Hewing faithfully to Jackson Phillips’ characteristically crisp, concise guitar pop, Pastlife is a coming-of-age album for 30-year-olds, concerned with newfound commitments and misbegotten ambitions.

Pastlife

Listen to any given Day Wave song and you’re bound to hear the same tried-and-true formula, save for a tweak or two: sparkly guitar riffs, galloping drums, and hazy vocals that convey delight even when the writing betrays otherwise. When Bay Area native Jackson Phillips released his debut EP, Headcase, in 2015, his alt-rock influences floated so close to the surface that it was hard to say what, exactly, differentiated him from all the other bands who emulated New Order, Phoenix, and the Radio Dept. In the following years, Day Wave’s work became sharper and more detail oriented, but Phillips rarely diverted from his signature sound; 2015’s “Drag” and 2020’s “Potions,” for instance, could be mistaken for the same song. Phillips’s guitar pop has progressed in a straight line—a sing-along hook here, a set of ohs and ahs there, a looped guitar riff that refuses to noodle outside the lines—and even after collaborating with Saba and producing an album for Pete Yorn, he doesn’t seem all that interested in making songs that veer too far from his playbook.
His new album, Pastlife, nearly perfects the Day Wave formula while also taking a few much-needed risks. It’s a gorgeous, energetic record full of tight, concise melodies and unsentimental lyrics. Phillips’ voice is occasionally gilded with a sheen of fuzz; layers of guitars unfold in rich, legible patterns. But although each song sounds excellent on its own, the album relapses into the same safe structures again and again.
Much of Phillips’ early work centered on nostalgic longings and flailing relationships, and though there’s still plenty of that here, his focus has shifted. Pastlife is a coming-of-age album for 30-year-olds, mostly concerned with newfound commitments and misbegotten ambitions. “So much for finding our way/Arguing into the day/And I don’t know what’s left to chase,” he sings on “Blue,” which sounds like an early Alex G demo. One of the album’s best songs, “Loner,” looks at the complicated nature of letting go: “You locked onto something that would make you feel alive/But it never stays.” Despite his lament, the crisp acoustic guitar and sinewy fingerpicking give the impression that he’s gazing calmly into the source of his suffering, smiling despite the strain of it all.
The music’s simplicity suits Phillips’ straightforward writing. As ever, the songs are built from breezy guitar licks and snappy, uptempo drums. The record’s at its most compelling when Phillips makes minor alterations to his blueprint. “Before We Knew” includes a chanted chorus perfect for screaming at a show, while “Where Do You Go” features lush harmonies and subtle adlibs. But in the album’s second half, the chippy snares and bright guitars begin to wear thin. For an artist with such tight control over his production, Phillips could benefit from a little messiness—a surprise sound, an unexpected switch in tempo, anything to break the songs free from their geometric rigidity.
One of the few moments where Phillips tries something new is on “Great Expectations,” an elegant acoustic song that’s reminiscent of Carrie & Lowell-era Sufjan Stevens. Reversed synths and fingerpicking slink behind doubled guitars as Phillips sings some of the album’s most poignant lyrics: “Seems to be I’m not anything I wanted.” Languishing in self-pity is a temporary fix, though, and soon he’s back to pondering where the hell his life’s going. Confronted with the scary unknown, he opts for comfort: cuddling safely into the well-worn type of song he clearly loves to play, even after he’s wrung every iteration of it dry.


Though it’s less outlandish than previous projects, the Queens rapper’s new album confirms his status as one of New York drill’s most important innovators.

WiCKMAN STiCKMAN

New York drill has gone through an astounding number of mutations in the last nine years. Technically, it’s a third-generation copy of a subgenre that already had two distinct homebases: the warbling 808s of the UK’s AXL Beats and the haunted, concrete-hard menace of Chicago drill, which was first popularized by Lil Durk, G Herbo, and Chief Keef. The Brooklyn iteration spawned firecrackers like Bobby Shmurda’s 2014 track “Hot Nigga,” as well as flex anthems, like all of the songs that Pop Smoke dropped in 2019. A then-lagging New York rap scene put its weight behind these two budding icons, who were either locked away in their prime or tragically murdered.
Instead of fizzling out after the death of Pop Smoke, even more East Coast offshoots emerged: Producers in Jersey and the Bronx, like Great John and Cash Cobain, began incorporating samples into their drill beats, while others in Jersey and Philly created a hybrid of club and drill by ratcheting up the tempo to ankle-shredding BPMs. The regional subgenre has expanded impressively, so much so that the lurching tension of Shmurda and Rowdy Rebel’s “Computers” and the pepped-up horniness of Cobain and Chow Lee’s “Vacant” can exist within the same rich spectrum.
Queens rapper Shawny Binladen, the self-proclaimed king of sample drill, is most comfortable in the middle of that binary. His ear leans toward busy, even chaotic beats, ones that leverage samples and drums in the way an amateur mixologist might use a touchscreen Coke machine. But within the chaos, his voice is chill, launching threats, jokes, and come-ons with an unnerving insouciance. Who else could float over chipmunk soul and what sounds like Clams Casino leftovers blaring through a busted computer speaker on the same album? WiCKMAN STiCKMAN tinkers slightly with the intoxicating formula he’s been savoring since 2020. It sounds a touch more expensive—and lacks noticeable samples compared to his earlier work—but it is no less raw.
Shawny’s breathy delivery keeps the songs as energetic as the beats do. Though he rarely rises above a whisper, its rasp, combined with punched-in vocals that often drag a hair behind or skip a step ahead of the beat, make the songs stretchy and unpredictable. His voice billows through the dense bed of drums and synths on “The Reaper,” or floats across “Larry Lobster” while he rants like a chatty supervillain. On the clubby “Wick Jr.,” he uses his choppy flow to hop from topic to topic; he laments his opps’ mothers’ need to start a GoFundMe, then claims he’ll have his son smoking on opp pack when he turns 20. Most drill artists are either manic or stoic in both form and content, but Shawny’s indifference gives his animated boasts a devilish edge—fitting for a man who named himself after a notorious war criminal.
He’s not the most thoughtful lyricist in the world—every song features some combination of antagonizing rivals, repping his Grinchset crew, having sex in every position imaginable, and the occasional homophobic slur. But details bring the bleakness of his surroundings into focus. There’s a moment on “TLC” where Shawny reckons with the roughness of his twisted city: “All you see is RIPs, white tees, and black hats/Had to run it up, now that wocky in my backpack.” They’re only glimpses of the conditions that force Black boys into this image of manhood, but Shawny is only as callous as the environment that raised him. Flows, punchlines, and grim scene-setting give WiCKMAN an episodic feel. It’s like returning to a comfort series after abandoning it for a few seasons: These are the same stories told in different ways, but they rarely get old.
There aren’t any on-the-nose Cash Cobain-style sample flips to be found here, but other longtime collaborators, like Natt Carlos, Chubby El Hefe, and several others, are responsible for the booming grayscale beats that Shawny rips through. Not to say there aren’t any samples at all: Choirs, sirens, and horns rub against the project’s bubbling low end. “Makman” features a twinkling guitar sample that could’ve been pulled from a spaghetti Western. “Hate Datt” is anchored by club drums and synths that gleam like comets. Even the more standard takes on drill have neat little flourishes, like the distorted violin sample at the heart of “The Reaper,” or the piano keys on “On God.” These are among the most refined beats Shawny’s ever rapped over, and he wastes no time finding his place in them.
Any indication that New York drill was just a fad has gone out the window, much like the reputation of New York mayor—and self-appointed enemy of drill—Eric Adams. Alongside Griselda’s chunky revivalism or the warped experiments of the underground scene, drill’s thumping urgency is just one of the multifaceted sounds of modern Gotham. Shawny Binladen has staked his claim as a drill innovator, and while WiCKMAN STiCKMAN isn’t quite as outlandish as last year’s Wick the Wizard or 2020’s Merry Wickmas, it’s still a wild ride through the troubled and creative mind of one of drill’s finest.


The debut album from this Swedish multi-hyphenate, an associate of Yung Lean and Yves Tumor, trades hip-hop for an expressive—and surprisingly pretty—take on contemporary pop.

E

Ecco2k’s work until this point has been in the service of other people’s visions: The Swedish artist (aka Zak Arogundade) is creative director for his compatriot Yung Lean, editor of music videos for Yves Tumor, and an occasional runway model. He’s also a member of Drain Gang, the Yung Lean-adjacent collective that includes producer Whitearmor and vocalists Bladee and Thaiboy Digital. There’s been an air of mystery to Arogundade’s output as a multi-hyphenate creator; his career can be traced through guest features, behind-the-scenes credits, and cameos in the background of his friends’ videos.
Perhaps somewhat unusually for a hyper-prolific jack-of-all-trades with his fingers in multiple artistic economies, Ecco2k seems fine letting his collaborators take most of the credit, happy to offer his varied skill set as a helping hand to other artists. But wherever he turns up, it’s impossible to mistake Ecco2k’s voice for anyone else’s. That his fluttering, almost angelic falsetto has appeared only sporadically on other people’s records has made Drain Gang’s devoted fanbase—self-described “drainers”—even hungrier for his debut.
Beauty might be relegated to the background of Yung Lean’s music, in dialectic with the darkness of his lyrics and the occasional awkwardness of his delivery, but Ecco2k places aesthetic pleasure and warm feeling up front. More than anything else, the word to describe Ecco2k’s music is pretty, like a gentle tune from a music box. His light wail is often refracted through Auto-Tune but other times hangs plain and soft, devoid of digital manipulation.
Thaiboy Digital and Yung Lean’s take on rap is a looking-glass version of the American mainstream, but they can clearly be described as rappers. Ecco2k is different, and on E he jettisons most everything resembling hip-hop save for a loose, familiar framework of pounding 808s and occasional Soulja Boy references; this is the Stockholm rap scene’s most explicit stab at pop yet. Most tracks are still produced by Gud and Whitearmor, but Ecco2k strays from the Drain Gang house sound on “Fruit Bleed Juice” and “AAA Powerline,” both produced by genre-hopping compatriot Yves Tumor. On tracks like “Calcium,” Ecco2k alternates between very light rapping with a vaguely pop-punk vocal performance over beats that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Charli XCX project. These songs offer the vague outline of radio hits, filled in with an uncanny substance.
Tracks quickly rewind and fast-forward, sputter and start again, phrases repeated like fading memories turned over and over again in your mind. The opening track, “AAA Powerline,” is built largely around the repeated refrain “Zip-tied up/Can’t move my arms.” Ecco2k’s lyrics twinge with anguish and self-loathing. “Every time I look in the mirror I see monsters,” he laments on “Security!,” a song built on the desire to disguise a perceived ugliness inside: “How did you get so perfect?/I wish that I was perfect.”
As much as he might feel at odds with himself, the strongest track on E is a resolute commitment to self-expression. “Peroxide” plays up the contrast between Ecco2k’s ever-changing hair and the color of his skin: “No peroxide/I stay dark.” In a 2016 interview, a then-21-year-old Arogundade reflected on his experience growing up mixed—his mother is Swedish and his father is British and Nigerian—in a region known for racial homogeny: “I used to not want to be in the sun because I didn’t want to get sunburned; I didn’t want to get darker skin and just, like, really dumb stuff like that. But now it’s kind of the other way around, so I’m very much embracing being a black person.” That self-acceptance radiates from “Peroxide,” even if the world around Ecco2k still labels him an outsider: “They all stare at me/I don’t care at all.”
When Yung Lean and his Sad Boys collective first emerged in 2012, the appeal of their music lay mostly in the dissonant juxtaposition of childish lyrics with achingly beautiful beats. As his work matured, Lean ditched the novelty of profane juvenilia, reaching for something more honest and introspective. Ecco2k has never really messed around with gimmickry or mimicry, shooting straight for the heart from the start. When he sings of breaking out of straitjackets, he’s referring as much to the confines of genre as the limits of his own identity. Ecco2k is committed to staying dark, but his music gleams bright in a region and rap scene known for its cloudiness. No longer just a below-the-line collaborator or background associate, on E he finally steps into the spotlight.


