Soundtracking Netflix’s Michelle Obama documentary, the Los Angeles saxophonist trades the sprawl of his albums for a more concise approach, wrapping pop-friendly motifs in big arrangements.

Kamasi Washington: Becoming (Music From the Netflix Original Documentary)

That Los Angeles saxophonist Kamasi Washington was tapped to compose the music for Becoming, director Nadia Hallgren’s documentary-film companion to Michelle Obama’s 2018 memoir, feels almost like a given. While there is a vital, venerated, multi-generational jazz scene still thriving in Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama’s hometown of Chicago, Washington’s music epitomizes the Obama presidency’s once-in-a-generation vision, uplift, and sense of hope. Today, that period looks like a beacon of light in a time of incessant dolor. You might even feel a lump in the throat when the film shows 2008 footage of Michelle signing campaign materials as a brief reprise of Washington’s bittersweet 2015 song “The Rhythm Changes” plays in the background.
Becoming’s 15 tracks reveal a seldom heard side of Washington: concision. Barely topping a half-hour runtime, the record ends right where you would otherwise be deep into the third cut on The Epic or Heaven and Earth. Yet such brevity suits Washington here, letting him wrap pop-friendly motifs in big arrangements while also allowing him room to experiment with different approaches. In the film, it’s rare that Washington’s saxophone cuts through to the foreground. But as his records show, his charts and arrangements are every bit the equal of his horn, and the soundtrack allows him to fully embrace his inner Q. For all Heaven and Earth’s grand ambition, Washington tries on more styles and takes more risks across these cues.
With no room to sprawl, Kamasi cuts right to the melodic core. Sunday-service church organ blends beautifully with his breathy vibrato on “Southside V.1.” Atop subtle strings, he assumes a steamy Last Tango in Paris mode on “Take in the Story,” and slots in alongside the horns on the stepping AM soul of the title track. “Provocation,” which soundtracks a scene depicting the racist backlash that President Obama faced during his time in office, is full of fluttering reeds and suspenseful brass, and its contrapuntal movement makes it as dramatic a piece of music as Washington has recorded to date.
Some songs sound almost like snippets of Washington’s winding album tracks, cut into bite-sized chunks. “Connections,” “Detail,” and “Announcement” could easily be mistaken for excerpts from Heaven and Earth, yet they feel slightly anonymous in this context. As refreshing as it is to hear Washington working in a smaller scale, there are times you wish the compact form would give way to sustaining a mood. In “Fashion Then and Now,” just as the quivering strings, chiming piano, and warm woodwinds start to gather momentum, the piece abruptly stops.
The most gorgeous track here is “Song for Fraser.” It’s as slow and smoky as a Stan Getz ballad, and Washington’s tone is mellow and enveloping, touched with velvety vibrato. There’s a real ache when it draws down after just two minutes, but in the context of the film it’s even more heart-wrenching. It plays as Michelle Obama fondly recalls her late father, Fraser Robinson III, relaxing in his recliner, listening to his old jazz records. Washington’s score is the perfect evocation of those bygone golden eras—one long ago, and one still fresh in our memory.


Following records devoted to the Sounds of the Sounds of Science or years worth of WFMU pledge-drive covers, this is the latest intriguing low-key release from Yo La Tengo-- a compilation collecting their work on four indie films, including the critically acclaimed Junebug (starring Amy Adams) and Old Joy (Will Oldham).

They Shoot, We Score

The awesomely titled They Shoot, We Score collects Yo La Tengo's film score work for four low-profile films-- a convenient way for fans to grab some unreleased tunes-- yet it doesn't lend itself to start-to-finish listens. After all, this CD compiles music composed for a range of flicks-- a drama centered around the 1986 World Series (Game 6), another about two old friends on a camping trip (Old Joy), a story about a big-city/small-town dysfunctional family (Junebug), and a ensemble piece about strangers in New York making connections through sexual exploration (Shortbus)-- and the music they wrote reflects the disparity between these films.
Though four films are represented, the majority of the disc is taken up with the work from Old Joy and Game 6. Junebug's presence is mostly comprised of a handful of minute-long interpretations of "Green Arrow", from I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One. "Ashley" features the song's melody on piano, while "Madeline" features a string section, "George" a vibraphone, and "Meerkats" a woozy violin accompanied by maraca. They're all gorgeous, but it gets a little repetitive, even in small doses, and these interstitial bits also get in the way of the few actual pieces of original music from the film, like the whimsical woodwind-abetted (and very un-Tengo-like) "A Roomful of Ladies". Shortbus, on the other hand, is represented by only four tracks, one of which (the Casio-nova'd "Wizard's Sleeve") is available on the official soundtrack for the film. That leaves two nearly indistinguishable versions of the pensive and warbling "Panic in Central Park", and "Isolation Tank", a fantastic and all-too-short somber bit of jazz.
The Game 6 section of the disc includes a truncated version of "Spec Bebop" (another I Can Hear The Heart... track), and most of the music takes its cues from that track's smoky atmosphere. Whether the music is more rocking (like with the would-be rave-up of "Game Time") or more pensive (as on the dramatically swelling "Buckner's Boner", a track title that probably brings a smile to Mets fan Ira Kaplan's face), there's a sense of the grime and heart of a city that permeates this work. It's a sharp contrast to the tracks from Old Joy, which are imbued with a rustic, panoramic laid-back vibe. Though the tracklisting certainly make logisitcal sense, for such a low-key release, I wish the group had shook things up and reworked They Shoot, We Score to make it more album-like/ After all, co-mingling folky tracks like "Getting Lost" and "Driving Home" with the city-slick Game 6 offerings and some of the other highlights from this album (even a few of those "Green Arrow" rewrites) would create a pretty faithful facsimile of a legitimate Yo La Tengo LP, which speaks volumes about the quality of the work here.


The celebrated pop star’s fourth album attempts a return to the carefree party pop that defined her early career.

High Road

Kesha is a vocal supporter of underdogs and outsiders; she stands up for LBGTQ rights, women’s rights, the environment, songwriters, and gun control in a time when all are being threatened. She sews every seam of her brand with inclusivity and empowerment (“keep glowing, ur a fuckin rainbow,” she tweeted to a fan who came out as transgender). After years embroiled in a legal battle with her former producer, Dr. Luke, whom she accused of physical abuse and sexual assault, Kesha transformed her pain into the country-rock reckoning Rainbow and an emotional 2018 Grammys performance supporting the #TimesUp movement. In her colorful universe, you are believed and accepted, doused in glitter and moral support, perpetually reminded that neither tragedy nor socio-economic status define you, and encouraged to be your baddest bitch self. It’s hard not to root for Kesha.
Yet very little of this determination, maturity, or depth comes through on her fourth album, High Road, which regresses from Rainbow’s clear-eyed courage to Animal-era party-pop. It’s a tough pivot after everything that’s gone down, and she recycles the same innocuous frameworks she wielded a decade ago: that getting high and sleeping around don’t make you a bad person, that women are multidimensional (“You’re the party girl/You’re the tragedy/But the funny thing is I’m fucking everything,” she sings). Triteness aside, it would’ve been relatively easy to get behind an album of unfettered Kesha revelry, but High Road feels strained, scattershot, and loaded with tension, like someone trying to portray freedom and free-spiritedness–even a recovered sense of identity–who isn’t quite there yet.
“My Own Dance,” effectively a “TiK ToK” sequel, is the album’s closest thing to a centerpiece and lays out the challenge she faced: “So the internet called and it wants you back/But could you kinda rap and not be so sad?” Kesha is correct that our demands are unfair, but then she goes and fulfills them, insisting that she’s conforming by choice (“Hey! I don’t do that dance! I only do my own dance!”). This puts the listener in a confusing position: Are we to feel guilty or celebrate? It might be less uncomfortable if it felt like she’d made peace with her decision, but the song is coated in indignation: “I feel like I’m nothing/Somedays I am everything/Caught up in my feelings/Bitch, shut up and sing.”
This sense of uncertainty permeates the album, making it feel distant and erratic. Kesha has always covered a range of moods and styles—deep confessionals, party bops, twangy folk songs, bits of goofy banter—but High Road dials this up to an almost frenetic state, yo-yoing between tear-jerking ballads, overwrought empowerment anthems, and head-scratching moments of ironic nonsense. For every bizarre one-off (the chiptune inspired “Birthday Suit,” the lascivious “Kinky,” or the oddly childlike “BFF”), there’s a frothy, generic pop anthem pulling her back to the middle: “Little Bit of Love,” co-written by Nate Ruess, feels entirely anonymous.
She seems determined not to let you get too close. Enveloping emotional moments are often interrupted by puzzling production choices and lyrical contradictions. “Raising Hell,” a spirited ode to celebrating and forgiving yourself, featuring Big Freedia, is deflated by an insufferable horn synth that blares like a Major Lazer song. “Shadow,” an immersive piano ballad that exhibits her empathy and sheer vocal strength, is punctuated by a sour, flippant interlude (“If you don’t like me you can suck my—”, she chants). Even the title track, which attempts to frame her reaction to trauma as considered and mature, is itself defensive and sarcastic, stumbling from escapism into stoned denial. This is what makes the album’s hard-partying premise so difficult to accept: It doesn’t feel like moving on, it feels like running away.
There’s no question Kesha is capable of assured, sincere truth-telling. “Resentment,” a stunning confessional featuring Brian Wilson and Sturgill Simpson, is so personal and emotionally generous that it actually feels healing, leaving you to marvel at how arresting her voice is when you can actually hear it. The lightly mystical “Cowboy Blues,” which mentions her three cats, therapist, and tarot card reader, feels relaxed and spontaneous, as if she’s writing it right in front of you. When it swells into an all-together-now dive bar singalong, lit up by whistling ooh-oohs and sha-la-las, you remember that Kesha is the rare songwriter who can funnel big, existential ideas like destiny and chance into the casual story of a night out in Nashville. These aren’t hell-raising, stadium-sized bangers about blacking out and acting up, but they are at least about her. As anyone who has wrestled with self-acceptance understands, often the most rebellious thing you can do is be your unvarnished self.

Buy: Rough Trade
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This low-key EP features songs from Julianna Barwick's gorgeous 2011 album, The Magic Place, remixed by Diplo and Lunice, Helado Negro, Alias Pail, and Prince Rama.

