The Swedish artist better known as Yung Lean makes an unexpected pivot on his long-running side project, swapping out sad rap and vaporwave to embrace his inner crooner.

Sugar World

In the past decade, Yung Lean has traveled well beyond the novelty-rap origins of “Ginseng Strip 2002,” moving from trance to 2-step to art pop. But he’s never really been able to escape the fact that he was first known to the world as a white 15-year-old making joke raps. The jonatan leandoer96 side project and its predecessor Jonatan Leandoer127 have, over the years, offered a respite from the baggage that comes with the name Yung Lean—not just his fans’ expectations for a certain type of rap music, but also the air of appropriation that colored the project’s origins. If Yung Lean had introduced himself to the world first as jonatan leandoer96, he might have been regarded more like the Swedish King Krule than the stepchild of Lil B. The double-edged irony of viral success is that without the meme appeal that initially built his audience, he wouldn’t have a built-in following for his subsequent wanderings, and would likely still be toiling in obscurity.
Though he used to keep his two projects siloed, Yung Lean and jonatan leandoer96 have increasingly converged as the respective experimentation of one inevitably feeds into the other; the haunted piano ballads and post-punk riffs of Yung Lean’s 2022 album Stardust fit snugly within the leandoer96 palette. While the first leandoer96 releases possessed the diaristic aimlessness of a sketchbook, his new record Sugar World is tightly produced and precisely programmed, marking both a confident step forward and a somewhat unexpected pivot for the artist, regardless of moniker. Here, Lean sounds less interested in hypnagogic pop than classic Britpop.
Lean benefits from the grounding presence of Danish multimedia artist Frederik Valentin, with whom he seems to have found an unexpected kinship. As one-fourth of the thumb-nosing butt-rock group Hard Rock Power Spray, Valentin experienced early success with his edgelord antics, opening tours for Green Day and Bloodhound Gang, joining the Warped Tour, and even releasing a concert-movie-cum-porno called Rock N Fuck. But time has a way of wearing down even the artists most invested in shock value, and Valentin seems to have matured into a respectable avant-garde polymath. Big riffs and dick jokes gave way to loops and reverb, adult film soundtracks swapped for Chris Marker live scores. However unexpected it might seem, the slightly elder Valentin offers a role model for Lean, as the rapper continues his own transition from adolescent transgressive to dignified auteur.
Though the leandoer96 project has grown in scope and confidence with each release, it has remained firmly in the bedroom until now; Sugar World drapes Lean in velvet and syrup, with a lush sound befitting the cornball crooner he plays on the album’s cover. The production is more melodic and uptempo than the sparse compositions and ambient soundscapes of Valentin’s recent years, but he’s nevertheless softened since his punk days, arriving at a singular combination of glam rock and indie twee. Lean has always had strong taste in collaborators, and like Gud and Sherman of the Sad Boys collective, Valentin fills out Lean’s aesthetic universe with textured shading, infusing Sugar World with the kind of whimsy Jon Brion brought to Late Registration.
The dissonant shapelessness and heavy reverb of 2016’s Psychopath Ballads mimicked Hippos in Tanks labelmates like Dean Blunt and James Ferraro, but Sugar World is more like the second coming of Jens Lekman. Polished arrangements replace the slapdash Garageband drafts that populated previous leandoer96 releases, and tracks unfold like miniature suites. At once hard rocking and sweetly melodramatic, Valentin’s treatment positions Lean as a Bowie or Bolan-esque figure, a chameleonic icon shifting into his blue-eyed soul period. “Nightmare Amusement Park” effortlessly glides from guitar-heavy power pop into a glistening symphony as Lean’s own voice oozes in and out of Auto-Tune. On “Open (Copenhagen Freestyle),” Lean is in pure piano-ballad mode, before a talkbox-like guitar joins in to duet.
There are still traces of a lo-fi sensibility—Valentin generally favors a simple drum machine over full percussion—but the freeform warblings of the leandoer96 project have been molded into a new shape. The jangly keys and sweeping strings of “Rivers of Another Town” channel Camera Obscura, and the clean lead guitar of “If I’m Born I Have to Live” has an echo of Phoenix. At other moments, Valentin and Lean flirt with a classic FM radio sound. The opening bars of “Nightmare Amusement Park” riff on Kiss’ “Strutter,” while the guitar solo on the title track blazes into “All the Young Dudes” territory.
Just as he once played the rapper, Lean has searched for new characters to embody, and here he summons his inner wedding singer. Abandoning his monotone rap flow, Lean stretches into the upper reaches of his register, the cracks and chokes of his unvarnished voice offering an evocative counterpoint to the blushing twinkle of Valentin’s production. On “Swedish Elvis Storm,” he reaches an angelic falsetto, swaying like a doo-wop crooner standing on a corner. Some of his lyrics still mimic rap bars—“When I was a young one/Got my head sprung”—but Lean’s writing conforms to pop structure more than ever, distilling it to a refined simplicity. There’s still an occasional clumsiness to the phrasing and delivery, but he’s learned to exploit that as a vehicle for an almost adorable earnestness, serenading the unseen lovers in his phone. Lean’s accented voice achieves a distinct emotional affect, where stumbling and half-uttered words stand in for a broken heart.
What skeptics misunderstand about Yung Lean is that his appeal was never solely about irony: It was about a kind of dissonance between the profanity and imperfection of Lean’s lyrics and the dreamy, frequently gorgeous production that served as a backdrop. Lean was always drawn in by the sublime, but he offset it with the juvenile deflection of a kid uncomfortable with sincere emotion. Over the last decade of his career, he’s struggled not only to be taken seriously by others, but to take himself seriously as a voice capable of making beautiful noise. With Sugar World, he finally lets all the sweetness and gentle feeling built up inside come tumbling out, stripped of any macho defense mechanisms. While it’s the kind of stylistic switch that might at first seem like another gimmick, Lean lets his heart bleed freely like never before.


Executive produced by Thom Yorke, Chris Clark’s latest album is warm and gratifying, offering the veteran electronic musician’s fragile falsetto as a graceful counterpoint to his intricate production.

Sus Dog

Like the shifting atmosphere of a distant planet, Chris Clark’s music is subject to violent extremes. With little warning, a reassuring beat might furiously morph into an instrumental storm, breaking just as suddenly into a diamond rain of twinkling synths. The British musician’s delight in wrong-footing expectations has been one of the few constants in a career that has swerved wildly—from tricky IDM to off-kilter hip-hop beats, and from blistering techno to hushed minimalism. At his propulsive best, Clark dazzles with both the density and dynamism of his music. But in contrast to the explosive changes that have taken place from record to record, Clark’s work has also undergone another, more subtle evolution. In recent years, as he has amassed a growing body of soundtracks for film and TV, he has developed an ear for emptiness, one that has both heightened the drama of his music and accentuated its suggestion of three-dimensional space.
The architecture of Clark’s production has never sounded airier or more fluid than it does on his latest record, Sus Dog, where he foregrounds one instrument he has largely left in the margins: his voice. Executive produced by Thom Yorke, Sus Dog is warm and immediately gratifying, offering the musician’s fragile falsetto as a graceful counterpoint to his intricate and sometimes breakneck production.
Historically, Clark’s experiments with voice have yielded mixed results. By turns angelic and menacing, the vocal accents on 2017’s Death Peak are crucial to that record’s apocalyptic appeal, while the garbled, ultra-processed growls and chanted raps on 2009’s Totems Flare have aged poorly. Here, rather than slapping his voice on top of the mix, Clark has learned to accommodate it. Working with a more limited palette of alternately boxy and lightspeed synths interwoven with acoustic instruments, Sus Dog is an ornate but fleet-footed synth-pop album brimming with some of the loveliest music he’s ever made. Clark glides over his beats, using his high, plaintive voice to nudge a song into gear before soaring on its pent-up momentum. “Clutch Pearlers” levitates over a bed of delicate music-box plucks, while on “Town Crank” he surfs a blaring synth pulse reminiscent of Suicide at their most antagonistic, his voice rising above the chaos as the track veers into the red.
With the exception of Arca’s mentorship with Björk, no electronic producer has had a more reliable singing coach than Clark under the tutelage of Thom Yorke. At first you might think that Yorke himself is tearing into “Town Crank,” but the similarity between the two men is limited to their beatific falsettos. Clark’s voice, while handsome, lacks the lower range and piercing, corroded edge that Yorke brings to Radiohead’s most emotive tracks, a quality that he more than makes up for with the sheer violence of his production. Apart from the bridge of “Bully,” where he sighs an ultra-Yorkean line—“Drift off in traffic/Colonized by your phone”—in a particularly Yorkean way, he largely forgoes replicating any of his mentor’s vocal tics, even when they harmonize together on “Medicine.”
The power of Clark’s singing derives from the shapes that his voice makes out of air as much as the content of the songwriting itself. He opens “Alyosha” with a tinny a cappella refrain, repeating “I want to believe” in a hurt tone before his voice cleaves into separate spheres that pit mature practicality against raw adolescent distrust. “Forest” is almost entirely instrumental until a bright, multi-tracked chorus to rival Fleet Foxes rises brilliantly out of the mist. In one of the record’s most striking moments, at the title track’s emotional nadir, he leaps an octave from a mournful croon into an aching note of despair as a detuned synth bleeds over the song’s swelling acoustics like a bruise.
Because Clark’s production is so finely detailed, one risk in making the leap to conventional songwriting is that his words might appear crude in comparison. But his approach as a lyricist remains resolutely off-kilter, pitched between vague but highly evocative ribbons of text and a clear-eyed sensitivity that approaches the unknowability of human behavior from odd angles. “Alyosha,” a song whose title might be a reference to the virtuous but passive protagonist from The Brothers Karamazov, is full of unanswerable, emotionally naked pleas for understanding that are met in turn by one of the producer’s most scorching and merciless techno refrains. On “Dismissive,” he achieves a Zen-like clarity, recognizing cruelty for the shortcoming that it is before transforming derision into drive. “And they can be as cynical and dismissive as they like” he croons, “In fact please carry on/It’s all fuel to the fire.”
For years, Clark’s best work has toggled between beauty and brutality, blistering noise and otherworldly calm. Sus Dog is also situated between those two poles, but in leveraging his voice like this, Clark has discovered not only a new way to guide listeners through his maze-like production, but also of expressing the strain of navigating such wild terrain. On the closing “Ladder” he sings wearily over mournful piano about “living on a ladder stuck between two floors,” which itself could be a bleakly beautiful metaphor for the zigzagging course of his own music. On Sus Dog, Clark harnesses his career’s wild atmospheric extremes; it’s as though for the first time, he truly felt the weather in his bones.


