Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the 1996 album from the hip-hop trio, a socially conscious blockbuster grounded by the realities of the immigrant experience.

The Score

In the summer of 1994, the Fugees were in danger of getting dropped. The New Jersey hip-hop trio’s debut LP Blunted on Reality, produced by Kool and the Gang’s Khalis Bayyan, was a misguided effort to conform to the aggressive street sounds that, while popular at the time, failed to capture the multi-faceted perspectives of Prakazrel Samuel Michel, Wyclef Jean, and Lauryn Hill. After the first single “Boof Baf” whiffed on commercial radio and record sales flagged, the Fugees appeared to have flopped. Were it not for remix guru Salaam Remi, they just might have.
The 22-year old producer had made his name crafting records for hip-hop OGs like Kurtis Blow and Craig G, and remixing dancehall tracks by Shabba Ranks and Super Cat. A master at blending the sounds of the Caribbean with breakbeats from the streets, Remi was recruited by Columbia to remix the next two singles in hopes of landing a hit. For the first, “Nappy Heads,” they shed the shouty rapid-fire flows of the original, giving Wyclef and Lauryn Hill’s bars room to breathe, slowing down the tempo and rebuilding the bassline with a jazzy swing. Having stripped away the tough guy façade from the album’s original recordings, what remained was a more accurate representation of their energies; Wyclef’s goofy charm, Lauryn’s effortless cool, Pras’ precocious wisdom. It quickly caught fire at New York’s Hot 97 (where Remi worked on Funkmaster Flex’s show) and cracked the Billboard 100. Columbia finally got the hit they had been looking for, and the Fugees got to make another album.
The Score was birthed at those early sessions with Remi. Not long after the “Nappy Heads” remix dropped, he played a beat originally made for—and snubbed by—Fat Joe, flipping a Ramsey Lewis sample into a boom-bap film score that inspired Wyclef to spontaneously shout his prophetic opening bar: “We used to be number 10/Now we permanent at one.” It was Lauryn that brought the “La,” riffing on hooks until she landed on Teena Marie’s 1988 hit, christening the ineffable “Fu-Gee-La.” The song would serve as the spiritual center of the new record, and their new sound.
Armed with a $135,000 advance and complete creative control, Pras, Lauryn, and Wyclef retreated to the Booga Basement, the makeshift studio in Wyclef’s uncle’s house that had become the home base for their Refugee Camp crew. They invested the advance in professional studio equipment and founded a creative hub for the constellation of artists in their orbit (including Rah Digga, John Forté, and an extremely young Akon), a home base from which Wyclef and his cousin Jerry Wonda would produce hits that would be heard around the world. They spent five months in 1995 writing and recording The Score, freed from the ticking clock of rented studio time and the watchful eye of label executives.
For Wyclef, the endeavor was a 24/7 lifestyle. He had moved into a bedroom upstairs after being kicked out of his home in Newark by his religious father for creating sinful music. The lyrical themes weren’t that different from their debut, but in the Booga Basement, the Fugees finally sounded like themselves. “Problem with no man, before Black, I’m first human,” Wyclef spits on “How Many Mics,” offering a glimpse into how the Fugees viewed their connection to the world at large. As “refugees” or even “hip-hoppers” they’d grown accustomed to being othered, but those experiences evoked as many commonalities as they did differences. From their perspective, everyone seeks refuge from something; their jobs, their families, police, or their own neighborhoods. The Fugees found it in music; the ’70s R&B and soul of Lauryn’s youth, the rock and pop Pras and Wyclef gravitated to while living with their rap-hating preacher fathers, and the Caribbean-influenced hip-hop they wanted to make themselves. All of this can be heard in The Score. At the time of its release, there was little else like it.
The group managed to balance these three volatile personalities by carving out distinct roles that naturally highlighted their strengths while covering their weaknesses. Pras was smart enough to recognize he was the weak link musically. His verses are always the shortest, and while he had an ear for pop hits, he could neither sing nor play any instruments. But his business acumen was sharp: he’s the one who got them the record deal and was trusted to handle the finances. (It was also his idea to cover an early-’70s ballad, one that would catapult them into the Top 40.) Wyclef, ever the daydreaming troubadour, brought an element of musicianship the others lacked. Adept at both guitar and piano, at Fugees shows he would spin street tales alongside screeching solos, viewing himself as equal parts Melle Mel and Jimmy Cliff.
Then there was Lauryn Hill, the virtuoso: The best singer, the best rapper, the coolest, calmest, and most collected. Her singing balances sweetness with strength, with just a touch of the vulnerability she would later explore on her solo opus The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. But Lauryn the MC was untouchable, a confident woman unfazed by her status in a man’s world. Throughout The Score, she dismisses sex pests (“The Mask”), wannabe mafiosos (“Ready or Not”), and creatively bankrupt biters (“How Many Mics”) with equal aplomb. And never has a rapper been so unbothered by so-called competition as Lauryn is on “Zealots”:

So while you fuming, I’m consuming mango juice under Polaris
You’re just embarrassed 'cause it's your last tango in Paris
And even after all my logic and my theory
I add a ‘motherfucker’ so you ignant niggas hear me

Haiti’s refugee crisis, fueled by political unrest and state violence, hit its peak in the early ’90s with the coup d’etat that deposed the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Haitian-Americans, already callously branded by the CDC in 1982 as one of four groups determined to be "risk factors" for HIV infection (the others being “homosexuals, heroin addicts, and hemophiliacs”), were being repatriated en masse as they fled the violence by boat, and those that made it ashore were detained indefinitely. Many Haitian-Americans understandably kept their ethnicity secret, allowing people to mistake them for Jamaicans or immigrants of other Caribbean nations.
When the Fugees first got together, “refugee” was most likely to be heard in a derogatory context. But Pras and Wyclef chose to embrace the culture, and seek common ground with refugees worldwide. It was genuinely wild to see the “Ready or Not” video in rotation on MTV, with Pras rapping “I, refugee, from Guantanamo Bay/Dance around the border like I’m Cassius Clay” from a submarine, a million-dollar Hollywood production depicting Caribbean outlaws openly flouting racist—and illegal—U.S. border policies towards those they slurred as “boat people.” Their effect on the palpable stigma towards Haitians may not be quantifiable, but at a time when Haitians had trouble selling their homes and Haitian goods could not be sold in stores, it was a strong statement of identity and a rejection of the status quo. Wyclef would later squander that goodwill in the wake of the 2010 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince after his Yéle Haiti Foundation was accused of misappropriating what amounted to $16 million in donations earmarked for humanitarian efforts. But in the ’90s, Pras and Wyclef were some of the only high-profile Haitians in the public sphere, and it’s hard to understate just how radical it was for a crew of mostly Haitians to call themselves the Refugee Camp.
But beyond their ethnicity, the record manages to strike the elusive balance between mass appeal and street authenticity. Mainstream media at the time tended to highlight the dynamism of their impressive live performance, with their hits interwoven with medleys of classic tunes played on live instruments standing in stark contrast to their peers’ hype men and backing tracks. But the record was made of, for, and by the hood, yet it wasn’t gangster; it was socially conscious but grounded in the street by the realities of the immigrant experience. The Fugees brought a remarkably diverse set of references to a hip-hop record—Lauryn’s R&B & soul, Pras’ rock and pop influences, and Wyclef’s Caribbean flair.
“Fu-Gee-La” may have been the spiritual center of The Score, but its biggest hit was a cover, wasn’t even officially released in the U.S. as a single, and was the last song they recorded for the album. It was Pras who suggested they cut Roberta Flack’s 1973 hit, but “Killing Me Softly With His Song” ultimately served as a vehicle for Lauryn Hill’s debut to the world at large, and was the catalyst for The Score’s unprecedented commercial success. Wyclef wasn’t convinced of its potential as a single, but radio programmers had other ideas, pushing the song onto the singles charts without an official release. It sold millions of copies in Europe, but in a calculating move, the song was never released to the U.S. market. The label was banking that it would force fans to buy the album to hear it—a scheme that would be impossible to repeat in the streaming economy.
Upon its release, few would believe that The Score would represent nearly a quarter of Lauryn Hill’s creative output. She had long been identified as the group’s breakout talent, fending off suggestions—and offers—to leave her group behind long before it eventually dissolved. She seemed to have been anointed for stardom from a young age; Before graduating high school she had already acted in an Off-Broadway play (Club XII, the hip-hop Twelfth Night), daytime soap (As the World Turns), and two feature films (Sister Act 2, King of the Hill), as well as releasing the Fugees debut. In the face of the undeniable talent on display on The Score, she grew tired of feeling that people (and press) assumed that her male collaborators were largely responsible for her—and the group’s—success, tired of being seen as Wyclef’s girl.
And while she would evolve into something bigger than hip-hop on her 1998 solo debut The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, her work on The Score remains unparalleled in the genre; no MC has ever sung with such soul, power, and grace, nor has any singer ever spit as hard as she does here. If that statement sounds histrionic, just try to come up with a list of her peers that sing and rap even remotely as well as she did. Cee-Lo? Pharrell? Drake? It’s laughable. There’s a reason why everyone freaked out when Azealia Banks dropped “212”; the skillsets just do not often intersect, despite the AutoTune crooners that have since flooded the pop charts. And even the OGs place her at or near the top of their best-ever MC lists. Yet even after all the praise and recognition, she still felt somewhat unseen, somehow unappreciated. This would manifest itself in Miseducation, both in its powerful expressions of vulnerability and in her tyrannical exclusion of her collaborators from that album’s writing and production credits.
The Fugees recording career barely lasted three years. Flooded with offers and opportunities in the wake of their multi-platinum opus, the group began to fracture. Wyclef began recording The Carnival, supported—both emotionally and creatively—by Pras and Lauryn, who both make guest appearances. But when Lauryn started writing songs for her own solo debut, Wyclef gave her the cold shoulder, a stinging rebuke in the wake of the many solo opportunities Lauryn had spurned in solidarity with her group. The dynamic was made all the more awkward by their clandestine romance, despite his marriage to another woman, and later, Lauryn’s with Bob Marley’s son Rohan. And when the birth of Lauryn’s first child became embroiled in a paternity scandal, the fracture became a fissure, ending hopes of a prompt reconciliation.
The Score was the product of chance alchemy, made by three artists whose independent visions coalesced just long enough to create something remarkable. In the process, they laid out a template for hip-hop’s cleared-sample era, where the curation of old records was more important than how you chopped it up and disguised it. Rappers and producers quickly realized that if you had to pay for it, you might as well make the sample recognizable to those that remember the orginal, and court that new audience in the process. “Killing Me Softly” exists across several decades: It borrows from the Roberta Flack version, which itself a re-arranged cover of the Lori Lieberman original; the Fugees version adds the boom-bap drum beat from A Tribe Called Quest’s “Bonita Applebum,” which itself samples “Memory Band” from Minnie Riperton’s Rotary Connection.
The Fugees managed to diversify the voice of the ghetto, one often depicted in a single dimension. They reclaimed pride for Haitians worldwide, a heritage maligned for its postcolonial poverty and strife but still remembered as the setting for the new world’s first successful revolt of enslaved people against their oppressors. Their sound was multifaceted because they were, too, their music diverse, just like the Black experience.

