A powerful, iconic document of West Coast punk is reissued, warts and all.

Los Angeles

By the time the late ’70s rolled around, maybe it was more punk to be in Los Angeles. In California, the artists revolted against the easy feelings that pervaded FM radio and ripped apart the culture of cocaine and groupies and limousines. Los Angeles is where X first marked their spot, the title of their 1980 debut, and the first of their catalog to be reissued this year as the band heads back to the studio to make a new record and on tour.
Several songs off Los Angeles were featured in The Decline of Western Civilization, Penelope Spheeris’ 1981 documentary of the L.A. punk scene, placing X in the landscape of Germs, Black Flag, and the Circle Jerks. The band couldn’t have been more Los Angeles: The X of their name signifies anti-everything, certainly a lack of a proper signature in an autograph-worshipping town. Singer and bass player John Doe took his stage name from the police code for an anonymous person. He came to L.A. inspired by how the city was starkly rendered by writers like John Fante and Charles Bukowski. Exene Cervenka, née Christine, was living in Tallahassee; they met in a poetry workshop. Drummer DJ Bonebrake was in the early L.A. punk band the Eyes; guitarist Billy Zoom came up in groups that opened for Etta James and Johnnie Taylor and joined Gene Vincent’s rockabilly band. And Ray Manzarek, well, he came from the other side.
“I liked the Doors’ version of the ocean, which was dark and scary,” Cervenka says in We Got the Neutron Bomb. X had a thing for the Doors and they found a kindred spirit in Manzarek, who plays organ and produces this album. By all rights, the keys in “Light My Fire” absolutely should not work on a searing punk record, but they add a psychedelic undercurrent that is both upbeat and a little bit unhinging. Cervenka best described the band in her contribution to Doe’s book about the L.A. punk scene, Under the Big Black Sun: “Bits and pieces of Britpop, glam, country, old music, new music, old cars, East LA sugar skulls and lowriders, Hells Angels with their choppers lined up on the Sunset Strip—it was a sexy, scary thrill to walk the gauntlet of all those biker eyes.”
Musically, Los Angeles is almost infallible. “Your Phone’s Off the Hook, But You‘re Not” kicks off with relentless immediacy as if you’ve jumped into a speeding car on a midnight tour. Doe and Cervenka trade lead vocals and occasionally Cervenka veers stunningly off course in vivid and blistering wails, a Siouxsie Sioux in Southern California. On top of Bonebrake’s motoring drums, the songs are dark and doom-laden, fiery and mordant. X sings about drugs and violence and cruising and ennui, conjuring a mood that prefigures Hüsker Dü’s “Diane” and Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising. They stick it to the upper class with “Sex and Dying in High Society” and they finish with one of the best punk love songs of all time, “The World’s a Mess, It’s in My Kiss.” “Go to hell, see if you like it/Then come home with me”—the musical equivalent of cigarette ashes and red lipstick—the end to a wild ride through Los Angeles’ underworld.
Doe and Cervenka’s co-authored lyrics are written in character—told in the first person, the second person, and in close third perspective. They are noir snapshots, deliberately literary, sprung from pulp fictions and Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, a fatalistic vision of Los Angeles told through a flawed cast of characters with raging, reckless impulses.
Jarring still, almost 40 years later, is the title track, a song starring a vitriolic character on her last day in L.A., where Doe and Cervenka deploy the n-word. There’s no salvaging or smoothing over the inherent weaponry of that word in the song of a white person, no matter how great the artist, no matter the intent. As the writer Camille Collins observed in a piece published on Afropunk in 2011, “Black lovers of punk are no different than any other kind; we love the assault of impolite, opprobrious sounds thrashed out and hollered with little regard for the protocols of harmony and catchy lyrics that define pop... But what’s a black person to do when their favorite punker drops the ‘N’ word in what might otherwise be a totally awesome song?” Collins is also the author of a young adult novel, The Exene Chronicles, about a teenage girl growing up as one of the few African-American persons in her San Diego neighborhood, idolizing Cervenka.
What is any listener to do when an album re-enters the world decades later in which a dearth of compassion is met with a dangerous shortage of nuance and complexity? What are artists to do, if anything? The reissue doesn’t attempt to answer those questions. There’s no 2019 addendum in its liner notes. The lyric sheet is reprinted in full here, but does not rewrite or redact or explain.
Granted, that leaves “Los Angeles” in its original context. It’s evident the narrator has hatred for “every...Jew” and “every Mexican that gave her a lotta shit/Every homosexual and the idle rich.” The fact that they reserve their lone actual slur to refer to, presumably, African-American persons loads it with greater violence. The character is based on a former roommate of Cervenka’s, known as Farrah Fawcett Minor, who was leaving L.A. for England. If she’s the narrator of a song, whose name is a city, perhaps—charitably—she is also a metaphor of the city’s rapidly evaporating past, the buried ugliness of intolerance. The song is a reminder, in a culture that rhapsodizes the early days of punk, exactly how limited its considerations of the most marginalized people were, how narrow its stage once was and how vast it is becoming.


The New Jersey sextet’s fifth studio album is an easeful tour of muscular riff-rock, noodly song suites, and curtsying pastoral folk.

Dodging Dues

Since debuting in 2017, Garcia Peoples’ greatest challenge has been to get people to forget what they’re called. You don’t name your psychedelic rock band after the most famous member of the most famous psychedelic rock band of all time if you’re not up for the challenge. And while their particular trip has often taken them through the Grateful Dead’s astral wake, they’ve steadily widened their sound and ambition over the past five years to include touches of dub, sticky Bitches Brew jazz, and tetchy post-punk. They’re too nervy to be a proper jam band, but they jam way too much to be anything else. Dodging Dues, the New Jersey sextet’s fifth studio album, dials back some of the abrasion of 2020’s Nightcap at Wits’ End, but its easeful tour of muscular riff-rock, noodly song suites, and curtsying pastoral folk settles further into a sound worth taking on its own merits. If you pick up this record in the hopes of hearing someone imitate the tone of Jerry Garcia’s tiger guitar, look elsewhere.
Dodging Dues was recorded in a pair of sessions in 2020, with Superwolves maestro Matt Sweeney in the producer’s chair. Though it’s relatively tidy at 34 minutes long, its sense of patience and control makes its runtime seem broader, if not longer; where most rock groups’ studio improvisations feel unnaturally compressed by the band’s consciousness of an album’s shape and size, Garcia Peoples never sound burdened by much of anything here. Their general ease and comfortability, aided by the clarity of Sweeney’s production, give these seven songs a sense of fluid communication as they move through styles; even if the details dim in the memory, the feeling of their conversation is easy to internalize.
Dodging Dues is built around the trio of “Cold Dice,” “Tough Freaks,” and “Stray Cats,” a musically interlocking triptych of songs whose lyrics circle the exhaustions of big-city life in search of a place to catch a breath. Danny Arakaki, Tom Malach, and Derek Spaldo’s guitars pass one another like pedestrians in a busy crosswalk, become entangled, split back apart, and pursue oblong paths that don’t appear to follow logic, but they never stumble into dissonance. “Sick of dodging dues,” they sing in “Tough Freaks,” “stop wasting all your time.” This is ordered, well-managed music about the importance of living an ordered, well-managed life. “Heal me with truth, you immaculate one,” goes one line in “Cassandra,” a song so mannered and traditional in its expectations you expect it to doff its cap as you pass.
It’s Garcia Peoples playing to their strengths. Though still firmly tape-trader music, their form of psychedelia has more in common with the likes of Kikagaku Moyo, Dungen, and Chris Forsyth, the latter of whom they’ve backed live—all artists who use the clicked-in propulsion of krautrock to keep their wildest trips firmly within the guardrails. For Garcia Peoples, this sense of restraint makes their music more compelling and allows them to subvert expectations. At just the moment you’d expect closer “Fill Your Cup”’s middle solo to lift off into some triumphant shredding, it suddenly goes stroboscopic and buries itself in the belly of the song. Where most bands would draw out a shining, imperial solo to cap something like the aforementioned three-song run, on “Stray Cats” Garcia Peoples give you 10 needling seconds of mosquito buzz, then peace out.
This dedication to a form of efficient and orderly journeying—musically or otherwise—carries through much of the album. In “Here We Are,” the guitars go balletic, interweaving, touching down, springing back up. They’re not quite interlocking or running parallel or phasing; Sweeney places them just close enough to force you to consider the blank space their dancing creates. Listening to it is like tracing the gaps in a healthy monstera.
Even when things get loud, they don’t get heavy. Opener “False Company,” a beefy valediction to a fake friend, pumps by on an oil derrick beat from drummer Cesar Arakaki and bassist Andy Cush (who is also a contributing editor at Pitchfork), while the guitars smoke a low and slow barbecue riff. It’s an almost absurdly muscular song, the kind of thing you can imagine slapping the hood of while cracking a cold beer, but the vibe is pure light: “Now that the weight has been lifted,” Pat Gubler sings, “There’s a gladness in my heart that’s returning to me.”
You can hear a touch of Thin Lizzy in “False Company,” and a whole lot of ZZ Top. There’s Fairport Convention in “Cassandra,” and, yeah, the Grateful Dead pretty much everywhere else. Dodging Dues isn’t interested in clearing new territory for psychedelic rock, which is not a criticism: Wandering a well-tended garden path can be far more rewarding than hacking your way through the brush. Lyrically and musically, this album is built to pursue the felicity of spirit that can come with following an expertly manicured path, which is another way of saying it goes where it wants without worrying about the weight of other peoples’ expectations. You can travel so much farther when you pack light.

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On a softly melancholic new album, the Los Angeles musician offers a concentration of his strengths in service of one sharpened, sustained mood.