The South African producer behind 2019’s viral hit “Untold Stories” tests the limits of amapiano, fusing its trademark log drums with established club genres.

My House My Rules

Amapiano, the South African club strain that’s equal parts slick and thunderous, finds itself at an inflection point—its third in as many years. Having solidified in 2019 around the thunk of its log-drum basslines (rather than the more amorphous, bordering-on-corny piano licks that gave the genre its name in the early 2010s), the sound filtered across Africa and then further afield during COVID-19 lockdowns. Since clubs reopened, amapiano has gone from underground buzzword to its own category on Beatport. In 2022, it’s been sprinkled across albums from stadium acts including Burna Boy and Stormzy, and in Asake’s “Peace Be Unto You (PBUY)” it gained a definitive pop anthem.
Vigro Deep, the cherub-faced producer out of Atteridgeville, west of Pretoria, has been there at each shift, helping to cement the log drum with his 2019 viral hit “Untold Stories” and then touring relentlessly and adding a mainstream sheen to the sound with his vocal experiments (including at least one extraordinary nu-metal flip). Now, with My House My Rules, he reckons with the sound’s future, picking from a slate of more established club genres to see what sticks.
Vigro Deep’s DJ sets are snappy, tune-juggling affairs, and they offer plenty of payoff for amapiano’s lengthy and titillating intros. This album is languorous by comparison, but with no less opportunity for intrigue as he takes a mixologist’s approach to combining sweet, salt, and sour. The rough rhythmic edges of bacardi house rub up against saccharine vocals on “Ngizokulinda,” while the whistles and grainy synths of gqom and latter-day dubstep cut through a clatter of snares on “My World.” With an approach this expansive, there are bound to be misfires—the Ibiza-lite beach-club sounds of “5am Set” are unmemorable, and “Beats of No Nation” is more aimless wander than global odyssey—but Vigro’s willingness to try on new styles, and to execute with such exactness, is impressive. It also sets him apart in a scene that’s risked settling on a single binding identity.
With that said, the album’s standout moments still come soundtracked by amapiano’s established components. The “yay” and “yo” of “Shukushuku” are paced for meditation, but the rattling drums tell a different story. “My Rules” is seemingly lab-tested to turn heads: Whirling, syncopated synths twist in on each other like a shoal of fish evading shark attacks; the thwacking, thrumming log drums provide one of the year’s most devastating and understated choruses. The appeal here lies in just how physically these songs arrive, be that in the belly—where the bassline churns—or the ever-present shakers and off-kilter snare hits that keep all four limbs jangling, as if on strings. Vigro Deep’s grip remains firmly on the marionette’s cross.


The duo of  OFWGKTA members Hodgy Beats and Left Brain burrow deeper into their own world on their sophomore album, a collection that raises the question: What's the end game for MellowHype?

Numbers

Though it slipped under the radar, MellowHype's "La Bonita"-- the first single off their sophomore album Numbers-- was an interesting new direction for the duo of Hodgy Beats and Left Brain. Odd Future got popular without really ever going pop, but "La Bonita" threatened to change that. It didn't, of course, but for all the hosannas that Odd Future have issued in the direction of Pharrell, this was the first song to sound like it could be dropped straight into a classic Neptunes mix. Pharrell's attempts at this kind of light, slinky funk in the past half-decade have yielded results frighteningly close to Jimmy Buffett, but "La Bonita" pops, thumps, and pays off at the end when Hodgy nearly cops Pharrell's honeyed falsetto.
So it comes as a disappointment that Numbers itself is a retreat into insularity. Though it's the nominal follow-up to the group's debut album, Numbers follows more in the footsteps of Hodgy's Untitled EP, which was a pleasant, though unspectacular, foray into weed-fueled indie rap. But both that EP and Numbers lack the blistering energy of MellowHype's debut, and that's something that the group initially made its name on. There is no "Fuck the Police" on Numbers-- a song like "Untitled L", which aims to play that role, feels like its going through the motions. Odd Future's greatest asset as a collective was that they demanded you pay attention and form an opinion, and BlackenedWhite succeeded at doing that as well as anything the group put out. Numbers does no such thing. Above all, it asks one question: What's the end game for MellowHype?
That's because there's nothing wrong with making rap for stoners, but Hodgy-- the group's main MC-- isn't exactly MF Doom. He can rap on a technical level, but Numbers begins to reveal flaws in MellowHype's formula. Hodgy raps quickly but not exactly creatively, and without the foot-through-door bangers that pepper BlackenedWhite, his verses and Left Brain's wonky productions begin to bleed into each other in a way that does its individual songs no favors. Where the group's debut explicitly suggested that you play it while wreaking havoc on Halloween, Numbers is dragged down by a distinct aimlessness and lack of direction.
There are high points, but a lot of the album feels interchangeable. If songs like "Break" or "GNC" or "Monster" exchanged titles or switched out verses, it would be hard to tell. "La Bonita" doesn't have that problem, nor does "Snare", which effectively deploys a group of singing children (or at least the simulation of one). "P2" and "Astro", which feature Earl Sweatshirt and Frank Ocean, respectively, also stand out, but even those magnify the lack of starpower that is Numbers' relative downfall.
If there's one thing that could've improved the album, it would be the increased presence of Left Brain. His production, whether he's playfully pawing at your face with sampled guitars on "P2" or pounding out radio-ready synth melodies as on "Astro", is fantastic. His beats are mostly built from the noise up, and it would be difficult to be as obsessed with sounds as Left Brain seems to be without making beats that are formless. But that's Left Brain's charm-- the central gurgling synth figure of "Beat" shouldn't really work, but it's one of the most repayable things on the record. He appears too infrequently as a rapper, though-- his charming goofiness and laid-back charisma cuts through Hodgy's unflinching seriousness but isn't deployed enough.
Numbers is a solid rap record, but MellowHype have shown themselves to be capable of more. They further burrow into their own world here, but it results in exponentially diminishing returns. The group that offers skewed takes on Waka Flocka Flame and the Neptunes is galvanizing, but the MellowHype on Numbers is standardized, and that's something it never quite seemed they would be.


Recorded live with no overdubs, Maxwell Allison’s latest electronic album is more groove-oriented than his previous work, his hardware noise sounding both vintage and pristine.

Mukqs: 起き上がり

起き上がり

Maxwell Allison’s music as Mukqs lies at the meeting of various opposing forces: high and low tech, shimmer and crunch, structure and chaos. He is a member of the freeform Chicago improv trio Good Willsmith; he’s also no stranger to four-on-the-floor kick drums and other trappings of dance music. But when it comes to beat-based fare, he is a denizen of the same corner of the American electronic underground as Container, where soldering irons and four-track tapes are the tools of the trade, rather than laptops and soft synths.
His solo rig comprises a hodge-podge of cassettes, looping pedals, synths, and anime samples ripped from YouTube, and his early releases could be staunchly unvarnished, sometimes blistering affairs recorded live in single takes with no overdubs. As recently as early last year, on the Umor Rex tape ダメ人間, concessions to beauty—like the coruscating opener “My Baby-Tachi”—were balanced with a mangled metallic clank that evoked submarines crumpling. But recently he’s been exploring more streamlined sounds: Last spring’s fine mini-album 11,666,666,666,666,666,666, for Chicago’s Midwich label, settled into a steadier groove, wreathing crisp drum-machine programming in the rosy sunrise synths of Terry Riley—a homegrown style you might call “beatific beat.”
His new record is even more groove-oriented, with the fullest, most pristine sound he has achieved yet. Like its predecessors, it was recorded live with no overdubs and no laptop. But heard in the context of a DJ set, you could easily mistake some of this stuff for the output of a self-identifying dance-music producer, rather than something with its roots in the noise scene. Take “ゾッド,” a slowly evolving house excursion that rolls ahead at a textbook 120 beats per minute. The bass, fashioned from tuned toms, is chest-massagingly deep, and the snare and hi-hat programming is a marvel of efficiency. You can hear an echo of early-’90s releases on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label in its elegant clockworks, while the new-age synths that spill over lumpy machine percussion, like a fogbank cascading over mountaintops, suggest the dreamy style currently emanating from Vancouver, B.C.
The other long track here, “ベヘリット,” also has a slightly vintage feel, which might have something to do with both his choice of gear and his studio methods. (In the early 1990s, even the straightest, most club-centric electronic music was often made without the use of a computer, and single-take recordings were not uncommon.) The bass and drums are even more driving, and an eerie, note-bending melody lends to the noir atmosphere. Allison’s hands-on approach plays out in shape-shifting timbres that morph from banjo to mallets to flutes against a shimmering backdrop of layered synthesizers.
Not everything is so straight ahead. “Ronaldo Kuriki” takes a page from minimalism’s rulebook and wads it up, collapsing pulsing keyboards into a tangle of crinkled vectors; the no-frills synths give it the feel of a kind of Casiotone kosmische music. “Marble Gallery” is even more disorderly: Yanking away at knobs on his sampler, Allison juggles crashing cymbals, horror-film atmospheres, and bowed prayer bowls. It sounds like a lava flow swallowing a carousel, and the closing “Redfield,” nodding to both Oval and Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica, is similarly spasmodic, if marginally more muted.
Somewhere in between those extremes lies the opening “Al Saiduq.” Wreathed in electronic fizz, its pinging metallic groove sounds at first almost like techno, but its rhythmic cadence resists parsing, and unlike most techno, it resolutely refuses to follow a straight line. Two minutes in, a short reverie filled with elegiac synths and arrhythmic claps serves as a prickly palate-cleanser, like a sorbet stuffed with thumbtacks, before Allison wipes the slate clean once again; the track’s final stretch juggles North African-sounding synth melodies over jumbled drum machine. It’s an example of his balancing act at its most vertiginous—and its most thrilling. For now, anyway, Mukqs’ sweet spot is this relatively unexplored interzone where noise and groove collide.


