Why is it that hip-hop artists have so much trouble reinventing themselves once they're established in the\n\ game ...

Electric Circus

Why is it that hip-hop artists have so much trouble reinventing themselves once they're established in the game? In the rock and roll milieu, someone like David Bowie can adopt a different persona with each record he drops, and not only get away with it, but have it increase his marketability. With hip-hop, though, conventional wisdom is to stick with the tried-and-true as long as it moves units, then get the hell out. Think about it: Run-D.M.C.'s Back from Hell was based upon the premise that they went underground and re-emerged as hardened thugs, a ploy that got hip-hop's equivalent of the three wise men nearly laughed out of the kingdom. Meanwhile, others that have had drops in the bucket of post-revisionist success either possessed suspect credibility in the first place (can I get an Everlast?) or just changed the punchline to what was already a bad joke (that's you, Kid Rock).
Upon first glance, it appeared Common may have achieved that kind of transformation with his follow-up to Like Water for Chocolate. From the Sgt. Common's Lonely Peeps Club Band cover art to an 8\xBD-minute ode to Jimi Hendrix, Electric Circus resonates with a lava lamp glow that's a lot more hip-pie than hip-hop. But that's Com's idea of where hip-hop should be headed-- to a land far, far away from the bling-blingity of his mainstream peers; if only his record hadn't been released so close to The Roots' Phrenology (note to MCA management: fire the person responsible for that little "oversight"), Common's three steps backward might not pale so harshly in comparison to his peers' two steps forward.
The most difficult sword to swallow in this particular circus is the near-absence of noteworthy vocals. Though Common's never exactly been a top-shelf emcee, his previous records always had enough good ideas to cover up what he lacked in invention on the mic. This time out, Com comes off as alternately uncomfortable and downright lazy, half-speaking-- or worse, singing-- new-age revelations to the masses. Even on a crunk-ass Neptunes track like "I Got a Right Ta", he plods along with an awkward flow only to boast, "I'm the only cat in hip-hop/ That can go to a thrift shop/ Bring that get-up to the ghetto/ And get props," as if it's something to be proud of. But for better or worse, he still delivers some vintage Common flow on "I Am Music" and the equally imposing (and nonsensical) "Electric Wire Hustle Flower", making it impossible to write him off completely.
Common's also always had a soft side, which has more often than not stood up in defense of his tendencies toward lyrical misogyny. Unfortunately, returning to that comfort zone on Electric Circus translates into some of the record's weakest moments. If "Star *69 (PS With Love)"-- a totally predictable phone-sex love song that reeks of cheap incense and leopard-print upholstery-- isn't example enough, Com's smarmy duet with Mary J. Blige on "Come Close" should be sufficient. With a line like, "The pimp in me may just have to die with you," Com invalidates any claims he might have to renaissance man status in a mere eleven syllables.
Yet there's one crucial element to Electric Circus that salvages it from the razor-sharp ends of our three-pronged fork: listening to it on headphones is another experience altogether. The record has a mellow tide to it much like that of Like Water for Chocolate, with brief musical interludes that fuse even the sharpest stylistic changes together nicely. It all builds up like a slow fever to the two marathon-length tracks that dismantle the big top-- "Jimi Was a Rock Star" and "Heaven Somewhere"-- both of which are laudable for their ambition, even if they're not quite cohesive.
If nothing else, Common does at least succeed in his mission to offer an alternative in a culture that, on the surface, values material wealth over spiritual well-being. Because even if Electric Circus isn't the sonic coup d'etat he might've intended, it does plant the seeds for future revolution within anyone who cares enough to kick back and listen.


Despite missing early single "I'll Stick Around", and including blah new songs, these modern rock survivors prove their singles band cred on this comp.

Greatest Hits

We all know the hero myth of Nirvana: Kurt Cobain stormed MTV and radio with punk anthems of genuine rage, and saved us all from the vapidity of hair metal. This story has been repeated so many times that it's rare to find Cobain's music framed in any other context, especially since his suicide served only to make him a rock'n'roll martyr. Foo Fighters have something of a hero myth going on too, but it's a lot less dramatic: Following the death of his comrade, Dave Grohl rocked on as the leader of his own band, and spent the next 15 years making mainstream rock radio, uh, slightly more listenable.
Grohl's task may not be anywhere near as glamorous or as era-defining as that of his former band, but in a way, it's much more difficult and thankless. In the years after Cobain's death, corporate consolidation of rock radio took hold and quickly snuffed out nearly every bit of underground weirdness that made its way into the mainstream after the record industry went through its phase of signing every cult band they could get in the hopes of finding another Nirvana. The playlists got tighter, and if you're reading this site, we probably don't need to tell you just how bad the music on these stations got, and how to this day it only seems to get worse. Grohl and his band may have been grandfathered into the radio format mainly for his connection to Nirvana, but he earned his keep and turned out a reliable string of enjoyable hits.
This probably sounds like faint praise. Indeed, you barely need to be mediocre to outshine the likes of Nickelback, Creed, and Hoobastank, but Foo Fighters are not merely a tolerable band floating along in a sea of crap, or a decent band that somehow remains mainstream against the odds. Foo Fighters are excellent at being mainstream, and, over the course of six albums, Dave Grohl has gone through the unlikely transformation of being known only as the powerhouse drummer of Nirvana to becoming his generation's answer to Tom Petty-- a consistent hit machine pumping out working-class rock.
Part of what makes Foo Fighters thrilling, at least from an indie/alt-rock perspective, is that Grohl manages to smuggle bits of underground sounds into his arena-filling hits. "All My Life", a smash from 2002's One By One, owes a significant debt to the slashing chord progressions of math rock titans Chavez, and "Big Me" is one of the few songs to come out of twee to enjoy major commercial success in the United States. "Everlong", perhaps Grohl's most enduring and beloved composition, bridges the gap between the midwestern post-hardcore emo of Hum and Braid and the more commercial iterations of emo that would follow.
Grohl doesn't appropriate in order to seem hip, and his reference points are not particularly relevant to getting across the appeal of his music-- he simply has good taste and borrows ideas that work. His soaring ballads, like "Learn to Fly" and "Times Like These", are not nearly as cool, but his punk influences shine through in his total commitment to a sentimental tone without allowing for mawkishness or surrendering to cheesiness. Grohl is known to be a funny guy, but there is never a trace of an ironic smirk in the guy's music, and he shines when his earnestness is most apparent, whether it's the gleeful riffing of "Monkey Wrench" and "This Is a Call", or the tortured romantic angst of "The Best of You".
As a compilation, Greatest Hits offers few surprises other than that Grohl somehow resisted the temptation to title this thing The Best of Foo. Though the record conspicuously lacks the band's breakthrough single, "I'll Stick Around", the first 13 tracks make good on the promise of the title and provide a relentless hit parade of modern rock radio staples. Of course, modern-hits compilations are unnecessarily larded with new tracks recorded to promote the set upon release, and this is no exception. Like nearly all songs recorded specifically for these releases, "Wheels" and "Word Forward" are catchy but uninspired, and have no place among the heavy hitters in this collection. "Wheels" is particularly aggravating, sounding something like a half-hearted attempt at a country-rock crossover, which indicates a nervous desperation for continued success that has been absent from Grohl's work to date.
The band surely had better options for non-album tracks. Why not instead include their well-known cover of Prince's "Darling Nikki", their soundtrack hit "The One", or a new recording of a strong B-side like 1996's "How I Miss You" or Grohl's sole Nirvana composition, "Marigold"? At least those songs would've fit into the general conceit of a career survey. These bonus tracks are contractual obligations and a simple fact of the modern record industry, but Foo Fighters' Greatest Hits is a perfect example of an otherwise valuable catalog release marred by this unnecessary meddling in the interest of stimulating first-week sales.


Harmonix updates the hugely popular video game for the Beatles-- 45 songs from across their career are represented-- and gives it a markedly different vibe.

