In 1973, Goats Head Soup marked the end of the Stones’ imperial era, capturing them as they transitioned from the World’s Greatest Rock‘n’Roll Band to just a really good one.

Goats Head Soup

In the period spanning 1968’s Beggars Banquet to 1972’s Exile on Main Street, the Rolling Stones’ title of “World’s Greatest Rock‘n’Roll Band” was less a boastful marketing slogan and more of a plainly self-evident job description. If the Stones started out as rambunctious kids with a press-hyped bad-boy image, by the turn of the ‘70s, the band had acquired a truly sinister aura, the kind of malevolence that had amassed rap sheets, body counts, and iconoclastic admirers eager to feed off their black magic. Not only had the Stones outlasted their rivals in The Beatles, they had become a band that could seemingly do no wrong, even when they were doing things that were very wrong.
But if Exile on Main Street represented a seance-like communion with their most sacred old-school influences (blues, gospel, country), Goats Head Soup was where the spell was broken and the Stones had to contend with the fact that they were a veteran band entering their second decade amid a rapidly changing musical landscape. Glam rock was setting new standards for provocation and transgression, while the fiercest, grittiest street music was coming from the world of funk. So on Goats Head Soup, the Stones landed somewhere between the New York Dolls and Isaac Hayes, straining to push themselves to new heights of campy outrageousness while seriously engaging with the contemporary Black music of the day in a way that would have a lasting effect on their rhythmic DNA.
Even though work on Goats Head Soup began with producer Jimmy Miller mere months after Exile wrapped up, the conditions of their creations couldn’t have been more different. Exile may have been famously been recorded in the humid, moldy basement of Keith Richards’ French villa, but those extreme conditions created a sense of freewheeling, all-in camaraderie that—for all its heroin-hazy atmosphere—exuded a genuine sense of joy, an all-night bender where everyone’s wine glasses are overflowing and so are the toilets. Goats Head Soup was a far more disjointed experience, its recording locations—Kingston, London, Los Angeles—indicative of a band that was starting to drift apart.
Following his marriage to Bianca Pérez-Mora Macías, Mick Jagger was becoming the toast of the society pages and firming up his place in the A-list celebrity establishment; Keith Richards, by contrast, was holing himself up in a Swiss rehab clinic to put the brakes on a worsening heroin habit. As a result, the once-telepathic songwriting team of Jagger-Richards was becoming more like Jagger-or-Richards. “I think Mick and I were a little dried up after Exile,” Richards wrote in his memoir, Life. “After Exile, such a beautifully set up list of songs that all seemed to go together, it was difficult for us to get that tightness again.” So, true to its title, Goats Head Soup became something of a potluck where each threw their random ideas into the cauldron in the hope they’d blend into something palatable.
As Jagger recently quipped to Rolling Stone, Goats Heads Soup may be the first album recorded in Jamaica to include “not the slightest influence of reggae on any of the tracks.” But while that may be true on a superficial level, the record is definitely running on island time, as the band casually wade through the piano-blues romp “Hide Your Love” and the Funkadelic-style swamp-soul chant “Can You Hear the Music” with a palpable lack of urgency. And coming off Exile’s rip-this-joint energy, the rave-ups on Goats Heads Soup can’t help but feel a little staid: “Silver Train” steadily rolls on the same track as Exile’s superior “All Down the Line,” while the X-rated lyrics of “Star Star” (a.k.a. “Starfucker,” a.k.a. the Stones’ raunchiest song this side of “Some Girls”) seem to be overcompensating for its basic “Roll Over Beethoven” backbeat. On tracks like these, we hear The World’s Greatest Rock‘n’Roll Band settling for just being a pretty good one, the menacing shit-kickers of old curdling into good-timey toe-tappers. Even when Jagger summons his old friend Lucifer via the deliciously evil voodoo riff of “Dancing With Mr. D,” he ends up closer to “Monster Mash” than “Sympathy for the Devil,” trading in that song’s politicized fury for puerile B-movie graveyard hijinks.
However, Goats Head Soup’s best tracks are so good, they not only carry the album, they make it sound like nothing else in the Stones’ catalog. While the lurid urban-crime narratives of “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)” read more like TV Guide cop-show synopses than probing social commentary, the combination of Jagger’s raging vocal, Billy Preston’s apocalyptic clavinet riff, and a hair-raising brass refrain give the song an unmatched intensity among Stones singles of the era. (The obvious influence of blaxploitation funk would also loosen up the group for their oncoming disco years.) And if the mid-’70s may not have been a peak for the Stones as a rock band, it was a golden period for Stones ballads, as heralded by the still-sumptuous “Angie,” which is arguably both the most genteel and desperate song in their canon, and the mold from which future tearjerkers like “If You Really Want to Be My Friend,” “Memory Motel,” and “Fool to Cry” would be cast.
But it’s a pair of album cuts, each tucked into the No. 3 position on their respective sides, that makes Goats Head Soup worthy of classic status, despite the album’s flaws. Richards’ countrified reverie “Coming Down Again” is the sobering counterpoint to Exile’s saloon-door swinger “Torn & Frayed,” as if he were surveying the scene of that album’s basement bacchanalia the morning after, wondering, “Where are all my friends?” Even better is the exquisite “Winter,” a dazed daydream of a song where Jagger’s uncannily Van Morrison-esque vocal is left to float atop Mick Taylor’s snowdrift guitars and swirls of regal orchestration. For all their stylistic fluidity, the Stones have always been a verse/chorus/verse kinda band, but “Winter” is a rare moment where they put feeling over form, letting themselves unravel in elegantly wasted fashion. When you think of the many bands who’ve channeled the disheveled spirit of ‘70s Stones—Primal Scream, The Replacements, early Wilco—the target was usually Exile on Main Street, but in their own beautifully damaged ways, they wound up a lot closer to Goats Head Soup.
This record features another excellent ballad that has thus far gone unmentioned here—because, on the album proper, it’s trapped inside a rambling, clavinet-powered arrangement that tries to pass it off as a soul-funk workout. But “100 Years Ago” always seemed like a song that deserved a better fate, and the outtakes disc in this deluxe reissue does it justice through a raw, utterly compelling piano demo that anticipates the stark, ivory-pounding punk romanticism of Patti Smith. It’s no overstatement to say that, had the song been originally released in this form, it’d be considered a classic of the period. But its inclusion here highlights just how much tinkering and second-guessing went into Goats Heads Soup, as does a looser alternate take of “Dancing With Mr. D” that sounds like it was cut by Neil Young and the Stray Gators.
The Goats Head sessions famously yielded songs that wouldn’t surface until 1981’s Tattoo You; those demos aren’t featured here, but we do get three previously unreleased tracks that suggest the record could’ve gone in an entirely different, more party-hearty direction. While the jolly “All the Rage” verges on cruise-ship-commercial frivolity, “Criss Cross” is the sort of cowbell-clanging boogie that Royal Trux spent half of their existence chasing, and the Jimmy Page-assisted “Scarlet” poses a question—what if the Stones decided to groove more like Zeppelin?—that would go unanswered until the second Black Crowes album.
If these Goats Heads Soup rarities betray the album’s indecisive, scatterbrained origins, the reissue’s third disc—an oft-bootlegged but greatly enhanced recording of a Brussels show from October ’73—finds the Stones still very much at the top of their game as a live act. In sharp contrast to the rough ‘n’ tough 1970 live set, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, the Brussels concert sounds like it could’ve been recorded earlier this year—and that says as much about the pristine remastering job as how well it captures the Stones’ mid-’70s transformation into the crowd-pleasing, showbiz-savvy revue that would top Forbes music-biz listicles for decades to come. The extended sax solo on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” the call-and-response crowd participation on “Midnight Rambler,” the breakneck, scribble-outside-the-lines jamming on “Street Fighting Man”—this is a document of the Stones’ arena-rock playbook being written in real time.
Tellingly, the Stones sequester the selections from Goats Head Soup together into a four-song mini-set, as if they needed protection from seasoned warhorses like “Gimme Shelter” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” By the end of their 1975 tour, only one (“Star Star”) remained, and by the time of their 1981 stadium jaunt, practically any trace of Goats Head Soup had been erased from the setlist. This would suggest Goats Head Soup’s true significance is that it marked the moment where a new Rolling Stones record ceased to be a game-changing cultural event, and more like a fresh pile of coal shoveled into the engine room to keep the show on the road. But if Goats Head Soup revealed the first real chinks in the Stones’ armor, its eternally wounded ballads turned that fallibility into a virtue. Ultimately, Goats Head Soup remains fascinating for how it makes the Stones seem a little less mythical and a lot more real.

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The teenage Tallahassee rapper fast-tracks a summer-ready debut mixtape that’s in touch with his Florida roots.

My Vision

Since the mid 1980s, when 14-year-old rapper Roxanne Shanté’s diss track “Roxanne’s Revenge” sent the New York rap world into a frenzy, teenage rappers have been prone to blowing up fast without trying all that hard. That happened in the fall to Tallahassee’s Luh Tyler, who was 16 when a couple of breezy, punchline-fueled singles recorded directly into his iPhone suddenly made him the talk of Florida’s hip-hop scene. He raps about three core concepts—getting girls, getting high on weed, getting money with the guys—with a conversational flow and the raspy voice of Marge Simpson. Early singles, like his theme song flip “Law & Order Pt. 2” and the ode to Instagram influencer “Jayda Wayda,” are boyish and grown at the same time.
Now 17, Luh Tyler arrives with his fast-tracked debut mixtape My Vision. It easily could have been overstuffed with label-purchased features and trend-chasing one-offs, but it’s kept relatively organic with beats that lean on the bounce of Florida rap and only a couple of out-of-state visitors. “Can’t Move Wrong” is a highlight: Assisted by Broward County’s Trapland Pat, Tyler coasts on the skittering beat with regional specifics like the thick bassline and bits of steel drum. Meanwhile, his lyrics are low-key one-liners that stick out based on how they’re said: “Pull up to the club, rock the stage, got your bitch amazed” is given life by the way his scratchy vocals drag out “amazed.” He channels similarly chill energy in “Santa” with Pompano Beach’s Loe Shimmy, which isn’t as vibrant as their November collab “A Day in the NOYA,” but their shared iciness gels. Previously released day-in-the-life joints “Back Flippin” and “Fat Racks Pt. 2” still sound bright and beachy, even if they’ve been worn out in my headphones—and even though “Fat Racks” didn’t need a BabyTron redux.
My Vision would be even better if Tyler cared more about the minor but important particulars that elevate storytelling. His lyrical vagueness makes me appreciate non-sequitur wizards like Flint’s Rio Da Yung OG and central Florida’s Goldenboy Countup, who fill each line with so many details that the ordinary becomes colorfully wild. Tyler isn’t as naturally animated, but bars like, “Niggas hoes, on my trail, nigga, they like, ‘Oh he rapping’” on “Moncler on My Coat” are still too fuzzy. Whose girlfriends are they? Is it the rapping itself or the rap lifestyle that’s impressing them? Is this interaction happening in person or in the comments? The closest he gets to fleshing out his world is “You Was Laughing,” a slightly reflective look at what he’s been through during the grueling grind of the past, uh… six months.
But hey, these are songs for and about chilling, and they serve their purpose well—most specifically the two tracks that bring in producer Polo Boy Shawty, a pioneer of the hazy, summer-ready plugg sound. His work on the laid-back intro “My Vision” makes me dream of Tyler’s version of Tony Shhnow’s Plug Motivation mixtape. And on “Hit the Top,” Tyler doesn’t have much going on outside of rolling blunts and going to Rolling Loud, but the trippy rhythm paired with his cloud of punchlines delivered in that middle-aged cigarette smoker voice makes doing absolutely nothing sound cool as shit. You don’t need to be a teenager to get behind that.


