The Roots' 13th album, which includes a brief, four-part orchestral suite that builds off a Sufjan Stevens piece, is definitely their most downbeat. It's a concept record that tells the story of a man dying, in reverse.

Undun

Undun is the story of a man, Redford Stevens, dying in reverse, rewinding from the moment he became a statistic and hitting the points in his life where he's at his most self-aware. That he's a criminal who got caught up in the familiar street-hustle trappings that the modern media's documented countless times is a pivotal detail-- it's hit at an angle that seems to emphasize the futile inevitability of it all. His life could be any number of misdirected narratives that ends with a toe tag, and what details listeners learn about him are hazy, buried under archetypal turns of fate and decisive struggles. That this protagonist is a fictionalized composite of a handful of real people, filtered through a matter-of-fact narrative that splits character ambivalence with journalistic impartiality, only makes his lack of direction and the failure of any real closure stand out even more. "Lotta niggas go to prison," Dice Raw states on "Tip the Scale", "how many come out Malcolm X?"
So the Roots' latest album isn't a sprawling, rise-and-fall crime story, not a condemnation or a veneration of a man living outside the law, not a bullet-riddled grand guignol heavy on explicit details of soldiers getting cut down. It's a character study of a man whose existential crisis ends only with his death-- a death gone largely unspecified, the glamor and tragedy washed over with a doomed resignation. That's a hard thing to pull off, even for a band as given to deep-thinking concepts as the Roots are. And when your main lyrical catalyst is Black Thought-- a man more given to allusions than direct statements-- it's likely that it'll take a while for the full scope of Undun to really sink in.
If and when it does, it might strike listeners as a bit skeletal: omit the mood-setting instrumental bookends, including a brief, four-part orchestral suite that builds off Sufjan Stevens' "Redford (For Yia-Yia and Pappou)", and you've got maybe a half hour's worth of material. By ?uestlove's accounts, writing Redford's story introduced the headaches and challenges that come with scriptwriting into their songwriting, and what's left on Undun is the end result of frequent revisions and rewrites that attempt to reconcile character, theme, and continuity. If it comes at the expense of nuance, it's not always obvious: There's an easy-to-trace narrative line from Redford's acceptance of his fate ("Sleep") to his acknowledgement of how close it's approaching ("Make My"), back through declarations of aggravated toughness ("One Time"), and celebratory fatalism ("Kool On"), along ups and downs that juxtapose motivation ("Stomp") and helplessness ("Lighthouse"). When the vocal portion of the album ends with two of the bleakest sets of verses in the Roots discography, peaking with the estrangement of "I Remember" and the desperation of "Tip the Scale", Undun reveals itself as a story where a man's actual death isn't quite as tragic as the circumstances that pushed him to it.
The catch is that the inevitable familiarity of this storyline, even in the service of a deep emotional study, is almost an end in itself-- a cycle seen far too often, played out in terms anyone who's ever been or known someone with their back against the wall can understand. And if Undun succeeds at putting one man's criminal-world struggle with free will and fate in empathetic terms, it does so at the expense of any unique details or unusual traits that would set him apart-- Redford is humanized, but he's not entirely individualized. If you've bought an Apple device in the last couple of years, you can download a free app that includes some world-building video clips and photos that give him more of a full-life context. If you're still relying on a Blackberry and a clickwheel iPod, you're left with the voices of Black Thought, Dice Raw, and the now-more-googleable Greg Porn to fill in most of the blanks. They're admirable technicians and can be charismatic on their own terms, but voicing raw emotion isn't a major strength for any of them.
What you do get is a heightened sense of perplexed frustration, and there are times when Black Thought actually hits another level in his lyrics to meet it. A resilient, on-the-grind turn of phrase like "I'm never sleeping like I'm on methamphtamines/ Move like my enemy 10 steps ahead of me" ("Kool On") is delivered with the same emphasis as a bitter, regretful line like "I'll leave the memories here, I won't need them/ If I stop thinking and lie, now that's freedom" ("Lighthouse"). But if that's one of the reasons Undun feels almost relentless in its singleminded dejection, it's also proof that, if Black Thought can't always push through a sentiment with his voice, he can at least deliver the fuck out of an idea.
The other MCs in the Roots' core provide some welcome shifts in tone: Greg Porn's nasal drone often slips into bluntly nihilistic imagery ("Put the knife in ya back cut down to the red meat/ Daddy should've let me be a stain on the bed sheets"), and Dice Raw's rapper/singer double-threat role continues to provide a heart of much-needed pathos. His closing line on "One Time" might be the most pitch-perfect moment of film noir cynicism on the album: "To make it to the bottom, such a high climb." When Phonte and Big K.R.I.T. deliver guest verses that still feel like relative afterthoughts, it's a bit disappointing, but they come strong enough to keep the album's fated, introspective mood consistent.
There's one other aspect to Undun that gives it a sense of ambivalence, even if it's a minor and comparative one: The music itself feels less immediate. After How I Got Over channeled frustrated, brooding soul toward a gradual expansion into triumphant liveliness, the limited palette of down-to-mid-tempo dirges here feels almost stiflingly gloomy. Which means it works-- if this album is a cinematic experience, the score here fills in the cues for moods that the MCs mostly just suggest. The drums-and-keys structure feels more delicate and less urgent than the Roots' best meditative moments, and what few tracks there are with some kick to them-- the burbly guitar-driven "Kool On", the worried funk of "Lighthouse"-- have more of a pull in their chorus than anything in the instrumentation does. Yet the cumulative effect of all that mournful weight is effective enough in the story's service. And in the run-up to "Tip the Scale", a string-accented elegy loosely reminiscent of "You Got Me", the idea comes across that any glimmer of optimism in this album would be beside the point. This isn't the Roots' most accessible album, and it's definitely their most downbeat, but it comes from a place that isn't always easy to dwell.


Through decayed beats and gothic atmospheres, the musician formerly known as Aristophanes transforms sexual desire into an existential threat.

Pan the Pansexual

For 潘PAN, the body is a bomb about to explode. On the 2015 Grimes track “Scream,” her voice fluttered across Mandarin lyrics about howls packed deep in the lungs like gunpowder; between delicate rap verses, she let those subdued screams erupt. The Taiwanese musician born Pan Wei Ju, previously known as Aristophanes, has toyed with the boundary between composed beauty and volcanic monstrosity ever since. On Pan the Pansexual, her first full-length release since renaming herself, 潘PAN turns her attention toward the existential threat of sexual desire, and how its satisfaction can liquefy one’s sense of identity just as easily as it can crystalize it.
In 2017, 潘PAN followed her indelible Grimes feature with the mixtape Humans Become Machines, a lively, populous release that showcased a wide range of vocal moods: playful, introspective, frenetic, furious. It was a colorful affair. By contrast, Pan the Pansexual crouches in an unrelentingly bleak corner. Its beats lurch and scuttle, decaying out of time, drumming up echoes of 2010s goth records like Gazelle Twin’s Unflesh.
On “Embers,” 潘PAN raps in Mandarin and sings in English over a jazzy loop whose swung rhythm scrapes against the oppressive atmosphere. The skittering cymbals hint at levity, but the synthesizer washes and pained lyrics hover in the gloom. “If I somehow die in my endless depression, I want all my beautiful illusions keep alive,” she sings in a breathy upper register while a minor-key piano figure twinkles deep in the fog. On “Reborn,” one of two tracks produced by cloud rap phenom Clams Casino, 潘PAN braids together wordless keens that call to mind Jarboe’s solo work. Here, she envisions new life emerging from violent death: “Choke me slowly with your old scars/Make me bloom once again with your blood,” she sings right before a string interlude injects a sense of old-world gothic romance into Clams’ digital static.
Similar tensions simmer throughout the album. When they do resolve, they pour forth in a fury. On “FNGRMEHRDR,” over a bassline descended from Le Tigre’s electroclash classic “Deceptacon,” 潘PAN sings about a voracious desire that belies deeper longing: “I never, ever felt this lonely/Fuck it, finger me harder.” Her Mandarin lyrics, delivered at a more agitated clip, depict a totally alienated sexual encounter. “My bones are soft like mud now, my consciousness collapses, when you kiss me like the way flood spreads,” she raps. “I turned out to be a lonely person since I met you... you are making me incomplete.”
Pan the Pansexual arrives during the summer of Chappell Roan and Billie Eilish, two artists who sing about queer sex as neon relief from uncertainty and repression. Roan’s “Red Wine Supernova” is an outpouring of sensual joy, while Eilish’s “LUNCH” hits like a long exhale at the end of a breath held for years. 潘PAN’s own grappling with sexual identity traces a more tortured path. What if pursuing your secret hunger didn’t calm the incalculable questions writhing in your mind, but only deepened them? What if getting off didn’t actually mean getting out? That’s the fear weighing heavy over this album—that it’s not always so easy to come home into your own body. Sometimes the bomb goes off and the question hangs in the air, unanswered.


The Killers follow Sam's Town with this odds'n'sods collection, a hodgepodge of everything they've tried in the past as well as a few things they'll no doubt try again in the future.

