Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Billy Joel’s greatest album, a sublimely crafted breakthrough that finds the meeting ground of the romantic and the mundane.

The Stranger

The Stranger is the reason we know who Billy Joel is. Before the album, his fourth for Columbia and fifth as a solo artist, Joel had two Top 40 songs: “Piano Man,” about a guy (Joel) who got stuck playing bar tunes to a bunch of drunks, and “The Entertainer,” about a guy (Joel) who got stuck playing music for a fickle audience and whose label cut that other song in half just to fit on the radio. Joel was raised in Hicksville, Long Island, classically trained on the piano, and giddily admired the real rock’n’roll of the 1950s. He was something of an anomaly on the label of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, not an impassioned poet, prophet, or star, just a guy with a choir boy’s tenor who loved melody and technique and when songs sounded good. He wasn’t his label’s priority and he wasn’t much of a name, but then he went ahead and made an album filled with classics.
Joel says he didn’t make The Stranger like it was his last shot at success, but it’s hard to see it any other way. Famously, Joel likes to say that he didn’t want to put the biggest song on the album. “That’s one of the greatest songs I’ve ever heard,” Linda Ronstadt apparently told Joel after hearing “Just the Way You Are” in the studio. A lot of people have since agreed with her, including those at the Recording Academy, which gave Joel the Grammys for Record and Song of the Year.
The success of The Stranger did a lot to erase, or at least ameliorate, Billy Joel’s reputation as an aggrieved musician who made a point of despising the dog and pony show of music promotion. He cut his teeth as a young musician, playing on three albums before his 1971 solo debut: The Hassles and Hour of the Wolf, with his bar band the Hassles, and the proto-metal Attila, with his buddy and fellow former Hassle Jon Small. The albums weren’t notable enough even to call them failures. His debut, however, was a failure and objectively fucked up. For some reason, Artie Ripp, who produced the album and signed Joel despite his commercial track record, simply didn’t notice or care that the mixing machine was set incorrectly, leaving Joel’s vocals on Cold Spring Harbor pitched up “like Alvin and the Chipmunks.” Joel smashed his test pressing, and still claims to hate the album.
After Cold Spring Harbor, Joel drove across the country to Los Angeles with his girlfriend Elizabeth Weber and her 5-year-old son Sean. (The hiccup was that Weber was married to Jon Small, who figured his wife and son were kidnapped and went West to locate them and bring them back to Long Island. Weber later married and managed Joel.) In Los Angeles, Joel struck a deal with Columbia and made two albums, Piano Man and Streetlife Serenade. While the former had its champions, not many people liked Streetlife Serenade. Stephen Holden, who eventually wrote glowingly about Joel for The New York Times, opened his Rolling Stone review, “Billy Joel’s pop schmaltz occupies a stylistic no man’s land where musical and lyric truisms borrowed from disparate sources are forced together.” Joel returned to New York in 1975 and made Turnstiles, which Village Voice critic Robert Christgau called “more obnoxious.”
The secrets to The Stranger’s success, however, are scattered across Joel’s first four albums, unfortunately buttressed by a lot of unremarkable songs that lack their own punch. Take “James,” from Turnstiles, inspired by Joel’s high school friend and bandmate Jim Bosse. Joel lightly excoriates James for pausing his artistic ambitions to go to college and “living up to expectations.” The melody is not particularly gripping and the chiding doesn’t feel particularly deserved. Now turn to The Stranger, which opens thrillingly with another mild diatribe against middle class professional ambition, “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song).” As soon as the needle drops, Joel is smashing on his piano and the bass is kicking up the groove, playing with gusto and rhythm.
Also from Turnstiles is “Summer, Highland Falls,” my favorite pre-Stranger Joel song. His piano chords are enchanting, and he coins his greatest phrase from a non-hit: “It’s either sadness or euphoria.” As charming as “Summer, Highland Falls” is, it’s also absurdly wordy: “How thoughtlessly we dissipate our energies/Perhaps we don’t fulfill each other’s fantasies.” Again, fast forward to 1977 and “Only the Good Die Young,” Joel’s cleverest Stranger song lyrically: “You didn’t count on me/When you were counting on your rosary,” and, “You say your mother told you all that I could give you was a reputation.” It’s a hoot.
Joel made The Stranger with his road band, largely the same group who played on Turnstiles. The big difference was that Joel produced Turnstiles himself but brought in the well-regarded Phil Ramone for The Stranger, with whom he struck a long-term relationship. Joel claims that he chose to work with Ramone—known for work with Paul Simon and Phoebe Snow and co-producing Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson’s A Star Is Born—instead of the legendary Beatles producer George Martin because Martin wanted the pianist to record his album with session musicians, which Joel attempted to poor results on Streetlife.
Ramone liked Joel’s band—most importantly comprised of bassist Doug Stegmeyer, drummer Liberty DeVitto, and multi-instrumentalist Richie Cannata—and wanted to bring their live energy to life in the studio, where things had rarely clicked for Joel. One of the most frequent criticisms in his early career was his inability to translate the magnetic personality of his live performances onto his records. An early 1977 concert preview from the Los Angeles Times read: “A common question about the 27-year-old New Yorker is why such a scintillating performer hasn’t become a star.” Later, as if to prove the point, Joel gathered his unheralded songs on the 1981 live compilation Songs in the Attic where the early material absolutely soars and the crowds erupt.
With Ramone behind the boards and the band intact, Joel made an album with a verve and attitude he’d never achieved, sounding like an actual rock star, one who’s sardonic but hopeful. Almost every song on The Stranger has one accusatory line or another, a facet of his lyricism that Joel is quick to attribute to the general unhappiness of a person whose father, a Jewish refugee of Nazi Germany, purportedly told him as a little boy, “Life is a cesspool.” I’d be naïve, however, to try to argue that Joel made depressing songs, no matter how depressed he was while he was making them. Joel is a straightforward, often simplistic lyricist, and he composed primarily in the major key. And it’s that tension, the meeting of bombast and the mundane, that makes The Stranger the greatest success in his catalog.
The juxtaposition bursts open on The Stranger’s centerpiece “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant.” Across seven and a half minutes, Joel tells the superbly ordinary tale of Brenda and Eddie, high school sweethearts turned divorcées reuniting for dinner. The music tells another story, as Joel and his piano are accompanied by a carnivalesque swirl of accordion, saxophone, tuba, and the works, and it’s all for lines of unadulterated chitchat, such as, “Things are OK with me these days/Got a good job, got a good office/Got a new wife, got a new life/And the family is fine.” The music, understandably, is most jubilant when it soundtracks Brenda and Eddie’s good ol’ days, but those yesteryears aren’t exactly exceptional: “Nobody looked any finer/Or was more of a hit at the Parkway Diner.”
Joel’s not alone as a singer-songwriter championing normal folks and everyday life, but there’s something so unbelievably plain about Brenda and Eddie, and the uncomplicated way Joel concocts and presents them, like when he seems to run out of material near the song’s end and rhymes, “That’s all I heard about Brenda and Eddie/Can’t tell you more than I told you already,” that’s palpably sad when set against his musical scenery. It’s as if Joel is saying all the Brendas and Eddies out there deserve the royal treatment they got back in the day, if only for a night, because we’ve all got some regrets so let’s reminisce and have a drink and a laugh—or maybe he’s not, and the whole thing’s a sendup of two people who really could stand to keep ploughing ahead with their really regular lives because they’re not getting any better. With “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant,” Joel paints love as too banal even to be romantic, a commonplace emotion that thrills briefly before living continues.
Following the winding epic of dwindling hopes is “Vienna,” a compact tearjerker built on the lilting little piano melody that introduces the tune. Whereas the disenchantment lurks in the subtext of “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant,” “Vienna” is straightforwardly melancholic, ironically making it The Stranger’s most empathetic and heartwarming song. It’s about growing up and taking things as they come, and Joel and the band move calmly through the song, like they’re demonstrating how to play a ballad for students. Yet Joel can’t help but lecture even when he’s being supportive. While he’s likely singing to himself, there’s ambiguity as to whether he thinks he, his character, or his narrator is somehow right or wrong in his actions or advice. As sweet as it can sound, “Vienna” pairs disappointment with aspiration, with a melody that’s alternately whimsical and maudlin.
Joel also looks to diagnose humanity on “Vienna,” something he does often across The Stranger while still mostly writing about familiar things or people; “Just the Way You Are,” “She’s Always a Woman,” and “The Stranger,” for example, were written for or about Elizabeth Weber. He’s thinking of the bigger picture while his eyes are focused squarely on what’s in front of him, lending an idiosyncratic air to his words, straddled somewhere between profound and puzzling, like an author who purposely contorts a cliché. On the title track, for instance, Joel gets at the common phenomenon of feeling like we change our personalities for different settings—“Well we all have a face/That we hide away forever”—only to get specific about what those faces or masks are: “Some are satin, some are steel/Some are silk, and some are leather.” I can’t think of many people who categorize their moods by fabric. In the end, Joel winds up searching for meaning and is unable to make up his mind; a definitive truth remains elusive. The hit ballads, too, are built on self-doubt and fear, making them Trojan horses of scorn that an aging Frank Sinatra could cover like the singer of the world’s cheapest wedding band, as happened with “Just the Way You Are.”
And, obviously, “Just the Way You Are” and “She’s Always a Woman” don’t sound resentful; they’re absolutely doe-eyed. Because Billy Joel, as he discovered with The Stranger, couldn’t help but make hits, songs that embraced melody at the risk of being labeled schmaltz. “She’s Always a Woman” is balanced and warm like a lullaby, something you could easily think you’d heard before but just can’t place, instantly familiar but fresh and stirring in its own right. “She’s Always a Woman” is the sparest song on The Stranger but the principles of sharp songwriting with understated production remain across the record as Joel constructs monster melodies and choruses with his band. “Those songs—they’re built like the Rock of Gibraltar,” Bruce Springsteen once said of Joel’s work. “Until you play them, you don’t realize how well they play.”
With his compositional gifts and unfussy writing, Joel made a hit record that’s mostly about how life just is, how good things come and good things go and it seems like we’re stuck in the middle of it. Joel, however unwittingly, accentuates The Stranger’s themes with the album’s least interesting songs, the closing “Get It Right the First Time” and “Everybody Has a Dream.” The former, with its boilerplate chipperness, is similar to a Piano Man cut, and it culminates with him trying to make a move and leave a good first impression. And then, on “Everybody Has a Dream,” Joel adopts something like a preacher’s rasp to say that his true dream is for love and a quiet home life, juxtaposing the domesticity with “everybody” else’s silly pipe dreams. What the two songs lack are clear foils, someone for Joel to contest or present as somehow pitiable. There is no God-fearing Virginia, no silk-masked Stranger, no “crazy child,” just Joel alone, trying to make sense of himself or where he is.
There are two props on the cover of The Stranger: the theatre mask, which reflects the words of the title song, and, obscured in shadows, a pair of boxing gloves. Joel boxed briefly as a teenager before a punch to the face broke his nose and ended the fun of the hobby. “The last fight I had, one that was actually in a ring, was with a guy who was a terrible boxer,” he recalled of his final opponent. “That’s when I realized that no matter how ‘bad’ I think I am, there’s always somebody badder.” Suited and barefoot on The Stranger, Joel, 28 years old, kneels on the bed and looks down at the mask on the pillow, representing his album, his songs, a desire to make something of his own, something new and successful. But the gloves dangle like an albatross. He had fought and gotten knocked down; now it was his time to land one.