Buy: Rough Trade
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With a newfound sense of melancholy, the Florida jam duo has crafted its tightest studio album without losing the ambling spirit that fuels its live performances.

Petunia

No matter how many decades pass since its 1960s heyday, our collective fascination with the jam band refuses to die. One only has to look at the ever-increasing number of street fashion brands reinterpreting the Grateful Dead bootleg lot tees of yesteryear to get a sense of the innate allure that the jam band lifestyle still holds in our psyche (even if it means people are spending more money to see John Mayer than they could have ever imagined). Of course, beyond the hypnotizing tie-dye and the communal joy of taking psychedelics and dad-dancing in a field with your caravan for three hours, there’s the music. The best jam bands have always stirred the ingredients of the American songbook into a psychedelic porridge, with an emphasis on the magical, spontaneous inspiration that arises out of improvisation. Bands like the Dead were experimental in a way that still stands out in the pantheon of classic rock music, making them enduring icons of the DIY world—particularly for young searchers like brothers Andy and Edwin White of Tonstartssbandht.
But while the Dead have long played in the realm of massive stadiums and extensive lineups, Tonstartssbandht channel this same energy on a much more intimate scale. As with other lo-fi journeymen of the late 2000s like Sun Araw and Eternal Tapestry, Andy and Edwin White reinterpret the concept of “jam music” for the college basement show, stirring a spoonful of bizarro noise pop into their guitar hero worship. Though they easily slid into the slacker rock boom of the ‘10s with their punny track names and funny haircuts (the brothers were even roommates with Mac DeMarco), Tonstartssbandht always pushed their sounds to more transcendental ends, taking lessons from krautrock and noise as handily as they did from country music. Their focus on live performance has meant that for the most part, the best way to hear Tonstartssbandht was either in the room with them or on one of their outstanding live records, which captured their sprawling psychedelia in all its shaggy glory. These live documents, as well as their 2017 studio effort Sorcerer, are daunting beasts, consisting of sidelong tracks and songs that bleed into each other like a black hole by way of “Bad Moon Rising.” With Petunia, however, Tonstartssbandht have finally figured out how to translate their vision into a tight, cohesive studio album without losing the ambling spirit that’s fueled their music from the start.
Whereas previous Tonstartssbandht albums had a ramshackle giddiness straight out of the Meat Puppets playbook, there’s a sense of melancholy to Petunia. Recorded in their home city of Orlando in the midst of the pandemic (as opposed to being pieced together on tour from multiple cities, as their records usually come together), the White brothers’ Byrds-ian church boy harmonies sound more wilted than ever, like road rock anthems sung from the end of the tracks. From the moment “Pass Away” slowly rumbles to life, Andy and Edwin’s twin falsettos carry a foreboding tone, dueting about how “some folks are born who can taste their days/Me, I can’t wait to pass away.” Over the song’s nearly eight minutes, Andy pulls new riffs out of his 12-string as if making them up on the spot, each section flowing with a gentle, swelling tranquility. All of Petunia’s songs carry this quiet sense of discovery, as on the casual swamp boogie “Hey Bad,” which culminates in a fluttering riff that bears more than a passing resemblance to Jerry, or the spiraling arpeggios of “Falloff” that effortlessly build to a highway-careening blues rock sprint, before a string-bent melody brings the whole song to a dazed, sighing finale.
Petunia’s finest moment is the wistful, tremolo-driven elegy “What Has Happened,” a song that sounds unlike anything Tonstartssbandht have previously laid to tape. Over Edwin’s brushed, subtly shifting drum patterns, Andy sings softly of time slipping away, his voice barely rising above a low-hung murmur. The song’s cycling melody may seem simple at first, but its sense of sorrow slowly creeps in like a mist, conjuring those long autumnal walks where one’s thoughts inevitably drift toward the existential. “Honestly, what has happened to me?,” he asks in a quivering falsetto, before the brothers lay a fountain of gorgeous harmonies and weary chord changes, turning the song’s bare few elements into a mournful chamber of self-reflection.
On previous albums, the White brothers might have slathered these moments of clarity in a lo-fi smear, stretching them out and making it impossible to tell where they begin or end—as if we were hearing the idea of what the perfect two-man psych rock band might sound like. Now, Tonstartssbandht brush away all the echo and distortion, focusing instead on rich and complex songwriting as the foundation for their endless jamming. They haven’t lost their ability to channel classic rock’s penchant for epic mysticism, but they have learned how to make it work on a more earthly level, revealing the human emotions that lurk behind their happy-go-lucky noodling. It stands as a testament that the best jam sessions can take you on a journey, even from your living room.

Buy: Rough Trade
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This career-spanning box set to mark Roxy Music's 40th anniversary is often startling, usually wonderful, and more affecting than expected. It's also fascinating as the story of a gradual hardening of an elegant, enigmatic persona, of Bryan Ferry's transformation from art-school pop star to self-made sphinx.

Roxy Music: Roxy Music: The Complete Studio Recordings 1972-1982

In their 1970s heyday, Roxy Music enjoyed enormous critical and commercial success, but even so, they and their art-school rock were admired more than trusted. American critics snipped at leader Bryan Ferry's arch romanticism, while the Brit press considered the models Ferry squired and the suits he doffed and dubbed him "Byron Ferrari". Almost everyone affirmed that the band were great, while disagreeing as to when, exactly. For some, the great achievement was 1982's farewell, Avalon-- impeccably designed pop for weary grown-ups. Others went a decade further back, to the early, playfully experimental albums Roxy released when Brian Eno was in the band, playing androgyne peacock to Ferry's tailored lothario. Whether you see their development between those points as progress or cautionary tale, it's easy to let this contrast define the band.
This box set of remasters to celebrate the band's 40th anniversary-- not lavish, but thorough and reasonably priced-- is an opportunity to break free of narrative and see what sets every phase of Roxy Music apart. The answer is Bryan Ferry, one of rock's great, sustained acts of self-definition. In classic 70s style, like Bowie or Bolan, Ferry invented a pop star. A sybarite with a plummy, awkward croon, gliding through his own songs like they were parties he'd forgotten arriving at. A flying Dutchman of the jet set, doomed to find love but never satisfaction. Having worked his way into character over an album or two, he simply never left it, becoming more Bryan Ferry with every record and every year, whether performing or not.
Which might have been insufferable, except Ferry's performances could hit an emotional core nobody else in rock was getting near. He made enervation his own-- a real, neglected feeling, if a hard one to sympathise with. On Avalon's title track he puts it plainly: "Now the party's over/ I'm so tired". Roxy were never drained by hangovers or comedowns, more by moments of rueful self-knowledge. But you hardly needed lyrics to spot it: from first to last, Roxy Music scattered moments of exquisite exhaustion through their songs. The hanging chords on the intro to early single "Pyjamarama", as if the song can't decide whether to get out of bed. The smothering synthesised pall of "In Every Dream Home a Heartache", from their masterpiece, 1973's For Your Pleasure. The hilariously overwrought dolour of "A Song For Europe". Or the band rousing themselves on "Just Another High" for a quixotic chase after one last thrill, futility nipping at their heels.
That song, closing out 1975's Siren, was one of the great career-ending statements. Except Roxy reformed and returned-- a three year break counted as a split in the frenzied 70s-- for a trio of albums that explored ennui in ever smoother, prettier, and more laconic ways. They restarted well. The glowering, compelling title track from 1979's Manifesto promises a meaner and darker band than we ever quite got. But the later material isn't always worthwhile. There are moments on 1980's Flesh and Blood, in particular, where the band stop sounding tired and start sounding bored, a fatal difference. There are also moments, like Avalon's "More Than This" and "To Turn You On", where the entropic gloss is a feint to let heartbreaking loneliness get in close and floor you. The ultimate late Roxy Music song, oddly, might be their cover of "Jealous Guy", released after John Lennon's murder. Here genuine loss is paid tribute by studied melancholy, soul-baring replaced by poised regret, and in the greatest tribute a narcissist could pay the song stands revealed as a Roxy tune all along.
Exhaustion was Roxy Music's speciality, but if it was all they could do they'd be a footnote. The band earn their ennui by convincing us how hard they can party. The superb mid-70s albums in particular-- For Your Pleasure, Stranded, Country Life and Siren-- are giddy, muscular displays, and vicious when they need to be. They're also Ferry's peak as a vocalist: by Stranded (also from '73) he'd found his voice but hadn't settled into the lounge lizard comfort zone, and was confident playing things staccato, mocking or sentimental. More importantly, his band had the same freedom to roam. If they lack the impertinent invention of the Eno years, these records are generous with opportunities for Roxy Music's lynchpins-- Phil Manzanera, Andy Mackay and Eddie Jobson-- to shine and stretch. When they reach full steam behind an inspired Ferry, on "The Thrill of It All", "Street Life" or "Mother of Pearl", it's the best, most exciting music the band created.
Eno's departure, as he himself admitted, helped Roxy become that more focused, energized band. But his contributions had been colossal. Eno helped Ferry mutate his songs into referential collages and eerie synthscapes, and that experimentation gave the early Roxy their identity. He's easier to spot on their flashy, daring self-titled 1972 debut, the inventiveness of songs like "Ladytron" and "The Bob (Medley)" helping cover up rattly production. But For Your Pleasure is a greater testament to Eno's importance: it's hard to imagine an album that better exploits the tension between two fast-diverging creativities. Its best tracks play games with sincerity and emotional tone: the preposterous schmaltz of "Beauty Queen" resolving into real anguish, while "In Every Dream Home an Heartache" lurches from creepiness to hilarity. Speculating on what would have happened if Eno had stayed with Roxy Music past two albums is wistful fun. But once you've squeezed nine-minute krautrock jam "The Bogus Man" and light-footed pop manifesto "Do the Strand" into the same space, and made it work so magnificently, where do you go? Besides, Ferry needed room to obsessively refine himself.
What they lost, over time, wasn't so much inventiveness as playfulness. Country Life (1974), in particular, is an album of delightful variety-- the genre pastiche of "Prairie Rose", the gothic folly of "Tryptych", the gentle reflection of "Three and Nine". None of these survived the three-year gap. The box set has two discs of non-album material-- singles, mixes and edits-- including all the instrumentals they put on B-Sides. Relaxed studio goof-offs ("Hula Kula", "Your Application's Failed") give way to portentousness ("South Downs") as Ferry, or the group, evolve, and it's a shame. There were trade-offs, of course. The final records may not be so much fun but Ferry had found an occasional knack of crafting brilliant, swooning radio choruses-- "Dance Away", "Oh Yeah", and "More Than This" fully deserve their thrones in AOR Valhalla.
Direct Roxy Music copyists are few, but their themes-- romantic gloom, and the weariness of hedonism-- will be pop-relevant as long as self-conscious twentysomethings get famous, or want to. The music on this box set is often startling, usually wonderful and more affecting that you might have expected. But it's also fascinating as the story of a gradual hardening of an elegant, enigmatic persona, Bryan Ferry's transformation from art-school pop star to self-made sphinx.


