This reissue collects the crude and exceedingly noisy early recordings of the Silver Jews, back when the band included Pavement's Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich.

Early Times

In the early 1990s, "lo-fi" actually meant something interesting. For all the received ideas about songwriting and performance that had been booted aside in the previous 15 years, almost nobody had seriously interrogated the way rock recordings sounded. The understanding was that you were supposed to reproduce, as closely as possible, what a performance in the same room would have sounded like. Then a string of bands started deliberately doing recording "wrong," or at least asking to what, exactly, "fidelity" in music was supposed to be. Nobody did it wronger-on-purpose than Silver Jews, whose first two EPs-- 1992's Dime Map of the Reef and 1993's The Arizona Record--were pile-ups of cheap cassette wobble and flaws, song fragments, sloppy jams, and flubbed notes, with something cracked but wonderfully original radiating from within them.
The rumor, in 1992, was that this ridiculously named band was actually Pavement under a pseudonym. Dime Map of the Reef came out about a month after Slanted and Enchanted, on the label that had put out some of Pavement's earlier records, and one of the voices on it clearly belonged to one of the Pavement guys; it was obvious! (Fine, laugh. We didn't have Google back then.) Silver Jews weren't Pavement, but for a while the two bands shared singer/guitarist Stephen Malkmus and drummer Bob Nastanovich, and Pavement's early repertoire included "Secret Knowledge of Backroads" and "West S", both of which appear here. (Malkmus has even played the latter solo.)
It became evident with time that Silver Jews were very much singer/guitarist David Berman's band. They had the same progenitor as Pavement (University of Virginia band Ectoslavia), and a pretty similar knack for knotty riffs; both bands had obviously listened to the Fall a lot at an impressionable age. But Berman maybe cared a little less about tunes than Malkmus, and a little more about language. He, in fact, was the one who had come up with the phrase "slanted and enchanted."
Dime Map is more a thrown-down gauntlet than a collection of songs, opening with a fake tourist jingle for Canada and continuing for a packed 7" single's worth of recordings that refuse to behave. "The Unchained Melody"-- no relation to that other "Unchained Melody"-- rambles through an extended introduction, and cheekily fades out in the middle of its first verse. Berman begins "The Walnut Falcon" with a dramatic image of two rams clashing on a mountain, then immediately undercuts its seriousness: "The horns go thwop/ The horns go thwop/ And I'm looking for my snowy bed."
The nine tracks that made up The Arizona Record are more satisfying on their own: The sides of its original vinyl incarnation opened with the two skewed, compelling songs that the Jews shared with Pavement. It's also got a couple of fragmentary songlets-- "Jackson Nightz" cuts from a crappy recording of a promising riff to an even crappier cassette recording of the same, then back to the original version, mid-lyric, and fades out on a snatch of Malkmusian falsetto. But it ends with a piece that actually seems finished, the meditative instrumental guitar trio "Bar Scene from Star Wars".
The Arizona Record and Dime Map are all we get here, although it'd have been nice if this set included the band's other early recordings, including a side of a split single credited to "Silver Jews & Nico." Still, the early Silver Jews' whole aesthetic was built on enforced incompleteness-- suggesting that something amazing had happened on the nights they recorded in Bob Nastanovich's living room, and that they'd just barely managed to catch enough of it on the fly to imply its glory, like a fragment of a Sappho poem. As the Fall put it: "What really went on there? We only have this excerpt."


Unmoored by the Wind is Los Angeles songwriter Kayla Cohen’s second album under the Itasca name. On this album her work can be classified as a straightforward form of homespun folk.

Unmoored by the Wind

"Aloneness is a state of being," Townes Van Zandt once observed, "Whereas loneliness is a state of feeling." On Unmoored by the Wind, Kayla Cohen, a.k.a. Itasca, spends much of her time navigating between those two states. Her folk-derived style is one that seems necessarily borne from many hours spent in solitude and quiet contemplation. And though this solitude has clearly given Cohen the space to perfect her instrumental craft and to revel in the rhythms of the natural world, there is also a subtle tug of melancholy coursing through many of these songs that speaks to a sense of displacement and a yearning for community or connection.
Unmoored by the Wind is Cohen’s second album proper under the Itasca name, following a string of CD-R and cassette releases, including several mystic drone and experimental works that she recorded under the name Sultan. On this album her work can be classified as a much more straightforward form of homespun folk. Cohen’s delicate and expert fingerpicking places her work somewhere in the area of American Primitive, a genre that can always stand to benefit from additional female performers. But on Unmoored by the Wind, her vocals are an even bigger draw. She has a voice that is at once striking and vaguely familiar, the type of voice that will send folk-nerds to rack their memories to decide which other obscure or semi-obscure singer she most resembles. (I’m going with Bridget St. John and/or Sibylle Baier for now.)
Recorded at her home in Los Angeles, the album features the occasional flutter of flute or overdubbed vocal, but is otherwise built almost exclusively on Cohen’s voice and acoustic guitar. She does a fine job of balancing the album’s lyric and instrumental passages, and constructs her songs with enough textural variety and narrative energy that the album’s momentum never flags despite the simplicity of its production. Aside from such baroque interludes as "Colt in Hiding", which features multi-tracked layers of angelic vocals, the album’s overall tone is one of conversational intimacy, and it is not difficult for listeners to feel as if we’ve been invited to pull up a chair right there in the room with her, with the shades partially drawn.
This never feels more literally true than on the prayer-like "After Dawn", which finds the singer sitting quietly by her window watching as the sunlight changes and people flow past. It’s as though she is viewing the world and its human activities from a distant remove, a meditative sort of self-imposed seclusion that is further echoed on such tracks as the pastoral "The Hermit’s View" or the dreamy instrumental idyll of "Walking in Hahamongna".
Elsewhere, however, this sense of isolation from the world grows a bit more pronounced. On the narcotic "Dream of the Water Bearer", the song’s narrator, beset by mysterious dream figures, helplessly waves her hands in the air "just to see if I could change the picture." Similar dream figures appear in "Nature’s Gift", images that "seem as if I’ve called them here" although she is unable to determine how "these angels can help me out."
When the dreamy cobwebs clear away, as on the wake-up call "Alleyway" ("I walk out my door to find the world same as it was before") and especially on the radiant "Congregation", Cohen writes personal pep-talks with the lucidity and clarity of a self-help manual, variously singing "I’ve got to change my ways" or "I’ve got to find my hopeful place to rest" like she is writing lines in a private journal. This feeling that we, as listeners, have been granted access into Itasca’s private inner sanctum is what helps give Unmoored by the Wind its quiet gravity, and her ample instrumental skills and deft songcraft make this invitation well worth your while.


Read Stephen M. Deusner’s review of the album.

For Emma, Forever Ago

The biographical details behind the creation of an album shouldn’t matter when it comes to a listener’s enjoyment, but For Emma, Forever Ago, Justin Vernon’s debut as Bon Iver, exudes such a strong sense of loneliness and remoteness that you might infer some tragedy behind it. So, to skirt the rumor mill, here are the particulars, as much or as little as they might apply: In 2005, Vernon’s former band DeYarmond Edison moved from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to North Carolina. As the band developed and matured in its new home, the members’ artistic interests diverged and eventually the group disbanded. While his bandmates formed Megafaun, Vernon—who had worked with the Rosebuds and Ticonderoga—returned to Wisconsin, where he sequestered himself in a remote cabin for four snowy months. During that time, he wrote and recorded most of the songs that would eventually become For Emma, Forever Ago.
As the second half of its title implies, the album is a ruminative collection of songs full of natural imagery and acoustic strums—the sound of a man left alone with his memories and a guitar. Bon Iver will likely bear comparisons to Iron & Wine for its quiet folk and hushed intimacy, but in fact, Vernon, adopting a falsetto that is worlds away from his work with DeYarmond Edison, sounds more like TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe, not just in his vocal timbre, but in the way his voice grows grainier as it gets louder.
Vernon gives a soulful performance full of intuitive swells and fades, his phrasing and pronunciation making his voice as much a purely sonic instrument as his guitar. In the discursive coda of “Creature Fear” he whittles the song down to a single repeated syllable—“fa.” Rarely does folk—indie or otherwise—give so much over to ambience: Quivering guitar strings, mic’ed closely, lend opener “Flume” its eerily interiorized sound, which matches his unsettling similes. “Lump Sum” begins with a choir of Vernons echoing cavernously, which, along with that rhythmically rushing guitar, initiates the listener into the song’s strange space.
For Emma isn’t a wholly ascetic project, though. A few songs benefit from additional recording and input after Vernon’s initial sessions: Christy Smith of Raleigh’s Nola adds flute and drums to “Flume,” and Boston-based musicians John DeHaven and Randy Pingrey add horns to “For Emma”; surprisingly, their company doesn’t break the album’s spell of isolation, but rather strengthens it, as if they’re only his imaginary friends. Vernon turns the cabin's limitations into assets on “The Wolves,” layering his falsetto, tweaking his vocal tones to simple yet devastating effect, and piling on clattering percussion to create a calamitous finale.
That passage contrasts nicely with the simple intro to the next track, “Blindsided,” which builds from a single repeating note into a halting chorus melody that sells his skewed Walden imagery: “I crouch like a crow/Contrasting the snow/For the agony, I’d rather know.” Vernon’s lyrics are puzzle pieces that combine uneasily; his nouns tend to be concrete, yet the meanings slippery. On “Flume,” the lines “I am my mother’s only one/It’s enough” form a strong opener, but the song grows less and less lucid: “Only love is all maroon/Lapping lakes like leery loons/Leaving rope burns—reddish ruse.” It’s as if he’s trying to inhabit the in-between spaces separating musical expression and private rumination, exposing his regrets without relinquishing them. His emotional exorcism proves even more intense for being so tentative.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the Massive Attack associate’s 1995 debut, a gloomy unicorn of contemporary UK pop.

