The Casady sisters’ first album in five years marks a return to their maximalist tendencies, piling on drum machines, chintzy synthesizers, over-the-top raps, and nu-metal guitars.

Put the Shine On

For most of their 16-year tenure as CocoRosie, sisters Bianca and Sierra Casady have tried to untangle the complicated childhood history they share. Born in Iowa and Hawaii to a compulsively nomadic couple, they spent many of their early summers on Native reservations while their parents sat in on peyote circles. After a decade of estrangement, the sisters reunited as young adults in France, and began ruminating on their unusual family memories via a singular mix of twisted freak-folk and lo-fi hip-hop. Their catalog touts moments of sublime melody and atmosphere amid a lot of questionable artistic choices. Put the Shine On, their seventh album and first in five years, marks a return to CocoRosie’s more maximalist tendencies after a period of sparer work, piling on drum machines, chintzy synthesizers, over-the-top raps, and nu-metal guitars.
The Casady sisters recorded much of Put the Shine On in San Francisco, working on the record between visits to their mother, who died 11 days after she tracked backing vocals for “Ruby Red,” a song about her own life and death. Despite its closeness to mortality, “Ruby Red” is more a celebration of life than a dirge. But that complicated tone—praising a parent newly passed as you survey how they’ve made you who you are—gets blunted in the record’s production. Stock hip-hop beats and clumsy synth bass take up outsize space in the mix, dominating the sound with rhythmic elements to which the sisters’ vocals never quite adhere.
Generational trauma, mental illness, and sexual violence tumble through Shine’s lyrics, as they have on past CocoRosie albums, but the language used to approach these weighty themes tends towards the archetypal rather than the specific. Little girls sprint through the woods avoiding men and wolves; Biblical symbols of lamb and sheep populate multiple songs. When the images aren’t tired, they’re baffling. CocoRosie use “Britney Spears” as a verb on two different tracks, with little clarity about which aspect of that complicated figure they mean to deploy.
Bianca and Sierra’s voices, whose tight harmonies and curdled edges comprised the most striking aspect of earlier CocoRosie records, tend to get lost in the surfeit of production elements on this one. Saloon piano, fuzz bass, and a scuffling snare crowd out lyrics about a woman roaming the country without a home on “Restless.” On “Smash My Head,” distorted power chords straight out of early 2000s alternative radio blare over a jittery IDM beat. Harp loops and field recordings of animals and warbling synth leads all compete for attention in the album’s busy jumble, burying its narrative elements in an incoherent melange.
In a 2019 interview, CocoRosie admitted that they had never listened to Chance the Rapper before the Chicago artist approached them to contribute a feature to his album The Big Day. That a group who has availed itself of hip-hop elements for over a decade doesn’t keep up with some of its most ubiquitous players is maybe not all that surprising: CocoRosie tend to rap as if to highlight their own distance from the form, to play up its incongruousness with their position as white indie artists shielded by a heavy layer of quirk. On Put the Shine On, when they rap lines about familial abandonment in an aloof, sing-songy chirp, the effect of both their words and the way they choose to deliver them gets muddied. The pain behind the words is real, but its rendering starts to feel like a bit.


Jokes about the title aside, this payload of alternate takes presents a complex portrait of a complicated time for the singer-songwriter as he made a masterpiece.

Bob Dylan: More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series Vol. 14

The lore has always been that there are two versions of Blood on the Tracks. There’s the one that got released in January 1975—the comeback album that reinvigorated Bob Dylan’s career after a stint in the shadows, the classic that begins with the low hurdy-gurdy of “Tangled Up in Blue” and saunters onward like a sad walk through autumn woods. And then there’s the version that Dylan scrapped—the widely bootlegged, mostly acoustic collection he recorded in four days in New York City but second-guessed weeks before its scheduled release. He rewrote and re-recorded half the songs with a full band at home in Minnesota, in two days just after Christmas 1974. A combination became the definitive Blood on the Tracks.
Anytime during the last 40 years, Sony could have simply released the record’s early version, long known to fans as the “New York Sessions,” and sold it as a simple, digestible lost classic. But that is not how Dylan’s Bootleg Series, now in its 14th volume, operates: Instead, we’ve got the charmingly titled More Blood, More Tracks which, across six discs and 87 recordings, documents every note of those New York sessions and the complete full-band renditions from Minnesota. For more casual fans, there’s a one-CD or double-LP set that features the best alternate take of each song, stripped of overdubs or production effects. And so, a third version of Blood on the Tracks emerges—one that illustrates the vulnerability of the scrapped release, the one-take intimacy of Dylan’s earliest work, and the grandness of the album proper.
Despite its nearly instant reception as a classic, Blood on the Tracks is not a world that Dylan inhabited for long. By the end of 1975, he was already a different person (in full costume) leading the crowd-pleasing Rolling Thunder Revue and working up the epic gypsy-folk ballads of 1976’s Desire. We can now wallow in the moment a little longer. This is not the first time the Dylan camp has offered a box set as an audio documentary. In 2015, The Cutting Edge covered every studio take from 14 months of sessions in the mid-1960s that led to three consecutive breakthroughs: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. Put on any disc from that set, and you’ll hear Dylan at a moment of inspiration, fueled by relentless creativity (and endless amphetamines) as he searched for his—and, by extension, rock music’s—future.
A decade later, nearing his mid-30s, he worked with a different energy. More Blood, More Tracks is slow, largely solo, and set in its ways like a sullen dude reading Chekhov in the corner of the bar. There’s occasional piano, pedal steel, drums, and bass, but it’s mostly Dylan alone with his guitar and harmonica. Nearly any other presence seems to unsettle him. In one of the box’s most revealing moments, Mick Jagger visits the studio on the final day of the New York sessions. Clearly spent and unsatisfied, Dylan noodles away at the bluesy “Meet Me in the Morning.” Jagger suggests some slide guitar might liven things up. “No, I don’t want to play slide,” Dylan seethes before giving it a clumsy go to prove his point. When Jagger sheepishly concedes that the song is fine, Dylan gives a bratty little laugh—he wins again.
Unlike The Cutting Edge, Dylan does not rely on accompanists to push these tracks forward. A swooning, full-band “Simple Twist of Fate” is quickly discarded for the sparse, solo one. “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” is also a wonder of reduction, as Dylan slowly realizes it can only exist without a drum part. As he repeats its flowery narrative across half-a-dozen takes, it occurs to him that his words are the percussion: “Purple clover, Queen Anne lace/Crimson hair across your face.” The swinging country beat from Richard Crooks can’t help but clash against the consonants. For most of the box set, the creation of Blood on the Tracks seems like a process of refinement. Dylan’s lyrics—precise, constant, breathless—also settle early in the process, minus some pronoun and tense switches. His voice transforms the most, as he navigates these songs like dramatic monologues on the page.
While fans and critics were quick to draw a connection between Dylan’s new material and his private life, including his impending divorce, Dylan has long maintained that these songs are not autobiographical. As presented here, they do not feel memoiristic—at least not in the traditional sense. Instead, they paint a larger portrait of Dylan’s creative vision. “You’ve got yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in the same room,” he famously said about his process during this era. More Blood, More Tracks brings that concept to life in surprisingly vivid ways. This was no desperate bloodletting; every drop was placed just so.
The single-disc edition of the album, featuring all acoustic solo takes, sounds excellent but embryonic: just the present, before the past and future showed up to fuck everything up. No matter where in the process you encounter these songs, it’s hard to go wrong. The very long outlier “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” is either your cup of tea or not; whether a band is trying to recreate its whirling circus atmosphere or Dylan is going it alone doesn’t make much difference. “Idiot Wind” sounds best in its original acoustic form, with all its open spaces and trepidation left in, before Dylan weaponized them against his blasphemers. “If You See Her, Say Hello,” on the other hand, comes alive when his Minnesota bandmates (who, in the liner notes, finally receive credit for their performances) flesh out its baroque, love-drunk daydream of a melody.
As for the outtakes, the only extra song that stood a chance for inclusion on the finished album is a weak spot here. When Dylan attempts “Up to Me,” he struggles with the rhythm of his verses, which are mostly jokes, self-pity, and self-mythology. Similarly, “Call Letter Blues”—likely scrapped in favor of the more abstract “Meet Me in the Morning”—is the only song that brings children into the picture, a call for empathy during a breakup. It rings hollow. Maybe Dylan felt it was too on-the-nose, blood better left between the lines.
Much of More Blood, More Tracks elicits an eerie feeling, a dramatic feedback loop of Dylan’s shifting self-image. It’s not uncommon for the Bootleg Series to leave breadcrumb trails for fans, yet hearing Dylan obsess over these songs about obsession creates an uncanny Synecdoche, New York effect. Spend enough time inside the six-hour set, and you’ll hear Dylan sing over and over again, in a number of warring voices, “I’m goin’ out of my mind.” You’ll hear him curse himself as a “creature void of form.” You’ll hear him try—and eventually fail—to assert, “Somebody’s got to tell the tale/I guess it must be up to me.” At a certain point, you can’t help but believe him.


On Air's first best-of collection, the early hits are all accounted for—but the band's quirks and ambitions get lost in the haze.

