The 17-year-old rapper-producer’s solo debut is pastel pretty in the Surf Gang tradition, coating pristine samples in a thin layer of digital grime.

FearDorian

FearDorian beats are potent enough to leave you with a contact high. Their enveloping chaos feels structured, as if you synced playback on two completely different songs until they formed an alien vibe of their own. Like his stylistic forebears-turned-collaborators in Surf Gang—Dorian used to make dance videos set to the collective’s songs on Triller—rap, indie rock, and vaporwave are clear influences. Bending those sounds into different shapes and sizes is the 17-year-old rapper-producer’s default zone. This is a kid who’s sampled Amy Winehouse for a Milwaukee rap track, who pulls as much inspiration from Midwest emo records and James Ferraro as he does from Chicago rapper-producer Lucki. Take the droning guitars and booming trap drums that power Seattle rapper Ghoulaveli’s 2019 single “no!,” or how the addition of twinkling strings to the synthetic claps on AyooLii’s “Andele” makes it just a bit zanier. Dorian’s production reflects the borderless imagination of the postmodern rap internet while remaining solid enough to not dissolve in its own haze.
After years of offering up beats to his growing network, Dorian uses them to tell his own story on FearDorian, his self-titled solo debut. Unlike AyooLii or Florida rapper 454, whose pitch-shifted chortles tend to hover above the beat, Dorian’s whispered croak is nonchalant, always on the verge of being consumed by its surroundings. Even when he’s grappling with the ennui that plagues every teenager, he doesn’t necessarily sound timid or unsure. Early highlight “Acrid Taste” fishtails through emotional heel turns: Out-of-body experiences at parties and fears of turning into his father give way to cheeky second-wind optimism (“I feel like I’m dyin’, I tell bro to pass the water”). But what stands out most isn’t the melancholy lyrics or the silky beat—a sample from a song by Philly shoegaze band They Are Gutting a Body of Water combined with tinny, blown-out 808s—it’s Dorian broadcasting from the epicenter.
The songs on FearDorian aren’t as grandiose as the stadium-sized rock-rap of someone like Kenny Mason. They don’t fully fit the Hot Topic-by-way-of-Nike-tech aesthetic of evilgiane or Polo Perks either. Dorian’s percussion is warbly and busy but soft, more interested in setting a mood than inciting a mosh pit (not that that’s stopped anyone trying). The album’s harshest beat is “Raining in Brooklyn,” where chiptune-esque synths drape around thundering drums and non sequitur bars. Otherwise, the beats on FearDorian are post-Surf Gang wonders, pastel-pretty with just a touch of digital grime. Lead single “Highschool” pits skipping hi-hats against swelling keyboards, recalling SenseiATL’s work with Tony Shhnow if it were retrofitted into an HD remake of Nights Into Dreams, while “Virginia Hymn” suggests MexikoDro remixing Dirty Projectors.
Dorian has rapped before, but those earlier lyrics usually came in short bursts, serving more as set dressing for the beats. And while he doesn’t boast mind-bending couplets or breathless technical ability, the raps on FearDorian are poised and focused, stacking flexes, ruminations, and slice-of-life details in quick succession. On “What Happened,” he compresses every stage of a party, from the pre-game session to the stuck-in-bed malaise the morning after, into less than 10 seconds. The words themselves aren’t profound, but the way he skips over the chanting vocals and drum claps creates a gnawing anxiety. Bad thoughts loom on the margins of Dorian’s songs like scabs begging to be picked, but he’s locked in on racks, new love, and the occasional self-deprecating joke. “Don’t know what you see, girl, but I’m glad you see it/’Cause I ain’t slept in weeks,” he says on the otherwise gossamer “Still Here,” fighting off insomnia with affection.
What teenager doesn’t have days when they’re on top of the world and stuck in quicksand at the same time? In an interview with No Bells, Dorian mentioned rapping about things he wants—accolades, swag, money—as if each song were an act of manifestation. Buying a designer bag for a love interest is cool and all, but sometimes the most important goal is to make it through the day, or the depressive episode, in one piece. FearDorian doesn’t have cures for those loaded feelings, and it doesn’t ignore them, either. Dorian just invites you into their fidgety cores.


The Canadian singer/songwriter/producer turns in a more focused album with a sonic palette reminiscent of his recent production work for Women.

Diaper Island

In addition to turning in three very solid albums of his own in the past few years, Chad VanGaalen also produced fellow Albertans Women. The two albums he made with that band in his basement were distinctly homespun and lo-fi sounding, but packed with some of his characteristic idiosyncrasies-- from recording on boomboxes to unexpected appearances of synth to flourishes of odd percussion. There was a sense that Women were being let into VanGaalen's world rather than the other way around.
So it makes sense that he returns to the sound of the two Women albums on his fourth LP, Diaper Island. VanGaalen's previous records are characterized by their eclecticism, veering from acoustic folk songs to electronic synth workouts, and they often sound like grab-bags drawn from his apparently prolific recording habits (he recently told an interviewer he had recorded 80 songs leading up to this record). Part of what makes Diaper Island a success is its cohesive sound and restraint. There's an economy in his instrumentation and recording that allows a set of well-written songs to take center stage.
On Diaper Island VanGaalen internalizes feelings of restlessness into the fabric of his songs, giving them more depth than before. The de-tuned guitars of "Peace on the Rise" hew close to the sound of 1990s indie-- bands like Sonic Youth and Pavement loom large here-- spinning a downtrodden riff that's also quite an earworm. But the song's melancholy tinge takes an unexpected nosedive halfway through the song in a beautiful, droning mid-section that opens out with horns and rough textures. It's a characteristic left-turn, the kind of unexpected shift that VanGaalen used to perform with production switches on previous records.
But there's a lot of surface-level enjoyment too, as VanGaalen's excellent riffs compete for the spotlight. The best of these comes on "Burning Photographs", as glassy guitar propels zig-zagging verses in front of a loose, ticking drum beat. There's a satisfying energy at the heart of many of these songs, and VanGaalen allows them to sound slack and jammy as he launches into taut solos on "Replace Me" and "Blonde Hash".
The record manages to be compelling even during some of its weaker moments, such as spiky second-half cuts "Freedom For a Policeman" and "Can You Believe It!?". Both have an almost mean edge to them. VanGaalen sounds prickly on the latter song as he sings, "That fucking mind scanner/ That made me piss myself/ Now that I'm calming down/ I'm really thankful they erased it." It's not the most instantly enjoyable track on the record, but it shows a different side of VanGaalen's character and makes his songwriting feel more engaging on the whole.
VanGaalen closes the record with the line, "Baby, will you love me/ I'm really feeling ugly," on a song called "Shave My Pussy", and Diaper Island-- as hinted at with that title-- isn't the prettiest record he's ever made. Instead, it's gritty and honest. Beneath the surface-layer thrill of some of these songs are subtle character shifts and brave one-liners, all of which confirm VanGaalen's status as gripping songwriter as well as a producer.


Caroline Polachek, of the recently disbanded synth-pop outfit Chairlift, offers eighteen sparse instrumental tracks, with reedy sine wave tones moving meditatively in negative space.

CEP: Drawing the Target Around the Arrow

Drawing the Target Around the Arrow

Caroline Polachek—of the recently-disbanded synth-pop outfit Chairlift—has characterized her forays into sine-wave synth composition as a recuperative process, “an ear break from working on whatever I was working on.” Drawing the Target Around the Arrow, released under her initials, CEP, collects eighteen of these sparse instrumental tracks, recorded between 2012 and 2016. Polachek’s songwriting for Chairlift and solo projects like Ramona Lisa often skews dreamy and ornate, sometimes edging into cloying, but these compositions embrace a neutral, elemental sound. Drawing the Target is less a departure than a detour, but it’s a lovely one all the same, offering a sort of instinctual minimalism without conceptual baggage.
Sine waves are sound in its most elemental (and, in a sense, least stylized) form; aesthetically, Drawing the Target is made of thin, its reedy tones bending into one another but rarely intersecting. Full of negative space, it’s the kind of music that gets lost if it’s competing with conversation, or street sounds, or the rush of a subway car. In this sense, these tracks are personal by design, cultivating something of a contemplative space. Some melodies on the album emerge more resolute than others— “Singalong” repeats, in vibraphone-like staccato, a sweet, optimistic phrase, and “Sleeping Fish” sounds like it could be a sketch for a B-side from Huerco S.’s recent album—but it’s just as likely to softly growl and hum. “Borg Pillow” is almost pure texture, quietly groaning in and out, and “Pupil” sustains the same unchanging notes for its full five-and-a-half-minute duration.
The overall tone is generally unobtrusive, and the individual tracks often run together. To this effect, it almost seems odd that the songs have been given titles that conjure physical objects, nature, and human emotion: perhaps the most satisfying aspect of this release is its definitively non-linguistic form of expression. And yet, even if the sine wave is a distinctly unvarnished tool for music-making, Polachek’s compositions are also stylish in their way. Minimalism is often embraced as a utilitarian salve to cultural overload—in this case, applied as a practical break from pop music's loaded emotional structures. But the smart elegance that drives Drawing the Target, I imagine, will also map well onto the fleshier pop songs Polachek has to come.


The Danish DJ Courtesy’s label pivots from Copenhagen’s fast-techno sound to a more nuanced and mysterious snapshot of the city’s electronic sounds.