Julianna Barwick: The Matrimony Remixes EP

The Matrimony Remixes EP

Quick question for anyone who's zoned out to Julianna Barwick's gorgeous 2011 album The Magic Place: Did you ever think to yourself, "This is cool, but I'd love to hear some beats laid on top of these tracks?" Me neither. But given that this EP is a low-key release being sold on Bandcamp for $5 (and available to stream for free), you can't begrudge Barwick or her label for wanting to extend the life of that album. If nothing else, given the strength of her last record, she deserves a victory lap.
One issue with remixing tracks from The Magic Place is that they're hard to pull apart. With their layers of voices, heavy reverb, and instrumental loops, they feel integrated and whole, each part gaining its meaning through its relationship to the others. That's true in all music, of course, but with immersive ambient tracks based on addition and subtraction and so dependent on harmony for musical content, it becomes that much more difficult to isolate one element and build something new out of it.
Four remixers here give it a try (the six-song set is rounded out by the album versions of "Vow" and "Prizewinning"). Diplo and Lunice's take on "Vow" is, in one sense, the most cookie-cutter version, in that it mostly does what remixes of indie music have been doing since the late 1990s: isolates a small section of the original and adds some programmed drums. By foregrounding an electric keyboard refrain, giving the tune more of a pulse, and adding a 1980s sheen, it actually bridges the gap between Barwick and Enya circa Watermark, but it feels more like an uninspired original track that happens to have some samples from Julianna Barwick than a proper song. Helado Negro's take is more interesting, as it condenses rather than separates, creating a compact loop of highly melodic sound that reminds me of early Four Tet remixes. On top of the loop is an original vocal, presumably from project leader Roberto Carlos Lange, and it has some relationship to the original but doesn't feel bound to it. It's solid, but not something I'm likely to return to.
The two remixes of "Prizewinning" include the set's high and low points. The duo Alias Pail cut up Barwick's vocals and fold in some tribal drums, and the result feels like an empty exercise. Prince Rama, on the other hand, take the track and amplify it, making it more in every respect-- surging sounds, changed vocals, extra-shimmery production-- and it works surprisingly well, almost brilliantly. To my ears, it's the best thing Prince Rama have ever done, and it winds up feeling like a proper collaboration that has a compelling reason to exist. That's ultimately all you can ask for from a remix, even if it doesn't happen often enough.


Now working solo, Liars’ Angus Andrew looks back on the dissolution of his group with a strange, often contradictory album conceived in self-imposed isolation.

TFCF

To follow Liars’ long, prolific, often paradoxical career is to discover a band as erratic as it is true to itself. Across 17 years and multiple continents, they’ve remained contemporary avant-garde music’s household chameleon. Smirking punk-funk, acerbic drone-dance, existentialist bar rock, and disquieting synth pop find common ground in the band’s catalog, with each dissimilar form somehow catalyzing the next. On a granular level, no two Liars albums truly sound alike, even as they’ve all been unmistakably the work of core songwriters Angus Andrew and Aaron Hemphill. Pull back far enough, however, and a trend emerges. From their auspicious beginnings as four Brooklyn-based upstarts to their heyday as a convention-bucking trio to their reinvention as an electronic duo, Liars have progressively distilled their music down to its essence.
So maybe it was just a matter of time until that process reached its logical conclusion. In 2014, the undercooked dance tracks on Mess felt like a creative low point, and not only because WIXIW’s poignant electronica had been a more appealing display of their talents two years prior. It was as if Andrew and Hemphill had all but discarded their band’s beating heart: the tension that blooms when experimental music is retrofitted with pop structures. Mess was brash and obvious, a play at simplicity from artists who built their names on confounding expectations. It would also prove to be the last Liars album written as a group. Following the “death” of their creative relationship, the founding duo of Liars was reduced to a solo act. Andrew, the towering, de facto frontman, soldiered on with the project, relocating from L.A. to his native Australia and treating his newfound artistic autonomy like a golden opportunity for revitalization.
Whether as a result of the unusual circumstances or because he tends to thrive when adapting to the unfamiliar, Andrew’s first solo record is at once recognizable and unlike anything else in his catalog. Called TFCF, an acronym that stands for “Theme From Crying Fountain,” it’s an album about loneliness and heartbreak conceived in self-imposed isolation. During a recent AMA on Reddit, Andrew explained TFCF’s artwork and impetus: “I felt like I was married to Aaron [Hemphill] creatively, and now that he is gone I am alone in my wedding dress. The record is basically the theme music for our creative relationship deteriorating.” It was nestled away on an island off the coast of Sydney, reachable only by boat, that the latest and undoubtedly strangest phase of Liars was born. Opting for self-reflective nostalgia and internal turmoil over any sense of extroversion, it’s the ultimate fakeout for a band as restless as Liars.
In listening to TFCF, however, it’s obvious this wasn’t always the plan. The 11-song tracklist is riddled with tangents, one-off larks, and various stylistic indulgences, but it’s all nonetheless connected by the rampant use of recycled audio. The music is made in part from the scrapped recordings of what could have been the final Liars album, which only adds to the lyrical pathos. As Andrew said in an interview with The Skinny, he began recording ideas alone in an L.A. studio while Hemphill was living in Berlin, and wound up with “thousands of files” that would become the basis of TFCF. At the end of “No Help Pamphlet,” one of a few acoustic guitar songs here, Andrew shares a pre-recorded message seemingly meant for his distant bandmate: “OK, that’s it. Those are all the songs I really like… I hope that you have a really great break. And I’m thinking of you all the time.”
After the album’s downtrodden opening third, “Face to Face With My Face” introduces violent, brooding electronics like a reassurance that TFCF isn’t all sadness and bewilderment. Andrew also has some personal soul searching to do, and that’s where he excels. At his most thorny and mystic, Andrew seems to channel Thom Yorke’s solo work through the lens of Throbbing Gristle. Then there are tracks like the curious “No Tree No Branch,” a sort of kaleidoscopic folk-punk jaunt that’s one of the catchiest and most bizarre Liars songs in recent memory. But this is also where Andrew subtly weaves together the threads of his past. The singalong bridge in “Cred Woes” can be traced as far back as 2001’s They Threw Us All In A Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top; Sisterworld’s raw instrumentation and the ominous fragility of WIXIW fill out TFCF’s every corner; and even Liars’ lightning-in-a-bottle masterwork, Drum’s Not Dead, bears out its influence in the percussive blasts driving “Coins in My Caged Fist.”
If this all reads as a scattershot, stream-of-consciousness album, that could very well be the point. Andrew has offered a glimpse of his headspace during an especially pivotal time in his life; it only makes sense that what’s revealed is emotional and capricious. On paper, the jangly, medieval pomp of “Cliché Suite” couldn’t be further removed from the heavy boom-bap of “Staring at Zero” or the sullen dirge of “The Grand Delusional.” And the resonant bass drones and airy field recordings of “Emblems of Another Story” would seem to contradict that injured ballad’s heartfelt immediacy. But those glaring conflicts become one of the album’s strengths. We may not fully understand every awkward, splintered idea on display, but the closer we look at TFCF’s affecting exquisite corpse the more we can appreciate why and how Andrew stitched it together. This earnest, well-crafted jumble couldn’t be a more appropriate marker of the irrepressible project’s evolution, nor a more fitting testament to Liars’ legacy.


On their full-length debut, the Norwegian and Spanish experimental duo N.M.O. deliver a zig-zagging array of unnerving forms, evoking militarization and irreverent playfulness in equal measure.

N.M.O.: Nordic Mediterranean Organization / Numerous Miscommunications Occur

The duo N.M.O. is composed of free improvisation and noise rock drummer Morten J. Olsen alongside sound artist Rubén Patiño, but beyond those facts defining them gets tricky. They seem gleefully aware of this, and eager to compound the confusion:  The first 100 physical copies of their debut inexplicably come with hot sauce housed in a poppers container. The album is also accompanied by an ooey gooey “Tim and Eric”-esque promo video telling the viewer, “You will not forget me” in both Spanish and English. Just like the different meanings they like to give their eponymous acronym—on top of the album title and several track names here, they’ve also interpreted it as “New Mexico Occult,” “Nederlandse Maatschappij Ontwikkeling,” and “Natalia Martínez Ordóñez,” each with its own unique set of associations—their provocations are suggestive less of an unequivocal statement than a customized index of entry points for playful, leftfield zones of thinking and feeling.
There is one obvious interpretation of the hot sauce gesture, though, and it’s as an analogy for the sound of this record, which evokes the stinging overstimulation of too much intense input in a compressed time frame. Synthesizing acid-house squelch, early European hardcore, and production techniques suggestive of dub and electroacoustic musics, the duo plays with club music’s titillation until it takes on a takes on a certain disgust. In this fascination, N.M.O. recalls the work of Patiño collaborator Roc Jiménez de Cisneros’ project EVOL. The similarity between the two projects—which have both released music on Powell’s Diagonal Records imprint—is this particular blend of anguish and delight.
On the surface, N.M.O.’s music evokes a now-familiar combination of dance floor beats with experimental, abrasive production techniques—labels like Hospital Productions or L.I.E.S. come to mind. But Nordic Mediterranean Organization / Numerous Miscommunications Occur sets itself apart in its grating insistence. Humor is a prominent theme on the record, and it could easily soundtrack a fantastically lawless episode “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” What makes the element of comedy work is that it’s liable to quickly turn into revulsion: the smudged viscosity of “New Bulgaria” is hard not to associate with puke, or a petri-dish science experiment gone horribly wrong.
The group describes its style as “Military Space Music AND/OR Fluxus Techno” in promotional materials, and while this might simply seem like psilocybin raver jest, a little bit of research proves there is some conceptual conceit backing it up. In a mix and accompanying essay for the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art last year, Olsen considered “the possibility of drumming” and how it might be a “universal, even innate” form of expression, noting in particular drumming’s historical use in military communications. Upon closer inspection, this theme of militarization suffuses N.M.O.’s work from the formal level—their snares pound out authoritative patterns like a drum brigade’s—to track titles, such as “German Trained Unit 1-4,” and the names of this record’s two halves (“Nordic Mediterranean Organization” sounds like a covert operation, while “Numerous Miscommunications Occur” might be a description thereof.) A recurring motto for the group is “As Strict As Possible,” which is itself suggestive of combat parlance.
When it comes to the question of what they’re militarizing and why, though, N.M.O.’s stance is blurry. Indeed, where music can be a useful site of staged antagonism between opposing social groups, the conflict here is free-floating, not tied to individual actors. In this way, the record channels something of our current moment’s topography of war, fought between overlapping and oftentimes contradictory configurations of nation states, corporations, insurgent militias, software companies, anonymous hacking collectives, activist groups, local police, and others.
Even though Nordic Mediterranean Organization / Numerous Miscommunications Occur defines itself in relation to a series of real-life references, even leaving a trail of cues temping the listener to decode an overarching approach or sensibility, at the end of the day the fundamental impulse seems to be towards wonkiness for wonkiness’ sake. Their emotional register is impulsivity held mid-squirm, constantly interrupting itself with cartoonish locked grooves (“Neoliberal Madness Offering 1-4”) and march-like vignettes (“German Trained Unit 1-4”). It’s all very fittingly closed out with “Abhaengen,” which suggests variously “to hang” or “to hang out”: tonally evocative much less that of a finale than an intermission, it conveys that Olsen and Patiño are already moving onto other things, deciding what else N.M.O. could stand for.


