On a companion EP to last year’s Information, the New York house producer continues to experiment with new styles, but the prevailing mood is one of late-night weariness.

Proof

A Cleveland native who’s been based in New York for more than a decade, Galcher Lustwerk first appeared in 2013 with the now classic 100% Galcher mixtape. Since then, he’s quietly amassed an extensive catalog while working under a variety of names (including Road Hog and 420, and as one half of the duo Studio OST), cooly connecting the dots between smoky R&B, fantastical strains of hip-hop, and the kind of smoothly melodic deep house that Midwestern legends like Larry Heard first cooked up in the late 1980s.
Although Lustwerk has tinkered with his aesthetic over the years, 2019’s Information, his third full-length under the alias and first for Ghostly International, documented a subtle, albeit significant expansion of his repertoire. Intermittently abandoning the dancefloor altogether, the low-key LP folded in meditative bits of jazz and ambient while exploring feelings of late-night weariness. That process continues on the Proof EP, a quality companion piece that’s similarly steeped in a sense of exhaustion, even when a bumping beat is present.
“Proof” is something for the DJs, its low-slung house groove fleshed out with gleaming pads, tiny flecks of piano, and moody vocal clips. As always, Lustwerk is almost impossibly cool on the mic, even as he swaps his usual narrative approach for a melange of stream-of-consciousness ad libs. He’s back to storytelling on the sultry, sax-laden “I Had to Slow It Down,” in which he luxuriates inside an updated New Romantic template, his voice bleary and gravelly. The confident “Graham” exaggerates his vocal affect even further, dispensing with drums entirely and ultimately sounding like a woozy excerpt from a Southern rap mixtape. These creative departures are some of Proof’s strongest offerings, but those looking for something with a vintage Galcher feel might be satisfied by the lush keys and gently clicking rhythm of digital-only cut “Leave,” along with Lustwerk’s new version of “Another Story,” a repurposed track from Information that he’s reinforced with a sturdier beat; to the latter he also brings an extra shot of bravado that makes lines like “I’m in New York and I’m Black (Black)/I can make beats, I can rap (rap)” sound especially potent.
Although those lyrics were penned long ago, they take on added significance right now, as dance music publicly wrestles with structural racism and Black erasure. There’s been a renewed call not just to reassert the music’s Black roots, but also to examine and dismantle the many ways that the industry and the culture around it continue to place Black artists at a disadvantage. Lustwerk—who’s never previously been particularly vocal on social media—has been right in the thick of the dialogue, most notably when he recently tweeted a long list (which he’s since deleted) of microaggressions, indignities, and racist situations he has encountered as a touring DJ. Blackness has always been a part of his work—the title of the first Road Hog LP, 2014’s D.W.B., is short for “driving while Black,” a phrase used to describe the racial profiling of Black motorists—and while the critical discourse around his music has largely avoided the topic of race, Lustwerk seems determined to push the conversation forward.
On Proof, that conversation is loudest on “Speed,” a track off Information that’s been remixed for the EP by red-hot NYC outfit AceMoMA (aka AceMo and MoMA Ready). The song’s slippery hardware rhythms and infectious energy will undoubtedly ring familiar to anyone who’s been following the pair’s HAUS of ALTR label, which has specifically sought to showcase talented Black producers on both sides of the Atlantic. Enlisting AceMoMA is a way of co-signing their efforts—and strengthening solidarity among Black and brown artists who are no longer content to wait for recognition from entrenched (and usually white) industry institutions. As exhausted as Lustwerk sounds on Proof, he’s clearly got the energy to demand better of dance music, both for himself and all who follow in his wake.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the quintessential release from the Detroit producer, a 2000 mix of house and techno that forms a capacious document of the sounds of his city.

Forevernevermore

Kenny Dixon Jr. started his career modestly; to hear him tell it, he made his first ever single as Moodymann at a Guitar Center. “I went in… quietly testing out something, so they thought,” he revealed in a sprawling 2010 interview at London’s Red Bull Music Academy. “I had my cassette and I was in there making a track. I spent about an hour on it and put that motherfucker out about six months later.” As the somewhat theatrical interview progressed, and he slowly talked about how he was going to give the audience the whole truth, a woman stood behind him and combed his hair.
Though some of his declarations seemed like jokes, his sense of what he provided as a DJ was completely honest: “I am not going to play the hottest tracks in the world. But what I will do is give you the truth on them turntables. Whenever I’m playing up there at a particular moment, I might be at home in Detroit at my motherfucking Impala playing the same mad shit.” Running through these anecdotes and mission statements is the sense that the quotidian can be a portal to the majestic–the beginning of a legendary musician’s career can be where teenagers test out riffs on electric guitars, and the most transcendent night of music you will ever hear can be streaming out of some dude’s Chevy.
Released in 2000, Forevernevermore feels like Moodymann’s attempt to put the listener in the backseat of that Impala. The album is made up of a series of tracks that he had put out on white labels—unmarked vinyl releases that DJs make to promote their music—in the preceding years that were edited and expanded to form a capacious document of the interior and exterior sounds of his home city. For Moodymann, there’s no place like Detroit and its music, where growing up the radio stations were unsegregated; “Hell, I thought Kraftwerk was four niggas,” he joked to RBMA. To a certain extent, this was also what Kraftwerk were going for: In an interview for Dan Sicko’s book Techno Rebels, a history of Detroit techno, Kraftwerk percussionist Karl Bartos said soul music, Motown, and James Brown were some of the group’s core influences. Later in the book, Sicko argues that “even the most ‘hard core’ and militant-sounding techno groups”—like Detroit’s defiantly anti-corporate and pro-Black Underground Resistance techno collective—had “lofty ideals at heart—scenarios where race is no longer an issue.”
Before releasing Forevernevermore, Moodymann had approached race through direct statements on his EP covers and subtle references in his music. His 1996 EP, Don’t Be Misled, took its name from the Super Fly soundtrack sample on the first track, wherein Curtis Mayfield sings in anger and pain about Black people’s inability to protect each other, while exhorting the listener to think of the fate of the titular Fred, a drug dealer who gets dispatched in the film. “The City: A place where most suburban kids think they’re from. Detroit: A place where neggahs roam, neggahs like me... don’t be misled!” the EP’s cover stated. This salvo at middle-class tourists who either toured Detroit or watched it from afar on television screens expressed a visceral disdain towards these people, while simultaneously embracing the freedom of civic neglect.
More damning was the cover of his 1997 Amerika EP: “It’s been proven in history no matter what I do or what I become I’ll always be J.A.N. in this country–AMERIKA (This planet’s greatest thief) SIGNED Just Anotha Nigga.” Amerika contained two interpretations of a Gil Scott-Heron track where he traces the lineage of the blues to the United States, because the blues can only exist in a country that makes itself and the world so wretched. In both cases, the music was never as angry as the statements themselves; Moodymann simply said what he thought needed to be said.
Forevernevermore splits the difference between hinting at past oppression and urging for a different future through its enveloping sound, taking in everything from stadium rock to gospel. You can detect the influence of Underground Resistance and Kraftwerk on “The Setup,” a slice of fairly menacing techno. Its gnawing pads devour the space of the song, leaving room only for paralyzing metronomic percussion. “The Setup” is interrupted with a snipped bit of dialogue—a pronounced threat from the blaxploitation film, The Mack. The transition feels like talking to an overexcited friend who tells you that they need to pause the song they just began because they have another cool thing to let you in on. This and the following song, “[Logo],” form the techno section of the album. “[Logo]” is ambient washes of synth and glitchy notes played quick, all surrounded by unrelenting drumming. It’s the aquatic type of techno that the Detroit duo Drexciya was known for, but this isn’t the music of the future; towards the end of the track, Moodymann integrates Curtis Mayfield samples and the sound of children screaming, positioning the work in the current day.
The throughline of Forevernevermore is about making do with what one has in the present moment. While Moodymann has said his upbringing was mainly around Black people, whites would appear from time to time, and their presence generally meant that something was going to go wrong: “I’m not saying everybody in Detroit is racist or nothing like that, but the only time I saw white folks, you come to cut my gas off, you come and take my father to jail,” he said in the RBMA interview. It was a quotidian formulation: white proximity would lead to Black subjection. The grim fact of this history is made clear from the opener, “Meanwhile Back at Home.” The track is a floor-filler that gets its African drums from Quincy Jones’ soundtrack to Roots—in particular, the theme played when the Africans who will soon be sold into slavery are first seen in their bucolic village. Yet this song flows into the fluttering “Wednesday Night People,” which functions as a rejection of the negativity associated with meditating on the past. The track is a weightless house groove that has the words “I keep on” as a mantra, which repeat the whole time through. It’s fairly short, but its elements—a slowed down moan, a drooping bass, the slight singing of birds—are bright and expressive enough to comprise a heavenly infinity.
This pragmatic hope is what gives the album its particular presence. Moodymann has bluntly stated that Detroit is a city where the options can seem limited, yet his stated philosophy has prioritized self-reliance as a response to structural circumstances: “I don’t care if you are out here selling dope, do it well,” he told British DJ Gilles Peterson in a 2007 interview. “I don’t care if you are out here selling pussy, fuck it well. It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.” These lessons came to Moodymann through the Black church, and the power of the music of the Black church is foundational to Forevernevermore’s magnum opus, “The Thief That Stole My Sad Days (Ya Blessin Me).” Built around a fiery sermon focused on slavery (the preacher screams about “400 years” of bondage) and a simply undeniable piano loop, the song is house at its most spiritual. Throughout, the musician Debbie Welch sings to a God that makes everything OK. Her vocals are hypnotic and plaintive all at once, earning every single iota of emotion she strains out of her hums and screams. After she illustrates how she has been helped by Jesus, a house beat comes in, propelling her up as she exalts him: “You pick me up/And ya rocking me.” Improvised organ played by Moodymann’s collaborator Amp Fiddler moves all of this closer to a celestial level, making Welch sail upwards. What else can follow this but praise?
On “Tribute,” Moodymann pays homage to Marvin Gaye by cutting together different bits and slices of the soul singer’s tracks, presenting them with ethereal pads and thumping, ecstatic percussion. “Tribute” gets at two pillars of Moodymann’s universe: family and music. Its entire premise is based on witnessing the departure of a great musician, and realizing that there’s not much one can do but listen to the records they left behind. The track originally appeared on 1994’s The Day We Lost the Soul EP, where it was titled “Tribute! (To the Soul We Lost),” and followed an eponymous introductory track made up of radio clips from the day Gaye died. According to Moodymann, even getting these clips was a family endeavor; when Gaye died, he and his aunt recorded the entire day’s worth of tributes on Detroit radio. It was mourning through conservation.
The 1994 version was constructed around a sample of “What’s Going On.” It’s more of an edit than anything else, consisting of Gaye’s instrumentation (altered to sound as spacey as ESG) and vocals. The sample lies just under the mix, swathed in glowing chords and shakers. The album version is slightly different—it’s shorter, ending with a recording of what could only be a family get-together. After what sounds like a relative playing on the piano fades out, you hear a child sing a song that they came up with themselves. You hear his community’s presence, one that keeps Forevernevermore from sounding like an ethereal collage, close to something like the KLF’s ambient pastoral masterpiece Chill Out. Though comfortable in abstraction, he never stays there, deeply connecting his work to Motown soul, disco, jazz, and gospel.
For Moodymann these records aren’t just music—they’re guideposts, signals that can’t be ignored. There’s a video of Moodymann playing the first Movement Festival in Detroit, where he begins by playing Gil Scott-Heron’s “We Almost Lost Detroit,” rewinds it, reminds the crowd where he’s from (“Everybody up here driving through Detroit. I drive in it, you understand? Every day”), and then plays the record again, letting Gil Scott-Heron’s rasp tell the rest of the story. He seems completely comfortable here, happy to let the music play, singing along to the chorus from time to time. The song, of course, is about the threat of nuclear annihilation, about the threat of extinction, about the threat of purposeful extinction. But this doesn’t frighten Moodyman: “If it wasn’t for Detroit, I wouldn’t be the motherfucker I am today. So I’m not leaving my baby. I’m going to stick with it,” he said in the RBMA interview. “If that motherfucker fall down to the ground, well, y’all pray for me because I’ma fall with that motherfucker, you understand?”
Moodymann’s pride in his local scene comes from a time before globalization and from a place that was robbed by it. But this theft and isolation are what makes the city itself so special. Somehow a musical utopia arose out of decades of gradual deindustrialization, and this only came about with the perseverance of those who stayed. Moodymann occupies his own distinct place in Detroit. Where other DJs like Theo Parrish release music that sounds raw, Moodymann will release music that feels like a work in progress; the same record might sound different depending on what country it was purchased in. These calculated errors form the mystique that surrounds him, and they also speak to a DIY sense of entrepreneurship. If people are interested in buying something that’s real, then they need to take the good with the bad; nothing can be left out, including mistakes.
The rattling immediacy of Forevernevermore comes from its rejection of any totalizing reading. The three-part title track is a case in point: Concluding the album, it begins with six minutes of a turned-up disco groove, floating in and out of the mix are snatches of crowd noise, a horn solo, and dialogue. The effects are very similar to the party sounds that open and close “What’s Going On.” Yet unlike the samples found there, which served as an elegiac counterpoint to Gaye’s expression of political turmoil, they function as joyful noise–very pleasant shit to hear along with the Brazilian pianist and disco producer Eumir Deodato’s “Whistle Bump.” The next part is abstract industrial with Moodymann mumbling to himself, entertaining himself by repeating phrases that jokingly hint at irritation with the way he’s perceived by others (“Niggas be talking all that shit about me/Why you always going overseas?/Why you always driving around the D?”).
Finally, the song moves to a conclusion with the glimmering techno we only got a glimpse of earlier. Yet the pounding drums and buzzing notes that make up this interlude disappear almost as soon as they accumulate, leaving us with the reverbed voice of a child telling us the record’s over. It feels like just some guy fucking around in his living room, playing snatches of different records, wondering what he’s going to do before his kid comes home. Ignoring the fact that this is his stated purpose, this is really what he knows how to provide, and what he perfects on Forevernevermore. Every irritation, every joy, every mistake, and every combo that just somehow worked comes together to form a piece that feels seamless.
That’s the wonderful illusion of Forevernevermore—it asks the questions Gil Scott-Heron asked, only to rumble your speakers; it makes Chic sound even better, and then it hits you with the gospel. It’s a compendium of Black thought, doubling as one dude’s very long stand-up routine. At the end of the RBMA interview, Moodymann was asked what the most rewarding place he’d ever been was. His response? “Man, the east side of Detroit is incredible. I hit it every weekend, you’ve gotta go. Southwest is all cool, we got our Spaniards down there they be teaching me all kind of shit. West side is my roam, that is some bad motherfucker, we got some kings over there.” This record shows he was speaking the truth.


