As far as concept albums about magical, abnormally sized severed heads go, this is a pretty breezy listen.

King’s Mouth

If there’s been one constant in The Flaming Lips’ careening four-decade evolution from Okie goth-punk weirdos to festival-conquering freak show, it’s that Wayne Coyne loves to tell a story. Back on 1989’s Telepathic Surgery, he hit pause on the album’s acid-fried garage rock to relate a childhood encounter with UFOs. Throughout the ’90s, he specialized in the sort of musical tall tales (”Put the Waterbug in the Policeman’s Ear,” “The Big Ol’ Bug Is the New Baby Now”) that required narrative exposition nearly as long as the tunes they were teeing up. And even as he started writing more serious songs about humans with wives and children, he was just as likely to dress up heavy themes in fantastical yarns about fighting droids and killer mechanized canines.
But, oddly enough for a Pink Floyd-worshipping band that’s introduced us to enough colorful characters to fill several Lewis Carroll novels, the Flaming Lips have never released a proper, front-to-back narrative song cycle. (A handful of robot-populated tunes on Yoshimi doesn’t quite count.) And their first attempt at such, King’s Mouth, arrives with muted fanfare, falling somewhere between a proper Lips studio album and one of their many extracurricular novelty releases.
King’s Mouth was initially conceived as the soundtrack to a synchronized light-art installation—or rather, an “immersive head-trip fantasy experience”—staged by Coyne. (This is, of course, is what the viewing chamber looked like.) It was then developed into a 12-song storybook album that was released in a limited-vinyl run last April on Record Store Day. Like many of the projects the Lips have debuted on RSD, it boasts some inspired celebrity stunt-casting: The album is narrated by The Clash’s Mick Jones, who delivers the particulars of its outlandish plot with the tone of a kindly old granddad.
I’m not really spoiling anything by telling you King’s Mouth is about a royal baby born to a queen mother who perishes during labor, presumably because the kid has an abnormally massive noggin, which is put to effective use when he saves his city from an avalanche by devouring the universe whole with his giant chompers only to die in the process, after which his followers chop off his head and live inside of it for all utopian eternity. Ultimately, it’s just an elaborate ruse for Coyne to lean into his favorite topics once again——the fragility of life, the inevitability of death, the perseverance of the human spirit, the inexplicable wonders of the universe. Likewise, King’s Mouth is a musical patchwork of familiar Lips flourishes: the operatic exultations of The Soft Bulletin, the campfire electro of Yoshimi, the glitchy textures and simple, sanguine balladry of Oczy Mlody. But the pieces don’t always come together in a satisfying way—scene-setting track “The Sparrow” aims for the multi-sectional splendor of past triumphs like “The Spark That Bled,” but feels too fragmented to take flight.
That song provides an early indication that King’s Mouth is not the sort of album you’ll be stripping for playlists—only the winsome acoustic sing-along “How Many Times” functions as a stand-alone track. But as far as concept albums about magical, abnormally sized severed heads go, King’s Mouth is a breezy listen. And at 42 minutes, it’s also the Lips’ shortest album since 1992’s Hit to Death in the Future Head.
More than simply reaffirming the Lips’ flair for bizarro storylines, King’s Mouth reminds us that Coyne can draw poignancy and pathos from the strangest sources. On King’s Mouth he voices the title character’s inner thoughts from birth to afterlife, steering the cosmic lullaby “Giant Baby” from Jones’ quizzical observations about the difficulties of sourcing oversized toys into a somber rumination on losing a parent. In moments like these, King’s Mouth may seem a touch too dark to replace Goodnight Moon or Each Peach Pear Plum as an evening storytime staple. But by reimagining the weighty concept record as light, escapist entertainment, King’s Mouth is as strong a candidate as any for Baby’s First Prog Album.

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Unified by its abundant lo-fi charm and with lyrics referencing the Butthole Surfers, Dexedrine, and Taco Bell, the squirrelly New York alt-country duo sounds more playfully idiosyncratic than ever.

Grog

For two people in a city of eight million, Frog garnered a respectable New York following in their early years. But the Queens alt-country duo found fandom—real fandom, where people queue to buy your music and the faces in the front row aren’t your longtime friends—overseas. Audio Antihero, a British boutique label that signed the band after discovering their 2013 debut record, boosted Frog enough to warrant a full-fledged UK tour before they ever plotted a regional U.S. leg.
Since then, Frog have spent the past decade enjoying life as a cult favorite. When not going for $250 on the resale market, their records draw comparisons to Townes Van Zandt and Silver Jews—fitting, as the late David Berman once wrote Frog a letter of admiration—while smudging the edges of barren indie rock, low-key emo, and hearty Americana. In the lead-up to Grog, the band’s fifth album and first in four years, their situation changed. Singer-guitarist Daniel Bateman moved to New Rochelle and welcomed twins, while longtime drummer-bassist Tom White moved to England and was replaced by Daniel’s brother Steve Bateman. The new album kicks off the band’s fraternal era, but Frog’s sound remains as squirrelly as ever.
Sounding as if they were still holed up in their parents’ garage playing for nobody but themselves, Daniel and Steve Bateman are all unbridled inspiration and freeform spontaneity, be it the last-minute glockenspiel in “Ur Still Mine” or the spectral piano haunting “Goes w/o Saying.” Their comfort with one another is audible. Daniel namedrops Butthole Surfers and Metro-North tickets with the tongue-in-cheek tone of someone fluent in the shared language of a sibling canon. When he opts for a more straightforward approach in “DOOM SONG,” a slog of discordant chords and ominous cymbal crashes, Daniel encourages his brother to cut loose: “Take pride, young bro/You should sing as in a dream/Stop the show, break a string.”
Daniel’s emotional delivery has always been one of Frog’s strongest assets, and that still holds true with Grog. On “Maybelline,” he sings about a Dexedrine-dosed woman in a car crash like he’s pouring one out for someone he’s known all his life. He injects “New Ro,” an ode to his new hometown, with vocal harmonies to match the retro romance of his banjo plucks. As if the simplicity of how he sings the love song “So Twisted Fate” wasn’t enough, it evolves into a voice note of his children attempting to sing while a synth chord morphs into focus. There’s no exact science to Daniel’s singing, but his untrained voice has a purity that’s difficult to fake and moving to hear.
Grog’s tracklist may appear scattered; in reality, it reflects a newfound confidence. His brother’s influence affords Daniel the conviction necessary to see more varied ideas through, even if they deviate from Frog’s alt-Americana tag. “420!!” is an extrapolation of Animal Collective’s “College” in sound and sentiment; Daniel romanticizes cutting class for Taco Bell and questions the purpose of school en route. His hasty acoustic strumming pantomimes a cartoon dog following the visible scent of a Crunchwrap Supreme, his gait giddy and liberated. On “U Shud Go 2 Me,” he amplifies drums and bass over his own guitar work, an unexpected mix that proves to be the right focus come its end, mimicking his lyrical fixation on creeping insanity as it nears a breaking point. Even the most out-of-place track, “Black on Black on Black,” still fits within Frog’s aesthetic, despite its blues-rock spin on disco. The brothers recorded the song with the same 1979 Otari MX5050 tape machine from Count Bateman, originally purchased because Elliott Smith used that exact model, and it lends the single a hissing warmth and lo-fi charm that unifies Grog.
The record opens with a 20-second exposition about the album’s namesake, a sailors’ term for diluted rum rations, lifted from a YouTube explainer by 18th-century obsessive Townsends. The album originally featured additional samples from American Movie, the 1999 documentary-turned-cult film cherished for its depiction of DIY passion amid setbacks and a creeping sense of failure, but the band scrapped them in fear of licensing troubles. Listen closely, however, and you can hear those themes take shape in a different configuration; Daniel’s humdrum American portraiture and embodiment of passionate persistence have defined Frog’s sound for nearly a decade, and on Grog, a brotherly bond encourages those songwriting traits to get louder, bolder, and weirder without sacrificing any of the heart.


English Little League is Guided by Voices' fourth LP since their comeback, meaning they've now made as many post-hiatus LPs as they managed during their "classic era." Amidst the booming arena-rockers, swift power-pop, proggy bluster, and wads of bubblegum, it marks the first appearance of recordings from Bob Pollard's new home-studio.

