Reinforcing the melancholy aspect of her work, this dark 44-track anthology of work by pioneering British electronic composer Daphne Oram draws from over 400 tapes she left behind after her death in 2003.

The Oram Tapes, Vol. 1

Like Léon Theremin, an electro-acoustic pioneer and inventor whom the Soviets put to work developing surveillance technology, Daphne Oram seems like a star-crossed figure-- a visionary tripped up by circumstance and, perhaps, her own eccentricities. But a new anthology of Oram's work, drawn from over 400 tapes she left behind after her death in 2003, helps illuminate the depth and breadth of her legacy, suggesting her career as a kind of parallel history to electronic music's dominant narratives.
Oram's idiosyncratic methods and eccentric pursuits suggest the classic profile of the "outsider" artist, but she spent much of her career deep inside the system. When she was just 18, in 1943, Oram found work as a studio engineer at the BBC. Her official duties there were often unglamorous, but she took advantage of the studio to pursue her own experiments with magnetic tape and tone generators. The BBC's resources were actually quite meager, at least compared to the studios in European cities like Paris and Cologne, but Oram was resourceful: one story has her gathering all the BBC's tape machines together and working through the night on an electro-acoustic composition, then dismantling the array and putting its components back in their proper places before work the next morning.
Magnetic tape was a relatively recent medium, and electronic sound generation was still in its infancy, but Oram already grasped their enormous artistic potential. As she wrote in her 1972 book An Individual Note: Music, Sound, and Electronics, "In my work I am not concerned with synthesizing orchestral sounds-- we have excellent orchestras for making those sounds. My interest is in making new sounds which are musical." In 1957, she recorded the first all-electronic composition to be played on the BBC, and in 1958, she finally received funding to open an electronic-music studio, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Oram and her bosses had very different ideas about its purpose. She had imagined a research facility on par with the electronic-music studio at Cologne's NWDR or the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrete at Paris' RTF, but the BBC was less interested in avant-garde composition than sound effects and background music, regarding the Radiophonic Workshop-- so named to appease the musicians' union and other music departments at the BBC-- as a kind of sci-fi Foley studio. (Indeed, today, the Radiophonic Workshop is best known for the music and sound effects it produced for Doctor Who.) After just one year, Oram left the BBC, setting up her studio in a house in Kent.
There, she pursued a range of work, both personal and commissioned, including sound effects for Jack Clayton's 1961 film The Innocents and various television commercials. The commissions, combined with a research grant, helped fund her main project: a home-built apparatus called the Oramics Machine, a combination synthesizer and sequencer that generated sound waves by "reading" hand-painted film strips with a reverse-engineered oscilloscope.
It looked like a gigantic Meccano contraption, and it was, by all accounts, a tremendously complicated device. What's more, it was a perpetual work in progress, under constant modification; only Oram and the engineers she employed really understood it. It's unclear when she stopped using the machine. By the late 1980s, she told an interviewer that she had moved onto working with computers, although she remained intent upon designing a system to read hand-drawn inputs. She suffered a series of strokes in the 1990s, and she died in 2003. The Oramics Machine was left gathering cobwebs in Tower Folly, which fell into ruin.
The Oramics Machine was recently restored for the London Science Museum's exhibition Oramics to Electronica: Revealing Histories of Electronic Music, coinciding with a growing re-appreciation of her work. But no matter how much biographical detail comes to light, Oram and her work remain shrouded in mystery.
This first volume of The Oram Tapes, compiled from a trove of over 400 tapes held by Goldsmiths College, reinforces that impression. Where 2007's Oramics 2xCD set brought together the quixotic warbles of her Oramics compositions with quirky genre studies and commercial commissions-- sound effects, advertisements for Lego and power tools-- this release emphasizes her darker, more minimalist and abstract sounds.
Across 44 tracks, the album is by turns hypnotic and jarring, veering from sinewy drones, suggestive of Kevin Drumm, to pieces that sound like icicles being cleared from the eaves of a wind-chime factory. The prevailing mood is dank and claustrophobic, however, fogged with clammy reverb and bristling with strange clicks and alien voices.
It sounds as futuristic as it did then, but don't expect hi-fi: despite mastering by renowned Berlin's Dubplates & Mastering facility, the audio can be murky. It's not hard to believe that the original tapes lay moldering in a box for years before their restoration. But that sense of decay actually contributes to the emotional resonance of the music. There's a veiled quality to much of it, and a sense that there's so much more there than meets the ear, as frequencies melt into the ether.
The anthology is thin on data; few of the tracks have dates attached, and there's little information on what Oram was using to make a particular piece-- or even why. Experiments with pulse and delay rub up against musical sketches, spoken descriptions, even a recording of a baby's birth. Two tracks titled "2001 Effects Tape" were presumably intended as submissions to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It all raises the question of how much of this Oram intended as music, and how much the tracks are simply fragments of her work, sketches torn from a notebook. But the compilers have made the most of the jumbled source material. In the liner notes, they write, "As most of the tapes in the archive contain limited factual information, descriptions or dates, a chronological assessment of Oram's work was impossible to present. It is for this reason that we chose to arrange the tracklisting with an emotional narrative in mind, as albums are often sequenced."
They've succeeded here. Purely as a listening experience, it's wonderful. I've had it playing on nearly constant repeat during days of below-freezing temperatures in Berlin, and there are times when I can't decide if the music is the perfect complement to the climate or vice versa. It's both gripping and distracting, fading into the background and then jumping back out at you. In the few segments where Oram speaks, detailing her craft, it feels less like an archival document than a kind of relic, a spectral emanation. Recalling the early belief in the phonograph as a spirit medium, and keeping in mind Oram's own esoteric interests-- she began An Individual Note by suggesting that "memory, music and magnetism will lead us towards meta-physics"-- only reinforces the idea that there's something truly auratic humming in the grooves.
In an Invisibile Jukebox feature in The Wire, People Like Us' Vicki Bennett said of Oram, "A lot of her music has got a melancholy to it. It's like a sad machine that exists on its own planet and just sings to itself." That likely has something to do with the way that Oram was tuned to her own, unique frequency, resonating at a pitch inaudible to few others in her time. The Oram Tapes reinforces the melancholy aspect of her work, but it also offers a kind of solace, drawing her planet closer to ours, and finally finding an audience for her one-of-a-kind music.


The L.A.-based, Pennsylvania-bred outsider pop artist Michael Stasis mines the sun-bleached sounds of '70s AM radio for inspiration, weaving in a pre-industrial grind and psychedelic guitar work. RIP III is the third in a series of compilation albums, all of which draw from Stasis' home recordings, cassette releases, and other ephemera.

RIP III

Michael Stasis has jokes. On the L.A.-based, Pennsylvania-bred artist's new album RIP III,  you'll hear the cult '90s kids show "Land of the Lost"'s theme music interpolated as "Land of the Goths" and the sky described as "green, like Mountain Dew." Like Ariel Pink, with whom he's often compared, Stasis mines the sun-bleached sounds of '70s AM radio for inspiration, while also weaving Martin Rev's pre-industrial grind and Cleaners From Venus' psychedelic guitar work into his tapestry of outsider pop. He used to be involved in a band called Snowboarder while living in the Bay Area, but told an interviewer he'd only snowboarded once. He's the type of artist fans will try to one-up each other with where-they-heard-him-firsts as they attempt to accurately retrace a career that's brought Stasis from Philly to New York to the West Coast.
That said, those fans would barely fill a Highland Park living room. Not only is Michael Stasis not particularly famous, he's essentially unknown outside a small subset of the California DIY scene. That leaves RIP III in the difficult position of serving as both a de-facto debut and a greatest hits collection for an artist with precisely zero "hits." As it turns out, RIP III is actually the third in a series of compilation albums, all of which draw from Stasis' home recordings, cassette releases, and other ephemera. III, however, has the unique distinction of being the first Stasis album released via Arbutus, the Montreal label that has served as a launchpad for alt-pop heavyweights Grimes and Majical Cloudz and remains home to underground faves like Sean Nicholas Savage and Tonstartssbandht.
Fortunately for Stasis, RIP III shows not only that he deserves the larger audience, but that it's a surprise he's stayed under the radar so long. "The Necklace" is a love song whose haunting, hummable chorus is darker and weirder than first appears. "This I'll hang on you," Stasis sings, irony saturating each drawn-out syllable, the twist being that what Stasis has to give is both a gift and a curse. Another parallel between Ariel Pink is Stasis' friendship with Jorge Elbrecht, known for having helped shaped some of the past decade's best experimental pop. Though RIP III is mostly self-recorded, Stasis' production, especially on songs like "The Necklace" and "Little Devil", hews close to Elbrecht's pillowy aesthetic. "Brown Cow", a track that appears to have no deeper meaning than describing a literal cow in a field, has a motorik groove that hits like Wilco's "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" if you listened to it at a Club Med on mushrooms. That the effect is charming, rather than just confusing, is a testament to Stasis' ability to sell even his strangest left turns.
As one might expect from an album recorded under varying circumstances and in different places, RIP III has radical changes in sound and production quality from track to track. It's not an exaggeration to say that, without some background info, you might not recognize that it's the same dude behind all these songs. "Crushed", for instance, is a bit of rollicking '60s surf rock that slams headlong into "All the Ways", a wobbly slow-burner that recalls Wolf Parade. "Surface Area", on the other hand, is a foray into Magnetic Fields' territory that's surprisingly affecting and totally unlike anything else on the rest of the record.
Though disjointed, RIP III's eclecticism is part of its charm. Rather than coming off as haphazard, the album has the feeling of surfing between public access channels with a one-hitter at hand. Nothing in particular unites the images, but a singular mood blankets the activity. The danger for Stasis is that his more satirical side will overshadow his skill as a songwriter, or, worse, that he'll be seen as a dilettante without a clearly-defined aesthetic of his own. But if playlists are indeed becoming as important as albums, RIP III shows that an individual songwriter can contain the same multitudes. On album opener and highlight "Venus of Soap", the chorus, huge and ecstatic, repeats the phrase "I'll just laugh it off." For Stasis, it's a mantra. But the joke's on us if we do the same.


Unlike many of their contemporaries, this Unknown Mortal Orchestra-associated Portland dream-pop trio aren't out to deconstruct 1980s pop so much as dutifully replicate its essence.