The Hamburg musician’s second album is a spartan mix of techno, acid, EBM, and coldwave. Even at her most damaged, Helena Hauff’s take on noise is nothing short of opulent.

Qualm

High fidelity has never been Helena Hauff’s bag. Once, in what she’s described as her most disastrous DJ experience, an angry clubgoer berated her from the crowd, shouting, “Can’t you hear how fucking shit all your bass drums sound?” But as any fan of Wolf Eyes or Black Flag or the Jesus and Mary Chain could tell you, for many listeners, “fucking shit” is the whole point. And the German DJ and electronic musician has crafted her entire career around precisely that: techno at its nastiest, gnarliest, and most ragged—as bracing as a mouthful of bees or a toaster on the edge of the tub.
The irony is that Hauff’s bedraggled beats are actually exquisitely crafted. Spend some time with her new album on both headphones and a proper sound system and it quickly becomes apparent that cans won’t cut it: Her bass and drums, degraded as they are, cry out for big, fat speakers. This is lo-fi music, made on battered analog gear, and swimming in the sounds of line noise, tape hiss, and tube distortion. But translating all that muck—the spring reverbs, the janky patch bays—requires a hi-fi listening experience. Making those sounds sing calls for speakers capable of pushing serious air. Like a ruined building in a vacant lot, her wreckage needs to breathe.
Qualm is the Hamburg musician’s second album, and it is largely of a piece with everything she has released over the past five years, including 2015’s A Tape, a sort of pre-debut LP collecting early sketches and stragglers, and her proper debut, Discreet Desires, from the same year. Her productions stem from her tastes as she honed them as a resident at her hometown’s Golden Pudel, a notoriously go-for-broke underground club. (DJ Koze told me about the time he jumped from an outdoor staircase onto the roof and fell clean through the ceiling to the dancefloor; the one time I went, I ended up in the emergency room with a gash in my head.) Working largely with hardware instead of computers—classic machines like the Roland Juno-60 synthesizer and TB-303 bass synth—she turns out a whorled mix of techno, acid, EBM, and coldwave with no obvious hallmarks to date it. Most of it could be from any point in the past 30 years.
Hauff has called Qualm “a kind of strong, weird, one-drum-machine-and-one-synthesizer thing,” and that description pretty much nails it. The album is grimy, her coldwave influence has largely burned off to reveal a brutal, incandescent core.  At points, she may even be overstating her album’s range: On the opening “Barrow Boot Boys,” it’s not one synth and a drum machine; it’s pretty much just one damn drum machine—a slo-mo blast of hammering kicks, toms, claps, and cymbals, all run through distortion until they crumble like the white crust of a burned-up briquet. “Lifestyle Guru,” which makes use of the same drum sounds and adds searing acid squelch, is more agile and less corroded but just as grimly focused. Unlike a lot of grayscale techno, though, Hauff’s tracks are also lots of fun (no surprise that she cites the Stooges as a teenage fave). There’s a real knuckle-dragging sense of abandon in her music; this is primal stuff, its alarm-bell buzz designed to trigger the same fight-or-flight instincts that have been bubbling through our collective blood since long before homo erectus got wise.
It’s not all so hardcore; some tracks are more like mood pieces. “btdr-revisited” is a three-minute fugue for bleeps and claps that careens like colliding space debris, and a few cuts are purely ambient fantasias or chiming studies in counterpoint. Others, though, are proper journeys. “The Smell of Suds and Steel,” an eight-minute 303 workout, bangs incessantly away at a barely varied drum pattern, yet coming out the other side still feels like emerging from some kind of dancefloor wormhole with your atoms subtly rearranged. The same goes for “Hyper-Intelligent Genetically Enriched Cyborg”: Acid might be dance music’s most done-to-death subgenre, yet she still manages to find something fresh in a mix of textures that’s evocative of gargling thumbtacks and diamonds. Even at her most damaged, Hauff’s take on noise is nothing short of opulent, and it’s that alternatingly grating and sparkling attention to detail that makes Qualm so exciting. What might at first sound retro turns out to be simply timeless.


The Baltimore noise-rock quartet's sophomore album, their first for Drag City, finds them softening their sound but still nailing the sweet spot between savagery and self-awareness.

Natural History

On their debut album, Nupping, Dope Body hit loft-show paydirt by splicing noise-rock with melodies salvaged from the junkyard of 1990s FM radio. That may sound like an unpalatable combo, but the Baltimore four-piece used each genre to subvert the other's worst tendencies. A swatch of Red Hot Chili Peppers homage could complicate the menace from a song stacked with splintering feedback. A few atonal squelches helped tweak a pummeling riff's macho momentum. The result was heavy music that possessed moments of levity but avoided parody. Now, perhaps weary of having Anthony Kiedis comparisons lobbed at them, Dope Body have backed away from the butt-rock influences.
On their follow up, Natural History, they've chilled out a bit. Maybe some of the mystical neo-Americana vibes championed by their new label, Drag City, have rubbed off on them. The first sound on the album isn't a blast of feedback but the tingling of wind chimes. That song, "Shook", lilts back and forth on a languid two-chord vamp with frontman Andrew Laumann grunting quasi-mystical pronouncements, striking closer to Lungfish's Daniel Higgs than Zack de la Rocha. "Crystallize the eyes/ Let them know you can feel it/ I feel it all around," he grunts.
Even in its most jittery, Nintendo-nostalgic moments, Natural History is a roomier effort than its predecessor. On Nupping, guitarist Zach Utz loaded songs with sonic belches and abstract gurgles. This time he's more selective with the audio-graffiti. His playing has taken a more melodic turn, incorporating elements from Holy Ghost Party, his tropical-psych guitar side project with Dope Body drummer David Jacober. On "Weird Mirror" he plots out a pattern of robot-rock riffs that make the band sound like the Cars channeling San Francisco sci-fi proto-punk duo, Chrome.
Brutishness is still Dope Body's forte, though, and they haven't abandoned it. During the chorus to "Road Dog", Laumann gets inspirational, chanting the lines, "Do what you want to do... Be who you want to be." But he barks the words like a gym teacher on the edge of blowing his anger-management course, commanding listeners to either self-actualize or drop and give him 20. "Out of My Mind" churns like an off-center cement mixer, with a bassline that probably owes a few royalties to Soundgarden's "Slaves and Bulldozers".
It's one of the only flickers of 90s worship on Natural History, but there are still plenty of moments when the line between goofball antics and freakish punk-rock blowouts gets blurred. They may have changed up their game, but Dope Body still nail the sweet spot between savagery and self-awareness.


The two Bay Area presences come together for a short but supremely fun trip on the latest in the Tonite Show series.

The Tonite Show

Ezale is a human emoji. He’s always smiling, dancing, or on fire in some way that swirls his thin braids around. When he burst onto the rap scene in 2013 behind “5 Minutes of Funktown”—an intersection between nostalgic beats from Whodini and Rick James and dumb Oakland swagger—he felt less like a rapper and more like a giddy tour guide. When he collected that world-building origin story and other great singles “Foreal Foreal” and “Too High,” he put on the appropriate costume and titled his 2013 mixtape Drug Funnie, a riff on the Nickelodeon show “Doug.”
On the cover of his collaboration album with DJ Fresh, The Tonite Show, Ezale and Fresh share detailed, slightly grotesque Adult Swim-type caricatures. DJ Fresh is an old-fashioned DJ who loves making music. He crisscrosses influences into a funky, pastel patchwork that reflects the diversity of Oakland and growing up surrounded by every type of music (never mind that DJ Fresh is actually an East Coast transplant). He builds common ground between Bay Area slap and G-funk through ’80s sounds, connecting the dots from soft rock to quiet storm, adult contemporary pop, disco, and new jack swing. While some of Fresh’s Tonite Show albums have drawn attention by featuring artists who would seem incongruent (like Gary, Indiana’s Freddie Gibbs and Houston’s Trae tha Truth), not since D-Lo has Fresh worked with someone as unique and compelling as Ezale, a talent complementary to his own.
DJ Fresh productions are a perfect stage for feeling out the sound of words, and while Ezale doesn’t lift off into the gumbo of slang that Bay Area rappers are sometimes known for, his personality is similarly airy and charming, the guy at the party who wants to ask you if you got any pills, not if your friend is single. “Used to bust down zits, now I ship out packs,” he offers on “Stop Come On,” and it’s a great, self-deprecating image and sneaky clever, a dynamic that a lot of rappers, even ones who are trying to be funny, fail miserably at. He’s never hateful or mean, because Ezale is just knocking words back and forth until he finds a joke he likes or a bit of wordplay he can slide into (“I need green bags like Sun Chips/I can’t afford to go to Rita off some dumb shit,” from the introspective “Got the Game From the OG’s”)
True to most Tonite Show records, this one moves at a clip. Fellow Oakland producer Hawk Beatz takes the reins on a few songs to switch it up, most notably by sampling another Bay Area figure Jocelyn Enriquez and her jam “A Little Bit of Ecstasy,” finding Fresh’s bloodline within the slinky beats of ’90s electro. Ezale gets quietly poignant, breaking the fourth wall to hit you with, “My brother coulda made it to the NBA/But it didn’t go his way/But don’t worry, one day,” and “Livin’ life in the Town make it hard to pray/cause they say a stray bullet took my brother away.”
Everything that works on the sub-half-hour* Tonite Show* is contained in “We Want Some Pussy,” a terrific end-of-summer song that prominently samples 2 Live Crew but takes the energy level down a few notches, not even riding a swing-for-the-fences beat that you might conceive while thinking of marrying Miami bass with Oakland slap. It’s this kind of subtle stylistic switch-up that is so compelling—how many different ways can these guys convince you they want some drugs, they want to fuck, they want to party—and how many different ways can it sound great? The answer to both: a lot.


The Queensbridge legend’s 13th album marks a retreat into a nostalgia-act comfort zone, one that suits him even as it yields diminishing returns.