The Taos composer’s 1987 accompaniment to a sculpture exhibition with a sci-fi bent makes for a synth-heavy adventure in new age that’s by turns eerie and playful.

Cave Vaults of the Moon

The Toronto DJ, musician, and producer Brandon Hocura co-founded Invisible City Editions—a hybrid record store, soundsystem, and label—back in 2012. The imprint specialized in strains of dance music that fell between genre’s cracks: African deep house, left-field soca, and opulent calypso disco. But last year Hocura stepped away from Invisible City and established Séance Centre, another label with an archival focus, but this time less oriented toward dancefloors and more toward meditation centers. But finding unusual music remains his expertise. So far, the label’s reissues include Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s effervescent new-age synth ruminations and MJ Lallo’s ambient boogie.
They’ve found a similarly hard-to-slot character in Joanne Forman. The Taos, New Mexico, composer has written operas, song cycles based on e.e. cummings poems, and children’s musicals; she’s also worked as a journalist and puppeteer. The oddest job of them all was back in 1987, when Forman was commissioned to create a sound piece for a Taos sculpture exhibition entitled “Artifacts From an Alien Civilization.” Cave Vaults of the Moon is the end result, a rare cassette now returned like some lost transmission from beyond.
The last few years have seen a reconsideration of new-age music, from a comprehensive historical survey to a well-deserved renaissance of the iconic Laraaji. With its meditative pacing, wordless voices, analog electronic washes, and abundance of flutes, Cave Vaults sounds at first blush very much like a cassette that might be found alongside crystals in an esoteric bookstore. Despite having many of the genre’s earmarks, Forman soon wriggles out of easy classification.
Cycling acoustic guitar underpins songs like “Moon Castle I” and “Promeni I,” but they sound less like something from the Windham Hill catalog and more like lost airs from The Wicker Man. They are bucolic like the former, but one can just as easily imagine eerie, disquieting pagan rituals being enacted to their stately melodies; baritone humming adds another exotic aspect to the proceedings.
Forman apparently imagined the moon as a potential vacation destination for extraterrestrial beings from other galaxies; in this thought experiment, the sculptures in “Artifacts From an Advanced Civilization” became the remnants of an abandoned playground. It’s a curious inversion that makes the music feel earthbound and alien at once. But for the most part, Cave Vaults’ most lasting memories are its darkest ones: a vacation marked not by glowing sunsets so much as looming thunderheads. “Codex” and its gently lapping rhythms bring to mind the hazy imaginary realms of Jon Hassell’s Fourth World music. But while the song moves at the relaxing pace of a lullaby, the synthesized choir that rises up in the background casts a shadow across it. It’s a dread-inducing sound that comes back later on “Compline” to much darker effect.
Amid such disturbing ambience, the album’s most curious moment suggests a playful undercurrent. A shimmering soundscape using Forman’s Ensoniq Mirage and Juno 106 makes for a ticklish and disorienting three minutes on “The Twittering Machine.” Whether anticipating the social-media platform by two decades or simply imagining a frivolous state of play and relaxation, Forman paints a vivid picture of intergalactic beings sunning themselves at the poolside.


Repentless, the 12th album from the thrash metal institution Slayer, comes at the most fraught time in the band's career. But despite the death of founding guitarist Jeff Hanneman and the absence of founding drummer Dave Lombardo, it offers the best possible outcome.

Repentless

Repentless, the 12th album from the thrash metal institution Slayer, comes at the most fraught time in the band's career. Founding guitarist and songwriter Jeff Hanneman's passing in 2013 from cirrhosis of the liver looms large; it's impossible to overstate the impact he had on the group. His hardcore influences, and the way these influences warped the group's early NWOBHM style, formed the more extreme wing of thrash that would later inform death and black metal. Hanneman's death is Slayer's greatest concern, but it's far from the only one. Founding drummer Dave Lombardo quit in 2013 allegedly over money concerns, and Paul Bostaph, who played on Slayer's '90s records, returned to replace him. Bostaph is no slouch, but Lombardo is a once-in-a-lifetime talent, whose ferocity set the standard for metal drumming as a whole. The two remaining members, bassist/vocalist Tom Araya and guitarist Kerry King, also seem to be somewhat at odds with the future of the band. King's never short of bluster and says Slayer will soldier on; Araya is a little more apprehensive. How much either's letting on is hard to determine, but there's definitely a rift.
There's also a clear waning in popularity. Slayer headlined this year's Mayhem Fest, which was plagued by attendance problems. It was depressing to see a legendary band barely filling amphitheaters and having to downgrade the venue in San Antonio, one of the most solidly metal cities in the States. King was also open with his disdain for the fest's lineup, and his online spats with tour organizer Kevin Lyman kept the metal news site Blabbermouth going this summer. And Repentless is not Slayer's first album to be released on September 11—God Hates Us All came out the day of the attacks. In the case of God, it was an unfortunate but morbidly appropriate coincidence; with Repentless, it seems calculated to appeal to the basest shock values of metalheads. So, yes, it's easy to be cynical about a new Slayer record.
Despite all of this, Repentless is solid—far from a classic, but the best possible outcome. King and Araya may be drawing from the same well as they always have, but no one knows how to make a Slayer song like they do. Three decades on from Hell Awaits, "Delusions of Saviour" shows they still know how to create a lurching intro, minus Satan yelling "WELCOME BACK!" It leans heavy on the wah, but King doesn't overdose on it like Kirk Hammett would. The title track and "Take Control" display steadfast worship to their own speed; the product is quality, and Repentless does benefit from focusing on that speed Hanneman fostered. But "When the Stillness Comes" recalls "Spill the Blood" from South of Heaven and "Dead Skin Mask" from Seasons in the Abyss, two of Slayer's slower classics. Araya works within his vocal limitations to complement King's rhythms to honor Slayer's slower side without straining or parodying himself. Sticking close to the Slayer playbook was probably the most sensical move—King and Araya have every chance to overindulge or lose the plot but don't. Most songs on Repentless will remind you of a specific track from Slayer's past, and there's enough diversity within their own style.
Losing two key members will irreversibly change dynamics, and Repentless isn't immune. Exodus' Gary Holt, Slayer's live guitarist since 2011, contributes solos, but King played almost all of the guitar here. There isn't the chaotic back-and-forth that Hanneman and King wrestled with in their prime. In fact, the solos are oddly conservative by Slayer standards. They fit, but Hanneman's loose touch is noticeably missing. King is essentially playing off himself—he can't be the more metallic foil to Hanneman's punk ear. Granted, he does wrangle a convincing homage to Hanneman's punkiness in "Atrocity Vendor". It's oddly a more fitting tribute than "Piano Wire", which Hanneman had a hand in writing. "You Against You" is another punky track that could have been slipped in Undisputed Attitude, and that it comes right after "Wire" and "Atrocity" suggests that Slayer made a little Hanneman suite in his honor.
Bostaph is a dependable presence, which is both a compliment and a slight. "Vices" and "Take Control" could have benefitted a little bit from Lombardo's intensity on the double bass. Still, he came into probably the toughest assignment of his career and knocked it out. Bostaph's return also brought back some of the more groove metal tendencies that Slayer adopted in the '90s, most evident in "Implode". "Implode" worked as a one-off single before it was known it was goning to be on the album, but it doesn't mesh with Repentless as a whole. It even brings down the second half of the record, which doesn't have a "Stillness" to compensate. For a band that made a genre-defining album that doesn't break 30 minutes (Reign in Blood), Slayer have lost a bit of their editing touch.
Will they continue after this record? If they do, and they're likely to milk at the very least a couple tours, Repentless doesn't spell their end. If they hang it up, at least they didn't end their career on an embarrassing note. Slayer, even with their recent turmoil, have had good fortune compared to their other peers in the Big Four. Their decline is more gradual, the kind that merely comes with age; they never fell off like Metallica and Megadeth did. They've managed to produce one good record without two irreplaceable members; even so, Repentless doesn't quite answer if they've still got it for the long haul.


The New York City dream pop band's second album sees them introduce a darker, more socially aware edge, though it trades their former instrumental rigidity for amiable, mid-fi college rock jangle.