The classics kid in me craves noble grandeur-- craft-happy shit with more than meets the rods and cones, less is ...

We Are Monster

The classics kid in me craves noble grandeur-- craft-happy shit with more than meets the rods and cones, less is always more (except with clothes), suggestive-seductive vs. the once-off gunfuck. Full-on body music's great, sure, but so is porno, and with that shit I'd much rather wax new flesh than drag my stylus off the same old 10-second loop. Same time, Intelligent Body Music's as much a nightmare as Intelligent Anal, both a prefab excuse for pleasure-lack. So we're stuck in this immediacy=better rut, when really the best stuff cross-genre-- cross-platform, cross-media-- has instant funk, but with enough tricks for prolonged appeal.
Liking We Are Monster is easy. Isolée aren't bangers but they groove hard enough; melodies are pretty but most times we have to look for them (no lead vox or riff jihad per se). Tracks aren't afraid to be songs ("Face B"), and songs aren't afraid to be tracks ("Jelly Baby / Fish"). Everything's pleasant in other words, non-threatening like the cutesy-est Morr Music lullaby, but physical enough that you could get away with some great normal-person dancing. There are guitar sounds on a few tracks too, if that's important ("Today" sounds like "Do You Realize?"), and traceable horizontal A-->B trajectory in songs with actual movements and quantifiable progress. No need for all the "it's about size! it's about expansion!" apologies people make for their favorite loops.
As for loving this record-- letting it problematize itself with spins and learning to let it offend-- well, We Are Monster has the depth if you have the time. Yep, here's a fun record that's a work-for-it, in-the-details record, too. Behind the choked-vocals groove of, say, "Enrico" are countless micro-surprises (check how the kicks break down differently each turnaround, or how the downbeat finally drops deceptively mid-bar instead of on the loop's head), structured flips with chess-like anticipation (the guitar-like scratches function percussively at first, their color stuck in overtones until the song needs them in full), and avalanching momentum not from Isolée stuffing ideas half-baked, but from letting the seeds of lines grow, branch out, and tangle. Not sure we can talk of "Golden Age IDM" or even "Golden Age Techno" yet, but something like the Copeland-does-Glam gem "Schrapnell" seems so effortless, breathes so carefree, years from now crits might accuse it of sounding timeless-- maybe even of being so.
The rest of the tracks have their own self-revealing logic, obeying the beat but never in dependency to it. Honestly, you could drop the drum sounds off "Madchen mit Hase" and the song would still kill a floor, the rhythms of its composite parts boasting good spine, serving the melody before decorating the dancefloor. No gesture's incidental; the simplest blip plays for both a greater purpose and its own passing punchline. Even the second-trackiest number, "Do Re Mi", fronts a perplexing guitar jingle so it can alley-oop with drones of the same progression and a goofy italo-disco melody of 180-degree mood change, then the polar-opposite timbre. These songs are well-poised and well-developed and terrifyingly autonomous-- so much so I'm afraid they're no longer Isolée's anymore. On that note: Yeah, while I wish We Are Monster was an Album w/Overarching Concerns and Worldview, not just a Bunch Of Sweet Similar-Sounding Stand-Alone Tracks, I'm also convinced that in fact, a worldview is there, and probably an exciting one at that. I just haven't cracked one yet-- or just won't be able to.


Originally released in 1997, the Britpop band’s second album feels like a crash course in the history of UK rock, zipping through glam, psychedelia, punk, and pop in fresh, surprising ways.

Supergrass: In It for the Money (Remastered Expanded Edition)

Indulgence can be its own reward. Take In It for the Money, the wild, careening sophomore set from Supergrass. Flush with success and fresh out of adolescence, the Britpop trio embraced all the new adventures heading their way, a journey that steadily pulled them away from the frenzied pleasures of their 1995 debut I Should Coco. Where their peers sang of common people and wonderwalls, Supergrass concerned themselves with teenage thrills: buzzing on speed, getting busted by cops, telling dirty jokes, and hanging out with friends. At the center of the album was the smash hit “Alright,” an incandescent pop song about being young, dumb, and free. Other bands might have chased the charts by attempting to re-create the spirit of “Alright.” Supergrass instead chose to see how fast and far they could run.
In It for the Money isn’t so much a departure from I Should Coco as a progression. Often, it feels as if Supergrass are attempting to offer a crash course in the history of British rock, cramming in elements borrowed from the swinging 1960s and 1970s classic rock, then filtering these well-known sounds through the irreverence of punk. They still sound vigorous—witness the rampaging single “Richard III”—but they lack the exuberance that fueled their first album. The shift was necessary for their long-term survival. “Alright” threatened to pigeonhole Supergrass as loveable teenage imps, a role they played to the hilt in the song’s supremely silly video. (They played their part so well that Steven Spielberg believed Supergrass would be ideal candidates for a gen-X spin on the Monkees.)
Supergrass turned down Spielberg, choosing instead to do the things normal rock’n’roll bands do: play an enormous amount of shows before hunkering down in the studio to make another record. It helped that Supergrass had arrived just as the Britpop wave crested, its rising tide not only lifting the shaggy group into the Top Ten but putting them squarely within a happening scene. They shared space on charts and festival bills with the amiably straightforward likes of Cast, Sleeper, the Bluetones, and Ash, yet they were qualitatively different, possessing punk-pop smarts to rival Elastica, a brawnier musicality than Oasis, and a self-evident sense of humor.
All of this comes to a head on In It for the Money, an album where the riffs and jokes are wrapped in woolly psychedelia, blaring horns, and splashes of sweet melancholy. Where I Should Coco blew by at a breakneck pace, In It for the Money unfolds with a deliberate sense of drama, slowly coming into focus with the menacing swirl of the title track and proceeding to ebb and flow across its 12 songs. The record feels so unified that it’s remarkable to realize they entered the studio in 1996 with only two completed songs in tow, forcing them to write the bulk of the album during the recording sessions. Along for the ride was Rob Coombes, a keyboardist who was the brother of Supergrass frontman Gaz. He’d been on the band’s periphery for a while, hammering out the piano to “Alright” and playing woozy organ on “Going Out,” the stopgap 1996 single Supergrass released between their first and second albums, but he’s an integral part of In It for the Money, earning writing credits on all 12 songs and adding distinctive color throughout. (Rob Coombes would officially become a member of Supergrass in 2002.)
Listen closely—or spend some time with the clutch of monitor mixes and rough versions that fill the second disc of the new 3xCD deluxe reissue of the 1997 album—and it’s apparent that Supergrass did indeed write In It for the Money in the studio. Many of the songs are rooted in vamps that blossom into full songs: The slinky funk that propels the verses of “Cheapskate,” the circular stomp on “G-Song,” the lazy, shambling gait of “Hollow Little Reign” all bear telltale signs of compositions that began as group jams. None of these songs sound tossed off, though, littered as they are with overdubs, backwards guitars, and sound effects. Supergrass couldn’t resist any bit of studio trickery when they were making In It for the Money, yet they retained their sense of concise craft. The record feels vibrant, not overstuffed.
The triple-disc reissue of In It for the Money can dampen some of the album’s energy. Some fine B-sides, such as the tuneful neo-music-hall ramble “Melanie Davis,” are buried among the alternate mixes and working versions on the second disc, a collection of ephemera that plays better as individual tracks than as an album. The disc of live recordings is another story. Anchored by a full show from January 1998, a concert given nearly a year after the release of In It for the Money, the live disc shows Supergrass at full roar, turning these studio creations into breakneck rockers.
The title of In It for the Money is a nod toward Frank Zappa’s anti-hippie classic We’re Only In It for the Money. Supergrass may not sound anything like the Mothers of Invention, but their choice reflects the extent to which they were steeped in rock history. Supergrass never attempted to be innovators. They were magpies who busied themselves with figuring out how to assemble pieces of glam, psychedelia, punk, and pop in fresh, surprising ways. They would continue to hone their craft, making sleeker albums than In It for the Money, yet the group’s enthusiasm and imagination are at a peak here. They sound delighted to discover their full potential, and that giddiness remains infectious decades later.

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On their fourth LP, the Olympia band sounds as ever like they just wandered off the set of a country Western being shot inside a shipping container. But this modest-feeling band explores vast emotions, and Dream All Over has the blue-sky sensibility of a soul-searching road trip.

