The recent breakout band follows its delightful 2006 album, The Trials of Van Occupanther, with a long-awaited new folk-pop record.

The Courage of Others

In the middle of 2006, Midlake released The Trials of Van Occupanther, a record of Ren Faire-infused folk-pop shot through with a healthy dose of post-blues, pre-bitterness Fleetwood Mac. Van Occupanther was full of small delights and the occasional major triumph. Its charms were subtle; occasionally a shimmering melodic flourish or a shade in singer Tim Smith's earthy throat would float into the mix and really knock you out. Though it dragged a touch toward the end and sometimes felt a bit self-satisfied in its smoothness, it was a pleaser and-- because it moved them light years beyond the gooey Grandaddy-lite of their debut without much apparent effort-- seemed to promise good stuff on the bound.
At long last, we have The Courage of Others, reportedly the product of the perennial touring band's newfound obsession with the British folk of Pentangle, Fairport Convention, and the like. It was, they've said in interviews, an attempt to distance themselves from Van Occupanther, which is understandable; after three and a half years of touring behind a record, ripping it up and starting again is what you do. But there were shades of the kind of British folk they're talking about all over Van Occupanther; fewer flutes, maybe, but the same sort of compositional fussiness and hushed, dulcet tones matched with rich harmonies. And they were, virtually without exception, woven together into far better songs. Van Occupanther, low-key though it was, kept the arrangements frothy and dynamic, the tunes multifaceted and sweeping, the playing precise but limber. The Courage of Others is a step down on songcraft, atmosphere, and apparently, even self-awareness: If you're trying to distance yourself from something, you wouldn't plunge headfirst into it, would you?
Without calling too much attention to it, Van Occupanter swayed and squirmed, and as a result of this constant shift, songs rarely ended up where they started. Save the occasional flittery fingerpicked intro, the tunes on The Courage of Others take up the same languid, near-narcotic pace, and they stick with it. Van Occupanther's best songs seemed to match up a couple of disparate ideas and found ways to slowly lead one toward the other-- the prim verse melody of "We Gathered in Spring" didn't seem an easy fit with that song's gooey choral descent, but they patiently bring the two together, and the resulting payoff lent the lovely but lethargic tune some drama. There are no stakes like that with the Courage songs, no sense that things might fly off into uncharted territory. Theirs is an exceptionally polite reading of these British folk constructions, and as nearly every tune tumbles through its ornate intro, its hushed first verse, and the minor lift of its chorus, your patience wears as thin as the tunes.
It's no help that Smith, never the most expressive vocalist, sounds at times uninterested; his vocal melodies have gotten simpler to match the music, but he himself seems detached, delivering every line with the kind of passion you might reserve for courtesy calls. Lyrically, Van Occupanther's man-out-of-time treatments of honor and family were admirably antiquated, but while Courage picks up Occupanther's naturalistic bent, it lacks a thesis to tie it all together. That, I suppose, it leaves to the all-too-similar execution. With precious little exception, these songs are just so wispy, and the band's treatment of them so delicate, it turns Courage into a museum piece, stuffy, bloodless. A lot of those Britfolk cats were really hot players and there's not even that to hold onto; every performance is a few notches above adequate, but there's no bite to any of it, no intensity, precious little conveyance of emotion. I wish there were a single great song, one shining moment to point to as a beacon of hope for what's to come for these guys, but Courage just feels so monochromatic, so flatlined, even the tiniest signs of life have no power to resuscitate.


After the Western soundscapes of their debut album took hold through Spotify, the New York quintet return with an expanded edition of their meditative, magnetic debut.

Ghost Box (Expanded)

If you want to approximate the hypothetical essence of time travel, consider a drive through the southwestern United States. Mountains and mesas rise from the landscape in improbable ways, making it impossible for a new arrival to tell if a geographic feature is 25 or 250 miles away. A four-hour drive down an empty desert highway can feel as sublime and effortless as a Sunday stroll in a city park. The New York quintet SUSS capture these surreal sensations with uncanny precision on Ghost Box, their debut album. The band self-released a seven-song edition of Ghost Box in February; it took surprising hold through Spotify, with the whistle-laced “Late Night Call” alone accruing several million streams. Now, under the aegis of experimental syndicate Northern Spy, they have updated it with four unreleased tracks. What was once a neatly rendered portrait is now an immersive panorama.
During the 1980s, SUSS founder Bob Holmes and Gary Lieb, who manipulates electronic loops here, were part of Rubber Rodeo, a country-fried New Wave ensemble that suggests a midpoint between the B-52’s and Southern Culture on the Skids. In SUSS, their spirit is less hurried, favoring slow-motion ascension over neon ricochets. Jonathan Gregg’s elastic pedal steel playing summons shifting desert views, while the gently twangy guitars of Pat Irwin and William Garrett shape a distinct country sensibility, so these pieces feel more like songs than mere soundscapes.
The environments SUSS create aren’t populated by swaggering buckaroos or shoot-’em-up showdowns; they instead survey the vast swaths of nothing and no one that cover so much of the Western landscape. “Wichita” begins with wobbly circles of guitar and pedal steel, spiraling around two alternating bass notes. It’s immediately hypnotizing, almost narcotic, suggesting it could go on forever. Other tracks are hazy or ambling. “Steam,” an addition for this edition, expands and contracts repeatedly over its seven-and-a-half-minute stretch; soft puffs of static offset pools of pedal steel and guitar, which reverberate through layers of distortion. The drift recalls the vague anxiety of watching a serious storm approach, especially as thundering low-end builds during the back half.
Like the desert, which secretly teems with life, SUSS’s ambiance reveals greater nuance and depth upon inspection. A throbbing industrial rhythm and distorted snippets from cowboy movies nearly make “Gunfighter” unnerving, creating menacing tension by wrapping inky rhythms in pedal steel. “Canyonlands (Return to Wichita)” is wistful and marked by the slightest trace of uplift, while the echoes of someone whistling through the hum of “Late Night Call” lends the song a sense of aimless searching. The whistle is gentle and loose, used to fend off boredom or announce one’s presence to figures unseen, not a sounded alarm.
The animating principle of Ghost Box is less one of manifest destiny than deliberate moseying, underscored by the expansive guitar ripples of “Rain” and the moderate rhythmic patter of closer “After the Storm.” Ambient music aims to build an environment, be it one that can be relegated to the background or create an all-encompassing wonderland. With Ghost Box, SUSS favors the latter interpretation through a vivid landscape where mellifluous tones foster the mystery and magic of a fabled landscape.


Camae Ayewa channels the politics of noise music and Afrofuturism for a deeply confrontational and affecting album that makes real and visceral the trauma of the past.

Fetish Bones

The science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany wrote that the raison d'être of the genre was not about creating an imagined future, but to consider a world in which art can provide “a significant distortion of the present.” To travel through time, to be plopped out on the other end of a wormhole was to excavate the present moment and remix the past.
For the Afrofuturist music critic Kodwo Eshun, this thinking was essential. The art of the Afrodiaspora, from Du Bois’ double consciousness to Sun Ra’s extraterrestrial imagination, was united by a desire to create contexts “that encourage a process of disalienation,” by reconsidering what was possible in the present. Camae Ayewa (a.k.a. Moor Mother) follows in the footsteps of these radical time travelers. Her latest LP *Fetish Bones, *is a discombobulating journey from the 19th century to the end of the world—through government-sponsored racism, redlining, and the carceral state, revisiting every single wrongful slaying from Emmett Till to Sandra Bland. It’s music that implicates, reveals culpabilities, and creates a space to learn from its inherent difficulty.
Ayewa is a Philadelphia-based artist and community activist who has been a fixture in the city for over a decade. Moor Mother began in 2012 as a solo project, and under the moniker she’s released dozens of EPs on Bandcamp, recasting the protest song as a moving electronic collage. According to her own description of the music, it falls within “blk girl blues” and “project housing bop” to “slaveship punk.” These self-made categories allow Ayewa’s music to be fluid in terms of expression, yet consistently grounded in a sense of history. It is very much influenced by the idiosyncrasies and formal experimentation of Sun Ra, but also aligned with the chaotic joy of Shabazz Palaces. Her music is without a doubt confrontational, it often asks you to not only suspend your disbelief, but open yourself up to punishment as well. *Fetish Bones *is her masterclass on creating a sensory experience that interrogates your complicity, pushing you through a door that sends you hurtling through time.
The opener “Creation Myth,” is an astonishing stand-alone musical experience. The way Ayewa arranges sounds reflects a non-hierarchical kind of thinking. Dissonant textures are forced to work in tandem, creating a strange but discomforting beauty. The opening seconds find an electronic warble resembling a tractor beam sharing space with serene flutes, a whispered poem, and a percussive pitter-patter.
If you pay attention to the whispered voice beneath the noise, the content of the nearly inaudible words becomes chilling: “Four out of five every day a slaying/Two black girls hanging/Three black men choking/Gun to your face when you praying/Or get lynch in ya cell for changing lanes.” When Ayewa enters the scene, digital noise starts to coalesce at the song’s center, and she begins reciting for the next four minutes a harrowing poem that tries to get a handle on the black experience at a nearly molecular level: “Your DNA, the processes of your chromosomes, systematically forming to prevent one's own annihilation.” The narrator of Ayewa’s poem reconstructs the feeling of racing through history by revisiting moments of historical trauma: “The idea is to travel throughout the race riots from 1866 to the present time...I’ve been bleeding since 1866/Dragged my bloody self to 1919/And bled thru the summer being slaughtered by whites.” The writing here is allusive and surrealist but powerfully direct in its effect. It’s a piece that could be endlessly analyzed: The mixture of words and sounds evoke the visceral intimacy of shared trauma, and it turns a history of abstract suffering into a close-proximity experience.
This is not to say the other 12 tracks are slouches. The album is made up of a series of noise poems, mostly just over two minutes long, wherein Ayewa crafts remarkably dense stories. Take “Deadbeat Protest,” which resembles a Death Grips song in its frenetic pace and howling flow. “Trying to save my black life by fetishizing my dead life” Ayewa gasps, making clear the pitfalls of self-centered allyship. In other moments, like in “KBGK,” she looks at how not only the government but capitalism has not only failed the black community but commodified them: “No use for crying/They catalog buying/And everything for sale/Even ya swag in ya public housing.”
To live in this album is to be escorted from the past, to present, to future in thirty-second chunks. It happens in part by Ayewa’s woozy selection of both futuristic and anachronistic sounds: needling synths interact with saxophones and grainy sermons in dizzying fashion. This is most evident in “Chain Gang Quantum Blues,” a dazzling and temporally unmoored collage made from the recordings of a chain gang singing through static dissonance. In moments like these, where found sound is heavily processed and queered, the album showcases a frank and unsparing documentarian touch. Ayewa’s great skill is to make the evidence of the past even more uncomfortable, somehow even more present.
The last words you hear on the album in “Time Float” are: “Use my dead body as a raft to survive the flooding that’s coming.” In a sentence, she compacts an entire economy of images and events and fears into a single imagined event. Yet in Ayewa’s delivery, it is not brutally sad or even wistful, it is a reminder of the hardships of love under the regime of historical trauma. In those last words there is a sense of sacrifice and duty to the community, that at the end, even under duress, someone is there. It embodies the experience of the album: You will never be able to unhear *Fetish Bones *because it will have made you a witness.


