As D.C. punks with ties to Priests, Fugazi, and Comet Ping Pong, Flasher are expected to have something to say about politics in 2018—but their debut album would have felt just as timely 30 years ago.

Constant Image

In their two years of existence, Flasher have existed at the cross-section of what makes Washington, D.C. an exhilarating and terrifying place to create political art. They've recorded in the studio of Fugazi’s Brendan Canty. Guitarist Taylor Mulitz was previously in the radical rock band Priests and continues to oversee its Sister Polygon label, which launched Downtown Boys andSnail Mail. And all three members of Flasher have also worked at Comet Ping Pong, the suburban D.C. pizza joint and DIY venue made famous by the psychedelically absurd and legitimately chilling alt-right conspiracy theory Pizzagate. All of this makes them exactly the kind of act that is expected to have something to say about 2018. What’s surprising—and thrilling—about their debut full-length, Constant Image, is that its social commentary would have felt just as timely at any point in the past 30 years.
The current tendency to view music primarily through the lens of politics can be aggravating and even, at times, counterproductive. But Constant Image makes the case that it’s willfully ignorant not to acknowledge how a calculus of independent choice vs. structural power governs the majority of our waking moments. The only alternative is an off-the-grid life, and that is nowhere near Flasher’s reality. The band members all attended prestigious institutions of higher learning and are now saddled with student loans and service jobs (whose monotony they view as a perk). They’re part of a lineage of countercultural art that attracts young, creative types to urban hubs and subsequently prices them out. Even now that they’ve signed to Domino, where their labelmates include Arctic Monkeys and Blood Orange, Flasher’s spare, scabrous form of punk seems unlikely to win over the lucrative festival crowds that can make indie music a full-time job.
The first lyric on Constant Image is “Doing drugs at midnight”—a succinct, vivid portrait of those in Flasher’s predicament, for whom recreational highs inevitably accompany career lows. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” are the album’s final words, on “Business Unusual,” and it’s clear from the context that cutting up a few lines after work is a far lesser evil than shoring up whatever power you have by taking away others’ freedoms: “Make the team/FOP, ICE, POS supremacy.” Distraction is the best you can hope for in the absence of real joy. Or, as the band puts it on “Material,” “Laughter in this century/Is a misery afterglow.”
While there are traces of shoegaze beauty, new wave jitters, and studious ’80s college rock in their sound, Flasher are effectively genreless. Similar to Spoon's early-2000s work, the songs on Constant Image are both minimalist and rich with percussive texture. Sunlit, harmonious hooks suffuse “Material” and “XYZ.” There’s a saxophone solo in the record’s final chorus. Even touches as subtle as shakers and tambourines feel rigorously vetted for maximum effect. Flasher never sound overwhelmed by their ideas, though the streamlined Side B run from “Skim Milk” to “Punching Up” throws their ingenuity in the album’s opening half into relief.
Constant Image peaks with “Who’s Got Time?” which chooses a shitty relationship over none at all. Described by the band as “a celebration of disappointment and failure,” the track indulges in some common punk tropes: ennobling underdogs who just can’t help themselves, finding triumph in camaraderie rather than traditional success. But Flasher don’t romanticize the times when the adrenaline nightshift gets way too real, fueled by whatever stimulant gets them through that thing they do to keep the lights on; they highlight the power structures that keep them on that treadmill. People who share the band’s demographic profile and financial straits like to joke about what’s “tired” and what’s “wired,” what’s “woke” and what’s “broke.” Constant Image recognizes that they are all of the above—and have been for quite a while.


The latest from experimental musician David Tibet is an arduous but rewarding album, the feeling of listening to a preacher behind the pulpit, or a doomsayer on the soapbox.

The Light Is Leaving Us All

For disciples of Current 93, David Tibet has always had the air of a prophet. The eccentric singer-songwriter and permanent leader of this revolving band seems a kind of sage or guru, a grey-bearded mystic of deep, arcane wisdom. His industrial noise and mournful neo-folk teems with hymns, incantations, and transcribed dreams. These qualities are the hallmarks of what is by now a familiar and well-defined sound. They are what draw people to Tibet’s music, and what brings him perilously close to self-parody. How seriously can you take songs in earnest about witches and magic and apocalyptic auguries?
Tibet has said of his albums that they often begin “with a conceptual idea, which is often just a phrase.” One can assume The Light Is Leaving Us All started with its title. This evocative construction presides over the record as a constant, portentous refrain: It is exclaimed and whispered and enchanted over and over across the album’s 46 minutes, blazoned to the listener as if from a preacher behind the pulpit, or a doomsayer on the soapbox. As on many Current 93 albums—on the 2006 masterpiece Black Ships Ate the Sky most particularly—Tibet is both in command of the words and in thrall to them. Hypnotized. He exhausts their power through extreme repetition.
Pet obsessions abound: a thousand witches, flaming “horsies” as Tibet calls his equine friends, red barns, wolves, stars, the sea, the moon. Birds sweetly singing—sometimes literally, as chirps join the usual piano and acoustic guitar backing instrumentation. Absent the coterie of famed guest vocalists that has lately diversified Current 93 albums, we are left with Tibet alone among his enthusiasms and passions. He acknowledges early on the resulting sensation of seclusion and almost manic single-mindedness: “Call the surgeon/The surgeon is dead/Call the policeman/The policeman is dead.” There’s nobody around. It’s just Tibet and his fixiations.
Such fanatical purpose makes The Light Is Leaving Us All an arduous listen. When “A Thousand Witches” ends and “Your Future Cartoon” begins with the words “one thousand witches,” it is hard to elude the feeling of captivity, as though Tibet has us trapped in the bleak realm of his dark imagination. One escape hatch is humor. I found myself, as Tibet rounded into an account of “the messiah-seeking donkey,” laughing at the absurdity, perhaps because finding this stuff ridiculous provides relief from the gloom. And yet it is only when one accepts Tibet on his terms—when one takes his somber omens seriously—that one can access its rewards. Because while The Light Is Leaving Us All is quite silly, it is also beautiful. Tibet’s visions are wonderful even as one must suppress skepticism to fully share them.
Images as distinct as those Tibet is uniquely capable of expressing would not exist if they were insulted by ironic distance. He has to embody the mystic and the guru to do it. “In the first book, and in the last book, and in all the books in between, and between the books and the words, there is something at war with nothing,” Tibet intones in “30 Red Houses.” “There is someone at war with no one, and everything at war with you.” This is a stunningly realized description of art and creation, wedged in between repeated lines about bird songs and dead horsies and yet more witches. It’s all part of the swirling riot of Tibet’s strange decrees. Nightmares rage on with insane nightmare logic; he reads “in the tea leaves” and scans “in the stars,” as “Bright Dead Star” tells. Through it all, we must choose sincerity. The light has to leave us all.


On this intriguing debut EP, the 17-year-old Archy Marshall, who formerly recorded as Zoo Kid, pairs his deep, cracked voice and a bleak, restless tension with warm instrumentation. Jazzy stand-up bass and string hits lend a redemptive, hopeful quality to the music.

King Krule EP

This summer's riots in London were unique in that a great deal of those taking part were essentially kids-- young people whose opportunities have been squeezed tight over the past years with widespread youth unemployment and huge University fees. Generational divides can often make the things young people do seem kind of alien, and the riots-- with no spokesperson and no manifesto-- were difficult for some people to comprehend. At just 17 Archy Marshall, aka King Krule, belongs to that frustrated section of the populace, and although he told Pitchfork recently that he didn't riot himself, he understood why others did.
His debut EP might not be overtly political lyrically, but there's a wellspring of tension and bleakness running through the record that taps into those feelings of discontent that hung in the air this summer. Often the tension in Marshall's songs is restless and unresolved. "Lead Existence", for example, builds for just a minute before snapping shut on the line "I lost the soul to my blues, a long time ago"-- in itself a pretty haunting line for somebody so young.
Then there's his voice, which doesn't seem like it should come from a figure so slight-- it's at turns gruff, deep and often cracked. There are shades of Leonard Cohen in that delivery and a similar drawl at times to Billy Bragg (who himself championed Marshall back when he was going under Zoo Kid). It's an expressive voice, changing and morphing with the mood of the songs. On "Bleak Bake" Marshall sounds more laidback over a canvas of dubby keys, 808 drums, and deep bass. That calm delivery makes the violence in the lines, "My heart got hold of my head and ripped it to its seams," and, "Now I'm covered in blood on the bed/ And its a familiar scene," seem all the more chilling.
While most of Marshall's lyrics can be bleak or even violent, the instrumentation almost always strikes a warm contrast. There's beauty in the clean, echoing guitars that are all over King Krule and some unexpected moments too-- the jazzy stand-up bass on "363N63" or the string hits in "Bleak Bake", for example. These textures and sounds lend a redemptive, hopeful quality to the music.
EP highlight and closer "The Noose of Jah City" is the most complete and focused song on the record. It pivots on an echoing guitar line and sparkling keyboards as Marshall's vocal, enveloped in reverb, spills across that background. In the verses he sounds poised, imagining his own death, stoically predicting, "My body found, but my soul was left to drown/ Suffocated in concrete." Marshall's anxiety about his mind and soul is a recurring motif throughout the EP and, like the beauty in some of the instrumentation, makes for a detached, almost mystical contrast to the kitchen-sink vibe of the rest of the drama.
There's a documentary realism to much of these recordings, from Marshall's cough at the start of "Bleak Bake", to his spoken introduction to "The Noose of Jah City". Those moments make you feel like a voyeur sneaking a listen to a work in progress. If there's one flaw, it's that King Krule does seem quite slight in its brevity, and ideas are often left to hang in the air rather than chased to their conclusion. But the record also feels like an important moment in time marked on a door frame-- it's an intriguing peek into the restless, youthful development of King Krule.


The ritualistically anonymous GOAT return with a double album of psychedelia rendered primarily with acoustic elements. Though still veiled, they reveal more of their heart and personality than ever.

