A self-consciously minor work, this collection of spoken-word pieces is a brief but beatific respite during a particularly rewarding era of the songwriter’s long career.

Seven Psalms

Four decades after emerging as the seething frontman of the Birthday Party, Nick Cave has lately been making some of the most challenging and rewarding music of his long career. His recent albums, both with the Bad Seeds and as a duo with his right-hand Seed Warren Ellis, unfold in long contemplative stretches, slashed through occasionally with Cave’s old menace. The song forms have become progressively more open-ended; the narratives more diffuse and dreamlike; the instrumental arrangements softer and blurrier; the subject matter more openly preoccupied with questions of love and death. With each successive release, Cave’s work grows more distant from rock’n’roll and closer to religious music. The religion, admittedly, is an idiosyncratic one, whose high priest may also be its sole practitioner—a songwriter-mystic for whom sex, monsters, and bloodshed are as important as everlasting grace.
In contrast to the grand statements that Cave has produced in this vein, Seven Psalms is a self-consciously minor work. It consists of seven spoken-word pieces of one to two minutes each, with vaporous musical accompaniment from Cave and Ellis, and ends with one longer instrumental that is essentially a medley of the previous backing tracks, incorporating elements from each. The format and release strategy also encourage listeners to think of it as something other than the new Nick Cave album: a limited-edition 10” EP sold via Cave Things, a webstore that Cave has set up to sell art prints, Polaroid photos, T-shirts, and the like—what he calls the “incidental residue” of his creative practice. If he were a visual artist primarily, you might imagine these seven pieces hanging in a small and rushed-through anteroom to an exhibition of this distinct period in his work, included as interesting but inessential context for masterworks like 2021’s Carnage and 2016’s Skeleton Tree.
Cave flirted with spoken word on Carnage, in performances that were rich with drama and irony, taking breaks from his more traditional singing to cajole, plead, and intimidate. On Seven Psalms, the speeches are the main event: The fact there is music playing at all seems largely incidental. Cave is a much more reliable narrator this time around, ditching the previous album’s flashes of mania and hilarity in favor of solemnity and sobriety. You get the sense that this is the real Nick Cave delivering these lines, not some mad-eyed character he’s inhabiting. The music—a blend of synthesizers, gospel-inflected piano, and occasional wordless vocal harmonies, all swathed in heavy reverb—establishes a stately and ceremonious mood and never wavers from it, reinforcing the notion that Cave means what he says.
What he says usually has something to do with God, who seems a benevolent presence, with almost none of the Old Testament wrath that has often characterized His earlier appearances on Cave albums. “And though I have nothing but this prayer/That all will be revealed by and by/I pray someday my Lord you will appear/And lead me to your mansion in the sky,” Cave intones in one representative passage from “I Have Wandered All My Unending Days.” In another, from “I Come Alone and to You”: “I have nowhere left to go but to you, Lord/Breathless, but to you.” And from “I Have Trembled My Way Deep”: “I have stood at the threshold of your wonder/Bid me enter, Lord, allow me to unfold.”
Evaluating Seven Psalms as a pop record is likely beside the point; Cave seems to intend it straightforwardly as a sort of devotional aid. (The physical release comes with a prayer card.) But even if you lack the conviction in a higher power that animates it, you may find yourself moved by the strange beauty of his imagery—God as a stag whose antlers “rake lightning ’cross the sphere,” or a face in the morning mist held in place by the force of the narrator’s prayer—and by his unflagging belief in a goodness that transcends earthly horrors. He addresses the horrors most directly on “Such Things Should Never Happen,” which sketches out two mothers, a human woman and a sparrow, who lose their babies to early death, an unavoidable parallel to the deaths of Cave’s own sons in 2015 and 2022. “Such things should never happen,” goes the grave titular line. “But they do.”
As a Cave fan, it’s easy to miss the sex and monsters and bloodshed—not to mention the songs themselves—when playing Seven Psalms. It’s hard to imagine even the most devoted listeners returning to it regularly. But if anyone has earned the right to a brief and beatific respite, it’s Cave. And for the rest of the faithful: The man has a big catalog. If you want less God and more fucking, you can always listen to Grinderman.


Recorded on a four-track over a weekend, Shamir's sophomore album is the definition of a departure, moving from effervescent pop into a bracing new lo-fi world.

Hope

Shamir is at a crossroads. On the latitude runs Ratchet, released in 2015 to almost universal acclaim, an effervescent and even brooding pop record with monumental hooks and the kind of electronic beats that should be bottled and sold as anti-depressants. On the longitude is his sophomore album Hope, an album he recorded over just one weekend and released for free on Soundcloud, something between an unapologetic creative manifesto and a collection of tossed-off lo-fi bedroom demos.
About this new project, Shamir explains that “from day one, it was clear I was an accidental pop star,” which, in hindsight, rings painfully true. When looking at the video for Ratchet’s lead single, “On the Regular,” what once seemed like an exuberant introduction to a fresh-faced artist now feels slightly uncomfortable—Shamir dances without really acknowledging the camera, and when he does, there's a bashful awkwardness to his movements. It could just be a nervous kid shooting his first video, but Hope’s complete 180-degree turn in sound and mood make his persona in the video seem like a reflection of something deeper.
The album begins with a harsh burst of feedback from a guitar amp, a deliberate signal to check any notions at the door. Before long, Shamir's familiar vocals begin to peek through the mix, raw and brushed with static. The lo-fi direction of Hope isn’t necessarily a surprise for those that have been following Shamir’s career recently. In 2016, he released “Tryna Survive,” a three-minute sun-bleached pop song that sounded, somewhat astonishingly, like something Sheryl Crow would have dropped circa “Soak Up the Sun” only glossed-over with Shamir’s countertenor vocals. It absolutely worked, and pointed towards exciting developments in Shamir’s sound. Unfortunately, “Tryna Survive,” or anything resembling it, is absent from Hope and the album suffers from its few pop hooks being buried under its muddy, un-production. Shamir is not the first artist to fall prey to the trappings of lo-fi—like all “less-is-more” creative strategies, it's deceptively difficult to perfect, and the line between ruggedly effective and amateurishly basic is razor-thin. More often than not, Hope skews toward the latter.
From Larry Levan to Le1f and beyond, electronic dance music has been part of the queer black experience for decades, and it was very easy to slot Shamir and Ratchet into that narrative. It takes nerve to release something like Hope when the weight of your community’s expectations lies on your shoulders, and cheers to Shamir for taking the undeniable risk, even if its product is neither sterling nor altogether listenable. But there’s “Like a Bird,” which glows with a subtle beauty, shiny electro-pop for insomniacs, and makes amazing use of Shamir’s plaintive and untreated vocals. Unlike some of the album’s more experimental tracks, its soft meandering feels apt. “I Fuckin Hate U” has a purposefully Shaggs-like quality, with a skittish drumbeat slip-sliding under an idly plucked guitar. Where certain tracks like the tepid “What Else” peter out after a few minutes, Hope has enough good ideas in it to conceivably pave the way for the new chapter, should that be the road Shamir chooses.
For further context, Hope was recorded on a four-track in a Philadelphia bedroom by someone who played every instrument and produced it themselves. It is the fear of the sophomore album realized as music, released both as a statement of process and purpose. If pop music demands perfection and following a regiment of rules, Hope runs screaming away from all of that, perhaps freeing Shamir to travel uncharted waters.


Spirit is Depeche Mode’s most pointedly topical album, but the synth giants still write universal, stadium-sized music. These songs make you feel like singing in response to today’s headlines.

Spirit

The 14th studio album from synth giants Depeche Mode begins with frontman Dave Gahan declaring that “We are not there yet/We have not evolved.” It’s the first of many admonitions Gahan issues on what turns out to be the most pointedly topical and compassionate effort in the band’s career. Over solemn piano chords and a lockstep electro groove that hints at the cadence of a protest march, Gahan laments how “we feel nothing inside” as we “track it all with satellites” and “watch men die in real time.” By track two, “Where’s the Revolution,” Gahan begins calling for out-and-out revolt, chiding the audience: “Come on people/You’re letting me down.” In his golden-throated baritone, Gahan reminds us that we’ve been “pissed on/For too long,” our “rights abused” by governments who “Manipulate and threaten/With terror as a weapon.”
Apparently, principal lyricist and songwriter Martin Gore is no longer content to focus all his attention on the spiritual searching that has defined Depeche Mode’s music for more than 30 years. Over that time, few artists have so artfully portrayed the inner dialogue between redemption and indulgence. By the band’s 1990 breakout Violator, Gore had basically invented his own syntax for the human condition as a purgatorial struggle between sinful pleasures and a yearning for higher peace. And Gahan, with his ability to invest urgency, soul, and a feeling of debauched weariness into subjects like S&M and tortured love, has never failed to translate Gore’s restless malaise to the throngs who fill stadiums to connect with it. Gahan turns despair into sex appeal unlike no other. But this time, he’s tasked with looking up from his satin, regret-stained sheets and making us believe that an aging rock star really cares about civil unrest.
Gahan delivers Gore’s state-of-world address for three songs in a row before going back to the band’s bread-and-butter obsessions. Later, though, on “Poorman”—which self-consciously references the spartan electronic gurgle of the Violator hit “Policy of Truth”—Gore and Gahan risk coming off as oblivious to the irony when they observe that “corporations get the breaks/Keeping almost everything they make” and ask, “When will it trickle down?” But Depeche Mode deliver anthems with such proficiency that sincerity barely matters. A song like “Where’s the Revolution” makes you feel like singing in response to today’s headlines. Depeche Mode still make universal, stadium-sized music that’s limber enough to fit through your bedroom doorframe, as if it had been conceived with your life in mind.
In some respects, though, their consistency works against them. The sixth album since the departure of multi-instrumentalist/arranger Alan Wilder, Spirit sees Depeche Mode once again shuffling through the most quintessential components of their sound. On “Cover Me,” Gore’s haunting Lanois-esque guitar twang allows you to close your eyes and picture yourself under the Northern lights Gahan sings about. But aside from “Cover Me,” Spirit lacks the ambience of Depeche Mode’s most atmospheric material. If only producer/mixer James Ford (Florence and the Machine, Foals, Arctic Monkeys) had disheveled the sounds a bit, Spirit could have better asserted its place in Depeche Mode’s body of work.
Instead, Ford—who is also one half of the electronic duo Simian Mobile Disco—mimics the vibe of the band’s iconic work with producer Flood. But even Flood didn’t imitate himself when he mixed the last DM album, 2013’s far more creatively resolute Delta Machine. Nevertheless, this is a band whose effortlessness can misguide you into thinking they’re not trying. Don’t be fooled. In the bridge of “Where’s the Revolution,” Gahan repeats the line “the train is coming, the train is coming... get on board.” You can draw inspiration from that lyric whether or not you take to the streets or petition your elected officials. Gore’s directive is less about activism and more about opening your heart so that it guides your conscience. For him, the term “spirit” has come to encompass politics, but it’s fueled by the same eros that’s driven the band’s music since day one. Which is why Spirit is so convincing in spite of its radical shift in tenor. For both the band and audience, that shift couldn’t have come at a better time.


