The Australian singer-songwriter looks to the warm, easygoing sounds of ’70s troubadours on an album that rarely demands attention, only politely asks for it.

Live in… New York City

Tex Crick is a man of few words. You’re less likely to know the keyboard player from his instrumental solo project than you are the many appearances he’s made over the past few years with indie luminaries from his native Australia and beyond. Although most well-known as a member of Kirin J Callinan’s band, Crick has navigated a twisty, pleasantly variegated career path —adding a citric piano line to Traffik Island’s “Sunday Painter” here, covering “Moonlight Shadow” in Weyes Blood’s band there. His one solo record so far, 2017’s largely instrumental psych set Between Cruel & Tender, suggested a wry, virtuosic sensibility behind the long list of credits. But for the most part, Crick’s enviable CV—add Connan Mockasin and Iggy Pop and South Coast punks the Pinheads to the list—paints a picture of a versatile, reliable musician.
Live In… New York City establishes him as just that: a magnetic and decidedly old-fashioned crooner, whose playfully composed love songs radiate warmth and familiarity. Years as a sideman have not diminished Crick’s ability to command an audience, though contrary to what the title implies, this is not an actual live album. As the first artist to release a non-Mac Demarco album on Mac Demarco’s label, Crick projects a self-assuredness beyond his years, displaying a canny knowledge of when to step into the spotlight and when to hang back. The result is a record with the ingenuity of a debut and all the easygoing charm of a classic.
That restraint comes in handy more than a few times on Live In… New York City. Crick’s production largely abandons the lush psych of Between Cruel & Tender in favor of the genial, piano-led pop of ’70s greats like Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson. The short instrumental passages towards the record’s back half in particular—“Spinster St. I” and “Spinster St. II,” with their duetting clarinet and piano parts—echo the more wistful moments of Newman’s film scores. Crick is in tune with this feather-touch vibe: the possibilities suggested by an ambling piano line gently fading out, the power and warmth of a well-placed horn section, and the resonance of a good cliche, like “I’m achin’ for ya!” dropped right as a song reaches its apex.
All three of those things appear on the centerpiece “Sometimes I Forget.” It and direct follow-up “Peaches & Cream” are pretty much the only songs on the album where Crick discernibly uses more than five or six instrumental tracks, and, fittingly, they arrive around halfway through, serving as emotional anchors. “Peaches & Cream” is also the only song on the record with distinct, changing verses, as opposed to repeated hooks and phrases. Placed at the center of an album that rarely demands attention, only politely asks for it, it’s a big swing into wide-grinning showmanship, and it works precisely because Crick doesn’t overuse the style. He sings a little like Arthur Russell at his poppiest, but elsewhere, he actually recalls Cass McCombs circa-Mangy Love—practically mumbling lyrics like “Sweet darlin, you’re always on my mind,” and, “Oh, the way you make me feel, it’s so unnatural” like a rockstar preparing a stadium show without wanting to strain his voice. This understated style gives Live In… New York City a homespun intimacy, as if Crick is happily but self-consciously playing these songs for just you.
The “live” here refers not to the album’s format, but its tenor. This is a studio album that celebrates the most wondrous parts of just being alive and in love, alive and just hanging about, alive and playing music, alive and being surrounded by the hustle and bustle of a new, endlessly fascinating city. Crick wrote and recorded the record during a period of living in the New York training as a piano repairman, and many of the songs are set to a faint buzz of the sounds of the city, including recordings taken of the patrons at jazz bars Crick would frequent. New York is both culturally and geographically one of the absolute furthest places in the world from Australia, and this element of Crick’s production reflects the romantic, eye-opening wonder of moving to a place that feels sprung from the furthest corners of your imagination, when even the ambient buzz of its nightlife feels like a melody. These moments on Live In… New York City are just as important as the more distinct segments, and when Crick takes the spotlight—whether with a piano line or a vocal line—it feels earned, respectful of the fact that Crick is just one character in a sea of many. That is the crux of Crick’s artistry: a few words, done well.

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The individual songs on the K-pop girl group’s mini-album are perfectly adequate, but the release itself never reaches the group’s former heights.

Queendom

When K-pop girl group Red Velvet debuted in 2014, it was unclear how well the then-quartet would fare. “Happiness” felt like a revamp of Miss A’s “Breathe”—quirky and fun but unconvincing as a first impression. It was followed by a cover of “Be Natural” that was too faithful to the original to showcase Red Velvet’s creativity. Then, half a year and one additional member later, they released two back-to-back singles that catapulted them into K-pop’s upper echelon: “Ice Cream Cake,” a sneering cheerleader romp with music box melodies, Brill Building girl-group harmonies, and a Skrillex-like buzz, and “Automatic,” a slick and sumptuous ’90s R&B track. These two songs were emblematic of their “red” (upbeat) and “velvet” (slower) sides, respectively, but more importantly, they foretold their impressive range.
Red Velvet’s discography serves as a convenient entry point for those interested in what contemporary K-pop does best. For a one-upping of a major Western pop single, there’s “Dumb Dumb,” which transforms “Bang Bang” into an even more boisterous kitchen-sink frenzy. For Korea’s undying love for Yours Truly-era Ariana Grande, there’s the unassailable “Talk to Me.” For a top-shelf K-pop song inspired by Ghost Town DJ’s’ “My Boo,” there’s the heartfelt “Blue Lemonade.” There are truly singular moments, too. “Bad Boy” is one of the only K-pop songs to actually feel sexy, its bassline and synths playfully grinding on each other, while “RBB (Really Bad Boy)” is built on an outrageous assortment of campy whistle-register shrieks and vocal warm-ups. The group’s first two albums, The Red and Perfect Velvet, are among the strongest albums in contemporary Korean music history, regardless of genre. Given such remarkable consistency, it’s fitting that Red Velvet’s latest mini-album is titled Queendom—they handily tower above their contemporaries.
Queendom doesn’t overflow with excellence, though, and its title track rarely offers the quintet the chance to flaunt their vocal prowess. After the year-and-a-half wait since their last single “Psycho,” the song’s uplifting dance-pop is too low-key and frustratingly one-dimensional. In the past, Red Velvet’s singles had specific textures and structures that bolstered their lyrics; the streamlined genre-blending of “Red Flavor” concluded with a sudden ritardando, suggesting a final savoring of summer love, while the stirring chord changes and strings of “One of These Nights” mirrored its uneasy navigation of heartbreak. Here, the message is one of direct encouragement, and without any risk-taking, cries to “be boss” fall flat. The pre-chorus stands out for its piano-house chords; they’re graceful and warm, like a friend clutching your hand, providing a wordless assurance of support. Yet this affection doesn’t register elsewhere, so the pep rings hollow.
Much of Queendom is similarly unambitious, but a couple of its other songs at least have everything in order. “Knock on Wood” traces the anxieties of falling in love, fleshing out the range of emotions felt with careful detail. The verses have sweet melodies, but sharp synth stabs reveal an undercurrent of nervousness. Later, the chorus’ staccato-like singing finds Red Velvet trying to appear composed. Even the titular line’s varied deliveries are important: When the members use a higher register, they sound giddy and hopeful, whereas confident moments present them as hotly determined to win over their crush. “Pushin’ N Pullin’” is the most brilliant track: After a referee whistle blows, piano chords bounce back and forth to signal fighting between lovers. When the chorus arrives, vocal harmonies blossom and push everything else aside. That the piano can be heard beneath this breathy, blissful cloud is moving; it’s a symbol of how this couple’s long-standing love and patience win over their quarreling. It’s the most striking depiction of romance in Red Velvet’s career.
Queendom both falters and thrives in simplicity. On “Better Be,” an elastic beat bubbles and squirms, but neither the vocal harmonies nor the instrumentation create enough tension to move the song past charmless cool. With its f(x) verses and ITZY synths, “Pose” convinces you of its poise despite the tepid energy level. “Hello, Sunset” actually nails a laid-back atmosphere, forming a gentle swaying rhythm with guitar strums. For a song about luxuriating in the joys of a long-lasting relationship, it’s an apt closer to this chapter of Red Velvet’s career.
In fact, right before Queendom’s release, the group celebrated their seventh anniversary with the “Queens Archive,” providing short video clips soundtracked by non-singles from their back catalog. Though it served as a reminder of how strong their music has always been, seeing these videos prior to Queendom’s release was bittersweet; it feels like Red Velvet are uninterested in proving their royal status on this mini-album. No song here is outright bad, and much of their best assets shine through the banalities, but Queendom feels like a signpost of Red Velvet’s former glory. You come to it expecting to meet the royals in the flesh, only to be confronted with their portraits instead.

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The second album from the crossover star features a few inarguable pop hits, but Post Malone’s singular, dour mood wears thin and grows stale after too long.