The singer and activist’s second album hides behind well-trodden pop star guises. Even when the lyrics point towards desperation, there’s no frisson.

Panorama

The term “lesbian celebrity” was once an oxymoron. Openly lesbian musicians, most famously the signers and signees of the Washington, D.C. label Olivia, often worked in an insular and separatist manner, making and distributing music among themselves while maintaining a keen skepticism of the mainstream. Not until the 1990s did lesbians start to become a visible, marketable demographic, a commercial watershed marked by events like k.d. lang holding Cindy Crawford on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1993 and Ellen DeGeneres coming out on television in 1997. More recently, the banner of proud lesbian cultural icon has been taken up by Hayley Kiyoko, the former Disney actor turned pop singer. For almost a decade, Kiyoko has helped to forge a consistent place for women who love women within pop’s contemporary mainstream, tethering her success to a politics of visibility and representation. Across her self-directed music videos, Kiyoko has brought underrepresented identities into her mainstream ambit.
Unfortunately, lesbian celebrities are still scarce, and as such, Kiyoko is often called upon as a delegate for queer women. In the choreographed intimacy of her videos and her recently publicized relationship with former Bachelor star Becca Tilley, she provides a public template for the private lives of young fans. Each June, she appears for timely cover stories, granting gracious soundbites about self-love and queer joy. Today, there’s a striking disconnect between the radical community figurehead of Kiyoko’s interviews and the steamy vapidity of her music. Her lyrics tend toward well-worn and impersonal platitudes, and you’ll have to dig beyond the music itself for any sense of transcendence or revelation. You’re more likely to find poignancy and power in fan comments on Kiyoko’s Instagram account than in her lyric book.
Her second album Panorama—inspired by a shift toward healthy, conscientious living after a period of years dogged by mental and physical health issues—intends to display Kiyoko’s personality beyond the pablum. Instead, its theme of embracing the journey and the struggle, rather than the destination, feels as bromidic and remote as a commercial for therapy. Kiyoko hides behind well-trodden pop star guises: From “Found My Friends”’ supersized take on E•MO•TION-era Carly Rae Jepsen to the metrically perfect pilfering of Taylor Swift’s hiccupy flow on “Well…,” the pop genre is in control of Kiyoko rather than the other way around. Instead of defining a unique sound, Panorama carries the unmistakable metallic tang of reverse engineering.
Kiyoko’s 2018 debut Expectations was filled with euphoric walls of sound that made your heart feel as though it were in congruence with the world, reminders of her theater-kid youth spent listening to Arcade Fire and Coldplay. This time, she collaborated with Danja, the superproducer famed for his work with Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, who encouraged her to make her vocals more prominent. Panorama has fewer such cinematic moments, but when they appear—as on “Found My Friends”—the production makes ample space for Kiyoko’s voice. This isn’t necessarily a good thing. Kiyoko isn’t the strongest or most distinctive singer; more nose than diaphragm, her vocal personality tends to make everything sound like an anti-emergency. This has suited her music in the past, as on the 2018 single “Curious,” where she played the role of an ex-lover trying to appear disaffected by her former girlfriend’s new relationship. But when she attempts a dramatic, emotionally sincere vocal line, she misses the mark. As her voice wades flatly into the stacked nighttime-drive chords of “Found My Friends,” it feels like speeding into a traffic jam.
The unintentionally anhedonic delivery squanders the album’s more galvanizing moments. “Loving you is all I wanna know,” she sings through the sputtering embellishments and weeping violin of “Supposed to Be,” with all the urgency of a hotel receptionist. Even when the lyrics point toward desperation, there’s no frisson. Here, Kiyoko has achieved the previously unimaginable: a lesbian love song that feels devoid of intensity.
It’s a shame that Panorama’s artistry doesn’t match Kiyoko’s accolades. But she shines on the album’s best songs, “Sugar at the Bottom” and “For the Girls,” a pair of summery, percussion-driven jingles that make use of a bass-as-lead approach. Both revolve around slick hooks rather than soaring choruses, in a way that’s commensurate with someone like Dua Lipa, who crams syllables into a tight metrical structure, turning tongue-twisters into refrains. Kiyoko’s voice sounds absorptive rather than detached, and for a moment, the most interesting thing about her is the music she’s making.


Interpol re-group on Matador and record a bleak, depressive album about disillusionment and being at the end of one's rope.

Interpol

The impressive thing about Interpol has always been the refinement of their sound, its remarkable sense of purpose. Sure, when the band debuted, a huge share of conversation revolved around the other acts they sounded like. But no matter how familiar any of the parts were, the band had welded them together into a whole that was instantly recognizable and easy to grasp-- they'd carved out the simple, narrow box of how an Interpol song worked, and they could put it across clearly, quickly, and thrillingly. Maybe the suits they wore were supposed to say something about style, but they also said something about professionalism: This was a band with a clear agenda, and they were all business about it, every last detail engineered to work. And it did work, which led the band to great success and only one little problem: Their box is a small one, and it's been difficult for them to sneak out of it.
That dilemma's surely not lost on them. This self-titled album is their last recorded with Carlos D.-- the bass player whose sense of pacing was the secret motor of their best work-- and one of the good things about it is that it's very honest. It's an album about exhaustion, confusion, the hollowness of success, the bitter feeling of having few options worth chasing, and the realization that endlessly satisfying your own desires can turn you into a pretty shitty person. Paul Banks' lyrics seem preoccupied with what kind of man he's turned out to be, from the declaration, "I'm a good guy," to a song actually subtitled "The Man I Am". He kicks off the album by announcing that he's found success, but he doesn't sound remotely pleased about it.
Elsewhere he's pleading for someone to just tell him what to do, because his own desires are leading him in the wrong directions. The songs keep skirting away from hooks and tension in favor of still air, exhausted drizzles of guitar, and portentous piano figures; the big hooks and builds they do try out seem all the more half-hearted and workmanlike, surrounded as they are by the sound of a band wondering why it bothers trying anything in the first place. The whole thing sounds like the eighth day of an endless party where everyone's already slept together, burned themselves out on drugs that used to be fun, and developed systems of grudges and resentments that make it barely worth talking to one another. And yet the party goes on and there they sit, sighing bitterly while confetti pours down and the drinks go around.
The problem is that the music feels that way, too-- and who'd have thought that this band, of all bands, would miss the mark on a bleak, depressive album? Plenty of great records have been made from this end-of-the-rope feeling; I'm pretty confident the members of Interpol own a few by the Cure. And it'd be the height of arrogance to suggest that Interpol should be making records about feelings other than the ones they have. It's just that, as a listener, it's easy to get the feeling that any other version of this band-- happy Interpol, smarmy Interpol, pissed-off Interpol, the tense-and-edgy Interpol of their debut-- would be more entertaining to listen to than the tapped-out, unsure act that shows up here, sounding like people who have come to loathe certain motions but can't stop going through them.
The good news is that they're too skilled, experienced, and important to make a record that's just a mess, and for a while there's nothing so terrible about this one. In its first half, songs are carefully assembled; "Summer Well" packs some gorgeous hooks; the band's rhythm section is always a treat; and if nothing else there's always that singular Interpol atmosphere, the pure sound of a group a lot of us will always like hearing. That sound is compelling enough to keep someone searching for a secret payoff to this record, some dark heart to sink into. The problems here, though, aren't in execution-- they're more existential. Cross over into the wrecked second half, and every song makes this sound more like an album that's not really ready to seethe, not really cathartic, not really full of painful hopeless beauty or any of those other things that make bleak records worthwhile. With every listen it just sounds like more of a fucking drag. For a moment, "All of the Ways" seems like it's prepared to lean into its own feelings of helplessness, and turn into the kind of desolate, bottomless song that feels good to fall into-- but then Banks can't help trying to sing it into something grand, trudging hopelessly through the same old routine. The ninth day of the party.
It's too bad. The album is asking honest and important questions about disillusionment. What do you do when you can have too much of what you want? What do you do when you get it and find you don't want it anymore? How do you manage your own desires and turn out a decent person? The songs might be more enjoyable if they seemed to present some glimmer of an answer, or at least some consolation-- if it could convince you that this, this music right here, was the payoff for all the agonizing, not just another job that's barely worth doing.


Crammed Discs asks 26 non-African artists-- including Animal Collective, Andrew Bird, Deerhoof, Oneida, and Shackleton-- to take on Congotronics.