With pastoral folk roots, New York singer-songwriter Will Stratton has gotten more discreet in his approach. Not a single note sounds out of place here, meshing into a breathtaking whole.

Rosewood Almanac

The sixth full-length album from singer-songwriter Will Stratton begins with the sound of chirping birds—a nod, perhaps, to the pastoral folk roots that Stratton has worn on his sleeve for the better part of his career. The birds set a comfortable tone for an exceedingly comfortable, if engrossing, set of songs that bare the influence of English folk pioneers like Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, and Richard Thompson. But these days, Stratton wears them like an old jacket he’s grown into with ease, one that now conforms to his own features.
When Stratton debuted in 2007 with What the Night Said at the age of 20, his prodigious technique distinguished him from the slew of other artists drawing on the same sounds. Over time, his touch on the 12-string acoustic in particular has only gotten more graceful. But it wasn’t really until his fourth album, 2012’s moody, almost filmic Post-Empire, that Stratton showed signs of coming into his own voice. Up to that point, it had been easy to dismiss his music as exceptionally well-executed but otherwise typical coffee house fare, the stuff one might expect to find in the charming spaces that dot Stratton’s beloved Hudson River Valley.
Stratton’s next album, 2014’s Gray Lodge Wisdom, addressed his life-threatening bout with cancer, so it was only natural that his music would reflect a more seasoned personal outlook. Rosewood Almanac, named for the rosewood guitar stock whose sound Stratton describes as darker and “ almost menacing,” contains one explicit reference to Stratton’s cancer experience, on the closing track “Ribbons,” when he sings “my brain just ain’t the same since the poison in my veins.” Otherwise, the album gives no other direct indication of what Stratton went through and, ultimately, survived.
If Stratton’s brain hasn’t been the same, his hands most certainly are—at least from a listener’s standpoint. On Rosewood Almanac, he supplies all the guitars, bass, keyboards, and dulcimer himself. Right from opening track, “Light Blue,” the music practically overflows with Stratton’s handiwork. “Light Blue” initially resembles your average plaintive folk ballad—nothing more than Stratton accompanying himself on guitar—but the song quickly swells into a whirl of parts so dense the song moves and breathes more like an orchestral piece than a folk tune.
Stratton has gotten more discreet with his approach. Where he could be something of a gunslinger in the past, not a single note sounds out of place here, and all of the instruments mesh together into a greater whole of breathtaking scale. As he’s done in the past, he also features violins, viola, and cello with a keen eye for intensifying the drama of his chord changes, which would pack quite a punch even without the extra trimmings.
Overall, Rosewood Almanac plays like the musical equivalent of going from one aquarium display to another, with lots of small, brightly colored objects darting in all directions yet moving somehow in unison. In that respect, Stratton shrugs off some of the baggage of his influences and steps decisively into the present. Sure, Rosewood Almanac couldn’t exist without Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, but in terms of sonic dimension Stratton follows more closely in the footsteps of classic Joni Mitchell titles like Court and Spark and The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Stratton’s ambitions are far more modest, but the new album quite successfully transports your attention away from the banal.
When Stratton dials up the melancholy, as he does on the eerie, wide-open space of “Thick Skin,” he shows that his music can verge on heart-rending without histrionics or melodrama. And when he sings “You can move if you want to but your problems, they move too,” Stratton conveys a sense of grave warning without over-affecting the tone in his voice, which has grown by leaps and bounds as well. Where his high pitch once appeared overwhelmed and at-odds with the stories and mood of his songs, here his David Gray-like timbre finally supports the weight of the music.
“I don’t want to front like I’m from another decade/And I don’t want to feel like I’m part of a decaying past,” he sings on “Whatever’s Divine.” Stratton might next want to focus on the present—he still arguably lags behind contemporary trends—but Rosewood Almanac contains plenty of hints that he’s in prime position to get ahead of them.


Recording in the duo’s respective hometowns yields Wye Oak’s brightest, most straightforward effort yet, in which the limits of human understanding are a source of fascination, not frustration.

Wye Oak: The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs

The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs

Wye Oak’s 2011 album Civilian was a major inflection point for the band. Supporting the record brought the Baltimore duo of Andy Stack and Jenn Wasner across oceans, onto “The Tonight Show,” and into the arsenal of Hollywood music supervisors. By the end of the year, after wringing every possible variation out of their setlist, they were spent. “I feel like our band is going to change very, very drastically from here on out in order to remain vital to us,” Wasner noted in an interview with the Village Voice. And so they did, situationally and stylistically. Stack moved to the artistic enclave of Marfa, Texas, and then on to Portland, Oregon. At the same time, Wasner set her guitar aside as she worked on her throwback chirp-pop project Dungeonesse; the results were sufficiently freeing that Wye Oak’s 2014 follow-up, Shriek, eschewed the six-string almost entirely.
This is a standard narrative: a band that has to evolve or die. But more than that, it’s the story of trying to maintain relationships as adulthood scatters everyone to the winds. In order to make Shriek, Stack and Wasner passed demos back and forth. This time, they opted for a series of home/away dates, alternating weeks recording in Marfa (to which Stack returned after Shriek) and Durham, North Carolina (Wasner’s home since 2015). The strategy forced more direct collaboration, as well as a spirit of first-thought-best-thought. The result is The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs, which, for all its weight, has the particular giddiness of conspirators reuniting.
Pound for pound, The Louder I Call is Wye Oak’s brightest, most straightforward effort. Like the best of 2016’s retooled outtakes set, Tween, it fuses the dream pop of the band’s middle period to galvanic backbeats. On a number of tracks, synth ostinatos provide the connective tissue between Stack’s machine-tooled timekeeping and Wasner’s array of guitar daubs and squalls. The duo is urgent yet unhurried. On the pan-happy “Say Hello,” Wasner’s higher register—a doodle of strange skywriting over the buzz—recalls Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser. “Five hundred aerial miles to go,” she sings before dipping some desperately gorgeous howls into the serration of her guitar. On “It Was Not Natural,” the popping bassline—the foundation of so much of Shriek—returns the band to earth. Wasner takes a walk, overturns a strange object with her foot. “It was not natural/All along,” she decides over synth twinkle and piano thud, “Only human hands/Could give us/Something so unforgiving.”
As if to prove the point, they follow “It Was Not Natural” with “Symmetry,” a bassy, doomy St. Vincent homage, right down to the screen paranoia (“The accident/To video/Awareness in the afterglow”) and the broken-modem crackle of the solo. It’s as blunt as the group gets. Doggedly allusive in their early years, they have settled for merely elliptical: the quick-fire thoughts of born observers. “I fear we speak a broken language,” goes a line on “Over and Over,” as Stack keeps chopping into an oompah beat. That’s generally how it goes here: Wye Oak puzzle over the limits of understanding, but their compositions treat the mystery as a source of fascination rather than frustration. “I believed that life could be better,” Wasner sighs on “Lifer,” just before uncorking a ragged solo that gently chides her belief.
Wasner has described the album’s title as “sort of psychological litmus test,” one which revealed the band members’ varying levels of acidity. Wasner envisioned “it” as a sort of approaching menace; Stack interpreted it as receding hope. Those ideas aren’t entirely in tension: either way, something is about to be lost. It could be peace, or comprehension. It could be connection. “My people are all over/Spread out and thin,” Wasner croons midway through the album, on the string-quartet-backed tone poem “My Signal.” “I’m watching them/And we may never breathe the same air again.” But I can’t discern any regret, only reverie: It’s just another note shared by two old friends across the intervening miles.


The Torrance, California band’s new and allegedly improved rarities collection is the punk record they always wanted to make, and a chance to redefine their legacy for newer listeners.