English Little League

Guided by Voices were back; now, they're just here. Two years into their reunion, and the news that the lo-fi titans' 1993-1996 lineup would be returning hardly even qualifies as news anymore. English Little League, their latest, is GBV's fourth LP since their comeback, making as many post-hiatus LPs as they managed during that fabled "classic era." Sixteen months back, when they cut the ribbon on Let's Go Eat the Factory, a narrative seemed to emerge: beloved band's finest-ever incarnation returns with a spotty but satisfying LP. Three fitfully gratifying LPs later, however, and the story's much the same.
English Little League, like so many GBV albums before it, gathers a couple all-timers and a few respectably jagged pop-rockers together with several total trainwrecks and calls it an LP. First, the good: the exceedingly generous lead single "Flunky Minnows" is brimming with so many hooks, it spends its two minutes and change running around in circles, begging you to take them off its hands. Opener "Xeno Pariah" is the best first-shot of GBV's second act, a sharp, clear-eyed rocker with a head-lodge hook all its own. Highlights are everywhere, from the sway-and-spill chorus of "Send to Celeste (And the Cosmic Athletes)", to the goofball rumble and Zero Mostel gags of "Crybaby 4-Star Hotel" and the gnarly heft of bruiser "Know Me As Heavy". The playing's shrewd, the recording's warm, and frontman Robert Pollard's vocals are rousing, even brash; with the right songs in front of them, these guys are as good as they've ever been.
English Little League marks the first appearance of recordings from Pollard's new home-studio. Which is not to suggest that he's somehow gone slick; even amidst Little League's booming arena-rockers, swift power-pop, proggy bluster, and wads of bubblegum, it's on these late-night home-recordings that you can hear the figurative scrape of the tattered Tascam the loudest. Most of the home-brewed stuff takes the form of drunken 3 AM ballads, howls-at-the-moon likely inspired by those nights when the beer's all gone and every liquor store in 20 miles is closed until the morning. In the right mood, these ballads'll knock the wind out of you. But English Little League's got four of them-- "Sir Garlic Breath," "Biographer Seahorse," "Reflections in a Metal Whistle" and "A Burning Glass"-- and with every passing weeper, the album sags a tad more.
Still, I'll take a glut of ballads over something like "Noble Insect", the dismal co-write from Pollard and Tobin Sprout that leaves neither side off the hook. Over a lunkhead riff, Pollard bleats "Japan, Japan" semi-tunelessly for a while before sliding into chorus so good-- and so effortless-- you'll wonder why they'd ever think to burn it on a song that dopey. Really, it might be best if GBV stay out of Japan for the time being: the record's other lowlight, the jaunty, underwritten "Reflections in a Metal Whistle," also shoehorns in a incongruous (albeit less annoying) mention of the country. Tobin Sprout spends Little League with his head in the clouds; whether he's harping on Jesus on the far-too-sweet "The Sudden Death of Epstein's Ways" or talking about a girl who chats with refracted light on "Islands (She Talks in Rainbows)", his ageless voice and crisp melodies are typically a smart counterpoint to Bob's ragged glories. But these songs he brings to English Little League are pure cotton candy, sticker and more saccharine than they are satisfying.
Guided by Voices weren't even this prolific back when they made their rep for being prolific. So, after unloading so much music in such a short time, finding a moment to step back and consider each album on its own takes some doing. It's clear now that Let's Go Eat the Factory was the weird one, Class Clown Spots a UFO the one with the most range, and The Bears for Lunch the flat-out catchiest. Little League's harder to draw a line around; even with all the ballads, there's not a prevailing mood or a dominant sound. So, while it's perfectly pleasant from moment to moment, the whole never congeals. With 17 songs in just under 46 minutes, a good number of them ballads, English Little League seems to unfold at an unusually relaxed pace; songs that would've been 75 seconds long now get two verses and a repeat airing of the chorus, not always deservedly. Tobin's songs have that gloopy faux-chestra thing going for them, and Pollard howler "A Burning Glass" is almost crowded out by echo, but for the most part, the production's spare enough, it doesn't especially feel like production.
Song for song, League's about par with the three LPs that preceded it: The Bears for Lunch is a bit more consistent, but its highs certainly weren't any higher. Still, as with the three LPs it follows, something's holding the very good League back from greatness; in this case, its lax pacing, its over-reliance on balladry, and whatever the heck "Noble Insect" is supposed to be. Great as it is that GBV are still knocking sounds like "Flunky Minnows" into the stands, it's a shame they're not popping off 20 such songs a year the way they did way back when. The hits still connect, but the batting average is a little lower these days. In many ways, GBV's revamp is still one of the indie-rock comebacks to beat: they didn't return for a quick cash-grab, but as a fully functioning band, willing to risk whatever legend they'd built up in their absence by flooding fans with new material. But, triumphant as the return itself has been, the records themselves have really only skirted triumph. English Little League is no different.


With a newfound penchant for slow jams, the Detroit rapper’s latest emphasizes his emotional depth, cartoonish humor, and attention to detail.

Get Wet.Radio

“Skinny Dip,” a song on ZelooperZ’s new album Get WeT.Radio, is a study of contrasts. It begins with a languid sample of a flamenco-inflected acoustic guitar solo that, along with the Detroit rapper’s opening lyrics, conjures a luxurious, balmy setting—say, a yacht anchored off of a private beach in the Mediterranean. “Baby girl said she wanna dip/Take her ass on a trip,” he half-sings. An instant later, producer Black Noi$e throws in a double-time beat that completely interrupts the mood, its nu-disco pulse transporting us a few miles away and a few hours later, into the middle of a club in Ibiza. The song alternates between these two paces, and Z’s delivery follows suit; by the end, he sounds exhausted, unconcerned about the destination so long as it’s far away. It’s at this strange nexus of romance, escapism, and pervasive moodiness that Get WeT.Radio stakes its territory.
Get WeT.Radio is inspired by a Spotify playlist which was, by ZelooperZ’s own admission, “the only thing I got left from my pops before he passed two years ago.” The “Get WeT. Radio” playlist mostly comprises songs released between the ’80s and the early ’00s that wouldn’t be out of place on R&B and smooth jazz FM stations. Like the playlist, the album is deeply horny, but it’s also ruminitive and even melancholy. Many of the reference points on the playlist—such as Ginuwine’s “So Anxious” and Janet Jackson’s “That’s the Way Love Goes”—come from a school of pained R&B in which sadness and horniness are nearly inseparable. Grief is never ZelooperZ’s main focus on Get WeT.Radio, which he surprise-released on his father’s birthday, but it colors his words as much as those musical reference points color the artfully curated beats.
The cartoonish charm that’s become Z’s calling card is still present in the album’s many pickup lines. But unlike previous releases, Get WeT.Radio’s slow jams make it hard to ignore the stark realities lurking among the free-associative jokes and outlandish voices. “Head 2 the sKy” contains the most explicit reference to ZelooperZ’s father, quoting some of his nuggets of wisdom alongside an uplifting gospel sample. When Z talks to or about women, which accounts for most of the lyrics, it’s usually playful, but it can also be sensitive. On closer “Who U Love,” which depicts an it’s-him-or-me ultimatum in a crumbling relationship, Z sees hope through the pain: “When your tears hit the concrete grew a bouquet of flowers.” Even though his lyrics aren’t preoccupied with death, his tone is colored with the heightened empathy that often comes with loss.
ZelooperZ’s grounded approach is bolstered by the cohesive sound of the record. The late-night ambience of his father’s favorite music is recreated via samples that are flipped into impossibly smooth beats, mostly by the central brain trust of Dilip and frequent Bruiser Brigade collaborator Black Noi$e. Guest vocalists like Fousheé, SuperCoolWicked, and duendita are an impeccable fit as well. Alongside underground hip-hop stars MIKE and Hook, they’re the exact type of R&B singers whose music would fit on a 2020s version of the “Get WeT. Radio” playlist.
Slick curation is the main thing that separates Get WeT.Radio from its predecessor, last year’s excellent Van Gogh’s Left Ear. With its Rxk Nephew guest spot, Crash Bandicoot sample, and quotable non sequiturs, that album thrived on the unpredictability that has defined much of ZelooperZ’s output to this point. Get WeT.Radio loses some of that spark amid its weight and commitment to retro sounds, especially when it forces Z out of his comfort zone, which ironically is when he sounds most laid back, as on opener “Sorry.” But the album paves the way for a future in which Z isn’t best known as Danny Brown’s similarly wacky protegé. His vibrant talent has been apparent for years, but Get WeT.Radio emphasizes a depth and attention to detail that’s often been overshadowed by its creator’s outsized personality.


The Brownsville MC's newest LP puts weight behind the wisdom of age and experience. Fittingly, it's the kind of record that takes a bit of experience to really sink in.

Grief Pedigree

Critics tend to think big-picture when it comes to hip-hop reminiscent of an older tradition. They question what it means to Bring New York Back, whether the early-mid 1990s looms too large over a genre and a lifestyle that never stops evolving, and if there's a point in reviving a moment that's almost universally agreed upon to be impossible to replicate. But lost in that debate is the smaller, more individual picture: what it means for specific artists with their own sets of expectations and influences to come to terms with their formative experiences.
The rapper Ka came up as a 1970s baby out of Brownsville, New York, a crucial place and age to live through a wave of creative revolution that spanned from Slick Rick to Wu-Tang and onwards. But as he's mentioned in recent interviews, he didn't feel like he was at the ideal talent level to put in his own voice. He's been quick to self-identify as the weak link in Brooklyn crew Natural Elements, he's chalked up the stalled career of his one-12"-wonder group Nightbreed (1998's "2 Roads Out the Ghetto") to being overwhelmed in a talent-rich field of peers, and he hung up his mic for the better part of the 2000s out of a combination of frustration and personal day-job necessity. By the time 2008's Iron Works finally got his career catalyzed again after years of struggling with his own creative ambivalence, the means of expression he carried with him for most of his life had the added weight of a well-documented style's celebrated past.
But Ka's an artist who's put a lot of thought into what it means to be a rapper past your thirties, and Grief Pedigree is an album that puts a lot of weight behind the wisdom of age and experience. Fittingly enough, it's the kind of record that takes a bit of experience to really sink in. Ka's voice is a bit subdued, often affectless, and quietly straightforward-- not an easy way to get a fickle listener's attention. You can get a grasp of his thought process and the nuanced emotions that drive them, but the thousand-yard-stare flow that clinically unspools incidental corner-hustle details is the same one that mourns lost friends, holds on tight to the thankful moments, and claims his own resilient parcel of Brooklyn hip-hop territory. It might take some dedicated listens for opinions on that flow to shift from "deadpan and repetitive" to "focused and hypnotic," so the more immediate draw in the meantime is his lyricism. And these are the kinds of verses that stand out bluntly in the cold light of a matter-of-fact flow, giving equal time to agile internal rhymes and frank, unobscured sentiment.
On the surface, you could thematically peg Ka on a continuum that ranges from Mobb Deep's bleak threats to the sinister comedy of crucial collaborator Roc Marciano; the latter's complement paid off on Marcberg's "We Do It" and gets a returned favor here on the defiantly survivalist "Iron Age". (An announced upcoming teamup, Metal Clergy, is both inevitable and promising.) But there's more introspection and ambivalence at work, the sense of a man who's survived a lot but still feels like there's little he can control about his own destiny. That ambivalence stands out in a self-contained moment like "Decisions", a for-the-seeds track that underscores just how much can hinge on a single judgment ("Blood or Crip/ honor my moms, or who I'm thuggin' with/ is this lust or do I love this shit/ keep it gutter, or get butter dip") without getting didactic about which path's always the correct one.
It also scatters conflicting emotions across tracks in a way that ties them together, like how the bravado in "Cold Facts" is inseparable from spiritual self-doubt and regret. It's the kind of lyricism that doesn't technically need hooks, but benefits from the care put into them anyways-- the almost shellshocked way the fatalist refrain of "Summer" plays out in particular is especially hard to shake ("This goin' be the summer they come for me/ guns for me/ tryin' to put food in my young tummies/ this goin' be the summer the cops get me/ shots fit me/ tryin' to push whips off lots swiftly"). And once the words work their way in, that delivery starts to feel more and more like a pure expression of low-key intensity.
Finding a blatantly 1995 precedent for the juxtaposition of Ka's stark voice and similarly stark production is a bit trickier than it seems, though-- he'll spot you the odd 1970s Hi Records loop ("No Downtime"), but even with a full litany of circa-DITC sounds to compare it to there's still something a bit more contemporary at work. There's not much that really knocks non-stop in the way golden-age, Hot 97-geared classics intended-- imagine the insomniac feel of Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II interstitial "Pyrex Vision" dissipating across 37 lean, hazy minutes-- but that's by design, and in the right mindset it can be as devastatingly evocative as any speaker-rattling break.
A number of the loops are simple but well-chosen: an icy, twinkling guitar/electric piano lick for the reverie of "Every…"; a woozy,swaying bell/wah-wah concoction to back up the tightly-knotted verses on "Collage"; a couple stray chords reverbed to the point of decay on "Cold Facts". It's as though he found a way to build an entire production backbone off the parts of records that lead up to the big crescendos, and that looped all-prelude-no-payoff feel is the kind of friction the album needs for its confessional release to hit home. Yet as uncomplicated as these beats are, something about them sticks in a way that leads to the suspicion that they come from well-worn records that Ka listened to hundreds of times long before he even got the idea to sample them. And if sticking with music for a while doesn't pay off immediately, that only makes it more of a revelation when it finally does.


