This Michigan-based noise trio has risen to notoriety over the past few years not just as Sonic Youth's attention-getting opening act of choice, but on the strength of their wildly divisive, abrasive, and in fact, downright excruciating full-lengths. Burned Mind, the group's Sub Pop debut, is among the most visceral, caustic records you're likely to hear all year. What we're saying is, the underground has a new Merzbow.

Burned Mind

Music should not make you want to die. If a record ever successfully achieved such an effect, my sincere hope is that it would be summarily taken off the market and marked for burial at a nuclear waste site. But while few bands are truly capable of inducing such crisis, an unprepared listener's response to abstract, texture-based noise music, like that of Wolf Eyes, will often run something like this:
"This makes me want to kill myself."
With songs like "Burn Your House Down" and "Let the Smoke Rise", Wolf Eyes have doubtless left many craving a fistful of aspirin and a glass of water, but these Michigan noisters' brazen electro-industrial soundscapes have yet to provoke any suicides. Dauntingly abrasive, yes; spiritually violating, no: Wolf Eyes are hyperbole-inducing provocateurs whose scalding compositions never fail to get a rise out of unsuspecting bystanders. And that's part of what makes them so appealing/appalling.
Which raises the inevitable cynical question: Do Wolf Eyes have any actual fans, or just the ever-fickle appreciators, grazers, and gimmick seekers?
This collection has been likened to an art project, and that's an unjust charge. Burned Mind doesn't belong in a museum (where it may well garner glowing reviews), though it does answer to the trove of obnoxious descriptors typically foisted upon music of its stripe: dense, abstract, challenging, and confrontational. But more often than not, Wolf Eyes are on your side: Enlist them to kick your meek ass, and they're happy to oblige. The mesmeric, chainsaw guitar rips of "Reaper's Gong" are nothing if not galvanizing, while the plodding saw-synth tsunami of "Stabbed in the Face" is downright debilitating.
Songs like this might make some want to harm themselves, but can for others offer a quick syringe of adrenaline, or provoke a meditative look inward at a dark stratum of emotions, chief among them frustration, anger, and an overwhelming sense of imminent peril. In fact, much of Burned Mind sounds as if it were scored for a late-21st century update of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where the villain is actually an indefatigable android gone haywire.
The opening 45 seconds of "Dead in a Boat" may suggest a quieter, less volatile beast than was present on previous records like Dead Hills and Slicer, but those notions are quickly dispelled as the silence is broken by a wave of electronic squall. The introduction grows more misleading with the next track, "Stabbed in the Face", which features a looped female scream over a heady milieu of feedback and grating pitch-bends. One of the most uncompromisingly and mesmerically abrasive tracks in recent memory, it's easily Burned Mind's crown jewel, and a serviceable mission statement for a band who explore noise not for gimmickry or shock-value, but because that's the mode in which they express themselves best.
This is by far Wolf Eyes' most visceral release to date. The masochistic appeal of stertorous noise and the comely allure of pop music are one in the same: Burned Mind, like any pop album worth its salt, conjures a deeper realm of images and moods beyond its surface qualities. Beneath the shock value of these overwhelming sonic miasmas are unambiguous aural parables about a world gone awry, and technology is held as the main culprit. Song titles like "Dead in a Boat", "Urine Burn", and "Black Vomit" are just façades (if not entirely inaccurate ones), indicative of the arid landscapes of human squalor and degradation stretching open behind. The rusty swingset shrieks of the interminable title track evoke images of spiritless machinery at work, as the band pummel with an admirable dearth of humanity.
Superficially, there's only so much that can be said about Burned Mind that hasn't already been belabored into irrelevance and bought Wolf Eyes curt dismissals. Of course, their style is, to a degree, old news; there are manifold precedents for this breed of unrelenting stridency, dating back to Lou Reed's infamous Metal Music Machine. Throbbing Gristle took a similar stance against technology and industry in the 1970s, and their influence is certainly echoed here. If Wolf Eyes stand out from the legacy of doomsayers that includes Throbbing Gristle, Suicide, Whitehouse, and more recently Yellow Swans, it's because they're impressively, expertly abrasive. The shear inertia of these songs is sufficient to make most self-styled hardcore kids recoil in terror. Burned Mind, better than any recent album I can think of, betrays music's implied purpose of providing an enjoyable aural experience, while at the same time being psychologically compelling and richly imagistic enough to invite repeat listens.


The superstar’s eleventh studio album pairs her with famous friends ranging from Stevie Nicks to St. Vincent.

Threads

Sheryl Crow’s first two albums were to ’90s kids what Anita Baker’s Rapture and Paul Simon’s Graceland were to their siblings a decade earlier: minivan mainstays blasted by parents aging out of their misspent youth. Raucous within limits, sardonic without blurring into cruelty, Tuesday Night Music Club (1993) and Sheryl Crow (1996) buried sly experimental touches and an encyclopedia’s worth of classic rock knowledge under a radio-ready sheen thick enough to survive heavy rotation. Sheryl Crow, her first self-produced album, threw together Wurlitzers and Neil Finn, Penny-Owsley pianos and the Attractions’ Pete Thomas—it was all good to Crow, master of ecumenical mom rock.
In other words, Sheryl Crow has always gotten by with a little help from her famous friends; she once billed a live album Sheryl Crow and Friends. On her eleventh studio album Threads, she summons another phalanx of luminaries, the lot of them pledging their troth to the SoCal ideal, the ’60s’ most persistent legacy. Inspired and incongruous juxtapositions abound. Stevie Nicks and Maren Morris? Right on. But Bonnie Raitt and Mavis Staples? What about Crow and—get this—St. Vincent? Years with little to prove have muffled Crow’s ear for cool new sounds, hence the preponderance of songs with chords and lyrics generic enough to support, well, Maren Morris and Stevie Nicks. Nonetheless, Threads makes an admirable case for the continued survival of “L.A” as synecdoche and pension plan.
The remakes comprise the album’s least compelling section. Thumbs up for choosing relative Boomer obscurities like George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness” and Bob Dylan’s “Everything Is Broken.” But “Darkness” is little more than an excuse for an extended jam session with Eric Clapton, Brandi Carlisle, and Sting, and Jason Isbell sounds like an aide escorted him to a mic at knifepoint on “Everything Is Broken.” A bigger problem is that Crow is incapable of projecting unease. Accepting romantic entanglements with a quip—that’s the Sheryl we love, the songwriter who flashes the line “you’re my favorite mistake” like an épée. The wry Keith Richards-sung Stones number “The Worst” and Kris Kristofferson’s ramblin’ anthem “Border Lord” are better fits.
News alerts on Crow’s smartphone inspire the most atypical collaborations. A gesture of noblesse oblige called “The Story of Everything” depicts a world where “troubled souls” walk into churches and “gun everyone down” while Chuck D and Andra Day huff and puff over Gary Clark Jr.’s axmanship and a clattering rhythm track. The not-funk complements the determination to avoid offense. Better is “Wouldn’t Want to Be Like You,” about a topic she has insight into: moneygrubbers. Apparently St. Vincent in 2019 is Eurythmics’ David Stewart in 1985: superproducer for stars who want a dollop of her coolness and just enough of her discreetly mad studio modernizations. Nevertheless, the track works. St. Vincent and longtime Crow collaborator Jeff Trott trade increasingly scabrous licks over a more convincing Crow rap than Chuck D’s.
Besotted with harmony as an end in itself, Crow wheedles animated performances from Vince Gill (“For the Sake of Love”) and James Taylor (“Flying Blind”). If they need material for their own albums, I hope they keep her contact info. Same goes for Joe Walsh, briefly recapturing the careening essence of the James Gang on the on-the-nose “Still the Good Old Days”—why wasn’t he paired with St. Vincent? Threads’ most poignant moment demonstrates what imagination and thousands of dollars of craft can accomplish. A series of renunciations spun as affirmations, “Don’t” presents Crow at her piano, still chewing on the bite-sized ironies of “My Favorite Mistake.” Lucius’ backup vocals shadow her, seizing the title by turns desperately and threateningly. She’s together and alone, as much a truth for insiders as the rest of us.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On his debut album, the standard-bearer of the sad-rap movement refuses to reveal much in the way of emotion at all, aside from a kind of sullen, conflicted defiance.

