The hushed flows from the Brooklyn-based rapper are compelling, but some of her stories struggle to captivate.

Mourning Due

If Nappy Nina were a comic book character, her thought bubbles would fill whole panels. In her music, the Oakland-raised, Brooklyn-based rapper’s thoughts flow in arcing run-ons that skip from prayers to confessions to flexes. Her latest album, Mourning Due, adds sighs to this skittish mix, reckoning with unspecified losses that stalk Nina’s writing and performances like a shadow. Though she never fills in this looming backstory, strong features and beats keep the music engaging.
Nina has a pianissimo timbre that brings to mind your “inside voice,” to use a grade school phrase. Her near-whisper and poetic lyricism somewhat recall Ladybug Mecca and Noname, but her love of double-time cadences and assonant rhyme schemes puts her closer to Homeboy Sandman and fellow Oaklander Suga Free. Yet unlike all of those rappers, Nina rarely writes punchlines or jokes, instead chronicling her life as a queer Black woman in Brooklyn. She’s too guarded to be considered a diarist, but her lyrics are rooted in everyday concerns, especially survival. “I’m saying, lately I’m staying/Tethered to turfs where I’m sanctioned,” she raps on “Amen,” outlining her fraught relationship with public spaces.

Her frequent allusions to grief suggest private spaces don’t offer much sanctuary either, though the writing never builds on these brief disclosures. “My lists of loss are lengthy,” she says on “Sorrel Sip,” a typical gloss. To cope, she turns to weed and sleep, but slumber offers little consolation. She either wakes up and feels unrested, or is unable to tuck in and quiet her mind, a vicious cycle captured by both the cheeky album art and a vivid line from “Amen”: “I awoke in a fire, so tired kept sleeping.”

The production often taps into that conflicted sense of drowsy jitter, pairing nocturnal torpor with restless motion. New York producers dane.zone (Sonnymoon, Quelle Chris), JWords (Maassai, MIKE), and Nelson Bandela (Terence Etc., Nick Hakim) provide nearly all the beats. They favor a one-two punch of loopy keys and hard, shuffling percussion, a combo that fits Nina’s hushed but racing anxiety raps. “Peddles” exemplifies the album’s sound, as Nina and guest OHMi glide over teetering drums and airy chords.
In her verse, Nina uses the phrase “hyperlink-type beats,” a funny and apt description of Mourning Due’s electro boom bap sound and that of other upbeat, electronic-inspired production styles seen on H3IR’s ve·loc·i·ty, Wiki and NAH’s Telephonebooth, and They Hate Change’s Finally, New. These albums avoid the punch-drunk soul loops that have dominated underground rap for the past few years, popularized by Earl Sweatshirt, Roc Marciano, and Griselda Records. The departure from that approach suggests it may be losing appeal in some corners, though no particular ethos appears to be driving the shift. Whatever the cause, there’s clearly a growing interest among producers and rappers in the textures and cadences of noise, ambient, and trip-hop, as seen on recent albums like Moor Mother and billy woods’ BRASS, as well as JPEGMAFIA’s All My Heroes Are Cornballs—the strongest records this turn has produced. The production on Mourning Due isn’t as adventurous as anything on those records, but its bubbly digital textures enliven Nina’s flows.

The album loses steam when the beats take cues from R&B, growing more leisurely and atmospheric. Those instrumentals are strong on their own, but they don’t fit Nina’s bashful style—a mismatch underscored by the magnetic presence of the many featured artists, who basically all hit home runs. Moor Mother’s verse on “Stone Soup” is the album’s best: In the span of a minute, she coolly interpolates Nas’ “Ether” and references time travel, Kara Walker tableaus, and “Bennie and the Jets”—a mix of wit, personal touchstones, and precise imagery that eludes Nina for 14 songs. Mourning Due is her strongest release, but she’s not yet figured out how to turn stray thoughts into developed ideas.


Common and Kanye West continue the sound of 2005's solid comeback Be with a follow-up that attempts to inject it with a bit of Dilla-fied Soulquarians style.

Finding Forever

There's one line on Common's new album, Finding Forever, that keeps sticking with me, and it comes right about in the middle, on "Southside": "Back in '94 they called me Chi-town's Nas." It's accurate in more ways than the idea that Resurrection is the Midwest's Illmatic: Both MCs have spent the past 13 years struggling with artistic detours, shifting audiences, and diminishing returns, Nas taking the cash-in route with the commercial-skewing (and subsequently underrated) It Was Written while Common's street-level bohemianism gradually and inadvertently narrowcasted him towards an audience of, as he infamously put it, "coffee shop chicks and white dudes." Both of them came back later in their careers with fires lit under their asses, though there's a difference between being called out by Jay-Z for being washed-up and being called out by your fans for turning into a flat-out freak (see: Electric Circus).
Seeing as how Be was a commercial, critical, and fanbase success that restored Common's rep, it's weird that its successor follows its winning formula to the letter yet somehow sounds comparatively lead-footed and tired. Although the Kanye West partnership that flourished in Common's 2005 return to form felt like something that could reap a lot of creative dividends over the course of subsequent albums, Finding Forever is a turn toward going through the motions, weighed down by an adult-contemporary atmosphere that mistakes fatigue for relaxation. There's screw albums with more liveliness than this.
Common may not have gotten more confident as he's matured-- he didn't really need to, already having developed an authoritative voice by age 22, and at 35 he's still as comfortable taking the pulpit as any MC his age-- but his street wisdom and his man-of-the-people rhetoric have developed a cynical tone that too often turns his tales of humanistic living and tragedy into joyless scolding. The righteousness worked well on Be since Common tended to leave the self- out of it, and there's a few moments on Finding Forever that succeed for the same reason; his intricately delivered insights into the vicious cycle of ghetto life in "Black Maybe" ("We leanin' on a wall that ain't, that ain't stable/ It's hard to turn on the hood that made you/ To leave, be afraid to, the same streets that raised you can aid you") and his barbed fury on "Start the Show" ("With 12 monkeys on the stage it's hard to see who's a guerilla/ You was better as a drug dealer") don't just hit hard, they hit precisely. But the narrative in "Misunderstood" about the loosely defined street hustler and the college girl turned drug-addict stripper seem more distant than the more firsthand-feeling observations in Be's closing track "It's Your World", and the first verse of "The Game" has so many disconnected talking points (global warming, spoiled rich teenagers, black power, the greatness of Big Daddy Kane) over the course of 40 seconds that it feels like a suffocating avalanche of conscious-rap clichés.
And sometimes it gets borderline-Mencia ignorant: Describing white people's supposed unfamiliarity with day-to-day struggles on "The People" requires a lot more insight than claiming they prefer to "focus on dogs and yoga" (is that how Jeremy Piven lived on the set of Smokin' Aces?), and if the flirtation in "Break My Heart" was a real-life conversation, it'd probably wind up being mocked on Overheard in Chicago: "It was a dream day/ Met her on Spring Break/ Look like the type that be like 'no habla Ingles'/ She said 'you look like you rap, where's your bling-ay/ And your clothes are tight but you don't seem gay'/ I said 'naw, that's dude from N-Sync-ay.'" At least when he griped about black men dating white women, he tried reminding himself to go beyond the surface. And he didn't lace it with a series of warmed-over pop-culture wisecracks, either: Between the references to OK Go's treadmill video, the crazy astronaut lady, and gossip-rag celebrity couples (Kimora Lee and Russell Simmons, sure, but Ryan Phillippe and Reese Witherspoon?) on the Lily Allen-augmented "Drivin' Me Wild," he's more VH-1 than KRS-One.
But while it's easy to pick and choose the goofiest shit Common says on a record, the lyrics aren't necessarily what makes Finding Forever so tedious. Kanye West, who once again produces the majority of the album, has tried making a tribute to Common's Jay Dee-fueled Soulquarian-era sound, and he doesn't fit it well at all, managing half of its vibe and none of its energy. "Southside" features a guitar riff that sounds like a rote impersonation of the bugged-out synth on Donuts' "Da Factory"; "Forever Begins" relies too heavily on a washed-out supper-club piano and an obvious break from Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover"; and even the fairly close approximations-- particularly the 70s Hancock/Wonder soul-jazz of "The People" and "Break My Heart"-- lack Dilla's knack for immaculate drum programming and thick, rich bass. (The first time I heard "The People" was in a taxi with the windows slightly cracked, and once we hit the freeway all I could hear under the wind was a weak snare shot.) It doesn't help that the inclusion of a genuine Jay Dee beat on the album-- the lush "So Far to Go," which already appeared on last year's Dilla elegy The Shining with different lyrics-- makes Kanye's shit sound even more ersatz.
It could just be a matter of an album needing the right audience: Its over-earnest soul-rap production and righteous indignation might strike a nerve with anyone who's under the impression that "real rap" needs to be saved from some evil influence (like, I don't know, Southern tracks with hooks or whatever). The problem is, Common already brought this "real" hip hop back two years ago, and by presenting a weaker, more frivolous and significantly duller version of it, he's risking falling into the same routine of formulaic coasting as the white-tee strawmen older heads gripe about. Call it Be Minus, and let me know when he's found his spark again.


A huge misstep, Lupe Fiasco's new LP simply sounds bad, playing against every single one of his strengths and creating new weaknesses.