Joyce Manor: Songs From Northern Torrance

Songs From Northern Torrance

Barry Johnson just wants to be a punk. When Joyce Manor released their polished second album Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired in 2012, even he seemed a little unenthusiastic: “I’m really, really happy with it, don’t get me wrong, but at the same time I wish we would have just done a punk record.” Six years later, still seeking to recapture a grittier sound, the band tapped Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou to produce Million Dollars to Kill Me—their most gently melodic record to date. It’s a tension that’s long existed in Joyce Manor’s music, where the wry power pop of Guided by Voices and the fiery, grating screamo vocals of a band like Orchid combine to produce massive hooks. At live shows the band often mines its history, playing early demos to explosive response. What fans who came onboard after 2014’s Epitaph debut Never Hungover Again might not realize is that clean vocals used to be the exception, not the rule, on a Joyce Manor song. With the new rarities compilation Songs From Northern Torrance, they revisit their formative years and finally get the punk record they always wanted to make.
As a band whose early interviews directed readers to Myspace, Joyce Manor’s history isn’t necessarily hard to access. Some Songs From Northern Torrance are already familiar: The record opens with crowd favorite “House Warning Party,” and its second half is taken track-for-track from 2010’s Constant Headache EP. Astute fans noted that Joyce Manor removed a rarities compilation with a similar tracklist from streaming platforms just prior to the new record’s release; the band clarified that Songs From Northern Torrance represents a “thoughtfully curated compilation.” Their second run at a rarities album is a chance to redefine their legacy for newer listeners. These sequencing and song choices are less enamored with the bouncing post-hardcore zeal of early tracks like “My Elise,” and more indebted to the embittered anger of folk-punk and screamo. It’s also telling what history the band omits, like Johnson’s early brushes with ska.
The compilation’s abrasive edge evokes the basements, bowling alleys, and backyards that dot Joyce Manor’s southern California home. “DFHP?” (short for “Do Fish Have Periods?”) and “Who Gave You a Baby” rely on acoustic guitar and Johnson’s voice to carry their rhythms, trading the power of distortion pedals for earnest, unfiltered vocals and the brushing of fingers against strings. The inclusion of these pared-back demos, rather than the more robust versions released previously, offers a sense of bedroom-recording intimacy missing from their robust, professionally produced recent albums. For longtime fans—those who’ve continued to find catharsis by screaming along at concerts as the band leveled up to headlining slots—it is perhaps a necessary reassurance.
The remaining new additions to the tracklist are reminiscent of the scrappy folk-punk scene Johnson frequented pre-Joyce Manor. The clipped vocals and loose, jangling guitar of “House Warning Party” certainly recall the defining traits of aughts folk-punk revival. But it’s the lyrics—a vision of romance as a salve against economic depression and broken homes—that sound surprisingly political coming from a band better known for dejected lamentations on growing pains and arrested development. The narrative recalls the brutally bold lyricism of former tour mates AJJ, while “Fuck Koalacaust” serves as a permanent reminder of the days when obscure SoCal band rivalries could inspire whole songs (both Johnson and Koalacaust claim ownership of the opening riff). As with “Who Gave You a Baby,” hearing Johnson express his rage so clearly and pointedly is invigorating. His scream of “Fuck you, Dad” on “House Warning Party” is the quintessence of frustrated anti-authoritarian anger.
The final five songs, all taken from the Constant Headache EP, come closest to Johnson’s elusive holy grail of punk. The rapid cymbal hits and downtuned guitar of “Constant Nothing” convey newfound intensity after half a record of smaller, more anxious acoustic sounds, and the shrieking chords of “Done Right Discount Flooring” build the energy. Other songs, especially popular live picks, lose steam in the studio; setlist staple “Five Beer Plan” lacks ferocity in its recorded version, the long pauses and the absence of a circle pit noticeable even if concerts weren’t indefinitely on pause. There’s also something faintly ironic about listening for marginally higher fidelity in remastered versions of recordings that were often comically blown out in the first place. As a second rarities compilation that shares most songs with its predecessor, it’s hard not to see Songs From Northern Torrance as an effort to hold fans’ attention between new records. But for newcomers looking for a sense of Joyce Manor’s earliest days, these scrappy, bare-bones demos serve as an idealized backstory, one that lends the band a hardened edge as their arc bends further towards pop.


On his latest album-- and first for Merge-- Dan Snaith fully inhabits the 1960s, specifically the branch of sun-kissed pop that was aware of psychedelia but chose not to abandon the pillow-soft pleasures of AM radio, the Zombies, Free Design, the Mamas & Papas, and the Beach Boys.

Andorra

Dan Snaith's Caribou project, to borrow a line from another Canadian songwriter, has been a zigzagging journey through the past. He was most entrenched in the present moment on his 2001 debut Start Breaking My Heart, but even that record's soft-focus, post-Aphex Twin electronica seemed pulled from two or three years earlier. By 2003's Up in Flames he began glancing at psychedelia, but through a distinctly 1990s lens, mixing the cracked sensibility of Boces-era Mercury Rev with the ecstatic come-together crescendos of big beat. Milk of Human Kindness from 2005 was connected closely to its predecessor, but it added the unblinking rhythms and tidy instrumental efficiency of 70s krautrock. And now, with his latest album Andorra, Snaith finally and fully inhabits the 1960s, specifically the branch of sun-kissed pop that was aware of psychedelia but chose not to abandon the pillow-soft pleasures of AM radio, of the Zombies, Free Design, the Mamas & Papas, and, of course, the Beach Boys.
The significant factor in Snaith's transformation from his instrumental beginnings is his increased confidence as a singer. On Up in Flames, the voice was another sound to be fed into the computer, a way to reference the idea of songs rather than actually sing them. From there, it's been an unsteady trajectory pointing toward songwriting proper, and with Andorra, Snaith seems to be paying attention to chords and melodic progression first. He may have even titled a song to commemorate the new development: "Melody Day", Andorra's first track and lead single, is the most tuneful of the bunch, with Snaith's high tenor sitting squarely in the center of the rolling drums, sleigh bells, flute, and what sound like vintage synths.
"Melody Day" is also significant for being the only track to fully embrace what has become a Caribou trademark: the brief pause at the end of a bar which explodes into an enormous volley of percussion. The album as a whole is a touch more subdued; these "big" moments-- which were at risk of becoming a cliché, anyway-- appear sporadically, and generally with less intensity. Instead, in Andorra's more song-oriented first half, Snaith creates tracks that startle with their lightness of touch and joyous evocation of honeyed late-60s guitar pop. A half-decade after the Elephant 6 movement first started to fade, Snaith's move can be seen as risky, but it succeeds, oddly enough, in part because of the one-man-band nature of his project. He still works essentially alone, playing and sampling instruments and building tracks with a computer, and his music, with its loops and thick production, retains the markers of his process. He's also not aiming his music at any sort of radio; the mid-range is jammed full, distortion pops up regularly without apology, and weird sounds appear from nowhere and zoom between the speakers.
The sunshine daydream reaches peak intensity five songs in with "Desiree", whose very title dates it perfectly: we know from her name that this girl might trip down the streets with the Association's Windy, perhaps looking for kicks or waiting for Mary to come along. There's barely any percussion to speak of, just swells of synthetic strings, bits of flute, zooming harp runs, and chiming guitar leading to a big chorus that's all Snaith's multi-layered voice. Then there's "Sandy" and "Irene", also names more likely in 2007 to belong to grandmothers. The former is a Andorra's most dynamic track aside from "Melody Day", and also has the most interesting vocal arrangement, its highly reverbed streaks of harmony suggesting of a pop-minded church choir. It hints that Snaith might also be taking lyrical inspiration from a earlier time: "Sometimes in her eyes I see forever/ I can't believe what we've found." The words here are not always intelligible-- there's often a lot going on, so they're easy to miss-- but it's safe to say that the music carries the bulk of the emotional meaning.
Andorra takes an odd detour over its final three songs. "Sundialing" returns to the repetitious Neu!-isms of Milk of Human Kindness but dresses up the steady rhythm with Day-Glo swirls. "Irene" is a short mid-tempo ballad that is instrumental through its first half, and even then the only sound is essentially a drum machine. The tune in its second half is vague, suggesting a more fleshed-out song sitting somewhere else that's never quite articulated. The eight-minute closer "Niobe" builds from bubbling, acidic synths and folds in tightly sequenced, Orb-like pulses, an extended slow-burn that occasionally threatens a big climax with a sampled drum fill but never quite goes there.
Considering its length and placement at the end of the record, "Niobe" is a tad disappointing, never quite acquiring the momentum its structure would seem to suggest. Still, it's also an encouraging sign that Snaith is thinking in these more open-ended terms, that's he's not confining himself to the retro pop explosion that, as he demonstrates here, he has essentially mastered. Andorra will undoubtedly win Caribou a lot of new fans and rightfully so; it's a big, bold, tuneful collection that impresses with its ambition and meticulous arrangement. But it's also nice to think that Caribou's course is not fixed, that the future might hold a few more surprises than what's found here.


The only minor album in the Beatles' catalogue is this soundtrack to a feature-length cartoon, a project with which the Beatles had little involvement.