Various Artists: Tradi-Mods vs. Rockers: Alternative Takes on Congotronics

In 1987, a French record label called Ocora released a cassette called Zaïre: Musiques Urbaines á Kinshasa. It was a set of four half-hour performances by four different bands, recorded in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), in 1978. It was the first time Kinshasa street music ever made it out of Africa, but the timing wasn't quite right; pre-Internet, word of mouth could only spread this music so far. And it was up against a mainstream world music industry that didn't prize rawness or real African soundworlds. It went out of print, but if you can find it, it is very worth hearing.
But that music couldn't stay hidden forever. In 2004, producer Vincent Kenis curated an album by one of those street bands that had been recorded in 1978, Konono Nº1, for Crammed Discs (they also recorded a live LP for Terp that year). Konono in 2004 sounded almost exactly like Konono in 1978-- a bracing mix of headlong rhythm and interesting texture, created by found-object percussion and crudely electrified likembe thumb pianos. This time, the timing (and let's be honest, the marketing) were much more fortuitous. Konono Nº1 crash-landed in the Western indie rock and avant garde worlds and were embraced wholeheartedly, and Crammed embarked on a series of "Congotronics" releases aimed at building a broader picture of Kinshasa's vibrant street music scene, which is comprised of bands from ethnic groups around Congo who amplify their traditional music to be heard over the urban din.
Their latest Congotronics project takes a different tack. There's no doubt that Congotronics has had an impact in the West, and Crammed's Marc Hollander (who long ago was Kenis' partner in the band Aksak Maboul) asked 26 artists to contribute their own personal takes on Congotronics, and contributed one himself under his old Aksak Maboul banner. These artists took a variety of approaches: some wrote original music, some covered actual Congotronics songs or used parts of them as raw musical material, some sampled the source material, and others wrote music modeled on a specific piece. Each song is credited to the artist "vs" the Congotronics act that inspired the song (usually Konono or Kasai Allstars), and it's a hugely diverse, double-disc grab-bag by a group of contributors from Europe, the U.S., and Japan.
Some tracks are related to their inspiration more in spirit than anything else. A good example is Tussle's spectacular funk workout "Soft Crush", which has a very loose relationship to Konono Nº1, dropping ethereal thumb piano patterns into its otherwise relentless stomp. Bear Bones and Lay Low's "Kuletronics" is like Congotronics via the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, directly quoting Konono Nº1's "Kule Kule", but transposing the likembe groove to odd, throbbing bass sounds and sprinkling the mix liberally with pinging sound effects and filtered, echoing noises. It's interesting to hear the inherent similarities between things that seem as disparate as, say, Konono and Andrew Bird. Bird's pizzicato violin loops on "Ohnono/Kiwembo" are nothing too out of the ordinary for him, but it's amazing how well the interlocking patterns he creates reflect an affinity with the band's likembe patterns.
There are plenty of other highlights, from Shackleton's 10-minute, spaced-out "Mukuba Special", which features vocal interjections sampled from Kasaï Allstars, to Jherek Bischoff's very literal, amazingly heavy orchestral arrangement of "Kule Kule". AU's "Two Labors" is a crazy pile-up of as many likembe rhythm patterns as possible playing at breakneck speed, while Oneida sucks the music into its own noisy psychedelic world. Juana Molina is one of several who adds vocals and lyrics of her own, bouncing her own melody off the patterns of Kasaï Allstars, whose call and response chants she samples into her own composition.
Hollander has afforded each artist the chance to talk a little bit about his or her contribution, and reading the range of thoughts behind the tracks here makes for an interesting companion activity to listening. There are certainly ways a project like this could have gone wrong-- everybody avoids the biggest one, which would have been for a Western artist to try and perform the chants in the original music-- but the artists involved were given enough free reign and seem to have enough genuine appreciation for the music that the final result is a very pleasing listen that captures some of the spirit of the music without outright imitating or caricaturing it.


The second album by the French producer Gesaffelstein brings in big pop collaborators like Haim and Pharrell.

Hyperion

As Gesaffelstein, the French producer Mike Lévy has built a reputation for snarling, fiery electronic music derived from techno. In his hands, the insistent 4/4 pulse assumes a sinister shape, like “Killing Eve”’s Villanelle moving through a packed club with a shiv at the ready. For much of his career thus far, the 31-year-old has released nasty-sounding music through a small Montreal record label, but his profile skyrocketed after co-producing Kanye West’s titanic Yeezus cuts “Black Skinhead” and “Send It Up.”
At its most ferocious, the still-inimitable Yeezus sounded like a thousand car-crash videos auto-playing in the same browser window—precisely why Lévy’s highway-pileup sonics fit in so well. A Gesaffelstein banger isn’t something you can simply walk away from; you practically require the Jaws of Life to extricate yourself. His rude and rumbling 2013 debut capitalized off his Yeezus moment (even though, technically speaking, it had been recorded two years before) with über-aggressive singles like “Pursuit” and “Hate or Glory” and moments of simmering ambient reflection that nodded to another dimension of his palette. He elaborated on this subtler side with his work on the Weeknd’s My Dear Melancholy,; “I Was Never There” slowed a G-funk whine to a creeping slither, and “Hurt You” gave off a muted glow similar to the Weeknd’s Daft Punk collab “I Feel It Coming.”
The aesthetic connections between Lévy and Daft Punk don’t end there; for one, they’re labelmates now. Some of the hardest-hitting Gesaffelstein material resembles a ’roided-out take on the brutalist house and hip-hop that Daft Punk explored on Homework. The second Gesaffelstein album and first for Columbia, Hyperion, is Lévy’s attempt to channel the more accessible side of the robot duo, featuring futuristic pop with vocal collaborations ranging from the Weeknd and Pharrell to Haim and Toronto synth-pop duo Electric Youth (of Drive soundtrack fame). Hyperion feels more meticulously crafted than Aleph, sequenced to evoke a journey not dissimilar to Daft Punk’s own pop-as-Epcot ride Random Access Memories from 2013.
Even with a decade of experience under his belt, though, Hyperion suggests that Lévy isn’t quite ready to make the professional leap that the album supposedly represents. Its strongest tracks are immediate, both in impact and sequencing; the title track whirrs and oscillates with lovely synths spiraling into eternity, while “Reset” is the platonic Gesaffelstein experience—wonky, hip-hop-inflected electronic music with its own respiratory system, sounding as if angry turbines learned how to breathe. The Weeknd collab “Lost in the Fire” marks the pair’s most effective team-up to date: Abel Tesfaye’s MJ-isms blend so seamlessly with Lévy’s inky backgrounds that it might take a listen or two to suss out the rank homophobia of Tesfaye’s typically drab lyrical attempts at lasciviousness.
Hyperion’s other guest spots aren’t as successful—evidence that his jet black range could use a wider color palette. The relative failure of these crossover attempts is more damning considering that the artists in question have more effectively collaborated with mainstream dance figures in the past; the stiff, mid-tempo Electric Youth cut “Forever” doesn’t come close to achieving the weightless glory of their iconic “A Real Hero” with French producer David Grellier’s College project, while Haim’s contributions to the misty “So Bad” lacks the impact of their performance on Calvin Harris’ 2015 single “Pray to God.”
Even “Lost in the Fire” and the Pharrell-featuring “Blast Off”—two songs featuring frequent Daft Punk collaborators—can’t help but come across as budget-level attempts to replicate past glories from other artists. If it seems unfair to judge Hyperion’s weaknesses against the work of Lévy’s supposed peers, it’s equally frustrating that he hasn’t yet given us a real idea of who he is as an artist. He didn’t invent the rough-and-tumble approach to techno that most know him for, and the churning instrumentals of Hyperion would’ve sounded at home amidst the grab-bag Aleph—proof, maybe, that while he has consistency on his side, true artistic evolution remains out of Lévy’s reach.


Bristol's Flying Saucer Attack were a murky and beloved cult band that mixed shoegaze guitars with the drifting throb of krautrock to create extreme feelings of isolation and alienation. These albums, now reissued on vinyl by Drag City, find them at the moment in the mid-'90s when their sound hit its stride.

Further / Chorus

In their own small way, Bristol's Flying Saucer Attack were as '90s as Nirvana and the Beastie Boys. They emerged early in the decade in an independent music world that was expanding its reach; information, then as now, was zipping around the world, but when FSA debuted, it was mostly traveling on paper. Indeed, the band, consisting at first of Dave Pearce and Rachel Brook (the latter also was a key member of the excellent Movietone), and later of Pearce alone, owed a great deal to the zine world that had blossomed in the '80s and was in this pre-internet moment in full flower.
One influential zine in particular, Ptolemaic Terrascope, founded and based in the rural west of England, championed FSA early, positioning them in a dark, drone-y, goth-derived scene that included Windy & Carl and Roy Montgomery along with Bristol acts like the Third Eye Foundation and Amp. During this period, you could be an impossibly murky and impenetrable lo-fi psychedelic band obscure enough that even devoted indie music fans had never heard of you, but still play a Peel Session, release singles and EPs on 7-inch vinyl (this when turntables were considered by most a hopelessly passé marker of the clunky analog era), and find yourself with a modest and devoted international cult. These two records, now reissued on vinyl by Drag City, find Flying Saucer Attack at the moment in the mid-'90s when their sound hit its stride.
Flying Saucer Attack were less about invention and more about combining disparate ingredients in a new way. Their most distinctive feature on first listen is the thick blanket of feedback and distortion that overwhelms almost everything else. The roots of this technique were clearly in the Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy, but where JAMC fetishized bubblegum pop, FSA applied hyper-distortion to British folk and the drifting throb of krautrock. So where the noise of JAMC and later shoegaze bands amplified the catchiness of their simple melodies, FSA blew up the abstraction, and where the best shoegaze noise generally hinted at an enveloping ocean of sensuality, FSA used similar techniques to wallow in feelings of extreme isolation and distance. This was music you used as insulation, raw material to thicken the space between you and the world, and these qualities were reinforced by the proudly D.I.Y. nature of the records; “home taping is reinventing music,” read a line on the spine of Further.
Further from 1994 is arguably the quintessential Flying Saucer Attack album, with a little bit of everything—evocative instrumental miniatures, folky near-songs, extended spatial explorations—that made them good. There's plenty of fingerpicked acoustic guitar amid the white-noise din, and the bassy pulse of analog noisemakers floats in and out, evoking the spaciness of early '70s synth music. Pearce's voice, a husky tenor indeterminate pitch, is as buried as a voice can possibly be, but despite his extreme limitations as a vocalist, he manages to communicate melancholy, alienation, and loneliness. “Still Point” features lead vocals by Brook, her slightly warmer tone breaking the illusion that Pearce is the last person in the world. The ballad “Come and Close My Eyes” is structured enough that you could almost see someone covering it, while “To the Shore” is a gnarly instrumental that moves from a cymbal tap to churning sonic violence and back to delicate acoustic guitar over the course of 12 minutes.
Chorus from 1995 is a collection of singles, B-sides, and a Peel Session, but Flying Saucer Attack's general approach was so narrow it feels like a proper album. The two main differences are a uniformity of song length, befitting the 7-inch format, and, at places, a growing technological sophistication, as if Pearce was learning how to squeeze more out of his 4-track. The precise layering of the rumbling distortion and simple melody on “Popol Vuh III” demonstrate considerable craft, and “Beach Red Lullaby,” another Brook lead and a gorgeous acoustic folk song, sounds like a genuine product of another time, an accompaniment to a grainy art film that Pink Floyd might have soundtracked several decades earlier. There's a track called “Feedback Song,” demonstrating just how much Pearce embraced his defining aesthetic, and later in the collection, as if that wasn't enough, we get “Feedback Song Demo.” But despite the repetition and the feeling of deja vu, Chorus hangs together and makes for a richly rewarding 40-minute listen; Flying Saucer Attack are living proof that you only need a couple of ideas as long as they're good ones.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the high-stakes saga of Max B and French Montana’s 2009 mixtape, a modern classic of New York rap.