With patient songwriting and gentle arrangements, the Icelandic art-pop musician portrays seismic emotional transformations through resounding moments of stillness.

Museum

Jófríður Ákadóttir was at odds with herself. “I can't tell my feelings apart,” she sings in “Life Man,” a standout from Museum, her third album as JFDR. “Even when I reason with myself/I’m no closer.” All the while, she keeps moving: “Get up brush your hair and start the day at midday/In the meantime.” Fittingly, the song’s title comes from an unsatisfying interaction with a therapist, in which Ákadóttir unspooled some existential crisis and was greeted with raised eyebrows and a simple shrug of “Life, man.”
Jocular as the reference might be, Ákadóttir’s therapist’s words help contextualize Museum. Right when lockdown was starting in March of 2020, Ákadóttir released New Dreams, an album that marked a fuller realization of her sound and boasted some of her most striking songwriting. Having holed up in Australia with her bandmate and soon-to-be-husband Joshua Wilkinson, Ákadóttir went through the sort of listless identity spiral many artists experienced during the pandemic. After performing in various projects since her teenage years and having already released over 10 full-lengths, she questioned her future in music until Wilkinson encouraged her to revisit some demos. Soon, Ákadóttir started collecting new fragments and lost scraps and eventually booked a recording session in New York with longtime collaborator Shahzad Ismaily.
Museum continues the refinements of New Dreams. As always, many of her songs are strikingly pretty. Across the album, Ákadóttir and her collaborators craft patient art-pop atmospheres above rippling piano and acoustic guitar; many songs are accentuated by the metallic tones of the langspil, an Icelandic string instrument. On singles “The Orchid” and “Spectator,” Ákadóttir drifts on aqueous synths and flickering orchestration to powerful denouements. Discussing the title Museum, Ákadóttir likened these songs to sculptures, pieces chiseled out of recent memory. With her incantatory melodic sensibility, they could just as well be conjurings, wading through the debris of life before arriving at gentle catharses.
Images of nature abound on Museum. In “Air Unfolding” the air in question is a tangible gulf between two people anxious about where they stand, while relationships bloom in “Underneath the Sun” and contort in “Sideways Moon.” She renders human flaws and foibles as something elemental. Under JFDR, Ákadóttir hasn’t shied away from the tradition of Icelandic art that captures the surreal, severe nature of her country’s landscape, and there is often something hushed and naturalistic to her music. Her voice is an expressive whisper carried not on storm gusts or carved from towering glaciers, but instead weaving in and out of more wandering winds and waters.
JFDR’s music is not necessarily minimal, but it is restrained—sometimes to a fault. It’s easy to fall for the slowly unfolding beauty in her songs, and every now and then she comes around with something more propulsive, like “Life Man” or New Dreams’ “Taking a Part of Me,” that more directly depicts the forward motion she seeks in her lyrics. That is not where JFDR is yet; Museum is by design a document of stasis. She makes intimate portraits cataloging seismic emotional transformations, but occurring in single, resounding moments of stillness. Museum feels like a transitional statement—a small but powerful reflection on an era when everyone and everything ground to a halt. But at their best, these songs also offer hints of how Ákadóttir might start moving again.


With the help of some producers du jour, the Irish singer-songwriter expertly blends his deep love for acoustic soundscapes and hip-hop on his fully realized third record.

We Move

Until recently, Irish folk singer and songwriter James Vincent McMorrow only existed in wisps. His delicate falsetto would vanish quickly back into the silence of his sparse arrangements and his ideas were veiled and occasionally incomprehensible, blurred as lyric fragments and extended metaphors. His sophomore album, Post Tropical, was atmospheric in theme and tenor, relying primarily on mood and melody to produce sensations. The beauty was in his exquisite style and sound that buoyed arcane stanzas like, “Someone is ringing a bell/It chimes through this shimmering shell/That once was my vision of birth/But now it’s my vessel and curse.” But McMorrow has hinted at a desire to be bolder and to fully realize his love of hip-hop and electronic music in song. Post Tropical implied these connections existed, but it couldn’t fashion them into a working framework that made meaningful use of the components.
The first single from his new album We Move, called “Rising Water,” signaled a complete transformation was in store. The song reimagined McMorrow’s standard indie folk as a pop R&B jam. He kicked up the tempo with heavier drums, creating layers of sound out of electro synths and pulsating bass. It distanced McMorrow from his previously cryptic writing style—which he has charitably called “esoteric”—presenting text that’s easier to follow. His voice was even reintroduced on the track as a powerful and vibrant instrument. But more than anything else, the song seemed to find his perfect balance.
“Rising Water” was produced by OVO hitmaker Nineteen85 (the mastermind behind three of Drake’s biggest successes—“Hold On, We’re Going Home,” “Hotline Bling,” and “One Dance”—and one-half of the R&B duo dvsn), who McMorrow met on tour in 2015 and worked closely with for We Move. Nineteen85 brings clarity and sharpness to McMorrow’s work, just as he does Drake’s, by only using the bits that are functional and necessary. Operating alongside OVO’s secret weapon, Frank Dukes (another Toronto beat-maker who has worked with Drake, Travis Scott, Kanye West, Rihanna, and Kendrick Lamar), and Two Inch Punch (who has written and produced songs for Jessie Ware, Sam Smith, and Tory Lanez), have also added more depth and resonance. McMorrow’s music was once picturesque but idle, a prisoner of its own tranquility. His songs were to be admired, but never fully understood, and they didn’t do enough with melody to overcome a static nature and convey more than just “vibes.”
The songs on We Move subvert this established pattern. The ideas are articulated much more distinctly than on past recordings, bringing added significance to the gorgeous compositions. McMorrow still communicates most of his feelings through high-pitched coos, but the notes carry more weight and they linger into richer backdrops, like on “Killer Whales” and “Surreal.” The verses are stated plainly and the syllables are more than just conductors for sound. He still leaves some of the mystery, divorcing many narratives from any context, but the writing is much more striking now. “Last Story” is the best song he’s ever written, an epic drama about revisiting old romance that melds the strengths of his two writing styles, remaining ambiguous without feigning intimacy.
There are songs about heartbreak and loss; about trying to make it work and moving on; about the many ways lovers can destroy each other, and about personal growth. It isn’t just about conveying a feeling anymore; it’s about examining them. Some songs ruminate on relationships, past and present. Others compile shared experience. He asks rhetorical questions of anyone in earshot: “Are you hopeless like me?” and “Have you come here to save me?” and “Who battled here for you to live?” People saving each other is an ongoing theme, and We Move is fascinated by the impact we make. Every now and then, he’ll say something truly devastating like “I’m afraid to die without leaving a mark.” This album, perhaps, is the greatest reflection of that.
We Move is the album McMorrow has always dreamed of making—the one he tried to make with Post Tropical: an elegant, hip hop-indebted record with a folk nucleus that still hangs on every utterance, that advances on his tasteful croons. (McMorrow, a noted fan of rap, has always wanted to transmit that spirit in his tunes but lacked the direction; earlier this year, he said the original version of Early in the Morning had all electronic drums that were created on a Korg Triton—a favorite tool of rap producers like the Neptunes—before he panicked and changed it.) The songs on We Move marry his acoustic ideas with hip-hop/R&B sentiment and programming, blending the two into something new and fluid. On “Get Low,” the deep guitar licks settle into a thumping bass line. The chorus of “Ohs” on “Evil” slips into a skipping rhythm of hi-hats and washed-out synths. At every turn, the music is fuller, less caught in suspension. “Is it better to live your life in shallow water or is failure drowning in the deep end?” McMorrow asks on “Lost Angles.” In his case, leaving the safe alternative proved to be the right choice.