On her latest album, the South Korean singer-songwriter pairs warm, impressionistic lyrics with her most ambitious arrangements yet.

Hometown to Come

Ten years ago, Minhwi Lee performed on South Korean public television with the freak-folk band Mukimukimanmansu, straining her voice as her bandmate Muki destroyed a traditional janggu drum with a hatchet and offered its pieces to a shocked studio audience. Since then, the songwriter and composer has channeled her creative fire into film scores, a jazz trio, and the sludge metal band Gawthrop, for which she occasionally plays bass. Her 2016 solo debut, Borrowed Tongue, combined chamber folk orchestration with a loose narrative around the limits of communication, winning the Korean Music Award for Best Folk Album. Inspired by the poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in “Dicteé,” she sang in Korean, “Father, I lost my tongue last night/I cannot even say those words because my mouth is empty.”
Recorded after moving back to Seoul in 2019, Hometown to Come, meditates on a different kind of absence. Accompanied by fingerpicked guitar and orchestral sweeps, Lee’s lyrics resemble the poetry of Kim Hyesoon, refiguring emotions into impressionistic parables. Both artists ruminate on the theme of phantom pain: The hometown that Lee remembers feels like an amputated limb that retains sensation, at once a “place that disappeared long ago” and a place where she’s already arrived.
Often the emotional payoff rests on lyrical ruptures which invert sadness to reveal warmth. Her language works in the space between opposites: “I find myself thinking of your smile, as you asked about grief/I find myself thinking of your grief, as you searched for a smile,” she sings in Korean, lying in her room alone at night. Resolving the tension—between keys and guitar, comfort and unease—she sends us off with a “goodbye” (“annyeong”). But every “goodbye” can also be a greeting: Lee uses the Korean language to complicate the binaries between escape and pursuit, meeting and separation, sadness and joy that condition our ideas of home.
Lee’s arrangements here are some of her most ambitious. On some tracks, there’s a 19-person orchestra that brings her songwriting into the realm of French singers like Françoise Hardy; on others, her classical guitar arpeggios acquire a medieval quality amid Jeseok Jedol Kang’s flute melodies. On “Returning,” she’s accompanied by saxophonist Kim Oki, a prolific collaborator in Seoul’s music scene, who brings out the jazz sensibilities in her songwriting. Lee maintains the melancholy of her early strummy, campfire fare, but she uses the fuller instrumentation to tease out an emotional ambivalence. Listen to how the timbral and melodic claustrophobia of flute and guitar in “Blue Flower” unfolds to reveal a swell of strings at the bass’ gentle guidance, like a projector switching to a wide 16:9 at the beginning of a film screening. And the bass solo that ushers in “The Station” is pure noir, with rhythmic white noise that barely obscures the sound of a speeding train.
Hometown to Come germinated for seven years, the same amount of time it took Lee to write Borrowed Tongue. But it was when she wrote the closing lines to the title track that she felt confident about compiling her scattered thoughts about “home” into an album. While Lee’s work has always explored the disjointed relationships with tradition, communication, and belonging, “Hometown to Come” offers her most forward-looking refrain yet: “The song I sing today will be the song I sing tomorrow.” Again playing with the ambiguity of the Korean language, she purposefully omits the subject in her final refrain: The “song I sing” can also be interpreted as the “song we sing.” If Borrowed Tongue questioned our ability to connect with one another, Hometown to Come suggests that it’s the only way forward.


On Aaron Freeman's self-titled solo album, the 44-year old singer and former Ween member finds himself on the other side of recovery, atoning for a life lived recklessly. There’s no easy emotional true north on Freeman, and for Ween newcomers, the record is bound to sound odd, even off-putting.

FREEMAN

For teenaged lo-fi diddler Aaron Freeman, the rarefied state of “brown” was the ultimate achievement. Starting with 1986’s home-recorded The Crucial Squeegie Lip, Freeman and his best friend Mickey Melchiondo, recording as Gene and Dean Ween, aimed to create a sound (and life) experience that was extremely “fucked-up, in a good way,” as Melchiondo describes it. What #based is for Lil B—a good-natured raison d’etre doubling as a foggy aesthetic manifesto and rallying cry for fans—“brown” was for Ween. Early on in the duo’s fledgling career, brown meant making themselves happy, often at the expense of their audiences. During an opening slot for Fugazi in the late 1980s, ex-Ween tourmate Matt Sweeney remembered in a recent book, “they were pelted with change by newly bald straight-edge kids as Aaron sang the same Cat Stevens song over and over."
Flash-forward 30 years from the DIY spirit of Ween’s early recordings and performances, past the decade-plus when they packed amphitheaters, played late-night TV, got Elvis’ old backing group to perform on an album with a song called “Piss Up a Rope”, and released a double-disc live album on Elektra called Paintin’ the Town Brown. Now, there’s FREEMAN: on Aaron Freeman's self-titled solo album, the 44-year old singer finds himself on the other side of recovery, atoning for a life lived brown. “Covert Discretion” opens the album with a crushing level of vulnerability: “Another gig now, got an aching head, and I’m back on display,” he murmurs in a soft, folky voice that hasn’t deepened much since he was a teenager. “I’m your best friend, I’m your superstar/ Yeah, I’m down with the brown.” Despite it all, Ween could be a very reflective band, but “Discretion” is the first song sung by Aaron Freeman about the cost of living as Gene Ween.
“Discretion” is also the first public step of a drying-out process triggered by a sad January 2011 Ween show in Vancouver that would lead to the band’s dissolution the following year. In front of 3,000 fans who paid $50 per ticket, Freeman laid down on the stage during songs and slurred his lyrics when he could remember them. The same behaviors that a 20-something Freeman would use to antagonize audiences, and with which he accumulated a fanbase of countless suburban stoners, had become blatant symptoms of a serious problem—what made Ween also killed it. As is his wont, however, there’s no easy emotional true north on FREEMAN. After gently pirouetting on a “Dust in the Wind”-style guitar figure for a few minutes, “Discretion” suddenly shifts gears into a slick hesher anthem. “Fuck you all, I got a reason to live/ And I’m never gonna die,” he asserts, as the image of a New Age recovery facility gives way to a vision of a packed arena. Such balance of abject pathos and profane teenage-boy hardheadedness is a Ween trademark, which Freeman mastered on 1994’s “Baby Bitch,” a heartrending breakup song that had “Bitch” in the title and the line “Fuck you, you stinkin’-ass ho” gently inserted into the verse.
Indeed, part of what made Ween so great was Freeman and Melichiondo’s refusal to distinguish between sincerity and silliness, a mainstay of the druggy teenage boyhood that neither ever left. On “(For a While) I Couldn’t Play My Guitar Like a Man”, Freeman toys around with a bluesy lament, but it’s impossible to tell if he’s aiming toward a Crossroads-style soul-selling or a 12-step-style soul search (or if, after Clapton, there is even a difference). Though “Black Bush” was inspired by the bucolic surround of the upstate New York region where the album was recorded, Freeman takes the opportunity to sing about the “crab man” and “woody-pecker” in his most cartoonishly mannered guru voice, even lapsing into Hindi on the chorus. FREEMAN is a thoroughly mellow—one might say anesthetized—recording, but throughout, Freeman’s gentle absurdity combines with the crack studio musicianship (Megafaun’s Brad Cook and the Foreign Exchange’s Chris Boerner contribute) to make an eerily soothing form of psychedelia bent on exploring the other side of getting fucked up.
Aaron Freeman’s search for brown has long faded, and what powers FREEMAN is his unique gift—audible since Ween sequenced the heartbreaking “Birthday Boy” two tracks after “Papa Zit” on 1990’s God Ween Satan—in his inability to compartmentalize his emotions in his creative work. For three decades, he sacrificed his sobriety and nearly his life so that people like me could soundtrack stupors and sentimental moments in equal measure. As a teenager, I watched my skater friends huff Redi-Whip in an attempt to really understand “Big Jilm” (perhaps the band’s brownest song), and 12 years later, I watched two of my best friends dance to “Stay Forever” at their wedding reception. For Ween newcomers, FREEMAN is bound to sound odd, even off-putting. I get it. But this is the promise and labor of appreciating a lifelong cult artist like Freeman: taking the time to engage him on his own terms.


With seven additional tracks and a Heba Kadry remaster, the ambient synth experimentalists’ landmark album is even more transportive than it was in 2010.