Beerbongs & Bentleys

At his Coachella set this year, Post Malone indulged in a little score-settling. He ran down some of the insults his critics hurled at him early in his career—“one-hit wonder,” “culture vulture,” “piece of shit”—during a heated rant that boiled down to: Look at me now. He certainly has reason to gloat. With his recent hits, he’s not only vanquished any lingering notion that his breakout single “White Iverson” was a fluke, but also proven himself one of the most perceptive figures in pop right now, an artist with a better understanding of commercial winds than even most of the rappers he cribs from.
Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Yachty, and their peers may have ushered in rap’s current rock-star era, but none have run quite as far with the premise as Post Malone. For Post, “rock star” is less a genre signifier and more a declaration of mass appeal. His music is melodic trap, mostly, yet its rugged sensitivity is so universal that much of it could slot into rock or even country playlists, too. He only rarely uses guitars, but they’re often implied. And while there isn’t so much a hint of twang on his stature-cementing sophomore album, Beerbongs & Bentleys, based on his guttural, belted delivery on opener “Paranoid,” it’s not a stretch to imagine him doffing a cowboy hat for a cheering arena. Twenty years after Whitey Ford sang the blues, this Bud Light–loving party animal with a gold grill and Willie Nelson braids has rewritten the rules of gravity for a crooning white rapper.
With its impassive descriptions of womanizing, pill-popping, and property destruction, Post’s smash 2017 single “Rockstar” sets the tone for Beerbongs & Bentleys. “Party going in with the threesome/Raw dog, prolly have three sons,” he raps on “Takin’ Shots.” On the champagne-clinking Swae Lee feature “Spoil My Night,” Post points out which woman he wants his handlers to deliver to him like he’s a diner at a lobster tank (“I ain’t even see the face, but she got beautiful boobies,” he enthuses). If Beerbongs’ hotel trashing, groupie-banging brand of debauchery sometimes feels like a throwback to the Mötley Crüe days, that may be deliberate: Tommy Lee even drums on “Over Now,” a rare overture to the rock fans Post Malone otherwise mostly courts with dog whistles.
The difference between rap’s current class of rock stars and the archetypal rock stars of the ’80s, of course, is that serious rappers aren’t allowed to enjoy their stardom. Success is a burden, modern rap songwriting conventions insist, and Post is never less convincing than when he fans the notion that he, too, resents his fame, as if it were possible that anybody who scaled the industry so purposefully never volunteered for it. At his nadir, Drake pushed his fame’s toll tropes to the point of self-parody, but even he never wrote a song as naked in its messaging as “Rich & Sad.”
At times it’s almost impressive how long an album called Beerbongs & Bentleys can go without cracking a smile. It is more assured and impressive than its predecessor, Stoney, but it’s also more exhausting. At 64 minutes, it repeats itself quite a bit, both thematically and sonically. Post has learned to do more with his voice, but he does it too much: He sings like a contestant on The Voice pleading not to be cut, overplaying every ache, quiver, and twitch. Especially in the album’s dour, mostly guest-free final stretch, it’s hard not to feel crushed under the weight of his undulating Adam’s apple.
The irony is Post sounds best when he isn’t trying quite so hard. “Rockstar” and its follow-up single “Psycho” have an ease to them, an unlikely grace. Each pairs the rapper with a spacious, unhurried beat and simply gives him room to ponder thoughts and chew syllables. It’s hardly a profound formula, but it plays to Post’s greatest strength: his melodic instincts. His best hooks are so tuneful and airless they directly target the ear’s pleasure centers. Too often, though, Beerbongs overplays its hand, twisting potentially breezy songs into something false and performative. For an artist whose secret weapon is his light touch, Post Malone lays it on mighty thick.


Afterlife compiles fifteen of DJ Rashad's previously unreleased collaborations. They match the mood and fervor you want from a Rashad track quite often, but it is hard to ignore their skeletal and fragmentary nature.

Afterlife

Posthumous art is always going to be a tad controversial. At its worst it feels like a tabloid-style ransacking of an archive. At its best it's a thoughtful and prodding collecting of memories—the ultimate memorial to a life in art. Most of the time it falls somewhere in the middle. We turn to the rough drafts of greats because they might offer hints of the magnum opus always on the horizon. And without the presence and guiding hand of the art’s creator, quality rests solely in the skill of curation and editing.
The 26th of this month will mark the two-year anniversary of Rashad Harden’s (DJ Rashad) passing, and in the 730 days since, the pulse of his legacy remains strong. Fifteen of Rashad’s previously unreleased collaborations have been compiled as Afterlife. The editors of the collection intelligently admit a fallibility in the face of the materials, and even offer a tantalizing hint of things still lurking in the vault, saying "it would be impossible to present a definitive collection of DJ Rashad's music" and that "many many classics will remain unreleased for ever." And like all posthumous art, Afterlife raises a very hard question: Does the trove of tracks significantly affect the ways we evaluate and interpret Rashad’s legacy?
In short, the answer is no, and the fifteen songs in Afterlife all feel incomplete in some way or another. They match the mood and fervor you want from a Rashad track quite often, but it is hard to ignore their skeletal and fragmentary nature. Many of the songs feel like sonic bridges between tracks in a DJ set; they can ferry one moment to the next, but seem to lack the legs to stand on their own. And as befits an album cobbled together from unfinished stuff, you can see the stitching exposed. It doesn't have the same complete narrative push of Double Cup, the concision of the Rollin’ EP. In composition it is closer to Rashad’s Just a Taste, Vol. One, a survey of work rather than an album perhaps.
Not to say that there aren’t highlights throughout. The opener, "Roll Up that Loud" is classic Rashad, ebullient from start to finish. It has the inimitable quality of a Rube Goldberg machine, with all the moving parts of the track whizzing back and forth. It's hard to know where artistic intentions and listener interpretations begin with posthumous work, but large chunks of this project reflect a surprising melancholy. This same feeling in Rashad’s work was most present in the Rollin’ EP, where high-speed funkiness was blended with a languorous mood. "Oh God," one of the most simple songs here, is composed of a lone synth arpeggio and gentle drum patterning, and its tone is as plaintive as 160 BPM music can get. Rashad’s collaboration with DJ Paypal, "Do U Wanna B Mine," meanwhile, counts as one of the odder songs Rashad had worked on. The melding of their two musical personalities leads into something that surprisingly sounds like earnest chiptune.
What Afterlife succeeds in above all is capturing the spirit of familial connection and experimentation integral to the Teklife crew. Teklife has always been a family affair. Not a single release from the collective has existed without collaboration. What made them so vital on stage and across blistering tracks was the ethic of teamwork. In all the times I’ve seen Rashad and the extended Teklife crew, I was witness to the exuberance of familial genius. The mixer was their hearth and they all took turns stoking the fire, whispering into each other’s ears, grinning because they all knew what five minutes into the future looked like: a mass of writhing bodies losing their shit in the face of something nearly ineffable. It was something I endlessly appreciated as a seventeen-year-old who had never even heard the whisper of a synth or the bump of a drum machine. To discover Teklife and Rashad then felt like walking across a mile of hot coals—throttled by the sheer force of realization at the other end.


The Danish R&B duo's second album proves their mettle as a musician's band; Quadron's hermetically sealed, ultra clean pop world evokes the last decade's neo-soul elite, and has won them fans in Prince, Pharrell, and Kendrick Lamar, who guests on the album's best song.

Avalanche

Quadron are a musician’s band. The Danish duo count Prince, Kendrick Lamar, and Pharrell amongst their many famous fans. It’s not hard to see their appeal: Airtight and carefully virtuosic, they’re perfectly wrapped up in their own hermetically sealed pop world. The attraction largely boils down to singer Coco O’s elastic voice, sometimes chirpy and sometimes soulful. She works in the tradition of the last decade’s neo-soul elite, channeling the jazzy effortlessness of Amy Winehouse circa Frank and the vulnerability of also-ran Duffy, shapeshifting between extremes mid-song. Avalanche is the duo’s second album, and the one that’s poised to earn them wider attention off the back of simple and effective songcraft.
Coco’s partner is Robin Hannibal, also the mastermind behind buzzed-about R&B act Rhye. Avalanche is dominated by his touch, an oh-so-perfect production hand that brings to mind the fastidious fuss of Fleetwood Mac minus the shag carpet thud. This all-consuming perfection is at once Quadron’s most alienating and tantalizing quality-- no alarms and no surprises-- set out in clear tones from the very beginning with “LFT”. Cautious horns, careful guitar, and flamboyant strings offer an impossibly polished surface for Coco’s vocals to glide over, singing a melody that’s just twisty enough not to challenge the listener. “Yes I’m still looking/ Looking for trouble,” she intones defiantly, as if trying to prove her own edginess in a world of perfectly rounded corners.
The duo have deservedly received plenty of pre-release attention for *Avalanche’*s first single “Hey Love”. With its throbbing hand percussion and Timbaland-worthy vocal snippets, it has all the precociousness of one of those folky ditties that soundtracked iPod commercials at their ubiquitous peak in the mid 2000s. It’s bolstered with an earworm of a chorus, but it’s a bit of a fake-out: Avalanche prefers intimate ballads over perky pop, offering nothing else as jaunty as “Hey Love”. That’s not a bad thing in itself, but the songs feel a little insincere when saddled with the band’s generic lyrics.
The way Coco borrows mannerisms from country, 60s pop, and other recognizable signifiers brings to mind Camera Obscura stripped of their excess and showmanship. But her lyrics lack that band's depth and detail, meaning her vocal tics have to pick up the slack. On songs like “Crush”, she’s front and centre, exploring every corner of her voice, and moving from raspy and snarky to hurt and forlorn at the flip of a coin. These slower tracks are a catch 22, however, because when she doesn’t have a stellar melody to orient her, like on “Befriend”, it feels like she’s merely stringing together cliches. Other attempts at more upbeat pop (“Neverland”, “It’s Gonna Get You”) are anodyne and patently inoffensive, music made to be quietly piped through coffee shop speakers.
But when they’re on, they’re on. Avalanche ends with a stretch of soft-rock stunners, including the heartfelt title track and the slide guitar daydream of “Sea Salt”. “Better Off”, with its summer afternoon swing and gentle ebb, is arguably the album’s best song-- here Coco’s vocals sound expert and controlled, topped off with an appearance from a sedate Kendrick Lamar. He’s neutered and hushed to fit into their own cultivated world, because above all, Quadron inhabit a very specific universe on Avalanche, one where no note or sound is out of place. If schlocky FM-lite pop is what you’re into, there’s lots to like on Avalanche, but it’s an album that feels hard to love. Avalanche’s obsessive squeaky cleanness keeps its audience at a distance. Coco might insist that she’s still looking for trouble, but there’s none to be found on Avalanche.


*Hypercaffium Spazzinate *is the first LP in over 12 years from the California pop-punk icons, and it relies on the same humor, honesty, and personal experience that has always powered their music.