Sawdust

They can be taught! What separates the Killers from contemporaries such as the Bravery and Panic! at the Disco-- and what will ensure an audience when those bands have fully fossilized-- is that the Vegas quartet can learn and adapt. While they evolved out of the Strokes' 1970s guitar strut and a flyover approximation of that band's New York-centric sense of style, the Killers have since managed to move up the evolutionary ladder, developing actual tools and displaying the capacity for reason. Sam's Town, their second rung, predicted opposable thumbs and verbal language in the band's future. The band used Springsteen to poke out even more drama from new wave, cross-breeding two very different species-- the Boss' concentrated working-class rock with effete British new wave. Surprise: It sometimes worked.
On their way forward, the Killers offer a glance backward with Sawdust, a hodgepodge of everything they've tried in the past as well as a few things they'll no doubt try again in the future. With its vague title and ludicrous artwork, this catch-all gathers outtakes, B-sides, covers, Jacques Lu Cont's Thin White Duke remix of "Mr. Brightside", and a dorky hidden track that reveals their debt to Stone Temple Pilots. What the Killers haven't learned is how to dial it back: These songs, just like the albums they were recorded for, are busy with sounds and effects, as if they are aiming to deploy every studio knob or realize all of their harebrained ideas at once. Opener "Tranquilize" sounds weighted with stuff-- the typical drum-bass-guitar, of course, but also more guitars, synths both ominous and light, a children's choir, Lou Reed-- all in service to trite lyrics and bombastic melodies. Likewise, their cover of Joy Division's "Shadowplay" shoots for epic, losing the minimalist menace of the original in a maelstrom of garishly climactic instrumentation.
The Killers' clunky more-is-more aesthetic derives from stadium bands like Depeche Mode, whose music had to sound good in an arena as well as on headphones. But Depeche Mode had the good sense to streamline their songs, making you listen deeply, not broadly. In this sense, Sawdust is musically dense but superficial, with seemingly no grand plan for all those sounds beyond having all those sounds. Songs like "All the Pretty Faces" and the too-wry "Glamorous Indie Rock and Roll" ramble on long after the band has spent that particular nickel, and even shorter tracks like "Under the Gun" and "Show You How" never feel concise like three-minute pop songs-- the not-so-bright side of ambition. Even the "Mr. Brightside" remix, which breaks the song down just to build it up again, reconstructs with the wrong elements and loses most of what made the original so enjoyable in the first place.
On the other hand, boneheaded bombast is what the Killers do best, and they know enough not to grasp for subtlety. Because it's not a proper album and therefore not a big statement, Sawdust may actually be the Killers' loosest collection to date. Whenever listening becomes a trudge, there's a relatively off-the-cuff track like their cover of the Mel Tillis-penned, Kenny Rogers-popularized "Ruby Don't Take Your Love to Town". Buried in the back half of the album, it sounds like they recorded in a practice room, with only a few instruments at their disposal. Of course nothing the Killers do is that spontaneous, but nevertheless, they do right by the song, powered by Ronnie Vannucci's rolling beat and Brandon Flowers' slight reimagining of the chorus. Similarly, they downplay Dire Straits' "Romeo & Juliet", delivering it like a song instead of a community-theater monologue. Following in Mark Knopfler's footsteps, Flowers refuses to emote, which has wrecked other covers, and the band's understatement is appreciated.
Overall, there's a strong sense of exploration on Sawdust; if the Killers don't seem to have much intuitive understanding of balance and songcraft, the overproduction at least suggests a strong musical curiosity underlying their obvious career ambitions. To date, the Killers' greatest accomplishment has been keeping their possibilities wide open, which few acts have managed to do without coming across as timid or aimless. If they can keep that up and actually go to unexpected places, regardless of the results, they'll be walking upright while other groups are still dragging their knuckles.


An odds-and-ends compilation with no coherent vision, Slime Season finds Young Thug rapping at a high level, but performing less consistently as a songwriter. Yet Thug remains one of hip-hop's most exciting stylists, and there are still a few career highlights here.

Slime Season

If you're new to Young Thug, don't start with Slime Season. An odds-and-ends compilation with no coherent vision, the tape finds Thug rapping at a high level, but performing less consistently as a songwriter. It's not clear he even wants to be a songwriter on all these records; one gets the impression the tape's been compiled ex post facto, a few fully-fleshed out classics mixed in with studio dross. Some feel more like workouts, perhaps cut quickly during marathon recording sessions. (Initially Slime Season was to be produced entirely by London on da Track. "Ask 300", the beatmaker tweeted—a reference to Thug's label—when questioned about the more diverse production lineup of the final tracklist.) The bulk of these songs are for Thug completists, or those convinced of his infallibility. Nevertheless, Thug remains one of hip-hop's most exciting stylists, consistent even amid inconsistency, and there are moments worth savoring.
Part of the problem is that Thug's catalog has already been flooded with leaks and unofficial releases. Some of them—"Hey I" is a particular standout—are superior to many of the records here. Thug's biggest fans would be better off compiling their own greatest hits from the pile, and Thug neophytes will find this year's Barter 6 or last year's Rich Gang tape a much more consistent entryway. It's unclear why certain records made the cut and others didn't. The inclusion of Wayne feature "Take Kare" (which has been out since last year) may be yet another pointed dig at Thug's idol (the two have since had a falling out), but it was also an anticlimax. "Power", produced by London on da Track, seems like something left on the cutting room floor from the Barter sessions, and if it was, it's easy to hear why: where each Barter record made up a discrete facet of the album's sound, "Power" sounds a little bit like three of them at once—consummate filler.
In the rush to fete Thug for his radical talents, it's important to draw distinctions between what records work, and which ones do not—or those which sort of work, if you look at them from the right angle. Part of the joy of his art is that you can draw together your own version of his canon from a scattered field, picking up on the pieces that most attract you. (This is not a quality limited to Thug; it's been this way since the Internet began to reward rappers, like Lil Wayne and Gucci Mane, who could flood the market without drowning in it.) The most evident gem here is "Best Friend". Its hook is inspired by a viral vine (Tokyo Vanity, the meme's creator, has released a "Best Friend" record of her own), and its surreal video is sly and artfully unpredictable. The Ricky Racks-produced record, which builds upon disorienting sound effects and hypnotic pizzicato strings, draws you in while bringing you no closer to figuring it all out, a contradiction at the heart of the Young Thug project.
Thug's best songs are carefully structured, even if they appear effortlessly thrown together, and the most effective moments tend to be subtle, sidling up to the listener. Each of the song's parts—melodies, backgrounds, hooks, choruses, and flows—lock in to give the song a shape as particular as a fingerprint. Many songs on Slime Season don't chase this goal; at the album's opening, Thug's drawn to repetitive, headbanging patterns and the results are for hardcore fans only. The opening tracks, the Sonny Digital-produced trap banger "Quarterback" and the Southside-produced "Rarri", are interesting but lack replay value. A few of the harder-edged songs do work: "Freaky" might be its best experimental moment, with Wondagurl's unstructured, percussive beat bringing Thug's songcraft and improvisational rap style to the fore.
But the album's true highlights don't arrive until its close, with the one-two punch of "Draw Down" and "Wood Would". On the former—which has been out for some time—Thug  strategically deploys different flows to shape the song, while his unpredictable figurative language keep the listener on their toes: "Pull up with that K out of the coupe! I like my bitch brown like a mu'fuckin' boot!" he says at one moment, or later: "Put that pussy on my head like a fuckin' Motrin!" Disguised in his squall of a delivery, they're not conveyed as jab-you-in-the-ribs punchlines; they're playful and impossible to anticipate, chasing novelty rather than cliche, lending the song an uncertain, volatile air.
As for "Wood Would", it's the album's strongest, and stands among the best in his catalog. With its sample skipping like a stone as its drums slam in place, it's low-key and unassuming, evading direct translation and shifting in and out of lucidity. Yet Thug wears his heart on his sleeve through one of pop's oldest tools: an undeniable melody. It says everything he doesn't need to, as if everything you didn't know were clear as day.


Following the maximalism of 2010's landmark Cosmogramma, Steven Ellison returns with a comparatively subtle and focused album. Quiet re-thinks his music's relationship to space and mood with a new and welcome sense of simplicity.