Blueblue

Years before Sam Gendel was one of the main fixtures of Los Angeles’ bubbling ambient jazz scene, he was the frontman of a quiet little outfit called Inga. Though the group barely had any releases to its name, Inga’s performances were twisting and spontaneous, as Gendel wove his way through lopsided bossa-nova patterns with his understated, fluttering guitar technique. To watch them play was like watching a hunched caterpillar sneaking its way through the grass, each modal jump as oddly angled as it was delicately naturalistic. Since then, Gendel has primarily focused on his solo output, building his kooky sound world around mellowed out hip-hop beats and his psychedelic, Jon Hassell-indebted approach to saxophone. But on Blueblue, Gendel returns to the guitar as his primary vehicle once again, taking everything he’s learned in the intervening years and yielding one of his most richly rewarding sets in the process.
Gendel has earned a reputation for his ability to distill disorienting free-jazz experiments into something that goes down smoother than iced tea, but following his output can still be daunting. Between his endless stream of collaborations and his willingness to bury some of his best material in sprawling 3-and-a-half-hour compilations, Gendel gives the sense that music simply pours out of him—that it’s as easy for him to create as it is for us to listen to. Blueblue, however, benefits from precision: Its 14 tracks are concise, writhing creations, often revolving around just a few stray elements caressing against one another to build a distinct, unified sound. Recorded in a cabin in Oregon overlooking the Columbia River, Blueblue ebbs back and forth like a body of water unto itself. Where Gendel’s previous work has often tended toward jarring stylistic leaps from track to track, Blueblue remains satisfying by sticking with its calm frame of mind, as Gendel dives in to see just how much he can find.
Born from a collaboration with a Japanese clothing company that works with traditional sashiko embroidery, each track of Blueblue is titled in kanji after a different stitching pattern within the style. Though this titling scheme comes off more like a tired aesthetic appropriation, the music itself is executed much more gracefully. Where on previous albums Gendel would often push his squiggling saxophone lines into as many atonal places as he could take them without totally killing the vibe, here his guitar playing is soothing, even inviting, in its softly melancholic strum. “Tate-jima (縦縞, vertical stripes)” opens the record on an intimate note, as Gendel’s unadorned guitar inches along as if he were playing it lying on his back, his eyes grazing the bedroom ceiling. Even on minimal tracks such as this, there’s a textural coarseness to the sound, pulsing with a cassette-tape warmth without losing its bassy, hypnotic depth.
Aside from Craig Weinrib’s pitter-pattering drums, Gendel performed all of Blueblue’s instruments himself, and he deserves just as much credit for his skills as an arranger as he does for his musicianship. As he fingerpicks through the breezy “Toridasuki (鳥襷, interlaced circles of two birds),” a glowing bed of harmonized horns slowly enters, the jittering saxophone never overtaking the track as it glides through one sublime chord change after another. Gendel fills Blueblue with these kind of luminescent details, be it the fairy-tale chimes that hover about “Hishi-igeta (菱井桁, parallel diamonds or crossed cords),” or the tense synthetic strings that lend a horror-movie eeriness to “Tate-waku (竪沸く, rising steam),” or the phantasmagoric flute that careens over “Shippō (七宝, seven treasures of the Buddha)” like some brightly plumed bird soaring over a cliffside. Oftentimes, Gendel luxuriates in a surreal sense of unease, as on the standout “Uroko (鱗, fish scales),” which lurches on a slanted guitar groove and a chorus of beeping synths that flicker on and off like machines in some evil laboratory.
There have been times where Gendel’s dazed approach to slacker jazz has given his music a low-stakes quality, where its effectiveness as good background listening has betrayed a deeper lack of focus. But his latest feels like a purposeful statement, a concentration of his strengths as an instrumentalist in service of one sharpened, sustained mood. In a way, Blueblue plays like Gendel’s tribute to exploratory, late-night jazz records like Andrew Hill’s Judgment! or Bill Evans and Jim Hall’s Undercurrent, swirling about untethered as if searching for a place to rest. Those albums remain enduring today not only for their willingness to experiment, but for how much emotion their creators were able to express using only their instruments and their wit. With Blueblue, Gendel sounds like he is finally learning how to let feeling guide the way.


The soulful debut from Syrian-born Azniv Korkejian showcases the depth of her songwriting and uses Spacebomb’s retro sound to create an exquisite, subtle, and wide-eyed collection of songs.

Bedouine

Halfway through Azniv Korkejian’s gorgeous debut album as Bedouine comes an abrupt shift in tone. While the rest of the record dazzles with sweetness—“like a lamp in the light of day/Drowning in summer rays,” as she puts it—the centerpiece is a haunting protest song. Born in Aleppo, Syria before moving to Saudi Arabia and eventually landing in Los Angeles, Korkejian wrote “Summer Cold” in a moment of despair. The lyrics reflect her reaction to news that American-made weapons had fallen into the hands of Syrian terrorists. “I don’t want anything/Ever to do with them,” she sings, using her wise, fluttering voice to convey a sense of anxious fear. The song resolves with a cycle of found-sound samples she recorded at her grandmother’s home, making its previous verses feel at once more vivid and more distant, the way a nightmare lingers after you wake up.
“Summer Cold” is an outlier on Bedouine—an album more successful at sustaining a mood than reacting to any moment in time—but it’s indicative of the depth in Korkejian’s songwriting. Recorded for the Richmond, Virginia label Spacebomb, Bedouine is backed by full horn and string sections, lending it a similar fairy-tale whimsy to Natalie Prass’ self-titled debut. Still, Korkejian’s songs retain their natural intimacy, with arrangements that, at their most ornate, feel like impromptu daydreams in the minds of their narrators. In the swooning “Dusty Eyes,” she dreams of city lights and lost love as the music builds in intensity, as if to match her lovesick fantasies. In moments like these, Korkejian’s work as a music editor for films (most recently The Big Sick) becomes evident: Her songs gain resonance equally from her lyrics and the sheer sound of everything.
The sound of the record is exquisite, breezing through about 40 minutes with an effortless charm. “I will try my best/To keep my head nice and quiet/For you,” Korkejian sings sweetly in the opening track, a subtly powerful song about our instinct to maintain an air of perfection in relationships. The moments on Bedouine that break through that pleasant veneer are welcome, whether in the stark realism of “Summer Cold” or the moody imagery of “Back to You.” Over creeping Hissing of Summer Lawns jazz-pop, Korkejian places herself as an outsider in the city, where people “talk in exclamation marks” and lead “lives so designed.” Her skepticism reflects a self-awareness that pairs nicely with the wide-eyed wonderment in her music.
Korkejian strikes this balance with such delicacy that it’s sometimes hard to believe this is her first album. “Solitary Daughter” is a direct line to the conversational inflections of early Leonard Cohen. In its verses, she sharpens her vocal style into a rougher spoken-word delivery, stretching out her words and landing on each rhyme with metronomic precision. She takes a similar approach in “Heart Take Flight,” the album’s finest, subtlest track. As Korkejian gives her heart permission to soar away, the music remains decidedly earthbound. Her words are accompanied only by gentle fingerpicking and a lonely array of distant horns, letting each image bloom in your imagination. “Everything around me is/Exactly as it should be,” she sings, “I feel so free.” It’s a contagious feeling, one that Azniv Korkejian seems fully prepared and grateful to share with the world.


These Nashville upstarts keep the doomy legacy of their forebears close and add to the mix teeth-gnashing thrash, ferocious grindcore breakdowns, slabs of Palm Desert-style stoner rock, and a little industrial ambience.

Songs of Descent

The performance spaces of Nashville clubs like The End and Exit/In have incubated one of metal’s best-kept-secret scenes, as heard in the sludgy strivings of acts like Loss, Across Tundras, and the city's own Yautja. On their debut LP, Songs of Descent, the trio keep the doomy legacy of these forebears close—but not too close, since there are plenty of other ingredients in the mix: teeth-gnashing thrash, ferocious grindcore breakdowns, slabs of Palm Desert-style stoner rock, and a little industrial ambience.
If that scans as disjointed, blame the pedigree; Bassist Kayhan Vaziri shares his duties with sludge-lords Coliseum, while axeman Shibby Poole plays bass in local hardcore outfit Nameless Cults. Rounding out the trio is drummer Tyler Coburn of Gnarwhal, whose atypical polyrhythms provide Songs of Descent’s frenzied, untraceable pulse. Mix it all together, and you’ve got one beast of a border-crossing debut.
Grind is all about the pivots, and Songs of Descent makes a conscious effort to keep things unpredictable. “Denihilist” takes a simple melodic thread as an invitation to lurch forth into oblivion, before scaling back to a swampy jam just past the halfway point. The mechanical riffs that opens “A Crawl” could have been copped from Queens of the Stone Age—until the instant when Coburn cues up the blast beats for its manic microsong of a coda. Two instrumental interludes,“(Path of Ascent)” and “(Path to Ground”), stir up unease as they plod along, massive and uncertain. The “gotcha!”’s that follow, “Denihilist” and “An Exit”, respectively, feel all the more thrilling.
To mix this monster, the band enlisted Mikey Allred, who’s played tech wizard to everyone from Hellbender to Inter Arma. His raucous, ramshackle approach is heavy on the bass, giving Vaziri’s melodic, mucky tones the auditory advantage over Poole’s noodling. This gnarled sound lends heft to hardcore-leaning tracks like “Tar and Blindness”, but can’t stick to “Faith Resigned”, a seven-minute slog that proves exhausting with its abundance of (literal) bridges to nowhere. “Teeth” treads water similarly, a teasing series of fills and fake drops that opens up, finally and agonizingly, to little more than a relative rumble.
Still, with Songs of Descent, Yautja has conjured up the brute force and brain power necessary to live up to both their monstrous namesake and the heralded hometown. World domination? Not quite. But give that surly stock more time to develop, and that just might be an intergalactic emergency.


Guided By Voices' classic record gets a makeover on this vinyl-only release. The new album includes the original 33-track sequence for Bee Thousand, another record's-worth of tracks that weren't initially included but eventually made their way onto the LP, and The Grand Hour and I Am a Scientist EPs.