Dream All Over

What Gun Outfit do sounds secret and borderline ineffable. Like many bands to come out of Olympia since the '80s, they understand their place in rock history: their four LPs bear the mark of musicologists who know their "Bad Moon Rising" from their Bad Moon Rising, their "Kool Thing" from their "2 Kool 2 B 4-Gotten", their "Some Velvet Morning" from their Some Velvet Sidewalk. Levitating hooks and an emotional heaviness co-exist in their impressionistic songs, like the light-and-dark glow of a perpetual magic hour. As a singer, Carrie Keith (who also plays guitar) has absorbed as much from Lucinda Williams' pained rasp as from Kim Gordon's spacious monotone. And it's telling that her notably crazy-legged fellow guitarist Dylan Sharp once played in a corrosive hardcore band called Spiritual Warriors, an allusion to the surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. The connection underscores the subtle late-capitalist critique in his plainspoken lyrics, a soft-pedalled but deeply felt ideological edge. Gun Outfit are a seemingly modest band who sound alternately chained or freed by their devotion to thinking big-picture, by their gentle insistence on life-or-death stakes.
As ever, they sound like they just wandered off the set of a country Western being shot inside a shipping container, but Dream All Over is Gun Outfit's most consistent record by some margin. With its echoing grooves, drifting landscapes, and new textures—bits of bluegrass banjo, homemade electric sitars—Dream All Over has the blue-sky sensibility of a soul-searching road trip. There's gorgeous outlaw poetry on Keith's imagistic "Legends of My Own", a tale of a woman reborn alone in a foreign land. "When I put my blanket down/ I'm going to dream all over," Keith sings; it's an inspired metaphor for the act of becoming, and the cool composure with which she draws out the line "I wear a mask but not to hide" is its own kind of empowerment.
That abstract feminism also comes through on the LP's bare, sun-staring centerpiece "Angelino". Keith's symbols of "a kingdom in ruins" and "all of the cowgirls on the losing end" are more graceful ways of saying "fuck the patriarchy," but if you listen close to them they bite. Dream All Over's incantatory folk-rock cushions pleas for the systematically oppressed, meditations on apathy, poverty, greed, slavery, death. In the survivalist's love song "In Orbit", Sharp sings "You and I/ Are not the only satellites/ Circling an uninhabitable void/ For our whole lives." At least they are together.
Gun Outfit's music has gotten slower with each release, an inversion of (or response to) how human life has evolved since their band formed nine years ago. They reject the pace of our times, where everything happens so much. When they do evoke the modern world—like the 3D-printed gun that appears in the lyrics to closer "Only Ever Over"—there is an ominous, no-future edge to it. They seem to acknowledge the planet is doomed, while drawing a strange relief from facing facts. "Oh world, what lesson do you teach?" Sharp sings on the poignant ripper "Worldly Way". "Console yourself with sadness/ Befriend your misery." It made me think of an essay by the poet Melissa Broder, in which she explores the idea that depression is the over-evolution of the mind.
Perhaps this is why Gun Outfit—a band that will validate your pain as much as it will comfort you—still has such a fervent cult following underground. Punks love Gun Outfit because punks are inherently a little shattered. It's easy to carry a heavy heart when you live in a state of constant confrontation, when "anxiety's your default," as Sharp tosses off on the relatively upbeat "Gotta Wanna". Gun Outfit understands what it is to feel unsettled, to need some calming. On "Only Ever Over", after making the grand, dour, and quietly hilarious assertion that rock'n'roll and literature are dead, Sharp sings: "Cup a little coal/ Try to make it glow/ We're going to have a fire before we go."
In a recent interview, Sharp gave one of the best definitions of punk that you're likely to hear this year—that it's broadly "about being humble and resisting the illusion that everything's fine." In this framework, Gun Outfit fit as logically alongside folk tradition as Sonic Youth, to whom they have often been compared. The latter connection seemed truer of 2010's clattering, astounding Possession Sound, which should have made Gun Outfit as popular as contemporaries like Kurt Vile or Angel Olsen. The comparison now feels more spiritual, insomuch as Gun Outfit can offer a countercultural compass of restless subterranean artists, filmmakers, bands, labels, philosophies. Dream All Over recalls the most crucial lesson of all underground rock music: become your own sound, and create a universe for it to exist in.


Dropping the crust punk of their earlier offerings, the San Francisco band is committed to old-school death metal on its brutal, surprisingly catchy latest LP.

Deathless Master

San Francisco's Acephalix began as a hybrid of crust punk and death metal. Given that a couple of their earliest releases came out on Prank, it's natural a little punk would shine through the murk. Through a pair of tapes released in 2010 and 2011, and packaged together as Interminable Night, the death-metal influence became more prevalent. D-beats were still a component of the band's machinery, but the riffing began to resemble Grave and other stalwarts of 1990s Swedish death metal. On Deathless Master, the crust presence has all but departed, and Acephalix are now committed to death metal. In metal, consistency is more desirable than diversity-- bands are at their most potent when they record albums where the sound is uniform and where the atmosphere is established. There's always the occasional Naked City, but Acephalix know they are not Naked City. They know that finding your strength and focusing on that will reap artistic dividends, which is exactly what Deathless does.
Spiritually, the quartet-- which shares three members with the newer group Vastum-- takes cues from the most ancient death metal band of them all, Master. When Paul Speckmann created Master in 1983, there was no "death metal." He took the thrash and heavy metal he loved, amplified the harsh aspects, and birthed the new genre. Acephalix display a similar appreciation for simplicity on Deathless-- they don't seek to fancify death metal, but to penetrate the soil deeper. Riffs are still of the Swedish persuasion, but Acephalix also work in grooves that they can call their own. Guitarist Kyle House has a knack for catchiness in a genre that seldom rewards such a trait; this is especially seen in "On Wings...", where he maintains a bounce even when the chord patterns and tempos shift. "The Hunger" serves the same function as the long closing title track from Interminable, but improves upon that template. House's introductory lead is off-kilter and angular; from there the band continues to vamp and pummel until the track fades out.
Acephalix's most noticeable transformation is with vocalist Daniel Butler. In the group's earlier days, he had a snarl that was kept high enough to fit the then-crusty sound. Out of all the members, he's embraced the shift in direction the most, delivering a guttural yell seemingly submerged in tar. His vocals add the ambiance a death-metal album needs-- that the band is overtaking you, that you are a slave to the inevitable. You have to wonder if he's had it in him this whole time, and he was just waiting for the right music to really let hell break out. Lesser bands will list their vocalist under "Vokills" in their liner notes as a contrived measure of brutality; Butler will simply use his gut to strangle you.
What's also interesting about Deathless is that, while it's an entirely different organism from the rest of the band's works, like them, it was recorded at San Francisco's Lennon Studios with Vöetsek's Jef Leppard. He's in tune with the band's changes, and dials in appropriately thick tones. It's nice to see that a band can organically develop its sound while still maintaining a home-grown sensibility. Should the relationship continue, how else will Acephalix mutate in the future? Sometimes, even the music most focused on darkness can inspire a burst of optimism.


This odds-and-ends compilation features tracks originally released between 2010 and 2016, and presents a more vulnerable version of the pop colossus we know now.

Care Package

During his creative peak, from 2011’s Take Care through 2015’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, Drake processed his memory through his music. He plumbed the depths of his skyrocketing stardom, processing it all with a weary stream-of-consciousness. It was almost as if he was rapping names, places, and scenes as a way to remember them. (Never forget Courtney, from Hooters, on Peachtree.) Some songs included snippets of voicemails from irritated girlfriends. Others felt like rhyming notes to self, including one where he spent four minutes apologizing to his mother.
Drake will be 33 in October, and he’s no longer that person. His music has become more of a narrative running alongside his celebrity than the main product. Yes, he still breaks records, but his albums and songs now seem to be in service of the bigger, more lucrative business of being Drake.
But when his breakthrough mixtape So Far Gone turned 10 earlier this year, Drake decided it might be time to relive some formative memories. Or at least, to remember—and reap streaming royalties from—them. His OVO imprint celebrated the occasion with a physical release and digital release, and So Far Gone made its debut on the Billboard albums chart, hitting No. 5. In that same spirit comes Care Package, an odds-and-ends set that collects tracks that were originally released between 2010 and 2016. It’s an accessible time capsule, a concise document of his growth as a musician and a primary source for his OVO imprint’s signature sound, which has since anchored multiple careers. For Drake, who has had a relatively quiet year musically, now’s as good a time as ever to reflect on where he’s been.
While many of the songs on Care Package had logistics-related reasons for never seeing wider release—for instance, “Dreams Money Can Buy,” “Girls Love Beyoncé,” and “Draft Day” all contain expensive samples—they were all easy to find online, and quickly emerged as fan favorites. (Drake, a seasoned product pitchman at this point, described the release as “Some of our most important moments together available in one place.”) Many of these songs find Drake dredging up his rawest emotions while utilizing R&B textures and moods, speaking to a broad audience while still maintaining a singular perspective. There are tracks here that winningly delve into vulnerability, defeat, fear of failure—subjects his music rarely addresses anymore. Several songs once served as warm-ups for eventual full-lengths, musical mile-markers from a guy overflowing with great ideas. Drake could hardly miss during this period, a fact that Care Package definitively underscores.
“Paris Morton Music,” the oldest song on the collection, is a throwback to the time immediately before the entire radio started to sound like Drake featuring Drake, with a blurry-streetlight score that would become a rap radio formula for the first half of the decade. It’s a huge sound, by design—in producer Noah “40” Shebib’s production, Drake could easily find pockets to rap, pockets to sing, or both.
Throughout the compilation, from the after-the-afterparty trap of “Days in the East” to the versatile performance and soft-bellied synth twinkle of “The Motion” to the music-blog-friendly “Dreams Money Can Buy,” Drake is also presented not only as a versatile pop vocalist who could impress himself on almost any trending sound, but also as someone who could add a new dimension to that sound. His appeal as a pop musician was growing, and songs like “Club Paradise,” released a few months before Take Care, previewed Drake’s forthcoming leap; candid and funny, the song served as self-indulgent, status-update music way before “mood” was a hashtag.
Certainly, there’s a few corny or dated moments—listening through Care Package, you’ll hear hashtag rap (“I got that Courtney Love for you/Crazy shit”), epically cloying vocal runs, and overly cutesy wordplay like, “Brunch with Qatar royals all my cups is oil.” However, the best songs here stand up with Drake’s best music. Take “Trust Issues,” perhaps the most meta moment on an extremely meta release, a song where Drake echoes his own hook from the DJ Khaled hit “I’m on One,” casting a shadow on all of its implied excess. Or 2013’s “Girls Love Beyoncé,” featuring a “Say My Name” sample that Drake and 40 reorient as a lonely plea for connection. “You know how this shit goes,” Drake sings, over soft drum claps and sampled vocal snippets. “This isn’t like four years ago.” The version of Drake that Drake is referencing on that song is the Drake of 2009, a guy with humbler ambitions. A guy that was gone, but not totally forgotten.
The Drake of 2019 has moved into the future—he now owns an eSports team. He is likely no longer driving his girlfriend through the snow so she can make the bar exam. He’s far more protected, far wealthier, far more inaccessible. As opportunistic as the release of Care Package is, the reminder of Drake’s work at the margins during his most prolific creative period is a timely one. The compilation layers history upon history, creating a dense nostalgia. We may no longer have the Drake from five or 10 years ago, but we’ll always have the memories.


Recorded live at the 1966 Newport Jazz Festival, this brief but incendiary set includes a famous rendition of “Mississippi Goddam” tucked inside a handful of potent standards.

