. It’s playful and funky and sensual; it sounds like something Janet would make for herself. And even though it’s been out in the world for three years, the tour DJ on Jackson’s current tour runs it pre-show.
Probably the only downside to Janet’s 11th album *Unbreakable—*aside from it running about three tracks too long—is that it doesn’t contain that kind of axis-shifting single. Missy Elliott gives it a try, two-stepping in with a squirmy synthesizer for "BURNITUP!" and the lazy bass and airy vocals of "Dammn Baby" sounds like Tinashe-meets-Teena Marie. "The Great Forever" and "Night" are formally ambitious pop songs, but don’t deliver as much personality as 2004’s underrated Damita Jo. Instead, Unbreakable is a synthesis of ideas Jackson’s collected and tested throughout her career. "2 B Loved", with its cavalcade of hoots and hollers, is probably the album’s most "now"-sounding song.
"No Sleeep," the dusky R&B single, is quintessential Jam & Lewis-abetted Janet. A sweet melody and ribald Isley Brothers sample builds a sultry Quiet Storm groove. Even the silly J. Cole feature can't prevent it from being one of the best songs of the year, a conscious curving of the melismatic summertime bombast of chart-toppers like the Weeknd, Jidenna, OMI, and Bieber. It came out in June, in time for warm summer nights, but fits in better with the enveloping dark of fall. Like Janet, it's timeless.
The story here is love and catharsis. It's her first album since Michael Jackson's death in 2009, and the dissolution of her relationship with Jermaine Dupri. The warm, acoustic guitar sway of the title track sets the tone: these are giddy, grateful grown-woman songs. Janet's settled into a new relationship and, if songs like "After You Fall" and "Broken Hearts Heal", are any indication, ruminating with love on her brother's life and death. On the former she dips into her lower register whilst singing over a somber piano line; on the latter, an uptempo pop song filled with sunny harmonies, she tilts her voice skyward, singing a song of praise about childhood memories and afterlives with an Arabic 'inshallah' on the hook. Jackson, now married to a Qatari businessman, remains private about her personal life but has reportedly converted to Islam. And that one word coming from a pop icon does more for a post-9/11 world than Unbreakable's social-message songs like "Black Eagle", and especially "Shoulda Known Better", a start-stop fist-pumper about reading beyond the headlines that's two choruses and a verse too long.
This ability to synthesize what music needs instead of catering to its whims is what has made Janet Jackson an enduring pop star. Unlike Madonna, whose presence and work open up much-needed conversations about sexuality, commodity, and the gendered age biases of pop music, Jackson, 49, exposes these conventions as construct. Unbreakable might be her most demure album in years, but that doesn't mean it's not sexy. Its strength comes from savvy instead of gimmickry, returning to the producers and formula Jackson built her career on (jubilant dance-pop, bedroom R&B, that angelic giggle). Because Unbreakable is about putting faith in one's career and fans, it plays like the natural next phase in Jackson's discography, which individually might be markers of their time but are ultimately ageless.


Cale's 1982 solo album Music for a New Society is reissued and bundled with a vastly different new version of the record, allowing him to wring new meaning from old songs.

John Cale: M:FANS / Music for a New Society

M:FANS / Music for a New Society

About halfway through John Cale, a 1998 BBC documentary about the Welsh experimental rock authority, the focus shifts to the beauty of its subject’s home. "There are certain patterns of behavior you pick up when you’re young that never leave you, moments of tranquility that you get when you’re young that are always the most valuable," drawls Cale in voiceover, a soft and pliable topnote to the tender folk song underneath. The camera swoons over leaves rustling under a waterfall, cattle trotting benignly through verdant fields. "That sense of nostalgia is always with you, because it’s a way of inuring you against the passage of time." The film then smash-cuts to a white cow wedged into a slaughterhouse warren, eyes pleading as it’s shot in the skull, its throat is slit, and torrents of dark blood stream forth. It’s a transition of cruel and abrupt apathy, a needlessly gruesome pivot—Cale isn’t even present—and one that director James Marsh must have believed embodies Cale’s volatility throughout his long career.
Cale has long carved mercurial paths—first in the Velvet Underground, where his eerie bass, piano, and viola parts pushed the band toward the eccentric end of the art-rock spectrum, then as a producer, when he captured the raw spirits of the Stooges and Patti Smith on both artists’ classic debut albums. The 73-year-old’s 15 solo albums touch on protopunk and classical and are niche to the point that some have been out of print for years; one of those works, 1982’s Music for a New Society, has been singled out as a pernicious lost masterpiece, the spare and depressive about-face to his agitpop screed of the previous year, Honi Soit.
When Music was finally reissued this year, it came bundled Jekyll-Hyde style with M:FANS, a new reworking of the album. The latter isn’t as hagiographic as the acronym suggests—Nick Zinner isn’t here shaking a tambourine or anything—but is rather Cale’s attempt to revisit bleak characters through a lens of rage instead of sorrow, as well as process the death of his occasional nemesis Lou Reed. Hearing both versions of the album together, especially by hopscotching to compare tracks directly, is a harrowing yet rewarding spree, not least because Cale’s originals often sound more modern than the new versions.
On Music for a New Society, sparse keyboard lines languish in chilly air, arid spaces imbued with acute confidence. Cale unfurls somber, detached appraisals of miserable lost souls, including mothers on murder sprees ("Taking Your Life in Your Hands") and loners exhaling their death rattles ("Sanctus (Sanities)"), atop deconstructed bleats of churchy organs and dissonant strings. There are wisps of tight pop melodies perched atop a confluence of oddities—"Thoughtless Kind," a spooky dirge, pairs a thickly processed a capella refrain ("The best of times/ With the thoughtless kind") with rough cackling and an agitating percussion line reminiscent of a ticking clock. "Close Watch," its title cribbed from Cale’s septuagenarian spirit animal Johnny Cash, anatomizes loneliness via plodding piano and decomposing bagpipe bursts. Aside from the lone straightforward rocker, "Changes Made," on which Allen Lanier of Blue Öyster Cult plays guitar, the semi-improvised record feels meticulously plotted and borderline intrusive—the most revealing scrawls yet from the solitary confinement of Cale’s fulminating mind.
M:FANS is less reclusive, just by virtue of its premise—Cale is collaborating with himself, the ultimate glum foil—but also because it fills every swatch of white space with his later-career electro-industrial leanings. That needling chronograph tick on "Thoughtless Kind" is now gregarious, beefy with fizzing synths and hyper-processed coos. Amber Coffman of Dirty Projectors joins him to sing staccato microtones on "Close Watch," a brusque and R&B-leaning reimagining virtually unrecognizable from its weepy source material. "Sanctus (Sanities)" also proves malleable, Cale intoning a requiem of personal and general-interest doom ("It was a marriage made… in the grave!" is not the least histrionic line) over a driving mechanical stomp Nine Inch Nails would’ve relished. It’s a lot of futurism sourced from the '90s, which highlights Cale’s prescience in the first go-‘round.
Cale is clearly still curious as an artist; in recent years, he’s collaborated with Danger Mouse and represented the motherland at the Venice Biennale. Hell, he practically flirted with Bond villainy two years ago, when he commanded a horde of wasp drones onstage in London. Still, there’s a greater vigor, and a real lack of vanity, to releasing a notorious lost album and upending it in the same breath. That these projects work in tandem, three decades removed, gives nostalgia a good name.


