After an 11-year hiatus, the first album from Jack White’s other other band floats in weightless, haughty bliss through a perpetual 2008.

Help Us Stranger

The gloss of celebrity served the Raconteurs well in the late aughts—“the White Stripes are dying, long live Jack White’s new radio-rock band!” But 11 years after the band’s last album, the novelty has faded and the Michiganers—Brendan Benson, Jack Lawrence, and Patrick Keeler alongside White himself—have found themselves floating in a weightless, haughty bliss, through a perpetual 2008. Help Us Stranger must now contend with the strength of a new indie rock field, and the mere fact of White’s affiliation is not nearly as compelling as it once was.
The Raconteurs make the strongest case for themselves through competent, workmanlike song construction. They’ve built a rock record that is sequenced perfectly; sturdy, but never staid. Raucous numbers like “Sunday Driver” recall the band’s biggest hit, 2006’s “Steady, As She Goes,” and they’re nestled alongside softer, more contemplative pieces, like the lovely, acoustic “Only Child.” The players swing skillfully from loud to quiet to loud, never neglecting either side of the scale. There are few surprises on Help Us Stranger, but that tends to be the case when you’re in the hands of capable adults.
Some light improvisation in the recording booth lends spontaneity without veering into the self-indulgence that so plagued White’s latest solo album, 2018’s Boarding House Reach. Off-the-cuff flourishes abound. Nigh-title track “Help Me Stranger” opens with a brief, bluesy rendition in miniature by the band’s bassist, Jack Lawrence, equalized to sound like Jimmie Rodgers on an old 78. “Now That You’re Gone,” too, is a welcome change: In its verses, the narrator lashes out, petty and vindictive, at a former lover—“Where you gonna go? Not that I care!”—only to slip in the chorus and lay bare his own lonely stupor: “What will I do now that you’re gone?” Without sacrificing sonic or thematic coherence, the Raconteurs vary their approach enough that each individual track sparkles.
But even the album’s brightest moments are colored by a kind of dull, grey disdain. Attempts to conjure bluesy commiseration and evoke alienation are uniformly bloodless. “Don’t Bother Me” is a poor choice for a rock refrain; the song’s rage is so impotent it may as well have been titled “Get Off My Lawn.” Other songs are undercut by static simplicity: “Some days, I just feel like crying/Some days, I don’t feel like trying.” Clunky as these lyrics are on the page, they’re diminished even further by the sheer lack of conviction in White and Benson’s vocal delivery. Their tone throughout is one of boredom, even irritation—with themselves, with anyone who might be listening, with the mundanities of making music.
The songs of Help Us Stranger often succeed only because they succeeded before, decades ago, as better songs. Tapping your foot to the giddy “Live A Lie” is fun until you recognize, in a too-familiar riff, a limp effort to conjure the anarchic, animal spirit of “Fell in Love With a Girl.” The piano lines and orotund group harmonies of “Shine the Light on Me” land like painted-by-numbers Sgt. Pepper’s, less tribute than hacky pageantry. The Raconteurs have never been coy about pastiche, but on this record, their motivation for mining the past feels firmly rooted in fear of the unfamiliar. White’s rapping on Boarding House Reach offered, at least, the perverse thrill of real transgression. Here, he never takes any risk so great that failure presents a real possibility. The band’s few efforts to innovate on their own catalogue are peccadilloes in the grand scheme: a new amp here, a new pedal setting there. The result is an air of timidity that dampens the pleasures this album does offer.
Other indie rock groups—supergroups, like boygenius even—are presently making music that is orders of magnitude greater than this record, often with vastly less experience, vastly fewer resources, and vastly higher barriers to entry. Recall the indelible moment in “Me & My Dog,” where Phoebe Bridgers’ voice becomes a scooped-out husk of itself, and she murmurs, ashamed, “I cried at your show with the teenagers.” Even in her own song, she is at somebody else’s show, her story dissolving into a crowd of other stories. The Raconteurs, by contrast, would never lower themselves to the level of their audience. They understand their presence on the stage as a given, not something to be earned anew. They have always stood in the spotlight. They assume that they always will.

Buy: Rough Trade
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N.W.A.: Straight Outta Compton / Efil4zaggin

Straight Outta Compton / Efil4zaggin

Last week I was buying some detergent at a local laundromat in rural Nebraska. This is what was occupying my mind: "See, I don't give a fuck, that's the problem/ I see a motherfuckin' cop, I don't dodge him." Now, based on my limited experience with law enforcement, I've found most cops to be cordial, beneficent protectors of the law. Yet, at that moment, I didn't just want to fuck tha police, both physically and figuratively; I wanted them lynched, drenched in gasoline, and burnt alive. It's one thing to get a catchy couplet stuck in teenagers' heads; it's another to convert half the nation into murderous psychopaths hell-bent on riot and rape. N.W.A. accomplished the latter.
Straight Outta Compton was not the first gangsta-rap album, nor was it the first album to use such disconcerting and scabrous blasts of sound, but the music was revolutionary for two reasons. First, Dre and Yella took the vitriolic, cacophonous rampage of Public Enemy and discarded all the motivation and history behind the anger; second, they sampled laid-back jazz, psychoastral-lovetron p-funk, sweetly romantic soul, naïve doo-wop, Martha Reeves, Charles Wright and Marvin Gaye, and proceeded to lay it under the most gruesome narratives imaginable, dead ho's and cop killers. This is tantamount to using a "Happy B-Day, Grandma" Hallmark card to inform a family you just slaughtered their grandmother. It's cruel, duplicitous, perverse, horrifying, hilarious.
In some ways, Straight Outta Compton is the archetypal rap album, the one you would send into space if you wanted to ignite a stellar holocaust. It unites the paranoia of It Takes a Nation of Millions with the chill of The Chronic, while still retaining an old-school, Run-DMC-style playfulness. The opening squall of "Straight Outta Compton", "Fuck tha Police", and "Gangsta Gangsta" is still as confrontational and decimating as it was at the dawn of the 1990s. The bass throttles, the funk combusts, and the sirens deafen as Eazy-E dispenses with tired romantic clichés: "So what about the bitch who got shot? Fuck her!/ You think I give a damn about a bitch? I ain't no sucker!" And this is the least misogynistic of N.W.A.'s albums.
In the remaining ten tracks, the group depicts a paranoid, conspiratorial wasteland where cops "think every nigga is sellin' narcotics," where they often are selling narcotics to buy gats to kill cops, where bitches have two functions in life-- to suck dick and get shot when they stop-- and where there are two only professions: bein' a punk and shootin' punks. The mind itself is a ghetto, and the ghetto is universal. A lot of people, for whatever reason, take offense to such ideas. William S. Burroughs writes the same thing and gets hailed as the greatest writer of the twentieth century. There is no hope, no messages, no politics, rarely an explicit suggestion of irony. The only respite is "Express Yourself", the sweetest anti-drug song to ever take place in a correctional facility. Musically, the rhythm pummels and the scratches are strong but sparse; lyrically, Dre says it best: "It gets funky when you got a subject and a predicate." For all the genius, there are some tracks that simply can't compare to the classics. "If It Ain't Ruff", "8 Ball", and "Dopeman" are triumphant rap songs, but they consist of minimalist beats and the silly battle raps that N.W.A. helped eliminate.
Efil4Zaggin, meanwhile, is about as close as you can come to a death metal/hip-hop hybrid. People will get hurt here. The group, sans-Cube, is simply trying to further their status as icons of shock-rap. Unlike someone like Alice Cooper or Marilyn Manson, though, N.W.A. sound like they've actually gone insane: The song titles alone ("To Kill a Hooker", "One Less Bitch", "Find 'Em, Fuck 'Em and Flee") are enough to send some people into seizures. I have no idea what Eazy-E was doing between albums, but it clearly involved a lot of sadomasochism and PCP-- his lyrics are revoltingly unlistenable: "Yo, I tied her to the bed/ I had to let my niggaz fuck her first/ Loaded up the 44, yo/ Then I straight smoked the ho/ 'Cause I'm a real nigga." The main musical motif is the Psycho theme.
The songs here sound like the Bomb Squad in the graveyard Superfly got buried in. "Approach to Danger" is essentially rapping over a Halloween FX record. It's complexly debauched, fantastically jagged terror-hop that at its best challenges anything on Fear of a Black Planet and at its worst challenges anything off Dre's 2001. It's also much funnier than Straight Outta Compton. Eazy-E's Ten Commandments on "Appetite for Destruction" set the bar so high on his first command that he can barely think of enough vices to finish it. In the skit "Protest", an N.W.A. concert turns into a scene from Platoon. Eazy also sings on two tracks, one of which ("Automobile") may as well be titled "With a Little Help from Your Pussy". Ten seconds can barely pass before someone is murdered or raped. It's the sound of an expletive anger at its breaking point.
The reissues sound pretty tight, but high-quality audio was never really the point. The supplementary tracks are a more interesting point of discussion. Straight Outta Compton adds extended mixes of "Express Yourself" and "Straight Outta Compton". The former may be a better song, but only because it uses more of the Wright sample, whereas the latter regrettably decides to disturb the propulsion of the original by inserting spoken dialogue. The B-side, "A Bitch Iz a Bitch", however, is one of Cube's finest moments, beginning as a specification of what he means when he curses, and ending with a tirade against a "contact-wearin' bitch." Efil4Zaggin just adds the 100 Miles and Runnin' EP, which is fairly superfluous. The title track, though, is easily one of the best rap songs of all time-- N.W.A. if commissioned to write a James Bond theme.
Listening to these discs again just remind me how ludicrous the whole Eminem controversy was. More than a decade ago, N.W.A. was instructing suburbia to smash bitches' brains in with a cock in one hand and a glock in the other. In comparison, Eminem's harshest lyric ends up sounding like, "I may slightly disagree with certain tenets of popular ideologies." When Eminem rapes and kills his mom, it's because of a long-standing psychological disorder that relies on a complicated relationship with his family. When Eazy-E does it, it's because nothing good was on TV that night. These are the most nihilistic, apolitical recordings since the Nixon tapes.


The lines between post-hardcore, indie rock, and emo blurred on the two mid-’90s full-lengths from the Van Pelt, which are newly reissued.