Blouse

I often return to this line from Simon Reynolds' Retromania: "Unlike digital formats, analogue degrades through overuse: each listener kills the sound she loves." There's a certain comfort in that kind of reciprocity, and anyone who's ever accidentally reset the listening history on their iTunes library and felt like they'd wiped a part of their identity clean is familiar with the digital world's maddening indifference to our affection. With that observation, Reynolds hits on the unifying and fundamentally human allure of chillwave, lo-fi, smear-pop, and any other kind of contemporary music that makes a conscious choice in an Auto-Tuned world to sound less than pristine. It's music trying to approximate the grubby, hopelessly destructive way we love books, records, and each other.
Like a pre-owned Delorean or a Berlin cassette slowly decaying in the bargain bin, Portland trio Blouse's self-titled debut comes to us sounding like it's already been colored by somebody else's use. Though it's got an unabashedly Reagan-era sound, it's the record's almost pathological obsession with the past that places it so squarely in the now. Any of its 10 tracks could sit comfortably on pretty much anyone's 2010s playlist: it broods like a lower-fi version of Charli XCX's Cold War-tinged tunes, it beams through cloudy dark like John Maus' murky pop, and it even boasts a song called "Videotapes" on which the synths sound like warping videotapes.
And yet, Blouse amounts to something more evocative and suggestive than trendy pastiche. There's one obvious reason: Some of these songs are just really that good. "Into Black" strikes the right balance of lush atmosphere and driving force, while the mid-tempo "Controller" evokes an austere cool. It's album opener "Firestarter", though, that best expresses the young band's manifesto, introducing them as a dream-pop group intent on razing the roof. "Let's forget the ceiling," vocalist Charlie Hilton beckons beguilingly over a wash of twinkling synths, "It's just made of stone."
Hilton's voice is breathy and commanding though not terribly distinct-- think Victoria Legrand channeling Trish Keenan minus a bit of je ne sais quoi. The propellant at the heart of Blouse is bassist Jacob Portrait, who also plays with Portland psych-poppers Unknown Mortal Orchestra: His steady pulse gives the songs just enough oomph to keep them from getting lost in their own gloom. Unlike many of their contemporaries, Blouse aren't out to deconstruct 1980s pop so much as dutifully replicate its essence. It's an easy thing to do wrong, but Blouse find success by not overreaching their grasp. It's beside the point to fault a record like this for not being innovative; by the end of this stretch of songs, there's something almost noble about their poker-faced commitment to time travel.
There are a few moments when all the backward glancing becomes a bit heavy-handed, but in their most inspired moments, Blouse find the connection between the limits of outdated technology and the terrible bliss of desiring something impermanent. (In one song Hilton's idea of fun is watching a lone blackbird perched on a telephone wire, "Just long enough to notice when he flies away/ Because he always flies away.") Blouse aren't just nostalgic for the golden years of MTV pop, but for an entire way of interacting with the world-- for the romance of a time when some things still felt out of reach. "Videotapes" finds Hilton longing to see the face of her perennially camera-shy lover. "What it would be like to see you again," she croons, wishing she had a videotape to remind her. That this sentiment feels like such an anachronism in a culture satiated by instant gratification only makes the track more heartbreaking. Blouse harkens back to love in the time before GPS to mine an enduring truth of pop music: getting lost has always sounded good.


On the synth-rock project’s fifth album, the stakes feel higher, with new fatherhood and the perilous state of the world inspiring searching introspection and dramatic gestures.

Brighter Wounds

Like Spencer Krug and Sufjan Stevens, Ryan Lott, who’s helmed the synth-rock project Son Lux for the past decade, is the kind of songwriter who can turn the most intimate moments sweeping and majestic. His albums treat crisp, minuscule detail with cinematic grandeur. Lott, a classically-trained composer, has scored several films, and it’s not hard to imagine any one of Son Lux’s recent songs soundtracking the trailer to an upcoming blockbuster. Brighter Wounds, Son Lux’s fifth LP and second since guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang entered the fold, has loftier ambitions than Lott’s prior work. It’s not the first time Son Lux have kept one eye trained on the state of the world, but it is the first time the stakes have felt quite this high.
“Is this the future standing over me?” Lott asks through muffling vocal effects in the first minute of the opening track, “Forty Screams,” singing darkly of seeds and “sour blooms.” Like many Americans over the past year and a half, he’s had to reckon with his share of responsibility for the condition of the country as it stands. Lott also recently had his first child, whose birth has pointed his wary eye toward the future. “I hear the future voice of my son every day: ‘Why did you let this happen?’,” Lott said in a 2017 interview. If the world is intolerable for Lott (“I can’t bear another day like this,” he repeats on “Forty Screams”), how can he expect his child to become part of it?
Brighter Wounds frames these questions with gorgeous instrumental bursts that lift Lott’s vocals to a desperate breaking point. Acoustic instruments like piano and strings ballast the synthesized chirps, squiggles, and vocal effects that have long detailed Son Lux’s music. Songs often follow predictable structures only to break from them at the last second, turning a false ending into a thrilling coda. There’s a moment toward the end of “Dream State” where a torrent of voices and synthesizers falls away, leaving only Lott against a drum beat, and he breaks into falsetto—not the coy, reticent kind that textures Bon Iver’s music, but a genuine shattered gasp. It sounds as though Lott has been punched in the diaphragm yet still needs to scream. It’s the only time on the album he uses that particular voice, and its deployment helps turn “Dream State” from a standard-issue radio-rock anthem (it makes abundant use of the millennial whoop, not to mention the kind of drums Imagine Dragons might want to steal) to a startling portrait of brokenness and fear.
To survive the present, Lott has to reckon with the past. “I am not my father’s son/I don’t belong to anyone,” he muses over a nervous breakbeat on “Surrounded,” and on “All Directions,” that million-voiced chorus asks, “Weren’t we beautiful once?” Throughout Brighter Wounds, Son Lux resist the idea that each moment is merely the sum total of all the moments preceding it. They do this in a formal sense, pivoting their songs with the grace and melodrama of an Olympic figure skater, and in their lyrics, making a declaration of something you might call faith. On the album’s climactic closing song, “Resurrection,” over towering drum crashes and whirlwinds of strings, Lott sings of the failure of both “silence and protest.” So he scours himself for a third option: something he can’t name yet, but can only begin, with wonder and curiosity and courage, to trace.


Hatchie's platonic ideal of dream pop goes down a bit too easy, like another rewatch of a John Hughes film.

Keepsake

Shoegaze offers the perfect place to bury bad feelings; there is a storied legacy of groups like Slowdive and Mazzy Star sinking Tory conservatism and post-breakup remorse into hazy swirls of distortion. Harriette Pilbeam uses Hatchie as an outlet for more quotidian concerns — friendships, romances, nostalgia. On her EP Sugar & Spice, Pilbeam offered glassy guitars, long sighs, and some bright choruses, but there was nothing darker beneath the surface to reward your close, ongoing attention. She promised a broader palette for her debut, but Keepsake feels hemmed in by the same lack of depth. Pillbeam's platonic ideal of dream pop goes down a bit too easy, like another rewatch of a John Hughes film.
“Not That Kind” opens Keepsake with the same buzzing synthesizers and metallic guitars that made Sugar & Spice such a potent nostalgia trip. By the time the same patterns repeat on “Her Own Heart,” and again, slower, on “Kiss the Stars,” Keepsake begins to drag. Even “Stay With Me,” pitched as an electro-pop escape from the guitar-heavy record, sounds more like a Revlon commercial than anything memorable enough to spin at the party featured in its music video. In a vacuum, each of these tracks is inoffensive but forgettable. Taken together, they are much less than the sum of their parts.
For an artist so laser-focused on pop production, Pilbeam’s songwriting is unapologetically sophomoric. Romance is either predestined in stars and magic (“Just as long as you keep me under your spell just a little longer,” she sings on “When I Get Out”) or painfully banal (“Just for a while, let’s reconcile,” she suggests on “Secret”). And as on her breakout single “Try,” the smallest efforts seem to mean the most: “Give it a try,” she repeats on the chorus of “Unwanted Guest.” At the very least, the platitudes provide a canvas of long vowels and deep sighs tailor-made for Pilbeam’s breathy vocals.
Album closer “Keep” sticks out as the most successful riff on a preset formula. After a surprisingly upbeat intro propelled forward by rubbery synths, it builds in layers; by the time the vocals come in, mixed low, the song resembles a fresh take on the early Flying Nun catalog. Keepsake is an album filled with small, inspired moments like this, but they don’t add up to much. Sugary but hollow, Keepsake melts like cotton candy, dissolving on impact.

Buy: Rough Trade / Vinyl Me, Please
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Madonna’s 14th album feels stretched thin all over the globe, layered with an ambitious concept that ends up muddled and convoluted.