Total Xanarchy

In the annals of the Least Hip-Hop Shit Ever Documented, the headline “Lil Xan Flees Angry Tupac Fans… Cop Keeps Him Safe” is up there. If you didn’t know Xan from “Betrayed,” a red-eyed anthem for breaking up with benzos that last year cracked the Hot 100, your introduction to the 21-year-old may well have been from the recent “controversy” following his proclamation of Tupac’s music as boring in a deeply useless bit of video content. Boy, did that make folks mad—Waka Flocka, Michael Rapaport—though for whatever it’s worth, a small piece of context seemed to get lost in the mix. The video called for the rapper to rank subjects specifically in terms of “clout” on a scale from one to nine, a proposition that strikes me as far more idiotic than Xan’s answers themselves. For comparison’s sake: Kush, according to Xan, is a hard nine on the clout scale; face tattoos are an eight (because “they’re cool and all, but too many people are getting them nowadays”); and Xanax bars, in a Shyamalan-esque twist, have a clout level of zero. Tupac is clout level two.
To all of which I say: Who cares? It’s a little too tempting to dunk on Lil Xan and his Xanarchy crew—one member of which you may know for the Anne Frank tattoo covering the right half of his face, affectionately dubbed “Xan Frank”—for reasons that might reveal more about the listener’s false hopes as to what this stuff is supposed to be, and for whom, than what it actually is. And yes, this is a young man named after a prescription tranquilizer who makes sold-out theaters chant “I like lean, I like drugs, I like beans, I got plugs”; yes, he looks like a streetwear-swaddled cherub fallen out of heaven and directly upon hard times. There is certainly that.
But Xan opens his debut album, Total Xanarchy, with a sing-song proclamation—“Xans don’t make me what I am, Xans gon’ mess up all my friends”—and that complicates things. That song, “Who I Am,” is of the “XO Tour Llif3” school of rap that presents incredibly bleak scenes with startling casualness: “The only friend I have is time/The only friend I had just died,” Xan raps later, in the cadence of a nursery rhyme. “Betrayed,” his biggest hit and the reason why this album exists, is the same deal: Over a Bobby Johnson beat somewhere between Noah “40” Shebib and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, a miserable-sounding Xan rejects his namesake. He’s said he recorded the song during the final days of his years-long Xanax addiction, the fallout of a prescription to treat his extreme anxiety. Art-wise, maybe it’s not the kind of thing that outlasts the fall of empires. But when he dispassionately chants “Xans gon’ betray you,” someone needed to hear that—a lot of someones, if the proof is in the play count.
Thanks to “Betrayed,” Lil Xan got billed early on as part of a wave of sad rap, or emo rap, popularized by guys like the late Lil Peep. But most of Total Xanarchy does not feel “sad,” exactly; in fact, save for a suite of melancholy and fairly poignant Bobby Johnson collaborations towards the end, it’s hard to detect any particular emotion at all. Instead, we get a whole lot of Cool SoundCloud Rapper posturing delivered in a comatose flatline that is perhaps thematically appropriate but a bummer all the same: “I fuh dat bih, yea,” he reminds us on “The Man,” in case the nuances of his Twitter handle (@lilxanfuhyobih) did not fully sink in. Flows are borrowed with a heavy hand. Charli XCX shows up to do her depraved femmebot thing on “Moonlight,” a cloud-rap/folktronica crossover that is, if not good, at least interesting, like a Caribou song with clout goggles. “Sauce for the young niggas and all of my white fans,” 2 Chainz raps on “Tick Tock,” clearly aware of the “How do you do, fellow kids?”-ness of all of it.
Which, of course, is probably the point: If adult critics really loved this stuff, the Xanarchy team would no doubt feel they’d made a wrong turn somewhere. It’s punk, or it’s the thing people who don’t really know what “punk” means call “punk,” or it’s a dog whistle meant to sail over the heads of the the elderly (i.e. anyone over 24); on “Saved by the Bell,” a “Citgo” descendent on which Xan manages to pronounce the titular phrase using only two consonants, he raps, “Fuck them teachers, fuck suspensions, fuck detention.” And though many of the songs themselves feel hollow, I find myself struck by the idea of a character who is profoundly conflicted by the identity that made him famous, living in a world in which the thing people want from you is precisely what you hate about yourself. In recent months, Xan’s promoted what he’s calling the anti-Xan movement. At some point, he hopes to be known by his first name, Diego. By then, perhaps Total Xanarchy will be a mile-marker of a moment someone thought they had themselves all figured out.


Blank Face LP is a collection of catchy, urgent gangsta rap songs that show the South Central native at his charismatic best, gallows humor and tough talk failing to obscure a humane core.

Blank Face LP

“Music-wise right now, I suck.”
In 2014, Schoolboy Q bluntly described his difficulty staying off lean, and what the drug had done to his art and personal life. He told radio personality Angie Martinez that he’d managed to keep it at arm’s length while recording his major label debut, Oxymoron, but that as soon as the album was done, he’d had something of a relapse.
Listening to the album though, you suspected that Q may have been dabbling before the record was mixed. Lean leads to bloat, and while Oxymoron featured plenty of memorable moments, it had too much empty material to fully capitalize on the promise of the rapper’s snarling sophomore album, Habits & Contradictions.Q’s enormous personality had been downsized, his sharp edges smoothed, his straight-talking iconoclasm receding into rote gangsterisms. So while Oxymoron was received positively upon release, enthusiasm soon dwindled for the record and for the rapper once thought by many to be the slyer, less-earnest equal of his TDE labelmate Kendrick Lamar.
Two years later, Quincy Matthew Hanley says he’s no longer addicted. He’s lost 30 pounds and with his second album for Interscope, Blank Face, he’s returned to the trajectory that had him looking like the yin to Kendrick’s yang. Q’s unpredictable flow, as likely to morph into a bizarrely appealing sing-song melody as it is to shift to sneering double-time, has returned. With it comes a collection of catchy, urgent gangster rap songs that show the South Central native at his charismatic best, gallows humor and tough talk failing to obscure a humane core.
The new record is loaded with features, a warning sign of scattershot focus on most major label albums. But Q’s voice holds the center of nearly every track on Blank Face. Anderson .Paak, rap’s scene stealer of the year to date, is compelling as ever on the album’s title track, but it’s Quincy who grounds the narrative, his spoken-word verses painting a past on Hoover Street and a future with the daughter he refers to as both a munchkin and a queen. Kanye West and Vince Staples, two of the biggest personalities in hip-hop, trade bars with Q without overshadowing him, and the songs on which they’re featured, “That Part” and “Ride Out,” are standouts that nonetheless fit seamlessly into the course of the record as a whole. (Miguel is the only exception to the rule of polite guests: His smooth hook and Q’s sandpaper verses repel each other on the late-album misfire, “Overtime.”)
We’re accustomed to seeing concept albums from TDE, but Blank Face strays from the polemic, reaching instead for portraiture. Q’s verses are built from concrete details and raw emotion, and his flexibility is such that he’s able to channel two seemingly conflicting emotions into a single verse. His bitterness will be palpable, one moment; in the next, pride shines through. “Guess I’m being a real n---a like I’m ’posed to be,” he raps on “Lord Have Mercy.” “But bein’ real never once bought the groceries.” Then, in the span of a couple bars: “Hope was all that I needed/dreaming myself to work. The working affair was better than bullet holes in my shirt.”
Tracks like “Groovy Tony / Eddie Kane,” which was produced in part by TDE producer and frequent Q collaborator, Tae Beast, signal a return to the collective’s house sound. Blank Face turns away from the ambitious fusion of To Pimp a Butterfly, instead doubling down on a smoked-out atmosphere that points the listener’s focus toward rapping. That puts the onus on Q to hold attention for the duration of the record’s hour-plus running time, and he does so with a wide array of tricks, lacing his bars with tone and tempo shifts, a melodicism reminiscent of a young 50 Cent, and ad-libs worthy of Jadakiss, whose signature growling delivery and descriptions of Tony Soprano–esque nihilism provide a thrill on the back half of the track (the first part of which was released as a single without Jada in April.)
Schoolboy Q’s resemblance to those stars—both of whom flamed out to some degree as the commercial and creative center shifted away from gangster rap—is natural. Unlike Drake, or Future and Young Thug, Q’s music doesn’t represent a definitive break with the past. Instead, he symbolizes something of a road not taken, a gangster rapper with the personality and pop instincts to translate an antiquated genre for younger listeners, something like YG’s work with DJ Mustard. Q’s early hits, “Hands on the Wheel” and “There He Go,” were classic rap songs with pop appeal, and Q continues to ably tread that tightrope on Blank Face, with tracks like the E-40 feature “Dope Dealer” and “Whateva U Want,” which somehow makes a trance beat work.
But it’s Q’s reemergence as a distinctive voice that makes Blank Face so welcome. Quincy isn’t the preaching type, but he’s a careful observer both of his own tendencies and those of the world he occupies. Bluster and braggadocio are traditions in rap, but while Q spews plenty of both, he also has a penchant for telling it like it is. In our current political moment, that makes some of the songs on Blank Face particularly unforgettable. “Black Thoughts” features some of the most moving production from TDE familiar Willie B, as Schoolboy Q raps the blues: “On gangster Crip, my papa was a bitch/Left me where hope just don’t exist.” It’s one of many points on the record where Q casts something like a documentary eye on his own surroundings.
In the early morning on July 7, Q tweeted out four bars from “Neva Change,” the blistering centerpiece of Blank Face: “You see them lights get behind us/They pull me out for my priors/Won’t let me freeze ’fore they fire/You say that footage a liar.” The song was most likely recorded months prior. But hours after Philando Castile was fatally shot by a police officer while reaching for his license and the aftermath of the encounter was watched by millions, the rapper’s words were more timely than most reporting.


The Brooklyn band’s second record is bigger and darker, amplifying their ’80s new-wave sparkle into ecstatic triumph.

Young Enough

Darkness is always bubbling beneath Charly Bliss. On their 2017 debut Guppy, the Brooklyn band—singer and guitarist Eva Hendricks, her brother and drummer Sam, guitarist Spencer Fox, and bassist Dan Shure—offered a bundle of off-kilter confessionals that were at once sneering and vulnerable. Over blasts of power pop, Hendricks celebrated the death of a lover’s beloved pet, gazed at a boyfriend’s new partner like “softcore porn,” and gleefully admitted that her conscience was “fucked.” The effect was buoyant and campy, an unapologetically complex portrait of femininity.
While it retains its predecessor’s spirit and attitude, Charly Bliss’ second record, Young Enough, takes a bit of a chill pill. Guppy buried traces of electro-pop beneath grunge fuzz, and Young Enough amplifies that ’80s new-wave sparkle into ecstatic triumph. It’s nothing new for young bands to trade their scrappy rock origins for a glossy sheen—just look to Hendricks family favorites Blondie. It’s also not uncommon for bands to lose their lyrical sincerity within a newfound over-produced sound. On Young Enough, Charly Bliss walk this thin line gracefully.
Opener “Blown to Bits” builds off a sharp buzz of synth as Hendricks’ voice grows increasingly Auto-Tuned, dropping references to Cole Porter musicals, Rilo Kiley, and reality television. “Capacity” bursts with eclectic flourishes, from cavernous drum fissures to the metallic sheen of a guitar synth pedal, a maximalist approach that Hendricks phrases explicitly: “I’m at capacity, I’m spilling out of me!” The band allows all these textures to steep, and when the bridge finally arrives—“I was raised an East Coast witch like/Doing nothing’s sacrilegious/Triple overtime ambitious/Sentimental, anxious kid”—it feels like an epiphany rather than an outburst.
Charly Bliss’ embrace of synth glitz does little to disguise Young Enough’s heaviness. Hendricks scrutinizes her present through the lens of her past, reclaiming pain and prioritizing her own happiness. “I’m fucking joy and I hemorrhage light,” Hendricks shouts on “Bleach,” her voice tart like she’s sucking on a WarHead. “He can destroy everything that I like!”
The transformation of trauma to catharsis reaches its apex near the album’s end with “Chatroom.” Underneath its bubblegum euphoria, the lyrics tell of an abusive ex, violence, and betrayal. “Wasted my summer slapping my face, well/I wanna see you stripped down, naked,” Hendricks taunts, her steady voice barely masking a trace of vengeful relish. But “Chatroom” fuses pop and pain into joyful release. Its spiritual companion, “Hard to Believe,” takes a similar approach, elevating Hendricks’ emotional conflict with high-velocity riffs. “Hurt Me,” on the other hand, is the band’s most somber song yet, a synth-driven number that pushes Hendricks to the emotional brink as she pleads, “You don’t want to hurt me, baby.” Charly Bliss have never sounded so simultaneously restrained and desperate. Hendricks’ voice hardly wavers as her bandmates underline the confrontation with surges of electricity.
On intense moments like these, the razor-sharp wit Hendricks flashed on Guppy is polished into something more meditative. Though her writing is still deliriously idiosyncratic (“I’ll occupy your nation, fool!” she declares on “Under You”), she seems more comfortable letting vulnerable revelations stand on their own, rather than downplaying them with a manic laugh. As such, her storytelling has become more abstract. “Eyes like a funeral, mouth like a bruise/Veins like a hallway, voice like a wound,” she belts on “Hurt Me,” painting a figure that bleeds like watercolors past the edges.
These stirring lines are made all the more immediate by the euphoric melodies carrying them. The band recorded the breakneck Guppy twice, but on this album, which was made in considerably less time, they sound patient even when they’re chasing a gigantic chorus. Building off a simple guitar note, the record’s slow-burning title track is perhaps the band’s greatest accomplishment yet. The band converges around Fox’s guitar line, slowly assembling something that is—to steal their phrase—“astronomically huge” and joyful. As Hendricks recalls vignettes of warmly lit homes, bloody feet on icy sidewalks, and crushed cigarettes, she acknowledges the masochistic naivete of teenage romance: “We’re young enough/To believe it should hurt this much.” It’s an elemental concept that Charly Bliss set aflame.