The Van Pelt: Stealing From Our Favorite Thieves / Sultans of Sentiment

Dig deep enough through the archeological record of the 1990s underground and the lines between post-hardcore, indie rock, and emo begin to blur. Looking back on the work left behind by the Van Pelt, it’s as if those styles were less offshoots branching out in different directions than tributaries flowing into a larger pool. Originally active for just four years, the Van Pelt released two full-lengths before breaking up in 1997. Both releases heavily reflect their time and place. Some elements sound dated, even clichéd, to our modern ears after decades of overuse: the undistorted guitars, the somber tone and cerebral lyrics, the trebly production that progresses to Albini-like room ambience from one album to the next.
If you’re allergic to these sounds, the Van Pelt aren’t the best vehicle for overcoming your prejudices. Dozens upon dozens of bands have yielded songs like the vaguely punkish, uptempo pogo-jangle of “You Are the Glue,” for example, off the band’s 1996 debut Stealing from Our Favorite Thieves. In several respects, the Van Pelt were stereotypical of their era, but if you look past the cosmetic features, Thieves and its ’97 follow-up Sultans of Sentiment provide a zoomed-in perspective on a group of overlapping movements coming to a head more or less at once.
Period aficionados will rejoice over the historical value here: out-of-print titles by an obscure band with members who would go on to better-known acts like Blonde Redhead (bassist Toko Yasuda) and Jets to Brazil (guitarist Brian Maryansky). But nothing on either album positions the Van Pelt as a “missing link” within a greater narrative arc. Instead, what comes across in hindsight is just how much rock’s fringe had encroached on the mainstream and vice-versa. In an ironic twist, the Van Pelt were offered deals by several major labels but only one indie, Gern Blandsten. Averse to being groomed into “the next Nirvana,” the band remained independent.
It’s hard to say whether the Van Pelt would have broken had they chosen the opposite path, but it’s easy to picture the production on Thieves beefed-up and window-dressed. Easily the more derivative of the Van Pelt’s two albums, Thieves nevertheless crackles with personality and energy, not to mention hooks. In a parallel reality, at least tens of thousands of people are looking back on their teenage years getting misty-eyed at the way “It’s a Suffering” soundtracked their summers. The song’s chorus is so big and full of a sense of promise that it rivals anything Foo Fighters ever struck gold with.
On the other hand, frontman/guitarist Chris Leo keeps one foot defiantly planted in art rock and post-punk, too. Leo—brother of Ted Leo, who supplies backing vocals and percussion—spikes much of Thieves with somewhat non-melodic verses that border on the spoken-word style of the Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie and the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow. Much of the lyric sheet reads as prose. This is unsurprising given that Leo would go on to publish novels, starting with 2004’s White Pigeons. But he had already reeled-in his wordplay in favor of economy and space by Sultans of Sentiment.
Sultans doesn’t quite flow with the same continuity as its predecessor, but it’s a major step forward in terms of production and vision. In some respects, the album sounds as anchored to its time period as Thieves does—Leo and Maryansky weave-together arpeggios and chords as so many of their contemporaries did—but the improved fidelity exposes the unique fingerprints in Leo’s songwriting. Sultans was written and recorded during a personal low point for him, and whatever plagued him at the time remains buried under heaps of metaphor. Still, the album is completely devoid of the youthful bluster from just a year earlier. Somber and reserved, Sultans is, in a manner of speaking, heavier.
When the Van Pelt wander off the beaten path, such as on the folky violin-laced “Don’t Make Me Walk My Own Log,” they sound like a band on the hunt for their own voice. You can debate whether they ever found it, but the Van Pelt might have been more ahead of the curve than anyone could have rightfully guessed in 1997. Watching live clips of Sultans-era material from a brief 2014 reunion, Leo and company recreate the vibe of the original recordings with an accuracy that few bands ever nail after that much time has passed. The songs sound even heavier with age, and surprisingly in-tune with current sounds. Perhaps they contained an adult wisdom that the Van Pelt were unable to convey back then. Whatever the case, they were onto something.


The young, Manchester-based Portuguese producer offers a radical take on batida that draws on the scrappy aggression of UK bass and experimental electro-R&B.

Álbum Desconhecido

For tight-knit crews like Príncipe Discos, proximity is everything. Rooted on the outskirts of Lisbon, the niche label of DJs and producers has invigorated the city’s underground dance-music scene by drawing international attention to batida, the percussive, polyrhythmic sound popularized by immigrants from war-torn Angola and other former Portuguese colonies. Príncipe has expanded cautiously, in an effort to protect the community sound from exploitation and appropriation. So what happens when an artist relocates and the collective is forced to relax its grip? In the case of P. Adrix, a young producer who moved from Lisbon to Manchester, England, in 2015, the answer is Álbum Desconhecido, a riveting debut with a dual-citizen sensibility. Selectively fusing his native batida with elements of jungle, grime, and drum ‘n’ bass, he deftly links two hotbeds of electronic music and creates something entirely new.
Conceived in Lisbon’s vast slums and suburbs, batida is a hybrid of traditional African rhythms—Angolan kuduro, kizomba, and zouk, among others—and contemporary electronic dance music. It gained traction in 2012 as Príncipe waded into block parties boasting minimal equipment and big beats. The sound is marked by frantic synths and fierce, choppy drum patterns, its turbulence and dizzying repetition reflecting Lisbon’s tumultuous political climate. As Príncipe co-founder Pedro Gomes told Pitchfork in 2014, “We were looking for contemporary manifestations and evolutions of Angolan and Verdean music that reacted to being from there and now living here.”
But just as emigration from Luanda to Lisbon turned kuduro into batida, so the sound has continued to evolve as it has been carried out of Portugal and into new countries. Nowhere is this happening as radically or artfully as on Desconhecido, which rounds up all of the original ingredients and bakes them in enthralling new forms. It’s reassuring to see Príncipe broadening its horizons; the label has recently supported more experimental projects, like DJ Nigga Fox’s longform acid 12-inch and the unexpected melodies DJ Lycox unveiled in a mix for the Astral Plane. The traditional rhythms underpinning batida still inform these releases, but they no longer exclusively define them. The same can be said for Desconhecido. Moving at a breakneck pace, Adrix takes listeners on a rollercoaster of twitchy techno, whinnying flutes, furious breakbeats, and sensual soul.
It’s astonishing how many energies and emotions he crams into 22 minutes: angst, paranoia, thrill, fury, depression, panic, euphoria. Although it’s not unusual for batida producers to work in shorter cuts, Adrix’s feel especially tightly edited. While most of DJ Marfox’s tracks hover around four minutes long, here only “Viva La Raça” eclipses the three-minute mark. More often than not, he gets the timing just right: He cuts the howling “Bola de Cristal” before it loses any intensity and packs “Ovni” with bursts of chaotic flutes that fizzle on top of each other like a fireworks finale. Slowed-down mind-benders like “Sonhos” and “Estação de Queluz” take you by surprise, filling the room with the raw sensuality of minimalist electro-R&B. But the shining moment is “Zelda Shyt,” which opens under a black cloud of snaking, sinister synths and only gets darker from there, ascending into a vortex of chants, syncopated drums, and cymbals poured over an oscillating howl. When the storm clears and lifts into a quiet click-click-click, it’s always too soon.


A mysterious project from an unknown source sends listeners on an exhilarating goose chase through ambient techno and ethereal jungle.

Sekundenschlaf

It was a good shtick while it lasted. The music, it was claimed, had been discovered on a refurbished hard drive purchased off Russian eBay—hence titles like Hard Drive Tracks 1, and hence, presumably, the fuzzy, lo-fi sheen and garbled timekeeping, qualities suggestive of corrupted data. What was this stuff? Were these vintage rave bangers crafted by some bedroom producer back during Mikhail Gorbachev’s reign? Were they newly created, retro-leaning tracks using orphaned audio files? Or was the whole thing a hoax, the Russian text merely a red herring?
With тпсб’s latest release, on the London-based imprint Blackest Ever Black, the story has shifted. Now the music is said merely to be of “unclear authorship,” originating “somewhere west of Lake Lagoda, near the Russia-Finland border.” The artist, or artists, must have realized that the original tale sounded, frankly, too good to be true, because when I emailed them to find out more, they readily copped to the subterfuge: The tracks weren’t really recovered from a secondhand hard drive at all. But a pair of emails, one from an intermediary named Gregor and another from one Fedor Servolenko, who claims to be the artist behind the music, left me no less confused. Their accounts suggested stories nested within other stories, unreliable narrators ceding the stage to other, even sketchier narrators, like the introduction to a novel by Melville or Conrad. The alias тпсб is apparently an abbreviation for “темное прошлое светлое будущее,” or “Dark Past Bright Future”—a name that Servolenko, via Gregor, says he likes for its ambiguity. That’s appropriate: Having tracked down an old interview with Servolenko, I’m still not convinced that he’s not an invented character.
Fortunately, wherever it’s from, this stuff needs no elaborate backstory. Its pleasures are readily apparent in every dubbed-out synth chord and chopped-up breakbeat. Just seven tracks and 32 minutes long, Sekundenschlaf is a full-body immersion in ambient techno and ethereal jungle that is by turns meditative, ominous, and exhilarating. Murky drones float like oil slicks atop layer upon layer of sampled and programmed drums; new-age keys veil indistinct scraps of dialogue. It’s easy to see how the artist came up with the found-sound conceit, because nothing here feels like it has been meticulously arranged. Layered phrases fall where they may, and short loops repeat with the nagging insistence of a stuck MPC pad. Just as Burial is said to compose his music using a rudimentary audio-editing program, these drifting scraps of synths, drums, and field recordings don’t sound like they required much CPU power to put together. An aleatory spirit governs the music. The various parts suggest less the precisely gridded lines of Ableton or Logic than they do scraps of analog tape that have been hung from a clothesline in the breeze.
As a fuzzy snapshot of vintage rave made all the more thrilling for the gaps in its memory, Sekundenschlaf shares a lineage with Burial’s Untrue and Mark Leckey’s “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore.” The title is taken from a German word for “nodding off” that’s frequently used to describe falling asleep at the wheel, and the music conveys that sense of hurtling through the darkness at terrific speed. But unlike many stabs at rave revivalism, the mini-album doesn’t restrict itself to a small set of hoary tropes, and it benefits from the wider perspective. The opening track, “Catching Rare Birds,” begins with looped congas, choral pads, and tentative electric bass tones before an imposing acid squelch seizes control; it has as much in common with 4AD as it does 4 Hero. The similarly hybrid “Walking Distances” is a kind of gothic dancehall, and even the B side’s more uniformly white-knuckled tracks sound like approximations of jungle by someone who had read extensively about the genre without ever having heard a lick of the real thing.
In the closing “Are You Still Hurt,” the record’s heart-in-mouth climax, tight loops of wordless vocals and short bursts of breath weave a wheezy web above craggy breaks and savage drum programming. The whole thing is suspended between furious energy and weightless rumination. Just like the moments of dangerous fatigue referenced in the title, the music acts out a kind of surrender, where you don’t know where you are and you don’t know where you’re going. It’s a portrait of motion, plain and simple, of free falling through empty space, and no mystery—and, conversely, no ultimate reveal, should it come to that—can rob this music of its immediacy.


A template for both emo and modern rock, Sunny Day's original lineup has its two records reissued, with bonus cuts, and they deserve reassessment.

