From the beginning, Sam Smith seemed set for stardom, and that's the main problem with his debut album In the Lonely Hour: it feels like the record company has groomed him within an inch of his life.

In the Lonely Hour

From the beginning, Sam Smith seemed set for stardom: his debut came at the start of Disclosure's world domination and gave them a show-stopping performance on the lingering mega-hit "Latch". Less than a year later, he appeared on Naughty Boy's "La La La", a summer smash that went to number one in the UK and the top of the charts in the rest of Europe. By the time he released "Money on My Mind" at the beginning of 2014, it was already a done deal. The young 22-year-old, the son of a wealthy London banker who was fired for spending too much time trying to jumpstart his pop career, would be the UK's next big thing. And here we are: the week where his debut In the Lonely Hour, sees release in North America, the album is sitting at number one in the UK for the second week in a row, riding two chart-topping singles and edging the US top ten with its latest.
So why all the hubbub? If you've heard "Latch", you already know about that voice: Sam Smith possesses one hell of a set of pipes, able to go from a commanding lower register to an inhumanly high squawk in record time. (“I remember hearing ‘Latch’ and thinking, ‘No person can go through that many vocal ranges at one time without going through a computer,’ ” said one of his A&R reps in a recent feature.) That talent is central to "Money on My Mind", an itchy-feet drum'n'bass number with a chorus so high-pitched you might mistake Smith for a bird. More importantly, however, he details his signing to the record label and his apparent unwillingness to kowtow to record label demands, attempting to set himself apart as a freethinker. "I do it for the love," he insists on the chorus, and "You say, 'Could you write a song for me?'/ I say, 'I'm sorry I won't do that happily'" in the verse. But the main problem with In the Lonely Hour—and all of Smith's music up to this point—is exactly the opposite: it feels like the record company has groomed him within an inch of his life.
With undeniable pipes weighed down by generic songcraft, Smith makes me think of Duffy, a blue-eyed soul singer recruited in the wake of Amy Winehouse to capitalize on the sudden hunger for retro soul music. While Smith doesn't tap into that sound as directly, the emotional impact of the syrupy strings, by-the-book lyrics about heartbreak, and trite chord progressions is the same.
In the Lonely Hour is meant to be Smith's love letter to a man who never returned his feelings; it's an affecting idea, and Smith's inexperience—he hasn't yet been in a relationship—should provide for a fascinating level of sincerity, but too often it feels like he's being held back by an oppressive sense of musical conservatism. "Stay With Me" (currently making its way up the U.S. charts) has all the elements of a stunning ballad, a plea for a lover to stay over after a one night stand just for some human contact. Unfortunately, a hammy choir over-emotes all over his delicate late-night vulnerability, taking Smith's raw honesty and overcooking it to a grey pallor.
There are other moments of lucidity that pop up amidst the midtempo mush. The tender "Good Thing" has Smith expertly navigating tangled lyrics about obsession ("Too much of a good thing won't be good anymore/ Watch where I tread before I fall")—but then there's an inexplicable blast of cheesy Hollywood strings in lieu of a bridge. "Leave Your Lover", meanwhile, has a disarmingly direct chorus: "Leave your lover/ Leave him for me," all sung matter-of-factly in his most gorgeous falsetto. He repeats the conceit on "Like I Can", this time a mess of clichés built on a trendy acoustic guitar stomp, a sound that's more representative of the rest of the album. "Not in That Way" is a histrionic weeper with all the subtlety of a Susan Boyle song, and the type of lyrics written by high-schoolers still stuck rhyming "moon", "June", and "spoon".
Still, most of In the Lonely Hour is enjoyable just for Smith's voice alone—so unusual, unpredictable and utterly pleasing that it can be wonderful to listen to even through the most egregious of lite-FM tropes. But so much of the album remains hard to swallow otherwise, lost underneath layers of industry polish and focus-grouped lyrics. Though there's no doubt In the Lonely Hour comes from a personal place, it doesn't end up feeling like a very personal record. Except for one part: on the album's very first line, Smith quivers "When I signed my deal/ I felt pressure." Judging from how In the Lonely Hour turned out, his suspicions were for good reason.


Over the course of five EPs issued on five different labels-- the highlights of which are compiled here-- this Los Angeles duo's mastered a low-tech immensity that allows its songs to seem much bigger than their constituent parts.

Weirdo Rippers

Beginning this past March, Los Angeles duo No Age released five impeccably decorated, vinyl-only EPs on five different labels. The blitz coincided with a seemingly endless string of live shows-- the kinds you go home and tell friends about. Not a bad one-two punch. Shattering eardrums in clubs is the most natural way to spread the word about your band, and their records were a smart way to spread a wealth of material while creating colorful collector's items in the process. Weirdo Rippers, an 11-song compilation consisting of highlights from those records, stitches songs together by sound and feel, rather than presenting them chronologically. The songs flow together swimmingly, and despite track-by-track brevity (three songs are under two minutes, three are under three) the group has mastered a low-tech immensity, and the album builds into something much bigger than its constituent parts.
Guitarist Randy Randall and singing drummer Dean Spunt nabbed "No Age" from the 1987 SST compilation of the same name. The album featured Black Flag, Blind Idiot God, Henry Kaiser, Pell Mell, and others taking a stab at instrumental music-- not a bad historical, aesthetic, or West-Coast linkage. The band's coolly detached, eye-catching design schemes aren't random, either: Randall and Spunt, who were two-thirds of beloved noise-rockers Wives, are firmly entrenched in the L.A. DIY/art scene. They collaborate on visual/performance/video art and are connected to grassroots art space the Smell-- the building on the cover of Weirdo Rippers-- where you can score vegan pancakes, drink orange juice, and get a $5 haircut while watching Silver Daggers bleed the speakers. No Age played their first show there in April. (Continuing with the multi-trasking, Spunt also runs PPM! records, which has put out music by Wives, Mika Miko, KIT, Shoplifting, and John Wiese.)
A loud duo with art credibility, a massive touring schedule, and a one-man label in its ranks brings Lightning Bolt to mind; but No Age have a softer surf-psychedelic side that conjures another twosome: old Olympia favorites Kicking Giant. Or, as another Pitchfork staffer pointed out, the best K Records fuzz-rock band of all time, Lync. No Age, though, goes into an even airier, bedroom-pretty realm, with a punk rawness to their delivery. Their oft-chanted hooks (see "Boy Void" or "Every Artist Needs A Tragedy") are out-of-phase, the approach sloppy and spastic. At the same time, these songs come off soporific, restful, and totally in control. Nothing grates. It all feels soft and up-close.
"I Wanna Sleep", maybe a mellow response to Harry Pussy's "I Don't Care About Sleep Anymore", is a feedback lullaby beneath mellow, chugging guitars. A similar rhythm opens "My Life's Alright Without You", which jump-cuts suburban goth to the Dickies' nasal enunciations ("Well, I hate you/ I hate you/ My life's alright without you"), only after a shuffling loop. Every now and again the drums and vocal kick disappear, revealing that trippiness, which never quite goes away. "Everybody's Down" (full disclosure: I included it on a CD I recently curated) is the most rousing, kick-ass song I've heard in a while. Opening with brief spate of backwards distortion strands, it shifts to a speedy strum and doubled vocals shouting teen-bleak lyrics that culminate with a poppy shout of angstful communalism: "Everybody's down/ Every soul in every town/ Everybody's got me going 'oooh ahhh ooh ahh ooh ahh ooh'." A speedier shout and dust-kicking drum'n'guitar wrap it up with a clatter.
Deerhunter's Bradford Cox recently called No Age his favorite new band. Like Cox's crew, Randall and Spunt seem to be creating their own universe. In "Loosen This Job", after drum sticks tap out a code and distortion gently floods the room, Spunt asks, "Why are there so many records in my life?" Or at least it sounds like that. It's hard to tell. Whether or not that's what he says, or what he means, he's right. Despite an overload of music these days, if often feels like there are fewer essential listens. At the end of Weirdo Rippers, you're left with a rare sense of having discovered something new. Outside just their sound, No Age bring back the DIY energy of Kicking Giant and Lync and '90s zines and, importantly, a life away from computer screens. The songs have thumping heartbeats. Each and every one. All the jangling feedback loops and cymbal submersions in the world can't hide that.


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 piece of Detroit history that rippled through all of hip-hop.