Guided by Voices: Bee Thousand: The Director's Cut

Bee Thousand: The Director's Cut

Our Pollard, who art in Dayton, hallowed be thy name... man, look at that rating. The eighth deadly sin must surely be the curse of objectivity. By now, having been lucky enough to spill my guts all over this site on such diverse topics as the ghosts of GBVs past, present, and future, the myth of Robert Pollard, and a religious experience at a long-gone concert when it seemed like the band might just be the answer to any question rock 'n' roll wanted to ask, it may seem that my objectivity is in short supply. It is. The part of me that holds an irrational, almost baseless devotion to Robert Pollard's hissed-out anthems is screaming "10!" from the back of my brain, and it only takes a listen to the restless ghosts of "The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory", or the rejuvenated arena dinosaurs of "Buzzards and Dreadful Crows" to weaken my resolve. But something's wrong, and every time that voice speaks up and asserts this album's perfection, it's shouted down by a simple, immutable truth: "If it's right, you can tell."
Guided By Voices got it right back in 1994. Bee Thousand is the band's definitive moment, the point when the ringing Who-isms of Pollard's youth-- filtered through four-tracks and his own post-punk, X-Men, stream-of-consciousness quirks-- finally matured beyond the atonal growing pains of Vampire on Titus and Propeller. The distinction was slight but unmistakable-- like learning to harness all the jaw-dropping, stadium-quaking power of Propeller's triumphant exclamation ("I'm much greater than you think!") without all the run-up or refining the unworked defiance of "Exit Flagger". On Bee Thousand, GBV mastered all those fragments of greatness and assembled an entire album from them. Sure, it stumbles occasionally, and falters as only four spare-time, blue-collar bandmates from Dayton, Ohio can-- that is, humanly and forgivably-- but the original Bee Thousand simply stands alongside the greatest of the modern era. The original warrants a 10.
So what of The Director's Cut? Shouldn't this just be a bionic Bee Thousand? In what parody of a just universe is this not every ounce of the original plus whatever else was left over? I feel faint...
Track sequence, it turns out, is really, really important. This new, expanded version of the record includes an early, 33-track sequence. It's spread out over four vinyl sides, along with another record containing the standard B1000 tracks that weren't initially included, as well as The Grand Hour and I Am a Scientist EPs. Unfortunately, this original sequence is so bafflingly unsatisfying that it might've kept Guided by Voices in the basement for another decade had clearer heads not eventually prevailed.
"I Am a Scientist" first earned GBV a measure of notoriety and in some small way helped legitimize the rise of lo-fi to minor prominence in the early 90s; sadly, it wouldn't even have been included on Bee Thousand (here, it's relegated to the extras and outtakes disc). And that's least of the original's tracklist problems: The "new" material in the early sequence is composed almost entirely of Suitcase and King Shit and the Golden Boys tracks-- material that was substandard even on those collections of outtakes.
The burden is only slightly ameliorated by an older, thinner version of the otherwise classically bombastic concert staple "Postal Blowfish" (better reprised on the Brain Candy soundtrack), a four-track demo of "It's Like Soul Man", and a few lazy, acoustic charmers like "Indian Was a Angel" or "Supermarket the Moon". But for every new highlight, there's an equally inaccessible "Deathtrot and Warlock Riding a Rooster" or "Zoning the Planet"; the resultant load proves to be a little too heavy for even classics like "Echoes Myron" to completely bear.
With the remains of the final cut haphazardly tacked on at the end, in addition to a thoroughly mixed bag like The Grand Hour, and almost-redundant alternates of both "Shocker in Gloomtown" (included twice in the span of four tracks, and yet still valuable for the energy infusion it provides both times) and "I Am a Scientist", the "bonus record" is as slapdash as The Director's Cut itself. Thankfully, a fantastic unreleased version of "My Valuable Hunting Knife" ends this ordeal on perhaps its highest note, dispensing with the haunting atmospherics found on the Alien Lanes version and plunging into a sea of churning guitar and a clipped, punchy vocal performance from Pollard.
Of course, a phenomenal finish isn't quite enough to correct the confusing missteps of the previous hour. Despite containing the core of one of the most stunning, unexpectedly triumphant records ever recorded, and a few wonderful tracks besides, Bee Thousand: The Director's Cut manages the almost impossible feat of reducing itself to a merely good album with some incredible highlights-- maddeningly similar to almost every other album our beloved Fading Captain has ever tossed off. The slipshod nature of this expanded reissue serves only to prove two things: for better or worse, GBV is ever Robert Pollard's child (and thankfully Tobin Sprout was around to shepherd it, at least for a time), and that the final edit of Bee Thousand is every bit the miracle it sounds.


The avant-pop stalwarts return with one of their loosest and most rock-heavy records yet, slightly bending their own rules while remaining stubbornly singular.

The Magic

It’s hard to pinpoint what “consistency” means in the context of a restless band like Deerhoof, who have spent the past 20 years crafting record after record of experimental rock music—each sounding distinct from one another but also sounding unmistakably like Deerhoof. While it’s true a single moment of their inscrutable avant-pop can sometimes recall other artists—a garage-y guitar riff, a Stereolab-y keyboard part, a Fugazi drum roll—each Deerhoof record (or even song) mashes all of these things together in a way that feels completely exclusive to them.
It should be no surprise then that The Magic stands out from the rest of their output while still being “another Deerhoof record.” Like on 2014’s La Isla Bonita and 2011’s Vs. Evil, this new album shows the band continuing their recent trend toward music that is ever-so-slightly more accessible. But unlike on those records, which each featured plenty of synths and a number of soft spotlight pop moments, The Magic—recorded in seven days in an abandoned office in a New Mexico desert—is one of their loosest and most rock-influenced records yet, with the guitars placed front and center.
Beginning with a ripping riff and galloping drums worthy of the White Stripes, the “bring the rock” mentality is made clear from the album’s opening moments on “The Devil And His Anarchic Surrealist Retinue” (a title apparently taken from a section of Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise describing Stalinist opera). A few of the album’s tracks go even further, all the way to traditional-rock-song territory. “That Ain’t No Life to Me,” sung by guitarist Ed Rodriguez, pumps out no-frills garage-grunge, complete with simple, allusion-free lyrics. “Dispossessor” is a bit more interesting, channeling ’70s arena guitar  into a less sexy Cobra Verde. And “Plastic Thrills” features a lip-snarling guitar line, woo-woo backing vocals, and even handclaps. These three tracks are so unexpectedly straightforward that it’s almost hard to believe that it’s Deerhoof.
It’s no coincidence that all three feature male lead vocals in place of main vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki’s typical dreamy sing-speak chants, perhaps the band’s biggest distinguishing factor. While the male voices of Rodriguez and drummer Greg Saunier help fill out Deerhoof’s sound palette, particularly on harmonies, it’s Satomi’s voice that consistently makes Deerhoof sound both cool and weird. It works like an instrument in the same way that out-of-place vocalist Damo Suzuki’s yelps worked on Can’s classic run; in either case, going with a traditional white male rock voice would have dumbed down the musical output. The Magic’s rock’n’roll feel extends throughout the record, but Satomi thankfully leads the way. Both “Model Behavior” and “Debut” are deliciously funky, with the latter sounding almost like a Satomi-fronted take on Bowie’s Station to Station. And “Kafe Mania!” blends bursting guitars with the Deerhoof mainstay technique of Satomi singing a mirrored melody of an accompanying keyboard line to great effect.
The Magic’s true highlight though is “Criminals of the Dream,” a five minute epic that begins with a dreamy synth intro that sounds like it could play over a scene of Atreyu and Falcor in The Neverending Story, before a kraut guitar and Satomi’s vocals kick in. After a long build-up, the song finally climaxes with a minute of one of the most gorgeous melodies Deerhoof has ever put to record. The circling chords and refrain of “I know you can dream things aren't as bad as they seem” makes you wish the song would just go on forever, even though you know it won’t.
As rock-leaning as it may be, The Magic is no less an acquired taste than most of the other records Deerhoof have put out. The strange vocals and constant, hyperactive changes in pace will never be for everyone, and the overall bursting-at-the-seams-ness can even impart a feeling of exhaustion in a listener. Within the context of Deerhoof’s oeuvre, The Magic is a bit of a back-to-the-garage reset that doesn’t approach the heights of career apexes Friend Opportunity and Runners Four**, but offers a fresh energy that rewards the converted.


Barely out of his teens, Chancelor Bennett has transformed himself from a suspended high school student to a much adored Chicago rapper. His second mixtape, Acid Rap, invites elements of classic soul, juke, gospel, blues-rock, drill, acid jazz, house, ragtime scat, and R. Kelly, Twista, and a young Kanye to the same open mic poetry night.

Acid Rap

In another world, you can imagine Chance the Rapper lip-syncing “Twist and Shout” at Chicago’s Von Steuben Day parade, surrounded by frauleins doing the money dance. You can visualize a rap game Ferris Bueller: arms outstretched to snare a foul ball, staring stoned at Seurat, ducking fascist educators, and oblivious parents with cinematic ease. You can hear his impression of Abe Froman, sausage king of Chicago, and it’s pitch-perfect.
Barely out of his teens, Chancelor Bennett has already transformed himself from a suspended high school student to the young Chicago rapper universally adored among "sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wasteoids, dweebies, and dickheads." The release of last week’s Acid Rap triggered such intense demand that it crashed both hosting site Audiomack and Windy City rap agora Fake Shore Drive. Cops recently banned Chance from two separate high school parking lots after mobs formed once kids discovered he was on campus.
But life rarely parallels a John Hughes script. Unlike Bueller, Chance actually got caught skipping school, a 10-day sabbatical that inspired his first mixtape, last year’s #10Day. His neighborhood of West Chatham might not be the worst in a city whose alias is Chiraq, but it’s still South Side and far removed from baronial Highland Park. The drugs are high-velocity, the slang is crisper, and in this scenario, Cameron dies.
The victim was Rodney Kyles Jr., a close friend who Chance saw get stabbed to death one gruesome night. His memory haunts Acid Rap. On “Juice”, Chance mourns his inability to “be the same since Rod passed.” On “Acid Rain”, he still hears screams and sees “his demons in empty hallways.” The circumstances aren’t necessarily unique. Last year, Chicago murders outnumbered American casualties in Afghanistan. Drill stars, King Louie, Chief Keef, and Lil Durk have given the violence a public face with videos so dark they practically resemble a first-person shooter PS3 game set in Section 8.
Acid Rap isn’t trying to be an alternative; it’s an attempt to encompass everything. There are shout outs, musical or lyrical, to practically every important Chicago tradition short of Thrill Jockey. It invites elements of classic soul, juke, gospel, blues-rock, drill, acid jazz, house, ragtime scat, and R. Kelly, Twista, and a young Kanye to the same open mic poetry night, where the kid on-stage is declaiming about what’s going unreported. Its genius is that he somehow makes this work.
The structure is as expansive and freewheeling as any strange trip. Acid Rap is a less about the attempt to break on through than a way of describing the hallucinatory shades, transitory revelations, and cigarette burns of the journey. You can get off or on the bus at any juncture. There is no ideology or orthodoxy. No arbitrary binaries between conscious or gangster, apostle or agnostic. Freaks and free thinkers are accepted. Chance understands that those who are frightening are often frightened, too. He comes off as a guy who could find something in common with anyone but a high school principal.
Chance mixes nostalgia with a nasal tone as effectively as almost anyone since the Pharcyde. He’s only 20, but “Cocoa Butter Kisses” laments the days of bright-orange Rugrats cassettes and Chuck E. Cheese pizza. It could come off like sentimental back-in-the-day cliché, but there’s a street-smart edge that holds the cheesiness in check. He puts Visine in his eyes so his grandmother won’t know he’s high, acknowledges his addictions, and invites Twista to play the smoked-out, speed-rap, O.G. Jedi.
The guest spots mirror the funhouse characters you’d expect to meet on a memorable acid excursion. Action Bronson offers instant quotables on “NaNa”, sticking out his tongue, slicking back his hair like Rick Pitino, and peeling out in an El Camino with three Japanese lesbians. Ab-Soul plays the shadowy street pharmacist in the liquor store parking lot, opening up the trunk of his Dodge to offer grass, acid, and offside soccer metaphors. Chance’s Save Money crew partner, Vic Mensa and Childish Gambino act as effective co-conspirators.
Some ears won’t settle to Chance’s voice. It occasionally recalls an Animaniac playing the harmonica, a scat singer with a mean soft shoe routine, and/or Lil Wayne and Kendrick Lamar. The latter is his most obvious immediate predecessor and clearly, Chance owes him a stylistic and conceptual debt down to the parental voicemail of “Everything’s Good (Good Ass Outro)”.
But Chance’s vocals are mostly modulated for effect not eccentricity. The cartoon squawk of first single “Juice” bears no resemblance to the mournful Caribbean Kaddish of “Acid Rain”. He leans on his hip-hop inspirations as homage. The intro and outro flip a Baptist hymn from an early Kanye mixtape track. The beat from A Tribe Called Quest’s “Sucka Nigga” is repurposed for “NaNa”. Slum Village’s “Fall in Love” serves as the base for “Everybody’s Something”. 2Pac gets rightful daps on “Juice”. While “Favorite Song” artfully nicks the sample from Mary J. Blige and Biggie’s “Real Love” (Remix).
Even if the voice leaves you cold, you could be sold by the sheer sense of playfulness and love of language. Despite the weighty subtext, it’s often fun and life affirming. Chance stretches syllables to ToonTown lengths. He caroms them off each other like a pool hustler sinking trick shots. He’s a “tobacco-packing acrobat/packin’ bags back and forth with fifths of Jack.” You tend to get swept up in the youthful adrenaline rush like Lamar, mixtape Wayne, early Eminem, or Jay-Z in the ”22 Twos” era. To make sure he has his own spin, Chance stashes his own psychedelics and local slang (“thot,” “dino,” “hitters”).
If Lamar’s good kid m.A.A.d city stoked tension through plot cliffhangers, home invasions, and ominous minor chords, Chance’s Acid Rap is a triumph of meditative moments, open-ended quests, and brass flares. The hooks are more jabs than uppercuts. None will probably bang in a club, but most will make sense live, as chanted back by a thousand fans.
“Everybody dies in the summer, wanna say ya goodbyes, tell them while it’s spring,”
Chance sings this with funereal drone on the second half of “Pusha Man”. It’s the line that keeps sticking in my head when I play the record on loop. It’s a requiem for those already dead and a warning about the imminent carnage coming soon. It’s this fleeting spring afternoon where Acid Rap seems to take place-- the last day off before adulthood-- after you’ve realized your mortality, but before your fate has been sealed. When you aren’t sure if you’re supposed to say hello or goodbye.