Requiem

Whether they’re parlaying their carefully cultivated mystique into pop stardom, or just outed by the press, camera-shy buzz acts generally don’t stay anonymous for long. But the masked members of GOAT have now made it to their third album without breaking character or being doxxed, which is no small achievement for a self-mythologizing entity in the age of oversharing. And even if they’re the only ones still recounting their incredulous origin story with a straight face (or a mask depicting a straight face), GOAT are still clinging the conceit, and to this day, interviews with the band put journalists in the awkward position of picking up the phone and asking to speak with somebody named Fuzzmaster.
And yet in GOAT’s case, the ridiculous high-concept package ultimately reinforces the sincerity with which they approach their pan-cultural psych-funk fusion. Unlike fellow Swedes Ghost—whose campy black-mass theatrics seem like an awful lot of effort for what’s essentially melodic ’80s pop-metal—there’s very little ironic distance between GOAT’s image and execution. For them, costumery is not a means of drawing attention to themselves but deflecting it back onto their collectivist music. If GOAT aren’t actually a small-town sect reinterpreting the ritualistic sounds of the ancients (and are really just crate-diggers with robust internet connections and unlimited budgets for Afrobeat imports), what’s important is that they genuinely resemble one.
On Requiem, that narrative becomes further entrenched, as GOAT lure us deeper into the woods for a communion ceremony under moonlight. This is their Zeppelin III move, a psychedelia rendered primarily with acoustic elements, pastoral brushes, and field-recording ambience. But even in stripped-down mode, GOAT are unrepentant maximalists, and the full weight of the ensemble is always felt. They’ve dialed down the volume, but not the frantic exuberance. On the joyous Afropop of “Trouble In the Streets” and the mandolin-powered raga “Try My Robe,” the band’s female mouthpiece blares as loudly as she did on past acid-rock ragers, while the chirpy flute-folk of “Union of Sun and Moon” and “I Sing in Silence” do little to temper the band’s innate sense of groove.
But while there’s a greater emphasis here on compact songcraft (“Alarms” could be a brown-acid Mamas and the Papas), GOAT are still at their most transfixing when they engage in rhythmic hypnotherapy. Requiem is a double album, granting the band the real estate to stretch out more than usual and, at times, you wish they’d go even further: the thundering “Temple Rhythms” teases the connection between campfire drum circles and piano-house raves, though it fades out before the band can properly build upon its vibrating foundation. However, with the self-referential “Goatband” and “Goatfuzz,” Requiem erects its towering tentpole tracks: The former is a mesmerizing jangle jam where GOAT’s wah-wahed shredding dissolves into a textural haze; the latter is a rare moment of amped-up aggression whose electric-boogie breaks imagine Grand Funk Railroad riffing on "Yoo Doo Right."
Despite their mosaic of international influences, GOAT are, at heart, a classic-rock band in pagan clothing. Even at their busiest, the group rarely veer toward confrontational chaos, and despite their sinister appearance, their lyrics are incense-scented, hippy-dippy platitudes (at times excessively so—this band has no compunction about giving its ballads names like “Psychedelic Lover”). But if you’re wondering how long GOAT can keep up the cult-rock gambit, well, there’s evidence here to suggest GOAT are pondering that very question, too.
Requiem’s penultimate track is an instrumental titled “Goodbye,” which could very well just signal the album’s end, however, the sense of finality is compounded by the fact the song sounds like the Doors’ “The End” given an Indo-funk remix. It’s followed by the closing curio “Ubuntu,” which reveals that GOAT haven’t just copped their sense of rhythm from African funk records, but their way of life as well. Atop free-form organ doodles, we hear recordings of men and women from the continent explaining the titular philosophy of connectedness and sharing, their sanguine sentiments (“I’m not human without your being present”) folded into GOAT’s own communal ethos through a distant flashback of “Diarabi,” the first song on the band’s first album, World Music. It’s the sort of full-circle move that suggests the closing of a chapter—but even if GOAT’s faces remain a mystery, with Requiem, they’ve at least showed us a bit more of their heart.


With pop stars once again performing garish exaggerations of what seems like real personal trauma, Shirley Manson & co. have timed their return perfectly.

No Gods No Masters

Garbage made music for ’90 teens on the hunt for mild subversion but wanting sharper hooks than Nine Inch Nails or Smashing Pumpkins proffered. They weren’t so much a band as a proposition: Nirvana and Pumpkins producer Butch Vig, together with friends Duke Erickson and Steve Marker, hooked up with Shirley Manson, the keyboardist of Scottish non-starters Angelfish, to record an amalgam of goth, shoegaze, and ’60s girl groups, all held together by electronically processed guitars. On two platinum albums released during the dotcom era, the deal worked. Then their context dried up. Now, with Lil Nas X and St. Vincent performing garish exaggerations of what seems like real personal trauma, Garbage suddenly return to friendlier climes. Faster and friskier than expected, No Gods, No Masters is their strongest album since Version 2.0.
Manson and her crew don’t regard songs as vehicles for self-expression so much as iconographic collages, fan letters to a shared past, and demonstrations of mixing-board flimflammery. Skeptical of the straightforward, Garbage decorate tracks without cluttering them. The bad-boyfriend lament “Flipping You the Bird” could’ve gotten by on its toy piano alone; Vig et al. find room for more ear-catching details anyway, not least of which is the audible delight with which Manson caresses the line, “You spread your legs and gesticulate.” “Godhead”opens with programmed swooshes and vaguely Indian melodic swirls before settling on the whispery-whiskery dynamics Manson used to creepy effect on 1998’s “Hammering in My Head,” only this time she has earthier pleasures in mind: “If I had a dick/Would you blow it?” She expects no answer. Selling the drama, baby!
Pop stars require the media to realize themselves. David Bowie triumphed in the era of the talk-show appearance and the rock-press interview; Lil Nas X thrives on TikTok. Garbage during their prime relied on the more traditional means of promotion, and they looked and sounded like the parts they played. Goth still suits Manson like a pair of vinyl boots: the genre for drama queens, self-styled freaks, and anyone who turns eyeliner into a reflection of the soul. “Pour your misery down on me!” she demanded on Garbage’s greatest single. We know she takes her emotions seriously because she puts scare quotes around them. “Stuck inside my head/All the fuckin’ time,” she chants twenty-five years later, an audible eye roll on opener “The Men Who Rule the World.” Garbage are most powerful when they find musical complements for that din in Manson’s head. With the help of a topsy-turvy synth part and her lovely lower register, Manson turns “Uncomfortably Me” into a confessional that consumes itself; the resignation has a kick.
Applying thick globs of black lipstick to received pop forms doesn’t lead to Hall of Fame nominations. Nevertheless, Version 2.0 remains my favorite album of 1998, the sharpest corner of a triptych of college-radio staples by women (Polly Jean Harvey, Courtney Love) blowing up from the inside the stereotypes projected on them. Manson, foraging through several decades of female lead-singer tropes, gained confidence; Erickson, Marker, and Vig pulled and molded and burnished material with thousands of dollars spent on aural gewgaws—a Parallel Lines for a blighted decade. I’m not sure whether No Gods, No Masters equalling Version 2.0 matters on any scheme, but, then again, Garbage have never been a band for whom significance was a thing.
And yet they do matter. They have new colleagues: A landscape where Japanese Breakfast, Wolf Alice, and Olivia Rodrigo can release albums whose stars revel in their oversized emotions establishes Garbage as an act with a lineage instead of mere plunderers of history. The young ’uns gotta top this, though: “I gotta bend or we will fall/My reality’s a metaphor,” Manson shouts over the clattering din of “The Creeps.” Gauntlet thrown.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Having eased back significantly since 2009's ambitious What Will We Be, Banhart draws from pre-Beatles concepts of pop and rock on Mala, and writes from distinctly non-punk perspectives such as loving with levity, and aging with grace.

Mala

Insofar as anything about Devendra Banhart was ever considered "underrated," the man rarely got enough credit for his sense of humor. He was often called "playful" or "mischievous," or some other lightly stepping compliment that aligned more comfortably with the image of him as the kind and gentle Cosmically Transcendent Avatar of Freak-Folk. But check his track record: "This Beard Is For Siobhan", "Chinese Children", "The Beatles", Megapuss, and, oy vey, "Shabop Shalom"-- dude's got jokes. If you still don't get the picture, witness the title of his latest album Mala. It's a term of endearment that loosely translates to "sweetie pie" in the native tongue of his fiancée, Serbian artist Ana Kraš. But as a guy who frequently sings in Spanish, Banhart must be very aware of how most people will initially read it-- especially in light of the artistic freefall he's been in for the past six or so years. If he's baiting us with a pun, it's a great relief to find out he's earned the right to fuck around, as Mala is Banhart's best record in nearly a decade-- largely because it's his loosest and funniest.
While not exactly a trend within itself, it's interesting to see how Banhart's latest follows a similar route to recent solo albums from Christopher Owens and Jim James, longhairs who had similarly been burdened with messianic praise and rock savior archetypes. Like those men, Banhart has eased back on multiple levels after increasingly ambitious records, digging up pre-Beatles concepts of pop and rock while writing from non-punk states such as loving with levity and aging with grace. Mala's no less diverse than Cripple Crow or Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, but it's exponentially less heavy-handed in its genre-hopping. As the lovely instrumental "The Ballad of Keenan Milton" attests, he hasn't completely foresworn solo acoustic performance, but otherwise, these songs are short and spare, little more than reverbed electric guitar accompanied by light drumming and rudimentary synth tones. It retroactively posits him as something of a missing link between Ariel Pink and Owens, which is an accomplishment within itself.
Most importantly, these are by far Banhart's most plainspoken and legible songs. Considering they're in the form of soft-shoe jazz or playful R&B, there isn't urgency per se, so much as immediacy resulting from how Mala often feels like snippets taken from Banhart's daily life. "Daniel" namechecks bars and street names as well as "waiting in line to see Suede play," while the record's cloaking, murky production gives the impression that he stills lives on a more mysterious plane than most of us. It also gives Banhart the freedom to get a little goofy even when Mala sounds dead sober. The muffled disco strut of "Für Hildegard Von Bingen" reimagines the 12th-century mystic as "a VJ on location" and leaves it as just a passing fancy Banhart felt worthy of capture rather than some high-minded metaphor. Likewise, "A Gain" is more of an interlude than a song, about a minute of free-form violin and Banhart muttering lines about being a disappointment to his mother, hair gel, and the W Hotel. As he rushes to jam in every last word in the line "love is gonna be a long lost biological father," he's laughing at his own emo capacity as well as the nakedly "confessional" format.
For the most part, Mala makes good on its titular inspiration by way of including plenty of silly songs about love. Which is different than "silly love songs" in a crucial way-- Banhart's light touch with the more embarrassing aspects of relationships cuts against the occasional whimsy, and his self-deprecation feels earned, humanizing him as someone who can be a jerk in mundane ways: a guy who dated starlets but probably got yelled at for leaving the toilet seat up. Banhart takes on a deeper register that's equally suave and fatuous on "Never Seen Such Good Things", a song that borders on rhinestone cowboy pop. He laments a lost love with momentary nobility before the gawky phonetics and crude sentiment of "if we ever make sweet love again/ I'm sure it would be quite disgusting" make it a multilayered joke at the expense of our faulty memories regarding exes. This is even more pronounced on "Your Fine Petting Duck", a duet where Banhart and Kras play ex-lovers on opposite ends of a proposed reconciliation; Kras wants him back, Banhart is quick to remind her of the numerous ways in which he was a total ass: "If he ever is untrue/ Just remember I was too... and so much more so." For whatever reason, it switches midway to a lo-fi electro-pop thump while Banhart and Kras sing in German, because... why not? Even if it's fiction and decidedly anti-romantic in content, the feel is that of an inside joke between two people who really like each other; in practice, it's an ironic Valentine that's a powerfully effective demonstration of the conspiratorial giddiness of new love.
So it's best to think of Mala as a new beginning for Banhart than a triumphant return to form-- for one thing, this is not the sort of record that will bring back the diehards who felt he fell off the moment he traded in his four-track, to say nothing of cleaning up his image and reneging on the promise of "Long Haired Child". And he still isn't the most fastidious editor of his own work; on the whole, it's for the best that his mojo and humor are given equal billing on Mala, though he should've kept the Zappa pastiche "Hatchet Wound" to himself. But one overly bawdy locker room joke is a small price to pay as Banhart sounds refreshed and relieved here, someone happily on the outside looking in rather than trying to situate himself as a countercultural star, and finally taking the opportunity to show that he doesn't take himself as seriously as a lot of people take him.