Rock Band

Here's the story of the Beatles, as told by the intro to The Beatles: Rock Band. They started as four lads in a basement club, covering Chuck Berry for hours at a stretch. Girls screamed, and the band got bigger and bigger 'til it stormed the world (specifically, America). Tours and celebrity and more screaming girls followed, until suddenly the world was a drag-- and they ascended a magic escalator to the sky, where they rode the giant elephant god Ganesha up to the edge of the creation. They became saints, or gods, or something just as sacred, and on a tablet it was written: "You don't mess with the Beatles."
That was Harmonix's mantra going into the project. The developers knew if they were going to handle one of the biggest properties in popular culture, they would take excruciating care to make it loyal, even worshipful. The visual design is warm and adoring, and each Beatle looks gentle and kind-- especially John Lennon, who's so beatific you almost forget that George Harrison has died, too. And the Beatles dominate the game. They're the only people on the virtual stage: Eric Clapton never plays guitar and Billy Preston and Yoko Ono are expunged. More importantly, the Beatles ignore you. Every song is shown with period dress and setting: You can't play "Helter Skelter" in the Cavern in Liverpool or "Boys" at their 1969 rooftop concert. When you screw up, the screen just fades to black. In the first few clubs, the camera regularly cuts to those girls in the audience, screaming, in love. But they're not screaming for you.
You, the player, are the disciple. You're here to study the music: To play as fast and loud as the band did in its youth, to finish the delicate "Dear Prudence" without a single bum note, to master Paul McCartney's bass line to "I Saw Her Standing There" on expert. The challenge is moderate compared to other music games, and harmony vocals are the only new feature: While the Beatles used strings, tape loops, and other effects, these are all channeled through the standard four instruments (guitar, bass, drums, and mic), and playing the strings for "I Am the Walrus" with the guitar controller works better than you might expect. But the harmony vocals make it a far better party game than previous Rock Band editions. I've played with two additional singers, a guy who likes to belt Rush and a woman who's in a choir, and listening to them chant "GUTEN MORGEN GUTEN MORGEN GUT" was worth the price right there.
The 45-track setlist balances better-known Beatles songs ("Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds", "Day Tripper") with deep cuts chosen for gameplay. (The loping, sad "Dig a Pony" is an instant favorite.) The game even bends the canon, reaching out to the Love soundtrack's mix of "Within You Without You" with "Tomorrow Never Knows", which gives you the melody of the first with the drums of the second. Many songs also cut off before their fade-outs-- which was the right call, but it sounds strange on a song as burned in your brain as "Yellow Submarine".
The first chapters take place in concert settings in front of screaming crowds. But after the Beatles quit the road in 1966, the game segues to the Abbey Road studio, where each song gets a "dreamscape." These vignettes recycle well-worn references for each song, and none of them would make the creators of Yellow Submarine lose sleep. Covering the band's psychedelic period, they're a thin metaphor for the fact that the band was well off their tits, but they also reinforce what an insular and magical place these recordings seem to emerge from-- especially if you skip the turmoil behind the scenes.
That's not to say the game ignores their history. Good scores unlock rare photos dug from the archives, as well as clips of sound and video. You get their 1963 Christmas fan club record, a rough rehearsal for "Ed Sullivan", and a promotional film for "Get Back" edited out of outtakes from the Let It Be film. And there are clips of the band just chatting or goofing around.. They're candid, but the candidness doesn't make the band seem more human; rather, you feel like you're eavesdropping on a whole new level of divinity.
The storytelling is at its finest in the last act, the rooftop show in London in 1969. The audience has aged and the band is tired. We never watch them fight, but the break-up is implied in the climax of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", where the camera jitters until the song cuts off. But encore "The End", the unannounced 45th song, is the proper send-off: Ultimately, the band was judged by the love they made.
The word "love" sums up the entire vision for the game. Where past Rock Band and Guitar Hero titles emphasized the thrills and the grinds of rock, The Beatles: Rock Band feels completely different: it's soothing and cozy, and the songs keep luring you back not just because they're excellent and fun, but because the familiar recordings, the nostalgic visuals, and the Beatles' smiling faces make a peaceful, loving place. As a painstakingly crafted piece of fandom, it's a bullseye.
But all this worship has a drawback. Discussing Rock Band 2, which doesn't use the likeness of any real stars, Harmonix's Helen McWilliams once told me, "We want it to be about you, and your rock star fantasy... You're there with your band, for each other, and you're fulfilling your rock star dream together, and the audience is there for you." The Beatles: Rock Band is the total opposite. The "characters" are untouchable, and the tracks don't even toss you a freestyle section. Your only choices are to get the song right, or not. Sure, it's a cliché that most videogames make you save the world, but at least in those games, you know you're needed. I've never felt less important in a game than this one.
But I'll let 'em get away with it. After all, they're the Beatles.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]


On their sixth record, the New York band is stuck in a Medium Mood and a new producer doesn’t help energize their increasingly frozen-in-time sound.

Marauder

More than any of their frenemies in the 2000s indie-rock tell-all Meet Me in the Bathroom, Interpol understood the power of a unified front. They’ve survived parting ways with the only guy in the band who clearly wanted to be a celebrity, a widely mocked dalliance with a major label, a rap mixtape by frontman Paul Banks called Everyone on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be that actually happened, and another Banks rap album on Warner Bros. that actually happened after that, mostly proving the adage that 80 percent of success is simply showing up. Their return to Matador resulted in two essentially self-titled albums that were variously lauded as “returns to form”—an objective truth, since Interpol outlasted all of their contemporaries and soundalikes to be the only game left in town. Survival has been a pretty good look for them, and with Marauder, they act on their newfound surplus of goodwill by conducting something other than business as usual.
The album has them enlisting a plus-value producer for the first time since Antics in MGMT and Flaming Lips guru Dave Fridmann, and then there’s the “concept” behind it. According to Banks, Marauder is voiced from the perspective of a titular character who represents, “the portion of your personality that isn’t really concerned with accountability and just kind of does.” The irony is that most people have always chosen to see Interpol as brooding hedonists in the first place.
But Marauder is definitely Interpol’s most topical project, and maybe their only one—pervasive societal cynicism (“If You Really Love Nothing”), social media desperation (“Party’s Over”), the ghost of Prince (“NYSMAW”), and third-eye-in-the-sky theorizing (“Surveillance”), is all new territory for the group. (The illicit tryst of “Stay in Touch” is not.) Then again, Banks and the “Marauder” don’t seem so different. “The Rover” isn’t a Led Zeppelin cover, but “I can keep you in artwork, the fluid kind” is phrased and sung with Banks’ own rock’n’roll virility. It’s genius or ridiculous nonsense, or most likely, the kind of ridiculous genius nonsense that Banks writes because it sounds both profound and absurd at the same time—the true essence of an Interpol song.
For too long, people have attempted to mock Banks’ lyrics simply by quoting them, but we should know better by now. He was taken far more seriously than he should have at the start, and he’s actually way funnier and more self-aware than he’s ever given credit for. “Ella, Teletext or you can call me/Galavanting heart,” “Like Prince sang in Tennessee/I wanna drive with you down there to Alphabet Street,” these are the words of someone leaning into their reputation as a wine-soaked Manhattan dandy rather than combating it. Or, the way he cheekily acknowledges the “back to basics” narrative of Marauder: “Rock’n’roll, bitch/I’m into it/Let me show you my stuff.”
The most distinct parts of Marauder likewise result from Interpol doing Interpol things as loosely as possible—Daniel Kessler has become one of the most distinctive guitarists of the 21st century by simply playing straight eighth-note leads, and drummer Sam Fogarino is the broad-shouldered classic rocker. These two things are still true, but when they slacken just the slightest bit, Interpol can actually sound the slightest bit bluesy (“The Rover”) or funky (“It Probably Matters”). Then again, the near absence of any notable bass save for an occasional synth blob shows that they haven’t even tried to replace Carlos D (recall that a working title for Turn on the Bright Lights was Celebrated Basslines of the Future suggested by Carlos D of course). It’s all immediately identifiable as Interpol, and even if they can’t convincingly do “loose,” it’s at least dressed down. This is how Turn on the Bright Lights might’ve sounded from a band that looked and acted more like the Strokes.
But this isn’t a band that ever impressed through sonic innovation, or lyrics that speak to universal emotional truths, or inventive melodies, or even being cool; everything from the suits to the stylized typography to Turn on the Bright Lights’ lush production to the opening gigs for U2 smacked of effort and ambition. Despite the temptation to nostalgize Interpol as a bastion of a druggier, sexier, and more sinister version of indie rock that wouldn’t last a day in these more morally circumspect times, they essentially served the same purpose as the more benign and scandal-free War on Drugs or Tame Impala: They are a carefully curated vibe. It’s an elusive quality. At their best, Interpol speaks to the feeling of invincibility among the ruins of your life, rising like a phoenix from the ashes and coke residue of one’s early 20s. Or, on Antics, the seductive power of holding onto that ideal in spite of a growing body of evidence to the contrary.
For the past 15 years, Interpol have tried to either replicate this vibe or find another to replace it. The band is stuck in a Medium Mood, and most of the blame on Maurader lies with Fridmann’s mix; my burned CD copy of 128 kbps Turn on the Bright Lights mp3s had less digital clipping. Marauder was recorded to 2-inch magnetic tape without ProTools in the interest of recapturing some of the intuitive electricity of Bright Lights, but the actual mix is so compressed, doughy, and airless, it might as well come packaged inside a Grands! biscuit tin. That said, it’s certainly more appealing than their previous records, which were defined by their various forms of malaise. Marauder is the least-bad Interpol album in more than a decade, but that still doesn’t make it great. Interpol were once able to transmute urban ennui into something so transcendent, even the most sheltered and secure suburban kids understood. On Marauder, there’s a new kind of emptiness, of hearing an Interpol album that doesn’t really seem concerned with doing better than “good enough.”


Between the end of “Twin Peaks” and filming its prequel, David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti made a wild album of sinister spoken-word jazz, available at last.

David Lynch / Angelo Badalamenti: Thought Gang

Thought Gang

Soon after television executives pressured the makers of “Twin Peaks” to solve Laura Palmer’s murder midway through the second season, the show came to an abrupt, ignominious end. The creative team of David Lynch and Mark Frost soon pivoted to their full-length film prequel, Fire Walk With Me, but Lynch briefly turn his gaze to another project, too. As a lark, Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, composer for both the film and show, concocted a musical experiment: The director would dream up some outlandish scenes, and Badalamenti and a crack team of jazz players (including legendary drummer Grady Tate and Herbie Hancock bassist Buster Williams) would provide the soundtrack. “There were no arrangements or preset orchestrations,” Badalamenti told Rolling Stone. “We simply gave a tempo and an initial key to get started and asked them to play what they felt.”
Outside of a few menacing cues that appeared in Fire Walk With Me, the short-lived HBO miniseries “Hotel Room,” and “Twin Peaks: The Return” decades later, Lynch and Badalamenti’s rumored “jazz record” remained unheard. Nearly two decades later, Sacred Bones has pried those sessions from the vaults and presented the full picture of Thought Gang. While Lynch remains the marquee name, this unearthed hour of skin-crawling, malevolent, ludicrously doomy spoken-word jazz mostly reveals the vast range of Badalamenti’s talents—not just as an arranger and player, but also as a menacing vocalist. For many of these improvisations, Badalamenti sends his voice through the kind of busted payphone that Captain Beefheart and Tom Waits often used to garble and distort themselves. So startling is Badalamenti’s vocal turn here that, when a disbelieving Lynch first heard him approach the mic and cast a spell on “A Real Indication,” he laughed until he gave himself a hernia.
Thought Gang avoid the smeared dream-pop collaborations with Julee Cruise and the simmering jazz that propelled “Twin Peaks” and Fire Walk with Me. “Logic and Common Sense” bears the barely controlled careening speed and creeping noir of 1980s downtown-era John Zorn, while “Stalin Revisited” veers from pure noise to skin-prickling bowed bass. The industrial ambient of the epic “Frank 2000” will be familiar to anyone who caught Eraserhead at a midnight screening, its smoggy atmosphere even undiminished by unnecessary slap bass.
“Angelo is going to make a complete fool of himself,” Lynch whispered to his engineer during these sessions. He wasn’t altogether wrong. The set hinges on Badalamenti’s circus geek-like need for debasement before the microphone, his unhinged performances making it grimly fascinating and noxious by turns. He repeats “the black dog runs at night” over rubber-band bass and whispering wind; it goes from grim incantation to irritant in under two minutes. “Woodcutters From Fiery Ships” involves a character named Pete and some cats in his backyard, some menacing woodcutters, a boy bleeding from his mouth, and Pete’s apple pie. Badalamenti’s voice is so distorted he nearly drops the call. As frightful and bewildering as a Dion McGregor nightmare, Thought Gang reveals Lynch and Badalamenti’s shared drive to disrupt any through line or logical outcome, the sounds and words as baffling as dream logic.