Not quite the concept album we were promised, The Cool still features isolated moments of widescreen drama-- and Fiasco's storytelling abilities, lyrical dextrousness, and willingness to submerge himself in the theatre of it all make for a rewarding sophomore album.

The Cool

Serious bonus points go out to anyone who can manage to extract some kind of meaningful narrative out of The Cool, Lupe Fiasco's purported concept album. His pre-hype interviews may have informed us that the record centers around three metaphysical characters called The Cool (spun off from the track of the same name from Lupe's 2006 debut Food & Liquor), The Streets, and The Game, but it turns out those facts-- or any discernable storyline, really-- aren't immediately evident from just, you know, listening to the album.
There's a fine line between respecting your listeners' intelligence and mistaking your own vague allusions and abstrusities for some kind of coherent statement, and this time around, Lupe's landed on the wrong side of that line. But here's the thing: The Cool ultimately features enough isolated moments of widescreen drama that what it fails to deliver in terms of a linear experience, it makes up for in sheer pathos. There are genuinely thrilling moments to be had here; some of it from Fiasco's storytelling abilities, some of it from his lyrical dexterity, and some of it from his willingness to submerge himself in the theatre of it all. Add it up and you have an album that unwittingly delivers on its promises, even if it takes a slightly convoluted route there.
The Cool's overarching story may exist mostly in Lupe's head, but there is some sort of vague logic to its structure. Forgetting the cringeworthy and condescending opening monologue "Baba Says Cool for Thought" (which you should probably play once for laughs before banishing to the trash can), its first portion is relatively untroubled by any of Lupe's big-picture proselytizing. Instead, we get tracks like the virtuosic double-time of "Go Go Gadget Flow" (mostly just a lyrical flex) and the hooky first single "Superstar", with Fiasco protégé Matthew Santos (who has probably heard a few Coldplay albums) playing Adam Levine to Fiasco's Kanye West. There are also two other highlights upfront: the bittersweet chamberpop lament of "The Coolest", on which Lupe, backed by a choir and dripping strings, weighs up his conflictedness with a laser-sharp opening line ("I love the Lord/ But sometimes it's like that I love me more") and the lazy jazz of the shuffling "Paris, Tokyo", which adds another dimension to this past October's Fiascogate by sounding pretty much exactly like vintage A Tribe Called Quest.
Conflict is a big part of Fiasco's persona, and in this record's first half, he wrestles with it accordingly, tempering any allusions to his comfortable lifestyle with what sound like warnings to himself. As these become increasingly portentous, the album's production style moves towards darker, more cinematic flourishes; as if moving in time with the circling pianos, brooding strings, and moody guitar squalls, Fiasco pulls the camera back from himself to take a rooftop-level view of his surroundings. The rest of the album plays out this way, with the first person expunged from the frame and replaced by Fiasco in storytelling mode.
When it works, it works tremendously. Much has been made of Fiasco's love of comic books, and indeed there are stretches during this second half where you can feel him working a lot of the same angles; his predilection for stylized city-under-siege dystopia is so refined that it's not difficult to imagine these stories playing out in panels. The beautifully shaded rapper origin story "Hip-Hop Saved My Life" kicks off an evocative three-song stretch that includes the chilling "Intruder Alert" (which uses the title phrase to connect the stories of a rape victim, a drug addict, and a landed immigrant) and the doomsdayish "Streets on Fire". Elsewhere, though, tracks like the much-maligned "Gotta Eat" (on which Fiasco uses a cheeseburger as a clumsy metaphor for the high-calorie lifestyle of the streets, or something), the UNKLE-produced, rap/metal, sub-Linkin Parkisms of "Hello/Goodbye (Uncool)", and the jokey closer "Go Baby" render the album's final third a mixed, occasionally tedious, and anti-climactic affair that provides little in the way of satisfying resolution.
With the notable exceptions of Snoop Dogg (who appears on the middling party track "Hi-Definition"), Fall Out Boy's Patrick Stump (who lends production to the surprisingly bumping "Little Weapon"), and UNKLE, there isn't much room for outside collaboration on The Cool. In fact, from Santos and producer Soundtrakk to Chicagoan rapper Gemstones and vocalist Sarah Green, most of the album's remaining featured talent comes courtesy of 1st and 15th, the Atlantic-bankrolled label of which Fiasco is co-founder and acting CEO. While the jury's still out on whether that stems from a canny marketing sense or control-freakishness, it doesn't leave much room to doubt that the vision for this sprawling, grandiose, and occasionally overambitious record came from anyone other than Fiasco himself. Whether he delivered on the full extent of what he wanted to achieve is up for debate; luckily, he's good enough that even when he comes up short, he's still better than most.


On their first new album featuring all four original members since 1985, the Los Angeles punk icons return to the sound of their heyday on a highly formidable comeback.

ALPHABETLAND

This month, the venerated Los Angeles punk rock band X opened a window that had been shut for 35 years, returning with their first new album featuring all four original members since 1985. They released ALPHABETLAND early, while X fans are quarantined inside and waiting for refunds for the Los Angeles 40th-anniversary tour the band was set to embark on this month.
A quick glance at the tracklist reveals instant fan service. “Delta 88 Nightmare,” first released on the 2001 reissue of Los Angeles as a demo, gets a proper recording. Its 100 seconds of vintage X fury is kicked off by guitarist Billy Zoom’s rockabilly lick, blazing like an Eddie Cochran LP mistakenly played at 45 RPM while Exene Cervenka and John Doe shout in unison, invoking John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel Cannery Row. Even though the reference is a literary one, based on Depression-era Monterey, California, it’s easy to transpose the imagery to X’s version of Los Angeles, Doe and Cervenka stumbling drunk down back alleys, past the “cute resort with dads and moms/Staring at us and making fun.”
“Cyrano de Berger’s Back,” another Los Angeles-era demo that the Zoom-less X recorded for 1987’s See How We Are, gets the version it always deserved. Zoom funks up the verses with some chunky upstrokes and the production from Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, Saves the Day) gives the song—written during Doe and Cervenka’s courtship, recorded after their divorce, and presented as intended here—an emotional weight it was never previously afforded. “I got ten arms for you,” the former couple harmonizes, as beautifully as ever, even though the words mean something different 40 years later. “Ten hearts all beating blue.”
X certainly played with its sound across records—even going pure country as the Knitters for a pair of albums—but ALPHABETLAND is a return to the X of the early 1980s. On “Free,” Zoom’s rhythm guitar part dances in-between drummer D.J. Bonebrake’s toms as Cervenka finishes Doe’s phrases. It’s a jangly mid-tempo rocker that peaks with Bonebrake repeatedly slapping the bell on his ride cymbal as forcefully as he did on “We’re Desperate” and “I’m Coming Over,” from 1981’s Wild Gift. “Lemme go free/Don’t tell me I can’t,” Doe pleads. The lyric echoes a 2017 interview on the PBS show Overheard with Evan Smith. Smith, the Texas Tribune CEO, asked Doe point-blank, “What is punk rock?” Doe, a silver streak now bisecting his black mane, answered before Smith finished: “Freedom.”
The one outlier, ALPHABETLAND’s closer “All the Time in the World,” is Cervenka doing spoken-word over a piano. It’s an odd and clunky choice to conclude the record. But even if the song isn’t an ideal way to end an otherwise formidable comeback album, Cervenka’s lyrics are quite fitting. She looks back on the last 40 years, of the notion of her “youthful infinity” that now appears like mortality. She laments the young punks lost along the way, to “infected needles” and “speeding metal,” the latter likely an allusion to her sister, Mirielle, killed by a drunk driver in 1980 on her way to an X show. Perhaps resurrecting the past in making ALPHABETLAND 35 years later both inflicted pain and gave some needed perspective on life. Either way, she has no regrets: “It was fun while it lasted.”