King’s Disease

By all measures, the rollout of 2018’s NASIR, the fourth project of Kanye West’s chaotic Wyoming summer, was a mess. Marred by Nas’ lazy flows and conspiracy theories, the album also arrived under the troubling cloud of domestic abuse allegations from his ex-wife Kelis. Nas’ 13th album, King’s Disease, seeks a return to the cozy wistfulness of 2012’s Life Is Good, a late-career opus which toured ’80s stash spots and triumphant nights at the Apollo while ostensibly interrogating the dissolution of his marriage. The new album marks a retreat into a nostalgia-act comfort zone—one which suits Nas, even as it yields diminishing returns.
There’s desperation in the way Nas endlessly plumbs the scenes of his adolescence, like a red-eyed wedding guest clutching your shoulder three hours into the reception and pleading, “Remember?” This is the rapper who cruised “Memory Lane” at 20, who at 28 excoriated peers unable to leave behind the emotional confines of their Queensbridge childhood. Yet by his late thirties, Nas had become so convinced of the importance of those years—the sanctity of Cold Crush park jams, the unforgettable eyelashes on that girl down Vernon Boulevard—and, in an odd display of humility, less concerned with his own place in them. On “Car #85,” a summertime ride through Koch-era New York, Charlie Wilson’s background vocals lend period-specific authenticity to Nas’ vivid memories of “White Castles at midnight, fish sandwiches, forty-ounces and fistfights.” In middle age, he’s a full-on evangelist for the lost city of his youth, and for the days just before Illmatic changed everything.
By now groaning about Nas’ beat selection is the rap-fan equivalent of complaining about the weather, but Southern California native Hit-Boy, best known for his credits on “N****s in Paris” and “Backseat Freestyle,” acquits himself pretty well as the resident producer on King’s Disease. Despite the synthetic sheen of his single-tracked pianos, digitized snares, and clap drums, his beats are stately without defaulting into the prescriptive mood music Nas generally prefers. His audio templates have proven adaptable enough for the likes of Dom Kennedy and SOB X RBE; he evokes an easy brightness on the Anderson .Paak collaboration “All Bad” and the A$AP Ferg-featuring “Spicy.” Nothing jumps out as an anthem or single, and it’s hard to fathom which prospective consumer demos are mobilized by Big Sean and Lil Durk’s appearances.
Just as relieving for those who suffered through NASIR’s arrhythmic vocals, the flow which seemed to abandon Nas after Life Is Good appears more or less restored on King’s Disease. Even in his heyday, Nas would never have been mistaken for the most musical MC, but his ability to ride a bassline conferred a smoothness to his hyper-literate bars; on NASIR, the looseness of Kanye’s capacious productions resulted in something akin to a poetry slam. Long gone are the nested, multisyllabic rhyme schemes of the Illmatic-to-Stillmatic arc, but Nas sounds positively energized on “Blue Benz,” rapping about Jersey City madams and excursions to the Tunnel with Chris Lighty. He delivers an inspired opening verse on “The Cure,” keeping time without a snare until the song’s second-act beat switch.
Nas tends to falter when tackling capital-S Subjects (King’s Disease is blessedly devoid of any Plandemic speculation), and he’s better at coaxing pathos from characters he observes or creates than he is at autobiographical soul-searching, his stony affect strained by intimacy. King’s Disease unfolds with a thematic scope suitable for reminiscence and self-coronation, with a bit of the Marcus Garvey-inspired liberation theory he’s dabbled in since “If I Ruled the World.” In a few instances, the record manifests a vulnerability rare even in Nas’ most personal work, as on “Til the War Is Won,” when he curses God for taking his doting mother instead of his jazz-playing, jet-setting father.
But where the song is on its surface a paean to single mothers, Nas’ bemoaning of broken families culminates in a mealy-mouthed admonishment: “Women, stop chasing your man away/Men, stop acting crazy, chasing your woman away.” King’s Disease makes overtures of applauding women in a manner that feels defensive in light of the 2018 allegations. Still evident is the backhanded slut-shaming so eagerly cribbed by J. Cole, the unwitting as-a-father-of-a-daughter misogyny of 2012’s “Daughters”: on “Car #85” Nas recalls chasing a teenage crush to Co-op City only to find 10 fellow suitors waiting outside her building. Both “Replace Me” and “All Bad” address nameless exes, vacillating between spite and remorse without enough nuance or transparency to disburse any appreciable insights.
King’s Disease climaxes with “Full Circle,” which reunites The Firm’s 1996 lineup of Nas, AZ, Cormega, and Foxy Brown. In past Firm reunions, the reconvened members—titans of New York’s blockbuster era—looked back on their wild youths, warily contemplating their divergent paths. “Full Circle” is the closest they’ve come to an honest reckoning, each acknowledging missteps along the way. AZ, perpetually mid-champagne flute in toast to his impossible good fortune, admits to dishonesty in relationships: “The games that I was playin’ was silly/Similar to them days when I was packin’ that milly, it could’ve killed me.” Cormega, never one to forgive a slight or forget a grudge, rues his past control issues: “Thinking my girl was my possession—I stand corrected.” (It’s strange that Foxy Brown was conscripted for this exercise in male redemption, and her verse belongs on a different song altogether.) There’s a memorial air to the proceedings, running mates who’ve drifted to the suburbs and whose kids attend different schools. Nas remains a prisoner of his own device, but that doesn’t mean his comrades can’t move on.

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Techno star's latest album further explores pop accessibility, bringing a new sense of songform to his shapeshifting production work and drawing comparisons to LCD Soundsystem, Beck, and Caribou.

Asa Breed

Between the animalistic funk of 2003 single "Dog Days"-- a dance track that cheerfully nuzzled its way into a SXSW/CMJ mindset-- and 2004's Backstroke LP, there was a lot of talk of Matthew Dear's shapeshifting abilities. He'd already proven, both under his own name (recording for Ghostly and its Spectral sublabel) and as False (for Richie Hawtin's Plus 8 and Minus labels) and Jabberjaw (for Perlon), that he could stretch and twist his Slinky-like tracks to traverse any hairpin of techno's staircase. Now, word was, Dear was turning towards even greater accessibility with a record that would bring a new sense of songform to his gritty, agreeable beat structures.
But while six of Backstroke's eight tracks featured vocals (as did "Dog Days") and fell into the occasional verse/chorus structure, the record failed to deliver Dear a wider audience. His voice, even with its odd pitch, put its shoulder to the wheel in the service of pop, but the tires were worn from burning rubber behind a disco stoplight; its tracks felt like retreads-- cracked, wobbly, a little thin. I still enjoy the record, but compared to the staggeringly confident tracks Dear released as Audion in just the last year -- "Mouth to Mouth", "I Gave You Away", remixes for Claude VonStroke, Hot Chip, and Black Strobe, anthems all-- it's difficult to hear Backstroke as the work of the same individual.
With his new album, Asa Breed, Dear finally makes good on his long-awaited metamorphosis. It's not that the record is a straightforward pop romp: It's still anchored in Dear's lumbering beats, its rhythms cobbled together from misfiring drum machines and colored with barely-in-tune keyboards and yellowing room tone. Still, Dear pulls together his widest array of elements yet, not just in terms of instrumentation-- electric and acoustic guitars, live drums, and haphazard percussion all play strong roles-- but also style: Hints of new wave, indie rock, Afropop, and even country enliven Asa Breed. Dear's mercurial approach to genre, however, feels less like dabbling than a kind of shambling dandyism, trying on mismatched styles with a sidelong wink in the mirror.
The most immediate change is that Dear's voice now sits front-and-center in every track. Actually, make that front-and-center and side-to-side: Virtually every song features two- or three-part, multitracked vocals, encompassing his natural baritone, a more idiosyncratic midrange, and finally a warbly falsetto, generally digitally smeared as a sort of pitch-correction. It's not the greatest voice in the world, but he uses it well, sliding into the notes, lingering on his vowels, and greasing the mechanistic clutter of his backing tracks. It's a suggestive and evocative voice, though exactly what's being suggested is often left ambiguous. On the downcast "Deserter" it's impossible to miss the influence of Joy Division's Ian Curtis; on the ruminative "Fleece on Brain", his backing Ooh-oohs sound like a scrap of 1960s pop that's wafted in on some errant, psychedelic gust. Sometimes, the vocals themselves mutate into something approaching pure musicality, more sensibility than sense: On "Will Gravity Win Tonight?" it might take you dozens of listens to realize that the background babble is really the mantra-like repetition, "More work to be done."
Asa Breed is a moody record, thanks in no small part to its affirmational lyrics and plaintive guitars. Some critics have found fault with Dear's way with words, and he does occasionally misstep, but more often than not, his slightly cryptic character sketches work well, allowing ambiguous narratives to sprout from the cracked pavement of his productions. The lyrics invite all manner of questions. Who are "Don and Sherri"? If love is "such a tricky thing/ Can include diamond rings," is that a good or a bad thing? (Dear is married.) And in a record so filled with self-doubt, how much is pure literary invention, and how much points to a crack in the artist's own psyche? It's so rare to get any sense of dance artists' personae that Dear's ambiguous, occasionally confessional lyrics take on extra weight. Part of the pleasure of Asa Breed is its introduction of a character we've never met before; Dear's reluctance to reveal only sends you back into the music looking for answers. (Some of those answers will surprise you: the closing country dirge "Vine to Vine", featuring a Johnny Cash-like spoken word drawl, is about a paternal ancestor of Dear's that was allegedly gunned down by Texas Rangers over a century ago.)
The other thing that keeps me returning to Asa Breed again and again, beyond its individual songs' inventive, engrossing composition and production, is the pacing of the album. It's moody, yes-- even a jaunty track like "Fleece on Brain" feels haunted and fraught with anxiety-- but the record's sequence pinballs from brassy electric bumpers to pensive pits and suspenseful pauses. The first four songs seem to circle a common mood as if poking and prodding from every angle, shining a Maglite in the recesses of a deep funk. (The way he wields phrases suggests the minimalist he's always been, twisting and spinning a few sinewy strands into a rope as tough as woven steel; you can hear Audion's druggy abandon throughout, in slow, grinding synthesizers and tones that change color as gradually as a darkening, stormbound sky.) With "Elementary Lover", Dear abruptly changes course, channeling the Tom Tom Club. "Don and Sherri" plunges back into the murk of a humid dance floor. "Will Gravity Win Tonight?" is bitter black tea as a sort of palate cleanser; "Pom Pom" is a bizarre, Beach Boys-influenced miniature (at 2:39, it's the shortest song on the album, by two seconds); "Death to Feelers" is a kindergarten tale of unrequited love for toy piano and tambourine. And the last four songs usher us out in a kind of extended dream sequence of organs, acoustic guitars, country yelps, the Sea and Cake lounge jazz, and the totally unexpected American Gothic of "Vine to Vine".
Maybe it's because Dear has worked on the album, off and on, for the past three years that its stylistic drift is so wide; what's remarkable is how well all the pieces sit together, and how convincingly they lay out a series of stepping stones. Ultimately, the path leads back inside the album itself, breeding as many questions as certainties. One thing remains clear, though: As producer, songwriter and persona, Dear has come into his own with Asa Breed, a bootstrapping album that not only reveals the miles walked, but an ambitious road map ahead.


