The return of Dinosaur Jr. as a trio forced the singer to find a new avenue for his softer side and acoustic explorations. His third album in that series arrives at perfectly refined folk-rock.

Elastic Days

Dinosaur Jr. didn’t reunite so much as reset. Since the mid-2000s, J Mascis, Lou Barlow, and Murph have essentially picked up where they left off after 1988’s college-radio touchstone Bug, reasserting themselves as indie rock’s most ferocious and slackadasically tuneful power trio. But their reconciliation erected a wall around the more exploratory path that Dinosaur Jr. had taken during the 1990s, after Barlow’s acrimonious departure allowed Mascis to seize full creative control of the band (and all the mellotrons and timpanis that went with it). In that time, Dinosaur Jr. had effectively become a solo vehicle for Mascis, who handled the production and most of the instrumentation. But with the original lineup back in action—and more prolific than ever—Mascis has respected the fact that the musical alchemy he shares with Barlow and Murph is its own special thing. He has directed his more sophisticated songcraft into a parallel series of solo albums, favoring low-key acoustic arrangements that allow him to both simmer down and branch out.
Mascis’ third such album, Elastic Days, reunites much of the supporting cast he corralled for 2014’s Tied to a Star, including pianist Ken Maiuri, former Black Heart Procession singer and guitarist Pall Jenkins, and Miracle Legion leader Mark Mulcahy. Their reappearance suggests that, for Mascis, these solo albums aren’t an unplugged antidote to Dinosaur Jr. but instead the manifestation of an equally considered alternate vision. It’s taken some fine-tuning to get there: 2011’s Several Shades of Why was achingly intimate, while the more lively Tied to a Star was liable to drift into hacky-sack psych. With Elastic Days, he’s arrived at the sort of refined folk-rock that the ’90s iteration of Dinosaur Jr. probably would’ve made had it continued veering toward the middle of the road.
For the generation of Dinosaur Jr. fans who discovered the band by seeing the video for “Get Me” on “120 Minutes” in the early ’90s, Elastic Days will feel like a homecoming. As that song proved, Mascis’ perpetually pained moan was always begging for some healing harmonies. On Elastic Days’ beautifully breezy opener “See You at the Movies,” Jenkins fills the role Tiffany Anders did 25 years ago, his plaintive backing vocals wrapping around Mascis’ wounded croon like a wool toque. Jenkins is one of many guest singers called on to nurse Mascis’ bruises: “I Went Dust” is a lovely duet with Zoë Randell of Aussie indie-folk duo Luluc, where a lick straight out of Jimmy Page’s acoustic playbook punctuates each crestfallen line. During the gently galloping country-rocker “Picking Out the Seeds,” Mascis’ underrated falsetto gets a boost from Devadas, the Brooklyn composer who’s previously joined Mascis for occasional forays into Hindu spirituals.
But as with any Mascis release, one voice resounds louder than all: his guitar solos. Naturally, his playing here is more tempered and soothing than the typical Dinosaur Jr. face-melter. But the function of his guitar solos remains less decorative than demonstrative. Almost every single song J Mascis has written over the past 30-plus years sounds like an excerpt from the same intensely personal, painfully awkward exchange, where the averted gazes and shrugged shoulders say more than the limited words. The solos on Elastic Days play the role of emotional interpreter, giving Mascis’ notoriously vague lyrics a more acute, deeply felt sense of ache and distress.
As such, pretty much every song here is a build-up to the moment when Mascis inevitably lets loose. The tunes don’t all sound the same; there’s a canyon between the campfire serenity of the winsome title track and the freewheeling “Sometimes,” where an accelerated back half practically turns it into a folk-rock “Feel the Pain.” But Elastic Days is the sort of record where the album sequence feels immaterial, where there’s no discernible dramatic arc. Each track functions as its own ecosystem, undergoing the same cycle of welling up and gushing out to achieve the right balance of musical clarity and emotional confusion. As Mascis sings on “See You at the Movies,” “Finding you is easy/Finding me is hard.” On Elastic Days, he’s somehow as accessible but elusive as ever.


"Every day I wake up and it's Sunday," Fran Healy exhales to begin The Man Who. This lazy day ...

The Man Who

"Every day I wake up and it's Sunday," Fran Healy exhales to begin The Man Who. This lazy day mood stretches throughout Travis' sophomore release. The tunes stay in their sweats and don't get around to showering until 5:45pm-- fifteen minutes before the pizza arrives. The tunes flip through football and golf. Healy sounds like he's spilling his soul to an empty cabin after 13 hours of sleep. Check out a daily planner, though-- Sunday has the least amount of space. This is the least productive day, yet most anticipated. Travis fulfills the musical equivalent of this basic human need for the occasionally mundane. While by no means groundbreaking, The Man Who massages with sincerity and crisp precision.
The production is cool and spacious thanks to Nigel Godrich (of OK Computer fame), and his breath can be seen slowly puffing throughout. Icicle pickings chime over jangling acoustic ballads. Elegent and deceptively simple, like unfinished furniture, the ten songs never rise to a scream, yet the trembling ambience is nonetheless smothering. Your ears will shift focus through translucent layers of sound. Godrich truly is blessed. Fran Healy sounds remarkably like a stable Thom Yorke, and songs like "The Fear" point directly to this influence, but with a more folky, tender approach. Some of his notes will make your cheeks tingle. And eminating from his lungs, the repetition of "Turn" brings goosebumps.
Travis' debut shamelessly prayed to power rock like a British Weezer, and there are still echos of that boyish glee here. Along with Weezer, Travis keep the flame of the righteous guitar solo lit while uninspired, obvious guitarists continue the Tom Pettification of this lost art and continue to piss on it. The ability to imbue solos with any sort of soul and intensity should be cherished.
On The Man Who, power comes from restraint and space. There are enough subtle flourishes buried beneath the pillowy snow to reward repeated listens-- the chimes and ominous keyboard under "As You Are," the wind in "Slide Show," and the sitar strums on the dramatic chorus to "The Last Laugh of the Laughter." The hidden track even rewards those who need to rock with bellowing choruses, gong guitars, and unnerving cymbal ticks.
British bands tend to leave a bad aftertaste with American audiences with their cognizant conceit. If anything, the raw humility of Travis is refreshing. Figures that this has still only seen release in the UK, while Gay Dad is being dumped on us from bombers.


This collaboration between Connan Mockasin and Sam Dust, formerly of dance-punk Brits Late of the Pier, strikes a discomfiting balance between queasy and cute.

Soft Hair

In a few short years, New Zealander Connan Mockasin has proven himself game for all manner of chameleonic collaboration. With just a few days in Marfa, Texas, he cooked up a little something with Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes, wrote for and served as Charlotte Gainsbourg’s backing band, and apparently played around with Vince Staples and James Blake on a not-released project. But most tantalizing was a long alluded-to collaboration with Sam Dust, formerly of the British dance-punk Late of the Pier. For all of the rapidity of those other connections, Mockasin and Dust first began smushing together their weird Play-Doh pop songs back in 2009. Meaning that well before Mockasin proclaimed Forever Dolphin Love and busted out a FreekiLeaks slow jam and Dust’s band imploded, Soft Hair was slowly growing.
Hinted at seven years ago and many mixing delays later, Soft Hair finally appears. And for those tantalized/ perplexed at the thought at Mockasin’s creepy castrato set against the heavier, tweaked beats that Dust made as LA Priest will instead find him hewing much closer to the former’s sound. The soggy pretzel logic of Pod-era Ween informs songs like opener “Relaxed Lizard,” most pointedly with that band’s obsession with early Prince. It’s a good fit for Mockasin’s squeaky voice—which can twirl up to “Camille”-like heights without having to speed up the tape—but also for Dust, who can dip into Prince’s vibrato with conviction. “Lizard” almost passes as a helium-voiced sexy little number, until the come-on of “I’d love to fuck you” has to share space with the admission “when you find she’s seventeen” deflates the balloon completely.
The waterlogged skank of “Jealous Lies” is a drunken ditty that replicates the kind of lo-fi weirdness that everyone from Paul McCartney to Aphex Twin has doodled in their home studios. The slow rise and fall of distant ocean waves and flanged-out guitar lines keeps “Lying Has to Stop” from being any kind of conventional beach track. It’s slow bubble could be seductive, except for Connan’s discomfiting come-on “I like to watch you run/But I’ll never touch your bum.” Dust’s dramatic over-emoting on “In Love” sticks out, but it’s the croaked chorus of “in love with the Japanese girls/in love with the Chinese girls” that turns the song irredeemably creepy.
Every so often, the album strikes that tricky balance between queasy and cute. “Goood Sign” is strange and charming in equal measure, Arthur Russell mumblecore on downers, set atop a slo-mo ’80s Italo horror synth soundtrack. The drum machine may be set to ‘somnambulant’ on “Alive Without Medicine,” but it makes for a lazy groove that syncs well with Super Mario water world bloops. Dust finds a rubber boot beat midway through, only to have Mockasin’s voice break the spell and have the track resolutely meander off course. “l.i.v.” is a mild, languid closer, but it’s not hard to think that after seven years spent cooking, Soft Hair’s results come out half-baked.


The gorgeous and hypnotic second Lightning Bug album focuses more than ever on songwriter Audrey Kang's hushed voice and simple, soulful lyrics.