The Russian electronic experimentalist creates a world without borders, singing in four languages across ambient soundscapes that evoke imaginary lands.

Multiply Intentions

Katya Prokina thrives in liminal spaces, making music that sits between continents and states of consciousness. A decade ago, as a member of a dream-pop band called Tip Top Tellix, the Russian producer, vocalist, and classically trained violinist tried to “embody the phenomena of listening to music while falling asleep,” with pleasant-enough results. Going solo as Katya Yonder, she succeeded more fully across three eerie ambient cassettes for the St. Petersburg label Floe, culminating with 2017’s Winter Skins, a patient, drifting album that evokes a snowy mountainside glimpsed from the brink of oblivion. Yonder’s fourth album, Multiply Intentions, is her boldest effort at boundary-blurring yet.
Born out of a 2018 mix for well-traveled Berlin label Métron, Multiply Intentions explores Yonder’s perspective as a native of Yekaterinburg, a former Soviet industrial hub located on the border between Europe and Asia. Spacey electronics coexist with the earthy hum of Azerbaijani folk instruments, and the lyrics traverse from Yonder’s primary Russian to Japanese, English, and French. That intercontinental concept underpins an album that’s just as absorbing for how it flits across other thresholds: between pop and experimentation, authenticity and fantasy. With spectral vocals, watery chimes, pulsing bass, and hardly any drums, Multiply Intentions captures what it might feel like to listen to music while falling asleep on the Trans-Siberian Railway, or whatever path might best lead to someplace you’ve only imagined.
Although Multiply Intentions is the first Yonder album with prominent vocals, it’s more atmospheric than conventionally song-based, and not only due to the comprehension barrier for anyone who isn’t quadrilingual. Her opening words, a Russian-language declaration that she’s plunging headlong into something like an abyss, are barely audible amid Uncut Gems-like synth burbles and woodwind flutters. When Yonder’s high lilt first comes to the fore, murmuring about having “to stop for a while” over the LaserDisc science-special shimmer of “Solution,” her words are still slightly out of reach, an effect like a British folk ballad plopped down in 1980s hyperreality. “Another Time,” the most propulsive of these 14 tracks, hits harder in context than it otherwise might, because its aching synth-pop is tucked amid all this heady reflection.
Multiply Intentions invites you to keep puzzling over it after listening, especially its songs that sit at especially sharp divides. “Наверняка” (“For Sure”) is coolly intoned in throaty Russian, but its hypnotic organ squiggles wouldn’t be out of place in the belly dance music of Egyptian legend Hany Mehanna. Its serenely ringing arpeggios, meanwhile, keep sending me to French duo Air’s Japan-seeking “Alone in Kyoto”—originally from the soundtrack to 2003’s Lost in Translation, aptly enough. The next track, “Invented Journey,” a centerpiece of Yonder’s 2018 mix, is the first track here with lyrics in Japanese, which Yonder studied in school. Though her engagement with the language is evident, she has never actually been to Japan. The ghostly echoes and bird-chirp sound effects of “Invented Journey” are transportive, but to someplace misty and not quite there, like trying to remember a Kate Bush song your subconscious made up overnight.
Kate NV, Yonder’s fellow Russian electronic artist, is an easy comparison, but also a fitting one. With Multiply Intentions, Yonder too has made an otherworldly album that defies all borders. On the finale, “Interlude,” another lushly arrayed standout from the 2018 mix, she delivers a French translation of a German poem by a Romanian-born writer: a dreamy postcard from an undefined utopia. Long after Multiply Intentions ends, the possibility of such a place stays with you.

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The latest album from the Drums—now just frontman Jonny Pierce—is his most honest and most unvarnished.

Brutalism

To hear frontman Jonny Pierce tell it, his fifth album as the Drums, Brutalism, is his most honest effort yet. Something is indeed new and different on Brutalism, but it isn’t Pierce’s obsessive self-examination, nor the A-B-A-B-schemed verses, nor even the fact that it’s the first Drums album to use a live drummer, as its beats remain as simple as always and the difference is barely detectable. What’s different here is that Pierce’s best trick—bailing the Drums out of all the above criticisms with undeniable hooks—is practically absent. Pierce has described Brutalism as a brave, necessary shedding of a false persona he felt forced to maintain ever since the Drums suddenly exploded into one of America’s most-hyped bands. Many others will just hear a lowering of the bar for what qualifies as a finished song.
Brutalism marks the second Drums album with Pierce as the sole member. Looking back on the intensity of their first couple years as young Brooklyn upstarts—from a ridiculous and irrefutably infectious debut single, to becoming one of the most Shazam’d artists of that year, to the subsequent and mysteriously contentious departure of their lead guitarist—it’s a small miracle that we have a Drums album to talk about at all in 2019, and maybe to no one more than Pierce: “I like the idea of putting out a few strong albums then going away forever,” he said in 2011. But Brutalism is a Drums album by technicality, as Pierce is now settled into a familiar path for 21st-century indie-pop bands, one taken somewhat recently by The Shins’ James Mercer, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s Alec Ounsworth, and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s Kip Berman: trudging forth with sole custody of a defunct band’s name. Everyone in this club has since produced mixed results, and Brutalism doesn’t inspire much confidence that the good will outweigh the unnecessary in this phase of the Drums.
Pierce is clearly over what the Drums were before, but the task of replacing that identity with something interesting seems to be eluding him. Those thudding faux-bass lines at least gave their early albums a unique fingerprint, for instance; now they are gone, replaced by a much cleaner-sounding low end that almost feels sterile in comparison. “626 Bedford Avenue” is speckled with unnecessary electronic frills. So is “Kiss It Away”, with the addition of a cranked-up BPM, which at least makes its frustratingly flimsy chorus go by faster. Either Pierce forgot that there was ever more to his best songs like “Days” or “Best Friend” than a couple synth voices and an easy rhyme, or he’s hoping his listeners won’t know the difference. The latter possibility is cynical; both are bad news for Drums fans.
And then there’s the subject matter. The lyrics are brutally raw, not just in the emotional sense, but in the uncooked sense: seemingly laid to paper or Notes app once and instantly greenlit.  Over the sound of a real voicemail, Pierce tells us on opener “Pretty Cloud” he’s badly missing someone, and the diary-entry level of detail that ensues throughout ensures that we don’t forget it. At his best, he can still be effective while being extremely personal. Album closer “Blip of Joy” is both: lyrically hyper-detailed about the hesitations involved with moving on to someone new, and also as exhilarating as a deep breath of fresh air in its upward-surging melody. In other words, it’s strong and considered enough to mean big things to more people than just Pierce. Even the best Drums albums surround a few highlights with filler, though, and Brutalism falls even harder into this pattern. It’s entirely possible that Pierce chose to use this formal LP as his scratch paper for working through frustration, and that Brutalism is simply the type of album made for its own creator above all.


