*Triplicate, *again, features Dylan singing tunes from the Great American Songbook. His voice is filled with character, though the cumulative impact of the 30-song set is somewhat dimmed.

Triplicate

Bob Dylan’s Triplicate is the third album of American standards that Bob Dylan has released in the past two years. It is also three albums long, with 10 songs on each album, for a total runtime of 95 minutes. Dylan, a songwriter whose most enigmatic refrain is that he is less complicated than everyone makes him out to be, has explained that 10 is the number of completion, a lucky number, “symbolic of light.”
In any case, the project brings the total number of hours of Bob Dylan singing American standards to just under three. Like Fallen Angels and Shadows in the Night, Triplicate leans most heavily on material associated with Frank Sinatra, a singer with whom Dylan has nothing obvious in common other than that fame turned both men into myths. Some of the songs here—“Stormy Weather,” “As Time Goes By,” “Stardust”—are well known, at least to the vanishing population of those who care. Most were written in the misty and unremembered days when the singer still went by Robert Zimmerman, a period on which Dylan has staked his entire career.
The arrangements are polished and controlled: guitar, bass, brushed snare drum, the occasional weep of steel guitar. Dylan’s voice is not, and has not been for nearly 50 years, but coming to a Bob Dylan album for vocals is like going to the state fair for the food: Let’s hope you like it fried. In the absence of a crooner’s virtuosity and polish, there’s character, that great unteachable quality that makes even the marginal doodles of a genius flicker with life. Dylan’s voice—gutted but charming, a ghost banging around in the closet looking for a lightswitch—sounds best on the album’s mid- and uptempo songs, where it carries wisdom and resilience and light, imbuing received wisdom with the bittersweetness of lived experience.
The ballads, beautiful as they are, sometimes feel static, bereft of that innerverse opened by singers like Johnny Hartman or, say, Willie Nelson, whose own standards album Stardust remains a high point for projects like this. There seems to be a tempo threshold below which the songs on *Triplicate *become quicksand for Dylan, turning him from an old scamp into a confused puddle of remorse. Call it the difference between just enough and one too many. (At least he’s not maudlin, the cliff over which all ballads peer.) The exceptions—“There’s a Flaw in My Flue,” “But Beautiful”—tend to be songs whose lyrics offer their singers an opportunity to be funny, a quality Dylan continues to not get enough credit for.
In either case, the gambit—and this has always been Dylan’s gambit as a vocalist—is not to sing well, but to sing appropriately. For the same reasons you wouldn’t cast a 7-year-old as someone’s grandmother, it’s tough to sell “Here’s That Rainy Day” when sung by a singer who sounds like they’ve always stayed dry.
Traditionally, an album like Triplicate would have been a way for a performer to showcase their interpretive powers, the relic of a time when songwriting was consolidated in office buildings and movie studios and popular art was understood—without handicap—to be the product of the division of labor: Some write, some produce, some play, some sing.
The irony is that this is a tradition Dylan helped to destroy. “Tin Pan Alley is gone,” he wrote in 1985, referring to a metonym for the songwriting industry during the 1930s and ’40s. “I put an end to it. People can record their own songs now.”
Can and do are different things. We still have our superproducers, our backdoor deliveries, the shapes moving behind the curtains. We also still have our “bad” singers, many of whom are the most interesting vocalists around: Young Thug, Bill Callahan. Things—as the durability of the sentiments behind these songs show—don’t change all that much. Still, 95 minutes is a long time.
Let’s say we take Triplicate at face value. What do we have? A good-natured investigation into the Great American Songbook that allows a wealthy eccentric to stroll, publicly, through the annals of his own mind. One does get the sense of life behind these performances, of private experience refracted through universal sentiment, of hard knocks transubstantiated into easy wisdom, but, as is often the case with Bob Dylan, the drama remains mostly internal. There is something ridiculous about it, something enigmatic, something that glitters with the transcendence of a weird idea brought to stubborn fruition. Something Dylanesque.


Up-and-coming Cleveland songwriter collects his first few months' worth of singles and mp3s, plus releases a new four-song single that ups the fidelity.

Cloud Nothings: Turning On / Leave You Forever

Turning On / Leave You Forever

Last fall, Cleveland native Dylan Baldi began recording songs in his parents' basement, on a computer, under the name Cloud Nothings. By December, Baldi was playing his first show, opening for lo-fi kingpins Woods and Real Estate in Brooklyn. There was one snag: Baldi, 18 at the time, was in the middle of his first college finals. He opted to drop out, play the show, and spend his time touring and recording like wild.
Turning On is a compilation that lassos together nearly everything from those first several months, including one split cassette, a 7", and the cassette-turned-CD-R-turned-vinyl LP from which it takes its name. All of the songs have been floating around online for a while, but the comp is as much a primer for a forthcoming full-length as it is an early portrait of a young songwriter with an immediate ear for what works and why. Though Baldi figured out pretty quickly how to deliver his hooks in a variety of styles (see: the post-punk squall of "I Am Rooftop" or the AM-radio twinkle of "Strummin'") his strength lies in always giving straight-ahead pop mechanics license to spazz out. Verses boast sharp fangs, choruses beg repeating, and everything is presented with throaty conviction.
But what becomes clear most quickly is how much these songs would benefit from a studio and band. (Baldi recorded every instrument himself.) Beneath his chorus and backup vocal on "Waddya Wanna Know", you can barely make out a handsome guitar line that, if heard more clearly, would only tease out more melody. Three quarters of the way through "Water Turns Back", the disc's highlight, Baldi solos loosely but very faintly, the sound of his Fender almost completely buried in an already heady mix. Moments like that are scattered throughout this compilation, though to really hear a difference, you need to hear something new.
Released alongside Turning On, the four-song Leave You Forever single, recorded this summer, finds Baldi giving his songs a bath. The guitars are clean and sharp, there's a drummer with verve behind the kit, and as a result, every hook is more vibrant. From the slingshot pace of the title track to the La's-like ribbons of "Talk to Me" to the harmony-enriched coda of "You Were Scared", there's a lot at which to marvel. Here, Baldi sounds not just like a guy getting over a girl, but someone whose melodic understanding continues to evolve as his confidence grows.


Death From Above drummer/vocalist Sebastien Grainger's new solo effort Yours to Discover is an album of love songs, a release that's catchy for the wrong reasons and confined by its narrow scope.

Yours to Discover

It’s always difficult to establish a solo career in the shadow of your previous band if it was short-lived, intensely loved and went out in peak form. But over the past decade, Sebastian Grainger’s had it easier than most in that unenviable position. As the drummer/vocalist in Death From Above 1979, he basically did one thing—searing, noise-pop breakup songs where he and bassist Jessie F. Keller punished their instruments as hard as they punished themselves in the lyrics. And DFA 1979’s last album You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine nailed an extremely specific sound and feeling so perfectly that a reunion show where a police horse got punched seems like the only logical or acceptable follow-up. You couldn’t begrudge the lack of new material, as their limited range and narrow focus led you to believe that it would never top You’re a Woman, and in all likelihood, should be a lot worse. Unlike the more “singer-songwriter” excursion of 2008’s Sebastien Grainger & The Mountains, the slicker, louder Yours to Discover gives you an idea of just how much worse.
By a good distance the best song here, “Waking Up Dead”, is the closest Grainger gets to recalling his old band in both content and delivery. Feeling like shit about a busted relationship and knowing you deserve to feel that way was basically You’re a Woman’s emotional baseline and despite its zippy, glossy latter-day Strokes facade, “Waking Up Dead” is a domestic drama given a gut-level punch. After another night of getting wasted and forgetting anything he might’ve said, Grainger yelps “I woke up in an empty bed/ you left for work/ I thought you left for good”, and yeah, we’ve all been there. The chorus also boasts an immediate hook, albeit one that starts out strong for its first couple of bars before taking too many indecisive turns. Still, “Waking Up Dead” is the peak of Yours to Discover and the last time it ever bears some resemblance of a relatable human moment. It’s also the second song, and the first is an instrumental “Overture.”
This is problematic since Yours to Discover is an album of presumable love songs. Not only that, there’s more than a few lovemaking songs, which in a roundabout way has the album picking up where DFA 1979 left off. It’s just an alternate reality where “Sexy Results” turns out like Sugar Ray’s “Fly”, a jumping off point rather than the previous album’s total outlier of a closer. Sure, many people love “Sexy Results” (myself included) and DFA 1979 might still be living off some of that Motorola Q money, but it benefitted greatly from humor (in both the lyrical construct and Simpsons reference) and context within a caustic, self-flagellating record. Yours to Discover has neither qualities aside from a few casual remarks about becoming a greying letch. And as such, all that remains is the smooth talk and the smoother corporate rock sheen. For the latter, don’t think of Toto, but rather latter day Weezer and Fountains of Wayne, assembly line pop-rock incapable of inspiring any emotion except for the nagging sense you’re being sold something.
In this event, it’s non-descript civic planning over lukewarm funk on “The Streets Are Still a Mess”, demo-quality disco more akin to the other DFA (“Let’s Move To NYC”) or, most often, Grainger himself (“I Want Sebastien Grainger”). Grainger’s usually selling himself in the figurative sense, as a power-pop craftsman, and some of these songs are actually pretty catchy. But they stick for the wrong reasons, whether it’s an awkward melodic turn or, more often, an unconscionably lazy lyric. Over a dorm-room acoustic strum, “I'm Looking For A Hand” oozes fake strings and even faker sentiments—“How many times have I gone missin’/ looking for a girl in a world of women/ I tell it to you, ma-ha-ha-an/ I’m looking for a ha-ah-ah-and.”
Yours to Discover never feels like a dishonest record, just one where it’s incredibly hard to grasp the intentions or ambitions of its creator. Are we to take the title, cover and solo attribution of Yours to Discover as a sign that it's meant to be heard as a transmission from Sebastien Grainger rather than "Sebastien Grainger's new project"? Or, does the plasticine production and rigid verse-chorus structure of these songs give you a sense that Grainger hears it as a star turn of sorts, albeit in an aesthetic that has no currency whatsoever? The bigger issue and really the only one, is that for an album so obsessed with physicality, none of its twelve songs operates from the brain, heart or groin. So while Grainger didn’t make a record that tops You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine, he did make one more deserving of its title.


Roughly two years after their dynamic debut Silent Alarm, Bloc Party are no less earnest and deadly serious, but no less in charge of their craft either.

