The new EP from Pender Street Steppers collects five tracks of the Vancouver duo’s breezy, hazy house music. It finds the Steppers not venturing very far outside of their comfort zone.

Pender Street Steppers: Pender Street Steppers

Pender Street Steppers

On the insert for their 2013 cassette Life in the Zone, Vancouver’s Pender Street Steppers thank their MPCs, all the star signs, even “everyone that never supported us.” For good measure, they added that they were cool with it if you decided to dub the cassette and give it away to your friends. Part of the city’s media-averse Mood Hut collective, the duo of Jack Jutson and Liam Butler come across as fairly chill individuals in words and sounds. The duo has since leisurely released three singles, most of them choice selections from that original mixtape. With this new five song EP, Pender Street Steppers nearly double their available tracks.
With little of the Mood Hut catalog available digitally, the label’s sound is a slippery one to pin down. There are traces of boogie and funk to be had, but dub, smooth jazz, and new age also blip up. Though the beats hew closest to house music, they are by turns breezy and hazy, and you may find yourself zoning out to them rather than moving. The crew often toys with expectations, as when they released a compilation of dance edits entitled Disco Mantras: mellow and woozy, they drew from unlikely sources like new age reedman Paul Horn. Listening through the Mood Hut catalog, you’re not quite sure if they are ideally suited for bobbing on a dancefloor or else strolling across the quad, and “Raining Again” strikes that balance.
Despite the inherent dejection in its name, “Raining Again” is perky, full of the crisp hi-hats and dubbed-out toms that give their productions a heady feel. The melody is carried by what might be an electric saxophone from a 1980s infomercial, its cheesy, cheap tone closer to a duck quack. But whereas previous PSS productions would have just ridden that sound around and around, now Jutson and Butler deftly fold in more elements. Clean-picked guitar lines enter against a fluttering arpeggio (and upon repeated playback, a voice humming along in harmony). Soon another sax line swoops in, sending the track even higher into the rain clouds.
For Mood Hut obsessives, the most notable track here is “Molto Bene,” which was pivotal when the duo first slotted it into their Resident Advisor mix back in 2015. Built around a shuffling snare and kick pattern with fidgety bass and organ keys that flutter around the beat, it’s the kind of track the duo excels in, catchy yet still fuzzy. A voice mutters in the background and a jaunty whistle winds through.
As good as the duo can be at taking a nagging little sound and looping it to the point of mesmerism (think back to the “um” sound that runs through their track “Bubble World,” or the hiccup of “Openin’ Up”), the back half of this EP finds them retreading a few tropes. “Blackboard” utilizes a grimaced “aye!” as its vocal, which becomes redundant and needling, taking away from its playfully ponging drums. “No Need”’s clap and snare veer so close to Jack J’s own “Looking Forward to You” that you half-expect the song to stumble into it. The half-mumbled vocal delivery that Jutson also deployed on his own single reappears here, this time murmuring “baby don’t stop.” But rather than come across as a dance music command, it’s so laid-back as to be inert, the keys around incrementally slowing and spacing out around the vocal. It makes for a relaxed closer, but the EP finds the Steppers not venturing very far outside of their comfort zone.


The London producer pays tribute to his musical and familial heritage on a sophomore album that makes vintage Roland gear sound new again.

Bloodline

Bloodline is a record whose roots run deep. Steven Julien’s follow up to his 2016 debut album, Fallen, is named for the influence the London producer’s family has had on his music. But Bloodline resonates even more profoundly as a callback to Julien’s musical heritage, with each track featuring a piece of Roland equipment—most notably the iconic TR-808 drum machine—in honor of Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi, who died in April 2017.
Julien may be the ideal musician to pay tribute to Kakehashi. Julien’s productions, while inventive in execution, are relatively simple in sound, using a basic palette that would have been familiar to the Detroit techno innovators of the 1980s who did so much to enhance the reputation of Roland’s TR-808, TR-909, and TB-303 machines. Bloodline takes this minimal approach even further than the nearly skeletal Fallen: The new album’s title track is built on 808 drums and a daub of spectral melody from a Roland Juno synth, while opener “Hunt” uses little more than shifting synth drones, the ominous clanging of a bell, and a noise that resembles the nervous rustle of a thousand wind chimes in a desecrated church.
What makes an impression here are not so much the individual sounds—there are few of those jaw-dropping set pieces that you get in the work of Arca or Katie Gately—but what Julien does with them. This is where the bloodline of the title comes in: Julien recently claimed that his drum programming “ain’t coming from just me, it comes from a long line of ancestors” that includes “rhythm from tribes in Africa and natives from the Caribbean.”
It would take a musicologist to comprehensively trace this evolution, but there is something unique about the way Julien programs a drum machine. On “Roll of the Dice,” his 808 sounds like it’s on the verge of a funk-strained nervous breakdown, its rhythms punctuated by brutal bass drum rolls that seem to want to punch their way out of the 808’s casing. The beat breathes new life into the acidic squiggles of the TB-303, one of the most overworked instruments in techno, constructing a ramshackle acid house that patrons might fear to enter. “Queen of Ungilsan” pushes the electro snap of the 808 in weirdly syncopated directions, with drum hits darting into the mix with the precision of a production-line robot playing jazz.
The liberated feel of Julien’s drum programming extends to the way the songs are arranged. While much electronic music is tightly constrained, programmed in blocks for maximum dancefloor response, sounds on Bloodline come and go freely, with a drum roll or a cymbal crash introduced because it feels right, rather than simply to mark the passing of 16 bars. Tempering these hard machine rhythms is a liberal sprinkling of melody that brings to mind the work of Detroit techno pioneer Derrick May. As May did on late-’80s tracks like “Nude Photo,” Julien scatters impassioned, jazzy touches on “IDK” and “Queen of Ungilsan” to offset his percussive thrust.
This is an album equally suited for swooning or raving, six tracks with enough thump for the dancefloor and enough brain food for the couch. Julien claims that Bloodline “feels more in your face sonically” than Fallen, and there is a certain raucousness to the drum sound on “Roll of the Dice” that wasn’t obvious on his debut. But the new record is more a companion piece to Fallen than a giant leap forward, a reminder that musical bloodlines runs deep and that simple machines can sing with soul. Ikutaro Kakehashi, who built his machines to favor ease of expression over virtuosity, would have approved.


The Lisbon producer returns to his hometown’s Príncipe label with nine new tracks of hyperkinetic, defiantly experimental club music.

Cartas Na Manga

In early 2015, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke posted a few tracks he was taken with at that moment, ranging from Kool A.D. to musique concrète master Bernard Parmegiani, pummeling UK techno to Caribbean soca. But even among these eclectic selections, DJ Nigga Fox’s “Weed” stood out. At a time when few knew about Portugal’s Príncipe label and their hand-painted 12” releases, Yorke helped introduce the rest of the world to the bewildering polyrhythms of Rogério Brandão and his labelmates, all of them representatives of Lisbon’s Afro-Lusophone diaspora. Their sound, batida, has since traversed the globe: Nídia appeared on Fever Ray’s Plunge, DJ Marfox has mixed with DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn, and Nigga Fox released an EP on Warp last year. But for the most part Príncipe and its artists have kept their mix of kuduro, semba, and kizomba relatively close to home and defiantly undiluted.
Brandão has restlessly continued innovating—just see his 15-minute single “15 Barras,” an outlier in a scene full of two- and three-minute songs. But with the nine-track Cartas Na Manga, he returns to the label for the first time in two years to drop his most exploratory set to date. It retains the woozy instability of his prior work while folding in startling new timbres. “Sub Zero” shows off Brandão’s skill set from the jump, juggling a number of incongruent bleeps, claps, gurgles, and alien tones for its first three minutes and allowing them to build. Then, in an instant, he flips it all on its head like a Jello mold, whole and wholly coherent.
Nigga Fox’s gymnastic knack for inverting everything and still nailing the landing carries across the set. In that way Cartas Na Manga emulates its modular cover art, by in-house designer Márcio Matos, whose sticker shapes can be assembled in any number of ways. Throughout the album, new shards of sound jump out: horn fanfare, piano, electronically warped exhalations, even flute and synthesized woodwinds. The pummeling that opens “Nhama” soon careens into plonky piano, marimba, and flickering vocals, fracturing into numerous small elements yet still holding together as a track. “Faz a Minha” flashes a number of telltale sounds from different subgenres of dance—acid gurgle, house low end, itchy experimental electronics—then spins it like a carousel so that it all blurs into giddy release.
“Talanzele” is the most straightforward dancefloor track, but even then Nigga Fox makes it feel permeable, letting a flute amble in and then an array of kitchen-sink percussion march across it. “Água Morna” takes the trademark knocking Príncipe beats and injects the kind of minor-key apprehensiveness that Lalo Schifrin or Quincy Jones would add to a soundtrack to heighten tension.
If you ever wondered what Nigga Fox would sound like if he turned pensive and absurd, there’s closer “5 Violinos.” Thrummed metal gives the track its dreamy shuffle, while his voice is screwed up and down, cartoonish one moment, a drugged warble the next. Whether you make out the boast “Nigga Fox na maior” as “the illest” or “the chillest,” depending on your translation of Portuguese street slang, Brandão still sounds far out there, inviting the rest of us into his headspace.


Styled like a boxing match until they get bored with the concept and abandon it, the raucous mixtape still proves Flint, Michigan has another rap duo worth talking about.

