One of the key 1990s "Lost Generation" UK post-rock bands gets a 2xCD reissue of its masterful debut album.

Quique: Redux Edition

Being an early 1990s shoegaze band whose big claim to fame is that they "went electronic," it's impossible to talk about Seefeel without also talking about technology. On Seefeel's MySpace page, there's live footage of "Industrious"-- from their 1993 album Quique-- at a Russian festival in '94. The band doesn't quite stand still; bassist Darren Seymour does some kind of spastic dance during the bridge. But something about the basic immobility of the band-- attempting to recreate its pulsing, programmed loops live on stage, a music that pours My Bloody Valentine's oozing pink and purple plasma onto techno's chrome skeleton-- is tied to a long-gone age of implacable MIDI-sequencing, lacking the real-time software flux available to Christian Fennesz or the freedom of movement enjoyed by modern cyborg bands like Battles.
But only a maniac would claim that Kraftwerk's neon lights shine any less brightly because they didn't have Ableton Live, and Seefeel's music continues to sparkle 14 years later, an entire generation having built an ambient-motorik noise-pop aesthetic around Quique songs like "Plainsong". Too Pure finally brings the album back into print after far too long with this double-disc "Redux Edition", and listening now, you'll hear the beginnings of a still-thriving genre that remains slippery and unnamed, purely electronic music with a strange, tangy rock aftertaste-- think Tim Hecker's own post-shoegaze explorations into ultra-violet noise, Nathan Fake's plastic techno My Bloody Valentine homages, M83's heavily sequenced Vangeliscapes, a good chunk of the Darla Records catalog, and the twinkling textures of Mouse on Mars, who sent Too Pure a mash note with their demo after they had become infatuated with Quique. Even starting out in a genre where texture and noise already did much of the heavy lifting, the "rock band" version of Seefeel was just a shadow on the studio wall by the time of Quique, making it kind of proto-IDM before the genre even really had a name.
And in this rock-free space, the eight minutes of opener "Climatic Phase No. 3" actually sound like "Comedown Phase No. 3". It's just the barest tinkling of percussion, a rising and falling bass line to provide a barely audible pulse guiding the track, and the laziest melody Kevin Shields or Robin Guthrie never wrote. Not afraid to name a song "Spangle", that most overused of adjectives when it comes to post-Cocteau Twins' guitar atmospherics, Seefeel's canvas on Quique was the azure 8-bit horizon of a computer game where the band blew pixilated clouds that spritzed digital mist and crafted minimal hooks from just hypnotic smears of faraway feedback and Sarah Peacock's nape-of-your-neck intimate whispers.
Needless to say, if Seefeel's pace gets to, say, mid-tempo, the band's pretty damn worked up. The songs stretch out like groggy limbs after a mid-day nap, and the band is often at its best when it's at its most languid, as on the impossibly sensual and nearly static "Filter Dub". The underrated, understated rhythm work--rarely brought up when critics like me start talking alliterative nonsense about vapor trails and guitar swooshes--scrapes and pulses more than it pounds or strides, often recalling a stiff Kraftwerkian metal-on-metal version of polyrhythmic sway of Polynesian percussion. The silvery splash of the cymbals on "Industrious" is just another harmonic color in the palette; the chittering "Through You" sounds like gamelan recast with Atari-era tools.
In the band's attempt escape rock's orbit, the second disc of nine unreleased tracks and rare cuts melts any remaining physicality away until all that's left is, as the band titles the last track, a "Silent Pool", even removing most of the "techno" from "ambient techno." The "avant garde" mix of "Charlotte's Mouth" mutes the original's percussion until it's the spectral, washed-out blur of an underdeveloped Polaroid, and the eerie "My Super 20" blows barren winds as cold the bleakest tracks on AFX's Selected Ambient Works II or the arctic static of Thomas Koner. Moving to labels like Warp and Rephlex and exploring a more purely electronic sound--guitarist Mark Clifford went on to a long and fruitful techno career as Disjecta and other pseudonyms--was perhaps Seefeel's only option as they forced a rock/techno fusion that the technology of the time couldn't quite accommodate. But while it would have undoubtedly been interesting to see where the band might have gone in the anything-goes laptop age, Quique still sounds timeless.


With Excavation, London-based electronic producer Bobby Krlic, aka the Haxan Cloak, offers a multifaceted roadmap of the afterlife. The record, his first for Tri Angle, is about the journey taken after death, and it's bold and domineering, the kind of music that towers over you and casts a giant, intimidating shadow.

Excavation

Death isn't going to come easy for Bobby Krlic, the London-based producer who records as the Haxan Cloak. At least he has Excavation, a sort of multifaceted roadmap of the afterlife, to guide him. This record, his first for Tri Angle, is about the journey taken after death, making it a sequel to his eponymous 2011 debut, which was themed around someone approaching their final days on the planet. Both albums are imagined, instrumental quests, drawn out through electronic compositions with occasional strings. The first record came close to twisted Wicker Man folk at times. This one plunges into a blackened well and never gets out. There is no light relief from Krlic's malaise, no sense that we won't be here some day and there's a place at the end of it all where we might find peace. Excavation is quite the opposite. It paints death as a terrifying, complex process, full of confounding turns and illogical rhythms.
Krlic isn't exactly working in isolation as the Haxan Cloak; he has peers in Demdike Stare's drone-shaped darkness, and he's in a similar orbit to the digital trudge-to-oblivion practiced by fellow Londoners Raime. But while Excavation continues a theme, it goes to more expansive places than anything that bears vaguely similar properties. It's bold and domineering, the kind of music that towers over you and casts a giant, intimidating shadow. There's a magical quality to it, drawn from its transportive nature. It's hard to imagine this being put together in someone's bedroom or a crappy studio, mainly because it's so far withdrawn from the everyday. Krlic has far grander thoughts in mind. He is, after all, building a whole world here, one full of mysterious scratch marks on walls, bloodstained carpets, or the noose tossed into view on the album's cover.
Excavation is more soundtrack than regular album, pulling on familiar tropes from the horror world such as the sudden escalation of strings that lead to a stony silence in "Consumed". But Krlic doesn't follow a straight path at any point, instead setting muted rhythms in progress and disrupting them just when it feels like you've got a handle on where he's going. The depth is quite extraordinary at times, largely due to the bottomless bass Krlic deploys, helping to depict the afterlife as a relentless slog. In many religions death is seen as a destination, but here it's a struggle, another journey, a new set of circumstances with which to grapple. There's a strong sense of deterioration, of things falling apart. When "Excavation (Part 2)" plunges into the quiet it feels like Krlic's carefully constructed world faded away, only for it to segue into the queasy strings that beckon in the following "Mara" that confirm: yes, you are still here in his personal hell.
It's an album sequenced with a central narrative in mind, and one that's not without glimmers of hope at key junctures. "The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2)" and "The Drop" are key tracks, both deploying lighter textures that symbolize a form of redemption from the sooty gloom that eats at the edges of the Haxan Cloak. They come toward the close of the record, suggesting that some kind of unsteady peace has been made in this particular form of purgatory. It adds a resigned air to the album, a sense of accepting fate no matter how bad it may be. Krlic brings the strings into greater view once again during "The Drop", heightening the feelings of sadness and empathy that slowly guide us away from the inky path of all-out grief and dejection. Still, the bass hits continue to punch in that sinking feeling and the beats add a dramatic flourish, always emphasizing that this is a place of sickness, not security.
With music we like, we often talk about the compulsion to come back to it, that need to hit the repeat button as soon as it's over. But music you need a break from can be equally powerful. Excavation has that air, of a place that actually needs some preparation before entering into it. It's not aesthetically similar to Scott Walker's later works, but it similarly highlights how certain music specifically needs the right time, place, and mood to function. Krlic even seems to know it himself, commenting in his Rising feature about the effects of his nine-hour-straight recording sessions. "Being in that zone for that long can freak you out," he said. Instead, Excavation gains power from gathering a little dust for a while, becoming a dark treat to occasionally sink into. It's not a place in which to seek refuge from life's ills, but rather one in which you can satisfy a perverse need to draw them in closer.


After a string of releases that sometimes felt like hearing Bird think himself in circles, the singer-songwriter relaxes into his most plainly and darkly funny album in a long time.

My Finest Work Yet

Andrew Bird’s work the past decade has scrutinized on the link between sound and time. He made an acoustic album in a barn; he recorded an instrumental album at the bottom of a canyon, and then another while standing in a river; he toured for years with gigantic spinning gramophone horns; he turned a single song into a seven-track EP by treating it like a film score; he made an actual film score. Along the way, Bird’s image started drifting away from playful fiction-spinner and toward haggard philosopher: sometimes isolating and difficult to follow, always interesting. Around the time that he jolted into a 7/8 breakdown on a sprawling, sorrowful song about physically mutating from tour-life conditions called “Anonanimal,” the Andrew Bird who once promised snacks at the end of civilization was becoming a fading memory.
That irreverent, contentedly existential side of Bird makes a pleasantly surprising return on My Finest Work Yet, his most plainly and darkly funny album in a long time. While its cover art depicts Bird swapped into Jacques-Louis David’s “The Death of Marat,” its music is more Monty Python’s Life of Brian: consumed with human history and equally ready to poke fun at it. It sounds eerily informed by “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” right down to its undermining of doom with whistling: “The Earth spins faster, whistles right past ya / Whispers death in your ear / Don’t pretend you can’t hear,” Bird casually drops on “Manifest,” just before offering another of his signature whistling solos. After a string of releases that sometimes felt like hearing Bird think himself in circles, the philosophy professor drops the chalk mid-proof, turns to the class, and cheerily concludes, “We’re all screwed!”
Even those who tend to tune out lyrics can recognize a reinstated directness in Bird’s composing, whether in the ambush of violins on“Manifest”, the straighforwardly beautiful ballad “Cracking Codes,” or the unrestrained “OH”s that hoist up “Olympians.” There are a few filler moments that would fit on any other Bird album—”Fallorun” in particular falls flat—but the rest feel like they share a common attitude of “Why not?”. “Don the Struggle” actually brings back the 7/8 dance breakdown, but this time to serve as a foil to the song’s “Benny and the Jets” stomp. The flip is as clear as Bird’s shrug when he repeats over and over, “We’re all just stumbling down / Through an unnamed struggling town.”
Bird knows how to deploy specificity so suddenly and casually that it tickles—and then how to complicate that reaction. Lines here about J. Edgar Hoover, the Spanish Civil War, and Sisyphus all feel more intended to incite chuckling than chin-stroking. On the latter, which is also the name of the opening track and lead single, he questions the condemned Greek king’s dilemma: “Did he raise both fists and say, ‘To hell with this,’ and just / Let the rock roll?” That image seems more than a little self-referential in light of Bird’s obsessive style of music-making. Here, he takes a moment to set that boulder down, throw his hands up, and grin at the beautiful futility of it all.


