The Los Angeles rapper’s final album before his 20-year sentence is anxious, forlorn, and self-assured—the violence simmers just below its cool and breezy surface.

God Level

As of this June, 03 Greedo is a ward of the Potter County Sheriff’s Department. The State of Texas expects that, for the next 20 years, one of Los Angeles’ most celebrated rappers will be a resident of a shared pod at a detention center in Amarillo. For the duration of Greedo’s stay, the lights will come on at 4:30 a.m. every morning, his small cache of personal items must fit in a rectangular plastic box, and, though he has a purple grape cluster tattooed beside his left eye, his outfit will be a particularly carceral tone of orange. In the eyes of the law, this is just punishment for possession of a controlled substance and unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon. In the estimation of anyone with a sense of proportionality, this is a miscarriage of justice. There are many 03 Greedo albums awaiting release, but God Level was his final testimony before a long sojourn.
In the days before his surrender, Greedo performed with a frantic regularity, proposed to his girlfriend on-stage (she said yes), dined at a Beverly Hills steakhouse with daughter Meilani, and released his latest tome, God Level. Like his other six albums—he’s very adamant that they’re not mixtapes—God Level is a snapshot of his life in a precise, fleeting moment. It’s him, reckoning with incarceration, desperately supping every last ounce of fame, fortune, and sex before the cup, once overflowing, is snatched away. It’s anxious, forlorn, self-assured, lustful, vulnerable and unrepentant.
Greedo’s honesty is revelatory and, in the sense that every rap fan has some yearning for lyrics to have real-life ballast, it’s exciting. But the seeming absence of fictive storytelling can shade his work with horrifying and saddening hues. When Greedo asks his wife if she’ll mail him photos while he’s imprisoned, that isn’t a hypothetical request—basic privations are his new reality (“Bacc to Jail”). He doesn’t sensationalize his adolescent practice of bringing guns and drugs to school—he doesn’t have to (“Street Life”). And, when on “Basehead” he claims, in his nasal, Miles Davis-overblowing-voice, that he bought his first gun from a basehead? Well, that’s probably true, too.
But verisimilitude is only part of what makes folks croon Greedo’s songs. They sing because when confronted by an artist with a touched-by-god intuition for catchy choruses and hooks, it’s hard to remain silent. And, on God Level, Greedo has some of his most polished pop moments to date. “Dibiase” has the languid sway of green-yellow palm fronds; “Conscience” is a filigree of soul-baring lyrics about his deceased best friend, Paul “Lil Money” Reed, backed by a golden instrumental; “100 100 100” is a spring shower of royal purple raindrops. But it’s the aspirational “Floating,” with its honking, mumbled chorus, that’s the climax of God Level. It epitomizes Greedo: unhurried and confident, with violence simmering just below its cool and breezy surface.
Like every Greedo album save the 13-song First Night Out, God Level suffers from mild bloat. With 27 songs clocking in at a generous hour and 40 minutes, the album is too long and, in parts, too unpolished to be fully immersive. While his prolificacy is impressive, in overstuffing his albums he occasionally draws some of the listener's’ attention away from the remarkable to the merely passable.
But of all the tragedies to befall Greedo—and of all the tragedies he may have caused—the possibility that he may never generate a singular, masterful project seems a minor concern. For the past two years, the precariousness of his life has determined the tenor of his career. His first effort as 03 Greedo, Purple Summer, was released less than a month after the Texas arrest which led to his recent incarceration, and subsequent albums were recorded while on the lam from bounty hunters (Purple Summer 03: Purple Hearted Soldier), after death of Lil Money (Money Changes Everything), and on his first night in Los Angeles after being caught by said bounty hunters (the aforementioned First Night Out). The clang of that arrest on a barren stretch of I-40 still resonates, and God Level is just one of its echoes. It isn’t 03 Greedo’s magnum opus. But until he’s free of the deprivations of an unconcerned carceral state, it’s close enough.


This 36-disc box set presents every surviving tape of Bob Dylan's 1966 world tour, capturing combative audiences and transcendent performances nearly every night.

Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan: The 1966 Live Recordings

Bob Dylan: The 1966 Live Recordings

Put on nearly any of the 36 discs in Bob Dylan’s The 1966 Live Recordings box set and it will probably be perfect. Capturing the songwriter at the crest of his magical ’60s peak and culminating with a series of exhilarating performances in Manchester, Paris, and London, the imposing block of music documents Dylan facing down confrontational audiences while making some of the most ambitious creative leaps of his career. Causing controversy in some quarters by playing electric guitar in front of a rock band and seemingly abandoning his topical political songwriting, the shows depict an ongoing battle between Dylan and self-righteously betrayed folkies. Debuting material from the not-yet-released Blonde on Blonde alongside recent hits and new electrified arrangements of old tunes, Dylan is luminous and fragile-sounding during his opening solo acoustic sets, and equally fierce and possessed during the electric second halves, backed by the quintet that would soon become the Band, who match him in super-charged vitality.
A classic tour from start to finish, the set’s only drawbacks owe more to the format than the music: Various incomplete or missing songs, a few over-saturated vocal tracks, five CDs worth of grotty audience tapes, and the fact that Dylan performs nearly the same set lists in nearly the same order at every stop of the tour, from Long Island to Stockholm. Thoroughly consistent, especially by Dylan’s later live standards, the repeated performances from the 22 represented shows might be seen as feature, not a bug. Listening to oblique narrative epics like “Visions of Johanna” and dense truth attacks like “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” over and over, each becomes like a sculpture viewed from different angles, each liable to reveal something new about the lyrics or melody or interplay between musicians.
The 1966 Live Recordings builds itself around discs 19 and 20, a long-bootlegged show from Manchester officially released in 1998. Containing the notorious back-and-forth in which an audience member calls Dylan “Judas!” and Dylan snarls back, "I don’t be-lieve you, you’re a liar" (and to the musicians “play fuckin’ loud”), the Manchester show also finds the just-exactly-perfect balance of performance, soundman Richard Alderson’s mix, and high drama. Listened to in the context of the gigs on either side of it, one hears Dylan and the Group (as they were capitalized at the time in the British music press) circling around the tempos and inflections of what would become the classic performance of the material.
But each disc—even the barely listenable audience recordings—has its own rewards for the committed Dylanologist, from on- and off-stage histrionics to a range of varied mixes, each with its own personality. Turning 25 on May 24th in Paris (discs 26 and 27), Dylan goes into near meltdown, attempting desperately to get his acoustic instrument in tune. “This never happens to my electric guitar,” he deadpans, a punchline deployed many nights, part prop theater (“This machine confuses fascists”), part a musician's nightmare of gear damaged in transit. Slurring his words, Dylan is deeply inside of both himself and his songs, his Woody Guthrie drawl blurred into the oft-caricatured nasal howl. One takeaway, though, and perhaps the perpetual Dylan hot take, is that the dude actually is an amazing singer, lingering sensuously on every syllable during the quiet acoustic sets and occupying every bit of smarter-than-thou word-play and put-downs when the electric guitars come out.
“It takes a lot of medicine to keep up this pace,” Dylan told journalist Robert Shelton that year, and various accounts (including those of liner-notes writer Clinton Heylin) hint at Dylan’s prodigious chemical intake during his extended world tour in 1966. Dylan had been touring in the electric/acoustic format since the previous summer, cramming in studio sessions between an extended fall tour with his new accompanists. The former backing group for Arkansas-born rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, the ex-Hawks played 60 gigs with Dylan in the fall of 1965 and spring of 1966, drummer Levon Helm bailing in late November, before the start of Dylan's first world tour in 1966. Helm and others can be heard on the scant fall ’65 audience tapes released as downloads last year, and Sandy Konikoff can be made out (barely) on the audience-recorded discs from the American leg, stuck rightfully at the end of this set. But it’s the hard-hitting Mickey Jones (later seen in bearded form as neighbor Pete Bilker on ABC’s “Home Improvement”) who galvanizes the band from April of 1966 onward, providing gun-shot snare-cracks to start songs and a dependably rolling thunder. “In my group, the drummer is the lead guitar player,” Dylan would tell a press conference a quarter-century later, and Jones totally wails.
Often dismissed in the British music papers, the Group was anything but typical, owing especially to the double piano/organ attack of Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson. Filling the corners of each song with soulful R&B color and sometimes lost in the mix, Manuel can be heard especially on the May 14th show in Liverpool (disc 14), adding on boogie-woogie filigrees to “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.” Though Hudson's solos are few and far between, one of the recurring pleasures of the box comes with his conversational fills between vocal lines every night on “Ballad of a Thin Man,” with Dylan taking over for Manuel at piano. Perhaps the keynote for the entire period, Dylan milks the tune for every last insult.
With Jones driving them, Manuel, Hudson, Danko, and lead guitarist Robbie Robertson make room for one another, all while heeding Dylan’s urgent rhythm playing, an electrified bandleader for barely six months by the time of the box set’s chronological opening on February 5th in White Plains. Climaxing all sets but one with “Like A Rolling Stone”—a #4 hit in the UK the previous year, #2 back home—was almost a joke in itself, a reminder that none of this electricity should be any sort of surprise. With most of the violent upheavals of the ’60s still building towards a fever pitch, Dylan had gradually moved away from overt topicality beginning with 1964’s Another Side of Bob Dylan, adding electric instruments to the mix for 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home. And, every night, “Like A Rolling Stone” makes a thrilling conclusion, Dylan yawping out the vocals, Robertson and pals transforming the sparkle of the 1965 studio rendition into an ethereal punch.
Speaking almost entirely in parables in interviews and press conferences, the Bob Dylan that stood in front of audiences in 1966 had an unearthly air, a beautiful and vibrating young alien. “Bob Dylan got very sick backstage and I’m here to take his place,” he announces in Glasgow (disc 21), but whoever it is that's wearing the Bob Dylan mask positively glows. The folkies were right, of course, in that he and his lyrics had drifted far from topical concerns, replacing them with a personal expression that spoke more to the abstract intellectual autonomy of the counterculture than the ongoing issues of the New Left. But sharpened even beyond that, the acoustic sets possess a stark beauty, like a series of elegant black-and-white portraits.
It would be the last time Dylan regularly performed extended solo acoustic sets, and it is a form he has mastered. Finding a subtlety in his harmonica playing, it ranges from spare melodic statements like the introduction to “Fourth Time Around” to more abstract honkings (such as the concluding solos in “Desolation Row”) perhaps more akin to what soundman Richard Alderson had recorded as house engineer at avant-garde label ESP’-Disk. At times, such as on the terrible February 5th audience tape from the Westchester County Center in New York, Dylan squonks up and down the harp for comedic value, but mostly it’s an instrument as weird and pliable as Dylan’s voice.
The long-haul listening experience of 29.5 hours of music provides able space for contemplation, a manner of observing Dylan’s work in real time, hearing him earn giggles for his then-unreleased “Norwegian Wood” answer song “Fourth Time Around” in Sheffield (disc 17) and endlessly tweak the work-in-progress electric set opener “Tell Me, Momma” at every stop of the tour. Dylan doesn’t settle on a single set of lyrics throughout the 20 surviving performances of this song, which was never recorded in a studio; the official lyrics in his published lyrics book (and on his website) bear only fragmentary resemblance to any version documented on the box set. A lost classic, never performed again after 1966, each version flashes by in a perfect torrent of Dylan-esque babble, as if he were scribbling in a notebook, trying out endless variations.
To Dylan, his sets with this Group seemed to represent the next step in his work. Though only Robbie Robertson featured on Blonde on Blonde, in stores a few weeks after the tour concluded, Dylan would rush-release the Liverpool recording of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” as the B-side of the last pre-album single, “I Want You.” In addition to spending post-show time with the Group and his entourage reviewing Alderson’s recordings, Dylan continued to work off-hours on even more new songs, with a half-dozen fragments of hotel songwriting sessions with Robertson included on last year’s The Cutting Edge, almost all abandoned after the tour.
Operating at high speed in every regard, Dylan’s career would take a major turn after a motorcycle accident in Woodstock in July, canceling the next legs of the tour, eschewing live performance until 1969, and staying off the road until 1974. The 1966 Live Recordings, then, are a definitive cap on one of the most productive and astounding periods in any popular artist’s creative history, a story so familiar it’s become an archetype and myth. While the recordings sound pristine as might be hoped, give or take occasional distortion, the accompanying packaging is left a bit wanting. The long liner note essay by longtime Dylan scholar Clinton Heylin is excellent, but the mere quantity of music seems to demand even more material than the set provides, or even just more caring annotation of what is included, like the dates of film stills or even the names of the concerts’ venues. (Heylin’s own recent book Judas! From Forest Hills to the Free Trade Hall is an excellent start.)
The box set offers dramatic resolution, too. During the tour's penultimate gig, at London’s Royal Albert Hall (disc 29), Dylan’s syllable-crunching shout-singing bounces gracefully off the Group’s elastic crunch, a performance every bit as transcendent as Manchester. But on the last night (disc 31), Dylan finally snaps, and after the electric set-opening “Tell Me, Momma,” offers a completely earnest and logical explanation for the music. “I like all my old songs, it's just that things change all the time, everybody knows that,” he says in part. It’s so earnest, in fact, that he finds himself speaking words that one would rarely associate with the future Nobel laureate. “The music is… the music is… I would never venture to say what it is,” Dylan trails off, perhaps even shocking himself in his attempted candor. But on this final night of the tour, mostly, Dylan finally sounds too far gone, his voice weak. He and the Group seem to fray in places, and in doing so reveal the other 21 performances for the high-wire achievements they were and are. “You can take it or leave it, it’s up to you,” Dylan says, and the choice still exists, the answer out there blowin’ somewhere.