GrindHard E vs. YSR Gramz

Flint, Michigan’s flourishing rap scene was built on duos. Particularly the smooth operating combination of YN Jay and Louie Ray and Rio Da Yung OG and RMC Mike’s unhinged team-ups. Together and solo, these four rappers have taken up most of the bandwidth, understandably since their personalities are huge and their singles centered around extremely detailed and darkly funny punchlines, heart-racing beats, and shape-shifting flows have come to define the city’s sound. But there’s a new pair with a bid to be spoken about in the same breath, GrindHard E and YSR Gramz.
Both E and Gramz have been floating around the Flint scene for a while. It was said that Rio and Mike started by laying down records at E’s place and Gramz emerged years ago with two-handers alongside local rapper KrispyLife Kidd. Though whenever E and Gramz jumped on a track with one of the big four, they often felt like afterthoughts: Gramz’s monotone delivery is frequently drowned out by Jay’s charisma on their shared singles and on E’s 2019 collab mixtape with Rio his punchlines don’t have the same level of imagery. Those weaknesses are still glaring, but their joint tape finds a sweet spot by leaning into the competitiveness of being a duo.
GrindHard E vs. YSR Gramz is conceptualized like a boxing match—each of the 12 songs is titled after a round, and instead of separating their verses, they’re intertwined to simulate the back-and-forth feel of a fierce prizefight. This theme may seem misleading considering they’re not exactly going toe to toe through battle rap-style punchlines, but instead by who can string together the hardest non-sequiturs or create the most vivid drug-dealing fantasy. “Round One” starts things out swinging, you can feel the sense of them trying to one-up the other with the best anecdote. They’re both getting ripped off. Gramz smacked a dude for shorting him on a deal. And E is unaware that trading drugs for meals at Applebee’s is bad business.
Throughout the tape this energy hardly wanes, each getting their moments in the spotlight. Over the pounding beat on “Round Six,” Gramz gets off a hilarious run of family-related vignettes: he clowns a guy for having no privacy because he lives with his mom; he does a deal while watching Lion King with his son; he labels himself the opposite of Tyrese in Baby Boy because he beat his stepfather’s ass. Then on the Enrgy-produced “Round Four,” he disgustedly raps, “You the type of nigga ask a bitch ‘Where my hug at?’” Meanwhile, E is much more exciting to listen to technically. His flow is high-pitched, erratic, and sometimes the words leave his mouth so fast that he fumbles through them and keeps going anyway. On “Round Seven,” I wish his tales were more lively but the flow has a new wrinkle every time he tags back in. Similarly on “Round Eight,” E trips up mid-verse and lets out a frustrated scream, then as the song moves on his delivery gets increasingly sloppy in the best way.
The final three songs on the tape are unnecessary, though. Aside from the titles, the format is dropped as guests join in for a few run-of-the-mill Michigan posse cuts. They’re not memorable or creative, especially “Round Ten” which is marred by Gramz casually dropping a homophobic slur—leaning on the ease of edginess instead of forming a well-thought-out punchline. Nevertheless, the first nine songs are consistently explosive. And even if the mixtape is missing the knockout or haymaker you might expect from a great boxing match, Flint has another duo worth talking about.


On her adventurous and melancholic full-length debut, the Nigerian pop star re-asserts herself as an imaginative producer and the author of her own lore.

Born in the Wild

Tems was born in candlelight. “There was no electricity when my mom gave birth to me,” she told NPR. “It was night in my life for so long that, like, I just thought it was never coming.” Twenty-eight years later, the Grammy-winning Nigerian artist finds herself in the glare of the global spotlight. Born in the Wild revisits the shadows with clarity and confidence. In her earlier EPs, the Afro-fusion singer revealed her spellbinding prowess; with her debut full-length, she re-asserts herself as an imaginative producer and the author of her own lore.
Tems remains her own sole songwriter, confronting the pressures of stardom through a tender, melancholic exploration of pre-fame traumas. Each song evokes a kaleidoscope of emotions, but whether addressing a higher power (“Me & U”) or reflecting on an ill-fated romance (“Unfortunate”), Tems remains focused on gratitude. On the acoustic guitar-guided opener and title track, her voice emerges as if she’s singing beside a dying campfire, piano twinkling in the sky above.
Distilling her music to its essence, Born in the Wild opts for a stripped-down ’90s vibe, affording Tems the serenity to explore her innermost thoughts. Tems self-produced much of the LP alongside GuityBeatz, the Ghanaian Afropop DJ behind her 2021 EP If Orange Was a Place. The polyrhythmic soundscape, adorned with the earthy tones of conga drums, wind chimes, and shekere rattles, provides a counterweight to the homogenized sound of contemporary Afropop.
In songs like “Love Me JeJe” and the Diana King-interpolating “Gangsta,” she marries vintage African music with modern R&B, dancehall, and pop, writing a love letter to the past and a message for the future. The former song is a sparkly refresh of Nigerian singer Seyi Sodimu’s 1997 call-and-response classic: “All the old heads in Nigeria, they looove this song,” she said during a recent Tiny Desk concert. “Wickedest” features a sample from Ivorian quartet Magic System’s “1er Gaou”—an iconic zouglou hit from the early aughts that triggers memories for Africans everywhere.
Tems’ unembellished arrangements feel old-school and lived-in. Accompanied by jazz fusion guitarist Nsikak David on “Boy O Boy,” she conjures an ambiance of solitude as lavish as a hotel lounge ensconced in velvet. On standout “Burning,” she processes her inner turmoil in a lilting singsong, letting her vocals become the luminous core of the music. On “Forever,” which is produced by Brummie duo DAMEDAME* but sounds like a Kaytranada groove, Tems’ bassy timbre ascends to a floaty falsetto reminiscent of a young Michael Jackson. She channels 50 Cent and Lauryn Hill for the hip-hop track “T-Unit,” flexing her rap skills while staying true to the album’s melancholic mood.
Across a generous 18 tracks, Born in the Wild has the feel of a sprawling mood board, incorporating the undercurrent of Tems’ Christian faith, the melismatic cadences that mirror her fluctuating self-assurance, and refrains that blur affirmation and rumination. Her artistry is undeniable, though the album could’ve benefitted from a focused edit. The interludes, featuring snippets of her mother and managers, could have been pared back, or perhaps omitted. Afrobeats heavyweight Sarz produces “Get It Right,” a fun amapiano feature with Asake, but the song’s commercial sheen disrupts the album’s studied chiaroscuro. J. Cole’s verse on “Free Fall” also under-delivers; I would’ve much preferred Tems’ 2023 single “Not an Angel,” another Sarz production that surprisingly didn’t make the cut.
Born in the Wild, much like Tems the artist, is a slow burn that rewards patience. Closer “Hold On” sounds like the light at the end of the tunnel. “This is for the girl in the dark,” she sings, her voice now bathed in sun. “You’re gonna find it, it’s gonna find you…it’s the one in you.” In her past EPs, Tems ran from the darkness. On Born in the Wild, she makes peace with its permanence.


The husband-and-wife duo with an eclectic global sound find a home on revered techno imprint Kompakt but the resulting music is not inspiring.

Boys and Diamonds

Although it still has pretty amazing cachet, I bet most electronic music nerds would agree that Kompakt's facing a tough brief as it powers through its second decade as a label. For starters, it no longer seems to produce the kind of paradigm-breaking acts or tracks like it did when microhouse was in its heyday. For seconds, the parallel ascendancy of Kompakt-inspired labels like Brooklyn's Wolf + Lamb has hinted at a generational shift in techno; one could now argue that Kompakt is more revered than it is fashionable-- aging well, but aging nonetheless.
And while the label has always looked further afield than most gave it credit for, it's still tough to feel like the signing of California-based husband and wife duo Danny and Tiffany Preston isn't a quietly precedent-setting move, and one that's perhaps indicative of a more open mandate towards new kinds of sounds. Taken in isolation, that in itself is probably a good thing; after all, one need look no further than Warp to find a shining example of an imprint that refreshed itself by expanding on its initial remit. Here's the bad thing, though: Rainbow Arabia are kind of awful.
The elevator pitch is that Rainbow Arabia make post-punky, pan-global electronic synthpop. Between their polyglot of rhythms and singer Tiffany's array of no-wave vocal affectations, they're clearly making a play for the space between M.I.A., the Knife, the Slits and the kind of generalized 80s new-wave nostalgia that's quickly moving from a place of fashionableness and freshness into grim parody.
In fact, it's kind of hard to watch the video for lead single "Without You"-- in which Tiffany dresses up like a mime and pogos meaningfully around the streets of Serbia while Danny sits cross-legged in the background and sheepishly stabs away at a small Casio keyboard-- without feeling like it is some sort of parody. The art direction is so consciously oddball, the music so artfully spiky, the energy so telegraphed, and the global aspect so clearly worn like a badge that it's hard not to feel like it's some sort of nadir.
Boys and Diamonds bustles with African, Indian, and Caribbean rhythms, and boasts some genuinely interesting production in places. But the songwriting is ultimately too blocky and dull and slapped together for it to succeed as the thing it most wants to be-- a pop record. "Without You" aside, there's very little touch on display here; most of the tracks are blunt instruments that feel like they were composed in two stages-- the complicated but occasionally unfocused production first, the aimless caterwauling later. I listened to this record about 15 times and still had trouble retaining any of it, so I asked iTunes to randomly select one last song to write about and got "Papai", a dour, sorta-instrumental thing that's stuffed full of clattering sound effects, icy synths, bongo drums, and some fun-fair-haunted-house-ready chanting. It may not work as a song, but it's a perfect parable for why Rainbow Arabia miss: You can see what they were trying to do, but that's a long way from feeling it.


After parting ways with Matador, Cold Cave's Wesley Eisold has said that his band’s last LP, Cherish the Light Years, is “the Cold Cave I can’t stand to hear.” This collection rounding up his subsequent singles suggests that, in the time since, he’s treated that record like a rejected transplant.