Lasers

One of the few things more depressing than actually listening to Lupe Fiasco's new album, Lasers, is imagining the monumentally emasculating studio sessions it took to make it. It's easy for label heads to see the commercial success of arena-rap like "Empire State of Mind" and "Love the Way You Lie"-- or crossover debuts such as Nicki Minaj's Pink Friday and B.o.B.'s The Adventures of Bobby Ray (Lupe turned down the Alex Da Kid beats to "Airplanes" and the Smeezingtons' "Nothin' on You") -- as a public mandate for more of the same. But wouldn't it just be easier to find someone down for the cause rather than to remake the public persona of someone who's already established?
Lasers simply sounds bad, playing against every single one of Lupe Fiasco's strengths and creating new weaknesses. Surveying the current pop-rap landscape and retaining nothing worthwhile, it's at once chaotic, bored, and yet unyieldingly abrasive-- overblown, forced choruses, rawk guitar tracks that had to be laid down by a guy with a ponytail, mixing as subtle as a nu-metal record. There's a guy on several of these songs singing putrid hooks through what sounds like vocal filters retrieved from Dan Deacon's recycle bin-- he's named MDMA. This is a coincidence of cosmic proportions.
And then there's single "The Show Goes On", so gallingly lazy, I'm at least willing to view it as some sort of next-level parody of A&Rs asleep in the hit factory-- it would certainly be a more clever indictment than "Dumb It Down". This is one that "interpolates" Modest Mouse and trades Isaac Brock's fuck-all optimism for Lasers' most blatant attempt to siphon juice from Recovery's redemption-story treacle. Look, "Float On" is a great song, not a sacred text but interpolated into a half-Branson, half-Disney brass fanfare somehow cheapens it worse than any appearance on Kidz Bop or "American Idol".
But if this was simply "man, shame about some of the beats and hooks," someone might assume they stumbled onto a review of Food & Liquor or The Cool. Whether it's self-sabotage or a total lack of inspiration, the major difference here is that Lupe isn't working hard or playing hard. Doing just enough to escape his 16 bars before the next bombshell chorus blows, he fills his verses with guh-inducing wordplay, one-note concepts (the central metaphor of "Out of My Head" was deep enough to support a Drew Barrymore/Hugh Grant movie), or stock attempts at anguish ("Beautiful Lasers (2 Ways)"), uplift ("Coming Up"), and non-conformity ("State Run Radio").
You can't knock him for trying something new, but the tools he should be using-- his rubbery wordplay, thoughtful commentary, sheer love of the art form-- get ditched, with nothing interesting to replace them. This is mostly true even on the songs that sound like Atlantic's reward to Lupe for holding up his end of the bargain. Or maybe I'm wrong about all this and in time, Lasers will make the bean counters happy enough to grant Lupe the resources to and freedom to do whatever he envisions as his classic. Then again, his emo past is well noted-- as is the chip on his shoulder. Lupe often has enough trouble staying out of his own way, yet Lasers doesn't suffer for that reason; it just feels like the flaming wreckage of a project that never had a prayer.


Remix albums rarely have purely noble intentions. From underground promotional vehicles to hobbyist experiments for props at local watering holes ...

The Grey Album

Remix albums rarely have purely noble intentions. From underground promotional vehicles to hobbyist experiments for props at local watering holes, the concept of backing familiar voices with unexpected surroundings had been all but lost to simpler production clinics with high profile guests. That is, until Danger Mouse (best known for his work with Jemini and Sage Francis) turned a color inference into an underground phenomenon with his bootleg conceptual assault, The Grey Album, a remix album that pairs the vocals of Jay-Z's Black Album with The Beatles' legendary White Album.
By the most basic rules of the homemade remix, the record works: The vocals are on beat, pauses are natural, and the background always works thematically with the lyrics. In these more technical areas, the record effectively succeeds. But the most exciting part of any remix project is hearing whether or not the producer can save your least favorite songs, and this is clearly where DM shines. "Moment of Clarity" was the kind of awkwardly misplaced synthetic emotion expected from posthumous Tupac records. Here, however, it's a stomping guitar monster, with John Lennon's chopped vocals croaking like one of its victims. And while the original "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" sounded like Timbo going through the motions (if he decided to morph into The Neptunes for a day), Danger Mouse's rendition is like Prefuse 73 meeting David Banner, arguing chops over handclaps and eventually finding middle ground through a second strangulation of Mr. Lennon.
Of course, it isn't all so progressive. Similar to the fates of "December 4th" and "Change Clothes", "What More Can I Say" works on the tone it develops, but ultimately ends up too simple to hold attention. "My 1st Song" is enjoyable for the harsh drums that DM tracks and the closing statements that have Jay-Z doing the Charleston over "Cry Baby Cry". Of course, Shawn Carter's elastic speed-rap is near impossible to capture, as evidenced by the distracting guitar-crashing effect which closes off every few couplets. Most glaringly, no remix attempt is made on "The Threat", arguably Jay-Z's hardest performance on The Black Album, while "Lucifer" is sacrificed at the altar of conceptualism: DM simply inverts a couple Jigga vocals, chops up vocals and pianos, and inserts a bass riff and orchestral bits from "I'm So Tired" and "Revolution 9".
Though DM's takes are obviously more rock-centric than the original Jay-Z tracks, they still manage to be undeniably in tune with the spirit of hip-hop. "PSA" is turned from a menacing spin on a Black Moon standard to woodland crunk with rings of Robin Hood flute, acoustic finger flicking and truncated outbursts from George Harrison. And "99 Problems" turns the obvious rock nod into a slightly more pronounced clinic in "Helter Skelter" headbanging, with panning walls of guitar sound and a chugging main riff that, in this context, reminds me of Kool Keith's "I'm Destructive".
Danger Mouse was recently issued a cease-and-desist by EMI regarding this project's Beatle-sampling. While he insists the record was intended only as a promotional item, 3,000 copies are already in circulation, and one can't help but feel the loom of a forthcoming lawsuit. So the question now is, was the creative payoff of this project worth the possibilities of this potential worst-case-scenario? Well: While The Grey Album is truly one of the more interesting pirate mashups ever done, it ultimately fails at the hands of perfectionism with several pieces sounding rushed to beat some other knucklehead to his clever idea. Additionally, the missing songs and occasionally poor tracking means the project take a few hits. Still, it's stronger than it ought to be given the disparity between the two artists, and as far as raw experimentation goes, it further proves DM as a wildly imaginative producer. Even taken out of the context of listenability, The Grey Album will end up the trivia answer we'll always love to submit.


SZA is TDE's newest artist, the first woman and R&B singer to sign to the label. Her debut album Z plays out like a fractured memory you struggle to piece together fully: there are shards of clarity, but only that.

Z

When thinking back on the early careers of Kendrick Lamar, Schoolboy Q, and Ab-Soul—the household names on the label Top Dawg Entertainment—one element that sticks out is how easy it was to understand each rapper's point of view: Kendrick as the slick-talking, perceptive narrator with a fixation on the Reagan era of the 1980s, Schoolboy as the cocky street-hustler who turns gangsta rap on its head, Ab-Soul as the paranoid hippie. With recent signee Isaiah Rashad, the label has kept it up, presenting an assured artist in the lineage of the South's great thinking-man's MCs.
But the ability, or perhaps desire, to be understood immediately eludes TDE's newest artist SZA, the first woman and R&B singer to sign to the label. Her debut album Z plays out like a fractured memory you struggle to piece together fully: there are shards of clarity, but only that. Of course, not every album needs to be completely digestible, but Z is not the sort of mysteriously seductive record that reveals itself over time. Instead, it has walls that are tough, if not impossible, to punch through, making for an unnecessarily frustrating listen that too often feels guarded.
It is clear that SZA knows precisely what she wants her music to sound like: Z is essentially a chillwave album, every song resting softly on a bed of gauzy keyboard tones as muffled guitar figures and teetering drum patterns float by like dust in the sunlight. The results sound less weird than that description implies, since plenty of current R&B music folds back towards the same slumbering fog that defined chillwave. But very little chillwave featured female vocals—unless you include Beach House (previously sampled by Lamar, natch), spiritual ancestors of SZA whose DNA also courses through Z. A female R&B singer's version of a chillwave album could be both novel and contemporary if executed well, but Z is deeply flawed.
Z's biggest problem is that, despite choosing a sound that is soft and somnolent, SZA is too often overpowered by the music. The album is a glimmering swirl, but her voice gets lost. In a literal sense, it can be hard to hear her: on tracks like "Warm Winds", "Shattered Ring", and "Omega", her vocals are as ethereal as the beat, as entire songs dissipate into a mist. It's also impossible to get a sense for who she is. What is SZA going through? What has she been through? Unfortunately, Z does not reveal the answers to these questions, cutting against both the nature of her label and R&B as a genre.
The album opens up when SZA does, but that happens only in slices: the offhand aside of "Your skin tastes like brussels sprouts, I swear" on "Ur", the muttered plea of "Do you want to know me?" on the soulful "Child's Play", or the bracing humor of "Bumping that Jadakiss is dangerous for your sanity" on "Shattered Ring." "HiiiJack," produced by Toro y Moi, is the only time the album blossoms into a real, affecting chorus: "Sometimes I keep you in my mind/ Sometimes I let you go up high/ I'm using everything I find/ Do anything to keep you tied up." Here, SZA comes from an identifiable, relatable place, making a strong—and maybe even irrational—statement of devotion. With a beat that is both off-kilter and soothing and a chorus that floats away slowly like an ascendant balloon, it's a song so good that more like it could have pried Z all the way open. But that power rests solely with SZA, and hopefully she'll harness it on whatever comes next.


This Baltimore duo sand the edges between quiet and loud, gentle and rough, hard and soft, clean and dirty, and make their best LP in the process.

Civilian

Civilian opens with the sound of ambient chatter, a room full of voices quickly washed away by steeled guitar and electronics. It's a shift at odds with the polar dynamics this Baltimore-based duo has sworn by in its half-decade career. In a 2009 interview, The Onion's AV Club asked guitarist/vocalist Jenn Wasner if her band's knack for suddenly juicing volume was done with the live experience in mind. "We won't admit this to ourselves often," Wasner said, "but the way we play live is based on loud-quiet breaks, super-huge jumps in volume and distortion. Sometimes it's really important to explode with huge amounts of volume. Whether it's out of a creative impulse, or just an angry one where it's like, 'Hey everyone, look over here!'….It's fun to absolutely dominate a room for a couple of seconds." But those first seconds of opener "Two Small Deaths" are telling: On this, their third full-length, Wye Oak's tendency to smack listeners with giant, unannounced surges of distortion has been tempered. Wasner and Stack have taken to sanding the edges between quiet and loud, gentle and rough, hard and soft, clean and dirty. From there they've crafted their best LP yet.
It's an awful lot of ground for a duo to cover, but these two have their ways. As in the case of the White Stripes, it starts with Wasner's guitar. While Marnie Stern and Kaki King tend to run away with top honors and attention amongst female guitarists, Wasner's wailing has remained largely unnoticed. Civilian should change that. Whether it's spare, elegant chords like those on closer "Doubt", or the corkscrewing figures of "The Alter" and Sonic Youth snarl of "Holy Holy", she displays marvelous range and power.
Since Wye Oak began recording under the Merge flag in 2008, their combination of boy-girl hymns and dreamy, sometimes shoegazing sonics, have garnered accurate comparisons to the likes of Yo La Tengo. Though they still hew closely to 90s indie rock, their label found a way of describing their sound best as "21st Century Folk." That's a big umbrella but it works because one very malleable influence imbues this particular set of songs more than any other: Neil Young. You can hear Shakey in Wasner's storytelling just as much as her guitar-playing, this album's titular track and centerpiece. It's a fingerpicked, relationship still life that slowly expands before erupting into a clenched-fist coda solo that's one of this album's most arresting moments.
But don't sleep on Stack. His time-keeping here is understated when it ought to be and gargantuan when a song's climb requires it, the tick-tocking-turned-feral stomp of "Dogs Eyes" rolling both into one. More impressive, however, are the synth elements he adds to each effort; they breathe life into spaces that didn't have any before. I have yet to hear these songs played live, but together, as they are on record here, this band sounds like more than just an army stuffed into a bedroom. While plodders like "Fish" and "Plains" revert back to extremes, late burner "We Were Wealth" does the exact opposite. What begins as a languid, guitar-driven mood piece, blooms into something far more delicious. Wasner's satin vocals lift, Stack couples a key-driven pulse with splashes of delay and crash cymbal, and what we're left with is fireworks of a dozen colors. They have our attention from beginning to end.