Kulør 006

Humor and heartbreak are two sides of the same coin; both invoke the absurdity of being alive. At least, that’s what Kulør 006 has me feeling. The second compilation on Danish DJ and creative director Courtesy’s label Kulør, it showcases the work of local producers and musicians from her hometown, Copenhagen. The first, Kulør 001, was a snapshot of the city’s “fast techno” scene, which has more in common with trance motifs and rave aesthetics than it does Berlin’s minimal take on the Detroit sound. Courtesy used to co-run another label, Ectotherm, that centered on this particular facet of Copenhagen dance music, but it wound down in 2018. She started Kulør the same year with the intention of exploring a wider sonic palette, which is where Kulør 006 steps in. Kulør, she explained in an interview, is “like a living organism that can grow and morph into things that I can’t even imagine now.”
If that description could peel itself off this page and make a home inside your ears, it might sound a lot like Minais B’s delightfully eccentric “To Levende Væsener” (or in translation, “Two Living Beings”). Seesawing synthesized strings make way for a chorus of digital mouth sounds that land somewhere between the croak of a frog and the yap of a small dog. While sonically distinct, they tickle the senses in a not dissimilar way to a particularly squelchy acid line. Purists like to paint electronic music as a wholly serious endeavor, but wise practitioners know that a spot of ludicrousness can light up a dance floor like nothing else.
The sense of humor that Varnrable wields on “Cold Bright Hard Light” is dry to the point of brittle, but just as effective. Filtering post-punk energy through sharp synths, the artist narrates a desire to escape to the countryside, anticipating a cold welcome, before deadpanning the quintessential millennial stance: “Thank god for good Wi-Fi connection, right?”
Laughter’s the best medicine, they say, but tears also clear a path for healing. Interestingly, the only two artists on Kulør 006 who also appeared on the hedonistic first compilation—Schacke and IBON—are also the ones who dig deepest into the comedown zone. Schacke spells it out with “The End of Ecstasy,” a subdued looping melody that feels in conversation with “Smokebelch II (Beatless Mix)” by Sabres of Paradise, an association I’m perhaps more sensitive to given Andrew Weatherall’s recent passing. Where “Smokebelch II” is tinged with joy, “The End of Ecstasy” has a curled-up and contemplative energy, characterized instead by burnt textures and feelings alike. IBON’s contribution, a watercolor synth track called “Sorgpad,” also exists in the lonely hours that stretch out between the last record of the night and the relief of a new day. Eschewing melody, IBON uses incremental shifts in tone and timbre to tell a story that seasoned ravers will recognize.
There’s plenty more for curious ears to explore, and it is nothing if not surprising. On the vinyl version, the A-side has a scrapbook pop moment with Sofie Birch’s “Look,” which recalls the sweetly scruffy production of London in the early 2010s (think early Sampha, Micachu, and Kwes), and a slice of polyrhythmic heaven in Astrid Sonne’s “Swirl,” which performs an endless build without losing traction. Over on side B, “Never Rest” by Lyra Valenza traverses ambient, industrial, and trance territories, while “Dares Soar” by X & Yde combines spoken word, slabs of bass, and squiggly sax. And that’s not even everything! Kulør 006 is a thrilling peek inside the multidimensional mindspace of this network of Copenhagen artists that counts Courtesy at its heart.


Serious is a subjective term. In 25 years as a band, writing songs on such blithe yet cosmically related topics ...

Cool to Be You

Serious is a subjective term. In 25 years as a band, writing songs on such blithe yet cosmically related topics as girls, television and spicy food, the Descendents have been called a lot of things, and serious isn't one of them. On the other hand, ten albums and a best-of collection is a pretty serious output, regardless of the band's sometimes trifling subject matter. And though they've always affected an irreverent, lighthearted persona, the Descendents have written more than a handful of seriously great songs. Ever battling a self-styled "war against mediocrity," the band have witnessed the relentless ebb and flow of countless cultural trends, and on Cool to Be You, their first album in eight years, they continue to resist deviation from a sound they helped bring to the fore in the early 1980s.
After spending most of their first two decades on SST, the band moved to Epitaph in 1996 to release Everything Sucks, a wontedly transient collection of pop/punk nuggets, many of which saw immediate induction into the Descendents pantheon. "Coffee Mug" was a memorable, if paltry, punk seizure that beat Michael Johnson in his best 400 meters, and more importantly, kept pace with other classic sprints in the band's catalog. But following that effort, frontman and cover art muse Milo Auckerman returned to his on-again, off-again career as a chemist, effectively putting the Descendents on the backburner.
So behold the fruits of eight years' relentless experimentation-- that is, real experimentation, in an actual biochemical laboratory. Though it appears Auckerman's day job has finally earned him the bankroll to support a new pair of horned-rims, the Descendents have emerged as their same old selves. During their downtime, members Karl Alvarez, Stephen Egerton and ex-Black Flag drummer Bill Stevenson managed to release three studio albums as the wacky but inessential spin-off All, and while that band has never pulled the critical weight of the Descendents, it seems to have kept them sharp technically-- now reunited on Fat Wreck Chords, the group seems strong as ever, thrashing as always in the name of food and flatulence. Case in point: "Blast Off", a song that attempts to reconcile both interests with lyrics like, "Stay away from the chili verde/ Unless you want to get blown away," and, "Capsaicinoids are a thing to avoid/ Unless you want to burn in that 'roid."
While maturity may not have gained any import to the band in their time off, they remain as good for a hook as they were 20 years yore. "Talking" is the most anthemic of the Cool to Be You lot, featuring a winsome guitar melody, a giddy bassline, and Auckerman's typically pining verses. "Nothing with You" revels in their signature braindead juvenilia, and its music is pleasantly complementary. Meanwhile, on "Dreams", Milo affirms his reputation as an inwardly self-loathing nerd, spitting cynical, clever salvos like, "Why do I get my hopes up at all?/ I've been living this Walter Mitty life for too long." The song represents Cool to Be You's fiercest moment, and though it lacks pubescent humor, it would feel right at home amongst the band's 80s arsenal.
Elsewhere, the band waxes serious: On EP-carryover "'Merican", they step outside their teenage matrix and reach for relevance. The result, however, betrays the tongue-in-cheek introspectiveness that won the band the bulk of their adoration, and its lyrics about American arrogance and double standards not only lack the dumb fun of the rest of the record, but are also disconcertingly trite. Luckily, "One More Day" and "Maddie" are redeemingly heartfelt and riff-laden, while the album closer, "Dry Spell", catchily (if needlessly) reiterates the point. Its speedy final chorus seems somewhat anticlimactic-- but somehow, it seems humbly appropriate: Rather than forcing an ostentatious grand finale, the Descendents unassumingly steal away, leaving their legacy fully intact.


The nine tracks on High on Fire’s masterful seventh album, Luminiferous, are among the most enthusiastic and bracing of the Oakland metal band's career. Featuring mammoth riffs and hooks, it feels like a classic compendium of High on Fire’s successes.

Luminiferous

Matt Pike has become a punchline again. In the weeks leading up to the release of High on Fire’s masterful seventh album, Luminiferous, listeners began to notice that the singer’s long-latent suspicions and esoteric interests had morphed at last into legitimate conspiracy theories. During "The Black Plot", the album’s exuberant opener and first tease, Pike grunts about the need to hide your mind because of nearby aliens and relents to the damage an evil global scheme has already caused. During subsequent browbeater "The Sunless Years", Pike growls about dropping acid, spotting satellites, and huffing chemtrails. "Someone please tell them," he shouts mid-verse, "this is our fucking lives." When Rolling Stone asked Pike about those ideas, he reinforced them rather than recant: a book by noted snake oil salesman David Icke had opened his eyes. 9/11 was an inside job. And the aliens built both the ziggurats and pyramids. “Dude, I say a lot of fucked-up shit!” Pike admitted. As it does, the metal Internet laughed online.
But if that’s the stuff that drives Pike and his increasingly volatile and complex rhythm section to play with the gumption and zeal of Luminiferous, so be it. These nine tracks are among the most enthusiastic and bracing of High on Fire’s career, with mammoth riffs and hooks spurred on by a momentous band. Luminiferous feels like a classic compendium of High on Fire’s successes. There are mid-tempo marches, like the arching wallop of "The Falconist", and breathless moments that push the accelerator on doom metal until the pedal seems to stick, like the clawing "The Dark Side of the Compass" and the irrepressible "The Black Plot".
The parts themselves have never sounded better. Pike, who supplies a solo for every song, is an audacious, unapologetic leader. Drummer Des Kensel has become an exceptional drummer, able to shoehorn blast beats inside weighted sludge riffs and actually swing through the most straightforward moments. Bassist Jeff Matz is an expert at interlocking with both sides, sharing the load of the riffs and the rhythms until they’re all too big to resist. Now approaching their second decade as a consistent trio, High on Fire’s interplay has become a marvel. To wit, Pike’s set of brief solos during "The Falconist"—and the way Kensel and Matz subtract and add time around it—warrants jazz-level scholarship.
Still, Luminiferous is at its best when High on Fire seem to be preaching about these zany ideas, as if Pike has some great revelation that must be shared with his disciples. "Slave the Hive", for instance, ricochets between hardcore built by a doom metal toolkit and shout-out-loud classic rock played by madmen on speed. "They got us wired to the reptile brain," the band howls during the hook. "Your life is not the same. This world is insane." It’s the kind of silly, serious rallying cry that’s meant to be yelled back at the band onstage, even if you don’t buy it. That infectious feeling applies to the relentless title track, too, a pick-sliding monster that reaches back to the days of punk-and-metal crossover to lecture on theories of Hertz-based mind control and the deeds of white-wigged barristers. Pike unleashes soul-scraping yells between the verses and over the coda. It is a quasi-religious paroxysm; he’s hollering about despising government overlords the way a gospel shouter might scream about loving the Lord.
Every number on Luminiferous—and for the most part, in High on Fire’s entire collection—begins with some jolt, be it a heavy drum roll from Kensel or a big swipe at the guitar from Pike. But late into this album, High on Fire take one of their most unlikely detours ever, opening "The Cave" with a pensive bass solo and colorful clouds of textural abstraction. Acoustic guitar trots along to a steady beat, and Pike legitimately croons lines about putting life, the road, and even conspiracy theories on hold long enough to fall in love. They seesaw between distorted, supercharged choruses and muted verses, arriving somewhere between a power ballad and a post-grunge acoustic anthem. It suggests broader possibilities for High on Fire than the established strum-churn-and-solo modus operandi and provides a welcome break to this parade of heavy hitters. What’s more, "The Cave" indicates that Pike’s time in the reunited Sleep has served him well, causing him to slow down and be more than some shirtless 43-year-old dude with tough-guy lyrics. Al Cisneros, "The Cave" suggests, is not Sleep’s only surviving master of mood.
Speaking of Sleep, two decades ago, the hard-living Pike couldn’t help keep that band together long enough to release its third album, an epic poem about a mecca made of marijuana. Few might have predicted that, countless narcotic trips later, the now-sober Pike would be one of metal’s most trustworthy bandleaders, fronting a trio so consistent that Luminiferous feels only like the next point in a long line of remarkable records. Yes, High on Fire add a few new tricks here, especially through an enhanced ability to push and pull tempos at will. But for the most part, they remain a powerful trio with perfect chemistry, capable of embedding great hooks and marvels of rhythm section athleticism within riff-worshipping hits. "Before, I’d be all like, ‘How do we top the last one?’" Pike told Rolling Stone of Luminiferous in the same interview that turned him back into a minor metal meme. "It’s not better—it’s just a different version of myself that I’ve been trying to express all along." That’s not crazy talk. That’s fact.


The artist’s full-length debut is an honest step forward, but emotional vulnerability can’t save it from the clichés of confessional songwriting.