Dälek follow 2002's From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots with another collection of dense, well-sculpted hip-hop. On Absence, the rhymes are more direct than on its predecessor but they're still complex and considered.

Absence

I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to describe Dälek's third album without making it sound repetitive and boring, two things it most certainly isn't. Whereas many modern hip-hop albums spill over with infectious beats and sci-fi sounds, and draw variety from a wide array of hired-in producers and guest spots, this does the opposite: It's the product of just three guys-- Dälek, Oktopus, and Still-- and the entire record is built around essentially a couple of simple beats with slight yet important variations.
Dälek have a knack for taking basic elements and sculpting them differently every time, a controlled, deliberate attack designed for pinpoint destruction and insight. They can turn a sheet of blistering, white-hot skree into a convincing hook simply by attaching it to the right part of the beat and controlling the volume and density of the noise, allowing Dälek's complex, considered rhymes to weave their way through the tangle. Here, the harsh, cavernous textures coating the songs are ostensibly all dissonant, droning walls of noise cut through with scratches and samples.
The templates of Dälek's tracks are augmented by an incredible wealth of detail in both their beats and backdrops. Cascading flumes of gutter noise torment the edges of "Asylum (Permanent Underclass)": They heave and bend, wavering in pitch and contorting into snatches of tortured melody. Close listening reveals that the squall is actually a tight cluster of dozens of drones, added and subtracted to mold the music into grit-teethed crescendos and dizzying passages of spiraling, exquisitely controlled chaos.
Dälek the MC spits head-spinning verses like "Who trades his culture for dollars/ The fool or the scholar/ Griot, poet, or white collar" ("Culture for Dollars") and "Seen your movements through peripheral/ Remain same individual/ When a man's viewed as criminal to act animal is logical" ("Distorted Prose"). There's nary a nod to sex or personal enrichment, and in fact he opens the album by rapping, a cappela, "Broke stride as last of men realized their deep deceit/ This troubling advance of half-assed crews crowd these streets," a broad and open indictment of what he seems to see as hip-hop straying from its early ideals.
In "Eyes to Form Shadows", he speeds up his flow as melody is forcibly wrenched from queasy, metallic tones, before culminating with "Addicts move in slow increments within granite/ Hands bound and damaged are weapons we brandish/ Deemed savage by masses/ When this anger's just average." Dälek's unsatisfied with nearly everything-- and politics are no exception. On "Asylum", he skewer administration arrogance and fear-mongering with clear-eyed and direct lyrics that avoid the tendency toward opaque abstraction that bogs down so much underground hip-hop.
Crunching along in an endlessly innovative fashion, Absence seems old-school in its simplicity, clarity and forthrightness, but sounds futuristic. And although the album is full of abstract noise and painstaking sound sculpture, the no-nonsense approach to beat-making and Dälek's modest flow make this album more accessible than its presecessor, 2002's From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots. That album had higher peaks than this one, but Absence is more consistently engaging-- and another powerful statement from one of modern hip-hop's greatest crews.


On Berlin house producer Moomin's second album, ruminative, dewy-eyed house music remains the name of the game—one part Larry Heard, one part '70s tearjerker, and as richly textured as it gets. These songs scratch a very particular emotional itch in extremely satisfying ways: They're both melancholy and zippy at the same time, downcast yet fleet of foot.

A Minor Thought

The opening song on Moomin's debut album, The Story About You, said a lot about the Berlin house producer's approach. Its looped Rhodes keys were tentative and misty, and its drum programming skipped just so; the rhythm folded in the sloshing of waves and the looped cries of seagulls, sounds that imbued the song with an unmistakable pang of wistfulness, while the title, "Doobiest," scanned as slightly tongue in cheek. Did it refer to marijuana? Yacht rock? (From the sound of things, probably a little bit of each.)
The gulls reappear on "123," the opening track on A Minor Thought, his second LP for Hamburg's Smallville label. Once again, ruminative, dewy-eyed house music is the name of the game—one part Larry Heard, one part '70s tearjerker, and as richly textured as it gets. The drum machines are apple-crisp, and the song's main riff, a rising and falling horn loop, is as soft and rounded as sandstone. Over it all, a two-bar phrase of muted saxophone flutters like a tattered flag over a beach house that's been boarded up for winter. It is so him that it's almost self-parody. Moomin (Sebastian Genz) joined Smallville in 2010, four years into its run, but the way he has internalized the label's aesthetic might make him their most representative artist. Every one of his productions feels like a perfect distillation of an ideal type, and the same is true here, where each track renders the Smallville universe in miniature.
But nothing on A Minor Thought feels redundant. For one thing, these songs scratch a very particular emotional itch in extremely satisfying ways: They're both melancholy and zippy at the same time, downcast yet fleet of foot. Just listen to the way the piano in "Loop No. 1" tumbles up and down the scale, like a daydreamer with a restless leg. His songs are twee but never sappy, flirting with sentimentality while remaining at a winking remove from it. On top of all that, he's just very good at this sort of thing. Anyone could try to write a Moomin-style track by gathering up the requisite elements: the bone-dry 808, the airy keyboard loop, the layer of vinyl hiss. In fact, all of those sounds could probably be dialed up via sampler presets. But the way Moomin massages all his favored elements together is unusually artful.
How does he do it? Well, his drum loops collage together both patterns sourced from classic drum machines and hits sampled from physical kits. He's particularly fond of lone hi-hat hits swiped from old records and EQed until they sizzle in the mix, and he likes breaks that leave a little something extra in, like a scrap of crowd noise or a whisper or a laugh. In "Stotheh," some kind of voice lurks beneath the white-hot drums and lowing horns, and while it's impossible to tease out where it comes from or what it might be, it lends a crucial additional element of presence to the music. On "A Minor Thought" and "You Neva Know," the looped vocal samples are pushed up in the mix, but they remain largely indistinct and unintelligible, like human fingerprints smeared back toward pure abstraction.
Another of Moomin's tricks is to loop a chiming glissando, often a Rhodes electric piano or a xylophone, so that it seems to shimmer in midair. He favors background elements with soft, smooth attacks, so that they seem less played than simply willed into being, set free of the usual cause-and-effect relationship. He's a clever polyphonist, too: On "Chemistry," he begins with a backwards bell tone, adds wheezy organ, then paints on a high, sour ostinato that's not quite dissonant and not quite consonant, either. The bassline might or might not belong to the same key, and the same could be said of another synthesizer that he adds to the mix. The result is a cotton-candied swirl of tone that doesn't apply to the usual modal rules; severed from anything resembling a root note, the chords float in the air like colored mist, never touching the ground.
There is not, it is true, much variety here: All 11 tracks are paced somewhere between 120 and 125 beats per minute; all of them follow pitter-patter house beats; all of them use the same palette of cool jazz samples and Chicago house basslines and warm, watery keys. But if you're a fan of this kind of thing, A Minor Thought proves that sometimes variety isn't the most important quality in an album. Just like the sound of seagulls at the beach, sometimes familiarity offers its own rewards.


With their third LP and major-label debut, the hardcore band Code Orange offer up compelling, caustic, and occasionally even catchy evidence that they have earned their alpha-dog scene posturing.

Forever

A warning to the Warped set: The band once known as Code Orange Kids are children no longer. The Pittsburgh savants—musical partners since high school, barely legal at the time of their 2012 signing, long barred from the club circuit due to their age—have certainly paid their dues. They’ve spent the past decade plotting and pummeling their way from the hardcore underground to rock’s MainStage, touring with everyone from Full of Hell and Touché Amoré to Deftones and the Misfits and recording under the guidance of two of the most respected luminaries in their genre. Their first two albums (2012’s Love Is Love // Return to Dust and 2014’s I Am King) were released on Converge frontman Jacob Bannon’s Deathwish Inc. label, and produced by his bandmate Kurt Ballou, one of metal’s most highly-regarded board wizards. And yet, even as they stay the course, the group continue to grapple with their precocious past, leading some to reframe them as interlopers, snooty art school kids trying to act tough.
Certainly, Code Orange’s aesthetic and presence involve plenty of mean mugging: grisly music videos and artwork, on-the-record refusals to tour with acts they consider “bargain-bin deathcore bands,” unflinching accounts of in-studio fist fights, vows of Darwinist vengeance against the “fake rockstar mentality” espoused by scene hotshots like Asking Alexandra (“They will be the first to go,” the self-proclaimed “thinners of the herd” stated ominously in a Facebook post). With their third LP and major-label debut Forever, Code Orange have offered up compelling, caustic–occasionally, even catchy–evidence that their claims of intra-scene superiority are, for the most part, justified.
Despite all this talk, the Code Orange crew's approach is surprisingly communal. There’s no bandleader to speak of; instead, we’ve got a vocal tag-team between drummer Jami Morgan and guitarists Reba Meyers and Eric Balderose, the latter of whom’s on power electronics duty as well. They’re less a trio than a cacophonous hydra fighting with itself, each head bearing a distinctive battle cry: Morgan’s razor-throated yelps and deadpanned raps; Meyers’ piercing shrieks, alternated with the haunting alto typically reserved for her pop-punk side project, Adventures; and Balderose’s guttural death growls. This multivalence is partially to blame for the album’s erratic atmosphere; rather than reconcile these disparate approaches, the band duke things out in turn, leaving the guitar hooks (and Joe Goldman’s unfussed, even-keel bass playing) to tie everything together. Sometimes, a twisted choir forms: the half-sung, half-shouted chorus of “The Mud” for instance, or the end of “Hurt Goes On.”
There are many moments on Forever when the band momentarily vanishes for a few voiceless, riffless seconds, before re-materializing with axes in hand. These trap-door jump-scares are a staple in Code Orange’s live show; they turn mosh pits into fever swamps, making you doubt it you’ll make it out of the venue alive. Unfortunately, they fail to generate that level of excitement on record, killing the momentum on tracks like “Kill the Creator” and “The Mud” just as the band hit their stride. Even with Ballou and Will Yip (La Dispute, Touché Amoré) behind the boards, the Reznor-ian scare tactics grow wearisome, especially on “Hurt Goes On,” a Downward Spiral case study dragged down by Morgan’s stale sneers—“Mentally,” he drones flatly at one point, as if reading from a highway sign, “I want to hurt you mentally”—followed by (you guessed it) more silence.
High-definition production and label home aside, Forever is hardly the platonic ideal where heavy-metal crossovers are concerned. Its 11-track, 35-minute runtime proves an abrasive, acerbic listen from start to finish, firmly situating it within the burned wheelhouse occupied by bands like Nails and Knocked Loose, as opposed to, say, Nothing’s big-tent breakthrough Tired of Tomorrow. There’s one notable exception, of course: “Bleeding In The Blur,” a grungy ballad carried by Meyers’ clean vocals which features a head-spinning guest solo from Sumerlands’ Arthur Rizk. That the album’s biggest shot at a radio hit functions as a venomous kiss-off to all the scene snobs who wrote them off (“You’re bleeding into the blur/You’re dying in a ditch/Paint the picture how you want/It’s yours to make fit”), not to mention a formal fiat against Asking Alexandria and company (“Faith in numbers on the paper/the view will never change/constructed just to fill the void, you oil the machine”) only reiterates what we, and the band, knew all along: the heavy rock mainstream could use a good razing, and Code Orange are well-equipped for the demolition job.