Overdue for increased attention, this female five-piece specializes in a brash mixture of classic punk, hardcore thrash, and skronky no wave.

We Be Xuxa

A few years back, it would have been hard to predict that a scuzz-punk duo like No Age would gain wide popularity outside of a niche fanbase, or that the band's all-ages homebase the Smell would come to be seen as one of the preeminent breeding grounds for underground rock. Even as the indie paradigm has shifted towards the noisier, it's still difficult to guess which (if any) of the acts in No Age's wake will go on to find similar success. Surely due for increased attention, though, are Smell torchbearers Mika Miko, a female five-piece specializing in a brash (but danceable) mixture of classic late-70s punk, hardcore thrash, and skronky no wave.
Known primarily for the dynamic energy of their stage show, Mika Miko have been operating in some form since the early part of the decade, touring shitloads and scraping together an armful of homemade cassettes and CD-Rs. They embody Smell ideology-- community building, inclusion, steadfast DIY-ness-- and though We Be Xuxa is their first medium-profile release, it's actually the group's 10th official recording. Their brand of industriousness and good-natured punk spirit are fine reasons to like a band (or at least root for them), but the other part of that equation, of course, is enjoying their tunes. And that depends on your outlook: the intentionally basic songs on the 23-minute We Be Xuxa lean heavily on aggression and energy.
For those who like their music brief and stupid-simple (and appreciate the various strains of the punk canon Mika Miko are drawing upon), We Be Xuxa can be plenty of fun. Its best tracks, such as shouty opener "Blues Not Speed", rumble past at a violent clip with just enough time for the band to do its damage and then peel out in the getaway car. The group has a healthy sense of balance, too, and usually knows when to cut its bitterness with sugar, like on the bouncy call-and-response of "I Got a Lot (New New New)". But not all of the record's remaining moments achieve such equilibrium, and since it operates in only two gears-- fast and faster-- there's a tendency for its lesser songs to bleed into one another and become indistinguishable.
Indeed, the similar-sounding "Wild Bore" and "Sex" might as well be one song, and the distinction between neighboring tracks "On the Rise" and "Beat the Rush" doesn't really exist. That's a problem on a record this short, and generally speaking, We Be Xuxa would benefit from more genre variety. Ironically, when the band does occasionally fiddle with other styles-- notably on the very convincing no-wave boogie of "Totion" and their cover of the Urinals' "Sex"-- they produce some of the record's most memorable material. Something tells me, though, that Mika Miko aren't really that interested in deeper genre explorations or crafting a grand concept piece. They're about turning kids onto punk rock at sweat-soaked backyard parties, and that's pretty cool too.


The instrumental act's latest album finds them revisiting their circa-05 roots, offering tracks that are as pummeling as they are danceable.

Congrats

The best instrumental acts make it easy for you to imagine what their frontperson might be like, if they had one. Explosions in the Sky would undoubtedly feature an earnest, heart-clutching romantic—it’s not surprising they’re as much of an influence on emo’s 4th wave as American Football. Russian Circles would present as a burly, stoic, type and even without Tyondai Braxton, Battles maintained the impish, playful charm of his vocals from Mirrored. Holy Fuck are tougher to get a read on: They were arguably electro-punk subversives at the outset; they’ve toured with M.I.A., and appeared on the Billboard Dance chart, and since 2010’s Latin, Graham Walsh has recorded Canadian acts that sound nothing like each other or Holy Fuck (METZ, Alvvays, Preoccupations). Although they actually emphasize vocals on *Congrats, *it’s somehow even harder to figure out what Holy Fuck is trying to express.
While *Latin was crisp and kinetic, Congrats *seems to take on at least some of the post-punk griminess of Walsh’s production charges. The bloodthirsty opener “Chimes Broken” emphasizes rumbling toms over snares, undulating bass over abrasive treble; first single “Tom Tom” batters the vocals in delay and echo. It’s notably similar to the fluorescent, toxic murk Liars oozed on Mess, rudimentary electronics and tribal rhythms given a high-end production sheen.
Above all else, Holy Fuck are a *rhythm *band, and much of *Congrats *has them circling back to where they started in 2005, i.e., a dance-punk band in a literal sense, trying to approximate electronic music with live instrumentation (and some non-instruments), to be as pummeling as they are danceable. *Congrats *is a record that rarely lets up, but there’s a sense of humor creeping in somewhere, mostly in the titles—on “Neon Dad,” they imagine themselves as a musclebound chillwave act and the synth-bass of “Caught Up” is a sincere homage to early-'00s DFA.
Holy Fuck never sound out of their element on *Congrats—*the most surprising addition is an acoustic guitar on the “Shimmering” interlude. But even at less than a minute, “Shimmering” somehow exposes the ultimate issue with *Congrats *and perhaps Holy Fuck as an enterprise. It’s not so much that “Shimmering” is the first time *Congrats *repeats itself—as a reprise of the earlier “Shivering,” that’s completely intentional. But as one of the final tracks, there’s the assumption that *Congrats *is meant to be consumed as a whole, that it has some kind of sonic narrative. *Congrats *isn’t incoherent in its diversity, it just never seems to build on itself—the record lacks a definitive peak, and most of the individual tracks tend to just state their main idea fairly early on.  Mostly, it’s tough to specify what exactly makes Holy Fuck special or innovative at this late stage in their career, or what they're trying to do with this project besides keep things moving. Of course, that’s a high calling by itself, and maybe Holy Fuck is just the lifesaver who shows up to the party with ice and cups: though it’s functional, *Congrats is *still fun.
*Correction: Due to a tracklisting change, an earlier version of this review misidentified the song “Caught Up” as “Crapture.” It has been amended.   *


Too often when electronica mates with jazz, one side gets the upper hand. Either the producer trips, chops, or buries ...

Junk Magic

Too often when electronica mates with jazz, one side gets the upper hand. Either the producer trips, chops, or buries the musicians and masks the flow of their improvisation, or he stands back, letting the musicians run blithely past the light colors or static backdrops set behind them. The Thirsty Ear Blue Series has repeatedly tried to put both sides on equal footing-- or at least to start a wrestling match-- like on last year's sadly dull Antipop Consortium vs. Matthew Shipp. But even when the music works, you can still see the separation: The two camps mix, but don't synthesize.
Then there's Craig Taborn, who approached his latest album as a performer and as the producer. It's hard to believe this is only Taborn's third record as a leader, and his first with electronics. When you flip through his work as a sideman and keyboardist-around-town in New York City, the breadth is overwhelming. With James Carter and on his own Light Made Lighter, Taborn is a methodically swift pianist who can solo like Scott Joplin's piano player plugged into the wrong voltage. He's also acclaimed as a leading Fender Rhodes revivalist, blowing the cobwebs off fusion licks for Tim Berne or Dave Douglas.
But Taborn is most distinctive as a textural player. He's said he follows the example of Sun Ra or Larry Young, pushing his keyboards to see what they can do for him; but Taborn uses the latest technology. If the hypnotic see-sawing of "The Golden Age"'s melody recalls the theme to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that's just one touchstone for his digital space jazz, which also co-opts Detroit techno and dance beats. But he also constructs immersive spaces, opening up rough-hewn synth backdrops or triggering a deep sonar "ping" that creates the illusion of light-eating depths.
Each track on Junk Magic is crammed to the gills, and then made light by the restlessness and motion that drive the album. Taborn may have spent weeks constructing a machine but he gets to flick the switch right in front of us, and the product unfurls in real-time, even as you acknowledge the overdubbing. This starts right on the opening track, where IDM chirps fly like tacks over the synth lines that pile on top of the piano figure and thick organ chords at the low-end-- wheels spinning within wheels.
Taborn works with a group here, although he easily outnumbers them. Of his three sidemen, The Bad Plus' "dude, holy shit, you've gotta check this guy out" drummer David King is the chief commercial draw. He gives up some freedom when he joins Taborn's cyborg army, but it's worth it to hear the way Taborn bats him around-- as on "Mystero", where he's cut up like a stop-motion photograph. Aaron Stewart joins what you could call the frontline on tenor sax, but microtonal violist Mat Maneri adds the most color, sawing seared lines and rasping soliloquies over Taborn's precision. The musicians submit to cameos on some tracks and get full-contact jams on "Prismatica" and "Mystero", and "Bodies at Rest and in Motion" even starts as a stumbling acoustic piece-- though you know it's only a matter of minutes before the digital insects fly back in.
Impeccable taste keeps this project on track. Taborn sticks to one palette but never uses it the same way twice: Each piece is distinct, even the busiest tracks have a hook or clear melody to hang onto, and best of all, the record is concise, clocking in at just over 40 minutes, which leaves no time for screw-ups. It could've been stiff, crass, or even grotesque; instead, it's a definitive recital, and it throws down a challenge for the rest of the Blue Series. We've spent several records hearing Matthew Shipp flirt with electronica or gently funkify his piano, and the whole time Shipp had the spotlight, Taborn was already on the other side of the moon. Here's hoping people finally notice.


California's Bethany Cosentino delivers on the promise of her noisy early singles with a richer-sounding album that highlights the power of her voice.