Madame X

There is a case to be made for classifying Madonna, in 2019, as an underdog. Granted, it requires overlooking the superstar’s grotesque wealth and enduring ability to command some sort of an audience with every public move. But her status as a pop star has degraded considerably in the last 15 years. Whereas they once inspired awe, or at least controversy, her live televised appearances of late tend to yield mockery. Her days of hit-making seem long behind her. Her last album, 2015’s Rebel Heart, was a mess with more tracks and less to say than any Madonna record that preceded it. Apathy ensued.
It seems that Madonna, once queen of pop and enforcer of the regimentation that comes with that, is no longer controlling her narrative. This was never more evident than in her denouncement of a recent New York Times Magazine profile by journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis, who Madonna dragged in an Instagram post for focusing on “trivial and superficial matters” such as her age. “It makes me feel raped,” wrote Madonna, echoing a contentious comment she made to Grigoriadis about her reaction to several Rebel Heart tracks leaking months before she had completed the album.
The magazine perhaps leaned too heavily into the age thing—the article, after all, was titled “Madonna at Sixty.” But of course Madonna’s age is relevant to her current story because it reminds us that her career path has always been one of uncharted territory. Today, the question is what does a veteran who redefined pop stardom for decades do in her 60s?
Even she doesn’t seem sure on her muddled 14th album, Madame X. Convoluted in sound and concept, it is intended as a means for both dissociation and the reaffirmation of Madonna’s multitudes. “Madame X” was a nickname given to her at 19 by her dance instructor, the legendary Martha Graham. “That was in the beginning of my career when I didn’t think about who I should be or what I should be,” Madonna told Billboard in May. In recent press, her wariness of public scrutiny after almost four decades of stardom is palpable: “I preferred life before phone,” she told Grigoriadis regarding the internet’s consistently shabby treatment of her. You can see why she yearns for a clean slate. Hear her pining in the opening lines of Madame X’s first single, “Medellín”: “I took a pill and had a dream/I went back to my 17th year.”
At the same time, Madame X is a secret agent, a dancer, a professor, a head of state, a nun, a housekeeper, and several other things, according to Madonna’s video announcement of the album. Later, she clarified: “I embody all of those people but then I also use those people to the extreme in the form of Madame X as a disguise to do my work.” Excepting the specific eccentricities here (such as referring to Madame X in the third person on Twitter and the fashion eye patch), the Madame X concept is the most recent example of a marketing trope in which divas use real nick- and middle names to thematically signal that they are revealing more sides of themselves than they previously allowed (see: Mariah Carey’s Mimi, Janet Jackson’s Damita Jo, and Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce). Needless to say, these exercises are rarely illuminating even when the accompanying music is good.
It’s a lot of puffery for business as usual—so much that it’s tempting to give Madonna a pass for trying. Madonna and her collaborators (chiefly Mirwais who co-helmed much of 2000’s Music and 2003’s underrated American Life) recorded in several different countries, marrying genres as disparate as Portuguese fado, baile funk, Cape Verdean batuque, and good old American trap to make a literal, at times clinical, rendering of world music. Madonna’s astonishing work ethic is written all over her voice: she raps, she sing-raps, she sings (in English, Spanish, and Portuguese). She has crafted a motif of did-they-or-didn’t-they sexual intrigue to accompany two collaborations with hunky Colombian superstar Maluma. Madonna and company have produced the shit out of virtually every notion here.
But blatant ambition has an unfortunate way of accentuating failure. In what could be most charitably described as delirious exuberance, many of Madame X’s songs trip all over themselves to change course and offer something new every few seconds for the attention-span deficient. Consequently, they often fall flat as an adolescent’s self-conscious contrivances of weirdness—the 808 gloom of “Dark Ballet” gives way to an interpolation of Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker Suite: Dance of the Reed-Flutes” done in the heavily synthesized style of Wendy Carlos’ score for A Clockwork Orange. It is horrendous. On “God Control,” Madonna’s mumble-rap intro begets a creepy children’s chorus, which begets ersatz disco whose strings are in perpetual flights of fancy, which begets Madonna affecting a cheesy I’m Breathless-era accent to rap about not smoking dope using the meter of De La Soul’s “Me, Myself & I.” Oh, and the song’s theme is roughly: “something…something…gun control.” This is supposed to be fun, but it’s exhausting.
Thematically, there are some vague references to civil unrest and social justice, but for the most part, Madame X is lyrically inarticulate. The grave “Killers Who Are Partying” opens with some unintentional comedy: Madonna referring to gay people as “the gay” (“I will be gay, if the gay are burned”) as if they’re elk or something. Over a shivering fado acoustic guitar and light four-on-the-floor pulse, she aligns herself with a litany of persecuted identities—people of Africa, Muslims, Israel, children—to gesture empathy without an iota of practicality. “I will be poor, if the poor are humiliated,” she sings. But no, she won’t. The poor are humiliated, and she will be wealthy for the rest of her life. The only functional implication here is to remind us of Madonna’s benevolence—the only thing this song actually expresses is an image.
Meanwhile, “Future,” begins with the line, “You ain’t woke.” Madonna sings this over a dubby Diplo beat as Quavo weaves in and out of her lines for punctuation (and eventually delivers one of his all-time least inspired verses). Madonna warbles through Auto-Tune and adopts a contemporary hip-hop posture that ends up just sounding like a flat sort of honking out of her nose. It’s not so much that she’s riffing on hip-hop that’s the problem (we’re not going to solve appropriation with one Madonna album, especially when it’s rampant); it’s that she’s being smarmy as she does it.
And look: Madonna’s always gonna Madonna. She’s always going to put her twist on culture to which she has no legitimate claim. From her first record’s dabbling in post-disco boogie to voguing to new jack swing to her Eastern philosophy-and-fashion period to revolutionary posturing to trying on Timbaland’s and Pharell’s space-age takes on R&B: Sharks bite, Madonna appropriates. Her pop exists to exploit and sand off edges, packaging esotericism for the masses. It’s just that on Madame X, she is not merely dining out on other cultures; she’s whipping around drive-thrus. Perhaps some find this sort of pretense charming, as she plays peek-a-boo with a tabla on “Extreme Occident,” describing globetrotting, feeling lost, not being lost, and then resolving that, well: “Life is a circle.” But it seems absurd to grade a superstar on a curve and to forgive her hackneyed attempts at depth simply because of who she is.
There’s a distinct tension between Madame X’s idiosyncrasies and its commercial aspirations. The best-case scenario for striking the balance is the first single “Medellín,” a sugary reggaeton cocktail shared with Maluma. The song’s beat slowly fades in and intensifies, like a great idea. But not enough of these songs are good enough to justify overlooking their imperialism, and the ones that are—the rickety, triplet-drunk “Come Alive” and “I Don’t Search I Find,” a loosely structured workout with chunky ’90s house percussion that sounds like it was ripped from The Rain Tapes—aren’t quite as extreme in their cultural pilfering. The worst-case scenario is “Crave,” a mid-tempo trap ballad with Swae Lee that sounds like a naked attempt to score Madonna her own “We Belong Together.” The singing is flat as a denial, and the lyrics are all tell, no show: “My cravings get dangerous,” Madonna warns without even the smallest sense of danger in the vicinity besides falling asleep at the wheel. What is she even talking about?
If you’ve cared about Madonna in the past, but aren’t currently viewing her through rose-colored standom, she presents an exhausting challenge: Rooting for her when you know she has done (and probably could do) better. At her height, Madonna was a great persuader who could convince you of her dominion over whatever she took on. But as her career stretches on and she finds herself in the position of niche artist, her large-scale projects have the one-way intimacy of a rich friend who drags you with her to a boutique and makes you watch her try on clothes that will sit in the back of her closet for the few months before they’re donated. Life is short; aren’t we all getting a little too old for this?


On her second album, the California singer and songwriter pulls in references and sounds from everywhere and shapes them into music that's both haunting and life-affirming.

Ekstasis

"I hear a lot of music that's just lazy-- you know, people in their bedrooms singing some shit into the microphone." That's California singer and songwriter Julia Holter, talking to Pitchfork recently. This passage from the interview leapt out at me because it gets at what makes her second full-length album special. Like a lot of home-recorded music in the indie sphere in the last few years, Ekstasis makes heavy use of atmosphere. There's plenty of reverb and vocal tracks are braided together into drones; it's the kind of swirly production that's good for hiding mistakes. But nothing Holter does feels random. This album is above all careful, and its deliberate construction allows it to work on a different plane from most music that scans as "ethereal." Ekstasis is not the sort of oceanic wash you lose yourself in; instead, Holter's music has a way of snapping tiny moments and small sonic gestures into focus. Ekstasis is above all smart, and it makes no apologies for it.
Holter's work exists at the intersection between pop and "serious" music. The mayor of that particular corner is Laurie Anderson, and there are obvious parallels between the two. You can hear Anderson in Holter's flat, chant-like inflection, which allows her music and lyrics to do the emotional work. You can also hear it in her love of simplicity and approach to mixing traditional instrumentation and electronics. Another touchstone is the dark magic of Klaus Nomi. It's not just that the tracks like "Fur Felix" bear a similarity to Nomi tracks like "Keys of Life", there's also an undercurrent of ritualism and theatricality in Holter's music. Ekstasis is certainly mysterious, but not because meaning is hard to pin down; it's more that there are so many possible meanings, so many places to focus your attention.
Listening to Ekstasis, I keep thinking about how it differs from music that feels superficially similar. The music of Julianna Barwick, for example, has liturgical overtones, bringing to mind stone and glass and voices rising in cathedrals. Barwick wants to tap into something beyond words. But Holter's music sounds like it was assembled in a dusty library a floor or two below the sanctuary. It's a few shades darker, but it's also based on ideas first and intuition second. Despite using vocoders, drum machines, and electronics, it feels "old" in part because Holter so deliberately connects her music to the distant past. On her debut album, she did so by basing her songs on a play from ancient Greece by Euripides; here, she pulls words and scenarios from literature and mixes them with her own idiosyncratic approach to words. The songs include quotes from the likes of Virginia Woolf and Frank O'Hara. A line from O'Hara's poem "Having a Coke With You"-- "I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world"-- animates "Moni Mon Ami", nestled amid the twinkling synths, strings, and keyboards that sound like harpsichord are original lines like "Hours become years when you're gone!"
Where Holter's Tragedy felt more like a tapestry, with vocal tracks mixed in with instrumental bits and interludes, Ekstasis leans toward proper songs, and it palette is more uniform. "In the Same Room", despite its chintzy drum machine and mechanized hand-claps, is actually a drama unfolding in close quarters. "In this very room, we spent the day and looked over antiquities. Don't you remember?" to which the other character replies, "Do I know you? I can't recall this face but I want to." You see it play out on paper on the lyric sheet and it feels like a linear exchange, but Holter twists the voices together and the narrative folds in on itself. It's there as pure, gorgeous sound if you want it-- you don't need to know what the songs are about to immerse yourself in this record-- but the deeper you go, the more the songs open up.
"I can see you but my eyes are not allowed to cry..." is a lyric from "Goddess Eyes", a new version of a song that appeared on Tragedy. It's a line from the Euripides play that inspired her first album, and it's delivered in processed voice reminiscent of a vocoder. So we have a 2,000-year old phrase run through a device that makes a human sound like a 1970s version of the robots of the future. And at the center of all this time travel stands Julia Holter, pulling in references and sounds from everywhere and shaping them into a music that's both haunting and life-affirming, something to make you dream and think.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a hard-rock colossus, one of the heaviest and bleakest albums to come out of the early ’90s Seattle scene.