The double album from Jeff Tweedy and son Spencer carries a subtle, personal theme: many of the songs address, usually in a roundabout way, Jeff's wife and Spencer's mom Susan Tweedy’s battle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.  Sukierae takes her family nickname as its title, and the backstory lends the breezy music a different urgency.

Sukierae

Jeff Tweedy makes sure he's never the best musician in the room. Ever since he learned the ropes from the more experienced Jay Farrar in Uncle Tupelo, he's surrounded himself with players who are either more technically skilled or possess a distinctive style. It’s an odd strategy for an artist who is himself technically skilled and possesses a distinctive style, but over the last 25 years, it's proved a successful approach. In Wilco 1.0, Jay Bennett helped shape the sunburnt pop of Summerteeth and the twitchy roots-noise grandeur of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot; in Wilco 2.0. it was guitarist Nels Cline and drummer Glenn Kotche stretching Tweedy’s songs into k**osmische jams. This is not to downplay Tweedy’s contributions to the band he fronts—just the opposite, in fact, as he uses these idiosyncratic musicians to color in the corners of his own vision.
Spencer Tweedy doesn’t have the pedigree of those musicians—at least, not yet. He may have played on albums by Mavis Staples, White Denim, and Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion, but as of this writing he can’t drink legally. Any allegations of nepotism, regardless, are handily dispelled on Sukierae, the double album that Spencer and his dad have recorded under their shared surname. On these 20 songs, the younger Tweedy emerges as the kind of musician who actively challenges his old man. His playing is rooted in jazz, rock, and avant-garde, which means he doesn’t simply keep time and add a lot of fills—but he still defines the grain and texture of these songs. Spencer gives “Diamond Light, Pt. 1” its jittery gallop, “Low Key” its low-key hustle, “World Away” its classic rock rumble. Favoring what might be described as a strum—rolling across toms and kick drum in a rhythm that rocks toward and away from the beat—Spencer ensures his father’s pop melodies never sound settled or merely decorous. Instead, he conveys a jumpy paranoia, as though he and his dad expect to hear the worst news possible.
Listen for his brief pause in the beat on “Slow Love”, which Spencer punctuates with a cymbal crash. It’s a sly trick, which at first seems to disrupt Jeff’s dad-folk tune—as teenagers typically do—but ultimately that small glitch in the song’s momentum commiserates with his dad’s understated rumination on love and commitment, creating a fleeting moment when you can identify the security of a long-term relationship or question it. “What to call it but falling in love,” Jeff sings, striking that familiar tone of laid-back melancholy. “I never needed to know what is was.” The lyrics are straightforward, but the music injects some ambiguity into the song even as it underscores the father-son dynamic. The song works better when you know it’s all in the family.
There are other musicians on Sukierae, including Scott McCaughey on keyboards and vocalists Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig on backing vocals. But Sukierae is typically at its best when it emphasizes Jeff as the proud singer-guitarist and Spencer as the drummer—in other words, when the music is stripped down to its barest essentials, when it’s at its most minimalist, when even the saddest tunes sound like they were a joy to create. And there are many sad tunes on Sukierae, or at least many conflicted tunes pitched somewhere between celebratory and commiserative. Most of them address, usually in a roundabout way, Susan Tweedy’s battle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a malignant but treatable form of cancer. The album takes her family nickname as its title, and the backstory lends the music a different urgency, one that belies the breeziness of songs like “Summer Noon” and “Wait for Love”. Jeff is too experienced as a lyricist to address that subject directly, which would makes these songs either too obvious or simply exploitive—the emotion overpowering the music. Instead, he writes around the crisis, transforming the travails of love and commitment into sharp, deceptively sunny hooks. “Low Key” and “I’ll Sing It” continue the subdued power-pop of Wilco’s most recent albums, but the songs are distinguished by the more austere palette of drums and guitar.
Of course, there’s no reason it needs to be a double album. Reportedly, the elder Tweedy penned 90 tunes, but pared it down to a somewhat more manageable 20. But this isn’t Being There, whose two sides obviously commented on and complicated each other. Instead, it’s more like Sky Blue Sky, both in its aggressive breeziness and its repetition occasionally curdling into tedium. The sprawl is less generous than it is indulgent, rendering the album more intimidating and less accessible than it should be. Only Jeff and Spencer can comprehend the full implications of these songs; the rest of us can grasp them only generally. Perhaps, given the story behind the album, that’s exactly what they intended.


Combining elements of post-bop jazz and chamber music, the Claudia Quintet have found a unique and engaging hybrid.

Royal Toast

It's fun to grapple with music that doesn't fit a prescribed notion of genre-- it forces you to listen a little harder and think a little more about actual sound. For instance, I could call the Claudia Quintet "post-jazz" or something similar, but without getting into the details of the music, you wouldn't know what that means. "Jazz" itself is a term that doesn't mean a whole lot anymore without modifying it-- the tent pitched by the word is huge. Here, when I say that the Claudia Quintet combine elements of jazz and modern chamber music, the jazz I'm referring to is mostly the post-bop stuff that's been swirling around in various permutations since the early 1960s, small ensemble music that doesn't necessarily lean on swung rhythms, is built on modal composition, and doesn't fear dipping into the avant-garde.
On Royal Toast, the Quintet, led by drummer John Hollenbeck and here augmented to a sextet by pianist Gary Versace, moves easily between improvisation and intricately arranged composition. For instance, "Sphinx" spends most of its first minute charging through a series of seemingly disconnected phrases that make more sense as they're repeated and combined, then pulls back for an almost funky midsection in which Chris Speed gets a chance to wail a bit on his clarinet. Bassist Drew Gress gets a little spotlight, too, almost as a reward for holding down the hyperactive low-end that gives everyone else their exploratory foundation on the rest of the song.
This is the group's fifth album, and they're clearly good at reading each other and knowing when to shift the rhythm to help a soloist escape a cul de sac. The band's unorthodox instrumentation-- bass, drums, reeds, accordion, and vibraphone-- gives it a distinct sonic signature. Ted Reichman's accordion is used in every conceivable way, playing leads, soloing, harmonizing with the clarinet, and in some of the album's slowest and most rewarding passages, hypnotically vamping in a static dance with Matt Moran's vibraphone. Though they can clang along with the best of them, they do quiet and meditative well. These more placid moments balance out the record's stormier passages and offer respite from fussy sections where the shifts in rhythm and time signature are a bit too much.
It's fitting they'd land on the Cuneiform label. The overall effect the band gives off is that of a more well-adjusted cousin to doom-obsessed labelmates Univers Zero, offering the sturm without so much of the drang. I wouldn't mind hearing Hollenbeck use the group to explore his softer side, because the pulsing comedowns on this record are some of its most arresting moments, even though the in-betweenness makes it unique and enjoyable on its own merits.


Building on the success of their highly lauded 2004 singles "Formed a Band" and "Modern Art", Bang Bang Rock & Roll finds Art Brut obsessing over girlfriends, little brothers, and other rock bands while bashing out three sloppy chords that imbue their minutiae-riffing rants with a paradoxical fist-pumping grandeur.