Full Cold Moon

Shoot for the moon—even if you miss you’ll...probably end up making a total fucking faceplant. That’s a lesson many people in have learned the hard way in Hollywood, and to hear Wesley Eisold tell it, he's one of them. His last Cold Cave record, 2011’s Cherish the Light Years, was an explosive lunar launch that embraced every opportunity to tell you how awesome it was—nothing but souped-up goth-rock jock jams, bombastic lyrics and hyper-loud Brick Wall of China production. And yet, it failed to satisfy the one person most invested in its success:  Wesley Eisold. Eisold told us that Cherish the Light Years is “the Cold Cave I can’t stand to hear,” and in the time since, he’s treated 2011 like a rejected transplant.
But in addition to separating himself from former collaborators, dealing with his internal demons and external demonization, Eisold got a prosthetic limb after spending his entire life hiding his missing left hand. The metaphor wasn’t lost on him—it’s a sign of being accountable, refusing to think of himself as a victim. These are themes that Eisold dealt with on the singles he intermittently released during 2013 as a free agent from Matador Records, and Full Cold Moon collects them to create an account of the imperfect progress of someone trying to take back control of his life.
So is Full Cold Moon the “new Cold Cave album”? Not really—though in a strange way, the familiarity of these songs make it far more “singles”-packed than the overtly commercial Cherish the Light Years.  Eisold claims the new material is more “honest” as well, and that can be taken a number of ways, depending on whether you think the tag is a preemptive strike against the idea that he didn’t have much choice but to make more humble-sounding music. It’s clear that Eisold can’t stop writing anthems, as “Don’t Blow Up the Moon”, “God Made the World,” and “People Are Poison” are every bit as broad and striving as their titles indicate. But while the songs are fully formed, the production has a demo-like starkness and the underlying instrumentation is dank, rudimentary stuff that sounds like one man in his home studio, accountable to no one besides himself.
On opener “A Little Death to Laugh,” synths bleep like first-gen ringtones over unyielding, old-school machine beats and wormy bass while Eisold inverts his prior vocal performances, sounding like he’s being deflated rather than projecting outwards. “Oceans With No End” and “Black Boots,” two singles which immediately recall the rock dynamics of Eisold’s recent past than the New Romantic S&M of Loves Come Close, are among his strongest and most passionate work—but they’re also the songs on this release that could’ve used bolder presentation or a dynamic shift to turn their choruses into legitimate singalongs.
That said, even if Chris Coady’s hyper-compressed production on Cherish the Light Years is occasionally missed, over the span of an entire album, it was like a corset—meant to enhance and excite the onlooker, but it sure seemed painful for long periods of time. Eisold sounds freed on the first quarter of Full Cold Moon, which is almost an EP unto itself that reminds you Eisold is Cold Cave, and the project will sound however he chooses. After “A Little Death to Laugh,” “Young Prisoner Dreams of Romance” is a black-on-black leatherbound punk burner that’s over almost as soon as you read the title, immediately followed by the off-kilter, strangely beautiful coldwave instrumental “Tristan Corbière.”
But Full Cold Moon is more honest in the sense that Eisold is asking himself harder questions than he did on songs like “Underworld USA,” which were necessarily blank. It’s a shame that Eisold’s vocals are mixed curiously low; for one thing, they minimize the impact of his melodies, the immediate advantage he has over the hundreds of mid-fi coldwavers working in a similar range. Without the lyrics sheet, you can completely overlook his searching, often searing self-reckoning. During “A Little Death to Laugh,” Eisold mutters “I lost a limb on the left hand path/And I never ever got it back,” a double entendre with a hell of a lot of resonance considering Eisold’s life story as well as Cold Cave’s aesthetic. Meanwhile, “People Are Poison” sidesteps the potentially Reznor-esque notebook scrawling to flatly state, “You better die young or you will be me or something/And then they will say, ‘In your prime, you were nothing.’”
There’s a good chance your appreciation for Full Cold Moon will be inversely proportional to your appreciation of Cherish the Light Years’ flair for the dramatic, but remember that Cherish the Light Years is actually an outlier in Cold Cave’s discography—go back even further beyond the industrial New Order of Love Comes Close, to the days when Cold Cave was a noise project closer to former bandmate Dominick Fernow’s Prurient than Depeche Mode.
As to what Cold Cave is now, “Meaningful Life” is coincidentally stuck right in the middle of Full Cold Moon and is presented as a kind of spiritual crossroads for Eisold. It’s an eerie, free-floating meditation of organ and flutes reduced to 8-bit versions of themselves. As for Eisold: Some people live very meaningful lives, some don’t. Which one will he choose? And what does “meaningful” even mean?  Eisold intimated that the next true Cold Cave album will be called Sunflower, so that probably gives an indication he’ll be choosing the right hand path out of the darkness.


His career revived by the 2015 anthology Sounds from the Far East, the Japanese electronic musician and video-game composer returns to the radiant deep house that won him fans like the late Larry Levan.

Asakusa Light

The past is sometimes said to be a foreign country, and for the mature musician, the chances of going there tend to be especially remote. If nations typically enjoy the assumption of stability, a music scene’s own monuments—genres, labels, magazines, record shops, nightclubs—are more easily toppled. Tastes change. Flats rise. Luck rots. What remains when the cliques and dancefloors of your youth have disappeared? Something along these lines seemed to cross Soichi Terada’s mind one day a few years ago in Wakasu Seaside Park, a waterfront he used to cycle to whenever he’d “run out of ideas to compose.” As he lay on the grass, his arms outstretched on turf where landfill once stood, he said, “I am trying to remember some of the places I used to go to during the ’90s. However, most of them are clubs that have closed or changed location… In the end, change might be the most appropriate word to describe Tokyo’s scenery.”
The passport to remembering is full of fading stamps. But Asakusa Light attempts to be the exception. Over an 18 month period, Terada challenged himself to “[recall] my feelings from 30 years ago” and distil them across an album of deep house, his first full-length of new material in more than two decades. In the early ’90s, Terada was making music with an impressive fidelity to the stuff circulating in New York (this 1987 classic, “The Morning After” by Lenny Dee and Tommy Musto, is what you might call proto-Terada). Soon, though, he emerged with a covetable sound of his own; in the year before his death, Larry Levan, one of Terada’s heroes, remixed the wonderful “Sun Shower,” which began with his own voicemail to the Japanese artist: “Mr. Terada, I need to know the key of your fuckin’ song.” (It’s B minor.) Whatever the mode, the thing about Terada’s music, and especially the karaoke perfection of “Sun Shower,” is that it sounds extremely grateful to exist.
You can hear this urgency even on one of Terada’s moodier classics, “Low Tension,” where, amid smoky trails of synth bass, flute, and horn, Rhodesy keys fluttered with a bird-of-paradise grace. This is more or less the mood in which Asakusa Light begins. “Silent Chord”—which, like “Low Tension,” has that deeply satisfying synth-bass chug—opens with a warbling minor chord and a tinkly iPhone alarm-clock tone, whose effect resembles a shy optimism for the day ahead. This generosity of spirit flows throughout the album. Terada shows it most obviously on the next track, “Double Spire,” whose inquisitive piano figures and glissing space-disco pads are surprisingly reminiscent of Lindstrøm, and the fourth, “Diving Into Minds,” where happy-to-be-here chords and another deep bassline glide through undulating synth canopies. Whenever Asakusa Light evokes a feeling of flight, the ride is reassuringly smooth.
An unusual feedback loop has brought Asakusa Light to being. It’s a new album inspired by old music, an opportunity set in motion by a reissue of largely forgotten work, 2015’s Sounds From The Far East. (The late-career revivals of Midori Takada, Hailu Mergia and the late Pauline Anna Strom took similar paths to fresh material). The comeback business is booming. As the music critic Ted Gioia recently pointed out, the growth area for music in the U.S. is in reissued vinyl, classic radio hits, and holographic resurrections. Instinctively, this must sound Problematic, particularly to those with a natural inclination for progress, or ideas that resemble it. But a renewed emphasis on the past has at least corrected some historical oversights, shining light on the niches in which Terada and his reissued peers were long hidden. And if fetishising novelty in the name of supporting new artists, as dance music tends to do, might mean fewer second chances for talents like Terada’s, then what, exactly, is better about that?
Terada does occasionally step beyond Asakusa Light's nostalgic concept. “Marimbau,” a vibey big-room ripper with celestial piano-and-synth filigree and 2-stepping bass pressure, is a remarkably fresh-sounding house track with a West Country accent, the kind of thing Roman Flügel often nails. A few tracks call back to Terada’s once-prolific career as a video-game composer. (In 1999, his soundtrack for the Ape Escape, a cult classic on the Playstation, introduced hundreds of thousands of teenagers to jungle and drum & bass.) Of these, “Bamboo Fighter”’s flicking 16-bit synth lead reflects that lineage nicely, and the bassline’s tough swagger echoes a similar feeling—something you could call main-character energy—in Yuzo Koshiro’s Streets Of Rage soundtracks. These tracks share a bias for cleanly drawn arrangements and vintage-synth dazzle. If the overall effect can at times feel too slick, “From Dusk” is a modest remedy, with off-key reversed playback and a bassline that churns like boiling mud.
On the deep-house spectrum, where one end is marked “bitter” and the other “sweet,” Terada’s music tends to sway to the latter. One of the pleasures of his work is his willingness to disrupt an aesthetically tasteful mood with outrageous cheer, like a bouncy castle at a cocktail party (listen to the contrast between “Soaking Dry”’s cool, nocturnal keys and its grinning thumb-piano melody). But more than the feeling of a good time, what lingers on Asakusa Light is a respect for innocence, a poignant note that Terada hits again and again, never more sweetly than on “Runners.” Its crystal chimes, teardrop piano breakdown, and, particularly, pan-pipe melody convey something emotionally sincere, even sentimental. Rather than being a flaw, that quality seems essential to such an affectionate record. Unlike so many ’90s house copyists, Terada brings more to this music than the muscle memory of a revered genre. As he recently told Crack, electronic music had saved his life “not once, but many times.” Asakusa Light shines not because it longs for the past, but because Terada knows that the past is worth celebrating.

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The 21-year-old Bronx native belongs to an exciting new generation remaking NYC rap in their own image. On his third album, he grapples with present-day poverty and everyday life.

Under the Shade

For a while, it seemed like every rapper coming out of the five boroughs was a retro revivalist, tethered to the greats of the past, like a rookie NBA player pulling on the jersey of a legacy team. But young guys like MIKE, Medhane, Adé Hakim (formerly known as Sixpress), and Slauson Malone reside in a New York City where Earl Sweatshirt is a more powerful god than Chuck D. These rappers have run an insurgency campaign on the local scene, contorting elements of classic East Coast hip-hop into their own warped vision for the future.
Enter Caleb Giles. On his third album Under the Shade, the 21-year-old Bronx native engages with some core tenets of the classic New York sound—dusty samples, deep-thinking lyricism, soulful attitude—but with a bitter streak as cold as a winter ride on the top deck of the NYC Ferry. Countering the icy atmospherics, Giles’ flow is clean and youthful, his writing is resonant, and he has a way with a pleasing chorus. It adds up to a set that unites past and present more clearly than any of his contemporaries, adding a distinct ripple to this new surge of regional inventiveness.
Giles’s burgeoning rap career comes with an interesting peg: he also plays saxophone in Standing on the Corner, the jazz ensemble with credits on both Earl and Solange records. Yet Under the Shade never indulges in the freewheeling jazz meditations you might expect. Sure, there’s a decaying old trumpet here, a stoned bassline there. But they help form a neatly clipped set of percolating beats that compliment Giles’s plainspoken flows.
Under the dim light, Giles comes off as a burdened young man. He laments missed opportunities and describes poverty with grim clarity. Rap usually locates poverty comfortably in the past, but Giles wants you to know all about his present-day struggles. On the 50-second “Gather,” he lays out a pretty basic wishlist: He wants a car that runs, to hold down a job, and to simply have $100 in his pocket.
It’s fair to say that Under the Shade is a solid release, not a defining statement. At 24 minutes, it’s over too quickly, with shorter cuts like “Gather” and “Syl’s Song” begging to be developed into full-bodied songs. And as a rapper, Giles lacks a force of personality to match his nuanced lyrics. But Under the Shade excites anyway, another welcome shot in the arm for contemporary New York rap.