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Nobody's Smiling is one of Common's most personal records in quite some time, reflecting on the ups and downs of his relationship with producer No I.D. and meditating on the loss of J Dilla. He also addresses his own conflicted decision to leave the city and people that so greatly shaped some of his best music.

Nobody's Smiling

Common exists in sainted territory in hip-hop: the rare rapper who's appeared on "Oprah", he's earned a default level of respect and can reliably release major label albums every few years, no matter what the industry climate. For many, Common's latest album, Nobody's Smiling, will hold a polarized position in the midst of Chicago's senseless violence, a symbol of all that is right in a genre too often derided for moral depravity and/or artistic bankruptcy. Others will cynically dismiss this latest effort, as Common hasn't lived in Chicago in years but is releasing a record capitalizing on the city's newly gritty national reputation. But Common's not interested in moralizing, nor trendchasing. Although he writes a familiar snapshot of Chicago, its troubles seem a catalyst for his own creativity. The album's most convincing when tackling the push-and-pull conflict between the individual and his hometown, as Common's good intentions are buoyed by memory, generosity, and attentiveness to his craft.
Looming over the album is the specter of Chicago's gun violence and the music which first brought it to our attention; Common's 2011 album The Dreamer/The Believer was released just weeks before Chief Keef hit the national radar. So Nobody's Smiling displays some idealism-drain, its black and white cover art reflecting a stripped down sound. Common and longtime producer No I.D. aren't interested in competing with the street sounds emanating from his hometown. Instead, they go for a complementary feel, with old head-friendly percussive loops and blaxploitation rhythms ("Blak Majik," "Speak My Piece," "Hustle Harder"). Common's delivery has a loose, nimble quality throughout, his words tumbling out with practiced ease. His lyrics are writerly, internal rhymes focused on a history he can recall but which seems distant now: "Have you ever heard of Black Stone around Black Stones?/ And Four CHs, Vice Lords, Stony Island on Aces/ The concrete matrix, street organizations, they gave violations, hood public relations."
Common's approach here is to intertwine his own story with his memories of Chicago in order to forge a connection to the next generation. The use of a Biggie sample on "Speak My Piece" is emblematic; when Common was an emerging artist, the young Christopher Wallace spoke powerfully to the same state of mind Chicago's street rappers wrestle with today. "7 Deadly Sins", a bonus track on Nobody's Smiling, sounds like another way to integrate a mid-'90s street feel, complete with a "Ten Crack Commandments"-esque concept and Wu-Tang-recalling beat. Throughout, Common attempts to speak to everyone, offering bits of wisdom for a new generation while contextualizing for an older, outside audience.
This attempt at generational continuity also explains why Common grants a platform for a phalanx of strong guest stars to shine. Opener "The Neighborhood" features Lil Herb, a young street rapper whose memories of his era are more freshly etched in each bar: "Used to post up on that strip, I look like a street sign/ I been out there three days and I got shot at three times." Meanwhile, West Side rapper Dreezy's verse on "Hustle Harder" argues convincingly that she might be the best bar-for-bar rapper in Chicago right now: "I could be a lady in the streets, but in the booth I pull triggers/ Shots fired, I go harder than a nigga."
Other guest artists, like Def Jam signees Vince Staples and Big Sean, acquit themselves well, providing different points of view on the record's central conflict. Big Sean tones down the usual hamminess, perhaps due to the severity of the subject matter, and catches a slick behind-the-beat flow. But Staples stands out particularly: "Lean and took a puff and then she gave it to my father/ Used to take the bullets out so I could play with the revolver/ Satan serenading ever since I was a toddler." But it's poet Malik Yusef who nearly steals the show, appearing at the end of the album's title track and spitting an evocative piece that captures the album's real central paradoxes: "Now I see how my daddy felt the dark day he discovered that black power didn't keep the lights on." "They drilling on my land but ain't no oil to be found / I might be part of the problem." He hits especially hard while engaging with wordplay in the differences between "shy" and "Chi": "Are these celebrities way too shy to be loyal to the town?"
The album's closer, "Rewind That", is one of Common's most personal records in quite some time, reflecting on the ups and downs of his relationship with No I.D. and meditating on the loss of J Dilla. He  addresses his own conflicted decision to leave the city and people that so greatly shaped some of his best music. Truth is complex, and the popular manichean tensions don't map out so predictably atop "conscious" and "gangster". That's true for street rappers themselves, who have to navigate an ever-increasing divide between their lives and those of the communities who propelled them to fame. And it's true for Common, too, who had to leave his home to continue his career, and for whom—nearly two decades later—finds that the decision still weighs upon him. Nobody's Smiling is driven by the search for this common denominator.


On his first album in seven years, Ted Leo faces down private and public upheaval, as personal tragedy and political calamity fuel the most expansive, emotionally devastating music of his career.

The Hanged Man

Throughout the 2000s, Ted Leo invited us to rally around his heart of oak. At a time when everything was starting to feel ephemeral and imperiled, Leo’s politically enraged, personally engaged, Lizzy-kissed pick-me-ups offered refuge and reassurance. He was the pillar we could lean on when times got tough, a totem of industriousness and perseverance to which we could all aspire. When the better, kinder world we dreamed of seemed to fade out of view—i.e., right around the time George W. Bush won his second term—Leo simply assured us, “There’s a whole lot of walking to do,” and led the way forward.
But the conditions Leo endured after 2010’s The Brutalist Bricks, in both his personal and professional life, nearly pushed him to the breaking point. As the title of his first proper album in seven years ominously suggests, his proverbial oak has come to represent less a wellspring of life than a convenient place to throw up a noose—not for himself, per se, but for the life he once knew, and for the future he imagined.
The Hanged Man was recorded by Leo primarily at his house in Wakefield, R.I., where the longtime New Yorker recently decamped after waving the white flag on the Big Apple and its astronomical cost of living. The physical upheaval followed a series of emotional ones. As he recounted in a recent, soul-baring Stereogum feature, declining record sales and diminishing crowds forced this DIY lifer to seriously consider packing it in. At that career crossroads, Leo was waylaid by tragedy: In 2011, the baby he and his wife were expecting succumbed to a late-term miscarriage. In the wake of all that, one of indie rock’s most impassioned and outspoken voices all but went silent for a couple of years.
Leo’s low-key, winsome collaboration with Aimee Mann as the Both would reintroduce him to the public realm in 2014—a pleasant diversion that helped restore his confidence. But The Hanged Man is where Leo truly unleashes all the pain, anger, fear, and disappointment he’d been harboring over the past half-decade. For the first time, he’s billing himself without his redoubtable band, the Pharmacists; its drummer, Chris Wilson, backs him up on several tracks, but he’s in service of a dramatically different vision than Leo’s typical ampheta-mod anthems. Here, Leo is less rocker than auteur, crafting the most expansive, experimental, and emotionally devastating music of his career (and mostly on his own, save for a handful of strategically deployed guests).
Like the signature state-of-the-union address he delivered 13 years ago, The Hanged Man arrives at a flash point in U.S. politics, though this isn’t exactly Shake the Sheets II: Electric Trumpaloo—much of the material predates last November’s presidential election. But the outcome adds an extra layer of black-cloud coverage to what was already shaping up to be an intensely introspective album. The opening “Moon Out of Phase” wasn’t just written in the election’s aftermath, it actually depicts the Wednesday morning after, with a dejected Leo summoning the will to “barely make it into clothes” as “the creeping and the menace grows.” In sharp contrast to his usual adrenalized modes, the song is a hulking monolith built on a sludgy, droning, one-chord riff that effectively heralds Leo’s first foray into doom metal. Despite the tantalizing rattle of a tambourine, the drums never kick in to push the song forward, as Leo opts to wallow in the muck of America’s “straight white pigpen.” At the same time, you can sense Leo finding strength in the song’s unrelenting ugliness, like a fallen superhero reconnecting with dormant powers.
The Hanged Man continues to project a bold, subversive spirit even after that introductory blast of static clears. “Used to Believe” is an ebullient jangle-pop aria about losing all hope; when Leo sings, “I used to believe we’d be comfortably settled by now,” the sentimental strings feel almost like an act of cruelty, putting a soft-focus patina on a domestic dream that’s fading out of view. And on “Can’t Go Back,” Leo laments his fading fortunes over a jaunty “Mr. Blue Sky” bounce, while Jean Grae’s cheery, Motown-style backing vocals prod him with a velvet-gloved touch.
Clocking in at over an hour, The Hanged Man isn’t always so willing to mask its disillusioned lyrics in pretty dressing: “The Nazarene” subjects a mournful, McCartney-esque piano serenade to the “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” treatment, building its repeated chords into a queasy, slow-motion cyclone. But even as its musical terrain turns more treacherous (like on the overburdened orchestro-electro elegy “Gray Havens”), Leo includes just enough of his patented windmill-powered rave-ups to keep the momentum rolling—and forcefully exorcise the demons plaguing him. “The Future (Is Learning to Wait Around for Things You Didn’t Know You Wanted to Wait For)” crafts the album’s most rousing chorus out of its wordiest title; Leo’s acquiescence turns to rage in the hammering final minute, as if he can’t bring himself to accept his own song’s sanguine, everything-happens-for-a-reason philosophy. The album hits its frenetic peak with “You’re Like Me,” a bloody-knuckled power-pop confessional that obliquely references recent revelations of the sexual abuse he experienced as a child by assuring fellow survivors that they’re not alone.
The latter track forms the first part of a closing triptych that stands as the most lyrically harrowing music of Leo’s career. It’s completed by two songs that unflinchingly address the loss of the baby girl he never got to welcome into the world. With the solitary electric-folk strummer “Lonsdale Avenue,” he tries to find the light in his darkest hour: “She taught me better love that I might love again,” he admits. By contrast, on The Hanged Man’s crushing piano-ballad finale, “Let’s Stay on the Moon,” Leo’s personal journey orbits back to the despair of the album’s similarly lunar-themed opener. “We had a daughter and she died,” he sings with bleary-eyed resignation, before framing his personal apocalypse in terms of a global one: “Let’s stay on the moon/And watch the earth go down.”
But in the song’s final moments, thanks to a makeshift gospel choir featuring Mann, rapper Open Mike Eagle, and comedian Paul F. Tompkins, the statement transforms from a declaration of fuck-it-all nihilism into a promise of renewal. It’s a testament to Leo’s unyielding generosity that he’s willing to elevate a song about a deeply personal trauma into a vehicle for communal catharsis over the sorry state of our world. On The Hanged Man, he invites us to watch it burn with him—because, at this point, it feels like the only option toward building a better one.