Erstwhile hip-hop beatmaker Lee Bannon fully embraces ambient music’s conventions on an album that shifts between placid states and disquiet.

Tahoe

While producer Lee Bannon made a name for himself with East Coast rappers like Big Shug, Inspectah Deck, and Joey Bada$$ and the Pro Era crew, along the way the artist also known as Fred Warmsley began to drift into abstraction. The tracks he started making as Dedekind Cut put him at an even further remove from his hip-hop heritage, and he mingled with unslottable artists including Rabit, Chino Amobi, Yves Tumor, and noise overlord Dominick Fernow on 2016’s intense $uccessor.
For his debut on the esteemed Kranky label, Tahoe finds the Sacramento native not only returning to the West Coast but also fully pivoting to ambient music. While a noir twang ran through his recent mixtape as Barrio Sur, Tahoe wholly embraces the conventions of the genre. Opening tracks “Equity” and “The Crossing Guard” are so hushed that, if heard as the soundtrack for your morning commute, they dissolve almost completely into the daily noise. Quieter surroundings are required to really hear Bannon in motion.
The slow, murky, 10-minute spiral of “The Crossing Guard” brings to mind the mournful undertow—if not the actual decaying sound—of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, with a gentle bath of white noise rising and receding at the periphery. Those accustomed to Bannon’s approach on previous releases may find themselves waiting in vain for a noise to disrupt the calm, as he plays it relatively straight. The same goes for the title track, an elegant heave of orchestral strings and water sounds that move him closer to the likes of GAS, as well as the melancholic “De-Civilization,” which brings to mind Eduard Artemiev’s soundtrack for Solaris.
Tahoe only starts to perk up and run counter to expectations with “MMXIX,” an epic, nine-minute track that utilizes all manner of ambient tropes and then upends them. Pan pipes, reverberated piano, nimble Windham Hill fingerpicking, celestial choirs, and water sounds all gush forth in the dizzying first minute before Bannon slowly peels back all the layers and returns to a placid state. Keys that hark back to new-age grandfather Steven Halpern shimmer, as does the unmistakable deep buzz of Tuvan throat singing, a sound utilized most famously on the KLF’s Chill Out. Using it here, Bannon injects a sense of disquiet. As the glistening sounds of water, birds, and voices return, Bannon emphasizes their synthetic quality, as if suggesting that the state of calm one seeks in ambient music is ultimately illusory.
The album’s other tentpole is the 12-minute monster “Hollow Earth,” which moves masterfully between stomach-churning dread and contemplative quiet. Monastery chants and nature ambience mingle in the opening moments before Bannon drops a menacing low tone followed by a blast of white noise and droning voices that deepen the sense of anxiety. But even as the piece is at its blackest, Bannon judiciously starts to move towards the light. That mineshaft-deep rumble slowly decays, allowing in a luminous tone that falls like a sunbeam in the forest. The sense of calm that washes over the last few minutes of “Hollow Earth” and droney closer “Virtues” feels like a well-earned rest after an arduous trek.


Joined by veteran saxophonist Evan Parker, Joshua Abrams’ exploratory jazz ensemble delves into a single piece that stretches to 75 minutes and seems to pass in no time at all.

Natural Information Society / Evan Parker: descension (Out of Our Constrictions)

descension (Out of Our Constrictions)

Life on pandemic time tends to feel like an endless blur, and it might now also be the readiest example of what bassist and composer Joshua Abrams calls “mandatory reality.” “If our music’s political, it’s because it offers the possibility of slowing down,” the Natural Information Society leader once said. “We live in the age of attention and availability, and [our music] is offering a certain level of experience, and it operates in slightly different ways.” In the past year, however they may have attempted to fill the days, millions found themselves in the realm of experience described by the title of NIS’ 2019 album: Stuck in the same mandatory crawl of time.
But those who caught a NIS performance in the months leading up to 2020 witnessed the delectable possibility of Abrams and bandmates speeding back up. At live shows that summer and fall, the band took a new tack, playing an expansive 40-plus minute piece that revved up to twice the speed of Mandatory Reality. Even guests sitting in with the band, like drummer Jim White, appeared propelled along like a leaf in a fast-moving river. Stripped down to a lean quartet, guided by Abrams’ thrummed guimbri, a sound that had previously felt as steadfast and measured as a walking meditation now hovered at 142 BPM, more appropriate for clubgoers in Berlin. And—as Abrams sought a throughline between ancient Gnawa trance and 1980s Chicago house—it didn’t feel like too much of a stretch. “It’s the original 808, because it has a percussive skin mixed with a bass tone,” he has said of the guimbri. Though NIS is commonly labeled as jazz, its primary instruments of guimbri and harmonium stretch back centuries before the birth of that art form.
Spread across four sides of vinyl and now approaching 75 minutes, that single extended piece comprises the entirety of descension (Out of Our Constrictions). Recorded live at London’s Café Oto in summer 2019, the quartet of Abrams,
harmonium player Lisa Alvarado, bass clarinetist Jason Stein, and drummer
Mikel Patrick Avery are joined by British free jazz legend Evan Parker on soprano saxophone. Exploring the outer edges of the ecstatic as well as the physically exhausting, the four sides of descension push deeper, higher, and wider, using kinetic movement to interrogate stasis.
After an introductory figure on the guimbri from Abrams, the band quickly gets to it. Avery’s stickwork is astonishing throughout, maintaining that high BPM with clock-like precision. Though tireless as a drum machine, he somehow always slides around a steady 4/4, framing it yet never slotting into it. On previous NIS albums, Alvarado’s harmonium favored the instrument’s droney, slow-evolving aspects; watching her work its bellows now might cause your carpal tunnel to flare up. She chops her lines into 16th notes, making the thing hyperventilate rather than breathe deep.
Breath is a natural metaphor when considering Parker’s long, storied career in European free improvisation—an early album was titled The Topography of the Lungs. His circular breathing on descension is a dream pairing for NIS, his cascading solos as ardent, mesmerizing, and pattern-focused as his bandmates. He weaves around, roots under, then circles above them. Hearing him in conjunction with Stein evokes seemingly contradictory qualities: Is it skronking free jazz or early swing? A high-altitude dogfight or a highly attuned conversation, akin to John Coltrane’s soprano trading solos with Eric Dolphy’s bass clarinet at the Village Vanguard a half-century prior?
It feels silly to roadmap, recap, much less discern the four parts of descension. Both journey and landscape, the piece lifts off and soars to maximum cruising altitude, where, even at top speed, it seems to stand completely still—and then, over an hour later, you’re on the other side. Saying it all sounds the same might seem dismissive, but one of the descension’s remarkable aspects is its ability to convince your ears and mind otherwise. It’s as transformative and banal as a transatlantic flight. Grumbling about it feels like bemoaning the number of trees in a forest, that the Sahara is just sand dunes. It’s utterly maddening, and to get lost within it feels like the past calendar year: undifferentiated, infinite, and delirious.

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On their first release since 2013, the avant-rock group forego the escapism of their past work in order to provide a score for our present chaos.

Magik Markers: Isolated From Exterior Time: 2020

Isolated From Exterior Time: 2020

Escapism has long been the guiding philosophy of Magik Markers. The avant-rock destructionists titled their 2013 album Surrender to the Fantasy, a reference to the role of “the unconscious mind” in their music-making. Singer-guitarist Elisa Ambrogio told Interview Magazine that their music is, in part, a conscious rejection of “the reality of your day-to-day existence,” an attempt to find joyfulness and ecstasy amid life’s doldrums. For the better part of two decades, they’ve torn up the tropes of rock and blues history and reassembled them into unrecognizable, otherworldly forms. It’s jarring music, but that’s the point—it’s supposed to shake you free from your normal rhythms and lead the way to another world. On Isolated from Exterior Time: 2020, their first new EP since 2013, they shift this approach; instead of providing an escape to these times, they choose to score this period’s chaos.
Such a disposition feels fitting when much of the world is stuck inside, grappling with the uncertainty of an unprecedented global health crisis and the destabilization caused by its calamitous management by the people in power. It’s only fair that the Magik Markers would attempt to reflect the downcast spirit of the year. A brief piece of writing that accompanies the EP on Bandcamp suggests that the timing of their return is no accident: “[Magik] Markers only appear in times of duress.”
The 25 minutes of music on Isolated from Exterior Time certainly don’t sound like a balm for all the time everyone has spent inside. Like the psychedelic memoir of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s recent films, they aim for a kind of transcendence, one where truth is gestured at obliquely through surrealism, static, and violence. The four songs are illusory and upsetting—full of spectral harmonies and needly riffs crawling along ominously and overlapping chaotically. “Machines” picks up more or less where Surrender to the Fantasy left off, presenting the Markers in their more song-like mode, offering a few straightforward riffs and some elusive lyrics about fear. But from there the song doubles over on itself; Ambrogio’s lyrics are barely legible as she sings over herself, the song spiraling out into more chaotic thought processes. It’s likely a familiar energy for anyone who’s been cooped up since March; everything starts out normal, but as you spend more time isolated with your thoughts, things can start to get weird.
The rest of the tracks are only stranger. There’s a ghostly round called “Three Guitars” that haunts and creaks in a way that recalls Charalambides’ distressed Americana. “Arms to the Sky” is an echoey, creeping drone that sits somewhere between Spiritualized’s hopeless ballads and the anhedonia of doom metal. However, the record’s most moving moments are peppered throughout the ten-minute closer “Jet Skis (Alt Mix),” a loping, feedback-laden epic that sounds like it got lost in the desert on its way to meet Manuel Göttsching. Unlike the splatter-painted psych-noise that Magik Markers first become known for, it’s gloomy and monochrome, a trudge through the psychic muck and mire. It’s an apt soundtrack for a year that’s been an overwhelming slog. There’s little hope for escape, but Magik Markers make the case that it’s ok to feel a little lost.