Featuring production assistance from Yoni Wolf of WHY?, the Cincinnati quartet’s second album uses bright surfaces to obscure sinister intentions, clothing dark songs in indie-pop innocence.

Almost

“Fun always comes at a cost,” Spencer Peppet warns in the opening line of the Ophelias’ “General Electric.” On paper, this sounds like good-faith advice, but in the context of the song, it’s creepy and menacing, delivered like a deke toast to an enemy Peppet is about to poison. Considering that the frontwoman and lyricist named her band after a tragically peripheral Hamlet character, perhaps the play and its many stealthy murders were on her mind again as she was composing the Ophelias’ second album, Almost. While the Cincinnati quartet’s 2016 debut, Creature Native, never hid its overcast mood, this follow-up uses brighter surfaces to obscure sinister intentions, clothing surprisingly dark songs in indie-pop innocence.
Almost is rooted in sounds from early 2000s: Peppet’s affection for clever, confessional lines paired with propulsive melody make Rilo Kiley-era Jenny Lewis an obvious reference point. But the Ophelias push their songwriting further, deconstructing each musical element and distorting these constituent parts with a fun-house mirror approach that occasionally recalls the Books. Two of the album’s first three tracks are in a 6/8 time signature, and the other is in an even less common 6/4; drummer Micaela Adams treats each of the six notes per bar as an opportunity to improvise, playing hopscotch across her tom, snare, and cymbals. “Lover’s Creep” stitches sections together with unintelligible snippets of a male voice, ghostly and screwed up, in a faint but haunting touch of weird nostalgia.
A collaboration with fellow Cincinnatian Yoni Wolf of WHY?, who first happened upon the Ophelias playing in a park, Almost has moments that vividly recall his band’s poppy 2009 album Eskimo Snow. Wolf is credited with co-producing, mixing, engineering, and contributing percussion to the Ophelias’ record, but it’s easy to see how the mere presence of a xylophone-happy veteran songwriter whose best work airs what he’s characterized as “shit I won’t admit to my head shrinker” might also have nudged their mood and sound in unexpected directions. You can hear Wolf’s influence in the album’s first big break-open moment, on “General Electric,” when a flock of shiny glockenspiels swoops in from out of nowhere.
But not even a metallophone can establish the twee atmosphere that the Ophelias make it their mission to disturb and debase as effectively as violin. So it makes sense that the contributions of violinist and pianist Andrea Gutmann Fuentes form the backbone of Almost. By the album’s final track, “Moon Like Sour Candy”—as Fuentes’ plaintive violin underscores cute-then-revolting lines like “Tongue like bubbles floating down my rotten skin”—that spine is in desperate need of a chiropractor.


Hitch

Though they certainly didn't intend to, the Joy Formidable have captured the trajectory of '90s alternative rock in just three albums. The Welsh trio's bravura 2011 full-length debut The Big Roar recreated the moment when underground rock crashed the mainstream with a sonic boom. It contains the band's only significant radio hit, "Whirring," and it probably could have spawned two of three more of them if it hadn't arrived at a time when the public's appetite for herculean guitar rock was at an all-time low. 2013's Wolf's Law was the group's sprawling "let's put our major label budget to use" record, the work of a band spreading their wings *Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness-*style, attempting even bigger, proggier sounds and hiring a string section just because they could. It was spottier than their debut, but no less exciting, if only because it teased the new directions that might come next.
Unfortunately, that makes their third album the disappointing realization that nothing new comes next. Hitch isn't just a retread of the band's previous work; it's a summation of all the ways the Alternative Nation has under-delivered since the new millennium. It's Billy Corgan throwing everything he has into a new album and coming up with the merely good-enough Oceania. It's the gradual realization that Dave Grohl had always been more into classic rock than he was punk. It's the Toadies securing a prime spot at Lollapalooza because they were the only reunited act of their era playing that year.
It might not be a shock to see Joy Formidable eventually fall into the same pattern of diminishing returns as their predecessors, but it still stings, because they've been one of the genre's brightest young exports. Their magnificently loud yet melodically supple vision of big-tent rock has filled a void, and on their earlier albums their blustery sound paired fabulously with singer/guitarist Ritzy Bryan's relatable songwriting. Her gargantuan riffs could make lyrics about routine personal experiences—miscommunications, slights, and romantic letdowns—sound like they were of enormous cosmic importance. And although it's never defined their image, the group also has a righteous feminist streak. Many of Bryan's songs capture the frustration of being talked over; their sheer volume served as a kind of pushback to every man who presumed to know what she's trying to say without having the consideration to actually listen to what she was saying. Alternative could use more bands like this.
But Hitch finds them in a holding pattern. "Radio Of Lips" is a virtual rewrite of the Wolf's Law lead single "This Ladder Is Ours," right down to its propulsive tempo and fluttery, caffeinated-Cure guitar riff. It could be a knock-out song, if it didn't linger for a full six and a half minutes. "The Last Thing On My Mind" dabbles in Zeppelin-y blues, but similarly outstays its welcome. Bryan's guitars have always been the band's selling point, but in such prolonged exposures they become downright numbing. The band self-recorded the album over 12 months in a self-built studio in their remote hometown Mold. They clearly spent a lot of time cooped up with these songs, and it's as if they want they listener to feel cooped up with them, too.
Wolf's Law had the proggy ambitions to justify its bloat, but Hitch's songs take much longer to do far less. Unsurprisingly, then, one of its highlights is one of its shortest. The song that most directly addresses Bryan's break-up from bassist Rhydian Dafydd—a break-up that could have easily ended a different band—"Fog (Black Windows)" has the tight focus and light bounce of one of Bossanova's torch songs. "These sheets are haunted / Not by you, but by a moment that's long gone," Bryan sings. And though she worries that "a love like you will never come again," she grasps at a silver lining: "Maybe we're not alone after all." It's a sweet moment, a woman grieving a cherished relationship, while the very ex she's singing about coos supportively in the background. Everything that comes after it feels mechanical by comparison.
It's hard hearing a band with this much raw talent pour so much into an album that rarely gets off the ground. At times it almost sounds as if they know they've taken their current sound as far as it can go and seem palpably frustrated they can't figure out their next move. Near the end of the record—well into its 67-minute runtime—there's a song called "Blowing Fire" where Bryan vents about "blowing fire for too long and getting nothing," and the line sums up the band's newfound stagnancy so aptly it's as if they're daring critics not to throw it back at them. Fire still comes easy to the Joy Formidable, but Hitch is the first time they've seemed at a loss for how to use it.

Caroline / Membran / Maplemusic / C'Mon Lets Drift / The Orchard


On the newly reissued 1974 live album It's Too Late To Stop Now, Van Morrison discovers his peak as a performer. The band builds an environment; Morrison wanders through all of its available space.