You’ve Got to Learn (Live)

Nina Simone’s legendary 1966 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival has been talked about in small circles with awe for half a century. This is due in part to two things: Her set was so captivating that the audience wouldn’t let the next act on the stage; they hooted and cajoled the festival’s emcee until he finally announced she’d be back for an encore. It was also for the revamped version of her passionate “Mississippi Goddam.” For completists, fans, and anyone who even vaguely loves Simone’s music, the Newport “Mississippi Goddam” has been like a vapor in the wind: often discussed, rarely heard.
You’ve Got to Learn is the first-ever release of this specific Newport set, in honor of what would have been Simone’s 90th birthday. Of course, there’s no shortage of recordings of Simone playing live. From her first time at Newport in 1960 all the way to her sets at the London jazz club Ronnie Scott’s in the ’80s, the stage is where her endless artistry shone brightest, and where her often unpredictable stage demeanor deepened our understanding of a brilliant and troubled artist. But this set captures a moment at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, after the marches in Selma and Jackson where Simone performed, but before many of her friends like Langston Hughes or Martin Luther King Jr. had died. On You’ve Got to Learn, Simone renders familiar songs in unique arrangements, and its political urgency translates through a particular serenity in her performance, like she was both eye and the hurricane.
As the set begins to rapt applause, Simone goes back to the roots of blues, grounding each track in the foundation from whence they came. The wrenching title song—recorded with strings and soothing background vocals for 1965’s I Got a Spell On You—is presented here in its true form, a powerfully sad and gritty blueprint for suppressing the pain of a broken heart until it scars over. On “I Loves You Porgy,” the George Gershwin tune that made her a star, she sounds stranded in the muck of human emotions. In an interlude introducing the commanding “Blues For Mama,” she sets the scene in her honeyed, regal speaking voice: “There is an old porch, and there’s an old man, and there’s a beat-up guitar and a broken bottle. There are flies all around, there is molasses all around, and he is composing his tune on a hot afternoon.” In that political moment, if inadvertently, she traces the long road from the origins of the blues to the fight for liberation, but also brings it home: “It will appeal to a certain type of woman who’s had this kind of experience.” Simone, too—the pain is just at the surface, but she’ll let it all out on the piano.
You’ve Got to Learn is worth it for the new “Mississippi Goddam” alone. Simone had written the song in response to the racist violence plaguing the South in the summer of 1963—the assassination of attorney and Civil Rights icon Medgar Evers in his Jackson, Mississippi, driveway, by a Ku Klux Klan member; and the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing, where four KKK members in Birmingham, Alabama, planted a dynamite bomb that murdered four young Black girls. The ensuing furor over a Black woman singing a curse word in a song demanding equality in the era of Jim Crow resulted in radio stations breaking the vinyl singles in half and sending them back to the record label. But their anger couldn’t come close to Simone’s own, which channeled that of a nation. “We all wanted to say it,” observed the legendary activist and comedian Dick Gregory, in the 2015 documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? “She said it.”
The most popular rendition of “Mississippi Goddam,” recorded at Carnegie Hall in 1964, is a knowing bait and switch: her anger towards the murderous cruelty visited upon Black Americans is, at first, expressed mainly in words. She sings, conversationally and almost cheerily, over her bright chords and lets the tension build as the song spreads out, and then the cloudy key shift of the bridge: subjugation, despair, urgency, and finally, existential revolt. It hasn’t lost an iota of its power, but it says a lot about both the era and her Carnegie audience what makes the audience gasp in shock is Simone saying the word “goddam” aloud.
Two years after the Carnegie Hall performance, in Newport, Rhode Island, “Mississippi Goddam” was a rallying cry, and Simone decided to sideline the rousing showtune rhythm, instead swinging deep into a blues riff. In this accounting of the chaos, she swaps out Tennessee for California in the lyrics to reflect the Watts Rebellion of ’65, “sending the listener on a wave across the growing expanse of national violence,” as the professor and author Shana L. Redmond puts it in the liner notes. Simone’s delivery is especially conversational here, her voice curling at the edge of each phrase with a scratchy, exasperated depth. But even at her most powerful, she never quite betrays the measured nature of her rage, an enigmatic quality that permeated her music as well as her life. Her brilliance stemmed from both studiousness and tumult, her technical virtuosity an outlet for the personal pain she endured, whether at the violent hands of her first husband and manager, or through the struggles of her long-undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
Across seven songs and 33 minutes, it’s hard to feel like we’ve discovered a new fold, wrinkle, or tear in Nina Simone’s richly cataloged life and music. But even in its brevity, You’ve Got to Learn is a hearty document of how music can motivate a political moment and how the most crucial of these songs reverberate throughout history, particularly as history coils in on itself, repeating the same cruel pattern. Simone’s music and voice still have the ability to deliver us toward righteousness.


Developed in collaboration with the Alias dance company, Fernando Corona’s newest solo album is a swirling miasma of ominous drone and murky rhythm that hums like an electrical substation.

The Alias Sessions

In his work as Murcof, Fernando Corona has long shown a talent for drawing beauty out of bleakness. On his earliest albums, 2002’s Martes and 2005’s Remembranza, the Tijuana native fused the timbres of contemporary classical with the tonal and rhythmic elements of ambient, minimal techno, and microsound. Over the years, Corona diversified without abandoning his essential palette, balancing fulsome dub techno with spectral drones and glitch miniatures with lyrical etudes, in conversation simultaneously with Scriabin and Oval, Autechre and Ligeti. The Alias Sessions is Murcof’s first proper solo album, not counting the soundtracks Lost in Time and La Sangre Iluminada, since 2008’s The Versailles Sessions. Where that record explored the sensuous textures of chamber instruments like viola da gamba and harpsichord, The Alias Sessions represents a new stylistic step, distilling synthesized drones, acoustic timbres, and the occasional drumbeat into a molten, swirling mass, ominous yet engrossing.
Corona, who lives in Girona, Spain, has spent the past dozen or so years working with artists from across disciplines, exploring jazz fusion with French trumpeter Erik Truffaz and contemporary minimalism with French classical pianist Vanessa Wagner. The Alias Sessions derives from a pair of collaborations with the Brazilian-Swiss choreographer Guilherme Botelho and his company Alias. It’s striking to imagine this as music for dance, if only because overt rhythm plays such a minor role. Actual beats are few and far between: A brief flare of agonizingly slow death-march drums on “Unboxing Utopia” recalls Andy Stott’s scorched-earth techno; the percolating modular pings of “Underwater Lament” bring to mind the fizzing pulses of golden-era Pan Sonic. Mostly, his tones—out-of-tune strings and piano, charcoal-hued reverb, the threatening hum of aging electrical substations—just hover, like some foul mist. The net effect is a blend of mystery and outright malice; had Hildur Guðnadóttir not gotten the commission, Corona’s music would have made a fine soundtrack to HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries.
But this is, without a doubt, music of movement. For all its omnipresent darkness, nothing is ever static or even stable. Gray clouds are forever swelling and fading; weary whale-song moans rise and fall in pitch; microtonal clusters tremble with dissonance. The piano figure heard early in Contre-Mondes, the suite that takes up disc 1, flickers unsteadily, seeming to dissolve into midair. The disc 2 suite Normal opens with a tentative melody—violin, or perhaps Theremin—that is equally ethereal. It feels as transient as the memory of a color glimpsed just once, long ago. One of The Alias Sessions’ most fascinating motifs—the first identifiable sound heard on the album, and one that recurs throughout the first suite—is a low rumble, like a dog’s growl, slowed into a series of evilly oscillating waves. It is a kind of ghost rhythm, a seething undercurrent to the album’s carefully sculpted shapes; it feels as though Corona slid one of his drones beneath a microscope and discovered something terrible lurking inside the waveform.
Video extracts of Alias’ dance performances offer a fascinating glimpse of Corona’s music in situ. In Contre-Mondes, naked bodies writhe in slow, arcing movements, half covered in shadow; zoomed-in sequences draw parallels between the dancers’ rippling flesh and Corona’s undulating frequencies. Normal appears more dreamlike: The dancers, dressed in street clothes, fall to the ground as though fainting, then rise again, over and over, in waves. Live, Botelho’s choreography must have added a welcome dimension to Corona’s slow-moving behemoths, but the music is plenty dynamic on its own, particularly the doomy maelstrom of Contre-Mondes; the held tones and arpeggios of Normal are slightly more conventional, their abiding melancholy more familiar and thus less startling.
Most important, though, is a good pair of speakers or headphones, ideally turned up loud; there’s a wealth of detail here that laptop speakers simply can’t capture. And to really appreciate the worlds that Corona has created, they should be absorbed in full. These aren’t songs meant to be cherry-picked for playlists. Each of the two suites, both more than 40 minutes long, is a single piece of music, gradually and gracefully playing out its dramatic arc. The Alias Sessions may appear forbidding, but give it the requisite time (and volume) and Corona’s work rewards handsomely. Like the best horror films, it raises a spectacle of unease from which it’s impossible to look away.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The debut album from the uncompromising rapper was released one week before his untimely death. It delivers a concentrated dose of his tense, menacing take on drill.