The legendary Athens band goes from being hipster homework to being easily appreciated thanks to a DFA reissue that includes every song from both versions of Gyrate, plus a few singles and extras.

Gyrate Plus

…on which the beloved Gyrate gets its remastered, expanded, completist, contextualized due. Even with liner notes by principals from R.E.M., the B-52's, and Gang of Four, this reissue from the dependable vinyl-miner James Murphy at long last permits the appreciation of Pylon to stop being hipster homework; DFA's generation-later vouch frees the listener, finally, to enjoy the assaultive relationship of Michael Lachowski's often ominous boing-boing-bass and Curtis Crowe's hot-pursuit whackamole drumming. The 10 songs from every copy of this seminal Athens band's debut are here, as well as both of the alternating "11th" tracks. Also included: The "Jamaican" version of "Danger" ("Danger!!") from the Pylon!! EP, the confident first single, and a previously unreleased track whose title is also, less than incidentally, Gyrate's defining preoccupation: "Functionality".
The original three musicians had a self-assignment. Their aim: To get NYC ink and then press kaboom. They weren't yet traditionally proficient with their instruments, and thusly seemed to approach their technological implements with a "How can I use this tool?" ethos, resulting in a kind of primitive precision, each member locking into a groove hardly ever intuitively related to that of another member. Before they found Vanessa Hay (née Vanessa Briscoe), they came close to using a recording about teaching parrots to talk as "vocals." Hay's eventual Situationist bark often reduced musicality to Pavlovian stimulus-responses via a joyless-sounding (but, ironically, joy-producing) series of reports or demands: "Cool" fascistically declares everything cool, baiting dissidents. "Dub" brags angrily of devouring dub at the start of each day, lest any white British acts think themselves superior digesters of the mode. Whereas Joy Division demanded "Dance, dance, dance to the radio"; Pylon grunts the tad-more-individualistic "Dance, dance, dance if you want to," even though the invitation is parsed like a warning with harsh consequences. "Volume" instructs its audience to "forget the picture" and "turn up the volume." "Gravity", obviously about the physics of the nightclub, taunts listeners by telling them that they both "cannot resist the urge" and "cannot dance," framing the insanely danceable track as an incitement to rebel against its mouthpiece. "Read a Book" is some seriously infectious Maoist literacy-advocating combat-rock.
Other tracks seek to provoke proletariat detournement: "Precaution" is about anything but risk minimization. "Human Body" juxtaposes bottom-rung job skills ("I can sweep/ I can mop") against enlightened capabilities ("I can think") while espousing "safety glasses" and "safety shoes" for the sake of a vessel that can "function/ without going to school." "Working Is No Problem" pretends to establish boundaries between the brain and the body, but the knowledge that Hay was a nurse, factory worker, and Kinko's manager makes it even more literally functional: Lyrics such as "Everything's in boxes" and "I'm not a racecar driver" obtain a kind of not-neurotypical discipline. "Stop It" raises the faux-dictatrix stakes, as the listener is instructed first to not rock-n-roll, and then to rock-n-roll on cue. "Driving School" merely catalogs, unromantically, the common nouns of public schools' instructing folks to use the dominant/subsidized means of transportation. The song insists that for certain industries, the government is a willing propagandistic babysitter, and even the stereo is implicated. Yet: all of these cuts are pogo-able, full-on jams, every scraped string ahead of (the mainstream version of) its time*.*
Did Hay adopt such a dry tone in order to defuse gender-based responses to her band's art, to become a sexless object instead of a sex object? (I, for one, am intimidated by the orgyhole-shorthand-versus-radio-signal agenda of her current project, FFFM.) Many a female-led band since (Numbers, Controller.Controller, Love of Diagrams, Glass Candy) has adopted her iced-ham, standoffish tone. Maybe, like her fellow Georgian artist Flannery O'Connor, Hay "refused to do pretty." Meanwhile, her bandmates were busy wondering how minimalist, how non-"human," analog dance music could get without ceasing to be fun. The result: a kind of militaristic disco. No, wait, I meant: android reggae. No, wait, I meant: postpunk without the melodrama. Of course Pylon didn't blow up like their fellow Athens luminaries; they were too fucking Spartan.


After a debut album that reinterpreted Iberian folk for a contemporary audience, the Catalan duo turns toward the future, adding electronics and collaborating with Holly Herndon and Kronos Quartet.

Clamor

CLAMOR, the second album from Catalan duo Maria Arnal i Marcel Bagés, offers dazzling proof of the old adage that sometimes you need to go back to go forward. The duo’s debut album, 2017’s 45 Cerebros y 1 Corazón, interpreted Iberian folk music from the 1950s and 1960s for a contemporary audience, using electric guitars and modern production techniques in a spirit not a million miles away from Rosalía’s experiments with flamenco on her debut, Los Angeles.
On CLAMOR, Arnal and Bagés take their inquisitive inclinations into bold new territory. While the material on their debut was built up over a period of time, CLAMOR was born from a desire—inspired by romantic separation, post-tour exhaustion, and a looming fascination with apocalypse and rebirth—to wipe the slate clean and make something genuinely new.
Arnal compared the recording of the new album to coming out of the “bubble” that was their debut, opening up to fresh sounds and new imaginative leaps. This meant inviting collaborators such as Holly Herndon and the Kronos Quartet into the fold; it also involved embracing new compositional techniques, bringing the electronic effects that were passing influences on their debut into the heart of their work. Producer David Soler, more of a passive presence on 45 Cerebros, became a key part of the duo’s sound on CLAMOR, as Arnal and Bagés built their new musical world from the ground up.
The result is a panoply of musical colors. “Fiera de mí” judders to the kind of sheet-metal bass rumble found on old dubstep records; “Murmuri” rides a sickening detuned string rush; “Hiperutopia” mixes a clattering industrial beat with stuttering vocal effects. “Milagro,” with its strummed guitar and apparently unprocessed vocal, is about as close as you get to 45 Cerebros’ new traditionalism on CLAMOR, and even that ends up in a whirl of distortion and programmed beats, calling to mind the febrile pop of Björk’s Homogenic.
The connecting thread to 45 Cerebros comes in the combination of Arnal’s gorgeously full-bodied voice and CLAMOR’s heady vocal melodies, which soar and dive like an eagle after its prey. These may be largely new songs—“Cant de la Sibil·la”, which is adapted from a medieval liturgical drama that prophesies the apocalypse, is the exception—but to the untrained ear the darkly dramatic melodies of “Tras de ti” or “Jaque” could be part of the same Iberian tradition celebrated on 45 Cerebros. On “Fiera de mí,” this songwriting form is alloyed to a strident pop sensibility and a well-defined chorus to create an anthem to rival 45 Cerebros’ stand-out track, “Tú Que Vienes a Rondarme.”
Arnal’s exquisite voice is key to the success of CLAMOR. But it is far from alone: the “clamor” of the album’s title is reflected in a rush of voices, both human and non-human. Field recordings bring the sound of birds, goats, and the gentle burble of a river to the mix, while on “Meteorit ferit” (“Wounded Meteorite”), Arnal channels the voice of a meteorite who is feeling vulnerable and doesn’t want to hurt anyone. This experimentation reaches its apotheosis in “Cant de la Sibil·la,” a sensational meeting point of musical tradition and technological thrust, where Holly Herndon’s “AI baby” Spawn meets the combined voices of Arnal and Catalan folk duo Tarta Relena in what could be a hymn to musical perpetuity.
The song’s synthesis—of medieval and 21st century, local and international, human and robot—exemplifies the brilliant complexities at the heart of CLAMOR. The album may take its inspirations from endings, but it finds its strength in what comes next. What comes after the apocalypse? How do you fill the hole of a broken heart? And where do you go after the success of your well-defined debut album? The answer, on CLAMOR, is upwards, outwards, and beyond.