This set gathers the three 2011 mixtapes from Toronto R&B singer Abel Tefsaye and adds three new songs along with new mixes and mastering. Trilogy as a whole sets up a narrative that was previously only implied and has more force when heard in this form.

Trilogy

If you checked out completely in 2011, Trilogy has all the makings of a blockbuster: 22-year old Toronto native Abel Tefsaye along with producers Illangelo and Doc McKinney developed a state-of-the-art R&B template and scored several radio hits; they're associates of megastar Drake, and have played sold-out club shows and rapturously received festival appearances. But there's one catch: If you weren't checked out completely during 2011, you've already heard the vast majority of Trilogy, for free. So it's understandable if you're wondering why this set, which collects the Weeknd's three 2011 mixtapes in one package and adds three additional songs, exists in the first place. But presentation matters to the Weeknd. This is evident in the project's early anonymity, the unified typography, the striking photographs, the ambitious videos and, most important, the fact that Tesfaye called his three releases of 2011 a trilogy. It's not unprecedented for someone to put out three albums in a year, but Trilogy suggests an ambitious and rigorously planned Work of Art.
While the previously available versions of House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence already felt definitive, a three-hour immersion provides a new way in, assuming you are willing to take it as a single piece. Which isn't easy: in spite of Tesfaye's diaphanous voice and the lush production, these are heavy records, with tempos that slow to a codeine drip for five minutes or more. But Trilogy as a whole sets up a narrative that was previously only implied.
House of Balloons is the "fun" part of the story, though that's a relative term. It has the only Weeknd songs you might play at a celebration, and the only point where the illicit behavior feels alluring. On House, the Weeknd introduce an aesthetic that, over the course of the rest of the three tapes, gradually evolves into something deeper and less based in traditional songcraft. It's a continuation of the purple-tinted R&B and hip-hop hybrid forged by The-Dream and Drake, with eye-of-the-quiet storm assurance of Sade and Aaliyah and industrial and trip-hop touches that range from Nine Inch Nails to Tricky. But the Weeknd show a flair for melody that allows every richly atmospheric song on House to stand on its own, boasting strong (and sometimes borrowed) hooks that embrace repetition without feeling manipulative. The cyclical choruses of "What You Need", "The Morning", and "High For This" in particular are both immediately striking and subtly ingratiating, overtures to pop radio that operate outside of it.
Those borrowed hooks mean that House of Balloons is the part of Trilogy most affected by the remaster. If you can't catch how the guitars hit a little harder and the drums have a bit more pop on "High For This", you'll definitely notice how the sample from Aaliyah's "Rock the Boat" has been wiped from "What You Need". If I had to choose, I prefer the original House of Balloons for its spontaneity, but it's kind of like familiarizing yourself with your partner after they get a new haircut; it's just different for a while, and if you want, you can always go back.
Thursday is exactly the kind of "difficult" second record you'd expect from the Weeknd had they disappeared for two years and holed up in the studio as a reaction to House's success. But it came just a few months after. It's more ambitious in its way, incorporating influences far from the R&B mainstream and generally just sounding like it has something to prove.
The title is a loaded metaphor; Thursday is a day for the most dedicated partiers, the one that separates a lost weekend from a week full of blackouts. Accordingly, the album is an hour-long exploration of people acknowledging a point of no return. What had been seductive has become menacing. Outside of Drake's guest verse on "The Zone", there's not much indication that the songs take place in a club of any sort. The pleasure on House of Balloons felt consensual; here, it feels codependent.
Echoes of Silence benefits considerably from the Trilogy context and now seems on equal footing with House of Balloons and Thursday. As Juicy J helpfully reminds us out of nowhere at the end of "Same Old Song", Echoes was released near Christmas, a refractory period between the publication of year-end lists and the turn of the calendar. It's easy to overlook new music that drops at that point, especially in this case, where the lack of immediate hooks suggests that it could have been a rush job.
But get familiar with Echoes' aims and you can hear its value. For one, the lyrical and thematic callbacks make clear that Echoes was meant to interact with what preceded it, to serve as an epilogue and appendix in addition to a denouement. More importantly, it's easier to tune into the final third's resounding depression after having been tenderized by the preceding two hours. It's a morning-after record for a night that never ended, where people have to go into their day shift with no sleep, where club stars still live with parents and the parents find drugs in the laundry. And it's where people who only hours before were perfectly fine to snort their life away simply cannot fucking stand to be around each other for another minute.
But the arresting music redeems that potentially alienating emotional view. "Montreal" boasts a frigid and concise hurt as well as a pop sensibility that went missing from the previous half hour, "Outside" incorporates intriguing Eastern overtones, and "The Fall" integrates Clams Casino's brand of beautifully wasted hip-hop, which ascended in parallel to the Weeknd throughout 2011.
On House's "The Party and the After Party," Tefsaye sings, "They don't want my love/ They just want my potential." In the context of Trilogy's progression, it's the first crack in his callous exterior, revealing a lifelong studio nerd with possibly years worth of grudges ("I don't play/ Unless it's keys and I play all day," he claims on "Loft Music"). He makes repeated mentions of "potential," and being "next," fixating on those particular words like he's holding onto something a girl told him in 7th grade. If you turn your ear right, Trilogy is the most in-depth exploration of male sexual neuroses this side of Pinkerton.
"You never thought I'd go this far," Tesfaye sings on "Same Old Song". That line could be a reference to marathon drug use or the progressive demoralization of his narrator, which bottoms out amidst the pall of gang rape coursing through the very uncomfortable "Initiation". The inclusion of Michael Jackson's venomous "Dirty Diana" on Echoes (renamed "D.D.") is perfect in this context, retaining the original's deplorable depiction of predatory groupies as the feminine norm. Tesfaye's narrator celebrates his own irresistibility and embraces the poisonous justifications of victimhood.
Just as perfect is the closing title track, which finds Tesfaye alone in a quiet room, letting the past reverberate, hitting bottom because he simply stops digging. It's the point where the Weeknd's 2011 stops and it's a perfect way to end things. At least it was; on Trilogy, it's followed by "Till Dawn (Here Comes The Sun)". Like all of the new songs, it's strong enough on its own but arbitrary in terms of sequencing and has only minimal relation to the LP it was included on.
This is some of the best music of the young decade; judging by its already pervasive influence, it's safe to say Trilogy (or at least House of Balloons) will be one of those records that will be viewed as a turning point when we look at the 2010s as a whole. Some of it's up to demographics. Artists of Tesfaye's age had formative years where Timbaland, the Neptunes, Missy Elliott, D'Angelo, and Aaliyah were at the peak of their powers. And given the "new rock revolution" early in the 2000's, which created nothing new at all, it stands to reason that many who came of age in that era don't hear rock as a progressive form. You can sense the shift when talking to new bands. And of course, for those who have some indie rock inclinations, Beach House and Siouxsie samples don't hurt.
Ultimately, the Weeknd's music creates a world. In it, people acknowledge their humanity as expressed by their desires to fuck, to get high, to resent one another, to hurt, to not care about tomorrow. That's a lot for a single artist to take on. "You'll wanna be high for this," Tesfaye memorably sings within the first minute. Trilogy's triumph is in how it makes its three hours feel necessary to fully embrace it all, to acknowledge its existence inside ourselves and to vicariously live through it as art.


The young techno producer with a heavy Villalobos influence and strong singles and remixes to his name crafts a weird and wonderful debut LP.

Space Is Only Noise

Strange can exist anywhere, but we have a habit of thinking only the maximal and unhinged-- Captain Beefheart, Basement Jaxx, R. Kelly-- are truly weird. How bizarre can the music of Philip Glass or Wolfgang Voigt really be? It seems contained, planned; the curio is the choice to be so on-keel in the first place. One of my favorite aspects of Nicolas Jaar's debut full-length, Space Is Only Noise, is how thoroughly it scatters this misconception. Space is leftfield electro-pop, far-flung and without reserve, but it is also patient, quiet, and small.
Jaar is a Providence via New York via Chile producer. He is 21, he attends Brown University, and he already has several well regarded singles and EPs to his name in addition to running the Clown & Sunset imprint. Requisite hot remixes: check. He exhibits all of the earmarks of a rising techno star: He remixes dance music, and his early singles were released as 12"s on dance labels. He counts Chilean techno giant Ricardo Villalobos as a prime inspiration. Little with Jaar is straightforward, however. His father is an acclaimed visual artist. His mixes play like outsider pastiche. There are conflicting reports about whether his downtempo beats-- usually clocking between 90 - 110 bpm-- actually move dancefloors (Jaar himself is skeptical).
Here is an alternate theory as to why Jaar occasionally fails to shuffle Nikes: He makes weird, self-contained music that only lands a glancing blow on house or any other particular dance subgenre. Jaar's music incorporates lounge pop, African jazz, hip-hop, and sound collage in addition to house and pinches of dubstep. The type of soundsystem most appropriate for Space isn't a sleek club hi [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| -fi but a Victrola in a stop-motion film ("steampunk house"-- let's please not go there).
The textures and ingredients of Jaar's music exist in the context of techno-- rhythm and repetition are clearly important to him-- but Space is not dance music. It's too slow, sure, but it's also too diffuse in its methods and results. Pianos, organs, guitar strings, and, most surprisingly, Jaar's voice all fall under Space's sepia-toned veil. This sounds like a lot to take in, but Jaar goes to great lengths to ensure that Space settles lightly. The tracks are short, funny, and always hitched to a melody. He sidesteps impulses-- during the quivering "Almost Fell", for instance, or during "Specters of the Future", during which actual techno threatens-- to drift into full-on ambience, skronk, or extended beat passages. The goofy bass bumbling of "Problems With the Sun" is as likely to stick with you as the elegiac "Colomb". Functionally I keep thinking of my first listens to The Books' Thought for Food: familiar styles and influences are wafted under my nose. There is a lot of teasing recognition but very little realization. The record passes easily and quickly.
Just as Jaar's treated instruments blur the line between digital and acoustic, his voice-- calm and husky, somewhat affected-- saddles up to the soul samples and film dialogue that pepper the album and confidently blends. He hums earworms-- "Replace the word 'space' with a drink and forget it"; "Too many kids finding rain in the dust"-- that ripple across his productions. These voices-- Jaar's own or samples-- are more than melodic placeholders. The gentle house balladry of "I Got a Woman" uses a looped Ray Charles refrain and French film dialogue to evoke something more specific than the electric pianos and breakbeat can. Jaar is akin to labelmates DJ Koze and Dave Aju, who weave voices among beats in counterintuitive ways.
Space never feels like a showcase for Nicolas Jaar; it's just a modest and well-decorated gathering place for some things he loves, a place for them to interact. This teetering restraint masks the true weirdness of Space Is Only Noise. I could understand someone finding the intensely self-contained Space a bit claustrophobic, but the album is most rewarding when you just grab a seat at the table. Because when Jaar chants "Grab a calculator and fix yourself" I don't sit there and think, "Gosh, why am I listening to electro-acoustic downtempo future-jazz?"; I go look for my calculator.