Unlike the commercial soundtrack music she writes in her day job, the Los Angeles producer’s solo work is an over-the-top onslaught of electronic noise and withering anti-capitalist sarcasm.

Salesforce

Whether you’re aware of it or not, you are probably a heavy consumer of library music. Any time you watch reality TV, commercials, a YouTube documentary, or anything that requires background music, many of those songs have been sourced from commercial studios tasked with creating music to complement visuals. This niche is how Lauren Bousfield makes a living. The Los Angeles-based producer previously worked under Hans Zimmer helping to sculpt tracks for the likes of Batman v. Superman and Kung Fu Panda 3, and now she spends her days composing library music for television shows and video games. “I have to distill a lot of ideas into something that is passable as music,” she recently told The Wire, wrestling with the dissonance she feels writing tracks intended to have a passive effect. “Society does not work, nothing works, so making music for something that’s like, ‘This totally works!’ makes me feel more sardonic.”
Though she may pay the rent with perfectly unobtrusive songs, Bousfield’s own music is impossible to ignore. Over the last two decades, whether under her own name or as Nero’s Day at Disneyland, Bousfield has raked and scraped synthetic, jagged sounds against one another, crushing her distorted vocals between violent breakcore rhythms with the force of a trash compactor. Hearing her coagulate the horrors of contemporary society into a breakneck rush of sound might be despairingly intense if she didn’t deliver it all with the inflection of a sick joke. Bousfield’s sense of humor is one of her deadliest weapons against disillusionment, and on her latest apocalyptic release, Salesforce, she folds her composerly sensibilities and head-thrashing style of drum’n’bass together to craft one the most aggressive statements of her career.
Bousfield’s work has long felt prescient: Albums like Grievances and Dead Malls and Avalon Vales depicted a rave-soaked landscape where the internet has dissolved the boundaries between genres and genders. Salesforce plays like the evil shadow twin to modern digicore, particularly on the cacophonously melodic “Hazer,” where Bousfield pairs up with Ada Rook of Black Dresses. Rook’s bleating screams make a vicious counterpart to Bousfield’s scorched-earth drum programming, and together the duo builds to a surprisingly hooky chorus, emerging from the harrowing sludge with something actually resembling pop.
Track titles like “Mansions No One Wants to Buy for Any Price” and “Headstone Prices on Credit” offer a helpful frame for Bousfield’s vision of a capitalist wasteland, since her own hissing, heavily processed vocals can be difficult to make out. But the lyrics are worth reading to follow how she dementedly twists corporate signifiers into cartoonish shapes. “I want to reiterate our core values,” she keens over the choral opening passage of “Mansions,” before requesting the listener to “break your demon dick off inside me.” These laugh-out-loud moments come sandwiched between bouts of industrial onslaught. “Sable Wings” makes reference to a “Wingstop surveillance campaign,” while “Debtors Prison Click Here Disney Needs to See This” instructs us to “grind up Goofy’s bones and snort”—this comes after Goofy himself even makes an appearance in the Kingdom Hearts III-quoting intro of “Hazer,” but it doesn’t take long for his gawrsh-ing voice to be swallowed whole by an ocean of terraformed noise. Bousfield exploits this same sense of plasticity in her sound design as well, using chintzy, quantized synth tones to uncanny effect. When the spiraling keys of “Hail Sound” begin to stretch and distort into unnatural shapes, it’s like watching a grand piano bleed out all over the floor.
Bousfield’s approach is so aggressively berserk it makes Fire-Toolz seem radio-friendly by comparison, and the tracks where she exerts more controlled dynamics are the most rewarding. When “Narrow Down Concepts Force Meaning” slowly ramps up its baroque piano intro before exploding into a blitz of chopped-up breaks, it makes for a brain-splittingly cathartic release. Bousfield’s music operates at such a fast clip that it can be too much for the brain to process, yet that overload feels like exactly the point. “Permanently Closed” climaxes with a burst of drum breaks sped up so quickly that they register as a wall of snares, making it hard to do anything but bang your head in an attempt to keep up. At a time where it’s easy to become numb to the hell that corporate greed has wrought, Bousfield’s music is a thrilling reminder of the punishing absurdity that surrounds us.


Shameless holiday cash-grab recycles old Biggie verses in new songs that feature contributions from Jay-Z, Just Blaze, and, um, Korn.

The Notorious B.I.G.: Duets: The Final Chapter

Duets: The Final Chapter

"I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."
-Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818
He's not coming back like some revivified monster. This attempted resuscitation, this half-assed memory-stirrer, is a project of the crassest order. It's graverobbing at its most furtive, orchestrated by a master career-tarnisher. Igor Diddy lurks, hunch-backed, quietly approaching your ear: "Hey there, young consumer, do you like my best friend, the legendary Notorious B.I.G.? Dr. Pha and I, we've breathed new life, created vivacity, and taken creation from God's hands."
It's particularly sad because statement albums were never lost on Biggie. The scope and fearlessness of Ready to Die says as much. The push/pull stories between the then-Sean "Puffy" Combs and his meal ticket are renowned. Ever the capitalist, he constantly sought ways to remix street records into pop hits. But Biggie, a natural songwriter, was always conscious of credibility, name-checking Jeru the Damaja and Nas and Gang Starr. For the most part, he could write hits without pandering, instead leaning on a confusing vulnerability/masculinity complex and that chunky voice. All's to say, he was no saint, nor a pariah of pop. But he had integrity. Duets ignores all this precedent by cashing in blindly, amassing pointless guest spots and fusing old verses over tinny, soulless productions.
Bad Boy has recruited hacks and hit-hounds like Scott Storch, Jazze Pha, and Swizz Beatz to reconfigure songs that needn't be touched, or gotten sound-specific artists like Akon and Mobb Deep to put together Biggie Smalls-Made-Easy cookie-cutters. The first posthumous B.I.G. release, Born Again, had plenty of problems, but at least unheard music saw the light of day. As far as I can tell, this project is a sham. For years we'd been told that Mister Cee, the DJ credited with breaking Biggie, had a stash of unreleased vocals and freestyles. We were told he was waiting to unleash these vocals for a duets project that would blow our wigs back. That's not this project. There are zero unheard verses here.
The list of collaborators ranges from intriguing (Scarface, Nas, T.I.) to groan-inducing (we see you Korn and Nelly), but few of the songs actually leave any impression. The Just Blaze-produced "Living in Pain", jacking Biggie and 2Pac's verses from the latter's "House of Pain", is the only truly effective track. Sampling Lamont Dozier's sweeping, many-times-flipped "Blue Sky and Silver Bird", the song's ululating strings summon an epic sadness, while Mary J. Blige's expertly delivered chorus oozes with conviction.
But elsewhere, only a decent Slim Thug verse saves "Breakin' Old Habits" from utter mediocrity. Not as much can be said for the middling new R. Kelly and Missy Elliott songs featuring tacked-on verses, or the ludicrous Dipset/Lil' Wayne collaboration "I'm Wit Whateva" that doesn't even feature B.I.G.'s vocals. Is this a mistake or are Jim Jones dedications enough to justify inclusion here? Maybe "Whatchu Want", the requisite Jay-Z duet (ludicrously credited to the Commission), is a big deal, but it's stock compared to their earlier thriller "Brooklyn's Finest". Even the songs that make sense, like "Get Your Grind On", with Fat Joe, Big Pun, and Freeway, fall flat.
If anything, this compilation will have youngsters scratching their head over what made the Notorious B.I.G. the subject of hero worship. Everything from the foolishly illustrated album art, featuring a stoned-looking Christopher Wallace with a crown slooping off his head, to the overwrought dedications from his kids, mom, and Lil' Cease (!) flounders in the face of his intimidating if overstated legacy. This record has no rhythm or personality-- and truthfully, no reason to exist. The presence of so many of big names speaks to his importance, vis-à-vis the Rapper=Rock Star revolution. But none of these artists can speak to B.I.G. And if they could, something tells me he wouldn't have much to say back.


This album of bright, hymn-like drone is mesmerizing but also oddly challenging, with constantly shifting textures that invite steady attention.

Nicholas Szczepanik: Please Stop Loving Me

Please Stop Loving Me

When I first started listening to Nicholas Szczepanik's latest album, its title felt off by 180 degrees. Its single, 48-minute track is warm, reverent, and emotional. Compared to some recent trends in drone, which tend more toward the dark and cavernous, Please Stop Loving Me's bright organ tones are practically hymn-like. In other words, this is music that sounds like it wants you to love it.
The further I got into the album, though, the more Szczepanik's wry choice of name made sense. Whenever you try to get too comfortable with his drones-- to glide across their surface or ride them like a soft cloud-- he pushes back. His sounds constantly twist, dive, and circle, avoiding complacency and requiring you to do the same. Innumerable shifts in volume, tone, and tempo occur with sneaky unpredictability. Often Szczepanik will lull you into calm waters before tossing you into choppy waves. There is a lot to love here, much of it mesmerizing, even soothing. Just don't turn your brain off, because Szczepanik is more interested in challenging than hypnotizing.
The beauty of Please Stop Loving Me is that he manages to do both consistently. There's really no point along Szczepanik's journey-- which doesn't feel long or short, but more outside of time-- where the music's meditative qualities outstrip its thought-provoking ones or vice versa. In that sense, his material reminds me most of the careful work of Kyle Bobby Dunn. There's an intangible similarity between the ways both musicians turn sounds and patterns into wordless emotional language. But where Dunn is a master at massaging his tones toward quietude, Szczepanik excels at finding subtlety and nuance in immersive volumes. Even at his softest here, he could fill an airplane hangar with his music.
Szczepanik's work conjures lots of images like that one. Whenever I listen, I find myself thinking in pictures and metaphors, giving shapes and colors to his sounds the way I imagine the faces and voices of characters in a book. So it's tempting to concoct a narrative that could accompany this sonic epic, and claim that its arcs and curves are scene changes and plot twists. Maybe they are, but what impresses most about Szczepanik's story is that it could be told only with sound, and only through his particular, engrossing way with it.