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Kylie Minogue’s most relaxed album in years is a compendium of all the sounds she’s best known for: confectionary synth-pop, breezy Euro house, and propulsive EDM.

Tension

Should executives at Mattel follow through with their plans for a full-blown, thousand-year Barbie movie franchise, they might take a page from another enduring icon and star of the summer: Kylie Minogue. The similarities between the Australian pop diva and the American fashion doll have been remarked upon (and played into) for the better half of Minogue’s four-decade career, but apart from the unfailingly sunny demeanor, flamboyant costume changes, and elemental, almost psychedelic blondeness, Minogue has always foregrounded a humanity that no corporate property—never mind most pop stars—could hope to touch. “Self-knowledge is a truly beautiful thing and Kylie knows herself inside out,” Rufus Wainwright once exclaimed to The Guardian, “she is what she is and there is no attempt to make quasi-intellectual statements to substantiate it.” Minogue’s art is surface—fabulously so. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the singer made pop stardom as compelling a site of projection as Kate Moss was for modeling, collaborating with artists and filmmakers to depict her beauty and blondness through a darkly romantic lens or in campy, theatrical neon. Unlike Janet Jackson or Madonna, who sought to reveal fresh aspects of their psychology with each new release, the fiercely private Minogue has often opted to present herself at face value, even as she’s navigated intense personal upheaval.
To read too deeply into the lyrics of a megahit like “Padam Padam” would be an insult, so consider its charm: The single, which defied industry expectations, became an officially sanctioned Pride anthem, sparked dialogue about ageism on UK radio, and dominated the summer off the back of a million TikToks, is a testament to how invigorating and multifaceted the effect of the singer’s music can still be. It is also, taken for parts, a profoundly weird song: the rare hookup banger that manages to shout out Édith Piaf, keep time with your heartbeat, and elicit Pavlovian screams from gay bars in a mere two syllables. “Padam Padam” embodies a looseness of concept that slightly conflicts with the title of Minogue’s 16th album, Tension. It is the most relaxed of her recent LPs and by far the best, a return to form that privileges the emotional immediacy and kinetic sensation that’s defined the best of her music for years.
Minogue forayed into concept albums with 2018’s countrified Golden and 2020’s DISCO, which yielded a few undeniable gems but failed overall for the simple reason that they didn’t sound quite like Kylie. In the process of accommodating mirrorballs and cowboy hats, the singer sacrificed a degree of spontaneity, resulting in a self-conscious sound at odds with her self-possessed spirit. After drafting and then ditching plans for an ’80s-inspired album, Minogue and her collaborators—producers Biff Stannard, Duck Blackwell, and Jon Green—abandoned overarching themes in favor of a more casual process, recording with a portable mic setup in Airbnbs and hotel rooms whenever inspiration struck. The final product is a compendium of all the sounds Minogue is best known for: confectionary synth-pop, breezy Euro house, and propulsive EDM.
At some points it’s easy to recognize exactly which sounds the singer and producers were gunning for. The interwoven sing-song rap of “Hands” feels like an unambiguous stab at recreating Doja Cat’s “Say So,” while the flirtatious roller-rink strut of “Green Light” seems suspiciously Dua Lipa and Carly Rae Jepsen-adjacent, especially with its prominent, dreamy sax. This would be a problem if it weren’t for how capably Minogue finds a home for herself in the music. To sing something like Kylie is to sound as though you were the most deliriously fun and sexy woman on the planet, and apart from some pinched nasal notes on the otherwise excellent “Hold on to Now,” she’s beguiling and dynamic a presence as ever, even if the instrumentals occasionally register as a bit canned in comparison.
There’s no real unifying concept underlying Tension, except that almost all of it is concerned with the singer’s longtime pet themes: love and sex as all-encompassing, full-body highs. Checkered romantic histories present themselves as obstacles to swiftly overcome and breakups only ever slingshot the singer and her beau passionately back together. Nothing quite has the cinematic drama of her self-titled’s “Confide in Me” or the slinky come-on of Body Language’s “Slow,” but what the new record lacks in variety is redeemed by full-hearted energy. “Hold On to Now” is a Robyn-esque plea for romantic faith, while the rapturously fun “Things We Do for Love” pits her racing heart against a euphoric synth-pop beat. The title track and “Padam Padam” are the record’s camp highs, with the singer vamping through pounding piano house to deliver some truly ridiculous lyrics. Both songs land on the right side of silly-serious and wield sledgehammer-subtle choruses with the feverish commitment required to make a hook like “Call me Kylie-lie-lie/Don’t imitate-tate-tate/Cool like sorbet-et-et” feel ecstatic rather than clunky.
“Vegas High” and “10 Out of 10” are the only tracks that register as flops: the former feels like an unambiguous advertisement for her forthcoming Vegas residency, while the latter is far too bloodless and vanilla to remotely merit its watered-down ballroom chorus. At its best, Kylie’s music possesses an intense physicality; energizing in a way that bypasses the head and appeals directly to the heart and body. This is also true of the best of Tension, and when the romantic urgency of her lyrics and the bracing runner’s high of her music commingle it reminds you that what is most glamorous and definitive about the singer is not only her sustained self-belief but her capacity for making it felt.


Third album from Broadcast-- now downsized to a duo-- sees them dressing their poptastic efforts with whatever ruckus they can conjure.

Tender Buttons

If you thought Haha Sound was a sonic mess, you might want to bring a Dust Buster with you for your first go with Tender Buttons. Where The Noise Made By People eagerly embraced listeners with its pastiche of groovy space-age bachelor pad couture and timeless pop songsmithery, Haha Sound was more standoffish at first blush. The tunes were there, but they were covered in a bit of soot. Those able to look past the static were rewarded; the clash between the off-putting sounds and the melodies created something greater.
The same plan of attack is in place for this album. Only two folks were involved in the making of Tender Buttons-- vocalist Trish Keenan and bassist James Cargill. What the group lost in manpower, they more than make up for in racket. Keenan, as always, lends her gorgeous frigid voice to the proceedings, often two times (as on the lilting ballad "Tears in the Typing Pool"). As for the music, Keenan and Cargill bring the melodies, but then dress their poptastic efforts with whatever ruckus they can conjure.
It begins with the keening pings that kick off "I Found The F", and continues throughout. (For what it's worth, a kinder, gentler reprisal of the first track's melody ends the record.) The first single, "America's Boy", disguises its topicality in warbling, ghostly shrieks. "Arc of a Journey" chirps and skitters through its tunefulness for three minutes, then ends with a distorted and distended coda. Meanwhile, "Corporeal" decides to just throw in the raucous bits against the tune's Young Marble Giants-esque facade to see what sticks.
This possibly comes off as a dour appraisal of this album, which I enjoy, and there a good reason for this. As noted earlier, Haha Sound went for the approach, and brought stronger tunes to the mix (cf. "Colour Me In", "The Little Bell"). There's no such stand-out track on this album (and there's certainly no "oh wow" moments like "Papercuts" or "Come On Let's Go", either). What you have with Tender Buttons is a Broadcast album that listeners might need to spend more time with than expected. That said, this is still a Broadcast album, meaning it's one of the better things you'll put in your ear this year. Don't mind me if I reciprocate the album's tough love in equal measure.


Wild Nothing's second album, Nocturne, distinguishes itself from the crowded pack of dream-pop nostalgists for the same reason 2010's Gemini did-- Jack Tatum is simply one of the best songwriters in this field, and Nocturne's significant upgrade in fidelity makes that point more clearly than ever.