A Weekend in the City

Of all the big British rock bands of the moment, Bloc Party are probably the guys who take themselves the most seriously. As smart people go, they're surprisingly convinced of their own capacity to say something meaningful. They're just as serious about the possibilities of grand, ambitious pop/rock. Whether it's the messianic hooks of U2, the far-reaching drama of Radiohead, or the grandiose sensitivity of Coldplay, most indie rockers approach stepping lightly and sounding self-conscious; Bloc Party come at them with a sincerity that can seem almost naïve, almost teenaged. And with music and image both totally free of the attitude we expect from young, clever bands-- there's no humor, irony, cynicism, or snot, and never a trace of cool-guy apathy-- they seem as earnest and serious-minded as seminarians or door-to-door campaign volunteers.
All of this could have led them down the path to an absolutely dreadful second album: pompous, preachy, overreaching, and still dull. But then there's the other side of their seriousness. Judging by their records, Bloc Party are awfully dedicated to the craft and the details of making this stuff: From their first songs onward, they've been cruising through big tricks with a studied ease that makes you wonder why other bands find it so difficult. If they have the demeanor of rock's teacher's pets, they have the talent and the work ethic, too-- they're attentive, conscientious, and good at what they do. And this keeps them … well, convincing.
And so when A Weekend in the City comes bursting out at you with a gaggle of second-album upgrades-- new tricks, new scope, new arrangements-- the bulk of them sound like good ideas: They've been executed by hard-working professionals. The opener has singer Kele Okerere trying on a sly, potentially embarrassing falsetto, but within a minute the band's starting to kick up dust, on its way to a chorus hook that's loose, energetic, and honestly thrilling: It's the kind of craftsmanship that would sound good coming from nearly anyone. "Hunting for Witches" fakes you out with a sample collage at the top, then takes on xenophobia in a dutiful re-take on the band's first hit, "Banquet". And then there's "Waiting for the 7:18", the best summary yet of the band's personality: unfashionably starry-eyed at the start, then running its way up to huge hooks and guitar heroism that feel a lot more fierce and weighty than you'd think. Through it all, they're upping the technical ante, too-- Matt Tong drumming tricksy rhythms alongside computer programs, Russell Lissack stepping out from between synthesizer choirs with a string of squalling guitar leads. It's darker, broader, and more desperate than their debut, and through its first half-- when they're front-loading the hooks and energy-- it's difficult to imagine what they might have done better.
Okerere's lyrics reach a lot farther, too, which both helps and hurts. Looked at line by line, there's plenty of clumsiness, and the words don't do much to dispel the band's earnest-undergraduate feel. The subject matter and the sentiments, though, are starting to shine brighter, and not on the Big Topics. A pair of rather complicated songs-- "The Prayer" and "On"-- are spent begging both drugs and the powers that be for the power to live out nightlife fantasies: "Tonight make me unstoppable/ And I will charm, I will slice/ I will dazzle them with my wit." Elsewhere, Okerere starts to sing about his own sexuality and love life: This may be the moment where the earnest undergrad, always more comfortable writing about Issues, starts learning to reveal.
But of course there's always the part where it all starts to drag. Bloc Party's sound may have a lot to do with the many bands these days that have been influenced by post-punk, but the truth is that-- sincere young men that they are-- they have none of the punk-bred skepticism or self-censorship of the average indie act. This is, without doubt, a good thing, and a nice change. But at times it really does let the band get pompous and dull: When they go wrong, it almost always comes in the form of easy drama or their visile sappy streak, two things they turn out not to be as skilled with as you'd think. Maybe it's just that the hooks aren't working, but "Uniform", the longest song on the record-- spent taking the kids to task for their "masks of cool and indifference"-- is a chore: Self-serious, schoolmarmish, convinced it's being dramatic when it's mostly just being boring. And the second half of A Weekend in the City keeps falling into similar traps: Drama that's more ponderous than ominous, and ballads that shoot for slick, sensitive pop-chart appeal, but come off fluffy, underinspired, or strangely retro-- stuff that would have felt heavy in 1995, but seems too doe-eyed and green today.
Still, one can't help but be impressed by these guys. They're a rare rock band, after all-- such skilled craftsmen that they can hang on to indie fans even as they aim, with striking earnestness, to be the kind of band who show up on "first album I ever bought" lists.


Light in the Attic’s new age compilation I Am the Center doesn’t try and pretend new age music was something it’s not. Focusing on private presses, it starts in 1950, about 25 years before the term “new age” existed in any kind of widespread way, and leads up to 1990, when the genre had devolved into factory-like repetitions of itself.

Various Artists: I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age Music In America 1950-1990

One of the best things about Seattle label Light in the Attic’s new new age compilation I Am the Center is that it doesn’t try and pretend that new age music was something that it’s not. Look at the album’s cover illustration and you’ll see an angel-like creature carrying an orb of yellow light through the clouds; open the gatefold and you’ll see what appears to be a bird made of stars launching itself out of the ocean. Press play and be delivered into over two hours of mind-numbingly mellow music with titles like “Unicorns in Paradise” and “Tien Fu: Heaven’s Gate”. The structures are simple and the textures are light. Focusing too hard on it is like trying to remember a dream you just had: It will do nothing but piss you off. But like the right color paint on the walls or a thoughtful arrangement of lamps, good new age music feels both peripheral and essential: Something made not to be focused on as much as to remind people listening to it that focusing is only one way to experience the world.
Center starts in 1950, about 25 years before the term “new age” existed in any kind of widespread way, and leads up to 1990, when the genre had devolved into factory-like repetitions of itself. (Steve Vining, who took over the pioneering label Windham Hill from its founder Will Ackerman, once said that running it was more like running Proctor & Gamble than running a record label.) The picks here focus on private presses: Essentially, DIY labels operating outside conventional channels of marketing and distribution. If there’s any argument being made by Light in the Attic here, it’s that new age wasn’t just a multimillion-dollar industry engineered to relax middle-aged Americans rich enough to afford CD players in 1982 (when they cost the equivalent of about $1,600), but an underground scene as self-reliant and countercultural as the ones surrounding newer labels like Oneohtrix Point Never’s Software or Los Angeles’ Not Not Fun—labels whose artists have recast aspects of new age as a form of punk, or what Lopatin once called “quiet noise.”
Like any genre, the sound of new age varies. Some of the tracks here are acoustic; some are all electronic. Some—like the keyboardist Stephen Halpern or Brian Eno collaborator Laraaji—suggests a quiet, person-to-person connection that way a folksinger with a guitar might. Others—a like Iasos and Constance Demby—make cavernous music seemingly designed to remind us that we are but specks of dust in a cosmos too awesomely infinite for our mortal brains to ever possibly comprehend. (Iasos insisted that his first album was not made by him but through him; Demby once invented an instrument called the “space bass” that she has described as “a transdimensional communication device”—gestures that both assert new age ideas about spirituality but also reassert very old-fashioned ones about how the self can dissolve when it comes into contact with the sublime.)
Personally I prefer the less grandiose stuff, but the variety of I Am the Center is one of its best attributes: Instead of pigeonholing the genre by turning it into something overly specific, Center shows how artists with totally different approaches to sound and style can still be grouped together. Crucially, it does this without trying to stretch the Venn diagram of new age to include artists or styles with more cultural cache, like 70s classical composition or drone—music that shares new age’s interest in spirituality and repetition but that tends toward an intensity that, in the context of new age, seems damningly unchill. What you end up with is a compilation that stays true to its genre while also doing everything it can to demonstrate how varied that genre can be.
When I was a kid, I suffered intense anxiety problems, which my mother tried to help me combat with a variety of cures: Exercise, homeopathic medicine, counseling, religion, and eventually, new age music. While other kids were being subjected to the Beatles on car trips, I lay on the carpeted floor of my room listening to cassettes with titles like Celestial Journeys and Inner Sanctum II: Reclaiming the Inner Sanctum. A few years later, when I started to get into punk and hardcore, I realized the best new age music wasn’t all that different: There was a similar purity of purpose, a similar rejection of societal values, and a similar unwillingness to bend, either toward more concrete rhythms—which can sometimes turn new age into chintzy, synth-heavy instrumental pop (e.g. the ubiquitous Kitaro)—or toward more complex compositions that might have leant their makers credibility but compromised the essentially relaxing quality that good new age promised never to disturb.
Still, I write this knowing that new age is among the most easily ridiculed genres of music that exists. Its practitioners can be somehow pretentious and weak-minded, ludicrously abstract and yet as sure of their discoveries as a scientist. “Music helps to concentrate oneself,” the liner notes to I Am the Center start. “To bring oneself to an inner state when we can assume the greatest possible emancipations. That is why music is just the thing which helps you too see higher.” The words—a quote from Thomas de Hartmann—say it all, which is to say that they don’t really say anything. Then comes the voice of Yoga Records founder and Center’s compiler, Douglas Mcgowan: “So many declarative statements to make on the subject of new age, and so little time. And yet,” he goes on, “we do have the time, and the best new age music shows us this.” It’s the kind of subtle, canny move new age acolytes aren’t exactly known for making: Accepting the occasional goofiness of what they do while reasserting its value at the same time.


On his 14th album, Beck roams across a pleasant, gently psychedelic landscape looking for something new.