Welcome to O’Block

Dayvon Bennett, known throughout Chicago as rapper King Von, was shot dead outside the Monaco Hookah Lounge, Atlanta in the early hours of November 6 when, according to police, an argument between two groups of men “escalated to gunfire.” He was 26 years old. Von—one of two men killed in the incident—leaves behind two children and a catalog of music that’s stark and uncompromising in its depiction of street violence. Yet at the time of his death, Von appeared motivated to escape the trappings of a troubled past. “I like the people more in Chicago, but it’s just smarter to live at where I am now,” he told Passion of the Weiss earlier this year.
Atlanta might have been his adopted home, but Von was Chicago all the way to his bones. The title of Welcome to O’Block—released exactly a week before Von’s death—references the tough 6400 block of South Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive on Chicago’s South Side. Dubbed O Block after murder victim Odee Perry, it includes the Parkway Gardens apartments, where Michelle Obama grew up, where Chief Keef used to hang out. Von’s music is heavily indebted to drill pioneers, and bears many of gangster rap’s timeless fundamentals. His verses are unapologetic about the violence that rippled through a life marked with stints in prison, delivered with an unpolished flow distinguished by its sense of tension.
Welcome to O’Block has been pitched as Von’s debut album after a series of mixtapes and his “origin story.” The tragedy that has followed its release means the project shoulders more of his legacy than Von could ever have intended. Thankfully, it delivers a concentrated dose of the rapper’s burgeoning style. Von was not Killer Mike, broadly covering America’s social ills, but when he raps about committing burglaries at 13 years old (“I Am What I Am”) and asserts he has “bodies from way back” (“All These N****s”), it comes with not just a captivating belligerency but sobering honesty. The opening lyrics to opening track “Armed & Dangerous” immediately give the album a sense of edginess: “Police steady watching me/Everyday they clockin’ me.” Von’s voice is the sound of tense muscles impossible to unwind.
Welcome to O’Block is a more nuanced set than Von’s last tape Levon James, which traded almost totally in hardened gangsterisms. On “Can’t Relate,” Von makes it clear his life can only be viewed through glass, insisting we can never appreciate the gravity of being on the run from authorities or sitting in jail away from your children. The album’s best section is its final three tracks, a painful hint at what Von’s future as a recording artist might have held. “Ride” sees him give thanks for a partner who stuck by his side during a trial. Punctuated by an AutoTune-doused hook, “How It Go” offers a vivid telling of his legal troubles, while closer “Wayne’s Story” depicts a 14-year-old trapped in a cycle of violence.
Primarily produced by ChopsquadDJ, the beats are uniform in their presentation: eerie piano keys, humming basslines, skittish drums, a palpable sense of menace. There are occasional divergences from the formula—“I Am What I Am” places Von in the Brooklyn drill scene alongside rising regional artist Fivio Foreign—but by prioritizing heavy atmosphere, the music scores Von’s words with the appropriate sense of gravity.
There are moments when an artist notable for his raw style shows a lack of polish. “Mad at You” shows Von somewhat churlishly decrying a woman who left him, with Dreezy playing the role of his ex. The generic “Back Again” features a strangely lackluster appearance from Von’s mentor and label head Lil Durk. Much better is “All These N****s,” a short, energetic shot of drill that showcases the pair’s musical chemistry. (Both Von and Durk’s recent work has been in the backdrop of charges faced in connection with a February 2019 shooting outside of Atlanta restaurant the Varsity. The case is still open.)
Becoming laser-focused on flaws perhaps unfairly sidesteps the importance of Welcome to O’Block in the broader Chicago rap narrative. Recontextualised in terrible sadness, it serves as the most complete document of Von’s artistry, tinged with the sting that he was still getting better. King Von wrote about a world that was bleak. His passing just makes it all the more so.

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On the former emo standby’s first album in five years, Chris Conley documents the history of the band, missing the reason they mattered as he recalls his chart-topping glory days.

9

Saves the Day have long operated with an inflated sense of self. “This song will become the anthem of your underground,” Chris Conley sang on 2001’s Stay What You Are. At the time, he may not have been far off. It’s hard to imagine mid-2000s alternative had the band’s lyrical forthrightness not inspired a wave of suburban adolescents to buy studded belts, pick up guitars, and whine about their relationships. Post-hardcore outfits like Midtown were the very offspring of the New Jersey scene Saves the Day helped foster, while Fall Out Boy, the genre’s savviest shapeshifters, first connected through a shared love of Saves the Day’s 1999 benchmark, Through Being Cool.
But after more lineup changes than years in existence and consistent record-label hopscotch, Saves the Day can barely be considered the same group that once clogged Case Logic binders; instead, during the past decade, Conley used the name for ill-fated concept albums and public mental breakdowns. With 9, the band’s first record in five years, Conley hopes to create a lyrical scrapbook of sorts from an earlier era of the band: “This album is the story of Saves the Day and my own personal journey through life,” Conley announced, “which all unfolded as my relationship with music progressed.” It is a document meant to capture the moment he ruled, if not the world, at least “the scene.”
While bands like Rites of Spring and Sunny Day Real Estate pioneered the emotive lyricism that would inspire the much-maligned subgenre’s name, Saves the Day brought emo and its cultural associations to the mass audiences of MTV with blunt, lovelorn lyrics, ripped from the pages of a teenage diary. Their forebears often hid their emotions behind weepy metaphors about wilting flowers, but Saves the Day plainly didn’t care about being cool: “I wish I had friends like that,” Conley shouted on their first record. “They’d always be there for me/I wouldn’t look bad/Yeah, they wouldn’t talk behind my back.” Like a good episode of “Degrassi”, Saves the Day spoke directly to the insecurities any awkward kid might face in high school.
On 9, Conley applies a similarly honest approach to a different subject matter. Conley’s no longer being picked last in gym class; he’s rocking out on a Les Paul, signing to large labels, and singing about it all. “Oh yeah, we’re writing a record,” he begins on opener “Saves the Day.” On his later records, Conley was derided for more moody, complex arrangements. Not here: These songs are choppy, fast, and elemental, with his saccharine voice somehow pitched higher than on those songs he recorded two decades ago. Save for the blown-out breakdown in the 21-minute saga “29,” the guitar riffs are clean and catchy. Despite the attempts to recreate the dense power chords and pained whines that made Saves the Day emo poster boys, the formula fails when applied through Conley’s rose-colored vision of his own glory days.
Nostalgia can be potent and poignant, of course, but Conley fumbles it by assuming the audience is still just as enamored with his band as he is. “You’re gonna love it/You’ll know it forward and backward,” he continues. “We’ll get it stuck in your head every day.” Perhaps with 20 years remove, the band’s success is all that Conley remembers about albums that codified the growing pains of early adulthood for so many. Absent of emotional context, it feels delusional and desperate: “Let’s sing along another 20 years,” Conley begs, conjuring up the cursed image of a wrinkled, 50-year-old Saves the Day performing “At Your Funeral” at some kind of twelfth-wave emo revival cruise full of retirees.
For the rest of the album, he tries, with the same play-by-play specificity, to paint a picture of Saves the Day’s early accolades and kinetic energy. But like the wildest moments of teenage debauchery, the stories are cooler when retold without the bad parts. On “Suzuki” and “Side by Side,” Conley recounts the making of Can’t Slow Down, calling out the record by name. It comes off as a half-brag—“Come over Friday/And bring your Les Paul”—and half-desperate ploy for eternal youth—“We’re faded on a Thursday before midnight in a basement in New Brunswick.”
Then there are Conley’s days “on the road,” his self-mythology made self-important through song titles like “Kerouac and Cassidy.” His memories of international tours and playing Conan come off like a jock recalling athletic feats while drinking bottled domestics at a high school reunion: simplistic and overeager, leaving the listener incredulous that they ever happened. And for a band whose lyrics have inspired body ink, lazy rhymes like “Rendez-vous sidestage/Parlez-vous Anglais?” just seem sad.
Conley has said 9 is a love letter to Saves the Day’s fans. He enthusiastically thanks his listeners multiple times here, as on the fast and loud ode to longevity, “Suzuki.” But in a bigger sense, Conley has completely misrepresented their fandom. Saves the Day lifers, the ones who come to their reunion shows and still speak of Conley’s lyrical feats, found the band because they spoke to their lived experience as misfits and losers. But it’s impossible to relate to the world Conley has built for himself on 9, with heartbreaks at the top of the Eiffel Tower and tours through Berlin in a Mercedes-Benz. And when Conley bursts into ecstatic rhapsodies about the beauty of the world during 9, it feels dismissive and out of touch with the moment, like a therapist gaslighting patients. Saves the Day was once the biggest band in the scene—if only Conley could remember why.


The minimalist composer's latest album features a piece that takes inspiration from Radiohead songs, along with a recording of Reich's 1987 classic Electric Counterpoint, performed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood.

Radio Rewrite

When Steve Reich heard Jonny Greenwood perform his 1987 classic Electric Counterpoint at a Polish festival, he was swamped. By his own admission, he was floundering beneath a massive, unmanageable multiple-orchestra commission for the London Sinfonietta, and watching Greenwood's bracing, devoted rendition, originally written for Pat Metheny, he felt something settle in with a "click."  It occurred to him that, despite friends' repeated urgings, he had yet to "check out" Radiohead, so he finally did. Radio Rewrite, a five-movement piece built on themes from Radiohead songs, was the result.
The songs he focused his piece around were "Everything in Its Right Place", from Kid A, and In Rainbows' "Jigsaw Falling Into Place". In an interview last year, he called the opening series of chords on "Everything in Its Right Place" "one of the classics in Western music," elaborating: "'Everything' is a very rich song. It's very simple and very complex at the same time. What does it mean? Maybe it's about a relationship, maybe I should ask Thom Yorke."
The piece itself doesn't quote Radiohead's songs, exactly, as cock a quizzical eyebrow towards them. You can hear the jagged heave of "Jigsaw"'s rising action in the first movement, and the tabula rasa drone of "Everything" in the second, but by the third movement, the lines of transmission grow spotty, by design: "The piece is a mixture of moments where you will hear Radiohead, but most moments where you won't," Reich remarked in an interview with his publisher Boosey & Hawkes. The harmonic language starts to complicate itself, stirring up clouds and creating something that feels more like a series of dreams the songs themselves are having than a straightforward tribute.
When Reich's music quietly departs from its source material, the piece achieves lift off, as the form fades and the piece settles into a seething, anxious rhythm of its own. The piece follows the by-now familiar Reich structure—pairs of movements, titled "Fast " and "Slow", alternating between thrumming low-level unease and calm—and the familiarity has a bittersweet tinge to it. When the piece directly references Radiohead, the piece feels troublingly like a printout, with new material going in one end and the churning minimalist music emerging reliably on the other.  His final two movements, with their scrambled rhythmic pulses and sumptuous string writing, help mitigate this feeling.
Jonny Greenwood's recording of Electric Counterpoint, meanwhile, feels genuinely different. His version, which he's honed live over years and is included on Radio Rewrite, has a nagging, insistent edge, with more space in between the guitars than in the famous Pat Metheny version, as if the tracks are echoing from opposite corners of a massive, empty room. Greenwood's phrasing is choppier; you can hear almost every pick strike, making it sometimes feel like you need to swat away a locust cloud. In Greenwood's hands, Electric Counterpoint suddenly becomes body music.
Greenwood's taken the unusual step of pre-recording 1o of the 11 guitar tracks that comprise the piece. His guitar tone is unmistakable, especially on the second movement, which directly channels "Let Down". Oddly, it feels more like more of a meeting of the minds between Reich and Radiohead than Radio Rewrite itself.  There is another piece on the album, a reworking of Reich's Piano Counterpoint, played here by Vicky Chow, who surfs atop the pre-recorded tracks with fierce aplomb. Watch her do it in real-time here, with a half-smile on her face, to get a sense of her calm ease and total control, and then listen to this recording; you can almost hear the same half-smile.  It's ironic, and maybe fitting, that the younger musicians on this album find more easeful communion with the hardy, contrarian spirit of Reich's works than Reich does.