Coke Wave

It was the winter of 2007 and New York rapper Jim Jones had the biggest single of his career with “We Fly High,” a defining moment of an era where nearly everyone across the five boroughs wanted to ride around in pink Range Rovers and wear durags under their MLB fitted caps like a lost member of Dipset, the irreverent Harlem rap crew. In New York City public schools, on television, and even on the Giants’ roster, reenacting the jump-shot motion from the music video while shouting the song’s signature Ballin’! ad-lib from the top of your lungs was common practice. Before “We Fly High,” Jones was surely Dipset’s third in command, behind people’s champ Juelz Santana and their leader Cam’ron, who mentored Jones by convincing him that if he rapped about the hard life he lived, the money would come. Jones did just that with “We Fly High,” and the result was country-wide recognition and a guaranteed spot in New York rap lore. But while Jones was on BET’s 106 & Park with a chain around his neck and diamonds in his ears, the song’s co-writer, Max B, was sitting behind bars.
A decade earlier, a teenage Max B, born Charly Wingate, had been sentenced to eight years in prison for robbery. He spent his time locked up working on a character that he described as a combination of The Notorious B.I.G. and 2Pac, called Biggavelli—Max B for short. When Max was released in 2005, he met up with his childhood friend from the same building in Harlem, Cam’ron, who’d become immortal two years earlier, the moment he revealed his all-pink outfit in the “Dipset Anthem” music video. “Yo flee, you know I rap now,” Max said to Cam. “Let’s get this shit clickin’ like Dorothy’s heels.” Cam laughed him off, so Max met up with Mike Bruno, a hungry individual from the same block. Bruno saw it all in Max: the charisma, the swag, the endlessly quotable way he spoke. He introduced Max to Jim Jones, who was looking to form his own clique under the  Dipset umbrella.
Jones put Max to work on Jones’ second studio album, Harlem: Diary of a Summer. Released that August, Max’s contributions to the album are undeniable. He shifted Jones’ style to a midpoint between the soulful chipmunk samples synonymous with Dipset and the menacing gutter raps of 50 Cent’s G-Unit crew. On “G’s Up,” Max is a star, with a memorable hook that outshines Jones’ stiff verses. Max’s two other credited features on the album use a rough melody that elevates typical street braggadocio into absurdist hood poetry: “Max B look like Derek Jeter on the shortstop/I’ll put the heater to ya’ soft spot,” he says smoothly on “Confront Ya Babe.”
But while Max B’s songwriting was elevating Jones’ career, Max was relegated to the shadows. In a later Doggie Diamonds video interview, as Max counts wads of cash wearing dark shades and jeans held up by a designer belt, and repeats his signature Maxisms like “wavy” and “owww,” he vents about his frustrations with Jim Jones. “I did eight years in the can, when I came home, my job was to come home and do this shit and go somewhere.” He unleashed his cartoon character-like persona, clearly tipsy from the brown liquor he usually sipped like apple juice, his Katt Williams-like perm swaying in the wind. “Not be working for a nigga in the studio, writing songs, while he the only nigga lookin’ hot, he the only nigga...spendin’ $5,000 on his bitch.” His requests to release solo material of his own were continuously pushed aside by Jones. Instead, Jones was focused on forming his ByrdGang collective—headlined by Max and the late Far Rockaway, Queens rapper Stack Bundles—and having them work on his third album, 2006’s Hustler’s P.O.M.E.” Max’s exasperation led him down a path that played out like an inept crook subplot in a Quentin Tarantino script.
Gina Conway was an ex-girlfriend of Max, who had recently returned to New York after spending time in North Carolina. According to testimony given by Conway, she was being pursued by a real estate and credit card fraudster by the name of Allan Plowden. One day in September of 2006, Plowden brought Conway back to his hotel room, where, in an attempt to impress her, he showed off a Louis Vuitton bag filled with an estimated $50,000 in cash. Later in the evening, Plowden and his business partner, David Taylor, went clubbing. Instead of joining them, Conway immediately called Max to brag, and the two began to orchestrate a robbery.
Max’s plan was to have Conway steal the money while Plowden was at the club. When Conway arrived, accompanied by Max’s stepbrother Kelvin Leerdam, Plowden was unexpectedly in the room. They woke him up at gunpoint. Unable to find a sufficient amount of money, Conway and Leerdam ordered Plowden to call Taylor. When Taylor arrived, Leerdam pointed the gun at him and after a struggle, the gun went off, killing Taylor. Conway and Leerdam escaped with all the money they could find, but when the police arrived, Plowden told them about Conway. When Conway was found not long after, she said that Leerdam killed Taylor and that Max set up the robbery attempt. Max was arrested and his bail was set at $1.5 million.
At almost the exact same time as Max’s arrest, Jim Jones released his third album, Hustler’s P.O.M.E. The project was Jones’ breakout moment and Max was featured on seven tracks, with writing credits on others. Despite Max’s pleas, there were no signs of Jones or the ByrdGang label coming to bail him out; he sat in jail while Jones went national.
After months behind bars, Max’s manager put up property to front his bail, but he still needed cash to cover the remaining amount—rumored to be around $120,000. Pretending to be Max’s white knight, Jones came up with an idea: Max would sign over his publishing rights to Jones in exchange for cash. Out of desperation, Max agreed. In the summer of 2007, Max B was released and Jones assumed he had his songwriting guru back in his employ to work on his next album and the upcoming ByrdGang group project. Max’s solo album remained on the shelf and he couldn’t profit off of any music released without Jones’ approval. With his trial looming large, Max finally reached his breaking point.
Like a comic-book origin story, Max B turned into a New York City vigilante. He gave interviews on DVDs and WorldStarHipHop that were more like wrestling promos, often drifting into the third person. Put a camera in Max B’s face and it was guaranteed he would clown rappers across the city he didn’t care for: Prodigy, Papoose, Hell Rell, and, especially, Jim Jones. During this time, Max went on a mixtape run that was equally as definitive as his interviews: Public Domain 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Million Dollar Baby 2, and Wavie Crockett. But Max B’s opus wouldn’t arrive until he developed a bond with another rapper who had a similar wish to make Jim Jones’ life hell.
French Montana was from the South Bronx, at the time most known for founding one of hip-hop’s most popular DVD series, Cocaine City. Inspired by the Smack DVD series, Cocaine City became notable for a glimpse at the street life through interviews with legends like Pee Wee Kirkland, guests like 50 Cent and Remy Ma, music videos, and freestyles (though the purpose of the series was to simply give French’s nascent rap career a platform).
At some point in 2003 or 2004 outside of a studio at the border of Harlem and the South Bronx, French was shot in the back of the head. He survived, and his attempted murderer was killed in the incident by friendly fire. According to French in a 2009 interview with DJ Vlad, he said that his beef with Jim Jones started when he found footage on DVDs of the Diplomat commenting on his near-death experience. In the Spring of 2008, while completing his mixtape Live From Africa, French was looking to record a Jim Jones diss track and to make it sting, he knew who to turn to.
“Waavvy,” also known as “Fuck Jim Jones,” is the first collaboration between Max B and French Montana. “Why don’t you tell me why you don’t love Max B no more, because yo’ nigga not workin’ for free,” wails Max B on a hook that sounds like it was recorded with a bottle of Grey Goose in hand. After the release of the track, Max B and French became inseparable. In true New York fashion, a city where hate is stronger than love, they bonded through a mutual disgust of Jones. Together, they stalked Jim Jones through the streets of New York, named a stuffed puppy after the Diplomat before stomping on it and running it over with a truck, accused Jones of attempting to blackball their careers, and constantly referred to a misogynistic incident involving Jones’ wife that became known as “She Touched It in Miami”—you know, normal things that friends do. It was all building to the release of Coke Wave, a joint mixtape they promised would be a classic. They were right.
Executive produced by Dame Grease, Coke Wave was released in February of 2009. Like Max B and French, Grease felt that New York’s household names weren’t giving him the respect he had earned—he emerged in the ’90s producing for The Lox, Mase, and contributing a majority of the production on DMX’s It’s Dark and Hell is Hot. Grease’s beatmaking on the mixtape unifies the capriciousness of both Max B and French and is the factor that brings their colorful imaginations to reality.
On “We Run NY,” Grease interpolates Sting’s “Englishman in New York” into a celebratory Uptown head bopper. “I Warned U” is similarly spiritual, as the trio spin Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You” into a soulful ballad for anyone that has ever worn a Pelle Pelle jacket and NBA jeans. “I warned you/The right way/I warned you/Now look what you made me do,” French belts on a woozy hook, maybe the best that has ever left his mouth. Max B surfs over the production with a swag that justifies every third-person DVD monologue he’s ever done.
The mixtape’s centerpiece is “Coke Wave,” a track that shows what the three are capable of when it’s all clicking. Max B sounds like he’s hungover singing a lullaby about drug dealing and heartbreak, French Montana’s relaxed delivery is like having a conversation with an incredibly high mob boss, and Grease’s funky production is timeless. No matter what sound Dame Grease laces them with, Max and French never step out of character; they’re going to talk about moving weight and bad decisions they made after sipping too much Remy Martin.
French Montana is the grounding presence, Dame Grease may be the glue, but it’s hard to be enamored by anything outside of Max B’s animated street poetics. If you close your eyes long enough, his stories can make you wake up on a stoop on Lenox Ave. in 2009. He can painfully howl over a cinematic Young Los beat made for fare evading (“Here It Is”), he can make songs for the backroom of an NYC strip club (“Stake Sause”), or emotionlessly describe a day cruising through the city avoiding the NYPD and rivals looking for a payday (“It Gotta Be”).
Coke Wave arrived during a time in New York where the city was in a desperate search for who was to be next after Dipset and G-Unit. But instead of sticking to New York’s hardened street rap, Max B and French Montana made the next wave whatever they wanted. They could hop on a classic Dr. Dre instrumental and infect the beat with the spirit of New York summer. Or could go back in time to the shiny-suit ’90s era to show off their ageless bravado and toss some subliminals at Jim Jones while they’re at it: “Backtrack two years ago I was with niggas straight hatin’,” Max says—you can picture him cackling in the booth with a plastic cup at his side after spitting that one-liner. There were no rules.
In the months following Coke Wave, Max B’s trial reached a verdict. Gina Conway testified, Max B did not, and he was found guilty on nine of the 11 charges including felony murder, aggravated manslaughter, and conspiracy. On September 3, 2009, Max was sentenced to 75 years in prison. One of the final songs he recorded while free was “Never Wanna Go Back,” a rare time where he addressed his situation in the music. “I never wanna go back in there/Life just isn’t fair,” he sings painfully, losing the optimism that made Coke Wave feel celebratory.
Over a decade since Coke Wave, Max B’s legacy has only grown. Some of that credit belongs to A$AP Yams, who introduced a younger generation to Max B’s music and injected his spirit into the A$AP Mob. But more so it’s been because of French Montana who has never stopped saying “Free Max B,” as murky reports of sentence reductions surface every year.
In 2010, Max B was officially released from his obligations to Jim Jones. His debut album finally arrived in 2011, titled Vigilante Season, of course. The album is no Coke Wave, but feels like the closing of a chapter that Max B had been desperate to complete since the days when he first conceived the Biggavelli character. “We all gon’ die, but who gon’ leave a legacy, who gon’ be remembered the biggest,” Max B said in an interview with Hood Affairs shortly after his fallout with Jim Jones. He spent his short-lived freedom trying to cement a legacy; Coke Wave is that moment.