Diary / LP2

Whether it's lifelong softies like Jimmy Eat World, strident scream machines such as Thursday, or over-their-heads windbags in the vein of Angels & Airwaves, critspeak about bands with roots in emo usually dictates the following career path: Hang with Fat Mike all you want, call us when you're ready to sound like U2. It's an easy narrative to set up, maybe because it requires fewer keystrokes than the more correct comparison: Sunny Day Real Estate.
It's got nothing to do with churches of reverb or Christianity, though those would come later for SDRE. Taking the longview, SDRE seem even less of their time than they were in the mid-90s, positioned between the more stone-faced acolytes of Fugazi and the branches of Jade Tree that went mathletic or simply stuffed as many proper nouns as possible into radio-intended pop-punk (see: songs called "Anne Arbour"). SDRE saw beyond the constraints of "scene" and envisioned a point where the meek would inherit the arena--- independently minded, sensitive boys doling out anthems of introspection to thousands of fist-raising, navel-gaving kids. With a hotly anticipated fall tour coming, Sub Pop has reissued the original lineup's only two records, which reaffirm what those swiftly sold-out shows already made pretty clear: a lot of people love these guys, and rightfully so.
What immediately strikes you about Diary is it doesn't sound intended to be a gamechanger-- even if it's no surprise that one of emo's most enduring documents is called Diary of all things. But even if it doesn't break new ground musically, it signaled a new way to talk about the passion. The quicksilver time-changes and jangly-but-not-collegiate guitar chords show nods to Dischord, but it's the terse yet tender delivery of the lyrics from Jeremy Enigk that ultimately drew people in. "The waiting could crush my heart/ The tide breaks a wave of fear," okay, fine-- this kind of stuff inspired a whole lot of heartfelt word salad from far less talented sadsacks, but "Seven" still is one of those great album-starters, written like they had to win you over in five minutes or it would be their last song.
Immediately after, the insistently ringing two-note riff that opens "In Circles" portents something every bit as excitable, but to this day, I still find myself genuinely surprised as it folds into a half-time dirge. It's quite possibly the definitive SDRE song, since it's here where you hear their signature trick: Enigk is often content to softly nudge verse melodies, but the choruses are something else entirely. If the harmonies were prettier, it could be straight-up pop; if they were yelled, it might be punk. Here, it simply hits a sweet spot for people who were into shows for the community, but also to meet potential dates. The rangy, disarmingly ramshackle "Song About an Angel" nearly equals it during its six-minute run.
If Diary has a reputation of being front-loaded, it can't be in the pejorative sense: bands can and have spent entire careers ripping those three songs off over and over again. For a while, I thought Diary happened to be an album whose importance exceeded its quality-- thanks to some unfortunately (or unavoidably) dated production, if nothing else. That's been remedied to good extent on this remaster-- "The Blankets Were the Stairs" no longer sounds as grounded by its granular grunge tones, and the drums sound less bogged in Green River sludge. Elsewhere, classic rock guitar heroics are more prevalent than Pac NW grunge: certainly in the memorable riffs from "47" and "Round", and "Shadows" played the shadow-and-light game better than any of their peers who were just dying to be compared to Led Zeppelin.
Despite Diary's success, SDRE had a pretty uncomfortably defined relationship with their audience as well as themselves, so the follow-up proved to be a knottier affair, and not just because it's widely known as either Sunny Day Real Estate, LP2, or The Pink Album. The songs themselves didn't get any shorter or less intense, but they feel significantly less edified. When the charmingly animated video for "Seven" ran on "120 Minutes", it never felt too out of place regardless of whether it led into Jawbox or Pearl Jam, but LP2 tended to veer more towards the obscure. It certainly didn't help that the packaging itself contained no artwork other than its entirely pink cover or lyric sheet. And compared to Diary's untouchable opening triad, that of LP2 was bound to pale, and you feel like SDRE is playing it overly self-aware-- "Friday", "Theo B", and "Red Elephant" each would've been the shortest track on Diary, save for its near-interlude "Phuerton Skeurto". "Friday" starts LP2 with the kind of risky, slippery melody that all but screams "difficult follow-up." The high-wired guitars of "8" introduce damn near atonality, the kind of chords an amateur bangs out on a piano, but soon they become the backbone of the record's most muscular number.
It's easy to project the idea that this was a band dissolving personally and musically from the inside-out if you know the history, but the music itself is every bit as ghostly on its own-- even beyond the threadbare arrangements, Enigk has said that many lyrics were left unfinished or sung as gibberish. LP2 certainly has more than its share of moments, but in the context of SDRE's artistic arc, a time when they wanted to be Shudder To Think instead of arena-fillers can feel like a bridge to nowhere.
And that was pretty much it for the classic lineup of SDRE-- the rhythm section would play on Foo Fighters' The Colour and the Shape, a record whose brickwalled dynamics and gleaming-edge guitar arguably did just as much to determine the actual sound of modern radio rock as Sunny Day or even producer Gil Norton's work with the Pixies. Meanwhile, Enigk would put more emphasis on mysticism than mystery for 1998's amber, glowing How It Feels to Be Something On and 2000's divisive swan song (to this point) The Rising Tide. Some saw Tide as a natural culmination of Enigk's sonic ambitions and lyrical specificity, while others took Return of the Frog Queen and "Rain Song" in tandem and wondered when the fuck this guy turned into Rick Wakeman. Either way, it certainly deserved better than to be tethered to Time Bomb Records, which would shortly cease to exist after the release of The Rising Tide.
Sure, the B-sides will generate some interest amongst die-hards, but as is the case with the recent Radiohead reissues, the sort of fans that would buy a Sunny Day Real Estate album twice probably are more than familiar with, say, "The Crow". But really, it might just be in the vein of so many rereleases that are meant as a reminder or a call for rediscovery-- in some circles, SDRE is Pavement, or MBV or any of the other 1990s legends you might care to mention, but a huge difference of perception is that most of their acolytes, despite making great records, are just too damn earnest to be fashionable. Or maybe it's just that Sunny Day Real Estate's influence is more conceptual than musical, and if that's the case, it's been so fully adapted into modern rock (emo or not) that it's not so much innovative as it is timeless.


On Real Estate's rich, sad third album, Atlas, the once-ideal pool party band has turned to soundtracking the cleanup: Everyone's gone, the sky's threatening rain, there are cigarette butts floating in the pool, and we've all gotta work tomorrow. The result is at once their most forlorn record and their most beautiful.

Atlas

Before their rich, sad new album Atlas, it would have been difficult to imagine the Real Estate song you'd turn to in a time of crisis. “Suburban Beverage”? “Let’s Rock the Beach?” The New Jersey band's first two albums were simply not places to which you brought problems—they were escapist havens, Tiki-torch grottos leading you away from your worries and gently towards the pool raft. The lyrics, meanwhile, were mantras best understood with a beer koozie gripped in one hand: What you want is just beyond your reach; keep on trying. Whoah, it's real. Budweiser, Sprite.
On Atlas, their basic sound hasn't changed—frontman Martin Courtney's clean-strummed open chords, Matt Mondanile's bright leads, and a light-stepping rhythm section all squish together comfortably like college housemates sprawled on a sectional sofa—but the mood has. "I'm just trying to make some sense of this before I lose another year," shrugs Courtney on "The Bend”. On "Crime", he sings "Toss and turn all night, don't know how to make this right/ Crippling anxiety." The once-ideal pool party band, in other words, has turned to soundtracking the cleanup: Everyone's gone, the sky's threatening rain, there are cigarette butts floating in the pool, and we've all gotta work tomorrow.
The result is at once their most forlorn album and their most beautiful. Producer and mixer Tom Schick dissolves the noncommittal haze of reverb that made it sound like you were hearing Days through a fisheye lens, and the crispness that emerges on Atlas is gorgeous. Courtney’s tenor is soft and even, and the room tone is bruised-ripe like an October sunset. In this soft light, the band sounds like the platonic ideal of themselves, and it’s difficult not to wish all their albums had been recorded this way.
The clarity of Atlas underlines what an uncommonly graceful unit they are. Real Estate essentially has two lead vocalists—Courtney’s tenor on the one hand, and Mondanile’s pearly guitar melodies on the other. The two voices enjoy a near-telepathic relationship, and it’s almost impossible to imagine Courtney’s singing without Mondanile’s guitar twirling around it, and vice versa. As the tabbed tutorial they posted for “Crime” underlines, nothing anyone is playing would tax a first-year guitar student. But their two voices, working modestly and in perfect sync, key into a mysterious and powerful emotional calculus. When the bell-clear leads rise out of on "The Bend" and"Navigator", they feel like spontaneously welling tears.
This simplicity and eloquence is the key to Atlas’ surprisingly profound ache. Courtney’s words tend to mention the same things over and over—the sky, the horizon, the sidewalk, the houses on his block—but he’s not repeating himself. He’s shaping the contours of a world, one that's built on a sense of cosmic gratitude matched by an equal and opposite sense of cosmic loss. “I don’t need the horizon/ To tell me where the sky ends/ And it’s a subtle landscape/ Where I come from,” he sings on “Had to Hear”. “Just over the horizon/ That’s where I always think you’ll be/ It’s always so surprising/ To find you right there next to me,” he sings tenderly on “Horizon”. The bittersweet disorientation of these two competing thoughts—I’ve lost more than I’ll ever know, I have more than I ever imagined—mark out a very particular phase of life, and it’s one Courtney is currently in the throes of: He’s about to have his first child.
This is a life moment when you engage in a little less dreamy reverie about who you might be, and begin assessing, with some alarm, who you have already become. If you’re lucky, like Courtney, you are roughly pleased with what you find, even as you squint bewildered into the recent past to mark the notch where the transition happened. “I remember when/ This all felt like pretend/ And I still can’t believe,” he marvels on “Crime”. “I’m staring at the hands on the clock/ I’m still waiting for them to stop” he sings on “Navigator”, the album’s final song and one of many bemused meditations on the passing of time. Real Estate have weathered some jam-band comparisons, and Alex Bleeker is an avowed fan of the Grateful Dead, so it feels like a permissible stretch to note that the shadow of a very particular Dead song—the wry, valedictory “Touch of Grey”—seems to hover over Atlas. Like that song, Atlas assesses the current moment, and everything leading up to it, with a puzzled head scratch and shit-eating grin.
Real Estate are a deeply suburban band, and the shade of long tree-lined streets, the lonely symmetry of the houses, rise up continually out of their music. If it has been too easy to underestimate Real Estate in the past, it might be in part because of this: Suburbs are not often stages, in the popular imagination, for great existential drama. They are places of reverie, of absence, into which the drama of the real-world intrudes. But Atlas gazes calmly and wisely into the face of some troubling questions: Mortality, the passing of time, the problem of loneliness. With it, Real Estate have made more than just their third excellent record in a row, more than just their best-ever record. They’ve made the first record of their career that feels like it might teach you something over time. It is rare, and special, for a band to be this effortlessly and completely themselves.


Twelve years since D'Angelo released his dirt-encrusted soul opus in the first month of the new millennium, we have yet to see a follow-up. Heard now on this 2xLP reissue, Voodoo still stands as a paranoid, mysterious, and challenging statement that somehow managed to scale the industry.