Ruban Nielson’s mildew-covered fourth record continues UMO’s long journey inward, pinballing between love and indifference, bops and dirges, pop and its opposite.

Sex & Food

When he founded Unknown Mortal Orchestra in 2010, Ruban Nielson declared his intention to “hatch a new musical dimension,” using the language of psychedelia as a cover for old-fashioned solipsism. UMO’s insomniac psych-rock has an escapist quality, but it is the inward escape of burrowing so deeply into solitude that one’s own misery becomes abstract. In the half-ruins of Nielson’s songs, loneliness is so pervasive you forget it’s there. This commitment to interiority is part of his outsider charm, which stretches far beyond the Portland, Oregon basement where he often records. Just as Tame Impala use solitude to springboard into kaleidoscopic wonderlands, Nielson maps inward frustrations to make his home in the psychic gutter.
That he remains morbidly internal on Sex & Food, UMO’s mildew-covered fourth record, is hardly surprising. On its predecessor, 2015’s Multi-Love, Nielson documented the true story of his and his wife’s entanglement with a shared third lover, somehow coming away with the breeziest music of his solo career. That record’s spiritual uplift was a relief—both in musical terms and as a window into Nielson’s psychiatric health, often grimly portrayed in his nihilistic lyrics. On some level, it’s a relief again to see Nielson discover new territory on Sex & Food. The record’s otherworldly folk, shellshocked R&B, and emaciated soul drift closer than ever to that “new musical dimension” of his. But it can be an exhausting trip.
Where Multi-Love upped UMO’s mainstream- and sex-appeal, here we have a more radical reinvention—one that dials down both qualities to a freezing point. These minimal songs sound ready to give up the ghost altogether and sink back into the fabric of the universe. This was always a danger, that Nielson’s antique obsessions—his compression of rock history into pedals, fog-machine filters, and other vintage affects—would finally land him in a creative black hole. But the black hole, it turns out, sounds pretty good: bleak, austere, kind of creepy, but possessed of something admirably deranged, pinballing between love and indifference, bops and dirges, pop and its opposite.
Hidden in this chilly world is an assortment of oddities: “How Many Zeros” projects Nielson’s falsetto onto ghostly funk, like Thundercat master tapes fished from a river, while “Hunnybee,” a love song to his young daughter, sleepwalks between disco and R&B with eerie calm. Even “Not in Love We’re Just High,” a gorgeous declaration of romantic incapacity, sounds washed-out and strangled, like a downbeat Prince rarity recorded on a dictaphone in Arthur Russell’s pocket.
At times, you begin to feel like a prisoner in the “hostile wasteland” described in “Ministry of Alienation.” Full of oblique nods to modern disaffection—“No one will fuck the ugly robot,” Nielson wheezes—the psych-folk curio meanders inconclusively and ends with a miniature, mortally wounded sax solo. Much of Sex & Food sounds like work in progress, ideas toward a more inviting fusion of insular sounds and soulful alienation. If these are indeed building blocks, the completed music might sound something like “If You’re Going to Break Yourself,” weird-era Sly Stone feel and lyrics about friendships lost in a drug wilderness. While still rooted in Nielson’s desires and frustrations, this human moment hints at a UMO enriched by looking to the outside world once in a while.
Sex & Food is best in this spaced-out zone, where alienation sounds genuinely alien. The record’s disembodiment is precisely what makes it intriguing and, occasionally, unlistenable. The songs often sound reluctant to be heard at all and have none of the lysergic flair that makes gear-driven rock music indulgent. Sex & Food goes the opposite way, draining away all empathy and worldly color until you are cocooned, for better or worse, in Ruban Nielson’s tiny, claustrophobic psyche.


The Toronto rapper's debut shows off his ridiculously catchy melodies and distinct persona, even as it moves within bigger stars' shadows.

Killy: Surrender Your Soul

Last year, Toronto rapper Killy took his last paycheck from working a sales job at Nordstrom and spent it on the video for his breakout hit, “Killamonjaro.” In the song, his whispery sing-song floats over an eerie, bass-heavy beat, as the 20-year-old beckons: “I can introduce you to this life we live forever.” Killy most obviously belongs to the Travis Scott camp of trap music, in which creating a dark mood through sound design and vocal manipulation almost always takes priority over lyrical depth or melodic complexity. Nor is that the only resemblance to be found in his style: His nasally voice and goofy ad-libs recall Lil Uzi Vert, while the re-looping of hooks mirrors Trippie Redd’s approach. With his debut album, Surrender Your Soul, Killy shows that he’s adept at following a template already established by his peers, while also suggesting—with his knack for ridiculously catchy melodies and his distinct persona—that he could soon pull away from the pack.
Raised in a Filipino and Bajan household, Killy has described being the only non-French student at his Francophone school, where his classmates would mispronounce his given name, Khalil. This led to the alias Kill Ill, which later morphed into the stage name he uses today. As a performer, he has stepped into the role of a menacing antihero, sprinkling in fantasy imagery and lyrics about fighting for your legacy throughout the album. “I’m the only worthy opposition… See me as a hero or a villain,” he croons on “Distance.” Later, he compares himself to a notoriously cold-blooded “Dragon Ball Z” prince in “Live Your Last”: “Screw face lookin’ like Vegeta/I’m a demon with the divas.” And on “Doomsday,” Killy seems to challenge fate itself, as he claims he’ll “come alive” at the end of the world.
The music on Surrender Your Soul, too, fits within Killy’s vision. Crafted by Torontonian hitmakers like WondaGurl, Boi-1da, and Daxz (all of whom have worked with both Drake and Travis Scott), the beats ring with dramatic synths and guitars and mysteriously twinkling piano. This album sounds like it could soundtrack the moment in a first-person adventure game when your character first enters a new, dark, and scary world.
Killy generally steers clear of the common melodramatic or disaffected vocal tropes of his SoundCloud and emo rap counterparts. Instead, he sounds like he’s having fun—like he perpetually has a mischievous smirk on his face. The only instance where he leans heavily into the emo rap aesthetic is the album’s closer, “Fireflies (Outro).” Essentially a slowed-down Blink-182 song with trap drums, the sunset of a track opens with Killy’s Auto-Tune-drenched voice, evoking Rebirth-era Lil Wayne: “Lately I’ve been searching for my purpose/Will you show me where the Earth ends?”
With the majority of its tracks clocking in under the three-minute mark, Surrender Your Soul is a lean offering. In many ways, it seems designed for quickly bored listeners who are eager to move onto the next hype artist. As enjoyable as they often are, the tracks largely conclude without transitioning to a bridge section or reaching a climax, resulting in bite-sized songs that are easy to consume but ultimately unsatiating. Killy clearly has killer natural instincts, but his debut shows that he has ample room for more complexity. He once said that the name “Killamonjaro” represents his “ultimate form.” If he wants to fulfill his potential, he’s going to need to keep evolving.


The Texas singer-songwriter’s fourth album sounds older and wiser, casting her mystical interests as a foil to the bittersweet, ordinary moments that add up to earthly life.

Sorceress

For around $38, or the price of three cheese raviolis at Olive Garden, you can buy a 1.5-ounce jar of “Sex Dust” at Urban Outfitters. Sex Dust is an “aphrodesical warming potion” sold by the wellness brand Moon Juice, one of many witchy, New Age-y remedies endorsed by Gwenyth Paltrow, whose GOOP empire helped bring psychics and Tarot to the mainstream. You might also pick up some quartz crystals and zodiac tapestries, or a “survival mist” to tide you through Mercury’s retrograde. Nowadays, the occult is crudely commonplace, which poses a problem: In 2020, a folk singer with a collection of songs titled Sorceress and a passion for books on “spirituality, new age weirdness, and ... witchy woman 101” might be a little passé.
But Texas singer-songwriter Jess Williamson’s fourth album is not breathlessly absorbed in the cosmos; it’s thoroughly grounded on earth. Whereas 2018’s Cosmic Wink was, in her words, about “naively trusting in synchronisticity and magical thinking,” Sorceress discards utopianism. The word “sorceress” emerges as a refusal, an acknowledgement of mortal limitations: “Yes, there’s a little magic in my hat/But I’m no sorceress,” she tells a skittish lover on the title track. Wistful observations like “you ain’t a tourist here no more” signal the time that’s passed; her body, she repeats, is aging. The moments Williamson documents are bittersweet and ordinary: having enough money to buy the expensive eggs, or losing a pregnancy, or getting invited to an ex’s wedding but wisely choosing not to go. The overarching sense is of someone who’s wised up; she’s too old for turbulence. “Can we put the coffee and our favorite record on?” she asks, fatigued, on “Love’s Not Hard to Find.”
Williamson has a fluttery, plaintive voice reminiscent of Angel Olsen or Faye Webster, and the mood of these songs is that of watching an old friend pack their belongings and disappear down the road. “As the Birds Are” is especially forlorn and cinematic, like a classic film heroine taking one last glance at the wreckage before she goes. “Oh, to live in some photograph,” Williamson cries, apologizing for her past cruelty. “Wind on a Tin” was inspired by a revelation at a friend’s memorial service, when she heard an angelic, flute-like noise blown by the wind. “I heard God,” she murmurs, and you understand how someone can be moved by such a simple sound.
The best cuts on Sorceress are effortlessly golden, glimmering with pedal steel, tambourine, and the occasional sliver of saxophone. The swelling disco-folk lament “Infinite Scroll” glows like a desert sunset. But Williamson missteps when she adds too many embellishments: cicada chirps and a whipping sound on “Sorceress,” meant to emphasize the line “I can’t tame a lion,” or choir-like harmonies on “Ponies in Town” that feel as kitschy as Christmas at Hobby Lobby. And the album trails off with a set of slower, dustier compositions, like “Rosaries at the Border,” an immigration ballad with the well-meaning but florid Jesus rhetoric of a “thoughts and prayers” statement.
But these are small sins in the grand scheme. Sorceress is a mature and freeing record, one that celebrates meager triumphs of womanhood even as it mourns a loss of innocence. “Should we give up on Tarot? Maybe it’s a waste of time,” Williamson wonders. Of course, the magic was never in the cards, but in piecing together your own faith.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


On her third album, the English singer/songwriter vividly captures a love both intimate and powerful.