Daniel Lopatin’s latest doesn't swerve in a new direction but instead serves as an overlook for his career, highlighting his skill at splicing the old and the new in continually fascinating ways.

Oneohtrix Point Never: Magic Oneohtrix Point Never

Magic Oneohtrix Point Never

Like any handover of power, a radio-station format change—from country to classic rock, say, or Top 40 to oldies—follows a loose script. A farewell from the outgoing station manager, a second or two of dead air, and then the benediction from the victorious new regime. No wax seals memorialize these fleeting events; no toppled statues litter the ground. But they are charged moments nonetheless, admissions of failure and also statements of continuity: The king is dead, long live the king.
Brief snippets of such format flips are threaded throughout Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, Daniel Lopatin’s first album since his Uncut Gems soundtrack. Gathered from an online archive, they’ve been manipulated and sequenced to sound like a kind of cartoonish Greek chorus. These “eulogies,” as he has called them—for outmoded styles, written-off market segments, abandoned listeners—are nonetheless, in the manner of commercial radio, relentlessly upbeat; they seem to proclaim that American lives are nothing but second acts, perpetually being erased and reset. “Somehow the music we grew up listening to doesn’t relate to our adult reality and our new dreams,” says a disk jockey in one of a handful of format-flip interludes, surrounded by murky, atonal flourishes. His garbled voice rises in pitch as easy-listening piano blossoms in the background. “The main question to mind is, Have you changed? And the answer is, uh, yes.”
At this stage in his career, “I’ve changed” would not be a terribly revelatory statement from Oneohtrix Point Never. In recent years, Lopatin has become a skilled choreographer of wrongfooting listeners’ expectations, trading the vaporous textures of his early work for the overdriven “hypergrunge” of Garden of Delete and then the almost incomprehensible world building and dizzyingly recombinant styles of Age Of. It’s tempting to look for an autobiographical subtext in Magic Oneohtrix Point Never; recall that Lopatin took his moniker from Boston’s Magic 106.7, which provided the gauzy soft-rock backdrop of his youth. But Magic, which was created largely during the pandemic, is not so much a format change in Lopatin’s discography as an inflection point or perhaps simply an overlook: an opportunity to take stock of where he’s been and where he might go next.
In sound and feel, Magic frequently dwells on familiar sounds and tropes, many of which return to Replica and R Plus Seven. The album is thick with sounds that blur the line between the fake and the real, like plucked and bowed strings, reed, harpsichord, hammered dulcimer, and marimba. Whether sampled, synthesized, or acoustic, they are rich with implicit physicality, evocative of stretching and striking; processed voices are carved into curved, glistening shapes, uncanny as ice sculptures. It’s a ridiculously opulent palette. The thrumming strings of “Long Road Home,” a sort of Mike Oldfield-esque ballad featuring a largely unrecognizable Caroline Polachek, could easily be repurposed for an Audi commercial, while the slicing bows and THX-grade sound effects of “Shifting” evoke big-budget Hollywood blockbusters.
“Every song is an opportunity to freak somebody out,” Lopatin has said; the most audacious thing about Magic Oneohtrix Point Never is probably a co-executive producer credit for Abel Tesfaye, aka notorious R&B rapscallion the Weeknd, who reached out to Lopatin after hearing his score for Josh and Benny Safdie’s 2017 film Good Time. After both worked on the Safdies’ Uncut Gems, Lopatin ended up working on a few tracks for the Weeknd’s After Hours. Tesfaye appears only once here—on “No Nightmares,” an ’80s-inspired power ballad reminiscent of Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away”—but Lopatin credits Tesfaye’s feedback in helping to shape the album. (“I needed someone to give me perspective on what I was doing as a music fan because he’s got unbelievable taste,” Lopatin told The Guardian. “He was like: ‘Burn it down! This is an OPN record!’ I was like: ‘Oh yeah, I forgot!’ He was really in my corner as a friend.”) Still, Tesfaye’s fingerprints are not obvious; even on “No Nightmares,” which also features Polachek, his customary falsetto is vocodered beyond recognition, and the lyrics are free of his signature tales of sex, drugs, and self-loathing.
One of a handful of pop-adjacent songs on Magic, “No Nightmares” is probably the album’s nadir. It could be that the world simply doesn’t need another “Take My Breath Away,” no matter how ambiguously tongue in cheek; it could be that Lopatin’s principal talent is not in writing pop songs. The really moving parts of Magic happen in its more abstracted tracks, which fortunately comprise the bulk of the album. Following Lopatin’s movements can feel like watching a tornado tear through a fabric mill, ribbons of color spilling out in every direction. In “Bow Ecco,” shoals of harpsichord swirl around plangent woodwinds, directionless yet somehow compelling; “The Whether Channel” (surely one of his best titles yet) arrays sweetly blippy synths over cascading dulcimer and dissonant drones in a way that makes chaos feel somehow lyrical.
Lopatin has a remarkable talent for giving shape and movement to an indistinct mass of sonic matter, setting it in motion like a baton-wielding maestro conducting a murmuration of starlings. “Tales From the Trash Stratum” is as beautiful and incomprehensible a piece of music as Lopatin has written. Out of a fog of radio-dial swirl emerge first a blast of noise and then delicate mallet percussion; it soon sounds like Oval taking his Sharpie to a Steve Reich CD against a backdrop of synthetic birdsong, running water, Ren Faire flutes, spaceship whirr, and what might be the startup chime of a vintage Mac hybridized with Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd’s The Moon and the Melodies. Except you barely notice any of these things as discrete sounds; taken together, it all simply sounds like Oneohtrix Point Never.
What is so moving about these radically abstracted pieces is their instability and their impermanence; they are always in the process of becoming or disintegrating, and the listener accustomed to OPN’s way of working soon comes to understand that no moment of beauty will last for long; that even the most gorgeous passage will soon crumble to noise—or, worse, become something tacky and distasteful, a song you can’t change the radio dial fast enough to turn off. In this sense, there’s something poignant even in the album’s ugliest bits.
Magic Oneohtrix Point Never touches upon all Lopatin’s usual themes: memory and forgetting, nostalgia, the mystery of taste. But where his treatment of those ideas can sometimes seem academic, the album is shot through with a powerful and pervasive sense of melancholy. He told GQ, “I put all of these dead air moments throughout the record—eulogies—to make them say something that felt personal to me as far as my own career, as well as what was happening to the country.” Seen in that light, his sample flips are signs not just of impermanence but also division, of a body politic cleaved in two. It’s a disheartening thought. Toward the end of the album, a disk jockey chirps, “There’ll only be a memory of the music you heard over the years, but the country will not die—it exists at a new home, and I’m sure that home’ll give it the space to grow.” Another announcer’s voice is spliced in: “This has been—this. And this dream is the sound. And this dream will self-destruct in 3… 2…” Drowned out by churning loops of tone, he never gets to finish his sentence. Like other albums created during the pandemic, Magic Oneohtrix Point Never is steeped in the loneliness and disorientation of the present moment. What sets it apart is Lopatin’s willingness to face—with tenderness but little sentimentality—the uncertainty of what might await us on the other side.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Mike Skinner says goodbye to his Streets project with an attempted return to the sound of his landmark 2002 debut, Original Pirate Material.