Voodoo

It's impossible to talk about Voodoo without talking about what's happened since Voodoo. Or, more accurately, what hasn't happened since Voodoo. It's been 12 years since D'Angelo released his dirt-encrusted soul opus in the first month of the new millennium, and we have yet to see a follow-up. During those dozen calendar runs, the Virginia-bred singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer has learned to play guitar and spent countless hours in various studios, trying to find his way to the next sound. This time last year, unofficial D'Angelo status updater and kindred spirit/collaborator ?uestlove told me the new album is "pretty much 97% done." And this year, D played a number of live shows, his first in a decade. That's the upside.
He's also been arrested-- for disturbing the peace, marijuana possession, carrying a concealed weapon, and driving under the influence in 2005, and then for offering an undercover NYPD officer $40 for a blowjob in 2010. There were several attempts at rehab. And he's almost died at least once, when he drunkenly crashed through a fence and flipped his Hummer alongside Virginia's Route 711 seven years ago. In 2010, when I asked ?uestlove how his friend stacks up against the other luminaries he's worked with-- people like Jay-Z and Al Green-- he summed up the D'Angelo dilemma well: "I consider him a genius beyond words. At the same time, I say to myself, 'How can I scream someone's genius if they hardly have any work to show for it?' Then again, the last work he did was so powerful that it's lasted 10 years."
At this point, it's easy to forget that Voodoo itself was, for quite awhile, one of those forever-delayed studio myths, too. "I've been gone so long, just wanna sing my song," D'Angelo sings on "The Line", a self-directed pep talk and explanation of his slug-like pace, "I know you been hearing a lot of things about me." Voodoo arrived five years behind D's home-recorded bap&B debut, Brown Sugar, and blew through its fair share of release dates before touching down on January 25, 2000. Its arrival came during the twilight of the mega-CD era-- six months after Napster's birth, two years before the iPod-- but its four-year gestation occurred during the halcyon 90s, a time when artists were afforded the chance to tinker for years on end while blazing through bottomless studio budgets. The record topped the Billboard albums chart during its first two weeks out, and looking at 2000's other #1s-- including N'Sync's record-breaking No Strings Attached, Eminem's angsty Marshall Mathers LP, and, uh, Limp Bizkit's Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water-- Voodoo stands tall with October's Kid A as a paranoid, mysterious, and challenging artistic statement that somehow managed to scale the industry.
Riding high off of 1998's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Maxwell's first two LPs, and Erykah Badu's 1997 album Baduizm, the so-called neo-soul movement, which favored earthy 70s production rather than 90s slickness, was reaching an apex in 2000. And Voodoo was positioned as a more down-to-earth alternative to the infinite excess of late-90s hip-hop and R&B. "[Contemporary R&B]'s a joke," scoffed D'Angelo at the time. "It's sad-- the people making this shit have turned black music into a club thing." (For his sake, here's hoping D hasn't flipped on the radio in the last five years.)
While this viewpoint may seem somewhat myopic in our poptimist era, to understand D'Angelo is to understand who he looked to for musical and spiritual guidance: Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, George Clinton, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Al Green, Otis Redding, Prince-- supremely gifted artists known for expertly plying their craft. His devotion isn't merely cosmetic or fashionable, though-- by all accounts he's a hardcore music nerd who "knows every Prince concert's playlist," according to recent GQ profiler Amy Wallace. His love of musical lore is partly why he chose to make Voodoo in Electric Lady Studios, the downtown Manhattan recording space Hendrix built in 1969. Listening to the album, his influences are apparent, but also ingrained in a way that's equal parts reverent and uncanny. Rather than just listening to old Funkadelic or Stevie albums for inspiration, Voodoo was literally born from them; a typical night at Electric Lady would have D, ?uestlove, bassist Pino Palladino, and maybe one or two of their prodigious buddies playing an entire classic soul album through, and then seeing where those jams led them. This went on for years. The result is ineffably natural, the type of live-in-studio sound that requires copious god-given talent-- D'Angelo started playing piano at age 4-- and constant woodshedding to really pull off. There are no shortcuts.
D'Angelo's old-school obsessions extended even further than songwriting inspiration. Voodoo was recorded on 2" tape-- 120 reels of the stuff were used in total according to engineer Russell Elevado-- and many of the songs' instrumental takes were recorded live without overdubs. Vintage gear was employed. The analog fetishism is ironic considering how, at the time of its release, vinyl had yet to make a resurgence; indeed, this 2xLP reissue is a godsend in that respect, especially for anyone who's considered dropping $100 on eBay for one of the few LPs originally made in 2000. I've been listening to this album since it came out-- my original 74-minute CD-R, burned from a friend, left out the 79-minute album's last song-- and it never gets old, or grating, or tired. While this is obviously largely due to the quality of the songs, it's hard not to think that the warm glow given off by the equipment and recording techniques used to create it factors in as well. Not all music needs to be built to last, but Voodoo was designed and willed and technically optimized to be a testament for the ages; it captures empty space and heartbreak as well as it does rim shots and joy. The grooves deepen. When the news of a bare-bones, no-bonus-tracks vinyl reissue causes palpable excitement 12 years later, it's a rare accomplishment.
But Voodoo is more than a fetish object for analog geeks and old-soul collectors. It's peppered with hip-hop inflections largely informed by the singular work of J Dilla, the record's biggest modern influence. D'Angelo probably had Dilla's beats in mind when he wanted ?uestlove to dirty his impeccable timing to drum like he had just "drank some moonshine behind a chuckwagon," as ?uest once put it. In GQ, D cited the Detroit producer's 2006 death as the moment he decided to wake up from his booze-and-cocaine fueled lost years. "I felt like I was going to be next," he said. And when he played this year's Made in America festival in Philadelphia, he stepped out to the strains of obscure Canadian band Motherlode's "When I Die", which Dilla flipped on the finale of his last true album, Donuts. The song's hook: "When I die, I hope to be a better man than you thought I'd be." Voodoo's element of sampling is crucial and varied as well, whether through flawless interpolations (as on "Send It On", which borrows its horn-laden lilt from Kool and the Gang's "Sea of Tranquility"), or sly cut-ups (like when DJ Premier drops in a line of Fat Joe's materialistic "Success" into the anti-materialism screed "Devil's Pie"), or well-chosen covers (the slowed-down brilliance of "Feel Like Makin' Love", a #1 for Roberta Flack in 1974).
Given his extensive repertoire of male R&B legends, the fact that D chose Voodoo's only cover to be a song made famous by a woman also seems key. Because another aspect of the album's overall concept involves an embrace of femininity. "The Aquarian Age is a matriarchal age, and if we are to exist as men in this new world many of us must learn to embrace and nurture that which is feminine with all of our hearts," wrote singer/poet Saul Williams in the record's liner notes. "But is there any room for artistry in hip hop's decadent man-sion?" The album's most uncharacteristic moment involves this schism between hip-hop and misogyny and feminism, when guest stars Method Man and Redman drop tone-deaf dick-fluffing broadsides on "Left and Right". (Intriguingly, Q-Tip recorded a more thematically appropriate verse for the track, though that version has yet to surface.) But everywhere else, Voodoo exhibits a mature attitude toward women and relationships-- one that doesn't pander, but empathizes, and shows that the then-26-year-old father of two was becoming acquainted with all sides of love.
Voodoo's second half, from "One Mo' Gin" through "Africa", goes from the depths of despondency, to regret, to carnal ecstasy, to something more spiritual and everlasting. These songs get to the bottom of nothing less than the core of human interaction; what happens when people collide and come together and break apart. And it's all done with the omnipotent knowing of a saint. Nothing is overstated. "The Root" is the record's most downtrodden track lyrically, where D'Angelo confesses, "I feel my soul is empty, my blood is cold and I can't feel my legs/ I need someone to hold me, bring me back to life before I'm dead." But instead of dour instrumentation, the song's accompanying rhythm is comforting, warm. The whole song leads to a kind of exorcism-- in its final minutes, the singer masterfully layers his own voice on top of itself, vocal lines coming in at every imaginable direction, offering a peek inside his brain. Then it all smooths out, finding comfort in infinity: "From the Alpha of creation, to the end of all time." D'Angelo knows these stakes are high but, as he concludes on "The Line", "If I can hold on, I'm sure everything will be alright." Voodoo is the sound of him holding on; its ensuing silence marks his lost grip.
Details also give Voodoo its timelessness. The album's gentle avoidance of common song structures adds spontaneity; even after hundreds of listens, it's still possible to be surprised. The barely-heard words spoken in intros and outros give things continuity and a voyeuristic quality, like you're hearing it all through a city wall; listen again for the the sweetly awkward conversation with an ex that starts "One Mo' Gin" or the way "Greatdayndamornin'" is introduced with D'Angelo praising ?uestlove to journalist dream hampton: "I was like, 'You gonna be my drummer one of these days,'" gushes D.
The concept of voodoo itself-- as portrayed via the record's voodoo-ceremony photos-- is multi-layered. While probably using voodoo's exaggerated and misrepresented image within modern popular culture to add some mystique and danger, D'Angelo's also likely referencing the religion's African origins, and how it was coveted by uprooted slaves, feared by slave owners, and ignited the Haitian Revolution of 1791. D'Angelo was born the son of a Pentecostal minister, and he was exposed to that religion's closely intertwining relationship between the spiritual and earthly realms: speaking in tongues, divine healing. And music. "I learned at an early age that what we were doing in the choir was just as important as the preacher," he told GQ. "The stage is our pulpit, and you can use all of that energy and that music and the lights and the colors and the sound. But you know, you've got to be careful." Coming out of D's mouth, this is more than hokum-- he believes it and he makes you believe it. There are many ghosts hidden within this record. They're still being drawn out.
Still, many simply know Voodoo for a certain naked music video. The clip for "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" is the reason why the album went platinum, and it plays a large part in D's ensuing disappearance. It instantly transformed the singer from a very talented artist to a pin-up. The song was the last track recorded for Voodoo, and it's the most direct thing here, a churning Prince-inspired ballad that bests nearly every actual ballad Prince ever recorded. It's about lust, sure, but it's a two-way street. The way he sings it, "how does it feel?" isn't necessarily rhetorical, no matter how much it should be considering the power of the music. And if you look closely, the video isn't just a handsome and muscular guy flexing his pecs. There's a vulnerability in D'Angelo's eyes, an awkwardness that's both endearing and slightly uncomfortable.
"You've got to realize, he'd never looked like that before in his life," D's trainer Mark Jenkins told Spin in 2008. "To be somebody who was so introverted, and then, in a matter of three or four months, to be so ripped-- everything was happening so quickly." The video became a phenomenon and, soon enough, women were standing at the lip of D'Angelo's stage, telling him to take off his clothes. The attention was infuriating to him, and it sent the singer to a dark place-- all that work, all that time blown away by a few sweaty shots of his abdomen. Then again, while he was hesitant, he still shot the video. The unfortunate ordeal causes writer Jason King to conclude, in this reissue's new liner notes: "For all of Voodoo's claims to realness and authenticity, D'Angelo's imaging, while rooted in promise, had been in some ways a charade, an unsustainable performance of black masculinity gone awry."
"I got something I'm seeing; I got a vision," D'Angelo told Time upon Voodoo's release. "This album is the second step to that vision." It seems safe to say the prophecy he was speaking about did not entail more than a decade of nothingness, or drug addiction, or shame. Now, it's difficult to say where this vision is leading. Playing an upbeat new funk track called "Sugar Daddy" at this year's BET Awards, he looked solid, and his voice sounded fantastic, but it was almost as interesting to watch the cutaway shots-- to see Nicki Minaj staring on, seemingly confused, or Kanye talking to someone during the performance, or Beyonce standing up, loving every second. (BET headlined the clip: "D'Angelo's Sexiest Performance Ever!")
There's a big difference between a prodigious, smooth-skinned 26-year-old playing retro-styled music and a 38-year-old doing the same thing. The backwards-looking pose can calcify; by the time Prince was 38, he was well into his symbol phase. That said, D'Angelo is the quintessential old soul. And there's hope in the comebacks of fellow 90s refugees Maxwell and Badu, who both released some of their best work after long layoffs over the last few years. But D'Angelo's inactivity has only helped to inflate Voodoo's myth, though it doesn't need much help. It's frustrating to think about how someone so enamored with the past, who knew his heroes' failures so well, could be doomed to repeat them. It's almost as if he studied them too much, and the same spiritual power that fueled his greatest moment couldn't help but bring him down. Like that's how he thought it was supposed to go. In an interview between ?uestlove and D around the release of Voodoo, the drummer confronted the singer about his idols: "They all have one thing in common, they were all vanguards, but 98% of them crashed and burned." To which D'Angelo responded: "I think about that all the time."