Maxinquaye

Tricky’s Maxinquaye brought grinding doubt and psychedelic waves of paranoia to the radio at a time when Oasis were telling us we would live forever and Blur were living that Parklife. Tricky would go on to release masterful music after: Nearly God and Pre-Millenium Tension, both from 1996, push at the boundary between enjoyment and unease, aching and itching in their weed-infused paranoia. But neither is as elegantly chaotic as Maxinquaye, an unrepeatable record so unbelievably wrong it could only be right. Maxinquaye is a work of beautiful disorder and lucky mistakes. Its success was like the extraordinary run of an underdog sports team to the final: wildly unlikely yet oddly fated.
The crux of Tricky’s early music is the combination of his own deep-smoked vocals and the wispy, melancholy delivery of Martina Topley-Bird, a teenager who Tricky met when she was sitting on a local wall, drunk on cider, after finishing her exams. That chance meeting alone was essential to the genesis of Maxinquaye. Without other moments of serendipity, Tricky might never have become a solo artist. He was born Adrian Thaws in Bristol, England, and his early life was impossibly hard: His mother, Maxine Quaye, died when he was four and his father was rarely around. Tricky met Milo, who would later become a DJ for legendary local soundsystem the Wild Bunch, when he was just a boy; this connection led to him coming on board as a rapper for the group, which in turn gave birth to Massive Attack. While never quite at the center of the Massive Attack world, Tricky featured on the band’s 1991 debut Blue Lines and was sufficiently in their orbit to ask their management for cash when cash was needed.
It was Mark Stewart, the Bristol musician who founded the Pop Group and lived with Tricky in the 1990s, who suggested that Tricky should try to “blag” money from Massive Attack’s managers to make a solo record. It worked, with half of the money going to booze and the remaining £300 to record “Aftermath,” a devastating work of hip-hop blues that Massive Attack apparently passed on. (As ever with Tricky—not the most reliable narrator—it is worth hearing these claims with a skeptical ear.)
“Aftermath” was a statement of intent: a mixture of midnight keyboard trills, rockabilly guitar riffs, haunting flute, and dub basslines that lopes to a dusted boom-bap beat with the menace of a stoned tiger. It could have been one of the classic debut singles of the early ’90s. Yet “Aftermath” languished, unheard beyond its initial white-label release in early 1993, until Tricky’s cousin suggested he try to secure a record deal a couple of years later. Julian Palmer, who ran the Fourth & Broadway imprint within Island UK, was a fan of “Aftermath” and convinced Island to fund recording sessions with Howie B, a Scottish producer who had worked with Siouxsie and the Banshees and Soul II Soul. The sessions produced “Ponderosa,” a bhangra-influenced evil lullaby whose percussive gamelan lurch threatened to drag the song upbeat, even as the lyrics painted a picture of troubled minds and temporary oblivion. “Ponderosa” persuaded Island to sign Tricky, although legal and managerial wrangles detached Howie B from the project and shelved an early batch of songs.
Tricky and Topley-Bird, by now a romantic as well as a musical couple, were on their own to record an album, a process Tricky proclaimed he knew nothing about. In another moment of fortune, he asked Mark Saunders, a producer on Massive Attack associate Neneh Cherry’s debut album, to collaborate on the record, attracted by his handiwork on the Cure’s Wish and Mixed Up. It was—as Island understood it—a fairly straightforward engineering gig. “I don’t think the record company really knew what Tricky did,” Saunders told Sound on Sound in 2007. Island, he says, thought they had signed a DJ/producer who would be perfectly capable of making his own album and had furnished him with a small studio’s worth of equipment in a house in London’s Kilburn to do so. “However, the first day I went to his place to work, it was just littered with vinyl all over the floor,” Saunders explained. “He said, ‘OK, let’s sample this record,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, sure, go ahead.’ He said, ‘No, no, I don’t do any of that stuff.’”
In his book Hell Is Round the Corner, Tricky paints a rather different picture of the album sessions. According to him, Saunders came in at the end of the recording process, after Tricky had produced most of the tracks himself, to mix the album. He also claims that Saunders—“a corny old dude”—didn’t understand the music on Maxinquaye and frequently added unwanted guitar parts to the songs, which Tricky later wiped.
Whatever the case, recording Maxinquaye was a deeply peculiar experience for all involved. Saunders called the album “a complete un-learning experience,” while Tricky was surfing on the power of musical naivety. “Being naive I think is how you construct new music,” he told The Guardian. “When you start thinking too much what is it you’re doing? You’re just making an album. You’re not doing brain surgery.” His aim was simple: “To do an album that’s going to fuck everybody up. No compromise whatsoever.”
When I say that Maxinquaye is unique and unrepeatable, this is what I mean. Tricky’s naivety meant that he approached making music as no one else would, rejecting any kind of musical orthodoxy. “If someone can tell you how they did a song, I don’t trust them,” he once told Rolling Stone. “It should be a magical process.” Saunders relates tales of Tricky asking him to sample two songs that ran at different tempos and in different keys; of Tricky picking from records scattered around his flat seemingly at random; of rough mixes and rotten sounds left in to fester; of borrowing a Portishead sample, stoned, and forgetting about it. Sometimes—as on “Strugglin’,” a remarkably bleak work of slo-mo hip-hop that feels like Houston chopped-and-screwed oozing up through a Bristol gutter—Tricky’s singular choices could be made to work by bending and de-tuning the samples at hand. At other times, this would prove impossible, and Tricky would move swiftly onto the next idea bubbling inside his head.
“Tricky’s genius is just being Tricky,” Saunders explained in 2007. “He had no idea of pitch whatsoever and also not much regard for any kind of timing. He really couldn’t get the concept of four-bar, eight-bar, 12-bar sections; that stuff meant nothing to him.” On this point, Tricky largely agrees: In Hell Is Round the Corner, he proudly explains that he “didn’t know how to make music.” “I had no rules,” he wrote. “I’ve always had weird time signatures, not because I’m trying to do it—some artists use them to try and make their music weird. My music is weird because I don’t know what I’m doing.”
You might expect that Maxinquaye would be the fearsomely unapproachable work of a hip-hop malcontent, a Trout Mask Replica for the Blue Lines set. But somehow these fiercely amusical ideas cohered into exquisitely lush almost-pop songs that chill in their intent while seducing with their delivery, a little like the RZA’s perfectly realized avant-hip-hop beats on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Even at its most experimental—on “Strugglin’” or “Overcome”—Maxinquaye is never less than listenable, while the Michael Jackson-referencing, Britpop-baiting “Brand New You’re Retro” is a poisonous pop dart to the neck.
It would be easy to assume that Saunders deserves credit for the album’s cohesion. “Just for the Hate of It (Rough Monitor Mix),” a precursor to “Abbaon Fat Tracks” included on the 2009 deluxe edition of Maxinquaye, stumbles and lurches, a mess of badly interconnecting elements, while the finished “Abbaon Fat Tracks” glides, weaving together disparate elements—telephone tones, lurching piano, and what sounds like a heavily phased guitar—in a silken mesh. But listen back to an alternate mix of “Aftermath,” taken from the song’s 1993 white-label release, and it is obvious that the irresistible hooks and pop smarts were there from the beginning, rendering the layers of tape hiss and recorded gloop irrelevant.
More than anything, Maxinquaye came from hip-hop. While recording the album, Tricky was invested heavily in the Geto Boys’ horror-scarred Southern rap, and hip-hop runs in deep currents underneath Maxinquaye, from the scuffed breakbeats to Tricky’s mumbled raps. But Tricky has broad musical tastes—he once named Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life” and “Lalla Laroussa” by Algerian rai singer Cheb Anouar among his 10 favorite songs—and these pushed Maxinquaye into unlikely new spaces.
Tricky considered Maxinquaye to be “new music,” and you can see what he means. He’s not recreating anything, though you can hear a debt to everything from the Specials’ pointed ska fusions to labelmate PJ Harvey’s heart-on-sleeve bluesy intensity. At the same time, Maxinquaye wears the sharp thrill of perfect pop music. Tricky would claim to be annoyed by the success of Maxinquaye—which reached No. 3 in the UK charts, turning it into what he called ”a coffee-table album”—but he was always a fan of more adventurous pop artists, notably Kate Bush, who he called “in the same league as John Lennon.”
In assimilating these expansive tastes, Tricky was surely influenced by his upbringing in Bristol, the culturally adventurous Western English city that helped birth Massive Attack, Portishead, Flying Saucer Attack, Rip Rig + Panic, Smith & Mighty, John Parish, Roni Size, and Krust. Tricky may claim to have little time for talk of a Bristol scene (and very little time for Portishead) but it seems noteworthy that this musical free spirit grew up in a city where the Wild Bunch mixed punk with R&B and Massive Attack added reggae, soul, and downtempo hip-hop to their soundsystem stew.
Topley-Bird’s vocals also played an important, if perhaps unconscious, role in sweetening the Maxinquaye pill. Tricky wanted to foreground a female voice in the role of “my mum speaking through me,” and many of the lyrics were written from a woman’s perspective, adding a prescient sense of gender fluidity to the record. Where Tricky’s voice is rough and phlegmy, with all the silent menace of the powerful, Topley-Bird’s is a cobwebbed whisper, somehow both lush and fragile, like the thinnest silk thread.
Don’t mistake this delicacy for weakness, though. On songs like “Brand New You’re Retro” or “Black Steel,” Topley-Bird has an incredible swagger, while on “Abbaon Fat Tracks,” she is alarmingly blank and predatory. Tricky used different vocalists on two Maxinquaye songs—Alison Goldfrapp on “Pumpkin” and Ragga on “You Don’t”—and, to my mind, they feel slightly off, like representatives of a parallel universe where Tricky and Topley-Bird never met.
Topley-Bird also brought the lion’s share of vocal melody to Maxinquaye, spinning off improvised tunes like velveteen rabbits from a hat. Rather than suggesting that Topley-Bird listen to his tracks in advance and reflect on what she would sing, Tricky would apparently hand his teenage foil a set of lyrics and send her off to the kitchen to improvise a take. It was, Topley-Bird said, “totally instinctive.” “There was no time to drum up an alter ego,” she told The Guardian. Yet the melodies she came up with are otherworldly and sublime, from the hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck revolt of “Strugglin’” to the disinterested disgust she lays on “Abbaon Fat Tracks.”
These various themes—happy accidents and wide tastes, casual melodic power and genre ambivalence—collided on “Black Steel,” a strutting, guitared-up half-cover of Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” that dented the UK charts. The track started with a scratchily recorded drum loop from “Rukkumani Rukkumani,” taken from Indian film composer A. R. Rahman’s Roja soundtrack, which Tricky had received from the mother of his former girlfriend and to which someone—possibly Saunders—added a backward guitar riff. When it came time for Topley-Bird to record her vocals, Tricky couldn’t be bothered to write them out in full, so Topley-Bird ended up using just the song’s first verse, to which she improvised one of her most powerful melodies, twisting and swooping like a bird escaping from its cage. Techno-rock act FTV, who Tricky had met at a gig, added snarling guitar and Sex Pistols-style drums to create a supremely unlikely—and yet entirely fitting—Bollywood/rock/techno/hip-hop take on the Public Enemy classic.
Maxinquaye was an immediate sensation in the UK, selling 100,000 copies in its first months of release. It even made an impact in the U.S.—something almost unknown for a hip-hop-leaning act from the UK at the time—and Tricky teamed up with Gravediggaz for The Hell EP, cementing a stylistic union with RZA. For an album so rooted in Bristol, Maxinquaye’s reach remains surprisingly universal: Tricky might have claimed that Beyoncé had never heard of him when she invited him to guest at her 2011 Glastonbury headline slot, but without the critical and commercial success of his debut, that bizarre cameo surely would never have happened. Such public recognition came at a price. Alongside the output of Portishead and Massive Attack, Maxinquaye would come to be seen as a leading work of the trip-hop movement, a stylistic tag that Tricky hated. “I don’t really know what trip-hop is, I think it’s bollocks to be honest,” Tricky told Dummy in 2013. “People call Morcheeba trip-hop don’t they? Well I’ve never listened to them.”
You can understand his distrust of the label. Tricky’s music is far darker and more abstruse than the soft-soap hip-hop beats of Morcheeba or Sneaker Pimps; it is far more claustrophobic than Massive Attack’s celebrated trio of ’90s albums; and there is little to no connection between the scorched velvet of Tricky and Topley-Bird’s vocal pairing and the operatic intensity of Portishead’s Beth Gibbons. Tricky had poured his whole life into Maxinquaye and had no desire to see his music watered down by weakling imitators armed with a sampler and a couple of library-music albums.
Even if his debut were trip-hop, Tricky would spend the next few years recording an increasingly bleak collection of records intended to “kill all that Maxinquaye bullshit,” resulting in the noxious paranoia of Nearly God and the vibe-suffocating desolation of Pre-Millenium Tension. With the ratcheting nerves of Tricky’s subsequent albums—2020’s Fall to Pieces was his 14th—Tricky’s star has faded somewhat, and he has bounced label to label and collaborator to collaborator. For almost 30 years, listeners have been waiting for Tricky to return to the monumentally anomalous charms of Maxinquaye, a record regularly cited among the best albums of the ’90s.
They will wait in vain. To revisit such singular territory is unthinkable, like wishing lightning would strike twice with a slightly updated color scheme. Even if Tricky wanted to return to the sound of Maxinquaye, he almost certainly couldn’t. Maxinquaye was based on musical instinct—on not knowing what was right, and caring even less. But chance encounters happen only once, and innocence lasts only so long. In recording Maxinquaye, Tricky inevitably started to absorb the conventions of musical production, slowly strangling the goose even as it laid the golden egg. Fall to Pieces is a great album, agonizing in its wounded depths; but, the odd anarchistic touch aside, it is a fairly orthodox record, one that appears to know all about eight-bar sections, consonant harmonies, and the other musical conventions to which Tricky was once so gloriously indifferent.
Like fashioning a house of cards in a strong wind, Maxinquaye held its destruction in its own creation and its failure in its success: a borderline unclassifiable work that was Tricky in both name and nature. If we can no more remake Maxinquaye than land another first man on the Moon, it remains a magnificent singularity, a full-on solar eclipse of an album that blotted out all precedent to seek refuge in the shadows.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the Australian superstar’s 1997 departure to clubland, a misunderstood journey of self-discovery that became the black sheep of her catalog.