Glasshouse

On the front cover of Glasshouse, Jessie Ware is pictured emerging from the courtyard of the Neuendorf House on the island of Mallorca, off the coast of Spain. The modernist villa, designed by architects John Pawson and Claudio Silvestrin, is less a house than a series of walls that give shape to different kinds of space: long hallways that open out onto a tennis court and a rectangular pool, the ceilings in the interior partially deleted to let long rhombuses of light in. The photo is not exclusively focused on Ware and the shadows pooling around her; the eye is drawn as much to the soft, ruddy brown of the walls or the blue sky packed into a crisp rectangle above her. Ware wanted the cover to emphasize architecture; as she explained in an interview the week before the image was shot, “I want it to be a beautiful image that maybe I’m a small part of.”
Each song on Glasshouse has its own distinct aesthetic; unlike her previous albums, 2012’s Devotion and 2014’s Tough Love, there are no songs here that could be confused for each other, none that seem an afterthought carved from the greater mood of the album. Here, tracks are discrete entities, seemingly designed and assembled by its own team of architects, whether it’s Benny Blanco, Cashmere Cat, and Happy Perez embroidering “Selfish Love” with weightless, rippling flamenco guitar or Stint forming the spine of “Your Domino” entirely out of soft synthetic pulses. It almost feels like Ware is trying to divert attention from herself, but she is positioned directly at the center of the album’s trembling choreography. She connects each of these unrelated environments—shaping them, in the tradition of singers like Anita Baker, into slippery vacuums of desire. They’re songs about how feelings tend not to map onto reality, and how reality tends to be undisturbed by the weight of our feelings. And Glasshouse came at a deepy emotional time for Ware; she wrote much of its lyrics after giving birth to her daughter, while immersed in the exhaustion of early parenthood.
The intimacy that exists at the margins of sleep isn’t ordinarily a subject of pop music; in the last 10 years, it can be mostly located in R&B songs like Janet Jackson’s “No Sleeep,” Maxwell’s “Pretty Wings,” and Miguel’s “Coffee,” among others. But this is precisely the feeling that Ware is trying to draw to the surface of her record, the idle moments that initially seem to have little universal importance but people tend to find themselves in, anyway. As if imitating the Neuendorf villa, on Glasshouse, Ware longs to partially delete the ceiling of her own house, in order to zoom in on the private warmth of domesticity.  In the closing track “Sam,” which Ware co-wrote with Ed Sheeran, she drinks a cup of coffee at a train station and seems to lose herself in someone else’s conversation—but even as her thoughts scatter, they always circle back to her husband and her child and the ways in which they both rerouted her life. “And I hope I’m as brave as my mother, wondering what kind of mother will I be,” she sings in the chorus. “I hope she knows that I found a man far from my father/Sam, my baby, and me.” The acoustic guitar, Pino Palladino’s bass, and Ware’s voice seem to disappear into a humming cloud of synths and cymbals, through which Nico Segal plays a trumpet solo; his individual notes cluster, separate, and pulse faintly through the membrane of smoke.
Ware feels especially at home in the more organic arrangements on Glasshouse. “Selfish Love” and “Sam” are supported by the rhythm section of bassist Palladino and drummer Chris Dave, both of whom accompanied D’Angelo on his 2014 album Black Messiah, and whose playing shapeshifted according to the liquid design of that album’s funk and soul songs. Dave and Palladino are extraordinary, dexterous players; on Ware’s songs, which aren’t necessarily detached from either funk or soul, they express themselves primarily through restraint—Dave barely plays on the verses of “Selfish Love,” and his interlocking rhythms in the chorus make it sound as if the track is being pushed by whispers. Stint supplies live drums to the slow jam “Stay Awake, Wait for Me,” and the delay between each snare hit adds a stretchy emptiness between Ware’s shivering musical sighs. The song itself sounds drowsy, only half-awake to its own desires, formed in a language that repeats itself and digresses, as if it were composed just after Ware surfaced from a deep dream. “We could be a perfect picture,” Ware sings. “Picture this/An endless kiss/You’re hanging on my lips.”
On the album’s best song, “Last of the True Believers,” Ware sketches another intimate scene: a couple (possibly a family) driving through mist, abandoning a vast city behind them. The details stop evolving there and begin to evaporate as Ware’s attention drifts toward more abstract but enveloping images. “Let’s be alone together, where the sky falls through the river,” she sings, and the family, the car, and the city are absorbed into this greater feeling. The instruments behind her gently flicker and glow. This is Ware’s particular talent: her ability to seamlessly flow from the specific to the general, from complicated to clear, her songs gradually including you. “Let’s get lost forever/Are you hearing me?” she sings; her words are echoed by Paul Buchanan, frontman of the glacial Scottish band the Blue Nile, who developed the form of immersive romanticism which Ware inhabits here. “Last of the True Believers” brings to mind a reel of discrete images of longing: thickets of illuminated buildings, streetlamps glowing through a thick fog, a love so intimate and powerful it not only maps onto the environment seamlessly but it changes it. It’s architecture. Ware is just a small part of the beautiful image, but she’s also the reason for it.


The Boston-based, Brazil-born Ricardo Donoso eschews percussion to create rhythm through timing and momentum. His second album takes roots in dance and techno as well as the minimalism of Terry Riley, Cluster's trance, and Oneohtrix Point Never's spaced-out arpeggios.

Assimilating the Shadow

"My favorite time was around when the sun came up," Boston-based musician Ricardo Donoso recently recalled when discussing the dance parties he attended as a youth in Brazil. "The music got slower... the floor would be much emptier and, more often than not, you were surrounded by amazing landscapes." Those memories serve as a good description of Donoso's solo synth work. It's a kind of dream-state dance music, filled with rippling light and vivid atmospheres, and devoid of hard, four-on-the-floor beats. In fact, there are no drums in Donoso's pulsing tunes. All the rhythm-- and there's a lot of it-- is created through timing and momentum.
The resulting sound on Assimilating the Shadow, Donoso's second solo album, has roots in his dance/techno background, but stretches toward the minimalist flights of Terry Riley, the Kraut trance of Cluster, the spaced-out arpeggios of early Oneohtrix Point Never, and film scores like John Carpenter's horror themes or Tangerine Dream's bubbling soundtracks. Donoso is familiar with genre-crossing-- he's played drums in improv-jazz and avant-metal groups, and his duo Perispirit veers toward all-out noise. But he melds these strains naturally, never jamming them together or grasping for superficial variety.
In fact, the 10 songs spread over these two LPs are pretty simple. Each starts with a basic, insistent synth figure, which slowly overlaps with similar lines while simultaneously gathering chords and accents. But as active as these tracks are, they are rarely dense and never blurry. Donoso uses space and staccato to maintain clarity; everything he's doing is always out in the open. And though he's into repetition, he also has a knack for song structure. Each tune progresses with discernible shifts that create drama in loops of tension and release.
In the best tracks, those loops intertwine with looser abstraction. On "Chemical Structures", a reflecting synth riff spawns crescendos without wavering from its solid cycle. Similar waves course through "The Bow and the Lyre", but Donoso continually adds rippling echoes, the sonic equivalent of pelting a lake with different-sized pebbles. Most remarkable is closer "Renunciation", whose swarm of small sounds creates a bright buzz, like a symphony of crickets coaxing a sunrise.
Which again suggests that Donoso's music evokes the morning end of an all-night party. The title, Assimilating the Shadow, itself seems to allude to that surreal time when the sun fades in, swallowing the darkness as it rises. But according to press notes, it's a reference to Carl Jung's claim that "everyone carries a shadow." That works too-- there's an undercurrent of foreboding in these compositions, an ominous sense that danger lurks on the horizon of Donoso's rolling sounds. Yet nearly every moment is also calm and soothing, as easy to zone out to as it is to get chills from. Perhaps that's the strength of his music-- as simple as it sounds at first, repeat listens reveal something wider and deeper going on.


Guerilla Toss make a "Donkey Kong"*-*soundtrack version of punk, with synthesizers ping-ponging against screeching guitars. It's brainy music that feels immediate and visceral.

Eraser Stargazer

Guerilla Toss may project themselves as deeply weeded hippie-punks, but they are not slackers. In just the last three years, the group has checked a number of boxes on the avant-rock bucket list: Releases on Digitalis Limited, NNA Tapes, Feeding Tube, and a CD on composer John Zorn’s Tzadik label, where they appeared as part of the Spotlight Series, a sub-imprint meant to highlight young and emerging weirdo talent. That honor is well earned. In concert, the band is wild and disorienting—a kind of punk rock "Donkey Kong" soundtrack with synthesizers ping-ponging against screeching guitars, the rhythm section halting and then churning in dialog with singer Kassie Carlson's animalistic yelps. They make brainy music that feels mmediate and visceral.
Now signed to New York's DFA, Guerilla Toss have simmered down a little. The band’s first full-length for the label, Eraser Stargazer, finds them less manic and more zoned-out, augmenting pulsing repetition with heaps of gurgling psychedelic jewelry and elastic basslines. In terms of DFA’s classic catalog, they skew closer to the gonzo tradition embodied by Black Dice than the streamlined dance-punk of the Rapture. The later favored minimalism and poise, embodying a fluid and streamlined rhythmic sensibility. Guerilla Toss' music is more like the burbling glop at the top of the Slurpee machine—viscous and messy. Think Chocolate Synthesizer-era Boredoms spliced with The Uplift Mofo Party Plan-era Red Hot Chili Peppers. No, don't laugh. That's not a takedown. On Eraser Stargazer, Guerilla Toss suggests funkiness without channeling the grody and ultra-masculine energy that seems forever sewn to punk-funk. Not exactly an easy thing to do.
In a way, their closest contemporary kin might be Baltimore's Dope Body—another band that has thrived on deconstructing '90s dude-rock into heady mulch. Though, Guerilla Toss’ alternative-era source material is not so much MTV as the jam band world. Which shouldn’t suggest that they are given to jamming. That kinship comes more through a lack of musical self-consciousness—the willingness to seek transcendence via improvisation and weirdo genre bending. On Eraser Stargazer, Guerilla Toss captures that crowd’s yin and yang—the blissed-out hippie vibe and also the druggy parking lot creep-out factor.
But like the jam bands of yesteryear, Guerilla Toss’ on-stage appeal is not easily consumed through the thin reed of a SoundCloud single, a YouTube video, or even a LP. In concert, the band can survive on sheer intensity. But as a record, Eraser Stargazer is sometimes weirdly hookless and ponderous. There’s plenty of stoner fog, but not always much to grip. It is a forward move for the band, though. Where Guerilla Toss’ music was once driven by the push and pull between abrasive elements, Eraser Stargazer glides by in a dreamlike gonzo haze. Gentler, but no less strange.