The Visitor deepens Matias Aguayo's dependence on his voice as he steers away from merely assisting dance tracks to carrying song structures. In the past, his goofy, spontaneous-seeming persona has carried his music with ease, but here, he sounds like he's struggling at times.

The Visitor

Matias Aguayo has always been a goof, the type of jump-on-the-table artist who's having way more fun than you. He depends on this persona for his scatterbrained takes on house and electro; it takes more than a little charm and panache to get someone up on that table with you. So it's problematic that it feels like Aguayo's laboring for long stretches of his third album, The Visitor. Aguayo has, in the past, mixed in noisier, less friendly tracks, but on The Visitor these tracks are more prominent, busier, and messier.
The Visitor deepens Aguayo's dependence on his voice as he steers away from merely assisting dance tracks to carrying song structures. For an inveterate weirdo, Aguayo has been involved in a surprising number of smashes: the catchy-despite-itself "Rollerskate", his vocal turn on Battles' "Ice Cream", his DJ Koze-remixed "Minimal" and its spiritual companion, "Walter Neff". On his best tracks, the rhythms act as a centrifugal force, an axis around which his voice and melodic detritus can spin. Too many songs on The Visitor fail to establish this center, and the result is an album of oddball psychedelia with its wacky creator foregrounded.
Unfortunately, we've reached the point of diminishing returns on Aguayo's imagination, as The Visitor veers from style to style recklessly; The Visitor was recorded with a host of South American artists, many of them residents of the Cómeme label. "Dear Inspector", for example, is a long, gently tumbling pop song that sounds like someone in the Elephant Six collective bought an MPC sampler. After dragging "Dear Inspector" out for nearly eight minutes, Aguayo abruptly switches modes on "By the Graveyard", a reverb-heavy storm that sounds like Can's more aggressive moments, a style he revisits on the album's clanging, industrial closer, "A Certain Spirit". These tracks have plenty of rhythm, but Aguayo can't seem to find it. He shrouds himself in effects and shouts the songs' titles, retaining none of his casual tunefulness.
Aguayo has trouble balancing his whimsical impulses with his aggressive ones throughout The Visitor, like he can't decide if he wants to flirt or brood. The chant-heavy "Llegó El Don" is domineering, its thwacking rhythms pointed right at the listener. "Levantate Diegors" busies itself with noise, unleashing dozens of small rhythmic flourishes around its bossy, bass-y vocals. It's not just that these tracks are less fun, it's that they're not compellingly deviant either. The big, evil synth line that anchors the creeping "Las Cruces" feels like a better mix of Aguayo's new style and troublemaking instincts.
Aguayo is better, too, when his tracks are less cluttered. He captures a little of his old magic on "Una Fiesta Diferente", a vocal-heavy stew where he and some background singers spin an easy tune out of bilingual lyrics. "El Sucu Tucu" is frantic but focused, with Aguayo's staccato vocals matching the song's eager snares. "Rrrrr" opens the album with a stupid, inviting bassline, and the chorus's purring, rolling "r"'s are vintage Aguayo. Aguayo's music is brave and increasingly complex, but it's worth wondering how well these impulses are serving his tracks. There's potential in The Visitor's mix of electro, new wave, and pop, but it's obscuring or distorting Aguayo's personality, which is the engine that has driven his songs for so long.


The major-label debut from the Maryland rapper clearly wants to appeal to the thinkers. But even at its most lucid, this loosely conceptual album falls well short of lofty ambitions.

Is He Real?

Maryland rapper IDK wants to be rap’s next great aesthetician. His major-label debut, Is He Real?, is a concept album of sorts, in the way all of his projects are; there is a theme and a structure but it isn’t actually beholden to them. The “He” in the title is God, the framework around which the album is built. It opens with a kid denying God’s existence, and an uneven discourse unfolds from there, with rap theology serving as plot points along the album’s arc: a DMX prayer, a conversation about divinity with Tyler, the Creator, a hood psalm from GLC, and IDK playing Devil’s advocate.
In the end, these outlooks crescendo into the PG County rapper arguing that humans don’t have the capacity to dispute His being; the end result of his probe is basically the shrugging emoticon. His unspooling scriptural thread is easy enough to follow. It’s what happens in between that makes the album perplexing. It doesn’t always track, and its pursuit of grandiosity feels largely fruitless. Even at its most lucid, it falls well short of lofty ambitions.
IDK, whose name stands for Ignorantly Delivering Knowledge, considers himself a polymath and educator. (He helped people get their GEDs in prison.) He clearly wants his songs to appeal to the rap thinkers, for listeners to have to peel back the layers of meaning and have epiphanies. He has labeled his music “suburban trap” or trap with substance, trying to collapse a nonexistent lowbrow-highbrow trap binary, as if Jeezy’s The Recession never happened. His songs aren’t deep enough to warrant or hold up under dissection and they aren’t ignorant enough to scan as brainless amusement. A student of Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar, he aspires to hifalutin aesthetics and big ideas. This album is a self-professed effort to lay a foundation for future classics. “This will be the Section.80 mixtape before my good kid, m.A.A.d city,” he vowed in The Fader. But Is He Real? isn’t the raw display of talent Section.80 was, and it is far less inspired—musically and conceptually. There is a whiff of self-importance that IDK struggles to live up to. He is an intriguing, occasionally even stimulating rapper who has yet to really bring any of his (sometimes bland, sometimes bold) visions to life.
In this instance, IDK never really gets to the point. What is to be gained by posing this question here and now? What is to be gained by failing to answer it? The aesthetic argument claims that art itself is proof of God’s existence, but this album never scratches the surface of something that meta, much less a conclusive purpose. Given the heavy Kendrick influence, IDK almost forces a comparison he can’t possibly do justice to. It’s hard not to wonder how much more depth the Compton rapper could’ve brought to this idea.
IDK can be a clever writer, but he doesn’t have nearly the skill or the range to prevent a subject this huge from crushing him beneath its weight. Neither preacher nor parishioner nor nonbeliever, he has a hard time saying anything definitively and with emphasis. Within a clusterfuck of thoughts, he strains to connect songs like “Alone” and “Digital” into his larger spiritual saga. The songs are designed to transition seamlessly from one to the next but the shifts are inconsistent; sometimes hollow, sometimes overwrought, sometimes challenging.
His singing, however, is pleasantly surprising. He ably flips the dancehall classic “Murder She Wrote” (on “December,” with a more than game Burna Boy) and Amerie’s “Why Don’t We Fall in Love” (on “I Do Me … You Do You”), interpolating the latter and using the former as a backbone for an afro-fusionist jam. He also doles out his unexpectedly malleable voice to expound upon on the album’s lesser ideas: the collective consciousnesses’ diminishing attention span (“No Cable”), money as the root of all evil (“24”), and golddiggers as embodiments of sinfulness (“Lilly”). In one instance, he’s jaded and mournful; the other, he’s flamboyantly flexible; the third, he’s impish. He cites Frank Ocean as an influence, and his croons are a nice chaser for his rap bravado.
The album’s best song has nothing to do with its almighty dialogue: “Porno,” a libidinous collaboration with Pusha-T and J.I.D., feels like an extension of Pusha’s “Sociopath.” At its core, it’s a song about a sexualized society that, among other things, finds space to mimic the intro of “Wannabe” by Spice Girls. (IDK’s attempt to weave this into the wider narrative is to simply rap, “Bad hoes is the devil, like 666” and “The bible say beatin’ my dick and killin’ is equal/But that don’t add up.”) Unlike so much of what happens on this album, “Porno” is fun-loving and low-stakes. He isn’t overthinking it. Along with outliers like “No Cable,” it is the nexus of an interesting thought experiment: If IDK wasn’t so married to tawdry themes, his music would be much better. His songs wouldn’t be undermined by his desire to be recognized as a philosopher and auteur.
For all the album’s shortcomings, Is He Real? has many really exciting compositional flourishes. A team effort helmed primarily by IDK with beatmakers Eden Eliah Nagar and Rascal, the production is rich and diverse, often familiar but never derivative: the Pi’erre Bourne-ish funhouse thrills of “Digital,” the ugly, “HUMBLE.”-esque piano mash of “24,” and the meditative sampling of “No Cable” and “Julia …,” are all satisfying in their own ways. “Julia …,” for its part, also happens to be a gut-wrenching remembrance of his mother, who died of AIDS in 2016. The album could’ve used more of those personal revelations and less biblical revelations.


It isn’t really in Keef’s nature to be sentimental, but even Zaytoven has a way of getting to the hardest rappers.