In Rainbows

Like many music lovers of a certain age, I have a lot of warm memories tied up with release days. I miss the simple ritual of making time to buy a record. I also miss listening to something special for the first time and imagining, against reason, the rest of the world holed up in their respective bedrooms, having the same experience. Before last Wednesday, I can't remember the last time I had that feeling. I also can't remember the last time I woke up voluntarily at 6 a.m. either, but like hundreds of thousands of other people around the world, there I was, sat at my computer, headphones on, groggy, but awake, and hitting play.
Such a return to communal exchange isn't something you'd expect to be orchestrated by a band who's wrung beauty from alienation for more than a decade. But if the past few weeks have taught us anything, it's that Radiohead revel, above all else, in playing against type. It's written in their discography; excluding the conjoined twins that were Kid A and Amnesiac, each of their albums constitutes a heroic effort to debunk those that came before it. Although 2003's Hail to the Thief was overlong and scattershot, it was important insofar as it represented the full band's full-circle digestion and synthesis of the sounds and methods they first toyed with on OK Computer. So, after a decade of progression, where do we go from here?
If the 2006 live renditions of their new material were anything to go by, not much further. With few exceptions, the roughly 15 songs introduced during last year's tour gave the impression that after five searching records, Radiohead had grown tired of trying to outrun themselves. Taken as a whole, the guitar-centric compositions offered a portrait of a band who, whether subconsciously or not, looked conciliatory for the first time in its career. Although a wonderful surprise, their early October album announcement only lent further credence to the theory. Where they'd previously had the confidence to precede albums like OK Computer and Kid A with marketing fanfare worthy of a classic-in-making, this sneak attack felt like a canny strategy to prepare fans for an inevitable downshift.
The brilliant In Rainbows represents no such thing. Nonetheless, it's a very different kind of Radiohead record. Liberated from their self-imposed pressure to innovate, they sound-- for the first time in ages-- user-friendly; the glacial distance that characterized their previous records melted away by dollops of reverb, strings, and melody. From the inclusion and faithful rendering of longtime fan favorite "Nude" to the classic pop string accents on "Faust Arp" to the uncharacteristically relaxed "House of Cards", Radiohead's sudden willingness to embrace their capacity for uncomplicated beauty might be In Rainbows' most distinguishing quality, and one of the primary reasons it's an improvement on Hail to the Thief.
Now that singer Thom Yorke has kickstarted a solo career-- providing a separate venue for the solo electronic material he used to shoehorn onto Radiohead albums-- Radiohead also sound like a full band again. Opener "15 Step"'s mulched-up drum intro represents the album's only dip into Kid A-style electronics; from the moment Jonny Greenwood's zestful guitar line takes over about 40 seconds in, In Rainbows becomes resolutely a five-man show. (For all of Yorke's lonely experimental pieces, it's easy to forget how remarkably the band play off each other; the rhythm section of Phil Selway and Colin Greenwood are especially incredible, supplying between them for a goldmine of one-off fills, accents, and runs over the course of the record.) A cut-up in the spirit of "Airbag"-- albeit with a jazzier, more fluid guitar line-- "15 Step" gives way to "Bodysnatchers", which, like much of In Rainbows, eschews verse/chorus/verse structure in favor of a gradual build. Structured around a sludgy riff, it skronks along noisily until about the two-minute mark, when the band veers left with a sudden acoustic interlude. By now, Radiohead are experts at tearing into the fabric of their own songs for added effect, and In Rainbows is awash in those moments.
The band's big-hearted resurrection of "Nude" follows. The subject of fervent speculation for more than a decade, its keening melodies and immutable prettiness had left it languishing behind Kid A's front door. Despite seeming ambivalent about the song even after resurrecting it for last year's tour, this album version finds Yorke wrenching as much sweetness out of it as he possibly can, in turn giving us our first indication that he's in generous spirits. Another fan favorite, "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi" brandishes new drums behind its drain-circling arpeggios, but sounds every bit as massive in crescendoing as its live renditions suggested it might. "All I Need", meanwhile, concludes the album's first side by dressing up what begins as a skeletal rhythm section in cavernous swaths of glockenspiel, synths, pianos, and white noise.
With its fingerpicked acoustic guitars and syrupy strings, "Faust Arp" begs comparisons to some of the Beatles' sweetest two-minute interludes, while the stunning "Reckoner" takes care of any lingering doubt about Radiohead's softer frame of mind: Once a violent rocker worthy of its title, this version finds Yorke's slinky, elongated falsetto backed by frosty, clanging percussion and a meandering guitar line, onto which the band pile a chorus of backing harmonies, pianos, and-- again-- swooping strings. It may not be the most immediate track on the album, but over the course of several listens, it reveals itself to be among the most woozily beautiful things the band has ever recorded.
With its lethargic, chipped-at guitar chords, "House of Cards" is a slow, R.E.M.-shaped ballad pulled under by waves of reverbed feedback. While it's arguably the one weak link in the album's chain, it provides a perfect lead-in to the spry guitar workout of "Jigsaw Falling Into Place". Like "Bodysnatchers" and "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi" before it, "Jigsaw" begins briskly and builds into a breakneck conclusion, this time with Yorke upshifting from low to high register to supply a breathless closing rant.
Finally, the closer. Another fan favorite, Yorke's solo versions of "Videotape" suggested another "Pyramid Song" in the making. Given the spirit of In Rainbows, you'd be forgiven for assuming its studio counterpart might comprise some sort of epic finale, but to the disappointment of fans, it wasn't to be. Instead, we get a circling piano coda and a bassline that seems to promise a climax that never comes. "This is one for the good days/ And I have it all here on red, blue, green," Yorke sings. It's an affecting sentiment that conjures up images of the lead singer, now a father of two, home filming his kids. A rickety drum beat and shuddering percussions work against the melody, trying clumsily to throw it off, but Yorke sings against it: "You are my center when I spin away/ Out of control on videotape."
As the real life drums give way to a barely distinguishable electronic counterpart, Yorke trails off, his piano gently uncoils, and the song ends with a whimper. The whole thing is an extended metaphor, of course, and, this being Radiohead, it's heavy-handed in its way, but it's also a fitting close to such a human album. In the end, that which we feared came true: In Rainbows represents the sound of Radiohead coming back to earth. Luckily, as it turns out, that's nothing to be afraid of at all.


The British punk-hop duo’s career-spanning collection shows their unlikely ascent from ranting on sidewalks to ranting at Brixton Academy.

All That Glue

The British punk-hop duo Sleaford Mods are really a trio: vocalist Jason Williamson, producer/professional button-pusher Andrew Fearn, and Williamson’s water bottle. Williamson doesn’t simply leave his Evian by his floor monitor in case he needs an occasional swig; it’s affixed to his left hand, the life force that allows him to shout himself hoarse for 60 minutes about how everything’s fooked. His desperate gulping forces you to contemplate the superhuman effort he puts into his bilious rants, and, as this new career-spanning collection affirms, the effect remains just as potent when you’re getting berated at home.
It makes sense that one of Britain’s most breathless acts would want to push pause now and take a look back: 2019’s Eton Alive cracked the UK Top 10, capping the Mods’ unlikely ascent from playing on sidewalks to headlining Brixton Academy. All That Glue, which bypasses a number of crucial cuts, has no designs on being definitive. Rather, the compilation positions a handful of the Mods’ most popular songs (“Tied Up in Nottz,” “Fizzy,” “Tweet Tweet Tweet”) as familiar cross streets on a back-alley tour of non-album singles, cassette-only releases, alternate versions, and previously unreleased ephemera. Fortunately, with a band as lyrically and sonically crude as Sleaford Mods, there’s zero dissonance between their official and non-official output: All That Glue’s unearthed tracks easily punch as hard as their better-known counterparts, and each showcases Williamson’s bottomless reservoir of ways to vent spleen.
The story of Sleaford Mods is, of course, inextricable from that of England itself over the past 10 years. Thanks to dole-line dispatches like “Jobseeker,” the group emerged as Britain’s preeminent punk-rock band for an austerity age where even the most basic punk-rock rudiments (electric guitars, amplifiers, drums) seem like unattainable luxuries, and where no one can afford to feed their families but there’s “digital time boards on the new public shitters.” Williamson’s lyrics provide grave diagnoses on multiple English societal sicknesses, including its rightward creep in the Brexit era; on “Rochester,” he recounts a confrontation with a “separatist pub racist.”
And yet he also speaks to quandaries that resonate for listeners with no idea what the EDL or BHS is. On “TCR,” he’s just a forty-something dad trying to keep his cool when chaos reigns both inside and outside his household. On “Fat Tax,” Williamson grapples with the new reality of being a touring artist in middle age: “If I play another venue covered in stickers where everybody chain smokes, it’s so no no!”
All That Glue’s chronological sequence emphasizes the most remarkable thing about Sleaford Mods’ improbable success—i.e., that their rising popularity has had negligible effect on their music. (To wit, even Mark E. Smith—who, by law, must make a cameo in every Sleaford Mods review—eventually moved onto congenial Kinks and Gene Vincent covers.) But its cherry-picked tracklist also provides a clearer picture of the duo’s incremental evolution. Sleaford Mods may never deign to write a proper pop song, but as the motorik punk of “Seconds” demonstrates, Williamson has become evermore adept at harnessing his rangy rants into accessible chants. And tellingly, they opt to close with two Eton Alive outliers—the clarinet-squawked “OBCT” and damn-near-balladic “When You Come Up to Me”—that suggest a band on the cusp of a greater transformation. On All That Glue’s opening track, “McFlurry,” Williamson repeatedly declares, “I’ve got a Brit Award” with copious snark. But by the end of the record, the joke doesn’t seem so funny anymore.