Crazy For You

Scene-famous boyfriends, a quote-generating Twitter feed, scuffles with bloggers, and the most meme-generating feline since Keyboard Cat got carpal tunnel: Yeah, it's safe to say Bethany Cosentino, who writes and records with cohort Bobb Bruno as Best Coast, is a long way away from her days as a member of drone/psych outfit Pocahaunted. Best Coast's full-length debut, Crazy for You, serves only to increase that distance from the outré-music scene; the brief record delivers on the promise of a strong string of singles released over the past year. Just as Pocahaunted loosely capture the basic feel of dub and reggae, Crazy for You is a meditation on the stickier hooks of classic indie pop, with slight detours into surf-rock ("Bratty B") and countrypolitan balladry ("Our Deal"). While Pocahaunted cover their signifiers under piles of static and delay-triggered noise, Best Coast take the opposite route, slathering honey over every song and letting them drip-dry in the sunshine.
The record's overall gorgeousness has a whole lot to do with Cosentino's voice, which hits every pitch with equal clarity and intention of tone. Good thing, too, since Crazy For You is an especially vocal-heavy record; excluding the bonus track "When I'm With You", there are few moments here where Cosentino's voice isn't featured. She backs herself wordlessly, fills in non-verbal gaps (especially in the California-highway chorus of "When the Sun Don't Shine"), and repeats simple sentiments like mantras ("I wish he was my boyfriend," "I want you so much," "That's not your deal, that's not my deal").
That last function has become a sticking point for many who complain that, as a lyricist, Cosentino lacks a certain depth and overall intelligence. It's true that she's not exactly the Randy Newman of the beach-pop game-- there's a few too many "crazy/lazy" rhyme schemes, and feel free to snicker at the "I wish my cat could talk" line from "Goodbye". But it's easy to miss that, just as these songs are relatively basic in construction, she's never aimed for any sort of lyrical grandiosity-- just feelings, presented as straightforwardly as possible.
Simply put, she knows what she's doing-- and, lo and behold, there's more lyrical complexity to this record than a fault-seeking light listen would glean. Just when you think you've gotten the point of "Boyfriend", Cosentino flips the script and reveals that she isn't just envious-- she feels inadequate, too: "The other girl is not me/ She's prettier and skinnier/ She has a college degree/ I dropped out when I was 17." In "The End", she verges on nihilistic, admitting in the song's chorus that she'll ruin it all permanently for temporary wish fulfillment: "You say that/ We're just friends/ But I want this/ Till the end." She's not being submissive or simple-minded-- she's being honest, and regardless of sweeping appeal, it's endearing that she puts herself out there instead of throwing on some sunglasses and using irony as UV protection.
"Endearing" is the key word that comes to define Crazy for You; while most of the guitar-based indie pop that's made waves over the past few years has been characterized by scenester antagonism and attempts to fit in (Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, Beach Fossils), this record is carefree and instantly likable-- even if it doesn't seem to care what you think of it. Just as you don't have to be into bong rips and strains of Indo to laugh at Cosentino's 140-character riffs on Katy Perry and True Blood, even the least indie-inclined of listeners can find plenty to love here. It may be a summer album by design (I mean, for Christ's sake-- that cover), but I'll place my bet that Crazy for You will sound pretty great all damn year, and beyond.


This split EP pairs tracks from two Montreal artists: the ghostly avant-pop project Grimes and the more literate singer-songwriter d'Eon.

Darkbloom EP

On her side of Darkbloom, a split 12" with fellow Montrealer d'Eon, Claire Boucher of Grimes sounds like a pop star from a distant planet-- distant enough that "pop star" is an unfamiliar concept there, but close enough to intercept earthly radio signals and press some bootlegs of Mariah Carey's no. 1s. Boucher's music draws upon a diverse collection of influences (Panda Bear, Salem, Alicia Keys) as she experiments with eerie loops and a stratospheric falsetto. (She says that while recording last year's otherworldly Halfaxa, she "practiced" singing in four octaves by listening to Mariah's "Heartbreaker".) While Grimes' previous work found her burying her poppier inclinations beneath dense atmospherics and moody textures, her material on Darkbloom melds all of her impulses into a coherent and confident sound, resulting into some of her strongest tracks to date.
For Grimes, Darkbloom comes on the heels of a prolific 2010. She released two solid LPs: the melodic and intimate debut Geidi Primes, and the darker, more unified Halfaxa. The latter could be classified as bubblegum macabre; songs like "Weregild" and "Sagrad Прекрасный" somehow suggested the skeletons from Daft Punk's "Around the World" video singing Tiffany songs on karaoke night. I liked Geidi Primes even better, a record that filtered the confessional intimacy of lo-fi bedroom pop (as on the standout track "Rosa") through influences including dubstep to synth pop. Boucher's tendency to throw everything in the pot occasionally came off as a lack of unity, but I found its aesthetic miscellany to be one of her debut's charms. "Everybody thinks I'm boring," she sang in a mock-confessional tone on "Zoal, Face Dancer"-- a sentiment that nobody who heard the record could possibly agree with.
Darkbloom, though, announces Grimes' arrival as an avant-pop force. This is largely thanks to the single best song she's ever done, "Vanessa", which channels Lykke Li by way of a blissed-out Donna Summer reverie. "Crystal Ball", perhaps her most upbeat song yet, is also a stunner. Both tracks display a new, cleaner aesthetic for Grimes-- lushness instead of grain, beats that thump rather than pulse, vocals high and clear in the mix. Still, something else entirely makes Grimes unique. There's an eerie, supernatural undercurrent to these songs, and the moody instrumental pieces that surround them.
Chris d'Eon's side of the split, which follows last year's LP Palinopsia, isn't without highlights. His best track is the wistful, R&B-tinged "Transparency", a song about the uneventful sex lives of ghosts. Inspired by his longtime interest in Tibetan music, d'Eon figures himself in the Eastern symbol of the hungry ghost, a specter who's back from the beyond just to see his lover's face. Incidentally, not as great as it sounds: "Do you want be human? Do you want to make love again? I guess that's just the price you're gonna have to pay for transparency." Over the chorus' icy, arpeggiated synths, he comes to the logical conclusion: "Doing this was a big mistake."
In spite of d'Eon's weaker material (like the skittish and schmaltzy "Thousand Mile Trench") his tracks might have made a decent EP, but either way the two sides of Darkbloom don't work particularly well together. Following Grimes' tracks, which favor mood over story and transcend any particular emphasis on lyrics, d'Eon's half feels overly literal and tethered to the material world: His hungry ghost is left searching for a body to inhabit, while Grimes sounds altogether liberated from hers. Undoubtedly, Boucher hits the highest notes on Darkbloom, proving over the course of just five tracks that she's blossoming into a promising artist-- and one who's developing almost more quickly than we can keep track of. "I've moved far beyond that," she's already remarked of this material in a recent interview with Dummy. "I'm working on a full-length, which I kind of feel is my first album." And as the only complaint I've got with her side of Darkbloom is that it's too short, this is indeed cause for excitement.


The thrilling debut from the Michigan rock band burns hot and bright. It’s a record that’s as melodic as it is physical, where pent-up aggression turns into physical liberation.

Melee

While the word “melee” would have been truth-in-advertising for the riotous post-hardcore battle royale of Dogleg’s debut album, it’s actually an homage to Super Smash Bros.—a video game as essential to their live show as frontman Alex Stoitsiadis’ onstage cartwheels. The Detroit, Michigan quartet offers free swag to anyone who can beat bassist Chase Macisnki on the Nintendo 64 emulator at their merch table and they haven’t lost a T-shirt yet. Despite their overt gaming references on the album to Pokemon and Star Fox, Dogleg aren’t interested in fantasy or world-building, just the sheer, rejuvenating physical pleasure of controlling a lifelike version of yourself capable of jumping higher, punching faster, and sustaining more damage than any human could.
Though still self-produced and recorded in Stoitsiadis’ house, Melee levels up like Dogleg are clutching some kind of glowing orb that allows them to jump the gap between their rowdy live shows and 2015’s scrappy Remember Alderaan? EP. Dogleg guarantee hyperbolic energy, whether playing in front of a dozen onlookers in an unfamiliar DIY space or the jubilant hometown crowd at Bled Fest captured in the video for the atomic shout-along “Fox.” It’s a testament to their unwavering vitality that “Fox” isn’t an outlier, but surrounded by equally anthemic instances of fighting anxiety with more anxiety.
There are still hints of the gateway bands that served as Dogleg’s early influences. “Wrist” does breakneck jumping jacks until Milwaukee’s Best sweats through its pores, as if the Strokes had spent their late teens in University of Michigan’s Metal Frat instead of a Swiss boarding school. As with most rock music that sounds truly youthful, Melee doesn’t invent new forms so much as connect bands once separated by subtle genre classification. The Gen-Z members of Dogleg use Melee as a synopsis of guitar music made in their short lifetime from bands whose aggression appeared completely at odds with prevailing tastes. In their sound are bands like ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead and At the Drive In who served as the violent wing of the New Rock Revolution; Cloud Nothings’ Attack on Memory and Japandroids’ Celebration Rock’s  referendum on chillwave; an entire decade of Midwestern emo raging against cosmopolitan lifestyle-indie. Melee effectively advocates for a binary of taste: There is rock music that slaps and rock music that does not, the latter of which should not be given any attention.
Melee was more or less complete when Dogleg signed to Triple Crown in early 2019, and in the time since, they’ve tinkered with the mix only to settle on the most obvious production aesthetic: loud and, if possible, slightly louder. From the first engine-revving, “buckle up, motherfucker” riff of “Kawasaki Backflip,” Dogleg are fueled by the perpetually brick-walled waveform, whether through blunt force, sidelong strikes, or the kind of precise combinations of both that make them so formidable at Super Smash Bros. “Kawasaki Backflip” and “Hotlines” live in the exhilaratingly small space between floating and faceplanting. The vocal and guitar melodies chase each other across “Bueno” and “Wartortle,” as Stoitsiadis turns a harsh, melodic bark into an atonal scream every time the band tries to shake him off the trail. “Fox” ends in a full sprint, and after a brief snippet of laughter, “Headfirst” spends its duration somersaulting downhill, the thrill of victory and agony of defeat as one.
While many of Melee’s thrills are similar to contact sports, Dogleg’s decision-making process is painstaking and considered, even if it mostly amounts to “play fast.” The blinkered dedication to velocity becomes an asset. For all of its immediate, point-and-shout, crowd-surfing appeal, the most impactful moments on “Fox” are an ankle-breaking hitch of a drum fill and a bass solo leading up to Stoitsiadis’ triumphant guitar-whee. In the video for “Kawasaki Backflip,” Dogleg break shit alone in a garage until Stoitsiadis takes a sledgehammer to his reflection during the rhythm section’s climactic slam on the brakes.
Melee is filled with similarly counterintuitive hooks: put the beery group vocals at the front of the song, save the strings and horns for the loudest tracks, avoid the mid-album ballad and put the nastiest songs there instead. There are no quiet parts, no calm, no pauses for a group hug, even if there are 13 credited backup vocalists. In the rare moments when there’s any bit of space, someone in the band is still screaming off-mic before plunging back into the fray.
There is no doubt that Melee is emo as hell—Stoitsiadis begins and ends the album lying on the floor in a state of abject depression, framing the choice of fighting back or giving up as the same kind of elemental, apocalyptic ultimatum that echoes through “Born to Run,” “A Praise Chorus,” and “Fire’s Highway.” But spiritually, it’s aligned with subgenres like crunk and happy hardcore, where the lyrics mostly function as prompts for its ultimate goal of sublimating pent-up aggression into physical liberation. If Dogleg’s scope is limited, it’s only in the service of blocking out anything that stands in the way of a singular, superhuman ambition to buck all assumptions about what an ambitious rock album is supposed to do in 2020. Dogleg aspires to nothing short of breaking the first law of thermodynamics: creating energy where none previously existed.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On its Def Jam debut, the veteran hip-hop band avoids wilds tangents and trims some of its freewheeling ways; the resulting record is svelte, smart, lively, and one of the year's most pleasant surprises.