Clash the Truth

Dustin Payseur sounds confused on Clash the Truth and rightfully so-- the Beach Fossils frontman is dealing with some tricky stuff. The time that's passed since Beach Fossils' solid, well-received eponymous debut has given its name an unintended resonance; when we all pass from this mortal coil, songs like "Daydream" and "Vacation" will be artifacts frozen in time, informing our descendents of what happened in 2010 when the attitudinal tenets of chillwave were leeching into fuzzy, soft-focus indie pop. There's the big picture stuff too: how to let one's ambition manifest, what really endures in a world where so much is fleeting, the challenges of squaring artistic expression with financial temptation. These are all relatable even if you're not in a band, and they've proven fine inspiration for musicians who confidently use their art as a means of making sense of it all. On the other hand, you sometimes get a passive-aggressive album like Clash the Truth, which just sounds kind of confused.
That's really the bigger concern. Their first album peers Wild Nothing, Real Estate, and Cloud Nothings have already proven themselves with assured, expansive sophomore LPs, and in even quicker succession, former guitarist Zachary Cole Smith's Dive went from "Beach Fossils side project" to DIIV, a band that surpassed them while operating in the same lane. There's a lack of conviction on Clash the Truth that finds numerous ways to infiltrate otherwise fine songs; the opening title-track makes an unexpected shift into a post-punk monotone which only stresses the utter lack of urgency in Payseur's vocals. By introducing a darker, more socially aware edge, it makes a song on the opposite end of the spectrum like "Taking Off" ("I'm taking off again/ It feels like it's so soon/ Am I excited or am I just so confused") sound like a sheepish retreat to their previous work.
Elsewhere, Beach Fossils' indecisiveness arises more subtly. Some wondered if the relative cleanliness of their 2011 What a Pleasure EP detracted too much from the scrappy charm of Beach Fossils; it isn't the production methods that defined them so much as a kind of instrumental formalism where all the moving parts work in an almost militaristic lockstep. Without that rigidity, you get amiable, mid-fi college rock jangle along the lines of "Careless" and "Crashed Out", or drowsy, rainy-day window-watchers like "Sleep Apnea" that are perfectly tuneful in the moment and do little to impress on one's mind in any way, let alone establish themselves as the work of Beach Fossils and no one else. You also get the sense of a bigger, conceptual gambit that they couldn't quite grasp. The inclusion of several short guitar pieces isn't a bad move in theory; their riffs are often tasked with handling the expression when Payseur's flat, affectless voice cannot. But while their titles suggest some sort of attempt at unifying the disparate sounds of Clash the Truth, they manage no sequential effect and unlike DIIV, the difference between their instrumentals and vocal pieces is too wide to hear them as anything other than filler.
The wishy-washy attitude may be slightly bothersome for most of Clash the Truth, but it's frankly inexcusable on "Generational Synthetic", a song about the intersection of commerce and art whose title makes its point abundantly clear. Whether or not you think Beach Fossils have earned the right to make a song like this is a moot point. Two years ago, you wouldn't have thought Cloud Nothings would've had much to say about it either, but by making their sound a philosophy, Attack on Memory was a kickass rock album and potent criticism. With its ringing guitars and brisk drum rolls, "Generational Synthetic" is not too different than any other Beach Fossils song. If they admitted to their own ambivalence, they'd come off as sympathetic. Instead, Beach Fossils come from a place of judgment and open themselves up to criticism.
As such, "Generational Synthetic" doesn't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny-- when Payseur leans on sarcastic, passive-aggressive commentary ("Oh your words are so poetic/ Generation apathetic"), he comes off as both preachy and phony in the context of music that sounds like part of the problem rather than the solution. And considering the troubling financial realities of even the most successful indie bands are common knowledge, by sneering "trade your fortune for a song," he just sounds naïve.
Beach Fossils aren't hypocritical for making "Generational Synthetic", as criticizing a system you fully participate in is pretty much democracy in action. But a guy like Craig Schuftan, author of the alt-rock dissertation Entertain Us!, has thought longer and harder about the clash of indie rock and major money and calmly, unintentionally ethers their message with one sentence: "It's not so much about whether playing in front of a logo makes a mockery of your principles, it's more about making sure your principles are good in the first place, that they're strong enough to survive a process like that." Or, as Iceage put it, "Where are your morals?" On "Generational Synthetic", Beach Fossils get on a soapbox without taking a stand, and it's the most damning example of the mixed messages that pervade Clash the Truth-- as the cliché goes, be the change you want to see in the world.


Originally released in the UK four years ago and subsequently dissed by the artist herself, Amy Winehouse's debut finally lands on U.S. shores.

Frank

The self-destructive tortured-artist routine was bullshit when Kurt Cobain did it, it was bullshit when Elliott Smith did it, and it's bullshit now. As anyone who's seen the video of Amy Winehouse desperately finger-fumbling her way through "Back to Black" at the MTV Europe Video Music Awards knows, her look-how-messed-I-am public persona is now screwing up her art something fierce. So instead of a new record, Americans are now getting a modified version of Frank, her first album, originally released four years ago and subsequently dissed by the artist herself. Its two weakest links, "Know You Now" and a pointless cover of standard "Moody's Mood for Love", have been yanked out of the original running order and appended as hidden penalty tracks.
Winehouse has a hell of a voice, even when she imitates her favorite jazz vocalists-- especially Billie Holiday-- much too closely. (Just in case anybody misses the idea that she's supposed to be a jazz singer who's somehow stumbled into a neo-soul record, Frank begins with a little fragment of Winehouse scat-singing, and the chorus of "October Song" doesn't just namedrop Sarah Vaughan but lifts its melody from "Lullaby of Birdland".) None of her songs here are as indelible as "Rehab" or as cutting as "You Know I'm No Good"-- and the best are co-written with Nas and Fugees collaborator Salaam Remi-- but you can hear the development of the high-powered songwriter she turned into on Back to Black in the snarky character sketch "F*** Me Pumps" and in the way the sharp-nailed ballad "You Sent Me Flying" breaks into a Soul II Soul beat halfway through. And although she hasn't quite nailed the 1972 vibe of her later record (despite some corny vintage-vinyl sound effects), a couple of her stylistic experiments pay off, especially the high-drama soul loop that underpins "In My Bed".
But Winehouse's slow public wreck isn't just an unfortunate thing that's happening to someone who happens to be a star, it's part of her act, and has been from the get-go-- which means it makes her audience complicit in it. Her favorite lyrical topic, even on her debut, is loving not wisely but too well; on "Amy Amy Amy", she's gently wagging a finger at herself about her fondness for bad-news boys. And her deliberate affectation of Holiday's unmistakable vocal tics can't help but suggest the narrative we're supposed to buy into: "Great singer, tragically destroyed by her unhappy private life and bad habits, who turned her pain into universal art." (What are we as her audience supposed to do? Stage an intervention? Well, we can at least think very carefully about what our participation in that narrative means. And who are we to say we wish she'd stop going on about how she doesn't need any help and get some goddamn help already? Not vultures, that's who.) Winehouse is good enough that she was worth paying attention to for her music alone before her drama started ruining it, but in the light of her subsequent career, Frank comes off as the first chapter in the Romantic myth of the poet who feels too deeply and ends up killing herself for her audience's entertainment. And that is some bullshit.


Over the last eight years, the Arctic Monkeys have gone from spastic punk, to doomed stoner rock, to sparkling guitar pop, to their fifth album’s skinny-jeaned funk. On AM, the quartet, now based in Los Angeles, offer a paranoid, haunted collection that goes beyond the sweaty clubs and furtive flirts into the hotel rooms, after parties, and bad decisions that can follow.

AM

Their first record was called Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not—a Nevermind the Bollocks–type sendup of the generation-defining Self-Titled Debut Album as well as a bratty act of defiance from four Yorkshire youths drunk on their own twitchy cleverness. Their fifth album is called AM, and those mountainous initials stood sky-high behind the band as they preened and stomped like proper rock stars through a headlining Glastonbury set earlier this year. Their face-shrouding hair and brown hoodies are out; greaser streaks and bespoke suits are in. And the same band that once aimed its sights at windbag poseurs on “Fake Tales of San Francisco” is now based in Los Angeles. These changes have caused some to question Arctic Monkeys’ commitment to their initial no-bullshit ideals. But the quartet isn’t giving into the mindless grandeur of rock’n’roll as much as they’re working within its confines to mine new territory; over the last eight years, as they’ve gone from spastic punk, to doomed stoner rock, to sparkling guitar pop, to this new album’s skinny-jeaned funk, Arctic Monkeys have stayed close to the spirit of their debut’s title while minimizing its excess at the same time.
Meanwhile, singer and lyricist Alex Turner has moved from syllable-stuffing chronicles of indie nightlife culture to songs that are sleeker, more blue-black, more self-lacerating. Thematically, AM centerpiece “No. 1 Party Anthem” comes off like a seedier take on Arctic Monkeys’ breakout track “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor” as it tells of a collar-popped lothario on the prowl in a dank club made up of “lights on the floors and sweat on the walls, cages and poles.” But instead of blaring, this anthem is wistful, its piano, acoustic strums, and croons suggesting days gone by (along with ’70s Elton John and Rod Stewart). Its swirling bridge sums up the scene in just a few choice phrases—“The look of love/The rush of blood/The ‘she’s with me’/The Gallic shrug”—and sounds like a definitive endnote to Turner’s most notable songwriting style.
So AM goes beyond the sweaty clubs and furtive flirts into the hotel rooms, after parties, and bad decisions that can follow. The crux of the record is neatly summed up by the hook to the blistering “R U Mine?”: “R U mine tomorrow, or just mine tonight?”—an entire world of sex and love and desire distilled to quick-hit text-speak that Drake could appreciate. Turner isn’t sure of the answer to that question, and the resulting limbo does his head in all over the LP. He’s an avowed romantic living in an unromantic world, grasping for meaning in a city-to-city road-dog lifestyle hellbent on repelling it. In some ways, Turner’s struggle and his band’s recent gleaming transformation into something like rock gods is reminiscent of U2’s turnaround circa Achtung Baby, when that quartet traded in deep virtuousness for sin, rhythm, and leather jackets. For Arctic Monkeys, loosening the tether to credulity can be freeing, allowing the band to live out their classic-rock dreams: T. Rex bop, Bee Gees backup vocals, Rolling Stones R&B, and Black Sabbath monster riffage are all rendered modern throughout AM with the help of longtime producer James Ford. And for Turner in particular, the switch has him connecting strings of desperate 3 a.m. thoughts: some horny, some bleary, some a bit frightening.
Two of the album's slinkiest and best tracks have Turner sounding slyly wolfish, like a perplexed predator confusing lust and longing. “I dreamt about you nearly every night this week,” he purrs on opener “Do I Wanna Know?,” which slowly rolls forward thanks to guitarist Jamie Cook’s lizard-brain riff and drummer Matt Helders’ Queen-sized beat; “Knee Socks,” meanwhile, tells of a wintertime tryst that climaxes with an operatic guest vocal from Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme, who could’ve used some of AM’s groove on this year’s lumbering … Like Clockwork. Whereas 2009’s Homme-produced Humbug had the Arctic Monkeys trying on QOTSA’s heaviness with varied success, AM integrates its influences more fully—and, at times, even beats Homme at his own snake-rock game.
The only solace found on this paranoid and haunted album is within its eclectic music, as well as the idea of music itself. “Mad Sounds” is AM’s most hopeful song, an achingly sincere ballad that employs melody, swing, and “oh la la las” to attest to the power of melody, swing, and “oh la la las.” It teases out the purest interpretation of the Rorschach-like sine waves that adorn AM’s cover, which—depending on your vantage, or mood—could also read as leering sunglasses or maybe a bikini top. Creeping closer “I Wanna Be Yours” combines all three meanings while seemingly answering the question posed by opener “Do I Wanna Know?” That is: When faced with the choice between easy pleasures and lasting devotion, Turner is picking the latter. Sweet, right? But upon further inspection, it's not so simple. “I Wanna Be Yours” features lyrics by UK punk poet John Cooper Clarke from his 1982 track of the same name, which uses the language of commercialism to express the deepest love. “I wanna be your vacuum cleaner, breathing in your dust,” sings Turner as a lonely drum machine highlights the sentiment’s emptiness. Still, the song doesn’t sound cynical. It’s genuinely affecting. The ultimate message—will future generations have the capacity to love people as much as their cars, their coffee pots, their phones?—rings terrifyingly true in our time of personal branding. Arctic Monkeys let these thoughts languish. “Maybe I just wanna be yours,” Turner sings. Maybe not.