After creating 137 records under 135 monikers-- including Viktor Vaughn, King Geedorah, and Metal Fingers-- this ex-KMD and current Madvillain star finally releases his second album under his Christian name, MF Doom.

Mm..Food?

Rap loves food. Skeptics: name another genre that has its own brand of potato chips, or counts as heroes men named Notorious B.I.G. and Big Pun and Puffy and Fat Joe and Raekwon the Chef, or singlehandedly stabilized a dying French wine town with an MTV spot and a few choice Diddies. Foodtalk is facile shorthand, and after 15 years in the game, MF Doom has had his share of Warren G Cheezie Nachos and Master P Platinum BBQ Rap Snacks. But when hip-hop got fat and gangsta and lucrative-- as well as massively important, culturally influential, and-- Doom kept low, disgruntled by what he saw as big-money rap's new self-importance. "Only in America could you find a way to earn a healthy buck/ And still keep your attitude on self-destruct," Doom would say later in "Rhymes Like Dimes". By 1993, rap had toasted to The Chronic, Illmatic, and 36 Chambers; had it been released then, KMD's pointed and confrontational Black Bastards would have sounded but a wolf cry while the rest of hip-hop was taking its first sips of gin and juice.
"There are different topics besides murdering everybody. That seems to be the in thing-- how many people you can murder on a record. So I'm bringing it back to the old, bragging about how nice you are with the words." Doom said this on NPR in 2003, but the sentiment holds true for his 1999 comeback solo full-length Operation: Doomsday. Like other rap heavyweights at the time, Doom promised world domination, but with tongue firmly in cheek, making tall boasts only to undermine them with nerdy self-deprecation and high-falutant science-fiction soap-ops. Doom "came to destroy rap" because rap had betrayed itself: Operation: Doomsday was the story of-- and vehicle for-- his return-to-roots revenge.
"Operation Doomsday complete," we're told in the opening sound collage of Mm..Food?. As an official follow-up to Operation: Doomsday, Mm..Food? is an attempt to make good on Doom's almost fascist conceit to restore rap's golden age despite its loss of innocence. While Doom doesn't drop strictly food-related rhymes, the album's subject matter is always commonplace: friends, sucka MCs, girls, weed, and hip-hop. Post Doomsday, MF Doom as MF Doom has no interest in the space-laser rapocalypse of King Geedorah's Take Me To Your Leader or the dysfunctional gangster whim of Madvillain's Madvillainy. Here Doom wants nothing more than to score some Clever Points with quirky one-liners over tight beats.
"On his own throne, the boss like King Koopa", Doom spits silver dollars like a subway-card dispenser, but he also loosens his mask a bit for a few tender bleats: "Look like a black wookie when he keeps his hair low," he confesses on "Beef Rapp". There aren't as many belly laughs on Mm..Food? as there were on VV1 or Madvillainy, but Doom does manage this spam-mail slam on "Kookies": "Supposed to be checkin e-mails/ All I got is messages from ass naked females [cookies]/ I don't know no Jenny, she said it's free/ And I won't owe her a penny, and that's the last time I saw her/ But thousands of more horrors are on line (Gomorrah...)". Unlike Doomsday, guest spots are smartly kept to a minimum, though in fairness, "Rapp Snitch Knishes" co-emcee Mr. Fantastik hardly embarrasses himself: "True to the ski mask New York's my origin/ Play a fake gangsta like a old accordian."
Most of Doom's raps on Mm..Food? sacrifice cohesion for maximum punch. When Doom does muster some self-restraint, he comes off triply brilliant. From the beginning, the Count Bass-D production "Potholderz" darts back and forth across the metaphor until we simply can't tell whether Doom's talking about gloves or roach clips: "What-- these old things?/ About to throw them away with the gold rings that make them don't fit like OJ". The Whodini sample on "Deep Fried Frenz" is awful in that purposeful maybe-Eminem sort of way. Here Doom turns a feel-good song into a mess of betrayal, bitterness, and matter-of-fact credos: "You could either ignore this advice, or take it from me/ Be too nice and people take you for a dummy."
With the exception of the album's two older tracks-- the Madlib-produced, Madvillainy leftover "One Beer" and the PNS-produced "Yee Haw", here re-recorded as "Kon Queso"-- and "Potholderz", Doom controls all the production on Mm..Food?. A lot of these beats are old no-frills Special Herbs loops, most lacking the marks of Doom's science-fiction fetish. Of the newer beats, the 70s Blue Note funk on "Vomitspit" is up there with Doom's best production work, and the stuttery "Potholderz" has the best bassline on any hip-hop album this year. Doom is also one of the few producers who should be allowed to do sound collage skits: "Poo-Putt Platter" has sample sequences that at one point reads, "'You risked your life for us.' 'Thanks.' 'I've lost an arm.' 'Good.' 'Stop it father!'" One skit would have been plenty though; instead, Doom dumps four of these right in the middle of the album, a nasty rut that makes Mm..Food? pretty much unplayable front-to-back after the first few spins, especially since the tracks that follow these skits-- the elevator-rap "Kon Karne" and the maudlin "Guinnesses"-- are among Doom's worst.
If Mm..Food? feels merely good or somewhat inconsequential, it's because it is that way by design. Doom has no pretense here-- he's an equally great rapper and producer, and he wants people to respect him for his skills alone: "It's about the beats/ Not about the streets and who food he about to eat". On one hand we can admire his intentions; on the other we can criticize his pigheadedness. Hip-hop can be consequential and important when it wants to be, and perhaps the capable Doom is keeping his aspirations too far in check. The truth is that Doom could go on making five or six Mm..Food?'s each year for the rest of his career-- but when will "merely good" not be good enough?


Free mixtape from Adult Swim pairs Atlanta's top rappers (Jeezy, Cee-Lo, Gucci) with some of today's top indie producers (El-P, FlyLo, Dam-Funk).

ATL RMX

It probably says less about the State of Hip-Hop than it reads, but Adult Swim, an offshoot of the Cartoon Network, is now one of the most trustworthy names in the genre. Doubt their cred if you must, but you can't doubt their sincerity: With all due respect, you don't release Witchdoctor albums in 2009 if you're just in it for a quick buck. Beyond that, they eased in naturally since there was always heavy overlap between the fanbases of, say, MF DOOM and "Aqua Teen Hunger Force". However, ATL RMX departs Adult Swim's safety zone for something more controversially curatorial: something called "Imma G (Memory Tapes Remix)" by Dem Getaway Boyz isn't some prank along the lines of Trent Reznor's Strobe Light-- it's the actual third track here, and pretty typical of what to expect, some of electronic/hip-hop's bigger producers reconfiguring a murderer's row of Atlanta rappers who... okay, let's be upfront: If you've had a discussion with someone concerned about the obsolescence of "lyrical" hip-hop, I'm almost certain you got an earful about how the MCs on ATL RMX are at fault.
But even if El-P and Young Jeezy are the battle lines upon which ideological wars about what constitutes "real" hip-hop are fought, wouldn't it be worthwhile to see if there's any crossover between each's unique and impactful take on urban dystopia? They're both really good at what they do-- it's worth a shot. But is it worth a listen? Well, ATL RMX's first track, Jeezy's "I Got This (El-P Remix)" bangs like crazy, but it does so in a weirdly individualized way. It takes a monster of a beat to make Jeezy sound overwhelmed, and his boasts end up as a nearly incidental sound effect under all those clip-emptying drums and enjambed female vocal interjections (this mixtape appears to exist only as a "clean version"... that doesn't necessarily help). I'd love to hear more, but maybe if Jeezy heard the beat first?
Still, ATL RMX starts out strong: DJA adds a buzzier backing track to Rich Kids' "Patna Dem", but it's the irrepressibly emphatic chanting that's going to sell it every time. "Imma G" has a strangely sweet and sour tropical taste and essentially becomes a typical Memory Tapes track by its midway point, suggesting Dayve Hawk has incorporated more hip-hop into his sound than he's often given credit for. There's also honest to god rapping from Cee-Lo. If that doesn't justify this mixtape's completely nonexistent download cost, I don't know what to tell you.
But elsewhere, the remixers seem compelled to justify their existence/appearance in ways that rarely do any favors to the source material. I suppose SALEM's reverence for both Chapterhouse and Swishahouse will pay off someday, but their decision to chop and screw Playboy Tre's subdued, lyrically potent sipper's lament "Sideways" feels like a misunderstanding of the material at best and a joke at worst-- the last interpretation this sort of thing needs. Many have remarked upon the influence of rave music on Lil' Jon's mid-decade work, but matched up with the BPMs and sinus-eroding coke bump of Danger Beach's "Give It All You Got" remix, he hardly sounds revitalized or even relevant. And if HEALTH truly want to make an impact in hip-hop, they'll let M.O.P. spit flame over "Die Slow", because that shit knocks. Their pounding, dissonant remake of OJ Da Juiceman's "Good Night" should be enough to really make M.I.A. rethink boasting her upcoming album as a crit-wank fantasy of Animal Collective-meets-Gucci Mane.
But even when ATL RMX fails, it represents a discussion worth having-- though OJ Da Juiceman getting booed at a CMJ showcase served as a flashpoint, it was less "OutKast gets booed at the Source Awards" than "Philadelphia Eagles fans boo Santa Claus," an understandable reaction (it was a skinny, poorly dressed Santa/I didn't hear Pill or Curren$y getting booed) with understandable timing (the Eagles were blowing a chance to get the #1 pick, oddly enough, O.J. Simpson/it was hours into a rap show running impossibly late on a Wednesday night) that made an audience with an already hostile rep look irreparably bad. No one comes out looking good, especially in the wake where sides are too easily taken, when hip-hop is considered a zero-sum game where only one region or mindset can be "right" and enjoyed only for the right "reasons." But is it worthwhile at all to wonder if Scott Herren enjoys Shawty Lo "legitimately" or whether it's "correct" to finally give Gucci Mane a shot only because he's being remixed by Flying Lotus (or vice versa)? Hell, most of hip-hop listening these days seems to revolve around conversation anyway, so let's keep it going. Maybe next time we'll hear DOOM over some Zaytoven beats.