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The second album from Tennessee songwriter Julien Baker wrestles with self-worth, rejection, and God. Centering on her voice, guitar, and piano, Baker begins to sound defiant.

Turn Out the Lights

On “Claws in Your Back,” the last song on her second record Turn Out the Lights, Julien Baker pulls out the stopper from all the tension that’s mounted in her solo music to date. The Tennessee songwriter’s first album on Matador wrestles with many of the same demons that populated her chilling debut Sprained Ankle in 2015. In her cracked but steady voice, a voice trained on pop-punk in her band Forrister and later subdued to spare, acoustic rock, Baker appeals to God. She asks familiar questions: Am I enough? Do I deserve to be here? Will I ever be OK? In the album’s final moments, she at last settles on something like an answer. “I think I can love the sickness you made,” she sings. “I want it to stay.” She thunders out the last syllable in an unbridled belt, the kind that sparks full-body shivers no matter how fortified your guard may be. Her voice echoes into what sounds like a cavernous space, and then you hear her close the lid of the piano, the heavy work of catharsis behind her.
If that “stay” stuns beyond anything Baker’s ever recorded, it’s only because she fought so hard to get there. The fragile, gentle songs on Sprained Ankle played like an open diary of mental illness and substance abuse, with an ember of faith flickering at its core. “There’s more whiskey than blood in my veins,” Baker sang over sparse piano chords on that album’s closer “Go Home,” “more tar than air in my lungs.” On Turn Out the Lights, Baker reckons with the ghosts that follow her even into sobriety. Though the album still centers on her voice, guitar, and piano, she’s got more company this time, both in the form of additional personnel (Sorority Noise’s Cameron Boucher plays woodwinds on “Appointments” and “Over,” and Camille Faulkner lends strings to five tracks) and new characters in the lyrics. The “you” Baker sings to is sometimes God, like before, but also sometimes a romantic partner or friend she feels she’s disappointing. Whomever she’s addressing in a given moment, she dreads their rejection constantly—even on the title track and “Shadowboxing,” where the only person she’s struggling with is herself.
Baker often sounded defeated or apologetic on Sprained Ankle, couching her dejection in the language of physical injury—a metaphor she extends through “Televangelist” with the couplet, “I’m an amputee with a phantom touch/Leaning on an invisible crutch.” Elsewhere, though, she begins to sound defiant, as though with enough rage she could finally beat back her sadness. “The harder I swim, the faster I sink,” she repeats toward the end of “Sour Breath,” her voice building to a scream she throttles through a distorted microphone.
On “Happy to Be Here,” she confronts her maker directly: “I was just wondering if there’s any way that you made a mistake… I heard there’s a fix for everything/Then why/Then why/Then why not me?” Her voice climbs each time she repeats the question, until it breaks and hangs in the air around her. By the end of the song, she ameliorates her frustration by opting to “grit my teeth and try to act deserving/When I know there is nowhere I can hide from your humiliating grace.”
A direct thematic line runs from the album’s first full song, “Appointments,” to “Claws in Your Back”’s riveting finish. On “Appointments,” Baker grapples with the apparent futility of her strained optimism; at the song’s coda, her multi-tracked voice sings to itself, “Maybe it’s all gonna turn out alright/I know that it’s not/But I have to believe that it is/I have to believe that it is.” That innate contradiction, that faith against all reasonable odds, resonates behind the chain of confessions that follows. By the end of the album, she’s landed on another cluster of paradoxes: “I’m better off learning how to be/Living with demons I’ve/Mistaken for saints/If you keep it between us/I think they’re the same." The way she sings it, you’d believe she’s telling her secrets to you and you alone, all evidence to the contrary. You’d believe that loving your demons—not banishing them—might just be the secret to that evasive grace.


One of 90s R&B's leading lights makes a surprising, and rewarding, comeback on this, his first new album in eight years.

BLACKsummers'night

Heartbreak is a constant in popular music, and with good reason; Maxwell is among the billions across the globe who have had their hearts broken at one time or another, but his latest record, BLACKsummers'night, is a deeply moving and evocative record that finds the singer expounding on this universal feeling like few can. The record misses frequent collaborator Stuart Matthewman and initially has an almost underwhelming live-performance feel when compared with his older records. But while it lacks the iconic significance of his debut, BLACKsummers'night is a record more than worthy of Maxwell's talents, because it trades the physical sensuality of his earlier work for a deep emotional resonance, the performance of an artist whose focus and attention to detail gives his expression a singular veracity.
Maxwell's debut, Urban Hang Suite, is one of the top R&B records of the 1990s. Back then the young, precocious singer wielded an introverted, understated persona; he seemed to have a profound understanding of himself with a quiet-spoken reserve that, when blended with incredibly crafted songwriting, came across as confidence. Here was an artist who seemed to have shaped every chord change for maximum emotional effectiveness. Maxwell was also a performer who knew that songwriting was not simply writing melodies and chord progressions, but could be structurally ambitious, with the kind of consistent unpredictability and subversiveness of the song form, embracing the unexpected, like the sudden crash after the long pause in the middle of Urban Hang Suite's "Dancewitme". His latest record finds these kinds of details, this external, broad-perspective view of what "composition" really means, the love of intricacies, its best songs balancing compositional excellence, development, and tension, with carefully designed moods that reflect or complement each work's lyrical focus.
Take "Help Somebody", for example: Maxwell begs the listener to show love, turning such feelings into a moral imperative, tension ratcheting with a gradual build, musically searching for release that never comes, a long hopeless cry to force logic to intrude over irrational feeling. Maxwell's power is least effective when he loses this composed structure; "Stop the World" reaches for raw, unrehearsed expression, but without organization, it feels listless. By contrast "Fistful of Tears" is anchored by a Prince-inflected quarter-note harmony waltz; not coincidentally, it's also the album's most immediately affecting track.
Although Maxwell has always seemed preternaturally mature, there is something new here, a depth of emotion appropriate for this level of heartbreak. "Pretty Wings", the lead single and album centerpiece, doesn't work in simple binaries or reductive ideas; it lays out a fair yet confused examination of a relationship's fall. Maxwell even acknowledges his own mistakes after an indictment of his partner's, creating a realization of loss and all of the intricate personal responses that implies. But what is truly powerful is that it is just as musically complex as a relationship's disintegration is emotionally. Maxwell's patience allows him to effectively write such paens to devotion; it is as if he wanted to catalog every aspect of this very human breakdown, identify each strand to create a song that fully captures, laid bare, the complex emotional terrain that wells up during such an exceptionally difficult and human experience. This level of detail carries with it a lived-in feeling, a convincing truthfulness simply because the emotions are too specific to be anything but real. Music this effective is difficult, and only someone as passionate about music as they are the human heart could so successfully produce work that reflects well on both.


Incorporating all of Odd Future's members with surprising ease (not an easy task considering all the stylistic differences at play), The OF Tape Vol. 2 is the first thing in well over a year that will remind people of why they liked the L.A. skate punks in the first place.

Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All: The OF Tape Vol. 2

The OF Tape Vol. 2

"Rella" video: Hodgy Beats shoots lasers from his crotch that turn girls into cats, Domo Genesis smacks a black girl in the face and she turns Asian, Tyler as a coke-snorting centaur.
"NY (Ned Flander)" video: Hodgy as a deadbeat dad preoccupied with softcore porn, Tyler's head on a baby's body.
If you thought that one-two punch of videos for the lead singles from The OF Tape Vol. 2 was the beginning of the end for the notorious gang of L.A. skate punks, you weren't alone. Never mind that the songs were fine, but for a crew whose visuals were as important to their meteoric rise as their music (if not more), those big-budget videos suggested Tyler and the rest of Odd Future had forgotten why they became such a big deal. Both clips try to get over on low-level shock value, but in playing up their propensity to rankle casual onlookers, the group overlooked that they became a sensation first and foremost because of their dynamic and unique chemistry. Their insularity and aura is what draws people to them and that was wiped away by sterile video sets and CGI.
"Oldie" video: While at a Terry Richardson photo shoot, the entire Wolf Gang stages an impromptu video, reciting their verses from the album's closing track. They interrupt each other, bust each other's balls, play hypeman for each other, and laugh and smile a hell of a lot. Its lo-fi spontaneity is as close as we've gotten to the group's early videos, and it looks like the most fun you could have on any given day. This is no coincidence. The energy and camaraderie that ignites the video is the purest distillation of Odd Future's accidental genius, and after a year-plus of overwrought attempts to continually up the shock level, it's a much-needed breath of fresh air. This is great news, but even better is that The OF Tape Vol. 2 as a whole shares more with the "Oldie" video than the other two. The tape incorporates all of Odd Future's members with surprising ease (not an easy task considering all the stylistic differences at play) and pieces together the first release in over a year that'll remind people why they liked the group so much in the first place.
Part of it is just mathematical. Contributions here are less than any one person would put into a solo album, and though that simple formula doesn't always equal success when it comes to group records, every member here benefits from the arrangement. For guys like Hodgy and Domo, there's barely any room for filler lines (let alone filler verses), and that helps mask their lesser-developed personas. As for Tyler, well, at the moment, less Tyler is better than more Tyler. His presence still dominates the album, but his charms are more apparent and his abrasiveness is easier to digest than on Goblin. Those three show up on nearly half of these tracks, and that's crucial to the album's success since any combination of the three works well together. This is often thanks to Hodgy, whose versatility finds him just as comfortable turning up the aggression with Tyler on "NY (Ned Flander)" as he is trading verbal workouts with Domo on "Bitches" for style points.
But the album is a success mainly because everyone simply steps it up. Domo in particular seems to have evolved from the group's bumbling stoner into a guy who can spit dizzying, complicated verses. Even the peripheral members manage to hit it out of the park when given their turns: Mike G's "Forest Green" has been out for close to a year, but its inclusion here is obvious and deserved. Syd has show-stopping turns as a singer at the end of "Analog 2" and on the Internet's "Ya Know", the latter being a more successful take on the sort of lounge-soul that Pharrell used to awkwardly dabble in. Frank Ocean swings by for a few hooks plus "White", his lone solo contribution, which will add Stevie Wonder to the list of classic singers he's usually compared to. Even "We Got Bitches", Tyler, Jasper, and Taco's second stab at an affectionate Waka parody, is almost good enough to make up for Goblin's "Bitch Suck Dick".
Which brings us back to "Oldie". The 10-minute-plus track closes an album that's probably too long in the first place, and in theory it borders on overkill. But it's a reminder that when you strip away all the noise, there's just a group of rappers here, and pretty good ones at that. Maybe it's also a reminder to Odd Future that their skills can allow them to stand on their own, teen dreams of wild music videos be damned. Oh, and the return of Earl Sweatshirt doesn't hurt either.