Good Riddance

Gracie Abrams is a two-fold industry baby: Her father is Star Wars director and Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams, and her mothers are Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers. The artist’s 2020 debut EP minor is a collection of diaristic tracks with ashen vocals, recalling her predecessors’ heartfelt divulgence. Although it inspired Olivia Rodrigo’s breakout song and has amassed nearly 300 million streams on Spotify, the EP is underdeveloped, with simple production and promising (but sometimes cliché) confessional writing. Her debut full-length Good Riddance dives deeper into personal accountability and sincere reflection on the fallout of complex relationships, revealing more of Abrams than ever before. But with melodic repetition and unadventurous production, the record is often stagnant, leaving you wishing for a more sophisticated, compelling take on whisperpop.
Abrams’ creative relationship with producer and co-writer Aaron Dessner is central to Good Riddance. While the two collaborated on a few songs for her 2021 EP This Is What It Feels Like, Abrams described their dynamic on this record as “a very tiny bubble, which felt like such a safe space to work through what I needed to process in these songs.” This comfort is palpable across the record: There are moments that display an admirable capacity for self-interrogation (“Used to lie to your face 20 times in a day/It was my little strange addiction” on “Best”), even if others feel like a middle school lesson on writing a metaphor (“I’m your ghost right now/Your house is haunted”; “I’m a rollercoaster/You’re a dead-end street” on “I know it won’t work” and “Full machine,” respectively).
The duo’s work remains mostly inside the box here. Taylor Swift’s recent collaborations with Dessner put her songwriting skills on full display, while adding newfound subtlety to her work, like the understated 5/4 discomfort of “tolerate it” and the unexpected stomp beat of “closure.” Knowing what he’s capable of inspiring, his input feels muted on Good Riddance. What he does offer is delicate acoustic guitars, pastel percussion, and the occasional unique embellishment. Abrams’ vocals are soothing and hazy, but their whispered quality risks being static. Repetitive, few-note melodies make this problem especially apparent; on tracks like “The blue” and “Best,” Abrams’ vocal performance sometimes lacks the energy needed to keep the songs engaging. You want her to wander somewhere unpredictable—to do something that would make these ostensibly intimate moments more special.
Some songs on Good Riddance don’t deliver on their promise of vulnerability, a frustrating truth considering the abundance of literary lyrics here. “Where do we go now?” tackles a failing relationship at a crossroads; in each verse, Abrams succinctly captures the guilt and confusion that comes with romantic uncertainty. But the relentless, B-flat synth pulse and the constant repetition of the question in the song’s title quickly force the song into tedium. With each hook, the production expands bit by bit, but every time it draws back, the track’s valuable momentum diminishes. Maybe this is the point; the song is, after all, about not knowing where to go. But just because it might be intentional doesn’t mean it works. If it doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere...it doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere.
Undeniably, there are tracks on Good Riddance that show Abrams’ and Dessner’s ability to tap into something especially profound. “Amelie” is bewitching, capturing a sense of aching beauty that stands out amongst the album’s more passive moments. Against a simple, finger-picked acoustic guitar and foggy piano notes, Abrams’ voice breaks with a post-cry elegance; recorded in just one take, she sings, “I met a girl once/She sorta ripped me open…Why’d it feel louder/When all of it went unspoken/All I can do is hope that this’ll go away.” The song is a misty balance of the universal and the personal, leaving one commenter on Abrams’ Instagram announcement to ask earnestly, “Okay but does anyone know what this song’s about?” To dip so eloquently into one’s psychic interiors—only to pull away from the last few details—resembles the sense of longing Abrams identifies in herself. In this context, “Amelie” could be anyone: a past lover, a lost childhood friend, an alter ego.
Good Riddance is, in a word, nice. But there are plenty of other diaristic artists, ones whose music displays a certain sense of individuality: Consider Mitski’s poetic disaffection, Rodrigo’s playful angst, or Bridgers’ acute melancholy. Abrams’ writing is honest and personal, offering moments of clear, quiet charm. Writing with emotional transparency is only one part of the equation, especially given the ubiquity of “sad girl” songs these days. As of now, it’s a bit difficult to see what sets Abrams apart from the rest.


A compilation from Nina Kraviz’ трип label connects the dots between leftfield techno, acid, and breakneck hardcore, forging an adventurous style evocative of warehouse raves in deepest Siberia.

Various Artists: Don’t Mess With Cupid, ‘Cause Cupid Ain’t Stupid

Like Warp Records, Factory, and even Motown before it, Nina Kraviz’ трип (Trip) has the three defining characteristics of a great record label: a distinct but ever-evolving sound, a staunch core of artists, and a particular geographic base, with most of трип’s music coming from Russia and Iceland. Most importantly, трип, though still in its infancy, has forged its own internal logic. If you wondered what links the glacial IDM of Biogen with the industrial hardcore of Marc Acardipane, or the oddball techno of PTU with the acidic attack of Aphex Twin’s Universal Indicator project, then the answer is трип itself, the label providing the contextual thread that binds these disparate elements together.
Acardipane, aka German hardcore pioneer Marc Trauner, is the notable newcomer to the трип stable on this release. His contribution, a slice of 165-BPM dark hardcore, is merely rugged rather than nosebleed extreme, but his presence on Don’t Mess With Cupid enforces the idea that трип is a label operating at electronic music’s fringes. It also, alongside the appearance of a vintage Richard D. James tune, suggests that the curatorial scope of the compilation, rather than the top-down sweep of the artist album, is where трип’s unruly aesthetic truly thrives.
Much like Kraviz’ audacious DJ sets, what unites the 10 tracks on Don’t Mess is not so much genre or BPM but a certain feel: an adventurous menace and steely electronic funk, doused in the kind of chilling atmospheres that raise images of freezing Siberian plains and Icelandic perma-dark. This thematic cohesion means that the frantic acid techno of “15 c7”—a raw, nervous dancefloor track originally found on Universal Indicator’s Red album, released on Rephlex back in 1993—sits snugly alongside the mechanical ambience of Roma Zuckerman’s “Zero,” which leads elegantly into the harsh rhythmic whirl of Kraviz’ “Opa.” You could, at a push, call all three tracks “techno,” but this techno remains true to the pioneering spirit of the genre’s American originators without getting trapped in slavish devotion to their sound. A very European take on the genre, it leans on the classical precision of Kraftwerk more than warm Detroit nights.
This spirit of adventure is best found in the compilation’s highlights—Bjarki’s “3-1 tap lush,” Shadowax’s “I want to be a stewardess,” and PTU’s “Castor and Pollux”—which bend techno’s electronic futurism into fascinating new shapes. “3-1 tap lush,” a staple of Kraviz’ DJ sets, is both delightfully twisted and strangely gentle, resting on an undulating and unnerving vocal sample that sounds like a child discovering silly mouth noises while exploring the echoing of an abandoned hospital. PTU take a similarly impudent approach: “Castor and Pollux” continues the pick-and-mix approach the Russian duo pioneered on 2017’s A Broken Clock Is Right Twice a Day, throwing grandiose, arcane noises against a juddering techno beat and seeing what sticks. “I want to be a stewardess” is even more unlikely, combining cinder-block techno thump, clipped Russian-language vocal, and a twisted jungle break into a blood-boilingly exciting, shape-shifting whole that cascades up and down the octave while ratcheting up the metallic intensity.
Against such invention, the rather square 4/4 thump of Exos’ “Grasshunter” and Nikita Zabelin’s edit of DEKA’s “Pearl” are too straight-laced for comfort, while Pilldriver’s “Pitch-Hiker” feels a little tame for an artist revered as a wizard of the dark hardcore arts. But odd individual moments never threaten to derail a magnificent album of join-the-dots adventurism and pointed thematic elegance. All of трип’s releases have been brilliant over the last year, but the label’s spirit really shines on compilations like this one, offering a reminder that curation itself can be an act of creation when done with this degree of taste and vision.


Backed by a 36-piece orchestra, Rufus Wainwright puts on the Ritz and pays a track-by-track tribute to Judy Garland's 1961 Carnegie Hall performance, which has been dubbed the "greatest night in showbusiness history."

Rufus Wainwright: Rufus Does Judy Live at Carnegie Hall

Rufus Does Judy Live at Carnegie Hall

"When I was a kid, I always wanted to be Dorothy," drawls Rufus Wainwright, between songs, clearly having the time of his life on stage at Carnegie Hall in October 2006. "Except for the bad days, when I wanted to be the Wicked Witch." Rufus Does Judy... is the fulfilment of this childhood wish and the ultimate Judy Garland tribute: A song-by-song recreation of her legendary 1961 set on the same stage, the show which established the troubled singer as "the world's greatest entertainer". As a kind of conceptual drag act, it's comparable to Far From Heaven, where Todd Haynes had a similarly gay old time paying lavish homage to the melodramas of film director Douglas Sirk.
Rufus Does Judy is a lovingly meticulous recreation ("I feel like Judy Garland's secretary!" he sighs at one point), right down to the flubbed lyric in "You Go to My Head" and the babbled banter before "A Foggy Day in London Town", but it's no diligent impression. Wainwright's reedy tenor is no match for Garland's brassy vibrato, but, to his credit, he elegantly outdoes her on a couple of the ballads. Listen again to Garland's original double album-- an oddly primitive recording, full of microphone crashes and a drummer a few clangs short of his trolley-- it's clear that, in concert at least, she was less a singer than an overwhelming dramatic presence, a force of showbiz nature. In fact, in a funny way, the most impressive tracks aren't the songs themselves but rather the astonishing waves of cheers and applause, the sheer rush of devotion from the audience.
That's an intensity that Wainwright clearly craves. On his own records he's seemed increasingly trapped in the prissy prison of his languid chamber pop, an orchid blooming in an arid greenhouse. But his talent is far too gaudy to stay cooped up, and over the course of this performance, channeling the chutzpah, getting high off the roar of the crowd, he comes to high-kicking life. Nothing is too corny for him: "When You're Smiling", "That's Entertainment", even a shit-eating "Swanee". He revels in the broader than Broadway bravado, it seems such a central part of his persona, but it's often simply refined out of his records completely. Of course Garland's real showbiz heir isn't Wainwright-- it's Britney Spears. So I wonder if, at heart, this splendid celebration isn't simply mourning a distant dawn-of-the-60s moment, when it was still possible to believe in the amusements of entertainment, and the chance of happy endings for child stars.
But is this more than just shits and giggles for devotees of the American songbook? Does it have anything to offer the curious yet showtunephobic indie kid? Well, maybe. In the truly Garlandy spirit of family revue, Wainwright introduces his sister Martha, who turns in a stunning, showstopping "Stormy Weather" in an appropriately brazen bid to steal the show. And he himself cuts to the quick of Garland's art with heartfelt performances of the ballads, particularly "Do It Again", "The Man That Got Away", and "If Love Were All".
"I believe that since my life began, the most I've had is just a talent to amuse", sang Garland on that last number in 1961, making Noel Coward's words her own, milking the self-dramatizing self-deprecation that moved her audience so. Sung by Wainwright the words take on a different ring. He already has the arthouse chic, the operatic range, and the high-class plaudits that Garland coveted. You suspect he would dearly love to have "just" that talent, or, in fact, that audience to amuse. He's said that he started listening to the Carnegie Hall album in the weeks and months after September 11, craving some cheap showbiz cheer, but wound up discovering something deeper. Of course, you can dismiss that as camp denial, a kind of wishful clicking together of the heels in the face of terror. But the bluebirds and rainbows of Garland's songs and movies were borne out of real horrors of the 1930s and 40s, and her own very particular demons. What her audience loved about her was her stout, sweaty, determined, ultimately doomed, defiance.