Hyperspace

Beck has now spent 15 years struggling with the very challenge he presented in the first half of his career: Who does he want to be? After a string of minor statements, Hyperspace doesn’t reignite his spark but it sheds a little light. Produced mostly with Pharrell, his 14th album is a breezy song cycle that rarely rises above a warped, shimmering sigh. Following 2014’s densely orchestrated Morning Phase and 2017’s labored pop turn Colors, it immediately feels like a relief. Like his best records, you can imagine the mood board hanging in the studio—synth-pop, vaporwave, trap beats, the future as imagined in ’80s movies—as he bends his influences into new shapes. At first, the plan was to collaborate with Pharrell on just one song, but after a few sessions, they felt there was more ground to cover within this gently psychedelic landscape. It was a good instinct.
The album sounds best when they stick to the plan. The cloying, stomp-clap single “Saw Lightning” is an outlier; it’s also the type of song that might have kept Beck up at night after “Loser” threatened to turn him into a one-hit wonder a quarter-century ago. Maybe he imagined himself at 49 searching for a hit while rapping over distorted slide guitar and so he decided to pivot his career in every other conceivable direction, as quickly as possible. “I would have thrived in a time like this,” he recently told NME. “I was creating so much music and my limitation was that I didn’t have the equipment to record myself. If I had a laptop and SoundCloud I would have loved it.” His sentiment rings true—particularly in a year when the biggest breakout hit was a grungy, tossed-off hip-hop-country hybrid—but his use of the past tense speaks louder. Why isn’t Beck thriving in a time like this?
He’s found himself in a strange position. Kind of like the Flaming Lips, he has been grandfathered into the role of an eccentric major-label lifer, and, like the Flaming Lips, he occasionally wanders into the interesting-in-theory vanity project netherworld. But Beck still adheres to old-school tenets of the industry: big singles, high-profile collaborations, brand partnerships. Hyperspace was previewed with a blandly conventional Amazon Exclusive set of Prince covers, an especially damning moment as it coincided with the 20-year anniversary of Midnite Vultures, Beck’s spiritual tribute to Prince. It’s been a long time since he successfully integrated his personality and his music. On a trajectory more like a blockbuster film franchise, his biggest release of the decade was essentially a reboot of 2002’s Sea Change.
Despite its missteps, the smooth, twilight sound of Hyperspace pushes him toward new territory. During the second half of the record, the sky seems to darken and the songs bind together into a mini-suite with overlapping themes and melodies. It culminates with a gospel choir bursting out of “Everlasting Nothing,” but the whole record works toward a more muted kind of celebration. Along the way, there are guest verses from Pharrell and L.A. songwriter Terrell Hines, undetectable vocals from Sky Ferreira and Coldplay’s Chris Martin, and yet the mood remains intimate, solitary even. Its best songs—“Chemical,” “Dark Places”—are like lullabies delivered from a space shuttle with just one person on it. You can feel the distance.
The results are consistently pleasant to listen to, though there’s a subtle dissonance between medium and message. Thematically these ballads draw a line to Sea Change, Beck’s initial foray into heartbreak and sincerity. Many of the songs on Hyperspace continue a weary road narrative, their lush settings just a blur outside a moving window. A few moments allude to his recent divorce from actress Marissa Ribisi and another makes a direct, slightly jarring reference to using heroin. But all of them search for escape in their vague, downer narratives. He rarely focuses on any thought for too long, and the transience works in his favor. If he’s going to drift, at least he’ll enjoy the view.
“I feel so ugly when you see through me,” he sings midway through the album. At one point in his career, it might have sounded like a confession, back when his constant reinventions felt like a defense against being pigeonholed. On those early records, he’d bury apocalyptic visions in music that was playful and referential, rarely drawing attention to how much thought was being poured into every decision. Nowadays, it’s less rewarding to dig for the substance beneath his aesthetics. There’s less to see through. “There was a point where I was, like, ‘Is this over?’” he recently admitted to the New Yorker. “But I wake up with songs going. Melodies, harmonies, a bass line. It’s like there’s a radio station playing in my head all the time.” Listening to Hyperspace provides a similar experience—sometimes he hits pure signal, and sometimes it’s just background noise as he gets to wherever he’s going next.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Borrowing the sample-crazed approach of the Avalanches, this unlikely California trio create winning tunes from a junkyard jumble of soft-rock keys and big breakbeats.

Breakfast

If the name Mötley Crüe (give or take some letters and umlauts) weren’t already taken or if Tommy Lee weren’t so petty, it would make a great handle for an unlikely California trio. Oakland’s J. Darrah, aka 12manrambo, is a noted collector, blogger, and dealer of rare Bay Area rap tapes. Oakland drummer Harland Burkhart plays in the shape-shifting metal bands Wild Hunt and Dispirit. And Los Angeles’ Cole M. Greif-Neill, aka Cole M.G.N., is a collaborator of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti and a celebrated producer whose credits include Julia Holter, Snoop Dogg, Beck, and Christine and the Queens. But when the ragtag group made their debut EP in 2010, they called themselves the Samps, evoking perhaps the only technique that could unite three musicians working in such wildly different worlds. Sampling is about what you bring to the table, never mind where it comes from.
Their debut EP took the Avalanches’ approach—chopping dozens, even hundreds, of samples and buffing them, like agates in a rock tumbler, until their origins are all but untraceable—and tipped it toward sounds in vogue at the top of this decade, like the squishy funk of Nite Jewel or the pop fantasies of Washed Out. Eight years later, their debut album, Breakfast, continues in the same vein, but it’s bigger in every way: often funkier, frequently funnier, and, at its best, far stranger.
Their palette is a junkyard jumble of soft-rock keys, wailing guitar solos, gargantuan breakbeats, and outmoded drum machines. They apply distortion to everything, with a dash of madcap humor riding just beneath the surface. “We’re gonna have a big fun tonight,” purrs an oily baritone at the record’s outset, before a searching string intro gives way to a starry-eyed line from the film George Washington: “I wish I could go to outer space, man. I wish I had my own planet. I wish there were 200 of me, man. I wish I could just sit around with computers and brainstorm all day.” A bumptious funk romp in the lineage of Todd Edwards and Akufen, “Head” takes the tongue-in-cheek baton in a darker direction, folding in an iconic clip from the 1992 horror film Candyman and a few filthy rap couplets.
Daft Punk loom large over the Samps’ hooks and kitsch. The stuttering hard-rock guitars and drums of “Spice Ship” sound like “Robot Rock” as performed by an assembly line run amok; the sleeker “Hit n Run” flips yacht-rock guitar licks into filter-disco heaven, with vocoders glistening like spun silk. And “Let Me Down” caps the album with its most ebullient mood of all, whipping filtered synth chords and wordless vocals like a meringue, light as the frothiest M83 song.
The Samps are more intriguing when they’re less obvious. Beneath the omnipresent distortion, “World Keeps Burning” has an understated yearning that recalls Washed Out’s “Feel It All Around.” The album’s opening stretch zig-zags mysteriously between acid-fried DJ Shadow tributes and airy pop-ambient that could bring a tear to Godley & Creme’s cheeks. The Samps have cited Kompakt as a major influence; you can hear echoes of Dettinger’s lumpy, off-kilter beats on “Recovery,” while “Try Two Move” sounds like the Field run through one of Tim Hecker’s distortion units. On songs like these, the Samps harness euphoria without tugging too hard on the heartstrings. That restraint goes a long way.
Tucked deep in the back half, between the abstracted “Try Two Move” and the eager-to-please “Let Me Down,” “Backstabbers” seems easy to miss—just a few gossamer synths braided with easy-listening sax, acoustic guitar, and ambient rumble. It all hangs on a single sample, pitched way down, that layers a voluminous kick drum with pastel-colored atmospheres. Every time it hits, it’s like the dull surface of a geode cracking open to reveal a hidden world of crystals. The way it came to be remains a mystery, but the shine is irresistible.


More of a producer than a composer, Toro Y Moi carries the chillwave torch into 2010 and works best when he's exploring sounds instead of songs.

Causers of This

About six months removed from the summer of chillwave, Toro Y Moi's debut LP is being released in the dead of winter. Which is kind of great, if only because it prohibits us from falling back on categorizing Chaz Bundick's sound as "beach music." After all, chillwave was never really about the beach. Even if the springy sounds of Neon Indian and Washed Out often felt coastal and waterlogged, the style was always more about texture and atmosphere than it was about place. As Bundick told me in a recent interview, "The beach thing is coincidental. If I look at a band like Best Coast or Wavves, they live on the beach. I go to the beach, like, once a year."
The other hump to get over when discussing chillwave is the purported sameyness of the artists involved. You know, the idea that Toro Y Moi isn't really that different from Washed Out, Memory Tapes is basically an ambient Neon Indian, and so forth. This one's a little more difficult because there really are clear aesthetic similarities between these guys. Still, there are distinctions. Looking at Toro Y Moi in comparison to Washed Out and Neon Indian, the main difference is that the latter two put more of an emphasis on hooks. Their songs are generally catchier and more straightforwardly composed. Bundick, on the other hand, is more producer than songwriter. While they might lack the immediacy of a "Deadbeat Summer" or "Feel It All Around", his tracks often have deeper, more interesting layers.
Which approach you prefer will impact how much you get out of Causers of This. The album is geared more toward those who appreciate production, and in some ways is a departure from Bundick's earlier singles such as "109" and "Sad Sams". At times guitar-based, those songs were generally pretty punchy and utilized a fair amount of lo-fi tape hiss. Here, though, Bundick embraces a cleaner and mellower sound that's more indebted to hip-hop. He wears his inspirations proudly, and throughout there's a clear nod to producers like J Dilla and Flying Lotus. What he extracts from these sources, Bundick combines with his own vocals and other instrumentation to make warm, wobbly pop songs that, while not always as catchy as his contemporaries', are distinctive and appealing in their own right.
The album starts out strong with a string of tracks that showcase Bundick's range. First two songs "Blessa" and "Minors" exhibit his pop sensibilities, setting a wash of vocals over looped electro-funk instrumentals and crisp drum programming. Here Bundick strikes a nice balance between sticky vocal melodies and the undulating arrangements that feature through the rest of the record. On other tracks in the first half, he takes on genre experiments with similar success-- first jaunty piano soul on "Imprint After" and then sparkly disco with "Lissoms", the album's most propulsive moment. While these songs are all enjoyable, "Fax Shadow" serves as the best representation of Toro's potential. It's the most complex track here, and in its Dilla soul sampling and distorted beat pattern, Bundick shows production skill far beyond most of his peers.
Each of these songs work in a similar way. Instead of using crude production, he manipulates sounds to create texture. It's the way "Freak Love"'s drums fall off that enhances its mood, not that they sound blown-out or tinny. This craftsmanship carries him through most of the album, but begins to fade towards the end. Bundick doesn't run out of ideas at this point, but his balance of arrangement and song feels off. "You Hid" is wobbly but one-note, lacking punch, and the closing title track is too cluttered. If Causers of This stayed consistent through the end, it might be up there with the assured debuts of his peers; instead, it's just a few notches below.


The Swedish band’s 1986 debut balanced lumbering riffs and operatic drama, spawning the genre of epic doom metal. This reissue pairs its crushing, rough-hewn songs with demos and rehearsal recordings.