Bang Bang Rock & Roll

WE'RE JUST TALKING... TO THE KIDS!
When you start to measure the amount of music you listen to in gigabytes and jumbo-size Case Logics, it's easy to forget the awesome power of the simple declarative statement. Nothing against all those 30-piece ensembles, nautically focused concept albums, intricate field-recording pastiches, and three-hour drum circles that dominate our musical neighborhood, but sometimes it's refreshing to hear a band maximally juicing a single sentiment down to two-minute concentrate. Meet South London's Art Brut: They're here to fill that vacancy.
I'VE SEEN HER NAKED, TWICE! I'VE SEEN HER NAKED, TWICE!
That it's difficult for me to find a recent point of reference for Art Brut is a testament to just how self-serious indie rock has become-- although they do share a refreshingly bratty quality with proto-punks like the Buzzcocks and Television Personalities. Frontman Eddie Argos even appears to share Joey Ramone's love for first-person narratives that sound no more complex than a transcript of just-some-guy's thoughts on a completely unremarkable day. Ruminations on ex-girlfriends, new girlfriends, little brothers, modern art, his band, other bands, Italian currency, Los Angeles-- all are expressed in language too shallow for even diary-scrawling, but lifted up to anthemic status through sheer multiple exclamation-point enthusiasm.
I CAN'T STAND THE SOUND OF THE... VELVET UNDERGROUND!
Oh my God, heresy! But of course, it's only half-serious, a joking reminder to today's bands that VU ended up writing (gasp!) unabashedly fun songs like "Sweet Jane" and "What Goes On", too. If these sloppy, succinct three-chord bashers fail to tread any ground that isn't already well-worn, they do so in an appealing way that underscores Argos' oscillations between humility and delusions of grandeur. Art Brut might display more versatility than one-tempo Ramones, but not by much, contenting themselves with fast songs ("18,000 Lira", "Bad Weekend") or slow songs ("Rusted Guns of Milan", "Stand Down"). It's just enough to give these minutiae-obsessed songs their paradoxical fist-pumping grandeur, and not a bit more.
NO MORE SONGS ABOUT SEX AND DRUGS AND ROCK N' ROLL... IT'S BOOOOOORING!
That this line comes amidst the album's most straight-ahead rock number-- and that about 90% of Argos' lyrics discuss these very topics-- is probably the best joke on the album, though it's not wanting for humorous company. The sly origin story "Formed a Band" and art-fetish celebration "Modern Art" (both re-recorded here from their 2004 single versions) may have laid the foundation of Art Brut's blog rep, but Bang Bang Rock & Roll's new material is equally hilarious when it aspires to be. Argos paints the perfect picture of musical awakening in "My Little Brother", the subject of which expresses his frustration through mixtapes of "bootlegs and B-sides," and makes "Emily Kane" more than just a casual remembrance of young love by being able to recollect the last time he saw her, right down to the second. It's tempting to think of Art Brut as the foreign replacement for the catchy/clever observances Weezer used to traffic, the escape fantasy of "Moving to L.A." obliterating the clichés of "Beverly Hills", with its shirtless motorcycling, hanging with Axl and Morrissey, and foolish tattoos.
HAVEN'T READ THE NME IN SO LONG... DON'T KNOW WHAT GENRE WE BELONG!
Well, let me try to help. See if you can follow this: Art Brut, through their thoroughly unpretentious embrace of pretentiousness, are the most punk new band I've heard in years, punk having lost itself long ago to the pretentiousness of unpretentiousness. So even though Argos boasts of wanting to "write the song/ That makes Israel and Palestine get along," and planning to perform Art Brut's hit eight weeks in a row on "Top of the Pops", any chance you might take him seriously is deflated by the little meta-moments like the one caps-locked above. As with the best LCD Soundsystem singles, Bang Bang Rock & Roll is at times some of the best music criticism going right now, and far better than our boringly verbose bullshit 'cause you can dance to it.
AND ART BRUT, WE'VE ONLY JUST STARTED!
The optimism of that statement is infectious and hard to argue with, though I'm perfectly aware of the large pile of empty Brit-hype firecrackers that went off with a barely a whimper Stateside. Given their reliance on dry English humour (yes, two u's) and lack of a timely U.S. distribution deal, it's unlikely Art Brut will fare well as well with North American listeners as fellow countrymen Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, and the Futureheads. But then, just a year ago, it seemed unlikely that any of those bands would find fans in the States at all, let alone enough to spark yet another small-scale British invasion-- and all told, it's not hard to imagine their dagger-sharp guitar lines and pop-fueled bash carving its own niche in those other bands' wake if given the opportunity. The only thing to do is start a letter-writing campaign, suffer the import prices, and hope Art Brut's got enough in their tank for another album or two. I can't wait to hear "Recorded a Sophomore Album!"


The Nashville brothers' seventh album, their first for a major label, was produced by the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach. Coming from a fuzz-pop band that has just two members and three guitar strings to its name, Hypnotic Nights covers a deceptively wide swath of sonic terrain.

Hypnotic Nights

It's summertime, which means that, right now, all across the land, lifetime friendships are being forged and virginities are being lost, and the fond reminiscences thereof will be forever associated with whatever songs happen to be playing in the background. Because the soundtrack to our lives is often accidental and serendipitous, comprising random tunes that turn up on the radio, or on shuffle, or in a DJ's playlist at just the right moment, thereby conflating a certain song and a certain shared experience into the best night of your life. But JEFF the Brotherhood ask: Why leave it all to chance? Why not just reach for a record that's already as up for a good time as you are?
The fraternal Nashville duo's seventh album-- and debut for Warner Bros.-- is their version of celebration rock, if not quite Celebration Rock. Where fellow two-piece Japandroids' recent second album is a paean to the good times as seen in the rearview mirror, Hypnotic Nights captures the memories as they're being made-- specifically at 3 a.m. in the overcrowded kitchen of a home belonging to some classmate's oblivious, vacationing parents. And from the sound of things, Jake and Jamin Orrall's idea of the perfect house party involves little more than The Blue Album on full blast and a thick cloud of pot smoke. Hypnotic Nights continues with the Weezer worship introduced on 2011's We Are the Champions, but answers the fuzz-pop frivolity with equal doses of motorik groove and psychedelic drone: In the giddy, phased-out thrust of "Hypnotic Winter" and bubblegum-covered Krautrock of "Wood Ox", you can imagine what kind of record Rivers Cuomo might've made post-Pinkterton had he gone to Cologne instead of college.
JEFF the Brotherhood's concerns are so basic in their everydude needs-- "I want a place where I can smoke meats/ Where I can drink and swim in a creek," Jake offers by way of mission statement on "Country Life"-- we might as well call them J-Brah. But coming from a band that has just two members and three guitar strings to its name, Hypnotic Nights covers a deceptively wide swath of sonic terrain: Dan Auerbach's production incorporates everything from saxophones and piano to synths and sitars into the mix, mostly to thicken the band's distorto-rock drive rather than provide a respite from it. However, Auerbach does coax an impressively straight-faced performance out of the duo on the mid-60s-styled psych-pop reverie "Region of Fire", an effective late-album comedown that makes the closing cover of Black Sabbath's cigarette-lighter igniter "Changes" all the more superfluous. Even if it's meant to suggest that every epic bender must ultimately come to a sobering end, the gospel singer-assisted reading is too melodramatic to be introspective, and-- by swapping out the original's piano melody for amateur-hour synth taps-- too half-assed to be taken seriously. Given how well Hypnotic Nights otherwise lives up to its name, the Orralls' ersatz-Ozzy act proves to be an unnecessarily rude awakening.


Fourteen years after their first collaboration, the unlikely duo reunites for a well-curated selection of covers that spans generations, while adding their fascinating mystique to every one.

Robert Plant / Alison Krauss: Raise the Roof

Raise the Roof

The success of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ Grammy-winning 2007 record Raising Sand set a lofty bar for their bewitching energy as a duo. Fourteen years later, Raise the Roof maintains their careful simplicity, rising to the challenge of releasing another record of mostly cover songs that are still impactful and original. When their talents are interlaced, Plant and Krauss are masters at dusting off generations-old tracks and making them saunter to a fresh, personal rhythm.
Between his Led Zeppelin roots, his love of 1950s doo-wop, and a decades-long passion for Asian and South Asian music, Robert Plant has tried many musical derivatives on for size. Equal parts glimmering golden ringlets and devilish rock’n’roll mystique, his career is one of inarguable expansion and divergence. It was incomplete, however, until a 2004 Lead Belly tribute concert where he met bluegrass singer Alison Krauss, the lifetime Grand Ole Opry member, who, until this year, held the record for most Grammy awards won by a woman, having won her first at age 18.
Despite seemingly polarized genre identifications, the pair’s “almost telepathic” connection was immediate, first yielding the effulgent Raising Sand. Produced by T Bone Burnett, the collection of 12 covers and one Jimmy Page/Robert Plant original showcased how the two musicians coalesced when venturing into what Plant dubbed the “music of the mountains.”
Raise the Roof, also produced by Burnett, is the dark and spacey counterpart to Plant and Krauss’ first release, with covers that span from modern indie-folk band Calexico to early Delta blues musician Geeshie Wiley. Their cover of Calexico’s “Quattro (World Drifts In),” the song that ignited Krauss’ desire for a second duo record, suspends Plant and Krauss in a personal nomadic catharsis, delivered with such ardency that it is as if the two penned the track themselves. Similarly, despite the insidious nature of Wiley’s “Last Kind Words Blues,” Krauss’ voice soars above it all, like a sunflower straining towards sunlight. The opposing tones of Krauss and Plant, coupled with Marc Ribot’s gentle banjo plucks and Stuart Duncan’s hypnotizing mandolin, harkens back to Plant’s galvanizing vocal symmetry with his other female duet partner, the immortal folk singer and Fairport Convention frontwoman Sandy Denny, the only guest vocalist on any Led Zeppelin record.
Plant and Krauss’ rendition of the Anne Briggs classic “Go Your Way” feels like a dark and stormy folkian B-side to Led Zeppelin III’s crown jewel “That’s the Way,” both haunting and divine. The stylistic changes, such as the ebbs and flows of Plant’s soft rasp with an emphasized drum beat and sorrowful pedal steel, thoughtfully reinvent the track as a farewell letter that feels miles from the original. Plant is persuasive and comfortable on “Searching for My Love,” the softest and most innocent track on this intimately dark record. The bridge’s magmatic guitar riffs pair tremendously with his boundless vocals.
Written by Burnett and Plant, “High and Lonesome” is the zenith of Raise the Roof, with the weathered energy of a dirt-dusted cowboy boot stomping the stage. The clapping percussion dances the track into a fireside incantation; Plant chants “Will she still be mine?” and “There I must find my love” as if casting a spell, while violins swirl up from the cauldron of his lower register. Plant and Krauss’ paralyzing and disquieting reimagination of Appalachian-life raconteur Ola Belle Reed’s “You Led Me to the Wrong” continues the record’s theme of revealing their darker side.
The album falls into a valley of platitudes with the final number, “Somebody Was Watching Over Me.” The Brenda Burns cover falls short, with a haphazard piano part and incongruous backing vocals. Raise the Roof should have ended one track sooner, on Merle Haggard and Dean Holloway’s “Going Where the Lonely Go.” Glinting with Russ Pahl’s pedal steel touches, it’s Krauss’ most empyreal moment, conjuring the lonesome dreamscape imagery simply by her stunning approach as a vocalist.
Plant and Krauss remain an unexpected pairing, at least on its face. But what beauty lies beneath. With versions that bend and reshape the originals, they once again leave their imprint on a well-curated songbook that suits their mystical nature. They dig deeper into the corners of American music and by doing so, come up with something far more rare and incisive about its past.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On her excellent new album, Juana Molina continues shedding formal pop structures to reveal more of her own artistic voice. Her occultish narrative is defined not by words, but by moods.