Something More Than Free is Jason Isbell's sparest record yet, and feels noncommittal: not quite folk, not quite country, definitely not rock. Isbell's lyrics keeps thorny issues at arm's length, and Free sounds nondescript and—worse—placeless as a result.

Something More Than Free

Jason Isbell's fifth studio album opens with a familiar face. The narrator of the cheery "If It Takes a Lifetime" is a man settling down after years on the road, adjusting to an empty house and a dead-end job while acclimating to the lowered expectations of a lonely life. The song's chief conflict is summed up by the line, "I keep my spirits high, find happiness by and by." There's more than a little bit of Isbell the touring musician and recovering alcoholic in that narrator, not only in the lines about the road ("I thought the highway loved me but she beat me like a drum") but also in the references to not drinking ("I don't keep liquor here, never cared for wine or beer"). "If It Takes a Lifetime" sounds like Isbell playing a game of What If: What if his solo career hadn't taken off after he departed the Drive-By Truckers eight years ago? What if he hadn't emerged as one of the most popular voices in the thriving Americana movement? What if he had just settled down in one of the small towns he depicts so vividly in his lyrics?
It's a fine song, sporting a spare, defiantly upbeat arrangement and a melody that celebrates rather than laments the narrator's situation. With an eye for telling details that accrue into specific settings and characters, Isbell is one of few songwriters today who can turn a line like, "Working for the county keeps me pissin' clear" into a solid earworm. And yet, I can't quite shake the feeling that I've heard "If It Takes a Lifetime" before, in some iteration or another, at some point in Isbell's catalog. Five albums plus two live releases into a solo career, any songwriter will find his themes solidifying, his sound coalescing into something recognizable and, if he's lucky, something completely distinctive.
"If It Takes a Lifetime", however, introduces an album that contains too few surprises. These are, as usual, not story-songs so much as they are character sketches: Very little happens beyond a character reflecting on past mistakes and present circumstances, which means the narrative arc—the big decisions, the major conflicts; in short, the action—has been consigned to the distant past. As a result, Isbell's narrators tend to be surprisingly passive, observing the world without doing very much. "I don't think on why I'm here or where it hurts," notes the main character on the title track, who lives in his own memory more than in the present world.
"Children of Children", which serves as the album's centerpiece, wrestles with some tangled issues in a family with "five full generations living," but Isbell seems more interested in the romance of sepia-tone photographs than in the reality of a great-great-grandparent. It's an odd hull of a song, whose weirdest element is the way it borrows the female hardship of childbirth only to bolster male drama: "All the years I took from her just by being born," the narrator says of his teenage mother, even though he's really talking about the burden of his own guilt. The arrangement is spare and languorous, with Derry DeBorja's Mellotron adding a windswept quality to the music. Isbell and producer Dave Cobb put that instrument to fine use on Southeastern, where it played like a jerry-rigged orchestra and conveyed an immense sense of isolation. On "Children", however, the ersatz strings generate only ersatz drama.
In general, the music does little to distinguish these characters or enliven the lyrics. Cobb is one of the most adventurous producers in Nashville, and together they have made Isbell's sparest record yet, with an austere palette dominated by acoustic guitar. The results are noncommittal: not quite folk, not quite country, definitely not rock. Even Amanda Shires' fiddle sounds stripped of the eccentricities she typically brings. It's a shame, as Isbell's home state boasts a lively and surprisingly diverse music scene, with bands like Alabama Shakes, St. Paul & the Broken Bones, and Wray slyly subverting and therefore rejuvenating Southern conventions. Isbell is obviously familiar with the music of the region, yet Something More Than Free sounds nondescript and—worse—placeless.
In 2015, Southern identity occupies the center of a number of heated debates, and few artists are better poised to comment on its complexities than Isbell. But race has never been a compelling issue for him, and while class underlies every one of his songs, he long ago stopped writing about it with much acuity. His approach has become internalized, rooted in a self-consciously literary first-person perspective. And while he's created strong work within these parameters, I still lament the lack of urgency to engage with anything too far beyond the reach of his customary stand-ins. Isbell once again shows the world through familiar eyes, but here it just feels like we've seen it all before.


For decades, the Mississippi septuagenarian has self-released idiosyncratic fusions of blues, bebop, zydeco, ambient, and modern composition. This reissue confirms him as a true American original.

Adagio Fishing

For decades, David Michael Moore has been composing, songwriting, inventing his own instruments, and making albums that almost no one hears. He hails from the tiny riverside town of Rosedale, Mississippi, where he’s been playing since the 1970s and self-releasing his music under a variety of aliases since the ’90s. In 2021, the boutique label Ulyssa encountered his work and began a reissue campaign. You can imagine their excitement when they found it. Moore’s songs are sly and surreal documents of everyday profundity, with the mysteriously resonant imagery of mid-’60s Bob Dylan and the breezy equanimity of J.J. Cale. His instrumental compositions touch on blues, bebop, zydeco, ambient, and modernist classical music. And he plays them all on instruments like the homemade buzz box and the dog-bone xylophone. At 70-something years young, he’s a genuine American original, like a Mississippi Moondog.
The primarily instrumental Adagio Fishing, recorded in 1994, is the second in Ulyssa’s series of reissues, and the first re-release of material that Moore initially conceived as an album, following last year’s excellent Flatboat River Witch, a compilation of highlights from across his catalog. “Birth of Love (A Major Adagio),” Adagio Fishing’s opening track, might give new listeners the wrong idea about what sort of artist he is. Five and a half minutes of luxuriant synthesized strings, with chord changes whose ambiguous yearning could soundtrack an alternate-universe Twin Peaks, it’s not entirely unlike the sort of dusty private-press new age that’s kept the lights on at various reissue labels over the last decade or so, albeit with an unusually rich harmonic palette for that style. Moore returns to this devotional mode a few times on Adagio Fishing, but on the whole the album is a lot stranger than its introduction suggests, and better for it.
“My Prosperity Package,” the second piece, opens with an audio play of sorts. We hear a charismatic radio preacher, evidently recorded and sampled from the Mississippi airwaves, and a helium-voiced regular Joe who seems to be listening to the sermon (presumably Moore himself with a pitch-shifting effect). The preacher promises deliverance from poverty and strife, and the listener starts murmuring his assent. But it’s hard to tell if he really means it: There’s something puckish and sarcastic in his squeaked uh huhs and alrights, like maybe he knows the guy on the radio is a fraud, and he’s mocking him by playing along. Before the sketch can reach a resolution, Moore interrupts it with a brief, elliptical piano solo, its chords first strutting low and bluesy and then becoming vaporous and impressionistic as they ascend. It’s difficult to know what to make of “My Prosperity Package,” but it has the feeling of a thematic signpost, in part because it contains some of Adagio Fishing’s only legible words. In both the music and the dialogue, it holds the celestial in tension with the earthbound, reaching for transcendence in one moment and laughing at the very idea in the next.
Adagio Fishing has the air of outsider art, not due to any naivety of technique—Moore has serious chops—but because of his apparent disregard for the way his music might be received by the market. Oddities like “My Prosperity Package” share space with comparatively straightforward fare like “Maria of Egg Sandwiches,” which could nearly pass for a Classical-era bagatelle if not for its down-home title and the chintzy bell-like keyboard patch Moore uses to play it. Along with his custom-built instruments and a few traditional ones, Adagio has lots of these then-contemporary, now-dated synth sounds, whose uncanny aspects Moore seemed to sense and savor even at the time. At the climax of “Maria of Egg Sandwiches,” he leans heavily on his keyboard’s pitch-bend wheel, turning notes into gooey squiggles. The gesture is both deliriously out of place in the elegant environs of this particular tune and perfectly in keeping with the wigged-out sensibility of the album at large.
Adagio Fishing’s stylistic jumble can make for a disorienting listening experience, but the force of Moore’s personality as a player and composer has a unifying effect: Whether grandly orchestrated or performed solo, forthright with its charms or evasive, each piece offers a sense of uproarious mischief tempered by reverence and curiosity. “Cracks in the Sidewalk,” with its jaunty gait and dissonances that suggest a Cubist painter’s take on the blues, evinces a deep affinity for Thelonious Monk, one of American music’s greatest tricksters. “Kildeer Sing (Where the White Meets the Muddy)” tethers symphonic grandeur—harp, strings, cascading percussion—to a nagging refrain played on a synth that recalls a dollar-store slide whistle. “What’s Going On (Okies on Ham),” the furthest-out track by a wide margin, brings back the radio samples and the high-pitched interlocutor, setting them among all manner of unidentifiable pings and squelches. This time, the squeaky guy acts as a stand-in for the listener, repeating the first three words of the title with increasingly frenzied incredulity—the only appropriate reaction.
Given the breadth of Flatboat River Witch, the compilation that introduced Moore to a slightly larger listening public, it seems that Adagio Fishing presents only a portion of his artistry. According to Ulyssa, there are plenty more albums in the vault. They aren’t available online, which means that this reissue campaign will be a fun one to follow for a certain sort of crate-digging music fan. Who knows: the next record could be a singer-songwriter album, or a set of jazzy solo piano improvisations, or an atonal dog-bone xylophone showcase, or an electronic sound collage. From what we know about Moore so far, we can safely assume two things: It may be confounding, but it won’t be boring.


Miley Cyrus only appears once on the Flaming Lips’ claustrophobic new full-length, but the record wouldn’t sound the way it does without her presence in their lives.