The Toronto-based musician explores his Nicaraguan roots on an album of drifting, ambient-adjacent songs incorporating instruments like the quena and llamador.

Máscaras

Take it as an auspicious omen when you have to google the instruments used on a recording. Many listeners may find that the case with Máscaras, the fourth album by Canadian-Nicaraguan musician Brandon Valdivia, aka Toronto-based Mas Aya. A deft multi-instrumentalist who’s worked with Laraaji, Tanya Tagaq, U.S. Girls, and John Oswald, among others, Valdivia uses the bansuri (a side-blown bamboo flute originating in India), quena (a seven-hole flute from the Andes), and llamador (a Colombian hand-percussion instrument) in addition to tin whistle, thumb piano, and drums. Over the years, he has optimized this unusual tonal palette, filtering traditional sounds through modern technology. On Máscaras, what could have been a glib amalgam of ancient and futuristic tropes in less skilled hands becomes a compelling admixture of unlikely elements, the rare quasi-ambient work to which you can nod your head in tricky time signatures.
The album’s title means “masks” in Spanish, and Valdivia uses it to signify their use in both indigenous rituals and Nicaraguan resistance movements. Opening cut “Momento Presente” fades in with a festive flute aria and then deep, mesmerizing llamador hits; soon the avian-like woodwinds layer and overlap chaotically, creating ghostly shimmers and overtones. When hard claps enter the mix, a wonderful sense of temporal disorientation ensues. On “Key,” a gorgeous drone built around a peaceful four-note progression shows that Valdivia’s time spent with Laraaji did not go to waste. Eventually, drums and oddly tuned percussion—seemingly made out of logs and Tupperware—come in, and we’re transported to a new-age house-music club on a Caribbean beach.
Valdivia is fond of beginning his pieces with intriguing atmospheric drift, as he does in “Villanueva,” and then dropping in beats after a few minutes of oneiric mood-setting, as if to shift your reverie into revelation. When sluggish kicks enter around the halfway point, they launch “Villaneuva” into the ominous trip-hop zones of Scorn’s Gyral. The blissful wind instruments rubbing up against the rugged low end generate an odd friction.
If Máscaras has a single, it’s “Tiempo Ahora,” on which Canadian-Colombian diva Lido Pimienta sings a beautiful ballad over methodical trap beats and dewy synth wisps. But the album’s true peak comes on “18 de Abril,” a Latin American take on Jon Hassell’s sonic dislocations, with hints of Jorge Reyes’ mystical ambient forays and Master Musicians of Joujouka’s 4 a.m. trance formations. The bulbous beats aren’t exactly danceable, but they’re impossible not to twitch to; marvel at some of the fattest snare hits you’ll likely hear this year. Valdivia ingeniously gets his woodwinds to swirl into hypnotic ribbons that resemble the rhaita, a North African double-reed instrument. He also drops in agitated voices amid frantic percussion runs, suggesting intense socio-political unrest. The whole song is druggier than a William Burroughs/Brion Gysin/Brian Jones summit meeting in Morocco. On the closing “Quiescence,” rapid, weirdly tuned percussion bubbles and crackles beneath feathery flute. There’s a wondrous chillout opus struggling to be heard above the rhythmic bustle, and it’s this tension that exemplifies Máscaras’ piquant musical spells.
Valdivia’s alias is a double pun referring both to his grandmother’s Nicaraguan hometown, Masaya, and the Spanish-language phrase “el más allá,” or “the beyond.” On Máscaras, with a masterly blend of earthly and unearthly sounds, he draws a link between his roots and otherworldly points unknown.

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Produced by PC Music and affiliates, this collection from Charli XCX is presented as a “project” rather than an album or mixtape. It’s largely stolen by its guests, like Uffie and CupcakKe.

Number 1 Angel

At some point, the music world decided that Charli XCX doesn’t suit or want her new direction: that 2013’s True Romance was the true Charli, that 2014’s was Sucker an acceptable lark, that her PC Music collaborations were acts of desecration. Charli would disagree, probably while partying. In the past year, she has defended SOPHIE and co. in almost every interview—and while half of True Romance comprised immaculately tasteful dramatics, the other half was Charli karaoke-ing over Gold Panda tracks and collaborating with Brooke Candy. Before that, she was a MySpace kid drunk on Ed Banger Records. Charlotte Aitchison makes her own decisions, and if those decisions involve dystopian car sleaze, so be it.
A proper follow-up to Sucker has yet to materialize. So to apparent label consternation, Charli released Number 1 Angel as a nebulous—but increasingly common in pop—“project.” It’s not a proper mixtape (it isn’t free) nor an album (the stakes are lower, or that’s the hope), as the ever-prolific Aitchison rummages through the vaults to fill out a stopgap. Like Vroom Vroom, Number 1 Angel is produced by PC Music and affiliates, but this isn’t entirely their show.
The main difference between the True Romance era and 2017 is that Aitchison doesn’t write alone but with her peers, like MNDR (Feed Me Diamonds) and Sweden’s Noonie Bao (“Run Away With Me,” “I Could Be the One”). With Aitchison, they tone down PC Music’s worst habits—Tinkertoy takes on Eurotrance, two-dimensionalizing of women into storyboard dolls—and bridge their work with pop radio. The dovetailing is uncanny. While Aitchison’s said she doesn’t write about real-life heartbreak—making her the Diane Warren of teenage angst—the current of masochism that runs through her work runs exactly parallel to the anthemically undone women of EDM-pop today.
Number 1 Angel is best at its most vulnerable. On “Emotional,” Charli guiltily relishes an affair, plunging into a cavernous Patrik Berger track whose doomed joy would fit perfectly on True Romance. “3AM (Pull Up)” contains an entire emotional arc: a heroically lust-lorn “holding on” hook, an ill-advised booty call answered to perky trop-house, then the same perk used to shoo him away, however long that lasts. A.G. Cook can’t resist turning the last third of “Blame It On You” into a jock jam, but the rest nails the late-night desolation of letting oneself be played.
Sometimes the desolation is a bit much. “White Roses,” despite being a cool True Romance callback, is a dubious, desiccated, and over-obvious take on “The Rose.” When Charli sang about ecstasy on True Romance’s “Take My Hand,” it sounded like she was actually on ecstasy; here, “Drugs” says the word but sheds the high. It’s PC Music, so there’s a chance her dead-eyed “baby, you the love of my life/Selling all the drugs that I like” is just cynical, but it might as well be a D.A.R.E. commission to make drugs sound terrible.
The other novelty of Number 1 Angel and Charli’s past work is that it showcases, and is largely stolen by, a lot of guests. Starrah (“Needed Me”) and Raye (“All Cried Out”) carry themselves confidently on “Dreamer,” but a bit too confidently and interchangeably; the track comes off like three successive cuts of a Charli XCX demo that may not go to any of them. The otherwise delightful “Babygirl” exhumes trash-rapper Uffie from Charli XCX’s teenage dreams, and—maybe just from absence—she of all people steals the track away.
Sometimes the producers are at fault. The problem with emulating the likes of Britney’s Blackout is that fetishizing the vocalist as cipher comes with the territory. “Roll With Me,” produced by Robyn collaborator Klas Åhlund, perfectly channels the Swede in her cutesy-maniacal fembot phase—but like his song for Britney, “Piece of Me,” you sort of only can hear Robyn. On “Lipgloss,” Charli gets her QT on, vanishing into PC Music’s Alice-Deejay-at-Claire’s-but-sexy aesthetic. It features the rapper CupcakKe, who has too much personality and gleeful filth to be disappeared like she is. Her verse, zipping from iCarly shoutouts to the X-rated uses of pineapple, is a revelation. You could see all this as camaraderie: Charli, having sorta made it, helping others catch up. But the cost is hearing one of pop’s most vibrant young personalities consistently, disappointingly upstaged.


The Horrors tone down the experiments of Primary Colours for a record with obvious stylistic debts and impeccable taste.