Yellow Submarine

Hey, nobody's perfect. The only truly minor album in the Beatles' catalogue isn't really an album at all. Yellow Submarine, released in January 1969, is the soundtrack to the feature-length cartoon of the same name, a project with which the Beatles had little involvement. The idea of an animated film stretched back to 1965, but these were busy years for the band, and the project was pushed to the backburner. Once the movie finally got underway in 1967, the Beatles had no real interest in the details.
In one sense, the Yellow Submarine project is the opposite of Magical Mystery Tour. While the latter film was derided as pretentious and incoherent, the Yellow Submarine feature was well-received. And while the record releases associated with Magical Mystery Tour are of staggeringly high quality, the Yellow Submarine soundtrack is like the work of a supremely talented band that couldn't really be bothered. Brian Epstein had died in August, and with him gone, there was little motivation for the Beatles to participate in any meaningful way. So actors mimicked their voices, their input into the story consisted of a meeting or two with the filmmakers, and when it came time to assemble the soundtrack, they combed through the vault to see what was left over.
Of the six tracks by the Beatles on the album's first side, two, "Yellow Submarine" and "All You Need Is Love", are already familiar from their original contexts (as part of Revolver and as a single, respectively). The other four were holdovers from sessions in 1967 (Paul McCartney's "All Together Now", George Harrison's "It's All Too Much" and "It's Only a Northern Song") and 1968 (John Lennon's "Hey Bulldog"). They never found release during the time they were recorded because, well, they weren't good enough. Granted, we're talking about a time when the Beatles were making some of the finest pop albums of all time, so the question of what constitutes "good enough" is relative. But even setting aside their exceedingly high standards, this lot is pretty middling, if certainly still enjoyable.
Neither of Harrison's songs ranks with his best. "Only a Northern Song" and "It's All Too Much" are filled with swirling psychedelic production-- tooting horns, backward instruments, shimmering percussion-- but beneath the din there's not much else interesting going on. "Only a Northern Song" at least has a good joke going for it, simultaneously alluding to the North of England and the Beatles' Lennon-McCartney-dominated publishing company (i.e., no matter what Harrison wrote for this particular number, it belonged to Northern Songs, Ltd.). But "It's All Too Much" stretches on for an endless six and a half minutes, the constipated production in fruitless search of a tune. For McCartney's part, "All Together Now" is a cheery and pleasant sing-along befitting an animated soundtrack, and Lennon's "Hey Bulldog" is a tough and funky piano-driven rocker, by a good margin the best song here. They might be second-rate Beatles songs, but still.
To round out the album, the second side of Yellow Submarine is filled with George Martin's score for the film. Pieces like "Pepperland", "Sea of Holes", and "March of the Meanies", however they were received at the time, function now primarily as garish kitsch, lushly orchestrated orchestral music that could have come from anywhere. Personally, I can enjoy this stuff when I'm in the mood. The blandly anonymous but beautifully recorded swoop of strings, self-consciously "exotic" percussion, and recurring thematic motifs serve as an intriguing sort of time capsule of a time when light "beautiful music" still commanded the ears of a sizeable listening pubic. But it's very easy to forget that the music has anything to do with the Beatles, or even popular music of the last 50 years, at least until the "Yellow Submarine" melody returns in "Yellow Submarine in Pepperland". As a souvenir of the film, Yellow Submarine has its place, and in fairness, it was never intended as a major release. But as an album it's ultimately forgettable, which is something the Beatles so rarely were otherwise.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]


After a stint as Waxahatchee’s backing band, the Detroit folk-rockers subtly sharpen their musicianship on a laid-back album suffused in positive vibes.

Let There Be Music

Let There Be Music, the third album from Bonny Doon, feels as if it was created over the course of a few sunny afternoons. That carefree quality is an illusion: The Detroit band took the better part of five years to deliver the sequel to 2018’s Longwave, a slightly ragged collection of tenderly tuneful folk rock. In the meantime, the group endured a number of personal traumas. Bobby Colombo recovered from a brain injury and Lyme disease; drummer Jake Kmiecik experienced a worsening of Crohn’s, an autoimmune disorder.
A bright spot in this period was Bonny Doon’s steady gig with Waxahatchee. A longtime friend of the group, singer-songwriter Katie Crutchfield declared Longwave “my immediate favorite record” and recruited the trio as her backing band; then, after taking them out on the road, she had Bonny Doon play on her 2020 album Saint Cloud and accompanying tour. You can hear how that experience helped subtly sharpen the trio’s musicianship on Let There Be Music.
Bonny Doon remain anchored by the gentle, empathetic interplay of guitarists Colombo and Bill Lennox, yet they show less inclination to ramble than they did on Longwave. Quiet assurance and precise execution dictate the record’s shape and mood: Songs unfold at an unhurried pace, planting seeds that grow in the subconscious. Steering away from artisanal folk, Bonny Doon deftly expand their palette, moving closer toward pop. Piano plays a prominent role and drives the jaunty title track, reinforcing the impression that the group is drawing from a deep river of 1970s soft rock—artists like Harry Nilsson and Gilbert O’Sullivan, who themselves are tributaries of Paul McCartney.
Despite the laid-back vibe, Bonny Doon still prize subtlety. The mellow electric pianos on “Naturally” are mere coloring, highlighting the sun-kissed air of relaxation at the heart of the songs, as is the fuzztone guitar that weaves through the ramshackle “On My Mind.” They haven’t abandoned the folkier elements of their sound—“You Can’t Stay the Same” carries echoes of the Band’s rendition of “I Shall Be Released”—but it’s now one strand in a tapestry, not the main motif.
Apart from “Crooked Creek,” whose primitive thump and monotone melody suggest Maureen Tucker supporting Stephen Malkmus, Let There Be Music doesn’t particularly sound like indie rock, save for one factor: Both Lennox and Colombo sing with the deadpan delivery common among bands inspired by 1990s lo-fi rockers. There’s a crucial difference between that era’s slackers and this group, though: The trio’s flat affect never reads as irony. It’s earnest. At no point on Let There Be Music do Bonny Doon give the sense of looking askew at a subject—or themselves. Everything is presented at face value. On the album’s title track, they sing, simply: “Let there be love/Let there be laughter, more than enough.”
Such an embrace of positivity runs the risk of sounding saccharine, but Bonny Doon are saved by their modesty. They take no big swings on Let There Be Music, and they tackle no grand subjects; they merely concentrate on sculpting sweet, sincere songs about subjects like being vaguely homesick on a fine afternoon (“Fine Afternoon”), allowing emotions to evolve organically (“Naturally”), and trusting that hope will arrive as soon as today (“Maybe Today”). Each song is a carefully constructed miniature, and the album itself is endearingly small-scale too—a record where life lessons aren’t preached, just lived.


The UK rapper-producer’s new album is an indelible rush of free-associative rhymes, ghostly textures, and shapeshifting vocals.

Iceboy Violet: Not a Dream But a Controlled Explosion

Not a Dream But a Controlled Explosion

Iceboy Violet found a lifeline in noise. They were 18 years old and making hip-hop beats influenced by Madlib and Dilla—satisfying enough on a formal level, perhaps, but there were deeper, more conflicted emotions that classic boom-bap couldn’t assuage. Their housemate, though, listened to noise music, and the two would sit up until 7 a.m., bathing in the chaos. “It was the only thing that could drown out the voice in my head,” they said. At the same time, they were delving into the sounds of grime, whose chest-puffed rage seemed to mask a deep well of anguish—“all this pain that’s kept hidden by the pressures of hyper-masculinity,” said Iceboy, who is nonbinary, in another interview.
On their debut mixtape, 2018’s wild, bracing MOOK, they brought those two strains of music together—burying Dizzee Rascal samples in cavernous reverb, looping snippets of homophobic MC taunts over concussive waves of bass, and whipping white noise into corrosive whirlwinds. Not until the final track, woven from delicate filaments of drone, did they reveal their own rapping voice: a plaintive snarl, cracked and swollen. “Father, father/Why won’t you unburden me/My chest feels heavy/Can’t breathe,” they pleaded, sounding as though a foreign mass were lodged in their throat.
Since that shot across the bow, Iceboy Violet has continued to shape their voice into a peerless instrument. They contributed a handful of guest features to artists like Loraine James and aya, and on last year’s The Vanity Project mixtape, they explored new cadences and registers over beats by likeminded producers that stirred drill, ambient, grime, and noise into an ominous miasma of melted textures. Not a Dream but a Controlled Explosion is the first project to fully combine Iceboy’s rapping with their own production, and if it is less noisy than MOOK—marginally, anyway—it is no less cathartic, and no less unusual. It’s a major step forward for the artist.
The album opens with a fake-out: a half minute of synth shimmer and crystalline pinging, as gentle and ethereal as Fennesz, before an overdriven, drill-inspired beat breaks through with the force of an earthmover. Blending sensuousness with violence, this is the palette that will carry across the whole record: thundering, distorted 808 kicks; clouds of vaporous tone color; bass frequencies that smolder like a mine fire, sucking all the oxygen out of the mix. “Black Gold” borrows the choral pads of so-called weightless grime and tips them toward chilly, mid-’90s ambient techno; “Refracted” pairs deadweight drums with ghostly wails before trailing off into an a cappella phrase of almost liturgical grace. The production is so enveloping that an instrumental version of the album would not seem to be missing anything at all.
But there’s no missing Iceboy Violet’s voice: Even when their rapping is hard to make out, which is often, they are a commanding presence. Words ride roughshod over the beat, a tumultuous stream of images almost too fast to keep up with. Despite their immediately recognizable tone, they stretch themselves in striking ways: In “Refracted,” their insistent, broken yelp is reminiscent of a hardcore singer’s bark, while in “Ekklipse,” they dip into a gravelly baritone over a scabrous dancehall beat.
Their lyrics unspool in a free-associative stream of assonant rhymes. “Baby we’re survivors/Flowers turned to fertilizer/What’s going on inside ya?” Iceboy riffs on “Black Gold,” trading verses with Florence Sinclair, whose sandpapery drawl here evokes Forest Whitaker’s Ghost Dog character. In “Ekklipse,” they offer a vision with the force of a soothsayer’s premonition: “Idols to false gods lie/Like dogs in the water/Dreams ekklipse the sun/And whistle like mortar.” Songs rarely can be pinned down to a single, clear meaning, but certain themes—religious imagery, the inseparability of longing and shame, repeated instances of shattering and breaking—pile up into a suggestion of ambient desperation, of a self grappling with its own identity.
The most crucial throughline might be the centrality of desire. Iceboy Violet has said that the record is fundamentally about the ways that everyday perception of reality is molded by feelings of want—“daydreaming, hallucination, yearning & cum.” Peer behind the wreckage of the beats, and an unabashedly romantic sensibility is palpable in imagery of bodies tasting and enfolding one another. In “Paris, Bradford,” Iceboy reveals an unexpected tenderness: “Burn after reading/You lead the slow foxtrot into the evening,” they murmur over a pastel swirl of what might be guitar feedback. “Silk threads connect our spines/Lost track of what limbs are mine/I feel everything but fine/I hope I know that you need me.” Beneath the bass’s crushing weight, a lightness stirs: a dizzying blend of spiritual rapture and physical pleasure that refuses to be kept down.


The Welsh band with Britpop-sized ambition offers its long-awaited full-length and it includes re-worked tracks from last year's mini album.