Game Theory

The way ?uestlove keeps telling it, that initial meeting with new boss Jay-Z sounds like a fully-hocked saliva rocket in the eye of every asshole who tried to force the Roots to compromise their status as studied hip-hop altar boys in pursuit of the bottom line. Like the tough-ass principal with a heart of platinum, it seems Mr. Def Jam was full of charity, spewing quotables like, "Don't come to me playing a whole bunch of Clear Channel songs thinking I'm gonna be cool with it," and, my personal favorite, "If y'all come here with snap music, I'm snapping y'all the fuck out of my audience."
So the Roots were sent off to make a Roots album...you know, that "artsy shit." For a band known for the occasional indulgence (the $300,000+ price tag to complete Phrenology's horrendously overwrought "Break You Off", a concert mentality that equates excruciating length with awesomeness), such a mandate could have birthed a freewheeling disaster tipsy on its own pretensions. Miraculously, art-hop's highest get concise on Game Theory-- cutting song lengths, spoken-word tedium, and call-and-response nonsense. Fourteen years deep, the Roots avoid the wild sonic tangents of yesteryear, zeroing in on a svelte, safe, and solid take on what we've come to expect from a Roots record.
Light years away from the jazzy bap of their early days, the Roots continue to embrace their band-dom and musical acumen here, with studio guru ?uestlove tweaking with purpose; unlike the sometimes directionless experimentation of Phrenology and the preternatural smoothness of The Tipping Point, each sonic decision sounds measured and precise yet still alive and heaving. Beat-wise, the bounding throb at the center of "Here I Come" pumps hardest, with key-man Kamal striking futuristic synths while ?uest lays down an unrelenting boom that's rewarded with a fizzy solo outro. Wet drums return on doom-y "In the Music", adding grit alongside a horror movie bassline and simmering guitar-- clearly (and thankfully), Scott Storch is nowhere to be found.
Pop music writer Chuck Eddy once described Bruce Springsteen as someone whose "muse can't be separated from his ego; he's too palpably concerned with how he'll be documented in the history books" and the same can be said about the Roots. They sometimes mistake experimentation with progress while preaching holier-than-thouisms to the choir. Both "Take It There", with its over the top piano melodrama and the listless "Livin' in a New World" falter, relying too heavily on questionable texture and knob tricks. Tellingly, though, they are also two of the album's shortest tracks. Whereas such noble risks were once epic, they're now miniaturized-- the Roots have learned from their mistakes. More than ever, the band uses its know-how skillfully, as on the stunning title track, which beefs up Sly Stone's early 1960s song "Life of Fortune & Fame". On the original, Stone all but predicts the paranoia and doubt he'd perfect with 1971's There's a Riot Goin' On. That album's claustrophobic murk is felt throughout Game Theory, and its musical moodiness is echoed by Black Thought, who unpeels himself ever so slightly while charging hard with anger and desperation.
There's been much debate about Thought recently, spurred by recent critical drubbings deeming him dull and uncharismatic. Even ?uestlove chimed in on the Okayplayer message boards, dismissing the hate as a mere "trend." Such rationalizations can't hide the monotonous nonchalance of Thought's natural delivery or his often second-rate bread-and-butter battle rhymes. Though technically proficient, his passivity is the Roots' most noticeable handicap. Game Theory partially solves this problem with a healthy dose of guest shots from old friends Malik B (making a strong return as a non-member after being booted for drug dependence about six years ago) and Dice Raw, along with welcomed mixtape all-star and Philly native Peedi Peedi (aka Peedi Crakk) and newcomer Porn.
All four are gifted with lively styles that juxtapose nicely with Thought's steady cadence. The two best vocal performances on the disc come courtesy of Dice, who annihilates "Here I Come" with a one-eye-open, nervy confessional, and Peedi, who shows off an uncharacteristically tender touch on the warm Illadeph ode "Long Time". Although he gets the dubious distinction of Least Googleable Rapper, Porn haunts with his unique sing/cry style on the hook for "In the Music". Indicative of the LP's troubleshooting nature, Thought is wisely relieved from most of the album's hooks, and he trades in his half-huff boasts for pinpoint post-Katrina polemics that deride Bush, the creaky state of American democracy and the urban drug trap as he plays modern black editorialist.
The Public Enemy-inflected "False Media" finds him voicing Dubya as a multitasking evil empire unto himself ("Send our troops to get my paper/ Tell 'em stay away from them skyscrapers") and it does an excellent job of summarizing five years of fear-heightening boogey-man hunting into a few tidy lines. "Baby", a loose, Jay Dee-esque highlight that serves as a superior sonic tribute to the late producer than the album's well-intentioned but sappy Dilla shout "Can't Stop This", has Thought sing-songing through hallucinatory tales of rape and lust-- it's the pitch-black flip to "You Got Me". The MC's anxious musings become overbearing and repetitive by the album's end, but his bravura bursts on "Long Time", where he tempers his dread with home-grown hope, and especially the convoluted drug-feud terror of "Clock With No Hands", show that getting past his aesthetic pitfalls is a worthy pursuit.
When I interviewed ?uestlove earlier this year about the progress of Game Theory, he admitted that "it's a challenge to not over think" his band's work. Of course, the album is over thought-- it is a Roots album after all, and superfluous embellishments along with high-concept artwork and sequence second-guessing are part of the excitement. But now, the excess brainpower is mostly used to cover-up past blemishes en route to a streamlined product that die-hards can justly revel in. President Carter should be proud.


On his eighth album, a skillful Drake struggles to keep it interesting. His familiar concerns, while occasionally sincere or funny, have become quite boring.

For All the Dogs

Whither Drake, the brokenest man in music? The golden bachelor emerged from pandemic lockdown and unleashed a whirlwind of creativity with three albums that explored Afrobeats, club music, and trap, all while sending his emo fuckboy persona into increasingly darker crevices. Long the jilted lover who lashed out at women in response, his chameleonic melodies—and his endless charisma—often overshadowed his soft emotional outbursts, with bouts of insight on moody ballads of the sort he built his name. “I’m still working on me, and I’m coming back better for you,” for instance, on Certified Lover Boy’s “Fucking Fans,” an empty promise inside a heartfelt journey through his infidelity and remorse.
By Her Loss, though, his 2022 album with fellow wayward son 21 Savage, the sentiment had curdled. By putting famous women in his sights alongside the nameless proles in his contacts, his churlishness became more widely noticed—most specifically on “Circo Loco,” a bass track on which the line, “This bitch lie ’bout getting shots but she still a stallion,” was taken by fans and Megan Thee Stallion herself to mean both ass injections and a sideswipe at the Houston rapper. It also added to the shameful laundry list of male rappers who cast aspersions on whether Tory Lanez, now serving 10 years in North Kern State Prison, shot her.
On For All the Dogs, Drake has yet again doubled down over a melange of styles—drill, underworld R&B, Playboi Carti’s flow—and other than a few flashes of brilliance, the music can’t save him from himself. Despite his agility on “8am in Charlotte” and a tuneful SZA verse on the otherwise mid Men Are From Mars tone poem “Slime You Out,” the meat of this bloated 23-track album are his own grievances and a dearth of topical contrast. Once again releasing an album with the runtime of a feature-length film, Dogs is an unfocused, disjointed listen loosely tied to the undercooked conceit that the album is playing on a fictional quiet storm radio station—BARK Radio—hosted by DJs Snoop Dogg, George Clinton, and, miraculously, the Sade Adu, who shows up to do a brief radio tag.
Another wobbly peg seems to be Drake working through some kind of awful island vacation, which he makes sound like his own emotional Fyre Festival. It appears on the Savage-featuring “Callin For You,” in the form of a skit about flying economy, which is entirely sampled from Rye Rye on “Shake It to the Ground,” the Baltimore club classic she made with DJ Blaqstarr when she was just 15. The lounge-adjacent “Bahamas Promises” addresses “Hayley” with signature Drake corn—“You put the ‘no’ in monogamy.” Whether or not the vacation exists is a question for the tabloids, yet there’s no question Rihanna is the topic of “Fear of Heights,” where Drake demonstrates how hurt he is by making a song about how not hurt he is. “Why do they make it sound like I’m still hung up on you? That could never be,” he raps, protesting entirely too much.
By the time he says “The sex was average witcha”—referencing Rihanna’s “Sex With Me,” a song that came out close to a decade ago—you’re hoping for anyone else to grab the mic, whether it’s young rapper Yeat, who steals the show on “IDGAF,” or even the comparatively relaxing croons of Teezo Touchdown. On “Gently,” Bad Bunny sounds like he dialed in his verse from the Sprinter en route to the Gucci show while Drake deploys his best seventh-grade Spanish on a dembow beat—(“My broski Benito, he needs a bonita,” et cetera)—and yet it’s still a high point far away from Drake’s darkness. The Miami bass banger “Rich Baby Daddy” is clearly the best track on the album, due in part to Sexyy Red’s chorus: “Bend that ass over/Let that coochie breathe”—thank you, ma’am, for your concern for airing out one’s yoni—and SZA singing about her desire for “dick and conversation.”
At times Drake’s breakup bromides are softer and more interesting, as on the celestial “Tried Our Best” with rising R&B singer (and former The Four contestant) JeRonelle, when Drake drops the pose: “I swear there’s a list of places that I been with you, I wanna go without you/Just so I can know what it’s like to be there without havin’ to argue,” he sings earnestly. But by “All the Parties,” which is buoyed by a too-short Chief Keef interlude, you’re rolling your eyes as he interpolates Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls,” which might end up costing him some pocket change. Even lines that should otherwise be funny—Drake softly crooning, “Bust that pussy open for a real one” on “BBL Love (Interlude)” like Sinatra gone pornographic—have become dreadfully boring, caught up in what by this time feels like a narcissism spiral with a dash of famous-person insecurity (“Sometimes I think to myself, what if I was somebody else/Would your ass still be here?”). For All the Dogs suggests a magnanimity, a document of inclusive player’s anthems, but if you make it no-skips to the end, it’s clear the only dog in Drake’s world is Drake, and he’s trying to get the Men’s Rights Conference to howl back at him.
Thirteen years into his career, Drake keeps turning the dial of his music away from lovesick bachelor, past vulnerable playboy, and towards vile cretin. Whether this new setting is sincere, performative, or a bit of a troll, it’s at best repetitive and at worst severely off-putting. The effect is that of a man on the street who hollers at a random woman, but retaliates after she politely declines. A good half-hour of For All the Dogs is a slog through his thoughts on wealth, women, and surgical injections, with a few bright but frustrating bits of reprieve, which provide a glimpse into what could’ve been here if Drake only employed a better therapist. “Away From Home” is one of the best cuts here, an accounting of his struggle and come-up over a velvety Björkian, which includes an incredible flex about how Drake has three different friends named Jason (“My life like The Matrix,” he adds.) Yet he also snipes at the multitalented Esperanza Spalding for beating him out for the Best New Artist Grammy a full 12 years ago and, for some reason, blames Michelle Obama for her husband’s annual playlist.
At 36, Drake has risen to become one of the world’s most popular rappers and culturally-defining millennials. He has built an empire on underdog affability, internet-savvy quirks, and definitively changing the way rappers sound, his sensitive croons defying the age of the monotonous delivery and altering the pop landscape for a decade-plus and counting. His endearing qualities—his diaristic, heart-on-sleeve lyricism, his occasional dorkiness, his smart approach to serenade and diss track alike—have kept him rightfully dominant for a good chunk of the century. Yet For All the Dogs caps off a recent persona that sounds like none of it’s fun to him—and he’s dragging us along to be the company of his misery.