On her self-assured second album, this singer-songwriter uses her mordant wit to confront serious subjects, exorcising trauma with hooks and humor.

LONER

“Sarcasm is hard to get through in music,” Caroline Rose lamented in a recent interview with Rookie. “Especially if you’re making pop songs, and you’re singing about something that’s pretty serious.” Rose, a singer-songwriter from New York with a penchant for cherry-colored tracksuits, certainly likes serious subjects: Her second album, LONER, is full of songs about misogyny, self-doubt, disillusionment, and death, each confronted with unflinching candor. But it’s Rose’s mordant wit that makes those songs work—and Rose is very funny. “I go to a friend of a friend’s party,” she sings, martini-dry, on “More of the Same.” “Everyone’s well-dressed with a perfect body/And they all have alternative haircuts and straight white teeth/But all I see is just more of the same thing.” Sarcasm might be hard for other songwriters, but not for her.
There’s a constructive quality to Rose’s sense of humor: It affords her the room to exorcise trauma in a playful spirit. “Cry!,” a full-throated power-pop jam built around bass synths and pedal-steel guitar, wallows in the gross invective hurled at women near-daily while implicitly mocking the retrograde attitudes behind it: “You’re gonna cry, little, little girl!” Rose sneers. “You silly thing/You will learn your place yet.” Its counterpart, “Smile! AKA Schizodrift Jam 1 AKA Bikini Intro,” is a caustic minute-long fuck-you to every strange man who has commanded a woman in the street to do just that. The rock-depth low spirits of “Getting to Me,” a painfully relatable song about loneliness, culminate in a resigned sigh that’s bitterly hilarious in its understatement: “I think it might be getting to me,” she sings, oddly upbeat. “I think it might be finally getting to me.”
Musically, Rose has no less fun than she does with the content of her lyrics. “I’d say this album was as much inspired by Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears as it was late-’70s punk,” she declares in LONER’s press materials. These are references that some artists might put on for effect—many musicians like to seem omnivorous, even if that range doesn’t manifest in the actual music. But Rose’s tastes really are that comprehensive. LONER spans squawky rockabilly (“Money”), sleepy trip-hop (“To Die Today”), and what Rose herself describes, unimprovably, as her “riot grrrl feminist surf-punk anthem” (“Bikini”). Sometimes she sounds a little like other super-charged fast-talkers, like St. Vincent or Eleanor Friedberger; sometimes she has the exuberant swagger of, say, Craig Finn. And, as promised, she even channels JT, on the distinctly FutureSex-esque “Animal.”
LONER may come as a surprise to admirers of Rose’s previous album, 2014’s I Will Not Be Afraid. A front-to-back collection of alt-country and blues, all whisky-soaked wails and Americana twang, it sounded pretty much like what you’d expect of a record whose first song bears the title “Blood on Your Bootheels”—not a bad debut by any means, but in truth only moderately promising. So what happened? Rose has described her evolution between the two albums as a matter of finding the right sound to match her personality. That sense of discovery is evident not only in the wide spectrum of styles she adopts here, but in the certainty with which she adopts them. LONER is a singular artistic statement, from its unforgettable album art all the way down. It represents for her a major change—a change she totally commands.
If Rose has located her voice, she remains as lost as the rest of us when it comes to the big questions. “The world don’t stop/Even when you’re living in color,” she croons on “Jeannie Becomes a Mom,” awash in a rinse of synths. “No, the world don’t stop/Time is only gonna pass you by.” It’s a fairly wretched sentiment articulated with surprising cheer, as is Rose’s wont. “Every so often I’ll have bouts of pretty bad anxiety, where it feels like I’m running out of time,” she has explained of the song. “It makes me think about my goals, that no matter how many dreams I fulfill I’m never going to be able to outrun time or my often rude reality.” Well, none of us really will—that’s life. But in committing these anxieties to tape with such wit and good humor, in speaking for everyone who experiences similar problems on their own, she’s made reality a little bit easier to handle.


The Japanese fashion designer’s passion project is characteristically stylish and star-studded, featuring contributions from Pharrell, Kanye West, Tyler the Creator, and the late Pop Smoke.

I Know NIGO!

If you were a viewer of Japanese variety shows around 2005, you likely noticed a man dressed in fluorescent camouflage who looked very much out of place in the parade of poised stars and goofy comedians. Nigo was then a Japanese designer in his mid-30s but he looked more like an American rapper, down to the chains draped around his neck and the grills he wore in his teeth. Though he wasn’t yet a household name in Japan, his clothing line, A Bathing Ape, was making waves in the U.S. thanks to early adopters like Pharrell Williams and Clipse (Pusha T’s ongoing feud with Drake can be traced back to Lil Wayne wearing a BAPE hoodie on the cover of VIBE in 2006). Right around this time, Nigo launched his first serious attempt to pivot to music, the hip-hop group Teriyaki Boyz. He served as the group’s DJ and svengali, assembling a crack team of Japanese rappers and calling in favors from friends like Daft Punk, Ad-Rock, and DJ Premier. The group’s Def Jam debut was a modest success in Japan but the mostly Japanese-language album predictably failed to break through in the U.S.
Nearly two decades later, having cemented his legacy as one of the most influential streetwear designers of all time (“Bape is my generation’s Chanel,” the late Virgil Abloh once said), Nigo is giving music another shot. This time around, the album bears his own name—his first international solo release since 2000’s Ape Sounds—and he’s enlisted Pharrell to serve alongside him as co-executive producer, as well as a rotating cast of A-list rappers. The bulk of the production on I Know NIGO! is credited to Pharrell and the Neptunes, with a few additional producers filling in the gaps; the beats are as sturdy and tuneful as you’d expect but not as adventurous as you might hope. As for Nigo, his role in creating these songs seems to be similar to that of James Lavelle’s role in Unkle (incidentally, Lavelle put out Ape Sounds on his Mo’ Wax imprint): not as much a musician as an ideas guy with a deep Rolodex.
Nonetheless, Nigo and Pharell manage to produce a largely enjoyable and consistent compilation that recalls DJ mixtapes of the mid-2000s. If nothing else, the standout tracks are worth seeking out. While it’s not quite “Potato Salad,” “Lost and Found Freestyle 2019” demonstrates that Tyler and A$AP Rocky have chemistry to spare; both here and on the album closer, “Come On, Let’s Go,” we’re reminded that Tyler is incapable of phoning in a verse. Just as noteworthy, “Punch Bowl” reunites the Thornton brothers with the Neptunes for the first Clipse track since 2019. While No Malice admittedly sounds a bit rusty, it’s oddly heartwarming to hear him spit lines like “My Chingo Bling meet me at Dulles” alongside his brother. Pusha T also gets a solo turn on the Kanye West-produced “Hear Me Clearly,” which feels of a piece with his last few years of reliably great solo work.
As tends to be the case with DJ mixtapes, a few tracks fall short of their potential or fade into the background. “Arya” is fairly rote as far as late-period A$AP Rocky goes—it sounds sophisticated, refined, and pretty inert: rap music for art dealers. If you find Kid Cudi cloying, the rave-like “Want It Bad” will not change your mind. On paper, “Heavy” sounds like a clear highlight: Lil Uzi Vert facing off against a lumbering, funereal beat from drill mainstay AXL Beats. Sadly, Uzi sidesteps the challenge by rapping in half-time, instead of trying to keep pace with the drums. It’s still one of the better tracks here, even though it feels like Uzi is holding back.
I Know NIGO! is clearly a labor of love, from a man whose passion for all things hip-hop has never been in question. Even so, there’s an uncomfortable question that hangs in the air around figures like Nigo: When you’ve made a career out of selling your proximity to Black American culture, what, in turn, might you owe to actual Black Americans? “It is hard to witness the pain of friends,” Nigo wrote in 2020, announcing a campaign to raise funds for Black Lives Matter. “...I have been thinking about what I can or should do as a Japanese person.” Plenty of fashion designers were conspicuously silent during that summer of protests, so Nigo’s effort is commendable. As a recording artist, though, it’s instructive to compare him with one of his contemporaries, Abloh, whose advocacy for new artists in both music and fashion was tireless. In place of a Gunna feature or yet another posthumous Pop Smoke song, which new artists could Nigo have used his platform to highlight? I Know NIGO! is a fun project and its marquee names largely deliver but it serves to further fortify Nigo’s legacy rather than pay it forward.


Conor Oberst and company have not lost their taste for grandiosity on their first album in nearly a decade, setting familiar woes against a dazzling collage of sounds.