Welcome 2 Detroit

The opening two notes of Welcome 2 Detroit, a dramatic double hit of modulated bass guitar and dusted organ, represent the culmination of a vast musical history. Not only was this album J Dilla’s debut as a 27-year-old solo artist, but it was also the first time that name appeared on a record cover. After nearly a decade of DIY releases, high-profile remixes, and productions credited to Jay Dee, slowly a renown bordering on reverence was built for one James DeWitt Yancey.
Though he had several creative phases yet to come, Dilla was, in many ways, operating at the very peak of his game at the turn of the millennium. His production work with A Tribe Called Quest had brought him into the neo-soul collective Soulquarians, a circle of like-minded collaborators who had just worked on a string of critically acclaimed LPs: the Roots’ Things Fall Apart, Common’s Like Water For Chocolate, and Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun. After donating his talents to artists, it was time for Dilla alone to step into the spotlight.
What Dilla ultimately delivered to the label was not even close to a beat tape, which was what he was ostensibly commissioned to create. As much a portrait of a city as a personal introduction, Welcome 2 Detroit is closer to a jazz-funk concept album like 1969’s Yusef Lateef’s Detroit than a conventional rap record, framing Jay’s own particular reinvention of hip-hop within the city’s multi-decade legacy, including live excursions into techno, electric jazz, and Afro-funk.
It was a lot to get across, especially for an artist known chiefly to those listeners who cared enough to read productions credits in the liner notes—which is why it packed so much into its very first bar. That initial double tap, followed by a more intricate resolution of the musical phrase in a bass and drum shuffle, admirably served to condense the history of Dilla, Detroit, and beyond. Like many individual notes and drum hits in Jay Dee’s extensive beat catalog, they reward obsessive, granular contemplation. The texture of the drum sample suggests a segment of funk or psych-rock committed to tape somewhere in Detroit in the early 1970s; you can practically hear the room noise at Motown’s Studio B or the equally legendary United Sound Systems.
Play those two notes again: Maybe they were lifted from some lesser-known Funkadelic spin-off, a more psychedelic side project from Motown session guitarist Dennis Coffey or his Sussex labelmate Rodriguez, or maybe even a bluesier passage from Detroit proto-punks MC5 or the Stooges. The simple loop not only echoes through all those references in the space of a single bar, it conjures the clash and swell of the larger forces—the riots, the assembly lines, the church choirs—that shaped them. It’s hard to listen to that short vamp without assuming a hurts-so-good frown.
Despite the feel of its local origins, the sample actually comes from Moğollar, a Turkish group that sounds to the Western ear something like a cross between the Moody Blues and a band of actual gypsies. Jay Dee dug deeper and ranged much further afield than any of his contemporaries—all the way to Asia Minor, in fact—to isolate a few bars of gold that could speak perfectly to the heart of the inner city experience. The connection to Detroit, however, is almost entirely sleight of hand, created by Jay’s words (“Welcome to the D, Baby! It’s all live out here”) and the context he’s placed around it. A close listen to the Moğollar original, the 1970 single “Haliç'te Gün Batışı” reveals even more sorcery at work. There are organ flourishes that disappear on Welcome 2 Detroit, evidence that Jay Dee filtered, freaked and Frankensteined bits of the source material to get the perfect fluid-sounding bed for his first 50 seconds of fame.
There are novels that could be written just about this intro, recorded, according to Dilla’s original liner notes, “the night B-4 the album turn-in date” with a handheld mic under the influence of Möet and weed. The raw, dusted production quality, for instance, foreshadows Just Blaze’s work on JAY-Z’s 2003 “Public Service Announcement,” itself the start of a whole era of East Coast rap where the grungier side of rock was reclaimed by black MCs as a signifier for the depredations of the hustler lifestyle. But it is, of course, only the intro, its main job to pave the way for what follows—another introduction. “Y’all Ain’t Ready,” though more in line with the hip-hop productions Dilla had become known for by ’01, is essentially a second course of appetizers, letting Dilla swear to the listener’s unreadiness. In fact, as ardent Dilla dissectors have recorded, the words “get ready” or similar (“Y’all ain’t ready” etc.) are repeated some 18 times between these first two tracks. But what we’re meant to get ready for, apparently, is a sensation that combines musical enjoyment with a state of extreme disorientation. Track three, “Think Twice,” is another sharp left turn, the third in under three minutes. Instead of some riotous pay-off, there’s a single lingering chord painted delicately in electric piano, which then melts into a neo-soul cover of “Think Twice” originally by trumpeter and jazz fusion guru Donald Byrd.
This unconventional sequencing is Dilla’s way of announcing Welcome 2 Detroit’s unconventional story, filled with stray dialogue, some kind of plot, and a dizzying montage of twists and turns meant to sketch the whole spiritual landscape of Detroit. The result feels like the opening chase sequence of Beverly Hills Cop, where Eddie Murphy hangs from the back of a truck of stolen cigarettes as it jackknifes its way across Detroit to the tune of the Pointer Sisters “Neutron Dance.”
All of Dilla’s abrupt jumps gradually settle into a sort of jerky rhythm all their own. What at first seems like a series of non sequiturs slowly reveal an underlying structure: Welcome 2 Detroit is actually two or three different kinds of styles woven together. One is an entirely sample-less and mostly instrumental, like “Think Twice,” the first of five such compositions on the album that re-interpret a genre through Dilla’s lens. “B.B.E. (Big Booty Express)” is also a clear tribute to Detroit techno and its foundational texts (Kraftwerk, Vangelis, the progressive italo-disco of Giorgio Moroder and Alexander Robotnick) created on Triton keyboard and the iconic Roland TR-909 drum machine. “Rico Suave Bossa Nova” and “African Rhythms” are essentially drum covers of by the Milton Banana Trio and Oneness of Juju.
Carving through the instrumentals is straight ahead rap—or at least as straight-ahead as any Dilla project ever gets—operating more like a release from his original Detroit crew Slum Village. Several cuts on Welcome 2 Detroit sound more like sequels to tracks on their breakout 1997 album Fan-Tas-Tic Vol. 1, but here, in keeping with the all-city theme of project, the SV roster is replaced by a stellar who’s-who of mostly D-based vocal talent, including Dilla himself, who also stretches out as an MC. On tracks like “The Clapper,” he comes into his own as one of the game’s greasiest MCs. This side of Dilla unexpectedly complements the sophistication and musicality of his production, as if you suddenly discovered that Four Tet and Beanie Sigel were actually the same person.
In some ways, these different modes could be evaluated and reviewed on their own, but much more important is how they speak to each other and the overall thematic statement of Dilla’s debut. Where his influences sampled bits of soul-jazz to provide melody and timbre to compositions of eight-bar breaks, Dilla more often sampled bits of, well, anything to reconfigure them into less predictable compositions that functioned more like jazz. Helming all the instruments himself except for voice, trumpet (Dwele) and trombone (credited to “Dwele’s brother”), Dilla abandons the parameters of sample-based music altogether on “Think Twice,” following Byrd’s composition through it’s three distinct melodic movements with a feel that stands up with the best of what you might find on a Maxwell or D’Angelo LP.
Occasionally, Welcome 2 Detroit is marred by a goofily sexist voicemail skit and other moments of clunkiness (“‘Cause you know it’s Frank-n-Dank/Take a sip of/Ya drank”) and even a certain repetitiveness as Dilla’s always-banging drum tracks tend to veer consistently towards the minimalist end of his palette. The zags into other territory serve to break up the metronome quality of the rap tracks, but the irrepressible melodic sense that marks much of his other hip-hop production (think Slum Village “Fall in Love” or Common’s “It’s Your World”) are nevertheless a bit siloed here.
But even the jumps between genres and the album’s slightly scattershot feel speak to his restless brilliance. It wouldn’t be a proper Dilla introduction unless he was innovating on multiple levels—melodically, rhythmically, thematically—even if these seem to pull him in multiple directions at once. If anything, the needle-skipping mood hurt only in the sense that they keep the album moving sideways, rather than building upwards; always engaging but knee-capping the emergence of a larger sweep or clear story arc.
Even when they pull against each other, these individual moments of Dilla-ness—the squelchy-low end frequencies painted with a detuned Mini Moog Voyager, the bits of soul records you know by heart transformed into odd melodic passages that float in and out of a rap boast in sublime defiance of conventional verse/chorus structure—are are so, well, dope; the touch so deft, the innovations so original, that even the skips, clunks, pauses, and unexpected turns will be pored over and replayed so obsessively they almost become a part of the listener.


The experimental metal trio’s four-song, 76-minute album is the peak of their career. It’s dense and invigorating, highlighting the band’s dexterity, creativity, and clarity of purpose.

The Healer

From the start, Sumac has welcomed abundance. Singer and guitarist Aaron Turner, an omnivorous multi-disciplinary artist with some 20 musical projects to his name, feeds all of his storied past into his band with drummer Nick Yacyshyn and bassist Brian Cook. When the Pacific Northwest supergroup debuted in 2015 with The Deal, their songs were already knotty hybrids of sludge, hardcore, noise, death metal, and beyond. And each subsequent record has sounded increasingly unsatisfied with keeping pure the tenets of heavy rock’s subgenres. Whether building or deconstructing, Sumac’s open-ended metal continuously seeks to incorporate more and more and more.
For all their indulgences, Sumac are veteran musicians in absolute control, whose improvisations are as exact and technically proficient as their dense, circuitous songwriting. This has never been so bluntly apparent as it is on The Healer, the trio’s fifth full-length. Sumac doubles down on everything that made them one of the most fascinating metal bands in recent memory. Grimier chords, longer and weirder freeform jams, utterly confounding rhythms, seismic heaviness, and profound humanity at its core—all sharpened for maximum effect. Their four-song, 76-minute album is a live performance tour de force unique in its dexterity, creativity, and clarity of purpose.
But if jaw-dropping musicianship is a given by this point in Sumac’s career, what makes The Healer exceptional is its command of spatial presence and emotional weight. “World of Light” begins its unhinged half hour as an eldritch ooze of drone, low-end rumble, and Turner’s primal rasp. The cracked caterwaul he releases when crying out “Shiiine!” sounds more animalistic than any guttural growl could. About 11 minutes in, the music starts climbing out of the turbulent soup with slow, deliberate steps. It can feel like some kind of cosmic rebirth or spiritual awakening. Yacyshyn and Cook’s brutal rhythm section sometimes drops out completely, leaving Turner’s guitar and Faith Coloccia’s tape noise to cut haunting shapes from the void. Diving head-first into negative space, Sumac builds tension while revealing what hides beneath each onslaught.
Often what The Healer reveals is hidden in plain sight. The three main instruments are recorded as if under a microscope, more intensely rendering the physicality of their moment-to-moment vibrations. Bass strings rattle against the fretboard like a chained animal; droning feedback crackles like woodfire; the toggle of guitar switches snap like dried leaves; cymbals burst and glimmer like fractals. The hyper-reality of these peripheral sounds brings a raw psychedelia to the music, which is a rich through line across The Healer. “Yellow Dawn,” full of warbling organ notes and low-slung tom patter, begins with the band’s most explicitly psychedelic arrangement. It carries through the merciless pummeling and origami time signatures to reemerge as an untethered guitar solo that’s as much “Dopesmoker” as it is “Black Hole Sun.” Such recognizable and warmly loved sounds round out the album’s more intricate stretches in a way that galvanizes both.
In a year that has seen Knocked Loose going viral on Spotify and Deftones rank among the most popular bands listened to during sex, Sumac has released their least crossover-friendly record yet. The Healer stands in stark contrast to dopamine-drenched metal blasts the length of TikTok videos, like a meditative yet grotesque Jodorowsky film in all of its surreal excess. Epic album closer “The Stone’s Turn” is a mystifying journey, full of starts and stops, whirlwind blast beats, diffuse psych, and electrified riffs that just fucking go. If Love in Shadow searched ever more deeply for metal’s untapped possibilities and May You Be Held confidently wrestled with its roiling unknown, then The Healer swallows its universe whole and reforms it anew. It’s an album that uses the rejection of metal’s well-trodden forms not as an endpoint but as a catalyst for bringing something else into being.


26-year-old Swedish singer and songwriter Tove Nilsson's debut album showcases her foibles and off-kilter perspective on heartbreak. She offers shape and personality to a record that might otherwise be written off as too slick or inert, or indistinguishable from a host of peers making competent, spacious, and downcast pop music.