Emeralds: Does It Look Like I’m Here? (Expanded Remaster)

In January 2013, synth musician Steve Hauschildt wrote a series of messages on Twitter to share some sad news. His band of seven years, the beloved Cleveland-based trio Emeralds, had come to an end. He closed with a quote from legendary experimental composer Pauline Oliveros, writing, “Listen to a sound until you no longer recognize it.” The line is a prompt from her 1974 book of textual compositions, Sonic Meditations, which she’s referred to as “recipes” for listening. On its face the prompt is clearly prescriptive: Allow a sound to repeat until your perception of it changes. But maybe there’s another suggestion there, as well. Allow yourself to become so lost in the act of listening that the source and context of a sound disappear, leaving only the innate qualities of sensation.
For a group like Emeralds, whose members weren’t anonymous but did seem determined to melt away behind their gear, there was ever only the sounds themselves. Make it to one of their many storied basement performances in the early years and find three kids in their 20s on the floor, heads craned over an array of knobs and triggers, performing a delicate ritual to draw forth another uncanny electronic frequency: Hauschildt with his Novation Bass Station or Prophet ’08, John Elliott with his Korg MS-20 or Moog Voyager OS, and guitarist Mark McGuire running his Les Paul through any number of pedals. The band’s best work would blur the line between instrument and operator so far that it was impossible—not to mention pointless—to distinguish intent from accident.
Honing this mix of control and improvisation since 2006, Emeralds brought a uniquely personal magic to their exploratory synth music. But not until their third album, 2010’s awe-inspiring Does It Look Like I’m Here?, did the trio’s undercurrent of emotional resonance rise to the surface. It was a watershed moment, or as McGuire described it to XLR8R, “the culmination of scrambling in the studio constantly for four or five years.” The humanity of the musicians looms large in “Candy Shoppe,” the miniaturized melodic suite that trains its ambitions on the sky. Each shimmering layer of the densely orchestrated “Genetic” reveals a religious dedication to craft, while seemingly basic chord changes evoke an almost spiritual ecstasy. Even in more understated pieces, like the tumbling synth mulch of “Shade,” Emeralds underpin their tangle of sound with radiant drones and soft staccato notes that fall like raindrops. Thirteen years later, each recording sounds as alive and teeming with secrets as ever.
Now remastered and packaged with seven bonus tracks, an excellent new edition of Does It Look Like I’m Here? renews a monumental modern synth record. The remaster from renowned engineer Heba Kadry (Björk, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Tim Hecker) brings some added depth and fullness to the frequencies. Propulsive songs like “Double Helix” and the title track have a fresh airiness without losing their weight. “Now You See Me,” the closest we get to an Emeralds ballad, sounds more tender and gentle with a better balance of the central guitar chords, synth pads, and vocal swells. McGuire’s guitar strums in “Goes By” are warmer, nestled deep within the slow-moving synth drift. Such updates aren’t blatantly obvious, but they bring subtle details that reward deeper listening.
The bonus tracks joining the original 12 include languid ambient meditations (“Escape Wheel,” “Lake Effect Snow”) and slow-building electronic whorls (“August (Extended),” “In Love”), rounded out by two excellent remixes that Dan Snaith produced in 2012 under his club-minded alias Daphni. But the showstopper is the 28-minute “Genetic (Rehearsal),” a song that seems to encompass Emeralds’ sphere of influence. The proggy inclinations of Tangerine Dream shine through the circuitous guitar; watery synth noise and galactic drones reflect Klaus Schulze’s analog sound design. And when the core arpeggiations drop away and the music begins to bask in a spacey float, echoes of Cluster and Fennesz rattle across the spectrum. For all its indulgence, the extended version still doesn’t overshadow the more concise 12-minute original; none of the additional tracks here can compare to the main event. But having more readily available Emeralds music from the most important era of their career is no bad thing.
Since disbanding in 2013, all three members of Emeralds have continued to release their own music. Hauschildt’s six solo albums span kosmische, ambient, and synth-pop. As Imaginary Softwoods, Elliott has burrowed deep into the possibilities of psychedelic electronic music. And McGuire’s constant stream of cosmic guitar experiments unfolds like a collection of daily devotionals. Each has brought the supernatural essence of Emeralds to a different destination, and the expanded remaster of Does It Look Like I’m Here? is the ideal place to begin to retrace those winding paths. As a career inflection point and catalyst for contemporary synth music, it stands as canon. As a pure listening experience, it begs to be unrecognizable.


Secretly Canadian introduces a solid new Americana band that-- althogh steeped in the usual influences (Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, the Band)-- never burdens you with the stigma of roots music or reached-for authenticity.

Wagonwheel Blues

The War on Drugs make excellent road-trip music. As its title implies, the Philly quintet's debut, Wagonwheel Blues, is Americana reimagined as blacktop and yellow lines, rubber tires, and overpriced gasoline. The album urges you along the interstate, but never burdens you with the stigma of roots music or reached-for authenticity. Of course, the band invokes the usual influences: Adam Granduciel sings like Bob Dylan, spewing a torrent of words in accusatory second-person ("Chasin' squirrels around your property/ Makin' sure that they know that this is your kingdom"), and the band nods to fellow Philadelphians Marah, to the Waterboys, and of course, to the Boss himself. The Felice Brothers drove the same roads on their recent self-titled album, but where those upstate New Yorkers treated their Band dynamic as a link to a past more imagined than real, the War on Drugs filter these elements through the noise of early Yo La Tengo and Sonic Youth. Their songs are tangles of guitar, distorted harmonica, and droning organ, all wrapped so tightly that they become indistinguishable.
Following a free digital EP, Barrel of Batteries, where two of these songs originate, Wagonwheel Blues sounds modern, outsize, and urban. On opener "Arms Like Boulders", guitars dart like tracers as Granduciel sings about...well, like Dylan, his lyrics demand some extreme parsing, giving few concrete details in favor of a general sense of subject matter and attitude. The War on Drugs' concerns, however, aren't necessarily narcotic, as their regrettable band name might suggest, but largely ecological and occasionally political: "And so now that you realize that planets are spheres with oil on the inside / And your God is only a catapult waiting for the right time to let you go into the unknown." On "Taking the Farm", Granduciel picks up that thought again: "You can feel it in the ozone-zone-zone/ You can feel it in my knees knees knees," he sings above the controlled din, savoring the scatlike repetition and the long vowels. He may be referring either to the general buzz of bad omens or to the song itself, which adds a drum loop to their established formula, speeds things up, makes it infectious, then implodes in an ominous guitar finale. Back to back, these two tracks make an enormous first impression.
Immediately following that pair of openers is the instrumental "Coast (Reprise)", despite the fact that the song it's nominally reprising doesn't come until much later in the album. It seems like such an odd choice in sequencing-- chasing two defining tracks with an atmospheric aside-- but their madness becomes more methodical with repeated listens. In fact, the War on Drugs have divided their debut into three sections separated by two instrumentals. It's a curious tactic: "Coast (Reprise)" and "Reverse the Charges" build open-road ambience with cascading guitars and synths, and although they can be repetitive and overlong, these buffer tracks generate an immersive lurch and lull, which makes Wagonwheel Blues distinctively roadworthy.
Beyond that, they reveal the band to be more than simply a backdrop for Granduciel's familiar singing and songwriting. Wagonwheel Blues is largely a collaboration between multi-instrumentalists Granduciel and Kurt Vile (whose own album, Constant Hitmaker, elaborates on this solid approach), and they emphasize sound and song equally, showing a wide musical range despite the limited elements. "Buenos Aires Beach" churns a trippy dread with filtered acoustic guitar, psych-rock organ, and a military snare rhythm. Slurred guitar notes hoist "There Is No Urgency" aloft, with only faint drums as ballast. And "Show Me the Coast" is a 10-minute epic that devolves into what might best be described as the E Street Band doing shoegazer.
On Wagonwheel Blues, the War on Drugs' approach comes across as not only natural, but imminently worthwhile, as if these revered sources needed to be roughed up a bit to sound new. So the Arcade Fire-sale organ on "A Needle in Your Eye #16" (one of the best approximations of that band's cathedral-size sound) may initially seem immodest against Granduciel's classic-rock vocals and the relentless snare rhythm, but the War on Drugs aren't just another indie band with arena ambitions. Instead, they craft a big sound for their big ideas, so that Wagonwheel Blues fills the space between horizons.


Though fully charged with political fervor and booming metallic beats, Chuck D and Flavor Flav’s incomparable lack of subtlety make this another clumsy late-career outing.

Public Enemy: Nothing Is Quick in the Desert

Nothing Is Quick in the Desert

Thirty years ago, when Public Enemy released their debut album, Chuck D was 26 going on eternal, a wise and booming authority from the start. In 2017, he has calloused slightly, sounding like the stodgy teacher who’s spent a career stuck at his own alma mater. His voice still booms, but his lesson plans have tightened into a passionately rote routine.
Late last month, celebrating their thirtieth anniversary as a group, Public Enemy released their fourteenth album for free and in secret, or at least as an unheralded surprise. Chuck D later confirmed the record, Nothing Is Quick in the Desert, as a limited-time download expiring on July 4th—a vaguely political gesture perhaps—and as a result, the album is no longer available through official means. (Chuck has been pointing fans on Twitter to a YouTube rip.) Fitting its shoddy build-up, distribution, and milestone marking, Nothing Is Quick in the Desert doesn’t call for much coddling, and it’s, unfortunately, another clumsy late-career Public Enemy outing.
Subtlety has never been in the band’s wheelhouse. Instead, even at their best, Public Enemy employs a bludgeoning, message-music approach to both their raps and sound. It’s a style that calcified their political urgency early on but has lately grown aimless and gawky. On “So Be It,” ostensibly a concept record, the vagueness of PE’s political criticisms veer into random rambling. “Y’all know it/So be it/Then be it so/So it be revolution/Then let it be known,” Chuck demands on a hook that doesn’t deserve half the repetition it endures. A more lucid, obvious target doesn’t help. Eyeing down Donald Trump on “Beat Them All,” Chuck blunders in his arresting, shouting baritone: “Hey dude, why you building a wall?/Think you got enough balls?” Nothing Is Quick in the Desert is full of humorless clunkers like these, even if they are delivered with an admirably persistent zeal.
Sometimes the rhymes aren’t just tired, they’re downright unwieldy. “I really never really dug ‘The Wire’,” Chuck D raps randomly on “Toxic,” not quite walking in step with the stuttery beat. You can almost hear him counting syllables on his fingers to force that second “really” into the bar. As ever, Flavor Flav’s drop-ins sweeten the pot for better and worse. On the same song, he yelps out an unadorned mention of the Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo on the hook, a delightful non sequitur in Flav’s croaky rasp. At the beginning of “Yesterday Man” Flav also sounds perfectly at home chanting over a conga break and shifty piano sample with an in-your-face refrain. But the beat whirls out of control and the song quickly devolves into a pair of old men yelling at clouds. “Kanye marrying Kim/Bruce Jenner turned to femme,” Flav raps, each bar eliciting a shouty “What happened?!” from Chuck. “Is rap still the Black CNN?” Flavor quips, covering up a pair of ugly lines by revisiting a decades-old PE proclamation without the tact to carry it forward.
For all the missteps, there are gratifying moments littered throughout. For the most part, the production, spearheaded by David “CDOC” Snyder, is patched together smartly and with regard to tradition. “Smash the Crowd” nails a classic PE sample barrage recipe, chunking the track into chapters of distinctly bulky loops. A couple of the album’s guest verses pop up here, and Ice-T benefits from a metallic breakdown, a crunching guitar charging up one of the album’s better verses. It sounds like frequent latter day PE collaborator Khari Wynn that’s constantly unspooling distorted metal guitar riffs, muddled if not dexterous solos that spin around themselves without any forward momentum or resting place. Those guitar runs are similar to the album they grow from. Throughout Nothing Is Quick in the Desert, Public Enemy have plenty of fuel left in the tank, but they seem to be breathlessly gunning for the horizon without a plan of attack or final destination. No matter how far they make it, they might as well be spinning in place.