Singer and composer Jenny Hval and multi-instrumentalist Håvard Volden collaborate for an EP of two extended, lucid, and intimate pieces of art-punk.

Feeling EP

For a certain set of listeners—feminist pop fans, post-punk philosophers, people who like to feel as much as they like to think—Jenny Hval has become ever more heroic with each album. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m complex and intellectual,” the Norwegian avant-gardist sang on her fifth full-length, 2015’s Apocalypse, girl. Hval, now 37, has made her name on slyly affirming moments like this: self-reflexive, conceptual, at once serious and fun. She consistently extends the boundaries of herself. Hval’s most recent LP, 2016’s Blood Bitch, was inspired by vampire movies, Chris Kraus’ book I Love Dick, and period blood; it won the prestigious Nordic Music Prize. There is no doubt that Hval is complex and intellectual. But that lyric, from a song called “Why This,” was moving because it sounded like Hval needed to convince herself in order to keep going. We all do sometimes.
Lost Girls is Hval’s latest collaboration with the multi-instrumentalist Håvard Volden, who also plays in her live band. Hval and Volden previously recorded under the name Nude on Sand, releasing a more organic-sounding 2012 record of Volden’s acoustic guitar experiments and Hval’s feather-light singing. The new Feeling EP is a stark and welcomed turn. Its two extended compositions center on Hval’s spoken word, deep rhythms, and a feeling of dislocation. “Accept,” the largely instrumental B-side, is an 11-minute hybrid of wide-open free jazz drumming, blown-out blast beats, and B-movie horror vocalizations. Hval repeats “accept the risk” with a bracing intimacy; she audibly does.
But the 14-minute monologue “Drive” is Feeling’s main concern—like a lucid sonic essay, an episodic mix of synth-pop, tablas, and criticism at once. What begins with Hval observing her surroundings while in the van on tour (and musing on her destination: the gig) soon grows heavier. “Drive” comes to feel like some innocuous daydream that sneaks up on you and sucks you into the void.
If Feeling is a footnote to Hval’s primary work, then it’s an essential one. For Hval is the best kind of punk thinker: a natural skeptic whose curiosity about the world remains boundless, from anarchism and porn to religion and romcoms. She sees through everything. On “Drive,” simply by describing what’s around her, she covers the creature-comforts of capitalism, patriarchy, performer-audience dynamics, and the similarities between underground and mainstream culture. It is hard to imagine another artist who could make such a heady undertaking transmit so much emotion—melancholy, power, care, and joy.
Hval and Varden have said that “Drive” was initially inspired by the blustering hardcore aggression of Black Flag, before they got into the late opera composer Robert Ashley and it changed. But watching Ashley’s dreamlike, absurdist operas for television, such as 1978’s “Perfect Lives” (Ashley preferred not to wait for the permission and space of the opera establishment) there are parallels to 1980s SST punk. Both antagonized convention with an audacious and uncompromised outsider perspective; they were based in raw language and personal transformation. These qualities take shape on Feeling as well.
Hval bears her process on “Drive”—she confesses to watching herself on YouTube, to listening to her own music—and it all comes to a potent conclusion as she states her ultimate goal: “I want us all to cry together… in the empty clubs.” But then she catches herself. “What am I saying? I want you all to cry with me? Isn’t that just manipulation?” Hval lets the seams of her thinking show and she wonders if what she’s doing isn’t just as evil as the “arena concerts” or “mainstream movies” that plunder our base emotions, warping our expectations of reality when they introduce violence or violins or “kissing in the rain.”
But what Hval shows here is empathy. She knows how confusing it is to just live. As her logic deepens, the music grows more wrenching and intense; the drums hit harder and crisper; her voice melodically twirls for emphasis. “Feeling something and you don’t know why,” Hval grapples, before fine-tuning it: “Let me rephrase that/Feeling something/But you don’t know who you are.” Hval’s work, though, has an opposite effect: It makes lost girls feel seen.


The Queens-raised rapper’s fourth album is an inconsistent letdown, swaying between soul-baring R&B, cookie-cutter flexes, and empty posturing.

Bas: We Only Talk About Real Shit When We’re Fucked Up

Bas is one of a few Dreamville delegates who has yet to experience a true breakout moment. The Paris-born, Queens-raised artist, who has also lived in Qatar and briefly went to college in Virginia, is the son of a Sudanese diplomat. That recipe should make for an interesting perspective; in practice, he combines a flexible New York-cool rap style with beats that blend trap, boom-bap, and dashes of Afrobeats and R&B. It has led him to decent success, with four studio albums and two RIAA-certified platinum releases to his name. But his highest-streamed song on Spotify, a 2018 J. Cole collaboration called “Tribe,” stands out more for his guest’s electrifying verse and producer Childish Major’s peppy, guitar-led beat than his own contributions. He’s certainly come a long way from near-death shoot-outs on Hillside Avenue and helping his brother—Cole’s manager and Dreamville co-founder Ibrahim Hamad—pass out mixtapes at the North Carolina rapper’s early release parties. Still, he has yet to cross over like fellow Dreamville signees JID and Ari Lennox have. Though he’s a competent rapper with a good ear for beats and a distinct background, he hasn’t quite cracked how to translate those unique traits into a full project.
His fourth album, We Only Talk About Real Shit When We’re Fucked Up, attempts to split the difference, with more R&B melodies and heartfelt vulnerability than ever. The general idea—finding the courage to be open about your life and struggles while sober—is a ripe one, but Bas only occasionally transcends the hokey weedism of the album’s title. Startling revelations, like stories of friends stealing money from Dreamville artists and reflections on his life before fame, bring new depth to his writing: a heartbeat to back up the flashy flows and shit talk. But these thoughts are only explored in fits and starts; Bas often defaults to the boilerplate posturing and jet-setting flings of his earlier work. It’s a naked attempt to open up to fans on a more personal level, and the inconsistency makes it even harder to connect with.
Opener “Light of My Soul” is at least a promising start. The first verse rides in on a mournful vocal sample, its melancholy accentuating his tales of strained friendships and drunken nights. By the time the drums thud into place, he’s completely baring his soul, delivering lines about wearing sunglasses to hide behind his pain and working through his people-pleasing tendencies: “Mama told me ‘Treat ’em to the light of my soul/The light of my soul, and don’t expect nothing back’/The light of my soul, but shit, I want something back.” Exasperation is uncommon on a Bas song, and hearing him navigate this emotion over such a forlorn beat is as uncomfortable as it is gripping.
For every white-knuckle storytelling display or reflection on his Sudanese heritage and self-destructive drug use, there are a handful of songs that either fall back on old habits or redress them in surface-level ways. Singsong ballads make up the bulk of the tracklist—a first for Bas. Though his harmonies are smooth, they’re occasionally monotonous; at the very least, it’s somewhat of a risk. If several of these songs didn’t revolve around the same bland relationship stories he’s been rapping about since 2014’s “Fiji Water in My Iron,” it’d feel even more adventurous. “Choppas” seems to compare a fraught romance to the spin of helicopter blades, an awkward conceit that muddies an otherwise gorgeous FKJ and Christo beat. “Black Jedi” and “Decent” abandon the specificity of his writing, coming off more like faceless BET rom-coms than relatable or vulnerable admissions. No one is asking him for an entire album of Ab-Soul-style introspection, but it’s undeniable that the soul-baring tracks stick more than the rest.
Because this is a solo album, it’s ironic that outside of Real Shit’s confessionals, Bas sounds most comfortable and self-assured when rapping next to Cole, who appears here on three songs. On “Home Alone,” he adopts Cole’s sputtering flow, trading traumatic anecdotes and flexes over bouncy synths and drum work from producers T Minus and Cubeatz. “Passport Bros” comes across like a more leisurely version of their previous track “Tribe,” with its bright guitars and drum shuffle sauntering underneath stories of lovestruck, boozy boat rides. On a more structured album, a song like this would welcome a sunny moment after intense reflection. But here, it feels far removed from the album’s concept and speaks to where Bas’ interests and talents are best suited. Once hailed by The FADER as Dreamville’s heir apparent, Bas wants to be all things to all people. But as a solo artist, he winds up doing the one thing he feared most: spreading himself too thin.


On her debut album, the Iranian-born Netherlands-based singer and multidisciplinary artist Sevdaliza establishes herself as a provocateur with a sense of global mission.

ISON

At the top of the insert for ISON, the debut full-length from Iranian-born Netherlands-based singer and multi-platform artist Sevdaliza, there’s a modified quote from a love letter that author Franz Kafka wrote to Czech journalist Milena Jesenská: “In this life, you are the knife with which I explore myself.” Though not Sevdaliza’s own words (and Kafka originally wrote “love” not “life”), the quote encapsulates the artist’s way of being both grandiose and explosive with simple, compact phrases. And while Kafka’s tortured correspondence certainly makes for an appropriate window into the mindset of ISON, a more fitting manifesto for Sevdaliza’s work might be: “I am the knife by which you explore life”—the “you” being us, the audience.
Some artists, it seems, have an irrepressible drive to ride the razor’s edge, to go places the world isn’t necessarily ready or willing to explore. For that type of artist, creation alone isn’t enough. ISON establishes Sevdaliza as an artist-provocateur with a sense of global mission. Provocative in the most generous sense, ISON’s messages both jar and invite. Sevdaliza is also blessed with a huckster’s knack for hyping her efforts via high-minded concepts. The album cover, for instance, frames Sevdaliza as mother to herself, to her past lives, and to the album’s 16 songs.
Originally on track towards a career as a basketball player, Sevdaliza abandoned athletics to pursue art. Like FKA Twigs, it’s clear that music represents just one dimension of her creative being, as she guides its visual and filmic presentations. And when you watch the lavish videos for ISON songs like “Human,” “Marilyn Monroe,” and “That Other Girl,” you might get the impression that the music doesn’t stand up quite as well without the visuals. On ISON, though, Sevdaliza and co-producer Mucky create an aural world so rich in detail and ambience that the music almost functions as a film set all on its own.
ISON is a modern-day trip hop album built on minimal breakbeats and heavy layers of orchestration courtesy of string arranger Mihai Puscoiu. Sevdaliza and Mucky take a rather frugal approach in their choice of sounds, and yet the sum total of the soundscape is massive and enveloping (thanks, in part, to masterful use of reverb). At the center of it all is Sevdaliza’s voice. As an entirely self-taught vocalist, she shows a startling level of agility and command as she switches between the stately inflection of a classic jazz singer backed by strings and the brassy nerve of a digital-age R&B artist flexing and cooing over the beat.
Impressively, she provokes thought and discomfort more with the emotion in her voice than through the stories her songs tell, like an actor emphasizing facial expressions over lines. In her videos, Sevdaliza tends to spell out her central themes (i.e: the conflicted interplay between womanhood and the constraints of motherhood, societal expectations, the male gaze, etc). Search for those subjects in the actual music, however, and they prove to be somewhat elusive, if ever-present. ISON is fraught with the push-pull dynamic between vulnerability and power, confidence and grace—dichotomies that Sevdaliza seeks to challenge.
There are too many eye-popping turns of phrase to list, but for Sevdaliza, even the simple, deadpan phrasing of the line “I am human” bursts with meaning. If there’s one knock on ISON, it’s that it stretches out to an hour-plus, which is a lot to take at the same crawling tempo. While Mucky’s beats can be nimble, some songs barely seem to move. Still, ISON is an album that gets under your skin and lingers in your thoughts. As warm and inviting as it gets at times, Sevdaliza was right not to make it too easy on the listener.