The debut album from Spillage Village founders Olu and WowGr8 is a whimsical, theatrical attempt to capture the inexhaustible magic of Atlanta.

Mirrorland

One of the most impressive feats of Donald Glover’s surrealist FX show Atlanta is how it captures the sheer multiplicity of the city’s many characters. The dope dealer turned rising rapper is managed by his homeless Princeton dropout cousin, whose Afro-German girlfriend is a grade-school science teacher with a homegirl who scams pro athletes; it’s on and on like that down to the most minor roles. Atlanta has often been dubbed Black Mecca, in part for the wide swath of black identities it fosters. Among the inheritors of this broad lineage is EarthGang, an ATL duo comprised of rappers Olu (also known as Johnny Venus) and WowGr8 (also known as Doctur Dot), founders of the wide-ranging Spillage Village collective that includes J.I.D., 6LACK, Mereba, Lute, and more. Their debut album, Mirrorland, released on the heels of their Dreamville label’s touted compilation Revenge of the Dreamers III, longs to be a black world unto itself.
Mirrorland was inspired by The Wiz, the all-black 1978 adaptation of The Wizard of Oz featuring music produced by Quincy Jones for Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Lena Horne. “Atlanta is the Land of Oz,” Olu said in July. “It’s black people just being unafraid and unapologetically creative. Just running around being themselves.” The album certainly has the whimsy and spectacle of a musical, and it’s clear Olu and WowGr8 consider themselves unapologetically creative, too, but there is the sense that this is less about them and more about honoring that down-home creative spark. There is a theatricality to the music, as if they are donning personas and performing bits, paying homage to the many types of people they encounter and the place that produces them. The scope of Mirrorland is wide enough to capture the inexhaustible magic of Atlanta.
The songs on Mirrorland are clear attempts to chart the city’s diverse sound. They are rich and constantly shifting and evolving. Produced by Olu, Elite, DJ Dahi, Bink!, Childish Major, and others, this is EarthGang’s most complete record and their most unpredictable one. It is as captivating as it is unusual. When the songs don’t erupt into full-on parades like the groovy hoodoo opener “LaLa Challenge,” they split open into alternate arrangements, like “This Side,” its rippling synths receding to uncover slapping drum programming. The album can swing from funk-rap to trap so quickly that it almost inherently reveals how these styles trace back to the same roots. The shifts are anchored by the two rappers, who dictate the flow with their larger-than-life styles and their flamboyant execution. Some of that performance is at the expense of more personal songwriting. There’s nothing as reflective as the songs on their EP trilogy, Rags, Robots, and Royalty. In place of rapping that communicates more of their individual identities, madcap demonstration takes the fore.
Both Olu and WowGr8 can rattle off semi-automatic raps or bellow tuneful chants, or even fuse the two together, as they do on “Top Down.” Olu leans into the cartoonishness of his voice a bit more, while WowGr8 has the conversational tone of a rambler. Both are prone to breaking out into song at any moment, channeling gospel soul or freaky country-fried blues. Their eclecticism and their risk-taking ways are indebted to OutKast; their music, less so. It’s a comparison they’ve gotten almost constantly, and an unfair one, really. They aren’t the rappers André and Big Boi are, nor are they the storytellers. Their relationship to one another is a parallel, oddball to oddball, as opposed to free spirit to pragmatist. Big Boi kept André weighted to the ground; neither here is a tether to Earth, so there’s nothing preventing them both from drifting out into space. But it’s better for them this way. No one can be OutKast, and EarthGang’s unrestrained looseness gives them free rein to do and try just about anything.
The ideas sprawled across Mirrorland are mostly in service of songcraft, adding color and texture to their vibrant visions of a super-black Emerald City. It’s Atlanta rap fantasia, manifold in form and style, each track a new, distinctive set design in the production. There’s the trumpeting Afrobeat sashay of “Tequila,” the throwback neo-soul of “Blue Moon,” the out-there BTG-ish balladry of “Proud of U” (with Young Thug in tow). The songs aren’t necessarily about anything in particular, and none of the writing really grabs you, though it does usually contain kernels of insight (“Nigga that you hatin’ on probably got something he could teach your corny ass/While you in the corner grindin’ teeth,” WowGr8 raps on “Avenue”). The album works because of its holism, the sense that its songs make up an entire picture. “Cinematic” is a word they’ve used to describe Mirrorland, but EarthGang’s album isn’t 2D, it’s multidimensional—a marauder’s map of Atlanta as a black paradise.


M

Myrkur steps confidently from the shadows on M, the full-length debut from the polarizing black metal project of Danish singer and bandleader Amalie Bruun. Late in 2014, Myrkur emerged with a self-titled debut EP clouded in and catapulted by mystery. Hyperbolically billed by Relapse Records as "a wholly unique perspective on the genre," the seven songs webbed haunting, seraphic singing around tremolo guitars and primitive, rumbling drums. The conceit was intriguing, but the songs were unevenly built, with parts that never quite became a complete puzzle and a force that felt mitigated by some sycophantic need for second-wave credibility.
Still, even (especially?) people who dismissed the songs demanded to know just who the unnamed creator of the one-woman black metal band was, a process that begot pernicious conspiracy theories and comment threads devoted to ferretting out the singer and connections that would make her a little less kvlt. Bruun, indeed, had worked as a pop singer and half of an indie rock band signed to Fat Possum, biographical talking points that inspired ire. Days before the EP arrived, Relapse confirmed that Mykur did, indeed, belong to Bruun, setting off another wave of debate about whether or not the anonymity had been a mere promotional ploy. The hubbub was more interesting and accomplished than the music that inspired it, a distraction from the real reason anyone should or should not have been talking about Myrkur. But on M, Bruun is free and clear of any identity drama—and a much more convincing bandleader for it.
Myrkur’s animating idea remains much the same on M: Add Bruun’s beautiful voice to brutal metal outbursts, and offset serrated black metal screams with contemplative piano or vocal interludes. This time, though, Bruun has sealed many of the foundational cracks in her compositions and owned the audacity of the project and the form at large. She recruited Ulver mastermind Garm as the co-producer, alongside a rhythm section comprising members of Mayhem and Nidingr and a cadre of horns and stringed instruments endemic to Norway and Iceland. They reinforce these songs, adding flourishes that are both striking and subtle and delivering an instrumental aplomb that Myrkur initially avoided.
These songs feel unabashed and fully rendered, neither limited by the codex of a hidebound genre or hindered by the need to prove too much at once. Rather than recede from public view following a sometimes-uncomfortable start, Bruun has pushed Myrkur into the spotlight of big, bright production—a kiss-off to cynical kvlt critics that doubles as a convenient invitation of accessibility. On Myrkur, the relationship between the songs’ varied aspects—the choral singing, the piano pieces, the relentless browbeaters—seemed casual at best, facets of a project that Bruun had not yet fit together. But M works as an album of interconnected miniature arcs, with many songs following the same structure.
Bruun flexes here, too: In the past, and throughout much of M, she has meted out her harsh vocals, judiciously scattering them for dramatic emphasis or as textural undercurrents. But on "Mordet", the most direct evidence of her increased ambition, she foregoes clean vocals altogether for the first time in her catalog. Her grim voice webbed with echo, she sounds as though she’s hunting an evil tail through the search-and-destroy maze of guitars, drums, and noise. If only for four minutes, she escapes her predictable comfort zone of hard-and-soft counterbalance, becoming the heavy metal force that her past has only suggested.
At its most compelling, black metal pits the impossible grandeur of the world against its harsh natural realities. It’s a big, vivid vision, where battles between heroes and villains, the dark and the light, the past and the present come into ecstatic conflict. It’s become so stylized and specific, though, that some of that spirit can often be lost in rote genre exercises or aggressively experimental attempts to re-contextualize it. From the start, it was clear that Myrkur wanted to recapture the essence of those competing forces and the tension they produced. That prospect was always more enticing than who she was or who she wasn’t. At last, Myrkur’s music has started to bear out that promise and to rise above the gossip about her pedigree.


Maybe you've heard of this one? This meeting of two long-reigning titans is the kind of stadium-sized event-rap spectacle we don't get often enough.