Killer Mike and El-P’s collaborative free-for-all puts the spotlight on artists from the Latin American diaspora. It’s an exciting lineup, but a little too inconsistent to work as an album.

RTJ Cu4tro

Run the Jewels is one of the most feel-good stories in hip-hop: the musical equivalent of a buddy comedy starring two aging Gen X rappers who join forces and breathe new life into their art and careers. Michael Render (Killer Mike) and Jaime Meline’s (El-P) four studio albums—each minted instant classics—are the product of a unique, alchemical bond, even as they sought to emulate a long line of rap groups who came before them.
But a remix record is about looking outward, expanding the pool of collaborators, and inviting artists with different POVs to reimagine their work. RTJ Cu4tro trains that focus squarely on Latin America, drawing artists from across the diaspora. The musicians featured here live on the cutting edge while flirting with the mainstream—with one notable exception, the Oscar-winning Broadway megastar Lin-Manuel Miranda. While RTJ Cu4tro isn’t the group’s first remix record, it’s the first that doesn’t feel like a joke. At the center of the project is Brooklyn’s Nick Hook, a frequent Run the Jewels collaborator who helped curate and co-executive produce the album with El-P. The record leans hard on Hook’s collaborative relationships and is as much a result of his taste as the group’s.
RTJ Cu4tro highlights some of the more exciting Latinx artists working in the margins, but it doesn’t really work as a coherent album. With wildly different sounds, the sequence doesn’t have the same flow as the original project; it’s as if one attempted to reassemble a puzzle in the same way, even after all the pieces changed shape. Since the only connective tissue outside of the original material is the amorphous “Latin” category—a commerce-driven catch-all that places often disparate genres under the same umbrella—that inconsistency is somewhat inevitable. It’s the rare Run the Jewels project in which the sum of its parts exceeds the whole.
RTJ Cu4tro may be a collaborative free-for-all, but it still yields some memorable moments. The best ones feel the most transformative, when the connection to the originals is just barely recognizable: Bomba Estéreo’s airy electronic palette pulls “never look back” out of the gutter and into the ether, while cumbia punks Son Rompe Pera continue their relentless campaign to make the marimba sound hard AF on “El Suelo Debajo.” Perhaps the most surprising is Nick Hook and Danny Brasco’s reinvention of “Goonies vs. E.T.,” which pulls a saxophone out of the previously crunchy and chaotic mix, pairing it with a moody new piano melody and a scene-stealing performance from Sarah La Morena.
Others are reshaped by new vocal performances, rather than drastic production changes. Mexican rapper Pawmps heats up Gangsta Boo’s ice-cold hook on “Caminando en la Nieve” with a nimble-tongued Spanish translation, and Lido Pimienta manages the seemingly impossible, matching Mavis Staples’ intensity from “Pulling the Pin” with her singular, cacophonous wail on “Tirando el Detonador.” And while Mexican Institute of Sound’s version of “Ooh La La” sounds somewhat sleepy compared to the original, Guanajuato MC Santa Fe Klan’s rolled Rs and aggressive vocal timbre compliment Mike and Jaime’s well enough to wonder what it might have sounded like on the original.
Meline and Hook deserve props for seeking out collaborators from across the diaspora (Honduras, Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico); even better is the fact that there are Black and brown artists included here, especially in an industry that tends to center white Latinx performers. In that sense, RTJ Cu4tro feels less like co-opting a culture and more like a genuine interest in Latinx artists—a tacit acknowledgement that these perspectives have been missing from what has so far been an intimate collaborative project.


The English band’s first album in over 20 years lacks the fuel and fire to elevate it from a good Britpop record into a great Boo Radleys record.

Keep On With Falling

The evolution of the Boo Radleys roughly follows the timeline of British guitar pop in the 1990s. Ichabod and I, the 1990 debut album by the Merseyside quartet, led by guitarist Martin Carr and vocalist Simon “Sice” Rowbottom, was of a piece with the overdriven, hyperspace sound of groups like Teenage Fanclub and Swervedriver. By the time the Boos announced their split following the release of 1998’s Kingsize, they had adopted cleaner, more direct melodies closer in spirit to contemporaries Blur and the Verve. The fulcrum point for this progression was 1993’s Giant Steps, a masterwork that perfectly married the band’s psychedelic introspection and eardrum assaulting volume: an album equally crucial to the canons of Britpop and shoegaze.
No matter how poppy and accessible their music was—the punchy, horn-driven 1995 single “Wake Up Boo!” landed at #9 in the UK—the Boos kept throwing volatile elements into the mix via lacerating guitar work or production techniques that borrowed from dub reggae and electronic dance music. Those radical components are nowhere to be found on Keep On With Falling, the group’s first new album in 24 years. Tellingly, it’s also their first release without Carr, their principal songwriter and chief architect who was responsible for much of the Boos’ unconventional sonics.
Carr’s absence is an important detail in this new chapter of the band’s history, and the result was glaringly obvious when the first singles from Keep On With Falling dropped last year. Both songs—“A Full Syringe and Memories of You” and “I’ve Had Enough I’m Out”—are well-constructed and catchy, led by Sice’s still-robust vocals and dashed with chirping synths and a touch of strings. But, as with much of the album, those tunes are never more than pleasantly vanilla: lovely to listen to but in need of some extra fuel and fire to help turn it from a good Britpop record into a great Boo Radleys record.
“A Full Syringe and Memories of You” is the best example of the album’s valiant but often underwhelming efforts. The song seems to have been built from the title out, with fairly standard turns of phrase about moving beyond a poisonous relationship. “I can do this/I’m no fool/This ends here,” Sice sings. The music keeps mostly to a warm midtempo sway, and its glammed up bridge is nasty but muted. It’s the kind of song that, in previous years, would have boiled and spattered, but here it merely simmers.
Surrounding this song is plenty of friction-free, nostalgia-inducing material. The lovelorn tunes “Tonight” and “Call Your Name” float by without incident, while the multi-tracked harmonies of “Keep On With Falling” and reggae interludes on “I Say a Lot of Things” hearken back to fan-favorites like “Wake Up Boo!” and Giant Steps’ “Lazarus.” In the album’s strongest moments, the Boos regain that lush middle ground where shoegaze and Britpop commingle, as on the glittery “All Along'' and the heaving “I Can’t Be What You Want Me to Be.”
The current Boos lineup deserves credit for daring to move forward under their old moniker, knowing full well that anything they made would be held up to the high standards of their previous Carr-led efforts. But if Keep On With Falling reveals anything, it’s that the band’s success in the ’90s was due to the musical chemistry of the core quartet. Sice, Brown, and drummer Rob Cieka were flexible and fluid musicians, capable of following Carr down whatever twisting pathway he was carving out of the pop landscape. Remove any component from that formula and it wouldn’t be the same. The proof of that is right here in this well-intentioned but watered down comeback.