Ferreira’s newest album doesn’t stray from his core sound of jazzy boom bap, but his candid writing brings out the lucidity and urgency of his music.

R.A.P. Ferreira: 5 to the Eye With Stars

5 to the Eye With Stars

The cover of R.A.P. Ferreira’s 10th album depicts a vintage car parked on the shore of a psychedelic stream. People, perhaps the owners of the vehicle, float face-up in the water as if taking a break, but the car looks ready to move along. Its headlights beam into the borders of the image as if seeking the unknown. That mix of repose and anticipation captures the spirit of 5 to the Eye With Stars, where Ferreira takes stock of his journey while plotting its next leg. The record doesn’t stray from Ferreira’s core sound of jazzy boom bap, but his candid writing brings out the lucidity and urgency of his music.

He’s always been a stargazer and maverick prone to obfuscation and evasion. “Yo milo, why you always rap in passcodes?” he asked himself on 2015’s so the flies don’t come. The answer: “’Cause they assholes/Who don’t deserve the whole.” He still shuns legibility, but since 2021’s Bob’s Son, his album-length ode to beat poet Bob Kaufman, he has prioritized finding himself rather than eluding the listener. Arcane allusions to pop culture and continental philosophy have decreased, supplanted by autobiography and pointed interactions with his surroundings. “Negro, I’m on the World Wide Web/Slandering Eugene V. Debs, and I’m having fun with it/My mindset is on an abundance/These muhfuckas is Wakanda pundits,” he raps on “boot knife.” Even his flexes foreground his pleasure and curiosity.
Ferreira does a lot of shit-talking and stunting on this record. Opener “fighting back” sets the tone with rhymes about making his first million off cassette sales and powering the cosmos with epic poetry. On “ark doors,” he hits the electric slide while holding his scrotum in Cashville (Nashville), where he relocated after a stint helming a record store in Biddeford, Maine. Single “ours” finds him colonizing the stars and dunking like Kareem Abdul-Jabar over a jingly Rose Noir beat. The production feels muted compared to the rutted beats on Purple Moonlight Pages and Bob’s Son, where the textures brought out the swing in Ferreira’s loping cadences, but his boosted confidence emboldens him. His lines land like blows.

That sense of weight extends to his frequent soul-searching, which ballasts his boasts. “This chapter of my life is called almost,” he says on “fighting back.” On “consolation,” a track inspired by the poem “Butter Sunday,” he offers a Pyrrhic victory chant. “Well fed, my consolation,” he murmurs for the hook, embracing his minor success as an indie rap act while acknowledging its meager rewards. Ferreira has always paired the poetic with the prosaic, but here there’s no whiplash or provocation. He simply unspools, “a being, being honest,” as he puts it on “ours.”
On the elegiac “mythsysizer instinct,” which features one of the neatest hooks in his catalog, he pivots from plaintive disclosures (“There are days I only get to see my son on FaceTime”) to imagistic couplets (“Stained white Ts, Delilah delights me/Ronda Rousey type beat”) while building to a haymaker in the second verse. “You know, rappin’ get people killed,” he raps, the deliberate pause underscoring the gravity of the statement. He neither editorializes nor mythologizes. He just observes, and steadies his pen for whatever comes next.
Earlier this year, Ferreira tweeted that he no longer found “the idea of genre useful,” and that he is “operating in a Black cultural, historical tradition spanning many vocal techniques, instruments, forms, electricities.” In September, he followed that announcement with an EP of scrappy blues songs under the name Crow Billiken. 5 to the Eye With Stars is a more conventional and accomplished set, but it’s just as interested in evolution. In its most inspired and unmoored moments, even doubt feels clarifying.
Correction: The description of the car depicted on the album cover has been updated.


Last year's American Weekend, Katie Crutchfield's piercing debut as Waxahatchee, got passed around like a secret. Cerulean Salt, Crutchfield's second album, demonstrates newfound assurance, marking her as a new songwriting voice to reckon with.

Cerulean Salt

Last year's American Weekend, Katie Crutchfield's piercing debut as Waxahatchee, got passed around like a secret. On the surface, it was a modest record-- 11 lo-fi acoustic songs written and recorded in the span of a week while snowed in at her parents' neighborless Alabama home near the body of water from which the project takes its name. Chronicling missed connections and cell phones smashed in moments of frustration, it was an album-length meditation on the modern allure of going off the grid (the first song was called "Catfish", but it wasn't about that). But what gutted you was a voice that cut through the murk like infomercial shower cleaner. Crutchfield sang frankly ("I think I love you, but you'll never find out") and without inhibition, as if she desperately wanted but didn't expect to be heard.
Cerulean Salt, Crutchfield's new album, is going to be heard. But from its opening moments, you get the sense that she's ready for it, the newfound assurance, steadiness, and clarity of her voice immediately obvious. "We are late, we are loud, we remain connected as you're reading out loud," she sings on the smolderingly evocative opener, "Hollow Bedroom". Like American Weekend, it begins with just a guitar and a voice, though this time the instrument's plugged in and the recording sounds more professional. (It was still recorded at home, this time in the Philadelphia house she shares with her sister and bandmates.) But it's no less intimate-- if anything, the clean recording only brings you in tighter. Crutchfield's voice rises to be heard over the distortion that kicks in during the song's final minute. "And I don't believe that I care at all," she sings with quiet defiance. "What they hear through these walls."
Since her early teens, Crutchfield has been a precocious, prolific songwriter, and now that she's in her early 20s, she's already a veteran of a number of short-lived projects: an early solo act called King Everything, plus a few melodic punk bands she played in with her twin sister, Swearin' frontwoman Allison, including Bad Banana, the Ackleys, and P.S. Eliot. Crutchfield hails from Alabama-- a fact that's stamped all over her voice's twangy swagger-- but her songs have a drifter's perspective that suggest that, in a sense, she's also come from everywhere. Her music is partially about being young and on the road, what happens in those rare cases when teenage wanderlust is not a suburban daydream, but an everyday reality.
Cerulean Salt is full of vagrant wisdom and people who might once have hitchhiked across the country but were born into a moment when they could just join a punk band instead. They crash on shitty group house floors, cram their gear and bodies into vans with questionable, unexplained "blood on the back seat," and shirk from commitment whenever feelings are anything more than fleeting.  "I'll try to embrace the lows," she sings on "Coast to Coast", a song whose buoyant static makes the most of her new band members (Kyle Gilbride and Keith Spencer from Swearin' add bass and drums).
Crutchfield has a way of delivering a line so casually that it takes a half-dozen listens to fully realize how devastating it is. "I had a dream last night, we had hit separate bottoms," she sings, a brilliant, crushing line hidden in the middle of the gently strummed "Lively". Her songs paint scenes in quick, deft strokes thanks to her knack for knowing exactly which physical details will carry emotional resonance. There's something almost unbearably poignant about the wedding reception she describes where "make-up sets on [the bride's] face like tar" and "the champagne flutes poorly engineered, employ dixie cups and jars."
Marriage, tradition, and lineage are all sources of great anxiety in a Waxahatchee song. There was a track on American Weekend about a grandmother, with the repeated refrain, "You got married when you were 15," uttered with disbelief, as though Crutchfield were trying to imagine how different her own life would be had the same been true for her. These themes are explored in more depth on Cerulean Salt; in "Swan Dive" she confesses that "dreams about loveless marriage and regret" keep her up at night, while she presents a peer's wedding as more of a "tragic epilogue" than a celebration on "Dixie Cups and Jars" (which feels like a slightly more harrowing take on Built to Spill's "Twin Falls"). "You’ll remain," she says to her, "I will find a way to leave gracefully, or I'll escape." Where she'll go isn't clear, but it's these free-floating desires and unanswered questions that give Crutchfield's songs their haunting power.
"This place is vile, and I'm vile too," Crutchfield howls on the stunning closer, "You're Damaged". In the hands of a lesser singer, a line like that might feel too exposed. But Crutchfield's characters can't help but be exactly who they say they are: they're catfish in a Catfish world. And as they squirm, flop, and clumsily make their way through their lives, their specific experiences become something universal. "For me, the only way to write lyrics is not to think about other people at all," Crutchfield said in a recent interview. "You just have to write stuff for you and only you, and not worry about how people are going to take it. It'll be inevitably relatable because it's true to you." It’s that blazingly honest, hyper-personal quality that places Cerulean Salt in the tradition of Elliott Smith, early Cat Power, or Liz Phair's free-flowing Girlysound tapes-- the work of a songwriter skilled enough to make introspection seem not self-centered, but generous.


On the L.A. band's debut, their influences floated incredibly close to the surface. But Hummingbird is a record of lateral growth, a clear move towards the band establishing their own footing among their contemporaries.