The Big Roar

The Joy Formidable's long-gestating debut full-length opens with roughly 45 seconds of some unspecified, arrhythmic clatter-- it could be hail stones pelting a cold tin roof, or a door opening and closing, or fireworks, or just the over-amplified sound of typewriter keys hitting paper. On their own terms, these noises might feel jarring and bothersome, but compared to what transpires over the next 49 minutes, they seem like an oddly naturalistic, curiously imprecise element on album that sounds otherwise scientifically engineered to make the Joy Formidable sound like the Biggest Band in the World, rendering traditional metrics like No. 1 chart rankings and platinum records as mere formalities.
After a decade that saw Britpop break down into Franz Ferdinandian funk, Arctic Monkeys insolence, and xx-ian austerity, the Joy Formidable project a certain guileless bravado rarely heard since the mid-1990s. For this Welsh trio, a Glastonbury main-stage headlining slot doesn't represent some distant career goal to gradually aspire to, but a deeply ingrained spiritual state of mind. This notion informs every rocket-launcher riff and back-of-the-bleacher chorus heard throughout The Big Roar, the title of which is but a surface indication of the band's wanton disregard for subtlety. The deliberate nature of the Joy Formidable's aesthetic can be evinced by the fact that four of the songs here first appeared in alternate form on the 2009 mini-LP A Balloon Called Moaning and have been retooled for this big-league debut on Atlantic. And in some cases rather dramatically: the sprightly pop single "Whirring" now comes appended with an extended, accelerated and supremely arse-kicking coda-- complete will dual bass-drum triggers-- that suggests "You Made Me Realise"-era My Bloody Valentine with a young Lars Ulrich behind the kit.
But with her Corgan-like tendency to slather the songs with infinite layers of grungy guitar gloss, Ritzy Bryan at times comes perilously close to overpowering her own bracing voice, which becomes an increasingly important humanizing element amid The Big Roar's in-the-red onslaught. It's somewhat telling that the album's massive opener "The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie" fades out rather uneventfully after a dramatic seven-minute build, as if the band members suddenly lost their place in its thickening thundercloud of noise and didn't know where else to go. The Joy Formidable are wise to offset their more colossal tracks with shorter, snappier, new-wavy numbers ("I Don't Want to See You Like This", "Cradle"), but even in smaller doses, they rarely relent in their pedal-through-the-metal ballast. As a result, songs like the dancefloor-bound "Austere" and the slow-motion lurch of "Buoy" are robbed of their dynamic variation and definition. The atmospheric late-album ballad "Llaw = Wall"-- the lone vocal turn by bassist Rhydian Dafydd-- initially marks a change of pace, but even that cedes to an inevitable quiet-to-loud mid-song eruption. (A he-said/she-said duet along the lines of 2010's spirited Paul Draper collab "Greyhounds in the Slips" would've added a welcome new dimension to the sound here.) There's no denying the Joy Formidable's passion, vigor, and pop smarts; it would just be easier to appreciate those qualities if The Big Roar didn't so often sound like a big blur.


Erykah Badu's second album is dense with ideas and sounds that draw from the past and look toward the future. Released in November 2000, it embodies the millennial tensions of that pivotal year.