Queen of the Clouds

We’ve reached a point at which the once-hyperbolic term overnight success is literal. Catchy songs and videos find huge audiences instantly but quickly lose their adhesive; stars burn ultra-bright and ultra-fast. But we’re also in an era of quiet, slowly spreading hits—polished, anonymous-seeming pop songs that percolate and achieve ubiquity over many months. They take root on small blogs, find homes in cosmopolitan retail stores and overpriced fitness classes. They’re used in TV shows; they excite a cappella groups. Eventually, as if by some abstract force designed to counterbalance the internet’s star-making warp speed, some begin gradually inching up the pop charts. Songs now become full-on phenomena years after their initial recordings; Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and Disclosure’s “Latch” bubbled up forever, it seemed.
Another artist making such an upward crawl is Tove Nilsson, a 26-year-old Swedish singer and songwriter who goes by Tove Lo. Her résumé includes writing credits for artists like Cher Lloyd and Lea Michele from “Glee”, and she’s firmly rooted in Sweden’s current network of pop characters. In high school, she played music with Caroline Hjelt of Icona Pop (for whom she’s also written songs); she’s linked with Max Martin and production duo the Struts. After listening to her music—bruised, brightly arranged pop songs that feel grand but not excessive—it should come as no surprise that she graduated from Stockholm’s Rytmus music school, the place where Robyn was trained.
Nilsson released a song called “Habits (Stay High)”, and the accompanying art showed the singer with mascara tears streaming down her face, in a photo that looked like it could have been snapped on an iPhone—about a year-and-a-half ago. It’s a big, sticky song, but not so big that it stuns your senses or numbs you into enjoyment. The single, which just recently cracked the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100, is an exclamation of lost love and self medication; it contrasts a giant hook and chorus (“I gotta stay high all the time/ To keep you off my mind”) with snappy verses filled with quietly distinct, often strange imagery: of Nilsson eating her dinner in the bathtub, getting drunken munchies, seducing dads on playgrounds.
This sort of color—which might feel whimsical, were the content not so dark—pops up frequently across Nilsson’s assured major-label debut, Queen of the Clouds. Her foibles and off-kilter perspective on heartbreak offer shape and personality to a record that might otherwise be written off as too slick or inert, or indistinguishable from a host of peers making competent, spacious, and downcast pop music. She thrives on understated contradictions and grim quirks: While her friends are dating guys who are “turning 53,” she sneers on “Like Em Young”, she says prefers younger men. She gets drunk during the day and stays that way into the night, not the other way around, she tells us on “Talking Body”, a song that turns a lustful gaze on a male partner. On that song, seemingly low stakes are given great weight, and delivered with dead seriousness: “If you love me right/ We fuck for life.” On a song called “Moments”, she resents her cushy, happy childhood, as though it’s caused her to work doubly hard in order to become an interesting artist.
“I can get a little drunk/ I get into all the ‘dont’'s,” Nilsson continues on that song, before delivering the kiss-off: “But on good days I am charming as fuck.” It’s this sort of disarming honesty, a coupling of self-doubt and boldness in well-phrased lyrics—not necessarily Nilsson’s great hooks—that stick in the brain while listening to Queen of the Clouds. In two months time, she'll join Katy Perry on an arena tour, and by then, that the majority of the audience members will most likely be quite familiar with her music—and assumedly, they'll be just as delighted to hear the odd, charismatic little asides in her songs as they will be to belt out the choruses.


Australian electronic outfit Cut Copy never sounded like a band that had a problem getting to the point. On Free Your Mind, though, their most overtly fun and least dynamic music restates the obvious over and over again.

Free Your Mind

Cut Copy never sounded like a band that had a problem getting to the point. Nor did they ever sound like a band that needed a serotonin boost. Yet, even “Lights & Music”, “Need You Now”, “Hearts on Fire”, “Take Me Over” and just about any of the Australian quartet’s uniformly excellent and directly-titled singles can sound wishy-washy and kinda dark in the face of Free Your Mind, its Successories screen-saver album cover and Dan Whitford’s claim that the title refers to a freedom that’s “universally positive and timeless.”  Maybe Cut Copy were hippies all along, and whether you think that’s progress or a serious regression, Free Your Mind is at least a sensible continuation of their trajectory from the cosmopolitan, club-friendly and DFA-affiliated In Ghost Colours to the breezier, more festival-ready 80s pop of Zonoscope.  But there’s a difference between freeing your mind, losing your mind and just flat-out shutting it down. And you just wish Cut Copy left even something to the imagination, as their most overtly fun and least dynamic music restates the obvious over and over again throughout Free Your Mind.
Their aims are admirable here. Whitford claimed the band took their inspiration from the Summers of Love, both 1967 and 1989. Philosophically and sonically, those years are something of a package deal anyway—Stone Roses and Inspiral Carpets were essentially psychedelic pop-rock bands with beats, while Primal Scream and Happy Mondays had no qualms about straight-up pilfering the era. You can’t doubt Cut Copy’s commitment to sidling up with nu-Madchester types like Jagwar Ma and Paradise, as there’s barely any modernist touch to be found on the title track, just all of your favorite E’s and wizz signifiers, sorted out neatly: staggered house piano vamps, endlessly thumping bass drum and Whitford letting his vocals get all baggy in every sense of the word, an amalgamation of Shaun Ryder’s dysfunctional relationship with pitch, Ian Brown’s bedheaded proclamations and Bobby Gillespie’s revolutionary hokum.
In about five minutes, you hear everything new Cut Copy has to offer, though they stay true to their strange nostalgia for the future by slipping inside the proverbial acid house on “Let Me Show You Love” and all but sampling Stone Roses’ “Don’t Stop” on “Take Me Higher". There are enough highlights to still make their ecstatic live shows a must-see; “Walking in the Sky” is stately flower-child pop while “We Are Explorers” reaches the hands-in-the-air mania as effectively as their previous singles. But with its timbale breakdown, a chorus melody with sharp contours rather than flabby curves, it’s just a reminder of what you're missing out on here.
Free Your Mind has a personality, at least. It’s a concept album of sorts, taking you out of the desert (Coachella’s EDM-friendly Sahara Tent?), above the city and... something about the waves. You wouldn’t think they’d have much more to say about holistic healing and solar-religiosity after ending Zonoscope with a 15-minute song named “Sun God", and they don’t really, though it doesn’t stop them from trying—the lyrical component of Free Your Mind is straight Screamadelica magnet poetry about us getting higher/shining brighter than the sun and getting free and getting loaded. And while Whitford’s slack affectations are pitch-perfect on “Free Your Mind”, elsewhere the same effect just means he’s singing off key, capturing the tone of his influences, but lacking the necessary rock-star posturing.
If this seems like an unusual amount of focus on Cut Copy’s lyrics, it’s because the music itself seems content to keep the beat and little else. Though it’s every bit as sequentially-formatted as In Ghost Colours or Zonoscope, Free Your Mind lacks the dynamism of its predecessors, the DJ-curated ebb and flow. You can laugh at the ridiculous spoken word interludes, but they’re about the only thing that can jar you out of the mid-album lull created as Free Your Mind goes forward. With few exceptions, it’s basically a Cut Copy album that’s just deep cuts—you get the same octave-jumping funk basslines (“In Memory Capsule”), the occasional acoustic-laced pop-rock (“Dark Corners & Mountain Tops”) and slow-moving disco-pop from their past records, only with lumpier melodies and Dave Fridmann’s mixing job using reverb like packing peanuts to make Free Your Mind sound both puffy and stiff.
Cut Copy’s music has always been simple; the difficult part was trying to explain in non-illusory terms what made Bright Like Neon Love, In Ghost Colours and Zonoscope glorious and uplifting rather than silly or even flat out dumb. My take is that they had omnivorous enough taste to show they take their craft seriously, while avoiding crowd-moving mock profundity and proving they don’t take themselves all that serious. Free Your Mind manages to be Cut Copy's most homogenous and it's most "message-based" record yet, and in doing little other than turning on, tuning in and dropping out, there’s precious little separating it from the vapid electro-pop to which Cut Copy used to be an alternative.


Isaac Hayes' game-changing film score, which launched the soul/funk soundtrack craze in the early 70s, is given a deluxe reissue.

Shaft OST [Deluxe Edition]

It's not often that a musician gets a chance to initiate a massive shift in two different fields of entertainment at the same time. Things were different before Isaac Hayes made the leap to scoring movies: you had your Beatles vehicles and your concert documentaries, your ripped-from-the-charts soundtracks (Easy Rider) and your film scores that became pop hits (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly). But there was nothing quite like the convergence of popular and cinematic music in Shaft, at least not since Duke Ellington was tapped to soundtrack Anatomy of a Murder 12 years previous. With Shaft, Hayes didn't just break through with a #1 pop album, #1 pop single, and Academy Award, he changed the musical directions of Hollywood and R&B simultaneously. Within two years, damn near everybody in soul had a soundtrack in their discography, resulting in career-defining classics (Curtis Mayfield's Super Fly) as well as creative transitional experiments (Marvin Gaye's Trouble Man). And it hit hard in the other direction, too: by 1973, Bruce Lee and James Bond alike were busting heads to Lalo Schifrin and George Martin scores that threw in the same serpentine wah-wahs and supple funk percussion that nabbed Hayes his Oscar.
And yet most people have a hard time looking past that first song. For all the "baaaad mother--/ Shut yo' mouth" rapport and whocka-chicka style that provoked a thousand deconstructions of 1970s attitude, "Theme from Shaft" was an intricate overture doubling as a character-establishing theme that made a title card all but redundant, and it proves how easy Hayes' transition from songwriter to film-score composer actually was. The liner notes to Stax's new, remastered Deluxe Edition reissue of the Shaft soundtrack make note of Hayes' previous foray into the field (the semi-obscure Norman Mailer film Maidstone) and the advisement of jazz composer Tom McIntosh to "just do your thing" instead of worrying about taking cues from the score to an epic like Doctor Zhivago. But despite his non-traditional approach-- The Isaac Hayes Movement was said to have recorded "headwise," without the use of sheet music-- Hayes reached an ideal midpoint between film scoring convention and R&B auteurism, and Shaft is full of cinematic cues and motifs that came naturally to a musician who'd already pushed the boundaries of symphonic soul two years before on Hot Buttered Soul.
The majority of Shaft is instrumental, with lots of incidental music that runs between a minute to four and change; it's best experienced in the original filmic context but still has a certain appeal on its own. Aside from being a rich vein of sample material (the agitated cricket-chirp guitars in "Walk From Regio's" and the simmering, brassy strut of "No Name Bar" being two of the richest), these tracks are also an illuminating cross-section of what Hayes and his musicians-- the Bar-Kays, the Movement, and the Memphis Strings & Horns-- were capable of. The Hammond-driven "Bumpy's Lament" is the most distinctive nod to Stax as it existed in both the mid 60s and the early 70s, combining the grittiness of gospel roots with opulent strings and flutes. "Ellie's Love Theme" and "Shaft Strikes Again" take it even further, grafting Burt Bacharach/Hal David light-pop melodies into the mix to add an undercurrent of upscale sophistication. And the nods to jazz (the Wes Montgomery-esque guitars in "Café Regio's") and blues ("Bumpy's Blues", one flying-V and raspy-smooth drawl away from being an Albert King single) were, if anything, emblematic of how versatile the Stax/Enterprise "house style" had actually become.
There are still a couple moments of Isaac Hayes as we know him in a more traditional, non-cinematic sense, even though one of them isn't just montage-ready but a sort of montage in itself. "Soulsville" is one of the quintessential 70s slice-of-life-as-protest songs, and while its travelogue-style breakdown of ghetto strife is a now-familiar theme, it's also clearly written as an entreaty for otherwise-oblivious whites to sympathize with Black America's troubles ("The chains that bind him are hard to see/ Unless you take this walk with me"), and its mournful sax might be the most iconic moment outside the title theme. Then there's Hayes as marathon runner: the simmering funk of "Do Your Thing" takes vamping to a staggering extent, starting with a slinky backbone and working its way into a manic, wailing-guitar frenzy that seems calculated to top the already-intense climax of Hayes' own "Walk on By". It's that rare 19 1/2-minute song that's so propulsive and energetic that it goes by like it's five, though the band does get so exhaustively thorough with wringing every last drop of sweat and power out of its groove that eventually one of the guitarists just starts riffing off the three-note NBC theme for no apparent reason. (Left on the CD/digital version: the sudden, hilariously meta "fuck it, we're out of time" needle-scratch ending.)
Within a couple of years of Shaft, Hayes had become so much of a soundtrack celebrity that it briefly threatened to eclipse his other work, and by 1974's Tough Guys and Truck Turner he was able to knock out an entire album's worth of soundtrack-ready funk so easily that he had more than enough time to star in the movies themselves. But while his music never really regressed-- Truck Turner, soundtrack or no, might be his best album of the 70s-- Shaft is where Hayes' meteoric popularity peaked. And for damn good reason: he created a theme song that was both ubiquitous and game-changing. But, as the liner notes reveal, it was the last thing he wrote for the score-- making it a song whose strengths were simply the culmination of an already extensive and finely-crafted soundtrack.