Until the Quiet Comes

Steven Ellison called his breakthrough album as Flying Lotus Los Angeles, and his music still has a strong metaphorical connection to the city. He's an admirer of producers like Dr. Dre, but Ellison's vision mixes the pulse of contemporary urban life with an extra dose of sci-fi futurism. He has his ear to the ground in terms of what's happening now and what's real, but his mind is fixated on what might happen tomorrow-- part Boyz n the Hood, part Blade Runner. And since Ellison's musical palette always circles back to the Eastern-tinged textures that infiltrated jazz when his great aunt Alice Coltrane was helping set the pace (assorted bells, harp plucks, the pings of steel and knock of wood), his music feels cosmic, bound to L.A. as a geographic idea but not necessarily of this earth.
In the last five years, Flying Lotus has become a standard-bearer for 21st-century beat construction by looking forward and backward simultaneously and making music that feels like an exploration. So what happens when such an artist reaches a cul-de-sac? After Flying Lotus' 2010 landmark Cosmogramma, further density was not an option. That album was packed so tightly with rhythms, instruments, and textures that adding more to the mix would have meant risking identity; just a few more samples could have turned the music into an indistinct mush that contains every color at once. Cosmogramma felt like an end game, and the new Flying Lotus album, Until the Quiet Comes, finds Ellison lighting out in a new direction. He's thinking in terms of air, mood, and simplicity. In an interview with the UK magazine The Wire, Ellison described Quiet as his attempt at "a children's record, a record for kids to dream to." While there's nothing cute or naive on the album, you get a sense of what Ellison might mean when it comes to dreaming.
The album's opening section, including "Until the Colours Come", "Heave(n)", and "All In", functions as a sort of miniature suite of downtempo jazz. This is Flying Lotus at its most vibe-heavy and mystical, where rooms are thick with purple incense and it's always 3 a.m. The sound is not new-- tracks like these were a cornerstone of 1990s trip-hop of the Headz comp/Ninja Tune variety-- but the sheer beauty of Ellison's design sets his music apart. This is a quality he shares with the very different Ricardo Villalobos: By pulling back and giving his meticulously-constructed elements room to breathe, Ellison allows us to hear them as if for the first time. "Tiny Tortures" begins with a rhythm that's all bones-- a simulated wood block, snare, and hissy cymbal tracing out an off-kilter beat. Against this backdrop the bass guitar of Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner enters, and the contrast between his gliding, harmonically rich runs and the spare opening is breathtaking. Thundercat's expressive bass work also adds character to the comparatively thick title track, as a gong and handclaps flow continuously like water over rocks while an unstable Dilla-fied keyboard wedges in between the beats. But even here, when there's more going on, the ear can fixate on any one sound and extract feeling from it.
As the album progresses, it changes in feel, but the shifts are organic. If the tracks in the opening section bring to mind an abstraction of spaced-out jazz, elsewhere Ellision conjures the blocky colors of videos games. See the thick 8-bit synths in "Sultan's Request", the curlicue melody in "Putty Boy Strut", the simple refrain of the title track, which makes me think of a digital hero on a quest. These lighter moments are careful and reserved. You can feel Ellison putting a smaller frame around each individual part.
The hushed world Ellison has constructed here is hermetic and internally focused, even for him, and the album's guests don't break the spell. The featured players meet Ellison on his turf and adapt to the landscape of the record. Erykah Badu's connection to Flying Lotus' broader aesthetic is readily apparent, as her sense of mystical earthiness is grounded in tradition but free to wander outside of it. On "See Thru to U", she does away with soul singing in its formal sense and allows herself to become an instrument. The result is a satisfying melding of creative personalities but it wouldn't work on an Erykah Badu album-- it's too vaporous, too unconcerned with personality. The same goes for Thom Yorke's contribution on "Electric Candyman"; Ellison turns him into a ghost, which makes perfect sense.
Following the shattering Cosmogramma, Until the Quiet Comes is disarming at first. It sometimes feels like an experiment in how much can be stripped away while still sounding like Flying Lotus, but the reduction offers a new perspective into what Ellison is about. Los Angeles and Cosmogramma brought to mind the L.A. that thrives on acceleration. The energy here is just as strong, but it's concentrated into a smaller space. So while this might be Flying Lotus' most accessible record, it's less about being pleasant and more about deep focus. Each of these 18 tracks tends to introduce one or two emotional or musical elements and meditate on them for a brief time before easing back into silence. Quiet is a series of suggestions or clues and it always feels just out of reach, but that leaves a lot of room for the listener. The surface is a gorgeous invitation to return and see if you can figure out what it all means.


Driven by dance-inspired beats and ghostly sampled voices, the new Four Tet album is the most focused in Kieran Hebden's catalog, and also among his best.

There Is Love in You

Kieran Hebden first came on the scene in the 1990s as a member of Fridge, a post-rock outfit that to me always looked better on paper than they sounded on record. Whatever you think of his first band, Hebden's subsequent career can be seen as the idea of post-rock done right. His appetite for music, on the evidence presented in his albums, singles, DJ sets, and collaborations, is voracious. But Hebden has a way of transforming and integrating influences rather than channeling them. So if his loose improvised collaborations with drummer Steve Reid captured something of the spirit of the classic late-60s free jazz records on Impulse!, they also managed to carve out a unique and identifiable aesthetic that sounds very much like today. When working with others, like the wooly free-folk unit Sunburned Hand of the Man or the dubstep producer Burial, Hebden knows when to lead and when to get out of the way. But all the while, whatever the context, he's absorbing. And when it comes to his own records as Four Tet, he has a knack for combining sounds from all over and making them his own.
Rounds is the one undisputed Four Tet classic, but all are at least good. It's not unusual for Four Tet records to have a few dull patches, but given Hebden's M.O., that's never a big problem. You expect him to explore a bit, so it's okay when once in a while something doesn't quite gel. Ringer, an intriguing EP from 2008 that throbbed with a minimal pulse and revealed a surprisingly austere side to his music, is a good example. It was the kind of record you wanted to inch closer to, because you had the sense there might be more going on beneath the surface than you'd initially realized. The follow-up album, There Is Love in You, is the glorious sound of those ideas being drawn into the light.
This is the most focused Four Tet album by a huge margin, and for some listeners that could be an issue. Hebden apparently refined this music over the course of a long stint as a resident DJ at the London club Plastic People. He'd play developing tracks in his sets, see how people responded, and return to them armed with this information. And while the result isn't dance music proper, There Is Love in You definitely functions on that plane. This isn't fist-pumping music that toys with the pleasure of pop music, like one of my favorite Four Tet tunes, "Smile Around the Face". And it's not an album that bowls you over with the density and intricacy of its textures. Instead, it's both heady and physical, subtle but powerful music for thinking and moving or ideally doing both at the same time: It's been a while since a brisk walk through the city sounded this good.
Very early in the 2000s, the corny word "folktronica" was sometimes applied to Four Tet's style. It never defined him, but the tag was applied because it described his fondness for samples of sounds that seem to be reverberating in a physical space. He sampled jazz cymbals, guitars, gamelan-style percussion, and voices, mixing them in with electronic squiggles and choppy breaks culled from hip-hop. Hebden's fondness for acoustic sounds caused his music to come over as unusually airy and bright. It made you think of daylight rather than the nocturnal crackle of sampled vinyl. Though Love is a very different album from those earlier records, remnants of the sound palette remain, imparting a similar sense of clarity, brightness, and warmth despite its late-night club-bound inspiration.
The album begins with a crisp cymbal tap on "Angel Echoes" that sounds perfectly live until a quick digital stutter comes a few bars in, and then a clipped female voice, reduced to just syllables but still conveying a strong sense of yearning, begins looping into view. There are bells, a steady midtempo 4/4 kick, and that voice, and that's about it. But "Angel Echoes", like most of the record that follows, is strangely moving in spite of its limited toolkit. After it ends abruptly and tumbles into the brilliant "Love Cry", a much more drawn-out and darkly shaded tune, it starts to become clear that another inspiration could be in play: the music produced by Hebden's schoolmate, Will Bevan aka Burial.
The pair collaborated on an intriguing two-track 12" last year, and if nothing else, Hebden's consistent return here to the texture and expressive possibilities of vocal fragments forms a clear link. "Sing", halfway through the record, is the most affecting and flat-out gorgeous example of the technique, as it laces the propulsive housey rhythmic thrust-- the push and pull of the kick and snare, bits of percussion, a short and repetitive synth motif-- with an alien, genderless voice that curls into a kind of weary howl. The effect reminds me of nothing so much as the "ah-AH-ah" vocals that snake through Aphex Twin's immortal "Windowlicker", and Hebden's processing gives "Sing" a similar sense of simultaneous grounding and weird dislocation.
Hebden has studied Aphex Twin carefully, having made his first splash in 1999 when he remixed a track from SAW II for one of Warp's 10th Anniversary compilations. Elsewhere on Love, you can find the creative melding of beats and classical minimalism that producers like Richard James and Nobukazu Takemura were exploring in the 90s. An array of metallic percussion pops up, organized into hypnotic grid-like patterns that gradually build and change over the track's duration. The voice sample in "Circling" doesn't appear until two-thirds of the way through the track's runtime, and it brings with it a cluster of bright electronic tones that call to mind the iconic pulse of Reich/Riley minimalism. The loping, sleepy "This Unfolds" has several layers of quietly twinkling sound happening at once, and you can shift your perception to follow along with any one of them or simply let the whole thing wash over you. Though it mostly lays back and doesn't waste any notes, There Is Love in You always has just enough going on to pull you back in any time you feel like relegating it to the background. It works best taken whole, rather than broken into individual tracks.
Whenever There Is Love in You comes to the closing "She Just Likes to Fight", a quietly pretty instrumental built around a straightforward guitar melody, I start thinking of Hebden's early days. There's a moment at the 2:18 mark where the music pauses for a moment as a tapped guitar harmonic rings out, and it brings me back for a split-second to "Harmonics", the acoustic guitar instrumental that is the one Fridge tune I love without reservation. It's such a basic and elemental thing, the overtones of one metal guitar string vibrating in place, but in the right hands it becomes a tool that can be used to deliver a surprising blast of feeling. The simple power of sound is something this guy has understood from the beginning.


The one-time EDM superstar’s production has never sounded shinier or sugarier, but beneath the maximalist synths and peppy rhythms lurk more complicated, bittersweet feelings.