Mama’s Gun

From the moment Prince’s party ran out of time and the ball dropped in Times Square to signal a new millennium, people were waiting. They were waiting in the wee moments of the new year for ominous, Y2K catastrophe to hit, for worldwide web grids to collapse, for large scale chaos of another order to afflict the globe. That the calamity didn’t drop in the form of a Roland Emmerich summer blockbuster sparked an initial sigh of relief. But the phenomenon of collective waiting—to see whether the recent impeachment of a president would lead to the end of the Clinton good-times era, to see whether the courts would order the family of six-year-old Elian Gonzalez to return him to Cuba across the Cold War divide, to see whether the officers who fired 41 shots into unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo would do any time at all, to see whether hanging chads would tip the balance of a presidential election—all that waiting would roll out across the entire year in waves of succession. Long spells of anxiety and watchfulness would punctuate the year 2000, a pivotal period that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle when trying to pinpoint the origins of new millennium unrest and epic uncertainty.
When she stepped into New York’s historic Electric Lady studios in 1999 and began recording her much-anticipated sophomore album, Erykah Badu had her finger to the wind. The tracks she was laying down extended what had quickly become her trademark vibe: that of deep-groove tarrying, wrestling with time, pushing up against and pulling at the beat but also lingering in the pocket while delivering pithy observations about temporal lag and the will to move. Her music brimmed with the suggestion—albeit a conflicted one—to wait for it. “On & On,” Badu’s breakthrough single from her 1997 smash debut Baduizm, became an anthem for this kind of indelible, cool-breeze, fitfulness. “Oh my my my I’m feeling high,” she sings with the distinct horn-like phrasings that brought Billie Holiday comparisons, “my money’s gone, I’m all alone/The world keeps turning…” It all came together in Badu’s sound and style: the image of a sister who couldn’t be bothered, who couldn’t care less about the time (“I think I need a cup of tea…”), yet who simultaneously recognized and paid reverence to black time, that which is past and that which is still to come. Her many references to the Five Percent Nation and Afrocentric cosmologies on Baduizm announced the arrival of new black nationalist soul, steeped in astrologically configured wisdom (“My cypher keeps moving like a rolling stone”) and headed toward an Afrofuturist destination to be determined.
To be rooted in the here and now while also resolutely and speculatively elsewhere—this was Erykah Badu’s distinct gambit early in her career. But Mama’s Gun turned an important page as she set out to pair songs that evoked the art of exquisite and romantically-charged lingering and hanging (the “urban hang suite,” as Maxwell would call it on his own debut album from 1996) alongside songs about being fed up with stasis, isolation, restriction and aborted dreams. In contrast to Baduizm, Mama’s Gun offers a more pointed, sustained, and grounded statement about what it means to get tired of waiting out and wading through the wretchedness of urban blight, the perpetual threat of police brutality and lethal force, the baggage from bad relationships and the sometimes oppressive voices inside one’s own head.
Those voices open the record’s first side in a cacophony of whispers as Badu admonishes herself about a laundry-list of unfinished tasks, nagging fears, and floating enigmas swirling through her mind (“I have to write a song… I have to remember to turn on the oven… warm up the apartment… Malcolm… Malcolm… I need to take my vitamin”). What cuts through the noise is a burst of sonic muscle—pure soul energy compressed into 10 initial seconds: the joyful ensemble (Chinah Blac and YahZarah) bellowing in Rufus-meets-Brand New Heavies unison as longtime collaborators Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson on drums, James Poyser on piano, Pino Palladino on bass, and Jeff Lee Johnson on guitar lay down a robust opening riff that sounds definitive and defiant. The opening moments of Mama’s Gun sound much less like anything off of Badu’s first record and instead resonate unmistakably in the vein of two other releases from earlier that year, Common’s fourth studio album, Like Water for Chocolate, and D’Angelo’s game-changing Voodoo. All three albums were recorded simultaneously at Electric Lady. All three benefitted from the skilled hand of legendary engineer Russell Elevado, who mixed each LP and drew on vintage recording techniques to evoke the ghosts of venerable albums past. And most crucially, all three featured MVP player Questlove acting improvisationally at the center of an alternative black pop universe at the turn of the millennium, one with clearly nostalgic tenets that nonetheless held fast to present communal concerns and future Wonder-inflected aspirations.
This was neo soul at arguably its most prolific and thrilling moment of growth and possibility. Innovated by black Gen-Xers who ardently valued and sought to revive their parents’ and their older siblings’ music and the albums that soundtracked their childhood, neo soul runs best on a seductive combination of cultural nostalgia, black solidarity dreams, and the will to couple sensually with an ideal partner while paying attention (somewhat but not always) to the politics of gender equality. And the list of remarkable artists who broke onto the scene alongside of Badu working this sound in the year of and leading up to 2000 underscores what a busy, passionate, and productive time it was.
From 1993, when Me’shell NdegéOcello stepped out ahead of everyone with Plantation Lullabies on Madonna’s Maverick label to D’Angelo’s 1995 first effort Brown Sugar (often erroneously referred to as the first in the genre) a year later to Maxwell’s debut (Urban Hang Suite) to Lauryn Hill’s insta-classic Miseducation in ’98 to oddball soulster Macy Gray’s one-hit smash On How Life Is in ’99, to the year 2000 when Jill Scott made her first LP (Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Volume I), these were exciting times when black singer-songwriter musicians were referencing Black Panther memoirs, African-American Studies history books, and deep cuts from reluctant soul icons like Bill Withers. In the days after Voodoo dropped into the world, New York Times critic Ben Ratliff would famously describe the genre as “a mature music, and a family music, for living rooms, rather than for the streets.”
“Penitentiary Philosophy,” the charging, opening track on Mama’s Gun pulls all of these ambitions together. Bursting with the energy and the righteous discontent of King’s letter from a Birmingham jail (in which he declared to the world “why we can’t wait” for liberation), it recalls the sonic palette of Maggot Brain-era Funkadelic while venturing further down the road of trenchant social critique that Badu had already begun to walk on Baduizm’s “Other Side of the Game,” her third single off of that album and one that planted her firmly in the run of socially-conscious hip-hop culture. With its looped sample of Stevie’s “Ordinary Pain,” “Penitentiary Philosophy” stays focused on the perils and corrosive effects of streets that don’t love you, streets that can trap you. “Here’s my philosophy/Livin’ in a penitentiary…” she declares, dropping verses like Gil Scott-Heron, “Brothers all on the corner/Tryin’ to make believe/Turn around ain’t got no pot to pee/Make me mad when I see you sad… you can’t win when your will is weak/When you’re knocked on the ground….” In the same year that David Simon dropped “The Corner” and two years before his masterpiece “The Wire,” Badu was still singing about the effects of the game from a woman’s point of view (something Simon’s shows were often, at best, half-assed about doing). Still the caring sister who observes the ensuing crisis from the sidelines, Badu has morphed on this track out of the role of devoted bystander into full-scale Last Poet.
Badu gently admonishes her listeners to get to going, drawing on the Brixton trans-Atlantic migratory sound of Soul II Soul on “Time’s a Wastin,” a “Keep On Movin’”-style new-millennium anthem and something of a partner song to “Penitentiary Philosophy” that warns against drifting and advises listeners to “Make your money last/Learn from your past…. Don’t take your time, young man…” The brothers who are lost, the brothers who can’t find their way in an “oh-so-strange world” remain near and dear to Badu’s heart, and she offers them visions of the beautiful journey that awaits them, one that can change and restore their hope because “oh baby we need to smile…” Badu is no prophetess or preacher like her counterpart Hill, but she leans into this song’s alluring keyboard arrangement which, at the bridge, evokes the sound of the “incidental” church organ, what black studies critic Ashon Crawley brilliantly refers to as “nothing music,” the music of the organist doodling and improvising underneath the riffing of the deacon or the pastor or the volunteer bake sale representative. It’s the sound of sitting in the sanctuary together and having frank and easy conversations with one another as she wistfully warns of a future without a plan (“Ain’t no tellin where you’ll land…”).
The Badu of hope, headwraps, and incense is still very much present on this record, voicing anthems about correcting one’s path and questing on tracks like “Didn’t Cha Know” and the sequel jam, “… & On.” The former track wraps itself around a hypnotic sample from New York-based fusion jazz-funk ensemble Tarika Blue’s 1977 “Dreamflower” record, a Badu obsession that she discovered while crate-digging, at the behest of J Dilla, through his extraordinary collection. Badu rides the chillout vibe of this song in the face of despair (“Think I made a wrong turn back there somewhere/Didn’t cha know, didn’t cha know/Knew the toll, but I would not pay…”). In the Oprahfied age of black female self-help narratives led by Iyanla Vanzant and novelist Terry McMillan, she continued her rise as an icon of black bohemian positivity (“Free your mind and find your way/There will be a brighter day”). What set her apart from other neo-soul women of this era was her unabashedly quirky, black hippie stance which she kicks into high gear throughout “…& On,” spinning like the earth on its axis like a “Gypsy/Flippin’ life game from the right brain/Ascension maintained/Rolling through like a burning flame…” Badu’s rhymes summon the sound and feeling of late 1990s Nuyorican Café poetry slams and basement club, late night jazz improv.
For sure, some of the album’s metaphors flirt with cabaret cliché. Badu got flack from some critics for the beatnik flute and cosmic references on “Orange Moon.” But the thread that ties these tracks together is the flow that is freedom—freedom to pursue new love (on “In Love With You,” a birds-tweeting, Spanish-inflected guitar ballad that finds Badu doing her best Deniece Williams impression and in duet with Stephen Marley), freedom to pursue pleasure (“Kiss Me on My Neck (Hesi)”) for herself. It’s a distinct kind of liberation from that of Lauryn’s redemption song sermons, Me’shell’s brooding tales of struggle and conflict, and even Jill Scott’s earnest Black Arts era feminist poetry.
Ironically, it is Mary J to whom she most clearly pays homage on the aptly titled “My Life,” which swings with the hip-hop soul queen’s b-girl cadences. With its Puffy-designed excess and materialism, hip-hop soul was always at odds with the political earthiness of the neo bunch. Yet the bounce on this track clearly echoes that of the Yonkers R&B diva’s album of the same name. Here in Badu’s version of “My Life,” as on other tracks, she stalls to figure out a plan (“Standing downtown… tryin to figure out a way up out of this town”) and vows that “one day” she’ll be “flyin’ high.” Songs of strength and self-worth like her “Cleva” chronicle a moment when artists like India.Arie were using their music to reject Eurocentric beauty standards in pop (on 2000’s “Video Girl”) and megastars TLC were waxing contemplative about self love rather than outer beauty (on their 1999 track “Unpretty”).
But Badu would consistently put her own bold and wickedly sharp twist on such themes. “This is how I look without makeup/And with no bra my ninny’s sag down,” she sings on “Cleva,” sounding like a modern day Moms Mabley. Badu lifts the boast and braggadocio so clearly associated with hip-hop MCs of both genders and turns it into the language of the R&B goddess, a lesson that one Texas-bred superstar would follow and master as the ’00s would further unfold. Badu is by far the slyest and most playful wordsmith of the neosoulsters as is evident on her brilliant feminist critique, “Booty,” the fierce, signifying answer to NdegéOcello’s bellicose (and casually mean-spirited) “If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night).” Backed by a horn section doing its best take on the Quincy Jones-circa 1972-black sitcom theme song sound, “Booty”’s I don’t-want-to-fight-you resolve still stands out in a sea of pop songs across this (and last) century cataloguing lost-my-man, you-can’t-have-my-man, and give-me-back-my-man crises. It’s a song that also eschews woman vs. woman “bad blood” posturing in favor of extolling shrewd observations about the crazy things patriarchy makes women do to each other.
It’s a singular feminist statement on the album topped only by Mama’s Gun’s first single and accompanying video for the track “Bag Lady,” arguably the first pop song by an African-American musician to overtly engage tropes and images from a classic work of black women’s literature. In loving tribute to Ntozake Shange’s 1975 pathbreaking choreopoem drama For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, the video for “Bag Lady” re-stages signature scenes and images from the play as the song revisits its major themes of self-love, self-discovery, unrequited love, gender conflict and communication, emotional and psychological bruising, failure, redemption, and personal fulfillment for black women. Produced and directed by Badu, the clip, “a poemeography by Erykah Badu,” features five women (as opposed to seven in Shange’s play) who represent the colors of the rainbow. Badu, the Lady in Red, begins by literally breaking out of the wide-screen cinematic format and moves in the next scene with our five “colored” women, strolling the streets together before ending up in the enclosed space of the classroom, a constricted site in more ways than one since it’s here that, as Badu sings “I guess nobody every told you/All you must hold on to/Is you/Is you/Is you!”
The inadequacies of institutional education—it’s inability to address the specific needs and concerns of black women—are put on blast as each “colored woman” shrugs her shoulders to the beat of Elevado’s mix and Badu’s own deft production. To the church they head for a spiritual revival to “let it go, let it go, let it go.” Badu’s Red Lady advises her sisteren to “pack light”—let go of the harmful elements of the past--or else “you gon’ miss your bus.” It’s a song that contemplates how to not let the baggage weigh you down and make you wait, and it offers a way forward for women of color (many colors here) by way of a text from the bygone 1970s black feminist renaissance era.
Like Hill and her sometime Soulquarian sister Scott in particular, Erykah Badu was not willing, on Mama’s Gun, to sacrifice extolling narratives of black feminist self-care for ones that exposed black communal peril, trauma, and tragedy. “A.D. 2000,” her broken-hearted yet clear-eyed elegy for Amadou Diallo is, in fact, a song that weaves together the profound sadness arising out of the recognition about how little black life matters in American culture. In the wake of the acquittal of the four plain-clothed police officers who took Diallo’s life, Badu sings a song for him (A.D.) and for the after-death era, one in which no monuments will mark the passing of those who were killed by the hands of the state. Thirteen years before Bay Area community organizer Alicia Garza would lament the chronic disregard for the slaughter of black life and, with her fellow queer black feminist activists, create a hashtag that subsequently ignited a global movement, Badu recorded a dirge for the newly-woke age of no justice. That she did so while enlisting soul legend Betty “Clean Up Woman” Wright to contribute vocals drives home the ways that she yokes together gender solidarity and black uplift politics in the 2.0 version of her career.
At its core, Mama’s Gun is an album that understands just how essential black love is to any movement to fight the power, and it also recognizes just how expensive it is to lose it. Badu went through a high profile break-up with Outkast’s Andre “3000” Benjamin, the father of her first child, as she began to work on the album. In the wake of the split, she penned the aching, Chaka Khan-inflected epic that closes the record, the 10-minute “Green Eyes,” which moves through several different suites that capture the many moods of a relationship coming to an end. Opening with a nod to Lady Day-era jazz vocalizing, “Green Eyes” crackles with the sound of vinyl as Badu croons a torch song lament that rolls with fits and starts through jealousy, fear, resignation, regret, resolution. We move with her as she travels the abyss of her unbearable “growing pains.” It is a song that underscores the fact that, more than a decade before Queen Yoncé, Erykah Badu laid down the blueprint for a black feminist album that went well beyond documenting tales of heartbreak to address issues greater than the sum of any one relationship. She made a record that wore its awareness of the larger traumas and challenges that complicate human intimacy on its sleeves. It was music for the revolution that wasn’t televised.


Philly-based artist who also plays in Birds of Maya releases an album of warped and raw guitar-pop experimentation.

Purling Hiss: Public Service Announcement

Public Service Announcement

It's not normally a good sign when you put on an album and the first thought that comes to mind is a dude in acid washed jeans noodling for hours on a guitar in the middle of a music store. The opening bars of Public Service Announcement by Purling Hiss bring to mind such an image, but the album turns out to be a little more complicated than that.
If underground rock music has spent the past couple of years skewing rough and lo-fi, toying with ideas that lean away from actual structure or fully completed pieces, then Purling Hiss (aka Mike Polizze, who also plays in Birds of Maya, a band that kicks around Philadelphia with Kurt Vile) takes the idea to its logical conclusion. Songs bend under warped tape while guitars jam up into upper-register treble. Listen to Public Service Announcement on mediocre headphones, and it can sound like watery background static. But a situation involving staring at a wall and focusing on the record while accepting its controlled mania can be rewarding.
Tracks like "Porch Dude/Slight Return" begin with a perfectly normal riff. But then the tape wobbles and the music sounds like an accident that's been reigned in and controlled. The jams are given shape and then ripped apart by recording technique. And these days, when an album sounds this imperfect, you have to assume there's a reason. It's 2010, and recording pristine songs takes little more than a good mic and some pirated editing software. It's up to artists to recreate primitive, raw recordings artificially, and Purling Hiss uses this rawness as a dominant instrument. Without these smudges, Public Service Announcement could play out as an off-kilter, potentially flat version of recycled AM radio gold. With these imperfections, though, it sits comfortably beside other sonic innovators with a vital pop music heart: Ariel Pink, John Maus, and even at times a stony version of Phil Elverum's warm, all encompassing ambient hiss.
But if Public Service Announcement finds its comfort in rambling experimentation, then its main fault is how drawn out it is. It's the risk that comes when you stuff the music with a million ideas that are about halfway there. Nothing sticks around too long-- except, unfortunately, on "Malice in Wonderland", when the guitar grind sounds like a propeller plane taking off for about five solid minutes. Beyond that, it's a challenging record in the best way, splitting the difference between easy nostalgia and a windswept take on pop experimentation.