October Song

It was nearly five years ago when an unknown band named Lightning Bug uploaded their first recordings to SoundCloud and Bandcamp. The New York-based trio had yet to play a show by the time their debut album, Floaters, was released to an audience of friends, family, and a keen-eared blogger or two. Yet that 10-song LP belied a rare confidence and versatility. The music was a pastel tapestry woven from the threads of Stereolab, My Bloody Valentine, Camera Obscura, and plenty of early ’00s indie rock, stitched into a unique pattern. Floaters gradually accumulated new listeners and eventually found a spot on NME's list of the best debut albums of the year.
Then, once again, Lightning Bug went away. In the middle of 2016, singer and primary songwriter Audrey Kang had to remind her fans she didn’t abandon them. “We are still here,” she wrote on Facebook, “just keeping quite still and quiet at the moment.” A modest four-song record called the torment of love arrived nine months later with no fanfare. Named after a French Caribbean pastry sold by widows, the 2017 EP was markedly intimate and somber, as if meant to share an honest glimpse of how Lightning Bug had been growing slowly in secret.
More than two years later, that period of personal discovery culminates in October Song. The second Lightning Bug album focuses more than ever on Kang’s hushed voice and simple, soulful lyrics. Her longtime collaborators, multi-instrumentalist Kevin Copeland and producer Logan Miley, are no less vital, but now they serve to support Kang's vision. “I’m carrying a song to sing but I do not know when,” she begins on “(intro),” as applause and crowd noise nearly drown her out. Her voice never rises above a murmur, but when she sighs “A secret thrill, I know I will, and spring will come again,” her stillness draws you in.
That small, unassuming space—where whispers ring out like bell chimes, guitar distortion feels like a downy blanket, and emotions swell but never burst—is where October Song thrives. In the middle of the bobbing drums and tape-warbled guitar of “The Lotus Eaters,” Kang sings as if she’s the only one listening: “Will my own past forget me?” The lyrics are among the shortest on the album, but they feel like a detonation. Kang ends her stanza in defeat: “Sometimes I think nothing changes,” she sings, and the music explodes around her in a whorl of glittering synth, rich choral harmonies, ringing chimes, and crystalline guitar.
October Song is bisected by a beatless, textural piece called “The Root,” which owes as much to Tim Hecker as it does Grizzly Bear and Grouper. At its rumbling center, Kang emerges with an angelic falsetto only to fade back into the ether. It’s utterly immersive, from its sound design to its melody. On “I Looked Too Long,” they tip their hat to Ennio Morricone, an unexpected turn that functions as a palate cleanser for the wistful balladry of “September Song,” which show how quietly multifaceted and adept Kang is as a songwriter.
Just before the release of Floaters in 2015, Kang told the music blog yvynl about Lightning Bug’s early days. “At first, it was a very private project and working together felt like being in a secret club,” she wrote. “We had this loosely enforced rule that while we were working, there always had to be one person napping. It was pretty magical.” October Song never surrenders the sense of cozy grandeur that made Floaters so magnetic, even as it zooms in further and reveals more of the person behind it.


Equally suited for headphones or the cookout, this is the UK multi-instrumentalist’s most expansive record yet, reaching beyond broken beat to incorporate boogie, disco, boom bap, jazz, and more.

Don’t Rush the Process

The title could double as a maxim for Kaidi Tatham’s career: Don’t Rush the Process—an encapsulation of the producer and multi-instrumentalist’s decades-long immersion in his singular proclivities. Since the mid 1990s, Tatham has been one of the central pioneers of broken beat, a style of stripped-down and bugged-out beat music forged in the furnace of the West London underground that emphasizes syncopated drumbeats and heavy basslines. He’s a former member of production collective Bugz in the Attic, and his session and remix catalog includes Slum Village, Mulatu Astatke, Marcos Valle, and Henry Wu cuts. But Tatham’s solo career has increased in velocity since he found a home on First Word Records, a company that believed in him enough to reissue 2008’s In Search of Hope—his debut solo record under his own name—a couple of years ago while also overseeing a growing series of LPs where he extends the borders of his sound.
Don’t Rush the Process is Tatham’s most expansive record yet, reaching far beyond his broken-beat origin story to incorporate boogie, disco, boom bap, bossa nova, and shades of Thundercat. There are dreamy harps, Jon Brion-sized strings, choir samples. Tatham’s omnivorous music places him alongside British contemporaries like Kamaal Williams, Joe Armon-Jones, and Tenderlonious. But by underpinning the arrangements with neat, programmed drum loops—as well as keeping the project moving with beat-tape brevity—Tatham’s productions still feel more insular than lush. Don’t Rush the Process is a headphones album that you can still throw on at the cookout. It’s instrumental music with melodies that will stay put in your temporal lobe for days. Tatham showcases his versatility with cohesion and focus.
So you get a song like “We Chillin’ Out”: With its repetitive piano progression, upbeat horn riffs, and cosmic keys, it’s an Earth, Wind & Fire-esque slice of 1970s disco. The sweet ba-ba-ba vocal harmonies of “Knocknee Donkey” invoke Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66. The title track is built out of the kind of squelchy synths and bass that could give a lowrider its bounce as it cruises L.A.’s boulevards. (The palm tree in the background on the sleeve sure isn’t depicting Tatham’s hometown of Redditch, just south of Birmingham.)
Amid the more skittish beat cuts—like the grubby, Dilla-worshiping “Funky Fool”—Tatham indulges his taste for jazz. On “Any Flavour,” his brisk piano play is matched with a prominent bassline and hand drums that give it a little Latin swing. He tinkles the keys over ethereal samples on “Runnin’ Tru.” In fact, there was room here for more soloing—there’s nothing quite as fervent as his playing over, say, the second half of 2016 number “The Shadow Ain’t Going Nowhere.” But pull the viewfinder back to a wider angle and witness a prolific veteran currently dedicated to moving away from broken beat—or any other easy genre signifier—with flair and focus. More than two and a half decades deep, Tatham is in a new groove, and it’s anyone’s guess where it may carry him.


Glenn Danzig’s first eponymous album was a thunderous, Rick Rubin-produced progression of his moody, Evil Elvis sound. It’s the pinnacle of goth populism.

Danzig

Who the fuck is that guy with the ZZ Top beard, Glenn Danzig pondered, and what’s he doing going crazy backstage at MY show? It was a sweltering night in July of 1986 in lower Manhattan, and Danzig had just stormed the stage of the Ritz with his beloved goth rock band Samhain. (The show was part of industry conference New Music Seminar.) You’d think the pasty-faced prince of darkness would be in higher spirits, happy to soak up all of Samhain’s hard-won praises, just as he’d done with earsplitting horror-punk progenitors Misfits earlier in the decade. Instead, lurking backstage just three years after launching his supposedly definitive project, the erstwhile horror punk found himself feeling restless and insatiable.
That’s when Danzig got around to talking with the mysterious beardo he spotted backstage earlier in the night. This much-hyped rap producer and label owner was one Rick Rubin. He’d come to the Ritz in search of talent for his Def American label; at the previous year’s conference, he’d discovered his inaugural signees, Slayer. He saw immense potential in Danzig and offered to sign him—provided the frontman cleaned house. “I don’t want any of these old guys,” Danzig recalls Rubin telling him. To Rubin’s ears, “[bassist] Eerie [Von Danzig] can’t play; the drummer can’t play.” His interests were pointed: “I never liked the Misfits,” he said. “All I want to do is sign you.”
Remarkably, Rubin’s backhanded compliments resonated. Danzig was up for pressing the reset button on Samhain—but only if bassist Eerie remained, and only if Rubin could convince drummer Chuck Biscuits (D.O.A., Black Flag) to sit behind the kit. The producer honored both requests, but insisted Danzig fire guitarist Pete “Damien” Marshall; John Christ eventually took his place. In 1988, Samhain 2.0 staged their triumphant return under a new name—the frontman’s own, so as to avoid royalty lawsuits—and released a self-titled album. Danzig is a thunderous debut that sharpened and streamlined the preceding project’s moody, blues-rock aesthetic without dialing back the darkness. Consider it the pinnacle of goth populism.
Danzig’s strength stems from his devilish voice: a deep, coarse, serpentine croon that fills the space from the bottom up, like a deluge of poisoned honey. Rubin rightly establishes the frontman’s vocals as Danzig’s true north, alongside pared-down arrangements that treat guitar riffs like samples. It makes Danzig’s primal energy all the more fearsome by contrast. Consider the wailing lick Christ doles out on the chorus to “Soul on Fire,” just after Danzig vows revenge on a cold-hearted “devil girl”—it’s not so much a performance as it is an aural exclamation point, a clever instrumental extension of the frontman’s not-so-subtle gravitas.
For the most part, Danzig functions as a monument—or rather, a haunted monolith—to raw power. Most of its grandiosity stems from the bandleader’s idealistic pivot away from Misfits’ acrid pulp fiction: his emergent lyrical obsession with Teutonic literature and the Bible, rather than the pillars of low-brow Americana such as comic books and monster movies. The Old Testament-inspired opener “Twist of Cain” lays bare the blueprint for Danzig as a whole: sultry blues licks, ostentatiously violent imagery, wry innuendos, and of course, that Evil Elvis swagger, all sneered syllables and swooping phrases.
When he’s not singing about ancient acts of fratricide or heartbreaking she-devils, Danzig conjures apocalyptic sex scenes. Much like Jim Morrison before him, he assumes the role of a corrupted avatar for the debauched fantasies woven into humanity’s DNA. Importantly, he maintains a level playing field between genders, exploring the power dynamics of coitus from the perspective of the dominant as well as the submissive. For every sadistic alpha-male control fantasy—“And I will worm inside your skull/Make you beg to be my whore,” crows Danzig on “Possession”—there’s a moment of emasculation. “She will make you scream/She’s death,” he sings on “She Rides,” trembling in awe before his lover. By forgoing the boneheaded locker-room-talk endemic to the hard rock world in favor of dynamic fluidity, Danzig doesn’t just challenge the canon—it transcends it.
“Mother,” the album’s centerpiece, and the biggest hit of Danzig’s career, is a soundtrack for the battle of the ages. It is a war waged not between God and Satan, but between rock’n’roll and Tipper Gore—the silent majority’s messiah, who sought to shield America’s youth from explicit music in the late ’80s, lest Prince, 2 Live Crew, and Twisted Sister drive Generation X to degeneracy. Danzig wrote the five-chord anthem as a rhetorical challenge to Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center, the committee who gave us the Parental Advisory sticker. “Al Gore wanted to tell people what they could listen to and what they couldn’t,” the musician later said of the organization, whom he went on to label as fascist, in 2013.
What better way to lure these people to the dark side than with a siren song inviting mom and dad to the party for an evening of bleeding and headbanging—and informing them, proudly and lustfully, that you’ll be taking their daughter on a nocturnal, presumably X-rated sojourn to your world? (Ironically, despite its lack of four-letter words, PMRC eventually slapped a sticker on Danzig anyway.) You can’t convert them all, but you can scare them shitless, and have fun doing it.
Nearly 30 years after its release, Danzig—the man, the band, the album—has become synonymous not only with “Mother,” but with heavy metal itself. That the jokes of a pair of dorky, animated heshers (“Beavis and Butthead”) were later key catalysts in Danzig’s ascent to icondom hardly scans as a coincidence. After all, though his legendary yowl gives his portraits their distinctive, shadowy form, it’s Danzig’s character—the transgressive machismo, the sullen hip-swinging, the overwhelming vampiric energy—that keeps us coming back for more. Danzig, then, is less an album than a countercultural idea. It is the sonic conduit by which we feeble mortals may commune with a resurrected, vengeful rock god and walk away with ears ringing, enlightened.