Skying

It must be hard for a young British band growing up as NME darlings, but the Horrors seem to have handled it all rather well. They made the cover of the magazine in 2006 before having even released an EP, presumably on the strength of their black cotton-candy haircuts and their media connections. And they debuted first single "Sheena Is a Parasite" with an equally uncommon assist from director Chris Cunningham, who had previously done his unsettling, special effects heavy work for more musical outliers such as Aphex Twin and Autechre.
But if the Horrors' high profile debut was baffling, their follow-up moves were encouraging. They spoofed themselves with an appearance on an episode of the British comedy "The Mighty Boosh", as a band called the Black Tubes, in an episode revolving around protagonist Vince Noir trying to squeeze into a pair of impossibly skinny jeans so he can join the band. They quickly shed the campy, dark garage shocks of debut Strange House, announced a sophomore album produced by Portishead's Geoff Barrow and Cunningham (the latter resulting in a lot of "cinematic" talk despite his decidedly claustrophobic small-screen style), and started stretching out their sound to accommodate eight-minute krautrock jams. This is perhaps the best you can hope for from your rising rock stars: a willingness to laugh at oneself and a will to evolve.
Skying continues the evolution set in motion 2009's Primary Colours, but with an emphasis on melody and pop form. This time, the band recorded and produced in their own studio, crafting a sound that recalls both the gothic pomp of 80s new wave and the big-screen dreaming of early-90s shoegaze, just as it was beginning to transform into chart-conquering Britpop. That the record can be heard as a catalogue of influences is nothing new for this outfit. They've routinely been tagged as "record collector rock" for their unabashed aping of influences from the Cramps to Can-- and indeed their well-selected covers indicate a group that has spent some time in record shops. Skying isn't likely to change that perception. The insistent chorus and Badwan's breathy delivery on "I Can See Through You" comes off like the Psychedelic Furs run through the effects rack of My Bloody Valentine. "Monica Gems" nods to Suede with its decadent guitar swirl and Badwan's moaning sighs. On "Endless Blue", a horn section pops in for the floating intro as if borrowed from a James Bond theme by way of Blur or "This Is Hardcore" before the song abruptly surges into an impressive rock nosedive. The debts owed here are obvious, but the taste is impeccable, and the application is more often than not convincing.
There are moments when the band stretches out past seven minutes and opts for something more impressionistic, like the hypnotic "Moving Further Away" and the reclining-then-softly-erupting album closer "Oceans Burning", but the Horrors seem otherwise content to craft solid, emotionally inflected rock songs here. Lead single "Still Life" sets the tone in that regard, with an appealing bucolic stupor, rhythm section keeping half time, synths seeping backwards, and frontman Faris Badwan singing in a low, foggy voice that holds its spot high in the mix as easily as it drifts away on the chorus. That it brings to mind Simple Minds and, by extension, teen angst of the John Hughes variety, is by no means a negative.
Both Badwan's voice and the band's production have made some strides here: He sounds surer behind the microphone than ever, and the band's guitars and synths are frequently smoothed of shrieks into one great blur, the black eyeliner watered down and smudged into a gray cloud. So while they may have started out as all glittering surfaces, the Horrors have evolved into a dependable band making wide-reaching rock music. Whether a calculated retreat or just a natural maturation, the Horrors have found a sound more content with background and atmosphere, and it suits them nicely.


Nine Inch Nails’ surprise-release new EP Not the Actual Events is slight, but at moments it delivers the kind of visceral fury that NIN hasn’t recreated since its mid-’90s Downward Spiral heyday.

Nine Inch Nails: Not the Actual Events EP

Not the Actual Events EP

Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor has spent decades griping about the music business, dating back to his complaints about TVT in 1992 and his resulting “secret recording sessions” of the Broken EP. Now in some ways, he is the music business, a power player whose pioneering moves—surprise releases, extreme secrecy, fanbase cultivation, big budget commercial soundtrack jobs—have become global-pop-star S.O.P. So when he boldly introduces his surprise new EP Not the Actual Events as “an unfriendly, fairly impenetrable record that we needed to make” there is some cause for both intrigue and healthy skepticism.
For longtime followers of Reznor, a few scenarios suggest themselves. Maybe he's hoping to stoke enthusiasm for a slight, 21-minute EP that mainly serves as a promotional tool for a trove of concurrent reissues. Maybe he thinks he's done something remarkable, because he still sees himself as an innovator, even though his output since reforming NIN in 2005 has been well-textured but either comfortably formulaic (With Teeth, Hesitation Marks, The Slip's first half) or uncomfortably ambitious (Ghosts I-IV, the second half of The Slip, parts of Year Zero). Optimists and diehards might wish for a third option: Maybe he's legitimately produced powerful and fresh music under the Nine Inch Nails banner. To Reznor’s credit and detriment, he's managed to touch on each scenario.
There are only a handful of examples in Reznor’s post-millennial NIN output where the group have departed from their turbulent, sturm-und-drang industrialism. There’s the piano and Vocoder-driven disco barnburner “All The Love In the World,” opener to the otherwise-toothless With Teeth; the gloomy, overlong and under-baked instrumentals-only closet-cleaner Ghosts I-IV; and on 2013’s Hesitation Marks, the baffling, sunny “Everything,” a rare major-key tune in the band’s catalog. The more interesting of these, “All the Love in the World” and “Everything,” are the opposite of “unfriendly” or “impenetrable”—their disarming warmth is what makes them memorable. Nine Inch Nails have spent nearly thirty years trading on a signature type of abrasive, parents-repelling industrial melancholia—they’ve provided decades’ worth of precedent in this style, and it would be it pretty damned difficult to release anything that could notably set itself apart on these terms. The band’s most “impenetrable” release so far is Ghosts, which demonstrates how that word can frequently mean “boring.”
Despite its rough-edges production, Not the Actual Events is neither unfriendly nor is it inaccessible, especially for fans. It does, however, deliver a kind of visceral fury that NIN hasn’t recreated since its mid-’90s Downward Spiral heyday. “Burning Bright (Field on Fire)” begins with a detuned, overdrive-saturated guitar riff reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine rather than the crunchy, sharp riffs of standard NIN before erupting into a swarm of shimmering guitars that give the synesthesiastic effect of being inside the field aflame. The song doesn’t necessarily go anywhere, but its crude, unhinged force feels vital.
On “Branches/Bones,” the band stays truer to their post-2005 form. A textbook post-Fragile NIN single, it follows in the efficient and winning form of The Slip’s “1,000,000” and “Discipline” or the Nirvana-meets-NIN 2009 single “Not So Pretty Now,” tracks that show Reznor as a biting pop songwriter rather than a brooding noisemaker. However, his decisions to wedge in a chorus of “It’s like I’ve been here before!” and cut the proceedings off abruptly after less than two minutes feel perverse, suggesting a desire to tease what’s worked in the past but deny the full-on pleasure of nostalgia.
Unfortunately, the album’s other three tracks don’t bring enough new ideas or fun to justify that denial. The burbling synth number “Dear World,” goes nowhere and says little, while cacophonous album centerpiece “She’s Gone Away” is a spiritual sister to “Burning Bright” but plods rather than runs; at six minutes of churning sludge, you wish Reznor would have lopped off two and half and added them to the opener. Penultimate headbanger “The Idea of You” resembles a Broken-era track updated for 1997’s Reznor-produced Lost Highway soundtrack, with ear-shredding trebly guitar riffs reminiscent of (gulp) NIN-lovers Rammstein and the clear, plaintively struck piano notes from Reznor solo cut “Driver Down.”
It’s disappointing that after a four-year wait—let alone the pretension of “[it’s] a record we needed to make”—Not the Actual Events turns out to be so slight, at just five tracks with no dramatic shift in form. It’s the least essential non-instrumental album the band has released. But with the subsequent announcement that “two major events” for NIN in 2017 are now also promised, perhaps Reznor himself knows this already, and it will turn out that that this slight record was in fact, not the actual event.


The 1994 hip-hop landmark is reissued in a box set with vinyl, a gold CD, an ersatz cherry wood case, and a 48-page book. Almost 20 years later, it remains a sterling example of how great rap can be.