Epicus Doomicus Metallicus

There’s no award for album titles, but when one spawns an entire genre in its wake, it feels like the highest possible honor. It doesn’t happen often—see Smokey Robinson’s A Quiet Storm and Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports—but as heavy metal became globally popular in the 1980s and continued branching out into web-like subcategories, it happened twice in just a few years. In 1982, the British band Venom released their startlingly extreme second album, Black Metal, first inspiring a wave of speed-demon thrash bands, then even more evil-sounding bands who took the “black metal” banner and ran with it. And in 1986, some kids in Sweden who played slow, dramatic, heavy music not only coined the “epic doom metal” genre tag, but also made its ur-text. Like a power hitter pointing to the bleachers beyond centerfield while approaching the plate, Candlemass dubbed their debut Epicus Doomicus Metallicus. Peaceville Records’ new 35th anniversary reissue celebrates the album with a fresh remaster and two bonus discs of demos and rehearsal recordings.
By the mid-’80s, the new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM) had ripped like a wildfire around the world, distancing metal from the blues riffs of its early days and speeding up its tempos. Its many thrash progenies, such as Metallica and Slayer, further ramped up that arms race. In this landscape, Candlemass were retro fetishists from a corner of the map that hadn’t yet established itself as a metal stronghold. Avowed Black Sabbath fans, they drew up an entire blueprint from the slowest, creepiest songs in their idols’ catalog, such as “Into the Void,” “Electric Funeral,” and of course, the song that’s commonly cited as the first-ever example of doom metal, “Black Sabbath.” Candlemass strove in the complete opposite direction of their most popular contemporaries, but just like thrash bands’ giga-warped take on Iron Maiden’s galloping riffs and black metal bands’ lo-fi corruption of Venom’s vision, they made Sabbath’s sounds their own by taking them to the extreme. Fatter riffs, slower tempos, more operatic vocals, more gothic synths, nerdier lyrics—these were Candlemass’ aspirations.
The melodies on Epicus Doomicus Metallicus are dramatic and expansive without being overly complex, alternately hinting at pre-Renaissance origins and/or the most basic skeletons of classical music. Especially during acoustic passages on songs like “Under the Oak” and “A Sorcerer’s Pledge,” it’s easy to imagine the music being cribbed from a cruel medieval dynasty’s funeral rites. (On their next album, the band actually covered the most famous funeral march of all-time.) Epicus’ deceptively simple trick is that these melodies, when transposed on drop-tuned, distorted electric guitars, make the beefiest blues riff sound like a kitten’s mewl. Witness the transition on opener “Solitude” where, just as a mournful acoustic guitar line peters out, an electric fades in, playing a version of the same melody, but simplified in a brute-force way that instantly awakens the lizard brain. This is what striking gold sounds like—a simple, near-accidental discovery that, in time, made thousands believe that it was as easy as sticking a pan into a creek.
Candlemass’ early lineup shuffling suggests that it might actually be that easy. Of the six people that play on Epicus, only two, bassist Leif Edling and rhythm guitarist Mats Björkman, showed up on the following year’s Nightfall. Epicus was recorded with a singer (Johan Längquist) and a lead guitarist (Klas Bergwall) who were called in as session musicians at the eleventh hour to record material that, apart from the guitar solos, was already finely mapped out. Despite the constant churn, Candlemass were consistent, putting out four good-to-great albums between ‘86 and ‘89, and Edling was the glue that held it all together. He’s the sole songwriter on the vast majority of Candlemass’ output, and on the demos included with this Epicus reissue, he’s even doing the vocals. Especially for music that’s driven by lumbering riffs instead of tight grooves, it’s rare for a non-singing bassist to be the bandleader: Unlikely as it was, Edling became the godfather of epic doom metal.
Compared to Candlemass’ ensuing output, Epicus has a charmingly rudimentary, rough-hewn quality. It’s not astounding to imagine session players learning these parts in a matter of weeks. At the time, Längquist (who rejoined the band in 2018) wasn’t quite the lurid, vibrato-prone wailer that his more celebrated successor, Messiah Marcolin, was. But these crushing, slightly ridiculous songs require everyone to hit their marks, and as a result, Candlemass never sounded more united toward a single purpose. This renders the reissue’s demos, whose differences mostly lie in audio fidelity, less essential; it also makes the band’s more grandiose later material look even more ambitious by comparison. Compared to the self-consciously “epic” bands it would inspire, Epicus balances histrionics with an edgy brawn, instantly recognizable among the era’s more primordial heavy metal.
Bands like Pentagram, Trouble, the Obsessed, and Witchfinder General had built on the Sabbath template throughout the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, so the term “doom metal” was already in the ether by 1986. But due to a number of factors—in Pentagram’s case, forming in 1971 but not releasing their first album until 1985—it took until the mid-’80s for the the genre to evolve and spark scenes as far-flung as New Orleans and Northern England. Epicus was initially received so poorly that Candlemass were dropped from their label, Black Dragon Records, shortly after its release. Six months later, demand was so high that the album had been repressed three times. And now, you can hear its echoes in every skyward-reaching doom band.


The Toronto post-rock band returns with their first album in eight years. It’s the well-oiled sound of a band pushing the boundaries of a genre littered with tropes, without succumbing to any of them.

Do Make Say Think: Stubborn Persistent Illusions

Stubborn Persistent Illusions

Listening to the Toronto band’s new album, I wished upon myself an experiment: What if I heard one of these tracks without knowing it was Do Make Say Think? I’m sure “Horripilation,” at more than ten minutes long with its braided guitars and dual drums, would have given the band away immediately. But other songs would have kept their secret, and so there is much newness in which to revel on Stubborn Persistent Illusions, the band’s first album since 2009’s Other Truths, which will sound both familiar and peculiar to anyone who has spent time with their previous music.
Even the most arcane genres have tropes, and post-rock has built up plenty of its own. The most well-defined and obvious are often derided (or celebrated) as “crescendocore,” a self-explanatory tag that doesn’t quite pin down a group like Do Make Say Think. Yes, they are often building up to something in their songs, but not always in volume or drama. The group, who shares members with the recently revived Toronto indie outfit Broken Social Scene, has the well-oiled sound of a band in its third decade, a chemistry required to compose such experimental rock and make it sound natural instead of regimented. They don’t always sound tight, but they never sound apart.
Stubborn Persistent Illusions has the immediate trappings of a Do Make Say Think record. “War on Torpor,” which is unusually charged up from its first moments, can feel like it’s spinning in place as a result. “Horripilation” might be immediately identifiable as a DMST song—the clean, almost bumbling guitar riffs have a delicate sturdiness in their repetition—but as it winds around in minutes-long sections, the group uncovers new wrinkles in their sound. Two minutes in, a snare drum sounds downright funky all alone like that, and a few minutes later, a bass drum marches into a gallop. It’s not just that it sounds like a Do Make Say Think recording, it covers distance like one, a marathon approach: themes are repeated like track workout sets, interludes play out like lazy jogs, the home stretch feels like an accomplished return.
At their core, DMST are a guitars and drums group—two of each—but they’ve often let other instruments perform the cinematic lifts of their mid-song interludes. A couple minutes into “Her Eyes on the Horizon,” the horns take over entirely, slowing things to a creak so that the band can rebirth the original theme on a refreshed, sanctified canvas. In this way, Do Make Say Think’s songs don’t demand attention so much as reward it. The album is easy to let play through, but sometimes hard to feel intimate with its complexity. It makes for music that’s wonderful to live with, encouraging repetition while allowing for unconcentrated listening.
Like most post-rock outfits, DMST invest heavily in timbre—their guitars variously ring, buzz, shudder, and twinkle—but they rarely let things get atmospheric, instead grounding their music in weaving, persistent riffs. The album’s frantic centerpiece, “And Boundless,” is propped up by a misdirecting set-up track called “Bound.” The first song builds and collapses a twinkling surge, but it doesn’t pay off in the way most DMST pieces do. “And Boundless” is a relentless and unnerving march by comparison, built on imposing, siren-like guitar strums and crashing drums, this from a band frequently and accurately pegged as pastoral. Even at their loudest, DMST are never rollicking or spinning out of control; here they’ve harnessed and reigned in one of their most nerve-wracking works into an opus that winds around like a top prowling around a table.
Elsewhere, “As Far As the Eye Can See” finds the band at their calmest, playing grazing tunes built around the type of filigree guitar-riffs-as-theme they’ve made into a hallmark. It’s an effect that produces an internal logic, in which a song can feel like an island with its own ecosystem, and an album an archipelago. It’s challenging to find your way inside. In the oscillation from serenity to cinematic triumph, their music can seep into your conscious and float around your daily life, not so much a soundtrack as a pliable accompaniment. Even when it’s not competing for your attention, Stubborn Persistent Illusions feels impossible to put down.


The hybrid pop collaboration between Josiah Wise and Haxan Cloak is a sly and personal exploration of the queer experience, boiling with personal energy and fantastically operatic in scale.