After last year’s more than promising Stranger, it is difficult to regard the Stockholm rapper’s latest mixtape as anything but a step backward.

Poison Ivy

He is only 22 years old, but Jonatan Aron Leandoer Håstad, a.k.a. Yung Lean, has already traced a lifetime’s narrative arc. The Stockholm-born rapper formed a successful underground hip-hop group while still in high school. At 16, he went viral, with videos for songs like “Ginseng Strip 2002,” he sold out clubs across the United States his first time there, and he was profiled in The New Yorker and The New York Times. Tasting stardom, he became addicted to Xanax, lean, and cocaine, was hospitalized, and then ushered to the Swedish countryside to recover. He released his candid, back-to-basics comeback album last November, at the age of 21. “I’m not a temporary artist,” Lean told Fader in 2016, in a nearly 5000-word profile charting his storied rise and fall. Barely past legal drinking age, it feels like he’s been around forever.
Yung Lean was destined to be ephemeral: a short-lived novelty act from the SoundCloud ether who would vanish back into Scandinavian obscurity when our attention drifted to another fleeting trend. But then, as the rapper endured personal hardship, the landscape of hip-hop changed, and in the years since “Ginseng Strip 2002” exactly the style of narcotic, despondent cloud-rap of which Lean was an early practitioner ascended from niche curiosity to the dominant mode of the rap mainstream. It’s kismet: Yung Lean fits in better with the sound of 2018 than he ever has before. He didn’t just outlast his fate as a passing fad—he watched the fad prevail. For an artist who ought to seem outdated, Poison Ivy could hardly arrive at a more opportune time.
And yet it is difficult to regard Poison Ivy as anything but a step backward. Last year’s Stranger was almost universally agreed to represent a step forward for Lean—its production more coherent, its aesthetic more refined, its content more articulate than what had been demonstrated on his previous albums. The expansive, often impressionistic production of Stranger has been scaled back and stifled, exchanged for some of the least-inspired beats he has rapped over since 2014’s inchoate Unknown Memory.
This is a real disappointment. Stranger afforded glimpses of the artist it seemed Lean could be: a defiantly weird, unfashionably bookish white kid from Sweden interested in gothic horror and the supernatural, capable of conjuring cinematic visions both disturbing and evocative. It’s hard to reconcile that artist with some of the feeble images Lean summons up on Poison Ivy. He stumbles right off the bat, on opening track “happy feet”: “I be draped in Burberry/Late nights like the cemetery,” he lazily starts. “Got magic like I’m Harry/Dark magician, you a fairy.” “Yellowman,” the last track on Stranger, was based on the 19th-century short story collection The King in Yellow. That seems a far cry now from gay jokes and references to Harry Potter. Where’s the imaginative fervor of the artist who as recently as last year claimed an affinity with Yukio Mishima and Edgar Allen Poe?
It isn’t merely that Lean seems less serious—Stranger had its kid-like flourishes and pop cultural references less dignified than classic literature, and his music has always spanned a wide range of brows both high and low. But one of the chief creative breakthroughs of that album was its candid specificity. He allowed himself to get confessional, dealing honestly with his struggles with mental health and the nightmares that evidently plagued him. (“When I’m afraid I lose my mind/It’s fine, it happens all the time,” he admitted on album highlight “Agony”.) He cracked something when he learned to be particular. On Poison Ivy he recedes into the general. “Ridin round town/Blowin dough/Money spender,” he drawls on “bender++girlfriend,” a song on which he compares himself to the “Futurama” character. This follows tracks in which he sees himself variously in Sauron, Darth Maul, and “The Sims.”
At eight tracks and 23 minutes, the Poison Ivy mixtape is something of a stopgap in the mind of Lean. It doesn’t align with the arc he has been tracing since the beginning of his career, following through on the creative potential he’s been developing. The apathetic languor of a song like “ropeman” or the astonishingly limp “trashy” are without the glimmers of inspiration and wit that made his most recent releases promising even when not quite successful. It all feels distinctly like stagnation at precisely the point when he seems ready to move forward.


Fatima Yamaha’s 2004 song “What's a Girl to Do?” made him a cult favorite. Here, on his second release since then, the Dutch producer offers future directions but none as captivating as his start.

Araya EP

Fatima Yamaha’s new Araya EP would not exist without persistent cheerleading from a few impressively dedicated followers. The Dutch producer Bas Bron released a record as Yamaha in 2004 and then appeared done with the name. He continued to put out records under other pseudonyms—Bastian, Seymour Bits—and run his Magnetron label. The results of the Yamaha experiment, a four-track EP titled A Girl Between Two Worlds, seemed like a one-off curio.
But over time, those who heard the EP became smitten. In particular, they swooned over “What's a Girl to Do?,” with its sprightly synthesizers and existential-crisis dialog sampled from Lost In Translation. Two labels, D1 Recordings and Dekmantel, eventually released the song; another devotee, producer Hudson Mohawke, included Yamaha's tune in an Essential Mix for BBC Radio 1 in 2009 and used it as the basis for “Resistance,” a new track featuring Jhené Aiko, in 2015.
This put Bron in a strange spot: a Def Jam vocalist with Top 40 cred was singing one of Yamaha’s melodies, but Yamaha barely existed. So Bron pulled the moniker out of mothballs and released the LP Imaginary Lines in 2015. He could have done anything he wanted—he was hardly constrained by precedent—but he decided to stay faithful to his most hardcore fans. Imaginary Lines mostly picked up where A Girl Between Two Worlds left off, maintaining a handsome balance between fluffy and driving. Movie-score atmospheres sit easily next to songs like “Love Invaders,” with its resistance-is-futile grip recalling crackerjack pop songs.
In contrast, the three tracks on Araya represent a swivel away from the accessibility that earned Yamaha ardent admirers. Though “Piayes Beach Bar and Grill” has plenty of dinky electric snap, it avoids any head-rush moments: the synths never achieve peak friskiness, there’s no sample lying in wait to ambush the listener and suddenly transform the song's final quarter. The track ends during the middle of a showy solo, so you get the annoyance of indulgence without the triumphant, ascend-the-scale payoff.
“Romantic Bureaucracy” maintains distance in a different way; it has the exclusive feel of an inside joke. The song plays like a response to “Love's Got Me High,” a ’90s floor-wrecker produced by Detroit stalwart Terrence Parker. As one piano lays out a simple groove similar to the one that carried Parker’s track, Bron adds criss-crossing clusters of keyboard notes—sonic paperwork—on top. A beat never arrives to cut through all the red tape.
Still, Bron can't help but make something hard to shake—that quality, after all, is what kept the Yamaha spark alive for all these years. In that vein, Araya’s title track is crisp and chipper, with a commanding melody ricocheting playfully across a stern, ’80s-pop low-end. It's not much of a leap from here to the work of a more mainstream producer like Eric Prydz. There's a pair of especially pleasing moments around the song’s four-minute mark: a light drum beats out a military rat-a-tat behind the primary melody just as it finishes one strafing run and prepares to begin another pass. This is a great trick for stakes-raising that you can also find in hits like Maxwell’s “Ascension (Don't Ever Wonder).”
Bron needs these overtly gratifying tracks—without them, Yamaha wouldn’t have picked up boosters, and the project would have remained a quirky singularity. But even with “Araya,” this EP makes you wonder about Yamaha’s status. First the persona inspired a minor cult; then it stormed back as a small-scale dancefloor hero. What is Yamaha now? Araya offers a few possibilities, but no answers.


Nailing a transformative take on grime, Gobstopper Records founder and London DJ Mr. Mitch's new full-length is more restrained, more skeletal, and often more mournful than anything he's done before.

Parallel Memories

For a genre built on, and named after, trunk-rattling energy bordering on absolute filth, grime also holds a certain power in its calmest moments. Before last year, Mr. Mitch would have been considered a surprise source for that kind of work. The Gobstopper Records founder and London DJ was a monster out the gate, with a self-titled 2010 debut EP and 2012 beat-battle showstopper "Senior Bass" standing as early-career trophies for the producer; his ability to bump the heavy shit but shun cold-concrete aggression for bright, alcopop-buzzed hyperactivity was what made him exciting. Even when he went a little overcast, he did so playfully—for proof, check out the ODB-looping Grime 2.0 highlight "Viking" and its tipsy, bottom-heavy synthesizer whistle. It's as potent with "Funky Worm" squiggle-synths as classic g-funk was.
That's why Parallel Memories is surprising. Just a year ago, Mitch was bumping trap-drenched, hip-hop-adjacent bass-war artillery like the Suave EP. But he also made a point of countering last year's agressive, grime-producer soundclash "war dubs" free-for-all with his own simmered-down "Peace Edits". Now he's breaking out with a full-length record that's more restrained, more skeletal, and often more mournful than anything he's done before, a metamorphosis from somebody who's had fans growing to expect them on the regular. And he so regularly nails that transformative take on grime that it's tempting to assign the things he does here as a new potential signature sound. At the minimum, it gives him a new tool in his kit.
The wide-open hushed silences and swooning interplay between synth hooks and pared-down beats puts Parallel Memories in the neighborhood of something that could be called "ambient grime" if that weren't a little too pat. But the slow-burning loops, distance-making reverb, and glassy digital melodies are made to envelop, not built to destroy. The first kick on the album doesn't show up until nearly two and a half minutes into opener "Afternoon After", and when it does finally thump its way through warped-Minimoog swells that chirp like the offspring of harps and whistles, it sounds like a bomb being dropped. That's just one bracing use of negative space, and in a track more suited to scene-setting; in the cuts with more of a focus on rhythm—as busy as the plastic clatter of "Intense Faces" or as screwed-down as the deep-snow trudge of "Hot Air"—the sawed-off beats hit harder for the air around them.
But what's remarkable is how many different moods Mitch is able to evoke this way. Take "Don't Leave": it's simple—and staggeringly effective—to draw off the power of a sampled hook like he does with Blackstreet's "Don't Leave Me", pitting virtuoso R&B vocal intensity alongside delicate, wandering, halting digital melodies that create deep tension with two different strains of slow-motion heartache. But the calm that masks tension also sweetens harshness, like the way the subtly martial snap-thump stutter-step beats of "Intense Faces" shed their gloom the moment he brings in its plinky keyboard counterpoint. And even inside those juxtapositions, there are different shades and detours that provoke mood swings through each loop. "The Night" is frayed nerves or lucid relaxation depending on the angle, a recurring indistinct voice repeating the same two syllables that could either be calling somebody's name or waving them goodbye. "Bullion" plays out like a electro banger slowed to a crawl because the gears are gummed up, and draws out an odd, ill-at-ease feel of triumphant queasiness in the process. And "Sweet Boy Code", a Peace Edit of Dark0's "Sweet Boy Pose", maintains the original's fast-forward euphoria even at half-speed, floating through frozen time with a lightheaded clarity. There's plenty of room for interpretation in the margins of this music—but there's even more room to breathe, and to move.