With a low-stakes live album, the English art-rock band showcases the playfulness that runs through even their most elaborate work.

Live Fire

black midi don’t jam as much as they used to. The London art-rock band assembled its 2019 debut in part by editing extended improvisations, but with 2021’s Cavalcade, they began composing from the top down, and their music has only grown more precisely arranged since then. This year’s Hellfire features the longest tracklist and shortest runtime of their catalog so far, its skronky maelstroms and baroque characters whipped up and dispelled in brisk strokes. Live Fire, recorded at NOS Primavera Sound festival in Portugal, cements that album’s orchestrated mayhem as the band’s new foundation, but is looser and more playful than its studio companion, foregrounding the inherent goofiness of their madcap style.

Backed by keyboardist Seth “Shank” Evans, a session musician from Cavalcade and Hellfire who has become a fixture of black midi’s gigs, the band spends the 11-song set condensing and rewiring their music. They don’t call attention to their alterations, but the songs constantly fray and braid back together in exciting ways. “Sugar/Tzu,” Hellfire’s metal operetta about a murder during a heavyweight boxing match, rattles like a speedbag as Shank and drummer Morgan Simpson ratchet up the tempo, its calmer sections snapping into focus when the relentless pace breaks. For the live version of “John L,” the bristling prog opener of Cavalcade, they play so fast that the sounds seem to tumble forward even during the silences between riffs.

Guitarist Geordie Greep’s archfiend voice, a truly distinct timbre that can evoke a goblin newscaster or an auctioneer on Adderall, often seemed detached from its wild milieus of noise and texture on Hellfire. That sense of distance between his narration and the rest of the music could sometimes make the songs feel like sneering celebrations of a burning world rather than explorations of it. Live, he eases up on the bit. His singing throughout Live Fire is warm and gallant, inflected with giddy lilts and maudlin croons that place him within the hyperactive music rather than above it.

Bassist and fellow vocalist Cameron Picton, typically the straight man to Greep’s ringmaster, also changes tack. He adopts a curdled growl on “Eat Men Eat,” making the song’s manic ship captain character sound even more unhinged. On “Speedway,” which Shank’s filigreed melodies turn into a bubbly jazz fusion number, Picton deviates from the lyrics to sing about slicing his finger while cutting manchego cheese. These tweaks are impish and silly, but also affecting. The characters feel become warm-blooded people rather than the writerly muses they can seem to be on the studio albums.

“Lumps,” the set’s sole’s new song, marks a subtle but significant departure. After Greep scolds the band to “slow down,” they settle into a breezy groove that swings more than it shocks. Any one of the elements here—like Simpson’s dynamite drum fills, or Shank’s elegant vamping— might have sent a previous black midi composition spiraling in some unforeseen new direction, but this time they stay the course. For once, they seem bored of being restless.


Frank Pavich's 2013 documentary Jodorowsky's Dune tells the story of surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky and his ill-fated 1974 adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi novel Dune set to star Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, and Salvador Dalí. Jodorowsky's plan and process frame the documentary's soundtrack, composed by Kurt Stenzel with analog synths that he sequenced and mixed in real time.

Jodorowsky’s Dune OST

In 1974, surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky was tapped to direct his adaptation of Frank Herbert's monumental sci-fi novel Dune. The film was set to star David Carradine, Gloria Swanson, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí, and Amanda Lear. Meanwhile, after the producers considered none other than Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pink Floyd was slated to compose along with contributions from the French prog-rock outfit Magma. Jodorowsky was given a lavish budget but the film didn't make it past its intensive pre-production stage.
As Frank Pavich's 2013 documentary Jodorowsky's Dune illustrates, Jodorowsky and his production team put a great deal of effort into storyboarding and design, with an eye for detail that would've made Stanley Kubrick blush. As it turns out, the great irony of Jodorowsky's career is that he made his most widely-felt impact with a film he never even began shooting. To this day, his work on Dune continues to reflect in popular cinema and culture. In a sense, his version of Dune died giving birth to the genre-defining films that emerged in its wake. Alien, for example, was written by Dan O'Bannon and of course bore the unmistakable design aesthetic of Swiss painter H.R. Giger—both of whom had been brought in for Jodorowsky's production. This backstory, of course, frames Kurt Stenzel's score to Pavich's documentary and vice-versa.
So many things could have gone wrong here had Stenzel attempted to encompass the pretense and grandeur of the subject at hand. "We need to try," he writes in the liner notes—the implication being that we as the audience should put forth our best effort both to imagine the film Jodorowsky envisioned and to honor the scale of what he was aiming to accomplish. But Stenzel's score—which consists mainly of a bunch of analog synths that he sequenced and mixed in real time (with no additional digital sequencing)—actually requires little effort from listeners.
Given the psychedelic quality of Jodorowsky's most well-known films, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, it's no surprise that in the documentary the maverick Chilean director talks about wanting to mimic the effects of LSD with Dune. But his goals didn't stop there. Jodorowsky breathlessly describes how his film was to serve as a "prophet"—not as a prophecy, but as a living, breathing entity with a consciousness of its own. "For me," he declares on camera, "Dune will be the coming of a God. An artistic and cinematographic God."
To Stenzel's credit, although he does fall prey to a bit of reverence—most notably in passages that feature audio samples of Jodorowsky waxing poetic on what moviemaking means to him—the music doesn't strive to be anywhere near as lofty as that. Stenzel is wise to go for a more discreet, at times even whimsical, tone that supports the documentary's easygoing, storytelling structure. It's too bad that Stenzel, when he does opt to use Jodorowsky monologues, doesn't get more creative with them by chopping them up or subjecting them to effects, but the samples occur rarely and end up being incidental to the score's overall flavor anyway.
Charmingly, the liner notes include a list of all the synth gear Stenzel used, just in case you're interested in geeking-out. But that would be missing the point. Stenzel's score doesn't stand out so much for the tools he used to create it as much as for the choices he made while using those tools. Pavich instructed Stenzel to go for a "Tangerine Dream-type feel," and as such the predictable path would have been to mimic the wheezing, primitive synthesizer sounds that define sci-fi cinema of the '60s and '70s—sounds that now feel quaint at best and moldy at worst. Had Stenzel emulated the audacious bleeting style of, say, early Moog pioneer Richard Teitelbaum, Emerson Lake & Palmer, or any number of artists from the period, he would have artificially encased this music in a temporal ambience it doesn't actually require in order to engage your attention. Ultimately, not unlike the French electronic duo Air, Stenzel has too much creative inspiration to settle for being a stylist, and though he openly references the past, he lands with both feet firmly anchored in the present.
Pavich's documentary more or less consists of a string of interviews undercut with shots of old photos and storyboard drawings. Clearly then, Stenzel's job was to keep the music moving along to match whatever pace Pavich set as appropriate for the audience's patience threshold. Stenzel shifts quickly but gracefully from one motif to the next, weaving sounds in and out like a choreographer who prefers to stay offstage while guiding each "dancer"—each new instrument, melody, textural element, or structural change—into the fray on cue. By turns dramatic, spaced-out, otherworldly, entrancing, stately, ominous, hopeful, playful, and chatty, most of the tracks on Jodorowsky's Dune run about a minute long and manage to cover more than one mood before they run that course. Taken as a whole, they stream by yet never feel rushed, and Stenzel establishes his dual knack for patience and economy very early on.
In what is perhaps this album's defining moment, a high-pitched synth line wails and echoes in a vast empty space. Stenzel gives it a character and shape not unlike those celestial bodies that appear to us via deep-space photography as giant, colorful plumes. The lone synth line segues into a live drumset, the first appearance of organic instruments and room ambience on the whole album. The drums don't last long, and soon they too meld into vaguely Middle Eastern-sounding chants before the voices grow more distressed. Then, a snarling, heavily filtered electric guitar riff that recalls Tool's "Forty-Six & 2" makes its entrance before flaring out as quickly as it came. One might expect these elements to step on each other's toes. But, as with just about every other sound that leads up to this passage, Stenzel creates a sensation of smooth sailing, even as he radically alters the scenery every few minutes. On Jodorowsky’s Dune, Stenzel takes you across topographic oceans that never rock the boat.