Computers and Blues

Back in the early 00s, Mike Skinner and James Murphy both seemed like transformative figures: two charismatic producer/talkers with rhythm, intelligence, senses of humor, and senses of gravitas. Both were innovators who existed at once inside and outside a pair of emerging genres (grime and dance-punk, respectively), and both focused so fully on their own tiny corners of existence that they made those experiences tangible to people who only had the slightest idea what they were talking about. Now, a decade later, both are preparing to say goodbye to their signature projects.
Skinner's landmark debut, Original Pirate Material, hit just months before LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge" single, but the follow-up, A Grand Don't Come for Free, arguably holds up better today. A staggering conceptual LP, the record was a grounded and powerful piece of linear storytelling that found Skinner in a more challenging and ambitious mode. But in that album's wake, Skinner adapated a much less relatable and charismatic persona, releasing a pair of disappointing LPs that squashed his accumulated goodwill. The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living was a near-fatal cocaine-and-tabloids tantrum, an attempt to shed light on celeb-culture shallowness that simply wound up indulging in it. And Everything Is Borrowed was even stranger, an amber-hued pastorale that made no sense at all. Now, convinced he's got nothing left to say, Skinner gives us Computers and Blues.
A collection of lesser beats and hooks that somewhat returns to Original Pirate Material's sonics, Computers and Blues sadly trades that record's wonderful sense of place for a foggy vagueness that leaves Skinner's insights mostly impenetrable. And yet, after the last two albums, it feels something like a return to form, actually coming closer to the particular weird spark of Skinner's debut than anything he's released since. Even the image of the apartment building on the cover echoes the lonely tenement on his first album. And as a series of disconnected sketches with cheap bedroom beats, Computers and Blues is not without its charm.
But where Original Pirate Material empathetically chronicled the lives of its scabby potheads, Computers and Blues mostly concerns their weed-hazed days-- including, on "Outside Inside", the frustrating inability to get off the couch. Even as Skinner toys with some truly dumb lyrical conceits, it's a joy to hear him push language around: "The fossiled remains of lots of ancient ways are buried or lost in every one of my mates' brains." And there's also the genuinely moving "A Blip on a Screen", a vulnerable and wonderstruck song about seeing your kid on an ultrasound screen for the first time.
Musically, too, this is still recognizably the work of the kid who once mined rap and garage for everything he could use and threw the rest away. The beats are all endearingly awkward and homemade-- drums and horns and Bollywood samples tripping all over each other rather than combining into any sort of steamroller. A few tracks bring a nice garge-disco glide, an encouraging sign that Skinner could go on to be quite good at actual dance music. The hooks may be uniformly awful, but at least he's trying.
Still, nothing on Computers and Blues rivals even the weakest moments of Skinner's first two albums, and it comes out at the same time of something much more encouraging: a mixtape called Cyberspace and Reds, which Skinner claims is all music he's made since he finished this album. Cyberspace and Reds dips deeper into British rap than Skinner has ever allowed himself to go, with old grime comrades like Wiley and Kano and Jammer stopping by to talk shit. It's fun, for a change of pace, and it offers no indication that Skinner's trying to make an important piece of work. If he can lighten up enough to make something like that, there could be hope for him yet.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore Built to Spill’s winding, monumental 1997 album Perfect From Now On.

Perfect From Now On

There’s a mustiness to the term “classic rock” that makes it seem like a slur. It’s the air of overfamiliarity, of overstayed welcome, of predictability, of canon that we had no say in being forced upon us. This, at least in part, is what made even the embarrassing aftereffects of the culture and business of rock music in the ’90s so thrilling—that feeling of storming the gates even if no one was quite sure what to do once inside.
But there’s also something aspirational about being labeled “classic rock”—about wanting to make something that could both iconically represent a specific time and become unstuck from it. This feels like the way to think about Built to Spill’s Perfect From Now On, which began its life being compared to avatars of the former but gets to spend eternity as an exemplar of the latter.
There’s Nothing Wrong With Love the second album Doug Martsch had made with a revolving cast of bandmates under the name Built to Spill, was of its time. Released in 1994, it’s an unassuming, lovely slab of lo-fi fuzz-pop about growing up, and not growing up, in Idaho, with picaresque lyrics about playing seven-up with grade-school crushes, driving nowhere in particular, loneliness, and the childlike wonder of staring up at the stars. Then he followed it up with an album-length response from the galaxy’s point of view.
In 1997, at the peak of the underground’s widespread gentrification, there wasn’t an album that blended outsize ambition with characteristically indie aw-shucks modesty like Perfect From Now On—a sprawling, seeds-in-the-gatefold opus happily bankrolled and distributed by one of the biggest media conglomerates on earth. Two years after its release, Doug Martsch described the album to the AV Club as “kind of big and epic, but also kind of crappy and personal,” which is about as clear a distillation of the music industry’s post-grunge boom years’ identity crisis ever stated. If the mid-’90s meant mastering the fine art of trying to do big things while seeming small, Perfect From Now On may be its defining artifact.
It is positively quaint, now, to think back on the melodrama of indie bands signing to major labels and the degree to which this drove the central narrative for an entire era of music. One of the most important and fruitful periods in contemporary pop cultural history was dominated by the question of whether or not to take corporate money to make art. This period’s most important artists were often defined by their abilities to resist; their subsequent work was seen through the filter of how that decision changed them, of what was sacrificed in the name of expanding an audience, of whether something means more if it’s consumed less.
When Built to Spill signed to Warner Bros., it didn’t feel shocking, nor was the decision in opposition to the band’s carefully cultivated outsider image; they didn’t have one. Martsch had a young son to take care of, there’s nothing wrong with practicality. There was little hand-wringing as to whether “Car” would start soundtracking Volkswagen commercials or whether Martsch would abandon the fierce principles he’d shaped over a few years of lo-fi scrappiness to score a gig at the Peach Pit. But: If the label wanted to give him more money than he’d ever needed to make an album, he was going to use more money than he’d ever needed to make an album.
While the songs on There’s Nothing Wrong With Love were straightforward and concise, the new ones were expansive and twisty, layers of guitars doing things that often didn’t sound like things guitars do. They had all the markings of dramatically increased scope, even if that was a goal their creator wasn’t necessarily interested in telegraphing.
What this all amounted to was a guarantee that some mathematically measurable number of people were actually going to hear this music and judge it on its merits, stripped from the comfort of indie-clique shorthand. “It was definitely the first time I thought there was going to be an audience for my music,” Martsch told Magnet. “This was the first time I was like, ‘Whoa, people are actually going to listen to this, and it’s going to be reviewed.’ Up until then, everything was kind of like free and fun.”
One explanation for Perfect From Now On’s enduring appeal is the fact that it was made three different times. Produced again by Phil Ek, making his own major-label debut at 24, the first sessions felt lackluster, so Martsch scrapped them. They started over with Martsch’s high school bandmate Brett Nelson on bass and the Spinanes’ Scott Plouf on drums, where they’d remain for 17 years. Confusingly, Brett Netson of Boise’s Caustic Resin, played guitar. Those tapes were ruined after being left in Ek’s pickup truck. So the third time—with that much more preparation and rehearsal—was the charm, but at the expense of Martsch’s patience. When it came time to tour behind the album, Martsch could barely bring himself to play any of the songs that were on it.
The meticulousness, whatever it took to get there, shows. The album consists of eight songs in 54 minutes, although that’s a little deceiving—“Stop the Show” has no fewer than four different songs packed into its six and a half minutes. The shortest is “Made Up Dreams” at a svelte 4:52, and the climax, “Untrustable / Part 2 (About Someone Else)”—there is no Part 1—is just shy of nine minutes. Big songs about big moods.
“Randy Described Eternity” begins the album with a metal sphere 10 times the size of Jupiter that floats a few yards past the earth every thousand years and a dude named Randy, but this is as close as the album comes 2112’s orbit. Nothing is a difficult listen or a test; even the most intricate songs feel like long brisk walks rather than math problems. There are guitar solos—are there are ever guitar solos—but they don’t feel wanky, they don’t feel like self-indulgent refutations of punk’s economy, they just feel like a guy who knows how to play guitar real good.
“Velvet Waltz” is as advertised, “Kicked It in the Sun” is rainy-day indoor space-rock. It’s a concept album about not really having any idea what’s going on. The album’s most memorable lyric is the refrain of “Untrustable”: “God is whoever you’re performing for.” It’s a marvel of a rallying cry about art and intimacy the myth of indie-rock ambivalence and defining for yourself what success means and Martsch sings it like a shrug.
Martsch himself resisted the low-hanging comparison to FM staples like Neil Young (although his trademark adenoidal vocals and this 21-minute cover of “Cortez the Killer” probably didn’t help). He saw his nascent guitar heroism and gravitation towards more complex arrangements as owing to contemporaries like Butthole Surfers and Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and Dinosaur Jr. It was classic rock for kids who didn’t know whether it was cool to like classic rock but would never admit to being self-conscious enough to question whether it was cool to like classic rock.
The total lack of mythology or image surrounding the band has become Perfect From Now On’s greatest asset. The music is just the music, there’s no baggage that’s accrued with time that changes its perception, nobody disappointed anybody or died or joined the Smashing Pumpkins. Your enjoyment suffers not one bit from not knowing what Doug Martsch looks like. The record doesn’t sound like 1997 or 1967; it and exists to get lost in, to make you want to carve out some time to get lost. There are new things to find in every listen, which isn’t that different from the impulse to sync up The Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz, just to see.
Perfect From Now On didn’t mark some dramatic fulcrum in the band’s trajectory—the album sold well enough to begin a relationship with Warner Bros. that, remarkably, only wound down last year. Its follow-up, 1999’s Keep It Like a Secret, was a return to more compact songwriting and subsequent albums have generally followed suit, to surprisingly little diminishing returns. But none of them feel as of a piece as Perfect. Martsch, Plouf, and Nelson played the album in its entirety for shows in 2008; it feels right to think of this as a 10th-anniversary celebration that they spaced on and wound up getting to a year late.
Nor was it even 1997’s most dramatic example of a band leveling up and delivering a career-redefining existential masterpiece; OK Computer could be Perfect From Now On’s evil twin (or maybe Perfect is OK’s stoner cousin). Martsch seems fine with not having any answers and revels in the comfort of being lost. In “Velvet Waltz,” a song about a “world that’s not so bad,” he sings, “You better just enjoy the luxury of sympathy if that’s a luxury you have,” and it’s the best advice no one ever gave to Thom Yorke. Both albums hit similar nerves about the significance of cohesive album-length Big Statements, whether that was a conscious throwback or just a reminder that the present wasn’t such a convulsive change after all.
On a recent Thursday night in Brooklyn, Built to Spill—now comprised of Martsch, Steve Gere on drums, and Jason Albertini on bass, the same lineup BTS has had since 2015’s Untethered Moon—played to about 250 people between stops on a co-headlining tour with Afghan Whigs. Martsch seemed to only have brought one guitar with him, so changing a broken string or between-song tuning became exercises in long, stubborn, almost performatively awkward silences. The instinct to say something seemed so obvious that to just not somehow felt like a political decision, a meta-commentary on what it means to lead a band and manage the dynamic between performer and whoever you’re performing for. On this night, God looked like a bunch of folks wearing winter coats indoors and stifling the urge to shout requests while making fleeting “You think this is a little weird, too, right?” eye contact with one another. And our subject, our disciple, was an unbothered guy who may have packed too light for a long trip.


Kode9’s Hyperdub label celebrates its 15th anniversary by moving confidently beyond the London club music’s conventions.