GloToven

Chief Keef, if you didn’t know, put out five tapes in 2017, nine projects in 2018, all capped this January by the seventh installment of his The Leek series. Sometimes, despite all that activity, and roughly one in every three of those projects doing something weird or interesting, it feels like very few people are actually paying attention. One way to draw such attention is to do an entire tape with Zaytoven, the virtuosic trap pianist who has brought soul and verve to many a great rapper’s catalogs. GloToven, a 12-track collaborative effort, finds Chief Keef once again tinkering with what his songs can be.
A few weeks ago, Zaytoven played his own Tiny Desk Concert when Future no-showed a planned set featuring a couple of their most breathtaking songs. With no rapper in front of him and a band behind him, Zay was sensational. He was no stranger to the format, having accompanied Gucci Mane there during his comeback tour in 2016, but being the focus seemed to empower him. Without verses, in a smaller space, the songs were even more intimate; they breathed, each chord lingering. One confounded YouTube commenter wrote of the Zay-led set, “It’s crazy just hearing this trap music turn into contemporary jazz with a change of performance style.” The transformative, adaptiveness of Zaytoven’s playing has become a hallmark of his: He’s turned Future into a blues singer and Usher into a man half his age.
Keef interprets Zay’s production differently than any of the maestro’s previous partners (with the exception of “Fast,” which is of a kind with Beast Mode’s “Real Sisters”). He doesn’t emote into the warm beds of the producer’s masterly keystrokes. He can’t lurch through Zay’s busiest king-making processions the way Gucci does, so he has started to taper his barked melodies so they settle just above the shimmers of a superb set of Zay beats, allowing the production to speak nearly as much as he does.
GloToven finds Keef in an entirely different mode than last October’s Back From the Dead 3, which, in keeping with that series, was rap as noise music, his largely amelodic bars erupting through booming productions, his verses sitting way up in the mix and nearly cacophonous. With Zaytoven establishing the terms, he is far more simpatico; perfectly measured and never suppressing the sounds cushioning him. Be it the crystalline gleam of “Spy Kid” or the bounce of “Sneeze,” Keef’s intoned flows are perfectly in phase.
As the godfather of “mumble,” Keef continues to push toward new sounds, expanding the scope of his music at every opportunity. (“All the young niggas grew up, wanna be me/You can act like it, bitch, I know you see me,” he raps knowingly and defiantly on “Spy Kid.”) On GloToven, he is constantly changing the shape of his voice and fiddling with its composition. Keef is far from the post-form ad-libbing of his acolytes like Playboi Carti; these songs have very clear ideas laid out and are performed deliberately. There seems to be little rhyme or reason to the songcraft beyond what Keef feels, but he has great instincts. “3rd Person” is a single rambled verse, in which his flows float through a wind tunnel of sounds from across the Zaytoven starter kit. Half of “F What the Opp Said” is just wordless Auto-Tuned warbling buoyed between Zaytoven’s oscillating keys. Ever the maverick, Keef turns a tender arrangement fit for The-Dream, on “Petty,” into an anti-ballad about how a paramour is nagging him too much about the cheating he’s definitely doing.
It isn’t really in Keef’s nature to be sentimental, but Zaytoven has a way of getting to the hardest rappers. The presence of fallen love ones looms in the periphery as the tape goes on. “I ain’t got no choice but do this shit for my dead partners,” he raps early on. “I wanna bring my brother back but I know it ain’t gon’ happen,” he accepts on “Ain’t Gonna Happen,” calling Fredo Santana out by name. The anthropomorphic gold star on the cover, with its double cup and the cross between its eyes, is likely an homage to the late Fredo, who appears in promo footage for GloToven in which Keef bangs out a tune on a baby grand and is dubbed “the new Beethoven.” As the piano chords swell across GloToven, Chief Keef continues to expand his legacy, for both his sake and the sake of those he’s lost.


Ennio Morricone's score for Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight marks the 87-year-old legend's first work on a Western-themed film in over 30 years. His melodies are still simple, relying on a few notes to form a backbone from which he never strays far. Morricone still trusts that a few strong musical ideas can supply lots of atmosphere and emotion throughout an epic-length film.

*The Hateful Eight* OST

Eighty-seven-year old legend Ennio Morricone occupies a unique position among film composers. He's known outside of his industry, a rarity for any score-writer not named John Williams. And he's one of the few film composers whose work has had a significant impact on rock music (perhaps only John Carpenter can claim more). In fact, the work that first brought him fame—his iconic soundtracks for Sergio Leone's mid-1960s Spaghetti Westerns—might have had more influence on rock musicians than film composers. Whenever I hear dramatic rock using echoey twang and dusty atmospheres—examples include Labradford, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 (who covered Morricone's music for Leone), and Earth—I immediately think of scenes from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
All of which makes Morricone's decision to score Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight immediately interesting, since it's the first Western-themed film he has worked on in over 30 years. Doubling the intrigue is the fact that some of the music is a cross-pollination of Morricone and Carpenter's visions. Due to time constraints, Morricone re-used pieces he wrote for the latter's 1982 thriller The Thing which Carpenter ultimately didn't include. Then there are the facts that Tarantino has never made a fully-scored film before—he's only used previously-recorded music—and that Morricone once said he "wouldn't like to work with [Tarantino] again, on anything" (a statement he later partially rescinded.)
So there's a lot of promise in The Hateful Eight soundtrack, and the final result delivers—though not necessarily due to the factors above. Morricone's return to the Western genre ends up somewhat coincidental; this music is more in line with his later, traditionally-filmic orchestral work, and there's nary a guitar twang to be heard. The score's relation to Carpenter (whose own music has undergone a recent underground revival) is more evident. Morricone's themes have the kind of primal tension that Carpenter used so well in his other movies, but in this case transposed from synth to orchestra.
Ultimately, Morricone's music for The Hateful Eight is rich and evocative regardless of the circumstances of its creation. You might guess that after this long, he'd have to make increasingly complex pieces to find new things to say. Yet the opposite is true: his melodies are still simple, relying on a few notes to form a backbone from which he never strays far. His arrangements and flourishes build momentum, but the core is always powerfully uncluttered. Morricone trusts that a few strong musical ideas can supply lots of atmosphere and emotion throughout an epic-length film.
The Hateful Eight isn't all Morricone, though. Tarantino can't resist DJ-ing a little bit, sprinkling in a short gem from the second White Stripes album, an excellent mid-'60s Roy Orbison single, a David Hess track from the 1972 Wes Craven movie The Last House on the Left, and a fascinatingly-unpolished version of the Australian folk song "Jim Jones at Botany Bay" as sung by Jennifer Jason Leigh in the film itself. There are also snippets of movie dialogue interspersed throughout, which are entertaining but too short to be very meaningful (they also include what has to be the most uses of the n-word on any Morricone album).
All those Tarantino additions add texture to The Hateful Eight soundtrack, but Morricone's music by itself is more than enough. There's a wealth of both visceral adventure and reflective emotion in hs pieces. At best, these songs are thrill rides, mood swingers, and thought provokers, all at once. That makes them a perfect fit for a Tarantino movie—but then, as he's proven for over half a century, Morricone is the right choice for any filmmaker.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the Clash’s famously complicated fifth album that contains some of their biggest songs as well as their moodiest and most impenetrable material.