Hypercaffium Spazzinate

The Descendents didn’t set out to become heroes of punk rock–if anything, they came together to earnestly troll it. The California group seemed innocent enough when they formed in the late ‘70s: four guys from Manhattan Beach playing cheeky hardcore songs about coffee, crushes, and hating your parents. Compared to their macho peers in the then-booming Golden State scene (Black Flag, TSOL, Fear, and the like) the Descendents struck most punks as unthreatening, maybe even a little bit soft–and that was the point, as frontman Milo Aukerman so passionately argued on a song titled (wait for it) “I’m Not a Punk:” “Show me the way to conformity,” he sneers, smirking at the beefcakes, “Try to be different but it’s always the same.” The self-proclaimed outcasts went on to achieve great success, releasing a slew of great albums over the next three decades that proved, once and for all, that the loser always got the last laugh–and more importantly, outlasted the competition.
Rumors of a new Descendents LP began to surface in 2010, when the band reunited for a set at Fun Fun Fest, followed shortly thereafter by a smattering of shows. At the time, frontman Milo Aukerman insisted that the gigs were mere “one-off shows” assimilated into into his summer vacations—one of the many perks of his lesser-known career as a biologist—but the the hype machine had already left the station. Before long, Aukerman put his academic pursuits on the back bunsen-burner to pursue music full-time. The quartet finally confirmed their reunion this past June by formally announcing *Hypercaffium Spazzinate—*their first LP in over 12 years, as well as the follow-up to 2004’s Cool to Be You. As with all Descendents records, the 16-track effort avoids over-aggression or extensive political chatter, instead relying on humor, honesty, and personal experience to power their musical and thematic engines, with considerable success.
The Descendents have come a long way from the spastic hardcore of their Milo Goes to College days—and not just because all four members are in their fifties. Even after over three caffeine-fueled decades of shouting himself hoarse and belittling the elitist attitudes of his fellow punks, Aukerman remains tethered to the band’s sonic and thematic cornerstones: reliability, universality, and of course, satire. Fortunately for the diehards, Hypercaffium Spazzinate is devoid of the stylistic overindulgence or inflated self-importance often associated with hiatus-ending efforts; the Descendents continue to focus on food, friends, family, and just about everything besides perfunctory political tropes—the only difference is their unprecedentedly mature perspectives on these topics, informed by the members’ experiences with aging, fatherhood, loss, and illness.
“No Fat Burger,” for instance, revisits and rebukes the gluttonous revelry of 1981’s “I Like Food.” Where the latter song sung the praises of “juicy burgers, greasy fries, turkey legs,” the new song chronicles a gastronomic break-up: “Can’t have no m0re juicy burgers/Can’t have no more greasy fries/Doctor took my lipid profile/He told me I’m barely alive.” Meanwhile, on “Limiter,” Aukerman uses nostalgia to accent his laments about society’s mounting tendencies to treat conditions like ADHD with pills (or “limiters,” as he calls them). “Whatever happened to drug-free youth?” he asks. “What’s to become of our sons, what can we do?”
Sobering lyrical themes aside, Hypercaffium Spazzinate is hardly the work of a band with their brows frozen in a collective furrow. It doesn’t matter if they’re grappling with self-hatred (“Fighting Myself”), toxic masculinity (“Testosterone,” which sees Aukerman railing against “fuckin’ dicks who beat [their] chests”, only to request a shot of the titular chemical so he can prove that he “has what it takes” to be a man), or intolerant Bible Thumpers (“Shameless Halo”)—the band charge through the pain as if it’s an excuse for pleasure, or at the very least, rudimentary, sugary pop-punk that puts the Warped crowd to shame. Stephen Egerton keeps his guitar riffs jagged and melodic, buoyed by Karl Alvarez’s staccato bounce; behind it all, Bill Stevenson wields his drum kit as an invaluable dynamic tool, switching between leisurely 4/4 and pugnacious double-time in order to emphasize his bandmates’ carefully-calibrated fury. Aukerman’s piercing tenor has withstood the test of time; apart from a slightly more limited range and a raspier delivery, he’s as impassioned as ever, pushing himself to the brink on lead single “Victim of Me” because he’s got absolutely nothing to lose.
Like the Descendents themselves, Hypercaffium Spazzinate has zero interest in flashy instrumentals or thematic grandeur. The album’s closer, “Beyond the Music,” frames the Descendents’ existence as an offshoot of a timeless friendship, rather than a career: “Frustrato-rock or chainsaw pop/Or whatever it is we play/This is our family/And it will always be this way.” Whether the track’s intended as the band's pre-emptive eulogy or a statement of renewed commitment is up for debate, but such postulation’s besides the point. Even for a bunch of brainiacs, these four Californians have always stressed the importance of living in the moment, sticking together, and keeping it simple—nothing more, and nothing less.


The Stones Throw drummer/producer has worked with everyone from Paul McCartney to Common and tours with Diana Krall. His first solo offering is a grand addition to the ever-expanding canon of instrumental hip-hop beat tapes.

Alone Together

Though you may not have heard of Karriem Riggins, the list of artists he's associated with in includes some recognizable names. The Stones Throw drummer/producer has worked with everyone from Paul McCartney to Common and tours with Diana Krall, a fellow mentee of the late jazz bassist Ray Brown, who, in turn, played alongside Dizzy Gillespie and pianist Oscar Peterson. Though his new album Alone Together is his first solo offering, it sounds like the work of a vet and is a grand addition to the ever-expanding canon of instrumental beat tapes. Because the producer is such a talented chameleon-- evoking with the 34 tracks here a whole range of his fellows-- the album ends up functioning as a sort of survey course: every piece, based on its distinct construction and influences, will lead the curious listener down a rabbit hole of wonderful sounds.
As a hip-hop instrumentalist, Riggins hews most closely to the Dilla format, taking miniaturized loops and samples and scrambling them together to come up with the eminently digestible sketches now immortalized as "donuts." This approach frequently yields tracks that sound time-stamped by certain periods of Dilla's progression, as if Riggins reached into his fellow Detroit native's seemingly bottomless vault in order to gain inspiration for his own meanderings. "Round the Outside" could be a great, lost sketch from the Ruff Draft sessions and the 40 second dream "Orbitz" contains that encoded whispering that marked Donuts as a distinctly spiritual experience. "Double Trouble" evokes Dilla most strongly; its woodwind flourishes and tonal progressions may as well have been produced by Jay Dee's ghost.
But Riggins is more than just a convincing Dilla clone. The producer's interest in exotic instrumentation also recalls some of Madlib's more far-flung forays. "Moogy Foog It" (think Beat Konducta in India), "Esperanza" (which incorporates a trilling flute), "Africa", and "Back in Brazil" are spread throughout the album, and each time one pops up, it makes for a peregrine treat, providing an outré extension to some of the more familiar sounds.
Though it works in many places, the scattering of sound-alikes is symptomatic of Alone Together's principal downside. There appears to be little thought put into sequencing-- tracks are placed back to back with all the personal investment of the iPod's shuffle function. "Stadium Rock", though aptly titled with its gladiator ululation, is a little jarring, coming as it does after the melody of "Oooooaaaaa".  Meanwhile, the anxiety-inducing "Because", contains a jagged section of electric guitar which describes a tension that's altogether absent from the rest of the album.
For the most part, the analog warmth of live instrumentation is employed thoughtfully, reminiscent, in some places, of some of the best tracks on Oddisee's fantastic Rock Creek Park. The sketches come alive when they incorporate dulcet bell tones on "Ding Dong Bells", reedy harpsichord on "Harpsichord Session", and alto flute on "Alto Flute". (It's a minor complaint, but Riggins clearly needs a crash course in the art of naming things: There's a good chance his household pets are named Dog, Cat, and Bird.)
Complementing the warmth of the instruments are the voices. Riggins particularly excels when he incorporates live vocals, as on "Tom Toms", where a mellow voice adds warmth to the smooth surface of the track. And on album highlight "I Need Love", a trio of singers provides backing for an amorous chanteuse, a brief interpolation of that early Motown sound. But, even when vocals aren't present, Riggins gives almost every track enough musical complexity to stand on its own. Everything here would sound great with a rapper over it, yet none of the tracks feel handicapped by the absence of lyrics.
The death of the MC is all too common a conversation, but the current ascendance of instrumental hip-hop producers is a phenomenon that's been ignored for too long. More and more artists (Thundercat, Knxwledge, and Eb7#9, to name a few) are combining the rigidity of traditional rap structures, with the progressive tendencies of jazz to create instrumental music that appeals to fans of both genres. Though Riggins occasionally explores the margins-- "Water" recalls the complex ambitions of someone like Flying Lotus-- he mostly keeps things simple, content to unleash tracks that, frankly, sound as if they could have been made by others. That said, it's a beautiful album, casually constructed and surging with an uncommon warmth, a success that will hopefully prompt Riggins to continue working alone, eschewing collaboration to deepen his explorations into unknown territory.


The Dominican artist’s terrific second album runs at a breakneck pace and excels at two of the elements that make dembow so irresistible: hooks and humor.