Hyperswim

The journey from Hyperdub’s 10th to its 15th birthday has proved as exciting and change-ridden as the equivalent passage into human adolescence. It’s not that the London label has abandoned its childhood friends—longtime pals Burial, Cooly G, Ikonika, and DJ Taye are all here to blow out the candles on this anniversary compilation—but they mingle with new acquaintances, who bring international poise to the party.
Hyperdub always was a globally-minded label, providing one of the first homes for footwork outside of Chicago and taking an early interest in South African electronics. But as recently as 2014, the label still felt like a reflection of the London underground; the four compilations released to mark its first decade gravitated around the sprawling UK bass continuum, from grime to funky, garage to dubstep, gilded by touches of R&B, footwork, and techno.
HyperSwim, released in collaboration with anarchic cartoon network Adult Swim, is an altogether more cosmopolitan beast, held together more by the spirit of innovation than local circumstance. London is represented by the likes of Burial, Dean Blunt, and Cooly G, but they rub shoulders with artists from Cape Town (Angel-Ho), Angola (Nazar), Turin (Mana) and Philadelphia (Mhysa). As well as this geographical drift, HyperSwim captures Hyperdub’s growing agnosticism to genre. Even the most eagerly informed listener would struggle to say exactly what kind of music this album contains, with Hyperdub tapping into a global electronic underground for whom genre is little more than a SoundCloud tag.
That might sound like a recipe for chaos, but HyperSwim works these diverse sounds into recognisable strands of shape and feel, allowing the listener to drift from the sweetly naive, deconstructed pop of Mhysa’s “Games”—whose un-AutoTuned vocal and rambling feel remind me of Sarah Records’ hair-clip indie—to Fatima Al Qadiri’s deliriously dystopian “Filth” without feeling any jarring changes.
Broadly speaking, the album starts sparse and melodic, accelerates through the biting rhythms of New Jersey club, then closes with thunderous four-to-the-floor drums. But nothing is quite as it seems on this devious beat excursion. DJ Taye may be a member of legendary footwork crew Teklife, but his “Inferno” owes as much to Three 6 Mafia’s proto-trap as it does to DJ Rashad; Doon Kanda appears to have sucked all the life out of a Ricardo Villalobos production to create the nightmarish haunted house of “Perfume”; and Mana’s contribution, “Climbing the Walls,” sounds simultaneously fast and slow, a spectral guitar sample coming up against racing hi-hats.
For all HyperSwim’s futuristic feel, the standout tracks largely come from the label’s established artists. Burial’s “Old Tape” is a wonky masterpiece that combines the familiar crackle and murk with an unexpected ’80s pop touch reminiscent of Inner City, Jan Hammer, and Enya; label founder Kode9’s marvellous “Cell3” sounds like orchestral grime being slowly sucked through a supermassive black hole; and Laurel Halo’s “Crush” is a bizarrely funky mixture of broken beats, bleeps, and the roar of the hopeless void. But as with most compelling compilations, HyperSwim’s success doesn’t come down to individual tracks. Instead, its brilliance lies in its cohesion and disparity: the way it teases a logical narrative out of decentralized musical moods without sacrificing artistic individuality.


Newly reissued on vinyl, the most experimental album from the Charlottesville jam institution explores the uneasy zone between celebratory anthems and grim lamentations.

Dave Matthews Band: Before These Crowded Streets

Before These Crowded Streets

In the summer of 1997, the Dave Matthews Band reigned as unlikely alt-rock superstars. The group’s major label debut, 1994’s Under the Table and Dreaming, elevated them from heroes of Virginia’s progressive roots scene to mainstream success, and 1996’s Crash made an even bigger splash, propelled by the ubiquitous hit single “Crash Into Me” and a resultant Grammy win. As was their style, DMB had dedicated most of the years between to touring, jamming ebulliently to crowds of adoring fans who were, as comedian and podcaster Marc Maron would eventually put it, only truly comfortable while “jigging around in an arena with other like-minded people.”
That DMB was difficult to classify hadn’t barred them from hitmaker status, but the spotlight left Matthews feeling restless. “Maybe you couldn’t call them pop and you couldn’t call them jazz and you certainly couldn’t call them rock,” producer Steve Lillywhite told Relix in 2018. “What were they?” With 1998’s Before These Crowded Streets, Dave and co. asserted that whatever you thought they were, they were something different. Newly remastered and reissued on vinyl to commemorate its 25th anniversary (puzzlingly sans bonus material, given the ponderance of archival tape), the record represents DMB at its most nakedly ambitious. The core of the band’s sound remained intact: maximalist rhythms from drummer Carter Beauford and bassist Stefan Lessard undergirding Matthews’ buoyant odes to abandon, while the melodic runs of saxophone/flutist LeRoi Moore and sawing fiddle of Boyd Tinsley offer counterpoints. These songs, however, explode the template with gothic romance, horror, and yes, a few goofy odes to bliss.
As work began on the record, DMB were tasked with contributing a recording to Wes Craven’s meta-horror sequel Scream 2. Though the band owed its stardom to peppy, worldbeat and jazz-inflected acoustic rock, one entry from Matthews’ songbook made immediate sense for inclusion: “Halloween,” an uncharacteristically aggressive number about a jilted lover that originally appeared on the group’s 1994 pre-major label EP Recently. They got to work on an update, shaping the queasy, see-sawing composition into something more sinister. Matthews’ voice usually sounded friendly and jovial. Now he was howling, dripping menace and bile, part Tom Waits with a side of Vincent Price. The band began wondering if perhaps the song was too interesting to give away, so they reversed course, submitting “Help Myself,” an old reworked tune, instead.
“Halloween” is a testament to the darkness that lingered in the corners of the breezy music of the Dave Matthews Band from the very beginning. With Crowded Streets, that darkness moved to the fore, unavoidable even among supremely horny songs like “Stay (Wasting Time),” the knotty funk of “Rapunzel,” and the sleek and devotional “Crush,” where Lessard’s Mingus-inspired bassline and blocky jazz chords impart an air of smoky sophistication. “No need to bear the weight of your worries/Let them all fall away,” Matthews sings at the start of the record; then he and his collaborators spend the next hour documenting all manner of anxiety.
Though the DMB lineup was already vast, a wide cast of guests joined to fill all available space. Alongside jam band fellow traveler Béla Fleck on banjo, Alanis Morissette on backing vocals, and the Kronos Quartet, returning contributors included Chapman Stick player Greg Howard, pianist Butch Taylor, trumpeter John D’earth, and crucially, guitarist Tim Reynolds, whose frenetic guitar work nudges toward prog. Though Reynolds was essentially the band’s lead guitarist on their first two albums, Lillywhite had largely directed him away from the electric guitar. Now, he had more creative license: electric was the default, playing in the right speaker against Matthews’ acoustic in the left.
Lillywhite may have suggested DMB as a “non-rock” act, but the album’s unlikely first single, “Don’t Drink the Water,” embraces their rock bonafides. Like Pearl Jam’s “Given to Fly,” the song is an overt homage to Led Zeppelin. With Beauford and Lessard locked into a Bonham and John Paul Jones-inspired churn, Matthews explores the subject of colonialism based on his childhood in apartheid-era Johannesburg: “What’s this you say? You feel a right to remain? Then stay and I will bury you,” Matthews sings. The song drew on his South African roots but it also addresses the forced expulsion of Indigenous people in the United States. “Your land is gone and given to me,” Matthews sings, before Morissette joins him for a wailing conclusion, their entangled voices suggesting the cries of the damned far more than friendly whoops from the crowd at Red Rocks.
Matthews makes ample space for songs that subvert the grim qualities of the epics. On “Crush,” he evokes the specter of Marvin Gaye, sounding more than a little like Sting, and backed by Beauford’s dynamic harmonies. The song’s title was inspired by an in-joke about “Crash Into Me,” but it’s also a kind of reaction to the former song, maturing from youthful voyeurism into something more gentlemanly and charming. Speaking with GQ’s Alex Pappademas, Matthews said that unlike “Crash Into Me,” “Crush” communicates his devotional intent: “[W]hen I hear it now, I don’t go, Jeez, pal. Pull your pants up.” Following a fiery solo by Tinsley, the song settles into a luxurious jam that could extend indefinitely.
Twenty five years later, Before These Crowded Streets remains DMB’s most experimental album, a crossroads in the band’s history. Their followup, 2001’s Everyday, would pull back on the eclecticism in favor of pop cohesion. Not that overt darkness and challenging structures stopped Streets from debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, displacing the Titanic soundtrack. Certainly, it represented Matthews’ desire to dispense with the perception he was a mere “chugalug mirth-meister,” as David Browne put it in his 1998 Entertainment Weekly review, but it also showcased his desire to step forward and embrace his paradoxical multitudes.
The record’s penultimate song, the tragicomic “Pig,” synthesizes Matthews’ viewpoint. As Moore and Tinsley play woozy, elegant arcs with the easy feel that characterized the band’s earliest singles, Matthews adopts a gentler perspective: We have right now, and that’s enough. Like so many of the songs on Crowded Streets, this one concerns blood, but now it represents a life force, “alive deep and sweet within.” Here, Matthews carves out a peaceful space between the impermanence of life and the certainty of death. “From the dark side we can see a glow of something bright,” he sings, suggesting an interdependence between what we love and what we fear, the space between who we are and who we imagine ourselves to be. Stumbling into unlit territory, the Dave Matthews Band found something gleaming deep in the shadows.


The Antlers’ first full-length in three years confirms that they are operating in their own zone. It doubles down on their last record's somnambulant moodiness and increases the focus on atmosphere, resulting in their longest, most subtle release.