Twentyears

For many years, Air’s clever hybrid of downbeat electronic, 1960s pop, and Gallic kitsch served as a gateway to undiscovered worlds of cool. They brought their cachet to artists long out of fashion: the leather-voiced Serge Gainsbourg, the antic electronic experimenters Perrey and Kingsley, the easy-listening maestro Burt Bacharach, the mellifluous synth wizard Tomita. Long before yacht-rock made lite acceptable, Air spun effortless good taste into a form as frothy, weightless, and melt-on-your-tongue easy to consume as meringue.
However, Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel are more than just hip foreign exchange students who lived with you in high school and left behind a bunch of really cool CD-Rs. Over the course of their two-decade career, the French duo expanded their dandelion-tuft pop sound across nine albums—among them groundbreaking film scores, Italian spoken-word collaborations, and, last year, a vinyl-only soundtrack to a museum exhibition. Still, in 2016, does anyone need a greatest-hits release from them—especially when you can sequence your favorites on the streaming services that have now replaced them as gateways to the obscure?
Even for those who answer “yes,” it's doubtful that Twentyears, the French duo’s first best-of and rarities collection, will be the one to satisfy. Diehard fans and more unfamiliar listeners alike will likely find its tracklist obvious, as it draws heavily from the band’s early material; if you really wanted to hear half of their debut, Moon Safari**, wouldn’t you just listen to it? The best-of disc includes five songs from Talkie Walkie, two from 10,000 Hz Legend, and then just one apiece from The Virgin Suicides, Pocket Symphony, and Le Voyage Dans la Lune. Consider this: 13 of the best-of disc’s 17 selections appear in Apple Music’s ranking of the duo's most popular songs.
The first eight tracks on the disc include “La Femme D'Argent,” “Cherry Blossom Girl,” “Playground Love,” and “Sexy Boy”—songs you've probably heard so many times, you scarcely even register them as they’re playing. The first half of the disc lulls you into such a stupor of viscous strings, vibraphone, soft-porn jazz flute, and similarly syrupy ingredients, poured on in motions as familiar as your own bleary-eyed matinal rituals, that you barely even notice when track nine, “Moon Fever”—from 2012’s Le Voyage Dans la Lune, and probably the first song here you haven’t heard more times than you can count—cuts through the daze with its otherworldly, breathtakingly spooky beauty.
But then that's followed by back-to-back songs from 10,000 Hz Legend—the mouth harp and motorik chug of “Don't Be Light” (Air does Suicide, essentially), followed by the gossamer gospel of “How Does It Make You Feel” (Air does Spiritualized?)—and you’re reminded that you’re listening to a playlist, not an album. “Once Upon a Time,” *Pocket Symphony’*s piano-driven echo of Stereolab, is a lovely tune. Then there are some more songs from Talkie Walkie and Moon Safari, just in case you'd forgotten those albums exist. Only by the penultimate track are we treated to a non-LP cut, “Le Soleil Est Près de Moi,” a slow drip of narcotic R&B that harkens back to their early connections to Mo Wax.
As for the rarities disc, three of its songs were already released on the Moon Safari tenth anniversary edition in 2008. Two more come from 2009's *Love 2**—*a release that doesn’t figure at all into the best-of disc—while another is from *Love 2’*s Japanese edition. (That one’s called “Indian Summer”—do you even need me to tell you it’s got a sitar in it?) “High Point” is just an instrumental version of “Once Upon a Time.” Fortunately, there are a few nice surprises, even if six of the “rarities” are songs fans have heard before. The Pocket Symphony bonus cut “The Duelist,” a breathy, Bowie-referencing duet between Charlotte Gainsbourg and Jarvis Cocker, is great, with a quirky melodic drift that wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Cate Le Bon’s albums. The previously unreleased “Adis Abebah,” from the soundtrack to 2010’s Quartier Lointain, folds Ethio-jazz saxophones into Air’s velvety downbeat, to winsome effect. And the hushed, deadpan “The Way You Look Tonight” plays to their strengths as masters of style over substance: “I like the way you look tonight/No blood in your vein, what does it mean/Trashy art everywhere, on the screen/Slow-motion aftertaste, and love at first sight.” It’s seductive and ridiculous all at once.
But that's the rare instance on Twentyears where the band's ambitions are given their due. Where are the odd, wonky pop songs like “Missing the Light of the Day,” from Love 2? Or the bristling electronic textures of 10,000 Hz Legend? They hint at a more exciting compilation that might have been by including “Land Me,” a gorgeous, meditative sketch off last year’s unexpected Music for Museum, a minimalist ambient soundtrack for an art exhibition? Why not include more of that? Or, instead of a superfluous best-of collection, why not reissue the vinyl-only Music for Museum, which is currently selling for $130 and up on Discogs? Air have never been the most adventurous of bands, but as Music for Museum proved, they’re not afraid to experiment.
Ultimately, the picture that emerges on Twentyears is a simplified version of Air that swaps out most of their quirks for only their most palatable qualities. It’s a lite version of the band, and a frustrating missed opportunity.


If there is one characteristic that has defined the music of the New Zealand group the Chills over the course of their 35-year, on-and-off, up-and-down existence, it’s their ability to summon a kind of effortless beauty. Their first album in 19 years finds them doing what they do best.

Silver Bullets

If there is one characteristic that has defined the music of the New Zealand group the Chills over the course of their 35-year, on-and-off, up-and-down existence, it’s their ability to summon a kind of effortless beauty. Their best songs occur in soft focus, the vocals of frontman and sole consistent member Martin Phillipps hushed and controlled, his guitar lines sturdy and gleaming like gold thread. His best melodies arrive as easy a sigh—gliding steadily through the center of "Satin Doll", spinning through "Tied Up in Chain" between tumbling piano. Where their contemporaries in the New Zealand scene of the early '80s capitalized on shambling charm (the Clean) or loose, looping jangle-pop (the Bats), the Chills were gentler and—especially as their career progressed—more regal, the corners of their songs filled with almost baroque detail. They feel designed to soundtrack some storybook undersea kingdom, sumptuous and mystic.
This is remarkable, considering the group’s history is shot through with turmoil and darkness. Founding drummer Martyn Bull succumbed to leukemia shortly after recording "Pink Frost", the haunting meditation on death for which the group is best known. Forever tipped as the breakout band from the Dunedin indie scene, they cycled through as many as 15 different lineups, releasing an endless string of singles and EPs for New Zealand’s storied Flying Nun label, but always seemed to collapse when they were finally hitting their stride. Case in point: they inked a deal with Warner Bros. in 1990 and scored a modest success with the smart and self-aware "Heavenly Pop Hit" from the utterly immaculate Submarine Bells but they failed to capitalize on the momentum. The intervening years delivered more EPs, compilations, and even a box set of rarities, but nothing like actual forward movement, And then there was the darkness surrounding Phillipps himself: After grappling with immobilizing depression in the late-'90s, he turned to heroin, and contracted hepatitis C after sharing a needle with a fellow user who carried the disease.
So, it’s both a surprise and relief to hear Phillipps in full fighting form on the title track from Silver Bullets, the first Chills full-length in 19 years. The song—and the album that contains it—handily erases everything from 1990 forward and seems to pick up exactly where Submarine Bells left off: guitars wreathed in reverb, organs heaving, Phillipps’ voice, as quietly assured as ever—even if what he’s singing is tinged with militance. "And if it’s true they kill a heinous vampire/ Charged with magic charm/ If forced to fight your evil empire/ We have the means to harm." Much of Silver Bullets strikes this kind of oppositional stance, Phillipps positioning himself as a kind of kiwi pop Tom Joad, pushing back against larger forces that threaten to swallow the less-fortunate whole. Often, the political is personal: on the roaring "I Can’t Help You", Phillipps grapples with the knowledge that he’s done harm to others, working through his feelings as his guitar and a whistling keyboard turn somersaults in the foreground. On the elegiac "Underwater Wasteland", he uses environmental destruction as a metaphor for social Darwinism, describing plesiosaurs and sea serpents with a kind of awestruck wonder. The music that surrounds him is rich and whispering: guitars that spiral like paper streamers in a breeze, drums that seem smothered in feathers. Combining delicate grace with ornate detailing is no easy feat, but on Silver Bullets, Phillipps manages it again and again.
But the album is not without its missteps. Phillipps’ songs are most effective when his enemies are faceless and generalized—it’s better suited to the album’s storybook mystique. The leaden bromide "America Says Hello" comes off like a conspiracy theorist’s 3 a.m. Facebook rant. Ditto "Tomboy", a song about a girl who’s picked on by her classmates whose graceful melody and good intentions are undone by Phillipps’ numbing repetition of the title. And "Molten Gold", a tumbling number about the healing power of love, feels rote compared to the richness that surrounds it.
The album is best when it’s at its broadest, and it’s never more so than in the expansive, eight-minute "Pyramids / When the Poor Can Reach the Moon". It’s the most ambitious song in the group’s entire catalog, and one whose firm grasp of melody and dynamics more than justifies its length. The tension builds for a full five minutes, the rich getting richer and the poor getting smarter, until it arrives at its glorious, sun-drenched conclusion when, instead of violence and chaos, the gates to the mansion are flung open, guitars and pianos sparkle, the oppressed are liberated and, in Phillipps’ words, "the poor can reach the moon." The net effect is warm and rousing, speaking to the power of hope in the face of darkness. After three decades of near-misses and dark alleys, Phillipps has finally embraced his role as king of the underdogs. On Silver Bullets, he fights back the only way he knows how: with beauty.


Production has always been as important to Gojira's attack as note choice, and the metal band's new album is an audiophile's wet dream.

The Way of All Flesh

Gojira are like Democratic Presidential candidates-- policy wonks who are smart but stiff. They combine the tunneling riffs of Morbid Angel with the steely precision of Strapping Young Lad and Meshuggah. But the resemblance ends there. Unlike Morbid Angel, Gojira have no occult concerns; unlike Strapping Young Lad, Gojira have no sense of humor; unlike Meshuggah, Gojira's lyrics are actually about something-- namely, the environment. The band's ecological fetish somehow seems appropriate for its French origins. No American or Scandinavian death metaller would sing about "Flying Whales" or proclaim, "I embrace the world!" "Death metal" best describes Gojira only because "life metal" hasn't caught on yet.

The band is aptly named for the Japanese pronunciation of "Godzilla." Over time, Gojira's sound has increasingly mirrored the terrestrial destruction in their lyrics. The sound peaked on 2006's From Mars to Sirius, which began with "Ocean Planet", ended with "Global Warming", and deployed riffs that could knock down buildings. Production is as important to Gojira's attack as note choice, and The Way of All Flesh is an audiophile's wet dream. Instruments are defined with pristine clarity; drums are crisp yet heavy; guitars and bass form a crystalline audio monolith. Gojira sing about the evils of modernity, yet they're the sonic embodiment of it.