The New York producer’s latest album bounces between rolling grooves and dissolving basslines. It’s primed for both the dancefloor and for getting lost in a headphone fog.

Daystar

Scientists call it the Goldilocks zone: the narrow band around a star where it’s neither so cold that liquid water freezes nor so hot that it vaporizes. Within this zone are the conditions needed for life to flourish. The porridge, in other words, is just right. New York producer Beta Librae (aka Bailey Hoffman) makes music that floats in a kind of Goldilocks zone. It’s bounded on one extreme by the alien chill of ambient music; on the other lies the searing heat of a roiling dancefloor. Her work channels both realms without belonging to either. It’s alive with rippling grooves, yet often feels as ethereal as it does physical. An adventurous DJ could absolutely use it to make people move, but it’s just as suitable for zoning out and getting lost in a headphone fog.
Over the years, Beta Librae has tended to follow an elliptical orbit. On certain tracks, or even full albums, she tugs toward one pole before canting back in the opposite direction. On her 2015 album Swope Park, fine-tipped frequencies often darted like the needles of an industrial knitting machine, offering a spine-tingling invitation to dance, while on 2018’s Sanguine Bond, tempos slowed and solid forms softened, dissolving into the murk. On Daystar—released, like its predecessor, on Anthony Naples and Jenny Slatterly’s Incienso label—her music moves markedly closer to the sun. It’s her heaviest release yet.
“Penny Universities” opens the album with knives sharpening in time to the rhythm of a UK garage-adjacent beat; the kick drum taps incessantly at your sternum, while a gravelly bass tone pulses ominously, lifting the dancefloor with every throb. It certainly wasn’t made for sitting down. With “Late at Night,” she feints sideways into dubby rumination, but with the bleepy techno of “Megafauna” and “The Dance Class,” she catapults us back into a landscape of explosive kicks and jagged shards. It’s not just that the album’s beats hit harder than usual, or that the drum sounds are more cutting, though both things are true. In the near-total absence of salient melodies, even the tonal elements—like basslines sculpted out of tuned kick drums—pack a muscular wallop.
The album possesses an almost architectural sensibility. Drum patterns and dissonant synth riffs criss-cross like load-bearing beams; reverb tails suggest the illusion of vectors cutting angled lines. Close your eyes and follow the way certain sounds pan across the mix, or consider how tracks come to resemble three-dimensional structures, scale models mapped out in sound. Some parts, like a clanging dub chord reminiscent of Horsepower Productions’ Y2K-era dark garage, turn up in multiple tracks, lending a sense of flow that is no doubt related to Beta Librae’s experience as a live performer, retooling and resequencing her productions on the fly. Despite Daystar’s propulsive intensity, it’s never obviously utilitarian, and it never falls prey to predictability. Grooves tend to roll on in waves, like broad swells; rhythms evolve almost imperceptibly, rewarding immersive listening. After a long, unexpected breakdown halfway through “Penny Universities,” rather than returning in a climactic, concussive drop, the beat instead simply reassembles itself out of thin air. It’s a gratifyingly sneaky twist on club convention.
If Beta Librae mostly leans into her rhythmic instincts on Daystar, she ventures further afield on “Late at Night,” where fellow Incienso signee James K’s voice swirls airily over dub chords and a choppy, syncopated beat. I’m not sure it works, at least within the context of the album; James K’s R&B-influenced singing feels grafted on, as though Beta Librae were trying to create a new pop hybrid out of her customary strain of experimental club music. A vocal as strange and singular as her productions might land better here. Still, it’s good to see Beta Librae trying new things and testing the limits of her zone. She may have her particular sweet spot all mapped out, but by the next time we hear from her, she’ll likely be coming to us from a different quadrant of the galaxy altogether.


The New Jersey jazzman combines hip-hop sensibilities with the precision of Count Basie in a collection of highly controlled compositions that are nonetheless warm, languid, and dedicated to the funk.

Hello, Summer

The New Jersey jazzman Pat Van Dyke is in his mid-30s, which means he’s part of a generation of players who grew up immersed in hip-hop. That has put the music he plays, composes, and produces in direct conversation with beatsmiths like Oddisee and Kev Brown, whose love for analog sounds gives their music an organic feel. Van Dyke doesn’t make beats, exactly. But he does favor repetitive, mid-tempo jazz that, although it occasionally features mild improvisation, often resembles the Native Tongues beats of the 1990s. It wouldn’t just be possible to rap over many portions of his compositions; it would be tempting.
For beatheads, Van Dyke’s Hello, Summer is easily his most compelling album since 2014’s Technicolor Hi-Fi, a cult favorite and spiritual ancestor to many of the lo-fi compositions that now circulate on YouTube. Composed and produced by Van Dyke, the new record is built on a series of melodic refrains that either grow or transform over the course of each track, undergirded by the artist’s alternately splashy and subtle percussive instincts. It also features a gang of Tri-State session musicians, including eight different brass players. They give the music the force of an ensemble, and the album comes to feel something like Count Basie directing a big band dedicated to lost Roy Ayers compositions; it is highly, almost restrictively controlled, but nonetheless dedicated to the funk. And though the songs are modest and predominantly bright, their surfaces ripple with small surprises.
Many of these come from Van Dyke’s cunning, low-key touches and abilities as a multi-instrumentalist. The bandleader started playing the keyboard when he was five, then switched to drums four years later. Though he has no shortage of collaborators on Hello, Summer, he plays many of its instruments himself. The album’s best tracks, like “Lotus” and “Go-Go,” are driven by melodies that emerge from unexpected places: an opening salvo of bass on the former and a current of earthy guitar on the latter, both performed by Van Dyke. Another standout, the funky “Blues for Benny” buzzes with mild psychedelia, making excellent use of David Stolarz’s organ and a charismatic trumpet solo from Eric “Benny” Bloom.
The eighth of 11 tracks, “Blues for Benny” initiates a stellar late-album run. “Stone Road,” which follows, may appear to be the simplest composition, but it builds to a comforting groove that feels as breezy as a short ride bike ride home from a long barbecue. And it brings us back to that feeling several times, punctuating the theme’s second arrival with another lovely solo from Stolarz. “Gutterball” and the closer, “All I Need,” are similarly evocative, the band putting all its effort behind bringing the soul of each song to fruition—coaxing, from a series of discrete sounds, a rich and complex essence. Naming an album after a season can be a gamble; if the tunes don’t fit, the whole effort seems flawed. But that’s not a problem here, as the brightness of the album’s opening half gives way to a dreamy sensation that exactly matches the vibe of a lazy August night.
Tracks like these rescue Hello, Summer from the easy-listening label some of its lesser compositions deserve, as Van Dyke permits solos on “Clockwork” and the title track that are almost too pleasant—lilting digressions that sap both songs’ energy. But while its pleasures may seem simple, the album’s effortlessness rewards repeated listening, which brings new snatches of melody and particular performances to the fore with each spin. Rich with funky, danceable melodies balanced by disciplined musicianship, it’s a feel-good instrumental record par excellence.


After nearly a decade in the psych-rock group Quilt, Rochinski offers a bold, buoyant debut that mingles propulsive riffs with off-kilter instrumentation and lyrics that make heartbreak and disillusionment sound like a party.

Cherry

On her bold debut solo album Cherry, Anna Fox Rochinski makes heartbreak and disillusionment sound like a party, full of psychedelic rock guitar riffs, earworm bass lines and shiny pop vocals. The result is sometimes chaotic but ultimately fun, like having a conversation on a crowded dance floor about your place in the universe—you may not remember what you talked about later, but you remember how you felt.
That cacophony is especially tantalizing on the title track “Cherry,” which begins with 30 seconds of bubbling synths that sound like an extraterrestrial language before Rochinski sings: “How did I get so obsessive?/Watching me spiral on and on/They just say, ‘that’s too bad.’” The track builds to a climax of dissonant notes, bell dings, cymbal clashes, and synths, bringing to mind Robyn fronting Parquet Courts. It’s not immediately obvious what the bridge “Cherry til I die/ Cherry in my eye” means, but you’re too busy nodding along to care.
Cherry is full of propulsive guitar riffs that recall psychedelic rock bands of the ’10s like Temples, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, or Quilt, of which Rochinski was a member for nearly a decade. But on Cherry, Rochinski uses synths, marimbas, and keys to send shockwaves through those riffs, making playful, buoyant music that doesn’t take itself, or anything, too seriously. On “High Board” she explores existentialism, singing in a gooey ’80s pop timbre: “Does it even really matter?/ What are we ever after, what if we get something better?” before a robotic voice speak-sings what sounds like a line from a Twilight Zone script over dazed, space-age synths.
But for all the playful instrumentation on Cherry, there’s also a lot of precision and control. The comparatively sparse instrumentation of the ballad “No Better” showcases Rochinski’s slight vibrato and expansive vocal range, before the song cascades into a sitar-like psych-rock riff, moving from pop to psychedelia like a magician pulls a rabbit from a hat. Rochinski cherry-picks instruments and genres on a seemingly granular level: an ’80s synth for one measure, a steely ’60s guitar strum for another, leaving the impression that every single sound is there for a reason.
The beauty of Cherry is that it doesn't require a close listen to enjoy its tact and playfulness. You may not remember if Rochinski gets anything she yearns for, if any hurt is mended, or if any questions are answered, but you leave with her cooing voice and head-bobbing bass lines permanently etched into your skull. It’s like not knowing where to focus while watching a meteor shower — in a brief span of time, so much is dazzling.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Recorded shortly before her move from New York to San Francisco, the Canadian club-pop musician’s third LP with Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan sounds sensual, understated, and effortless.