Halo

The first songs Juana Molina wrote on her guitar as a young girl in Argentina were simple things, repetitive melodies comprised of a few notes and chords. She would play them over and over for weeks on end, lulling herself into a trance. Without the confidence to explore her droning ambient tendencies, she dressed them up with a chorus, verse, and bridge, a spoonful of sugar meant to disguise her kookier tendencies.
Her 1996 debut LP Rara did much of the same, a folky pop record that only offered glimpses of the rhythmic experimentation she would later explore more fully. Her early career was marked by a slow shedding of her protective pop armor. And when she discovered the Boss RC-20 loop station for 2004’s Tres Cosas, she finally had the tool to take those trance-inducing loops she’d been drawn to since childhood and craft lush, layered compositions. With each record, as she’s shed layer after layer of constricting pop and folk structures, she seems to reveal more and more of herself.
Halo is Molina’s seventh and strongest LP. She wields a sonic palette refined by two decades of experimentation to create a narrative defined not by words, but by mood. Loosely based on the folk legend of the “luz mala”—a halo of “evil light” that floats above the ground where bones are buried—the record evokes the occult in its music as much as in its Spanish lyrics. The fickle protagonist of “Paraguaya” feeds potions to a lover in order to manipulate his desires, but beyond the words, there’s clearly some brujería at work. The ominous strings and purring percussion make that clear, if the 1,000-yard stare peering at you from the femur on the album’s cover didn’t already.
On 2008’s “Un Día,” Molina sung of a desire to deliver songs with no lyrics; in 2017, she’s perfected the form. Three tracks on Halo—“In the Lassa,” “A00 B01,” and “Andó”—feature her voice but no words. Her rhythmic vocals are looped and layered, blending in as another instrumental layer in the ambient compositions. Above each song hangs a looming specter, its characters in search of paranormal assistance in the physical realm to soothe their confusion and regret. Occasionally she even seems to speak with her synthesizer; its brooding warble on “Cálculos y Oráculos” is as expressive as any vocal.
Much is made of Molina’s past as a comedic television performer in Argentina. Her decision to walk away from her show “Juana y Sus Hermanas” at the peak of its popularity is an alluring part of her mystique, but it also underscores her intention. Her acting career was a means to an end, a way to support her music, the art she cared about. Her early folk tendencies and pop structures served a similar purpose, a means to explore the off-kilter rhythms and ambient melodies that lulled her into a trance as a child, pulling us in along with her.
Halo suggests a self-realization that is often breathtaking. On “Cara de espejo,” Molina sings of a woman looking in the mirror, shocked by the truth she finds in her own reflection. “Cuando uno sabe qué va a verse en un espejo/Pone la cara que espera ver en el reflejo,” she sings. Or, in English, “When you know you'll look at yourself in the mirror/You pull the face you hope to see in the reflection.” It seems Molina finally sees her true self staring back at her.


While the Big Thief guitarist’s solo work makes more room for American country music than his main band, it offers much of the same warmth and whispery intimacy.

Two Saviors

Buck Meek sings a bit like someone who didn’t expect to find himself singing. When the Big Thief guitarist opens his mouth, he comes off slightly hesitant and bashful, not entirely committed to the pitches or the rhythm. He sounds like he might be singing just over your shoulder, so even when he lets a little goose-honk crack disrupt his voice, he’s appealing and warm. His solo work carries much the same whispery intimacy as his main band, even if it lacks some of the intensity.
Two Saviors follows Meek’s self-titled 2018 solo debut, which was released in the gap between Big Thief’s second and third albums, 2017’s Capacity and 2019’s U.F.O.F. Somewhere in this time, Meek and Big Thief’s leading force, singer-songwriter and guitarist Adrianne Lenker, quietly divorced. Their marriage was never much spoken of in the press, nor was its dissolution: “I feel like it made us stronger and closer,” Lenker told the New Yorker. “A lot of our love is funnelled into the music, which is maybe the form it was always meant to have.”
The songs on Two Saviors glow with some of that transposed love. They have the customary ease of folk rock, of course—save for drummer James Krivchenia’s experiments in electronic music, most of the Big Thief projects fall under the same homespun umbrella—but they also have the intimacy of a love letter written to a former flame. “Remember the time/You snuck in through the bathroom window and waited for me there?” Meek asks on “Pareidolia,” the album’s first song. The words don’t trouble themselves to make much literal sense, but now and then he’ll ask a direct question, charged with love and its loss: “Did your eyes change? I remember them blue/Or were they always hazel?”
The instruments all seem to step lightly over each other, the drums and Rhodes and pump organ tangling around the edges of the downbeat. Meek makes more room for American country music in his arrangements than Big Thief does, from the expert pedal steel on “Cannonball! Pt. 2” and “Candle” to the Sun Records boom-chicka of “Two Moons (morning).” The whole album sounds like it just spilled out of a junk drawer you pulled open looking for something else, and the spirit of the Grateful Dead, or at least a couple of their T-shirts, drapes lightly over the proceedings.
Meek and his band tracked the album over seven days in an old Victorian house in New Orleans, with no second takes. The rickety house infuses the album with so much room tone it nearly deserves a credit in the liner notes; it’s easy to close your eyes and envision the drafty stairwell ceiling in the distortion-clipped drum track of “Ham on White.” This is very comfortable music, but Meek threads strange disturbances into its weave. Residing alongside the blankets and stars and blue jays of his lyric sheet are darker things—faces forming on the ceiling, broken tongues, swimming pools full of turpentine. He sums up his brand of gentle uncanny nicely, on “Second Sight”: “If you have a need of which you can’t describe/A feeling of the third kind/That’s my specialty.”

Buy: Rough Trade
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Tim Presley's solo debut reteams him with producer Cate Le Bon for a stark, stream-of-consciousness odyssey.

The Wink

On last year’s DRINKS, Tim Presley and Cate Le Bon threw out the rock rulebook and forged their own scrappy tools of invention. Wielding their guitars like crudely hewn spades, the newly formed duo tilled indiscriminately through history, splicing krautrock with hippie folk and welding inside jokes to piercing proto-synths. Partially inspired by Soul Jazz’s Punk 45: There Is No Such Thing As Society Vol 2 compilation, the agitated vibe mussed Le Bon’s usual tidy surfaces on this year’s Crab Day, and returns to scare every trace of classic rock out of Tim Presley’s solo debut, The Wink, which Le Bon produces.
Over the course of their six albums to date, Presley’s shaggy classicists White Fence have marched ever closer to something resembling clarity. The Wink is also a clean listen, but significantly starker than White Fence fans might expect, trading jet-thrusting psychedelia for the rickety twang common to “Bike”-era Pink Floyd, post-punk anarchists, and the Fiery Furnaces at their most ornery. Throughout, Presley seems like the willing supplicant to Le Bon’s autodidact.
Although it starts with an interlude that suggests seals welcoming you to a séance, The Wink is a more coherent and approachable record than DRINKS. As Presley’s songwriting comes back into focus after that wigged-out record, he seems both damaged and reinvigorated, his atonal guitar and nervy register often exuding an appealing, hen-pecked panic. On these harder moments, Le Bon chucks in curveballs to up the ante, like the dabbles of vaudeville piano on the title track, Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa’s trolley-crash emphases on “Solitude Cola,” and the slack saxophone on “ER” that billows like a deflated Airdancer. The disparate elements combine to something resembling a riff from Presley’s track “Clue,” albeit one that also evokes Television attacking an obstacle course.
Presley’s abstract impressionism is surprising and rich with detail, though there are gentler life rafts here as respite from the madness. “I can’t wait to write to you, love of my life!” he swoons on the amiable “Goldfish Wheelchair” (where the Californian sounds suspiciously Welsh). “All done!” he declares, as if he’s just plopped his note in the letterbox. Presley’s lyrics are mostly inscrutable streams of consciousness that are meaningful to him alone, but the occasional plainspoken tenderness leaps out like a shooting star: “And I’ve whittled my sticks/And my love cannot miss,” he chants on “Long Bow,” “It’s a long bow/Pull tight.”
The Wink is a high-wire act that may find more fans among, say, free jazz listeners than conventional rock lovers. But even if the scratchy destination lacks home comforts, the journey is its own thrill. In DRINKS, Le Bon and Presley tore up the rules; on The Wink, they set about rewriting them to their own addictive whims.


The London quintet’s second album takes a softer approach to Britpop-infused post-punk and a more emotional perspective on working-class consciousness.

Blending

As High Vis frontman Graham Sayle explains, the title of the London band’s latest album, Blending, is Liverpool slang for looking sharp—“Like ah, lad, you’re blending.” The quintet’s second LP, however, has little to do with getting a fit off and everything to do with breaking down the superficial posturing that drives us apart. High Vis are no strangers to raging against the machine; on their 2019 debut, No Sense No Feeling, they sang candidly about the nihilism permeating their lives in working-class Britain. Blending explores themes of class consciousness and anti-capitalism through a more emotional perspective. Like Turnstile’s funk-inflected hardcore, High Vis’ Britpop-infused post-punk brings an electrifying softness to its own rough edges.
The current of hope that blooms throughout Blending is a surprisingly gentle one: Sayle delivers his blunt, visceral lyrics with town-crier muscle over Martin McNamara and Rob Hammeren’s strobing, Flock of Seagulls-like guitars and Rob Moss’s buttery Fugazi bass. The warmer approach is also indebted to drummer Edward “Ski” Harper, who encouraged Sayle to seek therapy and abandon the self-described “fuck it, that’s life, innit” attitude that had left him feeling angry and depressed. Still, Blending is never superficially cheery; many of the record’s most hopeful moments shine in tandem with its bleakest assertions. On album opener “Talk for Hours,” Sayle acknowledges the fragile connection forged between strangers in search of anything to lose. “I hardly know ya/But I’m listening,” he assures. “I’m listening to you cry.” “Fever Dream” opens with a callback to the band’s debut—“There’s no sense where there’s no feeling”—before launching into a plea for connection and life. “I’m as empty as the waste and the green land,” Sayle cries in a nasal, Gallagher-esque moan.
Throughout Blending, High Vis acknowledge that anger often coexists with hope, even suggesting that to an extent, the two are inextricable. “The working class is good as dead,” Sayle shouts over blown-out guitars and thrashing drums on “0151” (the Liverpool area code). In his impassioned yowl, dashed hopes and the “ghosts of the docks and the factories” become regenerative, even revolutionary: “If you won’t give it then we’ll fucking take it!” Blending’s emotional centerpiece, “Trauma Bonds,” which was written in the wake of a friend’s suicide, takes an unflinching look at the desperation that both precedes and precludes healing. “Are we still lucky to be here?” Sayle rasps through cutting instrumentals, as if the answer could only be a resounding no. Still, he manages to strip away the apathy and self-destruction to reveal genuine fear. Sayle has said “Trauma Bonds” is difficult for him to perform live.
While its calls to action and emotional candor are undeniably moving, Blending ultimately feels as if the loose ends have been tucked out of sight, rather than tied up. Songs sometimes veer inscrutably towards arena rock, as on the album’s weakest track, “Join Hands,” and some lyrics can read simultaneously preachy and oblique. While Sayle always performs with sincerity, the scope of his music can feel too grand, too consciously results-oriented, to reflect it. High Vis are at their best when they tell it like it is, and Blending too often grasps for an answer that isn’t all there.