Nocturne

"You want to know me? Well, what's to know?" asks Jack Tatum on the title track of Wild Nothing's Nocturne. The album's subtly addictive nature is such that only after a dozen listens did this anti-revelation strike me as its most revealing lyric. Tatum really does view himself as a facilitator. He drove that point home during our interview last month, debunking any attempts made in the past two years to classify him as a "personality." This seems self-defeating for a guy who works in a style of lovelorn, Anglophilic indie rock that never goes in style because it never really goes out of style, and tends to favor extreme recluses or extroverts for its breakout artists. Fortunately, Nocturne distinguishes itself from the perrennial crowd of dream-pop nostalgists for the same reason Wild Nothing's 2010 debut Gemini did: Tatum is simply one of the best songwriters in this field, and Nocturne's significant upgrade in fidelity makes that point more clearly than ever.
Whether it's better than Gemini or its EP follow-up, Golden Haze, only matters in the event you have room for just one Wild Nothing album in your life, and you probably shouldn't limit yourself. It's hard to imagine anyone who dug Gemini jumping ship here-- Nocturne is a richer, comparatively luxurious listening experience, but it doesn't sound flashy or ostentatious. Even while recording with one of Brooklyn's classiest sonic interior decorators in Nicolas Vernhes, Tatum granted himself only basic amenities-- live strings, a human drummer, better microphones.
Nocturne is painted with the same colors as Gemini, but the resolution is much higher. When the songs on Gemini wanted to convey vitality or physicality, they were charmingly ramshackle, stuffed with busy drum machines and insistently strummed guitar. If Nocturne wants for anything, it's the sense of immediacy that marked highlights such as "Chinatown" and "Summer Holiday". This record is more about craftsmanship. Lead singles "Shadow" and "Paradise" feel newly urgent in a holistic way, going places Tatum couldn't access in his Blacksburg dorm room two years ago. "Shadow" allows itself brief asides between verses to let those lustrous strings moan and swoon, "Paradise" interrupts its glistening downer-disco for an indulgent ambient build-up. The full-bodied sound means the softer side of Nocturne gets fleshier too. Gemini relied on reverb to convey texture and depth, and while there's still plenty on "Through the Grass", the rhythmic complexity of the song's delicate, interwoven arrangement plays a bigger role in making it one of the loveliest thing to be done with guitars this year.
Entire labels and local scenes are dedicated to preserving the era Nocturne evokes-- lacquering the malaised vocals, getting the right reverb plates, and hoping that aesthetic identification is more important than writing melodies that stick. Tatum, however, is a songwriter first who just happens to work in this medium. His vocals are put to the forefront to give the listener a clearly marked place to return, and his melodies are smoothly curved, like a small divot at which the rest of the arrangements can dig deeper. The hopscotch verse melody of "Shadow" works in tandem with an insistent, four-note motif doubled on lead guitar and violin. On "Counting Days", a simonized harmony serves as the chorus, but the little guitar countermelody that darts around it is the hook. Tatum understands the semantics of this stuff.
Which makes it strange that his ambitions as a melodic tunesmith aren't matched by his lyrics. Successfully writing like Robert Smith can be just as tricky as doing a decent Morrissey, which becomes clear every time Nocturne crosses an invisible line where a tiny bit of editing would pay off: "Paradise" contains the sensible-sounding, yet bafflingly mixed metaphor "velvet tongue so sweet", while "Only Heather" rhymes first and asks questions later: "I couldn't explain it/ I won't even try/ She is so lovely she makes me feel high."
Or maybe that's the only kind of lyric that really matters on Nocturne. If there's a Heather in your life, that song might be the centerpiece of your next mix. Or you might just listen to it hoping you'll meet a Heather, in which case, Wild Nothing is invested in the concept of wish fulfillment. This is called *dream-*pop for a reason, and there's no logic for what drives adults to lie out on the grass staring at the sun for hours or write songs about girls with fantastical names like "Rheya". Nocturne gives a voice to those feelings, and damn if it isn't lovely to listen to.


An all-star lineup-- Mangum, Oldham, YLT, Callahan, Merritt, Darnielle, Jay Reatard-- pays tribute to the iconic Kiwi singer/songwriter and stroke sufferer.

Various Artists: Stroke: Songs for Chris Knox

Stroke: Songs for Chris Knox

For decades Chris Knox has loomed over New Zealand's music scene. While Knox occasionally ventured outside his native land, the charismatic/confrontational Enemy/Toy Love/Tall Dwarfs frontman and solo act spent most of his life home supporting New Zealand's productive arts scene, paving the way for such acts as the Clean, the Chills, and the Verlaines. Along the way Knox amassed more than his share of fans around the world, too, and when news spread that he suffered a stroke last summer, support and sympathy arrived in equal measure to his stature.
Still, that doesn't quite prepare you for the quantity and quality of A-list acts that appear on Merge's Stroke: Songs for Chris Knox, a 2xCD tribute to the man and his music whose proceeds will go toward his recovery (Knox, 57, currently has limited speech and mobility). (Pre-orders are currently being accepted, and the record is out now digitally.) The sheer breadth and diversity of this recorded response almost begs disbelief, considering how quickly it came together, and really shows how far Knox's influence has reached, from several of his Kiwi peers to kindred spirits. The already much missed Jay Reatard starts off the set well-paired with the Toy Love nugget "Pull Down the Shades", "recorded in the bathroom of a hotel in Denmark on a 4-track," and the just plain missing Jeff Mangum, whose cover of the Tall Dwarfs' "Sign the Dotted Line" marks a rare recorded reappearance of the Neutral Milk Hotel mastermind, whose own lo-fi inclinations lined up well with Knox's.
Incredibly, the presence of Mangum is just the tip of the iceberg. The cavalcade of high-profile support continues with Bill Callahan and Will Oldham, whose versions of "Lapse" and a stunning "My Only Friend", respectively, remind that Knox could be as moving as theatrically manic. Stephin Merritt (who enlisted Knox to close the first 6ths album) simultaneously pays homage to Knox's aesthetic while reminding us of his own home recording roots with his (allegedly circa 1983!) version of "Beauty". Yo La Tengo mellow out "Coloured" and Lambchop offer a faithfully piano-led ren [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| dition of "What Goes Up". Elsewhere AC Newman's "Dunno Much About Life But I Know How to Breathe" channels Knox's trademark lust-for-life brio, while John Darnielle personalizes his sympathetic Mountain Goats track "Brave" with a get-well introduction. Longtime Kiwi pop aficionado (and top secret Merge Records co-founder) Mac McCaughan tackles "Nostalgia's No Excuse" as Portastatic, replete with an approximation of Knox's sneer and dollops of fuzzy distortion.
And then, of course, there's the host of New Zealand acts paying their respects to their friend and inspiration. Flying Nun peers and veterans such as the Bats, Verlaines, Hamish, and David Kilgour (of the Clean), the Chills, Peter Gutteridge (providing a hypnotically reinvented "Don't Catch Fire"), and Shayne Carter (of Straightjacket Fits) make appearances, as do relatively fresh faces like the Checks (doing Toy Love's "Rebel"), the Mint Chicks, and Pumice. Even some bona fide Antipodean stars show up, including Don McGlashan (of the Mutton Birds) and Neil Finn (who covers "It's Love" with his wife and two kids). It's a bit of a bummer that MOR singer Boh Runga gets Knox's beloved "Not Given Lightly", especially considering Pearl Jam covered it well on tour in New Zealand last November and could have provided this comp yet another ringer, but her heart is in the right place.
Special mention, of course, must go to Alec Bathgate, Knox's longtime partner in the Tall Dwarfs and the co-writer of many of these tracks, who contributes a sterling version of the solo Knox gem "Glide". There are other treats and surprises in store, too, from Jordan Luck's inspired choice of "Becoming Something Other" (about a father stricken by Parkinson's, highlighting Knox's sometimes twisted but always humanist lyrics) to SJD namesake Sean Donnelly's lovely "The Outer Skin" (a song covered by the Hope Blister way back when) to Lou Barlow's "Song of the Tall Puppy", from 2008's Chris Knox and the Nothing album A Warm Gun, a gentle reminder that the guy still makes records.
Which leads us to the best surprises of them all: new recordings from both the Nothing and Tall Dwarfs. The Nothing song in particular, "Nappin' in Lapland", offers a glimpse of Knox's novel, inspiring way around his predicament: songs with singing, but no words. Leave it to Chris Knox not to ever let a little thing like a debilitating stroke get in the way of making music.


The Lisbon-based producer’s soft, contemplative pop centers around everyday memories, embracing repetition as a technique to reveal the novel in the ordinary.

We Had a Good Time

Over the last decade, the Lisbon-based Nathan Jenkins, who goes by the name Bullion, has created epic songs in miniature. Before moving to Portugal, he hosted a show on London’s NTS online radio station, presenting songs by sophisti-pop stalwarts like the Blue Nile and Prefab Sprout alongside synth-rock ballads by John Martyn and Robert Wyatt. With 2011’s You Drive Me to Plastic and 2012’s Love Me Oh Please Love Me, he made early,  sample-heavy attempts to fuse these influences. On his 2016 album Loop the Loop, which he’s described as being about “making changes rather than going over and over on the same old path,” he perfected his own flavor of contemplative pop. We Had a Good Time, his newest collection of songs, explores repetition’s ability to find the novel in the ordinary.
On We Had a Good Time, Bullion uses guitar, synth pads, and reverb for a mellow set of songs that center around memories of the mundane, finding the sublime in the banal. Opener “O Vermona” is made up of an Emeralds-like drone and Bullion’s lightly doubled vocals: “I’ll never go quiet on you.” He cuts the phrase into fragments and layers the pieces, turning a simple declaration into an arresting hook. When he allows the line to play out again before the song goes silent, it has obtained a peculiar power.
The most daring display of repetition-as-technique is the decision to record two versions of one song: “Hula,” which appears halfway through the EP, and “Hula Hula,” the record’s closer. If you aren’t paying attention, you might imagine you are hearing “Hula” a second time. But the subtle additions to “Hula, Hula”—more echo, a new guitar solo, extra bleeps—become evident on closer listening. Only a cryptic lyrical fragment remains the same: “Are people in pain where you are?” In the ebullient “Hula,” the question seems rhetorical, like a public service announcement attempting to make you more aware of your fellow citizens. In the spectral “Hula Hula,” the query evokes a deeper, more existential line of thought: Is there anything you might have missed?
We Had a Good Time is acutely conscious of the fact that memories fade. The elegiac title track, co-written by Diego Herrera (aka Suzanne Kraft), seemingly mourns a past relationship. Though each wash of ambient sound, artificial clap, and synthetic organ is calculated, the cumulative effect is one of real regret. The present will someday be lost; that’s why Bullion is fascinated by the quotidian. We may tire of our everyday surroundings, but if we fail to note them, we dull ourselves to the phenomena of our lives. Bullion’s music is a reminder to look for the momentous in the familiar.


On his first album of all new material, the Chicago footwork pioneer pushes at the outline of the genre, playing with convention and keeping listeners thrillingly off balance.

I’ll Tell You What!