The collaborative concept album from rapper Denmark Vessey and producer Azarias mixes Afro-Brazilian rhythms, grime, and bass to imagine a dystopian world in which desperation is the new normal.

Buy Muy Drugs: Buy Muy Drugs

Though they seem impossible to forget, here are a few facts: there’s a racist wrinkled orange running the United States; every day, the threat of nuclear war looms heavily above our heads; in 2017, cops can kill unarmed black people and get away with it, even if it’s documented on video. Things are pretty fucked up. Perhaps predicting the not-so-distant future, rapper Denmark Vessey and producer Azarias use their collaborative album, Buy Muy Drugs (“muy” is pronounced “my” here), to imagine a dystopian world in which agony prevails and desperation is the new normal.
The idea isn’t so strange if you’ve followed Vessey’s career. A Detroit native, the rapper/producer borrows his stage name from a former slave turned carpenter who, in 1822, planned what would have been the largest slave revolt in American history. While Vessey the artist isn’t so militant, he dissects current events in his own eccentric way, using off-color rhymes and peculiar imagery to criticize racial discrimination and spiritual constructs. On 2013’s Cult Classic, Vessey played the fictional role of Dr. Yessev, a failed rapper who establishes a cult in an attempt to become famous and wealthy.
On Buy Muy Drugs, Vessey navigates the Silk Road, telling the imagined tale of a black market narcotics dealer pushing his product to the working class. Throughout the album, it’s clear Vessey is talking about something far beyond marijuana or cocaine. This is high-grade, early ’80s crack epidemic level. “Take this shit, feel one-thousand times lighter,” Vessey groans on “MFKZT” (the song title is also the name of the make-believe drug being distributed on the LP). As it plays, though, the stimulant Vessey is referring to becomes increasingly unclear. Are we talking powdery substances, or something distributed by needles? Vessey and Azarias keep the narrative open ended, letting you choose your own adventure.
Perhaps hyper-consumerism is the drug in question. Lyrically, Vessey speaks to our collective insecurity, riffing on hopeless moments in which we buy unnecessary items to ignore the grief by which we’re surrounded. It’s a coping mechanism and a way to feel better when our personal lives go awry. At certain points throughout the album—namely on the Yasiin Bey-aided “Buy My App” and “American Robot,” featuring rapper Open Mike Eagle—Vessey mocks the so-called American Dream, using a wink and wry smile to assess the mind-numbing malaise of daily existence. “Wake up every morning and I brush my teeth!” the rapper exclaims. “Kiss the wife! Go to work!” The following song, “Pressure,” continues that theme. “Yeah I bet this yo’ dream job…,” Vessey raps sarcastically. “Fuck yo’ dreams, bitch, where the fuck is yo’ gold at/Chauffeur in my bulldozer, steam rollin’ your goals flat.”
Sonically, Buy Muy Drugs is noisy and tough to endure, far different from the more traditional rap aesthetic of Cult Classic and 2015’s Martin Lucid Dream (which Earl Sweatshirt liked a lot ). Drugs takes cues from contemporaries like Saul Williams and Busdriver, as something rooted in alternative rap but also influenced by acid-rock and punk. The music is grim, trippy, and dissonant, mixing Afro-Brazilian rhythms, grime, and bass, which adds urgency to Vessey’s unorthodox flow.
In his own unique way, the rapper is pushing us to look beyond the veil and to not take things at face value. Buy Muy Drugs examines our dependence on material possessions, and how being overly dedicated to superficial shit can erode social discourse. The album reminds us to stay the course and ignore the nonsense, to find some kind of peace in a world that’s become increasingly unstable. It seems to say: Human decency is under attack; do what you can to protect your soul.


Almost two years after the release of the astonishing single "Wut", the UK producer is back with a new EP for Night Slugs: Can he make lightning strike twice?

Club Rez EP

The bar's been raised high for Philip Gamble, and it's almost entirely his own doing. Back in 2010, the UK producer who works as Girl Unit followed up "IRL", his debut single for the hip cross-continental poly-dance label Night Slugs, with an absolutely massive slab of electronic mania in the form of "Wut". Simultaneously frantic and spacious, with the kind of vocal hook that both burns itself into your brain and resists simple replication, "Wut" was six-and-a-half minutes of airhorn-slathered awesomeness that made the melodic tang of purple sound positively black by comparison. It was the type of single that didn't so much top year-end lists as it did absolutely wreck anything that came close to approaching its perch.
The single sounds as relevant now as it did in 2010, its all-everything-now sonic swarm and nods to Southern hip-hop rhythmic textures found in contemporary maximalist producers, from Araabmuzik to Rustie. It doesn't seem like a stretch to say that, in another five years, either everything or nothing will sound like "Wut". The official release was backed by two accompanying cuts of Bayhem, "Every Time" and "Showstoppa", both of which sounded like Twisted Metal elevated into real-life status, with gnarled car crashes and warehouse explosions tornadoing through speaker systems. The only thing more surprising than all of the carnage Gamble was capable of creating was the silence that followed, as he essentially took from then until now as a vacation, rather than capitalize on the considerable momentum that the "Wut" single rewarded him with.
One year and seven months after "Wut"'s release, Gamble's back with a new EP for Night Slugs, Club Rez, and with its arrival comes the inevitable question: Can he make lightning strike twice? The answer's complicated, since there really isn't one to be found. If Gamble's aware of the deserved hyperbole that his previous work's been awarded, he certainly isn't interested in showing his hand; neither a disappointment nor a promise delivered, Club Rez finds him largely abandoning the chaos of his previous releases and seeking out different sonic territory that's unfamiliar to both the Girl Unit project and Night Slugs' general oeuvre. Some might feel let down that there's nothing here that's as singular or sonically comparable as anything on his previous EP, but once the shock wears off, there's plenty to sink your teeth into regardless, especially if you have a solid pair of headphones to tap into the at-times lush landscapes Gamble's constructed here.
Club Rez certainly sounds like a new statement of purpose for Gamble, as he showcases his previously untapped melodic ability by presenting hooks that stand sturdily when not propped up within an ace DJ set. His affinity for color is largely in full form here, as evidenced by the techno-fused French Touch flourishes of "Ensemble (Club Mix)" and the distant screaming flares of "Rezday"; elsewhere, he proves more than adept at evoking atmosphere, from the 48 Hours shake of "Plaza" to the cavernous dance-mecca trance of the title track.
The EP's most surprising moment arrives in the form of "Double Take", which starts off as a drip-drop slice of steam-machinery beat math that characterized label mate Jam City's early NS singles, before blooming into the type of gorgeous, slow-riding R&B hook that nearly deserves separate designation from the track it's attached to. Given his documented proclivity for aural insanity, the amount of restraint that Gamble shows here is more than impressive and certainly speaks to the great promise his talent possesses. He manages to satiate his obsession for thousand-detail soundscaping while creating pieces that walk the line of sensory overload, never overwhelming but always blurring the edges.
Club Rez is something of a marking point for Night Slugs as a label, too. Many of the imprint's releases take on a blocky, club-functional sonic guise; Club Rez, on the other hand, not only roosts in the Night Slugs catalog's small club of relatively straightforward releases-- "Wut", L-Vis 1990's Forever You EP, Julio Bashmore and Hyetal's collaboration as Velour, The Velvet Collection-- but also stands out as one of the label's most accessible releases to date. Perhaps that's why the EP falters when Gamble turns out productions that are more traditionally Slugs-y, like the pounding metal intensity of "Cake Boss" or the skittering bass drops of the title track.
About "Club Rez": the single proper has been floating around for a while previous to this EP's release, most notably making an appearance near the end of label co-boss L-Vis 1990's BBC Essential Mix earlier this year. Hearing it in its shortened form, I hoped that there would be some sort of Big Release leading up to the track's handstamped trance motif, the kind of logical progression that such a melodic buildup usually demands. Perhaps the most disappointing thing about "Club Rez" is that there is no such release, but then Gamble clearly enjoys playing The Waiting Game, even if there are no winners in the end. Let this be an open plea, then, that we don't have to wait so long to hear from him again, if only because the weight of expectations can crush even the most solid follow-ups.


This time, the perennially chill Toronto musician‘s second album in as many years focuses on the guitar across a slow-motion, beatific collection of songs.