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On his fetching seventh solo album, the witty and digressive songwriting of Stephen Malkmus becomes newly and delightfully grounded in the present day.

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks: Sparkle Hard

Sparkle Hard

Though Pavement’s sound and soul have been inextricably linked to the ’90s, Stephen Malkmus’ solo career feels unmoored to any era. Removed from the zeitgeist and any real commercial expectations, Malkmus has settled into a comfortable routine of indulging whims, exploring rabbit holes, and generally making music just far enough removed from Pavement’s buzzy aloofness that nobody could accuse him of chasing past glories. Give or take a Real Emotional Trash, the approach has flattered him.
So perhaps the most surprising thing about his fetching seventh album, Sparkle Hard, is how of-the-moment it feels. It engages with the present in a way none of his Jicks albums have, time-stamping its songs with lyrics about Facebook and nods to the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements (“Men are scum, I won’t deny,” he sings). On several songs, he even toys around with vocal manipulation and Auto-Tune. He doesn’t go full Frank Ocean or Bon Iver or anything, but it’s a tantalizing taste of the kind of music Malkmus might be making if he were a quarter-century younger.
Malkmus possesses a delightful sense of ease and unpredictability here. “Solid Silk” is caressed by warm strings right out of a ’70s Philly soul record. On the country lark “Refute,” Kim Gordon swings by for a verse that slyly reimagines the circumstances of her very public divorce; her poker face and his smirk play off of each other so flatteringly that it’s amazing she and Malkmus have never worked together before. In general, Malkmus’ words are flowing off his tongue even more seamlessly than usual. “You know you should be blushin’ to a hue of Robitussin,” he hums on “Middle America,” a gorgeous doodle of a song.
The album doesn’t skimp on rippers, either. Malkmus has cut back on the guitar theatrics over his last few records, but when he deploys them, he makes them come alive. Slathered in unruly fuzz, “Shiggy” rides a beaming riff that grows more jubilant by the minute. And then there’s “Bike Lane,” which juxtaposes news of a bike lane with the violent death of Freddie Gray at the hands of the police. “They got behind him with their truncheons and choked the life right out of him,” Malkmus sings, accompanied by a chugging krautrock rhythm. It may be the most confrontational song he’s ever written.
The Wowee Zowee standout “Grounded,” with its protest that “boys are dying on these streets,” was also a plea for caring, but it directed its jabs at the detached upper class, with their luxury sedans and crystal ice picks. Here Malkmus is poking at his own bubble, the socially aware middle class that presumably makes up much of his audience these days—the ones that back Black Lives Matter on paper, but tend to get a lot more worked up about issues that affect their daily commute. “Bike Lane” is the rare Malkmus song that demands you to wrestle with it. Is it even in good taste? Malkmus is low on the list of artists anybody wanted to hear tell Freddie Gray’s story, and his voice is far too glib for the subject matter. But at least he’s saying his name, and that’s more than most indie-rock records do.
Sparkle Hard is not ostensibly different than his last couple albums, but its arrival feels better timed—there’s been a hole in the market for indie-rock albums this impervious, compact, and good-natured. Where Malkmus’ solo work has sometimes walked the fine line between too detached or too self-satisfied, the record cartwheels over it with the assurance of an artist who’s correctly assumed that so long as he’s enjoying himself enough, others will too.


The trio’s second album buffs away some of its debut’s grime and distortion for a set of knotty, pummeling rock that sounds vintage but feels current.

Love Jail

The heavy-rock trio Dommengang hail from a little bit of everywhere. Guitarist Dan “Sig” Wilson has been gigging around the Pacific Northwest psych scene for years now, occasionally sitting in with Castanets and Scout Niblett, among others. With roots in Oregon and Alaska, drummer Adam Bulgasem and bassist Brian Markham settled over in Brooklyn, roughly 3000 miles away from their bandmate. After touring together as the backing band for Portland’s Holy Sons, they recently moved out to Los Angeles together, marking the first time all three of them have ever lived in the same city. Rehearsing and recording must be a lot easier.
From these places these three musicians bring different concerns, different influences, and different ideas. Each of them bashes his instrument like he’s playing lead, but the music retains an arid austerity, like it might have been left in the sun too long. The trio’s 2015 debut as Dommengang, the mostly instrumental Everybody’s Boogie, combined heavy riffs with thrashy punk and spacey psychedelia to create a hyperactive form of guitar rock; their follow-up, which was produced by Tim Green of the Fucking Champs, buffs away some of that grime and distortion. Love Jail, despite its crummy title, sounds cleaner and more focused, its heavy sound rooted in the classic rock of bargain-bin denizens like Free, Rory Gallagher, and Humble Pie.
Perhaps due to their proximity, they’ve become a tighter combo, more inventive in their pummeling and more resourceful in their references. Bulgasem plays all fills behind Markham’s sludgy bass and Wilson’s contorting riffs, especially on instrumental jams like the title track and “Lone Pine.” They still can’t muster up anything as nimble as an actual boogie, even when they title a song “Dave’s Boogie,” but even at their stiffest, Dommengang prize tension and release, which lends even their most meandering jams a sense of purpose. “Stealing Miles” sneaks in a country-rock chorus that may be the album’s strongest hook, but the song nearly runs into a ditch as they navigate one knotty jam after another. “Color Out of Space” sounds like the tweaked desert pop of the Meat Puppets, morphing seamlessly into the compelling aimlessness of the instrumental “Stay Together,” which sounds like that title was a musical command.
In that regard, the band’s scattered origins can be especially compelling. Dommengang understand they’re going nowhere—not, of course, in the professional or musical sense. The roads they travel in these songs have no real destinations.  “Lovely Place” opens with a cocksure strut along a desert highway, and gradually the band ratchets up the tempo and the tension. “The country is torn,” Wilson snarls, perhaps understating things. “It’s still a lovely place to be, with the windows rolled down and the sun in my hand.” Then they break into a wide-open jam, careening across the bridge like they’re drag racing Golden Earring.
The resurgence of heavy rock may be linked to a nostalgia for a time when crunchy guitars and the dudes who played them enjoyed a more prominent place in pop culture, but Love Jail goes beyond a mere glance in the rearview mirror. It sounds vintage, but it feels current. Dommengang find some potential for escape in this music, some freedom in that absence of a destination. They can go anywhere, bashing out in all directions until they find solid ground between the darkness of our torn country and the sun in their hand.


On her self-titled sophomore effort, Laetitia Tamko leaps with both feet into new sounds and new horizons.

Vagabon

In crafting her self-titled sophomore album, Laetitia Tamko (aka Vagabon) was hyper-cognizant of how the context around her had changed. The unexpected success of her 2017 debut Infinite Worlds meant more resources at her fingertips, but also heightened scrutiny from a public that so often defaults to consuming black women as prophets of oppression and pain. “I was growing really weary of black sadness and seeing how it’s consumed,” the Cameroon-born artist said earlier this year. “I don’t want to romanticize being tortured.” she told Pitchfork.
Inevitably, Tamko was folded into the ongoing conversation about the scarcity of visible black women in indie rock—the only world she has known as a practicing musician, having emerged in New York City alongside artists like Frankie Cosmos. She could have dug her heels deeper into the sound that first won her acclaim, but Vagabon is instead a bracing departure, wielding digital sounds and strings alongside her familiar, delicate guitar in search of wider worlds.
Tamko produced the album herself and played most of it, and you notice immediately that her voice is subtly foregrounded. The beckoning whisper of Infinite Worlds has become rounder and more confident. This new boldness is matched by her production, which toggles between small-room intimacy and cathedral-sized grandeur. Tamko plays with all kinds of new palettes here, showing impressive mastery over them. On “Flood” and “Water Me Down,” she subsumes the bombast of ’80s and ’90s new wave into her quietly insightful writing. The heartbreaking “In A Bind” combines her tiptoeing acoustic guitar with a gospel choir and new age, “Orinoco Flow”-esque synth tones.
Throughout most of Vagabon, Tamko is not shouting to a crowd, but addressing one specific “you,” reassuring them of her love, pleading for them to stay, questioning their permanence, all in service of her own self-determinism. “I belong to no one/You tried hard to be mine/I won’t ask permission from you/We reserve the right to be full when we’re on our own,” she sings on “Every Woman.”
Tamko’s adventurousness is admirable, both lyrically and sonically, but occasionally the intimacy of her writing is overwhelmed by her surroundings. The layered arrangement of “Please Don’t Leave the Table” feels muddled, which obscures the simple, evocative chorus: “Please don’t leave the table I’m still eating.” It’s a rare misstep on an album that otherwise uses restraint to its advantage.
With its opening and closing tracks, Vagabon forms a sort of self-comforting loop. “Full Moon in Gemini (Monako Reprise)” takes the album’s opening track and tones it an octave down, turning the song from bright and hopeful to easy and accepting. The closed circle feels like a protective gesture, an act of will, a way to book-end her growth and frame it on her terms.  With that transformation, Vagabon concludes as a work of not only personal self-discovery, but evolution in real time.

Buy: Rough Trade / Vinyl Me, Please
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Produced by the legendary Joe Boyd (Nick Drake, Nico, Fairport Convention), Vashti Bunyan's lone solo album massively influenced San Francisco's new freak-folk movement, despite being long out of print. Now the Dicristina Stair label finally rescues this 1970 classic from record collector hell.