On their second album as a trio, Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman build fresh narratives from the fabled history of folk music.

Bonny Light Horseman: Rolling Golden Holy

Rolling Golden Holy

On Bonny Light Horseman’s 2020 self-titled debut, singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson (of Fruit Bats), and producer and multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman moved their modern weft across the warp of folk traditions past. Borrowing pieces from old-time songs, their interplay between convention and innovation could have ended as a one-off project, especially after the collaboration earned them a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album. But the kismet of their creative commune seemed too good not to keep exploring, so they set about writing original songs. Their second album, Rolling Golden Holy, imagines what contemporary stories might look like when framed in the Anglo-American folk tradition. Entwining themes from broadsides and British ballads, musical styles from Appalachia, and touches of modern production, they deliver new tales, new colors, and new patterns.
In 1957, folk scholar George Malcolm Laws classified broadside ballads into topics like “Lovers’ Disguises and Tricks,” “Faithful Lovers,” and “Unfaithful Lovers.” While these categories apply to plenty of genres, Bonny Light Horseman delight in building fresh narratives from the fabled history of folk music. The duet “Comrade Sweetheart” evokes an early 20th century setting, when the blue-collar struggle for justice made its way into songs from Woody Guthrie and later Pete Seeger. Johnson and Mitchell pledge their love and fidelity, promising to care for one another in their fight for larger causes.
The songs on Rolling Golden Holy trace a variety of love stories, with Mitchell and Johnson trading off leads like they do perspectives. “Gone by Fall” reflects on love that will end when the seasons change. The song’s brightly plucked guitar contrasts the sorrow ruminating at its center. Johnson takes lead vocals, while Mitchell’s soft touches add flourishes of nostalgic sweetness, as though the present were already a potent memory. “Exile” declares grandiose passions in an effort to win back a lover. Johnson’s and Mitchell’s voices plait in and around one another. “You know I’d fly right into the eye of the hurricane for you,” they sing against a fluttering banjo, while Mike Lewis’ bass and JT Bates’ drums juxtapose that soaring interplay with a grounded heft.
Johnson’s rollicking banjo and Lewis’ saxophone begin the joyous “Sweetbread,” in which Mitchell defiantly shuns a wild-hearted lover who won’t commit. Instead, she imagines a satisfying independence. “Sweetbread when I’m hungry/Red liquor when I’m dry/I take a lover when I’m lonely/Blue sky, lord, when I die,” she sings euphorically with Johnson backing her. In an updated version of Anthology of American Folk, Harry Smith might well apply one of his famous descriptions: “SELF-SUFFICIENT WOMAN LETS GO OF NE’ER DO WELL; VOWS TO EAT, DRINK, AND BE MERRY.”
Not all of the compositions work so seamlessly. “Fleur de Lis” calls to mind a lineage of ballads that employ nature as a metaphor, like “The Fair Flower of Northumberland” or “The Rose of England.” A beating synth and electric guitar scaffold the nestled dulcimer, but the song ends up curling around itself, leaning too heavily on folk’s repetitive patterns for an ultimately staid effect. It detracts from the album’s compelling momentum, feeling closer to a loose stitch. Mitchell, Johnson, and Kaufman may have started with a fascination for certain traditions, but it’s their collaboration—and the potent exchange of those talents—that makes Rolling Golden Holy gleam.


On their second album together, London DJ Gilles Peterson and Brit-funk pioneer Jean-Paul “Bluey” Maunick pay tribute to an overlooked strain of UK dance music.

STR4TASFEAR

In the early 1980s, before house music hit like a hurricane, many of the hippest dancers in the UK were wigging out to Brit funk, a home-grown take on jazz-funk that leaned on disco, drum machines, and slap bass, perfumed with the faintest flavor of of reggae, courtesy of artists like Central Line and Freeez. A Brit-funk revival has shown signs of sparking into life over the past few years, via scattered compilations and sporadic media interest, but it has never really caught fire. Now UK duo STR4TA set their sights on the neglected genre, and it’s hard to think of anyone better suited to the task.
STR4TA’s members are Jean-Paul “Bluey” Maunick, a member of Brit-funk pioneers Light of the World and, later, acid-jazz mainstays Incognito, and Gilles Peterson, a London DJ and radio icon whose support for jazz-funk never wavered, even as its influence in clubs was decimated by the electronic sounds arriving from Chicago and Detroit. On STR4TASFEAR, their second full-length, they are joined by keyboardist Peter Hinds, who played with both Light of the World and fellow Brit-funk legends Atmosfear; UK neo-soul pioneer Omar; and Rob Gallagher, once of Galliano, a band that typified all that was wrong and right about the acid-jazz movement that snatched the crown from Brit funk at the start of the 1990s. (You can hear shades of Brit funk in Brand New Heavies and Jamiroquai, acid jazz’s biggest global stars.)
As unashamed revivalists, STR4TA were always unlikely to push the musical envelope. STR4TASFEAR, much like their 2021 debut, Aspects, could largely have beamed in directly from 1985, with few nods to the anything that came after. The band’s sound is a mixture of jazzy chord changes, disco-ish keyboard trills, a sticky web of noodling basslines, and drums that sit somewhere on the fence between disco’s 4/4 pulse and the more complex cadences of funk and jazz, to which they add the occasional honeyed vocal. But STR4TASFEAR leans more heavily on drum machines than its predecessor, in homage to the electro/street-soul movement that Brit funk evolved into, influenced, or lived alongside (depending on who you believe), with songs like “When You Call Me” and “Night Flight” suggesting a tentative step into ’80s electronic.
At times, STR4TASFEAR feels like it is begging to be pushed into the specialist’s corner. “Why Must You Fly” opens with a bassline so thumb-slappingly complex that you practically have to fight your way through it, hacking away at the low-end tangle like the dense arboreal layers of a tropical forest. And opener “Galactic Fanfare”’s garish glissando synth soloing hangs a sign over the album’s entrance, warning that herein lie exceptionally groovy jazz-funk monsters. Resolutely prog, rather than punk, STR4TASFEAR is not an album for listeners who fear musical virtuosity or the occasional instrumental folderol that comes with it.
Maybe that sounds uninviting. But a love of extended bass grooves never did Thundercat any harm, and fans of DāM-FunK or 1970s Herbie Hancock will find plenty to admire in this finely crafted and refreshingly easygoing album. STR4TASFEAR operates in a world entirely impervious to musical fashion, spiriting worries away with serene chord changes and cosmic vibes. Meanwhile, the drum-machine songs, especially “When You Call Me,” have the irresistible TR-808 slink of Marvin Gaye’s classic “Sexual Healing”—the sound of the lascivious future as glimpsed from the near past.
In this context it is refreshing, and perhaps unsurprising, that STR4TASFEAR’s strongest moments come from its younger guests. Emma-Jean Thackray, the Northern English bandleader whose 2021 album Yellow was a revelation of psychedelic jazz, sings on album highlight “Lazy Days,” her energy and bite driving a song whose pop dynamism betrays its indolent title. American trumpeter Theo Croker, meanwhile, adds spacey melancholy to “To Be as One” and “Soothsayer,” his haunting trumpet lines billowing around the mix like smoke from a dying campfire.
STR4TASFEAR confidently sets out its goals and, as an extremely well-produced pastiche—absolutely no bad thing—pays loving tribute to an overlooked period of British music. But in bringing in younger guests who are less in debt to a specific vision of the past, STR4TA briefly transcend their roots, making a case for Brit funk as a musical genre that can still look to the future, rather than one mummified in the past.


Public Image Ltd.'s second reunion album is solid not because of the songs, but because John Lydon is their singer. At their best, PiL construct sturdy grooves and momentum-building loops that Lydon sprays his voice all over like graffiti splattering a wall.

Public Image Ltd: What the World Needs Now...

What the World Needs Now...

John Lydon doesn’t seem like the jealous type. But I like to imagine that when he relaunched Public Image Ltd. six years ago, he saw the extended careers of peers like Mark E. Smith or David Thomas—iconic singers who can make interesting music with pretty much anyone—and thought, "Shit, I can do that too." He’d likely snort at the suggestion, but whatever his motivation, the two latest PiL albums are similar to recent Fall and Pere Ubu efforts: They’re solid not because of the songs, but because of the singer.
What the World Needs Now… is an improvement on 2012’s This Is PiL primarily because Lydon’s vocal theatrics and calisthenics are even more entertaining this time. He rants, spits, croons, screams, gulps, and whispers, all with equal commitment. In the process he injects tension into even the most predictable music. And much of What the World Needs Now… is musically predictable, but not in a bad way. At their best, PiL—again like the Fall—construct sturdy grooves and momentum-building loops that Lydon sprays his voice all over like graffiti splattering a wall.
The moments when the music matches the intensity of Lydon’s singing are exhilarating. Fiery opener "Double Trouble" is so cartoonishly angry it sounds like a Sex Pistols parody, until you realize Lydon’s in on the joke (the lyrics recount a mundane argument with his wife over toilet repair). Even sharper is the delirious "Know Now", where it sounds like Lydon got dizzy trying to keep up. This synergy works on some mellower songs too, such as the shuffling "The One" and the soaring "Spice of Choice".
Other mid-tempo tunes on What the World Needs Now… don’t fare as well. The line between compelling repetition and tedious wheel-grinding is pretty thin for this group, and though Lydon always battles valiantly to breath life into flatter songs, he can’t save them all. Things never quite fall apart completely, though it does become tough to find a heartbeat inside the fuel-deprived "Big Blue Sky". It doesn’t help that the tune’s disengaging loops and arena-rock choruses last for over eight minutes.
Those kinds of struggles come during What the World Needs Now...'s second half, which makes the album feel a bit like a five-mile race run by a sprinter. Things end on a pointed note, though, as Lydon solves the riddle of his own album title: "What the world needs now/ Is another fuck off!" Anyone ensnared by Lydon’s past work will find enough here to hope he and PiL continue to seek those kinds of answers.