Dirt

A few weeks after the notorious 1985 Parents Music Resource Center hearings, where the so-called “porn rock” lyrics of musicians like W.A.S.P., Prince, and Cyndi Lauper were debated before a Senate committee, the Seattle talk show “Town Meeting” devoted an episode to the issue of “obscene” pop lyrics. At one point, the host gave the floor to an 18-year-old audience member named Layne Staley, who at the time was fronting a local glam-metal band called Sleze, and offered a personal take on the manufactured controversy. “Our lyrics are all positive—we don’t use bad language or sing about drugs and sex,” he said, “but I just want the freedom to write about what I want.” Wearing blue-tinted aviators with his hair teased several inches above his head—the glam-metal look of the moment—Staley wasn’t nearly as high-profile as Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, but his brief take echoed Snider’s PMRC testimony. They were both participating in a heated cultural moment when it felt like pop music was under direct threat of censorship by an ascendant cadre of cultural conservatives.
Five years and a handful of band changes later, Staley’s first hit single with Alice in Chains stuck to that topic. The lyrics to “Man in the Box” came to Staley after dining with some vegetarian Columbia Records executives who explained how veal was derived from calves raised in tiny enclosures. “So I went home and wrote about government censorship and eating meat as seen through the eyes of a doomed calf,” Staley explained. The explosive chorus may have been the most attention-grabbing part of the song, but that core riff was a novel moment in hard rock–Staley’s acidic yawp doubling guitarist Jerry Cantrell’s serpentine melody to conjure the pained moan of a beaten creature.
There was nothing quite like “Man in the Box” on the radio or MTV at the time. Director Paul Rachman set the song’s video at an abandoned farmhouse and shot it with a low-budget art-horror vibe that distinguished it from its Headbangers Ball contemporaries. Though Cantrell looked very much the metal guitarist—long straight hair, shirtless under a leather jacket—Staley’s ratty blond dreads, goatee, and sad-eyed gaze didn’t fit neatly into any genre. It was eye- and-ear-catching enough for MTV to grant the video its prized “Buzz Bin” designation, concocted a few years earlier to grant “next big thing” status to lesser-known or genre-agnostic artists. By mid-1991, Alice in Chains weren’t just a promising new metal band, but had been programmed into the nascent “alternative” landscape populated by fellow Buzz-worthy acts like EMF, Jesus Jones, and P.M. Dawn.
It's become a standard part of the grunge origin story that “Man in the Box” was the first national hit to come from the region that would soon re-define American music and popular culture in its own image. While Seattle-area bands Screaming Trees, Mother Love Bone, and Soundgarden had already garnered national interest, Alice in Chains were the first Buzz Bin band to sport flannel on MTV, introducing the world to the guttural grunge yowl that Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder would soon come to personify. At the same time, Alice in Chains never really thought of themselves as a “Seattle band,” however ill-defined that term was, and their first national tours for their debut LP, Facelift, predictably came on some ill-fitting bills. They weren’t nearly metal enough for the fans of godheads Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax, who threw all manner of shit at the band during their opening set; they weren’t pop enough for Van Halen fans, whom Staley constantly trolled during Alice’s opening slot on the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge tour.
On 1992’s Dirt, such distinctions failed to matter much anymore. The band merged Seattle scuzz, the vestiges of pop-metal, and Staley’s limitless self-loathing into a hard-rock colossus. The title itself says it all: Dirt is, on one hand, the most elemental album of the grunge era, tackling the big questions with bluesy and Biblical seriousness: a busted dam, a rainstorm, a flood, a big old pile of them bones. For dirt thou art, And unto dirt shalt thou return. It’s also an album about feeling like dirt, and knowing that others see you that way. Dirt is by and for a dispossessed generation who came of age in the shadow of Vietnam, amid skyrocketing divorce rates, hard drugs, and an ever-widening gap between the haves and have-nots. All this time, they swore they’d never be like their old man. “There’s a growing group of people in the States that just don’t feel a part of stuff,” Cantrell said in 1993. “They feel outside, they don't want in on the Dream. They want out, man, out. And our music is a very small part of that.”
Staley puts it more bluntly on “Junkhead”: “But we are an elite race of our own/The stoners, junkies and freaks.” And with Dirt, a collection of grimy bummer jams, pungent riffs, glowering shock rock, and a handful of hard rock’s most enduring ballads, he gave them their scripture. The album rightfully made Alice in Chains one of the most famous bands in the world, and revealed them as one of the most gifted, capable of shifting from the B movie jump-scare screams of “Them Bones” to the poignant hesher existentialism of “I’d like to fly/But my wings have been so denied,” from “Down in a Hole.” It’s not for the faint of heart, either: Dirt is one of the most unremittingly bleak albums ever released by a major label. As they toured it through arenas and amphitheaters, tens of millions of fans were listening—and screaming along—to Staley plumbing the depths and torment of his heroin addiction.
A painfully fragile rock frontman if there ever were one, Staley was crushed by the death of Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood from a heroin overdose. Chris Cornell recalled to grunge historian Mark Yarm that Staley made a heartbreakingly dramatic entry at Wood’s wake: “Layne flew in, completely breaking down and crying so deeply that he looked truly frightened and lost.” A year or so later, in the klieg lights of post-“Box” stardom, Staley started using. “One of my ways of dealing with the success was to get really high,” he told a reporter. “I didn’t know how to deal with it. I’ve never been really good with people and crowds—going out and meeting a hundred people and shaking hands makes me nervous. So I started fuckin’ around with heavier things.”
While Cornell paired with Wood’s erstwhile bandmates to pour his grief into the Temple of the Dog ballad “Say Hello 2 Heaven,” Alice in Chains took a different tack on their own homage. Director Cameron Crowe was directing the Seattle-set film Singles at the time, and he sent the band into the studio to record a soundtrack cut. Along with jamming out some acoustic songs that would be packaged together on the Sap EP, they recorded “Would?”, which sounded like Jane’s Addiction’s shamanistic psych-rock soundtracking a biker rally, and would become the best track on the soundtrack. Over a slithery, dark-glam groove from bassist Mike Starr and drummer Sean Kinney, Cantrell’s enigmatic and suggestive incantations set up Staley to explode on the chorus. Far from an encomium for his lost friend, Staley, himself in the throes of addiction, screams the song to its conclusion with what amounts to a tantalizing, terrifying warning: If he succumbed to the temptations of heroin addiction, could you?
In the early 1990s, a lot of people were doing just that. Heroin was more potent than ever—by one measure, its purity had jumped from 4% in the mid-1980s to 65% in the early 1990s, an increase that made the drug far more seductive to the curious. Seattle was hit especially hard, with heroin and morphine-related emergency room visits more than doubling between 1988 and 1994. Kurt Cobain famously struggled with addiction up to his death; Mark Lanegan nearly had an arm amputated because it was so infected; Stefanie Sargent of 7 Year Bitch died from an overdose the summer before Dirt came out. But in popular culture, heroin wasn’t treated as a public health crisis as much as a sardonic part of the local color. Current Sub Pop CEO Megan Jasper framed her first visit to the city in the late 1980s with appropriate irony: “Welcome to Seattle: mountain climbers and heroin addicts.” A November 1992 Times story claimed that grunge was “inspired and tempered by that city's three principal drugs: espresso, beer, and heroin.”
Heroin had been a dependable rock star muse and subcultural cautionary tale since Lou Reed chronicled its instantaneous and confusing euphoria on a song that quickly became a live favorite—and which Reed often accompanied with a performative demonstration of tying off and fixing. Yet despite a cultural canon of twentysomething icons dying from heroin overdoses—Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious, Darby Crash, Jean-Michel Basquiat—rock culture tended to mordantly focus on the survivors. Thus: the ubiquitous dad jokes about Keith Richards’ dauntless dependence, The Onion begging a past-its-prime Aerosmith to get back on the smack, and the late-life resurgence of the original “unredeemed drug addict” William Burroughs, who cameoed in Gus Van Sant’s 1989 heroin-themed film Drugstore Cowboy and recorded a one-off with Kurt Cobain a few days before Dirt hit stores. Most dismal was the irony-pilled early ’90s kickstarting the morbid “heroin chic” fashion trend, epitomized by Calvin Klein’s early-1990s “Obsession” campaign featuring ultra-thin, expressionless model Kate Moss.
After a failed trip to rehab at the same clinic where Andrew Wood stayed, Staley quit cold turkey to start work on what would become Dirt. Unlike contemporaneous bands who used the drug as a vehicle for tasteful remorse, painful autobiography, or wink-wink wordplay, Staley eschewed subtext or sarcasm in lieu of a frightening carnival ride straight into the terrifying depths of smack-induced panic and despair. Dirt’s most successful heroin songs illustrate the drug’s ghastly effects by dramatically fluctuating between sonic and emotional extremes. On “Sickman,” Staley’s maniacal verses are underpinned with a wild stereo-panned drum loop which—cued by a delirious Staley scream—spirals down into a depressive waltz-time dirge for the chorus: “Ah, what’s the difference, I’ll die/In this sick world of mine.” In concert, like Reed, Staley would jab his arm with the microphone while performing. On “God Smack,” Staley chews the scenery in full grunge-Nosferatu drag, and “Angry Chair” ping-pongs between murky dope-fiend paranoia and a breezy “I don’t mind, yeah” refrain that comes in out of nowhere, sounding like the brave public face of an otherwise miserable addict. “Hate to Feel” contains the most depressing couplet about the descent into addiction: “Used to be curious/Now the shit’s sustenance.”
Dirt is quite a tough hang, nowhere so much as the mid-album back-to-back paeans to pain. Staley is still buried in his own shit, and things seem to be getting worse. “Junkhead” is a simultaneous ode to heroin and a sneering dismissal of the normies who’ll never know the truth. The refrain—“What’s my drug of choice?/Well, what have you got?/I don’t go broke/And I do it a lot”—is frighteningly celebratory, delivered like a valedictory address from a newly minted 25-year-old rock star who’s reached the absolute apex of fame-fueled addiction. The title track follows like a depressive solo come-down in the hotel after the show, with Staley doubling Cantrell’s opium-den riffs with that same ghoulish moan. They concoct a disconsolate psychedelic requiem, like Sabbath in Prozac Nation. Even in the “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die” moment of hard-rock self-loathing, the second verse of “Dirt” is chilling: “I want you to scrape me from the walls/And go crazy/Like you’ve made me.”
The obvious precursors here are Ozzy Osbourne’s “Suicide Solution” and Judas Priest’s “Better By You, Better Than Me”—both of which led to unsuccessful lawsuits from grieving parents of children who died by suicide. But maybe a better comparison is the Geto Boys’ 1990 track “Mind of a Lunatic,” a hyper-detailed gore-fest of murder and mental illness that its own record label initially refused to distribute. Indeed, as Seattle joined Black Los Angeles as the music scene-spectacle du jour, “Junkhead” and “Dirt” sketched a white outlaw icon to join the “gangsta” in the public imagination. But where the Geto Boys and N.W.A. rooted their provocations in a radical, if occasionally contradictory racial politics, the desperate, vengeful addict of Dirt pushes his body and mind to the edge of the abyss mainly to scare the squares. When, on “Junkhead,” Staley—a 25-year-old heroin addict with the keys to the kingdom—pits his “elite race” of dirtbag freaks against the workaday sheep of mainstream America who would do better to tune in, turn on, and tie off, it felt an adolescent taunt, not a liberatory offer.
Dirt’s centerpiece is a much more mature work about surviving a different kind of hell on earth—the catastrophic, decade-plus slog that killed millions and created a generation of emotionally devastated heroin addicts. But “Rooster” provides a complicated response to the rest of the album, because unlike Staley’s characters, he ain’t gonna die. “Rooster” was the nickname of Cantrell’s estranged father Jerry Sr., who served multiple combat tours in Vietnam and, unable to reacclimate to civilian life, left his son with his grandmother and mother (who died within six months of each other when Cantrell was 21). “Rooster” is a masterpiece, featuring Staley’s most impassioned vocal, Cantrell’s best riffs, and the group’s best harmonies. Cantrell’s mordant counterpoint to Staley’s yearning growl on the chorus has not lost an ounce of its potency, and the pair’s wordless, cooing introduction achieves a soulful solemnity all but invisible from hard rock of the era.
Columbia pulled out all the stops for the video, hiring Mark Pellington—fresh from directing Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy”—to oversee a clip that merged documentary interviews with war spectacle. Inspired by Platoon, edited by the guy who cut JFK, and overseen by Oliver Stone’s military consultant, the “Rooster” video is a minor epic. One of the great hard-rock ballads, “Rooster” dramatically broadens the scope of Dirt and brings its themes into greater focus. It’s an album about hard drugs and depression, but it’s also about men trapped in terrifying conditions beyond their control and trying to negotiate their doom through sheer bravado, if not self-delusion—which, of course, are often one and the same. Cantrell has said that the song acted as a bridge to reconcile with his father after decades apart, and on an album that’s otherwise obsessed with misery, “Rooster” is the lone ray of light breaking through the tightly closed curtains.
In 1993, music journalist Ann Powers caught up with Alice in Chains on the Dirt tour and found a group wandering the wilderness. The show she attends is a mess—Staley and bassist Starr are wasted and miss their cues—and she sees a band on the verge of collapse. “They’re like the kids in Lord of the Flies, stranded in strange territory with no clear rules of conduct,” Powers observed. “They’re trying to survive, but they’re eating themselves alive.” Soon, the band would fire Starr for increasingly erratic behavior, before spending the year touring the world, including a co-headlining slot on the 1993 Lollapalooza tour. Exhausted, they quickly recorded Jar of Flies, which sounded more like Zeppelin III than Master of Reality; nonetheless, it became the first EP to debut at the top of the Billboard album chart. But Staley’s heroin addiction never disappeared for long, and the band was forced to drop out of an opening slot for Metallica the next year, as well as the Woodstock ’94 bill.
Apart from the band’s self-titled third LP—which also debuted at the top of the album chart in 1995—Staley’s last recordings were subdued affairs. He provided lead vocals on Above, the underrated, jazz-inflected LP from the Mad Season “supergroup,” and displayed his increasingly frail appearance on the band’s MTV Unplugged set the next year. The band decided not to tour for the self-titled album, and after their fourth show opening for Kiss in 1996, Staley was hospitalized for an overdose. Soon after, his longtime girlfriend died of complications from her own drug abuse. The band went on indefinite hiatus, and Staley disappeared.
While Dirt was solidifying itself as a modern rock standard, a crop of lesser Alice-influenced bands were rising up the charts, and “heroin chic” was falling out of fashion, Staley was wasting away in isolation. When he was found dead in his Seattle apartment in 2002, Staley’s body had been decomposing for two weeks. It made for a morbid, but superficial grace note in his numerous obituaries: This was the man, after all, who was known primarily for vividly documenting his addiction and depression on an album that sold four million copies a decade before.
But that’s also far too simple and cruel an explanation. When he was 18, Staley, like so many other aspiring rock stars, wanted the freedom to write about what he wanted, how he wanted. As his fame increased, and his addiction and isolation deepened, he started using his music to shock, but also to build a bridge into his world. In this light, “Would?” is a far more accurate depiction of Staley’s drive to draw others into his personal darkness. “Try to see it once my way,” he pleaded, both a provocative dare to the squeamish and an invitation to keep him company, for as long as you could.