Impossible Princess

Kylie Minogue asks what if. In her radiant pop world, every feeling tingles with possibility: the longed-for romance that you barely dare whisper, the intoxication after just one drop, the liberation under the strobe light. She is love’s defiant crusader who, in her 1987 single “I Should Be So Lucky,” made being ignored by a crush sound flat-out delightful. She has an answer to everything; rejection is her gasoline. You don’t want my love? Put your hand on your heart and tell me. Most famously, she is consumed with an infatuation so dizzying it defies words, bubbling to the surface only as la la la.
The Australian artist’s music is an invitation to share what she feels, an ethos that has enthroned Minogue as an icon of positivity and a poet laureate of dancefloor communion. “It’s hard work being a Kylie,” said Björk, a friend of Minogue in the ’90s. “It’s a service to the nation. You have to smile and do handshakes—it’s like being a diplomat, or the Queen.”
On her 1997 album Impossible Princess, pop royalty went rogue. Minogue simmers with rage, thrashing at the limits of torture and tenderness in a dark tango with the frenetic club music of the day. With help from a slate of buzzy producers, her unvarnished songwriting tangles with underground styles including pulverizing breakbeat and drum’n’bass, throbbing techno and ambient rave, as well as joyous jangle pop. If Minogue’s earlier music had been seen as a universal opiate, this was a mischievous abdication of civic duty.
Minogue considered the record a personal triumph. “I had people controlling me for years,” she told New Idea at the time. “Now I am reveling in the fact that I have control, I take responsibility for my decisions and I live and die by them.” But Impossible Princess was troubled by a messy rollout, label mismanagement, and some stale collaborations, making it more complicated than a straightforward artistic win. She would never make a record like it again.
Born in Melbourne, Kylie Minogue started acting professionally at age 8 in a period drama called The Sullivans. After a series of roles in her teens, she became a star in the UK and Australia thanks to a role on the sunny soap opera Neighbours, in which she played a tough-talking mechanic named Charlene. Within a year, Minogue became known simply as “Kylie” to an entire continent and was whooshing down the soap actress to pop star pipeline. She signed to PWL, the London-based label that was home to Stock Aitken Waterman (SAW), a British production trio that had helped to define ’80s Hi-NRG disco, crafting landmark singles for Dead or Alive, Divine, and Hazell Dean. SAW were the architects of Minogue’s sparkling early sound, powered by her winsome, youthful image and dance-pop that snapped like a rubber band. “They told me what to sing, what clothes to wear, and how to look in my photographs,” Minogue later said of PWL. She likened the experience to being “knee-deep in concrete.”
After four albums with PWL, Minogue signed to the independent dance label Deconstruction in 1993, favoring the small London imprint over offers from EMI and A&M for the creative freedom it offered. The promise turned out to be bluster. Her first release for the label, 1994’s Kylie Minogue, was meticulously A&R’d. That album boasts one of her best songs in the iridescent “Confide in Me” and some nice post-Erotica pop-house, but had plenty of missed opportunities too. A exhilarating Pet Shop Boys demo, “Falling,” was remixed into an elegant wisp (Minogue liked that decision; it sounded like Mr. Fingers, whom she adored). The label also nixed a Prince duet Minogue had been planning (Minogue did not like that decision). Deconstruction “had no idea what they wanted, apart from being different from the SAW stuff,” said Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne, who worked on two unreleased tracks for the record. Minogue later called it “a musical bridge over troubled waters”—one she had to “endure” to get to Impossible Princess.
Outside of music, Minogue’s three-year relationship with INXS’ Michael Hutchence had, she said, taken her “blinkers off” to a wider cultural world. She was a fan of dance labels like Mo’Wax and Source Lab, went clubbing at Aphex Twin’s legendary party Rephresh, and was listening to Tricky, Daft Punk, Massive Attack, and Beck. After what she described as a “Hollywood faux pas” in the 1994 turkey Street Fighter, she starred in a Sam Taylor-Wood art film, Misfit, lip-syncing to the last known recording of a castrato from 1904. In 1995, she duetted with Nick Cave on the murder ballad “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” singing from the perspective of a slain virgin. Performing the song on Top of the Pops with Cave, Minogue wore a dress from Alexander McQueen’s incendiary 1995 collection Highland Rape. She looked like a Pre-Raphaelite heroine ready to be reborn.
Minogue’s boyfriend at the time was Stéphane Sednaoui, a French-born artist and director who helped to define the scrappy, surreal aesthetic of post-grunge MTV with music videos like Smashing Pumpkins’ “Today,” Fiona Apple’s “Sleep to Dream,” and Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic.” To Minogue, Sednaoui represented freedom—and the kaleidoscopic escapes depicted in his music videos seemed like welcome relief from the paparazzi hounding her in London, where she had lived since 1990. The pair embarked on a series of trips to Australia, Japan, South Korea, and piled into a muscle car for a month-long road trip across the U.S. Minogue snapped photos on her Contax camera. She began writing in her notebook, and found that she had much to say.
Cave had passed Minogue a book by the British punk poet Billy Childish titled Poems to Break the Harts of Impossible Princesses, a collection which grapples with generational trauma and finding one’s place in a broken world. She brought the book along to an early meeting with Brothers in Rhythm, a British production outfit who had collaborated with Janet Jackson and Pet Shop Boys. Inspired by Childish’s writing, they began working on a song called “Dreams.” Here, too, Minogue asked what if? But for the first time, the target was her own desires, rather than canny twists on the pop playbook. “To taste every moment and try everything/To be hailed as a hero, branded a fool/Believe in the sacred and break every rule,” she sang, over lushly orchestrated trip-hop. “These are the dreams of an impossible princess.” Delivered with the sincerity of a fairy tale, Minogue’s earnest message of spiritual clarity is unexpectedly moving. On a 2022 episode of the This Is Disco podcast, Brothers in Rhythm’s Steve Anderson recalled his mindset after the session: “We have to scrap everything we’ve been doing [...] We have to create this blanket of safety to let her experiment, and we have to help her make the record that she wants to make.”
To record Impossible Princess, Minogue traveled with Brothers in Rhythm to Real World, a bucolic residential studio owned by Peter Gabriel. Over a weeks-long stay, the boundary between her life and creative process began to dissolve. She lived in a small house opposite the studio, working on demos in a glorified closet behind a maintenance room. “I was quite obsessed by my album,” she told Australia’s Feast Magazine. “It [was] like [an] ache that every now and then is really obvious. Which makes it sound like a bad thing, but it wasn’t.”
The resulting album is Minogue’s umwelt—her individual sensory world—made real, propelled by vibrant perceptions and impressions that are, at times, delivered with ferocity. “Too Far” is a phantasmagoria of frenetic drum ’n’ bass, breakbeat, sawing violins, buzzing bees, and layered pleas and screams. In the verses, Minogue can barely keep up with her thoughts, as if she’s frantically trying to capture the realization that every painful ending can be a wonderful new beginning. “‘Too Far’... is as psychotic as I’ve been,” she said in a 1997 interview with The Big Issue. It was the end of a relationship, and she was angry and hurt. “I went for a walk to the end of the street and into a cafe, and wrote it all down to get it off my chest. I got the moment by the throat by putting it all on paper.” Ten minutes later, the song was done. “Some of my favorite songs weren’t changed [after writing],” she said of the album. “No going back and rearranging. Just subconscious scrawl that formed itself, and I found those ones really pleasing.”
Minogue paired her raw automatic writing with vocals that shapeshifted to its moods. On the 140-BPM techno heater “Drunk,” she dances with oblivion, sounding wrecked over menacing strings. “Time and space and hurt and tears are not enough,” she slurs, bleeding into the next bar, before an accelerating beat brings an epiphany. On the industrial-dance whiplash of “Limbo,” co-produced by Soft Cell’s Dave Ball, she tries out jazzy impressionism over synths that rev and swerve. She shifts into unexpected registers—stretching some syllables, and cramming others into spaces where there’s only room for one: I’m HUUUUUURTing!/Helpmeout.
The album Minogue delivered to Deconstruction was quite different from the one we hear today. The label informed her there was no lead single, and cut fascinating experiments including the psychedelic trip-hop of “You’re the One,” the smoky jazz of “Stay This Way,” and a nine-minute interplanetary rave ballad titled “Take Me With You.” Minogue was paired with Manic Street Preachers, scuzzy glam rockers turned UK rock radio mainstays, in an attempt to get a hit. The trio rounded out the tracklist with “I Don’t Need Anyone” and “Some Kind of Bliss,” brightly gleaming Britpop moments that already felt dated by 1997, a year when even the subgenre’s architects like Blur were turning to alt-rock. The songs were an ill fit for the album, but, in a textbook bait and switch, “Some Kind of Bliss” was chosen as Impossible Princess’ lead single against the wishes of Minogue, who wanted “Limbo.” “Some Kind of Bliss” reached No. 22 on the UK charts, her lowest-charting single to date.