Debut album from this Brighton-based six-piece rolls early-80s action theme songs, vintage hip-hop, Saturday morning cartoons and cheerleading squads into one sick party record bursting with surly, overdriven guitars, triumphant trumpet lines, and battling drum assaults that seem to break through walls with the barreling force of a thousand Kool-Aid men.

The Go! Team: Thunder, Lightning, Strike

Thunder, Lightning, Strike

The A-Team. CHiPS. The Great American Hero. Hunter. Riptide. Magnum P.I. Hardcastle and McCormick. For an all-too-brief moment in the early 1980s, network television seemed to cater almost exclusively to boys aged 7-15. I was lucky to be a member of this elite class, amongst the target demo of these kid-tested/mother-denied telecasts. But for all the hours I spent admiring Lee Majors' proto-MacGyver ingenuity and B.A. Baracus' oppressive unsilliness, I have no distinct visual memories of these shows; just a vague montage of military-grade explosives, dirt mounds, and white limousines.
The only thing I remember with any clarity at all is the music-- those awesome, supercharged theme songs that outblasted any onscreen artillery and promised more stunt-powered glory than Evel Knievel's Snake River Canyon jump. And most of them were written by one man: the cruelly unsung Mike Post, stateside television's own Ennio Morricone. The breadth of Post's stylistic range and uncanny knack for visceral impact have made him one of very few television composers worth remembering, and I guarantee you know more of his work than you think.
I can't pretend to know which brilliantly Post-themed programs were broadcast in the UK (although many were), but six-strong Brighton brigade The Go! Team are clearly just as familiar with his work as any American my age. Their debut album, Thunder, Lightning, Strike, is a hazy blend of nostalgia, evoking that period through a melange of action hero theme songs, early hip-hop (from 1979-82, in particular), and traces of 70s sunshine funk.
In a contemporary context, The Go! Team-- not to be confused with Calvin Johnson's highly inferior 1980s collective of the same name-- could be shelved alongside The Avalanches and Rjd2, as all three share a party aesthetic whose reflection of bygone eras is just slightly wistful. But one immediately striking difference between them is The Go! Team's reliance on live instrumentation. Though they certainly do their fair share of sampling, they tend to use fragments as a means of fleshing out the battling, overdriven guitars, triumphant trumpet lines, and drum assaults that seem to break through walls with the barreling force of a thousand Kool-Aid men.
Thunder, Lightning, Strike's opener, "Panther Dash", wastes no time establishing the band's modus operandi: Its "Hawaii Five-O" crash-in mates with an open-range harmonica to evoke some lost Sergio Leone-directed "Speed Racer" showdown. "The Power Is On" pops like puffy rainbow stickers, rubbing determined piano chords against surly trumpets and cheerleader chants. "Junior Kickstart" is BMX banditos navigating mud-caked spokes and handlebars through flagged-off terrain. "Bottle Rocket" throws back to Saturday morning cartoons and Brooklyn b-girl breakdowns, with female rapper Ninja lunging from dusk-cast shadows to conjure a katana-wielding Sha Rock.
This record recalls, with striking exactness, a very specific time and place that The Go! Team could only have experienced second-hand, through imported television and culture. But then, it was vicarious for us all: Thunder, Lightning, Strike aspires to recapture the imaginary good-natured competitiveness of a period before realism dominated prime-time TV, when cars and helicopters could talk, and good guys always wore pleather. It's all dusky reds and yellows, shag-headed battle royales, exploding tanks, and getting up the next day to relive it on the playground.


After a solemn post-divorce album, the Nashville-via-Texas songwriter works his endearing wit back into songs about loving someone new and abhorring social trends.

What It Is

Very few roots singer/songwriters would dare include “joie de vivre” in a rambling song about the state of the world; fewer still would get away with it. But two songs into his sixth album, the Texas-born, Nashville-based Hayes Carll manages this modest feat when detailing what it takes to be a good citizen: “I just wanna do my labor, love my girl, and help my neighbor,” he declares during “Times Like These,” his rapid delivery running the words together. And then, shooting beyond his upper register, he adds, “while keeping all my joie de vivre,” almost turning the exclamation into the beginning of a spirited “yeehaw.” As he’s long done, Carll is poking a little fun at himself for using such a phrase at all. The levity underscores a chagrined attitude toward the song’s subject matter, as though life in the late 2010s is itself a grim joke.
This barbed humor recalls vintage Carll, from not long after he emerged in the early 2000s with an interesting take on the Texas outlaw tradition. Setting his songs in dive bars and small towns, he livened up familiar subject matter with a sharp sense of humor, usually making himself the butt of any joke he might crack, as when he starts a bar brawl with the Almighty during “She Left Me for Jesus.” But he got serious on 2016’s Lovers and Leavers, a stark acoustic album inspired by his divorce and the gnawing realization that his songs weren’t quite reflecting his life. It’s a fine album, but, minus those moments of irony, sarcasm, and self-deprecation, it’s one that almost anyone could make.
He shakes loose again on What It Is. Carll brings in a rambunctious band for these songs, ranging from barnstormers like “Beautiful Thing” to the bluegrass of the title track. The rambling sound perfectly suits his demeanor, flourishes of organ and fiddle underscoring subtle winks and wry asides. Opener “None’ya” finds him in thrall to a mystifying lover, the sort who paints the front porch turquoise because it keeps out bad spirits. When he asks where’s she’s going, she quips, “None’ya business.” The point of the song isn’t her eccentricity but his response to it—that is, his promise to appreciate the woman in front of him. When he sings, “I try because I want to” in the chorus, he draws out the second word as if in awe of his good fortune.
The subject of “None’ya,” as Carll has said, is Allison Moorer, the veteran country artist who co-produced this album and is his fiancée. The love songs here seem less about her in particular and more about his struggle to be a good partner and person. “If I May Be So Bold” and “I Will Stay” are sweet songs about determination and devotion, but they lack a certain, well, je ne sais quoi. Carll’s sharpest instincts don’t show here, so it sounds like he’s writing about self-reflection without doing much self-reflecting, solving equations without showing the math.
Masculinity threads through these tunes, linking a love song like “Be There” to a political one like “Fragile Men,” co-written with the Tennessee singer/songwriter Lolo. Racists marching in Charlottesville inspired “Fragile Men,” and the lyrics incisively dissect their petty pathology: “It must make you so damn angry they’re expecting you to change.” But again, the song never delivers the catharsis you want. Maybe it’s the fussy string arrangement or the unwavering directness, without a character or a narrative to bring the ideas to life. Something similar happens on the squirrely “Wild Pointy Finger,” about trolls blaming everybody else for everything. The ideas are sound, but both songs need anchors, next steps to make them sound like he’s not just lampooning convenient targets.
The best song on What It Is is the most familiar. Carll wrote “Jesus and Elvis” years ago with Moorer and Matraca Berg, and Kenny Chesney recorded it for 2016’s Cosmic Hallelujah. It describes a dive bar presumably deep in the heart of Texas, decorated with velvet paintings of “the King of kings and the King of rock’n’roll.” Each verse discloses a bit more about the tragic significance of those decorations, and Carll makes that backstory sound more human and more heartbreaking than Chesney ever did. It’s the one song that’s most disconnected from Carll’s story, but it captures something very special in the everyday, a bit of the joy of life even in the face of death.


West Coast groove aficionado Dâm-Funk offers an engrossing selection of tracks that are as dreamy as they are funky in his installment of the DJ-Kicks mix series.