The Belgian beatmaker ups his game, roping in guest vocalists Siifu, Spote Breeze, and Mamoyo on a breezy, 22-minute album that, at its best, recalls golden-age Slum Village.

A Black Market Album

Throughout his brief career, the Belgian beatmaker ShunGu has been simultaneously so ahead of the curve and so underground that you worry he’s in danger of being hit by a subway car. He turned heads in 2014 with a series of beat tapes named for the astrological signs, a good three years before the first @NotAllGeminis Instagram post. His beats were influenced by the genre’s godheads—Dilla, Madlib, Knxwledge—but set apart by a healthy amount of personality and wit that seemed specific to Louis ShunGu’s vision. He would take rap classics like “Da Art of Storytellin’” (on The Leo Tape’s “All.Love”) and transpose them to a setting so different that it was as if you had never heard the original before. And he showed himself to have good taste in collaborators, partnering with some of the brighter lights of Bandcamp’s rap scene, including Chester Watson and the Hot Record Société.
On his new record, A Black Market Album, you can tell that ShunGu, now 28, makes a point of keeping up with his contemporaries. There’s a good amount of Kaytranada in this thing, as well as some sounds derived from the Internet’s standout beatmakers, Matt Martians and Steve Lacy. But the compact set of beats and raps ShunGu serves up here is, with its perfectly chosen drums and subtle swagger, reminiscent of nothing so much as golden-age Slum Village and other pre-Donuts J. Dee classics.
“Roll With Me” is the first song to give you that old Detroit feel. Its drum sounds hit hard and distinct, never disappearing into the mix, as important as Pink Siifu’s excellent raps. (The gruff, belching bass, meanwhile, borrows from a later Dilla trick, one showcased on the posthumous track “E=MC2”). After a lovely, Slum Village-like sung interlude, “Groove It Baby,” we’re back to rap with the track “Drop Knowledge.” The song carries an echo of its predecessor; you can still hear the voice singing, “We just gotta groove it baby,” as Spote Breeze walks up to the mic.
How does ShunGu choose his collaborators? The ever-compelling Siifu, the Oakland-based Spote Breeze, and Mamoyo, the spoken-word lyricist featured on the last track, are all good at the whole words thing. But what unites them further is their sense of musicality. The happiest contradiction on A Black Market Album is the way that standout elements seem inextricable: The drums, lyrics, synths, and melodies all stand apart, yet each is impossible to envision functioning without the others. It’d be hard to guess which sound was produced first; you imagine them all springing into being simultaneously.
Spote Breeze’s verse on “Drop Knowledge” deserves a little extra attention, with nested jokes as dense as Doom’s. It took me a couple times to figure out why he was rapping about Romney retaking office. Finally I realized that he had made a crack about people trying to catch his jokes, “but the mitt won’t fit.” (Many of his punchlines come a bar or two after they’re expected, which heightens the pleasure of the landing.) Like Baatin and T3 before him, Breeze’s raps are breezily lyrical, clever, and politically informed. He’s a smart guy, and he doesn’t care whether you think so or not.
The back half of A Black Market Album is mildly less compelling. With its glimmering synths and multi-patterned drums, the minute-long beat “Let’s Go Outside” is just a little too indebted to Kaytranada for comfort. While the other short beats back here (“There’s a War Outside” and “Tokyo Express”) are diverting, they’re less original than ShunGu’s work with his trio of wonderful lyricists. But the record is only 22 minutes long, so these (perfectly good) tracks breeze right by until suddenly you arrive at the closer, “Touch by Sun,” on which ShunGu bathes Mamoyo’s poetry with warm sonic rays. Spoken word sometimes gets a bad rap, but this is pretty unimpeachable.
Shungu is from Brussels and, as with the best of YouTube’s “lofi” channels (most of which are run from the Continent), it’s fascinating to hear the lineage of instrumental hip-hop refracted through a European lens, continuing a long tradition of Europe taking America’s music and making it just a little bit weirder. As with the lofi channels, there’s a sense of community that radiates through the record (Siifu, characteristically, even shouts out his parents), giving the lie to the idea that true communities can’t form online. A Black Market Album doesn’t seem thrown together, by any means, but it’s just as casual as a rooftop party on the first truly warm day of the year. That easy feeling makes sense, given the producer’s process: “I cut my sample with my ears,” he explained in a 2014 interview. “I just follow my ears.”


Prince’s hip-hop-influenced ’90s comeback is the subject of a new box set that offers fascinating insight into a prolific, if uneven, period in his career.

Prince / The New Power Generation: Diamonds and Pearls (Super Deluxe Edition)