In collaboration with singer Xan Tyler, the musician and producer Kramer offers a thoughtful, cavernous-sounding counterweight to a mischievous career.

Let It Come Down: Songs We Sang in Our Dreams

Songs We Sang in Our Dreams

Kramer, Let It Come Down’s main songwriter, fosters the sort of mystique you might expect of someone who goes by his last name alone. Born in 1958 and adopted by a Long Island car salesman and his wife, Kramer made a reputation as an independent, staunchly anti-industry figure well before he learned his birth father was a famed PR executive and his biological brother was high up at Interscope. Kramer’s own label, Shimmy-Disc, offered bands verbal agreements instead of written contracts and forged some of the iconic indie sounds of the 1990s: Kramer discovered Ween, produced all three of Galaxie 500’s records, and some of Low and Half Japanese’s most influential work.
Beginning in the late ’80s, Kramer and performance artist Ann Magnuson performed as Bongwater. The band’s four LPs drew their sense of political conviction from the revolutionary 1960s, while tapping into the day’s slacker culture with a loose sound and titles like Double Bummer and The Power of Pussy. After Bongwater split, Kramer went solo, releasing the two-hour-long The Guilt Trip and the comparatively focused The Secret of Comedy. Although he composed beautiful classical pieces like The Greenberg Variations, his own rock efforts were largely overlong and smattered with profundity, like a genius novelist’s first drafts.
Let It Come Down feels like a counterweight to a mischievous career, a project that Kramer—once an avowed improviser—has worked on for years. He weaves the weight of time into its structure, stretching simple lines into blank canvases for emotion. On Songs We Sang in Our Dreams, boyish humor blooms into something mature and feminine, thanks largely to the band’s crystalline vocalist, British singer Xan Tyler. Perhaps more important, the duo’s debut embraces a logic Kramer fled until his seventh decade: It plays to his strengths.
Among them is a knack for picking collaborators, an idiosyncratic musical vernacular, and an unparalleled ability to make music sound “hall-sized,” the term Galaxie 500’s Dean Wareham used to describe the producer’s treatments on their classic song “Tugboat.” Songs We Sang in Our Dreams is cavernous with strings, synth-aping Les Paul, and instrumental cameos, whether tanpura drones or cuíca samples. A dream-pop record from one of the genre’s great architects, it jettisons messy rock for delicate arrangements and surprising vocal accompaniments.
Tyler is a perfect foil, and a stark contrast to previous Kramer collaborators like Magnuson and Half Japanese’s madman-in-chief Jad Fair. While those musicians were notable for their archness, Tyler leaves an impression because of her technical skill, delivering precise, roving melodies that play off the structure provided by Kramer’s acoustic guitar and piano chords. The pair’s harmonies may feel reminiscent of Low, particularly since both duos rely on male-female tension. But while Low’s dynamic often feels romantic, Let It Come Down give the impression of two people alone, singing with identical longing from separate isolations.
Kramer’s unique vernacular helps distinguish Let It Come Down from the tradition he helped create. Samba rhythms—a career-long predilection—form the backbone of “Fingers,” a song that clashes wonderfully with the project’s otherwise consistent mood. The recorded speech in “One Moon,” “Three Wishes,” and closer “Four Hands” evokes Bongwater, but instead of forefronting agit-prop messages, the tracks stand out for their meticulousness, the repetition and timbre of human voices building to something ambiguous yet filled with doom.
Like the sand sliding down the neck of Ed Ruscha’s hourglass on the album’s cover, Kramer and Tyler are two people out of time, writing wistful, dread-filled songs for a planet in a similar situation. “I’ve lost interest in music that makes people laugh,” Kramer told Magnet magazine in 2007. “I want people dipping their toes in a pool of tears. In such an ugly world, beauty is the only true protest.” Let It Come Down fulfills the lofty, admirable goal that he set for himself. This won’t sound like protest music, yet Songs We Sang In Our Dreams rises far above the ugliness of the everyday before it sets us down, reflective if not enraged, in a place where everything seems beautiful.


*Start Your Own Fucking Show Space *is a loving and lovable tribute to the Brooklyn DIY space Death by Audio

Various Artists: Start Your Own Fucking Show Space

Start Your Own Fucking Show Space

There once was a time when live albums were a crucial step for rock bands. They were a way of defining the band’s legacy (this is what we sound like, these are the songs we play) as well as proving their technical prowess as performing artists. But as YouTube has made live recordings more immediate than ever, and rock bands in general have become less of cultural icons, the live album has, for the most part, gone the way of the Enhanced CD. Start Your Own Fucking Show Space, though, is a different kind of live album: a means of documenting a venue, not a particular act. The triple-LP set is a loving and lovable tribute to Death by Audio, the Brooklyn DIY space and pedal shop that always operated on old-fashioned values, even while standing at the forefront of a very particular trend in underground rock music.
With much of the crowd noise edited out between tracks (likely a way to keep things moving swiftly and to keep the set from spanning six LPs instead of just three), *Show Space *feels like a type of collection just as anachronistic as the live album. For the most part, it plays like a carefully curated mixtape, chronicling the last decade of guitar-centric noise-rock (save for a few synthier moments by the likes of Future Islands and Dan Deacon). Given the immersive, comprehensive feel of the album, it’s impressive that these recordings are all taken from one month, November 2014, DBA’s final one as a venue. As indicated by the extensive liner notes, featuring the lineups for all 1800 shows that took place in the venue’s seven-and-a-half years of operation, there’s a communal, democratic essence to Show Space. Boasting 26 different tracks and running at 95-minutes, Show Space flows with a familiar, comfortable sense of continuity.
Of course, some bands are bigger than others. Ted Leo & the Pharmacists’ “Bottled in Cork” arrives halfway through the set, sounding as close as these songs come to a hit single. Meanwhile, a gripping performance of Thee Oh Sees’ “Turned Out Light,” a highlight from last year’s Mutilator Defeated at Last, is one of the most euphoric moments: a performance by a band that has perfected the noisy, psych-rock ideal that so many DBA acts aspire to. Performing several months before the release of their debut album, Downtown Boys play a furious, lightning-in-a-bottle “Wave of History” rife with excitement and anger. Nots’ “Strange Range,” meanwhile, is propelled by a rhythmic rumble: a tense performance, the sound of a band bracing for impact. By collecting performances by bands at all different stages in their careers, the set, like a good festival lineup, alternates well between moments of veteran competence and nervous, excited energy.
“I feel like I grew up here in a way,” announces Ty Segall, before playing a righteous and intense “Wave Goodbye.” “I played my first New York show here as a young lad,” he explains. The show Segall is referring to is included as a bundle with the 3xLP. Combined with his performance on the compilation, it allows you to hear his growth in a concise before-and-after juxtaposition. Throughout its brief runtime, Segall’s 2008 DBA set sounds anxious and embryonic, just a small window into the electric performer he would become just years later. His performance of “Wave Goodbye” on this compilation, is powerful, confident, and emotional by comparison. The two performances represent exactly the kind of artistic growth DBA nurtured, creating an environment that made artists feel compelled to bring their best to its stage.
It’s a sentiment alluded to by A Place to Bury Strangers’ Oliver Ackermann, founder of Death by Audio, before his band’s performance of “I Lived My Life to Stand in the Shadow of Your Heart.” Monolithic and noisy, A Place to Bury Strangers sounds like exactly the kind of band whose frontman would run a guitar pedal shop and music venue; their moody post-punk indebted to more band names than can fill a wardrobe of t-shirts and their void-filling feedback like the sound of a hundred bands soundchecking at once. “Much love to everyone involved. We all knew who was there,” he slurs, before correcting himself. “Maybe you don’t know everybody, but everybody was fucking really great.” It’s a spirit of community, empowerment, and consistency that was essential to DBA, and it’s one that is exemplified in a righteous way by these recordings.


On Guided by Voices’ latest, Robert Pollard sounds reenergized by a sobering sense of lucidity. Some of these songs rank among the most intimate and earthbound in the band’s bottomless canon.