Pila’e Teteo

You could be diplomatic and call Kiko el Crazy an influence, or you could cut the bullshit: The man fathered many of the trends that your favorite Spanish-speaking pop star is currently borrowing for style and clout. Everyone from Bad Bunny to Rosalía has sampled him or invoked some of his lingo, hoping to replicate just a little bit of his Dominican dembow magic. Take “Saoko,” on which Rosalía says “la pámpara”—a now-ubiquitous self-mythologizing catchphrase that Kiko invented. Or consider the (ethical?) non-monogamy banger “Titi Me Preguntó,” which samples the same slogan and Kiko’s maniacal laughter. A cursory review of the Billboard Latin charts over the last year will demonstrate that dembow is the industry’s new favorite toy—and that Kiko has been one of its primary envoys.
The artist born Jose Alberto Rojas Peralta has been making music since 2009, but he broke out of el bajo mundo, or the dembow underground, around 2019, arriving in the public eye with hot pink hair, neon drip, and hairless cats—a larger-than-life panache far removed from the diamond-hard toughness of many dembowseros at the time. He caught flak from homophobes for wearing skirts, painting his nails, and voicing support for queer communities—choices that he says caused some artists to refuse collaborations with him, even as his songs were planted firmly in the thematic realm of dembow’s (often hypermasculine) obsession with sex and partying.
But his debut, 2022’s Llegó El Domi, was marred by middling pop hooks and corny EDM build-ups; it was an obvious bid to soften dembow for pop audiences. For Pila’e Teteo, his second album, Kiko seems to have flipped a switch. Like the shock of a defibrillator delivered to an arrhythmic heart, it revives the devil-may-care whimsy that made Kiko so magnetic in the first place.
Pila’e Teteo excels at two of the elements that make dembow so irresistible: hooks and humor. Kiko’s charisma stats are maxed out here: On “Pichirry,” he recruits El Alfa to flip the Dominican term for chicken butt into a metaphor about a woman’s ass. On “Loca y Linda,” he daydreams about someone as “crazy and pretty” as the YouTuber and influencer Lele Pons. The Angel Dior-featuring “Pa’ Ti Ya” transforms an expression about being down for someone into a hook about loading up on pills (at one point, Dior brags about taking molly that sends him to Jupiter). Any dembowsero can rap about getting laid or turning up, but the ability to wield wordplay, metaphor, and onomatopoeia into laugh-out-loud moments is a gift, and part of what makes Kiko so exceptional.
Kiko may not be able to sculpt his voice into infantile babbles or trilling yelps like El Alfa, but he still has impressive vocal control. You can pretty much hand him any beat and he’ll find a way to fit his voice into its contours. Over the ragga bounce of “Pa Que Baile,” Kiko twists his vocals into playground taunts and dancefloor commands. On “Te Puede Llena” and “Tu Va Dobla,” producer Imperio builds a maze that Kiko easily solves: Layers of handclaps, chopped vocal loops, and Fever Pitch riddims cross over and under each other, Kiko turning every corner with effortless brio. “Saco e’ Sal” is horror-movie dembow, with Kiko rapping so fast, it almost feels like he knows he’ll be the first to get killed off.
Pila’e Teteo lands like a grueling HIIT workout; with 15 songs running well over 100 BPM—and most under the three-minute mark—you are likely to be panting by album’s end. The pace is breakneck, but rarely do Kiko and his guests struggle to keep up—instead, the speed is a motivator, pushing everyone here to stay the course or risk getting lost in the blur. Dembow is a collaborative, singles-based genre, but Pila’e Teteo takes it a step further; this is a lineup showcasing genre sluggers both past and present. There are appearances from veterans like El Alfa, Chimbala, and somehow, the late Monkey Black; as well as prolific young guns Flow 28, Angel Dior, and Braulio Fogón. The features are usually seamless complements to Kiko’s style, as on “Con una Casa en el Cuello” and “Saco e’ Sal.” In other moments, like on “Pa’ Ti Ya,” his creative partners outshine him. Kiko stepping aside from time to time isn’t necessarily a detriment. More so, it affirms his status as an expert curator: the man has summoned his peers and disciples for the teteo of the century.
When it falls back on lazy, retrograde tropes, Pila’e Teteo doesn’t live up to its promise. “Haitiana” reproduces cringey racial myths about Haitians, African-Americans, and blackness, while on “Rapa Un Cuero,” Kiko brags about having sex without a condom. And even though artists like Yailin La Mas Viral, Gailen La Moyeta, Tokischa, and La Perversa are part of a massive renaissance for women in dembow, Pila’e Teteo features none of them. In fact, it doesn’t feature any Dominican women at all; the Andalusian rapper Mala Rodríguez is the only woman to appear across all 15 tracks, and while her verse on “Saco e’ Sal” rips, the choice to spotlight someone from Spain rather than the Black women who are actually part of the movement is a disappointment.
Pila’e Teteo arrives at a decisive moment for dembow. Long derided by the elite as too crude, too Black, and too low-class—a barrier to entry that has obstructed the genre’s incursion into the mainstream Latin music industry—it finally seems that the world has picked up on the movement’s power. Skeptics often attributed that struggle to a problem of dialect, claiming that Dominican dembow artists relied too heavily on hyperlocal slang, which made their songs less palatable for a wider Spanish-speaking audience.
Ironically, that experimental engagement with language is part of what has drawn stars like Bad Bunny and Rosalía to the music. Whether it’s through ribbing banter, knowing innuendo, or onomatopoeic romps, dembow artists have transformed Spanish into a linguistic playground, one that all the new kids want to frolic in. As the Dominican critic Jennifer Mota has written, the world may stigmatize the way we speak the colonizer’s language as “improper.” But in their phonetic subterfuge, dembow artists are also forsaking more than 500 years of grammatical entrapment and colonial fuckery.
Pila’e Teteo builds a discipline of rebellion. With his inventive approach to language and wacky aesthetics, Kiko has shepherded a constantly transforming genre into freakier, more playful directions. Pila’e Teteo is not a hybrid-pop attempt at a crossover audience or a watered-down version for the uninitiated; it is dembow in its rawest form. It is the sound of La 42, of Dyckman, of Cristo Rey—the music that blares out of corner colmados and custom soundsystems, scandalizing your mother and infuriating gentrifiers. Let them stay mad.


Michael Gira reshuffles his famous band's lineup, inviting collaborators like the Necks and Ben Frost for a record that emphasizes elegiac beauty over raging catharsis.

Leaving Meaning

In 2017, Michael Gira dissolved Swans, putting an end to its most stable configuration in 35 years of the post-punk brutalists’ on-again, off-again existence. It wasn’t the first time that Gira had started over. He first did it in 1997, after a 15-year stretch of constant evolution in which Swans grew from atonal bloodlust worshippers (Filth) to blissed-out neo-folkies (The Burning World) to self-flagellating maximalists (The Great Annihilator). Titling the band’s posthumous 1998 live album Swans Are Dead was Gira’s way of laying a boulder on the lid of the tomb—at least until 2010, when, after a decade at the helm of his psych-folk project Angels of Light, he rolled back the stone and brought Swans back to life.
Now, on his first Swans album since 2016’s The Glowing Man, Gira has reshuffled the deck once again. Players from throughout his various projects’ histories have rejoined him here, including several of Angels of Light’s core members (Christoph Hahn, Dana Schechter, Cassis Staudt, Larry Mullins) and pretty much the entire recent Swans lineup. As has frequently been the case over the years, Gira has swelled the group’s ranks with guest players: organist Anna von Hausswolff and her sister Maria; noise musician Ben Frost; shock-headed former street harpist and neo-cabaret singer Baby Dee; Australian improvising trio the Necks. (The latter, praised for their minimalistic attention to detail, make for an unexpected fit: When it comes to sustaining a single repetitive groove for endurance-testing lengths, the Necks are the pianissimo yin to Swans’ pile-driving yang.)
The chief difference between the recently departed Swans and their reincarnation here boils down mainly to method. Where heavy touring turned Swans’ 2010-2017 incarnation into something like a living, breathing organism—in which the band’s pummeling, long-form concert performances informed the shape of successive studio recordings, and vice versa—for Leaving Meaning Gira returned to his role as a producer, ringleader, and foreman, laying down basic tracks on his own and then inviting his contributors to fill in the blanks as they best saw fit.
Sonically, the album backs away from the dirge-rock rave-ups that defined the group’s last four albums. That’s a welcome development: By The Glowing Man, a record that often seemed intent upon dwarfing the horizon itself, they were running out of new things to say on such a scale. Leaving Meaning is shorter and simpler. Where Swans’ last three albums were all two-hour behemoths, this one clocks in at a relatively manageable 93 minutes, and only one song breaks the 12-minute mark—a significant departure from their recent habit of digging in for 20 or 30 minutes at a time.
The new record is sweeter, too, shifting its focus from raging catharsis to eye-widening beauty. Instead of the hammer-on-anvil force of recent albums, the largely acoustic palette leans toward plucked strings, brushed percussion, and sighing choirs. At least two songs are in an uncharacteristically chipper major key, and one of them (the radiant “What Is This?”) summons a sparkling beatitude reminiscent of Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas.
The gorgeous title track is a highlight. It’s one of two featuring the Necks’ ruminative piano-and-contrabass improvisations, and while Gira’s songwriting gravitates toward his usual contradictions (“I can be it/But not feel it/I can steal it/But not keep it/I can break it/But not heal it”), he sounds uncharacteristically calm, purring like an old cat in a bookstore window. He’s as charismatic a ranter as they come, but to hear him so sedate makes for a nice change.
“Amnesia,” which first appeared in radically different form on 1992’s Love of Life, here becomes a fingerpicked ambient waltz for strings, tympani, and choir. And when he digs into the barrel-chested depths of his register on songs like the tender, elegiac “Annaline,” he evokes the kind of weary tragedy endemic to sad drunks and wastrels. As a lyricist, Gira has always conveyed an irreparable brokenness, and in songs like this one—“Let’s burn in a fire/Let’s clean what is true” he groans—he embodies the image of a fallen man. (Rape allegations against Gira—denied by him, but never retracted by his accuser—will forever draw an uncomfortable shadow beneath Gira’s portraits of repentant sinners.)
It’s not all so gentle or so gossamer. “The Hanging Man” and “Some New Things” both reprise the pounding rave-ups of the band’s recent records and live shows, while the overdubbed chants and chain-gang rhythm of the closing “My Phantom Limb” recall the agonies of the Greed/Holy Money years. And as always, the apocalypse hangs heavy over songs braided from the strands of Gira’s holy trinity: sex, death, and the infinite. The lyrical themes here are all familiar by now: Lovers claw at each other, seeking self-annihilation. Salvation is an illusion. Negation is the only certainty.
“The Nub,” the other song with the Necks’ at its center, seems at first to be about sexual pleasure. But as it drifts and droops, and Baby Dee sings of krill, bleached fluid, and putrefying flesh, the song comes to resemble an audio portrait of a whale fall. Scavengers may feed on the decomposing meat for months; the skeleton then becomes a source of sustenance to mussels, clams, and microbes for years or even decades to come. Whether or not it’s what Gira had in mind, this ruined, rotting grandeur is a fitting metaphor for Swans’ ongoing body of work. Swans died so that new life may flourish.