Combat Rock

Joe Strummer claimed he’d run the Paris Marathon in three hours and 20 minutes. Officially, he didn’t race at all—just showed up that morning in May 1982 and dodged whoever was taking names. Hardly anybody knew he was in France. Strummer was dodging them all: Clash manager Bernard Rhodes, who’d dared him to go AWOL as a publicity stunt and then had to hire a private detective when Strummer actually disappeared; songwriting partner Mick Jones, who’d been hurt when the group rejected his vision for their new album and become increasingly difficult to get ahold of; brilliant drummer Topper Headon, who was losing his friends’ trust as his drug use escalated precipitously. Only the Clash’s unflappable bassist, Paul Simonon, seemed to be doing alright.
Combat Rock, the band’s fifth album, came out that same marathon weekend. The Clash were supposed to be touring the UK, but when Strummer didn’t return, the dates had to be postponed. Maybe the Parisian vanishing act was calculated, a way to show his bandmates they couldn’t very well carry on without him. Maybe, as Strummer would tell NME’s Charles Shaar Murray days later, he’d just gone “a bit barmy.” Wouldn’t you have to be, to gatecrash a marathon after a night out drinking and then get drunk again afterward? But compared to the Clash, Paris probably felt like a dream. Not long after the race, Clash PR rep and fixer Kosmo Vinyl tracked Strummer down at a café and hauled him back to London.
It makes a certain grim logical sense that an album heavily inspired by the aftermath of the Vietnam War and more directly by Apocalypse Now would get in deep and then start to lose the plot. The second-to-last Clash album is better than it has any right to be, considering the tension amid the people who recorded it, and the debt it owes producer Glyn Johns, who tightened an unwieldy, 16- or 17-track album into a 12-song bruiser after the band deemed Jones’ mix unsatisfactory. It wasn’t as zippy or as effortlessly brilliant as London Calling—few albums are. But it’s a good record: bracing, challenging, authentically conflicted by its own enthusiasm for military aesthetics. When Margaret Thatcher made a bid to save her re-election prospects by launching an imperialist war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands weeks ahead of its release date, Combat Rock became spiritually aligned with the anti-war cause, hit No. 2 in the UK, and made the Clash stars in America.
The Clash were an extraordinarily intertextual and self-conscious, and in that sense postmodern, punk band. You know this instinctively when Strummer says something like, “phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust,” and if listening to London Calling is like reading a book with a lot of footnotes (BBC World Service, Spanish Civil War, original “Brand New Cadillac”), Combat Rock is an oblique political tract that lifts off into a hallucinatory vision of a society plagued and entertained by violence. It’s all less legible than it first looks, particularly pre-internet. (“If you don’t know what’s goin’ on,” urges Strummer on the recording of that October’s concert at New York Shea Stadium, “just ask the person standing next to you.”) Combat Rock is as wrapped up with world events of the day as it is spectacularly still relevant; it holds a couple of the band’s most overexposed songs and some of their moodiest and most impenetrable material.
The history of the Clash reads like a comic strip—maybe a soap opera—where nearly all the main characters are young Englishmen, the kind of rough-and-tumble social environment where if you miss the setup, you’re about to be the punchline. The antagonist is usually Rhodes, the manager; he preferred Bernard, so naturally, the Clash always called him Bernie. Rhodes, along with guitarist and singer Mick Jones, had assembled the band in 1976, recruiting Paul Simonon, a passionate reggae fan who couldn’t yet play the bass, and Joe Strummer, the magnetic frontman of local London pub rock band the 101ers.
Rhodes, a volatile, fast-talking operator who moonlighted as a car mechanic, was undeniably a formative influence. Early on, the Clash rehearsed at his studio seven days a week. Rhodes insisted the group write songs not about their own small lives or feelings, but about real-world issues: conflict, power, protest. “Bernie was very against it being a social scene,” original drummer Terry Chimes says in Pat Gilbert’s Passion Is a Fashion: The Real Story of the Clash. “He’d say, ‘Are you here for a goal or are you here just eating a cucumber sandwich?’ He had a way of wording things to make you feel stupid, and get you to do things his way.”
Trouble was, Rhodes answered to no one, certainly not the band he worked for. “If the Clash was the Communist Party, Bernie was our Stalin,” quips Simonon in Mark Andersen’s We Are the Clash. In 1978 the band fired him, allegedly for scheming to replace Mick Jones with Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, the latest bungled maneuver in Rhodes’ long-term frenemy drama with Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. But the band didn’t cut him off for long.
In 1981, frustrated by public response to the sprawling triple-LP Sandinista! (with production supervised by Mick) and anxious to recapture the dynamism of London Calling, Strummer insisted the Clash take Bernie back. Mick understandably objected, but Strummer supposedly threatened to walk, and Simonon backed Strummer, so here they all were again, making Combat Rock and gradually accumulating emotional scar tissue.
Work commenced in London until Mick Jones purportedly said he’d only show up in New York City, where his girlfriend lived, so they moved to the Electric Lady recording studio. Later, he’d claim he’d been joking, but the mood was heavy: Jones appointed himself producer while Strummer holed up in a fort made of flight cases (the “spliff bunker”) and by the end, they worked separate shifts and were barely speaking. Reaching a compromise on the final mixes and track sequence proved impossible. The album wasn’t done when the Clash departed for a tour of Asia and Australia in early 1982, so they flew out the unfinished tapes and the standoff continued. As photographer Pennie Smith, who joined the band in Thailand to shoot the Combat Rock cover, puts it in Passion Is a Fashion: “If you’re with people for long periods of time you can sense they’re fed up without anyone having to say anything.” Finally, Rhodes suggested they call in Glyn Johns, a career rock engineer who’d helped salvage the Who’s Who’s Next, and Johns, Strummer, and a very reluctant Mick Jones sat down and reworked every song in three days.
Some popular bands get along well, and some make enough money to fake it, but the Clash circa Combat Rock couldn’t manage either. They weren’t yet cashing in on their records, because they’d sold London Calling and Sandinista! for bargain prices in Britain. They weren’t making it up on tour, because they wanted rock-star live production and refused to pass on the cost to the audience. After Sandinista!, the band owed their label, CBS, something like half a million pounds. The upside was that, by now, the Clash could play almost anything: slinky socialist disco (“The Magnificent Seven”), white reggae-rock (“Bankrobber”), swanky barroom blues (“Jimmy Jazz”), even a fluke American pop hit (“Train in Vain”). It’s this flexibility and fluency that carries Combat Rock’s walloping opener “Know Your Rights” into the carbonated R&B-punk of “Car Jamming” and on to the spacious, echoey dub of “Sean Flynn.”
The album’s themes—antimilitarism, the damage inflicted by American imperialism—weren’t new material. “I don’t wanna go fighting in the tropical heat,” the band had railed on “Career Opportunities,” from 1977’s The Clash. London Calling’s anti-fascist rocker “Clampdown” took up the specter of Brownshirts; Sandinista! protested the draft and U.S. interventions in Latin America. Combat Rock is constantly of two minds, fascinated by the grit and vibrance of early ’80s New York and aghast at the bigger system of which it was part.
The ambivalent nature of many later Clash songs reflected the criticism the band faced in the UK rock press (too focused on America, betraying punk values) and doubles as a way to sidestep the fact that art doesn’t equal political action. Often, Combat Rock seems to speak in the voice of another, absorbing establishment doublespeak on “Know Your Rights,” the omniscient narration of Allen Ginsberg on “Ghetto Defendant,” and the POV of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle on “Red Angel Dragnet” (voiced by Kosmo Vinyl). Sometimes the provenance is less clear: “Car Jamming” is like a folk song stitched together from fragments of broadcast news and “Atom Tan” presents the grotesque spectacle of “the first all-live heart attack.” Casualties of war on “Inoculated City” occur not in battle but “at the top of the hour” for an indifferent public. The mediated distance, the intimation of surveillance, feeds into the album’s sense of wariness and paranoia. Yet the Clash also speak with clarity: “Murder is a crime!/Unless it was done/By a policeman or an aristocrat.”
If you think of the two sides of Combat Rock as a narrative arc of tension building to fury and the slow, destabilizing comedown of catastrophe, you’ll notice the comedown lasts far longer than the fury. But for a thrilling few moments it sounds like “Rock the Casbah,” an instrumental Headon recorded practically by himself on a day when no one else showed up to the studio. Strummer’s lyrics, about a repressive sheik’s failure to stamp out rock’n’roll, were partly a parable inspired by the 1979 Iranian Revolution and partly a shot at Rhodes, who’d quickly grown impatient with the Clash’s taste for improvisation and complained that all their new songs were too long.
Taking a page from Apocalypse Now, “Rock the Casbah” mythologizes the Clash’s professional frustrations and maps them onto the cinematic land of the sheikh, who drills oil and drives an American car. In retrospect, it’s a terrible miscalculation: “Rock the Casbah” is famous now in part because it was a hit in the U.S., and thereafter used as an ad hoc soundtrack to the American bombing of the Middle East. The orientalist imagery enables this sort of reading even as the narrative writes against it, a criticism that doesn’t apply to, like, fuck-up former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani using “Rudie Can’t Fail” as walk-on music. Like the band’s polarizing debut single, “White Riot,” “Rock the Casbah” is almost too powerful; the Clash mean to suggest music as the catalyst for revolution, but their hedonistic glee summons the kind of energy that’s hard to control.
All of Combat Rock is preoccupied with cycles of violence and the structures that support them, especially “Straight to Hell,” where the music echos hollowly under an enormous arc of oppression that spans deindustrialized English steel towns, the children of American servicemen in Vietnam, and the plight of immigrants throughout history. When the Clash ask who has the right to kill, the answer is: no one. “Who got shot tonight?” they cry above the ominous reggae thump of Simonon’s “Red Angel Dragnet,” another perilous Clash political mirror that holds up New York City vigilante organization the Guardian Angels alongside Kosmo’s deranged Travis Bickle: self-congratulatory reactionaries celebrated for their impatience to clear the streets.
Nothing on the second half brings quite the same energy—in Strummer’s words, “Fifty percent of Combat Rock was great rock, but the other fifty was what Phil Spector would call ‘wiggy.’” Side two kicks off with the lively but lyrically weak “Overpowered by Funk,” perhaps the nadir of the Clash’s interest in early hip-hop and improvised rap (“Breakfast, serials?/You know you can’t escape”); the guest verse by graffiti artist Futura, whom the Clash had hired to live-paint their stage backdrops, is more interesting as a glimpse into the golden age of New York street art culture than as a technical accomplishment. From there, it moves slowly from the cockeyed apocalyptic humor of “Atom Tan” into the cold fog of ambient dub collage “Sean Flynn,” named for the photojournalist and son of Hollywood actor Errol Flynn who had disappeared in Cambodia more than 10 years earlier. The closing “Death Is a Star” tinkles like the accompaniment to film credits, mournful and a little confused, reflecting on the cinema-going experience with the faintly dissociated feeling of one who’s just walked out of the theater.
But if Combat Rock eventually spirals off into psychedelic battlefield phantasmagoria, Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg is the director’s cut, Apocalypse Now Redux. Half an hour longer and significantly woozier than the album proper, Rat Patrol—a working title borrowed from the vintage television series about a quartet of Allied servicemen—is often described as Mick Jones’ final version of Combat Rock, shelved sometime in 1981. In truth, the bootleg sounds a little rough and hissy around the edges, like a transmission to a cheap radio, but to this day, plenty of Clash fans will tell you it’s required listening. The influence of Jones’ sequence on the final tracklist is clear, bunching together his timeless “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” with “Rock the Casbah” and “Know Your Rights” before spiraling out with a lengthy instrumental jazz interlude and versions of “Ghetto Defendant” and “Sean Flynn” that stretch to six and seven minutes.
Extended runtimes came naturally to the Clash as dub reggae fans and prodigious stoners, though you don’t have to be a major record label to see why they’d be a hard sell. Much as they might’ve downplayed it for the benefit of the British press, the Clash aspired to reach U.S. audiences, and a third super-long LP would’ve risked already tenuous label relationships. But it can be tempting to overwrite the 46-minute Combat Rock with Rat Patrol, the looser, wilder album, arguably the more ambitious attempt to fuse the Clash’s diverse musical interests and take in the whole sweep of American moral decay in one staggering, 77-minute slow pan.
Then there’s the notion that the clarified and abridged version of anything must be inauthentic and thus fundamentally un-punk. Imagine if the Clash had released another dense double LP and “Rock the Casbah” would’ve never taken such a gruesome turn, because the whole album would’ve been weird and unmarketable. Offer any counterfactual you like: If Combat Rock weren’t so successful, maybe the band wouldn’t have felt so conflicted about it, and there’d have been more Clash albums after (there is one, the unfortunate 1985 Bernard production Cut the Crap). When fans debate Rat Patrol vs. Combat Rock, it’s like watching an endless re-enactment of the competing tastes and opinions that fueled and then splintered the band.
It is traditional to locate the Clash’s failure in their fundamental contradiction, a collective psychic conflict between ambition and principle—what Strummer, speaking in 1984, called “an experiment of a kind, that’s never succeeded, mind you, in making rebel music for a mass audience.” Of course, contradiction is their source of success, the reason why Rat Patrol is interesting but Combat Rock hits. Jones’ mix brought the sinister atmosphere and heroic stamina, but popular art requires strategy. “Every night we play I wonder who our audience is,” Strummer told Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore during the Clash’s 1982 U.S. tour. “But you have to figure you’re reaching some of them. Maybe we’re only entertaining most of them, but that’s not really so bad when you think about it—look what it is that we entertain them with. I reckon each show we reach some new ones, really reach them. It’s like fighting a big war with few victories, but each of those victories is better than none.” The other word that comes up a lot with the Clash is “romantic,” because the romantic is always holding out hope.
So chalk up a few victories to Combat Rock. It sounds like a band drifting toward the edge, yet it remains astonishingly, unsettlingly topical. Among the lessons the Clash learned from reggae: Protest music doesn’t have to be loud and fast (punk) or slow and serious (folk); it can be midtempo and jammy, spare and surreal. Its power lies in the ability to unite an audience in the sense of being outsiders—to draw in other people who like to think they’re pretty clever and tell them something worth knowing. Forty years later, the opening trifecta on “Know Your Rights” will grab you by the throat: the impunity of wealth and power, the indignity of means-tested welfare, the suppression of dissent. At the end of the song, when Strummer breathes the word “Run!” and Jones’ lead guitar takes off in flight, the rhythm section pursues in a jackbooted stomp. I don’t suggest that you learn politics from the Clash, necessarily; you listen to the Clash and understand what politics means, which is life and death.

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