Guided by Voices: How Do You Spell Heaven

How Do You Spell Heaven

Since reuniting in 2010, Guided by Voices’ trajectory has essentially played out as a LARP-worthy reenactment of their ’90s narrative. After a cavalcade of ramshackle releases from the beloved “classic” line-up, Pollard once again dismantled the group and reformulated it anew. And just as he did about 20 years ago, he’s turned to guitarist Doug Gillard to be his Ronson/Richards-esque right-hand man, and to serve as the steely anchor of a crew that now includes guitarist Bobby Bare Jr., bassist Mark Shue, and drummer Kevin March. After taking this retooled GBV on tour in 2016, Pollard gave them the ultimate recorded initiation earlier this year with the 32-song double-album opus August by Cake, even granting Gillard, Shue, and March lead turns at the mic to fill the vocal-foil role once occupied by Tobin Sprout.
But despite its generously democratic approach, August by Cake’s crazy-quilt sprawl wasn’t necessarily the best showcase of this rock-solid unit’s road-tested roar. In hindsight, the album served the same transitional function as 1997’s Mag Earwhig!, the record that first built a bridge between GBV’s early lo-fi experimentation and high-definition ambition. Now, with the expedient follow-up, How Do You Spell Heaven, Pollard and Gillard get to pretend they’re on TVT Records all over again, indulging their radio-rock fantasies without having to deal with the major-label paperwork or pressure to become the next Weezer.
Much of GBV’s post-reunion output has necessitated some degree of excavation to separate the premium tipples from the proverbial pile-up of crushed empties. But How Do You Spell Heaven requires no such effort. With Pollard reassuming all lead-vocalist duties, this handsomely crafted record strikes a balance of crystalline jangle, authoritative swagger, and Wire-schooled crunch reminiscent of 2001’s (way underrated) Isolation Drills. The album’s most immediate earworms—“The Birthday Democrats,” “Diver Dan,” “Paper Cutz”—bound about like kids running through a sprinkler on the first warm day of the year, basking in the fresh air and sun-kissed splendor. And even songs that initially seem like off-the-cuff oddities prove to be less typical GBV fragments than seeds that blossom in surprising ways: the bossa-nova sway of “King 007” triggers a wailing proto-metal rave-up; “How to Murder a Man (In 3 Acts)” begins as a simmered-down rumble, but soon tries to whip through enough structural shifts to fill Abbey Road’s second side in less than three minutes. (Appropriately enough, it’s immediately answered by a rare GBV instrumental, “Pearly Gates Smoke Machine,” whose lead-guitar trade-offs and audible bonhomie posit it as a gently chooglin’ cousin to the Beatles’ “The End”).
On top of polishing up the band’s sound, Guided by Voices’ TVT releases also showcased a newfound clarity and emotional candor in Pollard’s often obtuse, fantastical lyrics, and How Do You Spell Heaven gamely follows suit. Even Pollard’s most outré songwriting can occasionally acquire some accidental real-world resonance—not the least of which is releasing a song called “Steppenwolf Mausoleum” the very week a member of Steppenwolf passed away. But How Do You Spell Heaven winds down with a trifecta of songs that rank among the most intimate and earthbound in the band’s bottomless canon: “Just to Show You” is a gently sashaying declaration of devotion, while the self-evident “Low Flying Perfection” is a harmony-gilded, country-dusted ballad from a band that’s often in pursuit of high-flying imperfection.
And then there’s “Nothing Gets You Real,” a slice of shimmering melancholy that could pass for mid-’80s Go-Betweens, contrasting its glistening guitar strums with a brutally honest account of how ennui can lead to self-harm: “Something is revealed, slashing at your arm,” Pollard sings, “something you can feel, sounding the alarm.” He once fancied himself the lost soul who shoots himself with rock’n’roll, and certainly Pollard has injected enough of the stuff over 100-plus releases that you couldn’t fault him for becoming numb to its effects. But even in those moments when How Do You Spell Heaven doesn’t give him an occasion to scissor-kick, he sounds reenergized by a sobering sense of lucidity.


The New Zealand songwriter returns with a sparse and oblique album whose gentle psychedelic folk and beguiling free association proudly resist interpretation.

Warm Chris

Not everything has to come to a logical conclusion; not everything needs to be about something. In her lecture “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” the writer Garielle Lutz explains her fondness for language where “the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language.” By that, she means that language, for some, is at its best when it can be isolated, when it takes on a sort of synesthetic, acoustic resonance. You can apply this terminology to the songwriting of New Zealand’s Aldous Harding, who, for four albums, has made folk music with a conceptual weight that’s difficult to categorize or assign to any established narrative. Her latest album, Warm Chris, is a record of the portable solitude that Lutz writes about: It is opaque, surreal, and above all, lonely.
At first blush, Warm Chris is almost a discouraging listen. Its soft, slightly psychedelic folk pop is deceptively thorny and dense. You have to learn how to listen to it, kind of like how you have to teach yourself how to read Samuel Beckett or Renata Adler. It is less accessible than 2019’s Designer: Most of the pop hooks and acoustic bass drops are gone. It moves slowly, and the music flourishes where you least expect it. A song like “Ennui” builds in waves, with an arrangement that snakes from strident pianos to squeezes of baritone sax. Harding’s voice sounds plucked from a dream, growing more awake as the song progresses. “No one look/And a canny fucking fill/Don’t lie to me!” she sings in one moment. It doesn’t really make sense, but it’s not supposed to: Harding wants you to find your own logic. “I just want everyone to feel like a philosopher. You put on a record, and that record belongs to you,” she said in a recent Pitchfork interview.
Harding is a painstaking songwriter, even though her lyrics tend to veer toward disorder. At times, the vantage point can feel almost dissociative. On “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,” she subverts a traditional song title into something alien and mournful. Banjos and horns bloom brilliantly as Harding sings about love, and her words are soft and searching, as if she were narrating the view through a train window. On the title track, her voice drops from soprano to alto and she sings about watching paper planes burn. Her delivery almost recalls a lullaby, and the tape hiss in the background is as gentle and constant as the sound of waves heard from within a seaside home.
For all her inscrutable intensity, there are also moments of levity and light. “Lawn” is sneaky and surreal, the kind of song that demands you put on vintage Mary Quant and go boogie—or turn into a human-sized gecko wearing Twiggy eyeliner, which is what happens to Harding in the video. On “Leathery Whip,” her voice bends abruptly from the sound of a long-haired songwriter living in Laurel Canyon circa 1972 to that of the chipmunk outside her window. “Here comes life with his leathery whip/Here comes life with his leathery leathery!” she exclaims, joined by the flat, freaky baritone of Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson. She draws out her words as she sings, blowing up vowels like twisty balloons. It’s funny yet vaguely threatening, like the last thing you’d hear before Harry Houdini saws you in half.
The sound of Warm Chris is sparse and oblique, and trying to anchor yourself in Harding’s lyrics can feel like organizing a narrative from the shape of passing clouds. But that’s also where its brilliance lies, what makes this some of Harding’s best songwriting yet. Warm Chris asks you to surrender catchiness and legibility and think instead about how a lyric like “sometimes shepherds have it right” (from “Staring at the Henry Moore”) might also be infused with inexplicable melancholy. Or why on “Lawn,” you have to suppress a giggle when Harding rhymes “They don’t mean a thing to me” with “All these lamps are free!” She favors this kind of free association, unconnected turns of phrase that synthesize the strange, lonely resonance of staring at a piece of abstract art or visiting an empty beach in winter. These are concrete images, but Warm Chris isn’t explicit about anything: The feelings you have when you experience these songs are yours alone.


Former Japan leader strengthens his ties to modern avant-garde, be it jazz, electro-acoustic improvisation, post-glitch electronics, or modern composition.

Manafon

David Sylvian's enjoyed a career common to art-rock-leaning, former English pop stars who've doggedly chased their personal obsessions in lieu of giving their old fanbase what they want, again and again. He's not quite as intractable as, say, old peer Mark Hollis (Talk Talk). For one thing, Sylvian's still releasing records. But from the time Japan ditched the crowd-pleasing glam sheen onward, Sylvian's music has forced his cult to reexamine their ongoing relationship with the master's music every few years.
That's not to say each of Sylvian's reinventions has been total, at least on an album-to-album basis. Manafon is of a piece with the music Sylvian has released in the 21st century, especially 2003's small masterpiece, Blemish. Like that quiet, achingly personal record, Manafon reaffirms Sylvian's aughts-forged connections with the modern avant-garde, be it jazz, electro-acoustic improvisation, post-glitch electronica, modern composition, or the artists who manage to occupy all four worlds while claiming none of them.
A small army of The Wire-friendly types contribute-- sax colossus Evan Parker; Japanese "onkyo" ascetics Sachiko M. and Toshimaru Nakamura; guitar re-inventors on the level (and varying praxis) of Keith Rowe, Christian Fennesz, and members of Polwechsel; and many more. So this may be overstating the obvious, but pop music it ain't. Even the unearthly minimalism of Japan's "Ghosts" or Blemish's "Late Night Shopping" are more immediate than anything on Manafon.
If the results aren't as bracingly sour as Sylvian's cross-purpose collaborations with Derek Bailey, they also lack the warmth he gleaned from Fennesz's heat-prickly electronics. His collaborators' small, brittle, seemingly disconnected instrumental gestures slip around the unctuousness of Sylvian's infamously mannered high-romantic vocals. Sylvian's remains a voice whose only peer for unrestrained melodrama is Antony Hegarty, and whose old-school voluptuousness makes Antony's whinnying jazz-isms seem positively astringent. Sylvian's voice doesn't lend itself to the kind of modern scat one associates with "free" singing, nor does he even try.
But what drama this musical/vocal combination, oil and water on paper, creates on disc. Sylvian often sounds as if he's reading verse rather than singing songs. Choruses are scant, or so languidly paced (as on "The Greatest Living Englishman") that they barely register as such. He lets you know just how carefully he's wrought his words, each line left to vibrate with portent before he'll move onto onto the next. Never have the words "don't know his right foot from his left" seemed so flush with private meaning.
At its best, it's shiver-inducing, a sort of inverse of Joanna Newsom's ecstatic prolixity, though with the same deliberate pacing that can alienate listeners used to songs that progress from verse to verse at the usual clip. Sylvian can rival Michael Gira when it comes to taking his own sweet time getting through a lyric. And at least Swans had brutal, repetitive rhythms to help guide listeners along. Sylvian makes no such concessions to rock tradition, however perverted. And it's the music that makes Manafon a marvel, a mixture of free-improvisation's moment-to-moment sonic epiphanies with Sylvian's molasses-slow kinda-sorta torch songs.
Mark Hollis' 1998 solo album is probably the closest comparison to the backing tracks of Manafon. On that underheard record, Hollis asked why couldn't a singer-songwriter album move to the staggered (and staggering) quietude of Morton Feldman's china-fragile chamber music. Sylvian takes it much further out, though. For one thing, while he knows restraint when necessary, you could never describe Sylvian's performance as "hushed," whereas Hollis often seemed to evaporate from his own compositions.
Sylvian is front-and-center on every song, which is good because he provides the only rhythmic and melodic stability, as the instrumentals dart and scratch and feedback around him, whether it's the scouring burst of formless guitar noise that opens miniature "125 Spheres", the random notes pricking the drone of "Snow White in Appalachia", or the splinters of Bernard Herrmann-meets-AMM piano on "Random Acts of Senseless Violence". Nothing makes "sense" by usual capital-s Songwriting standards; it's music with the rhythm and textural illogic of precipitation. And no other singer is making music this bravely untethered to tradition. Though you know he'll some day move on, you want Sylvian to explore this eerie, expectation-subverting world forever.