RP Boo has got death on his mind. In his introduction to I’ll Tell You What!—astoundingly, the first album of all new material from the legendary footwork producer—Boo says he wants to “die empty,” purging his musical mind in order to have left no idea unexplored when the Grim Reaper comes calling. That sense of urgency drives I’ll Tell You What!, an album that pushes at the edge of what footwork can be—a footwork record that clings to the genre by mysterious means, questioning where the limits lie.
Footwork has long delighted in fluidity, stamping its mark on anything from rock backbeats to sweet soul samples. Boo himself helped create that viscous template: His 1997 track “Baby Come On” is credited as one of the genre’s founding songs. Boo’s previous album, 2015’s Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints, made good use of this, riding roughshod over samples of everyone from Kenny Loggins to “The Munchkins Parade,” from The Wizard of Oz. But whereas that record still bore the hallmarks of classic footwork—drum-machine kicks, metallic snares, and guttural bass to keep the dancers moving—I’ll Tell You What! strips back Boo’s sound dramatically, often leaving just the genre’s ghostly trails as a guide.
At times I’ll Tell You What! feels like a brother to Wiley’s famed “Devil” mixes, when the London producer took the beats out from underneath his early productions to leave a skeletal corruption of grime. I’ll Tell You What! isn’t quite so radical in its reduction—only a few tracks dispense with the kick drum altogether—but many of the songs hand over main rhythmic duty to the bass, whose triple-time rumbling is often the only indication that we are in footwork’s orbit.
“Earth’s Battle Dance” has a lengthy middle section where the drum machines drop out entirely, leaving just a languorous funk break, over which clipped vocal samples and an insistent bass throb make a subliminal suggestion of footwork. Elsewhere, on tracks like “U-Don’t No” and “Cloudy Back Yard,” the style’s familiar percussive palette shows up almost reluctantly, dropping in for a few bars of lazy-yet-precise drum hits with the deadly lurch of the “drunken fist” fighting style.
The radical change in mood exhibited on “Earth’s Battle Dance” is another distinctive feature of I’ll Tell You What!’s sonic sorcery. Songs will frequently slam into dramatic left turns that unsettle and excite, turning the fabric of the track upside down and dissolving the line between fast and slow. “Flight 1235 (ft. Phil & Crossfire)” sounds like a fairly standard footwork outing for its first 90 seconds, all vocal fire and drum-machine strut, only to ratchet down the gears like a sports car on a country road with the introduction of a sunshine-mellow chorus.
Similarly, “U Belong 2 Me” sounds at first like a throwback to the ghetto-house style from which footwork was born, thanks to a bouncing 4/4 rhythm and pitched-up vocal samples. But halfway through, the insistent bass drum drops out and a funereal melody comes in, while Boo welds the song’s two vocal samples together so that the innocuous “Let go of this” and “You belong to me” combine to produce the chilling refrain of “Let go of me.” “Wicked’Bu” is, if anything, an even odder combination of moods, brilliantly combining the dramatic synth drones of Daft Punk’s Tron soundtrack with a sample that stinks of 1960s spy flick.
I’ll Tell You What! is a masterful album of precision and imagination, one where footwork resounds with the potential of a rewritten rule book. It is also astoundingly alive, its energy and originality a reminder that visionary ideas and emptied minds can outlast feeble human mortality.


The Detroit siblings dial down the intensity of their underworld street sagas, but their latest mixtape is still packed with drama.

LOS X NUTTY

Every Los and Nutty mixtape ascribes to the logic of Dick Wolf-produced television procedurals: You pretty much know what you’re getting every time you click play, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The more familiar you are with the Detroit siblings’ stories of dope deals and brotherly love, the more oddly comforting their underworld sagas are. Often, their hustling chronicles are centered around the less glamorous details, the ones they usually blow by in the movies. You know, the backbreaking work necessary to make the drudgery pay off. Sleepless nights on the highway. Opening up shop in a new town and then closing it in search of greener pastures.
The difference between their new project LOS X NUTTY and mixtapes of the past is the intensity. On 2020’s Panagnl4e, Vol. 2, for instance, their hellish tales of wiretaps and pit stops at motels were so vivid, it felt as if they were happening in real time. Meanwhile, LOS X NUTTY is a bit more removed; you can picture the brothers sitting on the couch in their childhood home, exchanging anecdotes and reliving the old days.
The beats are a big element of the trips down memory lane; this time around, many of them are softer and smoother. They are tailor-made for jolts of nostalgia, like the gruff-voiced Los reminiscing about the rush of a high-speed chase on “Won’t Get It,” while the vocal sample gently blooms in the background. An understated funk groove is the foundation of “I Thought 10 Was Enough”; over it, Nutty, the feistier of the two, recounts memories of snapping photos with stacks of money with the wistfulness of a former high school football star looking back at the state championship game. When it’s less evocative, the lighter touch is a drag. Nutty loses some of his punchiness on “Washin My Hands,” so much so that I zoned out by the time featured guest Samuel Shabazz jumped in. “The Reason” is replete with life lessons that aren’t really that special, though they probably would have been more compelling if the dewy-eyed instrumental didn’t sound like it came from the camp of Complex’s 2023 rapper of the year.
But Los and Nutty don’t stray that far from the formula that works for them; a handful of the tracks do end up capturing the grueling spirit of the Panagnl4e trilogy. None reach the heights of those mixtapes, but they’re still reliably dramatic. Take “Extorted,” which has the duo trading nerve-wracking verses over wailing sirens and barking police dogs. The pair pull out some cool tricks to give the tape extra juice; for one, Nutty sounds real inspired by the N.W.A. homage on the intro. And Los doesn’t typically rap on a beat as breezy as “Los 2 Hot,” yet the tongue-in-cheek particulars he includes in his bars only sound right coming from him: “White people even at the truck stops love me.” He also revives Lil Onion—a cartoonishly high-pitched, high-strung character he introduced on his 2021 tape G, Shit Vol. 2. It’s unexpected and a little funny, the kind of idea that cleverly redraws the blueprint they hold so close.


After the fury of the stunning New Amerykah Part One, Badu returns to creating relaxed, personal funk that feels more like a sketchbook than a record.

Erykah Badu: New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh

Erykah Badu's a narcissist, but narcissism is her art. The title of her debut album, Baduizm, turned her name into a religion, a concept. On 2008's New Amerykah: Part One, she sang, "Everything around you see/ The ankhs, the wraps, the plus degrees/ And, yes, even the mysteries-- it's all me." It's not that she ignores the world at large, it's that she invariably draws her observations and opinions back to home base: herself, her family, her experience, her music. She and her boyfriend Jay Electronica took turns tweeting through her third pregnancy. ("I see the head, full of hair" read one Biblically paced message.) She named the baby Mars.
After Baduizm, she kept writing vocal lines and melodies but loosened her song structures to the point that her albums sounded like a series of digressions. The pose she struck on record became increasingly informal. Her final statements became ellipses. The change wasn't a drop in quality, but a shift in style. Mama's Gun and Worldwide Underground (from 2000 and 2003, respectively) are albums that, at best, sound like music that was made with no effort and very little planning. And though there's never any doubt that she's the center of attention, she started singing like she was off to the side. In its own way, Badu's music is ambient music: It drifts, ebbs, and flows. The verses don't have to hang together as long as the mood does.
2008's New Amerykah Part One was an unusually dark, hard album for her. Instead of the precedent for India.Arie, she was the echo of Sly Stone: fucked-up, long-winded, and overflowing. In her own way, Badu is always protesting something-- the way people betray themselves to be accepted by society, the way society forces people to stop being individuals-- but New Amerykah was almost like a historical re-enactment of a "protest album": the government is watching you, America eats its young, etc. The coffeehouse Afrocentrism of Baduizm was wiped out by producers like Madlib and Dilla, whose collage style is as forward-thinking as it is backward-looking.
New Amerykah Two, by comparison, is a return to the kind of music Badu was making in 2003: relaxed, personal funk that scans more like a sketchbook than an album. Considering this album was being promised as soon as Part One came out, I can imagine someone getting pissy at the inclusion of minute-long half-thoughts like "Agitation" and "You Loving Me (Session)", but... so what? They're funny, memorable, and most importantly, they're hers. And her ability to toe the line between sounding effortless and sounding tossed-off is remarkable-- it illustrates the big, variable personality she's always claiming to have. My least favorite song here is actually the one that sounds like she's really trying: the 10-minute, multi-part "Out My Mind, Just in Time".
Most of the lyrics here dwell on relationships, which Badu handles with a confidence and informality that most of square-ass, tax-filing society just hasn't caught up to and probably never will. ("Had two babies, different dudes," she sang on 2008's "Me"-- "and for them both my love is true.") Badu wants a window seat and nobody sitting next to her. Badu is fucking your friends and laughs about it. There's satire, too-- "Turn Me Away (Get Munny)", where she plays a vapid nag who just decided she really, really loves you. There's a song actually called "Fall in Love (Your Funeral)". But despite the breadth of attitudes toward love, there's no angst, which makes it an uplifting experience-- it's like Badu is actually convinced that life goes on.
There's stuff here that is empty excess-- about three minutes of "Love", for example, or the drowsy instrumental "Incense" (basically a collaboration between Madlib and harpist Kirsten Agnesta). But for the most part I appreciate the ease of the album-- it's really the first time I feel like I'm understanding her, actually. Her art is her life, and her life-- like anyone's-- is too messy and varied to contain. Whether or not it's her responsibility to distill and make sense of it all is beside the point. To invoke Badu logic, Part Two just is what it is-- a coherent expression of a big, scattered personality.


The UK duo loosen their collars on their new remix compilation, pushing the songs on 2022’s I Love You Jennifer B to more mischievous, high-energy places.