The Kyoto-born, Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist uses his nonchalant flow and the sharp instincts he acquired playing saxophone as a kid to craft a dynamic, introspective jazz-rap debut.

Cannonball!

The Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist Sen Morimoto started playing the saxophone when he was ten years old. It’s his proto-instrument, the one that shaped his core understanding of how music is made. On his dynamic jazz-rap debut album Cannonball!, he brings the instincts it taught him to every element of his music, delivering a swinging, adventurous experience on each of the record’s nine tracks.
Saxophonists are often capable of hopping from note to note faster than any of their jazz-band counterparts, which means that, at its best, their music is characterized by dynamism and velocity. Those who know how to handle the instrument take advantage of its pace to explore as much territory as possible over the course of any given composition. That approach is reflected in the phrasing of every instrument on Cannonball!—the keys, the drums, the synths—and, more generally, in its impressive breadth of tones, moods, and subjects. The record moves like a kite in steady wind, dipping, swaying, and wrinkling in unexpected and deeply satisfying directions.
Motion is a defining feature of Morimoto’s artistry: Born in Kyoto and raised in Massachusetts, he came into his own after moving to Chicago several years ago. Now, he’s an active participant in a Windy City scene that also includes the Pivot Gang rap collective and the singer KAINA, who is featured on Cannonball!, and he’s spoken openly about the way that artistic community has inspired him. While his raps are centered mostly on his own ideas and feelings, Morimoto’s impressive flow and nonchalant delivery contribute to the impression that he takes the music, but not himself, seriously.
“This Is Not,” the second track on Cannonball!, gives the album’s first indication of his musical and emotional range. It opens with staccato stabs of guitar and drums, paired with vague, restless lyrics that exude frustration. Then, about a minute and a half into the song, Morimoto has an outburst. “I thought everything was simple as sugar and water,” he sings, and suddenly his irritation with the world turns into irritation at his own naivety. In the aftermath of that line, the song transforms radically, until it’s bursting with sweet harmonies. The celerity and elegance with which the moods of his compositions shift is remarkable. The album’s final track, “People Watching,” opens joyously, with fleet-footed sax and chimes, then turns slow and pensive before launching into a jaunty melody. It’s a six-minute song, but all of those shifts take place within the first 21 seconds.
At his best moments, Morimoto’s speed and range is matched by lyrics that move easily from abstraction to specificity and from the personal to the observational, usually over drums that zip breathlessly along as if rolling down a hill. The title track transitions from pure imagery—“deep end, cannonball, shallow smile, evil moon”—to personal declarations: “I want to dance until I feel all right again.” Aside from KAINA, Cannonball! has only one credited feature, from rapper Reason Being, whose deft flow powers the terrific “Picture of a Painting”—a song that reimagines the “most photographed barn in the world” scene from DeLillo’s White Noise for the Instagram age. It’s one of the most pleasant pieces of music on the record, but as if to dilute that pleasant feeling, Morimoto’s lyrics are cutting: “Everyone’s so salty I think I can almost taste it.”
The artist’s sense of humor brings some levity to his sulkier declarations. On “This Is Not,” in the midst of declaring that “nobody can sit with me and no one can belittle me” he breaks to tell his listeners that “my keyboard is broken so this song is missing middle D.” But because his lyrics seem to emerge spontaneously, maybe even thoughtlessly, they sometimes provoke an eye roll, reaching for depth that isn’t really present. “When was the last intelligent conversation you had that didn’t have you lost?” he asks on “How It Is”—and his persona is so appealing, so breezy and light, that it takes a second to realize that this is a silly thing to say.
Rap-influenced jazz and jazz-influenced rap are, of course, everywhere these days; Morimoto’s music will surely sound familiar to fans of GoGo Penguin and BADBADNOTGOOD. But at this early stage of his career, his most direct predecessor is Ish Butler, whose group Digable Planets made jazz-rap songs in a stirring, thoughtful mode that Morimoto’s music most closely resembles. In a 2014 interview, speaking about his more recent project, Shabazz Palaces, Butler said that the duo’s music incorporated jazz in that they relied on “capturing instinct and improvisation and impulse and letting it stand.”
That improvisational approach helps to explain Morimoto’s occasional lyrical shortcomings, and also why they aren’t that irritating. He is young, and his music reflects that, bouncing with the earnest energy and romance of young bohemianism. Cannonball! sounds fresh every time you press play. It may be unpredictable, but most of its choices work out just fine.


Andrew Butler returns, sans DFA, sans Antony, and sans the rich sound of 1970s disco, with a record built on the principles of Chicago house circa 1987.

Blue Songs

Be warned, right off, that the Hercules and Love Affair on this album is not quite the same act as the group on 2008's Hercules and Love Affair. The band's songwriter, producer, and creative director, Andy Butler, remains in place, as does DJ/vocalist Kim Ann Foxman, but the others who lent their talents to the debut-- including singers Antony Hegarty and Nomi Ruiz, DFA producer Tim Goldsworthy, and !!! bassist Tyler Pope-- are replaced by a new team on a new label. Among the recruits are vocalists Aerea Negrot and Shaun Wright, and Bay Area producer Mark Pistel, whose previous credits include the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and industrial acts Meat Beat Manifesto and Consolidated.
So be it; HLA was always a producer's group, and besides, Butler's taking a distinctly different tack on this album. Where Hercules and Love Affair built on the lush, rich sound of 1970s disco, Blue Songs is much more a house record-- specifically, house as it was understood around 1987, when Chicago sounded like the center of the musical universe. Its strongest tracks aim right at that target. "My House", in particular, is both a convincing pastiche of the heyday of Marshall Jefferson and Frankie Knuckles and a commentary on it from a remove of 20 years. ("My house is in order," goes the hook; how did nobody manage to think of that pun at the time?)
As the album rolls on, though, Butler fails to recapture the chemistry he had with previous vocalists. Negrot and Wright are not quite anonymous, but lack the dynamic presence of previous contributors. While it's interesting to hear how his style works in a pop-house context, Kele Okereke of Bloc Party's guest appearance on "Step Up" falls flat, and the song's chorus ("Baby, you might just be like this/ Baby, this might be who you are") is hardly juicy enough to bring the track to life on its own. Nearly every dance track here still has something to recommend, like the mock-serious Grace Jones impression on "Answers Come in Dreams", or the swooping bass that introduces "Falling". "Visitor" distinctly recalls what Marshall Jefferson was doing when he went by the name Hercules on the 1986 single "7 Ways". But apart from "My House", nothing here feels like a complete package, and especially not the way "Blind", "Athene", "You Belong", and "Hercules Theme" did last time.
Two slower songs in the middle of the album nearly derail it. "Boy Blue" has the incantatory, repetitious tone of house, but it's arranged around acoustic guitar and woodwinds and outstays its welcome considerably. It's followed by an earnest chillout-room tune called "Blue Song", featuring Butler's own voice rather aggressively high in the mix. Butler has talked about wanting to demonstrate his "ability to write more than a four-to-the-floor dance track." The thing is, he's really good at writing four-to-the-floor dance tracks, and the other stuff is nowhere near as interesting.
Blue Songs closes with a meandering, beatless six-minute cover of another Jefferson production, Sterling Void's 1987 house single "It's All Right". That song was also covered, much more famously (and effectively), by Pet Shop Boys in 1989, which means that making it a part of this album album can't help but call up comparisons to the PSBs' version. (HLA also spell the song's title as "It's Alright", like the Boys.) Is Butler commenting on the relationship between house and pop music? Is he reclaiming house from some version of the mainstream? Is he just underscoring his own sources? It's hard to tell: So much of the album is straining to be more than just an homage to the club sounds of the late 80s that it ends up being a bit less.


With regal harp strings, droning synths, and kinked guitar lines, the Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist’s full-length debut establishes her as a loose but imaginative composer.

Lovegaze

Nailah Hunter angles her compositions toward the spiritual realm. A pastor’s daughter, she once said that her upbringing left her with a “residue of Christian faith,” but her music draws more upon the tenets of astrology and mysticism. The Los Angeles-based artist was singing in choir when a harpist joined their performance one year; she was transfixed by the instrument’s ethereal tones and regal beauty (“Even in the way that it looks, the crown is pointed to the heavens,” she said in an interview with KEXP). As a harpist for sound baths and meditation sessions, Hunter’s relationship with the instrument has not only shaped the way she composes, but how she approaches the tedium of daily life; she is a firm believer that the frequencies emanating from the harp have healing properties.
Hunter’s six-song EP Spells, released in 2020, was written to conjure reflection and tranquility, twisting elements of ambient, experimental, and new age into gilded strands. For her debut full-length Lovegaze, the musician sketched out songs on a borrowed Celtic harp in a small city on the southern coast of England, later enlisting London producer Cicely Goulder to sharpen and shine their edges. Across the 40-minute album, Hunter emerges as a dexterous player and loose but imaginative composer. Rather than succumbing to the often corny tropes of new age music—mawkish melodies, pan flutes, chimes—she cleverly incorporates elements of contemporary R&B, pop, and jazz.
“Through the Din,” with its looped and layered vocals, circular beat, and icy synth tremors, recalls early Portishead, while Hunter’s falsetto glimmers through its moody ambiance, like headlights cutting through fog. Goulder fleshes out the song, supplying strangeness and complexity with a cascade of piano keys that ground Hunter’s skyward harp. Hunter could easily play it safe, swaddling the listener in major scales and good vibes, but Lovegaze suggests she’s interested in augmenting form and genre.
Hunter’s compositions are spacious and dynamic, fine-tuned with Goulder’s meticulous production choices. She handles every plucked harp string, every silken filament of Hunter’s voice, with the utmost delicacy. On the title track, Hunter and Goulder fuse baroque balladry with abstract jazz, smearing Hunter’s harp chords and stacked harmonies with reverb and letting crisp snare rhythms snap at the surface. The off-kilter details—kinked guitar lines, askew trills of alto flute—contrast Hunter’s willowy voice, accenting its elegance without overwhelming it.
Hunter is even more restrained on the album’s second half, which includes “Cloudbreath,” an iridescent, rippling instrumental of harp, flute, and synthesizer. The pared-back arrangement and production on pieces like “Bleed” and “Adorned” draws the ear to Hunter’s subtle yet evocative lyrics. On the latter, Hunter drapes her voice over droning, organ-like synths and sleek ribbons of saxophone. “Far from remorse/It’s the pain you adorn,” she sings. Her efficient phrasing positions psychic wounds as medals, or all-new limbs to tend to. Singing the line “pain you adorn” repeatedly, Hunter gestures at our compulsion to feed personal suffering with constant, damaging attention.
Dark little crevices, tucked into the calming expanses of Lovegaze, add a lyrical complexity that’s missing from the album’s first half. The finest example is the spare and intriguing “Into the Sun.” Part medieval dirge, part demented nursery rhyme, the song is stretched across a scaffolding of harp plucks and Hunter’s earthiest register. “I dream of beheadings/And goose feather bedding on fire,” she sings, climbing from a crackling low to a gauzy falsetto. “A sword through the eye/For an endless supply of beginnings.” The arcane, violent imagery bristles against Hunter’s sparkling strings, forging instant tension and intrigue. In these vivid passages, Hunter endures the pangs of change in order to transcend her pain, luminous and unburdened.