Crash of Rhinos' second album, Knots, is the result of endless practice in the time since the UK band's 2011's Distal and a formidable inspirational spark. Knots is an intuitive, rigorously plotted record hinting at genre transcendence.

Knots

The title of Crash of Rhinos’ stunning second LP is taken from a list of stalemates-- “wasted nights, impasses and knots.” The Derby, UK, quintet spends the duration Knots trying to break through these deadlocks, and they start with anthemic single “Opener”. With equal parts anxious anticipation and relief, Ian Draper barks “you’re not wasting time” to his companion, embodying the stomach-in-knots feeling that pervades the record: the two are going to sleep together that night or never see each other again, but nothing’s going to be left unsaid this time. It’s a confrontational song about a confrontation and it’s almost impossible for hear it and remain a disinterested bystander. My first listen, I wanted to tear a phonebook in half. A colleague said it made her want to cry, “in a good way.” But the heart’s a muscle too, right? Make no mistake, Knots is emo as hell and a reminder that the term evolved from “emotional hardcore.” It’s an album of real stakes and bone-deep commitment, where any honest interaction, of mind, body, or soul, is preferably full-contact.
The multifaceted construction of the band allows them to express themselves as both grounded and aspiring, a combination of Dischord’s stoic post-hardcore and the literate, heart-on-sleeve and girl crazy Midwestern emo of the mid-to-late 90s. Crash of Rhinos describe themselves as “five voices, two guitars, two basses, one drum kit,” adding, “we make a racket.” The roles are fluid, as drummer Oli Craven is just as likely to be foregrounded as any of the guitarists, while the overlap of steely, resonant lead vocals and unvarnished yelling result in both strident melodies and unorthodox harmonies. That’s a lot to keep track of and on their 2011 debut Distal, Crash of Rhinos occasionally lost the handle, a promising band a bit overwhelmed by their wealth of ideas.
The songs on Knots unfold like brilliant football plays, utilizing synchronization, deception, quick cuts, speed and brawn, the individual players given omni-directional free reign for the larger purpose of forward momentum. “Opener” mirrors the dramatic conversation of its narrators where heavy emotions can no longer be expressed delicately and everything has to go right. All four guitars appear to strike out in different rhythms, yet churn forward by interlocking in their respective gaps and pauses. When “Opener” snaps into its pulverizing chorus, it puts the subtle restraint of Knots into sharp relief-- it’s the only time all five members appear to be acting in unison, and the force is devastating.
Knots is often every bit as hooky following “Opener”, though rarely as condensed into radio-readiness. More than half of the songs here extend past five minutes to accommodate every four-bar tangent or drum fill accenting the band’s burly barstool poetry and dashboard confessionals. I imagine Crash of Rhinos are partial to semicolons, as Knots abides by its instructions: pause. Collect yourself. Go.
The album’s bookends “Luck Has a Name” and “Speeds of Ocean Greyhounds”, are reverse images of each other, the former sprinting out and cycling through quicksilver time changes before settling into a patient build, while the latter starts out as a ballad before closing out Knots with a percussive victory lap. “Sum of All Parts” feigns itself as a mid-album, waltz-timed cool-down before a chorus of doubled vocals and guitars that lunges out of the speakers. There are two short guitar instrumentals-- acoustic fingerpicking exercise “Everything Is” and the ruminative “The Reason I Took So Long”-- and while beautiful in their own right, they’re the only points on Knots where Crash of Rhinos limit themselves to one thing.
They both prove necessary in establishing continuity throughout Knots, as Crash of Rhinos get increasingly ambitious throughout. The first half acknowledges its debt to the bands that will draw in new listeners and nostalgists-- think a softer Fugazi, a musclebound version of tourmates Braid, …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead,  anything J. Robbins has been involved with-- while Side B goes out into more audacious, free-form compositions. On “Mannheim”, they tease out the dissonant chords and oblong time signatures of their earlier work. “Standards & Practice” weaves two gracefully looping guitars for a melody too distinct to allow counterpoint-- instead, the band’s vocals clash in brassy, atonal harmonies like free jazz horns. You get the sense that Knots could be a standard in its current genre, but the exploratory second half suggests Crash of Rhinos are working towards transcending it.
It’s that combination of potential and realization that gives Knots a spiritual connection to its lineage in addition to a sonic one. A UK band whose influences are entirely American, you can picture Crash of Rhinos watching YouTubes of old Fugazi and Braid shows and wishing they had something similar, where the communal expression was as meaningful for the crowd as the artist. The best of this stuff felt like it was perpetually on the verge, that something was at stake, and that’s where Knots finds the energy to answer its main philosophical challenge: Is fear stronger than your desire for emotional freedom? This is played out on centerpiece “Impasses”, where guitarist Richard Birkin screams “it could’ve been a waste of your time!” before the band spasms and double clutches, working up the courage to admit “it wasn’t a waste of mine!” It’s a raw moment, expressing the kind of sentiment that leaves one vulnerable and prone to embarrassment if it’s not reciprocated. There’s an undeniable catharsis in crossing that line as well and after that point, “Impasses” can never go back to being the tense and composed post-punk it presented itself as in the beginning. Instances like these make Knots feel vital. While indie rock still primarily traffics in timid sounds and mannered emotions, Crash of Rhinos dare to care too much on Knots and their risk is our reward*.*

Big Scary Monsters / Top Shelf / To Lose La Track


Direct, smart, catchy, and extremely punk, Shopping is a band for our confusing times. It's for dancing first and foremost, with any political undertones there for the taking after you're done shaking your ass.

Why Choose

Whenever Shopping are asked whether they’re a political band, they always default to talking about dancing. Any messages in their music are purely a matter of circumstance, they say: of being delivered by a queer woman of color, of being a London DIY band who know what productivity looks like on their own terms. It's not hard to see why they'd want to avoid the political umbrella: when a British band cops to having political motivations, their inability to overhaul the system/write "Ghost Town" Part Two is usually held up as a sign of their failure—in the U.K., at any rate. And so rather than subject themselves to that scrutiny, Shopping instead choose to shake off their oppressors, encouraging shimmying to fill the emptiness of the superficial social interactions and masquerade of commerce-as-choice that their songs quite clearly detail.
There’s no shortage of academic texts citing the radical nature of movement, but the trio’s second album, Why Choose, is blissfully direct and free of added intellectual ballast. When so much modern discourse is a teetering layer cake of opinions, it’s bliss to hear Rachel Aggs celebrate idleness in one breath—over the awkward twangs of "Time Wasted"—and then demand urgency on "Why Wait"’s anxious, accelerated disco hi-hats. As she puts it in the latter, "Why choose when I just want it both ways?/ When I could just take it all?/ I wanna do it my way."
To that end, very few of Shopping’s post-punk moves are novel, but the trio maintain an exhilarating, crafty pace, having upped the detail and twisted the structures of their songs since 2013’s Consumer Complaints. The almost uniformly plain guitar tone used throughout is a great showcase for their bright and endlessly varied post-punk tangles. Their nimble songs barely touch the ground, other than the occasional coldwave synth breeze, or seawashed motorik splash à la Electrelane, touches that make for lovely, errant starbursts in Shopping’s otherwise tightly martialed constellations.
A sense of street-smarts survival runs through Why Choose: The rattling guitar of "Wind Up" and "Knocking" is scrappy as a young bare-knuckle boxer. "Take It Outside" runs on caustic pep, mocking the language of empty threat with drummer Andrew Milk delivering weary pleas to "break it up." By contrast, the record’s sincere, personal moments don’t posture. On the brisk "I Have Decided", Agga adopts a deep, unyielding tone to declare, "You won’t change my thinking/ This means nothing to me."
Shopping are in constant conversation, literally so when Aggs and Milk act out halves of two different lovers’ quarrels on "Straight Lines", the second half of a dialogue they started on Consumer Complaints. On that record’s "For Your Money", Milk played the role of a young man hooking up with rich older guys; here he plays the moneyed party, allowing the band to turn the uncertain power dynamic of user and used inside-out again. He reels off his character’s anxieties at the arrangement, concluding: "You go home empty-handed when you go home with his type," but there's no implied judgement of the situation. Shopping’s idea of choice doesn't mean one agenda at the expense of another, but establishing a welcoming space for all comers. It works because their naturally scatty, riotous spark means they could never sound neutral.


The second album from the UK pop producer is pleasant and anonymous, all good vibes and cabana jams.