Oczy Mlody

Last year was a relatively quiet one for the Flaming Lips. Sure, the Oklahoma vets take an average of four years or so between proper albums, but they’re rarely out of sight, whether they’re upholding their reputation as a festival clean-up worker’s worst nightmare, launching side projects, or just generating headlines over something outrageous Wayne Coyne has said/done. But, ironically, their most scattershot extracurricular activity to date—backing up Miley Cyrus on her teen pop-repudiating, Soundcloud-clogging Dead Petz project—has, in hindsight, proven to be a guiding light for this ever-exploratory band.
Over the past three years, Cyrus has gone from being Coyne’s instant Instagram BFF to becoming his go-to girl with kaleidoscope eyes to serving as the Lips’ muse—the potty-mouthed, pansexual Nico to their expanding plastic inflatable. It’s a friends-with-mutual-benefits relationship: Cyrus uses the Lips as a wrecking ball to her past, while the Lips use her a conduit to relive theirs.
Cyrus only appears on one song on the Lips’ new album, but the record wouldn’t sound the way it does without her presence in their lives. Oczy Mlody is a Polish phrase that translates to “eyes of the young,” and, here, the Lips strap them on like a VR headset. After spending much of 2013’s The Terror in a disorienting haze and ruminating on loss, lust, and impending apocalypse, on Oczy Mlody, Coyne reconnects with his childlike sense of wonder, populating its lyrical universe with unicorns, demon-eyed frogs, and wizards (not to mention enough f-bombs to challenge Cyrus in a swear-jar contest). And joining Cyrus’ squad shaped the album’s sonic direction as well: After sharing the console with Mike WiLL Made-It on Dead Petz and becoming party pals with A$AP Rocky, Coyne and co. have adapted their low-end theories to the Lips’ future-shocked psych-pop.
But if Oczy Mlody lacks The Terror’s weighty themes, it retains its claustrophobic, science-lab atmosphere, yielding songs as dense, tangled, and intricately structured as the gear set-up likely required to produce them. The Lips haven’t functioned as a straight-up rock band for two decades now, but never have they felt more like a pure studio entity—this is their first album to barely feature any (perceptible) drums, leaning instead on a wobbly rhythmic foundation of tinny programmed beats, bass-frequency throbs, and finger-snapping hooks. But while Oczy Mlody finds the Lips still eager to stretch the parameters of their aesthetic 30-plus years into the game, this time, it leaves them sounding a little distended and shapeless.
As harebrained as some of the Lips’ sideline experiments can seem, all those existentialist sci-fi-flick soundtracks, six-hour jams, and kooky karaoke exercises are important whiteboard workshop exercises for ideas that eventually get refined into holistic, conceptually focussed albums like The Terror and its predecessor, Embryonic. By comparison, Oczy Mlody feels more, well, embryonic. If the Lips’ 2009 opus introduced this current iteration of the band with a thundering Soft Bulletin-sized statement, and The Terror was its more subdued Yoshimi-scaled counterpoint, then Oczy Mlody is the At War With the Mystics moment, where the band sounds like it’s being pulled into too many directions at once, and struggling to reconcile their crowd-pleasing and contrarian tendencies.
Oczy Mlody’s fairy-tale fantasias are hardly unchartered terrain for a band that found its greatest success making a quasi-concept album about karate battles with robots; the difference here is that the whimsy is delivered in stern, serious tones, as if reciting a children’s storybook as docudrama. But just when you’re willing to overlook the goofy lyrics of a song like “There Should Be Unicorns” (“There should be day-glo strippers/Ones from the Amazon!”) and surrender to its tense, twitchy electro groove, the hypnotic spell is broken by a silly spoken-word intrusion from comedian Reggie Watts where he ruminates on horn-headed horses like Isaac Hayes doing pillow talk. The song finds a superior counterpart in “One Night While Hunting for Faeries and Witches and Wizards to Kill,” another tale of an epic quest for mythical creatures—set to an intensifying techno-powered thrust. But in lieu of a dramatic finale, it simply dissolves into the chintzy, chipmunked synth pop of “Do Glowy.” (Sample lyric: “Glowy, glowy, go/Let’s get together, yeah/Glow, glow, glow, glow.”)
These pendulum shifts—from frustrating to fascinating and back again—play out within the songs themselves. While the compelling near-instrumental “Nigdy Nie (Never No)” navigates a linear path from cosmic avant-R&B reverie to subwoofered robo-funk, dead-weight tracks like “Galaxy I Sink” and “Listening to the Frogs With Demon Eyes” force you to wade through meandering tracts of sputtering drum machines and free-floating guitar jangle to reach their brief, sky-clearing moments of radiance. Even a pretty reprieve like “Sunrise (Eyes of the Young)”—which repurposes a melody previously heard on Cyrus’ “The Floyd Song (Sunrise)”—isn’t immune to the album’s impulsive tendencies, with each plaintive verse answered by a momentum-stalling choral flourish that feels like a placeholder for a proper chorus. (The album boasts a better ballad in “The Castle,” a bittersweet, trip-hoppy serenade that would sound right at home on the back half of Yoshimi.)
Where The Terror appended its sullen song cycle with an ebullient bonus track (“The Sun Blows Up”), Oczy Mlody’s unlikely closer—the Coyne/Cyrus duet “We a Famly”—is presented as part of the official tracklist. But given the scatterbrained nature of all that precedes it, the song’s appearance is both moot and highly welcome. “We a Famly” reportedly dates back to the Dead Petz sessions, and it differs from the rest of Oczy Mlody in every possible way, from its traditional rock-anthem structure, to its real-world references to Wichita, to the presence of a joyous, arm-swaying chorus on a record that otherwise does its best to avoid them. Certainly, “We a Famly” will give amorous Lips fans something else to slow-dance to at their weddings besides “Do You Realize??” But in these divisive times, the song also functions as a more pointed statement of solidarity—for America at large, or, at the very least, among two generations of Oklahoma freaks who prove the president-elect doesn’t have a monopoly on watersports-related headlines in 2017.


Earth bandleader Dylan Carlson returns with his third full-length in three years under the solo guise of Drcarlsonalbion. Gold comprises 24 instrumental vignettes that originally served as the score for a 2013 film that chronicled the ruinous journey of seven German immigrants into the northwest during the Klondike Gold Rush at the tail end of the 19th century.

Gold

When Dylan Carlson’s electric guitar swells from silence to an acute roar at the start of “Gold XIII”, from his third full-length in three years under the solo guise of Drcarlsonalbion, the sound induces a sudden shiver, as though a closed window has been unintentionally sprung during the middle of a fierce winter gale. It’s a harrowing tone, a somehow glowing rush of cold that Carlson lets linger. He eventually flicks a few isolated notes over the lonesome drone, letting them fade into the backdrop like ghosts vanishing against the night. When the 30-second instrumental goes almost quiet, Carlson strums a few quick, bright chords, like he’s willed the sun to rise again. It’s a moment of hope that borders on optimistic, but it barely lasts 10 seconds before Carlson shifts to the snarling, aching blues figure of “Gold XIV”.
That’s the general temperament of Gold, which comprises 24 instrumental vignettes that originally served as the score for a 2013 film that chronicled the ruinous journey of seven German immigrants into the northwest during the Klondike Gold Rush at the tail of the 19th century. It’s often been suggested that Carlson’s despondent instrumentals with Earth—both the monolithic early iteration that established drone metal as a genre and the latter-day take known for its blues-crawl refinement—would serve as suitable soundtracks for film renditions of Cormac McCarthy’s books. The westward Klondike trek killed thousands, subjecting the naïve to the abject nature of untamed wilderness and lawless humanity, so Gold is a litany of awful events, where hardscrabble characters endure painful deaths and existential crises, abject loneliness and corrupted dreams. It is, at least, in the McCarthy milieu, finally offering an appropriate cinematic environment for the slow sweep of Carlson’s guitar.
In the movie itself, Carlson’s miniature instrumentals serve mostly as frames, musical borders that guide transitions between scenes and help reinforce moods. But you can trace the same worry, regret, uncertainty and foolhardy aspiration that define the movie through the pieces, too. Together, “Gold III” and “Gold IV” form a brief miasma of self-defeat, each note that Carlson elicits suddenly swallowed by the noisy roar of his amplifier; every picked string is the start of a trip that stands no chance of success.
“Gold XIX,” one of the longer numbers here, staggers along the edge of a slow, angled melody, a precipice rising above a dangerous descent. By track’s end, though, Carlson can barely move through the riff, his motion beset by whorls of noise and the rising wash of Davies’ cymbals. It’s the sound of trouble morphing into terror. The sparkling, if sullen, theme of “Gold XXIII” renders halcyon moments of deliverance. Whether through the release of death or the relief of a stream and clean water, the at-risk adventurers seem to find some relief, maybe even a mirage of it. Carlson lets the end of each phrase float skyward, ascending toward anything else, anywhere but here.
The music on Gold isn’t difficult. The riffs are simple patterns that most anyone with a guitar and a sense of scales could soon pick out. They’re largely unadorned, too, accompanied only by splashes of cymbals and, once, a bass drum from Earth drummer and Carlson savior Adrienne Davies. That might make Gold a hard sell for many. Both the rhythmic grace of recent Earth and the overwhelming volume of early Earth—the band’s central assets for many—are all but absent. But the twist, and the real feat of Gold, comes instead in the guitarist’s simultaneous control and exploration. These are mostly solitary conversations between Carlson, his instrument, his amplifier, and a few effects pedals. Sometimes, it seems, he’s playing pieces of riffs only to hear what they sound like when they decay; at other times, he repeats fragments of melodies in a process of accretion, their repetition building until he can coax feedback from a gently picked purr.
To that end, Gold suggests a crossroads of the dual versions of Earth, where the deliberate melancholy of the latter fuels the amplifier worship of the former, albeit in a much more restrained and reserved space. In their own modest way, these 24 pieces suggest systems music, where the configuration of the guitarist in a room with his guitar and its accessories is more important than the input of what he actually plays. It’s a system with a predisposition for the forlorn, a ghost in the machine that allows these snippets to work onscreen and off.


The new album from Jonti—a part-time touring guitarist for the Avalanches—is aesthetically omnivorous, encompassing dream pop, electronica, hip-hop, and R&B. It sounds unrestrained and overproduced.