Soft Landing

Time is both our most omnipresent yet precious resource, always moving too slow or running out too fast. The convoluted career of Sandro Perri can be seen as an ongoing effort to find the right balance between those two states, to make time feel like it’s moving at just the right pace. Whether it takes the form of chilled acoustic pop, abstract electronica, or post-rock odysseys, Perri’s defiantly unhurried music asks that we savor the moment. His records are busy, vibrant, and bursting with life, but aren’t ever in a rush to get anywhere. But even an island-time adherent like Perri can appreciate that the seven-year layoff between 2011’s Impossible Spaces and 2018’s In Another Life was probably a bit too leisurely, so he’s followed the biggest gap in his solo discography with the shortest one.
Soft Landing arrives just a year after its predecessor and, on the surface, assumes a similar structure, in that it features one very long song followed by a handful of much shorter ones. But each of Perri’s albums to date have existed in their own distinct, discrete sonic universe, and Soft Landing is no different. Where past releases have showcased the tropical troubadour, the Arthur Russell-inspired avant-funk alchemist, and Eno-esque conceptualist, Soft Landing emphasizes a heretofore underrated facet of his personality: Sandro Perri, guitar hero. Sure, Perri’s sublime use of pedal steel has long been a signature of his work (both as a solo artist and as ambient-techno producer Polmo Polpo), but Soft Landing sees him plug in and work his six-string magic on a record that caters to WIRE and Guitar World subscribers alike.
Where many artists initiating conversations between pop music and the avant-garde deploy strategies from the latter to corrupt the former, Perri works the other way—he makes meticulously layered, experimental music that feels as breezy and inviting as the smoothest yacht rock. Soft Landing is his most traditional singer/songwriter-oriented release since 2007’s Tiny Mirrors, but it both embraces the melodic integrity and warmth of ’70s AM-radio standards while stripping away the pop-song packaging to let the contents unspool in unpredictable ways. The album opens with a tranquil, tiki-torch-lit love song, albeit a 16-minute one dedicated to time itself, as Perri grapples with the ultimate dysfunctional long-term relationship: “I can remember, not long ago, I said you move too slow/When people tried to tell me that you were on my side/Now that we’ve spent some years together, it seems like you’re more indifferent/You don’t take sides.” And so, four minutes in, he liberates himself from the limitations of time and redirects this wind-chimed beachside ballad into a gloriously messy, extended jam that suggests the Velvet Underground if Warhol’s Factory were relocated to a South Pacific cruise ship. But as the song swells into an all-consuming tsunami of tangled guitar lines, mutated piano plinks, and unidentified squeals, its slow-motion groove remains as steady as waves on a moonlit ocean, reminding us of time’s ceaseless march despite Perri’s best efforts to halt it.
If “Time (You Got Me)” is a masterclass in controlled, calming chaos, Soft Landing’s shorter tracks favor a formal and tonal clarity, using their surroundings to amplify their emotional undercurrents. With exception of the atypically irreverent sleepwalking soul of “God Blessed the Fool,” the remainder of Soft Landing features some of the most direct, affecting songs in Perri’s canon. “Wrong About the Rain” drizzles a clavinet-funk groove in luxuriant guitarpeggios, but that plush exterior can’t conceal a festering urban angst: “I need the sand, I need the swim, I need that thing that happens when, out there all day, time slips away.” And with “Floriana” and the title track, Perri applies his guitar wizardry to a pair of drifting yet dramatic instrumentals that conjure mid-’70s fretboard-squeezers like Santana’s “Europa” and Jeff Beck’s “Diamond Dust” with their tear-jerking technique.
Those aren’t the sort of names that normally come up in discussions about a Constellation Records release—or about any left-field indie artist for that matter—but as ever, Perri manages to filter these unexpected influences through his own humble, perpetually zen personality until they feel like a natural part of his meditative milieu. Accordingly, Perri counterbalances Soft Landing’s more audacious indulgences with the disarmingly simple and effortless “Back on Love,” a plaintive acoustic plea that not only echoes the melody of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” but also its message of holding onto our compassion in a cruel world. In both sound and sentiment, the song epitomizes that cherished quality Perri has been chasing his entire career—it is, in a word, timeless.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Electronic / Experimental / Folk/Country


Returning with their first new album in 40 years, the Swedish pop titans attempt the seemingly impossible: balancing the lure of nostalgia with the pull of the present day. Amazingly, they pull it off.

Voyage

Rarely has a reunion seemed as superfluous as ABBA’s. In Europe and Australasia, 40 years after they first broke up, ABBA remain omnipotent, an ever-present part of the pop landscape, like guitar solos and interminable Coldplay album rollouts. The band’s legacy may have dimmed slightly in the 1980s, after their split at the start of the decade. But since the early 1990s—and particularly following the release of ABBA Gold in 1992—ABBA’s traces can be found in every nook and cranny of cultural life, from musicals to movies, Madonna to museums.
That means the stakes for the band’s comeback, with Voyage, are both impossibly high and curiously low. (As ABBA co-songwriter Benny Andersson recently told The New York Times, “What is there to prove? They’ll still play ‘Dancing Queen’ next year.”) ABBA could return with a song as irrationally perfect as 1975 hit “S.O.S.” and it still wouldn't resonate with the same lived-in emotional significance as the 19 songs on ABBA Gold. At the same time, as long as ABBA 2021 sound vaguely in line with the classically inspired, slightly nerdy Swedish pop overlords of popular memory, their recorded return will be loaves and fishes to their fans, who have already forked out in their thousands to watch digital avatars of Agnetha, Benny, Björn, and Anni-Frid prance around a London stage.
Much like the forthcoming digital residency, the band’s new album falls somewhere between the lure of nostalgia and the pull of the present day. Voyage is a mixture of songs, old and (mostly) new, that have all the glam boogie, scandi-disco bounce, and epic pop construction of the band’s revered catalog, with some tentative nods to the passing of time. They may have kept the music on Voyage “absolutely trend-blind” to modern pop production, but Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad's vocals have a slightly world-weary, aged tone to them, their vocal range a touch lower than in their pomp, while the album’s lyrics frequently speak of old times, faithful friends, and the demands of parenthood.
It feels almost rude to ask for anything more. Voyage is as richly harmonic, smartly constructed, and satisfying as you might expect of Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, two of the most talented songwriters in the history of pop music. “Keep an Eye on Dan,” “No Doubt About It,” and “Don’t Shut Me Down” are home to some of the best pop melodies of the year—vaguely unpredictable yet glaringly obvious once heard. They’re also fantastically arranged, with hooks piled on top of hooks, gently arranged on a bed of unusual musical choices, like the suggestion of reggae on “Don’t Shut Me Down” or the gnarled-around-the-edges electronics and irregular cowbell on “Keep an Eye on Dan.” The musical winks to the band’s past are a nice touch, too: “Keep an Eye on Dan” closes with the same piano melody that opens “S.O.S.,” while the soaring flute opening of “Bumble Bee” is surely a nod to “Fernando.”
But, as Benny and Björn’s very successful if never entirely satisfying post-ABBA musical Chess demonstrated, without the vocals of Agnetha and Anni-Frid—perhaps pop music’s most durable lead vocal combination—ABBA are just BB. Their voices are what make the group, and they’re still capable—both solo and in duet—of expressing melancholy and ecstasy within the same breath. On “I Still Have Faith in You” when Anni-Frid declares her enduring faith after all these years, as if through gritted teeth, you can feel the maculate defiance, her voice strong but still haunted by the passing of time. And Agnetha’s delivery of "Don't Shut Me Down”’s opening lines—“A while ago, I heard the sound of children's laughter/Now it's quiet, so I guess they left the park”—is nothing short of devastating.
ABBA understand, perhaps better than any other band, the epic importance of pop music against the humdrum rumble of everyday life. Pop matters to ABBA because people and feelings matter. But ABBA know that pop can also be ridiculous, and it is a relief to find that the band haven’t jettisoned the outlandishness that marked some of their best material, even as they reflect on the passing of the years. “When You Danced With Me,” the very second track here, is a crossover between pop and Celtic jig that even Ed Sheeran’s “Galway Girl” might consider just a bit too much. “Little Things,” which follows, is a Christmas song that ends with a children’s choir singing about “tiny elves with wings.” Maturity might bring wisdom, but Voyage proves you don’t have to be boring with it.
And yet, by ABBA’s own imperial standards, this is more ABBA Silver than ABBA Gold. “Just a Notion,” the album’s third single, was originally rejected for the band’s 1979 album Voulez-Vous (the Voyage version puts the original vocals over a new backing); winningly chirpy as the results are, that kind of knock back would never have happened to “I Have a Dream,” which places “Just a Notion” squarely in the second tier of ABBA recordings. “I Still Have Faith in You,” meanwhile, is two thirds of a brilliant song, let down by the rather earthbound melody in the song’s verse (if, indeed, it is a verse—these things can be hard to define with a band as hook-laden as ABBA), where Anni-Frid sings “Do I have it in me?/I believe it is in there.” “I Still Have Faith in You” is doubtlessly a great song. But you suspect it would not have passed the band’s titanium quality control in the 1970s, given the strength of some of their unreleased material. In ABBA’s best songs, every second is golden.
Still, a second-string ABBA record is far better than most pop groups can muster, and Voyage is the rare post-reformation album to build upon the band’s legacy without abandoning what we loved about their classic records in the first place. That makes Voyage a surprisingly necessary trip into the present from a band who could have coasted on the warm fumes of adulation ad infinitum.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The dancehall superstar’s latest mixtape is the best of every facet of his work, from slow-wine ballads to summery head-bangers. It’s a testament to his place at the forefront of the genre.