Illmatic

You hear the arthritic rumble of the train. The 100-ton iron horse clacking at 55 miles per hour through the tunnel to nowhere. Stainless steel cars bombed with balloon letters in bubble gum paint. The F Line, pre-Giuliani, packed with rats and villains, foreigners and flummoxed out-of-towners, beggars, bandits, and sweating working stiffs. Third rails everywhere. It stops at 21st street. Queensbridge exit.
The doors crumple open and the passengers vanish up half-lit stairwells into the Bridge. There is no Illmatic without the Bridge. Illmatic is the bridge. Queensbridge Houses, the largest projects in America, brick buildings dun as dead leaves, a six-block maze clotted with 7,000-plus trying to survive. The pissy elevators only stop on every other floor. The neighbors are the rotting East River and the "Big Alice" power plant, its smokestacks hacking up black clouds.
The Bridge is where Nas was raised. He explained the mentality to The Source in April 1994, the same month Illmatic was instantly canonized with a perfect 5-Mic score: "When I was a kid I just stayed in the projects… that shit is like a city. Everybody's mentality revolves around the projects. Everybody's gotta eat. It's just the attitude out there, it's just life. You can't be no sucker."
Illmatic starts with that rumbling of the train. A VHS snippet from Wild Style immediately snarls, "Stop fucking around and be a man!" You hear a cassette tape hissing the verse from teenaged Nasty Nas on Main Source's "Live at the BBQ," 1991: "When I was 12, I went to Hell for snuffing Jesus." He anointed himself the "street's disciple." Everyone blessed him as the Golden Child.
The track shifts to "The Subway Theme" from Wild Style, hip-hop's first creation myth, the 1983 film that exposed the routines of the South Bronx to the rest of the world. Nas calls his version "The Genesis", fusing his own story of origin with the culture.
His brother Jungle snaps, "yo, Nas, what the fuck is this bullshit?" Nas tells him to chill. He's carrying on tradition, defined as: "When it's real, you do it even without a recording contract." It's an oath of purity amidst poisons-- something that seems sanctimonious in a post-Puffy world, but it assured the older gods that they would have a stake in the next generation. He was the spawn of the Wild Style, the first great to grow up with Park Jams as his earliest memories.
I lay puzzled as I backtrack to earlier times.
Hip-hop was a teenager when Illmatic dropped*.* Old enough for biblical foundation, but young enough to be embroiled in an early identity crisis. The Columbia press sheet that accompanies it opens: "While it's sad that there's so much frontin' in the rap world today, this should only make us sit up and pay attention when a rapper comes along who's not about milking the latest trend and running off with the loot."
New York street culture was losing its birthright to hip-hop's evolution. Death Row and West Coast gangsta rap dominated the charts and mass media oxygen. Rap-A-Lot was carving up its empire in the South. It was after Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer, and leather-suited rappers wanted that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze money. Big Daddy Kane was firmly in the silken post-Madonna Sex book era. LL Cool J was mugging with a red beret in Toys. Even a young RZA and GZA got bamboozled into goofy New Jack Swing jams by clueless executives. And Nas couldn't get a record deal.
This sounds insane in hindsight. When people start making greatest rapper lists you can't count to five before Nas' name is mentioned. The kid who went to hell for snuffing Jesus has become a sacred cow. Twenty years deep, he's nominated for a Grammy and is in Gap ads with his dad. There was the album with Damian Marley, the feud with Jay-Z, there was Belly. Nas is firmly entrenched in VH1 Special territory. He has crossed over enough without ever making radio hits, save for "Oochie Wally", in which he is out-rapped by his bodyguard-- all for oochie.
But Def Jam's Russell Simmons passed on the demo, famously claiming that Nas sounded too much like Queensbridge machine gun, Kool G Rap. Translation: great but unsalable. He signed Warren G instead, who went triple platinum in the summer and fall of 1994. Illmatic only sold 330,000 copies in its first year. It has no "Regulate" that can inspire drunken Nate Dogg sing-a-longs, but it is widely regarded as the greatest East Coast rap album ever made. Illmatic is the gold standard that boom-bap connoisseurs refer to in the same way that Baby Boomers talk about Highway 61 Revisited. The evidence they point to when they want to say: this is how good it can be.
I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death.
The enduring vision of Nas: a baby-faced Buddha monk in public housing, scribbling lotto dreams and grim reaper nightmares in dollar notebooks, words enjambed in the margins. The only light is the orange glow of a blunt, bodega liquor, and the adolescent rush of first creation. Sometimes his pen taps the paper and his brain blanks. In the next sentence, he remembers dark streets and the noose.
The phrases and images are so deeply rooted in rap consciousness to have become cliché. Over the last 19 years, a million secret handshakes and scratched hooks have been executed to lines from Illmatic: I woke up early on my born day; I sip the Dom P, watching Gandhi 'til I'm charged; you couldn't catch me in the streets without a ton of reefer, that's like Malcolm X catching jungle fever; I'm an addict for sneakers, twenties of Buddha, and bitches with beepers; vocabulary spills, I'm ill; life's a bitch and then you die.
Removed from context, they seem unremarkable. When spit with criminal smoothness over beat breaks, they became iconic. If Rakim was rap's Woody Guthrie, Nas was the Dylan figure expanding the possibilities and complexity of the form, twisting old fables to match contemporary failings, faithful to tradition but unwilling to submit to orthodoxy.
Illmatic was the bridge. Melle Mel and Kurtis Blow, to Run-DMC, to Rakim, the Juice Crew, and Big Daddy Kane. Now Nas. Everyone said he had next since Large Professor brought the chipped tooth kid sporting Gazelles into the studio. His arrival was a communal effort. After MC Serch discovered he was unsigned, he landed him a deal at Columbia Records. When Nas summoned beats, he was laced with jewels from the city's best producers: DJ Premier, Pete Rock, the Large Professor, and Q-Tip.
Regional demand was so high that Serch claimed he discovered a garage with 60,000 bootlegged copies. The brief length (10 tracks, 39:51) was due to this rush to get to market. It also left less room for error. There are many albums with higher highs than Illmatic, but none with fewer flaws. The sequencing is perfect down to "Halftime" ending as the cassette tape clicked. It's as dense and claustrophobic as Queensbridge, but blood simple. The verses sprint around blind corners and the hooks are hypnotic chants: New York State of Mind, One Love, It's Half Time, The World is Yours, Coming Out of Queensbridge, Represent.
A classic album is supposed to change or define its time. Illmatic did both. The Notorious B.I.G. borrowed everything from art ideas to album structure. It was so blatant that Ghostface and Raekwon dedicated an entire skit to mocking it. Jay-Z took a hot Nas line and made a hot song on Reasonable Doubt. If you listen to Sean Carter before Illmatic, the rat-a-tat is straight from Big Daddy Kane. After Nas dropped, Jay-Z suddenly got smooth. Those are just the two most famous appropriations.
No album better reflected the sound and style of New York, 94. The alembic of soul jazz samples, SP-1200s, broken nose breaks, and raw rap distilled the Henny, no chaser ideal of boom-bap. The loops rummage through their parent's collection: Donald Byrd, Joe Chambers, Ahmad Jamal, Parliament, Michael Jackson. Nas invites his rolling stone father, Olu Dara to blow the trumpet coda on "Life's A Bitch". Jazz-rap fusion had been done well prior, but rarely with such subtlety. Nas didn't need to make the connection explicit-- he allowed you to understand what jazz was like the first time your parents and grandparents heard it.
I pour my Heineken brew to my deceased crew on memory lane.
None of this context has to matter. Illmatic is imprisoned within itself. The power is targeted in the narrow scope of its worldview. There are six desperate and savage blocks and there is nowhere else. Nas captures the feeling of being young and trapped. You see his struggle and you see his ghosts.
The more I listen to Illmatic, the more haunted it feels. When you're younger, it clubs you with its hail of words and the skeletal beauty of its beats. But the older I get, the more it strikes me as a teenaged requiem for those still living. "Old Soul" is the sort of stock phrase used by yoga teachers and amateur psychics, but it always fit Nas. He's 20 and prematurely nostalgic, struck by memories of park jams and watching "CHiPS.", when Shante dissed the real Roxanne, and how much he misses Mr. Magic.
There is no narrative about Ill Will, but you hear the name over and over. Will was his best friend and first music partner who lived on the 6th floor with turntables and a mic. He was shot to death in Queensbridge over a drunken argument. You don't hear how Nas and his wounded brother Jungle rushed Will to the hospital, got static from emergency room officials, and watched him die. But the sense of grievous loss shadows almost every bar, especially "Memory Lane" and "One Love".
If you listen to it enough names start to pop out: Fatcat, Alpo, Grand Wizard, Mayo, the foul cop who shot Garcia, Jerome's niece, Little Rob, Herb, Ice, and Bullet. The entirety of "Represent". You start to wonder where they are now, or if they are. The album's lone guest AZ, lays it down flat: he's destined to live the dream for all the peeps who never made it.
But Nas uses Illmatic as more than a vehicle to escape. The styles and stories that formed him fuse into something that withstands outdated slang and popular taste: it is a story of a gifted writer born into squalor, trying to claw his way out of the trap. It's somewhere between The Basketball Diaries and Native Son, but Jim Carroll and Richard Wright couldn't rap like Nas.
That's why 19 years later, Get On Down is re-issuing a box set with a vinyl, gold CD, and an ersatz cherry wood case featuring a 48-page book with The Source article that originally crowned him-- even if Illmatic was the archetypal cassette album (along with the purple tape). It's best heard by ignoring the dogma, culture wars, Nas clones, and would-be saviors that have accreted since April of 1994. Who cares whether it's the greatest rap album of all-time or not? It's an example of how great rap can be, but not necessarily the way it should be.
There was no real follow-up to Illmatic because Nas understood that he'd tapped into a moment that could only come once and in one place. This is what things had been building towards. A little over a decade later, Nas claimed that hip-hop was dead, but this world that was his was already starting to vanish on Illmatic. But you can still summon it from the first rumble of the train. This is what happened when the doors opened.


The young Australian DJ/Producer's profile has grown immensely in the past few years. On his new album, he recruits an all-star cast including Beck, Little Dragon, Vince Staples, and more.

Skin

The universe opened quickly for Flume, the 24-year-old Australian DJ/producer born Harley Edward Streten: his debut album topped the ARIA charts, Lorde and Disclosure enlisted him for remixes, and mud-caked crowds have strained to glimpse him at Coachella and Lollapalooza. And with that rise, he’s become something of a dance music Rorschach test: either he’s posited as mainstream electropop’s next great hope, or he deepens the frowns of those fatigued by rave culture ubiquity and personifies all that is frivolous about it. (The Guardian recently brushed him aside with, “Oh, great! Just what the world has been waiting for,” a pessimism that leans toward the Woody Allen school of astronomy.) It’s no wonder, on his second album, Flume says he aimed to write a track that sounds “like the fabric of the universe tearing ”—all that weight was cramping his shoulders.
Skin, the record in question, aims for that level of grandiosity throughout. It’s a stadium-sized upsell of Flume’s prior atmospheric formula—skittish beats that cleave easily to gruff rappers and R&B sopranos alike, rattling future-bass warp, undulating synths—that swells with energy but spills over edges. Here, Flume recruits an array of famous guests (Beck, Little Dragon, Vince Staples, Raekwon, AlunaGeorge), padding their radio-friendly cuts with the persistent crescendos of his self-titled debut, then ballasting them with loose instrumental interludes. The sum suggests that he’s an earnest collaborator, flashier but still casting around for a distinct identity.
Flume has a fondness for female voices singing in their upper register. On his first album, that role was played by Jezzabell Doran on the album’s best cut (“Sleepless”). Here, it’s handled twofold by Aluna Francis of AlunaGeorge (the groggy, glitchy “Innocence”) and also Kučka, a young Aussie singer who distinctly echoes Francis in slinky R&B phrasing and tinny topnotes. The halting, futurist beat of Kučka’s solo track (“Numb & Getting Colder”) nods to Flying Lotus and Four Tet; that core is closely repeated on her second turn, “Smoke & Retribution,” which jolts awake in agile verses by rapper Vince Staples. The lead single, “Never Be Like You,” is already a Disclosure-remixed pop hit (and a winking psychotropic video); it saunters on Flume’s languid trap drops and a plummy R&B hook from the Canadian singer Kai, a former Jack Ü collaborator who trills a mundane mea culpa with a gleam of defiance. (“I’m only human can’t you see/I made, I made a mistake/Please just look me in my face/Tell me everything’s OK”). There’s a mathematical quality to how he deploys singers in these productions, where the heavier his low-end distortion throbs, the more featherweight smoke curls follow.
Snuck in at the close, “Tiny Cities,” featuring Beck, is comparatively minimalist, a welcome smattering of downtempo new wave synths. Here, the production is as nimble as the vocalist; Beck opens in staccato leaps, chipper despite the Sea Change-like refrain of despondency (“it was never perfect, never meant to last”), and Flume loops him in a slow, roiling momentum until the sentiment blooms into a battle-scarred catharsis worthy of a John Hughes soundtrack. There’s one betrayal of Flume’s busy hand in the song, in a dubstep-lite drop halfway, but it’s energizing. The delicate ebb that follows it—complete with falsetto from Beck, naturally—is the most vulnerable moment of the album. Skin’s other cameos don’t approach that humanity: Little Dragon’s “Take a Chance” buckles under an erratic beat that feels determined to remix itself twice over, and Tove Lo’s lilt sounds harried on “Say It,” though her chorus does generously provide your next Tinder icebreaker (“let me fuck you right back”).
Against this, the instrumentals can be hesitant, as if waiting patiently for a vocalist to drop by—“Pika” stretches out a fragment of a SBTRKT-like soul murmur, and “Free” pushes the repetitive yet determined synth runs of a keytar gained sentience. But there is one glimpse of intriguing extroversion in Flume’s standalones: “Wall Fuck,” the musician’s aforementioned attempt to rip the universe a new one, which delivers a hell of a rubbery, electrohouse-inflected bass and snarls a sliver of ghostly female coos into a strange, invigorating banger. It’s short and snappy, gone too fast in an album that could’ve been streamlined to let moments like it shine. But maybe it’s the sound of floodgates opening.

Transgressive / Mom+Pop / Future Classic


Tokyo's Moscow Club came to attention at a time when bands from all over Japan's independent music scene seemed poised to break out internationally. The moment didn't last, and the quartet's second album has the feeling of a tribute for a time that slipped away. It's also a reminder that they stood out because they knew how to write a solid, catchy song.