Just Another Diamond Day

One of the happiest by-products of the ongoing underground freak-folk explosion is the reemergence of British singer Vashti Bunyan. After spending more than three decades completely off the music industry's grid, the past couple years have seen the angel-voiced Bunyan duet with fan Devendra Banhart on Rejoicing in the Hands, gig with Stephen Malkmus, and collaborate with both Piano Magic and Animal Collective. And now, as if in response to those wondering what all the fuss might be about, the Dicristina Stair label has finally given Bunyan's lone solo album, Just Another Diamond Day, its first U.S. CD release.
Produced in 1970 by the legendary Joe Boyd, Just Another Diamond Day has long been considered a holy grail for Brit-folk record collectors, with original copies of the album fetching over $1,000 at auction. It shouldn't take many listens to realize why it's so highly regarded; Just Another Diamond Day is, in its own humble way, nearly a thing of perfection.
The album features contributions from such folk luminaries as The Incredible String Band's Robin Williamson, Fairport Convention's David Swarbrick and Simon Nicol, as well as string arrangements by Robert Kirby, who performed the same duties for Nick Drake. Boyd's production is impeccable, with the sound of each breath and string given an appropriate weight in the mix. This is crucial because of the almost impossible fragility of Bunyan's voice, an instrument as lovely and delicate as a dew-covered spider's web but one which could easily be drowned out by over-instrumentation.
Considering the deftness of its acoustic, percussion-less songs, Just Another Diamond Day seems at times like a sonic sibling to the Boyd-produced Nick Drake albums-- albeit one that chooses fresh air and sunlight over Drake's depressive shadows. Although Bunyan wrote all of the songs herself, the lyrics have an organic, out-of-time poetry that makes them feel more like traditional works. Her songs reference neither the politics of the time nor the psychedelically refracted medievalism so prevalent in the folk-rock of the era-- the simple quatrains of hypnotic songs like "Diamond Day", "Come Wind Come Rain", or "Where I Like to Stand" instead consist of uncomplicated lyrics ("Just another field to plough/ Just a grain of wheat/ Just a sack of seed to sow/ And the children eat") that could've been written virtually any time in the past few centuries.
Some listeners find Bunyan's thematic emphasis on nature to be overly cloying and childlike-- especially on such bucolic tracks as "Lilly Pond" or "Glow Worms". But others find themselves captivated by the sincerity and purity of Bunyan's pastoral vision, particularly in the subtle way she's able to portray human activities corresponding perfectly with the rhythms of the natural world, as though the people she encounters are just another feature of the landscape. ("I'm counting the waves/ The men in the boats they wave/ To their wives and say/ I'm counting the hours in the day.")
And the whimsical wordplay she weaves through songs like "Timothy Grub" or "Jog Along Bess" ("Jog along Bess/ Hop along May/ Squeak along Blue/ It's a walk along day") makes it easy to trace the influence she's exerted on contemporary artists like Banhart or Animal Collective. But even with her reputation re-established and her influence deservedly spreading, it's unlikely that you'll encounter another album as charming or transporting as Just Another Diamond Day any time soon.


The outstanding album from the Philadelphia electro-psych trio is reclusive, cryptic, late-night paranoia music. Their oblique songs can evoke an entire landscape of feeling in very few words.

Spirit of the Beehive: ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH

ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH

The term “Kmart realism” was first coined in the 1980s to describe a trend in literary fiction defined by sparse sentences, fast food joints, and the hyper-acceleration of capitalism and commercialization in primarily suburban spaces. Kmart realists like Mary Robison, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and, to some extent, Don DeLillo, wrote about the eerie feeling of walking through a shopping mall at night, of relaxing in front of the TV only to be greeted by endless advertisements for personal injury lawyers and small-town waterparks, of sending your brain into oblivion with synthetic drugs. The term could also be applied to Spirit of the Beehive, the project of psychotropic Philly punks Zack Schwartz, Rivka Ravede, and Corey Wichlin, whose excellent fourth album, ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH, is lit by that same, terrifying, phosphorescent glow.
If you were to try to hold a conversation while listening to ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH, you would forget what you were saying as the words spilled out of your mouth. It is an inherently destabilizing album, one that doesn’t adhere to any concrete narrative. Instead, it’s fragmented, sewn together with bits of old commercials, blasts of noise, and guitar breakdowns. Opener “Entertainment” starts off sounding like an auto demolition, then shakes itself up, taking on the quality of a rotted-out yé-yé song. A string section rises out of the dirt; the lyrics are hazy and distorted. “Heading east towards KSMO/16-wheelers passing too close/Dust picks up and swallows us whole,” sings Schwartz, as if just waking up from a nap.
Spirit of the Beehive aren’t peerless, but they just don’t sound quite like anyone else in their home scene. They come from the world of Philadelphia DIY, of punk basements without proper plumbing and houses with big front porches. They hang out with people in bands like Palm and Body Meat. Frank Ocean’s a fan. If anything, their sound is less sympatico with Philly DIY and closer to the kind of music released by London’s Warp. In their talent for fermenting chintzy pop music into something rabid and noisy, they evoke something a bit like electro chanson freaks Jockstrap.
ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH isn’t significantly different from anything this band has made before, it’s just better, more refined. It’s no less weird or haunting than, say, 2018’s Hypnic Jerks; if anything it’s even creepier and stranger. A song like the muscular “Wrong Circle” feels like experiencing a bad high all over your body, one where your eyes twitch and the pressure builds in your chest. Singing birds are juxtaposed against hyper-vivid synthesizers, oceanic percussion, and modulated vocals. The music flickers and clicks, like an old TV on a channel-search setting, or flies buzzing beneath a yellowed street light.
Schwartz spent much of his youth in Miami taking acid, playing music in a storage locker, and then heading to his job in a mall, as he’s told Pitchfork. He compared his experiences to the Jonah Hill skater flick Mid90s; ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH is similar to Hill’s movie, too. It feels listless, like a summer of drinking Robitussin and skateboarding, or maybe spray painting a pentagram on the side of an old lady’s house. “I Suck the Devil’s Cock” best underscores this feeling of a summer wasted idling inside the mall, dreaming of being anywhere else. At nearly seven minutes, it’s the record’s longest track. There is a burst of noise that sounds almost melodic, as well as multiple lines of guitars. “Scared of needles but not of everything,” sings Schwartz, “Another middle-class dumb American, falling asleep. He don’t appreciate constructive criticism.” Spirit of the Beehive’s surreal lyrics reflect the kind of malaise that’s superabundant in the writing of Kmart realists: visceral, hallucinatory vignettes that evoke an entire landscape of feeling in very few words.
ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH is an intensely beautiful, intensely difficult record. It is reclusive, cryptic, late-night paranoia music, so unsettling and loud that at times it’s almost too intimate, even in the absence of any real identifying details. The feeling it evokes is like listening to a close friend recounting the details of their night terror: You see the sweat, the enlarged pupils, the general sensation of acute discomfort. “Rapid & Complete Recovery,” however, provides a moment at the eye of the storm. The song is meandering, peaceful. Layers of synthesizers suggest watching the world retreat below you as you ride an elevator to the top of a skyscraper. “Spanning lifetimes compressed in a vacuum/No limitations, you know what comes after,” Ravede and Schwartz harmonize, their voices perfectly calm. What it is that they’re after isn’t clear; Spirit of the Beehive is an unknowable band. At any given point in time, they’re a whole galaxy away.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Wild Nothing completes his big year by collecting the previously available Evertide EP, a Gemini B-side, and two new tracks.

Golden Haze EP

Whether digging through the crates at a used CD store, or plumbing the depths of Amazon, one of the great thrills of being a music fan is discovering a certain style that appeals to you, and seeing just how deeply you can immerse yourself in it before coming up for air. Gemini felt like Jack Tatum was sharing that feeling with all of us-- that first experience with a Smiths or Cocteau Twins album when you wonder, "Where has this been all of my life?" That he made his album stand out amidst a formidable number of similar acts was a testament to how well he could extract one recognizable cell from the past and spawn it into something wholly his own, reverential but hardly derivative.
Golden Haze initially appears to be the culmination of Wild Nothing's big year, collecting the previously available Evertide EP, a Gemini B-side, and two new tracks. But as a State of Wild Nothing Report, it shows that Tatum is nowhere near done messing with his favorite musical ingredients. While still enamored with 1980s UK indie, like so much of Gemini, the maneuvering here sneaks up on you. The sunny jungle of "Summer Holiday" is almost completely forgone for something sleeker and darker, more along the lines of Gemini standouts "Chinatown" or "Bored Games".
It's a good look for him, considering Tatum's knack for succinct romantic pleas ("beautiful one, I want to go where you are") and weaving chains of floral guitar notes, both of which propel the gorgeous title track. It's one of Wild Nothing's strongest singles, but it's also where he starts to tweak the arrangements, particularly with drums. The textural mesh of its severely-gated snare and sleigh bells recalls the Cure's "Just Like Heaven", and Tatum's portentous and maudlin vocal range invites further comparisons to Robert Smith.
Oddly enough, the one selection from Golden Haze EP that would've been the most jarring inclusion on Gemini is actually a B-side from "Summer Holiday"-- "Vultures Like Lovers" is pure, ecstatic texture, a heavily processed guitar ping-ponging with delay, and Tatum's tremolo'd vocals building a cyclone from the ground up. It's the sort of experiment that ends up as a B-side for a reason, but its inclusion is evidence of what I find most charming about Wild Nothing: The combination of decades-old influence with the ability to see a modern prolific talent progress almost in real time.


Ultima II Massage finds the Black Moth Super Rainbow frontman moving from the gently corroded Technicolor psych-prog of 2010’s Maniac Meat to a full-on barrage of wobbling, low-end-heavy bizarro pop. Tom Fec’s work as Tobacco is frequently approached as a dichotomy of beauty and ugliness, and at times the "ugly" quotient is often ramped up to match the project's warped, grotty imagery.