The Fayetteville rapper’s debut album is at its best when he shines a light on his darkest moments and traces his glow-up step-by-step, imbuing each word with purpose.

Street Sermons

For North Carolina rapper Morray, music is an audible beacon of light. He first started singing in church at four years old and took to rapping years later after briefly moving from Fayetteville, North Carolina to Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Being kicked out of school for fighting led him to the streets and, eventually, back to the comfort of music. His first recorded song was a birthday post to his wife on Facebook in 2014, which proved to be his gateway to a serious music career. After six years of fine-tuning, his voice had become a precise instrument, one with the power of a gospel singer and the melodic finesse of a rapper.
On his debut project Street Sermons, that voice is complemented by a story both personal and universal. The album’s lead single “Quicksand” pairs Morray’s rapid-fire delivery with tales about his time in the streets, full of close-call shootings and desperation, and elevates the narrative with trills that breach the surface of Hagan and Ant Chamberlin’s warm production like a shark’s fin. The song’s ethos—the struggle is real, but it doesn’t have to last forever—turns out to be a worthy thesis for an artist who’s gone from penning hit singles in his bathroom to co-signs from fellow North Carolinian J. Cole. Street Sermons is at its best when Morray shines a light on his darkest moments and traces his glow-up step-by-step. And even when he occasionally wades into generic territory, his vocals imbue each word with dimension and purpose.
Morray’s good-natured approach to his newfound fortune is infectious: “Smile, nigga. Enjoy your bag because your good is right the fuck there,” he recently told Genius’s For The Record about the project’s intent. At first glance, there’s little separating him from Rod Wave, another crooner whose music blurs the tear-soaked lines between rap and the blues. But where Wave’s perspective usually lands on the glass-half-empty side, Morray’s point-of-view is the inverse: the glass isn’t only half-full—he can see the bottle containing his salvation. “Trenches” uses an anecdote about five friends sharing a bottle of liquor and a bag of weed to highlight how a strong community can make the darkness of hood living bearable.
When Morray does have to leave the comforts of home, it’s to support his family. On “Reflections,” he sings of buying his daughter a birthday cake using an EBT card during a bout of homelessness and remembers trying—and failing—to kill someone for profit. Even when he’s afraid of losing his grip on reality, his will pushes him to be a bard for his relatives and himself. “Been there, did this, did that, nigga/I seen so much pain,” he belts on the song’s hook.
What makes Street Sermons largely so engaging is Morray’s voice. It’s a gritty tone that doesn’t sound strained as he leaps from mid to high range with frightening ease. His breathless performances on songs like “Kingdom” and “Big Decisions” give equal dimension to the pains and triumphs that color his world. It even energizes the handful of otherwise rote songs peppered throughout the project. Street Sermons only stumbles when Morray drifts from the personal touch of his best songs into message-mongering. The anthem “That’s On God” and the chest-puffing kiss-offs “Facade” and “Real Ones” feel like the down sections of a rousing speech from a streetwise deacon. When the stories falter, though, Morray’s voice carries them to the end, every word an edict delivered from a mountaintop.
Morray has expressed concerns about his earlier music sounding too much like Drake and Chris Brown. While he’s found a unique, compelling voice on Street Sermons, the shifts away from his hopeful perspective tug at the seams of what’s otherwise a solid project—especially for a debut. Rap in 2021 is no stranger to sadness, which means anyone pushing back against the tide with positive vibes will only stand out more aggressively.

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With a few catchy singles, the demonstratively upbeat L.A. trio's first album dares you to categorize them, assess them, or even engage with them.

Torches

"You say, 'Now what's your style and who do you listen to?'" Mark Foster sings on Foster the People's first album, before adding defiantly, "Who cares?" Later, he punctuates "Call It What You Want" with the declaration, "What I got can't be bought." With just a few catchy singles and a reputation for energetic live shows, this L.A. trio already sounds defensive and cagey, as if bristling from some imagined attack. We've heard their sort of scene dissection before, mostly from younger bands entering a fractious pop arena (Arctic Monkeys, for instance), but Foster the People-- at distinct odds with their nurturing moniker-- seem to be daring you to categorize them, assess them, or, hell, even engage with them. By way of introduction, it's a bit off-putting, especially soundtracked by demonstratively upbeat West Coast indie-pop buzzed on disco-infused vodka.
Once you get past the genre paranoia, Torches actually has enough going for it that Foster the People could conceivably make those same points through their music rather than their lyrics. The songs dodge and weave stylistically, avoiding perceived critical jabs by scavenging pop history for new old sounds. Foster's falsetto alternately evokes Jamiroquai and Mercury Rev's Jonathan Donahue-- surely the only overlap between those two performers-- while his keyboards volley between early-90s radio dance pop and more recent MGMT doodles. Foster the People's proud maximalism also extends cannily to their songwriting. Foster can write a chorus so bold and simple that you can hear it once and sing it for a fortnight, a tactic that has already made minor hits of "Helena Beat" and "Pumped Up Kicks" (the latter of which promotes hipster-on-hipster violence).
Particularly hoisted onto such dense production, the hooks are so big, blunt, and persistent that even my four-year-old niece counts Foster the People as her favorite band. But on Torches that plays as a crutch as well as a strength. For example, the band runs a two-line melody into the ground on "I Would Do Anything for You", never building on it or allowing it to evolve in any way. Still, when this earworm-core works, as on the singles, its pleasures are perfectly modest and enthralling. All of which makes the group's dodginess only more distracting-- no less so considering their rapid successes: a major-label deal, a Billboard top 10 debut, a coveted slot at Lollapalooza, and the devotion of at least one fan who prefers them over the Wiggles or Odd Future. Listing those accomplishments may strike Foster the People as an accusation of selling out, but seriously, relax. As the song that's wedged into my cerebellum goes, "Who cares?"


On their second LP, the New Zealand indie rockers downshift into a muted, sleeker sound, sacrificing some of the energy that made their debut special.