Tokorats

Jonti does not subscribe to the philosophy that less is more. Indeed, the Johannesburg-born, Sydney-based songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist can never seem to do enough: His busy perfectionism makes his every song an epic of pop flamboyance, lavish and wildly ornate. Jonti’s third album, Tokorats, has been almost six years in the making—recorded, then discarded, then recorded from scratch again. Jonti claims to have produced hundreds of variations of each of the album’s 15 tracks. And what is a tokorat? “A multicolored weirdo mutant composed of all the elements of your story and all the complexities of your character,” Jonti explains. Well, Tokorats is all that, and then some. It is the unwieldy work of an artist seemingly incapable of self-restraint.
Before he was a musician, Jonti was a painter. When he painted, he has said, he “always tried to get as much detail on the canvas” as he could—an indulgent impulse he admits “carried over a little onto music” and that remains entirely apparent from song to song. (Even the album’s long list of collaborators feels like a product of this voracity.) Of course, maximalism isn’t necessarily a shortcoming: the same sort of everything-but-the-kitchen-sink extravagance is the presiding spirit of a number of magnificent albums, from J Dilla’s Donuts (which Jonti cites as a major inspiration) to Since I Left You by the Avalanches, for whom Jonti serves as a part-time live guitarist on tour. The difference is that those artists had a vision. Jonti seems to just enjoy the sprawl.
Tokorats is aesthetically omnivorous. It encompasses a wide range of styles and moods: ethereal dream pop, sparkling electronica, vibrant hip-hop, mellow R&B. There is playful brass on “Zuki,” a spontaneous laugh riot on “Island Rose,” a melody of Atari bleeps and bloops on “Papaya Brothers.” But the musical diversity is flattened by Jonti’s doting, and in consequence the whole thing sounds the same—fussy and overproduced. The manifest intricacy of the material is totally at odds with the vague and nebulous result. The instrumentation may be elaborate, and the arrangements complex; nevertheless, Tokorats merely feels bogged down. Listening, one is wearied by the homogenous effect. Even the record’s most sprightly pop songs often lumber past the five-minute mark, making this slog more tedious still.
Over all of it looms Jonti’s unifying persona: sanguine, buoyant, and wildly earnest. At times this sunny, heart-on-sleeve temperament seems harmless and even quite endearing. More often it simply grates: he’s too precious, too twee. But the whimsy is inseparable from the man: “It usually starts with a silly idea,” Jonti has said in an interview about his approach to songwriting. “Like, ‘I wonder what it would sound like if Kermit and Missy Elliott wrote a song together?’” Nothing on Tokorats sounds like a Kermit-Missy collaboration, to be clear. But everything sounds like the product of an artist who thinks that way. One imagines him sequestered in his suburban garage, tinkering with a delicate keyboard arrangement with obsessional fervor, dreaming up these “silly ideas” and slavishly realizing them. It may be such flights of fancy, as much as his perfectionism, that made his process last so many years.


Jack White takes a stronger, more central role on the second Dead Weather album, sharing vocal duties almost evenly with Alison Mosshart.

Sea of Cowards

If anyone thought the Dead Weather was going to be the project where Jack White let someone else take the lead, those notions end a minute and 38 seconds into Sea of Cowards opener "Blue Blood Blues", when White tears into one of his most nonsensically badass couplets ever: "Check your lips at the door, woman!/ And shake your hips like battleships!/ Yeah, all the white girls trip when I sing at Sunday service!" It's fantastical tough-guy gibberish worthy of Bo Diddley, and it's the sort of line that only an extremely confident singer would ever attempt, let alone pull off. It reveals the Dead Weather to be just another White vehicle-- the one that plays host to his most deranged impulses.
On last year's Dead Weather debut Horehound, White largely ceded frontperson duties to Kills singer Alison Mosshart. But on Sea of Cowards, the two split lead-vocal duties almost completely down the middle, with White unleashing his full range of vocal tics: yelps, mumbles, arch sneers, growls, screeches, groans. Mosshart mirrors every one of those inflections, to the point where it's not always immediately apparent which one is singing. When Mosshart's howling full-bore, her bottomless blues wail could pass for PJ Harvey's. But even more than on Horehound, Mosshart stays within White's freaked-out range, each singer firing off one outrageous non sequitur after another. Together, they sound like two feral cats circling each other outside a dumpster, trying to figure out whether to fuck or fight.
For two people capable of writing gloriously catchy rock choruses in their sleep, White and Mosshart sure stay away from them here. There are barely any choruses on Sea of Cowards, but that's not to say there are no hooks: the catchiness is all in the thud and flail of the band. This is some serious locked-in rock-dude shit: discordant guitar leads, fuzzed-out organ blurts, clattering falling-down-stairs drum fills. It's unhinged classic-rock explosiveness that sounds like it could be the result of a few vicious jam sessions-- the rumblings of scuzz-rock lifers given a chance to air out all their purest expressions of fuck-you-up ire. And when a chorus does emerge from the swampy ether, as on the ferocious first single "Die By the Drop", it cuts deep.
Little details jump out. The backfiring keyboard on "The Difference Between Us" sounds like nothing so much as the Faint, circa Blank-Wave Arcade-- electro-rocking harder than most actual rock. The two guitar leads on "I Can't Hear You" sound like they're in the middle of a fiery lovers' argument, one staying maddeningly calm and steady while the other bleats and rages. White and Mosshart are old-style rock stars, the types who don't feel like they have to explain everything to you, or share it with you. And even if Sea of Cowards sounds more bashed-out than labored-over, it works. It's a heavy, snarly, physical rock album, and it feels like the work of people so secure in their ass-kicking abilities that they don't have to sweat the details.


Recorded in single takes with minimal overdubs, the San Francisco band’s latest album—its first sung entirely in Satomi Matsuzaki’s native Japanese—is a confident set of small epiphanies.

Miracle-Level

Since forming almost three decades ago in pre-dotcom San Francisco, Deerhoof have been some of indie rock’s most effective ambassadors for the power of anarchic creativity. A sense of mischievous delight is never far from the controlled chaos of their intricate melodies, zig-zagging rhythms, and unpredictable song structures, whose admirers have included Radiohead and ?uestlove as well as not-so-famous kindred spirits like John Dwyer and Wendy Eisenberg. Nowadays scattered across different cities, the current quartet, intact since 2008—bassist/singer Satomi Matsuzaki, drummer Greg Saunier, and guitarists Ed Rodriguez and John Dieterich—has continued to gamely experiment without losing that prankster merriment, whether espousing radical change, going full concept record, or ushering in multi-genre collaborators.
Deerhoof are at both their most whimsical and most energetically approachable on Miracle-Level, their 19th LP. Billed as the first Deerhoof album written entirely in Matsuzaki’s native Japanese, it is also the first to be recorded from start to finish in a proper studio. The album was produced by Mike Bridavsky, better known as the “dude” of the late online-celebrity cat Lil Bub, but Deerhoof’s air-quotes “studio debut” doesn’t so much smooth their scruffy charm as sharpen it up. Concentrating only on songs that could be done in one live take, with minimal overdubs but ridiculously lavish guitar textures, it’s a confident set of tiny epiphanies.
Swapping languages opens up new realms of expression. For listeners who don’t speak Japanese, Matsuzaki’s titular entreaty at the start of opening track “Sit Down, Let Me Tell You a Story.” isn’t that much less intelligible than the nonsensical playing-cards references on 2003’s “Dummy Discards a Heart” or surreal vegetable imagery that kicked off the last album, 2021’s Actually, You Can. Yet the feline exuberance of Lil Bub-dedicated “My Lovely Cat!” leaps over any linguistic barriers—particularly given the universality of terms like “Instagram” and “TikTok.” Sitting down with a translation nicely focuses the listening experience while uncovering deliciously absurd Easter eggs: What a joy to find that, amid the Latin-jazz organ groove of “The Little Maker,” Matsuzaki sings, “Doesn’t this song sound different from usual Deerhoof?” Sort of!
The band’s sound here is a live-wire version of whatever “usual Deerhoof” might be, with plenty of space to breathe and an overwhelming illusion of being in the room with them for every herky-jerk start and stop. “Everybody, Marvel,” which benefits from lyrical cognates (“records” sounds almost the same in both languages), is stunning dream pop that somehow name-checks Eurythmics. The marching-clown clamor of “Momentary Art of Soul!,” which at around five minutes is the longest song on the album, feels like it could go on forever; it locks into a teetering polyrhythm that evokes the giddy transcendence of artists as variously virtuosic as Horse Lords, Mdou Moctar, and Xylouris White.
Miracle-Level is no less captivating when Deerhoof take their feet off the gas. The coruscating undulation of “The Poignant Melody” wouldn’t be out of place on a recent Jeff Parker album; it helps that the phrase “melody” is another close cognate, and it helps even more that the translation attributes to ’70s shlock rockers Journey the idea that a melody needs to mean something: “But what does it mean, this melody?” Any way you want it, Neal Schon. Tender finale “Wedding, March, Flower,” a keyboard-based ballad that tasks drummer Greg Saunier, this time, with singing a non-native language—his vocals are in Japanese too—is genuinely moving: “Let’s walk closely together/Let’s live/I can hold an umbrella for you for a long time,” the English translation of the lyrics concludes.
The idea of miracles recurs across Matsuzaki’s lyrics. The clapping, swaying title track proclaims that “we need only ‘love’ songs,” but this is no ordinary love: “I’m talking high-level!/I’m talking religion-level!/I’m talking miracle-level.” The mesmerizing, convulsive “And the Moon Laughs” begins with a light-hearted nod to “non-drinking teens [who] compete/Shaking butts at cell-phone,” but soon becomes a terse parable for an age of disenchantment: “Non-miracle said:/That’s not my problem. I give nothing./ Well, I am not your slave. Become ice-cream then!” With bass synth, cowbell, and circuitous twists and turns, “Phase-Out All Remaining Non-Miracles by 2028” calls for the magical-realist goal it states in its title, but ends on a fantastically optimistic note for humanity: When it comes to “non-miracles,” the translated lyrics read, “Luckily there aren’t that many.”
Miracle-Level celebrates the heady euphoria that can result when skill and craft meet with serendipity and happy accidents, like a long-running indie band teaming up with the former owner of Lil Bub and hustling out a full album in two weeks’ studio time. “The idea that an artist even knows what they’re doing … I think it’s a lie,” Saunier said in a recent podcast interview. “It’s an illusion that we tell ourselves for the purpose of making selling the record easier. We dumb it down to a blurb.” A melody doesn’t have to have a meaning, it just is. Or, as Saunier told another recent interviewer, “Generosity, creativity, and love are just as much human nature as competition, coercion, and brutality.” Do you believe in miracles? No? Become ice cream then.


It's not necessary to become fully acquainted with shape-shifting LA musician M. Geddes Gengras' output to enjoy Collected Works Vol. 1: The Moog Years, a limited collection of instrumental work. Gone are the sunshine and purity from 2012's bright collaboration Icon Give Thank, with a strong sense of embrace replaced by something far more inward looking and ruminative.