Ultima II Massage

Ultima II Massage, the latest full-length from Tom Fec's Tobacco project, finds the Black Moth Super Rainbow frontman moving from the gently corroded Technicolor psych-prog of 2010’s Maniac Meat to a full-on barrage of wobbling, low-end-heavy bizarro pop. Fec’s work as Tobacco is frequently approached as a dichotomy of beauty and ugliness; on Ultima's front half*,* the "ugly" quotient has been ramped up to match the project's warped, grotty imagery.
The album's standouts signify an evolved sound. Obscene, rowdy, and fun, “Eruption (Gonna Get My Hair Cut At The End of the Summer)” is aggro-R&B cut with a dose of Minneapolis funk, while album opener “Streaker”, which features Beck collaborator Brian LeBarton, is grindhouse glam rock with heavy artillery.  Fec claims in a press release that Ultima II Massage is the “definitive end” to his conceptual aims, and he ends up with a zombified mix of Marc Bolan and Prince doused in the industrial scuzz and slime of Tobacco’s customary sonics and executed with puerile glee.
Lyrically, Ultima II Massage is in line with previous Tobacco efforts. Fec is, in his own way, a sensual songwriter, his lyrics are calculated for visceral impact—so there’s plenty of material about popsicles, ejaculation, and fruit, naturally, along with various skin-crawling ephemera. Obscenity is applied liberally, moreso than on past releases; Fec has said that Tobacco's associated imagery draws inspiration from a pre-pubescent mindset, and here he possesses all the excitement of a kid who’s just discovered the full power of the word “motherfucker” for the first time.
Ultima*’s* less gentle tracks are a welcome evolution in Tobacco's music, but the old, swooning BMSR sound--scarred, melodic music that sounds as if it’s just starting to rot--pops up now and again. Occasionally, Fec finds a sweet spot between the two poles, an approach that's crystallized on the violently saccharine “Lipstick Destroyer”. “Creaming for Beginners”, meanwhile, is a heavily distorted ballad with a blistering, slow-burning melody.
Overall, though, Fec doesn't always achieve that balance, so there's several mid-album cuts here that jog in place despite their inherent prettiness, speaking to the album's uneven momentum as a whole. While Ultima II Massage starts off with material that's heavier and meaner than anything he’s done previously, the lighter sound of the album's back half can't help but come across as a drop in ambition, turning down the volume on what could've been the most dynamic Tobacco record to date.


Conor Oberst doesn't read the reviews. Nope, he's not playing for me, as he clearly states on "Let ...

Bright Eyes: Lifted, or, The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground

Conor Oberst doesn't read the reviews. Nope, he's not playing for me, as he clearly states on "Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and To Be Loved)." Fair enough, because it shows. If Oberst was really out to put smiles on the ears of his critics, the sound he's cultivated up through this, his third release, probably wouldn't be quite so constant. By now, expecting Oberst to somehow gravitate away from his tortured tales of youthful angst and the perils of confiding yourself in another seems as hopeless as asking a dolphin to stop using echolocation.
Bright Eyes' jangly acoustic strumming and rise/fall vocal quaver has evolved fairly naturally since his 1998 post-Commander Venus solo debut, Letting Off the Happiness. So, then, would you be shocked to discover that Lifted is just about the least surprising album of all time? It's true. This record will happily provide you with plenty of opportunities to be unsurprised-- vocally, thematically, and in some cases musically. Thankfully, it's all dramatically counterbalanced by some of the most unique arrangements Oberst has dreamt up yet.
The Bright Eyes orchestra lends its services to Lifted, pulling a string section and a few horns out of hock for atmosphere, and even recruiting some drunks for choir detail on "Laura Laurent" (there are some sober folks, too-- not just alkies). When these orchestral elements take center stage, the effect is light-years removed and improved from any previous Bright Eyes offerings, though subdued enough to preserve the essential tone of past works, lest the sound be too disorienting.
The changes on Lifted-- beyond the aforementioned strings and horns-- are immediately recognizable. Somewhere along the way, Oberst has developed a much better ear for melody and left (most of) his shrieking tantrums by the wayside. The tunes are often lighter, even playful at points; a far cry from prior heartsick ballads, some of which did little more than display his temper. Of course, these backroom confessions are as intimate as ever, but the vibrant, slightly more lighthearted arrangements are a knowing wink of one bright eye as Oberst crows, "I could tell you/ The truth like I used to/ And not be afraid of sounding fake/ Now all anyone is listening for are/ The mistakes," on "False Advertising." All the self-consciousness can become draining after a while, but the lion's share of this album consists of songs about his family and friends, and the musings of an artist second-guessing with the prospect of failure (and only 22 years old).
Love it or hate it, the precious, nasal vibrato Oberst affects is the tie that binds all these varied tunes together in the end, and in most cases, it compliments the music admirably. It has its lows, of course, the most notable misstep being the nearly a capella "The Big Picture," which stretches the limit of taste for seven full minutes. Oberst falters often here, giving the illusion of greater emotional heft, although the track only really serves to underscore his vocal limitations. Lifted's other weak moments come with a few rarities heretofore consigned to the limbo of cyberspace. "Method Acting" now comes complete with a backing chorus for the bridge, and "Waste of Paint" sounds to have been reworked a little, but they've been out in the sun too long. Next to the fanged beauty of "Lover I Don't Have to Love," these songs are undeniably faded.
But Lifted hits more than it misses. The slow buildup of strings in the languid waltz of "False Advertising" is exceptional despite containing the album's most embarrassing moment (a contrived 'mistake' in the playing just as Oberst sings "mistake"), though, as with the album as a whole, its accomplishments compensate for its oversights. "Bowl of Oranges" features a delicate, continually shifting piano refrain and bittersweet swells of strings in the background. "So that is how I learned the lesson/ That everyone's alone/ And your eyes must do some raining/ If you're ever going to grow," is backed by major-to-minor shifts to compliment the subtle mix of emotions.
The slow burn of "Don't Know When But a Day Is Gonna Come" hangs like a thundercloud in Western skies as Oberst talks of men with silver guns and dying for his father's sins. The cadence that unrolls and distant piano warbling sound like the first drops of rain that presage an eventual downpour, before the song finally breaks with a flood of strings and guitar. It brings to mind some of the darker moments of The Man in Black himself, Johnny Cash, with all its murmurings of end-times prophecies and sober grit-- and that's just about as high a compliment as I could pay. This track is definitely first among equals with the other great moments of Lifted.
The album wraps with "Let's Not Shit Ourselves," a vaguely country-and-western tune that's all over the place, taking a vague stab at assessing the world's situation and how it relates to Oberst himself. It's wildly pretentious, but the charming-- dare I say, quaintness-- of this record finally makes that an asset, especially on this sweeping closer. He's wracked, maybe by necessity, and he's really starting to turn that to his advantage; the prosaic poetry of his work is genuinely compelling on this album, partly due to pretense, and partly to sincerity. In the end, of course, I'm still somewhat disappointed that Oberst isn't catering to my personal expectations, but as long as he keeps marching toward broader musical horizons, I say more power to him.


*Songs in the Key of Life *was the culmination of a historic period of creativity for Stevie Wonder. Its ambition and scope were unprecedented, and he never approached its caliber or impact again.