The British press called Minogue’s new musical direction “Indie Kylie,” a term which probably had more to do with the singer working with the Manics and her new cropped hairdo. But it cast a broader sense of suspicion over Minogue, as if she was masquerading for Cool Britannia points. In fact, Minogue’s music had never hewed so closely to the sounds dominating mainstream pop, particularly in the UK, where the charts are historically quicker to embrace the club. Nevertheless, the album was Minogue’s biggest commercial failure. Originally scheduled for September, it was hastily repackaged with the title Kylie Minogue following the death of Princess Diana in August—which made it, oddly, Minogue’s second consecutive self-titled album—and trickled into stores around the world that fall, before finally making its way to Australia in January 1998 and the UK in March. It stalled at No. 4 in Minogue’s home country and at No. 10 in the UK, but has since become a fan favorite: A 2022 vinyl reissue restored the album’s original title and charted higher in both countries.
Minogue’s effervescent voice was a perfect vehicle for PWL-era pop, but audiences and critics were unused to hearing darker themes delivered in a light lyric soprano—her register read as bubblegum. A Sydney Morning Herald review of Impossible Princess noted the lack of “guts in her voice,” and The Guardian said, of one track, that “it could be any breathy vamp singing it.” NME’s pan of Impossible Princess envisioned Minogue “singing into her hairbrush in front of her bedroom mirror, hamming up proceedings without anything approaching conviction.”
The world didn’t seem to know what to do with a cirrous voice singing about serious things. Minogue’s high-femme take on ennui had little similarity to Madonna’s late-’90s Earth Mother reincarnation, and even less in common with the grit and gristle of Grammy favorites like Alanis Morissette or Sheryl Crow. Minogue emphasized her comfort with higher registers on Impossible Princess’ most intimate songs like “Breathe,” an isolation chamber of airy subtlety, and “Say Hey,” a minimal techno trip cocooned in the purrs and sighs of self-pleasure. But the double standard ate at her. In 2020, she spoke of feeling like an imposter, asking rhetorically, “How are you being successful if they’re telling you that you can’t sing and your voice is not a valid voice?”
The notion of a pop star snatching the reins from label bigwigs to make a personal album is cliché. But Minogue’s late ’90s weren’t so much a matter of wresting control away from her bosses as working through their neglect. Deconstruction label head Pete Hadfield was unwell, and as a result the record company’s A&R department “hadn’t really been present for much of the album’s development,” wrote Minogue’s creative director William Baker in the 2002 book Kylie: La La La. “Creative control of the project was left with Kylie and Stéphane.” Minogue and Sednaoui were well-connected in the music world, but famous friends are no substitute for a seasoned A&R. A wider network of co-writers could have helped shape Minogue’s clunkier lyrics on songs like “Through the Years” and “Dreams”; additional producers might have opened the throttle on slight almost-anthems like “Cowboy Style” and the Japanese-edition bonus track “Tears.” The lack of support got to Minogue, who said in a 2000 interview with Rolling Stone Australia: “On some songs, lyrically it’s obvious to me now that I am saying, ‘I’m not waving. I am, in fact, drowning. Hello? Is there anybody there?’ At the time I felt like there was no one to help me.” A few months after the release of Impossible Princess, Deconstruction dropped her.
While Impossible Princess is Kylie Minogue at her most impish and spectacularly strange, it also offers insight into her private growing pains at a time when she felt abandoned by the music industry. Isolated and in a state of psychic turmoil, she threw off the burden of speaking for everyone and spoke only for herself. She is the girl who knows too much, who needs saving from herself. In its bracing honesty and crafty embrace of unexpected sounds, Impossible Princess shares a sibling bond with contemporaneous albums like Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope and Madonna’s Ray of Light, forming a trilogy of A-list experimental pop records in 1997-8 that addressed their artists’ fears, anxieties, and dreams. Minogue’s album is rather more scattered—fascinatingly so—but you can’t blame mainstream audiences for being reluctant to unpick a Gordian knot. Crucially, it has no euphoric floor-filler like “Together Again” or “Ray of Light,” moments of transcendence that drew pop fans to albums of wisdom and weight.
In her later music, Minogue avoided anything like Impossible Princess. She followed the record by signing to Parlophone and releasing 2000’s Light Years and 2001’s Fever, critical and commercial juggernauts that showcased Minogue at her dance-pop zenith. Understandably, she is no longer interested in creating music about her struggles. Not when civic duty beckons. In 2007, following a battle with cancer, Minogue released her tenth album, X, a collection of glossy electro-pop performed in structural outfits that resembled armor. Some wondered if she had considered bringing her private trauma into her music once again. “If I’d done an album of personal songs it’d be seen as Impossible Princess 2 and be equally critiqued,” she said. “I didn’t want every song to be about being ill. I wanted to do what I do.”


The urbano star’s third album pushes him beyond his comfort zone as a romantic reggaetonero—and abandons some of the qualities that once made him unique.

Nibiru

When you’re the biggest star on the internet, is there anywhere to go but down? Such was Ozuna’s dilemma as he headed into 2019. His first two LPs (2017’s Odisea and 2018’s Aura) sold more than half a million units each, and he had just been crowned YouTube’s most-viewed artist of 2018, featuring in four of the platform’s top 10 most-streamed videos of the year. He teased his third LP, Nibiru, three months after Aura’s release, and the excitement was palpable. But things didn’t exactly play out as planned.
Behind the scenes, the 27-year-old Dominican-Puerto Rican was being extorted over an “intimate” video from his teen years, which ended with his extortionist’s murder (Ozuna was never a suspect). He was nominated for a Latin Grammy for Best Urban Song, but lost out to an artist who isn’t even Latin. And after two years of releasing an album each August, he was still working on Aura’s followup through the fall. By the time Nibiru was released at the end of November, expectations had reached a fever pitch that would prove almost impossible to meet.
Nibiru is a self-described urbano record—that umbrella term that encompasses the reggaetón, trap, and R&B currently dominating the Spanish-language pop charts. Reggaetón is made for the dancefloor, fueled by a classic, irresistible riddim. And Latin trap can trace its roots back to Atlanta’s strip clubs, with basslines that ooze sex and sleaze. Ozuna typically occupies the space in between, a romantic reggaetonero who softens the edges of the traperos he often collaborates with. Tracks like “Se Preparó” and “Síguelo Bailando,” from his debut LP, crystallize this notion, conjuring a suave and sophisticated aesthetic imbued with both confidence and vulnerability. Nibiru extends him beyond this comfort zone, and in the process, loses some of what made him unique.
Named for a fictional planet where Ozuna makes his music before bringing it back down to earth, the LP hints at the scope of his ambition: He’s been beyond the clouds, searching for new territory after so thoroughly and quickly conquering YouTube. There are glimpses of that otherworldly talent on Nibiru. His agile flow en español shines on “Yo Tengo una Gata,” a kush-cloud duet with Panamanian reggaetonero Sech, with a simple synth melody that yowls with heartache. And “Baila Baila Baila” may be almost a year old, but it has endured as one of the biggest dance tracks of the year and reveals Ozuna’s mastery at writing hooks.
Much of the rest of Nibiru suffers from an identity crisis, and most of its hip-hop collaborations feel like regressions. “Eres Top,” which revisits Diddy’s early-aughts hit “I Need a Girl Part 2,” feels hollow, like DJ Snake slapped the reggaetón riddim on top of the original and called it a day. And “Patek” wastes some of the album’s strongest production on a tired post-Future trope of soothing heartache with expensive cars and watches, and features one of Snoop Dogg’s wackest verses of the decade, a category with intense competition. The Swae Lee-featuring “Sin Pensar” is a notable exception; Ozuna naturally assimilates into the Rae Sremmurd hook wizard’s MIDI-toned future pop&B, and their Auto-Tuned harmonies sound as natural as anything robotic ever could.
Ozuna’s growing pains were likely inevitable. It is entirely possible that the pressure to constantly churn out music led to some of Nibiru’s missteps. That this record could be considered “late,” coming just 15 months after 2018’s Aura, is evidence of the outsized expectations for a contemporary urbano star. Not exactly a triumphant return, the inconsistent Nibiru contains some of his best and worst work. It’s a record made by a massive talent who’s not quite sure what to do next. That it disappoints has as much to do with the promise of its creator as it does the quality of its contents.