The New York singer-songwriter's debut is catchy and well-produced, but she rejects the ice-cream gloss and ambiguity of many other contemporary pop artists.

King Con

In a pop landscape filled with cartoonish characters and alter-egos, the first refreshing thing about New Yorker Alex Winston is her name. Confidence in her own skin is something Winston revels in and turns into her most powerful weapon on her debut record, King Con. Her songs are undeniably poppy and well-produced but reject the ice-cream gloss or ambiguity of many other contemporary pop artists. Instead there's a homespun feel here, and the layered production is stuffed with detail and component parts. It's an approach that makes the songs feel driven on piston power rather than Pro Tools.
Her voice is full of quirks, too, and more often than not she sounds closer to more alternative singers such as Kate Bush, Joanna Newsom, or even Karen O. Transplanting imperfect, personality-rich influences like this to a set of powerful pop songs is an interesting move and one that mostly pays off on King Con.
The sound that opens "Velvet Elvis" is a worn, gently warping vinyl stuck in a groove. This nostalgia wash acts as the bedrock for the busier elements that join the scuffle before bursting into a typically big chorus. Winston's narratives here and elsewhere feel just out of reach; they're fantastical but never come across as forced. That's thanks in part to the infectious feeling of excitement she gives off in each her performances. There's no hint of irony on King Con. There is a lot of heart, though, and there's something to be said for that in a realm of music where it's easy to feel manipulated. (That's not to say Winston doesn't pull some strings of her own. The togetherness in songs like "Medicine" and "Host" echoes the "us-versus-them" anthemic sway of a band like Arcade Fire.)
Despite being over a year old, "Locomotive" still feels like a highlight amongst this set, and the song hasn't changed a lot since we wrote about it last February. The edges have been heated up a little, and if anything Winston sounds even looser and more idiosyncratic. The song's feverish momentum is both a high point and vital characteristic of King Con, where each victory feels hard won.
The downside to the relentless energy is that the record can get tiring, particularly after the impressive, but front-loaded first half. "Benny" is the only restrained moment here; even that feels too brief and comes too late. A large part of King Con's charm is its confidence in direction, but toward the end, the sheer weight of similarly paced songs ends up dragging it down. For the most part, though, King Con's an enjoyable collection, one that presents Winston as an artist with a strong enough personality to overcome that dip and to stand out in a scene where it can be hard to make an impression.


If Le1f's career has thus far been about breaking glass ceilings as a queer black rapper, then Riot Boi shows us a trailblazer sitting down atop these cracked shards of glass, reckoning with what it means to have come first.

Riot Boi

Queer rap is this era's Riot Grrrl—a "genre" as much as a cultural movement of previously muted voices—and while Hole translated Riot Grrrl into noise within the grasp of Entertainment Weekly's attention, queer rap still awaits its pop culture avatar. Le1f has long seemed poised to cross-over into the mainstream, and he could still become that pop burglar—but not with his debut album Riot Boi. Although lead single "Koi" may sound like a strategic aim at a buzzworthy radio single comparable to the FM accessibility of Le1f's breakthrough track "Wut," Riot Boi is most immediately an album about not being seen. "I'm wonder like Stevie, like Stevie you won't see me," he raps on standout "Swirl." If Le1f's career has thus far been about breaking glass ceilings as a queer black rapper, then Riot Boi shows us a trailblazer sitting down among these cracked shards of glass, reckoning with what it means to have come first.
Riot Boi's early cuts capitalize on production polish that moves beyond the underground grittiness of Le1f's first mixtape Dark York and the simpler sound of his Hey EP. Opener "Hi" succeeds from pure hype, the constant background greetings of a robofemme "Hi!" reminding us that this is a long-anticipated debut—while concluding lines "I'm feelin' like such a new being" promise a newly matured artist. On "Rage",  Le1f offers the promise "It's lit/ Now, let's rage", but what follows is less "rage" than swagger-laced annoyance, as on "Grace, Alek or Naomi," where Le1f spits "I'm the faggot they stan or they don't understand it/ I run with the posse and I band with the bandits." This sass saturates "Swirl," which enlists Junglepussy and House of LaDosha to assert the black partner as the erotic powerbroker in interracial trysts—reversing the white gaze. On the track, Le1f reclaims black exoticism with lines like "I'm a dark-skin nigga on TV." Riot Boi thus begins with Le1f navigating his own breakthrough, his point of view oddly retrospective for a debut album—evidencing the new hype economy of the internet, where a star can be made before ever being born.
Le1f's self-reckoning also involves returning to familiar sounds that unfortunately feel like regression rather than mastery. Album midpoint "Koi," alongside "Umami / Water," only recall how much better this kind of aqua shtick worked for Azealia Banks' Fantasea or even for Le1f's own 2012 tracks "Bubbles" and "My Ooozy." "Water" is built on a melodic riff of what sounds like an electric guitar wet-dreaming of a sitar, Le1f's East-Fucks-West aesthetic at its best. It's the album's most compelling sound, but nevertheless its water witch-hop aesthetic (shared with "Koi") diverts the innovative ideas from Riot Boi's early highlights.
Riot Boi delivers what its title promises--a transgression of pop cultural limitations—most clearly in the final three tracks, socially-conscious slow jams with far more overt political messages than Le1f's usual banger-obscured radicalism. This makes for the cringe-worthy "Tell," an admonition to down-low closet cases to come out, but Le1f's political lucidity also allows for the stunning "Taxi." The song speaks about sexual economies of racialized desire but doubles as a commentary on the way mainstream audiences "pass" Le1f "like taxis do." But, he sings, "I don't care, whatever, it's cool/  Roll the window up on 'em"—making it clear that, whatever crossover potential the album falls short of, Le1f is more than content to remain a riot boi.


Member of Crystal Stilts, Vivian Girls, and Dum Dum Girls abandons the lo-fi M.O. of those groups for a harmonically driven, high-fidelity throwback pop album.

Frankie Rose and the Outs: Frankie Rose and the Outs

Frankie Rose and the Outs

Frankie Rose is a Brooklyn bartender best known for her drum/vocal/guitar work with fuzzed-out retro acts like Crystal Stilts, Vivian Girls, and Dum Dum Girls. As she bounced from one project to the next (in some cases before she was even considered a proper member), the distinctive threads that joined these bands-- garage-rock ethos, dour jangle pop, 60s girl-group harmonies, questionable sonic fidelity-- suggested Rose had a clearly defined musical M.O. But with her fourth project in almost as many years, Rose is taking on a different approach: She seems intent on creating a harmonically driven, high-fidelity throwback pop album-- a novel concept among the dozens of her lo-fi peers looking to similar sounds for inspiration.
While Frankie Rose and the Outs lacks some of the charge of her former projects, her restraint feels as brash and satisfying. The key is subtlety and refinement: The guitars here do none of the heavy lifting, often left to only punctuate or reinforce the cascading vocal harmonies and rolling bass that anchor these songs. "Memo"'s sharp, lightly reverbed notes are whisked away by charging drums and voices; the buzzy flat tone in the background of "That's What People Told Me" exists only to offset the song's cautious, lilting shake before shaping itself into a spy-movie riff.
At times woefully angelic (like on the sublime cover of Arthur Russell's "You Can Make Me Feel Bad") or richly layered (the soaring "Little Brown Haired Girls"), Rose's harmonies nail down the technical aspect of what made these girl groups so appealing. For a record this simple and, even at its punchiest, seductively serene, it might seem far-fetched to compliment it for being daring. But considering its own orbit-- and her eschewing lo-fi recording techniques-- Rose cuts right to the chase, making lean, elegant music that practically glows in the face of exceptional fuss.


Self Restraint, the latest album from rapper Gods Wisdom of the New England-based Dark World collective, arrives feeling strangely dated, as if it’s an artifact from 2011 or 2012.

Self Restraint

I don’t know if technology has accelerated the process of nostalgia, but we’re only six years removed from the blip the words “witch house” created on the music scene, and even fewer than that from when art-damaged kids creating abrasive rap seemed novel. Self Restraint, the latest album from the Northampton, Mass. rapper Gods Wisdom of the New England-based Dark World collective arrives feeling strangely dated, as if it’s an artifact from 2011 or 2012. The tropes are there, from “666” in Gods Wisdom Bandcamp URL, Tumblr-inspired “wtf” samples (like a snippet of “The Simpsons” here or old news footage there) to the music videos made to look as if they’re shot on VHS; the obsession with the most obvious staples of rap is there, too, from booming low-end to hyperbolic  boasts (“in high school I had sex with my teacher” from “2 Lives” is a galling moment, because it’s unclear if this is supposed to be funny or obtuse—it doesn’t work either way), and it’s all done in a manner that suggests this stuff is blazingly au courant. (Noted cool person Kim Gordon, for instance, put Gods Wisdom in her Top Ten of 2015 for Artforum).
Some of the songs work on a goofy, outré level—in spite of its many forehead slapping punchlines, “2 Lives” (which is two years old by the way) rides a triumphant trap beat that Gods Wisdom slathers his voice over with a hook from fiery singer/songwriter Mal Devisa, and it’s a discomfiting piece of music, something that escaped Western Massachusetts and ended up sounding almost fresh, perhaps because instead of winking and telegraphing all of its weirdness, it just kind of exists. Before that, “Respect Women” works a brooding, minimal beat like a good Lil Yachty song does, and Gods Wisdom manages a few memorable lines: “So heavy metal/sexuality of the devil/I’m going out like James Dean/but so much colder.”
Self Restraint bottoms out when Gods Wisdom attempts to create a ruckus, though—instead finding some catharsis in the noise, like avant-rapper B L A C K I E does, it’s just an endurance test—there’s no greater meaning behind the mess. His attempts at “going weird” like the “Peter Piper”-reminiscent bells on the lethargic “Leather Wings” don’t have enough oomph behind them to help Gods Wisdom access the confidence held by similar artists like Juiceboxxx or Baltimore’s Schwarz. It feels hollow, a bunch of signposts (classic samples, smooth jazz sax, vague vaporwave vibe) that don’t point anywhere. (It’s maybe worth noting at this point though that another Gods Wisdom track, “Beep Beep,” is a deliriously silly earworm that is better than anything on Self Restraint.)
And unfortunately, while his sleepwalking-Folk Implosion-meets-Lil Uzi Vert delivery has intermittent charm, it overwhelms the record and for the most part a lot of Self Restraint sounds like Salem Part 2, but updated to a more current operating system. Instead of chopped and screwed rap, the record takes some cues from drill and even Waka Flocka Flame, two inspirations that also stopped being novel in 2012. The opening title track and “Paranoia” are basically Salem songs, noise dripped into rap rhythms with blasé vocals on top—a pointedly unpleasant listening experience. There’s even a micro-staple of witch house—the left-field cover—on Self Restraint, “On the Beach” (yes, Neil Young), which exists outside the parameters of good and bad. It’s a Rorschach test. Did you find something cool/rebellious/interesting in the ugly, casual nihilism of witch house? Then you should like this. If you thought it was all hollow “but that was the point,” you might like this. If you’d rather listen to literally anything else, keep moving.