SMILE! :D

Porter Robinson thought he was ready to have fun. After the probing vulnerability of his 2021 album Nurture—wrung out after years spent trying to complicate the candy-painted sheen of his experiments with EDM—the North Carolina-raised musician set out to reconnect with the pleasure-seeking that informed his earliest work. His new album SMILE! :D is garishly nostalgic and unrepentantly joyous, full of maximalist synth leads that glimmer like a Blingee gif and tender-hearted vocal melodies that vibrate with the youthful abandon of songs overheard in suburban skate shops.
On one level, it’s a cathartic release, a relieved exhale after a creative block that led to his last album. With a guest spot from the alt-pop pranksters in Frost Children and a torrent of silly stunts to promote the album’s singles, he signaled his goofy intentions. (At a pop-up event for “Kitsune Maison Freestyle,” he vibe-checked each fan that showed up and gave away clothing from his own closet.) But what’s actually in the songs is more complicated and emotionally raw than his reckless abandon implies.
For the first time, Robinson reveals more of his sense of humor—“Bitch, I’m Taylor Swift,” he deadpans in “Knock Yourself Out XD”—but underneath the vivid colors and silly jokes, he’s wrestling with heavier themes. “Cheerleader,” though built around a synth lead as sickeningly sweet as the dust at the end of a roll of Smarties, grapples with the dynamics of parasocial relationships between fans and artists. Appreciative but anxious, lighthearted yet lacerating, the track’s tone is a tightrope walk made all the more dizzying by the confectionary rush of its instrumentation, which recalls both the impossibly glossy emo pop of late-aughts Warped Tour staples like Metro Station and the post-hyperpop experiments of singer-songwriters like glaive and aldn.
Throughout, Robinson reflects on getting older and becoming an almost-pop star and ever more public figure. Even when he wraps his thoughts in colorful, caffeinated trappings, they hit hard. On “Year of the Cup,” he sings of a desperate, self-lacerating urge to be liked: “I can’t go to sleep/’Cause my mind keeps ringing with times that I laid out everything wrong with me up on stage/It’s embarrassing.” “Easier to Love You” mulls the loneliness of aging, finding disappointment in the distance between the person you are and the person you thought you might become. All the while, he favors arrangements as bright as he’s ever programmed: Tempos remain high, and chiming guitars float skyward in the mix.
The energy is never more striking than on “Russian Roulette,” a peppily bittersweet song that grapples with career exhaustion and suicidal ideation—and takes a tongue-in-cheek swipe at an infamous joke review from Pitchfork’s early years—before ending with one of the most cutting moments on the whole album. After an emo-fueled chorus—“I wanna live/I don’t wanna die”—leads to a bouncy trance outro, a primitive computer-generated voice lectures about dance-music cliches (“The kick drum and bass suggests the song is coming to a close—that’s the format we’re used to”) before scolding, “Don’t kill yourself, you idiot.” Amid such stark contrasts in tone, the sudden vulnerability is strangely affecting.
The split between effervescent sound and downcast mood is jarring. Robinson has been smiling through the pain at least since the loopy yet apocalyptic “Sad Machine,” but something feels different on SMILE! :D, as though he were under less pressure to make sense of the grand, sweeping emotions. He’s willing to be chaotic and a little all over the place, and though that does occasionally result in moments that are hard to process, Robinson proves that he’s as adept at wringing moving moments out of pop tropes as he is conjuring alien worlds.


Björk's eighth full-length release may be her most ambitious yet. The nature-themed Biophilia is supported with iPad apps, a series of live shows, and a forthcoming documentary, but sometimes the cross-platform zeal outstrips the songwriting. *
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Biophilia

The most common caricatures of Björk tend to fixate on her outsized aesthetic sense. But for all the bonkers fashion choices, outré collaborators, and leftfield influences she pulls into her orbit, it's easy to forget that her worldview is also equally informed by a sympathy and awareness of the systems that guide us. From the "beats and strings" manifesto that shaped Homogenic to the "music for laptop speakers" mandate that drove Vespertine through to the vocals-only absolutism of Medúlla, her obsession with patterns and structure and conceptual boundaries has consistently been at the center of her work. Often, she has celebrated the messiness and the chaos implicit in these very things; in fact, the very first line of her very first single took a perverse delight in the lack of logic inherent in one of the biggest and most complex systems of all: human behavior.
Biophilia marks Björk's eighth full-length release, and represents her definitive attempt to create an ecosystem around her work. Billed as her "most ambitious and interdisciplinary project yet" and boasting all the usual fixings of a Björk release (dazzling artwork, a Michel Gondry video, vanguard instrumentation, a bizarre list of collaborators), it also comes supported by a corresponding iPad application for each of its 10 tracks, a new website, a series of live shows and "music workshops", and a forthcoming 90-minute film documenting its creation. Beyond that, the album itself purports to engage with some pretty momentous themes, with song titles like "Thunderbolt", "Dark Matter", and "Cosmogony" and imagery focusing on time, space, and the natural world. (Note that editor Brandon Stosuy wrote press materials for this release prior to being hired by Pitchfork.)
The stakes feel even higher in light of Björk's mottled output over the past decade. Between 2004's well-received but thin-sounding Medúlla and 2007's unfocused and sprawling Volta, Björk has arguably been unable to produce anything definitive since 2001's Vespertine. In its worst moments, Volta painted a picture of an artist whose quality control instincts had been eroded by indulgence. One would be forgiven if news of all the scaffolding around Biophilia sounded up alarm bells: Is this her coming back strong, or piling conceptual materials on top of her music in an effort to give it extra depth?
If the songs themselves are any indication, the answer leans more toward the latter. While the promotional and conceptual packaging around Biophilia are as forward-thinking as ever, the sheer quality of Björk's songwriting remains problematic. It feels, once again, as if she's prioritized the superficial aspects of Biophilia's presentation over, well, the music. I can't imagine, for example, how a middle section as dull as "Dark Matter" and "Hollow" made the cut. Even slightly more realized compositions like the the music box plink of "Virus" and the twitching "Thunderbolt" are essentially just simple motifs stretched way beyond their limits. Too often, she combats the lack of any real structure or melody by over-singing, or lapsing into one of her familiar and increasingly lazy-sounding house vocal runs.  It too often feels as if Björk's songwriting process is now to sing arbitrarily over top of her collaborators' instrumental tracks rather than structure the music around a melody.
Sure, there are highlights. When she does get a tune to sing, she attacks it with almost apologetic gusto. Lead single "Crystalline" features one of the album's best hooks, and as a result, one of Björk's best and most focused performances. Elsewhere, the gorgeous "Cosmogony" carries a faint hymnal quality and an immediacy that wouldn't sound totally out of place on Vespertine or even Homogenic. With its satisfyingly filthy electro skronk, the uptempo "Mutual Core" may be the album's best track overall.
Although a big part of the PR story around Biophilia, the apps ultimately feel less than essential to the overall experience. Even after spending significant amounts of time with them, it's easy to separate them mentally from the music. They're well-designed and infused with appropriate amounts of playfulness and mystery, and a few have almost meditative properties that suit the music well, but ultimately they feel like they're there to support a concept rather than vice versa. Beyond that, in costing $1.99 apiece (or just under $10 for the full complement), the app gambit ultimately hits upon another latter-day Björk tendency, which is her seeming willingness to exploit all available revenue streams.
Is it fair to fault Biophilia for failing to realize its own ambition? That's a tough question; Björk's curatorial acumen, her visual sense, and her vision are so beyond reproach that it feels almost churlish to complain about something as simple as a lack of melody, or the fact that she's an experimental music pioneer who might just be over-charging for her experimental iPad apps. Nonetheless, for an album ostensibly about the elements, there are some essential pieces missing here. As an innovator, she's as vibrant as ever, but as a songwriter, she sounds tired.


An indie folk record with tinges of country rock, the songwriter’s latest album pays tribute to his Kansas City home with a vision of the Midwest that feels mythical and enormous.

Sundowner

Kevin Morby writes love songs about places. On Singing Saw, it was California. On Harlem River and City Music, it was New York City. On his latest record, Sundowner, it’s Kansas, with its endless stretches of highway and shocking pink sunsets. Morby grew up in Kansas City, and recently returned there after a multi-year stint on the West Coast. Sundowner is his homecoming, an indie folk record with tinges of country rock that feels like looking at an old postcard. At times, it’s so dedicated to late-’60s pastiche that it becomes too precious, like little more than a study of influences. Mostly, though, it is a perfect afternoon under a big blue sky, a vision of the Midwest that feels mythical and enormous.
Sundowner corrects the course after 2019’s Oh My God, which seesawed from huge, pinwheeling Sticky Fingers arrangements to half-baked Transformer karaoke. Morby sounded lost, unsure of what kind of music he wanted to make. Sundowner is sharper, more in sync with his previous records. It’s certainly referential, but it’s hardly completely retro. On opener “Valley,” an estuary of Mellotron pours into a crystal sea of guitar. Morby sings of the stars above him, and the valley beneath. His voice sounds weary and reedy as ever, and then it cuts out, allowing a guitar to split the night sky in two. “Campfire,” with hushed vocals from Katie Crutchfield and field recordings from an actual campfire, feels like a constellation of three songs wrapped up in one. The Mellotron takes the lead for the ending, the album’s prettiest, quivering as the song shifts into a waltz that feels like crossing dewy grass with a blanket draped over your shoulders.
The more uneven moments threaten to undermine Morby’s strongest songs. “Brother, Sister” belongs in a tacky old Western movie, with drums that boom like thunderclaps and a goofy yelp at the end. Much of the song involves Morby singing “bum buh duh bum,” or, “Oh brother/They killed you dead,” like a small-town sheriff with a handlebar mustache. While his penchant for all things retro is usually compelling, here it’s so painstakingly recreated that it’s a little ridiculous. “Velvet Highway,” a fully instrumental track, runs into a similar problem. It starts off with languid, dreamy keys, then disintegrates into weird percussion and what sounds like someone jabbing the highest notes on an old piano. This is where Morby runs into trouble: by leaning too heavily on tropes from the past, he misses the opportunity to bricolage with the present.
He’s at his best when he writes the character studies that have become almost a signature of his career. Often they are called by their first names: On Sundowner, we meet Jamie, who died when he was 25; Desi, who became a mermaid; and Jessi, the one with the beautiful voice. Morby loves them all; you can see them flash in front of your eyes like old Super 8 footage. The record’s most vivid and potent moment comes on the melodramatic, seven-minute-long “A Night at the Little Los Angeles.” Morby imagines a girl smoking cigarettes on Mulholland, beaches of sugar, the soft sound of people having sex in the next room. He notices things that are hard to catch: a tightness in his chest; background conversations with a hotel clerk; the infinite stretch of Kansas. His observations require perception—perhaps Morby’s greatest skill as a musician. Plenty of what he sees is mundane, but it’s Morby’s gift that the quotidian never feels boring.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The singer and multi-instrumentalist joins jazz musician Francesco Turrisi for a thoughtful and ambitious album that spans opera, Appalachian bluegrass, gospel, and traditional Italian music.