The 1983 film score aspired to the weightlessness of outer space. A remastered edition adds an album’s worth of new songs that reflect how far we’ve come from the Apollo missions’ optimism.

Brian Eno: Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks - Extended Edition

A decade into a solo career dedicated to aural novelty, Brian Eno released an album intended to transform weightlessness into a kind of spiritual exaltation. On Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, the former Roxy Music keyboardist/troublemaker took a break from the fractured narratives and lissome grooves he had helped create for David Bowie and Talking Heads, respectively. The occasion? In its original, 1983 form, a documentary consisting of 35-millimeter footage of the six moon missions; the score composed by Eno, brother Roger, and guitarist Daniel Lanois complement its static, clean images. But in the era of The Return of the Jedi, maybe audiences didn’t respond well to static cleanliness in space movies. After director Al Reinart’s re-edit, the documentary was released in 1989 as For All Mankind.
The backstory inspires less interest than the soundtrack itself, which excels at simulating a visual experience from the sparsest means: Call it Another Gravity-Free World. Long a favorite among Enophiles, Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks gets a sparkling remaster and almost an album’s worth of okay-to-pretty-good new tracks. Listeners familiar with consistent royalty generators like “Deep Blue Day” (used to beatific effect in 1996’s Trainspotting) will note the bell-like clarity of these souped-up versions, the better to savor the tension between Eno’s occasional dissonance and Lanois’ penchant for gauze, especially on the friendlier second half.
“The idea was to try and make a frontier space music of some kind,” Eno said in a 1998 interview. “When I was asked to do the music for the film, I discovered that the astronauts were each allowed to take a cassette with them on those missions, and they nearly all took country and western songs. I thought it was a fabulous idea that people were out in space, playing this music which really belongs to another frontier—in a way, seeing themselves as cowboys.”
Tickled by the protean sampling possibilities of new synthesizer technology, the Enos and Lanois constructed a suite of tracks that approximate Duane Eddy on Mars (there’s another possible album title). This is the album’s real innovation, still under-discussed. Ambient music is called many things, but “cornball” isn’t one of them; the way the guitar twang on “Always Returning” schlocks up the pretty ripples of Eno’s keyboards and the purr of tape manipulations should have produced three dozen offspring by now. (Imagining the electric piano on “Weightless” anchoring a Jack Wagner hit is not out of bounds.) Lanois stars on “Silver Morning,” the ur-text for the well-behaved producer-goes-singer exertions of 1989’s Acadie. “Deep Blue Day” has earned its rep as Eno’s most recognized instrumental thanks to the turquoise density of the synths and the warmth of Lanois’ pedal-steel playing; it’s emphatic¸ unlike other Eno ambient recordings, like 1975’s Discreet Music and 1992’s The Shutov Assembly.
When Eno goes on his own solo exploratory missions the results are predictably immersive. Ominous gurgles turn “Matte” into a quiet nightmare: trapped in an oil drum at the bottom of the Pacific. On other tracks he gives Lanois a heads-up on future arrangement ideas—Peter Gabriel, whom Lanois would produce a couple years later, might have concluded after listening to the prominent bass and faint, stately wash of organ on “Stars” that they’d do nicely for “Mercy Street,” 1986’s So mediation on poet Anne Sexton. Credit Eno’s discovery of the Yamaha CS80, one of the first polyphonic synthesizers; it formed, according to Lanois in a 2012 interview about the album, “an essential part of the work we did together.”
The new tracks don’t sully the original recordings so much as recontextualize them in sometimes rather garish ways. The gleam of the synthesized chords on “Like I Was a Spectator” doesn’t summon outer space; it summons boutique hotel elevator music, which might be the idea. Perhaps that’s as it should be. As the excitement about manned space missions—a consequence of Cold War politics intersecting with Great Society notions about what the federal government could fund—has waned in the last 35 years, Apollo’s clear lines and our memories of, say, National Geographic back issues with photos of the moon’s surface fuse into a nostalgia of the mildest evocatory power. The following year Eno and Lanois would produce U2’s The Unforgettable Fire, an album on which anthems, Eurodisco, and modest, modish synth doodles rub against each other with nary a fuss. The Unforgettable Fire presents itself as a book of prayers; Apollo: Soundtracks and Atmospheres limns an eternity without a heaven.

Buy: Rough Trade
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DAMN. is a widescreen masterpiece of rap, full of expensive beats, furious rhymes, and peerless storytelling about Kendrick’s destiny in America.

DAMN.

Life is one funny motherfucker, it’s true. “DUCKWORTH.,” the last song on Kendrick Lamar's fourth studio album DAMN., tells a winding story about Anthony from Compton and Ducky from Chicago, whose paths cross first over KFC biscuits, and again, 20 years later, when Ducky’s son records a song about the encounter for Anthony’s record label. It’s a precious origin story, the stuff of rock docs and hood DVDs, and it’s delivered with such precision, vivid detail, and masterful pacing that it can’t possibly be true. But it’s a tale too strange to be fiction, and too powerful not to believe in—just like its author. Kendrick Lamar has proven he’s a master storyteller, but he’s been saving his best plot twist this whole time, waiting until he was ready, or able, to pull it off.
Storytelling has been Lamar’s greatest skill and most primary mission, to put into (lots of) words what it's like to grow up as he did—to articulate, in human terms, the intimate specifics of daily self-defense from your surroundings. Somehow, he’s gotten better. The raps on his fourth studio album DAMN. jab mercilessly like a sewing machine. His boyish nasal instrument is distinct and inimitable as it slithers up and down in pitch on “PRIDE.” Even when Lamar sounds like Eminem, or Drake, or OutKast, he sounds like himself, and he arguably outpaces them all as a writer. On “FEAR.,” he relays daily threats from his mom (“I’ll beat your ass, keep talking back/I’ll beat your ass, who bought you that? You stole it”) and from his neighbors (“I’ll probably die because I ain’t know Demarcus was snitching/I’ll probably die at these house parties fucking with bitches”) over low-slung blues stirred by The Alchemist. Lamar’s recitation is so effortless you wonder where he breathes, or if he does at all.
Kendrick is a relic of the mid-aughts rap blog era, where bedroom WordPress pages would post .zips of albums by amateurs. After years of such releases, Kendrick dropped a self-titled EP in 2009 that featured Big Pooh from Little Brother and elicited such Nah Right comments as “I like the beats on this” and “who da fuk?” Accolades swelled with each project; by 2011, he was considering signing with Dr. Dre; by 2013, he was playing “SNL” and touring with Kanye West. He came of age with his fans, and by 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly, he put to music their chest-clenched frustrations. Ever the curtain-puller, he released an album of untitled and unmastered drafts and grew his hair out. His short absence, even after lending Taylor Swift a verse, has been made to feel longer by his media shyness and a surging tide of new rappers shuttled out daily.
Throughout it all, he’s avoided the boxed-in fates of predecessors like Nas and peers like J. Cole through an electric originality and curiosity. He mastered rap not for mastery’s sake, but to use it as a form, undeterred by slow-eared fans who’ll only highlight his “simplest lines.” His best new trick is repetition; it offsets his density and drills his ideas, as enthralling as a Sunday sermon or pre-fight chirp session. There have been few threats committed to record as sincere as, “Let somebody touch my mama, touch my sister, touch my woman/Touch my daddy, touch my niece, touch my nephew, touch my brother”—you tick down the list along with him, slot in your own lifelong bonds with loved ones. Such internal processing plays out through the album’s Greek chorus, via the singer Bēkon, who speaks in riddles of balance throughout: “Is it wickedness, is it weakness;” “Love’s gonna get you killed, but pride’s gonna be the death of you;” “It was always me versus the world/Until I found it’s me versus me.”
DAMN. is best in these philosophical spaces. It lags slightly around the center, where the concept loosens: “LOYALTY.,” with Rihanna, has all the makings of a radio mainstay this summer, and is as low-stakes as the platform demands; it’s always fun to hear Rih rap, and her presence is its most interesting aspect. “LUST.” would sound better if it weren’t next to an ear-worm as tender as “LOVE.,” which slow-dances between Zacari falsettos and Lamar’s sheepish read of the girl who fills him up. Between the two tracks, it’s easy to tell which force is tugging at him harder.
The record’s few lulls succumb to what surrounds them. The springboard bounce of “HUMBLE.,” the war chant of “DNA.,” and hot steel of “XXX.” show Kendrick in his element, fast and lucid, like Eazy-E with college credits and Mike WiLL beats. The production is taut and clean, but schizophrenic, often splicing two or three loops into a track and swaying between tempos, closer in kin to good kid, m.A.A.d city’s siren-synths than Butterfly’s brass solos. If he was “black as the moon” on his last album, he’s an “Israelite” here, refusing to identify himself by the shade of his skin but fluent in the contents of his D.N.A. Butterfly floated along to soften its scathing stance—“We hate po-po” sounds better over a smooth saxophone—but with so many “wack artists” in play, what’s the reward for upliftment? Kendrick is so alone at his altitude that when he acknowledges Fox News, let alone Donald Trump, it feels like a favor to them both.
Still, the album exists for “DUCKWORTH.” It’s the final piece of the TDE puzzle, a homegrown label of Compton natives that happened to deliver the best rapper of his generation. If we’re to believe the song’s last gunshot—and its seamless loop back to track one—much of DAMN. is written from the perspective of a Kendrick Lamar who grew up without a father to guide him away from the sinful temptations outside his home. He bobs in and out of this perspective, but the repeated pledges to loyalty and martyrdom evoke the life and mind of a young gang member who carries his neighborhood flag because no one’s proved to him that he shouldn’t. These choices, Lamar suggests, aren’t pre-determined or innate, but in constant dialogue with and in reaction to their surrounding circumstances. They aren’t above or beneath anyone who can hear his voice. Success and failure choose their subjects at their whim; we’re as grateful as Kendrick for his fate.

Top Dawg Entertainment / Aftermath / Interscope


Prince is back on Warner Brothers more than two decades after his bitter departure from the label, and he has two new albums in tow: one solo record, and one credited to his all-female backing band 3rdEyeGirl.