Hummingbird

Local Natives' 2010 debut, Gorilla Manor, was fully-formed and immediately pleasing, functioning at a level that lesser acts spend entire careers trying to reach. But it had a certain youthful scrappiness, too. Alongside expansive tracks like "Shape Shifter" and "Wide Eyes", there were the silly howls that introduced "Airplanes" and the shouty breakdown of "Sun Hands", both of which brought comparisons to Animal Collective. All told, it was very of-the-moment with influences to match. Guitarist/singer Taylor Rice cited Broken Social Scene in an interview around the time of the album's release, and anyone following along with big-tent indie rock could pick up on other borrowed elements: Grizzly Bear's choirboy sway, the National's starched-shirt seriousness, Fleet Foxes' rolling melodicism. But while the songwriting was strong, you had to wonder if the band would prove to be more than the sum of their influences.
Hummingbird, Local Natives' second album, offers a tricky answer to that question. They're still on the same path-- no fashionable synths or newfound fixation with 1990s R&B here-- but innovation seems beside the point. This is a record of lateral growth, one that finds the band establishing their own place among their contemporaries. Ironically, they've found their sound with the assistance of one of their major forebears: the National's Aaron Dessner performs and contributes songwriting on Hummingbird, and shares production credit with the band while recording with them in his Brooklyn studio. (His brother and bandmate, Bryce, contributed horn arrangements to several songs, too.)
As with member-cum-producers Death Cab for Cutie's Chris Walla and TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek, Dessner's production style isn't terribly distinctive. But he knows how to make things sound good, and there's plenty of richness and depth to these songs. Bassist Andy Hamm left Local Natives in 2011, leaving Local Natives as a quartet; on Hummingbird, Aaron Dessner acts as fifth band member of the group.
In our interview with the band last year, they described the split with Hamm as "heartbreaking," and it wasn't the only loss suffered following Gorilla Manor's release: lead vocalist Kelcey Ayer's mother passed away last summer. Accordingly, the brightness and boisterousness of Gorilla Manor is mostly absent. Advance track "Breakers" is a pulsating rush of drum fills and "ooh"s that deflates to nearly nothing just as the wordless hook begins to sink in. There are other ominous touches: the tangled vocal ascent of "You & I", "Black Spot"'s closing instrumental tumble, the static laden "Wooly Mammoth", one of many cuts that showcases drummer Matt Frazier's knack for creating expressive, overwhelming washes of rhythm. Lyrics convey the anxiety and depressed confusion. Where Gorilla Manor tried to capture the feeling of twentysomething malaise ("Water's in the clouds/ Is my life about to change?/ Who knows?/ Who cares?"); here words are more vivid, conveying scenes of hopelessness and the feeling that everyone you know around you is slowly becoming a stranger.
Lyrically, they're best when they're at their most direct. "Colombia"'s beautiful swell takes syncopated bass and stately piano and grows into something warm and emotionally cathartic. Vocally, Ayer takes a lilting upper register, leaning into it more and more as his lonely voice turns pleading while addressing his deceased mother: "If you never felt all of my love/ I pray now you do". On an album that spans a wide range of emotions, "Colombia" is Hummingbird's most affecting moment; it's also one of the best songs the band's ever written.
Although there are a number of fine uptempo songs, Hummingbird's strongest moments are the quiet, elegiac cuts similar to "Colombia": the brief, sweetly sung "Ceilings", the skyward wails of "Three Months", Ayer's simmering solo take on the verses of "Heavy Feet". Subtlety is key, and Hummingbird is nothing if not subtle. There's nothing as melodic as "Airplanes" or "World News" on here, but this isn't a bad thing. With Hummingbird, Local Natives have made a thoughtful, lovely album with small gestures that provide great rewards.


The Chicago artist’s first posthumous release doesn’t feel like a final goodbye, but instead a continued look inside his world. It’s bleak and beautiful.

Legends Never Die

At 21, Juice WRLD had begun to master the world around him. He could wed the sounds of influences like Billy Idol and Chief Keef and create something entirely different. As a songwriter, he could pair an airy melody with lyrics about heartbreak or drugs, and given the chance, fire off marathon freestyle sessions on a whim. A wunderkind with many imitators on SoundCloud, he sounded far more polished, far beyond whatever his closest peer was attempting to accomplish. When he died in December 2019, days removed from celebrating his 21st birthday, it opened up yet another wound for a generation of rap fans struggling to hold on to the new voices that spoke for them.
Juice WRLD brought people from outside the margins into his crystalized world of vulnerability in a dash towards mental freedom. His most fervently repeated lines doubled as yearbook quotes or quickly deleted tweets. His closest supporters, such as producer and longtime collaborator Nick Mira, have kept his legacy close to them, maybe more so than any other group of fans who recently lost their champion. Juice asked those fans to trust him—and the people who supported him—as if they were family. Legends Never Die, the Chicago artist’s first posthumous release, doesn’t feel like a final goodbye from Juice but instead a continued look inside his world.
Across three major releases—Goodbye & Good Riddance, WRLD on Drugs, and Death Race for Love—Juice proudly kept himself at a distance while pining for love, bringing fans closer to his truth while still keeping his guard up. The bulk of Legends Never Die sifts through his thoughts as he battled anxiety in the face of stardom. He understood the game he played and how it kept him centered: “If it wasn’t for the pills, I wouldn’t be here,” he sings on “Wishing Well.” It’s a bleak and beautiful world he’s created, one where the most poignant moments are buried in candor and honesty.
Throughout Legends Never Die’s 56 minutes, Juice’s delivery is conversational and evocative as he checks off the perks of success and the lingering doubts (“Just got a new house, gotta hide the skeletons in the closet”). The emo-heavy sounds that blossomed on Death Race’s “Robbery” and “Empty” have now morphed into a fully developed ecosystem where all of the sounds and keys are built around Juice’s frame of mind. Mira’s touches on Legends Never Die don’t appear until the harrowing “Righteous,” where sparse guitar plays underneath Juice’s confessional: “Taking medicine to fix all of the damage/My anxiety the size of a planet,” he sings. Pop heavyweights such Dr. Luke and Marshmello grab the mantle on “Wishing Well” and the pop-rock ready anthem “Come & Go,” where Juice thanks God for allowing him grace and support.
Juice writes a great hook like no other, but it’s a fine line between being catchy and being repetitive. The themes of despair and downing pills to mask problems carry over to many songs and make for an uneasy listen that doesn’t really reveal more about him in the process. As high as Juice was in creating watershed moments, his self-awareness about those highs eventually betraying him became evident. Even when he shifts into a tough sneer, he steps into knotty one-liners about gunplay (“Let my gun bust a nut”) that fall flat.
There are moments when Juice’s peers take the wheel to eulogize him. “The Man, The Myth, The Legend” captures anecdotes and unpretentious thoughts on his life from the likes of G Herbo and others. Stories about Juice’s freestyle skills and triumphs are peppered with colossal heapings of praise and zero mention of what ultimately robbed his life. Even without that added dimension, it’s the intent that’s paramount. Herbo and company—like many who struggle with how best to remember family when they pass—choose to be protective and highlight Juice’s greater deeds and accomplishments, rather than to relive a tragic final act.
The gripping parts of Legends Never Die come when Juice is speaking from the heart. With a casual flex in his voice, he points out his guiding ethos: Regardless of how destructive his path was, he sought to save those who listened to him. He found those same sentiments in peers like Lil Peep and XXXTentacion, both of whom captured raw material from the id to establish cult-like fanbases and died just months apart. (In 2018, Juice released “Legends,” a tribute song to both men, singing, “What’s the 27 Club?/We ain’t making it past 21.”) Legends Never Die becomes another way for Juice WRLD to keep saving people from their demons. He wanted to help fans who were also enduring his pain—he never wanted to be alone in the process.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Three invaluable reissues showcase a young bandleader and his top-tier players as they create a powerfully cohesive group sound: elegant, adventurous, warm, and ferocious all at once.

Pharoah Sanders: Tauhid/Jewels of Thought/Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmun Umyun)