there is no Other

there is no Other, the sparse collaborative album by Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi, doesn’t shine a light on old music; it blocks out the sun entirely, scavenging the darkness for deeper understanding. Giddens is a MacArthur Fellow, a conservatory-trained opera singer, and a multi-instrumentalist with a knack for finding uncanny harmony among distant generations and geographies of music. Turrisi is a jazz composer with concentrations on early baroque and Mediterranean music. On this wide-ranging collection of covers and original material by Giddens, they speak to each others’ strengths, refining century-spanning stories into a broken prayer for unity. The music asks for close listening and contemplation; the space they create is small, with room for all of us.
Giddens’ body of work—including three solo albums, a ballet score, and collaborative projects like Carolina Chocolate Drops and Our Native Daughters—is united by a desire to use everything around her to its fullest communicative potential. As a result, listening to her records can feel like exploring a well-curated home, where every object weighs heavy with meaning. Take, for instance, her banjo. A familiar tool within her favored arenas (folk, bluegrass, old-time music), it serves Giddens as a symbol within a symbol: a custom-made recreation of the 19th-century African American instrument adopted by white musicians and popularized through minstrel shows. She plays it as a reclamation, a way to ensure her music’s history remains inextricable from its delivery. “You’re gonna have things that I never had,” she sings in a gripping rendition of civil rights activist Oscar Brown, Jr.’s “Brown Baby.” “Sweetie, you’re gonna live in a better world.” Churning along to the rhythm of Turrisi’s Arabic frame drum, the banjo is a source of droning dissonance and lilting refrains of hope.
Like the best folk music, there is no Other was documented quickly, in just five days, and it consists mostly of first takes. The song selection is thoughtful and ambitious, spanning opera, Appalachian bluegrass, gospel, and traditional Italian music. Pristine and almost confrontationally quiet, the production focuses on the duo’s interplay, as they bore into their songs with earthy severity; on the most elaborate arrangements, they are joined by a cellist. Approaching textures that feel almost gothic, it continues Giddens’ path from her T Bone Burnett-produced debut, 2015’s Tomorrow Is My Turn: a continual refinement of focus that allows her songs to speak for themselves.
With such sparse arrangements, the album’s grandest moments come from Giddens’ vocals. She delivers her originals with the same spirit as more familiar material, like a show-stopping take on “Wayfaring Stranger.” A gospel standard that’s endured hundreds of years (not to mention covers by everyone from Johnny Cash to Ed Sheeran), it’s Giddens’ favorite kind of artifact: wounded but immortal, of unknown origin but with deep roots. She sings the words as though the journey could lead her somewhere pivotal and new, a search for common ground through history’s most haunted corners. Few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration.


Borrowing the clean hooks of metalcore and scene-chewing flourishes of MySpace emo, the San Diego band’s second album takes an unflinchingly honest look at impending doom.

SeeYouSpaceCowboy: The Romance of Affliction

The Romance of Affliction

Note: This review discusses addiction and self-harm.

Connie Sgarbossa spent the past two years wrestling with addiction, depression, OCD, bipolar disorder, and the question of whether making SeeYouSpaceCowboy’s second proper album would offer any kind of relief. Two weeks after the band finished recording The Romance of Affliction, Sgarbossa’s girlfriend found her unconscious on the couch, the result of a Xanax overdose meant to end her life. By recent accounts, things have improved—SeeYouSpaceCowboy are back on the road and Sgarbossa has given herself grace as she pursues recovery. What hasn’t changed is her conviction in the unflinching and often unflattering honesty of The Romance of Affliction: SeeYouSpaceCowboy are living proof that cathartic self-expression shouldn’t be expected to perform miracle cures.
Sgarbossa’s lyrical fatalism complicates and enriches an album that would otherwise be considered a full triumph. Imagine Converge guzzling Sparks Ultra and steel shavings, and that’s 2019’s deviously catchy The Correlation Between Entrance and Exit Wounds, which announced SYSC as heirs apparent to sasscore 2.0: After all, this mutant form of dance-punk was created in their homebase of San Diego, as the city’s white-belt screamo and “Spock Rock” post-hardcore scenes commingled with far-left politics, highbrow literary pretense, and gratuitous handclaps. The Correlation had a lot going for it, and The Romance of Affliction does these things more so: The vocals skew harder towards both deathcore and Warped Tour, the production is sharper, and the songs are longer and more unconventionally structured, expanding to accommodate upstart noise rappers and metalcore icons.
The guest list is impressive, and the mere appearance of members of Every Time I Die and Underoath signifies The Romance of Affliction’s status. But both Keith Buckley and Aaron Gillespie accommodate themselves to SeeYouSpaceCowboy, not vice versa—each a recognizable voice, yet one among many in Sgarbossa’s frenetic racket. The closing title track expands on SeeYouSpaceCowboy’s fruitful collaboration with heavily face-tattooed Epitaph act If I Die First, while the Shaolin G feature “Sharpen What You Can” proves that panic chords and double-kick drums are fundamentals for a new generation of emo rappers.
If the individual influences are familiar, their coherence within a singular sound is modern—and like most exciting music in the vanguard of populist and extreme metal, SeeYouSpaceCowboy’s accessibility and ambition are inversely proportional to their desire to appear “tasteful.” Opener “Life as a Soap Opera Plot, 26 Years Running” shifts gears about five times before the band lets out an a cappella “woo!” “Misinterpreting Constellations” grinds to a halt for a handclap breakdown. This isn’t a fun record by any means, but SeeYouSpaceCowboy are freakishly adept at using the most immediately gratifying parts of oft-maligned influences, drawing on metalcore’s clean, septum-piercing hooks and the scene-chewing flourishes of MySpace emo. On past releases, melodies felt like brief interruptions from Sgarbossa’s guttural howls; here, “Misinterpreting Constellations” and “Melodrama Between Two Entirely Bored Individuals” evoke a more believably vampiric AFI or the Blood Brothers retconning themselves as a festival act.
The Romance of Affliction isn’t a crossover album—playing it in a social setting would still be taken as an act of antagonism by people who’ve never listened to metalcore. Even putting aside the confrontational production values, SeeYouSpaceCowboy demand a reconsideration of the reflexive tendency to stereotype this type of music as an expression of overblown, adolescent suburban pain. It’s not that they lack a sense of humor—this is a band with a song called “Stop Calling Us Screamo.” But there’s also the self-awareness that often accompanies a prolonged struggle with mental illness. Sgarbossa never glamorizes nor sanitizes her pain, even when it’s rendered with theatrical flair. “It’s not enough to stay warm/I want to burn in the flames” captures the impulsivity and nihilism of active addiction, where no emotion can ever be considered overdramatized. SeeYouSpaceCowboy initially imagined The Romance of Affliction as an uplifting sequel to The Correlation Between Entrance and Exit Wounds until life intervened; the album owes its success to their inability to fake a happy ending.

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New Order: Movement / Power, Corruption and Lies / Low-Life / Brotherhood / Technique [Collector's Editions]