Bright Eyes: Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was

This—[gestures broadly]—is happening, and Conor Oberst is singing over a “Hotline Bling”-type beat. The uncanny moment occurs almost halfway through Bright Eyes’ 10th album, Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was. “The world went down in flames and man-made caves,” the beloved Omaha bandleader sings on “Pan and Broom,” backed by the sort of rudimentary drum-machine clicks that powered Drake’s world-conquering 2015 smash. Though the musical setting is contemporary, the message is familiar for Bright Eyes, with lyrics that are as personal as they are apocalyptic. In between a push down the stairs and a flight to Tulum, Oberst’s narrator uses the titular pan and broom to sweep up his dreams.
Since rising up out of the flat and corny Midwest in 1995 like a quivery-voiced derecho storm, Bright Eyes have never shied away from the maudlin, a tendency that once caused non-teenagers to look down their noses. In recent years, as Oberst has focused on solo projects and other collaborations, the band’s cultural status has solidified: Post Malone interpolated them for Young Thug, Mac Miller covered them, Lil Peep sampled them. Oberst is now bandmates with Phoebe Bridgers, in their open-hearted folk-rock duo Better Oblivion Community Center. And the 1975’s Matt Healy, for one, endorses those scare-quoted mid-’00s “new Dylan” comparisons. Bright Eyes have belatedly found critical acceptance as a kind of musical rite of passage for smart, sensitive youths. That’s not faint praise, but it still seems to sell them short as their first wave of fans age into their 30s and 40s.
The emotional outpourings of a wunderkind are easy to dismiss as raw passion. With Down in the Weeds, the painstaking craft of Oberst and the other two longtime Bright Eyes members—producer Mike Mogis and multi-instrumentalist Nate Walcott—is on vivid display. As related in innumerable quarantine interviews, the band deliberately ransacked disparate aspects from their back-catalog: lush orchestral pop, twangy Americana, warped electronic textures, blown-out distortion, tremulous whispers-to-a-scream. Flea plays slap bass on several tracks and never raises an eyebrow. Rather than try to recapture lost youth, as their tour through past sounds might imply, the group glories in incipient middle age. Oberst, who has recently gone through a divorce and the death of his brother, brings that perspective to his ornate but piercing lyrics. You can scream along to Down in the Weeds, but also quietly appreciate it—a testament to the artistry that went into this Bright Eyes album and all the others from which it draws.
Almost every song here shoves interpersonal woes against societal angst in a fundamentally Bright Eyes way. On the bizarro wedding-dance swooner “One and Done,” before pointing at “the masochists all celebrating love,” Oberst mentions “the final field recording from the loud Anthropocene,” and that lofty sense of doom suffuses the record. Standout “To Death’s Heart (In Three Parts)” links visceral introspection (Oberst asks, “What’s it like to live with me here/Every fucking day?”) with the tragic 2015 attacks on the Bataclan in Paris and, as if moving by dream logic, Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here.” “All these same fears/Year after year,” Oberst sings, paraphrasing the classic-rock standard. It’s an apt mission statement for Bright Eyes’ return: Age hasn’t dimmed the relevance of their existential anxieties. Or, as Oberst told an interviewer, “I take no joy in being right about all of this stuff.”
The specters of Oberst’s ex-wife and late brother hang over the proceedings. The first voice on the album is the Spanish-language, spoken-word lilt of Corina Figueroa Escamilla, who still shares two dogs with Oberst, on a ragtime- and mushrooms-inspired opener that establishes the audacious, très-Bright-Eyes scope of the record. The folk-rock romp “Tilt-A-Whirl” begins with Oberst singing, “My phantom brother came to me.” A queasy Marxophone interlude can’t lighten the misery: “Life’s a solitary song,” the lifelong singer sings, “no one to clap or sing along.” On another highlight, the melancholic “Stairwell Song,” Oberst constructs a specific-yet-ambiguous story that could address either lost partner, or neither. He concludes with a wink, howling “You like cinematic endings” as a triumphant swell of horns and strings cues the credits.
Not all of the satisfactions of Down in the Weeds are so baroque. Joined by a gospel choir on the comparatively buoyant “Forced Convalescence,” Oberst is hilarious as he sings about “catastrophizing” his 40th birthday, and the inability to escape from “housework, or the bank clerk, or the priest.” On the piano ballad “Hot Car in the Sun,” Oberst might be “dreaming of my ex-wife’s face,” or having sad visions of overheating dogs, but in the real world he’s just chopping celery for soup: “Didn’t have much else to do,” he confides. On the wide-screen finale, “Comet Song,” he sets out a household scene that’s uncomfortably easy to picture: “You clenched your fist/You threw the dish/And called me Peter Pan/Your aim’s not very accurate.” The whole of this album is more than the sum of the parts, but the parts can still be devastating.
But Down in the Weeds falters when it loses touch with its essential grandiosity, in a handful of songs that feel more like standalones than threads in a tapestry. “Dance and Sing,” a jaunty and well-earned call for love and endurance, is more easily digestible than many songs here, but also less dazzling. The most conventional pick among the pre-release singles, the slick stadium-rocker “Mariana Trench,” also works well enough, its lyrical purview spanning from Mt. Everest to “your other brother’s grave,” but doesn’t reach into the next level of detail that raises goosebumps elsewhere.
Down in the Weeds, recorded before the global pandemic, suits the daily desolation of lockdown. It also makes me regret that Oberst can’t perform these songs live, where young fans and old could form bonds as lasting with them as with Bright Eyes’ past staples. On “Nothing Gets Crossed Out,” a confessional from the 2002 classic Lifted, Oberst worried aloud about the future, singing, “I’m just too afraid of all this change.” Down in the Weeds begins with the vow, “Got to change like your life is depending on it,” and peaks about the point where Oberst looks back on his psychic aches and stutters, “All that’s constant is that change.” Running over the same old ground, Bright Eyes have found the same old fears. Wish they were here.

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The announcement of his engagement to singer-actress Mandy Moore capped a strange start to 2009 for Ryan Adams, who had kicked the year off with even more cryptic blog posts and a threat/promise that he was quitting music for good. That entry was quickly deleted, signaling either a renewed commitment to songcraft or a realization that he's more qualified to be a singer-songwriter than anything else. So perhaps his impending nuptials are the reason for the more-intense-than-usual weirdness emanating from Camp Adams and for *Extra Cheese*, an iTunes-only EP featuring six previously released songs and a studio version of an

Extra Cheese EP

The announcement of his engagement to singer-actress Mandy Moore capped a strange start to 2009 for Ryan Adams, who had kicked the year off with even more cryptic blog posts and a threat/promise that he was quitting music for good. That entry was quickly deleted, signaling either a renewed commitment to songcraft or a realization that he's more qualified to be a singer-songwriter than anything else. So perhaps his impending nuptials are the reason for the more-intense-than-usual weirdness emanating from Camp Adams and for Extra Cheese, an iTunes-only EP featuring six previously released songs and a studio version of an obscure, 10-year-old live track. Ostensibly this collection of babymaking music is a Valentine's Day tie-in, but it might double as a mixtape to the future Mrs. Adams. Or triple as a sort of non-chronological career retrospective-- a greatest-hits package with no actual hits.
As such, Extra Cheese is fairly thorough, drawing from nearly every stage of his Universal/Lost Highway career. So there's no Whiskeytown or Heartbreaker, which is a shame, but also no Rock N Roll or 29, which is a relief. Instead, the EP culls from Gold, Demolition, Cold Roses, Easy Tiger, Follow the Lights, and Cardinology-- arguably the highlights of his tenure at the labels. "Two" may be the best song here and one of his best songs period, with a strong hook justifying the laidback vibe and Adams' voice mixing nicely with Sheryl Crow's. It actually could have been a hit, or at least the soundtrack for a sappy TV drama (oh wait, it was). "Answering Bell", from his would-be breakout Gold, is less impressive. Adams affects his vocals mawkishly, the band pales next to the more inventive Cardinals, and hey, is that Hold Steady tourmate Adam Duritz singing backup? "Blossom", which is not about the 1990s sitcom, hails from deep within Adams' short-lived Grateful Dead phase with a steeply ascending hook that shoots for pretty but comes off as gangly.
As Extra Cheese proceeds, Adams strips away the instruments until only he, an acoustic guitar, and a harmonica remain. "Desire" sounds like it was scribbled on a Waffle House napkin at 2 a.m., then stuffed into his jeans pocket until he discovered it weeks later and hit "<RECORD>". It feels lived in and off-the-cuff-- a setting where Adams shines-and after so many full-band tracks, its modesty is refreshing and reassuring. "Evergreen" and "My Love for You Is Real" both reach for the same intimacy, but like much of Adams' recent material, they sound too slick and deliberate. Finally, there's "Hey There Mrs. Lonely", which is only sorta new: The song first appeared on the bootleg Live at Almost Blue in 1999, recorded around the time Whiskeytown disbanded. Even on this studio version, with its double-tracked vocals and intertwining guitars, "Hey There" remains spare and melodic, but the young Adams' lyrics overreach: "I'm the plastic three-inch armies you destroyed," he sings. "I'm the monster underneath your bed you ain't afraid of yet."
What makes "Hey There Mrs. Lovely" stand out isn't its newness, but the hints of conflict and lust mixed in among the childhood metaphors. There's no real angst and very little desperation in these songs; instead, a general neediness permeates Extra Cheese, trying to pass itself off as heart-on-sleeve earnestness. But Adams is much more interesting when he's writing and singing about romantic confusion than when he's pledging his desire and devotion, and he gets no points for acknowledging his schmaltziness with that tongue-in-cheek EP title. This drowsy set of songs may represent the mainstream crossover Adams aspires to be, but it gives little clue to the complex artist he actually is.


On Metronomy's new Love Letters, songwriter Joseph Mount arrives with another rearview glance at pop and rock history, aging backwards into a gray space between late psych and early glam.

Love Letters

Joseph Mount just can't stay tethered to a moment. Metronomy's 2008 LP Nights Out was the headlong dive into pop's peak-coke gloss, archly tweaking disco, new wave, and all points in between. Three years later, Mount dusted off some old vintage navy blazer and got yacht-rockish for The English Riviera, trading California beaches for the boardwalks of English seaside resorts and almost pulling off the integration.
With another three years passed, Metronomy arrives with another rearview glance at pop and rock history, aging backwards into a gray space between late psych and early glam with a bit of pastoral Kinks ennui mixed in to whatever's left of the old indie-dance pedigree. (He even booked Toe Rag Studios for that special analog-purist touch.) But there's a wide gulf between the idea of Love Letters as pleasant, throwbackish pop-rock nugget and the vapor-thin nonentity it became. What worked for The English Riviera's mellow beachfront reveries—subdued instrumentation, placid vocals, clinical studio-band polish—doesn't stick as well when the tempo's edged back up a notch or two towards something a bit more trad-rock. And what simple-enough songwriting chops there are to this album's credit are delivered so flimsily it's less twee than just plain weak.
If you're looking for a specific culprit, pin that on Mount's voice. Ten seconds and twelve words into opener "The Upsetter", Mount tries pushing his luck at the end of the phrase "straight from the satellite" and creaks out this whimpery Bowie affectation that's a pained balloon-squeak of a noise. It's viscerally grating, and there's more where that came from: When he's not reducing his passionless mumbling to a caricature of a non-committal indie-slacker voice (at its slackest on lite-Kraut "Call Me" and the dozy quasi-waltz "Never Wanted"), he's trying his hand at a fume-drunk midpoint between 60s UK pop and velvety R&B that creaks and shudders under the burden of a voice better built for flatness. Even through a number of permutations—Holiday Inn lounge Motown ("I'm Aquarius"), chirpy analog-organ dance-craze pop ("Reservoir"), drunk-dial Clientele ("The Most Immaculate Haircut")—it sounds like he's holding back, looking at his feet, trying not to cause a scene.
The big shame is that all these side-route trips into oddball drum-machine garage rock or motorik-a-go-go soul had the making of something daringly weird, intentionally out of step with your typical Brit-indie fare, yet still giddily catchy. After three NyQuilcore tracks that make the drum machine from Timmy Thomas' "Why Can't We Live Together" sound like a Clyde Stubblefield/Ginger Baker showdown, the title track feints towards another woozy slog for a bit over a minute before breaking out in a big stomping piano-pounding number that actually shakes the needle. If only the rest of the record caught on to that out-front force—the words on Love Letters might scan as more than lonely fridge-magnet poetry, the beats might feel like more than just placeholders, and the music could be something to dance to instead of just drift off to.