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The Georgia post-punk band Arbor Labor Union are veterans of various punk and hardcore bands, and on their new album they expand on the rootsy drone of their first.

I Hear You

Arbor Labor Union likes to sing about singing. The Georgia post-punk band’s debut album, released in 2015 under the name Pinecones, was titled Sings for You Now, and it contained numerous lyrical references to the titular act; in essence, the album was an account of the band’s own creation, propelled by muscular hymns and steeped in a mystical if not downright metaphysical aura. If Sings for You Now was an origin story, I Hear You is a mission statement. Following a name change to Arbor Labor Union, the group has refined and expounded upon its throbbing, rootsy drone. They’ve also doubled down on singing about singing—if not always in the most convincing way.
Veterans of various punk and hardcore bands, the guys in Arbor Labor Union drew inspiration from Henry David Thoreau’s transcendentalist philosophy for Sings for You Now, and these two areas of inspiration still hold heavy sway over I Hear You. On the pounding “Radiant Mountain Road,” an uplifting command to “Ascend to the Mount of Joy” is fueled by nervy guitar interplay. Rather than trading or entwining leads, though, guitarists Brain Atoms and Bo Orr speak to each other in blocks of chord and texture. “Belief’d” is just as elemental, a hymn cast in circular, mutant-Southern-rock riffs and bleary distortion; at the same time, there’s an almost pagan spiritualism at play, a call to invest “in the occult whispers of shifting plates” and “the stacking of heads into a faceless totem” before adding—exclamation point theirs—“We believe in those things / Belief!”
If it sounds a bit on-the-nose, that directness is even more blatant on tracks like “Mr. Birdsong,” “Hello Transmission,” and “Volume Peaks.” Here Orr sings of being “fresh and green/And you’d always heard of song/But you would never sing”; of how “In a song I sang to you/That in a song it came to you”; and how “I live in a song/I dance when it’s played.” At points, this recursive amplification of the power of song is dizzying. Other times it comes across as forced, a clever idea filled beyond its capacity, or  a conceptual exercise that flies in the face of the music’s primal howl.
That howl, though, is considerable. Ironically, it’s also restricted mostly to the instruments. Orr’s vocals have developed only slightly since Sings for You Now. His style and subject matter are so similar to that of Lungfish’s Daniel Higgs, it's impossible not to compare the two—and in that match-up, Orr can’t come close in terms of depth, dimensionality, or sheer force of will. But even disregarding that, Orr’s delivery feels far too sleepy and easygoing when pitted against the enormity of the band, or even his own lyrics; even his occasional yelps of euphoria feel restrained. He’s most compelling on “IHU,” a shimmering, meditative chant that boils over into a call to action: “We trust our leader/We heed his word/We’ve studied joy / And it can be heard.” That joy can’t always be discerned throughout I Hear You, but Arbor Labor Union have taken a respectable leap toward realizing the throbbing cosmic Americana that clearly rings in their souls.


Having already amassed a solid discography of limited-run releases on numerous labels, St. Louis-based drone architect Joseph Raglani arrives at Kranky with a well-formed aesthetic.

Of Sirens Born

Having already amassed a solid discography of limited-run releases on numerous labels, St. Louis drone architect Joseph Raglani arrives at Kranky with a well-formed aesthetic. You can hear that experience and the confidence it inspires on Of Sirens Born (previously a 2006 CD-R on Gameboy). It's a dense, patient work that could only have been made by someone who's done this before. There are certainly precursors to his music: the haunting film scores of Popol Vuh, the all-night minimalism of Terry Riley, the garage din of Yellow Swans, the natural timbres of South American folk music. But the assured way that Raglani mixes these styles is less mimicry than synthesis, as if he were directing his influences like actors on a film set.
Raglani's movie features an ensemble cast, but the name above the title belongs to Popol Vuh. Through a Kranky press release, he cites the German group's score to Werner Herzog's Aguirre, Wrath of God as a reference point, and you can hear PV's trance-inducing soundtracks in this album's ringing atmospheres. That gives Of Sirens Born a cinematic quality, with widescreen drones perfect for slow pans across foggy landscapes and ominous bodies of water. Through layered sounds and well-timed changes, Raglani builds a wordless narrative, each track feeling like an abstract painting set in motion.
The most Popol Vuh moment is opener "Rivers In". Pushing choral tones like ocean waves, Raglani sounds both austere and organic. You can practically see empty fields of grass wafting back and forth to these windy chords. The 10-minute "The Promise of Wood and Water" follows with similar environmental leanings, but floats off a bit too far, caught in a loop of hums and chimes that veers toward new age. Of Sirens Born recovers quickly. "Perilous Straits" evokes Terry Riley with rolling tones that gradually grow denser yet somehow clearer. "Jubilee" continues that upward drift, as sheets of static and distortion cover each other like winter blankets.
The album's noisiest cut, "Washed Ashore", is its peak, a grinding sprint that conjures images of an exploding temple, then descends into small, sparse sounds, like the crackling embers of an acre-sized fire. On an album with such clear antecedants, it's the one track that sounds only like Raglani, blasting away all traces of influence. If he keeps heading in this direction, such reference-deletion will become permanent very soon.


Woodsist presents the first full-length from this krautrock-indebted collaboration featuring Wooden Shijps guitarist Erik "Ripley" Johnson.

Escape

Moon Duo are San Francisco's Sanae Yamada and Erik "Ripley" Johnson, guitarist for psychedelic journeymen Wooden Shjips. After a quick EP and single released within a year of their 2009 formation, they're bringing Escape (via recent lo-fi haven Woodsist) just as swiftly. Four songs in just under 30 krautrock minutes, it's an LP that pulls Johnson even closer to Suicide and Silver Apples, influences that have played an audibly important role in his work with Wooden Shjips. Johnson's vocals are barely there, whispers buried in sheets of two-chord riffs and Yamada's keyboard dissonance. Moon Duo don't stray too far from the deep-cutting, fuzzy gymnastics of Johnson's other band, though he's allowed further freedom to hypnotize on the playground where he's most comfortable. More than just a branching off deeper into another third eye, Escape is a pop record at its core.
Or at each end. Opener "Motorcycle, I Love You" churns along on a classic Phil Spector drumbeat, speeding up as Yamada and Johnson add layer upon layer of shadow and menace. It's a very sexy juxtaposition, and Moon Duo's music is sexy throughout, the interplay between Johnson and Yamada on full, propulsive display. Whether Johnson's taking a pause to add some breathy vocals or working up a froth on his guitar, the song's pulse won't quit. The middle of the record's a different animal. "In the Trees" slows shit down to a grind, Johnson soloing through screens and clouds of low-end more akin to the drone of Wooden Shjips. "Stumbling 22nd St" employs an equally heavy feel, Yamada acting as the song's melodic spine this time out with a keyboard riff her bandmate embraces from time to time by mimicking it on guitar.
The titular closing track is pure pop in comparison, if only in that it's infinitely lighter and easy to digest. Riffing over a drumbeat and a breeze, Johnson sounds a lot like Ducktails' Matthew Mondanile as the latter does when in his zone. All that track-by-track geeking aside, what makes Escape so successful is that these two are able to meet you halfway-- just as they do one another. Traditionally, the repetitive forms they're working with make for relatively passive listening. But this isn't that kind of psych record; textures are engaging, rhythms reveal serious drive. And be it the way they set a hook or the way they lord over each song's space, Moon Duo don't beam you out. They pull you in.


During an interview at a kitchen table in Soho sometime last month, Will Oldham mentioned Joanna Newsom as one of ...

The Milk-Eyed Mender

During an interview at a kitchen table in Soho sometime last month, Will Oldham mentioned Joanna Newsom as one of his favorite storytellers. At the time, I'd only passingly listened to her two self-released EPs, and was more familiar with her keyboard work with San Francisco's The Pleased and harp contributions to the Deerhoof/Hella side project Nervous Cop. But that's changed with the release of her first long player, The Milk-Eyed Mender. Here, the words to her meandering stories-- disarming in their formal purity, but still highly individualized and eccentric-- elaborate on an aesthetic that evokes French coins, dark maroon leaves, shafts of wheat, and ostrich feathers as much as it references them directly.
Born in Nevada City and currently residing in San Francisco, Newsom's yarns summon a deep, rustic South. A line in the buoyant "Bridges and Balloons" uses e.e. cummings neologisms and Omoo's breezy prosody to impart the tale of a winter's day on a fallible ship: "The sight of bridge and balloon/ Makes calm canaries irritable/ They caw and claw all afternoon/ 'Catenaries and dirigibles/ Brace and buoy the living room/ A loom of metal, warp-woof-wimble/ And a thimblesworth of milky moon/ Can touch hearts larger than a thimble." In "Sadie", the title character is asked to accept a pinecone and a bone, talismans to ward off death. Really, they're the gentlest tokens that mark the beginning of a relationship, and later reaffirm the love despite an inevitable move towards taciturnity.
Newsom's wonderfully detailed romanticism ("Your skin is something that I stir into my tea"), homespun wisdom ("Never get so attached to a poem, you forget truth that lacks lyricism"), idiosyncratic flourishes ("See him fashion a cap from a page of Camus"), and insights into the prosaic ("There are some mornings/ When the sky looks like a road") infuse each track with the weightiness of an embroidered travel narrative and a private field-recording.
She wields a joyful trill reminiscent of Texas Gladden on her "Devil and the Farmer's Wife", while her often childlike intonation also recalls Linda Hagood of the early '90s Uncle Wiggly-related trio, Smackdab, saturated with the air of '60s English folkie Vashti Bunyan. Showing an appreciation for Appalachian folk and the experimental composer/folksong scholar Ruth Crawford Seeger, her spare arrangements-- harp, Wurlitzer electronic piano, harpsichord, piano, and slide-guitar on two tracks-- unwind like early Homestead oddity, The Supreme Dicks.
Creating avant-garde American music for the back porch, she expands upon tradition without losing authenticity. In this sense, her practice could be linked to Devendra Banhart, a friend and kindred spirit. Both map a pile of eccentricities that tumble together to create something useful, familiar, and nearly sacred. Here's hoping to a duet for the new folk future. Perhaps Kenny-and-Dolly style?