Such contradiction characterizes The Way of All Flesh. Lyrically, it's downright soulful. Once again, environmental themes abound. "Toxic Garbage Island" turns "Plastic bag in the sea!" into an angry mantra. "Adoration for None" thunders, "Everyone is doing their best to destroy it/ Simplicity's forgotten/ And we all drill the ground." But in between the Greenpeace anthems now is a whole lotta death. The theme is a far cry from metal's usual necrotic obsession. Instead, death and life are a continuum. "Oroborus" could be the stuff of yoga classes: "Serpent of light, movement of the soul/ Crawling stately along the spine/ Mighty phoenix from the ashes arises/ Firebird cycle, life, regenerate the cell." Joe Duplantier's vocals are stronger than ever, employing a wide variety of growls and singing.

Unfortunately, this humanity doesn't translate to the music. The performances are flawless, but overly so. Everything is polished to a gleaming sheen. When the band tries to swing, like in "A Sight to Behold", it comes off as, well, white. Heaviness is in no short supply; "Vacuity" is a single-minded stomp, while the title track pounds chugging riffs into the ground. Without edges, heat, or blood, though, such punishment is joyless. To their credit, Gojira avoid metal's tonal clichés in favor of open-ended abstraction. But it's cold and distant, unbefitting of the passionate lyrics. Undoubtedly, this material is better live, where the band has a fearsome reputation. There, the images are of raised fists and flying hair. Here, the images are of plastic discs and 1's and 0's.


This collection compiles some of the EDM-oriented netlabel's finest cuts, and serves as a great introduction to one of Japan’s best outfits bubbling up from the Internet.

Various Artists: Trekkie Trax the Best 2012 - 2015

Trekkie Trax the Best 2012 - 2015

Between social media streams delivering seemingly endless awful news and the creeping sense that we’ve entered content singularity, it’s pretty easy to feel cynical about the state of the Internet in 2016. That same sense of digital constriction extends to music, a place filled with lukewarm takes and fast food restaurants toddling towards relevance. It’s overwhelming, but not hopeless. Plenty of artists have carved out space online where they can create new communities and explore new sounds. They exist far from the regular churn of the Web, just waiting for like-minded people to find them.
Japan’s “netlabel” scene has offered this escape for nearly 15 years. Online imprints such as Maltine Records and Bunkai-Kei Records gave space for young producers with little way of entering the country’s mainstream music industry to experiment—not to mention provide an alternative to a club culture hampered by laws straight out of Footloose. One of the bigger names to emerge in the Japanese netlabel world recently is Trekkie Trax, a collective launched by a few 20-somethings in 2012 that has put out around 50 releases from a global roster of talent and developed a reputation for energetic in-real-life shows across Tokyo. Trekkie Trax the Best 2012-2015 compiles some of the label’s finest cuts, and serves as a great introduction to one of Japan’s best outfits bubbling up from the Internet.
Trekkie Trax’s emergence parallels the Japanese commercial boom in EDM, and many moments on this compilation feature elements of the genre. It’s natural for the young artists here to be attracted to hard-hitting sounds aimed at listeners their age, but the results end up mixed when they cling too closely to the style. The Best lags when simply trying to replicate a buzzy Skrillex drop or Middle-Eastern-tinged Diplo hook, but shines when a producer finds a new angle to the familiar. Masayashi Iimori’s “Break It” draws from the aggressive stylings of trap all the way down to the air horn samples, but offsets the hyped-up centers with longer passages that ramp up the drama significantly. AMUNOA's “Cinderella Song (VIP)” uses similarly clanging beats and vocal samples to get things going, but dusts them with wispy synthesizer that adds an emotional longing to the track.
Youthfulness ultimately helps the Trekkie Trax crew stand out, the artists appearing on The Best capturing the energy of early adulthood when anything seems possible. They are digital natives, producers who grew up with the Web and are eager to throw as many ideas as possible into their dance tracks. Snail’s House embraces elements evoking Japan’s “kawaii” culture—helium-injected vocals, big colorful keyboard notes—on “Kirara,” while matra magic plunks snippets of Lil Wayne between gloopy synth drips. Kyoto's In the Blue Shirt combines split-second vocal slices with breezy ocarina on “Free Will,” but he engineers this potentially twee patchwork into a bouncy blast of sunshine. These moments come off like personal details woven into high-BPM numbers, a chance to add character to numbers that function best as uptempo club cuts.
For all the wonkiness, the label is at their best when barreling forward. Tokyo’s Carpainter gives UK garage a spin on “Journey to the West,” delivering a woozy number propelled by tribal percussion and opting to slowly reveal new details over a consistently driving tempo rather than build up to a huge moment of release. Even better is duo Lolica Tonica’s “Make Me Feel,” a jittery electro-rush somewhere between breakcore and Jersey Club. On a collection full of songs featuring vocal samples tripping over themselves, “Make Me Feel” is a highlight thanks to pure exuberance, nailing the nervous excitement of just letting loose.
Trekkie Trax didn’t reinvent anything over the last three years—artists in the Maltine Records universe laid down this path years ago, and those in Trekkie Trax point to Maltine as a massive influence on them. Rather, they are shepherding the netlabel spirit to the next generation of Japanese listeners, while also making a greater push internationally by using the net as an amplifier to spread electronic music from artists hailing from places rarely getting the same attention as their Western equals. The Best offers a concise gateway into their world, highlighting the sonic diversity of their crew and their intensity. They found room online to share their energy, and are using the Internet to bring it to anyone looking for an alternative.


This culinary-themed Toronto supergroup crafts languorous jazz-pop grooves that capture the ambiance of a bistro dying down at closing time.

Fresh Pepper

Nobody has ever sung more smoothly and suavely about chopping onions than André Ethier, the de facto frontman of Canadian supergroup Fresh Pepper. This is among the first things you hear on Fresh Pepper’s gastronomically themed debut: Ethier’s musings about onions (there are, apparently, new ways of chopping them), delivered in a croon so sensual and deep you might wonder if “chopping onions” is some sort of innuendo. “Sous chef/Dry your eyes,” the singer mutters over gentle waves of quiet storm keys. Two decades ago, as vocalist for the scuzzy rock band the Deadly Snakes, Ethier sang in a nasally warble often compared to Bob Dylan. But his voice has deepened to an astonishing degree, now sounding somewhere between Barry White and Tindersticks’ Stuart Staples.
There is a lounginess, an air of decaying elegance, to this honeyed croon, which pairs well with the exploratory saxophone tangents of Fresh Pepper’s other founding member, Joseph Shabason. Both veterans of Canada’s indie scene—Shabason is known for his work with Destroyer—Ethier and Shabason formed Fresh Pepper as a way of processing memories and emotional scars from working in the Toronto food industry. Every musician they recruited for Fresh Pepper (whose seven-piece lineup includes several members of Toronto’s Bernice) has done time in the service industry, and the apron-clad baby pictured on the album cover consummates the culinary concept.
Yet this peculiar album is never stilted or constrained by its food focus. This isn’t MF DOOM’s Mm..Food or Weird Al’s Food Album; Fresh Pepper is less concerned with snack-based puns than with using the restaurant setting as a loose prompt for a dreamlike flow of kitchen vignettes. The vibe is jazzy and reflective; Ethier’s lyrics are rich with novelistic detail: mushrooms sizzling in a frying pan (“Congee Around Me”), a pair of flies landing on a clock, that all-powerful barometer of a service shift’s beginning and end (the jazz-funk standout “Prep Cook in the Woods”). Across eight alternately vocal and instrumental pieces, Fresh Pepper crafts languorous and slow jazz-pop grooves that capture the ambiance of a bistro dying down at closing time.
Fresh Pepper plays like an eclectic showcase for Canadian indie-scene lifers even before Destroyer frontman Dan Bejar himself shows up for a woozy cameo on “Seahorse Tranquilizer.” The indistinct murmur of restaurant patrons ushers in this six-minute centerpiece, which evokes the drifting, free-association majesty of a Kaputt outtake. Bejar winds his way through impressionistic imagery (“Guitars floating down the river”) and satirizes the flashy promises of fine dining establishments (“We harvest insane roses/We harvest insane roses”) before retiring to let a Greek chorus of backup singers ride out the groove.
Shabason once confessed that, before joining Destroyer, he was “a self-loathing sax player for so long.” His playing on Kaputt showed him that audiences “actually want to hear a saxophone solo.” Fresh Pepper relishes the thought. The album utterly teems with Shabason’s tasty sax stylings—dueling with wafty keys on “New Ways of Chopping Onions,” simmering softly around the edges of the sighing bliss of “Congee Around Me,” taking a more menacing and processed tone on “Dishpit.”
Like much of Destroyer’s work, the record flirts with smooth-jazz kitsch; sometimes it crosses over too far, as on the antiseptic “The Worm” with its full-on Richard Marx mid-’80s sheen, but there is never the faintest whiff of ironic detachment. Fresh Pepper was recorded in-person during a lull between COVID restrictions, and the musicians clearly revel in each other’s presence, playing jazz that’s gentle and light but never stagnant or settled.
At times, Fresh Pepper feels a little too lethargic, too gentle to summon the indignities of an industry known for grinding hours and rampant exploitation. Instrumental pieces like “Walkin’” and the avant-jazzy “Dishpit” (named after the menial corner of the kitchen where dishes are stacked) are the only tracks that capture that air of hustle and bustle, and the latter feels like it was orphaned from one of Shabason’s solo records.
At its best, though, Fresh Pepper evokes the calm after the storm, the camaraderie and sense memories that linger after a restaurant shift is over. Arguably the finest song on here, “Congee Around Me” finds our narrator frying mushrooms and onions, only to reveal that he’s been fired and is now on his own. Strangely, the track—with its sense of nourishment and care, of cooking for or with someone you love—reminds me of that wonderful scene in Big Night, the 1996 Stanley Tucci film, where the two brothers (Tucci and Tony Shalhoub) wordlessly share an omelet and reconcile after a fraught night in their floundering restaurant. Sometimes, the most meaningful balm after cooking for angry strangers is cooking for yourself, just the way you like it.