Familiars

The Antlers have grown up in their own way: slowly. The project’s first full-band effort, 2009’s Hospice, followed two collections of roughshod solo material from lead vocalist Peter Silberman, records that sounded as if he were fumbling in the dark; Hospice, then, was light making its way into the room, a collection of indie rock that drew from the sounds you’re likely to find on an iPod owned by someone in their mid-20s—sparkling chamber-pop, angsty, emotive vocal surges, gaping shoegaze guitars. Two years later, they returned with Burst Apart, a transitional effort that found the Antlers getting weirder, incorporating the kind of saucer-eyed ambience familiar to anyone who’s ever heard Sigur Rós in a smoke-filled dorm room.
If Burst Apart was the sound of the Antlers dipping their toes into unfamiliar waters, on the following year’s mini-LP Undersea they took the plunge: notions of immediacy and concision were discarded, replaced by a slow-handed approach to space rock that valued detail over the type of explicit melodicism showcased in their earlier work. In opposition to the music that was being put forth, the shift on Undersea was startling, bold, and more than a little brave. By industry standards, the Antlers were growing—Undersea was their first release for Anti-, a significant step up in visibility from their previous label, NYC-based farm-team indie Frenchkiss—but as the lights were increasingly trained on them, the band managed to find their own darkened corner in the musical landscape. Hospice could sound like the work of a band that was very good at sounding like other bands; Undersea was the point at which the Antlers found themselves. Familiars, the Antlers’ first full-length in three years, confirms that they are operating in their own zone. They’ve doubled down on Undersea’s somnambulant moodiness and increased focus on atmosphere, resulting in their longest, most subtle release.
As with every Antlers record since Hospice, Familiars was self-produced, and the group’s collective ear for texture continues to take hold as its own expressive instrument. As ever, drama is in no short supply either. Silberman’s lyrical predilections, in particular, have long possessed an emotional scope that speaks to the honest naiveté associated with stumbling through your young adulthood: Hospice essentially compared love and loss to a children’s cancer ward, Burst Apart was all house fires and metaphors for sexual frustration, and Undersea explored the age-old concept of water-as-emotional metaphor. In an interview with Pitchfork, Silberman name-checked filmmaker Gaspar Nóe’s trippy opus Enter the Void, a movie that treats death as an orgasmic act of self-exploration, as one of a few inspirations for Familiars’ funeral-pyre slow-burn. “There are different ways to look at death,” he said, “and they don’t have to be depressing at all.”
In that same interview, Silberman claimed that the Antlers are frequently pegged as a “sad band,” and while no one will mistake the breathy ruminations of Familiars as “happy music,” the record’s instrumentation has a transcendent brightness, not unlike what you might see when closing your eyes after staring into the sun for too long. The spacious lope of “Intruders” is made up of muted guitar stabs and molasses-slow drum work, surrounded by heavy swirls of space and dotted with the occasional horn and keyboard flourish; “Surrender” rests itself on a gently descending guitar figure that, at the six-minute song’s midpoint, reaches upwards to impossible heights before dissolving in pedal-abused piano and horns soaked in warmth.
Whether they’re reaching above their heads or to the deepest depths, on Familiars the Antlers are even more concerned with catharsis, resulting in a string of patient, beatific crescendos. (The word “patient” is, at this stage of the Antlers’ career, operative: only two of Familiars’ 10 songs finish before reaching the five-minute mark.) The elegiac “Director” spends its first two minutes and change moving at the pace of a burning stick of incense, as Michael Lerner’s brushed cymbals create a suitable bed for drowsy guitar; then, the weight shifts in the form of rolling drums and just enough six-string fuzz, evoking the type of soft psychedelia that Spiritualized have occasionally turned to. Opener “Palace” is essentially five-and-a-half minutes of declarative melody that comes on strong and stays there before vanishing completely, while “Revisited” is the record’s torch song—but one without resolution, as Silberman repeatedly switches between anguished vocals and receding into the background, breaking into a elliptical guitar solo near the song’s end that floats above the fizzy electronics.
As a vocalist, Silberman’s never shied away from theatricality; on Hospice’s “Sylvia”, he seethed and cried to match that song’s bursting guitar burn of a chorus, and every successive release has seen him expanding his register to match the music’s at-times skyscraping qualities. On Familiars, Silberman cements himself as one of indie rock’s most compelling and distinctive singers. He’s capable of projecting a wide, complex range of emotions—angry and defeated on “Hotel”, cautiously hopeful on “Intruders”. On the straightforward saunter of “Parade”, he takes on the ruminative prognostication of someone looking at a yearbook and wondering if the future and past possess any connection at all.
Lyrically, Silberman’s very much in his therapist’s-couch lane on Familiars, with a few subtle shifts in his mindset that you’d expect anyone currently reaching the end of their late 20s to undergo. “Maybe when I’m older,” he optimistically states in the beginning of “Intruders”, “I’ll be clearer/ More attuned and understanding.” On “Refuge”, he morbidly turns his gaze to what life’s endgame means—”When you lift me out of me/ Will I know when I’ve changed?”—but despite that and other brief meditations on death-as-release, Familiars’ thematic focus is a bit more scattered than Silberman name-checking The Tibetan Book of the Dead would have you believe. This time around, the theme he returns to most is identity—who we see when we look in the mirror, what happens when we don’t recognize who’s staring back—and on “Intruders”’ emotional peak, he confronts the terrifying possibility of encountering a dopplegänger with what sounds like murderous intentions: “When my double scales the wall/ I’ll know exactly where he’s landing/ And I’ll surprise him.”
Indeed, even as Silberman’s stuck with his most literary affectations—full-sentence lyrical statements, a heavy reliance on symbolism—he and the Antlers have loosened in terms of pretense over the last five years, taking on more self-absorbed concerns as their music has grown more insular and drowsy. The 28-year-old Silberman was barely of drinking age when he released music under the Antlers guise in earnest, and in the eight years since he and his band have aged publicly, charting their own distinct course while making music about the small-scale challenges faced when you feel truly lost in the world. Against all odds, they’ve become one of the most interesting indie rock bands working, and the stately beauty of Familiars is the latest satisfying effort from a band that continues to reward those listeners who give them the attention their elegant, secretly weird music deserves.


Wild Nothing's new EP is his most synth-heavy outing yet. It has the same relationship to its full-length predecessor as the Golden Haze EP did his debut: it’s noticeably bolder, sounds more expensive and crafted with live performance in mind.

Empty Estate EP

Wild Nothing’s two full-lengths have made it clear which artists Jack Tatum models his sound after. Judging from his EPs, he also hopes to emulate their careers. As with his much-cited indie and dream-pop influences-- Belle and Sebastian, My Bloody Valentine, to name a couple-- Tatum tailors his ambitions to the format. With an EP's expectations and stakes lowered, he builds on the previous full-length and takes some artistic risks to push his sound forward. His second EP, Empty Estate, has the same relationship to its full-length predecessor as the Golden Haze EP did his debut: it’s noticeably bolder, sounds more expensive and crafted with live performance in mind. But it’s also the first time Tatum’s music hasn't improved on what came before.
On Gemini and Golden Haze, Tatum's strengths lay in writing modest indie rock songs that stuck, as he found an exact point where familiarity didn’t cross over to derivation. Unlike most current bands in the dream-pop/shoegaze nebula, you sense that Tatum starts with melody and adds atmosphere as opposed to the other way around. With Nocturne, you could hear a concerted effort to be a little more immodest and little less indie on “The Blue Dress” and specifically “Paradise”. These songs weren’t dance music per se, but they had rhythms and fleshier arrangements that Tatum built knowing he’d have a full band at his disposal. Empty Estate continues this push towards extroversion. Where Wild Nothing songs were once centered firmly on guitar with synths filling out the margins, Empty Estate inverts the ratio, leaning toward glittery electro-pop.
Empty Estate tries to guide Wild Nothing towards a more physically charged sound, and it’s not always an easy transition. Tatum still has the same wispy vocals, and the Byrne/Bowie talk/sing approach on the verses of “A Dancing Shell” are as jarring as the typically moony chorus is soothing. Tatum will be the first to admit he doesn’t put too much stock in his lyrics and his chosen genres can tolerate plenty of nonsense. But it's a little hard to take when Tatum’s stonefaced sincerity doesn’t break on a line like, “I’ll be your monkey/ Every night/ If it makes you love me.”
There’s a chance Tatum could make a full adjustment by Wild Nothing’s third album-- he still hasn’t written a bum song. After Empty Estate, what he has done is composed a couple of bum instrumentals. You can’t just toss out “On Guyot” and “Hachiko” if you value Empty Estate as a full experience; credit where it’s due, the entire thing is carefully sequenced to play as a continuous, single serving. But Tatum’s arranging skills lag far behind his songwriting and the instrumentals lack any sort of textural contrast or field of depth. Still, the EP as a whole suggests that, regardless of the outcome, a gradually evolving songwriter like Tatum benefits from not waiting two years between releases.


Air's wonderful debut is, perhaps oddly, re-packaged as a 10th-anniversary set with a disc of B-sides and Mike Mills' 1999 tourfilm Eating, Sleeping, Waiting and Playing.

Air: Moon Safari - 10th Anniversary Edition

Moon Safari - 10th Anniversary Edition

We all know what horrors illegal downloading has wrought on new releases; one side effect of that erosion involves labels attempting to recoup those losses by re-animating their back catalogues, Mary Shelley style. Before the big swoon, it was tough to justify a reissue without a remaster, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and so lately, we've seen an increasing spate of albums re-released for no other reason than a round-number anniversary. In the cases of your Thrillers and your Pet Sounds, that's a justifiable enough benchmark-- in a way, those reissues provide the platform to talk about us and how much we've changed as much as the music. Something like the new deluxe edition of Air's Moon Safari, though, is a slightly trickier proposition.
For starters: There's the niggling question of whether Air's debut, superb as it is, really merits canonical treatment. As a collection of songs, it's endured well enough over time; after a decade, it still holds up fine. But so have a ton of other similarly acclaimed and successful records from 1998, and it doesn't seem remotely appropriate to roll out the red carpet for those either. As far as modern connect points go, there's nothing really happening musically at the moment that makes Moon Safari suddenly worthy of re-examination. If anything, with its dainty sonics and polite arpeggios, a lot of this record runs counter to the discofied and Balearic dance that's currently in fashion. Even Air would quickly abandon the cultivated library music aesthetic that characterized this record in favor of spindlier, more complicated, more sinister material. So yeah: As a snapshot of a place in time, you could do a lot worse than Moon Safari. But as something to be canonized in a three-disc set? The physics are lost on me. What, aside from the poetry of the number 10, is the exact reason to celebrate it now?
Granted, it probably wasn't Air's idea to do this, and it's certainly not their fault that Moon Safari's legacy ultimately yielded a long list of bands along the lines of Lemon Jelly, Zero 7, Morcheeba, and Thievery Corporation, so perhaps it's fairer just to concentrate on what this reissue offers rather than the reason for it. The answer there, unfortunately, is: mixed returns. Although a robust collection featuring the original album, a disc of bonuses and B-sides, and a DVD featuring Mike Mills' 1999 tourfilm Eating, Sleeping, Waiting and Playing, this reissue doesn't offer nearly enough in the way of substantive bonus material to warrant its existence, nor does it even select the right material from that era to re-package.
The bonus disc is the biggest indicator of the lack of quality control or thoughtfulness on hand: instead of material from the duo's excellent surrounding EPs, Le Soleil Est Près De Moi and the singles compilation Premiers Symptômes (a lot of which could actually benefit from having a light shone on it), we get five live tracks-- including a horrible, thrashy version of "Kelly Watch the Stars"-- which expose Air's live approach early on as light on musicianship and heavy on grating affectation and kitsch. Of the remaining demos and remixes, only the two-minute long, string-heavy take on "Remember" (itself a resurrected B-side) and a sparse demo of "You Make It Easy" (from when it was an instrumental called "Bossa 96") are remotely illuminating. Everything else just feels incidental and reheated.
Provided you like your filmmaking mannered and slightly cutesy, Mills' documentary remains a worthwhile curiosity, but even still, I can't imagine that anyone who'd be willing to shell out the money for a Moon Safari 10th Anniversary Edition wouldn't be acquainted with it already. Aside from that, you're basically paying for the packaging; in this case, that means a DVD-sized hardcover package with a nice, if slightly unnecessary, lyrics book attached. As a case for Moon Safari as a classic record, it falls a little short. But as a nice keepsake of a lovely record, it could be worse. I guess in the end it's really just a matter of whether you're fanatical enough about this album to buy it again. Virgin's either betting (or hoping) that enough of you are.