blisters

An actual serpent with feet is an image that belongs to a prelapsarian world. It’s a mythical reminder of original sin, and perhaps a symbol of lost potential, fallibility, desire, and all sorts of biblical things good and bad. It’s a hell of a name for a musical project, coded with all the grandeur and primordial muck of the Book of Genesis. serpentwithfeet is Josiah Wise, a classically trained singer who’s moved nomadically between neo-soul, funk, R&B, and a self-described style of pagan gospel—he finds refuge, takes lessons, and moves on. On his debut EP, *blisters *he’s enlisted Björk collaborator and producer the Haxan Cloak to help craft a world that boils with personal energy and is fantastically operatic in scale.
*blisters *is a brief five-song EP, barely over 20 minutes long, but it’s gorgeously multivalent and strangely wrought, morphing that short timespan into an experience that is unabashedly vulnerable and powerfully queer. Its opening title track sounds simultaneously ancient and postmodern. Harps share space with thunderous electronic drums and belches of static creating a whirlpool of sounds that seems totally inhospitable until Wise’s voice threads it all together. A combination of spooky processing and classical inflections make his voice so affecting: shifting between whispers and moans, splitting off, multiplying, and taking root in your ears in such strange ways.
The way his voice is used reminds me of Holly Herndon’s vocal experiments. It’s protean and malleable, at any time diffuse or concrete, and serves as the album’s most powerful instrument. In the following track “flickering,” Wise continues this experimentation by dissolving almost all instrumentation, and allowing his voice to luxuriate in its own timbre. It’s easy to get hypnotized by Wise’s singing, which borders on glossolalia in terms of its pounding spirituality, but when his words connect, they resonate right in the chest. On “flickering” in particular, Wise loves the melodrama (“I’m starting to feel the cord connecting us two is made of gossamer”), but he sells it by virtue of his delivery, thumbing the scale with emotional weight. When he says, “Don’t let me doubt you,” or, “I offer myself to you,” the pain goes from his mouth to your heart in a flash.
It works because his music is theatrical. It demands you to sit down and pay attention. In particular, blisters invests in the megachurch and the opera, always looking for a safe landing between dogma and drama, faith and obsession. In songs like “four ethers” he leans into the glory of these forms. The song hangs on a motif of swirling atmospheric strings that are less Wagner or Puccini, but more like Hans Zimmer in effect, and it’s incredible if not a little cheesy. It works together with the tone of the song’s lyrics which are puncturing but somehow funny and self-mocking (“Your name is about as easy to remember as the four ethers/And who the hell knows the four ethers”).
He’s also direct, visceral, and imagistic, recalling Frank Ocean’s knack for storytelling circa-Channel Orange: “Babe I know you learned some fucked up shit from your mother/Had you tucking your dick/Had you hiding the shit that really made you special.” He delivers these lines with a lilting falsetto, as Haxan Cloak’s noises and screeches of strings explode around him. In these personal disclosures of desire, sexuality, and failure, Wise can make individual and personal struggles seem mythic.
In addition to his subtly haunting textures, Haxan Cloak also makes Wise sound swaggering and enormous. It’s because Wise has intent and vision as he explores the difficulties of identity and the liquidity of the queer experience with a sly sense of humor. Listening to *blisters, *I was reminded of the bittersweet optimism of the theorist José Esteban Muñoz, who wrote, “Queerness should and could be about a desire for another way of being in both the world and time.” In *blisters, *Wise pauses to examine the ugliness of our world, then floats right past it to another way of being.


This just-reissued live album is not simply P-Funk in its early phase—it’s P-Funk in transition. Having hardly rehearsed with two new members, Meadowbrook captures moments of barely controlled chaos.

Funkadelic: Live - Meadowbrook, Rochester, Michigan - 12th September 1971

Everybody with a stake in R&B knows the essence of live P-Funk: the costumes, the stagecraft, the dozen-plus musicians pushing freewheeling communication through the chaos. It’s known in the visual sense by the coming of the Mothership (an on-stage prop), and in recorded history on Parliament-helmed albums like 1977’s Live (P.Funk Earth Tour) and 1993’s Tear the Roof Off - 1974-1980. Anyone who’s seen footage of the band at their prime can’t overstate the greatness of their spectacle; their Halloween ’76 stop in Houston during their reputation-immortalizing if money-losing Earth Tour is the stuff that shifts tectonic plates.
That history places the live-staged peak of the P-Funk operation at a mid ’70s origin point without the come-up background to go with it. Records of the band’s tour itinerary are surprisingly sparse in the years before the summer of 1975, too. But there was a stretch in 1971—including an extended stay in the UK—where their relentless barnstorming was starting to shape who they’d become en route to the double-LP sprawl of America Eats Its Young and funk-rock power hitters Cosmic Slop and Standing on the Verge of Getting It On. It wasn’t until 1996 that an official release on Funkadelic’s early label Westbound Records gave fans insight into what this year had in store for the band—and what they made of a well-regarded but turbulent moment in their history.
Funkadelic Live: Meadowbrook 1971 was recorded when they were dealing with a personnel turnover that could’ve annihilated less-driven bands. Mere months after Maggot Brain came closer than anyone had ever gotten to picking up Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic rock-soul mantle, Funkadelic would have to become an almost entirely different band. Rhythm guitarist Tawl Ross and on-and-off drummer Tiki Fulwood were both casualties having their separate issues handling drugs. Bassist Billy “Bass” Nelson would split from the group over financial compensation. And guitarist Eddie Hazel—the man who gave Maggot Brain its most searing moments, particularly the title track’s acid-rock lamentations—was one foot out the door en route to a time-monopolizing gig with the Temptations. Hazel and Nelson were still with the band as of September ’71, but the other two musicians needed substitutions—in both cases, on extra-short notice.
That’s what makes the just-reissued *Meadowbrook 1971 *more than a mere happenstance snapshot of the band: it’s not simply P-Funk in their early phase, it’s P-Funk in transition. Originally given a soundboard recording without the band’s prior knowledge by Westbound label owner Armen Boladian, this September 12th gig on the outskirts of the band’s adopted Detroit home is a band piecing themselves together while discovering how to adapt. If that sounds like a sort of stop-start feeling-out process, it really is: new rhythm guitarist Harold Beane had been a Stax sideman most known for playing with Isaac Hayes, and freshly recruited drummer Tyrone Lampkin was the drummer for the Apollo Theater house band. Those are strong bonafides, but not entirely compatible with the acid-blotter blueprint of Funkadelic—and what’s more, they’d hardly even rehearsed before the show, if at all. That makes the first half of this set an exercise in barely controlled chaos.
The 14-minute version of “Maggot Brain” is worth the recording’s existence alone: at this point, it’s still a recent composition, but it’s had enough time to mutate and expand into a spotlight showpiece that makes the full-band interplay as important as Hazel’s soloing. In other moments, the struggle to click-in makes the songs raucously janky at best and an actual “scrap this and start over” moment at worst. The metallic roar of “Alice in My Fantasies” fits the former, as though it’s just barely being held together through the sheer force of its raunch; it wanders with a predatory restlessness compared to the snap-tight *Standing on the Verge *version they’d drop three years later. But the false-start flailing around “I Call My Baby Pussycat” is mostly worth hearing for the way they actually change it in real time from its uptempo origins on Parliament's Osmium to the slower, slinkier variation they’d record for America Eats Its Young.
George Clinton’s memoir rightfully touts Lampkin, the drummer, as a transformative force who “helped remake the band’s sound: louder, both looser and tighter,” but that night he was so intent on bursting out of the pocket and bringing the flash that Clinton had to make a point of half-apologizing for it. “Y’all got to kinda bear with us,” he tells the audience over a more boisterous variation of the “I’ll Bet You” drum beat than the band was presumably used to. “We got a new drummer here tonight... Tyrone. We’re gonna get it together anyhow, and gonna pee on your afro.” That last ad-lib wasn’t the only preview of the band they’d become by ’74; Lampkin flashes the elasticity here that would make the grooves of songs like “Cosmic Slop” and “Red Hot Mama” rock-solid no matter how many flourishes they’d get. That makes the selections from their ’70 debut—a snarl-of-joy rendition “Good Old Music” and a thunderstorm of a take on “I Got a Thing, You Got a Thing, Everybody’s Got a Thing”—reach the top of their potential for heaviness and wildness.
In the end, it’s still Clinton who nails his preacher-turned-benevolent freak heights as Bernie Worrell acts as conductor/NASA ground control. Worrell held a vital role in keeping the fracturing group on point, dropping moments of dissonant counternotes with classically trained comedic timing, finding new ways to layer on distortion, and giving the other players riffs to improvise over in an enviable feedback loop. Parliaments oldie “All Your Goodies Are Gone (The Loser’s Seat)”—which was vocal-group soul in ’67, slinky funk in ’74, and a simmering acid-gospel 15-minute meditation on loss here—is the centerpiece that points to better things to come. In Rob Bowman’s must-read liner notes, Nelson reminisces that it was “like the instruments were playing us.”
And even if the band was played within an inch of their life—the customary noise-freakout closer of “Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow” was cut short when a frustrated Nelson walked off the stage early—it’s hard to think of a moment where stress and strength intersected for P-Funk as fruitfully as it did here. Beane would be a key player in America Eats Its Young; Lampkin would be a percussive axis all the way through The Electric Spanking of War Babies. And by the time Hazel returned to make one of his biggest imprints on the band with his co-writes and solos on Standing on the Verge, he had guitarist Garry Shider and bassist Cordell “Boogie” Mosson to spar with. But before all that fell into place, this one night of fortuitously recorded havoc proved that it would take more than just a clash of styles to undo Funkadelic—in fact, that clash wound up making the funk even stronger.


The rapping, singing, and drumming polymath approaches the funk canon from a rap perspective, offering a wide-angle portrait of Los Angeles’ hedonistic landscape.

Oxnard

With its languid pace and sunstruck mix of hedonism and tragedy, Los Angeles has always had a powerful and enduring relationship with funk music. The onset of G-funk in the ‘90s channeled the whining synthesizer experiments of Zapp and Parliament Funkadelic into something sepulchral and nihilistic and, in doing so, defined parameters for L.A. Funk. And now, you can hear Parliament-by-way-of-Dr. Dre in the music of Thundercat, Dâm-Funk, Terrace Martin, and Dre’s own Aftermath Records artist, Anderson Paak.
On Oxnard, Paak’s follow-up to his 2016 breakthrough Malibu, the rapping, singing, and drumming polymath approaches funk from a rap perspective. When Paak allows himself to be instinctive and loose, Oxnard blends these influences with a comforting ease. Cloaked in natty threads and a horndog ladies-man persona, he favors bubbling bass, silky textures, and sunset timbres, forever somewhere between Snoop Dogg’s “G’z Up, Hoes Down” and Bootsy Collins’ “I’d Rather Be With You.” In that richly instrumented, sometimes misogynistic, and sexually debauched space, Paak has enough leeway to showcase his versatility as a vocalist.
In the best possible way, Paak has a voice like ’80s R&B singer El DeBarge after a pack of cigarettes. Though Paak doesn’t have DeBarge’s piercing falsetto, his pitched-up, suggestive rasp is apt for a self-styled lothario. Throughout Oxnard, he exalts blowjobs and carps about a “petty bitch” and, on “Sweet Chick,” has sex with a skater who “watches anime while [he’s] laying dick.” Even his vaguely political song, “6 Summers,” opens with artless wish-casting: “Trump’s got a love child/And I hope that bitch is buckwild/[...] I hope she kiss señoritas and black gals.” Individually, his moments of hetero-masculine bluster are mostly passable—”Sweet Chick” is particularly enjoyable—but, in aggregate, they seem like a sock stuffed down the front of his jeans.
Oxnard is at its best when Paak’s overt lasciviousness is muted by rap legends Kendrick Lamar, Q-Tip, and Tha Doggfather himself. (Dr. Dre interrupted leg day to make a rare appearance, but the stiff, militaristic delivery that marked his last album, Compton, is still present.) Paak and Lamar’s pastel boogie “Tints” is breezy, fun, and should have been released in the summertime; Q-Tip, his own high-pitched voice sharp as ever, recalls past heartbreaks on the ruminative “Cheers”; and Snoop Dogg who is transforming into rap’s own Willie Nelson as his hairline recedes, reminisces about his Long Beach childhood on the lolling cookout jam “Anywhere.” (Perhaps the most glaring sign of the end times is that Snoop Dogg now seems a moderating influence.)
The crucial flaw of Oxnard isn’t its forgivable spates of juvenalia (after all, much of funk is thinly-veiled sexual metaphor and innuendo) or Paak’s occasionally stilted rapping—it’s the album’s sprawling, burdensome ambition. With its lyrics about a mythical, lesbian Trump offspring, the initial two minutes of “6 Summers” mistakes easy provocation for insight, the cocksure “Mansa Musa” seems more in service of Dr. Dre than it does Paak, and “Left to Right,” performed partially in Jah-fakin’ patois, is a golden, crispy Jamaican patty filled with compost. Paak can do nearly anything, but that doesn’t mean he should do everything. With its often effortless synthesis of funk and rap, Oxnard is a wide-angle portrait of Los Angeles’ hedonistic landscape—it’s just a little out of focus.