Ten years in 10 discs: this-- surely definitive-- edition of the New Order story starts with a shattered band groping to replace the irreplaceable and ends with a group surfing to no. 1 on the UK charts. In between is some of the most casually amazing pop music ever made, but these two bookends-- "Dreams Never End" and "World in Motion"-- tell you more about the group than you'd think.
The interesting thing about "Dreams Never End" is that Peter Hook sings on it, and he does as well as Barney Sumner would have. Following the suicide of Ian Curtis and subsequent retirement of the Joy Division moniker, New Order began as a band without a frontman; the trick of them is that they stayed that way, even after Sumner had become the regular vocalist. Sumner's often flat, affectless voice might be a familiar point of contact with New Order but it's rarely their focus. Their notoriously careless lyrics-- Sumner has generally made great play of how last-minute they are-- are a further sign of the group's discomfort with the way rock music tends to be lensed through its singer. So it's no surprise the 12" format was so attractive for New Order-- more lovely space for the vocals to wander out of entirely.
So if Sumner isn't a frontman, what is he? "World in Motion" suggests an answer. It's a song that uses soccer as a metaphor for raving and resistance-- "Beat the man! Take him on!"-- so why not use the sport as a metaphor for what the band who made it do? In those terms, Sumner isn't a frontman, he's a target man: The striker whose job isn't just to score, it's to hold the ball so his teammates can move forward and into play. New Order's secret is their fluidity, their easy sharing of the spotlight. At any time in any song, any one of them might provide the hook-- the bright drama of Gillian Gilbert's keyboards, the giddy sequencing of Stephen Morris' percussion, Peter Hook's famously liquid basslines, or indeed Sumner's own guitar lines, as gorgeously full and melodic as his vocals are blank.
This interplay defined New Order from the beginning-- on Movement's centerpiece "The Him", your focus flickers from the tribal drumwork to the blocky thrash of Sumner's guitar to the stern jab of the bass: it's almost never on the words. But New Order really woke up to their own potential when they bought a nightclub and started making music that might fill it, and for this side of the story you need the second discs of these generous releases, filled with singles and 12" remixes.
The deluxe reissue package can feel like the industry's last throw of the back catalogue dice-- hoover up all sorts of bits and bobs and use historical context as a figleaf to persuade people to buy the same record a third or fourth time. But not this time. If New Order had never released singles, how would we remember them now? Perhaps authors of a solid body of pop work, dependable fixtures of the alternative scene whose success nobody could begrudge. These albums are often excellent, but of these five packages, the "bonus disc" beats the first at least three times.
The rhythmic experiments on Movement, for instance, make more sense when you hear them alongside the mechanoid funk of "Everything's Gone Green" and the sudden break into joy of "Temptation". The second disc here takes the bleak pressure off the original album, letting it breathe not as an awkward afterthought to Joy Division but as a group pushing that band's musical ideas further. Their most coherent and underappreciated record, it's still an uncomfortable listen, with tracks like "Senses" savage in a way they never were again.
Power, Corruption and Lies exists in the shadow of two remarkable singles: "Temptation" and "Blue Monday". The first had established the band's emotional signature: a bittersweet rush of hard-won, inarticulate bliss. Many of their most glorious tracks-- "Bizarre Love Triangle", "Run", "Your Silent Face", "Thieves Like Us"-- feel like returns to the well "Temptation" dug, which makes it even more perverse that the 1987 re-recording of that track is an absentee here: The original's greatness is rougher-edged. "Blue Monday", meanwhile, took the icy landscape of Movement-- and hence its loyalist audience-- fully onto the dancefloor. Power, Corruption and Lies works to reconcile these seminal records: It's a spiky take on synth-pop, with some of the group's giddiest music. The uninhibited tumbles of "Age of Consent" and "The Village" suggested a band drunk on possibility; "Your Silent Face" married rhythm and grandeur and anger.
A generally sympathetic re-mastering job can't disguise how clattery and sharp Low-Life sounds: Hailed at the time as New Order's first really great album, it's now the one that seems most time-bound thanks to its brash mid-80s keyboard sounds. There's plenty of drama here, but the album's two stand-out tracks are best heard in their bonus-disc extended versions. At full 18-minute stretch, "Elegia" more than earns its pomposity, while the long mix of "The Perfect Kiss" has some claim to be the decade's greatest 12" edit: A riot of interlocking bass and keyboard hooks, breathless handclap drums, and five or six different climaxes.
The bonus disc of Brotherhood has two more peerless 12" mixes-- Shep Pettibone's extensions of "Bizarre Love Triangle" and "True Faith"-- but the album itself is New Order at their most wickedly ramshackle, turning away from the brash electropop of Low-Life and covering most tracks with the messy jangle of Sumner's guitar. They sound, for the first time since Movement, like an indie band-- but a superb one: Four musicians at ease with each other and themselves, combining on tracks like "Way of Life" to provide a feast of hooks that leaves the listener breathless and delighted. Elsewhere, "1963" and "True Faith" suggested they had the songs to be chart fixtures on relatively conventional terms; "Touched By the Hand of God" and the pointless "Blue Monday '88" hinted they might be running out of steam.
Instead they made arguably their best record. Past the red herring of "Fine Time"-- a dance music band "going dance," and one of those rare gags that stays entertaining-- Technique takes the easy interplay and full-band sound of Brotherhood and drenches it in good Ibiza vibes. Each track, as it leads you into a fluid maze of melody, is a hug from a stranger you've known all your life. "Nothing in this world can touch the music that I heard as I woke up this morning," sang an awed-sounding Sumner, catching the album's mood perfectly.
Technique is magnificent, but it has the weakest bonus disc of all-- listless B-sides and instrumentals, and merely functional remixes. Standard-bearers for club culture in the alternative world for most of the decade, New Order never really adapted to dance music's victory in the UK mainstream: They made more great records, but no more great 12"s. With their sound perfected, they also stopped surprising us: So even though this isn't all the records they made, these collectors' editions still feel like a complete story of this most accidental of bands.


Reinventing himseld as a full-on neo-soul singer, Aloe Blacc follows his inspired and often-innovative 2006 LP, Shine Through.

Good Things

Hands up, who remembers the 1970s? OK, now who's gleaned a vague but evocative interpretation of the 70s through its music? Inevitability, the latter group is going to eventually outnumber the former group, and eventually the archivists and revisionists and reinterpreters will be all that's left. And while it'd be nice to think that this group of historical translators is going to do that weird, alternately maligned and lionized pop-music era justice, it's easy to overlook just how received some of that wisdom might be. Yes, Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye were great-- but they were great when there wasn't an established standard for what Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye were yet. Following their lead might take you places, but you don't sweat too much when shadows that tall give you shade every step of the way.
Aloe Blacc's recently taken this classic-soul path after years of laboring under an intriguing indie-rap jack-of-all genres approach. And while he clearly studied the vintage R&B greats before creating Good Things, he's content just building a reasonably convincing backlot replica of classic soul rather than putting a new twist on it. Blacc doesn't display the sweet vocal flair of a Raphael Saadiq à la The Way I See It, or the modernized post-hip-hop touch of Ne-Yo in "Back Like That" mode. What he does have is a sort of straightforward emulation of that certain R&B singer-songwriter vibe, a modest, filed-down compromise somewhere between Bill Withers' raw, aching warmth and the smooth, subtle intensity of Donny Hathaway. That voice isn't without his strengths, and lead single-slash-How to Make It in America title theme "I Need a Dollar" is the best exhibit: His voice is strong enough to push back against the spring-step backbeat and turn the chorus into an earworm. If it's the song people know him for from here on out, he could do a lot worse.
While Good Things is well-constructed and boasts some inspired touches (the backbone-shivering strings on "Take Me Back" and "Life So Hard"; a slick, skulking reggae groove on "Miss Fortune"), it lacks the foggy, borderline-sinister allure of the best El Michels Affair compositions it strives to match. And with Aloe Blacc's lyrics skewing toward sentiments that straddle the line between "universal" and "so what else is new," Good Things doesn't do much to catch you off guard. He can tug at your heartstrings when the opportunity presents itself; good luck listening to "Momma Hold My Hand" without getting a lump in your throat when he sings, "Momma used to be strong, but she ain't now." But enough of his lyrics lean heavily enough on generations-old songwriting tropes-- pouring his heart out for a woman by telling her that "you make me smile"; lamenting about "families in the street with nothing to eat/ Little baby boys and girls, no shoes on their feet"; calling politicians "hungry wolves dressed like sheep"-- that genuinely human and heartfelt ideas, even sung as warmly as they are, come across through their words like slogans you've long since tuned out.
Complicating things is the fact that Aloe Blacc's last album, 2006's Shine Through, was an inspired and often-innovative shot at pushing hip hop-inflected R&B forward; there were a few baffling moments, but he was defiantly ambitious enough to do some pretty out-there things to minimalist disco, Tropicália, and Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come". The one time Good Things actually hits on a comparable throw-out-the-blueprint moment, it's with an unlikely cover-- in this case, the Velvet Underground's "Femme Fatale", re-envisioned as a satin-suited ballad for slow dances. That's a neat bit of unconventional thinking that this album could've used a little more of-- less by-the-book horn charts and worn-out homilies, more era-hopping hybrids and unexpected detours. As it stands, Good Things feels like hopping into a time machine, dialing it to 40 years ago, then forgetting to bring a stack of recent 12" singles with you to completely blow 1970's mind.


Beirut's new album was recorded in a piano trio format in just a couple of weeks after Zach Condon scrapped the material he'd been working on for a few years. The resulting nine-song, 29-minute barely-LP, appropriately, sounds like a collection of exposed scaffoldings—a record of a rehabilitative process, more a story of survival rather than a shot at reinvention.

No No No

In recent interviews, Beirut singer and songwriter Zach Condon has shed some light on the backstory behind the odd, skeletal sound of his band's new album. Condon had been embroiled in personal and creative despair for a few years, some of it the result of working on a new maximalist opus in the vein of his previous work. He abandoned this material to return to low-stakes jamming in a piano trio format; ultimately, No No No's songs developed out of this approach, and the album was recorded in just a couple of weeks. The resulting nine-song, 29-minute barely-LP, appropriately, sounds like a collection of exposed scaffoldings—a record of a rehabilitative process, more a story of survival rather than a shot at reinvention.
It would be easy to assume that reinvention was foremost on Condon's mind. After all, his ethnomusicological interests and motley folk orchestras have next to nothing to do with today's musical landscape. Nine years ago, however, these elements seemed to fit in perfectly, distinguishing Condon from the expanding crooner rank-and-file (Jens Lekman, Andrew Bird, Patrick Wolf, Rufus Wainwright) and aligning him with a broader drift toward prewar—or, to use a once-popular keyword, "sepia tone"—nostalgia (see also: the shanties and strophic ballads of the Decemberists, the carny/gypsy fusions of Man Man and Gogol Bordello). But it was doubtless Condon's sense of how to make his compositions sound ornate and simple at the same time—through triumphant, sometimes wordless choruses—that truly gained him his fanbase. His 2006 and 2007 releases were full of mild-mannered anthems that stood on their own—mix-CD-ready cuts like "Postcards from Italy", "Elephant Gun", and "Nantes".
Unlike this formative work, there's a sense of absence in the music of No No No; sometimes Condon's commitment to simplicity leads to undeveloped ideas. Condon has honed his innate skill as an arranger of chamber horn and string ensembles over the years: The first half of his 2009 double EP, March of the Zapotec, scored largely for 19-piece Mexican brass band, took his skill to its furthest level of complexity, while the follow up, The Rip Tide, found him making a more serious bid for pop/rock crossover success. For Condon to put his big-bandleader chops to the side—so crucial to all of his previous work—on his first album in four years seems like a tacit acknowledgment that the style of his earlier music is no longer in vogue, as well as a need to find a new, less obsessive process.
When Condon does employ horns on the new album, they are effective precisely because they are so sparing: The  writing has a punchier, more functional quality that is worlds away from his former brass chorale leviathans. There are no vestiges of the approach that sometimes made it feel as if Condon had built his entire career in the shadow of Neutral Milk Hotel's "The Fool". These are horn licks in the tradition of '60s and '70s R&B, and all of the later pop music that bent it out of shape.
But though this is all new for Beirut, the charm of the well-chiseled, simplistic grooves is modest, and Condon's strong melodic voice is not always there to create a through line. It floats on top of everything like a decorative descant, which can sometimes be taken or left. The two-minute "At Once" pairs an irresolute, maddeningly cyclical four-chord piano progression with a melody that is mostly just one note, and vocals are eschewed entirely on "As Needed" (which sounds like we are hearing only the backing track for a "Surfs Up"-like Smile outtake). It's sometimes easy to wonder what, exactly, Condon was going for when committing so fiercely to such lightly sketched ideas.
The answer would seem to be mood, or simply his own pleasure; Condon's own comments articulated how fun the process of making the album was. The greatest joy, however, seems to have occurred when these ideas were germinating, not being formalized and committed to wax. On midtempo flotsam like "Pacheco", or even the slightly awkward title track, the passion seems to have already been wrung out of the song. The best tracks are the most uptempo and groove-locked: moments where Condon's initial excitement seems to have seeped into his melodies. The clearest examples are "Gibraltar" and "Perth", with their syncopated guitar rhythms.
No No No may sound ineffectual after a cursory listen, but it reveals some subtle pleasures if you keep it in rotation. Even potentially soporific moments like closer "So Allowed", with its borderline West Side Story-quoting chorus, are ultimately pleasant, and even poignant. But it lacks the melodic heft out of which Beirut briefly built an empire, and doesn't demonstrate Condon searching for something else to fill that void. While it definitely unifies itself around and gains some affective power from sounding unfinished, it still sounds it.