On his Nonesuch debut, the innovative saxophonist reinvents jazz standards with a psychedelic hip-hop touch.

Satin Doll

Songbook standards can offer a blank canvas. Even straightforward renditions can reveal artists in a new light, like when Willie Nelson tackled the Great American Songbook on his immaculate Stardust at the height of outlaw country, or when John Coltrane countered claims of being “anti-jazz” with his luminous Ballads. They can serve as a bold statement, as when Oneohtrix Point Never deconstructed the Harry Warren/Al Dubin ballad “I Only Have Eyes for You.” After a few years bubbling under with work for Vampire Weekend, Ry Cooder, Lonnie Holley, and Atticus Ross, Los Angeles-based jazz saxophonist Sam Gendel takes the latter tack with his Nonesuch debut, Satin Doll.
Recorded live over the course of three days with bassist Gabe Noel and electronic percussionist Philippe Melanson, Satin Doll pays tribute to everything from Duke Ellington to Hoagy Carmichael, with Gendel dismantling each standard and reassembling it. You’ve never heard so many glitches, hiccups, and pregnant pauses in “Afro Blue” before; Gendel's trio stretches the frame as far as it can go while keeping the tune recognizable. The result feels as weirdly expansive as Coltrane’s famous nine-minute exploration of the Mongo Santamaría original, even as it wraps up in just over three.
Rather than extrapolate on the original melodies, Gendel’s group instead reveal alien qualities inside them. Gendel’s closest predecessors might be Jon Hassell and Ben Neill, but he also nods to the slurred aesthetic of West Coast and Southern rap. You only need to hear two notes—burred and squished though they may be—to perk up with recognition at “Freddie Freeloader,” which Gendel couches in the pneumatic wheeze of G-funk. His tactile playing reveals all manner of new textures within the title track: candy-paint gloss, soap bubbles, Jeff Koons’ balloon dogs. But beneath all that shine, his horn captures the swoon of the original.
It doesn’t always work. Their sputtering take on Charles Mingus’ Lester Young homage “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” is intriguing, but the synthesized vocals—delivering the lyrics that Joni Mitchell penned years later—feel like an A.I.’s attempt to “swing.” A better Young homage comes one song later with “Stardust;” Gendel’s buttery vibrato burrows beneath the track’s otherwise-impenetrable sheen, evoking the late tenor saxophonist’s essence.
Gendel and group coyly slot original tunes like "Glide Mode" and "Saxofone Funeral" into the mix.  They melt the familiar timbres of horn, bass, and drums into blobs and add samples, making explicit their love for Madlib and chopped ‘n’ screwed music. That playful approach makes their rendition of “Cold Duck Time” feel even drunker than Eddie Harris’ woozy original (a tribute to the titular treacly fortified wine). Gendel and group pile on with UFO whooshes and garbled vocal samples. The trio lets loose, Noel’s bass propelling them into deeper, weirder space. Throughout, Satin Doll warps these standards delectably, leaving you pleasantly dizzy.

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The rapper’s hard-knocking horrorcore is classic Memphis trunk music, and only other artists from the 901 are invited along for the ride.

Memphis Massacre III

Ever since his 2019 breakout “Crunk Ain’t Dead,” Memphis rapper Duke Deuce has been leading seminars in Southern rap history, laying claim to the mystic styles developed in his city and bringing its history into the present. He’s not resentful that so many people have dipped into his hometown’s creative well, but he wants credit where it’s due: “Shout out to Migos for bringing it back, but the triplet flow comes from Memphis,” as he puts it bluntly on the opening track of his new tape, MEMPHIS MASSACRE III, a return to the mixtape series that started his career.
There’s a constant raucous momentum to Duke’s albums, but with every project, he unveils a new variation of his core persona. On this summer’s CRUNKSTAR, he embraced his inner scene kid, mixing guitar-laden ballads with the stiff, martial beat that’s become his signature. MEMPHIS MASSACRE III, released for Halloween, returns more explicitly to the sound of the city that made Duke: the hard-knocking horrorcore is classic Memphis trunk music, and only other artists from the 901 are invited along for the ride. Duke casts himself as a gleefully anarchic troublemaker nicknamed “Deucifer,” who’s as concerned with tearing up the club as tearing down the system.
Duke loops his hooks like a chant, recalling the rhythmic minimalism of Three 6 Mafia’s early underground tapes, which turned the human voice into its own drum pattern. Though he often looks to Memphis tradition, Duke has a keen talent for lyrical worldbuilding, inducting the listener into a kind of secret society with its own passwords and handshakes. “Anna” isn’t a name, but the word “animosity” sawed in half—“Who got anna? Who got animosity?”—distilling his haters’ bitterness into two syllables. Duke’s become known for his gangsta-walking dances as much as his rapping, and he spits like he moves, combining boisterous enthusiasm with deceptive dexterity. His voice contorts with ease, snarling on the cutthroat “Black Ops” and meditatively crooning on closing track “Nobody Needs Nobody.”
Several years into his career, Duke has assembled a tight-knit stable of producers, including Hitkidd and Ayoza, as well as his father Duke Nitty—keeping it in the family and in Memphis. The musical palette of MEMPHIS MASSACRE III is straight out of a horror movie, all creepy keyboards and funeral dirge organs, and Duke’s sharp ear for sequencing means it flows as naturally as a film score. A decaying tape loop provides the foundation for “Mr Memphis Massacre,” which is practically a seance to summon the spirit of Lord Infamous, as Duke uses the imagery of witchcraft and demonic possession to describe the paranoia and the naysayers who plague his life. But Memphis rap is more than just nightmares, and tracks like “Buck the System” and “What’s My Name” channel the city’s smooth-pimping style. For all the buckness, Duke’s choices are often baroque and ornate, like when he enlists Opera Memphis to provide choral accompaniment on “Deucifer.”
Horrorcore godfather DJ Paul lends his menacing touch to “What You Rep,” but even at this relatively early stage of his career, Duke is already opening up the platform he’s built to emerging Memphis rappers like ATM RichBaby and Paper Route Empire’s Big Moochie Grape. Women rappers like Gangsta Boo and La Chat are a vital part of the city’s musical legacy, and Duke nods to their influence by inviting up-and-coming female talent to steal the show. “Gwak Gwak” is a raunchy duet with fellow Quality Control signee Gloss Up, but it’s Glockianna who comes in hottest, chewing up and spitting out her verses on “Riverside” and “Respect” with the hunger of a newcomer and the confidence of a veteran.
The influence of Three 6 Mafia-style horrorcore haunts contemporary artists from 21 Savage to $uicideboy$, but Memphis rap itself has largely pivoted away from the demonic since the 1990s. Drawing on the city’s underground laboratory of twisting flows and unexpected styles, MEMPHIS MASSACRE III returns the spooky crown to Duke’s hometown. While his music might recall the ghosts of Memphis past, Duke himself never appears stuck in time or overcome by nostalgia. With one ear turned to tradition and another to the future, he’s become a new standard bearer.