The ever-ambitious Toronto composer tackles big themes on her environmentally minded song cycle, but keeps things refreshingly immediate and small-scale.

Phantom Forest

Lydia Ainsworth’s third full-length hints continually at the bloated, convoluted record it could have been. An environmentally minded song cycle inspired by Greek tragedies and Italian Renaissance art and partially narrated from the perspective of Mother Nature, Phantom Forest nonetheless resists the pull towards grandiosity. Instead, Ainsworth opts for a compact and personable nine songs over a lean 30 minutes, prioritizing immediacy over maximalism.
Phantom Forest’s 2017 processor Darling of the Afterglow rarely missed a chance to go big. On that project, Ainsworth cast herself as a wide-tent experimentalist in the mold of Susanne Sundfør, spinning a Ferris wheel of showy, synthesized classical pop and bombastic EDM. Impressive as it could be, the project worked better as a showcase reel than a proper album, and sometimes Ainsworth’s personality got overshadowed by the gloss. Phantom Forest sacrifices a little wow factor in favor of more direct songs, a tradeoff that flatters her.
Ainsworth never sounds more beguiling than when she imagines the kind of records Kate Bush might have crafted if she had grown up on ‘90s R&B. Her voice takes on hues of T-Boz’s feathery croon as she imagines an endangered natural utopia on “Can You Find Her Place,” a slinky track with the pep of Tom Tom Club’s immortal “Genius of Love.” Over a trap-shaded beat on “Tell Me I Exist,” she casts a suspicious eye toward facial recognition technology, particularly the Google Arts and Culture app that had users racing to surrender their personal data in exchange for seeing which classic paintings they maybe kinda-sorta resembled. “In leverage of your comfort/To match a portrait’s face/That hangs inside of a museum/Now hangs a database,” she sings skeptically.
Ainsworth is aided on two standouts by S U R V I V E’s Kyle Dixon, one of the composers behind the Stranger Things soundtrack, and their visions prove especially complementary. On the call to action “The Time,” a mechanical strut with an undercurrent of menace, her bright, weightless voice cuts through the gloomy synths like blades of fresh grass on a muddy field, while the minimalist “Give It Back To You” provides her ample room to show off her agile, Tinashe-esque quiver. The more intimacy a track allows her, the more passionately her voice blossoms.
Phantom Forest closes with a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Green is the Colour,” and while typically few moves signify ambition quite like a Pink Floyd cover, Ainsworth uses it as one final opportunity to go small. David Gilmour wrote that song about a natural wonder, the Spanish island Ibiza, but Ainsworth’s spectral rendition renders it even more elemental, turning it into a love letter to nature itself. The track offers a final moment of hope and tranquility on an album that, without overstating its case, outlines the threats to the planet’s most dependable source of those comforts. Like the record itself, it’s a big statement in a deceptively humble package.


With its tinny mix, infectious chant raps, and Fruity Loops-style beats, this Texas dance rap king's debut has a refreshingly unforced charm.

TisaKorean: A Guide To Being A Partying Freshman

Tisakorean’s A Guide To Being A Partying Freshman sounds made for a Myspace page in 2008. With its tinny mix and Fruity Loops-style finger snaps and steel drums, you can easily imagine the whole thing being made on a high school computer lab’s Dell desktop. His rushed vocals, meanwhile, sound recorded in a bedroom closet just before his mom forced him to do his homework. And yet the Texas rapper has established himself 2019’s king of dance rap.
His journey picked up momentum in late 2017, when he uploaded “WERKKK” to the YouTube page of Texas-based videographer and dance video host JMoney1041. The song served as a widespread introduction to Tisakorean’s startling screeches and sinister whispering, inspired by Texas dance rap staples like Yung Nation. He followed up “WERKKK” with “Dip,” a song that found success soundtracking a Dallas-Fort Worth area dance craze called “The Woah” on social media—eventually getting the Lil Uzi Vert remix treatment. But his social media ascent was solidified when he hollered, murmured, and danced his way into virality in an ongoing series of Instagram freestyles.
In the mold of a teenage Soulja Boy, Tisakorean’s A Guide To Being A Partying Freshman—featuring a mixtape cover influenced by the YA novel Diary of a Wimpy Kid—is packed with brief minimalist tracks about school, made to be danced to on social media apps like Triller, TikTok, and Instagram. The goal is virality, but there’s a refreshing innocence to the project. Nothing is polished and nothing feels forced. Tisakorean’s lyrics are mostly irrelevant. His voice is just another instrument in the mix—one that I’m not sure he always knows how to use—with constantly changing volumes and melodies as he falls in love in the school hallway on “Gabby (Booty in the Hallway).”
A Guide To Being A Partying Freshman’s issues are minimal. One is the Kenny Beats-produced “Apple Sauce” which feels too slick and sticks out. Another is “Where’s Ms. Juicy (Hamburger Booty)” in which Tisakorean takes the Soulja Boy influence too far, with horns that need to stay locked up in a mid-2000s Atlanta time capsule. But those moments don’t prevent Tisakorean from creating one of the first mixtapes that can be enjoyed on Instagram, TikTok, and Triller. So pick any song from A Guide To Being A Partying Freshman, download the Triller app, mimic Uzi, and experience Tisakorean the way you’re supposed to.


South African singer-songwriter Yannick Ilunga, aka Petite Noir, appeared on the Solange Knowles-curated Saint Heron compilation, but even with the alt-R&B scene growing broader as it grows larger, his music is hard to classify.

Petite Noir: La Vie Est Belle / Life Is Beautiful

La Vie Est Belle / Life Is Beautiful

South African singer-songwriter Yannick Ilunga, aka Petite Noir, appeared on the Solange Knowles-curated Saint Heron compilation, but even with the alt-R&B scene growing broader as it grows larger, he still doesn’t quite fit in. There are elements of dance music, rap, and rock scattered throughout his debut album,  La Vie Est Belle / Life Is Beautiful, but none of those labels quite describe his sound. And while Ilunga frequently incorporates elements of his half-Congolese, half-Angolan ancestry, his music shouldn’t be shoved off into that condescending, colonialist hangover, "world music." "Psychedelically-tinged baroque contemporary African pop with heavy goth undertones" is a mouthful, so "noirwave," a descriptor coined by Ilunga himself, works as well as anything.
Ilunga introduces us to his sound with a literal fanfare. Following an impressionistic, semi-abstract intro that sets up Ilunga’s predilections for complex rhythms and sensual modulated textures, La Vie Est Belle explodes with the chorus to his first single, "Best", which tops an achingly cathartic post-punk hook with an off-kilter brass arrangement that comes in from out of nowhere to flip the song’s buttoned-up synthpop mood on its head. The horns are jarring, bracing, and just dissonant enough to add a manic edge to the song. They sound like maybe they were inspired by Ennio Morricone, or maybe by Neutral Milk Hotel, or maybe by any number of brass bands you can find playing on streets from New Orleans to Kinshasa.
For listeners of a certain persuasion, trying to trace La Vie Est Belle’s sounds back to their influences can be a distractingly entertaining way to appreciate the record, especially when the trail gets as intriguingly ambiguous as that horn part. (Such as Ilunga’s supple, swooningly expressive baritone, which can sound a little like Dave Gahan and a little like David Bowie’s more lucid moments of the '80s.) It’s a tough game to keep up, though. All those different pieces come at you at a rapid pace, and it’s hard to keep an eye on the individual threads when Ilunga keeps pulling your attention back out to the entire tapestry.
In a pop music landscape where eclecticism has become the status quo, Ilunga’s not only pulling from a broader range of sounds than all but a few other players in the game, he’s able to synthesize them into a seamless sonic entity that stands entirely away from the pack. La Vie Est Belle is a gorgeous, complex trip, not just aesthetically but emotionally. By turns, it’s abysmally abject, bravely hopeful, unguarded, canny, sexy, and profound—the kind of richly, messily variegated album that only comes around a few times a year. Yannick Ilunga feels like pop music's future—borderless but deeply rooted, challenging but pleasurable— and La Vie is strong enough to have earned Ilunga the right to call his revolution whatever he wants.


Dominick Fernow's latest one-man recording is... pleasant, and not only by contrast with his old unholy racket.

Bermuda Drain

This is not the plug-your-ears Prurient you've come to know and possibly love. In the world of 21st-century harsh noise, Dominick Fernow's one-man recordings have been among the harshest, the most physical, the least compromising. Earlier albums, like 2006's hellishly screeching Pleasure Ground, were overwhelming floods of feedback and heavy psychic ugliness. Like the earliest industrial music, Prurient's records were more than sonically off-putting. They felt pained, beyond urgent, the product of some need to loose inner turmoil into the world, coming as much from Fernow's body as his machines.
Bermuda Ground isn't just pleasant by contrast with Prurient's old unholy racket. It's often actively enjoyable, albeit in a decidedly creepy way, rooted as much in familiar retro-rock moves as formless face-eating noise. Perhaps it's down to Fernow's time playing in the decidedly more accessible and anthemic synth-pop/post-punk act Cold Cave, but Bermuda Drain is full of distortion-free keyboard, perverse disco beats, moments of beauty, even hooks. Especially for those who feel they get enough aural abuse just walking down city streets, it's the first Prurient record they might throw on for reasons other than testing their pain threshold.
Which isn't to say it's accessible, necessarily. It may owe more to the creeping dread of old synthesized horror flick scores than the splatterpunk intensity of exploitation gorefests, but Bermuda Drain still opens with the kind of scream and fried-circuit blast designed to clear the room of everyone but the hardcore. When he's not roaring like a metal frontman let loose on a rave tune ("A Meal Can Be Made"), Fernow's whispering in a way that feels intimate in a decidedly uncomfortable and icky way. And song titles like "Let's Make a Slave" should let you know that Fernow-the-songwriter isn't exactly penning happy-go-lucky new wave here.
Fernow's shrieking and quiet-loner monologues also give Bermuda Drain a real sicko intensity that's been lacking from the recent glut of "dark" early-1980s synth stuff. He has the sound down, somewhere between Factory Records sturm-und-drag and grotty old VHS-tape slasher soundtracks, but you could never accuse Bermuda Drain of being a slick or faceless attempt at mere nostalgia. Like the earlier Prurient records, it comes from a dark and personal place, less an exercise than an explusion. Fernow wants to shake you up, unnerve you, make you understand just how fragile "beautiful" music is, rather than simply make sure he gets the synth tones period-perfect.