When I first heard Swedish psych outfit Dungen via the 2004 international breakthrough album *Ta Det Lugnt*, Gustav Ejstes' lyrics could've been as dopey as Neil Diamond's "Porcupine Pie" for all I knew. Turns out they weren't, really, but for someone who doesn't comprehend Swedish that's simply a safety net. The important thing was Ejstes' voice-- a rich, multitracked sharp/sweet melodic hum which could be non-contradictorily described as a "beautiful whine." Nobody else in rock sounds like him, and since he's clearly aware of the multilingual nature of his audience-- especially as a musician with an international rolodex of influences

4

When I first heard Swedish psych outfit Dungen via the 2004 international breakthrough album Ta Det Lugnt, Gustav Ejstes' lyrics could've been as dopey as Neil Diamond's "Porcupine Pie" for all I knew. Turns out they weren't, really, but for someone who doesn't comprehend Swedish that's simply a safety net. The important thing was Ejstes' voice-- a rich, multitracked sharp/sweet melodic hum which could be non-contradictorily described as a "beautiful whine." Nobody else in rock sounds like him, and since he's clearly aware of the multilingual nature of his audience-- especially as a musician with an international rolodex of influences and interests himself-- he puts a strong focus on the purely musical aspect of his voice. Understand Swedish, and you get the full meaning; if you don't, you still get caught up in the striking way he draws out all those unfamiliar syllables.
Yet that voice had become familiar by 2007's Tio Bitar-- enough that it was easier to catch your breath and cast a slightly more jaded ear towards the formula churning away: bucolic Scandinavian folk, fuzzed-out psych, a bit of bop-jazz elasticity, lots of Keith Moon-ish drum fills, and ringing piano chords. Even then, going from sounding revelatory to sounding reliable isn't exactly falling off, and the music still made it hard to believe that it was put together largely by Ejstes alone in a multi-instrumentalist, producer-assembled capacity informed as much by Pete Rock as Pete Townshend.
4 follows Tio Bitar, and while it's clear Ejstes has grown comfortable without getting complacent, he's managed to shake things up for the better this time around. Most notably, there's been a subtle shift to the group's dynamic-- and it is a group this time around. As much as Ejstes' one-man operation's been played up, there's a greater role for other musicians on 4, as Gustav opts to focus primarily on vocals and piano; Reine Fiske reprises his Tio Bitar role providing most of the lead guitar spark, Johan Holmegard takes over behind the drum kit, and touring-band member Mattias Gustavsson holds bass duties. 4 shows this permutation of Dungen to maintain the kind of tautness previous albums have thrived on, the end result of a touring unit assembled and honed to ideally recreate the careful constructions of a stylistically restless auteur in a live setting.
The resulting lineup has come up with a tighter, more focused, and more compact record than Tio Bitar (10 songs, 38 minutes, no songs over five minutes) that still finds a way to touch on all of Dungen's sonic tendencies in lively, unpredictable fashion. Moments of mournfully wailing acid-rock beauty (the violin-tinged opener "Sätt Att Se") give way to gentler strains of classically influenced pop ("Målerås Finest"). The loose-fingered, high-speed freakout of "Samtidigt 1" is joined in progress right after the fluttering pastoralism of "Det Tar Tid"; its partner "Samtidigt 2"-- culled from the same full-band jam session-- soars into some kind of Deadhead exosphere only to dissipate into the soft piano/chime/flute melodies of "Bandhagen" (and its not-so-soft drumbeat-- like every other Dungen record, 4 is a percussive monster). And sometimes the contrasts build over the course of a single song, like when the jaunty Zombies/Kinks march-beat of "Finns Det Någon Möjlighet" eventually shifts from lighthearted, piano-driven frolic to a feedback-drenched trudge through creeping dread.
And since the music has a renewed surprise to it, that voice does, too. Even though 4 has a greater emphasis on instrumental compositions that don't suffer much from the absence of Ejstes' vocals, it's a bit of a disappointment that they only show up in half the songs. Especially considering that they're a fine melodic accompaniment to just about anything the musicians are capable of-- crooning Byrds-inflected self-harmonies over the minimalist Motown groove of "Ingenting År Sig Likt", for instance, or keening through the Turkish-influenced stomp of "Mina Damer Och Fasaner". But even if that voice's an incredible instrument, it's just one piece of what's become an intricate structure.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a crucial jazz record from 1961, led by a lyrical trumpeter and composer who captured the many overlapping currents of the genre.