On June 28, 1965, four months after the assassination of Malcolm X and just a few weeks before the Voting Rights Act became law, John Coltrane assembled his largest-ever ensemble to record Ascension. A beautiful and harrowing listen, the album’s sole piece extends across 40 minutes of thundering, screaming, and meandering free jazz, radically breaking from the formal elegance and tight group interplay he had epitomized with his “classic quartet” on A Love Supreme, released earlier that year. The album also marked a changing of the guard, with Coltrane welcoming into the spotlight a scrappy, untested generation of iconoclastic players, many of whom were beginning to embrace emergent strains of black-power philosophy in their music. Among them were such soon-to-be luminaries as Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, John Tchicai, and a young, unknown tenor saxophonist named Pharoah Sanders.
Sanders had arrived in New York a few years prior, struggling to get work and often living on the streets. Early collaborations with Sun Ra and Don Cherry helped him find his footing in the burgeoning free-jazz community; it was Sun Ra that suggested changing his name from Farrell to Pharoah. But it was his work alongside Coltrane that set him on the course he would follow for the rest of his career. Starting with Ascension, Sanders became an invaluable foil for Coltrane’s virtuosic, divisive deconstructions. “Sometimes I didn’t know whether Pharoah was doing the growling or John,” said Frank Lowe, a contemporary of Sanders who played alongside Alice Coltrane. “You know, you don’t stand next to a man and copy him—so Pharoah was pushed into other areas.”
Despite the prestigious alliance, with Coltrane publically praising him as a man of “tremendous spiritual reservoir,” many critics balked at the viscera of Sanders’ solos. Whitney Balliett, writing for The New Yorker, decried his playing as “elephant shrieks... [which] appeared to have little in common with music,” while the San Francisco Chronicle dismissed him as “primitive.” As the 1960s wore on, with the Vietnam War entering its second decade, the Black Panther Party forming in 1966, and the rise of a “turn on, tune in, drop out” youth culture, the beloved post-bop of only a few years prior seemed trampled underfoot by a disorderly new generation of squawking, honking interlopers.
What’s astonishing is how rapidly Sanders developed from a wildcard sideman into a confident bandleader after his mentor’s untimely passing, in 1967. Albert Ayler famously declared, “‘Trane was the father. Pharoah was the son. I was the holy ghost”; Sanders’ seven-year, 11-album run for Impulse! Records directly builds on the core premise of Ascension, stretching Coltrane’s templates across a string of masterpieces. These three invaluable reissues showcase the young Sanders confidently guiding a steadily growing panoply of “fire music” MVPs, uniting their disparate voices and egos to create a powerfully cohesive group sound: elegant, adventurous, warm, and ferocious all at once.
Tauhid, from 1967, is his debut for the label, and it plays like a mission statement. At the helm of an all-star sextet that includes Henry Grimes on bass, Dave Burrell on piano, and Sonny Sharrock on guitar, Sanders leads the group through three pieces that transcend the traditional “head/solo/head” structure (where, following a quick introductory melody, each player gets a turn in the spotlight before the piece returns to the “head”). On Tauhid, the pieces are suites that play like seances, with movements billowing and unfolding of their own accord. The group’s unity is powerful, creating a spiritual atmosphere that casts a spell from the opening bars.
Opener “Upper Egypt & Lower Egypt” takes the “Acknowledgement” section from A Love Supreme as a starting point before Sanders launches his group into the stratosphere. Where Coltrane kicked off his album with a quick 30 seconds of fanfare before diving in, Sanders lets Burrell and Sharrock lead with almost five minutes of roiling piano and guitar, backed by bells, thrumming bass, and cinematic tom rolls. It doesn’t take much to imagine a sacred rite of initiation performed in a darkened room filled with the scent of frankincense. This gives way to a bowed bass-and-piccolo duet between Grimes and Sanders that owes more to Toru Takemitsu’s fusion of European modernism and traditional Japanese music than New York’s jazz nightclubs. Nine minutes in, Grimes finally settles into a groove and the group falls into place, vamping on two breezy chords. When Sanders eventually joins in, just shy of the 12:30 mark, his opening notes tweak Coltrane’s introductory solo on A Love Supreme; it’s half homage, half breadcrumb trail, giving wary jazz heads enough of a reference point to stick things out while Sanders breaks bold new ground.
Less than four minutes in length, “Japan” follows, a lovely pentatonic march with Sanders on the mic. A gently swaying hymn with no particular flash (and no solos), it reinforces the group-hug friendliness that defines Tauhid’s softest moments and tempers its most aggressive. The album closes with the three-part “Aum / Venus / Capricorn Rising,” a suite that flexes the ensemble’s avant credentials. In the first minutes, Sanders makes good on his reputation, ripping through the foreground while Sharrock darts in and out of the fray, carving proto-punk shapes that anticipate no wave by almost a decade. Soon, though, he’s wrenching yearning melodies out with an undeniable expressive force. The group pivots right with him, tapping into a sound that’s as sophisticated as it is primal.
Jewels of Thought develops this dichotomy further, with a benevolent love-in on the A-side and a somber, dissonant astral voyage worthy of Sun Ra’s Arkestra on the flip. Leon Thomas’ vocal contributions are, for many, an acquired taste. With his earnest monologue on “Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah”—about a “universal prayer for peace” where “all you have to do is clap your hands, 1-2-3”—and his propensity to yodel, he has about as much gravitas as a summer-camp counselor. If you liked what you heard on Tauhid and were hoping for more, this addition may blindside you—it’s no surprise jazz yodeling failed to catch on. Yet despite the lingering dweebiness of Thomas’ performance, the piece soars. By allowing soulful prettiness alongside more vicious passages, Sanders opens the album up, connecting the dots between joyful communion and unflinching catharsis. A squalling solo toward the end of the side sounds like a cry from the deepest, most tortured part of his soul, but it’s supported by an unerringly mellow piano accompaniment (and answered by still more yodeling, now comfortably chilled out in the back of the mix). It’s a moment of deep vulnerability in a genre can often devolve into macho blowing contests.
If “Hum-Allah” is the sugar, then “Sun in Aquarius” is the medicine it helps get down. After an intro of reedy, North African-cribbing winds, thumb piano, and gongs, it yawns out like a terrifying chasm before letting Lonnie Liston Smith’s piano boil over for the better part of five minutes. Sanders is in devastating form, screaming through his tenor. Even after a mid-side comedown and a breathtaking bass duet from Cecil McBee and Richard Davis, he leaps back in undeterred, firing out one of his heaviest solos like a machine gun.
His fourth release for Impulse!, Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmun Umyun) may be Sanders’ finest work from this era. The album is split into two side-long sessions, and the group, now an octet, breathes as one like never before. Coming off of a busy touring schedule, the players were locked in, often building songs out of loose ideas or hints of an arrangement. If the title track finds the players in a joyous, near-telepathic groove, “Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord” is simply spiritual jazz of the highest order. Aching with emotion, it stands alongside Alice Coltrane’s “Prema” and Albert Ayler’s “Our Prayer” as a devotional masterpiece and a fulfillment of free jazz’s promise. Many of the same musicians from Jewels of Thought remain, and you can hear how subsumed they are in the music. They play on top of, around, and in between each other without ever making a wrong move. The song’s title couldn’t be more apt; the music exudes so much sorrow, hope, compassion, joy, and humanity it seems to truly reach for a home beyond our world.
The decades that followed saw Sanders’ career take different turns, never quite reaching the ecstatic highs of this era, and much of his early work fell out of print. What’s remarkable about these reissues is not only how timeless the music is, but how relevant it feels today. Many of his contemporaries seemed to be pushing forward to see how far out they could go and who could get there fastest. Sanders went straight for the source. By pursuing a spiritual approach, he created a body of work that responded to its own historical moment without being time-stamped by it. Shortly after Coltrane and his group recorded Ascension, LA was engulfed in the flames of the Watts riots; by the time Jewels was released, Martin Luther King, Jr., had been murdered. This turmoil and anguish is clearly audible in Sanders’ playing, and today, as the nation once again feels like it’s splitting at the seams, Sanders’ agonized cries resonate, as expressive and important as ever.


The uneven but fascinating sixth album by the Lemonheads gets a new reissue that explores the moment when Evan Dando was everything everyone said he was, all at once.

The Lemonheads: Come on Feel (30th Anniversary Edition)

Come on Feel (30th Anniversary Edition)

In and out of the Lemonheads, Evan Dando has occupied conflicting personae over the past 30 years: himbo bubblehead and underappreciated power-pop savant, a privileged prep playacting as Gram Parsons, wannabe Gallagher brother, and tragicomic, troubled survivor. While Dando’s public appearances of late have tended toward the former descriptions, the ongoing reissue of the Lemonheads’ major label output has attempted to shift the focus toward the latter, a just reward for a band that now serves as a model for much of what’s left of classic indie rock. The campaign now reaches 1993’s Come on Feel the Lemonheads, the last album that stood between alt-rock fame and tabloid infamy, the one where Dando was everything everyone ever said he was, all at once.
Though the album title reflects early ’90s irony, there’s an underlying truth in its intentions: Come on Feel the Lemonheads was a charm offensive by a band that was still largely known for a kitschy cover song, a nod to their ascending star and desire to capitalize on it. The videos for “Into Your Arms” and “It’s About Time” are careful to reiterate that we are meant to see the Lemonheads as a band, one that’s still having a wonderful time together. Bassist Nic Dalton and drummer David Ryan get plenty of camera time, and each of them probably would’ve been the “cute” one in 99 percent of the bands with whom they shared Buzz Bin space. But if the viewer is supposed to get familiar with the Lemonheads, they’re getting intimate with Dando, who’s framed in a variety of settings where one can imagine falling in love—in a forest, cuddled up on a couch, at an impromptu street concert, in a bathtub.
And, of course, only Dando’s face is shown in full on the album cover, gazing wistfully into some uncertain future where someone of his talents will probably end up just fine. But after a brief spell of time when the Lemonheads were a fixture on MTV, I mostly remember seeing that face staring back at me from cluttered racks at Disc Go Round, Wherehouse, Plan 9, and wherever else I shopped for used CDs in the ’90s. The album’s cut-out bin status isn’t necessarily indicative of its quality—there were also quite a few copies of Transmissions From the Satellite Heart, Last Splash, Star, and File Under: Easy Listening, records by indie darlings who’d scored an unexpected hit that didn’t quite prepare mall-walkers for their weirdness.
But there were plenty of examples of sophomore slumps, time capsules from alt-rock’s flop era, and general letdowns coasting off the goodwill from a previous hit. The Lemonheads somehow managed to fit both categories. Less than a year after Dando pinched his nose and covered a song he “hated” for the 25th anniversary of The Graduate, Come on Feel the Lemonheads had enough juice to peak at No. 56 on Billboard. Though nowhere near as crass as the autopilot pop-punk of “Mrs. Robinson,” or even 1989’s take on Suzanne Vega’s “Luka,” the band’s biggest hit was a cover all the same, albeit one from someone in the Lemonheads. Dalton replaced Juliana Hatfield on bass following It’s a Shame About Ray and contributed a curio from his previous band, the Love Positions. In its original form, “Into Your Arms” was 100 seconds of state-of-the-art K Records worship: no drums, gooey, pitch-shifted lyrics, on an album called Billiepeebup with a bunch of pink hearts on the cover. The red-blooded, full-bodied version that ended up on radio proved that Dando was no Kurt Cobain in terms of comportment, but still a valuable interpreter for Alternative Nation and its financiers: someone who could smuggle Boston college rock and Australian twee into places they couldn’t get to on their own.
The ensuing singles continue to shine outside of their original context as songs that couldn’t sustain the momentum of “Into Your Arms.” “The Great Big No” pivots from their standard, strummy college rock jangle to an uneasy, dissonant chorus, almost like a purified version of shoegaze, heavier than anything the Lemonheads had done even when they were a Dinosaur Jr. worship band. “It’s About Time” and “Down About It” reiterate the strengths of It’s a Shame About Ray, Dando’s shopworn voice and gnomic hooks suggesting vast experience if not deep thoughts—that there are stories here, if you’re willing to wait for them. Fittingly, the last great song the Lemonheads would write would be called “If I Could Talk I’d Tell You.”
These highlights all occur within the first 10 or so minutes of Come on Feel the Lemonheads, creating the illusory effect of an album that always seems to be better than you remember it, or at least better than the critics thought then. “Evan Dando is a good-looking guy with more luck than talent and more talent than brains who conceals his narcissism beneath an unassuming suburban drawl,” Robert Christgau wrote in his 1993 “Turkey Shoot,” a cascade of assumptions that didn’t need to be scrutinized because the first claim was clearly true. But this gets to an irony that’s made reassessment of the Lemonheads so compelling: Dando was the rare male musician subject to the standards by which many female alt-rock artists were judged, wherein the art made their appearance, romantic relationships, and drug use fair game for gossip and assumption. And unlike Cobain, Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell, or other male, alt-rock sex symbols of the era, Dando didn’t outwardly shy away from that gaze. When he acknowledges the obvious on “Paid to Smile,” he’s more bemused than anything (“I can work the handle on any car/It’s really not that hard”), empathizing with anyone in the same position. Someone’s gonna do it, why not him?
It’s just as likely that Dando wasn’t taken particularly seriously because he didn’t take himself all that seriously either; as Come on Feel the Lemonheads progresses, he marvels at the Coriolis Effect, reads the labels on his spice rack, and calls out the chords he’s playing on “Dawn Can’t Decide.” Among my few middle school peers aware of the Lemonheads’ existence, “Big Gay Heart” was the most transgressive thing imaginable at the time, not even so much for its hook, but its earnest embrace of country music—we were still three years away from Ween’s 12 Golden Country Greats. But at that point “Big Gay Heart” was only the second Lemonheads song longer than four minutes (1990’s “[The] Door” was about 75 percent guitar solo) and still lasted twice as long as it should have. The same fate awaited “Style,” which shrugs at Dando’s spiraling substance abuse (“Don’t wanna get stoned/But I don’t wanna not get stoned”) that was later reprised as “Rick James Style,” a murky, zombie-funk jam that, in an icky bit of stunt casting, actually featured Rick James.
The remainder is mostly unremarkable: Hüsker Dü worship tamped down by the Robb Brothers’ dated production, an alt-country throwaway featuring a Flying Burrito Brother, swapping Hatfield for Belinda Carlisle on backing vocals during the cloying “I’ll Do It Anyway.” Shaggy where It’s a Shame About Ray was succinct and sharp, Come on Feel the Lemonheads feels about twice as long as its predecessor, and that’s before “Jello Fund.” It would’ve been more fashionable to make the 15-minute studio jam a hidden track, but “Jello Fund” feels like apt metacriticism of a band with too many ideas and not enough follow-through.
Revisiting Come on Feel the Lemonheads can be revelatory in spite of its unevenness—with some scruffier production, the jumbled mix of ZooMass revivalism, power-pop sparkle, and complementary co-ed vocals could’ve been passed around the Run for Cover office at any point in the past 10 years; latter day Tigers Jaw was more or less invented when Hatfield came in to steal the last chorus of “Down About It.” I wish I’d had someone in my teenage ear to put this band in proper context, as a gateway to the Pixies or Throwing Muses or 4AD rather than a cuter Cracker or Soul Asylum. As with the reissues of Lovey and It’s a Shame About Ray, the deluxe version offers demos and outtakes that justify a physical reissue in 2023 and not much else; perhaps the more authentic experience would be copping a $2 used copy. But the cover has changed, and the image feels far more accurate now: Dando’s no longer the center, but slumped off in the top left corner, at the top of his game and well aware he’s about to hit bottom.