Once upon a time, there was a Prince who was so powerful that he could write a hit song on command. It happened when he was making his watershed 1999 album. In Alan Light’s Let's Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain, the artist’s former manager, Bob Cavallo, recalled telling Prince he was missing a first single for the set. Two weeks later, the guy came back with “1999,” which would become one of his signature songs. Same goes for Purple Rain. The movie’s director, Albert Magnoli, told Prince that he needed a track to play over a mid-picture montage, tying its themes together. The next day, Prince handed him “When Doves Cry,” another signature and his longest running No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
It happened again with Diamonds and Pearls. Ahead of the 1991 release of a major comeback for one of the titans of ‘80s pop and the unveiling of his new band the New Power Generation, suits in the Black-music department of his record label, Warner Bros, weren’t hearing a lead single for R&B radio. Prince disagreed but he took the weekend and came back with “Gett Off,” a pummeling interpretation of new jack swing that contained a string of slick pick-up lines—some rapped—from Prince and the promise of “23 positions in a one night stand” from N.P.G.’s in-house rapper Tony M. It became a No. 6 R&B song, and its orgiastic video portraying an HR nightmare of a dance audition lived in heavy rotation with the persistence of a vibrator that summer on MTV.
“Gett Off” was a perfect single, and not just because it reoriented Prince in a hip-hop context while sounding both fresh for him and the genre. It also sported the radio-friendly ambition that guided the album it previewed. Diamonds and Pearls was tailored to be a success. “He wanted a big—capital B-I-G—pop record,” Marylou Badeaux, former Warner exec in the promo department, recalls in one of the extensive essays in the new Diamonds and Pearls Super Deluxe Edition, a package that’s almost as big and heavy as a tombstone (at least on vinyl). The album was a shot at regaining chart relevance after flops like 1988’s Lovesexy and 1990’s Graffiti Bridge album and movie. Prince engaged in an “uncharacteristic sweep of industry showcases,” according to the zine Uptown, and even deigned to speak to journalists.
The early ’90s was a time when many veteran Black acts who had, to one degree or another, been accused of ignoring their Blackness and their Black audience, made a concentrated effort to prove that chatter wrong. Whitney Houston hooked up with Babyface and L.A. Reid on her third album, 1990’s I’m Your Baby Tonight, and Michael Jackson had Teddy Riley co-produce roughly half of 1991’s Dangerous. This was all before the R&B craze that would find marathon runs at No. 1 from the likes of Boyz II Men—but it was just before it. For Prince’s part he incorporated samples, loops, and raps and… hired a band, which was actually not very contemporary-R&B of him at all. But he was Prince. It was always going to be at least a little weird and he was going to do his damnedest to make it work. The album spawned both R&B and pop hits and went double platinum. It contained his strongest string of singles since Purple Rain, including the regal title track; “Insatiable,” the perfection of his quiet-storm aesthetic; and “Cream,” which is so simultaneously self-affirming and horny that it’s as close to autofellatio as any Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 ever got.
Engineering hits and demographic goodwill was just part of Prince’s M.O. on the varied and uneven Diamonds. Subliminally, the album shrieks, “Look what we can do!,” as Prince takes his shiny new band out for a spin. Included in the lineup were master craftsmen: Michael Bland on drums, Levi Seacer, Jr. on guitar, Tommy Barbarella on keys, Sonny T. on bass, Damon Dickson and Kirk Johnson on percussion, and Rosie Gaines, whose voice is nothing less than titanic. Prince seemed proud of them, saying their names during the tracks and thrusting them to the front of the mix. They flew through jazz, glam rock, operatic balladry, and, yes, quasi-hip-hop. The resulting album is playful and projects a palpable joy, but absent the futurism of Prince’s best work, it doesn’t wow. It’s merely a funky fait accompli.
Inspired by the era’s hip-hop, Prince promoted back-up dancer Tony M to the NPG’s in-house MC at a time when slapping rappers on a track was de rigueur in dance-pop. The uptempo hip-hop/dance tracks are the weakest on Diamonds (aside from “Gett Off,” which has a spareness that the others don’t), and the anti-manager “Jughead” is often considered the red-headed stepchild of Prince’s catalog. But these songs are slightly more tolerable when seen through the everyone-is-doing it lens of early ’90s beat-based music. (Prince, it has been said, was a fan of C+C Music Factory at the time.) They’re disposable, but that’s capital B-I-G pop records for you.
Regardless, Chuck D was a fan of the dabbling, or so he writes in a brief essay included in the D&P SDE: “I remember being fascinated with the rapper on the album, Tony M,” whom he describes as “just dope.” In another piece, Tony M, who comes off as a swell guy who sincerely appreciated his time in the spotlight, expresses his trepidation about Prince’s incorporation of hip-hop after the artist had mocked it (and so eye-rollingly) on The Black Album’s “Dead On It.” Tidbits like these make this deluxe edition more than just a deep dive in a shallow pool. Duane Tudahl’s extensive notes on every track—including the haul unearthed from the vault—endow the songs with captivating backstories. “Push” featured samples referred to as “dogs in heat,” and one of the loops in “Daddy Pop” was labeled “animals doin’ it.” Among its many layers, “Insatiable” (a solo production) features a loop of Prince whispering “push and pull.” Most shocking: That indelible, sneezy shriek at the start of “Gett Off” was unleashed not by Prince but by Gaines.
Naturally, the point of interest for many diehards here goes beyond the remastered album and its collected remixes and B-sides. We’re here for the vault. Thirty-three previously unreleased songs are spread across three CDs/five records. But even though these songs could technically fill entire albums, most of what’s here is only relevant in the context of a very close look at a post-peak album. Unlike the would-be-classic vault material on the Sign ‘o’ the Times and 1999 Super Deluxe Editions, the “grooves and grooves up on the shelf” here are mostly one-spin curiosities.
Of the 33 new-old tracks, 13 are Prince’s reference versions for songs that were ultimately released by other artists. These could easily have been assembled for a follow-up to the excellent 2019 compilation Originals, which featured Prince’s demos of hits he wrote for others. But nothing here was a hit in its ultimately released form. These songs largely represent his conformist streak to replicate what was working on radio, and they’re generally devoid of the eccentricities he was still endowing his own music with, so there’s some generic new jack swing (“Skip to My You My Darling,” which went to Jevetta Steele), adult R&B (“Open Book”), and some frivolous dance pop he worked on with Martika (including the frisky, double-entendre-laden “Martika’s Kitchen”). However, “My Tender Heart,” co-written with and eventually recorded by Gaines, features a luscious and mournful vocal from Prince, and the arrangement predicts the kind of weepy Babyface-generated dirges that would, in less than two years’ time, overtake Top 40 radio, asserting R&B as pop music, period.
Diamonds sat on the shelf for a while at Warner Bros’ urging and so, according to engineer Michael Koppelman in Ronnin Ro’s book Prince: Inside the Music and the Masks, “we just kept working on it.” That drafting process may account for the many alternate versions that populate the vault discs, including an extended title track (with even higher vamps from Gaines), a more swinging version of the anti-war song “Live 4 Love,” a sparser (and cooler) version of the B-side “Horny Pony,” and a remix of “Jughead” dubbed “The Last Dance (Bang Pow Zoom And The Whole Nine)” that’s less cluttered and features an endearing moment of Prince cracking up Tony M with a self-effacing punchline.
Eleven of the vault tracks—a third of them—weren’t released in any form. They include the gag track “Work That Fat” (using a pitched-down voice a la The Black Album’s “Bob George” over the “Martika’s Kitchen” instrumental, Prince objectifies and mocks fat women and then learns a valuable lesson), “Schoolyard” (which lived on early configurations of the D&P tracklist, and according to a 1990 Rolling Stone interview is about “the first time I got any”), the moving instrumental Miles Davis tribute “Letter 4 Miles” (recorded two days after the innovator’s death), some early rock noodling that the N.P.G. would hone in subsequent years, and “I Pledge Allegiance To Your Love” (a killer torch song that Prince curls his vocal around, like smoke on fingers at a nightclub a few decades ago).
The vault tracks show Prince as reliably prolific in the early ’90s, though there were now very clear bounds on his creativity—at least in the studio, and especially when writing for others in attempt to gussy them up in the day’s fashion. Onstage was a different matter, as evidenced by the blistering performance recorded January 11, 1992, at Prince’s Minneapolis club Glam Slam that appears in both audio and video in this set. It was an intimate version of the Diamonds & Pearls tour he was about to take to larger venues and it’s absolutely insane. At its most populated, there are damn near 20 people onstage (including the five-piece NPG Hornz and the vocal group the Steeles, who join for an extended, gospel-infused version of the then-unreleased “The Sacrifice of Victor” from the Love Symbol album). Prince dons four different outfits—he both ties his tie onstage then undoes it along with his button-down shirt a few songs later, during a seductive “Insatiable.” Virtually everything here outdoes its studio counterpart. “Cream” is funkier. “Gett Off,” at over 14 minutes, is longer. “Jughead” is… more tolerable. The show climaxes with Prince practically floating back and forth across the bar.
Also included on the Blu-ray is Prince’s performance at the 1992 Special Olympics (as well as its soundcheck) and the Diamonds and Pearls Video Collection. Missing, though, is the “Gett Off” video maxi-single, which included videos for its B-sides like “Violet the Organ Grinder.” There are also many tracks associated with this era, like “Gett Off’s Cousin,” “Player,” and “I Wonder,” that are absent from the vault discs. The Diamonds and Pearls Super Deluxe Edition makes the picture of Prince’s creativity during this period more complete but it’s still far from complete. It’s a solid study of a genius after he’d peaked creatively, but it doesn’t transcend that mission. There are some gems, yes, but we already knew about those. Too few are the diamonds in the rough.


The Wrens’ songwriter Kevin Whelan’s bittersweet solo debut is a rousing, unabashedly sentimental indie rock album that stakes out a sweet spot between the anthemic and the intimate.

Observatory

The Wrens’ final album now exists only as a broken promise. For years, the New Jersey band pledged a follow-up to their 2003 masterpiece The Meadowlands, periodically even claiming the record was all but complete, only to blow through whatever deadline they’d set for it. The holdup, by most accounts, was the band’s de facto leader Charles Bissell, a notorious perfectionist who always found more work to be done on songs he may never be satisfied with. “My best years and work are clearly behind me,” Bissell posted in 2014, in one of the regular status updates Wrens fans had learned to expect in lieu of new music.
Bissell’s painstaking process left the band’s other songwriter, Kevin Whelan, sitting on a batch of songs that, contrary to Bissell, he believed were the best he’d ever written. And perhaps inevitably, Whelan grew tired of waiting for others to hear them. Bissell and Whelan don’t agree on all the details of the Wrens’ implosion, which has left both musicians tossing around the word “betrayal,” but the unhappy ending was confirmed in a New York Times article this September where Whelan revealed plans to release his own album, which he recorded with two of the three other Wrens. The nail in the coffin? Observatory, Whelan’s debut album as Aeon Station, would include five songs he’d tracked for The Meadowlands’ follow-up.
If there’s an upside to Observatory’s dispiriting origins, though, it’s that the album is released from the impossible expectations of living up to one of the most beloved indie records of the last 20 years. And that helps, because The Meadowlands looms large over the Observatory, a rousing, unabashedly sentimental album that’s even more explicitly about recalibrating fading dreams than its predecessor.
Many of these songs seem to be commenting on their own backstory. The chiming “Everything at Once” in particular reads like a eulogy for Whelan’s former band. “We were the pilots to all the young dreams we wasted all away,” he laments. On “Alpine Drive,” he depicts the Wrens’ creative process as a Sisyphian exercise: “One thousand night shifts all end with the sun/Still breaking rocks into songs we never get done.” Though Whelan cast these songs as ostensibly hopeful, with takeaways about embracing change and rebuilding, they linger an awful lot on the setbacks and missed opportunities along the way.
As on The Meadowlands, Whelan stakes out a sweet spot between the anthemic and the intimate. Where Arcade Fire and some of the other bands the Wrens inspired sometimes conflated catharsis with spectacle, Aeon Station’s gambit is that it doesn’t need scores of strings and choirs to make its grand moments soar. Instead, Observatory achieves its goosebumps with minimal embellishment—a few accompaniments from friends, little splashes of backing vocals, guitars that break open at just the right moment. Whelan’s instincts are exquisite. His melodies are sweet, but never overstated. His songs rise and swell, but it’s never too much, always just enough. Even when they go unabashedly big, as the back-to-back stunners “Leaves” and “Fade” do, they’re grounded in a sense of humility.
Observatory is not, however, The Meadowlands. It doesn’t sustain the golden ratio of gut punches to bangers as that album, although in stretches it can come impressively close. Without Bissell, it’s missing The Meadowlands’ dueling perspectives, of course, but also some of its texture and scale. The Meadowlands was an hour long and still felt like a small slice of a vast expanse, suggesting an entire world just outside the frame. Even at a lean 40 minutes, Observatory’s borders show.
The tragedy of Observatory is it can’t escape the shadow of an album that can now no longer be. In a profile last month for The Guardian, Pitchfork associate staff writer Jazz Monroe shared an anecdote that’s bound to torment Wrens fans. Bissell let the writer sample a more intricate, alternate version of the Observatory rocker “Queens” that he’d punched up for the Wrens album. “My stomach somersaults upon hearing this mothballed labor of love,” Monroe gushed. “With just a few Bissellian flourishes—eerie harmony, close-miked guitar filigree—there’s an uncanny transformation to the song.” The Aeon Station version of “Queens” is plenty invigorating, to be sure. But no, it won’t make your stomach somersault.

So which is preferable, a mythic album that doesn’t exist, or a very good, if merely mortal LP you can play right now? Whelan’s pragmatic approach may not be as romantic as Bissell’s pursuit of perfection, yet Observatory’s songs support the possibility of settling for something different than you’d hoped and still coming up a winner. Near the end of the album, there’s a celebratory track called “Better Love,” the only song on Observatory that portrays an unqualified victory, with no regrets about what might have been. “Here comes a better love/Here comes the one you dreamed you’d always have,” Whelan cheers. You can’t avail yourself of something better, these songs contend, without giving yourself permission to move on.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Major Key is DJ Khaled’s ninth studio album in 10 years, and it’s undoubtedly his best. Depending where you stand on the Khaled spectrum, that may mean nothing or everything.