Quality Control / Motown / Made Men Movement


The New York singer’s casually elegant EP is remarkably accomplished. Even at just four songs, Amber Mark sounds like a veteran of pop songcraft and performance.

Conexão EP

Before settling in New York as a teenager, Amber Mark lived around the world, bouncing between Miami, Berlin, and India; she’s someone for whom the exotic and exceptional have become commonplace. It’s a life of envy, and not just because you imagine her beholding foreign skylines and dipping her toes in the ocean. Immersing herself in other cultures and enduring the drudgery of intercontinental travel helped her grow up a little faster than the average early twenty-something. Her grounded, global perspective makes her sound settled, even as she flits in the space between genres, and it’s the foundation of the casual elegance that defines Conexão, her magnetic new EP.
Mark’s 2017 debut 3:33 AM traced her grieving process after her mother’s death, with each track reflecting a different emotional dimension. Conexão doesn’t bear the same thematic weight—it’s all about garden-variety “love drama,” in Mark’s words—but it’s reinforced by its own narrative arc. The title track captures the instant when sparks start to fly, transcending time and space; it sounds like two strangers meeting each other’s gaze across a dimly lit hotel bar. She explores a relationship that’s started losing its heat across “Love Me Right” and a poignant cover of Sade’s “Love Is Stronger Than Pride.” By the time she reaches “All the Work,” she’s gently but firmly rejecting an ex who’s crawled back after seeing her thrive.
Following a relationship from bloom to bust isn’t a novel concept, but it’s enlivened by Mark’s emotional nuance and attention to detail. “Love Me Right” isn’t an ultimatum or an explosive list of demands: It’s a pained request, a last-ditch effort from someone who sees the good in her relationship but just isn’t satisfied. She reaches a breaking point when her partner’s inattentiveness leads to self-doubt: “Or is it just me? Am I not what you want?/’Cause if that’s the case, baby, why lead me on?” Her vocals are agile but conversational, as if she’s posing rhetorical questions to a close friend over a weekday lunch. When she navigates an electric key change a few minutes later, it feels like the all-too-familiar moment when a heated discussion morphs into a full-blown romantic crisis.
Her musical choices are just as subtle. Conexão is the Portuguese word for “connection,” and Mark spends much of the EP playing with the rhythms and instrumentation of bossa nova. She makes her intentions clear by undergirding the title track with a classic, sensual beat, but Conexão doesn’t dip into gimmickry. The sounds of bossa nova are building blocks in her hands, tools that can ever-so-slightly modify R&B, pop, and dance music. When “All the Work” transforms into sleek pop-house upon reaching its chorus, it does so from an unexpected position; adding skittering layers of rhythm gives “Love Is Stronger Than Pride” roots Sade’s version lacked.
These little touches may not seem important in isolation, but a resonant turn of phrase here and a measured vocal take there add up to something like trust: You listen to an artist and feel like you’re in capable hands. Mark’s career is just beginning, but Conexão rings with the grace and looseness you’d expect from a veteran’s genre exercise. She’s always been ahead of the curve, why stop now?


New York-based, Florida-born producer/singer Roberto Carlos Lange's latest album as Helado Negro is his boldest and most intricate work to date, grappling with memory and its uncanny tendency to wear away despite our best intentions to preserve it.

Double Youth

Two young boys stare out from the cover of Double Youth, and only one of them is Roberto Carlos Lange. The New York-based, Florida-born producer/singer who goes by Helado Negro doesn't remember who the other one is. Face-painted and serious, they both seem to be taking a moment out of one of those perfect childhood days to oblige a parent's request for a keepsake. The cover of Lange's fourth LP is a photo of a photograph that he found unexpectedly in his parent's house; its tears, curls, and age spots are captured in full as part of the composition. Fittingly, Double Youth, the boldest and most intricate Helado Negro work to date, grapples with memory and its uncanny tendency to wear away despite our best intentions to preserve it.
Double Youth follows a trio of ambient, mood-based EPs, shifting emphasis to structure, motion, and beats. It's the first time that Lange's lyrics, which as always shift effortlessly between English and Spanish, aren't the most concrete feature in his music. Synth figures grind together like clockwork on "It's Our Game", which owes some of its playfulness to Jimmy Tamborello's work with the Postal Service and as Dntel. The bass line that tumbles through the song acts more as a counterpoint to Lange's phrasing than a part of the rhythm section, although the line between the beats and everything outside the beats here is a porous one. The 8/8 time signature becomes something for Lange to challenge, not submit to.
Later, "Myself On 2 U" entertains a Boards of Canada-esque flutter while gulps of analog synths and backing soprano map out the chords. The menacing "Triangulate" rides a bristling industrial bass whose ascending phrases seem to leer at Lange's layered chants. "We'll take our time/ And we'll crawl to you," he sings, as if extracting threats from the dissolving context of a dream. Throughout Double Youth, Lange's words follow dream logic rather than concrete narrative. He uses language not as a key to the album's core but as another texturizing element, rolling out commands that sound more natural in Spanish than they ever could in English: "llamame" ("call me"), "dejame" ("let me go"). On "Queriendo", he pronounces the Spanish equivalent to the album's title, "doble juventud", a phrase whose syllabic density gives it an inherent rhythm of its own.
The album's gentle hallucination crystallizes on lead single "I Krill You", a slowly unfolding suite with a patient melody at odds with its rapid techno pulse. Lange builds the song only to break away at its midpoint to a synthetic choral moment, leaping lucidly from the club to the cathedral. "It's a dream, a dream, a dream about you again," he repeats, calling to an unseen other with the sort of longing that usually only survives inside Arthur Russell albums. Spritzes of synth brass stand in for slashes of cello; the beats pile, but never overwhelm.
Double Youth plays as an exercise in reconciling forgotten artifacts with present memories, as anyone who's had the chance to rifle through their former possessions and discover evidence of a totally alien former self knows the uncanny feeling that's articulated so effectively on Helado Negro's latest. The album's title refers most transparently to the twin figures on its cover: two boys being young side by side. But it can also describe the shadows we leave for ourselves, the youth we remember crashing into the husks of youth we discover. Helado Negro animates that conflict, finding not resolution, but harmony in the gaps between selves.