The Malian desert guitar band changes things up with acoustic instrumentation and guest spots from Nels Cline and members of TV on the Radio. The invitation of outsiders into the songs is in one sense a measure of the confidence the band has in the integrity and singularity of its sound, and also a reflection of where they've been recently.

Tassili

In southeastern Algeria, there is a vast plateau set aside as a national park called Tassili N'Ajjer. It's close to the border with Libya, and years ago, in the 1980s and early 90s, it was a place of relatively safe passage for Kel Tamashek fighters moving between the refugee camps in Libya and the battlefront in northern Mali. To look at it in satellite images, you might think you were looking at he surface of some distant moon, long ago scarred by geologic activity but now barren and strangely beautiful. It wasn't always this way. Thousands of ancient cave and rock paintings dating from 8,000 to around 1,700 years ago depict a place of plenty that slowly dried to become the modern desert. There are lost religions and civilizations out there.
The Tassili N'Ajjer covers some 45,000 square miles. Near the southern rim of the plateau is a town called Djanet, and it's out in the rocky desert near this town that Tinariwen chose to record its fifth album. The group would have preferred to record near its homebase, Tessalit, in northern Mali, but the security situation was too precarious. The re-flaring of a conflict the group hoped was put to bed clouds some of the album they made-- the first couplet on the album, sung in weary Tamashek by Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, translates to, "What have you got to say, my friends, about this painful time we're living through?" It's not only about the new conflict, though. From there, the song calls out to people who have given up the nomadic life of the desert, lamenting that they've left but seeming to understand why they have.
These complex emotions run through the album, and the predominant feeling that comes out of them is longing, for home, for peace, for old friends, for a way of life whose place in the modern world is uncertain. Tinariwen have mostly put aside their electric guitars for this album and returned to the acoustics they first played together, backing the rhythmic playing with small hand drums and clapping. They've invited in a few friends as well. Nels Cline contributes a beautiful wash of ambient guitar to opener "Imidiwan ma Tennam", two members of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band add rough, sonorous texture to "Ya Messinagh", and TV on the Radio's Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe, who traveled out to the desert recording site, are on hand on five songs, adding subtle backing harmonies and even a bit of lead vocal on one song.
The invitation of outsiders into the songs is in one sense a measure of the confidence the band has in the integrity and singularity of its sound, and also a reflection of where they've been recently. Tinariwen has toured the world and will be in North America again this fall. Some of the longing for the desert in these songs undoubtedly stems from the band's travel schedule, and when Alhabib asks others why they left, he may in part be doing it to remind himself that it's worth the challenge of staying. Meanwhile, Tassili is a very different album from any Tinariwen have recorded before, and they're proving to be a band of considerable range as they build a catalog of varied and excellent albums. Only time will tell where they're able to record the next one, but their retreat to the Tassili seems to have left them creatively refreshed.


On her first album for her new label, the subtly devastating singer-songwriter continues her dark exploration of love and loss.

Marissa Nadler

"Puppet Master", the sixth song on the new album by Marissa Nadler, opens as a lonely country shuffle. Over a muted beat and a quiet circular guitar line, Nadler again pines for a lover who's left, something she's done about as well as any young American songwriter during the last decade. "Cobalt and sea, come back to me," she sings, her loneliness delivered like a ghost's whisper. "I'll never do you wrong." But 90 seconds in, "Puppet Master" takes an unexpected turn, adding vibraphone and transitioning to a near-waltz that suggests the Ronnettes, just slowed and simplified. Nadler's experience sublimates into a puppet's innocence: "Lately, all I want is you," she offers, sweetly and almost cheerily. "Puppet master, see me through."
Nadler volleys between mourning and flirting on "Puppet Master", the centerpiece of her first album for own label, Box of Cedar. It's a telling move, too: Her looks at love have grown increasingly intricate, subtle and-- most importantly-- realistic since her 2004 debut. Her songs are now much too considered to be only elegiac, too complex to be simply sad. That idea translates musically as well. Just like "Puppet Master", the best songs here make slight and unexpected detours. With the help of producer Brian McTear, the songs fit together naturally; whether above synthesizers or acoustic guitar, Nadler never sounds forced. "In Your Lair, Bear", for instance, is an opening masterstroke, a bold six-minute move that patiently rises over its duration. Drums, strings, electric guitars, and harmonies enter and exit in turn; Nadler's two characters use each other, seasonally wearing one another like amulets or accessories. "I took you home, and I crashed you," she sings at the end, subverting her general role as the one demolished by love. She assumes the power just to admit she's abused it.
Nadler's songs are frank, careful examinations of all the ways a relationship can grow cold. Her music sounds as somber as ever here, and her distant air remains one of the most absolutely haunting things you're likely to find anywhere near indie rock. But she's grown past solipsism to become more of a reporter on the battles she's seen. During "Alabaster Queen", she admits giving over to a someone who is nothing but trouble, excusing the "women wistful wanting" with a deliberateness that foretells how badly this will all end. For the emotional minefield "Baby I Will Leave You in the Morning", Nadler's protagonist preemptively asks for forgiveness before she hits the road, where she'll drink to sleep-- most likely, with another lover. She doesn't blame the despair of the gorgeously pained "Wind Up Doll" on the dead husband, and she doesn't badmouth the lover who doesn't reciprocate her eternal, exhausting feelings during "Wedding". She just shares those stories in songs that are as gorgeous as they are elliptical and intriguing.
Nadler's diligently expanded her reach as a writer and arranger during the past decade, culminating so far in the expansive sounds of 2009's Little Hells and the subtly twisting forms of this new eponymous album. But she's part of that caste of American songwriters who don't make music grand enough to be Joanna Newsom or Bon Iver, brazen enough to be Fleet Foxes. Rather, her contemporaries might be considered Richard Buckner, Doug Paisley, Alela Diane, and Bill Callahan-- really good songwriters who can get lost in the current indie climate, or, as Mike Powell wrote about Callahan earlier this year, folks who might "have nothing to add to the general conversation about music in 2011." These are writers sitting on terrific strings of records, yet remaining relatively unnoticed. Once again, though, Nadler has maintained and etched out yet another album of cold, stony truths about the ways we love, or fail to.


Dan Bejar’s intellect is so formidable that it feels like an event in itself, and Destroyer has, for 12 years or so, been the most rewarding intellectual project in indie rock. New album Poison Season retains the sumptuous melancholy of 2011's Kaputt, leavening it with the elegant swoon of Nelson Riddle-era Frank Sinatra.

Poison Season

Dan Bejar's intellect is so formidable it feels like an event, and Destroyer has, for 12 years or so, been indie rock's most rewarding intellectual project. You listen to Destroyer to hear the smartest person at a party mutter funny and erudite things in your ear. Even by 2006, Bejar had generated a world deep and manifold enough that fans of his made, and passed around, a Dan Bejar lyric generator. His mind, and the music he's made exploring its contours, is a minor zip code in independent rock music.
Kaputt from 2011 exposed that zip code a little bit, briefly subjecting Bejar to the indignities of mid-level festival-touring success. It was the most immediately beautiful record he'd ever made, but it also accidentally coincided with a rising interest in the soft rock of the 1970s and '80s, which meant that Bejar, long the wry bridge troll beneath the zeitgeist, momentarily represented it. The story is important to Bejar's career, but it feels like an ancillary concern to Poison Season, his new album. The point and pleasure of Destroyer's world, after all, is that it motors away on its own  juice, irrespective of others.  The world is a big place, his records seem to say, and it can be wearying and demanding, but your thoughts are a republic entirely within your control. As he memorably put it on Destroyer's Rubies' "Painter in Your Pocket": "You looked OK with the others, you looked great on your own."
Poison Season retains the sumptuous melancholy of Kaputt, leavening it with the elegant swoon of Nelson Riddle-era Frank Sinatra. There are string arrangements all over Poison Season, and they are gorgeously recorded: the orchestra on "Girl in a Sling" sounds like 180-gram vinyl even while in earbuds. Destroyer has always partly been a nostalgia project, even when Bejar's nostalgia was decidedly ersatz—his records aim to stir the feelings that classic recordings arouse in us. Streethawk hearkened back to glam-rock Bowie even if the resemblance was off, and the magic of Kaputt was partly that of a peculiar and gnomic figure like Bejar conjuring the jaded romanticism of Bryan Ferry. On Poison Season, he visits a different section of his record collection, one that predates rock'n'roll, and he applies all the studied love and imagination to the endeavor we've come to expect from him.
Bejar uses his voice in new ways here, stretching words out generously on the two-part story-song "Bangkok" so that we feel the beauty of the melody but also don't miss the bumps and crags in his throat. There's a basic tenderness that communicates itself beneath the vermouth of his words, and they remain a joy to soak in, a purposeful blurring of sense and sound. Lines like "The writing on the wall/ Wasn't writing at all" or "It sucks when there's nothing but gold in those hills" resist interpretation and invite savoring—the Destroyer-lyric-generator couplet here would probably be "The ass king's made of asses, the ice queen's made of snow," from "Archer on the Beach". But my favorite moment might be Bejar muttering "aw shit, here comes the sun" on "Dream Lover", the Bruce Springsteen-style rocker that, as he told Pitchfork, he didn't even want to make. The juxtaposition—a curmudgeon swearing under his breath as the horns and drums he's arranged around him power the record up to transcendence—is, as he Bejar noted with some self-deprecation in that same interview, "Destroyer 101."
In fact, there are moments on Poison Season where Bejar's formidable mind threatens to drag the proceedings down a bit. The swooning '50s strings sometimes collides awkwardly with the '70s pop gestures—the funk bass line that peppers "Midnight Meet the Rain" mostly serves to underline the sleepiness of the album's last third. "Hell" lurches between ponderous chamber pop and a swinging beat, capturing the album's uncertainty about exactly what kind of dance it's doing. For an album that took an unusual amount of time for Bejar to make—the four years separating Poison Season from Kaputt represents his longest stretch ever—it feels tonally hesitant, jets of cold water and warmth doled out in furtive and uncontrolled doses. He has never made, and will probably never make, a bad album—he's far too accomplished, intuitive, and literate for that. But on Poison Season, you can occasionally detect the dismaying sound of indie rock's greatest intellect second-guessing itself.