DJ-Kicks

The best DJ sets always involve some sort of telepathy. Usually it’s when a DJ constructs a set that steers you towards euphoria so effectively that it feels like they’re inside your brain at a panel of controls, à la Voltron—a state of ecstatic dissociation so magical that it's the third most popular subject for pop songs after love and smoking weed. But rare and particularly talented DJs can pull off an even more magical feat, dragging you out of your head and into their minds, letting you hear the world through their ears for a moment.
I used to think Dâm-Funk was the more typical kind of DJ, mostly because I’ve only seen him at festivals and big events, and never at Funkmosphere, the residency he’s held at an L.A. bar for the past 10 years. In that more intimate environment, he can stretch out and offer a fully immersive sound experience. And after hearing his contribution to the DJ-Kicks franchise, which is designed to replicate the Funkmosphere vibe, it’s clear that he’s actually the second kind of DJ, and maybe one of the best at that specific kind of mind meld.
Heard through Dâm-Funk’s ears, the world is, as you might expect, a very funky place. It’s also very dreamy. Dâm may be best known for reigniting L.A.’s passion for hard-edged, car-shaking synth funk, but at 44, he seems more interested in creating a shared hypnagogic utopian mindspace than simply rocking a party.
The mix’s tempo tops out at a fairly restrained 126 BPM, and most of the tracks chill a few notches below. The mood is overwhelmingly easy-going, from contemporary synth auteur Moon B’s study in warm, reverb-drenched minimalism that opens the mix, to the closing shimmer of Philly-inspired soul group Crystal Winds’ 1982 track “Funk Ain’t Easy.” Some of the selections, like the airbrushed erotic fantasia “Love Jam” by the cultishly strange duo Randell & Schippers (who have a screencap of a complimentary MySpace comment from Dâm on the homepage of their website, beneath a backstage photo at a Blue Man Group show), border on New Age. Others, like Gaussian Curve’s synth pad daydream “Broken Clouds,” cross fully over.
Taken as a whole, the mix paints a soothing watercolor portrait of a funk-based American counterpart to Balearic house—a style that Ibiza ravers were starting to greet the dawn with around the same time as the bulk of Dâm’s DJ-Kicks picks were being recorded–that never actually existed. Piecing together obscure old cuts from regional labels that probably wouldn’t ever have crossed paths back in the day (like Verticle Lines’ proto-vaporwave 1982 breeze-funk rarity “Theme From Beach Boy” and Gemini’s airy 1997 take on Chicago house, “Log In”) Dâm’s crafted an entire genre in retrospect.
It’s a sound with a promising future, if this mix is any indication. Dâm’s picks lean heavily on vintage grooves that are extremely rare even by crate-digger standards, but some of the strongest material is new. There’s Moon B’s “Oof,” and Kansas City funk auteur Reggie B’s purplishly psychedelic “Poison Candy,” and Dutch producer Henning’s “Arrival / Departure,” which drops a throbbing G-funk beat into a crystalline garden of blissful synth flutes.
Despite Dâm’s preference for playing tracks pretty much all the way through—which suggests an infectious, wide-eyed passion for the music that fits into his mind-control powers—the mix is properly appreciated as a whole. You can let it wash away whatever cares you have in warm, funky waves. There are a few songs that deserve to be listened to on their own, though, and one of the best comes from a collaboration between Dâm and fellow L.A. dreamchaser Nite Jewel. “Can U Read Me?” takes the peak-Janet weightless perfection of “All for You” and turns its touch even lighter, transforming it into something that captures the joy of seeing the sun rise in the corner of your eye and knowing the party isn’t even close to being over. Funk may not be easy, but with Dâm at the controls it can sure feel that way.


Cate Le Bon’s wondrous sixth album exists in a waking dreamscape whose locked-in grooves approach the unknowable at slanted angles.

Pompeii

“Faced with a choice, do both,” Brian Eno once proffered. On Cate Le Bon’s apocalyptically titled but sky-reaching sixth album, the Welsh art-pop iconoclast orients her bemused songs by the compass of this oblique strategy. Le Bon collages the saxophones and bass grooves of Pompeii into a heady harmonic mix of psychedelia and pop, awe and bewilderment, amplifying both her criss-crossing inscrutability and the inexhaustible pleasures of clarity. These inquisitive songs feel, to borrow a word from one of her lyrics, “multidirectional.”
Now based in California’s Mojave Desert—a peculiar, austere, and immersive landscape, not unlike that of her songs—Le Bon has been making records for her entire adult life. But she likened the process of her last, 2019’s Reward, to writing a first album. She had stepped back from music for a year to learn the craft of building practical objects—chairs and tables, specifically—while making a daily practice of listening to David Bowie. The creation of Le Bon’s next album would not be so methodical. Recording Pompeii at the pandemic’s peak, she fluctuated between hope and dread: “You can’t help but wonder if this is the last thing you’re ever going to make,” she said of her “mental polarization” then. “You’re swinging between ‘Oh, fuck’ and ‘Fuck it.’” Nodding to the crumbling nature of life as we knew it, and perhaps to her own excavation of buried memories, she named her record after a civilization in ruins beneath lava and ash. But there is a hidden optimism here: “Every fear that I have/I send it to Pompeii,” goes the titular chorus, turning the fossilized Roman city at once into an evocation of the end times and an incinerator for doubt when there is nothing left to lose.
Pompeii exists in the vivid waking dreamscape of Low and Bowie’s other late-’70s adventures, at times imagining a reality where he glittered up the production of John Cale’s wry surrealism instead of Lou Reed. But Le Bon’s particular streak of shape-shifting absurdism has its own poised and introspective post-punk lawlessness. Like her rawer, more spontaneous band DRINKS, a collaboration with Tim Presley, Pompeii sounds like music we are listening in on, and when Le Bon sings, it is with all the mystery of late-afternoon light casting streaks and shadows on the wall. Pompeii is her poppiest album, and yet one might picture Le Bon devising the title while watching her psych forebears rock amid ruins in Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, a scene with uncanny resonance in 2020: an isolated amphitheater with no audience, no feedback, the air unsettled.
If the locked-in grooves propelling Pompeii’s otherworldly textures make these nine tracks feel like one, that’s in part because Le Bon wrote primarily on the bass, which sings across this record as anchor and harmonizer. The record’s silvery tone has a similar unifying effect, inspired, as it were, by a painting of Le Bon in the guise of a nun by Tim Presley. (The actual album cover is a photographic portrait replicating the painting, which Le Bon could not bear to commodify.) In interviews, Le Bon has described how she and co-producer Samur Khouja stared at the artwork’s striking color scheme (amber, olive, Yves Klein blue) to guide the assembly of their own synth palette—how dualities of light and dark, hope and fear, exist, for Le Bon, on the canvas. To further illuminate the beguiling divinity of Presley’s piece, Le Bon has cited a Rebecca Solnit essay on Virginia Woolf that reads: “Most people are afraid of the dark… many adults fear, above all, the darkness that is the unknown, the unseeable, the obscure.” But Solnit is quick to clarify that this is the same darkness “in which love is made, in which things merge, change, become enchanted….” The spacious, improvisatory energy of Pompeii often contains the feeling of searching through this night. Its tone could be called the enchanted unknown.
Le Bon’s pristinely askew songwriting has always felt suspended between the desire to be understood versus the freedom of remaining furtively unplaceable. But more than ever—alongside Pompeii’s swarming tapestries of sax, clarinet, and synth lines—the directness and relative vulnerability of her songwriting voices a longing to connect. “What you said was nice/When you said my heart broke a century,” Le Bon sings sleekly on “Harbour,” a typically slanted image that is still charged with emotion. On the immaculate “Moderation,” Le Bon directs us to “picture the party where you’re standing on a modern age,” like a mantra for getting out of one’s head and into the world. When she sings of catching “a plastic bouquet/down the aisle” on “French Boys,” and feeling so woefully out of place, her misfit spirit is alive in every jigsaw note. Le Bon’s singing and Stella Mozgawa’s drumming can make Pompeii’s nervy rhythms feel physical and anthemic, like the Talking Heads’, and the way Le Bon pushes her voice heavenly high or tugs it down like a riptide—“You know, I’m not cold by nature,” she croons on “Running Away”—makes the songs sound as if they are constantly expanding at the edges.
One tune towers over Pompeii, an obvious testament to Le Bon’s recent ascent to Joshua Tree karaoke queen. She sings the title of “Moderation” in the album’s most irresistible hook—as in “Moderation/I can’t have it”—and the song becomes a new wave ode to the act of obsession. (Joni Mitchell was in the desert, too, when she parsed the difference between artists such as herself, who “travel the breadth of extremities,” unlike those who “stick to some straighter line,” an implication that rings through “Moderation.”) “I get by, one eye on the sky, but I can’t put my finger on it,” Le Bon sings, as if narrating the tempestuous creative process itself. “I wanna cry, I’m out of my mind.” She renders chaos and control with audacity and beauty all her own.
“In the remake of my life, I moved in straight lines,” she sings on “Remembering Me,” but on Pompeii, she fortunately gives us the first cut. Le Bon’s creative power remains in the circuitous jaggedness with which she navigates pop and poetry, uncertainty and revelation. In her favored Solnit essay about Virginia Woolf, the author suggests that it’s the job of artists to explore beyond that which is easily knowable, to “go into the dark with their eyes open” and shine. What might one say from the depths of inexplicable darkness? “It’s my heart, it’s the beating of my heart,” Le Bon attests in her highest register on the title track, deep in the mix but unmistakable, tilted but clear. From note to note, Pompeii keeps you guessing, which is a way of knowing our hearts beat, too.

Buy: Rough Trade


The New York DJ Tony Humphries mixes an impeccably smooth course through disco-inflected house from Germany’s Running Back label.

Running Back Mastermix

In 2002, the German DJ Gerd Janson borrowed the football term “running back” for his new label because, he has said, he liked the way it expressed the idea of  “going back and simultaneously rushing forward.” On of Running Back Mastermix, a mix album celebrating 15 years of the label, he apparently takes “rushing” to mean something more like “ambling in a slow, groovy fashion.” This is a mix of unashamedly classic, disco-inflected house that, for all its positives, doesn’t exactly sharpen electronic music’s cutting edge.
Choosing the distinguished New York DJ Tony Humphries to mix the album may have something to do with this. A legend in the clubbing world, Humphries is a masterful DJ of soulful house and garage known for his wonderfully smooth mixing skills. It is little surprise, then, that he highlights the parts of the Running Back catalogue that pay homage to classic disco and house, from Todd Terje’s celestial nu-disco number “Ragysh” to Tiger & Woods’ French touch-inspired “Time.” In doing so, he arguably smoothes out some of the appealing wrinkles in Running Back’s history. This is, after all, the label that unleashed the nightmarish techno thump of Theo Parrish’s “Black Mist” on an unsuspecting public, and once reissued an obscure Japanese sound-effects record pretty much on a whim.
What Humphries brings to the mix, however, far outweighs any possible gripes about conservative track selection. Reflecting a DJ career of more than 35 years, Humphries’ mixing and sequencing are second to none. There’s little flashy or choppy here: He may play with the EQ and filters, but Humphries mostly leaves the songs alone, favoring long, smooth transitions that might join two given tracks for a minute or more, creating something new in the process. Early in the mix, he transitions from the electro-boogie of Tiger & Woods’ “Don’t Hesitate” into the same duo’s “Time,” layering the wonderful string rush of the latter under the former’s nagging vocal hook in a perfect example of harmonic mixing. Later on he introduces the eerie, atmospheric tapestry of Paul Woolford’s “Forevermore” into Matthew Styles’ “Hot!,” helpfully dirtying up the latter’s rather-too-straightforward acid blips.
The sequencing here is key. Rather than rushing into endless sugary drops, Humphries builds in peaks and troughs that gently guide the dancer up and down. The tough filters of Tiger & Woods’ “Time” give way to the wandering, Balearic synths of Jex’s “La Casa,” which in turn cedes the floor to Tiger & Woods’ club stomper “No More Talking,” a song that brings to mind the brilliantly effective sample cut-ups on Daft Punk associate DJ Falcon’s 1999 EP Hello My Name Is DJ Falcon. The track selection, while limited in musical palette, works well as an introduction to Running Back, with songs from the label’s established names (Todd Terje, Leon Vynehall, Paul Woolford) mixed up with the work of newer producers (Roy Comanchero, Jex, and and hugely promising Shan). The individual track highlights are legion, too, including Mr. G’s minimalist Latin masterpiece “Ben & Gerd (Killin It M Day),” the taut, Mood II Swing-like bounce of Vynehall’s “Beau Sovereign,” and Shan’s fizzing rave throwback “Work It (Piano Mix).”
Weighed against these are a couple of songs that start to drag in a home-listening context, notably Redshape’s “Dogz,” which could have lost a minute in the mix, and Matthew Styles’ “Hot!,” which ends up sailing too close to Pepe Bradock’s 1999 track “Burning Hot” for comfort. And Shan’s “Bassline Party,” while a great track in itself, closes the mix on an anticlimactic note, as if Humphries had a further four hours to give. The limitations of the single CD format mean this isn’t the case. Running Back Mastermix may not be the definitive story of the label, but it succeeds as a finely tuned celebration of joyful, disco-infused house. In an age of digital abundance, being left wanting more feels refreshing.