Out Front

At the dawn of the ’60s, jazz was in the midst of a growth spurt that doubled as a culture war. Ever since Ornette Coleman’s 1959 debut at New York’s Five Spot—a gig that’s often viewed as the official unveiling of free jazz—critics and artists had been fretting over the future of the genre like parents of a wayward teen. Much like when bebop swept the scene in the mid-’40s, the prevailing sentiment was that you had to pick a side. Were you a defender of the jazz faith, or a champion of its latest modernist turn?
At least one thoughtful young musician, trumpeter Booker Little, wasn’t buying the binary. As he put it in a 1961 interview, if jazz were mapped on a political spectrum, he’d fall somewhere in the center. “My background has been conventional,” the conservatory-trained 23-year-old told the writer Robert Levin, “and maybe because of that I haven’t become a leftist, though my ideas and tastes now might run left to a certain degree.” He went on to defend Coleman (“…I think I understand clearly what he’s doing, and it’s good”) before touching on one of his core aesthetic tenets. For Little, dissecting an artist’s methods without considering the feelings that informed them made no sense. “I can’t think in terms of wrong notes,” he said. “Because if you insist that this note or that note is wrong, I think you’re thinking completely conventionally—technically—and forgetting about emotion.”
These beliefs were crystallizing at a critical time for the trumpeter. Tragically, he wouldn’t live to see 24—in October 1961, he died from uremia, essentially blood poisoning due to kidney failure. But before his death, he would back up his statements with an album that made the post-Ornette jazz wars seem petty and myopic. Out Front, his third LP as a leader, recorded in two sessions in the spring of ’61, didn’t feel remotely like free jazz. But it crackled with a Coleman-esque charge thanks to the saxophone work of Eric Dolphy, who in 1960 had recorded alongside Ornette on the album that would become the flagship of that movement, and would soon take part in John Coltrane’s most adventurous work to date. Nor did it fit in with the hard-bop sound that defined the jazz mainstream at the time, where fellow rising trumpet stars Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan (both born, like Little, in 1938) each found a comfortable home. Yet at moments it swung as hard as a typical contemporary Blue Note recording.
It didn’t exemplify any other trending jazz topics of the time, either: spacious modal jazz à la Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue; the classical-fusion movement known as Third Stream; Dave Brubeck’s rhythmic experimentation as heard on Time Out. But Out Front’s sound—marked by elaborate arrangements featuring piquant harmonies and ever-shifting time signatures, occasionally broken up by moments of startling minimalism—felt just as fresh as any of those developments.
Out Front was simply Booker Little music. And if the goal was to bring a composer’s touch to jazz while keeping emotional expression at the forefront, few statements in the genre—and even fewer outside the catalogs of, say, Duke Ellington or Charles Mingus, both of whom the trumpeter cited as key inspirations—can rival it. (Candid, the label that originally released Out Front, will reissue it in a remastered vinyl edition later this month.) What Ellington realized with a big band or Mingus a midsize ensemble, Little achieved with a sextet. “Moods in Free Time,” maybe Out Front’s quintessential track, shows just how much he could accomplish in that format, summing up the Booker Little soundworld in just under six minutes. It starts out feeling orchestral, with Little leading his band—including Dolphy; Max Roach, the pioneering bebop drummer and Little’s first major employer; trombonist Julian Priester; pianist Don Friedman; and, on this track, future bass legend Ron Carter—through a tightly plotted overture. The horns trace distinct but interlocking paths through a complex multi-part theme that cycles through various rhythms—including a prominent section in 5/4, a favorite meter of Little’s that shows up all over Out Front. As crisp and driving as the arrangement sounds, the harmonies have a slightly sour, mournful quality, reflecting Little’s love of the tastefully outré. (“In my own work I’m particularly interested in the possibilities of dissonance,” he told Levin. “The more dissonance, the bigger the sound.”)
In a typical jazz tune of the time, following this “head,” you’d expect a series of solos on the same form. But right around the one-minute mark, the piece downshifts into a dirge, with the horns sobbing out a painfully slow background pulse as Little improvises aptly yearning lines, maintaining his trademark tone—rounded and gorgeously pillowy—even as he cranes for piercing high notes. Roach, a master of vigorous swing, sets aside a timekeeping role entirely and draws on his classical percussion background to conjure eerie whooshing-wind sounds from a set of timpani drums. When Dolphy enters on alto sax, the vibe changes from somber to downright harrowing. Ushered in by dramatic mallet strikes from Roach, he plays a shuddering, eruptive phrase, setting up what feels less like a jazz solo than some kind of sonic Butoh, where long, jagged swoops and wobbling squawks collide with bluesy punctuations. Once Dolphy finishes, Roach switches back to the kit for a brief, sharply etched solo that reestablishes the feel of the intro, and the band comes in for a reprise of the initial theme. Taken as a whole, “Moods” is bizarre yet breathtaking—a through-composed musical manifesto that perfectly balances compositional intrigue with an outpouring of visceral feeling.
How is it that Little had already staked out such rich aesthetic terrain at such a young age? His early background offers some clues. Little’s mother and father both played music in church; his sister, Vera, sang opera and enjoyed a long, distinguished career in Europe. In 1959, she sang Bach at the Vatican, becoming the first-ever Black singer to perform for a pope. Little started playing trumpet while attending Memphis’ Manassas High, where he formed close bonds with future jazz greats like pianist Harold Mabern and saxophonist George Coleman. In his autobiography, Miles Davis made reference to “the great young trumpet player Booker Little,” and wrote of this Manassas cohort, “I wonder what they were doing down there when all them guys came through that one school?”
Little went on to study composition, theory, and orchestration at the Chicago Conservatory. While there, he met rising saxophone star Sonny Rollins, who stressed to Little the importance of finding one’s own sound, and also facilitated his first high-profile gig by introducing him to Roach. In 1958, the drummer—who’d previously worked with another young trumpet star, Clifford Brown, before Brown’s death in a 1956 car accident—hired Little for his working band, which also included the trumpeter’s old Memphis pal George Coleman. Little quickly established himself as a star soloist with Roach, but his writing made an equally strong impression. On pieces like “Larry-Larue” and “Gandolfo’s Bounce,” Little compositions that showed up on Roach’s albums during his tenure in his band, you can already hear him using a jazz quintet with three horns as a mini orchestra. Little’s own debut album, 1958’s Booker Little 4 and Max Roach, featured just two horns—his trumpet and George Coleman’s tenor—but achieved a similar effect.
The next couple years were a flurry of activity for Little. He made a powerful and assured quartet album under his own name; recorded more sessions with Roach, including the groundbreaking civil-rights-movement–inspired We Insist! and an all-star date held in protest of the Newport Jazz Festival, which featured a brilliant Little original; and tracked his first date with Eric Dolphy. Things ramped up majorly in 1961: In February, he re-teamed with Roach, We Insist! producer Nat Hentoff and the Candid label on singer Abbey Lincoln’s Straight Ahead. The album features two pieces arranged by Little, including “In the Red,” a chilling evocation of, as he puts it to Hentoff in the liner notes, “that awful suspense you’re always in when you’re broke.” With its crawling tempo and tense harmonies, it plays like a prelude to Out Front—the clearest statement yet of Little’s expressionistic vision.
But Out Front, recorded in March and April of ’61 and also produced by Hentoff, was where everything clicked into place—the first album-length immersion into the trumpeter-composer’s heart and mind. In line with "Moods in Free Time," the full LP has an uncommon gravitas. On “Strength and Sanity,” one of several downtempo pieces on the album, Don Friedman’s romantic piano intro and Roach’s whispery brushed cymbals set the table for a classic jazz ballad, but the composition refuses to settle down. After two minutes of gently unspooling melody, the rhythm section drops out and the horns play a kind of wounded fanfare, where Dolphy’s alto and Priester’s trombone frame Little’s trumpet in deep ochre tones. Little goes on to play a lovely extended solo with soaring peaks, but the heaviness of the arrangement—its sense of being suspended in a persistent existential ache—never subsides.
“Man of Words,” dedicated to Hentoff and paying tribute to his profession, is another pensive masterpiece. Played without drums and featuring Ron Carter on bowed bass and Dolphy on bass clarinet, it employs an incredibly simple arrangement to awesomely intense effect. The entire piece, just short of five minutes, consists of a droning, descending melody, repeated over and over, with roomy pauses in between. Little is the only soloist, and his phrases are both precision-sculpted and filled with pathos. He builds steadily from slow arcs and pirouettes to an arresting climax: Right around the 3:40 mark, he plays three pulsing, almost gasping high notes. The last one, which rings out while the rest of the band is silent, feels like some kind of sonar ping into the abyss.
There’s also optimism on the record, as on hard-swinging opener “We Speak,” where Little’s bold, proudly ornate writing feels more anthemic than reflective, and “Quiet Please,” which repeatedly zig-zags between slow and fast, portraying the struggle of a parent trying to keep a rambunctious child quiet. (“He’ll obey for a few moments, but he’s quickly active and roaring again,” Little, already a young father by then, told Hentoff in the liner notes.) The accelerating structure of the piece inspires thrilling quicksilver alto runs from Dolphy.
Out Front possesses a rare kind of self-assurance, a staunch commitment to an unusual vision that demands full engagement from both the players and the listener. Around the time Little recorded these pieces, as Coleman, Dolphy, and others were spearheading the emerging jazz avant-garde, his peers Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard were releasing albums packed with catchy, swinging tunes that presented them as star soloist-bandleaders. Out Front features plenty of virtuosic playing, but its fireworks are secondary to its shifting moods and sonic curveballs. The album feels more like a suite tailored for a concert hall than a set that would translate well to a nightclub.
But Little wasn’t having any second thoughts; he knew he’d found his direction, and that Out Front was a breakthrough. “I don’t think there’s very much of my work prior to these Candid albums that expresses how I feel now about what I want to do,” he told Levin after recording the LP. He had lots of ideas about upcoming projects, including a possible multimedia work involving visual art and an album that featured tenor-sax giant Coleman Hawkins in what Little termed “a modern setting.”
Meanwhile, right after the album’s second session, he got back to work. In May and June of 1961, he recorded with John Coltrane on what would become Africa/Brass, the first album of the saxophonist’s legendary Impulse! Records run. In July, he and Dolphy spent two weeks co-leading a band at East Village club the Five Spot; one full night was recorded, yielding an electrifying pair of live albums. In August he made his last recordings with Max Roach, which would end up on the drummer’s Percussion Bitter Sweet, an album filled with rich arrangements that seem to point back to the orchestral feel of Out Front. And either that month or in September—the precise date is fuzzy—he made one final album under his own name: Booker Little and Friend, later reissued as Victory and Sorrow, the title of the opening piece.
That fall, apparently just days before his death, Booker Little visited the office of Down Beat magazine and gave an interview. Only one quote was ever published, but that brief statement was enough to capture how much determination he still had in him, and how certain he was about his creative direction—that unique weave of improvisational pathos and compositional sophistication that came to full flower on his recordings that year. “Writing is a special thing with me,” he said. “I want to play, but I am very interested in writing because I hear so many things for others. I’ll develop, I need to, and I’ll do it in my own way. I’ll always be me in the important part that’s me. The other part, the part people buy, that’s different. I’ll still always be me, even there. You can’t sacrifice integrity and still be you.“
In his liner notes to Out Front, Nat Hentoff pointed out a slight paradox in the album’s title. “In Out Front, Booker Little is actually not at all ‘far out’ in the usual sense of that term,” he wrote. “He is, on the contrary, a strongly self-disciplined creator of forms that follow his own inner feelings.” It’s a smart read: As both his music and his words show, Little wasn’t necessarily aiming to revolutionize jazz in the way that Ornette Coleman already had or John Coltrane soon would. Maybe for that reason, coupled with the fact of his untimely death, Little’s influence has been limited—though in the six decades since his death, other trumpet luminaries have made a point of keeping his legacy alive. Freddie Hubbard included a lovely ballad dedicated to his peer and friend on Hub-Tones, recorded almost exactly a year after Little’s passing; Dave Douglas, Kenny Wheeler, and Nicholas Payton each composed tributes to Little in the ’90s and early 2000s; and in 2017, new-school star Jaimie Branch singled out Little as “by far my favorite trumpet player.”
Booker Little wasn’t a rule-conscious conservative, nor an iconoclastic “leftist,” but some artful weave of the two, intent on using music to explore his own distinct blend of beauty and anguish, victory and sorrow. Thankfully, before he left us, he found the courage to look beyond all the furor over right and wrong notes, zeroing in instead on the ones that simply felt the most true.


Drawing from footwork, jungle, acid, and more, the UK producer lets his breakneck tempos lead him to some of his funkiest, most kinetic—and oddly beautiful—work to date.

Oh No EP

Between hyperpop’s entry into the mainstream, Gen Z’s embrace of drum’n’bass, and the international success of regional genres like footwork and singeli, warp-speed electronic music is everywhere, leading the charge as popular music, broadly speaking, picks up the pace. In his work as Itoa, the British producer Alex Godoy has staked his claim in dance music’s fast lane, regularly clocking 160-plus BPMs without ever stalling out on straightforward genre imitation. His music draws deeply and liberally from rapid-fire strains of house and techno—classic acid, footwork, bassline, and jungle—which he manipulates into wildly danceable assemblages. At its best, an Itoa song is packed with intricately moving parts that, taken altogether, coalesce into a sound that’s rubbery and relentless. On his latest EP, Oh No, Godoy presents some of his most kinetic, funky, and oddly beautiful work to date, refining his sound while also unlocking promising new skills.
Opener “Wet Brain” kicks things off on a slightly anxious note, building from a timid hi-hat and woodblock rattle before escalating into a footwork-fueled trance banger, complete with chirping synths and choppy vocal science. What’s most remarkable is how seamlessly Godoy segues from pounding dance music into unexpected pockets of beatless ambience and back again. His talent for wrongfooting the listener with both beauty and brutality extends to “Girlboss Microplastix,” which lurches forward with a broken drum break before the floor falls out and lands in a pocket of ominous calm, a respite before the violence of the drums resumes with a vengeance.
Godoy’s color palette brightens considerably toward the middle of the EP, at which point things get wildly fun. The title track, a collaboration with Japanese performer なかむらみなみ (Nakamura Minami), pits her staccato, shit-talking flow against an alternately throbbing and squelchy bassline that wouldn’t be out of place on a SOPHIE record. Unlike other vocalists who perform over footwork—like Jessy Lanza, who floats dreamily above the mix, or DJ Taye, who races at light speed against the clock—the rapper’s hop-scotching vocals fasten perfectly into the beat’s pocket, her every syllable building out the song’s kinetic rhythm and unlocking the latent mischief and swagger of Itoa’s production.
But the euphoric highpoint is the massive “Catch Eyes,” which weaves a grinding TB-303 bassline into a quick-stepping syncopated rhythm; then, just as everything’s running smoothly, Godoy detonates the song’s groove with an explosion of racing pinwheel synths and babbling, fragmented vocals. For an artist so skilled at producing utilitarian, floor-filling dance music, Godoy clearly delights in proving just how far he can tilt a track off its axis without ever losing the flow.
The momentum that Itoa achieves and sustains throughout the EP is remarkable—and close listening reveals just how energizing and effortless even the most meticulous elements of his production can be. Despite the relentless tempos and complex detailing, Oh No never feels exhausting or top-heavy. Its power derives from the collision of two opposing forces: the density of Godoy’s ideas and the dynamism of his light touch.