Major Key

No one could have predicted the trajectory of DJ Khaled except Khaled himself. Well before he ascended to Snapchat stardom in his soy milk-and-cocoa-butter'd glory, he was a local Miami radio DJ pushing brand-worthy catchphrases (“Listennn…”; “We the best!”) and promoting unity and self-belief with a persistence that was as endearing as it was annoying. His bombastic statements seemed to be a nod to his reggae soundclash bonafides, but it was actually a ‘hood-oriented manifestation gospel. Khaled wasn’t just beating his chest, he was willing his success to existence—comparing himself to his apparent betters such as Quincy Jones and Russell Simmons; later he placed himself alongside icons like Jay Z and Kanye West in a way that suggested good-natured delusions of grandeur. It started as cute and laughable, but it quickly became clear that Khaled was justifying his place in the big leagues with a succession of  hits—to the point that, when he claimed that “All I Do Is Win,” it was hard to disagree with him.
Khaled’s ascent is one of the most remarkable in the past decade of hip-hop history: He started as a bit player in Fat Joe’s Terror Squad, but has outlived (and maintained) that association to become a living meme, motivational figure, and controller of culture nonpareil. He may not have the cachet of the people he regularly rubs shoulders with, but he often transcends them with the depth of his connections and the breadth of his reach. He helped reestablish Miami as a creative export factory and has been instrumental in the rise of just about every notable commercially successful hip-hop movement that has popped up since 2006. It’s hard to imagine the prominence of Rick Ross’ MMG, Drake’s OVO, and Baby and Lil Wayne’s Cash Money and YMCMB without Khaled serving as the glue between those factions, even as they splintered and openly warred with one another. It’s been a running joke that Khaled—who has sporadic production credits, some under the alias Beat Novacane—doesn’t do more on his records than shout, but that ignores that fact that many DJs have tried their hands at compilation albums, and none have been as consistently successful at it as DJ Khaled. (For a quick comparison, one can listen to DJ Drama’s recent Quality Street Music 2; while Drama has had the golden touch with his Gangsta Grillz* *mixtapes, his official albums haven’t left the same footprint as Khaled’s efforts.)
Major Key is DJ Khaled’s ninth studio album in 10 years, and it's undoubtedly his best. Depending where you stand on the Khaled spectrum, that may mean nothing or everything, but it should be noted that—its awards show lineup of guests accounted for—this is the most streamlined and focused album that he's ever masterminded. Yes, he still swings for the fences too hard and too often, but he's also become a more well-rounded player. The first five tracks of Major Key—featuring, Jay Z, Future, Drake, Nas, Big Sean, Kendrick Lamar, and J. Cole—are the shrewd mix of some of the most respected craftsmen and hitmakers of the past 20 years and past 20 weeks alike. Sometimes, these songs work only because of Khaled: “I Got the Keys” is a sub-par Jay Z song and an okay Future song, but somehow emerges as a great Khaled song. It’s not a number either artist would make on their own, or together without Khaled, whose motivational “special talk” peppers both stars’ verses.
Some songs seem to have nothing to do with Khaled. Nas—over a filtered Fugees sample courtesy of Cool & Dre—is forensic and poetic on “Nas Album Done” about the recirculation of the Black dollar; J. Cole is characteristically vulnerable, earnest, and weary about the personal and the political over a meditative thump provided by Khaled himself (on “Jermaine’s Interlude”); on “Holy Key,” Big Sean touches on everything from race and police violence to self-help ideology to Christianity to veganism, admirably doing his best to redeem himself from his “Control (H.O.F.)” roasting, but Kendrick Lamar spazzes with a technical and vocal madness that makes a line like “hair like ODB” seem like the most important and original rhyme in history. There’s also Betty Wright taking everyone to church the way only a 62-year-old soul singer who was dropping gold records on her own record label before her collaborators could walk can, and it’s all majestic.
*Major Key *contains a smattering of his usual overblown numbers, which somehow sound like everything else on the radio only slightly more so. “Do You Mind” features Nicki Minaj, Chris Brown, August Alsina, Jeremih, Future, and Rick Ross, making it feel longer than its five-and-a-half-minute run time, and yet it’s the perfect cookout song, in tone and temperament. “Tourist” sounds exactly like what you’d expect Lil Wayne and Travis Scott duet to sound like—druggy, garbled, and robotically melodic—but both contributors are firing on all cylinders, because no one comes to a Khaled project with a half tank.
Some numbers, pitched directly at the ignorant, misogynist, and unwoke—“Pick Those Hoes Apart,” “Fuck Up the Club,” “Work for It”—are exactly the kind of disposable songs that have littered Khaled's past albums. They’re serviceable, but not necessary or novel. But Khaled ends on an on-brand note. If you can see Mavado’s “Progress” for the tacked-on bonus cut that it is, the album closes with “Forgive Me Father,” featuring Wiz Khalifa, Wale, and Meghan Trainor. Here, Khaled is audacious enough to try to recapture the crossover power of Wiz’s “See You Again,” allowing Trainor to over-riff with singing-the-National-Anthem-during-the-World-Series desperation, which is the only kind of thing that actually works for a song this saccharine and cloying. Khaled’s only voiced presence on this song is to calmly declare “another one,” and it's hard to disagree with him. Like all of his albums, *Major Key *is a mixed bag, fitting for a maestro who traffics in a blend of chest-thumping and humility that’s both as comical as it is prophetic.


The Queensbridge rapper’s sequel mythologizes his business acumen and doubles down on the formula of its predecessor to mixed effect.

King’s Disease II

Nas tends to cast his life in prophetic terms. From the “ancient manifested” street tales of Illmatic to the Afrocentric history lessons of songs like “I Can” to the “God’s Son” tattooed on his stomach, he’s long insisted he’s anointed by a higher power. At his best, that fascination with the divine made his music feel grand and stately even when it was about smelly elevators and petty crime. At his worst, his spiritual streak has fueled a bland prosperity gospel. Last year’s King’s Disease, while an improvement from Nasir, was mostly the latter: the Queensbridge rapper mythologizing his business acumen and the personal experiences that helped shape it. The sequel doubles down on that formula to mixed effect.

Continuing where its Grammy-winning predecessor left off, King’s Disease II’s main themes are maturation and tutelage. Nas, emboldened by his longevity in rap and successful business ventures, invites listeners to “MasterClass, Escobar,” as he puts it on “EPMD 2.” This rap elder template fits a Nas who seems more stimulated by an investment opportunity than a sick snare, but the songs here aren’t illustrative. Nas’ mogul talk is mostly a highlight reel: “Money off tech, pushing a Tesla/Rolled up a fresh one/It’s one IPO to the next one,” he raps on “Store Run,” mechanically referencing Illmatic. It sounds like he’s introducing himself at a corporate luncheon.
Hit-Boy returns as the main producer, again matching Nas’ monied raps with elegant beats befitting a wine tasting. The partnership works. Nas’ kingship goes down easy over Hit-Boy’s clean drums and neat arrangements, which indulge Nas’ nostalgia without kowtowing to it. Hit-Boy even occasionally coaxes Nas out of the executive suite. “YKTV” channels the sour glitz of Bronx rappers like Lil TJay and A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, the latter making a guest appearance. “Rare” swings from spare breakbeats to snappy hi-hats and a spirited organ loop. Nas seems to power up as the beat builds, his flows spry and unforced.
The moment passes. Where Nas’ clunkers used to at least feature a striking rhyme or image, now they just fall flat. “Correctional facilities never do it correctly,” he says on “The Pressure.” “Only island that my niggas knew was Rikers or Staten,” he says on “40 Side,” a line that’s neither clever nor true—his native Queensbridge neighborhood is just across Roosevelt Island from an island called Manhattan. On “My Bible,” he notes that jewelry and cars can be cursed. “Let that soak in your mind,” Nas says. These misfires rarely tank a song or verse, but they underscore how forced the boss posturing is. Guests EPMD, Eminem, and Lauryn Hill (reemerging from recording hiatus with a fiery verse) land all of the standout lines.

When Nas’ rhymes aren’t clumsy, his storytelling is. For “Death Row East,” he journeys back to the height of the 1990s coastal rivalry, relaying an ultimately futile reconciliation attempt between himself and Tupac, who died before they could parley. The account never becomes more than a footnote, Nas speedrunning through his own nostalgia. “Moments” is just as slapdash. “I never met Muhammad Ali, wish I did/My brother saw him, champ told him nothing is real/Gave me the chills, thought about it, that’s how I feel,” he raps. That’s the whole story.

There’s a hint of survivor’s guilt in Nas’ fixation on the past. The first verse of the album opens with “I ain’t made it till we all can say that we made it,” and throughout, Nas pauses to note the people he’s lost, as well as dead rappers. He’s clearly taking stock of his career and his life, but his insistence on a moral to his life story crowds out detail and texture, turning his soul-searching into grandstanding. His version of history is a perpetual victory lap, an eternal bacchanal of self-help gruel—or “Brunch on Sundays,” as he puts it. King’s Disease II isn’t the worst legacy-obsessed rap album in recent memory. But it’s a reminder of the emptiness of rap as monument, the way fetishizing posterity reduces the genre. Nas is blessed, yes. Is that it?

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On her latest record, Shura is at the vanguard of a scene of young queer pop stars who are updating the ’80s model of self-sufficient, fully liberated mainstream pop.