Malmo-based group's second album is full of syrupy pop songs-- effortless vocals riding the crest of soft-focus synths and programmed drums.

Pet Grief

There's something about Swedish pop music that strikes me as clinical. Chalk it up to a relentless sense of perfectionism-- this is a country that not only produced "Dancing Queen" but also the exquisite engineering of Saab and the precision of Björn Borg's backhand. The dream pop of Malmo's Radio Dept. is cut from the same cloth. Their second album, Pet Grief, is stacked with syrupy pop songs, as Johan Duncanson's effortless vocals ride the crest of soft-focus synths and programmed drums. But too often, the songs come off like the sonic equivalent of IKEA furniture: highly functional, sleekly designed, and sterile.
That might sound harsh, but it doesn't mean that Pet Grief is lacking. Part of these songs' charm is their love affair with sounds from the 1980s and early 90s-- like a more ethereal, Quaalude-doped version of the Pet Shop Boys or New Order's energetic electro-pop. But the ingredients are there, from dancefloor beats and big piano chords to layers of majestic, string-aping synths. "Every Time", the album's catchiest song, even cops the flat, treble-drenched distortion of My Bloody Valentine's guitars, and Duncanson's half-whispered delivery decorates with a fragile and compulsive melody. Between the band's production choices and lovely (if understated) vocals, Pet Grief is built to be instantly pleasing and, as a result, sometimes smacks of déjá vu.
This lack of originality is echoed in Duncanson's musings on relationships, which are often trite to the point of unfeeling. On "Tell", for instance, he simply announces, "Betrayal is always sad". It would be an insufferable moment if his no-brainer observation wasn't packaged with easily loveable music. Elsewhere, his naïveté is more amusing. Concerning a girlfriend that has moved on, he takes comfort in knowing that her new boyfriend has "the worst taste in music," explaining, "If I didn't know this, I'd lose it." It's a line at once juvenile and touching, illustrating the little ways we negotiate pain.
The songs on Pet Grief are easy to fall in love with; the facile melodies and slick production eliminate any barriers to enjoyment. But the lack of challenge-- few surprises, scant diversity-- means you won't want to put the album on for repeat listens, even if you're never compelled to turn it off while it's playing. Radio Dept. could sacrifice a little polish for a few more rough edges.


Three years after they reached superstardom with The Heist, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis return with This Unruly Mess I’ve Made, a blend of juvenile joke raps, inquisitive woke raps, and diaristic contemplations of Macklemore’s life that attempts to prove they belong—that they’re not just white saviors trying to project their face onto the culture.

Macklemore / Ryan Lewis: This Unruly Mess I've Made

This Unruly Mess I've Made

"You got robbed," begins the most guilt-ridden apology of the 21st century. "I wanted you to win. You should have. It's weird and it sucks that I robbed you." The screencap seen 'round the world explains the duality of Ben Haggerty, aka Macklemore, whose unexpected mainstream appeal has enabled him and his music partner, Ryan Lewis, to rise to the top of the industry. At the 2014 Grammys, the duo’s The Heist had defeated Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city for the Best Rap Album Grammy, an upset that weighed on Macklemore’s conscience. He reached out to Lamar, screencapping the mea culpa for Instagram so everyone could see how just how hard he’d fallen on his sword.
Macklemore understood that the only people who thought The Heist was better or more important than good kid were Grammy voters and misguided white teenagers. But he also needed deeply for the world to know he understood. This same tension between humility and ego fueled his crossover smash hit "Same Love," which advocated for the very non-controversial idea that "being gay is okay" and made them unlikely spokesmen for easily digestible social justice. It also prompted criticisms that they weren’t ready to preach from the mount, and after a few years spent internalizing those criticisms, they’ve returned with This Unruly Mess I’ve Made, a blend of juvenile joke raps, inquisitive woke raps, and diaristic contemplations of Macklemore’s life that attempts to prove they belong—that they’re not just white saviors trying to project their face onto the culture.
"Music was intended to be that one thing that we could rely on to disrupt the norm," Macklemore said in a video announcing the album. "Start conversations and change the way that we think and we feel." When he released "White Privilege II," a sprawling monologue in which wonders if he’s an interloper and lectures about the literal definition of white supremacy, he didn’t just drop the mic and try to let the song speak for itself. Instead, he gave interviews about the song with non-white publications, and launched a website in which he and his collaborators—including Chicago singer Jamila Woods (who sung the hook on Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment’s "Sunday Candy"), community organizer Dustin Washington, activist Nikkita Oliver, and more—detailed its conception. There was a lot of effort to convince you he was taking the issue of white privilege very, very seriously. Call him the rap game Matt McGorry—the rare white pop star making political music with explicitly middlebrow outreach.
And make no mistake, Macklemore is taking a lot of issues very seriously. "Same Love" wasn’t complicated, but it put a human face on gay marriage that was able to connect with millions of Americans. Here, the clattering funk of "Kevin" reaches for a similar understanding about the prescription drug crisis, as the accessibility of opioids like Oxycontin has devastated low-income (and white) communities across the country. Macklemore is a former addict, and his invective about the parasitic sway of drug abuse ("We play Russian Roulette/ And try to find a life where we could be content/ ‘Cause for us, we're just trying to minimize the fear of being alive") carries the moral authority of lived experience. (In interviews, he’s said he also lapsed back into his addiction within the past few years, giving his words a different urgency.)
But Leon Bridges’ hook is too moralizing, and it has the maudlin feel of a song written to solve a problem. Macklemore has more appeal as the everyman—a normal guy who who just stumbled into all this pageantry. On the opener "Light Tunnels," he narrates a trip to an awards show: He feels desperately out of place in his town car and his tux, the industry’s eyes on him without his friends for support. ("I wish I had the homies with me here but nope/ Most of the artists I know don’t get invited to this show.") He waxes about how "they" want gossip, drama, for Kanye's rant "to go on longer." As he accepts an award (which may be the Grammy he robbed Kendrick of), he ponders how he’ll explain "this unruly mess I’ve made"—a slightly disingenuous "aw shucks" characterization of his career that nevertheless communicates some truth about the weight of his expectations.
"Buckshot," meanwhile, reflects on his days as a rebellious graffiti artist, featuring KRS-One and DJ Premier, and "St. Ides" is a tender travelogue of his days as a teenage alcoholic. On "Growing Up," Macklemore dictates a comprehensive list of cool-dad lessons for his newborn child ("Listen to your teachers, but cheat in calculus"; "Take your girl to the prom, but don’t get too drunk hanging out the limo.") His knowledge is slightly undermined when he recommends reading Langston Hughes’ A Raisin in the Sun (Langston Hughes did not write A Raisin in the Sun), but hey, nobody’s perfect.
He developed the big-tent struggle gospel sound of The Heist with Ryan Lewis after a decade spent as an underground rapper, and the formula hasn’t changed much here: There are still lots of choirs, dramatic string cues, and dewy pianos set to tug heart strings. Even a goofy song like "Dance Off" gets a swelling horror-movie organ intro before a big dancehall rhythm kicks in. It’s atypical backing music for a rap album, but Macklemore is kind of an atypical rapper. His cadence tends to fall between "impassioned slam poet" and "guy talking in your ear," and when he’s doing the latter, the lights dim on the production. "The Train" is set solely to piano and the sound of a train whizzing over the tracks, as he softly raps about how his growing responsibilities have pulled him away from his family. "St. Ides" is almost completely muted but for a pealing guitar riff. It sounds like the reference track was Buffalo Springfield’s "For What It’s Worth," or like, the Mountain Goats.
The hit here is "Downtown," which features three legitimate rap pioneers—Melle Mel, Kool Moe Dee, and Grandmaster Caz—and passionate vocal theatrics from Foxy Shazam’s Eric Nally. Macklemore’s verses are trivial—the opening verse details his attempt to purchase a Moped—but there’s an appealing breeziness to his low-stakes ribbing. The rap O.G.s aren’t given much to do, acting as a chanting Greek chorus and flexing in the video, but their presence gives the song the feeling of an event and allows Macklemore to show he knows and respects his history. (According to Kool Moe Dee, it was Big Daddy Kane who brokered the collaboration.) "Downtown" is a Broadway song, basically—rap for people who loved Hamilton. I hear it and imagine parades, streamers, the Super Bowl half-time show they will probably someday play.
Macklemore is also a skilled mimic. He presses hat to heart when Chance the Rapper is around, spits with cocksure nostalgia around KRS-One and DJ Premier, does budget OG Maco-flow trading lines with YG on "Bolo Tie." On album highlight "Need to Know," Chance delivers a thoughtful verse about the pitfalls of fame—being alienated from the white girls who "call me nigga at my show," feeling the pressure to strip the spirituality out of his music and "just leave the cool parts." (Meanwhile, Macklemore offers hashtag rap in the guise of self-awareness: "I only think about my worth, I only think about my come up/ Capitalism.") It’s the opposite of Chance’s stint on Kanye’s "Ultralight Beam," where he exclaimed "I’m just having fun with it!" But Chance isn’t here to have fun, because Macklemore is so granite-faced on the serious songs that his guest stars have no choice but to match his mood.
"Fun" is reserved for songs like "Dance Off" (in which Idris Elba challenges you to a dance off) or "Brad Pitt’s Cousin" (in which Macklemore boasts that "every white dude in America went to the barbershop: 'Give me the Macklemore haircut'"). That said, it isn’t always easy to tell when Macklemore is trying to be fun, or when we are having fun at his expense. "Let’s Eat" is presumably about our collective body image issues, but the jokiness prevents it from getting a foothold. Macklemore would not be the first rapper to alternate between goofiness and gravitas, but the gulf between sober analysis of Oxycontin abuse and white privilege, and the "DEEZ NUTS" jokes is just too wide. If he’s serious about wanting to "start conversations and change the way that we think and we feel," he needs to sound as comfortable serving wisdom as he does shooting Sandler-esque wisecracks.
The trumped-up portentousness of "White Privilege II" is still difficult to digest. It’s a messy explainer of his still-forming politics, a Facebook status come to life. His heart is in the right place, but it’s hard to justify on musical terms. He doesn’t deserve a free pass for being well-intentioned, of course. But "White Privilege II" is different from, say, Brad Paisley and LL Cool J’s "Accidental Racist," another race-focused song with its heart in the right place that nevertheless missed the mark because it made no attempt to examine its founding premises. ("If you don’t judge my gold chains, I’ll forget the iron chains" is not a fair trade.) Instead, Macklemore is laboring to show us, brick by awkwardly-rapped brick, how he laid the foundation of his new ideology. It isn’t a link to a Wikipedia page—it’s the whole article. As a song, it’s not great. As an endeavor, it’s hard to be snide about. His credibility regarding his intellectual growing pains is the most essential part of his music, even as it’s also the part that makes him seem doe-eyed and naive.
In other words: Do you want to argue that more public discussion of systemic power imbalances is a bad thing? More than one person I follow on Twitter expressed surprise that anyone needs white privilege explained to them, but Donald Trump has won three presidential primaries and counting, so maybe Macklemore has a better bead on the country than some are willing to admit. We can also dispense with the take that his motivation in writing songs like "White Privilege II" is cynical, because solemnly intoning about white supremacy is insistently anti-commercial, and not likely to endear him to radio markets that think Beyoncé hates the cops. It would have been much, much easier to record an album of "Thrift Shop" sequels; I’m sure at least one record executive suggested it.
Like Macklemore, This Unruly Mess I’ve Made is nowhere near as bad as its detractors would like it to be. It’s an occasionally inspiring, often corny rap album made for winning Grammy nominations and waking the hearts of the unwoken. The sum of this is sometimes appealing, though frustrating, if only because you’d like to imagine a world where Macklemore was not counted on to inject a dose of political consciousness into our daily proceedings. I’m thinking about Kendrick Lamar, and what he said months after Macklemore’s public apology. "Yeah, I think it was uncalled for," he opined. "But I think, for confirmation from the world, he probably felt like he had to put it out there, which he didn’t need to do... I don’t take nothin’ away from him anyway 'cause I know where his heart is at. He cool."