AudioLust & HigherLove

Play any song from SG Lewis’s second album, AudioLust & HigherLove, and you’ll wonder where you’ve heard it before. A Target or TGI Fridays? Maybe it was a Spotify-curated playlist called “Good Vibes” or “Happy Beats.” You’ve heard that four-on-the-floor drum pattern with the shimmery synth lead at least a thousand times, even if you can’t quite pinpoint where (but probably on a decade-old Daft Punk or Disclosure song). The 28-year-old British producer and songwriter’s wholesome blend of disco and dance music feels designed to soundtrack summer parties and moments when one might unironically mutter, “My life is a movie.” Like the rest of Lewis’ catalog, AudioLust & HigherLove is well-executed and loads of fun, but the question lingers: What, if anything, is distinct about his music?
Despite operating within a familiar pastiche, Lewis is more than just a great impressionist. He has produced for Dua Lipa, Jessie Ware, and Elton John, and his solo work sounds like a successor to Random Access Memories, a collage of squeaky-clean disco, house, and prog-pop that fuses live and electronic instruments. On his 2021 debut, times, he captured a glittery, strobing dancefloor ethos, rotating through a cast of glamorous hooks that hinted tonight might just be the night. It was schmaltzy and sometimes airless, but Lewis’ shrewd, pristine production compensated for the lack of conceptual ingenuity. Even so, times often sounded like the work of a producer still forming an identity, a devotee of Daft Punk and Pharrell reluctant to color too far outside the lines.
AudioLust & HigherLove is bigger, brighter, and more confident than times, its highs higher and its lows less gimmicky. The songs are glossy and anthemic, stuffed with vivid, cinematic details: side-chained vocals, live orchestral arrangements, kick drums so beefy they knock through an iPhone speaker. “Infatuation” and “Something About Your Love” highlight Lewis’ talent for crafting emotive, funk-flecked bangers; he’s a wizard at merging EDM build-ups with ’80s R&B rhythms. Both of these songs feature Lewis as lead vocalist, a welcome wrinkle for an artist who previously confessed a lack of confidence in his voice. On some songs, like “Another Life” and “Honest,” it’s obvious he’s still nurturing that confidence; his rigid, plainspoken melodies sound like placeholders for a more assured singer. But then there are the choruses on “Oh Laura” and “Missing You,” where he extends his range and lands on a pair of striking melodies, proving he’s capable of anchoring an arena-sized pop song on his own.
Lewis’ singing is one of the few novelties on AudioLust & HigherLove. The rest is all breezy grooves and cabana jams, frictionless and blemish-free. By the time “Plain Sailing” arrives more than halfway through the album, we’re already intimately familiar with the phaser-laden pre-chorus, the syrupy stacked synths, the processed vocals coated in a pleasantly dull sheen. Lewis’ writing, which evokes summer breezes and romantic flings, is as memorable as your fourth drink of the night.
Lewis describes AudioLust & HigherLove as a concept record in two acts: “AudioLust is the darker, lusty, infatuated, short-lived, and ego-driven version of love,” he explains in a press release. “The second half represents a much deeper, actualized, and fulfilled version of love.” But these themes—the lifeblood of mainstream pop music—are rendered so generically that they bear little consequence. Yes, Tove Lo revels in the “sweat drip[ping] down your naked chest” on early album cut “Call on Me,” and later, on “Vibe Like This,” Lucky Daye admits that he’s “never felt a vibe like this/Might be worth the risk.” The sentiment is nice, but the vibe is endlessly replaceable.


The UK rapper’s third album is pitched as both a pious expression of worship and an earnest message of self-affirmation—but with plenty of opportunities for flexing along the way.

This Is What I Mean

It’s time to add “singer” to the centipede of slashes that defines Stormzy’s career, because singing is what the rapper/publisher/philanthropist/awkward dancer mostly does on his third album, This Is What I Mean. There are soft coos, choral harmonies, pattering Sprechgesang, and even spirited shots at some lung-busting R&B. He also raps, of course, but he’s already shown that he’s good at that—September’s “Mel Made Me Do It,” a teaser for this album, proved his talent undeniable. It’s true that he’s eked out a few strained choruses before—most notably on 2017’s choir-assisted “Blinded by Your Grace Pt. 2”—but, since then, he’s been having lessons. Now he sings with the palpable freedom of someone hitting high notes in the shower, folding into the collective roars of the soccer terraces, or, more pointedly in Stormzy’s case, tuning harmonies with fellow church worshippers. He spent much of the past 18 months catching up on COVID-cancelled tour dates, bouncing from arena to festival field. But far from reflected adulation and sweaty mosh pits, this record feels imbued with the stillness of the monthly worship meetings that he attends in South London. “I heard Sunday’s the new Saturday,” he offers, offhandedly, on the title track.
The bulk of This Is What I Mean was recorded on Osea Island, a private slab of land that sits in the Blackwater Estuary, off the coast of Essex. For just a few hours each day, a single road connects the island to the mainland before the tarmac is swallowed up by brackish waters. Stormzy needed to isolate himself—from the world, from expectations, and from his inner doubts and demons—to remind himself what freedom feels like. In a setting that was part writing camp and part religious retreat, the sprawling cast of musicians hand-picked to work on the record would wake, eat, pray, and then create. Even with this collective approach, for much of the time, Stormzy is performing for an audience of one: God. Songs like the spare “Holy Spirit,” where he offloads the burdens he wrestled on Heavy Is the Head, are prayers shared. On “Please”—which will stir tabloid headlines for its gentle show of solidarity with Meghan Markle, a fellow lightning rod for the UK’s racist press—he addresses his Creator directly over simple, undulating piano; as his voice slips away to silence, the choir swells to embrace him, like a congregation laying hands on a penitent.
Not that he doesn’t make room for a flex or two amid all the Christian humility. He shrugs off 50-grand charges for sleeping through private jet departure times and blows through luxury watch brands with an ease that would make Switzerland’s toniest dealers blush. It’s wildly entertaining. On the luxurious kick-back rap of “My Presidents Are Black,” he takes potshots at the UK government, offering Cabinet member Michael Gove “something for your nose,” and pokes once more at his old foil Wiley, demurring, “I can’t war with no broken man.” And if he’s not flexing or exploring his faith, then he’s, well, fucking. He delivers “orgasms, more than you can fathom” on “Fire + Water,” and barely winking references to what’s in his pants on “Need You” (whose awkward amapiano log drums exhibit a rare instance of trend-hopping). He has a habit of falling for the corny when he’s pining, and his singing voice is a little too thin to carry off the clichés that pepper “Firebabe” about dancing on tables and “how she lights up a room” being “something to behold.” Sometimes he overshares, but Stormzy’s appeal has long been in his candidness.
The album’s cover depicts an envelope on a doormat. It’s ambiguous enough to hold broad, loaded meanings—just as possibly a letter from an apologetic lover as a demand left at 10 Downing Street’s famous black door. Mostly, though, the album scans as Stormzy’s note to himself, whether he’s writing through paranoia and suicidal thoughts on the lilting “I Got My Smile Back” or letting deep, healing breaths coat the mic on “Please.” Most striking is the clarity of the production. This Is What I Mean is an ensemble affair, but every note, every snare clack and hi-hat, has space to luxuriate. “Ahh, this is clean, this is clean,” Stormzy marvels on the title track. It’s a long way from freestyles in the park. But more than just a feat of engineering, it’s analogous to Stormzy’s clarity of vision and mission on this record. He famously bumped his hero JAY-Z off a song in 2019, and the same considered sense of curation bleeds through at every turn.
If Stormzy’s last album, and the pressure to speak for a generation, weighed heavily, then This Is What I Mean feels lighter, freer. “The second one was stressful but it’s simple for my third/Holy Spirit guide me to the things that you prefer,” he purrs on “My Presidents Are Black,” the album’s thematic anchor. Unburdened, Stormzy is able to open his lungs, not just to scream and shout, but to breathe, and sing. The payoff for the listener is hearing an artist—set aside the slashes—at the height of his powers, both creative and otherwise, and letting his instincts lead.


Debut LP from one of techno's poster boys delivers on the promise of his singles.

Drowning in a Sea of Love

It wasn't long after he released his first 12-inch on James Holden's fledgling Border Community imprint in 2003 that Norfolk's Nathan Fake was tagged progressive techno's poster boy. His age (a disarming 22), preeminent fondness for gauzy synths, and continued close affiliation with Border Community-- now sort of the Green Party of techno labels-- have reinforced that caricature, but its been his gradual shift away from the sturdy rhythms of early tracks like "Outhouse" in favor of the facemelting sounds of "Dynamo" and "The Sky Was Pink" that have cemented the image.
Drowning in a Sea of Love marks Fake's long-awaited debut LP, and sees him complete the transformation from 4/4-friendly house producer into the prog prince of nu-IDM. Where his singles once comprised long, rolling stretches of gravel road rhythms, there's barely a beat to be found here, and what few there are bump less like thunderstorms than metronomes, existing as cursory structures rather than focal points.
It's a drastic change, but it's not necessarily for the worse. Texturally, Drowning recalls both M83 and Morr Music's cutesy cadre of melody-happy synthpoppers, but where the former often feels too rich for consumption and the latter too relentlessly sweet, this strikes a perfect note somewhere in between. It's one of the lightest, easiest records I've heard in a long time, a low-calorie pleasure that makes up for what it lacks in gut-level punch by never seeming to diminish in returns.
"Superpositions", "You Are Here", and "Long Story" are all shoegazer-inspired tracks that begin as embers and finish as forest fires, and "Bawsey" is a beautiful, decaying, minor-key piece that might as well have been swiped right out of Boards Of Canada's textbook, but it's the swoonsome "Charlie's House" that stands as the album's highlight. Beginning with a crisp rhythm track and a glowing, circular arpeggio, it takes on a haunting, dusky quality about a minute in, when Fake introduces his favorite sound: the same yawning, mournful synth that made the original incarnation of "The Sky Was Pink" (which gets a workmanlike remix elsewhere on the record) such a revelation.
Holden's remix of "The Sky Was Pink" was one of my favorite techno tracks of last year, if not ever, and his shadow looms large over this record as well. I might just be projecting what I know of the back story onto the material, but despite having formally moved away from house music, it still often feels like Fake is setting the table for-- or at least overtly tempting-- the remix. Maybe that's why early reviews of this have been just as likely to lump it in with house as with IDM, because there's a certain spirit to what Fake does that can't be erased simply because the backbone has been. Regardless, he's got such a beautiful, producer-ly touch that we should be happy with whatever record he wants to make, so long as he's making them.


On their second album, the Australian quartet expands into a Colossus-sized version of itself. Everything feels bigger, heavier, and more meaningful.