Van Morrison: It's Too Late to Stop Now... Volumes II, III, IV & DVD

Van Morrison was and is an irregular live performer. “I do music from an introverted space…in an extrovert business,” he told CBS Sunday Morning in 2009, describing the profound alienation he often experienced onstage. But by 1973, he’d had finally found something approaching comfort and fidelity as a performer. “The last gig on the East Coast was Carnegie in New York, and something just happened,” he said at the time. “All of a sudden I felt like ‘You’re back into performing’ and it just happened like that. Click.”
Morrison documented this breakthrough on It’s Too Late to Stop Now, a 1974 live album culled from various performances throughout the previous year. Too Late has been reissued along with a box set of previously unreleased gigs (Volumes II, III, and IV) along with a DVD portraying a fraction of one of his shows at the Rainbow Theatre; none of the recordings overlap with the original album. What the newly issued concerts reveal is the night-to-night dynamic of Morrison and his then-band, a group of 11 musicians called the Caledonia Soul Orchestra. Caledonia was a name originally assigned to Scotland by the Romans; though the geography it describes still exists, “Caledonia,” as a word, has a kind of mystical aura. It combines history and myth until they produce a kind of transcendent space.
History and myth are also two forms of context Morrison is determined to combine in his music. His sets in 1973 juxtaposed original material from throughout his career with established soul and blues songs by Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, Willie Dixon and Sonny Boy Williamson. His own songs are composites themselves: blues, jazz, folk, and rock forms all appear in his music, sometimes at once, collapsing into a slipstream of associations. This feeling of endlessness, of the language of a genre losing its shape and blending with others, gives even his straightest R&B numbers the shape of a whirlpool.
This sort of free association flows into his lyrics. One rarely feels, listening to a Van Morrison record, as if they are sifting through a metaphor. He doesn’t reference authors; he names them, and tells us what they’re doing. On “Wild Children,” he sings “Tennessee Williams/Let your inspiration flow.” It’s one of his most permissive compositions, and in the performance at the Rainbow, his band is responsive and sensitive. They construct a flow around him, John Platania contributing soft coronas with his guitar, Bill Atwood’s muted trumpet issuing crisp phrases, like light fluttering on the surface of a lake. The band builds an environment, and Morrison wanders through all of its available space.
The Caledonia Soul Orchestra were as capable of knitting hypnotic grooves as centerless landscapes. “In Van’s best music, all the instruments, including his voice, are wholly integrated,” M. Mark wrote in her 1979 essay on the original live album. “They become one big instrument, perfectly tuned, expertly played.” This big instrument is audible in the precise interlockings of Jeff Labes’ piano, David Hayes’ bass, and Dave Shaw’s drums in “I Paid the Price,” a Van composition that has never been included on a studio album. “You’re as cold as ice,” Morrison sings, and Hayes’ and Shaw’s instruments thrum like a rabbit’s heartbeat. On “Domino” Shaw’s snare and hi-hat combinations are so sharp they have the depth of a snap.
You can also hear the specificity of the band’s interplay in the rendition of “Moonshine Whiskey” performed at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium—the verses stretch until it feels like they’ll separate into components: strings, drums, Van’s kinetic interjections. “I Just Want To Make Love to You” could radically shift its own anatomy from night to night. On the original album Morrison approaches the riff as if he is approaching the edge of a cliff. At the Troubadour it contracts into a sly shuffle. Perhaps what’s most stunning is that a band of this size and scale could sound so crisp and organized. The band are pulled gravitationally by Van, who is as much of a bandleader as soul singer on this collection.
But the band also pulls him; they act as shadows of each other, advancing and receding harmonically with the other’s movements. Van exhibits a feline sensitivity to the phrases arcing around him. There are moments where he seems to get lost. Words multiply and cluster; “I would nevernevernevernevernevernevernevernevernever be so meek,” he sings on the recording of “These Dreams of You” at the Troubadour. On “Listen to the Lion” his words deteriorate into individual vowels, molecular components of language. When he sings “Bein’ Green,” a composition originally performed by Kermit the Frog, he introduces a cavity of silence into his gig at the Rainbow. “And it’s what I…” he whispers. Four seconds pass. The audience doesn’t even clap. “…wanna be.” (“Bein’ Green” is a song that’s about confusing yourself with your environment, one of Van’s preferred forms of transcendence.) “The best way to describe it is…a kind of a light trance,” he says in the CBS interview. “If the musicians can follow me…I can go anywhere.”
Every performance of “Caravan” available on the box set features an instance of Morrison losing himself. Toward the end of the song the band will give way to the string section; the strings diminish in volume until they resemble the gentle tremble of waves. Then, out of the relative silence, Morrison shouts, “Turn it up!” The band recombines. “Just one more time!” Morrison screams at the end of each phrase, his face glossy with sweat. At this point he seems to experience a kind of weightlessness, as he leans his entire body into several fluid high kicks. (In the video of the Rainbow gig, he unconsciously boots one of the saxophones onstage.)
He’s also audibly lost in the recordings of “Cyprus Avenue,” the centerpiece of his 1968 album Astral Weeks. The Caledonia Soul Orchestra reverse the song’s polarity; it’s slowly put back together as raving soul (though the strings maintain some of its native drift). He sings, “And you said France!” and the audience responds: “France!” The venues from which the recordings on It’s Too Late to Stop Now were drawn generally seated around 3,000; in all of the performances of “Cyprus Avenue” I’ve heard, the atmosphere is so intimate that it sounds as though there are maybe 14 people in the theater, including Van and the band. The music gathers force and builds to a single note, atop which Morrison shouts “Baby!” Then: silence.
The crowd starts yelling at him. “I said…” he mumbles. There’s an audible restraint, the air having tightened from movements he hasn’t made yet. Tension generates from these long, empty fermatas; there’s a power and menace to this landscape of mere flourishes. On the original live album there’s a famous crowd/performer exchange; a member of the audience says “Turn it on!” and Van replies, “It’s turned on already.” Then he yells, “It’s too late to stop now!” and the band crashes in around him.
It’s a moment Lester Bangs isolated in his essay on Astral Weeks, in a performance he saw on television in 1970; he classifies the end of “Cyprus Avenue” as “the hollow of a murdered explosion.” The cover of It’s Too Late to Stop Now is a photo of Van cutting the band off, his fist raised, drawing them down into the hollow, the stage lights carving shapes out of the dark, just as Morrison gives shape to the silence.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the dawn of metal, a document of dreary working-class blight and anti-war screeds.

Paranoid

From a moonlit thicket, a soldier wielding a scimitar and a pointy shield approaches, his eyes bulging with terror beneath a bright white helmet. He wears pink leggings and an outlandish orange blazer, an outfit that becomes, in Marcus Keef’s clumsy long-exposure photograph, a garish streak of glowing neon across the midnight scene. These were meant to be “War Pigs,” autocratic henchmen Black Sabbath lampooned during their second album’s bellicose opener and its intended title. From a distance, they look like an errant splotch of paint across a sheet of construction paper; up close, they just look absurd.
Still, in all its grainy ignominy, Paranoid’s cover is one of the most transformative moments in the early history of Black Sabbath and, by extension, heavy metal. In 1970, Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut did something few were expecting—it sold very well, charting both at their home in the UK and in the United States. Their label, Vertigo, soon dispatched Black Sabbath back to the studio to record a follow-up, stretching their already-indulgent impulses into eight-minute songs about war and heroin and the glory of the guitar. When they needed one more tune, the band headed to the bar while guitarist Tony Iommi stayed behind and spent a few minutes writing a simple riff that chugged, paused, and kept prowling, like a predator always in search of its next meal. They recorded the song in a flash and called it “Paranoid,” the fulfillment of a legal obligation.
Vertigo didn’t hear filler; it heard a hit, a trouncing three-minute assault by a young band that still favored excessive jams. Six months after releasing Black Sabbath, they issued the song as Black Sabbath’s second single and demanded that the album’s title be changed from War Pigs to Paranoid. They wanted to remind potential customers of the song they’d seen four long-haired weirdos headbang to on “Top of the Pops” while avoiding the nasty business of saying something controversial in an era already fraught with civil unrest. But in the sprint to get the record into stores, Vertigo never bothered to commission an image that fit the new name. The soldier simply stands there, an embarrassment in neon. After nearly 50 years, bassist and songwriter Geezer Butler (and most everyone else) still hates it: “The cover was bad enough when the album was going to be War Pigs, but when it was Paranoid it didn’t even make sense.”
The label was right about “Paranoid,” at least. Propelled by its lead single, Paranoid was the only Black Sabbath album to top the British charts for the next four decades. In the U.S., where it nearly broke into the Top 10 mere months after the band’s small stateside debut, it has gone platinum four times. Record labels realized that heaviness and spookiness could sell and that Led Zeppelin, Sabbath’s favorite band, were just the beginning. In ceding to Vertigo’s commercial instincts about “Paranoid,” both as a single and album title, Black Sabbath helped launch heavy metal not just as a genre but also as a veritable industry.
But “Paranoid” itself foregrounds an adolescent sort of worry—about being depressed and not understanding the symptoms or root of it, about crying when others laugh, about breaking up with someone because “she couldn’t help me with my mind.” At the heart of Paranoid, however, are very adult concerns about the raging war in Vietnam, the button-push annihilation of atomic weapons, and the oligarchic structures that suppressed the working class in the band’s benighted hometown of Birmingham and beyond.
Paranoid is rightly seen as an essential metal template, but it should also be seen as an essential document of its time and place. Despite the pugnacious sound (“the new standard in power rock,” one early advertisement called it) and macabre promotional images of these proto-heshers stalking churchyards and cemeteries, it is a reflection of a troubled globe teetering on the brink of another world war or even a nuclear apocalypse, made by four blue-collar kids from a tough city. Those who worry about end times are ignored, while those who do the government’s dirty work are born to suffer. These are laments for a world gone wrong, coupled with calls to battle back and fix it.
Still, for decades, that’s not what the critics heard: In his 1971 review for Rolling Stone, Nick Tosches conjured Satanic clichés and misogynist Manson family jokes before mistaking Black Sabbath for their peers in Black Widow, anyway. The same year, The Washington Post wondered, “Your choice: Is the worst rock band Grand Funk Railroad or Black Sabbath? It’s getting harder and harder to decide.” As late as 1997, Rolling Stone still insisted it was “a campy farce … lumbering, obnoxious, and a total gas.” Had the album been called War Pigs a year after Altamont and months after Kent State, though, would critics have heard it differently? Would they have understood that, even if it sounded like spooky fantasy, this steely strain of rock could address real-world worries—and would even do so for the next half-century?
Of course, Paranoid’s high sales and wide reach, not this critical repudiation, made it heavy metal’s chrysalis. You can point to any of the eight songs here as the partial inspiration for an entire subgenre of metal or rock at large, each prompting decades of creative exegesis. More than the eponymous anthem that began their debut, the drifting verses of “Hand of Doom” are direct arrows into, well, doom metal, turbocharged by sections that feel like nebulous hardcore. The italicized pummel of “Paranoid” itself is the link between Zeppelin and thrash. The starts and stops of “Rat Salad,” and the way Iommi’s guitar line runs like razor wire between the rhythmic shifts, presage the instrumental ecstasy of math-rock, in spirit if not in skill. The beginning of “Fairies Wear Boots” keeps folding and rising, only to empty into declarative verses, like the skeleton of power metal awaiting eventual flesh. Ozzy Osbourne, his voice routed through a whirling Leslie speaker, delivers images of romantic escapism over circular bass and hand-drum patter during “Planet Caravan”—alongside electric Miles, a clear antecedent for metal’s exploratory psychedelic side.
These eight songs have become scripture because they are breathless explorations of possibilities, unfettered by expectations or half a century of heavy metal history. Paranoid, after all, captures Black Sabbath at a moment when the future must have seemed suddenly tantalizing and limitless. The humble adolescent vision of making a living through anything other than going to war or going to the factory were suddenly within reach, if only for a spell. Iommi, Osbourne, Butler, and drummer Bill Ward had nothing to lose now except hard jobs. They write, sing, and play with the zeal of liberation, the incandescence of potential.
During World War II, Axis bombs had splintered Birmingham, stripping the city of its economic engines and making existence odious for decades to come. In the 1960s, Birmingham suffered spates of anti-immigrant racism, desolate storefronts, and miserably cramped living conditions. The Brummies of Black Sabbath were the sons of factory laborers and office cleaners, shopkeepers and strict Catholics. When he was a teenager, Osbourne worked in an abattoir and went to prison for burglary; Iommi lost the tips of two fingers on his last day at a sheet metal factory and made his own prosthetics so he could play guitar. At home, they had seen stabbings and street brawls. “It had constant steam and smoke,” Ward remembers of the city and the way it shaped Sabbath’s sound, “so it has a very drab-looking landscape.” A career in rock’n’roll was not only a way out of Birmingham but a way to circumvent this cruel industrial order.
The most terrifying thing about Black Sabbath in 1970 shouldn’t have been the ostentatious chrome cross strung around Iommi’s neck, Osbourne’s hand tattoos, or the talk of evil and witches and Lovecraftian horror. It should have been that here were four kids from the lower ranks of bombed-out Birmingham’s society, gaining a popular foothold by openly hoping the ruling class would fall to their knees and beg for mercy beneath the blows. “Day of judgment/God is calling,” Osbourne sings in the immortal opener, triumphantly stretching the syllables until he’s almost out of breath. “On their knees, the War Pigs crawling/Begging mercy for their sins.” In this scene, God and Satan provide the same salvation—the sweet deliverance of overdue vengeance. Black Sabbath spend the next three minutes dancing on the graves of the self-proclaimed mighty, Iommi’s guitar curling upward into an infinite grin.
“We wrote ‘War Pigs’ because many American bands were frightened to mention anything about the war,” Butler later said. “So we thought we’d tell it like it is.” Though Osbourne has insisted that the band knew little about Vietnam, Butler says he paid closer attention to the war than most Americans did, in part because he feared Britain would join. Osbourne even calls the war by name during the second verse of “Hand of Doom.” The song became infamous as a supposed endorsement of heroin, but it’s a warning for deployed soldiers taken with the newfound hobby of trying to kill time with drugs but only killing themselves.
At the end, Osbourne pushes his voice to its early falsetto limits, sharing the pain of the prescription: “Price of life is high/Now you’re going to die.” Despite the indignation for the soldier’s bad choice, there’s a strong sense of pity here for the “fools” following orders, the real judgement reserved for the leaders who have put their people in this position. It’s the hand of invisible doom, of a free market at war with its own citizens.
The members of Black Sabbath had been born in the wake of World War II, some even the sons of veterans. They had lived much of their lives surrounded by its fallout, the Cold War, and were teenagers during the Cuban Missile Crisis, an existential flashpoint about whether we valued pride more than survival. They began to play music together just as the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and just as the Cold War began to spill into more territories. Anchored by a hangman riff and guided by Osbourne’s best sorcerer vocals, “Electric Funeral” lashes out at the woe of that atomic age and the endless destruction it enables. The song feels entirely uneasy, wobbling at the lip of a future where “Rivers turn to mud/Eyes melt into blood.”
Perhaps that’s what the deathless “Iron Man” has seen in his intergalactic voyage. Though the song has nothing to do with the Marvel comic of the same name, it is a surreal fantasy. A man has been shot into space to look backward at Earth’s future (that’s how time travel works, right?) and share some insight on how to make it better. He sees disaster, but the journey back through the atmosphere renders him mute, unable to share the dire truth. He’s ostracized and ignored until he lashes out, iron fists falling on the city with the weight of Iommi’s monstrous riff and Ward’s colossal Bonham drums. Black Sabbath again delight in revolt, from the relish in Osbourne’s voice as he sings “Now he has his revenge” to Iommi and Butler’s hyperkinetic score for the imagined fight scene.
The sense that these kids are almost always looking for a brawl during Paranoid comes to fruition at the end. According to band lore, the long-haired, heavy-drinking members of Sabbath encountered a crew of skinheads sporting boots after an early gig, as they often did. These weren’t the skinheads of the neo-Nazi variety; this was just a different set of working-class youth with alternate values and fashion choices, making for an S.E. Hinton-styled clash of subcultures. They fought, and Sabbath won. On what’s thankfully the only song he penned here, Osbourne immortalized the victory by calling the skinheads fairies, which had become a vogue insult for an image of gay men before World War II.
Sure, “Fairies Wear Boots” boasts one of the best grooves of Sabbath’s entire discography, some of Osbourne’s most effortlessly soulful singing ever, and a bridge and solo that feel every bit as triumphant as their alleged victory that night. But it plays up the budding egos of 20-somethings from a rough town now on the verge of rock’n’roll stardom with a lazy insult, an early flash of the machismo that would become hard rock’s lifeblood during the next decade. Youth is the perfect fuel for most of Paranoid; here, it is the puerile folly, getting the best of Black Sabbath’s armed hippie vision.
But Paranoid began to make stars of Black Sabbath, and the music of the boys from Birmingham reflected that almost instantly. Butler once (suspiciously) insisted that, during the salad days of their first two albums, they couldn’t even afford cheap booze, let alone a lot of weed; a year later, Master of Reality launches stoner metal with its first track, “Sweet Leaf.” The next seven years with Osbourne hinged largely on songs about feeling low on breakups, high on cocaine, irritated at the record label, and irate at one another.
Political songs didn’t entirely disappear from Black Sabbath’s catalog, but they did become more sporadic and ham-fisted. A year later, on Master of Reality, the bracing and relentless “Children of the Grave” offered a rallying cry for the kids, as society’s supposed heavy metal boogeymen urged the kids to organize and “show the world that love is still alive.” There is an odd rendering of an Orwellian world on 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and, improbably, a very bad piece of political theater about a cross-dressing woman who becomes president of the United States on 1976’s sleek and largely miserable Technical Ecstasy. What’s worse, a thread of class condescension began to ripple through Black Sabbath’s songs, too, criticizing the commoners and their inability to just cut free of society, to get wild. By then, Black Sabbath played from the pedestal of fame, not from the pit of Birmingham turmoil that had made Paranoid so timely and vivid. And slowly, the élan at work during Paranoid began to fade, too. The band made records because it was now a career.
At the start of the millennium, the original Black Sabbath quartet that created Paranoid and a map for heavy metal to come reunited in the studio alongside Rick Rubin. It took a decade and Ward’s acrimonious departure, but they eventually finished 13, their final album and first with Osbourne since their initial eight-album volley ended in 1978. In the interim, Black Sabbath had become a microcosm of behind-the-music melodrama, with Osbourne and Iommi infamously spending the better part of their adult lives trying to one-up each other by searching for a better singer or guitarist. There were reality shows, patrician lifestyles, and, presumably, more money than Satan.
In those sessions, Iommi later said, they wanted to recapture the essence of Paranoid—four kids locked in a room, letting off existential unease by plowing through tunes about everything that has gone wrong in the world. The best songs on 13 excoriate wicked demagogues and fret over the Earth’s precarious existence, like the best of Paranoid. The plan worked, intentionally harnessing some of the accidental urgency that helped make Black Sabbath famous 40 years earlier and shaping a reunion album better than anyone had a reason to expect. That is the strange power and sad relevance of Paranoid, a record whose technophobe fears and atomic anxieties are as salient in this age of brash politicians and international blunder as they were in that one.