Nothing’s Real

Like Courtney Barnett’s “Avant Gardener,” the title track of Shura’s debut album steals a second of control during a seizure. Barnett laid out her value system in the middle of an anaphylactic shock when she remarked of a paramedic, “She thinks I'm clever because I play guitar/I think she’s clever because she stops people dying.” In “Nothing’s Real,” doctors tell Shura that her panic attack has no medical basis, and hook her up to an ECG to prove it. “I see my heartbeat inside a television screen,” she sings, niftily marking the distance between fact and feeling with an image right out of the kind of ’80s pop video her music would have once called home: “Nothing’s Real” struts and whirls like Kylie Minogue spinning around in a Devonté Hynes disco mix.
Born Aleksandra Denton to a Russian mother and British father, Shura lived in Manchester as a kid and later became a youth footballer for Manchester City. She came out, moved to London for university, and started making music, first with producer Hiatus, then former Athlete frontman and songwriter-to-the-stars Joel Pott (possibly the anti-Hynes, as instant cred goes, though a fine partner here). The panic attack came when their song “Touch,” an anxious, tender number about a romantic connection dimming, blew up on YouTube in late 2014, and major labels came knocking. (Once she had established she wasn't dying, she went with Universal.)
The result, Nothing’s Real, is a coming-of-age record documenting that period when, per Shura’s hospital experience, feelings become untrustworthy. “Maybe I knew right from the start and that’s exactly how I broke us down,” she frets on “Kidz N Stuff” (a title that also neatly outlines 20-something imaginations of adult relationships). She’s great at the acute intimacy of awkwardness: rolling a cigarette even though she gave up smoking, and wearing her cap back to front, “trying to be someone I saw on TV once.” After a major breakup, she's “one girl on the last train/Small change in the universe,” which is almost certainly the loveliest way anyone's ever described the midnight overground to Shepherds Bush. These ticks are lonely moments of action in a record overflowing with mental anguish about what to say or feel.
Nothing’s Real focuses the approach of the strong but sometimes scattershot alt-pop of the past few years (“Everything Is Embarrassing”-era Sky Ferreira, Haim’s Days Are Gone, Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION**) and smoothes the weirder edges of those records without lapsing into empty R&B aching. There’s a strong historical foundation here, too, evoking the softness of Janet Jackson’s Velvet Rope, and further back to the effervescent demands of Madonna’s 1983 debut. What Shura lacks in diva-ish range, she makes up in character, dressing up the odd line with enjoyably overheated phasing that plays against the nerves she’s expressing. It’s not hard to imagine Janet steaming up the windows of the excellent “2Shy,” while “What Happened to Us” has the Lindsey Buckingham urgency and “ooh! ah!” production ticks of Tango in the Night.
Even the slower songs have a kick to them. There’s a moment in “Touch” where you can hear Shura’s heart drop in her chest—“I only need you to be friends with me”—only for it to skip back into action for the fluttering chorus. Her ballads are never gloopy or pouting, retaining an endearing, incandescent naivety and propelling forward on gasps of adrenaline. That youthful optimism powers her biggest tracks, too, which, other than “Nothing’s Real,” rarely dare to broach out-and-out euphoria. Instead, there’s something understated and ecstatic to a song like “White Light,” where she's in awe of a girl who illuminates the room in a different way, and “What Happened to Us,” which channels Tunnel of Love-era Springsteen through a pastel haze.
Pott co-produced most of Nothing’s Real, with the exception of “Tongue Tied” and “What’s It Gonna Be,” a Greg Kurstin number that applies his love of perfectly cheesy synths to Shura’s addictive pep rally ultimatum for a dilly-dallying girl. The video, which upends high school movie archetypes, is set in Shermer High, the fictional institution from John Hughes’ movies, but Shura’s music is sharper and more nuanced than the rampantly nostalgic Hughes-core that proliferated five years ago. Her videos have been much more radical than rote ’80s analog graphics, too, shining a soft light on young gay couples and seekers. Along with Years & Years, Christine and the Queens, and Tegan and Sara, she’s at the vanguard of a scene of young queer pop stars who are updating the ’80s model of self-sufficient, fully liberated mainstream pop. That seemed to skip a couple of generations, or at least vanish beneath the specter of the bionic popstrels that followed in its wake. Nothing’s Real offers a fresh vision for pop’s new reality.


Captured live a year before Helm’s death, this reunion of old friends and kindred icons is a testament to perseverance, faith, and mighty backing bands.

Mavis Staples / Levon Helm: Carry Me Home

Carry Me Home

By the summer of 2011, both Mavis Staples and Levon Helm—dual icons of the ’70s then newly in their 70s—were basking in late-career renaissances. Staples had inked a deal with the label Anti- less than a decade earlier, launching a formidable run of records that funneled her gospel origins, soul might, and status as a civil rights mainstay into singular hour-long sermons. You Are Not Alone, her Jeff Tweedy-produced triumph, had just introduced her to a new generation. And Helm, a decade after a throat-cancer diagnosis, had regained control of his gritty Southern warble to make two occasionally great records that corralled his Arkansas upbringing and broad rock experience. After the post-millennial folk revival, Helm felt like a hero returning to claim his status. So when the old friends reunited at Helm’s place in Woodstock in May 2011 to rehearse and perform, the premise was clear—they had made it separately, but they were here to celebrate together.
Helm, at least, had the good sense to get behind the cannonball of Staples’ fiery voice, not in front. On Carry Me Home—a 12-track document of their performance that Friday night in Helm’s Barn, backed by a powerhouse tandem of their combined bands—Helm remains largely in the corners. He adds harmonies of ragged glory, only taking the lead briefly during an inevitable and sauntering finale of “The Weight.” But his drumming is unmistakable, a jolly canter that seems to bask in the glow of Staples’ command. From start to finish, she leads these songs of resilience and long-term redemption with a minister’s conviction. The dozen-plus musicians around her—including her sister Yvonne and Helm’s daughter, Amy—became her de facto choir. Carry Me Home is a jubilant lesson in living history.
Politics are paramount here. Staples and Helm rendezvoused, after all, a little more than two years into Barack Obama’s first presidential term, when the Tea Party and racist birthers were still ascendant. Staples considers all three in the sardonic verse she adds to “This Is My Country,” a new American anthem Curtis Mayfield penned four decades earlier while still in the Impressions. Opening the album, it doubles as a joyous fuck-off and wry come-on-in. Toward the end, their darkly funky take on Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody” begins to suggest a warning. As Staples repeats the titular mantra and ticks off all the things her Lord is to her (“a mighty good doctor… a lawyer”), she seems to be taunting the Christian right wing, daring them to tell her about values.
Consider just how astonishing and galvanizing it must have felt for Helm, the white Southerner, and Staples, the scion of a Black Mississippi native, to witness that recent election after the toil of the civil rights era. (Staples was once arrested at gunpoint while crossing into Memphis.) Carry Me Home cherishes progress, however slow or imperfect it may be. Where Nina Simone made the freedom of “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” sound like some faraway dream, Staples—buttressed by blaring horns and quilted harmonies—roars with a gusto that suggests she’s almost there, that it will soon be hers. An astounding a cappella rendition of the hymn “Farther Along” deals frankly with death and heaven, but it has just as much to say about the aspirational quests of the living—freedom, happiness, community.
The gospel songs here speak to that same perseverance, that trust in reaching better days by whatever means necessary. Staples is a longtime master of making religious music feel ecumenical, as wide as the world’s problems. Carry Me Home is no different. Her delightful run through “When I Go Away,” written by Helm’s ace guitarist Larry Campbell, finds release and salvation, not fear, in the great beyond. Lifted from the Babylon of the Old Testament, “Hand Writing on the Wall” is an imprecation against the powerful and wicked, serving notice that they will eventually fall. Staples turns the promise into a party, exalting in overthrows to come.
Much has changed, of course, in the decade since Staples and Helm reunited for this set in Woodstock. Less than a year later, Helm died in a New York hospital, losing his battle with throat cancer after 28 radiation treatments. Cancer also took Yvonne Staples—a force of her own, even at her sister’s side—six years later. But the real tragedy and the true impact of this set stem from how current it feels now and how it will likely remain that way. Staples’ odes to faith and survival, as well as her quips about bad politics, are as relevant now as they were then, if not more.
“I’m only halfway home,” she sings during “Wide River to Cross,” the big band lifting behind her. “I’ve got to journey on.” It’s a Buddy and Julie Miller song, presumably about heavenly ascendance. But surrounded by family and friends, Staples grounds it here on earth, making it about the push for everyone’s progress. Make no mistake: This is fight music, rendered with soul strong and sweet.


Destined to be loved or hated, it's heartening how little Passion Pit concern themselves with decorum or trend-watching in search of an irresistible hook.

Manners

Even if the rock kids aren't doing the standing still as much these days, indie-friendly electro-pop bands are still liable to have their own backs against the wall-- Hot Chip with their Urkel affectations, Junior Boys' overriding permafrost, Cut Copy and their unflappable cool. Despite residing on the always trustworthy Frenchkiss, Passion Pit aren't cool. Their approach to danceable rock music is more Friday night than year-end-list. It's also distinctly, for a lack of a better term, American. It's extroverted, brash, and unconcerned with nuance, each synthesizer used for maximum melodic impact instead of texture. Most of the time, singer Michael Angelakos' half-eunuch/half-Jeremy Enigk voice is likely voicing some sort of commentary on his feelings. There's an almost archaic belief that a record should have at least four singles and the nagging feeling that Passion Pit could just be another garage/emo band that traded in their guitars for samplers. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, just about all of this works in Manners' favor, as it's the sort of heart-to-heart populist record that's every bit as sincere as it is infectious-- though Angelakos sings in a manner rarely heard outside of a shower with unpredictable temperature control, it feels symbolic of a band that's completely unashamed, not shameless, in its pursuit of a human connection.
It's easy to be skeptical. I understand. Passion Pit are, after all, following a buzzed-about EP, Chunk of Change, that attracted detractors and admirers in equal measure. The story of Manners, however, is how Passion Pit evolve from a one-man pet project to a fully fleshed concern that gives substance to Angelakos' melodic sensibilities over the course of more focused song lengths, more dynamic arrangements, and 40 minutes of joy-buzzer pushing.
Chunk of Change certainly had its rickety charms, but while "Make Light", "Moth's Wings", and "Eyes as Candles" retain the EP's building blocks-- glycemic keyboards, insistent major keys, and falsetto-- their compositional aspects go beyond what Passion Pit were capable of as a solo affair. "Make Light", despite working patiently towards a satisfying hook, would've likely plateaued during its midsection, but Nate Donmoyer's live drums keep it skidding perilously towards an organic collapse Chunk of Change never allowed. The elegiac tempos of "Moth's Wings" and "Eyes as Candles" veer closer to first-kiss soundtracking than even Chunk's mushier moments, but they're rendered fleshy with slowly blossoming arrangements of church choirs, saxophones, and a winding synth lead on the latter that catches you off-guard with its similarity to "Walk of Life".
Barely past drinking age, Passion Pit are obviously overjoyed with the studio as romper room, but the toy that has gotten the most attention is the kiddie choir that pops up on two of the first four songs. Call them behind-the-curve as they double up the "higher and higher" part of the chorus from "Little Secrets" (that's the one that sounds like "D.A.N.C.E.", Jarvis), but it's more over-the-top, and that's kind of the point-- in a weird way, it's heartening how little Passion Pit concerns themselves with decorum or trend-watching in the search of an irresistible hook. Manners does go for the quick knockout, pulling a similar trick five minutes later on the Hissing Fauna branch-off "The Reeling", and while Side B tends to delay gratification, Manners is deceptively consistent even beyond its singles-- if you like one Passion Pit song, you'll probably like them all. Or you might not like any at all-- though "Sleepyhead" has proven to be something of the consensus, its real-time chipmunk soul ambitions fitting in better on Manners than it did tacked as a transitional track at the end of Chunk of Change.
But as "Let Your Love Grow Tall" ushers in last call with a big ol' group hug, I realize how it puts me in a difficult position as a music critic: what happens when you're scrambling to think of why a record is worth hearing and you keep coming back to "it makes me happy"? Too often, we use a band's debut simply to conjure comparisons to other bands, but Manners is every bit as likely to bring to mind a successful night out with friends, or the party where you finally got to talk to that person you've been eying all semester. The video for "The Reeling" certainly helps with that visualization, but in a manner similar to layers of faux-flesh being peeled off Angelakos' face, the cracked-up lyrics themselves ache for some sort of connection after realizing the futility of physical and emotional bunkers*.* It's a fitting contrast for a record that's certainly not the most innovative or cred-boosting you'll hear this year, but quite possibly the one that most demands to be socialized with and is just so easy to love back.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a groundbreaking 1970 album, a lovely but tragic record led by a pioneering force in country music.