The singer-songwriter’s new album tackles the tenderness of motherhood with a series of transportive, ambient-adjacent experiments.

Bat for Lashes: The Dream of Delphi

Natasha Khan has always treated pop music like it’s spell-casting; her pinches of synth-bass and sprinkles of fantastical lyrics create an unmistakable sparkle. Over nearly 20 years performing as Bat for Lashes, the singer-songwriter has become an expert daydreamer—her last album, 2019’s Lost Girls, was written from the perspective of a female biker gang—and her theatricality has drawn frequent comparisons to Kate Bush. Then, in 2020, Khan had a baby. Her body became impossible to ignore, and its tenderness inspired her latest album. Dedicated to and named after Khan’s daughter, The Dream of Delphi offers several intriguing ambient-adjacent experiments—until its enchantment fades like a half-formed thought.
To continue the Kate Bush comparisons, The Dream of Delphi is Khan’s own Aerial. Like that 2005 album, in which a typically enigmatic Bush describes her son as sunshine, The Dream of Delphi sees Khan exchange personal sensuality—the wild horses and weepy kissing of past albums—for more earthly musings. The Dream often sounds like a cut-up version of Khan’s discography, taking her beloved strings, sappy ’80s synths, and seashell drums and slicing them into translucent slugs. The instrumental “Breaking Up” twitches slowly, like many of Khan’s bittersweet pop songs, with an imposing synth-bassline that gurgles like an empty stomach. The harpist Mary Lattimore releases starbursts into the title track, matching Bat for Lashes’ tendency to use strings as a sweetener. Khan sings hypnotically of “milk and opal light.” It’s all pretty, but, in comparison to her more hearty compositions, it’s missing protein.
Khan is an efficient maximalist when she allows herself to be, drenching everything with cascading synths—every second should be a waterfall or bust. The impulse to make things bigger translates well to the melody-forward ambient music that makes up most of The Dream, so songs like “The Midwives Have Left” have lovely balloon-like buoyancy. Khan’s fudgy voice thins out as she dips into weightless cooing, nested in piano splinters. These moments are some of the album’s most transportive; they recall the best experimental music about motherhood, like Medulla by Björk. A few of the songs on The Dream of Delphi are a little too underdeveloped and end up dissipating into thin air. But it’s Khan’s lyrics, always so full of gravity and grace, that keep the album from stalling out. “Remember you came from a spiral, unfolding,” Khan sings on “Letter to My Daughter” with the measured insight of motherhood. In this music, motherhood sounds as supernatural as it feels to the people who experience it.


Grown, sexy, and horny on main, the Dreamville singer’s second album pursues pleasure without compromising on self-love.

age/sex/location

Ari Lennox’s crisp, velvety soprano evokes both the lavender incense at a successful girls’ night in and the sensual intimacy after a delightful date night out. The amorous flair of her music channels a rich lineage of Black women neo-soul artists of the 1990s and early ’00s, who prioritized their sexual desires along the journey to self-acceptance. Drawing on Jill Scott’s jazz-inflected tension and Erykah Badu’s philosophical ruminations, Lennox’s own brand of neo-soul finds freedom in the flesh. The DC native’s 2016 EP Pho employed the retro flair of ’70s R&B to capture the bliss of having her carnal needs met; her 2019 full-length debut Shea Butter Baby exuded the aroma of passion while embracing the autonomy of a young single woman trying to understand her worth beyond sex. On her second album, age/sex/location, Lennox ditches the formulaic takes on lust and romantic uncertainty for a steamier, sexier collection of songs that push her further along in her quest for self-acceptance.
Lennox has described the new album as “the transitional space before my current eat, pray, love journey”—a clichéd yet accurate assessment of her most assured-sounding project yet. If Shea Butter Baby highlighted her frustration at not receiving the love she desires, Lennox is now more interested in giving that same love to herself. Situated in the transit space between the longing for external validation and the confidence required not to need it, age/sex/location offers a bountiful exploration of what it truly means to be grown and sexy. On the groovy, upbeat “Waste My Time,” co-written by British singer and producer MNEK, Lennox tests the limits of her upper range as she affirmatively decides to enter a relationship that will provide only temporary satisfaction: “Waste my time/Get on my line/’Cause I got the time to waste,” she instructs.
It’s the only time we see her indulge in an unsustainable encounter simply because she wants to: Lennox devotes most of the record to asserting her power in understanding what she doesn’t want. “Young Black woman approachin’ 30 with no lover in my bed/Cannot settle, I got standards,” she sings on the bluesy opener “POF,” featuring backing vocals by J. Cole. The humorous duet-skit “Boy Bye,” which casts Lucky Daye in the role of an earnest suitor failing to court a skeptical Lennox, sounds like a contemporary update of the interlude in Erykah Badu’s 1997 classic “Next Lifetime.” On “Blocking You,” Lennox’s voice floats over funky guitar chords and dreamy synths as she demands privacy to restore her inner peace: “Blocking you on everything.” On previous projects, Lennox sang about sex positivity and the self-doubt associated with relationships as if a romantic connection with a partner were required to survive (see “Whipped Cream”). Now she’s starting to understand that it’s not.
The best moments on age/sex/location arrive when Lennox fully leans into the explicit details of her sensual pleasures. Though rarer here than on earlier records, her talent for using her voice to convey the heights of physical satisfaction is peerless. On the stellar “Mean Mug,” which ends with a sultry trumpet solo, her honeyed tone vividly conveys the arousal she feels hearing a lover’s voice over the phone. “Voice noting on the daily/Vocal stroking my sweet valley,” she sings. The intensity peaks on “Leak It,” a heaven-sent vocal match-up between Lennox and Chlöe, who sound invigorated to discover just how freaky they can get when the long-distance connection on “Mean Mug” becomes an in-person night of piercing moans and melodic orgasms.
Lennox’s masterful vocal evocations of her horny-on-main tendencies hit a snag on “Stop By,” where her vocals seep into the background. But the slow moments don’t outweigh the album’s abundant confidence. The Summer Walker-assisted closer, “Queen Space,” marks Lennox’s commitment to give herself the love and respect she expects from her partners. Anchored by mellow keys, the track seamlessly melds Walker’s trap-R&B with Lennox’s old-school soul, spotlighting them as leading voices in their respective styles. Across age/sex/location, Lennox refreshes classic R&B stylings for a contemporary audience, sounding at ease with herself as she offers up her sexiest and most assured music to date.


Working again with members of David Nance & Mowed Sound, the North Carolina singer-songwriter finds an easy, patient groove pitched between Americana and classic rock.

Bite Down

Rosali Middleman, the singer-songwriter known as Rosali, first crossed paths with Nebraska rock guitarist David Nance out on tour. In his group’s full-bodied classic rock sound, she heard a kindred spirit—and a new possibility for what became her third album, 2021’s No Medium. After the reverb-heavy acoustic fare of her 2016 debut Out of Love and the steely edged folk rock of Trouble Anyway two years later, Nance and his band Mowed Sound helped to refract the flickering lamplight of her voice like a gold-veined vintage mirror. Together, they fashioned her Americana instincts—soft traces of pedal steel, banjo, and harp—into the warm, plush sound of 1960s rock’n’roll.
Teaming once again with Nance and members of Mowed Sound on Bite Down, her new album and first release with Merge, Rosali commits definitively to rock’n’roll’s most well-worn textures. It’s clothing she wears well, sounding at times like Stevie Nicks’ drowsy-voiced niece in the way she assesses life’s lingering bruises with cool disregard. “Said it was nothing/Well, what was it then?” she sings with a hint of side-eye on “Is It Too Late.” The track moves along at an easy drift, reflecting Rosali’s outward indifference, until the band accelerates to a frenzy on the last chorus, and reveals the deeper ache provoking her retorts.
Rosali perfumed No Medium with romance, but on Bite Down, those flowers have withered. New possibilities present themselves with no clear way forward. “I am here but I too may go/My body cares for nothing anymore,” she sings on the scuttling “Hopeless,” electric guitar fuzzy and dense behind her as she watches the last embers of love die out. Rosali has stumbled up against these questions before, but the hard-won confidence she displays across Bite Down is more willing to relinquish the need for an answer. “There is no way/No one way/Be there, OK/Be awake,” she sings on “Change Is in the Form.” James Schroeder’s glinting autoharp breaks up the album’s predilection for guitar jams, spiking the chorus with psychedelic sun glare.
Rosali finds the headiest chemistry with the Mowed Sound on mid-tempo grooves like “Hopeless” or slow burns like “Hills on Fire,” which builds a kind of atmospheric heat lightning. You can hear their chummy interplay on the skittering rhythm of “On Tonight,” a warm-hearted confab that sets delicate traces of acoustic and electric guitar against JJ Idt’s thick, rolling bassline. But when they crank songs up, like the jump-start of the Crazy Horse-nodding “My Kind,” Rosali’s voice gets lost, her attitude of nonchalance running against the grain. “My Kind” waits for her to impart a larger emotional flourish, as when her voice rises in confession on “Hopeless,” but instead she holds back.
At times Rosali can linger too long in a song. “My Kind” begins to feel like an extended chorus because she repeats the title phrase so frequently, the music ruminating alongside her rather than evolving to punctuate the churning repetition. Even the charming “On Tonight” burrows down into the chorus, spending the song’s final minute repeating some variation of the phrase, “You’re on tonight.” Bite Down is at its best when Rosali complicates an idea rather than simply circling it. In a rare flash of earnestness, she sings on “Rewind”: “I’m a gold light made of rhythm and space/She’s a soft wind, you’ll meet her someday.” What a tender surprise.