Watch the Throne

Watch the Throne features the following things: absurdly expensive samples, a pair of choruses from Odd Future R&B singer Frank Ocean at the exact moment where he's turning the corner and becoming a Thing, another chorus from long-been-a-Thing Beyoncé, a buddy-buddy shoutout to the President of the United States, multiple namechecks of brands so expensive that you've probably never heard of half of them, a murderers' row of producers working on almost every track, and a fleeting moment where Bon Iver's Justin Vernon sounds like the funkiest man alive. And yet for Jay-Z and Kanye West, this could actually be viewed as a relatively minor album. Amazing.
The album comes hot on the heels of career-landmark albums from both artists, but the few months they spent recording it on multiple continents were practically vacations compared to the way they usually work. Kanye's opus My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, still less than a year old, won across-the-board critical raves for its lush, prog-rap expansiveness; to create it, Kanye sequestered himself in Hawaii and flew in an endless stream of creative-peak collaborators. Jay, meanwhile, is still cruising on the momentum of The Blueprint 3, an artistically flat but commercially massive grab for continued relevance that did everything he wanted it to do. Watch the Throne brings little of Twisted Fantasy's boundary-melting ambition or The Blueprint 3's commercial acumen. It's just two of rap's biggest figures and best friends getting together to make some of the swollen, epic music that comes so naturally to them. Listening to it is sort of like watching George Clooney get all his movie-star friends together for a party at his Italian villa, and, along the way, maybe dream up Ocean's Twelve. (I liked Ocean's Twelve.)
In the past week, Internet sleuths have pointed out that the release of many Jay-Z albums have coincided with some national or international calamity, 9/11 not excluded. Watch the Throne is no exception: its release on the same day as yet another catastrophic stock market downturn has led some critics to conclude that the pair's boasts of obscene wealth is out of step with the times. That's a fair case to make. But one of the striking things about Watch the Throne is how often Jay and Kanye address matters beyond their bank accounts. On "Why I Love You", it's Jay's dismay at past crewmates' betrayals. On "Murder to Excellence", it's black-on-black crime and the scarcity of people of color at society's highest seats. On "Made in America", it's the hardships of youth and coming of age. "New Day" is framed as a letter to the pair's imagined sons, a device that mostly gives them a chance to soul-search and self-criticize. On "Welcome to the Jungle", Jay, never a tortured pop star, actually says, "I'm fuckin' depressed." Despite all the triumphant bravado these two bring to practically everything they do, they work overtime here to bring a sense of empathy to this enterprise. Once in a while, they even sound vaguely humble.
These subtler moments are admirable, but they don't always work. Consider, for example, the song "That's My Bitch", on which Kanye and his collaborators flip the classic "Apache" break into a devastating dance-rap monster with synths zooming off in every direction and Justin Vernon making the aforementioned sweaty soul moves. It's a vicious song, catchy as fuck, but it turns out to be weirdly awkward. Despite the title, Jay's verse is all devotional-prophet; it mostly concerns the way American beauty standards so often work against women of color. The sentiment deserves respect, but his laidback delivery, on a track with production and structure that call for ferocity, drains his ideas of force.
Watch the Throne works best when Jay and Kanye are just talking about how great they are. The single "Otis" is dizzy fun, with Jay and Kanye rapping hard and swapping mics like hungry kids. "Niggas in Paris" rides an impossibly propulsive synth riff and gigantic drums and gives Jay a chance to display the technical rap wizardry he still has in him. (It also features this great Kanye moment, "Doctors say I'm the illest because I'm suffering from realness/ Got my niggas in Paris, and they going gorillas," followed by a sample of Will Ferrell in Blades of Glory talking about how awesome shit doesn't have to mean anything.) "Gotta Have It" unites Kanye and the Neptunes to crazily chop up James Brown vocal samples and Eastern flute melodies. And "Who Gon Stop Me" finds Kanye cussing in Pig Latin while turning dubstep-rap into a viable subgenre.
If you buy Watch the Throne from iTunes-- the only place you can buy it at the moment-- you'll notice that it's credited to "JAY Z & Kanye West" (capital letters and missing hyphen unexplained). But while Jay might be billed first for seniority's sake, Kanye is this album's obvious guiding force. Throughout, he displays levels of unequaled audacity. On "Otis" and "Gotta Have It", he reduces Otis Redding and James Brown to simple grunts, then builds rhythm tracks out of them. On "New Day", over a beat co-produced by RZA, he actually runs Nina Simone through Auto-Tune. On "No Church in the Wild", he authoritatively vows, "You will not control the threesome." The musical scope of Watch the Throne is a tribute to his distinctive taste and sense of style. The whole thing sounds huge, and even the sillier moments ("Made in America", especially, reminds me of the inspirational ballads of late-period Michael Jackson) succeed on pure orchestral excess. Jay and Kanye debuted the album in a private listening session at a New York planetarium, a setting which made perfect sense: even if it never approaches the grandeur or character-study complexity of Twisted Fantasy, this is still exploding-star music.
So: two long-reigning titans make a relatively quick album which, despite their best efforts, still winds up being a monument to their own grandiosity. Should we care? Well, yeah. Kanye doesn't have a cruise-control switch, and when he's around, neither does Jay. On Watch the Throne, they push each other and have fun doing it, and the result is a stadium-sized event-rap spectacle that still sounds like two insanely talented guys' idiosyncratic vision. That's worth celebrating.


Composer and songwriter Jherek Bischoff's third record is an oceanic song cycle that encourages listeners to drop down into their own mind, a safe space in the dark where they are comfortably alone.

Cistern

There’s a meditation on seclusion buried inside of Cistern, composer and songwriter Jherek Bischoff’s third full-length recording under his own name.The record takes its title and theme from an empty, two-million gallon water tank in Washington that Bischoff found during an artist residency. The time he spent in the darkness improvising with the space’s long reverb decay (“You snap your fingers and the sound lasts for 45 seconds!” Bischoff enthuses in his Kickstarter video) formed what would eventually become Cistern, and left him thinking about his teenage years, when Bischoff’s family sailed for South America on a tiny sailboat. And if one looks at it this way, Cistern is an oceanic record, with the same pomp and violence that  runs through an orchestral piece like Debussy’s La Mer.
Claude Debussy hated the idea that music must tell a story, preferring instead to simply suggest images. Bischoff, on the other hand, once said in an interview that when he thinks of classical music, he thinks of the sweeping orchestras of old Hollywood soundtracks. Much of the music on Cistern is proudly cinematic. There’s a thrill in the creep of “The Wolf,” and in the intrigue-filled strains of “Closer to Closure.” The wailing violin deep in the distance on “Headless” mixes with forlorn strings and might stir post-rock fans’ memories of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s F#A#Infinity. Yet*,* when the song finally blossoms, it’s a small whimper of waves crashing against a rocky shore.
Cistern is unlike many popular ambient classical recordings, which strive to be uninterrupted and nonintrusive. Bischoff loves cacophony, and the record is accordingly difficult to settle into—nowhere ever feels like the “right” space to reflect on its sounds. Just when the music finds a repeated pattern, a shrill flute or violin cuts across the landscape, disrupting the sense of narcotic sleepiness that often defines post-minimalist music.
Bischoff is not a traditional composer, but is mostly self-taught. He’s arranged, composed and played for that loose association of weirdo pop musicians centered in the Pacific Northwest, like Parenthetical Girls and Xiu Xiu. Twice this year he’s collaborated with Amanda Palmer (in whose Grand Theft Orchestra he once played) to produce tributes to David Bowie and Prince.
He took advantage of some of these connections in 2012 to release an album of orchestral songs with a wide cast of guests*.* Cistern is not a far departure from the chamber pop of Composed at first glance. Like its older sibling, the songs on Cistern exist independently of each other. The nine tracks feel connected only by the fact that they share the same space on record, more like a collection of long takes rather than a movie*.*
It feels important to note that these scenes are almost always depopulated, except for “Attuna,” which leaves just enough room for two people in love. Again, they are in nature, under the stars in Maine (but they could just as easily be asleep in an apartment in Boston). These sketches encourage the listener to drop down into the cistern of their own mind, a safe space in the dark where they are comfortably alone. At its best, Cistern is a reflection of that secret place of contemplation. At a performance in April, while preparing to play the sleepy album-closer “The Sea’s Son,” Bischoff explained to the audience the empty water tank, its 45-second delay, and then he said quietly, “Now, Mr. Sound Guy, if you could please put us in the tank.”


This is not the new Daft Punk album. It's a score for a Disney franchise film.

Tron: Legacy OST

This is not the new Daft Punk album. It's a score for a Disney franchise film that cost an estimated $200 million to make. As such, there are lots of classical-inspired strings and horns played by an 85-strong orchestra. Most of the soundtrack's 22 pieces don't last more than three minutes; only a few could be considered actual songs. And while we knew this was going to be a score since it was first reported nearly two years ago, it's tough to shake the gloom of blown expectations while listening to the same ominous theme as it repeats in slightly mutated forms across the hour-long soundtrack. The French duo's current move is almost undeniably disappointing, but it's also not a surprise.
Daft Punk aren't the same two guys who made Homework and Discovery. Over the course of the last decade, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter have increasingly relied on images to complement-- and sometimes justify-- their music. Since their last proper LP, 2005's Human After All, the pair staged the greatest dance music tour of all time-- one that blasted its audience with enough visual stimuli to leave them blinking stars for hours. The pyramid, the gleaming helmets, and the lite-bright leather jackets brought Daft Punk's greatest hits to a holy, undiscovered realm. Their 2006 art-house indulgence Electroma went even further as it was directed by the twosome yet featured no new music. Daft Punk haven't even attempted a can't-miss song in at least five years, and the Tron: Legacy soundtrack keeps that unfortunate streak alive.
The score keeps another trend going, too. Bangalter and de Homem-Christo have flexed their robot obsession for years, but its nature has changed. On Discovery tracks like "Digital Love", "Something About Us", and "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger", they employed robotic voice effects to bring out the childlike naïveté of artificial intelligence. And Discovery's accompanying animated movie, Interstella 5555, was a bright and fun technicolor cartoon. But their mechanized fantasies have gotten continually darker since then-- consider the much more sinister robo effects on Human After All's "The Brainwasher" and "Television Rules the Nation". Electroma's two metal-machine leads commit harrowing self-destruct suicides. Most of the robot doomsaying can't compare with their ebullient side; their apocalyptic visions are hardly Philip K. Dick-worthy, and they're oftentimes a huge bummer to boot.
Tron: Legacy is rated PG and aimed at igniting the imaginations of 10-year-old boys. When I watched it in IMAX 3D it was easy to revert back to my younger self and just gawk at the exquisite whiz-bang of it all. That said, it's pretty fucking dark. Most of the movie takes place in a virtual world that doesn't know sunlight-- it's like a futuristic version of Tolkien's Mordor. Almost all of the post-Han Solo humor that buoyed the original Tron is replaced by a thunderous seriousness (and blue-black color scheme) more akin to The Dark Knight. And the music follows suit with endless crescendos of pounding timpani drums and monolithic strings. Naturally, the music synchs a hell of a lot better when you're watching the stunning images it was made to accompany. Daft Punk's score plays a vital role in making this poorly scripted mega movie seem bigger and more important than it actually is.
Even so, it hems frustratingly close to the sweeping classical film music style pioneered by John Williams (Star Wars) and picked up by Howard Shore (The Lord of the Rings) and Hans Zimmer (The Dark Knight). The Tron: Legacy score's supposed innovation is combining an orchestra style with electronics, but the meshing of the two styles is rare and rudimentary. More often than not, each piece is either mostly synth-based (including filter-house also-rans "Derezzed" and "Tron Legacy (End Titles)") or symphonic ("Nocturne", "Outlands"). When they pull off the combo-- as on the blistering "The Game Has Changed"-- it's thrilling even without an IMAX screen hijacking your senses. And while the classical arrangements mark a new style for Daft Punk, it's hardly revelatory in the sphere of movie scores at large.
Watching the movie, I couldn't help but think that this was Daft Punk's attempt at topping their legendary pyramid tour. Theoretically, by teaming up with Disney and the most high-tech cameras and surround-sound systems and recording facilities known to man, the two could could dive bomb into the minds of millions of people in one immense opening weekend and stay consistent with their man vs. machine ideology-- all without leaving the comfort of their own homes. But the tour was phenomenal because they were the central characters-- not just a side act-- and because it was delusionally fun. Tron: Legacy has flashes of that sort of brilliance, but it's downright puny compared to the sheer joy that is "One More Time" or "Around the World". Daft Punk used to be a couple of guys hellbent on making genius dance music who happened to wear goofy robot helmets. Along the way, though, their priorities seem to have changed.