After releasing a haunting EP on Tri Angle as Ayshay, the busy multimedia artist returns with another EP featuring a very different, more beat-driven sound with tropical inflections.

Fatima Al Qadiri: Genre-Specific Xperience

Genre-Specific Xperience

About a month ago, Fatima Al Qadiri released an EP on Tri Angle called WARN-U under the name Ayshay, adding another line to her already crowded résumé. The moody tracks centered around the spectral chanting of traditional Islamic songs in Arabic (Al Qadiri was born in Senegal, raised in Kuwait during the Gulf War, and lives in Brooklyn now). Given the content of that EP, it makes sense that she chose to release Genre-Specific Xperience using a different name, and on a different label. GSX harnesses the eerie mysticism of WARN-U that sat nicely under Tri Angle's shrouded, echoey umbrella but channels it into a percussive, neo-global club sound driven by an unexpectedly sinister synthetic steel drum-- and with a more compelling result. It picks up nicely where L.A. mixmasters Nguzunguzu left off when they made a 12-minute "megamix" of WARN-U, pumping the EP's original three cuts full of skittery beats and bass.
This EP could stand on its own as a piece of music suited for dancing under the right combination of fog and lasers, but it remains connected to her aesthetic as a whole. GSX showcases Al Qadiri's ability to evoke, using sound only, the uncanny and seductive themes she dreams up and explores visually. So it makes sense that the release party for the EP took place at New York's New Museum, complete with a screening of corresponding videos created by a horde of collaborators. But you don't need videos to get a grip on Al Qadiri's haunting, pan-cultural visions. Looking at the tracklist before listening to the EP, you might figure the title "Hip Hop Spa" to be just a nifty and offhanded combination of words; listening to the bassy, new age-bending song, though, it's clear that Al Qadiri has thought about exactly what music might be played at a hip-hop spa, if such a thing existed (in fact, she should probably open one). "Vatican Vibes", the EP's centerpiece, is a degree more suggestive still, folding Gregorian chants into a thumping, futuristic synth-and-steel-drum backdrop. All five songs deliver on the slickly gaudy, pillar-laden poolside setup gracing the cover.
GSX can lean toward gimmickry, but Al Qadiri stays on the right side of that line throughout most of the EP's 23 minutes. The only place she misfires is on "Corpcore", a shrill, forgettable closer that was first released over a year ago. Perhaps it was tacked on as an afterthought because its visual counterpart was put together by newly high-profile video-installation artist Ryan Trecartin. Regardless, its predecessors are substantive and strong enough that it doesn't much detract from the project's overarching vision: otherworldly, synthetic amalgams of dance sub-genres that sound like they've been sent from the future. Al Qadiri is a jack-of-all-trades-- she writes a well-informed column on global music, DJs, and exhibits her visual art in galleries around the world-- but GSX gives her original solo music a solid push to the forefront of her broad output.


The singer-producer explodes her sound with a feverish blend of shoegaze and bedroom pop.

Census Designated

On Frailty, Jane Remover was a voyager sculpting her own cosmos from her childhood bedroom. A frenetic combo of emo, EDM, and idyllic video game tones, the singer-producer’s 2021 debut rendered a cyber otherworld with ultra-blue fjords and bleach-white skies. Within her insular online music scene, it soon became a touchstone. Instead of capitalizing right away, she took some time to hibernate and touch grass, embarking on a cross-country road trip. She said goodbye to the freaky mashup microgenre she dreamt up under an alter ego. She also came out as a trans woman, announcing the name Jane Remover with the release of two songs: the smoky, whimpering ballad “Cage Girl” and “Royal Blue Walls,” which starts wispy and escalates into a delicate squall that felt less digitized than her past work. On her new album, Census Designated, Jane ushers in another evolution of this shoegaze blueprint.
Census Designated hits like a flash flood, following moments of dreamy calm with clattering downpours. It’s a feverish mutation of shoegaze and bedroom pop, anchored by her skills as a producer for sculpting layers that sparkle and mutate. Jane hangs in the storm like an eager specter. Instead of bitcrushing her voice or sampling stock howls like she did on Teen Week, she squeezes more from her own resources to unlock a newly expressive style. The way she weaves lattices of vocal clips and skitters between inflections—breathy sighs, elegant swoons, and desperate, ravenous screams that make her sound possessed—is intoxicating. Her curlicued melodies mirror the lyrical unease and lend baroque detail to songs like “Idling Somewhere” and “Lips.”
The weather patterns on Census Designated move in distinct acts and peak with glorious deus ex sonica noise-drops. Where Frailty’s dense, shiny synths could feel like drowning in pixels, these songs are scratchier and serrated: They crush you slowly and gently. Fuse yeule’s electro-acoustic ballads, Slowdive’s bright crescendos, and the febrile anticipation of Ethel Cain’s “Ptolemaea,” and you get a song like “Video,” which strums for six minutes and then erupts with a lung-tearing scream. “Lips” begins as a willowy whisper of indie balladry. As Jane sings about being someone’s nervous wreck, a semi-acoustic loop tuned like echoing chimes shimmers against a rhythm guitar that churns below the surface. Sure enough, everything warps into an infrared, rock nightmare. Jane’s voice claws through the smoke like a ghostly dagger—imagine My Bloody Valentine commissioned to soundtrack Fatal Attraction. “Take a step back boy/I’m so afraid,” she warns. “You want crazy/I’ll give you insane.”
Census Designated’s long, mountainous unfurling means that sometimes the songs stretch out for too long, and they aren’t stuffed with as much delicious ear candy as on Frailty. But the effect is immersive. As with her vocals, Jane takes a beatmaker’s approach to rock arrangements, sending filtered guitars, computerized burbles, and processed vocal shards flying in and out of focus. When dissonant drones shroud the sparse winter horizon of “Contingency Song,” you can almost feel the chill of its malign fog. The theatrics hit the ceiling on the title track. Engulfed in inferno-rock, Jane sketches a map of mindstates and geographic coordinates (a Marriott, NYC, the top of a mezzanine). She’s worried she’s being lied to and exploited for her age, yet she also delights in the idea of being “young blood, fresh meat.” At the end, a Puce Mary-esque blitz of static and spliced screams sounds like Jane’s being sucked into a sinkhole.
Having experimented with drum n’ bass, ambient, glitch rap, and Jersey club euphoria, why would she choose fiery avant-rock as a primary vehicle? More than any other style, these slow-then-sudden buildups convey the vertiginous emotions she sings about. For every deafening blast, there’s a quiet moment to sober up. When the hurricane clears, Jane turns soft and apologetic, compressing herself to fit in someone’s pocket on highlight “Always Have Always Will.” The intro weaves a single long ahhh that extends like an infinity mirror. Like all the other songs, its five-minute ascent peaks with a crash of fuzz, but this one feels more blissed-out than baleful. As the noise shreds Jane’s voice into glinting husks, she keeps repeating one request: “Just promise you’ll wait for me?” This music represents a decisive step away from the internet-addled hyperactivity of her early work, and Census Designated could be deployed as a dopamine detox regimen, its patiently unraveling compositions an offramp for kids hopelessly addicted to two-minute TikTok hits. It’s also the most poignant and piercing music Jane has made yet: the sound of an artist finally given the tools to realize her ever-expanding vision.


Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak’s faithful and loving ode to ’70s R&B has a distinctly light touch, which works both for and against the project.