Comfort to Me

Like the perfect comeback belatedly snapping into the mind during a shower, Amyl and the Sniffers’ second album calls back to a former antagonizer with newfound clarity. Two years ago, while the band was touring their self-titled debut, a “gobby pre-teen” accosted singer Amy Taylor on the street in London, calling her ugly. On “Freaks to the Front,” she reclaims the term with pride: “I’m short, I’m shy, I’m fucked up, I’m bloody ugly!” she sneers, pulling a B-Rabbit out of her hat by disarming any future fuckbois before issuing a warning: “Get out my way/Don't bloody touch me!”
Comfort to Me finds the Australian quartet at its most resolute, as Taylor’s lyrics pull us into her endlessly vacillating mind, made all the more relatable for its many contradictions. She wants love but doesn’t need anything from anyone. She wants to smash capitalism but isn’t quite sure she cares enough to pull down the hammer. Sweaty and surrounded in the pit, she’s just moshing on her own.
Despite the internal duality, Amyl and the Sniffers radiate confidence, even as they’re cribbing from the annals of hardcore history.  The band’s secret is in doubling down on, simply, ripping like hell. Produced by Courtney Barnett collaborator Dan Luscombe, Comfort to Me is crammed wall-to-wall with the primal currency of rock music: riffs. And while many of their well-creased notes have been in circulation for a while, they aren’t counterfeit bills. After a few years destroying stages and dives across the world, the Melbourne-based band who once mocked themselves as puerile musicians can finally shred.
Of course, with musical growth and big-time knob twiddlers—Comfort to Me was mastered by Bernie Grundman, who has also worked on blockbusters like Thriller and Aja —comes great responsibility, or at least expectations. Amyl and the Sniffers have expanded into a Colossus-sized version of themselves, magnifying and perfecting what they already did pretty well instead of caving in the foundation of their sound and starting anew. Why change when you’ve conquered the formula?
Anyone who has worn a Wipers pin will recognize a good many of these riffs, or at least detect their essences: “Laughing” reeks of the jagged staccato leads of D.C. punks the Monorchid and its sassier offspring Skull Kontrol. The band squats in X and Gun Club territory on the punk-blues breakup song “No More Tears.” Guitarist Dec Martens’ deft post-chorus line on “Security” is played by a man who I’d wager has heard Magazine’s “Shot by Both Sides.” Their music presents a canon of rock riffs like a succession of waves crashing on the same beach. Amyl and the Sniffers are, as ever, shamelessly chugging coldies by the surf.
Comfort to Me is the band’s heaviest outing yet, and never more clearly than on “Capital,” a Motörhead-influenced bounce that outlines the struggle between activism and apathy. Despite the transparency of the homage, Taylor’s idiosyncratic delivery takes the lead. As she spits tongue twisters like “slapping on the pokies and buying all the backy” at a frenetic pace, she races alongside the instrumentation, nearly outpacing it. It’s like she’s in the room, screaming in your face, determined to spill her mind out before the song has a chance to end.
Taylor has also evolved  as a lyricist. No shade to early romps like “70’s Street Munchies” or “Stole My Push Bike,” but punk’s reigning snarl champion has figured out how to address weighty issues without being didactic or surrendering the snotty squeal that made those early tracks so alluring. On “Knifey,” the band slows it down and lets the barre chords ring, allowing Taylor’s heartbreaking plea to burst through. ”All I ever wanted was to walk by the park/All I ever wanted was to walk by the river, see the stars/Please! Stop fucking me up,” she begs. But she’s armed and ready: “Out comes the night, out comes my knifey/This is how I get home nicely.”
Taylor is either recalling a personal experience and the knife is her weapon of defense, or she’s channelling the ubiquitous dread all women face. In switching pronouns from “I” to “we” halfway through the track, Taylor inverts the “alone in the pit” trope from the beginning of the album; this psychic pain is near-universal. But, as ever, Taylor’s knotty internal struggle reigns: “I turn around and backtrack, because I ain’t that tough.” Comfort to Me transports us to a familiar, paradoxical world: uncertain, harsh, and magnetic.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Beck's 2006 album is reissued as a 2xCD package with all of its attendant videos and remixes from Ellen Allien, Villalobos, and David Sitek, among others

The Information: Deluxe Edition

Whether its quickly canonized status as one of the 1990s greatest albums is deserved or not, the one thing about Odelay that seems the most innovative in retrospect is the avalanche of remixes that followed in its wake. No less than four of the album's songs-- "Devil's Haircut", "Where It's At", "The New Pollution", and "Jack-Ass"-- were released as extended CD or 12" singles and reworked extensively; "Devil's Haircut" alone has somewhere around a half-dozen variations, including Aphex Twin's hyperactive drill-n-bass machete job and a hardcore punk homage/parody titled, amusingly enough, "American Wasteland".
While there was a certain hip-hop methodology to the album's sample-heavy construction and production, it still seemed a bit weird and exciting to hear all these reinterpretations; few artists who fell under the rubric of rock (alt- or otherwise) had left their supposedly finished work so open to other artists' alterations. And with so many layers of postmodernism and context-warping already extant in the original music, each additional remix simply blurred whatever sense of meaning the songs-- opaque lyrics and all-- were supposed to have in the first place. Critics called it irony, but it felt more like reverse engineering.
Ten years later, Beck's notion of malleable pop had grown to encompass two introspective psych-folk albums in Mutations and Sea Change, a Dirty Mind-cum-Emotional Rescue disco-funk monstrosity in Midnite Vultures (which accidentally kickstarted electroclash-- "Get Real Paid" has a lot to answer for), and Guero, a disoriented attempt to try and return to a centered idea of what the Beck "sound" actually consisted of. The (wrong) answer: a collage of a collage.
By the time the mediocrity-stuffed remix album Guerolito came out in early 2006, the idea of easily reconfigurable modular music felt less intriguing than the idea of actually good music, and the summer hype push behind The Information-- make-your-own-design sticker covers, crazy low-budget streaming internet videos, a bunch of blah-de-blah about the user-created-content future of music-- felt less like the excited tinkering of a Fluxus-reared conceptual artist and more like a collar-tugging attempt to grab an audience increasingly disinterested in anything you couldn't put on an iPod. The CD came, the CD went, the press disappointedly mulled over it for a week, and then they moved on to whatever it was Danger Mouse was doing.
Thing is, The Information's a pretty decent album, and time's been fair to it: After half a year's worth of exposure, the moments that sounded like blatant sore-thumb references on first listen-- the "Chameleon"-ic fusion funk of "Cellphone's Dead", the piano in "Strange Apparition" that evokes circa-Altamont Rolling Stones, the synth-bass murmur and crystalline inflections that make "Dark Star" sound like a somnambulist take on Stevie Wonder's "Have a Talk With God"-- feel a bit more integrated into a greater sonic whole, while the album's less-immediate experimental tracks (the micro-Beck "Motorcade" and the Eno-lite "Movie Theme", in particular) have worked their way from dull, instant skip-overs into tolerable diversions. And Beck's lyrics are some of his most immediate, having developed into a coherent and unobstructed examination of modern-age anxiety without losing their beat-poet opacity. Calling it Beck's best since Odelay is sort of faint praise, but while it doesn't have the feel of a revelatory Event Record, the album does cohere into something evolutionary, using Beck's older work as a starting point instead of a salvage yard.
The irony, of course, is that Beck's attempted user-content toolkit of an album is singular enough to avoid benefiting from a bunch of extraneous, context-altering additional material-- especially in a package as unwieldy as the "Deluxe Edition" (has any other album packaging in major-label history made pulling a CD out of a paper sleeve this damn difficult?). Most of the diehard Beck fans who haven't heard the bonus tracks on the first disc probably just haven't figured out the finer points of filesharing, though his attempts at DFA-esque dance-punk ("Inside Out") and giggling, Clear Spot-style Beefheart funk (the Minutemen/Commodores/Sonic Youth/Jodeci-namedropping "This Girl That I Know") are worth hearing at least once.
Like the earlier pressings of the October release, the Deluxe Edition also has all those cheapie videos he made with producer Nigel Godrich, though if you're skeeved out by public access-quality cinematography and inane wigs you're probably better off just skipping to the noir-absurdist Michel Gondry clip for "Cellphone's Dead". And if you screwed up the sticker design on the cover of your old copy, this one comes with the full four-page set, so you can start it over and then put all the extra ones on your "Guitar Hero" guitar or something.
If there's a significant pull to buy this version of the album instead of the slightly cheaper original, it's the full disc of remixes, which are limited in the scope of their source material (three songs, six remixes) but still manage to steer clear of stylistic redundancy. Ellen Allien's propulsive minimal house transformation of "Cellphone's Dead" is the most essential track, downplaying the squelchy bassline of the original in favor of the delicate piano that underpinned it and relying on a ghostly-reverbed fragment of the chorus-- "eye of the sun"-- as the main vocal hook. David Andrew Sitek of TV on the Radio takes a similar route instrumentally on his mix of "Dark Star", scaling back everything but the rhythm and Beck's voice for the first couple minutes, then gradually letting a wave of electronics and an Ornette-style free-jazz sax solo bleed their way through.
The others are take-or-leave matters: Both attempts at re-envisioning "Nausea"-- the Bumblebeez's apathetic-sounding indie-disco slog and the Chap's amorphous orchestral electro-- feel less energetic than the original, while Ricardo Villalobos' 14-and-a-half-minute tech-house extension of "Cellphone's Dead" comes across like a pre-existing instrumental with the vocals stapled to it; here, Beck sounds like he's leaning against a wall in a state of bewilderment watching other people dance and muttering house-rap verses to himself to stave off his nerves.
So, this is a cash-in. Not like it's a bad time for it, since a relatively sparse stretch of the year like this-- Arcade Fire notwithstanding-- feels like a good occasion to revisit a moderately slept-on album that, if anything, at least transcends its gimmickry. Just be aware that once all the stickers are peeled away and the videos fall into YouTube limbo, most of the enjoyment you'll find on it is in the core of the album as it existed six months ago. It is what it is, and it doesn't need to be anything else.


Okovi showcases the searing, fully-formed music of Nika Danilova, an album of close personal experiences rendered into urgent goth-pop songs as emotional as they are necessary.