Pop music gets off way too easily; so long as groups stick to only the sweetest melodies, throw in a ...

The Unicorns: Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?

Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?

Pop music gets off way too easily; so long as groups stick to only the sweetest melodies, throw in a couple of ba-ba-buh's and sing about how Stacey's mom "has got it goin' on," or some other such timeless verse, they're valued as somehow above the fray. It seems even the most venomous rock elitists can be defanged by a few simple hooks, turned endlessly forgiving by some easy harmonies. If Stalin himself had ruled with less of an iron fist and more Beach Boys-style harmonies, he might be remembered as much for his keen songwriting chops as for the wholesale slaughter of millions of his own people; such is the inexplicably titanic redemptive power of pop. That self-same blinding power is also why it takes a band as innovative as The Unicorns to throw the complacencies of pop into stark relief, to finally hold it accountable for such casual abuses.
When it's so easy for bands to stay behind the indie-pop curve that you'd think someone's handing out ice cream back there, The Unicorns are ahead. In fact, they're so far ahead that superficial distinction becomes virtually unnecessary; they're striking at the most fundamental structure of the pop song itself. Without scrutiny, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?, their debut album for the otherwise experimental Canadian label Alien8, can pass for the same sort of sugar-glazed jangle-pop that's been done to death, but has nevertheless been beloved for years in indie circles; all the elements I just derided are present in abundance, right down to a rare few instances of smarmy lyrics. The band traffics in the occasional oooh's and aaah's, and relies on retro-basic keyboards for the requisite flourish above and beyond the standard guitar fuzz. And yet, The Unicorns toe the line of bedroom intimacy and heart-swelling wonder as perfectly as any of the modern masters of the form.
In that sense, they rival The Shins, or The Magnetic Fields, or any of the innumerable indie touchstones, but what truly sets Who Will Cut Our Hair apart is the near-total absence of traditional verse/chorus/verse framework in their songs; to nail beautiful, memorable lines with such remarkable ease is a feat unto itself, but to do so in essentially formless compositions is a different class of achievement entirely. Songs shift effortlessly from segment to segment, never relying upon the crutch of repetitive composition to create the illusion of a powerful hook. That's not to say that motifs aren't revisited throughout a song, but elementary concepts of A-B-A structure are abandoned in favor of brilliant, sprawling whole-song compositions.
These days, when "epic" describes a line at the bank, it doesn't seem adequate to describe the scope of some of these tunes, but it'll have to suffice. "Jellybones" is a titanic wreck of styles and forms, offering glimpses of hooks that would serve other bands as whole songs like so many kittens; "Tuff Ghost" builds around two simple rhythmic shifts and never looks back, burning through a dozen variations of the song's central keyboard line. And the intricate plucking to open "I Was Born (A Unicorn)" gives way to a bizarre fiction: "I was born a unicorn/ I missed the ark, but I could've sworn/ You'd wait for me," then, "So how come all the other unicorns are dead?" This hilariously morbid variation on a typical theme of loss or abandonment is par for the course on Who Will Cut Our Hair, exemplifying how The Unicorns continually and effortlessly sap the drama from rock's favorite, most maudlin topics, and transform them into simple, charming, light-hearted fun. It's a big part of what separates them from all those careerist indie rockers getting by on everyday hooks and affected disinterest; even at their goofiest, The Unicorns' level of comfort with their material-- and the obvious confidence that engenders-- makes it all seem totally natural and new.


The latest from the pair of Italian experimental musicians marked by its simplicity, distilling their music down to its most lyrical and affecting form yet.