Featuring John Coltrane, Art Blakey, and Coleman Hawkins, Monk's Music was the world's introduction to the pianist's most famous songs. It helped define the future of jazz and the mind of Monk.

Monk's Music

The summer of 1957 would seem to mark the redemption of Thelonious Monk, the summer he made Monk’s Music in one night.
He was then a 39-year-old New York jazz pianist of great repute who hadn’t been able to work at most jazz clubs in New York for the past six years. His cabaret card, a relic of New York law enforcement since prohibition, had been revoked in 1951 after a spurious narcotics charge. And so he hadn’t been easy to see, which means he might have seemed elusive. He was introverted and sometimes guarded; such behavior has never been unusual in jazz. In fact he lived with bipolar disorder—undiagnosed at the time, though we know about it now, especially through the work of the scholar Robin D.G. Kelley, whose book Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original is the principal source of much biographical information here.
At the end of 1955, Monk’s mother, Barbara, had died. In early 1956, an electrical fire destroyed his New York apartment on West 63rd Street, totaling his piano and resulting in his family of five, basically destitute, having to stay for months with friends—15 people in a three-room apartment. At the beginning of 1957, Monk spent three weeks in Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, taken there by a policeman he'd been unresponsive to after a car accident. (What else was going on in his bloodline? Kelley’s book, at this period, contains a chilling sentence: “Thelonious did not know that his own father had been living in a mental asylum for the past fifteen years.”) In May, his wife Nellie developed an illness which resulted in a thyroidectomy, leaving her frail and depressed, which had a relay effect on Monk. Also during this time, Monk got himself a manager, began a close musical relationship with John Coltrane, made several albums for Riverside records including Monk’s Music, regained his cabaret card, and started a six-month job at the Five Spot Café—a gig which would re-establish his performing career, serve as Coltrane’s finishing school, and be described thereafter as a high point in New York jazz culture.
This is all a relatively easy story to tell. There is a reversal of fortune; Monk makes a great album; he wins. Like any cliche, it only applies badly to Monk.
As a pianist, Monk, who would have turned 100 this year, was not a dazzler-virtuoso like Art Tatum or Oscar Peterson. He phrased in a wide circumference around the beat, leaving a lot of silence in an improvisation, enough for you to notice. He made polytonal clonks on the keyboard by playing the desired note as well as the key adjacent to it. The assumption, often, was that either he didn’t have much technique, or was withholding it because he didn’t want to be understood or known too quickly, and why would someone do that?
A common initial reaction to Monk was skepticism. The pianist Randy Weston, then 18, first saw Monk playing in Coleman Hawkins’ band. “Who is this cat on piano?” Weston remembers thinking, in his memoir African Rhythms. “I can play more piano than this guy!” In other words: it’s unclear what this person knows. Another reaction was humility. The drummer Art Blakey described in a 1973 interview how Monk had been his sympathetic guide through what Blakey called the “cliques” in New York jazz when Blakey first arrived from Pittsburgh in the early ’40s. Blakey watched Monk defend his own music and insist on the right way to play it. “He was very outspoken,” he said. “He knew what he wanted to do, and he did it.” In other words: this person knows a lot.
Much of the talk around jazz, and around Monk, turns on ideas of knowing and not-knowing. (I keep the hyphen, as for related reasons did Donald Barthelme in his essay of that name as well as various Buddhists and psychotherapists, because by “not-knowing” I mean flexibility, working without a fixed outcome, trusting oneself to find a new vocabulary, as opposed to what I would mean without the hyphen: ignorance, lack of awareness, incuriosity.) By one understanding, jazz is a consensual language of rhythm, harmony, and form, and a consensual repertoire accumulated over the last hundred years. That’s about knowing. If you want to work in jazz, you have to get the basic songs under your fingers. Those songs—including, say, “All the Things You Are,” “Donna Lee,” “Footprints,” and about ten by Thelonious Monk—are a part of what holds the tradition together.
The larger part is the fact that jazz is essentially African-American in musical vocabulary and disposition. Jazz is cultural memory. For many African-American musicians, to know is also to be aware of the values and dangers; to know is not to forget. Monk’s music suggested the cumulative past as a wider present: something older from within jazz—boogie-woogie or early Ellington—along with other vernacular traditions adjacent to it: rumba, gospel, or rhythm and blues.
Jazz is further defined by the discipline of improvising, which some say is an express-lane to thinking through time progressively and allowing possibility, the greater idea of not-knowing.
From the first seconds of “Well, You Needn’t,” the second track on Monk’s Music and the record’s greatest eleven minutes, much control is in evidence. You hear Monk, with only the bassist Wilbur Ware thrumming in the back, working upward from the C below middle C over an F pedal in half-steps: C, Db, D, Eb, E. Monk is playing in an implied three-beat rhythm, and punching out his notes a little roughly, as you might imagine yourself punching an elevator button. But he is doing it in between the beats, with style and purpose. He climbs his five notes twice, each time bringing you one step away from resolution in a perfect cadence; he is building tension and expectation in a classical and idiomatic way, alerting you that something is going to take place here, and it’s going to be an event. Then it arrives: the song’s hard opening, with John Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins and the rest of the septet piling in, Art Blakey’s drumming shoving it forward.
The band plays the theme together and Blakey crashes on its last beat. Now it’s Monk’s turn. He doesn’t start until the cymbal quiets down, and so for the first measure and a half there is silence. His solo begins as a restatement of the song’s melody, according to convention, but picks it up like a sentence started in the middle. He speeds up and slows down, experimenting, stamping his foot a little, testing the strength of the rhythm and his own relationship to it. Three times he brings his hand down on a strange five-note chord: a stack of fourths, all black notes. Each time he lets it ring for six beats. “Well, You Needn’t” was not a particularly famous song in 1957—Monk had recorded it ten years before for Blue Note, also with Blakey—but it sounds colossal here.
Monk wasn’t an album artist per se. Monk’s Music—produced by Orrin Keepnews, recorded at Reeves Sound Studios on East 44th Street, released on Riverside Records—is contradictory: strident, reassuring, fractured, centered. It isn’t perfect, whatever perfect means. Here and there it sounds like a rehearsal or a jam session. Some solos wander, particularly on “Epistrophy,” and the trumpeter Ray Copeland and alto saxophonist Gigi Gryce are comparatively weak links. But Monk’s Music also sounds loose and deep and urgent. At its best it suggests a party in a specific room; you come to know the room. After Monk finishes his solo in “Well, You Needn’t,” he shouts “Coltrane! Coltrane!” to signal who’s up next. Ravi Coltrane, John’s son, told me that when he first heard Monk’s Music he was 21, listening in a university library with headphones on. At Monk’s shout, he startled, thinking someone was looking for him.
The band includes the saxophonist John Coltrane, Monk’s new student, who sounds dry, driven, searching; the saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, Monk’s old mentor, with a gallant and knowing affect that he puts to special use on Monk’s ballad “Ruby, My Dear”; and Blakey, a kind of younger brother, pro-active, explosive, rendering the dance impulse in super-titles. Monk himself does nothing strange by his own standards. He is brusque and vatic and intimate, moving through funny, orderly, supremely affective songs. The first track is the exception in several ways: it is only a melody, played in straight rhythm by the horns alone; it is a hymn called “Abide With Me,” also known as “Eventide,” composed in the middle of the 19th century by the English composer William Henry Monk. Destiny’s Child liked to put their gospel songs at the end of their records; Monk put his at the beginning.
Monk’s Music includes the first renderings of a harmonically rich song that would become one of Monk’s standards, “Crepuscule With Nellie,” written for his wife at a fragile time. Monk plays it unnervingly slowly, and bids the band to do the same with him. (One of his drummers at the time, Frankie Dunlop, in an interview from 1984 extraordinary for the secret knowledge about rhythm it reveals, as well as for Dunlop’s imitation of Monk’s speaking voice, called Monk’s approach to tempo “a different musical category altogether.”) Really, it’s a radical slow dance. During the Five Spot gig, while others soloed, Monk began the practice of dancing on stage: a soft lurch, turning in a circle, imitating the greater circle around the beat.
A lot came together for Monk in 1957. Shortly thereafter, starting in the 1960s, he shifted up to touring theaters with a steady band. His records became elegantly repetitive and often staid. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1964; from then on, till his withdrawal from playing in the 1970s and his death in 1982, he was “known.”
You can make fun of jazz writers from the distant past all day, but some of their early published ideas about Monk in the ’40s, especially in Down Beat and Metronome, were only as naïve as Weston’s. If they liked him, they were describing a European-style avant-garde hero, desiring to cut loose from the known. If they didn’t like him, they were describing music they found incomplete or antisocial. They described him as “too too,” “for the super hip alone,” “neurotic,” and—worst of all—“bad, though interesting.” All these reactions imply Monk’s fecklessness or lack of control. They are the reactions of people encountering a critical intelligence and not knowing what to do with it.
Monk’s story is a story of relationships. Born in Rocky Mount, NC, he grew up among Southern and Antillean families at 234 West 63rd Street in Manhattan, on a block now called Thelonious Monk Circle. A couple doors down, No. 224, was the Columbus Hill Neighborhood Center, his social hub and the site of his early gigs. His engagement in the jazz culture of Harlem through the ’40s, alongside Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Kenny Clarke, created several new languages in jazz, collectively and roughly described as bebop. All his interviews, all the anecdotes, illustrate that Monk, to a great degree, knew his own value and had no interest in being strange on purpose. (“I don’t like the word ‘weird,’ anyway,” he told Nat Hentoff.) He knew who he was, and that knowledge allowed him the freedom of not-knowing.
One of the best lines in Kelley’s book comes in a secondhand story told by the poet Ted Joans. Be skeptical, but here it is. At some point in the second half of 1957, during a set at the Five Spot, Monk wandered off stage as the band continued to play, out the doors of the club, and walked for a few blocks. One of the club owners chased him down and found him looking at the sky. He asked Monk if he was lost. “No, I ain’t lost. I’m here,” Monk is said to have responded. “The Five Spot’s lost.”


Influential sample maestro Jack Dangers’ first album since 2010 is a moody, playful exhibition of his strengths.