Okovi

On the cover of her fifth studio album, Zola Jesus is drenched in a similar viscous substance that obscured her face on the sleeve to her 2010 Stridulum EP. Okovi, named with a word that means “shackles” in most Slavic languages, also marks a return to Sacred Bones, the Brooklyn label that nurtured the singer and producer in her early years and on which she’s released all her albums except for 2014’s Taiga, which came out on Mute. Zola Jesus, also known as Nika Roza Danilova, said three years ago that she hoped Taiga would break through to pop radio, climb the Billboard charts, and unpin Zola Jesus from her goth-pop niche. None of that happened; Zola Jesus has still only grazed the Billboard 200 by way of her feature on M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, but the abandonment of her Top 40 aspirations has yielded some of her most powerful music since that Stridulum EP and its sternum-cracking single “Night.”
Since Taiga’s release, Danilova experienced multiple brushes with death: Someone close to her was diagnosed with cancer, a close friend attempted suicide twice, and she herself felt pulled by depression’s gravity. Okovi threads these stories together in both oblique and direct retellings. Danilova yearns “to keep that knife from you” on the mournful, string-based “Witness”; on its punchier sequel “Siphon,” she insists, “We’d rather clean the blood of a living man...we’d hate to see you give into those cold dark nights inside your head.” These direct appeals to suicidal loved ones conjure an urgency that Zola Jesus’s more abstract ruminations on death tended to lack. While Taiga often sacrificed specificity in favor of power—“Dangerous Days” orbited darkness without ever clarifying its source—Okovi’s dramas are hard to miss.
Even explicitly fictional narratives like “Soak,” in which Danilova sings as a woman choosing to kill herself rather than be murdered, resonate with the album’s broader themes. Over a beat and cello combo that recalls Dido’s “Here With Me,” Danilova ventures into death in character, drowning herself in the tradition of Ophelia and Virginia Woolf. The gesture, a synecdoche for feminine madness, feels like Danilova’s attempt to externalize her longing for death, to plug it into an archetype far older than she is. As she inhabits the classical scene of a woman drowning, some of the weight of her own ideation seems to lift. Death’s a lot lighter when you’re seeing it on a stage or behind museum glass than when you’re carrying it around in your marrow.
As much as Danilova finds relief in history, it also prompts anxiety on the galloping “Veka,” whose goth, night-ready beat takes some of the air out of her unanswerable questions about legacy. “Who will you find you/When all you are is dust?/Who will find you/In centuries?” she asks, gently echoing Percy Shelley's poem “Ozymandias” and its illustration of the futility of building anything to last. Without that beat, “Veka” might have landed as a facile complaint about the uselessness of making art; as a body-moving banger, though, it prioritizes the here and now over the vague horizon of a world some centuries into the future. Who cares who digs up our bones as long as we can use them to dance while we’re alive?
The cover of Okovi differs from Stridulum’s cover in one pointed way: Rather than being slicked over, Danilova’s eyes have been cleared of the muck that otherwise covers her. She looks just slightly left of the camera, her eyes dark and calm, unbothered. Upon closer inspection, you can see she’s not actually drowning in the oil; instead, it looks like it’s been applied to a photograph of her that’s been re-photographed. There are brush strokes around her face, and the sharpness of the circles exposing her eyes makes the stuff look more like a mask she’s chosen to wear rather than something used to tar her. Maybe Zola Jesus is still carrying the same slime that’s weighed her down for years, but at least she can see clearly through it now. For all its dark signifiers, all its grapplings with death, Okovi leans towards the light.


On his fourth album helming the Brooklyn chamber folk ensemble, Jordan Lee brings a watchmaker’s precision to a baroque sound typically associated with billowy grandeur.

Growing at the Edges

It takes a true optimist to see the upside of a wildfire. Throughout Growing at the Edges, the bottomlessly tender fourth album from his baroque indie project Mutual Benefit, Jordan Lee conjures angry skies, scorched earth, and suffocating smoke, yet somehow the destruction only strengthens his sense of serenity and wonder. In Lee’s world, every catastrophe is an opportunity for regrowth and renewal. As he spells it out hopefully on the title track, “Peeking from a seed, where there was a wasteland, something new.”

Lee sees a kindred spirit in that charred soil, as he avails himself of new mindsets and healthier outlooks in the face of change. The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter spent five years writing these songs, but he insists it was only late in the process that he realized he was writing a love album—which is wild, given how impossible it is to listen to Growing at the Edges and miss the romance. The entire album is blanked in a lavender haze. Between Lee’s chivalrous quiver and the serenading string arrangements, every song lands like a softly blown kiss in a silent film.
The florid accompaniments of Mutual Benefit’s previous records carry over, but Growing at the Edges bears a much more pronounced imprint of jazz and classical, in no small degree due to the input of multi-instrumentalist Gabriel Birnbaum and violinist/string arranger Concetta Abbate. Lee says he took inspiration from his time listening to New York jazz radio during the pandemic, and if that makes him sound like a tourist, he demonstrates an aficionado’s appreciation of the genre’s subtleties. The record is never more serene than when he clears space to revel in the gentle explorations of Birnbaum’s saxophone.

In their brushed drums and blushing upright bass, Growing’s most serene tracks evoke the levitating rhythms of Richard Davis and Connie Kay on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. There are shades, too, of Neil Young’s Harvest Moon and Willie Nelson’s Stardust in the delicate, tuxedo-tailed twang of “Beginner’s Heart” and “Little Ways.” And in the watchmaker’s intricacy of its arrangements, there are echoes of Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimist, albeit with none of the tension or toil. Grizzly Bear’s songs always showed their work; they wanted you to hear the protractors and composition books involved in their meticulous creation. Mutual Benefit’s songs are no less exactingly composed, yet they offer the illusion they materialized from dreams.

One way to enjoy the record is to marvel at its sheer precision—how each song stands alone as its own perfectly bundled bouquet, even while their shared lyrical and musical motifs form the impression of a seamless suite. But for all its craftsmanship, this is an album that thinks with its heart. “I love how you will dance around the entire room to a song that only you hear,” Lee swoons on the waltzing “Wasteland Companions,” and in some ways the whole record feels like his attempt to honor the free spirit modeled by his partner—to turn off his overactive brain and indulge the possibility of hope, even in a world where so much can and does go wrong.

Over the last decade and a half, it’s been easy to become inured to records as gorgeous as this. As indie pop matured from the busted symphonics of Elephant 6 into the conservatory-trained chamber music of artists like Sufjan Stevens, Fleet Foxes, and San Fermin—and as the stray string accompaniments that periodically graced indie projects swelled into full ensembles—it grew harder be wowed by the grandeur and sophistication of it all. So perhaps Growing at the Edges’ greatest trick is rekindling the sense of romance and connection all that splendor can evoke. Its arrangements are lavish but never demanding, vibrant but never loud, decadent but never distracting. They do so much, yet never so much that they risk disrupting the record’s carefully understated sense of enchantment.


On his latest record, Neil Michael Hagerty hedges his post-modern tics in favor of three-minute, riff-based rawk that reminds us this is the same rock zealot who convinced Pussy Galore to re-record Exile on Main St. back in the day.

XI

Neil Michael Hagerty's long, tortuous career has laid waste to a lot of opening paragraphs, practically lobotomizing the reviewer before he/she can begin tackling his equally brain-melting music. I would even go so far as to suspect this Renaissance dude of fattening up his résumé intentionally, as a misdirect masking his ambitious yet sloppy music. Considering his two biggest inspirational sources-- classic and noise rock-- this equivocation makes sense: On the surface, Hagerty and his most recent band Howling Hex qualify as your standard meat'n'potatoes rock outfit, yet the group takes great pains in shrouding their potentially accessible sound with disjointed songwriting, arcane lyrics, and other artistic fuckery. And oh yeah, he was in Pussy Galore, Royal Trux, and has written two books as well as an obsessive Howling Hex blog, among other pursuits.
2006's Nightclub Version of the Eternal marked an unprecedented level of button-pushing for the Hex, as a string of seven minute-plus masturbatory jams frustrated even the staunchest defenders of the band's idiosyncrasies. Thankfully, XI's slicked-back tracks sound like reparations, Hagerty hedging his postmodern tics in favor of three-minute, riff-based rawk that reminds us this is the same rock zealot who convinced Pussy Galore to re-record Exile on Main St. back in the day. Hell, at some points, you might confuse this for a Spoon record. The meaty guitar/sax/horn trifecta on straightforward, swaggering pop rockers like "Ambulance Across the Street" and "Everybody's Doing It" avoids any protracted jams, the lyrics cogent enough to generate both pathos and a storyline in the latter: "Broken heart, broken home/ Now you're lyin' there all alone,/ In an ambulance across the street."
Unfortunately, Hagerty can't go completely cold turkey from the jam band stuff. Even with shorter songs, the ideas still remain fairly loose and unfocused, not to mention the spoken word diarrhea of "Let Fridays Decide", a pretentious intermission that undermines much of the album's unexpected edibility. Considering the punch of dirtier, nastier garage rock nuggets like "Live Wire" and "Theme", I wish Hagerty sought and destroyed more Stooge-isms on this record. Still, the consistent Fogerty shuffles here make XI the most worthwhile Hex release since 2005's All-Night Fox, and a nice little twilight-of-career album-- assuming the sun will ever set on Hagerty's rampaging career.


The Melbourne post-punk band makes a messy life feel easier to untangle, writing songs with an appealing simplicity, buoyancy, and emotional openness.

Amici

Primo! creates energy out of ennui. The first track of their 23-minute debut LP, “You’ve Got a Million,” is a tiny miracle: Primo! take the small, mundane experience of being simply overworked and reminds us—with spindly guitars, calm levity, and a tilted grace—that the muchness is universal, that you might be overwhelmed but you are not alone. “You’ve got a million things to do/Racing all over town,” the women of Primo! sing with verve, earning the exclamation point. “Flights of stairs can’t slow you down!” In the face of never-ending to-do lists—of “waiting for nothing much at all”—Primo! evoke composure and personal fortitude. You can make things happen while you wait, as the song’s existence attests. Their chiming music urges you along.
With sharp lyrics and copious breathing space, Amici lands somewhere between Flying Nun-style jangle and the extreme minimalism of Young Marble Giants, all while sounding uniquely of Melbourne’s current, thoughtfully witty art-punk moment. The band—Xanthe Waite, Violetta Delconte Race, Suzanne Walker, and recently added bassist Amy Hill—have ties to Total Control, whose guitarist Al Montfort recorded and mixed Amici. The electronic flourishes that hover behind the album feel like a connective tissue to his group.
But Primo!’s approach to post-punk, comparatively, has an appealing simplicity, buoyancy, and emotional openness. Songs blossom from dreary everyday life, like flowers in concrete—words like “deadline,” “traffic,” and “plastic covering” beam with possibility, becoming almost uplifting. Primo!’s music has a tactful lightness of touch, particularly its drumming, and it all floats, even as songs are set near “a cemetery gate” or “shopping alone on a public holiday.” Everyone sings together, adding a blissful collective energy, the kind that makes a messy life feel easier to untangle.
As with many great homespun pop records, you feel as if you are listening in on the process of Amici, rather than simply listening to it. That dynamic holds thematically, too: Much of Amici sounds like a subtle negotiation between quiet, interior struggle and the potential of a dreamer saving herself. The chugging “A City Stair” feels like zipping determinedly through streets alone. On the upbeat “Future,” the band is at an office intoning that, “You’re not alone/There are thousands and thousands/Like you!” And “Bronte Blues” is an empathic antidote to the kind of “very very very small problem” that threatens to stack up and topple over when you least expect it. “Balance it out with walks by the sea/Balance it out with little luxuries,” Primo! sings, with encouraging “Try it!”s shouted in the distance. (With that excellent title, I imagine these lyrics emerging while reading Wuthering Heights near a body of water.)
Few are worthy of a comparison to the beloved San Francisco band Grass Widow, but Primo! earn one, not just for their stylistic makeup and inspired harmonies, but because of their similarly discernible internal logic. Amici is the sound of people working together to find a way forward, and the whole of the record feels like a comrade telling you to hang on. Even the title seems to acknowledge Primo!’s three-way conversation, as well as the one uncorrupted source of comfort in life: friendship.
The highlight of Amici is the buzzy ballad “Ticking Off a List.” Like “You’ve Got a Million,” it’s about the hard fact that life happens while we’re busy tending to our endless, individual tasks. “What a bird’s-eye view,” they sing, “I’m not above, but I imagine you/Trotting around/Ticking off a list of things to do.” It sounds like a poem Frank O’Hara might write after gazing at the Instagram account of a faraway friend, and even more at the song’s outset: “What do you see? There’s a fogginess to some beauty.” That is a wistful daydream of a punk lyric, and one charged with hope. Clarity is rare; the tedium of quotidian responsibility can make things cloudier still. But, of course, it’s amid the work that we often and suddenly explode the boundaries of our lives. Amici is evidence of grasping joy along the way.