More interested in setting atmosphere than chasing trends, Taylor Swift’s 10th album pursues a newly subdued and amorphous pop sound.

Midnights

Midnights is about reflection, not reinvention. Taylor Swift has explained that at length, in her own flowery vernacular: These 13 songs are “a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams.” The thoughts that keep the 32-year-old songwriter up late are the ones she’s spent nine albums excavating: the unpredictable rise and devastating fall of romance; the binary of the “good girl” and the “bad girl,” and the chafing of societal expectation (that “1950s shit”); and the uncomfortable acceptance of her own fallibility. Life, she declares, “is emotionally abusive.”
Midnights is Swift’s first album to be recorded entirely with Jack Antonoff, after nearly a decade of ever higher-profile collaborations. In the past, he has accentuated Swift’s ambitiously vivid storytelling with expressive, technicolor synth pop. Here, in accordance with the lateness of the hour, they explore moodier, more subdued hues. Built around vocal effects and vintage synths, it’s an understated sound more interested in setting atmosphere than chasing trends. On the mid-album centerpiece “Midnight Rain,” against a backdrop as crystalline as the titular weather, Swift examines the pursuit of career over partnership. Exaggerating her natural uptalk, the production morphs her voice into a dramatic slant: “He wanted comfortable/I wanted that pain.” The woozy “Snow on the Beach” sketches an image of strange beauty in twinkling synth and violin, as Lana Del Rey’s warm background harmonies add a welcome coziness. Later, as Swift hesitantly enters a new relationship on “Labyrinth,” the production mirrors the ice melting around her heart, each synth quiver a pump of new blood.
Building on the softly stuttering Reputation tracks “Delicate” and “Dress,” the album at times recalls the way the spare, hazy beats of Lorde’s Pure Heroine cut through the denser radio hits of the early 2010s. While it’s gratifying to hear Swift push her idea of pop beyond the fireworks of her pre-2020 material, the evolution can feel uneven. In her transition from the Americana-lite of Folklore back to sparkling synths, she’s also restored some of her more theatric impulses. On “Karma” she conjures her sassy, shit-stirring alter ego in a less vindictive mood, luxuriating in her rivals’ inevitable comeuppance. The ominous, wobbly murmur lurking beneath the revenge fantasy “Vigilante Shit” recalls Billie Eilish’s debut, though Swift’s attempts at edginess come across as a costume; she was a far more believable killer on Evermore’s murder-mystery ballad “No Body, No Crime.”
If Swift’s previous recordings were full-blown productions with radically distinct aesthetics, this one would be best staged in a black-box theater, where the stories change but the physical space remains consistently austere. The effect is most curious on “Maroon,” which opens in medias res on the aftermath of a night fueled by some roommate’s “cheap-ass screw-top rosé,” a syllabic feat. This doomed romance unwinds atop a downcast rumbling, with drums that echo as if from within a black hole; by the final chorus, Swift’s vocals are processed within an inch of their life. In stark contrast to the passionate hue of her words, the overall effect is oddly impersonal, bordering on numb. Of all of the songs on Midnights, “Maroon” may be the one that keeps me awake at night.
On 2020’s Folklore and Evermore, Swift stepped away from autobiographical songwriting and found new depths of feeling in fictional narratives. For perhaps the first time in a career built on curated lyrical bloodletting, she gave herself the gift of emotional distance. With Midnights, she returns to a diaristic style, addressing the central conflict of Taylor Swift, the individual and the persona: She’s self-conscious to a fault but rarely self-aware. “I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror,” she sings on lead single “Anti-Hero,” more weary than winking. She has fun with her self-loathing, likening herself to a performatively selfless politician and a Godzilla trampling a city of sexy babies; “It’s me, hi/I’m the problem,” she says at the bridge, cracking a wincing smile and imagining the memes to come. Owning the “problem” isn’t quite the same thing as changing, and she’s betting that you can relate.
Swift revisits this tension in the final minutes of Midnights, on “Mastermind”: “I swear/I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian ’cause I care.” Movingly, she writes herself a twist ending: The lover whose attention she’s spent the entire song scheming to capture sees right through her designs. Swift has often portrayed love as something that happens to her; from “You Belong With Me” to “Don’t Blame Me,” she is forever at romance’s whims. But the “Mastermind” not only achieves what she wants and deserves through her own efforts, she finds someone who recognizes how important it is for her to assert creative agency. The sentiment is echoed again on “Sweet Nothing,” a hiccuping nursery rhyme written alongside her partner, actor Joe Alwyn (credited as William Bowery): “On the way home/I wrote a poem/You say, ‘What a mind’/This happens all the time.”
As has become Swift’s recent custom, this latest release is accompanied by a suite of bonus material: The seven additional songs on the surprise “3am Edition” vary in quality and offer little insight into the album proper. “Glitch” and “Paris” are just dumb fun, at least when considering the hilariously overwrought lines, “Sit quiet by my side in the shade/And not the kind that’s thrown/I mean, the kind under where a tree has grown.” The best of the 3am songs reunite Swift with the National’s Aaron Dessner, her collaborator for the bulk of Folklore and Evermore. One of these, “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” is seemingly a follow-up to 2010’s “Dear John,” drawing out the complexities of a teenage girl’s relationship with a manipulative older man and considering the weight of his violations with mature, nuanced perspective. It’s one of the best songs of her career, but its charging gallop would have pierced Midnights’ blanket of fog.
The closest comparison from the original release is the radiant “You’re on Your Own, Kid,” which indulges in some classic Swiftian mythmaking: Fueled by unrequited love, the outsider holes up in her bedroom and writes the songs that allow her to escape small-town stasis. The reality she finds is no fairytale. “I gave my blood, sweat, and tears for this/I hosted parties and starved my body/Like I’d be saved by a perfect kiss,” she sings, quietly nodding to her struggles with disordered eating. She concludes on an uplifting note, urging her audience to “make the friendship bracelets,” recognizing every misstep is a lesson learned. But the painful memories linger in the back of her mind, ready to creep into focus at the stroke of midnight.


The only American release to become part of the Beatles' canon, Magical Mystery Tour combines a soundtrack EP and some brilliant singles.

Magical Mystery Tour

After the death of manager Brian Epstein, the Beatles took a series of rather poor turns, the first of which was the Magical Mystery Tour film. Conceived as a low-key art project, the Beatles were oddly nonchalant about the challenges of putting together a movie. They'd assembled records, they'd worked on A Hard Day's Night and Help!-- how hard could it be? Without Epstein to advise, however, things like budgeting and time management became a challenge, and this understated experimental film turned into a sapping distraction.
Musically, however, the accompanying EP was an overwhelming success. The EP format apparently freed the band to experiment a bit, not having to fill sides of a 45 with pop songs or make the grand statements of an album. The title track is a rousing set piece, meant to introduce the travelogue concept of the film. The remaining four songs released exclusive to the EP are low-key marvels-- Paul McCartney's graceful "The Fool on the Hill" and music-hall throwback "Your Mother Should Know", George Harrison's droning "Blue Jay Way", and the percolating instrumental "Flying". Few of them are anyone's all-time favorite Beatles songs, only one had a prayer of being played on the radio, and yet this run seems to achieve a majesty in part because of that: It's a rare stretch of amazing Beatles music that can seem like a private obsession rather than a permanent part of our shared culture.
As a more laid-back release, the EP suggested the direction the band might have taken on the White Album had it remained a full band, happy to shed the outsized conceptualism and big statements and craft atmospheric, evocative pieces. In the U.S., the EP was paired with three recent double-sided singles, ballooning Magical Mystery Tour into an album-- the only instance in which a U.S. release, often mangled by Capitol, became Beatles canon. With only the EP's title track married specifically to the film's themes, the overall effect of a title track/album sleeve as shell game was in line with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Of the three singles, the undisputed highlight is "Strawberry Fields Forever"/ "Penny Lane", John Lennon and Paul McCartney's tributes to their hometown, Liverpool. Slyly surreal, assisted by studio experimentation but not in debt to it, full of brass, harmonium, and strings, unmistakably English-- when critics call eccentric or baroque UK pop bands "Beatlesesque," this is the closest there is to a root for that adjective. There is no definitive Beatles sound, of course, but with a band that now functions as much as a common, multi-generational language as a group of musicians, it's no surprise that songs rooted in childhood-- the one experience most likely to seem shared and have common touchpoints-- are among their most universally beloved.
The rest of the singles collected here are no less familiar: Lennon's "All You Need Is Love" was initially completed up for an international TV special on BBC1-- its basic message was meant to translate to any language. Harrison's guitar solo, producer George Martin's strings, and the parade of intertextual musical references that start and close the piece elevate it above hippie hymn. Its flipside, "Baby You're a Rich Man", is less successful, a second-rate take on John Lennon's money-isn't-everything theme from the considerably stronger "And Your Bird Can Sing". It's the one lesser moment on an otherwise massively rewarding compilation.
Much better from Lennon is "I Am the Walrus", crafted for the Magical Mystery Tour film and EP but also released as a double-sided single with McCartney's "Hello Goodbye". One of Lennon's signature songs, "Walrus" channels the singer's longtime fascinations with Lewis Carroll, puns and turns of phrase, and non sequiturs. "Hello Goodbye" echoes the same contradictory logic found in the verses of "All You Need Is Love", a vague sense of disorientation that still does little to balance its relentlessly upbeat tone. McCartney excelled at selling simplistic lyrics that risk seeming cloying, though, and he again does here-- plus, the kaleidoscopic, carnival-ride melody and interplay between lead and backing vocals ensure it's a much better record than it is a song.
In almost every instance on those singles, the Beatles are either whimsical or borderline simplistic, releasing songs that don't seem sophisticated or heavy or monumental (even though most of them are). In that sense, they're all like "All You Need Is Love" or childhood memories or Lewis Carroll-- easy to love, fit for all ages, rich in multi-textual details, deceptively trippy (see Paul's "Penny Lane" in particular, with images of it raining despite blue skies, or the songs here that revel in contradictions-- "Hello Goodbye"'s title, the verses in "All You Need Is Love"). More than any other place in the band's catalogue, this is where the group seems to crack open a unique world, and for many young kids then and since this was their introduction to music as imagination, or adventure. The rest of the Magical Mystery Tour LP is the opposite of the middle four tracks on the EP-- songs so universal that, like "Yellow Submarine", they are practically implanted in your brain from birth. Seemingly innocent, completely soaked through with humor and fantasy, Magical Mystery Tour slots in my mind almost closer to the original Willy Wonka or The Wizard of Oz as it does other Beatles records or even other music-- timeless entertainment crafted with a childlike curiosity and appeal but filled with wit and wonder.
On the whole, Magical Mystery Tour is quietly one of the most rewarding listens in the Beatles' career. True, it doesn't represent some sort of forward momentum or clear new idea-- largely in part because it wasn't conceived as an album. The accompanying pieces on the EP are anomalies in the Beatles oeuvre but they aren't statements per se, or indications that the group is in any sort of transition. But if there was ever a moment in the Beatles' lifetime that listeners would have been happy to have the group just settle in and release songs as soon as possible, it was just before and after the then-interminable 10-month gap between the Revolver and *Sgt. Pepper'*s. Without that context, the results could seem slight-- a sort-of canonized version of Past Masters perhaps-- but whether it's an album, a collection of separate pieces, or whatnot matters little when the music itself is so incredible.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]