Jump Rope Gazers

The Beths’ exhilarating 2018 debut, Future Me Hates Me, was paced like a perfect basement show. Even the slow burners accelerated into overdrive, with singer and guitarist Elizabeth Stokes’ wry, self-aware lyrics serving as perfect shout-along fodder. The two-year wait for their follow up has felt like hanging around for a very late encore, and in the opening minutes of Jump Rope Gazers, you’d be forgiven for thinking those ecstatic and restless Beths are back. On “I’m Not Getting Excited,” Stokes repeats the song’s title as the music tells a very different story—a guitar solo ascends and the tension cranks tighter until the song explodes. But it doesn’t last long: that kinetic energy falls off a cliff by the third track and never really comes back.
Instead, Jump Rope Gazers presents a sleeker, slower, more muted version of the band. The title track is a romantic ballad reminiscent of sentimental ‘90s and ’00s megahits like Sixpence None The Richer’s “Kiss Me” and Lifehouse’s “Hanging By A Moment.” It’s a novel and welcome departure for the band, but by the overly polished pop production of “Do You Want Me Now” and emo seriousness in “Out of Sight,” the novelty wears off and the album loses cohesion. The Beths might want to show their vulnerable side,  but they were plenty vulnerable and musically diverse on Future Me Hates Me. The issue is that they do so on Jump Rope Gazers at the expense of their consistency and typically unbreakable tightness. Where FMHM pushed forward, Gazers simply ambles.
The songs are enlivened by stacked harmonies and girl-group-inspired call-and-response chants, breathing life and memorable hooks into songs that crave them. Those slaloming vocal lines, taking strange side paths to their harmonic resolutions,  are a reminder that The Beths met while studying jazz at the University of Auckland, and at their most complex, the vocals suggest a hybrid of pop-punk and Motown.
Stokes’ neurotic lyrics have always made singing along with Beths songs that much more satisfying, and on Jump Rope Gazers, those details are still given room to shine. “I wish that I could wish you well,” she sings on “Mars, the God of War.” “Instead I’m hitting my head/And hitting backspace on ‘Can’t you just go to hell’.” Stokes has always presented her inner monologues in their most unvarnished form, and she’s in fine form here: “I’ve never been the dramatic type/But if I don’t see your face tonight / I… well I guess I’ll be fine,” she sings on “Jump Rope Gazers.” While these tidbits keep the sense of fun in The Beths’ music, they aren’t enough to fully invigorate their second album among the more sluggish songs. They’re mostly a reminder of what’s missing.

Buy: Rough Trade
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A fifth reissue of a 30-year old album needs something remarkable to make fans bite, and EMI promised just that for this edition of ABBA's risk-taking final record, which hosts their first piece of unreleased material since 1994, along with a set of uniformly terrific bonus tracks.

The Visitors [Deluxe Edition]

A fifth reissue of a 30-year old album needs something remarkable to make fans bite, and EMI promised just that for The Visitors-- ABBA's final album would now host their first piece of unreleased material since 1994. The Swedish pop goliaths have been quietly protective of their legacy over the last three decades-- no reunions and tight archival control-- so the new song made headlines. Would "From a Twinkling Star to a Passing Angel" be an unreleased gem or a justly forgotten offcut?
Actually, it's neither; instead, it's a good argument as to why exactly there's nothing left in the vaults. The twee-est title in ABBA's, and possibly pop's history, hides a fascinating, carefully arranged montage showing the group's craftsmanlike side. They take album closer "Like an Angel Passing Through My Room" from its birth as a re-arrangement of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" to its release as a twilit meditation on mortality. None of the many versions-- disco, nursery rhyme, strings-attached-- are as good as the final release. The medley seems designed to show both ABBA's punctilious approach to getting a track right, and their good judgement in knowing when they'd managed it. Even as the band's commercial star faded and its professional relationships quietly unravelled, they were perfectionists.
ABBA's music on The Visitors is more pristine and ambitious than it had ever been, its themes darker, its personal politics more tangled. Both of the band's couples had divorced, but the men were still writing lyrics for the women to sing-- meaning it's easy to see a cruel edge in tracks like "One of Us", in which a woman regrets her new independence over a typically gorgeous melody. All of this has made The Visitors a perennial critic's favorite. It's the record on which the wintry melancholy of "late ABBA"-- whose sadness had bubbled under their music almost from the start-- could finally dominate.
But things are never quite so simple. The original nine tracks that make up The Visitors are no less uneven than any ABBA full-length; in fact, the weakest songs are a snapshot of their foibles as a group. They had a long dalliance with musical theatre-- the pomp-pop fantasia "I Let the Music Speak" is their last and most bloated attempt. "Two for the Price of One"-- a hokey story of a failed threesome-- calls back to their earliest, goofiest records. "Slipping Through My Fingers", about the impotence of watching your kids grow up, is a great example of how the group had come to pitch records at adults, but in execution it's pure schmaltz.
The highs, though, are astonishing. The title track is a snapshot of life in a totalitarian state, full of justified paranoia and exhausted fatalism: "I hear the doorbell ring" it begins matter-of-factly "and suddenly the panic takes me." The music lurches between seasick synth-pop and nervous disco flourishes, with Frida Lyngstad's raga-infuenced vocals rolling uneasily on top. It's five years and a musical lifetime since this band sung "Dum Dum Diddle", but for all its distance from ABBA's traditional sound, "The Visitors" never gives up on catchiness. This is grown-up, risk-taking pop, but always pop nonetheless.
The same goes for the record's other strong songs-- the ghostly "Like an Angel Passing Through My Room", the cryptic "Soldiers", the wise and sympathetic "When All Is Said and Done". Aurally, too, the group was never better: The Visitors is deliciously crisp, layered, and rewarding where a lot of contemporary synth-pop now sounds rather thin. Some of the band's latter-day weaknesses have been ironed out-- their rather awkward relationship with disco, for instance. Their "disco LP," Voulez-Vous, was marked by a noticeable stiffness: By the time of The Visitors ABBA hadn't got any funkier, but they had learned to use their unyielding rhythms creatively, turning their dance-pop into something intriguingly angular and staccato on "I Am the City" and "You Owe Me One".
Those songs are both included on the reissue as bonus tracks-- indeed The Visitors' set of bonus material is uniformly terrific, turning a fine album into a great one. "Cassandra", like "The Visitors", is a cryptic sketch of unspecified political disaster, given devastating dignity by Frida's measured vocals. "Under Attack" and "I Am the City" are clockwork jewel boxes of hooks. "Should I Laugh or Cry", a puncturing of a pompous husband and dead marriage, takes all the spite of their famous divorce songs and turns it back on the men to wounding effect. And-- leaving out "From a Twinkling Star"'s exercise in archaeology-- The Visitors ends with career highlight "The Day Before You Came", Agnetha singing a woman's hesitant reconstruction of the day before she met someone we assume is her lover. The details are banal, but Agnetha makes them live anyway, and they're contrasted by keening backing vocals of such dread that it's been speculated the song's "You" is killer, not partner.
"The Day Before You Came" is, on paper, a happier song than "The Visitors", but it shares its themes with much of the album: Life is unstable, happiness may be fleeting, and your world can be instantly and forever overturned. These are strong, resonant ideas to end a career on, and this is an excellent way to finish-- a band and a record divided between almost throwaway studio mastery and spectral, uneasy premonitions of their own demise.


On a new shared EP, '90s G-funk legend DJ Quik and Problem, a rapper a generation younger, find a breezy, lazy rhythm together.

Rosecrans

DJ Quik and Problem have been sporadic collaborators for years, but news of a shared EP called *Rosecrans *arrived as a relative surprise. Quik, the '90s G-funk legend who continues making some of the best music of his career well into his 40s, has been quiet since his last album, The Midnight Life, was released in 2014. Over the same time period Problem, a generation younger than Quik but from the same city, has released a handful of mixtapes pining after the commercial peak he reached in 2013 with a single called "Like Whaaat." At six songs, the duo's breezes by as a loosely fitting tribute to a shared hometown.
"Y’all know what Rosecrans is, it’s a long ass avenue that go from the beach to the streets," DJ Quik says coolly on the first song, describing the famous Compton throughway that the EP could soundtrack a drive down on a lazy day. *Rosecrans *was co-produced by Quik and Problem together but it’s the veteran’s genius that shines through in the music. For decades Quik has injected an anything-can-be-funky sensibility into his catalog and into hip-hop more generally, but his legend rests also on an understated musicality that he provides himself and enlists in session instrumentalists. He makes smart music that’s easy to listen to, both clinical and warm at once.
Problem is a practiced and stylish-enough rapper, and he’s noticeably channelled better in short verses here than you’d find on an aimlessly sprawling mixtape. He also seems to have corralled many of the EP’s seven guests. Wiz Khalifa drops in as a mostly forgettable cameo on "This Is Your Moment," which trades the EP’s frequent live bass for a bottom end programmed for the club, alongside a young and far happier-to-be-here Compton rapper named Buddy. The first verse on the album belongs to Game, who has made a career of reminding listeners he’s from Compton and that he knows a bunch of rappers. He does both here with a word-cloud-like verse that checks off self-implicating references to Dre, Drake, Bompton, and Chuck Taylor’s. Bad Lucc sneaks in on "Take It Off One Time," a skippable track that sounds like a contemporary-R&B grab Problem brought to the table and Quik tweaked to his liking.
Rosecrans features a pair of instrumentalists that also appeared on Quik’s last album and are billed here alongside the man himself as a trio called SuperDave. (They’re all named David.) David Forman’s bass is both fat and nimble on the shimmering opening title track, while David "Preach" Balfour finesses his keys into a twinkle on top. David Blake is the obvious coordinator, and he talks his shit instead of rapping it here—not that there’s that much difference—introducing himself as "the abominable DJ Quik." Quik has always considered himself a producer first, but as a rapper he’s one of hip-hop’s great acquired tastes, and carries the ability to revolt and charm in a single conversational bar.
The EP’s crown jewel comes early with "A New Nite / Rosecrans Grove," which seems to function as a sort of nostalgic retread on one of Quik’s earliest hits, 1991’s "Tonite." Vocalist Shy Carter does a bit of a Nate Dogg impression on the hook, but the beauty is in the laid back and eventually rearranged groove. "Now this the kinda beat that I might need Dre on," Quik raps truthfully before promising, "I’mma stay on." It’s the blippy, chiptune synth that rises above the fray and catches the ear though. The seemingly out-of-place sound—"Is that my fucking pager going off?" Problem wonders during the intro—becomes the meandering centerpiece of the track, oscillating from choppily plucked out funk to the sounds you might expect from a prancing Mario as he pockets strings of coins in a hidden level. Later, after more dissection and a vocoder has set the mood, the synth somehow shifts into a wailing police siren with a European accent. The groove never breaks, but the synth throws things off-kilter. It’s another Quik trademark: an unexpected sound twisted to surprisingly versatile depths, the same magic he’s been using to steer his still-winding career.