All the Time

Jessy Lanza’s music sits just at the fringe between club and pop. Her airy, embodied techno is mild and frisky as a spring day, effortlessly stylish and ever so slightly aloof. With a high, breathy vocal pop style indebted to Janet Jackson, she’s an electronic producer whose approach alights on the clubbier side of experimental R&B. All the Time, her third full-length collaboration with creative partner Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys, rewards careful attention to the subtleties of a consistent sound. It lacks the muscularity of tracks like “5785021,” or the footwork edge of “It Means I Love You”; instead, its sunny swells and sanded edges recall the wistful electro-pop of Empress Of, or Robyn’s Honey. The golden glow feels easy to attribute to Lanza’s recent relocation to the Bay Area, even though the record was nearly finished by the time she left New York in March.
All the Time is a sound Lanza does well already, and it looks effortless. “Face” plays with breakbeats; “Like Fire” rolls out little siren peals of synth most immediately familiar from Jamie xx’s “Gosh.” “Alexander” and “Baby Love” swoon towards R&B, backed by a sublayer of synth that’s only intermittently interested in moving in the same direction. The opening “Anyone Around” feels deeper in conversation with hip-hop than Lanza’s previous work, and there’s a little deconstructed trap in its loud 808 claps, clattering hi-hats, and pavement-shaking bass. But once the melody comes in, her own aesthetic agenda is clear: curious squeals of modular synth to match the half-articulated question of the title, background coos that underline self-aware vulnerability.
More often than not, a Jessy Lanza song is also a sexy mood. Lanza’s songs—the title track of her 2013 debut, Pull My Hair Back; this album’s “Badly” and “Ice Creamy”—are full of understated gestures that sit just a notch beneath actively drawing attention to themselves. All the Time is full of pleas like “want ya, want ya” and “I do want you badly”; even more innocent refrains, like “over and over” or a whispered “do it baby, do it baby,” sound like variations on a theme. “I can’t deal without your love—and I really, really tried,” she confesses on “Over and Over,” with direct-to-the-camera, speak-sing sincerity. And “Like Fire,” which seems obviously sexy on its surface (“You know that I want your love/You know that I’m serious”), gradually reveals anger at unrequited desire: “You’re always holding out/All your cars and diamond rings/I can only blame myself/You burn me like fire.”
Though it’s a hard balance to strike, Lanza’s work is sensual, never titillating or ridiculous, which opens space to address other topics at the same time. She describes “Anyone Around” as inspired by the social isolation of moving from her hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, to New York City; “Face” began as a series of imaginary conversations between fellow subway riders. There is a sensuality inherent to this kind of craving for human contact, too. The sprightly single “Lick in Heaven” Lanza identifies as an expression of “cynicism”—particularly its video, in which she wears a magenta power suit and leads a business-casual dance party on the set of a morning talk show. It’s a simple concept with the brightly lit look of the small screen, and a subtler commentary on the environments and aesthetics of “women’s” media, with its many tacit boundaries and scripted models of authenticity.
But Lanza’s formula is simple, suggesting heavy emotions with few words and a light touch. Her muffled club bass, choppy vocal fills, and pitched-down, masculine-sounding gulps all feel like the work of humans, not machines. All the Time is sincere so it doesn’t have to be deep—merely an invitation to look beneath the surface.

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This 2012 LP, newly reissued, is the Scranton punk band’s definitive album—the record that inaugurated a signature vernacular of doomed romance and self-loathing nostalgia.

The Menzingers: On the Impossible Past (10th Anniversary Edition)

In 2011, after touring the country opening for Title Fight and Touché Amoré, the Menzingers went home exhausted to write their third album, On the Impossible Past. It was the record that eventually took them to the top of the bill. Cherished by fans, it’s the band’s definitive statement (although I’m as likely to reach for 2017’s After the Party)—the one that inaugurated a signature vernacular of doomed romance with diner waitresses and self-loathing nostalgia. Heartland rock for the world-weary and downwardly mobile, On the Impossible Past is (to paraphrase Dan Ozzi) a premature elegy for youth and for a child’s conception of America—the kind you might learn as a white kid from northeastern Pennsylvania, a false promise fading to adult disillusionment. “Maybe I’m not dying, I’m just living in decaying cities,” goes a prophetic-sounding line from “The Obituaries.” Spiritually, what’s the difference?
Buffing away the hardcore and Irish punk inspirations that flecked the band’s first two albums, On the Impossible Past is tragic, melodic pop-punk comfort food. The lines become clearer, the frames smaller, until the band is working in miniature, squeezing novellas into restaurant booths: “You’ll get seated as diners or lovers, you’ll get the check as friends for the better.” The tensions in their music arise in the space between literary aspiration and the urge to just scream, between abstract political circumstances and the mundane ways they encroach on life. So heady are the fleeting highs of “Ava House”—“You can’t touch us, we’re untouchable”—that you might forget it’s another elegy, for a recession-era Philadelphia punk venue with a shaky floor that had already shut down by the time they recorded it.
But the bigger picture is barely visible in On the Impossible Past, obliterated by sure bets on the short term. In Nabokov’s Lolita the phrase is “drunk on the impossible past,” and this is undeniably drinking music. The drink of choice is beer, cheapest you got, consumed on concrete stoops, Brooklyn rooftops, and behind the wheel of the “American muscle car,” a flashy symbol that only feels more obvious 10 years later. When the car drives into the first scene you already know it’s going to get totaled by the end of act two, and that it belongs to the singer’s friend, or ex-girlfriend, only serves to underscore this band’s narrative position as permanent underdogs. “I held the wheel while you drank and drove,” moans Greg Barnett on the title track, riding shotgun through a brief, disastrous interlude that ties together several of the record’s paralleling stories of self-destruction.
In the Menzingers’ lineup of dual guitarists and lead singers—Barnett’s tuneful, expressive vocals alongside Tom May’s rawer roar—there’s an inherent community that’s key to the band’s charm. At Le Poisson Rouge in New York City this month, May took over some vocal parts for Barnett, who’d lost his voice, but he didn’t sing them as himself; his timbre warped into the more melodious shapes of his bandmate, as if tapping into a shared consciousness. Within the world of the songs, though, you rarely have the sense that the two men are aware of one another; even in ragged harmony, they seem almost like two actors portraying the same role, with personas so sympathetic you’re afraid to ask what sent these ex-girlfriends running for the hills. Maybe it was all the drinking. Or maybe that’s just the way it goes, now; your friends grow up and move away for better opportunities, or they go to war and come home shattered, and you, in the words of a different band of tristate good-boy punks, will always be a loser. In “Casey,” another dedication to a restaurant server, I sometimes imagine a semi-unrequited crush on a coworker at a dead-end job, the person who when they finally quit left you wondering what you were even doing with your life.
That’s another unsteady comfort of Menzingers songs: the permission to have feelings even though it’s all been done before, the sound of machismo in retreat; this is the band’s most welcoming and quintessentially “emo” aspect. There’s no posturing, and (more Nabokovian of them) if the narrator is unreliable it’s only because he believes himself. As in America, the truth is hidden a little deeper, in the many allusions to “the shame, the fear, the guilt that’s tough to mention,” as Barnett sings on “Sun Hotel,” a memorial to another defunct local dive and a pretty good song in unfortunate violation of the rule that if you’re going to rip off Leonard Cohen, you’d better write an incredible one.
The new 10th-anniversary reissue is accompanied by a disc of acoustic demos, known as On the Possible Past and originally distributed in an edition of 1,000. Possible represents a rough draft of about half the final album, with the two opening songs in place and several key tracks (“The Obituaries,” “Gates,” “Nice Things”) yet to be added, and for the most part it takes the aggressively strummed approach of a Punk Goes Acoustic project. The biggest surprise—much remarked upon by fans over the years—is the early alternate “Sun Hotel,” which borrows even more from Cohen yet is strangely more affecting. It’s softer, reworking the intimate vignette of “Chelsea Hotel #2” as a behind-the-scenes portrait of friends of the band. “Dan played ‘Casey’ while sipping on a Mickey’s,” Barnett sings. Just then, the suggestion of companionship is so real it fills the room. Turns out “the loneliest corner in the whole world” has a corner store.
Upon the album’s release, Barnett described it as “essentially an accidental concept record,” which feels accurate to the self-contained storytelling, if not the poetic license the term often implies. Because even when the writing is more evocative than literal, the songs are realistic first, the type of fiction that’s truer than fact. If the band has struggled to move on from the fatalistic allure of the Impossible Past world—if “The plot does not develop/It ends where it begins,” from “Burn After Writing,” has at times felt like a self-fulfilling prophecy—consider it a failure of subject as much as author. The Menzingers’ colloquial punk forms and plainspoken lyrics situate personal disappointment and dysfunction in wider contexts, like a persistent societal failure to fix anything that matters to young people, then or now. That’s the world where we live. With On the Impossible Past, they located one crack in dystopia approximately somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania and tried to pry it open bare-handed.


Three years on from Lucky Shiner and following his DJ-Kicks set, the new EP from Gold Panda finds him refining his approach and exploring familiar themes, mixing bell-like textures, slow-mo house, and foggy drone.