Bruno Mars / Anderson .Paak / Silk Sonic: An Evening With Silk Sonic

An Evening With Silk Sonic

After fiddling with the R&B of the 1980s and ’90s to great commercial success on 2016’s 24K Magic, Bruno Mars has assigned himself a more challenging project: Silk Sonic, a fidelity-obsessed act in which he and onetime tourmate Anderson .Paak recreate the rhythm and blues of the ’70s. The duo sought out particular drum skins to better replicate the sounds of the studio during the heyday of Gamble and Huff, when those songwriter-producers polished soul music to an extravagant sheen. With period-specific instrumentation in place, the exuberant pop hitmaker and the acclaimed rapper-singer-drummer with underground cachet recorded as their ancestors did, with just one or two mics for the entire room of musicians. As a gesture of commitment, Paak got his chest tattooed with portraits of Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, and Prince. They even enlisted Bootsy Collins to host their lean game of musical I Spy: “Fellas, I hope you got something in your cup,” the beloved bassist from Parliament-Funkadelic announces on the intro. Trap drums freshened up 24K Magic but there’s nothing comparable on An Evening With Silk Sonic, a loving yet slight act of nerd-dom.
After one listen, my scorecard noted the crystalline guitar glissando best associated with Motown session musician Melvin “Wah Wah Watson” Ragin (see: Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You” or Ragin’s own “Goo Goo Wah Wah”), the siren-like ARP synth from Kool and the Gang’s “Summer Madness,” a whiff of the chorus from the Ohio Players’ “Fire,” and the title of Rick James and Teena Marie’s magisterial “Fire and Desire” (released in 1981, but close enough). Other critics will surely pin down allusions of their own. For a certain listener, this is half the fun: An Evening With Silk Sonic is an opportunity to prove your adoration and knowledge. For some younger listeners, this may be their first full-length engagement with one of the richest chapters in music history. Others will process this as simply a good time. But any significant level of investment poses the question: When artists invoke music as beloved as Motown and Philly soul, how can anything they create measure up?
One way to dodge the smack of the yardstick is with a joke, and An Evening With Silk Sonic does not want for winking silliness. If anything, Mars and Paak are hamming it up harder on this collaboration than on past records. The internet received the clip of Mars belting out “this bitch,” from the heartbroken lament “Smokin Out the Window,” and did the work of a crackjack marketing team by turning it into a meme. (For my money, that song’s funniest line reading is Paak’s despondent yet fluttering “I wanna die.”) The videos are pure burlesque. This is a cartoon revival of a well-worn aesthetic, and when so many of the creative decisions resist being taken seriously, any criticism makes you sound like a killjoy.
As many have pointed out, the classic means of Motown production as laid out by founder Berry Gordy were as regimented as the assembly lines in nearby Detroit auto plants. In his classic genre study The Death of Rhythm and Blues, Nelson George wrote that “Motown promoted Gordy as an affirmative, unthreatening symbol of black capitalism…Gordy clearly stated that his goal was to buy into mainstream standards.” To ensure the label’s artists passed inspection, Motown instructed its stars to cut a smooth figure. As quoted in Kelefa Sanneh’s recent book Major Labels, Maxine Powell, the head instructor at the label’s charm school, told her pupils to “be natural, be poised, and be positive.” There’s no chance Ms. Powell would have condoned Silk Sonic dropping the b-word, but it’s still possible to draw a line from Motown’s artifice to the contrived jokes and slickness of An Evening With Silk Sonic. These songs are more “explicit,” but they’re fundamentally safe. Motown’s artists worked hard to cross over; for years now Mars has operated from the epicenter of pop music, not the margins.
Still, some of the slicker numbers on the project work well: “Leave the Door Open,” “After Last Night,” and “Smokin Out the Window” are among the highlights, slathering elevated technique—all those key changes—with satisfying molten cheese. In the first verse of “After Last Night,” after Thundercat’s tender ooos place the sonic equivalent of a rose-colored scarf over a bedside lamp, Paak explains that one especially zesty sexual encounter has him throwing out his phone and deading his player tendencies. He opens the second verse singing, “If I still had my phone I’d call every girl I know/And tell them goodbye.” It’s an amusing detail made sweeter by Mars’ harmonies on the last syllable. This splashy interplay between male vocalists is perhaps the record’s strongest selling point: There are virtually no male R&B vocal groups of note these days, though the power of layered harmonies is the catalyst for much of the genre’s finest records, most notably the entire body of work of Marvin Gaye.
The best song, “Put on a Smile,” is also the cause of the most frustration. Co-written by the singularly talented Babyface, the album’s big ballad digs as deep emotionally as Mars and Paak are willing to go on a project that keeps the stakes low by choosing humor over sincerity at just about every turn. Collins’ rhyming intro mentions “begging in the rain,” and the subject matter doesn’t stray far from the Temptations’ “I Wish It Would Rain” or the Miracles’ “The Tracks of My Tears,” perfect songs about trying to mask your busted heart. Structurally, “Put on a Smile” teases massive catharsis with its first chorus that it smartly holds back until the second refrain, when the drums finally crescendo and Mars leaps to the top of his falsetto. The song is played entirely straight, as the level of emotion calls for. And it is immediately followed by an empty ode to partying in Vegas called “777.” Blow the dice, papa needs a new foreign, etc. It’s soulless.
Both artists are capable of more. Listen to Mars’ version of Adele’s “All I Ask”—don’t watch it, because he and his band are dressed like Halloween versions of hypebeasts and I don’t want you distracted—he has grit in his voice, total sincerity that doesn’t let up. It’s his most emotional, unvarnished recording. And “Wngs,” from Anderson .Paak’s collab album with Knxwledge, not only anticipates but nails the Silk Sonic concept, despite Paak singing over a simple beat. “Baby, get your shit together, we hittin’ the town/It’s been a long time since we drank all night and I wanna see that ass move around,” Paak sings, as rude and romantic and funny a lyric as he’s ever written. The sense of familiarity baked into the invitation is exactly the mood of Silk Sonic; what is this supposed to be if not the album of lovable carousing uncles? Depth doesn’t have to mean sad—on “Wngs,” it means lived-in, novelistic detail.
But An Evening With Silk Sonic was only meant to be a hyper-detailed costume party. As Paak explained to Rolling Stone, Mars told him, “We’re making music to make women feel good and make people dance, and that’s it.” He didn’t lie. At eight songs plus an intro, it’s the shortest full-length project either artist has released. Teased since March of this year, leading to a promotional cycle that’s lasted nearly nine months, it arrives burdened with more hype and attention than its songs should have been asked to bear. Could they have made a weirder, more surprising version of this record? Absolutely. But as they’ve insisted from the start, it’s not that deep.

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Three years after the genre-shattering, scene-defining debut Glass Swords, the inimitable Glaswegian producer Rustie returns with his second, diverse full-length. Danny Brown, Redinho, and others guest.

Green Language

Just four minutes into Rustie's Green Language, some 20 seconds before the close of the second song, there's a brief fade-out that's more like a fake-out. By this point, the album has blown through more than ten percent of its running time with what is essentially a pair of introductions. The opening "Workship" offers two minutes of gleaming synthesizers streaming chemtrails of white noise; vast and cinematic, it suggests a three-way fusion of John Williams, M83, and Oneohtrix Point Never. Then, "A Glimpse" materializes out of a mist of birdsong and running water, as carousel-like arpeggios accelerate and a sawtooth synth lead goes supernova. It's even more widescreen than the opener, but it still feels like a scene-setter rather than the main attraction.
That what makes what happens next feel so sneaky. The song fades out, and after near silence and another smattering of birdsong, there's a rumble like a gathering storm played back on fast-forward. And then, BOOM: an actual electric guitar! Shredding! It couldn't sound further from the Glasgow producer's wheelhouse, which is to say that it would be hard to think of a move more in line with his trickster's M.O. But before you can say, "I hear you're throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real; you want to make a Van Halen record," the joke, if that's what it is, is over. "A Glimpse" is presumably just that—a fleeting peek at a much stranger and more audacious record than Green Language ultimately turns out to be.
It's not entirely unsuccessful, not by any means; with some tweaks it could've been a great album. The Glasgow producer's chops have never sounded punchier, his synths never shinier or more serrated. Following his cock-rock feint, "Raptor" soars like a Kevlar-plated phoenix, synthesizer glissandi strafing all over the damn place, rat-a-tat 808 snares firing like a rivet gun. The light it throws off is dazzling; listen back to Glass Swords and it suddenly sounds practically lo-fi in comparison. The sheer amount of sonic information he packs in is almost overwhelming: is that the sound of an alarm clock in the background, or just some kind of residual tinnitus ring from all those harmonics being piled on top of one another? And what's up with the angel cooing above it all?
When Glass Swords came out, Rustie's approach was so unfamiliar that the music was discussed primarily in terms of its impact—"maximalism," a term also applied to his peer Hudson Mohawke—and its texture. He helped us out with titles like "Ice Tunnels" and "Crystal Echo", not to mention those dazzling quartz obelisks on the cover—imagery that felt like a DMT-inspired mission to unlock the secrets of synaesthesia once and for all. But things are different now. The kinds of sounds he privileged on his debut album—'80s-inspired slap bass, hyperkinetic electro-funk, the lysergic riffs on Southern hip-hop that he termed "aquacrunk"—have become popularized and re-naturalized. That last bit has become particularly true as the dubstep scene, the primary context in which Rustie was once considered, has cratered, its former practitioners gone looking for other styles to adapt or colonize.
Foremost among those is "trap"; Rustie's dalliances with the form make him look more like a follower than a leader. Case in point: "Attak", a blistering number featuring the Detroit rapper Danny Brown. The tune's not without its charms, especially a synth lead that interpolates an echo of Duran Duran's "Save a Prayer" between Brown's marble-mouthed spray—and those machine-gun snares are a nice touch. But it feels like he's reaching for a hit, or at least a festival anthem, and the same could be said of "Up Down", featuring the grime rapper D Double E from Newham Generals, although at least the latter's wormhole bass and gamma-ray high-end are more in keeping with Rustie's usual methods.
The main issue with Green Language is that it feels scattered. "He Hate Me", featuring Gorgeous Children, is a fuzzy cloud-rap track with a beat that sounds like Rustie's mashing his fist on a home organ; after D Double E and Danny Brown's double-barreled bellows, the rappers' whispery voices fall flat, and the wind goes out of the album's sails. With "Velcro" we're suddenly plunged into a bewildering collision of Nintendo, Daft Punk, and trap; "Lost", featuring Numbers signee Redinho, is a talkbox-revival jam that aims for Zapp but hits closer to Chromeo.
Just as the album begins with a succession of intros, as though opening up a set of Russian nesting dolls, it goes out with a series of alternate endings. The ecstatic R&B of "Dream On" would have been an excellent place to finish, but "Lets Spiral", with its helicopter-rotor hi-hats and helium arpeggios, is essentially a companion piece to "A Glimpse", and the final song, "Green Language", is just 1:54 of underwater Windham Hill riffing laced, once again, with running water and birdsong. There's nothing wrong with Rustie's ambient abstractions; they may be structurally slight, but they pack a surprisingly powerful emotional wallop. Ultimately, though, you get the sense that he can't decide between two competing visions: that of the festival-anthem trap lord, and the new age cosmonaut. The battle that ensues is exhilarating and frustrating in equal measure: as a producer, Rustie's skills are in top form. But instead of the epic hero he wants to be, he's tilting at glass windmills.