Color Me Country

In the summer of 2020, the 79-year-old Linda Martell sat in her daughter’s home in Irmo, South Carolina, recounting a phase of life that had faded nearly five decades prior. She sounded at peace but, at times, still peeved over what could have been. “Don’t get me wrong, there were some beautiful people,” she told David Browne of Rolling Stone, “And some not that beautiful.” The occasion for this meeting was the 50th anniversary of Martell’s 1970 debut solo album, the groundbreaking Color Me Country, which, at the time of its release, was hailed as the harbinger of a new generation of Black women artists who would find commercial success in a genre that had long shut them out. But Martell’s legacy has been greatly overlooked, referenced only periodically in the longstanding criticism of the country music industry’s determination to remain as white and male as possible, regardless of how the nation’s demographics shift.
Martell’s journey began about 30 miles west of where she sat for the Rolling Stone interview, in the small town of Leesville, South Carolina. She was born Thelma Bynem, one of five children, and like many in the African American musical tradition, she nurtured her skills in the church choir. In her teens, she formed an R&B trio with her sister and cousin called the Anglos which, most notably, released a 1962 single with the New York label Fire Records that included songs “A Little Tear (Was Falling From My Eyes)” and “The Things I Do For You.” On the latter, a 21-year-old Martell sings sultrily about the lengths she’s willing to go for the man she loves. It’s the kind of song that could have been a substantial hit if luck had somehow been on their side.
The Anglos played a few shows but never got much traction and soon disbanded. Martell began gigging around the Carolinas as a solo R&B act, and, while performing covers of country songs at an Air Force base, she happened to meet a Nashville furniture store owner named William Rayner. Rayner had record industry aspirations, and when he saw a Black woman playing country tunes, a lightbulb went off. In 1969, he offered to pay for her to cut a demo. Soon after, he introduced Martell to Nashville industry player Shelby Singleton Jr., who had her record a cover of Washington, D.C. soul group the Winstons’ “Color Him Father” and immediately signed her to a one-year contract—with a label literally called Plantation Records.
“Color Him Father” is a song of appreciation for a step-parent who filled the shoes of a father who died in combat, and the Winstons’ version had a rhythmic bounce that allowed the vocals to come across as conversational and charismatic. In 1969, their rendition hit No. 7 on the Hot 100. But in Martell’s sweet reconfiguring, designed to fit elongated banjo riffs and dreamy harmonica play, the intensity of deep familial love cuts through with more emotional precision. Singleton released the single days after signing her and, in the same year as the Winstons, Martell’s version reached No. 22 on the Hot Country Songs chart. From there, she aggressively toured the South to gain recognition, enduring slurs hurled by racist audiences. Her most legendary introduction to the scene was a performance at the famed Grand Ole Opry in the same year she was signed, making her the first Black woman to stand in the circle.
Months later, in a short profile titled “Country Music Gets Soul,” Ebony magazine gushed over Martell’s quick rise to notoriety and how refreshing it was to hear a Black artist incorporate her gospel and R&B roots into country, after opportunistic white acts had spent years stealing “all the little tricks of soul.” The future appeared prosperous. Martell received an offer to host a country variety show and was projected to earn $50,000 (just under $400,000 today) by the end of 1970. But having her value reduced to what kind of money she could make her handlers—projections that regarded her Blackness as a marketing tool instead of a lived experience within an anti-Black society coming out of the Jim Crow era—had severe ramifications.
Color Me Country—recorded in one 12-hour marathon session—was released in August 1970. And like Martell’s career up to that point, it performed well, peaking at No. 40 on the Top Country Albums chart. Revisiting the album now, it’s challenging to get a sense for just how much of the South Carolina singer’s true self was ever allowed to be on the project. She recorded a version of “San Francisco Is a Lonely Town” a tale about a couple who takes a Greyhound out to the Bay Area in search of a new life, but soon after arrival, the guy hits the streets, gets wrapped up in the city’s nightlife, and gradually drifts away from his partner altogether. Martell’s inflections when singing, “There were good times for a little while/But now his new friends say I cramp his style/I guess I’m in the way now. He don’t need me hanging ’round,” feature those resonant “tricks of soul” that Ebony alluded to in their profile.
One of the album’s singles, a honky-tonk number called “Bad Case of the Blues,” is directed at another no-good man whom, against her better judgment, Martell’s narrator just can’t let go. Watch the imperial Martell perform the song on Hee Haw: When she yodels, a big smirk streaks across the side of her face. On “Then I’ll Be Over You,” she sings about desperately wanting to recover from heartbreak, yet the production is bare enough that you can get lost in her melodies. Most of the songs on Color Me Country fall somewhere in this thematic range. Martell’s singing is sweet, mellifluous, but the umph in her voice on songs with the Anglos never really shows up here. Maybe it was the anxiety of auditioning for music-industry bosses, rather than collaborating with family; maybe it was the pressure to deliver the kind of mainstream success that now seemed within reach. Still, the conventions of rhythm and blues remained imprinted in her musical DNA.
“When you choose a song and you can feel it, that’s what made me feel great about what I was singing,” Martell told Rolling Stone. “I did a lot of country songs, and I loved every one of them. Because they just tell a story.” Over half of the album’s songs were written by Margaret Lewis and Myra Smith, a duo of white women who are some of country music’s most celebrated songwriters. The songs they didn’t work on were penned by Ben Peters, with contributions from a few others. Relying on professional songwriters was industry standard at the time, but, even today, the merit of a country performer doesn’t necessarily rest on the strength of their pen; rather, it’s their posture and delivery, their ability to make an everyman scenario feel intimate and personal to the listener. And Martell handles business on Color Me Country.
“The Wedding Cake,” which Lewis and Smith initially wrote for country singer Connie Francis a year prior, is transformed from a wistful number to something more vigorous under Martell—a direct result of her gospel-to-soul trajectory. When she sings, “It’s facing shadows of the future, praying they will fall away,” it feels like she’s drawing from the ebb and flow of her personal life. “Old Letter Song” takes an amusingly meta approach, making light of cheesy songs about nostalgia before eventually succumbing to their kernel of truth. And on “I Almost Called Your Name,” a song that’d been recorded by a handful of artists before it reached Martell, she hollers about the awkwardness of finding new love while still hung up on the last dude. Listening to her rendition feels like witnessing a riveting scandal in an audio soap opera.
During that 12-hour recording session, Singleton threw songs to Martell and a team of musicians to perform and, in return, she produced a boundary-breaking piece of art that wouldn’t be duplicated for years to come. But despite her meteoric rise and well-received album, by Martell’s estimation, her momentum at Plantation Records came to a halt when white female singer Jeannie C. Riley of “Harper Valley P.T.A.” fame became the label’s primary focus. When Martell tried to find work elsewhere in Nashville, Singleton thwarted her by threatening to sue prospective new record companies. Her career was left incomplete—a series of dispiriting what ifs? In the decades that followed, Martell bounced around the U.S. doing the music-industry equivalent of odd jobs—singing on a cruise ship off the coast of California, opening a disco and R&B record store in the Bronx, fronting an R&B cover band in Florida—before returning to her South Carolina hometown as a teacher and school bus driver. Even after failed attempts to rehabilitate her career as a recording artist, Martell’s life still orbited around a profound love for music.
In the decades since Martell’s country career fizzled, Black women country singers like Ruby Falls, Rissi Palmer, Brittney Spencer, Mickey Guyton, and others have experienced some semblance of success, though none have charted higher than Martell did over 50 years ago. In 2023, mainstream country music thrives in spite of the demographic and cultural changes taking place in America: The country stars who have enjoyed the most success this year are ones that have, in one way or another, declared opposition to those changes. Country music veteran Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” which has been criticized as a coded call to action encouraging rural white Americans to pick up their guns in the event of perceived unruly behavior, became a No. 1 hit. “Last Night,” a country song decorated with trap-style percussion, sat at the top of the charts for 16 weeks when singer Morgan Wallen re-emerged after saying the n-word on camera in 2021. Perhaps the year’s most surprising country chart-topper is “Rich Men North of Richmond,” from out-of-nowhere Farmville, Virginia singer Oliver Anthony. The song tugs at the frustration of poor and working-class whites who feel stifled by “new” social norms and envious of migrants and welfare recipients; Anthony’s wails add palpable dramatic effect.
“There is no other massive cultural industry where we would accept that it is OK for it to be this straight, this white, and this masculine,” University of North Carolina professor Tressie McMillan Cottom said on a recent episode of Vulture’s Into It podcast focused on country music’s present-day racial dynamics. When Black audiences embrace non-Black artists in genres like hip-hop and soul, McMillan Cottom says, “We don’t just give them an audience, we give them legitimacy. This is what country music denies Black artists. In country music, even when the music is produced by Black artists… it has to be separated from Black people to be considered legitimately country. That’s the difference.”
Those words ring excruciatingly true over the incomplete career of Linda Martell. Money-hungry men from Nashville never considered the singer in her fullness. She was an avatar fixed for white imagination, never granted the opportunity to tell a story that transgressed beyond songs with safe, established themes about women occupied with love (or the lack of it) from men in their lives. Her story inspires its justified share of rage and heartache, but in that same breath, it’s no less remarkable; a Black woman’s voice storming through an industry she wasn’t supposed to be part of, breaking records by sheer existence and leaving hard evidence of the kind of impactful work that outlasts even the hottest commodities of the moment.