The consistently excellent and consistently underrated experimental hip-hop duo's dense compositions layer scores of tiny components into woozy, disorienting symphonies of noise.

Abandoned Language

Record stores might file albums from this Newark duo in the hip-hop section, and the group might talk a good game about Rakim and EPMD and slather its CD booklets in graffiti graphics, but Dälek aren't really a rap group; it's more accurate to call them an industrial-shoegaze IDM group that sometimes raps. Even way-out exploratory underground rap albums like Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein tend to foreground voices and drums in the mix; in Dälek's music, there's no foreground at all. The voice of MC/producer Dälek (this is one of those confusing groups where the name of the duo is also the name of a dude in the duo) burbles up half-obscured from the thick, heady mix, ghostly in the way it suddenly appears and vanishes while shifting, heaving masses of drums, strings, guitars, and synths scream and flare and buckle around it. And so the actual rapping is only one element in the group's dense compositions, which layer scores of tiny components into woozy, disorienting symphonies of noise. So it's not a huge surprise that most of the group's support comes from the noise and metal undergrounds; they're more likely to tour with Isis or the Melvins than with, say, Aesop Rock. On playlists, they sound better next to Current 93 or Scott Walker than Sean Price or Rich Boy. It's not that rap doesn't have room for maverick explorers like these guys; it's that the group's explorations have led them to actively repudiate nearly all of rap's defining characteristics. They've opted out of the race and into something else.
The duo's last album, 2005's Absence, was an hour of ugly, discordant squalls, and it was still somehow the most accessible thing they'd ever made. On Abandoned Language, though, Dälek's impulses tend more toward the contemplative than the assaultive, but they're still as queasy and indistinct as ever. The opening title track is an ambitious, 10-minute sprawl that piles layer upon layer of synth and string on top of an anemic drum-track and a disconsolately muttered vocal. The duo allows Dälek's voice to push closer to the top of the mix than usual, but it remains incomprehensible as often as not. And really, that's fine, since Dälek's lyrics are mostly free-associative backpacker gobbledygook that only occasionally cohere into nice little snatches of language. The point of this stuff, after all, is the seismic drift of the composition; with three minutes left to go, the vocals drop out altogether, and a buzzing swarm of multitracked violins take their place. For a minute, chaos overwhelms the track, but then it coasts back into a pretty but uneasy swamp of warm Rhodes tones and sad, slow drums.
The rest of the album follows that opening track's blueprint, pitting glowing warmth against scraping noise and usually letting warmth win. On "Paragraphs Relentless", a constant bass-creak and an insistent sonar blip from guest DJ Rob Swift ooze gorgeously. Near the end of "Content to Play Villain", the synths and drums suddenly vanish and give way to a pretty jazz-horn collage. The scratched-in strings and moaning organs of "Tarnished" imply melody without ever quite letting it take shape. And occasionally seasick noise wins out, as on the beatless, shrieking instrumental "Lynch," but even then the end result is more ambient and organic than it's been on the group's older records.
If Dälek didn't have all this discordant float working for them, they'd be one of the most irritating rap groups in history. Their drum tracks never venture beyond simplistic, skeletal thuds. Dälek's delivery is a half-asleep mumble, and his lyrics tend toward joyless Dead Prez agitation and stodgy old-man battle-rap full of complaints about how kids today don't understand what rap really is. But the duo is smart enough not to let that text-heavy frustration overwhelm everything else. Instead, they've drowned it in oceans of sound, and for the first time, that sound has moved toward something approaching beauty. On Abandoned Language, Dälek have done something with rap similar to what their old collaborator Justin Broadrick has been doing with metal in Jesu; they've melted it into an infinity of reverb and revealed an abyss of sadness. It's too easy to say that Dälek make rap for people who hate rap; it's more that they make rap for people who hate everything.


Indulgent, sprawling, overflowing with ideas and excess, the White Album became not only a monument to unbridled creativity but a rock archetype.

The Beatles

In his review of the Beatles' 1963 LP debut, Please Please Me, Tom Ewing pointed out that whether or not you consider them to be the best band of the rock'n'roll era, they certainly have the quintessential pop band story. Everything they did is deeply embedded in rock's DNA, and the band's offhand and ad-hoc gestures have long been established parts of pop music mythology. And of the Beatles' albums, none-- not even Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band-- rivals The Beatles as a rock archetype. The phrase, "It's like their White Album"-- applied to records like Prince's Sign o' the Times, Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade, the Clash's Sandinista!, and Pavement's Wowee Zowee, among many others-- has long been accepted critical shorthand. To use the expression is to conjure a familiar cluster of associations: The work in question is large and sprawling, overflowing with ideas but also with indulgences, and filled with a hugely variable array of material, some of which might sound great one day and silly the next. A band's White Album is also most likely assembled under a time of great stress, often resulting in an artistic peak but one that nonetheless scatters clues to its creator's eventual demise.
The Beatles, the band's complex and wide-ranging double album from 1968, is all of these things. It's a glorious and flawed mess, and its failings are as essential to its character as its triumphs. People love this album not because every song is a masterpiece, but because even the throwaways have their place. Even so, for the Beatles, being all over the place was a sign of trouble. The disintegration of the group as one "thing" is reflected in every aspect of the record, from its recording history (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison sometimes worked in separate studios on their own songs) to its production (generally spare and tending to shapeshift from one song to the next) to the arrangements of the songs (which tend to emphasize the solo voice above all). Visual changes were also apparent. Until The Beatles, the group's album artwork tended to depict the band as a unit: same haircuts, same jackets, same costumes, same artist's rendering. But The Beatles was packaged with separate individual color photos of John, Paul, George and Ringo, and they now appear almost forebodingly distinct. All of a sudden, the Beatles neither looked nor sounded like a monolith. So soon after Pepper and the death of manager Brian Epstein in 1967, the writing was on the wall.
But the backstory of The Beatles, while fascinating, is inessential to the album's appeal. Yes, they wrote most of it in India on acoustic guitar, while on a pilgrimage of sorts in early 1968 to see the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Some of Lennon's songs, including "Sexy Sadie" and "Dear Prudence", are based directly on the group's disillusioning experiences there. But it's the spectral, floating mood of "Prudence" and Lennon's playful, faintly condescending vocal in "Sadie" that stay with you. And while we know that Lennon's new love, Yoko Ono, was a regular presence during the session, much to the rest of the band's chagrin (McCartney has claimed that she would sometimes sit on his bass amp during a take, and he'd have to ask her to scoot over to adjust the volume), and that her influence on him led to the tape collage "Revolution 9", the more important detail is the final one, that the biggest pop band in the world exposed millions of fans to a really great and certainly frightening piece of avant-garde art.
In one sense, "Revolution 9" almost seems like The Beatles in microcosm: audacious, repetitive, silly, and intermittently dull, but also pulsing with life. If the individual Beatles hadn't been on such a songwriting roll during this time or if the album hadn't been sequenced and edited so well, The Beatles could easily have been an overlong slog, a Let It Be x2, say. But somehow, almost in spite of itself, it flows. The iffy jokes ("Rocky Raccoon", "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill", "Piggies") and genre exercises (Lennon's aggro "Yer Blues", McCartney's pre-war pop confection "Honey Pie") are enjoyable, even without knowing that another gem is lurking around the next corner.
If The Beatles feels more like a collection of songs by solo artists, they've also each got more going on than we'd realized. John is even more hilarious than we'd imagined, wanting nothing more than to puncture the Beatles' myth ("Glass Onion"), but he's also displaying a disconcerting willingness to deal with painful autobiography in a direct way ("Julia"). Paul's getting disarmingly soft and fluffy ("Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da", "I Will"), while simultaneously writing the roughest, rawest tunes in his Beatles oeuvre ("Back in the U.S.S.R.", "Helter Skelter"). George is finding a better way to channel his new Eastern-influenced spiritual concerns into a rock context, while his songwriting toolkit continues to expand ("While My Guitar Gently Weeps", "Long Long Long"). And even Ringo Starr writes a decent song, a country & western number with weirdly thick and heavy production ("Don't Pass Me By"). Listening as the tracks scroll by, there's a constant feeling of discovery.
But ultimately, the thing about this record is that the Beatles sound human on it. You feel like you're really getting to know them, just as they're starting to get to know themselves. Their amazing run between the latter part of 1965 through 1967 made them seem like a band apart, infallible musical geniuses always looking for another boundary to break. Here, they fail, and pretty often, too. But by allowing for that, they somehow achieve more. White Albums come when you surrender to inspiration: you're feeling so much, so intensely, that you're not sure what it all means, and you know you'll never be able to squeeze it all in.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]


Sharing its title with a John Kennedy Toole novel, the Arcade Fire's second album is markedly different from its more cloistered predecessor: On *Neon Bible*, the band looks outward instead of inward, their concerns more worldly than familial, and their sound more malevolent than cathartic. Angry, embittered, and paranoid, but often generously empathetic in their points of view, they target the government, the church, the military, the entertainment industry, and even the basest instincts of the common man.