Trust EP

Gold Panda arrived on the scene in fine style with 2009's "Quitter's Raga". As a statement of intent it sat comfortably with many of the preoccupations of the time, mixing hazy nostalgia with the dancefloor-referencing electronic pop of Mount Kimbie. Even ignoring its timeliness, the project's debut is a gem, a stuttering, maximalist joy-overload, infectious in its naivety. A handful of further tracks followed, cementing an aesthetic that was placeless, both in its stylistic touchstones and its persistent use of non-Western samples, but also intimate in its homespun feel, its imperfections and its repeated references to loved ones and missed places. While far from ground-breaking-- the twin forks of his family tree stretch back at least as far as Four Tet and J Dilla-- his dusty aesthetic was singular and tremendously easy to love.
An album, Lucky Shiner, followed on Ghostly International in 2010. It was a solid if not stunning debut, falling short only next to the the considerable promise of Gold Panda's earliest output. Comparisons to the twinkly sample-scapes of Four Tet and the Field's gauzy techno became perhaps a little too pertinent, and in streamlining his sound Gold Panda seemed, slightly, to dull its charms. In the wake of the album the producer's momentum appeared to falter. His 2011 DJ Kicks mix rummaged through an array of contemporary electronica but failed to come up with a statement of particular coherence. The original Gold Panda productions accompanying the mix, meanwhile, were among his most polished work to date, exploring glistening melodic techno in the Border Community vein. Looking back over the past four years, there's no doubt that he has refined his process. His shepherding of samples has become more assured, and their edges are often smoother these days, all the better to slot into a coherent whole. But with that refinement has come a mounting sense that the mild anarchy of those early recordings was a large part of their appeal.
The Trust EP is a case in point. Across its four tracks, he explores familiar themes, but with diminishing returns. The intro, a foggy, submerged drone, is the most confrontational thing here, though at barely a minute long, it functions as little more than a palette-cleanser. The title track, meanwhile, sees him at his most relaxed, its melodies nestled snugly in a slow-mo house framework. "Burnt Out Car In a Forest" draws on much the same sonic toolbox-- particularly the bell-like tones, themselves dangerously reminiscent of Four Tet-- though in a more energetic setting. Flurries of claps and hi-hats give the impression of density, but where previously he might have inundated the track with melodic content, here his repitched sample-melodies do the bare minimum.
The downtempo "Casyam_59#02", finally, is the outlier. It's more melodically forthright than its companions, but there's still a disappointingly maudlin quality to the way it unfolds. The fact is that for music like Gold Panda's to function-- music that trades in a kind of heartfelt, familial warmth-- you need to believe it utterly, be swept up by its strength of feeling. It's all too easy, otherwise, to read it as a succession of empty platitudes, a sort of limp unending niceness that gestures at profundity without ever quite getting a grip on the heartstrings.


The L.A. producer’s music is a fog of samples and clips warped into peculiar shapes that defy recognition but prickle with familiarity, like memories from a past life.

1988

Knxwledge is known for his omnivorous sampling and a work ethic that’s produced a scrollbar-shrinking Bandcamp page, but the L.A. producer is also a lover of mischief. “I kinda just test limits on how funky or smooth you can make some, like, super hood rap shit about shooting people in the face,” he once summarized. That playful approach characterizes 1988, billed as Knxwledge’s second album despite being the latest splash in an ocean of releases. The record is a fog of samples and clips warped into peculiar shapes that defy recognition but prickle with familiarity, like memories from a past life.
In terms of method, 1988 is virtually no different from the beat tapes and mixes Knxwledge releases with the regularity of software patches, but its warm, teasing aura sets it somewhat apart. Named after the year he was born and filled with pop culture ephemera like soundbites from Cooley High and radio interviews, 1988 celebrates Knxwledge’s origins and fixations. There’s always been a strong sense of nostalgia to his work, but he has an agnostic’s ability to cherish the past while shaping it to his needs.
This is the mood throughout 1988. On opener “dont be afraid” Knxwledge snips ’90s R&B group Kut Klose’s “Surrender” into a sensuous, yearning loop. “Don’t be afraid of the way you feel,” the group sings, their voices altered to waft over snappy percussion. For “amansloveislife_keepon,” another Kut Klose flip, Knxwledge rearranges the groove of “Keep On” around the instrumentation instead of the group’s harmonies. It's a simple change, but it unlocks the funk embedded in the song, which itself samples Patrice Rushen’s “Remind Me.” It feels less like a tweak than a correction.
While he’s clearly a student of J Dilla and Madlib, Knxwledge distinguishes himself with his special attention to the contours of the human voice. The feathery keys and faint percussion on “watchwhoukallyourhomie,” a flip of an old Meek Mill freestyle, trace the edges of Meek’s buoyant yelps, matching his bobs and weaves. Likewise, the soured horns of “solivelife” drift around a helium-laced Anderson .Paak vocal, freeing the crooner’s voice to drag and spill across measures. Knxwledge seems endlessly fascinated by the voice’s ability to spawn new rhythms or bind disparate ones together.
That said, while the loops and beats of 1988 are as hypnotic and outre as ever, other than the cleared samples and elevated sense of personality, there’s not enough about 1988 that distinguishes it from, say, WT15.8_, released a week before, or that rises to the devil-may-care attitude of Knxwledge’s Vimeo page. Read in sequence, the song titles spell out a mission statement of sorts, but the music here is ultimately standard Knxwledge. Knxwledge remains a distinctive and prolific sculptor of sounds, but consistency alone feels like a low bar to clear, especially for an artist with such reverence for the infinite forms music can take.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Dennis Cooper's novel My Loose Thread opens with a high school student named Larry seated in a parked\n ...

Dead Hills

Dennis Cooper's novel My Loose Thread opens with a high school student named Larry seated in a parked car at dusk, on a hill overlooking his town. With him is the nameless boy he's recently been hired to kill by Gilman Crowe, a senior with a fake Neo-Nazi streak. The boy finds all sorts of aesthetic and emotional pleasure in watching people in the town below turn their lights on one by one as they realize it's getting dark. The distant and depersonalized movements become the patterns in a non-pictorial language: a flash here and a flash there. He does a similar thing with stars. As Larry says, "When you imagine the stars are a far away, upside-down city at night they seem more important." Larry later realizes, when reading the boy's notebook, that he just can't carry out the deed. As a reader of the novel, you get second-hand information about what's covered in the journal, but Cooper avoids offering too much about how the boy went about it or where his language took him. The aura of the unknown remains intact.
Wolf Eyes' latest is the aural equivalent of Cooper's aforementioned scene, another bold bit in the band's steady onslaught of material. Listening to Dead Hills, I saw Larry and the boy falling apart to AM radio hiss, barely recognizing the patterns around them, nonetheless sensing something sinking into and altering their emotional states. Current 93 channeled a similarly pre-lingual world of death and sex through their feedback, but where David Tibet evokes the haunting pre-Surrealist imagery of Lautréamont, Wolf Eyes act as the equivalent of three horror-obsessed punks in a forest, destroying a house by fire, watching their own homemade pitch-shifters burn and sing.
Since getting their start in the cassette underground in 1997, Wolf Eyes have produced over 40 releases, each archiving a beautifully troubling practice. With an approach to music akin to Vienna Actionism or a second-generation snuff film, Wolf Eyes bleed analog, mark their territory with piss, and shout all crazed over layers of sirens and random pulses. Aaron Diloway (Hanson Records), John Olson (American Tapes), and Nate Young (who builds much of Wolf Eyes' equipment) are Ann Arbor, Michigan's most interesting band, and the town's most explosive assault on regularity since Negative Approach busted up in 1984, or perhaps since John Brannon's post-Negative Approach act Laughing Hyenas hit their peak around 1990.
The title track from Dead Hills is its most impressive piece, launching from Colecovision explosions into tape loops running backwards before high-pitched rattling creaks like rusted gates over a stock horror film ding-dong effect, one of those incidental noises intended to signify that the person on screen should duck or run. It's equally reminiscent of suburban decay, conveying images of a pained girl drinking whiskey in a quilt-covered bed, hearts on her wall, a stuffed animal squirrel at her side, and a screaming wolf stenciled onto her headboard per Sue de Beer's Hans und Grete. In eleven minutes, "Dead Hills" shifts from tired video game rolls into rabid bugs and the screams of wounded animals. By song's end the shit has really hit the fan: a tempest of hijacked past-future laser guns run amok (and if you look closely to stage right you can spot Merzbow dancing with eyes closed-- he looks happy!). Like a nature recording of a forest in which each object has a contact microphone duct taped to its back, the agonizing, detailed noises define the lives of snowflakes' voices, screaming as they melt on the asphalt.
The next two seances-- "Dead Hills 2" and "Rotten Tropics"-- are more percussive, and kind of slinky, relying on overt shouts from their human singer to make their point. Unfortunately, the mystery of the first "Dead Hills" becomes a Big Black loop, like David Yow keeping apace with Cock E.S.P. But trying to find concrete musical analogies for the Wolf Eyes magic-- especially after being so fucking blown away by "Dead Hills"-- is unfair, and a bit of a letdown. The songs aren't weak, but they've already shown us what was written in the book. Never do that; keep shit hidden. Relegating the record to more obvious categorization, the entire offering seem less heroic and more human for its epilogue.
Despite this last-minute fall from the sublime, Dead Hills' 24 minutes are a briefly frightening fragment, a churning mass in the continually evolving oeuvre of one of the underground's most important tweaked-out bands. Outside any historical context, it force-feeds you, one by one, the screeching souls of those crickets you tortured as a kid.


Recorded in Jerusalem in 1987, Riad Awwad’s protest album is part ode to the beauty of homeland, part historical document of Palestinian struggle, and part instruction manual for revolution.

Riad Awwad / Hanan Awwad / Mahmoud Darwish: The Intifada 1987

The Intifada 1987

On December 8, 1987, an Israeli truck crashed into cars carrying Palestinian workers in Gaza, killing four. Israel had been occupying Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem since 1967, inflicting curfews, raids, deportations, and more on the Palestinians who lived there. The truck incident—which Palestinians interpreted as retaliation for the recent killing of an Israeli in Gaza—was the catalyst for a massive popular uprising demanding an end to the occupation. The widespread collective action of strikes, boycotts, refusal to pay taxes, as well as occasional stone-throwing and use of Molotov cocktails, was called the First Intifada. It went on until the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords of 1993.
One week after the First Intifada began, musician Riad Awwad met with his sisters Hanan, Alia, and Nariman, as well as famed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, and recorded 11 songs that spoke to the conflict happening around them. Three thousand copies of the recordings were made and circulated, but most were eventually seized by the Israeli military. In 2020, Mo’min Swaitat, the founder of British label Majazz Project, traveled to his hometown of Jenin, in the West Bank, and purchased thousands of tapes from a shuttered music store he remembered from childhood. Among them was a copy of the album that Riad Awwad, Hanan Awwad, and Mahmoud Darwish wrote, now reissued as The Intifada 1987. Its 11 songs are part ode to the beauty of homeland, part historical document of Palestinian struggle to exist on that land, and part instruction manual for revolution.
The Intifada 1987 alternates between cherishing moments of personal joy and comfort, many of which arise from tending and nurturing the land, and advocating communal political agitation when that joy is disrupted. Directives to nation-build “with a Molotov, with rocks” (on opener “Intifada”) are followed by poetic dreams of planting flowers upon returning to one’s homeland and descriptions of Palestine as the land of love and figs (“My Land My People”). Political and national identity tied to what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba (when 700,000 Palestinians were forcefully removed from their homes at Israel’s formation in 1948) coexists with more serene, individual documentation of Palestinian personhood: “I’m from Jerusalem/In the streets/In the farmers/In the factories/In the alleyway.” Together, these songs position rage and love as two sides of the same coin: The more you love your land and your people—the farmers and the factories and the alleyways—The Intifada 1987 asserts, the stronger your will to return.
While the lyrics convey the emotional urgency of the uprising, the music mirrors the DIY, community-based approach to organizing that made the First Intifada so impactful. The album was recorded in a living room on instruments that Riad Awwad made himself. There’s a captivating roughness and immediacy to the sound—usually just a twisting disco synth line and some light percussion—and a vocal rawness that makes it feel like you’re in the room with the singers. Their lyrics are often straightforward and repetitive enough to be sung in unison, like chants. “Uprising” and “The Graves” jolt forward as if leading a march out of the quiet of the living room and onto the streets.
Over 30 years later, The Intifada 1987 feels no less relevant. The militarized Israeli occupation of the West Bank continues, and millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants remain displaced as conflict over land, identity, and homeland continues. That these songs were confiscated and hidden by Israeli forces in 1987 speaks to their political potency then and now. This lost manifesto, unheard for years, is an enduring document of the power of hope, community, and collective action—how it worked in the past and how it will work in the future.