Like the best holiday-themed art, Chance and Jeremih’s expanded reissue of their 2016 Christmas mixtape is part timeless, part time capsule.

Chance the Rapper / Jeremih: Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama: Re-Wrapped

Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama: Re-Wrapped

A year ago, when Chance the Rapper and Jeremih originally gave us their free mixtape Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama, already feels like a moment frozen in history. Barack Obama was still in the White House, but everyone knew it was only a matter of time before Donald Trump would be sitting in the Oval Office. In music, a brutal 2016 taught fans that the biggest news stories for the foreseeable future would be about which beloved visionaries we’d lost.
On the mixtape, Chicago’s most magnetic rapper and R&B hitmaker, respectively, pulled off what it’s appropriate only around the holidays to call a “miracle.” That they were able to craft a Christmas record fluent in both present-day hip-hop and yuletide tradition, playable on Power 92 or alongside A Motown Christmas, was enough of a feat. That they also managed to salute a black, hometown president, whom Chance had met at age 8 and only recently sung for at a National Christmas Tree Lighting? All while simultaneously reflecting and soothing our deeper sense of cultural malaise? Well, some presents you can’t buy in a store.
The 2016 release of Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama was the gift we didn’t know we needed. The spirit of hope it carried into the new year, however, couldn’t last. Chance continued to scale new professional and philanthropic heights: winning multiple Grammys, rapping on his first No. 1 single, hosting “Saturday Night Live,” and donating millions to Chicago Public Schools. More quietly, Jeremih worked on his forthcoming album, Later That Night. But the tweeter-in-chief wrote about their home city as if it were enemy territory; each new day has brought fresh crises born of ignorance or mendacity. So the sudden arrival of an expanded edition of Chance and Jeremih’s tape—with more new music than old—feels like narrowly avoiding a year without a Santa Claus.
Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama: Rewrapped, streaming on Chance’s beloved launching pad SoundCloud and available, at least initially, for free download on his site, is a two-part package. The first, labeled as “Disc One,” dusts off the nine songs from last December’s mixtape. The second, “Disc Two,” adds nine all-new songs and one previously unreleased remix. The combination is not only a timely excuse to revisit the best holiday-party soundtrack in recent years, but a worthy extension of it. It’s like when you buy A Charlie Brown Christmas and there’s a second TV special included. Except in this case, the bonus material actually holds up pretty well.
Disc Two keeps many of the basic elements of what is now Disc One. Jeremih still croons tender seduction and Chance still raps about the sacred and profane with equally evident glee, their lyrics again riffing nimbly on weekend-night-out themes, Chicago references, and holiday carols that are burned into the collective memory. While Chance has said that Common and Emmy-winning “Master of None” actress Lena Waithe play drums on all of the new tracks, the set’s overall sound—gospel-soul warmth, stuttering low end—is most striking for how in keeping it is with its predecessor. Hannibal Buress even returns for another cameo, his laconic musings both on-the-nose and laugh-out-loud.
Still, there’s no formula for a holiday classic. What the new Rewrapped songs have most in common with their forebear is a feeling of sincerity. There’s no tolerance for bullshit. Chance has said his favorite song here is “Family For,” and with its rich vocal harmonies, clean guitar strums, and warbly chipmunk-pitched sample, it’s a clear highlight—not least because Chance can rap about a South Side spot “where they ain’t scared to say the name of the Savior” in one breath and declare “we screamin’ ‘Fuck the president’ like Marilyn Monroe” in another. Chance’s jubilance on the rumbling “Held It Down,” another ode to family, is convincing enough to be worth lowering the windows for in winter (there’s also a hilarious but cruel diss of someone else’s “ugly ass family, your great-great grandmammy shoulda used Plan B”). The less weighted songs have this whiff of reality about them too. Hear it in the way the loping window-shopping anthem “Down Wit That” summons up those harsh Michigan Avenue winds, or Jeremih’s mention of “black ice” in the hypnotically gliding “Lil’ Bit (Interlude).”
On last year’s songs like “Joy,” Chance and Jeremih did what the best Christmas songs and films can, create a festive space where it’s (shhh) okay to wear a misty-eyed grin. That happens again here, especially on the children’s choir-bedecked “Big Kid Again,” where they name-check their own real-life children and rejoice in being able to fulfill their kids’ Christmas lists. That’s in between channeling the Jackson Five’s “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” reminiscing about meeting Obama, and punning on the Grinch. The emotional show-stopper, though, is “One More Cry,” which pairs Jeremih’s lilting choruses with Chance’s quavering confessions, Chance working himself from unhurried to frenzied and back as he finds room to comment on voter disenfranchisement, his late aunt’s death from cancer, and Biblical grace. All that’s missing from Disc Two in this vein is a guest verse as stunning as Noname’s on Disc One’s somberly observed “The Tragedy.”
The more playful songs don’t always match the fresh inspiration of the first disc—where you had the stepper’s R&B of “I’m Your Santa,” the blunt topicality of “Shoulda Left You”—but it all still ought to go down nicely with spiked eggnog. “Let It Snow,” chiming like a digitally tweaked bell choir, isn’t a cover, but like the original mixtape’s “Snowed In,” it has a similar “since we’ve no place to go…” conceit—which Chance neatly takes off in an unexpected direction for a celebration of “black power, black privilege.” The Friday fanfic “Ms. Parker” is little more than a salaciously goofy novelty—but where would Christmas be without those? “Are U Live” is another welcome surprise, enlisting rising Chicago rapper Valee for a haunting, sing-song track that’s as close as Chance gets to trap. Nobody asked for a “piano remix” of last year’s “I Want You Back”-turned-Christmas carol “Stranger at the Table,” but damn if this one isn’t plaintively gorgeous.
“Last Christmas was a war zone,” Chance raps on the versions of “Stranger” on both discs. And, ugh. Whether It’s a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story, Donny Hathaway’s “This Christmas” or Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” the holiday-themed art that endures is part timeless, part time capsule. Charlie Brown killed the aluminum Christmas tree. Disc One, still full of bops, has also taken on a bittersweet tinge of nostalgia. Listening to “Shoulda Left You,” where Chance pays tribute to David Bowie and Prince, and Jeremih previously sang, “Fuck 2016,” means not only hearing their weary rejection of a shitty 12 months, but also remembering how hearing that song felt a year ago. It felt good. Feeling hopeful felt good too.
The same day Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama: Rewrapped arrived, House Republicans passed Trump’s only meaningful legislative achievement, a tax bill that will rob from our children and give to the very wealthiest. Despite pretending to bring back Christmas to a black White House where it was very much celebrated, Trump seems at worst hostile or at best oblivious to this time of year’s corny-but-true meaning. Poor little rich kid: He’ll have to find out about Scrooge’s three ghosts on his own. (Surely he has at least seen the end of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation?) For the rest of us, this music is a balm, self-care; a seasonal reminder of our shared humanity, and a glimmering from Michelle Obama’s native metropolis that things might not look so bleak forever. Aw, Chance and Jeremih always know just what to get us for the holidays.


Former blog-house band has fully transitioned into a sleek, urbane pop-rock outfit, taking polished cues from Steely Dan and Phoenix.

The English Riviera

Devonshire, England's Metronomy have traveled an impressive stylistic distance in the short span of three albums. The group began in 2006 as glitchy electronic smirkers, proffering a garishly irreverent take on chinstroking IDM. Yet for their third full-length effort, The English Riviera, they've fully transitioned into a sleek, urbane pop-rock outfit, taking polished cues from the well-heeled likes of Steely Dan and Phoenix.
The subtraction and addition of band members during that time surely played a role, yet Metronomy have largely always been the baby of singer and multi-instrumentalist Joseph Mount. And while the music Mount and his comrades are making might sound a lot different from what they were turning out at the group's inception, the two sounds do have a philosophical kinship. There's a significant amount of deliberation apparent in both sonic approaches; as loopy as "early" Metronomy may have been, when you're making electronic music mostly without words that isn't meant for the dancefloor, craft is necessarily going to be a major selling point. Likewise, finely calibrated pop-rock invites an appreciation of its studio-sculpted contours.
As you'd imagine given that description, The English Riviera is an extremely listenable album, starting with "We Broke Free", an exquisite, low-slung slice of 70s studio rock redolent of Boz Scaggs and the Dan. That seductively contented vibe pervades much of the record, including "She Wants", "Loving Arm", and the waltzing "Trouble". While still vigorously scrubbed, songs like "Everything Goes My Way", "The Look", and "The Bay" reflect dance and indie sensibilities, aligning those efforts more closely with the likes of Phoenix, Hot Chip, Junior Boys, and Stars. But where Steely Dan's lounge-lizard odes were laced with irony and venom, and where the springy pop of Phoenix is animated by giddy energy, Mount's immaculate compositions remain mostly inert. Almost all of the songs on The English Riviera sound great, yet few of them really emotionally or physically involve the listener, and there's little to take away besides an appreciation of that effortlessly attractive sheen. Metronomy deserve a ton of credit for so quickly and satisfyingly mastering a sound that's so disparate from the band's origins. However, the group hasn't quite figured out how to animate its precise creations with personality or passion, suggesting they'd be best served by not immediately leaping to another sonic identity with their next release.