While kicking around the jangle-pop scene, Frankie Rose was a member of Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, and Dum Dum Girls. On her second solo album, she transports us further and takes us higher than she ever could have as the drummer of an indie pop revivalist band.

Interstellar

Frankie Rose spent a few years kicking around the Brooklyn jangle-pop scene before striking out on her own: As the most charismatic member of Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, and Dum Dum Girls, she was a reliable bolt of onstage electricity enlivening the often noncommittal presences around her. It was pretty clear, even then, that she was eventually destined for bigger things, but her first solo record, recorded under the name Frankie Rose and the Outs, still felt constrained by a reflexive sort of cool-kid slouch. Between that record and Interstellar, she has dropped the pretense of a backing band entirely, and is recording simply as "Frankie Rose." The implicit point is clear: This time around, she's going for it.
The first moments of "Interstellar" make this point immediately. The song opens on a cool-blue vista of synthesizers, a transportingly vast sound of the sort Frankie's never made before. When her voice enters the mix, cooing about interstellar highways and moon dust, it's piped from above, passed through a series of filters so until she slightly resembles the Laurie Anderson of "O Superman". A minute in, a massive, Valhalla-pound drum hit resounds, the synths explode sideways, and Frankie hurls us down a flume ride of descending vocal harmonies. It's the most colorful, thrilling music of her career, and as grand a pronouncement as one can make that we're not doing things the same way anymore.
Interstellar is a big, second-album leap of faith into deeper waters, a sparkling synth-pop record that wants very badly to mean something to dreamy, hyper-emotional twentysomethings. For her model, she's taken the impression of some of the dreamiest, most hyper-emotional records of her youth. The production on Interstellar is gorgeous, and clearly modeled on the Cure's big, panoramic pop records, like Disintegration: booming-canyon drums, acres of spannable horizon. The drum beat that opens up "Know Me" is virtually identical to that of "Close to Me", and the silvery guitar leads on "Gospel/Grace" are pretty much mimeographed from "Plainsong". But although Rose indulges pretty heavily in the Cure's primary colors, she paints something distinctly her own with them. The world of Interstellar is a vision of paradise as lifted from the front of a Trapper Keeper: air-brushed, pastel-hued, and gloriously vivid.
Interstellar is not a thematically rich experience-- it basically has one single invitation, and that is to swim with Frankie in the glorious bath of echoes she's drawn for herself. "All that I want is a pair of wings to fly/ Into the blue, a wide open sky/ Show me your scars, I'll show you mine/ Perched out of the city on a pair of power lines," she sings over and over on "Pair of Wings", and you can hear this yearning for escape echoed in the record's every upward-spiralling note. Her singing has always been breathy and modest, but on Interstellar, her voice seems to mist on contact, even when she's swirling herself into a prismatic mini-choir of Frankies. On her record, she's just another celestial body orbiting larger ones.
The resulting album isn't one you actively explore so much as bask in gratefully. The longer I spend immersed in it, the more I appreciate its details: the haunting, truncated piano chords that the melody of "Apples for the Sun" clumps around, or the way Frankie's voice melts into and becomes one with the bloom of synthesized strings in the last minute of "Gospel/Grace". Rose is tapping the same slightly shameless clear eyes/full hearts well of teen melodrama that sourced M83's Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, and she demonstrates the same kind of focus and vision in carrying it off. On Interstellar, she transports us further and takes us higher than she ever could have as the drummer of an indie pop revivalist band. Amen to breaking free of sonic restrictions when they outlive their usefulness.


French experimental artist Cécile Schott returns with a third LP of increasingly fewer electronics, here creating beautiful string-and-wind meditations that harken back 400 years, yet seem tailored for today.

Les Ondes Silencieuses

After a 2006 EP, Colleen et les Boites à Musique, that featured music boxes, Colleen's third, largely string-based full-length, Les Ondes Silencieuses ("silent waves"), begins with a relative big bang. Opener "This Place in Time" kicks off with a panoramic cacophony of viola and cello that quickly fades out to a pretty, filmic harmony of long, drawn-out chords and tension-building silences. Colleen's usual urge to interweave loops of electronics with vocals and strings is absent here; instead, the opening track is so listless and chord-driven that it sounds like an exit-- either to an album or an Ang Lee film.
For much of the album, there's no palpable machinery at hand except a microphone. There are subtle effects lent to the classical guitar on "Le Labyrinthe", Colleen's seeming homage to Renaissance-era lyre ballads. Precise rhythms and ever-climbing scales between two guitars may suggest "computer," when in fact the song is simply a study of musical dialogue, and of polyphony. It's free of percussion and completely a relic of a distant past. Similarly, "Blue Sands" is breezy, inviting, and ancient. Slightly reverbed guitar plucks and windy strums recall Joni Mitchell at the dulcimer or Arthur Russell at the cello. Hollow harmonics on the viola reel and see-saw in the song's gorgeous climax, and the guitar remains in the background, adding a subtle counter-rhythm.
"Echoes and Coral", with its hints of watery field recordings and gong-inspired melody, sounds more like Mira Calix, to whom it's increasingly easy to compare Colleen since the latter relinquished the laptop in favor of a global range of strings and percussion. The song could easily be bells heard far off during a walk through a Buddhist courtyard, and yet there's a clear, traditional composition behind the seemingly random, relaxed taps of metal. "Le Bateau", also suggesting Calix's creeping, melody-free wanderings about strings and keys, knits itself into a cohesive, cognizant melody-- just the thick plucks of a viola shifting from mood to mood, relaxation to urgency.
The other star instrument here is the clarinet, which notably appears on "Sun Against My Eyes" and makes a pretty, but a little hokey, complement with the guitar. The tempo on this and most of the other tracks is so slow that it can be frustratingly lulling. But I can think of many situations when "Sun" could render a scene, a meditation, or a non-automobile TV commercial perfectly sad and memorable, and in fact it's one of few well-paced songs here. It's energetic in places, even urgent, and feels fully fleshed out, while many others here are sheer ruminations. Lovely as they are, many of these songs are little watercolors that might not find the same kind of audience as Colleen's electronics. However, they might find a new audience in those that dug Greenwood's score to There Will Be Blood, classical string fans or players, and anyone with painterly patience to spare on a crisp winter afternoon.


Like THEESatisfaction's breakthrough awE naturalE, EarthEE eschews easy hooks, creating an atmosphere both otherworldly and familiar. At its best, the album feels like an alluring, slow meditation on the black imagination.

EarthEE

THEESatisfaction's Sub Pop debut awE naturalE featured few hooks and choruses, focusing instead on instrumental grooves and the atmospheric flows of Catherine Harris-White and Stasia Irons. The album produced a hit in "QueenS", however, and launched the duo into a career post-Black Up, where they first gained recognition singing with Shabazz Palaces. Their follow-up, EarthEE, once again eschews easy hooks, creating an atmosphere both otherworldly and familiar through its production and stream-of-consciousness verses. The album, at its best, feels like an alluring, slow meditation on the black imagination.
"Said the bird to the water: May I take a sip? May I dip my toes in it?" sings Harris-White in "Prophetic Perfection", the album’s first song. It is a short invitation—or induction—that prepares us for "No GMO", a relaxed, smooth house party track that recalls past offerings like "QueenS". Like the dream hampton-directed video for that song, or the Black Weirdo parties that THEESatisfaction host, "No GMO" exudes a blackness wedded to an exclusive coolness; an invite-only funk that can’t be faked. "The gods were watching our eyes, keep this shit on the low, so clandestine," Stas raps.
The title track, meanwhile, dripping in ankh platitudes via Shabazz Palaces and Porter Ray, is the least intelligent song here. Riddled with borrowed, hotep tropes—"Eritrean queen"; "Kush goddess"; "bitches"; "Nefertiti"—the song pushes simplistic ideas about black women in the service of something that ultimately isn’t that fun or afrocentric. Referencing head wraps, presenting dichotomies like the club vs. literally anywhere else ("Fuck a club, let’s make love in the bathtub"), the song poses as progressive but mostly reinforces gender roles. "My pretty moms was pro-black," though a great line, peddles sexism under the guise of respect for African Queens™.
Most of EarthEE scans like a friend’s spoken word poem read aloud so many times that their sheer conviction makes it stick, mnemonically, to the roof of your mouth. But you can’t simply will catchiness. Something—usually a feeling—needs to hold long after you’ve forgotten the lyrics, and EarthEE  makes one think more than feel. Its intelligence—from the interestingly crafted, synthy, intergalactic-sounding beats to the rhymes waxing political and poetic—is unflinching. In terms of evoking deeper sensations, that feel like interstellar, communal prophecy, like Zora Neale Hurston and John Coltrane playing double dutch with Missy Elliott on the moon, there’s not much to grab on to. But perhaps that’s where EarthEE’s seductive energy—the meandering intonations, the sage chants—lies. There’s a power, take it or leave it, in music that functions like psychic holdovers until whatever futuristic soundscape comes next.


With an ambitious fusion of Hindustani classical, progressive rock, and jazz, the New York-based guitarist and composer offers an expansive, egalitarian vision of identity and belonging.