Songs in the Key of Life

Stevie Wonder’s legacy ranks among the most powerful in pop music, though his story remains elusive. His songwriting and his voice echo through virtually all R&B-related sounds that have followed him, from Michael Jackson to R. Kelly to Kanye West, yet there is no major biography, no documentary, nothing that presents the full sweep of the most dominant and defining artist of the 1970s. And make no mistake—it was an era of superstar acts and chart-busting albums, but no one was as universally loved, respected, and honored as he was.
To be sure, Wonder has done himself no favors in getting his story told. Long ago, the media figured out that his world runs on “Stevie Time,” that schedules and deadlines don’t apply to this towering genius, whether that means showing up for an interview or delivering an album.
“You set a goal in your mind,” he told me in 2005, when the record A Time to Love was released after many years’ delay, “and you say, O.K., this is what these songs need to have, this project needs to have, and you don't really settle for anything less than that.” As good as his word, Wonder has not put out a new album since.
But even Stevie Wonder realized that there was one project of his that demanded to be recognized and appreciated while he was still able, and in 2014 he mounted a tour to present, in full, his 1976 magnum opus *Songs in the Key of Life, *which turns 40 next month. The album—two LPs plus an additional four-song EP—was the culmination of a historic period of creativity, a concentrated burst of music matched only by a handful of artists (mid-’60s Bob Dylan, early ’70s Rolling Stones, ’80s Prince). Its ambition and scope were unprecedented, its power and resonance were timeless—and when it was done, he never approached its caliber or impact again.
In 1971, a decade into an already-legendary career, Wonder celebrated his 21st birthday by allowing his contract with Motown Records to expire, holding out for a new deal which gave him a higher royalty rate and creative control over his work. He responded with two albums in 1972, the breakthrough Music of My Mind and his first true masterwork, Talking Book. His next releases, 1973’s Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale in 1974 (which followed a serious automobile accident that left him in a coma for four days) won back-to-back Album of the Year trophies at the Grammys. Wonder not only reeled off six Top Ten hits in three years and repeatedly pioneered new frontiers in music technology (he introduced the Moog synthesizer and the sampler to the public), he also established himself as a leading voice of social protest with such profound commentaries as “Living for the City” and “You Haven’t Done Nothing.”
And then came the wait. Wonder, expressing frustration with America in the aftermath of Watergate and the never-ending war in Vietnam, had started to talk about quitting the music industry and moving to Ghana to work with handicapped children. He got as far as starting to make plans for a farewell concert. Instead, though, in August of 1975, he signed a new contract with Motown—a seven-year, seven-album, $37 million agreement, the largest deal made with a recording star up to that point. Though there were murmurs about an album release later that year, Wonder first took time off, then kept adding songs to the stockpile he had amassed, then decided there was more mixing and post-production required.
Two years might not seem like a long break between records now, but at the time, it was unheard of, especially from the biggest star in the game. Motown staffers printed up T-shirts that read, “We’re Almost Finished.” And when the twenty-one-song set was finally released on September 28, 1976, the promotional campaign borrowed some pages from the playbook for the previous year’s record-shattering movie Jaws, which had redefined the making and meaning of a true blockbuster.
Motown flew press and everyone who had worked on the album to the Long View Farm studio in Massachusetts for the first playback and a battery of interviews with Wonder, presenting everybody with autographed copies of the album. As it made its way to record stores, Songs in the Key of Life (changed from the working title Let’s See Life the Way It Is) was everywhere you looked. I distinctly remember what a major event the release was, and I was only 10 years old at the time.
Yet this was the very rare case in which there was simply no way to overhype the music. The sound drew effortlessly from funk, pop, jazz, Latin styles. Tracks ranged from the fusion groove of “Contusion” to the delicate voice-and-harp duet “If It’s Magic.”
Though more than 130 musicians are listed in the credits (including such stars as Herbie Hancock, George Benson, and Minnie Riperton), Songs in the Key of Life never strays from the singular, blazing vision of one artist. The sneaky pre-chorus in “Knocks Me Off My Feet,” the transcendent, spiraling rise of “As”—hooks pile on top of hooks, tucked irresistibly and unerringly into breaks, fills, and intros, most obviously on the album’s two biggest hits, the nostalgic, swaggering “I Wish” and the shout-out to Wonder’s jazz forefathers (and mothers) “Sir Duke,” soon to take up permanent residence in the repertoire of every marching band in the country.
The hat tip to Duke Ellington was significant, since in some ways Songs in the Key of Life most recalled that composer’s classic long-form works like “Black, Brown, and Beige” (or Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite or Charles Mingus’ “Pithecanthropus Erectus”) in its attempt to portray the complete sweep of the Black American experience. The album’s opening lines—“Good morn or evening friends/Here’s your friendly announcer/I have serious news to pass on to everybody,” from the almost impossibly gorgeous “Love’s in Need of Love Today”—laid out the stakes for all that would follow.
“Village Ghetto Land” spoke of the pain and indignity of poverty and homelessness. “Black Man” served as a literal history lesson, calling out examples of how all colors and cultures have contributed to global progress. “Ngiculela—Es Una Historia—I Am Singing" soared triumphantly in Zulu, Spanish, and English, with melody easily uniting all languages. Then there were the simple celebrations of love and faith—on “Isn’t She Lovely,” the magic of birth and family—emotions shared by all, but never to be taken for granted in undervalued Black lives.
The year 1976 was, of course, America’s Bicentennial year, and especially at a time of such frustration and distrust surrounding the government and the country’s institutions, U.S. residents were bombarded with stories of our history and heroics. Songs in the Key of Life functioned as a corrective, a counter-narrative, alongside such other radical, groundbreaking statements as Richard Pryor’s Bicentennial Nigger and Alex Haley’s Roots, both of which were released just a few weeks before the album.
Almost everyone understood the magnitude of Wonder’s achievement, but there were some objections, mostly having to do with the length and sprawl of the record. “[I]t has no focus or coherence,” wrote Vince Aletti in a wildly mixed but mostly favorable review in Rolling Stone. “The eclecticism is rich and welcome, but the overall effect is haphazard, turning what might have been a stunning, exotic feast into a hastily organized potluck supper.” But to complain about the excess was to miss the point—any great double-album (The White Album, Exile on Main Street) could easily be edited into something tighter and more consistent, but the all-encompassing aspiration is the whole idea, the desire to contain multitudes and to cover as much ground as possible during a revved-up creative groove. Sometimes, more is more.
Certainly, the public understood. Songs in the Key of Life entered the album charts at No. 1, only the third record to hit that spot straight out of the gate (after Elton John’s two previous releases). It then stayed there for the rest of the year; to understand just how ubiquitous the music of the mid-’70s could be, consider that it knocked Frampton Comes Alive! out of the No. 1 slot, and was finally bested in January of 1977 by Hotel California. Inevitably, Wonder won his third straight Album of the Year award at the Grammys (he missed the ceremony because he was visiting Nigeria at the time).
After Songs in the Key of Life, though, something seemed to deflate in Stevie Wonder’s work. It was as if, at the ripe old age of 26, he was bored by the idea of just writing hit songs. His next album was 1979’s mystifying, experimental, mostly instrumental Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants, a double-album soundtrack to a documentary about the feelings of greenery and flowers. Turning his attention to the crusade for a national holiday to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., Wonder rebounded with Hotter Than July in 1980 (featuring the sublime “Master Blaster (Jammin’)),” but since then, it’s mostly been long waits in between underwhelming new records.
It was like there was nowhere left to go after Songs in the Key of Life—and maybe there wasn’t. The album was more than just a masterpiece; it was the culmination of all of the potential that Stevie Wonder showed since his days as an 11-year-old prodigy. Musically, politically, culturally, it was the fulfillment of everything that Motown and the ’60s soul revolution had promised. And within a few months, disco was the focus for new Black music, while in the parks and playgrounds of the Bronx and beyond, hip-hop was taking shape for the next generation.
The sound of Songs in the Key of Life never stopped reverberating. Elton John and Prince said that it was their favorite album. Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston sang its praises. Coolio, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and Will Smith sampled its hooks. Mary J. Blige and Luther Vandross covered its songs. Kanye West said in 2005, around the release of Late Registration, “I'm not trying to compete with what's out there now. I'm really trying to compete with Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life. It sounds musically blasphemous to say something like that, but why not set that as your bar?” Still, it was a genuine event when Stevie Wonder decided to take Songs in the Key of Life to the stage 38 years after its release, and bring the spotlight back to his greatest musical accomplishment.
It required several dozen musicians on stage to recreate the album’s arrangements, with full horn and string sections (that harp!), but it also imposed a discipline on Wonder’s performance, which too frequently devolve into a mess of medleys and sing-alongs. The shows were magnificent, the words as true as ever, and there was Stevie, still telling us—showing us—that “music is a world within itself/With a language we all understand.” Almost four decades later, you could feel it all over.


On his seventh studio album, the Philadelphia singer-songwriter reckons with losses both personal and political in search of a new beginning.

My New Moon

Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter Amos Lee’s seventh studio album, My New Moon, pivots on the possibility of a new beginning. It’s not exactly a novel theme. Yet the title’s invocation of the first lunar phase, in which the moon initiates a new synodic month but remains unseen, feels purposeful and specific: It takes a while for the first sliver of moonlight to illuminate Lee’s black sky.
Before arriving at that moment, the album establishes a profound sense of loss; new beginnings generally follow the end of something old, after all. For Lee, the losses in question are both personal and political. Along with his grandmother’s passing—which informed the soulful jazz-pop of “All You Got Is a Song” and the gospel-leaning “Hang On, Hang On”—he mourns regressive changes taking place in the world around him.
“Crooked” opens with the famous Hamlet line, “There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.” It’s a melodramatic introduction to the song’s political themes, heightened by harpsichord and toy piano, whose tingling flourishes hint at the childishness that now reigns in the public sphere. But Lee partially redeems the heavy-handedness of his lyrics with what has always been his greatest asset: his weathered voice, which he uses on My New Moon to plumb dark emotional depths. “There’s a crooked leader on a crooked stage,” he sings, before a note of dismay enters his voice and he adds, “Turns out that I’m crooked too.” Determining how the U.S. got into its current predicament isn’t just about pointing fingers, Lee acknowledges. It requires introspection.
The news cycle also haunts “No More Darkness, No More Light.” Lee has said that he “ripped the whole [song] apart and put it back together” after watching the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivors expose politicians’ “thoughts and prayers” for the empty platitudes they were. “The day after Parkland happened, I was just… overcome with what the kids were saying and what our history in the United States is and what I feel like some of our obligations to each other are,” he told Billboard. In contrast with that heavy subject matter, the arrangement is unexpectedly bright. Lee frames the song with a bubbling, jumping rhythm that calls to mind Paul Simon’s Graceland; Malian guitar tones race up and down while a second electric guitar pulses darkly in the background. These juxtapositions temper despair with hope, finding solace in the latter without entirely believing in the redemption it promises.
It isn’t just in his songwriting that Lee is embarking on a new chapter. My New Moon marks his first album with Nashville-based indie-folk label Dualtone Records, after five LPs on Blue Note followed by 2016’s self-produced effort Spirit. The move relocates Lee within the Americana spectrum, rescuing him from stagnation. The words his remarkable voice communicate and the melodies that surround them haven’t always been distinct enough to help him rise above other soul-influenced songwriters, like Ray LaMontagne and Nathaniel Rateliff.
But My New Moon producer Tony Berg (Andrew Bird, Phoebe Bridgers) helps Lee shed some of his earlier jazz-pop influences and burrow into an earthier, more textured sound. Unlike 2013’s Mountains of Sorrow, Rivers of Song, his most Americana-saturated album, the new record has arrangements that do more than just hang as a backdrop for Lee’s voice. Touches like the autoharp on “Louisville” and “Don’t Give a Damn Anymore,” as well as the drum tones on “Little Light” and “All You Got Is a Song,” build soundscapes nuanced enough to contain emotional resonance of their own, allowing for greater interplay between the instrumentation and Lee’s vocals.
When My New Moon finally catches sight of the new beginning its title promises, the album is almost over. The standout penultimate track, “Whiskey on Ice,” written after Lee met a couple who shared a story about losing their young son to cancer, surges with the promise of renewal. “I can see the light/Starting to take shape/I can see the sun seeking out escape/I can see the moon slowly creeping in,” he sings, hushed and hopeful, as a longing falsetto reminiscent of Bon Iver’s layered bellows shifts in and out of the background. This is not quite the dawn of a new day, but a different kind of light is radiating from the darkened sky—an aching luminescence that reveals a narrow, arduous path forward.


Robyn, Sia, ANOHNI, Jamila Woods, and more all try their hand at some of Neneh Cherry’s greatest hits revealing just how erratically wonderful the Swedish singer has been across her four-decade career.