Gracefully navigating the intersection of folk-rock and country, the gentle-voiced songwriter turns detailed images of domestic tranquility and promise into reflections on disappointment.

Starter Home

For a decade, Canadian singer/songwriter Doug Paisley has turned quiet, specific moments into inquiries on life’s larger struggles. On his 2010 breakthrough, Constant Companion, Paisley used the inevitability of endings to explore understanding oneself, the only possible “constant companion.” For 2014’s Strong Feelings, he mulled death and its uneasy relationship with life, or how their juxtaposition ripples into every wave of existence. And now, on his fourth album, Starter Home, Paisley details the chasm that separates what poet Seamus Heaney described as “getting started” and “getting started again.” These songs examine how the person you are never truly aligns with the person you want to be, especially when you stumble upon a sticking point that’s hard to move past.
Paisley knows the subject well: As he told Exclaim, Starter Home required that he begin again (and again), ultimately recording at four different studios, including those of Cowboy Junkies’ Peter Moore and acclaimed folk musician Ken Whiteley. The results grace his earlier alt-country sound with softer folk touches, putting him in the realm of Kris Kristofferson or even Canadian predecessor Gordon Lightfoot. Paisley understands that personal lyrics don’t have to read like a diary excerpt—that specificity creates universality.
At the start, for instance, he details a young couple’s starter home. “Bring your dreams and your family,” he sings like the real estate sign out front reads, signaling the potential of this simple, scrappy beginning. “Maybe in time we should’ve moved on,” he offers during the closing verse, his voice dimming with quiet reflection. Michael Eckert’s pedal steel adds a wistful glow to the moment’s frayed introspection.
Paisley uses the language of physical space to communicate interior spaces. He stitches needlework scenes that sit uneasily in embroidery hoops—quaint on the surface, a shadow cast across the sides. Despite the jaunty country inflection of “Mister Wrong,” his voice darkens ever so slightly, his cadence quickening as he enumerates the ways he’s going to disappoint. “A home and family, vacation by the sea/On the Christmas tree, I’ll only let you down,” he sings, his voice gasping during “I’ll,” the confession giving him pause. Make enough promises, and more than a few will go broken. The sentiment arises, too, on “Waiting,” where Paisley resigns himself to a similar fate. Expectations can become chokeholds, so “This Loneliness” looks at them askance, as if the past were a mirror Paisley must confront reluctantly. Jennifer Castle adds stark backing harmonies here, her voice rounding out his. But there’s a note of hesitation in the way Paisley sings, an expression of his misgivings about what should have been.
In the poem “I Hear the Traffic,” Leonard Cohen writes, “Another day/To rise and fall/Make a buck/Start and stall.” He lets the final word hang, something to be overcome. If there’s a sense that stalling is fatalistic, Paisley overcomes it. “I look out my window, there’s so many ways it can go/There’s no way to know,” he sings at one point, repeating that last bit again and again, turning it over until it becomes a mantra with its own rhythm. Ultimately, that’s what stalling reveals, Paisley suggests: There’s no rhythm, no living, without the pause.


The California rapper takes stock of his life on an introspective album that balances melancholy and bliss over lush, sampled loops and opulent live-band instrumentation.

Even God Has a Sense of Humor

During his last visit to New York City in the early days of the pandemic, California rapper Maxo decided to undergo an artistic process called lifecasting. The brainchild of conceptual artist John Ahearn, the casting is more intensive than your average portrait: Sitting in a recliner with breathing tubes up their nose, subjects are covered in a pasty, clay-like material made of alginate similar to the kind used when creating dental molds. The process requires 20 minutes of complete stillness; the sitter’s clothing is cut off, forming part of the structure of the cast. Maxo went through this three separate times, left alone with his thoughts as the alginate blotted out most of the light and sound around him. Afterward, he was left with three larger-than-life sculptures of himself: one in a football jersey with slicked-back cornrows and a long, weary face; one smiling in a white tank top and pulling a fitted baseball cap over his head; and one in his trademark flannel, arms crossed, face as stoic as a local landmark.
These three statues grace the cover of Even God Has a Sense of Humor, Maxo’s second album for Def Jam, and reflect the dueling senses of melancholy and bliss at the core of his music. As a rapper, Maxo is blunt and plainspoken, eschewing clever wordplay for storytelling and edifying clarity. LIL BIG MAN, his 2019 Def Jam debut, explored the uncertainty, excitement, and ennui of Black life in one’s early twenties. That record often evoked the self-reflection of flipping through a photo album: It focused largely on making sense of the past, Maxo too in his own head to fully contemplate the future. Now that he’s closer to 30, he’s sifting through the embers of his misfortunes while keeping the life he’s built for himself intact. “I’m just trying not to burn everything I touch,” he says at the end of “Free!”
Even God Has a Sense of Humor is powered by an urgency to make sense of the dizzying way time ebbs and flows. Dallas singer Liv.e’s hook on the serene “Both-Handed” epitomizes the album’s spirit: “What if the meaning don’t exist, babe... What if we/Never figure it out?” Maxo’s writing can hop from hyper-specific to vague, sharpening and blurring focus as he sees fit. Take early highlight “Nuri”: He briefly hovers over the memory of a trip to Senegal with his mother and ponders advice from a family friend before obliquely mentioning failed dreams and stacks of money. Whether he’s clear or hazy, his delivery carries the verses nearly as much as the words do. On “48,” over Madlib’s pristine loops of guitar crackle and drums, the way he raps “I’m tryna fly, it’s like feet to the floor” summons the image of Maxo with his chest puffed out, like his foot got stuck in a crack during liftoff. Later, on the brief interlude “FUCKZU,” Maxo croons softly to impart powerful messages with the electricity of whispered spells: “You got the power of a God/Nigga, fuck what they told you.”
As often as Maxo changes perspective and tone, his stories are uniformly gripping. The album’s thematic throughline finds redemption in all manner of tragedy—trauma, breakups, calls for racial injustice that go unanswered year after year. Songs are composites of vignettes tethered together and experienced all at once, as though Maxo were Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan. “Face of Stone” is a man-in-the-mirror moment in which Maxo calls himself out over his own emotional distance and begs himself to break bad habits. “Who Gives Me Breath” is a whirlwind of harrowing memories scattered across the pitched-down groove of producer lastnamedavid’s beat: time with an imprisoned family friend cut off by the jail phone; liquor “dark as my skin” swirling in a glass; comparing his gratefulness to be alive in the booth to pouring blood out on the floor. Whether blessed or in mourning, there isn’t a single moment on Even God Has a Sense of Humor that doesn’t feel like a matter of life and death.
Maxo’s growing worldview is matched by a suite of expansive beats that walk the line between the sample-based loops cherished by the modern rap underground and handsome live-band instrumentation. Arrangements from drummer Karriem Riggins and multi-instrumentalist Beat Butcha sit next to gossamer chops and loops from lastnamedavid and Mutant Academy member Graymatter. They run the gamut from traditional (“Who Gives Me Breath”) to psychedelic (“What 4”), and all flow smoothly into each other, thanks to executive producer Dom Maker, of Mount Kimbie. None of these beats seamlessly combine multiple styles in the way that redveil’s Learn 2 Swim or Oddisee’s To What End do, but putting soul, jazz, gospel, and rap in conversation with each other is a risk that pays off in a beautiful, understated way.
That the album never loses its footing is a testament to Maxo’s will as a rapper. In the nearly four years since LIL BIG MAN, he’s gone from being a wide-eyed but cynical everyman in the vein of Blu, unsure if he’d even make it to 24 years old, to a bulwark for his family and a leader of a flourishing rap scene. Life hasn’t gotten any easier, but his words have become sharper, cutting closer to the heart than ever. Even God Has a Sense of Humor doesn’t offer concrete answers to life, the universe, and everything. It’s the kind of music you make when you’re happy just to wake up to a life worth untangling.


The Puerto Rican duo moved back to the island in the wake of Hurricane Maria, and their joyful and melancholic new album takes stock of their changed home.