Inglish

The question “Where are you from?” is a fraught one for people of color, loaded as it often is with insidious subtext on race, ethnicity, and nationalism. For Shubh Saran, it’s positively vexatious. The son of Indian diplomats, Saran had already lived in four countries on three continents by the time he was in high school. The full list of cities he’s called home reads like an airport departures board: Dhaka, Cairo, Geneva, New Delhi, Toronto, Boston, and New York City, where he’s been based since 2014. This nomadic existence has understandably left Saran feeling a “little lost, culturally.” So, with time on his hands during the pandemic, the guitarist and composer decided to dig deeper into lingering questions about identity and belonging in a globalized world.
Saran documents that investigation in intimate detail on his second album, Inglish, disentangling the mess of experiences and biases that inform his identity and creative process. He started down this road on the 2020 EP Becoming, which brought his pop-punk guitar roots into conversation with the jazz and R&B idiom he adopted while studying at Berklee. Inglish is a much grander project of musical integration, gathering Hindustani classical, Rajasthani folk, Middle Eastern folk, pop-punk, progressive rock, industrial, neo-soul, and jazz fusion into tense and occasionally fractious harmony.
The result is a lovingly assembled bricolage of Saran’s musical influences and personal history. Opener “Enculture” lurches from serpentine desert folk-tinged guitar to freeform piano, while Joshua Bailey and Angelo Spampinato’s twin drum attack marches in lockstep with distorted bass and synths, sounding for all the world like a slightly anemic Tool jam. “Intra” features even more dizzying shifts in styles and tempos. Drums, tabla, and folk percussion dance an intricate waltz, moving from a meditative stutter to bhangra frenzy in the blink of an eye. Saran’s guitar-playing channels Damnation-era Opeth via Arabic folk, while a brief sax-and-trombone interlude brings to mind the short-lived Mumbai experimental jazz band Groove Suppa (led by Madagascar-born saxophonist Tala Faral, another artist with wide-ranging musical roots).
Saran fuses these disparate sounds into a compelling composite, each element retaining its own identity within a largely cohesive whole. The compositional juggling act takes the normative idea of assimilation—of immersing oneself in the dominant culture, erasing difference—and turns it on its head. In its place, Inglish offers a more egalitarian vision—one which celebrates difference, abolishes cultural hierarchies, and leans into awkward, messy, confusing heterogeneity. If it sometimes feels like the whole thing might collapse under the weight of its contradictions, that only adds to the thrill.
The album’s clearest statement of intent—also hinted in the title, which references the uniquely Indian dialects of the English language that emerged from the collision of colonialism, globalization, and post-colonial nation-building—is Indo-futuristic lead single “postradition.” Notes from Rasika Shekhar’s bansuri (bamboo flute) drape themselves over arpeggiated modular synths like folds of gossamer fabric, while Saran’s sinuous guitar plays tag with chromatic swells of tenor and alto saxophone. In imagining a world beyond tradition, “postradition” argues for an expansive, inclusive concept of what it means to “be Indian,” pushing back against the politics of difference. The conflict between utopian dream and not-quite-dystopian reality reaches its zenith on “the Other,” where the drums stomp and swagger with undisguised menace and saxophones blare out a discordant challenge. Saran’s lead guitar picks a circuitous path through the chaos; having found a measure of peace, he turns his attention to its emotional and psychic toll.
In the post-rock grandeur of “There Across the Ocean,” Inglish is also tinged with a profound sense of loss—for the security of a homeland, for the comfort of deep, unconflicted roots. On “remember to come home soon,” the album’s emotional anchor, Saran drops the genre-bending tightrope act in favor of pared-back sincerity. Finger-plucked guitar and minor-key piano whisper to each other like exiles in a distant land, lost in bittersweet remembrance of a home to which they can’t return. What do we lose when we no longer belong to one place, when our roots are scattered across the globe? Beyond its Indian specifics, Inglish is a heartfelt exploration of the ups and downs of being part of the world’s fastest-growing floating tribe—part global citizen, part cultural refugee.

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The newly vulnerable Future and the hyper-expressive Zaytoven offer up a sequel that doesn’t just reprise the original’s magic but improves on it.

BEASTMODE 2

Even at the top of his game, Future said he was “halfway happy.” The story of his run from 2014-15 is the stuff of real-life legend—the four-project streak from Monster to DS2 that remains some of the most vital rap of the past decade. You could say the Dungeon Family heir had every reason to be thrilled, but that’s not how it works; I’ve yet to hear anyone make counting money sound so fucking depressing. In that same “halfway happy” interview, Future admitted he’d seen ghosts. Asked where, he answered simply: “Everywhere.”
Those ghosts haunted the periphery of the original Beast Mode tape—the early 2015 collaboration with trap virtuoso Zaytoven that sounded like nothing Future had released before. It felt like January: frozen, hungover. Where Monster before it was powered by red-eyed death drive, Beast Mode was elegant, deceptively unfazed. When I spoke to Zaytoven about the project recently, his mood turned tender, almost awed: “You listen to something like Beast Mode, and it's almost like looking at a pretty painting.” But in spite of its beauty, the tape’s most telling line—and the thesis, really, of that stretch of Future’s career—was tucked inside “No Basic”: “Took all the pain and I ran with it.” Literalists might say the tape glamorized drug abuse as a coping mechanism, but that would suggest any of it felt remotely glamorous. Mostly, it seemed, Future just wanted to forget who he was; nothing felt as good as feeling nothing at all.
The three years since have brought Future some of his highest highs, career-wise—last year’s duo of FUTURE and HNDRXX debuted with back-to-back Billboard No. 1s—but no full-length release has matched Beast Mode’s emotional tenor. With the surprise release of BEASTMODE 2, Future and Zay join the ranks of Raekwon and Francis Ford Coppola (and, well, Future’s own DS2) with a sequel that doesn’t just reprise the original’s magic, but improves on it. The 2015 tape may have felt more revolutionary as a shift no one saw coming, but musically, BEASTMODE 2 has the edge. And in its best moments, the unknowable rapper lays his cards on the table, vulnerable in a way he’s never been before.
Like its predecessor, BM2 takes a few tracks to warm up, retreading familiar territory before baring its soul. With its vaguely sinister orchestra of synth flutes and strings, “Wifi Lit” feels like a spiritual continuation of  Beast Mode’s “Lay Up”; its opening reference to the recent “I’m good luv, enjoy” meme is a move few other than Future could pull off without sounding desperate to cash in their virality tokens. “Cuddle My Wrist” is one of those quintessential Future catchphrases, the kind that doesn’t look like much on paper but transforms, through his delivery, into something you catch yourself muttering at random—a turn of phrase that evades meaning and conveys feeling at the same time. Even the banger here—“31 Days,” a dead-hearted romance and solid anti-UTI PSA with bass that straddles the threshold of dubstep—head-fakes towards profundity before sinking back into decadence. “This is a moment of clarity,” Future opens, before it becomes clear he’s referring to the quality of his diamonds.
But with “Racks Blue,” Future starts to sink. The beat feels expansive and expressive, like Zaytoven is playing from the heart with Future following where he leads. And though its hook, typed out, reads as a flex—“What I’m supposed to do when these racks blue?”—it feels more like a sigh when Future sings it, or a corrective to Howlin’ Wolf’s definition of the blues as brokeness opening the door for evil. What Howlin’ Wolf didn’t account for is how that door never really shuts.
Which leaves us here: “Money got me hesitant, what I got to live for?/All this fame getting terrible,” Future croaks on “Red Light,” BM2’s heartbreaking centerpiece, which repurposes Zaytoven’s beat for Trouble’s “Ms. Cathy and Ms. Connie” to stunning effect. For the first time, Future introduces us to his father: “All the times he lied to me, gave up on my arteries/I was such a worried child, just wanted you to be a part of me.” He has sketched portraits of his childhood before, but never as plainly as this. And if “running through the red light, looking through your rear view” describes the his very real paranoia behind the wheel, it’s also the perfect metaphor for Future’s entire thing: barreling forward but never fast enough to shake his past, which clings to him in a way that almost makes his name feel cruel.
Everything—the album, and frankly, maybe Future’s entire catalog—builds to the final track, “Hate the Real Me.” Zaytoven’s gladiator horns scream “triumph,” the kind of beat over which Rick Ross or Drake might toast themselves without a second thought. Instead, Future takes the opportunity to lay bare the undercurrent of self-loathing that’s coursed through his music over the last four years. “Pouring up in public, damn I hate the real me,” he sings, his throat tight as he cracks the seal of the lean bottle. His mother’s worried about him. He’s hearing voices; they’re turning against him. “I’m trying to get high as I can,” the chorus repeats over and over—the only way a traumatized dirtbag who knows the devil is real can sleep at night. And suddenly, Future’s roster of alter egos is cast in a bleak new light—just another way to avoid himself. But the mask can’t stay on forever.


South London musician Benjy Keating is signed to the acclaimed independent dancehall label Mixpak, where he makes a strange and subdued DIY bedroom-pop version of dancehall.