The ambient icon and his younger brother, a well-known pianist in his own right, reveal the results of an intimate musical conversation stretching back 15 years.

Mixing Colours

Given Brian Eno’s experimental bona fides, there’s something uncharacteristically low-key, and even rather sweet, about this collaboration with his younger brother. Roger Eno, a well-known pianist in his own right, calls it “a back-and-forth conversation,” one that goes back 15 years: He would record musical sketches on his MIDI keyboard, then pass them on to Brian to manipulate. Yet you wonder if the album should have stayed within the family. Mixing Colours won’t harm the Enos’ elevated reputations, but it won’t enhance them, either.
The album’s main problem: an unmistakable blandness that is at odds with the audacity of so much of Brian Eno’s catalog. Mixing Colours couldn’t have been made in the 1970s, when Brian Eno debuted his landmark ambient recordings; MIDI was first released in 1983, after all. But it sounds like it could have been, raising inevitable and ultimately unfavorable comparisons to Eno’s classic work. Ambient 1: Music for Airports was revolutionary in concept, offering music that was “as ignorable as it is interesting” in a way that defied 20th century popular music’s constant demands on our attention. But Mixing Colours is too often just ignorable: pretty, safe, and eminently forgettable.
For all Brian Eno’s claims about Mixing Colours’ sonic palette—he has talked about using electronics to explore the spaces between the “islands” of classical instruments—the album’s musical texture is underwhelming, a world of wipe-clean surfaces and expensive echo that resembles a particularly laconic Air B-side. Most of the 18 songs rely on glowing synth patterns and treated piano, a mixture so subtly inviting you can almost forgive its bromidic surface. It doesn’t help that Mixing Colours begs comparison to Brian and Roger’s collaborative work on 1983’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, whose idiosyncratic character benefited from the metallic dash of steel guitar that Daniel Lanois added to tracks like “Deep Blue Day.” “Quicksilver,” in particular, seems to sport a hole where Lanois’ melodic edge should be.
With stylistic and atmospheric surprises in short supply, Mixing Colours relies on melody to do the heavy lifting. There are some beautiful moments: The second half of “Celeste” has a gorgeous, rolling refrain that topples about like a boat in the breeze, its movements reminiscent of Pep Llopis’ Mediterranean classic Poiemusia La Nau Dels Argonautes. “Desert Sand” is wonderful too, an unsettling piano figure introducing a feathery touch of dissonance, while “Obsidian” has the solemn, slightly pompous melancholy of the best church-organ music.
At times like these, Mixing Colours merits its place on respected classical label Deutsche Grammophon. But on the whole, the album is too inoffensive to leave much lasting impression. Over 18 songs, its initially appealing tastefulness becomes cloying and monotonous. Instead of the dynamism of mixing colors, the album mostly yields just a uniform pastel wash.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Although the Calgary Flames lost by a single goal in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals-- squandering their chance ...

The Slow Wonder

Although the Calgary Flames lost by a single goal in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals-- squandering their chance to become the first Canadian team to take home the trophy since 1993-- the vanquished hockey players' country-folk have no reason to hang their collective heads. Among their luminaries, the Canucks can count a bilingual prime minister who speaks in full sentences, filmmaker Guy Maddin, and Vancouver's preeminent redheaded songwriter, Carl Newman, who has just released, by a stride, the best power-pop album of 2004.
Newman worked through his more angular pop leanings in the mid-1990s with Sub Pop indie rockers Zumpano and is now the primary songwriter in The New Pornographers. To place The Slow Wonder's aesthetics in terms that The New Pornographers fans will understand, these 11 tracks blend Mass Romantic's clipped frenetics, Electric Version's spacious tenderness, and the agile twists and turns of Zumpano, effortlessly humbling all three. On The Slow Wonder, the hooks crack apart and multiply, accruing additional catchiness the way the pumped muscles of a spinach-stuffed Popeye give birth to crops of testosterone-filled goose bumps. At one point in "Drink to Me Babe Then", a languid group of whistlers double themselves harmoniously before a quavering electromagnetic guitar blazes overhead; elsewhere, a fading melodian shoots rubber bands at the stars.
Taken as a single document, The Slow Wonder fits together for a taut 34 minutes without lags or rough spots; viewed as collection of singles, all but a couple tracks would justifiably fill the A-side of a seven-inch. From the catchy drum-fill intro of "Miracle Drug" to "35 in the Shade"'s soaring exit guitar, there's not a misfire to be found. Time and time again, Newman showcases a quaint nostalgia and a layered sense of production that often feels similar to the inventive beauty that made The Shins' Chutes Too Narrow such a whopper of a sophomore release. Like the exquisite chamber pop that Richard Davies and Eric Matthews showcased as Cardinal, these songs have a comfortable Kinks-like feel while still sporting their own unique, keenly crafted hooks.
Throughout the album, Newman keeps the palette varied, cramming enough pop muscularity into his two- and three-minute blasts to infuse this genre with the life it possessed in its 70s heyday. "On the Table" makes use of flourishing ragtime piano, a regal trumpet emerges from the fragile tambourine and deep percussion of "The Cloud Prayer", and "The Town Halo"'s sinewy cello propels like a metallic fuzz bass with zero distortion.
On "Miracle Drug", rat-a-tat surf drums gain momentum when interlaced with brazen rock guitar licks and a quirky storyline: "He was tied to the bed with a miracle drug in one hand/ In the other, a great lost novel that, I understand, was returned with a stamp/ That said 'thank you for your interest, young man.'" Instead of Neko Case's swooping country intonations and general high-end foil, Newman harmonizes here with Sarah Wheeler, who adds exultant punctuation to the track's "So why all the history now?" refrain.
Not mere ear candy, The Slow Wonder's playful, often surrealistic libretto riffs on guilt and innocence, victorious defeat, secret agents, boring rich kids, small-town saviors and the onset of revelations. Newman's concerns rest more with relational discourse and struggles than bubblegum and flowers-- fitting for an artist whose press photos show him asleep with a copy of Foucault's Power/Knowledge. Amid the hard/soft tidal wave of "The Battle for Straight Time", Newman chirps in staccato, "O come sweet life, wash clean my hands/ The revolution has been left to chance/ This dawns on me every morning at about three."
Sounding a lot like a track by The New Pornographers, "On the Table" looks at justice as "the deal between the thieves and exits." When "Come Crash", a seemingly pure and dark love ballad enters the picture, it's more a sleepy love story written by J.G. Ballard than the wimpy sentiments of feckless and freckled romantic: "That's luck, she led, we should be dead/ We eyed the wreck. Good god, we said/ She plants one kiss, for the road, on my chest/ Sirens came after we left." In the Guided by Voices-inflected "35 in the Shade"-- perhaps the album's most metaphorically charged track-- Newman plays with Cleopatra and magicians in order to win an argument, all the while trying not to miss his ride home from a bar.
Although not much longer than an episode of Small Wonder, Newman has created a timeless document. These are soulful sing-alongs with grit, pop nuggets that hold up to hours of repeat play in humid bumper-to-bumper traffic, and ultimately, the sound of a great songwriter hitting his stride.


Swedish troubadour Kristian Matsson returns as a more confident vocalist and a more nuanced and effective songwriter.

The Wild Hunt

Pesky comparisons to Bob Dylan have dogged Kristian Matsson throughout his short career as the Tallest Man on Earth. In 2006, his self-titled EP introduced a singer with that familiar croak, a songwriter with a folk-revival revival sensibility, and a guitar player with an impressively agile fingerpicking style. The next year, his full-length debut, Shallow Grave, expanded nicely on those ideas, buffing away some of the rougher edges but emphasizing fully realized and beautifully evocative songs. The Wild Hunt, the second Tallest Man on Earth album and first for Dead Oceans, makes a few specific nods to Dylan at his most earnest and bare-- including a reference to "boots of Spanish leather" on "King of Spain". Ultimately, though, Matsson interprets Dylan, just as Dylan himself interpreted Guthrie. More to the point, Matsson translates him into the Scandinavian countryside, where he sings about changing seasons and quiet, lonely places far from cities. His lyrics are rough and often ragged, more concerned with evoking aching emotions than with making explicit sense. But that coded aspect only makes him sound more urgent, as if he's trying to convince you of something he couldn't possibly put into words.
As with previous albums, The Wild Hunt features mainly voice and guitar, and in this intimate, austere setting-- where the banjo on the title track sounds like an indulgence-- Matsson coaxes a wide range of colors from that limited palette, whether it's the testiness of "You're Going Back" or the exuberance of "King of Spain". His grounding in American Southern traditions is apparent: While not a blues musician per se, Matsson draws important lessons from the likes of Mississippi John Hurt and Bukka White by realizing that his guitar speaks as loudly and as clearly as he does.
His playing is sophisticated but never showy, alternating between spry picking and forceful strumming. Whether due to his tunings or his crisp production, there's something bright and expectant about his songs, so that even at his most forlorn, as on "Love Is All" or "The Drying of the Law [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| ns", Matsson's heraldic guitar playing generates a certain major-key hopefulness that softly shades the songs. When he switches to an old and battered piano on the teen anthem "Kids on the Run", the effect is not diminished but amplified, as the instrument reverberates uneasily. It's an unexpected moment that colors everything that came before it and paints Matsson as a distinctive and singular artist.
As a singer, he has become much more confident and capable, using that wily, deceptively limited croak with greater nuance and subtlety. The hiccup hook on "Love Is All" sounds like a joyful noise despite the song's tentative tone, and the rawness of his vocals lends gravity to the accusations of "You're Going Back". On the other hand, Matsson sounds warmly generous on "Troubles Will Be Gone" when he sings, "The day is never done, still there's a light on where you sleep, so I hope someday your troubles will be gone." Matsson is both a romantic and a realist, and on The Wild Hunt, he uses the barest of pop-folk settings to give mundane moments-- another break-up, another tour, another change of season, another Dylan comparison-- a grandeur so disproportional that it's difficult not to identify and sympathize with him.