Outfit Of The Day

There was a moment a few years ago when Japan’s independent music scene seemed poised to break out internationally. Between 2011 and mid-2013, artists from all over the nation were making inroads abroad -- shadowy project Jesse Ruins signed to Captured Tracks, while outfits such as Sapphire Slows and Hotel Mexico were regulars on MP3 blogs such as Gorilla Vs. Bear, with many more rising up beneath them. It was during this period that Tokyo’s Moscow Club started sharing their music online, earning attention for their genre-hopping releases. The quartet also saw the potential in front of Japan’s indie community, prompting them to spearhead a compilation in 2012 highlighting unsigned artists. “It is so exciting that there are still so many undiscovered amazing talents creating their own sound somewhere on this little island,” they wrote at the time.
Moscow Club’s second full-length album, Outfit Of The Day, arrives long after the community they championed left the international spotlight. No moment can last forever, and many of the bands from that fruitful span have broken up, changed drastically or simply stopped doing anything (Moscow Club themselves vanished for two years, returning this summer). Outfit features collaborations with many of the artists from that period, and lends the album a feeling of a tribute for a time that slipped away, but also serves as a reminder of the talent that still exists.
Above all else, Moscow Club -- and the artists in the same orbit -- stood out because they knew how to write a solid, catchy song. Outfit starts with “Band Of Outsiders,” a fleet-footed indie-pop song packing every hooky idea it can into just over two minutes. This is the lane where Moscow Club excels, and Outfit features plenty of guitar-anchored tracks skipping towards sticky choruses. They especially shine when glossing up their jangle with synthesizers. The extra twinkle adds an emotional pining central to numbers such as “Carven” and “Celine” (owing to a band-wide interest in fashion, the album boasts a fashion theme, down to the Instagram-born title). The latter -- written by lead singer Kazuro Matsubara after hearing a Tokyo train station melody and featuring backing vocals from Amanda Åkerman of Swedish group Alpaca Sports -- showcases Moscow Club at their best, capable of a chugging number that progressively ups the drama.
Although hazy, melancholic indie-pop is their strength, part of Moscow Club’s appeal has always been their eagerness to branch out, resulting in glistening dance numbers or straight chillwave. Their ambition remains, as one of Outfit’s finest comes on the slow-burning “Tour De Moskow.” The title gives away one key point of inspiration -- though, if you forget, the breathing samples throughout serve as a reminder - but its shuffled beat also pays homage to Frankie Knuckles’ “The Whistle Song” and nods to electro group Telex. It’s a lot to juggle, but Moscow Club balance it all just right. More of a curveball, though, is “Carven (Orchestral),” a four-minute orchestra version of the more straightforward “Carven.” It’s an interesting interlude, albeit one that could have shaved a minute off.
Outfit, as mentioned, isn’t just a Moscow Club creation, but a collaborative effort featuring names central to the Japanese independent scene. Some of them appear on the songs proper -- Eri Nakajima of Osaka indie-poppers Wallflower sings on “Margaret,” while Ryota Komori plays saxophone on “Saint Laurent,” bringing the chaotic edge of his main band Miila and the Geeks to Moscow Club’s world. Two members of Kyoto’s now-defunct Hotel Mexico pop up too, although only lead singer Ryuyu Ishigami appears on track, as former bassist Kai Ito provided words for two songs. Yet the names behind the scenes are just as important, helping to write the lyrics gracing Moscow Club’s music.
It adds up to a very solid collection, and one bringing to mind a time that feels long gone. Western media tends to cover Japanese acts veering to an extreme side, whether that be harsh Japanoise or, in more recent years, cuter and weirder fare rarely taken seriously as music. The embrace of art confirming existing images of the country -- as strange, as colorful, as different -- is a disservice to bands such as Moscow Club, who sing in English and don’t play up being Japanese for just that reason. Outfit Of The Day is a solid collection of indie-pop with some detours, and a reminder of how good the often overlooked indie community in the country can be.


The rising pop star's sophomore album goes for experimental radio hits that are full of anhedonic drama. It's ambitious and nuanced, though calculating in ways that dull its impact.

hopeless fountain kingdom

Halsey’s sophomore album *hopeless fountain kingdom *comes with a backstory to rival an ARG. There were actual fountains and actual newspapers sent to actual doorsteps, but in 2017 this is the status quo. Tove Lo’s debut as the voice of Max Martin’s Wolf Cousins writing collective was presented as a four-part concept album about emotional turmoil. Beyoncé’s last two albums are bona fide franchises. Artists from The Fame-era Lady Gaga to suddenly-woke Katy Perry conduct album campaigns about how their music truly means something. It’s easy to see why: Streaming is a hopeless penny fountain, radio is a hopeless playlist kingdom, so one scrounges any extramusical interest one can. And most musicians prefer to think they’re making art, not content—especially with an audience that demands increasing creative control from artists and an industry that doesn’t keep up.
This is certainly less outwardly exploitative than the antiquated pop model of finding a teen, then corrupting their fictionalized innocent image for public ogling. Halsey’s bid at true meaning on hopeless fountain kingdom is to simply prove she’s “more than capable of writing radio music,” as she told Rolling Stone. The concept is ambitious, but the product ticks all the boxes: staid piano ballad (“Sorry”), In the Zone* *nostalgia (“Walls Could Talk”), R&B dilettantism (“Don’t Play,” Quavo-assisted “Lie”), recreations of proven hits (“Now or Never”). Of course, ever since she said she was raised on Biggie and Nirvana while getting high on kind and legal bud on *Badland’*s “New Americana,” Halsey has been accused of inauthenticity. Everything from her hairstyle to her racial and sexual identity has been seized upon as clues to debunk the enterprise. *The New York Times *called her “a millennial built in a lab.” Grantland: “Halsey’s life can be reduced to a perfect millennial construct.” Halsey lamented to Billboard the “conspiracy theorists who think [she] was crafted in a boardroom.” However, who but an actual Tumblr teen would imagine herself on a Rider-Waite card or dream up a post-teenage apocalypse where the only scarcity is connection?
“100 Letters” sets the scene: dingy floors, negs, and would-be love notes destroyed in the wash. The production is fittingly dirgelike with new age percussion loops and far away decaying guitar samples, like an Enigma track left overnight in a dive-bar bathroom. “Alone,” plush with brass and cellos, also sounds ‘90s: like a track off Everything But the Girl’s Temperamental if someone were actively having a panic attack over it. The lyrics cut through parties and drinks and hangers-on as Halsey’s vocal climbs the scale, increasingly agitated, up to the last, worst anxiety: “I know you’re dying to meet me, but I can just tell you this/Baby as soon as you meet me, you’ll wish that you never did.” “Eyes Closed” portrays that timeless gambit of getting over someone by getting under someone else, as well as the timely gambit of getting into co-writer The Weeknd’s production drears, withering melodies, and joyless sex. But while the backing vocals sound like Tesfaye, he’d never write something so abandoned as “he’ll never stay—they never do.”
The album’s not entirely anhedonic. The heart-thud pace and breathless quotables in “Heaven in Hiding” suggest genuine lust—that lurid diary entry with 25 blank pages on either side. Nor, despite the sheer quantity of shitty dudes here, is it just men who fail to connect. “Strangers” shimmers and yearns like a recent Tegan and Sara cut, with Heartthrob co-writer Greg Kurstin and with Fifth Harmony’s Lauren Jauregui as duettist. Jauregui, like Halsey, is bisexual, and “Strangers” is Halsey’s stated attempt to get a love song between two women onto pop radio. Not coincidentally, it contains the album’s most nuanced lyrics, the coupling that’s most promising yet most out of reach.
On an album full of radio experiments, some succeed—“100 Letters,” “Walls Could Talk” and “Alone” demonstrate the perennially fertile sound of alt-pop—and some inevitably fail. The two R&B tracks are a swagger void. “Devil in Me” is hopeless fountain kingdom’s requisite Sia track, and like so many others, Halsey makes it sound like anything but. More damningly, style never quite matches substance. That could be the young creative’s “taste gap”; Halsey is just 22. Or it could be the market. Is lead single “Now or Never,” as the story goes, “one part in the center of a long narrative that tells the story of two people in love despite the forces trying to keep them apart”? Or is it just writer Starrah commissioned to make another, poppier “Needed Me”—less prickly, less urban, less precise with the vocals? To some, it might not matter. Others might await a kingdom built on more than just airplay.


DonMonique is a young Brooklyn rapper who feels old-school without being too precious about it.  She recalls the huffy, hedonistic bravura of Lil Kim and zooms in on the lean, mean rapping that made Brooklyn hot. Danny Brown guests on a track.

Thirst Trap EP

On her very first EP, Thirst Trap, DonMonique, an unconventional young rapper from Brooklyn, slinks out the gate with two conventional rap album tropes: the voicemail, and the skit. "You's a fake and your man's a clown," she raps on the intro, leveling barbs at an invisible adversary.  She recalls the huffy, hedonistic bravura of Lil' Kim—right down to calling your man a bird. "If he with me then you know I make him eat it proper, cuff my hands and show me if you're down to be the poppa, poppa." Wielding Biggie's nickname like punctuation, it's inarguable that she's paying homage to one of her borough's finest.
"Phone Call" resumes the schtick, this time over a beat. It's "Phone Tap" minus the mise en scène: an old school, pre-social media kind of goading. The message is that DonMonique, without being too Joey Bada$$ precious about it, feels like an old school rapper. Stelios Phili, DonMonique's producer, helps further the allusion. Of the seven beats that follow the intro, no less than three invoke the crisp, airy, neck-cracking loops of the late '90s. "UNTLD", in particular, channels Blunted on Reality-era Fugees. Brrrraps waft about the track while guest rappers Remy Banks and Wara duck and weave, playing the Pras and 'Clef to DonMonique's sneering Lauryn. "Jada", the EP's closer, fades out with a clip featuring Jada Pinkett in the classic all-women heist flick, Set It Off. And on "Fifty Kay", over Stelios' brisk drums, guest rapper Noah Caine makes all these '90s fantasies explicit: "Me and Don the new Biggie and Kim."
Danny Brown, who worked through his own formative influences before breaking out to become one of rap's premiere weirdos, cuts enthusiastically in like a Kramer entrance on "Tha Low", which features a honky-tonk piano loop over smoke-thick bass and boom bap drums. His presence energizes what is otherwise a classic street-to-stage come-up story (DonMonique's said that it's inspired by Wu-Tang's "C.R.E.A.M.") "I don't serve no more, bookin' shows off the flows," raps DonMonique. On the next verse Brown mirrors the sentiment by looking back: "Remember when I was thirsty, couldn't even afford the orange juice."
What makes Thirst Trap more than just a series of recycled flows are songs like "ION". It's the most pop-sounding track on the EP, with slithering hi-hats and an Auto-Tuned hook that bears traces of the now. I's good, but not the album's best song. With Thirst Trap, DonMonique makes a case for a certain kind of nostalgia: one that's not about lifting classic cadences and rhyme schemes, or cloyingly idealizing the more noble values of a bygone era. This is not a treatise on real hip-hop. Instead, DonMonique zooms in on the lean, mean rapping that made Brooklyn hot.