M. Geddes Gengras: Collected Works Vol. 1 The Moog Years

Collected Works Vol. 1 The Moog Years

It's easy enough to get to know M. Geddes Gengras, a Los Angeles-based musician whose career to date has been a super-charged blitz through myriad genre shifts and musical accomplices. (Fortunately, he has a huge amount of music streaming for free on his Bandcamp page, and the Out Door comprehensively chronicled his work in a feature from earlier this year.) It's not necessary to become fully acquainted with Gengras' output to enjoy Collected Works Vol. 1: The Moog Years, a limited vinyl and digital release of contemplative instrumental work. In fact, anyone familiar with his most popular release to date, as part of the Gengras/Sun Araw/Congos culture crash that gave us the euphoric Icon Give Thank, will find themselves stepping onto craggier land here. Gone are the sunshine and purity from Icon, with a strong sense of embrace replaced by something far more inward looking and ruminative.
Gengras' work with the Moog largely sidesteps common sounds connected to the instrument. This isn't the giddy, frothy, bubbly tone found on countless covers records in the vein of Moog Plays the Beatles. Gengras cites Stereolab as the first band he heard who used the instrument, but their avant-pop approach lies in sharp contrast to his work here. Instead, he's remarkably restrained, choosing to tease out tiny motifs, letting oscillators softly pulse in the background, barely leaving a trace of hefty bass. It's not clear which Moogs Gengras was using, but clearly he's more enamored with using them to paint fainter traces than he is with going into all-out attack mode. It's a sound with more common companions in the past than the present, at times recalling Daphne Oram's moody "Brociliande" or the processor noise of Suzanne Ciani's "Second Breath".
The strong shift in mood strung across Collected Works is to be expected from something that was recorded in different periods, but what's surprising is how well that creates a sense of journey across the record. Compilations don't often hang together well, usually forging rather awkward trails that hint at how ideas evolved. But here it's mostly seamless, with a lament punctured by noises that sound like a fried circuit board ("Resistor") segueing perfectly into a minimalist composition that resembles the work Aphex Twin was indulging in around the time of Selected Ambient Works Volume II ("Untitled #4"). Gengras can alternate between big and small in a heartbeat-- the opening "10.17.2009" has a boundless feel that positions it in a place as vast as Mountains' most recent output, while "Inductor" meshes a mix of twinkly electronics and new age yearning that aligns it with Laurie Spiegel's The Expanding Universe.
Clearly Gengras is well schooled in this stuff, but there are only a handful of too-obvious steals from the music that preceded him in this field. Mostly he's focussed on setting and mood, reaching down to a place that makes it feel like he's trying to make the electronic equivalent of an old blues record. At its best this album has a weather-worn feeling, a sense of analog circuitry entering old age, maturing gracefully from frivolous beginnings. It fits well with the idea that these synths are very personal instruments, with each having unique quirks and characteristics. It's not always successful, but Collected Works reaches moments of poignancy, usually when a bank of synth noise rolls in and provides a dark cloak to hang over the track. In those moments you can almost picture Gengras carefully stabbing at a Moog keyboard, trying to figure out where the emotional center of such a surprisingly malleable instrument could possibly lie.


A transitional record, Deerhoof's latest finds them sidling up to the kind of heavy rock that's been their secret weapon in the past.

Deerhoof vs. Evil

Deerhoof's drummer Greg Saunier recently noted that "if there's any pressure on us, it's actually a pressure to not repeat." That's an admirable goal, and so far they've mostly stuck with it. They've spent most of their career as a fast-and-bulbous hybrid of a super-heavy, experimentation-minded art-rock band and a sweet little pop group, equal parts chirp and pummel. In the six-album-plus run from 2002's Reveille to 2008's Offend Maggie, they perpetually pushed the sound of the band into fresh if occasionally awkward territory.
They're also a totally idiomatic band, one of those groups where you usually only need to hear a few seconds' worth of any song to know it's them, whether or not bassist Satomi Matsuzaki is singing at the time. That puts Deerhoof in a difficult position: Their identity is built around all four members' particular quirks as musicians, but they're struggling not to repeat themselves, so they're hunting for new rooms within the house they have constructed for themselves.
It's been more than two years since Offend Maggie-- an unusually long stretch by their standards-- but Deerhoof vs. Evil is less a leap forward than a transitional record, along the lines of 2005's Green Cosmos EP. They're sticking to their M.O. of repeating a single odd musical or lyrical phrase ("I did crimes for you, they're coming true!") again and again until it sounds like a hook; beyond that, you can tell that they're trying to wriggle out of what they've been doing in the band's previous phase, but haven't quite figured out what comes next.
In particular, they keep sidling up to the kind of heavy rock that's been their secret weapon in the past, then bolting away from it. Deerhoof have always had a difficult relationship with great big stomps and riffs, but in the past their clever self-sabotage has often let a cracked-but-intact rock song sneak through-- Friend Opportunity's "+81", Apple O''s "Dummy Discards a Heart", Offend Maggie's "The Tears and Music of Love".
There's nothing anywhere near as direct as those songs here. Instead, we get the likes of "The Merry Barracks": A handful of rhythmically lopsided loops that eventually synch up with Saunier murmuring "Hello hello hello/ Atomic bombs are going to explode," then a passage where Matsuzaki's clear-voiced, unemphatic simper alternates with the band going WHAM WHAM WHAM, 15 seconds of the whole group doing their best imitation of '92 shoegaze, a free-noise guitar solo, and so on. It's also the first of two different songs that include the line "everyone, everyone, sing!" (The Saunier-sung closer, "Almost Everyone, Almost Always", begins with a variation: "Everyone, everyone, in a bow tie.")
What keeps Deerhoof entertaining even at their most distracted is that they actually mean that "everyone sing" bit: they're as open-hearted and goofy as egghead experimentalists get. "No One Asked to Dance", one of the prettiest songs they've ever recorded, could be incidental music from a late-60s European art movie; "Let's Dance the Jet" actually is a cover of a Mikis Theodorakis piece from a 1967 film, The Day the Fish Came Out-- a drone-plus-freaky-rhythm instrumental that's a welcome reminder that Deerhoof didn't invent this stuff.
Saunier indicated in a recent Popnography interview that all four members of Deerhoof individually write songs, which the other members then alter until everyone's satisfied with them. Sometimes that works out nicely: "Must Fight Current", a duet between Matsuzaki and guitarist John Dieterich, adopts the old Sleater-Kinney effect of two different songs that just happen to work when they're superimposed, then dials it down to a prickly, dissonant samba. Often, though, what's left of these songs is too much or too little. There's a lot to be said for ADD-- it's a pretty good strategy for not being boring-- but Deerhoof are fighting so hard to avoid obviousness and stasis that they're starting to undermine themselves.


On this double album, the madly prolific psych-rock band synthesizes everything they do into compact songs that still allow their weirder impulses to flourish.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: K.G. / L.W.

K.G. / L.W.

Everything about King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard is governed by perpetual forward motion, from their music’s relentless momentum to their frequent reinventions to their tendency to release new albums with the regularity of a Substack newsletter. But while there’s a lot of joy to be had in hitching yourself to the Melbourne psych-rockers’ careening locomotive, the group’s recent track record suggests they could benefit from erecting some guard rails, with the honky-glam hoedown of Fishing for Fishies and the doomsday thrash of Infest the Rats’ Nest veering too sharply into the silly and the sullen, respectively.
Of course, the nice thing about a band this prolific is that any missteps are swiftly left in the dust and a course correction is all but inevitable, and in King Gizzard’s case, not even a global pandemic can slow their roll. On top of dropping multiple live releases, two concert films, and a slew of Bandcamp keepsakes in recent months, King Gizzard recorded two albums’ worth of new material while in lockdown, with each member of the now-sextet laying down their parts in isolation at their respective home studios. The results have been delivered in two installments: K.G., released this past November, and its freshly minted counterpart, L.W. They’re discrete records, but interlock to form a continuous double album, wrapped inside a trilogy: K.G. and L.W. are being billed as the remaining parts of a triptych that began with 2017’s Flying Microtonal Banana, where the band fully embraced the equilibrium-upsetting effects of quarter-tone tuning.
But while the works may be connected on a technical level, the K.G./L.W. combo deserves its own unique standing in the band’s labyrinthine catalog. Arriving in the wake of King Gizzard’s 10th anniversary, the albums serve the same function as the sprawling Freedom’s Goblin did for their equally industrious psych-punk peer Ty Segall: They cap a decade of furious activity by reconciling all of the band’s far-ranging influences into a complete, 360-degree portrait of the group. The wild stylistic variation in the King Gizzard canon has made them the kind of band where 10 different fans might name 10 different albums as their favorite; K.G./L.W. strives to be the one that everyone can agree on.
Bookended by two radically versions of their new de facto theme song “K.G.L.W.”—which sounds like a John Carpenter soundtrack given prog-folk and doom-metal makeovers—K.G./L.W. boasts a circular structure that recalls the group’s 2016 infinite-loop opus Nonagon Infinity. But the albums’ sense of cohesion is more than just a product of savvy sequencing. Over the course of these records, King Gizzard synthesize their entire musical palette—British psych-pop and proto-metal, German kosmische rock, West African rhythms, Middle Eastern melodies, sitar-speckled psychedelia, American roots music—into compact songs that still allow equal room for the band’s songcraft and improvisational impulses to flourish.
K.G., in particular, has a natural fluidity that belies its piecemeal construction, and a steady rhythmic thrust that mirrors the urgency of its scorched-Earth lyrics. As the album unfolds, each song appears like a new scene on some never-ending dystopian Disney boat ride through the gravest threats to our civilization: unchecked AI (“Automation”), radicalized right-wing trolls (“Minimum Brain Size”), the untenability of modern capitalism (“Straws in the Wind”), pandemic-stoked xenophobia (“Some of Us”).
On this opening stretch, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard reaffirm their status as the house band for post-Trump geopolitical tumult, but in lieu of conceptual suites about barfing robots and intergalactic colonization, K.G. feels much more grounded, even personal. The album’s vigorous peak-hour standouts, “Ontology” and “Oddlife,” each ponder the meaning of life from opposing macro and micro angles. Where the former translates its big unknowable queries (“Why is there anyone?/Why do we think?/What is the point of it?/Why anything?”) into an existential crisis you can dance to, the latter is an unglamorous look at the physically grueling, mentally exhausting experience of touring: “No concept of geography,” keyboardist Ambrose Kenny-Smith sings, “I wake up and I’m still fatigued/I’m drinking till I’m dead asleep.”
But if “Oddlife” seems at odds with the rest of the album’s topicality (not to mention somewhat ill-timed for a moment when many groups would kill to feel burned out by touring again), it ultimately speaks to a universal conundrum: the fact that we’re often left too drained by our working lives to fight bigger battles. And as “The Hungry Wolf of Fate” closes out K.G. in a fuzz-metal firestorm, we’re reminded that a failure to break our complacency and heed the warnings of history will have disastrous consequences for us all. “We’re mindless pissants” who “haven’t learned sense,” bandleader Stu Mackenzie seethes, suggesting that not only is our demise all but assured, but well-deserved.
So after you’ve consigned the fate of humanity to the dustbin, what’s there left to do? Well, if the opening of L.W. is any indication, there’s still time for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard to cross “form the world’s weirdest Steely Dan tribute act” off their bucket list. L.W.’s lead-off track, “If Not Now, Then When?” snaps into a crisp, clavinet-spun Aja groove while Mackenzie shows that Kevin Parker isn’t the only Aussie psych-rocker concealing a killer falsetto. The ruinous imagery remains—rising oceans, raging wildfires, endangered species—but the surprisingly sleek execution betrays their deft touch at repackaging the same messages.
As that sudden change of direction indicates, L.W. is more of a grab bag, and a feeling of diminishing returns creeps in as tracks like “O.N.E.” circle around the same musical and ideological territory. In effect, L.W. resembles K.G. after three additional months of lockdown: It’s more antsy, more angry, and less concerned about letting its gut hang out, allowing the motorik acid-folk of “Static Electricity” to gallop toward the six-minute mark in a blaze of microtonal shredding. But if the songs are looser, the targets are more precise. Kenny-Smith’s “Supreme Ascendancy” is a scathing attack on the Catholic Church’s history of sexual-abuse cover-ups; “East West Link,” meanwhile, protests the namesake freeway plan that’s become a political lightning rod in Melbourne, resulting in the most exciting song about an urban-planning proposal you’re liable to hear all year.
But as much their social conscience and worldly observations have become central to their identity, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard still have the feel of a secret society—and the closing eight-minute version of “K.G.L.W.” is its national anthem, a sludge-metal mantra that repeats the band’s initials as if casting an ancient spell to awaken some long-dormant mythical beast. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s rabid fanbase has been casually referred to as a cult on many occasions; consider this song—and K.G./L.W. as a whole—the official indoctrination ceremony.
Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly attributed a lyric to Stu Mackenzie; it is actually sung by Ambrose Kenny-Smith.