Alongside producer Gil Norton, whose work defined commercial alt-rock, the Leeds hardcore band reanimates the sound of 1995 with eerie accuracy.

27 Miles Underwater

27 Miles Underwater is the most 1995 rock album of 2020, sounding and feeling like a DGC million-dollar advance. The Leeds band’s influences are almost exclusively drawn from the credibility void between Nevermind and Is This It, and they treat ’90s alt-rock with the reverence usually afforded to classic rock. It makes sense: The last time I listened to my local alternative station, they were playing “Get Lucky,” and any song that sounded remotely like Higher Power was about as old as frontman Jimmy Wizard—his age is one year for every mile underwater in the album title. Even the cover’s grungy, grey-green-orange color scheme is a period piece, recalling countless Buzz Bin casualties clogging Sam Goody racks.
2017’s Soul Structure was tuneful enough to suggest Wizard’s yelp could travel from dingy bars to Midwest fairgrounds with the right guidance, and Higher Power is the latest post-hardcore act to get called up to Roadrunner, which boasts an unparalleled track record helping heavy guitar bands achieve the more modern, modest definition of success—Turnstile, Creeper and Code Orange all worked their way up from raw, uncommercial beginnings to the bigger fonts on festival posters topped by their labelmates Korn and Slipknot. Higher Power is by far the most accessible of the bunch, which likely explains why they called on UK vet Gil Norton for production rather than Roadrunner Loudness War-mongers Will Yip or Ross Robinson; Norton practically invented the sound of commercial alt-rock on the Pixies’ post-Albini albums, perfected it on Foo Fighters’ The Colour and the Shape and was behind the boards when Jimmy Eat World, Counting Crows, Dashboard Confessional, and Catherine Wheel wanted to make their slickest, sharpest albums.
27 Miles Underwater’s resulting games of “spot the riff” are fun for all ages—depending on whether you got your Carhartt hoodie from Goodwill or the WIP holiday sale, “Seamless” might variously recall Jane’s Addiction, Glassjaw or a more radio-friendly Turnstile. As with Deftones when they first started to experiment with these funny little things called “melodies,” Higher Power link atonal riffs to polished choruses with transitions so jarring they become hooks on their own. As with many of their peers, Higher Power’s idea of psychedelia is sourced from the woozier moments of Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, and Hum, and they’re maybe the only one that remembers those bands could groove, too. While nearly every single part of a Higher Power song has an identifiable source, they cycle through ideas quick enough to avoid any charges of grand larceny even when they get caught stealing.
But ultimately, Higher Power’s Case Logic binders give more insight into their lives than their lyrics book. Wizard’s purview extends to what he calls “relationships and issues,” gut-level concerns that keep Higher Power grounded in hardcore but denies 27 Miles Underwater a perspective to match its grand sonic ambitions, something as distinctive as Matt Talbot’s sci-fi affinities, Page Hamilton’s stoicism or Chino Moreno’s bloodthirst. This isn’t helped by the tracklist, which shares titles with actual Pantera, Helmet and Deftones songs. The Headbanger’s Ball cosplay is less of a concern if Higher Power is your idea of fun, but there's not much to linger on here, and no matter how you look at it, once you break the surface of 27 Miles Underwater, it ain’t that deep.


This project has ridden a wave of online buzz thanks in part to a deliberately murky backstory, but the music, a kind of spectral R&B, transcends hype.

House of Balloons

Less than two months ago, few of us had ever heard of the Weeknd. Then, as soon as the creepy R&B tracks from this free mixtape began to circulate, the hype engine revved up. There was the Drake cosign, the album art that looked like Spiritualized crossed with Tumblr art-porn, the missing vowel, the stylish samples, and the project's creators hiding in the shadows. You can't buy buzz like this, and the Weeknd's quick rise to Internet fame, both in indie circles and in parts of the mainstream, raised fascinating questions about the blurrier-than-ever lines between those two audiences and the underground's newfound embrace of R&B. (see also: Frank Ocean, Tri Angle Records, How to Dress Well.)
These are very interesting topics that have already spawned some good thinkpieces around the web, but set all that aside for a moment and you're still left with an album, same as always. And this album happens to be very good. The work of Toronto singer Abel Tesfaye and producers Doc McKinney and Illangelo (Drake producer Noah "40" Shebib, is not, as has been reported, involved in the project), House of Balloons is a remarkably confident, often troubling debut that excels at both forward-thinking genre-smearing and good old-fashioned songcraft. Take for starters the track "What You Need": with Burial-style vocal samples, techno scrape, and a sticky pop chorus, it's far from your average R&B number.
Of course, the Weeknd are not without forebears-- producers from Rodney Jerkins to Static Major and recently The-Dream have been pushing the sonic boundaries of R&B for some time now. Where the Weeknd differ, though, is that their source material pulls from the leftfield (the title track re-purposes Siouxsie and the Banshee's "Happy House", two songs here ride mutated Beach House samples), and their approach is more about building vibe and atmosphere. They're great at rich, woozy compositions that send Tesfaye's aching falsetto through the mix. An example is "The Morning", which feels at first like a spacey synth instrumental before a stuttering digital drumbeat announces this massive, swaying chorus that enters your brain and refuses to leave.
The group's penchant for druggy atmospherics is mirrored in their lyrical content, which is overtly sexual, narcotics-focused, and occasionally downright frightening. Debauchery is obviously nothing new in R&B, but this takes it a step further-- the drugs are harder, the come-ons feel predatory and lecherous, and the general feeling is self-hating rather than celebratory. On opener "High for This", Tesfaye handholds a partner through some strange sex act, singing, "Trust me, girl, you wanna be high for this." "Glass Table Girls" is pretty clearly about doing coke. Because we don't know these guys, it's hard to say whether these are real-life tales or imaginative storytelling-- you want to think the latter, but ultimately the anonymity makes it seem more disturbing.
What makes this whole thing work in an album context is that all the thematic and sonic pieces fit together-- these weird, morning-after tales of lust, hurt, and over-indulgence ("Bring the drugs, baby, I can bring my pain," goes one refrain) are matched by this incredibly lush, downcast music. It's hard to think of a record since probably the xx's debut (definitely a touchstone here) that so fully embodies such a specific nocturnal quality. And even though the image of nightlife painted by the Weeknd isn't a place you'd ever want to live, it's one that's frankly very hard to stop listening to.


The latest album from the Big Thief singer evokes a singular, solitary chill. With a great imagination for melody, Lenker conjures a world of mingled trauma and love.

abysskiss

Adrianne Lenker dies within two minutes of her solo record abysskiss. It is not a dramatic passing. Over feather-light fingerpicking, she simply sings, “See my death become a trail/And the trail leads to a flower.” Her voice is sweet, the tone muted, nothing but her breath and guitar strings. The transformation sounds peaceful, maybe even a relief, a dispersing of stored energies.
Lenker recorded abysskiss quickly, in about a week, and the entire album has this exhaled quality. It doesn’t feel worked over, or rushed—it feels focused and unconcerned with your comprehension. The palette is muted and spare, exactly one electric guitar chugging away quietly on one song (“out of your mind.”) The rest of the album seems to be rustling toward some private horizon, a gleam in its eye. You don’t listen to it so much as follow it, the way you might track a wild animal that showed up in your yard. It is pastoral music, but not a barefoot-in-a-field way; more of a don’t-eat-these-berries sort of way, a world of mystery and menace whose secrets will always be held from us.
As the leader of Big Thief and on her own, Lenker writes powerfully about secrets of all kinds. The shared secrets of intimacy, the buried secrets of family, the impenetrable secrets of nature—they all swirl like sediment in a wine glass. abysskiss thrums quietly with the unease of these secrets, of mingled trauma and love. “Hold me in your heat” she whispers on “terminal paradise”—an animal plea, a child’s plea. On “out of your mind,” she sings, “My love pulls the trigger on you,” and on “10 miles” she kisses a lover “very hard and wild.” Her path is a prickly one, somewhere between savage and tender.
You don’t hear the savagery at first. It takes several listens before the delicate fingerpicking and the whisper of her voice turns dark. Her lyrics accrete alarming imagery in quick clumps, in the “little red flower on your wrist” on “blue and red horses,” or the “sharp glass loosing of your best friend” on “what can you say.” The characters in her songs always seem one wrong step away from leaking blood or spilling someone else’s. The more time you spend cocking an ear to her music, the more foreboding her world seems, the more likely it will end in pain.
This world is not that far removed from her work in Big Thief, but there is a solitary chill here that isn’t only or entirely because this is her solo work. Her songs for Big Thief bustle with characters, people with places and names and specific histories. She was a person rooted in and tethered to society, tweaking and exploring its bonds with her writing but still embedded within it. abysskiss is a taste of what Lenker’s imagination can do when it is set free down its own dreamy paths, away from these shared histories. There are almost no names here, just a world of beauty and terror, of worms dropped into beaks, horse tails flicking away flies. She is like Annie Dillard in her 1974 Pulitzer Prize–winning book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a dreamy soul wandering alone in nature and marveling at the brutality and the grace she finds there.
The album is also a quiet showcase for her melodic imagination. Fingerpicked acoustic guitar is the sort of medium that reveals the kind of musician you are at your core—like playing solo Bach, it leaves you with nothing to hide behind. You can learn the basics of the technique in two hours and then spend a lifetime getting lost inside the possibilities. The best and most inventive players treat the acoustic guitar more like a harp—Elliott Smith, Kurt Vile, Jessica Pratt—and Lenker has this same flickering touch. In her hands, guitar notes fan outward into little constellations. The chord voicings never settle entirely, just like her voice, which can sound soothing or alien, depending on her inflection. The mix of feelings—seething disquiet, lurking menace, breath-to-ear intimacy, lurching uncertainty—brings to mind the Elliott Smith. As with his music, you can read detect almost any intense emotion in its quiet thrum if you need to find it there.
She closes the album, as she opens it, with her own death. She is in someone’s arms this time, and there is a brief hint of the older, more sexualized meaning of “to die.” The song is called “10 miles,” and it is the closest we get to the warmth of Big Thief. She and her lover wake early on a farm. They feed horses. They read together. But it turns out that “nothing is real,” and this too has been a figment of Lenker’s imagination—the woman of the song is 10 miles away. Lenker is still alone, dreaming aloud, and as the album ends, she is once dying once more, gazing up into the sky.