Empire / Diamond Lane Music Group, Inc. / Blake Enterprises


Keiji Haino, Jim O’Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi record together once a year at an annual concert in Tokyo. The latest product of this relationship does away with the improv and amorphous noise that defined its predecessors, and makes the trio sound like a fully locked-in experimental rock band.

Oren Ambarchi | Keiji Haino | Jim O'Rourke: Now While it’s Still Warm Let Us Pour in All the Mystery

At first glance, the collaboration of Keiji Haino, Jim O’Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi looks more like a side-project than a band proper. Their albums are recorded at an annual concert in Tokyo, and billed under the players’ names rather than a group moniker. And their first two, though filled with high-level improvisation, were somewhat amorphous. Lengthy (sometimes half-hour-plus) tracks felt more like one-off experiments-- albeit excellent ones-- than purposeful music.
Things began to shift with 2012’s Imikuzushi, an enthralling set of noise rock journeys that made the trio sound more like an actual band. On their follow-up, Now While it Is Still Warm Let Us Pour in All the Mystery, Haino, O’Rourke, and Ambarchi have landed squarely on the spot they were clearly moving toward. This is now unmistakably a seasoned, fully locked-in experimental rock band-- and, not coincidentally, one of the best around.
The differences emerge both in form and content. For the first time, the trio sticks to shorter pieces-- six in total, with none longer than 11 minutes. And those pieces progress in a distinct arc, one that suggests more craft and forethought than before. Now While it Is Still Warm starts with quieter, more ambient tracks, gradually escalates into louder songs, then ends with a denouement that’s all mood and atmosphere.
More importantly, each track has a distinct shape, often featuring clear beginnings, middles, and ends. Whether with meditative drones, hammering riffs, or heavy rhythms, the trio diligently carves out patterns every step of the way, with at least one eye on where to go and how to get there. This is especially true of three tracks in the middle of the album. Here, Haino churns out guitar pyrotechnics supported by O’Rourke’s bass loops and Ambarchi’s weighty drumming. These are rock jams, though they still retain the group’s essential spontaneity, mostly in Haino’s ability to quickly shift from a memorable riff to an abstract explosion.
Just as compelling are the subdued pieces that bookend Now While it Is Still Warm. Opener “Once Again I Hear the Beautiful Vertigo... Luring Us to 'Do Something, Somehow'” sees Haino moaning hypnotically over the accompaniment of wineglasses (one of which is manned by master minimalist Charlemagne Palestine). Later, Haino’s flute and O’Rourke’s stage-shaking bass create dark lounge-jazz in “Who Would Have Thought This Callous History Would Become My Skin”, and the gentle tension of the closing title track could score an Akira Kurosawa noir thriller like High and Low or The Bad Sleep Well.
Those quieter pieces are so compelling that it’s tempting to hope for a future album made of nothing but. At the same time, it would be fascinating to hear the trio in tight-rock mode for an entire release. That’s the interesting paradox of Now While it Was Still Warm: by honing their music, the trio has actually widened it, showing how much they’re capable of. Haino, O’Rourke, and Ambarchi now sound like a band for whom anything is not just possible, but probable.


Having solidified their lineup, this Toronto band's third album is leaner, funkier, and more consistent than its predecessors.

Latin

For most of their history, Holy Fuck have operated as the augmented duo of Brian Borcherdt and Graham Walsh, surrounding themselves with a rotating cast of bass players and drummers (sometimes more than one at a time). Over the last few years, though, a consistent lineup has solidified, with bassist Matt McQuaid and drummer Matt Schulz holding down the rhythm section. And as one might expect, the consistency has affected the band's sound, making Latin, the band's third album, leaner and funkier than its predecessors.
Borcherdt and Walsh have refined some of their more aggressive noise, and here they use their arsenal of tone generators, guitars, and keyboards to create washes of tone that wrap around the rhythm section like a scratchy blanket. The occasional stab of melody flashes out from the maelstrom, before following the band on its next rhythmic turn. In fact, the album opens with a long ambient wash that builds in volume and intensity before peeling back to reveal the skeletal dance groove of "Red Lights", a highlight that makes the most of the strange interplay between untethered ambient sound and insistent rhythm.
Even in its new, tighter state, the band can still bring the noise, as on the crunching closer "P.I.G.S.", whose melodic synth patterns culminate in a vicious stop-time coda that ends the album on its roughest, most brutal note. Holy Fuck's original mission was essentially to use a live band to create electronic, techno-informed music, and it's a goal they remain wedded to here. Single "Latin America" in particular seems to pattern its rhythmic breakdowns and buildups on modern dance music.
Holy Fuck have carved out a unique and identifiable sound of their own, and as the band itself has solidified, it's made their identity even stronger. If the record loses some of the sense that things could fall apart at any moment-- part what made their sound so gripping-- they largely compensate with solid compositions and strong instrumental interplay.


Lou Reed’s 1975 album has been called one of the worst albums ever made. The truth is it is the product of genuine love and passion, still exhilarating and bursting with possibility four decades on.

Metal Machine Music

It’s all there in the first minute: there’s a low-mid whoosh that’s clearly guitar feedback, like a Jimi Hendrix power chord trailing off; there’s a bit of an electric rattle, perhaps a fluttering speaker cone gasping for air; then come the high-pitched screeches, perhaps bringing to mind a grainy video image of seagulls circling over an open sea filled with radioactive garbage. From there, a ringing squall is folded in, an unstable mess of harmonics that shudders and quakes like nerve impulses curling down a human spine. And with that, we’re deep into Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.
For a good 15 years after its 1975 release, Metal Machine Music, a double album of avant-garde noise put out by a rock legend who was only starting to get his commercial due, was discussed as a gesture more than as music. Explanations for its existence proliferated. Some said it was Lou Reed’s attempt to get out of a record contract, or a fuck-you to fans who only wanted to hear his most popular songs. Or it was mis-packaged, maybe, and was originally supposed to come out on a classical label, where there was some precedence for this kind of experiment. And some of these rumors about Metal Machine Music’s troubled release were started, or at least encouraged, by Reed himself.
Reed put out MMM at a precarious moment in his career, with VU firmly in the rearview but his own commercial prospects unclear. His 1972 debut solo album made almost no impact, but the David Bowie-produced Transformer fared much better with the rise of glam rock and the commercial success of the single “Walk on the Wild Side.” Though Reed followed that album with a poorly received commercial bomb (1973’s Berlin, now considered a theatrical rock classic), his profile in the rock world continued to climb through ’74 and ’75, and his past suddenly had currency. The Velvet Underground vault recording 1969 Velvet Underground Live with Lou Reed appeared in 1974, and the successful live solo album from earlier the same year, Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal, was heavy on glammed-up versions of VU songs. Sally Can’t Dance wasn’t one of Reed’s better albums, but the title song got some FM radio play, and the LP hit the Top 10. Given his dicey commercial prospects at the beginning of the decade, Reed could, by mid–1975, be called a successful rock star. Which explains why his next choice was so baffling.
Metal Machine Music is shrouded in mystery in part because Lou Reed made it alone. The nature of the music didn’t require a studio or an engineer, so he recorded it by himself at his Manhattan loft, working late into the night. Though he put a long series of instruments, filters, and technical specifications on the back cover of the record (“Ring Modulator/Octave Relay Jump”; “Distortion 0.02 bass and treble ceilings”), little or none of it had anything to do with the recording. The notes were a prank. The actual recording involved just a couple of amps and guitars with open tunings leaning against them, a few microphones, and a tape machine. When an amp is turned up, the vibration of the sound will stimulate the strings and pickups of a nearby guitar, generating what we all recognize as feedback. The harmonic information of the feedback will have a particular quality that varies along with the tunings, and with two guitars occupying the same space, the interactions between the instruments can create additional harmonics. Reed experimented with settings and guitar placements and then mixed the results into four separate 16-minute pieces, each of which has completely different information happening in each stereo channel.
Reed’s state of mind and thought process during the recording are not known, since there was no one else around during the recording and Reed himself, addled by chronic abuse of methamphetamine, served as an unreliable narrator (in his biography Lou Reed: A Life, Anthony DeCurtis called MMM a “hymn to speed”). All of which left an opening for stories to proliferate. In Victor Bockris’ book Transformer, Reed is quoted as saying “I put out Metal Machine Music precisely to put a stop to all of it. It was a giant fuck-you. I wanted to clear the air and get rid of all those fucking assholes who show up and yell ‘Vicious’ and ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’” But Reed’s “fuck-you” was more of a defense mechanism. He clearly knew the album would cause a ruckus and some of his actions were antagonistic provocations, such as the legendary liner notes, alternately boastful and incoherent, where he says, “Most of you won’t like this, and I don’t blame you at all. It’s not meant for you.” But deep down, in the heart he protected at all costs and showed to the world only when he was ready, he adored this music. Metal Machine Music was, for him, a perfect recording, taking his love of noise and drone and musical chaos to its logical endpoint.  In 2007, Reed told Pitchfork, “The myth is sort of better than the truth. The myth is that I made it to get out of a recording contract. OK, but the truth is that I wouldn’t do that, because I wouldn’t want you to buy a record that I didn’t really like, that I was just trying to do a legal thing with. I wouldn’t do something like that. The truth is that I really, really, really loved it.”
During the mid–1970s, Reed famously sparred in print with Lester Bangs, a Velvet Underground superfan who thought Reed was wasting his talent with his new music and was perfectly willing to tell him so to his face. Reed v. Bangs was the Fischer v. Spassky of the rock press’ golden era, two masters in their respective fields matching each other move-for-move. Two key Bangs articles capture Reed during the period. “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves” from the March 1975 issue of Creem, is among Bangs’ most famous pieces, and finds him and Reed, both drunk and drug-addled, basically screaming at each other as Bangs tries to get behind the rock star pose. “The Greatest Album Ever Made,” in the March ’76 issue, finds Bangs grappling with Metal Machine Music.
The title of Bangs’ Metal Machine Music piece is ironic, though Bangs clearly loved the music. The fact that he couches genuine appreciation in a series of jokes about the record shows that a critical language for appreciating the album didn’t exist in 1975. Even people who might have loved it (and there are very few accounts of anyone praising it at the time, other than Bangs) didn’t know how to explain why it might be good. At the time, with MMM considered only as “the new Lou Reed album,” it was met with confusion and derision.  Some writers, like John Rockwell for the New York Times, took the record seriously and tried to evaluate it on its own merits, but came away puzzled. Writing in the Boston Globe, William Howard called it “An appalling rip-off.” In their year-end poll, Rolling Stone called it the “Worst Album by a Human Being.”
The record initially sold about 100,000 copies, making it what has to be the best-selling noise music album of all time, but a great many of those copies were quickly returned, and the record was almost immediately removed from stores. After that initial wave of press and puzzlement, Metal Machine Music was, for many years, mostly forgotten, trotted out periodically for a “worst music of all time” list. Since it didn’t make the ’80s transition to CD (there was no reason to put it out) it was barely on the radar at all. MMM had become just part of rock lore, a record you heard about, not one you actually heard.
But something started to happen to Metal Machine Music over time: a context for understanding and appreciating it began to build up around it. Sonic Youth, the unimpeachable aesthetic conscience of the ’80s, were inspired by the album (you can see the wheels turning in a photo of a rapt teenaged Thurston Moore communing with his copy). Noise was in the air. In 1991, Neil Young, also beloved by Sonic Youth, put out a live album called Arc, which consisted mostly of 35 minutes of edited feedback and noise. In 1998, Sonic Youth themselves put out an album called Silver Session (For Jason Knuth) that could be heard as a “cover” of Metal Machine Music, as it was created with a room full of amps and guitars in the throes of feedback. Extreme music from Japan, led by Masami Akita’s project Merzbow, brought harsh sounds to the CD racks, many of which sounded uncannily derived from MMM. Record collectors with turntables found used vinyl copies of MMM which had never been terribly scarce given the album’s initially huge rate of return. In 2000, Metal Machine Music was properly issued on CD, with liner notes from Rolling Stone critic David Fricke.  And in the final decade of Reed’s life, he performed variations of the core idea of the record as Metal Machine Trio, and the work was scored for acoustic instruments and recorded by the experimental classical ensemble Zeitkratzer. Reed always said it would find its place, and he was right.
Reed has said he made Metal Machine Music for himself, and indulgence is baked into the concept. It’s the sound of electricity falling in love with itself, utterly relentless, a blast of energy that never lets up. On a casual listen, it seems static, like it’s only doing one thing. But the album constantly changes and is never the same from one second to the next. If you hear the music as placid, which is possible at lower volumes, it’s like a waterfall, endless particles of sound-matter crashing down and never landing in the same way twice. If you hear it as violent, which is also possible, it’s like an explosion that’s constantly at the moment of its concussive peak, one that never quite completes itself.
The key to understanding MMM is its physicality. Reed has underscored its connection to the body, which gives it a “functional” utility that separates it from the more cerebral end of experimental composition. He’s right that it’s best experienced on headphones, not just because of the extreme panning but because very few people have a living situation that allows them to blast an hour of noise music over speakers. To walk the streets with MMM playing loudly in your headphones is to bring focus to the present moment. You can feel your pulse quickening slightly because the noise triggers an alert in your body, but you then realize that when your nerves say “danger,” they’re not always correct. And the hormonal release that comes from experiencing noise can, if you pause to feel it, focus the mind. “It’s impossible to even think when the thing is on,” Reed said in Transformer. “It destroys you. You can’t complete a thought.” You see things and can isolate their shapes and colors while your ears are otherwise engaged in processing this overwhelming abstraction. And part of the masochistic excitement of the record when you listen to it loud is that it not only sounds like something that will damage your hearing, it’s the sound of the damage itself (warning: don't listen to it loud for long).
MMM’s greatest conceptual tweak might be the fact that it both has “an ending” and never ends. After 64 minutes of punishing noise that steers clear of melody and steady rhythm, a bassy rumble enters in its final seconds that sounds almost like percussion. It’s at this instant that the album slips into the circular locked groove created by mastering engineer Bob Ludwig. That rumble, now as fixed and tight enough for a rhythm track sample, goes around and around for as long as you want it to. If you have the vinyl, you can continue to listen to MMM as long as you like, that one bit of sound spinning round and round forever, it's beautiful, and it’s been playing for about 12 minutes as I write this now.