The Pittsburgh-based producer makes undeniably heavy music, combining hardcore techno, drum’n’bass, and footwork and sprinkling it with a bit of frivolity and chaos.

My Diary

After spending the early part of this decade making prismatic pop songs and wheezy techno experiments, Pittsburgh-based producer W00dy has recently settled into a kind of mutant club music that’s built around hyperactive vocal samples and, as the title of a 2018 tape put it, Relentless Kickdrum. In her rhythmic contortions, you can hear the echoes of all kinds of speed-demon dance music: hardcore techno, drum’n’bass, and footwork, among other molar-grinding microgenres. It’s music for ragers, first and foremost.
But the real joy of her tracks is: They’re silly. That’s the stated goal of her work, per her Bandcamp page, to “bring absurdity 2 the dance floor.” Without sacrificing the gurning pace of her tracks, she arranges the components in these overlapping, off-balance loops, which blend and blur together in a wonderfully psychedelic way. Listening to her music feels like you’re watching the dancefloor from the center of a lazy Susan, trying to rediscover your center of gravity.
W00dy’s latest full-length, My Diary, only pushes her sound further in that dizzying direction. The album begins with a flurry of slurred syllables, fluttering around one another erratically. As “Can’t Resist It” unfolds into more rave-ready shapes, that vocal continues to dart around, like a fruit bat mischievously unleashed on an unsuspecting nightclub. It’s a kind of chaos you can’t help but smile at.
There are only four tracks on My Diary, but they’re each so jittery and unpredictable that they feel like they contain a whole album’s worth of ideas. “Came 2 Party,” for example, starts with a slivered vocal and hopscotching kick drum rhythm that sounds like a Teklife record sent through a paper shredder, before morphing into hardcore, acid, and filtered breaks, all within just a minute or two of one another. Each of the tracks—none of which are less than five minutes long—is so stuffed with details and micro-samples that it almost feels like too much for your brain to process at points. It's similar to the approach of rave revisionists like Lorenzo Senni or the many genre-destroying producers that fill surrealist labels like Orange Milk and Hausu Mountain. There’s a sincere joy for the styles that she’s playing with, but a beautiful perversity in how willing she is to mangle them and the speed at which she does so.
W00dy has described My Diary as a collection of her “most personal thoughts & feelings.” It’s hard to know what she means by that in a literal sense—there are no lyrics here to speak of—but you can extrapolate a little about her from these four tracks. It’s a portrait of a mind in constant motion, looping back on itself, swinging wildly from unrestrained joy to disarray and confusion, never stopping too long in any particular sound or feeling. That’s probably a familiar sentiment if you too are a sensitive person in the Internet age, watching every day as global tragedies and personal triumphs scroll past you every minute. My Diary echoes that feeling on some level. It’s overwhelming, seemingly by design, but it also offers a balm. You can always dance through it.


Alice Bag was the lead singer and co-founder of the Bags, one of the first punk rock bands to emerge from L.A., and Alice Bag is her first solo record in a 40-year career.

Alice Bag

Alice Bag fell into punk rock via the same storied route of celebrated outsiders before her: the rejection of societal norms and the embrace of differences. Born Alicia Armendariz in Los Angeles in 1958, Bag’s youth as the child of Mexican immigrants divided her between worlds. At home, she was only allowed to speak Spanish. At school, where she was teased because of her overweight, frizzy-haired appearance, she could only speak English. Bag found solitude in music, soul tunes from her sister, traditional Mexican rancheras, and later, glittery acts like Queen, Elton John, and David Bowie; when she once transferred high schools, she requested classmates to call her “Ziggy.”  It took her almost 4o years, but she has finally found a way to unite all these disparate influences in Alice Bag, which is somehow her first solo album despite a storied musical career.
That career began the late 1970s, as the lead singer and co-founder of the Bags, one of the first punk rock bands to emerge from L.A. After the Bags dissolved in 1981, Bag went on to play in other bands like Castration Squad, The Cambridge Apostles, Cholita! The Female Menudo, and Las Tres. In 2011, she released her first book, the autobiographical Violence Girl, and in 2015 she self-published her second, Pipe Bomb for the Soul. Alice Bag is first formal LP of any of her projects, in addition to being her debut solo record. While Bag wrote all of the songs, she is joined by a variety of L.A. musicians as well as her daughter.
Alice Bag is an amalgamation of stories and sounds from its creator’s life, the latter focusing specifically on feminism, politics, and breaking out of the hive mind. In the early ’00s, Bag moved from L.A. to Arizona and worked as a teacher. There, she met a student whose father was undocumented and one day, he never came back from work. Bag acted as the family’s translator as the attempted to get the man out of a detention center. “Inesperado Adios” tells the tale as a sorrowful Spanish duet between mother and son. “Poisoned Seed” rallies against genetically modified seeds, specifically ones that force farmers to become dependent on Monsanto. “Programmed” confronts societal brainwashing with the declaration “Education be damned we are being programmed!”
Sonically, Alice Bag is as diverse as her aforementioned musical interests. On “He’s So Sorry,” Bag goes full ’60s girl group, complete with “Be My Baby” drum beat, a Shangri-Las spoken-word prologue, and “oooh"-ing harmonies. Considering the Spector sound, it’s only fitting that the song’s subject matter would confront domestic violence. Bag herself grew up witnessing her beloved father abuse her mother, which makes lines like “Just because he’s sorry doesn’t mean he’s gonna change/Just because you love him doesn’t mean you’ve gotta stay” even more impassioned. Later, “Incorporeal Life” is a jazzy tango featuring rumbling drums and slinky vocals. Bag’s songs that serve as a call to arms (regarding consent, self-liberation, and confrontations) tend to (rightfully) be faster while the reflective ones like “Suburban Home” (about a stagnant romance) or “Weigh About You” (about negative influence of a relationship).
An album 40 years in the making has a high probability of being underwhelming—records with less than half that timespan have more than proved that point. But Alice Bag feels like effortless self-expression that simply needed an outlet. Alice Bag promises to introduce its namesake’s work to a new generation of radicals, and luckily, her words are a revolutionary rally cry.


The lo-fi bedroom rock project from Indiana brings smooth guitar licks into clearer focus with their Fat Possum debut, a light and bright collection of weaving, winding psych-pop.

Routines

Hoops were born on a cassette reel. Since launching as the solo bedroom project of Drew Auscherman, the Indiana band has made the tape its preferred format. It’s the format they used to independently record and distribute their first three song collections—accurately titled Tape #1, Tape #2, and Tape #3—selling them at shows on tour and accumulating a following physically and in-person. One of these tapes caught the attention of Fat Possum Records, on which the now-four-piece group’s eponymous EP and new debut full-length, Routines, were released in quick succession.
All of this comes after the fact that Hoops’ sound recalls a time when cassettes ruled the nation. Hiss and fuzz aren’t just unavoidable variables in Hoops’ psych-pop—they’re vertebrae for the songs. That’s far from novel, but what sets Hoops apart on Routines is its proactive aversion to the trap of atmospheric overkill leading to song paralysis. If there’s one thing that Hoops lives by other than the code of the tape, it’s the will of the smooth guitar lick.
Hoops’ early releases adhered to the compact song-structure principles of lo-fi royalty Guided by Voices—get in, get the idea across, get out, get on to the next one—but the slick, sleazy vibe of ’70s radio comes to mind more often on Routines. For every moment of synths and chords swirling together in schematic agreement, there’s one of relentless motion—often featuring Auscherman’s guitar carrying the arrangement on its back and driving the song forward, like on the instrumental “Benjals.” It can be slurred or articulated, depending on what the moment requests, and often flipping back and forth.
Routines is the band’s first effort recorded in a studio instead of to a four-track. On “Burden,” there’s an appropriate reflection on the positive stress of a new environment: “It took me away from all my comfortable routines.” The versatility of core members Auscherman, Kevin Krauter, and Keagan Beresford—each of whom writes, sings, and swaps instruments—affords them chances to try on different masks, a huge strength despite some inevitable flat results. “All My Life” and “Underwater Theme,” a back-to-back package from the third tape, appear alongside each other again here. The former is dusted, polished, and with a fresh coat of paint, and the latter is at half speed and has an entirely different posture, slouching instead of squirming. While it doesn’t quite work as well, there’s great promise in the pivot itself.
“On Top” is the album’s highest flyer, and though it deals in unconditionally encouraging banalities (“Keep your head up, you’re doing fine/I know it’s hard but you’ll be alright”), it’s ultimately a pledge to the long view: “Don’t think twice when it all goes wrong/Put in time, you’ll come out on top.” Hoops’ talents are best used when serving their optimism, and anthems like this should guide them nicely moving forward.
Hoops takes its name from the hoop house, or polytunnel, which is a passive solar dome structure used for botany, something like a cheaper version of a greenhouse (and not basketball, in spite of the word’s more obvious definition in the state of Indiana). It’s also a conveniently concise symbol for how Hoops seems to operate. They’re small, protected encasements where seeds are planted and nurtured, but they have huge skyward views, and only in light do the yields thrive.