Playing a baby grand piano, Mike Milosh’s eight-song album reflects a sense of ritualistic quiet; it’s intimate without being heavy-handed.

Spirit

Rhye, the soft-pop group led by Mike Milosh, refurbished their sound last year on second album Blood to mixed results. Without producer Robin Hannibal, who fleshed out the group’s 2013 debut with minimalist, sumptuous production, Milosh leaned on beefier instrumentation and overstated lyrics that sapped most of the enigmatic, economical appeal from their music. Rhye’s new EP Spirit, recorded after an extensive tour last summer, feels like a loose, low-stakes companion to Blood. Rhye’s usual electronic and guitar stylings are stripped back to meditative piano arrangements and ambient mood-setting, making for an effective if lightweight backdrop for his sighing variety of romance.
Milosh put Spirit together after being gifted a baby grand piano by his girlfriend, using daily exercises as a form of meditation following a draining tour schedule. The brief eight-song album reflects that sense of introspection and ritualistic quiet, with most songs resting in minor key and Milosh’s hazy timbre offering up long, wordless hums. Rhye has used chamber music as an indirect influence in the past, whether stacking harmonies over a horn section on “Woman” or adding plucked strings to their cover of Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” But here Milosh mostly dresses things down to an intentionally spare, percussive base; his piano is close-mic’d alongside the slightest brushes of synths and strings, signaling intimacy without the heavy-handedness that dragged down Blood.
Lyrically, Milosh remains exclusively concerned with a tortured type of desire: He wants to be needed, feel your pain, wage your wars, et cetera. Delivered in a smooth, unified whisper, the words of affection sometimes sound vaguely sinister rather than sexy, as on “Needed,” written and produced with former Semisonic singer Dan Wilson: “Why you look so fragile? Do I seem so bad?/Oh, you look so pretty, there’s no devils here.” The song hinges on even clumsier phrasing during its chorus (“I wanna be needed, that’s what I need”) that undercuts all the feverish desire lurking at its core. Elsewhere, Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds adds his minimalist touch to the simmering, hymn-like standout “Patience,” while Milosh lets his piano do the legwork on muted instrumental trifles “Malibu Nights” and “Green Eyes.” It all feels a little perfunctory for Rhye at this point, but in a characteristically refined way that at least makes for easy casual listening.
Spirit boils down the seductive essence of Rhye’s music to core elements. It would do well as an introduction to the group for an unfamiliar listener, but doesn’t feel necessary by any means. If anything, Spirit comes across as more mood music by design, bespoke and undemanding, and it probably already has real estate on every bedroom-themed playlist on Spotify. Rhye is now a reliably polished provider of this style of music, but it’s a position that clearly doesn’t allow for very many risks.


Dialing back some of their eccentricities and embracing personal songwriting, Hot Chip have crafted their most consistent album yet.

One Life Stand

Ever since Hot Chip started as indie kids seemingly dabbling in classic soul and modern R&B, they've been underestimated (not least of which by us). Delivering lines about "20-inch rims" and "Yo La Tengo" in a proper English accent, as they did on their 2005 debut, can have that effect. Yet on their two subsequent records-- 2006's The Warning and 2008's Made in the Dark-- Hot Chip steadily rebuilt their reputation by toughening up their sophistipop side. Their melodies began to develop an itchy, nervous twitch, and they earned dancefloor credibility through an association with DFA.
Best of all, Hot Chip crafted some of the sneakiest and most effective earworms around-- songs that seem deceptively simple and assuming on first listen became year-end list locks by listen number 10. Their quirky detours, winks, and nods were no longer Prince and Stevie Wonder shoutouts; instead, they were subtler, so the band that initially came across as affable goofballs eventually revealed themselves to be the smartest guys in the room. In short, after a half-decade of having our expectations challenged and any hesitations about them erased, it finally felt like we knew who Hot Chip were. But their fourth album, One Life Stand, changes things a bit. After dialing back some of their eccentricities, their latest feels if anything even more likely to be underestimated.
Oddly, this is arguably their best record yet. Whether you'll agree will depend on what you want from Hot Chip and what you want from an album. One Life Stand is their most consistent and most complete record, but it's missing an A-list single on par with "Boy From School", "Over and Over", or "Ready for the Floor". It's also missing dance songs in the mode of the latter two, focusing instead on Hot Chip at their most lush and romantic. Some will claim it's them growing up, but that's not true-- they've always exhibited panache and sophistication. This is simply the first time since their debut that they've primarily honed in on those sensibilities, in the process revealing just how far they've come sonically in the past five years.
It's a bold move but well earned. The band's split personality was in full effect on Made in the Dark, which flitted between heart-on-sleeve songs like "We're Looking for a Lot of Love" and "One Pure Thought" and nebbishy hip-shakers like "Shake a Fist" and "Bendable Poseable". If you wanted a record of the former without the latter, well you're in luck, because that's basically what you have here. As Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal pointed out to me, it's a move akin to the one Pet Shop Boys took circa Behaviour-- a near-shedding of their more overt disco and house influences and an embrace of personal songwriting free of irony or distance.
Because the songs not only share mood and tone but also are generally of the same high quality, One Life Stand has a sense of consistency and completeness missing from their other records, too. At its most basic, One Life Stand is a record of love songs; more specifically, it's often a record of self-actualization and redemption-- of recognizing our need for real human connection. Whether about romance or friendship, the songs on One Life Stand are often about commitment (as the album title indicates) and reciprocal relationships. These qualities aren't typically celebrated in pop culture-- stable monogamy and sensitive male bonding don't have the inherent drama of a star-crossed, fleeting, or unrequited love, after all.
And yet Hot Chip locate the beauty and power in commitment and in stability. Fully two-thirds of the record is built upon proclamations of long-lasting love, which is made clear in many of the record's key lyrics: "You are my love light," "I only wanna be your one life stand," "Please take my heart and keep it close to you," "Happiness is what we all want," "I only want one life together in our arms."
If that seems like a sort of bait and switch, then you've really underestimated Hot Chip, because they've been trading in this sort of sincerity for years. On the one hand, between their inauspicious start, geek-chic dancefloor excursions, and videos, Hot Chip can be viewed as wired, robotic, almost anti-human. Yet Hot Chip have functioned as sort of a mirror image of intelligent, dryly confessional 1980s bands like ABC and the Pet Shop Boys: Whereas lyricists like Martin Fry and Neil Tennant smuggled cynicism into the Top 40, Hot Chip sneak sincerity into an indie electro-pop scene dominated at times by the dress-up of blog-house. Perhaps it's no coincidence then that the best of their peers-- electro-soul brothers-in-arms Junior Boys and big-room dance stars Justice-- are also so straight-faced that people also assumed at first they were each a put-on. And each of the three is far outstripping those chasing fads. (Hey, where's that Uffie record we've been "promised"?)
Weirdly, the songs here most likely to turn people off aren't the odes to everlasting love, but those explicitly about the importance of male connection ("Brothers") or the quest for spiritual guidance ("Slush"). And yet these are the record's twin centerpieces. Neither is as embraceable as singles and potential singles "One Life Stand", "Take It In", "Hand Me Down Your Love", or "I Feel Better", but they're the tracks that elevate the record from a collection of very good songs to a complete picture of an important band near the peak of its powers. Whether Hot Chip now stay in this headspace and sonic range-- perhaps there is a record full of nervy, upbeat and/or more tongue-in-cheek songs á la "The Warning" or "Wrestler" next-- won't obscure the risk they've taken here by fully embracing big-hearted electro-pop. And it won't obscure how successfully they've done it either.


The London rapper’s second album is smoother, preciser, and more measured. We see J Hus as a lost son of Gambia, an adult-in-progress, a talented pop polymath, and just a guy who has a lot of sex.

Big Conspiracy

J Hus’ conservative detractors believe he and his music play an outsized role in the UK’s so-called knife crisis. In December 2018, the London rapper was sentenced to eight months in prison after being arrested for carrying a knife at a local shopping center, his third arrest for carrying a knife or being involved in knife fights. When he was stabbed in 2015, he was criticized for making gang signs in his hospital bed and glorifying violence. “They wanna judge me from what they heard I do/It’s a big conspiracy,” he sings sarcastically on his sophomore album’s title track. He seems to embrace the role of the anti-hero, but only on the condition that the nation recognizes its own role in shaping him.
Improving upon his more eclectic debut, Common Sense, Big Conspiracy is smoother, preciser, and more measured. Common Sense showcased his working knowledge of road rap, Afropop, reggae, turn-of-the-millennium American rap, and even the weirder corners of SoundCloud; now, he is more concerned with how all of that might fit together. Big Conspiracy reunites Hus with Common Sense architect Jae5, along with co-producers TSB and IO, and as a unit, they create the rapper’s most balanced and full-bodied music yet. You discover that his versatility comes from feeling adrift and misunderstood in his own country, and these songs are a journey back to the center of his true self.
Big Conspiracy plays like J Hus wants to set the record straight. This is who he is: a lost son of Gambia, an adult-in-progress, a talented pop polymath, and just a guy who has a lot of sex. Common Sense was playfully aimless, a horny playboy fantasy with a few songs about gangsta paranoia. There’s still plenty of that here, too: he’s libidinous across “Fortune Teller,” and “Helicopter” emphasizes the terrors of probation and plainclothes officers stalking him. But this album more clearly sketches out his development from displaced African boy to imprisoned British man, and it is by far the best J Hus has been on record as a performer and storyteller.
There are introspective raps about his incarceration and prison culture, colorism, and colonialism; about the fear and paranoia and violence that come with street life; about carrying a knife around London and being ready to use it, and why using it might be necessary. Ever since the stabbing in 2015, his music has carried the urgency of knowing your attackers are simply waiting for an opportunity to finish the job. That cuts through Big Conspiracy’s more muted and low-key vibe. On “Must Be,” he’s seeing adversaries everywhere. The frenzied grime cut “No Denying” finds him at his most convincingly defiant: “You know me, I’m the livest, call on all your riders/Call on all your strikers, me, I don’t even fear death/You don’t know me, I’m fearless, me, I’m out here bare chest,” he raps. He’s not just self-assured, he’s invincible.
While Hus is an undeniably captivating rapper, he isn’t going to bowl anyone over with his lyricism. He is a solid, dependable writer somewhat reliant on his ability to sound comfortable in any setting, and he usually impresses with his charisma and the sheer command of his range. But his pivot toward interiority gives his songs a new dimension. His bars are simple, straightforward, and can occasionally lean toward fortune-cookie wisdom (“Get the bread, avoid the drama/You can avoid the feds but not the karma,” he raps on “Fight For Your Right”), but throughout the album, he seems to be growing more secure in himself.
The focus throughout Big Conspiracy is finding the person at the center of a musical matrix. Big Conspiracy joins records like Burna Boy’s African Giant and GoldLink’s Diaspora, which found connections between black music the world over, but like Dave’s Psychodrama this album feels distinctly about the personal turmoil of being the child of African immigrants raised in London, making a home in a place you don’t belong. “I had to play dumb, just to blend in/Then go to Africa for spiritual cleansing,” he explains in the final moments of closer “Deeper Than Rap.” Being uprooted has threatened many family trees; sometimes finding ways to take root in a foreign land is the only way to survive.