Regresa

Home is a complex concept for Puerto Ricans. The island from which we hail is both part of the United States and not; as an unincorporated territory, its residents are citizens but can’t vote, can move freely between the island and the mainland yet are still seen as immigrants. Like many Puerto Ricans, Buscabulla’s Raquel Berrios and Luis Alfredo Del Valle left the island and made New York City their home, seeking opportunities otherwise unavailable to them. And they’re not alone; there are more Puerto Ricans in the greater New York area than in the capital of San Juan. But for everything that New York has to offer that Puerto Rico does not, there are parts of Puerto Rico that can’t be brought up north; the white sand of the beaches, the sounds of the jungle, the local traditions that stretch back centuries. For some, the only solution is to come home.
Berrios and Del Valle moved to New York City separately to pursue their dreams, met at a house show, formed a band (its name is Puerto Rican slang for “troublemaker”), and started a family. But while they made their lives in the city, their spirit never left Puerto Rico, and the first two Buscabulla EPs were colored with deep longing and existential displacements. “Frío este duele” (“this cold hurts”) Berrios sang on “Frío,” their collaboration with Helado Negro, from EP II, yearning to warm her blood under the sun of her hometown. Once a record deal gave them the cushion to make the leap, they left New York six months after Hurricane Maria had battered their home. As thousands of Puerto Ricans fled the ravaged island for the States, Berrios and Del Valle headed in the opposite direction, packing up their life and moving back with family in tow. Regresa is the story of that return.
But the home they returned to was not the one they had left, nor were they the same people who had once absconded north for creative pursuits. Many of their close family and friends had left or passed away, and vulture capitalists had already descended, seeking “economic opportunity.” The songs they wrote and recorded at their home studio in Aguadilla, a coastal town on the western side of the island, were joyful but melancholic. Regresa maintains their brand of tropical synth pop, but while their first records could be cheeky, poking fun at Latino machismo, this LP probes deeper questions of life and identity.
The first song they wrote after arriving in Puerto Rico was “Vámono,” an indignant march inspired by local marching bands as well as Beyoncé’s Coachella set. Its video features traditions from their respective hometowns: vejigante masks from Carnaval de Ponce (where Del Valle is from) and the Festival de Las Mascaras of Hatillo, from whence Berrios’ family hails. It expresses the urgency of their journey—“Viene vamonos que es tarde ya” (“Come on let’s go it’s already late”) Berrios sings—as well as the overwhelming terror of what’s next (“Quien me va ayudar?” or “Who will help me?”).
Even before the coronavirus pandemic, Berrio and Del Valle made much of the record in isolation, but they found ways to inject fresh energy. Patrick Wimberly (Chairlift, Solange, Blood Orange) mixed the album and contributed additional production, and Nick Hakim’s pre-COVID-19 visit to their home bore fruit in the form of several songs, including contributions on “El Aprieto,” English vocals on “Volta,” and a co-writing credit on “Mio,” a screed decrying the political and corporate influences that are turning the island into a tax haven for the one percent. An orchestral arrangement from Helado Negro’s Roberto Carlos Lange gives an otherworldly tint to “Club Tú y Yo,” a romantic ode Del Valle wrote for Berrios.
But it’s the contributions of the famed 71-year-old Puerto Rican actress and singer Nydia Caro that keep the album from veering into darkness. The song marks the shift from angst to acceptance: “Light comes after the greatest darkness/You can't see the stars if you don't have a dark night/Let the darkness be your impulse towards Light,” Caro murmurs. Buscabulla’s Puerto Rico may be a paradise lost, an oasis devastated by an apocalypse. But from the moment they returned, they’ve been picking up the pieces and rebuilding; their home, their community, and themselves. After years of yearning from 1600 miles away, they’re home, and they finally sound whole.

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The Philadelphia band returns as a three-piece on a pandemic-era EP that introduces subtle shifts in sound and structure. It’s their first release that’s as tender as it is tough.

Perfect EP

When Mannequin Pussy released their excellent third record Patience in the summer of 2019, they were hardly prepared to take its title so literally. After years of slowly building a fanbase off the crackling energy of their first two albums, the Philadelphia punks had signed to a new label, Epitaph, and released their most clear-eyed, expansive record to date. Critics lauded it as their breakthrough; there were Coachella dates and a second round of touring set for 2020. But then, of course, their plans were put on hold.
For a band rooted in the mutual catharsis of screaming to a live audience, the idea of remote concerts seemed antithetical. “Livestreaming shows feels really fucking lame to me. I don’t want to do a performance for a computer,” frontwoman Missy Dabice said at the time. Instead, the band waited until summer to record a few sessions in person with Patience producer Will Yip (as well as founding member Thanasi Paul, who has since left the group). The resulting EP, Perfect, continues the sophistication of its immediate predecessor while introducing subtle shifts in sound and structure. Though capturing the full venom of Dabice’s screams required a proper studio, Perfect is the first Mannequin Pussy release that’s as tender as it is tough.
That range is most apparent on “Control,” a dialogue between id and ego that’s keenly aware of the balance between an explosive refrain and the tension of its build-up. It manifests not only in the contrast between Dabice’s quietest vocals and the crash of Kaleen Reading’s drums, but in lyrical content: Verses vacillate between reluctant acceptance of reality and the total entropy simmering beneath. The only real sense of control, Dabice suggests, is the freedom to lose it entirely.
Perfect makes brief yet ambitious departures from their previous sound, introducing bassist Colins “Bear” Regisford as a co-lead vocalist. Mannequin Pussy is undeniably a politically motivated band, but “Pigs Is Pigs,” written by Regisford about his outrage and fear of police violence as a Black man in America, marks the first explicitly political statement in their music. “It’s fucked!” he spits, his urgency palpable over charged guitar riffs. It’s a wholly new sound that already feels natural, reinforcing that this band is about energy and vehemence as much as Dabice’s pitched yelps.
Mannequin Pussy thrives on disrupting traditional hierarchies—it’s possible, their music argues, to be bloodthirsty one minute and crave intimacy the next, even to contain both feelings at once. But rather than attempt to marry these opposites in the span of a song, as on Patience, they play out in two different modes: On “Perfect,” a bratty, gnarled, “happy slut bad-bitch” ripper, Dabice demands to be called beautiful until the idea itself seems poisoned. It’s immediately followed by “To Lose You,” a bright jangle-pop anthem about missing a lover that reveals a far softer side. The contrasts play against each other without ever quite reaching the transcendence of synthesis, but still sum to a nuanced portrait.
In a first for the band, Perfect ends almost as quietly as it begins. If “Darling” sounds like a new direction, it derives its melancholy from the past: Dabice first wrote it five years ago, reworking it in the studio at the suggestion of the band. Yip programmed the drums, while Dabice added a layer of shimmering synths. Relaxing their posture as never before, they unspool into languid guitar and featherlight vocals. It’s like a lullaby after a nightmare, a weightless feat for notorious heavy hitters. After a year of unplanned hibernation, Mannequin Pussy have emerged less precious about their roots and eager to grow new branches.
Correction: An earlier version of this review misspelled the name of Colins Regisford, and incorrectly indicated that Thanasi Paul did not perform on Perfect. It has been updated.

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The UK trio's first album since 2011 finds new life in the smooth surfaces of house music.

Inflorescent

Friendly Fires debuted in 2008, in the long shadow of Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm and the shorter shade of the “Gossip Girl” soundtrack. They went on hiatus just three years later, exiting at precisely the moment when the band’s hazy blend of disco and effervescent funk was primed for a mainstream takeover (Walk the Moon, Mike Posner). They’ve spent the years since 2011’s Pala collaborating with a litany of pop producers who lean into the band’s more electronic tendencies—Disclosure, FaltyDL, Dusky. Inflorescent, then, is a bit of an inversion for the band: Rather than live-sounding danceable post-punk, they’ve found a new home in the smooth digital surfaces of house music.
The shift towards synths and strings doesn’t exactly come as a surprise—their last album was filled with drum machines and reverb-washed pianos to counterbalance every gritty bassline. And though frontman Ed Macfarlane has also tossed out the idea of a Friendly Fires piano house album, Inflorescent feels more indebted to French filter disco, from the syncopated loops that kick off the Disclosure-assisted “Heaven Let Me In” to the oscillating Bowie-esque guitars that open “Can’t Wait Forever.”
Perhaps because so much time has passed, it feels like a seamless progression; they sound lighter and more fleet-footed, and no less diverse than before. “Silhouettes,” with its “ba-ba-ba” refrain to its laser-like synths, recalls the ebullient jazz of Todd Terje, while “Lack of Love” evokes the chill of Balearic house. Nothing sounds unnatural, or too far from the band’s previous work, but the pretense of “rock” is out of the picture.
It can sometimes seem as though Friendly Fires are playing catch up for a post-EDM scene that largely sprung up in their absence. The cooing vocals and build-up/drop patterns grow a little tiring across the album despite their careful production, because they’re working in well-trodden territory in a post-Flume landscape. But there is a winning warmth to their music. Perhaps this is due to their dismal environs—“We need to have a miserable view to feel like we want to transport ourselves somewhere else,” Macfarlane recently said, contrasting the airiness of their music with their rainy hometown of St. Albans. Only someone who desperately wants to escape can make a fantasy sound this alluring, after all. And in the dog days of August, a cool jet of European house offers a welcome respite.


Guitarist William Tyler returns backed by an all-star band that notably includes Wilco’s Glenn Kotche and Megafaun’s Phil Cook, summoning a wide range of moods and telling stories without vocals.

Modern Country

William Tyler is not a traditional storyteller. Having played guitar alongside some of Nashville’s most distinctive songwriters (Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner and Silver Jews’ David Berman), he has clearly learned a good deal from them about establishing his voice, structuring narratives, and building tension. But Tyler—whose solo albums are purely instrumental—works in a field all his own, composing increasingly intricate and immersive narratives with just his playing. Tyler referred to his 2013 Merge Records debut Impossible Truth as being a “’70s singer-songwriter record without vocals,” and he develops that vision even more fully on its follow-up, Modern Country. Backed by an all-star band that notably includes Wilco’s Glenn Kotche and Megafaun’s Phil Cook, Tyler is able to summon a wide range of moods, from plaintive pastoral folk to a particular kind of k**osmische American music that fuses Brad Cook’s spacey synths and Luke Schneider’s gorgeous pedal steel like a slow, steady breeze on a hot summer day.
Even with all the talent in the room, Tyler’s guitar remains front and center. In “Kingdom of Jones,” his close-mic’d fingerpicking is breathtaking. The clear, constant sound of his strings rattling and his hand sliding across the neck highlight just how intimately produced and carefully performed these songs are. While quieter moments like these feel like a natural progression from Tyler’s early solo guitar work, other songs demonstrate how complex his signature style has become. Of course, there are enough sprightly, rubbery guitar licks to remind you that this is a guy whose official website also functions as a carefully curated Grateful Dead video blog. Still, Tyler puts an emphasis on both words in the album title. The compressed, layered solos in the first half of “The Great Unwind” recall prime-era Mark McGuire, while its triumphant, chugging second half actually brings to mind prime-era Mark Knopfler. First single “Gone Clear,” meanwhile, is Tyler’s most dazzling composition yet: a six-minute stunner that plays like Jim O’Rourke’s *The Visitor *reimagined to soundtrack a ballet.
Tyler’s thematic inspirations are equally far-reaching. “Kingdom of Jones” is dedicated to the Mississippi county whose anti-slavery stance during the Civil War put them at odds with the rest of the Confederacy. The lilting, starry-eyed “Albion Moonlight” is named for the title character of Kenneth Patchen’s American classic The Journals of Albion Moonlight (a character who coincidently posits that “Man has been corrupted by his symbols” and that “Language has killed his animal”—arguments put into practice by the band's quiet, evocative performances). Like his holographic figure on the album cover, Tyler lets himself become a part of his surroundings throughout Modern Country, encouraging his listeners to explore for themselves.
“The cultural geography of this vanishing America is what I sense as a slow fade,” spoke Tyler’s disembodied voice in a trailer announcing the album’s release: the kind of grandiose mission statement that might seem over-the-top were it not coming from an artist whose music is so radiantly full of ideas. He continued, “*Modern Country *is a love letter to what we are losing in America– to what we’ve already lost.” The beauty of the album lies in the fact that Tyler is able to pay homage to these foundations not with bitterness or cynicism but with awe, appreciation, and even hope.