The Mexican techno producer Rebolledo specializes in work that feels hollowed out and slightly creepy, with a sly streak of absurdist humor.

Mondo Alterado

The Mexican techno producer Mauricio Rebolledo has compared his own aesthetic to a drive through a long tunnel. You can hear that in his music: the whine of the engine and the wheels against the road; isolated notes bobbing in empty space like taillights streaking through the darkness; the steady pulse reminiscent of the rhythm of fluorescent lights passing overhead, all lines converging dimly on a distant vanishing point.
There were glimmers of it on his debut album, 2011's Super Vato, which spun bare-bones synth and drum tracks into rowdy, psychedelic club cuts that conveyed the manic rush of hallucinating at the wheel. But it really came together on his 2014 mix CD Momento Drive, particularly on a remarkably strange song he created for the mix, “Windsurf, Sunburn & Dollar,” in which he hollered the titular phrase in a throaty caveman howl—something more like “Windsor, sumble 'n' doar!”—over a beat that sounded like an electric guitar going up in flames, strings popping their coils as the whammy bar turned molten.
The same aesthetic defines Mondo Alterado, a new album of original material that has more in common with that mix CD than it does with his debut album. A DJ who is partial to psychedelic sets of mind-numbing duration—he and Superpitcher played a 25-hour back-to-back set (as Pachanga Boys) in Mexico City a few years ago—Rebolledo has said that he only began producing in order to create the kind of material he was seeking for his sets but couldn't find elsewhere. In that sense, Mondo Alterado is a testament to the clarity of his vision. It unrolls like an impeccably thought-through DJ set, right down to the way tracks flow seamlessly from one to the next, with held notes or drumbeats acting as the glue that holds the pieces together.
Rebolledo's music has always been sparse, but on Mondo Alterado, it's more hypnotically hollowed-out than ever. “Spacer Rainbow Woman” is typical of his approach, as two spindly guitar notes and a gently swaying drumbeat are strung like a rope bridge across the void. A wordless sigh offers a suggestion of melody, and in the song's long plateau—you can't really speak of “peaks” in Rebolledo's work—a rubbery bass arpeggio creates rhythmic and harmonic tension. “Discótico Sinético” and “Discótico Estático” are similar: one-finger synth melodies, distant whoops and howls, lunkheaded rhythms heavy on cowbell and tom. “A Numb Gas to the Future” is even more minimal—a coldwave sketch and seven-minute palate-cleanser, connecting two of the album's highlights, “Fears Come True” and “Pow Pow.” (The latter is especially great, coming closest to the unhinged ecstasy of “Windsurf, Sunburn & Dollar.”)
Nothing happens in a hurry here, and Rebolledo himself pokes fun at his music's humid languor in the title of the album's opening track, “Here Comes the Warrior (Super Short Album Version).” Its swirl of droning synths, tribal drums, and ululations goes on for nearly a quarter of an hour, and begs the question: What on earth must the long version be like? Which brings us to one of Mondo Alterado's best qualities: its absurdist sense of humor. In “Life Is Strange, Life Is Hard, Life Is Great,” Rebolledo fills in the music's emptiness with a rambling monologue full of platitudes and positive affirmations, sounding like a self-help speaker that the denizens of Black Rock City have mistaken for an actual shaman as he builds to a tongue-in-cheek climax: “Never lose the faith, 'cause life is really great/Dance again/Dance again.”
Despite the lyrics' campy qualities, there's something off about them, something almost sinister, and that disturbing undercurrent carries into “Fears Come Through,” a dead-eyed protestation of unrequited love delivered over canned tambourines and Novocaine-drip synths. With a chorus that goes, “I don't want to be afraid to say I love you,” it's the creepiest anthem you're likely to hear on a dance floor all year.
Throughout this long, sidewinding album, you may  find yourself asking, Is this guy for real?—and that's precisely what makes Rebolledo's whole shtick so compelling. The music is enervating and exhilarating in equal measure, and it sounds unlike almost anything else in techno right now, save for similarly left-field primitivists like Barnt. Mondo Alterado isn't for everyone. But for those who like their techno with a healthy dose of deadpan, Rebolledo's unique strain of gonzo trance is all the fuel they need for a long trip to the far side of nowhere.


Bubblegum surf-pop meets Midwestern earnestness on the Kansas City quintet’s sweet, funny, but sometimes inscrutable sophomore album.

Bell House

In the four years since they released their self-titled debut, Shy Boys have undergone a metamorphosis. Known for glossy harmonies subdued by lo-fi production, the Kansas City, Missouri quintet showcases bubblegum surf pop on its sophomore album, Bell House. Sleeker production allows Shy Boys to showcase their sunny falsettos, while creating a peculiar time warp: Their new music feels refreshing and nostalgic at once.
The project of brothers Kyle and Collin Rausch, along with their friends Konnor Ervin, Kyle Little, and Ross Brown, Bell House is named after the street they all shared for nearly five years and charged with familial love. The snap-happy “Champion” feels like the theme song for an ’80s sitcom where bickering friends and family learn wholesome values through gentle life lessons. Dedicated to the Rausches’ mother, it reminisces over back-to-school photos and marvels at her ability to make them feel like superstars. The song is emblematic of the sincere Midwestern sweetness that pervades Shy Boys’ work.
No matter where they direct their attention, Shy Boys come across as both introspective and benevolent. Their epic lead single “Take the Doggie” swaps blissful guitar for rock angst in the vein of Thin Lizzy, as they contemplate rescuing a neighbor’s abused, malnourished dog. True to their moniker, there are moments when Shy Boys reveal, and even celebrate, their fragility. “Tragic Loss” captures the anxiety of nightmares, and the uncontrollable nature of the subconscious. The chorus is suffused with panic: “Think of what a tragic loss would have done to me.” But for all its unease, the song’s melodramatic tone feels playful and self-aware. Such glimpses of humor are crucial for a band whose earnestness can sometimes feel like a bit much.
The same levity gives opener “Miracle Gro” its charm. The band members’ voices entwine like vines stretching sunward in a cappella harmonies whose Beach Boys-style airiness evokes innocence and simplicity—but the song’s title refers to the super-powered fertilizer one might use to grow a crop of overly potent bud. Handclaps keep the cheerful beat as the groups sings about a seven-foot-tall “dirty secret buddin’ off the street.”
Bell House is an endearing album, but too many gooey guitar licks and saccharine lyrics can start to give you a toothache. Although it ostensibly recounts drummer/bassist Ervin’s encounter with a thief, “Evil Sin” feels more like a scolding parable than a reflection on being the victim of a crime. “But it’s still an evil sin/If you want to be my friend/Don’t ever lie again,” Collin Rausch sings. The baroque-pop melody is pleasant enough. Perhaps there’s a hint of Shy Boys’ subtle humor at work here, too; like kindly teachers, they’re not mad at the robber, just disappointed. Ultimately, though, the pedantic lyrics and honeyed delivery still recall the preschool stylings of Barney or Disney.
Anchored in the Rausch brothers’ “blood harmony,” as Kevin Morby describes their vocals in their liner notes, Shy Boys’ gentle vocals can be disarming. But they can also sound sappy and artificial, as they do on “No Fun” and the odd R&B ballad “Disconnect.” On Bell House, it’s sometimes hard to tell when the band is being too precious and when it’s consciously using self-deprecating humor to subvert that self-seriousness. For all their charms, the album’s confusing tone suggests that Shy Boys haven’t quite figured out how to communicate with listeners who don’t know them as well as they know each other.