The Versions

Neneh Cherry thrives on unpredictability. Her four-decade career included stints as punk provocateur, street soul ambassador, trip-hop icon, and jazz singer, just to name a few. The same mercurial spirit that has made her career so thrillingly disparate has also made Cherry hard to pin down, which makes The Versions, a 10-track compilation of covers (and one remix) of Cherry’s songs by female and non-binary artists, a predictably confounding but mostly successful venture through a vibrant pop catalog.
Certainly, there is a lot to celebrate here. The artists who contribute include family members (TYSON is Cherry’s daughter), fans turned friends (Sia), and a number of musicians who operate in the lineage of Cherry’s borderless pop adventures (notably Robyn and London neo-soul/psychedelic R&B restless spirit Greentea Peng). Between them, they cover many of the musical genres that Cherry has embraced in her itinerant catalog. ANOHNI’s “Woman” reflects Cherry’s skill with a world-burning ballad; Greentea Peng’s amusingly grubby take on “Buddy X” nods to the song’s status as a UK Garage anthem (as remixed by scene figureheads the Dreem Teem in 1999), while Sia’s take on “Manchild” is pure pop, a glimmering reflection of the brief period in the late 1980s when Cherry was touted as the new Madonna.
It is “Manchild,” in fact, that provides this album’s two obvious highlights, with distinctive covers from Sia and Los Angeles singer/cellist Kelsey Lu proving the wonderful malleability of Cherry’s work. Sia’s faithful but not overly sincere cover dusts off the tear-jerking pop sincerity that sent the original single up the global charts, while Lu’s gorgeous string-heavy remake locates the jazz influences at the song’s heart. (Neneh Cherry’s stepfather, celebrated trumpeter Don Cherry, once called the song “kinda jazz” with its “seven chords in the verse.”) Crucially, neither version of the song sounds too in thrall to the original, or a victim of change for change’s sake, nimbly escaping the two obvious pitfalls tribute albums easily fall into.
Cherry’s other big hit—the classic “Buffalo Stance”—comes off far worse, despite the attentions of singers Robyn, Mapei, and Dev Hynes on production. Their remake was inspired by Maria “Decida” Wahlberg and Karl “Kyaal” Lund’s “Nostalgia for What Never Was” remix of “Buffalo Stance”, created for a 2017 exhibition in Stockholm on hip-hop as a cultural force. Interesting as this is, though, The Versions’ take on Cherry’s debut single has none of the original’s outrageous self-confidence, which suggested the arrival of a new pop paradigm, somewhere between UK street soul and U.S. hip-hop. Instead, their remake feels limp and unsure of what to do with itself, a combination of polite guitar lines and apologetic beats that drain “Buffalo Stance” of all its vigor, leaving a taste in the mouth like wilted lettuce.
This failure is symptomatic of The Versions’ other principle shortcoming, which is an over-reliance on good taste that edges out Cherry’s rogue-ish, rebellious spirit and sense of humor. (Let us not forget that “Buffalo Stance” included a thoroughly absurd interlude, in which Cherry asked “Wass he loike?” in a blustering faux-Cockney accent.) It’s hard to ask contributors for irreverence on an album celebrating one of the most fascinating pop talents of recent decades. But the cumulative effect of four very respectful covers in a row from Jamila Woods, TYSON, Sudan Archives, and Seinabo Sey—each perfectly satisfying in their own right—makes you wish for the same Neneh Cherry who once rapped about “Chocolates, bananas, doughnuts, and salami/Ain’t gonna fit coz you're full of baloney” (on “Heart”) to break down the studio door and seed some anarchy.
Full of baloney The Versions isn’t. But its muted—and sometimes rather predictable—approach only occasionally gets close to capturing the erratic wonder of Neneh Cherry in full flight, a truly singular star who operates above and beyond the demands of playlist pop and, it appears, major-label tribute albums.


Larry Heard’s productions remain the gold standard for dance music and Another Side, his sterling 1988 collaboration with vocalists Robert Owens and Ron Wilson, is no exception. The LP has been reissued on Heard’s Alleviated label, remastered and spread across three pieces of vinyl. For all the sophistication, smooth jazz chords, and political undertones of the album, it's important to note that it still knocks.

Another Side

"I used to pass the Warehouse after school, on my way to work, late in the evening and I wondered why there were so many people hanging out in the street," Chicago producer Larry Heard told XLR8R back in 1995, admitting he had never once set foot in the birthplace of house music. "I guess I was pretty naive." By the time Frankie Knuckles moved over to the Powerplant in 1985, Heard finally checked him out. And while still not the biggest fan of house music, he shared Knuckles’ tastes, a zealotry for both '70s R&B and Moroder-style Eurodisco. Heard, the drummer for a Yes cover band and multi-instrumentalist, began making his own productions as Mr. Fingers soon after, which brought things full circle; "Mystery of Love" and "Washing Machine" became both the urtext for house music and staples of Frankie’s sets.
Heard’s productions remain the gold standard for dance music. While he’s not as prolific in the 21st century, Heard’s still the person acts like Lana Del Rey and Disclosure tap for cred-boosting remixes. But finding and hearing Heard’s albums has never been easy, even in 1988, when he released two of house music’s finest full-lengths: Ammnesia (credited to Mr. Fingers) and Another Side, his sterling collaboration with vocalists Robert Owens and Ron Wilson as Fingers Inc. Both are beacons of American dance music, and ironically neither album was ever released stateside.
Nearly 30 years later, Another Side finally gets reissued on Heard’s Alleviated label, remastered and spread across three pieces of vinyl (it's also available digitally). Another Side might sound unfamiliar to modern EDM listeners, who might wonder where the incessant wallop and insipid vocals signifying "deep house" in 2016 went. The album opens with the shimmering keys and by-turns gritty and gentle soul vocals of Owens on "Decision," Heard’s programmed drums swinging around but never quite settling into a four-four. The downtempo rhythmic figures, silken pads, and whispers of "Bye Bye" only reinforce the anecdote that in 1992 Sade Adu personally approached Heard about producing her band's album, a collaboration that sadly never came to pass.
But while we may never hear the man in conjunction with Ms. Adu, Heard found a singular vocalist in Robert Owens. Forceful enough to growl over an 808 and smooth enough to slot into adult contemporary, Owens’ formidable talents are still not appreciated today. While his fellow Chicagoans were overt in their influences, be it Jamie Principle’s Prince obsession or Darryl Pandy’s Teddy Pendergrass impression, Owens balances between those two giants of R&B without ever being beholden to either. It’s a voice that conveys emotions rarely found in dance music these days: grace, gratitude, giddiness, forlornness, estrangement, defiance.
All those emotions can be not just heard, but felt on songs like the title track, "I’m Strong," and "Bring Down the Walls." "Be strong," Owens and backing vocalist Ron Wilson advise on "Another Side," hopeful for a better tomorrow, repeating as mantra: "Someway/ Someday/ Somehow/ (Carry on)." Whether you hear "I’m Strong" and "Bring Down the Walls" as a resilient call to arms for gay men, for the impoverished, for inner-city African-Americans, for South Africans under apartheid, or just for all the oppressed people seeking solace on a darkened dancefloor, they still resonate as that rare breed, elegant yet body-jacking songs of protest. Not bad for a song like "Walls," which Owens admitted to writing on toilet paper during his break at the hospital.
For all the sophistication, smooth jazz chords, and political undertones of the album, it's important to note that it still knocks. The programming of tracks like "Distant Planet," "Music Take Me Up," and "I’m Strong" still define dance music and elevate the room at peak hour. You could just as easily retitle the latter half of the album House Music’s Greatest Hits, as it’s filled with seismic tracks like "Mystery of Love," "Feelin’ Sleazy," "Bring Down the Walls," and "Can You Feel It."
While "deep house" now means certain club-friendly clichés to a generation of YouTube commenters and Boiler Room attendees, an album like Another Side has only had its title grow in meanings over the intervening decades. It suggests that at its inception, "house" was not a simple square but instead polygonal. Or as one of Heard’s devotees, Todd Terry, would put it a few years on, "house is a feeling." Another Side showcased Larry Heard’s myriad other sides, be it tropical ambient, grown-ass R&B, deft jazz chops, island rhythms, and even prog-rock’s embrace of early synthesizer technology. But ultimately, the music that Heard and Owens rendered back then was a way to make cheap synths and cast-off drum machines emote and express the tumult of human emotions that could arise after a long night at the Warehouse, or anywhere else. In hindisght, it sounds now like the path not traveled by the masses.


The Chicago jazz composer stitches together an album of big, unanswerable questions and gorgeously orchestrated music from a host of local heroes.

Rob Mazurek / Exploding Star Orchestra: Dimensional Stardust

Dimensional Stardust

It’s been five years since Rob Mazurek’s last album with Exploding Star Orchestra, and in that brief window, the Chicago jazz and avant-garde scene from which the collective first arose has enjoyed more attention than it has in decades. Dimensional Stardust was composed for a Berlin-based version of the group, but Mazurek recorded it with a lineup heavy on local heroes—longtime members Nicole Mitchell, Jeff Parker, and John Herndon are joined by Tomeka Reid, Damon Locks, and Jaimie Branch, among others. As a result, it comes off as a second coronation for this era of the city, following Makaya McCraven’s Universal Beings from 2018. But where that album highlighted the individual brilliance of Chicago soloists (alongside those from London, New York, and L.A.), Dimensional Stardust is a tightly orchestrated ensemble piece that—like many of the musicians who play on it—uses the gestures of experimental classical music and avant-garde jazz to move into fresh territory.
While previous Exploding Star Orchestra albums have made space for improvisation and soloing, everything on Dimensional Stardust was composed by Mazurek. He recorded each musician’s parts separately over the span of seven months then stitched the album together with the patience and precision of a luxury car embroiderer; if there are seams, they’re obscured by the intricate curlicues he pulls from his band. Throughout the album, he strings together long phrases of short tones, forcing his instrumentalists to play lines that, on staff paper, must have looked like a tangled pearl necklace pulled out of a drawer. On opener “Sun Core Tet (Parable 99),” he sends a spree of notes up Reid’s cello and through Macie Stewart’s violin, then back down via Mitchell’s flute. It’s a trick he repeats often, and it manages never to diminish the individuality of the players; when Mitchell, guitarist Parker, and vibraphonist Joel Ross trade lines in “A Wrinkle in Time Sets Concentric Circles Reeling,” it doesn’t feel like they’re stating one long sentence together so much as they’re considering an idea from multiple angles.
This sense of interdependence is palpable throughout Dimensional Stardust, and it’s made all the more powerful for its having been manufactured after the fact. Mazurek is a master arranger, and he fits the album’s constituent parts together in a way that defies logic. In one of the album’s most uncanny moments, he sutures a virtuosic run from Mitchell to the three-person percussion team in such a way it’s impossible to tell if Mitchell is playing her flute like a drum kit or if the percussionists are matching her polyrhythms tap-for-tap.
Elsewhere, on “Abstract Dark Energy (Parable 9),” Mazurek places a simple square of piano in the distance, giving us a focal point while an anxious bossa nova beat washes through much of the song. Much of the title track sounds as though it’s played in a long, low-ceilinged room with a thin layer of water on the ground, with the resultant compression feeling less like radio-ready loudness and more like the radiating energy of a universe waiting to be born.
Fully half of the songs on Dimensional Stardust are either titled or subtitled as parables, and it’s not hard to understand Mazurek’s attraction to the form. Parables are small stories that open up to cosmic truths. They suggest that our daily life and relationships reveal something greater about the universe itself, and that our quotidian reality is supported by untold mysteries that are nevertheless possible to understand. With his careful needlework, Mazurek stitches together an album of big, unanswerable questions and gorgeously orchestrated music, setting aside distinctions between genres, musicians, and points in time and space without losing sight of how each of these components is necessary to the whole. It rises up to gesture toward the cosmos, then returns us to life on Earth, tracing a single great parabolic arc.

Buy: Rough Trade
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