Undercurrent

The two Italian experimental musicians that comprise Bellows arrived at their aesthetic in a manner as oblique as their music. Giuseppe Ielasi, schooled in Derek Bailey and hardcore punk, started out as an improvising guitarist before moving into computer music, electroacoustic drones, and mischievous sampling. Nicola Ratti followed a similar path from guitar abstractions to minimalist electronics. The duo’s sound and methods have remained in flux from record to record. On Bellows’ 2007 debut, they piled soft, amorphous sounds, presumably of their own creation—glinting electric guitars, lopsided percussion, sourceless rustle and chirp—into unsteady heaps. On 2010’s murkier Handcut, they pioneered a twisted form of turntablism, applying contact mics directly to vinyl LPs, which destroyed the records’ grooves after a few rotations—a little like using a rusty scalpel as a musical instrument. But the loop has typically been Bellows’ principal unit of measurement, and on Undercurrent, their first release for Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle label, they deliver their most focused music yet.
For a while, Bellows’ recordings were growing in complexity. But Undercurrent is marked by its simplicity. Elongated tones drip against a backdrop of silence and tape hiss; in place of melody, they might offer a silvery curlicue of tone. Occasional tape warble leaves their sounds curling up at the edges. The notes are less important than the way they seem to swoop up or down to the desired pitch.
The music’s constituent parts are typically opaque. To create Undercurrent, Bellows recorded short instrumental parts on guitar, drums, and synthesizer, then cut them into tape loops to be played and manipulated in real time. The most hypnotic tracks, like “01” and “04,” evoke the slow rolling of waves at low tide, or ropes slapping against the masts of moored boats. Others are more harmonic: The placid “02” smears a single organ chord into an analog approximation of Oval’s glitch etudes, while in “05,” a buried humming sound recalls the modal groans of Georgian folk music.
The pace is so slow, the form so repetitive, it’s easy to overlook the subtle ways these constructions shift as they wander. In “06,” two chords modulate back and forth, conveying a sense of resignation as they curl and crumple, like slumping shoulders. And in the closing “08,” the album’s quiet climax, a steel drum makes a plaintive creaking sound, like a rusty gate swinging on its hinges, while faint bursts of Morse-code bleeps telegraph news of an advancing storm. It’s a testament to Bellows’ sleight-of-hand that they can spin such spare materials and subtle movements into something that feels almost like storytelling. With Undercurrent, Ielasi and Ratti distill their music down to its most lyrical and affecting form yet.

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On their fourth installment, Killer Mike and El-P are back to tune up the ruling class and the racist police state, this time streamlining the process and settling into their most natural rhythm.

RTJ4

RTJ4 begins at war with the police. The titular duo—Killer Mike and El-P—work to evade a swarming force of militant cops. They draw the mob in. They shoot back. They escape. It is a fantasy. The reality comes later.
“You so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper—‘I can’t breathe’/And you sit there in the house on couch and watch it on TV,” Killer Mike raps on “walking in the snow,” his voice urgent. The lyric is about Eric Garner. Now it’s about George Floyd, too. That these two unjust killings occurred under tragically, uncannily similar circumstances (out in the open; with other officers standing by; with a man being suffocated to death; on camera) nearly six years apart only underscores the unending flow of racist violence in America. The state of heightened rage such violence induces is untenable and corrosive. Yet love needs fury to fight hate. Clearly none of this is lost on the pair of indie, old head, no-fucks-giving, chain-snatching, self-professed menaces to sobriety behind this project. Their boisterous new album, RTJ4, makes time for trash-talking and chin-checking amid insurrection.
RTJ are still taking it to the streets to fight a tyrannical ruling class and racist policing. But after the taxing process of making Run the Jewels 3, a vitriolic album in a race against doomsday, they’ve leveled off to a manageable degree of righteous indignation. To maintain equilibrium, the punchlines are less juvenile, too, and there’s a noticeable decrease in dick jokes. Fortified with lessons learned from their “blue” album, the duo conjures up the album closest to who they are as rappers and fans, activists and husbands, goofballs and go-getters: weary but unbroken, wary but not hopeless, eager to knuckle up.
By now, at the fourth installment of this series greenlit by an Adult Swim programmer, it’d be easy for them to just punch in and deliver their mandated hour of outsized, kick-in-your-teeth braggadocio—obviously, there’s still plenty of that: “Until you rob a hypebeast you ain’t seen sadness/Clockwork Orange madness, left the scene laughing,” Mike raps on “holy calamafuck”. But on RTJ4, the pair has settled into a nice rhythm—Mike, standing his ground, gun in tow, atop a soapbox; El, the truther following every red string across a tack board. RTJ4 re-engineers their music to its most critical components, as if extracting its essence. They scrap any dead weight to maneuver more freely, finding the balance between mischief-makers and agitators.
RTJ3, released under the looming shadow of Trumpism, featured a quote from the 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. speech “The Other America”: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” What remained unsaid was what, exactly, the “other” America had failed to hear: that “large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.” The pursuit of justice is active here, and it’s loud as shit and shaking the table. These guys don’t do tranquility. They don’t even do subtlety. Ain’t shit fly but the drones. (One El-P assessment: “This whole world’s a shit moat filled to the brim like GitMo.”) But they are noticeably more measured, both in trying to portion out their fury more carefully and choosing their words more precisely. “Used to be a time I’d see it and I’d say it/Now I understand that woke folk be playin’,” Mike raps on “goonies vs. E.T.” That forethought brings concision that plays into their personas as pithy, shit-talking government watchdogs.
While his real-world politics aren’t as anarchic as his songs, sound bites, and even shirts suggest, and his black capitalist position does defang his “eat the rich” sloganeering some, Mike is still capable of reeling off devastating combinations in that rubbery voice of his. He forgoes some of his quotability this time to better serve the flexibility of his rapping. He establishes his priorities on “a few words for the firing squad (radiation),” through his wife: “Friends tell her, ‘He could be another Malcolm, he could be another Martin’/She told ‘em, ‘Partner, I need a husband more than the world need another martyr.” For him, now, staying active in his community is paramount, and he raps like someone lit a fire under him. His closing verse on “goonies vs. E.T.” is one of his best, at once dauntless and precise, like watching someone skip across a minefield and survive.
El-P, for his part, has rarely sounded so animated. He is in a near-constant state of agitation, appearing through plumes of weed smoke to kick up dust, like some whistleblowing anti-hero in a dystopian YA novel. “You see a future where Run the Jewels ain’t the shit/Cancel my Hitler-killing trip/Turn the time machine back around a century,” he raps on “the ground below.” It’s that kind of highly self-referential, bluntly political, fun-loving pulp fiction mash-up bar that keeps the project so viable.
There are fewer back-and-forth exchanges than on previous albums and the verses don’t dovetail as much but the two still move well in tandem. They cover each other, their writing well-sequenced, their rapping finely staged. There’s a section on “never look back” where Mike punctuates every one of El-P’s thoughts. Mike’s bluster can cover El’s evasiveness, and El’s tendency to hang back and observe bolsters Mike’s aggression. In one exchange, El strings out a sentence like a line of train cars, “You covet disruption, I got you covered, I’m bustin’/My brother’s a runner, he’s crushin’, it’s no discussion,” crafty in and around the corners, to which Mike adds, frankly: “People, we the pirates, the pride of this great republic/No matter what you order, muhfucka, we’re what you’re stuck with.”
The banter holds RTJ’s music together at the seams. Even when serious, it never runs the risk of becoming dour or unbearable, because they feel like they’ll always get the last laugh. This commitment to wordplay as wisecracks birthed the characters Yankee and the Brave, an imagined buddy comedy action thriller (that may or may not actually come to fruition on the screen), and manifests on the bobbing, 2 Chainz-aided “out of sight,” the slap-happy “holy calamafuck,” and in moments when Mike compares himself to Godzilla or El has “a Vonnegut punch for your Atlas shrugs.” For two rappers in their 40s, they sound so liberated and timeless, all without a chip on their shoulder about the younger class. This ability to stay true to who they are feels as radical as anything else they do. “Two dudes who were born in 1975 are not supposed to be allowed to be at the cutting edge of music,” El-P told GQ, after establishing the M.O. of this dynamic duo: “We’re using our powers for good.”
They have always been historians—2014’s RTJ2 was a classicist fever dream—but RTJ4 exists in tribute to the old school. Those intentions are clear: DJ Premier and Greg Nice guested on a single. There’s scratching across the record from Trackstar the DJ and Cutmaster Swiff. “Run the Jewels has always been an homage to a degree, to a feeling that we had, to the classic groups that we came up with,” El-P explained earlier this year. “Not trying to recreate them, but to just live in that feeling when we’re making music.” He likened this run that they’re on to raucous New York duo EPMD’s, and the comparison seems apt. Some of the songs embody vintage hardcore funk rap. Others sound like sci-fi boom-bap. “out of sight” is like an ever-mutating version of the D.O.C.’s “It’s Funky Enough.” Afforded greater financial freedom by the group’s success, El-P’s songs are layered with stunning and meticulous sample work, but the beats are no less forceful. These are hard-hitting throwbacks with an ear to the ground.
RTJ4 centers protest music less explicitly than RTJ3 did, but the moments when the album is most pronouncedly in active revolt are still when it feels most essential. The in-your-face commentary of “walking in the snow” and “pulling the pin,” with Mavis Staples seemingly transmitting from another era, bring the most out of the two rhymers. All of the surveying seems to come to a head on closer “a few words for the firing squad (radiation),” where both Mike and El rattle off personal reflections from inside a dying empire. In their verses, it’s the love for those closest to them and the losses they’ve sustained under the current order that fuels their fury. The song builds, the rage builds, and as it draws to a close, Mike makes clear who all this is for: the do-gooders that the no-gooders abused; the truth-tellers tied to the whipping post; the strange fruit left hanging from trees—the Eric Garners; the George Floyds.

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Meg Duffy sharpens their slow, perceptive songwriting into a vulnerable and compelling meditation on creativity and human connection.