On Angels & Devils, the Bug's Kevin Martin bifurcates his interests, offering six songs of muddy dirges and six tracks of raucous, MC-aided bangers that will be familiar to fans of London Zoo. Grouper, Gonjasufi, Death Grips, and others contribute.

Angels & Devils

Kevin Martin has been re-interpreting street musics—mostly dancehall, but also grime and dubstep—for nearly 17 years as the Bug, one of many aliases he’s worked under in a long career in underground music. He’s proved himself the rare artist capable of placing these sounds into more outre contexts without sacrificing any of their ferociousness. His last album, 2008's London Zoo, was full of menacing, fevered ragga that helped make explicit the connections between dancehall, grime, and the still-burgeoning dubstep scene. It was an album that proved especially enlightening to non-UK audiences, putting a point on several elusive trends. He returns here with Angels & Devils, an album that retains the precise brutality of London Zoo but feels labored in comparison.
Martin works slowly in genres that move quickly, and Angels & Devils arrives as grime has once again taken root as both a commercial and underground force: London Zoo all-star Flowdan can now be heard regularly on stations like Rinse FM toasting over mixes by DJs like Elijah & Skilliam, while newcomers like My Nu Leng offer potent blasts. Dubstep is...well, no one really knows what dubstep is in 2014. Dancehall persists, perhaps juiced a little by a generation of adoring rappers. Martin is unconcerned. Angels & Devils, an uneven collection, continues to skew dancehall toward the vanguard of British electronic music, extending an artistic handshake that’s been in effect for more than 20 years (and longer, should you want to move past electronic music).
On Angels & Devils, Martin bifurcates his interests, offering six songs of muddy dirges and six tracks of raucous, MC-aided bangers that will be familiar to fans of London Zoo. Presenting oneself as two competing forces is an artistic gambit that runs roughly from Ancient Greek theatre through Nelly's Sweat/Suit, and Angels & Devils slides comfortably between those poles. The problem is that Martin divides the album exactly, offering first six slow cuts—"angels", presumably—and then the ruffneck "devil" cuts. As a conceit, it fails, stultifying the album's flow and condescending to listeners regarding Martin's range: of course he's capable of slower, foggier productions, but did anyone think London Zoo needed more ambient passages?
Of course, slo-mo, waterlogged ephemera—be it dusty takes on R&B or traipsing down dub’s ever-expanding wormhole—is a pervasive trend in current British electronic music, leading to a lot of limp-wristed trip-hop variations. Grouper’s Liz Harris opens the album with “Void”, her airy, tip-toeing vowels as far as you can get stylistically from Flowdan without phoning Josh Groban. Martin’s lurching bass and gunmetal snares threaten, and Harris proceeds unaffected, as neither artist knows what to do with the other. Gonjasufi, meanwhile, sounds all too comfortable on “Save Me”, offering up the kind of moaning, industrial balladry you might find on a Liars album. It's not all bad: avant-chanteuse Copeland's lemon-sucking croon is fine foil for Martin’s bass rattle, and Miss Red proves that even on softer material, a Jamaican patois bests offsets Martin’s bouts of heavy, as she turns “Mi Lost” into a sonorous sendup.
The album’s second half is more familiar, and better. We’re treated again to three Flowdan cuts, and once again the combination of Martin’s fury and Flowdan’s resonant basso proves potent. Flowdan sounds good saying almost literally anything, and he delivers the occasional quotidian detail—“Why don’t my wife even like me?”—in the same confident bluster as his threats, which is both sneaky and funny. Manga, a bit more histrionic, turns the wild, splintering square waves of “Function” into the record’s best banging-on-the-dash party. In this context, Death Grips, who growl menacingly on “Fuck a Bitch”, sound stiff (and they always sound atonal).
Still, these tracks surge, bleeding adrenaline: Martin sows chaos and his collaborators keep things just under control. When the tempo and aggression are dialed back, the dynamic turns; Martin’s still a talented sound designer, but the whipping, centrifugal force that binds his tracks together is missing. That force is largely absent for the first six songs of Angels & Devils, and the album is trying as a result. The ruff cuts that close the album are your reward, and they are as rattled and rattling as ever, proving Martin still has a deft touch with the underground, provided the underground gives him something to work with.


Katy Davidson’s indie-folk project returns on an album that mines philosophical poetry from moments when ancient natural wonders meet modern technology.

Skulls Example

Katy Davidson retreats into the wilderness to find inspiration. But the Dear Nora songwriter and frontperson doesn’t seem to seek solace as much as perspective in nature. In their songs, physical distance from civilization becomes a way of discerning the absurdity of day-to-day life.
On one such sojourn, in 2003, the band returned to a childhood home of Davidson’s in the Arizona desert and made a masterpiece, Mountain Rock, that reshaped the landscape of their songs. An indie-pop group founded by a trio of college classmates in late-‘90s Portland, Dear Nora were suddenly issuing heavy folk ruminations from the middle of nowhere, instead of drowsy sing-alongs recorded in a dorm room. After a few more releases, Davidson retired the band. In the intervening decade, they recorded as Key Losers, played in other bands, and launched a career as a commercial music producer. But a 2017 reissue of Mountain Rock generated so much interest in Dear Nora that Davidson revived the act and released Skulls Example, a collection of songs written over the course of nearly eight years.
The album is of a piece with Mountain Rock in the sense that it feels out-there both in place and in mindset; Skulls Example is a Mexican travelogue filled with philosophical poetry about the natural world. Davidson favors surprising juxtapositions, images of transformation, and snapshots that highlight the absurdity of scenes, places, and contemporary existence in general, often considering the ancient and timeless within the same songs that capture the technology-driven frenzy of 2018. On the title track, they’re struck by the blasphemy of a modern church built atop ancient ruins; then, they move on to recounting a trivial faux pas in which they were reprimanded for taking a picture of a picture. The album is rich with observations of nature’s majesty—there are glaciers, cacti, thunderstorms, sunsets—but punctuated by nagging dread of the technology that comes along on these journeys: cell-phone cameras, WiFi, GPS. “I always know the time/Because I belong to the grid,” Davidson sings on “Black Truck.”
Skulls Example floats the tantalizing promise of a road trip, then weighs down the getaway car with the strange details of late capitalism. “Sponsored by PT Cruiser, and I’m driving to who knows where,” Davidson sings with a dreamy sigh on the psychedelic surf-rock track “Sunset on Humanity,” in which they watch the cacti breeze by while casually contemplating death and human extinction. On “Ancient Plain,” they flee the city but find that the empty road is a treadmill more than an escape route. Out of obligation or loneliness, they strike up a conversation with the staff at a strip-mall Starbucks and dip into a small-town bar where TVs no one is watching are all playing “Friends.” Davidson’s awareness of geologic time enhances the song’s sense of absurdism; they watch “thunder crash” on an “ancient plain” as technology crashes the serenity of nature. “Worship the Cactus” sounds both goofy and existential, a chronicle of mezcal, privileged guilt, and natural wonder. Davidson invokes the hazy romanticism of a vacation, then washes it away with a cynical shrug: “Expensive experience/We could leave home less.”
Dear Nora’s music remains as minimal as ever, even as the project’s new incarnation trades Davidson’s original bandmates for three studio musicians who help them stretch the limits of their sound. Although many tracks hover within their old, reverb-drenched wheelhouse, there are also a few playful pop experiments in the mix. “Antidote for Mindlessness” is like a slow-burning Prince song, complete with dramatic guitar noodling and stoner revelations: “All this everything in one world/All this world in every detail.”
While that innovation is welcome, some of the prettiest songs on Skulls Example stick to the old Dear Nora formula: short, urgent odes to love and relationships that brim with observational non sequiturs. Shrouded in electric-guitar flutters and little else, “New to Me” is an airy tale of falling in love over the course of a weekend, with Davidson feeling giddy enough in new-found intimacy to hole up indoors while the summer hums along outside. The track harkens back to the gushing emotions of Dear Nora’s earliest songs, its intensity a counterpoint to the position of philosophical—and technological—distance Davidson assumes elsewhere on the album. Now that they’re older, the empty page is luring them into ancient places more often than impulsive trysts. It’s as though Davidson has led us into Plato’s Cave, activated the flashlight app on their phone, elbowed us in the ribs, and said, “Hey, get a load of this.”