I<3UQTINVU

Anyone who has set foot in an academic space knows: Sometimes the brightest students are the biggest freaks. Jockstrap’s 2022 album I Love You Jennifer B was a top-of-class debut: a painstaking, high-drama pop collection with a clear command of classical songcraft and ornate glamour. Their new album, I<3UQTINVU (“I Love You Cutie, I Envy You”), compiles reworkings of those songs that the duo’s Taylor Skye created to blow off steam, fist-pumping anthems that loosen the collar on the polished originals. If Jennifer B was closing night of the big production, then I<3UQTINVU is the chaperone-free cast party: puckish, weird, and ultimately, pretty lit.
On Jennifer B, Jockstrap drew as much from chamber folk and UK rave culture as they did the classic pop canon. I<3UQTINVU scrambles the formula further, zigzagging into grime, chiptune, and harder EDM. Skye recruits a few featured players, including standout South Florida artist Ian Starr on “Red Eye,” which reworks Jennifer B’s strummy curtain opener “Neon” into a brief and unhinged banger. Starr’s nightmarish snarl of “I make that boat rock” sets the tone for the big payoff—a gargled primal scream that rips the track open into a glorious conclusion of 808s and autotune.
Not forgotten in the excitement is Skye’s main collaborator, vocalist and composer Georgia Ellery. Jennifer B placed her warble and knotty writing center stage in its horny baroque circus. Even broken down for parts, Ellery’s vocals are still a guiding force, maintaining a lightness that balances <3UQTINVU’s harsher edges. On songs like “Good Girl” and “I Feel,” Skye keeps key verses that preserve her songwriting, like an imagined lover’s quote from “Angst” on the latter: “You fucking love/You love to fuck/To fuck it up/Fucking listen to her sing!” And on “I Touch,” Skye leaves Ellery’s “Glasgow '' nearly intact, introducing a drum machine and looped vocals. It soars.
Not every cut here earns its place. “I Noticed You” sounds like Fred Again.. mimicry with its uber-smooth vocals and monotonous house cascade, missing Jockstrap’s signature skew. Despite a fun verse from vocalist Coby Sey, the inscrutable “All Roads Lead to London''—which includes new synths, dog barks, and Rubiks-cube restructuring—just makes you miss the swooning electro-catharsis of the original, “Concrete Over Water.”
Amid the band’s first-thought-best-though experimentation, a glimmer emerges. A bookending companion to I<3UQTINVU’s high-octane opener “Sexy,” “Sexy 2” reworks “50/50” into a warm lullaby, and features the album’s only new material from Ellery. Over slide guitar, banjo, strings, and shakers, she sets another beguiling scene of lust. But there’s no wink here, and none of Jennifer B’s melodramatic acrobatics: The recording is among their most intimate and unvarnished. Somewhere in the glistening runoff of Jennifer B, Skye synthesised one of Jockstrap’s loveliest tracks yet. It’s a testament to the mess on the cutting room floor as the necessary conditions for producing the next great song.


Philly rapper compiles 32 well-written, expertly produced tracks-- released once per day for the month of December-- into the overlooked Month of Madness mixtape*.
*

Month of Madness

In a genre with a reputation for inconsistency, 32 well-written, expertly produced tracks-- released once per day for the month of December, then compiled as Freeway's Month of Madness-- deserves critical attention. For a distribution gimmick primarily focused on generating internet buzz, even complaining about the length of the compilation misses the point. And if you do find one track that isn't worth your time-- say, the sub-par feature with James Blunt-- then you can always wait until tomorrow, or hit forward on your iPod, and there's a good chance there will be a track you dig. Month of Madness has a lot going for it-- consistency, quality, and the bottomless hard drive space of the iPod age-- but 32 straight bangers can also be an artist's own worst enemy.
Freeway is a great rapper; he's never lazy, writes detailed, interesting verses, and spits them with unique, frantic urgency. He has great taste in beats, using producers that hew closely to the 2000s' Roc-A-Fella soul-sampling blueprint; newcomer Blunt, who produces the bulk of the tracks, and 2008 It Producer Jake One both have great emotive moments. There are even a few outside-the-box tracks for needed diversity, with assists from Erick Sermon and the Alchemist. Don Cannon takes a break from looping classic soul to drop spinning chainsaws on "Bank Rollz". These are welcome changes from the de rigeur soul sampled banger for which Freeway is known, although they're also safe variations within the same narrow template.
And this is how Month of Madness proves that "quality" doesn't always supersede tedium. It's as if Free has decided that he's foreman at a street rap factory, churning out endless iterations of the same basic structure. Contrary to critical consensus, one of the standout tracks on Free At Last was "Take It to the Top", where a 50 Cent hook helped Free transcend this one-note production with a little bit of pop dimension. Not topical dimension-- Freeway has always managed to spit on a variety of subjects with perspective and intelligence-- but some stylistic flexibility. As a performer, Freeway raps one way and does it very, very well. If you already love the "typical Freeway banger," then you have no complaints. But it does suggest Free's not interested in expanding his audience beyond the converted, in building street buzz like Gucci Mane, or bothering Kanye on Billboard.
Freeway has never really seemed bothered by this. And to criticize him for it is typically hypocritical, since I've been a big fan of DJ Premier's ability to churn out endless variations on the same motif for the past decade. But if the best he can get is fifteen minutes of internet buzz, then maybe consistency isn't what we're really looking for after all. This revolutionary method of distribution has provided Freeway with a niche, to build the kind of fanbase he wants by saturating the same channels as inferior blog-hype rappers. He's very good at what he does, but two hours of great music still draws attention to what he doesn't.


One of pop’s most inventive composers returns with a braid of political, maternal, and celestial statements. On Native Invader, Amos’ intricately arranged songs are passionate and despairingly poetic.

Native Invader

For much of Tori Amos’ solo career, the piano-thrashing composer and singer has navigated the porous membrane between the personal and the political—the starkly searing depiction of sexual assault “Me and a Gun,” her waking-nightmare flip of Eminem’s murder lullaby “97 Bonnie and Clyde,” the Trail of Tears eulogy “Scarlet’s Walk.” On her heady, fever-dreamy 15th album Native Invader, Amos adds a third element, bringing in the increasingly strip-mined Earth as both imperiled muse and guiding light. The self, the ever-more-chaotic agora, and the physical world triangulate in a way that allows Amos to take all of them on at once, and to create a despairingly poetic, chillingly vital album that channels its depictions of humanity’s horrors through intricately arranged songs.
As this unjust year burrows deeper into our psyches, the space to think, to create, to just exist as oneself becomes ever more precious. Amos knows this; “Embedded in this record are energy forces, hopefully, that create a space—space to step into from the cacophony of the news cycle,” Amos told Lenny about Native Invader. The album is spacious and enveloping even as it warns of horrors down the line. The wraithlike “Wings” uses sparse electronics to cradle Amos’ exacting mezzo-soprano, while the broken-relationship chronicle “Chocolate Song” see-saws between brittle instrumentation on its verses and simmering organ lines on the chorus. The imagery of nature’s most beautiful creations, which encompass shooting stars as well as selfless women (the sighing “Climb” calls out repeatedly to Saint Veronica, who offered her veil to Jesus Christ while he was on his march toward crucifixion), further cements the album’s connections to the celestial and the maternal.
Amos is one of pop’s most inventive composers and lyricists, and her twinned skills allow the political content on Native Invader to float where others may sink. “Up the Creek,” which features Amos' daughter Tash on backing vocals, pivots on a refrain passed down to Amos from her Cherokee grandfather during her childhood in Maryland: “Good lord willin' and the creek don't rise,” the pair sing in spectral harmony. That line reverberates throughout the track as the music gets more clamorous and the lyrics more urgent, with Amos declaring “We may just survive/If the Militia of the Mind/Arm against those climate blind” as strings churn underneath her. The spiraling “Bats” and the coy “Benjamin” are paired at the record’s end, with the titular animals in the former possessing the knowledge of being “betrayed by humankind,” and the latter doubling as a warning about fossil fuel companies’ ever-extending tentacles into the public sphere—particularly their fusillade of propaganda against Juliana vs. United States, in which the country and its rulers were sued by 21 plaintiffs for “deliberately allow[ing] atmospheric CO2 concentrations to escalate to levels unprecedented in human history.” The piano lament “Russia,” included on the album’s deluxe edition, is an anomaly; lyrics like “Is Stalin on your shoulder?” and “Time to face those who take/More and more from our great Mother” make the themes of the album uncomfortably plain, although whether that unease comes from the lyrics’ explicitness or the situation they’re describing is a toss-up.
”Mary’s Eyes,” which closes the album, threads Native Invader’s needle; over drones and bleakly insistent piano, Amos sings of an unknowable mother who is clearly suffering, with “hymns locked in her memory” that can possibly be unlocked by patterns and sequences, and banishing sadness. It’s about Amos’ mother Mary, who lost the ability to speak in the wake of a stroke she had earlier this year. But the pain that suffuses Amos’ passionate vocal performance and the warnings of climate change doom that preceded that track make it feel like it’s doubling as an allegory for the mother Earth, which cannot raise its voice in self-defense even as it’s being hurtled toward a crushing fate.


The Reggae legend returns in full force on his latest album, displaying the indomitable spirit he has cultivated throughout his career.

Got to Be Tough

Reggae legend Toots Hibbert’s decades-long streak of sweaty, impressively athletic live shows came to a halt in 2013, after he was struck in the head by a vodka bottle during one of them. Hibbert filed a $21 million lawsuit against the 19-year-old who threw the bottle, but in a letter to a judge he pleaded that the man be sentenced to no jail time. “He is a young man, and I have heard what happens to young men in jail,” Hibbert wrote—a pointed understatement. Hibbert famously did prison time as a young man himself for marijuana possession, and his signature song “54-46 (That's My Number)” burned with the cruelty he experienced there. On some level, Hibbert has spent the rest of his career trying to reconcile the fundamental injustice of that incarceration, the way freedom could be taken away so arbitrarily.
Hibbert’s injury took the wind out of what had been a pretty remarkable late-career run. It sidelined him from the road for three years, and left him with depression, mood swings, and headaches. He was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. But the injury also set him up for the kind of comeback narrative that must be irresistible for Hibbert, a fighter who still thinks of himself as the boxer he was as a teen. A recent Rolling Stone profile paints a portrait for a legend who continues to work harder than might be ideal for his age, spending seven days a week in the studio. He air-boxes enthusiastically and still spars with a trainer, so it only makes sense that on the cover of Got To Be Tough, his first Toots and the Maytals record in 10 years, he's illustrated in his default pose: throwing a punch.
There's a Rocky analogy for every occasion, and at this point in his career, Hibbert is Balboa circa the 2006 installment of the franchise. In that movie, Rocky was slowed by bad knees and stiffened by arthritis and calcium build-ups in his joints, leaving him with just one move: hitting for blunt force. Even though he was a shadow of his former glory, there was still a certain power in watching a diminished titan work around the limitations of age.
And so it is with a 77-year-old Hibbert, whose once almost supernaturally resilient voice is now showing real signs of wear. He's lost some considerable range since 2010’s Flip and Twist, but he's switched up his attack accordingly, learning into the grit. His voice is hoarse on the soul scorcher “Just Brutal,” but his commitment sells the song”—he doesn't let the frog in his throat stop him from commanding the call-and-response like a one-man Sam and Dave. And although it may be low on the list of songs anybody needed to hear covered again, Hibbert’s reworking of Bob Marley's “Three Little Birds,” featuring Ziggy Marley on vocals and Ringo Starr on percussion, similarly delivers real heat, energizing Marley's standard with an urgent tempo and feverish horns.
Hibbert has always shined during these hard, soul workouts, and it's admirable that he hasn’t let age keep them away from him. Got To Be Tough’s mid-tempo rocksteady numbers, including its title track, don’t make nearly the same impression, but even on the album’s mellowest songs, Hibbert’s commitment is clear. In his Rolling Stone profile, Hibbert resists talking about retirement, but acknowledges his career is winding down. It may not rival his classic albums—and it never deludes itself into thinking it does—but Got To Be Tough captures Hibbert as committed as always, still giving it all he’s got.