Sugar the Bruise EP

For Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy, creativity is a ritual of connection that reconciles the innumerable unknowns within and beyond human existence. Over the years, they’ve come to understand that it’s the questions, not necessarily the answers, that provide color to life. “The container of a song can be a safe place to pose questions or take risks,” they said in an interview about their 2021 album, Fun House. “The ritual of performing the songs helps me become more comfortable with not knowing the answers.” For their latest EP, Sugar the Bruise, Duffy builds worlds around a multitude of unanswerable queries.
Duffy recorded earlier albums like 2019’s Placeholder entirely on their own, feeling like they had  “something to prove.” Now, moving with more curiosity and openness, they’ve brought on more collaborators, co-producing with Luke Temple, Jeremy Harris, and Philip Weinrobe. Here, Duffy is at their most instrumentally complex and collaboratively generous. The result of this free-for-all cooperation is Hand Habits’ most engrossing project yet.
Duffy examines creativity’s mysterious layers, using art to talk about art itself. They confront the hardships of a touring musician and their struggle with artistic integrity on “Andy in Stereo,” then marvel at a historic artwork on “The Bust of Nefertiti.” In the former, Duffy is an omnipresent narrator, a patron saint of workaholic performers who advises the song’s protagonist, Andy, as the track morphs from a melancholic ballad into a tinkling waltz. Later, glistening chimes rain down like a sunshower. “If the music’s in your hands,” Duffy urges during the epiphanic moment, “You could play it on your own again/Just like before you could afford the band/You were lighter then.” The song’s structure transforms alongside Andy’s shifting career, emphasizing that life and creativity are not meant to be stagnant or linear. Both are as malleable and fluid as the song’s mutations.
Although the majority of these songs explore the complexities of art and imagination, the two strongest tracks on Sugar the Bruise focus on human connection. On opener “Something Wrong,” Duffy aches for a new friendship to take hold, or for a previous relationship to move into platonic territory. “Is there something wrong with that?” they ask stubbornly during the chorus, as pounding drums stomp their feet in frustration. It’s the simplest song on Sugar the Bruise, both in structure and sentiment: the pure, guileless desire to connect with another. But Duffy transforms a simple chord progression into a pilgrimage towards intimacy, adding thick, neon synths, a corroded guitar solo, and high-pitched, wormy background vocals. It’s a new, unflinching tone for Duffy, who’s well-known for slow and perceptive songwriting, and it draws us in even closer to Hand Habits’ already intimate reflections.
Still, the most heart-wrenching moment on Sugar the Bruise is a return to form. Duffy slowly shrinks away from their lover on the vulnerable ballad “Private Life.” “Morning, talking to your mother/Only moments after making me cum,” they divulge, alongside delicate piano keys and subtle white noise. “I heard you tell her there was no one else here/How much shame you place between me and our love.” Their vocals evoke mixed emotions—yearning and acceptance. Being alive means both pain and love; being human means embracing the dissonance. “This is your private life/I don’t belong here,” goes the chorus. Throughout, Duffy’s tone rides a fine line of detachment and somber assent, but in the song’s final line, a tender bruise begins to develop: “This is your private life/I wish I belonged there.”
These tracks showcase Duffy living in the marvelous, painful unknown in the most evocative ways. On closer “The Bust of Nefertiti,” a bobbing bass and honeyed acoustic guitar strum excitedly alongside a stomping house beat. After Duffy softly sings about witnessing the legendary work, the song transports us out of the Berlin Museum where the bust is held and onto a technicolor dance floor for a transcendent two-minute outro. Years ago, Duffy said, “Music is a catalyst for the divine, and a vehicle in which to disappear.” On this song, Duffy glimpses something otherworldly. It may seem like the musician we’re familiar with has disappeared. Instead, they’ve just transformed into something more sublime.


Speckled with guest stars and produced by Andrew Watt, the Stones’ second original album this century is a bunch of hackneyed duds, polished until the character has disappeared.

Hackney Diamonds

Before he was the drug-smuggling, skull-ring-wearing pirate of rock’n’roll lore, Keith Richards was the Rolling Stones’ amateur accountant. A working-class kid born into mid-war England, the fussbudget immediately began documenting the band’s finances: how much they made from those early gigs (often zero), how much sessions cost (not much), and how Bill Wyman was more valuable as a guy who owned a Vox amp than as a bassist (ouch). The Stones subsequently became not just one of the world’s biggest bands but also most ostentatious—a merchandising machine with lips-emblazoned jumbo jets, rented French mansions, and outsized stadium shows. The Stones helped define rock stardom’s swaggering ethos. They also turned it forever into a big fucking business.
On Hackney Diamonds—the second album of original material by the Rolling Stones this century and the first since the death of drummer Charlie Watts, the band’s bedrock for more than half a century—these titans of industry flail as they try to act their image rather than their age. Alongside producer Andrew Watt, they turn every trick they can to conjure just one more hit, one more chance to cash in. They try and fail to reinvigorate themselves in the rock’n’roll fountain of youth they helped create, only to emerge with a dozen hackneyed duds. Hackney Diamonds, named for the shattered glass left by a burglar, reinforces the worst part of the Stones’ once-aggressive outlaw image: eternal avarice.
To that end, Hackney Diamonds lands right on time for the two American bonanzas for which it seems algorithmically rendered: holiday spending and Super Bowl advertising. This is exactly the sort of album you gift a middle-age, mid-divorce dad who’s flailing for direction as he speeds around town in his post-split sports car, cranking the Stones’ anti-romance rants. A petulant ex for 60 years now, Mick Jagger is so pouty about being put out here it scans as absolute arrogance. Sneering opener “Angry” is the theme song for the pops who reminds everyone how hard he’s worked, how little thanks he gets, and how he’s also, inexplicably, “still taking the pills” and “off to Brazil.”
You can picture Dad pounding his hand against the steering wheel in time to “Bite My Head Off,” four minutes of punk so patrician that it takes a blown-out bass solo by Sir Paul McCartney for it to sound remotely tough. During “Driving Me Too Hard,” Jagger threatens to escape to Morocco or the corner bar, then concocts neologisms for crying, an emotionally unavailable man too afraid of these things called feelings to name them. What’s more, it sounds like the Eagles trying to be bland.
The other half of Hackney Diamonds feels like an advertisement for advertising placements, songs meant to be sold to sell something else. As The New Yorker’s David Remnick noted in 2010, the Stones grossed $2 billion in the prior 30 years, largely buoyed by big-ticket syncs for beer and software. The priapic pleas of “Get Close” seem customized for Cialis, its buoyant hook perfect for the smiling silver couple. James King’s throbbing sax solo makes an apt bed for the side-effects legalese at the end. “Dreamy Skies”—an interminable and illogical country blues about escaping to the woods “with no connections or a satellite phone”—presages a potential bidding war between Jeep and Subaru. It barely matters that these aren’t primo Stones cuts and that they are as bland as talcum powder. Touched up by tech, Watt, and a half-dozen assorted engineers, Jagger’s lissome tone remains instantly identifiable, a marketing team’s dream.
This is the first Stones album Watt has produced—not bad, since it’s only the fifth they’ve released since his birth. Still, he’s been here before. Apart from albums by Post Malone, Miley Cyrus, and Justin Bieber, Watt has helmed sessions by Ozzy Osbourne, Iggy Pop, and Elton John (a frequent guest on Hackney Diamonds). In this realm, Watt is the antithesis of Rick Rubin. Rather than lean into the age and experience of his elders, he drags them toward the present, goading them to sound like their younger selves within ill-fitting contemporary settings. For the Stones, Watt favors the molds of circa-millennium alternative rock, from Collective Soul to Franz Ferdinand, then buffs the results until they gleam like sickly wax figures. Jagger, terrifyingly, has never sounded so youthful. Keith Richards has rarely sounded so normal, his solos all exercises in convention and efficiency. Imagine upgrading a classic muscle car, say the MG Midget or a 1967 Shelby Cobra, with cheap but shiny plastic parts. Posed, patched, and polished until the actual character has all but disappeared, that’s how Hackney Diamonds sounds.
The Stones are so tightly wound for the album’s first nine songs that they risk snapping, their famously ramshackle indulgence supplanted by the need to be quantized and mechanized. They blessedly let up near the end, when Richards steps forward to lead “Tell Me Straight,” a vulnerable little query about a relationship’s odds of survival. With its dim flickers of dissonance and bedraggled tone, it is a welcome reprieve from Hackney Diamonds’ exhausting and ageless quest for perfection. (What’s more, it’s a reminder of how the looseness of Richards and the Stones at large helped inform bands like Slint and Sonic Youth.) This is as unmitigated and honest as the Stones have sounded in years, the age showing through Richards’ licks and lyrics. Good thing for Keef, too, as his solos on Hackney Diamonds are among the most routine and forgettable of his career.
Aside from a post-scripted cover of the Muddy Waters mantra that gave the band its name, Hackney Diamonds ends with “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” a horn-lifted gospel number that mostly seems like an excuse to riff with Lady Gaga and Stevie Wonder. Jagger contemplates nationalism, poverty, and his own mortality, trying to resist the sirens’ call for just a bit more hard living. “No, I’m not going to hell in some dusty motel,” he rails, Gaga buttressing him as actual feeling and fight well up in his voice for the first time all album. “And I’m not, not going down in the dirt.” Jagger spends the first 30 minutes of Hackney Diamonds cosplaying a younger version of himself, all cocksure and strutting and fake. He is only convincing when he sings of what is real and nearer every day.
Richards turns 80 in December. Jagger beat him to octogenarian status by five months. It is possible, at least, that these Glimmer Twins will be the first two of our species to last forever. But probably not. And if Hackney Diamonds, despite the ever-impetuous Jagger’s protestations to the contrary, lands as the final Stones’ album, it won’t be a worthy farewell from the band that once made sex, danger, and bitter honesty so integral to rock’n’roll. Available in so many vinyl, CD, and Blu-Ray variants it should give Taylor Swift new ideas, Hackney Diamonds suggests that the key component of rock’n’roll as the Stones now see it is that it moves units. They have nothing of consequence to say here, even after losing the band’s anchor, nor no indelible riffs to play, even after two decades to write them. Just like the image of its title, Hackney Diamonds isn’t at all full of rare gems; it is, instead, the mess made in the attempt to get easy money from someone else.


The Julie Ruin’s second album, Hit Reset, is bandleader and punk icon Kathleen Hanna's most commanding release since her manifesto-writing days.