PAGAN

Benjy Keating started making music in a South London bedroom, spurred on by his roommate Dominik Dvorak (aka PC Music affiliated producer Felicita). At first he was making what he admitted to be “Burial rip-offs” but then, after hearing dancehall beats blare out of car windows, he drifted into a new style. The first taste of this came with a song called “Catch,” made in conjunction with SOPHIE. The song boasted a cool minimalism  grafted onto the whisper of polyrhythmic Caribbean sounds. On top of it was Keating’s voice: British, introverted, mumbly, a painfully shy-sounding white kid singing in a sort of patois. It was hard to know what to make of it, but there was an undeniable magnetism to it: Why make a totally introverted, melancholic, and skeletal brand of dancehall? There's an argument that it could maybe work: His current labelmate Popcaan proved in 2014’s Where We Come From that without a doubt, the voice behind a mic in dancehall wasn’t the providence of the badman exclusively.
It’s taken six years of behind-the-scenes work and training for Keating to release a full-length debut. He’s produced and written every second of the 36 minutes of *PAGAN. *He’s signed to Dre Skull’s acclaimed independent dancehall label Mixpak, has co-signs from PC Music producers, is featured favorably in respected magazines that span avant-garde art (DIS) and music (FACT, Fader, and others). In other words, he's enjoyed a light smattering of hype. The adjectives that seem to orbit around him—dreamy, romantic, intimate—aren’t necessarily wrong, but they don’t exactly say why he should be interesting. If anything, on a purely musical level, the 36 minutes that compose *PAGAN, *constitutes a bewilderingly long and shapeless journey into the heart of a sound that is truly lacking in depth.
Keating seems driven to explore how dancehall and soca rhythms might work in a vacuum. In PAGAN, he solely relies on looped synths, subdued drum machines, and the occasional sample, boiling down cultural signifiers so that only the essential components of those genre’s polyrhythmic patterns are recognizable. He then injects pop straight into the minimalism, making sure the selected synth loop twinkles nicely, and the drum beats happily shuffle. In the tiniest of doses, it can sound attractive but prolonged exposure (read: more than four or five minutes) is both irritating and bewildering. The songs themselves are so muddled, amorphous and repetitive that they become indistinguishable. It’s hard to know what the music is striving to make you feel, if anything: excitement is clearly not the goal, but modest DIY stuff is usually supposed to be fresh and wide-eyed, not clinical and sleepy. And “sleepy” is probably something dancehall should never be. In the brief instrumental interludes, like “Reekin” and “Comeragh Mountains” you can feel the limitations built into the very idea of making dancehall rhythms melancholic or atmospheric present themselves.
Then there are those vocals. It’s not necessarily insulting or offensive that Keating sings in a clunky patois. But it is mystifying that he chooses to deliver it in a lilting, high-pitched stage whisper. His lyrics are usually garbled, but when you do catch his words they’re throwaway statements about the modern condition (“I'm lost in the c/there's no remedy”) or generalized hot nonsense, like this one from “Beamer”: “Let the beat drop all night going back to back/back to back/slit my tummy good make a diamond suit.” Lyrics can be nonsense, of course, but a talented vocalist would make them bounce: Keating dashes through these ridiculous lines like a terrified kid reading at a middle school podium, elongating his delivery at strange sections and pitch-shifting his voice in arbitrary and irritating ways. Even in his most coherent song, “Club Aso,” his singing somehow comes off like a Chris Martin approximation of dancehall.
Keating has been quick to point out on Twitter that his relationship with dancehall is a tad more opaque and complicated than it might seem, writing back in May: “Just to clarify dancehall never died n also i don't make dancehall.” And then later in an interview with the *Fader *he said “I don’t make dancehall...Dancehall’s so pure as it is, it doesn’t need me to add anything to it."In both of these statements, it’s obvious that he’s grappling with the complications of his particular choices, but there is a certain quality of what he’s saying that feels half-hearted. It’s a rote statement of cultural sensitivity that doesn’t address the fact that his singing and cribbing of rhythms are at best poor impressions of nuanced and complicated linguistic and musical vernaculars. He name-checks the likes of Vybz Kartel and Alkaline as influences, when in a very real way he shares nothing with what they’re doing, considering his general attitude and actual sound. Overall, it’s hard to see where his strengths are, and on some deeper level, I can’t imagine a situation where listening to this album is appropriate for anything else but falling asleep at your desk.


Weezer's overlooked second album eventually became a cult favorite and now it's received a deluxe 2xCD reissue; there's also this other new record...

Weezer: Pinkerton [Deluxe Edition] / Death to False Metal

At one point, there seemed as strong a chance of Weezer's making an album as good as Pinkerton as there was of their reissuing it. To say nothing of playing it live in its entirety. It's hard to think of a more fiercely beloved record a band has gone to great lengths to write out of its history. To recap: Weezer's self-titled Blue Album went multiplatinum on the strength of shiny power-pop and goofy videos anachronistic in the era of post-grunge. For the follow-up, Rivers Cuomo holed up at Harvard and made a disturbingly graphic, harshly recorded concept album that includes his sniffing the fanmail of an 18-year old Japanese girl while imagining her masturbating. Needless to say, it was not played for laughs. Pinkerton was poorly received by critics upon release and considered a flop after peaking at #19. Cuomo probably didn't care about the critics, but he took the public indifference very personally, soon retreating from view. But the cult that adored and passionately identified with Pinkerton became hard to ignore by the turn of the century, with the commercial breakthrough of confessional emo seen as its ultimate vindication. The record that killed Weezer's career ended up saving it.
It's a nice story, and one that's integral and damn near necessary to protect Pinkerton's legend: a popular misconception is that a Rolling Stone readers' poll named it the worst album of 1996 (it was actually third behind Bush and DJ Spooky), and as Rob Mitchum suggested in his review of Make Believe, it's something that people of a certain age might protect from re-evaluation for what it might say about their youth. In actuality, Pinkerton may initially have been the victim of a generation gap. It was hardly the first album to get this uncomfortably confessional, but it had some unusually bad timing. Self-laceration was in vogue during 1996, but as far as critical favorites went, it was often from a female perspective (Liz Phair, PJ Harvey, Courtney Love) that balanced boldness and raw vulnerability. In comparison, Pinkerton was hardly misunderstood, but instead seen for what it was: written from a juvenile, male, and incredibly needy perspective. It's a really tough album to go to bat for if you're an adult, particularly since enjoying it is so closely associated with relating to it.
And who would want to do that? On the very first song, Cuomo is Portnoy's Complaint on wax, disappointed with his inability to find true love in the midst of meaningless sex. And on the last one, he forsakes a chance at true love for... you guessed it, meaningless sex, giving an explanation that drips with insincerity: "I did what my body told me to/ I didn't mean to do you harm." In between, he lashes out at a woman for having the nerve to be a lesbian ("Pink Triangle") and for not devoting all of her attention to him ("No Other One"). He takes two failed relationships as concrete proof of romantic futility in "Why Bother?", and of course, the big reveal in "Across the Sea": "It's all your fault, mama."
And yet because of all of this emotional baggage, the cathartic power of Pinkerton is second to none. While it's often compared to the Blue Album, Pinkerton bears more similarity to In Utero, a record that also mixed relatively raw alt-rock production, undeniable pop smarts, and a lead singer absolutely freaked the fuck out by fame. But while many sickeningly thought Kurt Cobain's suicide somehow validated his art, Cuomo's self-destruction was more quotidian and relatable, struggling with an unbearable need to be loved but a complete inability to realize the need for it to be reciprocated. It's why Pinkerton isn't misogynistic so much as confused: "No Other One" classically mistakes hating yourself for loving someone else, and "El Scorcho" reminds that fictional RomCom behavior is actually borderline sociopathic in real life. In fact, the songs most likened to cuddly Blue Album Weezer are the darkest-- "The Good Life" is Cuomo at the end of his rope, hysterical at the ridiculousness of his self-loathing, while a single line in "El Scorcho" sums up the core of Pinkerton's pain: "I can't talk about it/ I gotta sing about it and make a record."
The influence of Pinkerton led to hundreds of mostly regrettable bands, but what ultimately distinguishes Weezer is how they sonically mirror the unhinged and private mental terror of its narrator. Weezer actually sound dangerous here in places, in part due to the recording of Dave Fridmann, who maintains a first-take intimacy even when every instrument competes to be the loudest thing in the mix. Weezer's rhythm section rarely gets much credit, but Matt Sharp and Pat Wilson maintain a savage low-end they'd never repeat-- the coda of "Tired of Sex" embodies overwhelming and impotent frustration, while the chorus of "Getchoo" isn't a hook, it's a fist repeatedly hitting a wall.
The supposedly juvenile feelings of Pinkerton still pack visceral power years after listeners would've supposedly outgrown them. It's a record that reaches well beyond a diaristic look at Cuomo's perversions, and instead asks something more universal: Do we really grow out of our teenage feelings, or do we need something like Pinkerton to expose them as merely being repressed to the point where they mutate? It's heavy stuff, and in the manner of Violent Femmes, you can argue about the sexual politics, the late-career parody, or the total uncoolness of it in retrospect, but even if Pinkerton is ultimately an album that gets one single shot at you, the mark it leaves is indelible.
Befitting a band for the diehards, Weezer's always had certain B-sides that are every bit as loved as the singles. Though this deluxe version contains 25 extra tracks, 16 are alternate versions of material that appeared on Pinkerton: If you need muddy-sounding live versions of "Why Bother?" and "Pink Triangle", or if "Across the Sea Piano Noodles" triggers an uncontrollable completist impulse, consider it an early Christmas. Me, I'm here for their acoustic performances of "El Scorcho" and "The Good Life" at Y100, the erstwhile alt-rock station I listened to in high school. Otherwise, most of the unreleased B-sides are demo-level in both sound and quality.
The more intriguing prospect is Death to False Metal, proudly touted as "Weezer's third release of the fourth quarter." Not really sticking to any concrete organizational principle, Weezer cull unreleased material dating back to the late 90s from a wide range of sources, including their own fans and Toni Braxton. But as a clearinghouse for an increasingly prolific band, False Metal isn't particularly generous. In fact, judging from its wacky title/cover combo, 10-song tracklist, and overall quality, it dubiously achieves Cuomo's stated goal of creating the logical follow-up to Hurley.
The power pop Weezer work with maintains its devotees in large part because of its adherence to a kind of strict formula, and having mastered it early in his career, Cuomo can churn it out effortlessly, for better or (mostly) worse. Verses are treated with merely custodial concern before the big hooks, there's the guitar solos that are flashy enough to be noticed but easy enough to learn, and the production glosses everything up to radio-ready ubiquity and anonymity. But once again, there's a laziness that's more annoying than any of Cuomo's "cool dad" humor. There's the song about turning up the radio, and it's called "Turning Up the Radio"-- the irony of its being the result of a YouTube contest is actually kinda fascinating. Cuomo's shown an almost frightening ability to tap into a certain generic teenage frustration, and "Losing My Mind" is the song to which you can grouse about your allowance.
Upon reviewing Hurley, I said that Weezer's songs feel more like single-packed sitcoms now, but nothing on that album can match "The Odd Couple", which boasts the sort of hack-joke opening line ("I got a PC, you got a Mac") that Fountains of Wayne wouldn't touch*.* "Blowin' My Stack" and "I'm a Robot" are the working-for-the-weekend anthems, and that both have blatantly similar lyrics ("I need cash to pay my bills" / "I have to earn money to pay my bills") suggests a general lack of curatorial oversight to False Metal.
At the very least, there's a sense of closure in the simultaneous release of Pinkerton and Death to False Metal: For the past decade, new Weezer albums have been unfavorably judged relative to Pinkerton, and hey, we finally get to do it in real time. But there's always been an underlying unease that, at least in more indie-leaning circles, we're becoming every bit as susceptible to the generation gap that led to the dismissal of Pinkerton in the first place. Even if Weezer were able to come up with something as potent as Pinkerton, would we recognize it?
I suppose that doesn't give the listener enough credit, but we can do away with the idea that Pinkerton is somehow "realer" than other Weezer records. Even if they're more Spike Jones than Spike Jonze these days, it exists on the same continuum as Raditude, Hurley, and yes, even Make Believe-- Cuomo's work has always been driven by a need for approval, and once the Green Album was seemingly spawned by popular demand, he's used his band as an embodiment of that. That their "Memories Tour" is financially backed by AXE appears terribly ironic, but in reality, Weezer are also a brand that realizes striking a chord with boys obsessed with sex gives you a license to print money. By the same token, it gives me comfort that Pinkerton will remain timeless-- its fanbase is the ultimate renewable resource.