FIXTAPE

The version of Popcaan’s newest project Fixtape that’s on major streaming platforms is a star-studded, 19-track project that, in many ways, mirrors the music that the artist born Andrae Sutherland has released over the last six years. It’s dancehall that is aware of global trends, while still serving up tracks to the loyal core of listeners that have been around since he was a young protégé under the tutelage of Vybz Kartel’s Gaza. There are appearances from the rising Jamaican singer Jada Kingdom, Popcaan’s former Gaza teammate Tommy Lee Sparta, French Montana, and Drake, whose OVO imprint released Fixtape. There are peaks and valleys that see Poppy go from slow-wining to head-banging to a handful of uplifting ballads that detail his ascension to dancehall royalty. But to experience Fixtape in all of its glory, listen to the 90-minute, 30-plus track version that exists as a singular mix (handled by popular sound system Chromatic) on Popcaan’s SoundCloud. It is the best way to fully engage with and assess Popcaan’s stellar range, which encapsulates the dancehall of the past, present, and future.
In its mix form, Fixtape is framed as an epic tale in which Popcaan shares moments along his route to dancehall’s most prominent torchbearers. Instead of starting with the self-produced “Chill,” the SoundCloud version begins with melodramatic piano strokes, almost reminiscent of the theme song to The Young and the Restless. Those key hits grow into a symphonic instrumental adaptation of Popcaan’s 2011 hit “Only Man She Want,” and soon after, the first two non-Poppy voices you hear are a drop from incarcerated icon Vybz Kartel and audio of Drake’s praise at the first Unruly Fest in December 2018. Though even novice Popcaan listeners already know these affiliations, starting the project in this way is like flexing for the mirror, a moment of self-affirmation before proving it to the world. So it makes sense that the first song on this version of the tape, “Killy Dem Crazy,” is Popcaan trying his hand at Nas and Diddy’s Trackmasters-produced classic “Hate Me Now”—the perfect “fuck whoever don’t like it” gesture.
Unlike Popcaan’s earlier, more conventional releases, Fixtape is an all-access pass inside contemporary dancehall that explores how its reach spans across much of the global Black diaspora. His debut album, 2014’s Where We Come From, was guided by an autobiographical narrative and gained the favor of international listeners due to its incorporation of pop-leaning production. Four years later, his second album, 2018’s Forever, was mostly comprised of easily listenable stories about pursuing love interests and the spiritual favor he believes The Almighty has bestowed upon him. At the tail end of 2019, he released Vanquish, a low-stakes inaugural OVO release that, if dropped this year, could have followed the new in-quarantine trend of being a deluxe version of Forever.
Fixtape has elements of each of those releases. There are plenty of breezy, wine-inducing tracks like those that helped Popcaan break through to non-Jamaican markets. “Twist & Turn,” with production from dvsn’s Nineteen85 (responsible for “One Dance” and “Hotline Bling”), feels like it could be Popcaan’s breakout international hit. Were it not for this COVID-themed summer, the song likely would have enjoyed a “Work” or “One Dance” type of run at cookouts, bashments, and day parties. On “Suh Me Luv It,” he recruits singer Jada Kingdom for a seductive duet. By the time you get to the end of the project, Popcaan’s signature ballads serve as beautiful send-offs. On “Bank & God,” he’s distrustful of friends and family, but also reflective. “My Way” closes the project, where he sings, “Wi used to suffer, now ah everyday wi celebrate/Nuh money cyan ever mek wi segregate/Dawg man ah come from sardine, but nowadays, ah steak” while proclaiming that he is ready to accept all blessings. But in between these bookends are songs that demonstrate why Fixtape is arguably Popcaan’s strongest offering yet.
If you follow Popcaan on Instagram, then you’re well aware of how much his everyday life feels like a reality show: riverside excursions with friends, hilarious interactions with his mom Miss Rona, the clear indication that community (peers, collaborators, family, and beyond) is crucial to his well-being and that he never wants to be away from it. Before Fixtape, his ethos was never really displayed in the music. But at every turn of this project, you feel like you are either inside of the studio session or in the actual dancehall experiencing this firsthand. Contemporary Jamaican music stars like Protoje and Lila Ike check in throughout, while members of the Caribbean diaspora like Giggs, Kano, and Casanova show up to let Popcaan know just what a living legend he is. When whoever is on the mic hits their stride and wows everyone else in the room, you can hear the shouts of their peers in the background as Chromatic wheels the tracks back to their beginning. And when Popcaan goes over beats from stateside peers like Meek Mill’s “Uptown Vibes,” DaBaby’s “Rockstar,” or N.O.R.E.’s classic “Nothin’” you get a peek at his taste outside of the Jamaican music sphere.
Fixtape suggests a guide for contemporary dancehall artists (who, unlike Popcaan, rarely ever drop full-length projects) on how to cater to their base while simultaneously amplifying their voices internationally. It also challenges hip-hop artists in the States to get back to their underground roots for the sake of fun. Before this, Album Popcaan and Loose Track Popcaan acted separately. On the albums came the love songs, the songs that people who found Caribbean music through Drake could get down with. Loose Track Popcaan hops on popular riddims, gives you gunman tunes, and doesn’t care about who outside of the Jamaican diaspora gets it. But here, we get both, and it’s the best way to experience the full depth and grand scale of Popcaan.

Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music.


The Broken Flowers EP is a focused, purposeful release, clearly meant to introduce the PC Music sound to new listeners and commercial heights.

Broken Flowers EP

"Broken Flowers" is often cited as the most fully-realized PC Music single, a polished gem of a track released on a famously ephemeral label. Its author, Danny L Harle, is a shadowy figure, even by PC Music standards. We do know that he's a childhood friend of label head A. G. Cook (with whom he performs in Dux Content), a classically trained composer, and seems to have played a foundational role in defining the PC Music aesthetic. And yet, he's only released a few solo tracks since the label's emergence—he might be the least prolific SoundCloud phenom this side of Jai Paul.
Anticipation for new music from Harle is understandably high, a fact that clearly hasn't been lost on PC Music. The Broken Flowers EP marks PC Music's inaugural joint release with Columbia Records, the first shot fired in what the label has described as, "[a] multi-tier attack exposing the radical DNA of chart music, and the heart and soul behind every lab creation." Clocking in at 4 songs and just under 15 minutes, the Broken Flowers EP is a focused, purposeful release, clearly meant to introduce the PC Music sound to new listeners and commercial heights.
The EP is bookended by the titular single—closing track "Awake for Hours" is really just a remix of "Broken Flowers" that speeds up the original to a breakneck pace. Luckily, "Broken Flowers" is still a thrilling listen two years on. This is the closest thing the label has to a deep-house cut, a song that would feel at home on almost any dancefloor despite its winkingly maudlin lyrics. The track builds with impressive precision, with sinuous arpeggios, marimba notes, and reverberating vocal samples clicking into place atop a driving 4/4 beat. What's more, it sounds as if Harle has rebuilt the song from scratch for this release; where the original reveled in cliché house sounds, every element in this mix, including the vocals, feels cleaned up and refined.
The two new songs, "Forever" and "Without You", don't disappoint, even as they diverge from the template Harle sketched out on "Broken Flowers". Both tracks hew much closer to the PC Music playbook, with chirpy, pitched up vocals sitting atop glistening, Technicolor synths. "Without You" is a clear standout, surfacing the melancholic undercurrent that gave "Broken Flowers" its depth. Vocalist Emily Verlander pines for a lover over an airy track that heaves and sighs, exploring the tension between helium-inhaling vocals and confessional lyrics. The implication here is unclear—we're either being invited to dismiss the heartbroken pop song as naive or confront the infantilization of female narrators in pop. Harle's role as the male auteur behind the curtain further complicates our understanding, lending the song the sort of discomfiting air that's become a PC Music trademark.
As compelling as the music on the Broken Flowers EP is, calling it an EP feels like a bit of stretch—it's really just a single, one that's anchored by a remake of a track that's been out for two years. Then again, it's hard to blame Harle and PC Music for playing it safe given the stakes here. At the core of PC Music's agenda lies a desire to simultaneously critique and embrace chart pop by mimicking its form; what better way to signal the fulfillment of the label's ambitions than with an actual charting pop single? "Sometimes I feel, maybe/ This could be real," Verlander admits on "Without You". She adds, ironically, "Trust me."


This 1975 set captures the band reconnecting with the psych-rock fury of its primordial years, drawing from a cleaned-up recording of a super-fan’s tape.

Live in Stuttgart 1975

The title of Can’s 1975 album Landed proved highly prophetic. Over the preceding six-album stretch from 1969’s Monster Movie to 1974’s Soon Over Babaluma, the German band had used the standard vernacular of rock music—guitar, bass, keyboards, and drums—to develop an entirely new language, one that embraced the hypnotic properties, intricate edits, and limitless textural possibilities of electronic music, long before such concepts became popularized. But with Landed, Can came back down to Earth and started to behave like a more typical ’70s-rock band (albeit still a highly idiosyncratic one). It marked the moment where these trailblazers became trendspotters, loading their subsequent records with au courant influences like disco and reggae, before they unceremoniously petered out in 1979. Or at least that’s the narrative told by their studio albums. The story was always different on stage.
The old cliche that albums represent a snapshot in time was especially true of Can, whose records functioned like frames placed atop a canvas that stretches into infinity. Listening to their most totemic works—“Yoo Doo Right,” “Mother Sky,” “Halleluwah”—always felt like you were joining a program already in progress, as if the band had been searching for the perfect groove for hours and would continue for several more after the track faded out. Live, Can didn’t so much draw upon a repertoire of songs as an arsenal of motifs, riffs, and melodies that they could drop into their largely improvised concerts at will, like logs consumed by a raging fire pit. And as the first instalment of Mute’s new series of Can live albums attests, the band was still flying high without a map onstage, even as its records had begun to take a more predictable course.
Amazingly, for a band with a reputation for never playing a song the same way twice, Can never issued a proper live album (aside from a bonus compilation of concert recordings included in the long out-of-print Can box set). As legend has it, any time Can set out to make a professionally recorded concert document, various technical snafus would scuttle the results. As such, Live in Stuttgart 1975 was pulled from the personal archive of super-fan Andrew Hall, who surreptitiously recorded several shows throughout the ’70s by concealing his gear in bulky oversized clothing, like piggybacking kids in a trench coat trying to sneak into an R-rated movie. The Stuttgart show has made the bootleg rounds for years, but under the curation of keyboardist Irmin Schmidt—Can’s lone surviving co-founder—the tapes have been greatly enhanced, displacing the surface hiss and tinny fidelity with a fuller sound that emphasizes the incomparable rhythmic thrust of bassist Holger Czukay and drummer Jaki Liebezeit.
Recorded on Halloween night in 1975, the set captured on Live in Stuttgart 1975 took place not long after Landed’s release, but you would never know that without the date in the title. Not only is that record unrepresented here, Can also avoid the more cosmic and meditative sounds that defined Landed’s immediate predecessors, 1973’s Future Days and 1974’s Soon Over Babaluma. Still readjusting to life as a four-piece following the departure of vocalist Damo Suzuki, the Can we hear on Live in Stuttgart 1975 seem intent on reconnecting with the psych-funk fury that powered their primordial ’69-to-’72 phase. Doing away with vocals or recognizable songs of any kind, the five pieces here—demarcated numerically as “Eins,” “Zwei,” “Drei,” “Vier,” and “Funf”—provide exhilarating extended views of rock’s most forward-thinking band at their most unrestrained.
Live in Stuttgart 1975 makes the case that Can weren’t so much a jam band as an expedition team: Each member was given the complete freedom to explore his own path, but everyone was heading toward the same horizon, unified in their effort to breach the great beyond. That leads to some thrilling moments of intersection along the way, like when, nine and a half minutes into the warm-up exercise “Eins,” Czukay and Liebezeit lock into a taut groove that evokes Sly and the Family Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” while Michael Karoli’s bluesy guitar jangle and Schmidt’s honking keyboards playfully joust overtop. Even when it seems like one player is seizing the reins, that only serves to egg on the others: “Zwei” plays out like a mash-up of Tago Mago’s “Oh Yeah” and Future Days’ “Bel Air,” before Karoli’s stargazing solo freezes the song dead in its tracks, only for Liebezeit to bring it back to life, roaring at double the speed.
Liebezeit has long been the sort of drummer that can send you down YouTube wormholes in search of any footage that might prove such loose yet powerfully precise backbeats came from an actual human being. You’ll want to take another deep dive after getting swept up in the cyclonic undertow of “Drei,” which is loosely based on Ege Bamyasi’s opening jam, “Pinch,” but carries on for 35 glorious minutes of relentless, fleet-footed funk and carnivalesque clamor, with the players displaying the kind of superhuman physical exertion that makes you want to hand them towels and cups of Gatorade. And just when it seems like Liebezeit is running out of gas around the half-hour mark, he uses the cooling-off period to his advantage, relaxing in the pocket and transforming Can into the world’s freakiest boogie band for the home stretch.
“Drei” is obviously Live in Stuttgart 1975’s unbeatable peak, but the comedown carries its own rewards: “Vier” is a spectacular showcase for Karoli’s deeply emotive playing, which, when combined with Liebezeit’s accelerated thwack, reinvents Can as the motorik Santana. And while the closing “Funf” occasionally gives way to aimlessness, Liebezeit’s militaristic drum patterns and Czukay’s bug-eyed basslines can invest even the most shapeless track with a dramatic intensity. Sure, 90 minutes of free-flowing instrumental workouts may seem daunting to more casual Can fans who prefer their kosmische musik spiked with more digestible doses of “Vitamin C.” But devoted heads who surrender to the tide will no doubt emerge from Live in Stuttgart 1975 with another Can maxim in mind: I want more.