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Freezing Opening Thawing's opener may be the most dramatic outlier in Shackleton's entire body of work. While he's known for his darkly paranoid productions, here the tracks are bright and glossy, fully blanched of color, and a sterility hangs in the atmosphere.

Freezing Opening Thawing EP

Sam Shackleton's career began in the shadows and he's pretty much remained there since. He looked for inspiration past Britain's borders, to Berlin and beyond, at a time when dubstep's nucleus remained embedded deep within a South London postcode. Alloying a steely rhythmic exoskeleton to a sound still largely regarded as a ghostly mutation of 2-step, the run of 12"s on his Skull Disco label successfully ushered the first wave of techno-dubstep hybrids into clubs before it folded in 2008.
That sombre tone and gloomy imagery has become a hallmark since, pressed everywhere from a fêted Ricardo Villalobos remix through to more recent work, incorporating uncommon instrumentation and Middle Eastern motifs. The producer crafts detailed headspaces and then erodes their parameters, invoking a level of uncertainty and crumbled-spliff paranoia. His exacting focus on dread makes his extensive, and often brilliant, catalogue somewhat foreboding. It also instils immediate apprehension when approaching this perplexing new EP, his first after a nearly two year absence.
Freezing Opening Thawing's opener may be the most dramatic outlier in Shackleton's entire body of work, although not without some precedent: his sprawling "Mukuba Special" re-work on a 2010 Congotronics compilation is the nearest relative. There, the contrast between growling sub-bass and brittle guitar notes was the sonic manifestation of two worlds meeting. Here, the title track crams a head-spinning mesh of synthetic sounds into the heavily treated topline, hoovering up anything vaguely earthen and leaving behind a complete void of low-end.
The result is startling: marimba and mbira lines dart across one another at high velocity; oscillators spin out of control; the infectious lead is so over-processed that whatever its original components, it finishes up as sequenced distress signals escaping short-circuiting mainframes. Once it finally locks into a convulsing, serpentine rhythm, Shackleton begins layering stranger noises still: Transylvanian hammer horror riffage, clattering hooks, no-wave synth stabs. For someone who has admitted to spending months at a time perfecting a single drum loop, the torrential hail feels cast off at random, triggered in real-time on an ironing-board's worth of cheap circuit-bent instruments. It's the sound of Shackleton cutting loose in delirious, utterly entrancing fashion.
Given the sensory overload, the pair of tracks that follow offer some breathing room and a human touch. Chinking metallurgy and a collapsing bassline warm up "White Flower With Silvery Eye", ushering in a more linear progression before ducking out for a Deliverance-style showdown between two diametrically opposed percussive factions: digitized blip versus palmed drum skin. That odd juxtaposition is magnified on "Silver Keys", which begins with a grim monophonic MIDI dawn chorus and ends closest to a traditional Shackleton piece, closing out proceedings on a dark and ritualistic stomp. As opposed to the scabrous Coil-style feedback splayed across 2012's Music for the Quiet Hour, here the rich didgeridoo drone is somewhat comforting against the eerie melody; unusual but not necessarily unnatural.
Precious little unity binds Freezing Thawing Opening: the tracks are bright and glossy, fully blanched of color, and a sterility hangs in the atmosphere. Any attempt at human connection is paltry, even by Shackleton's standards. But in spite of the EP's innate weirdness every track remains supremely danceable and this could be his most groove-centric release yet. He's bound to continue as the chin-scratcher's choice, but if anything, this EP's about face will only add to Shackleton's peculiar magnetism.


Sternberg’s debut balances stark themes of suicidal ideation, abject hopelessness, and self-hatred with whimsy and redemptive tenderness.

Then I Try Some More

Joanna Sternberg is a New York-based cartoonist and musician, and on their website you can find a comic titled “somethings never change.” Sternberg depicts themselves as a lonely child in the first panel, then an equally lone adult in the following three. Underneath the strip, they write: “this comic is not me looking for compliments or words of comfort and wisdom...it is more to remind people that they are not alone.” If Sternberg’s debut album could have included the same addendum, it might have.
Sternberg comes to music with a strong compositional background—they specialized in jazz, blues, and ragtime at The New School for Jazz & Contemporary Music, and the pioneering Yiddish singer Fraydele Oysher is their grandmother. They have an intuitive knack for rhythm and meter; while you won’t find any poetry on this album, Sternberg’s concision is underlined by a consistent metrical pattern that gives every one of their words a punch.
Sternberg sings as though they’re one half of a conversation that turns from loving, to argumentative, to sleepy, and back again. “I wish I was scared of poison, pills, and pain,” they sing on the opener ‘This Is Not What I Want To Be,” with all the nuance of a speaking voice. Despite only singing of despair and depression, Sternberg gives every single beat weight in a way that both somehow eases the burden and demands every word be heard.
Just because the lyrics are clearly stated doesn’t mean they’re easy to hear. With themes of suicidal ideation, abject hopelessness, and self-hatred, Sternberg’s debut can be a challenging listen. For those who aren’t dogged by similar feelings, it may be forbidding, but for those who are able to identify with Sternberg, Then I Try Some More has the potential to be life-savingly relatable.
Sternberg balances the despondency with pathos and whimsy—sort of like the way one laughs when admitting that they’re not OK. The sequencing alternates between sad ballads played on piano and ditties on a chicken-scratched guitar. In the middle of the album lies “Pimba,” a story of a fictional penguin of the same name, who Sternberg uses to make their dejection appear cartoonish and endearing. “My name is Pimba, I’m the littlest penguin,” they sing in a near-squeak.
In terms of predecessors, one would be most tempted to draw similarities between Sternberg and Daniel Johnston. Both write and enjoy comics. Both have a laconic pop sensibility. Both have been dogged by severe mental illnesses. Both could be considered a musician’s musician (Johnston arguably got his break from Kurt Cobain, while Sternberg’s already been scooped up by Conor Oberst, who they’ll soon be supporting on tour). But where Johnston’s passion made up for his lack of musical virtuosity, Sternberg is able to balance both skill sets, in a way that still manages to endow their music with pathos rather than preciousness.


The duo’s latest album is a calming and tender reflection on appreciating what you have in uncertain times.

A Sky Record

Damon & Naomi’s A Sky Record could have just as easily been titled A Quarantine Album. Although the duo started working on the music in 2019, in Tokyo with longtime collaborator Michio Kurihara, they finished during the pandemic, and the lyrics bear the unmistakable stamp of those early months of lockdown: the shock of isolation, the days that bled into each other without distinction, the concerned check-ins from friends and family. “Oceans in Between” opens with a vow to those long-distance loved ones. “Every day I think of you,” Naomi Yang sings tenderly. “I send all my strength to you.”
In an essay included in the 48-page book that accompanies the album, Yang writes that her lasting feeling from quarantine was an overwhelming sense of gratitude, particularly for the support of friends and the comfort of daily rituals. And so, despite its many references to uncertain times and passing storms, A Sky Record is chiefly an album about appreciating what you have. “Shape things that you can change/Nothing need stay the same/Cherish the simple joys,” Yang sings on “The Gift.”
Nearly as much as the absence of Dean Wareham, this wide-eyed, sometimes almost new age-y outlook has separated Damon & Naomi’s records from the ones they used to make as two-thirds of Galaxie 500. Despite the group’s brief existence, Galaxie 500’s legacy has endured not only because they were a great band, but also because they were a cool band: Their dream-pop presented itself with the ragged edges of post-punk and the detached chic of the Velvet Underground.
The very trappings that gave Galaxie 500 their mystique, however, were among the first to go on Damon & Naomi’s own records, which have never humored superficial notions of coolness. Theirs is a much softer form of psychedelia, with an earnestness suggestive of dream catchers, coffeehouse open mics, and Peter, Paul and Mary albums. Their music is  so open and unguarded that it can almost be uncomfortable if you don’t meet it at its level. In the wrong frame of mind, A Sky Record can play like showing up for a dinner party where you were expecting more guests.
Yet once you avail yourself to its intimacy, A Sky Record is a beautiful album, one of the duo’s most beguiling works. Though it was conceived as an homage to the relaxed krautrock LPs released by the defunct 1970s label Sky Records (hence the title), it stands among Damon & Naomi’s most direct and song-forward releases, which makes it a good entry point for newcomers daunted by their three decades of music together. Better still, A Sky Record is especially generous with Kurihara’s majestic guitar, which is as much of a draw as Damon & Naomi’s calming melodies. On “Between the Wars” and “Season Without Time,” his bleary electric guitar cuts through the canvas like strokes of acrylic on what was previously a watercolor painting.
After so many songs that vividly evoke the year 2020, A Sky Record ends in the present moment on “The Aftertime.” “Has the storm truly passed?,” Yang sings. “Is it morning at last?” This is how Damon & Naomi write now. The sentiments are never cryptic or coded; the duo simply express what’s top of mind. That face-value approach to lyrics is well-suited for a subject as universal as a global pandemic. There’s comfort in hearing somebody sing what we’re all thinking, and comfort has always been what Damon & Naomi do best.

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The California singer-songwriter’s third album pulls sounds from all across the psychedelic neo-soul spectrum as she muses about matters of the heart.