In the ‘90s, the heady, ethereal techno made by 7th Plain had no peers. The best of this out-of-print and previously unreleased material still sounds otherworldly, all these years later.

Chronicles 1

One Saturday in 1994, a pair of recent college graduates wandered into the Yohji Yamamoto store in SoHo, on the corner of Grand and Mercer. Neither was buying anything. One, who took inspiration from New York club kids, was drawn to the outlandish shapes and imaginative draping; the other was simply tagging along for the ride, and felt more than a little overwhelmed by the fields upon fields of black, not to mention the astronomical price tags hanging from the garments. I know this, because I was that cowed young man. The music in the store that day also reminded me of space, and when I inquired about the shimmering electronic soundtrack, a clerk told me it was something called the 7th Plain. Despite the fact that the name sounded more like a cult than a musician, I hightailed it to Mondo Kim’s, where I plunked down $24 for My Yellow Wise Rug, an import CD that looked unlike any other I had ever purchased, packaged in a wide, flat cardboard box and emblazoned with a yellow “magic eye” illustration that I have never, ever managed to decipher, all these years later.
I recount the story because it might be hard to imagine, 22 years later, how alien that kind of music once sounded, especially in the United States. It was techno, but it wasn't really made for dancing; it was ambient, but it definitely wasn’t made for spas. It sounded like the future, and you were unlikely to hear music of its ilk anywhere on the airwaves, save perhaps for a few broadcasts on the far left of the dial. And while Luke Slater, the British artist behind the project, had recorded plenty of the raw, pile-driving techno then in favor in the rave scenes on both sides of the Atlantic, the heady, ethereal bent of the 7th Plain remained a niche concern.
Slater only released two albums and a handful of EPs under his 7th Plain alias, all between 1993 and 1995 and all of it on General Production Recordings, an ambient techno label that was home to artists like the Black Dog and Beaumont Hannant. (A third 7th Plain album, 1996’s Playing With Fools, never made it past the test-pressing stage, and the label shut down the same year). Slater has continued to record, though most of his subsequent output has been sterner and steelier than his halcyon 7th Plain music. He released a string of albums under his own name on Mute and NovaMute around the turn of the millennium, and since 2009, he has focused largely on his aliases L.B. Dub Corp and Planetary Assault Systems, recording a number of records for Ostgut Ton, the label arm of Berlin’s Berghain club. Chronicles I kicks off a new sub-label, A-TON, and in keeping with the imprint’s archival bent, it concentrates on out-of-print and previously unreleased 7th Plain material.
The best of it still sounds as otherworldly as it did more than two decades ago. “Boundaries,” from My Yellow Wise Rug, has all the widescreen grandeur of a sci-fi blockbuster as it unfurls rippling synth leads over cymbal flashes and a quietly dramatic ostinato pulse. “Extra (the 7th Plain Remix)” is a rework of a Ken Ishii track from 1995 that was originally released under Slater‘s own name, and has apparently been grandfathered into the 7th Plain catalog; balancing eerie, mercurial chords with hammering hi-hats and snares, it sounds like a steel-girded fog bank, and it exemplifies how the 7th Plain often borrowed from harder strains of techno in creating otherwise atmospheric music. “Grace” and “Surface Bound” both come from 1994’s The 4 Cornered Room. Like “Boundaries,” their layers upon layers of synthesizers seem to vibrate in the air, luminous and metallic. They are largely beatless, and their vivid timbres go to the heart of the 7th Plain’s greatest quality: his incredibly rich, sumptuous chords, each one composed of so many discrete tones that they become almost impossible to parse.
The album’s four remaining tracks seem to be previously unreleased cuts. One, “the Super 8,” is sweeping ambient techno in the vein of My Yellow Wise Rug, all cycling arpeggios and choral pads. “T Funk States” is taut, squelchy techno that sounds more in keeping with Slater’s other aliases. “Slip 7 Sideways” is a drowsy stretch of slowed-down breakbeats that's reminiscent of DJ Shadow or Urban Tribe, and stands as a reminder of hip-hop’s influence on early techno. The final cut, “Chords Are Dirty,” is an impressionistic miniature for a single synthesizer; the background hum suggests that it might be a rough sketch. As an album, Chronicles I doesn’t hold up as well as either of the 7th Plain’s original albums, and it seems strange that it cherry-picks so sparingly from them. It would have been nice had A-TON simply reissued My Yellow Wise Rug and The 4 Cornered Room and included the unreleased material as bonus cuts. Still, as an introduction to one of ambient techno’s relatively unsung heroes, Chronicles I provides a valuable service. The best cuts here rank alongside contemporary material from Aphex Twin, the Black Dog, Sun Electric, and other pioneers of ambient techno. And while it might not sound as unprecedented today as it did in 1994, it’s still capable of opening a passageway to other worlds.


C**OW has some of the Orb’s most gentle moments to date, eschewing ambient house for ambient music, pure and simple.

COW / Chill Out, World!

In his 1995 book Ocean of Sound, David Toop talked to Dr. Alex Peterson about the music he would go onto make with the KLF’s Jimmy Cauty, the music that began chillout clubs and ambient house and eventually the Orb itself. “We’d build melodies up…we used to keep it very, very quiet,” Paterson said. “We never used to play any drums in there. It’d be just like…BBC sound effects, really.” By the next year, Bill Drummond and Cauty would release the beatless and blissed-out Chill Out while Paterson would venture off as the Orb, adding in some drums to “Little Fluffy Clouds,” the ambient house genre well afoot.
To hear Paterson spin it in advance of the Orb’s sixteenth album, “the idea was simply to make an ambient album.” But considering the KLF’s Chill Out (not to mention its iconic cover art of sheep lounging in the English countryside), there’s a telltale Orb cheekiness to naming this album Chill Out, World, or COW. Fittingly, both harken back to Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother and that cover’s cow. But twenty-five years after making the classic ambient house record with The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, why scrub off the “house” bit so as to render that kind of smooth ambient record now?
As the other half of the Orb, Thomas Fehlmann, puts it, “it seem[ed] like a good idea for people to sit back and chill the fuck out.” That said, it’s still a tad disarming to hear “The 10 Sultans Of Rudyard (Moo Moo Mix),” full of birdsong and Harold Budd-esque piano (courtesy of Roger Eno himself) with no Orb-y snickers or elbowed ribs thrown into the mix. Even more stunning are the seven minutes of “First, Consider The Lillys,” another track woven from field recording. There are crickets and water gurgles and a hazy bit of strings like sunrise breaking on the distant horizon and the duo are careful to mimic a landscape’s biorhythms, ever-so-slowly thickening the sounds into a stew of hand percussion and twinkling keys, before withdrawing back into an ambient haze of crickets and processed pedal steel guitar.
But after that early highlight, COW moves away from such overt pulses. “Siren 33 (Orphee Mirror)” nods to Jean Cocteau’s famous 1950 film and gets built from bowed cymbals, metallic drones and a looping Pop Ambient-style snatch of strings. Like that series, the track just pinwheels in space, content to not evolve. Lush pop-soul strings underpin “5th Dimensions,” but the Orb don’t do much with them aside from add and remove layers of crackle and noise. Smaller pieces like “Sex (Panoramic Sex Heal)” and “7 Oaks” are cut from similar cloth.
Trains roar in the distance, harps and bells sparkle, CB radio calls crackle and birds chirp on penultimate track “9 Elms Over River Eno (Channel 9),” in a way that feels like déjà vu. Considering the happenstance samples, the sounds of train travel, crickets and cows, the lush sounds of AM pop reconfigured and abstracted, and the travelogue order of the album (and yes, there apparently is an Eno River in North Carolina) it’s hard to not notice the parallels between this sound palette and the one that comprised Chill Out (which phased the sounds of passing trains and famously looped Elvis Presley’s “In the Ghetto” to hallucinatory effect).
Only as Reich-ian pulses and heavier drums kick in near the end of “River Eno” does one feel the tingle of fluffy clouds arising. Where once 43 minutes into an album meant at most three Orb songs, the album abruptly stops here. COW has some of the Orb’s most gentle moments to date, but in eschewing their own classic album and instead oddly reflecting on one from their peers, they fail to get beyond the Ultraworld and the world of Chill Out, at times mimicking little more than some BBC sound effects.