Meat Beat Manifesto - Impossible Star

It’s no slight against Impossible Star, the first album by electronica innovator Jack Dangers’ Meat Beat Manifesto in nearly a decade, to begin this review by outsourcing it to another critic: my six-year-old daughter. “My favorite part is that it doesn’t just sound like one thing,” she said after listening to the album on a lengthy car ride. “Some songs are creepy, some songs are funky. I like that.” Who could disagree? The delights of a good Meat Beat record—a magpie approach to collecting sounds, combined with a tasteful precision in arranging and deploying them—are apparent even to a child’s ears, and Impossible Star is a very good Meat Beat record indeed.
Meat Beat Manifesto debuted with 1989’s Storm the Studio, a furious onslaught of gigantic beats, dizzyingly dense samples and barking agitprop from then-vocalist Jonny Stephens. Its influence on the industrial-dance scene of the day was major, and it sounds as savage as ever to contemporary ears. MBM’s subsequent releases have ranged through a dozen or so beat-oriented subgenres, sometimes all at once, slowing down after 2000 as Dangers’ eclecticism developed greater focus. All of these efforts sounded sincere, though some (his turn leading a full-fledged jazz quartet on 2005’s At the Center) made for more successful entertainment than others (his incorporation of dubstep wobbles and drops on 2008’s Autoimmune and 2010’s Answers Come in Dreams.)
Impossible Star, then, is a proverbial return to form. While less bombastic than Dangers’ ’90s albums, many of which came strapped with absolute banger singles (“Asbestos Lead Asbestos,” “Radio Babylon,” “Helter Skelter,” “Acid Again,” etc.), it evokes their wide-ranging combination of macabre moodiness, driving dance beats and playful aural collage, all while sounding surprisingly contemporary. Its prevailing sound is a blend of Tim Hecker’s fearful noise and Kieran Hebden’s shiny, happy studio wizardry, from an artist who predates them both and long ago recognized the thrilling emotional and intellectual power of that combination.
The album’s opening quartet of tracks displays these strengths concisely enough to serve as an introductory-level Meat Beat 101 course. “ONE,” the kickoff, begins with a quiet voice uttering the title precisely one time, giving way to several minutes of ominous, vibrating electronic gongs and tones, with dimly audible murmuring in the background. The next song, “Bass Playa,” juxtaposes a skittery dancehall beat and bassline with spaced-out “ahhhhs” and a high-pitched, head-nodding hook. The jittery “We Are Surrounded” takes its title from a vocal sample in which a man with an unplaceable accent warns against “liars” and “deceivers” through a haze of radio static. Finally, “Unique Boutique” creates a pummeling mid-tempo rhythm around the robotic repetition of the titular nonsense phrase, leaving the impression that the song was made just for the sheer silly joy of it.
Elsewhere, the title track wedges a stentorian sample of the phrase “PEACE IS THE WORD” (you hear it in all caps) with Dangers’ ghostly, pessimistic, vocoder-processed response: “It’s impossible.” The album’s emotional high point is “T.M.I.,” a dub-bass-driven trip-hop composition reminiscent of MBM’s gloomiest ’90s work. “Too much information/It’s gotta go away...Misinformation is all we’re gonna get now,” Dangers sings, his echo-shrouded voice sounding increasingly worried with each repetition. It’s an astute lament for our bullshit-overload era. But MBM’s long history of sampling from Space Age sci-fi and Atomic Age “this is only a test”-type assertions has always been about demonstrating that our civilization’s norms are anything but normal. If any artist was poised to make a comeback in the time of “fake news” and “bot armies,” it’s Jack Dangers.
Impossible Star closes with “The Darkness,” its title rendered ironic by a perkily staccato beat and soaring, spacey melody. It’s the album’s most optimistic song—the sonic inversion of the dour, unsmiling face staring at us from the album artwork. The contrast is fitting. After all these years, Dangers has earned the confidence to cheerfully plumb whatever depths he chooses.


A huge influence on the summery and Balearic sounds in indie over the past two years, Barcelona's El Guincho returns with his sophomore album.

Pop Negro

Pablo Díaz-Reixa's first full-length as El Guincho, 2007's Alegranza!, predicted the whole chill-obsessed, beach-minded trend that we've been more or less stuck with for two years running now. What made that record so fresh and engaging, though, wasn't its crystal-ball nature; it was Díaz-Reixa's disorienting, drum-heavy style and use of repetition. Sheets of pounding rhythm, joy-packed vocals making every structural shift sound like a parade turning a street corner-- El Guincho knows repetition can be bliss, but he also knows (unlike many of his followers these days) that bliss doesn't have to sound so goddamn boring.
Alegranza!'s formula seemed as if it would benefit from further refinement-- which is why it's more than a little disappointing that Pop Negro, Díaz-Reixa's follow-up, ditches said formula almost entirely. Instead of feeling warm and a little bit lived-in, the songs here sound relatively chilly and fussy. The percussive elements are more conventionally linear-- less a full-on rhythmic assault-- and the song structures are frequently disjointed and fidgety, as if he had trouble in staying in one place for very long.
This new approach ends up working a few times, most successfully on opening track and lead single "Bombay", which carries more than a little bit of a Balearic bounce in the steel drum hits that vibe under Reixa's expressive melodic phrasing. "FM Tan Sexy" embodies at least two of the words in the title (guess which ones) with a taut backbeat and sliding sighs, while "Ghetto Fácil" and "Novias" aim upward with tropical effervescence.
More often than not, though, the restlessness of Pop Negro cements its mediocrity. Too often, Reixa works himself into an enjoyable groove that is then disrupted by melodic transitions so ill-fitting they seem nearly discordant. There's some good ideas in these songs-- see: the carnival chorus of "Soca Del Eclipse", the ocarina'd fluttering of "Lycra Mistral"-- but all the clutter and overstuffed arrangements (really, every time a saxophone shows up here, it doesn't work) seem designed to ensure that those ideas only half-stick before sliding down the wall. Indeed, Pop Negro feels transitional. El Guincho has a clear abundance of talent; he simply didn't harness it this time around.


Patrick Haggerty was raised on a dairy farm outside Seattle before the twin shocks of the Stonewall riots and his ejection from the Peace Corps radicalized him. In 1973 he released Lavender Country, widely regarded as the first country record by an openly gay person, in an edition of 1,000. Now that the label Paradise of Bachelors is reissuing the collection, the richness of Haggerty's achievement can be appreciated again.

Lavender Country

Some artifacts can only be referred to by themselves: A kidney bean is a kidney-shaped bean, and Lavender Country is the best country record by an openly gay person released in 1973. It is an object singular enough in music history that the Country Music Hall of Fame officially recognized it in 1999. Patrick Haggerty, the man who wrote and recorded it, was raised on a dairy farm outside Seattle by a loving and accepting family before the twin shocks of the Stonewall riots and his ejection from the Peace Corps radicalized him. He responded with Lavender Country, pressing about 1,000 copies with the help of a local gay community organization and selling them by word-of-mouth and in the back pages of gay magazines. Once those were gone, that was more or less it—Haggerty remained a staunch advocate of gay rights, and performed Lavender Country songs at pride events and community centers. But his record receded into history, to a rumor perfuming the edges of record collector conversation.
Now that the resourceful and adventurous North Carolina label Paradise of Bachelors is reissuing Lavender Country, the enduring richness of Haggerty's achievement can be appreciated again. Haggerty didn't just write a "gay country album" for the political theatre. There are winking lyrics about tumbling in the hay and a rewrite of "Back in the Saddle Again" as "Back in the Closet Again", but the country signifiers aren't just cheap hay-bale-and-tractor-bed props for a message. From the inexpertly sawed fiddle of Eve Morris to Michael Carr's saloon piano to Haggerty's reedy, searching tenor, it is a country album through and through. The sound is wobbly and amateurish, but in a playful, "come on y'all" sort of way, and you can easily imagine a roomful of enthusiastic participants in folding chairs at a community-center basement, singing along at Haggerty's encouragement.
Like any good culture-clash project, Lavender Country stops to have fun with sly subtext. "There's milk and honey flowin' when you're blowin' Gabriel's horn", Haggerty leers on "Come Out Singing". On the title track, he envisions a utopia where you wear your "frilly blouse" to "The People's Outhouse" and "the folks will hang around and pee for days." "Cryin' These Cocksucking Tears" claimed the FCC license of a DJ brave or foolhardy enough to play it on the air. On it, Haggerty's backup vocalist Morris sings the words "cock-sucking tears" with a clarion earnestness, like Joan Baez working blue. It is a fresh joy to hear every time it comes along.
But Lavender Country is not a really a "funny" album. The songs address life inside the gay-rights struggle, and the specifics hurt. On "Waltzing Will Trilogy", Haggerty rails against the "pack of straight white honky quacks" administering shock treatment to homosexuals—"they call it mental hygiene but I call it psychic rape," he barks. Young men are beaten to death by police and sodomized by prison guards. "Back in the Closet" and "Straight White Patterns" detail the quiet torture of living within a straight white regime. And "I Can't Shake The Stranger Out of You" is a lovelorn take on gay cruising, a pickup song that doubles as a lament. "I reckon you're lookin for some neckin, yes I do," Haggerty sings, inviting the song's subject to "climb right up on into my manger, but let me warn you about one small danger, babe/ I can't shake the stranger out of you." The song's tone is masterful—sexy, sad, and tender all at once.
This is why, despite the references to the struggles of the era, Lavender Country never feels like a footnote, historical or otherwise. Haggerty's songs  are resonant and wonderful, folding pain into jokes and vice versa and exuding heartbreak and anger and wry good humor. You could never switch the gender pronouns on a song like "Georgie Pie", where Haggerty beseeches a would-be lover who remains closeted, and yet the song speaks to anyone who has ever felt the sting of a rebuke. Haggerty's playfully frank "Your body odor lingers in my toes and in my nose and in my head" on "Come Out Singing" will make you grin with recognition if you've ever picked up and smelled someone's t-shirt.
Haggerty kept moving after Lavender Country, running for local office twice and working in anti-police brutality and anti-apartheid movements. He is 70 years old now, and often plays to senior centers (he mostly sticks to Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn). Lavender Country is a piece of his past, one moment in a busy life spent in social justice. But, any way it is viewed, it's a tremendous feat, a remarkable act of bravery and honesty as well as a statement on the universality of love and lust and belonging. Pop songs are limited vessels for social justice, but the good ones do a remarkable job of teaching empathy, a few minutes at a time, and Haggerty's songs build a better world to live in, for forty minutes or so. There aren't many achievements more exalted than that.