The Barcelona musician expands her dizzying art-pop sound with sharper hooks and a feistier spirit.

Nekkuja

The first time you hear one of Marina Herlop’s songs, it might sound almost incomprehensible. Much of her singing comes from a place beyond language; her piercing harmonies, switchbacking rhythms, and sudden modal pivots are just as disorienting. The Barcelona musician’s songs are equally inspired by 20th-century avant-garde composition and centuries-old folk music, but they appear mostly like alien galaxies modeled upon non-euclidean principles. After prolonged exposure, though, a funny thing happens: They come to feel not just familiar but entirely natural, imbued with all the seeming inevitability of pop music, as though each brain-twisting tone cluster were an expression of some universal law. Bewilderment has rarely sounded quite so catchy.
Herlop wrote her new album, Nekkuja, in the interim between recording her breakout, Pripyat, and its long-delayed 2022 release. She has been performing the songs in concert for two years—often enough that if you’ve seen her once or twice, and checked in regularly with her Instagram stories, you’ll have assimilated even their most labyrinthine twists and turns by now. The music is an extension of the jewel-toned art pop she began with Pripyat; the songs are similar in sound and feel, but they are also punchier, with sharper hooks and a feistier spirit. Though shorter than its predecessor by three minutes, the new album feels more ambitious and more daring.
Herlop delights in pulling out the tablecloth from beneath her carefully appointed songs, leaving cutlery and stemware quivering dangerously in place. “Busa” begins placidly enough: Mellotron-like flutes, spiderwebbed harp melodies, the clacking of a typewriter. A peal of elfin laughter from her friend (la Busa, for whom the song is named) ripples across the stereo field. But jagged tritone synths stab crosswise through the arrangement; stacked vocal harmonies (“Pollen! Pollen! Pollen!”) slice like an industrial laser. “Cosset” opens with the woozy chimes of a deranged Christmas carol, but it abruptly shifts in mood and intensity, as thrumming drum’n’bass rhythms and jazz-funk electric bass take over. Singing a one-word chorus in Catalan—“Worms, worms, worms”—Herlop’s multi-tracked voice soars while underneath, the rhythm section shudders like heavy machinery. Angel choirs and earth movers reach an uneasy détente.
“Nekkuja,” it turns out, is a made-up word. Herlop says that she came up with it after a long search for the precise configuration of syllables that might express the nexus of sounds, colors, and textures that she had in her head. Herlop has always been a master fabulist, but these songs reveal what a vivid lyricist and meticulous composer she has become. The album is loosely themed around the idea of gardening—a preoccupation she nurtured in those difficult years awaiting Pripyat’s release, when she felt her creativity withering on the vine, and she turned her thoughts to ideas of nurturing, custodianship, and the necessity of making peace with that which cannot be controlled.
She opens the record with a line—“Damunt de tu només les flors” (“Above you only the flowers”)—borrowed from Frederic Mompou, a Catalan composer beloved for his minimalist piano pieces, that she spins into a magic-realist poem about childbirth and history, with a chorus like an armored-up nursery rhyme. She touches upon complementary images as she goes: slivers of light in her hands; trees that are sick of humans; roots pushing to shatter the sky. Her byzantine world-building comes to a head on “Reina Mora,” where nervous wooden clicks and flickering handclaps are spun into a controlled rhythmic fury that makes me wonder what a Herlop/Jlin collaboration might sound like. A brief interlude connects “Reina Mora” to the album’s final track, “Babel,” an elastic fugue for what might be hammered dulcimer, striking a perilous balance between Arca and Arvo Pärt. Both songs share the same lyrics, and at the end of “Babel” she returns to the line that opened the album, repeated with one final twist: “Damunt de tu només les flors/Damunt de tu només l’esforç” (“Above you only the flowers/Above you only the effort”). Her voice is split, like light through a prism, into stark harmonic bands, and the album’s parable of sowing and reaping becomes clear; incomprehensible toil gives way to the ecstasy of creation. Worms, pollen, roses emerging from wombs: Rarely are the agonies of the creative process brought so enchantingly to life.


1975’s Nasty Gal is another classic from one of the founders of funk. Davis and her band are a little sleazy, a little sultry, and show some surprising range on an album newly reissued on vinyl.

Nasty Gal

A decade ago, Light in the Attic set about reissuing the long dormant, early ’70s funk catalog of Betty Davis, starting with her self-titled 1973 opus. That album featured her standout “Anti Love Song,” a cover photo of the singer wearing a pair of thigh-high silver platform boots that Rick James probably wished he could have borrowed, and a backing band culled from a large swath of the Family Stone. Moving on to albums They Say I’m Different, Nasty Gal, and the previously unreleased Is It Love or Desire and Betty Davis: The Columbia Years 1968–1969, the whole project sought to clue in new audiences to the legacy of a singer formerly footnoted as the second wife of Miles Davis, who is said to have convinced her husband to change his tamer album title to Bitches Brew. Now, her 1976 album Nasty Gal, with its equally unsubtle title, is being released once again, this time as a long player. While the physical gratification of a deluxe vinyl treatment is reason enough for a new edition, it also marks a new occasion for listening, even more deeply and resonantly than its first reissue nine years ago.
What does it mean to be an artist ahead of her time—twice in her lifetime? In 1975, despite label support and heavy touring, Island Records’ release of Nasty Gal failed to take off in the way those behind it had hoped; shortly after, Davis receded from the public eye. Now at 72, she is the subject of a recent documentary (Betty - They Say I’m Different opened in Amsterdam in November) and otherwise leads a very private life in Pittsburgh. “I even turned your head around now,” Davis unleashes in the titular song, with characteristic formidable, seductive delivery, in what sounds now like lyric self-fulfilling prophecy. “You said I love you every way but your way/And my way was too dirty for you now.” In 2009, Nasty Gal continued the job of contextualizing Davis, placing her among peers like Parliament and the Isley Brothers; acknowledging her imprint on musicians from Rick James (“She was what funk was,” he has said), Chaka Khan and Lil’ Kim to Royal Trux’s Jennifer Herrema and, especially, on Prince, who said of Davis to a reporter in 2012: “This is what we aim for.”
To listen the record now—when the album shares a name with both a fashion brand inspired by Davis’ provocative, space-age style and a widely reclaimed slur uttered by the president of the United States—is another thing entirely. Nasty Gal is still as revolutionary and unbending as it was in 1975. In another preternaturally self-aware moment, amid the deep grooves of “F.U.N.K.,” Davis willfully seizes her place in the wider canon of funk, soul, and R&B: “Help me, Barry White!” she calls out and goes on to shout out to “Isaac Hayes, y’all,” Al Green, the O’Jays, Stevie Wonder, Tina Turner, and Ann Peebles, and ultimately, her good friend Jimi Hendrix (to whom she famously introduced her ex-husband; Miles doesn’t merit a shout-out in this anthem).
The musical roots of Betty Davis, née Betty Mabry, are not widely acknowledged in North Carolina, but she and the band she put together have deep ties to Reidsville, once a town of textile mills and cigarette factories founded on the border of Little Troublesome Creek (Davis also spent a lot of her childhood in Durham, N.C., where she leaned heavily on her grandmother’s record collection): “B.B. King, Jimmy Reed, Elmore James and all those people,” she once said. “I know some English guitarist who would love to get their hands on it.” Around the age of 12, she wrote her first song, “I’m Gonna Bake That Cake of Love.” The Mabrys moved to Homestead, Pa. where her father got a job in steel-boom Pittsburgh, and at 16, Davis took off for New York City. When she spotted her future husband at a club in the Village, she didn’t recognize the jazz trumpeter, but she liked his style; as the story goes, she told a friend she wanted to meet the “dude with the shoes.”
On Nasty Gal, her prowling caterwaul snakes and oozes through the album, over dirty bass and deep grooves. She trades lyrics with keyboardist Fred Mills on the raw, declarative statement of “Nasty Gal” and over a heavy riffing guitar on “Talkin Trash.” Image was central to the music: On the cover of Nasty Gal, Davis sheds her cosmic leotards and short-shorts for lacy lingerie and fishnets. She recruited a backing band from her home state—drummer Nicky Neal and bassist Larry Johnson were first cousins, Fred Mills lived in her hometown, and she added Carlos Morales on guitar. Davis choreographed their stage moves and insisted the band members play shirtless; she lathered the band members in baby oil so their muscles would shine under the lights. She wanted to change their name from Funkhouse to the Sleazes.
Nasty Gal is certainly in service of sleaze and of sex, but first and foremost, to classic, solid dance grooves that pulse under Davis’ snarl on “Shut Off the Light,” her bedroom vocals on “Getting Kicked Off, Havin Fun,” and the saucy, sultry “The Lone Ranger.” Davis has been chastised by some critics for her reliance on that howl; it’s her weapon of seduction and also her line of defense. But on this album, she briefly and astonishingly reveals a wider range. “You and I,” a lover’s lament about the impossibility of reconciliation co-written with Miles and arranged by Gil Evans, features a trumpet solo by him and orchestration by Gil Evans. It’s a gorgeously steamy slow burner of a ballad, the most lyrical song on the album, and feels spilled out of an open window on some city night. It’s Davis at her most vulnerable, as she sings, “I love you I love you I love you/But it’s so hard for me to be me I wish I could give to you/I’d be free I’d be free I’d be free.” And it’s also fleeting, followed immediately by the revved-up “Feelins,” which delivers Davis back to her foundational structure of gritty, fearless seduction over a strutting, percolating rhythm.
It’s tempting to wonder what might have been had Davis chosen or had the support to continue her career and perhaps to forge together some of these two poles of her work—the tough and the tender. Davis rose to fame but not widespread acceptance in an era when black women in this country were allowed to be seen but not heard—and certainly not to exercise artistic control as a musician. In the 1970s, the Rolling Stone Record Guide called Nasty Gal the work of a “black Marlene Dietrich”—a twisted show of admiration. But plenty of black audiences weren’t ready for Davis either—the NAACP urged a boycott of her work on the grounds that it perpetuated negative stereotypes about African Americans. For a woman, and especially a black woman in America in 1975, to openly sing about desire and sex with such ferocious power was most definitely ahead of the times. Even The New York Times, a year before Nasty Gal, acknowledged that Davis’ day would eventually arrive: “Miss Davis is trying to tell us something real and basic about our irrational needs, and Western civilization puts its highest premiums on conformity and rationality and rarely recognizes the Bessies or the Bettys until they’re gone.” May the record stand corrected.