On their astonishing fourth album, the Danish punk band reach for pop-gothic grandeur with more tenacity and abandon than ever.

Beyondless

Aren’t punks supposed to look at flowers and hate them? Not Iceage, it seems, who performed recently in Tokyo subsumed by flowers of every hue. Electric blue, royal red, magenta, periwinkle. Observing the Danish rock band in this breathtaking setting on Instagram, I imagined a funeral. The botanical barrage was, it turned out, an installation by the artist Makoto Azuma, famous for sending a bonsai into space. Maybe it was just supposed to look pretty. If so, this striking picture compounded beauty, softness, violence, ecstasy—not unlike Iceage’s new music. It felt like a commitment to the idea that we are not what you expect, of performed vulnerability, of embodying a question mark.
Iceage have spent a decade inching towards a twisted glamor: a sullen band fronted by a Draculian poet, constantly experimenting, carrying forth the clangoring drama of post-punk innovators such as Rowland S. Howard in The Birthday Party and These Immortal Souls. Their guiding principles play out in their best songs: With “Ecstasy,” their expressiveness; with “The Lord’s Favorite,” unblinking humor; with “How Many,” romanticism. And even as their strengths converge upon this astonishing odyssey of a fourth album, Iceage remain a moving target still.
On Beyondless, Iceage reach for grandeur with more tenacity and suspending energy than ever. On the opener, “Hurrah,” Elias Rønnenfelt sings of “roaring free-jazz fireworks” as if to introduce the band’s lushest yet palette of sax, trombone, trumpet, piano, and violin, which they play with the pummeling dynamism of contemporary Swans. Beyondless sparkles like a champagne bottle smashed in slow motion. Rønnenfelt’s lyrics—which he says wrote while hidden away, late at night, in a tower—can be Biblical or Shakespearean or they can just coldly stare you in the eye. To think of this heightened style alongside the crude, vicious hardcore of their 2011 debut is inspiring. The whole sound of Beyondless, from pop hooks to hints of cabaret jazz, seems to be fantastically coated with cheap gold paint.
Rønnenfelt, now 26, has always been an actorly frontman—his voice can sound demonic, detached, drunk, sometimes all at once—but now with a more concrete grip on English, he’s fully in character, like Rimbaud born into the Addams family. He compares himself to a rat and talks to God. He sings ridiculous lines about the end of the world and STDs in his mouth. He longs for “arbitrary thrills” on the LP’s druggish “Catch It,” and on the oceanic title track, he is “perfectly lost at sea internally.” Seedy desperation is a recurring theme. Rønnenfelt wields his pen with a new level of rigor and conviction, and he makes phrases like “anesthetic laison” and “derisions of the flesh” and “wretched pantomime” roll off the tongue. When he wallows through a couplet like “As above, so below/These transgressions take me higher,” he narrates his debasement with such command that it clears the air, and charges every crevice of the song, like opera.
But he also knows when to reel it in. Beyondless is Iceage’s poppiest music by some margin, and Rønnenfelt sometimes employs extreme repetition in his songwriting, like a vintage jukebox breaking down. “Part of me wants to be a pop star,” he said in 2014, and he lives out that fantasy on “Pain Killer,” a raw glitter-bomb of a duet with Sky Ferreira. Rønnenfelt sings a whole host of desirous metaphors about spider webs and death and “the altar of your legs and feet” with great stealth. When the pair ring out the instantly classic hook “I rue the day you became my pain killer,” it sounds like they’re pushing the sky, delightfully tormented together. It’s the sound of destiny; they’re perfect foils. You can practically see the words crawling on a crackling karaoke screen.
Rønnenfelt is an avid reader of fiction and he makes Beyondless brim with novelistic detail. The title comes from the absurdist author Samuel Beckett’s void-like 1983 novella Worstward Ho, which has no plot as such. (Beckett tried to use a bare minimum of language: “No. No place but the one. None but the one where none. Whence never once in. Somehow in. Beyondless.”) But the tales of Beyondless seem to reflect themes of discomfiting modern life. Rønnenfelt sings of Pre-Raphaelite architecture and dead butterflies on “Thieves Like Us” while describing a disturbing hostage situation, in which he wants to “file a restraining order on humanity or myself.” On “Hurrah,” he seems to embody a warmongering soldier who grotesquely can’t, shouldn’t, and never will stop killing—persistently chanting the line like a person who has been conditioned to murder. Iceage is not a band I really want to hear attempt protest songs, but in place of that, this subtle topical grist adds another layer of purpose.
“Showtime,” meanwhile, is pure vaudevillian madness. For one unlikely track, these ex-hardcore kids take their Bowie-ist logic of incessant change to an unimaginable extreme, pulling off the sound of a New Orleans brass band stuffed into a smoky lounge. Rønnenfelt innocently describes a theater scene: tickets purchased, small talk, a crowd of “upper crust and working folks, blockbusters, dishwashers, lady killers and floor-moppers.” The dizzying specificity throws “Showtime” into giddy comic relief—but then Iceage terrorize it. When the star of the show pulls a gun and “blows his brains all over the stage,” the derisive crowd want their money back. It feels like a comment on spectacle, capitalism, apathy, and the bleak realities of the performing arts, and it is the most shocking thing Iceage have done.
For the promotion of Beyondless, punk icon Richard Hell wrote a fawning essay about Iceage. He talks about their intelligence and anarchy and even compares the singer to their shared spiritual predecessor, Charles Baudelaire. This kind of validation feels rare for a band of Iceage’s ilk, and it could only come from a punk-literary elder today. In 2018, Iceage are still extreme outsiders—too cloistered-off for mainstream indie, not DIY enough for punk. It’s fitting that they’ve instead forged connections with artists like Ferreira, the painter Elizabeth Peyton, the opera singer M Lamar, or the flower visionary Makoto Azuma.
Iggy Pop also once called Iceage the only current punk band “that sounds really dangerous.” But where danger is concerned, Iceage’s earlier iteration pales in comparison to the daring of Beyondless. What is truly dangerous is to put your work on the line and take legitimate, consequential risks—which become an invitation to risk, and to possibility, and aliveness, for anyone who cares to listen.


On their latest album, the free jazz collective expands their palette to great effect, channeling the hopes of the past to demand liberation in the present.

Irreversible Entanglements: Open the Gates

Open the Gates

Born in the wake of the murder of Caribbean immigrant Akai Gurley by NYPD, Irreversible Entanglements harnessed the righteous rage they felt on their self-titled debut LP. Since then, the band’s experimental jazz has expanded, comfortably taking up more space and broadening in sound and scope. Their 2020 LP Who Sent You? looked to the past with a more restrained approach, as poet and vocalist Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother) reflected on the systemic racism and disenfranchisement that led us to this point. On Open the Gates, alternative histories are explored in an attempt to reshape the present and pave the road for a better future. This might seem like an impossibly abstract idea, but Ayewa has dedicated years to thinking through how Black and Afro-diasporan traditions of time relate to these principles. For her, music is a practical tool for time travel, and on this record, the quintet persuasively uses improvisation and incendiary poetry to channel past hopes in order to demand present liberation. Rooted in the free jazz tradition and Black experimentalism, the record is an exhortation to demolish the concrete and mental barriers that prevent radical change.
Beginning with Ayewa’s cry of “Open the gates, we arrive, energy time,” the record starts with eyes clearly focused on the future. Driven by Tcheser Holmes’ galloping rhythms and Luke Stewart’s looping bass, it marches ahead with resolve as surging horns swell with mounting tension, like a call to battle. But soon enough the cosmic instrumentation of “Keys to Creation” beams us back in time, with percussion that ticks away expectantly. Filled with determination, Ayewa’s voice dances with Aquiles Navarro’s trumpet as she finds strength in her forebears. Here their nod to the ancestors most clearly evokes New York Art Quartet and their work with Amiri Baraka, whose words “the future is always here in the past” echo throughout the album. But their improvisational approach is one that has a long lineage, and in their hands it is just as compelling, able to viscerally capture the deep emotions of the present moment while liberating minds from everyday struggles. “Lágrimas Del Mar” is one of the album’s most freeform pieces, and a testament to band’s sheer force, as the shifting rhythms and powerful improvised brass lines create a battering ram capable of challenging the foundations of oppression.
Just as important is Ayewa’s reverence for the Black women who’ve come before her. On “Six Sounds,” through the mournful peals of Keir Neuringer’s sax and a tentative rhythm section, she invokes, “Billie, Nina, Sarah, Nina, Betty, Abbey,” and asks, “Was it a dream to be more than healing?” It’s an ode to those that paved the way, and by celebrating this heritage she forges a way forward.
On Open the Gates, Irreversible Entanglements delve into new terrain, adding electronic instrumentation and lengthening their free jazz workouts. Synthesizers appear sparingly, but contribute to weaving tense and expansive atmospheres, further deepening the emotional breadth of their music. At times, post-apocalyptic synths appear as sudden tectonic shifts, capturing the anxiety of the moment, while opening new possibilities for the future. “Water Meditation” channels the foreboding energy of a brewing thunderstorm. Sprawling for twenty minutes, it is a collision of sound that shakes with propulsive drums, Ayewa’s shouts, and clamorous horns. While the lyrics are often cryptic, they contribute a demanding presence to this barrage, summoning you to the band’s vital call.
For Irreversible Entanglements, it is the tangible prospect of liberation, rather than immediate anger, that adds fuel to the fire. On “Lágrimas Del Mar” a better world feels within reaching distance, as Ayewa chants, “Cause I’m so close. Because we are so close to the good news” over interweaving, pointed horn lines. It’s a rousing sentiment, born out of a lifetime of engagement and struggle, carried by the longing of those who came before.
Buy: Rough Trade
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