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In which instrumental post-rockers compose the score to a Hollywood adaptation of the popular book about Texas high school football. Makes sense to us! Bad Company also contribute a track.

Explosions in the Sky: Friday Night Lights OST

Friday Night Lights OST

Located amid arid desert sprawl, Odessa, Texas is home to, among other things, the Globe of the Great Southwest, a replica of the original Shakespeare haunt; the Presidential Museum, a sizeable repository of presidential memorabilia (sorry, the arrival of empty warheads is taking longer than expected); and the Permian High Panthers, on whom Friday Night Lights is based. On the surface, this film adaptation of the popular novel of the same name appears to be a predictable entry in a continually unsurprising genre. But there are some notable differences between this and an infamous piece of bilge like The Program-- including the music, which was composed by Explosions in the Sky.
Explosions in the Sky have always made music of cinematic proportions, so it's fitting that they've found their way to the big screen. The bombast of their instrumental compositions is theatrical in it evocation of outsized landscapes and emotions, casting a colorful but somewhat phony sheen over their stellar playing. But even given EITS's penchant for excess, few could have seen this coming: a mainstream film soundtrack from an underground band whose fanbase is comprised mainly of scenesters with an aversion to contact sports.
On Friday Night Lights, the distortion and dynamism of Explosions in the Sky's erstwhile output has been excised in favor of a gentler approach, one that spotlights the band's skill for nimble interlocking guitar harmonies. On The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place, the band took a less dire bent, emphasizing quieter, more optimistic instrumentals where its M.O. had previously been simply to "fucking destroy." Still, that album was a caterwauling racket compared to Friday Night Lights, which features predominantly hushed dynamics and only scant drumming.
All this makes for a rather soporific listen. Of course, soundtracks are designed to reach a synergistic effect with the movies they accompany, so to judge Friday Night Lights on its own is to slight it somewhat. Still, this album's movements are too genteel and calculated to achieve any real stand-alone emotional impact. Furthermore, Explosions in the Sky are guilty of the same paint-by-numbers sentiment triggering than the filmmakers themselves employ-- the band suffused its songs with flaccid MIDI string swells and other overwrought flourishes.
There are some worthwhile moments: "To West Texas" hails Odessa and other barren locales, and featuring a scrappy, ghost-town melody over Chris Hrasky's trademark heartbeat bass-drum pulse. "From West Texas", on the other hand, exalts the Panthers players' faint hope of one day leaving Odessa, providing one of the album's only upbeat tracks. Elsewhere, however, twinkling guitar melodies and dolorous tempos blur into one another and merely sound like tepid background music.
Curiously, the album carries a bleary pre-dawn aura, a tone that was consciously (and thankfully) chosen to avoid the kind of hard-swinging, soft-landing new-metal fisticuffs that accompany many cinematic depictions of athletic drama. At times it seems as if Explosions in the Sky might not be scoring the right movie, although their acquiescence comes is a nice change of pace from the typical Hollywood rock-based score. Had the band delivered the bluster of its previous work, this could have been a more compelling project; as it stands, it's merely an awkward curiousity.


As the originators of UK post-punk enter their fifth decade, they write with a natural-born ease—uncomplicated music cruising under lyrics that question progress and our ability to move forward.

Silver/Lead

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Wire’s debut, the post-punk landmark Pink Flag. Its combination of sharp minimalism and unorthodox approaches—especially in lyrics which drove at meaning while dodging it—formed a blueprint for a band who through many stops, rebirths, and realignments have remained hard to pin down. Even their latter-day, more straightforward records contain levels that take work to penetrate.
Musically, Silver/Lead is as straightforward as Wire gets. Every song is streamlined, with solid (mostly mid-tempo) beats, clear melodies, and smooth, subdued vocals (mostly from Colin Newman). There are few surprises in individual songs—some even sound like variations on each other—but each one holds something memorable. On that level, Silver/Lead is a well-made rock record by a band who knows how to make rock records well.
It’s in Graham Lewis’ lyrics where Silver/Lead becomes more of a puzzle. His lines are always tricky to decipher, yet they’re never so vague as to be meaningless. You get the sense that plots are furthered and points are made, but the messages and scenarios are too slippery to be locked into one interpretation. That effect is enhanced by Newman’s sinewy voice. He often sounds like he’s spinning a riddle rather than speaking directly to you.
There is one line that gives a clue as to what Silver/Lead is about: “The path that is progress is under repair.” Throughout the album’s 10 tracks, our narrator seems intent on moving forward, but is unsure how, or whether it’s even possible. References to roads and motion make the album feel like a travelogue; there are multiple songs featuring boats and rivers. But Silver/Lead also poses questions it can’t quite answer. As “Short Elevated Period,” one of the album’s few up-tempo tracks, puts it: “My reasons for living were under review...Standing in the road, where would I go to?”
This tension between wanting to move and wondering how to do it enlivens songs that might otherwise feel inert. The pep talk of “Diamonds in Cups” (“The course of creation is often quite strange/Keep your mind open, be willing to change”) gains energy from uncertainty. A similar pressure emerges in “This Time,” which admits that “some folks claim they know all the answers” yet still insists “This time it’s going to be better.” One track, “An Alibi,” is nothing but questions, though its pessimism feels buoyed by the music’s confident swing.
There are a few spots on Silver/Lead where Wire succumbs to its own subtlety, as words empty and the tempos deflate toward flatness. But the group catches itself quickly, producing the album’s best track, “Sleep on the Wing.” Another exercise in self-encouragement, the song projects conviction as an answer regardless of what the question is. In other hands, a chorus like “Upward and inward, outward and forward/Sleep on the wing, fly through the night” could sound like a Hallmark card. But for Wire, it’s the well-earned release on an album that’s much tenser than it appears.


Deep into their career, Yo La Tengo's sense of craft is intact. Fade, at a tight 10 songs and 46 minutes, is the band's shortest album since 1990's Fakebook; it may tread over some familiar turf, but the relaxed pacing and pleasing melodies belie just how much action is really going on beneath the serene surfaces.

Fade

Yo La Tengo's classic mid-1990s run (Painful, Electr-o-Pura, and I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One) perfectly embodied the era's collective embrace of the mix-tape-as-courtship-device. These records were sprawling yet intimate, stylistically all over the map yet purposefully constructed. And whether they took the form of earwax-melting noise freakouts or bossa nova lullabies, they always projected the unmistakable, endearing personalities of their makers. But technological changes over the past decade have rendered the mix-tape (or CD-R) an outmoded concept as the shuffled playlist has become the cornerstone of our contemporary listening habits. What was once a unique, painstakingly assembled listening experience has become our default mode.
And true to their quietly contrarian, trend-averse nature, Yo La Tengo have responded to our accelerated, quick-click culture with a more patient approach: Since 2000's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, their albums have mostly favoured calming consistency over unpredictable pastiche, while their more outre interests have been redirected toward side projects (see: the garage-punk goofiness of Condo Fucks) or improvised soundtrack work (2002's The Sounds of the Sounds of Science). And even though their most recent releases have shown a renewed interest in stretching songs past the 10-minute mark, these extended pieces are segregated from the more pop-oriented material on the tracklist, serving as bookends (2006's I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass) or shunted off to separate sides of vinyl (2009's Popular Songs).
Fade takes the refinement process one step further, revisiting the brief, breezy-listening forms of Popular Songs' first two sides, but lopping off the backloaded free-form excursions entirely. And at a tight 10 songs and 46 minutes, it's the band's shortest album since 1990's Fakebook. But none of that is to suggest Fade is any more slight than its heftier predecessors. Even as Yo La Tengo lean to their quieter side here, the band's sense of playfulness comes through. Produced by John McEntire, Fade lets you appreciate the complexity of its simplicity. It may trod over some familiar turf-- Georgia Hubley's fuzz-pop standout "Paddle Forward" squeezes another drop of blood from "Sugarcube"-- but the relaxed pacing and pleasing melodies belie just how much action is really going on beneath the serene surfaces.
Truth is, Fade can be every bit as adventurous as the band's most eclectic albums, but applies its myriad layers in more subtle fashion: The opening "Ohm" locks into its shuffling, clap-along tabla-funk groove and repetitive, corrosive jangle riff for its full six-minute-plus duration, before gradually thickening the guitar noise and organ drone until the anodyne group-unison vocals transform from monotone to mantra. Centerpiece track "Stupid Things" is even more sublime, beginning with some tranquil, exploratory guitar noodling from Ira Kaplan that summons a brushed-snare beat resembling a krautrock skiffle, and sets its chorus aflight on a pillowy bed of strings. And the hazy, soft-focus balladry of "Two Trains" is beautifully bent out of shape by a wobbly, dubwise rhythm.
As ever, Kaplan and Georgia Hubley's lyrics assume the form of overheard, one-way conversations between intimates falling in and out of love. And even in Fade's most sanguine moments, there's a sense of unease creeping into Yo La Tengo's little corner of the world. The smooth Motown-by-way-of-Thrill Jockey moves of "Well You Better" belie Kaplan's anxious demands ("Baby, make up your mind"); "Is That Enough" tries to gloss over its sense of doubt and defeat with cheeky string-section fills, but the distant, distorted guitar line buzzing in the background offers a lingering reminder of the bitterness being suppressed. Fade threatens to become too preoccupied with understated details during its increasingly subdued second act, and yet that sense of restraint just makes the triumphant finale "Before We Run" soar all the more gloriously, elevating Hubley's humble melody with a euphoric brass-and-string fanfare. It may not herald another big day coming, but Fade is a thoroughly immersive dusk-to-dawn soundtrack to a dark night's passing.