Summoning the great ghosts of vintage 4AD and Kranky, the Australian singer and producer makes inky dream pop that’s as heavy and welcoming as a weighted blanket.

Penelope Two

Penelope Two is a monochrome mood board, a one-note tone poem, a mirror’s matte-black back. The work of Australian musician Penelope Trappes derives its power from its profound focus, the single-minded pursuit of a highly specific vibe. Once your eyes adjust to the darkness, it becomes velvety and enveloping: an expanse of sustained pianos, sub-bass rumble, and faint guitar, all drenched in reverb but topped with her cool, clarion voice. You can make out some of her words, but she sometimes doesn’t sing them at all, as though language would stand in the way of her otherworldly visions.
Trappes pursued an almost identical approach on her solo debut, last year’s Penelope One: the same instruments, same echo, same aching melodies, all hanging like breath in a beam of winter sunlight. Penelope One’s 11 songs already fit together like puzzle pieces; spanning 10 songs in a fleeting 33 minutes, Penelope Two is more cohesive. Field recordings—muted traffic, faraway playground din, the faintest suggestion of distant rainfall—blur the boundaries of each track, so that melodies seem to take shape like hooded figures emerging from shadows.
Her reference points are familiar ones, and she doesn’t try to obscure them. The piano chord that launches the album is a dead ringer for the watery tone of Harold Budd and Cocteau Twins’ 1986 collaboration, The Moon and the Melodies. The ethereal influence of the Cocteaus’ 4AD labelmates This Mortal Coil looms just as large over Trappes’ penumbral soundscapes and pervasive melancholy. Her molasses-drip tempos and close harmonies recall Low at their loneliest. On “Maeve,” her airy sigh and tungsten-bright guitar sound like Mazzy Star or Julee Cruise: a roadhouse slow dance as glimpsed in a hall of mirrors, or in a dream within a dream.
For the most part, her tracks do the bare minimum to qualify as “songs.” The opening “Silence” is just three minutes of held keyboard and deep-in-a-well humming, so static it feels as much like a snapshot as a piece of music. On “Connector,” her voice scatters over chasms that open between drumbeats as the guitar drips like icicles. Her mantra-like lyrics are as skeletal as her melodies, only deepening the music’s mystery. On the haunting “Carry Me,” she sings, “A tiny glory hidden in the palm,” her voice closing around the syllables as though unwilling to let go of some secret. And on “Farewell,” you can practically hear her shivering as she sings, “Cold, I’m cold as snow,” her voice small and dry against a backdrop of rustle and drone, like an iPhone voice memo recorded in a cathedral’s catacombs.
With the right reverb setting, virtually anyone can make a reasonable facsimile of doom. What Trappes is doing is more nuanced, difficult, and interesting. On “Kismet,” an almost shockingly pretty piano flourish joins the sounds of heavy wind, roosting birds, and ominous synthesizers—it’s like a daisy being pinned to a black mourning cloak. Creating such captivating environments with so few elements requires not only a strong command of production tricks but also of melody, harmony, and vocal control. Trappe wields her voice with the discipline of a calligrapher.
If the album stumbles at all, it’s in the final third, where a succession of largely ambient tracks leaves Trappes at the risk of disappearing into the murk. It’s not a deal-breaker; the closing “Nite Hive” is as heavy and as welcoming as a weighted blanket. But once the fog has lifted, few details about these atmospheric pieces linger. If Trappes can find a way to consistently marry her exquisite mood-pieces to songwriting as moving as that of Penelope Two’s highest points, then nighttime, winter, and even darkness itself are hers for the taking.


The Detroit punk trio’s first proper full-length is a blast, but its abstract, evocative lyrics make it a welcome subversion of the punk formula.

R U Saved?

If you listen to enough contemporary, small-label punk music, it becomes very easy to identify the points of intrigue. There’s the structural simplicity. The ragged ferocity. The extreme speed and decibel levels. Nuanced and unusual lyrics, however, aren’t always at the top of that list. For better or worse, punk lyrics are often part of a self-perpetuating mythology that goes something like this: “Being punk/Oi oi oi/No one can stop us from being punk.” Hearing Detroit trio the Stools for the first time, you might think that they emerged from the very same school of punk proselytizers. But on closer inspection, their debut album R U Saved? is more sophisticated than the average manifesto. Instead, it’s crammed with hypnotic, abstract gutter poems, shouted over scrappy drums and motor-revving guitars.
The Stools formed after singer and guitarist Will Lorenz called his buddy, drummer Charles Stahl, in the frenzy of a manic episode. “We have to start a band tonight,” Lorenz told Stahl. “We have no choice.” Stahl hadn’t actually played drums before, but the two men began recording that very evening, tracking to tape on a boombox in a dingy wine cellar.
The same urgency that propelled the Stools to record the very second it occurred to them bubbles up and erupts throughout R U Saved?, their first proper full-length. The group thrashes through each of the 12 tracks, whipping themselves into a concise but electrified frenzy. Hard rock ripper “Cut Me Off” is composed of only 14 distinct words, which Lorenz barks like Stiv Bators doing chest presses with a dislodged V8 engine. The Stools love brevity, and when Lorenz splinters his vocal chords to scream “You set yourself on fire!” in the chorus, it becomes clear why some of these songs are so short. The energy the Stools expel is like squirting lighter fluid onto a campfire: The flame is high and hot, burning through the fuel in a quick flash.
R U Saved? deals in muscular, blues-bent rock riffs, dialed up to the speed of ’80s hardcore. Lorenz’s lyrics are bizarre and impressionistic, stoking the imagination with a few specific visuals. On the raucous opener “Stare Scared,” he spools out surreal lines over grimy power chords: “Bunk beds glowing gold/Like chains of pearls…Thumb burned by lamplight.” “Into the Street,” a street punk bruiser bred with ZZ Top guitar, is born of a similar disorienting, dreamlike logic. “Torpedo doors/Old cans of peas/Like little prayer cards/In the blank white heat,” Lorenz shouts.
For all his abstraction, Lorenz can also be an extremely efficient lyricist, building entire scenes with a few well-placed words. On “Pickin’ Out Glass,” the narrator collects shards “from the sidewalk cracks,” noting nearby firemen standing at attention. With two simple images, we can hear windows exploding and whiff the smoke drifting over the ruins. On “Bad Eye Bob,” a song churning to the speed of a circle pit, Lorenz introduces an oddball specter lurking around the historic Coronado apartment building in Midtown Detroit. The titular Bad Eye Bob, who stuffs his cigarettes with M-80 explosives and makes “home videos in a bathroom stall,” is either a hazardous prankster or a street art savant. The answer is never spelled out, but Bob’s seedy kingdom is strangely inviting.
R U Saved?’s best song is the romping “Buick Boogie,” which is sung by bassist Krystian Quint and rides on rockabilly guitar and bass licks dirtied up with distortion. Quint cosplays a slick, suited gangster with “drive by style.” But for all his peacocking, our tough guy chickens out when it comes to busting an actual cap: “Got my finger on the trigger baby/But you know I’m afraid to shoot/Gonna hop in my Buick/Boogie back to you,” Quint sings over Stahl’s thundering drum beat. His confession might be a jab at traditional masculinity, or a metaphor for adultery stalled by erectile dysfunction. It could simply be an excuse to scream the words “Buick” and “boogie” in quick succession. Regardless of your take, R U Saved? is teeming with abnormal imagery and creative language—a welcome subversion of the punk formula.
Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that “Buick Boogie” is sung by Will Lorenz. It is sung by bassist Krystian Quint.


Behold sounds like a continuation of the abstract and free-form ideas that Oren Ambarchi and Jim O'Rourke set out on Indeed, their 2011 debut LP as a duo. What most separates the two records is the new album's strong sense of groove.

Behold

Oren Ambarchi is usually described as a guitarist but before 1998's Stacte, his solo debut, he was a drummer. And if early records like Suspension or Reconnaissance, with Martin Ng, tended to fixate on liquid oscillations and eyedropper drones, recent releases are putting his rhythmic sensibility front and center. Ambarchi's 2012 album Sagittarian Domain was propelled by an elliptical funk groove that moved between krautrock and post-punk. "Knots", from 2012's Audience of One, is largely a showcase for a scorching ride-cymbal fugue played by Joe Talia, and the recently released Live Knots, featuring Tokyo and Krakow performances of the piece, is even more intensely percussive, with Talia's drumming fighting to bring order to Ambarchi's torrential feedback. And now Behold, Ambarchi's new collaboration with Jim O'Rourke, picks up the rhythmic thread of the Australian musician's recent work and finds him back behind the drums.
At first, Behold sounds like a continuation of the ideas that Ambarchi and O'Rourke set out on Indeed, their 2011 debut LP as a duo. Like its predecessor, Behold is a single piece of music separated into two side-long sections. Within its 42-minute expanse, it combines multiple methods and approaches—real-time jams, electro-acoustic collage, synthesizers and guitar feedback, ambient dub and free improv—into a shape that's at once sprawling and streamlined.
It's really anyone's guess who is doing what. At the core of the music, there's a battle between brushed metal and scratchy percussive sounds, on the one hand, and luminous tonal elements on the other. The music is aglow with streaks of feedback, molten oscillators, rubbed wineglass rims, and even the occasional struck or held note. With music this abstracted, this gradual, small gestures count for a lot, so that a single pair of bass notes, played several measures apart, come to seem like a major theme. And while there are no melodies, per se, the way filament-like phrases flare up in the murk is nevertheless lyrical. Somewhere in the mix, there's what sounds like an organ, and that Hammond-like flutter imbues the album with lively, trembling movements, even when the music is comparatively still. There are drones like the buzz of airplanes high overhead and a forest's canopy worth of synthetic birdcalls. Beneath the crystal-faceted edges of the sound, the blur runs deep and dense.
What most separates Behold from Indeed is the new album's strong sense of groove, with Ambarchi carving deep patterns with ride cymbals and hi-hats and ultra-low, chest-caving kick drums. It feels like motorik distilled to its very essence, an IV drip of pure rhythm. Like everything else on the album, the drums come and go. For most of "Behold A", there's nothing more than a hint of cymbal tapped out in rolling, quarter-note pulses; for long stretches, there's not even that. Like an underground stream returning to the surface, the rippling metal pulse returns midway through "Behold B" and gradually gathers strength, rising in concert with squalls of guitar feedback and contrapuntal piano. After a long, slow climb, it's a quick climax; the beat dies, and the remaining sounds go sailing out into the abyss, like water over a cliff. But it's the rhythm that stays with you, long after silence has settled in.
Behold is the kind of music where, depending upon the angle from which you approach it, you may perceive its overall effects in radically different ways. The music evolves so gradually, it's easy to find yourself wondering how you've wound up at a given point; there's a sense of traveling without moving, of zooming in and out between broad strokes and pinpoint details, toggling between distracted reverie and close attention.