Irish folk singer Brigid Mae Power's latest occupies a liminal space made up of droning guitars, metallic piano reverberations, and lyrics that trace some barely escaped threat.

Brigid Mae Power

Danger lingers around the edges of the latest album by Ireland's Brigid Mae Power. She made her past records in empty car parks and churches—the kinds of places where you’re always looking over your shoulder. Her self-titled Tompkins Square debut was recorded in Portland with Peter Broderick, and occupies a liminal space made up of droning guitars, metallic piano reverberations, and lyrics that trace some barely escaped threat. “There were some people around us at the time who weren’t for us/Though they claimed to be,” she sings to her infant son on “Lookin At You in a Photo.” The liturgical haze and her slow, methodical singing give the impression of a woman and single mother learning to trust herself and others again, tentatively adapting to a life where she no longer has to look back every dozen steps.
Like This Mortal Coil, Marissa Nadler, and White Chalk-era PJ Harvey, Power is adept at grounding what could otherwise be quite gossamer music. Sometimes she uses pace and volume, as on opener “It’s Clearing Now,” which spends almost eight minutes creeping in like a storm over the horizon, until it becomes overwhelming and transcendent. “Oh, many, many times to force happiness, I have tried/But I had to be patient in waiting for its movement,” she sings meditatively, while her loosely strummed guitar beckons a whirl of strings. She shades her songs with soured highs and unsettling depths, like the low bass note on “Is It My Low or Yours”  and the blast of static that cuts through “Watching the Horses.”
Power is an equally nuanced vocalist. Her voice is agile and exhilarating, conveying all her nervous optimism and frank exhaustion, whether singing monastic drones (“Let Me Hold You Through This”), forlorn ballads (“Is It My Low or Yours”), or Carpenters-indebted melodies. She never comes close to elucidating what it is she escaped, but the aftermath leaves little doubt as to how serious it was. She reveals her coping mechanisms on “I Left Myself for a While,” but rediscovers everything she had locked deep in some internal safe on “Watching the Horses.” Backed by dreamy, subtly cinematic strings, she sings, “I thought I had completely forgotten/But it was in body's memory/I release it now/I am free.”
Despite its clear seriousness, Brigid Mae Power runs on that sense of newfound freedom. Power and Broderick find glimmers of light even in the darkest moments, and she learns to trust the kind of love that enables independence, after some period of coercion. “I feel your intent/I'm not sure of the meaning of it yet,” she sings on final song “How You Feel,” which starts with the sound of her laughter, and unspools in sweet freak-folk sepia that evokes great lost songwriters like Connie Converse. “But nothing, nothing feels bad/And I feel safer than I ever have before.”


John Cobbett is one of modern metal’s premier guitarists. In Hammers of Misfortune, he reinvigorates ’70s progressive rock and the hard rock of Deep Purple, Rainbow, and Uli Jon Roth-era Scorpions.

Dead Revolution

John Cobbett is one of modern metal’s premier guitarists, channeling an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre into virtuosic playing that bubbles with an energy folks from all levels of metal fandom can gravitate to. While he’s remained a cult figure, his work in VHÖL has given larger audiences a taste of his gifts for fusing contemporary and classic sounds. VHÖL almost overshadows Cobbett’s long-running main project, Hammers of Misfortune: In Hammers, he reinvigorates ’70s progressive rock and the hard rock of Deep Purple, Rainbow, and Uli Jon Roth-era Scorpions. Dead Revolution, Hammers’ sixth full-length, retains much of the dynamic lineup from 17**th Street and contains some of their most inspired material yet, but it’s also gloomier than much of their work.
It doesn’t begin that way, however. Cobbett and Leila Abdul-Rauf, another Bay Area veteran who’s also in perverse death metallers Vastum, kick off the album with “The Velvet Inquisition,” which begins on a familiar and addictive gallop before Joe Hutton’s vocals come in to dominate. Somehow, he makes triumph sound like despair, a feeling matched by the striding music: Melodically, it’s on point, but there is a pained smile behind the shredding, a sense of reckoning with an encroaching doomsday so ominous it might already be here.
If you’re going to call upon the spirit of Ritchie Blackmore-era Deep Purple, you’re going to have to bring in some organs. Sigrid Sheie, who also plays bass, keyboard, and piano (or rather, “Paino”) in VHÖL, is their John Lord here, but her work goes beyond retro texture. As in Purple, her organ playing acts as a complementary, and sometimes alternate, drive to the guitars, giving off a pollution that clouds Revolution in unease. She gives the Maidenesque “Flying Alone” a turbo boost, with an added dose of weltering confusion, as Cobbett and Abdul-Rauf descend into a tailspin of dueling solos towards the end. On the title track, her work adds to much urgency to the clanking of Will Carroll’s cowbell that it shrugs aside any schlock you might attach to it. One of the album’s most beautiful moments is when “The Precipice (Waiting for the Fall),” breaks into just Sheie’s organ and Hutton’s soaring voice, adding another twist to the duality that characterizes the record.
Hammers feel the sting of the Bay Area’s lightspeed gentrification like almost all of the regions’ artists, something they agonized over on “The Day the City Died” from 17**th Street. Revolution addresses this again by ending with a cover of “Days of ’49,” Joaquin Miller’s Gold Rush poem that was eventually covered by Bob Dylan on Self Portrait. It’s a personal take on the aftermath of a large influx of hucksters chasing fleeting economic gains—sound familiar? Hutton carries the song, combining power metal heft with Phil Lynott’s heart. He captures the longing of more optimistic times, while entirely aware of the damage its brought. Sheie brings her disorienting shimmer, as well as some piano, and Carroll’s thunder is the weight that lets Hutton thrive.
There’s an ongoing metal revival in the States, borne of an appreciation of the pre-thrash era, and perhaps a desire to hear some damn melodies, which rock radio nor the extreme underground will provide in abundance. Bands like Manilla Road and Cirith Ungol, who never got their due back in the day, are gaining a second life, and newer bands like Eternal Champion, High Spirits, Sumerlands, and Magic Circle prove traditionalism still can yield great results. Cobbett would like you to know with Revolution that not only was he ahead of the game, but that it can extend beyond hero worship.