Orlando emo outfit You Blew It! know their strengths. They've committed to making reverent crossover-emo and their new EP Pioneer of Nothing is their most accessible work to date.

Pioneer of Nothing EP

You Blew It! describe their genre as "1999", and Keep Doing What You’re Doing was a highly enjoyable, high-fidelity rendering of pre-2K indie/emo overlap—airing grievances with agitated, shout-along hooks one minute, begging to kiss and make up over swooning arpeggios the next. As the first major release from emo’s new wave in 2014, the Orlando band’s sophomore LP made a strong case for their scene’s staying power. It did not, however, set the tone for the rest of a year where the genre reclaimed and celebrated its most strident and abrasive qualities, as if to scour away every last dollop of guyliner.
Whereas You Blew It! have dutifully and enthusiastically embraced opportunity to become the revitalized Jade Tree’s most notable signing to date, emo’s official 2014 Hall of Fame inductions (American Football, Mineral, Jawbreaker) all imploded on the verge of their respective breakthroughs. You Blew It!’s affability made them an anomaly even amongst their more challenging, politicized peers—instead of making divisive, experimental spoken-word post-rock, You Blew It! made an EP of Weezer covers. Christian Holden of the Hotelier made brazen pleas for understanding of gender identity and mental health, Tanner Jones got drunk on the Harry Potter ride at Universal Studios. You get the idea. But all this means is that You Blew It! know their strengths—they’re committed to making accessible, reverent crossover-emo and their new EP Pioneer of Nothing is their most committed, accessible and reverent work to date.
It’s also their warmest work yet, and none of this should be surprising. Despite the new label and its brevity, Pioneer of Nothing isn’t actually the quintessential "transitional EP," but more of an arrival, since Keep Doing What You’re Doing was already a transitional album. "Match & Tinder" and "Award of the Year Award" began that record with an electrifying blue streak which effectively ended their adolescent period started on Grow Up, Dude. Five minutes in, they’d already moved on to the record’s core, softie mixtape tentpoles like "Strong Island", "House Address" and "Better to Best", which showcased Jones’ pliable lower register and the most luxurious and luminous guitars in modern emo. This is the only kind of You Blew It! that shows up on Pioneer of Nothing.
And they sound like peers of the late-'90s greats rather than students on the brilliant "Lanai". It’s the kind of masterful accomplishment that can be obscured by the fact that their name is You Blew It!, the casual intricacy and harmonic beauty of American Football and the instantly nostalgic, amber glow of Sunny Day Real Estate’s How It Feels to Be Something On adding textural counterpoint to a Clarity-worthy, gooey pop center. But there’s a bitter edge to the lyrics that carries over from Keep Doing What You’re Doing as Jones expresses another disappointment in a friend who hasn’t moved on—"Don’t be cold/ I couldn’t think of anything less cool/ Than your Saturdays talking trash." "Lanai" is a love song to the music that moves him, but also Jones writing a love song to a more positive version of himself.
The "whoa’s" return on "Bedside Manor", a show-closing, slow-climb ballad that’s been concentrated into a three-minute anthem. "Your Side" follows as Pioneer's most revelatory moment, albeit as the first time in a while that You Blew It!’s ambitions can exceed their reach. Jones has dispatched his bristled higher register and proven he can sing. But there’s a difference between carrying a tune and carrying a song, and he’s not quite up to it here; as a nearly a cappella lament about the emptiness of the bar scene, it’s Brand New’s "Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis" that can’t quite go there, and deliver the necessary vocal, lyrical or musical catharsis.
In a way, the near-miss of "Your Side" works in the favor of Pioneer of Nothing; otherwise, it might be too promising in a literal sense, giving every to reason to assume You Blew It!’s next album will likely exactly sound like this. Which would raise the question of why they wouldn’t just save "Lanai" and "Bedside Manor" for a record that has excellent odds of being the properly worthy Nothing Feels Good follow-up the Promise Ring never delivered to Jade Tree in light of Very Emergency’s cloying pop-rock and leaping to Anti- for their lush, heartbreaking and misunderstood swan song Wood/Water. Judging by the superlative extramusical qualities You Blew It! continue to demonstrate on Pioneer of Nothing—industriousness, transparency, a lack of hang-ups about the e-word—it stands to reason that they'll let us know their next step when the time comes and that it'll come soon.


UK quartet follows 2008's fidgety, impulsive baroque-rock debut, Limbo, Panto, with an album that refashions them as a steely art-funk outfit.

Two Dancers

In a day where Hot Topic peddles guyliner to millions of male teenage mallrats, it's hard to imagine a time when glam-rock was truly shocking. But there remains one gender-bending device whose provocative, polarizing power remains undiminished: the falsetto-- a sound that tends to elicit both laughter and skepticism, if not outright hostility. Still, it remains a highly effective weapon in the endless war against safe, overly earnest indie-- and few bands brandish it so wantonly as UK art-pop quartet Wild Beasts.
On the band's striking 2008 debut, Limbo, Panto, frontman Hayden Thorpe unleashed his shrill, glass-shattering shrieks as a means to project both the vulnerability and depravity of his sexually frustrated protagonists, and he didn't care if he went hoarse in the process (you can practically hear his vocal cords disintegrate on the galloping single "Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants"). Perhaps as a means to avoid chronic laryngitis, on follow-up Two Dancers he's deferring more frequently to bassist Tom Fleming, a deeper-voiced foil in the Nick Cave crooner mold. But that's just a surface indication of the transformation Wild Beasts have undergone in the past year-- in contrast to the first album's fidgety, impulsive baroque'n'roll, Two Dancers sees Wild Beasts refashioned as a steely art-funk outfit that's no less alluring in its austerity.
Granted, some old horny habits die hard-- we're not two verses into album opener "The Fun Powder Plot" before Thorpe hollers, "This is a booty call! My boot, my boot, my boot, my boot up your asshole." But his words feel less outrageous and much more ominous when set against the song's metronomic groove and melancholic jangle-- pulse-tempering measures that keep the cheekiness in check. Likewise, first single "Hooting and Howling" benefits from a patient, linear build that transforms the song from a quiet trill into a heart-racing anthem, with Thorpe's circular vocal and guitar lines burrowing the melody well into memory before the first chorus is out.
Fans of Limbo, Panto's chandelier-swinging flamboyance may be less enthused with Two Dancers' more organized presentation, but it allows Wild Beasts to better achieve their singular balance of aristocracy and anarchy: the debonair funk of "We Still Got the Taste Dancin' on Our Tongues" speaks of class warfare under the serious moonlight ("Us kids are cold and cagey rattling around the town/ Scaring the oldies into their dressing gowns/ As the dribbling dogs howl"), while the two-part title track suite finds Fleming sharing a grim, first-person account of some horrible attack before the song erupts in a tribal, psychedelic surge. He could very well be talking about a public stoning in the 15th century or a gang rape from last week-- and it's not even entirely clear if he's singing from a male or female perspective-- but the lack of specificity makes the transgressions described all the more unsettling, as if they could happen to anyone.
Wild Beasts certainly aren't the first rock band to stand up society's dregs and outcasts, but few others immortalize them on such a wondrous, mythic scale. And in the grand "This Is Our Lot"-- the sort of song everyone wants Radiohead's perpetually imminent "return to rock" to sound like-- we quite literally have an anthem for the ages. Over top a rubbery bassline and shimmering guitar riff, Thorpe tips his tipple to the enduring passion of youth: "We find ourselves dancing late/ Like young reprobates/ By the milky light of the mighty moon/ Find someone to nuzzle you/ And waltz from the room." Of course, come sunrise, those kids will have to clean themselves up and get to work on time. And perhaps the more accessible approach of Two Dancers suggests a greater willingness on Wild Beasts' part to interact with the straight world. But for them, every night is still a full moon-- and when it comes, Thorpe will be ready to howl.


The New York rapper’s skill and authority are so strong on his latest project it’s like listening to a director’s commentary without ever seeing the movie. It is also marred by his retrograde homophobia.