On her first official LP as Fire-Toolz, Chicago producer Angel Marcloid uses vaporwave’s expansive palette to explore the identities that the internet enables users to absorb, process, and redistribute.

Skinless X-1

Nothing is off limits to Angel Marcloid. In the experimental electronic music she makes as Fire-Toolz, the prolific Chicago producer scavenges voraciously from a dizzying array of sources: Proggy electric guitar solos bristle against Windows notification sounds; electronic-blast beats underscore muzak bass; black metal screams crash into samples from guided meditations.
The idea that every sound is on the table has proven a key tenet of internet-native genres like vaporwave, whose tactics Marcloid uses often but not exclusively. If vaporwave liquefies discrete source materials into a soothing, uniform goo, Marcloid’s work preserves the rough edges of its components, like scrap metal suspended in Jell-O. On Skinless X-1, she’s less interested in the glazed-over numbness that results from staring too long into the web than she is in excavating the particulate, contradictory identities that the internet enables its users to absorb, process, and redistribute.
Earlier Fire-Toolz releases, like 2017’s Drip Mental and Interbeing, stoked a keen sense of restlessness. The project veered from the staid ambient meditations and noisy experiments Marcloid has cultivated under a variety of other monikers in the past decade (her Bandcamp discography dates back to 2006). Instead of ruminating on a single theme, Fire-Toolz accentuates the contrasts between often clashing forms of sound, a strategy Oneohtrix Point Never also employed on his last two albums. But Skinless X-1, Marcloid’s fourth Fire-Toolz release, finds the project locking into new grooves. Rather than highlight how easily attention can scatter, it congeals attention, testing just how many disparate elements the ear can hold together in a single moment.
Many of the various genres Marcloid draws upon here have similar goals in mind. Black metal, trance, and new age music all seek to free the body from its usual routines of labor and leisure; they pursue sensory extremes in order to end psychological ruts and allow catharsis. Though Skinless X-1 jumps rapidly from one musical configuration to another, that dynamism rarely comes at the expense of momentum or depth. Songs like “Elysian Fields” turns what sounds like video game music into settings for white-hot guitar riffs, bolstering both elements with unsteady yet propulsive beats. On the standout track “Lethe,” Marcloid trades her black metal screams for choked, distorted vocalizations that sound as though they could be floating over a faulty phone line—and yet this scrambled voice beckons more deeply and more seriously than the flat-out howls on “✓
iNTERBEiNG.” The harder it is to hear Marcloid, the more inviting it feels to lean in and try to make her out amid the noise.
This decade has been a fertile time for musicians discovering what online spaces sound like—what the digital images and virtual realities of the present and past have done to attention, connection, and consciousness. Fire-Toolz calls back to an earlier era of the web, when the computer spoke every time you received an email and instant messaging services fostered a new sense of simultaneity among faraway strangers. Rather than suggest that this period marked the beginning of an epoch of detachment, Marcloid remembers the vintage internet as host to emotional intensities. Skinless X-1’s “In the Computer Room @ Dusk ☕” stirs together acoustic guitar, ambient drone, and slow percussive pulses, calling up the image of a young person on an old PC at the end of the ’90s, realizing they've accidentally spent all day online.
A nostalgic fondness percolates through the music, as if Marcloid were reminiscing about a time before online personas were tied to birth names, before the threat of doxxing loomed. Back then, you were whatever you said you were. You could play-act various identities, bond intensely with other play-actors. If you waded in deep enough, you might even have found something true about yourself.


Despite its name, Alone for the First Time features a number of collaborators. And for the first time, it features Hemsworth working largely with original, lyrical songs.

Ryan Hemsworth: Alone for the First Time

Alone for the First Time

Ryan Hemsworth has mastered the social web. You can see it in his tweets, which knowingly combine the sad teenager aesthetic with that of the semi-ironic, in-crowd broducer. You can see it in his Secret Songs record club, through which he's cultivated a community of bedroom producers in his likeness and given them access to a large audience. And you can see it on the guest list for his new album, Alone for the First Time, which, despite its name, features contributions from popular Soundcloud artists and Secret Songs amateurs alike. But even if it’s not literal, the title does justice to the major artistic step that this album represents. For better and for worse, this is the Halifax producer’s boldest aesthetic statement to date, and taking that kind of risk must feel something like striking out on your own for the first time.
Hemsworth started his career playing two distinct roles. He produced songs for minor, buzzing Southern rappers riding the cloud-rap wave and remixed the pop songs of the moment, tricking them out with candy-colored synths and creaky drum machines. He was already about as collaborative as it’s possible to be: most of his work either featured someone else rapping or was a rework of a song that had been created by someone else entirely. But even his original tracks felt like the work of a producer who wasn’t yet sure what kind of music he wanted to make, someone who was following cues from other artists. The Last Words EP from 2012 was catchy but scattered, and last year’s Guilt Trips, as refined as it was, showed a reluctance to commit to any one style. (The exception to these projects was last year’s Still Awake EP, the most direct precursor to Alone for the First Time.)
Hemsworth was one of the early, post-Girl Talk producers who reveled in the dissolution of genre, and he dabbled in bedroom electronic, candied R&B and Southern hip-hop without pledging allegiance to any of them. It was only when he fully embraced a fourth influence, the 8-bit soundtracks to handheld video games of the '80s and '90s, that he began to focus on refining a specific sound, one that combined his pop instincts with the miniaturized melodies of that format.
He’s been drilling down towards the essence of that sound for more than a year now. And the core he’s reached on the new album reveals a singer-songwriter bedroom pop by way of Final Fantasy. It’s unmistakably a winter album, and would be recognizable as such even were its first single not titled "Snow in Newark"; the album fairly bleeds nostalgia and comfort—listening to it feels like being swaddled with blankets and pillows. And for the first time, it features Hemsworth working largely with original, lyrical songs, a jarring development for fans who originally came to him for his remixes or production.
Hemsworth has made sport out of feeling vulnerable—his twitter is replete with references to him needing to snuggle—and his lyrics are generally in that mold. When they’re simple, as on "Walk Me Home", they can feel tender and lovely. The song’s refrain of "Leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me alone, there’s no room for me left in your heart," is genuinely heartbreaking, syncing nicely with an upswing of strings and what sounds like a live version of the drum machines he favors. But occasionally, his songs can feel like transmissions of his twitter feed that have been scrubbed of all humor or irony. "Snow in Newark" is the best example of this phenomenon: the first verse is one of the album's wordiest, but Hemsworth doesn’t use it to communicate details and the song ends up sounding both vague and precious, reminiscent of a lesser Jack Johnson track.
Songs like these will garner Hemsworth new fans, but it’s jarring to hear someone with such a refined sense of structure still struggling with songwriting. It can be a relief then to reach a track on which a truly talented vocalist makes up for Hemsworth's lyrical shortcomings. "Surrounded", which features the voice of the wonderful Angelino songstress Kotomi, is one of the most powerful tracks on the album, and it feels like a natural extension of the R&B remixes that Hemsworth came up on. The singer’s voice breathes life into the lyrics like a good actor into a bad role—the preciousness of the words is swallowed by the power of her emotion and the frantic production that surrounds her voice echoes the track’s message.
Tracks like "Surrounded" hint that the problem with Hemsworth’s songs is not necessarily the lyrics but rather his lack of confidence when it comes to doing those simple words justice. But the contrast between the amateurism of his songs is all the more jarring because he’s become such a sure-handed producer. Instrumental tracks like "Blemish" and "Hurt Me" are quintessential Hemsworth productions, springy, bubbly tracks that sound like they were produced for a Pallet Town after party. There’s an undercurrent of melancholy to each that’s balanced nicely by the chirpy synths and springy drums that have long been the producer’s forte.
You have to hand it to Hemsworth for refusing to make the same song over and over again. He’s learning from the artists he’s meeting online, going farther afield than ever before (the album features artists from all over the globe), and growing more comfortable in his role as someone who can create pop, not merely tweak existing songs. Alone for the First Time is the furthest he's pushed himself, and the growing pains on the album can be chalked up to the strain of trying new things, a kind of adolescent awkwardness that shows signs of maturing into something sophisticated and unique.


The Brooklyn singer-songwriter belongs to a contemporary lineage of classic-rock devotees; his melodic gifts make this double album, recorded in Memphis, exceptionally warm and inviting.