Moth

Fana Hues’ voice can only be described as romantic. Whether she’s singing about new love or loneliness, her timbre often transmits a sumptuous sense of desire. It bounces jauntily through the dubby piano and flirtatious sway of Tyler, the Creator’s “SWEET / I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE,” but it also swims through rivers of uncertainty and reverb-drenched guitar on 2022’s “dayxday,” always brimming with hope like a spring sunrise. That aura has surrounded her music, starting from her early years singing in her family band and in school productions of The Wiz to her first two solo albums, 2020’s Hues and 2022’s flora + fana. Hues has said she wants to “showcase the full spectrum of emotion” in her work, which unfurls through her hummingbird-delicate vocal runs. Her third studio album Moth—short for Matters of the Heart—shows Hues at her most assured, standing on firmer sentimental ground as a writer, singer, and lover.
In the past, the content of Hues’ love songs often scraped against their brighter presentation. flora + fana’s “breakfast” feels like gossamer—glittering, doo-wop guitar strums succumbing to a wall of lush bass and synths—but in its pure wistfulness, its story of post-relationship sorrow reads more like a hollowed-out Harlequin romance novel. “Must’ve left my heart where my head is…Woke up in the wrong day; forgot breakfast,” she says sweetly, forcing herself through the motions. But Moth largely moves with more clarity and confidence. In the bridge of “Gone Again,” she’s approaching a similar situation from the other side. This time, she’s the one questioning where the relationship stands, content to work through any fallout: “I know you’re here with me, we’re fine/And what we are won’t be defined/Still I need you to say ‘You’re mine baby.’” Uncertainty still lingers, but this time, she’s the one calling the shots.
Like the insect the album is named after, in her metamorphosis, Hues molts fear and doubt—and embraces a lust for life. Take the dancefloor-ready single “Rental,” where she compares a casual fling to the thrill of joyriding in a fancy car: “Let’s forget the safety/Ain’t no destination/Ain’t no course/Don’t it feel better when it ain’t yours?” Or consider “What Speaks,” which ditches metaphor entirely and asks a potential partner what exactly their desires are in and out of the bedroom. Hues isn’t just welcoming the future, she’s relishing in it. Producer Josh Grant—who has credits on nearly every song—offers up waves of hearty digital and acoustic funk that wash these mini-affairs in vibrant technicolor.
Boldness doesn’t just come through in the production or the lyrics, but also in the way Hues manipulates her dulcet voice. There are a handful of times on Moth where she pushes her higher register to its limits, where it matches the layered emotions of her writing. The hook of “Sweet Like” stacks vocals in the middle of a tornado of drums and bass, amplifying her seductive demands for attention. On lead single “Paper Tigers,” competition for a potential love interest boils over into a hook where she belts for her life, channeling Tina Turner and Janelle Monáe. Explosive moments like these are few and far between, but it’s nice to hear as much variety in her delivery as there is in the writing.
That’s not to say Moth ever gets boring or repetitive. Hues already plumbs the depths of her heart compellingly, but her writing gleams even brighter here, like a gemstone catching stray fragments of light. Life still has its ups and downs; relationships bloom and wither; decisions can feel like life-or-death scenarios. But Hues is no longer a victim of circumstance or meet-cutes gone wrong. She’s fully at the helm and willing to accept the unpredictable with grace. “Matters of my heart never looked so strange/Focused on the things that I cannot change/Who am I to judge what my God has made?” she says on the breezy late-album highlight “Til Morning Come.” With Moth, Hues isn’t shying away from life anymore. She’s ready to find love and self-actualization in the messes and successes of her future.


With tranquil, careful compositions that encourage introspection, the Vermont musician reflects on climate anxiety without succumbing to doom and gloom.

Kleinmeister

The title of Ruth Garbus’ second record, Kleinmeister, translates to “Little Masters,” a German term for a group of 16th-century artists who produced prints from miniscule, labyrinthine engravings. Viewing their work half a millennium later, one is awed by the patience of such handmade precision. Such is the experience of listening to Garbus’ music, the intricacies of which inspire a similar quiet reverence.
Before she was a musician, Garbus applied her attention to furniture design. After dropping out of art school, the younger sister of Tune-Yards’ Merrill joined the vibrant music scene in Brattleboro, Vermont, first playing in the acid-folk collective Feathers and then in the bratty garage-pop trio Happy Birthday, alongside Kyle Thomas (aka King Tuff) and Chris Weisman. Weisman and his brother Kurt, Garbus’ bandmate in Feathers, encouraged the burgeoning songwriter to pursue her own music. Garbus’ first solo release, 2006’s Ruthie’s Requests, was so minimalist and delicate that it felt like it might dissolve into its own fuzz. Four years later, her full-length debut Rendezvous With Rama pushed this insularity towards darker realms.
After two pop-leaning EPs, Kleinmeister returns to tranquil, careful compositions that encourage introspection. While Garbus, her guitar, and her idiosyncratic melodies remain the foundation of these nine songs, producers Travis Laplante and Ryan Power adorn opening tracks “Strash” and “Pain” with aqueous textures. Garbus’ crystalline mezzo soprano emerges from the ambience like a headlight on a foggy evening. From these hazy beginnings, Kleinmeister focuses on the careful intertwining of Garbus’ chords and voice, which has expanded with recent opera training. But the heights she reaches stand in stark contrast with the album’s lingering sadness.
While Garbus has not explicitly defined Kleinmeister as a record rooted in the climate crisis, she makes frequent references to Earth’s devastation. On the synthy “Strash,” she’s surrounded by a horrifying mix of organic and manufactured detritus: “Plasticated paper and popsicle sticks covered in algae,” “insurmountable heaps, hot and green,” and “visceral viscera wet cardboard steam.” Elsewhere, she sings about “Adirondack littering,” a vision of dead squirrels, pesticides, and needles—pine or hypodermic, it’s unclear—scattered across forest floors. “It doesn’t matter who, we’re all gonna be underground,” Garbus sings on “Pain”; the final word stretches until it disappears, leaving a void of despair.
But despite this somber sense of reality, Garbus never submits to doom and gloom. Rather, she calmly reflects on how to acknowledge the planet’s decay without becoming apathetic, and how to balance grief and fear without succumbing to them. “I’m not willing to say that everything’s bad, but I’m sad,” she intones on “Pain.” “Why can’t I remove all this psychic sludge?/Is it okay to feel not okay?” she wonders later on “Grey Sweatshirt.” The tenor sax-driven closer “Fetty Wah” imagines the titular character deceased at the bottom of the Atlantic, toes nibbled away by fish and skin glossed in “bivalve shine.” Kleinmeister accepts this fate with open arms.


Black metal band creates marathons out of marathons that demand complete attention and destroy attention spans.

Diotima

It must have been during the fifth or sixth listen when I finally realized that the appropriate reaction for Diotima-- the third album in four years from New York black metal supergroup Krallice-- was laughter. That's a surprising response to a record that lyrically keys on the transience of existence, the failures of our best efforts, and the high costs of man's lowly sexual instincts. But my chuckle was the delirious sort, based on my own addled exhaustion. That's how Diotima works: Unapologetically extreme and intense, it's the most relentless album from a hyper-dexterous band that's never been one to take it easy. Though it's not the longest Krallice album (that's Dimensional Bleedthrough, slightly), Diotima forgoes the long-short-long tack of previous Krallice efforts, creating marathons out of marathons that demand complete attention and destroy attention spans.
During "Intraum", from 2008's Dimensional Bleedthrough, Krallice took a break from their four-piece hustle. Guitarists Mick Barr and Colin Marston ricocheted through quick, countering riffs until the sound sublimated into a restless seven-minute drone. It's an off-ramp ahead of the album's appropriately titled 19-minute closer, "Monolith of Possession", a long-form roar whose pummeling is precise and seemingly perpetual. Halfway through, you realize just how much that pause meant. Nearly 10 minutes into "Telluric Rings", Diotima's penultimate track, you can hear Krallice reaching for the same rest-stop trick. It stands to be a well-deserved rest, too, as "Telluric Rings" is the fourth and final consecutive track on Diotima to race past the 12-minute mark. What's more, it's written as a lyrical sequel to the preceding "Litany of Regrets", meaning that, when Lev Weinstein's drums finally snap out here, it ends a mostly seamless 22-minute cavalcade. But don't rest easy: Marston and Barr noodle and slink for about 80 seconds, summoning a dark radiance with sheaths of distortion. Weinstein blasts back in, and the track's last 90 seconds offer a raze as energetic and complete as any in the band's discography. So brutal and mean, the track's closing blur is a perfectly executed nexus between grindcore and black metal, as cathartic as it is crushing.
Diotima's glory is often in its details. It has fewer stops, starts, and redirections than its predecessors. Rather, the big shifts are now often misleadingly subtle and slight, created more by the way the musicians move against and with each other than how the band moves as a unit. In theory, it's not unlike studying a Steve Reich phase piece, where patterns show themselves best when their relationships with one another change. Or, as McMaster explained to Chad Bowar, "Essentially, we wanted to have more unison parts, to amplify the contrast between when we'd all play the same riff and when the guitars and bass would split off into independent lines."
Indeed, this is the first album on which McMaster has written all of his bass parts, and his unexpected risks make this thundering gauntlet worth hearing at high volume, with high-end headphones. During "Inhume", for instance, the quartet is playing in strict unison when McMaster steps out of the pack, adding low, lumbering lines that sandbag the whole section. It’s a smart redirection, a moment worth hearing again and again. It’s technical black metal that thankfully never puts its own technicality above the bold ideas in its songs.
Diotima has broadly accessible glimpses: The central riff in "The Clearing" supplies all the majesty and power of a Sousa march-- memorable enough to hum, triumphant enough for pumped fists. Writing for Pop Matters, Adrien Begrand correctly called the title track "genuinely catchy" as it moves from "a cruising sludge groove... [into] the frenzied blast beats we know so well from these guys." But the album's emphasis on movement within the songs and within the parts makes it ultimately less dynamic and dramatic, at least on initial listens; the obvious bloodlust of Dimensional Bleedthrough comes funneled into a full assault that might be mistaken for monotony, especially compared to the latest by Brooklyn black metal brethren Liturgy. That's too bad, though, as Krallice's levels of composition and performance have never been higher-- so high, in fact, it's laughable.