With 63 previously unreleased tracks, this newly remastered version of Prince’s groundbreaking 1987 album is a trove of lost songs and dramatic lore, a jaw-dropping look into one of the most creatively fertile times in his career.

Prince: Sign o’ the Times (Super Deluxe)

Sign o’ the Times (Super Deluxe)

Sign o’ the Times is probably the most complete exhibition of Prince’s talent. Almost every style he’d attempted up to that point in his career is presented in its most clarified and uninhibited form. It’s also one of the leanest-seeming double albums of all time—not a note across its four sides registers as indulgent or out of place. But the very notion of “place” is a complicated one on Prince’s masterwork; the sessions that produced the record lasted over a full year and were intended for multiple unrealized projects and albums. The songs themselves sometimes hail from even further back in time, closer to the beginnings of Prince’s career, when he was still exploring the slender shadow-space between funk and new wave.
Which is why it might be helpful to think of the original 1987 release of Sign o’ the Times as more of a network than an album—a small reservoir of music filled from many disparate sources. No wonder listening to it has always sort of felt like walking through the rooms of a house inside of Prince’s dream. And with the release of the new eight-disc, Super Deluxe edition of Sign o’ the Times, one can finally zoom out and glimpse the totality of its scale. Entire new floors and wings have been unlocked in the structure, revealing songs removed from the album’s original sequence, as well as tracks he intended for his forebears Joni Mitchell and Miles Davis, free-flowing studio jams, and the tentative beginnings of a stage musical about roving gangs of musicians.
It’s an overwhelming amount of material. (There’s even a song called “Love and Sex” on the new set that’s completely distinct from the other Prince song called “Love and Sex” on the 2017 Purple Rain reissue.) Throughout 1986 and leading up to the release of Sign o’ the Times, concepts bloomed in Prince’s vision, only to shrink away when his attention drifted elsewhere. This didn’t mean he was unfocused. His burgeoning creative relationship with Revolution bandmates Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman produced complete gardens of songs, such that he could hardly keep them confined to one album; he sequenced both single and double-LP versions of a project called Dream Factory, a living archive of all the songs they made together that didn’t work on more focused album projects like the just-released Parade.
The Dream Factory songs unearthed from the vault are staggering. Wendy and Lisa added such lightness and complexity to Prince’s music, they made the ground disappear beneath its heels. “All of My Dreams” exemplifies this; from its first choral blossomings to its sophistipop chorus to Prince’s pitched-down vocal moving through the song like a lowered cloud; we hear him recount a sex dream where, for the umpteenth time in his work, the sensual grows indistinguishable from the surreal. It’s the platonic ideal of a lost Revolution track, a beguiling long-form experiment that is also undeniably pop, the strange, unbound invention of three true genre agnostics.
Also slated for Dream Factory was “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker,” the first song Prince recorded in his freshly-built home studio just a few hours after waking from a dream. A flaw in the installation of the studio console made the drum machine sound watery and distant, like a thumping beneath the hull of a ship, and the synths echoed like they were being bounced off sheet metal. Engineer Susan Rogers panicked, but Prince continued recording, impatient to get the idea down. The song ended up sounding half-asleep as he was, a trip through the unconscious world before waking. After finishing it, he asked one of the horn players in his band, Eric Leeds, to paste a horn arrangement on top of it. So many of Sign o’ the Times pleasures lie in Prince’s incorporation of horns—they blink like new sequins in the fabric of his music—but it’s mostly uncanny to hear the blear of “Dorothy Parker” suddenly studded with in-focus saxophone harmonies.
“Power Fantastic,” recorded live with the Revolution playing in Prince’s house, opens with Prince giving studio direction to the rest of the band from the control room. He’s in a relaxed, dreamy-sounding mood. “Just trip,” he says, “There are no mistakes this track. This is the fun track.” The instruments drift into each other in slow motion, gradually building to a free interplay between horns and piano and brushed drums that’s like waves crashing and foaming on rocks, before receding back into silence. Out of that quiet, Lisa plays the melancholy piano figure that begins the real song, the bones of which she wrote with Wendy, and Prince starts singing his vocal from the corner of the control room, only pausing to guide the band through the changes by saying “bridge” or “chorus,” the musicians pouring into each new part like water. It’s a gorgeous document of the chemistry the Revolution had at their peak, even as they were beginning to fall apart.
“Strange Relationship,” among Prince’s cruelest songs, had been around since 1983, but he decided to rework it with Wendy and Lisa for inclusion in Dream Factory. Their contributions to the original performance make it almost psychedelically deep. Sampled sitar buzzes swirl around the groove and make its borders fuzzier; Wendy and Lisa’s voices appear like hazy auras around Prince’s, which sounds wounded and grave, seemingly adrift between the song’s vectors of resentment and desire. When he sings “Baby I just can’t stand to see you happy/but more than that I hate to see you sad,” he sounds genuinely tortured about it. It makes for a more desperate and sad song than what appeared on the record; when Prince fired Wendy and Lisa from his band, he scrubbed most of their presence from the recording, and re-recorded his vocal, presumably so it would match the new lightness of the instrumentation.
With Wendy and Lisa gone, and the Revolution and Dream Factory both functionally over, Prince, tired of his own voice, fed it into a sampler and adjusted its pitch until it twisted itself into a high, androgynous peal. He named the voice Camille, credited his vocals to her, and planned to release a new solo album of pitch-shifted funk jams under the name. It was the apotheosis of all the gender play he’d worked into his visual appearance and his ambiguous and boundless sexuality on record, except Prince had erased himself from the picture: All that was left was the voice, this unknowable shriek exploding through the speaker. Originally designated as the opener for the Camille album, it’s remarkable to hear “Rebirth of the Flesh” in good quality (one of the distinct pleasures of these vault excavations is no longer having to decipher some of these songs through blown-out distortion or puddles of tape hiss). It’s like a lost statement of purpose for Sign o’ the Times, and it makes sense why Prince, after abandoning the Camille project, would retain it as the opening track for a triple-album concept that absorbed both Camille and Dream Factory into it, the different concepts now consuming each other like successively bigger fish. He called this new configuration Crystal Ball, and it contained almost every song that would end up on Sign O’ The Times, plus a few others.
What’s frustrating is that it’s impossible to rebuild Crystal Ball or Dream Factory just from the materials included in this box set. This is partly owed to the fact that Prince released several Crystal Ball songs when he was alive, on the confusingly-titled archival release, 1998’s Crystal Ball. But the segues and edits Prince had planned for each record are presumably still unavailable, and the albums themselves remain inaudible abstractions, something beloved in a form that’s just different enough to seem mysteriously new. When Warner Bros. asked Prince to edit Crystal Ball down into two LPs, it became the Sign o’ the Times we recognize today, and it’s a stronger album for that, even if it’s a compromised artistic vision.
As Prince finalized versions of each of these projects, more and more recording occurred around them; Prince practically seemed to live in the studio during this period. Tracks like “Adonis and Bathsheba” emerged, a fascinating and strange ballad poured out at a diagonal angle, and one of several vault tracks from this era that ends with a firework of a guitar solo. There’s a brief suggestion of Prince flirting with gospel on rave-ups like “When the Dawn of the Morning Comes” and “Walkin’ in Glory,” the grooves of which bring to mind an image of Prince strutting on high-heels through a congregation.
The most legendary, whispered-about lost song here is “Wally,” which Prince wrote for Wally Stafford, one of his bodyguards and dancers, who comforted Prince after his breakup with fiancée Susannah Melvoin. Prince reportedly thought the song was too personal to keep and asked Susan Rogers to delete the original track, despite her protests. He recorded it in a new arrangement a few days later, but this recording too went unheard. All of the sudden, here it is. It’s a Prince piano ballad that stops and starts like a conversation, pianos and horns lurching back and forth like their attention’s drifting toward each speaker, though we only hear one side: a playful question (“Wally/Where’d you get those glasses?/Those are the freakiest glasses I’ve ever seen”) that spirals out into Prince’s all-consuming loneliness without ever shedding the sense of humor that regulates their back-and-forth. Every other line is at least a joke or a confession; most of them are both. In the order of theatrically heartbroken Prince songs it feels posed somewhere between “Another Lonely Christmas” and “Purple Rain,” and there is yet another phenomenal guitar solo that coils and sparks through the final minutes of the track.
By the time Sign o’ the Times came out, Prince had replaced the Revolution with a band that responded to every flicker of his fingers. (They’re in great form in the Utrecht show and the New Year’s Eve performance at Paisley Park documented in this set.) He wasn’t a band member or a co-writer anymore. He was a conductor, a bandleader, like his hero James Brown. The music bent to his pressure, and the music was never quite the same. The grooves tightened up to the point where they could feel airless and mechanical, like pistons mindlessly hammering beneath a car hood. Even when the songs were good—and they often were—they started reacting to and absorbing popular sounds instead of dictating them. Sign o’ the Times is the strange, cracked compass that took him to this place, containing both everything he once had (his band, his relationship with Susannah Melvoin) and its dissolution. The path forked where it did. The album cover depicts him as a blur walking away from an unmanned drumset and an empty piano bench on a stage strewn with flowers. He wouldn’t look back, if he even could.

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