Nobody Lives Here Anymore

The world that Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Max Clarke builds as Cut Worms is a comforting and familiar one. His nasal, pure-hearted tenor evokes Buddy Holly as surely as a pair of black frame glasses pushed up the bridge of the nose, and the alpine chill, cavernous reverb, and placid stillness of his folk rock instantly recall solo George Harrison. Clarke belongs to a specific lineage of classic-rock devotees—Cass McCombs, Kevin Morby, Whitney—and his records are full of nice, homey, furniture-store qualities: lived-in, grainy, hand-crafted. His music smells like yellowing record sleeves and pleasantly mildewed cellars; you can hear the warmth and spaciousness of the studio he’s strumming his guitar in.
Records that sound like this are nearly impossible to dislike, and there is never any shortage of them. There’s always a pocket of singer-songwriters evoking some combination of these 1970s singer-songwriter influences, from the aforementioned George Harrison to Neil Young to Harry Nilsson. Practitioners are usually bearded and, generally speaking, male, and there is a high rate of turnover. Nonetheless, Clarke stands pretty tall in this field. His new record, Nobody Lives Here Anymore, is a double album, that ultimate symbol of classic-rock ambition, and Clarke traveled to fabled territory—Memphis, Tennessee—to record it.
You can certainly trek hundreds of miles and record a middling album, but Clarke did not, and his pilgrimage feels like a larger gesture of commitment that contains dozens of smaller similar ones inside it. When you’re trying to sink into an era, your success rate depends largely on your attention to important details, and Clarke’s is impeccable, perhaps attributable in part to his day job as an illustrator. Every element of these songs, whether it’s the perfectly tuned clip-clop of drum sticks and bass evoking Sun Records on “The Heat Is On,” or the early-Beatles backup vocals on “Always on My Mind,” wanders onstage with immaculate timing.
Records this handsomely appointed and inviting ask you to settle in. But inside this pleasant atmosphere, and among all these well-worn signifiers, Clarke has passion and vision to burn, and over the course of 17 songs, he seems to hold nothing back. Nobody Lives Here Anymore is an exceptional document of a songwriter and performer allowing all of their instincts and impulses to line up neatly with each other. It’s hard to imagine Clarke making a better or more complete record than this one: The longer it goes on, the richer and deeper it feels, and the more resonant and real Clarke’s imagined world becomes.
His strongest point is his ear for melodies. They spill out of him like loose change from turned-out pockets. Some of his songs have two or three of them that feel like whole songs themselves. “All the Roads” is a good example. The verse, which Clarke sings in an appealingly low, silky register over acoustic guitar, feels sinuous enough to hold a three-minute song. But he has a lot more to give us: There are two pre-choruses, each of them soulful enough to serve as real ones, and then a doo-wop-shoo-wop actual chorus that tops the whole thing like caramel drizzle. This easy generosity keeps the album from ever feeling slack or overstuffed, despite its runtime occupying an intimidating slab of your afternoon.
It’s a testament to the strength of Clarke’s compositional gifts and his command of mood that even 14 or 15 tracks in, in an album pitched at a consistent campfire glow and midtempo stroll, songs like “The Golden Sky” sound just as fresh as the record’s first notes. Clarke has Cass McCombs’ haunted way with Americana signifiers; in his hands, even a sound as recognizable as a pedal-steel guitar feels dreamlike. His songwriting gift is unforced, probably the greatest compliment you can give to a record like this, which measures its success by how long you want to spend with it without focusing on it too closely.
Clarke’s lyrics trade in homilies, and while there are notes of trouble in them that vaguely suggest young people surveying the world in 2020—“Oh my love, what more can we do?/I feel so helpless, don’t you/This whole place began to self-destruct/Long before we ever showed up”—they are couched in phrasing that could just have easily come from a Neil Young record in the ’70s. “Every once in a while, everything comes together/Every once in a while, everything comes out right,” he croons just one song later. On the chorus to “Veteran’s Day,” which could have come from Living in the Material World, Clarke hits the upper reaches of his register, telling us “You don’t know/What this life can do to a fool like me.” A simple sentiment—the simplest—but as Clarke delivers it, it feels as profound, and as resistant to analysis, as a sunset.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Featuring guest spots from Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, Danny Brown, and a snarling Killer Mike, El-P's first album since putting Def Jux on hiatus in early 2010 marks a break from the old order and another call to arms.

Cancer for Cure

Even the best relationships acquire baggage. Circa 1999, Def Jux forged a fiefdom from the ashes of vinyl champs Fondle 'Em and the soon-to-be-ruined promise of Rawkus. "Independent as fuck" was the mantra, and for those wondering why MF Doom and the Roots couldn't get airplay, it may well have been a war cry.
Until Russell Simmons took a temporary sabbatical from model mongering to threaten a trademark-infringement lawsuit, even Def Jux's name riffed on (Darth) Def Jam, the rap overlord at its greased-up and growling Ruff Ryders, Jigga, and Ja Rule apex. But back when the "Underground" was tagged in capital letters, the promise of an alternate subterranean grid seemed infinite. Fat Beats did booming business. Hip-hop culture mags cropped up to survey the soundbombing. Clinton was President. Gas was $1 per gallon. A Bellevue-certified eccentric like Kool Keith could get Doctor Octagon dough from Dreamworks to squander in and around the West Hollywood IHOP.
During that last spring of the 20th Century, Rawkus Records released Soundbombing II-- an Underground Now That's What I Call Music*!*-- that banged incessantly in dorm rooms across America and England. It marked the first and only time Eminem and El-P shared space on wax. Yet it didn't feel that weird at the time. People still used the phrase "on wax" and Shady had only recently signed to Interscope. To balance his quality time with Dr. Dre, Marshall Mathers also worked with people like Thirstin Howl III and Outsidaz. As the demented fan from "Stan" said: "I like that shit you did with Rawkus too, that shit was phat." Not only did people still use the word "phat," they opted to build clothing lines around it.
You can trace the genesis of El-P's solo career back to Soundbombing II's "Patriotism". A five-minute fulguration to American culture and the military-industrial complex, it was credited to Company Flow, but his one-time rhyme partner Bigg Jus sat on the sidelines. The next year, the group released its final single, "DPA". It was the second release on the fledgling Def Jux and doubled as a mission statement. This is "heart of darkness," El-P fulminated and as if to prove his point, George W. Bush "won" the Electoral College several months later. He may have been referencing Joseph Conrad, but the Brooklyn bomber soon received a bête noire worthy of Richard Nixon and Raoul Duke. The new imprint existed to chronicle the fear and loathing. And by 2007's I'll Sleep When You're Dead, he confessed to "a gonzomatic fear turning [him] Hunter S. Thompson."
At least that was the image that took root. The reality was more and less sophisticated. Bizarro attempts to break the mold with funk-fusionists Chin Chin and the original Lonely Island, Party Fun Action Committee, rarely received the attention they deserved. Nor did the mutant howls of Camu Tao, whose genre-clobbering experimentation influenced Kid Cudi, Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, and Danny Brown. Luck didn't lend itself to the Def Jux enterprise. Rjd2 could have re-made Deadringer a half-dozen times, and both label and artist could have reaped that soccer mom Moby licensing money. Instead, he ditched turntables for the microphone, signed to XL, and offered prayers to the mustache of John Oates. Meanwhile, meal tickets Cannibal Ox couldn't get it together for a sophomore album and were last seen wandering lost around the Gardens of Asgard.
That's a lot to deal with for any label head, let alone one tasked to redesign the Delorean every five years. It's hard enough to rap and make beats professionally, never mind having to worry about C-Rayz Walz wanting help with his 401(k). Factor in the ravages of online piracy and the tragic death of Camu Tao, and bombing the system seemed like the only obvious option. Yet what might've been most damning was that Def Jux became imprisoned by ideals that belonged to a different era. Even if most of their artists had long outgrown the "Us vs. Them" mentality, outside perception didn't always chart the progression.
By now, Eminem was making 12-step anthems for trailer trash. Soundbombing II star Common was allowed to wear angora and cinematically woo Queen Latifah with his low-post moves. But El-P and by proxy Definitive Jux were stereotyped with opinions like the one A$AP Worldwide co-founder Yams offered earlier this year: Company Flow fans don't buy A$AP Rocky records. Maybe that was true 10 years ago (if A$AP Rocky been out of Junior High), but the truth had become closer to El-P's response: I'm in Company Flow and I listen to A$AP. It was the rap equivalent of the Battle of New Orleans. The cease-fire had been signed, but there was one last conflict before putting the era to sleep.
With the exception of the Jay-Z/Kanye/Young Money/Rozay axis, the rap game has largely flattened out (or bottomed out, depending on your angle). A guy like Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire can get a deal from Universal after releasing a free mixtape over old Necro and El-P beats. Waka Flocka fronts this month's XXL, but Killer Mike and El-P get second billing alongside Chief Keef, Curren$y, and Slaughterhouse. 2Chainz is playing Rock the Bells. Things are more similar than they've seemed in a long time.
Cancer 4 Cure is both reinvention and inversion. El-P's first album since putting Def Jux on hiatus in early 2010 marks a break from the old order and another call to arms. Whereas Fantastic Damage served as a Def Jux coming out party and I'll Sleep When You're Dead synthesized the sweaty jitters of the mid-Dubya daze, Cancer 4 Cure consciously creates its own iron galaxy. None of the Def Jukies appear, save for Despot. In their stead are eXquire, Danny Brown, and a snarling Killer Mike, whose El-P produced R.A.P. Music is already the front-runner for rap album of the year. Any one of their guest spots could be a hip-hop quotable, if we still lived at a time when people cared about the Hip Hop Quotable. But my vote goes to Danny Brown, self-described as "Ric Flair/ With thick hair/ Yelling out 'woo'/ Getting head in the director's chair."
Cancer 4 Cure's closest analogue may be Portishead's Third: the textures and tones are distinctly different from past releases, but it's unimaginable that it could be made by anyone else. El-P has described the record as fight music abstracted. To be more specific, it's fight or flight music. Primal response mechanism rap. And like any good storyteller, his narratives are rooted in conflict. On "Tougher Colder Killer", El-P inhabits the mindset of a soldier haunted by post-traumatic stress, who made "his enemy dig his own grave at the point of a gun." "For My Upstairs Neighbor" finds the protagonist getting grilled by cops about a domestic violence situation in his apartment building. He tells "Columbo" nothing, but later confronts the abuse victim in the stairwell and whispers to her, "do the thing you have to and I swear I'll tell them nothing." Meanwhile, "Works Every Time" is a drug dealer dialectic between the urge to self-medicate and the consequences of the obliteration.
The closest thing the record has to a love song is "The Jig Is Up", where the hook uses the words of Groucho Marx to describe a relationship: "I wouldn't want to be a part of any club that would have me." Even "Sign Here", a song grappling with sexual power issues uses an interrogation room as a metaphorical backdrop. You don't need me tell you that it's heavy. It's a record from El-P, a man who could make Pollyanna see poltergeists. But to balance out the hangman's tension, there's "Drones over BKLYN" and "The Full Retard", two clavicle-cracking rants reminiscent of the old El-P, with rhymes "short and fat like Joe Pesci" that would "slap you out of your fucking shit."
The beats. The synths sound like they've been stolen from a bargain bin on Alpha Centauri, stocked with futuristic workout anthems for robot soldiers. Listening to it in daylight hours can make you feel allergic to sunlight. Most rumble at 130 to 140 BPM and feel uniquely congruent with and ahead of the times. After all, the producers at L.A.'s Low End Theory and the early London dubstep architects all owe a small but significant debt to El's experiments with negative space and bone-chipping bass.
What grounds the record is a scarcely subliminated obsession with death. Dedicated to Camu Tao, whose demise directly preceded its creation, the characters are forever warring with some imminent end, whether creative, romantic, or literal. It's rare when re-inventions seem so deliberate but unselfconscious. And through the struggle it gains a certain scarred freedom. It's simultaneously able to stand alone but alongside that trademark blend of sneering New York City skepticism. It sheds the bullshit of the past and is stained with the weary residue of an incalculable number of cigarettes, weed deliveries, bodega runs, and blind turns. It's the best kind of tribute El-P could make: a record that you can pump like they do in the future.