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A second volume of the Los Angeles composer’s archival work highlights pieces that attempted to bridge academic research with emotional accessibility, with mixed results.

Carl Stone: Electronic Music From the Eighties and Nineties

In the cloistered realm of academia, experimental composers often occupy a unique position. Careers can be focused on pushing musical systems, emerging technologies, or conceptual frameworks to the point where all but the most invested audience members are left behind. In 1937, John Cage expressed the daunting situation succinctly: “The composer… will be faced not only with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time... No rhythm will be beyond the composer’s reach.” But this perspective can lead to a deep suspicion of anything with crossover appeal, simple melodicism, or a steady beat. After all, these tools are known quantities. And if your goal is to push into the unknown (the theory goes), you want as little of that baggage holding you back as possible.
Carl Stone did not have this problem. Though he came up through academia, his circuitous route to composition was born in the early-1970s via a student job archiving Cal Arts’ LP library to cassette. By chance, he found he could listen to multiple albums at the same time, and soon discovered what today every novice with a pair of turntables (or open YouTube windows) knows: layering records is fun. Inspired by Steve Reich’s mid-1960s tape pieces and the phenomenological compositions of Alvin Lucier, he began editing, looping, and juxtaposing other people’s works. In a word, he was sampling, still a radical idea at the time. The groundbreaking approach helped him to skirt the typical issues of mandated esotericism and evolve his practice in sync with the development of samplers and home computers. Two years ago, the label Unseen Worlds compiled his formative years on Electronic Music From the Seventies and Eighties. The follow-up, Electronic Music From the Eighties and Nineties, is a retrospective of four mature pieces. Though noteworthy on technical and historical levels, Electronic Music flags emotionally, vacillating between maudlin optimism and a half-baked minimalism.
The compilation mostly acts as a best-of, revisiting three previously released works alongside the never-before-heard “Mae Yao.” All four pieces strike a balance between unabashed accessibility and complex methods. “Banteay Srey” slices and bends unknown source material into a breathy whalesong, wrapping it around a simple bass harmony. The music’s slow-motion dawn echoes the pregnant-with-meaning sampledelia of Boards of Canada, but oversells itself. Cinematic to a fault, it’s the kind of music that might nudge the listener towards a quiet epiphany on headphones but suddenly seems a little embarrassing when played for friends. At over 14 minutes, it’s also at least five too long. On the other side, “Sonali” highlights crisp, synthetic marimbas. It’s clearly influenced by the minimalist composers that preceded him by a decade, but the effect ends up much closer to Hollywood’s cheap rip-offs—“Sonali” begs to soundtrack a montage of brisk accomplishment. It’s “Music for Brainstorms.”
This is the album’s central flaw. Stone is clearly reaching for an emotional connection, but he remains oddly disengaged from the complexities of real life. Instead, the album smothers you in the kind of thin characterization of commercial middlebrow dramas. The hummingbird flutters of “Woo Lae Oak” or the jaunty ripples of “Sonali” gesture toward meaning without allowing even a hint of darkness or ambiguity. In Stone’s hands, all sounds get along. Only “Mae Yao” breaks form, processing a gamelan orchestra into a glitching seizure with more brow-furrowing rigor. Not quite a half hour in length, it feels like the A-minus work of a graduate student. Stone demonstrates technical fluency and works out his process with a not-unimpressive economy of means, but “Mae Yao” never actually blossoms into affecting music.
Absorbing those jarring pops and jumps, the gentle ebbing of sound around the stereo field, and the glassy, digital artifice reimagined as a source of wide-open pathos, it is impossible not to think of another artist active in the 1990s: Oval. The work of Markus Popp and co. deployed many of the same techniques as Stone—the group was famous for using skipping CDs, deep sampling, and long runtimes to both soothing and oozing effect. One wonders how Oval’s work can be so entrancing while Stone’s, remarkably similar on the surface, just spins its wheels. Perhaps it’s a matter of priorities. Oval explored the computer like a lost continent, mapping its terrain with barely a thought given to the human experience back home. Stone, on the other hand, seems all too concerned with making sure his listeners feel safe and attended to, and the work suffers as a result. In the academy, an appealing artist statement and a complex process can go a long way, but for music to make a real impact you need to take a leap beyond the page. Electronic Music jumps up and down with impressive energy, pointing excitedly towards the future, but in the end stays put in a quickly receding past.


With multiple drummers, bassists, guitarists, and one gnarly violinist, this Austin collective turns repetitive rock music into a glorious mind eraser.

In E

Forget music that makes you feel no pain. What about music that makes you feel like nothing at all, that pushes and pulverizes you until every woe, hope, and worry disappears like dust? That is the marvelous strength of Water Damage, an amorphous collective of about a dozen Austin underground heads whose high-volume indulgence in repetition is a force both obliterative and purifying. They ride the divide between noise and rock, pounding out rhythms like a power trio caught on an eternal trip to nowhere, all beneath feedback streaks and microtonal bleats. In New York in the late ’70s, the Ramones at CBGB inspired young composer and avant-impresario Rhys Chatham to repeat an electrified E above drums until the overtones turned into a fever dream, the vision fulfilled by his Guitar Trio. Nearly half a century later, Water Damage have turned that challenge into an obstacle course with In E, their third and best album and a reaffirming testament to just how ecstatic and mighty minimalism can be.
In E arrives as four side-long tracks, each charging down a single alleyway without ever wavering, glancing back, or bothering to do anything more than shift in barely perceptible ways. “Nice!” someone seems to yell 15 seconds into “Reel E,” the phosphorescent violin and colossal rhythm section presumably pausing just long enough to check the levels.
And then, their marathon begins, blown-out bass and brain-fried guitar unfolding like an imagined ocean. The drums fall in line like a marching band, at least two kits shaping an ironclad pocket. But the bristled violin of Mari Maurice Rubio—who records as the great more eaze—slices through the sides of the beat like she’s trying to make an escape. And that’s mostly where the piece hangs until the band breaks down and Maurice outlasts the rhythm long enough to sail into this open void. Loud, relentless, unrepentant: Lock into that tug of war, and you may forget where you are, how you are, who you are. It feels fantastic, a rare mind eraser for our increasingly plugged-in times.
Water Damage unlock the same effect on “Reel EE” and “Reel EEE” with very different approaches. For the former, the rhythm section summons a rock band that’s about to count in to their greatest hit, but they simply sit there, repeating the meter and doubling the bass until it all blurs into a trance. Don’t expect it to change when the guitars finally arrive, either, their slow wave of serrated tones washing over everything like insoluble oil. It is a web of interwoven drones, with feedback, distortion, and fragmented chords cohering into sustained chaos. “Can textures alone make a riff?” Water Damage seem to ask. The Motorik march compels you to nod along whether or not you agree.
“Reel EEE,” on the other hand, begins with the hum, its amplifier buzz and scraped strings slowly accreting into some demonic instrumental choir. Imagine Appalachia’s great Pelt, plugging in and zoning out. When at last the drums come, they swing like a GIF of someone dancing to disco on an endless loop. That beat bullies the layers apart, so that you can hear the collective hum’s individual threads—the plangent guitar, the shrieking violin, the plucked strings. Focus on any of them long enough, and again you’ll disappear, lost and locked inside a beautiful melee. When the tape runs out 15 minutes later, you may ask where the time has gone, maybe wonder if the clock itself has somehow skipped.
Water Damage, of course, are not the first band to muster these sorts of barrages. Whether their particular headwaters are somewhere in Germany at the start of the ’70s or in Memphis and the Delta below decades earlier, their path runs through the Grateful Dead and no wave, Load Records, and, more recently, 75 Dollar Bill. They nod to this lineage of proud cacophony with closer “Ladybird,” a demented 2005 opus of Austin-via-London project Shit and Shine. Much like Water Damage, Shit and Shine can expand and contract as needed, incorporating guests and stretching jams until last call. (Shit and Shine henchman Craig Clouse plays in USA/Mexico with Water Damage’s Nate Cross alongside King Coffey of another obvious antecedent, Butthole Surfers.)
And, again, much like Water Damage, Clouse once described Shit and Shine as “Repetition. Noise. A little humor.” As Water Damage near the end of their 20-minute romp through “Ladybird”—where distorted guitars surge through militant drums only to be swallowed up again, where the vocals sound like they’ve been trapped in a heat-warped spool of magnetic tape for decades—you hear that humor. This is gloriously absurd music, pushing rock ’n’ roll toward a threshold at which you either have to submit or simply walk away. Just go for it already.
In October 1972, Tony Conrad—the iconoclastic violinist who had helped name the Velvet Underground and helped give La Monte Young’s eternal music its theoretical underpinning—rendezvoused with the ever-mischievous Faust in Hamburg. Their session, Outside the Dream Syndicate, became a hypnotic classic, Conrad’s drone tunneling through the thrum like it a rusty razor blade. But Conrad often dismissed that record, saying they all sounded like hippies. That was especially damning for that moment, as the Vietnam War’s chthonic horrors reached new lows. The late Conrad might have loved Water Damage. On In E, they start from the same basic premise—put a big beat beneath a wild drone—and howl, offering none of the sense of safety or quarter Conrad must have heard in Outside the Dream Syndicate. Water Damage roar and rage against the troubles of our own time, their volume and power making you forget for at least 20 minutes at a clip. And then, they start again.