Sadly living up to the album's title, Daft Punk follow the exquisite, joyous Discovery with a record on which they seem to be going through the motions and, for the first time in their career, sounding like cynics.

Human After All

Ideally, the physics of record reviewing are as elegant as actual physics, with each piece speaking to the essence of its subject as deliberately and as appropriately as a real-world force reacting to an action. In that world, where this is just another record by another dance act, Human After All is passable and hardly special.
But in my head, where items like Homework and Discovery and-- oh, what the hell-- "Music Sounds Better With You" and "So Much Love to Give" are allowed to be admitted as evidence, and where the weight of expectation and precedence get to have a say, this feels like not just a failure, but a heartbreaker.
The rap on Human After All is that it was recorded in two weeks, which should've been our first clue that it was going to surface as a droopy flower. Such cavalier recording approaches fly in the rock world because listeners are forgiving of minimal production methods; hell, as any Julian and Fab'll tell you, under the right light, they'll even embrace them. In rock music, where descriptors like "raw" and "ragged" are virtues, finesse is not only unnecessary, it's often discouraged. In dance music, where the illusion of performance has to be sculpted, finesse is more critical-- make a record in two weeks and 99.6% of the time, it'll sound like it was made in two weeks.
Turns out Daft Punk are (mostly) human after all, because from a compositional standpoint, this sounds like it was made in about 19 days. Even the good stuff sounds painfully extemporaneous, like early sketches of tracks that deserve to be much better. Take the title cut-- a slick, vocoder-driven track that, despite being one of the better offerings on the record, has such a clinical build that it registers as patterned and completely starved of joy. It's Daft Punk going through the motions and, for the first time in their career, sounding like cynics.
If there's a defining thread to Human After All, it's that there's very little here that rings with wonderment or joy. The songs that make the most overt stabs at those emotions still sound like vague approximations of better songs that preceded them: "Robot Rock" is a poor man's "Aerodynamic", "Technologic" a poor man's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger", and so on. Ultimately, it's the phoned-in "Television Rules the Nation" that confirms Daft Punk's slackening standards; they give us nine proper songs after four years and this is one of them?
In the end, it's not as if there aren't things to like about Human After All-- both "Make Love" and "Emotion", for example, are totally charming. I just wish that they didn't come at the expense of Daft Punk's mystique. Then again, if the point is to be rock, maybe on some totally boring level, they've succeeded admirably: What's more rock'n'roll than hitting the self-destruct button?


The Atlanta trio Migos come back after a commercial and creative dry spell with a #1 single and a definitive work.

Culture

Okay, just for a second—as a thought experiment—let’s treat Culture as the sophomore album from the Migos. In this reality, it marks a sharp improvement from the North Atlanta trio’s debut, 2015’s Yung Rich Nation, an album that showed a tremendous amount of technical dexterity, but stiffer writing and only half-formed pop instincts. The Migos are better now, we’d say. They really grew.
In the real world, of course, Culture comes in a long, long line of hits, mixtapes, and one-offs. Since “Versace” and Y.R.N. (Young Rich Niggas) marked their breakthrough in 2013, they’ve been one of the most influential acts in hip-hop, and frequently one of the best. Their most obvious mark on the culture has been the tight, triplet-laced flow they resurrected and perfected. They also brought the dab to the world at large, and injected a handful of slang terms into the syntaxes of aspiring rappers from coast to coast.
So Culture arrives in what feels like the second act of a long career, by rap standards. The Migos came out as young upstarts, suffered through a litany of legal hang-ups and incarcerations, had short creative dry spells where they sniped at the kids on the lawn stealing their styles, and eventually came back around. This time, they have a #1 hit in tow, and they want to stick at the top of the commercial pyramid.
The first voice you hear on Culture is DJ Khaled’s, which couldn’t be more misleading. This isn’t a big-budget parade of set pieces and stunt casting; if anything, it’s remarkable for how long stretches of it are sober, somber. Culture’s midpoint is the phenomenal, Zaytoven-produced “Big on Big,” which is towering and defiant, and even flips their well-documented label troubles into a point of pride. That track is followed by two more (“What the Price,” “Brown Paper Bag”) that stick to minor keys and contemplative piano. There are plenty of stray prescription pills and idle threats to go around, but they’ve been reassembled to be eerier, more perilous. (Incidentally, this would have been a perfect place to insert “Cocoon,” their staggering loosie from last year.)
Culture is front-loaded with singles, which—perhaps counter-intuitively—makes for a nice balance. Heard back-to-back-to-back, “T-Shirt,” “Call Casting,” and “Bad and Boujee” are not only packed with color and virtuosic rapping, but elucidate exactly what each of the three rappers bring to the table, how they complement one another. Hearing Quavo float is a joy, but it’s even better when it’s underscored by Takeoff’s bass and Offset’s serration. There are also fascinating reconciliations: The Cardo-produced, 2 Chainz-featuring “Deadz” seems to find a middle ground between the sparse Atlanta sounds and Chicago’s maximalism that were warring around the time of Y.R.N.
Then there are truly strange moments. “All Ass,” from the album’s (uh) back end, sounds like Magic City mixed with industrial Berlin. “Slippery,” in an inspired move, turns a “skrrt skrrt” ad-lib into the song’s melodic backbone. Even when Culture grasps for the radio dial, it skirts expectations. The arc here is not one of artists leaving their roots to chase pop—it’s pop coming back around to accommodate them.
While the Migos are decidedly of Atlanta (coupled with some cadences from up in Tennessee), their records frequently remind you of rap’s earlier years, when creative kids holed up in bedrooms and tried to impress or make each other laugh—think The Migos Is Dead or Bizarre Ride II Nawfside. Culture might have national aspirations, but it’s charged with the energy of history, of family. On “What the Price,” Takeoff raps about the teachers and preachers of his youth who presented an inaccessible, exclusionary path forward. When he shirks that (“I’ma go find me a better route”), it’s not flippant, it’s resolute.
Later on the same song, Offset runs through a consumer fever dream, anchored by the line “I don’t plan on going out sad today.” In other contexts, that might be a curious aside, but over Ricky Racks, 808Godz and KeanuBeats’ somber track, it sounds like the album’s spiritual center. The Migos are (probably) not better than the Beatles, but their existence shouldn’t be reduced to memes that debate the issue. On Culture, their world is richly rendered, full of hopes and paranoia and unbridled joy. This gives the Migos the last laugh on those who thought they’d never crack the retail album format, marked all the while by the knowledge they never needed one to succeed. It’s a definitive work.


The Copenhagen duo Age Coin features two former members of the post-punk band Lower producing bleak industrial techno. Their second LP is inconsistent, but shows promise.

Performance

Though Age Coin produces industrial techno, the Copenhagen duo isn’t quite of the club. Kristian Emdal and Simon Formann were both members of the now-defunct post-punk band Lower, and their proximity to punk and noise is tangible on Performance, their second full-length, which echoes the intense, bleak temperaments of the bands who have come to define that scene. While the release’s best moments are intricate and beat-driven, its dominant mode seems located more in its interludes of thinly-built, staticky unease. Taken as a whole, these stops and starts can feel less intentionally unsteady and more flat-out inconsistent.
In terms of cultivating a mood, *Performance *starts on a high note. Opener “Esprit”’s rumbling bass crawls into focus, low-end slowly receding to highlight a single tinny beat. It’s dread-inducing, but also engaging and concise. The lead single “Raptor,” far and away the release’s standout track, follows in this vein: its staccato rhythm is tempered with broad, wavering strokes of melody, creating a rare sense of breathing room. It’s reminiscent of textured, Modern Love-style ambient techno, like a softer-edged Demdike Stare.
Elsewhere, things turn more abstract, and more claustrophobic. “Damp”’s horror-film textures ruminate for a few minutes before opening into cold, insistent percussion, never quite boiling over into true noise. “Protein” is similarly soaked in chilling atmospherics, structured around an anxious, fragmentary jungle beat. In a jarring change of pace, “Domestic I” and “Domestic II” dispense with beats altogether, instead overlaying a persistent buzz and clatter with mournful instrumentation: on “I,” a cello met with whining harmonies, and on “II,” a pretty, rickety piano solo. They’re not unattractive compositions, but for the time they take up on this otherwise fairly brief release, these interludes don’t feel particularly well-integrated or useful.
Moments of Performance offer welcome glimpses of something more complex than their once-stated mission to evoke “feeling really low in a corner of the club.” “Raptor” gives a particularly danceable example of this forward movement, but more fearsome moments like closer “Headron” are also promising. At their best, Age Coin synthesize the ambient and industrial mood-building of their past and concurrent projects with the physicality of techno, inducing anxiety through the occasional application of a frenetic texture. A more exciting approach might dispense with the instrumental experiments and embrace this path full-on.