ESP reissues these albums from the late free jazz legend.

Albert Ayler: Spiritual Unity / Live on the Riviera

Spiritual Unity / Live on the Riviera

Saxophonist Albert Ayler recorded Spiritual Unity for a new label called ESP-Disk in 1964. For years, ESP-Disk has been semi-dormant, licensing its back catalog to other labels for manufacture, but they've now reasserted control and have started a reissue campaign. Spiritual Unity and Live on the Riviera, which are interesting pieces in Ayler's astonishing run, are part of the first wave.
My favorite Ayler material involves him working with another horn. Something about his fat, driving tone-- the way it conveys joy even as his overblowing threatens to crack his instrument-- sounds a little lonely with just bass and drums. Still, some of his best music was recorded in the trio format, and he had a telepathic empathy on Spiritual Unity with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray. Together Peacock and Murray form a sound backing that at times seems more like an endlessly shifting cluster of sound than an actual rhythm section. Murray has a light, rapid touch, keeping the cymbals and snares going pretty much constantly, never breaking the flow of the music with a heavy roll, and Peacock functions as an extension of his textures.
Out front is Ayler, sounding strong and huge, opening and closing with versions of "Ghosts". His approach to this signature piece sets the tone for what he tried to accomplish with his music. Though he obviously has a deep love of simple folk melodies, the intensity of his feeling is such that a tune could never contain it, and the sound spills over and around the structure until it eventually bursts forth in a chaotic torrent. "The Wizard" doesn't begin quite as catchy and features an even harsher tone, moving into more challenging areas of free jazz, and "Spirits" is a swooning lament that has Ayler stretching notes to melodramatic and deeply moving lengths. Spiritual Unity is short (just under 30 minutes), intense, and a deserved classic.
Fast forward to the final year of Ayler's life, 1970, as he toured Europe with a quartet. Constantly searching for new textures, during the past couple years he'd experimented with vocals, bagpipes, harpsichord, and rock bands. On Life on the Riviera, the main remnant from these restless years is the presence of Ayler's girlfriend, the poet and musician Mary Maria. While her spoken words on "Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe" are on the one hand painfully dated hippie drivel ("music causes all bad vibrations to faaaade away") there's something oddly fascinating about the clash between her sentiments and Ayler's insane screeches. He's screaming through his tenor, pinching it to sound like a kazoo as the force of his wind drives it up a few octaves, and yet Maria's words ("it makes one want to love instead of hate, it puts the mind in a healthy state of thought") imply that what they're doing is a universal expression of affection and warmth.
Maria's voice is scattered throughout, sometimes reciting verse, sometimes singing, sometimes mimicking Ayler's phrasing with blubbery scat. Her crooning on the straighter ballad "Heart Love" is pretty solid, and when Ayler pipes in to sing a verse, as he often did in his later years, he makes her sound like Dionne Warwick. But as awkward as the vocals can get, the material is strong enough to survive it. The bouncy "The Birth of Mirth" shows that Ayler was writing great themes all the way to end.
A rousing version of "Ghosts" is the closer. Seven minutes into it, the band stops playing-- it's the apparent end of the set-- and the crowd applauds appreciatively. After 15 seconds or so of cheers the band kicks in with a reprise of the theme, the crowd explodes, and then, for three more minutes, the variations continue. It's incredible to think of how many places Ayler could still take the tune. Sadly, within four months the ending would be final and his opportunities would cease.


The witty, word-drunk Maine rapper (a.k.a. milo) follows up his 2017 breakthrough with a middle finger flipped in the direction of any remaining doubters.

Scallops Hotel: sovereign nose of (y)our arrogant face

sovereign nose of (y)our arrogant face

Last year’s who told you to think??!!?!?!?! was a watershed release for milo, the 25-year-old rapper and producer who’s found himself pitched as the reluctant poster boy for an art-rap movement that might not particularly exist. It’s no mystery why he’s seen this way: Residing in Maine, milo, who releases much of his music under the name scallops hotel, favors cryptic lowercase song titles and stream-of-consciousness lyrics full of literary and art-world references. “I feel like Arthur Miller when The Crucible drop,” he gleefully brags on that album’s “Yet Another,” while on “Take Advantage of the Naysayer” he recalls hipping fellow-traveller Open Mike Eagle to the French sculptor Jean Dubuffet while on a trip to a museum. These high-brow bars are relayed over a backdrop of free-form-leaning production built on kooky loops and digital ticks, swaddled in the warming ambience of static.
At times, milo’s style has been more of an endearingly experimental idea than something that produces cogent albums—but with who told you to think??!!?!?!?!, he found a way to back up his witticisms with weightier production that encourages repeat listens. His latest effort, sovereign nose of (y)our arrogant face, reinforces that forward movement. A compact 24-minute project that was snuck out on January 1st, it resonates as both milo’s most accessible work to date and a robust middle finger to the way his music has been misperceived.
Cutting right to the chase, milo spits hard and angry over an ominous piano loop on the opening track, “A Terror Way Before Falling.” “Cue yawning zeitgeist/Wack motherfuckers flounder for limelight,” he vents, before bigging up his label as only he can: “Ruby Yacht’s magnificence is bioluminescence.” He’s still going strong 10 tracks later on the album closer, “Sedans,” a dramatic outing co-produced by the Brooklyn-based beatsmith and engineer Steel Tipped Dove: “I wish I could give a fuck about a brush stroke,” milo says, pairing this barb with a warning to sucker MCs that works as a restatement of classic hip-hop ideals: “Know it’s no remorse ’cause rapping is a blood sport.”
This is the thing that’s often overlooked with milo: Many of his references might be more likely found nestling in the shelves of a university bookstore than on the racks of a streetwear pop-up shop, but he delivers them with an unimpeachable flow and a deep, palpable love for hip-hop tradition. Who else in 2018 is channelling their rap nerdery by referencing Boogiemonsters’ mid-’90s summer jam “Honeydips in Gotham,” as milo does on the woozy “A Method (JAWGEMS Pausing in the Hotel Lobby)”?
As if to address the way some of his lyrics might cause listeners to hit up Wikipedia before admiring the flow, on “Whereareewe” milo mentions Dee Dee Skyes, a character from the late-’70s Hanna-Barbera cartoon “Captain Cavemen.” The slow-tempo, smoldering song ends with a snippet of a conversation between the rapper and Steel Tipped Dove, who questions the reference to a decades-old Saturday morning deep cut. “I thought it was super-fun as a kid,” milo explains with a shrug. He knows that sometimes being a likable MC is mostly about saying something that sounds cool—and when it comes to saying cool shit, milo does it better than most.


Filled with sampled ephemera and vintage television clips, the rapper’s latest EP looks to science fiction for a pessimistic, paranoid vision of the present.

Lost Navigator

There’s little information readily available on Infinite Aziz, the rapper and producer behind Lost Navigator. His new EP is an astral mix of jazz and rap that feels like it came from nowhere, a flowing mix of sampled bits of movies and television shows interspersed with songs that feels like tuning in to a radio channel from an undiscovered planet. A cryptic description on its Bandcamp page reveals its ethos: “The understanding of the lost navigator is that yes, he or she can be mocked for being lost. However, the irony is that the mocker does not realize that the navigator is traveling while they are simply mocking in place.” Aziz is willing to take risks to end up somewhere new, and for most of the EP they pay off.
Opener “Ann” begins with a sample of a television announcer explaining what rap is (“A music that is all beat—strong beat and talk”) and proceeds to offer Aziz’s vision of what rap should be. Not content merely to sample the Arsenio Hall Show theme music, he bookends the song with a snippet of an interview with Hall. Between these throwbacks, he raps over a collage of voices and a piano loop. People can be heard speaking in the background as Aziz throws out pearls of wisdom: “You fight life/Embrace death, you got it backwards kid.” It’s disconcerting yet engaging, like watching someone make themselves heard over a busy open-mic night.
This sense of a lone voice through a storm is enhanced by the production, which manages to be frenetic and melodic at once. A whirring noise reverberates throughout “Grace Race,” as if Aziz is being carried off by a rocket. As he lays down alarmist bars about alien races (“Stockpiling our melanin for their trip to the heavens”) and state oppression (“We charged up but misdirected/My nephew facing 50 for some bullshit, please bless him”) on “The Gambler,” satellite beeps punctuate the march of the drums, lending a ringing menace to his paranoia. You get the feeling that Lost Navigator’s narrator has just watched a program that interspersed the horrors of American history with the wildest sci-fi, and he now finds it impossible to tell the difference between what was real and what was imagined.
By embracing this chaotic mode of interpretation, Aziz comes to revelations impossible to reach any other way. On “Really Out There,” he speaks in metaphor over a hazy fog of what sounds like slowed-down ECM jazz, musing out loud about the worst possible results of a mass uprising: “You really think the Death Star won’t collide with Earth?” he raps, sounding incredulous. Mass extinction seems more plausible to him than true equality. Over the piercing organ notes of the Goblin-sounding “Magnetic,” he gets as close to upfront as he can: “Violence saturates everyday life/We getting numb to that/These orchestrations all being funded so that they don’t collapse.”
You leave Lost Navigator feeling dejected, yet informed. Aziz’s vision is bleak but difficult to fully reject. Surrounding his pessimistic missives with ’80s ephemera and science-fiction scenarios is his way of adding noise to the signal, making real the conflict inherent in his content. How much can you change in a world that continually falsifies who you are? On Lost Navigator, Aziz proves that you may have to glide far out into space in order to see earthly problems with clarity.

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