On one hand, you have a group that have clearly said everything they wanted to say, whatever it is they ...

Margerine Eclipse

On one hand, you have a group that have clearly said everything they wanted to say, whatever it is they wanted to say. This is a pretty common criticism of bands by people who probably stopped listening to the records years ago-- though to be fair, if that's your idea of a flaw, Stereolab are deeply flawed. It's certainly something I've considered from time to time. Why it should come up more often with this band than, say, Radiohead, is another question. Apparently, "ruts" are not inherently bad, and it turns out the majors have been demonstrating this for as long as "pop" meant "popular." No, I don't think the fact that Stereolab have been making variations on the same record every year for almost ten years is the reason they briefly fell out of favor. This is fashion, you understand, and if anyone should understand the stylish generation, it's the Lab.
Of course, Stereolab never really fell "out of favor," per se, but getting two people to agree on the value of their indie-pop stock is a tall order. The main problem is that taking stock of the band's place within a contemporary context assumes that they were ever really "contemporary." Even back in the days when they might feasibly have been playing "indie rock," all of their musical cues were throwbacks to the vintage post-rock power of folks like Neu! and Raymond Scott. Their imagery was all fluorescents and retro-futuristic schemata, even before their music became the same. Their Marxism was about ten years too late to really be cool-- but as they consistently demonstrate, their kind of "cool" is, at best, a paradox.
Furthermore, and perhaps most on point, their music hasn't actually gotten any worse over the years. That may sound like a backhanded compliment, but in the faces of a significant faction of former Stereolab fans who think they've gone soft, it's practically blasphemy. You know, in merely quantitative terms, the ratio of good songs on their records is about the same as it was during their perceived mid-90s "peak," and I would argue that their music is actually more interesting now. Their preference for lounge and faux-acid jazz textures tend to polarize people, which I guess is a good thing considering my fear of a pending acid jazz revival.
All of this brings me to Margerine Eclipse. As a reward for sticking with me this far, I'll get right to the point: if you hated Cobra and Phases, Sound-Dust and Dots & Loops, you'll probably have little need for Stereolab's eighth proper full-length. All of the hallmarks of latter-day Groop are here: harpsichords, silly (yet great) 70s analog synthesizers with futuristic roto-bossa beats, and plenty of dreamy harmonies to fill out the barely existent song structures. Mary Hansen's presence is missed when you hear Laetitia Sadier spot herself on the high vocals, though it's easy enough to imagine her back in there if you want. All of it is very easy, which is a perfect way to sum up a new Stereolab record: easy to predict, easy to criticize. And easy to like.
I should come clean in that I never hated post-ETK Stereolab, so the familiar movements of Margerine Eclipse aren't really a disappointment as much as yearly revisits from old friends. When the band released an uninspired Instant 0 in the Universe EP in 2003 (coming off their first year without new studio material since they started making records), it looked momentarily as if the train was stopping. Now, the notion seems funny because listening to bright, buoyant tunes like "Le Demeure" or the fantastic opener, "Vonal Declosion", reminds me that they'll probably keep going like this until they're gone.
The aforementioned "Vonal Declosion" rings in the new record with a flash and the trill of the Farfisa, as the bass dances below Sadier's well-worn rhythmic French nothings. What's more, as the band transitions into a section sounding ripped out of Harry Nilsson's "Everybody's Talking" and Mary Tyler Moore Show incidental music at once, supermarket strings enter on the left and reveal Stereolab's true calling for delivering Perfect Pop for Then People. "Cosmic Country Noir" pulls out the classic robotic Wurlitzer drum machine patterns for more antiqua-groove, though the main body of the song is more reminiscent of The Free Design than Kraftwerk.
"Margerine Rock" doubles back on Stereolab's way with pop history by sounding most similar to their own music, circa Mars Audiac Quintet, even if guitars can't quite mask their now low-key charms. More fitting seems the poignant "Dear Marge", with Spanish guitar, gliding Farfisa, percolating synth and Sadier's counterpoint vocals so obviously being transmitted to Hansen somewhere off in the cosmos. The song is nostalgic, but handled with such care that its sweetness never approaches saccharine sentiment, or worse, stale lounge-pop. They ensure the song's fate by galloping out on a disco-funk plane right out of an Earth, Wind & Fire record. (Okay, so restraint isn't really Stereolab's thing, but damn it, they just have such good taste in sudden disco flashbacks.)
Ultimately, Margerine Eclipse probably won't be received as a "return to form," other than to say it's perfectly in accord with everything they've given us for the last several years. It won't gather them new fans, etc. etc., though I think that's an unfair way to judge a record. Times have changed, and the band hasn't, so you might just as well praise them for sticking to their ideals instead of latching onto some trend (Tim Gane does dancepunk, anyone? Bad example, I'd listen to that). The best way I can think to hear Margerine Eclipse is as another in a line of accomplished, eternally pleasant and intermittently brilliant Stereolab records. Really, it's just that easy.


The breakout rapper’s dystopian sci-fi concept album is full of glitzy soundscapes, rapidly morphing tempos, and naked cyborgian wails. Don’t mistake interstellar style for substance.

2093

One time at the meeting of the minds, aka backstage at Lyrical Lemonade Summer Smash, Yeat was asked by YouTube personality and guerilla reporter Andrew Callaghan what he would do with a time machine. His answer: Travel “six million years” into the future where there would be “spaceships” and “alien lean.” Pretty vague, but hey, no one is asking him to be Frank Herbert. If you’ve been following the formation of the Portland rapper’s devout cult over the last few years—from underground viral sensation with 2021’s pyrotechnic 4L to boxing out Drake on 2023’s For All the Dogs—then his ramblings about outer space and UFOs are nothing new. I never thought all that deeply about his obsession with futuristic imagery, though—I just figured that he’s frequently smacked and doesn’t have much else to talk about. So it’s a little surprising to see it becoming his thing. On his latest album, 2093—not quite six million years but far enough—he’s on top of a foggy city roof in a black leather duster straight out of Blade Runner, making galactic-scale music calibrated for interstellar communication. Welcome to Yeat’s vision of the future.
Too bad it’s not that interesting or original of a vision. The glitzy soundscapes, rapidly morphing tempos, and naked cyborgian wails, not to mention the audible generosity of the budget, make 2093 feel like a lightweight Travis Scott record. An underwhelming pivot, considering that these days one Travis is boring enough. Don’t believe me? You can hear the heavy (heavy) inspiration in “Power Trip,” especially in how his distant lilts and the gaudy beat combine for an effect as impersonal as contacting an airline chatbot. “U Should Know” is basically a UTOPIA demo, only worth it for the celestial extravagance of the instrumental. Even the glacial close-encounters ballad “1093” just seems like a Vultures 2 audition. Sure, the beats are flashy and very polished, but Yeat’s eccentricities as a rapper are flattened by the scope. He sounds less funny, less improvisational, less weird.
There’s still some fun to be had. (I would hope so at 22 tracks—or 28, if you include P2 and P3, add-ons designed to game his way to a No. 1 album.) For as showy and combustible as Yeat’s sound can be, it’s the small details that really hook you. All it takes is one silly bar or far-out melodic burst and suddenly you’re sending that one song to everyone in your contacts. 2093 has some of those moments: On “Tell më,” when he croons, “It’s easier to scream, I’ll send ya straight to hell,” and hits the final “hell” with a warped effect that makes his voice sound like it’s shattering. Or when the whirrs and bleeps of “Familia” dim for a second so he can evocatively spit, “I’m pissin’ on this beat, it’s like a bathroom stall.” One of the concepts on “Bought the Earth” is pretty funny: He gets so rich that he literally buys the planet, only to immediately sell it. He should be the CEO of a media corporation.
Speaking of CEOs, one of the most baffling parts of 2093 is Yeat’s new alter ego: the “Psycho CEO,” who debuts on the intro track and merits a few references throughout the album. Plenty of rappers have tagged themselves the boss, head honcho, or even CEO, but every time Yeat mentions the “Psycho CEO,” I can only think of how incredibly corny it is, like asking Elon Musk to host SNL. In so much dystopian science fiction, the CEOs are the slimy, greedy villains. Maybe that’s what Yeat is going for? Judging by all the sandpaper melodies he busts out (my favorite is on “Nothing Changë”) his lodestar remains Future, who is well-known for his rotten ways. But at his peak Future’s villainy was extremely complex, as if he were tortured by his own behavior. Yeat is just a “Psycho CEO” because it sounds cool. Whatever. I’m probably thinking about this idea way more than he ever did.
Don’t mistake this album’s half-assed concepts and themes for ambition. I blame the cult of Kanye, which has brainwashed us into believing that expensive and bloated spectacles signal depth, importance, and innovation. That’s how we got UTOPIA, and to a lesser extent, 2093. I’d argue that 4L and Up 2 Më are bolder than anything here: Yeat’s older projects threw you into the deep end of his magma flows and fuzzy world-building and asked that you either get it or don’t. An album this safe and familiar will be great for packing out bigger concert venues but only makes his musical identity more nebulous. On the bright side: At least Yeat isn’t trying to sell us a pair of sneakers yet. Now that’s a future I want no part of.


Harry Styles’ third solo album sometimes lacks substance, but style always abounds.