Prince / 3rdEyeGirl: Art Official Age/PlectrumElectrum

Art Official Age/PlectrumElectrum

Back in the mid-1990s, Prince and Warner Brothers did not split amicably. Not only did the superstar write the word SLAVE on his face, he also changed his name to an unpronounceable logo that was quickly translated into English as “The Artist Formerly Known As…” Unhappy with faltering sales in the new decade, he tried to release a quick slew of albums in order to get out of his contract, but Warner insisted on waiting the industry-standard two years between major releases. It must have felt like a demotion after Prince more or less owned the 1980s, a decade when even a flop like Under the Cherry Moon could spin off a hit album like Parade. Despite his complaints, however, Prince never regained his former popularity following his departure from Warner; as he struggled to go his own way and keep up with trends he was no longer setting, his independent output quickly grew prodigious and preeningly self-indulgent, ranging from the triple-disc Emancipation in 1996 to the soggy The Rainbow Children in 2001 to the one-two punch of MPLSound and LotusFlow3r in 2009.
What’s most surprising about Prince re-signing (or resigning?) with Warner Brothers nearly twenty years later is just how much sense it makes for both parties. The label has welcomed one of its signature stars back to the fold, who brings his never-reissued/never-remastered back catalog with him. They’ve already teased a new edition of Purple Rain—the dream we all dream of—and Prince gets some major-label backing at a time when he seems creatively rejuvenated and newly focused. A string of startlingly solid singles led to Art Official Age, which despite its ludicrous title, is the most engaged Prince has sounded in a long while. In particular, “Breakfast Can Wait” is an AM lovemaking jam that schools R. Kelly with its old-school slink and Prince in supreme pillowtalk mode (“Come here baby, let me put you on my plate”).
Musically, Art Official Age is all over the map—gloriously so, in fact—as though Prince is trying to cram a triple album into a single disc. Opener “Art Official Cage” cribs directly from Daft Punk’s more arena-ready moments, building a post-disco banger on some Nile Rodgers-style rhythm guitar. It sounds perhaps too familiar, but the song mimics its source with aplomb and what sounds like Princely arrogance. Cockiness has always looked better on Prince than assless chaps or satin frocks, and the song has a feisty energy that even a new jack swing rap can’t derail. Some of the best songs here are slow jams, like the wishful “This Could Be Us” and “Breakdown”, which sounds like one of the most personally revealing tunes Prince has ever recorded: “Waking up in places that you would never believe,” he sings with what sounds like deep regret. “Give me back the time, you can keep the memories.” As the strings lift the song out of the depths and laserbeams fire at the edges of the music, Prince launches into some vocal contortions that prove his voice has lost none of its wild mutability over the years. It’s the rare moment of true gravity on an album that sounds like Prince actually had a lot of fun making.
There’s something reassuring about such good spirits coming from him, as it recalls a much younger Prince whose mischievous smile and eye rolls conveyed a self-possession and self-awareness. On the other hand, the few times he nods to an overarching funk/sci-fi mythology—something about being cryogenically frozen for 50 years and waking up in a society with no first-person pronouns—Prince comes across as a grouchy old guy. “Twenty-four karat hashtag, put your phone in your bag,” he raps on “The Gold Standard”, sounding too much like a man in his mid-50s.
Art Official Age is not a return to form by any means, but a modestly exciting Prince album. That’s certainly more than we could expect in 2014, and it’s certainly more than we get out of PlectrumElectrum. Prince recorded the album with his all-female backing band 3rdEyeGirl, which includes drummer Hannah Ford Welton, guitarist Donna Grantis, and bassist Ida Nielsen. All have backgrounds and even degrees in rock and jazz, so it’s obvious they have immense chops. The rhythm section lock down the grooves on the punk-/surf-rock “Marz” and the strutting “Stopthistrain”, and Grantis (formerly a member of the New Power Generation) riffs and solos on “Anotherlove” with Princely abandon.
What they don’t have is much of a personality. Recorded live in the studio using analog equipment, the album is nevertheless too proficient, too slick, and too professional to come across as much more than anonymous. They show little of the kinky inventiveness of the Revolution or the innate versatility of the New Power Generation; instead, Plectrum is crammed with predictable rap-rock riffs, vague alt-rock menance, and bloozy showboating. Especially blasting from Paisley Park, this is a perversely unimaginative and restrictive idea of rock‘n’roll, with none of the musical freedom that Prince has traditionally shown. One of the great pop synthesists, he has blended so many different styles and sounds so fluidly that his best music sounded positively utopian: a world without charts or genres, release schedules, or label contracts.
Prince and 3rdEyeGirl have good intentions, of course, and at times the album sounds like a rebuttal to the pesky rock-is-dead palaver that so many of the form’s aging practitioners have memorized. “A girl with a guitar is 12 times better than another crazy band o’ boys,” Prince asserts on “Fixurlifeup”. But he’s decrying prefab pop groups while backed by a prefab pop group, preaching female empowerment while playing up the novelty of an all-female band. Both of these albums sound slightly out of time, but at least Art Official Age, despite its flaws, has the bravado to imagine how the pop music of the future might function. By contrast, Plectrum merely duplicates the sounds and politics of rock ‘n’ roll’s stodgy past.


On an album inspired by the psychological effects of trauma, the Detroit techno pioneer and science-fiction storyteller pursues his search for new frontiers that lie far from the dancefloor.

The EyeWitness

In techno, Jeff Mills is one of one, and he continues to move further from the genre norm. A remarkably prodigious icon who remains deeply associated with Detroit (though he splits his time between Paris and Miami), the 62-year-old DJ/producer is unwilling to be bound to the sounds and ideas that once defined him. A long-time sci-fi adept, he continues to use the language of techno—much of which he almost single-handedly pioneered—to comment on present-day dystopias or suggest new potentialities for anyone still willing to listen.
Though Mills’ time as a turntable wizard, Underground Resistance co-founder, and techno’s ultimate ambassador and autodidact informs every inch of his music, the context of his work has stretched beyond dance culture into something wider and headier. Mills’ compositions are humanist and often highly collaborative, and created in a self-imagined environment (Black American future music gone global, fluent in advanced technology and showing Borgesian comfort with the boundlessness of storytelling), with an eye to continuously revolutionizing the milieu they came from. He remains a dance festival headliner (though, pointedly, very rarely in America), yet the stimulation behind his vast recorded output seems more focused on the mind than the ass.
The EyeWitness, Mills’ second album of 2024 and one clearly reflecting the dark night of today’s human soul, is a good opportunity to hear how an electronic- and dance-music originator pushes the fruits of his legacy toward a more imaginative discourse. (It’s also one that’s easier to hear, period: After years of being unavailable on streaming platforms, the full-length releases on Mills’ Axis Records are now an easy click away.) It is a set of listening techno that, according to Mills’ liner notes, addresses the effects of shock and trauma on the contemporary condition. That The EyeWitness may have (almost) nothing to do with dancing reflects Mills’ belief that techno’s purpose and history are grounded in principles of future freedoms, intellectual mysteries, and cosmological phenomena, rather than mere physical reaction.
The EyeWitness’ reaffirms Mills’ marriage of thematic narrative, psychology, and sound, and it has plenty of precedents in the producer’s recent work. His second (!) score for Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 silent film, Metropolis, released in 2023; the exploration of feeling and knowing of 2021’s more rhythm-driven The Clairvoyant; his six-part 2018 radio series The Outer Limits, made with NASA for London’s NTS Radio about the universe and astrophysics—each is a spectacular piece of musical sci-fi storytelling that questions known life’s governability, and brings to mind Samuel R. Delany more than any electronic composer or producer. Yet at their shared musical center rests what may be Detroit techno’s most crucial contribution to modern sound: layers of musical tension without release, chord patterns that don’t resolve, beats that keep unfolding, a music that embraces mystery with no clear ending. It’s a strategy that stands in direct opposition to EDM’s almighty drop and pop’s built-in limitations. It’s also a great metaphor for one way that Mills and the techno culture he represents regard the composition of a track and a set, and what they intuit the payoff to be.
Not only are there no drops on The EyeWitness, there’s barely a kick drum. Only “Indoctrination,” which closes the vinyl release (streamers include four additional, primarily beatless tracks), resembles what a club environment might expect from Mills: a fat four-note loop and bass kick as a maypole for trademark 909 hi-hats to dance around. Even here, layers of synths pile on overdrive-building energy, jabbering like aliens in the background of a scene they actually dominate. Mills’ theme—the way that trauma changes people, and ingrained wounds destroy our relationships with the world and each other—is admittedly a heavy lift for instrumental electronic music, however freeform. The topic is a potential broadsheet of discontent, so Mills’ text purposefully refuses to get stuck in either partisan- or identity-centered moans. What the music does express is the ubiquitous dread brought on by hurt’s cognitive effects.
Much of Mills’ argument rests on provocative titles, matched by the kind of technologically updated tricks of the sci-fi trade not unfamiliar to UR soldiers or Vangelis stans. Except that Mills long ago reimagined these tricks. Tracks like “In a Traumatized World,” with Mills’ synthesized voice cut up into a chattering invented language that would make Lucasfilm proud, and “Menticide,” a post-WW2 word that describes torturous interrogation techniques meant to reshape a person’s will, are underpinned by sonambient sound effects, synth textures, and haunted melodic figures. This spooky foundation represents the album’s throughline, though, at times, other textures reinforce the nightmarish scenario: “Mass Hypnosis” builds into something approaching a swirl of digital koras and Giorgio Moroder’s Midnight Express sequencers, while “Pledge to the Sacred Iridescent Mirror” centers a martial beat and a minimalist bassline. Overwhelmingly, The Eyewitness is bathed in history’s shadows, unspoken but ever-present.
Only once does Mills step back from the darkness toward something more polychromatic, reflecting the unexpected metamorphosis when trauma begets beauty. “Wonderous Butterfly” is built on the shipwreck of a musical trope (the chopped recasting of the “Oriental riff”), built into dub-like, looping scaffolding that is the album’s least futurist moment. The track’s two lead lines—one that sounds like a synthetic clarinet, the other like a percussive electric piano—harmonically discolor any sense of cliched meaning, weaving instead into a mysterious, emotionally complicated concerto. Purposefully or not, the riff, the title’s lepidoptera, and the clarinet bring to mind Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly,” a classic product of colonial art whose historic trauma plays in opera houses worldwide. The EyeWitness’ “Butterfly” provides a counter-argument that is part of the whole, a momentary escape from the machines, a simple dance of remixing history in the timeline’s other direction. It’s also proof that Mills’ techno storytelling keeps reasserting itself as a narrative form as complicated as its topics, and as the world that brings them to mind.