Hit Reset

No sooner had Kathleen Hanna made her comeback than she was gone, struck down once again by the Lyme disease that had kept her out of the public eye for a decade. It was an authoritative return—documentary The Punk Singer cemented her legacy while the Julie Ruin’s debut album, Run Fast, started a new chapter of her life, or at least what seemed then like a period of remission. But while the band’s new-wave romp didn't lack energy, some of Hanna’s lyrics were unusually tentative. Not the title track, with its brutal truths about girls using butter knives to install locks on their bedroom doors, but elsewhere Hanna transferred her feelings to a nameless “you,” and anguished over “fake-forgiving... over-giving.” “Right Home” was about seizing the right to leave a crappy party, though it wielded a double edge. “I still wanna sink into some kind of hope,” she sang. “But I'm not real sure what the fuck I'm here for.” Hanna's relief at being well was palpable, but—understandably—she hadn't quite galvanized its purpose.
Three years later, Hanna is now fully recovered from her illness, and the Julie Ruin’s second album, Hit Reset, is her most commanding release since her manifesto-writing days. It’s a clean slate. Not a steady accumulation of baggage, but the chance to tip her experiences onto a sterile surface and assess each memory’s impact before dropkicking it into oblivion; the kind of process that’s often only possible when you’ve looked death in the face. It’s Hanna’s most personal work, interrogating the demands that have been placed on her her whole life: during life under duress as a kid in an abusive home. As the uneasy de facto spokeswoman for an anti-hierarchical scene. As the feminist trailblazer whose scholarship and trauma are perceived as a free resource and commodity, even more so now than when she sang “Starfish” 23 years ago. On Hit Reset, Hanna says no like only Kathleen Hanna can say no.
Hit Reset is bookended with songs about Hanna’s parents, one as chilling as the other is poignant. In the first three lines of the opener and title track, she distills her abusive father’s disregard for life and nurturing: “Deer hooves hanging on the wall/Shell casings in the closet hall/Drunk from a mug shaped like a breast.” Hanna dredges up her childhood fears; how she “slept with the lights on, on the floor/Behind a chair that blocked the door/Walk of shame from bedroom to plate/Stability just words of hate.” From that alone, you could understand how she became a feminist insurrectionist, but none of it would have been possible without her mother, to whom she pays tribute in final song “Calverton.” Named for the Maryland town where she grew up, it’s a ballad where Hanna sings endearingly off-key against ornate piano. The ugly-pretty contrast only makes the content more affecting; her mother’s whispered encouragement for everything Hanna’s father denigrated is what made her “think I could fly,” validating her voice. “Without you I'd take the fifth,” she sings. “Or be on my death bed still full of wishes.” The maternal aspects of Hanna’s own activism come into focus—the quality that made her an icon and a limb for leeches.
Hanna excavates that other trait we inherit from our mothers on Hit Reset: the emotional labor that can save and drain you, often at the same time. On “Be Nice,” she wails through distortion about the kind of guy who demands that you accept his aggressions with a smile as he calls you a bitch for refusing to satiate his grim desires, her hissing delivery and the band’s monochrome clatter evoking Grimes fronting Wolf Eyes. “Mr. So and So” is its opposite in sound: a tart sing-song against serrated guitar that could have fit Sleater-Kinney's No Cities to Love, where Hanna clowns the “male feminists” who mistake entitlement for enlightenment, damning female artists with faint praise.
Much of the rest of Hit Reset finds Hanna giving an acid bath to the toxic friends who offer nothing but needy narcissism and underhanded insults. “START A KICKSTARTER FOR YOUR HEART!” she and Kenny Mellman howl on the brilliantly ridiculous “Planet You,” which jolts on handclaps and new wave zaps. On B-52’s rager “Hello Trust No One,” Hanna ditches a frenemy, simultaneously celebrating herself and mocking expectations of feminist musicians: “Cause I can play one-handed guitar/While braiding my hair on a shooting star!” “Cause I can play electric guitar/While shaving my legs in a moving car!”
Any Hanna-related project is prone to vanishing beneath her mighty specter, but the deeper collaborative process that went into Hit Reset shines through. Kathi Wilcox, Sara Landeau, Kenny Mellman, and Carmine Covelli sound virile and versatile, digging into dank, bile-drenched sludge on “I Decide,” but keeping it classic on the curdled-Lesley-Gore vibes of “Rather Not.” There are indie-pop strains on “Record Breaker” and “Let Me Go,” where Hanna sings about her husband saving her from the pit of her illness when she would otherwise have given up. It builds from starry keys and jagged guitar to all-out sugar-laced chaos, bringing out the bittersweet qualities in her voice. Across Hit Reset, Hanna’s voice is as good a bill of health as any doctor could provide: On “I’m Done,” she wails on her cords like Pete Townshend windmills his guitar.
“I’m Done” falls towards the end of Hit Reset, where Hanna rejects the demands that have weighed her down all her life, and claims what’s rightfully hers. Funk riff-o-rama soundtracks her rampant pillaging on “Time Is Up”: “I come, I come, I come not to turn back time,” she taunts. “I come, I come, I come not for crown or throne/I came, I came, I came just to claim what’s mine/To glow like, to glow like a mountain of fireflies.” She lights up “Roses More Than Water,” with its tidy organ-dappled verses spilling into Hanna’s chattering chorus: “Maybe I want roses more than water and to be a loving father's daughter,” she sings. “Maybe I want something much more like a brownie sundae party behind closed doors or a typewriter palace with a shark filled moat,” she rambles on, voicing uninhibited childhood desires. “Maybe I’ll be hoaxed by my own demise; ‘I hear she saw a cliff and kept on driving.’” The pace slows to let her resolve emerge in perfect clarity: “Maybe I’m more hell-bent on living than I am just surviving.”


On their debut, Steely Dan brought pop instincts and studied musicianship to rock radio, putting a smooth spin on several hits that would prove to be a Trojan Horse for their esoteric ideas to come.

Can’t Buy a Thrill

In December 1972, one month after releasing their debut album Can’t Buy a Thrill, Steely Dan got eviscerated in the pages of The Los Angeles Times for looking like a bunch of car mechanics who had somehow wandered onto the stage at Whisky a Go Go. “Live rock’n’roll is supposed to be a show, and how long can one look at a pair of denim overalls without becoming utterly bored or downright repulsed?” wrote critic Richard Cromelin. He offered a modicum of praise for the band’s “moderately energetic” stage presence, and then immediately tempered it: “If only they can find some time to go shopping.”
David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona had made his debut that same year. Lou Reed issued Transformer, a glam rock album with a heavily made-up portrait of him on the cover, in November. Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, and Alice Cooper were all busy injecting danger and androgyny into American rock, which at the beginning of the ’70s was still finding its feet after the totality of the British invasion. And there were Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, professional songwriters turned curmudgeonly bandleaders, playing jazz-rock with a group of like-minded nerds, wearing overalls and oozing contempt for their glitter-spangled peers.
A dark cynicism hardened around Becker and Fagen during their stints as songwriters-for-hire in Brooklyn and Los Angeles in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Both musicians were born on the East Coast—Fagen in Jersey, Becker in Queens—and carried an Atlantic saltiness with them to the streets of California. They had met as undergrads at Bard College, bonding fast over a shared love of jazz and Frank Zappa. Few other white kids in their orbit attached as fiercely to black music at the time: “I thought I was the only person in the world who was into this little secret about jazz,” Fagen said in a 1974 interview. He found Becker, his musical soulmate, and the pair began writing songs together on the upright piano in the lobby of their dorm.
After graduating, Fagen and Becker shopped their demos around various record labels, most of which laughed them out of their offices. Producer Gary Katz landed them a job as staff songwriters at the L.A. label ABC Dunhill, known for putting out records by North American rock bands like Steppenwolf and Three Dog Night. The work was steady but boring, and Katz soon encouraged the two musicians to form their own band. Fueled more by a distaste for the early ’70s rock milieu than anything, Becker and Fagen ganged up as Steely Dan, a band named for a rubber strap-on in William S. Burroughs’ surrealist novel Naked Lunch.
They must have had some idea of what they were about to become. “The newly formed amalgam [of Steely Dan] threatens to undermine the foundations of the rock power elite,” Fagen wrote under the pseudonym Tristan Fabriani in the liner notes to the band’s 1972 debut, Can’t Buy a Thrill (they got the title from Bob Dylan, one of the few contemporaneous American musicians they could stand). “Amalgam” is right; rather than adhere to a standard rock formula, Steely Dan overloaded their sessions with players who could do Latin jazz or hot electric solos. They were a band who wanted more of everything: more guitarists, more drummers, more singers, spiraling out in a fever dream of excess. Fagen and Becker were the only writers in the room, but the credits for Thrill number a dozen musicians on instruments as far-flung as electric sitar and flugelhorn. Having escaped the sterile confines of commercial pop songwriting, Steely Dan were hell-bent on making a mess.
On paper, Thrill sounds as thorny as Italian prog, the product of a bunch of noodlers fiercely guarding their niche. But the record’s core hums with Fagen and Becker’s meticulous admiration for everything that makes pop tick. Bitter-mouthed contrarians in interviews, they wrote songs every bit as charming and delectable to the ear as the peers they claimed to despise. The members of Steely Dan appeared to take themselves as seriously as long-suffering jazz purists in a world drunk on three-chord ditties, and then they shot up the pop charts with sunny, flippant ear candy-like “Reelin’ in the Years.”
As badly as they felt the need to differentiate themselves from mainstream rock’n’roll, it was always a part of Steely Dan. They claimed the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Dylan as influences before doing so became an outrageous cliché. Echoes of Zombies’ psychedelia and Beach Boys’ sunshine also waft through Thrill. Fagen and Becker stockpiled their debut with hooks aimed straight at your dopamine receptors, with vocal harmonies and gleaming guitar lines braided tight. The weird was there, embryonic, waiting to unfurl on later, more adventurous albums. But it curled itself up in service of pleasure.
Take “Dirty Work,” basically an Eagles song, or the “na-na-nas” of the post-hippie strutter “Change of the Guard”: No matter how detached they felt from it, Steely Dan put out pop music. They tried to make a ruckus and ended up polishing gems for broad consumption. “We’re a strange band y’know. The music is all WRONG,” Fagen told Melody Maker in 1974. “Our songwriting process is not unlike the creation of junk sculpture.” If they identified with the gritty combines of mid-century artist Robert Rauschenberg, the songs they turned out were more like the sardonic baubles of Jeff Koons: fun, often hilarious, easy on the senses, and full of an unwavering disregard for the concept of authenticity.
Decades into their career, Fagen and Becker would claim the early hits as Trojan horses for complex musical ideas. “It was better to have our songs pass as pop songs and then have whatever else we wanted in them afterwards,” Becker said in 1995, as if the shimmering surface of Thrill were merely an excuse to smuggle their real musical passions into the mainstream. But the cresting harmonies and the guitar solos on “Reelin’” don’t sound like a front. They sound like a blast, like a group of young and insecure jazz dweebs egging each other on until they’ve made something so absurd even they can’t deny its allure.
Steely Dan crouched behind irony for much of their early career, and their popular legacy remains steeped in it. The hits from Thrill, “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ in the Years,” blare out from classic rock stations right next to Black Sabbath, Yes, and all the other peers they shit-talked at the time. Their flair for melodrama, humor, and quick compositional turns got sucked right up into the most vapid (and delightful) of late ’70s hair metal hits, like Journey’s “Wheel in the Sky” and Styx’s “Renegade.” They were so skeptical of rock music they ended up gilding it, breaking it down, and piecing it back together strangely enough for it to approach perfection.