Behold a Dark Horse

Roc Marciano is an artist of humble beginnings who, by will and wit, became one of New York’s finest shit-talking diarists. Almost 10 years after getting signed by Busta Rhymes and set aside in nearly the same breath, he self-produced his stark solo debut. And now, eight years after that, he is a cornerstone in that stark space, with a large enough following to sell digital albums for $30 a pop exclusively on his website. The tale of a Flipmode Squad cast-off becoming one of the most accomplished independent rappers nearly two decades later is as captivating a story as anything that happens in his songs. He has sometimes even tied his unlikely, industry-subverting success story into his imaginative street epics (“Fuck an A&R, I can do way more with an AR,” he brags on “1000 Deaths”). Behold a Dark Horse, his second album of the year following the sequel RR2: The Bitter Dose, folds his two worlds into one. His ability to make listeners see as he sees is second to none.
Marciano doesn’t ever deviate from his formula and he’s had plenty of time to refine the model since 2010’s cult classic Marcberg. But any notion that hearing one Roc Marciano album is like hearing them all is put to rest with Behold a Dark Horse. Nearly 20 years into his career, with his lane more crowded than ever, Marci has made his raps sharper, let his flows whisk through richer samples, and deepened his commitment to the character he plays. “Nobody’s perfect but I’m close/I can’t be cloned, when I was made: after, they broke the mold/It was written in stone,” he raps on a song called “Fabio.”
The same steeliness that powered previous records still powers Dark Horse, but there is a new momentum that props it up as something to behold. Marci has spent much of the ’10s fine-tuning his twisting technique and blurring the lines between throwback pimp iconography and gritty mafioso rap. But now that his legacy is preserved, he’s stepped out of the shadows a bit. Things are less grainy. Marciano (again) produces the majority of the beats here himself, but he laces some of his crispest sample work without losing that stained, cinematic quality, as if he’s restoring an old spool of film to digital. Beats from Q-Tip, the Alchemist, Animoss, and more are slotted in to add just a touch of color. The choicest among them is the Q-Tip-produced closer “Consigliere,” with its sweeping strings and dusty drums, and Marci lets it wash over him as he raps, “You know the forte: Ralph Lauren drawers on but fuck the horseplay/Got sauce for days; you got poor taste.”
The beats are foreboding and gorgeous all at once, but it’s the ways Roc Marciano frames himself inside them that makes Behold a Dark Horse so interesting, how his singular syntax reveals his mind. His Aussie bitch is double jointed and the double barrel joint is pointed at your boyfriend (“Sampson & Delilah”). He’s Huey Newton in the king’s wicker chair with the pistol near and his face is chiseled in the silverware, with care (“Amethyst”). His talk of murder and mayhem and moneymen seems almost mythic. He raps about himself the way other rappers lionize Escobar.
There are many MCs that now occupy the same space in our imagination that Marci once dominated at the turn of the decade. Plenty of these tri-state technicians have similar skill sets. But Ka is never this bold, Westside Gunn never this unflustered, Mach-Hommy isn’t nearly as Machiavellian. Marci’s less animated than Action Bronson but more quotable. He is so blasé reenacting the fanciful excursions in his songs that it makes them feel realer and more thrilling.
The only time Roc Marciano pulls the listener out of his world is when he is reiterating his long-held homophobic worldview. He has an extensive history of homophobic lyrics—not just slurs but also hate speech—across his entire catalog and as recently as RR2: The Bitter Dose. This pattern of behavior has largely gone ignored in the wake of his tremendous skill. But he brings it up so often on Dark Horse, and some of the lyrics are so off-putting, that it almost feels like a secondary mandate. Here’s a guy who is among the most fastidious and cultured street writers of an era still stuck in the stone ages on basic rights. It follows that a ’90s rap purist would hold such a retrograde belief; there is no place for it, in our world or his, and it sullies the experience of the album. For a rapper obsessed with relishing his own good taste and beguiling listeners into his densely packed domain, it’s not just inelegant or distasteful, it’s uninviting and obtuse.
These moments are frequent enough to draw the eye to the seams of Roc Marciano’s illusion on Behold a Dark Horse in what is an otherwise mesmerizing character study. His greatest trick is drawing you in so close that you lose the plot. He fits so much scenery, so much detail, into his frame of vision that anything outside the scope is extraneous. It’s like listening to a director’s commentary without seeing the movie.
Such a bizarre framework only works if your perspective is more powerful than the scenes you’re shooting, and Roc Marciano is among the best at positioning himself as the only reliable narrator. Marci never really makes a case for where his authority comes from or why it goes unquestioned, and he doesn’t have to. His rapping is the case. He strings together multis with a casualness that insinuates and even sells the power dynamics he cites. “You still a child/You need to climb down from the treehouse/Still, even then, we not playing on even ground,” he snarls. Behold a Dark Horse is the first time Roc Marciano feels as in control as he says he is on record, for better and worse.


The last Songs: Ohia album I heard was Ghost Tropic. That was the perfect\n\ name for its haunted post-folk ...

Didn't It Rain

The last Songs: Ohia album I heard was Ghost Tropic. That was the perfect name for its haunted post-folk, what with the sharp guitar chords, the percussion rumbling like uncontrollable spirits and Jason Molina's disconsolate wail. But each of his works as Songs: Ohia is a different beast, taking shape around the group of musicians he's currently working with. So I was a bit hesitant when I heard about the new album, which was recorded in Philadelphia with Jim Krewson and Jennie Benford of Jim and Jennie and the Pinetops, amongst other musicians. I wanted more of the Ghost Tropic sound-- a fractured structure just this side of collapse-- but here they were recording songs live in one take, with no overdubs, and garnering comparisons to the warmth of the Muscle Shoals Studio recordings during the 1970s.
Within one listen, Didn't It Rain convinced me that it was worth paying attention to its own terms. Songs: Ohia's compositions have a strange way of warping time for the listener. How else could the opening title track slip by me after nearly eight minutes? It begins in a slow progression of acoustic chords, and almost immediately Molina is singing about the eye of the storm, and those caught under its downpour. The chorus wells up with trilling guitar notes and Jennie Benford providing backing vocals, and Molina warns, "If you think you got it/ They're gonna beat it out of you/ Through work and debt." Calling a recording "intimate" can be cliché, but I swear you can practically hear the floorboards creaking. The song swells and sighs for minutes like a vintage Neil Young ballad, until right near the end when Molina asks the question in the song title.
I thought that Didn't It Rain might be more light of heart, like some of the Palace records Songs: Ohia is often compared to. In the previous song, Molina asks the group audibly to bring it back for another chorus, and it doesn't detract from the music at all. But it seems his tropical depression has lingered, despite titles like "Steve Albini's Blues" and "Cross the Road, Molina." The former lopes along deliberately, the pace set by banjo-like plinks and made more tense by the relative silence that pervades. Molina, Benford and Krewson join together to sing, "See its sulfury shine/ See the big city moon/ 'Tween the radio tower/ 'Tween the big diesel rigs." Reviewers often mention Molina's blue-collar background, but I'm not going to try to prove anyone's cred. Someone (probably Krewson) howls the line "see the big city moon" again, and the last-dime desperation in his twangy voice is authenticity enough.
There's a shared imagery that becomes evident, especially on "Ring the Bell" and "Cross the Road, Molina," two songs in the middle of the album that flow together as a conceptual piece. It's here that Molina might seem too far gone in gloom, as he begs, "Show us how bad we're outnumbered," but the compositions never reach the Gormenghastly nature of "apocalyptic folk" groups like Death in June. There's a bleak beauty in the arc of the amped electric strings, and when the Chicago moon "swings like a blade," Molina may even be painting himself as the Andalusian dog. You can trace the lyrical themes: light, darkness, the moon, fire, Chicago. Those themes are evoked again on "Two Blue Lights," a brief blues piece about the light from a bus and the moon, about hell and your hometown. Is it the scraping sounds of the frets that make it so earthy and uplifting?
I'll throw my cards down now: "Blue Factory Flame" is a classic. Drum-kit percussion enters for the first time, setting a steady 4/4 frame as Molina asks, "When I die, put my bones in an empty street/ Bring a Coleman lantern and a radio/ A Cleveland game and a fishing pole." The black-hearted procession continues as he describes ghostly iron ore ships coming home, and climaxes in the refrain "paralyzed by emptiness." It's as apt a summary of depression's effects as I've heard, and the electric guitar emits a stark, weathered sort of sadness.
Musically, "Blue Chicago Moon" evokes more of that aged Rust Belt atmosphere, but Molina admits that you're not helpless when you're hunted by the blues, and he calls out over and over for you to "try to beat it, try to beat it." From the first song, it seems that Didn't It Rain is intended as a bulwark against sorrow, and that commitment appears again on this last track. The compositions here are elemental, filled with flame as well as steel and stone, and they tie Molina's native Ohio together with his current home, Chicago. In the process of recording another incredible album, he's discovered that light is most visible when it's flickering alone in the dark.


The Gizzard’s abundant crop of fall albums spans custom incidental music, nerdy compositional experiments, and one of the best front-to-back records in their catalog.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava

Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava / Laminated Denim / Changes