An aptly titled debut record from a duo with a penchant for lush, moody, and surprisingly affecting trip-hop.

Eyelid Movies

They couldn't have picked a better title. Eyelid Movies, the debut LP from the self-proclaimed "street beat" duo Phantogram, is a lush and evocative thumper indebted to the sultry side of Moby's Play. Riding a steady trip-hop inspired groove, the hushed and mostly mellow Eyelid Movies seems a fine companion piece to a long stroll or something more sedentary and meditative; point being, it sounds great in the background.
But lean a little closer and you'll find plenty about Eyelid Movies to get swept up in. Behind the synth wash are shades of Portishead crackle, Dust Brothers clutter, even a little late-era Yeah Yeah Yeahs geek glamour. "Street beat" seems to be a nice way to gloss over the fact that this is, at its core, a trip-hop record, a genre that Massive Attack's latest seemed to suggest had moved well past its use-by date. But Eyelid Movies, although decidedly a nighttime record, doesn't lean on heavy-lidded noir or string-led psychodrama to get its grooves across. It gets messy, sweet, and a little weird; with most trip-hop, the best you could hope for would be two out of three. Try ignoring Eyelid Movies too long, and something will reach out and shake you a bit.
Take, for instance, opener "Mouthful of Diamonds", which matches an alluringly buzzy backdrop with Sarah Barthel's breathy vocal. You could just as easily get lost in her voice or trip out on the oddly loping, slightly off-kilter synth line that underpins the whole thing. Or the ratchety thunk of "When I'm Small", which suggests a funky Odelay cut as sung by Martina Topley-Bird. Rife with sonic detail but not overrun by it, they'd still be fine songs without all the toppings. But Barthel and partner/producer Josh Carter find ways to dress the songs up without weighing them down. They can be emotionally affecting-- the "should've been easier on you" chorus of the Carter-sung "Turn It Off" is a heartbreaker-- and they can be just plain strange. The xx, with their slinky trickle of spy guitars and frequent collision of boy-girl vocals, are probably Phantogram's closest contemporaries, but there's a self-serious intensity in the xx that's lacking here. It's hard to imagine Romy and Oliver from the latter band pulling out the Weenish vocal of "Running From the Cops", and harder still to imagine them pulling it off without cracking a rare smile.
Eyelid Movies runs a tad long. This many breakbeat-based numbers in a row can be numbing, and the strong currents of melody that run over the first two thirds of the LP subside a bit toward the back, giving way to atmosphere. And Carter doesn't have quite the voice Barthel has, a fact of which he seems aware. He's smart to dress his voice up in effects, and smarter still to spend so much time singing in tandem with Barthel. But the best bits of Eyelid Movies show range and attention to detail, so it's hard to care when they downshift into waves of serpentine sound. Eyelid Movies is a sumptuous, seductive record, easy to let fall into the background, sure, but easier still to fall into.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the misanthropic pop perfection of the indie British band’s sixth and best album.