At turns explosive and intimate, the three-hour-plus show performed at a small club in West Hollywood is a legendary document of how Bruce and the E Street Band could transform their songs on stage.

Bruce Springsteen / The E Street Band: The Roxy July 7, 1978

The Roxy July 7, 1978

Just over an hour into his marathon show at West Hollywood’s Roxy Theatre in the summer of 1978, Bruce Springsteen offers a confession: He doesn’t know how to fix a broken-down car. While this information might seem irrelevant to the night’s proceedings, it’s an important breakthrough in the action-packed group therapy session that is an E Street Band concert. After all, the man on stage—sprightly and clean-shaven, not yet 30, seemingly fueled entirely by adrenaline—had written nearly half his songbook about cars: building and tearing them apart, driving till dawn and finding redemption underneath their hoods. (He was also dressing a little like a car mechanic around this time.) “But I think I understand,” he continues, “the spiritual and religious significance of the 396.” The crowd at the 500-capacity theater roars and Springsteen introduces “Racing in the Street,” a highlight from Darkness on the Edge of Town, released just a month earlier. On the record, it’s the bleakest thing he’s ever recorded; tonight, it becomes something else.
The latest in Springsteen’s ongoing Live Archive Series marks the first official release of this concert in its entirety. In the canon of historically significant Springsteen shows, the Roxy ’78 stands high above the others—above similarly beloved, equally inspired sets that year in Passaic, New Jersey or Houston, Texas. You don’t have to be a fanatic to find your footing. Here is a band in the midst of a runner’s high, bold and electric and ready to face the world. The show was broadcast live, in full, on Los Angeles’ KMET FM, giving West Coast listeners a chance to experience the Jersey legend’s magic in real time. With its three-hour-plus length and uncontainable spirit, it became an instant favorite among the tape-trading community. There was also an issue of scarcity, with a large portion of tickets relegated to radio station contests that barred fans from getting into the already-too-small venue. (Springsteen begins the show by apologizing, earnestly and shakily, to everyone who couldn’t get tickets, an important reminder that such controversies did not begin on Broadway.)
This night’s performance of “Racing in the Street” is a crucial document of how these musicians transform on stage. In 1978, the E Street Band doesn’t jam: None of the members are virtuosos, so their superpower is instead in their focus—seven people stretching songs into their most imposing, unrelenting forms. Saxophonist Clarence Clemons is often singled out as the primary foil for Springsteen’s songwriting during his peak era, but these performances remind you just how irreplaceable each band member had become. At this concert in particular, pianist Roy Bittan, who adds unearthly gravitas to songs like “Prove It All Night,” “Backstreets,” and the world premiere of “Point Blank,” is a revelation. As “Racing in the Street” draws to a close, he lends the song a spectral elegance while Clemons’ sax stutters for percussive effect and the whole band lifts effortlessly like a small plane taking flight. The effect causes one audience member to shout plainly, in the song’s final moments, “E. STREET. BAND.” It’s all that needs to be said.
This is the type of show that converts the uninitiated, with definitive performances of some of Springsteen’s most immortal songs. Near the start, the band tears into my favorite performance of “Badlands,” one that runs proudly above tempo and ripples with defiant energy. Other songs forecast the darker shades his music would embrace. An ominous thunderclap of electric guitar introduces a pulverizing “Adam Raised a Cain.” The then-unreleased “Independence Day” is given a sparse piano rendition that furthers “Adam”’s father-son airing of grievances—a story that Springsteen was now just starting to see clearly—and offsets the ecstatic glee of oldies covers like “Twist and Shout” and “Rave On.”
The show can also be heard as an accidental bildungsroman, summarizing the first half-decade of Springsteen’s career. If Darkness, his final release of the ’70s, was an achievement of solitude and refinement, then its tour was an extended celebration, establishing his reputation for performances that were at turns explosive and intimate. A stunning take on “Growin’ Up” embodies that dichotomy. The audience, who had been alternately howling and singing along and shouting requests, falls silent during the on-stage monologue that serves as its emotional core: a quaint tale of his childhood as he draws a line in the sand between his parents’ dreams and his own expectations. “What they didn’t understand,” Springsteen explains about his parents, “Was that I wanted everything.” Then he cues in the band, who give him precisely that.


This 4-disc box set, curated by legendary Beat Generation composer and writer Paul Bowles, offers an eye-opening and immersive introduction to Moroccan music.

Various Artists: Music of Morocco: Recorded by Paul Bowles, 1959

By now, the stories of Sheltering Sky author Paul Bowles and other Beat-generation figures traveling to Morocco in the late '50s/early '60s aren't exactly lacking in mystique. In his introduction to the liner notes for this 4-disc box, former Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo references a widely circulated group photo of Bowles along with William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and others taken on the patio of the Villa Muniria hotel in Tangier. Of course, the North African desert would become almost synonymous with Bowles' storied career. But for him, Morocco was also the place he would call home for the rest of his life.
Long considered a 20th-century literary giant, Bowles actually pursued a career in composition prior to (and even after) the success of *The Sheltering Sky, *which was his first novel. Bowles, in fact, visited Morocco for the first time in 1931 on a trip with Aaron Copland, under whom he was studying composition at the time. And though he changed lanes professionally, Bowles continued to nurture a profound interest in music, which is made abundantly clear by this set. Of course, the author occupies a central role here, having recorded all four discs himself over a six-month period in 1959 during which he criss-crossed Morocco, but thankfully he keeps his focus trained strictly on the music and the cultural currents from which it emerged.
"For years, I composed music," Bowles can be heard saying at the beginning of the 1993 documentary* Un Américain à Tanger*. "Then, suddenly, I decided to write books instead... There’s nothing to say about either the music or the books. I hate talking about myself. I’ve got nothing to say." In another documentary, 1998’s Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, the author says, "There was no violence in my life ever—maybe that’s why I gave up writing music."
Maybe so, but on Music of Morocco he has plenty to say. True to his word, though, he says almost nothing about himself. Though his voluminous notes, reprinted here from his own journal, do at times provide first-person accounts of his travels, they do so only to serve a better understanding of what you’re hearing. In fact, "understanding" might be an understatement. The thoroughness of Bowles’ ethnomusicological narration (not to mention the way project producer Philip D. Schuyler organizes and adds to that narration) more or less gives listeners a crash course in the social, historical, and musical basis for four-and-a-half-hours’ worth of music.
Originally released in 1972 as a (now long-out-of-print) 2-record set, this new presentation more than doubles the total runtime, restoring each individual performance to its original length—a crucial difference considering that several of these pieces stretch to 10-15 minutes or more. Bowles separated the music into two major categories: the music of North Africa’s Berber people on one LP and Arab- and Sub-Saharan-influenced music on another. Schuyler, an ethnomusicologist on faculty at the University of Washington, explains that Bowles regarded Berber music and culture as reflective of the "real" Morocco and thought of the Arabic influence as an invasive "contagion."
Schuyler’s new track sequence remains faithful to Bowles’ delineation between those two musical strains, but he does point out that the Arab influence had been steeping in Morocco for a thousand years by the time Bowles arrived. (Schuyler got to consult with Bowles on the project before the author’s death in 1999.) And while it’s certainly not necessary to approach the liner notes as a textbook in order to enjoy the music, the uninitiated will undoubtedly have trouble distinguishing between sounds that Bowles had learned to tell apart. On the other hand, the running order at first comes across as disparate and somewhat disconnected—as if playback had been a secondary consideration.
But the musical variety proves to be an asset in the long run. You may not initially be able place the various rhythmic and harmonic modes that bob and weave in what at first seems like one giant pool of music. But the more you listen, the more you can discern how the various motifs inter-relate and complement one another. After a while, as you get acclimated and your hearing comes into better focus, the entire 4xCD swath starts to play less like a haphazard gumbo of sounds and more like a series of carefully laid-out fabrics.
Regardless, it requires zero background info to be struck right away by three key aspects: repetition, cadence, and the fluidity of North African melodic scales. Bowles and Schuyler expound at great length on all the above, but suffice it to say that much of this music induces a powerful hypnotic effect. In the 1970 documentary Paul Bowles in Morocco, the author recalls how he once saw a man walk into a Moroccan café where a group of musicians were playing. As the man grew more entranced by the music, he started to slash his own arms and legs with a knife—in rhythm as the musicians kept playing. While that’s certainly on the extreme end, it’s a good illustration of how transportive this music can be—not unlike the way American gospel or Haitian ceremonial music can move people into altered states.
Of course, Music of Morocco offers a deeply satisfying experience even if you don’t get that carried away. For some perspective: Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix significantly enriched their work when they trained their sights on North Africa, but their exposure was limited. When Bowles put his Alan Lomax hat on and made these tapes, he had lived in the country for well over a decade. Unfamiliar listeners will no doubt find the flow of this music alien, its meter unfolding in seemingly lopsided patterns the way separate sets of wooden chimes clatter randomly as the wind strikes them. But the form in that clatter becomes evident over time. Moreover, Bowles’ attention to detail shows that he didn’t just regard this stuff as brightly-colored wallpaper or background scenery, but as the living, breathing pulse of the place he chose to call home.  When approaching this box, it pays to ditch your notions of how glamorous it was for emotionally desiccated, self-destructive figures like William Burroughs and late Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones to feed their habits in an "exotic" locale, the allure of the North African desert a mere backdrop in the arc of their crash-and-burn stories. Unlike his peers, Paul Bowles wasn’t content to just disappear into a cloud of hash smoke.
And so it makes sense that Music of Morocco is such an eye-opening, immersive document, the kind we’d expect from someone who’s spent time in a country getting to know its way of life but who could still make observations (or simply observe) as a guest. And if you’re a fan of Bowles’ novels, don’t expect the indulgent prose that’s all too typical of writers who can’t help but phrase everything as if they were reading aloud in front of an audience. Thankfully, as Schuyler explains, Bowles—a college dropout—didn’t identify as an academic, so he doesn’t come off as pedantic either. (One of the CD sleeves describes his writing as "spare, precise, and carefully assembled.") Because he didn’t lay it on thick in his journal, and because Schuyler refrains from fawning, the faux-leather, 120-page book that comes with this box actually works as standalone reading material that you'd want to keep at your bedside table or pack in your travel bag.
For a record label that’s built its reputation in large part on top-notch presentation standards, Dust-To-Digital, along with Rounder Records’ Bill Nowlin, have outdone themselves this time with a breathtaking package and sleek art direction courtesy of Barbara Bersche. If either you’ve lost sight of or continue to lament the disappearance of the physical object in recorded music, you couldn’t dream of a better reminder than this set. Words just don’t do justice to how it feels holding Music of Morocco in your hands, or to its stately elegance sitting on your shelf. And if you’re looking for an entry point into the soul of a people via its music, you simply can’t do better than Music of Morocco. Consider it essential regardless of your musical tastes or background.