Segall’s new album feels like a sampler of what he’s been up to in the last half-decade. It's an easy entry point into his imposing catalog, and a complete portrait of his many capabilities.

Ty Segall

Back in the ’60s, when bands like the Rolling Stones were averaging three new albums a year, they’d also drop quickie compilations along the way—like High Tides and Green Grass and Through the Past, Darkly—to summarize a particularly prolific period (or just cash-in on more casual fans). As someone who aspires to a ’60s Stones ideal—in terms of both his sheer level of output and his ever-evolving garage-rock aesthetic—Ty Segall is also wont to drop the occasional summary collection that allows the average listener to play catch-up. Except Segall is so restless and relentless, of course, that these compilations actually comprise all new material.
In the fall of 2012, Segall dropped Twins, an eclectic album that took a tasting-menu approach to the three aesthetically discrete albums that immediately preceded it. Likewise, Segall’s new album feels like a sampler of what he’s been up to in the half-decade since: the melancholic acoustic meditations of Sleeper, the classicist craftsmanship of Manipulator, the Marc Bolan séances of Ty Rex, the diseased, dementoid psych-punk of last year’s Emotional Mugger. Ty Segall is the second self-titled album in his discography (after his 2008 eponymous debut), seemingly because its 10 tracks offer a complete portrait of his many capabilities. But Ty Segall is more than just an easy entry point into his imposing catalog. The new album shows Segall has not only mastered several, stylistically divergent strains of rock—he’s becoming ever more adept at seamlessly stitching them together.
For someone with roots in a genre—garage-punk—that puts a premium on gritty authenticity, Segall has become increasingly fond of artifice, be it the Bolan-via-Barrett faux British accent that’s become his default vocal tic, the silver-lipstick vamping, or his use of Emotional Mugger as a vehicle to masquerade as a surrogate band and terrorize morning news programs. And that mischievous zeal is the glue that ultimately holds this album’s disparate pieces together, particularly when they collide in the same song. Bulldozing opener “Break a Guitar” forges a holy communion between Big Star melody and Black Sabbath brawn, and its cocksure attitude spills over to the stripped-down follow-up, “Freedom,” a scrappy, acoustic-powered number that recalls John Lennon’s frantic Abbey Road curio “Polythene Pam.”
But that’s not the only move Segall has cribbed from the second side of that Beatles classic. “Freedom” immediately gives way to an epic sequel, “Warm Hands (Freedom Returned),” a 10-minute multi-sectional suite that ricochets between warped glam-folk, proto-metal ferocity, sneering British Invasion swagger, overdriven fuzz-punk, and a jazzy guitar jam that attempts to out-Santana the Stones’ “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” It’s the most ambitious, audacious piece of music Segall has ever produced, but he whisks through the song’s train-like structure with such manic glee that this colossal track ultimately feels as brisk and economical as a seven-inch single.
Given that it’s dropped early on in the No. 3 slot, “Warm Hands (Freedom Returned)” casts a long shadow over the rest of the album—in its wake, even the sludgy stomper “The Only One” and the wild, glass-smashing roadhouse rave-up “Thank You Mr. K” feel a bit rote in comparison. But Segall wisely balances his most epic gestures to date with his most intimate, as Ty Segall’s back half yields the prettiest, most pristine pop songs he’s ever written: “Orange Color Queen” is a mash note to his girlfriend rendered in T. Rex’s mystic-lady language; the piano-rolled “Papers” wraps the album’s catchiest chorus around a cluttered-desk scene straight out of a late-’60s Kinks album. And on “Take Care (to Comb Your Hair),” Segall shrewdly builds a deceptively hippy-dippy folk song into a Who-sized barrage of finger-slicing windmill strums and kit-toppling drum rolls, effortlessly bridging the troubadour and trouble-maker sides of his personality.
Of course, Segall can’t help but follow up these handsomely packaged songs with “Untitled,” which is really just a four-second blurt of guitar noise that closes the album with all the subtlety of a fart let out in the most crucial moment of a wedding ceremony. But that throwaway gag nonetheless serves as a reminder of Segall’s most essential quality: his refusal to settle. Rather than chart a typically linear course from raw to refined, Segall has constructed a discography more like a zig-zagging thrill ride liable to careen off into any direction. And whether it’s the jarring track-to-track juxtapositions or within the shape-shifting songs themselves, Ty Segall shows that, nearly a decade into the game, the only predictable thing about Segall is his ability to continually surprise.


The 23-year-old rapper shows the most promise on his sophomore album when he dials down the menacing grit and focuses on how his emotions have shaped his current reality.

Trench Baby

Chief Keef may have turned over the engine for Chicago’s drill scene in the 2010s, but plenty of rappers have since taken the wheel and pushed the sound forward. Lil Durk set the standard for drill, building Keef’s mumbling into a cohesive cadence and adding a new element: an intensely detailed style of singing that made the simple acts of spilling his feelings to a woman or wiping blood out of a rug into 3D portraits. Lil Zay Osama brings a similar haunted level of scrutiny to his sophomore project, Trench Baby. Though the record is traced off Lil Durk’s blueprint, Zay offers a glimpse of what makes him unique, relaying emotions instead of scribbling sketches of bloodshed.
After an extended stint in juvenile detention, Zay got serious about music in 2017. Two years later, his ragged debut Hood Bible became an Auto-Tuned manifesto for the streets and proved what Lil Zay could accomplish in quieter moments, with reflective music that felt more sorrowful about the past than anchored by tall tales. On Trench Baby, this meekness takes the stage with pensive keys and muted melodies that go down easier than before. “Shooters” stresses the emotional toll of being caught in shootouts with former childhood friends. “We’ll Be Straight” succeeds, not just because of G Herbo’s frantic search for happiness within his own memories, but because of Zay’s wide-lens approach to constructing scenes of the past so that listeners can fill in the frame.
Whereas Durk distanced himself from drill with intricate, violent world-building, Lil Zay is still learning how to sketch his own. He’s not rapping in 3D like Durk, but he does offer enough detail to draw a comic book panel. “Niggas get to tweakin’, we don’t think first, we just splat, splat/And I slimed plenty niggas out, I could say slatt, slatt,” he raps on “61st to 64th.” Still, guest features like Doe Boy and Jackboy only exacerbate Zay’s lyrical weaknesses. More often than not, his violent talk sounds like filler. With earnest singing that trades in menacing grit for emotional moans, “Ride for Me” is a shining example of when speaking from the heart enables Zay to create his own blueprint. On “Ex Bitch,” he comes alive, spitting daggers about a woman who missed her chance to be his side chick amid his rise.
When Lil Zay tries to reconstruct crime scenes with lifeless scene-building, the results lack the gravity of his more therapeutic songs. On Trench Baby, he shows the most promise when he dials it down and focuses on how his emotions have shaped and dictated his current reality.

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