Forever Breathes the Lonely Word

In November 1986, a writer for NME visited the flat of indie-pop enigma Lawrence. The mononymous musician lived in a quiet suburb outside of Birmingham, England, alone except for a collection of records, a set of first edition Kerouac paperbacks, and enough cleaning products to stock a small hospital ward. “A platoon of Airwick Solids stoically occupy strategic vantage points; the toilet bowl harbors not the usual one, but a breeding pair of those Cartland-pink santisers; a wicker basket provides a mass grave for spent aerosol air fresheners.” Since he rarely left the antiseptic apartment, Lawrence explained that his days were typically spent wasting time with mundane activities, like assiduously washing his floppy brown hair.
By that point, the legend of Lawrence the recluse, Lawrence the perfectionist was as central to the narrative surrounding his band, Felt, as the music itself. But he was long used to being the odd one out. Too bookish and restrained for mainstream pop, too neurotic for punk, and too bright and structured for post-punk, Felt never quite fit in with the world around them, which is one reason they are still so beloved.
Not being trendy was fine because Felt wanted to be timeless. Inspired by New York City romantics like Lou Reed, Tom Verlaine, and Patti Smith, Lawrence wrote vivid songs with verbose, sensual titles like “The World Is as Soft as Lace” and “Sunlight Bathed the Golden Glow.” His characters, desperate loners and anxious misanthropes, searched for some semblance of hope in this cruel world. Yet even their sadness could be sublime. “And all my great plans get blurred/By the softest touch, the gentlest word,” he sang once.
Lawrence’s love of beauty was always at odds with his other obsession: success. From their earliest days, Felt was driven by Lawrence’s desire to be somebody. In 1979, Lawrence self-released the first Felt single, a mumbled noise track called “Index” that he recorded on a cheap cassette player in his bedroom. He wanted the song to be a “statement,” he told the Quietus, something that would get him noticed “immediately.” After it was named single of the week in Sounds! magazine, Lawrence decided he needed to look beyond the independent world. “I want to be in the charts,” he realized. “I’ve got to form a band: a proper band, along the lines of Television, with solos everywhere.” He recruited schoolmate Nick Gilbert first, then Maurice Deebank, a classically trained guitarist who once impressed him with a cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” According to Deebank, Lawrence himself had basically “no musical skills.” But he had a vision.
Lawrence’s plan was to release exactly 10 albums and exist for exactly 10 years, at which point thousands of hypothetical Felt fans would be devastated by their breakup. He was preoccupied with posterity and figured that Felt would be properly evaluated after their demise. “Sure I want to be legendary,” he once remarked. “Is it wrong to think like that?” On the occasion of their first record, 1982’s Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty, Lawrence was determined to release “the best English debut album ever.” Despite the unapologetically lofty goal, Lawrence was grounded by artistic integrity. He wanted to come by fame honestly, to be known as a generation-defining songwriter who challenged his fans like his underground art rock heroes. He named the band after a line from the Television song “Venus” off Marquee Moon; he was moved by the way Verlaine stressed “felt” and how the word itself—the past tense of emotion—conjured images of nostalgia. “Lawrence wanted Felt to be high art and low art at the same time,” Creation Records’ Alan McGee once said. “He wanted Felt to be in the singles charts and screamed at like a boy band.”
Pulling from his rigorous studies of British music magazines, Lawrence closely directed Felt’s presentation, from their haircuts to their photo shoots. His fascination with professionalism carried over to the music itself. He loved the DIY spirit of punk bands but despised music that sounded imperfect. “Being happy with music that sounded like a demo?” he once said. “That was the opposite of what I wanted.” As a result, Felt’s earliest records are pristine and dreamlike, their atmospherics subtle and otherworldly. Carried by the spindly fingerwork of Deebank, Lawrence’s wistful lyrics are exalting.
By the time of the NME profile that made Lawrence look like the indie Howard Hughes, Felt had largely moved away from artsy minimalism and towards pure pop. They were the closest to mainstream success they would ever be. A tour with the Cocteau Twins led to Robin Guthrie producing their fourth record, 1985’s reverb-saturated Ignite the Seven Cannons, which spawned the biggest single of Felt’s career, “Primitive Painters.” With thick jangly melodies and the euphoric backing vocals of Elizabeth Fraser, “Primitive Painters” amplified Lawrence’s private sorrows into broad swashes of bliss. In a perfect world, this would have been the transformative moment where Lawrence’s ultimate vision came into view, when Felt would take their place next to their idols.
Their first release on Creation, 1986’s Let the Snakes Crinkle Their Heads to Death (aka The Seventeenth Century), withdrew from the blissful opulence of “Primitive Painters.” It was a curious display of Lawrence’s desire to experiment with the melodic limits of pop, composed entirely of minimalist and imaginative instrumental sketches. It was also largely ignored. “We spent all Creation’s money on that record and it was a complete disaster,” Lawrence later said. Perhaps he was unconsciously purging wordless compositions from his system, because Felt’s next record in 1986 was full of fleshed-out compositions with timeless lyrics. It would be the best album of their career.
On Forever Breathes the Lonely Word, Felt sound reborn. It’s the most cohesive presentation of Lawrence’s vision, eight songs that tie together pop perfection and misanthropy to glorious ends. Part of this was technical. “I changed the songwriting style a bit,” Lawrence explained. “I wanted to write more concise songs with normal structures, as opposed to the first two LPs which contain long, semi-instrumental, six-minute pieces.” Another cause of this growth was bureaucratic. After many periodic departures and years of personal and creative conflicts with Lawrence, Deebank had finally quit the band after Ignite the Seven Cannons. His guitar’s presence in Felt was filled by the young keyboardist (and future Primal Scream member) Martin Duffy, who joined in 1985; that’s his soft, boyish face gazing out from the cover, as if affirming his integral role on the record. (That said, Lawrence’s creative influence remains undeniable; these are, as the record’s insert cutely phrases it, “Lawrence’s songs coloured in by the band.”)
The cheery Hammond that kicks off opener “Rain of Crystal Spires” immediately draws a line between old and new Felt. With Duffy’s organ now serving as the lead sound, Felt’s uptempo melodies provide a foil for Lawrence’s brooding anxieties. In their early days, Lawrence was aggrieved by the constant Velvet Underground comparisons Felt received. (“We were much more mature,” he would protest.) Here, they leaned into the cozy influence of the ’60s on the delightful organ bounce of “Grey Streets” and the lush backup harmonies of “September Lady.” A note on the record’s packaging winks at the throwback: “Any similarity to songs already written is purely coincidental.”
With no instrumentals taking up space, Forever Breathes the Lonely Word showcases Lawrence’s best lyricism. He spins tales of weary hearts and wistful longing, of a world that offers little hope, and expresses doubt in religion, celebrity, and faith of all sorts. He imbues these narratives with a familiar intimacy; “I like lost people, because I suppose I’m one,” he once remarked.
From the confines of that sterile apartment, Lawrence imagined worlds for his discontent far more magnificent and vivid than his own. The melancholy of “Rain of Crystal Spires” is illuminated by visions of the legendary Arthurian island of Avalon as “Homer’s Iliad lay burning in the fire.” “Grey Streets” evokes images of “Closing eyelids [that] stutter and tumble and turn away/Makeshift memories they collide for another stay.” Later he envisions hallways choking on smoke, dead, uprooted trees, and “a man who’s got three square eyes and a boy with the snakeskin head.” Lest his listeners hear these poetic references and think of him as a “university type,” Lawrence clarified that he just had the ear of an aesthete. “I swear I’ve never read a poem in my life... It’s difficult to explain, but I just love beautiful things, beautiful words,” he objected. “We all know what classic pop music sounds like but there’s never been any classic pop lyrics—not for me anyway. Sure, I can take all the throwaway stuff but I prefer something more magical.”
By 1986, Lawrence had become a master at subtle shade in his lyrics, slipping in a snub and changing subjects before there’s time to process it, usually with a flair of the mystical. “I’m not your Jesus so will you get off my cross,” he requests during “A Wave Crashed on Rocks.” “You travelled back four centuries in search of a silver sword/Your self-induced hallucinations they just make me bored,” he taunts on “Gather Up Your Wings and Fly.” “Grey Streets” is especially vitriolic, an account of the power dynamic between a fan idealizing an artist. “And you were attracted to me because my face smiled down from a wall and you said I looked kind,” he tells the fan with a sad smirk. He lays into the fan’s coolness, saying, “You’re so semi-precious about life and you won’t let your feelings show.” (The words “semi-precious” are given a particularly spiteful emphasis.) For all the ennui in his voice, Lawrence was never apathetic. The depths of his despair didn’t need to be vulgarly overstated, they could just breathe.
“Grey Streets” gives way to the record’s centerpiece, “All the People I Like Are Those That Are Dead,” the closest thing to a Felt anthem. “Maybe I should entertain/The very fact that I’m insane,” Lawrence begins with characteristic self-deprecation. As guitar melodies twist around Duffy’s organ, Lawrence leans into his despair: “Maybe I should take a gun/And put it to the head of everyone,” he breathily wonders, seeing that as a mercy killing. A little over midway through, the instruments recede and Lawrence murmurs the title serenely to himself in near silence. The five-minute song epitomizes everything revered about Lawrence as a songwriter and Felt as a whole. Even when truly wallowing, denouncing God and all the sorrow he has caused, he never submits to melodrama. He knows he’s not alone in his misery. He just wants to show how much it can hurt when you feel so much.
Forever Breathes the Lonely Word was Felt’s crowning achievement and so naturally it was received rather passively by the UK press. Sure, it was beautiful, they seemed to agree, but it was too insular to place on a pedestal. “Felt haven’t reinvented anything, won’t change anything. Only ninnies would turn Lawrence into anything except an armchair camp hero,” wrote NME’s Mark Sinker. “But,” he conceded, “this is a great record.” The record didn’t chart, and it failed to appear on either NME or Melody Maker’s best of 1986 lists. There could only be one surly dweeb romanticizing violence in 1986, and Morrissey won the popular vote with The Queen Is Dead.
There’s not one specific reason why Felt never found commercial success. “It was too understated to be commercial, too art to go pop, too pop to go art,” Creation’s Alan McGee once said. Melody Maker put it more bluntly in 1986: “Felt make brilliant records that nobody buys.” Maybe it was the lack of support from BBC host and tastemaker John Peel, who was admittedly not a fan and never championed them on his show. Or it was the time that, shortly after the release of Forever Breathes, Lawrence attempted to mellow his nerves with some acid before a concert. Unfortunately, he got so freaked out that he refused to play until the audience—full of A&R scouts—left. And yet, Lawrence completed his 10-year plan and in 1989, after four more Felt records, the project ended. In the early ’90s, he formed Denim, a snarky ’70s revivalist act who met an untimely end when a song called “Summer Smash” was set to debut right after Princess Diana died in a car accident. Effectively abandoned by EMI, Lawrence went on to perform under the name Go-Kart Mozart, a maximalist electro-pop band still going today. As shown in the documentary Lawrence of Belgravia, the years that followed were marked by struggles with drug addiction and homelessness.
But Felt had not been forgotten. As Lawrence once predicted, the band has been cherished in its afterlife. The swoony organ in “Rain of Crystal Spires” alone can be easily linked to the spring in the step of jangle poppers from C86 all the way to Slumberland. The cult of Felt can be heard in the gentle daydreams of the Field Mice, in the bookish malcontent of Glasgow’s Camera Obscura, and in the lucid ponderings of the Clientele. Felt were especially rampant in the 2011 musical conscious, with both San Francisco duo Girls and Irish post-punkers Girls Names naming songs after Lawrence. A few years later, indie pop darlings the Pains of Being Pure at Heart referenced Felt in their song “Art Smock” and then covered “The Ballad of the Band,” with Kip Berman providing a properly bitter Lawrence imitation.
But their influence might be most obvious in the introspective songwriting of Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, a gigantic Felt fan who admittedly became obsessed with them only after their dissolution. “Poetic, ambitious, amazing,” is how he once described Forever Breathes the Lonely Word. “It’s hard to imagine this record ever having been released. Hard to imagine it was ever new.” Beyond referencing them in songs and fawning over them in liner notes, Murdoch’s music glows with Lawrence’s solitary introspection and his eye for profound beauty.
Though it can feel like a cosmic slight that Forever Breathes the Lonely Word was not recognized as a masterpiece in 1986, this twist of fate feels harmonious with the ideas that Lawrence laid out in Felt songs. “I’d like to be remembered as someone who never lost touch with what he set out to do,” Lawrence told Melody Maker in 1989, after the band’s final record. “Felt never made a timeless classic—the greatest thing would be to make a record that could sit next to Marquee Moon or Horses. They’re on the top shelf, standing alone. And our records are scattered about on the shelf beneath with all the other greats.”
Forever Breathes the Lonely Word closes with a song brilliantly titled “Hours of Darkness Have Changed My Mind.” After a record full of warmth, Lawrence presents a sparse sound that harks back to Felt’s first records. He gazes into the darkness and mystery swirling about him and admits a dream. “I’d like to do something that makes somebody somewhere care,” Lawrence sings with a desperation that is quiet but quite clear.


The latest EP from quietly legendary Cleveland producer Warren Harris offers deep house music with a beating human heart.

The Never End EP

Few terms have been as widely abused in the electronic musical lexicon as “deep house”—a phrase that has come to stand for glossy surfaces and a sedated pulse, an EDM for grown ups that flouts its maturity via half-hearted sax samples. Trace the genre’s history back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, however—to the work of Blaze, Kerri Chandler, and Larry Heard—and you will find something rather different. Back then, no one was consciously trying to create deep house. Instead, the label was used to describe a kind of house music that was slower, moodier, and jazzier than usual.
Hanna—aka Cleveland producer Warren Harris—fits firmly into this mold. He is one of those quietly legendary American electronic artists, overlooked in his own backyard but hugely respected overseas. Harris is a don of expansive house now into almost 20 years of releasing music, more into the chords themselves than the tricky business of dancing. The Never End, a new six-track EP, is unlikely to change his relative anonymity. Nothing here screams of a commercial breakthrough, and at times—as with the inclusion of ill-fitting drum and bass track “Deceptiv”—you feel like Harris is too wrapped up in his own musical universe to care. And yet The Never End proves to be a fantastic example of deep house alchemy, a release that shows how to navigate the paper-thin line between deep and dull, soulful and soulless.
The key tracks are the three straight-ish house numbers—“Punk,” “July,” and “Twombly’s Glen”—which are bookended by noodling, pleasantly forgettable ambient numbers in “Being” and “When.” Much like Larry Heard before him, Harris uses a small number of musical ingredients—jazz-inflected chords, burbling bass lines, and swinging drum machines—but rings a musical magic out of them, where what counts is not piling on the layers but finding precisely the right sounds to create a melodic mood.
It is striking, particularly on “Punk” and “July,” just how melancholic the results can be, a world of blue notes and extended musical funks. Near the start of “Punk” is a spoken word vocal that sounds on the verge of tears—“I just can’t fight,” the choked voice intones, “I know you understand”—to which Harris adds elegiac chord swoops, the flutter of an acoustic guitar, and a wandering synth line. The effect is quietly devastating. “July” is even more moving, as a perfect two-second snatch of melody is layered over a descending, aquatic synth run, an eerie clip of saxophone, and a shuffling house beat. There’s almost nothing to the song, but each element is finely weighted for maximum emotional heft, creating a tears-on-the-dance-floor moment that is straight out of the Satoshi Tomiie songbook.
After this sustained melancholia, “Twombly’s Glen” feels like a walk on a summer’s day with the sun on your face. Its palette is similar to “Punk” and “July,” with the syncopated chatter of hi-hats and sustained synth washes, but the song’s circular, airy melody suggests the hopeful ecstasy of love, overlaid by the joyful patter of keyboard riffs that flutter right out of the speakers. On these three songs, The Never End is house music with a beating human heart. It’s an arm around the shoulder and a cathartic swing on the dancefloor rather that a selfie and a fist bump. It’s house music that hurts and isn’t afraid to cry. More than deep, it is profound.