Christmas came early this year for the Gizzhive. Beyond embarking on their first North American tour since the pandemic began, the ever-industrious King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard gifted their faithful with three new records released over the course of four weeks this past October. These arrive a mere six months after the band’s most recent double album, which followed hot on the heels of another record, bringing their grand total of 2022 albums to five, matching the feat they first pulled off in 2017. At this point, being a King Gizzard fan is pretty much a full-time job.
You almost wonder if the Melbourne sextet is actively trying to corner the market: By displaying an equal facility with psychedelia, prog, garage-punk, jazz, kosmische musik, thrash metal, synth pop, and even rap, King Gizzard have essentially become the big-box one-stop for all your musical needs. And as anyone who’s braved Costco on a Saturday can tell you, an abundance of choice is liable to pull your attention in too many directions at once. The decision to unload a trio of records in near-tandem arguably does the greatest disservice to Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, which, if given more room to breathe as a standalone release, would more easily stick out as one of the best front-to-back records in the entire Gizzard catalog.
That may not seem obvious when you’re greeted by the album’s deceptively twee opener, “Mycelium,” a song so immersed in nerdy science-speak, it should come with a complementary head lamp. (Plenty of King Gizzard tunes make you want to take mushrooms; this one encourages you to study them, too.) But the song’s beach-bound vibe ultimately proves irresistible, its aquatic guitar lines, hiccuping reggae beats, and lustrous woodwinds enticing you to join the conga line even as main vocalists Stu Mackenzie and Ambrose Kenny-Smith start analyzing the more grotesque byproducts of human-fungi interactions. And “Mycelium” is a bellwether of more dramatic mutations to come, as Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava stakes its claim as the band’s most agitated yet fiercely funky record. The album title may read like a word-cloud summary of the Gizzard’s favorite lyrical topics, but its songs chart new paths to the outer cosmos without leaning on the usual motorik thrusters.
The question of whether or not King Gizzard are a jam band has stuck to this group like the scent of patchouli on a hemp poncho, and Ice, Death justifies the claims of both the yea and nay camps. Certainly, this is one of their loosest, most sprawling records, with almost every track exceeding seven minutes; on the other hand, even the most outré odysseys are less a product of improvisation than intricate arrangement. When the Afrobeat-steeped “Ice V” and the dizzying 13-minute showstopper “Hell’s Itch” settle into their fleet-footed grooves and start introducing new ideas every 16 bars, the effect is less like a band showing off their chops and more like rotating MCs chiming in with a few rhymes on a posse cut. And where past Gizzard epics have embraced a racetrack construction, whipping in and out of recurring motifs at regular intervals, the mischievous “Magma” is built more like a spiral staircase, its guitar accents and frisky rhythms swirling skyward en route to the cataclysmic, wah-wah-splattered finale. Its sequel “Lava” works up to similarly awesome heights, then busts through the ash clouds to reveal a ray of hope. “The volcano is death, the lava is death/Death is life! The lava is life!” Mackenzie repeats with nursery-rhyme glee, summing up the cycle of life that undergirds King Gizzard’s usual apocalyptic premonitions: Our species may be fucked, but the planet will be reborn.
If Ice, Death is an exploratory record that sounds like it was made with little regard for time, Laminated Denim has its eye on the clock. The record comprises two extended pieces of exactly 15 minutes each—i.e., the precise length of the intermissions during the Gizzard’s three-hour sets at Red Rocks Amphitheater, where the tracks debuted over the PA on October 10 and 11. The intermission-soundtrack concept dates back to when those shows were first booked for May 2020, at which point the band recorded two works—the amorphous, electro-shocked instrumental “Timeland” and the cosmic-rock collage “Smoke & Mirrors”—for the occasion. After the concerts were postponed, the band released the unused pieces as this year’s Made in Timeland mini-LP. But once the Red Rocks dates were rescheduled for October, the band suddenly needed new intermission music. Enter Laminated Denim, an anagram of Made in Timeland that also reflects the musical relationship between the two records: Though they share the same temporal parameters, the contents within have been completely reimagined.
In contrast to Made in Timeland’s free-flowing techno doodles, Laminated Denim gives us two linear, conventionally structured, vocal-driven songs that carve out their own lane in the Gizzard discography, somewhere between the ceaseless propulsion of their signature strobe-lit rock-outs and the blissful melodicism that defines their occasional forays into pastoral whimsy. For much of its runtime, first track “The Land Before Timeland” casually choogles along like the Allman Brothers’ “Jessica” as produced by Conny Plank, setting its twinned-lead guitar noodling to a steady, vacuum-sealed drumbeat that stays locked in for the long haul. But no matter how far out it ventures, “The Land Before Timeland” never loses sight of its practical purpose as intermission music: The song comes equipped with a two-minute warning, turning darker and freakier in the home stretch as if to pressure the Red Rocks restroom crowd to piss faster and get back to their seats. The following “Hypertension” (pronounced by Mackenzie as “hyper-ten-shee-yun” in perfectly Liamesque fashion) builds off that unsettled mood, introducing itself as a more restless “Street Spirit” and sustaining that agitated energy for its entire run, culminating in an ascending staccato guitar solo that plays like the climax to “Marquee Moon” at warp speed. Even when removed from their site-specific function, the two pieces on Laminated Denim stay true to their original mission: They each make 15 minutes go by in a breeze.
The group’s final October offering, Changes, is likewise an attempt to revive a previously shelved concept: in this case, a specific chord progression that recurs throughout all seven tracks in different contexts. The band reportedly began working on Changes during the high season of 2017, but never got around to finishing the album because there were always other albums to finish. The end result doesn’t quite resemble a painstaking magnum opus: Changes is the most subdued and modest record of the Gizzard’s October harvest. The album makes its most audacious statement with the 13-minute overture “Change,” which both introduces the woozy Wurlitzer motifs that appear throughout the record and plants seeds for the many forms they’ll take over its duration. Propelled by sun-kissed keyboard melodies, jazz-bar upright bass, and jaunty summertime-stroll backbeats, this constantly shapeshifting track taps into the Gizzard’s inner Steely Dan, imagining an alternate ’70s where Fagen and Becker appealed to acid-eating prog-heads instead of cocaine yuppies.
At times, the attempt to build new songs out of the same chord progression feels less like a bold challenge than a cheeky looky-here: Changes’ second track “Hate Dancin’” seems like it easily could’ve been absorbed into the multi-sectional sprawl of “Change,” as it simply adds a new vocal melody atop the established rhythm bed, organizing its predecessor’s mood-board disarray into a compact three-minute pop song. But on “Astroturf,” those common chords function as a springboard into a twitchy funk workout bolstered by sinister brass stabs—and just when you think Mackenzie is going to start shredding, the band drops in a truly badass flute solo instead. In “Gondii,” we’re treated to the album’s most radical recontextualization, as those familiar progressions get embedded into a synth-powered rocker that transports us far beyond the album’s retro-’70s soul-jazz milieu. “Gondii” is named for the highly transmittable parasite commonly found in cats that, in extreme cases, can cause brain damage in humans and trick rodents into cozying up to their feline predators. In the album’s most inspired moments, the recurring refrains heard on Changes function in a similar way, subtly worming their way into the songs and causing the host to behave in unexpected ways.


Kompakt's dependable compilation series, again curated by Wolfgang Voigt, returns with another balm for the post-winter blues.

Pop Ambient 2009

Ah, the Pop Ambient compilation. So reliable, so consistent, you could almost set your watch to the darn thing. Every year, it shows up around the same time with those same Photoshopped flowers. It features the same loose collection of artists (Klimek's back!) who share the same central aim: to rub some ointment on your post-winter blues with the gentle drifts and glides fans of the series have come to expect. The comp is rarely astounding and at the same time, never really disappointing. With a few minor tweaks to their time-tested formula and a couple fresh faces onboard, Kompakt's 2009 installment of its annual ambient-techno roundup is no different.
As he's done in the past, label head Wolfgang Voigt serves as the set's curator. Perhaps encouraged by the warm reception to his (excellent) Nah Und Fern boxset from last year, the Gas mastermind also contributes a handful of new songs to PA09. Sadly they're not his finest. Under his Mint moniker, Voigt presents "Hindemith", a relatively ho-hum concoction of spare piano, horns, and his signature vapor-like hiss. He teams up with longtime pal Jörg Burger for a pair of tracks: a pleasant but mostly forgettable remix of Jürgen Paape's "Ausklang" and "Frieden", a Burger/Voigt original that's easily the best of his three offerings. With deep basslines and active, echoing synths, it's equally soothing and dynamic, just what you want out of a Pop Ambient cut.
In addition to PA mainstays such as Andrew Thomas, Voigt and co. invite some new collaborators into the mix this year, and the album's prime cuts are split between its veterans and rookies. Popnoname (real name Jens Uwe Beyer), a producer who honed his skills on these compilations before venturing into solo material, offers once such standout in "Nightliner". He dunks a mild bass-guitar thump into a warm noise bath to coax an astral, floating quality from the track; the result is a delicious dose of auditory Percocet. Newcomers the Fun Years-- an intriguing inclusion as a guitar-based outfit-- also manage a winner with "I Am Speaking Through Barbara". A sort of post-rock/shoegaze hybrid, the song's organic textures offer satisfying contrast to the digital sounds elsewhere.
Other stretches of PA09 illustrate the series' gradual shift towards the orchestral, a trend that has characterized the past several entries and frustrated some longtime listeners. Such gripes are easy to understand, since a degree of propulsion (some beats here and there) is what sets ambient techno apart from, say, modern classical. That distinction is largely ignored on the disc's front half, though, where Klimek opens with "True Enemies & False Friends (Yesteryears Suite)", a regal-sounding brasswind piece before French composer Sylvain Chauveau drops two avant-classical numbers-- odd additions, since Chauveau's songs are a few years old (dating back to his 2007 Nuage soundtrack) and in a way represent a style that some simply aren't looking for from Pop Ambient.
Anyone bummed by these inclusions could claim that the abundance of non-Kompakt artists included here points to a lack of fresh ideas from the label, and that may be the case. Purists might even argue the venerated imprint's best days are behind it, and, indeed, one listen to any of the four Gas LPs makes many of PA09's tracks feel minor-league by comparison. But Voigt's interest in adjacent styles and willingness to draw from outside his own roster suggests to me that he's still engaged in the form and curious about what his past creations have wrought. And with a few minor exceptions (most notably the Field in 2007), Pop Ambient historically hasn't been the launching pad for Kompakt's hot new acts-- that's what the Total compilations are for. Instead, the series is more of a perennial thank-you note sent to a niche fanbase. If you've made it this far into my review, chances are you're one of the folks who received (and appreciated) the last missive, as you will this one and the next.


Twin Shadow's consistently compelling and refreshing debut nods to 80s new wave but doesn't forget the songwriting; Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor produces.

Forget

George Lewis, Jr.'s self-described bizarre and lonely childhood forms the backdrop for his work as Twin Shadow, and he uses the sounds of the past as a foundation. But while the 26-year-old Brooklynite's music is steeped in 1980s new wave-- he sometimes takes on Morrissey's vocal tone and phrasing, and threads of British bands like Echo and the Bunnymen and Depeche Mode run through his songs-- Lewis does well by this much-revisited era. Simplicity is part of what carries it over. On Forget, his debut full-length, he mostly sticks with a small collection of synth sounds-- strings, organ, piano, and brass-- along with electric guitar and drum machine. The instruments are clean, shimmery, and carefully placed. With Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor handling production, this limited palette proves to be more than enough to work with, and each song is immediately distinguishable from the others. Lewis' execution is immaculate, and he manages to make these familiar sounds into something that sounds refreshing and even dazzling.
The hotel-room production is ideally suited to the subject matter, matching the charged emotions of the lyrics. "Yellow Balloon" is full of vignettes from youth-- "If you hear your mama calling/ Get away from me/ Secret handshakes/ The swimming hole"-- and the icy atmosphere, along with a creepy piano line, suggests that these memories aren't necessarily good ones. On another standout, "Tether Beat", a ghostlike synth ranges around in the lower registers as Lewis asks over and over, "Does your heart still beat?" Album highlight "Castles in the Snow" creates a metaphor from the imagery of the title, using sharp hi-hats, handclaps, piercing strings, and bird-like vocal calls to show that everything the narrator touches "turns cold." Tracks like these create a mood that is nostalgic, regretful, and even sinister.
Roughly half the album consists of these slower, dreamier turns; the other half is faster paced and thus better tailored to the live setting (or a high school dance). On these songs, Lewis tackles the same broad subject of love-- forbidden crushes, dance floor flirtations, serious relationships-- with the same overall aesthetic. But he abandons menace in favor of sweetness: the bass on "Shooting Holes" and "When We're Dancing" thumps out locomotive disco beats; pretty flutes and strings accent the excellent dance floor saga "I Can't Wait"; and the sparkling synths on closer "Forget" create a lulling slow dance for Lewis' loaded refrain, "They'll give us so much to forget." Here, Lewis' lyrics are more narrative and romantic, but they're no less witty or poetic.
Taken whole, Forget feels undeniably of the moment, fitting in nicely with the craftsmanship of 80s pop revivalists like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Lewis' labelmate Class Actress, and, to some degree, the xx. And like the best of this wave, the album also has a function beyond its danceable beats and electronic fireworks: It is sophisticated enough to withstand close, repeated listening. The songs may be catchy, but their intricacy and thoughtful storytelling makes them stick. And for its impressive sonic sheen, the album's skillful restraint makes it sound better with every spin. Instead of merely evoking an established style, Lewis' songs feel honest and straightforward, so the new wave glances are a vehicle for the songwriting rather than the whole point.