George Lewis Jr. of Twin Shadow has always made music that felt rooted in '80s pop radio, a moment when thundering drum machines and vocal overdubs stormed the Earth. Here he's trying for something even more grand, but the trouble with big leaps is that they can come with precipitous drop-offs.

Eclipse

In 2010, George Lewis, Jr. released Forget, a small and evocative synth-pop record dotted with sense-memory details: "Here’s all I know/ Your checkered room and your velvet bow/ Your Elvis song in my ear," he crooned. The record was a success, but Lewis seemed impatient with the smaller-scale stardom it brought, and made his hunger for bigger stages plain in interviews. On his 2012 follow-up Confess, he upped the stakes, projecting in a booming, testosterone-rich voice over massive pop-rock tracks. It was a self-consciously spectacular pop record, and it solidified Lewis as someone eager to make Big Statements.
It’s easy to root for artists with this drive—the bedroom-to-stadium leap, when it goes right, is thrilling to witness, and major statements (and artists’ desires to make them) are a large part of what makes following music so worthwhile in the first place. The trouble with big leaps is that they can come with precipitous drop-offs, and on Eclipse Lewis plummets, hard, into a valley of deep ridiculousness.
Lewis’s influences have always felt rooted in '80s pop radio, when thundering drum machines and vocal overdubs stormed the Earth. On Eclipse, the sound edges into the twilight of '88, a moment when power ballads like Chicago’s "Look Away" ruled the airwaves. The dewy piano of "Alone", coupled with Lewis’s echo-drenched vocal, summon unwelcome memories of Richard Marx’s "Right Here Waiting". As he did with Confess, Lewis produces, and on Eclipse he pushes everything so far to the brink that it all tips over. The album sounds like the work of Ron Nevison, whose late-'80s work for Damn Yankees and Jefferson Starship set a new standard for what it meant to sound "overblown."
On Confess, Lewis gave us an outsized performance of masculinity that felt slippery, or at least self-aware, and a lot of that complexity lived in the dynamics. The choruses were massive, but the verses were taut and punchy, and the two worked in tandem. On Eclipse, that nuance is mostly erased, as is nearly any dynamic marking south of ffffffff. Most of the album is delivered in a triumphal shout. The chorus of "To the Top" punches the top of the mix so hard that there is almost nothing left to feel except stunned, and it carries a dangerous whiff of Dirk Diggler performing "You’ve Got the Touch".
Lewis dials back the volume once or twice on Eclipse, and each time it’s a welcome reprieve. "Old Love/New Love" is a legitimately sexy, fluid dance-pop song, marked out with a side-chained four-to-the-floor pulse and house pianos. The big, blocky synths of "When the Lights Turn Out" are slightly reminiscent of '80s Jam & Lewis, and Lewis’s voice is light and pretty above them. It might have a slight whiff of aerobicizing to it, but it’s sincere, and it’s possible, if you squint, to imagine it playing alongside One Direction (a huge compliment, in this case).
Playing next to One Direction is Lewis’s goal, and he is admirably focused and direct about it. "I hate when people that are definitely in the indie world posture themselves as pop stars when they lack the ambition, practice, and craft of someone who is at the top of their game in pop," he told Pitchfork in January. His disdain is rooted in a competitive impulse to swim with the big fish—he has also submitted material for Chris Brown and Eminem—and Eclipse, which is also his first album on Warner Bros., is his bid to join them. But the music feels wedged between weight classes—too ridiculous to be indie rock and too ponderous and generic for Top 40 pop. Say this for Eclipse: It doesn’t miss by half measures.


In the 37-minute piece that comprises his first solo album since 2005, the Mountains multi-instrumentalist ditches the distractions of the attention economy to luxuriate in a stream of consciousness.

June

Deep listening, extended listening, immersive listening—these are not novel concepts, but they do seem increasingly radical, and perhaps even endangered. Every year, the apparently irreversible march of technology chips away at our ability to focus, one crumbling nanosecond at a time. The attention economy turns concentration transactional, substituting red-dot rewards for the fluid pleasures of the stream of consciousness. Songs get shorter. Hooks sharpen. Images simplify, optimized for thumbnail view.
That’s not to say that great art is impossible in a distracted age. The young rapper-producer Tierra Whack recently proved that some ideas are so potent, they don’t need much runway. Her debut album found new dimensions in pop by breaking it open and letting the pieces tumble out like the insides of a kaleidoscope to reveal 15 perfectly proportioned baubles, each exactly one minute long. But to fashion music after the long tidal arc instead of the hiccup of the wired dopamine drip is to defend a different sort of value system. It is to decouple attention from economy, to insist that there need not always be a payoff.
Brendon Anderegg’s music has long been keyed to subtlety. In the early 2000s, recording solo under just his surname, he harnessed field recordings, tape loops, and electronics into crackling, rustling configurations not much more forceful than the scrape of a turned page. His duo Mountains, with Koen Holtkamp, channeled acoustic instruments into blissfully shimmering soundscapes imbued with the scent of the American heartland—a homegrown riposte to European cosmic music (he also occasionally mixes and engineers videos for Pitchfork’s video team).
June is Anderegg’s first major solo release in well over a decade. A single, 37-minute piece, it represents the most focused, minimalist music of his career. The first thing you notice is the suppleness of the sound: a lone synthesizer, twitching and bending at the edges, like a scrap of paper as it burns. That thin, twisting filament of tone is soon joined by a fluttering chord. There are no audible attacks, no traces of a key being pressed; sounds slink into earshot like Spanish dancers rippling across a diver’s peripheral vision. These are the elements that carry the listener through the next half-hour, shifting and morphing. Occasionally they drift down to a bassy near-silence; in the climactic final third of the piece, they build themselves back up into buzzing thickets of chords overlaid with aquatic gurgles, a spray of pulse and overtones reminiscent of Emeralds’ What Happened.
The music’s meandering flow resists interpretation; even its constituent parts—is that a synthesizer patch or a glassy scrap of feedback?—can defy identification. There is a lyrical quality to the melody, such as it is, an unmistakably expressive dimension to the way it twists and turns. Still, it is possible to imagine this as a composition with no guiding hand behind it—that Anderegg simply set the knobs on his boxes just so, flipped a switch, and walked away while the tape was running.
This ambiguity is the album’s defining quality. The pulses are quick, but the pacing is slow. There is little distinction between background and foreground. It’s impossible to say what is intentional and what is incidental. Is this “ambient music”? Yes and no; it is, above all, a music of in-betweenness. And in an increasingly binary world, that very slipperiness counts for quite a lot. June is equally suited for focused listening and gentle background hum, and it is entirely possible, over the course of its run, to toggle back and forth between the two states. That ability to cut a third way between attention and distraction is precisely what makes June feel so freeing.


Where his 1975 album Neighborhoods was rooted in the sounds of community, these previously unreleased archival recordings capture the Oregon wilderness in synths, zither, and field recordings.

Ernest Hood: Back to the Woodlands

In an endless sea of reissues from the world of early ambient music, Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods remains a beacon of light shining through the fog. Layered with field recordings of children running and playing, the 1975 curio has a warm, friendly air; where other electronic music of the era often sought transcendence in the stars or on the spiritual plane, Ernest Hood found it at the candy shop down the street. Confined to a wheelchair after being stricken with polio in his late twenties, Hood turned to sound as his connection to the world, mixing stray recordings from around his home in Portland with lush zither and synthesizer compositions, creating a woozy and nostalgic ode to community in the process. Much as Brian Wilson imagined Smile as a “teenage symphony to God,” Neighborhoods found a flicker of the divine in the buzz of a bustling playground.
Unlike Neighborhoods, which had been known to collectors for years prior to its 2019 reissue, Back to the Woodlands gathers unheard material. Recorded between 1972 and 1982 in what the notes identify only as “Western Oregon,” the music on Back to the Woodlands is clearly cut from the same cloth, but the pigmentation is different: Gone are the snatched bits of idle conversation that gave Neighborhoods its surreal sense of small-town charm. The synthesizers have yielded to a more acoustic palette that summons the tranquility of Oregon’s majestic wilds. It may not reach quite the same level of eccentric whimsy as its predecessor, but its soft patchwork of sounds also means it’s the easier listen of the two.
The Oregon Coast is home to some of the most stunning landscapes in the United States, and Hood captures its mystery with his fairy-tale zithers and babbling brook field recordings. On “Dusk,” his synthesizers hang in the air like the fog rolling into Astoria, tense blocks of notes floating in a strangely eerie calm. “Into the Groves” spills over with all the radiance of a mossy waterfall, as Hood plays dizzying arpeggios that slowly dissolve into shimmering sweeps across the strings. The real delights are when Hood taps directly into the feeling of being a young child wandering through the forest. In “Pleasant, This Garden,” he tiptoes along a plucked pattern reminiscent of a slowed-down Django Reinhardt swing—one of his original musical obsessions. “Bedroom of the Absent Child,” meanwhile, sways upon golden fingerpicked chords, its gentle melody winding up and down like a music box, each tinny note just barely tumbling out one at a time.
There’s a samey tone to some of the stretches throughout Back to the Woodlands, making the moments where Hood breaks from his swooning ambience to venture into playful new territory feel all the more vital. With its jazzy flutes, “The Jantzen Rag (Raccoons)” has all the mischievous innocence of a Vince Guaraldi waltz, while the hammering synth notes of “Fragrant Duff” spring forth like butterflies flapping their wings over a field of flowers. But even in its tamer segments, Back to the Woodlands offers a rich new perspective on Hood’s wondrous world. Where Neighborhoods elicited the reassuring feeling of living in a community where everyone knows your name, Back to the Woodlands accesses a more primitive, elemental sense of magic.