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In the last year, former Das Racist member Kool A.D. has released hundreds of tracks across multiple releases, and the latest zooms in on and explores a luxurious, off-kilter wooziness.

Have a Nice Dream

Since July alone the former Das Racist member Kool A.D. has released more music than some artists do during their entire careers; September’s Peyote Karaoke was not Kool’s first but second 100-track project of the year (and including last year’s O.K., his third in less than 365 days). The common thread between these releases has been a sense of musical restlessness, and most of acted as folios for his omnivorous appetite. Have a Nice Dream, his eighth project of 2016, continues this trend of zooming in on one particular sound—or, in this case, less a formal style than a general and overarching mood.
A reflective and meditative release, Have a Nice Dream luxuriates in an off-kilter wooziness. Opener “Who Am I?”—the lone contribution from Bay Area beatmaker Trackademicks, who handled all of the production on August’s ode to hyphy Official—features dramatic strings, over which Kool A.D. guides himself through an existential crisis. Part ontological investigation and part braggadocio session, it’s vintage Kool A.D.: “Just like the leg on a centipede, everything’s everything/Look at my wings so feathery, look at my energy.” Kool’s vocals are slathered in layers of effects, creating the sensation of a hundred internal voices battling for prominence. Even so, it’s the most straightforward track on the EP.
“Who Am I?” also holds the distinction of being the only song where the primary draw is Kool A.D.’s rapping. “Just Like Magic” is a breezy electro-pop trifle as viewed through a funhouse mirror: a little goofy, its proportions exaggerated to near-comical level, and pleasantly disorienting. But its lack of structure gives it an amorphous first-draft quality that’s hard to shake. Kool A.D.’s collaboration with Francis and the Lights, the unhurried “It’s Alright 2 Cry,” boasts the most shape of anything on Have a Nice Dream, and it works because Kool manages to inject some irreverence into the self-seriousness that sometimes plagues solo Francis and the Lights material.
Kool A.D. is, after all, the kind of dude who opens a song titled “America Is Dead” by melodically singing “Swag swag/Bieber.” It’s this sort of no-fucks-given approach that lets him conclude the project with a straight-faced ambient track that stretches out for 32 minutes. Less “My First Ambient Song” than would might expect, the EP’s centerpiece drags on about ten minutes too long, but the title track’s first two-thirds do a good job of conjuring the kind of dread someone like Andy Stott is known for, albeit with a less suffocating (and less polished) lurch. It’s representative of Have a Nice Dream as a whole: expectedly unexpected, surprisingly effective if meandering, and decidedly low-stakes.


Black Joe Lewis trawls the familiar intersection of blues, soul, funk, and garage rock, but he's got a few enlivening strategies to make the old formula feel fresh.

Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears: Backlash

Backlash

Black Joe Lewis trawls the intersection of blues, soul, funk, and garage rock—a well-traveled juncture. But he has a few strategies to make this timeworn mixture more tangy on his new album, Backlash. The first is vocal: Lewis can unleash a stirring scream, a cauterizing billow of noise that’s sure to flutter your nervous system. The second is compositional: he likes shifting dynamics so that a slack song suddenly stiffens and lashes out, like a horse kicking an inconsiderate handler.
That scream, coupled with his heavy reliance on guitars, has earned Lewis comparisons to blues institutions (Muddy Waters), soul shouters (Wilson Pickett), and funk innovators (James Brown). But he prefers a different descriptor. “It’s all about putting on a good show and getting everyone having a good time,” he said in 2013. “There’s no category for that other than rock’n’ roll, as far as I know.”
Lewis has shed collaborators and labels since releasing his full length debut, Tell ’Em What Your Name Is!, in 2009. After a pair of albums produced by Spoon’s Jim Eno on Lost High Way records, he jumped to Vagrant and worked with an almost entirely different band for 2013’s Electric Slave, while Stuart Sikes and John Congleton split duty behinds the boards. He’s back with a similar crew this time—Sikes produced the whole thing—on InGrooves. It’s been nearly three and a half years since the last record: his longest break as a recording artist, and maybe a sign that records don’t matter much if your stage show is an effective good-times machine.
In truth, the changes between the second and third album didn’t much alter the music coming out of your speakers, and the same rules apply to Backlash, where the foundation is still a selection of forms at most two degrees removed from the blues. When Lewis adds cement to the beat and irrigates his guitar with fuzz, there’s an outline of the Sonics, or maybe the Black Keys. Snappy rhythms and bright, highly enunciated guitar leads put Lewis in the neighborhood of the New York soul revival labels Daptone and Truth & Soul. There’s an “uh-ah” chant that might trace back to Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang” and female backing vocals that hint at the Sweet Inspirations.
You know this material well, and that’s where Lewis’ stand-at-attention strategies come in. He tends to ratchet up the energy just as his songs are ending, like a driver who speeds up to red lights. On “Global,” he hits you with the first howl just to straighten your spine in the song’s final minute, then wallops you with three of these in a row and adds another one low and far back in the mix for good measure. A comparable moment occurs during the bridge of “Freakin’ Out,” where the guitar quivers with enough agitation to merit a song of its own.
On “Prison,” Lewis generously gives you a 40-second lump of the really rowdy stuff. After a solo, he realigns with his band, and together they clobber their way out of the song with scabrous, cutthroat riffs and a dollop of defiance from Lewis: “I don’t mind being locked up!” But seconds later, the track comes to a close. It’s thrilling and enervating at the same time—Lewis gives the briefest glimpse of a supremely raucous affair, then shunts you out of a side door, all dressed up with nowhere to go.


The third album from the Philadelphia-based quintet, led by Dan Wriggins’ spare and transparent songwriting, creates a warm and disorienting mood.

Dreamin’

Anyone in Dan Wriggins’ social circle might soon find themselves in a Friendship song. Much of Dreamin’ finds the Philly-based singer-songwriter relaying frank conversations as they happen, occasionally edited to take the shape of lyrics and hummable melody. Friendship’s third album operates at the speed of an audiobook and is often just a feathery guitar or brushed drum tap away from being a cappella. A song like “Dusky” would earn every descriptor of “front porch” music—casual, faintly rustic, existing slightly out of time—even if it wasn’t literally about spending time on the front porch. Wriggins ordains a six-pack of Pabst, goes to get a smoke, appreciates the company, and the song ends. There’s no room for subtext in Friendship, except for its central songwriting principle: everything is exactly what it seems and it’s downright disorienting to confront this level of transparency.
It’s a similar formula followed on 2017’s overlooked gem Shock Out of Season, an arresting contrast of glacial synths and Wriggins’ convivial warmth, dropping life lessons and endearing pep talks (“It’s easy to tell that you’re doing right/If it feels like losing”) in a casual, calm tone as if his hand was constantly resting on your shoulder. Add in his bald dome on the cover, and it was easy to imagine Majical Cloudz reincarnated at a Philly house show. As with Shock Out of Season, Dreamin’ dropped with minimal fanfare last November, a record best enjoyed at one’s own pace, headphones on in the encroaching winter chill, reflecting on the past year.
But while the personnel and instrumentation remain similar, Dreamin’ is slightly more earthy and expansive, more drafty and dry than its predecessor. (Perhaps this is owed to Wriggins and drummer Mike Cormier serving as live-in groundskeepers on a pastoral Swarthmore property while writing Dreamin’). There’s still resonant drone and drum machine clatter adorning the edges of “I Don’t Have to Imagine Your Love” and “Clairvoyant,” which otherwise aspire for a timeless sentimentality honoring the enduring influence of Kath Bloom and Willie Nelson. But even the machinery sounds organic—they don’t sound like “synths” so much as small machines with corroded batteries, the kind of things you’d find in a garage alongside some rusted tools.
There’s a parallel between the band’s IRL handiwork and musicianship on Dreamin’, which is likely the quietest album of 2019 made by a quintet with guitars. Each member shapes, prunes, and manicures the surroundings of Wriggins’ curious musings on the minor pleasures that fill our lives: a wordless communication between friends, a resolution to be less judgmental, a belief in small moments of kindness, and honesty as the only effective weapon we have left. It’s no slight to say that the songs on Dreamin’ often don’t feel like songs, but honest human interactions that just so happened to be set to music. Yet while the intimacy of Friendship is their definitive quality, it also sets the limitations of Dreamin’, an album so focused on and trusting of its immediate circle that it forgets everyone else outside of it. “Low But On” more resembles switched-off Low, its brushed drums and cyclical riff circling the drain. And despite the foregrounding of Wriggins’ lyrics, “Hex on the Barn” and “Sure” too eagerly replicate a listless, porch-lit bull session that you can fade in and out of at will.
“Blessed are the places that grant us patience,” Wriggins drawls, and that’s Friendship’s energy: a desire to embrace the present, but without the exhausting urgency demanded by self-help books and futile New Year’s resolutions. He concedes to living on the verge of hopelessness in a world of hatred and lies within the first two minutes of “I Don’t Have to Imagine Your Love,” just like the rest of us. It’s kinda hard to believe the guy, but that’s not really a slight, rather a reflection of a kind of humanity on Dreamin’ so pure that it’s virtually superhuman.