Harry’s House

When a teen idol becomes a rock star, he announces it with a Rolling Stone spread. Five years ago, in the run-up to his debut album, Harry Styles got that quintessential rock’n’roll treatment: A sprawling 6,000 words by the celebrated journalist and filmmaker Cameron Crowe. They had lunch in Laurel Canyon; Cameron likened Styles’ voice to Rod Stewart’s, his crew to the Beatles, and his recording studio to Big Pink.
When a rock star becomes a lifestyle influencer, he announces it with a Better Homes & Gardens cover. Styles’ appearance in the June issue of that publication—which runs articles about organic fertilizer and Meyer lemons and rarely profiles musicians at all, much less those of Styles’ stature—brushes off the music press and cleverly promotes Harry’s House, his third album. Harry is pictured in Gucci pajamas carrying a breakfast tray; the story’s very existence signals his hard turn into comfort and leisure. Meanwhile, he’s got Mick Fleetwood peddling his nail polish. On TikTok, Harry’s House single “As It Was” is a go-to soundtrack for supercuts of curated domesticity. The state of the boy brand is strong.
On Harry’s House, pleasure is the aesthetic proposition. The album oozes the easy charisma that lifted Styles head and shoulders above his former One Direction colleagues and makes him one of pop’s more compelling live acts. Its sounds—which move through funk, folk, and 2010s Tumblr-pop—are friendly and familiar enough to satisfy passive listening, but deftly executed, with a surplus of style and whimsy that rewards a more active ear. Styles’ previous albums seemed preoccupied with a desire to demonstrate taste and legitimacy via retro-rock pastiche, but here he wears his influences more lightly. The mood is light, too: Opener “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” kicks things off with scatting, scene-stealing horns, and a litany of food references (fried rice, ice cream, coffee on the stove) that conjure a state of goofy, sated bliss. “I could cook an egg on you”: Harry Styles lyric or Denny’s tweet?
Styles kept this record in the family, working primarily with returning collaborators Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson. For some artists, an intimate writers’ room can draw out vulnerabilities or create a foundation for risk-taking, but little here suggests that Styles is looking to tap into anything overly profound. The emotional stakes are low: Harry is either wistful for past love, but not too pressed about it, or else drawn to someone new, but not effusively so. He’s “not worried” about who his ex is going home to, despite the nostalgic halo she wears on “Little Freak”; he’s not wine-drunk and despondent, he just has the “grape juice blues.” “Daydreaming,” a skin-deep but richly textured sex fantasy that borrows from the Brothers Johnson, articulates what’s felt on much of the album: Styles is writing inside a reverie, blissfully insulated from life’s extremity.
Substance sometimes lacks, but style always abounds. Harmonies open like refracted light around the bright, decadent passages of “Daylight” (“If I was a bluebird/I would fly to you/You’d be the spoon/Dip you in honey so I could be sticking to you”). “Satellite” enters into conversation with Ariana Grande’s “NASA” and features a wonderful bit of text painting: Styles sings about “spinning out” while the back half of the song builds momentum and nearly careens out of control. And on an album whose themes are largely generic, a few dots of self-reflexivity sparkle. The third-person talking-to Harry gives himself on “As It Was” invites a burst of empathy. On the slick, salacious “Cinema,” he works in a coded boast about his union with a certain film actor and director—“I bring the pop to the cinema”—over an extended breakdown propelled by plucky rhythm guitar. It’s a moment of ego indulgence, and a rare Easter egg from an artist whose personal life is closely guarded.
Striking a balance between aloofness and earnestness is something of a Harry Styles specialty. Though direct touchpoints with fans are limited—he is minimally active on social media—his keen sensitivity towards them is evident. In that 2017 Rolling Stone profile, Styles defended his young, predominantly female audience: “Young girls like the Beatles. You gonna tell me they’re not serious?” he said then. Lately, he’s commiserated with them. When he introduced Shania Twain, who made a guest appearance during his Coachella set last month, Styles deployed familiar pop feminist logic: “This lady… told me that men are trash,” he quipped. In the same set, he debuted the Harry’s House track “Boyfriends,” opening by saying, “To boyfriends everywhere, fuck you.”
Is this pandering? Maybe. Call it penance for the misogynistic rock tropes that Styles occasionally reproduced in earlier work. “They think you’re so easy/They take you for granted,” he sighs over finger-picked guitar on the song about boyfriends, voice multiplied into a chorus of soothing affirmations—an old folk lullaby for the spurned and exhausted. (Some—identity politics purists, Larry truthers—will wonder whether Styles’ ode to the hardships of dating men is an output of imaginative empathy or of personal experience, but they’re unlikely to get answers.)
Styles’ “Treat People With Kindness” ethos radiates across Harry’s House. “If you’re feeling down, I just wanna make you happier, baby!” he insists on Passion Pit-approximate “Late Night Talking.” One song later, he’s “on [his] way to buy some flowers for you.” In this way, Styles invites participants into his project of pleasure-seeking: He is a nice guy, so adoring him is uncomplicated and guilt-free. That the persona doesn’t get grating—with the exception of “Matilda,” a wan ballad whose namesake gets lost in Styles’ abundant sympathy for her—is a feat. So what if Harry’s House isn’t especially bold; innovation is not a requirement of a solid pop album, and working too hard is out of fashion, anyway. Better to slip on your Gucci pajamas and just enjoy.


Weezer's fourth self-titled record, trumpeted as a return to form just like 2014's Everything Will Be All Right in the End, is also their first concept album since Pinkerton.

Weezer (White Album)

In 2014, amidst the wreckage of a long, dispiriting bid for mainstream pop crossover, Weezer faced a disenchanted fanbase and promised them Everything Will Be All Right in the End. That album was framed as an extended mea culpa for the folks who had stuck it out through the "Beverly Hills"s, the "boo-yah"s, and the side collaborations with flat-earth rapper B.o.B. It was by no means an empty apology: the album proved refreshing and reassuring, their best in years, and frontman Rivers Cuomo seemed to have bested the curse that had been hovering over them for the past decade. It's appropriate, then, that the band have selected white—a color traditionally associated with purity and renewal—as the palette for their fourth self-titled album, trumpeted yet again as a return to form. Ostensibly, all is forgiven, and we can resume our march further and further away from Weezer's awful '00s with renewed spirits. Unfortunately, the White album proves that some curses are damn hard to break.
On Everything Will Be All Right in the End, Cuomo appeared to swear off future attempts at mass consumption, declaring  "I'm not a Happy Meal." Less than two years after that defiant statement, he's embracing the Golden Arches, so to speak. Longtime producer/Cars frontman Ric Ocasek is out, replaced by Jake Sinclair, an industry influencer who's manned the boards for Taylor Swift and 5 Seconds of Summer (he also helped them record the dreaded Raditude). Unsurprisingly, Sinclair's sonics rely heavily on prominent, over-dubbed vocals and mechanical percussion. The album's co-writers include Alex Goose (best known for soundtracking a Sperrys commercial) and Redlight, a British DJ. There's even a reunion with Semisonic frontman-turned-Grammy-winning-songsmith Dan Wilson on the limp opening track "California Kids." White's personnel and production frequently renders it indistinguishable from the milquetoast beach-pop blaring from the speakers of the half-empty Hollister at your local mall. "Wind in Our Sail" and "(Girl We Got A) Good Thing" derive their momentum from peppy keyboard plunks, rather than sawtoothed guitars. Apart from a criminally short, Thin Lizzy-esque solo on the latter track, Cuomo's joyful riffing barely gets a note in edgewise.
The White album also boasts the most batshit lyrical word bank of any Weezer album to date, and bear in mind that the last record had songs about Paul Revere and the resurrection of ancient Egyptian monarchs. Cuomo's everything-stays-in approach to lyric writing dictates that no allusion or image be left behind, however obscure or absurd it may seem to the average listener. Hence, we've got shout-outs to Charles Darwin, male pregnancy, Dante's Inferno, tiger shark extinction, composer Burt Bacharach, and opioid-induced constipation, just to name a few. This approach suits the quirkier numbers, like "King of the World," a punchy love letter from Cuomo to his wife Kyoko, loaded with intimate references to her childhood and even her fear of airplanes ("We could ride a Greyhound all the way to the Galapagos," he offers.)
The wackiness also suits "Thank God For Girls," the album's contentious lead single. At first glance, it reads like the unfiltered rant of a men's-rights activist, but a closer look reveals Cuomo is having some fun here:  Through a combination of subtle homoeroticism (fantasies of coming home to a lady with a "big fat cannoli to shove in your mouth"), inverted power structures ("She's so big/She's so strong," he gushes in the post-chorus, eying a woman in "sweaty overalls") and Biblical hot takes (what if God's really a woman, guys?), he pokes at some of the deep-rooted, frequently-unadressed fears of abandonment and inferiority that accompany modern notions of masculinity and femininity. How disappointing, then, that the song's sharp commentary is overshadowed by an overwrought arrangement cribbed from Zep's "Stairway to Heaven"—right down to the acapella ending—buttressed in the chorus by wan, brittle grunge chords.
The buried lede on White is that it is also Weezer's first true concept album since Pinkerton. Rather than the ambitious adaptation of Madame Butterfly, Cuomo opts here for a three-act tale of geek-meets-girl, followed en suite by boy-gets-heart-torn-asunder. From this angle, some of the nerdy name-dropping and masochistic sexual symbolism might be thematic conceits rather than lyrical shortcomings; our protagonist's comparison of himself and his crush to "Danté and Beatrice" in "L.A. Girlz" is supposed to be dorky, because he lacks the love language necessary to properly contextualize these sentiments. But first of all, which Weezer album couldn't be described at least in part as "geek meets girl and gets heart torn asunder?" And when's the last time we listened to a Weezer album for the story?
No, we listen to Weezer in 2016 largely for nostalgic dog whistles. We listen because Blue retreads like "Endless Summer" and "Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori" offer Proustian pleasures in spite of their obviously-recycled frameworks, and because the simpering, sweet "L.A. Girlz" is the group's best single since "Island in the Sun." We listen because "California Kids" opens the album with a smattering of triangle notes plucked from "Pink Triangle," while "L.A. Girlz" reclaims "El Scorcho's" rubbery guitar line as its own. Most of all, we listen for reassurance that our beloved Weezer can avoid relapsing completely into embarrassment—and by those parameters, mediocre may as well be magnificent.
*Correction: An earlier version of this review misattributed a guitar solo to rhythm guitarist Brian Bell.  *