Months after his country-rap video went viral, the purposefully mysterious artist releases an EP with all the personality of a wiped smartphone.

Drug Dealing Is a Lost Art EP

In the months since his Rascal Flatts homage “Rascal” went viral via a cheeky video pairing sweet singing and leering guns, RMR has cultivated a hazy mythology. He grew up “between” Buckhead, Atlanta and Inglewood, Los Angeles, cities a continent apart. He’s influenced by Kanye, Keith Urban, and Gary LeVox, but he’s not a country musician or rapper; he’s a “new-age artist.” In videos and in meetings with record execs, he wears a ski mask, insisting on anonymity because he wants “people to listen with their ears, not their eyes.” On his debut EP, Drug Dealing Is a Lost Art, all this intrigue falls flat. There’s nothing fun, intriguing, or provocative about his music. Despite all his fusionist posturing, he’s got the personality of a wiped smartphone: sleek, modern, empty.
Though RMR favors pageantry on camera, on record he’s modest. As seen in the “Rascal” video, which opens with him belting out a melody, he prizes his voice. It’s a resonant, powerful instrument, and the clip hinges on its bluesy allure to sell the emo-trap shtick that follows. The EP is just as dependent on his voice, but without the video’s props, RMR is exposed. His music is weirdly both overwrought and inert. He croons with the force and intensity of a Rod Wave or 070 Shake but fails to make that strain compelling. The flexes on “Nouveau Riche” are hollow despite being delivered at full blast. “Now I got the life I wanted/Hoping I don’t fuck it up,” he sings, sans context. He could be talking about signing a record deal or replacing his PC with a Mac. There’s no way to know and little reason to care.
He often speaks of escape and arrival without elaborating or embellishing his journey. From his perfunctory mentions of poverty and struggle on “Welfare” to the motivational-speaker talk of “Rascal” (“I came up and so could you”), RMR’s tales are so generic and grayscale that Westside Gunn lands the most colorful line on the album with a lazy throwaway: “My shooter got a big beard/He from Philly.” RMR’s elusiveness is clearly supposed to cultivate some sense of mystery, but there are no breadcrumbs to follow, no puzzle pieces to assemble. He describes the world and himself so impersonally it feels like he was literally born yesterday.
He supplements his poor writing with his bland melodies, convinced that the act of singing is inherently charismatic. “Codeine got me in my feelings/ Codeine got me in my feelings,” he repeats on “Dealer,” yelping the second line. He’s attempting to evoke the mania and delirium of a bender, but the actual result is more “heard ‘Codeine Crazy’ once.” That’s his bit, essentially: I’ve heard it all. This might be compelling if there were a sense of audacity to his mash-ups, but he’s got the stage presence of a floorboard.
Compared to Rina Sawayama treating nu-metal like a sacred art, Pink Siifu channeling hardcore into black rage, or Breland hamming up “My Truck” with that delightful, over-the-top drawl, RMR has no imagination. His take on hybridity is so staid and lifeless that he can’t even sell “Fuck twelve” on “Rascal;” in his mouth it feels less like a battlecry and more like a Spencer’s Gifts executive spitballing t-shirt ideas.
It’s that abiding feeling of vacancy that makes Drug Dealing Is a Lost Art feel so thoroughly feckless and inept. On “I’m Not Over You,” a track co-produced by Timbaland and Andre Brissett, RMR revisits the country- rap template that made him viral. Given Timbaland’s role in legitimizing and innovating country rap in the form of Bubba Sparxxx, the collaboration had the potential to give depth to RMR’s professed genre agnosticism, to show there was a vision underlying all the mythmaking. Instead, we get an uninspired ballad about some brokenhearted schmuck over a flavorless mix of banjo and bass kicks. Sometimes a mask is just a blank face.


Less than five months after frontman John Dwyer told an audience at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall that they wouldn’t be seeing the band in action for a while, Thee Oh Sees have reemerged with their eighth full-length record in six years. Drop turns out to be the next logical step in the progression undertaken on 2013’s Floating Coffin and 2012’s Putrifiers II.

Drop

Well, that didn’t take long. As it turns out, the only thing Thee Oh Sees do more expediently than release new music is hiatuses. Less than five months after frontman John Dwyer told a hometown audience at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall that they wouldn’t be seeing the band in action for a while, Thee Oh Sees have reemerged with their eighth full-length record in six years (to say nothing of a 7" and split-EP stream that that presumably puts as great a strain on America’s vinyl pressing plants as Record Store Day). And despite the significant developments in Dwyer’s life so far this year—like moving to L.A. and reuniting his early 2000s scuzz-rock combo the Coachwhips at SXSW*—Drop* turns out to be the next logical step in the progression undertaken on 2013’s Floating Coffin and 2012’s Putrifiers II, further reconciling Thee Oh Sees once-oppositional motorik-punk pummel and psychedelic-pop whimsy into a feel-good fuzz-rock groove. If Dwyer's morning-after clarification of his onstage address didn't already defuse the uncertainty surrounding the Thee Oh Sees' future, the steady-as-she-goes nature of Drop renders the hiatus announcement a total blip non-event in the band's trajectory.
If anything, the increasingly refined, texturally detailed nature of their recent recordings—not to mention a way-lighter touring itinerary than usual—suggests that Thee Oh Sees weren’t so much pondering a break-up as a Beatles-circa-’66 shake-up, easing up on the relentless road show in favour of a more considered approach in the studio. Accordingly, the songs on Drop aren’t so much tailored to the band’s notoriously blitzkrieged, crowd-swarmed concerts as the all-night after-party. That’s not to suggest it’s an especially mellow record; the noise and chaos linger, but Dwyer and co. are in less of a hurry to unleash it, preferring to patiently zone out rather than freak out.
Coming on like the come-down successors to Putrifiers II rave-up “Lupine Dominus”, the early double-shot of “Encrypted Bounce” and “Savage Victory” counts as two of the band’s most entrancing tracks to date: the former distills the serrated psychedelia of Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” and airtight groove of Can’s “Mother Sky” into Nuggets-sized dimensions, while the latter taps into the same spectral spirit as the Rolling Stones’ ace acid-rock oddity “2000 Light Years From Home”. But even though such familiar record-collector reference points abound on Drop, the mischievous melodies and funhouse-mirrored guitar contortions render the results unmistakably Oh Sees. After introducing itself with a mellontroned refrain uncannily similar to Aerosmith’s “Dream On” (not that there’s anything wrong with that), “The King’s Noise” shows Dwyer to be as in thrall to the early-’70s canon of Bowie, Bolan, and Lennon as peers like Ty Segall and The Smith Westerns—though, unlike them, he punctuates each verse line of faux-Brit diction with a destabilizing Yes-like arpeggio. And despite its titular allusion to every brostepper’s favorite sound, “Drop” actually splits the difference between the Who’s maximum R&B and the Stooges’ Raw Power. (However, the Kinksian “Camera”—with its admission that “life is a camera and I cannot get near ya”—could very well be Dwyer’s dismissive comment on selfies.)
If Drop ultimately ranks a notch below its immediate predecessors in Thee Oh Sees’ discography, it’s for a couple of tracks that stick out as frivolous filler, like the repetitious, nursery-rhymed paisley pop of “Put Some Reverb on My Brother” and the drifting, synth-washed decadanse of “Transparent World”. But as per recent Thee Oh Sees tradition, the album comes to a peaceful balladic conclusion with the unabashedly Beatlesque “The Lens”, though in this case, it feels less like a strategic antidote to the anarchy that preceded it than a natural manifestation of Drop’s stress-free spirit. And yet, just when the song introduces a baroque harpsichord flourish grafted from the mid-section of “In My Life”, it comes to a swift conclusion, as if the band were embarrassed by this uncharacteristic indulgence. It just goes to show that, even at their most relaxed and reverential, Thee Oh Sees’ feisty, impulsive essence still cuts through loud and clear.


Arriving during the UK’s worst cost-of-living crisis since the 1950s, the North London rapper’s debut album is an artfully told portrait of life on the dole.

Universal Credit

On paper, there are more exciting things than a concept album about being fucked over by a broken bureaucratic system. However, on the North London rapper Jeshi’s debut album Universal Credit (named after the UK’s welfare provision), he holds the recorder right to the receiver so you can trudge through the call centre menu options with him. The record is about being ground down and then going out. It’s a spiritual successor to Mike Skinner’s early output as The Streets that serves as a companion to slowthai’s more recent pointed truth-telling, and it contains moments where Jeshi reaches the exhilarating heights of both of these artists.
The album arrives during the UK’s worst cost-of-living crisis since the 1950s, and mere days after the Chancellor of the Exchequer became the first frontline politician to be named in the Sunday Times Rich List. The exact timing of these events may be coincidental, but they still add an extra poignancy and prescience to Jeshi’s bitter lyrics. The repeat refrain of “Generation no hope” on “Generation” comes with more bite, and the crushing frustrations of the opening skit sting that much more.
Jeshi lays out in detail what the cost of a hand-to-mouth existence is, explaining in depth what it feels like to have the government use your own poverty as a stick to beat you with. “Hit By A Train” captures the utter depressive slump that is life on the dole, and Jeshi describes a self-medication ritual full of cheap food and bad drugs. “Back here again, every weekend is the same, one loop on replay,” he spits over the bouncy kicks and sharp claps of “Sick.” He writes cyclical choruses that contain the same scenes repeating over and over again—like the daytime TV that fills his days on “National Lottery”—in a timeline that constantly collapses in on itself.
All this might be a miserable listen in lesser hands, but Jeshi captures life’s small joys as well as its multifold indignities. The stumbling pianos on “Killing Me Slowly” soundtrack a tale of getting hopelessly wasted; “Another Cigarette” successfully replicates the feeling of a drunken headspin, and the late-night antics of “3210” are soundtracked by a silky house shuffle. Still though, a dash of humor might have helped here and there.
Britain has, over the decades, taken up benefits bashing as something of a grim national sport. Welfare claimants have been paraded on TV shows like Benefits Street; so-called scroungers make an easy sneer for punch-down tabloids. Jeshi’s account, more artfully told, flips that tradition on its head. On Universal Credit, he proffers downbeat tales that invite empathy, and they deserve, more than anything, to be heard.