The Swedish producer and frequent Robyn collaborator offers an ambitious three-album suite of understated, occasionally disquieting techno nocturnes.

Dusk to Dawn

Hardcore Robyn fans already know the work of Swedish producer Rudolf Nordström, aka Mr. Tophat. He co-produced “Baby Forgive Me” and “Beach2k20,” two of the gorgeous, gently filtered house-pop tracks from last year’s Honey; his own 2017 release Trust Me, a three-song, 35-minute EP of throbbing, desaturated grooves, featured Robyn throughout. His latest solo release, Dusk to Dawn, is an ambitious three-album suite of understated, occasionally disquieting techno nocturnes. More melodic than the distortion-warped A Memoir From the Youth, two and a half hours of mostly chill, mid-tempo house conceal interesting moments within slack expanses. At its best, it’s a triple-album endurance listen that rewards partial concentration; at its slowest, it’s an illustration that Tophat’s signature long-format tracks don’t scale.
As in his work with Robyn, Tophat’s specialty is sleek, extended compositions that hide their seams, even as they meander and pool into ambience. Part I opens with the 14-minute “Intro,” a low, slow-building track bookended by medieval-sounding whistles; the beat doesn’t come to stay until two songs later. Vocals surface here and there, as if wandering from room to room at an enormous nightclub. The cheekily titled “Hedonism M.C. Robyn” features little more than some backing vocals, though she’s still unmistakable. There’s a good deal of variety for anyone motivated to find it: a section within “Hedonism” that sounds like ’90s video game soundtrack; acid-house tweaks on “Acid Samba” and “Memento Mori”; the flamenco-style guitars that surface in “Dusk to Dawn (Acoustic Edit Version)” and much later on “Solitude.”
“Vivid Imaginations” and “Tears of Illuminations” are highlights of Part I, working twitchy Balearic beats towards Italo-disco. Part II, the most compelling and active section, begins with a run of features from Swedish pop singers Noomi and Lune, as well as producers Axel Boman and Kleerup. Frothy synth and sub bass on the final version of the title track make the kinship with “Beach2k20” clear. But the spacey minimalism of “Pleiades” recedes to the background. Mainstream dance music is beset by expressionless, interchangeable vocal performances; once you’re familiar with how skillfully Tophat handles the real thing, it’s harder to settle for synthetic flute and chime.
Dusk to Dawn has moments of real drama and surprise, as when a klaxon-like siren cuts sharply through interstellar glitter on Part III’s “Thoth,” or when the AI voice of “Solitude” poses the alarming question, “Why even wear a heart/When you could store it in a chest freezer?” But seemingly every interesting transformation is counterbalanced by slow changes, like the glacial “Indecision.” The final effect can be tastefully listenable, like a boutique hotel soundtrack; a hipper chain could probably play the whole thing in the lobby. It’s not so important to remember everything about a long night, but too many of these tracks vanish without a trace.


Ellen Fullman’s imposing Long String Instrument and Theresa Wong’s cello create harmonically complex chord clusters that seem to place you within the belly of the composition itself.

Harbors

The buzzing hum of Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument engulfs its surroundings. As the composer walks in a stately manner between parallel arrays of 70-foot steel and bronze strings, her rosin-coated fingers gently stroking the thin wires, rapturous drones emerge, the tones enfolding each other like tiny fibers being spun into yarn. Wooden resonators are attached to the metal strands, allowing even the most subtle gesture of her hand to fill the air around her. The Instrument, which Fullman invented in 1980, is capable of transforming a room into a resonating body, its contours and contents vibrating along with the strings as they activate the entirety of the space. It often takes up to five days of calibrating and tuning until the instrument matches the reverberant qualities of wherever it is being installed. It is quite literally tied to its environment.
Fullman’s invention is surprisingly versatile given its simple design, and she has performed and recorded with musicians across the avant-garde spectrum, including Pauline Oliveros and members of her Deep Listening Band, guitar duo Barn Owl, percussionist Sean Meehan, and cellist Okkyung Lee. It is another cellist, Theresa Wong, that has been Fullman’s most consistent foil, and Harbors, their first album as a duo, is the culmination of over a decade of steady collaboration. The enveloping nature of the Long String Instrument provides a unique challenge to those who accompany it, and Wong tends to position herself in a supporting role, coloring the drones with swells of low-end, wisps of high-pitched harmonics, and punctuating thrums of pizzicato. Rarely does she attempt to tease out melodies from within Fullman’s rich, harmonically complex chord clusters, making the music less traditionally accessible but enhancing its mystery and subtlety.
The first and third parts of Harbors are predominantly dense, with Fullman demonstrating the expansive capabilities of the Long String Instrument as Wong’s cello fits snugly inside its drones. As “Part 1” ends it begins to unravel, you can hear Fullman shuffle across the floor as Wong responds to each sweep of the Long String Instrument with mournful harmonics, foreshadowing a more sparse “Part 2.” The second movement, quiet and dissonant, features both Fullman and Wong plucking the strings of their instruments, the sharp sounds reverberating in markedly different ways throughout the room. This contrast, felt as Fullman once again begins her deliberate march across the room at the beginning of “Part 3,” is almost shocking as the space suddenly comes alive with sound.
Harbors was inspired by the confluence of nature and commerce in the San Francisco Bay. The vast, undulating sound of the Long String Instrument evokes the dual rolling of fog and waves, and the rumble of passing ships can be heard as Wong slowly tugs her bow across the cello’s lower strings. But the album feels more nuanced than a simplistic one-to-one musical translation of the soundscape of the Bay—its three unique parts provide a murkier narrative that seems self-contained. What comes through is the sense of awe that arises when staring off past the water’s edge, and its relative stillness in an otherwise urban environment, as it is transmitted through suspended strings and fills the performance space. While other minimalist composers have cosmic ambitions, Fullman’s music is terrestrial, rooted not only in the inspiration she takes from her surroundings but also firmly bound to the place in which it is realized.
A recording is an imperfect conduit for the power of the Long String Instrument. That isn’t to imply that Harbors is deficient as a composition or that the performances are somehow lacking, but rather that music that invokes such a dramatic physical presence feels different when being heard on speakers at home, or even the more immersive sonic environment of headphones. However, in a time when most of us are confined to very specific spaces, the same ones we’ve likely been in for months, there’s power in music that asks us to place ourselves elsewhere, exploring other spaces with our minds. Harbors might feel one step removed from its ideal setting, but in a time of isolation and physical stasis it feels like an escape to inhabit these sounds as they saturate the air in a permeating cloud of overtones, wherever you may be.

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The Scottish group’s 1989 cult classic is an album of euphoric love and loss that unfolds slowly and with starry eyes. Its noir mood and icy melodrama are still felt all over modern pop.