While the group's us-against-the-world stance occasionally comes off as slightly self-righteous or reactionary, their scathingly critical perspective gives weight and direction to their

Neon Bible

Sharing its title with a John Kennedy Toole novel, the Arcade Fire's second album is markedly different from its more cloistered predecessor: On Neon Bible, the band looks outward instead of inward, their concerns more worldly than familial, and their sound more malevolent than cathartic. Angry, embittered, and paranoid, but often generously empathetic in their points of view, they target the government, the church, the military, the entertainment industry, and even the basest instincts of the common man.
While the group's us-against-the-world stance occasionally comes off as slightly self-righteous or reactionary, their scathingly critical perspective gives weight and direction to their nervy earnestness: If Funeral captured the enormity of personal pain, Neon Bible sounds large enough to take on the whole world. This is evident on the album's incantatory opener, "Black Mirror", whose title derives from a centuries-old device that supposedly foretold future events and allowed viewers supernatural insight the hearts of men. Here, the band holds that mirror up to the world and captures a malevolent reflection.
Fitting Neon Bible's more worldly concerns, the Arcade Fire have streamlined the raw, large sound of Funeral into something that achieves the same magnitudinous scale through more economical means. Propelled by inventive guitar work and Jeremy Gara's steady drums, the group pares back anything that might curb the controlled forward thrust of songs like "Black Mirror", "Keep the Car Running", or "The Well and the Lighthouse". These songs don't erupt, but gradually crescendo and intensify. Unlike the cathartic Funeral, Neon Bible operates on spring-loaded tension and measured release. As such, it could strike some listeners as a disappointing follow-up, but the record's mix of newfound discipline and passion will likely imbue it with a long shelf-life.
On most songs, the Arcade Fire achieve a headlong forward motion, bolstered by immense church organs and Calexico horns that underscore the angst of Butler's bitter, accusatory lyrics. Perhaps the most noticeable (and promising) development in the band's sound is the more prominent role of Régine Chassagne. If she once sounded studied or mannered, here her angelic soprano projects a tentative hopefulness, making her a capable foil for Win Butler's tense performance. Her contributions to "(Antichrist Television Blues)" and "Black Wave" sound like the vocal equivalent of her soaring string arrangements, co-written with Owen Pallet of Final Fantasy.
These changes aren't drastic, but they are significant, especially as they reveal new and interesting touchstones for the band's aesthetic. The influences most commonly associated with Funeral were Davids Byrne and Bowie, but on Neon Bible, it's Bruce Springsteen who appears not only in the wordy songs and aggressive shuffle, but in the compression of so many styles and sounds into one messy, exciting burst. "Ocean of Noise" shuffles furtively on a shoreline samba, due largely to Tim Kingsbury's bassline, while "Bad Vibrations", sung by Chassagne, blends girl-group and new wave performances into a darkly enticing whole. The band never compartmentalizes these styles or consigns them to separate songs, but allows them to blend freely.
Although they've expanded their sound, the Arcade Fire's transition into extroversion isn't always smooth or graceful. Neon Bible is full of clunky lyrics, revealing Butler's tendency to overstate and sensationalize. His rhyme schemes are sometimes too deliberate and set-- and no one should be allowed to use the sort of faux-antiquated sentence construction that pops up in lines like "I fell into the water black." "Black Mirror" features one of the record's worst offenders: "Mirror mirror on the wall/ Show me where them bombs will fall." Butler's words, however, have always carried less meaning than the way he sings them and the sound in which his band envelops them, so whenever a line falls flat on Neon Bible, the music, always hurtling forward, picks it up and carries it along.
Like many indie artists, the Arcade Fire work best in the album format, and Neon Bible runs on a different-- and in some ways more finely tuned-- mechanical system than its predecessor. It's a shapely work, gracefully building to fall away to build again, as the band sustains a mood that's both ominous and exhilarating. Even "No Cars Go", which originally appeared on their self-titled debut EP, sounds more powerful here than it did in its previous incarnation. As stand-alone tracks, these songs don't make as much sense, which partly explains why those early leaks were so uninspiring. The danger here is inaccessibility: There's only one natural entry point to Neon Bible, and it's "Black Mirror". Everything afterwards flows seamlessly from that song's low rumble and startling imagery-- until the final track.
Venturing into the lyrical realm of Trent Reznor, album closer "My Body Is a Cage" seems too eager to wallow in the sort of pained melodrama that fuels the band's detractors. The real disappointment is that Neon Bible doesn't end with "No Cars Go", which easily achieves the release they artfully promise but playfully deny throughout the record's first nine tracks. Not only would it have ended the album on a more generous note, it would have made perfect thematic sense as a final invitation to escape.
But despite their conflictedness , the Arcade Fire remain firmly rooted in the here and now. And even as press coverage and fan obsession suggest that the world is making a place for them, the band is still looking for a way to understand that world, and to see it for what it really is-- or at least as it appears in the distorted mirror they hold to it.


With his chilly vocals, minimalist beats, and conditions of the heart, the Atlanta singer finds a groove but has little to say about human relations outside of his own self-important quagmire.

East Atlanta Love Letter

Do you remember the Weeknd? I’m not talking about the neon-painted Starboy seen collecting Grammys from Ariana Grande, jumping on collaborations with Ed Sheeran, whose songs are parodied by Stevie Wonder. I mean the strange figure who emerged in the early sparks of this century with a dazzling set of cold-as-ice mixtapes that desperately depicted post-breakup anxiety, lurid sexual rendezvous, and drug-exacerbated paranoia. This faceless apparition resided in a cracked and debauched world. That Abel Tesfaye parlayed this gnarled form into a legitimate pop star was genuinely shocking. This unlikely success has been a big factor in turning a microgenre like alt-R&B into commercial paydirt, and has allowed an artist like 6LACK—with his chilly vocals, minimalist beats, and conditions of the heart—to ink a deal with Interscope and ride the stainless-steel sounds of songs like “PRBLMS” to double-platinum status.
So where does Ricardo Valentine fit in the alt-R&B canon? The first lines of “Unfair,” the opening track from his second album East Atlanta Love Letter, summarize his ethos: “Hope my mistakes don’t make me less of a man/But lately it feel like them shits really can,” he sings in his downbeat, slightly grainy tone. In 6LACK’s mind, hookups on tour are terrible, painful things. Women are saboteurs of his brittle emotions. He treats every speck of feeling that flickers through his wide-open chest cavity as worthy of a song but lacks the lateral thinking, poetic nuance, or sense of irony to pull this off. There’s only so much of his male feelings you can tolerate when, with all sincerity, 6LACK is unleashing lines like, “Fuck me like you’re about to lose your place to the girl next door,” from “Loaded Gun.” The song goes on to compare, not for the last time on East Atlanta Love Letter, his dick to a lethal weapon, as though an inability to control himself inevitably leads to brutal consequences. There’s no humor in this delivery—either you take 6LACK seriously or you don’t take him at all. Endlessly brooding about his own delicate feelings, the Atlanta star has little to say about human relations outside of his own self-important quagmire.
So we get songs like “Let Her Go,” where 6LACK paints “groupies” (his word) as untrustworthy and a source of conflict between him and his lover. “Disconnect” depicts the blow-by-blow of a break-up, the singer failing to draw listeners in with simplistic prose like, “I think we had enough/Like, I can’t hear you/I’m falling out of love.” The personal “Nonchalant” could have been his version of Drake’s “Say What’s Real”—an early Drizzy confessional that mixed naked emotion with star-making bragaddocio—but the surly verses only vaguely cover his process, post-fame issues, and haters in ways that cut about as deeply as a wooden spoon.
Underpinning 6LACK’s musings are a pristine set of foil-packed beats, all rasping drum machines and ambient synths. By far the most impressive song on East Atlanta Love Letter is the title track. Future is a canonical draft pick for someone trying to make a ATL street record with pop overtones yet this creeping piece of modern soul noir is untypical of Nayvadius’ usual dynamism as he and 6LACK whisper over doomed piano keys and very little else. The simple melody and corny lyrics on closer “Stan,” meanwhile, brings a goofy humility missing from the rest of the project.
The purest pop song is “Switch,” the one track that can pass for uptempo and boasts a hook that sticks. A few more fun moments like this would have helped keep the record moving. Yet even “Switch” comes with a bar like, “If I find out you cheating me, just know that/I’ma kill you and that ho, ain't no going back.” It’s like 6LACK can’t help himself.
At its best and bleakest, alt-R&B can make you feel like Max Payne, beaten and bloodied, functioning only on a heavy supply of painkillers. The Weeknd won making music like this because he went all in, pulling us into his druggy, self-hating world with scintillating sonics, captivating performance, and words that really popped. 6LACK instead traps listeners within the four walls of his drab hotel room, exposing us to his joyless, low-energy meditations that don’t capture relationships or the human experience in any kind of meaningful way.