Grimes is the one-woman cyborg-pop project of Montreal's Claire Boucher. Visions, her compulsively listenable third album, is an electro cotton-candy entryway to her peculiar kind of bliss.

Visions

As a child I feared the day the world would be taken over by robots; these days I am seized by a much more potent fear that I am becoming one. Digital interfaces invade our imagination in strange, tangible ways, and with each day I spend in front of my computer screen, the red Gchat dots representing my friends and co-workers start to look more and more like HAL. Have you ever caught yourself trying to open a new tab in your brain? Was the Wikipedia blackout of 2012 as important a cultural moment as the New York City blackout of '77? Do androids dream of electric sheep, or do you not have an app for that yet?
"Post-internet" is a term that's stuck all too easily (guilty as charged) to Grimes' airy cyborg-pop, thanks in part to her endless quotability in acknowledging the digital world's influence on her aesthetic ("The music of my childhood was really diverse because I had access to everything.") But Visions, the latest and best album from the one-woman project of Montreal-based Claire Boucher, complicates the all-too-tidy "post-internet" tag by bringing into focus the many contrasts at the heart of her music: tensions between pop structure and diffuse atmosphere, between technology and the human body, between sensory-overloaded hyper-presence and transcendence. More solidly constructed and a lot more fun to listen to than anything she's put her name to so far, the electro cotton-candy of Visions is an inviting entrance into Grimes' peculiar kind of bliss.
On her first albums, Geidi Primes and Halfaxa, Grimes buried pop impulses within textured muck and gloomy tones. But Visions finds Boucher mining not just the clean brightness of Aphex Twin-like atmospherics but also the immediacy of straight-up mall-pop: "Vowels = space and time" recalls nothing so much as Stacey Q's 1986 hit "Two of Hearts", while "Infinite Love Without Fulfillment" sounds like Boucher broke into the Apple store after hours and turned on all the display iPads to the same Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam video, rhythmically looped into something sublime. Some of Grimes' reference points call to mind the experimental pop of Nite Jewel or some of the artists on the 100% Silk roster. But that music seems interested in obscuring pop's immediacy or keeping a distance from the pleasure center, while Visions is an unabashed embrace of its source material, whether it's K-pop, new age, or bubblegum.
Boucher spends most of Visions singing in a vaporous falsetto. She occasionally manipulates her voice (as on the steely, Transformers-jam "Eight") but mostly she just loops it, layers it, and cloaks it in reverb; there are moments when what she's doing doesn't sound too far off from what Julianna Barwick's music might sound like if she were interested in making a synth-pop record. The most common complaint I've heard of Grimes come from people wishing her songs were more structured or hooky, or that her voice was more "present." But-- never mind the fact that even the haziest moments on the record are anchored by melody-- this diffuseness is one of Visions' most refreshing charms. Another oft-cited quote from Boucher the "post-internet" poster girl: "Basically I'm really impressionable and have no sense of consistency in anything I do." This is pop music for ambient fans, but it's also a welcome change for anyone exhausted by post-Gaga pop's tethers to artifice, theatricality, and skronky, turned-up-to-11 beats. To reach out and touch this music would be like putting your hand through a cloud.
But there's still that tension: Song titles such as "Be a Body", "Visiting Statue", and "Skin" are all testaments to Visions' interest in the corporeal. When she sings the titular lyric on "Be a Body", it sounds like a nagging request to come back down to earth, while "Skin" (which has a sputtering sensuality, like a robot programmed to write a slow jam) feels even more revealing: "Soft skin/ You touch me with it and so I know I can be human once again." Still, don't confuse these moments with any kind of new-agey, back-to-nature longing. One spin of "Genesis" is enough prove it: Post-humanism sounds like a blast.
Late last year, Simon Reynolds described electronic music's response to our digitized world as a new kind of maximalism: "a hell of a lot of inputs... in terms of influences and sources, and a hell of a lot of outputs." That's an apt description for the music that Grimes was making before, but Visions showcases a streamlined aesthetic, resulting in a statement that feels focused, cohesive, and assured. It's simple enough to leave room for Grimes to grow, but this thing is so compulsively listenable it's hard to come away from it wanting much more. Anchored to the digital imagination but unbridled from its skittish anxiety and concerns, Visions gestures skyward and beyond.


Warp's entry into the New Wave revival play jaunty, precise power pop with punk's antipathies, all while exuding a tentative cool.

A Certain Trigger

There are two kinds of rock bands: Those who discovered the music first, and those who spent their allowance on leather and had nothing left for records. If Maxïmo Park fall into the latter category, they do a good job of hiding it. A Certain Trigger, the band's debut full-length, is rife with enough peripatetic song structures and lithe arpeggios to convince substance-questioning naysayers of the Newcastle quintet's musical smarts. But, to an extent, yes, they're bandwagon-riders, and latecomers at that. The New Wave revival has already dined out on the charts. That's why, working with the scraps of a restless trend-seeking audience, Maxïmo Park's recent success in their homeland is so surprising.
Rather than turning up pebbles for the next Big Thing or exploiting a quirk, Maxïmo Park hone in on the specifics of an umbrella genre. Like the Futureheads or Postcard, they play jaunty, precise power pop with punk's antipathies, exuding a tentative cool. Managing (mostly) without fashonista caginess and attendant snark, Maxïmo Park are an easy sell. Occasionally, there's the requisite sneer at an ex or a self-deprecating barb, but A Certain Trigger is seldom anything short of gentlemanly.
That civility translates to a sort of sneakiness. Maxïmo Park's muted dynamics, understated vocals, and starchy production stack up to a weak first impression. But over the course of a slow'n'steady courtship, the album develops character. The tug comes partly from deceptively complicated song structures. Maxïmo Park dispense with traditional verse/chorus/verse formatting while the melodies, insouciantly catchy, play dumb. Songs slide from verse to pre-chorus to chorus to bridge to post-bridge with little fanfare. You're lucky to get a repeat, but who needs one when the band whip out with one-time, eight-bar dalliances like the ecstatic, whirling bridge on upwardly mobile single "Graffiti"?
"Apply Some Pressure", the album's lead single, is typically roundabout. The song twists through some punchy, stiffly syncopated verses, each capped by a unison fill, before slipping into an extended bridge, driven by the type of harmony most bands would have been content to ride for an entire song. "Going Missing", with its propulsive beat and manic mood swings, is an overstuffed suitcase of post-breakup ambivalence: Lead singer Paul Smith is resilient while awake ("I'm going missing for awhile/ I've got nothing left to lose"), mournful in repose ("I sleep with my hands across my chest/ And I dream of you with someone else"). Aforementioned "Graffiti", which features a wiry, Voidoids-style non-groove, is aberrantly loose-limbed, but the architecture is anything but perfunctory, sprouting little detours at every intersection.
The band's lack of swagger is refreshing amid the hot fussed-over convicts and misogynistic sun kings of the New Wave sphere, but it also hampers the less convincing tracks (i.e., "Once a Glimpse" and "The Coast Is Always Changing"). There's also the question of why Maxïmo Park, a pop band, are on Warp, home to electronic visionaries Squarepusher and Autechre. The only reason I can think of is "Acrobat", an amazingly tender, drone-seeped song that harkens back to shoegaze and Velvet Underground while embracing modern gadgetry. It's Maxïmo Park's "Maps", a song at once exemplary of and antithetical to its brethren.
Don't take the comparisons as caveats. Maxïmo Park don't use their forebears as stepping stones out of creative desperation; it's a mark of their business savvy. Even if you know what's hot, you still have to make it pop, and nearly every song on A Certain Trigger succeeds. Maxïmo Park leave their grubby prints on each track, be it the teeth-grinding squall riding atop "Signal & Sign"'s second verse or the synths and organs lurking merrily underneath every song like a loner kid who snuck in to the dance party.