Hats

Paul Buchanan, the elusive and self-deprecating frontman of Scottish pop group the Blue Nile, once compared making records to falling in love. “You can’t do it every year,” he elaborated. Since forming in 1981, the Blue Nile have released only four albums, each one followed by a long period of silence. Their music is patient and understated. Their songs mostly explore the trajectory of relationships, from their glittery beginnings to their plateaus of contentment and their exhausted, haunted finales. Their stories are set in the smoky locales of noir: in ragtown, shantytown, tinseltown. It’s usually raining. To listen passively to the Blue Nile is to ride in a taxi through the city at night as familiar scenes blur outside your window.
To listen closely to the Blue Nile is to become a part of the scenery. In this way, Buchanan’s metaphor about the time between albums comes alive. The long gestation of each record suggests, as in the early stages of a relationship, a sharpening of the senses, getting lost in a world that’s getting smaller around you. You want to do it right this time. The Blue Nile’s music also sounds like falling in love, slow and starry-eyed, with melodies that fizzle and glow like streetlights. By the time they released their sophomore album, Hats, in the autumn of 1989, Buchanan was 33 years old, and his songs, once littered with bold declarations of love, now seemed to be composed entirely of ellipses and question marks.
The members of the Blue Nile met while they were students at the University of Glasgow. After graduating and easing into an uninspiring teaching gig, Buchanan says he and his friends turned to music in search of a career that they “could be instinctive about.” With Buchanan on guitar and vocals, Paul Joseph “PJ” Moore on keyboards and synth, and Robert Bell on bass, they recruited a drum machine as their fourth member.
The Blue Nile’s first single—1981’s “I Love This Life”—is a catchy song about an up-and-coming rock band doomed to remain a cult act. Dreaming of adoring crowds and hit records, Buchanan sings with appropriate joie de vivre, but even on his first single, he sounds more like a veteran actor portraying a teenager. He has the type of pained, dignified voice, like Frank Sinatra or Johnny Cash, that makes it hard to imagine him ever actually being young. “I know I’m going out of style,” he sings and immediately asks, “Am I already out of style?” The song, paired with a downbeat B-side called “The Second Act,” became a self-fulfilling prophecy as the band continued in relative obscurity.
Their debut album, A Walk Across the Rooftops, arrived in 1984 via the stereo equipment company Linn, who were looking to expand their reach by starting a label. (“Linn weren’t a record company and we weren’t a band,” Buchanan would later reflect in Elliot J. Huntley and Edith Hall’s biography From a Late Night Train.) Still, their unusual working relationship allowed the members of the Blue Nile to record in Linn’s studios and operate without a strict deadline. As so often happens with our first brushes of love, the band chased this experience the rest of their career. No pressure and no expectations—a creative process they could be instinctive about.
Whittled down to seven songs, A Walk Across the Rooftops is a stately record that established the Blue Nile’s sound—a sprawling, sophisticated strain of ambient synth pop—and their major themes. “I am in love with a feeling,” Buchanan sings in “From Rags to Riches.” “Is there a place in this city/A place to always feel this way,” he asks in “Tinseltown in the Rain,” a minor hit in Holland and the closest thing the Blue Nile have to a signature song. The album, punctuated by Bell’s slap bass and a vibrant backdrop of keys and guitars, dazzled critics and established a small audience of devoted fans.
Instead of rushing to make a follow-up, the Blue Nile studied where their music had taken them, as they traveled through America and Europe. “[O]ne of the best things we saw in our first trip to London,” Buchanan told NME after the album’s release, “Was a guy and a girl standing in Oxford Street… They were obviously having a moment—breaking up or something, something that was wrong—and you just looked at it and knew the feeling. It was a brilliant reminder of what’s worth all the hassle.”
It was an omen. The five years between A Walk Across the Rooftops and Hats were trying times for the band. Relationships, both romantic and professional, crumbled around them. An album’s worth of material was scrapped—the feeling just wasn’t there—and the tapes were burned. Witnessing the dissolution of his parents’ decades-long marriage, Buchanan’s writing became increasingly sparse and tormented, like Raymond Carver stories stretched into the shape of torch ballads.
At his mother’s house, Buchanan tracked a new song called “Christmas” that wouldn’t end up making the record. Its lyrics are a portrait of the least romantic kind of adult despair: money running out, children crying. But the song is a balm, smoother and sweeter than anything the band had ever recorded. At one point, Buchanan plays an uncharacteristic guitar solo and hums along sadly. “Take it easy,” he sings as if to himself, “I still love you. I believe in you.”
This is the tone of Hats: a series of hard-won love songs written like no one was in the room. Despite its long incubation, the music arrived fairly quickly once the band established its arc. The song that opened the creative floodgates was “The Downtown Lights,” a rush of images and emotions that flows at the deliberate pace of a steady walk through snow. Buchanan’s guitar has hints of Nile Rodgers’ palm-muted funk; Bell’s bass slides where it once popped. By the end of the song, Buchanan is bellowing and the band is locked into an airtight stride, accompanied by a string section woven so closely to the lyrics you might think they’re daydreaming it.
Despite the movement of the music, Hats is an album in stasis. The Blue Nile understand that, like all good theater, relationships are inextricably linked to their setting, and the characters on Hats are prisoners to it, escaping only in fantasy. “Walk me into town/The ferry will be there to carry us away into the air,” Buchanan sings in “Over the Hillside.” “Let’s walk in the cool evening light/Wrong or right/Be at my side,” he pleads in “The Downtown Lights.” “I pray for love coming out all right,” he sings in the climactic final verse of “Let’s Go Out Tonight.” Then he cries out the title as one final desperate attempt to save something that’s already gone.
The magic of Hats is how the music makes defeat sound euphoric. Depending on your mood, Hats can be an uplifting album (“It’s all right” serves as its rallying cry) or a uniquely devastating one. These are multi-dimensional portraits: colorful cities populated by lonely people, romantic gestures received by silence, beautiful evenings going nowhere. The most immediate tracks on the album shift between moods like a plane dipping through clouds. “Headlights on the Parade” rides its glowing new wave groove while Buchanan prods a lover that something isn’t right. “Over the Hillside” begins with a sad hospital pulse and his depictions of a long, sleepless night, but it transcends to feel like an invitation, like elegance—“Thunder Road” in a luxury car. “Tomorrow I will be there,” he sings proudly at the end, “Oh, you wait and see.” On some listens, you believe him.
The Blue Nile are a band whose criticisms only draw fans closer. Sure, all their songs are about love. Yes, they have erred on the side of adult contemporary. It’s true that, in the ’90s, Rod Stewart and Michael McDonald sang Buchanan’s words as comfortably as their own. But just as Big Star became a symbol for the fame-averse underdog ideals of ’90s indie rock, the Blue Nile have proven newly influential. You can hear their heavenly chill on recent albums by Destroyer; their lowercase romance in the xx; their intense intimacy in Majical Cloudz. When Buchanan joined Jessie Ware to co-write a track on last year’s Glasshouse, it became clear how his band’s work had been reflected in pop music’s patient, moody turns.
While their influence has long run deep, with outspoken fans including Vashti Bunyan, Phil Collins, and the 1975, to this day nothing sounds quite like Hats. The Blue Nile themselves never quite replicated it, opting for a loose, soulful atmosphere on 1996’s Peace At Last and a more sober approach for 2004’s High. Its closest companion is Paul Buchanan’s 2012 solo album Mid Air—a collection of near-demos on piano that further refined his sunken vignettes. “Tear stains on your pillow,” he sings in “Wedding Party,” “I was drunk when I danced with the bride.” The stories—as with most concerning the Blue Nile—are between the lines.
It’s a shame that Hats was never a hit, but it also would have been a shame if it were. It’s hard to imagine being confronted by these songs in the wild. It seems inappropriate to even listen to it in the daytime. You carve out a place to hear Hats; you confide it in other people. An oft-repeated legend about the band involves Paul Buchanan at a Glasgow bar shortly after the release of their debut album. As he downs a few pints among the locals, the conversation turns to music, and someone recommends him a great new band from the area. They’re called the Blue Nile, they say. You’ll love them, I’ve got their tape in my car.
The anecdote illustrates the overarching philosophy for Buchanan’s art, to be removed from it completely. “[Y]ou hope that someday in the future some kid will be walking along the beach and find a little piece of green glass that has been worn down by the waves,” he once explained to The Sydney Morning Herald. “He’ll pick it up and put it in his pocket, take it home and love it. He won’t necessarily know why he loves it, but he’ll love it. Those are the kind of records we try to make.” In another version of this metaphor, he relates a boy and a girl watching a film on their first date: “They are much more important to each other, hopefully, than the movie is to either one of them.”
At the core of Hats is a heartbroken song called “From a Late Night Train,” featuring just piano, trumpet, and Buchanan’s vocals, all combining to sound like rain on the windshield of a parked car. “I know it’s over,” he sings in a low, beaten voice, “But I love you so.” It’s a song that illustrates the stakes of love, sung in the final moments of a relationship when there’s nothing left to say but the inevitable. On a record filled with questions—Where is the love? What’s so wrong tonight? How do I know you feel it? How do I know it’s true?—sits this gut-punch of an answer. You’re left broken, alone, and in love, looking into someone’s eyes and seeing the end of a dream.


In the past two years, this proto-Web 2.0 band has seen the myth of its self-made success eclipse the music contained on its still-fantastic debut. The band responded by enlisting producer Dave Fridmann to help shape a sophomore effort that, once again, it's quietly nudging into the marketplace.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: Some Loud Thunder

Some Loud Thunder

Unless you've been living under a rock that is itself under a larger rock-- or you're not an indie rock fan-- the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah story should have a folkloric familiarity to you. To read an indie blog or webzine in 2005 was to hear the tale of five brave lads from Philly and Brooklyn who bypassed the Byzantine conduits of record labels and PR agencies, selling more than six figures' worth of their debut album on the merits of the music alone.
But online opinion is like a magnifying glass in sunlight: Whatever it admires too closely for too long is enlarged, then incinerated. There was truth in the emerging narrative, but it reflected longing more than reality; the band's story became the stuff of myth, and myths beg to be debunked. That crystallization was completed when mainstream publications began filling their pages with identical articles about the internet as independent music's democratic new frontier and adopting CYHSY as the trend's avatar.
This was how, in the space of a couple months, CYHSY were transformed from a unique phenomenon to a creative ideal, and the music contained on their still-terrific debut album became difficult to hear above the din of warring ideologues. "Two years ago," the Independent Online's Andrew Purcell wrote in a January 12 article, "Clap Your Hands Say Yeah rewrote the rules of pop music, but this won't save them from the kicking that's coming their way." He's probably right, but this isn't necessary if we're careful not to get our distaste for packaged mythology mixed up with distaste for the music itself. Before CYHSY's sophomore album Some Loud Thunder materialized, the question of how the band would follow its hot-topic debut seemed hopelessly complex. But given that the group had little to do with its own hype-- and that Alec Ounsworth is by all credible reports a very private person who disdains public opinion-- the answer, in retrospect, is obvious: They made another Clap Your Hands Say Yeah record.
If Some Loud Thunder isn't as consistent as the debut, it's an adequate follow-up that contains a handful of fantastic songs, a handful of uneven ones, and a handful of duds. Famed producer Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Mogwai) brings his usual touch to the album-- it's denser than the debut, with even more towering harmonies. The only time Fridmann does the band a disservice is on the title track, which opens the record with the same sort of vague antagonism with which "Clap Your Hands!" kicked off the debut. "Some Loud Thunder" seems like a solid, peppy indie rock song, but it's such a mess that it's hard to tell for sure-- pickled in ugly distortion, it sounds like a bad rip. (Ounsworth claims the album is intended to be heard on vinyl; perhaps it works better there.) As a mission statement and a fuck-off, "Some Loud Thunder" is even more effective than "Clap Your Hands!": The latter was obviously intended to be daunting, while the former is rich with ambiguity. Was it meant to sound shitty or did it just turn out that way? Regardless, it's a drag to listen to.
The most engaging songs here zero in on what CYHSY do best: cracked, brassy vocals, shaggy rhythms, and luxuriant melodies. The flickering luau-rock of "Mama, Won't You Keep Them Castles in the Air and Burning?" finds Ounsworth's clarion voice at its most affecting, eventually washing out in a tide of woozy harmonies. "Love Song No. 7", with its slithering vocal line and stark piano, is distinct from the band's usual fizzy shimmer; it's darker and finer than anything else on the record. "Underwater (You and Me)" profits from its density, with tight coils of reverbed guitar spring-loading the bouncy melody. These tracks find CYHSY tweaking their template with more sumptuous, Fridmann-assisted layers, with excellent results.
An entire album of songs this well-tuned would have trumped the debut, but Some Loud Thunder bogs down in some uneven ideas. The transition from bright acoustic jangle to crispy garage-psych on "Emily Jean Stock" is vitalizing, but Ounsworth's drooping affectations emphasize the hokier qualities of his voice. The goofy yet fun "Satan Said Dance" is an indie-dance track laced with twittering sci-fi keyboards; one wonders if the indie world is comfortable enough with its relationship to dancing to enjoy a song about Hell being a place where Satan makes you dance. I have a soft spot for the admittedly overcooked "Yankee Go Home", a Destroyer-caliber piece of musical theater where Ounsworth gets to inflect the hell out of lubricated words naturally suited to his slippery voice, like "Honolulu." Rounding out these problematic tracks are stillborns like the meandering "Arm and Hammer" and the throwaway gypsy instrumental "Upon Encountering the Crippled Elephant".
In the end, one wonders if the hype didn't exert a subtle influence on CYHSY after all. Consider that Ounsworth, who represents himself as being neither comfortable nor interested in anything resembling a spotlight, has answered that hype with a murkier, weirder album than the one that spawned it, one that seems pulled in too many different directions. Then consider how the title Some Loud Thunder seems, deliberately or not, to refer to the very extra-musical cacophony that Ounsworth claims to be unaffected by. A wheel's stationary hub might not care about its spin, but it still feels the pressure of all those whirling spokes.